To Read or not To Read: Denny O’Neill’s The Question

I didn’t know much about The Question until DC bought the rights to various of the Charlton characters, including all the ones created by Steve Ditko, just in time to kill off their world in Crisis on Infinite Earths. What I saw I liked, which was the plain business suit, the old-fashioned reporter’s hat and the blank face mask. There was something clean and almost austere about The Question’s design, and the absence of any face or expression was strangely interesting.
His proper DC debut was as a guest star in Blue Beetle 5 as straight Ditko, but when Vic Sage got his own series, written by Denny O’Neill and drawn by Denys Cowans, starting in 1988, all but the absolute basics went out the window. It was there is the first line of narration, issue 1’s splash page, the name Charles Victor Szasz.
I know I bought issue 1 when it was first published and I think, but can’t be certain, I bought issue 2. I know I didn’t buy any more, though I did look in the issue where The Question bought Watchmen and mused about Rorscharch. But the series is highly regarded, and god knows, personally passionate work is not ten a penny in mainstream comics despite what all the creators say, so it’s time to have a look and see if I can now be persuaded to agree.
Though I don’t think I spotted the parallel at the time, it’s interesting to reflect that O’Neill chose the same approach to making over The Question as did Alan Moore on Swamp Thing, ending his first issue by ‘killing’ the old character by shooting him in the head. That’s a pretty drastic thing to do.
The first issue makes this its theme. From the splash page onwards it counts down to Sage’s death at midnight. Whilst it’s doing that it’s reinterpreting The Question’s past history by darkening it. In both guises, Sage is a hard man, a nasty bastard. He’s been around, he was an orphan, he’s newly returned to Hub City where he (thinks he) was born. He’s tacking civic corruption, both of him. He’s an adrenaline junkie, a self-righteous cocksure idiot who, at the end of the issue, walks into what he knows is a trap, is easily defeated by martial arts expert Lady Shiva, has the crap beaten out of him by the thugs, is shot in the head and dumped in the river. Where he dies.
No much equivocation there. O’Neill has however already revealed his hand. The bullet’s come out of the back of Sage’s head. It was an air pistol. It’s the get-out.
Because Vic Sage isn’t dead. A combination of improbable things, plus Lady Shiva, saved him. The bullet flattened against his skull, went round his head between bone and flesh and out the back, whilst something called the ‘Diving Reflex’, basically stored oxygen in ultra-cold water, kept his brain alive whilst the rest of him died, until Lady Shiva dragged him out and brought him to his ally, Tot, Aristotle Rodor, scientist. Sage remembers everything that happened to him when he was dead and nothing of who or what he was before he died.
His bastard cynical sense of humour survived, mind you.
Next came the re-make. Moore took four issues to complete that with Swamp Thing but O’Neill was dealing with a more grounded, less fantastic character, and chose a shorter route. The underlying question was why did Lady Shiva save him? This was only to be answered in part, unsuccessfully. Batman turned up to launch a pep talk, in the form of a savage diatribe about Sage’s lack of training or purpose, a dilettante amusing himself. Lady Shiva sends a helicopter to deliver him to Richard Dragon, Kung Fu master in a wheelchair, to deliver purposeful training. When Sage is ready, for now, she turns up to fight and test him. She sees him as driven by warrior instincts that are now trained, Dragon as driven by curiosity. We get no more answer than that.
Still detached from his past, Sage goes home, puts on the Question’s mask again and starts his attack on the corrupt and insane priest behind the drunken Mayor. The arc continued in issue 3, where the action was The Question saving a schoolbus full of children that was to be blown up, showing him still absorbing his lessons, but the wider picture being completed by showing his gorgeous redheaded fellow reporter, Myra Connolly having been forced into marriage with Mayor Fermin on threat of her daughter, in the same orphanage Sage once lived, being harmed. Myra lives in fear but it doesn’t stop her hating her husband, Reverend Hatch and the whole corrupt crew bleeding the city dry.
Meanwhile, Sage is only existing as The Question. His very recognisable alter ego has been missing for months, what with one thing or another and he hasn’t worked out how to come back.
Unfortunately, though Sage goes back to the Orphanage to find little Jackie and take her somewhere safe, he lets being good with the kids lower his guard and she’s taken. She’s taken for ritual sacrifice, a grotesque parody of Genesis 22:2. Showing better control, The Question prevents the sacrifice but refuses to do what any sane man would do in the circumstances, which is to kill the insane ‘priest’, because he will not become like him. So Myra does it herself. The Question does not blame or criticise her. His only words are: better you than me.
Interestingly, O’Neill finished the thread off with a kind of coda, chaos and riot in Hub City, people dealing with the things they deal with, a rape victim who resisted, a would-be rapist who killed himself, a bad cop who might turn good, a vigilante running himself into the ground fighting an unwinnable war and deciding to reappear as the journalist he once was, to try to stem, if not turn the tide.
I’m already well past where I read to before, where I can’t even remember if I bought issue 2. I’m still only intrigued as to where this is going, and I’m not keen on Denys Cowan’s stiff and stilted art, but let’s see how this develops.

First off was a one-off, whose main point seemed to be how nasty O’Neill could make it. Brutal, macho, twisted, unpleasant. And The Question wasn’t much better. For all that he’s absorbed Far Eastern martial arts techniques and their attendant philosophies, O’Neill has him as a cold, closed-off, sarcastic git with overtones of paranoia. A second story continued heavy on the violence, real violence, not superhero violence, whilst developing the background of a city slowly falling to pieces under a drunken and stupid Mayor, deprived of his handlers, with Myra trying to fulfil the role and pull things round. Interestingly, though she remained drawn to Sage, she wouldn’t sleep with him, because she had made vows, coerced or not, and she would not betray herself by breaking them.
Individual issues, individual stories. Linked by what I can only describe as sadism, the desire to inflict pain, answered by The Question, arriving to inflict greater pain, only this time deserved. Issue 8’s villain was, effectively, a deliverer of karma to people who did bad things, who decided not to kill The Question for exposing him, upon hearing how Sage was trying to change himself. The series was now tagged ‘Suggested for Mature Readers’, DC’s new ‘ratings system’ that caused such disquiet and concern among creators.
A new extended story, delving into Tot Rodor’s background, started in issue 9, whose letter column included a long epistle castigating O’Neill for basically retconning Steve Ditko out of his own creation. I was not unsympathetic to the accusation, though I was to the reply, which was a basic fuck-off in veiled terms, insisting on the right of comic book creators to basically rape and gut any character if they think they’ve got a good idea. No such words were used, but the lines were not so closely drawn that you couldn’t easily see between them.
Nobody so far has mentioned that Cowan is drawing The Question with a mullet that would have put Chris Waddle to shame, which is very much not Ditko. Still looks a mess now.
The story then took Sage to the Caribbean island of Santa Prisca, more famous later for being the home of Batman’s enemy, Bane. I found the story unengaging, with too many things happening behind the readers’ back. It suggested that quantum physics was a modern day alchemy and that it could convert a torturer into a saint, neither of which were propositions I could agree with.
But after eleven issues, perhaps I’ve found the key characteristic of the series: it’s unengaging. It’s cynical to the point that even the ‘hero’ is an unpleasant person to read about.
The first year ended with Myra Fermin setting up a secret meeting with Vic Sage to tell him she intended to run for Mayor as soon as His Drunkenness her husband’s term ended and that, as she was going to have to be completely squeaky clean to succeed, she wanted one last fuck before she forgot what doing it was like. After that The Question investigated a nice low-price good housing development that happened to be built on a toxic waste site. More cheerful stuff.
According to O’Neill, the series was about realistic, nasty and grim things going on but also about change. Charles Victor Szazs, Vic Sage, The Question, whichever they are they are about changing themselves, about moving on from being just the biggest badass in town to more thoughtful approaches. Sage is The Question not out of the goodness of his heart or for revenge, but insatiable curiosity. Why is it like that? Does it have to be like this? The philosophy would be more impressive if he spent fewer pages kicking every motherfucker’s head in.
A two part story had The Question buried up to his neck for a whole issue to make a point about honour, courage and strength that, in the end, was left out when the villains, a corps of military nuts, all shot themselves out of indecision.
But I have to applaud the team for issue 15. Someone is killing unconnected black victims. The issue is a cesspit of racist jokes and comments, coming from an out-of-town private eye, a disgusting bigot. He gets to the bottom of the case ahead of The Question, not that he plans to put an end to it. After all, he’s working for a prominent white nationalist bigoted organisation to check if it’s any of their members doing it. Loomis McCarthy is vile. Vic Sage loathes him. But Myra’s rival Mayoral candidate, himself a racist, takes exception and comes to kill Sage, except that McCarthy jumps in front of the bullet to save him and dies instead, just after Sage has taken him down with a verbal lashing. Why did he do it? Why did it have to be him, when Sage hates having this racist die for him? Wisely, we were given no answer, because given the nature of the story it is incumbent upon us, each of us, to come up with our own answer.
But it was followed by a dumbfuck issue featuring two gunrunners calling themselves Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This ran over into issue 17 which required Sage to fly to Seattle, during which flight he read a copy of Watchman, briefly dreamed he was Rorschach, kept comparing himself with Kovacs, which became a subtle form of denigration towards Moore and Gibbons’ creation, especially as The Question got taken down and had to be saved by Green Arrow.
If you think I’m reading too much into this implied criticism of Rorschach, there was Denny O’Neill’s regular reading recommendation appearing in the letter column every month: where can I find a book titled The Watchmen? Works for DC and can’t be bothered to get the name right…

As for the team-up, Green Arrow kept The Question tied up for half the issue because he didn’t trust him, then The Question showed off in front of him by continual quotes from Sun Tze. People like the philosophising in this series: I’m finding it boring.
These last couple of issues related to plastic guns and issue 19 brought the manufacturer on stage, offering contributions to Myra’s campaign and factories, jobs and tax dollars to Hub City. In return for being left alone. Alexander Polys was a plastic obsessive and The Question not only got him publicly linked to the erstwhile ‘Butch Cassidy’ but privately linked him to Myra’s campaign manager and ran him out of town. Meanwhile, Myra independently changed her mind and refused Polys’ support on moral grounds: I know this is 1988 and not 2022 but how the hell is the woman ever going to get elected with attitudes like that?
Issue 20 saw the first change in the creative team. O’Neill, Cowan and Rick Magyar had consistently produced 19 issues but Magyar took over full art for this issue. All issues of The Question are nasty and brutish, drenched in a cynicism that paints even the good guys as irremediably flawed, but this was a particularly nasty story about three dimwits whipped up by a right wing politician to commit murder out of self-righteousness. Maybe the parallel to the present day in Britain was too much for me.
The first Annual appeared in 1988, contemporaneously to issue 20. This was drawn by the Cowan/Magyar team, thus explaining the penciller’s absence from the monthly issue. The story brought back some thugs from the opening arc, plus Lady Shiva, who was recruiting a team of three to escort the aged O Sensei home to fulfil a promise made to his wife, eighty-eight years earlier, that his bones would rest next to hers. The rest of the team were Batman and Green Arrow though Vic, who was pretty useless compared to the others, having to have his life saved several times, talked Batman out of joining the mission because he made The Question redundant, and Vic needed to feel useful. There was a twist ending that you could see coming a mile off, turning failure into, if not success then non-failure. The overall effect was less than stellar.
The artistic juggling required to balance out work on the Annual saw Dick Giordano ink issue 21. It combined a people-are-all-shit High School Reunion, a misread date with a background character whose name still wasn’t given and a hospital drama harking back to a story a year ago that I couldn’t be bothered to look up. Denny O’Neill was a major writer but this was not evidence for that status.
Finally, the Mayoral Election came round next issue. The new series inker was Malcolm Jones III, who is first in line to blame for making Myra Fermin unrecognisable. It was a multi-parter revealing that Myra was way behind in the polls, hadn’t a chance and anyway her rich, bigoted opponent had had the new voting machines fixed. In order to get to the bottom of things, The Question had to spend page after page in investigation… whoops, no, I actually meant beating people up. More punching and kicking followed in part 2, leavened by moral qualms about whether it’s right to use savage tactics against the savage: wouldn’t a system that needs that kind of brutality to survive be better left to crash completely in hope that the good guys can clear away the rubble and the broken bodies after and start from scratch? I could have answered that succinctly before a broken and bleeding Tot Rodor reminded Sage that the bad guys might be the ones who survive, but I would have added that they’re the ones most likely to. As Woody Allen put it, the Lion and the Lamb shall lie down together but the Lamb won’t get much sleep.
We finally got the result in issue 24. First though The Question’s been doused in gasoline and is about to be immolated, but O’Neill’s been trailing a weather warning of a tornado throughout the last two issues and now it picks up a motorbike, throws it through a window and hits the guy with the match, putting it out. I’m going to leave you to think about that particular get out clause for yourself.
Anyway, the tornado was long enough to fill half the issue. Tot, estimated as having a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the beating he’d received turned up back at home next day, completely healed and tending to Sage’s minor injuries. The Election was over and the bigot Dinsmore won, by one vote, that being the vote Sage didn’t register for Myra.
But, as was foreshadowed at the start of issue 22, there was another get-out clause. Dinsmore’s car had gone into the river with him in it, and there was a little known provision in Hub City, based on the Mayoral Election of 1866 which favoured a much earlier Dinsmore, if the elected Mayor dies before taking office, the job goes to the runner-up, so Myra got elected after all. Yay, honesty! I’m not impressed.
That wasn’t the end. It turned out Myra didn’t want the job, in fact hated having won. But win she had and replaced her drunken sot of a still-husband who, as also heavily foreshadowed by his constant references to Jack, Bobby and Martin (for the youngsters, Kennedy, Kennedy and King), pulled out a gun during her acceptance speech and shot her through the chest. Sigh.
That brought us to issue 25. No-one tries to stop Fermin or get the gun off him until after he’s delivered an insane, drunken rant and shot Myra a second time, at point blank range, in the back. The first person to step forward is one of Sage’s TV colleagues, who gets his brains blown out after which a paunchy, smashed out of his mind, incoherent and unco-ordinated middle-aged man who’s lived solely on booze for at least a year gets away unseen. Oh, and Myra’s not dead, actually. I know that there are certain conditions of melodrama upon which comics are dependent but for fuck’s sake this is absolute bullshit. Not even a quote from one of my favourite poems, W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, could redeem this for a second.
It’s all because Sage’s got to bring Fermin in himself, after a torrent of destruction, but because this isn’t your conventional series despite everything O’Neill is doing with it that’s pure convention, he doesn’t get him and His Honour dies in a drunken shoot-out with a pair of thugs who have taken two old women hostage, probably killed them too, and goes out an apparent ‘hero’.
Do I really have to reread the remaining twelve issues of this series?

