All we are is ducks in the wind

Funny animal comics. They're easy to define by their three separate words: they're funny. They've got animals in 'em. And they're comics. Simple enough, ain't it? When you pick up one, you pretty much know what to expect: gags, chases, cats darting after mice, mice hitting cats with hammers, everybody has a good laugh and nobody ever gets really hurt. That's another definition, isn't it? Even in the most violent...say, Itchy & Scratchy Comics...Scratchy can get his head chopped off with a lawnmower but we larf and larf and larf because there's no sense of permanence in there. You think superhero comics with their revolving doors of mortality defy the inevitability of death more than any other genre of comic? You think a genre where only Bucky Jason Todd Uncle Ben Gwen Stacy remains dead is the extreme? Well, remember this, bucko: it's all good fun 'n' games in funny animal comics, and the best thing is, nobody ever shuffles off their mortal coil.

Well, not always. As another funny animal once quipped, "Not all animals are created equal." And I'm not specifically talking about more adult-oriented funny animal comics like Critters or Usagi Yojimbo or The Adventures of Captain Jack or even the original Eastman/Laird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. No, I'm talking about as deathproof as you can get: Disney comics. Black Pete or the Phantom Blot may have threatened Mickey or kidnapped Minnie but nobody ever got worse than a punch in the snout. Magica da Spell or the Beagle Boys have it in for Uncle Scrooge's money bin, not for his life. Sure, Bambi's mom and Simba's dad...I'll give you those. But good old-fashioned fun-for-all-ages Disney comics don't feature discussions of mortality.

Except...

I wrote in some length here about my collection of late sixties Top Comics, which, as helpful Martin Allen points me to in the comments, re-published three issues of Gold Key's Uncle Scrooge comic, two of which I've already covered ("The Great Steamboat Race" in issue #3 in that link above, and "The Doom Diamond" in issue #1 here. Both wonderful, wonderful Carl Barks stories: certainly not the stories he's best-known for or even where he was absolutely on top of his game, but they hold a special, dear place in my little red satin heart because they were my first exposure to Uncle Scrooge. But I have all three of the Top Comics Scrooge issues...what of issue #2? Well, as I mentioned before, even in those days before Disney/Gold Key/Top Comics printed credits in their books, I could clearly tell which stories were the work of the Good Duck Artist, even though I didn't know his name. "The Great Steamboat Race" and "The Doom Diamond" were clearly the work of that same genius I only much later came to know as Carl Barks. But issue #2, "King Scrooge the First" (originally published in Gold Key's Uncle Scrooge #71)...that one puzzled me. The artwork was very clearly not that of the Good Duck Artist, but the story was weird and mystical and oddly compelling, oddly unsettling in a way, and I kept returning to it as a tiny stuffed bull to read it again and again. Why did it compel me? And more to the point, why was it so vaguely disturbing to me? To give you the full effect, let me recap the story in an extreme abridgement, with the magic of Blogger, a scanner, and some IMG SRC tags. Be certain you're sitting down: I have not one but two startling twist endings for you at the end of this story.

As "King Scrooge the First" begins, McDuck and his posse of nephews are out for a walk and encounter a fortune teller:

All panels in this post are from Top Comics: Uncle Scrooge #2 (1967, originally published in
Uncle Scrooge #71, October 1967), art by Tony Strobl and Steve Steere

Scrooge scoffs, but the Swami knows how to pique the canny old duck's interest:


But, as another sentient water-animal might opine, "It's a trap!" The fortune teller hypnotizes Scrooge, Donald and the boys and whisks them away to a ghost town in the middle of the Saharan Desert, deserted for almost four thousand years:


Clearly, those webbed feet aren't taking our favorite ganders home:


Abandoning Scrooge and the others, the Swami spies on them from a distance. (Hey, how can he remember a town that hasn't buzzed with life since 2033 B.C.?)...


...and again hypnotizes them, making them believe they are living in the age the city in the desert boomed and bloomed:


In their Shirley Maclaine-flavored past-life recall, of course even an ancient Donald is pretty much still Donald:


...and so, rather disturbingly for a funny animal comic, so are Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Warning: duck bondage. (Ding ding ding go my Google referral hits!) Where are when we need you, Doctor Wertham?


