Half a century ago, July, 1976 brought the return of one of my younger self’s favorite comic book traditions of those bygone days– the annual team-up event between the Justice League of America and their forerunners from the Golden Age of Comics, the Justice Society of America.  This particular iteration was the fourteenth such team-up to appear since DC Comics had kicked the whole thing off back in 1963, not to mention the eleventh for your humble blogger, who’d first come aboard in 1966.  And though you couldn’t tell it from Ernie Chan’s cover, Justice League of America #135 had an additional numerical distinction as well, as it presented the first chapter of what would eventually emerge as only the second JLA/JSA event up to that point to occupy three full issues, two having been the norm ever since JLA #21 and #22 had inaugurated the tradition way back when. 

What made this particular story rate three issues?  Well, the first JLA/JSA three-parter, released in 1972, had introduced a new factor to the crossover event’s established formula, as it added another Golden Age super-team — the Seven Soldiers of Victory — to the mix.  And, as is indicated by JLA #135’s cover’s three sets of headshots, that factor would be coming into play this year as well, as a group of vintage heroes with the never-before-seen moniker of “Shazam’s Squadron of Justice” would evidently be joining in the fun.  So, maybe that’s why this one needed an extra issue.  On the other hand, for the very next summer get-together following the first JLA/JSA three-parter, DC had managed to squeeze the revival of yet another Golden Age group, the Freedom Fighters, into just two issues (#107 and #108, respectively).  So, the sheer number of teams doesn’t seem to have been the only driver in determining how many issues the story needed to be adequately told.

Of course, there’d been other differences between 1972’s and 1973’s crossovers.  For one, the 1972 event also commemorated Justice League of America’s reaching its 100th issue, as well as the additional milestone of being the tenth JLA/JSA shindig overall.  And it also had the advantage of coming out monthly, whereas by the time those two teams made the acquaintance of Uncle Sam and company, the title had been reduced to a bimonthly publication schedule — which meant that if JLA editor Julius Schwartz had opted to let the story run for three issues, the Justice League would have been sharing the spotlight with their fellow superdoers for fully half of the year.*  By 1976, however, The World’s Greatest Super-Heroes were back to appearing every single month, which likely influenced Schwartz’s decision to let the annual summer extravaganza run for three full issues, even with no notable numerical signpost in sight.

For further insights into what was going on behind the scenes at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, we turn to the words of the late Martin Pasko (1954-2020), one of the two writers credited for the story that ran in JLA #135 through #137.  Interviewed by Jim Kingman five years before his untimely passing for a retrospective on the JLA/JSA crossovers of the Bronze Age (see Back Issue #82 [Aug., 2015]),** Pasko recalled:

Though not the regular writer of JLA, I got involved because Julie said he needed “insurance”; I did them as a favor to him.  By 1976, the DC books’ editorial page count was down to 17 an issue.  JLA was always hard to write (Julie considered it his hardest book to write backwhen the stories were 22–24 pages), but at 17 pages, it was breathtakingly difficult.  So, because it didn’t pay any more than a less-complex book, it was an assignment I actively dodged after the first two or three issues I wrote. I lost money every time I tackled it…

 

It [the annual JLA/JSA team-up] had gotten to the point where Julie felt it was a bigger job than one writer could handle, and as a result there was the previous one that [Cary] Bates and [Elliot S!] Maggin co-wrote…  Other writer pairings [on JLA] followed.  But, as we all learned, to our lasting regret, this notion was professional insanity, because each writer was doing twice as much work as he’d have to do on a single-hero script, but splitting the page rate and making only half what he would’ve otherwise!  In my case, it was even worse.

 

E. Nelson Bridwell, who was Julie’s assistant editor, was the only writer working for Julie at that point who knew the Fawcett continuity and character group very well…  But Julie never found Nelson’s plotting inspired and thought Nelson had a tin ear for dialogue; he was happy to have Bridwell on short backups intended for very young readers, like Shazam! or Super Friends, but didn’t want him tackling something like the annual JLA/JSA team-up.  But turning a deaf ear to Nelson’s pitch that he was the best-qualified writer in Julie’s stable to do the story, since Nelson was writing a lot for Shazam! at that point, was difficult to justify. And, considering that those two shared an office, and Nelson was practically on his knees, begging, it was politically difficult for Julie to reject Bridwell outright.

