MONSTER MASHUPS #117

 More mutant monster malarkey from MIGHTY SAMSON #2.                                                                                 

Here we get the Fanged Flyers.                                                                    

Then the Morass Monster and the Three-Jawed Gator (I only see two).                                                                                                           

 Then there's the Titano-Turtle.                                                                 

And we finish up with an Octosaur (distant relation to Sharktopus?)

MONSTER MASHUPS #116

 After posting on a random issue of MIGHTY SAMSON here, I've read more issues and get the strong impression (so far) that the creators had from the first a plan to offer young boy readers lots of "mutant monster mashups," often with peculiar names. At some point, publisher Gold Key invited readers to make up their own monsters and send them in for GK to print. This proved a smart strategy to fascinate middle-school monster-lovers, and it paid off in giving SAMSON a reasonably healthy run for the era.                               

Here's heroic Samson as a little kid, exerting his mutant strength against "The Plant-That-Eats."                                                             

 Then Adult Samson faces off against a Liobear, who renders the hero half-eyeless (but not, as the phrase goes, "in Gaza"). Samson kills the Liobear and then wears his pelt a la Heracles.                                             

 Then our Cyclopean hero crushes the Needle-Throwing Cactus.               

 Then he defuses a Lightning Beast...                                                      
 

...And he finishes up by taking on the antler-headed Six-Pawed Gorilla. Note how his two companions tick off names for these critters as if they had their own mutant biology textbook at hand.

RAR #89: JOHN DEERFOOT

 

I found John Deerfoot totally by accident, selecting a random issue of G.I. COMBAT (November 1958). The story by Bill Finger is nothing special, but the protagonist does precede series characters Johnny Cloud (1960) and Little Sure Shot (1963), the latter being a member of Sergeant Rock's "Easy Company." Deerfoot has nothing to do with Rock's long-lived unit, for evidently the name was in use by DC writers before Rock himself appeared in 1959. In fact, the Wiki article on "Easy Company" alleges that a 1959 Bob Haney story first uses the unit-name, but it seems likely to me that the Finger story was both written and published first-- though who knows (or cares) if Finger was the first DC writer to use the name of the battle-unit.   

RAR #88: CHARLIE WHITE WING

 

 In RAR #16, I gave an example of a 1940s story in which American Indians had to be stigmatized because they had grievances against the U.S. government. But by the 1970s no one reading or writing comics would have doubted that the tribes' many grievances were justified. Thus BRAVE AND BOLD #121 (1975) pits the team of Batman and the Metal Men against a team of aggrieved "redskins" who extort the government for concessions by taking over a train stocked with such prized government documents as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Charlie White Wing is one of three leaders who have "passed" in WASP culture so as to become docents for this mobile museum, and writer Bob Haney may or may not have meant to imply that the three of them were able to pass because they were (in Charlie's words above) "half-breeds." To be sure, both the three organizers and their "red brothers" are all given the same light red pigmentation. Anyway, Haney had a formidable task: to evoke a sense of danger to the good guys while not unduly vilifying the extortionists. His solution is to make everyone happy with a secondary threat: unnamed foreign agents place a bomb aboard the train and the superheroes must work with the Indian insurgents in order to save themselves, the train and its precious relics. It's a facile solution, and it even loosely implies that the extortionists will be forgiven their sins and released without prosecution. But the intent was good, whatever the execution.