Showcase Presents – Page 4

August 4, 2013August 2, 2013

Showcase Presents World’s Finest Comics volume 4

By Cary Bates, Bob Haney, Robert Kanigher, Denny O’Neil, Mike Friedrich, Curt Swan, Ross Andru, Dick Dillin, Mike Esposito & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-3736-3

For decades Superman and Batman were quintessential superhero partners: the â€œWorld’s Finest teamâ€. The affable champions were best buddies as well as mutually respectful colleagues, and their pairing made sound financial sense since DC’s top heroes could happily cross-pollinate and cross-sell their combined readerships.

This fourth mighty monochrome compendium re-presents the cataclysmic collaborations from the dog days of the 1960’s into the turbulent decade beyond (World’s Finest Comics #174-202, spanning March 1968 to May 1971), as radical shifts in America’s tastes and cultural landscape created such a hunger for more mature and socially relevant stories that even the Cape and Cowl Crusaders were affected – so much so in fact, that the partnership was temporarily suspended: sidelined so that Superman could guest-star with other icons of the DC universe.

However, after a couple of years, the relationship was revitalised and renewed with the World’s Finest Heroes fully restored to their bizarrely apt pre-eminence for another lengthy run until the title was cancelled in the build-up to Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986.

The increasingly grim escapades begin with ‘Secret of the Double Death-Wish!’ by Cary Bates, Pete Costanza & Jack Abel from #174 (cover-dated March 1968, so actually the last issue of 1967) wherein mysterious voyeurs seemingly kidnap the indomitable heroes and psychologically crush their spirits such that they beg for death.

Smart and devious, this conundrum was definitely old-school but the New Year saw subtle changes as, post-Batman TV show, the industry experienced superheroes waning in favour of war, western and especially supernatural themes and genres.

Thus 1968 saw radical editorial shifts to National/DC and edgier stories of the costumed Boy Scouts began to appear. Iconoclastic penciller Neal Adams first started turning heads and making waves with his stunning covers and a couple of spectacularly gripping Cape & Cowl capers in WFC beginning with ‘The Superman-Batman Revenge Squads!’, scripted by Leo Dorfman and inked by Dick from World’s Finest Comics #175.

The story detailed how the annual contest of wits between the crimebusters was infiltrated by alien and Terran criminal alliances intent on killing their foes whilst they were off guard.

Issue #176 then featured a beguiling thriller in ‘The Superman-Batman Split!’ by Bates, Adams & Giordano. Ostensibly just another alien mystery yarn, this twisty little gem has a surprise ending for all and guest stars Robin, Jimmy Olsen, Supergirl and Batgirl, with the artists’ hyper-dynamic realism lending an aura of solid credibility to even the most fanciful situations, and ushering in an era of gritty veracity to replace the previously anodyne and frequently frivolous Costumed Dramas.

Jim Shooter, Curt Swan & Mike Esposito also edged (but just slightly) towards constructive realism with #177’s ‘Duel of the Crime Kings!’ as Lex Luthor again joined forces with the Joker. This go-round the dastardly duo used time-busting technology to recruit Benedict Arnold, Baron Hieronymus Carl Friedrich von Munchausen and Leonardo Da Vinci to plan crimes for them, only to then fall foul of the temporally displaced persons’ own unique agendasâ€¦

WFC #178 began a 2-part Imaginary Tale with ‘The Has-Been Superman!’ (Bates, Swan & Abel) which saw the Man of Steel lose his Kryptonian powers and subsequently struggle to continue his career as a Batman-style masked crimebuster dubbed Nova. More determined than competent, he soon fell under the influence of criminal mastermind Mr. Socrates and wound up brainwashed and programmed to assassinate the Gotham Guardianâ€¦

The moody suspense saga was interrupted by #179 – a regularly scheduled, all-reprint 80-Page Giant featuring early tales of the team’s formative years and represented in this collection by its striking Adams cover – before the alternate epic concluded in #180 with the gripping ‘Superman’s Perfect Crime!’ by Bates and new regular art team Ross Andru & Espositoâ€¦

During the late 1950s when the company’s editors cautiously expanded the characters’ continuities, they learned that each new tale was an event which added to a nigh-sacred canon, and that what was printed was deeply important to the readers – but no â€œideas manâ€ would let all that aggregated â€œhistoryâ€ stifle a good plot situation or sales generating cover.

Thus â€œImaginary Storiesâ€ were conceived as a way of exploring non-continuity plots and scenarios, devised at a time when editors knew that entertainment trumped consistency and fervently believed that every comic read was somebody’s first and – unless they were very careful – potentially their lastâ€¦

Bates, Â Andru & Esposito also crafted #181’s ‘The Hunter and the Hunted’ wherein an impossibly powerful being from far away in space and time relentlessly pursued and then whisked away the heroes to a world where they were revered as the fathers of the race, whilst in the next issue ‘The Mad Manhunter!’ depicted a suspenseful shocker which found Batman routinely rampaging like a madman due to a curse. Naturally, what seemed was far from what actually wasâ€¦

Another massive con-trick underscored #183’s Dorfman-scripted drama as apes from the future accused the Man of Steel of committing ‘Superman’s Crime of the Ages!’ and Batman and Robin had to arrest their greatest allyâ€¦

In WFC #184 Bates, Swan & Abel concocted another bombastic Imaginary Tale which revealed ‘Robin’s Revenge!’, tracing the troubled sidekick’s progress after Batman was murdered and with Superman powerless to assuage the Boy Wonder’s growing obsession with revengeâ€¦

Robert Kanigher joined his old collaborators Andru & Esposito from #185 onwards, detailing the bizarre story of the ‘The Galactic Gamblers!’ who press-ganged Superman, Batman, Robin and Jimmy to their distant world to act as living stakes and game-pieces in their gladiatorial games of chance, before taking the heroes on a time-tossed 2-part supernatural thriller.

In #186 stories regarding Batman’s Colonial ancestor â€œMad Anthony Wayneâ€ prompted the heroes to travel back to the War of Independence where the Dark Knight was accused of deviltry as ‘The Bat Witch!’ and sentenced to death. Of course, it’s actually the Action Ace who was possessed and became ‘The Demon Superman!’ before all logic and sanity were restored by exorcism and judicious force of armsâ€¦

After the cover to World’s Finest #188 – another reprint Giant – Bates returned in #189 with a still shocking 2-parter beginning in ‘The Man with Superman’s Heart!’ as the Caped Kryptonian crashed to Earth from space and was pronounced Dead On Arrival.

As per his wishes many of his organs were harvested (this was 1969 and still speculative fiction then) and bequeathed to worthy recipients.

When Batman refused to accept any, Superman’s Eyes, Ears, Lungs, Heart and Hands (yes, I know – just go with it) were simply stored – until Luthor stole them and auctioned them to gangland’s highest biddersâ€¦

In the concluding episode, ‘The Final Revenge of Luthor!’ saw a combine of crooks running wild with the transplants bestowing mighty powers Batman and Robin could not combat, but the whole mess had a logical – if astonishingly callous â€“ explanation, and the real Man of Steel soon appeared to save the dayâ€¦

Bates, Andru & Esposito then explored ‘Execution on Krypton!’ in WFC #191, as impossible events on Earth led Superman (and Batman) back to Krypton before he was born to discover how his sainted parents Jor-El and Lara became radicalised college lecturers, and why they were teaching their students all the subversive tricks revolutionaries needed to knowâ€¦

Bob Haney then joined Andru & Esposito from #192 for a dark, Cold War suspense thriller as Superman was captured by the Communist rulers of Lubania and held in ‘The Prison of No Escape!’ When Batman tried to bust him out, he too was arrested and charged with spying by sadistic Colonel Koslov, who utilised all his brainwashing techniques to achieve ‘The Breaking of Superman and Batman!’ in the next issue. However, the vile totalitarian’s torturous treatment disguised an insidious master-plan which the World’s Finest almost failed to foilâ€¦

The popular public response to Mario Puzo’s phenomenal novel The Godfather most likely influenced Haney, Andru & Esposito’s next convoluted 2-parter. Issue #194 took Superman and Batman undercover ‘Inside the Mafia Gang!’ to dismantle the organisation of â€œBig Uncleâ€ Alonzo Scarns from within.

Sadly a head wound muddled the Gotham Gangbuster’s memory and Batman began believing he was actually the Capo di Capo Tutti, condemning Robin and Jimmy to ‘Dig Now, Die Later!’ Helplessly watching, Superman was almost relieved when the real Scarns showed upâ€¦

An era ended with #196 as ‘The Kryptonite Express!’ (Haney, Swan & George Roussos) detailed how a massive meteor shower bombarded America with tons of the deadly green mineral. After most decent citizens gathered up the Green K, a special train was laid on to collect it all and ship it to a place where it could be safely disposed of, and Superman was ordered to stay well away whilst Batman took charge of the FBI operation.

They had no idea that master racketeer and railway fanatic K.C. Jones had plans for the shipment and a guy on the insideâ€¦

After #197 – another all-reprint Superman/Batman Giant – a new era began as the Fastest Man Alive teamed up with the Man of Tomorrow.

DC Editors in the 1960s generally avoided questions like who’s best/strongest/fastest for fear of upsetting some portion of their tenuous and perhaps temporary fan-base, but as the superhero tide turned and the upstart Marvel Comics began making serious inroads into their market, the notion of a definitive race between the almighty Man of Steel and the Scarlet Speedster became an increasingly enticing and sales-worthy proposition.

They had raced twice before (Superman #199 and Flash #175 – August and December 1967) with the result deliberately fudged each time, but when they met for a third round a definitive conclusion was promised – but please remember it’s not about the winning, but only the taking partâ€¦

When World’s Finest became a team-up vehicle for Superman, the Flash again found himself in speedy if contrived competition. ‘Race to Save the Universe!’ and its conclusion ‘Race to Save Time!’ (#198-199, November and December 1970, by Denny O’Neil, Dick Dillin & Joe Giella) upped the stakes as the high-speed heroes were conscripted by the Guardians of the Universe to circumnavigate the cosmos at their greatest velocities to undo the rampage of the mysterious Anachronids, faster-than-light creatures whose pell-mell course throughout creation was actually unwinding time itself.

Little did anybody suspect that Superman’s oldest enemies were behind the entire appalling schemeâ€¦

In the anniversary issue #200, Mike Friedrich, Dillin & Giella focussed on brawling brothers on opposite sides of the teen college scene who were abducted with unruly youth icon Robin and â€œMr. Establishmentâ€ Superman to a distant planet where undying vampiric aliens waged eternal war on each other in ‘Prisoners of the Immortal World!’ Green Lantern then popped in for #201 contesting ‘A Prize of Peril!’ (O’Neil, Dillin & Giella) which would give either Emerald Gladiator or Man of Steel sole jurisdiction of Earth’s skies, and Batman returned for a limited engagement in #202.

The final tale in this compilation, ‘Vengeance of the Tomb-Thing!’ by O’Neil, Dillin & Giella, saw archaeologists unearth something horrific in Egypt as Superman seemingly went mad and attacked his greatest friends and allies. A superb ecological scare-story, this tale changed the Man of Tomorrow’s life foreverâ€¦

These are gloriously smart, increasingly mature comicbook adventures whose dazzling, timeless style has informed the evolution of two media megastars, and they still have the power and punch to enthral even today’s jaded seen it-all audiences.

The contents of this titanic team-up tome are a veritable feast of witty, gritty, pretty thrillers packing as much punch and wonder now as they always have. Utterly entrancing adventure for fans of all ages!
Â© 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 2012 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

July 30, 2013July 29, 2013

Showcase Presents Superman Family volume 3

By Otto Binder, Robert Bernstein, Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, Dick Sprang & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-812-6

When the groundbreaking Man of Steel debuted in Action Comics #1 (June 1938) he was instantly the centre of attention, but even then the need for a solid supporting cast was apparent and wisely tailored for. Glamorous daredevil girl reporter Lois Lane premiered beside Clark Kent and was a constant companion and foil from the outset.

Although unnamed, a plucky red-headed, be-freckled kid started working for Clark and Lois from Action Comics #6 (November 1938) onwards. His first name was disclosed in Superman #13 (November-December 1941), having already been revealed as Jimmy Olsen when he had become a major player in The Adventures of Superman radio show from its debut on April 15th 1940.

As somebody the same age as the target audience for the hero to explain stuff to (all for the listeners’ benefit), he was the closest thing to a sidekick the Action Ace ever neededâ€¦

When a similarly titled television show launched in the autumn of 1952 it was another immediate sensation and National Periodicals began cautiously expanding their revitalised franchise with new characters and titles.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, being different in America was a Bad Thing. Conformity was sacrosanct, even in comicbooks, and everybody and thing was meant to keep to its assigned and intended role: for the Superman family and cast, that meant a highly strictured code of conduct and parameters.

Daily Planet Editor Perry White was a stern, shouty elder statesman with a heart of gold, Cub Reporter Jimmy was a brave and impulsive, unseasoned fool – with a heart of gold – and plucky News-hen Lois was brash, nosy, impetuous and unscrupulous in her obsession to marry Superman although she too was – deep down – another possessor of an Auric aorta.

Moreover, although burly Clark Kent was a Man in a Man’s World, his hidden alter ego meant that he must never act like oneâ€¦

Yet somehow even with these mandates in place the talented writers and artists assigned to produce their wholesomely uncanny exploits managed to craft tales both beguiling and breathtakingly memorable – and usually as funny as they were exciting.

First to fill a solo title were the gloriously charming, light-hearted escapades of that rash, capable but callow photographer and â€œcub reporterâ€. Â Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #1 launched in 1954 with a September-October cover date, the first spin-off star of the Caped Kryptonian’s rapidly expanding multi-media entourage.

As the decade progressed the oh-so-cautious Editors tentatively extended the franchise in 1957 just as the Silver Age of Comics was getting underway and it seemed that there might be a fresh and sustainable appetite for costumed heroes and their unique brand of spectacular shenanigans.

Try-out title Showcase, which had already launched The Flash (#4) and Challengers of the Unknown (#6), followed up with a brace of issues entitled Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane in #9 and 10 before swiftly awarding the â€œplucky News-henâ€ a series of her own – in actuality her second, since for a brief while in the mid-1940s she had held a regular solo-spot in Superman.

At this time Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane was one of precious few titles with a female lead and, in the context of today, one that gives many 21^st century fans a few uncontrollable qualms of conscience. Within the confines of her series the valiant capable working woman careered crazily from man-hungry, unscrupulous bitch through ditzy simpleton to indomitable and brilliant heroine – often all in the same issue – as the exigencies of entertaining children under the strictures of the Comics Code all too often played up the period’s astonishingly misogynistic attitudes.

The comic was clearly intended to appeal to the family demographic that made I Love Lucy a national phenomenon and Doris Day a ditzy latter day saint, so many stories were played for laughs in that same patriarchal, parochial manner; a â€œgosh, aren’t women funny?â€ tone that appals me today – but not as much as the fact that I still love them to bits.

It helps that they’re mostly illustrated by the wonderfully whimsical Kurt Schaffenberger.

Jimmy fared little better: a bright, brave but naÃ¯ve kid making his own way in the world, he was often the butt of cruel jokes and impossible circumstances; undervalued and humiliatingly tasked in a variety of slapstick adventures and strange transformations.

This third cunningly conjoined chronologically complete compendium collects the affable, all-ages tales from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #35-44, March 1959-April 1960 and Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #8-16, April 1959-April 1960, and commences with the Man of Steel’s Go-To Guy in three tales drawn as (almost) always by the wonderful Curt Swan.

Jimmy’s comic was popular for more than two decades, blending action, adventure, broad, wacky comedy, fantasy and science fiction in the gently addictive, self-deprecating manner scripter Otto Binder had perfected a decade previously at Fawcett Comics on the magnificent original Captain Marvel.

As the feature progressed, one of the most popular plot-themes (and most fondly remembered and referenced today by most Baby-Boomer fans) was the unlucky lad’s appalling talent for being warped, mutated and physically manipulated by fate, aliens and even his friendsâ€¦

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #35 (March 1959) opens with ‘The Menace of Superman’s Fan Mail!’, by Binder & Swan with inks by Stan Kaye, wherein the cub reporter undertook to answer the mountain of missives for the Man of Steel and inadvertently supplied a crook with an almost foolproof method of murdering the Metropolis Marvel.

The remaining tales are inked by Ray Burnley and begins with a rather disingenuous yarn which saw the lad repeatedly get into trouble wearing a futuristic suit of mechanised super-armour which only made him look like ‘The Robot Jimmy Olsen!’, whilst in ‘Superman’s Enemy!’ the devoted kid overnight turned into a despicable, hero-hating wretch. However as a veritable plague of altered behaviour afflicted ClarkKent’s friends, the baffled Action Ace began to discern a patternâ€¦

Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #8 (April 1959) opened with ‘The Superwoman of Metropolis’, by Alvin Schwartz & Kurt Schaffenberger, heavy-handedly turning the tables on our heroine when she developed incredible abilities and took on a costumed identity, and was instantly plagued by a suspicious Clark determined to expose her secret.

‘The Ugly Superman!’ dealt with a costumed wrestler who fell for Lois, giving the Caped Kryptonian another chance for some pretty unpleasant Super-teasing. . It was written by the veteran Robert Bernstein, who unlike me can use the tenor of the times as his excuse, and pleasingly ameliorated by Schaffenberger delivering another hilarious dose of OTT comedic drama illustration.

Following is a far less disturbing fantasy romp: ‘Queen for a Day!’ (Bernstein, Wayne Boring & Stan Kaye) found Lois and Clark shipwrecked on an island of Amazons with the plucky lady mistaken for their long-prophesied royal saviourâ€¦

Jimmy Olsen #36 began with Binder, Swan & Burnley’s ‘Super-Senor’s Pal!’, which found the boy South of the Border in the banana republic of Peccador helping a local rebel fight the dictators by masquerading as a Latino Man of Steel.

Stan Kaye inked the momentous debut of ‘Lois Lane’s Sister!’, which introduced perky air-hostess Lucy as romantic foil and regularly unattainable inamorata for the kid, in a smart, funny tale of hapless puppy love whilst the final tale (Burnley inks) described the cub reporter’s accidental time-trip to Krypton and ‘How Jimmy Olsen First met Superman!’

Although we all think of Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster’s iconic creation as the epitome of comicbook creation, the truth is that very soon after his launch Superman became a multimedia star and far more people have seen or heard the Man of Steel than have ever read him – and yes, that does include the globally syndicated newspaper strip which ran from 1939 to 1966.

