In September, 1965 — the month your humble blogger first started buying Justice League of America — DC Comics made an adjustment to the publication frequency of that title, adding a ninth issue — an all-reprint “80 pg. Giant” — to the eight-times-a-year schedule the book had been on since 1962.  My eight-year-old self didn’t manage to pick up the first of those giant-sized issues, which came out not only a couple of weeks before my own initial JLA purchase (issue #40), but also a mere four weeks after the first comic book I remember ever buying for myself — but I faithfully bought each one thereafter, at least for the next three years.  And why wouldn’t I?  For one penny more than it would cost you to buy two regular issues, you got three full-length Justice League adventures, by the same writer (Gardner Fox) and artist (Mike Sekowsky) who were producing the series’ current stories (up through issue #63, anyway). 

Of the three 80-page JLA giants I bought in those years, the standout by far was issue #67 (Nov.-Dec., 1968).  Behind an instantly-classic Neal Adams cover (it’s a great image; just don’t think about the spatial relationships between the characters for very long), this “Special Initiation Issue” reprinted the stories in which Green Arrow, Atom, and Hawkman had each joined the League, from issues #4, #14, and #31, respectively.  Since the team’s roster had been firmly set at ten members the whole time I’d been reading about them, these stories felt historically important to the younger me of the late ’60s; and even as late as February, 1973, I still had a vague sense of having missed something by not having been around for any issue that inducted a new Justice Leaguer.  The closest I’d come thus far had been issue #42, in which Metamorpho was offered membership but declined (though he accepted “reserve” status), and the much more recent #103, in which the Phantom Stranger was proposed for membership, but took off before finding out whether the vote was in his favor (it was, of course).  The one bona fide full, official, non-honorary new member in good standing that had joined the team since Id been reading the book was Black Canary, who’d emigrated from Earth-Two (and, presumably, resigned from the Justice Society of America) at the end of issue #74, following the murder of her husband, Larry Lance.  Her application for membership to the JSA’s Earth-One equivalent was discussed in issue #75, but never actually voted on, at least not on-panel; however, when issue #77 came out (issue #76 was another giant-sized reprint), her membership was presented to readers as a fait accompli.  As it happened, my younger self didn’t buy either #75 or #77 when they came out; but even if I had, I’m not sure I would have seen either of them as “real” induction issues on the order of the three that had been reprinted in JLA #67.*

So I was quite intrigued by Dick Giordano’s cover for JLA #105, which seemed to promise that the election of a brand new member (whoever it might turn out to be) would the focus of the issue.  And then,  when I opened the book to its opening splash page, I was even more gratified to see that writer Len Wein, penciller Dick Dillin, inker Giordano, and (last but not least) editor Julius Schwartz were prepared to deliver on that promise:

I’m pretty certain that my delight in this splash page came as much (and perhaps even more) from the fact that it echoed the “official proclamation” format (and even used the same wording) that had marked the advent of Green Arrow and Hawkmen as League members (for reasons now lost to time, the Atom’s induction issue splash didn’t follow the same format), as it did from the revelation that our newly minted JLAer was none other than Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man.

It’s not that I was in any way disappointed in that revelation, you understand.  After all, I’d liked Ralph ever since I’d first encountered him in another of the first comic books I ever bought, holding down what was then his regular backup slot in Detective Comics.  Rather, I suspect my attitude was along the lines of that expressed by Green Lantern on the issue’s cover: “It was bound to happen!”  The induction of the Elongated Man was one of those things that seemed more than inevitable; indeed, it felt overdue.  But better late than never, right?

The would-be art thieves may have the consistency of Silly Putty, but they’re surprisingly speedy, and they soon overwhelm Ralph with their numbers — leading Sue to wade into the fray wielding one of her high heels.  Attagirl, Sue!

In 1973, I — and I expect most other readers — were expecting this story to lead up to EM’s being elected to JLA membership.  That turned out not to be the case; still, you could hardly accuse Wein and company of cheating us out of an induction scene, as we’ll see on the next page…

Though Aquaman, Batman, and Hawkman are on hand for this flashback scene showing Elongated Man’s induction into the JLA, they won’t have a role in the remainder of the story… which I suppose is a good enough reason for them having been left off the first page’s “roll call”.  (Though it still seems a little odd, seeing as how they’re all shown on that very page… but maybe that’s just me.)

Returning to the present day, all the Justice Leaguers besides the aforementioned trio assemble in the team’s satellite sanctuary, where Ralph explains the situation to his new comrades.  “I usually handle this kind of crazy case by myself,” he assures them, “but these flubber-freaks have me outmatched physically!”  Superman says that of course they’ll all be happy to help, but he’s not sure what they can do until the putty-men strike again — which, naturally, provides the perfect cue for the JLA’s “Earth-Monitot” device to start pinging loudly, indicating that important new information is being received…

Wondering why Green Arrow is so down on “the small Northeastern town of Desolation”?  In February, 1973, I probably would have been too, if I hadn’t previously bought and read Green Lantern and Green Arrow #1, a mass-market paperback which reprinted (reformatted and in black-and-white, but otherwise intact) the first couple of installments of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ Green Lantern run — including “Journey to Desolation!” from GL #77, in which the “Hard Travelin’ Heroes” get caught up in an especially nasty management-labor dispute in the mining community of, well, you know.  As the events of that story don’t actually impinge on those of our current tale in the slightest, Wein’s decision to have the town suffering the depredations of the putty-people be Desolation is nothing more than a tip of the hat to O’Neil and Adams; it’s a nice touch, but one that’s made more obscure than it needs to be by the lack of the editorial footnote you’d expect in such an instance.

But getting back to “Specter in the Shadows!”… the Atom rides GA’s arrow straight into one of the putty-men’s blobby bodies; using his size-and-weight controls, he’s able to squeeze himself right back out again, but the putty-man hasn’t even been slowed down.  Similarly, the Flash throws a punch at another of the creatures, only to find his fist stuck inside its chest, so that he has to vibrate through its body to win free; again, our hero suffers no harm, but he doesn’t make any headway in resolving the situation, either.

The three Leaguers quickly exit the mine, to find the “putty-punks” busily gathering their purloined coal into big piles.  GA uses a net-arrow to capture the whole group at once, after which Flash begins to run around the confined creatures at super-speed, with the intention of squeezing “any fight left in them” right out again with “super-compressed air-pressure“.  But then…

Obviously, this “certain top-coated form” must be the “Specter in the Shadows!” referred to in our story’s title.  But who can he be?  One might be inclined to suspect the Phantom Stranger… but it’s only been two issues since his last appearance in these pages, and besides, his preferred form of outerwear — at least in this era — is a cloak, rather than a trenchcoat.  Hmmm…

Um, not so great at the moment, Clark.  Maybe you oughta stop daydreaming about how “attractive” Dinah is, and try to get your head back in the game…

Revived by “the sudden wind”, Black Canary thanks Supes for helping her out with his super-breath — which leaves him quite puzzled, as he’s done no such thing.  But before they can tackle that mystery, they need to dispose of the putty-people.  So Supes molds several of the damaged automobile bodies into a giant garbage scoop, which he then uses to gather up all of the creatures…

Green Lantern finds no sign of the Elongated Man beneath the waves — rather, he runs into some trouble of his own, as he’s caught in a mass of “golden seaweed” that behaves as if it has a mind of its own (though since no connection with the putty-men is ever established or even hinted at, I believe Wein means for us to take this for a natural phenomenon).  It looks bad for GL; but, wouldn’t you know, a certain “shadowy spectator” has been bearing witness to these events — and so, you can probably guess what happens next…

The homing signal leads the Leaguers to the Florida Everglades, where they find…

Here’s another place where it seems an editorial footnote might have come in handy — but since Julius Schwartz didn’t provide one, I’ll just note here that the Queen Bee, aka Zazzala of Korll, was an old foe of the league who’d made her debut in issue #23 (Nov., 1963), then had a return engagement in #60 (Feb., 1968).  Naturally, your humble blogger hadn’t been buying comics yet when the first of those came out (I’d also miss its first reprinting, coming up in just a month in 100-Page Super Spectacular #DC-17); and while I had bought and read JLA #60, her appearance there had definitely been upstaged by the same issue’s guest-star turn by Batgirl.  Still, I at least knew who she was.  (And if it seems like I’m making too big a deal about what at first seems to be a mere throwaway reference by Superman, well, stay tuned.)

I suppose that we’re meant to assume that the JLA have already determined by unspecified means that the putty-men are not only non-sentient, but non-living, since sealing them up in a pit forever would otherwise be rather inhumane, to put it mildly.

Thanks to this latest emergency, the Elongated Man’s new teammates don’t get a chance to ask him any follow-up questions, such as:  How did he disguise himself as one of the putty creatures, exactly?  As best as I can figure, he must have subdued the one that he went into the drink with back on page 15, and then torn it apart so that he could wear it like a suit — all while underwater.  Which on one level is a pretty impressive feat, but, on the other hand… eww.

The other JLAers attempt to show Ralph that he’s wrong, as Superman’ heat vision, Flash’s vibrations, and Green Lantern’s ring-energy, simultaneously focused on a single spot, are able to open a small hole in the force-field, which the Atom then slips through.  But then, once inside the hive structure, the Tiny Titan runs smack into “one of the putty-man production centers”, and is almost smothered in goo before EM, stretching an arm through the barrier-hole, is able to pull him out.  Since that puts our heroes back at square one, it seems that the Ductile Detective was right all along… still, the sequence burned up a page or so, so it probably fulfilled our storytellers’ purpose.

In any event, the Justice Leaguers have no time to come up with another plan before the hive blows up (or so at least says Superman).  But then…

Indeed, I was puzzled by the revelation of the “specter”‘s identity at the end of this story, seeing as I’d been around for the Red Tornado’s apparent demise at the end of JLA #102, just three issues back.  And I feel I must have been keen to learn not only how Reddy had survived, but also how he — a native of Earth-Two and a member of the Justice Society of America — had ended up on Earth-One.  So I’m perplexed as to the reason why I did not, in fact, purchase JLA #106 when it showed up on stands, two months later.  Even if I’d forgotten about #105’s inconclusive conclusion by the time the follow-up came out, surely Nick Cardy’s cover for #106 — which quite literally made the Red Tornado the center of the viewer’s attention — would have reminded me.  So I’m inclined to think that I just never saw this one… either because of distribution problems that kept it from reaching my main comics outlet (the neighborhood Tote-Sum convenience store), or because some other shopper stuck another comic in front of it on the spinner rack, hiding it from my sight.  Who knows?  In any event, by the time I picked up another issue of Justice League of America — issue #107, featuring the first installment of the latest annual Justice League-Justice Society team-up adventure — Red Tornado was already established as the newest member of the League.  I wouldn’t learn the full story of how he’d survived the events of the last such team-up, nor the circumstances of his arrival on Earth-One, for years to come.

But that’s no reason for you to be left in the dark, faithful readers.  So, here are the answers that had been promised both to the JLA and to their fans in the final caption of “Specter in the Shadows!”, as related by Wein, Dillin, and Giordano in the following issue’s  “Wolf in the Fold!”…

As the story begins, the full League membership has once again assembled in their satellite headquarters, there to hear the Red Tornado give his account of all that’s happened to him since they last saw him in issue #102…

Reddy finishes up his tale thusly: “I came searching for you then — but knowing your low opinion of me — I helped your cause in secret — deciding that the sooner you defeated the putty-men, the sooner you’d have time for me!”  Ouch.  Maybe partly out of guilt for how they’d kept the android hero cooling his heels for a couple of weeks when he last came to them for help, back in 1969 — a misjudgement that one could argue ultimately resulted in the tragic death of Larry Lance in JLA #74 — the Justice Leaguers immediately elect the Red Tornado to full membership, thereby making the Elongated Man’s stint as “newest JLAer” the shortest on record.  (And no, Reddy doesn’t get the “official proclamation” splash-page treatment; on the other hand, he’s at least inducted on-panel, which is more than can be said for poor Black Canary.)  Despite that show of faith, Reddy’s self-esteem issues continue to surface at various points in this story (as they will in future issues, as well).

At any rate, we’re just four pages in on JLA #106, and the team has already brought on a new member (beating #105’s induction of EM by a single page, if you’re keeping score) —  though, as you might have gathered from the fact that this story is entitled “Wolf in the Fold!”, all is not quite as it appears.  For all the events we’ve seen in these last two issues, from the first appearance of the putty-men onwards, have been the product of the manipulations of one Thomas Oscar Morrow — the man who actually created the Red Tornado (as originally chronicled back in JLA #64–65).  That villainous scientist, last shown being taken into the Justice League’s custody at the end of issue #65, has somehow escaped prison since then, and is currently hard at work plotting the super-team’s demise…

Got all that?  Last issue’s giant mechanical hive wasn’t just similar to one of the Queen Bee’s old setups — it was one of her old setups.  And the “putty-drones” were hers as well  T.O. Morrow had merely appropriated the technology for the purpose of getting the JLA and Tornado together, which is why the putty-guys’ criminal escapades were so nonsensical on their face.  That… works, I guess?  Anyway, the next part of the villain’s scheme calls for getting Reddy into a major jam, so that he’ll have to use his brand-new JLA emergency signal device to call for help:  “For I’ve planted a small mechanism inside the Tornado’s body that alters the device’s frequency!  The first time he presses that transmitter — the Justice League of America will die!”

Unfortunately for Morrow, his fiendish plan is inadvertently foiled by the JLA themselves, who’ve decided to keep close but surreptitious tabs on their latest addition — which allows them to intervene whenever Red Tornado gets in trouble, before he has a chance to use his signal device.  But then, on the very last day of the twenty-eight his computer has allotted for him to avoid disaster, the villain finally catches a break — or at least seems to — when several of his henchmen overpower a small group of JLAers with a sudden gas attack, just long enough to nab all their signal devices… all, that is, except Red Tornado’s, which the Elongated Man manages to activate just before he succumbs to the gas…

Thrilled and relieved to have achieved victory with only two hours left on his personal doomsday clock, T.O. Morrow throws open the door of the secret lab where he’s kept himself cooped up for the past month, eager to breathe some fresh air…

It’s a nice touch, I think, that Wein lets Ralph and Reddy — the two newbie Leaguers — simultaneously deliver the coup de grace to the defeated Morrow.

Yeah, that “cosmic balance” referred to in Morrow’s computer’s prediction doesn’t fool around, apparently — either the JLA had to go or Morrow did, and the bad guy pulled the short straw, existentially speaking.  At least, that’s as much explanation for Morrow’s vanishing act as we’re going to get on Len Wein’s watch.**

Anyway, that’s pretty much a wrap for this two-part storyline, which remains a pretty entertaining yarn fifty years later… despite some admittedly wobbly bits.  Having acknowledged that, one might still wonder just what Len Wein thought he was up to here.  Why, exactly, did he opt to bring in two new Justice League members in this fashion, one right after the other, rather than letting each one hold the spotlight on their own for a time?

Your humble blogger has no definite answers, naturally.  But I’m inclined to think that the choice Wein made here is of a piece with others that he made during his initial year as JLA scripter.  After all, he started his run with a three-parter that not only featured every hero who’d ever been associated with the League, as well as guest-starred the Justice Society, but also returned a whole other, third team — the Seven Soldiers of Victory — to current DC continuity.  He’d followed that up by almost adding a new JLA member, the Phantom Stranger, in #103; then, within the next three issues, brought in both the Elongated Man and the Red Tornado.  It’s as though, having finally been given the chance to write about DC’s superheroes doing their thing en masse, Wein wanted to make that masse as large as possible.

That’s my thesis, anyway… and while there is of course no way to prove its accuracy, I think it gains further credence from the evidence provided by the next two issues of Justice League of America, in which Wein added yet another whole team of costumed crusaders — the Freedom Fighters — to the DC Universe.  But for more discussion on that topic, we’ll have to wait until June, when it’ll be time to take a look at the first half of 1973’s JLA-JSA extravaganza.  I hope to see you then.

 

*For completeness’ sake, I suppose I should also mention the strange case of Sargon the Sorcerer, who helped out the JLA against the “cosmic vampire” Starbreaker in issue #98, and was subsequently offered “honorary JLA membership“… though this information was conveyed only via a throwaway reference to Sargon having “been notified” of the distinction in a single panel in #99, an issue which (like #75 and #77) your humble blogger failed to buy, with the result that I wasn’t even aware of Sargon’s status for a long, long time.  (The fact that Sargon wasn’t mentioned in JLA #100’s special anniversary celebration supposedly featuring “every” hero ever associated with the team leads me to suspect that Len Wein — who took over as JLA writer from the departing Mike Friedrich with that same issue — wasn’t aware of it, either.)

**As many of you reading this already know — and the rest of you could likely surmise — T.O. Morrow wasn’t quite dead and gone forever.  As related by other DC writers in the years to come, his vaunted super-computer had developed a malfunction which caused it to err in its Morrow-or-the-JLA-must-go prediction; unable to accept this imperfection, the computer itself caused the villain to be shunted, alive, to another world.  (Actually, it was a bit more complicated than that; the computer’s manipulations first split Morrow into two separate beings, then shunted those two selves off to two separate locations [and two separate storylines].  For more details, check out the Fandom DC Database’s entry on the malevolent Mr. Morrow.)