Enter: The Legionnaire!

With the Great Disaster currently looming in the DC Universe, and with Karate Kid's adventures in Countdown somehow connected, I can't help but think that these two comics, Karate Kid 15 and Kamandi 58, may be the most important back issues around right now:
I also think we can all agree with Karate Kid here that, with its record-breaking blizzards, Carter Administration, Jonestown Massacre, 3 Popes, and birth of Ashton Kutcher, 1978 needed a good punching.

Right around the time that these two comics were published, DC cancelled a whole bunch of titles in what quickly came to be known as the "DC Implosion." For most Implosion titles, the cancellation came swiftly and without warning (much like the gastro-intestinal distress I felt from the chicken salad I made yesterday). With Karate Kid , readers were warned of the oncoming cancellation in the title's letter page (much like I should have been warned by the large amount of curry powder I put in the chicken salad). To close out Karate Kid, then, writers Bob Rozakis and Jack C. Harris, along with editor Allen Milgrom, put together this crossover featuring two 30th-century heroes from alternate futures.

Ironically, Kamandi would meet its premature end in the following issue, 59. That month launched the highly touted "DC Explosion," where DC raised the price and page count of its regular titles, with most series taking on 8-page back-up stories. Kamandi's back-up was another Jack Kirby creation, OMAC, written and drawn by Jim Starlin.

Karate Kid 15 wraps up a storyline developed over several issues, where Karate Kid's 20th-century girlfriend, Iris Jacobs, tired of always being rescued and jealous of her super-powered rival, Princess Projectra, volunteers for some dodgy experiments at S.T.A.R. Labs, the DC Universe home for ethically questionable scientific practices. These experiments go horribly wrong--or wonderfully right, depending on your perspective--and Iris is turned into a mindless, indestructible killing machine called "Diamondeth." After subduing her, Karate Kid decides that only 30th century science can cure her, so he loads her in his time sphere for a return trip to his home era.

Meanwhile, the Lord of Time and Major Disaster--two villains who have been screwing with Karate Kid from issue 1--continue their dickish ways and send him on a detour to an alternate future: the post-Great Disaster future of Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth!

Upon landing in this new time, Karate Kid realizes that this isn't his 30th century when he sees Dr. Canus and Mylock Bloodstalker, two evolved dogs who are a part of Kamandi's posse. Behaving like any good superhero does when he meets a new, previously unknown group of people from whom he could learn about cultures different from his own, Kamandi proceeds to kick them in the face:



Once that's taken care of, the rest of Kamandi's crew, sans Kamandi, spends about 10 pages catching Karate Kid, and the reader, up on what's been going on in Kamandi's own book. It turns out that Kamandi has been kidnapped by some surfing lobster men, who treat him as if he were a god. All this time, Major Disaster and the Lord of Time are watching over Karate Kid, and Major Disaster chooses this moment to create a tidal wave that brings the surfing lobsters to our heroes:




After a brief and unbelievably lopsided fight, where Karate Kid discovers that his punches and kicks have no effect on the lobster men's hard shells, Karate Kid is coldcocked by a lobster man and taken prisoner. As it turns out they also worship him as a god.

You may be wondering, then, what the religious ceremonies of the lobster men look like First, their gods are placed in egg-shaped containers. Then, those containers are inserted into a projection machine, and the gods' consciousnesses are loaded into an already-existing film, which is projected onto a drive-in movie screen.


And in what movie do Karate Kid and Kamandi get to participate? Oh, it's better than you could possibly expect!


Perhaps, with this being 1978 and all, you were expecting that year's Oscar winner, The Deer Hunter, or the touching Vietnam veteran drama Coming Home, or even Woody Allen's foray into Bergmanesque drama, Interiors. However, Rozakis and Harris make the best of all possible choices by making the heroic duo the stars of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon!

Next: the story comes to a shocking anti-climax in Kamandi 58!

Friday Night Fights: Back to School Edition

Bahlactus has rung the bell, and it's time to go back to school with this week's edition of Friday Night Fights.

Today's lesson: How to clear out a roomful of thugs with a single kick.

When you're Batman, and you have to fight a roomful of guys, things can get pretty exhausting, so you need to find easy ways to get the situation taken care of fast.

1) Find the bouncy guy.


2) Wait for it ... and KICK!


3) Let momentum do the rest.


There is probably a bigger Physics lesson here about speed, momentum, energy, friction, ricochet, angles, etc., but I'm not that kind of doctor.

This also may be a useful lesson for gym class.

