DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 8: Earth Day

As the Gregorian calendar turned the page from the 1980s to the 1990s, DC’s public service comics continued in the same vein of well-meaning liberalism that Heroes Against Hunger had established. But world hunger was slipping out of fashion. The late 1980s and early 1990s were the undisputed heyday of a certain misguided form of environmentalism.

Not All Your Power Can Save Them: DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 7

The full-length (or even extra-length) PSA comic really enjoyed its heyday in the 1980s. As we saw in a previous installment, the Teen Titans even did what was effectively a three-issue miniseries about the evils of drugs. And today, those issues are perhaps the most strongly remembered DC Comics PSAs. But while we might often think of “Just Say No” as the pre-eminent and all-pervading public service campaign of 1980s pop culture, that honor would probably be more correctly bestowed upon a different effort: the fight against the famine in Ethiopia.

Comics You Were Never Supposed To See

In general, the unpublished comics I write about it here comics which were intended to be published and purchased and consumed by readers. But there is a smaller subcategory of comics which remained unpublished because they were never supposed to be published in the first place. We’re going to take a look at a couple o them today.

Belt ‘Em For Safety! DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 6

The 1980s were a busy time for DC’s public service comics. More than that, the decade was really the beginning of the widespread use of full-fledged comic books as PSAs unto themselves, rather than just a one-pager here or there. As we covered last time, perhaps the best-remembered example of this is the three-issue run of anti-drug New Teen Titans specials, and next time we’ll get to Heroes Against Hunger, but for now let’s content ourselves with some more little bits and bobs from throughout the decade.

Gordon’s Interspecies Romance: Robin y El Murcielago #6 translated

My ongoing project of translating Robin y el Murcielago, the bootleg Spanish Batman comic from the 1940s, has always been troubled by the weird and pervasive anti-Asian racism running through the books. But folks, I really thought maybe with the fifth issue, Ribera and Fernández had turned a corner, that maybe the racism was being eased out of the work. And indeed, most of the goons and thugs encountered in this issue aren’t Asian at all. But there’s no way around it: this might be the most racist one yet. It might be the most racist Batman comic ever. It’s pretty bad, man.

Also, Jim Gordon and a cow might have sex off-panel.

The Lurid Insanity of the Batman: The Animated Series Toy Line

This post isn’t actually about unpublished comics, or foreign bootleg comics, or anything else this blog is supposedly meant to cover. But it is, in a sense, about comics that never were, in that it is about toys depicting things that never happened in a comic book, or in any other form of media.

Fighting the War on Drugs: DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 5

Superman wasn’t the only DC superhero dispensing public-service-style justice in the 1980s. In fact, he wasn’t even the most popular one. The 1980s were kind of a weird time in comics. A pretty incredible time, but also weird. The X-Men took the comic book world by storm thanks to writer Chris Claremont’s revolutionary approach of sometimes killing off major characters and having a team of heroes with thick and vaguely offensive accents. In response, Marv Wolfman returned to DC and relaunched the Teen Titans as the New Teen Titans. The book boasted some new members and a Claremont-influenced approach, and soon enough it had spawned a dizzying array of spinoff titles, just like the X-Men. Readers couldn’t get enough of it!

The Plot Thickens: Robin y El Murcielago #5 translated

As Robin y El Murcielago, the Spanish bootleg Batman comic, continued to progress, it didn’t move away from its blatant racism so much as soften it. It’s still clearly centered around “yellow peril” fear of the entire Northeastern Hemisphere, but writer Julio Fernández López is no longer giving Asian characters an offensive accent and the narrative caption boxes no longer make constant referrals to “Orientals.” Meanwhile, artist Julio Ribera has almost entirely weaned himself off of racist caricatures.

And now, an unpublished work of Rob Liefeld

Alright guys, time for some real pervert shit. Time to increase the amount of Rob Liefeld art you’ve seen in your life. Look, at this point we’ve all seen that old Progressive Boink post about Liefeld, and if you haven’t, I’m linking to it yet again. The man is bad at comics. But unlike, say, the writing of J.T. Krul, Liefeld’s badness is both a hell of a lot of fun to gawk at and quite instructive. We can learn so much about how comics work by looking at examples of them not working.

Never Say Yes to a Cigarette! DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 4

After a terrifying glimpse at a world in which Superman is committed to putting children in jail and doesn’t care if parents beat up their children, DC’s PSAs regained their footing in the 1980s. First up was a UK-only anti-smoking campaign. This wasn’t the first time a DC character had done a Britain-only PSA. Batman made a traffic-safety video across the pond in 1967, and most episodes of the Batman TV series were broadcast in the UK with an intro bumper–lost to the mists of time, but well-remembered by British viewers of the era–warning kids not to try and replicate the stunts of the Dynamic Duo.