Issue 12: U.S. 1

Hop into your big rigs and get ready for a wild ride! In this episode, we're going to be talking about U.S. 1, Marvel's licensed series about a long-haul trucker who also happened to be a superhero.

Episode 12 Transcript

[00:00:00] Mike: If you're a middle-aged white guy, maybe trying to sit there and write about the troubles that indigenous people from other countries face, maybe don't do that. Just my ten cents.

Welcome to Ten Cent Takes, the podcast where we hand-wave plot holes like it's nobody's business, one issue at a time. My name is Mike Thompson and I am joined by my cohost of chaos, Jessika Frazer.

Jessika: Well, hello. 

Mike: Hello.

Jessika: How are you doing? 

Mike: Uh, I am doing a lot better now that I am not on jury duty anymore. So.

Jessika: Woo. 

Mike: I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a [00:01:00] civic duty that we should all be happy to perform, but it's really nice when you don't have to do it.

Jessika: I've been on a jury before. 

Mike: Was it, a cool case?

Jessika: No, it was a disturbing, unsettling case, but it was still a civic case? It was just, Yeah.

It was, it was not great. And I couldn't talk about it. So let's just say I, I took out a lot of my angst with a tennis racket against the wall. Not, not the racket itself, but hitting the ball against the wall a lot.

Mike: Yeah, 

Jessika: But, civic, duty, it is. So I was 19 at the time. 

Mike: I think the last time I had to report for jury duty in person I was 25, give or take.

Jessika: Mm. 

Mike: And then I got dismissed because they asked me if I would believe a teenager's word over a cop, and at the time I was like, hell no. And these days.

Jessika: Yeah. Different opinions now. 

Mike: Yeah. [00:02:00]

Tangent aside, the reason that we're here on this podcast is because we like to look at and talk about comic books in ways that are both fun and informative. We like to look at the weirdest, silliest, strangest, and coolest moments, and examine how they have been woven into pop culture and history in general. 

In this episode, we're hitting the open road of the Marvel Universe and looking at U.S. 1, a 1980s maxi-series about a superhero big rig trucker. But before we go down that road, what is one cool thing that you have read or watched lately?

Jessika: So, I had a suggestion made to me by Lauren, from Outer Planes in Santa Rosa. Hey Lauren. And she told me about a comic that is set in the same universe as the Alice in Leatherland that I started reading and I've had on my pull list now. 

Mike: Yeah, the one that you mentioned a couple episodes ago? 

[00:03:00] Jessika: Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And so it was also from Black Mask and it's called Destiny, NY.  I'm on issue one, which is a veritable chonker,  it's absolutely awesome. There are two girls kissing in a closet within the first three pages, so you know I'm already in. And it's cool because it's set in a version of New York where magic exists, and follows a school for kids that have been told by one seer or another that they have a destiny or a prophecy to fulfill. And the students have different abilities and visual characteristics, like one has a third eye and she's supposed to like, see the greatest lie out of the truths or something like that.

And she's like, but I don't even know what that is.  It's all super vague, like these poor kids. And I've grabbed the first five issues, and I will be tearing through these and no [00:04:00] time. I'm sure, cause it's already super fun. 

Mike: Yeah, that sounds fantastic, to be completely honest. There was a book that I read about a year ago called Magic for Liars, which is a boarding school for magic users. And then the sister of, one of the faculty is called in to investigate a death, and it's really cool because she's not a magic user, but her sister who is part of the faculty is so it's, it was cool. I liked it a lot.

Jessika: That's neat. 

Mike: But yeah, that was a cool book. 

Jessika: Nice. 

Mike: Yeah.

Jessika: Well, what about you? What you've been reading, watching, listening to? 

Mike: All right. So I'm always mildly embarrassed to admit that I'm a Conan fan, mainly because I think so many people just associate them with Arnold Schwarzenegger and those middling to not-good movies that they made with him in the eighties. Um, yeah, but I really fell in love with his Comics back in 2005 or so,  when they were being done by Dark Horse and they were really, really good.

They were these wonderfully dark, low fantasy stories that always seem to [00:05:00] balance like action and tragedy and comedy really well. And Marvel got the character back a couple of years ago, so they've been doing really cool work with them lately.  The new Conan series is really fun and feels really true to the original stories, but they've also displaced him through time, and now they've got them hanging out in the mainstream Marvel Universe via this series. 

Jessika: Oh, interesting. 

Mike: Yeah. And it's in the series called the Savage Avengers.  It's wild. It's written by Gerrry Duggan, who, he wrote, arguably the best Conan story that I've ever read in Conan 2099, which is they took that Spider-Man 2099 universe, and then they slapped him right in the middle of it. 

Jessika: Oh. 

