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Post by rberman on Jan 5, 2019 16:45:17 GMT -5
Goliath looks like just the man to fill those giant breeches...
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Post by tarkintino on Jan 5, 2019 17:05:42 GMT -5
JLA #82-83 “The year of the aborted JLA/JSA crossover” (August-September 1970)Creative Team: Denny O’Neil writing, Dick Dillin on pencils, Joe Giella inking. Another solid sci-fi set up, with another "it's about time" attempt to humanize the Silver Age Red Tornado, seeing how Marvel already crossed into that territory with the Vision--an android character that debuted two months after Red Tornado... Well...that was a dark thought... I think Fox could have found ways out of that "mandatory" annual meeting if he desired, but since its inception, the JLA/JSA meetings were so popular, who would just break that apart and risk upsetting longtime fans? ...and outside of the Green Lantern title (GA's showcase / platform), that was becoming tiresome; O'Neil using GA as his alter-ego / sociopolitical mouthpiece was fine, but in terms of development, he should not have received the lion's share of, as if his (GA's) life was just so worthy of such a key focus. Yeah..O'Neil having anyone make such an arrogant, threatening statement was over the top, as if he knew what the cover-all answer to "fixing" humankind was. Visually powerful use of the character--certainly an influence on all future handling of The Spectre in the series you referenced.
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Post by rberman on Jan 6, 2019 0:56:56 GMT -5
JLA #84 “The Devil in Paradise!” (November 1970)Creative Team: Golden Age writer Robert Kanigher substitutes for Denny O’Neil, but Dillin and Giella remain on art. The Story: In a four page in media res prelude, the JLA rescue Nobel chemist nominee Lars Hansun from the Commie goons of The Hundred. At the subsequent Nobel ceremony, the Peace Prize goes to another chemist, Dr. Willard, who has developed a “Pax serum” that turns anyone docile. It’s already been used to great effect on a primitive tribe in Australia! The Flash can’t wait for this serum to be administered to everyone on Earth! The JLA are then summoned to the Australian outback, where one aboriginal tribe has massacred another. The savages attack the JLA too, aided by some sort of magic involving flying skulls and mirror-shields, and then vanish into thin air. Dr. Willard has an island volcano lair (no, really) in which he plans to hide while his “Pax serum” has the opposite of its advertised effect, causing homicidal rage in everyone else in the world. Then he and his fiancee can rule over the empty cities and eat canned food until they die alone, which sounds pretty miserable. Willard’s fiancée Phyllis prevailed upon Willard’s monstrous servant Nether Man to help her escape in a speedboat, but then Willard sent Nether Man in a fighter plane to gun Phyllis down. Flash finds her clinging to driftwood and takes her to the hospital. More on this below in my comments… Phyllis leads the JLA to Willard’s island paradise, where Nether Man disobeys Willard’s command to kill Phyllis, killing Willard instead and then dying himself. The JLA take Nether Man’s act of self-determination as evidence that there is hope for this ol’ world after all. Continuity: Superman and The Flash have to terminate a race because they are endangering military planes and ships, but the race is “to be continued in the November World’s Finest Comics!” (#198 was “Race to Save the Universe!”) Also, issue #85 (dated December, as was issue #86) was a giant “64 pages for 25 cents” which reprinted the original Felix Faust two-parter from issues #10-11, so I won’t be covering it. In the 1970s, Marvel and DC both experimented with a lot of combinations of page count and price to see what the market would bear. My Two Cents: Robert Kanigher’s script is a mixed thematic bag. He bangs the drum of societal ills that O’Neil harps on. Hey, a harp and a drum could be the start of a band... In other ways, Kanigher returns to Silver Age DC tropes. Instead of “superheroes are freaks,” the JLA receive a special Nobel Prize for being awesome and helpful. Everybody loves them! I do wonder why Kanigher put two Nobel-winning chemists in the same issue- one in the first four pages, and one in the rest. It could have easily have been the same guy, and would have been more economical storytelling. Kanigher’s sexual dynamics have not aged well. This issue features not one but two swooning females who just need to be taken in the arms of a manly man—Doctor’s orders! The first woman is Phyllis, Dr. Willard’s fiancée, who takes her comfort from Barry Allen. But he gets busted by his wife Iris, who understandably storms out. The other fainting femme is Black Canary of all people, who is just finding her new life too much and needs a smooch from an obliging Batman. There is about a zero percent chance that O’Neil would have written this scene at all, let alone full of the purple prose captions worthy of a Kirby Young Romance or a Claremont X-Men. But Denny’s not in charge of JLA anymore, so off we go into a love triangle. Kanigher’s Black Canary develops telepathy, which she calls her “SP,” short for “Sonic Power” but also intended to recall “ESP.” Do other writers acknowledge this goofy turn of events? Meanwhile, Kanigher gets an “F’ in anthropology for asserting that aborigines are morally inferior to Westerners. I want to know more about the magical aborigines and their magical mirror-shields, but apparently they were just a sideshow to illustrate the true purpose of the Pax serum. Superman uses a new-to-me interjection: “Shades of Krypton!” And when fighting giant robots, don’t you find that your thoughts turn toward the dystopian satire of George Orwell, just as Barry Allen’s do?
