Henry Kissinger: Action Hero

Despite the fact that it features a giant dinosaur, the cover of Super-Team Family 8 (1976), starring the Challengers of the Unknown, doesn't even begin to highlight the awesomeness on the inside. For, "The Devil's Paradise," written by Steve Skeates and drawn by Jim Sherman and Jack Abel, contains what may be the greatest plot in comic book history: President Gerald Ford calls on the Challengers of the Unknown to rescue Secretary of State, Nobel Prize winner, and war criminal Dr. Henry Kissinger from an island in the Bermuda Triangle inhabited by dinosaurs, cavemen, and samurai.

I'm just going to stop writing now, forever, because I don't think I'll ever write a sentence as awesome as that.

But seriously, the story lives up to that description. Two unnamed nations go to war and threaten to drag the US and USSR out of the Cold War and into a nuclear confrontation. Sent to negotiate the peace is Dr. Kissinger (who does not, by the way, go by "Dr. K"). Before he can arrive at the peace talks, however, his plane travels through the Bermuda Triangle and is bombarded by unknown forces which push it into another dimension (and cause the doctor to resort to his native German).


The next morning (clearly, this isn't considered much of an emergency), President Ford puts out the fateful call:


After a quick recap of the Challengers' origin (thanks new-reader-friendly editorial policies of the 1970s!), the team finds themselves caught in the same vortex and brought to the island, where they unsuccessfully attempt to defend themselves against cavemen riding dinosaurs.

Once captured, the Challengers meet up with Dr. Kissinger in prison, and the peace negotiator gives them the score.

Say what you want about Kissinger, he knows his shit! He figured out a scientific explanation for everything before alleged genius Prof Haley could.

The Challengers rig an escape, which leads to an all-out battle with the island's denizens. The Secretary of State, however, seems hardly in need of rescue:

"Pinochet taught me this move, bitch!"

As the team flies off into the sunset, Kissinger manages to find a moral to the whole story.

"Yes, let's get rid of war. Now excuse me while I go offer American support to South American military leaders and encourage them to continue their human rights abuses."

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.