|
Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2017 13:26:01 GMT -5
I am in this thread for educational purposes. This is why I do not post much. 😺 Most of my Marvel and DC comics are from the 80's and 90's... I only have the Mike Grell and Mike Baron The Brave And The Bold mini-series about Green Arrow, The Question and The Butcher. I should reread this soon. It's short and I can barely remember it. I think it involves deforestation. I have all of the Grell Green Arrow stuff except for The Wonder Years four issue mini and all of O'Neil / Cowan The Question issues too, as they crossed over a bunch of times. I loved Shado and Dinah; I liked how Ollie took on poachers and other environmental issues. I'm predictable... Those look cool. Added to my want list.
|
|
|
Post by Prince Hal on Feb 13, 2017 17:03:16 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 15 DC’s Multiple EarthsYou may recall that, several Russian novels ago, I was talking about my original encounter with The Brave and the Bold (#57), in which a new character named Metamorpho made his debut. For me, B and B 57 was essentially just an early issue of a new title. (And it was a fun title and character, more Marvel than DC in its flippant, irreverent tone.) Unbeknownst to Hal-Boy, that and the second of the two Metamorpho try-out issues (#58) were a throwback for B and B, because as of its 50th issue, the title had switched to what was then a unique format – super-hero team-ups. The concept of a team-up between two DC heroes was not really on my radar screen at that point. Of course, I had read World’s Finest, which according to the perplexing tagline, teamed “your two favorite heroes, Superman and Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder.” (Do the math.) But those stories really didn’t count as team-ups because those two/three always worked together. It would be like describing Batman and Robin “teaming up.” Just not the same concept. Neither was the JLA, even though one of the bonuses of JLA was the old “let’s split into smaller teams or pairs” routine, which for a few pages anyway, did allow us to see Green Arrow team with Aquaman and J’onn J’onzz, or a team of Superman, the Atom and Wonder Woman. Outside the pages of the JLA, though, those kinds of things just didn’t happen. And you certainly didn’t see two heroes fight alongside each other for 25 pages each. I would soon discover that two (or more) heroes teaming up was a commonplace at Marvel. (I have yet to divulge the story of my introduction to Marvel, which occurred in early 1965 and involved deceit, theft, prevarication and Sgt. Fury. I’ll save that for another time.) As I became more of a knowledgeable comics fan, I began to recognize that among the many differences between Marvel and DC was that DC didn’t do much “cross-promotion.” Stan had a small roster of heroes, and from the get-go, those heroes were clearly shown to operate in a shared universe; in fact, Marvel’s heroes were all based in one place, New York City, less than 20 miles from the Fortress of Halitude. That was striking contrast to DC Comics, where the only cities that shared names with the world I lived in lay beyond the borders of the United States, like Paris or London. (In fact, it got more specific than that in those early days: the Avengers’ mansion was somewhere on Fifth Avenue, the Baxter Building was clearly in Midtown, Dr. Strange lived in the Village, and Spider-Man lived in Queens.) DC’s heroes lived in fictional cities in unnamed states (with the exception of Wonder Woman, who worked in Washington, DC) and they were the only heroes responsible for the extra-legal crime-fighting in those cities. I always guessed at, and sometimes writers put hints of, the counterparts for these fictional cities, but there was never any real consistency in any of that. For the record, I always thought of Hawkman’s Midway City as Chicago (because of Midway Airport); GL’s Coast City as Los Angeles; The Flash’s Central City as Kansas City; and the Atom’s digs, Ivy Town, as New Haven, Connecticut. Star City and Middletown, the hometowns of Green Arrow and J’onn J’onzz, were non-descript. Gotham and Metropolis were just Gotham and Metropolis. Each had such a distinct look and feel that they couldn’t both be New York City even though New York was clearly the city where Batman and Superman, the two DC icons, would naturally set up shop. (Although in the Silver Age, there was no New York City in the DC Superhero Universe.) The geography of these two places was fungible, though. Sometimes they seemed as close as the Twin Cities, sometimes they were not all that close together. Since the DC heroes lived all over the place, it was easier to accept that they rarely ran into each other. In the relatively small setting Stan had carved out for his heroes, however, it was inevitable that they would run into each other. And Stan took things a few steps further. Sure, Spider-Man, the X-Men and DD would show up in the FF in the present-day, but we also got to see Captain America fight alongside Sgt. Fury in World War Two, and even the Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt and the Two-Gun Kid rode together every so often, too. And then there was ”The Wedding of Sue and Reed” in FF Annual 3, (Summer 1965), a superhero extravaganza if ever there was one. I remember when a friend and I chipped in to buy that issue. I didn’t know the Marvel Universe all that well and I remember poring over that delightful Kirby goulash of a cover trying to figure out who all these guys were, and when I finally did, being disappointed that Kid Colt wasn’t in the story. That annual was my Marvel Comics primer, encyclopedia and history book, and I reread it time and again until it disappeared. The frequent encounters between Marvel characters may have been as much a business decision as an artistic one on Stan’s part. With a small stable of titles, Stan needed to interest his readers in everything he and Martin Goodman were publishing. Remember Stan’s constant plugs in the superhero titles to try Millie the Model, including Millie’s cameo in the FF wedding story? The Marvel line wasn’t large enough (nor Goodman willing, I’m sure) to have more than one editor, who also doubled as the primary writer, so it was simple for Stan to weave his characters and titles into a larger story. With no possessive, ego-driven editors to deal with, except Stan, Marvel’s heroes were able to work together (well, after an obligatory fight, of course) and inhabit a more realistic version of our world. From a kid’s point of view, though, it was just so cool that Marvel heroes (and villains) bumped into each other on what seemed a regular basis. In the issues released in May 1964, just to choose a random month, Baron Zemo was the antagonist in both Sgt. Fury and the Avengers; Namor, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were guest stars in the X-Men; and Loki was attacking Dr. Strange