Character Spotlight: Prince Daka

(Before we get to the post proper, I'd like to thank user Shadzane for suggesting this character in a comment on the Batman Not-So-Super Post over a year ago. I don't know if I had seen it before, but I saw it last week and was able to corroborate the information he provided, so here it is!)

Prince Daka has the distinction of being the very first villain Batman fought on screen, all the way back in the 1943 serial, Batman. As such, there's not much to him beyond being a racist caricature.

Prince Daka, known in America as Dr. Tito Daka, is part of a Japanese nationalist cult called the Rising Sun that plans to orchestrate a Japanese occupation of the United States from within. In addition to his secret base (called the Cave of Horrors), located in LA's Little Tokyo, and his elite gang called the League of the New Order, he also has a machine called the Electrical Brain that turns people into zombies - real, brainwashed-slave zombies, not flesh-eating, undead "zombies". He was, of course, defeated by Batman.

You'd think that a character like that, especially being so prominently featured, would be gobbled up quickly by the comics. But actually, he didn't appear until All-Star Squadron #42 (1985), and even then, his last appearance was the next issue.

And although I haven't read the issue, it seems like there's even less to him than in the serial. I'm going to assume that much of his backstory is the same, but in the issue proper, his goal is to attack America with a squadron of invisible jets and a team of Japanese nationalists known as Tsunami, Kung, and Sumo the Samurai. The two issues were published in the 80s, but they take place during World War II, making him a period-appropriate villains.

Superboy: "Rajah's Ransom"

In 1960, DC considered making a Superboy tv show called The Adventures of Superboy. George Reeves's The Adventures of Superman had just ended a few years prior and they were trying to prolong the cachet of that show. It didn't work. They did produce a pilot, however, called "Rajah's Ransom", which you can see the first half of here. And that pilot was later turned into a comic book story for Superboy #88 (1961), called "The Saddest Boy in Smallville!". Another story in that issue is called "The One Man Team" and is adapted from a non-produced tv script.

Below are two pages from "The Saddest Boy in Smallville!" which feature some characters from the pilot: John and Tommy Hunter, and the bad guys The ABC Gang.

Who Raised Bruce?

Everyone knows the story - especially because adaptations won't let us forget - of how young Bruce Wayne's parents were killed in front of him and he was raised by the loyal family butler, Alfred Pennyworth. Gotham (2014) has been getting a lot of mileage out of this, although we've also seen it in the Batman movies and most other adaptations. That wasn't always the case, though.

In fact, before Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985), Alfred started working for Bruce as an adult. He first appeared in Batman #16 (1943) as an actor/amateur criminologist whose father had once been the butler for the Waynes, and he became Bruce's butler to fulfill his father's dying wish. With Alfred not around during his childhood, Bruce was instead brought up by his Uncle Philip (a guardian in absentia), Dr. Leslie Thompkins, and the Wayne housekeeper Mrs. Chilton (who was secretly the mother of Joe Chill, the killer of Bruce's parents). All of this information was introduced at different times, but you can find it all in one story in The Untold Legend of Batman (1980).

But then, in 1985, the animated series The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians (the last season of Super Friends, renamed to match a line of Kenner action figures at the time) produced an episode called "The Fear", which featured the first ever depiction of Batman's origin outside of comics. In the episode, Scarecrow has attacked Gotham City, and Batman, dosed with fear has, finds himself in Crime Alley and remembers his parents' deaths.

It's here where we learn that not only did Alfred raise Bruce, he also helped train him. (And I think it's worth noting that the shot above looks like it could've come straight out of Batman: The Animated Series. We unfortunately can't say the same of the shots below.)

Frank Miller would use this idea in The Dark Knight Returns (1986), and then like most things he introduced in that book, incorporate them into the DC Universe proper in Batman: Year One (1987).

Scott and Jean's Marriage

I don't want to accidentally plagiarize anyone, so I'll note that I read about this on Comics Should Be Good and you can read a more in-depth version of it at that link. But the long and short of it is that there had been plans for Cyclops and Jean Grey to get married as far back as 1990, but they kept getting put off or cancelled by creators shifting books, leaving books, and higher-ups not wanting it to happen. However, when Bob Harras learned that X-Men: The Animated Series was planning a similar storyline, he used that to convince Marvel editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco to have it happen in comics as well and coincide with the show. And it did, in the summer of 1993.

