A couple of years ago, I got the notion of trying to hunt down some of DC's more comedy oriented books from the '60s. Inferior Five, Angel and the Ape. But even beat up issues are pricier than I'm willing to pay, so the plan never got past owning about three issues of this title, one of which was actually a reprint of their first appearance in Showcase.
The team consisted of five heroes who were the children of other, more successful heroes, pressed into service in place of their parents when an old enemy re-emerged. Awkwardman is clumsy, the Blimp is slow, White Feather's a coward, Merryman's a weakling and Dumb Bunny. . .well, it's in the name, isn't it?
The book takes the approach of trying to cram as many gags, jokes or attempts at funny wordplay in as possible. The phones they use to receive emergency calls are dubbed the "lukewarm line". When the Blimp's diner is carried into the sky on the growing mountain of trash, a cop tells a child it's a public service, since they won't have to eat there now. While climbing the trash mountain, they encounter both a dress shop, whose owners spend half a page outfitting Dumb Bunny, and a bunch of hippies, who plant seeds that turn into a man-eating plant(?)
The team is just competent enough to win (Dumb Bunny seems to be the most successful at actually using her powers to fight stuff), or else their opponents are that incompetent. I don't guess it was much of a hit, it only lasted 12 issues, and at least two of those were reprints of the Showcase stories. It went the parody route frequently, with two separate issues involving a "Kookie Quartet" that was a spoof of the Fantastic Four, plus another issue where the team visits the DC offices.
2 comments:
Presumably a "dark" version of them was introduced and probably murdered in InfiniteFinal Crisis.
I think they avoided that fate, though I can't imagine how. No character is too obscure for Geoff Johns to brutally murder them!
I know they popped up in the Phil Foglio Angel and the Ape mini-series in the early '90s (because Foglio decided Angel and Dumb Bunny were half-sisters), and JMS used them in a team-up with the Legion of Substitute Heroes when he took over writing Brave & the Bold around 2009. Giffen did some mini-series with that title in the last couple of years, but it was about a group of kids in the southwest U.S. as far as I could tell, and had nothing to do with these characters.
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