Omygod, how I loved DC’s Dollar Comics. For those of you too young to remember, a dollar for a comic was once a lot of money. When I first started collecting, comics were 15 cents (and candy bars were 5 cents) and as the ‘70s progressed, the prices slowly got higher and higher until 1977 when DC made the big leap to the Dollar Comic, a line which at first boasted 80 pages of all new material with no ads. Could you imagine that now? Oh, they’re called trade paperbacks. But these were very affordable for all, even at a dollar, and the sight of them today still gives me the chills when I see them in bins at comic book conventions. They’re thick, shiny, and substantial, usually sporting fab Neal Adams covers, boasted multitudes of stories, and promises of excitement with all-new superhero adventures galore. They just felt so good in one’s hands. They usually had those “Table of Contents” type covers popular in the ‘70s, where you could see all the different heroes and their adventures as opposed to today’s pin-up covers which tell you nothing.
Costs eventually forced DC to start inserting adds in place of all new material and then the page count began dwindling, but for awhile, it was ad-free heaven. This was all part of the DC explosion, which eventually became the DC Implosion as a variety of factors colluded to doom the expansion of titles and formats. This is considered one of the darkest days in comics, as the very survival of DC was at stake. In the slash and burn that followed, even DC’s flagship title and source of its name, Detective Comics, was almost cancelled. The backlog of unpublished material, intended for the DC Explosion books, was collected into two volumes called Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. These volumes have never seen the light of day, public-wise, and are deep in the DC vaults. For some, they are the Holy Grail of comicdom, but word from one DC staffer I know who’s seen this buried treasure, says it’s all best left buried. And I tend to believe him.
The evidence of this comes from the extra material that was actually published before the Implosion. Though a variety of factors caused the implosion, one was the quality of the material. For as much as I love the idea and sight of the Dollar Comics, they really didn’t have enough good artists and writers, or simply weren’t willing to pay for the better ones, to generate all this extra material (to be fair, there was a lot of A+ plus material sprinkled throughout).
Take for example, The Superman Family which had picked up its numbering when DC cancelled Jimmy Olsen, and decided to give Jimmy, Lois Lane, Supergirl and all manner of other Superman’s hanger-ons a place for their adventures. When it got expanded into a Dollar Comic, the added space did not equal added quality. It was particularly the art that suffered, generated by a range of B or C grade artists, inked, or should I say ruined, mostly by Vince Colletta. Vince, as I’ve complained before, was fast, probably cheap, but no good. He reduced even the best pencillers to crap. In this issue, #185, he inks three out of the five stories, reducing a usually spot-on Kurt Schaffenburger to a generic artist and rendering all the others into eyesores.
One of the stories that escaped Vince’s path of destruction was a 10-page story about Nightwing and Flamebird called “Beginnings”. Originally, this dynamic duo was composed of Superman and Jimmy Olsen who disguised themselves as superheroes down in the bottled city of Kandor. Modeled after Batman and Robin, they took their names from birds native to Krypton called the nightwing and the flamebird. Nothing gay about any of that. Eventually, another May-December couple took over these personas—Superman’s hot cousin Van-Zee and a hot young ex-criminal named Ak-Var. They happened upon into the Nightcave—the Kandorian version of the Batcave and donned the personas of Nightwing and Flamebird to fight such threats to Kandor such as amoebas and a variety of deadly giant Godzilla-like bacteria.
The story begins with a slam-bang, as Nightwing and Flamebird are grappling with a huge blobular creature hell bent on causing mayhem to the citizen of Kandor. The duo has little effect on the monster, which breaks into a building and steals a small cylinder before knocking out the heroes. The blob brings his prize back to the generic villain, Zal-Te, who wears a trendy headband (and this years before Olivia made it safe to get physical) and evil smile, taking evil poses as if he’d taken a course at the Learning Annex called “Hammy Super Villain Poses Without Straining Your Back”.
Meanwhile, Van-Zee has a wa-wa kind of flashback while trying to regain consciousness about the origins of this new version of Nightwing and Flamebird. It turns out that the villain, Zal-Te had threatened the city once before, with a ONE-EYED MONSTER with tentacles—hmm, sounds like a few randy barflies I’ve encountered. While it rampages through the city, probably leaving it white and sticky, Van-Zee and Ak-Var run off to seemingly the other side of the bottle, where the younger hottie reveals a hidden cave, which is like the most fabulous Upper West Side Condo you’ve ever seen, with glass-enclosed wardrobes, vintage space-age TV sets, bird sanctuary and lots of easy-to-clean surfaces everywhere. But instead of saying, “I love you, it’s time we moved in together and started a family,” Ak-Var gets a bit kinkier and asks his partner to put on a form-fitting outfit that shows off his impressive basket and some belt-jets that make his legs lighter than helium. Okay, not much different from dates I’ve had.
Improbably, instead of getting down and dirty, they fly off, past some snow-capped mountains (!) in Kandor to fight the creature, which has probably been destroying things for an hour or more, depending on how much primping and adjusting each hero needed with their new outfits and masks. After more grappling, they save the day and a partnership is born.
Back to the present, the two wake up and track down the villain who sicks his deadly bacteria on them. Nightwing takes out a gun which squirts a gooey white substance all over the creature and kills it. Flamebird saves the villain, who because of a psychic link he had to blobby creature, starts to die with it. Within three panels, it’s all over, another fine mess cleared up by our Ambiguously Gay Duo.
They really do look like the Ambiguously Gay Duo. The best thing about the lame story is the art, while not great, does its best to accentuate how sexy the two are. There are plenty of crotch shots, thrusting crotch shots, butt shots, and a great emphasis on muscular thighs, all designed I suppose to keep the reader interested long after the story induced yawns.
How I long for the days of the Dollar Comics again. Despite the wobbly quality of their contents, the feel and weight of these comics gave it a magic that I haven’t experienced again in terms of comic packaging. Note to self when self becomes Ruler of the Comics Universe—bring back the Dollar Comics format. Though perhaps at $6.99 an issue, sigh.
