Halloween Countdown Day 17 - Hells Bells

Greetings kiddies. Sorry I've been so inconsistent as of late. I've been working graveyard shifts the last couples of days. I've been hoblin like a goblin, there really isn't any rest for the wicked y'know. But I haven't forgotten about you. In fact, you liked my last Silly Symphonies post so much, I'm going to do another.

This one is a little ditty entitled Hells Bells. Ever think you'd see a demon cow get milked when you're sober? Me neither!

The Torch is passed

A staple of Marvel comics that has long set them apart from other publishers is the idea of a shared universe. Continuity is a dirty word to some, a hindrance for creators and an impenetrable wall of obscura for new readers who are just dipping their toes in comic books. Continuity has always fascinated me. The notion that these heroes occupy the same city (in Marvel's case, New York) made every story seem like a piece of a large puzzle. Each issue of any given title is a chapter in a long form superstory. Like Greek mythology, the heroes and villains intersect and the ripples from their battles effect everyone.

One could also look at the Marvel universe as a living organism. As time passes and the contributions of the individual are lost to the corporate entity called Marvel, the ever-expanding mass of characters and events has functions that resemble those in our human bodies. A character like the Scourge of the Underworld (from Mark Gruenwald's Captain America run) for example, whose purpose both editorially and within the context of the story was to seek out and murder redundant super villains, is like an antibody.

Before the Marvel universe was such a massive organism, before it was even a multicellular body, it was comprised of a few simple master cells. 1939's Marvel Comics #1 contained five features, two of which starred new characters. Al Ander's western hero The Masked Raider, Paul Gustavon's mystery man The Angel, and Ben Thompson's jungle lord Ka-Zar had all existed before in one form or another. The Masked Raider had starred in strips elsewhere and Ka-Zar was originally a character featured in pulp magazine prose stories. While these characters would be dusted off for later use in the Silver Age, it's the remaining two features that kickstarted the Marvel universe, whether publisher Martin Goodman and Funnies Inc. planned it or not. Bill Everett's Sub-Mariner and Carl Burgos' Human Torch would be the alpha and the omega in this burgeoning new stable of two-fisted adventurers and they could not be a more polar pair of opposites.

Everett's fighting-mad undersea king is a topic for another day, for I have the blazing android Human Torch on my mind this morning! As a young reader and collector, I think it was Wizard magazine or Comic Buyer's Guide where I first got a look at the cover to Marvel Comics #1. Veteran pulp illustrator Frank R. Paul produced the cover; a blazing humanoid figure emerging from a vault or container of some type. A second figure, a frightened mortal man, fires a pistol at the creature. The bullets appear to be as useless against him as the melted metal construct he's springing from. Like the previous years' Action Comics #1, which featured a raging circus strong-man with an 'S' on his chest destroying a car while normal people fled in terror, this defied my expectations of what a heroic debut could look like. The Human Torch looked more like the monster of the week than a new hero to follow and collect.

Furthermore, I already knew of a Marvel character called the Human Torch. His name was Johnny Storm and he hung out with the Fantastic Four, right? But just like Barry Allen and Jay Garrick across the pond at DC, the Torch I knew and loved was a Silver Age reproduction of the classic Golden Age character. As a naive young man, the idea of two Human Torches and just the fact that new characters could adopt an old name and take up the fight in their honor was unbearably "cool". Little did I realize the sinister reasoning behind the changes to the Torch or the ramifications of what Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done in resurrecting the character in name alone. I'll come back to this in a minute. . . .

So what about Carl Burgos and his original Human Torch? Imagine Shelley's Frankenstein with a pulpy, sci-fi twist. A monster created by man becomes our protagonist, and what begins as the story of a rampaging android would transform over subsequent issues into that of a flag-waving synthetic defender of democracy. This was the fate of nearly all Golden Age character heading into the 1940's: mystery men and monsters alike would aid in the fight, at home and abroad, and defend America's interests against the Axis forces. In that respect, Adolf Hitler and his empire were a boon to comic book creators. There was no need for imaginative antagonists when the greatest villain modern civilization had ever seen was ransacking Europe in real life. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story in Marvel Comics #1 features the brilliant but arrogant scientist Professor Phineas T. Horton, who has created a synthetic human android inside a giant test tube. Horton classically counts his eggs before they hatch, determining that "I found I had surpassed anything any scientist had ever done!" There is a tragic flaw in the android's creation however; the Torch burst into flame whenever he is released from his tube and exposed to oxygen. "Horton, destroy that man, before some madman can grasp its principles and hurl it against our civilization!" one member of the assembly tries to warn Horton as he showcases his creation. Like any good mad scientist, Horton doesn't heed their advice and soon the flaming android is rampaging through the city destroying friend and foe alike.

In Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, author Sean Howe describes Burgos's primitive comic story with real attention to detail, "Burgos' low budget, primitivist style only increased the sense that the buildings, cars, and people the Torch encountered were hastily constructed only to be destroyed in short measure." Burgos' line work and page layouts are quite simple by today's overproduced standards for what makes a comic book "work", but the foundation is laid for a character that would, at least for a few years, have some staying power. The importance of Burgos' work here lies in the fact that the Torch is such a striking figure that it would have been a waste for him to be slain in the first story. The Human Torch goes on to many more adventures after this and even starts to gravitate toward all of the usual superhero tropes. By the time the Torch is involved in World War II, he's seen teaming up with Captain America and the aforementioned Sub-Mariner on the battlefield, and even recruits a young sidekick named Toro. The Golden Age Human Torch is a sight to behold, but let's shift our focus now to the man who brought the flaming avenger to life.

Burgos was an art school dropout. Frustrated with the speed at which he was being exposed to new concepts and techniques, he left the National Academy of Design after his first year and went to work with the Franklin Engraving Company, where printing plates for comic book production were designed and stamped. From there, he began drawing backgrounds, laying out panel borders, and inking over other pencilier's work. His growing reputation as a utility player, as well as his own blossoming talent, led to some early original work including pirate stories for Centaur Comics and creating a Human Torch prototype character called the Iron Skull. Lloyd Jaquet, the art director at Centaur, gathered Burgos, Bill Everett, and a few other freelancers to form a comic studio that would sell original content to other publishers who were looking to outsource rather than build their own studio. The Human Torch was crafted under these conditions and was considered work for hire under the Copyright clauses of 1908, a career move that would return to haunt Burgos late in his career.

So Burgos made paycheck after paycheck producing Human Torch stories for Jaquet and later Martin Goodman as the heroes in the stories themselves took the fight right to Ol' Adolf. The post-war years saw the decline of super heroes and even mainstays like Captain America were hit hard. Even returning to the Torch's roots as a horror/suspense feature couldn't keep things from drying up. Over a decade later, the Human Torch name and likeness would be borrowed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to flesh out the roster for the Fantastic Four. But the name and likeness were all Stan and Jack really had a use for in their "hip" new cross-breeding of the monster and superhero genres. This torch was now the high-flying, trash talking Johnny Storm and Burgos's original version would fade into obscurity, only remembered by Golden Age fans and later given new life by fan-turned-pro Roy Thomas in the pages of The Invaders.

Without credit given for their new creation's stolen identity and no financial compensation coming his way, Burgos left comics in a bitter huff. His daughter recalled the night he threw his collection out on the lawn. Even her attempts to recover as much of her father's work as possible were in vain, as Burgos stormed into her room afterward and demanded they be gotten rid of. While a potential court case may have been open-and-shut, Burgos' claim never made it that far. Destroying his comic collection wasn't merely a tantrum about his rights as a creator, it was a response to a particular issue of Fantastic Four. As Marvel was about to lose its claim to the Human Torch name, they needed only publish a story with the original Human Torch to maintain the copyright. To defend one of their precious IPs, Marvel released Fantastic Four Annual #4, with a story that must've read like a knife in the back to Burgos and his contemporaries.

In the story, the Golden Age Human Torch and the Johnny Storm Torch met in battle. It must've been a whiz-bang clash for comic readers and a neat easter egg for longtime collectors. The original was destroyed in battle and Marvel, through Stan and Jack, had both extended their right to use the Human Torch name and taken shots at Burgos' comic book legacy in one story.

With the release of The Avengers film in 2012, the subject of creators' rights and what guys like Kirby or Don Heck were owed for their contributions to these now billion-dollar franchises came up. Some militant comic purists even boycotted the movie and message boards and discussion groups were ablaze with debate over work for hire laws. This isn't anything new. Comics have always been a cannibalistic venture on the business side of things, even going as far back the Silver Age. While the universes these characters inhabit grow into amazing celestial bodies full of thousands of fictional (but entirely functional) moving parts, they leave very real broken hearts in their wake. Inside the Marvel continuum it's a "shared universe", but outside that continuum we aren't sharing shit.

