Comicscape - December 10, 2003

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2003

OPINION:

You're probably wondering where the follow-up to last week's column about the difference between DC and Marvel is, aren't you? Well, truth be told, there was such a huge response to that column, with so many well-written and thought-provoking ideas on the subject, that I haven't been able to organize them into a coherent column as quickly as I'd hoped! And even as of this morning, the responses are still coming in! Looks like several nerves were struck last week, so I'm going to take an extra week to put as many of your responses together as I can in some rational way. In the meantime, you can continue to write in on the topic by sending your thoughts to comicscape@cinescape.com, or to me directly - but please make sure to e-mail either one or the other address, not both! Both addresses come to me eventually, and I've been getting double the amount I normally get - both a blessing and a curse, as you might expect. Anyway, I'll get back to the DC vs Marvel topic first thing next week!

It recently occurred to me that, had it not been for two things, I probably would not have been the comics column writer (and comics reader) that I am now: 1) my brother-in-law's decision to "buy" my good behavior, and 2) Power Records book and record sets. While most of you probably didn't have a brother-in-law bribing you, I'm betting many of you had the same experience I did with Power Records. It started when my sister Connie and her husband Sam moved back to Michigan from California when I was around five or six - and when (I guess) I must have been something of a hellion. I don't remember all the trouble I got into, but I clearly remember Sam making a deal with me: if I behaved throughout the week, he'd buy me a record on Friday, and the better I behaved, the better the record. I'm sure most parents would be aghast nowadays at the idea of paying a kid off like this for good behavior, but from what I recall, it worked, since I only remember one instance when I didn't get that week's record.

Or should I say, book and record, since it was the Power Records line of "listen as you read" adaptations of comic books that I always went for.

For those of you who are either too young to remember all this or who have never heard of it before, Power Records was a subsidiary of the Peter Pan Records Company, which itself was founded in New Jersey and which began making records after WWII. By the early 70s, they had produced an enormous catalog of the types of records youngsters would enjoy, some of which even featured popular characters like Bugs Bunny and so forth. Their next step was to produce a series of book and record sets - comic books whose stories were performed on a record by voice actors accompanied by music and sound effects - featuring the action figure G.I. Joe. These must have been successful enough, for their next step in 1974 was to produce a series of kid-friendly book and record adaptations of the then-hugely popular PLANET OF THE APES series of movies (all but CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the bleak plot of which probably resisted all efforts to render it "kid-friendly") and a series made up of reedited reprints of four Marvel titles featuring Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America and the Falcon, and the Hulk. (By the way, all this information comes from "powerrecordsguy"'s site which can be found here, though it still surprises me that his is the only site devoted solely to the Power Records phenomenon.) That was only the beginning of a large catalog of material that would eventually not only cover movies and comics but also genre-related TV series such as STAR TREK, SPACE: 1999, THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, and so forth. Not all were book and record sets, of course - in addition to the $1.49 book and record sets featuring one story, there were the $.79 records without the books, and for $2.75 one could either get a record featuring four or five stories without a book on a 12" album, or a set containing an album withtwo stories and a huge book - and certainly not all of Power Records' output had anything to do with comics. (For example, I remember a particularly good adaptation of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS that still resonates in my mind whenever I teach that novel in my Intro to Fiction class.) But even when the subject of said adaptations were something as usually far removed from the comics world as, say, KOJAK, the "book" part of the book and record set was first and foremost a comic book.

I don't know which came first - whether my love of comics sprang from wanting to see more of the characters I read about and

listened to, or whether I gravitated towards book and record sets because they starred heroes I was already reading about - but I'm guessing that it was the former. Most kids of my age had already seen reruns of the poorly animated Marvel superheroes cartoons from the sixties before they'd ever picked up a comic book or been able to read one, and certainly none of us would have missed SUPER FRIENDS for the world, even if we hadn't yet cracked open an issue of JLA. Judging from the earliest comics I remember buying, I would have started actively reading comics at age 6 (1976, for those of you working out the maths), and I know for sure that I was reading book and record sets sometime before that. The only conclusion I can draw is that the book and records sets got me into reading comics more than I would have been before - and that they probably have me an excellent grounding for reading (and writing), period. As an educational tool they were unparalleled, and as a deepening of the thrill of reading comics they were indeed "Power"-ful.

Sounds like I'm exaggerating, doesn't it? But I'd be willing to bet that there are a lot of comics fans out there right now who can remember Power Records being a large part of their early reading experience, and an incredibly formative one, at that. The company itself always touted the book and record sets as "educational," a claim which "powerrecordsguy" feels is a flawed one - after all, these weren't HOOKED ON PHONICS, not by a long shot. And yet the claim wasn't that far off, especially when one considers how much broader our reading experiences became because of those book and record sets. Sure, there were tough words like "phenomenon," "immoveable," "radiation," and so forth, but for a child intellectually hungry enough to devour comics at that young an age, it was no trouble to go ask Mom or Dad what the words meant, or even to learn how to use the dictionary ahead of time. That's what I did, anyway - and one of the major plus factors involved in reading book and record sets was that I'd get to hear the words pronounced as I was reading them. Not that a six-year old is often going to have use for a word like "immoveable" on the playground, but it came in handy about ten years down the road when it was time for the ACT, and even earlier than that.

