Now, part of the delay and all of the reason for me jumping in right now is that today is the day the similarly long-gestating relaunch of the Archie Comics superheroes collectively known as the Mighty Crusaders as helmed by writer J. Michael Straczynski finally hits comic shops (and I know DC is referring to these characters as the Red Circle characters, but I think that name is stupid). For anyone requiring a quick refresher on these eternally second-string players, here's an Archie house ad from the '80s used to keep the "big names" of the line in copyright...
Oh man, don't they look like they're having fun? All smiling and conspicuously posing with the most unique elements of their costumes on display. Sure, most comics readers of any stripe have barely any passing familiarity with this crew, and I have a hard time explaining my own affection for the team aside from a vague sense of nostalgia I get from being one of the few target 12-year-old readers who actually picked up the !mpact iteration of the characters in the early '90s. But at some point in college I discovered the wealth of awful relaunch attempts the Archie folks tried over the years and went a little haywire buying up Crusader appearances on eBay.
To highlight my waste of time and money (but mostly time), I'm going to spend the month of August looking at some of the dumbest comics starring the Mighty Crusaders I've got my hands on to coincide with the release of DC's Red Circle series (I may review a few of those books too). Let's start with one of the few kind of charmingly stupid Golden Age entries starring the characters...
THE HANGMAN IN PEP COMICS!
So I guess the one semi-relevant historical fact about this entire breed of pajama-wearing punching bags is that the superheroes in question predated Archie by a few years. Though the company would eventually carry the red-headed weenie's name as its own, Archie Comics started out as another trend chasing superhero fly by night called MLJ Publications. Aside from their signature "super G-Man" The Shield, MLJ had all sorts of uselessly bland superheroes including The Web, The Comet and some guy named Bob Phantom.
The Hangman holds up a little bit better than some of the other few golden age MLJ jokers I've happened upon, mostly due to the absurdly, semi-graphically violent art of Bob Fujitani. I know these days the hip folks point to Fletcher Hanks as the end all, be all of "there are no rules so let's get crazy" style of art from back then, and Hanks is great, but plenty of the artists back then found now forgotten ways of exploiting the popularity of the comics medium. Fujitani's particular brand of nutty, crappy, yet endearing comics involved tossing sinewy-yet-somehow-muscled men into dangerous situations involving either gangsters or some kind of supernatural Nazi menace. It's like a crack head's back alley marriage of Alex Raymond and The Shadow (or...geez, what was the '40s equivalent of a crack head? A booze hound?)
Actually, awkward men attempting to appear in proportion with their bodies and their physical surroundings may qualify as an MLJ house style, but Fujitani had a leg up on some of the other teenage New York trade school artists filling the fledgling industry's ranks. This comes thanks mostly to his striking splash pages which found novel ways of presenting the gallows-themed hero from grappling with some kind of Nazi barbarian's hounds of hell...
To swooping in on an evil Nazi scoutmaster saboteur...
To chasing some hot-to-trot con man to his grave around a giant record player...
In fact, the most commonly used Fujitani splash page involved The Hangman silently hanging over some crook and reminding him that a terrible death via strangulation was never far off...
And you know, this grim harbinger stuff reminds me of the second reason I love these golden oldies so much. Namely...
THE HANGMAN DOES NOT FUCK AROUND!
Gah! Look at the blood, you guys! While the Archie Comics of today pride themselves on being sanitized tom-foolery good at convincing seven-year-olds that teenagers don't drink or have sex, the MLJ company bowed to the almighty dollar by reveling in the death and destruction Depression-era kids couldn't get at the Saturday matinee. The Hangman (if you couldn't have judged by his name) led the charge in terms of sadistically punishing criminals and pressing them into their final moments. Now, most of these times didn't come with the outright gore of the above beheading, but The Hangman's proclivity for sneaking up on crooks and announcing their death was imminent made from some great melo-dramatic cheese...
And even when our hero wasn't swinging in to choke out the criminal element all on his own, he had a way of giving his enemies that final nudge towards the beyond...
"Ha Ha! Thanks for killing yourself, pal! Since you've done my work for me, I guess it's abour Beer O'Clock for this hard workin hero!"
"Wait! Don't jump! Naaaaaaaaaah, I'm just fuckin with ya. Go ahead and jump. You won't be missed."
OK...unless I'm reading this one wrong, rather than murder this Nazi officer, The Hangman just really punked him out in front of his superior officers. So maybe the Hangman does fuck around a little. BUT! In case any of you are still on the fence as to the stupefying brilliance of these bad comics, I present to you the absolute greatest motif in Bob Fujitani's Hangman oeuvre...
THE HANGMAN'S ADVENTURES CONTAIN A RIDICULOUS AMOUNT OF CRANIAL-SPLITTING AX VIOLENCE!
No fooling here. If there's one thing Fujitani loved to draw more than elongated adventure types hanging in graveyard settings was dudes taking the worse end of a hatchet into the skull. Let's look at some examples, shall we?
And I've only got like four of these comics! The Hangman appeared in Pep like 30 times! There's a probably a whole treasure trove of Nazis and bookies getting brained by the sharpened end of the lumberjack's friend that we haven't been exposed to for years!
With any luck, JMS and company's take on the character will contain at least a modicum of this gonzo violence (I'm picking up this issue this afternoon...fingers crossed), but even if it doesn't, I hope they can avoid the same pitfalls that led to the demise of MLJ as a superhero publisher:
