#windsor smith

Heroes Against Hunger

If you were old enough (and socially aware enough) you'd probably remember that collaborative charitable campaigns were pretty trendy in the 1980s. This is actually pretty ironic considering the 80s are often remembered as a decade of self-serving greed and decadence.

The collaborative charitable campaign trend kicked off with Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” which recieved worldwide airplay in 1984 (it featured an all-star ensemble of UK pop stars releasing a musical single with the intent of raising money/awareness for Ethiopia) and snowballed into the massive Live Aid benefit concert of 1985. Not to be outdone, North America also contributed it`s own Ethiopia awareness/fundraising collaborative single in 1985: “We are the World” performed by the USA for Africa supergroup. The pinnacle of the collaborative fundraising arms race between North America and the UK would result in 1986`s Hands Across America  wherein 6.5 million Americans held hands for 10 mins to create a human chain across the USA. If you think that is excessive, I haven`t even mentioned Sport Aid, yet.

Why was the world (well, UK and North America) so intent on helping Ethiopia? Ethiopia was struck by a massive drought in 1983 that saw the deaths of over one million Ethiopians. BBC news was the first on the scene to record the first-hand effects of the famine and televised them. The imagery shocked the UK and inspired it`s citizens to raise world awareness about the plight of the ravaged country. Philanthropist and rocker Bob Geldof was the first to organize a collective of musicians to form Band Aid, and now you know the rest of the story.

As previously mentioned, Live Aid (the massive fundraising concert which featured over 50 cumulative musical acts) started a trend and the 80s would see more collective benefit concerts such as Farm Aid,Self Aid, the Conspiracy of Hope US Tour, Heart Beat 86, and the Human Rights Now! World Tour.

DC Comics weren`t too far behind on the trend and introduced Heroes Against Hunger in 1986. Marvel Comics beat them to the punch one year earlier and published Heroes for Hope in 1985. Actually, it was Jim StarlinandBerni Wrightson who proposed the idea to Marvel Comics and based on the success of theMarvel publication (it got some exposure in Timemagazine)StarlingandWrightson decided to take the idea to DC comics and do it again.

Despite being a collaborative benefit project (all of DC`s top writers, artists, inkers, letterers, and colorists contributed a few pages), Heroes Against Hunger was a pretty solid story - it wasn’t too preachy, featured two of DC`s most popular protagonists (Batman and Superman), provided an in-depth exploration of the Superman/Lex Luthor rivalry, had an epic battle with an alien, and concluded with a brief illustrated history of why Ethiopia was in the fix it was currently in. They even made sure to use the pre-Crisis versions of Batman, Lex Luthor and Superman (Byrne’s Superman reboot would debut later that year). I`m not sure what kind of proceeds this one-shot procured, how many Ethiopians it helped feed or the awareness it raised, but I do know that it’s greatest contribution to comicdom was the all-star cast of artists it contained - each artist did about 2 pages of the story. Did you ever want to compare how Curt Swan,Keith Giffen, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Walt Simonson all drew Batman and Superman? Easy - just flip to the appropriate pages. I think this was alone was worth the price of the admission.

I remember seeing this house ad in my youth and my interest was piqued by the appearance of battlesuit Lex (a Super Powers action figure I also used to own) and I was really curious as to why Lex was torturing these poor Africans to get to Superman and Batman. I was pretty blasé about the whole `starving Ethiopian` thing at that age: to me the hungry Ethiopians were the primary reason my weekday morning cartoon block ended at 9:00am (after Inspector Gadget) and was followed by 2 hours of starving Africans on TV. I am much older and wiser now. It wouldn’t be until many years later that I would get to actually read this issue and discover that Lex on Batman and Superman`s side the whole time and just revealing the truth to them (albeit in a really condescending manner).

P.S. the cover of this issue was illustrated by Neal Adams.