The issue of Adventure Comics we’re going to be looking at today was the eighth in a row to feature the Spectre as its headliner, and as such, might well have been taken by a casual browser of the spinner racks in December, 1974 as simply offering more of the same. Yet this issue departed from its immediate predecessors in at least a couple of respects, beginning with its title logo. In response to recent commercial trends, as of the Spectre’s third outing (issue #433), DC Comics had started slapping the word “Weird” above “Adventure” on the venerable series’ covers. That was an adjustment which made good sense as far as the Astral Avenger was concerned… but wasn’t quite as good a fit with the King of the Seven Seas, Aquaman, who began a run as Spec’s backup in issue #435.
Three bi-monthly issues later, the “Weird” experiment seemed to have run its course — and so also had the Aquaman backup feature, which brings us to the second change initiated with issue #438: the debut of a new backup strip, this one starring the Seven Soldiers of Victory, whose advent was bannered on the book’s Jim Aparo-drawn cover — just above the once-again unmodified “Adventure Comics” logo. And we’ll be discussing the first installment of this new feature later in the post… though, naturally, not until after we’ve had a look at this issue’s Spectre-starring opener…
When modern fans look back at the Spectre’s Adventure run as a whole, we tend to think of it as the work of two creators: writer Michael Fleisher and artist Jim Aparo. And that’s valid, for the most part. Still, it’s worth noting that “The Spectre Haunts the Museum of Fear” represents Fleisher’s first solo flight as the strip’s writer; in every previous installment going back to issue #431, he’d received help from Russell Carley (generally credited for “script continuity”, meaning that in addition to helping with the plotting, he’d helped break the plot down panel-by-panel). Meanwhile, Aparo — whose normal modus operandi was to pencil, ink, and letter any job he took on — wasn’t going it alone this time around, but was rather finishing the work of another artist.
In actuality, Aparo had inked the pencils of another illustrator on two Spectre stories prior to this one; first, in Adventure #434, where the penciller had been Frank Thorne; then, in the issue immediately preceding the subject of today’s post, #437, where Aparo had applied his inks to the art of Ernie Chan — an arrangement that (as you’ll have doubtless noticed via the opening splash page’s credits box) continues on into #438. Since 1972, the Philippines-born Chan (still going by the surname “Chua” at this time) had been dividing his time between DC (where he usually both pencilled and inked) and Marvel Comics (who used him almost exclusively as an inker). But he was in the process of shifting his efforts almost entirely to the former of those two rival publishers, who’d soon be utilizing him as one of their primary cover artists, not to mention having him draw such prestigious features as “Batman”, both in that hero’s eponymous title and in Detective Comics. (Incidentally, the reason given on Adventure #437’s letters page for Chan’s two-issue stand was so that Aparo could not only take a brief vacation, but also “do Detective Comics” — which makes it a bit ironic that, after drawing the first three chapters of the “Bat-Murderer” serial in Detective #444-446, Jim Aparo would be replaced as penciller for the final two installments in #447-448 by… Ernie Chan.)
But it’s too late for a sedative — postman Herman Miller is awake, and understandably alarmed by his present circumstances. He leaps from the table and, after grabbing a knife from a nearby stand, runs from the room. Naturally, the professor sends his two assistants after their escaped “specimen”…
The police lieutenant who’s just entered our story is, of course, Jim Corrigan, aka the Spectre…
Wow, these guys are really confident, aren’t they? This is the second abduction they’ve pulled off on a public street, in broad daylight, in as many days…
Explaining to police HQ that the burglary at the taxidermy supply business is connected to a homicide case he’s working on, Corrigan drives to the location alone; once there, he observes the professor’s two white-coated henchmen loading crates of supplies into the back of their van…
It’s interesting that Fleisher makes Jim work just a little harder than usual to close his case in this story — though having the disguised Spectre stammer, as though he’s actually worried about being found out, doesn’t quite ring true, at least for this reader.