 

Martin Goodman at the center of the universe

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story begins with the ultimate "untold" story; the rise to power and prominence of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman. Like the root at the bottom of the great world tree Yggdrasil, all of Marvel's history springs forth from the actions of this one man. While comic book historians like Les Daniels and Will Murray have chronicled Goodman's early life and forays into magazine and pulp publishing, Untold Story author Sean Howe took on the task of combining and fact-checking their discoveries and filling in the blanks. His story, like most all men of his generation, is about building something from nothing.

Goodman was born in 1908. He traveled the country during the Great Depression, living in hobo camps and doing odd jobs for cash. He learned to think on his feet and developed the keen business acumen that would aid him later in life. By his early twenties, he showed and affinity for magazine production and distribution and worked for publishers like John Goldwater and Harry Donenfeld during the Golden Age of the Pulps. Donenfeld would go on to publish a little rag called Detective Comics, by the way. By 1932, he was part-owner of his own publishing house, Western Fiction. The pulp magazines and "penny dreadfuls" were the disposable entertainment of the day. Geared toward the young male reader and rife with fantastic and horrifying characters, they were in a sense the godfather of the modern comic book. In fact, the comic book as we think of it today is merely a form of sequential art bred from the pulps and the emerging medium of comic strips.

Perhaps Goodman wasn't present for the birth of the first comic book, but he was damn close to its point of origin, and not far behind in jumping on the bandwagon. The first comic books were low-cost loss leaders; reprints of comic strips in pamphlet form that flew off of vendor's racks in such a quick fashion that publishers soon decided it would behoove them to try and corner this market by hiring unknown artists to produce original content. Working in comics would have quite a stigma associated with it until the pop culture shifts of the 1960s, and was considered second rate to having a syndicated strip like Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates or Dickie Dare.

For the bulk of Goodman's tenure as the head honcho of either Marvel, Timely, Atlas, or any of its other earlier incarnations, comic books were merely supplementary income and never his main concern. Goodman fancied himself a more respectable publisher than that, and focused his own energies on the magazine side of things. There was definitely a soft spot in his heart for the potential for fantastic adventure and science fiction stories, however, or he would have scrapped the line at some point. The word Marvel itself seems to have some significance to the man, as it appeared in magazine titles as early as 1935's Marvel Science Stories.

Moving ahead a bit toward the end of the decade, we can see the transformation of the pulp-inspired mystery man into what we now affectionately refer to as a superhero. The original heroes were simply pulp adventurers injected with a science fiction or occult bend. Less calculating and worldly, more suited to action and feats of dynamism. On the Marvel side of things (then called Timely), characters like Karl Burgos' Human Torch and Bill Everett's Sub-Mariner took things to a new extreme and were true precursors to the Marvel Age of comics. There was an arms race in the superhero world, and characters were getting stronger and stranger.

What does this say about Goodman as a publisher though? Stories about the man vary wildly. He was known to be an overlord to some and a saint to others. One former staff member would regale you with a story of Goodman's kindness, writing a blank check to an employee whose child had landed in the hospital, while another would be quick to remind you of the layoffs that occurred time and time again in a vicious cycle through the fifties. Once comic book production had been broken down into a process, publishers like Timely would commission work by the truckload, filling file cabinets and drawers with finished stories ready to be published at a moment’s notice. When they were far enough ahead, Goodman could axe a good chunk of his staff and then replace them with even cheaper freelancers. This practice made many promising artists gun shy about working in comics and drove them to other fields like advertising and movie production.

John Romita was one such individual. It would take over a decade for Stan Lee to coax him back over to Marvel. Jack Kirby was another. He'd already been burned before, and at one point (long before his world famous collaborations with Stan Lee on Fantastic Four and Avengers) that he would "never work for that son of a bitch again."

Creatively, Goodman was a wildly experimental publisher early on. As long as book would sell, his artists had free reign to go wild with stories. Such lenience led to the first "crossover" of sorts, when the android Human Torch and the tyrannical Sub-Mariner did battle in Manhattan. Sure, Goodman would try and keep abreast of the latest trends and force some unproven artists to provide stick stories in the genres of Western and Romance, but proven commodities had full artistic freedom. This would dampen in the fifties, however, as comic censorship became a big problem and comics were the target of angry parents and teachers. Superheroes would all but disappear in the post-war years, and by the time of Fredrick Wertham and Seduction of the Innocent, there were only a few marquee characters that would maintain a presence. Unfortunately, Marvel didn't own them.