Images from Batman 336, "While the Bat's Away...": plot by Bob Rozakis, script by Roy Thomas, and art by the awesome Jose Garcia-Lopez and Frank McLaughlin.

Danger: Dinosaurs!

From the people who brought you "Super-Heroes Battle Super-Gorillas," "War Against the Giants," "Super-Heroes' War Against the Monsters," and "Earth Shattering Disasters," the 100-Page Super Spectacular is proud to present tonight's featured comic, DC Special 27 (May 1977):

Starring Captain Comet! Tommy Tomorrow! Chronos! And Whatever Other Characters DC Wasn't Using at the Time!

Man, I just have to say it: I could watch Captain Comet punch a T-Rex in the tongue all day. I appreciate the simple pleasures in life that way.

And I also appreciate the irony of the cover: Captain Comet--"a mutant born 100,000 years ahead of his time" (as he never fails to tell everyone in this story)--lays out the most dominant creature of 100,000,000 BC (At least that's the year cited in the comic. And since comics have never lied to me before, I'm prepared to defer to their greater knowledge of such things.).

I think the appeal of this comic can be summed up in one question, provided by editor Paul Levitz and writer Bob Rozakis:
The answer: Hell, yes!

In this story, a comet or meteroid or something buzzes the Justice League satellite in 1977, while Captain Comet is paying a visit to Hawkman. The comet, however, happens to be traveling through time, and when it reaches the year 2056, it pulls with it Tommy Tomorrow's spaceship, which happens to be on a rescue mission to Vega-IV, where a "space-fever" epidemic has broken out.

True fact: by the year 2056, humankind will have run out of names for diseases. The solution: just put the prefix "space-" before the names of already existing diseases, like "space-fever," "space-cancer," "space-herpes," "space-burning-sensation-when-I-urinate."

Anyway, Tommy Tomorrow and his crew are dragged all the way back to 100,000,000 BC, where the comet/meteor finally crashes to Earth. Immediately upon arrival in this prehistoric era, their ship comes under attack by pterodactyls. This is a bad idea for the pterodactyls:

That's right: when the pterodactyl tried to attack the spaceship, its head disintegrated! No wonder they're extinct.

Though Tommy makes a good faith effort to avoid killing dinosaurs, this doesn't work out, and he eventually just starts wasting them left and right: Clearly, Tommy Tomorrow never read that one Ray Bradbury story where the time traveler goes hunting dinosaurs and accidentally steps on an insect, causing cataclysmic changes to human history. I had to read that story in 8th grade, so I guess that the decline we're currently seeing in the American educational system continues to slide in 2056.

Also, Tommy obviously didn't receive the same advice that Homor Simpson received from his father on his wedding night: "If you ever travel back in time, don't step on anything, because even the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can't imagine."

Meanwhile, a t-rex comes across the meteor, with hilarious results:Man, am I glad that the meteor evolved that t-rex a nice blue unitard and some yellow boots--it saves me from seeing "tyrano erectus," if you know what I mean.

Upon gaining sentience, "Tyrano Rex" begins to worship as a god the meteor that caused his evolution, which makes sense--I'd worship a meteor if it gave me a six-pack and abs like that.

At this point in the story, writer Bob Rozakis has done something quite brilliant: he has solved the evolution vs. religion debate that, thirty years later, is still tearing this country apart. Evolution and religion, he is saying, can and should co-exist, and we should really be worshipping the space-meteor that caused evolution to occur in the first place.

So, Tyrano Rex immediately begins to build a shrine and establish a ritualistic dance ceremony in honor of his deity.

As the story progresses, Tommy Tomorrow kills a few dozen more dinosaurs before stealing the comet and returning to the 21st century. However, Tyrano Rex manages to stow away on Tommy's ship, causing Tommy to make a detour to 1977, where Captain Comet is currently fighting Chronos. There is really not much more to say here: the comet is destroyed, Tyrano Rex returns to his pre-evolved state before Captain Comet launches him into Chronos's time portal, and Superman comes in to help Tommy Tomorrow return to the future.

If you're like me, I know you have one lingering question, though: how did such a masterpiece come about?

For this, thankfully, we do have an answer, in the form of a text-page by Rozakis:

I love these text pages that ran in 70s DC comics, especially the ones written by Bob Rozakis. As a comic fan who got his start in comics from "letter-hacking," or writing frequent fan letters to DC comics, he inherently understands exactly what comic readers want in these pages. Here, he reveals some insights into how top-level editorial decisions were made at DC in 1977:


And I firmly believe decisions are being made this way at DC to this day.