in Strange Tales. It was quite the opposite at DC, where team-ups were events; the granddaddy of them all was the JLA’s annual two-issue summer picnic with the JSA, which had sprung from the classic “Flash of Two Worlds” in Flash 123 (on sale in July 1961), which also led to both good news -- three more team-ups between the Earth-One and –Two Flashes would follow – and bad news – it took until Flash 151, on sale in January 1965, for them to happen. So DC wasn’t exactly looking to squander what it thought was an attractive aspect of its universe. Even though it was still really in its infancy, DC’s Multiple Earths concept had been well received and justly celebrated by the readers. At that time, it was still a small cosmos, centered around Earth-One and Earth-Two, with Earth-Three and Earth-A making what were then one-time appearances in 1964 and 1965 respectively, both in the JLA-JSA team-ups. As a kid, I realized that there was something to be said for the rarity of a team-up or a guest appearance by another hero, but if marvel was overdoing it at times, DC was letting a great opportunity to create a more cohesive universe slip away by parceling out these “events” so infrequently. Of course, my fellow 10- and 11-year-olds and I didn’t quite realize that this kind of attitude shouldn’t have surprised us, because DC Comics, like the universe it had created might as well have been the model for Gardner Fox’s Multiple Earths, because DC Comics was sub-divided into separate Earths that almost never ever crossed each other’s orbits. But then we didn’t know from business. We just bought comics. Still, we could have used a guide to the various “Earths” that spun at different speeds in the DC editorial offices. If we’d had one in 1965, it might have looked like this: In order of the frequency of their appearances at Earth-N (Newsstand) and Earth-C (Candy Store), herewith the DC Editorial Earths when I was a kid: Earth-M was Mort Weisinger’s heavily guarded Superman Family Compound, with all the Superman titles, plus World’s Finest, which Mort had pulled into his gravitational field from poor Jack Schiff. Earth-J was Julius Schwartz’s cosmic playground, the home of luminaries like the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, and Hawkman, in addition to the JLA and the new look Batman and Detective. Earth-RK was the (primarily) war-torn neighborhood of Bob Kanigher, but he also helmed his creation, Metal Men, and inexplicably was the keeper of the keys to the wacky world of Wonder Woman. Earth-G was George Kashdan’s Island of Misfit Characters ( Metamorpho, Blackhawk, Rip Hunter, Aquaman, Sea Devils). Earth-B was Murray Boltinoff’s Dr. Jekyll Institute, where the manic ( Jerry Lewis, Fox and the Crow, Bob Hope, Sugar and Spike) shared space with the "serious" ( Challengers, Doom Patrol, Tomahawk). Earth-JM was Jack Miller’s Home for the Chronically Melodramatic (the romance titles) and which, as far as I was concerned, barely existed outside of an occasional barbershop sighting. Earth-S fell to the beleagured, hapless Jack Schiff. It was the sad Death Valley of the DC Universe. It was to this comic book elphants' graveyard that Mystery in Space, Strange Adventures, and Tales of the Unexpected had limped off to die and where the Houses of Mystery and Secrets had been deemed nearly unfit for human cogitation. We readers knew that at orderly DC, unlike at ragtag Marvel, no fraternizing between worlds was allowed.
JLA and World's Finest would have to suffice. However, as Hal Lad would soon discover, within the worlds was a different story...
|
|
|
Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 13, 2017 18:01:51 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 15 DC’s Multiple EarthsIn order of the frequency of their appearances at Earth-N (Newsstand) and Earth-C (Candy Store), herewith the DC Editorial Earths when I was a kid: Earth-M was Mort Weisinger’s heavily guarded Superman Family Compound, with all the Superman titles, plus World’s Finest, which Mort had pulled into his gravitational field from poor Jack Schiff. Earth-J was Julius Schwartz’s cosmic playground, the home of luminaries like the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, and Hawkman, in addition to the JLA and the new look Batman and Detective. Earth-RK was the (primarily) war-torn neighborhood of Bob Kanigher, but he also helmed his creation, Metal Men, and inexplicably was the keeper of the keys to the wacky world of Wonder Woman. Earth-G was George Kashdan’s Island of Misfit Characters ( Metamorpho, Blackhawk, Rip Hunter, Aquaman, Sea Devils). Earth-B was Murray Boltinoff’s Dr. Jekyll Institute, where the manic ( Jerry Lewis, Fox and the Crow, Bob Hope, Sugar and Spike) shared space with the "serious" ( Challengers, Doom Patrol, Tomahawk). Earth-JM was Jack Miller’s Home for the Chronically Melodramatic (the romance titles) and which, as far as I was concerned, barely existed outside of an occasional barbershop sighting. Earth-S fell to the beleagured, hapless Jack Schiff. It was the sad Death Valley of the DC Universe. It was to this comic book elphants' graveyard that Mystery in Space, Strange Adventures, and Tales of the Unexpected had limped off to die and where the Houses of Mystery and Secrets had been deemed nearly unfit for human cogitation. We readers knew that at orderly DC, unlike at ragtag Marvel, no fraternizing between worlds was allowed.
JLA and World's Finest would have to suffice. However, as Hal Lad would soon discover, within the worlds was a different story... I'd never looked at the DC/National editorial that way before. Great idea. I'm actually reading Twomorrows book on Don Heck and Heck was asked in an interview why he didn't seek work from DC since they paid so much better than Atlas/Marvel. He stated he did go there at one point, but didn't realize that each editor had his own little fiefdom, so when he didn't get work from one, he didn't realize he should talk to the others.
|
|
|
Post by Farrar on Feb 13, 2017 20:30:03 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 15 DC’s Multiple Earths And then there was ”The Wedding of Sue and Reed” in FF Annual 3, (Summer 1965), a superhero extravaganza if ever there was one. I remember when a friend and I chipped in to buy that issue. I didn’t know the Marvel Universe all that well and I remember poring over that delightful Kirby goulash of a cover trying to figure out who all these guys were, and when I finally did, being disappointed that Kid Colt wasn’t in the story. That annual was my Marvel Comics primer, encyclopedia and history book, and I reread it time and again until it disappeared. I remember being PO'd that that neither the Wasp nor the Scarlet Witch nor Medusa appeared in the story itself. But still, what a cover--probably my all-time favorite from the Silver Age! I got this as a back issue and paid a buck five for this at the collectibles store, best $1.05 I ever spent.