 

So Julie brought me in to “guarantee” that the dialogue would have more “spark” (Julie’s term).  He also knew that I’d try hard to tweak the gimmicks in Nelson’s plot so they would be less [Mort] Weisinger-absurd…  But it was 100% Nelson’s plot, completed before I was brought in…

We’ll return to Pasko’s recollections later in the post; for now, we’ll simply note that the reduction in page count to 17 might well have figured into Julius Schwartz’s calculations in deciding that this three-teams/three-earths storyline needed three issues to fully breathe — though, in the end, Bridwell’s plot was so very dense that it still feels terribly cramped… at least to this reader.  I’ll explain my reasons why as we proceed through this first episode…

Justice League of America #135 was the first issue I’d picked up since the conclusion of the last Justice League/Justice Society meet-up, back in August, 1975; thus, as far as I knew at the time, Bridwell and Pasko could have picked up the JLA writing gig immediately following JLA #124 and penned every issue thereafter, or it could have rotated through different scripters with every issue.  (In fact, the job had bounced back and forth between Pasko and Gerry Conway over the last ten issues.)  But whatever might have been going on on the writing end of things, the opening splash page’s credits box assured me that as far as the book’s artwork was concerned, matters were exactly as I had left them — with the ever-reliable (if not necessarily all that exciting) Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin still on the job.

Before moving on from the first page, we’ll note that the six Fawcett Comics heroes who were collectively labeled “Shazam’s Squadron of Justice” on this issue’s cover are here referred to as “The Legendary Heroes of Earth-S!” (which, incidentally, is the first official use of that alternate-Earth designation, as far as I know — although the “fact” that Captain Marvel and his associated characters resided on a different world from than the “main” DC Universe location of Earth-One had been established as far back as Shazam! #15 [Nov.-Dec., 1974], when Lex Luthor visited Cap’s world).  For what it’s worth, neither sobriquet appears anywhere in the story itself, either in this first installment or in the two to follow — which is probably just as well, given that the five had never appeared together as a discrete team before (and never would again, so far as I’ve been able to determine).

As to why we’re evidently going to focus just on these folks for now, and not on the much better-known trio of Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel, Jr., and Mary Marvel… well, there’s an explanation coming up on the next few pages — though perhaps I should stipulate that this is an in-story explanation only.  I honestly have no idea why Bridwell, et al, would opt to keep the Marvel Family almost entirely out of this crossover’s action until the back half of the third and final chapter — but that’s exactly how things are destined to play out, as we’ll see over the next couple of months.

Wow.  There’s a lot going on in this two-page “Prologue” — a fair amount of which I imagine would be more or less impenetrable to anyone who didn’t already have at lest some familiarity with the Marvel Family and their mythos.  And even the stuff that’s explained more fully comes with some questions.

Let’s start with our story’s Big Bad, King Kull (no, not that one).  This character had first appeared in Fawcett’s Captain Marvel Adventures #125, which also recounted his origin.  There as here, Kull and his fellow “Sub-Men” are said to have been overcome by the sheer numbers of their Homo sapiens foes, despite their vastly superior technology; following his awakening from suspended animation, Kull devoted himself to using that long-buried technology to make multiple attempts to destroy mankind — only to be thwarted time and time again by the Marvel Family.  But in this story, by specifying that Kull has access not just to enhanced munitions and other implements of destruction, but also to fast-as-light spaceships that can travel between universes, plotter Bridwell begs the question — once the Sub-Men realized that they would ultimately fall prey to the bows-and-arrows of those buff, long-haired dudes depicted above, why didn’t they just leave?  Maybe the creators of that first Kull story, writer Otto Binder and artist C.C. Beck, could have just hand-waved away any such concerns from their audience (which was primarily composed of children); but it’s a lot to expect from the DC Comics readership of 1976, which was surely somewhat older and more sophisticated than that of Fawcett circa 1951, at least on average.

Moving on, we come to the Rock of Eternity, and the gods and goddesses who live thereon.  While my younger self wasn’t a regular reader of DC’s Shazam! series in 1976, I’d read enough issues that I’m pretty sure I could guess the names of the six male worthies pictured in the last panel of the prologue’s first page — after all, who else could they be but Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles — five out of the six fellows who provide Captain Marvel with his powers — and the wizard Shazam?  (For the whereabouts of Cap’s sixth patron, Mercury, I of course only had to turn to the next page.)  On the other hand, I’m not sure I was as yet cognizant of Marvel Family lore to recognize the six female figures as the goddesses who empower Mary Marvel when she says “Shazam!” — i.e., Selena, Hippolyta, Ariadne, Zephyrus, Aurora, and Minerva.

But forget about the names for a moment.  Just what the heck are all those celestial luminaries supposed to be doing in that panel?  Are the ladies competing in a beauty pageant?  Having a fashion show?  Participating in a “win a date with a goddess” charity auction?  Honestly, I’d love to know precisely what the script called for poor Dick Dillin to draw in that space.

But, whatever.  Moving on…

The title of Chapter 1 is a riff on the first line of English poet Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, which was originally published in 1648.  Of rather more recent vintage, The Blue Knight is a 1972 novel by Joseph Wambaugh, which was adapted into a 1973 television miniseries that in turn spawned an ongoing series that ran for two seasons (1975-76) on CBS.  In all its iterations, it was the story of Bumper Morgan, a uniformed police officer who frequently employed a nightstick, or billy-club.

So… the first step in the plan that Shazam has given Mercury to execute — the one intended to prevent Kull from destroying “the humans on every world” (as he put it in the prologue) — is to gather up a group of six heroes from Earth-One… a group that, dare I say it, seems to have been somewhat arbitrarily chosen.  I mean, why leave Black Canary behind while taking Hawkgirl, who’s not even a Justice Leaguer (yet)?  Hmm, I guess the gods do work in mysterious ways…

This wasn’t quite the first time we’d seen the Batman of Earth-Two in a JLA/JSA crossover.  But his only prior on-panel appearance, in 1970’s JLA #82, had been a mere cameo; this was the first double-team adventure in which the OG Caped Crusader would get to fully participate in the action… and, as things would eventually (and sadly) turn out, it would also be the last.

As for Robin, the reference to his “working with that newly-formed Super-Squad” is kind of ironic, given that — as we previously discussed in last week’s All-Star Comics #62 post — he hadn’t shown up in the revived All-Star since the second issue, released some seven months before.  But as long as we’re on the subject of All-Star, this is a good place to note how mystified my younger self was back in 1976 (and in 1977, and in 1978) at DC’s apparent lack of interest in having the Justice League/Society crossover actually, you know, cross over from the JLA’s title to the JSA’s (or vice versa), now that that was an option.  After all, Marvel Comics had done that on multiple occasions with their various super-teams, so why shouldn’t DC?  It would be some years yet before I learned that, in this era, DC’s various editors still managed their individual slates of books mostly as separate fiefdoms.  And since Justice League of America was a Julius Schwartz book, and All-Star Comics was not (just for the record, in July, 1976 it was in the process of transitioning from being Gerry Conway’s responsibility to Joe Orlando’s), the twain were unlikely to ever meet.

It seems Shazam’s plan also involves Mercury assembling what, at least on the face of it, appears to be as random a selection of a half-dozen JSAers as he already has the same quantity of JLAers (counting Hawkgirl).  I guess the old wizard really likes the number six, for some reason; maybe because it’s the number of letters in his name (and thus, also the number of the respective arrays of gods and goddesses who give the Marvel Family their powers)?  Sure, let’s go with that.

Given how much I’ve already ragged on Bridwell and Pasko for not explaining things very clearly thus far, I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the very good job the script does of introducing the old Fawcett heroes as they arrive on stage, efficiently providing both their raison d’être and their modus operandi… or, to paraphrase Bill Finger in Batman #1, “who they are and how they came to be”.

