Yo, the Secret Government Robots page that would usually go up today will go up on Friday and the one for Thursday will go up Saturday. It’s all school’s fault. It’s times like this that I am quite thankful for the fact that I don’t have an audience that cares about those pages at all.
And thus ends another year’s collection of Phone Guys comics. For some reason, another year’s starts up next week.
Club Man
Conrad was a young construction worker who fell off a roof, but the ground he hit wasn’t the pavement below. Somehow, Conrad fell into a dimensional tear leading to Ogretropolis, a city for ogres. With no way to return home, Conrad had to fend for himself in that strange town, eventually finding a job as an exterminator (his relatively small size helped him get into areas the big ogres couldn’t and he fight the dog-sized insectoid pests). When he had made enough money, Conrad was finally able to pay a magician to send him home. Back on Earth, Conrad realized he had grown stronger and his enchanted club was more powerful than most Earth-material. With these advantages, it was easy for Club Man to continue cleaning up pests, but this time it is the criminal variety that is on the receiving end of his wallopings.
I’ve always been drawn to big dumb good guy characters. There’s something I relate to in the fellow who is strong and stupid as an ox, but it still a decent guy. I feel like that character was all over the place in my youth, but is less common now. I’m not at all surprised by the conventional “twist” on the trope by having the big guy also be smart, that happens all the time now, so I just wanted to harken back to the lovable dumb strong guy.
Wizardog
Who is a good dog? Wizardog is! Yes he is!
With mystic powers passed down from the ages, Wizardog protects mankind from various threats and creatures from Realms Beyond. Intelligent enough to communicate with humans, Wizardog doesn’t bother, with the exception of little Maggie Bronson, his owner. Wizardog wages his war in secret, expecting nothing in return, except a scratch behind the ears at the end of the day.
Super Animals are one of those elements of superhero comics that some people don’t like. As with all the other weird stuff I’ve mentioned over the course of this year, I think super animals can be done well. I won’t be happy until we get Krypto in a Superman movie. It’s a shame Hollywood hates me so much. (It’s not a superhero comic, but an excellent example of pets fighting supernatural stuff would be Beasts of Burden. Read that thing.)
This time, we’re over in World War I. This one soldier is friends with a bear and, since it wasn’t until World War II that people realized it would be awesome to have bears on your team, so the soldier had to give the bear, named Winnie after Winnipeg, to a zoo.
And so, ten years later, after all the bears friends have been horribly killed in trench warfare, we come across a man (Double-A Milne) who has brought his son and his illustrator to that same zoo. Young Christopher Robin likes the bear so much that Milne says he’ll write some books about it (though the fact he already had Mr. Shepard drawing the thing suggests that he was going to do that anyway, so Christopher Robin’s opinion means jack). The young lad suggests that they call the bear “Winnie-the-Pooh” but when pressed for answers, even he doesn’t know why. Literally nobody in this commercial can explain the bear’s name, but it remains the bear’s name. It is a fact embedded into the fabric of reality since time immemorial. This can only be the mysterious will of the Unknowable Beings Who Maintain Reality, they being the only ones who could be fomenting this fanciful idea, this sacred name, to grow in this young boy’s soul, hatching it into the world according to their plan. Why would they do this? I don’t know. Just Winnie-the-Pooh.
Anyway, this is another attempt to tie Canada into the creation of an enduring pop culture icon. I suspect that there is more validity here than in the Superman one, because the only claim Canada is making is that the bear is named after Winnipeg, instead of having Mr. Shepard in Canada showing his sketches to his cousin Piglet five years before the character was really created (again, that’s a reference to the Superman one). Still, as Heritage Moments go, I have to give the Superman one the higher esteem, with its fast-talking Joe Shuster easily trumping strange little Christopher Robin. Apart from that, we’ve got a decent musical score, we’ve got a little bit of quotable material. I feel I can confidently give this Heritage Moment Five out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.