If the finale of “The Spectre Haunts the Museum of Fear” seems to come a little too abruptly, that may be because, at 10 pages, it’s the shortest story of the Spectre’s ten-issue Adventure Comics run. (For the record, most of the stories ran for 12-13 pages; the only one to fill all 20 of a standard-size DC comic’s non-ad, non-text pages was the single entry pencilled by Frank Thorne, back in #434.) Perhaps that’s just as well, as the abbreviated length means that the reader has less time to muse on the story’s major improbability — namely, that the professor and his cronies could ever hope to get away with their crimes for any length of time, given their blatant disregard for the most basic level of caution (surely the cops who were originally supposed to respond to the burglary at 162 Prince Street could have handled the perps as efficiently as Spec, if not as colorfully… or, of course, as fatally). As it is, Fleisher’s brisk script gets its job done as a crime-horror yarn, with completely irredeemable bad guys performing hideous crimes that don’t have even the slightest hint of a profit motive — they’re essentially human monsters, whose very bad ends are ultimately in keeping with what one expects in a horror story, regardless of its superhero-genre trappings. Meanwhile, on the artistic side of things, Ernie Chan holds up his end of the storytelling just fine, while Aparo’s distinctive inks keep the strip’s look consistent with the rest of the series; in particular, both Corrigan and his alter ego remain 100% on model.
And now, we come to the reason for the unusually short length of Adventure #438’s lead story: the debut of the title’s new backup feature, the Seven Soldiers of Victory, which kicks off with not just one episode, but two.
This feature had been in the works for a while; in fact, it had been promised as far back as Adventure #433, which had come out all the way back in February, and whose letters column led off with the following exchange:
(Yes, that is indeed the same Paul Kupperberg who’d go on to enter the comics industry as a professional just a couple of years later.)
For more behind-the-scenes details — including the reason why it took so long to get the serial underway — we turn to a retrospective by Jack Abramowitz originally published in Back Issue #64 (May, 2013) (though it should be noted that the specific account quoted below is attributed within the article to a different writer, John Wells):
In July of 1973, DC was in the process of moving from 909 Third Avenue to a new base of operations on the sixth floor of the Warner Communications Building at 75 Rockefeller Plaza. And that also happened to be the time period when 16-year-old Paul Levitz snagged a job as [Adventure Comics editor] Joe Orlando’s assistant.
During the big move, the Seven Soldiers script was apparently discovered by Paul… Unlike the older, wearier DC personnel around him, he was enough of a fan to delight in the find itself and, more importantly, well-versed enough in DC history to recognize that it had never been published.
It was undoubtedly Paul who encouraged Orlando to have the story illustrated. And since Levitz was also the editor of The Comic Reader newszine at the time, word of the discovery was relayed to fans as early as TCR #100 (dated and evidently on sale in August). The Adventure Comics #433 letters column opened with a missive from Paul Kupperberg, who asked for a “sneak preview of what to expect from the ever-changing Adventure in the near future.” Kupperberg was TCR’s assistant editor and the letter was an obvious setup for an editorial reply (almost certainly written by Levitz) plugging the Seven Soldiers serial.
As to why it took until issue #438 to launch the serial, the article pins it on the success of the Saturday morning TV cartoon Super Friends, which began airing in September, 1973. Of the five DC heroes originally featured on that series, there was only one — Aquaman — who wasn’t currently appearing in his own strip. (Even Robin had a backup gig in Batman.) And so, the Sea King — who’d already been lined up to appear in Adventure‘s back pages somewhere down the road — got bumped ahead of the Seven Soldiers for his three issue run in Adventure #435-437.
And now you know.
“Land of Magic!” had presumably been originally intended for the 15th issue of Leading Comics, where the Seven Soldiers of Victory had been holding forth since issue #1 (Winter, 1941). But the super-team was booted from their home following #14 (Spring, 1945), as the title transitioned to a funny-animal format for the remainder of its fourteen year run; and Joe Samachson’s script was never illustrated. (For the record, Samachson, a prolific writer who had authored all of the Seven Soldiers’ exploits from Leading #6 on, would continue to keep busy at DC for another decade, eventually co-creating J’onn J’Onzz, Manhunter from Mars, with artist Joe Certa.)
