Fun with Comics: The Most Ambitious Crossover Event in History

So you want me to show you my all-time favorite comic book that I possess? Sure! My coverless copy of The Flintstones at the New York World's Fair:



from The Flintstones at the New York World's Fair one-shot (Warren (!), 1964), pencils and inks by Phil De Lara, letters by Rome Siemon
One of the very first comic books I ever got: Fred and family along and every other (pre-Scooby) Hanna-Barbera character goin' to the '64 World's Fair. Even the Jetsons. So fun!

Today in Comics History, May 15: Lions and tigers and bunnies, oh my!

Today is May 15th, and on this day in 1856, Mr. L. Frank Baum, the creator and author of the fourteen original Oz books, was born in Chittenango, New York. We here at Comics Oughta Be Fun were raised on the Oz books, one of the original shared-fantasy-universe concepts (Baum populated his Oz books with characters from his other novels and vice-versa), thus providing us comic book fans with a springboard for the fantastic and the magic, not to mention your little dog, too. So sit back, put on your silver slippers, raise a glass of Oz-chohol and let's salute Baum through the magic of our favorite medium: comic books. There's certainly been no scarcity of comics based on the Oz characters and stories, some more faithful to the source material than others...


...including more than a few that take the Oz concept into decidedly non-kid-lit directions...


But one of my favorite series of Oz comics of all time is DC's 1986 miniseries, Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! In The Oz-Wonderland War Trilogy. Whew! That's quite a mouthful, so let's just call it The Oz-Wonderland War from now, on shall we?


The concept's simple, fast, and fun: it merges characters and plots from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and L. Frank Baum's first three Oz books (the only ones in the public domain at the time the comic was produced) and mixing in DC's funny animal superheroes Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew (whose own book had been cancelled a couple years back). Rodney Rabbit (the mild-mannered cartoonist alter-ego of Captain Carrot) is visited by the Cheshire Cat, who calls for the Zoo Crew's help in defeating the evil Nome King (the villainous underground monarch Baum created in Ozma of Oz). Nomes live in the darkness of caverns and mine precious jewels, and are as tough and ancient as the hills themselves. Their only weakness: eggs are deadly to them. Too bad one of the Zoo Crew isn't a chicken!


from The Oz-Wonderland War #1-3 (DC, January-March 1986), script by E. Nelson Bridwell, script by Joey Cavalieri, art and additional dialogue by Carol Lay, lettering by Carl Gafford
At a council of war led by Oz's Professor H.M. Wogglebug, T.E. (Highly Magnified, Thoroughly Educated), the Zoo Crew join characters from Wonderland and Oz to plot a strategy against the Nome King, who had kidnapped many of Oz's denizens and turned them into knick-knacks (a plot first used by the Nome King in Ozma of Oz as well).


Carol Lay's beautifully detailed artwork is a delight: the Oz characters are portrayed in the same style in which they appear in the classic Oz book illustrations by John R. Neill, and the Wonderland folk are patterned after the artwork of John Tenniel. It's a credit to Lay's skill and design sense that not only do the two styles mesh wonderfully, they also work dynamically in the same panels as Captain Carrot and his band of animal heroes.


The story gives Bridwell a chance to write (and Lay a chance to portray) some of the most famous Oz characters like the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, but also some unfamiliar to you if your only exposure to Oz is the Judy Garland movie. Here, Yankee Poodle teams up with Tik-Tok, the mechanical man and Professor Wogglebug to battle Baum's giant hammering robot from Ozma of Oz:


Like all Oz authors after Baum, Bridwell also takes an opportunity to add new creations to the mythos: in this case a quartet of magically-mutated Nomes whose appearance and powers are probably more than familiar to most comic book readers:


Four super-powered Nomes? Unbeatable! Unless, of course, you gather the most amazing heroes ever to wiggle their fluffy tails! Captain Carrot is magicked away to fight these Nomish villains, along with the greatest rabbits in fantasy fiction: Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and Millie; Diana Prance, Wonder Wabbit; the Easter Bunny, the White Rabbit of Wonderland, the March Hare, Bo Bunny (from DC's comic book Funny Stuff), a rabbit from Walt Kelly's Pogo, and there's even a jackalope skulking around the edges. (Hey, where's Bugs?)