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Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2019 7:26:31 GMT -5
JLA #86 “Earth’s Final Hour!” (December 1970)Creative Team: Denny O’Neil is “Script consultant,” but Mike Friederich wrote it. Art is Dillin and Giella. The Story: Theo “The Zapper” Zappa is a wicked (of course) industrialist who made his fortune on the backs of innovators and now owns a stolen amnesia-gun. A magical alien appears to Zappa, asking for help in replenishing his world’s exhausted supplies of plankton. Zappa uses the amnesia-gun on his guest, steals the alien’s magic wand, and uses it to build a suction-equipped submarine. This begins hoovering up all the plankton in the seas, which Zappa plans to sell to both Earth and the aliens. Aquaman can’t stop it and calls for help from the JLA. Time to assemble and then immediately split into teams! Superman and Aquaman find an underwater plankton-processing plant and deal with Zappa’s magic-enhanced jellyfish. The Flash and Hawkman follow the plankton to a giant spaceship, but they’re unable to get there before Zappa teleports himself and his cargo to the alien homeworld. Batman and the Atom encounter the alien whom Zappa bushwhacked, and he takes them to his homeworld, where they incapacitate Zappa. Superman arrives and lectures a mob of aliens that they’re going to have to get their act together if they expect any plankton to survive in their polluted oceans. Figure it out, people! Superman turns to address the reader directly. Continuity references: Another one-panel ad for O’Neil’s GL/GA series shows that “Aquaman in distress” will have to take a back seat to “road trip to find the real America.” My Two Cents: I feel like O’Neil and Friederich are trying to teach me some sort of social lesson… maybe if I think a little harder I will understand its subtleties... The story structure is very Silver Age. Some of the hero squads actually contribute to solving the problem; others simply have experiences which help readers to understand some aspect of it, and fill some pages. It’s an all-man, all-white JLA that gives little opportunities for racist/sexist faux pas. Blessed are the peacemakers motif: We’re back to superheroes being objects of adulation rather than outcasts. Everybody loves Superman, even aliens whose ecosystem has collapsed. Friederich posits that "open hands raised above head" is a universal peace sign; it will appear in the next issue as well. Superman adds his own touch of "fingers extended in a V" for extra 1960s peacenik flair.
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Post by zaku on Jan 7, 2019 7:34:36 GMT -5
JLA #86 “Earth’s Final Hour!” (December 1970) Is this the story to which they referred in Must There Be a Superman?
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Post by zaku on Jan 7, 2019 7:56:27 GMT -5
Thank you. :-) So, this alien, who had access to advanced extraterrestrial technology, was going around ruining ancient historical Earth artifacts..? Pretty much. DC wanted to basically just revive Hawkman, which featured a winged flying man bashing people with maces and scooping them up in nets. With Julie Schwartz, a devoted sci-fi guy doing the reviving, everything got a sci-fi hook. Hawkman became an alien cop who comes to Earth and studies its past, using the old weapons in battle, despite having a spaceship with far more advanced technology. "A band of killer robots armed with powerful lasers is robbing a bank! I am sure that this precious and irreplaceable ancient gladius of the Roman Empire, made fragile by the passing of time, is the best weapon to fight them! I can't wait to get back to Thanagar to see their faces when I tell them all the advanced police techniques I learned on Earth!"
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2019 9:44:44 GMT -5
I just loved the art in JLA #84 ... and I do remember this panel vividly and I also enjoyed the writings of Robert Kanigher here for making it a different feel from Denny O’Neil here.
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Post by MDG on Jan 7, 2019 10:10:38 GMT -5
I just loved the art in JLA #84 ... and I do remember this panel vividly .... It usually doesn't matter to me, but the art in this thread (which look to be from a reprint) looks a lot nicer than it came across in the original printings, esp. with Giordano inking. Giella's inks can be a crapshoot--sometimes OK, sometimes bad.
