Previously, in Wuxtry...
[ Welcome BACK to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade!
That's right: MONTH TWO. Buckle the fuck in. ]
Armor & The Silver Streak #1-8 (1984-1990) - "written" & "illustrated" by Neal Adams; dialogue by the son-in-law, Peter Stone; inks & professional polish by Rudy Nebres; guest-starring Bart Sears, Trevor Von Eeden, Brian Apthorp, and even Kelley Jones
This one is legendary. It was supposed to be four issues. "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak", that is. But, as it hit the stands, something kept... happening. We'll address that in a moment. Maybe; I might need more than a couple.
What's longer than a moment? An interval? That sounds nebulous enough for Continuity.
We'll address "The Secret Origin" in an interval.
What *I* want to address, up top, is how fuckin' goofy this sad sack of space opera is. The alien designs are straight-up 70s, post Star Wars, full-on Barlowe's Field Guide To Extraterrestrials design wank. There's nothing you could call 80s about any of it, unless you're talking about the character of Armor himself, kitted out head-to-toe with martial arts weapons that're almost entirely japanese in origin. Whatever Neal's original intentions were when he debuted his "The New Heroes" portfolio, by the time he's paying a printer's bill, Armor's own series has become a full-fledged Sci-Fi cashgrab.
Cynical? You say that like you've never read a Neal Adams comic.
There's nothing in "The New Heroes" portfolio to suggest The Silver Streak & Armor are brothers. Apart from their shared name. They became brothers, by the time they featured in Revengers #2, which (one assumes) was in production alongside Armor & the Silver Streak #1. But it's hard to say? Because a hallmark of Continuity is a tendency to burden a single title-- such as 'The Revengers' --with the necessity of launching one flotilla after another of supporting titles.
Example: from Ms. Mystic we got Shadowhands, which would be reverse-engineered into Samuree, and Urth 4, sensibly re-trademarked as Earth 4. Well, maybe that's a terrible example. Almost sounds like Neal didn't quite have his shit finessed. Whatever. It was Pacific Comics. Do over!
From Continuity Studios for real: with the launch of the Zero Patrol, we got Megalith and Shaman. Five page, self-contained backups. Of the two, only Megalith's could be considered a legit push, since I don't for one damned second believe Neal saw commercial potential in Shaman; he spent the entirety of Continuity Comics' span as a publishing entity scrambling to discover a single practical use for the horsehair-mohawk-that-walks-like-a-man. Shaman's not that dissimilar to Dr. Strange in that he isn't a compelling character, he's a hairstyle with a handwave function for unwieldy plot.
Typical. In attempting to make a point, I'm drifting away from my actual point. Okay. Here:
From The Revengers flows Megalith, Armor & the Silver Streak, as well as the goddamned Hybrids; from Hybrids you get Valeria the She-Bat and (am I the only one fist-pumping?) Knighthawk.
Continuity's deck of characters is like an STD that never stops suppurating. That's the point.
It's rude-- downright unfair, really --for me to assume that I have any insight into what Neal's master plan was. I do simply because there's little evidence to the contrary. Armor & Silver Streak are brothers, we are told via omniscient narrator caption, and their parents are either abducted or dead... Yet abducted-or-dead was also the fate of Jacqueline, a.k.a. Scarlet, a.k.a. the Scarlet Streak, so named because her hair has one. Jacqueline did not exist in 'The New Heroes' portfolio, and feels like a very post-post-hoc addition to the team dynamics of The Revengers. A stylin', hard-rocking, blade-wielding chick to leaven the all-dick energy of a makeshift team of make-do heroes.
(No, I have not forgotten about the honorary Revenger, Samuree. But it would be easy to.)
Jacqueline a.k.a. Scarlet might even-- and it pains me to admit this, because it's giving undue credit to Peter Stone --be an invention of someone other than Neal. As in, "Neal, did you forget about the sister in issue #1?" and Neal being like, "Whose sister?" And then Peter pushed a character sheet bearing Kevin Nowlan's signature across the desk.
Pure supposition. Flim-flam. I don't have the foggiest, and neither do you. That's the magic of these books. The reader looks at them and has to inquire why? Why is there a banner atop every Continuity title strictly to recycle the logo of the character(s) featured in any given ish? Why does Armor #1 have that little i.p. push at the very top for ARMOR & THE SILVER STREAK, directly atop Armor's chunk-as-fuck logo? Why did The Silver Streak cease to receive that redundant li'l push on the very title that contains his Secret Origin, with issue #5? Why was his name stripped from the covers, despite the fact that every issue of "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak" maintains a splash-page appearance of his dopey-ass, Ice Capades-looking logo?
The answer would seem to be popularity. Nobody ever wanted The Silver Streak, nobody thought he'd make a keen toy, nobody cared about his confusing (& dubious) family relationship(s), nobody even cared to ask why he's a straight-haired Cali blonde while his brother's all brunette & curly. All anyone knows is Neal insisted. If you do Armor, the Silver Streak must ride along.
