The story we read for Pappy's Golden Age Comic Blog was funny as hell. An evil scientist who controls a hollow tin can robot to rob banks, and no one can seem to just follow it back to the scientist. It also showed how the whole "Rich playboy superhero" is also completely unoriginal. My personal favorite part of the comic was when the main character hid INSDIE the robot to follow it back. Apparently, completely hollow robot minions are the most reliable. When I saw that, I thought of Bender from Futurama, with his door he has on his body.
The team reading I have to recommend is is The Great Comic Book Heroes. It gave an insight into the actual origins of Superman and Batman, and much much more if you kept on reading. I thought it was interesting that even though they were so hokey, they were perfectly fine with brutally murdering people, like the Joker did. The string of robberies he pulled were damn clever, doing them the night before he announced it to make himself seem like some mystical criminal genius.
I had a hard time following along with the transcripts for if only because I had no real idea as to what the entire lawsuit was about. the website had the transcripts, sure, but it didn't say why they were taking place and exactly what for. Other than that, if was pretty crystal clear.
I agree that the Prize comics were racist. It seemed like the way that they sold these comics was by playing off of people's cultural fears. As we all know, this was the time leading up to the civil rights era, and I think that these comics are kind of struggling to keep up the typical (for that time) way of thinking about race and the white colonial era.
ReplyDeleteI also thought it was funny how spelled out everything was for the reader. No wonder kids ended up as the main audience for these. The whole time while reading the narrative parts, I had the cliche 30's radio announcer voice in my head. The whole point of the narrative was to explain the same thing that the panel is showing. It reads much like a radio broadcast in picture format would read.
The Bozo the Bot comic was interesting. I saw some similarities between this and some of the more popular comics that came out of this era. For instance, the commissioner sends the protagonist a message via a signal in the air. Sounds familiar....
Also, it is funny that the robot is hollow.
The relevance of the testimony appeared as though this shows how some companies got into "power" when it came to heroes and other companies making hero comics. It seemed to me as though DC was making sure that they had control over certain aspects of the industry.
With that said, I thought that the Batman and Superman comics were good for their time. Although that constant commentary did get on my nerves. Batman's awful puns didn't help either. But they both started with back stories which gave the hero an interesting dynamic. The Joker was very diabolical and they did a great job showing how evil he was. The comic of Superman stopping the dam was way less engaging. They resolved that with tension between Lois and Clark, while letting the reader know that she was in love with Superman.