A lot of what we experience as kids impacts us as adults. I sometimes find myself wondering why I like or dislike a particular thing, or why I grew up to think a certain way -- what did I experience as a child that impacted me in a way that would cause me to think/feel as I do today? When I stumbled across my old copy of Justice League of America #90 the other day, I realized that probably was the first major encounter I had with environmentalism. I probably haven't cracked it open in thirty, maybe thirty-five years, so I decided to re-read it to see what exactly may have struck a chord with me.

As it turns out, I must have totally mis-read the issue as a kid. It wasn't really an environmental story at all, despite my recollection of it being one. Probably due in large part to the cover. The gist of the actual story is the military (it's never specified which branch) dumped a bunch of "obsolete" poisonous gas into the ocean just to get rid of it. The dumping happens to crush the sacred "Proof Rock" of the underwater Pale People, and one of them takes that as a sign to use the gas to conquer Aquaman's Atlantis. They quickly take over, but the death of an Atlantean found on the shore alerts Batman, Superman, Hawkman, Green Lantern, and Atom to a potential problem. The heroes go save Aquaman and take back Atlantis. Hawkman then instructs the Pale People how they might use the broken Proof Rock in a different manner than before.

There are a number of problems with the story. The two beach-goers who find the dead Atlantean immediately recognize her as such, with no indication of how since she looks exactly like a human. How the Pale People go from having a boulder crushing their Proof Rock to using the gas weapons (which they'd never actually seen) to conquer Atlantis isn't really explained. How a gas weapon even works underwater is pretty murky as well. And somehow the Proof Rock becomes a Proof Rock Plant at the end of the story, and Hawkman seems to think that eating it is a sign of the faith they must have in their own souls. How do Hawkman's wings work underwater anyway? Batman is actually absent for most of the story because he's off searching for Flash, whose "special services" he suspects "will be needed on this case" -- um, since when does Flash have any powers that are unusually useful underwater? Not to mention a number of other smaller assumptions and leaps of logic writer Mike Friedrich seems to make.

But, hey, it was 1971. Comics were still considered kids stuff and not given a lot of thought. On the plus side, there's a moment of gravity and emotional realism towards the end. After the Pale People are defeated, Green Lantern notes, "Looks like everything's okay now!" to which Aquaman goes off about how 43 people died...

The next page shows Aquaman and much of Atlantis attending a mass funeral. So big props for including that sequence showing actual consequences.

But the various storytelling problems, I think, led to my thinking it was more actively an environmental story. I thought the Proof Rock had been destroyed by the gas itself after it had been dumped, not some boulders that had been knocked loose by the gas canisters. The couple panels later of the Pale People letting loose the gas were drawn in such a way that I didn't really make the connection that they had fully harnessed the gas as a weapon; I think I must have thought they were only redirecting the already exposed gas.

I suppose I must have read more into the cover, and made some assumptions about the story itself based on that. And I wonder if that's why I'm not more of an environmentalist. I got the basic message I think cover artist Carmine Infantino was trying to convey, but since it wasn't well reinforced by the contents, it only left me with a base level concern as opposed to being more activist about it.

Or else it had no impact at all, and I got whatever concerns I have from other sources entirely. Regardless, I do find these types of inquires interesting to explore, even if they don't turn up any conclusive proofs.

Back in December, I predicted that one of the big themes in comics for 2026 would be that a lot of legal barriers would be knocked down to allow publishers to "cross-pollinate" their intellectual properties. That is, we would see more inter-company crossovers AND more instances of publishers printing books featuring works already printed by other publishers. (Think: IDW's Artist's Editions of Marvel and DC comics.) We have indeed been seeing a lot of that this year, which I noted in April.

Of course, this isn't exactly new. We've seen cross-overs between Marvel and DC dating back to the 1970s, and the very earliest comic books were just publishers reprinting comics that had already appeared in newspapers. The reason why this type of thing typically happens -- as I explained back in my December post -- is because there is a lot of market uncertainty, and businesses in general veer more towards options with fewer risks. In the case of publishing, this means reprinting material there are known quantities for and doubling up on popular IPs.

What this means, internally to publishers, is that their legal departments are working a bit harder on ensuring they have all the rights squared away, and they're usually a little more flexible in negotiations with the other parties involved. That's how we finally saw, for the first time, a reprint of Marvel Two-in-One #21, which featured Doc Savage. The character was under license from Street & Smith when the original issue came out in 1976 but Marvel couldn't get reprint rights later, and so the issue wasn't included in the Essential reprint books which otherwise reprinted the entire run of that series. But they pushed harder for that and probably capitulated to some additional demands/money from Condé Nast (Doc Savage's current rights holder) in order to get a more complete set of the series for the Omnibus line.

