Month: August 2020

Jimmy Olsen #133 (October, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By August, 1970, I’d been buying and reading comic books for a full five years.  Somehow, however, in all that time, I hadn’t yet sampled an issue of Jimmy Olsen.

I’m not really sure why that was.  My very first comic book had been an issue of Superman, after all, and I’d picked up a couple of Lois Lanes pretty early on, as well.  And I don’t recall having anything particularly against the red-headed cub reporter (in comics, anyway — I think I always considered the version played by Jack Larson on the live-action TV show to be kind of a doofus).  Indeed, as best as I can remember, I actually kind of enjoyed Jimbo’s appearances in World’s Finest, where he basically functioned as the Robin to Superman’s Batman, as well as having his own team-up thing going with the genuine Boy Wonder on the side (the Olsen-Robin team even had their own secret HQ, the Eyrie).  Read More

Green Lantern #80 (October, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I have no doubt that many of the comic book fans who picked Green Lantern #80 up out of the spinner rack in August, 1970, took one look at the cover and immediately thought of Bobby Seale, and the 1969-70 trial of the Chicago Eight/Seven:

Courtroom sketch by Howard Brodie, from the collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

But I’m also pretty sure that my thirteen-year-old self wasn’t one of them.

While I feel certain that the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite (which, along with Mad magazine, was my main source of information on current affairs in those days) covered that story, I don’t remember being anything more than dimly aware of it, if that.  (My family usually had “Uncle Walter” on while we were doing other things, like eating dinner, which made it pretty easy to miss stuff.)  And so, when I scrutinized artist Neal Adams’ dramatic cover for GL #80, I didn’t understand that it was directly referencing the October 29, 1969 incident in which Judge Julius Hoffman had ordered Seale, a defendant with seven others in a federal case charging them with conspiracy and other crimes, to be bound and gagged following the latter’s allegedly disruptive behavior in the courtroom. Read More