WORLD'S FINEST COMICS #206
On sale in August 1971
Cover by Dick Giordano
This one reprints:
“The Secret of the Captive Cavemen” by Bill Finger & Jim Mooney (WF #138, Dec 1963)
“The Creature That was Exchanged for Superman” by Jerry Coleman, Dick Sprang, and Sheldon Moldoff (WF #118, Jun 1961)
“Riddle of the Four Planets!” by Coleman and Mooney (WF #130, Dec 1962)
“The Mirror Batman” by Coleman and Mooney (WF #121, Nov 1961)
These reprints added panels on the splash to identify penciler and original publication date and issue number (writers and inkers listed above obtained from GCD). Young Mike would have considered these reprints—between 10 and 8 years since original publication—to be pretty old, but I did have a basic understanding of where in the history of DC’s publishing these would have landed, having seen the Newsboy Legion reprint date in JIMMY OLSEN. The penciler credit was helpful as I was beginning to gather names and form a rudimentary awareness of differences between styles. As an artistically inclined youth, I knew from comparison between myself and others that some people were “better drawers” than others, but the concept that among professional artists there would be detectable distinctions and different levels of quality was not an immediately obvious conclusion without the accumulation of evidence. Credits helped me to develop that understanding.
Apparently the Superman and Batman related comics seemed like the safest bet for me during this first month of comics buying. Looking over all the comics on sale in August 1971, none of the other covers made a memorable impression on me, although I surely must have seen many of them on the stands next to the ones I did buy (this issue completes the total of four comics I bought during my first month). I’m at a loss to explain why none of the Marvel comics drew my interest. I knew Spider-Man and Fantastic Four from their cartoon shows, which I had enjoyed. I’m positive that I really liked The Hulk (particularly) and Thor (somewhat) from their appearance on the Grantray-Lawrence cartoons (but not Captain America, Iron Man, or Sub-Mariner!). Perhaps it’s just that the Marvel comics I saw didn’t feature enough monsters on the cover. AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #102 did feature “Vampire at Large” with Morbius, but perhaps I didn’t see that one. CREATURES ON THE LOOSE? WHERE MONSTERS DWELL? No memory of being tempted by those, and except for HULK #145, no prominent monstrosities stand out.
The table of contents identifies the theme of this issue as “Adventures on Other Worlds”, all featuring the team of Superman and the Dynamic Duo. This would be my first exposure to the fact that these guys had an ongoing history of teaming up. (Aside: a couple of years prior, my next door neighbor’s dad contradicted my contention that Batman was a “new” hero and Superman was “older”. He made the to-me dubious claim that they had been around for about the same length of time. This would have been my first lesson in the history of comic book publication. )
In “Secret of the Captive Cavemen”, Batman and Robin encounter an alien attempting to shoot humans with his Z-beam, which fires red loops but has no effect. The alien flees into the library, where Batman and Robin overhear him talking to someone—modern humans are not susceptible to the Z-beam. He needs to use it on primitive humans! The alien commits suicide (!?) by a poison pill when the heroes corner him, and his compatriots flee in a space ship that can travel into the past.
Time to visit Professor Carter Nichols (see
shaxper &
Hoosier X ’s
Batman review thread, now playing in this forum!) for an assist with time travel, with Superman scheduled to join him once the workday is over!
The World’s Finest team battles some cavemen, then become friends with the tribe right when the aliens return to take captives. The heroes tear up their uniforms and make themselves up to look like shaggy troglodyte versions of themselves to blend in. The costumes mark them as “leaders” of the tribe to the aliens, whose Z-beam saps free will…except, of course, modern men like the World’s Finest, who fake being mentally subdued.
The slaves are transported to the aliens’ home planet to be put to work. Their task? Mining drakkium, an ore that affects the aliens like Kryptonite, hence their inability to mine it themselves. Once refined, the drakkium is safe, it’s the raw ore that they fear.
The planet’s red sun leaves Superman de-powered, and when the aliens realize the World’s Finest aren’t really mind-controlled, the command the cavemen to attack them.
The problem is easily solved when Superman commandeers the Z-Beam himself and re-instructs the cavemen. It turns out these aliens are rebels attempting to overthrow their rightful government. The complicated plan? Expose the government aliens to raw Drakkium ore to kill them, then send the refined ore—which is equally deadly to humans—to Earth, and conquer our own planet, as well!
