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!

What Was Your First Comic Book?

I'm curious to hear from readers on this one - what was the first comic book you remember picking up? 

It doesn't have to be the first one you actually purchased, just, what was the first one to light a fire in your memory? Whether it came out fifty years ago or last week, doesn't matter. Maybe you never read a comic until last week but you were inspired by the Bill Nye/ Creationist / internet-zoo-animals-mating to purchase and read:

and

Whatever! Feel free to let me know at whatever length and with whatever meanderings you require.

If you're anything like me, trying to answer this question will lead you on a merry adventure through time and space and associative memories (and probably comics.org.) The year I began purchasing comics was definitely 1981, but my brother must have started bringing them home in the late '70s. I definitely remember seeing this one around the house:

I especially remember that cover price, as they were up to $.50 when I started bring my $2 allowance to the drugstore.

Marvel used to cover-date issues a few months ahead, so though that says April 1979, it was probably published in January or February of that year. As I have no memory of the story that goes with that cover, though, I don't consider Ghost Rider 35 my first comic book.

Nor this, although he definitely had this one, too. I can't say with absolute certainty that this is the first time the X-Men came onto my radar, but it most likely was.

I recall this one somewhat more vividly, both the cover and the story:

But I don't consider this my first comic, either. It tingles my Spider-Sense, though, so I decided to use August 1981 as my starting point.

This proved to be the right approach. It was definitely the summer of 1981 that I began taking monthly trips to the drugstore. But the plot thickens somewhat, as this was also the year when we moved from the States to Germany, and the delay in new comics was about 5 or 6 months. So everything I read 1981 to 1986 was 5 or 6 months behind what kids were reading stateside. (Excepting those summers where we'd come back to the States, when I'd stockpile.)

I apologize for overburdening you with McBackstory when trying to answer the simplest question. 

Long story short, I came up with about 20 comics from this time period, any 1 of which I could legitimately name as the primordial root from which grew the 9 or 10 long boxes currently in my closet. I whittled that 20 down to the following. 

PRELUDE: These first 2 were definite "kiddie comics," something I knew my brother and his pals looked down on, so naturally I pretended not to enjoy them.

Secretly, though, I loved these. These Richie Rich comics actually had some wild stuff going on - he was always time traveling and what not. Someday, some enterprising grad student will win a lot of old Richie Riches and write a dissertation on capitalism and America and make his or her reputation.

Probably not a dissertation-in-the-making for Spidey Super Stories, though. Prove me wrong, nerds of tomorrow!

LET US BEGIN IN EARNEST.

What was it that made me pick this one up? I'm not sure. To tell you the truth, I think my memory is playing a trick on me, as I may have picked up this one first:

and then because I liked it, went back to the drugstore and got #171, which was still on the racks. Or did I pick up #174 and go back and get 171 and 172? (I was missing 173 for years and years; I ended up paying top dollar for that at a convention in the late 80s.) It's a dang ol' mystery. On par with the pyramids, the Piri Reis map, or the continued careers of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. All I know is by the time this came out:

I was telling anyone who would listen that Daredevil was my favorite hero.

 

I have no such confusion when it comes to this next one, though.

Art by Michael Golden

Now that's a cover! As with many of the records I'd later bring home, my parents immediately took this away from me but gave it back after reading/ listening to make sure I wasn't being recruited into some Thrill Kill Cult. (They were cool like that)

This storyline culminated in a war with Satan himself, by the by.

METAL.

EVEN MORE METAL.

Sharing a cover date with Defenders #96 and Daredevil #171:

To be honest, I'm not sure how  I ended up getting into Green Lantern. No one else I knew was, but I liked his costume, I think. It might simply have been the Super-Friends cartoon. 

That would explain how I came to collect this next one, as well.

I had a subscription to both The Flash and Green Lantern for years. These were the only DCs I ever picked up prior to Justice League International and Batman, years later. 

Although I definitely read this one over and over again in 1981. If memory serves, I did not choose this one myself. My grandmother bought it and this next one for me.

Looking at these two especially, I'm chuckling over how many times I have packed them up and moved them with me over the years. I sold the bulk of my collection in the early 90s (though have re-acquired most of it,) but I still have my original copies of Buck Rogers #12 and JLA #194. Which means these have moved from Germany to Rhode Island to Ohio to Georgia to Chicago, multiple times. I haven't cracked that Buck Rogers open since Germany, I wager, so that's kind of funny. (And, I suspect, not an unfamiliar scenario for many of you, as well.)

I definitely associate this one with summertime in Pawtucket, RI, 1981, though not for any particular reason - just a powerful associative memory from looking at the cover.

As well as this one:

We took a trip to Georgia that summer, and I remember reading this one in the safety of my grandmother's trailer. 

Awesome cover.

(I was convinced - thanks to my older brother and my cousin - that if I stepped outside I'd be bitten by snakes or eaten by a crocodile. Plus the trailer had air conditioning.)

Finally, there's this issue of Micronauts:

But I'm not sure if that actually was the first issue of Micronauts I ever picked up. I definitely had this one in my collection by 1982, as I remember reading it that summer in Germany and realizing it was the oldest comic I had. 

How I ended up with it, though, I don't really know. A yard sale, maybe? Did someone see I liked Micronauts and got this for me as a present? I wracked my brains to answer this for you, but, as with those Daredevils, I'm afraid the answer has been consumed in the temporal sandstorm between hither and thither.

Captain McPike has an illusion, and you have reality.

May you find your own way as pleasant.

Your turn!

EDIT: The author of the Defenders comic aforementioned - among many other things, including (now) ongoing titles for DC and my all-time favorite run on Captain America (then) not to mention JLI, Brookyln Dreams, and a dozen other things I've loved over the years was kind enough to respond to my tweet at him.

A) It will never, ever get old to get a reply from J.M. DeMatteis. B) That link is shortened in the above, but here is the post, and it's great fun. Click and enjoy! and C) He referred to this very blog as a "fun read." Day made!