Star Spangled Comics

Batman #255 (Mar.-Apr., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of December, 1973, it had been seventeen months since my younger self had bought an issue of Batman.  For the record, that issue had been #245, in which the lead story (as well as the cover) had been drawn by Neal Adams.  The last issue I’d bought before that had been #244, which had also had a lead story illustrated by Adams; the last one before that had been #243, which was drawn by (you guessed it) Neal Adams; and before that came #242, which didn’t feature the art of Neal Adams, but did continue the Ra’s al Ghul saga begun in issue #232 by writer Denny O’Neil and artist… Neal Adams.  You see the pattern, right?  Adams’ art wasn’t the only factor that came into play when I stood at the spinner rack and pondered over whether to buy the latest issue of the Masked Manhunter’s title — but it was definitely the largest factor, and the presence of the artist’s work made it pretty much a no-brainer that I would buy that particular comic book.  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

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.

Read More

Phantom Stranger #17 (Jan.-Feb., 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

About a year ago I wrote my first blog post about an issue of Phantom Stranger; if you happened to read that one, you may recall that PS #11 was the first issue of the title I’d ever bought, and that I ended up liking it enough to become a regular reader henceforth.  Beyond the basic appeal of the series’ supernatural subject matter, my younger self was highly intrigued by the mysterious but noble-seeming title character; I was also a fan of the look given the comic by artist Jim Aparo, who not only pencilled and inked but also lettered each installment.  Meanwhile, Neal Adams continued to turn out one classic cover after another for the title, which, even if it wasn’t enough to make me buy the book just by itself, certainly didn’t hurt its appeal.  About the only thing in Phantom Stranger I wasn’t all that crazy about was the backup strip, which featured Dr. Thirteen, the Ghost-Breaker; but even that had the appealing artwork of Tony DeZuniga going for it, and anyway, it didn’t appear in every single issue.  Read More

Jimmy Olsen #144 (December, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed, and perhaps even wondered at, the absence of Jimmy Olsen in recent months.  After all, beginning with the advent of Jack Kirby as writer-artist of the adventures of Superman’s freckle-faced pal with JO #133, we’ve devoted an entire post to each and every issue of the series, sans one (that one being #139, featuring the first half of the “Goody Rickels” two-part storyline) — or at least we had done so, up through #141 (the second half of said two-parter).  Since July, however, there’s been no sign of the red-headed reporter for the Daily Planet around these parts.  So, well might you wonder: what’s up with that?  Read More

Jimmy Olsen #141 (September, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Why Don Rickles?

That was the question I had, back in the spring and summer of 1971, as Jack Kirby devoted not just one, but two issues of Jimmy Olsen — the first two following the conclusion of his initial story arc for the series, a six-chapter saga that he’d begun in his very first issue — to a tale focused on the famous insult comic.

It’s not that my fourteen-year-old self had anything against Don Rickles; I actually thought the guy was pretty funny.  But that didn’t necessarily mean that I wanted to see him — or any comedian, really — in my superhero comics.  I certainly didn’t expect it, in any event.  Read More

Jimmy Olsen #135 (January, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The month of November, 1970 brought comics readers the third installment of writer-artist Jack Kirby’s run on Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen — a book which also happened to be the third installment of the massive, multi-title, interconnected epic that we’d eventually come to know as Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, though few if any of us who were reading the comics as they came out fifty years ago had more than the vaguest inkling of that fact.

But it hardly mattered, because Kirby was giving us so much to thrill to and wonder at in each issue of Jimmy Olsen on its own, with no need for reference to any larger narrative.  The “King” had come roaring out of the gate with his very first issue, #133, which set Jimmy and his new best friends, the Newsboy Legion, on a mission into the mysterious Wild Area, where they immediately got mixed up with a community of motorcyclists called the Outsiders, who made their home in a “tree city” called Habitat.  The next issue, #134, found Jimmy and company taking their super-vehicle, the Whiz Wagon, out onto a subterranean drag strip called the Zoomway, joining the Outsiders in a quest for the Mountain of Judgement — which turned out to be an enormous, high-tech mobile home, the headquarters of yet another hidden society, the Hairies.  In the issue’s climax, a bomb that had been surreptitiously placed in the Whiz Wagon was discovered and — with the help of Superman, who’d followed Jimmy and his colleagues to the Wild Area — dealt with just in time to prevent the Mountain of Judgement and its inhabitants from being blown to bits.  The issue ended with Jimmy’s new boss, Morgan Edge — the man who’d built the Whiz Wagon for the Newsboys in the first place, and then sent them and Jimmy into the Wild Area — reporting in to his own, secret boss: a forbidding-looking fellow named Darkseid.

Quite a lot to take in for just two issues, wouldn’t you say?  Read More

Phantom Stranger #11 (January, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In August, 1970, DC Comics retired the logo that had, with minor adjustments, appeared on the cover of their publications since 1949.  (For the record, the red lettering had been added in 1954.)  It was replaced by a new branding approach that basically consisted of the letters “DC”, the comic’s title, and a graphic representing the comic’s subject matter.  That approach gave us a few imaginative and distinctive new logos, such as the eagle-and-shield emblem that graced the Justice League of America’s covers for a couple of years; for the most part, however, the publisher’s books defaulted to a simple formula of “DC” + title + image of the headliner(s), often with some or all of those elements enclosed within a circle.  The end result was that every series seemed to have its own individual (if not necessarily memorable) logo, with even those comics that were part of a larger “family” of titles — such as those starring Superman or Batman — standing on their own, with little sense of a shared identity.

There were a couple of exceptions, however, both of which involved anthology titles that didn’t have continuing characters who starred in every issue — specifically, DC’s romance and mystery comics.  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