I sometimes wonder whether more kids would be reading comics now if the record player hadn't gone the way of the eight-track tape player and the flimstrip, and if Peter Pan Records were still producing book and record sets featuring superheroes. (The company still produces read-along book and compact disc sets for children, but the days when Superman and Spider-Man strode through those pages is long since gone.) They were still produced on into the 80s, but somehow the latter-day book and cassette tape sets never caught on in the same way as their predecessors - it probably seemed an awful waste of one cassette tape to hold just one story, while a 45-rpm record could contain an edited version of say, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #124, "The Mark of the Man-Wolf," quite handily. But by the 80s, the damage was already done: those of us lucky enough to have had record players already had a firm grounding for a future as comic book readers in particular and readers in general, and those who came later moved further and further away from the printed page to the more exciting world of the television. When I was rereading the aforementioned issue just the other day, listening to SPEED RACER's own Peter Fernandez as the voice of Spidey in my head when the parts of the story adapted for the book and record set came up, I felt quite lucky to have been in the former group and not the latter. I hope I'm not the only one. I'd be interested to hear from anyone whose experience is close to mine, or who at least has a nostalgic place in their hearts and minds for Power Records. Send your own memories of the Power Records range by Saturday, December 14th to comicscape@cinescape.com, or to me directly. And as always, don't forget our discussion boards! Now, as for the comics that will not be adapted by Power Records in the future...

THIS WEEK:

Among other

things this week, Image is sending out the latest issue of the hit book by CINESCAPE's own Jason Henderson, SWORD OF DRACULA #2. If you haven't read the first issue, go find it, already!

The bad news for Bat-fans is that the latest issue of Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's run on BATMAN isn't out yet - but never fear, as Vertigo's giving us the latest issue of the book that got them the gig, 100 BULLETS #48. Or if you prefer, you can catch FABLES #20 and find out who this Red Riding Hood woman really is...

It's not like the Bat-fans have much to complain about, really: not only do they get BATMAN: DEATH AND THE MAIDENS #5 (Of 9), they also get BATMAN: LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT #174 and GOTHAM CENTRAL #14, which Tim Agen keeps telling me is the best comic I'm not currently reading. On the downside, they're also getting SUPERMAN & BATMAN: GENERATIONS III #12 (Of 12) - but hey, at least that one's finally over... And in this issue, John Byrne destroys the Earth. As we always knew he would do, really.

Speaking of

Superman, there's what appears to be a collection of flashbacks in ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #623, recounting three Christmas-related stories, if my sources are right (and given how dire Christmas stories tend to be, I'd prefer they weren't...).

Doctor Octopus is on the prowl - again - in SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #8 this week. (I can't wait for the second movie to come out, if only so Spidey will have a chance to fight someone else this year...) If that's not enough for you, then there's also the SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN VOL 1: THE HUNGER trade paperback for $11.99, continuing Marvel's tradition of reselling to you the comics you already own. (Yes, I know, DC does it, too. None of these people cares about your pocketbook, you know - not like I do.)

The Thunder God's son Magni (bet you forgot he even had kids, huh?) shows up in THOR #72 this week. Geez, I know Thor was pretty wrecked after that fight with Superman, but why bring Thor Jr. into this?

Arthur saves a group of boaters from a storm at sea in AQUAMAN #13. Yup, that's starting to sound more like the Aquaman we knew and loved...

Tony Stark faces the press in IRON MAN #75 as his bid for Secretary of Defense continues. C'mon, Washington, could you go ahead and appoint him so we can get out of Iraq already?

I never

thought Wildstorm would stoop so low, but they have: the AUTHORITY/LOBO CHRISTMAS SPECIAL ships this week. Ouch. Still, with Keith Giffen co-writing it with Alan Grant, perhaps it'll hurt in a good way, like the LEGION OF SUBSTITUTE HEROES special he wrote a while back, and not like...well, every single other book Lobo's ever appeared in. (I feel a hate crime coming on...) Wildstorm's trying to appease us by also giving us STORMWATCH: TEAM ACHILLES #18, and THUNDERCATS: HAMMERHAND'S REVENGE #3 (Of 5), but they're not fooling me. Oh, no, sirree.

The "Search for She-Hulk" ends in AVENGERS #75 as the Avengers find She-Hulk (duh!)...but they also find another green-skinned behemoth, too. I see a movie in the works...

DOCTOR FATE's astounding miniseries ends this week with #5. Now, any chance of this guy getting his own series again without it turning into a) DC's answer to DOCTOR STRANGE or b) yet another reworking of the character?

The 4-part "Little Better Than a Beast!" storyline concludes in this week's FALLEN ANGEL #6, but don't let that stop you from picking it up - this is the best writing Peter David's done in ages, hands down. Makes me almost regret all those times I dissed YOUNG JUSTICE. Hey, I said "almost."

I'm not

quite sure how this works, but here's the plot of HERO #11: archaeologists in Metropolis find clues that a superhero-type Cro-Magnon existed in prehistoric times. Sounds cool enough - but how would a Cro-Magnon man know to dial H-E-R-O??? I guess we'll all have to read this issue and find out, won't we?

Oh, dear, two holiday issues back-to-back? Mind you, I love Geoff Johns to pieces, but if JSA #55, featuring Santa Claus (I kid you not), is anything like the Thanksgiving dinner issue last month, I may just have to hack him to pieces... Bah, humbug.

X-fans have more than enough stocking stuffers this week: there's NEW MUTANTS #8; NYX #3 (yes, I know, but it does have an "X" in it; ULTIMATE X-MEN #40 (featuring the introductions of the Angel and Dazzler - whoo hoo!); UNCANNY X-MEN #434; X-TREME X-MEN #36; and finally, WOLVERINE VOL 1: THE BROTHERS trade paperback for $12.99, continuing Marvel's tradition of...oh, wait, I used that one already. See

above.

And finally, MARVEL: 1602 #5 (Of 8) ships this week, featuring Sir Nicholas Fury's attack on Carlos Javier's Witchbreed and the real story behind the Fantastik Four. Now, there's a Christmas present.

Think Power Records - and eat more fish.

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at comicscape@cinescape.com -- and don't forget to participate in our comic book message forum!

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