By the time his 20th anniversary rolled around he had been a regular on radio, starred in a series of astounding animated cartoons and two movies, and just ended his first smash live-action television serial. In his future were three more (Superboy, Lois & Clark and Smallville), a stage musical, a franchise of stellar movies and an almost seamless succession of TV cartoons beginning with The New Adventures of Superman in 1966 and continuing ever since. Even Krypto got in on the small-screen actâ€¦

It’s no wonder then that the tales from this Silver Age period should be so draped in the gaudily wholesome trappings of Tinseltown – even more so than most of celebrity-obsessed America. It didn’t hurt that editor Whitney Ellsworth was a part-time screenwriter, script editor and producer as well as National/DC’s Hollywood point man.

The Man of Tomorrow’s TV presence influenced much of Lois Lane #9: a celebrity-soaked issue scripted by Bernstein which began with artists Dick Sprang & John Forte detailing how performer Pat Boone (who coincidentally had his own licensed DC comic at that time) almost exposed Earth’s greatest secret with ‘Superman’s Mystery Song!’

The Silver Screen connection continued in the Schaffenberger-illustrated ‘The Most Hated Girl in Metropolis’ wherein Lois was framed for exposing that self-same super-secret as a ruse to get her to Hollywood for her own unsuspected This is Your Life special. The issue ended with return to fantasy/comedy as Schaffenberger introduced a lost valley of leftover dinosaurs and puny caveman Blog – ‘Lois Lane’s Stone-Age Suitor’â€¦

In JO #37 Bill Finger, Swan & John Forte revealed the incredible truth about multi-powered Mysterio in the case of ‘Superman’s Super-Rival’, whilst Binder, Swan & Kaye exposed the difficulties of frivolous Lucy Lane having ‘The Jimmy Olsen Signal Watch!’: a timepiece/communicator which kept the boy on a constant electronic leashâ€¦

This issue ended with a cunning caper which saw resident crackpot genius Professor Phineas Potter concoct a serum which allowed Jimmy to reprise his many malleable antics and tangled troublemaking as ‘The Elastic Lad of Metropolis’ (Binder, Swan & George Klein) – almost exposing Superman’s secret identity into the bargain.

Records from the period are sadly incomplete but Bernstein probably wrote each tale in Lois Lane #10, beginning with Schaffenberger-limned classic ‘The Cry-Baby of Metropolis’, wherein Lois – terrified of losing her looks – exposed herself to a youth ray and temporarily turned into a baby, much to the good-natured amusement of Superman and arch rival Lana Langâ€¦

Schaffenberger also illustrated ‘Lois Lane’s Romeo’ as the constantly spurned reporter finally gave up on her extraterrestrial beau and was romanced by a slick, romantic European. Of course he was also a conniving, crooked conmanâ€¦

She stormed back in formidable crime-busting form for ‘Lois Lane’s Super-SÃ©ance!’ (Boring & Kaye), apparently graced with psychic sight, but actually pulling the wool over the eyes of superstitious crooks.

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #38 also tapped the TV connection as the lad became ‘The MC of the Midnight Scare Theatre’ (Bernstein, Swan & Forte), uncovering an incredible mystery as his hoary, hokey act apparently scared four viewers to deathâ€¦

Although by the same creators, the broad humour of ‘Jimmy Olsen’s Wedding’ to Lucy had a far less ingenious explanation, but ‘Olsen’s Super-Supper!’ (Bernstein, Swan & John Giunta) ended things on a high as the impecunious kid entered an eating contest and allowed shady operators to try an experimental appetite-increasing ray on him. Of course the mad scientists had an ulterior, criminal motiveâ€¦

A plane crash and head wound transformed Lois into a fur-bikinied wild woman in #11 of her own magazine but, even after being rescued by Superman, ‘The Leopard Girl of the Jungle!’ (Bill Finger & Schaffenberger) still had one last task to valiantly undertake, after which the anonymously authored ‘The Tricks of Lois Lane!’ found the restored reporter up to her old schemes to expose Clark as Superman, whilst ‘Lois Lane’s Super-Perfume!’ (possibly Bernstein?) seemed able to turn any man into a love-slave – until the Man of Steel exposed the criminal scammers behind itâ€¦

Binder, Swan & Forte crafted all of Jimmy Olsen #39 which began with the lad stuck on another world where he quickly became ‘The Super-Lad of Space!’, after which, back in Metropolis, his ill-considered antics lost and won and lost him a fortune in ‘The Million Dollar Mistakes!’ before ‘Jimmy Olsen’s Super-Signals!’ saw him misplace his Superman-summoning watch and forced to spectacularly improvise every time he got into troubleâ€¦

Bernstein handled LL #12 beginning with two Schaffenberger specials: ‘The Mermaid of Metropolis’ in which an accident doomed Lois to life underwater beside Sea King Aquaman, until Superman found a cure for her piscoid condition, whilst in ‘The Girl Atlas!’ Lana sneakily turned herself into a super-powerhouse to corral the Man of Steel and learned what sneaky meant when her rival struck backâ€¦

Al Plastino illustrated ‘Lois Lane Loves Clark Kent!’ wherein Lois, believing she had incontrovertible proof of Superman’s secret, started a campaign to entrap the unknowing journalist in wedlockâ€¦

Swan & Forte illustrated all of JO #40, beginning with ‘The Invisible Life of Jimmy Olsen’ (scripted by Binder) as the hapless lad was enmired in all manner of mischief after a gift from his best pal unexpectedly rendered him unseen but not trouble-free, after which ‘Jimmy Olsen, Supergirl’s Pal!’ saw the reporter temporarily struck blind just as a crook with a grudge tried to kill him.

With Superman out of touch, the hero’s secret weapon Supergirl (a hidden trainee no one except cousin Kal-El knew of) rushed to the rescue, only to have the feisty lad disbelieve and dispute her very existence.

Bernstein then exposed ‘Jimmy Olsen, Juvenile Delinquent!’ as the kid went undercover to break up a prototypical street gang and discovered Perry White’s own son was a memberâ€¦

Bernstein & Schaffenberger led in the 13^th issue of the news-hen’s series, hilariously ‘Introducingâ€¦ Lois Lane’s Parents!’

Superman had offered the lady reporter a lift home to the farm of Sam and Ella Lane for a family reunion, but thanks to a concatenation of circumstances, local gossip and super-politeness, the Man of Steel quickly found himself press-ganged into a wedding.

Fair Warning: this tale also contains Lois’ first nude scene when proud father Sam got out the baby albumâ€¦

By the same creative team, and in a brilliant pastiche of My Fair Lady, ‘Alias Lois Lane!’ found the indomitable inquirer undercover as floozie Sadie Blodgett to snap candid shots of a movie star and hired by thugs to impersonate Superman’s girlfriend in an assassination plot bound to failâ€¦

Then, Finger, Boring & Kaye disclosed ‘The Shocking Secret of Lois Lane!’ following a tragically implausible incident which forced the reporter to cover her disfigured head in a lead-lined steel box. Thankfully the Action Ace was around to deduce what was really going onâ€¦

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #41 opened with Bernstein, Swan & Forte’s ‘The Human Octopus!’, which highlighted the lad’s negligent idiocy when he impetuously ate alien fruit and apparently grew six more arms. The true effect of the space spud was far more deviousâ€¦

Binder and Kaye joined Swan for ‘The Robot Reporter!’, as Jimmy used an automaton provided by Superman to do his job whilst he recuperated from a damaged ankle and managed to get into trouble from the comfort of his apartment. Thanks to some stupid showing off the kid was then mistaken for a master fencer and catapulted into a Ruritanian adventure as ‘Jimmy Olsen, the Boy Swordsman!’ (by Binder, Swan & Forte).

Lois Lane #14 led with ‘Three Nights in the Fortress of Solitude!’ (Binder & Schaffenberger) as the conniving journalist contrived to isolate herself with Superman long enough to prove how much he needed a woman in his life, only to suffer one disaster after another whilst the Bernstein scripted ‘Lois Lane’s Soldier Sweetheart!’ alternatively showed her warm and generous side as she helped a lonely GI attain his greatest desire.

Jerry Siegel then returned to the character he created using the still-secret Supergirl to catastrophically play cupid in ‘Lois Lane’s Secret Romance!’

Jimmy Olsen #42 started with the uncredited story of ‘The Big Superman Movie!’ (art by Swan & Forte), wherein the star-struck kid consulted on a major motion picture but would far rather have played himself, much to Lucy’s amusement. Nevertheless the sharp apprentice journalist had the last word – and laughâ€¦

Bernstein scripted ‘Perry White, Cub Reporter!’ which saw the Editor and junior trade places, with power only apparently going straight to Olsen’s head, after which ‘Jimmy the Genie!’ saw the something similar occur when boy reporter and magical sprite exchanged roles in a clever thriller by illustrated by Swan & Giunta.

Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #15 featured a landmark mystery tale in ‘The Super-Family of Steel!’ (Binder & Schaffenberger) which seemingly saw Lois attain her every dream. She and her Kryptonian Crimebuster first became ‘Super-Husband and Wife’, with ‘The Bride Gets Super-Powers’ as a consequence, and they even had a brace of super-kids before the astounding ‘Secret of the Super-Family’ was revealed to a shocked audienceâ€¦

In Superman’s Palâ€¦ #43 TV show 77 Sunset Strip got a name-check as ‘Jimmy Olsen’s Four Fads!’ (Swan & Kaye) found the kid attempting to create a teen trend to impress Lucy, whilst as ‘Phantom Fingers Olsen!’ (Boring & Kaye) he infiltrated a gang of murderous thieves, and was later adopted by ‘Jimmy Olsen’s Private Monster!’ (Siegel, Swan & Forte).

After causing no end of embarrassment in Metropolis, the bizarre beast took Jim to his home dimension where even greater shocks awaitedâ€¦

The final Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane in this collection is #16 from April 1960 and opens with ‘Lois Lane’s Signal-Watch’ with Schaffenberger art over (possibly) a Siegel script, as the Man of Steel learned to regret ever giving a woman who clearly had no idea what â€œemergencyâ€ meant a device which would summon him at any moment of day or nightâ€¦

That slice of scurrilous 1950s propaganda is inexplicably balanced by a brilliant murder thriller which showed off all Lois’ resilience and fortitude as she infiltrated and solved ‘The Mystery of Skull Island’, (Bernstein) whilst Siegel authored another cruel dark tragedy wherein Superman tried to cure Lois’ nosy impulses by tricking his own girlfriend into believing she had a death stare in ‘The Kryptonite Girl!’. (Of course, as all married couples know, such a power develops naturally not long after the honeymoonâ€¦)

I love these stories, but sometime words just fail meâ€¦

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #44 ends this third monochrome monolith, starting with ‘The Wolf-Man of Metropolis!’ (Binder, Swan & Kaye), which blended horror, mystery and heart-warming charm in a mini-classic which saw the boy cursed to hairy moon madness and desperately seeking a willing maiden to cure him with a kissâ€¦

That’s followed by Siegel, Swan & Forte’s ‘Jimmy’s Leprechaun Pal!’, a magical imp who made life hell for the cub until human ingenuity outwitted magical pranksterism, after which Bernstein, Swan & Kaye crafted possibly the strangest and most disturbing yarn in this compilation as the boy went undercover as a sexy showgirl to get close to gangster Big Monte in ‘Miss Jimmy Olsen!’

As well as containing some of the most delightful episodes of the pre angst-drenched, cosmically catastrophic DC, these fun, thrilling, deeply peculiar and yes, often potentially offensive stories also perfectly capture the changing tone and tastes which reshaped comics from the safe 1950s to the seditious, rebellious 1970s, all the while keeping to the prime directive of the industry – â€œkeep them entertained and keep them wanting moreâ€.

Despite my good-natured cavils from my high horse here in the 21^st century, I think these stories have a huge amount to offer funnybook fun-seekers. I strongly urge you to check them out.
Â© 1959, 1960, 2009 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

June 29, 2013June 28, 2013

Showcase Presents Justice League of America volume 5

By Len Wein, Gerry Conway, Cary Bates, Elliot S! Maggin, Marty Pasko, Denny O’Neil, Dick Dillin, Frank McLaughlin & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-0-85768-195-9

After the actual invention of the comicbook superhero – for which read the Action Comics debut of Superman in 1938 – the most significant event in the industry’s history was the combination of individual sales-points into a group. Thus what seems blindingly obvious to us with the benefit of four-colour hindsight was proven: a number of popular characters could multiply readership by combining forces. Plus, of course, a mob of superheroes is just so much cooler than one (â€¦or even one-and-a-half if there’s a sidekick in situâ€¦).

The Justice Society of America is rightly revered as a true landmark in the development of comicbooks and when Julius Schwartz revived the superhero genre in the late 1950s, it was inevitable that there would be a new banding together of the latest reconfigured mystery men.

That moment came with The Brave and the Bold #28, a classical adventure title that had recently transformed into a try-out magazine like Showcase. Just before Christmas 1959 the ads began running. â€œJust Imagine! The mightiest heroes of our timeâ€¦ have banded together as the Justice League of America to stamp out the forces of evil wherever and whenever they appear!â€

The rest was history: the JLA captivated the youth of a nation, further reinvigorated an industry and even inspired a small family publishing concern to create the Fantastic Four, inspiring a whole new way of telling comics stories.

Following a meteoric rise, TV spin-offs brought trendy international awareness of costumed crusaders which in turn led to catastrophic overexposure. By 1968 the superhero boom looked to be dying just as its predecessor had at the end of the 1940s.

Sales were down generally and production costs beginning to spiral. More importantly â€œfreeâ€ entertainments, such as television, were now found in even the poorest household. If you were a kid in the sixties, think just how many brilliant cartoon shows were created during that decade, when comics artists such as Alex Toth and Doug Wildey moved into West Coast animation studios.

Moreover, many comicbook heroes were now appearing on that ubiquitous small screen. As well as wholly original characters, the Marvel heroes, Superman, Aquaman, Batman, and even the JLA were there every Saturday in your own living room – even after that global bubble had burstâ€¦

It was also a time of great political and social upheaval. Change was everywhere and unrest even reached the corridors of DC. When a number of creators agitated for increased work benefits the request was not looked upon kindly. Many left the company – not always voluntarily – for other outfits. Some quit the business altogether.

Of course the greatest threat was the insatiable appetite for supernatural themes which decimated the industry’s pantheons of gaudily-clad mystery menâ€¦

This fifth monochrome Justice League Showcase volume compellingly reflects the signs of the times as the next generation of writers fostered a â€œnew waveâ€ and saw the title’s lowest ebb. Publication slowed to six issues a year before the tide slowly turned and the World’s Greatest Superheroes began climbing again to the top of the gradually recovering, tried-and-tested Fights ‘n’ Tights arenaâ€¦

Collecting Justice League of America #107-132 from the era when superheroes were in the direst doldrums and looked like disappearing forever, this tome covers the period September/October 1973 to June 1976, during which the market changed forever from mass market to niche-industry and comicbooks stopped being casual, cheap or disposable entertainment.

By the end of this book the stories reflected the harsh facts, and publishers had accepted the conceptual and commercial transition from a broad-appeal medium slavishly following outside trends and fashions to increasingly become a targeted service making only what their most dedicated fans wantedâ€¦

The dramas begin here with Justice League of America #107 and ‘Crisis on Earth-X’ by Len Wein, Dick Dillin & Dick Giordano, the first chapter of another landmark crossover with their Earth-2 counterparts and antecedents in the JSA.

Following the popular revival of a forgotten team during their previous get-together (The Seven Soldiers of Victory as seen in Showcase Presents Justice League of America volume 4), this time the annual team-up reintroduced another band of Golden Age warriors – from corporate acquisition Quality Comics and newly rechristened The Freedom Fightersâ€¦

It began when a recreational trip across the dimensional barrier was accidentally sabotaged by android stowaway Red Tornado, depositing Batman, Green Arrow and Elongated Man from Earth-1 and Superman, Sandman and Doctor Fate from Earth-2 into another alternate universe – one where the Nazis had won World War II.

Trapped and outnumbered, the seven displaced heroes were rescued by the last liberty-loving champions of a world dominated by fascist super-science and a secret dictator. Joining forces with embattled champions Uncle Sam, The Ray, Doll Man, Phantom Lady, Black Condor and the Human Bomb the newcomers ended the Nazi threat forever in the sinister sequel ‘Thirteen Against the Earth!’â€¦

With everybody returned to their home planes #109 then brought back a cultish guest star as ‘The Doom of the Divided Man!’ revived the dormant career of 1960’s hero/villain Eclipso, who harboured another cunning plan to conquer the world. However the real focus of this tale was the unexpected resignation of Hawkman following his recall to home planet Thanagarâ€¦

Wein, Dillin & Giordano then got to deliver a delightful and potent seasonal present in #110 as Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Black Canary and Red Tornado had to adapt to abrasive substitute Green Lantern John Stewart (a controversial â€œangry black manâ€ conceived at a time when non-Caucasian heroes could be counted on the fingers of one hand) mid-mission, when the League gathered to hunt down ‘The Man Who Murdered Santa Claus!’

Murderous psychopath The Key had set up the heroes for ambush with the callous assassination of an actor hired to cheer orphaned kids, but his horrific deeper scheme was only foiled thanks to the supernatural intervention of an almost forgotten League memberâ€¦

JLA #111 introduced a seminal villain who became, decades later, a pivotal player in The Final Crisis. Here however the enigmatic Libra merely used his incredible abilities to revive the dormant Injustice Gang of the World.

Although his stated goal was to imbue Chronos, Mirror Master, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Shadow Thief and Tattooed Man with energies stolen from Aquaman, Superman, Batman, Flash, Elongated Man and the fully recovered GL Hal Jordan, the ‘Balance of Power!’ he was really seeking meant keeping all the purloined might for his own unimaginable useâ€¦

Those stolen super-powers featured in #112’s follow-up ‘War with the One-Man Justice League!’ as the entire team gathered to help restore their diminished comrades. The high risk solution was to resurrect power-stealing android Amazo to collect the stolen energies and abilities – but nobody considered what the mechanoid might do after it absorbed Batman’s vast intellect and suspicious mindâ€¦

Justice League of America #113 (September/October 1974) proved how desperate were the times for the spandex set as the epic annual collaboration with the JSA was restricted to a single issue. Nevertheless ‘The Creature in the Velvet Cage!’ proved to be one of the very best team-up tales as a JLA visiting party to Earth-2 (Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Elongated Man) shared the shame and horror of The Sandman, when his greatest secret was catastrophically revealed.

