Action Comics #421

Here's an oddity from the 1970s that I picked up today at the South Attleboro Collectibles Show, which capped off my attending four conventions in eight days (Queen City Kamikaze, Boskone, Totalcon, South Attleboro Collectibles Show).

Title: Action Comics
Issue: 421
Date: February 1973
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Cary Bates, Elliot Maggin
Artist: Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Sal Amendola, Dick Giordano
Editor: Julius Schwartz

Let me guess? This is a tribute, right? Or maybe it's just a coincidence that Superman happens to be going up against a bald musclebound sailor who just happens to gain super strength by eating a special green vegetable? No, really, it's called "sauncha" (hey, that is several letters off from spinach!).

Interestingly, when you google "sauncha", the first entry that comes up is Wikipedia's page on "Captain Strong".

The story is also a bit on the mean-spirited side in the sense that sauncha affects Captain Strong as an addictive drug. He's well-intentioned, and presented as more of a victim than a bad guy, but it was still an unexpected tack if the intention was to pay tribute to Popeye. And it was played a bit too seriously for it to be treated as a spoof.

The story itself is pretty straightforward. Superhero fanboy Billy Anders is trapped in a collapsed building. When the door is busted in, he expects Superman to be the one to rescue him. Instead, it's Captain Strong. Billy tells the story to Clark Kent, while Strong tries to make a deal to sell the secret of his mysterious sauncha vegetable to a greedy businessman. When the food executive tries to doublecross the sailor, Captain Strong shows up looking for revenge (and amped up on a sauncha overdose). Superman arrives and it is ON.

Lots of Silver-Age goofiness, including silly identity-concealing tricks by Clark Kent.

With the weird Popeye ripoff going on, this had me scratching my head more than anything else. It is certainly an interesting curiosity piece.

The backup story featured Green Arrow. Dinah Lance is getting set to open her new flower shop ("Pretty Bird Flower Shoppe"; sorry, guys, "Sherwood Florist" was a much better name). After meeting an obnoxious press agent while saving a theater audience from a forest, Oliver Queen decides that he might just have a future as a publicist. After all, he can out-obnoxious just about anyone. So he promises Dinah that he's going to get her shop on the front page of the local paper.

Then he just has to figure out how to do it. The answer comes in the form of a fugitive mob hitman. All Ollie needs to do is to make sure he apprehends the criminal in exactly the right place.

This is a light story where not much really goes wrong. The action is secondary to the romantic comedy vibe between Dinah and Ollie, which is pretty amusing. It helps that Dinah is gorgeous, in spite of her appearing only in small panels on a couple of pages. It also helps that she's not buy into any of Ollie's attempts to turn on the charm.

Trick Arrow Count: Net arrow, bugging device arrow, siren arrow. Ollie also uses one regular arrow. You know, the pointy kind. Sadly, no boxing glove arrow.

Good backup story and a historically interesting (if only in the "how could this not have resulted in a lawsuit?" sense) main story.

Rating: 6.5/10