Into the Bronze Age: April 1971 (Part 2-Special Edition!)

This is a bittersweet post, and that touch of melancholy is part of what has made me slow to put figurative pen to equally figurative paper for this set of books.  On the one hand, we are starting a new month, full of the promise of adventure, but on the other, this month also holds the final issue of Aquaman’s solo series, the last solo Aquaman book that would be seen for six years until its brief revival, after which Aquaman would be absent from solo books until the beginning of the very divisive Pozner/Hamilton mini-series in the mid 80s, which, for whatever positive qualities it may have, is still guilty of starting the ‘let’s fix Aquaman’ approach to the character that endured for decades.  It’s a crying shame, especially given the very high quality of this book and the incredible inventiveness of its creative team, SAG.  Nonetheless, life, and comics, go on.

As I’ve mentioned before, the cancellation of this book was made all the more shocking and lamentable because it had much less to do with sales than with internal politics.  It seems that then editor-in-chief Carmine Infantino didn’t much care for Dick Giordano’s style, so, when Giordano desired to leave editing and start inking full time, the head honcho took that as an opportunity to rid himself of the man.  Now, Giordano was very fond of what he had created with Skeates and Aparo, so he offered to continue editing Aquaman freelance, but rather than agree to that or even replace him, Infantino just cancelled the book, despite the fact that it had maintained solid sales!  The Aquaman Shrine has a great interview with Steve Skeates that reveals a bit of the behind the scenes drama.

However unjust the cancellation, it was presented as a fait accompli, and it was a shock to all involved and a major blow for the character.  In fact, I would argue that it is this incident which crippled the character for years to come.  It attached a stigma that his book couldn’t sell, despite the fact that sales had very little to do with the book’s fate.  What’s worse, it robbed the hero of the chance for development and growth during a very important time in comics history, as I’ve mentioned before.  While Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and many others were being revamped and redefined in extremely influential ways, Aquaman is left by the wayside, with only the SAG team’s incomplete efforts to support him.  This is a situation that the character is only very recently starting to overcome, some forty years later.

Yet, not all is doom and gloom.  As promised, I have a special treat for y’all today.  You see, when the book was unceremoniously cancelled, Steve Skeates was left with a half-finished story.  Yet, he was not one to be daunted by such a small matter as a cancellation, and he would eventually finish that story, but do so on the other side of the aisle.  That’s right, in a 1974 issue of Marvel’s Submariner, Steve Skeates would pick up the dropped thread of this Aquaman adventure and finish the tale for Marvel’s own sea king.  I’ll be covering that comic today, in addition to our usual fare.  So, let’s see what this month has in store for us!

If you’re new to this little journey, you can check out the first post to learn what it’s all about.

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Roll Call

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(You can see everything published this month HERE)

• Action Comics #399
• Adventure Comics #405
• Aquaman #56 / (Sub-Mariner #72)
• Detective Comics #410
• The Flash #205 (Reprints, won’t be covered)
• Mr Miracle #1
• The Phantom Stranger #12
• Superboy #173
• Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #109
• Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #137
• Superman #236
• Teen Titans #32

Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.

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Aquaman #56

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“The Creature That Devoured Detroit!”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Dick Giordano
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

“The Cave of Death!”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Dick Giordano
Letterer: Jim Aparo

Here we have one of the all-time great Aquaman covers.  It’s exciting, titanic in scope and promise, and other than the rather muddy colors, is pretty much a perfect composition.  It’s got an old-school monster flick feel, right down to the title, like a 50s sci-fi film…but unfortunately it also bears little in common with the story inside.  Just imagine what could have been, a massive struggle between the King of the Sea and a colossal monster from the watery depths!  Instead, we get an offbeat, if unquestionably interesting, tale.  I imagine I might have been a more than a tad disappointed if that cover had persuaded me to pick the book up off the newsstand, only to find no massive monstrosity within.

Man, Aparo could pack personality into a page!

Instead, the final issue of Aquaman begins in rather simple fashion.  A husband and wife bicker over the minutia that can grow into its own sort of monster in a marriage, but the debate is postponed by the tuning in of a television to the “Warren Savin Show” (interestingly, that’s actually a pen-name that Skeates has used from time to time).  The show promises to feature, of all people, the King of the Seven Seas as their special guest, but it is interrupted by a special report about a massive algae growth on Lake Erie threatening to consume the city of Detroit.

This bumper bloom seems to be caused by a mysterious satellite which is reflecting light onto the city and its surroundings at night, keeping the area in a perpetual daylight that has sparked this overgrowth.  When the cameras cut back to the show, the Sea Sleuth is missing!  The Aquatic Ace has rushed out of the studio to see what he can do about this threat, answering the call to action.

Too bad this is symbolic…

Arriving in Detroit, Aquaman finds the green gunk everywhere and decides to look up an old friend of his, a former police scientist named Don Powers, to try to get a handle on the situation.  Meanwhile, we cut to a strange figure in a garish costume, and we’re informed that this bargain-basement Batman is ‘The Crusader,’ a superhero who is ignoring the growing plight of the city to chase a car theft ring.  We get a nice action sequence as the Crusader jumps the gang he’s been tracking and barely manages to subdue them.

After we see the orange and black clad figure finishes his fight, we switch over to follow Aquaman as he goes to consult his old friend, now a successful businessman and scientist, and the Sea King finds him at his corporate lab, where the fellow is completely unconcerned with the growing green tide swallowing the city, instead bragging about the reduction in crime thanks to the perpetual daylight and revealing that the mysterious satellite is, in fact, his.

During their debate, Powers brings up the Crusader, and Arthur reveals that the League had refused him membership because he was considered unstable and too violent (He’d fit right in today, no doubt!), which is a fun little detail.  When the Marine Marvel tries to take matters into his own hands, Powers and his flunkies jump him, and sadly, you guessed it, Aquaman earns another slot on the Head-Blow Headcount!  Skeates really loved this device a bit too much.

Not again

With the real hero disabled, we watch as Powers slips into his private office and dons the costume of…the Crusader!  In internal monologue, he reveals that he had an ulterior motive for launching the satellite.  His low-light vision is fading, and he’s willing to let the whole city suffer just so he can continue playing costumed crimefighter.  He justifies his selfishness by arguing that the case he’s working on is too big to abandon, and once he solves it he plans to destroy the satellite.  Powers also thinks that this case will be his ticket into the big time, that it will help him prove himself.  Now, just for some perspective, let’s remember that the case he’s trying to crack is no doomsday plot, no terrorist’s master plan, no city shaking scheme, just a car-theft ring.  Priorities man, priorities!

While the Crusader continues his…well…crusade, Aquaman awakens on a park bench, having been dumped there by Powers’ goons, and before he can get back to the lab, he sees a young girl threatened by the growing green goo and rushes into the morass to save her.  He does so without a second thought, putting her life ahead of his own, though the peril of the situation doesn’t entirely come through as well as I imagine Skeates intended.

A bit of a disappointing confrontation, really, and the dramatic title doesn’t help.

On his way back, he discovers a crowd surrounding a still figure on the pavement.  The Crusader lies dead, not felled by an enemy’s bullet or having met his death in the line of duty.  He just tripped over a wire and fell to his fate on the street below, his eyes finally having failed him.  He is the very soul of anti-climax.  When his mask is removed, the Sea King recognizes his friend and things begin to become clear to him.  Rushing back to Powers’ building, the Marine Marvel smashes his way inside, taking no chances, and locks himself inside the control room until he can find the proper switch.  The issue ends with the button pressed, the satellite destroyed, and the menace ended.

The title here, on the other hand, is pitch-perfect.

So, not exactly what one would expect from that cover, is it?  This is a strange issue, but certainly an inventive and intriguing one.  Skeates is doing what he has done all along, trying new things and experimenting with the medium.  The story at the heart of this comic, the contrasting of two different concepts of heroism in the person of two very different heroes, is actually a great one.  It’s still quite pertinent today.  It’s the examination of the perennial conflict, between selflessness and selfishness.  Aquaman’s selfless conduct throughout, abandoning the TV show to help Detroit, putting his life in danger to save the little girl, and even risking who knows what kinds of consequences to destroy the satellite, stands in relatively effective contrast to the purely selfish motives of the Crusader.  That myopic manhunter, for his part, ignores all other concerns in search for his own fulfillment and fame, endangering the entire city, a city that he supposedly protects, in order to continue his callous crusade.  The concept is a fascinating one, yet Skeates’ treatment thereof isn’t entirely successful.

Remember these images.

The story is far too rushed.  We meet the Crusader and see his futile death in just a few pages.  He’s not given the time to really develop the comparison appropriately, and compressing the setup and payoff into one book renders Aquaman’s contributions fairly slight.  Part of the trouble is that the threat to the city doesn’t ever quite seem tremendous enough to justify everyone’s concern.  We see the sludge surge up and endanger one little girl playing too close to the water, but that’s about it.  Skeates commits one of the prime storytelling sins.  He tells us about the threat rather than showing it convincingly.  Now, part of the reason for that simply has to be lack of storytelling space.  Nonetheless, this tale is certainly noteworthy for its innovation, and the central concept is worthwhile, despite its flaws.  This was a remarkable plot for its time.  Characters getting killed off was rare enough, but having a “hero” die, especially in the story in which he was introduced, was almost unheard of.

Of course, it almost goes without saying that the book is beautiful, with Aparo creating yet another cast of distinctive, interesting faces, lovely action, and rich settings.  Perhaps the greatest calamity in the cancellation of the book is the fact that Aparo stops working on the character that he captured better than anyone else.  Unfortunately, there is no shortage of four-color woe to be found in this comic’s cancellation, so that loss has plenty of competition.  Nonetheless, this is a fun and entertaining read.  It may be an offbeat ending to the series, but at least it’s an intriguing one.  All things considered, I’ll give this final Aquaman story 3.5 Minutemen.

This issue also contains a super brief backup with Aquagirl, where she rescues a little boy foolishly playing too close to an ominously named threat called ‘The Cave of Death.’  Something of a theme this month, apparently.  It’s only two pages, so really too brief to rate as a story by itself, but it’s always nice to see Aquagirl in action.    It seems clear that Skeates was setting something else up, and this is just one more way in which the sudden cancellation of the book is a shame.

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The Savage Sub-Mariner #72

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“From the Void It Came…”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Dan Adkins
Inker: Vince Colletta
Colourist: Linda Lessmann
Letterer: Artie Simek
Editor: Roy Thomas

 You can see what else Marvel put out this month HERE.

For our special feature, we once again pass across the aisle to Marvel comics, but this time it isn’t ersatz counterparts we see but an actual story-line continued.  It’s a shame that the rest of the SAG team wasn’t able to join Skeates for this revival of his Aquaman work, but he’s creating with a new team.  The results are surprisingly fitting for a Marvel comic considering the origins of this yarn over at DC.

While DC’s Sea King is my favorite comic character, I’ve also always had a soft spot for Marvel’s ocean monarch, Namor, the Sub-Mariner.  He’s not one of my favorite Marvel characters, but I’ve always liked him, and when I read through the classic Fantastic Four stories where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby brought him back, I really started to appreciate comics first anti-hero.  Incidentally, Kirby’s work on the history of Namor’s Atlantis is one of the coolest things ever.  While Namor’s temper can wear thin after a while, I’ve always appreciated the unfailing regalness of his character.  He’s one of the few times where comics have captured the ideal of royalty.  I’m just now starting to read his Silver Age solo series, and I’m only up to the 40s at the time of this posting, but I’m quite enjoying those adventures.  For this outing, I’m skipping ahead a few years, so I’m reading this tale without much context.

It begins with the Sub-Mariner himself swimming through the terribly polluted waters offshore of a major city and commenting, in usual fashion, on how terrible us surface dwellers are.  Notably, at this point Marvel’s Sea King is wearing his more substantial costume that replaced his green trunks.  It’s certainly a more dignified look, and it’s grown on me, though, being something of a purist, I tend to be biased in favor of original looks.  Sartorial concerns aside, the Sub-Mariner takes to the sky, still meditating on the evils of the surface world.

Our narrative lens shifts, and we move into space two years previously where a strange green blob, some bizarre alien lifeform, drifts through the cosmos and lands upon a certain satellite, just before a (blue) gloved hand destroys its temporary lodging.  Take a look at that image.  Does it look familiar?  That’s right, Skeates intentionally evokes the last panels from Aquaman #56 in order to tie these two stories together in a subtle crossover.

The creature rides the wreckage down and splashes into the ocean nearby where Namor will come ashore.  The being observes the sealife that passes by and decides to emulate those ocean dwellers by creating a body out of the slime on the seabed and the wreckage from the satellite.  The process takes the intervening years, and we get a really nice series of panels as the alien heads to the surface to explore.

Meanwhile, the Sub-Mariner has encountered trouble in the form of a strange pair of humans.  There’s something just a bit odd about these guys, and you might not be able to put your finger on it.  I wasn’t, at first.  Don’t worry, we’ll come back to that.  These two toughs decide, with suicidal bravado, to pick a fight with Namor because he’s different.  It’s a case of prejudice, and bizarrely, the attack is accompanied by a quote from Hitler which talks about the effectiveness of visuals in delivering messages.  Oookay.

This looks like a cover for a Double Dragon game.

The Prince of the Blood, who, let’s’ remember, has traded punches with the Hulk, belts his  normal human antagonist and somehow doesn’t turn his head into a fine red mist, instead sending him flying into the drink.  The thug’s friend jumps Namor in reprisal, voicing a rather strange response to the attack, “You’ve probably ruined him for life!”  How odd.  As the two tussle, the curious alien being reaches the dock, and they smash into him, leading all three to tumble into the water.  Interestingly, the narration notes that Namor has become somewhat unstable because of his constant battles, so that he meets the strange, monstrous newcomer with open hostility, just assuming that it’s a foe, and thereby leaving his original human antagonist to his watery fate.

While the fellow’s companion drags him to the surface, the Sub-Mariner and the star-spawned creature trade blows.  Namor pours all of his rage, all of his frustration, into this fight, attacking blindly, but the creature literally blinds the Atlantean in response.  Even that doesn’t stop the Sub-Mariner, who grapples with his slimy foe.

Finally, having had enough of this whole ‘body’ business, the being launches itself skyward once more, though, having meant no harm, as it passes into space it uses its powers to restore life to the drowned man and even, surprisingly enough, restore Namor’s sight.  Skeates plays with superhero conventions here to some pretty good effect, raising some questions about the violent ways such characters tend to respond to the unknown.

For his part, before his eyes are healed, the Prince of the Blood realizes that his metaphorical blindness may have trapped him in literal blindness.  His anger and rage kept him from trying to communicate with the creature and may have doomed him to perpetual blackness.  It’s an interesting and relatively effective message about understanding and tolerance of the “Other.”  And with that, Namor heads for sepulchral Atlantis (previously destroyed, it seems) while the two humans head home as well, with one of them saying, seemingly apropos of nothing, that he just got a new professional wrestling magazine.  With these scenes, our story ends.

So, what was the discordant note that the two wharf rats kept striking?  Well, these two toughs, Skeates later confirmed, were meant to be a gay couple.  Hence the rather flamboyant dress of the first thug, who was, by the way, named Bruce, a moniker with some associations with the gay community at the time, as I understand.  Now, you may wonder what in the world their sexuality has to do with anything in this oddball story, but it really does add a little depth to Skeates’ treatment of the theme of intolerance and metaphoric blindness.  You’ve got these two characters acting as bigots who have themselves suffered from intolerance, abuse, and bigotry, which is ironic.  While it could just be seen as anti-gay, it could also be read as an indication of the depth to which distrust of the “Other” is built into human nature, how deeply the disease goes.  Even those of us with reason to sympathize with societal outcasts can find it easier to lash out than attempt to act with understanding.

Nonetheless, that was certainly an unusual wrinkle for comics in 1974, when you could not present any openly gay characters.  Once again, Skeates is experimenting with the genre.  The story itself is solid enough.  It’s more effective in its delivery of its message than in telling a particularly compelling and enjoyable adventure yarn, though.  Yet, I do enjoy the focus on Namor’s reaction to the mysterious creature.  It makes rather perfect sense given the Sub-Mariner’s characterization over the course of his series and the endless series of conflicts and reverses he’s faced.  There’s a very human element in his blind rage.  Still, the story feels a bit disjointed, with the conflict with the two morons on the dock coming out of absolutely nowhere.  I know people are plenty stupid, but who says to themselves, ‘I think I want to pick a fight with that guy that can punch through steel!’  In the end, I suppose I’ll give this story a 3.5 as well.  It’s an interesting one, if not stellar.

P.S.: Oddly, this story, picking up from the final issue of Aquaman, falls on the final issue of the Sub-Mariner, who has outlived his distinguished counterpart by three years at this point but falls prey to a similar fate, and, ironically, with the same hand at the helm!  Steve Skeates had to wonder if he was jinxed when it came to aquatic characters!

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The Head-Blow Headcount:

Poor Aquaman adds yet another appearance on the Wall of Shame.  This really illustrates just how much Skeates relied on the head-blow plot device.  Whenever he needed to remove the Sea King from the story for a few pages, it seems a sock on the noggin was the first club out of the bag.  The results are self-evident, with Aquaman more than tripling the next most common resident on the wall in total head-blows.  At least one benefit from the lamentable cancellation of his book is he won’t be adding many more entries in this feature any time soon!

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Final Thoughts:

These two comics make for an intriguing pair, a unique case (at the time) with a story translating across both companies and years (Of course, the Marvel character Mantis will see a similar transition later in the decade).  Even more unusually, the stories are very reflective of their universes, DC and Marvel, with each comic fitting surprisingly well into the style of their respective companies.  The DC story is full of bigger ideas, while the Marvel tale is much more melodramatic and emotionally focused.  The contrast illustrates Skeates’ skill as a writer, as one of the great tests of an author’s mettle is the ability to write well in different styles.

I’m really curious what shape the second story would have taken if it had graced the pages of Aquaman as intended.  One wonders if the muck creature from the cover of #56 might actually have put in an appearance after all, perhaps on a much grander scale than Namor’s unwitting sparring partner.  If we assume that the alien creature and its curious attempt to explore our little globe was always the core of the concept, then perhaps it would make sense for all of that algae coating Detroit to be incorporated into the being’s new body.  We might have gotten a version of that massive monstrosity after all.  Sadly, we’ll never know what might have been.

That is, truly, the greatest misfortune to be found in the sudden and unlooked-for cancellation of the Aquaman book, the loss of what might have been.  The SAG team had been paving the way for a whole era of stories, layering in hooks for coming arcs and continuing plot threads, setting up some really intriguing story possibilities, and creating a fascinating setting for the Sea King.  There are too many lost opportunities and abandoned elements in this run to count, like the rabble-rousing politician and his bid for power, the rocky relationship between Tula and Garth, the myriad underwater civilizations we’ve encountered in the preceding pages of the book, the microscopic world in Mera’s ring, Ocean Master’s recovered memories, and so much more that could have been.  I’ll always wonder what plans the SAG team had, what heights the book might have reached in the years to come.  How might the undersea setting have grown?  How might the Aqua-Family have evolved?  The possibilities really dazzle the imagination, don’t they?  Instead, we get this rather off=beat finale.  The book ends, not with a whimper, but neither does it close with a roar worthy of what has come before.  Instead, it slips away without fanfare or acknowledgement, without the slightest hint that this is the final issue.

It’s one of the great comic calamities, and so it is with a heavy heart, that I bid adieu to one of the best Aquaman runs and one of my favorite creative teams.  And it is also time that I say goodbye to this post.  I hope you’ll join me again soon as I resume our regularly scheduled Bronze Age browsing.  Until then, keep the Heroic Ideal alive!

Into the Bronze Age: February 1971 (Part 2)

Welcome to part 2 of February 1971!  We’ve got a good pair of books in this post, and I found plenty to talk about.  I’m afraid I grow a tad long-winded on this one, folks, so be warned!  Let’s see what awaits us as we travel Into the Bronze Age!

If you’re new to this little journey, you can check out the first post to learn what it’s all about.

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Roll Call

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(You can see everything published this month HERE)

• Action Comics #397
• Adventure Comics #402
• Aquaman #55
• Batman #229
• Detective Comics #408
• The Flash #203
• Justice League of America #87
• The Phantom Stranger #11
• Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #108
• Superman #234
• Teen Titans #31
• World’s Finest #200

Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.

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Aquaman #55

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“Return of the Alien!”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Jim Aparo
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

“Computer Trap!”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Jim Aparo
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

Man, I am LOVING these Nick Cardy Aquaman covers.  They’re always exciting, dynamic, intriguing, and just beautifully rendered.  This is a particularly striking example.  The story within is definitely worthy of such a great cover, and it returns to a plot thread readers must have thought abandoned back in issue #52.  This tale takes us back to the strange microscopic world that exists within Mera’s ring and to the brave girl who helped Aquaman during his sojourn there.  I was really struck by the moral conundrum with which Skeates faced his character in that earlier story, as the Sea King had to choose between leaving his alien girl Friday in the clutches of slavers or risk her death at the hands of a hostile colony.  While I understood Aquaman’s choice to abandon her, it definitely seemed like an unresolved issue when he came back to the normal world.  In this story, the Marine Marvel finally sets out to right that wrong.  It’s great that Skeates brought this thread back from three issues ago, despite there not having been a single mention of it since.  That level of continuity was still rather rare in this era, and it’s the smallest example of such in this issue.

The story itself begins with Dr. Vulko, playing his role as Atlantis’s resident mad scientist, as he prepares a machine to transport the Sea King back to the microscopic madhouse.  Apparently, in a fun little touch of universe awareness, Aquaman got advice from the Atom about how to build this shrinking device.  Operating the machine, Vulko reminds Mera that she must concentrate, as she’s vital to the procedure.  As we discovered in that earlier story, the Queen can actually exert some form of telepathic control over the realm in her ring.  There’s actually room for a really interesting set of stories exploring that connection and the origins of this place, and I have to think that Skeates saw that possibility.  Unfortunately, he never got the chance to investigate those mysteries.

Vulko throws the switch, and Aquaman shrinks back to the surreal, Dali-esq sub-reality.  He begins to explore, but he encounters another one of those horrible cyclopean blob creatures that attacked him on his first visit.  Realizing that there’s nothing to be gained by fighting the monster, the Sea Sleuth evades it and continues his quest.  There’s a nice bit of characterization in that encounter, as Arthur evinces sound judgement but also shows some awareness of his public role as king, noting his subjects might not understand his actions.  As it turns out, that’s a thought that proves somewhat prophetic given the other events in this story.

With the telepathic guidance of his wife, Aquaman succeeds in locating the colony of the big-headed slavers of the previous story, and he just charges right in swinging.  It’s a pretty dynamic sequence, as the Sea King just smashes into their defenses.  Meanwhile, back in Atlantis, Mera can sense that her love is in combat, and Vulko stresses that she must not think about wanting him to return to her or she’ll bring him back prematurely.  At the same time, Aqualad is observing a fiery speech in an Atlantean park, where a local nutjob has managed to acquire quite a following.  The rabble-rouser, named Noxden, is stirring up resentment against the King by claiming that the destiny of Altanteans is to be air-breathers, and this is a destiny of which Aquaman robbed them!

I would NOT want to be in that guy’s way!

All the way back in issue #35, the Atlanteans were converted into air-breathers, and their king restored them (in issue #43), because it’s pretty stupid to live on the bottom of the sea if you can’t breathe underwater.  Yet, despite the utter absurdity of the fellow’s claims, people are beginning to listen.  There was a time when that would have seemed more far-fetched than it does today, I suppose.

Yet, if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that a looney who shouts loud enough and provides a convenient scapegoat for people’s problems will always be able to attract a following.  Aqualad is disgusted by the raving rhetoric, seething at the idea that Atlanteans would be so ungrateful to the king who had done so much for them, and he heads out to tell Aquaman.  Just at that moment, the Marine Marvel is getting overwhelmed by his alien antagonists and…oh no.  Not again…that’s right, the third head-blow in a row!  Arthur gets conked on the noggin and he’s down for the count!

Before we learn what happens with the Sea King, though, we have another stop.  Subplots galore!  In this case, we’re touching base with Mupo, the fiery young man who led the rebellion against Aquaman’s regent-turned-tyrant way back in issue #47.  This book is just full of continuity!  Mupo has been swayed by Noxden’s speech, and he begins to spout some racist rhetoric, which Aquagirl calls him on.  The Marine Mistress shows her class by storming out on the moron.

Meanwhile, Mera uses her connection with the ring-world to revive her husband, which si a nice touch and a way to give her more of a role.  Aquaman awakens as he’s being taken prisoner by the aliens and carefully times his escape, plowing through the guards that thought he was helpless.  As he’s swimming through the city, searching for a place to hide and make plans, who should he encounter but the object of his quest herself!  The girl signals him and hides the hero while they talk.  The Marine Marvel realizes that she’s communicating with him telepathically, despite the fact that this was against her beliefs when they last met.

She explains that her captors have opened her mind and taught her to think for herself, strangely enough.  Yet, even more surprising, when he tells the young lady that he’s there to rescue her, she refuses, saying she’s happy in her role!  While she may be a captive, she is, in many ways, more free than she was in her oppressive home.  It’s an interesting wrinkle and an unexpected twist.  Yet, it is also a bit unsatisfying.  Our hero has gone through all of this to save her, and she doesn’t want to be saved!

Stunned, Aquaman leaves, realizing that he’s got twenty hours on the clock before he’s due to be recalled and hoping he can find somewhere to hide and wait for his rendezvous.  At the same time in Atlantis, our plot threads are converging, as Aquagirl encounters Aqualad, just as she’s thinking over things with Mupo.  When the young Aquatic Ace brushes her off in his hurry to see the King, she thinks that the more he ignores her, “the more attractive Mupo looks!”  Uh-oh Garth, better watch out!  You’ve got competition!

Nobody draws action like Jim Aparo.

Back in the microscopic world, Aquaman encounters another group of the aliens, and as he’s tearing his way through them, he suddenly begins to grow, way ahead of schedule!  When he arrives back home, Mera apologizes, realizing that her anxiety must have inadvertently led to her recalling him, but her husband stops her, saying that she came through at the perfect time.   Just then Aqualad arrives and tells his tale, but Aquaman silences him as well, reminding his young charge that he respects free speech and isn’t about to start censoring folks he disagrees with, which is a nice character beat.  The story ends with a very striking image of Noxden, gesturing in a manner that is grimly familiar.

This is a very good tale, and it is absolutely packed full to the gills (if you’ll forgive the expression) with plot.  In fact, it’s so stuffed with story that I had trouble summarizing it!  Skeates is layering in storylines that could stick with the book for a long time to come, doing some worldbuilding, and in general giving Aquaman a more fully realized setting to inhabit.  Of course, that makes the title’s impending cancellation all the more heartbreaking.  None of these plotlines will get resolved in the next and, as it happens final issue, leaving so much undone, so much potential wasted.  I suppose I’ll talk about that in more detail when I cover the final issue, but on this read-through, I’m really struck by how much this loss hurt the character.  At the very beginning of the Bronze Age, where the DC Universe is evolving and growing, and when he had a fantastic opportunity to do the same, the powers that be cut the legs out from under Aquaman.  That’s just a crying shame, and it explains a lot of the problems the character has had since then.

Anyway, in terms of the story itself, it is a really enjoyable read.  The quick cuts between the different plots keep it moving at break-neck pace.  While the resolution of the plot of Aquaman’s girl Friday is a bit of a letdown, the adventure that reunites the pair is pretty exciting.  It does seem like the Sea King could have offered her a third option, or at least tried to do so.  He could have sent the Atom in to bring her up to Atlantis, where she could have had her mental and physical freedom.  Maybe that idea would have materialized in time, if Skeates had been given the opportunity.  We’ll never know now, I suppose.

I enjoy the mini-plots with Aquaman’s supporting cast.  At this time, the Marine Marvel is the only character that has his entire extended super family gathered around him, giving him unique story possibilities that other characters with similar supporting characters don’t have access to at the moment.  It’s great to see Skeates take advantage of that.  I also love seeing more of Tula in general.  The character she developed into under Skeates’ pen, capable, level-headed, independent, and still with a great sense of adventure, is one that I really love.  The plot of the trouble-making politician that the young Aquatic Aces are mixed up in is certainly not a new one for Aquaman, but this time it comes with a new twist.  Interestingly, part of Noxden’s platform is a call for free and democratic elections, which is actually quite sensible and seems only natural to an American audience.  After all, one of the central values of our culture is reverence for democracy.  There is a lot of potential for some fascinating stories in the interplay between tradition and progress in Atlantis.  Sadly, we won’t really get to see Skeates develop that potential.

In the end, though this isn’t a perfect story, it is a lot of fun and just full of intriguing beginnings.  The SAG team has done a lot of experimentation, but I rather feel like, with this issue, they were settling into what would have been a very promising routine.  I’ll give it 4.5 Minutemen.

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“Computer Trap”

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We’ve got a very pleasant surprise this month in the form of an extra Aquaman yarn as a backup in this issue.  This is a great little 7 1/2 page story that hits on some unexpected themes.  The backup begins with Skeates doing a bit more aquatic world building, as the Sea King, returning from a mission on the surface, swims through a submarine ghost town.  It’s a forlorn abandoned city that rather gives our hero the creeps, and while he’s pondering what happened to its inhabitants and how long it has lain empty, he suddenly detects a telepathic signal.  Strange!

When he goes to investigate, he discovers an advanced computer, a self-aware machine that attacks his mind!  The AI attempts to enslave his will, but Aquaman is no mental weakling, and his incredible willpower and mental strength hold off the telepathic attack.  In the interim, we get treated to a flashback to this device’s origins, and it’s a pretty interesting story, the archetypal ‘machines turn on their masters‘ setup. An advanced aquatic society built this powerful computer to help run their civilization, but, in a classic twist, the machine found the humans far too unstable and imperfect, so it simply took over.

In this case, the device actually dominates the minds of the citizens and turns them into efficient little worker-bees, creating more and more machines and more and more advancements, all in the name of ‘progress.’  That was the great ideal, progress for its own sake, and progress defined as technological growth, while all else in this culture decayed.  In a really neat take on the concept, the machine can only control the minds of the adult society members because their brains are fixed and rigid, leaving the youth to grow disaffected and eventually to abandon the colony in search of a place that valued more in life than the endless pursuit of ‘progress.’  In a cool example of truth in fiction, the minds of young people actually are more flexible and less fully developed, so this is surprisingly believable on that score.  Of course, there are also obvious social parallels as well.

Eventually, the machine’s slaves grew old and died, leaving no-one to serve it.  The computer plans to use Aquaman to attract a new population to pursue ‘progress,’ but the King of the Seven Seas is nobody’s pawn.  He stops fighting the device long enough to summon help, and though the computer invades his mind, the timely arrival of an electric eel breaks its control!  To put an end to the menace of this mad machine, Aquaman summons a horde of his finny friends, and they collapse the cave it inhabits.  Yet, Skeates leaves a note of mystery in the ending of this tale, as the machine may yet survive!

This is a quite a good story for as brief as it is.  It helps that it fits into the end of the previous yarn, building off of its momentum, allowing this one to feel a bit more expansive than it really is.  Skeates also deals with some really fascinating themes here, including the dangers of the rapid pace of technological advancement, one of the perennial subjects of science fiction.  As long as man has built machines, there has always been a fear that they might somehow cost him his humanity.  As it turns out, it’s a fear well founded.  We’ve begun to see that our hypertechnological society comes at a cost, with kids losing the ability to interact socially because of their addiction to social media and the like, not to mention the impact of information and sensation overload in the Internet Age.  These are just the newest manifestations of an ancient phenomenon.  Very little that we create comes without a cost, and it seems that those costs are growing more dear.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the story for me was Skeates’ implicit criticism of the concept of progress as its own goal.  C.S. Lewis described the origins of this tendency brilliantly in his essay “De Descriptione Temporum,” where he wrote of the modern idea of a progressive, which is to say ‘evolutionary,’ view of history:

“that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy.”

And he critiqued this view in his Mere Christianity, arguing that:

“Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

There can be no progress without a concept of a destination, without an ideal and a goal, and you’re either moving closer to that end or you’re moving further away, so movement by itself is not necessarily progress.  It’s a useful lesson to remember, and, in its own small way, this little backup tale teaches it.  The departure of the colony’s youth makes the point rather well, as they are searching for the things that give a culture its soul, the things that make life worth living, like the sublime pleasures of art and literature.  Of course, Skeates’ story is so brief that it can do little more than gesture at its themes, but they are interesting enough on their own merits that they still add some flavor to the final product.  I’ll give this great little backup 4.5 Minutemen, as it gets extra credit for at least having the potential to be thought-provoking.

Of course, it hardly needs to be said at this point, but Aparo’s art in this issue is as beautiful as usual.  His depictions of the action scenes are particularly impressive, but I just plain love his illustration of the ring-world.  He gives that place such a wonderfully insane feeling that it really adds something to Aquaman’s adventures there.  His Tula is a tad off this issue (she’s probably the only Aqua-character for whom I really prefer Nick Cardy’s rendition), but Aparo, as usual, also injects a lot of personality into the supporting characters.  That last shot of the rabble-rousing politician is a bit chilling and instantly conveys the fellow’s nature and personality.

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Batman #229

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“Asylum of the Futurians!”
Writer: Robert Kanigher
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Dick Giordano
Editor: Julius Schwartz

“Temperature Boiling… and Rising!”
Writer: Mike Friedrich
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Frank Giacoia
Letterer: John Costanza
Editor: Julius Schwartz

Not the most amazing cover we’ve had here, though I suppose it does do its job of making the reader curious about what’s going on.  And what is going on is rather weird.  This isn’t the type of terrible, lazy story we’ve encountered from Kanigher in the past, but neither is it the stronger type of tale he’s been telling lately in our reading.

The yarn itself opens with a young woman running along a country road where she encounters the Batman, who has come searching for her and her husband.  Her name is Laura, and how the Dark Knight knows her isn’t explained.  When she asks about his fortuitous arrival in the middle of nowhere and the middle of the night, he just says he’ll tell her later.  Odd.  She proceeds to tell the Caped Crusader that her husband disappeared in the middle of the night, and when she found him, the scene she witnessed was almost enough to drive her mad!

Refusing to describe the source of her trepidation for fear he won’t believe her, Laura leads Batman to an eerie, gloomy old house in the woods.  Therein, they observe a scene out of an asylum, as musicians play on invisible instruments, waiters serve phantom food, and diners dressed in futuristic garb eat off empty plates.  They observe Larua’s husband, Stephen, a “famed photographer of psychic phenomena” looking on in befuddlement before he finally breaks out in anger, demanding to know the meaning of all of this.  In response, the creepy lady in charge yells out that they thought he was “the Seventh Futurian,” but since they were mistake, they must kill him!  His work made them think that he’d be able to “hear” their music, and “taste” their food, things only a Futurian can do.

Batman takes that as his cue, rushing in and overcoming the gathered gang and their futuristic weaponry.  It’s a nicely drawn sequence for the most part, and it ends with only the girl left standing.  She declares that the Futurians are “the wave of the future,” born psychic and destined to rule the world.  They have cells all over the planet, waiting for the arrival of the Seventh who will lead them.  She reasons that only one person could overcome five of her fellows, and thus the Dark Knight himself must be the Seventh for which they’ve been waiting.  They hand the Masked Manhunter a crown, and he decides to play along in order to take care of them peacefully.  But it’s a trap!  The crown tightens on his head, knocking him out, and the Futurians decide to put him to the test.

Taking a book out of Renaissance witch trials, they lock him in a coffin and toss it in the lake, thinking that only the special Seventh could escape from a watery grave.  Inside his sinking prison, the Dark Knight uses the now loosened crown to pick the coffin’s lock and swims for the surface.  For some reason, the Futurians seem sure that this guy they’ve just tried to kill, TWICE, who has dedicated his life to fighting crime, is going to help them take over the world.

Instead, for some strange reason Batman seems more inclined to punch them in their faces.  He takes them out, using the estate’s statuary, and captures their lovely leader.  Then, as he takes the rescued couple home, we discover that when Stephen was captured, he “screamed silently for help,” and somehow, that call reached the Caped Crusader.  The question of psychic powers is left ambiguous, but not in a particularly productive way.  It’s so vague and these characters so forgettable (I had to go back and look up their names), that it doesn’t have much impact.

This is a mediocre story.  It’s okay, and Novick renders the action nicely.  Yet, the Futurians are too big of a concept to be tossed out in 15 pages while also vying for space with two other supporting characters, one of whom is entirely superfluous to the plot.  Kanigher could have just had Batman show up at the house and saved two pages for better use.  The gang/cult themselves are just shy of being interesting.  With some more development, they could have made the jump, but as is, they just seem like generic would-be world-conquerors.

In general, the concept of this story just doesn’t quite manage to come together, and that concept, interestingly enough in light of the Aquaman backup tale above, seems to be tied into Futurism, an early 20th Century cultural movement originating in Italy that, coincidentally enough, advocated complete neglect of the past and an ethic of unbridled progress.  Even when I first read the “Futurist Manifesto” in college, I thought its principles were utterly foolish.  To once more quote Lewis, he argued that “[t]o study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place.  But I think it liberates us from the past too.  I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians” (12).  Far from enslaving us, a knowledge of the past frees us from the blindness that makes contemporary mores into commandments and fashion into fact, and it also puts bygone days in their proper context, removing the rosy tinge that nostalgia tends to apply to all such visions.

But what has this story to do with Futurism?  It’s only tangentially related, but I can’t help but think that it is this movement which Kanigher had in mind when he penned this tale.  The antagonists of the piece read like a more militaristic version of the Futurists, which is impressive considering just how militaristic the originals were.  There are some definite parallels, and the sad thing is that these guys could actually furnish some really interesting villains if they were given any chance to develop a personality other than ‘strangeness.’  The story just feels a bit unfinished, though it is entertaining enough.  I’ll give it 3 Minutemen.

P.S.: Well, it just might be that I was wrong!  The letter’s page of issue #232 included a short note about the Futurians.  It turns out that the name was a reference to a group of science fiction fans from the 30s, many of whom would go on to be major influences in the genre.  How neat!  Yet, perhaps the political leanings of the group might indeed provide some overlap with the Futuristis.  I’m curious, but I can’t say.

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“Temperature Boiling… and Rising!”

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It’s nice to get a bird’s eye view of Hudson University.

The second half of this Robin tale is pretty good, even better than its predecessor.  It picks up with the student volunteers for Prof. Buck Stuart’s senate campaign as they try to make sense out of the shocking newspaper headline from last issue and the picture showing their golden boy giving a payoff.  In an interesting scene, a hippy-looking kid blows his top and tells Dick Grayson that he’s through playing by the rules before storming out.  What makes the scene fascinating is the boy’s mention of the Kent State Massacre.  Bringing that real event into the story instantly makes it feel more serious and grounded, and it really puts the kid’s anger and impatience into perspective.  This election, and those like it in which young people were getting involved, mattered.  They mattered because they were a chance to show the youth of this country that the system worked…or risk driving them into the streets in anger and despair.  It’s a small moment, but it struck me nonetheless.

The story continues, with the candidate himself arriving and telling the boys that the claims are phony.  With the help of Phil Real, the campaign photographer, Dick does some good detective work by realizing that the damning picture is doctored and sets out to prove it as Robin.  The Teen Wonder heads to the local paper where the editor tells him in no uncertain terms that their publisher is backing the incumbent and won’t allow a retraction without hard evidence, so Dick goes in search of just that when the fellow reveals that their source’s name was…Phil Real!

When Robin arrives at his friend’s room, he finds Phil’s roommate, who is one of the kids behind the fire at the campaign office from last issue.  The firebug and his friend jump the young hero, and for the second issue in a row, Robin barely escapes a slot on the Head-Blow Headcount, as he gets his bell rung pretty good.

Still, he keeps his feet and easily dispatches the two college-toughs. In the room he finds the evidence he needs of the photo tampering, enough to force the paper to print a retraction, which helps to swing the election in Stuart’s favor!  At the end of the tale, Dick Grayson leaves the victory party, saying there’s still much more work to be done, an ending that I rather liked.  There’s something in it that indicates our young hero is growing up.

This is a good ending to this story, and it manages to pack a really impressive amount into these seven pages.  There’s enough of a misdirect to make the mystery feel somewhat satisfying, with the evidence of both this and last issue seeming to point to the photographer.  Robin gets to display some detective skills and gets in a touch of action as well, in general, being portrayed as the intelligent, capable, and resourceful young man he is, which hasn’t always been the case with these Robin tales.

It’s nice to see the Teen Wonder come off well.  He is one of my favorite characters, after all.  This iteration doesn’t have as much focus on youth involvement in politics as the previous one, but together they make an interesting whole, commenting on the situation.  It’s fascinating to see the social unrest of the period work its  way so clearly into comics, and this tale is a particularly obvious example of the tendency.  I’ll give it a good score of 4 Minutemen.

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And that will do it for the second part of February 1971.  I hope y’all enjoyed the read and will join me again soon for the next edition of Into the Bronze Age, where we’ll have a little something from the Dark Knight and the Fastest Man Alive.  Until then, keep the heroic ideal alive!

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The Head-Blow Headcount:

Oh no!  Three in a row!  Poor Aquaman.  He just can’t catch a break, and the biggest blow of all is yet to fall.  Once again, Robin narrowly avoids inclusion on the Wall of Shame, and no-one else has really come close.  We’ll have to see if this month holds any more additions to the august company.

Into the Bronze Age: December 1970 (Part 2)

Hello readers, and welcome to another Into the Bronze Age feature!  Today we’re tackling an Aquaman and a Batman issue, two of my favorite characters and two of my favorite books, but this month doesn’t quite provide two of my favorite stories.  Nevertheless, I’ve got a fun and interesting set of reading for this post.  Check it out below!

If you’re new to this little journey, you can check out the first post to learn what it’s all about.

Roll Call (You can see everything published this month HERE)

• Action Comics #395
• Adventure Comics #400
• Aquaman #54
• Batman #227
• Detective Comics #406
• The Flash #202
• Green Lantern/Green Arrow #81
• Justice League of America #84 (reprints, won’t be covered)
• Justice League of America #85
• The Phantom Stranger #10
• Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #134
• Teen Titans #30
• World’s Finest #199

Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.

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Aquaman #54

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“Crime Wave!”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Jim Aparo
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

Well ladies and gents, this is a weird one.  It’s a self-professed experiment in storytelling, and not an entirely successful one.  Yet, neither is it a failure.  It’s a bold attempt to do something new and innovative with the format of comic book storytelling, and the SAG team definitely deserve some kudos for being willing to try new things, which they’ve been doing all along in their run on this book.  Yet, I feel like this script could probably have used one more pass in order to make it truly a hit.  Nonetheless, what we have is a creepy, disconcerting tale that is apt to stick in the mind, and all under a very striking cover by the inimitable Nick Cardy!

The comic is actually two stories, a framing narrative and an interpolated episode happening at the same time.  We start with two cops, John and Paul, and I feel like that might well be a reference of some sort which I can’t quite place, who have arrested a well-dressed man who had broken into a jewelry store (might it be a reference to the Apostles?).  The man is in a strange daze, unable to say anything other than “I’m dead!  Thanatos killed me!”  Apparently, the zombiefied thief is actually a prominent socialite, one of a string of respected citizens who have suddenly and inexplicably turned to crime.  They all evince the same bizarre behavior, and the police are stumped.  The detective, John, orders the passive prisoner taken to “the science boys,” in hopes they can figure out what is behind this.

Meanwhile, Aquaman has been visiting with some surface friends and has forgotten about his one-hour limit, which is stupid in multiple ways.  I’ll give Skeates a pass on the use of the limit in general because he’s just working with what he’s got, that being the established canon at this point.  Interestingly, the team includes a very fitting poem in the opening of the tale that hints at what lies within.

The King of the Sea is hurrying home to the water when he’s jumped by another suicidally overconfident gang of plain-vanilla street-punks, just like those that attacked the Flash last month.  Sheesh!  Is there something in the water in the DCU that gives generic gunsels delusions of grandeur, or what?  I suppose that something like that would explain why folks like the Ten-Eyed Man think they can cut it as supervillains.  Well, this gesture should have been incredibly foolish, but unfortunately the Marine Marvel doesn’t perform too marvelously.  He tears them up until…that’s right, the notorious head-blow strikes!  I’m really not crazy about random punks being able to take down the super strong, super tough Atlantean, as I’ve said before.  It really feeds into that inconsistent portrayal of his powers that plagues the character.  Generally speaking, that isn’t a major fault of the SAG run, but it does crop up from time to time.  I’ll give this instance a partial pass, though, as the hero would have been weakened by his time out of the water.

Either way, what follows is very strange, and a reader is apt to feel like they’ve missed a page.  Suddenly, we’re presented with a black panel with a few enigmatic word balloons, then Aquaman is suddenly free, walking down a spooky lane and approaching the faded magnificence of a crumbling mansion.  He has a note from Mera asking him to meet her there, yet there is some malignant presence within the house.  When the Sea King approaches a mirror inside, his image distorts, grows, and becomes a grotesque exaggeration of his form before bursting from the glass and attacking him.  What is going on?!  It’s a brave narrative gambit, and it works fairly well to invite the readers into the hero’s own sense of confusion and bewilderment.

Suddenly, Aquaman awakens in Atlantis, with Mera leaning over him.  She tells him that some kind surface -dwellers brought him back to the sea and he was rushed home, but she denies any knowledge of the mysterious note that drew him to that house in the first place.  Aquaman feels responsible for unleashing the monster that attacked him, whatever it might be, and he says that it is up to him to stop it.  That’s a good character moment.  It captures his sense of duty and morality, as he feels the necessity to take responsibility for this creature on himself, despite the fact that he was duped into releasing it.

Yet, before he can act on his impulse, we get another mysterious black panel with frantic dialog about how “He’s coming out of it!  Turn that thing up!” and other such exclamations.  Suddenly, Aquaman finds himself battling the being, which calls itself Thanatos, on a strange, surreal landscape.  Here’s where we get one of the issue’s missteps, as our perspective suddenly changes and we follow Thanatos himself for a time.  I think the action panel is supposed to serve as something of a chapter heading, rather than part of the story, but it’s so unclear that it breaks the flow of the story.  What’s more, following Thanatos and seeing his point of view doesn’t make sense in context of the story’s resolution.

We watch as the rampaging monster attacks Atlantis, and when Aquaman responds, he can’t seem to make any headway against the beast.  He gets weaker as it gets stronger!  Despite his best efforts, Thanatos knocks him out, causing him to awaken in bed once again.  Mera tells her husband that Thanatos headed out to sea, and despite being weakened, the Marine Marvel heads out after him, fearing what will happen to life in the ocean if the monster has free reign.

We check back in with the cops, who obligingly provide us with some exposition.  Apparently, a local crime lord has been kidnapping prominent citizens and subjecting them to a strange type of brainwashing.  The subject is trapped in their own mind, fighting an amped-up version of their own death instinct, and when the psychic manifestation ‘kills’ them, they become “death-driven,” beginning to act as pliant criminals for the mastermind.  If you’ve had any psychology classes, this may sound a bit familiar.  If so, it’s because this is basically Freudian psycho-analysis, and as such, is more or less debunked these days.  Still, Freud serves as a useful touchstone for popular conceptions of psychology and for exaggerated comic book science.

Well, we can probably figure out what’s happening to Aquaman now, which is why I think this reveal should probably have been postponed a bit.  We get another mysterious black panel, now a bit more understandable, and suddenly the King of the Sea arrives in…an underwater Wild West town!  It’s quite strange, but given that we know he’s in a dreamworld now, it sort of works.  I really wish that Skeates had toyed with this a bit more, told us, perhaps, why Aquaman would imagine a western town for his showdown.  I feel like there’s some fun character work that could have been done there.  Was a young Arthur Curry a fan of Wagon Train, Have Gun-Will Travel, or the Lone Ranger?  Personally, I see him as identifying with The Rebel (Johnny Yuma).

Our hero plays the part of the unwelcome stranger, and the townsfolk give him a cold shoulder until Thanatos arrives for a reckoning, submarine six-shooter and all!  We get a bizarre but fun underwater Old West face-off, straight out of a classic western, but once again, the monster saps Aquaman’s strength, and he gets hit!  Of course, this causes him to awaken again in Atlantis, and he begins to put the pieces together.  The Sea Sleuth deduces that none of this is real, but just then, Thanatos breaks into the palace!

The two aqua-foes square off as the two policemen raid the hideout of the crimeboss they think is behind the zombiefied citizens.  Inside, they discover the same slimeball who had kidnapped Mera back in issue #44, which started the classic ‘Search for Mera’ arc.  What follows is interleaved action, as the cops take down the villain’s gang and Aquaman takes down Thanatos in a really cool Aparo splash page.  While the other prisoners are zombiefied, the Sea King is able to resist, to hold out against his own worst instincts, until the policemen free him.  The story ends with our hero on his way home to Atlantis, ready to spend some time with his beloved, noting that they’ve been apart too much lately.

As I said, this is a weird issue.  The attempt to tell a dream story within another story is an interesting one, but Skeates breaks his own story logic by following Thanatos for a time, despite the fact that, in the scheme he sets up, this monster should be nothing more than a manifestation of Aquaman’s death-drive.  He shouldn’t really have his own motivations and desires, short of killing his alter-ego, especially because this is all happening in Arthur’s mind.  I think it would have been more effective to just have the beast show up every few pages and disappear inexplicably.  Skeates almost achieves that, with the constant reversions to the palace and the clever use of his black panels.  I do like that the villains have a hard time keeping Aquaman under control.  It’s another of those story beats that emphasize the power of his mind and spirit, which I always enjoy.

Aparo’s artwork is excellent as always, and the brutal, maniacal face he gives Thanatos really helps to establish the dangerous and fearsome presence of the character.  The story has a nice, moody color palette for many of the encounters with the monstrous manifestation and the scenes with the cops chasing their leads, giving the comic something of a noirish feel at times.  As usual for an Aparo book, I find myself having to restrain myself, because I tend to want to post every other page or panel because the comic is just chock-full of striking images.

The unexpected and unheralded return of Mera’s kidnapper is something of a letdown.  His roll could easily have been filled by any generic thug, as his backstory doesn’t impact the plot at all.  We don’t even get a ‘curse you Aquaman’ type moment.  It just feels like something of a waste.  The end result of this issue, uneven as it is, is still an enjoyable read.  I’ll give it 3.5 Minutemen, giving credit for the innovation that Skeates attempts despite its mixed success.

P.S.: This issue also has a very neat feature in the form of a letter from Steve Skeates about his writing process, talking specifically about the recent O.G.R.E. issue as well as this one and relating an intriguing story about how the writer actually worked for a group of industrial spies for a time!  It’s interesting to read about his perspective on these tales, but his account just drives home my feelings about the role of the spy organization in the last issue.  To bring OGRE back, only to tell us that they’ve been definitively shut down seems…something of a waste.  Nonetheless, check out the rare glimpse behind the curtain!

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Batman #227

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“The Demon of Gothos Mansion!”
Writer: Dennis O’Neil
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Dick Giordano
Letterer: Ben Oda
Editor: Julius Schwartz

“Help Me … I Think I’m Dead!”
Writer: Mike Friedrich
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Mike Esposito
Letterer: John Costanza

This issue of Batman, while not perfect, definitely captures the mood and feel that I identify with the Dark Knight.  I feel like we’re getting closer to that definitive Bronze Age Batman.  The plot has a few weak points, but the cover story really manages to strike the right tone for the character.  We get one of those always slightly ill-fitting stories that pits the (relatively) grounded Batman against the supernatural, but this outing does so with a fairly light touch that works pretty well.

The story centers around Alfred’s niece, Daphne Pennyworth, who made an appearance not that long ago in Batman #216, a story I only vaguely remember.  She’s written her uncle a letter explaining that she’s gotten herself into more trouble.  She’s taken a job at a remote manor house which is the scene of mysterious happenings.  It might be nothing, but a rather Hal Jordan-looking Bruce Wayne offers to look into it for his friend, and just like that, we’re off!  Batman investigates the estate, prowling the grounds and discovering armed guards.  That’s suspicious, so he tests their intentions by just strolling into sight and letting them take a shot at him.  I rather like this whole sequence, as the menacing, torchlit shape of the Batman strikes an ominous figure.  He is so capable and so on top of things that when they attack him, he easily takes them out in a nicely done page.

Having discovered that something untoward is definitely going on, the Dark Knight decides to spy on the other inhabitants of the estate, and he observes something quite unusual from his vantage point.  The owner of the mansion, Heathrow, and two followers pass by, discussing a dark ritual and the summoning of a demon named Ballk!  Something sinister is afoot!  The detective helpfully informs us Ballk is “one of the nastiest creatures of mythology,” but in this case, the name seems to just be made up rather than drawn from actual myth.

Now with some idea of what the trouble is, the Masked Manhunter goes in search of Daphne, who he finds locked in a tower of the mansion.  She fills him in on her predicament, telling him she was hired to teach Heathrow’s two children, but she discovered that they were “a pair of hideous dwarves!”  Whoa, I’m thinking that’s not politically correct!  Apparently Heathrow forced her to don an elaborate old-fashioned dress, the same dress as worn by the woman in an old portrait in her room, a woman who could have been her twin.  The mystery nicely established, Batman breaks her out, only to fall prey to a trap and be taken prisoner by Heathrow’s two little henchmen.

The master of the manse happily conforms to generic standards and both leaves the hero unattended in a death trap AND provides him with some grade-A exposition as well.  It’s convenient, but as I’ve said before, it’s an established part of the genre, so we can accept it.  Apparently, Heathrow’s family have served the demon Ballk for hundreds of years, and he and his followers have been searching for just the right woman to sacrifice to the beast, a woman who is an exact match for the original victim that once freed the spirit.  Daphne is just such a woman, and they plan to sacrifice her at midnight!

The trap itself is a fairly clever affair.  Batman is placed on a stone pedestal that is attached to counterweights, slowly sinking and tightening a noose about his neck.  His escape is excellent, as he tightens his neck muscles and swings, by his neck, to grab a torch off the wall with his feet, burning the noose off.  It’s a wonderful display of acrobatic acumen and grim determination, and it makes for a heck of a page.  Once free, the Dark Knight meets a shadowy figure who he thinks is Daphne, but her strange speech and hypnotic effect on him reveal that she is actually the ghost of the demon’s first victim.  In the only real weakness of the issue, the Masked Manhunter suddenly falls in love with her in a subplot that doesn’t really have enough space to breathe.

The phantom female leads our hero to a black chapel, where a horrible ceremony is taking place.  The Masked Manhunter intercedes just in time to rescue Miss Pennyworth and interrupt the ritual.  In another cool sequence, he scoops Heathrow up bodily and hurls him at his followers, scattering them like ten-pens.  The old man dies, either naturally or as a result of dark magic gone wrong, and the Dark Knight frees Daphne.  With matters settled, he rushes out into the night to track down the ghostly girl, but she fades away, leaving nothing but her portrait and a weeping hero behind.

The romance subplot is a bit odd and doesn’t really work, but the rest of the issue is good fun.  O’Neil nicely establishes a Gothic horror feel for the tale, and the coloring and moody art really helps to bring that effect to life.  The central plot is a conventional one, but it works despite its familiarity because of the good presentation.  I particularly like Batman’s portrayal as capable, dynamic, and grimly resolved.  His escape from the death trap is one of the high points of the issue, as is his effortless defeat of the guards at the beginning.  We’re approaching that spot-on portrayal of the character that I’ve been looking forward to.  Novick does a great job on the art for this issue, really turning out a striking book.  In the end, this story succeeds in its creation of atmosphere, tension, and mystery, even when the plot goes astray, so I’ll give it 4 Minutemen.

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“Help me…I think I’m Dead!”

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This Robin backup is an interesting one.  It features the Boy Wonder getting involved in politics, a prospect I’m of two minds on.  On the one hand, I’d prefer politics stay out of my comics, except in the broadest ways, but on the other, it makes sense that folks who pursue justice and have strong moral compasses would probably get involved in trying to fix their world with more than just their fists.  In either case, we’ve got another campus-centric adventure here, but unlike some of the previous stories, this one works pretty well with its setting.

The story opens with Dick Grayson arriving for a shift at “Friend’s Phone,” a student-led phone counseling service of sorts.  Basically, its for kids who need someone to talk to, and it’s a nice thing to see the Teen Wonder involved with.  However, when he answers his first call, he recognizes a voice on the other end, a voice that is incoherent and panicked.  Rather than call the police, which, in such a situation, would be a pretty fair response, he changes into Robin with the help of a trick briefcase and goes to investigate.

The voice belonged to a boy named Phil Real, who works for the same local political campaign that Dick has joined, but when the hero races to his apartment, he sees the young man tottering on the edge of a cliff.  With an acrobatic rescue, the Teen Wonder prevents a tragedy, and Phil, the campaign’s photographer, tells him that he had accidentally poisoned himself with developing chemicals and went out of his head.  While pulling the pair out of the river, Robin notices how terribly polluted it is, and we discover that this is, in fact, the central issue for his candidate, Prof. ‘Buck’ Stuart.

I have to think it wouldn’t be quite as bad if you were wearing pants, kid.

The next day we see a debate between the incumbent, Mr. Forte, and Buck, and it seems the town is on the Prof.’s side.  Yet, we see the wheels of corruption turn a little faster than the wheels of democracy, and the local corporation that is behind the pollution of the river passes orders down to stop Buck, one way or the other.  Those orders go into effect that night, as Robin is driving around town in his red micro bus and sees masked men running out of Stuart’s campaign office, which is ablaze!  In a scene that is clearly meant to be cool but just seems rather weak, the Teen Wonder flips a switch on his dash and changes the bus’s license plate.  That’s the only disguise the vehicle has.  I’m sure that no-one could possibly connect the guy who drives around in a red micro-bus to the masked crimefighter who ALSO drives around in the same type of vehicle.  Nope, that license plate is a stronger disguise than Clark Kent’s glasses!

Robin leaps into action, taking out one of the saboteurs before narrowly avoiding another slot on the Head-Blow Headcount!  He takes a blow to the back of the head and gets stunned, but he doesn’t quite get knocked out.  So close!  Unfortunately, the punks get away, and the political supplies in the office are a total loss.  Nevertheless, the kid volunteers redouble their efforts and take to the street to get the word out.  This is an interesting angle, as Friedrich focuses on the growing political power of teenagers, which was a rising factor in this period.  It’s neat to see that referenced in comics, especially comics aimed at just such an age group.  This story has something of an implicit encouragement to get involved.

Yet, the newfound vigor and momentum don’t last, as the local paper prints a picture that seems to show Prof. Stuart paying someone off to pollute the river and strengthen his case.  That’s where we are left, with many more questions than answers.

This is a solid story, especially considering the fact that it only has seven pages to do its work!  Friedrich sets up a good mystery, gives us two nice action beats, and even does a tiny bit of world building for Dick Grayson.  The one real problem with this setup is that the gadgets provided for the young hero have all been rather lame.  I think the poor kid is getting the short end of the stick.  While his mentor has Batmobiles, Batplanes, Batboats, and even WhirlyBats, poor Robin has…a micro-bus.

Obviously there isn’t much to this backup tale, but it is a good start, and I look forward to seeing what develops next issue.  Interestingly, there is a political undertone to this story, since our hero is backing a politician aiming to curb pollution and balance economic and environmental concerns.  It’s quite routine for us today, but I imagine it was a bit more challenging in 1970.  All-in-all, I’ll give this story 3.5 Minutemen.

P.S.: Fascinatingly, I just just discovered that this Robin story has a lot in common with an actual event from 1970!  Apparently, the river fire that sparked the events of the first JLA story I covered, JLA #78, had its origins in the headlines of 1969, when the polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio went up in flames.  This served as a rallying point for the beginning of the environmentalism movement, and in 1970, students at Cleveland State University got involved in local politics by staging a march to the river to protest pollution.  That hardly sounds like coincidence to me, and I have to think that this story of a polluted river and college students rallying to effect change must be related to those real events.  If so, we’ve got yet another touchstone for the impact of the growing social consciousness in comics.

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The Head-Blow Headcount:

Sadly, my favorite character moves into the lead on the Headcount, adding another appearance to the Wall of Shame.  Robin, despite a close call, will not join him again just yet.

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That will do it for today, folks.  Thanks for joining me for a further jaunt into that great comic era, the Bronze Age!  Please join me again soon for a few more classic comics.  Until next time, keep the heroic ideal alive!

Into the Bronze Age: October 1970 (Part 2)

Welcome to the second edition of October 1970’s Into the Bronze Age!  Today we begin our coverage of Adventure Comics with Supergirl’s new look, and we have another of the Aquaman adventures by the SAG team.  Let’s see what fun awaits us!

Roll Call (You can see everything published this month HERE)

• Action Comics #393
• Adventure Comics #398
• Aquaman #52
• Detective Comics #404
• Green Lantern/Green Arrow #80
• Phantom Stranger #9
• Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #105
• Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133 (Jack Kirby’s debut!)
• Superman #230
• Teen Titans #29

Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.

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Adventure Comics #398

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“The Maid of Doom!”
Writer: Leo Dorfman
Penciler: Jim Mooney
Inker: Jim Mooney
Editor: Mike Sekowsky

“Catcher in the Sky”
Writer: Mike Sekowsky
Penciler: Mike Sekowsky
Inker: Mike Peppe
Letterer: John Costanza
Editor: Mike Sekowsky

This issue of Supergirl contains a reprint, which is the headline tale oddly enough.  I’m guessing that they had a shortfall of some sort.  Either way, it also features the first of the ongoing adventures of the Maid of Might in her new costume.  DC apparently held a write-in contest allowing readers to design the new look.  That’s a pretty cool idea, and I imagine it was a good way to get interest and buy-in from female readers in 70s.  I do wonder, however, if traditionally “girlie” interests like fashion would have held as much fascination for young ladies that were already breaking with convention by having an interest in superheroes.  I suppose there are still a number of ‘female-friendly’ comics on the shelves at the time, comics marketed specifically at girls like the various romance books, but it seems like kids reading a flat-out superhero might be a bit different.  I suppose that my curiosity on that score isn’t likely to be satisfied any time soon, but there it is nonetheless.  If any of my readers happen to be ladies who were reading these books circa 1970, I’m sure we’d all be delighted to hear your take on the matter.

Anyway, the results of the contest are Supergirl’s new costume, and I have to say, it’s one of my favorite looks for her.  Unfortunately it is also a rather short lived one, but I find it an overall strong design for the character.  It helps with one of the problems of her classic costume, the color balance.  While Superman has his red trunks (in every proper version, darn you New 52!) to break up the blue, Supergirl doesn’t have such a feature.  The boots and belt of this costume help to provide more visual interest, and I rather like the gloves as well.  It’s recognizably a super-inspired costume, but one that has much more of her personality on display.

The story itself is a simple but fun little yarn, a variation on a gag that has been used many times before and since this issue hit the stands.  It begins with Supergirl, young Linda Danvers, lounging in her apartment watching TV.  Apparently, she enjoys watching the tube by contorting her body, given the way she has her chair aligned with the set.  Also, she seems not to have gotten the memo from Batman that one should do one’s TV watching in costume.  Nevertheless, she hears a broadcast about an aircraft carrier that has suddenly vanished in the Gulf.

She leaps into action and goes to investigate, searching for hours above and below the waves but finding nothing.  When she surfaces again, she sees a trio of search planes disappear into the thin air and she follows hot on their tailfins, emerging in an alternate dimension!

Come on Sekowsky!

When she arrives, she sees a massive alien, on something of a King Kong scale, examining the planes.  When she goes to speak with the creature, a larger being, apparently the smaller one’s father, enters, searching for something called a ‘dimension grappler.’  It seems that Jr. has been playing with Daddy’s tools.  The little one lies and says he hasn’t seen it, and in a funny little scene, Supergirl turns snitch, using super lungs to be heard and pointing out Jr.’s perfidiousness.  The mystery solved, the earthlings are sent home while Jr. gets his just deserts.

This is a silly but fun little story, and the silliness is so matter-of-fact that one can’t really hold it against the comic.  As goofy as the concept is, it still seems perfectly at home in the DC Universe.  I wonder how many times that gag has been used over the years, the omnipotent child.  I know it’s shown up in everything from Star Trek to Transformers, and many a setting in between.  This particular story is very brief, but it still manages a funny beat with the punishment of Jr. and a little bit of characterization in the way that Supergirl handles the problem.  Her dialog, not wanting to be a snitch, is rather entertaining, and I rather like that her solution is nonviolent, just a direct conversation.  In the end, this is just too brief to earn more than an average rating, however cute it is.  I’ll give it 3 Minutemen.

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Aquaman #53

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“Is California Sinking?”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Jim Aparo
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

Well dear readers, you are looking at a rarity, the only clunker in the entire SAG run on Aquaman.  It’s a crying shame too, because this book is graced by one heck of a cover!  Just look at that wild image.  How could you have resisted pulling that off the shelf or the spinner rack?  Unfortunately, the promise of that cover is squandered inside, and the epic struggle against impossible odds never occurs on the pages within.  Instead, we get a really bizarre little story that seems much more fitting for Bob Haney than for Steve Skeates.  It is silly and off-beat, but it feels much more like a handful of independent ideas than a coherent story.  I’m thinking that maybe there is some type of inside joke here I’m not getting, but whatever the case, this story just didn’t come together for me.  Interestingly, the splash page includes the debut of the S.A.G. branding.  This is not the most auspicious premiere of the symbol.

It begins promisingly enough, though with a quirkiness that proves par for the rest of the course.  A secretary is tap-tap-tapping away at her typewriter in an office building, oblivious to the fact that water is rushing in around her until she is entirely submerged.  The page is rather funny, and the girl’s surprised face once she’s underwater is comedic.  Aparo definitely stretches his comedy skills in this issue, for what that’s worth.

Yet, the submarine secretary is not actually about to suffer a sea-drenched sendoff.  This is apparently just the sales pitch of a “scientist,” a suspicious looking character wearing sunglasses and a fedora.  He’s trying to convince chubby Race Bannon…er…that is, Eliot Harlanson, a Californian bigwig of some unspecified variety, that Atlantis is destined to rise and, as a result, California is destined to sink beneath the waves.  Fortunately for Mr. Shades, Harlanson (Chubby Race…Chace?) has more money than brains, so he buys the tall tale…though, I suppose in the DC Universe, this would be pretty plausible.

In a really odd touch, the millionaire is not all that worries about the millions that would die if California sank into the sea.  No, what he’s really concerned about is his house, as he continually describes it, his “beautiful, spacious home,” upon which he’s spent millions.  Well, what is a selfish millionaire to do in such a situation?  Mr. Shades has a plan.  He just needs to buy an atomic bomb (an ‘A-bomb’), ’cause you can just pick one of those up at the corner store, and nuke Atlantis.  Problem solved.

So, you can see that the weirdness of this tale starts out already cranked to 11.  It gets more convoluted, though.  Mr. Shades turns out to be an agent of O.G.R.E.  Remember them?  They’re one of a passel of secret criminal organizations that sprouted up during the James Bond, Man from U.N.C.L.E. craze in the 60s.  There for a while, every hero had their very own evil organization as a nemesis.  Aquaman had his O.G.R.E. and Hawkman had C.A.W., and there were plenty others to boot.  These guys haven’t been heard from in nearly 30 issues at this point, and sadly this is not the most impressive of homecomings.

That really is a shame because I always felt like O.G.R.E. had a decent amount of potential, though it was never developed.  Blend in some of the 80s anti-corporate themes and make O.G.R.E. a consortium of massive, shady corporations looking to exploit the resources of the oceans and willing to go to any lengths to accomplish their ends; maybe you’d have something.  You could weave any number of plots into their machinations, and such a setup gives you a constant background source of threats and supervillains.  The last gasp of the ill-fated Sword of Atlantis take on Aquaman got into something rather similar, though it never got a good chance to develop the story hooks Tad Williams introduced.

This is apropos of nothing; I just love Aparo’s undersea vistas…

Anyway, as I said, O.G.R.E. doesn’t come off too well here.  Apparently, they want to take out Aquaman, and they see nuking Atlantis as the simplest way to do this…I wonder if they’ve ever heard of overkill.  Yet, their organization is not up to the job, so they’re convincing some random millionaire moron to do their dirty work for them…somehow.  But their plan is YET MORE convoluted, as they’ve also employed Black Manta to act as (unwitting) bait to lure Aquaman to Atlantis so he’ll be in position for the ensuing nuclear holocaust.  Remember that Manta showed up a few issues back?  Well, this is why.  He’s serving as a catspaw for O.G.R.E., and he’s armed with a shiny new raygun for the job.

We cut back to him ranting and raving outside of Atlantis, where he provokes the Sea King into sending his finny friends against him, only to have them scattered by a blast from the gun, which ‘scrambles brainwaves.’  For some reason, this single gun seems to convince everyone that Manta can suddenly conquer Atlantis with his half dozen men, so the Marine Marvel goes out to head him off.  In an  admittedly neat page, Aquaman bets on his mental powers to shield him from the ray’s effects and focuses with all his might on a single though, ‘get Manta!’  He powers through the blast and clocks his nemesis with a powerful blow.  I always enjoy displays of the Sea King’s mental fortitude and grit, so I like this bit.

After capturing the devious devil-ray themed villain, Aquaman interrogates him, literally slapping the truth out of him in a fairly awesome sequence.  The Sea King realizes that something is up, and he gets Manta to admit that someone put him up to this attack.

Slapping him THROUGH the metal helmet, Aquaman is a tough son of a gun.

Unfortunately, the villain doesn’t know what O.G.R.E. is planning, so the Marine Marvel can’t do anything but patrol around the undersea city.  Luckily, he spots the sub on its approach and summons a giant squid (!) to grab it.  This is an awesome panel, with the sea creature completely dwarfing the sub and emphasizing the power at Aquaman’s command.

Just as it seems the day is saved, the stupidity and utter incompetence of our Californian millionaire, personally overseeing the mission, of course, comes into play.  He hits the release lever for the bomb, and it seems as if Atlantis is doomed!  Aquaman races desperately to catch it, but even the fastest being under the sea isn’t quite fast enough, and the bomb hits the seabed…and nothing happens.  It’s a dud.

Meanwhile, G-Men have captured the O.G.R.E. agents, and when Aquaman and Aqualad compare notes with them, they learn that Harlanson’s girl friday was actually one of their operatives, and she arranged for the bomb to be a fake.  We also learn that pretty much everyone was just let go with a warning.  Despite trying to nuke Atlantis, Harlanson is just sent back home.  Apparently he didn’t know Atlantis was inhabited.  I’d call that unbelievable, but given the level of ignorance in the real world, it seems like the most plausible piece of this story.  More inexplicably, our hero just up and lets Black Manta go, saying that “knowing he had been used was enough punishment for him.”  Really?  Not, you know, prison?  They guy is, at the very least, a pirate and a murderer.  At worst, he’s a war criminal.  I know we want to keep our villains in circulation, but this is just plain ridiculous!  There has to be a better solution than, ‘oh well, don’t try to murder us anymore you naughty boy, you!’

This issue is just too weird.  Harlanson doing all of this just to protect his fancy house is just plain silly.  All of the other elements seem incongruous as well: the O.G.R.E. agents who don’t actually do anything, the anticlimax of the bomb being a dud, the pointless battle with Manta that has zero impact on the story, and the uncharacteristic foolishness of Aquaman just letting his most deadly enemy go free after capturing him IN THE ACT of trying to CONQUER ATLANTIS.  It’s just too much.  There are several fun moments, and Aparo’s art is as awesome as always, but the final result just leaves me scratching my head.  It isn’t actively annoying, like the book of certain Green-clad heroes, but it certainly isn’t nearly as good as the bulk of the SAG productions.  I’ll give it 2 Minutemen.  There’s some fun to be had here, but it is mostly buried under the silliness.

I’ll let Aqualad handle the parting thoughts today:

Thanks…that’s…good to know?

Was this really in the zeitgeist in the 70s?  I thought all that ‘Atlantis rising’ hogwash was a result of the spiritualist movement in the 20s with Edgar Cayce and that bunch.  I’m curious if there’s something I’m missing.  As always, if you know something I don’t, please drop me a line in the comments!

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Well, that does it for today’s features.  I hope you’ll join me soon for another pair of Bronze Age stories.  Until then, keep up the search for adventure!

Into the Bronze Age: August 1970 (Part 1)

Well, last month was a bit of a letdown, but this month promises to be a bit more interesting, with more Aquaman and more of the fun Manhunter debut!  Join me as we forge a little further Into the Bronze Age!

This month in history:

• 2nd San Diego Comic Con was held (of note probably only in this context)
• Rubber bullets used for the first time during the Troubles in Ireland
• France performs nuclear tests
• 1st computer chess tournament held
• Peruvian Airlines jet carrying 45 US exchange students explodes
• Jim Morrison is tried in Miami on “lewd & lascivious behavior”
• Venera 7 probe launched for Venus
• Unrest continues at home and abroad, with bombs and riots in the US and Ireland

Well, both the Troubles in Ireland and the Space Race continue, and although it was a quieter month in the US, things were obviously still not peaceful.  I imagine it will be some time before we stop seeing these events in our monthly roundup.

This month’s chart topper was “(They Long to Be) Close to You” by the Carpenters, a sweet, sappy song that is something of a contrast to the rage in the air all over the world.  Even in a burning world, love endures, I suppose.

Roll Call (You can see everything published this month HERE)

• Action Comics #391
• Aquaman #52
• Batman #224
• Detective Comics #402
• The Flash #199
• Justice League #82
• Phantom Stranger #8
• Showcase #92
• Superman #229
• Teen Titans #28
• World’s Finest #195

Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.

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Action Comics #391

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“The Punishment of Superman’s Son”
Writer: Robert Kanigher
Penciler: Ross Andru
Inker: Mike Esposito

“The Ordeal of Element Lad!”
Writer: E. Nelson Bridwell
Penciler: Win Mortimer
Inker: Jack Abel

Okay, I was astonished to find that the headline tale was NOT written by Bob Haney.  It features the Super Sons, after all, and it is full of all kinds of Haney quality Zaniness!  Of course,  that means this is an odd one, Haney or no Haney.  It is pretty hilarious in spots and just ohh so very goofy throughout.  The Super Sons stories are always pretty out there, and this one is no exception.  Interestingly enough, Wikipedia is all kinds of wrong about these oddball characters, maintaining that the first appearance of the Super Sons was in a Haney-penned story from 1973.  Apparently this 1970 feature wasn’t the first appearance either, though, as that was in 1965.  There you go kids; that’s why your teachers tell you not to trust Wikipedia!  Anyway, let’s jump right into the madness, shall we?

Essentially, this is Goofus and Gallant, the super hero edition, with the oddly doppleganger-ish children of the World’s Finest duo standing in for the titular pair.  We join Superman and his son, the incredibly creatively named Superman Jr. (Really?  Not, you know, Superboy?) as they discontentedly watch Batman and HIS equally creatively named son, Batman Jr.  The young Dark Knight is getting the Metropolis Medal of Valor in recompense for his deeds of daring do in the great city.  The Man of Steel and his son look on unhappily, with Super-Dad really bucking for ‘Father of the Year’ as he berates his son for not being as good as Batman’s boy.  Later, they head home to the “secluded, adjoining homes of Superman and Batman in the country between Metropolis and Gotham.”  And, just for the record, it was at that moment that I began to suspect that this issue was written by a 10 year old.  Seriously, there are a lot of concepts here that seem like something my little nephew would come up with, the fevered dreams of playground storytelling.  I realize that these comics were pitched to younger readers, but there’s a bit of a difference between what a kid would think is cool and what a kid would come up with if left to his own devices.

Anyway, at the door the super pair are met by “Mom,” who is conveniently wearing a wig and has her face in shadow.  This is actually a funny and clever little element of these Super Sons stories.  They always had the mothers’ faces in shadow and they tried to keep their identities fuzzy.  It’s hilarious that they’d go to that much trouble for these stories they’ve already labeled as ‘imaginary,’ and which don’t have many other concessions to logic or consistency.

Well, here we see a few more moments of the type of domestic farce that I love so very much, with the Super-Family sitting down to eat in full costume.  Fortunately, it’s not the focus of the issue.  It’s just a bizarre little side feature, as if Ross Andru just forgot that these characters have civilian identities after the first page.  Either way, Superman continues to play ‘disappointed Dad’ and is fairly ugly to his son as he takes off to retrieve a special singing alien plant.

We get an admittedly cool sequence as The Man of Tomorrow recovers the plant from a creature of flame, intending to bring the vociferous vegetable home to display on Earth.  The idea of a singing plant is not a new one, and it’s a cool enough sci-fi concept.  Yet, this story goofies it up by having the sounds the bush creates be genre and instrument specific.  This alien life-form plays “rock, marimba, strings, piano, cello, [and] steel band.”  Sure.  Just think about that one for a moment.

The Boy of Steel demonstrates his Goofus bona fides by burning the vocal vegetable to a crisp by flying too fast when he’s sent to deliver it.  This earns the poor schmuck a real tongue lashing from his father, combined with a healthy dose of parental guilt.  You really do feel for this poor kid (apparently only 14), as his various screw-ups throughout the issue are all accidents, and he’s really trying to do his best.  He reminds me a bit of Jerry Gergich from Parks and Rec.  To top things off, Batman and son just casually drop by to brag about how awesome they are.  I swear, the whole thing reads like parody.  If this were written today I’d think it was really clever satire!

Super goofs are the worst!  Also, smug Batman better watch out or he might find himself thrown into the sun…

The Super Sons hang out, with the Boy Detective trying to cheer up his super pal, including offering to let him ride his “Bat Bike.”  Ha!  Well, all of his efforts are to no avail, and then the two of them each attempt to stop a group of robbers with a nifty subterranean tank that looks more than a little like the Transport Modules from the old Ninja Turtles ‘toon (maybe the crooks work for Krang!).  The Boy of Steel blows it again, being fooled by fake Kryptonite, while Batman Jr. cleverly outwits the thieves…at least, if you don’t think about it too hard.  He finds the tunneling tank in a lake, hiding out from the authorities, so he plugs up its air snorkel, which is currently UNDERWATER, with a handkerchief.  This, somehow, causes the gang to surface, despite the fact that the snorkel was already blocked by being, you know, UNDERWATER!  It’s just a ridiculous little oversight that adds to the silliness of this issue.  Did you guys even bother to READ this thing before you sent it to press?

Afterwards, we get another dose of domestic farce as all of the heroes sit down to a family dinner, still in costume, to celebrate Superman Jr.’s birthday.  Yay.  For his gift, the elder Superman decides to take his son to the Fortress of Solitude for the first time in an attempt to heal the rift between them…the rift that he has totally caused for being a jerk to his well-meaning son.

Unfortunately, Goofus, I mean Superman Jr., screws everything up when he’s left alone in the Fortress.  He accidentally trashes the place, which seems to be the final straw.  The issue ends with the Dad of Steel locking his son in a booth and dropping in a piece of gold kryptonite to permanently take away his powers.  There’s actually something of value there, as the Super Father faces the fact that his son is more or less a danger to everyone on Earth because he’s such a huge clutz, but he’s also only 14…and who wasn’t a screwup at that age?  In other words, it immediately sinks into bathos or “narm.”  I’m sure we’ll see some type of turnaround next issue, but that’s where this merry-go-round of craziness ends.

So, what do we make of this non-Haney batch of zaniness?  Well, I’m not really sure.  It’s just so goofy and silly that I certainly can’t enjoy it the way I do your average adventure story, but it is also undeniably vivacious and full of energy in a way that last Superman story simply was lacking.  It is clear that Kanigher isn’t thinking too deeply…or at all…about this tale, but it is fun and you really can’t help but feel sorry for the Super-Loser.  It does seem like the basic concept suffers from a lack of creativity, with the Super Sons just being carbon copies of their fathers, but there are neat moments interwoven with the ludicrous ones, though the latter outnumber the former.  This is a very Silver-Agey tale, though somehow less obnoxious than some of the others we’ve waded through.  I suppose it is just so wacky that it comes back around again and is fun.  I’ll give it 2.5 Minutemen.  It’s final effect is silly, but entertainingly so.

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“The Ordeal of Element Lad!”

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In the backup position this month we have the continuation of the excellent Legion story from the previous issue, and just as in that comic, this story absolutely steals the show.  It suffers from its brevity to a degree, yet it still manages to deliver a great espionage adventure.  Bridwell really came through with this two-parter, giving us a fascinating setup, solid if limited character work, exciting twists and turns, and a level of sophistication that really stands in marked contrast to the childish fare that seems to populate the pages of the Superman books.

You can see Bridwell struggling with his limited space to a degree, but the way he’s structured the two separate episodes helps to mitigate these restrictions.  For example, our perspective shifts a bit with this issue, and characters who didn’t get too much focus in the previous story get to carry most of the action in this one.  Unfortunately, Timber Wolf and Karate Kid still get rather short shrift, falling between the cracks a bit, but I suppose that type of thing is bound to happen in a team book with a big cast, especially when page real-estate is at such a premium.  The real stars of the issue are Element Lad and Saturn Girl, and we join the latter at the beginning of the story right where we left her, deep in the belly of the beast, having infiltrated the science labs of the tyrannical President Peralla.  The previous issue’s mild cliffhanger ending is continued as the scientist’s assistant declares that she knows the young Legionnaire.  Fortunately, she doesn’t know her as a Legionnaire!  It seems that this girl, Marli Zhorg (gotta’ love these Legion names) was a schoolmate of Saturn Girl’s but hasn’t kept up with her fellow Saturnian’s exploits since the old days.  Thus, she thinks that Imra is just another scientist looking for a job, happily assuming that her college buddy has no more qualms about working for a dictator than she does.

Yet, though her cover is intact, the psychic heroine faces another obstacle.  She can’t telepathically smuggle the secrets of the ‘Humanoid’ super soldiers out to her teammates in the presence of another mind-reader.  Thinking quickly, she sends a seemingly innocent message ‘in the clear’ to Brainiac 5 that nevertheless appraises him of the situation.  It’s a nice display of her resourcefulness.  Meanwhile, the rest of the team is meeting with Masrin, the rebel leader, under the guise of being fellow operatives from the Dark Circle.  As they try to figure out how to fight the seemingly unstoppable Humanoids, Brainy discovers a trace of their substance on Karate Kid’s hand and rushes to conduct an analysis.

Just then, the loyalist forces attack, and a desperate battle ensues, a battle that will be hopeless unless the young Coluan can solve the mystery.  In a fun and fitting little sequence, Brainy solves the puzzle in the time it takes Element Lad to complain about his tardiness.  It’s a nice little character moment, demonstrating Brainiac 5’s competence, coolness, and also indicating the touch of arrogance that comes from knowing you’re the smartest being in the room.

With the secret in his possession, Element Lad begins a herculean labor, single-handedly dispatching the Humanoids by converting their bodies into various elements, all while making the rebels believe it is their new weapons carrying the day in order to maintain their cover.  The sequence is nicely illustrated by Mortimer, and the Legionnaire displays a creative use of his powers as he destroys the creatures.

The effort leaves him so drained that Timberwolf has to carry him when the rebels advance, but even so, he keeps up his attack.  Soon they are storming the capitol itself, and Saturn Girl sends them inside information, handily dispatching her former friend when she realizes what the young heroine is up to.  Brainy uses his force field belt to penetrate the city’s defenses and smash their controls, allowing the rebels to sweep in and providing him with a nice action sequence in the bargain.

Masrin is more concerned with securing the treasury than with the capture of Peralla, and he pulls a Scrooge McDuck (minus the charm and whimsy) as he examines the wealth of the planet.  Here we see the culmination of the solid character work that Bridwell manages to weave into this fast moving story, as the rebel leader’s vices are displayed in several subtle ways amidst the action.  We see it when he shouts cornball lines during the battle that make the heroes roll their eyes, as well as in his casual disregard for his men in the previous story.  His vices prove his undoing, in classic fashion, as his greed provides the opening the Legionnaire’s need to take care of him.  The team convinces Masrin to hold back most of the treasure and only offer a small portion to his troops.  When he does so, Element Lad uses the last of his energy to transmute the gold and jewels into simple lead and stone.  The rebels turn on their disgraced leader, and a better man takes his place.

The team, their mission successfully completed, is extracted, and the tale ends with Element Lad waking up in the infirmary after his heroic efforts, being congratulated by the others.  His valiant, unyielding perseverance throughout the issue was really quite impressive, and it’s pleasant to see the fellow get his due, especially because he’s a character that I don’t know well.  I like seeing new (to me) characters come out strong, and I always enjoy seeing underdogs (and Element Lad rather seems like one to me) make good.  He really does carry the issue, though, and his endurance in the face of his increasing exhaustion is a great heroic note for the character, even if it’s all we have time to learn about him.

So, there you have it, an excellent Legion adventure, full of fun, intrigue, and energy,  with personality and character packed into every rare spare moment.  I didn’t even mention the romance subplot where the rebel officer’s girlfriend was revealed to be in love with someone else.  That type of extraneous element could easily just feel tacked on and unnecessary, but it is indicative of Bridwell’s apparent desire to see that nothing is left hanging.  Instead of being a distraction, it is handled with a light enough touch to add just a little extra flavor to the tale, occupying no more than a single panel and fitting in organically.  Once again, we see the power of visual storytelling, as a single word balloon and a meaningful glance tell us everything we need to know about the way things stand.

The story isn’t perfect.  It’s just too short to be entirely successful.  The setup for the yarn remains impressive, though it doesn’t get as much exploration as we might like.  The final resolution, disposing of both Perala and Masrin, as well as the general threats to the world, as quickly as it does is a tad unsatisfying.  Nonetheless, the dramatic irony of Masrin’s greed-triggered fall helps to ameliorate this feeling.  On the whole, if the only complaint you can level against a story is that you wish there were more of it, you’re doing pretty well.  I’ll give it a solid 4 Minutemen, like it’s previous iteration.  I am really enjoying these Legion tales, and I’m looking forward to the next one!  They really help make these Action Comics days more enjoyable.

 

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Aquaman #52

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“The Traders’ Trap”
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Jim Aparo
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

“Never Underestimate a Deadman”
Writer: Neal Adams
Penciler: Neal Adams
Inker: Neal Adams
Editor: Dick Giordano

Well, back to Aquaman’s aquatic adventures, and happy I am for the return!  I really love this run, as I’ve remarked before, and though this isn’t the best one of the bunch, it’s still pretty darn good.  This issue is graced with another beautiful Nick Cardy cover, one that embraces the visual daring and creativity of the art within.  Once again, the SAG team deliver an innovative story that is breaking away from the standard formulas, along with really lovely and unusual art.  Imaginations continue to run wild, and the flurry of creative concepts keeps flying as the team further fleshes out this strange world.  What’s more, this story provides a really surprising and rather challenging moral dilemma for its protagonist.  In short, this book continues to encapsulate the best things about the Bronze Age.

Another beautiful, trippy Aparo splash page

Before we rejoin our hero and his silent girl friday, the SAG team tosses out another concept to populate this bizarre world, a new and interestingly designed race of aliens, quite ugly but also fairly unique.  They have an advanced ship that looks a bit like a fugitive from Star Trek, and they are apparently on the hunt for slaves!  They approach the blue colony sphere…thing…from the last issue and spot the Sea King and his companion fighting off a horde of the natives.  The giant-headed aliens are impressed with the scrappy pair’s prowess, so they decide to capture them.

Trapped in a force field, the Marine Marvel and the girl are brought aboard the alien ship and imprisoned in glass tubes with the rest of the day’s ‘catch.’  Aquaman deduces that the strange beings are telepathic and have highly developed brains, what with their huge melon-heads and all.  It seems telepathy is a common feature in the life forms of this bizarre land, a nice little bit of internal consistency that doesn’t get remarked upon but which makes the setting feel more fleshed-out and believable.

Then we get a moment that I really enjoyed, one of those ‘Aquaman-is-awesome’ scenes that this series does so well.  While the glass prisons are enough to hold most life forms, the Sea King is not so easily cowed.  Held in his cell by powerful mental force, Arthur proves once again how much raw willpower he can muster as, inch by agonizing inch, he forces his arm to move until he shatters the cylinder and escapes.  Then he proceeds to wipe the floor with the big-brained bozos, casually remarking that though they may be smart, they aren’t too much in a fight.  It’s a really great sequence, and demonstrates how well the SAG team handle the character.

I LOVE this panel with Aquaman cleaning three of the aliens’ clocks at once!

The Marine Marvel smashes a door control to cut off reinforcements and makes his way to the bridge, still desperate to follow the telepathic ‘pull’ that had drawn him to that blue colony in the first place in the hopes that it would lead him to Mera.  Some experimentation allows him to discern the workings of the controls, and the inclusion of that scene helps to illustrate the attention being given to the telling of these tales.  It makes sense that an alien ship could not be instantly piloted by a stranger, so seeing Aquaman actually pressing the wrong buttons as he’s trying to figure it out is a nice nod to logical consistency and their efforts to create a believable universe.  As Aristotle said, impossibilities (like men breathing under water and traveling to other worlds) can be accepted, as long as the are believably possible impossibilities.

Well, once he arrives back at the colony, we encounter the most interesting moment in the story.  Our hero realizes that the girl is still trapped, and he faces the choice of what to do with her.  He knows he is going to be charging into battle against overwhelming odds as he pursues his quest, and he also knows that the colonists are likely to kill the girl on sight because she was the one who fired on them.  Yet, if he leaves her behind, she is liable to become a slave…or worse!  It’s a compelling and puzzling moral dilemma with no easy answer, and Aquaman himself doesn’t instantly know what to do.  He wants to do what is best for the girl, yet what that might be isn’t easy to discern.  His decision is made quickly, but at least we are shown that he sweats over it.  He chooses to leave the girl behind as he continues to search for a way home.

Now, I’m far from convinced that this was the right choice, and it is actually rather troubling to me that Aquaman abandons her.  While I rather think that Skeates intends it to be thus, it seems that, at the least, Arthur should have woken her up and asked her what SHE wanted.  Of course, given her beliefs, she might not have ‘spoken’ with him, even if he had done so.  It is truly a difficult situation, as he could not take her home, her life wouldn’t be worth a plug nickel in the new colony, and our hero knows nothing else about this weird world.  As he remarks, at least she is safe, for the moment.  Nonetheless, it is vexing, and the fact that this simple four-color adventure book had me puzzling over a moral conundrum is a testament to its quality and to its uniqueness in the current crop of comics.

Well, to turn back to our tale, the Sea King attempts to fight his way into the colony, but he is felled by a…*gasp* head blow!  Yep, poor Arthur gets a second spot on the Head-Blow Headcount wall.  I’m afraid it won’t be his last, either.  I will say this for the noggin knock, though, at least these alien inhabitants of this land might actually have the strength to knock our hero out with one shot, unlike the average humans who tend to do so.  Either way, his captors decide to carry him to the “Extermination Chamber”!  Dun dun, DUNNN!

What a great place for a scene shift.  We check in briefly with Mera and Vulko, who are monitoring Black Manta as he circles Atlantis.  Suddenly, the Manta-ship disgorges two divers, but what are they up to?  Well, we won’t find out this issue, as our scene shifts again, picking back up with our hero on his way to his dreadfully named destination.  He makes swift work of his three guards in a nice, dynamic sequence, and he realizes that he’s reached the source of the strange ‘pull’…but there is nothing there!

Just then, Mera snaps and cries out that she needs her husband (calling him “Aquaman” instead of Arthur, which always bothers me as it seems quite unnatural), and in response, the startled Sea King suddenly finds himself growing…and growing…finally appearing in front of a very surprised Sea Queen!  What is going on?  Well, we’ll actually get our answers in the Deadman backup!

It’s a surprising and intriguing ending, though I really dislike Mera’s panicked outcry.  The modern portrayal of Mera has its problems (for one, she’s now trained as a warrior and assassin and quite blood-thirsty…just like every other character Geoff Johns reimagines), but at least she’s a fiery, independent woman.  I like my Mera with more spirit, more moxy.  She should be no-one’s damsel in distress, especially with all the power she is packing.  Still, like I said with the last issue, I do enjoy the idea that both husband and wife are desperate to be reunited.  It’s sweet.  This outburst pushes things too far, though.

The more interesting element is, of course, the controversial (to me, at least), choice that our hero makes this issue.  It is handled briefly, and the action moves right along, yet it is a really compelling moment that tells us about the character.  What do y’all think of his choice, readers?  What should Aquaman have done with the girl?  Feel free to weigh in through the comments.

Once again, the story suffers a bit from brevity, but it still manages to present us with a complete adventure, while also keeping us on the hook by raising as many questions as it answers.  Throughout Aquaman comes off as pretty awesome, powerful, capable, indomitable (other than that one head-blow…), and driven, yet still concerned about the girl who has fallen in with him, despite his own considerable problems.  I think the issue itself may not be quite as strong as the last one in all respects, but the episode with the choice provides enough interest and depth to push it up to the next level in my estimations.  Thus, I award it a very respectable 4.5 Minutemen.

