COMIC BOOK(S) REVIEW! NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR COMICS and YOUNG ALLIES COMICS No. 1 (Special Edition Reprints)

Back in the days (Don Fellman will not allow me to say "back in the day [singular]" since that is appropriating black lingo and he don't abide by it!) when I had a vast want list of goodies but a depression-era wage to depend on, I could only afford one of these Golden Age comic books that Special Edition Reprints had released somewhere 'round 1974. And at three bucks a pop that was a whole lotta kapusta I'll tell ya --- I never had all of the goodies and junk that you rich kids had that's for sure, and because of it I wasn't as --- ahem --- kulturally "up-to-date" the way a wannabe sophisticado teenbo in on the realm of o-mind should be! 

But anyway it really was a hard enough dilemma figuring out what to choose when it came to these reprints, but I eventually settled for the ALL SELECT COMICS one with Captain America, the Human Torch and Submariner laying waste to Berchtesgaden on the cover. And, ol' sentimental fanabla that I am, that very same ALL SELECT is still snuggled in my comic book collection waiting for yet another go through once I make my way past a whole lotta funnies I never even had the chance to look at yet!

I'm sure you get the idea that the two books up for scrutiny today were also high up on the want list, and that ever since I missed the opportunity to get hold of them way back when I've had the burning desire to snatch them up lest my life go unfulfilled. After all, both of 'em sure had a look and feel that would attract any fan of the comic book realm, what with NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR sporting both a Superman and (the original) Sandman story and the YOUNG ALLIES 'un Bucky and Toro (youth identification sidekicks of Captain America and the Torch) fronting a verifiable EAST SIDE KIDS bunch of miscreants fighting the Second World War barehandedly and doing a pretty snazzy job at that. Besides, I read all about the Allies in ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME and it sure sounded like the kinda comic custom made for any tubboid adlo pre-pubesprout suburban slob who liked a whole load of action and gratuitous pre-Code violence in his stories!

So after all this time I got 'em (for more'n three bucks a pop but I'm richer now) and yes, a hole in my swiss cheese like life has been filled and filled a whole lot more'n had I gotten that young girl vanity I wanted age four because it looked like an electric piano. Given that even at my "advanced age" I need a whole lot more comic book energy and vim in my existence than I have been getting recently these two titles sure help out when the settle back and snuggle up with a good read time comes, and nowadays I could sure a whole lot more of that that I have been getting I'll tell ya!

At a whopping twenny-five cents, the NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR comic must've busted the piggy banks of more'n a few pauper kids who at least had an excuse because it WAS the depression, but I guess it was worth smashin' ol' Porky in order to get the change for this heavy doody giant sized mag. Sure the innards, like the rest of repros in this series, are in black and white and some might complain about the faintness of the reproduction as well as the overboard text hyping the affair, but the energy and excitement one usually associates with these early comic books is here and that's what counts if you're a Saturday Afternoon Barber Shop kinda kid like I sure wish I was! 

You just can't escape the fair for each and every story features one character or another doing something positive for it or just having a whole buncha fun while being there. Naturally that means that the adventure strip characters like top dog Superman either foil some nasty thievery or perform acts of bravery while the "kiddie characters" (Bob Kane's Gingersnap and Butch the Pup) get into the same patented trouble they would in any other of their appearances! Nothing that dredges up warm 'n toasty Golden Age memories in me but they still had some shard of pre-ranch house-era adolescent appeal to 'em and succeed if only on that level.

And boy is there a whole load of kid-time fun to be found in these pages! Not enough to gag you to death but enough to fill you in on all of the new and out of this world things that were going on at the World's Fair from the Trylon and Perisphere to the interesting foreigners in their native costumes that were roaming about 'n heck, there's even an entire village populated by what Billy Barty used to call "the little people" and if you think anybody would get away with such insensitivity these days you're sadly mistaken!

But as far as being a nice artifact of a time and place that I'm sure still brings happy memories to quite a few nonagenarians out there it sure works out golly ned swell. And at least I get to read a rather good story from the original Sandman, a suited and gas masked chap who in these early sagas was a Batman-esque vigilante (wanted by the police on two continents!) with no special powers or gimmicks other'n the use of a gas gun that knocked evildoers out! Forget the Jack Kirby rendition which was a vain attempt to keep the character in circulation...the original's the real deal meal!