|
|
|
Post by Farrar on Feb 13, 2017 20:43:48 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 15 DC’s Multiple EarthsOf course, I had read World’s Finest, which according to the perplexing tagline, teamed “your two favorite heroes, Superman and Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder.” (Do the math.) ...From a kid’s point of view, though, it was just so cool that Marvel heroes (and villains) bumped into each other on what seemed a regular basis. In the issues released in May 1964, just to choose a random month, Baron Zemo was the antagonist in both Sgt. Fury and the Avengers; Namor, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were guest stars in the X-Men; and Loki was attacking Dr. Strange in Strange Tales.Very true; and also, look at how Stan included insets of the Thing and Thor on the ST cover (and in the very next issue Ben would be brought in as a regular co-star to try and bolster the Torch strip).
|
|
|
Post by Farrar on Feb 13, 2017 21:00:16 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 15 DC’s Multiple Earths... Earth-M was Mort Weisinger’s heavily guarded Superman Family Compound, with all the Superman titles, plus World’s Finest, which Mort had pulled into his gravitational field from poor Jack Schiff... When I was a kid, the great thing about the Superman books was that the same cast of characters appeared throughout. The sense of familiarity, and the notion that these characters didn't just exist in one comic, was quite appealing to me as a young reader. I loved to read the Superboy comic that featured a teenage Lana and Superboy, and then seeing them as adults in, say, Lois Lane and Action Comics. Same for seeing Supergirl in Action and then alongside Superboy in one of her (infrequent) appearances in Adventure with the Legion. That the characters would appear in multiple books seemed rather sophisticated to me back then. Also kudos to Weisinger for giving the Superman comics a consistent look for the covers. No matter who did the interior art--Forte, Papp, Costanza, others--the Curt Swan covers reinforced, in my mind at least, that these separate comics were all connected. Yes, I know after a while Schaffenberger did the Lois covers but his clean style was very similar to Swan's for the covers.
|
|
|
Post by Prince Hal on Feb 14, 2017 10:26:43 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 15 DC’s Multiple Earths... Earth-M was Mort Weisinger’s heavily guarded Superman Family Compound, with all the Superman titles, plus World’s Finest, which Mort had pulled into his gravitational field from poor Jack Schiff... When I was a kid, the great thing about the Superman books was that the same cast of characters appeared throughout. The sense of familiarity, and the notion that these characters didn't just exist in one comic, was quite appealing to me as a young reader. I loved to read the Superboy comic that featured a teenage Lana and Superboy, and then seeing them as adults in, say, Lois Lane and Action Comics. Same for seeing Supergirl in Action and then alongside Superboy in one of her (infrequent) appearances in Adventure with the Legion. That the characters would appear in multiple books seemed rather sophisticated to me back then. Also kudos to Weisinger for giving the Superman comics a consistent look for the covers. No matter who did the interior art--Forte, Papp, Costanza, others--the Curt Swan covers reinforced, in my mind at least, that these separate comics were all connected. Yes, I know after a while Schaffenberger did the Lois covers but his clean style was very similar to Swan's for the covers. So true! It was like being able to tell a MGM movie from a Warner Brothers movie back in the studio days. There was a kind of formality, a seriousness, about "Earth-M" and an internal consistency that really was a harbinger of the kind of attention to continuity that eventually became more of a hindrance than the benefit that Mort made of it. That seriousness of art and tone belied the fact that Mort's stories were aimed at his famous revolving readership of 9-13-year-olds. For me, like you, all of that conferred a sense of importance on the Superman stories. For all the mockery of Mort's approach, his "Earth" relied on a wide variety of stories -- epic adventure, soap opera, farce, melodrama, romance, humor, even animal stories -- that were even more appealing because they occurred to characters we knew so well.
|
|
|
Post by Prince Hal on Feb 16, 2017 15:10:58 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Part 16 DC Silver Age Team-Ups: Earth-RKAs I was saying last time, in the Silver Age DC universe, team-ups were treated as events, with the JLA-JSA get-together we looked forward to every summer being the pièce de resistance. Even so, team-ups did occur on DC’s individual editorial Earths. But on Earths-M and –J, they were generally few and far between and, like the summer extravaganza, presented as rare treats for the readers that DC was good enough to grant every so often. As you might expect, however, team-ups were a little different over on Earth-RK, where everyone and everything (think the oddball Metal Men and the nigh indescribable Wonder Woman) was a bit different. In fact, for a stretch of a couple of years there, from late 1963 through the summer of 1966, team-ups were pretty common in DC’s war comics. But far from losing their special luster, these team-ups did what Stan’s many team-ups had done at Marvel: they helped to create a more cohesive universe and made the characters that much more realistic when we saw that they weren’t alone out there. And of course, the team-ups also made reading the comics more fun because they were less predictable, especially in the days when the next issue of a comic was almost always a surprise. The first Earth-RK team-up I’m aware of happened when Mlle. Marie, who had lost her too brief series in Star-Spangled War Stories with issue 91(April 1960*), co-starred with Sgt. Rock in Our Army at War 115 (Dec 1961). Though her name wasn't mentioned on the cover, she was shown... A gallant gesture from RK to the sophisticated Marie, who had been replaced by a bunch of angry pteranodons and stegasauri chewing men and materiel to bits in the War That Time Forgot. A year or so later, Rock himself popped over to see Johnny Cloud, the Navajo Ace, in All-American Men of War 96 in January 1963, but other than those two instances, it was every man (and underground resistance fighter) for him or herself. But then along came The Brave and the Bold 52 (March 1964). With issue 50, DC had decided to change the format from Showcase-lite to team-ups, formalizing in a specific title what for Marvel had long been simply part of its shtick. (We’ll go into the reasons for DC’s decision and the first few team-ups another time.) After two issues teaming superheroes, DC for whatever reason, turned to Kanigher. He and Joe Kubert produced “Suicide Mission, “a 25-page “book-length novel” that teamed Rock, Johnny Cloud and Jeb Stuart and his Haunted Tank and another DC character, whom I will not mention because I ain’t the spoilin’ type. Anyway, that issue seemed to inspire Kanigher. In an interesting bit of detailed continuity that was rare for both DC and Kanigher, who could make Bob Haney-look like Roy Thomas in his concern for continuity, B and B 52 was immediately referred to (via flashback) in two comics that came out the very next month, Our Army at War 140 and All-American Men of War 102, which in addition featured Mlle. Marie working with Johnny Cloud. Kanigher must have been convinced that these team-up stories could be newsstand gold, and so he released the team-up genie from the bottle; over the course of the next two years, DC’s war books featured over a dozen team-up stories. By DC standards, Kanigher’s ETO became a breeding ground as fertile for team-ups as Marvel’s New York City. However unwittingly, Kanigher was creating a more cohesive “Earth” than DC readers were used to in the early 60s. Cloud would appear in six issues of G.I. Combat between April 1965 and April 1967. And in three of those, Rock also was a featured guest star. You might have thought that DC’s war heroes would be dropping in on Our Army at War, where Sgt. Rock reigned supreme as the flagship character of the war line. But the bulk of the team-ups occurred in the pages of G.I. Combat, where the Haunted Tank had been a fixture since #87 (Feb 1961). Oddly enough, though, these guest appearances/ team-ups were not always mentioned on the cover, which seems to defeat the purpose... Then I checked the sales figures. G.I. Combat was the steady leader by quite a margin among DC’s war books in 1963 (320,000+); 1965 (320,000+); 1966 (255,000+) and 1967 (200,000+)** . I’d’ve thought it would have been Our Army at War with Sgt. Rock, but he never cracked 270,000+. I never would have guessed that the Haunted Tank consistently outsold Sgt. Rock. Obviously if Kanigher wanted to boost interest in his other stars, it made sense to show them off in his best-selling title. Which explains why Jeb Stuart only clank-clanked over to fight alongside Sgt. Rock in OAAW twice, while Rock dropped in on Jeb Stuart in eight issues. If any title could have used the sales boost a guest star might give, it would have been AAMW, where Johnny Cloud had been the lead feature since #82 (September 1960). The title would be cancelled in July 1966 with issue 117, but Kanigher continued to use Cloud as a frequent guest star, I assume trying to gin up interest in him among the readers of OAAW and G.I. Combat. In any event, Johnny Cloud and Jeb Stuart ran into each other so often -- sometimes literally --... that you might almost have thought that Kanigher was trying to see if he could create a team out of them. (A foreshadowing of the Losers?) Two of those appearances (120, August 1966 and 124, April 1967) came in the wake of the cancellation of AAMW, which left Johnny grounded and homeless. In the latter issue, Cloud actually appeared twice, as the guest star in the first story and flying solo in the second. But even that possible back-up slot never materialized. (Keep in mind that Kanigher, like Weisinger, often used reprints as back-ups. Using new Cloud stories would have meant spending money.) Johnny showed up once more a couple of years later in OAAW 191 (January 1968) with Sgt. Rock (and Unit 3). I’m guessing RK had a soft spot for Johnny Cloud and wanted to keep him on everyone’s radar screen despite the apparent lack of interest in him. Aside: I wonder if air war stories, like naval war stories, just weren’t as interesting to most readers as those set on the ground. Enemy Ace didn’t sustain his own title for too long, either. As for DC’s quartet of Pacific Theatre fighters, Captain Storm, Lt. Larry Rock, Gunner and Sarge, they almost always worked solo, but there were a couple of exceptions, which also occurred during Kanigher’s team-up frenzy. Gunner and Sarge met the newest DC war star, Captain Storm, in their own series, in Our Fighting Forces 87. Eight issues later Storm made a cameo in Lt. Larry Rock’s debut as the Fighting Devil-Dog (August 1965). Then in Captain Storm 13 -- sorry, awful cover -- (March, 1966), all four of them joined forces for the first and only time. Of course, as we all know now, Storm would soon be joining Gunner, Sarge and Johnny Cloud as a member of the Losers. Even Mlle. Marie, she of the eight-issue run in Star-Spangled War Stories, dropped in for a few of RK’s couples-only affairs, teaming with the Haunted Tank in G.I. Combat 123*** and 131-132 and with Hunter’s Hellcats (DC’s Dirty Dozen “homage”) in Our Fighting Forces 116-17. The oddest team-up of all was probably the two-parter in OAAW 162-63 (Nov-Dec 1965)that featured Sgt. Rock and, out of the misty past, the Viking Prince, whose run in Brave and the Bold had ended in five years earlier. Give Kanigher credit for doing everything he could to boost sales. I can say that as a reader, I loved the team-ups, not just because they were fun stories, but also because, as I often remind everyone, you were never guaranteed that your favorite comic would be on the comic rack from month to month. G.I. Combat and OAAW were almost always exceptions. But pity poor Johnny Cloud; AAMW was a definite hit-or-miss title. So was SSWS. (Your mileage may have varied.) Thus, seeing the Navajo Ace with the Haunted Tank and the Rock of Easy was a definite treat, no matter how Kanigher decided to team them up. Next time: Earth-M actually had team-ups?* All dates are the on-sale dates, as graciously provided by St. Mike’s Amazing World. (I owe the Newsstand feature alone a sacrificial lamb or two.) ** DC sales figures from Comichron. Sales figures for 1964 are unavailable, but as so many of the team-ups took place in G.I. Combat, it stands to reason that it was still the best-selling war book.
