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Journey of Discovery with Mark Steel
Date: 1968
Publisher: American Iron and Steel Institute
The Cover Promises: A weekend retreat for male porn stars.
In the 1960s, the tail-end of that "real America" when jobs were plentiful and feelings went unexpressed, schools often shipped their students off on field trips to learn about the great American industries. Today such lessons would involve visiting factories in Juarez, or perhaps a bank of mailboxes in the Cayman Islands, but back then Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry would do.
In fact, the steel industry was so dedicated to youth outreach that it left no child behind, not even a bored, red-socked dandy like Jimmy, seen here awaiting a lap dance:
Another seachange since '68: Back then, Americans found nothing weird about some stranger's giant hand pawing at their children. They also apparently found nothing weird about this guy:
Say what you will about Jimmy, but his fantasies are admirably progressive. After some excitable introductions, this slab of PR beefcake guides Jimmy on a personal tour of all the ways that American steel shapes the world. They shrink down and fly through a steelmaking furnace; they jet over to the airport to examine jets; they study skyscrapers, suspension bridges, locomotives, and even the products in the grocery store.
They get around in Mark Steel's ride.
(It can fly. And it's a submarine!)
And Jimmy marvels at how all-American metals chill the canned sodas Mark Steel uses to win his favor.
Between that and the car, Mark Steel could be the American folk hero for wreckless resource management!
Steel can fly, but he's not ready for the Justice League of America:
Congratulations, Aquaman! "Guard rails" have replaced "fish talking" as the world's worst superpower!
A visit to a paper mill turns weirdly meta:
Jimmy, if there's pictures of you and Mark Steel together, I hope to God they're in a newspaper beneath the words "Amber Alert."
The comic goes on like this, full of steel facts and creepiness, until at last Mark Steel has to go and propagandize elsewhere, quite possibly with old friend Duffman.
They will meet again, but not soon. One day, twenty years later, as he and his co-workers file one last time out of the just-shuttered mill, Jimmy will spy an all-steel limousine slinking past. There, beneath the tinted glass, lurks a sad-eyed man-mountain. For a breath he and Jimmy will regard each other, both lifted and saddened by the dream they once shared. Then that limousine will engage its Mark 1 rocket boosters and zoom up and into the sky.
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