Over at Timely the Young Allies were, along with the proto-Avengers All Winners Squad, fighting the war so fast and so efficiently you wonder why they even bothered having armies.  Now, just like Jules Feiffer once wrote (prolly the only thing I agree on with the guy) I think that kid sidekicks are useless which is why Bucky and Toro (basically a Human Torch Junior) on their own leading up a casting call of forties kid stereotypes (the tough Irish mug, the fatso, the brainy one with glasses and the scared of ghosts black kid) sure works better'n those jerks do alongside their adult wards. And in case you were too stupid to know, these Timely tales really knew how to pack the punch at a superfast pace...if you think that the Marvel Age of Comics that came out a good two decades later was a totally birthed from the mind of a mid-aged Stan Lee the action and twisto changeo plots these tales exude will have you believin' different!

'n sheesh, the way these kids work wonders with the barest of necessities makes MacGyver look like a piker! On the search for an equally young British agent (a dignified beyond belief monocle'd chap) who was captured by the bad boys and valiantly struggling not to reveal the "secret code", the Young Allies trick the Germans at every stop even making their way into Der Fadderland where they actually get patted on the heads by none other'n Adolf himself for looking so Aryan-like! Even more ingenious is the part where Bucky disguises himself as arch enemy the Red Skull by painting an actual human skull (brainy kid Jefferson Worthington Sandervilt just happened to have a watercolor set on him) and slipping it right atop his own dome! Well, if I have to suspend belief/reality watching everything from the news to my favorite old timey television shows why not some comic aimed at kids who pretty much were apt to believe anything that was being tossed in front of their eyes.

If some of you more "pious" types really want to enjoy this you're going to have to suspend a whole WHOLE lot especially given this particular portion of the saga where, in order to raise some desperately needed money to get back home, the Allies put on a show for a crowd of exceedingly backwards Russian peasantry who look as if they'd be marveled by the invention of the wheel.  Along with Bucky and Toro doing some typical superhero pyrotechnics the aforementioned token black kid, "Whitewash Jones", gets his chance entertaining the locals as "Growlo the Ape Man"! Now if that bit of comic book history should make the rounds you could just imagine all of the rather "interesting" comments to be made on some of the message boards that I just happen to chance upon.

If you're one of the precious petunia types who becomes outrage at the mere hint of a "dog whistle" or "red flag" THE YOUNG ALLIES will offend you even more'n I ever could hope to. However, if you really want to be insulted you should read one of those (fairly --- 2009) recent Young Allies re-dos that were done up for whatever if left of the type of crowd who might still have some positive tinglings regarding the Golden Age of extreme comic book mayhem. Yup, the whole kit 'n kaboodle's been "updated" in these World War II sagas and perhaps for the worse given the overboard gotta be up to date and pay retribution for the past revision. Whitewash isn't the slant-skulled slo-mo with Hindenburg-sized lips anymore but now looks just about as prim and proper as Sidney Poitier visiting the white in-laws. It's as bad as when Chop Chop from BLACKHAWK went from a short pudgy bucktoothed Chinese sidekick to a normal looking full time member of the group which didn't seem as much a cast of the DC line being progressive as it was of them being condescending. Sheesh, they even had the chubby kid do some reducin' as well although I think they kept the Irish one as Gorceyesque as possible, or at least I hope they did if only to retain some semblance of gritty forties comic book aesthetics. Personally I think Marvel should have just let these characters alone because once you get down to the bared wire meaning of it all, it does seem more dignified.

BOOK REVIEW! MAJOR DUDES - A STEELY DAN COMPANION EDITED BY BARNEY HOSKYNS (Constable Books, 2017)

Maybe or maybe not, but some of you just might be surprised to hear that for a whole longer time that you could imagine I wasn't exactly what you would call a rabid loather of Steely Dan. Shee-it but I even kinda liked 'em, perhaps in a passing "oh, they're good" sorta way but I liked 'em nonetheless. I'm even brave enough to 'fess up that I lent plenty of ear to "Do It Again" and "Reeling in the Years" back when they were incessantly being spun on the radio, but then again that was during my non-discerning pre-pubesprout days when I seemed to like just about everything that I heard on the radio. Didn't hone the aesthetics nodes until much much later.

