The Brave and the Bold 69

Glad and surprised I never sold it.

                                       

all reprints

Marvel Collectors Item Classics  7

that is all.

Thanks Farrar !

December 1966

Jumping the gun, (at least stateside) because of commitments tomorrow.

This was another month in which I didn’t buy many comics at all, for whatever reason, though the two I did buy -- Batman 189 and Adventure 353, I remember vividly.

                                   

The Batman issue stayed with me primarily because of the cover, an all-time great. The art on the story itself (by Moldoff and Giella) was not up to the standards Infantino, Giella (and the unknown colorist) established. But that was nothing new on most of the “New Look” Batman issues.

I do remember, though, that the character of Jonathan Crane stuck with me. Clearly modeled on Ichabod Crane of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Crane made more sense as a character than Batman foes like the Riddler and the Penguin, whose alter egos seemed identical in every respect to their costumed selves. In most cases, we never saw them “out of character.”

Crane, however, had another life, as a teacher of all things, and was clearly an angry outsider who had never fit in and was now ready to burst. Because his m.o. was inducing fear by exploiting phobias, he was, even in the less violent and dangerous Silver Age, a foe Batman did not find easy to defeat.

The cover was a better forerunner of the kind of aura the Scarecrow would eventually have as an enemy of Batman’s and of the kind of Batman we’d see appear once O‘Neil and Adams started to tell his stories.

Adventure 353 made an even bigger impression on me. This was a top-notch issue. The blurb about a doomed legionnaire, the creepy design of Validus, and the somber background color (kind of a brownish-purple?) made this jump out at me.

The Dirty Dozen/Magnificent Seven motif worked beautifully. The doomsday scenario was believable, the dangerous villains without a hint of having even a nugget-sized heart of gold among them, Validus excepted, and the heroes a decidedly motley crew. The Legion would have to save the universe sans Brainiac-5 and Saturn Girl, as well as the rest of the Legion. Only Superboy (natch!), old reliable Cosmic Boy, new kid in town Ferro Lad, Sun Boy and the fabulously useless Princess Projectra were left to defend the Alamo against the ravenous Sun-Eater, a Galactus-level antagonist, something unheard of at DC Comics, in a story told on a cosmic scale.

Young Jim Shooter combined the best of Marvel with the best of DC in this finale (I had neither bought nor read the first half) and in a saga that today would have been a 12-issue mini-series destined to be collected in a trade, told a story of heroism, courage, treachery, and derring-do on an epic scale. In a time at DC that even a two-issue story was a rarity, this could have been expanded by two or three issues and would have been even greater.

Still, it was as good as it got in 1966. No muss, no fuss, no merchandise tie-ins, no rapes or mind-wipes, no grim grittiness or painfully self-conscious world-weariness.

These heroes and villains just got the job done. And so did Jim Shooter and Curt Swan.

Great comic.

A new month, a new year so it's Mike's time again...

on sale in January 1967

Only thing I have in physical form from this month is a copy of Captain Atom #85.

-M