How to Make Golf Interesting.

Golf is boring. It is seriously boring. Just thinking about golf makes me hyperventilate. It's even more boring than watching paint dry, because at least there's a chance that a mysterious cosmic ray from space will hit the paint and mutate it into a sentient being that will then become my invisible magic-powered sidekick. But there's no chance at all of golf being even remotely interesting.

But in the future--ah, the future, when we'll have flying cars, jet packs and hoverboards. When our greatest achievement will be to make golf an interesting and fun game!

We learn about this in "Danger on the Martian Links," (Brave and the Bold #46--Feb/March 1964), written by John Broome and illustrated by Carmine Infantino. In the future, golf courses are laid out over dangerous areas of various planets. Golfers are required to play through no matter where the ball lies--no matter what the ball lies. If you have to fight a monster, don scuba gear or outwit aliens before you can take your next shot, then that's just the way it is.

Earth's champion golfer, Wale Marner, certainly knows this, having quite literally fought his way across golf courses on many planets.

Gee whiz, this is the way to make golf interesting! Toss in a few death traps and alien monsters and I'll watch a tournament from start to finish!



Heck, the skills Wale has to hone to be a good golfer even help save the Solar System! It's while he's playing in the big Nine Planets tournament on Mars that alien invaders land. Fortunately, a good swing with a 9-iron is just what's needed to send those pesky aliens packing.

"Danger on the Martian Links" is a fun story, with Infantino's art bringing life to a silly but entertaining concept.

Comic book stories have always had enormous value in building our sense of wonder, touching our imagination, taking us to other worlds and simply entertaining us. But this story also shows that comic books can even save the world's most uninteresting game from collapsing under the weight of its own dullness.

Next week--ROBOT DINOSAURS!

It's Illegal to Play Ping Pong!

Last week, we looked at a sports-themed SF story reprinted in DC Special #13 (July/Aug 1971). This week, we'll examine another reprint from that issue--"The Saga of the Secret Sportsmen," first published in The Brave and the Bold #47 (April/May 1963). Like last week's tale, its written by John Broome and drawn by Carmine Infantino.

What's cool about this story is that it comes close to predicting the future in one small detail. A scientist in future invents what is essentially the Playstation or XBox, allowing people to "play" sports without ever actually leaving their living room.

In what is admittedly a silly plot twist, this leads to playing real sports being made illegal. But because of this, when aliens invade, humanity consists of a bunch of fat, lazy bums and we are easily conquered.

Fortunately, there is a band of outlaw athletes who have stayed in shape playing illegal sports. They launch a guerrilla war campaign against the aliens.

Another fortunate thing about the aliens is that their equipment is based on "anti-gravity" power, so if the athletes can destroy their gravity base, they'll be helpless. Yet another fortunate thing is that the athletic skills the humans have been developing are exactly the skills needed to break into the base and destroy it, thus saving the world and making exercise legal again.

Yes, it's a contrived story, but this is one of those rare occasions in which contrivance and a less-than-logical premise doesn't bother me at all and is arguably a strength rather than a weakness. The premise is too much fun to worry about whether it makes sense and (as with last week's story) Infantino's art is magnificent. If a story exists largely so that Carmine Infantino can show us human freedom fighters pole-vaulting over a wall to attack an alien base, then that is justification enough.

Weightless Warriors

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a 1973 issue of Strange Sports Stories, making the case that the theme was too limiting to be truly successful. I still think that's true--Strange Sports Stories gave us a contrived or mediocre tale for every good one. Unlike a more general theme, such as science fiction, specifically telling SF sports stories on a regular basis is simply too limiting.

But that doesn't mean its impossible to tell a good science fiction, fantasy or horror story with a sports theme. In the years before Strange Sports Stories, DC Comics gave us a number of these. I think the key is to tell a sports story when the writer or editor simply has a good idea for one and is not being required to come up with two or three ideas for every issue of a regular book.

In 1971, DC Special #13 reprinted a number of sports-themed tales published in the 1950s & '60s. All are at least pretty good and a couple of them are memorable. But all originally appeared in general sci-fi anthology books, so had a sports theme because it inherently belonged in these specific stories--it wasn't forced in.

By the way, several DC Specials featured reprints of strange sports stories. I wonder if good sales for these issues prompted the creation of the short-lived Strange Sports Stories.

One of the two more memorable stories reprinted in DC Special was "Warrior of the Weightless World," written by John Broome and drawn by Carmine Infantino. Originally published in The Brave and the Bold #49 (Aug/Sept. 1963), this story introduces us to the 22nd Century sport of spaceball.

It actually looks like a pretty cool sport--essentially it's basketball played in a zero-gravity chamber. The main characters--including a guy who only plays spaceball to put himself through medical school--are the three greatest stars of the game.

When Earth goes to war against an alien race, the opportunity to use their spaceball skills in a military unit soon arises. The aliens have a vital repair base set up on a zero-g planet. The spaceball stars are sent on a commando mission to blow this up and possibly end the war.

The three discover that tactics they used in spaceball work quite well in zero-g combat. They complete the mission and the future doctor learns to have more respect for a sport he had previously played only for money.