Years ago the Master of Dreams had accidentally transformed his sidekick Sandy, the Golden Boy into a ravening silicoid monster and been compelled to sedate and imprison his best friend.

Now after three decades the beast was awake and free, seemingly intent on destroying the world. At least that’s what Hourman and the Golden Age Flash and Wonder Woman believed when they joined their old comrade on his tragic manhuntâ€¦

Wein, with the plotting assistance of Mark Hanerfeld, ended his run as scripter with a smart and decidedly effective little thriller in #114 – ‘The Return of Anakronus!’ During a League-sponsored telethon an enigmatic time-bending villain took disgraced old team mascot Snapper Carr and his family hostage. Although definitely dangerous, the crazed felon’s ranting didn’t make much sense: after all, why would a man who had repeatedly defeated the JLA stoop to demanding a mere cash ransomâ€¦?

The tone turned cosmic in #115 as Denny O’Neil provided a fill-in script which brought back retired hero J’onn J’onzz, Manhunter from Mars who begged his former comrades to save the dying remnants of his people from ‘The Last Angry God!’ who had imprisoned them on a far-distant world.

Cary Bates then contributed ‘The Kid Who Won Hawkman’s Wings!’ in #116 as sightings of Hawkman in Midway City led Elongated Man, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Flash and Batman into a deadly duel against the Matter Master. Closer inspection revealed the Pinioned Paladin to be a baffled kid named Charley Parker who had no idea why he changed into a Golden Eagle, whilst the actual mastermind behind the plot was a shock to everybody concernedâ€¦

After just over a year’s absence the true winged Wonder returned in JLA #117. ‘I Have No Wings and I Must Fly!’ – scripted by Elliot S! Maggin and with Giordano’s protÃ©gÃ© Frank McLaughlin assuming the role of regular inker over Dick Dillin’s sleek and effective pencils – saw alien cop Katar Hol resurface to warn Earth of a deadly extraterrestrial menace dubbed The Equalizer.

This ineffable menace was driven to achieve pure balance in the universe, and to achieve this he somehow homogenised entire civilisations, making life forms exactly identical to each other.

His Equalizer plague weapon was overwhelmingly contagious and – after reducing the population of Thanagar to imbecilic, four foot tall clones of each other, including Hol’s beloved wife Shayera – the unfathomable voyager had turned his single eye upon Earthâ€¦

With his homeworld quarantined and after defeating the appalling threat beside the JLA, Hawkman had no other refuge than our planet and promptly joined Aquaman, Black Canary, Flash Red Tornado and Superman in resisting the ‘Takeover of the Earth-Masters!’ (#118 by Maggin, Dillin & McLaughlin). This saw a misguided attempt by trans-dimensional beings who sought to save our world from super beings by despatching eerie hyper-evolving Adaptoid organisms.

With even the Man of Steel unable to face the ghastly invaders, Hawkman devised a risky strategy involving his Equalization-infected wife, which fortunately turned out in Humanity’s favour in #119’s ‘Winner Takes the Earth!’

Another old friend reappeared in #120 as ‘The Parallel Perils of Adam Strange!’ (written by Bates) saw the Earth-born champion of Planet Rann forced to re-fight his greatest battles after despotic Kanjar Ro murdered his fiancÃ©e Alanna.

Even though Ro had cruelly stacked the deck, Strange – and his newly arrived Justice League allies – triumphed and even pulled a rabbit out of the hat to restore the Rannian heroine in time for her own magical wedding in the blistering conclusion ‘The Hero Who Jinxed the Justice League!’

In issue #122 Marty Pasko delved into the team’s private lives and revealed why the JLA shared their civilian secrets with each other in ‘The Great Identity Crisis!’ as old enemy Dr. Light used photonic super-science and the too-good-to-be-true mineral Amnesium (guess what it causes?) to mess with the heroes’ minds and lure them into what should have been inescapable death-trapsâ€¦

Another year gone, it was then time for the annual JLA/JSA yarn and Bates, Maggin, Dillin & McLaughlin stepped far off the reservation with ‘Where on Earth Am I?’ and ‘Avenging Ghosts of the Justice Society!’ from issues #123 and 124.

In Flash #179 (‘The Flash – Fact of Fiction?, May 1968) Bates and Gardner Fox first took the multiple Earths concept to its illogical conclusion by trapping the Monarch of Motion in â€œourâ€ Reality of Earth-Prime, where the Sultan of Speed was just a comic-book character.

Here Bates and co-scripter Maggin returned to the idea as a story conference in Editor Julie Schwartz’s office led to the oafish goons playing with the Flash’s hastily-constructed Cosmic Treadmill, sending one of them hurtling between dimensions.

Transformed and empowered by the journey, Cary Bates became the most dangerous villain alive, leading Earth-2 criminals The Wizard, Shade, Sportsmaster, Huntress, Icicle and The Gambler in a lethal assault on JSA heroes Robin, Hourman, Wildcat, Wonder Woman, Johnny Thunder and Dr. Mid-Nite.

Maggin, meanwhile, had followed his friend but ended up on Earth-1. Undaunted, he recruited Batman, Black Canary, Aquaman, Hawkman, Green Arrow and Flash to save three imperilled universes but it took the Divine Might of the supernal Spectre to truly set every thing back to its assigned place and timeâ€¦

Gerry Conway began his long association with the Justice League in #125 with a clever 2-parter concerning the dumping of toxic energy from an outer dimension onto Earth. ‘The Men Who Sold Destruction!’ craftily employed schizophrenic villain Two-Face as their wily broker to expend the deadly forces, but the super-minds of Dronndar completely underestimated the double-dealing Harvey Dent‘s capacity for betrayal. Almost as bad was that the opportunistic Weaponers of Qward and the JLA were as easily fooled by the Machiavellian maniac in #126’s Byzantine conclusion ‘The Evil Connection!’

JLA #127 confirmed that ‘The Command is â€œChaosâ€!’ when new menace The Anarchist discovered a means of tapping Green Lantern’s power battery and desperate Hal Jordan begged his fellow champions to stop him recharging his ring at any cost, after which Pasko popped back to author a sharp, smart reintroduction for the Earth-1 Amazing Amazon in #128’s ‘Death-Visions of the Justice League!’

For a period â€œourâ€ Wonder Woman had lost her powers and fought crime as a martial artist (see Diana Prince: Wonder Woman volumes 1-4), but once her supernatural gifts returned she underwent a self-imposed set of trials before rejoining the team.

Sadly her readmission coincided with the team disbanding following a cataclysmic, psychologically punishing assault by alien fear-eater Nekron, and even the Princess of Power seemed unable to galvanise the Leaguers before ‘The Earth Dies Screaming!’ in #129.

The next issue explored the revelatory early days of the team’s orbiting satellite headquarters as ‘Skyjack at 22,300 Miles!’ (scripted by Pasko) disclosed how an intergalactic interloper attempted to turn the space base into a spawning ground and put the nonplussed heroes through a gamut of ghastly trials before order and equilibrium were unconventionally restored.

This mammoth tome ends with a clever mystery double-bill from Conway, Dillin & McLaughlin. Issue #131 featured ‘The Beasts Who Thought Like Men!’ wherein a new credit card currency for America somehow enhanced the minds of animals and insects, simultaneously decreasing human brainpower to such a low point that bugs could enslave deadly villains like Sonar and Queen Beeâ€¦

The tale took a strange turn in #132 as Superman vanished and Supergirl stepped in to help against animals organised enough to conquer the country. Even then there was still one more tangled twist in the tale of ‘The Beasts Who Fought Like Men!…’

The Justice League of America has become a keystone of American comics and these tales are still among the most thought-provoking, controversial and purely entertaining episodes in their half-century history.

With captivating covers provided by Nick Cardy, Mike Grell, Giordano, Ernie Chan (nÃ©e Chua) & JosÃ© Luis GarcÃa-LÃ³pez, this captivating transition tome shows the unalloyed appeal of the Fights ‘n’ Tights Crowd at their most innovative and inspiring.

Just Imagineâ€¦
Â© 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 2013 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

June 9, 2013June 8, 2013

Showcase Presents Sgt. Rock volume 2

By Robert Kanigher, Joe Kubert, Bob Haney, Ross Andru & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1984-0

Sgt Rock and the â€œcombat-happy Joesâ€ of Easy Company are one of the great and enduring creations of the American comic-book industry. The gritty meta-realism of Robert Kanigher’s ordinary guys in life-or-death situations captured the imaginations of generations of readers, young and old. So pervasive is this icon of comicbook combat that’s it’s hard to grasp that Rock is not an immortal industry prototype like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman â€“ with us since the earliest moments of the industry â€“ but is in fact a late addition to and child of the Silver Age of Comics: debuting as just another tale in war anthology G.I. Combat (#68, January 1959, by Kanigher & Joe Kubert).

The archetypal sergeant was an anonymous boxer who wasn’t particularly skilled but simply refused to be beaten, absorbing any and all the punishment dealt out to him.

When ‘The Rock!’ enlisted in the US Army, however, that same Horatian quality attained mythic proportions as he held back an overwhelming Nazi attack by sheer grit and determination, remaining bloody but unbowed on a field littered with dead and broken men.

The tale inspired an instant sequel or two before, in Our Army at War #83 (June 1959), the story really beganâ€¦

This second titanic tour of duty collects in stark and stunning monochrome the groundbreaking tales which made Sgt. Rock a comics legend. These grim and gritty, epically poetic war stories are taken from the then still-anthological Our Army at War #118-148, bracketing May 1962 to November 1964, a period when American comics were undergoing a renaissance in style, theme and quality.

Scripted throughout by Editor Kanigher, the terse episodes herein begin with ‘The Tank vs. the Tin Soldier!’ illustrated by the brilliant Russ Heath as movie idol Randy Booth mustered in to Easy Company and spent all his snobbish energy trying to get out again. By the time he learned how to be a real soldier, his moment in the limelight had turned from cinematic melodrama to Greek tragedyâ€¦

The artist most closely associated with Rock, Joe Kubert illustrated #119’s memorable fable ‘A Bazooka for Babyface!’ wherein a kid who’d lied about his age made it to the Front, but didn’t fool the indomitable topkick. Of course, by the time the fighting died down enough to send him back, the Babyface was a seasoned combat veteranâ€¦

Kubert superbly limned the majority of stories in this volume, such as #120’s ‘Battle Tags for Easy Co.!’, which used brief vignettes to illustrate how squad stalwarts Ice Cream Soldier, Wild Man and Bulldozer earned their nicknames, before showing the latest Green Apple recruit why the Sarge was called Rock, after which ‘New Boy in Easy!’ in #121 introduced a chess-obsessed replacement who took a lot of convincing that war was no hobby and men weren’t just pawnsâ€¦

This narrative device of incorporating brief past-action episodes into a baptism of fire scenario played over and over again in Sgt. Rock and never got old.

OAAW #122 featured ‘Battle of the Pyjama Commandoes!’ comprising more portmanteau tales as a number of Easy Joes recuperated in a field hospital, until the Germans broke through and the wounded had to pick up their weapons againâ€¦

High-energy stylist Jerry Grandenetti illustrated ‘Battle Brass Ring!’ in #123 as a pushy new replacement antagonised the entire unit until he learned to his cost the value of teamwork and the price of command, after which Kubert returned for ‘Target – Sgt. Rock!’

When the indomitable warrior was captured and brainwashed by a Nazi tank commander into leading an attack on Easy, Bulldozer had to balance Rock’s life against his beloved sergeant’s unflinching standing ordersâ€¦

More moral dilemmas punished the valiant warriors in #125 (illustrated by Heath) as the unit was cut off from the main Allied force and ordered to ‘Hold – At All Costs!’, whilst ‘The End of Easy Company!’ (#126 and illustrated by Kubert) pitted the unstoppable dogfaces against impassable fortifications and a veritable mountain of Germans who severely underestimated the sheer stubbornness of tired, angry Americansâ€¦

With Kubert settling in for the long haul as regular artist on the strip, issue #127 offered an epic 25-page blitz of stories-within-a-story as a quartet of combat-happy Joes related personal tales of their unbeatable boss in ‘4 Faces of Sgt. Rock’.

OAAW #128 featured ‘The Battle of the Sergeants!’ as Rock met his Nazi counterpart in the deserts of Africa, after which #129 revealed that ‘Heroes Need Cowards!’ by exploring Rock’s earliest days in the Army, and ‘No Hill for Easy!’ in #130 saw the battered band of brothers go above and beyond to placate a shell-shocked Major and finish the suicide mission of a deranged last man standingâ€¦

In #131 ‘One Pair of Dogtags â€¦ For Sale’ saw Easy meet a woman warrior every inch their equal who literally spilled her own blood to keep Rock alive, whilst in ‘Young Soldiers Never Cry!’ the sergeant became a combat babysitter after rescuing a toddler on the battlefield of Normandy.

‘Yesterday’s Hero!’ in #133 saw a decorated veteran join Easy to a rapturous welcome, but flounder, unable to escape the shocking circumstances that made him an unwilling example of both heroism and cowardice, whilst in ‘The T.N.T. Book’ another replacement insisted on playing the odds in war as he had on the trackâ€¦ until he learned the true stakes of battleâ€¦

Our Army at War #135 pitted Rock against a German non-com who was in almost every way his ‘Battlefield Double!’, whilst in #136 a desperately frightened new kid arrived begging the indomitable topkick to ‘Make Me a Hero!’, and #137 saw a cavalry holdover from WWI finally achieve his long-delayed charge to glory in ‘Too Many Sergeants!’

When a close skirmish separated Rock from his greenest new replacement in #138, the weary warrior went through combat hell to find ‘Easy’s Lost Sparrow!’, before the next mission resulted in capture for four of the unit’s best and a ‘A Firing Squad for Easy!’ at a German Submarine dock. Happily the team of Frogmen they’d been protecting returned the favourâ€¦

OAAW #140 was another full-length thriller – with cameos from fellow comicbook combatant Captain Johnny Cloud and French Resistance fighter Mademoiselle Marie – which revealed the wry story of how Rock kept winning deserved but wholly unwelcome battlefield promotions. His dilemma as a ‘Brass Sergeant!’ was only resolved after reuniting a misunderstood son with his â€œspit-and-polishâ€ General father under exceptional circumstancesâ€¦

An timid old school friend turned up in #141, still needing Rock’s protection until â€œShakerâ€ finally pulled the ‘Dead Man’s Trigger!’, whilst in the next issue Kanigher pushed the envelope with the tale of a boy who held the sergeant to ransom and became ‘Easy’s New Topkick!’ in order to finish his dead Maquis comrades’ last mission. This stirring saga inspired the creation of Unit 3 – a French Resistance squad of battle-hardened children who appeared sporadically in later issues.

In #143 the US soldiers were back in the desert where embattled dogfaces honoured fallen comrade Farmer Boy by planting ‘Easy’s T.N.T. Crop!’ and harvested a victory built on sand, after which ‘The Sparrow and the Tiger!’ saw Rock at last succumb to battle fatigue and the constant loss of his â€œkidsâ€ until a scared replacement showed him the true value of persistence and grace under fireâ€¦

Our Army at War #145 offered the back-story on the squad’s Native American rifleman in ‘A Feather for Little Sure-Shot!’, whilst in #146 imagination ran wild as ‘The Fighting Guns of Easy!’ compared stories about the men who fired them.

This second savage selection of combat actions concludes with a rare 2-part yarn, beginning in #147 as ‘Generals Don’t Die! Book One’ found the hands-on topkick the envy of all his commanding officers. However, after helping desk-jockey General Bentley die in glorious battle, Rock was saddled with fulfilling a promise to a dying man and forced to impersonate Bentley.

Things got even trickier when the impostor had to lead the troops in breaking a stalled advance, a classic conundrum spectacularly resolved in the blockbuster conclusion ‘Generals Don’t Die! Book Two: Generals are Sergeants with Stars!’ as Rock kept the dead man’s secret and maintained Bentley family honour until he could pass on those unearned Brass Stars to the next Bentley generationâ€¦

Robert Kanigher at his worst was a declarative, heavy-handed and formulaic writer, but when writing his best stuff â€“ as here â€“ his work was imaginative, evocative, iconoclastic and heart-rending. He was a unique reporter and observer of the warrior’s way and the unchanging condition of the dedicated and so very human ordinary foot-slogging G.I.

With superb combat covers from Kubert, Grandenetti, and Heath fronting each episode, this battle-book is a visually perfect compendium and a certain delight for any jaded comics fan looking for something more than flash and dazzle.

A perfect example of true Shock and Awe; these are stories every comics fan and combat collector should see.
Â© 1963, 1964, 2008 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

May 29, 2013May 28, 2013

Showcase Presents the Spectre volume 1

By Gardner F. Fox, Bob Haney, Michael L. Fleisher, Paul Kupperberg, Murphy Anderson, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-3417-1

The Spectre is one of the oldest characters in DC’s vast stable, created by Jerry Siegel and Bernard Baily in 1940 and debuting via a 2-part origin epic in More Fun Comics #52 and 53. Moreover, just like Siegel’s other iconic creation, he soon began to suffer from a basic design flaw: he’s just too darn powerful.

Unlike Superman however, this champion of justice was already dead, so he can’t really be logically or dramatically imperilled. Of course in those far off early days that wasn’t nearly as important as sheer spectacle: forcibly grabbing the reader’s utter attention and keeping it stoked to a fantastic fever pitch.

Starting as a virtually omnipotent ghost, the Grim Ghost evolved, over various returns, refits and reboots into a tormented mortal soul bonded inescapably to the actual embodiment of the biblical Wrath of God.

The story is a genuinely gruesome one: police detective Jim Corrigan was callously executed by gangsters before being called back to the land of the living. Ordered to fight crime and evil by a glowing light and disembodied voice, he was indisputably the most formidable hero of the Golden Age.

He has been revamped and revived many times, and in the 1990s was revealed to be God’s Spirit of Vengeance wedded to a human conscience. When Corrigan was finally laid to rest, Hal (Green Lantern) Jordan and latterly murdered Gotham City cop Crispus Allen replaced him as the mitigating conscience of the force of Divine Retributionâ€¦

However the true start of that radically revised and revitalised career began in the superhero-saturated mid-1960s when, hot on the heels of feverish fan-interest in the alternate world of the Justice Society of America and Earth-2 (where all the WWII heroes retroactively resided), DC began trying out solo revivals of 1940’s characters, as opposed to their wildly successful Silver Age reconfigurations such as Flash, Green Lantern, Atom and Hawkmanâ€¦

This sublime and colossal Showcase selection collects and documents the Man of Darkness’ return in the Swinging Sixties, his landmark reinterpretation in the horror-soaked, brutalised 1970s and even finds room for some later appearances before the character was fully de-powered and retrofitted for the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe.