*** Added September 18, 2017. Thanks to Hoosier X! I missed this one!
|
|
|
Post by dcindexer on Feb 16, 2017 18:32:25 GMT -5
For war team-ups, there was also the often forgotten TNT Trio which consisted of Big Al, Little Al, and Charlie Cigar. They debuted in their own feature in G.I. Combat #83. Three subsequent stories followed in #84, 85, and 88 (1961). Three years later (1964) they met Gunner and Sarge in Our Fighting Forces #86. They met again in #92 and #93. www.mikesamazingworld.com/features/character.php?page=appearances&characterid=1067
|
|
|
Post by Prince Hal on Mar 3, 2017 15:35:52 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Team-Ups on Earth-MEarth-Mort was like a long-running TV series with a strong batch of supporting characters. On Earth-Mort, Superman was as ubiquitous in both Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane as they were in his titles -- in Action, even more than in Superman, it seems to me. In fact, the entire Superman line was a workplace series long before “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was.) Occasionally Mort would allow a couple of the other characters in his stable to pop up for a cameo in another Earth-Mort title, but they never truly shared the spotlight. Green Arrow and Aquaman, who belonged to Mort as back-ups in Adventure and World’s Finest dropped in, even appearing on the cover. A Legionnaire or three might too, and even Batman, once Mort took over World’s Finest from Jack Schiff, but at best, they would be revealed only at the end of the story as a deus ex machina. Once in a while, though, a guest star would be involved in a plot full of Superdickery, not Superman's, but the writers' as Robert bernstein did with Aquaman in Lois Lane 12. A little of this story should go a long way... Aquaman played a deus ex machina in Action 272; he even made the cover! However, as you might have guessed, he was disguised as the mysterious Mental Man, and of course, we didn’t know it until the very end of the story. So, not really a team-up, just another example of what could easily have been another title on Earth-M: Superman’s Pawn, (Fill in the Blank). Mort actually seems to have been doing something that seems uncharacteristically unselfish of him as 1961 came to an end. Aquaman (and the entire JLA) had already made a cameo appearance in Superman 149, the classic “The Death of Superman.” Then he showed up in Lois Lane 29 (Nov 1961) and was even featured on the cover as himself (with Green Arrow and Batman), in a classic Silver Age tale about the super-secret “Plan L,” which involves Lois’s kissing the three heroes to transmit a certain strain of Red Kryptonite (It combats the effects of Green K!) to them so that they can rush to the Arctic, where Superman is in danger of succumbing to Green Kryptonite wielded by alien invaders. Along with his regular back-up slot in Detective 297, this meant that the hero formerly known as Arthur Curry was getting quite a bit of exposure. Mort went a step further, including him yet again in a story in Lois Lane 30, in yet another bit of Superdickery employed against Lois, this time involving both Krypto and Aquaman (There’s a pair for you!). With his appearances in Detective 298 and JLA 8, it meant that Aquaman had been in a DC comic six times in about six weeks. Wassup widdat? Well, two weeks after Lois Lane 30, guess what hit the stands? The first issue of Aquaman, of course. Could it be that Mort, who always took credit for Aquaman’s creation, had a tiny soft spot in his notoriously hard heart for the Sea King, who had never had his own title and did his little bit to help him in his debut? It just so happens that the aforementioned Action 272 went on sale just a few days before Aquaman’s first Showcase appearance. Guest stars from other parts of Earth-M were more frequently seen in the Supergirl strip, which ran in the back pages of Action, and they were inevitably members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Again, though, they never truly participated in adventures fighting alongside Supergirl. They were testing her, or in disguise, or needed her to free them from some danger, or were just making “imaginary” appearances in dreams or illusions. The Legion members also popped up here and there in Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, but performed the same function as they did with Supergirl. Nothing rose above the level of guest star. Give Mort credit, though, he was good at knitting together his “Earth” and thus cross-promoting his titles. As a reader, you loved that these characters knew each other and for the most part, were friends (Superdickery aside.) However, in the spirit of true team-ups, Mort did some nice work in the pages of the Superboy strip in Adventure. However, these occurred in the early Silver Age; during the period we were talking about above, Superboy never met or teamed up with other comic book characters. Somehow, Mort persuaded (or bullied) Jack Schiff, who was editing Batman, Detective and World’s Finest, into letting him use Robin in Adventure 253 (Oct 1958). In “Superboy meets Robin,” time-traveling Robin has Professor Nichols send him back to Smallville in the 1930s to try to save Superman from dying in the '50s. The two young heroes actually do fight side-by-side, and not only is Robin successful in doing what he must to save Superman (Surprise!), but when they unmask the villain of the story, it turns out to be a young (if slightly un-continuitied) Lex Luthor. It’s a great little story. Five issues later, Superboy meets the young Oliver Queen, and in this case, is more like the typical Mort guest star than the lead character, acting as a mentor/guardian angel who inspires the unconfident Oliver to eventually become Green Arrow as an adult. Though it didn’t feature the two heroes fighting crime together to the same extent as the Superboy-Robin story had, it was closer to a team-up than most Earth-M stories that featured guest stars. Recommended. In Adventure 275 (August 1960), we got to see the best Earth-M team-ups, “The Origin of the Superman-Batman Team.” Two things: the story apparently flies in the face of the already established origin of these two; and it also seems to violate my own rule that Superman-Batman paring is not a team-up because they always team up. Well, no need to worry about the first problem: it’s taken care of handily. As for the second, it isn’t really a Superman-Batman story. It’s a team-up between Superboy and the Flying Fox, a secret identity Bruce adopts during his family’s heretofore unknown temporary residence in Smallville. I won’t ruin the story if you haven’t read it… and you should, because it’s everything a great Superboy story was: the story of life in a small American town; an Archie comic with danger and mystery; Kings Row with superheroes for you older movie fans; unpretentious, well written, respectful of both its genre and its audience. As with so many stories from the Silver Age, you wish it could have been told over two-issues, just so that the coincidences and plot devices aren’t so strained and obvious, but it’s still a little gem. Next time: Earth-J: Where Super-Hero Team-Ups Are Really Team-Ups
|
|
|
Post by Ish Kabbible on Mar 3, 2017 15:50:02 GMT -5
With all that pre-promotion for Aquaman in Mort's stable of books and possibly being his creator, it's odd that the Aquaman series was edited by Jack Schiff. Guess Mort had his plate full.
|
|
|
Post by MDG on Mar 3, 2017 18:11:31 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Team-Ups on Earth-MEarth-Mort was like a long-running TV series with a strong batch of supporting characters. On Earth-Mort, Superman was as ubiquitous in both Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane as they were in his titles -- in Action, even more than in Superman, it seems to me. In fact, the entire Superman line was a workplace series long before “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was.) Occasionally Mort would allow a couple of the other characters in his stable to pop up for a cameo in another Earth-Mort title, but they never truly shared the spotlight. Green Arrow and Aquaman, who belonged to Mort as back-ups in Adventure and World’s Finest dropped in, even appearing on the cover. A Legionnaire or three might too, and even Batman, once Mort took over World’s Finest from Jack Schiff, but at best, they would be revealed only at the end of the story as a deus ex machina. Once in a while, though, a guest star would be involved in a plot full of Superdickery, not Superman's, but the writers' as Robert bernstein did with Aquaman in Lois Lane 12. A little of this story should go a long way... I recently re-read this in a Superman family Showcase, and, even for 60s Weisinger, this has to be the most elaborate extreme to go to to get the plot going.