There were two guests in issue 26. One was The Riddler, being interpreted as a clueless no-mark and the other was artist Bill Wray, who was also a clueless no-mark: that was professional art? But the next issue was seriously strange. A third of it was The Question wandering the streets, getting involved in a fight and teasing us with the expectation that, just as Steve Ditko had once done, he would let a thug fall from a building roof. Another third was a visit from Tot Rodor’s cousin, a WW2 comic book artist on a Captain America knock-off, the third third being crudely written and drawn ‘excerpts’ from one of his comic books.
The weird bit was that Alvin Rodor believed that he and his fellow comic book artists had literally won the War with those comics. It tied in with a Congo pygmy tribe’s shaman who, before the tribe hunted, drew a picture of the desired prey that then had an arrow fired into it: every time the tribe returned with the prey, killed by an arrow in the exact place as in the picture. Germany and America didn’t have comic books so…
The idea was fanciful and I don’t know if it has any factual basis. My rationality argues against it yet it was a plausible tale. The seriously weird bit was when, out of the blue in this dark, gritty and realistic setting O’Neill has conceived, Sage has Alvin re-draw a page of his old comic, where the superheroine Betsy Ross is revived by injection with an antidote against zombiedom, only with Myra Fermin’s face substituted. And, in direct contravention of everything the series has been about, she wakes up from her coma.
Round about this time the second Annual appeared. It was the first half of a two-part team-up with Green Arrow, concluded in the following month’s Green Arrow Annual, which I don’t have access to. Since most of this Annual was again drawn by Bill Wray, I am not so cut up about only reading half the story as I might otherwise have been. It included a lengthy flashback revised origin drawn by Shea Anton Pensa, whose art was just as crude, fitting for a story in which Sage was nothing but an absolute bastard.
The only thing worthy of comment in the story was that the villain had developed a gas, that he was going to test in Hub City, that would remove all the evils of the city, the corruption, the violence, the exploitation, all the things Sage and The Question are knocking themselves out trying to stem, by making them docile, placid, suggestible. In short, effectively lobotomising them. Green Arrow rejected it instantly in disgust. The Question took it seriously as a solution.
Now I’m not going to say anything more than that because I don’t have the rest of the story and Sage will inevitably reject the idea, but I wasn’t at all impressed that he would even so much as flirt with it. What is a superhero about if not individualism? Individual action, individual thought. It’s the single most intrinsic element of their DNA code, just as controlling others, even for their own ‘good’ is hardwired into supervillains. It’s a secular blasphemy and to touch pitch is to be forever defiled.
Back at the main series, Myra’s awake again but Vic has retired Sage and prefers to be The Question near full-time because he’s relishing kicking butts, whilst Lady Shiva’s in town and town has gone to hell, and is being allowed to disintegrate even further, even though it’s already past that well-known Point, just to see what happens when an entire city departs from civilisation. The wallowing in thuggishness is boring me.
Needless to say The Question and Lady Shiva had to fight, amid rumours that the book was facing cancellation, denied as ‘ugly’ and ‘wrong’. Never believe denials on letters pages. Shiva was disappointed that Vic had gone downhill since Richard Dragon’s teaching but the point became moot when her ’employer’s gang rocked up and they had to team up to overwhelm these.
O’Neill was on a roll. Myra wanted the two major biker gangs in Hub City take over policing, to make the streets safe, a temporary expedient until better arrangements could be made but one leader preferred to kill the other and split whilst the other gang arrive wanting revenge. It all ended pretty feebly and indeterminately in issue 30, and the letters page confirmed that the ongoing story started in issue 1 would end in issue 36, at which point it was anticipated that members of the creative team would leave and the question was whether to end the series there or continue. No points in guessing which way those dice will fall.
So the endgame began, with Myra the Mayor deciding to have the slum district of Hell’s Acres dynamited to the ground, ridding the city of both a drain on its resources, an eyesore and the symbol of Hub City’s decay. Not to mention the place Charles Victor Szazs grew up. Only a bunch of dealers protecting their turf kidnap Her Honour, inject her and intend to use her to stop the demolition, except that no-one knows she’s there, and Vic hides them in the underground water pipes to survive where, in circumstances completely conducive to romance, they have sex.
The next issue mixed up Myra’s introduction of Civilian Vigilance Groups with a traumatised Vietnam vet who ended up killing a kid in a flashback, the Mayor wanting to meet ‘Mr No-Face’ and The Question getting closer and closer to the edge of killing someone, just to see what it was like. But another one-off in issue 33, a complex story about someone corrupt wanting Myra dead and The Question being too weak to save her whilst a silent mechanical genius hunchback from Gotham City did gave off the impression of wheels spinning. And termination with issue 36 had now been confirmed. Not falling sales, my arse.
Things got no better when issue 34, inked by Carlos Garzan, started with four obvious pages of guilt dream, followed by somebody mysterious taking down Sage and pages of even more tedious dreams from him. Myra calls on a psychiatrist who dopes her up, quizzes her about her love-life and threatens to rape her until she, despite being doped, punches his lights out and goes home, where the issue ends with her getting a visit from Richard Dragon. And about time because the series is hurtling out of control by now and needs a bloody serious handbrake turn.
The penultimate issue featured one of the thugs who’d stripped and beaten Sage sticking The Question’s mask on with aeroplane glue and going out robbing and killing, Izzy O’Toole the former bad cop going after him, intent on killing him then reverting to the bad, killing him and discovering it’s a petty crook. Meanwhile Richard Dragon leads Myra to where the battered Sage has holed up, having more dreams of the psychologically banal, and Vic coming up with the ideal solution: he and Myra should leave Hub City.

Will they? Won’t they? Issue 36 would, I hoped, make everything clear. Actually, the end came as more of a relief than a conclusion. Hub City finally came to a dead stop. Vic decided to get out. He persuaded Myra, who’d told him she loved him, in his sleep, and recognised him as The Question, to go with him. On the way to the helicopter arranged by Richard, she collected her handicapped daughter Jackie from the Orphanage, which had finally run out of everything. Lady Siva arrived on the helicopter and, as any moderately well-read reader had known from the moment Myra saw those helpless kids, the Mayor decided her duty as the Mayor, and her honour as a person, demanded that she stay. She told Vic she loved him, when he was awake this time. As he flew off, he cried.
So the series was over. It wasn’t supposed to be. The proximate Green Arrow Annual 3 guest-starred The Question and acted as a bridge to O’Neill and Cowan’s The Question Quarterly, which lasted five issues, each featuring a complete 48 page story. I don’t have access to these but Sage finally kills someone in the first issue, and Myra’s daughter dies later on, whilst Myra never returns so I will not bother.
The Question was batted about here and there. Rick Veitch completely revamped the character in a contemptible manner in a 2005 mini-series – I may not have liked O’Neill’s treatment but he didn’t fuck the character over that disgracefully – and DC killed him off with cancer during the year-long 52, replacing him with Renee Montoya.
But the final word goes to issue 37, one of the Blackest Night spin-offs. This was written by Denny O’Neill with Greg Rucka and Denys Cowan pencils. It’s only the second of these Blackest Night one-more-issue stories that I’ve read and it’s so similar to Starman 81 in basic structure that I conclude they were written to a formula, and not an interesting one at that so it can go unsummarised.
I’m no longer surprised when my opinion of something that’s been highly acclaimed turns out to be radically different. It would be convenient to find myself running with the crowd more often but I don’t think I’m going to change any time now. No, obviously, I didn’t like The Question and my decision to drop it after at most two issues was well-taken. I found the philosophy shallow and unconvincing, and ultimately The Question failed on his own terms. The series’ fabled post-Watchmen grittiness rapidly became an endless, joyless wallow in ordure of the worst kind: a shock from a writer such as Denny O’Neill. That it lasted three years is something of a surprise. I’m glad to put it behind me. I want something better and more inspiring next.

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When Canaries Cry: Black Canary vols. 1 & 2

I tell myself that I’m immune to adverts, that they don’t affect my choices in any way, except that the more egregiously inane ones sometimes have me swearing never, ever, to buy a product advertised in that way. I tell myself that the only time adverts influence me to buy anything is simply when they reveal to me that it exists. Of course, there are always exceptions.
In 1991 I had read a lot of stories featuring Black Canary, practically exclusively in Justice League of America. She was alright, a nice looking blonde. I had no strong opinions one way or the other. There’d been two Sixties issues of Brave & Bold teaming her with Starman, only one of which I’d read at the time, that was still a favourite of mine. She’d been in The Longbow Hunters, the Green Arrow series that copied the Dark Knight format, when she’d lost that ultrasonic Canary cry through trauma at being raped. When she was announced as starring in her own four-issue mini-series, I had no plans to buy it. Until…
Until I saw the house ad in something. The full page ad featuring the full page image of Black Canary, drawn by Trevor von Eeden and Dick Giordano, reverted to the original costume, the matinee jacket, the black strapless swimsuit, the fishnet stockings, the blue gloves and boots, the whole sexist array designed by Carmine Infantino in 1947 with the instruction to draw ‘his dream girl’. She was in a crouched pose, hands read to strike, eyes wary.
So I bought the series. If I was going to get drawings like that, direct, straightforward but at the same time realistic, it was going to be worth it.
Thirty years on, having re-read the series, I’m of two minds. The mini-series was sub-titled ‘New Wings’, implying a change of direction for the character, or at least a moving out from under the shadow of Green Arrow, whose ‘girlfriend’ she had been practically from the moment she’d been brought over from Earth-2 by Denny O’Neill. It was written by Sarah Byam, and the art was credited to von Eeden as layouts and Giordano as finishes.
I was intrigued by von Eeden’s art to begin with. He’d been associated with Green Arrow for a long time, but I was most familiar with him from the first eight issues of Thriller, seven of them with series creator Robert Loren Fleming. There, he’d drawn in a very subjective manner, experimenting with lay-outs to create an impressionistic absorption in the story. He’d also inked himself in a very dark, blocky style.
Here, he was drawing straight superheroics, with standard objective layouts, focussing on clarity, movement and emotion, using clear, focussed images and body language. It was, in its way, everyday superhero cartooning, with no extraneous or superfluous detail, allowing the story to move ahead, unopposed. If von Eeden was only doing layouts, then Giordano was not adding anything to the art, and wasn’t even imposed the usual sharp clarity he brought to his inking style.
It was an unusual artistic partnership, but it worked brilliantly. And von Eeden made everything solid and natural, insofar as a superhero can ever be natural. There were no over-elaborate movements, no impossible manoeuvres such as you get with Batman or Catwoman: everything the Canary did was perfectly believable for a well-trained and experienced athlete. And von Eeden’s depiction of Dinah, the flowing blonde wig, the slim figure, the long legs, lived up the issue 1’s cover as much as I hoped it would. Adverts don’t affect me, hah!

The story: not so much. It had good, strong, solid roots, though Byam couldn’t resist the urge to cram in too many elements for the best coherence. As befitted the sub-title, the first issue dealt with Dinah’s life with Oliver Queen, the self-centred and self-indulgent bloke, and her entirely natural exasperation with his irresponsibility, especially when it’s her shop, ‘Sherwood Florist’ that makes the income that supports them, with Ollie is frittering away and over-spending.
That sets her up as wanting to get away from him, and facilitating a new life, if the mini-series found favour.
The opening issue also introduced us to Gan Nguyen, half-Vietnamese, half-American. Gan’s a bit of a renaissance man, a translator, a radio talk show host and an informal activist, a crusader against the drugs trade in the Chinatown are of Seattle. With words, with stunts and with his fists if needed, Gan challenges the dealers and tries to rouse the public, which makes him a target.
This is where Byam clogs up the story with too many elements. It’s one thing to have the drug gangs want Gan out of the way, and bring in Black Canary to save his neck and get further involved, and just about ok to have the gang financed by Loren Gerrenger, son and campaigner of Senator Gerrenger, currently seeking re-Election, and even workable to have it suggested but never conformed that the Senator knows of the connection and may even be part of it himself.
But on top of this, Byam introduces proto-Nazis in the form of White Nationalists (an unwelcome foreshadowing) talking racist shit about the non-Americans among them, whilst simultaneous offering them a bone of sympathy over how they come from communities that have been discarded and stagnated. Again, these are good stories upon which to base the series, but Byam has to hurry from one to another, to keep their pots boiling, and she can’t quite get the ingredients to mix. It’s too much for a four issue series, though everything is there for it to work perfectly as a six issue arc.
And whilst there’s very little actual romantic stuff going on, Gan is clearly being set up as a potential new relationship for Dinah, an impliedly more grounded alternative to Ollie. He’s smart, strong, passionate and an obvious ‘Good Guy’ who’s clearly interested in her. And he’s observant enough to quickly work out who’s under the Canary’s wig. On the other hand, to Dinah he’s an amateur, and headstrong. One of his stunts to draw public attention results in two people being killed, for which she rightly berates him: her approach, her experience, is geared to keeping people alive.
Overall, it was an interesting experiment, with cracking art, even if the story was not entirely successful. Byam even found time to debate the life Dinah and, by implication, all costumed heroes live. And the mini-series was sufficiently successful commercially for Byam and von Eeden to be commissioned to do an open-ended Black Canary monthly, starting less than a year later.

This time, the inking was by Bob Smith and von Eeden was credited with full pencils. There was no significant change, but I detected more of the Thriller influence in von Eeden’s poses and movements. The story was still about drugs and dirty politics, with more emphasis on the latter, and the all-levels corruption inherent in poll-fixing.
Von Eeden’s art was even bigger and more active, with the emphasis on large panels, dominant figures in motion, simplified outlines and minimal backgrounds. The first arc re-introduced the 15 year old, spike haired, burly prostitute now named as Sally. Unwittingly, Sally passed out poisonous bootleg hooch that should have made the homeless visibly sick enough to be cleared off the streets at exactly the right moment to bid for the National Convention, but which killed them instead. And despite the Canary’s efforts to save her, Sally got her neck snapped. The assassin was nabbed but wouldn’t squeal on his boss, who the readers knew was named Whorrsman – subtle or what?
But the stories don’t match up to the art. Dinah is still part of Oliver Queen’s world, that is, the version of it being produced by Mike Grell, which means that it avoids superhero tropes and names, concentrates upon grounded issues, but at the same time tries to douse these in would-be grimness. Which would be better presented if Byam cared more about rigorous plotting.
Issues 5-6 have Canary guarding a unique black tulip that’s stolen by a ruthless costumed villain going by the name Blynde, who’s supposed to be blind, yet appears to operate with perfect sight. She can also fly, disappear into thin air and basically kills everyone she comes near who isn’t the boss she’s indebted to. Who. How. Why. These are just some of the questions Byam treats as not even existing.
The stories kept getting more perfunctory and the art larger and more vivid, but there was an odd feeling of irrelevance to them, and then issue 8 was a fill-in by James Owsley (who later took the name of British SF writer Christopher Priest) and James Hodgkins. It featured a guest appearance by The Ray, both the Golden Age and the recently rebooted version as well as some truly horrendous and grossly amateurish infodumping about the new character that killed stone dead any chance the issue had of working, if that hadn’t already been screwed by Hodgkins’ amateurish art.
Anyhow, the story’s a confused mess as far as the plot is concerned, and even worse on Dinah’s misandryst responses to both Green Arrow and the junior Ray’s attitudes towards her, both of which are dismissed in crude, sexist terms.

After that, it was only a matter of time. Byam, von Eeden and Smith were back for issue 9, with the Huntress dropped in to try to boost sales, though their decision to re-outfit the Canary with a variation on her old outfit that ditched the wig, spike-cut the black hair and overall went for the butch lesbian ballbreaker look in a big way was probably not a commercial move. Suddenly, the book was anti-men in the least subtle of ways.
This was a three parter and I’m missing the middle part but that’s fine. It obviously brought in Nightwing to help Huntress get Black Canary, and her old friend Bethie whose marriage to one of your unrefined MCPs was the point of all this, away from the primitive Middle Eastern kingdom where men and men and women would be better off being camels because they’d get better treatment: Saudi Arabia with the knobs turned up way beyond eleven.
It’s difficult to believe that the late Denny O’Neill was editing anything that had gotten this crude and empty, this procession of gestures without any real intelligence behind it, and he wasn’t editing it for much longer as the series was cancelled from issue 12. It had had a year and it had blown it.
For the last issue, which started at Dinah senior’s graveside, von Eeden was replaced by Leo Duranona. I don’t know the timing but it was presented as if Dinah’s mother had only recently died, though the date of death on her gravestone was 1991 and this issue was cover-dated December 1993.
The series ended on a not-quite cliffhanger. Dinah’s Florist’s Shop and her base of operations in Seattle is completely rebuilt by the grateful women rescued in issue 11. Meanwhile, in Gotham, Dinah meets Jack Lynch, an old but very fit fighting guy who was her father Larry’s partner in his Detective Agency, the partner nobody before now had ever heard of, who was in love with Dinah senior though she didn’t know it. Jack’s on the run from one of these illegal, underground geneticists operations out to improve and replace humanity by hybridising it with animals. Dinah brings Jack back to Seattle, they follow, her shop and home is totalled so she declares war on them as Jack’s partner.
There was no follow up to that lead, which comes into the category of small mercies. After the cancellation, Dinah continued to appear with the Justice League in various incarnations, but was more prominently seen as one of the central characters in the long-running Birds of Prey series, even appearing on TV for the first time in the short-lived TV series based on the comic (played by Rachel Skarsten, as it happened, who is Alice in Batwoman).
Black Canary did not get another solo series until 2007, the same pattern being followed: a four-issue mini-series followed, in 2015, by an open-ended series cancelled after 12 issues. But that Canary follows a number of reboots that breaks any real chain of continuity with the character in these two issues.
It’s nice to have the mini-series back, in a convenient form, and that splendid vigorous art by Trevor von Eeden that impressed itself upon me. And it was interesting to see how it was built upon in the second series. The mini-series gave Dinah Lance the chance to grow, to introduce new perspectives, a new milieu, but it crumbled so badly into crude sexual politics that, in their way, were as extreme as those Dave Sim expressed in Cerebus. Just because they went the other way, and the balance is already tilted against that model, doesn’t make them any better to read. Pity.

A Spot of Adventure: The Golden Age Revisited – Part 2

In early 1946, Harry Donenfeld’s Detective Comics Inc, and Charley Gaines’ All-American Publications Inc had been in dispute for several months, though negotiations on a $500,000 payout for Gaines were well-advanced, and soon business manager Jack Liebowitz would be negotiating the merger of both companies, plus the little-regarded American Comics Group Inc, another possession of Donenfeld, into National Comics Inc.
These were not the only changes in mind. The War was over, the GIs were coming home, that audience for cheap, gaudy and above all brief entertainment was disappearing, forever. Forget the paper rationing, forget the diminution of the package from 64 pages to 48, times were a-changing, and comics might have to change with them.
Detective’s oldest title was More Fun Comics. A decision was taken, to revamp the title completely, have it live up to its title, convert it to a comic comic. Funny animals, to a large but not exclusive extent.
But More Fun had a successful line-up of superheroes. It had just become home to Superboy, the adventures of Superman as a boy. And there was Aquaman, and The Green Arrow, who was incredibly popular and the lead feature for most of the time since he’d been introduced, nor to mention that flying speedster, Johnny Quick. What was to be done about them?

The chosen option was to decant them, lock, stock and barrel, into Detective’s second oldest title, Adventure Comics. Room was made by cancelling both Sandman and Starman, whose series had been running at an artistic loss for ages and could hardly be regretted. The War hero, Mike Gibbs, Guerilla, could be bounced too whilst the odd little oddball series, Genius Jones, could go the other way. He’d be more at home in an all-funny comic anyway. The Shining Knight? He was a superhero so he could be kept on.
And thus, with issue 103, Adventure transformed. What’s more, it was bumped back to monthly publication. If the run from New Comics to New Adventure Comics and beyond had been Phase 1, and the introduction of the original version of Sandman had ushered in Phase 2, now we were in for Phase 3. After the depths to which all the old series had sunk, how could it not be an improvement?
Well, for a start there was the line-up. The Shining Knight was far from being at the forefront, and Johnny Quick, though energetic and saddled with a comic sidekick in Tubby Watts, was enjoyable enough, but the Big Three now were Superboy and Mort Weisinger’s two uninspired knock-offs.
The first Superboy tale demonstrates where Siegel and Shuster were at, or perhaps where they were allowed to be at. This Superboy may be the Boy of Steel but he’s far from the teenager we’re familiar with. The story is set on Clark Kent’s 10th birthday, but it’s also Betty Marrs’ birthday and her need is greater than his. But Superboy has to come to the rescue when the unfortunate misidentification of Betty’s father with a bank robbery suspect has all the good, upstanding, God-fearing, salt-of-the-earth midwestern parents keeping their kids away from her party until Superboy streaks to the rescue and refreezes the melted ice cream.
This Superboy is a boy, a good-hearted little boy with very limited horizons. Siegel wanted his series to be all about showing off and playing pranks with powers but was not allowed to indulge himself that way. Instead, little Clark will use his powers to help his schoolmates. It’s a sweet idea, but somewhat short on thrills. It won’t last, naturally, but whilst it does…

Aquaman, with yellow gauntlets and no royal Atlantean blood was a pallid rip-off of Timely’s Sub-Mariner. It’s going to be a long time before he says or does anything remotely interesting, and by long I mean, not even in the decade after this one.
At this remove it’s difficult to appreciate, and even harder to understand, just how popular The Green Arrow was in his early years. I’m disadvantaged in that when I first encountered him he was a penny-plain, making up the numbers JLAer (remember, he was the only existing DC superhero excluded from the JLA’s founding line-up), a genuine C-list character on his best day, so I remember him that way, and all the way up to Neal Adams’ first costume re-design. But at the beginning, The Green Arrow was big. He was More Fun’s cover feature, disturbed only by the recent need to alternate with Dover and Clover (either read about them in my More Fun piece or, preferably, read it but ignore them), and he also had a second slot in World’s Finest, running concurrently.
Yet all he was was a Batman clone, substituting Arrows for Bats as his motif. He’s not even a trick arrow merchant at this point. But he was popular enough to hold down the back of book slot that so many series reserved for their strongest character, making sure the little kids read all the way through.
The Superboy series is very much pitched at the child’s level of its character’s age, with little do-good stories. Ma and Pa Kent hardly appear at all, the town isn’t even named as Smallville and Clark is far from the shrinking klutz he plays later on. Indeed, he’s a confident little boy, at home with his peers and treated as a valued friend by all of them. Yet it can bring us stories like issue 113’s touching little tale, involving neither crime nor villain, just the response of a community to the terrible misfortunes of a man who, for 32 years, has played a secret Santa to the town’s kids, and who needs the good offices of a Santa himself. It managed to be sweet without being sentimental: just a small-town America story that rang true.

The Green Arrow is just bland. Any lingering doubts about him being a Batman knock-off are surely dispelled by him having a clown enemy called Bulls-Eye. As far as Oliver Queen is concerned, there’s a near total absence. Neither Oliver nor Roy Harper have any personality, and we practically only see them out of costume when they’re just about to change into it. And the era of the trick arrow hasn’t started yet: there’s the occasional use of the boomerang arrow and little else. You really couldn’t imagine this guy becoming the Ollie Queen we’ve know since 1969.
Aquaman is similarly drab, but what do you expect from two characters created by Mort Weisinger to be knock-offs. Again, though the blond stiff is described as the Monarch of the Sea, we’ve over a decade to wait for the introduction of Atlantis, and this Aquaman just fights sea-style menaces, most often the pirate Black Jack, who first appears in issue 108. There’s a nasty little story in issue 111 featuring seals and swordfish and electric eels with names and a bunch of stereotype Japanese committing hari-kiri that would have been distinctly unpleasant even if the War was still going.
Between them, Aquaman and The Green Arrow don’t have enough personality to fill a thimble. For some reason he missed out in issue 118.
A new recurring character in Superboy, actually the first regular antagonist, debuted in issue 121. No, it’s not Lana Lang, though I might wish she’d appear soon, but rather the now-forgotten Orville Orville, indulged son of the richest man in town, who uses his father’s wealth to buy instant collections to win every category in a Hobby contest, at the expense of the ordinary, ‘working’ children who’ve built up their collections by hard work, diligence and effort. As he will on each occasion, Superboy intervenes to support his classmates.
It’s a surprisingly blue collar, almost Socialist theme, with echoes of the Protestant work ethic that harks back to some of Superman’s original themes, before the fantastic took over.
In comparison, Johnny Quick is head and shoulders above the rest. The very idea of speed automatically makes the series more vigorous, even if some of the science is more than dodgy. There is, however, a formula to the series in that increasingly they’re all about Johnny having to save the day by doing something relatively ordinary that would normally taken a large workforce days to complete, except that Johnny does it alone and at worst overnight. Add to that some Kubert-influenced art from Mort Meskin and Johnny Quick makes continued reading worthwhile.

As for the Shining Knight, his adventures are, like those of Aquaman and The Green Arrow, are also basically bland but in a different, almost wholesome way. Weisinger’s knock-offs come over as almost aggressively bland, the characters striving to demonstrate their importance, even as their stories are flat and banal. The Shining Knight is just ordinary, but the continuing emphasis on chivalry adds a certain atmosphere that lifts it by just enough of a degree.
But I was bemused by issue 124 when, out of the blue, Sir Justin is partnered with Sir Butch, aka Butch from Beeler’s Alley in Flatbush. The kid is a modern, slang-talking young teen, a tough kid, who’s been back to Camelot with the Knight and been knighted by King Arthur. I’ll swear I’ve read that story somewhere, but this is the kid’s debut. I hope future issues will explain.
But whereas the Knight had appeared continuously since his debut, that run ended after issue 125. He would not finally depart for comic book limbo until issue 166, but from hereon he would be in and out of the title according to no particular rhythm or schedule. For instance, he’s in issue 127 but doesn’t appear again until issue 131, beginning a two-issue run.
Very slowly, the Superboy stories have been evolving out of their ten-year-old helps his pals style. Very slowly, Clark has been ageing, and the proof of this was in issue 131, when he first shows appreciation of a girl. No, it’s not Lana Lang but a brunette cutie named Betty, though in the world of DC Comics she might as well have been named Shallow, first turning him down for their school’s star athlete, then turning to Clark when she needs help with her homework.
The Shining Knight adventure in the next issue re-introduced Sir Butch by telling the out-of-order story of how he meets Sir Justin, goes back to Camelot with him and ends up being knighted by King Arthur: pretty poor editing – credited at this time, as all National’s titles were, to Whitney Ellsworth – to have the stories come out so widely spaced and in this order.
By the time of his next run, three issues from no.137, it seemed as if the feature had undergone a permanent change, that it was now set in Camelot and the out-of-time traveller was Sir Butch. Instead of fighting modern crooks with the weapons of the past (and a flying horse), Sir Justin brought the science of the future (and a flying horse) to the time of magic.

The Superboy story in issue 140 was well in keeping with the general silliness creeping into the feature as Superboy accompanies an absent-minded Professor on the first rocket trip to the Moon, but it’s notable that, en route, the Boy of Steel has to fend off a destructive shower of meteorites that an excited caption identifies as remnants of Krypton. They have no effect on him. Mort Weisinger would have turned puce with anger at the missed opportunity. Superboy’s solo series – only the sixth ever from National or its predecessors – was in its infancy, so I’m guessing we can thank that series for this story to carry the first mention in Adventure of Smallville.
The overall truth, however, is still what I said in the first version of this post, that Adventure is simply too dull to be worthwhile. We have not yet reached the Fifties, the big three features offer nothing but blandness. Their stories are frequently not even stories bur rather catalogues of super-stunts featuring implausible exercises of their particular powers in combinations lacking in logic or even comprehensible sequence, and stopping without a climax when the page limit is reached.
Perhaps not surprisingly it’s the lesser features that offer some glimpse of enjoyment, though Johnny Quick very often succumbs to the same catalogue failing, but at least his art still has some spark of enthusiasm to it.
The chivalrous hero was back in 142, after two missing issues, and enjoying the best art of his career, though not yet from the young Frank Frazetta, but rather Ruben Moreira. To be honest, the is-he-or-isn’t-he? of whether there’ll be a Shining Knight story is the most interesting thing in this phase of the title, no disrespect to the still-entertaining Johnny Q.
Finally, Clark Kent’s parents appeared, in issue 145, taking him on a trip to Metropolis. It’s not much of an appearance: neither are named and Jonathan looks nothing like the standard portrait that became so familiar in the rapidly-nearing Fifties.
The Shining Knight had now appeared in four consecutive issues but not a fifth. Aquaman had a story in issue 147 where he found himself rescuing a man named Dan Dunbar over and over that wasn’t even a story but I note because Dan(ny) Dunbar was the identity of TNT’s sidekick, Dan the Dyna-mite, probably coincidence rather than conscious recycling.
There was an oddity in issue 149 with a six-page tale of the life of author Jack London interrupting the cycle that had by then run just under four years. Then Adventure hit issue 150 with a cover date of March 1950 and no fanfare or special features despite this being the company’s first title to reach that landmark. I couldn’t help but be amused to discover Johnny Quick’s villain – a man who hypnotised people into believing that he could walk through walls – being named The Spectre. Nah, buddy. And Frank Frazetta made his debut on The Shining Knight: nice art, and the first to make a flying horse’s wings look realistic.
Occasionally I wonder about certain things. The Trades Description Act, the one that sought to set up penalties for manufacturers and advertisers who told blatant porkies to get customers to buy their crappy stuff (and not only the crappy stuff: there was a memorable series of TV commercials featuring Bernard Miles admiring a pint of Guiness and burring that ‘it looks good, it tastes good, and by golly, it does you good’ which couldn’t be continued), wasn’t passed until 1968. I’ve no idea when the first of America’s Truth-in-Advertising Laws were passed, but I assume it wasn’t any time during the Forties. Or they would have been used against the words that appeared on every cover of Adventure: Another Exciting Story of Superman when he was Superboy. Another? I’m still waiting for the first.
Of course, the moment I noticed that, on issue 151’s cover, they dropped it!
I’ve never been a fan of Frazetta’s art, his posters and paperback covers, but on the Shining Knight he is absolutely fabulous, the best art ever to appear in the comic, and dragon’s head and shoulders above all the Knight’s other artists standing on each other’s shoulders on tiptoe.
To my surprise, the usual boring Aquaman story was missing from issue 159.
We’re still no nearer getting any thrilling Superboy stories but there was a nice, gentle tale in issue 160, showing both Clark Kent and Superboy turning a girl who thought of herself as dull and plain into a real-life Cinderella in the face of her cruel cousins. Sometimes, such stories err on the side of sentimentality but this balanced things out nicely, even down Clark losing the girl to more polished suitors without regret. And she had red hair. Hey, when do we finally get Lana Lang?
Next issue, in fact, no 161, large as life and twice as natural and already fully-formed in her snoopy-girl precursor to Lois Lane aspect. It’s genuinely nice to see her.
The consensus has always been that the Golden Age of Comics ended with the Justice Society of America’s final appearance in All-Star Comics 57. That came out the same month as Adventure 161, but in the original post I chose to go on to issue 166, despite not having it on the disc I was using. I chose that as my cut-off point because it featured The Shining Knight’s final appearance, and I shall do so again now.
The penultimate story was a curiosity, not a reprint but a re-presentation, a none-too old story completely redrawn by Frazetta, much more attractively. And he was there to the end, still utterly rock-solid and real.
So that’s the truer story of Adventure Comics in the Golden Age, as read issue by issue. What followed we already know and I’m not going over that again. So now I have the full story on all those Justice Society members whose solo series’ I wanted to read. And is that the eventual end of my Golden Age reads, after so many false endings? Actually, there is one more I plan to explore…

Breaching the Vibrational Barrier: 1983

Justice League of America 219, “Crisis in the Thunderbolt Dimension (Part 1)”/Justice League of America 220 “The Doppelganger Effect”. Written by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway (219) and Roy Thomas (220), art by Chuck Patton (pencils), Romeo Tanghal (inks), edited by Len Wein.

A terrorist attack is foiled by the two Flashes, who have met up early in anticipation of this year’s get together. But as they approach the Justice League teleporter, they are attacked by Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt, silent and malevolent, who defeats them both, but injures the Earth-1 Flash so badly, his counterpart has to rush him to the Space Satellite for treatment.
On the Satellite, the party is in full swing. Power Girl, the Huntress, Starman and Hourman are already there, with Green Lantern, Zatanna, the Elongated Man and Firestorm, the last of whom is having a lousy time because Power Girl is ignoring him. When the Thunderbolt invades the Satellite, Firestorm gets cocky over impressing Kara, but becomes the first to fall as the ‘Bolt blasts the Earth-1 heroes.
For some reason, the Earth-2 characters are left unharmed. This includes JLAers Black Canary and Red Tornado, who were originally from Earth-2 of course. The rest of the Justice League seem to have been similarly attacked, and the Transmatter Device, the JSAers’ way back, has been destroyed.
Suddenly, three crisis centres appear, each attacked by supervillains from Earth-1 and Earth-2, the six members of the Crime Champions in 1963, though not identified as such. The JSAers split into teams to tackle them, but Starman takes Black Canary in pursuit of the ‘Bolt, into the Thunderbolt Dimension, where he waits for Johnny Thunder to call him.
On arrival, they are attacked and defeated by the ‘Bolt, under the command of Johnny Thunder, but this is the Earth-1 Thunder, from the 1965 team-up, now wearing a green costume with yellow lightning flashes. He is alone in this Dimension except for two dead bodies, preserved in a crystal case. They are Larry Lance and Black Canary.
End of Part One

The JSAers are about to divide the three missions between them when they are joined by Sargon the Sorceror, another Earth-2 born character who has moved to Earth-1: he joins Power Girl on her mission.
In the Thunderbolt Dimension, the boastful Thunder reveals he has Johnny captive but that Larry and the Canary were here when he arrived. Between them, the living Canary and the ‘Bolt relate the history of Dinah’s relationship with Johnny, and the circumstances of her replacing him in the Justice Society. This leads to the revelation that Larry and Dinah had a baby girl, who they named Dinah, and that baby Dinah was cursed by the Wizard with a sonic power, a ‘Canary Cry’, that so young a child could not control.
For everyone’s protection, baby Dinah was taken away, placed in the Thunderbolt Dimension to sleep and grow harmlessly. Then, off his own bat, the ‘Bolt caused everybody’s to remember the baby as having died.
Meanwhile, Flash and Hourman tackle Chronos and The Fiddler, Red Tornado and Huntress face off against The Icicle and Dr Alchemy, and Power Girl and Sargon battle The Wizard and Felix Faust. Despite squabbling amongst each other about who’s to be the leader, the villains defeat their opposition pairings.
However, Johnny has finally worked his gag free, and even as the ‘Bolt struggles to resist an order to kill Starman and Black Canary, Johnny sneaks up on Thunder and socks him. After that, the ‘Bolt cures the stricken Leaguers, who turn up at the villains’ sites to defeat them and free the JSAers.
That still leaves the mystery of the dead Black Canary, but Superman and The Spectre turn up to give Dinah the final revelation. As Superman was bearing Dinah Sr. away, she developed severe pains, a delayed reaction to the radiation that killed Larry. Wishing only to see her daughter’s grave in her final moment, Dinah Sr. found Dinah Jr. still alive and grown into the spitting image of her.
Wishing Dinah Jr. to have a life, Dinah Sr. had her memories transferred into her daughter (except for her memory of her daughter, and the full extent of her love for Larry), just before dying. And so Dinah Jr. finally knows her true history, and why she so quickly fell for Green Arrow.

---

It’s years since I broke off this series, unable to progress until the Graphic Novel Crisis on Multiple Earths Vol. 7 was published, but it never was. Only now, thanks to the purchase of a comprehensive JLA DVD-rom do I have the means to complete this series.
The twentieth anniversary team-up was the work of Roy Thomas, with regular JLA scripter and close friend Gerry Conway as co-writer on the first half, and using an idea proposed by New Teen Titans writer Marv Wolfman. The result is almost stereotypical Thomas work, being full of nostalgic elements and leading to a major continuity implant, or retcon as they had by then become to be known. You know that had to be Thomas’s main, if not only concern in the story.
Wolfman had addressed himself to the anomalous position of Black Canary, who had transferred from the Justice Society to the Justice League in 1969. At that time, the JSA were still heroes who had been active in the Forties and who had come out of a dozen years retirement in 1963. A year later, Denny O’Neill introduced the twenty year discrepancy theory, but in 1976, Paul Levitz firmly and permanently anchored the JSA to the Forties.
Black Canary was the last JSA member, first appearing in 1948, but even the most generous interpretation of her age would make her about 53 in 1983: a clearly untenable situation when set against her Peter Pan colleagues in the League, and especially her boyfriend, Green Arrow.
Wolfman’s idea was to make Black Canary into two people, mother (JSA) and daughter (JLA), by revealing that the Black Canary who arrived on Earth-1 possessed of her ‘Canary Cry’ was in fact the hitherto unrevealed daughter of the original Canary, cursed with said sonic powers as a baby and confined to limbo in the Thunderbolt’s Dimension ever since, forgotten by all. The dying elder Dinah wants her daughter to have the chance to live so has her memories implanted in the experience-less younger Dinah.
It’s a clever-convoluted solution with a simple understructure to it, and Wolfman could have made a decent story of it, but Thomas ruins it with over-elaboration. The rest of the story, including the return of the Earth-1 Johnny Thunder from the 1965 team-up, and the Crime Champions sextet from the 1963 original, is just overkill, designed to create a MacGuffin for the Black Canary revelation.
What is, in outline, a straightforward action story, capable of being fast-paced and lively, is instead stodgy and dull because of the sheer number of old comics Thomas references throughout this two-parter. There’s eleven of them, and nearly twice as many in the exposition-heavy second part, each one of them a stumbling block to the course of events.
And unbelievably, Thomas doesn’t even reference the Crime Champions as first being gathered in the 1963 team-up, which is the only continuity element that is strictly relevant. Nor does he telegraph the Starman/Black Canary partnership as having appeared in two issues of Brave & Bold.
With Crisis on Infinite Earths in development, this story would not last long. The mother-daughter aspect would be retained once Dinah and Dinah represented different generations rather than different worlds, but in a much more rational and natural fashion.
Otherwise, it’s noticeable that Thomas goes for a much nastier overall approach from the villains. Where once the Crime Champions were all doing each other a good turn, now they’re trying to outdo each other and being aggressive with it, whilst the Earth-1 Thunder may be smarter but he’s nastier with it (and his green with yellow flashes costume is idiotic), having now managed to overcome the Thunderbolt’s tabu against killing. Beastly stuff.
Frankly, the story clunks at every turn, mainly due to Thomas’s desire to tie everything into an old comic, but also because he simply cannot write simple any more, insisting on filling up every panel with unnecessary verbiage, bogging things down.
There may have been two more team-ups to come, but this is the last one to feature the ‘real’ Justice League, and it’s a poor one to go out on.
Needless to say, and thankfully so, this is not a story that could have been told in the post-Crisis Universe.

Denny O’Neill R.I.P.

I’ve just heard the news about the loss of Denny O’Neill from the downthetubes comics web-site. Though there were things in his philosophy that I disagreed with, particularly with his approach to critically review other’s works, and though some of his most famous stories – notably the Green Lantern/Green Arrow run with Neal Adams – haven’t stood up to time nobody can deny that he was a massive presence in comics, as writer, as editor and, most important of all, mentor and inspiration.

Never was a Denny O’Neil story less than professionally written, to a high technical standard, and whether or not Green Lantern/Green Arrow looks that good now, or Frank Miller’s Dark Knight (which O’Neill edited), is still the landmark it was, what matters is what they were for and what they did for their times. They changed how things were done and how people thought, they made a difference.

Denny O’Neill made a difference, far too often to be thought of as anything but a legend. Another light has gone out of the sky: how many more befote it is too dark to see?

To be Brave and Bold: the Batman Phase

Batman Begins

And so, with issue 74, still under the editorship of George Kashdan, The Brave and The Bold came to its fourth, final and longest phase, the Bat-book era. Not content with Detective and Batman and Justice League of America and World’s Finest, DC turned over their team-up book to the Caped Crusader as the permanent one-half of the team.
The first victims, a term I use advisedly after reading the story, were the Metal Man. Bob Haney wrote a story that plumbed the depths beneath amateurism as Batman has to learn to expunge his prejudice against robots as Gotham City suffers a plague of robbing ones whilst spouting dialogue that makes you wonder whether it’s Haney or Bruce Wayne who’s the ten year old. It’s a very bad start.
The Spectre team-up in the next issue was considerably better but was an early manifestation of a problem that would dog B&B for ages and that was continuity. Technically, DC didn’t have it in 1967, but it had consistency. Haney held continuity in contempt, the traditional hobgoblin of small minds, insisting on writing his stories in whatever context suited them best. The Flash had gone to Earth-2 to team-up with The Spectre but this story was about the Earth-1 Batman (the yellow chest emblem) and Jim Corrigan was visiting Gotham to study its Police methods, as a fellow cop of the same Earth.
More things like this will follow. Don’t give yourself headaches trying to make them fit because they don’t.
Plastic Man was passable, the Atom acceptable, but Wonder Woman with Batgirl was a wasteful banality. It’s stone-cold bleedin’ obvious that the superheroine pair are only pretending to be madly in love with Batman to con villain Copperhead into thinking he’s distracted, but the story suddenly turns nuts and nonsense when they decide, mid-story, that they really are. It’s pathetic, and that’s without alliteration.
But issue 79 saw the appearance of Deadman, and with it a change of art as the Andru/Esposito team gave way to the only man that DC would allow to draw Deadman at the time, Neal Adams. And Deadman inspired Haney to write his best story thus far, with only one dumb moment that, out of respect, I won’t detail.
Disappointingly, the next issue, featuring the Creeper, is missing from the DVD. But Adams wasn’t here just for Deadman but for a regular gig, and very popular he was. What the reader didn’t know was that the new, dynamic, hyperrealistic Batman was being produced in conflict between writer and artist. Adams had clear, definitive ideas about how Batman should be produced, including the belief that his natural metier was night, not day, and he was changing the times and settings of Haney’s scripts, much to the veteran writer’s annoyance.
Flash, Aquaman, the Teen Titans – the latter a back issue I remember getting – were all decent enough stories but a war-time team-up with Sgt. Rock and Easy Company was stretching things again with Batman and Bruce Wayne looking identical in both the 1944 of the tale and the 1969 of its appearance. Also inside, editor Murray Boltinoff put paid to a reader’s suggestion of reviving some of the discontinued heroes with a short sharp statement that they were commercial failures and there was no chance.

A landmark…

But the landmark was issue 85, guest-starring Green Arrow. This was the famous story, “The Senator’s been Shot!”, that buried the boring, characterless archer of so many years and introduced the new look GA, with the goatee and moustache and the green leather costume that suddenly looked so sharp, Neal Adams’ design, with emphasis now firmly upon sharpshooting instead of trick arrows. It was a tremendous moment.
Deeadman was back next time, followed by the new, depowered Wonder Woman, complete with I Ching, in a story written and pencilled by Diana’s current scribe, Mike Sekowsky. It was considerably better than her last outing, but then an illustrated telephone directory would also have been an improvement.
Haney was back next issue, but not Adams, whose already noted deadline issues combined with how he’d antagonised the writer (especially given that Boltinoff only cared about getting a comic out on time and its quality a long way after) saw him officially relegated to a ‘pool’ of artists but in fact only to return once. Novick and Esposito drew an issue I bought back then, in the fading days of my interest in comics, shortly before I grew out of them forever. I suspect I can recall exactly where and when I bought this, on 13 August 1970.
The co-star was Wildcat, which brought back the issue of which Earth this was happening upon, the one Haney ignored, although it was actually Ted Grant who co-starred, with Wildcat appearing in a total of five panels only, across two pages. The recently-revived Phantom Stranger dragged Dr Thirteen along to issue 89 in a modest story but the Adam Strange story that followed was another exercise in looseness and implausibility making very little use of the peripatetic archaeologist.
Nick Cardy dropped in along with Black Canary – still new girl on Earth-1 – for issue 91, with Dinah Lance, under an assumed name, falling for its Larry Lance, just because he looked like her dead husband. It was another of those demeaning women-in-love-and-brain-drops-out-through-her… -ears stories since Larry was set up to be the villain from early on. And Cardy remained for the following issue which was even more demeaning, if you were British, being set in foggy London town with a ‘Bat-Squad’ of three Brits who talked like nobody under the sun has ever talked. London 1970 looked like a compendium of Jack the Ripper rip-offs. Ghastly, old chap.
Adams was back for a final flourish, bringing with him a long-promised Denny O’Neil script nominally joining Batman to the now mild-horror oriented House of Mystery, in reality an Ireland set supernatural affair, but Cardy was back next with the Teen Titans and a hip, relevance story that wore its heart on its sleeve with its ignorance tied over it. And the mystery of Batman’s surprise co-star the following issue was undermined by a) the clues dropped and b) my remembering it was Plastic Man from before. But another modern day team-up with Sergeant Rock, third personing himself and with bright orange hair was a plain old mess.
Issue 97 was the first of the run of 25c comics, as DC tried to get out ahead of inflation. Wildcat was back, and the back-up was a reprint of Deadman’s origin story. The Phantom Stranger returned the following issue, drawn by his current artist, the late, great Jim Aparo, one of the few DC artists allowed to do both pencil and inks. It was Aparo’s first B&B job, but before long he would be the regular artist for a very long run.
And after a Bob Brown/Nick Cardy job on The Flash in issue 99, Aparo took over with a special for issue 100, featuring those hard-travellin’ heroes, Green Lantern, Green Arrow and Black Canary, not to mention Robin. Unfortunately, Haney had to mess things up in his usual manner by having Green Arrow kill a thug with an arrow to the heart and without the slightest qualm. Then he had Robin constantly talking Black Canary down for being female, and then by proving the Teen Wonder’s point by having the Canary go to a hairdresser’s mid-case, to get her hair dried after being caught in the rain: it’s a bloody wig, Haney, you arsehole.
Many of these issues now are familiar to me. Though it’s still only 1972, and it was not until January 1974 that I started reading comics again, I did get into B&B through Aparo’s art after seeing him on The Spectre, and back-issues were plentiful and cheap. Metamorpho’s return, three years after his title’s cancellation I had but not the Teen Titans in a part-Neal Adams drawn story, taking over from Aparo after the latter fell ill.

An array of issues

From hereon, I’m not going to comprehensively list every guest star, just those who, for one reason or another are notable, such as Oliver Queen in issue 106, for being listed on the cover as still The Green Arrow and, some three or more years after losing his fortune which caused a fundamental change in his character, suddenly still/once again a billionaire. It’s not just Haney but also Boltinoff who didn’t give a shit for consistency.
Although the title now has a good, reliable artist, and Haney is starting to outgrow that get-down-with-the-kids hip talk of the late Sixties, I’m actually finding these stories a lot weaker, and often dull to read. Part of it is that Haney is making the stories fit ill with the guests. Nobody is quite ‘there’, because Haney is deliberately averse to an accurate depiction of the guest’s reality: it restricts his story to do so
And it’s astonishing how ‘wrong’ Batman feels to the modern eye. Because the Batman of nearly fifty years ago is almost as alien a creation as the infamous Fifties Batman of Jack Schiff. He’s clumsy, he’s amateurish, he’s constantly getting shot or knocked out, he pals around with Commissioner Gordon most of the time, he works hand in hand with the Police and orders them around, as if he’s one of them of senior rank, and he actually is a duly deputized officer. Worst of all, he has no intensity. Batman is not driven. He is nothing at all like the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths/Dark Knight Batman. And it makes the stories very weak indeed.
With issue 112, Brave & Bold joined the ranks of DC’s growing 100-page titles: twenty new pages, here featuring Mr Miracle and eighty reprint, all stories from earlier phases of the title that I’ve gone through in earlier instalments. But the following issue, reprints of The Green Arrow and the Challengers of the Unknown made it clear the title wouldn’t just confine itself to its back pages.
Even with the extra pages and some well-chosen reprints, I’m finding the comic a trial to read. These are the stories I returned to, that impressed me so much as a University student, albeit one only aged 18, that I found them such an improvement over those I still kept from the Sixties. It’s a back-handed testament to the impact Frank Miller and The Dark Knight Returns had upon Batman that this erratic, constantly injured and fallible character is now an alien being, linked only by the costume.
And I’ve also got to admit a distaste for editor Murray Boltinoff. It’s not just his determined rejection of consistency but his attitude to the readers. Boltinoff’s letter pages don’t print letters. They might contain two very short letters and then a host of part sentences and a very stiff attitude to readers who challenge this unique approach. According to Boltinoff, readers only write letters for their own ego-boost, and he’s not going to feed that, damn straight he isn’t. The impertinence of them! For a comic whose direction is set by the popularity of Batman’s guest stars, Boltinoff would really rather not have the readers get above themselves by doing any more than plop down their 60c. Miserable bugger.
The highlight of issue 117 for me was a reprint of the original first Secret Six story, by E. Nelson Bridwell and Frank Springer. I found it fresh, lively, individual, especially coming from Bridwell, whose other writing was usually, with respect, bland. This felt different, full of potential. It was, however, still the only original Secret Six story I’d ever read. Another reprint was planned for issue 119, but by then, B&B was no longer 100 pages long.
Indeed, it was back at 32 pages the next issue (Wildcat and the Joker), after exactly a year of supersizing, and boosted for the first time in its existence to eight times a year. Nothing else changed, though. Except that issue 120 was double-sized for 50c and carried that promised Secret Six issue 2 reprint, also very intriguing. What made the Secret Six unique at DC was being the only team whose members didn’t like or trust each other – more so even than the Doom Patrol – which was very Marvelesque.
Meanwhile, issue 121 reverted to standard 25c size.
Of course, the true peril of reading mid-Seventies comics that you used to read in your late teens is remembering stories you wish you’d never had cause to forget in the first place. A passable Swamp Thing led to another story mishandling Plastic Man, but these were nothing when set against yet another Sgt. Rock team-up into which Haney wrote himself, Aparo and Boltinoff as a team working frantically to complete the story according to script before the terrorist villains forced Aparo to draw Batman and Rock being killed, because if he drew it it happened. I can see that look of disbelief from here, you know. It’s like The Flash and Mopee: it did happen but it was first for the bonfire when the continuity got rebooted.
Despite Boltinoff’s contemptuous words about Golden Age characters being off-limits because they were failures, Wildcat was a regular guest, returning in issue 127. The team-ups are really with Ted Grant, Wildcat only getting a look-in, and every time, Ted’s life has been rearranged to be whatever’s convenient for Haney’s plot. This time round, he’s running a health spa in the Caribbean Sea and has killed a boxer in the ring on his second comeback. How? When? Forget it. Next time round he’ll be something and somewhere completely different.
In late 1976, with effect from issue 132, co-starring the no-longer current Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter, Boltinoff was out. DC were restructuring under new Publisher, Jeanette Kahn, with Joe Orlando in as Managing Editor, with responsibility for the line, and Denny O’Neil as Story Editor, taking direct responsibility for B&B.
But nothing really changed. John Calnan and Bob McLeod stepped in to draw issue 137’s team-up with The Demon, in a sequel to the Spectre team-up in issue 75, and with issue 139, Paul Levitz stepped into the editor’s chair. At the same time, the series went back to bi-monthly.

Batman vs Nemesis

Issue 143 was the one that came out in the DC Explosion, a big boom to 25 pages and 50c. Cary Burkett shared writing credits on Batman’s team-up with The Creeper, a second part to the previous issue’s Aquaman adventure, with Len Wein’s Human Target the back-up. And it was one of the very few to enjoy a second issue in that format. But good intentions were far from enough and the next issue was back to 17 pages for 40c, though with the compensation of elevation to monthly status for the first time ever.
With the landmark issue 150 coming up, assignments were jumbled up. Aparo was rested for 146’s first team-up with a new character in years, the war hero The Unknown Soldier, Haney in favour of Burkett for 147 and Aparo only inking Joe Staton in issue 148. The big issue itself was billed as ‘Batman and ?’ and the guest – who had never appeared with Batman in B&B before – was kept a secret until the end. Unfortunately, if you know who it was, it was easy to work out who it was: Superman
The Batman team-up era had now lasted for 77 issues. Bob Haney had written 117 issues overall, and Jim Aparo drawn 49. Few of that last fifty or so were worth reading twice. Haney’s stories were permanently unanchored in time and space, and it was a long time since he had gone beyond the formulaic.
The new monthly schedule meant fill-ins were necessary. Burkett and Don Newton contributed issue 153’s unprecedented appearance by the Red Tornado but it was Haney and Aparo who were responsible for the nadir of issue 155, with Batman and Green Lantern pursuing an interplanetary villain and Batman determined to have him tried on Earth out of sheer pigheadedness. It was a story that should have been a sacking offence, and that goes for editor Levitz too.
Burkett and Newton filled in again in issue 156, a rather intelligent little story using Dr Fate which didn’t lose too much space to the problem of getting him off Earth-2 and into the action, but when Gerry Conway wrote the Wonder Woman team-up in issue 158, it was the end of Haney’s long tenure as B&B’s regular scripter. Denny O’Neill with R’as al Ghul and Cary Burkett with Supergirl followed on.
Though a horde of Brave & Bold regulars would have disagreed with me, I was glad to see an end to Haney’s hokey stories. New viewpoints, indeed a range of them, were very welcome, and a few different artists didn’t go amiss. Paul Levitz was certainly more willing to try new guests, unlike the fervently conservative Boltinoff, and was a lot more responsive to reader’s ideas. There was also a run of guest artists as Aparo completed another assignment.
The ‘DC Implosion’ was now nearly two years back and the company had recovered its balance sufficiently to try again for the better package. With issue 166, B&B went to 25 story-pages and a 10c increase, cutting out eight pages of ads and substituting a new back-up, Nemesis, by Cary Burkett and Dan Spiegle. A moody, atmospheric series featuring Thomas Tresser balancing the scales of Justice after his brother assassinated a prominent Security officer.
Aparo was back from issue 168, and drew a full-length story teaming Batman with Nemesis in issue 170, which closed off the first arc of the latter’s story but left him just an everyday not-specially-motivated crimefighter in future. However, Burkett reacted by making Nemesis into a serial to keep things complex.
Paul Levitz’s editorial term came to an end with issue 176, handing over to Dick Giordano. As editor of the three Batman titles (imagine that, an era with only three Batman comics every month!) Levitz had aimed to inject a different feel into each one but Giordano swore to make them all the same.
There was no immediate difference to Brave & Bold, but Alan Brennert wrote a nice team-up with Hawk and Dove for issue 181 that put in place an ending for the original Sixties series that probably wouldn’t have suited Steve Ditko or Steve Skeates but worked for its time. And he came up with a superb one the following issue, sending Batman to Earth-2, where his older counterpart had died, to team up with not just the adult Robin but the original Batwoman. That was a tangled spread of emotions.
No such similar effect was achieved by Mike W. Barr’s Xmas story in issue 184, inviting The Huntress over to Earth-1 for the festivities. Charlie Boatner did find the right buttons to press in 187’s Metal Man team-up, reminding everyone of Nameless, Tin’s girlfriend from their Sixties series, and bringing her story to a conclusion with a fine and worthy flourish. On the other hand, did Doc Magnus really invent Metal Women?
As B&B went into its final year, Mike Barr did an excellent job on an Adam Strange team-up for issue 190, bringing in Carmine Infantino for one last, sentimental union with Adam and Alanna. Cohn and Mishkin produced a complex story teaming Batman with The Joker – genuinely – and with Len Wein taking over the editorial reins after Giardino’s promotion to Managing Editor, his first job sent Superman out with Superboy, both these stories displaying Jim Aparo art. Aparo was no longer the artist-in-residence, but he was once again the principal artist for the series.
Cary Burkett wrote the Superboy story, dealing quite intelligently with the time paradox aspect, and he was on hand again for issue 193, which teamed up Batman with his creation, Nemesis. I have a lot of time for the Nemesis series, a well-handled, street level story. Sadly, in a manner reminiscent of the long-ago team-up with Manhunter, this was to end Burkett’s series in the same fashion as Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, by Nemesis sacrificing himself to defeat the overwhelming opposition he’d fought all along. It was a shame that the art was given to Aparo rather than Nemesis’s artist, Dan Spiegle, and also that there was no room for Valerie Foxworth as there had been for Christine St Clair at the finish, but the final page saw Batman entering Marjorie Marshall’s home and adding the weight that finally balanced out the Scales of Justice for the death of Ben Marshall.
It made the swap-villains team-up with the Flash look the weak thing it was, despite Infantino art. No back-up meant extra pages for the main story, though only 23 now, which benefited the I… Vampire team-up in issue 195, which for a moment looked liked writing that series off without completion.
Suddenly, excellent stories were exploding. Robert Kanigher brought his short-lived Ragman, for whom I always had time in his original form, into an excellent story for issue 196, but Alan Brennert was on hand next issue, combining with Joe Staton, for one of my all-time favourites, teaming the Earth-2 Batman with his Catwoman in the story of how they came to admit their love for another and to marry. A gem in every page: Brennert wrote few comic book stories but those he wrote were superb, because he never needed to burn out his ideas on routine issues.
Brennert’s story overshadowed a poor and misguided Karate Kid team-up, and was too much for an otherwise decent Spectre team-up in issue 199, flirting with the old Fleisher touch but ending up by taking a new, cleaner route.
But time was up. The era in which a series devoted to nothing but team-ups between a static character and a random other was ending. Brave & Bold, by its very nature, could have only very limited continuity within its own pages. It had outrun its time. Mike W Barr had become the nearest to a regular writer in the title, and he proposed a change. Barr wanted to separate Batman from the Justice League, where he was still an anomaly, and make him leader of another team, of outsiders.

Final issue

DC approved of the idea and, to make room for it within the Batman universe, cancelled B&B with its 200th issue. The swan-song was almost obvious in its unpredictability, teaming Batman with Batman. That is, a story crossing two time-periods and two Earths, drawn, rather wonderfully, by Dave Gibbons. Barr’s story featured a gloriously Golden Age style Batman and Robin tussle with their villain Brimstone, who’s defeated but ends up in a coma. When he awakens in 1983, it’s to learn that Batman is dead so, somehow, he psychically imposes his mind on his Earth-1 counterpart to resume a battle that Batman is bemused with, but still wins.
There was also a sixteen page preview of the new Batman and the Outsiders series which was, respectfully, crap.
But The Brave and the Bold, one of the few DC titles to reach 200 issues, was gone, it’s fourth and final phase terminated, with few landmarks of any note, but those which were of note being of very high quality indeed. I can’t say I enjoyed every minute of my time spent on this series, but I wouldn’t have missed the good stuff for the world.

To be Brave and Bold: the Team-ups Phase

The cover date was October/November 1963, the editors were Murray Boltinoff and George Kashdan and the theme of The Brave and the Bold was now team-ups: the features you asked for. I take that with a pinch of salt, for I cannot see the comic book readers of late 1963, the remaining days of President John Kennedy’s life, wanting above all to see a team-up between The Green Arrow and The Martian Manhunter.
But these are honourable men, and who are we to doubt them?
From here and for a very long time, the series will be written by Bob Haney, a good, solid, professional writer but not one who, how shall we put it, paid undue attention to continuity. DC may not have had continuity as we know it in 1963, but Haney still cared less about what they had. For instance, the Martian Manhunter was accidentally trapped on Earth after being teleported by Dr Erdel’s Robot Brain, which then shorted out, stranding him here. However, Haney has him using the Robot Brain to teleport to Mars for advice and assistance about the Martian villains he and Green Arrow are facing.
It would be like this all along. Mind you, this was almost a highlight of a stupid, cliched and just plain rotten story that was no sort of introduction to the new(er) Brave & Bold.

Your obvious first choice

Aquaman and Hawkman was another non-natural pairing in issue 51, with the story clunking to try to make the air-sea combination work, but issue 52 was a glorious piece of work. Instead of the advertised Flash/Atom team-up, Robert Kanigher dropped in to edit and write a 3 Battle Stars story, with magnificent Joe Kubert art bringing together four of DC’s War comic stars, Johnny Cloud, the Haunted Tank, Sergeant Rock and, a surprise guest, Mlle. Marie. It put the two previous issues to shame, and easily. Kanigher was always on his best form with the War stories.
The Atom/Flash team-up duly arrived next issue and, apart from splendid Alex Toth art, was the usual sloppy mess. Part of Haney’s problem is his refusal to provide adequate explanations: things happen to complicate the heroes’ battle and then are dispensed with in a throwaway line. For instance, Flash loses his speed at one point and is captured, but regains it when he’s freed by the Atom, ‘because the planet has given it him back’.
The title had only spawned one successful series in its formal ‘try-out’ phase, so issue 54’s team-up of ‘junior’ heroes was ironic. This brought together Kid Flash, Aqualad and Robin in a story that started the Teen Titans, though as yet nameless. It would take the addition of Wonder Girl and a couple more appearances to seal the deal.
Not that the story was much good, especially from the point of view of the dialogue, especially the teens’ hip slang, the beginning of a long road of embarrassingly awful writing.

Not yet the Teen Titans

Kashdan did a solo job in issue 56, bringing together another bizarre pairing in the Metal Men and The Atom, before devoting the next two issues to try-outs again, in the form of Metamorpho, created by Haney and artist Ramona Fraden, whose bright, cartoony style is perfect for the oddball Element Man. This would extend the series’ success rate when Metamorpho got his own, albeit short-lived series. Everything’s there from the very beginning: the Metamorpho of the current The Terrifics is the Metamorpho of B&B 57-58.
Issue 59 provided a foretaste of the future in teaming up two of DC’s biggest heroes for the first time, Batman and Green Lantern. I was delighted to read this effort, having remembered it’s excellent title – ‘The Tick-Tock Traps of the Time-Commander’ – from the Sixties: I love the chance to find what lies behind some of these covers that impressed me in the house ads of the time.

A great title

The Teen Titans – named and a foursome – returned in issue 60 for a teen-supporting adventure in which the colourist got Kid Flash’s uniform badly wrong (hint, it’s not all yellow), but issue 61 is the one that’s most special to me, the first Brave & Bold I bought on one of those Saturday afternoons in Droylsden, working industriously through the newsagent’s spinner rack, anxious to make the best choice with the shilling I’d been given.
After The Atom, Julius Schwartz had announced that he would not be doing any more new versions of Justice Society members. Instead, he turned to actual revivals, starting with a two-issue run in Showcase for Doctor Fate and Hourman. Now he took over B&B for two issues teaming up Starman and Black Canary, all with scripts by Gardner Fox and art from Murphy Anderson. I loved this first one, and still have it (autographed by Schwartz) over fifty years later.
It was billed as the first team-up between the two characters (who had never been contemporaries in the JSA), which it is only if you discount their joint appearance in the 1964 JLA/JSA team-up. Starman’s Gravity Rod has now been upgraded to a Cosmic Rod, Dinah Drake has married Larry Lance, Starman’s arch-enemy The Mist, who didn’t feature in any of the stories on the Adventure Comics DVD, is back with an ingenious plan: it was pure heaven for me back in 1966, and I still love it now.

A lifelong favourite

The second story doesn’t hold anything like the meaning for me as I didn’t read it until much later (though I did see it in that same spinner rack, when I obviously found something else more compelling). The heroes turned out against two now-married villains, Green Lantern’s Sportsmaster and Wildcat’s Huntress, with the Big Cat making his first post-Golden Age appearance in a fun cameo.
Sadly, nothing came of either pair’s revival in terms of series: though JSA team-ups would carry on for nearly two more decades, the Golden Age revival was already showing signs of running out of steam.
Kashdan and Haney were back in issue 63, teaming Supergirl and Wonder Woman in a story so chauvinistic, condescending, demeaning and flat-out vile that I’m not even going to admit it exists: permanent karmic burden for both of them and the artist.
After that, anything would have been an improvement. What we got was hero vs villain, Batman and Eclipso in a confusing and in parts ridiculous story based on Batman falling for a red-headed heiress, first romantically then as a con, made much worse by the sudden arrival of corny dialogue that could have come straight out of the forthcoming TV series. It was horrendous.
On the other hand, the Flash’s team-up with the Doom Patrol – really as a fill-in for Negative Man – was well done and contained some intelligent points about the team’s dynamics, though a bit fewer uses of the word ‘freaks’ would have been welcome.
Another bizarre but oddly appealing team-up was Metamorpho and the Metal Men in issue 66, followed by another ‘big-guys’ story, with Batman (for the third time) and The Flash. This was, in many ways, an archetypal Haney B&B story, with a life-shattering menace being raised and disposed of in a lazy manner. Batman requires Flash’s help to combat a gang of speedsters in Gotham, but Flash’s speed is killing him, burning his body out from within. The ‘threat’ is negated by the fact this isn’t taking place in Flash’s series, where we might take it seriously. And it’s resolved by a miraculous and implausible ‘cure’ from the villains’ own power source (irony that’s what it is, irony). No way is anything remotely serious going to happen in Brave & Bold.
And it was a sign of the forthcoming times that Batman was back again one issue later, this time alongside Metamorpho, in another piece of nonsense that sees the Caped Crusader converted into Bat-Hulk (don’t ask). The TV series was big, the movie was just coming out, Batman who, two years earlier, was facing cancellation, was on a roll. People wanted to read him.
All told, there were going to be five consecutive issues of Batman teaming up with someone else, such as Green Lantern again, against another, less memorable Time Commander plot, Hawkman in a ridiculous tale about a Collector trying to collect their secret identities, and The Green Arrow in a story about Indian tribes that just about managed to avoid being patronising.
The waters having been tested, and found to be pleasurably warm, The Brave and The Bold reverted to its role in providing random team-ups for two final issues. The first connected the Earth-1 Flash to The Spectre on Earth-2 (Barry’s just visiting, but not his fellow-Flash but rather his ‘old buddy’ – one JSA team-up – the Spectre: besides, everyone on Earth-2 recognises Barry-Flash). The last brought Aquaman and The Atom together in a non-team-up in which each hero got half the story.
And with issue 73, the third phase of B&B came to an end. It’s fourth phase has already been heavily foreshadowed, and this phase would last until the comic’s end, in the distance in issue 200. I’ll cover that loooong phase in the last part of this series.

More Fun Comics – The First Original

New Fun Comics

Getting my hands on a DVD-Rom of More Fun Comics, a National Allied Publications/Detective Comics inc./National Periodical Publications Golden Age title published from 1934 to 1947, completes my collection of what I think of as the Big Four, that is, the four comics who contributed characters to All-Star Comics and the Justice Society of America.
That’s my angle of interest, but it must be acknowledged that More Fun has a historical significance of its own. As New Fun it was the first ever comic book to feature all-new material, and in issue 6 it offered the first published work by Cleveland teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, two instalments of Henri Duval, Swordsman of France, before creating Doctor Occult in issue 8. By then, the title had become More Fun, as of issue 7 and, finally, More Fun Comics with issue 9.
My DVD-Rom is more in the mould of Flash and All-American than Adventure, but like the two All-American publications books, the title did not survive the Fories, being cancelled with issue 127, by when the reason for my interest had long since gone by the board. It starts with issue 8, so let’s look at that to begin with.
Cover-dated February 1936 and published by More Fun Inc., headquartered in Missouri, issue 8 is a revelation. It’s the last of the original, larger-scale format, 44 pages with card covers. Comic books began as reprints of newspaper strips and despite the all-original boast, the comic is still trying to stick with that formula. With the exception of a prose serial, everything appears for one page only, laid out like a Sunday strip: four tiers, mostly square panels containing illustrations more suited to books that comics, no animation or attempt at movement, a mixture of B&W, limited colour and full-colour, funny strips and adventure ones, multiple genres. When I said this was all-original, that only meant that none of this stuff had been printed before: there isn’t an original idea in the entire issue, and nothing is remotely readable.
The next issue shrank to comic book size and expanded to 64 pages, with some series jumping to two pages, and some new features appearing. If you’re expecting to hear about these, you’ll have to find another blogger: I’m an analyst not an annalist.
It’s more-or-less a given that Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson used original art because he couldn’t afford the Syndicate fees for strips, and the young writers and artists he used were much cheaper. I’ve heard them described as rough, naïve, inexperienced and, reading between the lines, too untalented to make it on newspaper strips. Now I know they weren’t exaggerating.
None of this is of more than historical interest to me, except for an almost unbelievable letter of praise from a girl reader living in Newton Heath, Manchester, and there’s a lot of it to get through before we reach the meat of the run for me.
The change I had my eyes open for finally showed up in issue 31, May 1938. Gone was Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. Vincent Sullivan was now Editor, not assistant Editor. More Fun was now owned by Detective Comics Inc. And inside the front cover there was a full-page ad for a new title: Action Comics no. 1.
There was no immediate change. New features replaced old but More Fun stayed the same. Dr Occult was dropped but Seigel and Schuster’s Radio Car, a Police series, continued its irregular course. Old features drifted on, unchanging. But with every month that passed, DC, as I suppose we should now call them, were becoming more aware of what a hit they’d bought from Siegel and Schuster, and Bob Kane, enlivened by ideas from Bill Finger, was shaping his own costumed character. Unseen and unheard, there was a tide rising and it was going to overflow soon.
For now, e.g., issue 41, the mix was still the same, various miscellaneous adventure series, a couple of gag strips. More pages were in full colour, through these continued to be distributed haphazardly throughout the comic, favouring the front of the book. The biggest difference was that every strip got at least two pages and several as any as four, making for only a dozen different series.
Issue 43, cover-dated May 1939, was released alongside Detective 27, with plugs for the new action-adventure strip starting that month, the Batman. And Charlie Gaines had established All-American Publications and All-American Comics. And by issue 49, there wasn’t a single gag strip in the book.
But patience eventually pays off. The long life of the original More Fun Comics, little changed from the title put together by Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, ended in issue 51, cover-dated January 1940. in honour of that, let me list its contents. These were; Wing Brady, a Foreign Legion adventurer; Biff Bronson, an adventurer; King Carter, a globe-trotting cowboy adventurer: The Buccaneer, a sea-going adventurer; Kit Strong, a private detective adventurer, Lieut. Bob Neal of the Sub. 662, a Naval adventurer; The Flying Fox, an aviator adventurer; Detective Sergeant Carey, a Police detective adventurer; Sergeant O’Malley of the Red Coat Patrol, a Canadian Mountie adventurer; Bulldog Martin, an adventurer, and a single comic page starring Butch the Pup.
But the Buccaneer was ending. Its creator, Bernard Bailey would be drawing a new strip the following month, written by Jerry Siegel.

The white bits are not a costume

He’s there on the cover, with his green cape and hood, gloves and trunks, arms folded as he looks sternly down over a gang of crooks, The Spectre coming to turn More Fun around. Inside, he’s the lead feature, the first of a two-part telling of his origin as Jim Corrigan, hard-boiled Police Detective. The story’s familiar, as it should be given how often it’s been reprinted, but by the end of the episode, the ghost of Jim Corrigan is still wearing a tuxedo.
There’s one thing about the story that doesn’t sit all that well with me. Corrigan has blown out a party in honour of his heiress fiancee Clarice Winston to knock off some of ‘Gat’ Benson’s mob. Clarice is understandably angry with him for that. Corrigan’s hardly apologetic: indeed, he roundly tells her there’s only going to be one boss in this marriage, and that’s him. Clarice calls him a tyrant and a bully, but she still loves him.
Ok, it’s 1939, when marital relationships were looked on in a totally different light, and it’s hardly out of step, but it still jars modern sensibilities, or at least my modern sensibilities. But knowing more now of Jerry Siegel’s marriage and his personal history than I once did, I can’t help but sense a personal issue being worked on here. Jerry the mother’s boy, the nerd-before-there-were-nerds, who married against his Mother’s wishes, wouldn’t be the first writer to make his personal problems ‘work’ in his fiction.
The rest of the issue is unchanged, though I couldn’t help noticing that Bulldog Martin suddenly got a bottle of invisibility pills at the same time.
The other half of the story completes the tale with Corrigan’s revenge on Benson and his mob: dealing death with a glance, withering one into a skeleton, driving the rest out of their senses, you can already see where Michael Fleisher got his ideas from. Corrigan also revives Clarice from near death, breaks off their engagement rather woodenly, moves out of the apartment he shares with his best friend, all the time acting so strangely, and then sews himself a costume to wear as The Spectre. All these limitless super-powers and he gets out a sewing machine. It’s not the most favourable of signs.
Somewhat surprisingly, Corrigan gets the chance to relinquish his powers and receive eternal rest in his third episode, summoned to the edge of Heaven and getting an either-or offer from the Voice. Since he’s summoned in the split instant that a crooked Swami has fired a bullet at Clarice, who is proving impressively hard to shake off, Corrigan has no choice but to go for Option B: to be earth-bound, fighting crime until all traces of it are exterminated.
Only four episodes in and I have to say there’s a strange intensity about these early Spectre stories that just doesn’t come over in the solo chapters in All-Star Comics, which is self-evidently because those are written by Gardner Fox. Siegel brings a twisted perspective to Corrigan/The Spectre’s determined rejection of all human connection and an angry nihilism to the superficially charming Zor’s role as The Spectre’s evil equivalent.
I’m also intrigued that, whilst Corrigan and The Spectre are one being, the latter is already and constantly ’emerging’ from the former’s body, foreshadowing a significant development later in the series.

Half-helm only

The Spectre had obviously made a hit because in issue 55 he was joined by his partner in the supernatural, Doctor Fate. It’s a most odd first story as there is no origin, and whilst I knew this is held back some time, reprints had always centred upon Fate’s first meeting with debutante Inza Cramer. Here though, we start with Fate’s evil enemy, Wotan, targetting Inza to draw Fate’s attention, with the good Doctor – not described as possessing magic but rather the great secret of transforming Matter into Energy and Energy into Matter (what a gloriously meaningless attribute that is!) – not appearing until halfway.
So that was now two costumed heroes, both magical. Dr Fate took the cover for the first time in issue 56, continuing his battle with Wotan but overcoming him permanently (?), whilst the Spectre merely fought a gang of crooks. Elsewhere, More Fun was settling into a consistent run of adventure series, most of them veterans of the comic, though there was a new character, aviator Captain Desmo, who kept his face permanently concealed by flying helmet and goggles just as much as if he were a superhero.
And a new series, about Africa-based adventurer Congo Bill, facing up to a Phantom-esque villain called the Skull, started in issue 56. It’s a pretty basic adventure strip but it would last a surprisingly long time, hopping from title to until 1959, when, as we’ve already seen, it arrived in Adventure Comics, where Congo Bill was transformed into Congorilla.
The Doctor Fate strip also runs with a frenetic intensity. Gardner Fox just freewheels through each adventure, hurtling from one action to another, with very little evidence of a composed plot and a high-risk magical apocalypse threatened on every page. It’s gloriously goofy and gloriously weird. Both these strips burn in a way none of the other Justice Society members ever do. Though the basis of Fate’s power is still unsettled, now being an atomic force within him.
But the Gothic/Lovecraftian atmosphere of Fate’s series was fairly quickly decided to be a bit too intense for the readers, and this had to be dialled down. The first step, in issue 66, was to have the Doctor remove his helm and reveal a blond-haired handsome face: a human being, in fact, in response to Inza’s wish for someone she might love instead of a mysterious sorceror. Kent Nelson’s somewhat grisly origin, involving involuntary patricide, followed in the next issue.
At the same time, Congo Bill bowed out his short run in the comic.
Since their respective debuts, The Spectre had been the lead feature in More Fun and Doctor Fate closing things out. Now, in issue 68, the roles were reversed.
Despite Fate and the Spectre, More Fun had never wholly accepted superheroing.

The first time he was popular

Now the time was coming when this would change rapidly. Johnny Quick, a rip-off of The Flash in issue 71, Aquaman, a rip-off of the Sub-Mariner and The Green Arrow, a rip-off of Batman both in issue 73, all created by Mort Weisinger. In between times, Dr Fate got the toning down I knew was coming, getting rid of the supernatural and the eerie in favour of a half-faced helm that exposed his nose and mouth, and aiding his sudden vulnerability to attacks on his lungs. Only Radio Squad and Clip Carson survived the transition.
And Fate was not the only supernatural character to get toned down as issue 74 introduced The Spectre to Percival Popp, the Super-Cop. I have long read about, but never read, this comic relief character who was to dog Corrigan and his ghost for the rest of the series. Popp turned out to not be a cop but rather a private detective, determined to work side-by-side with Jim Corrigan. He was a short, skinny guy with a big nose, glasses and a shock of dark red hair. He could have been worse but he was bad enough: a comic relief character in January 1942?
The rest of the title was not at all impressive. Johnny Quick was crude. Aquaman and Green Arrow were as bland as their spells in the Fifties in Adventure, just cruder in style to begin with. And Doctor Fate had exchanged gothic/sinister tones for obsessive, pun-based wisecracking of a kind that makes Spider-Man look sophisticated.
The first history of The Spectre I ever read, as long ago as 1966, made mention of the time when the Avenging Ghost was permitted to resurrect Jim Corrigan’s body to life. I’d always been under the impression that this had preceded the arrival of Percival Popp, but in fact it followed it, by one issue.
Issue 75 saw Clarice Winston trying to re-enter Corrigan’s life. His cruel rejection of her in his origin is always held up as a key factor in that story but it leaves the impression that that was that for the lovelorn heiress. But Clarice remained as much in love with him as ever, and hopeful of getting married, and Jim still found her hard to resist. Now Popp, in his second apearance, took a hand in trying to put the two back together.

No comment

But Clarice was becoming the victim of an artist who was draining her life, and who was having a sculpture thrown into the river, exactly where Benson’s men had thrown Corrigan’s cement barrel. To prevent his body being found, and blowing his identity, The Spectre sought and received permission to restore Corrigan to life.
And the first thing Corrigan did was seek out Clarice.
It was a touching reward for her faith and patience. Now his excuse for not marrying her was, you’ll pardon the phrase, dead in the water. Did he get engaged to her? No, you’d think he was engaged to Percival Popp, in both his existences, since the little man became co-star of the series two issues later.
The success of the Green Arrow took me completely by surprise. By issue 76, he’d claimed the lead story and, an issue later, took over the cover. Clip Carson was dropped as from the same issue.
It might be germane to ask, if Green Arrow had become the most popular character in More Fun, as he self-evidently had, why was he not drafted into the Justice Society of America? There are two answers to that: America had entered the War, paper was rationed, no new titles were to be launched for the duration, and had they topped any reader’s polls, neither The Spectre nor Doctor Fate had anywhere to go to make room.
More pertinently, Green Arrow – and Speedy – already had a team to call home, Detective Comics’ Seven Soldiers of Justice, aka the Law’s Legionnaires, denizens of the recently created Leading Comics.
More Fun was now firmly a superhero comic. Clip Carson had gone, leaving only the long-running Radio Squad to disrupt the line-up. The Green Arrow’s stories were no better or worse than the ones in Adventure in the Fifties, the main distinction being that the Emerald Archer only fires real arrows, with points not gimmicks. Aquaman deals with mainly realistic sea adventures, without the constant ‘finny friends’ business, but he’s the entirely human son of a famous submarine scientist who’s taught him scientific ways of living under the water. Johnny Quick, now enjoying some solid art from ‘Mort Morton’, is the best of the bunch.
As for the old stagers, the de-powered Doctor Fate is not a patch on the full-helmed version. There are no magical or super-scientific foes, just ordinary crooks. The series is energetic enough and Inza is doing a sterling job of showing that you really don’t need to hide your identity from your girlfriend, but it’s still pallid stuff compared to the beginning. And The Spectre has now resigned himself to a full-time role alongside the ridiculous Popp. At least we no longer have to suffer the incessant and tiresome demands of the Cliffland Chief of Police that Jim Corrigan capture The Spectre because The Spectre is behind everything. Obviously. Not that much of a relief, sadly.
The War came to More Fun in issue 84, on the cover at least and, in passing, in Green Arrow’s strip. The next issue was billed as a big change in Doctor Fate’s life as the Doctor became a Doctor, retraining as a physician. This made me think: once again, the histories I’ve read of characters have not been as accurate as they might. Kent Nelson has always been portrayed as an archaeologist, like his father Sven, who changed profession to Doctor to be more useful during the War years. When he was revived in 1965, he was back in the digging business. Incidentally, having jettisoned the lower half of his helm, Fate dispensed with his golden cape as well.
In fact, throughout Fate’s series to date, once Kent Nelson was revealed, there was not one word about his profession. And how could he go on digs when he spent all his time in that walled tower in Salem?
Incidentally, the story revealing Nelson’s new profession saw Fate meet a plastic surgeon blackmailed into creating new faces for crooks over a brother in a prison camp in Germany, exactly the same set up as the Green Arrow story in the same issue.
Though he didn’t displace the Green Arrow from the leading position, Johnny Quick did get onto the cover for issues 86 and 87. As for issue 88, The Spectre story had him, and Jim Corrigan, as just a ghost again. There had only been one additional story after issue 75 to specifically reference Corrigan as human again (and dating Clarice), but this was a definitive continuity-reversal.
There was one final story to reference Corrigan and The Spectre as separate, and this was the one in which they separated. Corrigan the human could finally pass the physical, and went into officer-training, to fight the Japanese, leaving the Spectre behind to keep helping out Percival Popp. But separation from his host had the unexpected effect of leaving the ghost invisible. In possession of all his other powers alright, just not visible. So the once-mighty Spectre, who could kill at a glance, was now the stooge. Thankfully, not for much longer.
The same issue did include a development I was glad to see, the re-entry of Inza Kramer, fiancee to that dashing young Interne, Doctor Nelson. Aww, so sweet. Clarice Winston must have been green. But that would prove to be Inza’s final appearance in the series.
A minor detail that intrigued me by this point was a succession of adverts for Prize Comics, and then Prize and Headline Comics. No such titles were ever published by Detective or All-American, and these turned out to be titles published by Crestwood Publications, who had the bright and possibly unique idea of advertising in their bigger rivals line!
With paper rationing starting to bite, in the form of an order to reduce usage by 10%, More Fun, which had been monthly since it established itself, was demoted to bi-monthly status for the duration. All this was to was was to delay the changes lying directly ahead.
In the meantime, a slip on the cover of issue 93 plugged The Green Arrow and Speedy, whilst the Aquaman story was, for once, worth reading. The Monarch of the Sea guards a delayed freighter bringing supplies to Murmansk. The twist is that it has an all-female crew and, whilst Aquaman and the Germans patronisingly underestimate the ladies, they perform with calm confidence and aptitude, needing no condescension. Oh, and the Captain turns into a red-headed babe in a backless evening dress when they arrive!

Even less comment

Little things: Johnny Quick’s stories had adopted a comfortable formula by which the Mile-a-Moment hero has to help someone by doing a job that would take a dozen men a month to complete, but do it in less than twenty-four hours. At the back end of his run and using only the most minimal talents, Doctor Fate was only now being referred to regularly as ‘the Man of Magic’. And issue 94 saw the debut of Dover and Clover, twin private detectives who made Percy Popp look competent.
Nevertheless, they quickly proved to be so popular that they shared the cover of issue 98 with Green Arrow and Speedy, who were quoted as claiming this was “Our Mag”. Not for much longer it wouldn’t be but this issue saw the final appearance of Doctor Fate, in a sadly stupid and unbelievable little escapade that was below even the standards his series had sunk to. Cover date July-August 1944: in All-Star Comics 21, cover-dated Summer 1944, the Doc and Sandman were active in their last Justice Society adventure.
Fate was not replaced, unless you count a one-page comic historical feature a replacement. Two issues later, More Fun reached its historical 100th issue, without fanfare, celebration or effort of note, though Johnny Quick got the cover and the lead slot and Green Arrow was bounced back to fourth slot.
More Fun used to be The Spectre’s comic. It was so for the last time in issue 101 (January-February 1945). And the Ghostly Guardian, or else the Dark Knight as he was so frequently called over four decades before Frank Miller’s first Batman story, made his last appearance in All-Star in issue 23, Winter 1944. Like Doctor Fate, the disappearances were virtually simultaneous, and the last story undistinguished. Both had been undistinguished for a long time.
The Spectre’s replacement was introduced in a five-page prelude in issue 101. Superman had long been human until he reached manhood. Now he had a career to be revealed as Superboy, though not the Superboy Jerry Siegel had envisaged, nor a Superboy Siegel had any part in, More Fun‘s line-up would now consist of Superboy, Aquaman, Green Arrow and Johnny Quick, plus the stupid Dover and Clover. Sound familiar? It ought to, for reasons we’ll shortly learn.
Anyway, Superboy’s full-scale debut didn’t merit him the cover, which went to the twin detectives, nor even the lead slot, which was Green Arrow again. It was a younger Superboy than we would get used to, somewhere around age eight, and a Clark Kent who didn’t wear glasses and acted like a normal kid. There was some way to go yet.
And there was no rush to exploit the new character, though he was mentioned on issue 103’s cover, as Green Arrow and Speedy once again call out Dover and Clover for trying to take over ‘their book’, only for the clueless crime-crackers to turn up again to point out Superboy’s in it. And they showed him on the cover of the next issue, with the crime-fighting archers.
Superboy might have started without Jerry Siegel, but his name was on it, alongside Joe Schuster, next time around. There were none of the familiar characters, no Ma and Pa Kent, no pretty redhead next door. They wouldn’t come until later, and in a different title.
Because, after issue 107, cover-date January-February 1946, More Fun underwent a wholesale change of direction, to emulate its name by becoming a comic comic. The regulars, Superboy, Johnny Quick, Green Arrow and Aquaman, were shipped out en masse, to, as we have already seen, Adventure Comics, where they would stay for over a decade.

Alfred Bester created this?

With issue 108, Dover and Clover took over the cover, and the lead slot, greeting Genius Jones, who had travelled in the opposite direction and dropped into place behind them. The rest of the comic was new, or rather old – old hat, that is. A parade of silly characters and silly situations, without any of the ingenuity or humour of the newspaper strips of the era, or any of the rich cartooning abilities of their artists. But the next month, for the comic had been returned to monthly status now the war was over, just in time for its great change, Genius Jones – a creation of Alfred Bester, my life –  had both cover and lead slot and the detectives were back at the back.
In fact, they were settling in to alternate cover billing.
Now it’s fair to say that, with the exception of Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly and the Red Tornado, I get nothing from the Golden Age humour strips. Even Johnny Thunder was nigh on intolerable at times, when Peachy Pet took the lead. So from More Fun‘s change of direction to the end of the run, there is little to interest me. Nevertheless, I read each issue (semi-) diligently to check for anything requiring comment.
For the record, the line-up after the alternating leads consisted of Curly’s Cafe, Windy, The Gas House Gang, Rusty, Cabby Casey and Cunnel Custard, but if you want any more details than that, buy your own DVD!
That was until issue 121, which introduced Jimminy and his Magic Book, a fairytale adventure that got not merely cover status but two well-drawn stories inside. Genius Jones and Dover & Clover continued, as did Rusty, Windy and the Gas House Gang but everybody else was dropped.
There wasn’t much left. Howard Post’s art on Jimminy (whose other name was Crockett) may well have been the best ever to appear in More Fun, with a foreshadowing of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, but More Fun was heading for cancellation. Superman crossed the cover of issue 125, Cabbie Casey replaced Rusty in issue 126, and with issue 127, cover dated November-December 1947, with no less than five Jimminy stories and one final Dover & Clover, it was gone.
So ended DC’s oldest title and Genius Jones andDJimminy went with it. Depending on dates, Dover and Clover may have had as much as ten more appearances in them across other titles, but they ended up in deserved limbo too. And, in the absence of a DVD of either or both of Leading Comics and Star-Spangled Comics, that completes my adventures in the Golden Age.

A Spot of Adventure: The Silver Age – Part 1

It’s February 1958, though the cover date says April, standard comic book practice then and for decades to come to try to fool newstands, drugstores and Mom-and-Pop stores to leave the comic out on display for longer and longer, before tearing the strip with the title off the cover and returning it for credit. The new Flash had appeared in two issues of Showcase, both big sellers, but the management at National Periodical Publications (you didn’t shout the word ‘Comics’ too loudly in the Fifties) would require two more, this year, before trusting him to a series of his own. The Silver Age was struggling to be born but Adventure Comics and its editor, Whitney Ellsworth, was about to make their greatest contribution to the new era. He, writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino were about to introduce the Legion of Super-Heroes.
Appropriately for the time, it’s a bit of a jerky story. Three kids from the future, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, the latter two of which looking nothing like the incarnations we would become familiar with in the future, and all of which boast artificial super-powers that, at this stage, are not the inherent abilities stemming from their respective home planets, ‘tease’ (i.e., horrify) Superboy by knowing his dual identity, invite him 1,000 years into the future to join their superhero club, put his through competency tests in which they deliberately sabotage him, and all for fun. Remind me again, why did he join this bunch of creeps?
We only get to meet these three Legionnaires, although the group includes at least four other identified members, one of which is green-skinned and could possibly have been Brainiac 5. We also learn that, ten centuries on, feminism hasn’t arrived, since Saturn Girl is ‘only a girl’ (curl lip in contempt). Of such acorns do oak trees grow, however implausible, but if superheroes are on the way back, the idea’s a doozy.
There are still our hapless D-listers, The Green Arrow and Aquaman, to go through, and it was back to Superboy solo next month, But the Silver Age had visited and left its calling card on the table. The In-Between Age was doomed..
As this is a new run, I actually started reading the back-up stories, or enough of them to finally pick up on the patterns. Green Arrow’s stories are always about the arrows, and how the crime-fighting archers have to keep using different ones, whilst Aquaman is about him acting out of character for some secret purpose that gets revealed on page 5. And it was interesting to see that, when Adventure hit issue 250, one of a very small number of titles to do so, absolutely nothing was done to mark it.
Or did it? For that and the next six issues, Green Arrow gained a new artist, the King, Jack Kirby. No, it’s not particularly memorable art, or that distinctly Kirby, and apparently it was being inked by his wife, Roz, but it’s Kirby. And in issue 252, not only did Superboy encounter Red Kryptonite for the first time (but not its more antic aspects), but Green Arrow’s story was continued into a second part!
A major change arrived in that second issue. It was not Superboy teaming up with a time-travelling Robin the Boy Wonder but rather the introduction of the Silver Age staple, the letters page.
I was also pleased to see the occasional resumption of house ads, particularly the full-pagers devoted to new characters in Showcase, such as Space Ranger and Adam Strange, under the rubric ‘Adventures on Other Worlds’. But on the debit side, Aquaman’s series was now adorned with his own sidekick, his pet octopus, Topo. Don’t anyone tell Jason Mamoa about this.

