Classic lost comic of the 1970s: Senator Surprise in “How a spell becomes a law”
About a month ago I posted a short piece 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 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 reform, 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 accent, and you only begin to scratch the surface of his complexity. He’s largely forgotten now, although Chris Claremont is supposed to have claimed to have based Rogue‘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!
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. One of Hues Corporation’s characters, The Ochinaut (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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Wonderful work, as always. As someone who was a big comic book collector as a child, I can say you’ve done an incredible job in recreating the feel of the period. In fact, that pastry ad gave me a flashback.
How about a sea monkey ad in the next one?
There used to be such great ads in these things, like for real honest-to-goodness flying saucers and pills that turned you into Jack LaLane.
@Colin
Lots of good ads with O.J. Simpson too, selling sneakers or whatever…Too bad he started slaughtering people later in life.
Don’t forget the pyramid schemes! Comic book readers were apparently quite susceptible to such things.
It’s like the advertisers thought we were gullible or something.
Thanks for the kind words.
Epic! A triumph!
Is it my imagination, or does Needleman look like Wong, Dr. Strange’s stoic manservant?
@MC: It’s possible that Marvel sent one of their characters over to try and sabotage this great comic by a rival company. That’s just the kind of shenanigans they’d get up to.