|
|
|
Post by Prince Hal on Mar 10, 2017 15:16:27 GMT -5
A Comic Lover’s Memories Earth-J: The Coolest Pad at DC
Before we talk about the team-ups on Earth-J, let’s set the stage a bit. I knew little about artists and writers then, but even I could tell the difference between Batman’s heavy, clunky art and the darkness and claustrophobia of Gotham City and the graceful lines and sunny skies of Earth-J. Compare Sheldon Moldoff’s Gotham -- er, I mean, Bob Kane’s Gotham -- to the Central City and Coast City of The Flash and Green Lantern and you could immediately see the difference between 1950’s America and its 1960’s incarnation. Everything on Earth-J was sleek, from hairdos to automobiles, to furniture, to the. Which was why, to the Princeling Hal, Earth-J was without question the coolest, most sophisticated of all the DC Earths. Every house you saw in The Flash looked “modern” (“mid-century vintage” in the real estate ads now), like Rob and Laura Petrie’s place. Green Lantern and Carol Ferris went out to swanky parties and nightclubs, like you’d see in Rat Pack movies. And Adam Strange’s Rann... with its silhouettes of far-off cities that seemed to decorate every Infantino horizon like delicate filigree, looked nothing like the plywood-and-Styrofoam planets we saw in the Grade Z movies SF movies we watched and rewatched in glorious black and white on Channel 9 and Channel 11. As a young Silver Ager of 10 and 11, I loved the look of these books, but I was frustrated by the reading level and the scientific knowledge I needed just to understand the Mystery in Space, The Flash, and Green Lantern. Not that I saw them all that much. As I’ve said before, I only saw Green Lantern (or Green “Lantrin,” as my friend -- who also called Lois Lane “Louis” -- always said) at my nice cousins’ house. And the first place I saw a copy of Mystery in Space was at my dentist’s office, where I struggled mightily trying to read it before reluctantly returning it to the magazine table when he called me in. I felt as if I were reading something on a way more adult level than any comic I bought. Even so, I was immediately intrigued, in great part because of the stunning cover (I’ve written about it before on these boards), but also because of the futuristic look of the story, and because everything about it was so different from anything else I’d ever seen between two comic covers. Even the name and the logo (like The Brave and the Bold) fascinated me. “Sophisticated” and “adult” are the words that keep coming back to me as ways to describe them. As for The Flash, well, I don’t remember the first issue I ever saw, but I do remember that the first one I bought was #149, which I recall enjoying because of the big role Kid Flash played in it. First of all, “Kid Flash” was such a cool name, so different from any other sidekick’s name I’d ever heard. Plus, my mother and many other adults thought “kid” was a coarse word when applied to a child, which of course was another reason I liked it. It also had a tough sound to it that “Flash, Jr.,” for instance, or “Quickie” certainly wouldn’t have had. Little did I know then that it may have been a throwback to Golden Age names like Kid Eternity and the Tough Kid Squad, as well as Western heroes like Kid Montana, the Ringo Kid and the Apache Kid. I also bought (and loved) Flash 160 a few months later, an 80-Page Giant that created the soft spot I still have in my heart for Johnny Quick. Even as I got older, I didn’t buy The Flash regularly, but I did pick it up on occasion. I think maybe his Rogues Gallery and his adventures were just a tad too neat and non-violent for me. I enjoyed fisticuffs and mysteries and there didn’t seem to be much of either in The Flash. And to be honest, as much as I loved Infantino’s clean look, the flip side of was that it could get a little antiseptic. I liked the grittiness of Kubert more. I never really noticed Green Lantern on the stands, and when I saw this one… at my nice cousins’ place, I tore into it, but had trouble making headway. I wasn’t annoyed, really, just knew I was punching above my weight class, and I respected my cousins’ ability to understand this highbrow stuff. I just figured that, like MiS, Green Lantern would be a comic I’d have to earn the right to read by getting smarter. Now I was crazy about the JLA, which I read whenever I could get my hands on it from the time I was 10. I didn’t know from different editors then, so I didn’t realize that JLA was edited by the same guy who edited the other Earth-J books. But I did know that even if the science in JLA stories was over my head, it was more than made up for by Pier-Six brawls waged by an abundance of superheroes, including the ones I rarely ever saw on the stands. I have to admit that I was spoiled a bit because the first JLA I ever read was this one… I think I must have read it at my cousins’, and really liked it, but I never saw the second chapter. However, I know I bought JLA 31... hot off the stands at Cohen’s Stationery down on the Avenue. The cover grabbed me right away and remains one of my favorite and most memorable covers. (I think I’ve always been a sucker for covers with a black background because of this and Adventure 312.) I can remember reading this as I walked home, and by the time I got to Cumberland Avenure, five minutes from Cohen’s, I was starting to feel as if I were being allowed into a secret comic society where previously hidden or unknown information was being bequeathed to me: the scroll, the official process of nominating heroes for membership, the heroes hanging around afterwards shooting the breeze… it was all so cool. Hawkman even mentioned that he’d previously had adventures with Aquaman and the Atom, which suggested that these comics took place not in individual worlds, but in a far bigger place than I’d imagined. And since I was not to see an actual copy of Hawkman until a few years later, when he was just three issues from cancellation, seeing him in action in JLA was a true treat. One Earth-J comic I really enjoyed, but almost never saw on the stands was The Atom. Another cover etched into my memory is this one, thanks to the vivid colors and definitely because of the weirdness of Chronos’s costume. Looking back, I was never intimidated by the science in The Atom, despite its coming out of the same editorial office, but I’m sure it was because of the inherent whimsy of a tiny character. You just can’t help enjoy all of the outlandish settings: giant phones, giant cats, giant everythings. And the Gil Kane art was so beautiful. You could see every muscle in the Atom’s body tense and release when he sprang from one bad guy’s chin to and crash like a battering ram into another’s solar plexus. Maybe watching a little guy take it to all the tough guys who plagued Ivy Town – and there were always lots of “crooks” in Ivy Town in addition to the occasional super-villain – made him extra likeable to me as a 10-year-old kid younger by a year than his classmates and smaller than virtually all of them. Plus, for a kid who loved history, those great Time Pool stories were a ball. Thaks to Alpheus Hyatt, the Atom met folks like Bne Franklin, Dick Turpin, Henry Hudson, and even Edgar Allan Poe! The Flash was buttoned-down and serious. In Green Lantern the fate of the world, galaxy or universe was forever at stake. But The Atom always seemed to be a down-to-earth kind of guy who had a lot of fun being a super-hero, despite getting into apparently inescapable jams in every issue... I rarely got to see too many of his comics around the old hometown, but whenever I did, I gobbled them up. Apparently, I had developed a taste for whimsy, even though I had no idea of what whimsy meant, or that it even existed. The Atom and the JLA were my portals to the coolest earth of all, Earth-J, where, I would soon learn, the team-ups were as cool as everything else. Next: Earth-J’s Team-Ups Galore!
