I’ve joked for years that judging by Prez and other books Joe Simon wrote in the 1970s, he’d gotten into some really good drugs.
By comparison with Prez, Brother Power, The Geek is a gallon of LSD. Presumably shared with Joe Orlando (he edited it) and Carmine Infantino (as publisher I presume he gave it thumbs up).
First, let’s deal with the name. “Geek” in the 1960s and earlier didn’t have the connotations it does now of “someone who obsesses over pop culture.” Drawn from an old English word for a fool, it referred to the “geek act” in a carnival, AKA “the Wild Man of Borneo.” The geek was a drunk who, in return for a bottle or two of rotgut a day, dressed up in an animal skin, snarled at customers and bit the heads off chickens. No I’m not kidding (Harlan Ellison has an essay on watching the audience when he worked as a carnie. It’s good, if unpleasant reading).
That definition of geek does seem fitting for the freaky thing we meet in this issue.
Simon’s rationalization for calling him “Brother Power” is that the hippies who unintentionally created him on that page are part of a cult so it’s like monks calling themselves Brother Jeremiah and Brother Abraham. Except there’s no sign of any sort of cult behavior. They’re just regular hippies. Which for Simon is bad enough — notice his comment about “useless lives” above?
Maybe it’s the Protestant work ethic but men who drop out instead of joining the rat race have always irritated mainstream America. The beatniks. The hippies. Guys who live with their parents as adults and play videogames instead of getting jobs (a particularly stupid trope given how widespread gaming is — hell, my mum played videogames!). Women who have premarital sex because if guys don’t have to support a wife to get laid, they have no reason to accomplish anything (another extremely moronic trope0. Unless they’re the idle rich men should be keeping their nose to the grindstone like their parents did and that’s why America is going to the dogs1
Simon says on the issue’s text page that “the hippie scene fascinated me.” Unfortunately it seems to have done so in a Kids These Days! Get Off My Lawn! way, unlike Bob Haney, who seems cool with the hippie scene in Teen Titans #15 —
— or Jack Kirby, who did his own take a couple of years later with the Hairies in Jimmy Olsen and his own Forever People. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing negatively about hippies but Simon’s critique doesn’t go deeper than a TV sitcom of that era.
As you can gather from the cover, the “dangers in hippie-land” include battling bikers. So does Haney’s Teen Titans story, whereon Captain Rumble attacks the local hippie community. Did this represent a running theme in American culture that as an English kid I missed completely? Or are DC’s writers recycling shticks from the Beach Party movies where Eric von Zippel’s bikers constantly clashed with the surfers?
In Brother Power, the Geek #1, there’s a lot more going on than bike gangs. Brother Power ends up in a freak show—
— and runs for public office.
And yes, he also fights bikers and even the National Guard before hurling himself to his doom in desperation.
Is the Geek — no more? Dead as Bucky and Uncle Ben? We should be so lucky.
As I don’t have that issue, however, and don’t feel inclined to shell out on eBay, the senses-shattering story of Brother Power, The Geek #2 will not be told here (nor, obviously, later attempts to use him).
#SFWApro. All Brother Power art by Joe Simon, Titans cover by Nick Cardy.