Per Back Issue, Samachson’s script needed some relatively minor clean-up, but was largely left intact; and its old-fashioned quality certainly shows, for better or worse. In dividing up the chapters to be illustrated by a variety of artists, editorial assistant Paul Levitz (who seems to have been given an almost completely free hand by Joe Orlando, despite his youth) was simply following DC’s Golden Age team-book tradition, in which the adventures of the individual members of the Seven Soldiers of Victory (or the Justice Society of America) had each been drawn by a different artist, at least in their early days. For this introductory chapter featuring all the team’s members, Dick Dillin was a natural choice for penciller, having drawn all three chapters of the storyline that re-introduced the Soldiers to a new generation of readers a couple of years earlier, in Justice League of America #100, #101, and #102. The inker — cryptically credited on the splash page as “Himself… the O’Tex” — was Tex Blaisdell, who’d recently returned to freelancing for DC after several years spent working primarily on newspaper strips (notably including Little Orphan Annie, which he’d taken over following the death of its creator, Harold Gray).
We previously provided some fairly detailed background notes on the individual heroes of the Seven Soldiers of Victory (aka the Law’s Legionnaires) in our posts on the three JLA issues linked to up above — so let’s content ourselves here with a roll call of the eight (yes, eight… count ’em) heroes shown here, going clockwise (more of less) from top left-of-center: Vigilante, Stripesy, Crimson Avenger, Star-Spangled Kid, Green Arrow, Speedy, Shining Knight, and Wing.
In 2024, it’s difficult to look at the buck-toothed, orange-colored visage given Wing in the above-left panel and not wince (though I regret to say that it probably didn’t faze my seventeen-year-old self in 1974). For what it’s worth, while Dillin and Blaisdell (and the story’s anonymous colorist) are following the lead of their Golden Age predecessors here, they’ve also toned down the racial stereotyping typically found in the earlier stories of the Crimson Avenger and Wing… though perhaps not as much as one might wish, even in the cultural context of half a century ago.
In 2013, Paul Levitz recalled how he picked the artist for the serial’s Shining Knight chapter:
I have a pretty solid memory of thinking about [Howard] Chaykin for the Shining Knight as being able to do a credible faux-[Frank] Frazetta and have some fun with it.
As will likely come as no surprise to fans familiar with the opinions Howard Chaykin generally expresses these days regarding his early work, the artist himself was less sanguine in his own comments for Back Issue:
That job was cringeworthy… I truly was out of my league… the work I did was execrable … I tried ineptly to do my best take on Frazetta. How arrogant of me.
From “The Duel of the Flying Knights!”, as originally published in Adventure #153 (Jun., 1950) and reprinted in Masterworks Series of Great Comic Book Artists #1 (Spring, 1983). Text by Joe Samachson; art by Frank Frazetta.
Back Issue‘s Jack Abramowitz followed up this quote by rhetorically asking his readers, “Is he [Chaykin] being too hard on himself?”, then went on to answer his own question in the affirmative. And at the risk of causing Mr. Chaykin further consternation, I’m going to have to side with Mr. Abramowitz on this one. In December, 1974, I hadn’t yet been exposed to the eight Shining Knight stories Frazetta had drawn for Adventure Comics at the dawn of the 1950s; still, I knew what I liked, and I very much liked what Chaykin had done here (I might even have understood that the artist was going for a “retro” effect with his approach to this material, though that may be giving my younger self too much credit). Some nine years later, however, when I finally got a chance to read those Frazetta gems in the first two issues of DC’s Masterworks Series of Great Comic Book Artists, I came to appreciate Chaykin’s efforts ever more. To this day, I find this six-pager to be a fine homage to a master of fantasy art from an extremely talented (if still relatively unformed) young admirer.
Sorry, Mr. C.
Sir Justin takes the magician, Surlin, down with one punch; then he proceeds to sever the blades of the wizard’s armed servitors with a single stoke of his own enchanted sword…
The story’s internal logic (such as it’s been) falls apart at this point, as Sir Justin’s mirror-image double — clearly shown sitting on the floor next to our hero in the last panel of page 4 — somehow ends up back inside the mirror for page 5. Or that’s what it looks like is happening to me, anyway. Hmm, maybe we should just sit back and enjoy the pretty pictures…
It’s happy endings all around — at least as far as the Shining Knight’s solo adventure is concerned. Will Green Arrow and Speedy fare as well in the next chapter, against what seems to be an even more whimsical “menace”? Check back here in February, and we’ll all find out together; plus, we’ll join the Spectre for the first half of what will prove to be his last adventure in Adventure Comics.
Detail from the cover of Adventure #436 (Nov.-Dec., 1974).
Detail from the cover of Adventure #437 (Jan.-Feb., 1975).
This is the first DC comic we’ve featured on the blog since Swamp Thing #13 back in August — yes, it really has been that long — so before we put this post (and the comic-book year of 1974) to bed, it behooves us to take note of a significant change made by the company in the interval between the release of that comic and the publication of Adventure #438. In the month of October, DC had quietly raised the cover price of their standard-size (i.e., 32-page) comics from 20 to 25 cents; in doing so, they’d belatedly followed in the footsteps of their major competitors, who’d already instituted the same price hike earlier in the year. (For the record: Marvel, Archie, Charlton, and Harvey had all raised prices back in February, while Gold Key had held out until May.)
To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time that DC had raised the price of their standard-format comics without issuing a company-wide announcement explaining why they felt they had to make such a change. Going forward, this strategy of silence would be standard operating procedure for the major comics companies; but it was a far cry from the earnest message that had heralded DC’s last price adjustment, back in May, 1972 — or, for that matter, Marvel’s lengthy explanation of their own 20-to-25 cent jump from this past February.
Still more shake-ups would be in store for DC as the new year began… though we’ll postpone further discussion of those until our first DC post of 2025 (or, if you prefer, 1975) — coming your way just a couple of weeks from now.
It’s always a surprise to realize how brief Spectre’s Adventure Comics run was. Though given the formulaic aspect, I’m not sure it could have kept going much longer, much as I like it.
The death of the first assistant is odd by series standards — just drops dead, nothing particularly grisly or twisted. I guess the result of the tight space as you said.
“No hint of a profit motive” — yes, why are these henchmen working for the maniac? Does he have the kind of budget for his exhibits that can pay for professional killers? Not that this is a unique comics problem. Rereading the Mad Hatter’s debut (the second Hatter who’s obsessed with hats rather than Lewis Carroll), I noticed he’s not out to make money, just to steal hats for his collection. So how did he get a gang of hoods to work for him, particularly when they’re going up against Batman?
This story was, I assume, influenced by Vincent Price’s mad waxworks maker in House of Wax.
Huh. I never noticed back when that Aparo didn’t do everything as usual in those Spectre stories. Chan is so overpowered by him that I guess that makes sense as well as me also not remembering disliking the art as I did with everything else drawn by Chan ever.
I also gotta say I actually liked Chaykin’s art more than I ever did Frazetta. It isn’t that I had a negative opinion of Frazetta but I had a severe disinterest in the genre he only drew for. Chaykin drew a good (if off model costume wise) story and while it was still That Genre, it featured a super-hero which elevated it for me. Chaykin would lose me when he got more into fetishwear for his characters but here I still enjoyed his work unreservedly.
Here’s a blog entry with good info on Tex Blaisdell who inked Dick Dillin on the Seven Sons of Victory story. On the blog there is also a video link to his appearance on “To Tell the Truth” in the early ’70s:
https://todaysinspiration.blogspot.com/2010/05/luminaries-of-ncs-tex-blaisdell.html?m=1
I forgot to say I agree with Alan on Chaykin’s work, though being hypercritical of early efforts is a common thing with creative people.
The entire 7 Soldiers series was reprinted in the third Archive edition of their Leading Comics stories.
Actually, only the script for what would have been Leading Comics #15 was reprinted in the third archive: https://www.comics.org/issue/535232/#3394527 . The new artwork from Adventure Comics was not.
Sigh. memory played me false again.
Well, as Steve pointed out above, Aparo was one of those guys whose inking completely overwhelmed the pencils making it look like his work from the beginning, so it’s no surprise that we can’t really get a sense for what Chan was trying to do here. Of course, these were the days of Prime Aparo, when he was doing his best work on the biggest books, so I can only imagine DC wasn’t too unhappy with the way it turned out. I can’t speak for Ernie Chan, however…
There are a lot of problems and unanswered questions with the Spectre story, aside for the already-asked “why were these guys working for the professor if he couldn’t make them rich?” First and foremost, WHY was the prof making this display? He has to know it’s murder and that he’s not going to get away with it, that the exhibits will never go on display, so what’s it all for? Secondly, how could he possibly create an exhibit as large as this one obviously was without the museum knowing about it? These questions, plus the question of where the money was coming from to pay his henchmen takes the whole thing too far afield to really make sense, even in terms of “comic logic.” Still, the artwork was good and dramatic and the professor’s “murder by monkey’s” (yes, I know they’re apes, but I’m being alliterative) was grisly enough to be satisfying, though if not for the cover giving it away, I would have expected to find the prof stuffed and behind the glass in his own exhibit.
As to the Seven Soldiers of Victory, I would practically guarantee, despite the fact that Willie Wisher looks vaguely familiar, that I never read this story. I almost never read re-print stories from the Golden Age, and I doubt I’d have read this one, despite the fact that it had never been printed before. Which is a shame, because I like Dick Dillin as a penciller. He’s no Neal Adams or Gil Kane, but his work is solid and I like his over-all artistic style. I was never disappointed by Dillin’s work anywhere else, and I wouldn’t have been here.
Regarding the Shining Knight, I agree with the room that Chaykin did a fine job aping Frazetta and he should give himself a break. The reveal that the princess was a pig was weak and surely crafted to get the Knight out of that adventure as quickly as possible, but it does have the advantage of being unexpected.
All in all, a decent, but not great, issue of one of my favorite comics of the time. Thanks, Alan! Happy New Year, everyone!
Sorry, but I was already thrown by the first panel which had a dog bark as a speech balloon when it should IMO be a sound effect.
Ah, you see, the dog is reiterating his owner’s wishes that Herman’s rheumatism clears up, and is expressing this succinctly, in dog language. Dogs are smarter than people, so a single ‘arf’ does a lot of heavy lifting.
Well, regarding the Specter story, the art was nice but the story left a lot to be desired. I’d try to make sense of it but just have to chalk it down to the old Haney madness where, of course, a museum keeps a display of gorillas who go on a murderous rampage when let loose, which is contrary to both museums and gorillas in the real world. I’ve heard of adult chimpanzees biting off peoples fingers and even faces but have never heard of a gorilla going out of its way to attack and kill anyone, although that’s been a fictional trope for nearly two centuries now. We attribute to them the worst aspects of ourselves but with more muscles! As to the mad professor’s henchmen, I suspect in the DC & Marvel worlds there must have been underground papers advertising “Goons R Us! You need goons with guns who will do what they’re told without asking embarrassing questions and work cheap to assist in nefarious misdeeds? We got ’em by the hundreds, standing by now, awaiting your call to action and criminal mischief! Call: (999) 555-5555, any hour, day or night! They’re not too bright but they don’t have anything better to do!”
As to the Seven Soldiers of Victory stories, Dillan & Chaykin both strongly evoke early 1940s comics art, at least what little I’ve seen of it. Only seen a few examples of Frazetta’s comics art from the period, but Chaykin’s art resembles that pseudo Hal Foster style well enough.
fred, Michael Fleisher may well have believed that gorillas were savage, murderous creatures, but I think we can cut him a break on this one — the script is clear about these being stuffed and mounted specimens that have been animated by the Spectre, so we can safely ascribe their unnatural behavior to the mystical manipulations of our avenging “hero”.