For those of you out there who may be interested in these characters’ real-world origins and history as well as the “in-universe” versions, here’s the skinny on Ibis the Invincible.  The magician formerly known as Prince Amentep first appeared in Whiz Comics #2 (Feb., 1940), in a story generally credited to Bill Parker (writer) and C.C. Beck (artist) — the same guys who produced the very first Captain Marvel story (which also appeared in that issue) — although some sources attribute the art to Bob Kingett.  Ibis got his own title in 1942; it ran for six issues, during and after which time he continued to appear regularly in Whiz.  Ibis’ final Fawcett appearance came in Whiz #155 (Jun., 1953), the last issue of that title; interestingly, he was then briefly licensed to Charlton Comics, making at  least one appearance there (in Danger and Adventure #22 [Feb., 1955] before slipping into limbo for the next couple of decades.

All right, now we have an explanation for the absence of Captain Marvel and family.  Still, there’s even more to unpack in these last few panels.  To start with, why is Green Arrow greeting Superman, Flash, Green Lantern, and the Hawks as though he’s just arrived, when they’ve all been together since the end of page 3?  If we’re supposed to think that Mercury is gathering the heroes of all three Earths virtually instantaneously, maybe the writers should have refrained from using words like “later” and “within the hour” in their narrative captions over the last two pages, which have very definitely indicated the passage of time.

And while it’s nice to drop a reference identifying the location of the heroes’ meet-up as the hideout of the Crime Champions, from way back in the very first Justice League/Justice Society team-up, it would have been helpful for readers without an encyclopedic knowledge of all previous JLA stories to explain that said hideout is situated in the interdimensional gulf between universes, making it an ideal staging area for the combined teams of three worlds.

And, finally, speaking of the teams of three worlds — shouldn’t the Justice Society members collected by Mercury have arrived before the Earth-S heroes?  I suppose we can assume that they’re standing out of camera range in those last two panels — but it seems weird for our storytellers to have completely excluded them from this sequence, brief as it is.

We’re just on page 6, folks.  Does anyone else’s head hurt yet?

OK, at least the introductions of the remaining five Fawcett-eers are pretty straightforward — as will be the following brief historical notes on same (or so I hope).

We begin with Spy Smasher — who, believe it or not, is yet another hero who debuted in Whiz Comics #2, in yet another story by Parker and Beck.  Like Ibis, he eventually graduated to his own title, which ran for eleven issues in 1941-43; also like his sorcerous compatriot, he continued to hold down a slot in Whiz, although his last outing there came well before that title’s end, in issue #83 (Mar., 1947).  Afterwards, Fawcett tried changing his name to Crime Smasher — but after just one issue published under that title (cover dated Summer, 1948) the character once again disappeared from newsstands, not resurfacing until our present story… in which we see that, at some point in the last twenty-eight years, our goggle-wearing good guy must have decided that the old ways were the best, chucking the “Crime” and going back to being “Spy” Smasher.

Though yet another hero first written about by the busy Bill Parker, Bulletman didn’t debut in Whiz Comics — neither in the illustrious #2, nor in any later issue.  Rather, his first adventure was chronicled in Nickel Comics #1 (May 17, 1940), with the art being provided by Edwin Jon Small.  The helmeted hero continued to be featured in Nickel for the remainder of its eight-issue run, then hopped over to Master Comics beginning with that title’s 7th issue (Oct., 1940) His partner in romance and crimefighting, Bulletgirl, first appeared in her civilian guise of Susan Kent in the aforementioned Nickel #1, before suiting up for superheroic action for the first time in Master #13 (Apr., 1941).  The duo continued to appear in most issues of Master Comics, while also starring in sixteen issues of Bulletman from 1941 to 1946; they took their final Golden Age bow in Master #106 (Aug., 1949).***

Last –and perhaps also least– we have Mister Scarlet and Pinky, the Whiz Kid.  The first of these two worthies first showed up in Wow Comics #1 (Winter, 1940), and was the creation of writer Frances Herron and artist Jack Kirby (yes, that Jack Kirby).  His junior partner arrived on the scene just three issues later, in Wow #4, and the duo continued their crusade against evil through the remainder of that book’s run.  While they also appeared in seven issues of America’s Greatest Comics from 1941 to 1943, Mr. Scarlet and Pinky never quite managed to score their own title, and reached the end of their road with Wow Comics #69 (Aug., 1948).

And now you know.

Hmm… I guess that the Justice Society folks must have been there in the Crime Champions HQ all along, since they (with the exception of Johnny Thunder) are clearly being included in the “three squads of super-heroes” being dispatched to counter King Kull’s schemes on the three Earths.  Which is fine, I guess, but here’s another, thornier question: how does Mercury know just where to send them?  My own best surmise is that Kull has been constantly running off his mouth to his captive audience on the Rock of Eternity, and that Shazam has been telepathically transmitting this information to Mercury, thus allowing our heroes to plan a counter-attack; perhaps you can think of another scenario that’s equally plausible, if not more so.  Still, I hope you’ll pardon me for pointing out that this sort of very basic exposition really should have been provided by out storytellers, rather than left up to their readership.  At this point, it’s almost like we’re not reading an actual story, but merely a schematic of one.

Queen Clea made her debut in Wonder Woman #8 (Spring, 1944); she then went on to bedevil the OG Amazing Amazon on several later occasions, last appearing in WW #28 (Mar.-Apr., 1948).  As for her allies…

…well, I’m sure the Penguin needs no introduction — though your guess is as good as mine as to whether we’re dealing with the Earth-One or Earth-Two version here.  As for Blockbuster, he’s another Batman villain, if not on the same level as Oswald Cobblepot.  First seen in Detective Comics #345 (Nov., 1965), this wasn’t even his first JLA/JSA rodeo, given that he’d participated in 1966’s event (as chronicled in JLA #46-47); that said, the colorist’s decision to give him a blue shirt and brown pants this go-round, rather than his usual orange shirt and purple pants, means that anyone already familiar with the character will likely find him feeling a little off-model throughout this sequence.

Earth-S’s representative in this villainous quartet is Ibac, who first appeared in Captain Marvel Adventures #8 (Mar. 6, 1942).  Endowed by Lucifer with the nastiest attributes of Ivan the Terrible, Cesare Borgia, Attila the Hun, and Caligula — as well as with your standard super-strength, flying, etc, — he’d made a handful of Golden Age appearances before being mothballed; unlike King Kull, he’d been resurrected early on in DC’s revival of the Captain Marvel property, making his Bronze Age debut in Shazam! #4 (Jul., 1973).

Speaking of King Kull, your humble blogger has one more question, after which he hopes to give authors Bridwell and Pasko a break for a little while: Why on Earth(s) does our Big Bad enlist such a random crew of operatives from across three Earths to do his dirty work?  He has no previous connection with any of them, as far as we know, and most if not all are likely to have their own agendas.  Kull’s fiendish plan seems to have an enormous number of moving parts, any of which could easily go wrong, is all I’m saying.

But, whatever.  Let’s get back to the story…

In most JLA/JSA stories — actually, in more than a few JLA stories, period — cutting away to the main villain gloating about how the heroes aren’t really winning, despite appearances, would signal the end of a chapter, from whence we’d proceed to see another sub-group of heroes do their thing.

But our storytellers are actually doing something rather novel here, in having had this segment’s sub-groups of both heroes and villains break into still smaller units.  So while we’ve just seen Superman and Wonder Woman get the better of Queen Clea and Blockbuster, we’ve yet to see the remaining two heroes of this particular squad go up against the Penguin and Ibac.

All that said, I think it would have made for clearer storytelling if Bridwell and Pasko had let us know on the first page of the chapter just who was in that second vessel flying next to Diana’s Invisible Plane, instead of waiting us wait until the page we’re getting to now for the reveal.  But you can’t have everything, I guess.

It seems a little odd for editor Schwartz to have decided to cite the reprint appearance of “Operation: Jail the Justice League!”, rather than its original publication in Justice League of America #61 (Mar., 1968).  But, hey, that “Super Friends” tabloid had come out less than a year before, in September, 1975, and maybe he thought some supermarkets or other outlets might still have some available somewhere, tucked away next to the coloring books or something.

