The First Underground Comics?

DC was able to launch several series in the early 1960s featuring characters without super-powers. Sea Devils, Challengers of the Unknown, and Rip Hunter all had decent runs before giving up the ghost by the end of the decade. But there were several pilots whose chute failed to open, including this one.

Cave Carson was certainly given a chance to succeed; his tryouts spanned eight issues or about 200 pages. That's longer than some characters that did get their own mags, like the Hawk and the Dove or Anthro.

Cave's crew consisted initially of Bulldozer Smith, a former sandhog (underground tunnel expert) and Christie Madison, a geologist (yet another early 1960s DC female character in a non-traditional woman's occupation). Looking at that lineup, you can see the one item missing in the standard foursome as exemplified by the Fantastic Four, Rip Hunter and the Sea Devils. Smart guy (Cave), strong guy (Bulldozer), woman (Christie), but no kid. The team would expand in later stories to include Lena, a pet lemur, and Johnny Blake, Cave's swaggering rival for Christie's affections.

The story begins with Cave trapped below the surface of the Earth. Via a flashback, we learn that Cave had gone down there to investigate some mysterious occurrences. A giant metal tower and some train cars had been sucked down into the ground. He left his two assistants behind to finish work on the Mighty Mole:

Fantastic modes of transportation were pretty standard in the Silver Age, from the Batmobile to the Arrowcar to the Pogo Plane to the Metal Men's flying platform. Kids are fascinated by unusual vehicles and the Mighty Moles' likely prototype was the Hillman car, a 1960s amphibious craft:

Christie and Bulldozer have completed the Mole and bore into the ground looking for Cave, whom they find trapped under some freight cars. After rescuing him, they learn of the cause of the mysterious occurrences:

And from there, the story has them chased from the magnetic monster to a giant lizard to the lava monster shown on the cover, then back to the magnetic monster who destroys the lava monster before being defeated by Cave and the Mole:

The story is standard early 1960s DC, with monsters and more monsters; Bruno Premiani's art is the main redeeming feature. Jack Schiff was the editor for the first five (Brave & Bold) tryout issues, and the stories feature his steady recipe of monsters and aliens.

Things do improve a bit when the series was given further shots in Showcase #48, 49 and 52. There is some character development and hints of depth in this sequence from #48:

By this point Murray Boltinoff was the editor, with Lee Elias on the artwork and Bob Haney handling the plot and dialog. Although I am not a fan of Haney's work on the Brave and the Bold and Teen Titans, he does a decent job here of making the characters more three-dimensional. He adds what would appear to be a long-term villain here:

But although the series improved quite a bit under the new creative team, it was not a hit with the youngsters of the 1960s and save for a few cameo appearances, Cave Carson has largely vanished. I recommend the Showcase issues as worth reading.

Update: An anonymous commenter points to the Pellucidar series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which Abner Perry invents the Iron Mole, a craft that takes him to a world at the Earth's core. This is obviously the inspiration for the Mighty Mole, although the latter does have an amphibious quality that I cannot find in ERB's creation.

Here Come the Fanboys

It started, as did many things in that simpler era, with a letter. A young man wrote to Julius Schwartz, editor at DC Comics, inquiring as to the availability of back issues of All-Star Comics, a long-defunct DC title from the 1940s. Schwartz did not have any to sell the young man, but he did remember that the writer of those old issues, Gardner Fox, had kept his own copies.

The young man was named Jerry Bails, and following up on Schwartz's suggestion, he negotiated a deal to buy Fox's collection. Bails had read All-Star as a kid and amassed a decent collection before the title was canceled. Now he was looking to recover the issues he'd lost over the years and find the ones that he'd never read before.

If all this sounds a little strange, remember that back in those days there were no comics stores (forget about Ebay). Comics were sold in lots of little mom and pop newsstands and drugstores. Nobody advertised back issues in comics magazines, and so amassing a collection of older issues was pretty much a hit or miss proposition, involving checking garage sales and used bookstores.

And then a very odd and significant thing happened. Another young man wrote to Schwartz, also asking about back issues of All-Star. Schwartz referred him to Fox, who referred him to Bails.

Bails was so thrilled to discover that there was another adult out there who liked old issues of All-Star that he sent the second young man, Roy Thomas, duplicate copies of several of his issues. Over the next several months, Thomas and Bails wrote back and forth dozens of times.

Not long after this, Julius Schwartz resurrected the concept of a team of superheroes, this time named the Justice League of America. He incorporated the two superheroes he had relaunched thus far, the Barry Allen Flash and the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and rounded out the membership with three existing DC heroes, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter.

