WELCOME TO DYNAMIC DUO COMICS

WEIRD WAR TALES feat. CREATURE COMMANDOS

No 117, DC, NOV 82

TOBY FINCH

War! Huh! Good God, y’all! What is it good for?

Actually quite a surprising amount it would seem, especially if you’re a once-human monster that’s sick of molesting virgin peasant girls in dimly-lit dungeons. (Personally I would never get tired of that shit.) Yes, this is the story of how Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, Wolfman and, er, some chick with snakes for hair sign up with Uncle Sam to put the frighteners on Fritz! Once of course they get themselves the following more copyright-friendly alter-egos:

Dracula - Velcro the Vampire (Apparently he was this close to going with Non-Zip Fastener the Vampire but was talked into something a little more concise.)

Frankenstein – ‘Lucky’ Taylor (Because he’s always in stiches! Oh, the sweet hilarity!)

Wolfman – Griffith the Werewolf (Now they’ll never guess his terrible secret!)

Medusa – Dr. Medusa (What the hell?)

And what, you may ask, has brought about this sudden change of non-beating heart? Why, they’ve accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour of course! (Although how Velcro got baptized without exploding isn’t revealed.) Now they pray, quote the Bible (but without italics so the kids won’t suspect) and, in this issue, rescue a bunch of pilgrims on their way to Lourdes.

Fortunately, their deep and profound love for their fellow man doesn’t stop them from killing Germans by the beer-hall load. Especially Dr. Medusa, whose favourite technique is to lure the enemy into her arms with the lure of the glory that was Greece, then set her hairdo on them. “Achtung!” screams one hapless Hun, “Der Fuhrer did not tell us of this new allied secret weapon!” Probably because he thought that a weapon you could negate simply by stepping backward wasn’t actually that much of a threat, but more fool him obviously.

After they save the day (Yes, day! How the hell does that work?) the story stops dead in more than one sense…and sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I think about what might have happened to the Creature Commandos after the war was over, and then I remember I don’t care.

Back Up Story: G.I. ROBOT!

Before you start wondering just what sort of surname ‘Robot’ is, imagine a world where C-3PO stopped being a simpering he-bitch and grew a pair of ball-bearings to ship out to the WW2-era Pacific, and all will become clear, if not particularly plausible. And anyway, his name isn’t even really robot, it’s J.A.K.E., which stands for Jungle Automatic Killer Experimental – even though why the jungle needs to be automatically killed is never elaborated upon. But never fear, that bastard jungle doesn’t stand a chance because our hero has fingers that are all machine guns (except for the ones that are flame throwers or anti-aircraft cannons), and, um, memory banks. Apparently he is the second of his kind, and “the world will never know what it owes the first”; perhaps because the first and the world went out drinking once, and the world got absolutely trolleyed and borrowed some money from the first which it swore it was good for, and then the next day had this stonking great hangover and totally forgot all about it or something.

Anyway, despite being made entirely of metal and unable to talk, G.I. Robot still manages to exhibit such touchingly human behaviours as patronizing women and shooting Japanese people. Oh, and he also wears full combat fatigues because a lump of machinery not wearing a vest is just, y’know, weird.

In this particular story he employs his two latest battlefield necessities; a robotic dog and cat, which is a strategy that can only meet with success since the Japs would never know what to make of cute little robotic versions of popular domestic pets.

Just like the above story, it’s also never revealed what ultimately becomes of JAKE, and sometimes late at night when I can’t sleep, I don’t even think about it.

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THE INCREDIBLE HULK

Issue 203

Marvel, Sept ’76

TOBY FINCH

“We’ve extracted the atom that contains the sub-microscopic Hulk from your brain…”

Quick quiz for ya. What’s the name of that storyline where the Hulk’s sent off to a weird alien world only to be hailed a hero and fall in love before it all goes hugely, horribly wrong?

Well, that’d be the whole Planet Hulk thing, wouldn’t it?

Oh no it wouldn’t.

