Angola in the Comics #10: Swamp Thing #19

Here's another very brief look at an appearance by Angola as the setting of a DC super hero comic. Like my previous look at a 1977 Batman comic, Angola appears for only a single panel. The book in question is Swamp Thing #19 and the story "Rootless" by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artists Giuseppe Camuncoli & Cameron Stewart, originally released in 2001. It seems appropriate that a DC super hero visited Angola near the beginning of the Civil War and likewise one visited near the conclusion. (there doesn't seem to be any appearances from the middle though)

Swamp Thing is normally a thoughtful horror/fantasy book about the plant elemental creature Swamp Thing who, per Alan Moore, once thought he was a man named Alec Holland. However, the star of the Swamp Thing series which ran during 2000-2001 was Tefé Holland, the half-human/half-plant daughter of the original. Brian K. Vaughan was a relatively young comics author at the time, this being before his breakout work on Y: The Last Man or Runaways. In fact, Vaughan has said in interviews that he doesn't think too highly of his early comics work, that he saw it as a means to get "bad writing" out of his system.

It seems Tefé and her friend Pilate are searching for the literal Tree of Knowledge and their quest has brought them to Africa. Like, the entire continent. In a quick series of panels we see them visit just about every hotspot in Africa circa 2001: first an "amputee camp" in Sierra Leone, then to the civil war in Angola, then rescuing slaves in the Sudan, then opposing female genital mutilation in Ethiopia, then starvation in Somalia, and finally battling rebels in Namibia. Any one of those subjects could have been the subject of a half-decent post-Alan Moore Vertigo comic, but it's ultimately Namibia where the bulk of issue #19 goes down.

So all we're left with is that panel of Tefé & Pilate fighting nondescript people in a nondescript location which is only identifiable as Angola because the caption tells us it is; are those guys UNITA? MPLA? Mercenaries? Or just criminals? Heck if I know. Giuseppe Camuncoli has come a long way since 2001 - his work in this comic is very thin on detail. Even with Cameron Stewart inking him, it looks very dashed-off.

Swamp Thing was frequently a great platform for authors to talk about environmental issues they were passionate about and there is much to discuss about Angola - you could talk about how landmines have wrecked the agricultural industry, discuss the perfect environmental conditions they enjoy. You could talk about the unique plant life found only in that part of the world, like yesterday's Poison Ivy comic did. But nope, it's just glanced over, which is a pity. The actual plot in Namibia reads a little strangely as Tefé & Pilate encounter an African mystic who talks to them in English. Pilate says it's the first English he's heard in weeks, which is... huh? There's a pretty visible white population in Namibia and plenty of English spoken there. Heck, they'd just come from Sierra Leone, which has a lot of English spoken. Good rule of thumb for writers: former English colonies tend to have English-speaking populations.

Angola in the Comics #9: Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life and Death #1

Welcome to another entry in my occasional series, Angola in the Comics where I explore those rare times in which Angola has appeared as the setting of a comic book. This time out it's Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life Death #1, the first issue of a six-issue limited series from 2016. I won't be examining the entire series - in fact, I'm only going to look at the first few pages of issue #1 because it's the only part which concerns Angola. The story is written by Amy Chu and drawn by Clay Mann & Seth Mann.

We are, of course, looking a story where the protagonist is a villain. Poison Ivy is a long-time Batman villain but, like most of his enemies, she's acquired a healthy fanbase of her own, hence the mini-series.

We open in the deserts of southern Angola, where an African fellow named Dr. Nepolo is driving a jeep containing Dr. Pamela Isley, the civilian identity of Poison Ivy. Dr. Nepolo brings Isley to the site of a welwitschia, which is Isley's reason for being here. Now, she didn't have to go all the way to Angola to find one as they are also found in Namibia and as she's entering Angola from the south, she would have had opportunities to find one there. But this is all very accurate. The welwitschia is indeed a very rare plant (found only in Angola & Namibia). On my 2nd visit to Angola, my uncle insisted on show one to me; we didn't have to offroading in the desert like Isley, though - we could see one from the highway as we were driving through Namibe and he pulled over, then took me to see it. The weltwitschia is one of the oldest plants in existence.