Mike: It it's great, like the way that it was written was so perfect. And it's one of those books where anybody who sits there and even if they say they're not a Conan fan, I just say, you need to read this. It's wonderful.  But anyway, so Savage Avengers features him going on adventures with characters like Wolverine [00:06:00] Deadpool, the Punisher and Electra.

It's so dumb, but it's so much fun. Like, early on in the series,  he gets a Venom- symbiate joined with them, but it's really weak. So it can only form weapons for him. 

Jessika: Okay. 

Mike: It's just it, it’s great. It's an absolute guilty pleasure, and I refuse to apologize for this. So it was unfortunately not available in Marvel Unlimited, which is probably why I hadn't heard about it, but the back issues are all pretty cheap, and I grabbed a ton of them from Brian's comics on my last run, and I've just been having a blast reading them. We probably should do an episode actually, where we talk about the fact that Conan has been in comics for almost 50 years. And 

Jessika: Oh. 

Mike: He started at Marvel originally, and now he's back at Marvel, but there was a long hiatus.

Jessika: Ooh. I want to hear that arc. Absolutely. 

Mike:  All right. Moving right along. 

So as tempting as it is to just dive right [00:07:00] into U.S. 1 the comic and its strangeness, I don't think we can talk about it without covering some background info first. So, have you ever heard the term trucking culture before?

Jessika: I've absolutely heard of trucking culture, but I'm not too familiar with the intricacies.  My uncle drove a truck for years, but I think he's retired at this point. 

Mike: Okay. I think it's something that a lot of people aren't really aware of, or they hear about it and then they start making jokes. Like, I got some glimpses of it when one of my photography gigs have me living on a tour bus for a few months. So, we would visit a lot of legit truck stops in the middle of nowhere.

And I'm not talking gas stations, I'm talking full rest stops where restaurants served truckers before other patrons,  the bathrooms had shower stalls and all of the stores felt like kind of miniature Walmarts. They were just massive. And they had anything that you could think of you might need on a long road trip.

[00:08:00] It's this side that, if you live in an urban environment folks, aren't really going to see or understand, and it's the staggeringly huge thing that most people never even seem to think about. But I mean, trucking is this major part of the United States and its industry  as noted in this factoid from the American trucking associations, if you would be so kind.

Jessika: Nearly every good consumed in the U S is put on a truck at some point. As a result, the trucking industry hauled 72.5% of all freight transported in the United States in 2019, equaling to 11.84 billion tons. The trucking industry was a $791.7 billion industry in that same year representing 80.4% of the nation's freight bill. 

Mike: Yeah. It's I was actually, I was really surprised actually to see that it was that much. I assumed that trains [00:09:00] and shipping were at least a little bit bigger.

Jessika: No, because we don't here's the problem is that because of the auto industry in the United States, we stifled the ability to make all the train tracks necessary, to get the things to all the places we need. And now it's horrendously expensive to go on a train. Yeah. I don't know that people know that about the United States.

So for our international listeners: you can't take trains here, it’s very expensive. 

Mike: Yeah. First of all, there's no real national rail system. And, and second, the rail system that does exist is prohibitively expensive, unless you are a not far distance commuter.  Like I took Amtrak for a couple, for about a year traveling between Sacramento and San Francisco a couple of times a week.

And it was great. It was less expensive to do that a couple of times a week than it was to drive down. But [00:10:00] yeah, it's prohibitively expensive for most people. 

Jessika: Yeah. And there are some cities in the United States that do have a decent transportation system. Portland has a decent one in New York, obviously that there are other places to Chicago, yeah.  But I mean, for the most part across country, especially because we're such a large country,  and we are of course expected to share things. California has to share everything. Listen to me, I sound so greedy.

Mike: I know. Yeah. What does it, we have the, I think it's like it's top five or top 10 economies in the world.

Jessika: We're the top sixth economy in the world by ourselves. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, So if we just dumped off everyone else, the rest of the states would be screwed. Actually a few would hold their own, but those middlin’ states.

Mike: Yeah.

Jessika: Suffering. 

Mike: Well, as big as it is, the trucking industry, as we know it, [00:11:00] isn't even a hundred years old. Uh, yeah, so really, trucks were first used extensively by the military in WWI, and then trucking became prominent in the 1930s because of the increased construction on paved roads. So, it didn't take long after that, before truckers became a part of American pop culture. They started having songs and movies about them.

And as noted by Shane Hamilton in his book, Trucking Country: the Road to America's Walmart Economy, there was this mythology that almost lionized truckers. 

Jessika: Hmm. 

Mike: If you would, uh, do us all the favor of reading out the section that I found that describes it pretty well.

Jessika: The image of the respectable trucker circulated outside the world of Hollywood in the 1950s. As truckers became known as the Knights of the Road for helping stranded motorists, and using their blinkers and [00:12:00] headlights as courtesy signals. This image was further reinforced by the standard driver's uniform of the era: trim, neat pants and button shirt, and the chauffeur's cap.

