Ape is Enough

An obvious Tarzan copy, but it’s also more than that. It also incorporates elements from the Hulk. Hogarth is a hybrid of a human and an ape. He was born human, but when he gets angry or upset, he turns into a savage ape. Just don’t ask how he managed to get the DNA of both species.

And his name Hogarth is obviously a callback to one of the most popular Tarzan comic strip artists, Burne Hogarth.

Bat-ten Down the Hatches

 

Captain Strong was a Popeye pastiche who was a recurring character in the Superman titles in the Bronze Age of comics, but I think he only had a total of four appearances.

While I was drawing this, I couldn’t help but think of his visual similarity to Bibbo Bibbowski, who became a much-loved supporting character during the Triangle Years of Superman. Was Bibbo inspired by Captain Strong?

Powered Couple

My first exposure to this couple was in Marvel Team-Up, when they teamed up with Spidey to fight some dude named The Dark Rider in a time-traveling adventure set during the Salem Witch Trials. I know that I wasn’t even ten years old at that time, but it sparked my interest about the Salem story and I started reading about it in our school library. I think I was too young to realize how horrible it all was. I only recall seeing a picture of Cotton Mather and thinking that the way Sal Buscema drew him was not very accurate.

When Doves Fly

 Two Doves together? With Monarch in the background, you can be sure that time travel shenanigans are involved.

I quite enjoyed the Armageddon 2001 event from way back, but they kind of dropped the ball with the ending. DC had to change Monarch’s secret identity to Hawk because of leaked info that it was gonna be Captain Atom. But the whole thing with Monarch forcing Hawk to kill him in order to take up the armor and become Monarch himself was a huge plothole for me. If it had worked the way he intended it to, then he would just have been trapped in a time loop of going back in time to get killed over and over again.

Rainbow Raider

 

Part two of our crossover! At the end of the DNAgents series, all of the team members were put in suspended animation. Rainbow, in particular, had a romantic relationship with Crossfire which started in the miniseries Crossfire and Rainbow. To top it off, it was revealed that Rainbow was pregnant before being put in storage! That was quite a bummer of an ending, and I would have preferred that these characters had a happier one.

Cross Dressing

 

This is the first part of a two issue crossover! Crossfire originally had a black skintight outfit but he was forced to destroy it to be able to get out of jail (not gonna get into the details here). So for the remainder of his series, he was just using the mask and was just dressed in an ordinary turtleneck and pants. For this imaginary story, I’ve put him back in his black costume, but with added body armor because he’s going to need it. Where is this heading? Come back in a few days to find out!

Jungle Jen

 

I didn’t read She-Hulk’s first series, and only got familiar with her when she joined the Fantastic Four during John Byrne’s run. I really liked her relationship with Wyatt Wingfoot. They seemed perfect together. Too bad it didn’t last.

I would also read some issues of her second series. At first I didn’t appreciate the humorous fourth wall breaking because I found the sitcom style humor in the Justice League titles at that time more to my liking. But eventually it grew on me.

Getting Robbed

 

I wasn’t really into the Image Comics craze back in the early 1990s. Maybe because I was reading more DC Comics at that time, that I never really followed the hype with the hot Marvel artists who jumped ship and eventually formed Image.

All of the Image Comics I own are from back issue bins. The only Image issue I bought fresh from a comic shop was the Spawn issue that guest-starred Cerebus. I guess I found it intriguing enough to have such different characters appear together in a single issue that I had to read it immediately. Nowadays, that trope has become very common.

Also, I’m not an admirer of Rob Liefeld’s work. But I must admit that there’s something about it that’s hard to ignore. You just can’t resist looking at it, at least.

Falk Lore

 

Today marks the 90th anniversary of The Ghost Who Walks, The Phantom! He really is The Man Who Cannot Die. Happy birthday, Kit Walker!

Suckers

 

I think Andrew Bennett (I…Vampire) was the first non-evil vampire that I’ve encountered in any form of fiction. I never really followed his exploits, but would see a story or two when I would purchase House of Mystery when it catches my fancy.

Gustav Decobra, on the other hand, stuck with me. Because his first (and only pre-Crisis) appearance in Detective Comics is one of the earliest comic books that I remember reading.