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Justice League of America #124 (November, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty years ago this month, DC Comics brought us the second and concluding chapter of the 13th annual Justice League/Justice Society team-up event.  If you missed last month’s post about this story’s first half, or simply need to refresh your memory about what happened in it, you might want to go take a look at that post before digging into this one.  The rest of us, however, are just going to blow right past JLA #124’s cover by Ernie Chan and jump to the issue’s opening splash page, where we find the creative team of Cary Bates and Elliot S! Maggin (writers), Dick Dillin (penciller), and Frank McLaughlin (inker) picking up not long after the finale of the previous issue — which, if you’ll remember, ended with six members of the Justice Society of America having been rendered, well, dead:  Read More

Justice League of America #123 (October, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

1975’s team-up between the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America was the thirteenth such event since the annual tradition had begun in 1963.  Over the years, DC Comics fans had been privileged to vicariously visit such parallel worlds as Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Three, Earth-X, and even the short-lived Earth-A.  But there was one particular Earth that had been established as existing in what would eventually be known as “the DC multiverse” that had yet to be glimpsed in any of the JLA-JSA summer shindigs… though readers of those comics could hardly claim to be unfamiliar with the place.  After all, they lived there.

Of course, I’m talking about Earth-Prime.  Read More

Adventure Comics #435 (Sep.-Oct., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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.”  Read More

Justice League of America #113 (Sep.-Oct., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Beginning in 1963 and continuing through 1973, the June issue of Justice League of America had featured the first chapter of the latest team-up event between the JLA and their Earth-Two counterparts in the Justice Society of America.  It was an annual summer tradition that no DC Comics fan would have expected to see change in June, 1974.

And indeed, the Nick Cardy-drawn cover for JLA #113 gave nary a clue that anything was different this time around, what with its blurb trumpeting “A New JLA-JSA Shocker!”  But I suspect that for many readers (your humble blogger most definitely being among them), the real “shocker” would come when they got to the end of page 20 of “The Creature in the Velvet Cage!” and discovered that they’d just finished reading a complete story.  There would be no second serving of joint Justice League-Justice Society adventuring this year (let alone a third, as we’d had in 1972); rather, they (and we) were one-and-done, until next summer.  Read More

The Brave and the Bold #112 (Apr.-May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By my reckoning, DC Comics’ The Brave and the Bold was one of the first comic book titles I ever spent my own money on (for the record, it was preceded only by Superman, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Justice League of America, Flash, and Lois Lane).  I bought my first issue, #64, in December, 1965 — drawn in, no doubt, by its irresistible Gil Kane cover — and BatB soon became one of my most consistent regular purchases as a nascent comics fan.  No, I didn’t buy every single issue, but that was true of virtually every other title as well (the sole exception in those early days being Justice League of America, to which I quickly subscribed).  The ongoing appeal of the book, of course, was that you were always guaranteed at least two superheroes for the price of one (sometimes, as with issue #65’s team-up between the Flash and the Doom Patrol, you got even more).  That wasn’t quite as good a deal as JLA, which might give you as many as ten costumed crusaders cavorting in the same story… but it was still pretty sweet.  Read More

Justice League of America #109 (Jan.-Feb., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Nick Cardy’s cover for Justice League of America #109 is interesting in that it completely ignores the conflict that drives roughly 80% of the plot of this issue’s story.  Rather, it seeks to hook the prospective buyer by way of a tantalizing mystery — who is leaving the team?  It’s not a bad strategy, really, since even casual fans of the JLA would likely be curious to learn the answer.

The only real problem with hanging the cover’s whole pitch on this mystery is that the answer is given immediately, on the story’s very first page.  So if our hypothetical prospective buyer was only interested in that bit of information, and they so much as flipped past the cover while still standing at the spinner rack, they might well have opted to put the comic back rather than spend two dimes on it.  But, hey, see for yourself:  Read More

Justice League of America #105 (April, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Justice League of America #102 (October, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty years ago, this issue brought the conclusion of the tenth annual Justice League-Justice Society summer team-up extravaganza — a special event which also served to commemorate the League’s reaching its 100th issue milestone.  Making the occasion even more memorable, this JLA-JSA get-together was the first to take up three whole issues; it also featured the unexpected return, after twenty-seven years, of yet another DC Comics superhero team: the Seven Soldiers of Victory.

Or maybe that should be most of the Seven Soldiers of Victory, since one of the key mysteries of the storyline concerns a lonely grave standing on a Himalayan peak, with a stone marker inscribed to an “Unknown Soldier of Victory”.  As of the conclusion of JLA #101, small teams of Justice League and Justice Society members have retrieved four out of seven of the time-lost Soldiers (or Law’s Legionnaires, as they’re also called) — the Crimson Avenger, the Shining Knight, Green Arrow, and Stripesy — with three more left to go.  So who’s buried in the Unknown Soldier’s grave?  Is it Vigilante?  The Star-Spangled Kid?  Speedy?

The answer, as many of you reading this already know, is:  none of the above.  Which is, and simultaneously is not, a cheat.  But we’ll get to that soon enough — just as we’ll get to the solution to the separate mystery posed by Nick Cardy’s superb cover (his best yet for the title, in the opinion of your humble blogger) — who else among our heroes is doomed to die?  Read More

Justice League of America #100 (August, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In the spring of 1972, Len Wein had been writing comics professionally for almost four years.  The career trajectory of the 23-year-old fan-turned-pro had thus far taken him from writing scripts for DC titles like The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, House of Secrets, and Hot Wheels, to similar work at other publishers including Marvel, Skywald, and Gold Key (Star Trek being among his gigs at the latter outfit), and then back to DC, where he’d been scripting Phantom Stranger for about a year, among other assignments.  But his experience with the publisher’s best-known super-heroes had largely been limited to a single issue of Teen Titans, one Batman story in Detective (both co-written with his friend Marv Wolfman), and, more recently, a smattering of tales in Superman, Flash, World’s Finest, and Adventure.  So you can imagine his surprise (and excitement, and trepidation) when, out of the blue, editor Julius Schwartz asked him if he’d like to write Justice League of America on a regular basis:  Read More

Eerie #40 (June, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last summer I wrote a couple of blog posts detailing how I first started buying and reading Warren Publishing’s black-and-white magazine-sized horror comics, beginning with the 1972 Eerie and Vampirella Annuals and the 36th “regular” issue of Eerie, all of which came out in July, 1971.  As I noted at the time, I was fated never to become a consistent, regular reader of Warren’s titles, their ultimately serving as but an occasional snack within my overall comic-book diet during the next ten years.  Having said that, I’m still a little surprised that after getting off to such a strong start, it ended up taking me a whole seven months to get around to buying my fourth Warren.  Possibly I was anxious about getting in trouble should my parents catch me with such “mature” reading material (which did happen, in fact, on at least one occasion).  Assuming that was indeed the case, however (and even if it wasn’t), what was it that finally compelled me to go ahead and buy this issue of Eerie, after passing on the last three?  I can’t claim to actually remember for sure, but I feel pretty confident that, as with so many other impulse purchases I’ve made over the more than half a century I’ve been buying comic books, I was sold by the cover.   Read More