Hey everyone!
With Mac Gregor's permission, I'm doing another entry on entertainment in the world of 'The Union Forever'. This time, I'll be focusing on one of the most popular American comics books ever created.
Captain Venture (1962-1996)
A picture of Captain Venture circa 1963, during the 'Solar Age' of his comic book run
Captain Venture is considered to be one of the most popular comic book superheros of the 20th century. Many historians hold that the character is responsible in no small part for the popularity and enduring influence of the comic book industry. Several careers of some of the most prominent storywriters and artists in the business have worked on Captain Venture over the decades.
While the Captain Venture that most are familiar first debut in 1962, the origins and concept of the character go back much further. During the Great War, Corporal Josef Pomerantz was a Jewish immigrant from Romania who served in the trenches with the American Expeditionary Force as a medic.
While caring for patients, he would draw doodles for them of an American fighter pilot called Captain Venture, a dashing figure who looked every part the ideal American hero, and was usually drawn doing comical things such as socking Napoleon square in the jaw, rescuing a gorgeous woman from hapless jeering Austrians, or cheekily flying his plane, the Ruby Gale, leaving foes in his dust. The illustrations cheered up injured soldiers and it was not uncommon to find carvings on the sides of wooden support beams in the American trenches proclaiming things like "Venture says lick 'em for Uncle Sam!" or "Keep 'er steady, Venture protects".
One of the later imaginings of the Ruby Gale, an airship that Levi named after his future wife and his mother.
Although the doodles were popular, and many in the public relations branch of the Army were looking for him, Levi never came forward to claim his work for reasons that still remain unclear. He stored many of his unfinished drawings in a shoebox in the family attic, and started a tailor shop in New Jersey upon his return to the United States after the war.
Upon his death in 1959, his son Aaron, a talented artist in his own regard, was clearing out his father's attic when he came across the box filled with Levi's work. Shocked at the discovery, and realizing the secret his father had kept all those years, Aaron decided to honor his father's legacy while adding his own twist.
While his father's drawings had various fantasy elements in it, Aaron had always been inspired by the science fiction novels of Robert Wilcox. He decided to take the risk of working less hours his father's tailor shop, and work on publishing his own take on Captain Venture: a dashing, daring, astronaut that flew across the cosmos, finding adventure wherever he went and and upholding American values along the way. After several months of fruitless searching, a failing entertainment company by the name of Amazing World Comics took a risk on his product. The company had mostly concerned itself with detective tales, or science-horror stories and they were losing ground to their more established rivals in the industry. They gave Pomerantz a three issue contract in their
Tales to Amaze comic, hoping that it would help boost flagging sales.
When his first Captain Venture story debuted in the March 1962 issue of
Tales to Amaze, it set itself in a science fiction world of the 25th century, where "humanity has conquered the barbarian within, and now looks to conquer the stars". While taking place in a fantastical world that was rich with Aaron's bizarre and ingenious ideas, the comic stayed true to his father's messages, and contained light-hearted, comical stories that as Aaron put it: "tell tales that give a man hope, and make him smile even in his darkest moments, just like my father tried to do". Soon, Amazing Worlds Comics was demanding more and more comics about the exploits of Captain Daniel Venture, and Aaron took the risk of quitting his job completely to work on the series full time.
The comic was wildly successful, and soon Captain Venture comics were sold in every drug store with merchandise was flying off the shelf as fast as they could put it out. Phrases and terms from the comic started to enter into language at large, and people who were not usually fans of the medium soon found themselves lining up when a new shipment was arriving. In 1966, Amazing Worlds Comics officially changed its name to Venture Comics as a sign of gratitude towards the character that put them on the entertainment map.
Originally, Aaron stuck close to his father's ideas, using footnotes that Josef had included under his illustrations, but as Pomerantz became more comfortable with his writing and completely used up whatever sparse story notes his father had handed down, he started to take Venture further out into the stars. New alien races were discovered, and while some critiqued them as thinly veiled allusions to cultures and societies of the day, most were happy to pick up a new issue and see Captain Venture outfox the evil Chairman Kwan or the brutal warlord Hidalgo the Conqueror. Pomerantz had also seen the horrors of persecution firsthand, and firmly believed that the stories he wrote in Venture Comics could be used to spread messages of tolerance and individualism. Soon, Captain Venture was meeting, working, and becoming friends with all sorts of aliens that were very thin allusions for the persecuted in the country and the world at large.
Issue #132 of Captain Venture in 1972 during what was called the 'Schwartz Age'. Venture was always pictured as friendly towards his alien shipmates, and Pomerantz made constant strides to portray Venture as a man who judged someone by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
Although Pomerantz himself was a talented artist, he preferred to focus on the stories at the heart of the comics and leave the illustrations to others. As the years went on, Pomerantz would work with some of the best artists in the industry, with many of them contributing to the many 'ages' that the comic went through. He was also keen to work with other writers that Venture Comics employed, and would often end the calendar year with a collaborative miniseries that saw Captain Venture dealing with some of the current issues of the age. Some of the best comic book stories ever made, such as
Exodus from Nebular V, concerning the horrors of an alien civilization fleeing the destruction of their planet, to
The Great Devourer, which saw a cold war between the Nova Union and the Ron'Tarr Hegemony became hot, were created during these collaborations. The public ate it up. In a 1979 poll, Captain Venture and many of the other crew members on board his new ship
the Rubicon were some of the most recognizable American figures in the world, trailing only behind Ricky Raccoon and Shane Bayard's other Dreamworld characters.
After almost forty years of writing and drawing the character, Aaron Pomerantz announced his retirement from the comic book industry to focus on his family as his health was beginning to fail him and in 1996, published his very last issue of Captain Venture, a comic which today could fetch a large sum of money for a first edition on one of the various globtrix marketplaces. Venture Comics quickly named a replacement, but found that capturing the Venture spirit was easier said than done. Soon, people began whispering about the 'Venture curse' that caused many a writer and artist to produce sub-par quality work and tank their career after they were mercifully removed from the series. After gamely attempting to limp along for almost ten years, Venture Comics quietly announced that they were cancelling the series that had given them their very name. While many fans were outraged at the decision, few had any idea about what could be done to fix it.