It would in fact be the tale of how the Hulk winds up in the sub-microscopic (these days we say nanoscopic) world of K’ai. He gets there by being shrunk by the one-eyed psychic villain Psyklop. I love it when a villain does what it says on the tin. I mean, what the hell does ‘Mr. Sinister’ tell you about anyone? Anyway, Psyklop shrinks him, then makes him bigger again, then shrinks him again and then is himself shrunk. It’s all very complicated, and how the whole shebang wound up lodged inside some poor sod’s cerebellum is never even touched on, let alone explained, which is probably for the best. It makes my own head hurt just reading about it.

In the midst of all this, Hulk still manages to find lilliputian love with Queen Jarella, perhaps because she,like him, is also the colour of photosynthesis and doesn’t have two neurons to rub together. But it can’t last. K’ai is subject to world-wobbling earthquakes caused by the Hulk heedlessly pushing it out of orbit when last he was regaining his normal size. These are now being worsened by Psyklop as he penetrates the planet’s core with his not-in-the–least-phallic-looking ‘Dreadnaught Drill’ from the safety of his ‘underground eerie’ (which anywhere else would sound rather paradoxical, but given that the locals are given to exclaiming things like ‘By the Seven-Sided Circle!’ it’s evidently oxymorons-ahoy down there).

The Hulk naturally would put a stop to all this, but he’s been restrained by ‘dimundium steel’ which is totally, completely and wholly unbreakable and which therefore takes him all of two panels to pulverise. Now free, the man-monster sets about enacting his favourite strategy: peace. Which of course in this case is actually an acronym for Punching Everything and Anything Continuously Everywhere.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the land of normal-sized folk, forces are at work to rebiggerate the behemothal brute. Leading this charge against good sense in general and the English language in particular is one Doc Samson, a man who obtains his super-strength from his gamma-irradiated green mullet. This is ‘mullet’ the haircut obviously; the guy isn’t getting his power from a fish on his head. He evidently (and rightly) feels a little foolish about this fact, so he wears a lightning-bolt insignia on his chest in a pathetic attempt to convince everyone that he’s actually DC’s Captain Marvel. This does not work, but he keeps wearing it nevertheless. For a doctor of whatever the hell he’s a doctor of, he’s actually not that smart.

I mean, he’s devoted the entirety of his life to getting ridding the world of the Hulk (and, one presumes, hairdressers) and now that it’s been accomplished (the Hulk, that is, not the hairdressers) he’s trying to bring him back.

Indeed he’s kept it up even to the present day, now pursuing the new Red Hulk through Russia when more sensible people would have given up and gone home for tea a long, long time ago. The Hulk keeps it up because he can’t remember doing it all the other times, plus he’s got no choice. But Doc Samson has both memories and a choice, but still keeps at it anyway. It says something about him that he makes poorer life decisions than someone who’s about as bright as midnight in a coal mine, and what it says ain’t good.

Meanwhile, back down in tiny town, Hulk defeats Psyklop by cracking open the Essence Urn, which is a pretty vase for holding the souls of murdered millions, and which looks suspiciously like something I saw in IKEA the other day.

His triumph is short-lived however, as it’s right then that Samson’s larginator ray strikes, returning Hulk to the ‘world of the pink-skinned men’ – which means our world apparently, whatever any other-coloured men (or indeed women) may think. By why quibble over such little things? Nobody in the comic pays it much attention, just like they don’t care particularly when Hulk accidentally destroys K’ai and thusly invalidates everything he’s done for it. After all, as we all know: ‘Hulk Smash’! I love it when something does what it says on the tin…

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ROM: SPACEKNIGHT

Issue 40, Marvel, March ’83

TOBY FINCH

Once upon a time there was a noble man who sacrificed his very humanity to become a being of literally astronomical power and save his homeworld and the woman he loved from a terrible extraterrestrial threat.