Slaveducks can wait, because the city is being attacked!:


...all as part of a cunning plan by the Swami to make Scrooge, Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie re-enact a specific battle in history. But what's so important about this battle?:


Wait a minute! Does this invading vandalduck look familiar?


Of course he does: it's the Swami as he existed back in ancient times! Ah, now it starts to come together...the Swami is thousands of years old! That's not the twist I promised you, but it's a good one. But how did he become immortal?


Back in ancient times, the Swami demands one chest from King Scrooge's treasure trove to bargain for their safety. What's in that chest? Not jewels, not coins, but two small urns filled with powder. Whoa, that's a lot of work just for some paprika, isn't it? Another piece of the puzzle comes together when the ancient Swami reveals he just swallowed a powder of immortality:


Back in the present, after several pages of running about, ancient fortunes shuffled back and forth, and lots more hyp-mo-tizing, the Swami uses Scrooge's buried memories to rediscover the hidden cache of treasure. Scrooge, of course, turns the tables and the Swami is soon tied up, no doubt using an unbreakable Junior Woodchuck knot. He bargains for his freedom, asking for only one item from the treasure trove—Scrooge can keep the rest. It is, of course, that same chest that once held the two urns and now only holds one:


Before baffled duck eyes, the Swami turns into his true age: an ancient, weary duck four thousand years old:


...a duck long tired of immortality in an age when his comrades and slave girls long ago died...


W-w-w-wait a minute. That's how it ends? That's how this story ends? The story ends with the ancient swami wandering off into the desert to die? Whoa. Whoa. That's heavy stuff for a funny animal comic. Even though it doesn't come right out and portray the scene or say the D-word, the four-thousand year old duck is likely dead, dissolved into dust, before Scrooge can even dive into his new treasure. Now I remember why this comic book gave tiny, tiny me a bit of the heebie-jeebies—that's a heady and adult theme to pull off so effectively in a Disney comic book, not simply the concept of death, but the idea of a man duck so weary of life that he effectively commits suicide to head into the afterlife. Two years later in 1969's "Requiem for Methuselah," Star Trek would cover much the same ground, but this is deep, deep stuff for Disney in 1967, isn't it?

But the ending of this comic book story is only the first of the twists I promised you waaaaaay up there. The second one had a much longer pay-off because until tonight when I was researching the story on the web, I had it firmly fixed in my head as one of the lesser Uncle Scrooge stories by one of Carl Barks's successors—because even a casual comic book fan can glance at that art by Tony Strobl and Steve Steere and note that, while competent, that ain't Unca Carl. And yet, the scope and grandeur of the original story, the deep theme above and beyond the usual limits of Disney comics...well, that's a very good imitation Barks, isn't it? Almost uncanny...

Unless you're a Duck scholar or historian, maybe you didn't see this twist coming any more than I did, but I did not realize until tonight that "King Scrooge the First" was created by Carl Barks: it is a script he wrote before he retired in 1966, leaving the artwork for the story to be drawn by Strobl. In other words, I've been scratching my head over this story for years, thinking it was the next best thing to a Barks story...and it is a Barks story.

I love serendipitous discoveries like that, where your preconceptions suddenly turn on their head and something you never knew in dozens of readings of a favorite comic book suddenly becomes obvious. I have no idea whether "King Scrooge the First" was Barks's meditation on growing old (he'd have a very long career painting the Ducks following his retirement), but even if it was simply a story he never got around to finishing himself, "King Scrooge the First" suddenly sparkles and shines in a different light in my collection: a story I loved despite its apparent non-Barksness now shines with a new significance. The man who brought action, danger and adventure—and even the hint of mortality—to a buncha cartoon ducks continues to surprise me even forty years after this book was published. That's yet another reason I love old comic books I have a personal attachment or connection to: there's always some facet of the gem waiting to be discovered even long years after I first read 'em.

I hope you do the same. Take your lesson from Scrooge: comics are not meant to be sealed away and never read. Pull your comics out of their longboxes and their Mylar sleeves and give 'em another look. Dive around in them like a porpoise. Burrow through them like a gopher. Toss them up and let them hit you on the head. But most of all, read 'em. That's where the fun is.

James T. Quack

Today's lesson, class: Uncle Scrooge McDuck equals James T. Kirk.

