Zoo in the head

Ktang!

This is one of my favourite ever pages from a superhero comic - from Captain Marvel #17, October 1969, courtesy of the Giant Size Marvel blog, which has been celebrating the art of Gil Kane.

Kane's work is instantly identifiable from the absurdly over-defined muscles, the exaggerated lines of eyes and cheekbones, and the wing-like flicks of hair he liked to give his characters. As Richard Guion says, his re-design of Captain Marvel's uniform - the deep blue and red, the exploding star, the nega-bands on the wrists, and the half-mask showing off the silver hair - is the last word in superhero chic.

Kane's outstanding work was on Captain Marvel and Adam Warlock, a golden-skinned Messiah figure with a soul-devouring gem in the centre of his brow. In hindsight, it's interesting to note the political undertones in both characters. Mar-Vell was, you'll recall, a warrior of the Kree, blue-skinned extraterrestrial racial supremacists, suspect because of his pink skin: perhaps the idea of a white man being a racial outcast seemed radical back then. Warlock was a kind of perfect human, created by rogue geneticists, and then endowed with godlike powers by the High Evolutionary (a Dr. Moreau knock-off whose main hobby was turning animals into man-beast hybrids via a "genetic accelerator"); the whole thing was a very weird sci-fi amalgamation of the New Testament and Nietzsche. It makes a sort of sense that Kane later drew a comic-book version of Wagner's Ring.

Where's the beef?

Here, bizarrely, is the beef:

You won't need telling that this is Sabretooth, Wolverine's arch-enemy, who obviously takes care of himself - or not so obviously, given that, like Wolverine, he can mistreat his body all he wants and it will just repair itself. But let's talk about the source: Shirtless Superheroes, a blog dedicated to beefcake of the kind that has been pumped up by gamma rays, radioactive spiders, super-soldier serums, nega-bands, and so forth - super-porn.

It's no secret that superheroes are partly, and maybe completely, about sex - all those revealing costumes, the shadowy ripples and bulges, together with the constant anxiety that there are parts of yourself the world must never know about: oh yes, I remember that feeling. There are even occasional delicate hints - as here - of sado-masochism. Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay played with sexuality and superheroes to marvellous effect; so did Alan Moore's Watchmen ("Did the costumes make it good?" Silk Spectre asks Nite Owl after they've just got it on in his Owlship).

Shirtless Superheroes doesn't have time for all that pussyfooting around with cleverness and irony: they just swallow their beefcake whole, and lick their lips. I always find it worrying when somebody gets over-excited about people who aren't real; when the unreal people are people I get moderately excited about myself I feel worried and sordid. I won't be going back to Shirtless Superheroes. Or if I do, I won't be telling you about it.

Pay attention: this is the most important information you will ever hear

via Chris Sims, the "Critical Reception" section of the Wikipedia entry on the Pokemon character Bulbasaur:

CNN reporter Dennis Michael described Bulbasaur as one of the "lead critters" of the games and "perhaps the Carmen Miranda of Pokémon figures." Joyce Millman's impression of a Bulbasaur was that it looked like "a dinosaur thingy with what looks like a large garlic bulb growing out of its back." She did not know how it defeated its opponents but speculated that "perhaps [it] overpowers them with a strong batch of pesto."

Bulbasaur was selected as one of the top ten Pokémon by fans who voted at Pokemon.com. According to a panel of 5 - 8 year olds assembled by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1999, Bulbasaur was one of the children's three favorite Pokémon. A writer for the University of Notre Dame's The Observer noted that Bulbasaur was the the third most popular Pokemon to pick after Charizard, who was "was sleek, powerful, and utterly destructive", and Squirtle, who "would evolve into Blastoise, a tank of a turtle with huge water cannons on its back." Next was Bulbasaur, "which would become Venusaur, a clumsy-looking lout with a giant flower growing on its back." He speculated that the people who chose Bulbasaur were ones who "knew how it felt to be picked last in gym class." In a The Ohio State Sentinel point-counterpoint, Matthew Thomas Gross felt that Charmander is superior to Bulbasaur, saying Bulbasaur has "shown evidence of sloth and laziness," and has lower speed rating than Charmander. In contrast, Clark Helmsley feels that Bulbasaur is superior, noting that it is higher in four of the six main Pokemon statistics (HP, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense). Helmsley also feels that Bulbasaur's loyalty is more important than Charmander's abiltiy to evolve into the powerful Charizard.

For reference, Bulbasaur looks like this:

The comments following Sims' post lead to this:

Why you shouldn't go on the web while mildly drunk

You end up buying stuff like this:

Which is wonderful, obviously, but also available to read free online and have you any idea how lousy the dollar-sterling exchange rate is right now and what shipping from the US to Britain costs? Here's me supposed to be saving money.

There are some positives here, the biggest being that El Gorgo is an 800lb gorilla luchador with an Einsteinian-level intellect who battles Lovecraftian sea-gods across space and time to prevent them seizing world dominion, when he's not playing surf-guitar. Also, it's a wonderful spoof of/tribute to Jack Kirby (the man who created Captain America, the Silver Surfer, etc.) - Tamas Jakab's art gets the suicidally bold line, the awkward poses and the gaudy colour-schemes; and Mike McGee seems to have channelled Kirby to achieve the Donald Wolfit theatricality of his dialogue ("Do you think me blind, man?! Outnumbered thus, even a hero out of legend itself cannot hope to prevail!!"). And my copies are signed by McGee and Jakab.

On the other hand, I know perfectly well that I should have stopped being excited by this stuff when I was 12. 

(Hat-tip: I came to El Gorgo! through Chris Sims.)