Sure enough, the creators bring up these details - Dr. Nepolo identifies the plant as "at least 2000 years old." That's quite a statement based only on visual evidence - I believe the plant does become bigger with time, but heck, it looks about the same size as the one I saw by Namibe and it was less than a thousand years old.

Isley crouches down next to the plant, telling Dr. Nepolo she's having a "conversation" with it. This is something Poison Ivy does all the time in the comics, but of course Dr. Nepolo doesn't realize he's working with a super-villain and raises his eyebrow at this. Then they pull out shovels and start digging. It occurs to me that for all of Poison Ivy's claims that she is a protector of the plants, she's uprooting a unique specimen from its native habitat just so she can place it under her own care, really no better than those who capture animals for zoos. What I'm saying is, maybe super-villains don't have a moral code.

Before they can finish digging the plant out, a truck pulls out and two men emerge, brandishing guns. Dr. Nepolo identifies them as men from the nearby diamond mines. That's a little strange, as Angola's most fertile diamond fields are way, way up in the north, but I guess it's not impossible... on the other hand, the men speak perfect English, which is also not what you'd expect to find in southern Angola. The men accuse Isley and Nepolo of trespassing, but Ivy causes the welwitschia to spring to life and ensnare one of the men. The scene shifts to "48 hours later" as Isley finishes depositing the welwitschia in the Gotham Botanical Gardens. That's quite a feat, safely unearthing a plant that old... but putting it in a hothouse in the northern United States? Considering the welwitschia requires such an exact desert climate in order to thrive, I don't think a hothouse is the right place for it. And I definitely think there are safer cities than Gotham, considering how often that city seems to burn to the ground. What I'm saying is, maybe super-villains are not the brightest people around.

Anyway, this was a pretty minor appearance of Angola and although you could quibble about the details, they got a lot of things right!

• +2 estrelas for using the weltwitschia, a plant found in southern Angola
• +1 estrela for correctly identifying Angola as a place where diamonds are found.

TOTAL SCORE: Três estrelas!

Lights Out everybody

Yesterday I blogged briefly about the Inner Sanctum comic which (unexpectedly) appeared in an issue of Super-Magician Comics in 1943. Although the feature never reappeared in that series, in 1944 Street & Smith were ready to try again.

In two issues of Super-Magician Comics (v3 #6 & v3 #9), the radio program Lights Out appeared as a comic book feature. It was a strange time to trying to adapt Lights Out as the series had gone off the air in 1943. Still, I suppose it brought a bit of money to the program writer/producer Arch Oboler. Unlike the previous Inner Sanctum story where I was not certain whether the plot was adapted from a radio script, this time both instances are definitely adapted from Oboler's stories - they're both stories which have survived as recordings!

The feature in v3 #6 opens just as the Inner Sanctum story did, by providing a history of the personality behind the show; last time, it was a biography of the host, Raymond Edward Johnson. This time, it's of Arch Oboler himself (who did, of course, also host the show during his tenure). As before, The Grand Comics Database has no idea who worked on this feature. Most of the first 3 pages are spent describing Oboler's career, including his script for the film Escape and they drop the name of the radio show's last sponsor, Ironized Yeast.

Partially into the third page, the adaptation begins: it is of "Meteor Man" which you can hear at archive.org right here. The story involves a scientist who discovers a meteorite with a living creature inside whose mental powers threaten to enslave humanity. I understand that the original 1937 script of "Meteor Man" was a little more gruesome than the later radio play, which is the only one which survives (evidently the monster killed more people in the original). The comics adaptation would seem to be nearest to the later version.