Bails and Thomas were enthusiastic, but they had seen that comic books come and go. Bails wanted the Justice League to last, and so, during a trip to New York, he suggested to Schwartz that he start up a little newsletter for fans of the JLA, to help market the comics.

It was one of those situations where the stars were perfectly aligned. As it happened, Schwartz knew all about fan newsletters, because back in the 1930s he had started one for the then-new science fiction fandom. His two teen co-editors of Time Traveler had been Mort Weisinger and Forrest Ackerman (later the publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland). He told Bails that his project should be called a fanzine (combining fan and magazine), and started publishing the full addresses of letter writers so that Bails and Thomas could compile a database of older comic book fans for their market. Schwartz would provide Bails with information about upcoming stories so they would have a constant supply of copy.

Alter-Ego #1 (cover shown above) was the result. As you can see, it's something of a parody of the cover of Brave and Bold #29:

Bails opened with a mission statement that is largely what you'd expect, but he did throw a rather large bone to Schwartz and DC: he sprinkled cryptograms throughout the issue that could only be decoded with a key that Bails promised to send anyone who sent him a copy of their subscription label to Justice League of America.

The next few pages were devoted to previews of coming issues of the Schwartz-edited magazines, including a few classics:

If that format looks familiar to you, it should. DC used much the same layout for their Direct Currents house ads in the mid-late 1960s:

There followed feature articles on the Golden Age villain the Wizard (by Bails) and the Spectre (by Thomas), and Wonder Woman (Bails). The issue closed with the JLA parody shown on the cover; here's the splash page by Thomas:

Alter Ego was published sporadically throughout the 1960s; Julius Schwartz recommended it in the letters column of JLA #8, sending circulation soaring:

Thomas revived Alter-Ego as a glossy, slick magazine in the 1990s that is still published today. It's a terrific read; fans will love the special issues devoted to their favorite artists. My copies of the issues dedicated to Dick Sprang (#19) and Will Eisner (#48) are especially treasured.

Bails had already conceived of the next phase of fandom: the Alley Awards, kind of like the Academy Awards but for comic books. Compiling the votes for the awards led to the "Alley Tally", an early gathering of comic book fans, that led to the earliest comic book conventions.

The influence of organized fandom on comic books has been enormous. The comics industry drew much of its next generation of talent (especially writers) from the ranks of the fans. Roy Thomas went on to become a major force at Marvel (succeeding Stan Lee as Editor) and DC. E. Nelson Bridwell, Tony Isabella, Mike Friedrich, Martin Pasko, Jim Shooter and many others started their careers as fans. As the demand for back issues grew, comics companies began (starting around 1965) to emphasize the collectible nature of their products.

Note: I realize I have barely skimmed the surface of this topic. For more details on the birth of Alter Ego, see this article by Bill Schelly. I drew on other sources as well; Julius Schwartz's Man of Two Worlds was especially helpful.

Flash #120

The Flash was probably the most interesting DC hero of the Silver Age. Certainly his comic ran the longest of any of Julius Schwartz's reincarnations; Green Lantern was gone by 1972, the Atom and Hawkman ceased publication (after being merged) in 1969. The Flash made it all the way to 1985.

Given that history, it's worth speculating as to why Barry Allen lasted while the others did not. For starters, it pays to be first; Schwartz introduced the new Flash well before his other re-imagined heroes. The Barry Allen Flash first appeared in Sept-Oct 1956, while Green Lantern debuted a full three years later. Similarly, the first two superheroes from the Golden Age (Superman and Batman) outlasted almost all of their contemporaries.

Second, the Flash had an interesting and colorful rogues' gallery, as shown here (from 80-Page Giant #4):

Third, I would argue that the Flash's ability, running fast, is especially suited to exciting the imaginations of youngsters. Who wouldn't want to be able to tear up the miles rather than having to plod home from school? Who wouldn't want to be able to zip ahead to Grandma's house rather than suffer through the interminable car trips?

One element that was probably not a significant factor, was that the Flash had a juvenile counterpart. While I enjoyed Kid Flash, and especially the "moral" stories that he often appeared in, he didn't show up much in the later 1960s outside of Teen Titans

As you can see from the cover above, this is a Flash/Kid Flash teamup. As the story begins, Barry and Wally West are running late for a yachting trip with Iris and an explorer named Dr. Manners to South America. Dr. Manners is looking for evidence to confirm his belief that South America and Africa were once joined. It's worth noting that this theory was still controversial at the time, although it has now become widely accepted.

