“Suicide Squad: Kill Arkhan Asylum” #4
Take one stone-cold killer, four criminal mind controllers, and add a comedy relief villain in a comic without comedy, and the sum is murder and mayhem.
“Dial H for Hero!”
A mysterious telephone dial-like device that is capable of transforming whomever dials the letters H‑E-R‑O on in into a superhero, or, rather, a series of different superheroes. (Of course, its a little hard to so describe the H‑Dial now, as telephones don’t have dials, they have keypads.) Boy scientist Robby Reed first discovered the H‑dial in a cave in Colorado and used it to protect the town of Littleville. Several years later, teenagers Chris King and Vicki Grant would discover a different pair of dials marked similarly, which they used to become superheroes. Later, others, too, possessed one of the H‑Dials. Currently, the power of the H‑Dial is passing among ordinary people in the New 52 DC era.
As might be expected, a few of the heroes these people transformed into had hypnotic powers.
Hypno-Girl — Atomic Rocket Comics
Atomic Rocket Comics ("Italy's Most Mysterious Comics Publisher") is an Italian comics publisher who has a website featuring a number of comic heroes, so mysterious that is doesn't have any…
This Week in Comics — 2011/12/14
Star Trek & The Legion of Super Heroes #3 The team-up comic is now in its third issue and only now have the heroes of both worlds met. And, of…
“Paradise Dungeons” — A Critical History of Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman may be the absolute strangest fictional character ever to become popular. Created by William Moulton Marston, she is explicitly a character created to promote his vision of a…
Comic Archetypes: The Golden Age Hypnotic Heroine
History: Looking over the diverse cast of hypnotic characters in the Golden Age of Comics (which is the period from the start of comics publication through the end of WW II) one is eventually struck by the rampant sexism and male domination involved. There were a number of villains whose primary motif was some form of hypnosis in the Golden Age, but almost every one was male, from the shady sideshow hypnotists and crafty con artists to the mysterious mystics and malevolent magicians to the sinister scientists and demented doctors. Which should be no surprise, as there were very few female villains at all during that time. Also, the great majority of these characters were “one-shot” characters who only appeared in a single issue: for re-occurring characters like Lex Luthor, hypnotic control of the hero was a ploy they might use on rare occasions but never specialized in. Strangely enough, or, rather, more likely another sign of the times, is that such hypnotic control was rarely used against or by women.
There were a few exceptions, of course, such as the reoccurring Justice Society villainess Harlequin, who used a pair of hypnotic glasses as part of her circus clown motif, but she was a much more sympathetic character and eventually reformed, and the one-shot villainess Lady Serpent, who used her hypnotic gaze to mesmerize a female jail guard into letting her escape, yet her foe, the Black Terror, forewarned about her powers, was able to resist her. (Curiously, Catwoman would use use the same trick to escape prison in a much later comic, hypnotizing a female guard with a cat’s‑eye-jeweled locket.) It almost seems as though the comics writers just didn’t want to or weren’t allowed to have a female character, hero or villain, who could control the male characters: it was acceptable for Luthor to put Superman under his hypnotic control, but no woman could. Given the sexism of the culture at the time, that seems a likely explanation.
But there was one exception to all of this sexism, the most famous heroine of this era and possibly any era. And that was Wonder Woman.
“Mandrake the Magician” Makes an Appearance
I have just seen news that Titan Books will reprint the original "Mandrake the Magician" Sunday comic strips. The first collection will be released in February, 2012, and cover the…
This Week in Comics — 2011/03/09
Heroes for Hire #4 The Puppet Master's control over Misty (only here did I see that her real name is Mercedes) Knight is quickly deteriorating, and despite his efforts, she…
“Hip Knox — The Super Hypnotist”
It just goes to show that there’s always something else to discover out there, even when dealing with such a narrow field of interest as the cross-over between hypnosis and media. As a major superhero comic fan and being somewhat knowledgeable about their history, I thought I knew of most every superheroic hypnotist but there is one that I learned about only recently.
That superhero is “Hip Knox — The Super Hypnotist”. Hip Knox appeared in Superworld Comics #1–3, along with his bitter rival, a thuggish criminal named McFadden.
But there’s a story behind the comic and the hero.
Posted inCartoons and Anime
“Batman — The Brave and the Bold”
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1213218/]
History: It all started with ’ ”Batman: The Animated Series” and continued with ’ ”Superman’ “and finally “The Justice League”. These series were extremely popular with both adults and children, largely for their clever writing and the exceptional voice talents (Michael Ironside as Darkseid, Michael Dorn as Kalibak, and, last but not least, Adam West as a washed-up, stereotyped actor, for example) under the direction of voice director Andrea Romano. When they finally ended, the iconic character of the Batman was returned to screen in a new series, “Batman: the Brave and the Bold”.
So how does it stand up?