What's that I hear at the back of the classroom? Consternation? Uproar? Disbelief? Snickering? I heard snickering, didn't I? Let me explain it in visual terms, then:


I hear you gasp in amazement and declare what? Is black now white? Is up down? Are dogs cats? Is Aquaman Sub-Mariner? What the Sam Scratch is goin' on here? Patience, comics and SF fans...all will be made clear in warp speed/two shakes of a duck's tail.

Let's flip open Top Comics: Uncle Scrooge #1 (Ah ha! You knew it was going to come back to those dang Top Comics, didn't you?) and thrill to the sheer joy of the story within, Carl Barks's high adventure "The Doom Diamond." This isn't one of Unca Carl's most famous classics; it's at the tail end of his prestigious run on Uncle Scrooge. When I was collecting the big series of Gladstone's Complete Uncle Scrooge I kept waiting for this story to pop up, and it wasn't reprinted until the very last book...definitely one of Barks's final Scrooge tales. The magic and excitement is still there, however, and if it's not prime Barks, it's still tail and feathers above most other funny animal comics. In it, Scrooge, Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie board Scrooge's custom-designed souped-up pirate-proof super-ship to sail with ten million in gold bullion across the sea to buy a cursed diamond. Fast on their tails, er, trails, are Scrooge's perennial nemeses The Beagle Boys, who have built a super-sub of their own designed to thwart every one of Scrooge's defenses. Oh no! Is this the end of Scrooge McDuck? Will our dollar-hungry duck meet his end on the high seas?

Well, no. Scrooge makes mistakes, but he's a captain of bravery, creativity, ingenuity, and sneakiness. Sound like anyone we know? A certain starship captain renowned for his agile combat mind and his unparalleled bluffing skills? Why, it sures does sound exactly like James Tiberius Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. And even though Kirk's mission is to explore strange new alien females worlds and Scrooge's is to load up his money bin with more lovely moolah, Carl Barks has, in "The Doom Diamond," predicted the greatest Star Trek space battle of them all, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. For best results, cue up your Star Trek II CD to the track "Kirk's Explosive Reply" and then let's go to the play-by-play, shall we?:

(All film frames are from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; all comic panels are from "The Doom Diamond", written and drawn by Carl Barks.)

Kirk/Scrooge's ship is approached by an enemy vessel!:

Kirk/Scrooge calls the red alert!:

The enemy attacks!:

Expert advice from the trained crew:

Khan/The Beagle Boys demand: unconditional surrender!:

But both valiant captains are hiding a secret weapon!:

FIRE!:

Point blank attack...the enemy is crippled!:

On board the shattered enemy ship, accusations are leveled!:

And Kirk/Scrooge sails away, crippled but still alive after their close call:

So, when somebody says, "Oh, Nicholas Meyer saved the Star Trek franchise," don't forget to grab them by the lapels, shake them angrily, and shout in their face: "And Carl Barks, too!" Really, they'll thank you for the correction!

Why, just about all that's missing from "The Doom Diamond" to complete the Kirk/Scrooge analogy is a scene where our hero howls the name of his nemesis in despair. Don't worry, duckfans, I created one here for you to go with Kirk yelling Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!:




In the end, you can't deny that both Kirk and Scrooge are heroic characters of the same high caliber. Sure, one may be a miserly talking waterfowl and the other one now shills for Priceline.com, but never forget that in the end both James T. Kirk and Scrooge McDuck live each one of their high-adventure days by the same credo...:

"I don't believe in the no-win scenario...
I don't like to lose."

Saturday Morning's All Right for Watching

Courtesy of a two-page center spread in Top Comics: Uncle Scrooge #2, let's set the Time Bubble for September 1967! South Vietnam holds its first elections! NASA space probe Surveyor V lands on the moon! Jim Morrison sings about getting higher on The Ed Sullivan Show! Harry Connick, Jr. is born! BBC Radio 1 is launched! But to heck with all of those things...The CBS Saturday Morning Cartoon Lineup trumps them all!:


(Click image to embiggen)

You young whippersnappers today with your Nickeledeon and your Cartoon Network and your Kids WB and your BBC America may find this hard to believe, but at one time American kids, hopped up on pure cane sugar and unfiltered cigarettes, had exactly three networks of Saturday morning TV viewing to choose from (except for the weird kids watchin' PBS). You had your choice of NBC, CBS, and ABC, and CBS surely was targeting the growing fans of comic books with these series, weren't they? According to this excellent survey page of 1967's Saturday mornings, ABC had CBS well-beat from 9:30 to 10:30 with the double-punch of the original Fantastic Four and Spider-Man cartoons, but I'd sure as heck be hanging onto CBS for the rest of the morning.