The masculine mythologies of trucking moved increasingly into a wider cultural world in the 1950s and 1960s. As the image of the truck driving man was reflected back to truckers by movies and music. 

Mike: Yeah. So the 1970s were when trucking hit, it's kind of Zenith point and pop culture. They wound up being presented as kind of this modern version of cowboys, you know, wandering nomads who rebelled against the oppressive rule of law while still operating under their own kind of honor code.

There were a ton of movies and songs during this decade that romanticized the trucker life. And a lot of these have since faded into obscurity, but this was the period when we got that song Convoy by CW McCall, which also inspired a movie with a very young shirtless Kris Kristofferson, um, [00:13:00] uh, Smokey in the Bandit came out in 1977 and it was the number three grossing movie of the year behind Star Wars.

And there's also a really bad Chuck Norris action Flint called Breaker Breaker. Like it was a moment in pop culture.

Jessika: Are you really going to say that a Chuck Norris movie was bad? What if he's right behind you? 

Mike: I mean, yeah.

Jessika: It's always a threat. Don't don't deny it. 

Mike: Man. Remember when we all used to like Chuck Norris and we thought he was cool before we went off the deep end and it turned out he's just the worst. Remember those days?

Jessika: Oh no. We have a nefarious character, nefarious character alert. 

Mike: Yeah. What a shock. 

Jessika: Oh, not on our podcast. 

Mike: I know. All right. Well, okay. So the [00:14:00] eighties, this all started to change in the eighties when truckers started being portrayed more villainously, or at least poorly in media, like Thelma and Louise, you've seen Thelma and Louise, right? 

Jessika: Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. You remember how there's that gross trucker who keeps on harassing them.

Jessika: Yes. 

Mike: Yeah. And, the eighties, it was starting to decline, but it wasn't quite there yet. The nineties was when it really picked up and we'll discuss that in a little bit, 

Jessika: Hmm. 

Mike: But at the time that this comic project started, big rig truckers were still on the high side of public opinion.

So we've talked in previous episodes about how Marvel wound up undergoing a commercial Renaissance in the early eighties, under the guidance of Jim Shooter. Particularly, you know, with Saturday morning cartoons and all that stuff. 

Jessika: Mm. 

Mike: One of the major sources of the success came in the form of toy companies, partnering with the publisher for licensed comic adaptations and arguably, the biggest example of this kind of success came from [00:15:00] partnerships with Hasbro when Marvel created the characters and lore for both Transformers in G.I. Joe. So U.S. 1 was a comic that came about from another partnership, but this one was with a different toy company. It was called Tyco Toys and Tyco wanted to do a licensed comic based on their U.S. 1 brand of slot truck toys. 

Jessika: Oh, so this was all based on the Tyco truck, even.

truck even. 

Mike: Yes, it's a little bit different than the standard Tyco truck, and we'll talk about that in a second, but you know, Tyco probably doesn't sound familiar to people that are younger than us these days, but they were a company that originally made model trains for hobbyists. And then they started making slot car toys in the 1960s, which are the cars that you press the trigger and they go around a track and you can build out the track how you want.

So, by the eighties, this brand was the one that was dominating that particular section of the market, the slot car toy section. [00:16:00] And at this point, they decided to create some slot truck toys. It was branded U.S. 1 Electric Trucking, and it launched in 1981. And it was based on the earlier racing sets, but it had a couple of unique features.

You could drive the trucks in both forward and reverse, and you could also have the trucks pick up and deliver loads of, and this is the quote, action accessories with that direct interaction from the person operating it. And the tagline was “you control the action”.

So I've got this commercial that I found on YouTube, because YouTube has everything and it's actually really cute. You want to give it a shot?

Jessika: Sure thing. [00:17:00] Oh, this is really exciting. Oh! That’s actually a really fun. 

Mike: Right.

Jessika: No, that’s super freaking fun. That is that's super fun. 

Mike: Yeah. So Tyco came to Marvel and they said that they were interested in having a comic adaptation done. And, the comic wound up being written by Al Milgrim, who’s actually, he's a pretty interesting dude in comic history, he worked as a writer, and editor and inker, and a penciler during his career.

And he was particularly known for this long tenure editing Marvel Fanfare, where I think he edited it for like a decade.  Also the real reason that he's an industry legend though, is because Marvel actually fired him after he hid some messaging in a panel background where he was badmouthing Marvel Harris.

The then recently departed editor in chief of Marvel.

[00:18:00] Jessika: Oh, damn. That's cold. 

Mike: Yeah, it was actually really funny and you can look it up, where he basically wrote some messages vertically on the spines of books in the background of a Spider-Man comic. And there's some weird happenstances about how, I think the editor caught them and had the wording removed. And then, through some error, that image got used instead and went to publish and yeah, it's, it's kind of amazing, but he was actually a full-time employee, which was really rare for one of the people who was actually creating the comics.

