The World's First Superheroes

Sometime ago, I ran across this title in a stack of 39-cent comics at the Goodwill:

Even though the shininess of the foil-embossing doesn't show well in the scan, you can almost feel the waves of pure nineties-ness radiating from this cover, drowning the poor, staid Scholastic logo under crashing waves of total awesomeness. The book does not disappoint.

Published in 1996, Hercules: The Strong Man is the first issue in a series of tales under the title Myth-Men: Guardians of the Legend, which presented stories of heroes and heroines of Greco-Roman myth. This inaugural edition gives a one-paragraph introduction to Hercules, takes four pages to summarize three of the twelve labors, and then spends the rest of the book telling of the theft of the three golden apples of the Hesperides. (SPOILER ALERT) The tale ends with the moral that Hercules was smart as well as strong.

All of this is told in lavish full-painted pages in a format somewhere between illustrated story (an awful lot of narrative weight is carried by text) and comics (there are word balloons that convey essential information).

While the form is pretty typical for "educational" comics, is the sensibility that is most striking: the ancient world of myth is depicted in that mishmash faux-medieval/quasi-classical/fantasy mode that was popularized by Xena: Warrior Princess, Dungeons and Dragons, and most versions of Lord of the Rings. Myth-Men is part Classics Illustrated comic and part Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, wrapped up in pretty paper that's only slightly homoerotic.

I'll leave it another time to deconstruct the whole story; what's more interesting to me right now is that there was a whole series of these. Although I haven't been able to track down any more issues, the back of the book promises even more mythic badassery and shiny, shiny outfits:


Now let's zoom in a little bit for a quiz - or perhaps more properly a survey, since I'm not 100% sure of the answers myself.

Can you recognize these heroic men and women after their makeovers? We know the big blond guy is Hercules, and numbers 2 and 3 look pretty much of the period, if not terribly distinctive. But who's number 1, the dark-skinned woman warrior on the left? Is silver-carapaced number 4 wielding a Klingon bat'leth? And is that Scarlett from GI Joe at position 5?

Tell me what you think. No Google-cheating - just think back to your Bullfinch's Mythology, put on The Macarena, and take your best shot. Just list 1 through 5 and the names.

(Here's a hint: Issue #2 was subtitled The Soldier King.)

Who the heck? (things only I wonder about)*

So, while I was in Value Village today as part of an errands run, I encounter this guy hanging in a plastic bag on the cheap toys wall:

He was eye-catching in the first place because I didn't immediately recognize him: the brown suit, green bird-motif cape, and visored helmet rang no bells. At first, I thought he might have been an owl-guy of some kind, and Otis has been developing an owl-theme for me lately, so I picked it up. A closer look revealed more details:

Look at that phiz. Seems determined, but a little confused at the same time. The design of the helmet looks less like and owl, and more like a... parrot? Parrot-man? There ain't no Parrot-man I know of.

And the belt: besides his, shall we say, greater that typical belt size for a superhero, his buckle is a big "G." G is for... owl? parrot? Is this a Spanish superhero or something?

But get a load of the detail on the boots - the split-toe really makes the costume.

As I was taking photos and moving through these details, I started getting some resonance that I had indeed seen this fellow before, and that he was a Japanese character, from one of those groups of heroes like the Power Rangers. A little bit of internet research later, the mystery is solved: he is Ryu, the ship's pilot for Science Ninja Team Gatchaman! This series was known more popularly in the U.S. as G-Force or Battle of the Planets.


It's nice to know I haven't completely lost my touch for pop culture, even stuff I'm not directly interested in.

Oh, and despite indications to the contrary, that is indeed an owl suit: Ryu's name in some English translations is Hooty.

So, what did you do while you ate lunch today?

*Actually, that title is a lie: the server here in the Green Bean Coffee Shop took a close look at the figure and texted her husband to ask him who it was.