The banner on the ad reads "Saturday's Super Heroes," and hoo boy, they weren't kiddin': except for the day opening with (unshown in this ad) Captain Kangaroo and ending with The Road Runner, every single show on CBS's '67 lineup is science-fantasy heroic adventure. What's interesting is that of all the shows in the '67 CBS Saturday morning lineup, only two can probably be considered true "classics" (minus the word "camp" in front of that): Jonny Quest and Space Ghost. Jonny was in its third year, but no original episodes were being broadcast since the show's first season, perhaps contributing to its placement in the tail-end "graveyard" of the lineup at 12:30 PM. (But the cartoon lineup ran until 2 PM with The Road Runner!) Poor Space Ghost doesn't even get a picture in this cartoon ad; the man known south of the border as El Fantasma del Espacio was only in his second season, yet like Jonny, new episodes were produced only in season one and the rest of his run was re-runs. You can catch most of the other shows shown here on Boomerang and they haven't aged well, but those two seem to have stood the test of time. I'm fairly partial to the updated Space Ghost Coast to Coast and the Quest parody The Venture Brothers, and it's out of love for the original concepts that I came to enjoy the new ones.

By the early '80s the great art of action-adventure cartoons seemed to be at a nadir, replaced by gag cartoons like Heathcliff, The Smurfs, The Littles, Laverne and Shirley in the Army (their sargeant was a pig! Really!) and Fonz and the Happy Days Gang (they travelled in a time machine with a dog named Mister Cool!) Slowly the field began to build up again (Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was an early sign of the swing back) and by the mid to late 1980s we had turtles, transforming robots, real American heroes, and, by the early nineties, the height of the TV animation medium, Batman: The Animated Series. Which all goes to show: if you don't like what's on TV now, wait a while. Surely something you like will come along soon. Me? I'm waiting for the Gilmore Girls 2099 cartoon.

Purely to win brownie points with Tegan, here's a closeup of panel for The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure:



Secret messages? Way cool! I hope they spelled out ZJFZNZM RH XLLO ZMW MLG ZG ZOO OZNV.

Parents of today may think twenty-first century kids have a lot to keep track of—schoolwork, friends, instant messaging, Tivo, MySpace, MP3s, Gogurt, and a million other outside demands for time, which can dog-pile on the young 'uns of today and sadly lead to child stress and meltdown. Well, I'm telling you, those kids have nothing against the children of '67, who had to keep track of dozens of amazing Saturday cartoon shows in their pre-cell-phone limited memories! No wonder kids in the late 60s were snapping left and right! But Bully! (I hear you asking.) How the heck could we even keep track of such a wonderful line-up of senses-shattering action, adventure, magic and heroism back in the Summer of Love? Why, that's simple, true believers, because with the same thoughtfulness and generosity they will later show in allowing Julie Chen to report on both news and reality TV, CBS has provided a handy pocket chart:



Don't even bother asking Mom and Dad for permission to use the scissors, kids: just tear it out of your hard-earned comic! Who cares if you're ripping out a panel of Carl Barks's sublime work on the other side? No matter if you've just destroyed the future resale and collectible value of your weird-ass bumpkin Top Comic! Paste it in your scrapbook alongside all your Marvel Value Stamps! Just don't come crying to me when Mike Sterling tells you that Top Comic you want to sell to him is worth pennies instead of thousands because you tore out the freakin' chart!

So. Saturday cartoons. I miss 'em. And so do you.

Top Comics: What the heck are these?

Put on your detective caps and get out your meerschaum pipes, folks, because I've got a mystery I need help solving and I need the assistance of you good folks who might know a little more comics history than I do.

