Elliot S! Maggin

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

Batman #244 (September, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Neal Adams’ cover for Batman #244 is probably one of the most famous and iconic comic book covers of its era.  There are a number of good reasons for that, starting with the sheer drama of the moment it depicts, as our hero lies vanquished, perhaps even dead, at the feet of his greatest enemy, Ra’s al Ghul.  Then there’s the strength of Adams’ composition, which frames that dramatic moment so perfectly, as well as the sophisticated coloring by Adams and Jack Adler, which wonderfully enhances the mood as well as the visual appeal of the illustration.

And then there’s the chest hair.  Oh, and the nipples, of course.  Mustn’t forget the nipples.  Read More

Superman #238 (June, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

“Please –-” begs a kneeling Man of Steel on the cover of Superman #238, “You’re the only one on Earth who can help –”

“No!” replies the figure standing before him with arms impassively folded.  “I am not human!  I care nothing for you and your world!”  The figure is Superman’s doppelgänger in every respect — save that it appears to be made completely out of yellow sand.

If all that you knew about early-’70s Superman comics was what you’d previously read on this blog, you’d still be able to tell that quite a bit had happened since the last issue I wrote about, back in November.  In that heralded first installment of “The Amazing New Adventures of Superman”, a scientific experiment gone haywire resulted in an explosion that  temporarily knocked our hero down and out, but then was revealed to have had the welcome, and apparently permanent, effect of turning all kryptonite on Earth into iron.  The first indication that something rather less welcome had also resulted from the blast came thirteen pages into the story, when Superman experienced a moment of weakness as he flew over the spot in Death Valley where he’d fallen during the explosion.  Two pages later, a figure slowly rose from the desert sands of that very spot, and while this “thing” had a marked resemblance to the Man of Tomorrow, it didn’t yet have a face — so you could hardly expect it to speak, as we now see it doing on Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson’s dramatic cover for issue #238 (which, incidentally, is the first Superman cover since #230 to be neither pencilled nor inked by Neal Adams.  Now you know.)

So, yeah, a lot happened in the last four issues.  Let’s see if we can get you caught up, shall we? Read More