Hawkman

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 #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

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 #103 (December, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I may be misremembering, but I have a vague recollection of my fifteen-year-old self looking at this one at the spinner rack back in October, 1972 and thinking, “The Justice League standing around a grave site?  Again?”  After all, it had only been three issues since artist Nick Cardy had built his cover for JLA #100 around a similar idea.  On the other hand, it was October — the spooky season — and what could be spookier than an open grave?  Especially when said grave was being ominously loomed over by… hey, is that the Phantom Stranger?  In an issue of Justice League of America?  Forget about repetitive cover concepts; I couldn’t wait to buy this one and take it home.  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 #101 (September, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The fifty-year old comic book that’s the subject of today’s post features the middle chapter of the three-month-long celebration of Justice League of America‘s reaching its hundredth-issue milestone, as well as of the tenth annual summer event co-starring the JLA’s predecessors from the Golden Age of Comics, the Justice Society.  Your humble blogger is as eager as the rest of you to jump back into the story by writer Len Wein, penciller Dick Dillin, and inker Joe Giella — but before we do, let’s take a good, close look at the cover by Nick Cardy.

Like all of the other JLA covers of this era, it features a left-hand column of League members’ floating heads (this particular issue also includes a right-hand column of JSA heads as an added bonus).  But unlike virtually any other such cover, there are only three full-time active members of the League included in this group of five — the presently non-powered Diana Prince being on a leave of absence, while Metamorpho is only a “reserve member”.  That meager number is the max number of “official” JLAers appearing in the story as well. 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

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