Welcome to the House of Secrets

My blog posts about comics have been getting a lot of attention from people and/or robots just recently, so here's another! Golden Orbit comic & sci-fi fairs, as the website proudly boasts, have been running in the north of England and the midlands for over forty years. Although the Nottingham one, which I used to personally love more than thirty years ago, doesn't happen any more, I live near Birmingham now, so I always like to go along to the latest one here.

And even if like me you've got no money, there's always something wonderful to be found there - just look what I picked up yesterday, for only £1!

House of Secrets no.78, cover-dated June 1966, actually on sale at the start of March, about a week before Bob Haney's fortieth birthday, about a month before Bernard Baily's fiftieth and about three months before Jack Sparling's fiftieth. So let's celebrate these three great comic creators by reading through this great comic! (Although this blog post is more about the adverts than the stories themselves, because I just find them fascinating. Believe me, though, the stories are both really wonderful too!)

A note on the cover - the solar eclipse in the story is not in any way "secret". How do you have a secret solar eclipse, anyway?

But House of Secrets, at this point in its history, contained every two months one adventure for Prince Ra-Man, and one for Eclipso. Or sometimes there'd be just one big adventure in which the two title characters battled each other. Prince Ra-Man is a hero, but Eclipso (very unusually for the time) is a comic about a super-villain!

And both were apparently written by Bob Haney. The internet (or the user of it who researches uncredited comic writers and updates the Grand Comics Database with his findings) seems to have decided now that Haney did write Ra-Man, although it used to be attributed to someone else. And I can believe it - actually, Prince Ra-Man feels a lot more like Haney's typical writing than Eclipso (unarguably Haney's creation) always did. I've mentioned a few times before on this blog just how cool Bob Haney was, but it can't hurt to mention it again. He was amazing.

Also super-cool and happening were the Go-Go Checks! This is from that era of DC where all their comics had the checks at the top of the covers! Groovy, man!

The inside front cover tells us that Superman's on TV! And helpfully lists the local TV stations that are showing it! I've never understood why American television and radio have those four-letter codes starting with W or K. I suppose I could find out in a matter of seconds if I just looked it up on Wikipedia, but I like to preserve a little bit of ignorance here and there. Anyway, this wasn't even a new TV series; it was made in the fifties, but was being repeated, in colour, at this point in time.

We start this issue with Prince Ra-Man's adventure - uncredited, but written by Bob Haney and drawn by Bernard Baily. Sometimes Eclipso was the first story in the comic, sometimes Ra-Man was. Prince Ra-Man had only recently taken over this half of the comic - previously it chronicled the adventures of Mark Merlin, who investigated occult mysteries. Then in House of Secrets no.73, Mark ended up in the dimension of Ra, died, and came back to Earth reincarnated as Prince Ra-Man, complete with super mind-over-matter powers and a more superheroic look. He inherited Mark's supporting cast and girlfriend Elsa, but it was stressed that Mark Merlin was in fact dead, and Prince Ra-Man was something different. But also the same. If you see what I mean. It was all rather weird and ambiguous.

In this issue, we open with a wealthy playboy named Whitney Hargrave announcing that he challenges Prince Ra-Man to a contest of occult powers. Ra-Man does indeed show up and accept the challenge, which Hargrave thought he could win with the help of rigged props and some beginner-level genuine magic powers he's learnt. Ra-Man wins easily and stresses that he only showed up to teach Hargrave that amateurs really shouldn't meddle in this kind of thing. The audience all leave, jeering at Hargrave for being a bungler and faker.

So Hargrave vows to get revenge - in the course of his playboy globetrotting, he's acquired a servant called Jambo (by throwing himself in the path of an attacking bull gorilla in the Mountains of the Moon, which is a little hard to picture, but was enough to oblige Jambo to serve Hargrave forever). Jambo reluctantly tells Hargrave how to summon and control Lord Leopard, a magical being of enormous power. His powers, sadly, include the ability to hypnotise Hargrave before Hargrave can say the magic words to put himself in control.

The Leopard Lord makes Hargrave summon all his wealthy friends back to his mansion, and then takes control of all of them too. But Jambo has escaped and warned Prince Ra-Man and Elsa! That's the first six pages, and now it's time for some ads.

Our "Published as a public service" page for this issue (there was one in every DC comic) is about debunking health myths. Despite this, I'm pretty sure a steak continued to be the standard treatment for a black eye in every more humorous comic for many many years to come.

And that weird looking Kat was in every DC comic of the time too, talking about model kits. Did kids of the sixties like this kind of thing? I'll never understand it myself. That 80-page giant Superboy comic is fun, though, reprinting a lot of old classics. And now we resume with the final six pages of Prince Ra-Man and Lord Leopard...

Lord Leopard turns out to be more powerful even than Prince Ra-Man. He puts Elsa under his spell too, and fights off all of Ra-Man's telekinetic attempts to subdue him with contemptuous ease. Ra-Man flees back home to Mystery Hill, where he adopts more subtle means. Luckily, he still retains Mark Merlin's old power to put his mind into his black cat, Memakata, and still retains his new Ra-Man powers when he's in the cat's body. So in cat form, he manages to elude the Leopard Lord long enough to free Hargrave, who quickly says the magic words to give him control over the all-powerful leopard man. Hargrave then banishes the Leopard Lord back to where he came from, and renounces his desire to impress people with such dangerous powers.

Well, until the next issue, anyway, as the narrative caption at the end of the story tells us! Some playboys never learn.