That man of course, was Norrin Radd, better known as the Silver Surfer. Yet even as he rode some gnarly cosmic tubes (or whatever those jobless plank-riding aqua-hippies do) it must have bugged him considerably that somewhere else there was another shiny space sentinel just like himself, who shared the exact same back-story but looked more like a walking fridge and was Toy of the Year 1979.

I speak of course of Rom, who started life as a Parker Brother’s toy before getting a tie-in comic which did surprisingly well when you consider how little Marvel had to work with. What you got with Rom the toy was what you got in the box and nothing more. The writers and artists had to make it up as they went along.

One of the few things Rom actually did have was an Energy Analyzer, a sort of moral Geiger-counter which could tell in a Shirley McLaine-ish sort of way by your ‘energy’ if you were a goodie or a baddie. If you were evil, it beeped. If you were good, it also beeped. If Rom - as must have often been the case - completely failed to distinguish between the identical beeps and decided to make you God’s problem, he would reach for his sole weapon; the Neutralizer, which looked like a heat-lamp and transported the naughty person to ‘limbo’ – and not, as you’d infer from the its name, Switzerland.

And who exactly were these naughty persons being zapped off to a realm previously known only to obscure christian cosmology?

The Dire Wraiths, that’s who. There now; just in case you were harbouring any sickening leftie-leaning doubts as to their complete horribleness, I should think that name alone would be enough to erase the weak and despicable compassion from your heart. I mean, the ‘wraith’ part is bad enough, but the ‘dire’ part sounds just, well, dire.

Rom certainly thinks so. Oh, and there’s also some stuff about them attacking his planet that might possibly have contributed. So he’s vowed to hunt them throughout the universe (or as is more frequently the case, the continental United States) until he’s sent each and every one of them to join the righteous unbaptised in purgatory.

Although it’s never revealed exactly why the Dire Wraiths want to conquer the Earth, I’m guessing it’s got something to do with the fact that the words in their language not only sound like English words, but mean the exact same thing too. A language barrier is

obviously a big problem, because even though Rom has a gun-like universal translator that he works by pointing at people’s heads, it’s amazing how often he’s still met by fear and hostility.

And while we’re on the subject of Rom meeting things, let’s stop and think for a moment. He’s a cosmic hero. He’s in the Marvel universe. There’s a good set of potential match-ups to be had there. The aforementioned Silver Surfer, Galactus, Thanos, Adam Warlock etc.

So what galaxy-shaking threat does Rom square off against in this ish?

The Pied Piper. Honestly. Look at the cover if you don’t believe me. But to be fair, the loveable fairytale character is in fact in the employ of the Lovecraftian ‘Dweller on

the Threshold’, who is in turn at the behest of the Dire Wraiths so there’s at least some nanoscopically small element of danger present.

Good thing then that Rom is in the area, flying headlong into cliffs in futile attempts to kill himself because he can’t be with his earthbound lady love. When he sees the

Piper trying to lead some local children through a big swirly space portal thing he’s played into existence with his paranormal pan pipes, he takes time out from his

scheduled suicidal activities to remonstrate with him.

Now, only the pettiest of nit-picking nerds would bother pointing out all that is scientifically wrong with this. So here goes. How does music make what we’re assured is an

‘interdimensional doorway’? And how does something qualify as an interdimensional doorway when it’s clearly shown to only open out to another region of our own

universe? It don’t make a lick of sense, I tells ya.

Anyway, all questions as to the exact technical nature of the portal are rendered null and void when Rom throws both himself and the pesky piper through it in an act of

self-sacrifice only slightly detracted from by the fact that he was looking for a way to kill himself anyway. The portal collapses, dawn breaks, and the children are freed from their enchantment to stumble home - wondering as they do so why the strange shiny spaceman that saved them looked so much like that crappy toy they lost down the back of the sofa four years ago.

Best Ad:

“SUPER RING! Your super ring will control devices through objects with invisible magnetic field!” Because how many times have you said to yourself, “Dang! I need to control that device but this object’s in my way, and the only magnetic fields I have are all visible! Plus, my hand looks so bare and unsuper!”