Recently I excavated a lot of my old comics from the Bully Longbox Storage Vault, including a lot of comics I wanna regale you good people with my stories of how they're my favorite comics. (Is What If? #11 the greatest comic about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, ever? You make the call!) But among the superhero stuff I found my old treasure of Gold Key and Dell comics...dozens and dozens of battered and worn funny animal and cartoon tie-in books that I just loved so much I read 'em to shreds. Among these, however, were what I have always thought of as the weird backwoods country cousins of the Gold Keys: Top Comics.



What the heck are these? Top Comics baffled me when I was just a wee tiny stuffed calf and they still are bit of a mystery to me now. There was only one place I was able to get them at: the long defunct-chain of Savarin Restaurants and Rest Stops dotted along the New York State Thruway, during those never-ending car trips from Syracuse to Oneonta or Schenectady to visit relatives. There was always a spinner rack with plenty of Top Comics, and I was allowed to get two or three. But I never saw 'em anywhere else in my life. For that matter, minor mystery B: what the heck ever happened to the Savarin chain? I wasn't sad to see 'em go...their brand of unenthusiastic diner food was kind of dismaying even to me at that age, and I was excited to eat out anyway. Good riddance to bad rubbish and I was pleased when they were eventually replaced by Burger Kings and McDonald's. But why'd they go out of business? Whoa, whoops, I think I just answered my own question. Well, that solves the Mystery of the Disappearing Crappy Roadside Restaurant Chain!

Top Comics were, it's very clear, reprints of Gold Key Comics, and the indicia in each lists the publisher as K. K. Publications on North Road in Poughkeepsie, New York, which is another imprint of the octopus-like Western Publishing in Poughkeepsie, which published and distributed Dell and later Gold Key Comics. I'm simplifying that explanation tremendously for my purposes here. It's unpacked in a little more detail in Wikipedia's Western Publishing entry, but for my shiny dime nobody does a better job of clarifying the clear-as-mud Western story as Mister Mark Evanier, whose explanation here should be required reading for anybody interested in Dell and Gold Key. Come to think of it, maybe only Mark knows the true story behind Top Comics, but he don't mention 'em in his article. (Fill us in if'n you know, Mark!)

Anyway, these are clearly Gold Key comics under a different name. All the ones I have featured Disney and Warner cartoon properties, but from what very little I've been able to find on the web on Top Comics, they also produced issues of other Gold Key comics: The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Lassie, The Three Stooges, Tarzan, Flipper, and probably many more. (Those additional titles are courtesy of a sales page on the Mile High Comics site.) In addition, every comic has extra "Gold Key Club Comics" activity, cartoon, and text pages clearly branding them as Gold Key comics. (More about some of these feature pages a little further down.)

That sales page, however, is just about all I can find about Top Comics on the web...there doesn't seem to be anything else major that I can find and certainly no real explanation for what the heck these things are in the first place. Googling "Top Comics" returns a bajillion results, almost all of them referring to either the series Tip-Top Comics (home of Nancy and Peanuts) or various "top comics" lists. Last time I checked Overstreet, which was admittedly a few years back, there was no listing for the Top Comics either.

So what do I know about these? Well, all of mine seem to carry a 1967 copyright date. They are all unpriced on the comics themselves: several of them have a somewhat generic sticker that says "15¢" affixed to the cover, but they don't all have 'em...and none of the covers shown on that Mile High page show these stickers, so I'm guessing the stickers might have been placed on there by the Savarin gift shop operator rather than the publishing company. That leads me to make this wild, unfounded guess: were these comics that were published for overseas, or maybe for military bases?

About half of the comics in my possession have no ads. The inside front and back covers are filled with black and white one-page gag strip reprints, and the back cover is a repeat of the front cover art minus the logo but marked "Pin-Up":



On the other hand, the other half of 'em do have ads, mostly of the "send away for this cool cheap crap" variety (click on the photo to expand to a much larger and legible size):



...which doesn't seem likely for overseas comics to feature American send-in ads, so I'm stiff baffled. So, comics blogosphere and four-color scholars, help me out here: what were Top Comics? Why were they labeled and branded as such? Why could I only find them in a roadside gift shop? Why weren't they simply selling the usual Gold Key comics in those venues? Huh? Huh? Huh?

