Published In 1967 Here's
Issue #49 Of Mighty Comics
Featuring Steel Sterling
And The Fox. Art By
Paul Reinman. Script
By Jerry Siegel.
Yet Even More Comic Book Fun From The Past With Other Strange Stuff Thrown In Just For The Heck Of It.
These were some interesting superheroes, they would not have been out of place in 1930's/1940's comics. The Fox is a blend of Batman and Super-Argo, and Steel Sterling, man of steel could be the young cousin of Doc Savage, man of bronze.
ReplyDeleteGreat adventure tales from 1960s comics.
Love these MLJ/Archie superheroes of the 60's. Alex Toth did a fantastic take on The Fox in the 80's. I will have to find that and post it.
ReplyDeleteOK, first we have Steel Sterling and his painful shyness around women simply throwing themselves at him. Well, here's a case of either arrested development or of a gay man in denial. Either he needs to develop some combination of maturity & social skills or some combination of self-awareness & self-acceptance. We wish you luck, Mr. Sterling. We wish you luck.
ReplyDeleteBut then we come to the Fox... what are we to make of him? Usually when superheroes have a romantic rivalry with themselves they want to be loved as themselves in their secret identity not for the fame & glamour of their costumed identity. Not the Fox, though, it's his costumed identity that he's committed to. Really committed to, in that he's tried other costumed identities and they just don't do it for him.
So far not so bad. It's like somebody involved in a fetish subculture who is also obliged to maintain a straight life for some reason longing for validation of their real--i.e. fetish--selves.
But then we come to the fact that the Fox's been pestering his already girlfriend in her place of work with his unwanted advances. So much so that he's a joke to the other staff.
It gets worse. The perfume he gives her secretly allows him to keep tabs on her whereabouts. What a creep.
I know the Golden Age/Silver Age Superman/Lois Lane/Clark Kent triangle had its unhealthy dynamic, but Jerry Siegel took it up a notch here.
I don't believe the Fox is Paul Reiman, either. It's not bad, but it doesn't look like his stuff.
Are all 60s Archie superhero stuff this weird? I'd be interested to see.