BRUTE FORCE

Issue 1, Marvel, August ’90

TOBY FINCH

Now then. You’re just about to rob a top-secret lab on behalf of a very large and well-known multinational company.

Do you:

A: Do anything and everything you possibly can to avoid drawing any attention whatsoever to either yourself or the connection to your employer?

B: Go in there waving a shooter around while you’re dressed up as your bosses’ freakin’ corporate mascot for crying out loud.

If you answered (B) it may surprise you to learn that you’re not cut out for a life of crime. And it may surprise you even more to discover that this is in no way any impediment to actually pursuing said career - that is if you’re anything like the clown-costumed villains that turn up page one of this week’s offering. Mind you, they were probably just going with the flow, for not one person in this thing makes anything even remotely like a well-reasoned decision.

Take our hero, for example; ‘singularly brilliant and committed scientist Doctor Randall Pierce’ who takes time off from growing his early-Nineties-regulation ponytail to surgically augment a pack of disparate animals into a crack squad of superheroes. He’s making them purely for peaceful purposes, but as the story opens he’s working on a gorilla that’ll “translate its pain into rage”

and even as he’s operating on it is wearing ammo belts and a gimp outfit.

Not surprisingly, it wakes up and runs amok, but fortunately the aforementioned bunch of hoodlums are there to shoot and steal it. Poor singularly brilliant and committed scientist Doctor Randall Pierce has no idea who could have possibly done this until his young son wanders in, scoffing his face with a burger bought from a fast-food chain sporting a somewhat-familiar clown mascot. And even then he has to fire off a quick diatribe against young people’s eating habits before his apparently shining intellect finally puts two and two together. You can see why Reed Richards isn’t too worried about his position as the Marvel Universe’s smartest biped.

He’d be even less worried if he saw the various cyber-animals of ‘Brute Force’ that singularly brilliant and committed scientist Doctor Randall Pierce then sends swinging into action to get his monkey back. There’s rocket-powered eagle (because an eagle couldn’t possibly fly otherwise) an armoured grizzly bear and lion (because cuddly little animals like that obviously need toughening up a bit) and a kangaroo with a walkman (because er, erm, you’ve got me there). But the most bizarrely uncalled-for member must be the dolphin. Just stop and imagine what you could do with a technologically-enhanced dolphin. It’s smart (even without the superintelligencifing headset that allows this one to talk in English) and it can go so many places and do so many things that a human can’t. So what does singularly brilliant and committed scientist Doctor Randall Pierce do with it? He gives it a suit so it can walk on land. And a big water pistol. I don’t know about Reed anymore, even the Hulk’s got to feel a tad superior to that kind of thinking.

So anyway, of they all go to get Kinky Kong back from the bad-guy’s hideout in the Amazon jungle: which pleases the lion especially because he thinks he’s going home despite the fact that he is actually an African plains animal, and which anyway they completely fail to do.

Nevertheless, at the end of the issue singularly brilliant and committed scientist Doctor Randall Pierce decides they’re worth a second chance, which is the clinching evidence as to who is really the mindless brute on the team.

Best Ad:

There isn’t one. I’m sorry, but there you go. It was the Nineties; the ‘Dark Age’ of comics. Even the ads were bad.

COPS

Issue 7, DC, August ’88

TOBY FINCH

If like me you read a lot of bad science fiction and even worse comics you will have come across quite a few bad acronyms. Up until now the most mangled came from the all-too-aptly-named Disney abomination ‘The Black Hole’*. VINCENT - which was supposed to mean ‘Vital Information Necessary, Centralized’ represented a sort of high (or rather low) water mark for the most forced and motley collection of letters for a considerable time, because the list of competitors was so long and so tragic that it was difficult for any one work of fiction to distinguish itself in a field of such crapulence.

And yet somehow this week’s comic manages it.

It even has a head start, since its title is about as forced an acronym as a sane psyche could come up with; for COPS stands for Central Organization of Police Specialists.

