Metamorpho

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

The Brave and the Bold #76 (Feb.-March, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When I picked up this issue of Brave and the Bold fifty years ago (give or take a couple of weeks), Batman’s co-star in the book, Plastic Man, had been around for over twenty-six years — almost as long as the Caped Crusader himself.  But he’d only been a DC Comics hero for a little over one year — which is about as long as my ten-year-old self had been aware of him.  Read More

The Brave and the Bold #68 (Oct.-Nov., 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you’ve been a comics fan for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the concept of the “Silver Age of Comics” — a hallowed era of comic book history extending from (probably) 1956 to (maybe) 1970.  You may even have an image that comes to mind if someone says a phrase like “the Silver Age Flash”, or “the Silver Age Thor”, visualizing an emblematic artistic interpretation of a character that flourished in that era.  But even if you’re as old and grizzled a fan as this blogger, you may find yourself hesitant, and even confused, should someone ask you to visualize “the Silver Age Batman.”

That’s as it should be, frankly, because the decade-and-a-half period we call the Silver Age encompassed a number of distinct interpretations of Batman, all involving different approaches to depicting (in story, as well as art), the character and his world.  My own, personal inclination is to identify the “Silver Age Batman” with editor Julius Schwartz’ “New Look” version of the character, introduced in 1964.  And I can make a strong case for that, I believe, based on Schwartz’ role in the Silver Age revival of superheroes like Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom — said revival being one of the main markers of the era.  But, when it comes right down to it, my inclination probably owes at least as much to the fact that that version of Batman happens to be the one I first encountered as a reader, way back in 1965.     Read More

Justice League of America #44 (May, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Justice League of America #44 was the first comic book I ever got through the mail.  It came in a brown paper wrapper.  And it was folded in two, lengthwise.

Which, of course, would significantly lessen its future value as a collectible, but my eight-year-old self hardly cared about that.  After all, I was the kid who cut the logo off the cover of Superman #181 and cut up a story page in The Brave and the Bold #64 for the subscription coupon on the back — said subscription coupon being the very reason why I was now receiving my first issue of JLA through the mail, just a few months after I’d mailed the coupon in, accompanied by a single dollar bill.  (One dollar for 10 issues!  I saved a whole 2 cents per comic book.)  Read More

The Brave and the Bold #64 (Feb.-March, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I’ve mentioned DC’s The Brave and the Bold  in a couple of earlier posts.  This comic got its start in 1955 as the home for a variety of historical adventure series, starring swashbuckling heroes like the Viking Prince, the Golden Gladiator, Robin Hood, and the Silent Knight.  Later, it became a tryout book, showcasing new characters and concepts that could be spun off into their own series if their “pilot” issue sold well enough.  In this iteration, the book saw the first appearances of the Suicide Squad, the “Silver Age” Hawkman, Metamorpho, and (most successfully) the Justice League of America.  With its 50th issue, however, the book began a transition towards becoming a one-off team-up comic, with a rotating roster of (normally) two characters sharing cover-billing.  My own first issue of The Brave and the Bold, #64, was the second to feature one of DC’s two most popular heroes, Batman, as one of the two headliners; over the next eighteen years, however, it would be succeeded by 132 more such team-ups starring the Caped Crusader.  It was thus a typical issue of the series in terms of what was to come, if not what had gone before.  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