Target Comics #3 - pt. 4

As readers of this blog may have noticed, I have an unabashed appreciation for this peculiar little utopian future/boys adventure feature, Calling 2R. The writing is impressive and, on this page, you can see how the art keeps wowing me. Sure, this is a trace job, but it's a very good trace job! I think leaving all the perspective lines in even adds to the piece. 

There is something Steve Ditko-esque about this page, from the cartoonishness of that thrown punch to the didactic dialogue in the Hole. Yet the characters are inverted from how Ditko would later have written them; the individualistic Pretty Boy is sobbing and defeated, while the Captain is buoyed by his faith in the collective.  

It's also interesting that neither of these characters have proper names yet.

Contrasting nicely with the didactic Calling 2R is this more nuanced Tarpe Mills one-shot (part of the Fantastic Feature Films series, as if each one-shot was a movie), where four anarchists are portrayed in a surprisingly sympathetic manner.

In case, like me, you were unfamiliar with bubble dancing, The bubble dance is an erotic dance made famous by Sally Rand in the 1930s. The dancer (sometimes naked) dances with a huge bubble shaped like a balloon or ball placed between her body and the audience to make some interesting poses. It's possible that Tarpe had heard of bubble dancing but never seen one, since she seems to have misunderstood and has her holding the bubble behind her.

There are no heroes in this story. This American couple save the dictator, as if that was a good thing. The baroness, in the end, had the courage and conviction to do what seems to me to be the right thing, but is still thwarted. And the poor chicken gets killed!

That's it for this issue of Target Comics. Come back soon for my next read...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Target Comics #2 - pt. 4

 I just can't seem to let go of Calling 2R, being such a bold, ambitious utopian story -- the sort of thing I wish I could write, if I were to get really confessional. And that attention to detail in the background work! I don't think I would have the patience to draw that first panel alone.

I'm hoping the old man's not literally talking about fining those two for wrong thinking, as that sounds too 1984 for my taste. Owing a debt to society for wrong doing is nothing new, of course.

This page is full of glorious period detail, from the realistically drawn slums, to the sign for a "ice and coal" store, to slang you don't see in most stories, like "nerts" (= an exclamation like "nuts," and a fairly new exclamation, according to Mirriam-Webster online first used in 1929), "bulls" (= city police? But that's an unusual use of it, as Wikipedia tells me this was used for railroad police specifically), and the even more unusual term "white lights." This one's so obscure it almost has me baffled, except...if the punk likes to ride the rails like a hobo and has run afoul of the bulls before, then maybe "white lights" refers to the head lamps of trains?

Here's the protective vests of the rangers in action, and it looks like they work just like the force screen around the city, in terms of hurting and knocking back anyone who tries to melee with them, while also stopping bullets as if the wearer had the Imperviousness power. That's a pretty powerful vest; I'd try to balance that out by saying it can only operate for 3 turns in a row before needing 4 turns to recharge. 

It's unclear if the force gun actually harms/does damage to the opponent to render him unconscious or if it stuns (with a save to resist?). 

And this last page I'll share is from the last story in this issue; a stand-alone story about a pilot who befriends an ugly hermit. The hermit is so grateful that he shares a secret; he's guarding a cave full of dust (magic dust?) that disintegrates all metal it touches. A nice touch is that the dust is so fine that you can't see that it's in the air all around you while you're walking through the cave tunnels (as seen on a previous page). I'm sharing this page to show how incredibly potent this Dust of Disintegration is, effectively wrecking as if a 7th level superhero (I'm guessing, by how easily it destroys that tank). It's used here to stop the War in Europe, but it's a good challenging trap for high-level Heroes too.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)