Laying aside for the moment the question of what the hell is so central or organized about them, we wonder what exactly makes the heroes of this title police specialists. Well, they have codenames like Longarm, Bowser, Highway, Mace, Barricade, Bullseye and Sundown. Maybe what makes them so special is their ability to withstand the shame of having such arse-clenchingly awful aliases. Especially Sundown. I mean, there’s a very tenuous law-enforcement-and-related-paraphernalia theme to all the other names, but Sundown? But to be fair, if he didn’t sport a name so redolent of the wide open spaces of the west, how would we ever guess that he was a shootin’, tootin, cattle-rootin’ Texas boy? Why, we’d have nothing to go on but his constant cries of

‘tarnation’ and unending and belaboured references to the Lone Star State.

But I digress. For one of these cops has gone rogue.

How can we tell?

Because he’s called himself ‘Rogue’, that’s why. Oh,and he has too strong a handshake apparently. He’s also invented the ultimate crime-fighting robot, which of course looks like an elephant. Because elephants really hate crime, one assumes. Drives up the price of peanuts probably. Anyway, in his literally hand-wrangling madness, he has called it a name that is now the proud new

claimant to the title of most god-awful acronym of all time: TRAMPLUR.

At this juncture, I would advise that you stop reading. Really. You will save yourself some considerable pain. Because I’m not going to even mention all the other things that are wrong with this comic - not the guy called Brainstorm whose brain literally fizzes and crackles when he gets an idea, or the main villain that should have got the estate of Edward G. Robinson suing the creative team to out of their socks – I’m just going to bleat on and on about this stupid turd-burp of a name. So spare yourself the pain.

No? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

TRAMPLUR (last chance to look away) stands for Titanic Radio Activated Multi Purpose Laserized Urban Ravager. When I typed that last sentence spell-check went into red-underlining hysteria, and I don’t blame it one little bit. If the stupid metal monster actually cared about decency and justice it would pound Rogue to squishy death for his crime against the English language.

Firstly, he doesn’t even spell ‘trampler’ correctly. Why give something a bad acronym for a name if it doesn’t even say what it’s supposed too? But then again, why fight crime with a pandemonium-spreading pachyderm? Secondly, it’s not radio controlled. Thirdly and fourthly, it is neither made by, or makes use of, lasers (either with or without the ‘Z’).

However it is actually multi-function, because apart from stamping around a lot, it sucks.

With its trunk I mean. That mighty nose-pipe suctions up evidence, cash, and bad guys. Yet it cannot for all its power suck as much physically at it sucks figuratively. And this is where its multi-functionality really starts to kick in, because apart from being quite majestically awful, it makes you wonder why you’d want to read this damn thing at all.

Or even review it.

I’m somewhat at a loss about that one myself. Do you have any ideas?

No?

Good.

I’m off for a lie down. That sound of trampluring in my head is starting to drive me crazy…

TOBY

*Mind you, its score by John Barry is the best music he ever wrote that wasn’t in a Bond movie. Once heard, never forgotten. All together now; duh duh duh DDUUURRRR-DUH duh duh! Doesn’t that just say ‘infinitely deep gravity well’ to you

THE POWER OF DISCO

TOBY FINCH

For this extra-special instalment of our little feature, we’re going to begin at the beginning -the very beginning. The Big Bang in fact.

I want to you to watch through your mind’s eye as material existence itself explodes into being…and then freeze frame.

What do you see?

You see something suspended a trillionth of a second after the moment of creation, something in which not only are all matter and energy fused together as one but time and space themselves, something in which absolutely anything and everything that was, is, or ever shall be are all joined in one blazingly profound moment of absolute, supreme and perfect unity.

Something about the size of a beach ball, shining in the darkness.

What does that look like to you?

That’s right.

A mirror ball!

But that momentous moment passes, and the universe expands and differentiates. The eons march by, organic life emerges, and as soon as this fragile medium can support any kind of mind, that mind longs for that long-vanished instant of all-encompassing singularity.