It looks impossible for Barry and Wally to make it to the yacht on time, but Barry reveals that he knows Wally is Kid Flash, as a prelude to disclosing his own secret:

They are delayed a bit when they have to prevent a plane from crashing into a crowded area of the city, but they still make it. On board, they learn that there's a young girl of Wally's age:

I like that Infantino has them rather pointedly sitting on separate couches in that last panel. Dr. Manners explains their mission here:

And in fact the Wikipedia article on continental drift notes that the existence of the same animals on both continents are part of the proof that Africa and South America were once joined (although it's mostly fossils and earthworms that are cited there, not lemurs and aardvarks).

They dock in South America and journey inland. A tribe of natives warn them about a mountain known as the Sleeping Giant, but Iris dismisses it as superstitious drivel. However, as they make their way into the valley nearby, the Sleeping Giant awakens; it was a volcano, which causes earth tremors and rockslides. When the party recovers, they seem to have been transported far away, as the Sleeping Giant is nowhere to be seen.

Barry and Wally discover something odd:

They volunteer to do a little scouting around, not telling Dr Manners that it will be in their crimson uniforms. They come upon a caveman being threatened by a giant bird, and save him. But what are cavemen doing in modern times? Later, they see paintings of prehistoric animals created by the cave people. Have they stumbled into a valley that time forgot? They also learn that the primitives fear a giant named Grodan. And sure enough:

Flash vibrates his way free of the giant. He and Kid Flash use some cables that had been brought on the expedition to truss up the behemoth (as shown on the cover). Then Barry realizes that they are not in some hidden valley that has been missed by civilization; rather they are literally in the past. Sure enough, as they do some more exploring:

Okay, so that's a bit of artistic license. The dinosaurs in fact became extinct about 65 million years ago, well before the time of cavemen. Flash and his younger counterpart race around the globe, establishing that the continents were indeed joined at this period in time. But at that moment the earthquakes begin that separates the continents. They dash off to help the cavemen, who are under attack by the giants. But:

The actual phrase is, "there were giants in the earth in those days..." and it comes from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament.

Barry and Wally rush back to their expedition and try to set up duplicate vibrations to the original earthquake that transported them to the past. We get a rather psychedelic panel here:

And then they're back in the present day (well, 1961 anyway). Dr Manners has photographic proof that the continents were joined, and the juvenile romance subplot has been resolved:

Comments: A terrific and entertaining story by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, with only the occasional anachronisms as negatives.

Superboy #68

Although he became a comical, silly character in the 1960s, the original Bizarro, shown above, was played as a tragic figure initially. The story is somewhat loosely based on Frankenstein as portrayed in the Boris Karloff 1930s movie, which in turn was somewhat loosely based on Mary Shelley's classic novel.

As the story starts, Superboy is helping an inventor, who is trying to duplicate a sample of radium. If his duplicator ray works, it will be a boon to hospitals, which use radium to treat patients.

An aside here: Radium was constantly being mentioned in the Silver Age. It was used as a treatment for cancer, with radium being planted in the body to kill the cancer cells (and probably a fair amount on non-cancerous cells. It is not used any more that way; according to this site, it is more common to use either indium or caesium, although the actual treatment is still pretty similar. Radium was indeed an extremely valuable substance and remains pretty spendy: Current prices are about $50 million per pound.

But the experiment does not work; the synthetic radium fails to register on the Geiger counter. But as Superboy is about to leave, the inventor trips, and accidentally beams the ray on the Boy of Steel, creating a faulty duplicate:

It's probably not commonly known, but in the original Frankenstein book by Shelley, the monstrous part of the monster was not that he was horrifically ugly, or that he had an abnormal brain (he didn't). It was that he lacked a soul.

When they return from getting rid of the glowing pieces of the machine, Bizarro has gone for a walk. Superboy asks again, is it alive? No, insists the inventor, no more than a car that moves is alive. We get the first inkling that Bizarro doesn't talk the way he did on the cover here:

Bizarro is upset at the reactions of the people to him, who recoil in horror. But when he sees his own reflection in a shop window, he reacts similarly:

But Superboy is helping corral some escaped animals from the Smallville Zoo (which appeared to have very poor animal enclosures, judging by how often breakouts happened). A posse is quickly formed, led by Professor Dalton, but their efforts to shoot Bizarro have no effect on the monster's invulnerable skin.

He retreats to the safety of the Kents' home, but Mom is terrified of her new "son":

He adopts a farming family on the outskirts of town and attempts to be helpful. But when he wears a scarecrow costume to town as his secret identity:

A psychiatrist could probably write a dissertation on why kids found Bizarro so compelling. On the one hand, the monster often makes silly mistakes while trying to do good; it's not hard to see how youngsters could find themselves in the same situation. On the other hand, he's so goofy that the readers, only a few years removed from infantile behavior themselves, could feel superior to him.

