Saturday, May 29, 2021

POP-A-LOOZA: Martin Pasko's THE ALBATROSS (DC Comics, 1975)

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is my look back at a never-published DC Comics superhero from the '70s, Martin Pasko's The Albatross. The piece was written immediately after Pasko's death in May of last year.

Pasko had a ton of writing credits, and the unpublished exploits of The Albatross wouldn't even rate a footnote in his life story. I'm still a bit surprised that I have never seen it mentioned anywhere--anywhere--outside of my own reminiscence of hearing Pasko talk about The Albatross one afternoon in February of 1976, at the Super DC Con in New York. I mean, even if it were turn out that Pasko made the whole thing up as a story to tell comics fans at a convention (and I doubt that was the case), it still seems like something some pundit should have written about somewhere. The task of remembering The Albatross shouldn't rely solely upon a middle-aged blogger straining to recall what he heard at a writers' panel in a hotel ballroom when he was sixteen years old.

I wish there were a detailed account of that convention. I had such a wonderful time, and I would love to re-live that experience. Back Issue magazine published a brief retrospective of the Super DC Con, but I really, really want to read more about it. I've toyed with the idea of trying to craft a proper historical account of that convention, but my POV is too limited to do it justice. If anyone out there was there, I would dearly love to read your memories of that weekend.

In the mean time, you can browse through the convention's program book here. And until someone else comes forward with the true story of Martin Pasko's incarcerated crusader, we'll have to settle for my memory of The Albatross in the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

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