It's a fun, well-constructed story--setting up the premise efficiently and giving us an exciting action set-piece, all of which is brought to life by Infantino's striking art work. "Warrior of the Weightless World" is simply fun to look at.

And, by golly, I'd pay for a ticket to see a spaceball game. Add this to the list of stuff that should exist in real life!

I'm going to contradict myself by mentioning that this story is part of a five issue run of The Brave and the Bold in which the book specialized in strange sports stories--nearly all of which were pretty good. (Issues #45-49) So perhaps it is possible to write such stories on a regular basis without losing quality--at least for a short time. Next week, we'll look at yet another of those sports story reprinted in DC Special #13--one that is memorable in that it actually predicts the future! (Well, sort of. But not really.)

One Hit and One Strike Out

The anthology book Strange Sports Stories (published by DC Comics) ran for just six issues in 1973 & 74.

It's easy to see why it had a short run. It's a fun idea (sports-oriented stories given a supernatural or science fiction twist), but I suspect that the theme was limiting enough to give a lot of the stories a very contrived feel.

The very first issue (October 1973) is a good example of this. There's two stories in this one, both written by Frank Robbins and illustrated by Curt Swan. In the first, a pro baseball team plays against the devil for their souls, while in the second a group of supernatural creatures teach a teenager to.. um, well, to bowl. Because that's what supernatural creatures spend their time doing.

The first story--"To Beat the Devil"--is pretty good. A team called the Meteors is flying to the World Series when their plane is essentially hijacked by Satan. Satan will play them in a game. If they win, they go free. If he wins, he gets their souls.

The set-up is a little sloppy. The devil is pretty much just forcing them to play, possibly dooming them to Hell whether they were destined to eventually go there or not. There needed to be more of a hook. For instance, in the Charlie Daniels song "The Devil Goes Down to Georgia," the fiddle player was given a choice about whether to compete with the devil and would get a golden fiddle if he won. That's the sort of thing that needed to be happening here. I suspect there just wasn't time for anything more complex in a story that only runs 12 pages total.




Also, the Meteors manager and players accept the situation with remarkable aplomb, but I kind of like that despite it's lack of reality. Heck, professional baseball players have to deal with the unexpected, whether it be a grounder taking a bad hop or being kidnapped by the universe's Source of all Evil.

Once the game itself starts, the story does get interesting. The devil plays all nine positions on his team, teleporting from one spot to another as needed. He hits one home run in the first inning, all while keeping the Meteors scoreless.

When the manager realizes that Satan can't be in two places at once, he comes up with a plan for forcing his opponent into a forfeit. But a little bit of improvisation from the first baseman will be needed to make sure the plan works.

So despite a sloppy set-up, the overall story is reasonably well-executed. I remember reading this when it first came out and deciding that this was a fictional retelling of something that really happened to the 1969 Mets when they were flying to Baltimore for the first game of the World Series. There's nothing in the story that suggests this, but it was an idea that simply made the tale all that much more fun for me.

The second story, though, doesn't really work at all. Swan's art work looks great, but the concept and execution are just weak.

A teenager named Rip Van Wynne is a lousy bowler, tossing gutter ball after gutter ball as he embarrasses himself in front of his friends. He goes for a walk in the nearby woods and stumbles across the same guys who had put Rip Van Winkle to sleep a few centuries earlier.

They don't put Rip down for a 20-year nap. Instead, they give him a few bowling tips--enough to turn him into an instant expert. Returning to the bowling alley, Rip proceeds to bowl strike after strike.

But he'd been warned never to bowl a perfect game, because then he'd be guilty of the sin of vanity. So when he ignores this warning and tries to throw his last strike, one of the little people supernaturally kicks the ball into the gutter.

It's a silly ending to a silly story, because Rip wasn't acting like an arrogant jerk. The worst you can say about him was that he was hoping to impress one of the girls in his group of friends, but that doesn't sound all that horrible. Heck, it's not as if he were burning an entire civilization to the ground for the sake of the girl! 

The story makes it sound as if an athlete is guilty of vanity if he simply performs at his best level. Which is, of course, just plain dumb. An athlete might let vanity get the best of him when he wins--but he might also stay a humble and decent person. Bowling a perfect game is not inherently prideful.

If the story had simply depended on charm or humor to carry through with the idea, it might have worked. But the characters are too flat to generate either charm or humor.

"A Tall Tale of Tenpins" is a good example of why Strange Sports Stories didn't catch on. It was simply too limiting a theme for a monthly anthology comic. Weak and contrived plots, with the writer desperately trying to force a sports story into a fantasy or science fiction setting, were pretty much inevitable.

But the idea of the '69 Mets beating Satan in a game of baseball is wonderful. Heck, if the worst team in baseball can take the whole world by surprise when they suddenly win 100 games and take the Major League powerhouse Orioles in five games, then they likely could out-play the devil.  There's a part of me that still believes it really happened. I still don't care that the story doesn't hint at all that the Meteors secretly represent the Mets.

So--despite its flaws--I'm glad Strange Sports Stories was around.