Tales of the Parodyverse

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An Interested Historian
Mon Dec 19, 2005 at 10:27:16 pm EST
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Parody Comics: A Brief History - Part Two.
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The Golden Age: Part Two


In the winter of 1947, Parody Comics was a small but talented group of individuals who worked 16-hour shifts in a water-damaged building on Prince Street in New York. “The ‘Warehouse’ years…I remember hating that place as a kid; I was a scrawny teenager who worked in a building always colder than ice in the winter and hotter than the sun in summer,” Ian Watson told me in 2000. “Now I look back at it as some of my fondest memories.”
“In those early days, it always felt like we were doing something new, even dangerous,” added Babs Bennett. ”Marty [Feinberg] would come in to work early and he’d be a real cranky son of a [expletive]. You just plied him with coffee and around noon he’d be sociable, if not exactly cooperative. He got his best work done at night, so I could never figure why he came in with the dawn.”


The Hatman Cometh


Babs relates the story of the creation of Hatman. “We [Babs and Marty] were walking somewhere down on 34th street and its Christmas. We’re buying little decorations for the office and we see a drunk, wearing a Santa suit asleep on the kerb. All of a sudden, Marty goes into a rage, talking about how this drunk guy is ruining Christmas for kids and where the guy got the suit in the first place and how this guy, even though he wears the suit, ain’t Santa. I tell him ‘He ain’t wearing the hat, maybe that’s his excuse?’ and Marty replies, ‘Just because you ain’t wearing the hat that doesn’t mean you ain’t Santa.’ and then he just froze up, his mouth open. It was a moment of clarity and he thought up Hatman right there on the spot. He gave the drunk guy 20 dollars and we were on our way.” Hatman would wear the Santa bobble hat in Tales of the Hat #10, when Santa is captured by the Russian agent, Erskine Blofish in an attempt to destroy the western idea of Christmas and institute a communist Santa, who would give everyone a lump of coal.

The first issue of ‘Tales of the Hat’ would relate the origin of the Golden Age Hatman. Jim Walker is a construction engineer who is imbued with ‘the power of the hat’ when he’s struck by a meteor containing Serious Matter. In typically Feinberg style, the villain of the first issue would be Walker’s own tool set, also affected by the meteor. The sea monkey king Banjooo (the customary 5 o’s were added a year later) also makes a brief appearance at the end of the issue, crawling up the side of the Empire State Building with a woman in his clutches. Comic-buffs will recognise the woman as Babs Bennett.

Marty Feinberg recalls the initial difficulty with the character. “We didn’t use sports teams in the early days, so who knows types of hats that can be used for fighting crime? Sure, a cowboy hat turns him into a sharp-shooter, a deer-stalker makes him smart, his engineer hat gives him strength…After those three, I had to be pretty creative. One of my favourite moments is in Tales [of the Hat issue] 4, where Jim wraps a long scarf around his head and makes it into a turban, then he does the Indian rope-trick up the side of a building!”

Tales of the Hat would launch in February of 1948 to wide acclaim from fans. “Suddenly, we had a thousand offers to join or sell our company,” recalls Marty’s brother and Parody Comics’ business manager, Albert. “When National [Periodical Publications] couldn’t buy Parody, they sued us for copyright on the Dark Knight character.”


The Lawsuit Debacle of the Dark Knight


After the previous lawsuit filed by National Periodical Publications over the character of Amazing Guy (which avoided court only with the withdrawal of Acting Comics and Amazing Guy from circulation), Parody Comics had done its research on copyright. “We’d been looking into reviving the Amazing Guy character because it had such good numbers,” explained Albert Feinberg. “When National sued us over Dark Knight, we were prepared.”

Parody would counter with a lawsuit suggesting that since the publishing of Defective Comics, National had infringed on Parody’s copyright with its blatant plagiarism of the Dark Knight in the character of Batman. The Editor in Chief of National at the time was Whitney Ellsworth, who’d been promoted earlier that year when Sheldon Mayer left to concentrate on cartooning. “Sheldon was big on protecting the rights of our major characters, but he’d left at a crucial time, so I didn’t know what the hell we were going to do,” Ellsworth called a general meeting with his senior editors. “I asked them if their lawsuit had any weight. I got seven heads studying the top of a conference table very closely. Then Jack [Schiff, editor of Batman & Detective Comics] told me that there’d been meetings between him and Marty Feinberg! And I couldn’t believe it, they’d actually traded ideas on what to do differently from each other without stepping on each other’s toes! I guessed that Marty would bring that little gem out in court and there’d be one hell of a mess trying to sort out what goes where. So out of mutual benefit, the lawsuit was quietly dropped on either side.” The other mutual benefit to the lawsuit fiasco would be the relationship between National and Parody, formerly icy because of the Amazing Guy lawsuit; it developed into a friendly competition between the two companies. Julius Schwartz remembers “I always snuck a peak at Parody’s work; I didn’t feel it was as good as what we did, but it was pretty entertaining.”


The Lair Legion


“We’d been having a ball inventing all these crazy different characters,” explains Ian Watson. “We had Hatman and the Dark Knight selling well at the time, but we couldn’t keep throwing new heroes into every issue, so we made a team book.” Ian Watson would be promoted to assistant editor and co-plotter. “Basically, I did everything that I’d done before, except that my name was now on the first page along with Marty’s. I still swept the floor and emptied trash cans.”

Ian Watson remembers the creative process behind The Lair Legion. “We’d featured Parody Island in a past issue and Marty wanted to use it again ‘because he felt it’d look great on paper. We had the idea of a butler getting powers and being the leader and we had a fuzzy idea on who Wilbur Parody was. So Marty published it.”

The artist would be Frank Giacoia. “I’d bounced around various comic companies before the war and knew Marty. I think he’d seen some of my work at Avon and knew I was available.” Giacoia had studied at Manhattan’s High School of Industrial Art before joining Eisner & Iger, the studio of the Golden Age greats Will Eisner and Jerry Iger in 1941 at the age of just sixteen. “After working at National and Timely, I was a little surprised when I arrive at Parody Comics with my pens and paper and instead of this great office building, there was this huge tenement! [laughs] But that’s what it was! Most of the windows were busted and there was about 2 months worth of trash stuffed in bins out the front, it was just awful! [laughs again].” The creative experience would ultimately prove to be one of the most rewarding of Giacoia’s career. “Oh, everyone who worked there was great. Marty was a bulldog, but he loved comics and I remember that whenever he liked my work, he’d smile like an eight-year old. That’s what people worked for: that smile.”

Lair Legion #1 would prove to be somewhat of a misnomer: Jarvis (as Tim Butelier) would appear solo throughout most of the issue, until it’s revealed that he is the slave of alien-warriors in their attempt to conquer Earth. Jarvis bands together with the Dark Knight and Hatman at the very end to vanquish Anvil Man (his first appearance) and the Crime Clown who’d also joined forces. In the last (and much acclaimed) panel, as the three heroes band together to form the Lair Legion, Jarvis thinks to himself “I have been trained to destroy my fellow humans, but the question is…can I?”

Future Lair Legion issues would spend the rest of the year on the question.






Next on Parody Comics! A History: The Golden Age comes to a close with the rebirth of Amazing Guy! And Parody Comics! goes to Hollywood.


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