What then occurred to me is that there are few other Marvel comics that have never been reprinted because of rights issues and, interestingly, many of them share something in common. The two biggest ones I can think of are 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Marvelous Wizard of Oz, both of which were treasury-style books Marvel did in the mid-1970s based on the movies... which are owned by MGM. I haven't gone through Marvel's full back catalog, but I suspect there's a few other comics they did around that time based on MGM properies that have never been reprinted either. (Does The Marvelous Land of Oz have rights issues? The story is based on L. Frank Baum's books directly, not a movie, but it uses some of the same character designs. I'm not sure how that was handled.) I don't doubt Marvel's lawyers have investigated what needs to happen to bring some of these treasury books back to print for the first time in the half-century since their original publication, but MGM is now owned by Amazon and I have no idea how much hardball they're playing on this kind of thing. They no doubt recognize the value of the MGM movie libray itself, but how greedy are they around derivative works like these comics?

Maybe the Spider-Noir show opened some legal doors for reprint rights somehow? I'm sure they're totally different sets of lawyers involved on both sides, but there's some discussion going on between Marvel and Amazon/MGM at least. but in this era of heightened what-can-we-do-that's-a-sure-thing publishing, I wouldn't be surprised to see the two companies come to an agreement in the not-too-distant future.

Here's an experiment I proposed several years back. I've brought it up every four years or so, but I have yet to see anyone take this challenge up, so I thought I'd present it here again.

Is there anything in the original Star Wars trilogy that necessitates any given character being a certain race or gender? I can't think of anything. Obi-Wan and Yoda could have been female. Vader could have been Luke's mother. Even the Han/Leia romance could easily be portrayed by either two men or two women. Everything you think of as masculine or feminine in those movies is strictly a social construct, and it would be no problem at all to do color-blind casting since all ties to what we think of as racial identity are effectively null and void in a galaxy far, far away.

That got me thinking about how things are portrayed in comics. (Actually, everything pretty much gets me thinking about comics!) There are a lot of the same types of issues in mainstream comics. So what would happen if you took an existing comic book story -- particularly something really well-known -- and gender/race swapped characters randomly? Any number of fan artists have shown what famous characters might look like if they were gender/race swapped, but that doesn't carry the thought all the way to its natural conclusion.

There have been a number of stories where characters were gender-swapped already. The most famous example I can think of offhand is Archie #636 from several years ago. But, by and large, the writers here (and on the others) were quite conscious of the gender-swapping and specifically wrote the books to that effect. So readers are given a very consciously skewed version of the characters.

That's why I'd be more interested to see some existing stories swapped. Keep the dialogue and layouts and everything exactly as they were done originally, but simply swap the specifics of the illustrations themselves. The Galactus Trilogy, The Dark Phoenix Saga, The Killing Joke, The Death of Superman... what would these stories look like if everything were exactly the same, except characters' races and genders were assigned randomly? Again, exact same dialogue, exact same actions, exact same layouts; just swap out the visuals of the character designs.

I think this would be a fascinating and enlightening experiment. Rather than letting the writer consciously or subconsciously play to stereotypes, this approach would force readers to directly and honestly confront their notions of gender and racial identity. Why does Mrs. Fantastic sound like an utter bitch when Mr. Fantastic just came off as a bit gruff? Is Gene Grey's destruction of the D'Bari less heinous than when Jean Grey did it? Is Commissioner Jane Gordon excessively worried about her son's capture, given that he had already proven himself capable enough to fight alongside Batwoman? Does Superwoman's fight against Doomsday seem needlessly absurd now? (Well... even more needlessly absurd!)

In most race and gender swapping experiments, we're still stuck with preconceptions developed over years, if not decades, of social conditioning of what a person should/shouldn't act like based on their gender or race. Writers and artists, consciously or not, play to those stereotypes and present readers with (typically) one man's idea of what women would be like if they had masculine traits. By eliminating that aspect of the equation, and we pretend the original writer was simply writing from a gender/race neutral position, we can see how those stereotypes are often inadvertently catered to.

So here's my challenge. I would like to see someone go through some famous comic story, and randomly assign a gender and race to each character. Then recreate the story exactly as it was originally presented, but using the newly assigned race/gender for everybody. Yup, it would be a lot of work but it would spark one hell of a discussion, one that we haven't had yet!

Like many people, I am mostly familiar with Darryl Cunningham's work when it comes to non-fiction. Whether he was disproving absurd moon landing conspiracy theories or just relaying the life of a Russian dictator, he did a good job boiling down some complex elements into a fairly digestable narrative. But because I know him from that type of material, I was indeed curious to see what he might do with a straight-up science fiction story.

John of the Night is the story of the titular John, who discovers some "ripples" in space-time that seem to have originated some 3000 years earlier, in the 1960s, but could obliterate the universe. When he goes to inform his boss, though, he almost instantly finds himself at the wrong end of a several starships that blow his station into smithereens. While he and his daughter are able to escape the immediate execution, they have to race to keep ahead of John's boss's attempts to get rid of him. We learn of the war that was started by a group who believe the destruction of this universe will lead to the birth of a new and "perfect" one and that, when it comes to magic, belief is more important than reality. With the help of his daughter, John is able to thwart the universe's greatest assassin and ultimately save everything. Except perhaps himself.