So we all rode bitch, on a Secret Origin of initially four parts that spiraled off into... what, ten installments?
This could have been understandable, if Jacques Keaton (a.k.a. Silver Streak) had equal time in his own Secret Origin. That's two whole characters who need explaining! But Jacques was fated never to be a main character. The main character is Jack Keaton (Armor). If Jack loses a hand like Luke Skywalker, Jacques will be there to demonstrate how both his mitts detach. If Jack loses an eye and has it replaced by a ruby thoughtfully donated by a space computer, Jacques will be there to gawk, awkwardly, and the words To Be Continued will be appended to the base of the page, and then we won't find out any more about The Secret Origin of Armor & That Lesser Character for at least three years, while Neal hustles together some fill-in issues, all the while making big loud promises to draw the epic conclusion.
Hey, let me be fair. Maybe Neal did. I haven't gotten to issues 11-13 yet.
You want me to talk about something else now, don't you?
Tough.
Armor #9-13 (1991-1992) written by blabbadyblurfenhurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr1r1r1NO CARRIER
[ ed. note: we may be experiencing difficulties. not technical ones. technically not difficulties at all. just, coping. these comics are a lot to cope with! holy nutsweat, batdog ]
I SAID, written by Peter Stone, pencilled by Frank Springer & Brian Apthorp; inked by Rudy Nebres and STAN DRAKE, also, Ken Bruznenak, what're you doin' here? i thought you were at DC... coloured by John Floyd, Eva Grindberg, & David Marcus, you a baller
Let's get the compliments out of the way. The covers stop sucking once Nowlan walks on. The cover design is finally, rationally, refined & the fonts modernized, somewhat. The books start to look GOOD, with an obvious debt to Giffen, McGuire & Hughes' JLA / with maybe a side helping of Love & Rockets. Like I'm saying these are actual contenders for GOOD COVERS, something this series has seriously been lacking. And I'm not even getting to sucking the dicks I want to suck because I have to complain about the covers, and the content, of issues #9-10. The covers are terrible because Neal made these the covers: the covers are terrible because there are gratuitous clowns. Now mind you the clowns are all being violently dispatched by young Jack Keaton, Armor, a Ten among galactic gladiators, a teenager with an alien, artificial hand, and an alien internet uplinked crystal in his right eye socket: these clowns don't have a chance. In theory this cover is great, perhaps even one of the greatest covers Neal Adams has ever had a hand in: it's certainly dynamic as a dervish dance, and all the central figurework is done by My Man, Kevin Nowlan, so we're talking carnage. Clowns cowering in fear for their lives. Clowns strung up and left to discharge their bowels one last dark time. It's not a pretty scene. So in theory this cover should be great!
But then Neal follows it up with some weird hacked-out last minute shit where Armor is being clockwork oranged by Kracky The Klown, who is all up in the comic reader's grill with his greasepainted melon skull leering out, shouting-- Neal Adam's abominable hand-lettered yakking crammed unpleasantly into every square inch of negative space to either side of our central figures of Armor, who's literally having his eyeballs forcibly exposed, & Kracky, shouting --WELCOME TO KRACKY'S KRACK HOUSE! It's All It's Kracked Up To Be!
This has the reverse effect intended, of making me want to read it. In fact it makes me hate the previous cover, for having ever allowed clowns into my life. I am sad and alone and it was Neal Adams who made me this way. I want to repent of my sins. I can't live with my conscience like a dog pillow saturated with piss. This comic is clown scabies, and it has retroactively infected the previous cover with clown scabies. I bought these, god damn my soul. I LET CLOWNS INVEIGLE MY LIBRARY'S PROSTATE
Ahem.
What I am saying there are a couple of things we regret, before the covers actually show up to throw down on the newsstands alongside Kevin McGuire & Adam Hughes, or Los Bros.
The comic goes for it, in the final stretch. We just had to get past a story starring way the fuck too much Silver Streak, learning he has the superpower of eavesdropping through a fucking window, getting his ass kicked by clowns. Fuckin' clowns clowned the fuck all over Silver Streak and Armor, then engaged in wacky heavy-handed messaging hijinx about the hyporcisy of the Reagan era's War On Drugs, all the while krackin' wise about how the people selling the drugs are also running the rehab clinics, mannn. And I'm pretty sure Kracky gives a cop a tugjob, on teevee, in the final three pages of the book. I mean these issues really haul back and kick my will to live square in the nuts.
But the last three are really good looking books. Damned good art, great colouring, solid package. It's like the comic it was always meant to be... for the last three issues, before the series got eaten by Neal Adams' Event Crisis Overdose.
Yeah. But first:
[ next up: MEGALITH'S GROIN! ]
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