In issue v3 #9, the adaptation is of 1942's "Come to the Bank" which you can hear at archive.org here. This one is about a man who tries to place mind over matter and succeeds in walking inside a wall - but then can't get out. identifies this one as being drawn by Charles Boland, who signed the final panel.

It's pretty neat to discover Lights Out had its own comic book feature, even if it was limited to only two instalments. Although Arch Oboler's stories were written with actors & sound effects in mind, I think many of them would have been effective as comic book adaptations. Too bad it didn't appear more frequently!

Pleasant dreams?

It's kind of amazing that I have been a fan of comic books and old-time radio for as many years as I have, and yet still have so many new things to discover in how those two hobbies overlap. Just recently I was amazed to learn that radio's Inner Sanctum appeared as a comic book! Sure, a few years back Ernie Colon made a comic with semi-adaptations from the radio show (I wrote about it here), but this was a comic book from 1943 when Inner Sanctum was still on the air!

The comic book in question is Super-Magician Comics v2 #7, published by Street & Smith. The Grand Comics Database has no idea who was responsible for this comic, as Street & Smith's comics were usually printed anonymously and there simply hasn't been as much scholarly attention placed on them as on Fawcett, Quality, Marvel or Dell comics of the same era.

Interestingly, the comic's Inner Sanctum feature begins as a biography of Raymond Edward Johnson, using a very loose cartooning style to illustrate his time as a golf caddie and waiter before becoming an actor. On the third page, Raymond is dressed up in black and wearing a top hat (as he often appeared in publicity pictures for the radio show) and within an old house with a squeaking door.

The story is about 'the mummy's curse' and if it was based on a radio script, I haven't been able to find it. A woman believes that a mummy has the face of her missing husband and there's an evil yogi who tries to hypnotize her. It has a very strangely dizzying pace which leads me to believe it's trying to adapt a 30-minute radio play in only 5 pages, but I can't be sure.

Come back tomorrow for another radio/comics oddity...

"The Shogunate must not learn the secrets of our religion!" Usagi Yojimbo: The Hidden #7 thoughts

I suppose one of the most impressive things about Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo is that the series is constantly able to tread new ground and delve into previously-unexplored concepts. This is no mean feat for a 30+ year old title. Without transporting the series into a different setting (outside of Space Usagi, which has its own continuity) and without succumbing to tie-ins to other titles (other than the occasional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jam), Usagi Yojimbo finds new ideas by simply exploring different aspects of feudal-era Japan.

Most recently the series ran Usagi Yojimbo: The Hidden, a seven-issue limited series with an intriguing hook: two men are murdered and Usagi joins his old friend Inspector Ishida in examining the crime. However, the dead men are Christians at a time when Christianity is an illegal religion. As the story advances, they learn the dead men were carrying a Bible. A thief plundered the dead men and now various people are after the book; the killers turns out to be agents of the Shogunate, so it's the law vs. the law - Ishida as a local police inspector against the superior authority of the government.

Along with the recent Martin Scorcese film Silence, Usagi Yojimbo: The Hidden is one of the few American pieces of pop culture exploring this interesting period of Japan/Christian history. The text pieces by Sakai were very fascinating, especially in the final issue where he describes how Japanese Christians would use mirrors to fashion the symbol of the cross.

The climax of the tale involves a very neat little sleight-of-hand with a genuinely surprising reveal on the final page which changes how the previous 6 issues are interpreted, which is again no small feat. Stan Sakai remains a master of comic art storytelling and Usagi Yojimbo continues to prove itself his masterpiece.

Some recent Marvel profiles at the Appendix

I am no longer an active writer/editor at the Marvel Appendix site, but recently they held a special 2018 Halloween Event. I did contribute two profiles to that one: Hag and Troll, a pair of forgotten Ghost Rider villains. Check 'em out!

Live Like That

Yesterday I delivered a new sermon at my church, which can be listened to at this page. The gist of it is: I am now an associate with SIM Canada and will begin taking longer mission trips to Angola in the future.

As for the song I'm referencing, it's here: