And that was just the effect that Victor Richards and his death at the age of forty had on the nation, when the effect upon the character of Thunderman was every bit as severe. The tragedy and sadness of Richards’ life and relatively sordid demise had seeped into the fabric of Thunderman himself, and the character would subsequently not appear on-screen for almost twenty years.

  5: Brothers Bros, Thunderman (1978) ***

  I can already hear groans and curses over my three-star rating for what many consider the greatest Thunderman movie of all time, but I can only remind you that this is just my personal and highly biased opinion, which you are free to ignore and almost certainly will. I should also advise you to buckle up, because this commentary only becomes more mean-spirited and perfunctory from here on in, as the illusion of Thunderman’s physical existence is ever more perfectly and expensively realised, while the character’s mythic essence, and whatever meaning he may have had, become things that we apparently no longer possess the art to capture, and fade from view altogether.

  By 1978, the Brothers Brothers corporation were the long-time owners of American Comics and had evidently decided that after twenty years, with the Victor Richards story largely forgotten, it might be possible to relaunch their potentially valuable property to a new audience. Determined to dispel the unhappy spectres of the character’s past, the company were prepared to spend enormous amounts of money to achieve their ends. Sir Laurence Olivier was cast as Thunderman’s father, Zoron, rumoured to have been paid a thousand dollars per syllable for his few impeccably delivered lines before he and his flying city are destroyed by super-pirates. Equally surprising, but presumably less costly, was the choice of Dirk Bogarde to play arch-enemy Felix Firestone, a genuinely menacing performance that was all but lost in the directing. The sole casting difficulty came in finding a big-name actor willing to play the main character, perhaps because the role still had a lingering odour of bad luck amongst the acting community. Both Robert De Niro and Harrison Ford had apparently declined the part, which eventually went to relative newcomer Saul Richard. Although I’m sure there were superstitious misgivings regarding the actor’s surname being so close to that of his fated predecessor, Richard brought a genuine commitment to the role, and had something of Donald Adams’s dark-eyed good looks. Equally spirited in her performance was Elaine Merchant, as the first Peggy Parks to even suggest that there may be an element of sexual attraction in her relationship with the purple paragon.

  So, with a strong cast, big budget, and special effects that were, for their time, pretty much state of the art, what, you may ask, is my problem? Well, I have a couple. First, there is the matter of tone: why employ Sir Laurence Olivier to lend such gravitas to the movie’s opening scenes, only to undermine Dirk Bogarde’s attempts at a truly sinister Felix Firestone by making him into a high-camp character worthy of the King Bee TV series? Who was this film aimed at, exactly?

  This is my second problem – despite the clowning around of the Firestone scenes, this appears to be a movie that is chiefly concerned with establishing an adult audience for 1930s children’s comic book hero Thunderman. The relationship between Thunderman and Peggy Parks is foregrounded to the point where it seems that this romance narrative is the film’s central story, perhaps in an attempt to give the hoped-for adult audience a conventional formula they could relate to. And the presentation of the film in general seems geared to this same end, slick and colourful with a late 1970s airbrushed quality to its glamour. It is, deliberately, a million miles from the hokey, threadbare, black and white charm that had been more than adequate for a forgiving audience of children. With its big-budget aura of importance, it is attempting to persuade people that a man from another dimension in a purple and gold opera costume is a serious dramatic proposition for grown-ups.

  It is as if Thunderman’s corporate owners had perhaps come to realise that a divine, imaginal entity cannot be conjured into ordinary, physical, American reality without becoming ruinously degraded in the process, and had instead elected to create a smooth and gorgeous artificial American reality where such a being could comfortably exist. Looking back from today’s perspective, the seamless, moneyed and good-looking vision of America conjured by the film looks very similar to the yuppie dreamland that, with Ronald Reagan, would arrive within a year or two. For all the film’s proficiency, there remains something about it that is only bland and reassuring – yet in spite of, or perhaps because of this, the movie was enthusiastically received, making a sequel inevitable.

  6: Brothers Bros, Thunderman II (1980) ***

  This, essentially, is more of the above, and is only enlivened by a marvellously deranged and power-crazed turn from Malcolm McDowell as exiled Thunderland despot, Lord Varex. Richard and Merchant’s relationship continues to take centre stage, although, as in almost eighty years of Peggy Parks continuity, nobody has the faintest idea where to go with it without irreversibly ruining the whole supposed dynamic.

  7: Brothers Bros, Thunderman III (1983) **

  By this point, after five years of diminishing returns and dwindling budgets, it had become clear that the franchise had lost not only its lustre, but also its wheels. Vincent Price does his best as comedy villain the Toymaster, while an older Mickey Rooney is acceptably bizarre as otherworldly prankster Thundermite, but neither can rescue the movie from a sense of impending doom.

  8: Brothers Bros, Thunderman IV: The Search for Love (1987) **

  With the release of Thunderman IV, that doom had arrived in full force. There’s no denying that the movie’s intentions were good: leading man Sam Richard wanted a story where Thunderman brings enduring love, tolerance and harmony to mankind, but what became of those intentions would be nightmarish if it weren’t also kind of funny. Problems with the budget – there wasn’t one – meant that instead of being shot in New York, Thunderman’s home city of Macropolis was relocated to Birmingham in the English Midlands, with the city’s famed Bullring shopping centre visible in many of the backgrounds. Another, possibly greater difficulty was that wanting a popular British director who was within budget, the film’s producers had chosen Val Guest, perhaps without realising that his biggest semi-recent commercial success had been with 1974’s softcore sex comedy, Confessions of a Window Cleaner. When Saul Richard quit the movie in protest at Guest’s proposed changes to the initial utopian concept, Confessions star Robin Askwith became the next incarnation of Thunderman. The Search for Love was reimagined as Thunderman’s personal search for erotic satisfaction, and most of the supposed humour lies in the mullet-styled hero using his Thundervision to see through the walls of ladies’ changing rooms, complete with BOI-OI-OING sound effects. Having failed to gain the unembarrassed adult audience it was hoping for, the franchise was now apparently seeking a viewing public of sniggering schoolboys, and the disaster that was Thunderman IV (I’ve given it two stars because it’s hilariously watchable) would ensure that it was the last big-screen outing for the character for the remainder of the twentieth century. Thunderman had ended once in tragedy and once in farce. Perhaps a wiser culture would have learned from this.

  9: Brothers Bros television series, When Ambrose Met Peggy (1993–1997) ***

  Starring Brian Ball and Kate Porter, this was a perfectly serviceable light romantic comedy, if one of the participants being omnipotent and from a different species fits your criteria for ‘light’.

  10: Brothers Bros television series, Littleburg (2001–2011) ***

  With Asher Tarrant as young Ambrose, Cherish Montcourt as teen sweetheart Pauline Price, and Derek Danner as youthful frenemy ‘Flick’ Firestone, this was a perfectly serviceable high school mystery-adventure, if one of the participants being etc. etc. fits your criteria for ‘serviceable’. And if you don’t mind that the series’ only compelling mystery is ‘Why haven’t they called this thing Thunderboy?’ (Spoiler alert: whenever a superhero changes a successful name or basic costume, or drops out of the continuity altogether, it’s always because they were dying sales-wise or, as in this instance, because there was talk of legal action from the character’s plundered creators, Thunderboy’s being the estate of Simon Schuman and David Kessler.) The take-home message from this period of the character’s screen career would seem to be, ‘it’s OK to do something with the superhero Thunderman, as long as it isn’t really a superhero story, and as long as you don’t really mention Thunderman’. However, these shows would seem to have once more raised the tantalising possibility of Thunderman as a viable on-screen property, as the following entries surely attest.

  11: Brothers Bros, Thunderman Comes Back Again (2006) **

  Just as 1978’s Thunderman came nearly twenty years after Victor Richards’ shocking death had sent the original screen franchise down in flames, so too does this offering from director Dennis Midler arrive almost two decades after Robin Askwith’s pumping buttocks had horribly concluded the character’s second lease of life. It’s well enough done, and with the then current beginnings of the CGI superhero movie boom in the air, it must have seemed like a sensible idea, yet the only vision the movie offers is a yearning nostalgia for the Saul Richard days – leading man Christopher Gent is Richard’s near doppelganger – and it does nothing to demonstrate why the twenty-first century would need a Thunderman. But, with Massive’s properties like Freak Force heralding the start of the Massive Cinematic Universe, Brothers and American must have felt an urgent need to get their most famous character up there on the cinema hoardings again. It would take them around seven years.

  12: Brothers Bros, Man of Storms (2013) **

  Since the late 1980s, the comic book industry has been suffering from the self-inflicted malaise of having to realise its originally delightful children’s characters as ‘dark’, grim, and, if possible, psychopathic versions of their former selves, to service the needs of a dwindling crowd of habituated superhero fans, whose physical age has long since outstripped its emotional equivalent. Well, in Man of Storms, that malady/fashion finally catches up with Thunderman. As for the film’s eye-boggling special effects, I should confess that I would rather see an enormous fake rat-tail dragged across a studio floor while Vera Marshall acts her horrified response than witness the gleeful citywide carnage depicted here; the knowledge that whatever spectacle we are seeing is achievable given enough money robs it of any genuine wonder or awe. When most of our contemporary superhero movies are showcases for their escalating special effects, then the question of which film has the greater cinematic or artistic value becomes a matter of competing CGI workshops, and goes better unasked.

  13: Brothers Bros, King Bee vs. Thunderman: Supermen United (2016) **

  I saw an online review of this movie that said, ‘It has all the drama one would expect from a story that exploits the legendary, age-old enmity between pollinating insects and meteorological phenomena’, and I can’t think of anything I can usefully add to that.

  14: Brothers Bros, United Supermen (2017) *

  And here we are, at the end of the line. The reasons this long-anticipated American Comics game changer in the box-office wars with Massive is such an unqualified disaster are manifold, but somewhere underneath them all is the sorry fact that neither of the major comic book companies have even a pretence at continuity any more. None of the characters seem to be sure which version of themselves they are at any given time, and might anyway suffer a visit from the Didn’t Happener and end up as someone else entirely at the next semi-annual reboot. The United Supermen of America are now a couple of different squadrons with a galaxy of rotating members, and don’t really constitute enough of a definitive entity to make a film about. Especially not one as mangled as this.

  The basic incoherence of the comic book business is perfectly represented in the making of this movie. As is apparently standard practice in today’s film industry, rather than have a coherent and well-conceived script from the start, the current preference is to assemble an expensive cast and then shoot a lot of scenes that the producers or director thought would be ‘cool’. Then, at the editing stage, when it’s realised that there is nothing remotely resembling a story, the actors are called back in to shoot the additional footage necessary to make any kind of sense of the existing travesty.

  All this happened to United Supermen, with one added complication being an abrupt change of directors halfway through the process, and another being the ridiculous tale of what has been called either ‘Monkey Christ Thunderman’ or ‘Thunderasta’. What had happened was that after finishing the initial shoot on United Supermen, actor Stephen Beacher – who had played Thunderman since Man of Storms – had moved on to his next role, this being marooned hermit Ben Gunn in a new adaptation of Treasure Island. The method-school actor had already grown dreadlocks and a lengthy beard in preparation for the part, and when he was recalled as Thunderman for the reshooting of United Supermen, his pirate-movie’s producers insisted that he be neither shaven nor shorn. This might have still been somehow salvageable had a thrift-conscious and priority-blind Brothers Bros not entrusted the necessary digital retouching to someone who was plainly barely competent, and who left both Stephen Beacher and Thunderman looking, indeed, like the notoriously botched ‘Monkey Christ’.

  At least here, at the bitter end of the character’s trajectory into physical being, Thunderman has finally gained some kind of resemblance to a religious figure. Can we stop now?

