Bernard Sachs

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

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 #97 (March, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

During the nearly yearlong period (June, 1971 through April, 1972) that DC Comics published most of their books in a giant-sized, 25-cent format, Justice League of America presented a particular sort of challenge for its editor, Julius Schwartz.  The problem arose from the fact that the new, larger format called for a certain amount of reprint material — generally, 13 to 15 pages’ worth — to fill out each issue.  And whereas for Schwartz’s other books, such as Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Superman, there was a ready archive of suitable old stories featuring the titular stars, the same wasn’t true for JLA, which from the beginning had been devoted to issue-length tales of more than 20 pages.  Such stories weren’t going to work as backups in the new format without being either cut in half or severely abridged, neither of which options seems to have appealed to the veteran editor.  Read More

Superman #242 (September, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

With this issue of Superman, the story arc begun eight months earlier in the iconic #233 (“Kryptonite Nevermore!”) came to a close — and the revamp of the Man of Steel inaugurated in that issue by writer Denny O’Neil and editor Julius Schwartz was at last complete.  But before we dive into issue #242’s “The Ultimate Battle!”, written by O’Neil and illustrated by his usual artistic collaborators, Curt Swan (penciller) and Murphy Anderson (inker), we’ll need to back up one month to take a look at issue #241’s “The Shape of Fear!”, by the same creative team — which not only leads right into #242’s concluding chapter of the “Sand-Superman saga”, but also follows directly from the previous chapter in issue #240 — which, of course, also happens to be the last issue we posted about on this blog.

As you may recall, that installment had ended with a moment of great personal triumph for Superman, who, though his powers had been thoroughly leeched from him by his mysterious sandy duplicate,  had yet managed to save both himself and I-Ching (the mentor of Diana Prince, as seen regularly in Wonder Woman) from a vicious attack by the Anti-Superman Gang.  But as we’ll soon see, the note of optimism with which that chapter ended is about to turn decidedly sour… Read More

Justice League of America #46 (August, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By the time JLA #46 arrived in my mailbox one day in early June, 1966, I had a pretty good idea who the Justice Society of America was.  I knew about the “Golden Age of Comics” that had thrived a decade and more before I was born, and I also knew all about the “Earth-Two” concept that allowed for the “old” versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, and other DC heroes to co-exist with the current models I read about every month.  But I hadn’t yet experienced the extravaganza that was the annual two-issue JLA-JSA team-up — I’d missed the 1965 event by just a couple of months — and I didn’t have any real familiarity with most of the characters who didn’t have “Earth-One” counterparts.  So I don’t know exactly what I expected when I opened up this book for the first time (after flattening out its mailed-subscription-copy crease, of course).  I’m pretty damn sure, however, that I wasn’t the least bit disappointed.  Read More

Justice League of America #42 (February, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By December, 1965, I had been buying and reading comics for almost half a year, and in that time Justice League of America had definitely become my favorite comic book — the one series I would buy whenever I saw a new issue.  That’s not surprising, I guess, considering its all-star cast of heroes.  Concurrently, I had also sampled individual issues of a number of the Justice League members’ own series (and most of those that I hadn’t gotten around to yet, I’d be checking out before long).  But there were other DC heroes I only glanced at when perusing the spinner racks at the Tote-Sum.  These particular heroes — characters like the Doom Patrol, the Metal Men, and Ultra the Multi-Alien — were a little more bizarre, and a little less-human seeming, than Superman, Batman, and the rest of the JLA gang.  Nevertheless, there was a way for such characters to get my attention, and that was to appear in the JLA’s own book — as Metamorpho, the Element Man, did in Justice League of America #42’s “Metamorpho Says — No!” (produced, per the Grand Comics Database, by the series’ regular team of writer Gardner Fox, penciller Mike Sekowsky, and inker Bernard Sachs).  Read More

Justice League of America #41 (December, 1965)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Before re-reading this comic in preparation for this blog post — probably the first time I’d cracked its cover in at least three decades — I had been remembering it as a more typical example of the JLA stories of the period than the first one that I’d bought and read, the philosophical and essentially villain-less “The Indestructible Creatures of Nightmare Island!” in JLA #40.  As it turns out, however, this issue has a good bit more in common with its immediate predecessor than I’d previously recalled.  Like in that story, the main action here turns upon a character manipulating people’s attitudes and behaviors by artificial means.  However, in “The Key-Master of the World!” (uncredited, but produced by the book’s regular creative team of Gardner Fox, Mike Sekowsky, and Bernard Sachs, according to the Grand Comics Database), the manipulation is limited only to the titular heroes rather than affecting the whole world, and the perpetrator’s intent is malicious, rather than benign.  Read More