Hey, Kids! E-Books!

I am a proud member of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW), consisting of all the fine women and men who write your favorite media tie-in books and stories, from novels based on Monk, Burn Notice, Murder She Wrote, or the latest blockbuster movie novelization, to the comic books and coloring books featuring Dr. Who and the Penguins of Madagascar.

It's only natural that you get almost 200 writers together, you're gonna wind up with a book! In this case, it's Tied In: The Business, History, and Craft of media Tie-In Writing, featuring articles by such tie-in luminaries as Tod Goldberg, Jeff Marriotte, Max Allan Collins, Elizabeth Massie, Donald Bain, Robert Greenberger, David Spencer, Greg Cox, Burl Barer, Jeff Ayers, Nancy Holder, John Cox, Brandie Tarvin, William C. Dietz, Alina Adams, William Rabkin, and my own humble self ("Pictures to Prose: Comic Book and Comic Strip Tie-Ins," page 77). It's a fairly complete survey of the American media tie-in scene from early on through today, written by the folks who write these things and is edited by our illustrious co-founder, Lee Goldberg. I've been learning a bit myself reading through it!

Tied In: The Business, History, and Craft of Media Tie-In Writing is currently available as an e-book at Smashwords or Amazon (you'll find a link to the right). An ink and paper edition will be available in a few weeks, published through Amazon CreateSpace. I'll let you know when that happens!

The Good Old Days

In 2003, I edited a young adult non-fiction book. Critical Perspectives On The Great Depression for Rosen Publishing. The book was a collection of contemporary writings about that bleak period of American history, with brief introductions to the pieces by the editor. This is the intro I wrote for the book, which, in light of current economic conditions and and just a few short months after the 80th anniversary of “Black Tuesday,” might be worth taking a look at.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE GREAT DEPRESSION

© 2004 Rosen Publishing

Introduction

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, first inaugural address, March 4, 1933

Social Security. The federal income tax. Unemployment insurance. Welfare. The Federal Bank Deposit Insurance Corporation. The Tennessee Valley Authority. The National Labor Relations Board. The Securities and Exchange Commission. The Federal Housing Authority.

These are just some of the federal institutions and agencies that we today either take for granted or resent for their intrusions into our lives and business. Before October 29, 1929, most of these federal institutions (and dozens more just like them) would have been unthinkable to the citizens of the United States, accustomed as they were to a laissez-faire, or hands-off, style of government. Yet after 1929, these programs resurrected the United States from the depths of the greatest economic disaster to ever strike this country, the crash and near-decade long recovery that came to be known as the Great Depression.

It seemed was as though no one wanted to see it coming. Ever since 1919 and the end of the first World War, the United States had been on what appeared to be an ever-cresting tide of economic growth, with no end in sight. Gone were the restraints of the staid, pre-War Edwardian era, shoved roughly aside by returning veterans with a reckless disregard for what lay ahead. Here were the Roaring Twenties, the swinging Jazz Age, a decade of exuberance, of excess, of wild abandon. While the Eighteenth Amendment had outlawed the transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages (1919), anyone wanting a drink knew where to find the nearest speakeasy for a shot of illegal whiskey, accompanied by the hot sounds of the popular new jazz music.

The nation was fairly exploding with prosperity, innovation, and creativity. With only a little money down, and little government regulation or interference, anyone could invest in the booming stock market and find themselves—on paper, at least—instantly wealthy.

Air travel went from being a novelty craze to commercial viability with Charles Lindbergh’s successful 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, even as Americans bought millions of Henry Ford’s new Model A automobiles to create the most mobile society in the history of the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway brought literature into the modern age with such works as “The Great Gatsby,” “An American Tragedy,” and “A Farewell to Arms,” while motion pictures learned to talk, starting with “The Jazz Singer.”

There seemed no stopping America. “The chief business of the American people is business,” President Calvin Coolidge told the press in 1925 and no one could argue with that assessment. For most of its first century, the U.S. had been a largely agrarian society, but by the end of the first third of the Twentieth Century, the country had turned decidedly urban and industrialized, with a majority of its population living, for the first time, in cities rather than on farms. Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, was still considered a sleepy little Southern town, “A strange city, set up in the first place to be the center of government and, like government itself at that time, a city moving slowly and doing little,” according to reporter David Brinkley in his book, “Washington Goes to War.” Government was kept small, operating with a bureaucracy that can only be called miniscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers that today keeps the monolithic machine of government humming.