Humans evolve, and after a many a false start and failed attempt (which give rise to all the worlds’ religions and philosophies) finally manage, in the mid-nineteen seventies, to re-create the principle of total harmonic unison, with the image of that first, ancient unity enshrined at its very heart in the form of the mirror ball…

I speak, of course, of that incalculable force known only to mortal men as….DISCO!

Yes, DISCO; hereafter to be spelt in capitals throughout at befits its stupendous status!

But of course, the true mightiness of DISCO was too great for such miniscule beings as we to ever master, or even be privy to for the briefest of moments. Thus it came to pass that a mere decade after its coming, DISCO was lost to us, seemingly for ever. Seeking to protect themselves from the full horror of this loss, humans convinced themselves that DISCO was nothing more than a passing fad, a startlingly crass fusion of bad music and even worse fashion.

But one storytelling medium alone possessed the cosmic perspective and wide-eyed wonder to see DISCO for what it truly was, and that medium was of course comics.

And its finest hour had come.

That’s why it is my hugely swollen pleasure to welcome you to this,

THE

“IT CAME FROM THE BARGAIN BIN!”

POWER

DISCO

SPECIAL

You lucky, lucky people.

Ah, but I see some of you doubt the true majesty of DISCO. Misguided simpletons, know that you have nothing but my sincerest sympathies, for though you are dismally deluded, DISCO in its infinite compassion looks kindly upon you, and as a token of its unending benevolence has chosen me to reveal unto you two sacred texts that will reveal incontestably the full gloriousness of DISCO’s glorious glory.

The first holy text is known upon this sublunary sphere is JUSTICE LEAGUE AMERICA No 226, D.C., 1984

In this story, Set, the ancient Egyptian god of evil does battle with ‘the world’s greatest superheroes’ and wipes the floor with them. Unfortunately for him, the floor he wipes them upon is a dance floor, and thus he incurres DISCO’s displeasure. Realizing this, the one called ‘The Atom’ counsels the one called ‘The Elongated Man’ to reflect the dark divinity’s power blasts back at

him...with a mirror ball.

Needless to say, Set is given a right good smiting.

But what’s that you say? You’re still unconvinced?

Well then disbeliever - gaze upon the second testament, called DAZZLER, Issue 10, Marvel, December 1981.

Dazzler - dressed in a skin-tight silver jumpsuit and sequined high-heeled roller-skates and possessed of a bust that did not so much defy gravity as defeat it utterly - was perhaps DISCO’s greatest comic book embodiment, even without taking into account her mutant ability to be a one-woman son-et-lumiere presentation.

And it is as such that she comes to the attention of the world-devouring cosmic entity known as Galactus. For even one once described by a wise man* as ‘a being so ancient and powerful he probably bullied God at school’ must have recourse to the still-greater might of DISCO (and not at all because his computers identify her as having a rather libidinous-sounding ‘Dysfunction Potential’).

Beamed aboard his mothership, ‘Dazz’ (as she is known to hopelessly enchanted admirers such as myself) engages in some ‘frenzied locomotion’** until she comes across the big guy and hears his proposition. Seems he wants her to enter a black hole and get her hands on ‘Terrax the Tamer’s’ big hard tool (which disappointingly turns out to be a mystical battleaxe of some sort). In order to accomplish this, he must first pump her full of power that she ‘lusts to embrace…to worship…to clutch to her bosom like a lover…’

Actually, this might not be talking about DISCO anymore. Or maybe it’s talking about what DISCO was REALLY about. You can discuss this amongst yourselves; I’m off for a cold shower…

Best Ad:

The one for ‘Spiderman and His Amazing Friends’ with the picture of Firestar. God, she was even better than Dazzler – a literally hot redhead with a chest like a tie finish in a zeppelin race. There isn’t a shower cold enough…

*i.e.; me.