The Penguin retaliates by firing a noxious gas from his trick umbrella, which Green Arrow easily counters with a trick arrow that becomes a fan.  Pengy quickly succumbs to the fumes blown back in his face, and the fight is over and done.  Meanwhile…

We cut back yet again to King Kull, but, just like his dialogue indicates, this chapter still isn’t over…

Superman theorizes that the weird cloud has somehow “increased the molecular density of the island — thereby increasing its weight — causing it to sink!”  When Green Arrow objects that such a phenomenon should be flat out impossible according to the laws of physics, Superman basically shrugs it off, repeating his earlier observation that “there’s a lot of stuff on this world I can’t fully comprehend!”  Alrighty, then.  He then takes to the sky, determined to thwart the menace of the cloud before it can “move over all the land-masses on this world”, sinking every continent and drowning the entire population of Earth-Two…

And that’s where we’ll have to leave things for now… although before we wrap up the post, let’s check back in with Martin Pasko, and the remainder of his commentary from Back Issue #82.  We’ll pick up where we left off earlier, following Pasko’s acceptance of the assignment to script JLA #135-137 over E. Nelson Bridwell’s plot:

…I could tell at a single glance that the thing was over-plotted, as well as kitchen-sinked with extraneous characters from the Fawcett archives that were obscure for good reason.  Crowd scenes in every panel.  I thought that if I didn’t have a heart attack trying to execute that thing, poor Dick Dillin certainly would have.  It was the only time in my comics career I ever apologized to an artist for what my script put him through.

 

And, because Bridwell was tone-deaf — incapable, it seemed, of even perceiving the challenge of blending the oil of Captain Marvel whimsy with the water of JLA’s Earth-Shattering Seriousness, never mind capable of figuring out how to address that challenge — the plot came to me in a form that, in my opinion, had as little “annual JLA/JSA team-up flavor” to it as humanly possible.  So, because the approach had already been determined, there was never a chance that my “fanboyish” notion of how these team-ups should be done would influence my thinking.  I was just there to bail water out of the sinking ship. And then, after all that, Nelson got to my script before Julie did and rewrote a lot of my dialogue in his own style, defeating the purpose of all the agony I’d gone through.  By that point, Julie was too tired to argue and let it go through that way.  Wish I’d taken my name off it.  Not a happy experience, that job.

That’s pretty harsh — and, obviously, just one side of a story that will probably never be told in full.  But judging by the evidence before us, it’s difficult not to accept Pasko’s account as being generally credible.

And also obviously, this assessment doesn’t provide us with much encouragement that things are going to get better as the storyline continues.  But who knows?  Maybe Justice League of America #136 will pleasantly surprise us.  In any event, I hope you’ll all join me back here next month to find out.

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Today is July 4, 2026 — the 250th anniversary of American independence.  If you’re inclined to celebrate the occasion, good for you.  If, on the other hand, you’re really not feeling in the spirit for whatever reason (could be because you’re depressed about the state of the nation [believe me, I get you], or could be just because you live in a different country), and you need a reason to feel cheerful besides it’s being Saturday, please feel free to raise a glass in honor of your humble blogger’s 69th birthday.  You’re very welcome.

 

*The bimonthly schedule appears to have been a major factor in DC’s opting to restrict 1974’s JLA/JSA crossover to appearing in an unprecedented single issue, as previously discussed in our post about JLA #113.

**It should be noted that at the time Kingman conducted his interviews, Bridwell had already been deceased for twenty-eight years, while Schwartz had passed away eleven years earlier.  As far as I know, neither was ever interviewed during their lifetimes specifically in regards to JLA #135-137; so, while the lack of balance may be regrettable, Pasko’s recollections are, in the end, the only first-hand account we have to go by.

***Readers of approximately the same vintage as myself may recall the “Bulletman” action figure introduced around this same time (mid-1976) by Hasbro, as an addition to the company’s “G.I. Joe” line.  I recall that, upon seeing full-page ads for the toy in comics I bought, I naturally assumed that Hasbro had properly licensed the character from DC (or Fawcett, or whomever).  Apparently, this was not the case.