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“Never Underestimate a Deadman”

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This Deadman backup provides a fun and interesting, if a bit uneven, conclusion to our main adventure, and it is followed by an Aquaman epilogue that I will cover in this section.  Neal Adams is in fine form, so the art is beautiful, but unfortunately, he is also handling the writing chores, and his prose tends to be a tad purple.  He also makes some rather odd choices with his captions, as when the boxes constantly urge the hero to hurry.  Still, it’s a fun yarn.

It opens with Deadman and the strange, dimension hopping Tatsinda arriving back on Earth after a stomach churning journey.  The Deceased Detective commits something of a faux pas by telling his now cat-shaped companion that he liked her better in the other world.  They encounter the Ocean Master moping about his betrayal of the man who he has come to realize is actually his brother, Aquaman.  In a really nice bit of characterization, there is an element of pride even in Orm’s remorse, a certain epic grandeur that reminds one of Milton’s Satan in a funny costume.  It is not just that he betrayed his brother, it is also that he failed to save him, and the failure itself, a failure to enact his will, is, perhaps, what galls him most.  It’s actually a wonderful character beat, and I think it captures something about Orm that is true about most great villains.  The central sin, the original sin, and the one that leads to worldly greatness both good and bad, is pride.  It must be the defining characteristic of any would-be world-conquering villain.  Magneto or Lex Luthor would be nothing, despite their individual causes, if they were not backed up by towering pride and will to back it.

I’ll add, at the risk of sidetracking this commentary even further, that Ocean Master’s costume, though here it looks about as good as it ever does, is just a lost cause.  The light purple, almost pink cloak and pants, the whole color scheme…it just doesn’t have the dignity the character needs.  The later redesign that adopted a more serious color scheme looks world’s better.  The modern version is, like almost every single New 52 costume, overdesigned, but it has some good elements.  I like the scales that echo and reflect Aquaman’s armor, but the whole thing just doesn’t quite come together.  I think one more pass would get it right.  Unlike many folks, I actually quite like the helmet.  I think it is distinctive and interesting.  The new version refines it nicely, but I think it has always been a good trademark for the character, making the design pop.

Well, anyway, Deadman grows tired of listening to Orm’s monologuing as the fate of the world hangs in the balance, so telling Tatsinda to hang tight, he grabs the reins of the villain’s body, and uses him to infiltrate the aliens’ ship.  I bet you had forgotten all about these guys, huh?  Well, helpfully, we get a quick recap, and the invaders obliging explain their plan to “Orm,” since he is, after all, their ally.  They are going to flood the world with radiation from all of their emitters, and this will reduce the inhabitants’ intelligence, making them nice, tractable slaves.

The ghostly hero decides to smash their devices, and by jumping from opponent to opponent, he makes some progress, but the aliens shut their brains down to thwart him (That has to be a VERY specific skill.  How often would it come in handy?  I mean, other than going to see a DC movie?).  Unable to use the aliens, Deadman begins to flit across the globe, controlling various animals to smash the devices, but he realizes that to get the central device he needs help, namely, Aquaman!  We discover what has happened to the Aquatic Ace.  Apparently the invaders don’t believe in taking life (an interesting touch), so to fulfill their bargain with Orm, they just shrunk the hero down, and he is now trapped in a microscopic realm on Mera’s ring.  Intense concentration can reverse the effects (sure, why not), so Deadman snags Vulko in order to prompt Mera into such an effort, and this triggers the Sea King’s return.

Yet, is it all for naught?  The Dead Detective realizes that the time limit has expired!  Fortunately, it seems that his efforts were enough, even without destroying the central device…or were they?  Tatsinda tartly informs the smug spirit that it was, in fact, she, who saved the day.  She swam out to the ship and sabotaged the device so that it backfired, stupefying the aliens and forcing their withdrawal.  This is an unexpected and fun twist.  I enjoy Tatsinda’s self-satisfied recounting of her deed, and she also coolly informs our hero that no lady, no matter what her form, cares to be ignored.  It’s a fun little ending, even if it is a bit of an anti-climax.

To add to the fun of this issue, the team also provides us with an accounting of the creation of these interlocked tales, which is, in and of itself, an enjoyable and interesting read.  I’ll reproduce it below so y’all can enjoy it as well.  Essentially, it was a collaborative idea that all the creators contributed towards, the story evolving as it was told.

Anyway, the story itself was a good read, and Deadman’s frantic efforts made for good adventure fare.  In the end, these aliens just didn’t seem like that great of a threat, and that rather lowered the impact of the story.  I think that this is the weakest of the Deadman chapters, and the weakest chapter overall, especially considering the weight and enjoyability of the Aquaman section from this issue.  Still, those are pretty high marks to hit, and the tale deserves an above average 3.5 Minutemen.

The epilogue reunites our two submarine superheroes, and the couple discusses the strangeness of the recent ordeal while also bringing the returned king up to date on Black Manta’s odd behavior.  Mera notes that she is, in a sense, the goddess of this bizarre microscopic world and speculates about other such places.  We know from the Atom that they abound, making the DCU Universe even more packed with life and wonder than is apparent.  It’s a neat concept, and it rather reminds me of the medieval idea that God would waste no space in creation, thus, every element and every area must have its life, its wonder, and its purpose.  It’s a lovely vision of the universe, and, though it raises endless questions, is great for a world of wonders such as this.  The issue ends with Aquaman calling out Manta and promising further adventures to come!

 

Well, I am going to stop this post here, letting these two issues stand alone.  I’ve decided to start treating multi-feature books as multiple entries since their writing takes just as long as do multiple individual issues. That will also hopefully help me keep up a more rapid and consistent pace.  I’m trying to use this blog to discipline myself in writing, in part as training for my dissertation writing which is coming up soon, so hopefully this will aid that objective.  I’m also going to try to rein in my issue commentaries a bit, as they’ve grown more than I had intended, so you may look for more restrained summaries in the future.  As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments, and I hope you will join me next week as we tread further on our journey Into the Bronze Age!

 

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The Head-Blow Headcount:

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Poor, poor Aquaman.  He becomes the second hero to make a return appearance on the wall of shame.  At least this time, it might make some sense.  I have to say, I expected we’d see even more entries, but I suppose we aren’t even a year in yet, are we?  Clearly, this trope is alive and well in the Bronze Age.

 

Into the Bronze Age: June 1970 (Part 1)

Welcome to the next chapter in our Bronze Age journey!

This month in history:

• Soyuz 9 launched into Earth orbit for 18 days
• 1st artificial gene synthesized
• Tonga (formerly Friendly Islands) declares independence from UK
• The Falls Road curfew in North Ireland, imposed by the British Army while searching for IRA weapons, is lifted after a march by women breaches the British Army cordon
• Race riots in Miami Florida
• Edwin Land patents Polaroid camera
• “Catch 22” opens in movie theaters
• Two young girls die in a premature explosion in Derry after their father, a member of the Irish Republican Army, was making an incendiary device
• Following the arrest of Bernadette Devlin, intense riots erupt in Derry and Belfast leading to a prolonged gun battle between Irish republicans and loyalists

It seems that the situation in Ireland continues to deteriorate this month, and the Space Race also continues apace.  Imagine that, the same decades that saw some of the very greatest of human endeavors, our challenging of the great void of space, also saw the worst of our collective character in the violence of brother against brother all across the world from which we were in the process of escaping.  I wonder if we’ll continue to see these tensions transferred in interesting ways to this month’s comics.

The number one song this month was the Beatles’ “Long and Winding Road.” (I can’t find a decent version of it)  I’ve always felt that the Beatles are a bit overrated, but this is a fairly pretty song.  Yes, yes, I know that a good quarter or more of my readers are now frothing with rage, and I appreciate that.  I respect their importance in musical history, their influence, and all of that, but they’ve just never been one of my favorite bands.  Give me Zeppelin any day of the week.

Roll Call (You can see everything published this month HERE)

• Action Comics #389
• Aquaman #51
• Batman #222
• Detective Comics #400
• The Flash #198
• Green Lantern/Green Arrow #77
• Justice League #81
• Phantom Stranger #7
• Showcase #91
• Teen Titans #27
• World’s Finest #194

Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.

Action Comics #389

Cover Artist: Curt Swan
Writer: Leo Dorfman
Penciler: Curt Swan
Inker: George Roussos

“The Mystery Legionnaire!”
Writer: Cary Bates
Penciler: Win Mortimer
Inker: Jack Abel

This is one of those stock Superman plots that provide the fodder for the Super-Dickery pages the internet so dearly loves.  We have The Man of Tomorrow acting uncharacteristically, seeming to disregard his duties and generally act like a jerk, only to be revealed at the end of the tale to have had a good motive for his actions.

Our odd little adventure begins with the situation you see portrayed on the cover, and for once, the cover doesn’t lie!  Superman suddenly decides to start trying out some different sports, claiming that he’s considering a career change.  You’d think by this point in the DCU there would be some regulations against aliens, mutants, or other super-humans participating in professional sports!  The Batter of Steel performs various super feats on the diamond, but a young boy is brought in for the thrill of pitching to the hero, only to actually slip one by him!  The Metropolis Marvel reacts uncharacteristically to this little upset, hurling the ball into space and storming off.

Next, he tries soccer, playing the entire field by himself and eventually launching the ball through the net and into orbit!  Are we starting to see a pattern here?  Perhaps!  Once again, Superman abandons the promise of a lucrative contract and flies off to try something new.  Next up on his sports-tour?  Boxing.  Really.

The strongest being on earth climbs into the ring with a regular, squishable, mortal man.  His sparring partner wears full plate armor, but still!  What kind of nutjob would get into the ring with the Man of Freaking Steel?  Well, his opponent’s sanity aside, everyone else involved, including Jimmy Olsen, points out that this is a recipe for disaster in the form of lots of boxers dying from acute punch-death.  Superman gives a seemingly petty rant about being tired of the responsibilities that come from being a superhero, and he knocks the speedbag he’s working with into the stratosphere!  Yep, I think we’ve figured out the pattern by this point.

In the end, the Sportsman of Tomorrow tries tennis, basketball, and football, each time sending a ball into orbit.  It’s worth noting that writer Leo Dorfman takes the time to establish that our mighty hero has to use special sporting equipment that can stand up to his strength.  I appreciate that little nod to logic.

The situations of the earlier games are repeated, but after sending the pigskin into the great black yonder, Superman follows it up.  We discover that he’s been slowly decorating a strange-looking satellite with these various sports accoutrements, and our hero conveniently provides us with an explanation.

Apparently, this is an alien probe designed to test Earth’s atmosphere to see if it is fitting for invasion.  It is also rigged to explode cataclysmically if anyone or anything living comes too close to it.  The Last Son of Krypton had fortunately been informed about these aliens, the Slurrans, and their tactics, so he was able to prepare a plan to deal with their machinations.  Fearing he was being monitored, Superman faked his sports career to surreptitiously clog all of the air intake ports on this device with balls filled with a special gas which will mutate the alien animals it is to be tested on.

The aliens are horrified and mark Earth off as a no-go.  The tale ends with Superman relating the adventure into his journal in the Fortress of Solitude, noting that “Earth is entitled to know the truth behind that strange sports craze[…]I’ll record the facts[…]to be opened a century after my death.  While I think there’s no good reason for him not to tell the planet now, I do rather like the idea that Superman is not at all concerned with his image.  Who cares if people think he went sports crazy for a little while?  He saved the world!

This is a weird story that mostly serves as an excuse to show off Superman playing a bunch of sports, but unlike the King Kong riff from last month, at least this tale provided something of a justification for itself.  It’s not the best plot ever, but it isn’t bad, and Dorfman actually takes the time to cross some of the “t”s and dot some of the “i”s of this yarn, which I appreciate.  He addresses what would otherwise be niggling little plot holes or irrational moments.  He even explains how Superman knows about these aliens in the first place.  The sports imagery doesn’t do much for me, since I’m not much of a sports person, other than fencing, but it’s fun enough.  I think they provide a clever cover for our hero’s plan.  So, in the end, I’ll give it 3 Minutemen, as it is an enjoyable enough Superman story.

“The Mystery Legionnaire”

I think that the Legion story is once again going to be the star of the book.  It’s another of those mystery member yarns that seem to make up a good 90% of Silver and Bronze Age Legion stories, but the central conceit is an interesting one.  It involves a robotic criminal whose disembodied head is summoning its erstwhile body back to it across the space lanes.  It turns out this mechanical malevolent was defeated by a trio of Legionnaires, and what exactly happened during that earlier conflict forms the mystery of the issue.

Apparently, somewhere in space is a prison for handicapped villains, ne’er do-wells who can now do nothing well because they’ve managed to cripple themselves in their ill-conceived pursuits of ill-gotten gains.  While unable to continue pulling crimes themselves, these ill-favored inmates take advantage of their light security to construct a robotic robber, named KLIM, to steal in their stead.

On a wild alien world, he was confronted by the three teens, Cosmic Boy, Chemical King, and Shrinking Violet, who defeated, trapped, and beheaded the robotic renegade.  Fortunately for the synthetic villain, his head had its own propulsion and managed to elude his pursuers.  After recovering from his defeat, the bodiless bogey summons his body from across the cosmos.

Fortunately for the forces of order, the Legionnaires manage to track the body, though they encounter a series of traps at the villain’s sanctuary.  They each use their powers to overcome the obstacles, Shrinking Violet slipping through a gate, Chemical King rusting the bars, and Cosmic Boy smashing a trap with magnetized rocks.

Finally, they challenge the disembodied head, who is fixated on the single Legionnaire who defeated him, but it turns out that there was no solitary hero to blame.  Yet, the robot remains certain there was.  It seems that he conflated Cosmic Boy and Chemical King with his damaged optics.  Nonetheless, he determines to be revenged on all of the young heroes!  Yet, just as he prepares to strike them down with his powerful eye beams, his vocal device suddenly malfunctions, shattering his invulnerable prisma-glass shield!  How could this be?  Through the  machinations of Shrinking Violet, of course!  She shrunk down and played havoc with KLIM’s mechanisms, causing his boasting to burst his protective bubble.

This is a fun story, and the focus on the mystery is not overpowering or ridiculous as they sometimes tend to be in Legion tales.  KLIM provides an interesting villain, and overall this is just a solid all-around adventure yarn.  I like that Shrinking Violet, the apparently weakest member of the team, is the one who saves the day.  Everyone gets something to do, and even if there isn’t much characterization, it is entertaining.  I’ll give it 3.5 Minutemen.

Aquaman #51

Cover Artist: Nick Cardy
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Jim Aparo
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

“The World Cannot Wait for Deadman”
Writer: Neal Adams
Penciler: Neal Adams
Inker: Neal Adams
Editor: Dick Giordano

The excellent SAG run continues, and Aquaman’s sojourn in the strange alien world continues as well!  This is a visually spectacular arc of issues, with Aparo at the peak of his powers.  Story-wise, this arc is intriguing and has that heady, wildly creative feel of the best Silver Age Stan and Jack Marvel books, where innovative and fascinating concepts and characters are tossed out rapid-fire with amazing regularity.  It’s one of the great tragedies of the comic book world that the Aquaman book and the SAG team would not last long enough to really capitalize on the myriad creations they added to the mythos of the character and his world.

Of course, we’re first faced with that beautiful Nick Cardy cover.  That situation doesn’t really happen inside, but what an image!  We rejoin the Aquatic Ace right where we left him, meeting the leader of the strange, MC Escher-esq city on the edge of nowhere where he’s found himself marooned.  Unfortunately this Brother Warnn can tell Arthur no more than his winsome companion, despite the fellow’s awesome forked beard and robe.  The Sea King struggles with the seeming hopelessness of his situation, but Aquaman is not one to give in to despair.  He vows to once again brave the bizarre wastelands outside the borders of this strange city in search of other beings who might know the way…home!

Yet, his newly acquired ‘Girl Friday’ is horrified by his declaration.  Apparently it is blasphemous to her people to even suggest that there are any other civilizations outside of The City.  Their telepathic “conversation” attracts the attention of the powers that be, and the lovely lady warns the Sea King that he will face attack if he leaves the shrine, but a little danger is no deterrent for the Marine Marvel.  He takes out the guard at the entrance, but quickly finds himself pursued by more of these grim guardians with their strange bubble-weapons.  We get a really love page of how our submarine sojourner escapes the bizarre bubbles, diving through a narrow opening in a building to scrape them away.

Still, he finds his exit blocked, so he knocks out another sentry and uses the poor schmuck as a human (alien?) shield!  His strategy works, and he manages to escape his pursuers, hurling their hapless fellow back into them as a parting gift.

Aquaman, King of the Sea and King of Fair Play

Yet, as he strikes out into the vast unknown of the wilderness beyond, the Sea King discovers that his plucky companion has followed him.  We get a nice little moment where he privately hopes that her interest isn’t romantic.  Yeah, I don’t think Mera would be okay with that!

As they begin their journey in search of answers, they discover that the inhabitants of The City are rather sore losers.  They activate some sort of telepathic death-ray, and it nearly does both of the travelers in!

The girl collapses in pain, but our hero is able to struggle onward.  I like that.  It works for me that Aquaman, who must have an incredibly powerful mind, is able to resist this weapon.  They finally escape the reach of this weird weapon, our hero once again struggles with despair, but he refuses to give in, thinking only of Mera and home!

Speaking of the fetching fire-haired water witch, we check back in with her in Atlantis, where she is fighting a similar battle against despair, with Aqualad’s encouragement.  We get a brief recap of the events that have led us here, but then we discover that Black Manta is approaching Atlantis!  The Queen of the Sea orders out the army to go on alert, but secretly she laments the fact that she must face this challenge…alone!  We get probably a bit too much melodrama here.  It makes Mera seem rather weak, which I don’t care for.  Still, I like the idea of both man and wife pining for each other from more than a world apart.  I suppose I’m just a big old romantic softie, but that gets me.

We rejoin our intrepid explorers in time for a strange and funny little scene where they pass two small figures working a mine.  These elfin characters are named Steev and Jimm, and they reference another named Dikk.  That’s right, Skeates and Aparo added the whole team to their story.  Fun!

Well, Aquaman does indeed discover another city, but one much different from the first!  From a distance it seems to be a blue sphere, but when they get closer, they see it is actually honeycombed with caves and inhabited by a primitive looking people.  Unlike the inhabitants of The City, these folks “talk” in the open, a fact that proves too much for the Sea King’s companion.

She draws her weapon, and she fires at these peaceful people!  Fortunately, Aquaman realizes what she’s doing and slaps the gun away, though the shot summons a hostile response!  Suddenly the Marine Marvel finds himself preparing to fight for his life, and all because of this girl’s unthinking prejudice!

