Michael Uslan

Beowulf #1 (April, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Readers of this blog who have been following it for a while will probably have noticed the relative dearth of DC Comics-centered posts in recent months.  In all of 2024, your humble blogger wrote a mere eight posts devoted to DC’s offerings of half a century ago, compared to fifty-four about those of DC’s primary competitor, Marvel Comics.  That’s a far cry from 2022, when the breakdown was thirty posts about DC books to thirty-four about Marvel’s.  And if you have noticed the change, you may have wondered: how come?

To fully explain why the blog’s coverage of DC has changed over the past couple of years, we’ll need to look at how DC itself changed during the historical period covered by the blog these last 36 months: i.e., the years 1972 through 1974.  Read More

Showcase #64 (Sept.-Oct., 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

For a couple of months in the autumn of 1965, readers of most DC comics were confronted with this enigmatic message, which appeared in the borders of pages, and even within the panels of stories, all through the publisher’s line:

spectre-ad

It was an unusual marketing campaign — although my eight-year-old self didn’t know that at the time, since I’d only been reading comics for a few months.  Nevertheless, I can recall being vaguely curious about this “Spectre”, the eerie green lettering of whose name suggested that he might not be the warmest and friendliest of characters.  I had no idea whatsoever who he actually was, however — nor would most of the rest of DC’s readership at that time.     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