Murphy Anderson

1st Issue Special #9 (December, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

My first encounter with Doctor Fate dates back to 1966, when I met him as a member of the Justice Society of America in Justice League of America #46 — the opening half of that year’s annual summer JLA-JSA meet-up event, which, as it happened, was the first such event I experienced as a young comics fan.  As I wrote in my post about that issue nine years ago, he very quickly became one of my very favorite JSAers, probably due as much to his look (that golden, whole-head-covering helmet was so cool) as to his power set (I developed a predilection for the supernaturally-based superfolks pretty early on, for whatever reason).  That opinion hadn’t changed by September, 1975, so when the sorcerer from Salem was granted a solo showcase in the ninth issue of 1st Issue Special (his first such since 1944!), it was pretty much a given that I would show up for the occasion.  Read More

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

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

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 #108 (Nov.-Dec., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In August, 1973, the second half of the 11th annual team-up event between the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America led off with a cover (by Nick Cardy) that clearly called back to a particular predecessor — namely, the cover that had graced the second half of the 5th such summertime event, way back in July, 1967.  And why not?  That Carmine Infantino-Murphy Anderson number is an all-time classic, which, aside from its own individual excellence, arguably established the motif of “two line-ups of superheroes charging each other” that has been a staple of super-team comic book covers ever since.

That said, it rankled me just a bit at the time — and, what the hell, I guess it still does — that to make the idea work in the context of JLA #108’s story by writer Len Wein and artists Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano, editor Julius Schwartz had to fudge the cover copy a bit.  After all, there aren’t just “two different Earths” represented among the eight costumed stalwarts heading towards blows whom we see on the cover above — there are three.  The JLA’s Earth-One, the JSA’s Earth-Two, and — as had been introduced to DC Comics’ readers just one issue before — Earth-X.  A world inhabited by yet another team of heroes, newly dubbed “the Freedom Fighters”, who had been published during the Golden Age of Comic Books by DC’s now-defunct rival, Quality Comics… and also a world where the Nazis had won World War II.  Read More

Wonder Woman #202 (Sep.-Oct., 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In July, 1972, I bought my second-ever issue of Wonder Woman.  My first issue had been #171 (Jul.-Aug., 1967) — and as I wrote here on the blog back in May, 2017, my nine-year-old self hadn’t been all that taken at the time with Robert Kanigher’s silly scripts, nor had the art by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito held much appeal for me.  So, what motivated me to finally get around to giving the title another go, five years later?

It wasn’t the whole “New Wonder Woman”, white-jumpsuited Diana Rigg Prince thing, for sure; that had been around since 1968, and if it hadn’t inspired me to lay down my coin to check it out yet, it wasn’t going to.  No, it was the appearance on the Dick Giordano-drawn cover of perhaps the two most unlikely guest stars I could have imagined — science fiction and fantasy author Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery heroes, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.  What the heck were those guys doing on the cover of any DC comic book — let alone Wonder Woman?  Read More

Tarzan #207 (April, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I’m not sure if it would have been possible for an American kid of my generation to grow up not knowing who Tarzan was.  Even if you never once heard the name “Edgar Rice Burroughs”, you’d inevitably learn to recognize that author’s most famous hero by sight, as his loincloth-clad form swung by on a vine — or by sound, per his distinctive, (literally) trademarked yell.

Your humble blogger was no exception in this regard.  Still, I may have been in a minority among my peers in at least one Tarzan-related area: I never saw a single Tarzan movie in my formative years, despite their showing up regularly on television.  How come?  I’m not 100% sure, but I figure it was probably because of my dad.  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

Jimmy Olsen #147 (March, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As the year 1972 began, Jack Kirby had only two issues left to go in his Jimmy Olsen run.  According to Mark Evanier (one of Kirby’s two assistants at the time), the writer-artist-editor hadn’t been enjoying the assignment all that much, and it’s probably safe to assume that he wasn’t sorry to see the end of it.  Nevertheless, before making his exit from the “Superman family” of DC Comics titles, Kirby would take the opportunity to deliver on an implicit promise regarding the Man of Steel which he’d made his readers at the end of Forever People #1, published a little over a year previously…  Read More

Jimmy Olsen #146 (February, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In considering the last third of Jack Kirby’s run on Jimmy Olsen — a run of five issues beginning with #144 that starts out pretty well, but finishes up rather anticlimactically, with a number of tantalizing plot threads left simply dangling — it’s probably worth remembering that Kirby was never all that excited about chronicling the adventures of “Superman’s Pal” in the first place.

In a 2011 blog post concerning JO #144, Mark Evanier (one of Kirby’s two assistants in 1971) wrote:

Jack didn’t much like working on Jimmy Olsen. It was someone else’s character, someone’s else’s book…and when you worked on the “Superman family” comics then, you had to coordinate with a half-dozen other editors who also had Superman (and sometimes Jimmy) in their comics…  Many at DC hated the way Jack drew Superman and Olsen and his renderings of those characters were being redrawn by others… and Kirby was just sick of the assignment.

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