I love the look of frustrated determination on Aquaman’s face in that last panel.

This is a good story, as are all the issues from this run.  It captures that wonderfully weird, exotic sense of exploration and adventure that should absolutely characterize an Aquaman book.  I love for the Sea King to get up on land and mix it up, show that he’s a conventional superhero, but a good Aquaman series also has to take advantage of the unique and amazing setting the character has.  The undersea world of the DC Universe is a fantasy world, populated by all sorts of strange peoples and creatures, civilizations and wonders.

This era of the character did a great job capturing that sense of awe and scope in his undersea adventures.  What’s more, I think this tale has a subtle message about prejudice in the portrayal of the inhabitants of The City, and especially Aquaman’s “Girl Friday,” who, despite having MET someone whose very existence challenges her worldview, can’t escape the confines of her preconceptions long enough to see that wonder of the world around her.  Her willingness to murder the inhabitants of the cavern-city is particularly telling.  Once again, we’ve got a message delivered with subtlety.  Mr. O’Neil, are you taking notes?  I think we’ll see with the next week’s issues that you aren’t.  I’ll let you make your own inferences about how this applies to the current political climate in the U.S.

Unfortunately, this little yarn is just that, little.  It’s limited by its length, as the book is accommodating the Deadman backup, leaving only 15 1/3 pages for Aquaman’s adventures.  That means the tale feels abbreviated and a little rushed.  Still, all-in-all, it’s another fascinating chapter in this submarine saga!  I’ll give it 4 Minutemen.

“The World Cannot Wait for Deadman”

Speaking of that Deadman backup, it continues to be interesting and, of course, beautifully drawn.  It’s a fast-moving, engaging little yarn that also presents a wealth of potential that, sadly, doesn’t seem to have ever been exploited.  We rejoin our deceased daredevil in the grips of some otherworldly phenomenon caused by that bizarre cat-like creature from the previous issue.  He suddenly finds himself quite corporeal and whole in a strange new world, accompanied by a beautiful and mysterious young woman.

Deadman somehow senses that she is, in fact, the reason he is there.  It seems that the cat-creature was her manifestation in his dimension, though she is a native of this new world.  She explains that the aliens actually trap her people and use them to dispose of spirits like him, as their only way home is to “ride” a spirit back to their own dimension.  The explanation having been delivered, Boston naturally demands to be taken home.  Earth is still in danger, after all, and he’s the only one who even knows about it!  The lovely lady refuses, stating that she would be trapped again if she were to return.  Right from the start, you can feel Adams stretching his creative muscles in the design of this alien dimension.  We get only the most fleeting glances of it in this short story, but it’s got the makings of a fun fantasy setting, with the people riding giant birds, dwelling in sprawling subterranean caverns, and facing extraordinary threats.

It’s a real shame that, as far as I know, this is the only glimpse we ever get of this unique world, named Dano by its inhabitants.  Yet, though eerily beautiful, this place is dangerous, and Deadman, the girl, Tatsinda, and some of her people quickly find themselves facing a flash flood, so they flee into the caverns that their race calls home.  Once inside, the little party is ambushed by creepy, arachnid looking antagonists riding a giant…well, hypno-crab would be the best description, I’d say.  (All glory to the Hypnotoad!)  I really like the design for these arachn-anderthals (TM).  Once again, we see them only briefly, but they have lots of visual interest.

The bizarre mount of the arachn-anderthals renders the little party helpless with its gigantic, hypnotic eyes, and the raiders grab Tatsinda.  The Dead Detective shakes off the mind-warping effects of that gaze and pursues the attackers into a perilous web stretching through the caverns.  He employs his acrobatic training to good effect and quickly gains on them.  Deadman’s aerialist attack lets him get in close, and he turns those dangerous eyes against their owners in rather wonderful fashion.

Finally, he faces the last of the raiders in a desperate hand-to-hand battle, strength against strength, like Beowulf and Grendel.  Unlike the monstrous Mere-Stepper, though, this fellow doesn’t leave behind an arm as he plunges into the night.  Deadman effectively kills this guy, which is something that I’m usually, ahem dead-set against (I’m sorry!) in comics, but I’m willing to give him a pass this time.  After all, he’s not your average superhero, and this is a sword-and-sorcery-esq tale.  It feels right, even if it is a bit surprising.  There’s something ironic and interesting in Deadman using deadly force.  I don’t know the character particularly well, but I hope writers have taken advantage of that concept at some point in time.

The story ends with Tatsinda giving her rescuer a kiss, and then, thinking that his world needs his heroic heart more than hers needs her, she once again rips open the dimensional barriers and sends Deadman home!

It’s a good tale, far too brief to really stretch its proverbial legs and breathe the way we’d like it to, especially given the intriguing nature of the setting, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.  Adams manages to inject a lot in a small space, and one just wonders what he could have done with more pages.  Once again, it’s hard to rate stories this short (7 1/2 pages), but I’ll be generous and also give this 4 Minutemen.

Batman #222

Cover Artist: Neal Adams
Writer: Frank Robbins
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Dick Giordano

“Case of No Consequence!”
Writer: Mike Friedrich
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Dick Giordano

This is certainly a unique instance of “real life” influencing comics!  The famous urban myth that hounded the Beatles in 1969 about Paul’s death gets a silly, light-hearted treatment with this story.  In case you aren’t aware of this bizarre little conspiracy theory, apparently in 1969 a rumor began circulating around American college campuses, eventually gaining national attention, that claimed Paul McCartney of Beatles fame had died.  The crux of this whole weird myth was that his band-mates had covered up his death and hired a double to replace him…for reasons.  The proponents of this theory pointed to a number of “clues” to the musicians demise supposedly hidden in the Beatle’s music.  Supposedly, playing certain songs backward or in specific ways revealed messages about Paul’s death.

It is with just such a musical experiment that our tale opens.  Dick Grayson and his college friends at Hudson University are listening to an album of “The Twists,” playing it backwards at a specific speed, and they hear a line by the leader singer, “Glennan,” that seems to indicate “Saul Cartwright” (get it?) is dead.  The Teen Wonder’s curiosity is piqued, and when he discovers that the band is coming to Gotham, he talks Bruce Wayne into offering to host the fab-four during their stay, giving him a chance to get to the bottom of this “mystery.”

The band arrives, with Saul safe and sound, reassuring the cheering crowds that he is, in fact, still among the living.  Once they are settled in at Wayne Manor, specially re-opened for the occasion, even Batman’s curiosity is piqued.  The reunited Dynamic Duo decide to put the rumor to the test.  Dick gets a recording of “Saul’s” voice and compares it to an earlier sample from one of his records.  The two are markedly dissimilar when compared in the Batcave, but the Dark Knight points out that they would be, one being a speaking and the other a singing voice.

Robin decides to try a more direct approach, so he dons his costume and steals the mini-recorder that Saul always carries about from his room.  Or rather, he tries to, but the trained crimefighter is jumped in the darkened hallway of his own home by one of the British musicians.  Think about that for a moment.

We get a classic head-blow knockout, sending the young hero plummeting down the stairs!  Poor Dick is not coming off too well in this issue.  It’s also worth noting that our heroes start running around in full costume in Wayne Manor with guests staying there.  Good job protecting the secret identities, guys.

Bruce discovers his crumpled sidekick and brings him to the Batcave, where they start to work on new strategies.  After a few more failed efforts, they discover that the band is preparing to do a recording session at a studio in Gotham.  The Masked Manhunters head out to get there ahead of time, but there are a number of hired guns waiting for them!  Batman predicts their ambush with some really weak logic, and the heroes make short work of the gunsels.

The Dynamic Duo finally simply confront the Twists in Wayne Manor!  Really guys?  “Saul” is sick of all these rumors, but he doesn’t know anything about these attacks.  “Glennan,” however, is not so innocent.  He pulls a gun, because no-one has ever tried that with the Dark Knight before.

They slap the singer down without much trouble, and all is finally revealed.  Apparently, Saul is not an imposter, but the other three are!  It seems that the previous year, the rest of the band died in a plane crash while Saul was still home in London.  He wanted to keep the band alive, so he hired look-alikes and trained them for a year, starting rumors of his own death to throw people off the scent.  The truth comes out, and the remaining musicians, minus “Glennan,” form a new band called Phoenix.

So, this was a silly story, but funny as a parody of the whole “Paul is dead” craze.  It is not really clear why Batman would be interested in all of this.  Slow night in Gotham?  Is everybody actually staying in Arkham for a time?  Anyway, the joke is pretty much all that this tale has going for it, and the reversal at the end is a nice twist on the idea.  It’s funny enough, but there isn’t much to it.  I’ll give it 3 Minutemen.

“Case of No Consequence!”

I really liked this backup tale.  We’ve heard a lot in recent years about how Superman cares about everybody, how that’s one of his defining characteristics which is completely absent in this new big screen portrayal.  That’s entirely true, but what the people who cringe at Superman taking a life and cheer at Batman doing the same forget is that this is a trait not unique to the Man of Steel.  It is, in fact, a definitive mark of both of DC’s founding fathers.  That’s what makes this little yarn so good; it captures the fact that Batman does what he does, not just out of a desire for revenge, not because he is so broken and damaged inside, and not because he is bat-guano insane.  No, he fights his never-ending battle because he, more than anyone else in the DCU, knows the value of life, the value of redemption.  And that’s a beautiful thing, often lost amongst the darkness and grimness of his world.

This particular tale begins with Batman, exhausted from a non-stop night fighting crime, so tired he can barely stand, encountering a simple mugging.  He discovers that the victim is a deaf man, a free-lance journalist whose camera was stolen.  The Dark Knight realizes that the camera is this man’s livelihood, and though he wonders if this is really a case that deserves his attention, he quickly realizes that he can’t abandon the poor soul in his need.

The thief stepped in developing fluid, and the Dark Detective uses this to track him, tracing the fleeing felon to a seedy pool hall.  The camera-snatcher, a punk named Bleeker Bill, is reveling in his take and playing some pool, until the exhausted hero surprises him.  The Caped Crusader’s fatigue allows his prey to escape, but the hero’s physical abilities are much less important to his success than his brains, so he figures out where the rat will run.

Bats surprises him by taking a shortcut through the sewers, and cows the coward purely through force of his presence.  The tale ends with the Dark Knight returning the camera, secretly repaired, and pausing for a snapshot for the shutterbug before tottering home, utterly out of energy.

It’s a quick but complete story, and it captures that too-rarely seen quality of the character, his love for humanity at large.  Batman helps this man because he needs help, because it is the right thing to do, regardless of how he felt and how small the matter seemed.  To the victim, it was the biggest thing in the world, and the Dark Knight recognized that.  It’s simple, but good.  That being said, I’m not crazy about the thief getting away from our hero in the bar.  Tired or not, you’d think the Caped Crusader could toss a batarang or something!  Either way, I’l give this backup 4 Minutemen.

 

Thanks for joining me for another set of stories from the Bronze Age!  Please come back next week when we trek a little further into this great era.

 

The Head-Blow Headcount:

We’ve got a new addition to the Head-blow counter!  Poor Robin adds another appearance to the wall of shame.

 

 

Into the Bronze Age: April 1970 (Part 1)

Further up and further in!

This month in history:

• Riots continue in the Ballymurphy estate in Belfast between Catholic residents and the British Army
• Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for best picture
  • Ironically, John Wayne won best actor for an actual cowboy picture, True Grit
• The Beatles officially broke up
• Apollo 13 announces, in one of history’s most amazing examples of understatement, “Houston, we’ve got a problem”
• Muammar Gaddafi started the “Green Revolution” in Libya
• 50,000 US & South Vietnamese troops invade Cambodia

We’re still in pretty troubled waters here and will be for the foreseeable future, though I think the Beatles breaking up is an interesting yardstick for our progress out of the 60s and into the 70s.  Of course, the first few years of every decade tend to be more like the previous one than the one they actually inhabit.  We’re seeing that trend write small in the development of superhero comics this year.

This month’s #1 song evenly split between the Beatles’ “Let it Be” and the Jackson 5’s
“ABC.”  Double points for the rhyme!  Man, how far there is to go for little Michael Jackson.  Poor little weirdo.  Say what you will about him, but he could sing.

Well, that sets the stage, but what about the main feature?  Well, we’ve got a rather short month, having lost a few titles.  I’m particularly sad that Strange Adventures stop printing new Adam Strange stories, as they were really hitting a nice stride.

Roll Call (You can see everything published this month HERE)

• Action Comics #387
• Aquaman #50
• Detective Comics #398
• Green Lantern #76 (First issue of Green Lantern/Green Arrow)
• Superman #225
• Teen Titans #26

Bonus!: The Space Museum

Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.

Action Comics #387

Cover Artist: Curt Swan
Writer: Cary Bates
Penciler: Curt Swan
Inker: George Roussos

“One Hero Too Many!”
Writer: E. Nelson Bridwell
Penciler: Win Mortimer
Inker: Jack Abel

Our journey into the distant future with the never more appropriately named Man of Tomorrow continues in this, the third installment of our story.  The cover, though nice and dramatic, represents only a fairly minor incident in this tale.  The story itself is that somewhat frustrating mixture of fascinating and frustrating.  We see some particularly good character work with Superman this issue, courtesy of Bates, but we also see one of the more ridiculous (and maybe just a tad sacrilegious?) super-feats I’ve encountered in my comic reading tenure.

This chapter of Superman’s enforced future exile begins with his discovering a number of astronauts floating in space in capsules of suspended animation.  The Man of Steel rescues them by flying them through a “rainbow sun,” because Carey Bates apparently doesn’t understand how light works, and, though clumsily expressed, we get a good moment that sets the tone for the rest of the episode, as Superman thinks to himself that “this would have thrilled me once, an eternity ago!  Now even the most spectacular feats don’t give me a charge!  I’m just tired of doing my thing!”  It seems a bit uncharacteristic for Clark to refer to saving lives as “doing his thing,” but the wistfulness, the ennui of a man forever banished from his home, and now aged and facing the prospect of an eternal, anchorless life, is what gives this issue its emotional weight.

Once rescued, the astronauts naturally have some questions, being chronal refugees themselves, after a fashion, having been in suspended animation for 5,000 years.  Superman has no time for such light weights and, in a really lovely panel, with unusual detail and depth for Swan (‘m thinking Russos’ inking should get some credit here), the Man of Tomorrow blows them off and heads for space, not even bothering to flag down a passing spacecraft, just burning out a component with his heat-vision to force them to stop.  Now that’s an example of super-dickery if ever there was one, but I feel it is somewhat justified by the emotional turmoil that Superman is dealing with.

We get a brief summary of the story so far, which ends with a nice panel of the Time Trapper secretly observing his hapless victim.  The Man of Might then pays a visit to the Earth of this distant future, and he finds a grim sight awaiting him.  The planet is completely dead.  We get a neat, subtle (for the period) note at this point, where Clark remarks that he should have guessed as much “after a million years of pollution, war, and untold abuses from man.”  Once again, we find the thread of environmentalism being weaved into these comics, which is even more surprising given the generally traditional tone of these Superman books.

Well, Earth is dead and of no use to anyone, so the galactic cleanup crew arrives to dispose of it in the form of two massive, moon-sized robots.  Superman, being rather sentimental about his adopted world and not entirely in his right mind tries to drive them off, but finds the massive machines entirely unfazed by his efforts.  A frontal assault having proved useless, he heads inside their giant heads, crossing wires and generally mucking things up.  He turns them both into gigantic electromagnets of the same polarity, causing them to repel each other with great violence.  It’s a clever solution, and it is nice to see Superman not simply juggle these planetoid sized automatons…but then Bates blows it by having our hero juggle a planet instead.

Or rather, bring one to life.  In a ridiculous series of pages, Superman carves the dead world in two by drilling through it again and again, splitting it in two…though how exactly that’s supposed to lead to a world reborn is a bit beyond me.  Next Superman uses his…*sigh* super lungs to collect fresh atmosphere, gathers new vegetation, and new animals, all from alien worlds.

Finally, and this is really more than a little troublesome if you think about it for more than five seconds, the Man of Steel steals a freaking family of neanderthal-like creatures, cave and all, flies them through space, and deposits them, entirely alone, on a new and alien planet.  Just so that he can play God to a new Garden of Eden.  Of course, his version of a supreme being is definitely the watchmaker type, because he’s off again on his wanderings the next moment, leaving these poor, displaced primitive folks to almost certainly die on this new world without a tribe to help them survive.  Not to mention, it’s just a mother, father, and a son.  It’s not like this new race can go beyond the second generation.

Good job, Superman.  I’m beginning to think that maybe Lex has been right about you all these years.  And speaking of the smartest man on Earth, we get a rather neat flashback to an aged Luthor visiting the Superman museum back in the past, where he reflects that he never believed his nemesis was dead, nor would he believe it without seeing a body.  He knows he is nearing the end of his days, but the inventor is unwilling to let his hatred die with him, so he creates a small spacecraft, empowered by his own final breath, to hunt Superman across the stars and through the centuries.  Its’ a really cool scene, and it totally works for Luthor.  I rather like the idea of Lex being unable to let go, knowing that HE did not kill Superman, no matter what might have happened to his foe.  It’s a great story beat.

This weapon has been traveling the spaceways for the last million years, improving its technology and pursuing its neverending search.  I’m reminded of Amazo from JLU, where he just kept adapting until he because practically unstoppable.  Well, the device happens to come across the Metropolis Marvel in his meanderings and strikes him down.  Our hero is saved from the very brink of death by the robotic healer from the cover, and we get another nice character moment, as Superman derides the futuristic physician for saving his life, as he would have welcomed the release of death.  Now, once more, he finds himself in the same position, directionless, ageless, and deathless.  It’s a real curse of eternal life moment.

Back in the land of the living, despite his wishes, Superman pursues Lex’s weapon and destroys it by luring it into a massive comet.  Then…well, then the story gets weird.  I know, I know, you’re thinking, ‘wasn’t it already weird, with that whole reviving a dead planet thing?’  That’s a reasonable question, but at least that made sense in a Silver-Agey way.  This ending, though?  Well, I’m thinking that maybe Bates wrote himself into a corner.  So, how does he wrap up this tale and bring Superman home?

He has him re-live his entire life.  That’s right.  Superman flies far enough into the future that he suddenly wakes up again as a baby, living through his ENTIRE LIFE a second time, unable to change anything or deviate in any way from what happened.  Think about the Hell that would be for a moment.  Every mistake you ever made, every stupid thing you ever said, every embarrassing moment you ever  experienced, you get a second chance at every single one of them, but you can’t change a single thing!  Wow, I’m going to go ahead and say, I think that may be worse than living forever.  Of course, it also makes no darn sense.  Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m fine with the whole ‘time is curved’ concept.  It’s the out I was expecting, but why would Superman just pop back into his original life as an observer?  It’s just a bizarre story choice.