Desperate times require Captain Carrot to team up with the World's Mightiest Mammal! Chosen from among all others by the immortal elders—Salamander, Hogules, Antlers, Zebreus, Abalone and Monkury—Hoppy the Marvel Bunny travels the burrows and warrens of the land on a never ending mission: to right wrongs, to develop understanding, and to seek justice for all! In time of dire need, young Hoppy has been granted the power by the immortals to summon awesome forces at the utterance of a single word...SHAZAM!:


As the story progresses, our heroes gradually discover the enchanted artifacts that were once the leading lights of Oz....


...encountering the big names of the canon (Scarecrow! Tin Woodsman!) as well the lesser-known but still beloved, like the patchwork flying creature known as the Gump:


Finally, in the ultimate face-off against the Nome King, all appears to be lost...until Captain Carrot unveils the ultimate weapon of mass destruction: an egg. Wonderland's Humpty Dumpty, to be precise!


The Nome King is defeated, Princess Ozma of Oz is restored, and all is good and right in the Land of Oz, thanks to our stalwart heroes:


End of story? Well, sorta...until Captain Carrot returns home to Earth-C, turning his attention from fighting underground despots to fighting a comic book deadline, only to be interrupted in the final panel by the arrival of Earth-12's Inferior Five, setting us up for the next Captain Carrot mega-crossover...


...which, sadly, never occurred. The good Captain and his Crew remained unseen until their recent appearance in Teen Titans and the apocalyptic miniseries The Final Ark, which is a pity. Cap Carrot remains one of the gleefully delightful and satisfyingly silly characters and concepts of the DC Multiverse, and it's a pity a home couldn't' be found for them on at least one of DC's new 52 Earths. (In the meantime, Cap gets to nuzzle up close to Zatanna, and that's not a bad fate as fates go, after all.) I'm a long-time Oz fan and I'm ever-delighted by comics that don't take their superheroic tropes too seriously, so I've long considered The Oz-Wonderland War to be among The Most Fun Comics Ever. With more kids than ever before reading classic fantasy novels and comics, it's the perfect time to reissue this series in a trade book format. How about it, Johnny DC? Do us Cap Carrot fans a favor, and salute Mister L. Frank Baum (and Mister Lewis Carroll) at the same time. In the meantime, remember that somewhere over the rainbow, there's a magical land where rabbits, dogs, pigs and turtles fight crime. It's not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It's not too far, far away—it's waiting for you, in the back issue bins of your local comic book shop.

Happy birthday, L. Frank Baum!

Friday Night Fights: Time waits for no man, and it won't wait for Reed

I love time travel stories.

No, no, I really love time travel stories. If time travel stories were a girl, I'd marry them. (Also, if they were Keira Knightley.) I loves me some era-hoppin', clock-turnin', calendar-flippin', grandfather-killin' stories with the fierce passion of John Wilkes Booth as he tripped over me shouting "Sic Semper Tyrannus," and firing his handgun wildly, upset about his copy of Incredible Hulk #5, apparently.

I like historical time travel stories, where you get to meet Jesse James or Teddy Roosevelt or Clara Bow. I really like self-looping and -referential ones: where the traveler overlaps his own life and we see the effects of his own past actions on himself rather than just Julius Caesar or Fatty Arbuckle or Duke Kahanamoku. Think Back to the Future, Part Two (where two Marty McFlys stretch the special effects budget and double Michael J. Fox's rich-as-Croesus salary), or Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Time Squared," which pits Picard versus Picard for the Enterprise's annual "Make-It-So-Off" competition.

But what I really love are time travel stories where events appear chronologically out of sequence to the general observer but in fact have a logical forward-moving storyline from the POV of the time travelers. F'r instance: where the heck did that Data-head come from at the beginning of Star Trek TNG's Time's Arrow? (Data would lose his head in his own future but back in the past). How come The Doctor and Martha don't recognize either Queen Elizabeth I or Sally Sparrow? (Because those meetings occur in the Doctor's own future, which is the past for those two who have met him). When I first flipped open 52 Week 19, I was all thrilled and excited, because (as I declared loudly to the world) "Booster's back, Baby!" And with the time-hopping assistance of Rip Hunter, Booster's story no longer needed to continue chronologically...for us, that is. I wanted to see Skeets chasing Booster and Rip throughout time...more specifically, throughout the 52 weeks...which means we would have seen them pop up through out the series, out of sequence, every few issues. A Skeets/Booster/Rip appearance in, say, issue #32 might be followed by one in issue #37...that occurred before the one in #32. Only when you have the whole series could you follow along and put all the pieces together in logical time-traveler POV chronological order. When I realized, however, that this wasn't gonna happen (Booster didn't pop out of time until quite close to the end of the series), I was a little disappointed. I love Easter eggs like that, which reward careful reading, re-reading, and flipping around to link the segments together. I do think DC dropped the ball by not giving us short snippets of Booster leaping around the fifty-two weeks, but as the new Booster Gold series is pretty fun and seems like it might pull out that old but irresistible trick at some point, all is forgiven, Johnny DC.

