Teenage Mutant Cub Reporter

 

Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga began in the pages of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, so I decided to mashup a Silver Age Jimmy Olsen trope with a Bronze Age one. A mind-controlled Giant Turtle Man would be a pretty useful tool for Darkseid.

After the Fox

 I am too young to have seen the Walt Disney Zorro series when it was being shown on TV, but among all the Zorros I think Guy Williams is top of mind for most people, including myself.

I think the first movie I saw that had Zorro as a legacy character was Zorro: The Gay Blade with George Hamilton playing the son (or more accurately, sons) of the original who has to take up the mantle. This cover imagines if that happened to Williams’ Don Diego. Who would he have passed the mantle on to?

E is for… Eternia?

 

The new Masters of the Universe movie opened today in my corner of the globe, so it’s the perfect time for another pun that I couldn’t resist making an illustration of. The E-Man series from First Comics was heavily into parody back then, so this is something that the creators might have done, considering both the comic and the Masters of the Universe cartoon both came out in 1983.

Hire Power

I wasn’t following Power Man and Iron Fist when their series ended, so I didn’t know that Iron Fist was supposed to be dead. I only found out about it in John Byrne’s Namor series where he was brought back to life. I’m glad he did because Danny Rand is too good of a character to waste.

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!