As such this mammoth monochrome tome (624 peril-packed pages!) contains Showcase #60, 61 and 64, The Spectre #1-10, team-up tales from The Brave and the Bold #72, 75, 116, 180 & 199 and DC Comics Presents #29, the lead strips from Adventure Comics #431-440 and one last hurrah from horror-anthology Ghosts #97-99, encompassing the end of 1965 to the middle of 1983.

As previously mentioned, DC tried out a number of Earth-2 iterations (Starman/Black Canary – with Wildcat – in The Brave and the Bold #61-62 whilst Showcase #55 & 56 spotlighted Doctor Fate & Hourman with a cameo from the original Green Lantern), but Schwartz and Fox only finally achieved their ambition to launch a Golden Age hero into his own title with the revival of the Ghostly Guardian in Showcase – but it was hard going and perhaps benefited from a growing general public interest in supernatural storiesâ€¦

After three full length appearances and many guest-shots, The Spectre won his own solo series at the end of 1967, just as the super-hero craze went into a steep decline, but maybe Showcase #60 (January/February 1966) anticipated the rise of supernatural comics by re-introducing Corrigan and his phantom passenger in ‘War That Shook the Universe’ by Earth-2 team supreme Gardner F. Fox & Murphy Anderson.

This spectacular saga revealed that the Heroic Haunt had vanished two decades previously, leaving the fundamentally human Corrigan to pursue his war against evil on merely mortal terms until a chance encounter with a psychic investigator freed the ghost buried within him.

A diligent search revealed that, twenty years previously, a supernal astral invader had broken into the Earth plane and possessed a mortal, but was so inimical to our laws of reality that both it and the Grim Ghost were locked into their meat shells – until nowâ€¦

Thus began a truly spectre-acular (don’t groan – that’s what they called it back then) clash with the devilish Azmodus that spanned all creation and blew the minds of us gobsmacked kidsâ€¦

Issue #61 (March/April) upped the ante when the even more satanic Shathan the Eternal subsequently insinuated himself into our realm from ‘Beyond the Sinister Barrier’, stealing mortal men’s shadows until he was powerful enough to conquer the physical universe. This time The Spectre treated us to an exploration of the universe’s creation before narrowly defeating the source of all evilâ€¦

The Sentinel Spirit returned in Showcase #64 (September/October 1966) for a marginally more mundane but no less thrilling adventure when ‘The Ghost of Ace Chance’ took up residence in Jim’s body. By this time it was established that ghosts needed a mortal anchor to recharge their ectoplasmic â€œbatteriesâ€, and the unscrupulous crooked gambler was determined to inhabit the best frame availableâ€¦

The try-out run concluded, the editors sat back and waited for sales figures to dictate the next move. When they proved inconclusive Schwartz orchestrated a concerted publicity campaign to further promote Earth-2’s Ethereal Adventurer.

The Brave and the Bold #72 (June/July 1967) saw the Spectre clash with Earth-1’s Scarlet Speedster in ‘Phantom Flash, Cosmic Traitor’ by Bob Haney, Carmine Infantino & Charles â€œChuckâ€ Cuidera. This sinister saga saw the mortal meteor transformed into a sinister spirit-force and power-focus for unquiet American aviator Luther Jarvis who returned from death in 1918 to wreak vengeance on the survivors of his squadron – until the Spectre intervenedâ€¦

Due to the vagaries of comicbook scheduling, Brave and the Bold #75 (December 1967/January 1968) appeared at around the same time as The Spectre #1, although the latter had a cover-date of November/December 1967.

In the Batman team-up title – scripted by Haney and drawn by Ross Andru & Mike Esposito – the Ghostly Guardian joined the Dark Knight to free Gotham City’s Chinatown from ‘The Grasp of Shahn-Zi!’: an ancient oriental sorcerer determined to prolong his reign of terror at the expense of an entire community and through the sacrifice of an innocent child, after which the Astral Avenger finally, simultaneously, debuted in his own titleâ€¦

The Spectre #1 featured ‘The Sinister Lives of Captain Skull’ by Fox & Anderson, and divulged how the botched assassination of American Ambassador Joseph Clanton and an experimental surgical procedure allowed one of the diplomat’s earlier incarnations to take over his body and, armed with mysterious eldritch energies, run amok on Earth.

Those â€œmegacyclic energyâ€ abilities enabled the revenant to harm and potentially destroy the Ghostly Guardian and compelled the Spectre to pursue the piratical Skull through a line of previous lives until he could find their source and purge the peril from all time and spaceâ€¦

With issue #2 (January/February 1968) artistic iconoclast Neal Adams came aboard for the Fox-scripted mystery ‘Die Spectre – Again’ wherein crooked magician Dirk Rawley accidentally manifested his etheric self and severely tested both Corrigan and his phantom partner as they sought to end the double-menace’s string of crimes, mundane and magical. At this time the first inklings of a distinct separation and individual identities began. The two halves of the formerly sole soul of Corrigan were beginning to disagree and even squabbleâ€¦

New scripter Mike Friedrich joined Adams for #3’s ‘Menace of the Mystic Mastermind’ wherein pugilistic paragon Wildcat faced the inevitable prospect of age and infirmity even as an inconceivable force from another universe possessed petty thug Sad Jack Dold and turned him into a nigh-unstoppable force of cosmic chaosâ€¦

‘Stop that Kidâ€¦ Before He Wrecks the World’ was written & illustrated by Adams and saw a similar trans-universal malignity deliberately empower a young boy as a prelude to its ultimate conquest, whilst #5’s ‘The Spectre Means Death?’ (all Adams again) appeared to show the Ghostly Guardian transformed into a pariah and deadly menace to society, until Jim’s investigations uncovered the emotion-controlling Psycho Pirate at the root of the Spectre’s problemsâ€¦

Despite all the incredible talent and effort lavished upon it, The Spectre simply wasn’t finding a big enough audience. Adams departed for straight superhero glory elsewhere and a hint of changing tastes came as veteran illustrator of horror comics Jerry Grandenetti came aboard.

Issue #6 (September/October 1968) saw his eccentric, manic cartooning adding raw wildness to the returning Fox’s moody thriller ‘Pilgrims of Peril!’ and Murphy Anderson also re-enlisted to apply a solid ink grounding to the story of a sinister invasion by a quartet of phantom Puritans who invaded the slums of Gateway City, driving out the poor and hopeless as they sought lost arcane treasures. These would allow demon lord Nawor of Giempo access to Earth unless The Spectre could win his unlife or death duel with the trans-dimensional horrorâ€¦

As the back of issue #7 was dedicated to a solo strip starring Hourman (not included in this collection), The Spectre saga here – by Fox, Grandenetti & Anderson – was a half-length tale which followed the drastic steps necessary to convince the soul of bank-robber Frankie Barron to move on. Since he was killed during a heist, the astral form of aversion therapy used to cure ‘The Ghost That Haunted Money!’ proved to be not only ectoplasmically effective but outrageously entertainingâ€¦

Issue #8 (January/February 1969) was scripted by Steve Skeates and began a last-ditch and obviously desperate attempt to turn The Spectre into something the new wave of anthology horror readers would buy.

As a twisted, time-lost apprentice wizard struggled to return to Earth after murdering his master and stealing cosmic might from the void, on the mundane plane an exhausted Ghostly Guardian neglected his duties and was taken to task by his celestial creator.

As a reminder of his error, Penitent Phantasm was burdened by a fluctuating weakness – which would change without warning – to keep him honest and earnest. What a moment for the desperate disciple Narkran to return then, determined to secure his elevated god-like existence by securing ‘The Parchment of Power Perilous!’â€¦

The Spectre #9 completed the transition and opened with an untitled short from Friedrich (illustrated by Grandenetti & Bill Draut) which saw the Man of Darkness again overstep his bounds by executing a criminal. This prompted Corrigan to refuse the weary wraith the shelter of his reinvigorating form and, when the Grim Ghost then assaulted his own host form, the Heavenly Voice punished the spirit by chaining him to the dreadful Journal of Judgment: demanding he atone by investigating the lives inscribed therein in a trial designed to teach him again the value of mercyâ€¦

The now anthologised issue continued with ‘Abraca-Doom’ (Dennis J. O’Neil & Bernie Wrightson) as The Spectre attempted to stop a greedy carnival conjurer from signing a contract with the Devil, whilst ‘Shadow Show’ by Mark Hanerfeld & Jack Sparling detailed the fate of a cheap mugger who thought he could outrun the consequences of a capital crimeâ€¦

The next issue gave up the ghost and The Spectre folded with #10 (May/June 1969), but not before a quartet of tantalising tales by writer or writers unknown showed what might have beenâ€¦

‘Footsteps of Disaster’ with art from Grandenetti & George Roussos, followed a man from cradle to early grave and revealed the true wages of sin, whilst ‘Hit and Run’ (probably drawn by Ralph Reese) proved again that the Spirit of Judgment was not infallible and even human scum could be redeemedâ€¦

‘How Much Can a Guy Take?’ (Sparling) offered salvation to a shoeshine boy pushed almost too far by an arrogant mobster, and the series closed with a cunning murder mystery involving what appeared to be a killer ventriloquists doll in the Grandenetti & George Roussos illustrated ‘Will the Real Killer Please Rise?’

With that the Astral Avenger returned to comicbook limbo for nearly half a decade until changing tastes and another liberalising of the Comics Code saw him return as the lead feature in Adventure Comics #431 (January/February 1974) in a shocking run of macabre, ultra-violent tales from Michael L. Fleisher & Jim Aparo.

‘The Wrath ofâ€¦ The Spectre’ offered a far more stark and unforgiving take on the Spirit Sentinel and reflected the increasingly violent tone of the times as a gang of murderous thieves slaughtered the crew of a security truck and were tracked down by a harsh, uncompromising police lieutenant named Corrigan.

When the bandits were exposed, the cop unleashed a horrific green and white apparition from his body which inflicted ghastly punishments that horrendously fitted their crimesâ€¦

With art continuity (and no, I’m not sure what that means either), from Russell Carley, the draconian fables continued in #432 as in ‘The Anguish ofâ€¦ The Spectre’ assassins murdered millionaire Adrian Sterling and Corrigan met the victim’s daughter Gwen. Although the now-infallible Wrathful Wraith soon exposed and excised the culprits, the dead detective had to reveal his true nature to the grieving daughter. Moreover, Corrigan began to feel the stirring of impossible, unattainable yearningsâ€¦

Adventure #433 exposed ‘The Swami andâ€¦ The Spectre’ as Gwen sought spiritual guidance from a ruthless charlatan who promptly paid the appalling price when he finally met a real ghost, whilst in #434 ‘The Nightmare Dummies andâ€¦ The Spectre’ (with additional pencils by the great Frank Thorne) saw a plague of department store mannequins run wild in a killing spree at the behest of a crazed artisan who believed in magic – but couldn’t imagine the cost of his dabblingâ€¦

Issue #435 introduced journalist Earl Crawford who tracked the ghastly fallout of the vengeful spirit’s anti-crime campaign and became ‘The Man Who Stalked The Spectre!’ Of course once he saw the ghost in grisly action Crawford realised the impossibility of publishing this scoopâ€¦

Adventure #436 saw Crawford still trying to sell his story as ‘The Gasmen andâ€¦ The Spectre’ set the Spectral Slaughterman on the trail of a gang who killed everybody at a car show as a demonstration of intent before blackmailing the city. Their gorily inescapable fate only put Crawford closer to exposing Corrigan, after which in #437 ‘The Human Bombs andâ€¦ The Spectre’ (with pencils from Ernie Chan & Aparo inks) found a kidnapper abducting prominent persons – including Gwen – to further a merciless madÂ scheme of amassing untold wealthâ€¦ until the Astral Avenger ended their depredations foreverâ€¦

In #438 ‘The Spectre Haunts the Museum of Fear’ (Chan & Aparo again) saw a crazed taxidermist turning people into unique dioramas until the Grim Ghost intervened, but the end was in sight again for the Savage Shade and #439’s ‘The Voice that Doomedâ€¦ The Spectre’ (all Aparo) turned the wheel of death full circle, as the Heavenly Presence who created him allowed Corrigan to fully live again so that he could marry Gwen.

Sadly it was only to have the joyous hero succumb to ‘The Second Death of Theâ€¦ Spectre’ (#440, July/August 1975) and tragically resume his endless missionâ€¦

This milestone serial set a stunning new tone and style for the Ghostly Guardian which has informed each iteration ever sinceâ€¦

From midway through that run, Brave and the Bold #116 provided another continuity-crunching supernatural team-up with Batman in a far less graphically violent struggle against the ‘Grasp of the Killer Cult’ (Haney & Aparo). When Kali-worshipping Thugs from India seemingly targeted survivors of a WWII American Army Engineer unit, Detective Corrigan and the Dark Knight clashed on both the method and motives of the mysterious murderersâ€¦

DC Comics Presents #29 (January 1981, by Len Wein, Jim Starlin & Romeo Tanghal) revealed what happened after Supergirl was knocked unconscious after a cataclysmic battle and sent hurtling through dimensions measureless to man. When her cousin tried to follow, the Ghostly Guardian was dispatched to stop the Metropolis Marvel from transgressing ‘Where No Superman Has Gone Before’â€¦

By the early 1980s the horror boom had exhausted itself and DC’s anthology comics were disappearing. As part of the effort to keep them alive, Ghosts featured a 3-part serial starring â€œGhost-Breakerâ€ and inveterate sceptic Dr. Terry 13 who at last encountered ‘The Spectre’ in issue #97 (February 1981, by Paul Kupperberg, Michael R. Adams & Tex Blaisdell), where terrorists invaded a high society sÃ©ance and were summarily dispatched by the inhuman poetic justice of the Astral Avengerâ€¦

Now determined to destroy the monstrous revenant vigilante, Dr. 13 returned in #98 as ‘The Haunted House and The Spectre’ found the Ghost-Breaker interviewing Earl Crawford and subsequently discovering the long sought killer of his own father. Before 13 could act, however, the Spectre appeared and stole his justifiable retribution from the aggrieved psychic investigatorâ€¦

The drama closed in Ghosts #99 as ‘Deathâ€¦ and The Spectre’ (Kupperberg, Michael R. Adams & Tony DeZuniga) found the scientist and the spirit locked in one final furious confrontation.

This staggering compendium of supernatural thrillers concludes with two more team-up classics from Brave and the Bold beginning with ‘The Scepter of the Dragon God’ by Fleisher & Aparo (from #180, November 1980).

Although Chinese wizard Wa’an-Zen stole enough mystic artefacts to conquer the world and destroy the Spectre, he foolishly underestimated the skill and bravery of the merely mortal Batman, whilst #199 (June 1983) ‘The Body-napping of Jim Corrigan’, by Mike W. Barr, Ross Andru & Rick Hoberg, found the ethereal avenger baffled by the abduction and disappearance of his mortal host.

Even though he could not trace his own body, the Spectre did know where the World’s Greatest Detective hung outâ€¦

Ranging from fabulously fantastical to darkly â€“ violently â€“ enthralling, these comic masterpieces perfectly encapsulate the way superheroes changed over a brief twenty year span, but remain throughout some of the most beguiling and exciting tales of DC’s near-80 years of existence. If you love comicbooks you’d be crazy to ignore this oneâ€¦
Â© 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1974, 1975, 1981, 1983, 2012 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved

May 21, 2013May 20, 2013

Showcase Presents Batman volume 5

By Frank Robbins, Dennis O’Neil, Mike Friedrich, Irv Novick, Bob Brown, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Joe Giella & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-0-85768-853-8

After three seasons (perhaps two and a half would be closer) the overwhelmingly successful Batman TV show ended in March, 1968. It had clocked up 120 episodes and a movie since the US premiere on January 12, 1966 and triggered a global furore of â€œBatmaniaâ€ and indeed hysteria for all things zany and mystery-mannish.

As the series foundered and crashed the global fascination with â€œcampâ€ superheroes – and yes, the term had everything to do with lifestyle choices but absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation, no matter what you and Mel Brooks might think about Men in Tights – burst as quickly as it had boomed, and the Caped Crusader was left with a hard core of dedicated fans and followers who now wanted their hero back.

For character editor Julius Schwartz – who had tried to keep the most ludicrous excesses of the show out whilst still cashing in on his global popularity – the reasoning seemed simple: strip out the tired gimmicks and gaudy paraphernalia and get him back to solving baffling mysteries and facing genuine perils as soon and as thrillingly as possible.

This also meant slowly phasing out the boy sidekickâ€¦

Many readers were now acknowledged as discerning, independent teens and the kid was no longer relevant to them or the changing times. Although the soon-to-be college-bound freshman Teen Wonder would still pop back for the occasional guest-shot yarn, this fifth astoundingly economical monochrome monument to comics ingenuity and narrative brilliance would see him finally spread his wings and fly the nest for an alternating back-up slot in Detective, shared with relative newcomer Batgirl in stirring hip and mod solo sallies.

Collecting the newly independent Batman‘s cases from September 1969 to February 1971 (issues #216-228 of his own title as well as the front halves of Detective Comics #391-407), the 30 stories gathered here – some of the Batman issues were giant reprint editions so only their covers are reproduced within these pages – were written and illustrated by an evolving team of fresh-thinking creators as editor Schwartz lost many of his elite stable to age, attrition and corporate pressure.

However the â€œnew bloodâ€ was fresh only to the Gotham Guardian, not the industry, and their sterling efforts deftly moulded the character into a hero capable of actually working within the new â€œbig thingsâ€ in comics: suspense, horror and the supernaturalâ€¦

During this pivotal period the long slow road to our scarily Dark Knight gradually revealed a harder-edged, grimly serious caped crusader, even whilst carefully expanding the milieu and scope of Batman’s universe – especially his fearsome foes, who slowly ceased to be harmless buffoons and inexorably metamorphosed into the macabre Grand Guignol murder fiends of the early 1940sâ€¦

The transformational process continued here with the Frank Robbins-scripted Detective #391, as ‘The Gal Most Likely to Be – Batman’s Widow!’ (illustrated by Bob Brown & Joe Giella) saw the fleeting return of abortive modern love interest Ginny Jenkins who had become the passing fancy of mobbed-up publisher and extortionist Arnie Arnold.

