Dick Tracy Revives a Dead Villain...

The current Dick Tracy continuity (aka storyline) features a familiar...yet unfamiliar...face...

...who's likely based on a villain most CrimeStoppers (as some Tracy fans call themselves) have never seen!

In the spring of1966, due to the success of midseason replacement Batman, producer William Dozier was asked to try out other comic properties as TV series for the 1966-67 season.

He considered three...

Wonder Woman

(which resulted in a test reel featuring gorgeous future Planet of the Apes starlet Linda (Nova) Harrison as Wonder Woman...(actually a delusional Diana Prince's self-image of herself) which you can see HERE.)

The Green Hornet

(which had a half-hour pilot, then a one-season series that (damn it) still isn't available on DVD/BluRay or streaming!

and

Dick Tracy

(in a half-hour pilot starring future soap opera fixture Ray MacDonnell as the square-jawed hero!)

The villain of the episode was Victor Buono as Mr Memory, a villain who used computers linked directly to his brain...

.....does he look...familiar?

In reference to the "henchmen" the as yet-unnamed character mentions, Tracy made short work of them using karate!
(He was a serious kick-ass in this version!)
There's a kool blog entry about the pilot HERE with a link to the pilot on YouTube!

Is the character in the strip, in fact, Mr Memory?
Keep reading in your local paper or HERE to find out!

(Trivia: there was a Dick Tracy novel by William Johnston issued in 1970 featuring a villain named "Mr Computer".
Since Johnston was primarily a novelization writer doing books based on TV series and movies ranging from Get Smart to Room 222 to Klute to Caligula, I suspect this was based on unused plots for the TV series featuring Mr Memory.)

Monday Madness CAPTAIN BATTLE COMICS "Doctor Horror"

It's Monday, you're expecting "madness", and I'm gonna deliver it...

...with a character who made only one appearance...but what an appearance!

If this had been produced in the 1960s, I'd say the artist had gotten some bad weed before producing the latest issue of his underground comix.

In fact, it appeared in 1941's Captain Battle Comics #2, illustrated (and probably written) by Don Rico and read by impressionable young kids throughout America!

Publisher Lev Gleason had already introduced comics' first major super-villain, The Claw, in Silver Streak Comics, and it's possible he posed the suggestion to his artists that they come up with something to top The Claw.

Or, it's possible that with a deadline looming and pages to fill, Gleason assigned Rico to come up with a story in a very brief time frame!

We'll never know the answer.

But that shouldn't stop you from enjoying this startling story!

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Space Hero Saturdays UNEARTHLY SPECTACULARS "EarthMan"

"What if Superman had been a Terran marooned on another world..."

...and what if he lost his memory?"

On a koolness scale from 1-10, this tale rates an "11".

Unfortunately, there was never a sequel to this story from Harvey's Unearthly Spectaculars #2 (1966), so we'll never know if EarthMan got his memory back or not!

Written, penciled, and inked by Wally Wood, who apparently had some interesting variations on the theme planned, but never had the opportunity to carry them out.

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Friday Fun ARRGH! "Bugged!"

When I lived full-time in NYC, this was probably my #1 problem...

...in every apartment I lived in, and this never-reprinted tale from Marvel's ARRGH! #2 (1975) really hit home!

Written by longtime NYC resident Russ Jones (as "Jack Younger") and illustrated by Alfredo Alcala, this terrifying tale predates Stephen King's Creepshow segment "They're Creeping Up on You!"...

...by over half a decade!
(The page above is from the tie-in graphic novel adapted by King from his screenplay and illustrated by Berni [Swamp Thing] Wrightson!)