** That means skating fast and nothing more. Get your minds out of the gutters.

GOING GREEN

TOBY FINCH

After our little foray into disco, I've decided to go with a more topical theme this time. That is, being green. Oh sure, we all know thanks to the singing frog that it ain't easy being green, but what are the exact problems and complications encountered by those of a hue between jade and emerald? How did they manage in a world before it was fashionable to be green? What is -

Screw it. I can't keep this pretence up any longer. I don't actually have a theme going here; I just have two random comics that happen to feature green guys. What do you expect? It's not like I'm paid for this or anything…(note from Danny - I ain't being paid either, so stop yer whingin')

First up is INCREDIBLE HULK Issue 188, Marvel Comics June 1975. This is the second time that the Hulk has come up in this article, and you know what? It probably won't be the last either. His comics from this era get pretty far-out, as the young people used to say. The reasons for this are twofold; one, the writers where stuck with a character whose only room for development was dictated by the elasticity of his purple pants and two, they where all high probably.

Not that I'm complaining. The resultant stories as entertaining as hell and very much in tune with trippy tenor of their times. Indeed, in the film 'Fandango', (an early-era Kevin Costner effort from before he was crap) one of the students enjoying a final road-trip-cum-cross-continental-bender before departing for Vietnam is a stoner who seems to derive his strangely premature wisdom from Hulk comics and life-threatening amounts of pot.

In those days it was not uncommon for the Green Gargantuan* to slug it out with foes that all too obviously owed their garishly grim demeanour to both the menace and ridiculousness of a bad trip.**

A prime example of such is this issue's big bad; a giant orange communist mutant triceratops which not only talks, but talks in rhyme. His name is 'Droog', and whilst his feelings about milk and Beethoven go unrevealed, he does share with his namesakes a love for a bit of the old ultraviolence. Which he of course expresses in poetry: Hold your temper,emerald one! Droog's assault has

just begun!

But the Hulk is immune to this doze-inducing doggerel since he's already catatonic, being immobilized by 'electro-stasis beams' and crucified to boot. As an aside, I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen the Hulk crucified, but it's an obvious enough theme when you consider the many and manifest similarities between himself and Mr. J. H. Christ. For like the Hulk, Jesus is an unfairly persecuted innocent. Also like the Hulk he is three metres tall and radioactive. Well he might have been - the gospels are silent on the matter and you don't know, you weren't there.

However, unlike his proto-hippie forbearer, the Hulk doesn't resort to the old 'pretend you're dead until they go away' routine, preferring once freed to instead to play up the whole 'smiting with furious vengeance' angle so beloved of the aforementioned hippie's heavenly father.

Needless to say the scaly soviet Shakespeare doesn't take kindly to this, but the ensuing altercation is halted by something called a 'contra-energy transverser' blowing them both up with the force of a 'miniature sun', thereby allowing us to pass on to the second title under review, GREEN LAMA No.1 .

Only this isn't actually the original number one for this crime-fighter from the golden age of comics, it's instead the latter-day relaunch. Leaving aside the issue of whether it was wise to feature such a colour-specific character in a black and white comic, we pass on to the perhaps more damning criticism that he's just a load of old tosh.

And what is it about heroes from this era that they all have to be colour-coded anyway? You couldn't just be something; you had to be a colour of that something. Thank goodness that this colourific motif got knocked on the head when it did, otherwise by now we'd all be reading comics with names like 'Purple Pounder Meets Lavender Lad'.

Whilst we're on this somewhat tumescent theme, I may as well point out that just about the only entertaining thing about this comic is the amount of phallic symbols the illustrator has apparently subconsciously drawn into his artwork. There's two stonking great big ones on the front cover alone (three if you count the suspicious shape of the hero's hood) suggesting that the artist is either making an unwitting visual comment on the character's character, or he really does have a hard-on for, well, hard-ons.

In a similar vein, our Best Ad this time around asks "Who Else Wants a He-Man's Body?"

* By the way, 'gargantuan' is a made-up word, owing its existence to the 16th century work 'The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Kin of the Great Giant Gargantua' but people very rarely refer to someone or something as being 'pantagruelian', possibly because it sounds like porridge made from old underwear.

** Not that I'd know about this first hand, of course…