Kid Hal, 1964
|
|
|
Post by Prince Hal on Mar 30, 2017 17:22:25 GMT -5
A Comics Lover’s Memories Earth-J Team-ups: The FlashOne of the best parts about reminiscing about my early memories about the Silver Age is that I learn so much about the years I’m recalling that I had never had a clue about as a young kid just getting started in comics reading. In those days (I’m talking here 1963-65, when I was 9, 10, 11 years old), distribution was unreliable, my own access to funds and stores was limited, which meant that I would sometimes go months between seeing or buying a comic. Plus, the comics fan “industry” really didn’t exist, so we kids had no clue about what went on behind the scenes of comics. Anything you learned about what went on you had to glean from letters pages and ads for comics. We never for a moment thought that making comics was an actual business driven by numbers on a tally sheet, run by guys who were motivated by profits. We just figured that a bunch of guys were having fun making these and getting them out to us kids. No way was I able to recognize that comics reacted to trends in popular culture, that comics companies copied from each other, that editors were forever throwing out concepts at readers hoping something would drive up the sales figures, and that titles could be cancelled if they failed to sell. I just accepted that whatever comics were on the stands always had been there and always would be, excepting of course when a comic tying in to a movie we all liked came out. (Why there was no comic book of The Great Escape I’ll never understand…) An older reader, though, with the benefit of a wider perspective and a deeper knowledge of the medium would have been aware of those kinds of factors. Now, looking back, I can see deeper into the past thanks to websites like Mike’s Amazing Newsstand (I bow my head to Mike in wonder and awe!) and the many books that have been written about those years. One of my assumptions when I started to dig into the Earth-J (for Julius Schwartz) team-ups was that it was only fitting that the best and essentially only DC team-up stories were done so well there because it was on Earth-J that Gardner Fox had begun the whole Multiple Earths concept with a team-up for the ages in the pages of the now-sacred Flash 123. However, I discovered that it was well before the Earth-One Flash crossed the barrier to Earth-Two that the team-up horse trotted out of the Earth-J barn. In fact, that legendary team-up with Jay Garrick in Flash 123 was actually the third time that Barry Allen had teamed up with another super-hero. And both of the others were brand-new characters! And the first of these adventures holds an even more significant, if unrecognized distinction of being the very first team-up of two DC heroes in the Silver Age.* Just seven issues into his revival, the Flash not only works alongside another hero in this issue, but one who is making his debut, not just in the Silver Age, but e-vah, as we say up in this neck of the woods. Complete with domino mask, the Elongated Man (aka Ralph Dibny) slithered into comic books in the pages of Flash 112 (released in February 1960). The gimmick in the story (and one that would be a staple of many a superhero team-up) is that the Loose-Limbed Lawman is thought to be the culprit in a rash of crimes plaguing Central City. When the Flash captures the Gooey Gumshoe near the scene of one of the crimes, he explains that he’s being framed by the real crooks. Naturally, he and the Flash combine their talents to apprehend the crooks, and a new alliance is formed. Julie must have had a soft spot for the Curlicuing Cop, because he reappeared very quickly, and even “blurbed” on the covers of 115 and 119. In each he’s the co-star of the second story and enlists the help of the Flash. The Molassean Manhunter appears prominently on the cover of Flash 124, in a story in which it is the Flash who reaches out to Ralph for help in defeating Captain Boomerang. By this time, Ralph is essentially a semi-regular in The Flash, showing up every few issues. Perhaps Julie, recalling the success of Plastic Man, was trying to groom the Shimmying Shamus for a shot in his own title, or at least in Showcase or B and B? I know I’ve read somewhere that EM was intended, like the other Golden Age heroes Schwartz had revived and refashioned, to be a new version of Plastic Man, whom Schwartz and his writers didn’t realize was actually a DC property, having come over from Quality with Blackhawk, G.I. Combat and other titles. No matter, because DC had a propensity for heroes who stretched: Elastic Lad had shown up a couple of years earlier and Elasti-Girl was just over the horizon. And a revival of Plastic Man, as we all know, would inevitably occur as well. In #130 it’s a different wrinkle, a unique teaming of EM and Kid Flash. As is his wont, the Puttified Policeman is looking for help from the Flash, but the Crimson Comet is going on vacation and sends Kid Flash in his place. The two relative novices handle the Weather Wizard without too much muss and fuss in this one-of-a-kind pairing. Still wearing his domino mask, though making little effort to separate Ralph Dibny from his EM identity, the Ductile Dick is cover-featured in team-ups in Flash 134 and 138. That would be the final go-round, though, for the Flexible Flatfoot and the Vizier of Velocity. They were an odd pairing, but maybe those work best. The Flash was a crew cut, super-serious type, while EM was a dashing, charmingly egotistical devil-may-care sort, whose hair was always depicted as being wavy and longish -- especially for the early 60s -- who was forced, by dint of his goofy super-power and his sense of humor, to fight crime in a non-traditional style. He was a bit of an odd duck for the stodgier Flash to get used to. Any thoughts Schwartz or DC had of giving Ralph his own title apparently died there, as it would be almost a year before he would appear again. However, B.O. -- as Schwartz was nicknamed for his constant reminder to writers to “Be