Fifty years ago, behind the latest in a series of striking, near-wordless covers by artist Jim Aparo, Adventure Comics #439 gave us the opening installment in the first continued story we’d yet seen appear in the comic’s current lead feature, the Spectre… Read More
The issue of Adventure Comics we’re going to be looking at today was the eighth in a row to feature the Spectre as its headliner, and as such, might well have been taken by a casual browser of the spinner racks in December, 1974 as simply offering more of the same. Yet this issue departed from its immediate predecessors in at least a couple of respects, beginning with its title logo. In response to recent commercial trends, as of the Spectre’s third outing (issue #433), DC Comics had started slapping the word “Weird” above “Adventure” on the venerable series’ covers. That was an adjustment which made good sense as far as the Astral Avenger was concerned… but wasn’t quite as good a fit with the King of the Seven Seas, Aquaman, who began a run as Spec’s backup in issue #435. Read More
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
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
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
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
There’s a lot going on on the cover of Green Lantern #86. Besides boasting an outstanding illustration by Neal Adams that would probably be even better remembered than it is if it hadn’t followed right on the heels of its instantly iconic predecessor, the cover also boldly heralds the inclusion within the comic’s pages of “an important message” from no less a personage than the 1966-73 mayor of New York City, John Lindsay — and proudly announces that Green Lantern has won the Academy Award for Best Comic. That’s a lot to take in — but don’t worry, we’ll get to it all, starting with the subject of Adams’ compelling cover image — the concluding installment of the groundbreaking two-part story focused on drug addiction that Adams and writer Denny O’Neil had begun in the previous issue, #85. Read More
As we related on this blog back in February, in early 1971 Marvel Comics became the first major American comic-book company to publish a story dealing with drug abuse, when they released three monthly issues of Amazing Spider-Man without the Comics Code Authority’s Seal of Approval. But DC Comics could easily have been the first to do so, instead, if only they’d had the nerve — or at least that’s how artist Neal Adams tells the story.
That story appears to begin with a project that DC was invited to produce for a government agency (either the City or the State of New York, depending on the version of Adams’ narrative you consult). Both Adams and his creative collaborator on DC’s famously socially conscious title Green Lantern, writer Denny O’Neil, were asked to submit treatments for a comic book about drug addiction. This, presumably, would have been some sort of giveaway comic, distributed in such a manner that the Comics Code would have been irrelevant — but the project never came to fruition. As Adams told interviewer Bryan Stroud in 2007: Read More
As discussed on this blog back in January, Teen Titans #32 ended with two of our young heroes, Kid Flash and Mal, trapped in a bizarre alternate reality following their inadvertently causing the death of a young caveman during a time-trip to the Stone Age. Having been coerced by this quasi-medieval world’s version of their adult mentor Mr. Jupiter — here a wizard called Jupiterius — into being tested to prove themselves worthy of his assistance, the final page of the story found Kid Flash attempting to match or best “Trueshot” — this world’s Speedy — in an archery contest: Read More
Back in December, I wrote about the departure of Dick Giordano from his position as an editor at DC Comics. Giordano’s last day on staff at the publisher appears to have been November 4, 1970 — but, since the processes involved in producing periodical comic books don’t stop (or start) on a dime, the fruits of his stewardship would continue to appear in the titles he’d supervised for another few months, even after he was no longer the editor of record. The same principle had of course applied at the beginning of his tenure at DC; and thus, just as Giordano’s first issue of Teen Titans (#15, May-Jun., 1968) had featured a story almost certainly procured by his predecessor, George Kashdan, the first issue edited by his successor, Murray Boltinoff, would present a tale that had actually been written and drawn under Giordano’s direction.
Well, mostly written and drawn under Giordano’s direction. While the story in Teen Titans #32 is solely credited to writer Steve Skeates and artist Nick Cardy, its actual provenance is… rather more complicated. Read More