I read the story before reading any background on it. I had no idea what Cunningham's intentions were or how he approached this compared to his non-fiction work. About a third of the way into it, I recall getting the strong sense that it reminded me of Jack Kirby's Fourth World. Obviously, there's little in the way of visual similarity, but the storytelling felt like Cunningham was relaying some of his core ideas about the fundamental nature of mankind, life, and even reality itself through an action-packed story much like Kirby had done in the Fourth World. It's not pontificating and there are in fact several fight scenes which just allow silent storytelling to take place with no monologuing or anything. I got the strong sense that, like Kirby, Cunningham was building up a story around ideas that he couldn't quite express directly. And sure enough, he expressly notes in the back matter that Kirby was a direct inspiration for some of his effort in the book.

What I also liked was Cunningham was able to casually throw in "corrections" to common storytelling problems when it comes to science. For example, at one point John leaves his daughter through a time portal and assumes she'll be able to build her own time machine to find him. And even though it takes her a month to do so, she shows up almost immediately. And that notion of time being, you know, relative remains consistent throughout the story, unlike many who play fast and loose with those kinds of ideas because their creators can't think of a decent way to generate tension otherwise. (I'm looking at you, Back to the Future.)

Despite the shade I'm throwing there, Cunningham does not do that. He doesn't call out any one story or franchise for being "wrong" about how any of that works. In fact, he's got any number of Easter eggs to other time travel/alternate reality stories from Star Trek to Red Dwarf, and from The Wizard of Oz to The Prisoner. There's a slew of background nods if you want to stop for a Where's Waldo style hunt.

On the whole, I thought it was a really interesting story despite the protagonist being kind of an asshole. We get a backstory explaining why eventually, but it's just an explanation, not an excuse. He's still an asshole, even to his own kid. (Which, interestingly, she recognizes and acknowledges, but continues to live with him anyway; but seemingly not in a toxic sort of way strangely.) But John ultimately does play the role of the hero, not only to the universe but also to his daughter and her mother. So as a reader, you still have good reason to cheer him on. And, seemingly as a bonus, Cunningham just so happens to include a lot of his ideas about the nature of reality in the process.

John of the Night should be in shops on September 2, 2026 but you can obviously pre-order it now. It retails for $19.99 US and is being published by Avery Hill. An advance review copy was provided to me by the publisher.

One of the things that's struck me about older comics is some of the cross-media attention they were given. I think many fans are at least nominally familiar with some of the serials that were produced using Superman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and others, but less well-known are the radio programs that were popular around the same time.

The Adventures of Superman, of course, is one of the more well-known, largely by virtue of the titular character's popularity. He was, arguably, one of the first cross-media phenomenon. The old Fleischer cartoons are certainly well-known as are the serials and later TV show. So I think fans readily roll the notion of a radio show under that umbrella. "He was in all media, so of course he would have a radio show!"

But I don't know that fans today understand the importance and impact radio had back in the day. Unlike comics, radio programs could be listened to collectively and were a communal activity in a way that many other media -- certainly other media of the day -- couldn't be. So to have a character make the transition from comics to radio was a big deal, culturally on par with getting a blockbuster movie today.

Besides Superman, other comic characters that got their own radio programs included Batman, Blue Beetle, Flash Gordon, Blondie, Popeye, Blackstone, Archie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, Li'l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Skippy, Terry and the Pirates, Mark Trail, Buster Brown, and the Gumps to name just a few! Perhaps surprisingly, considering how little is spoken of them in comic circles, they continued to be popular up through the 1950s!

What's striking to me is that any of them maintained any level of success at all! After all, comics are very much a visual medium and radio very much is not. Therefore you not only lose the visualizations provided in the strips, but the nature of the storytelling needs to be changed significantly. Think about that sequence from Action Comics #1 where Superman comes up to a locked room and the governor's assistant dares him to knock it down -- the subsequent panel shows Superman doing exactly that but without any dialogue or sound effects. While that sequence could be translated into a radio format, it would require some re-working for the non-visual medium.

I wouldn't mind seeing more writing analyzing how various comics were able to make the transition versus how many simply applied comic strip characters to what were essentially existing radio scripts.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: How I Make Comics Review
https://ift.tt/zi97tYg

Kleefeld on Comics: Some Rat Queens Thoughts
https://ift.tt/jkgNLfC

Kleefeld on Comics: Mitsumasa Anno
https://ift.tt/C4D1EGh

Kleefeld on Comics: Kill Six Billion Demons Paratexts
https://ift.tt/kcVQy9Y

Kleefeld on Comics: Juneteenth Comics
https://ift.tt/A9XpBFE

Juneteenth is a federal holiday here in the US, but you'd barely know it from reading the comics page. These are all the comics -- and two of them argueably aren't actually comics -- that I've found this morning mentioning the day...