David Peattie has a comics related question that he's hoping I can answer even though it has nothing to do with Jack Kirby…
I have a comics related question I'm hoping you can answer even though it has nothing to do with Jack Kirby.
In the Golden Age Plastic Man stories I've seen by Jack Cole that featured sidekick Woozy Winks, initially Woozy had been given "protection by Mother Nature" so that whatever trouble he blundered into, nothing bad would happen to him because Nature would intervene. Somewhere along the way, that disappeared. I was wondering if you know anything about that…why it happened and what the thinking behind it was. I'd love to see this addressed in your blog.
Yes, amazingly I think I can answer this. At the 2002 Comic-Con International in San Diego, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing William Woolfolk, one of my favorite writers…of comic books and also television. He wrote some issues of Plastic Man and we got to talking of how the rubbery hero and his world were modified for a Saturday morning cartoon show on which I was a writer. (I did not do the modifications. They were done by the producer of the show, Joe Ruby, and another of my favorite writers of comic books and TV, Norman Maurer.)
They more or less changed Woozy into a character named Hula-Hula, who fulfilled the network's insistence on having at least one regular character who wasn't a white guy. Hula-Hula was, as you might guess, Hawaiian…and unlike Woozy, who had perpetual good luck, Hula-Hula had constant bad luck. No tape was rolling when he said this but Mr. Woolfolk said something like, "That was probably a good change. It's difficult to write stories when your hero can't be harmed and he triumphs just because of dumb luck."
I think he also said that's why they took away Woozy's charmed life and gave him one that could involve actual jeopardy. It's a problem that pops up in the writing of a lot of super-hero comics: How do you muster any suspense when your hero is all-powerful and maybe even invulnerable? That's why they invented Kryptonite for the Superman mythos and why most writers, given the choice, would rather write Batman.