Ah, ok, Alan! I suspected but missed that little detail. Been down with a rotten head cold today and not reading as closely as I should have. Also misattributed the story to Haney rather than Fleisher! I’d have expected Fleisher to come up with some much more bizarre means to dispatch the evil doer, but I suppose someone must have insisted gorillas be involved to put on the cover and thereby theoretically boost sales.
Anyhow, wishing you and all a Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you too, fred — and get well soon!
Thanks, Alan!
Regarding your comment on “Goons R Us!”, as you probably know, in the 1980s Marvel created a villain called The Taskmaster who, in addition to being able to mimic any hero’s fighting skill when he saw it (because he has a photographic memory) also ran a business where he trained henchmen for use by super villains. It was a wonderfully clever idea from the House of Ideas and while, sadly, the Taskmaster eventually just became an ordinary villain, when the Taskmaster ran his business (actually it was a school for henchman!) it was amusing to see villains calling in for recruits.
Marvel also came up with Damage Control in the 1980s, as a business to quickly repair all of the major damage that hero/villain clashes inflicted on New York City. Talk about a clever way of dealing with traditional comic book logic issues.
“service villains” as my friend Ross calls them are fun. Taskmaster. Paul Gambi. A couple of shrinks at DC who specialize in working for supervillains (hey, they need therapy too!). Justin Hammer and Tinkerer on the tech side.
This story had a truly macabre premise – perfect for the Spectre! I agree that the ending felt rushed, especially given that the Spectre makes his first appearance on page 8 of a 10-page story. I wonder if Fleisher wrote a 12-page story and was then asked to truncate it so the SSoV tale would fit in the issue. That would help explain the abrupt ending. The Chua/Aparo combination here is solid, but is not as pleasing to me as when Aparo both penciled and inked. I like the Dillin/Blaisdell art in Chapter 1 of the SSoV story and as you noted it ties them neatly to the recent JLA co-star trilogy. I was disappointed by the Chaykin art in Chapter 2, although if he was trying to recreate a 1940s feel to his art, he succeeded (which is why I didn’t love it). The SSoV story is a little too whimsical for my taste and doesn’t mesh well with the lead feature at all.
Sadly, my local store started having distribution issues a few months ago prior to this issue, so I missed the last two issues and nearly all the remainder of the Spectre’s run. I did get to catch up with these later in one of DC’s collections.
I didn’t really have an issue with the art. Aparo did overpower Chan, but Chan usually overpowered whoever he was inking, and Aparo was probably my favorite artist at the time.
I only got to read one part of the SSOV series (drawn by Chan), but did catch with it later as well. Since I enjoyed the old Golden Age stories, it was fine with me. I’m glad they came up with the idea.
Regarding Aquaman at that time, I recall reading somewhere that since he was on Super Friends, DC made a big effort to include Aquaman in as many JLA issues as possible…..I’m sure to offset the lack of his own title. Maybe it’s already been discussed here….if so, I apologize.
This never-published Seven Soldiers of Victory story being serialized in mid-1970s Adventure Comics was a treat to my 12-year-old self. These stories were written for children at the height of the Golden Age and tended to have just enough scale and scope and intrigue and, yes, whimsy, to keep younger me interested.
I’d read the SSoV Black Star story in two issues of the 100-page Justice League of America books maybe a year or so earlier and enjoyed that. The Willie Wisher story might not quite match that one, but Joe Samachson’s creativity dial was turned way up, even if some of the plotting is weak. It must have been an interesting challenge for the artists to convey the richness of 30-year-old source material while appealing to a modern audience.
Great to see this again here for the first time in, well, 50 years. Thank you, Alan.
I started collecting these Spectre issues earlier this year after reading Alan’s entry for AC#431, that lovely blue cover on Spectre’s first outing and Aparo’s pencils were enough to get me in and so I acquired 6 issues and stopped as I just couldn’t cope with the story telling. The plots were fine and engaging but I found the 12-13 page format just suffocated the story and forced them into these ridiculous abrupt endings that left me shaking my head (all so DC could cut costs by reducing page count and then shove a reprint in the back half).