And so it's this, you know, he was, he was actually fired by Marvel.

Jessika: Wow. yeah, From what I've read, most of them were freelance, so that's actually super interesting. 

Mike: Yeah.  It's an interesting story. And it's one I would love to talk to him about someday, which we'll discuss that later. I legit love that story about how Milgrim got, let go, because it's totally a move that I would pull.

[00:19:00] And then the series was originally drawn by this other long-time Marvel artists named Herb Trimp.  he'd made a name for himself with the Incredible Hulk, and also he is known as the first artist to actually draw Wolverine for publication because he drew the, he drew the issue. John Romita came up with the character design in sketch, but he was the one who actually first drew him in a comic, which was cool.

Jessika: That’s super neat.

Mike: Yeah. And so Trimp also, wasn't a stranger to projects like this. He had recently worked on G.I. Joe. He wound up penciling the first two issues, and then Frank Springer came in to finish out the series, and Springer was another reliable artist from Marvel and he had also been involved with G.I. Joe and Transformers.

Milgrim actually has an essay at the end of the first issue called In the Driver's Seat, where he talks about the comics. And it starts with how Tyco asks for the common treatment and then goes into his first meeting with Jim Shooter about the projects. And I kind of love this description where he talks about how he wasn't [00:20:00] really sold on the idea originally.

Jessika: Frankly, I wasn't sure. Nobody had ever done anything with trucks and comics before. When I voiced the concern to Jim, it was as if I had slapped his face and challenged him to a duel.

Exactly! He exploded. Nobody has done it before. Maybe nobody thinks it can be done. There may even be a lot of resistance to the idea, but we can do it and do it well. I got caught up in the challenge, Jim and I did not fight a duel to the death, lucky for him. Instead, we began discussing the idea of a truck driving hero.

We talked about the romance of driving a truck, the dedication of those self-sufficient loners who drive the big rigs, we got swept up in the notion, began to solidify the concept of a trucker with a mission, a goal, a quest. 

Mike: Yeah, it's kind of charming to hear how enamored he got with the project during that first meeting. [00:21:00]  The essay also mentions that Marvel's animation division, which as we've also covered in that episode about Saturday morning cartoons, was a thing that they had, was working on what sounded like a TV show pitch.

And there might be some toys and animated series in the future, but spoiler, that never happened. I'm curious, how would you summarize this comic series?

Jessika: A lot happened. So a lot happened. This series was wild from start to finish. It starts with introductions to Ulysses Solomon Archer, or USA, and his brother, Jefferson, or Jeff after their parents who are truck drivers die in an accident, US and Jeff are raised by Wide Load,. Who's a woman, and Poppa, who are the owners of a truck stop named Shortstop.

Mike: We need to stop this for a second. You need to, you need to acknowledge them by their full [00:22:00] names.

Jessika: I'm sorry. Remind me what Poppa's name is. 

Mike: Poppa Wheelie, and it’s Wide Load Annie, and Wide Load Annie.

Jessika: Okay. Let me re say that. Okay. Excuse me. 

Mike: I'm sorry. It's just it's too good.

Jessika: No, you're right. I'm not even going to cut any of this. I'm just going to leave it. No, you're right. I couldn't, you know what, honestly, because I couldn't remember what their full names were when I was writing this out. I was like, this is good enough. So, so yeah, they're the owners of a truck stop called Shortstop and US is this All-American blonde haired, white boy, who has it all going for him. He's literally good at everything without trying. And he's encouraged by Wide Load Annie and Poppa Wheelie to get a college education, even though he knows he wants to be a truck driver, just like his folks, and his adoptive parents and his big brother, Jeff, who he idolizes. [00:23:00] And Jeff is your classic, dark haired boy who just can't seem to keep up with US’s successes, and also becomes a truck driver obviously, and seemingly mostly as a backup profession, which is kind of interesting how they they're both like encouraging and disparaging of truck drivers inparts. And I'm like, it's kind of strange. There's a give and take. I don't know what it is. I don't know if you felt that too. 

Mike: It's the whole thing of, he is not good. Jefferson is billed as being not good at school, but US is. And so they're like, no, you have to go to college, you have to make something of yourself. And Poppa and Wide Load and Jefferson all support him and send him to school. And Jefferson is doing it via job in trucking.

Yeah, they talked about how expensive colleges in those days. And I'm like, my dudes, it's 1980. You could literally go to college on a minimum wage job. And it talks about how also, I think he had scholarships and.

Jessika: Cause he was good at [00:24:00] everything. 

Mike: and he double majored in computer 

Jessika: Electronics. Yeah, exactly. 

Mike: Electrical engineering, I think. And then, and then.

Jessika: Computer sciences. Yeah. Uh, Yeah. it was a whole thing. 

Mike: It's a thing. Exactly.