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Post by Icctrombone on Jan 7, 2019 10:22:36 GMT -5
JLA #84 “The Devil in Paradise!” (November 1970)The other fainting femme is Black Canary of all people, who is just finding her new life too much and needs a smooch from an obliging Batman. There is about a zero percent chance that O’Neil would have written this scene at all, let alone full of the purple prose captions worthy of a Kirby Young Romance or a Claremont X-Men. But Denny’s not in charge of JLA anymore, so off we go into a love triangle. The kiss between Canary and Batman rings true to me. Many a kiss has been proceeded by a need for comfort and not romance.
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Post by tarkintino on Jan 7, 2019 10:34:40 GMT -5
JLA #86 “Earth’s Final Hour!” (December 1970)Creative Team: Denny O’Neil is “Script consultant,” but Mike Friederich wrote it. Art is Dillin and Giella. Zappa. Perhaps the script consultant was a fan of Mothers of Invention frontman Frank Zappa, hence such a then-unique, single-association name popping up for a character. ...which was BS. Finding the so-called "real America" would--for a superhero--have to take the back seat to the distress Aquaman was referring to. As much as the GL/GA stories were great and important, this title should not have--what I believe to be--breaking a fourth wall of a kind to call out that then-well publicized GL run. Hhahaha! And that bottom panel...what--did the population turn into the "walkers" from The Walking Dead? UGH. I've never bought that kind of pandering in an attempt to make the series' star seem relevant to younger generations. It was no different than 60s TV where fake beatniks or rock bands would show up on sitcoms generally aimed at older audiences, and the fairly conservative/middle American-type lead characters (e.g., My Three Sons, The Donna Reed Show and yes, even Bewitched), would suddenly act as if they are in full understanding of the counter-culture.
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Post by rberman on Jan 7, 2019 10:55:47 GMT -5
I just loved the art in JLA #84 ... and I do remember this panel vividly .... It usually doesn't matter to me, but the art in this thread (which look to be from a reprint) looks a lot nicer than it came across in the original printings, esp. with Giordano inking. Giella's inks can be a crapshoot--sometimes OK, sometimes bad. Yes, my images are from a recently published Bronze Age JLA Omnibus.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 7, 2019 12:27:02 GMT -5
Random thoughts re these ;last couple of issues... tarkintino, wasn't that caption about GL and GA meant to be a criticism of their decision? BTW, as challenged as O'Neil's scripts for JLA were back then, Mike Friedrich's were even worse. Yes, he was a young guy, just starting out, but O'Neil 's "consulting" obviously was nothing more than a euphemism for saying, "Groovy, man." Where was Schwartz? I'm guessing the relevance train was chugging at full speed and since Julie had never bought a ticket, he trusted his new young guns. Plus Friedrich had always been a letter column favorite of Schwartz's. Now, on the other hand, Friedrich was preaching, but what he was saying wasn't entirely wrong. Had Dillin's visuals been more subtle in those two panels about the future of the Earth, his captions might have seemed less like a polemic and more like a melancholy warning. But Dillin was not known for the subtlety of his style.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on Jan 7, 2019 13:59:38 GMT -5
I'm reading along and... this is definitely a rough patch. How many more issues 'till Len Wein takes over?
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Post by tarkintino on Jan 7, 2019 15:11:54 GMT -5
Random thoughts re these ;last couple of issues... tarkintino , wasn't that caption about GL and GA meant to be a criticism of their decision? Oh, I understood rberman's observation; I was talking about the writers trying to justify GL/GA not helping during a crisis because of their tour of America. That's why I always believed any comic deserved the right artist for any particular story, even at the expense of visual continuity from month to month. Even imagining another artist illustrating this, the "future" panel still seems so heavy handed that readers of the time probably found it so way off that it failed to make an impact, sort of like the original Lost in Space TV series projecting a deep-space vehicle of the Jupiter II's class being technologically feasible only a mere 32 years beyond its 1965 debut.
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Post by Prince Hal on Jan 7, 2019 15:18:51 GMT -5
Oh, I understood rberman's observation; I was talking about the writers trying to justify GL/GA not helping during a crisis because of their tour of America. That's why I always believed any comic deserved the right artist for any particular story, even at the expense of visual continuity from month to month. Even imagining another artist illustrating this, the "future" panel still seems so heavy handed that readers of the time probably found it so way off that it failed to make an impact, sort of like the original Lost in Space TV series projecting a deep-space vehicle of the Jupiter II's class being technologically feasible only a mere 32 years beyond its 1965 debut. Sorry, I wrote that poorly. I meant that Friedrich might have been trying to be critical of the heroes' decision, as if he were disappointed in them. And so true re the right artist. It's like having Judd Apatow direct Saving Private Ryan. Just wouldn't work.
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