Being a ‘Marvel man’ I found this these truncated plots unacceptable, I’d been raised on full issues with plenty of space to let the story breath and sub-plots & tangents explored whilst this was just implausible and strangely took me out of my suspension of belief: hey, I’m fine with a revenging ghost taking the body of a policeman but I refuse to believe that he happened to be right at the court house when the judge was reading about a cold case that was remarkably similar (I made this up, but it seemed each issue had one of these weird crutches to finish it quickly).
Sorry you were disappointed in those “Adventure” issues, Spider! You make a good observation in regards to how DC’s predilection towards having two stories in a standard-size comic encouraged a different form of storytelling than was the norm at (mostly) one-story-per-issue Marvel — though I imagine some DC-favoring fans might argue that the flaws in Fleisher’s Spectre stories were due more to his own limitations as a writer than they were to the inherent limitations of the format. One small correction: I’m pretty sure none of the issues in this run of “Adventure” included reprints; like the SSoV serial that begins in #438, all of the backups were new (at least in the sense of never having been published before).
Post-Supergirl Adventure Comics is an interesting study in DC trying to figure out what it was doing. Black Orchid (yay!), the Adventurer’s Club, the Spectre, Aquaman …
And that wonderful issue – I think it was 425 – with stories by Toth, Kane, and Nino plus a lovely Kaluta cover!
They also had The Vigilante in there. They had to know Supergirl was going to get her book and they needed a better plan than they had.
It sort of reminded me of Sensation Comics in 199-’50 when they saw that WW & Wildcat could not carry the book. I sort of hoped they would give it to Kirby to do “adventure stories.”
In fairness, going with spooky and supernatural was the default in that era. Happened to the Challs, also the Teen Titans in the early 1970s.
In fairness, it also happened with Sensation Comics in the early 1950s.
And Captain America turning into Captain America’s Weird Tales.
The Seven Soldiers of Victory (“SSoV”) story slightly underwhelmed me. DC had fewer great artist working for them in1974 than they had in 1973 in my opinion. Alfredo Alcala going to Marvel to do the CPT Marvel issue you wrote about was something I saw as a particularly bad sign.
I had not realized some of the losses of talented people by DC were self-inflicted (Kaluta & Wrightson).
Fifty years ago, I figured Atlas was going to worsen the trend.
Well, the reality was it got more freelancers freelancing more.
But, the artists who the SSoV showed how slim the pickings were in late1974.
I thought Chaykin’s Shining Knight story was a highlight (as was Grell’s Crimson Avenger & Wing) but the rest of the art did not do much for me (it was nice to see. Lee Elias draw GA again). Dick Dillin was an underrated penciller, but Blaisdell’s inking did not suit him. They could not find someone like McLaughlin or John Calnan to ink it?
I did like seeing Chan come aboard (here, on Batman and on an Elongated Man in Schwartz’s first issue back at Detective and a World of Krypton he did in Superman with Marty Pasko). I had assumed DC (like Marvel) would use Chan as an inker (something I thought they needed). I liked most ofChan’s work on Batman and on covers (although, I preferred Giordano, who initially seemed slated to replace Cardy on the covers.
I tended to be more of a DC fan then. I still read a lot of Marvel (particularly, Englehart, Gerber & McGregor with a soft spot for Isabella’s brief runs on DD * Cap in 1975.
Reading these posts has been a reminder that “The Golden Age is12 (or 13).”
I liked the Spectre and I probably read this story fifty years ago, but I know that I did not read the Seven Soldiers of Victory story then because, like another commenter here, I never read reprints (and apparently repurposes) of Golden Age stories. However, in reading the story in this blog post for the heck of it, I must say that when Surlin (Surlin? Really?) told the Shining Knight (the Shining Knight? Really?, Willie Wisher? Really?) that the princess was really a pig, I thought that the magician was trying to pull a fast one and had turned the real princess into a pig. I guess even that somewhat expected possible plot twist was beyond this story.