The Heck Ya Mean? pt. 2

DON HECK

THE DC YEARS

We looked at Don "the" Heck "Ya Mean"s work for Marvel work last time; now it's time for his work over at National Publications. I ended up as always with more screencaps than I planned for, so this will be split into 2 parts.

Two quick things before we dive into the pictures: (1) I've always referred to Don as the unsung hero of Marvel's early years. I may have been overstating that a bit. I have no desire to dis the guy or anything, just I'd never looked at so much of his art all at once before. Some of it seems rushed or repetitive: twin hazards of the comics illustrator's job. But just being honest. I still think he's a rather unsung artist, but maybe I'm rethinking some of my earlier statements like "Don Heck belongs on the Mt. Rushmore of Silver Age Marvel." Maybe he does and maybe he doesn't, I just don't feel quite as certain of that as I once did.

And (2) my daughter saw the above Teen Titans picture and I had to explain who Harlequinn (the 70s Batman Family/ Teen Titans heroine, aka Joker's daughter) was. As I did so, I realized hey, this was a terrible idea. Could've worked, but it humanizes the Joker to give him a daughter for one (unless the origin story is somewhat dark, which is similarly unpleasant/ bad-idea-ish) and two, was her visual based on Lily Tomlin?

Could've been. Nothing wrong with that, I just wonder about such things.  I'll have to look up the appropriate Back Issue and see if there's any word on the subject. 

(While we're here: "You are ze masters of ze queek moves!" Wow. From Batman Family 14.)

Anyway: my daughters were both confused ("that's not Harley Quinn") and I think 70s / all-eras-audiences were, too. (Actually, that does not appear to be the case - there's a lot I'm skipping. But hey, the 70s had a lot of weird ideas, that's hardly controversial.)

Let's begin.

1.

BATMAN FAMILY

I remembered really enjoying Heck's work on the Batgirl segments of Batman Family when I was doing the 70s Batman posts. I still did on this revisit, but a few of the ones I specifically remembered as Heck were actually done by other artists. Oops. Sorry, Mike Grell et al., for this unfortunate but frankly all too predictable lapse in memory management. 

Still, Heck did a good enough job where I wonder what a stint on the main Batman books might have looked like. Marshall Rodgers, Jim Aparo, and other luminaries had it all covered, of course, but some good work all around.

I messed up with my captioning and Blogger formatting is making it difficult to fix, so no annotations for each issue, but they're all from Don's Batgirl segments in Batman Family v1.

2.

SUPERMAN FAMILY

The 70s had some of my favorite looks for super-heroines/ villains. This is hands down my favorite Supergirl costume. And no, not because of the hot pants aspect (although Don may have enjoyed that) - it just works well against the billowing blouse/ cape/ coiffure. But yeah: Ms. Marvel, Catwoman, Batgirl, so many others: their coolest costumes came out when Ford and Carter were in the White House and Pele was scoring goals for the New York Cosmos.

"The Man with the Eternity Hands" is an awesome title.
All caps from Superman Family 195 through 198.

Eyebrows, dude.

Outside of Supergirl, Don's other gig on the Superman books was the Rose and Thorn back-up in Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane, which I'll give its own section next time.  Next up:

3.

GREEN LANTERN

and THE FLASH

Someone should make a list of all the angel dust warnings in comics during the late 70s through the early 80s. I'm not saying they were unwarranted, just - like that meme about quicksand you see go round every so often - my generation might have been set up to think it would be a bigger presence in our daily lives than it turned out to be. Other horrors awaited us, but the quicksand and angel dust epidemic, thankfully, weren't really among them. My apologies to any readers who've lost friends or loved ones to either. 

Heck's run on Green Lantern and The Flash - the first and for many years only DC titles I read - isn't really all that great, story-or-art-wise, I'm sad to say. Actually, the stories for the Flash issues I looked at weren't bad, but I struggled to screencap my way through it. Which is weird because he's inked by none other than Dick Giordano in this stretch. 

Question for any Heck fans reading this: who inked him best? (My answer: Heck himself.)

Flash 281.

Some spacescapes from Green Lantern 185.

Fiona, Barry's neighbor and post-Iris, pre-Crisis (given that he died in Crisis - permanently, as was said a hundred times at the time; of course he's back now/ several times) love interest.

Flash 289.

Sadly, this issue (Flash 293) is not as fun as this panel might otherwise indicate.

4.

SINISTER HOUSE

There's a great Back Issue devoted to horror comics of the Bronze Age. I should've cracked it open for this post. But it's all the way on the other side of the apartment.

Anyway, I'm not sure why Heck didn't do more work for DC's horror titles. As I recall, the editor for those titles had a reliable group of Filipino artists like Gerry Talaoc and the like that handled most of those. I'm sorry to pass on such shoddy research; any parties interested in the era/ that stable of comics should look up that Back Issue or just go and buy any of the cheap Essentials collections for Ghosts, The Witching Hour, or Sinister House of Secret Love. They're all great.

Horror comics-wise, which publisher did the best work? The conventional wisdom is EC, I guess, though I'd say Warren (Creepy, Eerie) is neck and neck if not in the lead. EC has the virtue of being the Neil Armstrong of the bunch. But its knock-off competitors (including Comics Media, for whom Heck did a bunch of great work and covers as mentioned last time) all look pretty good in retrospect. And props must be given to DC and Marvel's attempts in the 70s, once the Comics Code went away. 

Heck's work for horror / non-superhero stuff always looked a little better to me than his superhero stuff. I didn't screencap enough of it. Same goes for:

5.

HEARTTHROBS 

and OTHER ROMANCE WORK

Anytime I see these old romance comics covers I think of the wonderful Romance Redux parody Marvel put out a few years ago, or the (hopefully) ongoing collections from IDW, Weird Love. All are totally worth getting; I love this crap. 

Just a couple of panels from Heartthrobs 100-102.

~

To Be Continued in 
Pt. 3: Don Heck - The DC Years, pt. 2!