At the dawn of the Marvel Age, just as Stan Lee was growing tired of writing romance and western books and artists like Jack Kirby were getting tired of drawing stagnant monster concepts every month, there is a story that is to Marvel fans the equivalent of splitting the atom. Goodman was playing golf with Jack Liebowitz, publisher of DC comics, and hearing Jack rave about the success of their new title, Justice League of America. It was a simple enough concept; produce a strip about a team of heroes rather than a single hero and the marketing could write itself. The idea of a group of heroes gave the reader a desire (and an opportunity, through fan clubs and newsletters) to be included. The superhero team was also marketable through the argument that a comic with a whole team of heroes is a better bargain for thrifty readers, story quality be damned. Goodman left the golf game and immediately told Stan Lee to come up with a hero team book. Lee was on the verge of quitting comics, but as the story goes his wife encouraged him to give this new title a shot and just "do it your way, since you're gonna quit anyway."

Historians and even witnesses to this era of comics have debunked this story, and naturally Jack Kirby tells it quite differently, but the fact remains that Goodman kept his finger on the pulse and was the primary force behind the creation of the Marvel universe. Not just from a business standpoint, but as a creative talent in his own right. Goodman had the vision to force Stan and Jack to give the hero book one last go, and it would change everything.

I've jumped around quite a bit today, and rambled about some things that might not be quite apropos to the subject of Goodman the man, so I'll call it a day. Before I get into the Fantastic Four and the birth of the Marvel Universe as we know it, there's a lot more to say about the Golden Age of comics and the World War II heroes like Captain America and the Destroyer. But my examination of Marvel's history is only beginning here folks, and there are many places you can better enlighten yourself. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a great start, as is the book Tales to Astonish by Ronin Ro. There's also Les Daniels' Marvel: Five Decades of the World's Greatest Comics.

My ultimate goal here is to not simply regurgitate the information I've read elsewhere, since that won't do anybody any good. I hope to find the link between creator and creation, and examine the conflict between business and art. I'll admit, as a thesis statement, it's pretty half-baked. But I hope my focus and reason for doing this becomes more refined as my research continues. Thanks for reading if you got this far, and check back daily for new updates and jumbled thoughts.

 

"1,000 Clowns", a brief look at Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

“Now take it easy, True Believer! This is where you shed those dark aspects that set you apart from your fellow clowns! Look at this renegade, he used to be one of the best! But he tried to buck the system! He began to think people were more important than things!”

-Len Teans (anagram for Stan Lee) Strange Tales feat. Warlock Issue #181

It always frustrated you. The hero worship and brand loyalty that many fans assume when it comes to defending one comic publisher over another. The fans were like little foot soldiers on the front lines of a war between two conglomerates. The heroes they loved and the stories that captured their imaginations were merely brand names and intellectual properties to the corporate masters of DC and Marvel. Growing up, you care less and less about the characters and more about the people who created them. You'd heard rumblings that Bill Finger died in poverty or that Marvel was refusing to help with Dave Cockrum's medical expenses. Not very heroic activity from the home of the heroes. You try to numb yourself with Indy books, but even that is a morass of bad deals and broken dreams. No matter where you turn in the comic book landscape, you will find very talented people at odds with bean counters and business moguls.

You dive deeper and deeper into comic book history. You learn that your favorite story was a happy accident or that a team of young heroes you really liked were the product of market research and focus group pandering. It all tastes very different to you now, and you feel like maybe it's time to grow up. Then you look at a John Romita drawing of Spider-Man and it all comes flooding back. The only difference now is you look at that comic page like a photograph and a story about Jazzy John takes shape in the gutters between the panels. It's how comics work after all; there are varying gaps in time between panels and your mind fills in the blanks. This is Marvel, between panels and between printings. 

Forget the coming of Galactus, the death of Gwen Stacy, or the Dark Phoenix saga. Sean Howe has crafted the ultimate Marvel story. The heroes and villains aren't the colorful costumed personalities that grace the pages of every Marvel comic, but rather the real human beings who were tasked with writing, drawing, inking, coloring, lettering, and editing these publications. From Karl Burgos to Rob Liefeld, every creator and personality within Marvel during any era is given a voice. After hearing Sean Howe interviewed on Comic Geek Speak, I knew Marvel Comics: The Untold Story would be next on my reading list, right after Grant Morrison's Supergods and Ronin Ro's Tales to Astonish.