Gadget Spotlight: Lasso of Truth

Everyone knows the story: Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, who also invented the lie detector. This is why Wonder Woman has her Lasso of Truth. Makes sense, right? After all, Marston didn't have any problems injecting other parts of his life into the book, such as his love of bondage or his idea that women are superior and should rule the world, so why wouldn't he include a reference to his day job?

Well...it's not that simple. First of all, although Wonder Woman first appeared in All-Star Comics #8 (1941), she didn't get the lasso until Sensation Comics #6 (1942). And the lasso - then called the magic lasso - didn't compel people to tell the truth. It actually forced people to do whatever Wonder Woman wanted, and sometimes that happened to be answering her honestly. So you see, the lasso has more to do with his night life than his day job.

In the Wonder Woman tv series (1975-1979), however, perhaps because of standards at the time, Wonder Woman only used it to make people tell the truth. So it follows that after Crisis on Infinite Earths, the lasso would be reintroduced as the Lasso of Truth in Wonder Woman #2 (1987), which it's been called ever since. 

Spider-Verse: Spidey Super Stories

Spider-Verse is a currently running event in the Spider-Man comics that will involve every* Spider-Man we've ever met, including several Spider-Women and Spider-Girls (not to mention Scarlet Spiders and Spider-Hams and whatnot), and several brand-new versions. The premise is simple: there's a group of people trying to wipe out every Spider character across the multiverse, so all the Spider characters will team up to stop them. This is, of course, a massive event - multimedia even, since it will also feature in the Spider-Man Unlimited video game and the animated series Ultimate Spider-Man - and given the premise, it's only natural that it will add a few entries to this catalog.

*I say "every" because Marvel says "every", but there are a few that won't be showing up, such as Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. (Although see here for more information on that.)

Today's entry is Spidey Super Stories.

The Electric Company was an educational sketch comedy show that ran on PBS from 1971 to 1977 and was meant for children who had graduated from Sesame Street. The original cast featured such talent as Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, and Rita Moreno, and it was very successful. One of the recurring segments, beginning in 1974, was "Spidey Super Stories", which featured Spidey taking on different bad guys, none of whom were from the comics. One interesting feature of the shorts was that, despite being live action, Spider-Man spoke in word balloons to help children learn how to read.

This Spidey was mentioned in Spider-Verse #2 (January 2015), along with another Spider-Man. But whereas (speculation time) that Spider-Man may only be mentioned because they don't have the rights to use him, I think this one may only be mentioned because it'd be hard to convey that his word balloons are actual word balloons, whereas everyone else's word balloons are just speech.

Spider-Verse: Turn Off the Dark

Spider-Verse is a currently running event in the Spider-Man comics that will involve every* Spider-Man we've ever met, including several Spider-Women and Spider-Girls (not to mention Scarlet Spiders and Spider-Hams and whatnot), and several brand-new versions. The premise is simple: there's a group of people trying to wipe out every Spider character across the multiverse, so all the Spider characters will team up to stop them. This is, of course, a massive event - multimedia even, since it will also feature in the Spider-Man Unlimited video game and the animated series Ultimate Spider-Man - and given the premise, it's only natural that it will add a few entries to this catalog.

*I say "every" because Marvel says "every", but there are a few that won't be showing up, such as Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. (Although see here for more information on that.)

Today's entry is Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is a 2011 Broadway musical by Julie Taymor, the woman behind The Lion King Broadway musical, Across the Universe, and several other things. If you're familiar with her work, you can definitely tell she did it. The sets, especially, are her all over, which means they're quite inventive. They use weird angles, perspectives, and optical illusions to make the stage feel like a comic book panel or to see the world how Spidey sees it; there are several moving parts, such as conveyor belts and panels that rise and lower, and projectors are used to distort scenes or otherwise enhance them

That being said, the production was pretty much a mess from Day 1. The villains costumes are atrocious, and the story wasn't much better, because it tried to tie the whole thing to Arachne and make her the villain, and because of its Greek ties, it included something called the Geek Chorus. The story was eventually rewritten to diminish the unwanted elements as much as possible...but not get rid of them entirely, which probably turned out even weirder. Another problem was that the musical featured extensive use of wire work and aerial stunts, which makes sense, but frequently injured cast members.

Even so, this version of Spider-Man was mentioned in Spider-Verse #2 (January 2015), along with a second Spider-Man: