About a year ago, in a post about Plop #1, we spent some time musing about the flourishing of the word “Weird” in the titles of various DC Comics series of the early-to-mid-1970s. As Joe Orlando — who was the editor of the majority of these titles — would later put it in a 1998 interview for Comic Book Artist #1: “I started using the word and [publisher] Carmine [Infantino] decided that ‘Weird’ sold anything. Weird War, Weird Western, Weird Worlds, Weird Mystery.”
In February, 1974, that group of titles was joined by another, as Adventure Comics — one of the company’s longest-running series, whose sequential numbering stretched back all the way to 1935 (and which since issue #410 had been edited by one Joe Orlando) — became Weird Adventure Comics. Or, at least, that’s what it said in #433’s title logo, atop artist Jim Aparo’s spooky cover featuring the comic’s current headliner, the Spectre; however, according to the indicia at the bottom of the first interior page, the official name of the periodical was still (as it would remain) plain ol’ Adventure Comics.
Not every reader was happy with this modification, unofficial or not. As fan (later to turn pro) Bob Rodi declared in an otherwise positive letter, published six months later in issue #436: “This magazine has stood strong and tall with Adventure Comics emblazoned on the cover for forty years and there is no reason to change.” This prompted the following editorial response (anonymous, but likely to have been written by Orlando’s young assistant Paul Levitz):
Which, frankly, seems pretty reasonable. Or at least did, so long as the book was running full-length stories of the Spectre, as it had in #434 — or so long as the semi-regular back-up feature was something as off-beat as the historical pirate strip “Captain Fear”, which had wrapped up its run in #433, the first to carry the “Weird” cover label.
But, as you’ve likely already noticed, the cover of today’s main topic, Adventure #435 (another fine effort from Jim Aparo) includes the banner “The Return of Aquaman!” at its top, right above the “Weird”. Now, in the real world, the ability to breathe underwater, or to communicate with aquatic lifeforms, might indeed be considered weird; but in the context of American comic books, that kind of thing is literally mainstream. Whatever adjectives a typical DC Comics reader of 1974 might have used to describe Aquaman as a character, “weird” was unlikely to have been among them.
In other words, Joe Orlando might have jumped the gun a bit with “Weird” in this instance, as the overall editorial identity of Adventure still seemed to be in a good deal of flux. Still, you couldn’t argue that the label continued to be a good fit for the character that still held the cover spot (visually, at least; you’ll note that the Spectre’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on this cover, as indeed it hadn’t since the second issue featuring his strip, #432, and wouldn’t again until #439).
And speaking of the Spectre, what say we go ahead and see what he’s up to this issue…
“The Man Who Stalked the Spectre” finds Jim Aparo returning to full art duties, following Adventure #434’s “The Nightmare Dummies and… the Spectre”, where Aparo had inked Frank Thorne’s pencil art. Meanwhile, Michael Fleisher continues as the feature’s writer, while his friend Russell Carley continues to receive his mysterious credit for “script continuity”, given for his assistance in helping Fleisher break down his plots into panel-by-panel form. (According to an interview with Fleisher published in Back Issue #42 [Jul., 2010], Carley also helped him come up with the various “colorful ways for the Spectre to bump people off” for which the feature is so well remembered.)
The car is totaled, but its three passengers escape unscathed. Their apparent leader, the gun-happy Jerry, orders them to split up, saying he’ll meet them a week later “at Maizie’s place!” We follow one of the other men as he makes for a nearby refrigeration unit, which he breaks into after shooting off its lock…
Just in case you weren’t paying close attention to the names given out in the last few pages — it appears that veteran comics artist Jerry Grandenetti (who’d drawn a few Spectre stories himself in the 1960s) has started doing some moonlighting…
Earl Crawford, “freelance magazine writer”, is the second — and last — major supporting character to be introduced over his and Aparo’s run on the Spectre. The first — love interest Gwendolyn Sterling — had been introduced in the feature’s second installment, in Adventure #432. For whatever reason (perhaps because he was usually working within a 12-to-13 page limit, and had a quota of grisly Spectre slayings to meet), Fleisher never featured these two characters in the same story during the feature’s Adventure run; so we’ll have to postpone further discussion of Ms. Sterling’s role in the series until a later post.
Crawford’s editor at Newsbeat makes the call to the appropriate people at the NYPD, and soon the arrangements are set for the writer to accompany the detective assigned to the Grandenetti case — one Lt. Jim Corrigan — though only over the latter’s objections…
As we covered in some detail last October in our post about Adventure #431, the depiction of the Spectre in this series didn’t match up well with how he’d been portrayed in previous appearances. This was a source of some consternation to continuity-minded fans such as your humble blogger; as reader John Leasure put the question to Joe Orlando in issue #434’s letters column, “Would it really hurt for your writers and fellow editors to put a thin thread of continuity into their stories?” Leasure’s query received the response shown below; like the one from #436 that I shared earlier, it may have been written by Orlando, but is at least as likely to have been the work of Paul Levitz:
I don’t honestly remember just what I made of this explanation when I first read it, back in April, 1974; on the other hand, I do clearly recall my reaction two months later to Jim Corrigan’s crack about “Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter.” I was irked, to put it politely. Clearly, the characters in this story operated in a world where Superman was a famous fictional character, with a well-known secret identity as a black-haired, bespectacled reporter named Clark Kent. That obviously didn’t jibe with the “reality” of either Earth-Two or Earth-One.
As regular readers of this blog may recall, this “Clark Kent” stuff came up last October in the comments section of the aforementioned Adventure #431 post (it’s been mentioned once or twice since then, as well). At that time, several readers opined that this sequence could work on Earth-One, given that Clark Kent was working as a TV news anchor at this time and thus had a reasonably well-known face. I don’t think anyone addressed the uniformed cop’s “are you really Superman?” line, but it’s hardly a deal-breaker; even without looking, I’m fairly sure that there are multiple Silver Age stories where Clark gets publicly exposed as Superman, but somehow manages to get the genie back in the bottle by the narrative’s end. And, hey, if there wasn’t such a tale already, we could always make up one on our own, right?
The thing is, this kind of after-the-fact continuity fixing-up, while fun and even useful in its way, doesn’t get at the root of what my younger self found so annoying in 1974 — which was that, to judge by this scene as well as by the feature’s other continuity issues, Michael Fleisher simply didn’t care whether his stories made sense in the context of a broader fictional reality shared with other DC comics. That “thin thread of continuity”, as John Leasure called it in his letter, was simply of no interest to Fleisher, who just wanted to write some contemporary tales of that vengeful ghost that he’d read about in old issues of More Fun Comics, while he was researching his projected multi-volume DC Comics encyclopedia.
And it wasn’t like he’d have received contrary directions from his boss; while an indisputably talented editor, Joe Orlando doesn’t appear to have much interest in or affinity for superheroes to start with, and probably had even less inclination to uphold the integrity of superhero “universes”. According to at least one account, Orlando had never even heard of the Spectre before Fleisher brought the character to his attention (given that his fellow editor Julius Schwartz’s Spectre series was only on its third issue when Orlando first started working on staff for DC, that anecdote, if true, underscores the extent to which DC’s various editorial fiefdoms functioned virtually as separate companies in the Silver and early Bronze Ages). Personally speaking, one reason that I suspect Paul Levitz wrote that “Earth-One” response to John Leasure is that I doubt Orlando was even familiar with the J. Schwartz-Gardner Fox multiple earths concept.
Page 1 of Cary Burkett’s “Speculations on the Spectre” from Amazing World of DC Comics #16 (Dec., 1977).
Panels from America vs. the Justice Society #2 (Feb., 1985). Text by Roy Thomas; art by Michael Bair and Alfredo Alcala.
Of course, from a purely creative standpoint, one can argue there’s no real reason why Fleisher, or Orlando, should have had to care about how their Spectre stories “fit” with all of DC’s other comics. It’s certainly legitimate to want to tell stories about an existing comic-book hero without being constrained by existing continuity; your humble blogger is as loath as any other fan to imagine a comics industry with no room for a Dark Knight Returns, or a Kingdom Come, or an Earth X. But even in an era before you had your Elseworlds, your Black Label, your Max, et al, it seems to me that, with just a little effort, Orlando and company could have found a way to tell us that’s what they were doing. Instead, over a period of years we got multiple ad hoc attempts to straighten things out, such as the already shared Adventure #434 lettercol note about “Earth-One”, followed by Cary Burkett‘s four-page article in the 16th issue of DC’s in-house fanzine Amazing World of DC Comics (Dec., 1977), and culminating in a 1985 Justice Society of America story scripted by Roy Thomas that refers to the Spectre having been Jim Corrigan on more than one Earth. Whatever else you want to say about that process, you couldn’t exactly call it efficient.
OK, got that off my chest. Now, back to our narrative…
Crawford reads the note — a tip that the last of the Grandenettis, Jerry, is “holed up at an abandoned sawmill… all the way up near Peakskill!” — and decides that he’ll go up there himself, alone, to warn the murderous criminal that he needs to give himself up to the cops before “that… that force” tracks him down and does him in, just like his kinsmen. Great idea, right?
Poor Jerry Grandenetti… if he’d just managed to hold on until he got his check from DC for writing and drawing the 8-page story “Shocker” in this very month’s issue of Unexpected, maybe he wouldn’t have been driven to a life of violent crime, and wouldn’t have ended up the recipient of what might be the single most memorable execution to be carried out by the Spectre over the course of his ten-issue Adventure Comics run. (Fleisher might have titled this yarn “The Man Who Stalked the Spectre”, but for me — and I expect many other readers as well — it’ll always be “The One Where the Spectre Turned a Guy into Wood and Put Him through a Buzzsaw”.)
Six issues in on the Fleisher-Aparo-Orlando take on the Astral Avenger, my younger self still had a fair amount of ambivalence about the whole venture. A lot of that was due to the continuity concerns that we’ve already covered here today; it also bothered me that the Spectre never faced any real threat from the bad guys he summarily dispatched, resulting in a lack of suspense. Still, that didn’t mean I was immune to the series’ genuine charms — which, at least for me, definitely included the imaginative demises that Fleisher (and Carley) devised for the Ghostly Guardian to dish out, as well as, naturally, the superlative artwork of Jim Aparo. Seriously, it’s hard to imagine anyone who was better suited to handle this feature’s mash-up of costumed superheroics with supernatural horror (with just a dollop of urban crime drama thrown in for good measure) than Aparo in his mid-Seventies prime.
No, it wasn’t “my” Spectre (by which I basically mean Julius Schwartz’s Spectre) — but that didn’t automatically make these bad comics. And the addition to the supporting cast of Earl Crawford — an in-story critic whose disapproval of the protagonist’s bloodthirsty ways mirrored similar concerns that had been expressed by a number of fans in the book’s letters pages — was a significant step towards making the stories more dramatically complex, if not necessarily more suspenseful. In June, 1974, my sixteen-year-old self remained on board with the series, curious to see where Fleisher would take things next, while also confident that if nothing else, Aparo would keep the proceedings looking good.
This issue’s back-up story, “As the Underwater City Sleeps”, was the first solo adventure of Aquaman to see print since the cancellation of his title with its 56th issue, back in January, 1971. The Sea King hadn’t exactly been idle since then, of course, having continued to appear regularly in Justice League of America, as well as having the odd team-up here and there with Superman (World’s Finest #203) or Batman (Brave and the Bold #114). Still, it was good to see the guy headlining his own strip again, even if it was in a supporting role.
The name of the story’s writer, Steve Skeates, was a familiar one to DC readers in general, and to Aquaman fans in particular, given that he’d scripted the last seventeen issues of the hero’s title. The name — not to mention the work — of its artist, however, was much more an unknown quantity. Who was Mike Grell? Your humble blogger had no idea — though you could say that was my own fault, since I wasn’t a reader of the “Legion of Super-Heroes” feature in Superboy… and that was where Grell had made his professional debut four months earlier — first as an inker over Dave Cockrum’s pencils for a story for issue #202, then graduating to become the series’ new regular artist one issue later, following Cockrum’s abrupt departure.
Due to the vagaries of DC’s production schedule, however, the “Aquaman” story I was about to read in June, 1974, despite not being Grell’s first published credit, was in fact the first story he’d drawn for the publisher. The 27-year-old artist, who’d already done a four-year stint in the Air Force before attempting to break into the comics field, had been advised to start at DC with veteran editor Julius Schwartz. In a 2000 interview published in Comic Book Artist #8 , Grell recounted how that meeting went:
I… marched into Julie’s office with my portfolio in hand, and started my prepared encyclopedia salesman’s speech, “Good afternoon, Mr. Schwartz, can I interest you in this deluxe 37-volume set of encyclopedias?” (If you get interrupted anywhere along the line, you have to go all the way back to, “Good afternoon, Mr. Schwartz.”) [laughter] I got exactly as far as, “Good Afternoon, Mr. Schwartz,” and he said, “What the hell makes you think you can draw comics?” [laughter] I unzipped my portfolio and dropped it on his desk, and I said, “Take a look, and you tell me.” He flipped through the pages, and he called Joe Orlando in from next door, and I walked out half an hour later with a script in my hand. Joe managed to see something in those early drawings that led him to believe I was worth taking a shot on. He gave me the script to draw a back-up comic for “Aquaman.”
Aquaman’s opening musings about how long he’s been away from Atlantis (“Feels like it’s been two or three years since I’ve –“) make sense just fine when taken on face value — but they had another meaning as well. As Steve Skeates related for a retrospective about the Joe Orlando-edited Adventure Comics published in Back Issue #78 (Feb., 2015), he was making “an in-joke about the two-and-a-half years that had passed since I’d written for Aquaman”. Pretty subtle stuff, and I’m sure the joke went completely over my head when I first read this story, though I find it amusing now.
Also in regards to this splash panel, while at least some readers — myself, for instance — looked at Grell’s first rendering of the story’s hero and were impressed by how well the artist conveyed the sense of Aquaman moving swiftly but gracefully through the water, others saw something else. In Grell’s own words from his CBA interview:
Joe Orlando took one look at the first page and shook his head and said, “You can’t do this anymore.” I said, “What anymore?” He said, “You’ve got Aquaman mooning the reader.” …It never dawned on me.
(Me either, Mr. Grell.)
By the time Aquaman gets clear of the darkness, Mantis and company have gone. Proceeding on to Atlantis, he finds that the residents of the domed city were overcome by the same “sleeping sickness” that knocked out the farmers, and debilitated him as well — though, fortunately, they’re all waking up now…
According to Mike Grell, his editor’s fault-finding regarding this job didn’t stop with the “mooning” criticism:
I’d done another panel of Aquaman sitting on the throne, and it made it look like he was sitting on a toilet. [laughter] Between Joe and Julie, I became known as the guy who drew Aquaman on the toilet.
It should be said that the artist appears to have taken all of this in stride; in the same 2000 interview, he went on to say:
Joe became my mentor. When I would bring an issue in-house, and he spotted an error in drawing, he’d sit down and give me a drawing lesson on the spot, show me where I’d made mistakes, and help with a lot of corrections.
It’s fair to say that Mike Grell still had some things to learn at the beginning of his professional career; his inexperience shows in his grasp of anatomy and perspective, and perhaps in other areas as well. But his storytelling and his compositions are strong, and his early inking style has a clean, polished look that I must confess I personally prefer to the somewhat busier, grainier approach he’d eventually develop. (Your mileage may vary, naturally.)
“47th”? Seeing as how Black Manta had only ever appeared in five stories before this one, I think that our hero may be indulging in a bit of hyperbole here. On the other hand, in the comic book where he made his debut, Aquaman #35 (Aug., 1967), he was depicted as an old foe of the Sea King’s who’d fought him on an indefinite number of prior occasions, so who really knows how many times Aquaman has punched Manta’s lights out?
Maybe I’m missing something here (and I should note that it probably didn’t faze me back in ’74), but why in the world does Aquaman, having soundly defeated Black Manta, simply… let him go? Even if Atlantis has no legal framework for trying and incarcerating surface-world criminals, the man (and his underlings) must be wanted for breaking laws in the U.S. and elsewhere; and it’s not like Aquaman, as a Justice Leaguer, doesn’t have contacts among the air-breathing authorities. Yeah, I get that you’re hungry, Arthur, but this is pretty short-sighted behavior — and will seem even more so in three years’ time, when Black Manta murders your young son, Arthur, Jr., in the pages of Adventure #452 (Jul.-Aug., 1977).
That dark day will be chronicled by other storytellers than Skeates and Grell, however, who move on to other things after giving us another pair of enjoyable, if inconsequential stand-alone seven-page Aqua-tales in Adventure #436 and #437. After that, the Sea King gets unceremoniously bumped from his back-up slot — not to return until Adventure #441, at which time he’ll take over the lead feature position from the just-cancelled Spectre strip… though those are developments probably best left for discussion in a later post.
I bought 6 issues of this arc this year…inspired by this site/blog of course! Being a mainly Marvel reader my biggest gripe was DC’s constant need to cut their books in two! I felt the plot was rushed and suffocated due to lack of space…they’re really thin with strange little mechanisms to speed it up or finish it…the police officer at HQ telling the reporter where a criminal is located is a perfect example of this. The plots felt like they were solid enough to be a full issue and then had to be culled down.
Jim’s work is great though however once again I feel it’s cramped and stifled due to the page count.
And yes, I did chuckle at the last page of the Spectre story! ‘Why couldn’t you even at least leave something for his family to bury!’…the Scottish side of me says they could toss a slab of him on the fire on a cold night and also save on funeral costs too!!
I was never entirely satisfied with the Silver Age Spectre (as I discuss here: https://atomicjunkshop.com/his-doom-was-sealed-in-his-second-issue-the-silver-age-spectre/) so I think the Fleisher Aparo became “my” Spectre. I don’t recall being bothered by the lack of continuity though the criticisms are legit. If it was just Corrigan making the Clark Kent jokes I’d write it off as the Spectre’s omniscience (and other people just scratching their heads and not getting the joke) but having everyone doing it?
Despite the odd anatomy there was something about Grell that instantly stood out from the pack — though unlike you, I’d already seen it in his Legion work.
I cannot explain it but me, who does not like or read/watch horror books, comics, movies, or TV, loved this Spectre series. I’ll just have to credit it to loving Aparo’s art from the first panel back when (probably Phantom Stranger) because the Spectre is a middling interest to me and Fleisher holding absolutely none.
And it’s interesting you praise Grell’s way of drawing anatomy. It’s his contempt for it over in Legion and subsequent assignments that he’s one of my most disliked artists. Overextended torsos that are too thin and appear to be either rubbery or having extra joints, weird limbs, etc, just turned me off for life. At least here he isn’t making everyone as underdressed as possible, though it might have made sense underwater.
Steve, I don’t think I praised Grell’s “way of drawing anatomy” at all; what I actually wrote was “his inexperience shows in his grasp of anatomy and perspective”. I was trying to get across the idea that I enjoyed his early artwork in spite of such flaws; I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.
I liked Grell’s LSH art. You could plainly see him developing as an Artist.
These three Aquaman jobs were assured an professional.. His Phantom Stranger/Deadman story with Arnold Drake was a really nice job that hints at his ultimate style.
I liked Skeates’s work on the first two of these stories. While Sleates was not my favorite late Silver Age/Early Bronze Age writer. his odd little digressions were always fun. The second story had a plot point of the credentialing of the first Canadian ambassador. (Elliot Maggin had been using Sec. Kissinger establishing formal relations with Atlantic as a recurring news item Clark Kent was reporting on in Action Comics since late 1972).
I had assumed that this was the Earth 2 Specter, probably from before he was “retired,” and had vaguely hoped that they were going to bring in (at least the darker) Earth 2 Characters. My thought with this issue was that if it was Earth 1, no wonder people commented on on Crawford’s resemblance to Clark Kent. Back in the Weissenberg years there had been several stories involving Talk Show Host/Comedian/Composure/Musician Steve Allen and his looking like Clark Kent.
The other thing was that in 1974, many people knew how print journalists (Woodward & Bernstein, Ben Bradley and Harry Rosenfield or Jimmy Breslin) looked and could recognize them.
This was an interesting reflexional of an interesting time.
,
Weisinger, reflection, Atlantis, don’t be uncritical of spell check , , , ,
I read it as criticism of his grasp of anatomy but praise for his storytelling skills. But I agree it’s a weakness and I’m not as willing to excuse it as a case of early career “inexperience.” IMO Grell’s deficiencies in anatomy and perspective have persisted to this day and are pretty much what define his style for me: Big heads, long, stiff limbs, figures standing in positions that should make them fall over…then or now, Grell is Grell. And yet for all of that I agree his stuff is not without its charms. And he writes well, which helps.
I reread my collection of Warlord recently. The dropoff in quality after Grell leaves affects the writing as much as the art.
I believe his wife had been quietly helping with scripts for quite a while when Mike Grell left, and I think she stuck with it for a while before departing herself. But yes, the Grells’ departure was pretty much the end of my reading that book.
Did anyone else notice the “impeach Nixon” graffiti on page 2?
If I remember anything about the June-August 1974 time period, it is how many people agreed with the idea. Since this was probably draw between January and March, this was prescient . . . .
I loved this book! The stories were surprisingly grisly and Aparo was at the top of his game here, going all-in on the violent fun. As for the “Clark Kent” joke, I probably didn’t care about that at all in ’74. If it had been a Marvel book breaking continuity like that, I’d have been upset, but I was well aware of the differences between Marvel and DC in the seventies and one of those differences was that DC didn’t take the same meticulous care to make sure everything fit together in the same big world as Marvel did. No surprise to me that Orlando and Fleischer didn’t care about continuity, and in a DC book, I didn’t care as much about it, either.
As for the Aquaman back-up, I enjoyed Grell’s work–especially his faces–and followed him throughout his career, from Aquaman to the Legion to Green Arrow and even Warlord and Jon Sable, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have limitations as an artist. In addition to his problems with perspective, Grell struggled with human anatomy. As Steve McBeelzebub stated in the post above, Grell’s torsos were always too long, his legs were too long and way too skinny and he had a desire to strip even the most manly hero down to a pair of tight shorts and a bare chest that would have done the most savage barbarian proud. Still, as you said Alan, there’s a cleanliness to the lines and an attention to detail that kept me coming back to Grell’s work time after time, despite whatever flaws it might have had. Thanks, Alan!
I’m sure I saw these issues of Weird Adventure Comics on the racks but never perused or purchased them, only becoming aware of their reputation years later from articles and commentaries in The Comics Journal. The stories essentially come off as revenge fantasies showing horrible things happening to thoroughly evil people. Makes for a sort of giddy, guilty pleasure to read as a diversion, particularly when you’re aware of the many horrors inflicted on so many innocent people but it does get rather tedious and problematic if you think about it too much. The Spectre is playing a game of whack a mole on a very small scale with local crimes but apparently unable to effectively deal with large-scale crimes against humanity, at least not without upending the fantasy world within which he exists, whether or not it is within the same one wherein Superman exists. Alan Moore dealt with such issues in both Miracle Man and Watchmen, but those were separate realities. Likely, Fleisher didn’t even consider taking his stories to that level, even if Orlando had allowed him to do so. Fleisher seemed to take some enjoyment from coming up with bizarre means to dispatch ordinary evil doers whom he knew would never be revived in any later stories (or at least were very unlikely to ever be revived, unlike more colorfully costumed criminals). It’s not all that surprising that given his macabre approach, these stories developed a lasting acclaim (or infamy), but it’s also not surprising that it didn’t make for a very long series.
As to the Aquaman story, Grell’s art has a stylistic flair despite some flaws. But that this was the 47th or whatever number of times Aquaman’s had to knockout Black Manta for his crimes is indicative of serious problem if the baddie is never genuinely held to account for his crimes and Aquaman doesn’t even occur to Aquaman that the matter is a problem worth considering and resolving. It’s like it is all just a game that will continue as long as they both live, which is, admittedly, how the situation plays out with all superhero comics who have been around for a long time. Even if Black Manta himself hadn’t yet shown up in enough comics to be shown getting knocked out by Aquaman 47 times, I’d guess characters like the Joker, Red Skull, Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, etc., likely have appeared at least that many times over the course of 60 to 84 years. A popular fictional baddie in serial stories just can’t be kept down forever, even if shown reduced to dust, etc. But that old murdering thug Jerry? Maybe someone put his remains on display or used them for firewood, but he’s not likely to ever make a comeback — or at least, I presume no one ever did so!
The Ostrander/Mandrake series of the 1990s tackled some of the problems around the Spectre’s mission. Based on how Ostrander wrote the Spectre/Corrigan relationship, I’d say targeting hoods like these reflects Corrigan’s worldview as a tough cop in the 1930s.
Of course, this is the same issue that comes up with any powerful superhero like Spectre or Superman, why not do more? Why not fix the Big Problems? But as Kurt Busiek says, comics are supposed to look like the world we live in, where these problems are definitely not fixed.
Alan, I was not planning to comment on this book since I did not read it in June 1974 (and don’t recall even seeing it then). However I noticed a really odd and incredible coincidence which I thought I should point out, regarding the Aquaman story. I am not sure if you are planning to discuss the last issue of Sub-Mariner (72) which came out this month, June 1974. I did buy S-M 72 (not sure why I was still buying Sub-Mariner since he was never a favorite character, I was steadily losing interest and Steve Gerber had recently left as the writer of that series). But S-M 72 would be the final issue (announced in a strangely subtle way by editor Roy Thomas by having the menace of the issue say this was Namor’s “final battle”). And this was actually an inventory issue which had been sitting around for allegedly a long time (as much as 2 years or more) and it was written by…Steve Skeates! So in the same month that Steve Skeates returned to DC’s underwater hero, Aquaman for the first time in 3 and 1/2 years (since Aquaman 56), a lone story that Skeates had written for Marvel’s underwater protagonist Sub-Mariner (and was later revealed behind the scenes actually ties into Aquaman 56 in an odd way) was published. What a strange coincidence!
I never saw this Aquaman story before. Since I did not read any DC comics between 1974-1980, I was not familiar with Mike Grell’s art and would not become familiar with his art for many years. I never read Warlord but eventually became aware of its existence although never had any interest in that particular series. I did come to like and admire Grell’s artwork. It’s interesting that I had the same reaction to the end of the Aquaman story….I was quite surprised that Aquaman just let Black Manta go. Aquaman is a superhero and a member of the JLA…wouldn’t he be capturing Black Manta for the authorities or as King of Atlantis trying him in Atlantis for crimes against Atlantis? That was an odd and abrupt end to the story but I guess there was limited space to address these issues.
Regarding the star of the book, I did read this and other stories in this Spectre series when the issues were reprinted in a mini-series (around 1988) which I believe was called “The Wrath of the Spectre” which also featured some previously unpublished scripts by Michael Fleisher illustrated in the 80s by Jim Aparo. I agree with your main criticisms of these stories which was especially noticeable reading the stories close together (and the mini-series, I believe, came out monthly) which is: few supporting characters, no one who can really challenge the Spectre, and so many gory deaths which became very repetitious. I also bought the original Spectre series (1967-1969) when it first came out, which I like until the last few issues (8-10). It’s almost amusing to consider that the Spectre was given such a hard time for his behavior in Spectre 8-9 of that series which would be considered mild compared to what he did in the series in Adventure Comics. What I liked about the 70s series was specifically Jim Aparo’s art which was a real peak for him and some of his finest work. The stories themselves definitely have some issues, such as the one reviewed above. The reporter acts like a complete idiot throughout the story and at the end appears to feel sorry for an unrepentant murderer who would have killed him without a second thought.
I found your discussion regarding the continuity issues for the Spectre very interesting but by the time I read this series it was the late 80s after the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I had given up trying to figure out continuity at DC (and of course, after the Crisis series there really was no continuity). As opposed to Marvel, it was never easy to figure out continuity issues at DC (a Batman who ran around in the daytime and had a girl friend named Queen Bee that he kissed in Public on Earth Haney in Brave and the Bold [plus numerous team-ups with Wildcat when there was no Wildcat on Earth One] and non-existent Wonder Girl who still manged to join the Teen Titans…I could go on and on…). You could bend yourself into a pretzel trying to explain the 70s version of the Spectre, which obviously many people did. Very interesting post, Alan.
Thanks for pointing out that coincidence regarding Sub-Mariner #72, brucesfl! I was aware of the “stealth crossover” with the final issue of Aquaman, but I hadn’t realized that it came out in the same month as Skeates’ return to the latter feature. That’s some synchronicity, there.
Sub-Mariner 72 was also supposed to be the only place to get the mysterious, much publicized Marvel Value Stamp #100 (Galactus), although Marvel screwed up and reprinted it somewhere else a few months later.
I recall having to check the letter page in every Marvel comic on the spinner rack that month and then having to buy (and subsequently mutilate) a random issue of Sub-Mariner.
Never did get a full set of value stamps. Not that it would’ve done me much good if I had. If I recall correctly, the only reward they ever announced for a full MVS album was discounted admission at the big city comic conventions, which was not of much use for a 10-year-old farmboy out in the boondocks of Illinois.
Considering that fans were expected to cut out the Marvel Value Stamp from the comic, which was often on the other side of a story page, it was actually more of a Devalue Stamp, lowering the future value of the comics they were cut from. As it was, I didn’t cut them out of any of the comics I purchased back then, although when filling some of the holes in my collection years or decades later, I did wind up with a few from which the MVS had been cut. I can’t say I was even thinking about the future value of any the comics I got in the ’70s, but younger me didn’t like the idea of damaging my own comic by cutting a hole in it for any reason, so I wasn’t even tempted to cut out the MVS’s.
I wish I could say that I, who was already a sophomore in high school by this time and really should have known better, never once cut a Marvel Value Stamp out of a comic. But if I did, I’d be lyin’. 😀
Well, I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve never heard of Marvel Value Stamps and have next to no idea what they are/were. The good news to that statement is I can say I never cut one out and defaced a comic in doing so. The bad news to that statement is, I must’ve really not been paying any attention to the stuff on the letters and Bullpen pages at all! The good news to that statement is that, from what you’re all saying, I didn’t really miss anything and didn’t destroy my comics. Win/win!
Always loved Jim Aparo’s Spectre. Much like the silver age Superman, he was too powerful. There’s only so many ways to turn the bad guys inside out. And I forget if he really had any vulnerabilities.
A bit of trivia. The cover of this issue is a swipe of More Fun Comics 53:
https://www.comics.org/issue/681/
and I still maintain these Spectre stories took place on Earth Prime.😁
Hmm, I don’t think I’d call that a “swipe”, exactly — more of an independent interpretation of the same basic premise. But interesting, either way!
The gamer nerd in me really, really wishes the choice to turn that second thug into a lead figure after murdering him by animating another was something inspired by some experience with Dungeons & Dragons – but it only came out in January of 1974, and this was probably scripted only a few months after that so the window of opportunity for that happening is too narrow to be very plausible. Most likely the killer pseudo-Viking was just a plain old painted leaden toy soldier like you could still find in some toy stores back then and D&D meant nothing to the creative team here. Still, it sure does look like there’s a dragon figurine in the background of one of those panels, doesn’t it?
Being able to identify the first clear reference to a roleplaying game in comics would be a bit of a feather in a geek archivist’s hat, wouldn’t it?