Single Issue Review: World's Finest #135

Cover Art by Dillin/Moldoff.

World's Finest #135 features the last appearance during the Silver Age of a new Dick Sprang story. There is some indication that this story may have been inventoried for awhile; if you look at the number of stories Sprang had published by year in the late 1950s/early 1960s, it sure looks like it:

1956: 16
1957: 15
1958: 13
1959: 14
1960: 11
1961: 1
1962: 2
1963: 2

The irony is amusing. Early in his career, Sprang's work had reportedly been inventoried by DC as a hedge against the potential that DC's regular Batman artists, including Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, might be drafted into the military for World War II. Now late in his (comics) career it was released in dribbles, apparently to keep the hope alive that he was still working for DC.

The story opens with Batman and Robin investigating a report of a strange-looking man digging in a farmer's field. They arrive as he excavates a small chunk of Green Kryptonite. When they confront him, he shoots them with a repulsing weapon and escapes on a flying platform.

Batman chases after him in his Whirly-Bat, instructing Robin to contact Superman.



Interesting; I had always known that Batman and Superman knew each other's identities, but not that Robin knew about Clark Kent.

Batman follows the Future Man's trail back to a cave where he discovers a time machine with a then-current date (June 8, 1963) and a notebook which mentions New Gotham City in 2084 and ancient Norseland in 522. Robin relays the message that Superman and he have found the Future Man at the local "Boy Ranger Museum". He has created Kryptonite bullets with which to stop the Man of Steel. Seeing Batman approaching on his Whirly-Bat, he forces the Caped Crusader to execute a daring maneuver:



Is this the finest moment ever in Whirly-Bat history? I'll leave that one to the experts, but it's surely high on the list.

The Future Man escapes and when Superman, Batman and Robin chase him to the cave, they discover the time machine vanishing. Has he gone into the future, or into the past? Superman will cover the former, while Batman and Robin go back to Norseland.

This of course means another appearance for Dr. Carter Nichols, a longtime Batman family member who was about to disappear as well. I don't think this was his final appearance but the clock was definitely ticking. He sends Batman and Robin back through time. Unfortunately, the Future Man has gotten there first and convinces the villagers that Batman and Robin are here to assassinate the local chieftain.

They are knocked unconscious and transported to learn their fate from the chieftain who turns out to be a surprise:



This is one of several "Thor" appearances in DC comics, and I would guess one of the last. It turns out that the Future Man's objective was to steal Thor's hammer, which he does and vanishes back to the present, with Batman and Robin in pursuit.

Meanwhile, Superman has gone into the future, where he initially faces charges for imitating the great hero of the past, but he quickly proves he's indeed the Man of Steel:



He recognizes the Science Minister as the Future Man, but later discovers it's actually his twin brother. The Future Man's minions capture Superman with the Kryptonite and tie it to him with ropes. We learn that the Hammer of Thor interacts with Kryptonite to cause amazing effects, hence the cover image, which scene appears next in the story.

We shift to the future, where the Future Man's henchmen greet his arrival from the present. Rak disintegrates the Kryptonite holding Superman down, apparently in preparation for destroying the Man of Steel himself. But it's a ruse, as Batman and Robin have defeated Rak already (using robots for the cover sequence), and with Superman free they quickly make short work of Rak's henchmen.

If we look at this story for keys as to when it could have been created, it immediately becomes obvious that it is after Detective #257 (July 1958) as this story features extensive use of the Whirly-Bats, which first appeared in that issue. There are plenty of other clues, however.

Superman is show as using his heat vision, not the heat of his x-ray vision. I am not sure of the exact date and issue that switchover was made, but I'm pretty sure it was around 1960.

The Thor appearance is a surprise. Marvel's Thor made his first appearance in August 1962 and he appeared on every cover of Journey into Mystery thereafter. That strikes me as a strong indication that this story must have been written before that. DC did have another Batman/Thor story before that in Batman #127 (1959), but with the heat vision aspect we're already after that.

I don't buy the date shown in the time machine of June 8, 1963. That's about when the comic went on sale (actually June 13, according to the DC Indexes).

There is one more aspect of the story that I have to comment on, and that is the tributes. This does certainly seem to be a swan song for Sprang, and Alfred/Rex and Commissioner Gordon are shoehorned into the story via a silly subplot about Batman's secret identity:



Alfred gets a line, the commissioner just gets to hold his head:



I tend to think that's intentional; if the Future Man really had Bruce's secret identity (and he did), then why would he contact Batman at police headquarters? Why not send him a message at Wayne Manor? The only answer is to give Sprang a chance to draw Gordon one last time. Bill Finger is credited with the script; did he know this was Sprang's last issue?

Comments: Nice story, excellent art as usual (but never again in the Silver Age) by Sprang.

There is a text story; World's Finest was one of the last superhero titles at DC to get a letters column. This one starts talking about frogmen of history, then switches to a discussion of the aquatic spider, then segues into modern skin (scuba) diving.

The second story is The Creatures that Conquered Aquaman. This one requires a small amount of intro. Jack Schiff had inherited the Aquaman strip from Adventure Comics. Initially he put Aquaman into Detective comics, but that only lasted for seven issues before he shipped it over to World's Finest. Initially both Aquaman and Green Arrow shared duties as backup features but effective with #134 they began alternating issues with slightly longer stories. This only lasted until #140; with the next issue Weisinger took over editorship of the mag and put a reprint story in the backup role. I have previously expressed bafflement at these decisions, especially since Aquaman had already gotten his own magazine by then. But in retrospect it seems obvious that although Aquaman had landed a new home, there was no room for the old Aquaman creative team of Jack Miller and Ramona Fradon over there.

This story is a rather pedestrian "Aliens from another dimension come to loot ours." They have these headbands that give them super-powers (mostly beams from their hands and eyes). Aquaman's finny friends help him out:



Comments: A mediocre story that feels padded even though it's only ten pages long. I've always like Fradon's art.

Lois Lane, Dominatrix?

I try to keep it pretty much G-rated around here, but that has always struck me as a weird cover. "Why is Lois Lane lashing a wooden puppet of Superman?" The answer, pretty obviously, is "Because the CCA wouldn't let her lash Superman himself!"

Craig Yoe has a more interesting take on the matter, which is already making headlines. Caution: R-Rated, but amazing material. I'm completely flabbergasted.

Something to Chew On

You know how Stan used to give us a hint about something that was coming an issue or two away?

Well, here's a little clue for you all: The Cash, Aquariuman, and Lean Arrow.

Great Posts on Other Blogs

Our buddy Chris is dedicating the entire month of March to the Bat-Mite canon. Bat-Mite is one of the characters that disappeared with the New Look Batman of 1964, but he was a fairly regular character, and was introduced in the 20th anniversary issue of Batman's first appearance in Detective Comics.

While we're on the subject of Batman, go check out Building Batman, the most unique concept I have ever seen for a blog. "Bruce" is training himself in the various Batman skills, from boomerangs to lock-picking to knot-tying. If you always dreamed of being Batman, this guy is living the dream!

Sticking with the Batman theme, the Comic Treadmill has another one of his "Prop Star" posts about the giant props that Bill Finger used to feature in his Batman stories. It's an interesting and different way to look at the Silver Age Batman.

Bill Jourdain has a long and informative post on the first year of Batman. As you probably know, Batman is approaching his 70th anniversary either on April 18th (the date Detective #27 went on sale), or in May (the cover date of that issue).

Highly recommended for inside dope is Funny Book Fanatic, the blog of Dave Olbrich, the former publisher of Malibu Comics. I know, their output was minimal in the Silver Age (probably because they didn't start until 1986, the slackers), but Dave's not just interested in the modern stuff and he's got some interesting tales about the inner workings of the biz as well as trivia quizzes and the like. Hat Tip to the Groovy Agent for pointing me to Dave's blog.

Comics of Rhodey has a reminiscence of his own history with comic books.

I pretty much ceased purchases after college as marriage soon beckoned. During my second year of teaching (the early 1990s), my wife told me she wanted me to get rid of some of those boxes of comics I had lying around.

Nicholas Cage had something similar happen to him as I recall. ;)

Classic Letters of the Silver Age

Mom, what does it mean that a marriage was never consummated? Hat tip to Mark Engblom for finding this one; I had read it years ago but could never find it, probably because I was looking for it in old Lois Lane issues.

How did Julius Schwartz and Gardner Fox--Doh, Robert Kanigher as pointed out in the comments--come up with the name Barry Allen?



Barry Gray is considered "The Father of Talk Radio". Allen, of course, was a pioneer of talk TV, hosting the Tonight Show back in the 1950s.

Here's a kid bucking for the editor's job:



And of course he eventually got it!

Here's how to wheedle the editor out of some original artwork:




At least he had the good sense to stop before he thanked the Donenfelds for taking the trouble to publish the magazine. Anyway, this blatant job of sucking up had its desired effect:



Oh, yeah, that was really going to help some kid in his cartooning. Snort!

Well, you know, it just might have:



Yep, old Funky Winkerbean himself. Batiuk would have been about 14 at the time this letter appeared; his strip began about 11 years later.

Dr Strange Versus Dormammu

Up to this point, there was no particular reason to consider Dr Strange as one of Marvel's more interesting characters. Yeah, Ditko's art was psychedelic, but the series suffered from fairly mundane villains and supporting characters. There were hints that Dr Strange was becoming more popular; at first the character did not even appear in every issue. That quickly changed, and he even began to share cover space with the Human Torch.

But the series really took off with the battle between Dr Strange and Dormammu starting in Strange Tales #126. Here's the memorable splash page:



Dr Strange is summoned by the Ancient One. The Dread Dormammu is planning to leave the Dark Realm and come to Earth. The Ancient One is unable to face him, so the Doc is drafted as a replacement:



Now there's a villain worthy of facing Dr Strange. And a durable companion is introduced a short while later:



The actual confrontation between Doctor Strange and the Dreaded One takes place in the following issue. We learn that Dormammu is the only thing keeping the Mindless Ones from breaking through into the Dark Realm.

In the battle itself, we see signs of Ditko's influence on the character:



And when the Mindless Ones break through, we see that Dr Strange is a man of honor:



He lends his support to Dormammu and together they repel the invaders, putting the Dreaded One in Dr Strange's debt:



This highlights one of the odder aspects of some of the Marvel villains. There were several who possessed a moral code despite their essentially evil nature--Dr Doom, the Sub-Mariner (back when he was played as a villain) and Galactus were notable for this supposed trait. In a sense this is just another out for the writer, which may explain why Lex Luthor underwent a similar transformation in the 1960s.

Superboy Saves The Economy!

Just happened across this story last night and I thought it would make a very topical post. In Superboy #59 (September 1957), the Lad of Steel is asked to help out the government with a new missile, called the Mole. As the name implies, it attacks by burrowing underground and then surfacing in enemy territory. The military wants Superboy to track the missile with his x-ray vision to make sure it does not go off course:



However, when Superboy returns to the military base, he does so by burrowing underground. Did the explosion affect him in some weird way, turning him into a mole?

Then the story turns even stranger. Underground, Superboy starts hoarding gold:



He finds ingenious ways to use the gold to help maintain his position underground:



But it's all for a good reason as we learn here:



Ironically, Superboy himself had caused the problem when he was tracking the Mole Missile:



Yep, that reverse-alchemy vision of Superboy's is surely his most useless ability, which may explain why it's one of the superpowers that time forgot.

Superboy fantasizes about what would have happened had he not rectified his mistake:



Sounds depressingly familiar. Maybe the US economy could use a little Superboy stimulus package!

Single Issue Review: Teen Beat #1

Here's a real oddball comic series from DC. Seeing the obvious interest for teen music magazines, DC tried to cash in with their own version of Tiger Beat. The first article is about Moby Grape, which Teen Beat claims is the best band to come out of San Francisco. It's a pretty bold claim, but AllMusic does rate their debut album (which shipped only a few months before this issue came out) with five stars.

One obvious lie on the cover: Although the mag says it's "In Groovy Color", in fact the pictures on the inside are all black and white with colorful backgrounds as in this photo of the notoriously crazy Skip Spence:



Spence later attacked the drummer with an axe and ended up in Bellevue's psych ward, which may explain why Moby Grape didn't remain a "Whale of a Band".

Up next is a look at the change in the Beatle's hair since they first hit the pop scene in 1964. The amusing thing is that it still looks fairly short compared to what was to come.

The third feature is on the one-hit wonder band, Every Mother's Son. Their only claim to fame was the snoozer "Come on Down to My Boat, Baby", which still occasionally gets airplay on oldies stations.

Next comes the cover-advertised story on whether the Monkees were splitting up. As best as I can tell from a quick reading, the "logic" employed here is that the Beatles looked like they were breaking up, so therefore the Monkees would eventually break up. Of course, as it worked out, the Monkees actually broke up before the Beatles, but well after this issue, so the cover blurb and story appear to be nothing more than a cheap trick.



The girl above is "Teeny" and she appears regularly throughout the mag making commentary on the bands. When there's a story about the "Two Faces of Peter Noone" (of Herman's Hermits), she says "I love them both!"

There's an oddball page about Zal Yanovsky leaving the Lovin' Spoonful; looking at the AllMusic site on the band reveals that he was more or less forced to leave because of a boycott by the burgeoning "counterculture". Yanovsky had been busted for pot possession and turned in his dealer.

Teeny Predicts stardom for four bands. Procol Harum, the Bee Gees, the Free Spirits, and the Tremoloes. It's safe to say that only the Bee Gees moved into that category, although I actually like the other three bands better myself. The Free Spirits were an early jazz/rock band featuring a young Larry Coryell, and while the Tremeloes were never a big success in the US, their song "Here Comes My Baby" is terrific.

There's a story about the Supremes (this comic had more black people in it than any DC comic in the 1960s), although of course they were soon headed for major shakeups as were the next band featured, the Byrds. And then a feature on the Jefferson Airplane, which includes this rather amusing claim:



Wow, the Airplane not a protest band?

Bonus coverage:

I couldn't resist talking a little bit about the second issue. First the title was changed to Teen Beam as explained here:



Second, DC began to utilize their cartoonists to create what the fan mags couldn't, like "baby pictures" of the Monkees:



A joke about Rudy Vallee and raccoon coats? And no, neither of these issues went out with the seal of the CCA.

Overall comments: Despite some interesting choices of bands to feature, the books obviously didn't sell. I suspect that given their comic-book size they were not placed on the rack with Tiger Beat and similar teen mags, where their 12 cent price might have attracted some girls. The individual features have the aroma of having been basically written by publicity people for the record company.

Hat Tip to Gorilla Daze, who noted the weird advertising for these issues which inspired me to dig out the scans of this very unusual DC publication.

More discussion of these two issues here.

About My Comics History

The earliest I can remember comic books was from when we would go visit my grandparents at Oneida Lake in New York State. When the car was all loaded up we'd head towards the highway, but along the way we stopped at the Sweet Shoppe and mom would hand me a dollar with instructions to get three of the giant-sized comics (25 cents apiece) and four candy bars (five cents apiece) and I got to keep the nickel. Back then I was only 8 or 9, so I tended to get the Harvey comics like Baby Huey, Little Dot, Richie Rich, etc. I had three younger siblings, but my brother Mark couldn't read yet, so he didn't get a comic.

The first superhero comic I can remember reading was Adventure #320, with the return of Dev-Em. It was at my cousin's house in Massachusetts. I remember going with my cousin over to a friend's house who had to play this hot new record for us: Help Me Rhonda by the Beach Boys.

I remember getting into Archie Comics when I was 10, and the Batman craze hit when I was 11, so like many kids in America I bought some comics around then. I remember specifically having bought Batman #179 and #181, and I also bought the final Outsider story in Tec #356.

But I didn't really get the bug until 1968, when I happened to read World's Finest #179 at the local barber shop. It was a reprint giant with lots of Dick Sprang artwork, and I was hooked enough that I went back to the barber shop the next day and gave them a quarter for the issue.

At around the same time, one of the NY news programs ran a piece on a comic convention in New York, so the idea that comic collecting was a hobby that could make you some money was also planted. I wasn't just buying four-color entertainment, I was making an investment in my future.

So I amassed my collection for a couple years. I actually went to a NYC comics convention around 1970 at the Statler Hilton. I got some cool comics there, including Batman #18, #31 and #71, the longtime sole issues of my GA collection.

And then, what happened? I got to be about 17 and I was saving money for car repairs and gas and dates and although I kept buying Batman and Spiderman I was not a comics junkie at all. I still had the pretty good collection I had amassed when I started in eighth grade, but like everybody else life intervened and so I got to college.

And found that for the first time in my life, reading a comic was not considered completely geeky. In my first semester, Warren came out with their first Spirit issue. Having read the Harvey Spirit #1 in high school, I bought that issue and passed it around my dorm. When I went to the local store a couple weeks later, the second issue was sold out, although I soon found many copies floating around the dorm.

There were cool people in college that loaned out their copies of comics. Thanks to them I read a lot of comics I would not otherwise have bought, like the Starlin Warlock series or Swamp Thing or the original Howard the Duck stories.

I got out of college and was apparently cured of my comics addiction. I got a job working for the man every day and I was climbing the corporate ladder. A friend of mine and I teamed up with two other guys to rent a house. And like the second day I after I moved in, somebody said, oh, you should check out the comics in the basement.

A complete run of Amazing Spiderman from about 110-142, including awesome copies of 121, 122 and 129.

That got the bug back in me, especially when those issues were followed by the original clone saga with the Jackal, which I found entertaining. But I dropped Spiderman shortly after Len Wein took over. He's a fine writer but he didn't have a feel for the character; his Spiderman stories read as if they had been written for Batman, not Peter Parker.

And that was pretty much it for comics and me for 20 years. Oh, I kept my collection, and every now and then I'd pick up an issue, like Batman #300, or one of the Hobgoblin issues of Spiderman, or the final issue of the (Barry Allen) Flash. A coworker of my girlfriend recommended Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen to me in the late 1980s, both of which I devoured. I bought quite a few of the Spirit reprints by Kitchen Sink. But if I read more than ten comics a year from 1978-1997 I'd be surprised.

Fast forward to May 1998. It's a Saturday night and I'm sitting around bored with nothing in particular to do, and I got this oddball idea: Why not try to locate the covers to the first 100 issues of Amazing Spiderman? Well, even in those relatively primitive internet days, that did not turn out to be terribly difficult, so I set myself a somewhat tougher task: Locate the covers to the first 100 issues of Batman.

I got about 60 covers from various sites; one of my big hauls came from a site called the Golden Age Batman site of Mr Bill Jourdain, who also blogs Golden Age Comics.

As the evening wore on into night, I decided to see if there were any binary newsgroups devoted to comic books. As it happened, a newsgroup had been created only a month earlier, called alt.binaries.pictures.comics. So I posted the covers that I had downloaded that evening. A few days later somebody posted some more covers, and a few days after that another poster uploaded a big set of covers.

I had a scanner, but like most people, hardly ever used it. But I still had a collection of comics and so I began scanning the covers to fill in gaps. And one evening in June I decided to try scanning a story. I chose The Secret of Hunter's Inn from Batman #18. If I expected a sensational response, I didn't get one. But about a year later, somebody posted a complete scan of a Cry for Dawn issue and the newsgroup literally went nuts. Everybody started scanning complete comics like mad.

We had only one rule at ABPC. Comics that were under a year old were not allowed to be posted. Partly it was defensive; we hoped that by not scanning the newest comics the companies would let us skate on the older material. But also none of us wanted to hurt the industry that had given us so much pleasure.

The scans posted to ABPC grew at a phenomenal rate. In the beginning I was burning a CD of new scans once a month, then twice a month, then once a week, then every day. To give you an idea, in April 2001, 412 comics were posted to ABPC. In April 2002? Try 1,045. By April 2003 it was 1644.

And in the midst of that flood of comics, I started filling in the gaps in my own collection. I found that I hadn't lost interest in comics so much as I had lost interest in new comics. Indeed, one of the things that had kept me collecting into the mid-1970s was the ready availability of reprints in the backs of those 100-pagers that DC published for awhile around 1974. But reprints very much fell by the wayside as that decade wore on, and the prices for the older issues kept rising.

Hence the focus of this blog on the Silver Age of Comics. Although I'm a big fan of the Golden Age material, I don't have the extensive knowledge of that era like Bill Jourdain. And although there's a fair amount of newer stuff that I like, there's a massive gap in my knowledge of comics from 1978-1997 that I'm never going to be able to make up.

Nobody Loves The Hulk

I wrote about a year ago about rock songs from the 1960s and earlier featuring superheroes; here's a new one on me:



This is not the first effort at rock marketing through comics; as I noted awhile ago, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention advertised their album We're Only In It For The Money with brilliantly weird ads in Marvel Comics in 1967.

Back in the day, you'd see an ad for something like that and you'd wonder whether it was any good. Maybe you came across it three years later and didn't know if the PO Box remained valid. So you were hosed if you wanted to hear this song.

Unless, of course, you came across this 40 years later, Googled it and found a working MP3 download.

"Bruce Banner was working in his laboratory,
When he saw Rick Jones about to go up in a blaze of glory,
Well he saved the boy but what a change,
Explosion made him feel so strange,
For his molecules had been rearranged,
Into the Hulk!"

Single Issue Review: Incredible Hulk #124

Everybody raise your hands! Although I'm generally a big fan of Herb Trimpe, this is a pretty mediocre cover. Shouldn't Betty have some sort of look of dismay and concern, rather than a happy, almost adoring gaze at something off-camera? The cover is at best an homage to (at worst a swipe from) Fantastic Four #33, complete down to the guy at the bottom right with two horns.

And the story itself is a swipe from virtually every wedding in the DC and Marvel Silver Ages. It opens with the Leader reading a newspaper about Bruce Banner and Betty Ross' impending nuptials.



FF Annual #3 opened with Dr Doom reading a newspaper about Reed and Sue's impending nuptials.



The Leader decides to disrupt the wedding; Dr Doom disrupted the FF's wedding, the Reverse-Flash disrupted the Flash's wedding, and the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime disrupted the wedding of Hank Pym and Jan. The Leader observes Bruce and Betty as they share a romantic rowboat on a lake. He is all set to kill them with one push of a button, when he has an evil genius moment:



What these evil genius moments amount to is a "get out of a plot point free card" for writers of comics stories. It allows the writer to put the hero in a much more difficult situation, because he knows that the villain will not do the obvious thing and immediately put a couple of bullets into the hero's skull. These moments are amusing because even back as teenagers we could see that this was the moment the villain could have succeeded, if only he hadn't insisted that it was too easy, too painless.

At any rate, nobody can accuse the Leader of lacking imagination. He decides that the best revenge would be to have the Hulk return (apparently Banner had found a way to prevent his bestial side from emerging at this point) and kill his bride on their wedding day. But he needs an ally from among the Hulk's enemies, so we get a brief rundown of the Sandman, Namor, the Mandarin, Maximus of the Inhumans, the Space Parasite, and the Rhino, whom he selects.

The Rhino had previously fought the Hulk in IH #104, and nearly died in a fire. In fact, the Hulk thought he had died, but villains seldom died for good in the Marvel Silver Age. He's still in a coma, so the Leader kidnaps him with a giant android, and then revives him with mental blasts. He augments the Rhino's powers and returns his horned suit.

They travel surreptitiously to the house of General Ross, where the wedding is to take place. A gamma-ray beam weapon transforms Banner:



We get another "this is where the plan went off the rails" moment here:



If you think about it, the idea of bringing the Rhino along never made any sense in the first place. If the goal was to use the beam to make the Hulk savage enough to kill Betty, the Rhino is useless. At any rate, you can probably guess the ending of the story from here. The Rhino gets in the way of the ray himself, and in anger turns on the Leader. The Leader tries to escape, but his craft is unstable with the Rhino hanging on and it crashes, apparently killing them both. (Hah!)

But the battle was not without its casualties on the good side:



Now a reasonable person might ask why you're saying this to the fiancee of the man you're talking about killing, especially since it seems clear that Banner himself was completely blameless for what happened. We know Talbot's trying to get Betty for himself, but it hardly seems likely to soften her heart towards him.

This story is unique in the Silver Age in that it is the only one I can find where a superhero (Hulk is arguably a hero) and his girlfriend were prevented from marrying by the villains. Betty and Bruce did marry eventually, but it was about 16 years later.

Trimpe's artwork is terrific aside from that rather dull cover, embellished marvelously (as the Groovy Agent notes in the comments) by Sal Buscema's inks. The story is just okay; although I am a big fan of Roy Thomas, this is not one of his better efforts.

Trivia Quiz #20 Answers

1. (Easy) True or False: Bruce Wayne was a star athlete in his college days.

True:


Back then they hadn't thought about him hiding his interest in crime.

2. (Moderate) Within 2 years, how old was Lois Lane supposed to be in the comics when Lois Lane #1 debuted?

This one surprised me when I saw it, which is why I thought it would make a good trivia question:



There are two conflicting goals here. On the one hand, the comics publishers want young characters for their readers to identify with. On the other, they want accomplished people in their field. It is hard to imagine a 22-year-old woman as the star reporter for a major metropolitan daily; it is far more likely she'd be doing feature articles on local screwballs.

3. (Tough) Name two Superman villains in the Silver Age of comics who obtained their power from green kryptonite.

The ones I had thought of were Metallo and the Annihilator, but Michael Rebain also points out the Kryptonite Kid, which is correct as well.

4. (Really Tough) What woman did Batman rename the Batplane after?



But it was all a plot to fool some crooks.

5. (Tough For Some) During the Adventure Comics run of the Legion of Superheroes, what two LSH members were cross-dressers?

Chameleon Boy (shown here after changing):



And Lightning Lass (later Light Lass) who was impersonating her brother, Lightning Lad. This trivia question was suggested by the Comic Treadmill in a post last week.

Michael Rebain got #1, #3 and #5 right.

Single Issue Review: My Greatest Adventure #74

(Cover art by Gene Colan)

DC had quite a few different lines of books in the early 1960s--Superhero, War, Romance, Science Fiction. It also featured what I call "Adventure" books, like Challengers of the Unknown, and My Greatest Adventure. The gimmick with MGA is that the stories were all written in the first person, as if the man (mostly) who had the adventure was telling it to us.

In the first story, We Were Challenged by the River Spirit, a guide leads an expedition of vacationers up the Zambezi in Africa. Shenzi, a river spirit seems to show an inordinate interest in Lita, a young heiress. Shenzi is explained to us here:



But is Shenzi really after Lita, or is it her scheming cousin, who would inherit her dough if she perished?

Comments: Beautiful art by Paul Parker according to the GCD. Vibrant colors, excellent details, and careful shading make this otherwise predictable story a standout.

The second story, I Climbed the Tower of Terror, is drawn by comics legend Mort Meskin. A steeplejack, working on a high-rise is startled when a cloud hits his building and he realizes it's solid, so he climbs onto it and is trapped when it floats away from the building. A short while later, a plane carrying a pilot, his girlfriend and a crooked banker who's trying to escape the law for 72 hours crash into the same cloud. The pilot is severely injured and needs medical attention quickly, but the banker is inclined to wait out his 72 hours and he's got a gun. It turns out they're stranded on the island of Hirandi, which had previously been in the Persian Gulf. A native explains:



The steeplejack has an idea how to get them down, but it requires the banker's gun. He creates a makeshift grappling hook and sticks it into the gun (yeah) and shoots it at the top of the tower. He climbs to the top and smashes the statue. The island lands (somewhere in France apparently fairly gently), and the authorities arrive to arrest, not the crooked banker but:



Comments: So-so story and Meskin mailed this one in. Cute twist at the end, so that the steelworker gets the girl.

The last story is the cover tale, Doom Was My Inheritance and is drawn by Gene Colan. A young man named Adam Lake is searching for his long-lost father. He finds Simon Horst, an old explorer friend of his father, who has become wealthy from an emerald mine. Simon makes a strange offer:



But the old man has set traps for Adam along the way as we saw on the cover. The girl decides to accompany him, but strangely this does not make Simon cease trying to kill them. The plot follows the "three-act play" format, with the jaguar, whirlpool and maze traps as shown on the cover. In the end, Adam finds his father, who was cheated out of the emerald mine by Simon, and the father defeats Simon to prove he was the better man. Adam gets both his dad back and a new girlfriend, even if he doesn't yet get half the emerald mine.

Comments: Solid story with the distinctive Colan touch. As always I'm mesmerized by his ability to get facial expressions so right they have a photographic quality about them despite little apparent effort as here:



It almost looks like he's cheating with Photoshop there, but of course this was in 1962.

Overall comments: This issue was fine artistically, but only the last story really holds together well and even that has some holes.

Oddity: Check out one of the endorsers of the American Specialty Company Christmas card ads:



Kevorkian? That's a distinctive enough name, and according to this website he was related:

My friend Kitty died on SuperBowl Sunday. Kitty was at his home in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in bed, watching the television when he died. It is still too soon to know the cause of death-- most likely a cardio-vascular event. Kitty was 54.

Kitty was his gay name. "When we all got gay names, I took mine from Kitty Carlisle." His born name was Harry Kevorkian. He grew up in Michigan. His uncle is Dr. Jack Kevorkian; because of Jack's efforts in behalf of assisted suicide he became a man of considerable notoriety and was imprisoned. Back in the 90s, I once asked Kitty if his uncle's notoriety had changed his life in any way. "Well, Mitzel," Kitty sniffed, "I no longer have to spell my name when I make restaurant reservations." Kitty loved good food and fancy restaurants.

Died at 54 in 2002, that would make him 14 at the time this comic came out; sounds like the same guy to me.