Herbert Hoover, who in 1922 spoke of “American individualism” over governmental regulation and interference in the lives of its citizens, was elected president in 1928. President Hoover, former head of the American Relief Administration (which organized shipments of food for an estimated one billion starving people in fifty-seven countries in post-World War I Europe) and Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, was a believer in balancing responsibility for the welfare of the people with a faith in free enterprise. During his 1929 campaign, Hoover proclaimed “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

Between May 1928 and September 1929, the average price of stocks rose forty per cent, with trading exploding from two to three million shares per day to over five million. Those interested in investing in the stock market could do so “on margin,” that is, for a small cash down payment, using the stock itself as collateral for its purchase; full payment came due when the stock was sold...usually, in those heady days, for a significant profit that would more than cover the purchase price. The market, once the playground of the wealthy, was suddenly open to Everyman. The railroad tycoon and the shoeshine boy stood side-by-side, watching the rise and fall (but mostly rise) of the Wall Street stock ticker.

Stock prices spiraled upwards, speculation ran rampant, and investors kept jumping on board the money-making wagon. But that wagon could support only so many before it collapsed under the weight and, on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, that’s exactly what happened, dumping the United States and the rest of the world into the throes of the Great Depression. In a single day, billions of dollars were lost (it is estimated that on the New York Stock Exchange alone, losses exceeded $8,000,000,000; this at a time when the average per capita urban household income was $750 a year and $273 for farming households) as more than 16,000,000 shares were frantically traded in a futile attempt to staunch the financial bloodletting. Small investors who had made their paper-profits on stocks purchased at ten per cent of face value were suddenly forced to pay the balance due on their stocks. But with prices plummeting so low, a majority of these small-timers had no profits to cover them and lost everything.

Jazz Age exuberance and excess turned almost immediately to desperation and deprivation. Banks and businesses failed, the money supply shrank, and, by 1932, the unemployment rate would reach a staggering 23.6 per cent (and continue on up, peaking at 24.9 per cent) as over thirteen million Americans lost their jobs. Relief efforts were organized across the country as families with no source of income were forced to stand in the infamous bread lines and soup kitchens, which were, for many, their only source of food.

Hundreds of thousands took to the road seeking work at any wage; entire families begin a westward migration from the southern and northern Plain states (Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arkansas), which suffered the added tragedy of one of the worst droughts in history that turned a large section of the nation into a Dust Bowl. President Hoover took a number of steps to stem the tide of desperation, including the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, and the banking regulatory Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, but it wasn’t until newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933 that the government’s response was equal to the magnitude of the crisis. As the Democratic nominee for president, Roosevelt had promised “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

Roosevelt was as good as his word. In the first one hundred days of his administration, his “New Deal” instituted a concentrated program of legislative activity, sending recovery bill after recovery bill to a Congress that, unsure how to respond, had not done nearly enough to help their constituents through this unprecedented financial catastrophe. Under the president’s guidance, Congress created, in swift succession, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Farm Credit Administration (FCA), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the National Recovery Act (NRA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), to name a few. This alphabet soup of federal agencies—along with a rash of banking, securities, and credit acts that followed—were all aimed at getting Americans back to work and the floundering economy back on track.

But for all the efforts of FDR (whose popularity as leader would lead him to being reelected an unprecedented three times) and his dedicated administration, it would be more than a decade before the nation, and the world, would truly recover from the events of that single, terrible day.

Well, Now Everyone Knows!

I wrote this introduction to the first volume of DC's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN ARCHIVES back in February 2003. Always loved the Challs, although by the time I discovered the book, the great Bob Brown had been the primary artist for years...

Introduction to CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN ARCHIVES Vol. I

© DC Comics

“What’s out there?—Places we cannot see! Things we fear to touch! Sounds that do not belong to this world. Riddles of the ages...lurking beyond the bridge without a name!”

So began the premiere adventure of the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN in the sixth issue of DC Comics’ try-out title, SHOWCASE (January-February, 1957). Four men—daredevils, scientists, explorers all—brought together by fate, given a second chance at life, daring not only to confront the myriad of things that go bump in the night, but overcome them as well.

The world has always been enamored of explorers. From Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus to Neil Armstrong, we’ve embraced those willing to leave their footprints in unexplored territory. Of course, by the late 1950s, the world was rapidly running out of nooks and crannies to explore and, at the time Showcase #6 hit the stands, we were still almost a year away from making the first, tentative steps into the great unknown of outer space.

But comic book creators have always had a license to go beyond the incredible, to delve into places both real and mythic, to leap all over the universe in needle-nosed rockets of imagination. Whether it was an ordinary man trained to the peak of physical and mental perfection, an android who could burst into flame, or a woman molded from clay and endowed with super powers by the gods themselves, nothing was too outrageous for comics. The very best creators made such fantastic scenarios plausible. The very best of the very best made them come to life.

Jack Kirby was the master—to be crowned, within just a few, short years, the “King”—of just that ability.

Jack Kirby, in fact, stands at the head of any list you might care to compile of the best of the best. And was, in his own way, an explorer as well...admittedly a bold statement to make about a man who spent most of his life sitting behind a drawing board. But Jack Kirby was usually one step (at the very least!) ahead of the pack. From that seat at his drawing board, entire universes were conceived and bold mythologies evoked because, quite simply, Jack could create circles around most everyone in the business.

He seemed to understand that a new age of exploration was coming, that comics were poised for a renaissance. Maybe he sensed it the way he had sniffed out earlier fads, beating other publishers to the punch. Maybe he just thought it was a cool idea whose time had come. (I’m betting on the latter; Jack Kirby never seemed to me a guy prone to deep analysis of prevailing trends. He preferred creating fads to following them.)

It’s no wonder that Jack had such a deep-rooted understanding of comic books; he had been making them since practically the art form began. Born Jacob Kurtzberg in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side in 1917, Jack possessed a natural ability that lead him, by 1935, to work in the animation field as an in-betweener for the New York-based Max Fleischer Studios, producers of Popeye, Betty Boop, Koko The Clown and, later, Superman theatrical cartoons. But even at such an early age, following other artists’ leads wasn’t fulfilling for him and, by 1937, he was already laboring in the four-color fields. At Fox Comics, Jack met Joe Simon, a writer-artist with a keen sense for business and a creative streak almost as wide as his own. The two formed a partnership that was to last almost two decades and be responsible for the creation of some of the best known characters in the field, and, since they were at it, a genre or two as well. From Simon & Kirby would come (to name but a few): Captain America, the Boy Commandos, Blue Beetle, Blue Bolt, Marvel Boy, the Vision, Captain Marvel, Sandman, the Newsboy Legion, Stuntman, Airboy, BOYS’ RANCH, BULLS EYE, CAPTAIN 3-D, FIGHTING AMERICAN, JUSTICE TRAPS THE GUILTY, MY DATE, WESTERN FIGHTERS, CHARLIE CHAN, HEADLINE COMICS, BLACK MAGIC, FOXHOLE, POLICE TRAP, and STRANGE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS. With YOUNG LOVE, they created the romance comic.

Their output was staggering, the quality always top notch. They worked for most of the major publishers of the day, maintained ownership of many of their creations, and in the mid-1950s, started up their own publishing house. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Simon & Kirby names on the cover were enough to insure success.

Of course, all good things must come to an end and so it was with this long-time collaboration. By the mid-1950s, comic sales had gone into a major slump, leading to the failure of their newly opened Mainline Comics imprint and the dissolution of their partnership. Jack found himself welcomed back at Atlas (the former Timely Comics, soon to become Marvel), as well as National Comics (DC Comics to you), Prize Comics, and Harvey Comics. He also hit the Holy Grail of comic book artist ambition: a syndicated newspaper strip, Sky Masters of the Space Force, which he wrote and penciled (and which was inked by Wally Wood and, later, Dick Ayers).

And, somewhere in there, Jack also managed to create the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN.

In those days, comic books were sold on newsstands, available practically everywhere you went. Under the distribution system then in place (way before the development of dedicated comic shops), it could take some six to eight months for a publisher to find out how well a given issue had sold. Six to eight months during which subsequent issues could come out and bomb. DC inaugurated the idea of a “showcase” title to test new ideas before committing to regular monthly (or, as was more likely in those days, bi-monthly) publication. The first three issues of SHOWCASE gave comic buyers non-starters like Firefighters (starring Fireman Farrell), King of the Wild (animal stories), and The Frogmen (scuba divers, not mutants). The book didn’t get good until its fourth issue, in which an entire new era for comics was born (the Silver Age), and the long-moribund super hero genre was revived with the Flash.

But DC was still taking baby steps in bringing super hero comics back before the buying public. There would be three more SHOWCASE try-outs for Flash before Barry Allen would receive his own title. CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN fell somewhere in-between super heroes and straight adventure. Its protagonists possessed no powers beyond their own natural born brains and/or brawn, yet they wore costumes and were outfitted with enough gadgets and geegaws to do Batman proud.