All that said, the baffling mystery that even at the time vaguely nagged at the back of my stuffed brains never kept me from enjoying the rich comicy goodness of Top Comics. This is classic and primal 1950s and '60s cartoon comics material here, folks, and it was through these as well as my beloved Golden and Disney Comics Digests that I mostly developed my sheer love of the consecutive art medium. Plus, rabbits dropping anvils on top of ducks! You can't go wrong with that.

Among these sixteen or so Top Comics is absolutely one of my favorite comics of all time. My love for the story inside probably is reflected by its well-worn condition: Top Comics: Uncle Scrooge #3...



...which features in its loose and curling pages (one even had a huge chunk accidentally torn out of the corner), quite possibly...no, make that absolutely positively, my favorite Uncle Scrooge comic story, ever: "The Great Steamboat Race":



I love this story: Scrooge finds out about an ancestor's never-finished steamboat race against a rival pig, and the pig's descendant and Scrooge decide to finish the race. There's one catch: both steamboats are sunk at the bottom of the muddy Mississippi. Well, there's another catch: the pig's got a professional salvage company to raise his boat. Scrooge has Donald and the nephews. There's a brilliant science gag in here where Scrooge's boat is raised using inflated inner tubes (not as clever as ping pong balls, but I wasn't aware of the genius of that story at the time). I've read this story hundreds of times and even when I eventually "traded up" for a cleaner and sharper copy in that big-ass Gladstone reprinting of the complete Uncle Scrooge, I still cherish and hold dear to my heart this tattered and battered issue.

Why? Because it is, as far as I can remember, my first introduction to the fantabulous work of Carl Barks. Take a gander (tee hee) at the splash page up above. Do you see any writer or artist credits? Nope, you do not. But like millions of other fans of Unca Carl, I instantly recognized quality and brilliance in his work, and I recognized that not all comics, or even all Uncle Scrooge comics, were created equal. The other shoe dropped in my head at that very young age: that people actually created comic books, and some of them were better than others. It was like a lightbulb flash going on over my head, but it started an entire lifetime of collecting, reading, and loving comics, and my search for the Good Ones, like those done by "The Good Duck Artist." Even before I knew his name I could tell that that Scrooge saga reprinted in tiny size in Walt Disney's Comics Digest where Scrooge unrolled his ball of string across Africa against Flintheart Glomgold was the work of that same guy who did the steamboat story. And the one where the Beagle Boys had a robotic submarine that fired diamond-sharpened bluejay missiles. And the one where Magica da Spell turned herself into a duplicate of Scrooge to steal his Number One Dime and was foiled by the nephews when she was rude to them. The best comics in the world...then or now.

So in the end, the mystery of Top Comics still makes me scratch my little stuffed head. But the magic will never stop.

Special bonus interior peeks!: all the Top Comics featured the usual-for-the-time Gold Key text, puzzle, and comics filler pages that were often a bit of a disappointment (they weren't truly comics, they were jus' takin' up space.) Mighty Mike Sterling over at Progressive Ruin recently posted a Gold Key quirky feature page of reader-submitted monster drawings, which reminded me just how much that particular page used to freak my little brains out as a kid:



Another regular feature was the aptly named "Can You Complete The Comic?," or, as I like to call it, "Western Publications Refuses to Pay Its Gag Men and Makes Kids Pay for the Privilege":



This feature mighta been more appealing to me if another Top Comic I remember buying at the same time hadn't featured the exact same gags, completed. I guess that Gold Key gag man finally overcame his writer's block with the help of some Savarin pancakes and a shot of rotgut whiskey, huh?:



Too young to vote? To heck with the establishment, man! While your 'rents are busy campaigning and ringing doorbells for Richard "Mister Clean Government" Nixon, and your crazy bohemian uncle keeps talking about how there's absolutely no way Bobby Kennedy won't be the next Prez, you can poo-poo those old squares and instead vote on something important: your favorite Top Gold Key Comics!:
Sadly, voter fraud in Ohio and Florida led to a manual recount, and after eighty-three days of scandal-ridden gerrymandering, the Supreme Court of Comics judged that dark horse Mighty Samson was the winner. Walt Disney's Comics and Stories was outraged! And of course, today Tarzan has a lucrative career on the lecture circuit with his multimedia PowerPoint presentation "A Tropical Truth: Saving the Rainforest (Do It for Tantor)".

Top Comics! They may remain a mystery, but the delight lingers on!