This book is the complete package: over four hundred pages of Sean Howe's masterful journalistic style detailing Marvel's entire history with extensive notes and opportunities for further reading in the back. It's a comic book historian's wet dream. Not only has Howe compiled a great many sources and perspectives to flesh out the saga of Marvel comics, but he conducted a slew of his own interviews that were practically spilling over with new insights and new stories from old-timers who no longer have to worry about getting work from the House of Ideas. Safely within the realm of retirement, more than a few big guns of yesteryear had new dirt to dish out. Howe revealed before the book's release that he didn't get much face time with Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko or former editor in chief Jim Shooter, making them the most notable missing perspectives. Luckily, Jim Shooter has taken part in a wealth of interviews and still maintains an online presence to this day for historians to pull from, but Ditko then and now has always been a recluse.

Howe divides the book according to the major shifts in the landscape of Marvel as a publisher. The first part covers the Golden Age of comics, the Timely/Atlas years, and the resurgence of the superhero through Lee, Kirby, and Ditko. It ends with Jack Kirby leaving Marvel and part two picks up with a new generation of writers and artists taking the reins away from Stan Lee and the errant Roy Thomas and forcing the characters into new mind-bending scenarios, due in part to their own methods of mind expansion. Talents like Mary Skrenes, Jim Starlin, Steve Gerber, and Don McGregor take the heroes to arguably their creative zenith, before Marvel as a publisher begins to go wildly off the rails until the rigid editorial regime of Jim Shooter is put into place. Part three is subtitled "Trouble Shooter", but it could be just as easily be titled "Shooter's Reign", as Shooter gets the trains to run on time and business moves upstairs force the creative department to adhere to a much more structured work environment. Part four covers the speculator boom and bust of the 1990s, the rise of the artist and the formation of the Image seven, and a chaotic power struggle within Marvel as a publisher and as a multimedia giant. Finally, part five follows Marvel into the new millennium, and ends with Marvel's sale to Disney and a peek into the lives of the surviving "cast members" from the golden, silver, and bronze ages of comics history in a Where Are They Now?-style retrospective.

One particularly poignant anecdote at the end of the book comes from Chris Claremont, writer of the X-Men for a decade and a half. He tells a story about Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman, working at Marvel doing menial tasks and production work, completely cut off from his creation and not receiving any royalties or benefits from his former employer. Claremont remarks, "I'm never going to end up like him." Fast-forward to the late 1990's, and Claremont is working as an editor at Marvel, no longer allowed near his precious X-Men, and receiving no credit for his contributions as the merry mutants head to the big screen. Another story involved Hugh Jackman publically thanking Wolverine co-creator Len Wein for his creation and claiming he owed him his entire acting career. "I would've preferred a check," remarked Wein in an interview after the fact.

It isn't all doom and gloom, however. There are periods in Marvel's history, like the early 90's and the mid-70's, where the Bullpen sounds like an awesome place to work. There are humorous stories about Bullpenners pulling pranks on one another and "story conferences" that consisted of various "mind expansion" techniques (you fill in the blanks). Even though the Bullpen was a far cry from the interpretation that Stan Lee presented in his famous Stan's Soapbox columns (most artists worked from home and only came by to drop off artwork), there are still ripping yarns about Stan clad in a propeller beanie and enchanting the staff with ditties from his ocarina.

Stan Lee. In a beanie. Playing an ocarina.

There's a lot more to say about this book. So much more, in fact, that I'm going to dedicate my blogging efforts here to uncovering more tidbits about Marvel's history and flesh them out in the future. I feel like I read this book at just the right time. My interest in mainstream comics as a conduit for storytelling is waning, but the more I read about the history of this medium, the deeper down the rabbit hole I go. Spider-Man's story has been told over and over again ad nauseam, but what of Steve Ditko? The X-Men have traversed the cosmos and gone toe to toe with Magneto a hundred times, but what about John Byrne? What interstellar sphere of influence spoke to Jim Starlin when he first put pencil to page for Adam Warlock or when Don McGregor sat at a typewriter to give the Black Panther's inner turmoil a rhythm? Somewhere between the creator and his creation, a more interesting story lies. 

 

 

 

Halloween Countdown Day 20 - The Lurking Horror

Greetings kiddies, your ol' horror host, Eerie Evan is back at it again. Today I'll be looking at an old favorite of mine. A little text adventure called The Lurking Horror released by Infocom in 1986.

Yeah, yeah, I can hear you now. "What's that Grandpa Eerie? Text adventures scary? I bet you wheeze you when ride elevators." Well I do! But that don't mean that a little venture outside of your namby-pamby 256 color graphics card color zone won't be rewarding.


