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The seventies reeked with bad superhero creations, built either to shift the demographics of the superhero universe to be more inclusive of women and minorities, or to follow some volatile fad that vanished, leaving these characters beached on islands built of their own datedness and lack of appeal.
At the risk of starting an avalanche of stupid arguments (made more so by the trivial nature of the subject matter), I herein propose that the coolest of the bad superheroes that made one-shots (or should have stopped with one-shots) was a Marvel Comics creation named Razorback.
Razorback appeared in Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man in its
first few years, when the team-up element lay heavily in that magazine.
The occasional new character appeared within its pages (like El Tigre Blanco),
and Razorback was one such figure.
Razorback was a trucker super-hero from Arkansas. He wore a green costume adorned with a pig's hide (much the same way that Hercules wore the skin of the Lion of Nemea, with the beast's head forming a cap). He had a beer gut and a remote-controlled tractor trailer rig.
No one piece made Razorback cool. The pieces all combined to make him so. Consider the following details:
Razorback started as the first superhero from Arkansas.
Can you imagine this? The Marvel Universe treats points outside of
Manhattan as slightly less accessible (and certainly more foreign and unimaginable)
than, say, other galaxies and alternate dimensions. Having a superhero
from Arkansas -- and glad of it, too -- was an unexpected blast
of coolness from an east coast publishing magnate.
Razorback took a pig as his mascot.
Superheroes patterned on animals are usually based on great cats way
up the food chain, magnificent (or very predatory) birds, extremely dangerous
carnivores, or monstrously large and powerful quadrupeds. To pick anything
in the pig family puts Razorback in a brotherhood that includes only himself
and the amazing Wonder Wart-Hog.
Razorback was a trucker hero.
Granted, this reflects the faddishness of the mid-70s CB craze, with
all of its annoying and pervasive inanity. Nonetheless, Razorback wasn't
some trucker wannabe; he rode a real rig.
Razorback had a real beer gut.
One found no chiseled abdominal six-pack on this man; no, indeed, he
bore the build of a man who lived on Budweiser, biscuits, and gravy, served
at more truck stops than the likes of us will ever count.
Razorback's rig was named Big Pig.
Does this really need explanation?
The essence of Razorback, I suppose, was his absurdity. In a superhero market awash with disposable and interchangeable killer vigilantes, mindless kung-fu clones, and dishwater-bland tokens, Razorback actually demonstrated so many ridiculous traits that he was cool in the same way that parody characters such as Wonder Wart-Hog, Normalman, and Megaton Man are.
Some folks out there may be familiar with today's dark, morbid, angst-driven, excessively violent, sometimes lewd, frequently gory, semi-nihilistic comics. Imagine the end-of-the-world scenarios, the corporate dictatorships, the mutant holocausts, and other formula elements of these books.
Is the picture in your head, big sharp teeth and ninety-five inch chests (male and female) and all?
Now imagine Razorback walking in with a big tire tool and his remote controlled semi. That would be a mag worth buying!
I had written this entire, long-winded essay up to this point and had filed it for some post-production when it became imperative to go look up some more comics, and something I read elsewhere on the web got me looking into She-Hulk comics because of Byrne's work in them--particularly the tongue-in-cheek writing he used during his run on her book. So, in the middle of 800 "is Superman really dead?" comics in the 'S' section, one single issue of She-Hulk remained.
I opened the damn thing at random, and what did I see but the Big Pig II. At this I simply assumed advanced age was playing with my brain, but on the hope that this wasn't just an inside joke, I turned a few pages, and who did I see, rescued from the oblivion of the 70s, but Razorback himself! The illustration on this page comes from just this magazine.
The very fact that John Byrne thought to include Razorback and his remote-controlled semi in a comic book at all raises him in my estimation from someone who is merely very good at what he does to someone with vision.
Here's to the Glory that is the Big Pig II.
Return to the Quarter Bin.
