Another collaboration between Kupperberg and Garcia-Lopez, and another mini-masterpiece. I present you the story in total:
...not that Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez ever did a bad art job in comics (or even a not-great one), but he and Paul Kupperberg really seemed to click on these Phantom Stranger stories. The two they did together for Action Comics Weekly stand to me as some of the best PS stories ever done.
Sadly, this was the last Phantom Stranger strip in ACW. Action Comics Weekly would last one more issue, and then with #643 return to an all-Superman title.
And that would leave The Phantom Stranger homeless again, left to guest-starring in other books.
But this coincided with a lot of supernatural DC heroes suddenly having their own titles, so the Stranger became very busy, as we'll see starting in two days.
But for tomorrow, I thought we'd take a moment to talk with Paul Kupperberg, who became the unofficial steward of The Phantom Stranger in the 1980s. Be here tomorrow for our talk with Paul!
Sadly, this was the last Phantom Stranger strip in ACW. Action Comics Weekly would last one more issue, and then with #643 return to an all-Superman title.
And that would leave The Phantom Stranger homeless again, left to guest-starring in other books.
But this coincided with a lot of supernatural DC heroes suddenly having their own titles, so the Stranger became very busy, as we'll see starting in two days.
But for tomorrow, I thought we'd take a moment to talk with Paul Kupperberg, who became the unofficial steward of The Phantom Stranger in the 1980s. Be here tomorrow for our talk with Paul!
1 comment:
Something that I'd completely forgotten until I just looked at this story again...which was a stunning bit of art by Jose (the man never did a bad job in his life...you only THINK the stories don't suck because the art's so good): this story was an homage (that's French for "I stole it but admit to it") to a comedy piece from MY BROTHER WAS AN ONLY CHILD (1959) by Jack Douglas, an Emmy winning writer for Jack Paar, Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante and others. I somehow got hold of Douglas's books (NEVER TRUST A NAKED BUS DRIVER) and was deeply and disturbingly influenced by his absurdist humor. "The Boy Who Cried Dinosaur" is about little Jimmy Lauderbinn, a little boy with a big imagination, who finds a dinosaur in the big swamp outside of town (Toms River, NJ) and befriends him. In exchange for peanuts, the dinosaur will do anything for Jimmy, including stomping on everyone who doesn't believe him or makes fun of him. Even with the entire town demolished except for them, his family still won't believe him about the dinosaur. The story ends:
Little Jimmy handed it a peanut.
"Step on Mother," he said.
Now, I think it was a metaphor for the stupidity and self-consuming destructiveness of the TV business. Then I thought it was goofy.
Anyway, thank you Jack Douglas! And thank you, Rob, for being so generous to my temporary guardianship of the Stranger. I enjoyed doing these stories and a few of them even hold up, 20 years later.
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