And anyway, as I suddenly remembered with a tiny light bulb going on over my fuzzy little head, somebody did a story like that already. And that somebody was the totally freakin' awesome Walt Simonson. And that story was the senses-shattering time-twisting Fantastic Four #352. And that this FF is one of the most fun comics, ever, and maybe I oughta tell you a little bit about it.

"But what," you ask, "has that got to do with the triumphant, fast-smashin', sucka-punchin' return of Bahlactus's Friday Night Fights, Bully?" you query me, and I shake my head and smile at your naive question. It's because, quite simply, dear readers, FF #352 features the mind-blowing spectacle of Reed Richards and Victor von Doom slugging it out mano a mano as they leap around in time. Or, as Unca Walt tells us, without a sliver of hyperbole:


Let's peer in on our kooky kwartet, shall we?

Artwork on this and further panels are from Fantastic Four #352 (May 1991), written and drawn by Walt Simonson, coloring by Marie Javins, lettering by Bill Oakley
(Click this picture to Big Ben-size)


It is exactly 1:04 AM. Long past my bedtime, but both Reed and Doom get to stay up late and watch Conan 'coz they're wearing Doom's "personal time sequencers" that allow them to skip back and forth in time anywhere within one half-hour of your origin point. Much like those pesky aliens who gifted Ralph Hinkley Hanley with the super-suit, Doom doesn't provide Reed with any instruction on how to use the time sequencer. But there's a reason why no VCRs in the Baxter Building ever flash "12:00"...Reed can figger out any machine in a split-second! By zipping back in time two seconds, Reed's able to land the first punch of this powerhouse fight, popping out of the space-time continuum just in...er, time to clock Doom a big rubbery sucka punch with Doom's collectible Mjolnir replica. Booyah, Doctor Doom!


But Reed is not all rubber and no silicon chip: he's got a plan, Stan, and he puts it in action by flicking ahead from 1:05 AM (see the green time box in the lower left-hand corner for the "real universe" time) to 1:08 AM (the white circular time balloon shows where Reed and Doom are heading to).


Turn the page and for bashful Benjy Grimm the clock ticks along placidly to 1:06 AM so you can read his emotional subplot with ex-She-Thing Sharon Ventura, and there! On the right side of the page pop Doom and Reed...but golly, what they're saying and doing doesn't following logically from the previous page, does it?


In fact, try to read this like a normal comic book and you'll quickly be confused. The Thing storyline progresses normally at a forward-clock movement per page pace, but the Doom/Reed panels seem to be disjointed and out of order! The dialogue doesn't seem to make sense and Reed is suddenly clad in some sort of armor he wasn't wearing on the previous page...oh wait, that's right! They're time-traveling! Don't read the Doom/Reed pages in comic book order; instead, follow their time travels using the minutes at the bottom right corner of the page!

Armed with this knowledge, flip back a page and note that Doom and Reed set out from 1:05 heading to 1:08. Flip through the comic until you spot the "real world" 1:08 (a few pages forward, in the bottom left green box), and there's where Doctor Doom has landed:


But Reed's not here? Tricky, tricky, Doc Richards! Doom heads off for 1:25 AM, and so should we, flipping forward into the future where he catches Reed unstable-moleculed-handed, arming himself (and armoring himself up!) in Doom's weaponry room of the not-too-distant future! But Doom catches up with him and off they head for 1:33 AM:


Plaang! Pound! Fzzzip! Foom! Here's the throwdown that Bahlactus has charged me with presenting to you good folks. It's not a good idea to have fistfights at 1:33 in the morning (some people are tryin' to sleep, you know!), they're not there long, heading back in the flash of an eye to 1:06 AM.


To follow them, you and I flip back a handful of pages until you find the green real world time of 1:06, and the story continues there. Now that panel from 1:06 AM makes sense, don't it? And am I not telling the truth when I opine with every bean in my body that this is one of the most fun comics, ever?

