It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Super Green Beret on Flag Day!

Never failing to capitalize on a pop culture trend, several 1960s comics publishers, noticing the popularity of the hit single Ballad of the Green Berets (by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler & Robin Moore) quickly launched comics series featuring the elite Army unit.
Most were standard war comics, just set in VietNam instead of WWII Europe or Asia, but one stood out from the rest for sheer weirdness...

What do you get when you combine...
1) Green Berets and the VietNam War with...
2) Teenagers...
and 3) SuperHeroes?
Why, SUPER GREEN BERET, of course!

Green Beret Roger Wilson saves a Vietnamese monk from a wild boar, and in return the grateful priest attaches a pin to his beret which makes it glow.
Home on leave, Roger gives the glowing beret to his teenage nephew Tod Holton, who discovers that, when he dons the headgear and salutes, he's transformed into a super-powered adult dressed in a soldier's uniform!
(There's a long tradition in comics of teens turning into adult superheroes, going all the way back to the original Captain Marvel and The Fly.)
Using his new-found powers of teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, transmutation, time travel, invulnerability, and super-strength, Tod decides to fight Enemies of Our Country, mostly Communists in then-present-day Asia, but also the British in the American Revolution and Nazis in World War II!
Yes, it's as hokey as it sounds!
And, to think it only ran two issues! (But they were 64 pages each, so it was like getting two regular-sized issues of mind-bending military madness at a time!)

We at Atomic Kommie Comics™ felt that we couldn't let such an outrageous character and concept be forgotten, so, as part of our War: Past, Present, & Future™ line, we incorporated Super Green Beret as a light-hearted example of 1960s funkiness to contrast with the seriousness of the World War II and Korean Police Action material (plus we wanted an excuse to make some kool SGB collectibles for ourselves)!

So, why not give a Super Green Beret collectible to the VietNam vet or gonzo comic collector in your life?
It'd make a great Flag Day or 4th of July gift!

FREE BONUS: A link to an online re-presentation of the origin of Super Green Beret!
You gotta see it to believe it!

"My Son is The Green Hornet!"

Status quo-changing events are not a new phenomenon in fiction.
Even in the Golden Age of Comics, series and characters received revamps (or even total reboots) if sales weren't meeting expectations.
Sometimes, the revamp extended through a character's other media incarnations as well!

To celebrate the release of the new Dynamite comic series Masks, which teams up the greatest mystery-men of the Golden Age of Comics and Pulps (plus radio and movie serials), RetroBlogs™ will be running some never-reprinted tales of those amazing heroes through the month of December!

First-off is the story that changed the status quo of The Green Hornet!

Much has been written about the 1947 radio show episodes that tied The Hornet and The Lone Ranger together, using Dan Reid, who was both Britt Reid's father, and John (Lone Ranger) Reid's nephew!

The 1940s Harvey Green Hornet comic book series had been loosely-adapting the radio show's scripts into comic stories, but when this storyline (spread over four episodes) ran on the radio show, the comics' creatives had to do some serious juggling to fit two hours of dramatic radio into two eight-page chapters in a single issue!

(And, yes, a Lone Ranger reference is in the comic story, too!)

It's so historically-important that we couldn't confine this tale to a single blog!

You can see the results tomorrow at Secret Sanctum of Captain Video™, with the conclusion Tuesday at Hero Histories™.

Plus, we'll be running tales of other heroes presented in Masks including Zorro, The Shadow, Miss Fury, Black Terror, and Green Lama through the RetroBlogs™ line during December.

And don't forget to check out...

The Classic Green Hornet Store

The NOW Super-Hero is here...on Monday!

We're back on schedule, so Monday will see the first chapter of...

...the never-reprinted Complete Saga from the 1970s in Hero Histories™.
Don't miss it!