Face Off

As I have noted in the past, one of DC's major trends of the late 1950s and early 1960s was to add continuing characters to the magazines that did not already feature them. The war books picked up Sgt Rock, Jeb Stuart, Gunner and Sarge, etc., while Mystery in Space added Adam Strange, Tales of the Unexpected featured Space Ranger, and House of Secrets highlighted Mark Merlin.

Strange Adventures, edited by Julius Schwartz, tried something different. Instead of adding one feature which appeared every issue, Schwartz rotated several recurring features: Star Hawkins, the Atomic Knights and the Space Museum appeared regularly over the course of several years. In addition, particularly successful one-shot characters were often brought back. The Faceless Creature was probably the most notable as he appeared on the covers of three* issues over the course of as many years. Those of you who are fans of the Brave and the Bold show on Cartoon Network may recognize him as the Hunter who served as Starro's herald in a two-part episode of that series.

As the first story (Strange Adventures #124, January 1961) begins, two Highway Patrolmen in South Dakota, Jim Boone and Bob Colby, are investigating the disappearance of the heads from Mount Rushmore. The heads disappear along with some other famous giant faces around the world, but then are returned. An alien spacecraft lands and:

After preventing them from firing their weapons as shown on the cover, the alien introduces himself as Klee-Pan from the planet Klaramar, which is a sub-atomic world revolving within a single atom of the Planet Jupiter. He explains that he is looking for a giant head which will unlock a vault where a bomb was hidden by a villain named Chen Yull (sometimes referred to as Chan Yull and also as Chun Yull). If the head is not located, the bomb will destroy the entire solar system in one second.

Well, one second on Klaramar, which is quite a bit longer on Earth:

The mathematician in me couldn't resist calculating that out. If one Klaramar day equals 1,000,000 Earth years, then one Klaramar second equals about 11-1/2 Earth years.

Klee-Pan has tried all the famous giant faces on Earth, but none of them work. Fortunately, Jim realizes the secret:

So he suggests the Woman in the Moon. Of course, most of us have heard of it as the Man in the Moon, but apparently the Chinese and South Dakotans have the gender reversed.

While the trio head to the Moon, Klee-Pan explains how his people became faceless:

That sequence would appear in each subsequent Faceless Creature story. They take the Woman in the Moon to Saturn, but Chen Yull has planned for this and destroys the face with ray guns. But Jim has another bright idea:

And by repairing the face, they are able to open the lock, defuse the bomb, and save the solar system. Klee-Pan offers them a reward, but all they want is for the face on the Moon to be restored.

The Faceless Creature returned in Strange Adventures #142 (July 1962). Chan Yull has learned that his prior plot to destroy the Solar System failed, partially because of the efforts of the two South Dakota Highway Patrolmen. So he creates a new bomb and uses them as the triggers:

But when they arrive the bomb does not explode. It turns out that Jim and Bob were given the power of telepathy by Klee-Pan, and so they had ordered each other not to explode the bomb. Klee-Pan sends them back to Earth with weapons that subdue Chen Yull and send him back to Klaramar.

Jim and Bob find themselves compelled to construct an odd, scientific device. When they turn it on:

Chen Yull heads to the UN Building, where he has a strange demand:

But when they do as he asks:

That seems a very strange quirk indeed. How useful an adaptation is it for a people to only be willing to destroy their own planet? Chen Yull reveals his fiendish plan:

Jim and Bob use the weapons they defeated Chen Yull with in the previous story on each other, shrinking themselves down while sending themselves to Klaramar. Once they are able to communicate with Klee Pan, he defeats Chen Yull and restores the two planets (and the Highway Patrolmen) to their normal sizes.
One other oddity about the series; according to the GCD, the pencils on the three stories were done by three different artists: Mike Sekowsky, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane. I was able to identify the latter two, but the first one really doesn't look much like Sekowsky at all to me except for a few panels. Then again, I noticed how heavy the inks were on that story (by Murphy Anderson), so maybe it's just a case of the pencils being overwhelmed.

*Technically two different faceless creatures appeared on the three covers; Klee-Pan on the first issue and Chan Yull on the other two.

