Bronze Age Adaptations
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BRONZE AGE ADAPTATIONS July 2016 No.89 ™ $8.95 The Shadowt Korak, Son of Tarzan Battlestar Galactica t Marvel Movie Comics Black Hole t 2001 t featuring Chaykin, Kaluta, Kirby, Kubert, O’Neil, Thorne, & more 1 8 2 6 5 8 0 0 0 5 4 7 Volume 1, Number 89 July 2016 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond! DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Michael Wm. Kaluta (Unpublished cover produced for DC Comics’ The Shadow. This image ran poster-size in black and white in The Amazing World of DC Comics #1, July 1974.) COVER COLORIST Glenn Whitmore COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER Rob Smentek SPECIAL THANKS Mark Arnold James Heath Lantz Brian Augustyn Val Mayerik Mike W. Barr Roger McKenzie Jonathan R. Brown David Michelinie Rich Buckler Allen Milgrom Dewey Cassell Michael Netzer BACK SEAT DRIVER Editorial by Michael Eury . .2 Howard Chaykin Luigi Novi Arthur Chertowsky Dennis O’Neil OFF MY CHEST Guest Column by Paul Kupperberg: Pictures to Prose . .3 Gerry Conway Tom Palmer One of our favorite writers looks at comic-book characters’ transitions to novels Jon B. Cooke Ralph Reese Lamont Cranston Philip Schweier FLASHBACK: Shedding Light on The Shadow . .7 Fred L. deBoom Walter Simonson The dark hero’s appearances in comic books, with O’Neil, Tollin, Uslan, Augustyn, Jones, Barr, and Goss Stephan Friedt Anthony Snyder Joel Goss Roy Thomas BEYOND CAPES: It’s a Jungle Out There!: DC’s Korak, Son of Tarzan . .27 Grand Comics Frank Thorne The junior jungle man’s ’70s swingin’ safari at DC Comics, with Len Wein and Frank Thorne Database Anthony Tollin Jackson Guice Michael Uslan BEYOND CAPES: Science Experiment: Marvel’s Worlds Unknown . .35 Larry Hama Don Vaughan Thomas, Conway, Reese, Mayerik, and Wein discuss the pros and cons of adapting sci-fi Heritage Comics Len Wein Auctions John Wells WHAT THE--?!: The Super Cops . .43 Gerard Jones Rod Whigham The strange story of the real-life Batman and Robin and their short-lived media blitz Douglas R. Kelly Marv Wolfman Paul Kupperberg FLASHBACK: A Monolith in Comics: Jack Kirby’s 2001 . .47 The King of Comics’ unexpected movie adaptation that created a Mister Machine-making spin-off #6. Nast Art by Michael Wm. Kaluta. TM & Condé © If you’re viewing a Digital FLASHBACK: Battlestar Galactica . .52 Edition of this publication, The Cylons are coming! Luckily, Marvel enlisted Simonson, Milgrom, and McKenzie to handle them The Shadow PLEASE READ THIS: FLASHBACK: Adapting Disney’s Black Hole . .55 The House of the Mouse sets its sights on its own Star Wars This is copyrighted material, NOT intended for downloading anywhere except our website or Apps. If you downloaded it from BACKSTAGE PASS: Marvel at the Movies . .59 another website or torrent, go ahead and Creators galore recall Mighty Marvel’s Hollywood adaptations of the 1970s and 1980s read it, and if you decide to keep it, DO THE RIGHT THING and buy a legal down- BACK TALK . .74 load, or a printed copy. Otherwise, DELETE Reader reactions IT FROM YOUR DEVICE and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH FRIENDS OR POST IT ANYWHERE. If you enjoy our publications BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, enough to download them, please pay for Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, them so we can keep producing ones like this. Our digital editions should ONLY be c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: downloaded within our Apps and at [email protected]. Six-issue subscriptions: $73 Standard US, $88 Expedited US, $116 www.twomorrows.com International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover art by Michael Wm. Kaluta. The Shadow TM & © Condé Nast. All Rights Reserved. All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter © 2016 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING. In the background: Detail from the 1974 cover of DC Comics’ Bronze Age Adaptations Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1 Comics, words, and pictures, used in congress to tell a story, have been a part of human written communication since the start. From the 32,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain’s Cueva de las Moneda, through the pictograms of early written language, to the illuminated manu- scripts of the Middle Ages, pictures have always stood alongside (or instead of) words. The modern comic strip was born at the end of the 19th Century and came by P a u l K u p p e r b e r g to maturity in the 1920s in a 20-plus-year burst of creativity that saw the introduction of countless iconic strips, including Dick Tracy, Tarzan, The Phantom, Blondie, Thimble