Jessika: So during a drive with a young US, Jeff's big rig is run off the road by a devilish figure he calls the high women just prior to driving off a cliff. The truck explodes and Us is gravely injured in such a way that he evidently needs a skull replacement?

Mike: You know? Sure. 

Jessika: Have you heard of that?

Mike: No.

Jessika: Usually with a skull replacement, you’re going to be a lot worse off than just, like, gonna in a pop awake in a couple minutes after you put something metal back on there, 

Mike: Yeah. It's, uh, I believe they worded it as, oh, is this experimental treatment and I'm like, what? Okay. 

Jessika: Which already was so [00:25:00] sus. 

Mike: Yeah. And they, basically replace his skull with it’s, in this comic, it’s implied that it's like just the top part of his skull that like, you know, protects the brain. Later comic appearances, it is very strongly hinted that they basically do a brain transplant into, or, that they basically just give him a metal skull of some kind.

It's like, there's no bone to be seen, but.

Jessika: Like a new head completely? Lord. Goodness gracious. Well, so after that, he vows to find his brother who he's like, I couldn't find him in the crash. It's like, bro, like you kind of couldn't look for him. You had a concussion, like you're not an expert in finding bodies in an explosion. I don't know how he just definitively was like, well I guess everybody else told him that, that he, the body was never found or whatever, [00:26:00] but.

Mike: Yeah, that’s true.

Jessika: Yeah.

So he decided he's gonna find his brother as well as the mysterious Highwayman that he yelled about right before. And he quickly finds out that he can pick up CB radio waves from his fancy new skullcap, and somehow has truck becomes self-aware and he can communicate directly with it? And it's making its own decisions. Inexplicably. It's not well explained, once again. 

Mike: It's so truck originally, he builds a remote control into like a half dollar, so he can drive it really like, like a precision driver with his remote. But then later on, I think there's, it was like some kind of like a lightning strike or something or electrical overload that then allowed him to directly interface with the truck.

And then the truck is also self-aware at times where it's providing narration for an entire issue. And we'll talk about that, too.

Jessika: Yeah, that's what I was going to say. [00:27:00] It was the weirdest thing.  I was kinda on board with most of it. And then the truck was having its own inner monologue. And I was like, wait a second, guys. 

Mike: Yeah.

Jessika: Oh, goodness gracious. And then there's also a spy planted within the truck stop in the form of a mind-controlled waitress, Mary McGrill, which their names, all their names. 

Mike: The alliteration and stuff and puns. It's great.

Jessika: Exactly. It's so cheese. I love it. And she uses this wacky mind control whip, and there's drama about the truck stop being foreclosed upon and being sold to make condos. And, and then DUN DUN DUN! Jeff turns out to be the Highwayman! And they are aliens looking for the best person, read trucker, you know, of course on earth to be some kind of space ambassador?

Mike: Yeah. It's not well explained. 

[00:28:00] I think it had something to do with they wanted people to pilot their star ships,  because they were like accustomed to like long bouts of being on their own and stuff. 

Jessika: Yeah, it was, it was a whole thing too. And then apparently all humans look alike to the aliens. 

Mike: I thought that was funny as fuck. That was. 

Jessika: I thought that was hysterical 

Mike: Because the aliens are so weird looking.

Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. And so apparently they had been scoping US this whole time, cause he's like the golden child, but then they accidentally swooped Jeff instead, because they made a mistake and Jeff was just like, yeah, I'm going to go with it.

So once they figured out their mistake, they felt really bad about wasting all of their time and effort on this, this putz. And so then they of course had to have a race to make sure who was the best one to be the space ambassador, whether it was [00:29:00] going to be US, who dun dun dun the aliens gave him the skullcap! 

Mike: Yup. 

Jessika: Or his brother who has been working with the alien tech and has, like, a time advantage and a training advantage. So it's of course, US wins. I mean, come on. So of course they just get sent up into space? And he gets to take the whole truck stop with him? And all of the people?

Mike: Yup.

Jessika: It's the Rapture?

Mike: Yeah. And then the greedy bankers who are left behind, who are going to take the property that the truck stopped. I think they, they wind up getting dosed with some kind of radiation.

Jessika: Yeah, the, they were going to build condos on the land and then it ended up being radioactive. And so the buyer ended up pulling out.

Mike: Yeah,

Jessika: Like right there, because that's how that works. 

Mike: Yeah.

Jessika: So yeah.  The end. That's it.

Mike: Oh yeah. [00:30:00] And then the other thing is that for the first half of the series,  we are given to believe that the Highwayman is demonic in origin. Like they do a whole thing where,  he's got his own mind-controlled, big rig that runs them off the road or whatever.

And, he's surrounded by devils when he's looking down triumphantly on the wreckage and there's, you know, it's the mythology of the open road where they're like, oh, he was this trucker who, apparently, couldn't keep up anymore with the younger truckers and their newer rigs. So we cut a deal with the devil and it was, I actually kind of dug it.

