Our new title, BIG BANG UNIVERSE from AC Comics hit the comic shops this week and it feels great to be back on the stands. It’s 80 pages of stories that have never been released through the direct market before, although the main story, “Skeletons In The Closet” starring the Knight Watchman (featuring Kerry Talbott’s great art) has been available as a print on demand title from IndyPlanet. I ran the Galahad story by C.B. Burk here in the BANG! last year. (more…)

Okay. I admit it. I played with dolls.

The original G.I. Joe was a doll. He was 12 inches tall, like Barbie and Ken. You bought the basic doll, either the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine guy and then had to buy clothes and accessories for him. Just like Barbie and Ken.

Back in 1964/65 we didn’t even have the term “action figure” to fall back on or hide behind. My dad and my older brother would make snide comments that only girls played with dolls. Ken was a doll. No doubt about it. But Joe was a macho dude.

G.I. Joe was burlier than the effeminate Ken, and didn’t even fit into Ken’s clothes. He had guns and grenades, and jeeps, cannons and even a space capsule. He had a scar on his cheek, and eventually life-like hair and beards, and a kung-fu grip. Like I said: macho!

Stony Smith was less doll-like. And also less fun, at least to me. His clothes were molded onto the body and only his arms and neck moved. Stony and his cousin Johnny West’s accessories were also made of plastic. Me? I preferred G.I. Joe’s fabric outfits.

Even cooler than Joe was Captain Action. Where Joe could become anyone in the Armed Forces, Captain Action could become any of a number of super-heroes, like Superman, Batman, Captain America, Spiderman or Aquaman. Pretty great for a comic book geek like me, but maybe more like a doll to other fellows. It didn’t help that Cap had four different Super Queens to help him out: Batgirl, Supergirl, Wonder Woman and Aquaman’s wife Mera. Yuck! They were girls! Dolls for sure.

I don’t think that Captain Action ever was a serious rival to G.I. Joe, although one of the last Joes was Bulletman, who had chrome arms, a chrome helmet and wore spandex. By 1976, Joe and Cap and Stony were all gone from the shelves, having been replaced by the 8 inch Mego figures.

Mego had super-hero dolls featuring many of the DC and Marvel characters as well as Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, Knights of the Round Table, Star Trek, and a soldier named Action Jackson. The Mego toys seemed less like dolls than Joe had. They were smaller than Barbie and even though they wore fabric and spandex clothes, they were complete when you bought them. There were no other outfits or accessories to buy and dress them in.

Mego ruled the 1970s, but were eventually crushed by the 3¾ inch Star Wars action figures, which prompted the rebirth of G.I. Joe as a 3¾ inch molded plastic toy. Megos disappeared, but super-heroes returned in the new format with DC’s 4” Super Powers collection and Marvel’s Secret Wars line.

The dolls were gone and action figures ruled. The toy aisles were safe once again for boys and dads alike.

What does any of this have to do with Big Bang Comics? Over the years, the vintage 12″ G.I. Joes and 8″ Megos became collector items, and even staged comebacks of varying degrees. Just for fun I have recently been customizing some Mego style Big Bang 8 inch figures and thought that I’d share them with you. You may have noticed them illustrating this post, instead of pics of G.I Joe and real Megos as you might have suspected.

 I will have some more pics and info next time around, but wanted to share these with you now and see if anybody else out there would be interested in Big Bang dolls – – er, toys and action figures. Let me know. You can leave a comment here or on FaceBook or email me at bigbangcomics@sbcglobal.net.

Picking a favorite character you’ve created is a bit like saying that you prefer one of your children over the others, but if pressed I would have to admit a preference for Thunder Girl among her Big Bang Comics brothers and sisters.

Thunder Girl is a less literal translation than most of her Big Bang brethren, all created to allow us to pay tribute to the great heroes and creators from the history of comic books. While the Knight Watchman and Ultiman seem very similar to Batman and Superman, Thunder Girl is a step or two removed from her inspiration, the original Captain Marvel.

That’s right. She fills Captain Marvel’s boots in the Big Bang universe, not Mary Marvel’s as some have claimed. Thunder Girl could easily have been named Thunderman if not for her sex change. Captain Marvel had originally been named Captain Thunder but was rechristened before publication.

I don’t recall why the gender switch. Maybe because my old buddy Erik Larsen had already created an avatar character named Mighty Man a decade earlier? Maybe we just wanted another female character? Whatever, the sex change was freeing because it made her another step distant from the source material.

I should mention here that my first introduction to Captain Marvel was in Jules Feiffer’s wonderful book, “The Great Comic Book Heroes”. There was only a single page of comics devoted to Cap, tucked between the full origins of Superman and Batman, because the World’s Mightiest Mortal was consigned to limbo in 1965, when that book was published.