Original” -- definitely hadn’t forgotten the Slinky Sleuth, as we’ll see next time. Now I mentioned that the Flash had yet another regular team-up partner who also preceded the first appearance of the Flash of Earth-Two. His name might surprise you. It was Wally West, aka Kid Flash. For me, team-ups are better when they rely on their uniqueness, not on their familiarity; ergo, a sidekick doesn’t qualify as a team-up partner -- Batman and Robin, for instance, can’t “team up,” because they always work together. As do Aquaman and Aqualad, Captain America and Bucky, and Green Arrow and Speedy. So what was different about Flash and Kid Flash? When you look through the old Flash issues, you realize that Kid Flash was never a sidekick to the Flash. He didn’t go “on patrol” with him or show up for his many battles with his Rogues Gallery. His adventures were almost all solo outings as the star of his regular back-up strip. As a kid, it always was pretty obvious to me that like most other Earth-J comics, the Flash was aimed at kids older than 9, 10, or 11. The letter-writers were obviously bright, they knew comics, and they had established themselves as important inhabitants of Earth-J. That they were mostly high school kids didn’t matter; Earth-J was for smart, well read, knowledgeable fans, and woe to you if you had sloughed off in science class, because by page four of a Flash or GL story, John Broome or Gardner Fox was making you wish you’d been paying attention when the teacher had been discussing the Aurora Borealis or sub-atomic particles. And right from his first appearance in Flash 110, Wally West was the teenage link with the comic’s older readers, not a tagalong who acted like a dopey kid, but a genuine do-gooder. He solved mysteries and foiled crime in far different milieus than his mentor: drag strips, beatnik pads, high school gang fights, frat house initiations, and the small-town underworld of Blue Valley. Frankly, even Robin couldn’t hold a candle to Kid Flash in those early Silver Age years. Turns out that Kid Flash not only worked alone, but that he didn’t work alongside the Flash until Flash 120, a year and a half after his introduction, which, as an acknowledgement of their separate careers, was actually billed as a team-up on the cover. I’m guessing that the adventure among the Golden Giants must have sold well, too, because Kid Flash returned for another novel-length team-up in Flash 125. (Flash’s third team-up issue in a row, btw…) It was in the next Flash-Kid Flash teaming ( Flash 135) that Kid Flash gets his way-cool “modern” uniform. (Nowadays, it would be called mid-century vintage, I guess.) The Supersonic Stripling appeared more than any other hero as Flash’s partner, including one “very special” issue ( Flash 173) in which he teamed with both Barry Allen and Jay Garrick! It’s obvious that once the sales figures on Flash 123 rolled in, Schwartz knew he had a good thing going, as he took advantage of the cosmic treadmill to team the Flash regularly with his boyhood hero, the Flash of Earth-Two. The Earth-Two Flash was Flash’s co-star just about annually, with six team-ups between 1961 and 1968. Don’t know what it was about the Flash that made him such a bro-magnet, but in addition to the three guys we’ve mentioned, he also became a tried and true buddy to Hal Jordan. In fact, Hal and Barry Allen became fast friends, appearing as teammates seven times, four times in GL and three in Flash. They were perfectly suited for each other, a couple of unflappable sf-oriented heroes with intelligent lady friends and a knack for using brains over brawn to save the world. Their mutual adventures began in GL 13 (on sale April 1962), which features a classic Ira Schnapp-designed cover blurb: “Introducing… A GREAT NEW FIGHTING TEAM.” Flash was so team-up crazy that he starred in two that month, as Flash 129 featured one with Jay Garrick. Like the two Flashes, the Verdant Vindicator and the Red Racer would also team up regularly, twice in ’62, once in ’63, twice again in ’64 and then once each in ’66 and ’67. As I said about a year ago at the start of this entry, I never would have suspected that the Flash would have been part of so many team-ups during his Silver Age career. Oh, as far as I’m concerned, the Flash’s Silver Age, which lasted just about nine years, was also the Infantino Era, stretching 68 issues, from #105 to #174 (less the annuals). Your mileage may vary, but it really doesn’t matter, as the Flash’s penchant for team-ups basically disappeared when Andru and Esposito took over the art and a gallimaufry of writers tried to do what Broome and Fox had done so stylishly for so long. End of cranky old guy rant. Anyway, of those 68 purely Silver Age issues, 22 featured team-up stories; that’s nearly a third of them! I never would have suspected there’d be that many team-ups in a DC comic in the Silver Age. I’m guessing Schwartz saw sales jump whenever the Flash teamed up with one of his many pals. They were to The Flash what purple gorillas were to the rest of the DC line. I only wish he’d thought about having Johnny Quick drop in for a visit. All the poor guy got was one lousy reprint in Flash 161, an 80-pager. My OCD, stats-loving side got the better of me -- feel free to check my math.** KF (8): 120, 125, 135, 149, 156, 159 (which also features Dr. Mid-Nite!), 161, 173 EM (6): 112, 115, 119, 124, 134, 138 GA Flash (6): 123, 129, 137, 151, 170 (also featuring Drs. Fate and Mid-Nite!), 173 GL (2): 131, 143 KF and EM: 130 112, 115 (1960), 119, 120, 123, 124, 125 (1961), 129, 130, 131, 134 (1962), 135, 137, 138 (1963), 143, 149 (1964) 151, 156 (1965), 159, 161 (1966), 170, 173 (1967) *Unless you count various chapters in the three JLA stories in Brave and the Bold 28-30, which I don’t. ☺ ** Yes, I’m a real nerd. Stats am fun. Next time, the other Earth-J team-ups, plus team-ups from the fringes of the DC Universe.
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2017 19:27:37 GMT -5
^^^ Prince Hal ... Most of these stories are among my favorites - about 80%.
|
|