About a month ago I posted a short piece [1] about one of my all-time favorite comic books, The Gormandizer. Response to that was overwhelming; I was inundated by a deluge of people telling me that I should scan some more Gormandizer pages, because the few scans I did post were AWESOME.
I fully intended on scanning more Gormandizer. However, as I was going through all my old Bronze Age [2] comics I discovered the following gem from the first issue of Senator Surprise. This story, “How a Spell Becomes a Law!” is eerily prescient, with its warning about the dangers of the United States Senate taking on financial [3] reform [4], especially as it relates to demons from other dimensions.
Senator Surprise is nearly as wonderful as The Gormandizer– imagine if you will that Doctor Strange or any of the other “mystical” based superheroes (the Phantom Stranger, The Demon, The Purple Crimson, Unusual Man, Cletus of Nightmares, Frolicking Milquetoast, Giant Merkin, Finger Louise, etc) were a Senator from Louisiana, and spoke with a thick and really quite lilting and lyrical Cajun [5] accent, and you only begin to scratch the surface of his complexity. He’s largely forgotten now, although Chris Claremont [6] is supposed to have claimed to have based Rogue [7]‘s accent on the Senator’s (Claremont was a big fan I think, actually, and I have somewhere in my notes the interview he gave with Comix Prevuews in which he declared “Senator Surprise was my favorite non-Marvel or DC character of the early-to-mid 1970s period.” Unfortunately my desk is a mess right now, and I’m quoting from memory and to be honest that might not be exactly what he said.)
Click on the images to embiggen them (and be able to read the brilliant dialogue by clicking on the images again on the new site), to bask in their artistic glory, to thrill to their amazement, and to be generally dazzled by what is, unarguably, one of the greatest comic books of the 1970s, with an important message for today’s audiences!
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Bonus: It was customary in the Bronze age for superheroes to appear in pastry ads. It sounds weird, I know, but if you don’t believe me there is a website that has several examples [19]. One of Hues Corporation’s characters, The Ochinaut [20] (link probably Not Safe For Work [NSFW]), appeared in one such ad, that was printed in the first issue of Senator Surprise and, strangely, issue number 212 of Wonder Woman. You can read it below:
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- Author Bio [22]
- Latest Posts [23]
Ricky Sprague [24]
Latest posts by Ricky Sprague (Posts [28])
- Meet the start-ups that are thriving in the current economic recovery [29] - May 27, 2016
- How a Wonder Woman comic from 1942 led to the Great California Cow Exodus of 2012, maybe [30] - November 28, 2012
- A common-sense approach to restoring economic prosperity [31] - November 19, 2012
- New Philip K. Dick novel too absurd to be believed [32] - September 17, 2012
- My 90 Days, 90 Reasons submission [33] - September 12, 2012