By crushing the crooked editor’s scam to fleece Gotham’s society eateries, Batman paved the way for Ginny to settle down with the true man of her dreamsâ€¦

Robbins (illustrious creator of newspaper strip Johnny Hazard) always had a deft grip on both light adventure and darker crime capers as seen in issue #392’s ‘I Diedâ€¦ A Thousand Deaths!’ wherein the Gotham Gangbuster’s plan to take down mobster Scap Scarpel went dangerously awry after trusting a less than honest â€œconfidential informantâ€. In Batman #216 (November 1968), Robbins gave faithful butler Alfred a surname (after thirty years of service) by introducing the old retainer’s niece Daphne Pennyworth in ‘Angel – or Devil?’ (art from Irv Novick & Dick Giordano).

The aspiring actress had become ensnared in the coils of a band of very crooked travelling players and nearly became their patsy for murderâ€¦

In an era where teen angst and the counter-culture played an increasingly strident part in the public consciousness, Robin’s role as spokesperson for a generation was becoming increasingly important, with disputes and splits from his senior partner constantly recurring.

A long overdue separation came in Detective #393’s ‘The Combo Caper!’ (Robbins, Brown & Giella) as Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson took a young delinquent with them on their last vacation together, embroiling Batman and Robin in a sinister string of high end gem heistsâ€¦

The partnership ended in Batman #217 and ‘One Bullet Too Many!’ (Robbins, Novick & Giordano) as Dick shipped out for Hudson University and Batman undertook a radical rethink of his mission and goals.

Dapper Gentleman’s Gentleman Alfred became a far more hands-on part of the mythology – like Margery Allingham’s Magersfontein Lugg from the Albert Campion mysteries rather than Wodehouse’s smugly unflappable Jeeves – from this point on: shutting up the stately Manor and moving the Batcave into the basement of the Wayne Foundation in the heart of the city where all the crime and injustice actually lurkedâ€¦

The first case – a brilliant old-fashioned whodunit – of the streamlined setup involved the unsolved murder of a paediatrician, but the real innovation was the creation of a new Wayne Foundation outreach project: the Victims Incorporated Program which saw both superheroism and philanthropy combine to provide justice for those who couldn’t afford to buy itâ€¦

The scheme immediately hit a deadly snag in Detective #394’s ‘A Victim’s Victim!’ (Robbins, Brown & Giella) when a crippled racing car driver came looking for vengeance; claiming Wayne had personally sabotaged his career. It took all of the Dark Detective’s skills to uncover the deadly truthâ€¦

Batman #218 was an all-reprint Giant Annual represented here only by the glorious Murphy Anderson cover, whereas the next tale marked a landmark step forward in the history of the Caped Crusader.

Neal Adams had been producing a stunning succession of mesmerising covers on both Batman and Detective Comics, as well as illustrating a phenomenal run of team-up tales in World’s Finest Comics and The Brave and the Bold, so his inevitable switch to the premier league was hotly anticipated. However Dennis O’Neil’s script for Detective Comics #395’s ‘The Secret of the Waiting Graves’ (January 1970 and inked by Giordano) also instituted a far more mature and sinister – almost gothic – take on the hero as he confronted the psychotic nigh-immortal lovers named Muerto whose passion for each other was fuelled by deadly drugs and sustained by a century of murderâ€¦

Adams’ captivating dynamic hyperrealism was just the final cog in the reconstruction of the epic Batman edifice but it was also an irresistibly attractive one.

Issue #219 led with a cracking political thriller in (Robbins, Novick & Giordano’s) ‘Death Casts the Deciding Vote’ wherein Bruce took his V.I.P. scheme to Washington DC and stumbled into a plot to assassinate an-anti-crime Senator, but the astounding Christmas vignette ‘The Silent Night of the Batman’ (by Mike Friedrich, Adams & Giordano) completely stole the show – and became a revered classic – with its eerily gentle, moving modern interpretation of the Season of Miraclesâ€¦

Adams couldn’t do it all and he didn’t have to. Detective #396 saw artists Brown & Giella up their game in Robbins’ clever contemporary yarn ‘The Brain-Pickers!’

Teen financial wizard Rory Bell cornered the stock market from the back of his freewheeling motorbike, only to be kidnapped by a greedy gang with an eye to a big killing – corporate and otherwise – until the Caped Crimebuster got on their trail whilst Novick & Giordano similarly adapted their styles for Batman #220.

‘This Murder has beenâ€¦ Pre-Recorded!’, scripted by Robbins, saw Bruce finally meet journalist Marla Manning (whose writing inspired the V.I.P. initiative) when an exposÃ© of corrupt practises made her the target of a murder-for-hire veteran.

O’Neil, Adams & Giordano reunited for Detective #397 and another otherworldly mystery when obsessive millionaire art collector Orson Payne resorted to theft and worse in his quest for an unobtainable love in ‘Paint a Picture of Peril!’, whilst #398 saw Robbins, Brown & Giella pose ‘The Poison Pen Puzzle!’ when muckraking gossip columnist Maxine Melanie‘s latest book inspired her murder and an overabundance of perpetrators queuing up to take the creditâ€¦

‘A Bat-Death for Batman!’ by Robbins, Novick & Giordano led in issue #221 as the Dark Knight headed for Germany to track down Nazi war criminals and their bio-agent which turned domestic animals and livestock into rabid killers, whilst the Friedrich-scripted ‘A Hot Time in Gotham Town Tonight!’ saw the Masked Manhunter eradicate the threat of a mystic idol capable of turning the city into smouldering ashes.

Detective #399, by O’Neil, Brown & Giella, introduced anti-Batman campaigner and political hack Arthur Reeves and revealed how ‘Death Comes to a Small, Locked Room!’ in a clever mystery centred on the apparent assassination of a martial arts teacher, whilst Batman #222 featured two tales illustrated by Novick & Giordano.

‘Deadâ€¦ Till Proven Alive!’, written by Robbins, featured a guest shot by Robin as British band The Oliver Twists hit Gotham, mired in speculation that one of that Fabulous Foursome had been killed and secretly replaced (a contemporary conspiracy theory had it that Beatle Paul McCartney had been similarly dealt with), after which Friedrich contributed another superb human interest yarn as an exhausted hero pushed himself beyond his limits to help a deaf mugging victim in ‘The Case of No Consequence!’

The big anniversary Detective Comics #400 introduced a dark counterpoint to the Gotham Gangbuster as driven scientist Kirk Langstrom created a serum to make himself superior to Batman and paid a heavy price in ‘Challenge of the Man-Bat!’ by Robbins, Adams & Giordano.

Batman #223 was another Annual, this time sporting a captivating Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson cover, after which Detective #401 spotlighted Robbins, Brown & Giella’s ‘Target for Tonight!’ as insane playboy hunter Carleton Yager stalked Gotham’s most dangerous game, armed only with his wits, weapons and knowledge of the Dark Knight’s true identityâ€¦

Batman #224 opened an era of eerie psychodramas and manic murder as the hero travelled to New Orleans to solve the mystery murder of a Jazz legend and battled the monstrous Moloch in ‘Carnival of the Cursed’ by O’Neil, Novick & Giordano, after which Detective #402 saw the Dark Knight capture the out-of-control thing that was once Kirk Langstrom and ponder if he had the right to kill or cure the beast in ‘Man or Bat?’ by Robbins, Adams & Giordano.

Batman #225 (O’Neil, Novick & Giordano) saw the murder of divisive talk show host Jonah Jory with witnesses swearing the city’s greatest hero was the killer in ‘Wanted for Murder-One, the Batman’, after which Detective #403 featured the gothic thriller ‘You Die by Mourning!’ (Robbins, Brown & Frank Giacoia, with a splash page by Carmine Infantino), in which the V.I.P. project turned up grieving widow Angie Randall who needed justice for her murdered husband.

This cunning conundrum revolves around the fact that dear dead Laird wasn’t dead yet – but would be tomorrowâ€¦

Detective Comics #404 then offered the magnificent ‘Ghost of the Killer Skies!’ (O’Neil, Adams & Giordano) which found the Masked Manhunter attempting to solve a series of impossible murders on the set of a film about German WWI fighter ace Hans von Hammer.

All evidence seemed to prove that the killer could only be a vengeful phantom, whereas in Batman #226 skewed science produced a new mad menace in ‘The Man with Ten Eyes!’ by Robbins, Novick & Giordano.

A cruel misunderstanding during a robbery pitted security guard Reardon against Batman just as the real thieves detonated a huge explosion. Blinded, traumatised and shell-shocked, Reardon was then subjected to an experimental procedure which allowed him to see through his fingertips but the Vietnam vet blamed the Caped Crimebuster for his freakish fate and determined to extract his vengeance in kindâ€¦

Detective #405 was the inauspicious start to a whole new world of intrigue and adventure as ‘The First of the Assassins!’ (O’Neil, Brown & Giacoia) found the Gotham Guardian seconded to Interpol to solve the murders of fifteen shipping magnates. Whilst struggling to keep the sixteenth healthy against a fusillade of esoteric threats from oriental fiend Tejja, the Dark Night first learned of a vast global League of killersâ€¦

Another groundbreaking narrative strand debuted in Batman #227 in ‘The Demon of Gothos Mansion’ (O’Neil, Novick & Giordano) as Daphne Pennyworth returned, begging help to escape her latest employment as a governess in a remote household. When Batman investigated he discovered a cult of madmen, demonic possession and what less-rational men might consider a captive ghostâ€¦

The epic, slow-boiling battle against the League of Assassins continued in Detective Comics #406 as in ‘Your Servant of Death – Dr.Darrk!’ (by O’Neil, Brown & Giacoia) another tycoon almost dies and Batman at last clashes with the deadly mastermind behind the global campaign of terrorâ€¦ or does he?

This staggering compendium of comics wonderment concludes with Detective #407; the final chapter in a triptych of tales introducing tragic Kirk Langstrom. In ‘Marriage: Impossible!’ (Robbins, Adams, Giordano), the ambitious scientist’s fall from grace is completed when he infects his fiancÃ©e Francine Lee with his mutated curse and forces the Dark Knight into an horrific choiceâ€¦

One last treat here is the cover to Giant Batman #228: another spectacular visual feast from Swan & Anderson which ends this marvellous meander through memory lane in perfect style.

With the game-changing classics in this volume, Batman finally shed his alien-bashing Boy Scout silliness and returned to his original defining concept as a grim relentless avenger of injustice. The next few years would see the hero rise to unparalleled heights of quality so stay tuned: the very best is just around the cornerâ€¦ that dark, dark cornerâ€¦
Â© 1969, 1970, 1971, 2011 DC Comics. All rights reserved.

April 24, 2013April 23, 2013

Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter volume 2

By Jack Miller & Joe Certa & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1368-8

As the 1950’s opened, comicbook superheroes were in a steep decline, giving way to a steady stream of genre-based he-men and â€œOrdinary Joesâ€ in extraordinary circumstances.

By the time the â€œRed-baitingâ€, witch-hunting Senate hearings and media investigations into causes of juvenile delinquency had finished, the industry was further depleted by the excision of any kind of reference to mature themes or content. The self-imposed Comics Code Authority took all the hard edges out of the industry, banning horror and crime comics whilst leaving their ghostly, sanitised anodyne shades to inhabit the remaining adventure, western, war and fantasy titles that remained.

American comics could have the bowdlerised concept of evil and felonious conduct but not the simplest kind of repercussion: a world where mad scientists plotted to conquer humanity without killing anybody, and cowboys shot guns out of opponents’ hands and severed gun-belts with a well-aimed bullet, without ever drawing bloodâ€¦

Moreover no civil or government official or public servant could be depicted as anything other than a saintâ€¦

With corruption, venality and menace removed from the equation, comics were forced to supply suspense and tension to their works via mystery and imagination â€“ but only as long as it all had a rational, non-supernatural explanationâ€¦

Arguably the first superhero of the Silver Age, beating by a year the new Flash (who launched in Showcase #4 cover-dated October 1956), the series depicting the clandestine adventures of stranded alien J’onn J’onzz was initially entitled John Jones, Manhunter from Mars; an eccentric, often formulaic but never disappointing B-feature strip which debuted at the height of American Flying Saucer fever in Detective Comics #225.

Hardly evolving at all – except for finally going public as a superhero in Detective Comics #273 (November 1959) – the police-based strip ran there until #326, (1955 to 1964) before shifting over to The House of Mystery and a whole new modus vivendi, beginning with #143 where he continued until #173, finally fading away during the Great Superhero Cull of 1968-70.

In volume 1 ‘The Strange Experiment of Dr. Erdel’ described how a reclusive genius built a robot-brain which could access Time, Space and the Fourth Dimension, accidentally plucking an alien scientist from his home on Mars. After a brief conversation with his unfortunate guest, Erdel succumbed to a heart attack whilst attempting to return the incredible J’onn J’onzz to his point of origin.

Marooned on Earth the Martian discovered that his new home was riddled with the ancient and primitive cancer of Crime and, being decent and right-thinking, determined to use his natural abilities (which included telepathy, psychokinesis, shape-shifting, invisibility, intangibility, super-strength, speed, flight, vision, super-breath, invulnerability and many others) to eradicate the evil, working clandestinely disguised as a human policeman. His only concern was the commonplace chemical reaction of fire which sapped Martians of all their mighty powersâ€¦

With his name Americanised to John Jones he enlisted as a Police Detective in Middletown and worked tirelessly to improve his new home; fighting evil secretly using his inherent powers and advanced knowledge with no human even aware of his existence.

This second and final Silver Age selection reprints in moody monochrome Detective Comics #305-226 (July 1962-April 1964) and the Manhunter’s entire House of Mystery career (#143-173, from July 1964-March-April 1968), almost all of which were written by Jack Miller and illustrated by the indefatigable Joe Certa.

One of the longest tenures and partnerships in DC comics’ history (although creator records are sadly incomplete), Miller and perhaps Bob Haney produced a wealth of scripts for veteran illustrator Certa, who had previously worked for the Funnies Incorporated comics â€œShopâ€ and all over the industry.

His other credits included work on Captain Marvel Junior and assorted genre titles for Magazine Enterprises (Dan’l Boone, Durango Kid), Lev Gleason’s crime comics, Harvey romance titles and others, whilst at DC he drew nautical sleuth Captain Compass and many anthology tales for such titles as Gang Busters and House of Mystery. Certa also drew the newspaper strip Straight Arrow and ghosted the long-lived boxing legend Joe Palooka. In the 1970s he moved to Gold Key, working on TV adaptations, mystery tales and all-ages horror stories.

This traditional all-ages delight opens with ‘J’onn J’onzz vs. Futureman’ from Detective Comics #305 wherein a cop from the 30^th century followed a Martian lawbreaker back to 1962 and mistook J’onzz for his fugitive quarry. When malign B’enn B’urnzz then aligned himself with ruthless earth criminals, the stage was set for a spectacular super-power showdownâ€¦

In #306 criminals using fantastic robot animals were given an unexpected boost when a blazing meteor sapped the Manhunter’s life force and almost spelled ‘The Last Days of J’onn J’onzz’, whilst a bewildering display of disguises and quick-changes was necessary to save John Jones’ police partner Diane Meade when the detective – ‘Alias Scarface Scanlon’– went undercover to expose a criminal safe-house in #307.

Detective Comics #308 revealed how a visit to a feudal European county found the Alien Adventurer embroiled in a coup and battling ancient magic on ‘The Day John Jones Vanished!‘ after which he foiled an alien invasion whilst wearing the form of a reclusive human as ‘The Man Who Saved Earth’ in #309 and overcame a cunning crook with a shrinking ray in #310’s ‘The Miniature Manhunter’

Vacationing Diane was on JadeIsland when it became the beachhead for ‘The Invaders from the Space Warp’ in #311, but to defeat the uncanny extra-dimensional thieves, J’onzz also needed the aid of friendly alien R’ell and his uncanny talking pet. When the war was over, however, the bizarre Zook was trapped on our world foreverâ€¦

A new era began in #312 as the cute E.T. became ‘J’onn J’onzz’ Pesky Partner’. Zook could change shape, generate extremes of heat and cold and had the mind of a five-year old, but posed a frequent threat to the hero’s secret identity by slavishly trailing him as he hunted crooksâ€¦

The kid learned quickly though and by #313, wherein ‘The Wizard who Conquered J’onn J’onzz’ almost killed the Martian with a stolen magic wand, Zook had adapted to a life of seclusion on Earth as the hero’s secret weapon. He proved his worth in #314 when a shape-shifting Saturnian stole the detective’s identity in ‘J’onn J’onzz vs. John Jones’ and the extra-dimensional ET helped defeat a villain as powerful as Manhunter himself, and again in #315 when his uncanny senses penetrated the various identities of a crooked stage performer who was also ‘The Man of 1000 Disguises’â€¦

Another bizarre meteor transferred all the hero’s abilities to ‘The Bandits with Super-Powers’ in Detective #316, but Zook and an equally Martian-powered Diane proved up to the task of thwarting them, after which J’onzz, Diane and Zook had their hands full dealing with ‘The Challenge of the Alien Robots’ found by ambitious, greedy humanÂ bandit Jasper Dowd in #317

When the terrific tyke took a blow to the head he briefly became ‘J’onn J’onzz’ Enemy – Zook’ but was restored by another bash on the bonce, after which the vacationing police detective strolled through a time warp and into a war of succession in mediaeval Auvergne, restoring rightful ruler Prince Charles to his stolen throne as ‘J’onn J’onzz â€“ Wizard of 1463’.

Back in the 20^th century, #320 saw the detective Jones and Zook solve ‘The Case of the Golden Eagle’ and restore a lost treasure to France, whilst #321 found the Martian and his pal battling the fantastic shape-shifting threat of ‘The Cosmic Creature’, after which an old Batman villain moved from Gotham to Middletown intent on becoming ‘The Man who Destroyed J’onn J’onzz’ in #322.

Professor Arnold Hugo had enlarged his intellect – and cranium â€“ to become a cerebral super-villain whose devices enabled him to steal the hero’s powers. However the wily mastermind had not realised that the ludicrous-seeming pet Zook was privy to his fallen friend’s weaknesses tooâ€¦

In Detective #323 the Manhunter flew solo on ‘The Hobby Missions’ wherein a charity auction for his services was suborned by a vicious criminal seeking lost artefacts which bestowed awesome power, whilst in #324 the hero tackled a bizarre rampaging monster and was trapped in a hideous bestial form, becoming ‘The Beast who was J’onn J’onzz’ until Zook intervened, after which a crook’s time-ray banished the hero to Ancient Greece where he helped ‘The Hero of 500 B.C.’ battle incredible beasts until Zook could rescue himâ€¦

Big changes were in the air at DC and by the end of 1963 Julius Schwartz, who had revived much of DC’s line – and the entire industry – with his modernization of the superhero, was then asked to work his magic with the creatively stalled and nigh-moribund Caped Crusader.

Bringing his usual team of top-notch creators with him, Schwartz stripped down the core-concept, downplaying all the aliens, outlandish villains and daft transformation tales, bringing a cool modern take to the capture of criminals and even overseeing a streamlining rationalisation of the art style itself. The most apparent change to us kids was a yellow circle around the Bat-symbol but, far more importantly, the stories also changed. A subtle aura of genuine menace had re-entered the comfortable and absurdly abstract world of GothamCity.

The â€œNew Lookâ€ Batman debuted in Detective Comics #327 and changed the shape of the industry but as part of the makeover the increasingly fantastic Martian Manhunter was no longer welcome.

In a rare move for the genre at the time, departing Bat-Editor Jack Schiff, who was taking J’onzz with him to his new post, decided to shake up everything and end the era in style so Detective Comics #326 (April 1964) marked ‘The Death of John Jones, Detective’ as the veteran cop was dispatched to investigate the theft of The Idol-Head of Diabolu and discovered that the outrÃ© relic was in fact a terrifying portal to uncountable extra-dimensional horrors.

When it transformed the thief who took it into a deadly menace, it also unleashed a dreadful beast which apparently killed the valiant cop before Manhunter ended the twin threats. However the unleashed Idol-Head was lost and promised to unleash a new menace at every first full moon, so the Manhunter gave up his human identity forever, leaving Middletown and swearing to track down the mystic menace whatever the costâ€¦

Thus the oldest Silver Age superhero moved over to House of Mystery (from #143, June 1964, and finally getting his to feature on covers) where, in keeping with the title and context of his new home, he became a wandering monster-hunter.

But don’t panic, chums, Zook came with himâ€¦

J’onnz’ adventures began as the Idol disgorged ‘The Giant-Maker’, a beast which transformed men – and poor Zook – into rampaging colossi and freed the wicked wizard Malador from millennia of bondage until the Manhunter stopped the dual dangers, whilst one full moon later in HoM #144 the peripatetic head opened a voracious space warp which sucked people into ‘The Weird World of Gilgana’ until J’onnz plunged in to seal the breach.

Issue #145 revealed the ‘Secret of the Purple People’ when the Idol allowed the metamorphic Venomee to ravage Egypt until Zook and the Martian stopped them, whilst #146 saw the wanderers find and lose the Diabolu head to fantastic cat-beast Aroo but still save Earth from the life-sucking, monstrous Chulko in ‘The Doom Shadow’â€¦

In #147 the Idol vomited forth living, malevolent musical instruments who mesmerised humans as ‘The Orchestra of Doom!’, whilst #148 unleashed ‘The Beings in the Color Rings’ which warped physical reality in ghastly ways.

An unwary beachcomber became ‘The Man-Thing that Unearthed Secrets’ in #149, changing into a succession of incredible creatures and compulsively retrieving lost mystic artefacts, whilst in #150 an artist’s brushes were ensorcelled and permitted the creation of ‘The Supernatural Masterpieces!’ with calamitous resultsâ€¦

‘The Doom from Two Worlds’ split J’onzz and Zook as the Manhunter battled horrors in a trans-dimensional nightmare world whilst his pal was left to defend Earth from a rapacious fire-demon, following which HoM #152 ‘Iwangis â€“ Creature King’ saw a bestial stone giant lead an army of monsters against humanityâ€¦

There was a brief busman’s holiday in #153 when Professor Hugo again reared his outlandish, oversized head to awaken and enslave ‘The Giants Who Slept 1,000,000 Years’ for an orgy of destruction and profit, whilst in #154 convict Orry Kane used a stolen magic looking-glass to create ‘The Mirror Martian Manhunter’ – a distorted, devilish doppelganger which needed the Manhunter to exercise his wits as well as his powers to exorciseâ€¦

The Idol-Head of Diabolu returned in #155 unleashing ‘The Giant Genie of Gensu’ to grant the wishes of evil men, but comicbook fashions were changing again and the Manhunter was about to be relegated to a B-Feature once moreâ€¦

The entire world was going crazy for costumed crusaders in the mid-Sixties, and every comicbook publisher was keenly seeking new ways to repackage an extremely exciting yet intrinsically limited concept. Perhaps its ultimate expression came with the creation of teen-aged everyman Robby Reed who battled crime and disaster in his little town with the aid of a fantastic wonder-tool in Dial H for Heroâ€¦

Taking the lead from House of Mystery #156 (January 1966), the birth of this new and outlandish hero pushed J’onzz into the back-up spot for ‘Look What Happened to J’onn J’onzz!’, a position he maintained until #173 (March-April 1968) when the comicbook disappeared for a few months to re-emerge as DC’s first – of many – modern anthological supernatural mystery titles.

In that truncated tale a sinister snake-beast almost absorbed and consumed the valiant Martian (irony, or what?), whilst in #157 Professor Hugo returned to mesmerise and humiliate his alien nemesis in ‘Manhunter, World’s Greatest Clown!’

House of Mystery #158 ended the long-running and now tired saga by revealing ‘The Origin of the Diabolu Idol-Head’ by plunging Manhunter back in time to Ancient Babylonia where the Martian finally learned how to destroy it, after which J’onzz marked the occasion by returning to his roots and foiling an invasion by ‘The Devil Men of Pluto’ in #159.

Apparently a helpless victim of trends, ‘Manhunter’s New Secret Identity’ debuted in HoM #160 (July 1966) as the hero tapped into the global super-spy fad by taking over the identity of an international playboy and suspected criminal to penetrate the inner echelons of sinister secret society Vulture. Soon he was popping up all over Europe, hot on the trail of mysterious leader Faceless, AKA â€œMr. Vâ€, forced to undertake increasingly suspect tasks and missions which threatened to compromise his ethics and integrity if not end his lifeâ€¦

He was almost immediately rumbled in #161 when ‘The Unmasking of Marco Xavier!’ found him battling Vulture’s top operative Abba Sulkar and only a tragic accident saved his stolen face.

A devious courier mission for Xavier in #162 allowed Manhunter to raid ‘The Lair of Mr. V!’ but Faceless proved to be a truly capable foe who easily eluded him, whilst in #163 an alliance between Vulture and a fugitive Mercurian resulted in the Martian becoming ‘The Doomed Captive!’ until the hero’s brains triumphed over the bad guys’ brawn and scienceâ€¦

In #164 the undercover agent was placed in an impossible position when Faceless ordered a hit on J’onn J’onzz and expected his playboy pal to carry it out. ‘Marco vs. Manhunter!’ offered a bewildering display of the hero’s disguise dexterity, whilst the next devilish ploy of Professor Hugo provided an unwelcome break as the rogue genius used nuclear blackmail and atomic science to transform the hero into ‘The Deadly Martian’â€¦

When the infiltration campaign had begun Zook had been abandoned in America, but he popped up again in #166 after Marco Xavier was dispatched to the States to secure the secret of turning men into monsters in ‘Vulture’s Crime Goliaths!’

On arrival back in Europe, Faceless tasked his playboy pawn with ingratiating himself with the enemy. ‘Marco Xavier, Manhunter’s Ally!’ proved to be a complex and ultimately unrewarding mission after which Zook called J’onzz back to the USA to tackle the alien predations of ‘Thantos – the 3-in-1 Man!’ in #168, before ‘The Manhunter Monster!’ saw the hero infiltrate Mr. V’s secret lab and become stuck in the shape of the gang’s latest horrific bio-weaponâ€¦

Events in the real world were starting to affect comicbooks, and after #170’s ‘The Martian Double-Cross!’ saw â€œXavierâ€ wrongly deduce the Manhunter’s weakness and only narrowly survive his failure, House of Mystery underwent a radical remodelling to display a slightly darker tone. The writing was clearly on the wall for exuberant, angst-free adventurersâ€¦

With #171 Zook was back for good and in ‘The Martian Marauders’ the odd couple battled an expeditionary force of invaders from the Manhunter’s home-world, whilst #172 found the hero mind-swapped and prisoner in the body of a Vulture assassin as the killer wore his alien frame in ‘Manhunter’s Stolen Identity!’

In those distant days series ended abruptly, without fanfare and often in the middle of something – and such was the fate of Robby Reed – but for J’onn J’onzz at least HoM#173 (March/April 1968) managed â€“ admittedly in an abbreviated manner – to wrap up the undercover agent’s mission in the climactic and explosive ‘So You’re Faceless!’

And that was that. The series was gone, the market was again abandoning Fights ‘n’ Tights fiction, and on the horizon a host of war, western, barbarian and horror comics were beginning to emergeâ€¦

Exciting, fun, engaging and silly in equal amounts (heck, even I couldn’t resist a jibe or too and I genuinely revere these daft, nostalgia-soaked gems) J’onzz has been subsequently re-imagined a number of time since these innocent odysseys first ran, but never with the clear-cut, unsophisticated, welcoming charm displayed here.

Although certainly dated and definitely formulaic, these complex yet uncomplicated adventures are drenched in charm and still sparkle with innocent wit and wonder. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste nowadays, these exploits of the Manhunter from Mars are nevertheless an all-ages buffet of fun, thrills and action no fan should miss.
Â© 1962-1968, 2009 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

February 14, 2013February 12, 2013

Showcase Presents Young Love

By Robert Kanigher, John Romita Senior, Bernard Sachs, John Rosenberger, Werner Roth & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78116-060-2

As the flamboyant escapist popularity of superheroes waned after World War II, newer genres such as Romance and Horror came to the fore and older forms regained their audiences. Some, like Westerns and Funny Animal comics, hardly changed at all but crime and detective tales were utterly radicalised by the temperament of the times.

Stark, uncompromising, cynically ironic novels and socially aware, mature-themed B-movies that would become categorised as Film Noir offered post-war society a bleakly antiheroic worldview that often hit too close to home and set fearful, repressive, middleclass parent groups and political ideologues howling for blood.

Naturally the new forms and sensibilities seeped into comics, transforming two-fisted gumshoe and Thud-&-Blunder cop strips of yore into darkly beguiling, even frightening tales of seductive dames, big pay-offs and glamorous thugs. Sensing imminent Armageddon, the moral junkyard dogs bayed even louder as they saw their precious children’s minds under seditious attackâ€¦

Concurrent to the demise of masked mystery-men, industry giants Joe Simon and Jack Kirby famously invented the comic love genre with mature, beguiling explosively contemporary social dramas that equally focussed on the changing cultural scene and adult themed relationships beginning with the semi-comedic prototype My Date in early 1947 before plunging into the real deal with Young Romance #1 in September of that year. Not since the invention of Superman had a single comicbook generated such a frantic rush of imitation and flagrant cashing-in. It was a monumental hit and the team quickly expanded: releasing spin-offs such as Young Love (February 1949), Young Brides and In Love.

Simon & Kirby presaged and ushered in the first American age of mature comics – not only with their creation of the Romance genre, but with challenging modern tales of real people in extraordinary situations – before seeing it all disappear again in less than eight years. Their small stable of magazines produced for the loose association of companies known as Prize/Crestwood/Pines blossomed and wilted as the industry contracted throughout the 1950s.

All through that turbulent period comicbooks suffered impossibly biased oversight and hostile scrutiny from hidebound and panicked old guard institutions such as church groups, media outlets and ambitious politicians. A number of tales and titles garnered especial notoriety from those social doom-smiths, and hopeful celebration and anticipation amongst tragic, forward-thinking if psychologically scarred comics-collecting victims was quashed when the industry introduced a ferocious Comics Code that castrated the creative form just when it most needed boldness and imagination. We lost and comics endured more than a decade and a half of savagely doctrinaire self-imposed censorship.

Those tales from a simpler time, exposing a society in meltdown and suffering cultural PTSD, are mild by modern standards of behaviour but the quality of art and writing make those pivotal years a creative highpoint long overdue for a thorough reassessment.

The first Young Love ran for 73 issues (1949-1956) before folding and re-launching in a far more anodyne, Comics-Code-approved form as All For Love in Spring 1957.

Unable to find an iota of its previous and hoped-for audience it disappeared after 17 issues in March 1959 before resurrecting as Young Love again a year later with #18.

It then ran steadily but unremarkably until June 1963 when the experiment and the company died with #38. Crestwood sold up its few remaining landmark, groundbreaking titles and properties – Young Romance, Young Love and Black Magic being the most notable – to National/DC and faded from the businessâ€¦

The new bosses released their first edition in the autumn of 1963 as part of their own small, shy and unassuming romance ring and carried on with it and a coterie of similar titles targeting teenaged girls (for which read aspirational and imaginative 8-12 year olds) for the next fifteen years.

The savage decline in overall comicbook sales during the 1970s finally killed the genre off. Young Love was one of the last; dying with #126, cover-dated July 1977.

This quirky mammoth monochrome compilation gathers the first 18 DC issues (#39-56 spanning September/October 1963 to July August 1966) but, although beautiful to look upon, is sadly plagued with twin tragedies. The first is that the stories quickly become fearfully formulaic – although flashes of narrative brilliance of do crop up with comforting regularity – whilst the second is an appallingly inaccurate listing of creator credits.

Many fans have commented and suggested corrections online, and I’m adding my own surmises and deductions about artists whenever I’m reasonably sure, but other than the unmistakable, declamatorily florid flavour of Robert Kanigher none of us in fandom are that certain just who was responsible for the scripting of these amatory sagas.

Likely contenders include Barbara Friedlander, Dorothy Woolfolk, George Kashdan, Jack Miller, Phyllis Reed, E. Nelson Bridwell and Morris Waldinger but I’m afraid we’ll never really know.

C’est l’amourâ€¦

The heartbreak and tears begin with the introduction of a soap-opera serial undoubtedly inspired by the romantic antics of television physicians such as Dr. Kildare (1961-1966) and Ben Casey (1962-1966), written in an uncomfortably macho â€œme Doctor Tarzanâ€¦ you Nurse Janeâ€ style by Kanigher and illustrated with staggering beauty by John Romita Senior.

‘The Private Diary of Mary Robin R.N.’ followed the painful journey and regular heartache of a nurse dedicated to her patients but fighting her inbuilt need to â€œsettle downâ€ with the man of her dreams – usually a big-headed, know-it-all medic who had no time to waste on â€œsettling downâ€â€¦

The serial opened with ‘No Cure for Love’, a two-part novelette in which the newly qualified Registered Nurse started her career at County General Hospital in the OR; instantly arousing the ire of surly surgeon Will Ames whose apparent nastiness was only a mask for his moody man-concern over his poor patients.

However even as he romanced her and she dared to dream, the good doctor soon proved that medicine would always be his first and only Loveâ€¦

I’m not sure of the inker but the pencils on ‘You’ve Always Been Nice!’ look like Werner Roth in a novel yarn of modern Texans in love that pretty much set the tone for the title: Modern Miss gets enamoured of the wrong guy or flashy newcomer until the quiet one who waited for her finally gets motivatedâ€¦

‘The Eve of His Wedding’ by Bernard Sachs went with the other favourite option: the smug flashy girl who loses out to the quiet heroine waiting patiently for true love to lead her man back to herâ€¦

In #40 Kanigher & Romita asked ‘Which Way, My Heart?’ of Mary Robin and she answered by letting Dr. Ames walk all over her before transferring to Pediatrics, but still found time to fall in love with an adult patient – but only until he got betterâ€¦

Filling out the issue were ‘Someone to Remember’ by Bill Draut which saw sensible Judy utterly transform herself into a sophisticated floozy for a boy who actually preferred the old her, and ‘The Power of Love’ (incorrectly attributed to Don Heck but perhaps Morris Waldinger or John Rosenberger heavily inked by Sachs?) in which Linda competed with her own sister over new boy Billâ€¦

Although retaining the cover spot, the medical drama was relegated to the end of the comic from #41 on and complete stories led, starting on ‘End With A Kiss’ by Mike Sekowsky & Sachs, wherein calculating Ann almost married wrong guy Steve until good old Neil put his foot down, whilst for a girl who dated two men at the same time ‘Heartbreak Came Twice!’ in a tale that was almost a tragedyâ€¦

Mary Robin then cried – she cried a lot – ‘No Tomorrow for My Heart!’ as Will Ames continued to call when he felt like it and she somehow found herself competing with best friend Tess for both him and a hunky patient in their care. She even briefly quit her job for the man of her dreamsâ€¦

The superb John Rosenberger inking himself – mistakenly credited throughout as Jay Scott Pike – opened #42 with ‘Boys are Fools!’ as young Phyllis was temporarily eclipsed by her cynical and worldly older sister Jayne until a decent man showed them the error of their ways. Vile Marty then used unwitting Linda as a pawn in a battle of romantic rivals for ‘A Deal with Love!’ (Rosenberger or Win Mortimer & Sachs?).

With a ‘Fearful Heart!’, Mary Robin closed up the issue by accidentally stealing the love of a blinded patient nursed by her plain associate. When the hunk’s sight returned, he just naturally assumed the pretty one was his devoted carerâ€¦

Young Love #43 opened with the excellent ‘Remember Yesterday’ (looking like Gil Kane layouts over Sachs) in which Gloria relives her jilting by fiancÃ© Grant before embarking on a journey of self-discovery and finding her way back to love, after which the Sekowsky/Sachs influenced ‘A Day Like Any Other’ and ‘Before it’s Too Late’ display the difficulty of being a working woman and the temptations of being left at home all aloneâ€¦

After that Kanigher & Romita ended the affairs by showing the childhood days of Mary Robin and just why she turned to nursing when her childhood sweetheart became her latest patient in ‘Shadow of Love!’

Issue #44 declared ‘It’s You I Love!’ (Kane or Frank Giacoia & Sachs perhaps?) as wilful Chris foolishly set her cap for the college’s biggest hunk, whilst in ‘Unattainable’ Lorna learned that she just wasn’t that special to playboy Gary even as Mary Robin endured ‘Double Heartbreak!’ when her own sister Naomi swept in and swooped off with the on-again-off-again Dr. Amesâ€¦

Sekowsky & Sachs opened #45 with ‘As Long as a Lifetime!’ wherein poor April found herself torn between and tearing apart best friends Tommy and Jamie, whilst ‘Laugh Today, Weep Tomorrow!’ (which looks like Jay Scott Pike & Jack Abel or maybe Win Mortimer) saw tragic Janet see her best friend Margot‘s seductive allure steal away another man she might have loved, before ‘One Kiss for Always’ found Mary Robin the patient after a bus crash cost her the use of her legs.