Of course, if you're following Doom and Reed, the Thing storyline will seem out of sequence. That's why this comic utterly rewards careful reading and re-reading: you need to read it at least twice (once following Reed and Doom, the other time to follow the rest of the FF), and then you'll be so gap-mouth slack-jawed freakin' blown away by teh ZOMG awesum that is the wild and wacky mind of Walt Simonson that you'll wanna read it again and again and again...not for nothing is this cover-blurbed as


Oh, and my second favorite part?


Reed lures Doom to 1:13 AM, just in time for him to pop out of thin air and be blasted by a robot that's fighting The Thing. Now that's thinking fourth-dimensionally, Reed!

But what's my favorite part?


At 1:34 AM, Reed goads Doom into blasting him point blank, but our Elastic Exemplar deflects the power of the blast using his time sequencer, sending the blast to 12:33 AM and himself to 1:20 AM. But wait a ever-luvin' minute...the story started at 1:00 AM...just where the Sam Scratch did Reed send the energy blast?

The ultra-cool answer: he sent it so far back that it went into a totally different comic book:


Reed Richards deflected an energy blast through time in Fantastic Four #352 and it wound up in Fantastic Four #350 (neatly skimming over FF #351, which was a fill-in issue).

...

(my head explodes)






(tucking the fluff back into my head)

Okay. Let's pull FF #350 out of the longbox and take a look at that. Doom has captured the Fantastic Four and placed each one in an impossible-to-escape trap. Sue's in a room filled with gas that keeps her unconscious, Johnny's apparently in a hotel suite with free adult movies, and Reed? Reed's in a dungeon cell so impregnable that there is not a single hole for Reed to stretch and slither out of. In short, Reed is trapped and we'll never see him again:

Artwork on this and the next panel are from Fantastic Four #350 (March 1991),
written and drawn by Walt Simonson, inks by Al Milgrom, coloring by Brad Vancatta, lettering by Bill Oakley


Oh, until he appears a few pages later telling Doom that he dug his way out with a belt buckle.


Cheat! shouted the amassed internet, or whatever CompuServe forums and AOL chat rooms existed in 1991, back when everyone's favorite comic blogs were just a twinkle in the eye. That seems like a careless excuse for an escape, hardly worthy of either Reed (not clever enough) or Doom (too sloppy a deathtrap). But now that we've read, out of page sequence, FF #352, we know the rest of the story: Reed was lying about the belt buckle. His real escape was facilitated by the deflected energy future-Reed sent back to 12:33 AM blasting down the walls of his prison. In short, like Bill and Ted, Reed escaped certain death by reminding himself later to save himself from certain death.

Right now, you're a Grinch or a communist if you're complaining in any way, shape or form about this story. If you still retain your senses and can hold in your drool instinct, however, you might ponder aloud: "Well, why didn't Walt show us Reed escaping from his trap?"

And the answer to that one is: he did...right on the cover of FF #352 (note the real-time counter "12:33 AM" in the corner):


(head goes 'splodey again)

Reed Richards: game, set, and match. But Walt Simonson for the win.

One hundred ten seconds ago, you clicked on a link from the Mighty Bahlactus that sent you here to my blog. Thirty-three seconds from now, I will be finishing writing this blog entry up and sending the link to Bahlactus. Yesterday, he replied with a thank-you note.

And for a dandy look at FF #350 ("The One Where The Energy Bolt Wound Up"), well, hop feet first into the joy that is Dave's Long Box!

Time, Time, Time, See What's Become of Me #4: All Together Now

One of my favorite bits of YouTubery (or if you must get technical, GoogleVideography) is the clever, "wish I'd thought of that" mash-up of Back to the Future and Back to the Future, Part II, which shows, in split-screen, the famous Fish Under the Sea Enchantment Under the Sea Dance scenes from both movies simultaneously on a split-screen, pitting McFly versus McFly for the stakes of the very time-space continuum...oh, why don't we just watch?:



Brilliant! I was very inspired by this. Why, I asked myself, don't I put the three comics I've just read into chronological order? Now, I don't have any special video editing equipment, but I do have three comic books, a pair of safety scissors, and a big ol' pot of glue, so sit back and enjoy "The Amazing Rama-Tut Adventure 3D" in glorious Mash-Up Vision! (No special glasses required, but feel free to put 'em on anyway...they look cool!)

The scene: 2940 BC. (Just after teatime). Journeying along the past lives of Morgana Blessing in search for her soul, Doctor Stephen Strange arrives in Ancient Egypt, where he is startled to find himself in a futuristic Sphinx.


