Minutemen – Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Mike Sekowsky — Road To Minutemen

January 11, 2020 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Mighty Crusaders #2, January 1966

Continuing our series on the roots of the Watchmen characters.

Alan Moore, on his original idea for Watchmen:

“I wanted more average super-heroes, like the Mighty Crusaders line … [the] original idea had started off with the dead body of the Shield being pulled out of a river somewhere.”

Although the Watchmen eventually morphed out of Charlton heroes instead, elements of the Crusaders and the other MLJ/Archie Superheroes found their way into Watchmen lore. Perhaps most notable is the Hangman, a Golden age Archie character who along with Black Hood, becomes the obvious inspiration for Hooded Justice, a member of the original Golden Age Minutemen in the Watchmen series. (And has a critical role in the Watchmen HBO show.)

Also notable is the Mothman, an obvious derivation of Archie’s (Simon and Kirby’s) Fly / Flyman.

The original MLJ superheroes disappeared into the mists after World War 2, which didn’t impact Archie financially as the title character and his teenage friends transformed the company, including the published actual name which changed from MLJ to Archie in 1946.

But Archie’s management seeing the giant superhero success down the road at DC and Marvel took another stab starting in 1959 with the Shield and the Fly. Ultimately, many of the golden age characters reappeared, forming a team, the Mighty Crusaders.

Superhero artist Mike Sekowsky was first a Timely (nee Marvel) staffer and then a long-time DC mainstay. He is perhaps best known for his work on Justice League of America, where he could draw almost any character.

So he is well suited to tackle the Mighty Crusaders, a team-up book developed to compete with Justice League and other superhero team books of the day.

But Jerry Siegel’s (yep, Superman’s creator) writing style had most definitely not kept up with the style of the day, and the book was cancelled after seven issues. In fact, the entire Archie superhero experiment fizzled out by late 1967.

But… not before they managed to bring together nearly all the dusty MLJ heroes and put them in one comic book. Issue #4 of Mighty Crusaders, is a goofy favorite, entitled “Too Many Heroes.”

Too many, perhaps, but certainly enough to reach into for character ideas twenty years later.

Issue #4 of the Mighty Crusaders is a… gas. Pretty much every MLJ/Archie hero (as seen twenty years later in this house ad) mysteriously reappears to apply for membership into the Crusaders. The Crusaders themselves disappear after a short-lived series in 1966, but re-emerge multiple times starting in the 80s.

*The classic Minutemen team shot as drawn by Dave Gibbons and recreated by the late Darwyn Cooke 25 years later, and the nearly identical PR photos from the 2009 film and 2019 television series.*

Final Scorecard — Minutemen and their original counterparts:

Silhouette = Completely unique. (Maybe an amalgam of Black Canary, Black Cat and a female version of the Fox if you want to stretch out the derivations…)

Mothman = Flyman

Dollar Bill = Captain Flag

Nite Owl 1 = Blue Beetle 1 (Dan Garrett)

Captain Metropolis = Shield (with some Steel Sterling thrown in)

Silk Spectre 1 = Phantom Lady (with some Black Canary thrown in)

Hooded Justice = Hangman (with some Black Hood thrown in)

Comedian = Peacemaker (with some Shield thrown in)

Mike Mayhew — Lady Of Quality

January 9, 2020 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Starman #44, July 1998

Continuing our series on the roots of the Watchmen characters.

Isn’t the Silk Spectre actually Nightshade, the only female superhero in the Charlton superhero line-up? After all, all the other main characters are derived from silver-age Charlton heroes.

Or, if not, perhaps she is an altered version of DC’s Black Canary, who, thanks to retconning, became a mother/daughter Golden Age/Silver Age legacy character?

What does Alan Moore say? He said at one time that she’s based on the Phantom Lady (Sandra Knight), created by the Eisner Iger studio in 1940, and first published by Quality Comics in 1940. (Moore says Nightshade was “boring.” I’m not sure what, if anything, he’s said about Black Canary.)

Phantom Lady had quite a few incarnations in the Golden Age, moving from publisher to publisher, ultimately becoming yet another casualty of the Golden Age.

She is perhaps best known for the cover of Fox Features issue #17 (by Matt Baker), prominently featured in Frederic Wertham’s infamous anti- comics tome Seduction of the Innocent as an example of titillation (costume) and sadism (bondage.)

She first appeared in the DC universe as part of the Freedom Fighters, a group of superheroes fighting Nazi domination of an alternate Earth (“X”), in Justice League #107 (October 1973.) The rest of the Freedom Fighters are also superheroes from Quality Comics — DC obtained Quality’s characters in 1956, but with the exception of Plastic Man, had kept the characters in limbo.

Between her multiple iterations and publishers in the Golden Age, and her (at least) four incarnations at DC, there are likely more versions of Phantom Lady than any other secondary character in comics history.

In this post-crisis version, she is retconned as Starman’s cousin, helping him fight crime in the “Golden Age.” In fact, this great action page by Mike Mayhew is from the classic James Robinson Starman series.

As for Charlton’s Nightshade? She can’t catch a break. She was briefly introduced as a partner for Captain Atom and received a short-lived back-up feature in his title just prior to its cancellation. Despite some fine early art by Jim Aparo, those stories have never been reprinted — other than public domain press.