It was ridiculous. And over the top, but it was great. And then it turns out it was just, I don't know, some disguise that he put on just the fuck with everybody.

Jessika: He did the Scooby Doo unveiling where he pulled a rubber mask off of his face, and I about lost my mind. 

Mike: Yeah. Okay. What was your overall impression of the series?

Jessika: It was a fucking [00:31:00] wild ride, but it was fun. I liked that it was so random at times. It legitimately kept me guessing the whole way. The topics though, they were not subtle with the overbearing American patriotism and the overt disdain for neo-Nazis, which obviously I'm behind.

Mike: I mean, whatever that was fine.

Jessika: that was great when they dropped the, the neo-Nazis in Televiv.

Mike: Oh God. Well, and the funniest part was they were, so  one of the  antagonists for us is Baron VonBlimp, who pilot, he, he looks like, he looks like kind of this weird aristocrat from like turn of the century, Europe. No, he's I think he even has a monocle. And then towards the end, when he shows up in his blimp, he drops out and he's got a bunch of Nazis with them and, you know, they've got the swastika, armbands and everything, and then it's revealed they're not actually Nazis and he's not even German.

He just liked how the uniforms looked. And then the aliens are like, whatever we're [00:32:00] done with this. And they literally hand wave them away into Israel. And I was like, that's, that's just magnificent. Just chef's kiss.

Jessika: Oh, yeah, I did actually really like that. So, so what about you? What did you think about this? 

Mike: I mean, it's one of those comics where I never expected to enjoy it as much as I did, but there's something so silly and pure about this entire story. It feels like the kind of thing that a five or six year old kid would come up with while playing with their trucks, you know, like monsters and aliens and races against air ships.

And then you hand wave away things when you want to change the narrative. And it  somehow kind of works actually. Like, I don't know how, but it kind of does.  I really loved, like I talked about, I love Baron VonBlimp, I thought he was just so weird.  And then I liked how the Shortstop is essentially the Mos Eisley Cantina, but it's got better coffee.

[00:33:00] And it seemed like every time that we first visited the place, someone was getting thrown through a window, which was of.

Jessika: Absolutely. There was always a fight scene. It reminded me of a saloon, like one of those old-timey saloons with  people getting thrown out double doors and things crashing. 

Mike: Yeah. And then we talked about how US’ his truck was self-aware, but, but I love the bit where Papa refers to it as a she and the trucks that there and says I'm not ashamed, but I'm secure enough in myself. That it's fine. 

Jessika: Yeah. 

Mike: I was like, that is weirdly topical through a 2021 lens, but this is also really good. And also every cover to this comic, it is a work of art. 

Like, like the styles vary, but they're really cool looking and they're just really weird. Yeah, I mean, it was just, it was a blast. Were there any highlights for you, or any lowlights.

Jessika: So I have to say my eyes just about rolled out of my [00:34:00] head, where the aliens showed up and needed chicken parts to make their ship work correctly. And the rivalry between the two female characters was pretty contrived.

Mike:  I did like how  they were trying to sit there and spin it so you didn't know who was the sleeper agent? I thought that was kind of cool, but yeah, they were, you know, they were fighting over Us and that was dumb, but it's also, you know, it's the 1980s. What are you gonna do?

Jessika: Exactly. Had to have some sort of, you know, forced love triangle of some nature. But I have to say I was oddly charmed at the editing notes from Ralph Macchio, all people?

Mike: Uh, editor with the same name as the, yeah.

Jessika: Oh, okay. All right. Wow. Goodness gracious. Cause I was like giving that guy a lot of credit.  

Mike: Nope.

Jessika: I did like that though. I did like the little comments, the little editing notes,  it was a little much [00:35:00] sometimes, but I love that he was throwing shade at the writers sometimes, or reminding the reader about the previous events or where you could read about them. And it was interesting how in depth they recapped each issue, but it must've been nice for the readers who weren't starting from issue one. 

Mike: Yeah. And especially because it was a maxi series and then it started in mid 1983 and then it ended in late 1984. So, it went from monthly to bi-monthly, and it was not a big name comic in the first place, so it makes sense that they would sit there and provide that background for readers.

And I also really appreciated that it was all the same characters over and over again, so that it wasn't doing anything crazy new, but at the same time, each of those issues you could pick up except for the last couple. Pretty easy to understand.

Jessika: Yeah. I would say so. 

Mike:  I mentioned earlier that  this was another licensed comic that was designed to help promote a toy line, but as [00:36:00] opposed to G.I. Joe and transformers, though, this wasn't nearly as successful. Comichron, which is a site that tracks sales data for comics doesn't have 1983 data in place yet,

but the site comic book, historians has this incredible online community. And I actually wound up posting there and asking if anyone had any insight into how the comics sold and Al Milgrim himself wound up chiming in if you would be so kind. 