The heroes defeat the plan, using raw Drakkium to render the rebels unconscious, saving them before they die, of course. The good government aliens bury all drakkium in the sea, and the trio returns to their own time, with Superman captured in the “collapsible time-box” Batman had on hand to return to Professor Nichols’ lab!
Next up is “The Creature That Was Exchanged for Superman”, and the split splash page previews the premise: Superman is transported to some other space-time dimension where he battles a goofy orange alien with a snout like a saw blade, while an identical and invulnerable alien takes his place on earth, defying the attempts of Batman and Robin to combat it.
The transfer occurs while the WF Team are campaigning to “Help the Heart Fund” in a banner-bedecked Batmobile:
The Dynamic Duo are incapable of restraining the apparently dangerous monster, who appears to be seeking out something with the aid of his light-emitting belt device. It burrows underground, giving Batman an idea of trapping it when it attempts to emerge. Robin has insightfully guessed that Superman has been swapped over to the creature’s world of origin, where a different variety of aliens attempts to restrain Superman, giving their creature time to complete its mission before swapping the two again with their exchange machine.
Superman’s invulnerable to their weapons but his powers are altered here: his heat vision becomes frost vision, and his flight is uncontrollable. Use of any power is, therefore, very risky, but a runaway vehicle makes the attempt necessary; his super-breath, though, is
flame breath! Fortunately for his conscience, the aliens’ technology is quite advanced, and they didn’t need his help!
Seeing the threat Superman presents, the natives share another piece of the puzzle: the space-time exchange ray was stolen by “Vathgar”, and they presume it was done to bring this deadly alien Superman to their world to help him conquer it!
Superman reasons with him, and meets other
Skran, the species of beast that has taken his place on Earth. These animals are harmless, but Vanthgar has stolen two. With one on Earth, the other must be with Vanthgar, and Superman’s unaffected super-hearing will allow him to track it…once he’s learned to control his wobbly flying powers!
On Earth, the Skran is gobbling iron ore, and defeats Batman’s attempts to capture it, being apparently as invulnerable as Superman, and capable of changing a cascade of water released from the dam into steam. It’s acquired new, strange powers from eating the iron ore!
On Xeron, Superman has mastered his distorted powers, and battles Vathgar’s other Skarn, also empowered from eating iron ore (which is extremely rare there).
Superman’s in a fix: if he allows the exchange to occur (the machine has scheduled it for a particular time and place), then the super-powered Skran currently on Earth will devastate Xeron, without him there to defeat it. But if he doesn’t go to the location to complete the exchange, the deadly Skarn will stay on Earth, imperiling Superman’s adopted home planet! And if Batman and Robin destroy the Skran on Earth, Superman is trapped there on Xeron!
Batman and Robin have deduced the same dilemma as the Skarn approaches the again-visible transport ray, when a barrage of artillery from the military appears to destroy the Skarn before it reaches the ray!
But the smoke clears, and instead, the attack has caused the Skran to split into two identical copies of itself! One of them enters the ray, and back comes Superman! But Superman has a plan already in mind, and retrieves an iceberg to encase the Skarn clone that has remained on Earth. It turns out that his freeze-breath had sapped the Skarn’s powers on Xeron, revealing the vulnerability of the iron-powered beasts. The Skarn left on Earth is now a harmless creature, destined for a new home (in an iron-free cage) at the Gotham Zoo!
In “Riddle of the Four Planets!”, the splash presents Superman battling the Zelaphod, a giant star-fish like alien digging tendrils into the surface of the planet, where they will trigger terrible explosions, while Batman, Robin, and some visiting aliens watch.
The next pages bring us up to speed: the aliens—all different in species—have arrived right with the Zelaphod, which has already burrowed itself outside Gotham. They’re a troupe of traveling entertainers on a sight-seeing trip through the cosmos, and they’ve accidentally brought along the deadly hitchhiker, a beast thought to have been a myth, but one that is reputed to absorb chemicals through its far-reaching tendrils, then destroying the planet it has been leeching from.
Summoning Superman doesn’t help, since he can’t dislodge the Zelaphod. The troupe recalls an antidote immortalized in a poem titled “Sauk”, which (“obviously”) stands for the initial letters of four planets, each of which is home to one of the ingredients cryptically referenced in the poem.
Superman will fly to Sinzar and Antella to get two of the ingredients, Batman and Robin will accompany the troupe to Unxor and Karos for the other two.
On Sinzar, Superman discovers its “waterless sea” in a lost city inside a mountain, and on Antella, the Forbidden Forest, home to weird creatures, finds the “barking tree”, retrieving both of his parts of the antidote.
