FW Team-Up: Superman and OMAC

Another case of characters who would never meet in real life--except through the magic of the team-up comic! It's Superman and OMAC the One Man Army Corps in DC Comics Presents #61 as reviewed by the podcaster team-up of Siskoid and Xum Yukinori!

Listen to the Team-Up below, or subscribe to FW Team-Up on iTunes!

Relevant images and further credits at: FW Team-Up Supplemental

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28 responses to “FW Team-Up: Superman and OMAC

  1. Great episode fellas! I missed this one on the stands, but the Perez art called to me from a back issue bin at some point. It’s a lot of fun, and you didn’t get to see Superman unleash much back in the day, so that was a treat. The Earth-One Supes could be a bit of a braggard even this late into the Bronze Age, so Danny Dark’s over-confident voice does really work well in this story and many others for me.

    O.M.A.C. and Cheese can’t happen soon enough! And I hope to see a MurderMek Xum’s Who entry soon!

    Chris

  2. Fun show guys. I wonder why Perez–whose time was so valuable to DC Comics–was deemed worthy for a stort like this, featuring a character most people didn’t really care about? I wonder if the man requested to do it.

    Both team-up suggestions sound great, now I wish there had been an ongoing OMAC team-up book.

    Of all of Kirby’s 70s concepts, OMAC was the one that left me the most bewildered–I just could never make heads or tails of it. Now that I am closer to Kirby’s age when he did those books, I am astonished at the seemingly bottomless reserve of energy the man had to create. After three decades in the industry, having created dozens of iconic characters, he was still coming up with new stuff at a time most creators would start to wind down.

    On a side note, OMAC would probably make for a great line of action figures.

  3. Great show and perfect issue for this show, celebrating the concept.

    I think these books were meant to introduce some of these characters to a bigger audience. As the Brother Eye satellite is a big part of the OMAC mythos, I’m not surprised it is in the sky and not in the rock slag.

    I also liked the twist ending. I wonder what the guy on the ledge was thinking that whole time other than ‘I am about to die’,

    And, of course, the ‘misunderstanding fight’ between heroes is classic.

    I liked all the jokes and Robocop/Terminator riffs. Hysterical.

  4. Another enjoyable episode, gentlemen. Two words immediately came to my mind after hearing your synopsis of this story, parallel play. This is a term from child development that describes the type of play typically engaged in by children 2-3 years of age. In parallel play, two children play alongside each other, enjoying each others company, but not directly interacting with each other. To my mind, that pretty much sums up the relationship between OMAC and Superman in this tale.

    For my OMAC team-up, I would like to see OMAC and (pre-Infinite Crisis) Maxwell Lord square off against Murdermek and Metron’s evil computer.

  5. I remember having and absolutely loving this issue. It has everything a good team-up should have: tons of action in a great done-in-one story, with beautiful art. Great episode, I enjoyed your discussion of this wonderful issue.
    Otherwise, it’s kind of off topic, but why is Xum only now getting into podcasting? What a golden voice he has! Can’t wait for his show.

  6. Exclamation: Great episode! I hearby dub thee: Xum, Voice of Butter. Wow.

    Query: in OMAC’s appearance in the animated Brave and the Bold, Buddy Blank was … a janitor for the GPA. Was that a nod to this issue?

    Declaration: thanks for this podcast. Can’t wait to see which crazy team-up is next.

  7. Regarding whether Len Wein got the idea for this plot from the script to the first Terminator film, or they got the idea from Len, I would guess they both may have gotten the idea from Harlan Ellison’s story “Soldier”, which was an episode of the “Outer Limits” TV series. Harlan successfully sued the producers of “Terminator” and received a settlement as well as acknowledgement in the film’s credits.

    1. True, though I do not recall the future soldier travelling back in time to kill an ancestor of the enemy in either the short story or the Outer Limits episode… I believe it was the “two future combatants travelling to the present to continue their battle” that was the similarity between “Soldier” and “Terminator”…

  8. Hello! Excellent episode. I will probably look forward to your coverage of DC Comics Presents the most. If you weren’t aware, I do a podcast called, “The DC Comics Presents Show”. I will be going through all 97 issues and the 4 annuals. When I did this particular issue, I had no idea who or what O.M.A.C. was. So I had a little trouble. Hopefully it sounded OK to the listeners. (if I have any) I really enjoyed your take on this issue. I look forward to other DC Comics Presents issues you cover and to see how our views of the particular issue compare or differ. Great Job!

    1. I’m well aware of DCCPS! Yeah, DCCP was probably MY team-up book growing up, a bit like MTU was Shagg’s. So I have a LOT of love for the wonkier team-ups of the later half of the run – Bizarro, Kamandi, the Demon, the Forgotten Heroes, etc. – though in adulthood, I was smitten by Bob Haney’s Brave and the Bold and it now stands head and shoulders above the rest.

      The loose plan is to have an issue of each in every 6-episode block (MTU, B&B, DCCP, M2i1) in addition to some team-ups outside these core series. That may mean you only get your fix twice a year, but I might do some Holiday-inspired special episodes and Supes DID team up with Santa Claus…

  9. I loved this episode! I’m old enough to remember getting this issue when it first came out AND seeing THE TERMINATOR one year later. I think I would’ve been about 18 or 19 when the movie came out. I even remember sitting in the movie theatre (on the east side of NYC IIRC, near one of the old Forbidden Planet comic stores) and realizing that this story was heavily borrowing elements that had appeared in the DCCP story.

    Funny thing, though… I remembered the little credit that Julie Schwartz and Len Wein give to Harlan Ellison for elements in the story. Even while watching the movie, I remember seeing that little credit. I’ve tried looking online for a copy of that page and credit but I can’t seem to find it.

    Fortunately, though… People love Harlan Ellison enough to interview him. He’s funny and engaging and well-spoken and can really tell a tale. Here’s an edited interview he did for a certain famous Canadian show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRXB0h7sf70

    Ellison presents his side of the story, which seems really reasonable. One of the many things that makes his interactions with the movie folk different from the folk at DC is that Ellison was friends with Julie Schwartz and Len Wein. I read somewhere that Julie Schwartz would call Ellison at least once a week just to chat, so it’s not hard to imagine that this DCCP story would have come up . At the end of the youTube video, Ellison even offers the principle by which the movie people could have saved themselves a lot of headaches. The video’s worth checking out; clips from the Outer Limits episodes are offered for comparison (Robert Culp as the demon with the glass hand!) and shout-outs to gone-but-not-forgotten Starlog magazine are included.

  10. I’m fond of OMAC, probably my favorite Kirby written book, and if I’d had the time/energy I’d have done a spotlight episode of DC Bloodlines on him for Kirby’s centennial next week. Instead, I’ll just push the podcast I was working on all this week forward. I own this comic, but haven’t read it. OMAC is another one of those properties that doesn’t seem transferable to other creators, although guys like Paul Pope and Mike Allred may be exceptions. No, not Perez.

    “Days of Future Past” predates The Terminator by nearly half a decade, and Nimrod arrived so soon after the movie’s release that I have a hard time not assuming that either Chris Claremont drew from the same influences as Jim Cameron or he was in fact one of those influences himself. That would go double for Len Wein and his similarly titled “The Once-and-Future War!”

    I’d like to see OMAC team up with Hex, The Atomic Knights, Kamandi, and the rest of the non-Legion dystonia future characters to prevent The Great Disaster.

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