But Tower Comics did not have the bullpen, the resources, or the distribution to pose a serious threat to the DC-Marvel death grip on superheroes, and the company folded in 1969.Įven so, Dynamo opened up to me a universe of brightly colored characters that were easy for a kid to understand in the early 1970s, and that presented the world in binary, good-versus-evil terms. 135, August 1965) and influenced by the hit TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. THUNDER (The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves) reflected our collective national interest in spies and the inevitable neuroses of Cold War America, and they were situationally parallel to Marvel’s burgeoning SHIELD characters (first appearing in Strange Tales no. 48 in 1940 and whose power and speed were achieved for an hour through ingestion of a pill containing “Miraclo.”) Dynamo and several other characters, such as NoMan, Menthor, Lightning, and Raven, belonged to the THUNDER Agents line of comic books, which began in November 1965 and which were published by short-lived Tower Comics under the direction of Wallace Wood and a handful of other artists and writers.

(Dynamo was, in fact, closely related conceptually to Hourman, who appeared for the first time in Adventure Comics no. He was government agent Leonard Brown, who gained exceptional strength and invulnerability for thirty minutes with the aid of a special belt. Of course, Dynamo was not Superman’s brother. 1 (August 1966), with cover art by Wallace Wood. It is also my earliest memory of what would become a lifelong fascination with comic books. This is my earliest memory of willful prevarication.

I casually explained that Dynamo was Superman’s brother. In those years of lunchboxes and recess kickball, one’s stature might reside, if fleetingly, in the question of whose hero could beat up the other’s. The calculus that informs six-year-old logic determined that his comic book was better because the quasiomnipotent Superman was universally known. Doug proudly displayed his copy of DC’s Action Comics starring Superman. My best friend and I sat across from each other in intense cross-legged dialogue. It was the summer of 1972 in Arlington, Virginia.

Art spiegelman maus pdf italiano