![]() He starts thinking about how much easier Poopsie's life is and somehow manages to whip up an "ego-exchanging machine" right then and there. Instead, the story follows Herman Klodd, the Van Dykes' hardworking groundskeeper, whose duties include walking his boss's poodle, Poopsie. It all adds up to one of the most memorable stories from any comic of the era.įor instance, "Captain Marvel Adventures" #133 gives us "Captain Marvel and the Dog Dilemma," where the title character doesn't even appear until a third of the way through. Some scenes, like the plane flying backward, putting itself and the fence it crashed into back together, play out in eerie silence. Most of Cap's adventures are as talky and jokey as an episode of "Seinfeld," but Beck makes the absurdity of the situation twice as shocking by playing it totally straight. ![]() This could have easily been a cheap gimmick, but Beck's handling of it seems more like the work of an avant-garde artist like Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware than a superhero adventure. "If only I could do it all over again!" he says. Back on Earth, Captain Marvel is musing on his failure to save a crashed pilot because he was too busy with a house fire. "Captain Marvel and the Mistake of Father Time" delivers exactly what it promises when the mystical old man accidentally leaves his hourglass upside-down during his nap on a cloud. In "Marvel Family" #20, Beck goes past the building blocks of comics to bend the rules of time itself. But no one involved seems to realize that all that money could pay for a lot more military gear than anyone could ever wring out of a couple pounds of armor. Black wants to buy Chickenheart's collection for $5,000, which somehow makes him the bad guy. All his troubles turn out to be the fault of another collector named Bart Black. Before his mental breakdown, Chickenheart is about to melt down his priceless collection of one-of-a-kind historical treasures to make into guns and tanks. Strange stuff, but the why of it all is even weirder. To keep him out of trouble, Billy Batson tags along as his pageboy in between turning into Captain Marvel so he can intervene when Chickenheart gets violent. While he's in the Pacific Northwest to promote a scrap metal drive for the war effort, Cap meets with a modern-day Don Quixote named Richard Chickenheart, whose obsession with medieval artifacts has led him to regular "spells" where he thinks he's a medieval knight. The basic outlines of the story are already strange enough. Mind firing so many German cannons it knocks the Earth out of orbit building a cannon called "Great Big Bertha" that fires mile-wide shells invading Scotland in an island-shaped battleship and Captain Marvel warning the Scots from the back of an unfrozen mammoth.įor instance, we have "Captain Marvel Visits Portland, Oregon, or Knighthood Flowers Again!" in "Captain Marvel Adventures" #29. This is a story so jampacked that Binder introduces two unrelated underground civilizations in one five-page chapter, but highlights include: Mr. ![]() Mind turns the Great Wall of China into a giant shield for the invading Japanese army. Not that this makes him any less of a threat: Not long after this discovery, Mr. Mind's hands, Captain Marvel finds out who he is - a caterpillar with cute little glasses who could have slunk out of a Disney cartoon. He has the entire resources of the Axis Powers at his disposal: Even Hitler himself happily takes orders. The Monster Society is an interplanetary cabal run by an unseen, seemingly omniscient mastermind named Mr. It's not so easy to forget how bizarre the story is.
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