Jessika: I'm sorry, what? That's cool as heck. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Jessika: Wow. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Jessika: Okay. Well, I got a, sorry, I got a little nervous. Oh sure. I think the first issue sold around 160,000 or so, not great for a first issue, but respectable. Marvel only contracted with the toy company to do a dozen issues.

I'm sure the sales went downhill from there. Still think the book was some good silly fun though (I may be [00:37:00] biased). 

Mike: Yeah, I was really stunned. This, the comic book historian group actually has a lot of amazing industry professionals involved in it. I've seen writers like Mark Wade chime in, the owner of Mile High Comics routinely posts about comic book history as well. They have a podcast and a YouTube series.

They did a long series of interviews with Jim Shooter that was really cool, which actually, I think did a lot to kind of redeem his character a bit because a lot of people viewed him as a villain in the comic book and yeah. 

Jessika: Oh. 

Mike: But yeah, Milgrim was super cool to chime in on that. And I wound up talking to him briefly afterwards and he said, he'd be open to doing an interview with us at some point.

So maybe there'll be a  Part two to the U.S. 1 episode. 

Jessika: That's exciting. 

Mike: Yeah.  The comic series ran for roughly a year and a half and it ended in October of 1984, the U.S. 1 toys were moderately more successful, they lasted until 86. And then after this trucking and pop culture continued to undergo this shift. [00:38:00] And it feels like the nineties, as I said, was when things really started to significantly change.

We talked about Thelma and Louise. There was that Kurt Russell trucking movie called Breakdown, where the villains were truckers. And then. I mean, it's kind of still how they're portrayed these days  in media. I really don't think it helps that the FBI released this five-year study back in 2009 that linked long haul trucking to serial killers.

Jessika: Oh. Wow. 

Mike: Yeah. And it's one of those things where it's not saying all long haul truckers are a majority of long haul, truckers are serial killers, but that there are a number of serial killers who are long haul truckers. And it makes sense because there's a lack of supervision. And also you can pick someone up in one state, killed them in another and then drop them off, dump the body in a third.

And also a lot of times the people that they pick up are people that no one really misses.

Jessika: Yeah. Yeah. 

Mike: On that high note.  [00:39:00] The funny thing is that this isn't where Ulysses S. Archer’s story ends. So even though this was a licensed comic book for a company that was eventually acquired by Mattel,  it seems like Marvel still owns the rights to the characters themselves because Ulysses pops up every now and then he's usually like the supporting character but sometimes it's as to this one-off deep cut.

So he appeared in a couple of issues of John Burns, Sensational She Hulk in the early nineties, he was supporting the She Hulk for a few issues. There was a brief cameo and the 2010 series new Avengers where he applied to be a babysitter for Luke Cage and Jessica Jones’ daughter 

Jessika: Oh, geez. 

Mike: It was, it was actually pretty funny.

He wound up helping out Rocket Raccoon in this backup story of a 2011 series called the Annihilaters, and then he also teamed up with Deadpool around the same time. And that's the issue where you see, it looks like he's actually got a fully replaced skull made out of metal. They, they, they do one of those like cross section cuts where you see [00:40:00] where you see underneath the scan, it looks like he's got just an all-metal skull.

Jessika: Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. And then after that,  we haven't heard much about him in the Marvel Universe, but weirdly his brother Jefferson has appeared a bit too. So, he was listed as a character in the Dark Reign files, which was a who's who guide to various Marvel villains in 2009.

And it actually retcon his story. Basically it claims that the highway man, after staying on earth wound up actually cutting a deal with Satan, in quotes, whoever that is. And then he wound up fighting against ghost writer. And then aside from the issue where Deadpool teamed up with his brother, he winds up fighting against Deadpool again in 2016 or so.

Jessika: That's super random. 

Mike: Yeah. And now we're in 2021 and it's been a few years since we've seen Ulysses and his friends show up. But I personally think that we're kind of overdue to have them come back like.

Jessika: I [00:41:00] want to see Poppa Wheelie in something. 

Mike: Right.  I would love to see him show up as a strong support character in one of those like heroes on the run stories where, whatever hero of the book is being pursued by,  the government or something like that. And then he basically winds up providing kind of a mobile base of operations or something like that.

And then he helps them keep our heroes one step ahead of the law. 

Jessika: Yeah. Like he floats down on the Shortstop, like space station or something. Yeah. That'd be cool as heck. 

Mike: Yeah or something,  I mean, there's so many different ways you could go, you could have him come back to earth and he just winds up working as a trucker again, because that's what he really likes. He misses driving through the natural beauty of America, something like that.

You know, I think there could be some really fun opportunities.  And I really hope that Marvel brings him back at some point, because he was just this really fun, weird character. And it was strange and it was silly, but it was also very sweet.

So that is U.S. 1 in a nutshell, [00:42:00] what are your final thoughts on it?