Baby steps

Life in the 21st century seems to revolve around not jetpacks and undersea cities but rather social networking technologies. I was at the movies last night and during the previews it was suggested that not only should I follow the theater's Twitter and check out their Facebook, but also that I should log the event on Gowalla and do something else with another network I'd never even heard of and can't remember now. All this near-instantaneous revelation and communication has seemed to lead to the demise of (or at least a sea-change to) blogging as we knew it (a topic I mused about here). If nothing else, the social networking phenomenon nearly killed this site, as evidenced by my having written only four posts in the ten months since that rumination.

So imagine my surprise when Jim Wilson, the force behind the brilliant Let's Not Talk about Movies and one of the Stalwarts, ticked me off on his list of noteworthy bloggers, despite that overlong hiatus. His notice was like good whiskey: warming, but bracing as well. He talked of inspiration, and I guess his praise was close enough to that. This morning, I shuttered the ol' Facebook site and came back here to turn on the lights, open the windows, and pull the sheets off the furniture.

I'm not going to promise anything specific, but I imagine that this summer will allow me to exercise my writing muscles a little bit more than I have recently. I think we'll let the freak flag fly high, and talk about superheroes, roleplaying games, movies, and how science fiction hasn't been any good since Stanley Weinbaum died.

But first, I need to pass on the meme that Jim gifted me with. That'll be the next post.

Auld Lang Syne

Tomorrow is Rob Lenihan's birthday: an occasion inconsequential to many across the globe, a cause for great joy and festivities to many closer at hand, and another reminder to me of the passage of time. You see, while some people - actually, it seems more like plenty of people - are in Rob's current coterie of friends and associates, I, on the opposite coast, cannot celebrate his birthday with the crowd, and must console myself with my status as, I think, his longest-sustained friend.

I have known Rob since he was Robert, when we both found ourselves in Brother Joseph Anthony's sixth grade class at Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge. Drawn together over the ensuing years by our shared interests in science fiction, comic books, old movies, his brother's Playboys, Levi jackets and Dingo boots, pulp magazines, girls from the Bronx, and kung fu movies, Rob and I found a friendship that was the stuff of song and story, or at least a movie of the week. Even after we enrolled in different high schools in different boroughs, we were as tight as ever, traversing Senator Street just about every day, from his house just past Fifth Avenue to my family's apartment at the other end, near Owl's Head Park.

You know that profile picture he has on Facebook, the one where he still has a head of black curly hair? That yellow Midas scarf he's wearing came from my sister's shop. That hand he is holding is my other sister's. That Christmas tree was in my house.

Even when I left the City for the wilds of Westchester and college, Rob and I were tight, keeping in touch and meeting to hang out. I remember being poured onto a Hudson Line train by him and our friend Liam Dolan after a night of drinking in Manhattan, to somehow make my own damned, drunken way back to Dobbs Ferry, thank you. What a pal.

When I left the East Coast for the Pacific Northwest in 1978, our relationship started to get a little sketchy. Rob was there when I returned to Brooklyn in 1984 for my father's funeral, but was not on the scene in 2001 when I came back for my mother's. In the intervening years we had lost touch; I understand now that it had something to do with an exile to the Poconos, but at the time it appeared to me that he had just dropped off the face of the earth. Not that I blamed him; more often, I blamed myself for not holding on.

Finally, though the miracle of the Internets, we were able to re-establish contact recently, and I couldn't be happier. Following Rob's adventures on Facebook, reading his blog posts, and having him present in my daily life, if only virtually, has meant more to me than perhaps he knows. That he appears to have aged well and matured his talent for writing - and living - is icing on the cake.

I can't give Rob a birthday cake, but I'd like to give him something else. Here, from the dusty archives that have managed to survive across five decades, is an example of Lenihan juvenalia, with undisputed authorial provenance. This was a joint writing assignment Rob and I did in sixth grade (note the "A" grade on the cover) and was the first collaboration of many.

The cover:


And because we all know a cover alone isn't enough, a title page:

And finally, just an excerpt from the deathless prose within:


(This is in my handwriting which was marginally more legible than Rob's. Okay, significantly more legible.)

I have held onto this for so long because it is the tangible manifestation of one of the most important things in my life: my friendship with Rob Lenihan. I can't be there to celebrate with him, but that doesn't mean I don't celebrate him.

Happy Birthday, Robert!