Jack seemed to possess an instinctive understanding of heroic archetypes and myths. With Joe Simon, he had built an already impressive body of work in the area of adventure heroes (BOYS RANCH, BULLS EYE, BOY COMMANDOS, to name a few). Now, left to his own devices, he was free to expand on that base and the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN was the result.

SHOWCASE #6 (the first of the team’s four try-out appearances, all reprinted in this volume) introduced readers to war hero and test pilot Ace Morgan, oceanographer, expert skin diver, and all-around brain Prof Haley, circus daredevil and electronics expert Red Ryan, and Olympic wrestling champion Rocky Davis. En route together to an appearance on the radio program “Heroes” aboard Morgan’s private jet, these four extraordinary men survive a crash that should have killed them all...but didn’t.

“We should be dead,” exclaimed the astonished Red Ryan. “But we’re not! My watch should be smashed—yet it’s unharmed, keeping time!”

“Borrowed time, Red!” said Ace. “We’re living on borrowed time!” And gathered there in the forest beside the twisted wreckage of their plane, the four men agreed to use this new lease on life to take “a few more risks...to challenge the unknown!”

“The CHALLENGERS are a suicide squad,” Jack once said. “They are the men who take the risks. These are the kind of guys who travel through time as casually as you or I go to the corner store. I wouldn’t want to travel through time like those guys. I’d be scared out of my underwear.”

Kirby’s decades of creative experience are on display in the very first CHALLENGERS story, his knowledge of story construction, the relationships between characters, the mixing of personality types to create dramatic tension. “It’s like any group of friends,” Jack said. “One is like this, another is like that, and they all complement each other. Groups have no need for duplicates, and God forbid if you had two hot heads—you’d never survive.”

And there it was, so simple a concept...

(one that an observant reader can’t help but notice possesses similarities with the origin of yet another fantastic quartet that Jack would be involved with in just a few years time over at Marvel)

...yet one that would lead to an eighty-seven issue, twenty year run (with a few gaps in publication here and there along the way), as well as a pair of revivals as miniseries in the 1990s. With stories sometimes supplied by Dave Wood, more often by Jack himself, with the occasional scripting over Kirby’s plots by France “Ed” Herron, the Challengers would unlock “The Secrets of the Sorcerer’s Box,” defeat a renegade robot when “Ultivac is Loose,” face “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” “The Menace of the Ancient Vials,” “The Man Who Tampered With Infinity,” “The Human Pets,” “The Monster Maker,” and a host of other menaces supernatural, scientific, alien, and even occasionally, human. On the art side, Jack’s always stunning and dynamic pencils were inked by such peerless talents as Marvin Stein, Bruno Premiani, and Wally Wood.

Jack would, alas, produce only twelve issues of the Challs adventures (four SHOWCASE appearance plus the first eight of their own title). A man who knew what he was doing and where he wanted his creations to go, Kirby admitted, “I’d get into fights with editors and I’d get into arguments with publishers,” sometimes leading to his departure from a strip, as happened between Jack and CHALLENGERS editor Jack Schiff. The Challs continued facing the unknown without Kirby under a variety of talented writers and artists, including scribes Herron, Wood, Arnold Drake, Bill Finger, Robert Kanigher, Mike Friedrich, and Denny O’Neil, and artists Bob Brown (for an impressive fifty-four issue run), Jack Sparling, Dick Dillon, and George Tuska. Even without Jack Kirby, the Challengers remained a vibrant, exciting book...but readers couldn’t help but wonder what plans the once and future “King” might have had in mind for his adventurous creations. (Of course, had Jack stayed at DC, he might never have found his way back to Marvel again where, with Stan Lee, he would help jumpstart a flailing industry in the 1960s. Instead, it might well have been DC, with Jack’s help, leading the way...!)

So, there it is: the why and wherefore, a little bit of back story, and a smidgen of historic context for the legendary CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN.

Now turn the page and prepare to tag along with Ace, Red, Prof, and Rocky as they investigate “The Secrets of the Sorcerer’s Box,” only the first of their many challenges of the unknown...!

# # #

Paul Kupperberg is an editor in DC’s Licensed Publishing group who not only once owned the entire run of the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, but also had the privilege of working with Jack Kirby on the 1985 SUPER POWERS miniseries, an event that still stands as the fan-boy high-point of his almost three decades in comics.