The celebrated Mr. K pays a BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE… — UPDATED 4/4/25: It’s the late Joe Orlando’s birthday! Perfect time to reprint this piece from 2023! Dig it. — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG Joe Orlando (April 4, 1927 – December 23, 1998) was one of those multi-discipline talents who for a few decades seemed to pop up in the middle of revolutionary moments in comics history. In the early 1950s, Orlando was part of the legendary EC Comics crew. In the early 1960s, he joined the growing world of the new Marvel Comics Universe as the penciller on Daredevil and played a pivotal role in the start-up and direction of the legendary Warren Publications black-and-white horror magazines. A few years after that, he was on hand at DC Comics when Carmine Infantino became the new editorial director and opened the stodgy old company to new and fresh ideas. Along the way, Orlando was an artist for such groundbreaking humor publications as Mad Magazine and National Lampoon (for which he drew one of my favorite covers of the magazine’s heyday) and created commercial art, including a famous Nixon era take-off on Superman for Newsweek). Joe was, in short, a legend. One I’m proud to say I not only knew but who I had the privilege to work with on several occasions. For a while in 1983, I reported to Joe when I was on staff at DC doing public relations (which is around the time of the photo of me and Joe, taken at Paul Levitz’s wedding; I didn’t typically wear a tux to the office, except on pay days), then I worked with him as my editor on the 1986 Super Powers miniseries I wrote (and which Joe also colored). This was the period in which he doodled the “young Jewish writer” portrait of me, and during which I shared “A Comic Moment with” him. My favorite Joe Orlando story in Direct Conversations: Talks With My Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators was told by then newbie writer Bob Toomey. One day in 1977, Bob delivered a script for a story in Young Love to editor Orlando. “He took the script from my trembling hands, read it, and then, with no expression on his face, said to me the words that would change my life: ‘What makes you think...
A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE to the late Shelly Mayer, who was born 108 years ago, on April 1, 1917… By JIM BEARD I loved her from the first moment I saw her. I was younger then, but I knew I’d never seen anyone like her, and likely never would. She dressed differently, she spoke differently, she even moved differently. She wore long johns. She said things like “By th’ Great Horn Toad!” She offered to “wrassle” people. She was an iconoclast. She railed at convention. She could not be contained. She was one of a kind. She was unique. She was there before others. Sheldon “Shelly” Mayer was no dummy. He was shrewd and clever. He also knew it was good to be king of his little corner of the world. When the opportunity presented itself, he threw caution to the wind and introduced her to me. He changed my life. She changed my life. It would never be the same. Now, all these many years later, I see she was there, at my side, every step of the way, even when she wasn’t. I never forgot her, and when I would come close to forgetting her, she would reappear and I’d be in love all over again. Her story is intertwined with mine, and, dare I say it, I even played a few very small parts in increasing her siren song. Today, I must share her with others who have seen what I have seen, heard what I have heard, and felt what I have felt. Jealous as I am, I cannot truly blame them. Her name is Abigail Mathilda “Ma” Hunkel, but she’ll always be the first, the original Red Tornado to me. This is my ode to her and to Shelly, her creator — 13 FABULOUSLY FUN TALES OF THE GOLDEN AGE RED TORNADO: — All-American Comics #20 (Nov. 1940). Shelly had introduced Ma as herself the previous year but when the superhero craze could no longer be denied he brought out the one, the only Red Tornado, and poor Scribbly Jibbet’s strip would no longer be solely his. As the Tornado, Ma became not only one of the very first costumed heroines ever, but the first superhero parody and the first cross-dressing crimebuster. — All-Star Comics #3 (Winter 1940). I want to be very clear about...
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The celebrated Mr. K pays a BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE to one of comics’ supergreats…
