Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Clothing is Optional When You Have a Great Mustache Wednesday!


So I'm reading through Cat-Man #4, and while I didn't find anything that made me say, "Wow, I can't believe this didn't take off!  What a buried treasure we have here!  My readers are sure to be charmed and delighted!", but I did find a few things of note.

Let's start with Dr. Diamond:


Obviously, the first thing of note is that awful costume.  The man runs around in shorts, boots and a cape.  Normally, I would say, "All he needs is a mustache and he's ready to become one of the Village People," but danged if there isn't a mustache right there.

He was a surgeon, you see.  And medical professionals ranking "doctor" or above in comics either have to be balding (if they're over 40) or have a mustache (see Dr. Strange).

Hey!  It's a gorilla!  This issue just became worth finding!:



As you can expect, the big twist is that it wasn't a gorilla at all, but a thug in a gorilla costume!  The chicanery!  The shenanigans!

Normally, that would put this story in the "lame" column, but it's salvaged on the final page with this, where the real gorilla gets his mitts on said thug:


Since it appears that Monstro is going to get to know Puggsy in the Biblical sense, I'd say this one was a winner, if not the feel-good story of the summer!

Here's something worth forgetting:


So, I toot my little horn there, and it acts like Sodium thiopental?  I have no idea how many stories they thought they were going to milk out of that little plot device, but I give them credit for their optimism.   Because I can only think of two off the top of my head, and one of them involves making the guy short of breath so that he has to play the horn via flatulence.

I know.  It's a sin that Marvel and DC are letting this talent languish.  A sin, I tells ya!

Anyway, I guess they quickly realized they had to expand his rather limited powers, so they had upped it to "death-causing" and "metal-dissolving" powers by the next issue.  Still, it seems like when you talk about "saving the day with your magic flute," you're setting yourself up for a string of "that's what HE said" jokes.  Not that there's anything wrong with that....

See you tomorrow!

3 comments:

Justin Garrett Blum said...

There's a weird kind of irony resulting from the changed usage of the word "gay" since that Pied Piper comic was published. I don't know. A guy spending a gay evening and then going on to fight crime by playing the flute? Actually, come to think of it, isn't DC's Pied Piper homosexual?

Lazarus Lupin said...

later he formed the rock group Jethro Tull

Lazarus Lupin
http://strangespanner.blogspot.com/
art and reviw

Zocktastic said...

Justin, the dude coming home from a "gay night" out on the town and subsequently being mauled by a panther isn't the Pied Piper character, it's someone else. Presumably a crook he was using his mind-affecting pipe (snicker) on.