Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
HERBIE POPNECKER: the
most powerful entity in all of Time, Space and Reality. Honest.
This page is dedicated to J. Kevin Carrier and Rich Morrisey...
both of whom are probably both laughing themselves sick, at this point.
Here's what I want you to do:
I want you to imagine every single super-hero and heroine ever to accept
membership within the ranks of the Justice League.
And the Avengers, too, while you're at it.
All eleventy-gazillion of 'em, from both spandexed tribes: lined up in one long,
serpentine file. Alphabetically; by height; any system you like.
Imagine how grotesquely all-powerful such a multiplicity of myrmidons would be. Nothing would be beyond the amassed uberwill of such an assembly. Time and space would be their compliant chattel; the nature of Reality itself, little more than a cheapjack bauble dangling from their collective throat.
Herbie Popnecker could whup all of their sorry hinders. )
The HERBIE series was one of a handful of odd little titles published during
the early and mid-60's by the (now defunct) American Comics Group; an outfit
specializing in science fiction and horror "anthology" titles, for the most
part. They were the sort of comics which thrived (in a manner of speaking)
during the pallid, largely superhero-less stretch of years between the inception
of the Comics Code Authority (and, hence, the end of the Golden Age) and the
publication of DC Comics' SHOWCASE #4 (the event signaling the onset of what
would later be recognized as the Silver Age). Tame, never-terribly-shocking
(much less interesting) comics, invariably with two-word titles such
as STARTLING STORIES; EERIE ADVENTURES; and COWBOY SEXCAPADES. (All right...
all right; maybe I did make up that last one. What are you gonna
do about it, huh? Big mister tough guy? Here: cross this
line, whydon'tcha? I dare ya. Sissy.)
HERBIE was one of said company's rare non-anthology entries into the
comics marketplace of the day. Detailing the studiedly surreal, Dali-esque
adventures of one "Herbie Popnecker" [see panel, accompanying -- aphlegmatic
and indolent grade school butterball whose sole obsessions were (in order):
eating; sleeping; and lollipops, and whose mortified father continually referred
to him as: "a fat little nothing!" -- the series was (you have my oath
on it) as completely and thoroughly beyond all possible categorization as the
most mutated rara avis. Nothing like it had ever before seen print,
in any mainstream American comic book; in its Boy Battleship-sized wake, nothing
has since, either. )
Herbie wasn't so much a super-hero, you see, as he was a sort of living super-singularity; bizarre, reality-bending phenomena circled Young Master Popnecker like so many lunatic fireflies -- the sudden manifestation (say) of George Washington's wooden teeth on a dining room table, here; a prehistoric cavewoman shambling out from the dynamited rubble of a highway excavation site, there -- and were sucked into his remorseless, slow-moving wake, in turn.
The Adipose Action Figure, however, was rarely (if ever) fazed by such outréoccurrences as these, when so confronted. He was, after all, an omnipotent being.
Truth. )
Herbie, you see, could accomplish any feat -- vanquish any foeman; sojourn to any point in time and/or space; even locate and purchase copies of TV GUIDE without those annoying little "record club" inserts stuck in the middle of same -- so long as he had a lollipop gripped in one meaty fist. [See pictures, accompanying]
With no more preamble than a drawled: "... gonna bop you with this
here lollipop...!", Herbie did -- throughout the course of histitle's
run -- dispatch such otherwise tres formidable opponents as: the Sheriff
of Nottingham; Hitler; Dracula; Zeus; and even the Hades-dwelling Lord of the
Flies his own bad self. The "bop" attack, apparently, knew no defensive
recourse; it was as deadly and implacable as a hurricane. )
Most fearsome of all, however, was the sight of an angered Herbie Popnecker
-- lumbering towards his chosen opponent with glacial imperturbability -- with
the dreaded "hard-to-find cinnamon flavor lollipop" clenched in one white-knuckled
paw. Said "cinnamon" pops, you see, were reserved for only the most dire
and awful of contingencies; sort of the confectionery equivalent, if you will,
of a missle carrying a nuclear warhead in its payload.
As charmingly explicated by writer Shane O'Shea and artist nonpareil Ogden Whitney, the HERBIE adventures were every bit as hallucinatory and non sequitor as anything one might find in Hunter S. Thompson's personal diary. For those readers who could (or would) "get" the joke... the title was nothing less than an inspired free fall into Total Dementia.
(In an odd sort of way -- and this will be, I promise you, the only time you will ever, ever see these two characters "linked" in any meaningful sentence -- the HERBIE comic was much of a muchness with the British JUDGE DREDD series. Both of these took what were essentially "one-note" characters -- the grim, hates-crime-above-all-else Future Cop, on the one hand, and the pokey, porcine pre-adolescent, on the other -- and took the [otherwise] absurdly "self-limiting" aspects of said characters and made fuel-efficient, turbo-charged storytelling engines out of them.
(Just as the readers of that title never knew [or needed to
know] anything about the "inner landscape" of Joe Dredd to enjoy his tight-lipped
and blackly humorous "scorched earth" approach to crime-fighting... so, too,
was Herbie Popnecker's credulity-straining Total Inertia sufficient unto the
storytelling "needs" of his own creators and readership, in turn.
Sometimes -- not often, I'll grant you; but sometimes, nonetheless --
archetypes really do better serve the cause of Humor better than might
more fully "rounded" characters.)
HERBIE enjoyed the monthly devotions of a fanatically loyal readership (of which number Your Narrator, I assure you,was amply proud to be counted) for many a year, during the greater portion of the 60's, outlasting any number of the more "serious" offerings from the American Comics Group. Changing fannish tastes and sentiments, alas, finally succeeded in accomplishing what any number of befuddled alien despots or slow-witted other-dimensional entities had failed to achieve prior, however: with the advent of the "Marvel Age" style of Heavy Angst and Total Seriousness during the latter part of the decade... the charming conceits of the self-styled "Fat Fury" fell out of favor with a plurality of the audience, and -- after a healthy (but too brief, still) run -- HERBIE was, at long last, canceled.
Not even the awe-inspiring might of the "hard-to-get cinnamon flavor," it seems, is sufficient safeguard, ultimately, against the vicissitudes of that most unforgiving of nemeses: The Marketplace (*choke*).
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