During her battle back to health, and loss of the only man she might have been happy with, the melodrama finally achieved the heights it always aspired to in a tale of genuine depth and passion.

The captivating Rosenberger’s led in #46 as Maria and Mark conspired together to win back their respective intendeds and discovered ‘Where Love Belongs’, after which Mortimer revealed ‘It’s All Over Now’ for Merrill who only got Cliff because Addie went away to finishing school. But then she came backâ€¦ This surprisingly mature and sophisticated fable was followed by ‘Veil of Silence!’ in which Nurse Robin took her duties to extraordinary lengths by allowing a patient to take her latest boyfriend in order to aid her full recoveryâ€¦

In #47 ‘Merry Christmas’, by Rosenberger, showed astonishing seasonal spirit as Thea cautiously welcomed back her sister Laurie and gave her a second chance to steal her husband, after which secretary Vicky eavesdropped on her boss and boyfriend and almost finished her marriage before it began in ‘Every Beat of his Heart!’(Mortimer).

Mary Robin’s ‘Cry for Love’ started in another pointless fling with the gadabout Ames and ended with her almost stealing another nurse’s man in a disappointingly shallow but action-packed effort, whilst in #48 ‘Call it a Day’ (Mortimer) found an entire clan of women unite to secure a man for little Alice, after which Rosenberger limned ‘Trust Him!’ wherein bitter sister Marta‘s harsh advice to her love-sick sibling Jill was happily ignored, and Kanigher & Romita explored Mary Robin’s ‘Two-Sided Heart!’ after â€œBillâ€ Ames again refused to consider moving beyond their casually intimate relationship.

Of course that couldn’t excuse what she then did with the gorgeous amnesia patient with the grieving girlfriendâ€¦

Young Love #49 opened with Rosenberger’s ‘Give Me Something To Remember You By!’ as Marge prays that her latest summer romance turns into a something more. Waiting is a torment but ‘Your Man is Mine!’ (Roth) showed what’s worse when sisters clashed and Clea again tried to take what Pat had – a fiancÃ©â€¦

‘Someoneâ€¦ Hear my Heart!’ then unselfconsciously dipped into the world of TV as Mary Robin dumped Dr. Ames for an actor and a new career on a medical show. It didn’t end well and she was soon back where she belonged with the man who couldn’t or wouldn’t appreciate herâ€¦

Roth opened #50 with ‘Second Hand Love’ as Debbie dreaded that the return of vivacious Vicky would lead to her taking back the man she left behind, whilst ‘Come into My Arms!’ (Ogden Whitney or Ric Estrada perhaps?) saw Mary Grant visit Paris in search of one man only to fall for another, after which Mary Robin found herself pulled in many directions as she fell for another doctor and one more hunky patient before rededicating herself to professional care over ‘The Love I Never Held!’

She jumped back to the front in #51 and discovered ‘All Men are Children!’ (Kanigher & Romita) when an unruly shut-in vindictively used her to make another nurse jealous, after which Rosenberger delivered a stunning turn with ‘Afraid of Love!’ wherein, after years of obsessive yearning, Lois finally goes for it with the man of her dreams.

Romita then took a turn at an anthology solo story with ‘No Easy Lessons in Love’ as Gwen and Peter travelled the world and made many mistakes before finally finding each other again.

The nurse finally got her man – and her marching orders – in #52’s ‘Don’t Let it Stop!’, but dashing interne Dan Swift only made his move on Mary after being hypnotised! Hopefully she lived happily ever after because, despite being advertised for the next issue, she didn’t appear again.

This abrupt departure was followed by the reprint ‘Wonder Women of History: Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’ (by Julius Schwartz & John Giunta from Wonder Woman #55, September/October 1952), detailing the life of a crusading social campaigner before Roth – possibly inked by Sheldon Moldoff – detailed how a flighty girl stopped chasing husky lifeguards and found a faithful adoring ‘Young Man for Me!’, and ‘The Day I Looked Like This!’ (by Dick Giordano and not Gene Colan) celebrated the day tomboy Judi finally started gussying up like a girl and unhappily discovered she was the spitting image of a hot starletâ€¦

Issue #53 began with ‘A Heart Full of Pride!’ (Sachs) as naive Mib proved to herself that, just like in school, determination and perseverance paid off in romance, before Mortimer detailed how standoffish Cynthia realised how she needed to play the field to win her man in ‘I Wanted My Share of Love’, after which Romita described the designs of Kathy who discovered the pitfalls of her frivolous lifestyle in ‘Everybody Likes Meâ€¦ but Nobody Loves Me!’

Bill Draut illustrated the lead feature in #54 as ‘False Love!’ detailed a case of painfully mistaken intentions as gang of kids all went out with the wrong partners until bold Nan finally spoke her mind, whilst ‘Love Against Time’ by Tony Abruzzo & Sachs showed schoolteacher Lisa that patience wasn’t everything, after which ‘Too Much in Love!’ (Romita) seemed to hint at a truly abusive relationship until Mandy‘s rival told her just why beloved Van acted that wayâ€¦

‘An Empty Heart!’ (Arthur Peddy & Sachs or possibly Mortimer again) opened on #55, revealing how insecure Mindy needed to date other boys just to be sure she could wait for beloved Sam to come back from the army, whilst Sachs’ ‘Heart-Shy’ Della took her own sweet time before realising self-effacing Lon was the boy for her, after which the original and genuine Jay Scott Pike limned the tale of Janie who at last defied her snobbish, controlling mother and picked ‘Someone of My Own to Love’.

The romance dance concludes here with #56 and ‘A Visit to a Lost Love’ (Gene Colan) – a bittersweet winter’s tale of paradise lost and regained, after which perpetually fighting Richy and Cindy realised ‘Believe it or Notâ€¦ It’s Love’ (Abruzzo & Sachs), and ‘I’ll Make Him Love Me!’ (Sachs) showed how the scary Liz stalked Perry until she fell for her destined soul-mate Budâ€¦

As I’ve described, the listed credits are full of errors and whilst I’ve corrected those I know to be wrong I’ve also made a few guesses which might be just as wild and egregious (I’m still not unconvinced that many tales were simply rendered by a committee of artists working in desperate jam-sessions), so I can only apologise to all those it concerns as well as fans who thrive on these details for the less-than-satisfactory job of celebrating the dedicated creators who worked on these all-but forgotten items.

As for the tales themselves: they’re dated, outlandish and frequently borderline offensive in their treatment of women.

So were the times in which they were created, but that’s not an excuse.

However there are a few moments of true narrative brilliance to equal the astonishing quality of the artwork on show here, and by the end of this titanic torrid tome the tone of the turbulent times was definitely beginning to change as the Swinging part of the Sixties began and hippies, free love, flower power and female emancipation began scaring the pants off the old guard and reactionary traditionalistsâ€¦

February 11, 2013February 8, 2013

Showcase Presents Secrets of Sinister House

By Jack Oleck, Frank Robbins, Sheldon Mayer, Robert Kanigher, Tony DeZuniga, Alex Toth, Mike Sekowsky, Alex NiÃ±o, Sergio AragonÃ©s & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-2626-8

American comicbooks just idled along rather slowly until the invention of Superman provided a flamboyant new genre of heroes and subsequently unleashed a torrent of creative imitation and imaginative generation for a suddenly thriving and voracious new entertainment model.

Implacably vested in World War II, these Overmen swept all before them until the troops came home. As the decade closed, however, more traditional themes and heroes resurfaced and eventually supplanted the Fights ‘n’ Tights crowd.

Whilst a new generation of kids began buying and collecting, many of the first fans also retained their four-colour habit but increasingly sought more mature themes in their reading matter. The war years had irrevocably altered the psychological landscape of the readership and as a more world-weary, cynical young public came to see that all the fighting and dying hadn’t really changed anything, their chosen forms of entertainment (film, theatre and prose as well as comics) increasingly reflected this.

As well as Western, War and Crime comics, celebrity tie-ins, madcap escapist comedy and anthropomorphic funny animal features were immediately resurgent, but gradually another of the cyclical revivals of spiritualism and a public fascination with the arcane led to a wave of impressive, evocative and shockingly addictive horror comics.

There had been grisly, gory and supernatural stars before, including a pantheon of ghosts, monsters and wizards draped in mystery-man garb and trappings (the Spectre, Mr. Justice, Sgt. Spook, Frankenstein, The Heap, Sargon the Sorcerer, Zatara, Zambini the Miracle Man, Kardak the Mystic, Dr. Fate and dozens of others), but these had been victims of circumstance: The Unknown as a power source for super-heroics. Now the focus shifted to ordinary mortals thrown into a world beyond their ken with the intention of unsettling, not vicariously empowering, the reader.

Almost every publisher jumped on the increasingly popular bandwagon, with B & I (which became the magical one-man-band Richard E. Hughes’ American Comics Group) launching the first regularly published horror comic in the Autumn of 1948, although their Adventures Into the Unknown was technically pipped by Avon.

The book and comics publisher had released an impressive single issue entitled Eerie in January 1947 but didn’t follow-up with a regular series until 1951. Classics Illustrated had already secured the literary end of the medium with child-friendly comics adaptations of the Headless Horseman, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (both 1943), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1944) and Frankenstein (1945) among others.

If we’re keeping score this was also the period in which Joe Simon & Jack Kirby identified another â€œmature marketâ€ gap and invented Romance comics (Young Romance #1, September 1947) but they too saw the sales potential for spooky material, resulting in the seminal Black Magic (launched in 1950) and boldly obscure psychological drama anthology Strange World of Your Dreams (1952).

The company that would become DC Comics bowed to the inevitable and launched a comparatively straight-laced anthology that nevertheless became one of their longest-running and most influential titles with the December 1951/January 1952 launch of The House of Mystery.

After the hysterical censorship debate which led to witch-hunting Senate hearings in the early 1950s was curtailed by the industry adopting a castrating straitjacket of self-regulation, titles produced under the aegis of the Comics Code Authority were sanitised and anodyne affairs in terms of Shock and Gore, but the audience’s appetite for suspense was still high and in 1956 National introduced sister titles Tales of the Unexpected and House of Secrets.

Stories were soon dialled back from uncanny spooky phenomenon yarns to always marvellously illustrated, rationalistic fantasy-adventure vehicles and eventually straight monster-busting Sci Fi tales which dominated the market until the 1960s.

That’s when super-heroes – which had begun to revive after Julius Schwartz began the Silver Age of comics by reintroducing the Flash in Showcase #4 – finally overtook them.

Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom and a growing coterie of costumed cavorters generated a gaudy global bubble of masked mavens which forced even dedicated anthology suspense titles to transform into super-character books. Even ACG slipped tights and masks onto its spooky stars.

When the caped crusader craziness peaked and popped, superheroes began dropping like Kryptonite-gassed flies. However nothing combats censorship better than falling profits and, at the end of the 1960s with the cape-and-cowl boom over and some of the industry’s most prestigious series circling the drain, the surviving publishers of the field agreed on revising the Comics Code, loosening their self-imposed restraints against crime and horror comics.

Nobody much cared about gangster titles but, as the liberalisation coincided with yet another bump in public interest in supernatural themes, the resurrection of scary stories was a foregone conclusion and obvious â€œno-brainer.â€ Even ultra-wholesome Archie Comics re-entered the field with their rather tasty line of Red Circle Chillersâ€¦

Thus, with absolutely no fanfare at all spooky comics came back to quickly dominate the American funnybook market for more than half a decade. DC led the pack by converting The House of Mystery and Tales of the Unexpected into mystery-suspense anthologies in 1968 and resurrected House of Secrets a year earlier.

However horror wasn’t the only classic genre to experience renewed interest. Westerns, war, adventure and love-story comicbooks also reappeared and, probably influenced by the overwhelming success of the supernatural TV soap Dark Shadows, the industry mixed a few classic idioms and invented gothic horror/romances. The mini-boom generated Haunted Love from Charlton, Gothic Romances from Atlas/Seaboard and from undisputed industry leader National/DC Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love and Sinister House of Secret Love.

The 52-page Sinister House of Secret Love launched with an October/November 1971 cover-date, offering book-length graphic epics in the manner of gothic romances such as Jane Eyre, before transforming into a more traditional anthology package as Secrets of Sinister House with #5 (June/July 1972) and reducing to the traditional 36-page format with the next issue. The format remained until its cancellation with #18 in June/July 1974.

In keeping with the novel enterprise, the dark, doomed love stories were extra-long affairs such as the 25-page Victorian period chiller ‘The Curse of the MacIntyres’ (by Mary Skrenes & Don Heck) which opened issue #1 and recounted how recently-bereaved Rachel lost her scientist father and fell under the guardianship of her cousin Blair. Moving into his remote Scottish castle she readily befriended Blair’s son Jamie but could not warm to the dwarfish cousin Alfie.

As the days and weeks passed however she became increasingly disturbed by the odd household and the family’s obsessive interest in â€œmutationsâ€â€¦

There was even room for a short back-up and the Jane Eyre pastiche was nicely balanced by a contemporary yarn of hippies in love. Undying passion and ghostly reincarnation in ‘A Night to Remember – A Day to Forget!’ by an unknown author, effectively illustrated by John Calnan & Vince Colletta.

Editor Joe Orlando and scripter Len Wein closely collaborated on the Tony DeZuniga limned ‘To Wed the Devil’ in the next issue, wherein beautiful, innocent Sarah returns to her father’s estate and discovers the place to be a hotbed of Satanism where all the old servants indulge in black magic rituals.

Moreover her father is forcing her to abandon true love Justin and wed the appalling and terrifying Baron Luther Dumont of Bohemia to settle an outstanding debt. This grim bodice-ripper tale saw the return of Victorian devil-busting duo Father John Christian and Rabbi Samuel Shulman who appeared far too infrequently in succeeding years (see also Showcase Presents the House of Secrets volume 1 and Showcase Presents the Phantom Stranger volume 2) whose last-minute ministrations saved the day, quelled an unchecked evil and of course provided the obligatory Happy Ever Afterâ€¦

Sinister House of Secret Love #3 was the most impressive of these early issues and ‘Bride of the Falcon’ was a visual feast from Alex Toth, Frank Giacoia & Doug Wildey, as author Frank Robbins detailed a thoroughly modern-day mystery. American proof-reader Kathy Harwood answers one of the Lonely Hearts ads in her own magazine and finds herself in Venice, Italy, trapped on the isolated Isola Tranquillo with the tragic, scarred and lovelorn heartsick Count Lorenzo Di Falco and his paralysed mother.

Something isn’t right, though, and as the wedding day approaches, a series of inexplicable deaths occurs. Soon, the romance-obsessed dreamer realises she is in deadly danger. Luckily, poor but handsome gondolier Roberto has constantly refused her demands that he stop bothering herâ€¦

The gripping psychological thriller is supplanted by prose ghostly romance ‘Will I Ever See You Again’ illustrated by Jack Sparlingâ€¦

‘Kiss of the Serpent’ by Mary DeZuniga, Michael Fleisher & Tony DeZuniga in #4 takes us to Bombay (you can call it Mumbai if you’re feeling modern and PC) where freshly orphaned teacher Michelle Harlinson has taken a job arranged by her uncle Paul.

Dazed by loss and the sheer exoticism of India, she is soon drawn into a terrible vendetta between her gorgeous wealthy employer Rabin Singh and his jealous brother Jawah. But as the American finds herself falling under the seductive sway of Rabin, she uncovers a history of murder and macabre snake-worship that can only end in more death and heartbreakâ€¦

With the next extra-sized issue the title became Secrets of Sinister House (June/July 1972), and Lynn Marron, Fleisher, Mike Sekowsky & Dick Giordano produced the eerie ‘Death at Castle Dunbar’ where modern American Miss Mike Hollis is invited to the desolate Scottish manse to complete a history of Clan Dunbar. However most of the family and staff are inexplicably hostile, even though they are unaware of the writer’s true agendaâ€¦

Mike’s sister Valerie was married to the Laird Sir Alec and apparently drowned in an accident. The author is even more convinced when, whilst snooping in the darkened midnight halls, she meet’s Val’s ghostâ€¦

Certain of murder, Mike probes deeper uncovering a deeply-concealed scandal and mystery, becoming a target herself. However when there are so many suspects and no one to trust, how long could it be before she joins her sibling in the spirit world?

In #6 the transition to a standard horror-anthology was completed with the introduction of a schlocky comedic host/raconteur along the lines of Cain, Abel and the Mad Mod Witch.

Charity offered her laconic first ‘Welcome to Sinister House’ (presumably scripted by Editor Orlando and illustrated by the astonishingly gifted Michael Wm. Kaluta), before pioneering industry legend Sheldon Mayer – who would briefly act as lead writer for the title â€“ replaced romance with mordant terror and gallows humour by asking ‘When is Tomorrow Yesterday?‘ (art by Alfredo Alcala) for a genre-warping tale of time-travelling magic and medicine.

‘Brief Reunion!’ by John Albano, Ed Ramos & Mar Amongo showed a hitman the inescapable consequences of his life, and veterans Robert Kanigher & Bill Draut showed a murdering wife that Karma was a vengeful bitch in ‘The Man Hater’.

Issue #7 began with ‘Panic!’ by Mayer and the sublimely talented Nestor Redondo, who together taught a mobster’s chiselling bookkeeper a salient lesson about messing with girls who know magic, Sergio AragonÃ©s opened an occasional gag feature of ‘Witch’s Tails’ and Mayer & June Lofamia futilely warned a student taking ship for America ‘As Long as you Liveâ€¦ Stay Away from Water!’

Sam Glanzman then illustrated Mayer’s twice-told tale of ghostly millennial vengeance in ‘The Hag’s Curse and the Hamptons’ Revenge!’ before cartoonist Lore Shoberg took a turn at the ‘Witch’s Tails’ to end the issue.