On Unxor, after filling in for the cast who have been stricken with space measles and performing a show of acrobatic stunts, Bruce and Dick find “the ears that hear the music of morning’s knell”, and on Karos, the “tuft of hair from the mystic Krell”, with Superman coming to their aid to defeat the dragon-like Krell. It is there that Batman discovers the origin of the Zelaphod and takes steps to ensure that another can never be born. Back on Earth, the antidote successfully destroys the monster.
Finally, in “The Mirror Batman”, halting a heist at an antique warehouse leads to a problem for Batman and Robin when Batman falls into a strange mirror and disappears behind the glass, with Robin unable to enter it himself!
Robin heads off to summon Superman, while one of the thieves gets an idea, knowing that Batman has been trapped in a mirror.
Once Superman arrives, Batman is able to return from the mirror world, but in a distorted funhouse mirror shape, and with no recognition of his allies. This disoriented and misshapen Batman demonstrates a variety of unusual powers such as walking through walls (this would have reminded me of what I always thought was the coolest episode of “Adventures of Superman” on tv, when he developed the ability to walk through walls; something about that visual tripped me out as a kid!).
Batman inadvertently damages a suspension bridge, keeping Superman and Robin busy while the thieves steal the mirror, thinking Batman is still trapped inside.
Meanwhile, Batman has returned to his normal shape, but not his normal mind, and is still demonstrating strange powers. Those powers aren’t enough to resist Superman, who brings him back to the warehouse to find the mirror missing!
Fortunately, the thieves have left a trail in the form of microscopic traces of swampland, of which there is little in the Gotham City vicinity. Superman and Batman easily track down the thieves, reattain the mirror, and solve its mystery, turning a hidden knob that opens the gateway to a strange world. Entering it, they all transform into distorted figures and Batman recovers his memory. In a confusing flashback, Batman establishes that he was mistaken for “one of Xanu’s creatures” by a defending alien being there, and that in his super-powered, distorted form, he can pass back through to Earth.
That same defending alien is still there when the World’s Finest team arrives together, and Superman agrees to defeat this “Xanu” in return for a cure for Batman. He does so, and the team returns to Earth, destroying the mirror behind them so that no other passage can take place.
I’d say a sampling of DC’s Silver Age weirdness is essential for a comics reader’s education, and this set of reprints gave me a good lesson. There were
lots of gratuitous battles with strange alien monsters padding almost every story, the plots were complicated, ridiculous, and engaging. Re-reading for the first time in decades, I’m confident that I would have enjoyed the selection of stories back in 1971, but not a single one of these stories had any sticking power in my memory, maybe because none of these throwaway stories was to have any impact on the ongoing mythos I was soon to find myself immersed in. Superman, Batman and Robin never returned to any of these worlds, or referenced their adventures there, so they were forgettable. This issue would settle down to the bottom of my pile of comics to be recalled only as a cover.
MONSTER APPEAL:
While the monsters in these stories weren’t quite up to the level of serious menace I craved, they were creative, varied, and numerous. The Zelaphod was my favorite: the idea of a giant starfish extending tendrils deep into the Earth was a juvenile taste of the kinds of Lovecraftian concepts I’d come to appreciate as I got older.
4 out of 5!
COLLECTING INSPIRATION:
I’d be buying WORLD’S FINEST fairly often, especially since I was soon to learn that this was, at the time, functioning as a Superman-based counterpart to BRAVE & BOLD, rather than a permanent Superman/Batman team title. It didn’t inspire a huge love for DC’s early Silver Age material, though.
2 out of 5!
LORE:
Most importantly, I learned that Superman, Batman, and Robin had had a long-standing relationship. Knowing their status as close friends was an important component of knowing the DC Universe as of 1971. I also met Professor Nichols, who I’d see in other reprints that would make it a little clearer how he was seemingly sending the Dynamic Duo through time.
2 out of 5!
ART-SCHOOLING:
Jim Mooney’s work, which would become very familiar since he was ubiquitous through the 70’s, was never a favorite of mine. This was my first exposure to it, as it was to the work of Dick Sprang. Sprang’s style was old-fashioned, yes, but he’d become one of my favorites in the many reprints of Batman stories that would be featured in the 70’s. His bold, pleasant artwork had an appeal similar to that I felt for Ernie Bushmiller’s on the newspaper comics page. The letterer was uncredited, but Stan Starkman’s work, seen on some of the stories here, would have subtly characterized DC’s Silver Age look for me, with its irregular-shaped caption boxes.
2 out of 5!