  13. (May, 2014)

  ‘No, I’m good with my Pepsi, but you go ahead and get another. I stopped drinking getting on thirty years ago, ’85, before they took me on at American. It was kind of a condition of employment, I guess. Dave Moskowitz, he’s, like, teetotal? So, no. No drink. But if you’re making any more trips to the powder room, then count me in. And you get as wasted as you want. It’s what conventions are for.

  ‘So what was I saying? I was telling you about Milt Finefinger and Byron James’s new forties project, and then I said how Byron was doing Anal Robot for Bordello Comics and … right! Dick Duckley. You were asking who he was. I can’t believe you never heard of Dick Duckley.

  ‘Duckley, he’s the editor on the Bordello porno-comics line. Me who got him the job, in a lot of ways. But what’s really funny is, I mean, you’ve seen Bordello’s stuff, right? Superheroines giving blow jobs and taking it up the ass and whatever. What’s really funny is that Duckley, who’s editing this smut, he’s this super-straight religious guy, or anyway he used to be.

  ‘First time I met him would be ’98, ’99, something like that. I started out dealing in comic art before they hired me at American, and I still do a little now and then. Anyway, back in the late nineties, I get this handwritten letter – and the guy’s handwriting is just beautiful – asking if I can find pages of Lou Shapiro’s work on the old Peggy Parks comic and, get this, he’s signed it, “I remain, sir, your obedient servant, Richard S. Duckley”.

  ‘So I’m expecting he’s this old geezer, but he sounds like he’s got plenty of money, so I write him back, tell him I’ll see what I can do. How it works – and don’t tell anyone I said this – but up at American they got these vaults where the originals are kept, going back fifty, sixty years. Most of the artists are dead by now anyway, and I have kind of an arrangement, yeah? I pick up these absolutely terrific Shapiro pages from Peggy Parks #14, and say I’ll deliver them by hand.

  ‘Yeah, I know. He’s out in Connecticut and it’s quite a haul, but I’m intrigued, you know? I drive up there and it’s this big old house right out in the middle of nowhere. I ring the doorbell and this young guy answers – younger than me, anyway. Maybe his mid-thirties? I ask if I can speak to Richard Duckley, figuring it’s this guy’s dad or something. He says, “I’m Richard Duckley.”

  s‘He invites me in and we talk, and I get the whole story. His mom and dad were these strict religious conservatives who thought the sixties and the seventies – all the sex and the drugs – they thought it was just all the work of Satan, literally. They inherited a lot of money, so they hire tutors – all guys – and they raise Duckley in this, like, indestructible bubble of Jesus, right from when he’s a baby.

  ‘He never goes to school; he never plays with other kids. Never even gets to see a photograph of a young woman until he’s in his late teens. By the time he got to read a daily paper, it would have these square holes in, where they’d cut out pictures and articles they didn’t want him to look at.

  ‘What cracks me up, he told me that the first pretty girl he ever saw was Peggy Parks. No, I’m serious. Turns out Duckley’s dad got it into his head there was some kind of religious message in Thunderman, how “Thunderman” is just a primitive name for God and like that, so those are the only comic books his folks let him read: Thunderman, Exciting, Teddy Baxter, Peggy Parks, and so on.

  ‘You should have seen him looking over those Lou Shapiro pages, where Peggy Parks is at some interplanetary beauty contest in a fifties one-piece swimsuit, like I was showing him hardcore animal porn or something. He bought all the artwork – no, I don’t want to think about what happened to it, either – and asked if I could get him any more. I don’t know. I guess I took pity on the guy. I mean, his parents sheltered him from the world all those years.

  ‘There was no TV in the place, no radio, no phone. He was this big, shy, overgrown Christian kid who didn’t know how to talk to people or how to act, not with guys and certainly not with women. He’s living like this until ’96, so he’s around thirty-three, when Mom and Dad get totalled in a car wreck and, bang, he’s on his own.

  ‘Sure, his folks left him the house, lot of cash in trust funds, and he’s got people who call by to clean and stuff, but when you think about it, it’s like the guy’s totally alone on an alien planet he don’t know the first thing about. You can see, somebody like that, how he’d identify with Thunderman.