DC Comics, home of Superman had claimed that Cap was a ripoff of their hero and started suing in 1940. They were especially ticked when Captain Marvel became more popular and outsold Supes. The courts sided with Cap’s owner Fawcett Comics over the years, but when the superhero comics biz started to slump in the early 1950s, Fawcett settled with DC and agreed to never publish Captain Marvel again.

Superheroes rebounded in the early 1960s when I became addicted to reading them, but Captain Marvel was long gone by then. I was excited when DC licensed and revived the character in 1972. I had visions of a fantastic Neal Adams drawn series, but “Shazam” was a very cartoony kid friendly book, what I figured that my Dad was referring to as “funny books”. My 15 year old self was confused.

I bought the books and enjoyed them, yet it wasn’t what I had been hoping for. Jim Steranko’s fantastic “History of Comics Volume 2” came out about then with chapters devoted to Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Junior, where I discovered that they had always been “funny books”. I guess I wasn’t the only one disappointed in Shazam. It limped along for a while before being cancelled and Cap was relegated to a back up spot in another book.

About then, DC started using less whimsical art and writing on the series but never did manage to find a way to fully integrate the characters into their universe, although Jerry Ordway’s “Power of Shazam” came closest to me. Alex Ross has always had a fantastic feel for Captain Marvel, in “Kingdom Come” and “The Power of Hope” and I’ve always wished that he had been able to do more with the character.

Back to my story. The original Big Bang miniseries at Caliber Press was intended to introduce the various characters in their Golden Age, Silver Age and Modern incarnations, comprising a full fake history of the Big Bang company, so I needed to find an artist that could evoke the feel of the Fawcett material.

I was lucky enough to locate a wonderful artist named Bill Fugate who loved comics as much as my big Bang cohorts Chris Ecker, Ed DeGeorge and I did. Above all, Bill was a cartoonist. Among other things, he had worked for Disney Comics doing “Little Mermaid” and “Roger Rabbit”. Bill made everything I wrote look and read better, even though he rarely changed a word and never the story.

My original inclination was that young Molly Wilson would transform into a more grown up and somewhat sexier Thunder Girl. My original thinking on her costume was toward that of a drum majorette or car-hop’s uniform. Bill convinced me to stay with a very simple design and a youthful Thunder Girl, and he was right. Thunder Girl debuted in Big Bang #0, which featured a beautiful painted cover by the marvelous Alex Ross.

It is surprising how few Thunder Girl adventures that Bill and I told, but that was partly because we did some Mighty Man stories for and with Erik Larsen after Big Bang relocated to Image Comics. These were done much closer to the original Captain Marvel template. Bill had drawn another Thunder Girl nearly complete tale, but it was thrown out with Bill’s other possessions by an irate landlord. Only the cover was saved, which was used on Big Bang Comics #16.

All of these Thunder Girl stories and more have just been reprinted in a fun little book titled “Thunder Girl Digest”. It also reprints the complete “Big Bang Summer Special” which was our tribute to the entire Marvel Family (Cap, Mary and Junior) who are represented by the World’s Nastiest Nazis – – Super Stormtrooper, Nazi Youth and Valkyrie, plus a tribute to Bill Fugate who died way too soon in 2013, including a number of samples of his non-BB work.

It also includes a cover by Mark Lewis and work by these other great Big Bang artists: Jeff Austin, Bill Black, Jim Brozman, Dave Bryant, Sue Dorne, Chris Ecker, CHAS, Mark Jones, Karl Kesel, Michael Kirsten, Mark Lewis, Doug Mabry, Bob Rivard, Andrew Sheppard, Tim Stiles, Nigel Tulley, Shawn Van Briesen, Jeff Weigel, Glenn Whitmore, Mike Worley and Jim Woodyard. Thanks guys.

“Thunder Girl Digest” is published by Pulp 2.0 Press and is available through Amazon.com for $7.19 at: http://www.amazon.com/Thunder-Girl-Digest-Comics-Collection/dp/1494803100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390934637&sr=8-1&keywords=Thunder+Girl+Digest

At left is a page from “Round Table of America: Personality Crisis”. Written by Pedro Angosto and featuring the beautiful artistry of Carlos Rodriguez, this page is the closest we ever got to showing Thunder Girl’s origin in the comics, which only appeared in prose inside the “History of Big Bang Comics Volume 1” (and is reprinted in the “Thunder Girl Digest”). What are you waiting for? Go order your copy now!

(Unfortunately, “Personality Crisis” is not in the “Thunder Girl Digest” and is slated for a future release).

Thunder Girl and all Big Bang Comics characters are copyright and trademark 2014 by Gary S. Carlson and Chris Ecker. Dr. Weird is copyright and trademark 2014 by Gary S. Carlson and Edward DeGeorge.

Shazam (Captain Marvel ) and all related characters are copyrighted trademarks of DC Comics. Mighty Man is copyright and trademark 2014 by Erik Larsen.