‘The Young Man Who Cried Werewolf Once Too Often’ illustrated by Draut in #8 found a most modern manner of dealing with lycanthropes, after which Maxene Fabe & Ruben Yandoc’s ‘Playing with Fire’ saw a bullied boy find a saurian pal to fix all his problems and E. Nelson Bridwell & Alex NiÃ±o again featured a wolf-man â€“ but one who mistakenly believed lunar travel would solve his dilemma during a ‘Moonlight Bay’â€¦

Secrets of Sinister House #9 showed what could happen if impatient obnoxious neighbours were crazy enough to ‘Rub a Witch the Wrong Way!’ (Mayer & Abe Ocampo), and Kanigher & Rico Rival revealed ‘The Dance of the Damned’, wherein an ambitious ballerina learned to regret stealing the shoes and glory of her dead idol, before Jack Oleck & Rival depicted obsessive crypto-zoologists learning a hard lesson and little else whilst hunting ‘The Abominable Snowman’â€¦

In #10 Steve Skeates & Alcala’s ‘Castle Curse’ saw a family torn apart by vulpine heredity, whilst Gerry Taloac’s ‘The Cards Never Lie!’ saw a gang turf war end badly because nobody would listen to a fortune teller, and a greedy hunchback went too far and learned too much in his drive to surpass his magician master in ‘Losing his Head!’ by Larry Hama, Neal Adams & Rich Buckler.

Following another Kaluta ‘Welcome to Sinister House’, Fabe & Yandoc crafted a period tale of greedy adventure and just deserts in ‘The Monster of Death Island’, after which all modern man’s resources were unable to halt the shocking rampage of ‘The Enemy’ (by persons unknown). More AragonÃ©s ‘Witch’s Tails’ then preceded an horrific history lesson of the 18^th century asylum dubbed ‘Bedlam’ by John Jacobson, Kanigher & NiÃ±o and generations of benighted, deluded exploited soulsâ€¦

Sekowsky & Wayne Howard led off in #12 with the salutary tale of a greedy, ruthless furrier who became to his horror ‘A Very Cold Guy’, after which Oleck & NiÃ±o explored ‘The Ultimate Horror’ of a hopeless paranoid whilst, following more AragonÃ©s ‘Witch’s Tails’, Bridwell & Alcala adapted W. F. Harvey’s classic chiller of ravening insanity ‘August Heat’.

Shock and awe was the order of the day in #13 when giant animals attack a horrified family in the decidedly deceptive ‘Deadly Muffins’ by Albano & Alcala, whereas Oleck & NiÃ±o wryly combined nuclear Armageddon and vampires in ‘The Taste of Blood’, before Albano & Jess Jodloman wrapped everything up with a nasty parable about great wealth and prognostication in ‘The Greed Inside’.

‘The Man and the Snake’ was another Bridwell & Alcala adaptation, this time depicting Ambrose Bierce’s mesmerising tale of mystery and imagination, but the original thrillers in #14 were just as good. In ‘The Roommate’ by Fred Wolfe, Sekowsky & Draut, a college romance is destroyed by a girl with an incredible secret whilst ‘The Glass Nightmare’ by Fleisher & Alcala taught an opportunistic thief and killer the reason why you shouldn’t take what isn’t yoursâ€¦

Issue #15 began with ‘The Claws of the Harpy’ (Fleisher & Sparling), wherein a very human murdering monster reaped a whirlwind of retribution, followed up with Oleck & Romy Gamboa’s proof that there are more cunning hunters than vampires in ‘Hunger’ and culminating with a surprisingly heart-warming and sentimental fable in Albano & Jodloman’s ‘Mr. Reilly the Derelict!’

Despite the tone of the times, Secrets of Sinister House was not thriving. The odd mix of quirky tales and artistic experimentation couldn’t secure a regular audience, and a sporadic release schedule exacerbated the problems. Sadly the last few issues, despite holding some of the best original material and a few fabulous reprints, were seen by hardly any readers and the series vanished with #18.

Still, they’re here in all their wonderful glory and well worth the price of admission on their own.

An uncredited page of supernatural facts opens #16, after which George Kashdan & Don Perlin proffered a tale of feckless human intolerance and animal fidelity in ‘Hound You to Your Grave’, whilst the superb Vicente Alcazar traced the career of the infamous 18^th century sorcerer the Count of St. Germain who proudly boasted ‘No Coffin Can Hold Me’ (possibly scripted by Leo Dorfman?), before Kashdan returned with newcomer Ernie Chan to recount the sinister saga of the world’s most inhospitable caravan in ‘The Haunted House-Mobile’.

Perhaps ironic in choice as lead #17’s ‘Death’s Last Rattle’ (Kashdan & the uniquely marvellous Ramona Fradon) combined terror with sardonic laughs as a corpse went on trial for his afterlife, even as an innocent living man was facing a jury for the dead man’s murder, whilst ‘Strange Neighbor’ by Howard Chaykin and ‘Corpse Comes on Time’ from Win Mortimer told classic quickie terror tales in a single page each.

To close the issue, the editor raided the vaults for one of the company’s oldest scary sagas.

‘Johnny Peril: Death Has Five Guesses’ by Kanigher, Giacoia & Sy Barry was first seen in Sensation Mystery #112 (November/December 1952) and pitted the perennial two-fisted trouble-shooter against a mystery maniac in a chamber of horrors. But was Karl Kandor just a deranged actor or something else entirely?

The curtain fell with #18, combining Kashdan & Calnan’s all-new ‘The Strange Shop on Demon Street’ – featuring a puppet-maker, marauding thugs and arcane cosmic justice – with a selection of reprints. From 1969 ‘Mad to Order’ by Murphy Anderson was another one page punch-liner and Dave Wood – as D.W. Holtz – & Angel B. Luna offered New Year’s Eve enchantment in ‘The Baby Who Had But One Year to Die’, whilst ‘The House that Death Built’, by Dorfman & Jerry Grandenetti, saw plundering wreckers rap the watery doom for their perfidy.

Once again the best was left till last as ‘The Half-Lucky Charm!’ by an unknown writer and artists Gil Kane & Bernard Sachs from Sensation Mystery #115 (May 1953) followed a poor schmuck who could only afford to buy 50% of Cagliostro’s good luck talisman and found his fortune and life were being reshaped accordinglyâ€¦

With superbly experimental and evocative covers by Victor Kalin, Jerome Podwell, DeZuniga, Nick Cardy, Kaluta, Sparling and Luis Dominguez, this long-overlooked and welcomingly eclectic title is well overdue for a critical reappraisal, and fans of brilliant comics art and wry, laconic, cleverly humour-laced mild horror masterpieces should seek out this monochrome monolith of mirth and mystery.

January 23, 2013January 22, 2013

Showcase Presents the Doom Patrol volume 2

By Arnold Drake, Bruno Premiani, Bob Brown & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-85768-077-8

In 1963 DC/National Comics converted a venerable anthology-mystery title – My Greatest Adventure – into a fringe superhero team-book with the 80^th issue, introducing a startling squad of champions with their thematic roots still firmly planted in the B-movie monster films of the era which had for so long informed the tone and timbre of the parent title.

That aesthetic subtly shaped the progression of the strip – which took control of the comic within months, prompting a title change to The Doom Patrol with #86 – and throughout a six-year run made the series one of the most eerily innovative and incessantly hip reads of that generation.

No traditional team of masked adventurers, the cast comprised a robot, a mummy and a 50-foot woman in a mini-skirt, who joined forces with and were guided by a brusque, domineering, crippled mad scientist, all equally determined to prove themselves by fighting injustice their wayâ€¦

Spanning March 1966 to their radically bold demise in the September/October 1968 final issue, this concluding quirky monochrome compilation collects the Fabulous Freaks’ last exploits from Doom Patrol #102 to 121.

The dramas were especially enhanced by the superb skills of Italian cartoonist and classicist artist Giordano Bruno Premiani, whose comfortably detailed, subtly representational illustration made even the strangest situation frighteningly authentic and grimly believable.

As such he was the perfect vehicle to squeeze every nuance of comedy and pathos from the captivatingly involved and grimly light-hearted scripts by Arnold Drake who always proffered a tantalising believably world for the outcast heroes to strive in.

Those damaged champions comprised competitive car racer Cliff Steele, but only after he’d had â€œdiedâ€ in a horrific pile up, with his undamaged brain transplanted into a fantastic mechanical body – without his knowledge or permission…

Test pilot Larry Trainor had been trapped in an experimental stratospheric plane and become permanently radioactive, with the dubious benefit of gaining a semi-sentient energy avatar which could escape his body to perform incredible stunts for up to a minute at a time. To pass safely amongst men Trainor had to constantly wrap himself in special radiation-proof bandages.

Former movie star Rita Farr had been exposed to mysterious gases which gave her the unpredictable and, at first, uncontrolled ability to shrink or grow to incredible sizes.

These outcasts were brought together by brilliant but enigmatic Renaissance Man Niles Caulder who, as The Chief, sought to mould the solitary misfits into a force for good. The wheelchair-bound savant directed the trio of solitary strangers in many terrifying missions as they slowly grew into a uniquely bonded familyâ€¦

Firmly established in the heroic pantheon, the Doom Patrol teamed with fellow outsiders The Challengers of the Unknown in #102, battling murderous shape-shifting maniac Multi-Man and his robotic allies as they planned to unleash a horde of zombies from a lost world upon modern humanity in ‘8 Against Eternity’.

Meanwhile, multi-millionaire Steve Dayton – who had created the psycho-kinetic superhero persona Mento solely to woo and wed Rita, met the outrageous, obnoxious Gar Logan. It was disgust at first sight, but neither the ruthless, driven authority figure nor the wildly rebellious Beast Boy realised how their lives would soon entwine.

Whilst in Africaas a toddler Loganhad contracted a rare disease. Although his scientist parent’s experimental cure had beaten the contagion before they died, it left the boy the colour of cabbage and able to change shape at will. A protracted storyline commenced in #100 wherein the secretive, chameleonic kid revealed how he was now an abused orphan being swindled out of his inheritance by his guardian Nicholas Galtry. The greedy, conniving accountant had even leased his emerald-hued charge to rogue scientistsâ€¦

Rita especially had empathised with Gar’s plight and resolved to free him from the unscrupulous Galtry whatever the costâ€¦

DP #103 offered two tales beginning with the tragedy which ensued when Professor Randolph Ormsby asked for the team’s aid in a space shot. When the doddery savant was transformed into a rampaging flaming monster dubbed ‘The Meteor Man’ it took the entire patrol as well as Beast Boy and Mento to secure a happy outcome.

‘No Home for a Robot’, however, continued to reveal the Mechanical Marvel’s early days following Caulder’s implantation of Cliff’s brain into an artificial body. The shock had seemingly driven the patient crazy and Steele subsequently went on a city-wide rampage, continuously hunted and hounded by the police. Here the ferrous fugitive found temporary respite with his brother Randy but quickly realised that trouble would trail him anywhereâ€¦

Issue #104 astounded everybody when Rita abruptly stopped refusing the loathed Steve and became ‘The Bride of the Doom Patrol’. However the guest star-stuffed wedding was almost spoiled when alien arch-foe Garguax and the Brotherhood of Evil attempted to crash the party and murder the groom. So unhappy were Cliff and Larry with Rita’s â€œbetrayalâ€ that they almost let themâ€¦

Even whilst indulging in her new bride status in issue #105, Rita couldn’t abandon the team and joined them in tackling old elemental enemy Mr. 103 during a ‘Honeymoon of Terror’ whilst the back-up yarn ‘The Robot-Maker Must Die’ concluded the origin of Cliff Steele as the renegade attempted to kill the Surgeon who had imprisoned him in a metal hellâ€¦ which finally give Caulder a chance to fix the malfunction in Steele’s systemsâ€¦

‘Blood Brothers’ in #106 introduced domestic disharmony as Rita steadfastly refused to be a good trophy wife and resumed the hunt for Mr. 103 with the rest of the Patrol. Her separate lives continued to intersect however when Galtry hired the elemental assassin to wipe Gar Logan and his freakish allies off the books.

The back-up section then shifted focus onto ‘The Private World of Negative Man’: recapitulating Larry Trainor’s doomed flight and the radioactive close encounter which turned him into a walking mummy. However even after being allowed to walk amongst men again, the gregarious pilot found himself utterly isolated and aloneâ€¦

Doom Patrol #107 began an epic story-arc which concerned ‘The War over Beast Boy’ as Rita and Steve started legal proceedings to get Gar and his money away from Galtry. The embezzler responded by opening a criminal campaign to beggar Dayton and inadvertently aligned himself with the Patrol’s greatest foes. Already distracted by the depredations of marauding automaton Ultimax, the hard-pressed heroes swiftly fell to the murderous mechanoid and Rita was dispatched to a barbaric sub-atomic universeâ€¦

Meanwhile the secret history of Negative Man continued with ‘The Race Against Dr. Death’ when fellow self-imposed outcast Dr. Drew tried to draw the pilot into a scheme to destroy the human species which had cruelly excluded them both, and the ebony energy being demonstrated the incredible power it possessed to save the world from fiery doom.

In #108 ‘Kid Disaster’ saw Mento diminished and despatched to rescue Rita whilst Galtry’s allies revealed their true nature before ambushing and killing the entire teamâ€¦

â€¦ Almost.

With only Caulder and Beast Boy remaining, the exceedingly odd couple nevertheless pulled a off a major medical miracle to revive the heroes in time to endure the incredible attack of alien colossus ‘Mandred the Executioner’ whilst Larry’s ‘Flight into Fear’ at the comic’s rear proved that Drew hadn’t finished with the itinerant Negative Man yetâ€¦

DP #110 wonderfully wrapped up the Beast Boy saga as Galtry, Mandred and the Brotherhood marshalled one last futile attack before the ‘Trial by Terror’ finally found Gar Logan legally adopted by the newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Dayton, but that was mere prelude to a titanic extraterrestrial invasion which began in #111 with the arrival of ‘Zarox-13, Emperor of the Cosmos!’

The cosmic overlord and his vanguard Garguax made short work of the Fabulous Freaks and with all Earth imperilled an unbelievable alliance was formed, but nor before ‘Neg Man’s Last Road!’ ended the origin of Larry Trainor as the alienated aviator again battled Dr. Death before joining a band of fellow outcasts in a bold new team ventureâ€¦

Unbelievably, the uneasy alliance of the DP with The Brain, Monsieur Mallah and Madame Rouge as ‘Brothers in Blood!’ in #112 resulted in no betrayals and the last-minute defeat of the invincible aliens – and although no rivalries were reconciled, a hint of romance did develop between two of the sworn foes. At the back, untold tales of Beast Boy began as ‘Waif of the Wilderness’ introduced millionaire doctors Mark and Marie Logan, whose passion for charity took them to deepest Africa and into the sights of native witch-man Mobu who saw his powerbase crumbling.

When their toddler Gar contracted dreaded disease Sakutia, the parents’ radical treatment saved their child and gave him metamorphic abilities, but when they subsequently lost their lives in a river accident, the baby boy didn’t understand their plight and blithely watched them die.

Orphaned and lonely, the lad inadvertently saved the life of the local chief with his animal antics and was adoptedâ€¦ making of Mobu an implacable, but impatient enemyâ€¦

Doom Patrol #113 pitted the team against a malevolent mechanoid one-man army in ‘Who Dares to Challenge the Arsenal’ but the real drama was manifesting in a subplot which saw Caulder attempt to seduce the schizophrenic Rouge away from the lure of wickedness and malign influence of the Brotherhood of Evil. The issue also included another Beast Boy short as ‘The Diamonds of Destiny’ saw two thieves kidnap the amazing boy, just as concerned executor Nicholas Galtry took ship for the Dark Continent to find the heir to his deceased employers millionsâ€¦

Issue #114 opened with the team attempting to aid Soviet asylum seeker Anton Koravyk and becoming embroiled in a time-twisting fight against an incredible caveman called ‘Kor – the Conqueror’ whilst in the Beast Boy segment ‘The Kid who was King of Crooks’ saw young Gar turned into a thief in Johannesburg until his faginish abductors had a fatal falling out, after which #115’s ‘The Mutant Master’ pitted the Patrol against three hideous but incredibly powerful atomic atrocities determined to eradicate the world which had cruelly treated them. Things might have fared better had not the Chief neglected his comrades in his obsessive – and at last successful – pursuit of Madame Rougeâ€¦

The comic also included ‘General Beast Boy – of the Ape Brigade!’ wherein a Nazi war criminal was accidentally foiled by the lost wandering Gar. The madman’s loss was the Galtry’s gain however, as his persistent search ended with the crook â€œrescuingâ€ the boy and taking him back to safe, secure Americaâ€¦

The mutant maelstrom concluded in #116 as ‘Two to Get Readyâ€¦ and Three to Die!’ featured the ebullient Caulder save the world from mutant-created obliteration and reap his reward in a passionate fling with the cured but still fragile Rouge.

The wheelchair-bound genius took centre stage in #117 as his neglect drove the team away and left him vulnerable to attack from a mystery man with a big grudge in ‘The Black Vulture’, but it took the whole reunited squad to deal with the grotesque madman ‘Videx, Monarch of Light’ even as the Brain challenged Caulder to return his stolen chattel Rouge. Nobody asked her what she wanted, thoughâ€¦

Tastes and fashions were changing in those turbulent late 1960s and the series was in trouble. Superheroes were about to plunge into a huge decline, and the creators addressed the problem head-on in #119 by embracing the psychedelic culture with a clever tale of supernal power, brainwashing and behaviour modification as the DP found themselves cowering ‘In the Shadow of the Great Guru’â€¦

An issue later they faced the furious Luddite ‘Rage of the Wrecker’ when a crazed scientist declared war on all technology – including the assorted bodies which kept Cliff Steele alive – before the then-unthinkable occurred and the series spectacularly, abruptly ended with what we all believed at the time to be ‘The Death of the Doom Patrol!’

Faced with cancellation, Editor Murray Boltinoff and creators Drake & Premiani had wrapped up all the long-running plot threads as the spurned Madame Rouge went off the deep end and declared war on both the Brain and Caulder’s â€œchildrenâ€. Blowing up the Brotherhood, she then attacked the city until the Patrol removed themselves to an island fortress. Even there they were not safe and her forces ambushed them. Captured and facing death, she offered them mercy if they would abandon their principles and allow her to destroy a village of 14 complete strangers insteadâ€¦

At a time when comics came and went with no fanfare and cancelled titles seldom provided any closure, the sacrifice and death of the Doom Patrol was a shocking event for us youngsters. We wouldn’t see anything like it again for decades – and never again with such style and impactâ€¦

With the edge of time and experience on my side, it’s obvious just how incredibly mature Drake & Premiani’s take on superheroes actually was, and these superbly engaging, frenetically fun and breathtakingly beautiful stories should rightfully rank amongst the very best Fights ‘n’ Tights tales ever told.

Even the mercilessly exploitative many returns of the team since can’t diminish that incredible impact, and no fan of the genre or comic dramas in general should consider their superhero education complete until they’ve seen these classics.
Â© 1966, 1967, 1968, 2010 DC Comics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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