(From "The Green Mask" volume 2, number 2, 1945.)
The Nerdmudgeon Podcast
Three middle-aged nerds (including yours truly!) review all of the MCU movies in chronological order. Short, funny, and full of good vibes, check it out and let us know what you think!
Nerdmudgeon.com
First cat ladies, now pigeons. Green Mask Mk.2 really knows how to pick his enemies…
I really hope those are exploding kamakaze pigeons.
I hope they weren’t paying these writers too much, Gene. Or the artists — by this point the book had gotten so incredibly derivative and cheap, it’s a little embarrassing.
Also, I’m noticing an interesting trend in the stories. Early on, most of these Golden Age super heroes were fighting the mob and organized crime in general. Pretty soon you see them move towards fighting the Japanese and Germans (thinly disguised as made-up other countries) in various iterations. Once the war started, you had heroes in combat (Captain America as an active duty serviceman, The Unknown Soldier, etc.). By the time the war was ending in 1945, you start to see them moving more to a general “defense of democracy” stance rather than a “defense of nation” one. You go from the specific existential threat of the Axis invading and destroying nations to the much broader idea of defending the big concept of democracy as a way of life.
I have no particular insight as to why or what that means, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
Pigeons of Death? I think The Green Mask is for the birds!
Looks like London’s finally become overrun with the things.
As inspired by the name, meet the pigeon of death:
http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l512/JohnnyGear/PigeonofDeath.png
At first I thought this was going to a new Harry Potter book.
Fly, my pretties, fly, FLY!!
The following issues will feature the sparrows of doom, the magpies of mayhem and the robins of terror.
So this is what that Condor guy’s been getting up to in his spare time…
Well, atleast it was only every day ordinary Pidgeons of Death. Imagine if it was the Giant, Atomic, Ninja-Samuria, Invading Pidgeons of Death from Mars.
Off the top of my head, I think the move toward “defense of democracy” was reflective of a growing perception that the Russians, who had been “our gallant allies,” were going to need to be watched. Before the war, socialism, if not communism, had gained a foothold in America among the victims of the Depression (and well before; there’d been Socialist party presidential candidates as early as 1900), and America’s power structure would have done all it could to take advantage of our new military and political clout to erode that foothold. I would not be surprised if pressure was exerted on comics to reflect Good American Values, or at least that comics reflected the prevailing patriotism of the day.
Hi folks! Merry Christmas, HeroMachinists! Jeff, I’m still having trouble accessing the blog. I can’t get to it directly via the HeroMachine site, but I can get to it through the links you post on Facebook. Anybody else having that problem? Any idea when the server problems might be fixed?
Thanks
Niall, I don’t understand — if you type in http://www.heromachine.com directly into your browser address bar, what happens? The links on Facebook still go to heromachine.com, that’s what’s throwing me. If you have a second browser you don’t normally use, can you try typing the URL in directly on that and see what happens?
The server exceeded memory usage last night around 10 and was rebooted, but otherwise it ought to be ok now.
Also, make sure you’re putting in http://www.heromachine.com, not just heromachine.com. The latter doesn’t work.