Weird 'nuff, but stuck in my usually sieve-like mind's their appearance (with Donald Fagan strumming the strings of his piano post-performance) on AMERICAN BANDSTAND back when Dick Clark revealed to us that their moniker came from "a device" that was found in a novel by William Burroughs. Or did he say Henry Miller? Gotta check on that but it wasn't until sometime later, around the days of AJA when you just couldn't escape "Deacon Blue" (a song I enjoyed at first before my better senses took hold of me) that the Dan were seen more as one of those progenitors of that oxymoronic term they now call "lite rock" or even more accurately "yacht rock". Sheesh, but even an outta-the-loop kid such as I wouldn't've believed that it would ever come to this group producing chi-chi wine and brie music back when they were starting out and the kids used to gab about the durty pictures to be found on the cover of CAN'T BUY A THRILL (y'know, the prostitutes and the nekked gal, and of course that shirtless guy whose lower excited half was fortunately edited out).

Well they did seem somewhat gnarly at first. Take a gander at their early promo pix (one of 'em directly below) which makes 'em out to look like some rough and tumble decadent white blues band, one almost on par with those other scruffy white blues bands that proliferated in the seventies (15-60-75 even!). And a lotta people whose opines I respect actually like these guys so maybe I should be giving 'em another honest appraisal, me being generous and considerate of everyone's tastes like I'm sure you already know.

But as someone like myself who has reviewed albums by merely looking at the covers and getting grief for a load of inaccuracies, looks can be deceiving and in no way were Steely Dan quite the grubboid local greasy haired bunch doing the wafrican-american (a nicer way of saying "wigger") game so common with the usual worn leather types of the past. Once you got down to the plain and horrid truth the team of Donald Fagan and Walter Becker were nothing but late-sixties snoot collegiate kids on that drug 'n cooze trip so typical of the upper class pampered menial of a snob youth, and we all know what kinda music them kinda brats used to go for before the advent of amerindie rock, eh?

No big surprise that I find MAJOR DUDES about as exciting as the vast majority of the music that the group produced. Edited by Barney Hoskyns (a scribe that I never had any beef over although I must admit I'm not all that familiar with his works), this anthology of interviews/articles/record reviews covers the Fagan/Becker Danglomerate that was ultimately so flatliner in the realm of music in general that it was no wonder these guys became rock critic faves. It collects a smattering of features, reviews and interviews from o'er the years and well, if you think I would have snatched this 'un up if Charles Shaar Murray and Jonh Ingham weren't included than you're way way off target even more'n you usually are regarding my own tastes, opinions and goals.

An interesting fact about this book is that, although this was by and for Steely Dan freaks both Murray and Ingham's contributions are what one would call less than favorable. That's one good thing (at least for this anti-snob rock maven) about MAJOR DUDES --- Hoskyns wasn't afraid to slip a little negativity into the mix but that still doesn't stop the onslaught of perhaps somewhat overboard platitudes that are to be found therein. Not that it's anything that would be uninteresting let alone downright upsetting, but if you want to read a passel of interviews with the usually detached (and at times boring) Fagan/Becker team and wade through the same kind of rock writing you've been trying to avoid your entire life then I'd tell you to spend your shekels on the newest Gwandanaland collection for a way more satisfying back brain rubdown.

Much of the time the scribes who appear are just as boring as their subject. I mean, I have nothing personal against MELODY MAKER's Chris Welch, a guy who beefed that paper up with his emphasis on progressive rock which, fortunately for them found a certain niche in the minds of the 70s record buying public, but that doesn't mean that I have to enjoy what he has written here. Actually his entry's one of the better articles to show up in MAJOR DUDES, but despite that I'd guess you'd hafta be a really diehard fan of this act to really get down to brass tacks enjoying those tales of Bard College and the hard life as staff writers at ABC/Dunhill records.

BUT ONCE YOU DIG DEEP INTO THE CORE OF IT ALL...despite the Burroughs ref, eye catching album cover art and Cathy Berberian namedrop, Steely Dan were ultimately just Ivy League decadents who chose the highfalutin' path to musical fun and big bux martinis and munchies jamz while, for the most part, pianist Fagan got his notoriety with some rather yawnsville Ray Charles impressions that only make the entire white guy doing the black groove thing stink even more to high heaven. Maybe an appraisal of those earlier efforts which did house some singles that sounded good in the early-seventies mix of AM hitting its stride would be in order, so who knows what the future holds in store regarding an eval of CAN'T BUY A THRILL or even its next few followups. After all, if Russell Desmond can name his fanzine after it maybe I can ooze some snide decadent early-seventies fun 'n jamz outta the things.