Theater and Popeye, Barney Google, Flash Gordon, Alley Oop, Bringing Up Father, Buck Rogers, Joe Palooka, and others. The earliest pictures told stories of heroism, of the hunters who kept them in mastodon meat and sabertooth tiger pelts. When tribes finally settled down into villages and towns, exchanging the excitement of the hunt for the predictability of the crop, artists began creating society’s heroes, weaving written fiction out of spoken legend and adding poetry in both its purest form and in the rhythms of prose. Heroes were created and evolved, from Oedipus and Achilles, across Robin Hood and Don Juan, to Tarzan and Buck Rogers, up through Harry Potter, James Bond, and Jason Bourne, all in the heroic- fiction tradition—which, in all these examples, saw the hero born in the fiction. But, for our purposes, we have to begin with Dick Tracy, cartoonist Chester Gould’s hard-hitting, fast- paced police procedural/adventure strip, distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate beginning in 1931. Tracy, a combination of up-to-date crimefighting techniques and raw violence fantastically based on Prohibition–era gang activity, was an immediate success. And it began its run just in time to get in on the growing fields of advertising and licensing, both of which were having comings of age of their own thanks to the new pop media of the 1920s, radio and motion pictures. Tracy was on the air by 1934 and made his big-screen debut in 1937. But before either of those achievements, Detective Tracy became the first comic-strip feature to be turned into prose, as the star of the first Big Little Book in 1932. According to Garyn G. Roberts’ book, Dick Tracy and American Culture: Morality and Mythology, “In all, more than 600 distinct (Big Little Book) titles appeared from Whitman [Publishing] and its followers during the Depression, World War II, and the first years of the Cold War. Most of the books were approximately 4 1/2 inches square and 1 1/2 inches thick... The usual format for these books was a page of text for each page of illustration… Dick Tracy Big Little Books were among the most prolific The House of Novels … or Is That the Library of Ideas? Four of the Pocket Books’ Marvel Novel Series from the late 1970s. Don’t you just love those painted covers? Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Bronze Age Adaptations Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3 1977 Novels (left) DC’s second- tier title Challengers of the Unknown got the novel treatment by Ron Goulart, from Dell Books. (right) Also that year, Marvel’s novel line launched with Len Wein and Marv Wolfman’s The Amazing Spider-Man: Mayhem in Manhattan. Challengers TM & © DC Comics. Spider-Man TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. what needed to be done to successfully transfer the Kotzwinkle’s straight adaptation of the sorry Superman Star-Spangled Avenger from the comics page to the III (Warner Books, 1983). prose. The Great Gold Steal is a fast-paced adventure that Another film producer’s interest in the World War II remains a good read nearly 50 years later. comic Blackhawk, a long-running third-tier feature that Going into the 1970s, the pickings for comics-based survived (but just barely) into the 1980s, caused DC novels were eclectic, including a series of 15 novels from Comics to rush out with a tie-in written by William Avon featuring Lee Falk’s Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks Rotsler from sister company Warner Books. (including Falk’s own charming The Story of the Phantom, In the 1990s, comic-book tie-ins received a new lease the first in the series), and half a dozen Flash Gordon on life, beginning with half a dozen short-story collections novels from Avon (1974–1977) credited to the comic strip’s edited by Martin H. Greenberger starring DC’s top creator, the late Alex Raymond, but actually written by heroes—Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—and Con Steffanson and Carson Bingham. The Challengers of featuring stories by the top names in genre fiction, as the Unknown, a marginal DC Comics title, made it into well as comic-book writers. Marvel Comics signed with prose in the eponymous-titled novel by science-fiction book packager and publisher Byron Preiss to publish an stalwart Ron Goulart from Dell in 1977; rumors of a extensive series of comic-book novels, starring Spider-Man, big-name movie producer’s interest in the property were X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, bandied about as the reason. The same year, Pocket Books the Hulk, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil, launched an 11-book series starring the heroes of the Generation X, Iron Man, and others.