                                      

If it wasn't for the word 'Horror' in big bright red letters in the title, you might not even think that this had anything to do with oogie-spookies. In fact, you'd probably swear up and down that this was more about a lazy college kid who is stuck on campus in the middle of a blizzard trying to last minute his way through a 20 page paper than it is about what would go bump in the night.

The game's box even included a fun group of "feelies" to set the atmosphere just right. You'd open it up to find a student id to your fake school, the kind of maps that you'd find at a Freshman orientation so you can keep track of your progress - oh! And a very realistic rubber centipede that probably caused more than one person to jump.
                                                                                                        

This is one of Infocom's best games, and that is saying something. Infocom being best known for Trinity a title which explores the meaningless of war in the atomic age, and A Mind Forever Voyaging, which explored...well..just about everything. So why not click on the link and give this one a try?

Until next time kiddies.

The Club of Heroes Podcast Episode 50: Secret Origins

It's a landmark 50th episode for the Club of Heroes. This special collectible anniversary episode is a collection of previously unreleased material deemed too hot for TV! First, Chris and Evan go back issue diving and encounter the Car Wash of Doom. Then, Matt joins the fray as the gang discusses what super-powers they would have and why. Next up, listen to the very first brainstorming session for the show, where hilarity ensues (think of it as a zero issue). Finally, we wrap up with an in-depth discussion about Infinite Crisis #6 for no apparent reason at all!

You can download or listen to the episode right HERE!

Halloween Countdown Day 22 - The Tale of the Dark Music

Greetings again my atrocious audience, your ol' pal Eerie Evan has yet another trip down memory lane for you. This time, we'll take a good look at one of my favorite 90's series when I was just a wee little lost soul - a show by the name of  Are you Afraid of the Dark?



While this was a show for the kiddies cooked up by YTV in Canada, it received considerable airplay in the United States. From 1991 to 1996, AYAOTD effectively fueled my nightmares without being outright banned by the Hand of God (I.E. my overlords who thought that I could handle Poe, but decided terror on the silver screen was just too much for lil ol' me. Unless it was Ridley Scott's Alien). This show was head and shoulders above Goosebumps, with better characters, better plots, and legitimately scary moments. Even now, there are a few episodes I watched which would probably be considered racy, even a little too much to show to a kid today. While there are some obvious ones that would be fitting to mention (The Tale of the 13th Floor, The Tale of Laughing in the Dark, The Tale of the Midnight Madness....)I'm going with an underdog today. My choice? An episode entitled The Tale of the Dark Music and man oh man, I have not the foggiest idea how this one got past the Nickelodeon censors.


                                                   

In this one Andy, his sister and his mom move into his old Uncle's house. His Uncle kicked the bucket a while ago, and according to his mom had a reputation for not being terribly liked amongst his neighbors and the rest of the townsfolk, mostly because he never seemed to want for anything and on top of that, he just seemed a bit...off. Andy's mother isn't exactly rolling in the dough, so he does things like pick up a paper route. Hey, Andy's life is looking up!

                                                    

Or was, that is. It seems a bully named Koda (What kind of name is that? Is that a Stryper shirt?) really has it out for him, greasy locks 'n all. We get a rare glimpse of empathy with our terribly named bully, as we see that he's belittle by his own dad in one scene - something rarely seen in kids television. But if all that wasn't terrible enough, there is a thing living in the root cellar.
                                                   
                                                    

So once Koda tosses Andy's bike into the street and ruins it, Andy decides he's had enough. He lures Koda down to the basement, traps him in it and contacts his otherworldly friend. What happens next you ask? Well, this is a pretty good indication.

                                                                                

When Andy makes it back down into the basement, Koda is nowhere to be found. What IS there however, is a brand new bicycle, even better than the one Andy had before. Perplexed, Andy watches as the cellar door opens and a voice announces that it'll happily give Andy anything he wants - as long as he supplies his friend with plenty of food. Cue his sister being annoying upstairs, and what does Andy do?

                                                              

Oh yes, I think that with a smile like that it is pretty damn obvious what Andy decides to do. This is by far the most dark episode of AYAOTD that there is. It has a murder in it. It ends with a second implied murder (not to mention all those people his Uncle must have offed to get his stuff...or what happened to him). But even better than that, it showed the audience that there are no guaranteed happy endings in life, and the 'angels of ones better nature' do not always triumph over evil.


Feel free to watch the episode below, and as always, until next time kiddies.