Jessika: I think it was a lot of fun. It was bananagrams, you know, all the way to the top, but  it was fun. 

Mike: Yeah.

 

All right. It is now time for that part of the episode called Brain Wrinkles, which is when we like to discuss things that are Comics related that are just sticking in our head and won't get out.

Do you mind if I go first? 

Jessika: Oh, please do. 

Mike: All right. I was going to talk about the recent news that Marvel's hired someone to direct Blade, but I'm actually way more excited about something else. There's this podcast called Comic Book Couples Counseling, which is this absolutely rad show. It's hosted by married couple, Brad and Lisa Gullickson, and they take relationships between comics characters, and then examine them through the lens of different self-help love gurus.  

So they've been super supportive of us so far. Like they've actually retweeted [00:43:00] our stuff and their show is really fun. But, I was recently reading through a whole bunch of nineties Valiant comics that I managed to pick up from the Bat Cave in Santa Rosa when they have this blind box sale.

And one of the series contained in these boxes is called the Second Life of Dr. Mirage. And it's one of the series that I collected when I was a kid it's about this married couple named Hwen Fong and Carmen Ruiz, who were his pair of psychologists. Hwen is this kind of like nebbish little guy, and Carmen is this bruiser, like, she's the bad-ass of the pair.

There's this early scene where she winds up saving him from zombies because she's a master of Kappa Wera, which is, you know, it makes sense, cause she's from Brazil. And then in the first issue, they run a foul of Valiance resident necromancer named master dark and he kills Hwen, but then Hwen comes back as a ghost, sort of a ghost kind of a thing.

Jessika: Hm. 

Mike: But I was reading through the series and I was really struck how this was a superhero comic that actually focused on an [00:44:00] adult relationship and relationship issues that come along with the supernatural stuff, like early on Carmen has a pretty heartfelt talk with her undead husband about how difficult it is for her emotionally, because he's still with her, but she can't touch him.

Jessika: Oh my god. 

Mike: And anyway, so I wound up tweeting about it, cause I thought the couple would make a good topic for Comic Book Couples Counseling, and they wound up picking up all the back issues like that day. And they're going to do an episode about the characters. So I'm super excited to listen to this. 

Jessika: Oh, that's super fun. 

Mike: Yeah,

Jessika: See, and I was going to talk about the same thing. 

Mike: I’m sorry, I stole your thunder.

Jessika: No, that's okay though. They're so good. So I'm that person who has to start from episode one, because.

Mike: They've got a lot of episodes too.

Jessika: They do they're back to 2018. So  I just went all the way back and it's so [00:45:00] fun though. I like to get that rapport.

I like to make sure I have that parasocial, you know, relationship really hooked in there with all the podcasts I listen to. So, the first section that they did cause they always do kind of like a month at a time, focused on one set of characters. The first one was the relationship facets of Jean Gray and Scott Summers from the X-Men. And I love the X-Men. So, it was really neat to hear all of the different ways that they had a relationship and then they were comparing it to a book about relationships. It was very interesting. It was very topical, and I liked that they also are very sweet and introspective about their own relationship.

Mike: It's really lovely. 

Jessika: Yeah. And like what they can do, what they can take out of it to apply to their own marriage, which is it's so sweet. So thank you guys. You guys are great. 

Mike: Yeah. Comic Book Couples Counseling, Brad and [00:46:00] Lisa, absolutely friends of the podcast. 

Jessika: Absolutely. 

Mike: And you know, if they ever want to come on here, they are more than welcome and we will talk about whatever they want to talk about. 

Jessika: Open invitation. I'll even read a I'll even. I'm not in a couple, but I'll read a self-help book. Like if that's what it takes. 

Mike:  All right. I think that's all from us. we'll be back in two weeks and until then, we'll see you in the stacks. 

Thanks for listening to Ten Cent Takes. Accessibility is important to us, so text transcriptions of each of our published episodes can be found on our website. 

This episode was hosted by Jessika Frazer and Mike Thompson written by Mike Thompson and edited by Jessika Frazer. Our intro theme was written and performed by Jared Emerson- Johnson of Bay Area Sound, our credits and transition music is Pursuit of Life by Evan MacDonald, and was purchased with a standard license from PremiumBeat.

Our banner graphics were [00:47:00] designed by Sarah Frank. You can find on Instagram as @lookmomdraws.

Jessika: If you'd like to get in touch with us, ask us questions or tell us about how we got something wrong, please head over to tencenttakes.com, or shoot an email to tencenttakes@gmail.com. You can also find us on Twitter, the official podcast account is @tencenttakes. Jessika is @jessikawitha, and Jessika is spelled with a K, and Mike is @vansau, V A N S A U.

Mike: If you'd like to support us, be sure to download, rate and review wherever you listen.

Jessika: Stay safe out there. 

Mike: And support your local comic shop.