Batman

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

Batman Family #1 (Sep.-Oct., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that when I picked up Detective Comics #450 in the late spring of 1975, it had been well over a year since I’d bought an issue of that title.  As it happens, I could have said the same thing about most of DC Comics’ other Bat-books of the time.  The last issue of Batman itself that I’d purchased had been #255, which had come out at the end of 1973, and I hadn’t been paying any attention at all to World’s Finest (which of course was technically Superman’s book at least as much as it was Batman’s) since well before that.  Granted, I was a somewhat more frequent consumer of Brave and the Bold, where every new issue arrived possessing the baseline advantage of Jim Aparo’s reliably fine artwork, then might pick up additional interest based on who the Masked Manhunter’s co-star happened to be this time around.  Still, you get the basic idea; while I continued to like the character of Batman just fine, DC’s “Batman family” of comic-book titles was mostly leaving my younger self cold.  Read More

Detective Comics #450 (August, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

This 450th issue of Detective Comics — a numerical milestone, though not commemorated as such by DC Comics at the time of its release (probably because the major comics publishers hadn’t yet determined that such commemorations often provided a sales bump) was the first issue of the series my younger self had purchased since #439, back in November, 1973.  As I related in a post last fall, as much as I liked the “new” comics material in that issue, I was a hard sell on DC’s reprint-heavy 100 Page Super-Spectacular format.  That meant I ended up missing out on most of editor-writer Archie Goodwin’s tenure on Detective, which largely overlapped with the run of issues published in that format — and which included among its highlights the “Manhunter” backup serial by Goodwin and a new young artist named Walt Simonson.  That serial, which ran through all of the Goodwin-edited Detective issues, culminated in #443’s Batman/Manhunter crossover — a “book-length” story which not only marked the end of the “Manhunter” feature itself (and the concurrent end of Archie Goodwin’s stint as Detective‘s editor), but was also the very first time that Walt Simonson drew the Batman.  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

Batman #255 (Mar.-Apr., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of December, 1973, it had been seventeen months since my younger self had bought an issue of Batman.  For the record, that issue had been #245, in which the lead story (as well as the cover) had been drawn by Neal Adams.  The last issue I’d bought before that had been #244, which had also had a lead story illustrated by Adams; the last one before that had been #243, which was drawn by (you guessed it) Neal Adams; and before that came #242, which didn’t feature the art of Neal Adams, but did continue the Ra’s al Ghul saga begun in issue #232 by writer Denny O’Neil and artist… Neal Adams.  You see the pattern, right?  Adams’ art wasn’t the only factor that came into play when I stood at the spinner rack and pondered over whether to buy the latest issue of the Masked Manhunter’s title — but it was definitely the largest factor, and the presence of the artist’s work made it pretty much a no-brainer that I would buy that particular comic book.  Read More

Justice League of America #110 (Mar.-Apr., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

From a creative standpoint, 1973 had been a very stable year for Justice League of America.  Everyone who’d been working on the book as the year began — writer Len Wein, penciller Dick Dillin, inker Dick Giordano, cover artist Nick Cardy, and (of course) editor Julius Schwartz — remained in place as 1973 neared its end.  From a business perspective, however, it was a rather different story.  After having been published on a nine-times-a-year schedule from 1965 to 1971, DC Comics’ premiere super-team title had dropped back to eight issues per year in 1972; and then, with the first issue of 1973, had its frequency reduced even further, to a bimonthly status.

And then, December, 1973 brought a change that was even bigger (in more ways than one), as JLA joined several other DC titles in transitioning to the “100 Page Super Spectacular” format — a giant-sized package that featured some three pages of reprints to every one of new art and story, at a cost of 50 cents — more than twice that of the “standard” format comic JLA had been prior to the change, which sold for 20 cents.  (With the following month, the price of the “Super Spectacular” format would go up to 60 cents, making these comics a full three times more expensive than DC’s standard size books… but of course we fans of the time didn’t know that yet.)  Read More

Detective Comics #439 (Feb.-Mar., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of November, 1973, it had been twenty-seven months since the last time I bought an issue of Detective Comics.  (For the record, that issue was #416, featuring the fourth appearance of Man-Bat.)  There hadn’t been any conscious “drop” decision involved in this long dry spell between purchases; like a lot of other titles, Detective was simply one of those books I made an individual buy-or-not-buy choice about every time I saw a new issue on the stands.  I’d check out the cover, glance at the credits for the Batman story, note who Bats was fighting this go-around — maybe even see who was starring in the backup feature (there was always a backup feature back then) — and if one or more of those aspects grabbed me (or, if the spinner-rack pickings were really slim that week, even just mildly interested me), I bought the comic book.  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