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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

Lois Lane #62 (January, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In tracking the publication dates of my earliest comics purchases via the Grand Comics Database, I’ve been a little surprised to find a lot of variation in how many (or few) comics I managed to pick up in a given month.  I guess the fact that I was an eight year old without a reliable means of regular transport to the nearest Tote-Sum convenience store provides a plausible enough reason — still, I’ve been somewhat bemused to discover that I apparently made only one comics purchase in November, 1965 — and of all the comics on the spinner rack that month, the single comic book that I chose was Lois Lane #62.

Lois Lane is one of those comic book characters that practically everyone knows, but of whom people have widely varying conceptions, based on what version of the character they’ve been exposed to and when.  If you line up all the renditions of the character in all media since her introduction in 1938, and look for qualities possessed by all of them, what do you have?  Lois Lane is a journalist.  Lois Lane knows Superman personally.  Lois Lane is… not a blonde.  Not a whole lot else, frankly.  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