Presenting classic graphic stories in tribute to the amazing women and men of the medical profession...our front-line defenders from plagues, pandemics, and disease!
You thought that, during the 1970s, we were becoming more sensitive to ethnic humor?
You obviously weren't around then, bunkie!
While TV series like All in the Family and films like Kentucky Fried Movie were cleverly skewering racial stereotypes, some pop culture contributors were still indulging in them, as this (not surprisingly) never-reprinted feature from Marvel's Crazy Magazine #43 (1978) proves!
I don't know what writer Fred Wolfe and artist John Langton were thinking when they created this, but the fact that editor Paul Laikin let it see print doesn't speak well for any of their sensibilities!
Much like Blacula, The Omega Man is one of the few 1950s-1970s genre films...
...that didn't have a "straight" comics adaptation!
For those under-40s who don't "get" the dated punchline, the final reveal shows the leader to be the primary character of the politically-incorrect 1970s TV series All in the Family.
Illustrated by John Severin (with an assist on likenesses by his sister, master caricaturist Marie Severin), this story from Major Publications' Cracked #100 (1972) is the only adaptation and only spoof of the movie, which itself is the second movie adaptation of Richard Matheson's novelette I Am Legend!
(The first was 1964's Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price!)
All three versions specify that a virus kills most of the human population and mutates almost all the survivors into creatures (ghouls/vampires/zombies depending on which version you're watching)!
Note: two of the three cinema versions specify that the disease is man-made!
(The original novella indicates it's a natural mutation of rabies and carried by animals!)
In the Will Smith movie, it's called the "Krippen Virus" and was intended to destroy cancer cells.
In the Charlton Heston flick, it's nameless biological weapons used by Red China and the USSR in a border conflict which gets out of control!
In the Vincent Price movie, the plague's cause is unspecified.
Plus, the lead character in all three movies is an MD!
Last Man on Earth: Dr Robert Morgan (Vincent Price)
Omega Man: Dr Robert Neville (Charlton Heston)
I Am Legend: Dr Robert Neville (Will Smith)
BTW, Heston's character, Robert Neville, is a US Army MD, who creates a serum from his own blood, which Dutch (one of the unaffected young survivors who's also a medical student) can utilize to keep the others from "turning"! Trivia:The Simpsons did their own satire of the 1970s movie as part of the annual Halloween "Treehouse of Horror" series...
OK, it's more "inspired" than an actual satire, but it is funny!