Unknown to the Master of the Mystic Arts, this time period is also host to four members of The West Coast Avengers, trapped in the past during a long time-journey:


Strange is knocked out by protective laser weapons inside the Sphinx:


Strange's unconscious form is dragged through the Sphinx by robots, until they're spotted by the West Coast Avengers:


The WCAs attempt to rescue Dr. Strange, but in the confusion his body is taken away by other robots:


...and carted through the corridors of the Sphinx.


He's placed in a stasis coffin...


Just before the robots seal him within its force field, Strange regains consciousness and sends his astral form out to freedom...


Seconds after that, Doctor Strange's astral projection escapes into the Sphinx just as the West Coast Avengers arrive to try to save him...


...but they're unsuccessful and move off again. They spend more of the rest of these events running around the Sphinx in seeming circles, trying to find some way to time travel back to their era while battling robots and warriors of Rama-Tut. More or less meanwhile, while traveling back in time to 2940 BC in search of a radioactive herb to cure blindness, the Fantastic Four are captured by the despotic pharoah Rama-Tut. As Rama-Tut gloats over his captives, they are observed by the non-corporeal Doctor Strange, and via close-circuited television elsewhere in the Sphinx, the West Coast Avengers.




As the Fantastic Four is dragged off, Doctor Strange catches sight of a young slave girl, whom he detects is the possessor of Morgana's soul fragment:


He follows her to another chamber, where he spies on the preparations being made to Susan Storm for her unwilling wedding to Rama-Tut, while the slave girl waits in the background:



Seeking to free the Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange observes a slave ship on which the Thing now serves as a slave rower. Unseen by anyone, he transmutes the cosmic rays of the sun upon the captive Thing, forcing him to transform into human Ben Grimm:



Spearheaded by Ben, the FF break free, causing Rama-Tut to flee into the depths of his Sphinx...


...where he comes face to face with Doctor Strange and the slave girl:


To elude Strange, Rama-Tut activates the Sphinx's self-defense lasers, forcing Doctor Strange and the girl to flee, at the same moment the floor of the room begins to melt...


...revealing only seconds later that the Fantastic Four have burned through the floor in their own escape attempt.



The FF pursue Rama-Tut to his control room, where the pharoah has sealed himself inside a pod...


...an escape pod, to be precise. Rama-Tut blasts off, observed by Strange and the slave girl (from outside the Sphinx) and by the West Coast Avengers, watching the scene on another close-circuit television:




Before they escape, the FF discover the optic nerve restorative they came for:



Only a few moments behind them, the West Coast Avengers arrive in the control room, now escape-pod-less:


The FF flee the Sphinx, only just missing a controlled explosion that destroys all of Rama-Tut's futuristic technology. Dr. Strange and the slave girl observe the explosion from outside, but the West Coast Avengers are caught inside in the blast. Luckily, it only destroys the machinery and leaves them unharmed:




The slave girl professes her love for Dr. Strange, while in the background the Fantastic Four make their departure back to their present using Dr. Doom's time machine. Strange then magics himself back to his time:




Now, here's where there's a continuity mistake. Although we saw in Doctor Strange #53 that the FF depart 2940 before Dr. Strange, in West Coast Avengers #22 it's the other way around: Strange leaves and then the FF depart, the West Coast Avengers arriving just a few seconds too late to hitch a ride:



That single sequential error aside, though, it's like an intricate jigsaw puzzle that's fun to read and even more fun to put together. As Paul Harvey would say, "And now you know...the rest of the story." That's not the end of it, of course: the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, and the West Coast Avengers' stories continue in each of their respective magazines, but what about Rama-Tut's story? What happens next to him? Well, his time-twisted saga is spread out all across the history of the Marvel Universe. You can never be certain when you see him...or his later incarnations, Kang and Immortus...that you're reading the story in chronological order. That is, until Kurt Busiek, Continuity Cop, ties it all up in the sprawling and intricate Avengers Forever miniseries of 2000—issue #9, especially, which works to put many of the pieces of the Rama-Tut/Kang/Immortus puzzle in chronological order. And that includes this panel:


'Zat panel look familiar, time travelers?


Physicist Dr. Michio Kaku once wrote:

It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy-and that's a big "if"-then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.

True. But what Dr. Kaku fails to mention, is how utterly kickass bitchin' it would be if the time machine looked like a giant Egyptian Sphinx:


Ride on, Rama-Tut. Ride on.