And at the bottom of the page, we have a rather strange advert for two consecutive issues of Strange Adventures, each of which contained three short one-off twist-ending stories with no recurring characters. Maybe someone really liked the cover of the previous issue (to be fair, it really is awesome) and thought it needed to be seen again before it disappears from the comic shelves!

Cap's Hobby Hints, another constant feature of DC comics in those days, teaches boys like Jimmy a plausible excuse they can use if their mother catches them experimenting with women's hair clips.

And the Direct Currents feature - a new innovation - highlights the Go-Go Checks branding and constant use of the DC initials at the heart of the 1966 marketing strategy. And also lists a selection of the comics that were coming out in the next week or two. We've got Superman, Wonder Woman and the Teen Titans for superhero fans; Lois Lane for her devoted followers and Jerry Lewis for his; two war comics and Sea Devils for whoever read those; and this month's Showcase gave us the really excellent debut of the Inferior Five!

The letters page (another new innovation, replacing the throwaway text feature that was still showing up in comics like House of Secrets until just recently) is mostly about the enthusiastic reader response to the 'Eclipso versus Ra-Man' issues. There will indeed be another one next bi-month, but then the issue after that will be back to separate adventures. And that, strangely enough, will be the final time we see either of our heroes in this comic! With no.81, House of Secrets reverts to those twist-ending stories that flooded so many other comics of the time. Eclipso and Ra-Man both vanished into obscurity, which is a terrible shame.

And now it's time for Eclipso! This one's written by Bob Haney and drawn by Jack Sparling. Eclipso was 'hero and villain in one man' - he's an evil villain, within the body of Bruce Gordon, who was cut by a black diamond during a solar eclipse and found that he transformed into Eclipso whenever another eclipse happened.

The exact mechanics of how this worked kept changing over the course of the series (which had been running since House of Secrets no.61) as Bruce, his girlfriend Mona and Mona's dad Professor Simon Bennet tried to remove the curse of Eclipso from him. By this point, Eclipso physically emerges from Bruce's body whenever an eclipse happens anywhere in the world, and can only be disintegrated again by a blinding flash of light.

And so, with an eclipse due apparently at the North Pole (it's watched by an eskimo and a seal), Bruce seals himself in a container in his lab, equipped with bright lights set to vanquish Eclipso as soon as he emerges. But Eclipso is too clever to be trapped like that, and uses his power to cloak himself in black light and escape again.

But this time, instead of immediately launching his latest evil plan to take over the world, Eclipso just goes into hiding. He doesn't reappear until the next eclipse happens, in England this time. He wants to expose himself to another eclipse, hoping this will permanently separate him from Bruce and leave him in existence forever. That's the end of our first seven pages - time for some more ads!

You have to turn your comic sideways to read this one. 100 magnets, for 79 cents! That's enough money to buy six and a half comics in 1966 America, but they do look fun. Amaze your stupid-looking yellow-haired friend by holding a magnet to a piece of paper! Build a dog or a tank out of magnets! The fun never ends!

And you can find some more comics here - The Brave and the Bold, which had team-ups of two superheroes every issue at this time, pairs the Flash with the Doom Patrol. And there's a gorilla on the cover. It was universally understood at this point that a gorilla on the cover vastly increased the sales of any comic. DC were careful to sparingly apportion the gorillas across the titles that needed it, not wanting to overuse the gimmick but wanting to maximise the sales. And meanwhile, Batman fights Death-Man. Not an all-time great foe for the caped crusader.

But Superman and Lois are more impressed by the new comic Swing With Scooter - strangely described as "a Showcase presentation", which is a holdover from the way it was intended to debut in Showcase, the try-out comic for new ideas. But the Beatles were so cool, that Scooter ended up being granted his own ongoing comic straight away! It wasn't actually all that great, but he looks like Paul McCartney and has adventures like Archie, so what could go wrong?

Back to six more pages of Eclipso. The second eclipse actually turns him into a big red monster, but he retains his intellect and powers, and gets to work with his latest master-plan - to uncover the secret treasure of Stonehenge. Unfortunately, the treasure (buried by ancient Britons) turns out to be a magic meteorite which strips the villain of his new powers and leaves him vulnerable to Bruce's photon grenade. Foiled again, until next time!

Next time, he'll tangle with Prince Ra-Man and Whitney Hargrave, so don't miss it!

Now this is a fascinating page. A silly half-page filler comic basically tells the exact same story as the Prince Ra-Man adventure, but makes a joke of it! Was it a coincidence, or a deliberate thing? The magic words to control the genie were Abra-Zabra, while the magic words to control the Leopard Lord were Simba Yenah, but the same thing happens when the magic being takes over.

And the ad at the bottom of the page is particularly badly planned. By now, we're reading every set of DC initials, and we naturally see "Don't Choose" the Go-Go Checks. The "hesitate" in between the two words is very easily missed. So everyone go out and choose something without Go-Go Checks on it, right now!

Or go out and buy some G. I. Joe toys. And join the G. I. Joe club! Offer good only in the USA and Canada, which makes me wonder if all that many Canadians really wanted to pretend to be American soldiers. Or maybe I'm just envious because it isn't open to me. Andy and George are having fun with it, anyway!

And the back cover gives is a plug for the brand-new Batman TV show (which is about to take over all DC comics with its staggering popularity) while advertising hobby kits with all your favourite heroes!

They don't make them like this any more!