Random Back Issues #144 - E-Man #1

The filming of a big stunt sequence for "Riders of the Last Buick II" goes wrong, as a defect in the tracks flings the boulder towards not only "Minnesota Schwartz" and "The Girl", but a crowd of gawkers. Seems risky to endanger your star, though Garrison Bellot is high on Aunt Jemima's Pancake Makeup, and if you're hoping we're almost done with the sub-Mad Magazine-level parody names, buddy, this is just the first page.

In an apartment overlooking this mess, exotic dancer and part-time archaeology student Nova Kane has brought a date home, but as they're about to get down to sexy business, her roomie Alec Tronn (E-Man) shows up. Rodney's apparently not up for experimentation, as he's got lots of questions about this other guy, not the least of which why he seemed to materialize out of the TV. By then, Alec has noticed the trouble outside and transforms to energy to phase through the window and destroy the boulder. Nova tries to rush Rodney out the door, but when he keeps asking questions, uses her own energy-manipulating powers to slow his brain's electrical activity and temporarily put him in suspended animation. Did she not want to waste the good liquor?

E-Man keeps anyone from being hurt by the boulder - minus a street performer that took a chunk of rock in the kisser - and the film's producer, sigh, Stringpull Schmaltzberg is trying to convince E-Man to star in his next movie. It's called V.D., about caring and sharing and how adulthood breeds those traits out us, expressed through the innocence of an alien. E-Man says he'll think about it, which isn't good enough for Schmaltzberg's mysterious boss, "B.S."

Next day, Nova visits E-Man's partner, unkempt, unpleasant, private investigator, Michael Mauser. She's looking for E-Man, but gives us a 4-page origin recap, by the end of which Mauser's asleep. E-Man shows up, soaking wet, pissed off, and ready to accept the movie offer. He was drawn to an aquarium by strange music, and saved a man about to be eaten by a Great White Shark. Except "FBI Agent I.M. Faceless" was undercover to catch fish thieves. The ingratitude has soured Alec on using his powers to aid mankind, making him smarter than anyone who ever served on the Avengers.

But wait! Mauser notes that sounds like a scene from Schmaltzberg's "Maws,", and the music that drew E-Man to the aquarium was the theme from "Gross Encounters of the Weird Kind." Mauser decides to question Schmaltzberg, but once inside his 'palatial cottage', he and E-Man find themselves in a constantly changing environment. Coney Island one moment, and a bar from the first Riders of the Last Buick, until they're captured by Schmaltzberg and E-Man's original arch-foe, the Brain from Sirius, aka B.S.

He's gone loopy after the dome containing his native atmosphere got cracked in a previous fight, as his clever plan was to 1) make E-Man a movie star, 2) mind-control him to run for political office like Reagan, 3) make him declare himself King of Earth, and 4) have him assassinated. Now he'll just lower E-Man and Mauser into a pit of lethal Sirian snakes. Which is about when Nova shows up, zaps the alien helmet Schmaltzberg's using to make it look like there are snakes, and they defeat the Brain. But Nova still wants to go back to being a regular woman, or, failing that, at least have a regular guy.

Would you settle for a short, bearded weirdo that keeps kids locked in cattle cars until they sign consent form to be turned into his latest batch of "F-Men"? Because Ford Fairmont's going to try and make you into a Phoenix-knockoff and this issue is absolutely toast in the upcoming annual collection purge.

{4th longbox, 80th comic. E-Man (vol. 3) #1, by Martin Pasko (writer), Joe Staton (artist), Bruce D. Patterson (colorist/letterer)}