Atom #7

In response to fan demand, DC liked to do team-ups with their heroes. Being DC, they tended to institutionalize the practice by making them annual events. Flash regular team-ups with Green Lantern, so it was a natural for Julius Schwartz to match his third GA reincarnation with his fourth.

The story, written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson, starts with a bit of a puzzle. Some crooks had escaped from a tall building which was too far from nearby rooftops for them to have jumped. There was no sound of a helicopter, so how could they have escaped? They take the puzzle to local physics grad student, Ray Palmer who comes up with an answer:

In Gardner Fox's Wikipedia entry, there is this note:

A polymath, Fox sprinkled his strips with numerous real-world historical, scientific, and mythological references, once saying, "Knowledge is kind of a hobby with me." For instance, in the span of a year's worth of Atom stories, Fox tackled the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the space race, 18th-century England, miniature card painting, Norse mythology, and numismatics.

So it is no surprise that I was able to locate an article from Time Magazine in 1927 on the European fad of balloon jumping:

Walk along the ground with a breeze at your back, approach a fence, bend your knees, spring lightly into the air when you feel the tug of the balloon. You will sail over the fence so easily and land so gently that you will be surprised. Barns and trees can be surmounted with more vigorous leaps, usually requiring a light second push-up with the tip of the toe on the barn's roof or on the tree's outlying branches.

Balloon jumping is already a popular sport among the English gentry, and is attracting the attention of playful Long Islanders.

Later, while Jean and Ray are out bird-watching, they experience a strong earthquake. They also notice a bird that is out of the normal for the Atlantic Flyway.

Meanwhile, Hawkman has also noticed some birds out of their migratory routes. When he asks them why:

Using some special contact lenses he has designed, Hawkman is able to see the radiation is coming from the East Coast and:

We learn that explorers had found the Cosmitron on a world ruined by war. It gave off radiation, but aside from that the scientists from Thanagar could not determine the machine's purpose. Hawkman contacts Shayera, who is on Thanagar and tells her to check to see if the Cosmitron has been stolen. Then he heads east to find the source of the radiation.

The Atom is at the police station when a call comes in about the balloon robbers. He accompanies them to the scene:

Okay, now that's just a bit silly on Gil Kane's part; there's no way a couple of tiny balloons like those shown could lift even a fraction of a man's weight. Here's a look at what is actually required.

So the cop shoots Atom up into the air with the speargun, which is actually a pretty cool idea. He starts popping the balloons, but by the third crook they're over the getaway boat and so the man makes a quick getaway. Meanwhile, the Atom is so far out to sea that he wonders if he will be able to swim back to shore. Fortunately, he's plucked out of the air by... Hawkman!

The Winged Wonder and the Mighty Mite make short work of the balloon crooks, then Hawkman hurries off in search of the Cosmitron. He locates it lying on the ground in a woods, but as he approaches, tiny men in a space ship attack him:

The aliens manage to kayo Hawkman and get away with the device. Hawkman meets up with the Atom at police headquarters and tells his story. Meanwhile, the aliens are hovering above the Earth. We learn what the Cosmitron does:

They transmit a warning to the United Nations. They were the original rulers of our planet and they intend to resume control. If the UN does not capitulate, they will cause terrible disasters to strike our planet. Perhaps this is an optimistic view of the response of the delegates:

The aliens take a knife to the globe, causing a huge furrow to appear in the ground. We get a page or two of explication on the history of the aliens. They had used the Cosmitron to get control of many planets, but eventually the power (provided by earthquakes) ran out and the Thalens were overthrown. Many years later their descendants had recovered the Cosmitron and intended to resume their conquest of the galaxy.

Since Hawkman's spaceship is gone (with Shayera back on Thanagar), he cannot get to the alien ship, but the Atom can, in a model of Hawkman's craft. Once inside, he steals the Cosmitron:

And after a fairly easy battle, the aliens are defeated, the Cosmitron destroyed, and even the furrow repaired.

Comments: I loved the little bits of backup information that Fox provided, and the artwork is terrific. The Cosmitron is an interesting piece of technology. Atom and Hawkman had several other team-ups in the future and eventually shared the Atom's magazine towards the end of the Silver Age.

Golden Age In the Silver Age: Showcase #55

The DC Silver Age was marked by the emergence of new characters based on old characters, but with significant changes. Jay Garrick was no longer the Flash, Green Lantern's power ring didn't work against yellow instead of wood, Hawkman was a lawman from the stars, and the Atom could actually change his size.

This must have been somewhat frustrating for fans of the Golden Age. True, there started the Silver/Golden Age crossovers between the two Flashes and the two GLs, and the Justice League/Justice Society annual stories provided some real Golden Age action. But Julius Schwartz had to this point avoided bringing back the GA characters in a separate book, solely dedicated to them.

This issue changed all that. Schwartz enlisted the talents of Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson for this issue, featuring the return of one of the more famous Golden Age villains, Solomon Grundy.

In the story we learn that Solomon Grundy had more or less spontaneously arisen from decaying vegetation in a swamp, that he'd led a criminal gang on a rampage across the country, but that the Golden Age Green Lantern (Alan Scott) had sent him away in a green bubble to outer space. Now he has returned. Can Hourman and Doctor Fate stop him on his mission of revenge against GL?

Doctor Fate's crystal ball alerts him to the presence of Grundy on Earth. Hourman (Rex Tyler) also finds out:



Why do I get the feeling that Rex's chemical company became a Superfund cleanup site in the 1980s?

Tyler swallows his Miraclo pill and becomes super-powered for one hour. Thus begins one of the annoying parts of the story; every time there's a panel featuring Hourman, we also have to have a clock telling us the current time. Not the information that's useful (like how many minutes are left on Hourman's hour of power), but the present time.

Obviously part of bringing back Solomon Grundy was to appeal to Hulk fans. But I confess, the "Hulk smash!" bit was a little tame compared to this:



As you can see, Dr Fate arrives as well, and the three of them battle it out for a bit. But Grundy wins and so he goes into Gotham City in search of Green Lantern. GL shows up and Solly kayos him with a bunch of wood. And when Doctor Fate and Hourman arrive, they turn against each other:



But unlike a Marvel slugfest of the period, where we'd see the skills of one hero against the talents of another, this is just a brief diversion. It turns out that they knock each other out, and they realize that there's some odd interference between Hourman's Miraclo pills and Dr Fate's magic.

Meanwhile, Grundy has encountered his old gang, giving him the chance to explain how he got free of the alien world where Green Lantern had left him. A comet happened by and swept his green cage into space with him in it. By holding the sides, he was able to guide the bubble to Earth, where it smashed.

Grundy helps out his old gang by smashing a few stores open so they can rob them, then continues back to the radioactive swamp with GL. The radiation works a change on Alan Scott:



But Dr Fate is able to change him back and in the end, he and Green Lantern team up to seal Solomon Grundy in a part-power ring, part-magic bubble that they place in orbit around the Earth.

Comments: This story has all the elements of a classic: great artist, talented writer, teamup of heroes and a classic villain. And yet it falls flat. Anderson appears to be mimicking the Golden Age style (especially on the inks), but the effect is to make it look old-fashioned. The story is dull as dishwater, and the conflict between Dr Fate's magic and the Miraclo pills appears to be padding to make the story last a little longer.

Update: For a different take on Showcase #55, check out M. Hamilton's post at the Comics Bin.

Book Report: Man of Two Worlds by Julius Schwartz

Note: This is not the cover to the book, but this comic gets referenced inside the book so I thought I'd put it here.

I checked this book out of the library over the weekend and devoured it. I am going to work parts of it into various posts, but I did want to discuss my overall impressions before hand:

The book is long on anecdotes, polished and well-told. Schwartz was a speaker at many comic and science fiction conventions, and obviously knew how to entertain his audience.

Unfortunately, polished anecdotes have a downside; oftentimes they have been embellished over the years by the speaker to make them more humorous or ironic. Note: This is true of anybody's anecdotes, so I'm certainly not accusing Schwartz of misrepresenting himself. But any historian worth his salt knows that anecdotal history tends to bear only occasional resemblance to the actual facts.

This is a minor example, but one that is revealing. Schwartz mentions his fandom for the New York Yankees, and Babe Ruth, and notes:

The Sultan of Swat signed a contract with the Yankees in 1927 for a record eighty thousand dollars, making him the highest paid baseball player. He was asked to justify eighty grand when at the time Herbert Hoover, the President of the United States was only making seventy-five thousand dollars.

Ruth snapped back, "I had a better year than Hoover. Besides how many home runs did Hoover hit last year?"

This is a very famous baseball anecdote, but the timing is off. Hoover wasn't president in 1927 (he didn't take office until 1929). Indeed, the fact that the story is generally told as of 1930 makes it punchier because of course the Depression had started in 1929.

The book opens with a terrific joke. Schwartz notes that he was always punctual, preferring to be an hour early rather than a minute late, and says that his gravestone will read: HERE LIES JULIUS SCHWARTZ: HE MADE HIS LAST DEADLINE.

On the other hand, some of the stories read like they'd make great anecdotes with the target of Schwartz's ire on a podium with him, cackling away at the tale, but seem unfunny and indeed a little insensitive in a book. For example:

Also, Mike [Sekowsky] used to like to have a drink with lunch on occasion. When he was doing Justice League for me I remember once when I had to tell him, "Mike, you have to do the cover today, so when you come back from lunch you have to be prepared to do the cover. So no more than two martinis for lunch.

....And on occasion, when Mike didn't come back from lunch, I had to summon someone else (usually Murphy Anderson) to pitch in on the work that was on deadline.

Ouch! As I said when I profiled Schwartz a few months ago, nobody has a bad word to say about him, so I assume that story did not seem as unkind at conventions as it does in print.

Update: Tom in the comments notes that Sekowsky's drinking problem is well-documented and led to his ouster from the Supergirl and Wonder Woman features. The drinking problem is discussed here.



And also mentioned by Joe Giella:

JG: Mike Sekowsky had a very bad temper. Anyone that crossed him had better look out. He drank... He was the go-to guy, but began to deteriorate later. One day he completed a story and I was asked to ink it, but it was very bad and I couldn't ink it. I was asked to re-pencil it and I did so gladly, because Mike really saved me once on a job and wouldn't accept a dime for his help... I liked Mike very much, but the drinking was really starting to hurt him.

So it appears that this was well-known in the industry and not some case of Schwartz airing family laundry. My apologies!

Schwartz acknowledges the huge mistake in Detective #327, his first Batman tale, which featured Batman picking up a gun and holding it on some crooks that he and Robin had already defeated. And he talks about the death of Alfred, another topic I have discussed.

Overall, I rate the book as a very entertaining read for anybody with an interest in the Silver Age of Comics.



Update: Here's an anecdote that checks out; Schwartz mentions being the first to publish something by Harlan Ellison, the famed science fiction author. Sure enough, from Real Fact Comics #6:

A Little Tribute to Murphy Anderson

Murph is probably my favorite artist of the Silver Age, since Dick Sprang was only around for the first half of the era. And among inkers, Anderson had no peers, only envious rivals.

Anderson was probably best known in the Silver Age for his work on Hawkman. Here's an example of his work from the first issue of that magazine:



Notice the intricate work that Anderson adds to his pencils; the inks on the jacket of the man in the background of the first panel really stand out. That's one thing noticeable about Anderson's artwork; he had lots of little bits in the background that make you feel like you're really there, like the hangars, the flight control tower, and the cityscape in the second panel. Of course, he does blow one small detail; more about that later.

Anderson was a master of sequential art; do we need any words here?



And look at the beautiful scenery in these panels:



Because Anderson was so solid at detail, he could draw smaller figures to give us more of a "wide-screen" feel to his panels:



In 1965, DC made an effort at bringing back some of the GA heroes. In Brave & Bold #61 and #62, we got a teamup of Starman and Black Canary:





You definitely get the impression that Anderson was a master artist working extremely diligently to make sure that everything is perfect. Notice the reflection of the house in the water. That is beautiful.

Anderson spent the early years of the Silver Age laboring on DC's science fiction magazines, mostly on one-shot stories and characters, although he did create the terrific Atomic Knights series.

Blown detail. Look at the second panel of the first picture I posted. Notice the plane coming in for a landing without its landing gear down?