The story finally ends with him observing the empty platform that the malfunctioning time bubble had occupied and considering his adventure.  It’s really a weak, weird ending for a story that held a surprising amount of promise.  On the whole, this is another very uneven issue, containing some great moments and some off-putting ones, with some just plain odd ones sprinkled in for flavor.  The pathos of Luthor hounding his greatest enemy even beyond the end of his life is a great boost to the tale, and Superman’s despair over his fate is rather touching in a few moments.  The problems with the recreation of Earth and the tacked-on, madness-inducing resolution weigh the story down, as does the fact that the Time Trapper’s roll in all of this remains entirely undiscovered and unpunished.  That wouldn’t bother me if we had checked in with him one more time to let him “win,” having tortured his enemy, even if he hadn’t completely trapped him.  As it is, this just seems like Bates ran out of pages and interest.  Still, there are elements here of something grander.  I’ll give it 2.5 Minutemen out of 5.

“One Hero Too Many”

Our Legion backup tale for this month is, for once, not markedly better than the headliner, being a by-the-numbers mystery where all the Legionnaires are working against each other to try to sacrifice themselves so their fellows don’t have to.  I’m beginning o lose track of how many Legion stories like this I’ve read.  This particular iteration has the distinction of involving politics and taxes, which is a new angle for me.  Basically, the Legion is meeting to test a teleportation device when the head of the future Earth’s equivalent of the IRS shows up, saying the team needs to pay taxes on this new gadget!

This is quite a surprise, as the Legion is a tax-free outfit, but this fellow informs them that such organizations are limited to 25 members, while they have 26.  The rest of the story consists of the Legionnaires fighting to fall on the sword of resignation.  They each claim to be more useless than the last, though I’ve got to say I think Bouncing Boy probably wins that particular argument…

As you might be able to tell, this story bored me a bit.  There’s really not a whole lot to it, the central conflict being about an unknown person sabotaging all of the Legion’s efforts to pick a member to drop.  They try to draw lots, only to have them burst into inextinguishable flames.  Next, Brainy has his super computer calculate who has done the least super feats in the last year, only to have it select him!

Supergirl insists on taking his place as the odd woman out, but she is stopped by the story’s strangest moment, as the Legion of Super Pets show up and insist that if she goes, they go.  Wow.  Is there a more Silver-Agey concept than the Legion of Super pets?  I honestly can’t think of one.  I can’t decide what’s sillier, a superpowered horse or a superpowered monkey…or maybe it’s the idea that a cat with superpowers would be a hero rather than a villain.  (Hey!  Don’t throw things at me; I’m a cat person, but you have to admit that the latter is WAY more likely..)

The issue ends with Superboy getting caught red-handed in an act of sabotage, revealing he was behind all of the others.  He hands in his resignation and refuses to tell his future teammates WHY.  Interestingly enough, he doesn’t tell the reader either.  The Teen of Steel bids a rather steamy goodbye to Duo Damsel, and then he heads back to his home time, leaving the Legion wondering why he resigned.

This is a rather generic story, with nothing that interesting going on.  None of the Legionnaires evince all that much personality either, other than Duo Damsel at the very end.  Any story that the Super Pets show up in is going to suffer in my eyes.  Given the promising notes in the headline story, this one feels like even more of a relic of the Silver Age.  I think it will also merit 2.5 Minutemen.

Aquaman #50

Cover Artist: Nick Cardy
Writer: Steve Skeates
Penciler: Jim Aparo
Inker: Jim Aparo
Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Dick Giordano

“Deadman Rides Again!”
Writer: Neal Adams
Penciler: Neal Adams
Inker: Neal Adams
Editor: Dick Giordano

Now here we go!  While this issue isn’t perfect, it is definitely just flat-out beautiful!  We’ve got the ideal Aquaman artist and the definitive Bronze Age artist together in a single issue, Jim Aparo and Neal Adams, teaming up to tell an intertwined tale about Aquaman and Deadman.  Of course, I’m also simply always excited to cover an Aquaman story by the SAG team.  This issue was covered by that home to all Aqua-awesomeness, The Aquaman Shrine, and I’ll be drawing on some of Rob Kelly’s boundless expertise on this subject.

Let’s start with that dynamite cover!  I love that long-time Aqua-artist Nick Cardy, who always produced truly beautiful books during his tenure on the title is still around to create our covers here at this later date.  I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Cardy cover that I didn’t like.  The man always seemed to bring something compelling and dynamic to his composition, and this particular offering is no exception.  We have this really intriguing image of Aquaman being attacked by this strange substance from an even stranger city, all against that stark white background.  It’s beautifully rendered and quite striking.  I’d certainly have plunked down my $0.15 (just 15 cents!  Even calculated for inflation, that’s barley a dollar today.  Why are we paying 4 bucks for a 15 page comic these days?) for this comic.  How could you not want to know what was going on inside?

And speaking of that very topic, let’s dive (I’m sorry, I’m sorry!) right in!  This issue demonstrates, perhaps as well as any I’ve read, the power of Jim Aparo’s visual imagination.  Throughout it is designed in fascinating, psychedelic fashion, and the reader’s disorientation in strange and alien landscapes recreates that of our hero as he journeys into worlds unknown.  We start with a splash page that hints at what is to come, and then we are dumped straight into a bizarre world that defies explanation or description.  Instead of wasting my words, I’ll just add an image of the strange vista that greets the Sea King as he recovers his senses.

He thinks back, trying to piece together how he ended up in this place, and we are treated to several panels of Aparo’s wonderfully fluid illustrations of the Undersea Aces in aquatic motion.  You really get a sense of their grace and power as they swim along.

They quickly spy Ocean Master and Mera, still in parley as we left them in the last issue, and before Aquaman can finish his challenge to his villainous brother, Ocean Master interrupts, swearing that his intentions are honorable.  In fact, he is there to warn Monarch of the Oceans about “Them!”  Orm declares that, for the first time in years, his mind is clear, and he remembers that Aquaman is his brother; unfortunately, this realization came too late, and he made a deal with “Them” to kill his sibling turned enemy.  Before he can explain the threat, a strange craft arrives, disgorging even stranger looking creatures armed with sinister devices.  Aquaman moves to defend himself, but he’s too late!  In a really striking panel, the Sea King is consumed by an inky black ray that literally splashes the page with obscuring ink.

We return to the “present,” where our Submarine hero is “swimming” through the air of the alien world in which he has awakened.  He comes upon a vast, amoebic lifeform with a single, cyclopean eye.  The creature pursues Arthur, and his strength and telepathy seem useless.  Suddenly, he finds that he is not alone in his fight, as a pretty young woman in odd garb opens fire on the beast.  Aquaman tries to contact her telepathically, but to no avail.  He takes the weapon from her and strikes the monster in its eye, only to have the girl shove him to cover as it explodes!

After he regains his senses, Aquaman begins to hear a telepathica “echo,” a distant, garbled signal, which is actually a familiar name!  This begins a nice little game that Aparo plays throughout the issue, hiding references in the “noise” of this bizarre world.  Let me also take a moment here and point out how refreshing it is to have our hero go to a world where there would be no reason for the inhabitants to speak English, and to have that actually be followed up in the story.  It’s a minor point, but it’s nice to see Skeates is on top of that type of detail.

As the Sea King pursues the “sound,” desperate to find a way home to Mera and his kingdom, he discovers that his lovely protector is following him, right to a wondrous and outlandish alien city that sees to stretch in all directions.  If this were a Lovecraft story, I’m pretty sure that the sight would tear Aquaman’s mind asunder, but our hero is made of stern stuff, and he takes the strangeness of this pace in stride.

Again he finds the inhabitants of this world “deaf” to his telepathic pleas, so he continues to pursue the “sound” he heard before, which lead him to a large building, but it is guarded!  Aquaman, plans to rush the guard, awash in garbled telepathic signals that are actually a whole set of names, featuring the best and brightest at DC!  The SAG team is featured, as are many, many others.  See how many you can pick out!

The guard responds by firing, seemingly blindly, and his gun discharges those very same bizarre green bubbles from the cover.  Aquaman laughs them off, until the coat him, sapping his strength and threatening to bring him down.  He shakes them off in a really lovely sequence, diving once more for the guard before he can fire another salvo, and lays a tremendous looking blow on him.

Once Aquaman reaches the interior of the structure, he discovers that it is, in fact, a temple, the one place where the inhabitants of this mad city are willing to “converse” telepathically, since they believe that communication is sacred.

Arthur learns that the people of this world have no conception of planets, stars, or anything beyond their own realm.  The girl tells the hero that their leader is the only one who might be able to aid him, and that is where the first half of our story ends!

This is, as I said, not a perfect issue, but it is a darn good one.  It is very creative, with a mysterious delima, fascinating new setting, and subtle but consistent characterization for Aquaman.  This is an inventive tale, especially visually, and you can really see the SAG team starting to hit their stride.  They’re doing new and exciting things, and they are putting out stories that are definitely of the Bronze, rather than the Silver Age.  I’ll give it 4.5 Minutemen.

“Deadman Rides Again!”

A particularly neat feature of this and the next two issues is that they include a set of backup Deadman stories drawn and plotted by none other than Neal Adams himself!  What is particularly cool about this arrangement is that editor Dick Giordano was not one to do things by half measures, so he wove the Deadman stories into the main Aquaman narrative.  The Aquaman Shrines’ Mr. Kelly writes that this decision was made in order to give Aparo a chance to get caught up on his deadlines, and I think it is fortunate for us that it did, as we get a really unique story.  It’s a rarity when a backup and a main feature overlap like this, and the pairing here is a particularly fun and unlikely.

This chapter of our tale opens in the mystical land of Nanda Parbat, where the restless Boston Brand prepares to resume his identity as Deadman in a quixotic attempt to fight evil and balance the cosmic scales.  He has a trippy, fascinatingly drawn conversation with the powerful…spirit…god…thing?  Rama Kushna.  This gives us one of my favorite panels in the book, a wonderful conflation of Deadman’s blank visage with the diving submarine of the Ocean Master.

Kushna informs Brand that he can begin his quest, but first he must address a danger that threatens the entire world, and she points him towards the aquatic villain without much more explanation.  Deadman pops in on Orm and plays fly on the wall long enough to observe him plant some sort of device and meet with a bizarre pair of aliens near a otherworldly craft.  I’m not crazy about the design of these aliens, as they are a bit too Silve Age-y for my tastes, but I’ll be darned if they don’t look quite striking in Adam’s stark pencils.

During this villainous tete-a-tete, Deadman learns that Orm has made a deal to have Aquaman killed, and he pursues Ocean Master to warn the Sea King.  In trying to take over Orm’s mind, Boston finds a small piece of it inaccessible, and in his efforts to break in, he inadvertently releases the blocked memories of the villain’s true family ties.  Thus, Orm recovers his memories and rushes off to warn his brother, bringing that portion of the plot back up to speed with the main tale.

I know folks make fun of Orm’s stylized helmet, but I’ve always rather liked it.  The design is very unique, and when streamlined as it was in later years, it makes for a great look for the villain.

One crisis averted, Deadman heads back to the aliens’ base, but they seem to be aware of spirits like him.  Before they can act, he discovers their plan, which is to reduce the intelligence of the Earth’s population drastically in order to make them more tractable.  I’m not the first to say this, but the current political climate really makes me wonder if a similar plan succeeded in our world.  The aliens quickly realize what is going on when the intangible hero starts possessing them, and they have a defense on board for just such an occasion!  They release a bizarre looking creature that resembles a cross between a monkey and a cat, with huge, hypnotic eyes.  It tears Deadman free of his host, and casts him into…”Noplace!”  There our tale ends.

This is an interesting story, though we don’t get a whole lot of plot.  Fortunately, it can ride the narrative coat-tails of the main feature, so it doesn’t suffer much in that department.  The art is, of course, superb, and we get several really captivating page and panel designs.  It is appropriately moody and psychedelic for a Deadman story, despite the slightly goofy alien designs.  I’ll give it a 4 out of 5, mostly for its role in the larger tale.

Detective Comics #398

Executive Editor: Carmine Infantino
Cover Artist: Neal Adams
Writer: Frank Robbins
Penciler: Bob Brown
Inker: Joe Giella
Editor: Julius Schwartz

“Moon Struck”
Writer: Frank Robbins
Penciler: Gil Kane
Inker: Vince Colletta
Editor: Julius Schwartz

This issue of Detective comics is something of a rarity, being a better Bruce Wayne story than it is a Batman story.  It isn’t a bad Batman tale, but it just has a few character moments for Bruce out of the mask that I particularly enjoyed.  We start off with a lovely metaphoric Neal Adams cover, so lovely that I wonder if the Bob Brown artwork inside might have been a bit of a letdown to kids who paid their change without thumbing through it ahead of time.  Brown is a fine, solid artist, but his action is a bit stiff, and he’s certainly no match for Adams.

The story itself begins in an airplane winging its way west as a couple of stewardesses try approach Bruce Wayne’s seat, hungry for an autograph.  Bruce, traveling incognito in a pair of all-disguising sunglasses (taking disguise tips from Clark, are we?), thinks they’re after him, and there is a fun little subversion of that which gives him a slight touch of humility as they ask the lady beside him for her John Hancock.  It turns out she is the famous, or perhaps more accurately, INfamous author of a new smutty, tell-all scandal book about Hollywood’s best and brightest.  This prompts a rather surprising and interesting exchange between this woman, Maxine Melanie, and our Un-Caped Crusader.

She offers to sign his copy, and Bruce responds rather stiffly, assuring the overconfident lady that he “wouldn’t be seen dead reading your book!”  She responds that he’s alone, as her work will soon be splashed all over the big screen thanks to the very studio our hero is on his way to visit.  Our scene shifts to said studio, and we get a continuation of that theme, which I find most intriguing.

Wayne storms into the studio and demands that they kill this movie, declaring that no business of his will have anything to do with such trash.  The executives respond by asking him if he’s even read the book, a fair point, and one that Bruce concedes, offering to read the work in question.  The plot begins to pick up here, but honestly, this short scene is the portion of the issue that caught my attention.  I really enjoyed the fact that Bruce Wayne was concerned with, not only murder, mayhem, and such other obvious evils, but was also with morality on a smaller scale.  He intends that he and his businesses should be a force for good, moral good as well as practical good, in the world.

That’s an excellent little touch.  That’s a hero, someone who isn’t just saving lives, but who is trying to live a morally exemplary life himself.  Not only that, but when he is challenged about the book, he immediately recognizes the point and agrees to read it.  That’s a reasonable, thoughtful response.  This is not the emotionally crippled sociopath that is the modern Batman.  I know this may seem prudish to a modern audience, but I really appreciate a character that is not simply a moral relativist.  How completely alien for heroes today who are, as often as not, devoid of all real virtue.  It’s sad that these days it’s not even possible to differentiate heroes from their villains by their being unwilling to kill.

Anyway, as for the plot itself, Bruce ends up having to go to a bookstore to get the book, as the studio’s advance copy is missing, and he finds the arrogant author there doing a signing.  Suddenly, she is murdered with a poisoned pen by a surprisingly spry granny who throws Wayne for a loop when he tries to stop her.  The murderer is clearly someone in disguise, and thus begins the real mystery.  We see some of the stiffness in Brown’s art in the action of this page.

Well, this hated writer had a long list of enemies, but at the top of said list are the Hollywood luminaries skewered in her book, a husband and wife along with an aging leading man.  Batman finally makes his appearance and begins to investigate, discovering that the couple each try to take the fall for the other, the husband going so far as to attack the Dark Knight with a poker.  Yet our hero is unconvinced.

On his way to interrogate the last fading star, he is attacked once again by the husband!  Or rather, it LOOKS like the husband, but it turns out to be our third suspect, who, as well as being a talented actor, is also a master of disguise!  This leads us to the other charming feature of this issue, which is the reveal that the star couple really do love one another, each having been willing to sacrifice their lives for their spouse.  That’s a good ending.

So, thus ends a rather unusual Batman story, one that is not a particularly great BATMAN tale or a particularly excellent mystery, but which has some intriguing features that make it stand out as a character tale.  I’ll give it 3.5 Minutemen, just for being interesting.

“Moon Struck”

Here we have another rather disappointing Robin story, which is a shame, because I’ve been looking forward to these backups. The setup is certainly interesting.  A Russian scientist is lecturing at Hudson University, and he has been presented with a moon rock by NASA.  Of course, young Dick Grayson is in the audience for the lecture, but so is an antsy young man named Herb who is so paranoid he is wearing what looks like a homemade space suit in fear of radiation.

When the students approach the hunk of lunar geography it gives off a bizarre flash of green light, leaving the fretful teen a verdant shade of weird himself!  This causes a lockdown of the school and fears of radiation and who knows what else.

Robin hits the scene and starts to check into this strange occurrence.  He checks out the showers, where Herb was right before he started looking like a Martian, discovering some strangely scented soap.  Just as he is starting to put things together, the lights go out and he is jumped by a mysterious figure!

Here’s where things get disappointing.  Robin has a brief fight with this guy, and then he is taken down by one punch.  Big hero.  The issue ends with him recovering consciousness and with me once again saddened by the poor performance of a secondary member of the Bat family.

I really want to call this a head-blow, but unfortunately, it doesn’t quite make the grade.

I think that the really fun bit of this story, at least for me, is the Cold War and Space Race subtext to the issue.  One of the students remarks that he’s surprised that the Russian scientist is working with NASA since his people lost the race to the Moon, and it struck me, here in 1970, the Moon landings were a very recent memory.  We are not yet even an entire year on since mankind first walked on the Moon. Science fiction has only recently become science fact. This very month a real-life space opera was playing out above the nation’s collective heads in the form of Apollo 13’s struggle for survival. I’m not quite sure what to make of this realization yet, but I am quite sure it is significant. There is no doubt that it puts this whole era into somewhat sharper focus for me.

It is one of the strengths of man that we organize reality in our thoughts, but it can also be a weakness as we impose boundaries and borders, cutting off possibilities and preventing ourselves from seeing connections. Thus, to my mind, the Space Race was a phenomenon of the Sixties, something quite alien to the atmosphere of the 70s, yet here we are, in 1970 with these events very clearly part of the zeitgeist.  This is a good lesson for me as a reader not to be too rigid in my thinking.

In the final analysis, the mystery of the moon fragment is an intriguing one, but Dick being dropped like a sack of potatoes doesn’t really seem worthy of the character.  The subtext of Cold War tension adds a little something, but it’s still a sub-standard tale  I’ll give it 2.5 Minutemen.

 

That’s it for this month.  I hope you’ll join me again next week for the next league in our journey Into the Bronze Age!