Don’t believe it…

But we are really getting into some deep and, frankly, scary psychological terrirtory, especially with the Superboy story in issue 255, which sees some Martian Red Kryptonite split Superboy in two, one of them the Boy of Steel and the other a merely human Clark Kent. Clark goes criminally batty and Superboy ends up killing him in an explosion. That’s right, killing him, or rather himself, without qualm or regret. That’s seriously disturbing shit.
Kirby’s last Green Arrow, featuring the most identifiably Kirby art of his run, was a re-telling of his origin in it’s pre-Speedy form. In fact, the letters page, and several requests for who, what and why, seems to have inspired a sweep of origin recaps across the Superman titles generally, not to mention another ludicrous team-up in issue 258, this time with Superboy trying to inspire new-kid-in-town Oliver Queen to take an interest in archery… In time, practically half of DC’s characters would pass through Smallville during Superboy’s youth.
When I mentioned that Whitney Ellsworth was editing Adventure, I was surprised to see his name in the indicia, as I’d always assumed Mort Weisinger’s legendary possessiveness about Superman would not allow anyone else to be in charge. Weisinger replaces Ellsworth as of issue 259, reminding me that when Ellsworth was editor of All-Star, it was Julius Schwartz doing the work. I think Ellsworth was editor in the same way Stan Lee et al were editor-in-chief at Marvel: the overall boss but not the hands-on man. I think Weisinger’s hand was on the real controls all along. Now, it just became official.
One of those origin stories appeared in issue 260, as Aquaman’s origin was retold for the first time in eighteen years, or rather retconned, for now Arthur Curry was named for the first time, and he was revealed as being Atlantean, though not yet as the rightful king of that undersea world. Next issue, the Boy of Steel met a teenage Lois Lane at camp, sharing a cabin with Lana Lang and deploring the latter’s constant efforts to discover Superboy’s identity: Lois would never do that. All-in-all, it was a chance for the Boy of Steel to anticipate his adult self’s trait of acting like a dick to two women who love him.
By now, it was clear that the Legion hadn’t caught the imagination of Superboy’s readers first off. In fact, it took twenty issues for the teenagers of tomorrow to reappear, in issue 267, and they were still dicks, humiliating the Boy of Steel, driving him off Earth, imprisoning him. It was the same trio but this time all in the uniforms with which we would be familiar in the Sixties, except that Saturn Girl was brunette, not blonde.
Two issues later, Aquaman met Aqualad, an Atlantean expelled from Atlantis for being afraid of fish, cured his fear and ending up with the kid imprinting himself on the King of the Sea and adopting him as a surrogate father with no legal proceedings whatsoever.

For issue 270, the first of 1960, there was a sudden change as Green Arrow’s series was replaced by Congorilla, big game hunter Congo Bill who, by rubbing a magic ring, could transfer his mind into the body of a golden gorilla for an hour. Remember too that 1960 was the year the Justice League of America debuted, consisting of seven of DC’s eight adult superheroes. The only one to miss out was… Green Arrow. Is there a connection?
Next issue, Superboy met the young Lex Luthor, farm boy in Smallville, Superboy hero-worshipper and would-be scientific genius, and we see that Luthor becomes a Superman-hater after Superboy causes all his hair to fall out. Don’t laugh so much, there are sound psychological underpinnings to this rationale, I merely looks goofy. And increasingly the letters page is becoming a source of inspiration, with the kids raising questions that prompt stories being written to explain the answers. Weisinger certainly knew his audience.
After Robin, Lois and Luthor, it was inevitable that Superboy would meet a young Bruce Wayne when his parents, the great philanthropists and benefactors of Gotham City, decided to move to Smallville; well, wouldn’t you? Who wants to live in a plush mansion when you could live in a hick town? Bruce gets the hots for Lana who agrees to let him take her to the Prom if he finds out Superboy’s identity, which he does, being smart, only Superboy shows him film of the future where he’s Batman and they’re best friends, so he doesn’t. Funny how the Boy of Steel omits the bit about why young Bruce becomes Batman…
Both back-up series had a change of title is issue 277, to introduce their kid partners: Aquaman and Aqualad, Congorilla and Janu, with National announcing that, in response to many such requests, they were giving the first pair a two-issue run in Showcase to see if they could carry their own title.
Issue 280 saw the Mermaid Lori Lemaris become the latest Superman character to pre-empt her first meeting with Supes by turning up in Smallville years early. As usual, the story was 90% silly, the exceptions being the provision of an entirely sensible explanation for Lori’s Atlanteans having fishtails whilst Aquaman’s have two legs, and the instinctive effort of the jealous Lana to save the life of the ‘girl’ she fears as a rival. It was also announced that, from the next issue, the first of 1961, Congorilla and Aquaman would alternate as back-up, their combined pages giving the opportunity for thirteen page adventures.
This time, it took only fifteen issues for the Legion of Superheroes to return, in issue 282, with a new member, Star Boy (albeit one with super-strength, electrical vision and supercool breath, instead of mass controlling powers), as well as a cameo from the previously unseen Chameleon Boy. Unfortunately, the story was an excuse for Lana to cook up one of her least reputable plots to discover Superboy’s identity. Not even the sight of Lana in a most un-1961 short skirt and her frank admission that she loved the Boy of Steel kept him from acting like just as much as a dick to her. Just fly her off and snog her, you fool!
Congorilla’s brief run came to an end in issue 283, with the announcement that he was being replaced by the more Superman-oriented Tales of the Bizarro World. It was supposed to be just him but, come the day, Aquaman was sent swimming too. But three issues later I was hoping for one or both of them to return, as the Bizarro stories were stupid beyond belief. And they’re getting all the covers, too! The time between Legion stories was rapidly diminishing, with Sun Boy, the “Seventh Legionnaire” being introduced in issue 290.
And the big three of Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl were back after only three issues, this time introducing, wait for it, the Legion of Super-Pets. Yes, that’s right: Super-Pets. These were Krypto, plus Beppo the Super-Monkey, Streaky the Super-Cat and even the as-yet unnamed Comet the Super-Horse, pet and occasional lover of Supergirl (don’t go there, just don’t) who hadn’t even been introduced in Supergirl’s series yet (hey, every young girl is into horses, right?)

There was a letter of protest about the Bizarros in issue 296 which brought forth a stinging rebuke from Weisinger, about how Adventure‘s sales figures had rocketed to their highest ever since the feature began, and that every month they got 5,000 postcards with suggestions from ‘Bizarro business’. Yeah, but that still doesn’t mean the series isn’t crap.
Finally, the suggestion came up of a regular Legion series, alternating with the Bizarros. So, with issue 300, the day finally came when the Legion, 53 issues after their debut, took a permanent role in Adventure.
And I’ll be back in two weeks for the next instalment.

A Spot of Adventure: The In-Between Age

Most people agree upon the periods of the Golden Age and the Silver Age of Comics, though there’s room for argument as to the Ages that have followed. The Golden Age, from Action 1 to All-Star 57, covers the years 1938 to 1950, whilst the Silver Age starts with Showcase 4 in 1956. That leaves a gap that has never been tagged onto any Age, metallic or otherwise.
For the second instalment of my review of Adventure Comics, I’m calling the period in question the In-Between Age, and I plan to go up to 1958, for two reasons. One is that, although the Barry Allen Flash debuted in 1956, he only made four appearances in three years before finally being unleashed on his own series, in 1959. I’d call that the true beginning of the Silver Age, but before that, in 1958, National would introduce a new idea in the pages of Adventure that was as Silver Age as you could wish. This essay covers the years leading up to then.
We begin with issue 167. The Shining Knight was fallen casualty to the times, leaving Adventure with a line-up, front to back, of Superboy, Aquaman, Johnny Quick and The Green Arrow (still with the definite article). Superboy has the perky, red-headed teenage beauty Lana Lang trying to uncover his secret identity, just as his adult contemporary has Lois Lane, and Lana gets the idea into her pretty head that an ancient helmet brought home by her archaeologist parents gives her Superboy-esque powers. Instead of just taking her for a long, slow ride at the next hayride and enjoying some enthusiastic smooching, Superboy has to pretend the helmet works to keep her from getting the right idea about why a robber’s bullet just bounced off him. Silly boy.
Lana was a seeming fixture for a few issues but then dropped out, which was a shame because she brought an element of personality to Superboy’s strip. It was still a mostly domestic strip, calling for no great effort on the kid’s powers but without the pretty redhead it was empty.
Indeed, going into 1952, the comic as a whole was dull. Aquaman, who was clearly the favourite of the DVD maker who manages to come up with the Sea King’s story even when nothing else of an issue is available, tends to fight pirates, Green Arrow and Speedy can’t even come up with new trick arrows anymore, and only Johnny Quick comes up with an interesting read, mainly because it still hearkens to its Golden Age look instead of the bloodless DC art of the era.
I’ll mention the story in issue 181, which featured Joannie Swift, Queen of Speed. Joannie is a typist who accidentally gains the same powers as Johnnie when a list of equations she reads out duplicates his Magic Formula. Joannie turns out to be brave, resourceful, athletic, intelligent, in short bloody good at being a super-speedster. Johnnie only wants her to go away, at first to save her from injury because, being a girl, she’s bound to be a weakling, but, as soon as he realises she knows her stuff, a rather too revelatory reason comes out: Johnnie doesn’t want to turn out second best to her.
Of course, that fate will never happen because, inevitably, Joannie’s afraid of mice, which causes her to forget the Formula. So, instead of a skilful, brave, worthy foe of crime, using her potential to the fill, Ms Swift is condemned to go back to the steno pool, because she’s a girl. Sometimes this stuff can make you want to barf.

Johnny Quick

Meanwhile, a whole year of the DVD goes by with only two complete issues but with every Aquaman story. These are formulaic, uninspired affairs, six pages of nothing: no wonder DC struggled in the early Fifties. Piracy still turned up, but also silly ideas like Aquaman running an undersea hospital or an undersea fire service.
When full service resumes, for a while, in issue 201, there’s another delightful Lana Lang story, with Superboy thinking he’s blown his secret identity to her Dad, and so relieved to find he’s wrong, he welcomes Lana’s determined pursuit of his secret: just kiss her, you chump, she’d be a great girlfriend.
The American comic book package started off at 64 pages. Thanks to paper restrictions during the Second World war, it was reduced to 56 pages, and then to 48, all at 10c, irrespective of size. But with issue 205, Adventure Comics was reduced to the 32 page size that’s been standard ever since. Johnny Quick missed out, though he returned the following issue at the expense of Green Arrow. But his final appearance was in issue 207, sadly not on the DVD. Henceforth, Adventure had only three features, and if I say that Superboy is the pick of them, you’ll appreciate how dull it is.
There was a landmark story in issue 210, with the initially temporary appearance of Krypto, the Superdog, nearly giving Clark Kent’s other identity away again to guess who? This was the only story for that issue, whereas next time we only had the Aquaman so I can’t say whether it was that or its absent predecessor where Aquaman switched from yellow gauntlets to the green ones we know so well. Either way, he was back to yellow for issue 212, that is, when he was coloured at all in a bizarre approach that saw him monocoloured pale blue in the majority of panels. Nobody seemed to be able to make up their mind as green and yellow alternated. Meanwhile, Krypto returned in issue 214 to prove that stories of the Superdog were likely to be pretty stupid.

A typical Aquaman plot

The Superboy story in issue 216 had the Lad of Steel meeting Superman without time travel, but its twist was that the adult version was really archaeologist Professor Olsen. Rescuing him endeared Superboy to Olsen’s young son, Jimmy… And speaking of costume changes, Green Arrow started wearing a red cap as opposed to his usual green one in the occasional story.
Frustratingly, Superboy’s real parents, Jor-El and Lara turned up in issue 217, having escaped Krypton after all, preparing to take their son to their new off-world home. It’s a trick alright, from Superboy’s callous ignoring of the Kents to the con on death row who pieces together his identity as Clark Kent, even down to how the Els are only seen flying when Superboy is holding their arms, but this was a very rare two-part story and we only have Aquaman for issue 218.
One of the interesting aspects of reading Adventure during this period (it’s more fun than the two back-ups) are the in-house ads for DC titles of the In-Between Age. Lists and covers of all manner of titles unwanted and forgotten, a publishing era lost permanently. But the cusp of change is approaching. Issue 22 carries an ad for yet another new title, starring Fireman Farrell. He never set the world alight, and we know that the ad is full of lies when it describes the new comic as a response to all those reader letters requesting different subjects, requiring a new kind of comic to fit them all in. We know that the real reason was to try to control the losses, both in money and reputation, from the way nothing new was catching on. Fireman Farrell was the first subject, the star of Showcase 1. In six months time…
In fact, the Showcase ads are fascinating. No-one ever cares about the first three, overshadowed utterly by no 4. The second issue featured Kings of the Wild, three outdoor adventures. These adverts are a history lesson in themselves.
So they stop printing inhouse ads at all, and I don’t get to see 3, or 4, come to that. Has nobody any sense of responsibility to future generations?
Meanwhile, the Aquaman and Green Arrow strips are growing dumber. Aquaman no longer has to pursue pirates, not when his time can be taken up with nonsensical ‘stories’ about how he schools his finny friends to obey his instructions or how he apparently turns into an egomaniac except it’s all a secret scheme, whilst the Battling Bowmen go trading places with other archers or else emulate their own trading cards. Truly this was an age of inanity.
Superboy’s own series continued to be both silly and sententious, but the occasional nice moment came along. Taking advantage of the fact that a leaking special gas would give everybody amnesia for an hour, the Boy of Steel decided to reveal he was really Clark Kent to test if a secret identity was more of a burden than a benefit which, this being DC Comics in 1957 it self-evidently was a benefit. But there was a touching moment when Lana, the teenage pest so set on proving Clark and Superboy were one and the same, began to cry at the proof – because Clark was a dear friend and she would never see him again.
I had a surprise in issue 239, which saw Krypto’s return, for I had read this story before, a very long time ago. Not in Adventure but in a British Superboy hardback annual, reprinting this in black and white. The first in well over a hundred Superboy stories that I had previously seen.
And harking back to Lana’s genuine distress at the thought of losing her dear friend Clark, how does the Boy of Steel repay her in issue 240? By becoming as big a Superdick as his adult self and humiliating her in front of all of Smallville to conceal his secret identity. What did I say about this stuff making you want to barf?
Obviously Lana got over it by the next issue, in which Green Arrow and Speedy were joined by Queen Arrow, aka Diana Dare (any relation to Dan?), who temporarily hypnotised herself into acting out her deepest desire, namely to be told by her heroes that what they do is too dangerous for a girl. Once he joined the Justice League, did Ollie ever try that line on Wonder Woman?

Some superheroes, huh?

Issue 243 is the last complete comic for this section, the next three issues represented by one story only, two of them the simultaneously tedious and ridiculous Aquaman. The last of these is cover-dated March 1958, making its actual publication most likely January of that year. Two issues of Showcase thus far have featured The new Flash. Two more would appear this year. The Silver Age was cranking up for the off. The next issue of Adventure would see a change that I’ll explore in the third essay in this series.