But at the end of Chapter 1, Bizarro finds one person who "sees" the real him:

Melissa is an amalgam of two characters from the movie, in which Frankenstein encounters a girl too young to be frightened of him, and a blind man who befriends him.

In the second part of the story, Bizarro comes to school and disrupts a gym class with his extraordinary strength, forcing Clark to save his fellow students:

He melts the screws with the heat of his X-ray vision. The boys reject Bizarro and he flies off in tears. Superboy realizes it's time for some more drastic measures. He locates a Kryptonite meteor in space, and, wearing a lead costume to protect himself, hurls it at the monster. But Bizarro is immune to the glowing fragments of the planet Krypton.

Determined to prove his good intentions, Bizarro sculpts a likeness of Superboy on a nearby mountain. But improbably:

Superboy and the military team up to try to destroy Bizarro with conventional weaponry, but (aside from some dynamic action), nothing happens. However, as he flies back to Smallville, Bizarro is momentarily weakened when he passes a garbage truck.

Bizarro overhears Melissa wishing that there was a babbling brook in her backyard, and drills down to a spring to create one. But when she falls into the water, he learns that she is blind. If she were sighted, she'd fear him like the rest of Smallville. Meanwhile, Superboy has realized that the glowing fragments of the machine that created Bizarro are what weakened him. And:

Their collision destroys Bizarro, but it does have an upside:

Comments: An absolute classic. I loved this story the first time I read it in a reprint giant as a youngster, and it still enchants me. It must have been very popular with the kids of the time, for DC soon brought back Bizarro as an antagonist for the adult Superman. Weisinger encouraged the kids to write in with their ideas about the stupid things the Bizarros did. This proved popular enough that they were briefly given the backup slot in Adventure Comics, bumping Aquaman.

The Secret Origin of the Phantom Zone

Wikipedia presents the following information on the Phantom Zone:

The Phantom Zone is a fictional prison dimension featured in the Superman comic books and related media published by DC Comics. It first appeared in Adventure Comics #283 (April 1961), and was created by Robert Bernstein and George Papp

Ah, but as I have discussed in the past, Mort Weisinger and his writers often swiped ideas and entire plotlines from earlier stories and so it is with the Phantom Zone. The precursor to the Zone first appears in Action #131 (April 1949), a full 12 years before its official debut. Here's the cover:

As you can see, the original machine was quite cumbersome, but the effect is clearly the same. The person's color fades, then becomes white (for the benefit of the reader, as the stories always made it clear that the characters in the zone were actually invisible).
In the Action #131 story, Luthor has come up with a new invention:

A teleportation device, in other words. But, in typical comic book criminal fashion the commercial applications for his machine don't occur to Luthor. Never mind that he could instantly put out of business every trucking, railroad and airline company, Luthor's bright idea is to put it to use robbing banks.
In the Silver Age tale, Superboy discovers the Phantom Zone projector (initially called the Punishment Machine) in a box of forbidden weapons that Jor-El had shot into space. He is accidentally sent into the Zone when a lizard presses the button as he stands in front of the projector.

In the Golden Age, Superman is holding a receiver when Luthor's teleportation device signals it. The crook thinks quickly:

In the stories, Superboy and Superman are unable to touch anything in the physical world, or communicate directly with anyone. But there is an indirect method of communication in both stories, and it is the same each time:


Incidentally, that bit with phantoms communicating via an electric typewriter was used at least once more that I'm aware of. Lois let Perry, Jimmy and Clark know she was still alive in Superman #129's The Ghost of Lois Lane:


Update: Commander Benson drops by in the comments and notes a very similar theme in the Atom Man vs Superman serial from 1950. Note particularly Chapter 8, which has Superman sent by Luthor into the "Empty Doom" where he exists solely as a phantom, and where his only means of communication with the corporeal world is... you guessed it, via an electric typewriter. From what I've been able to observe of the serial, it's largely based on the story from Action #131.

Amazing Spiderman #1

George M. Cohan once observed that plotting a three-act play was relatively simple. In Act 1, you get the hero up in a tree. In Act 2, you throw stones at him. In Act 3, you get the hero down from the tree.

Many comic stories follow this simple formula. Where Spiderman was different, was that Stan and Steve never got him down from the tree; they just kept throwing the stones at him.

This issue offers a classic example. After a quick summary of the events in Amazing Fantasy #15, we see that Uncle Ben's death has put Peter and Aunt May in a rough situation:

Peter considers taking up crime to pay the bills, but he knows it would break his aunt's heart if he were ever arrested. So he gets the bright idea of going into show business. Problem solved? Nope, because there's another stone waiting:

Spidey indeed finds it impossible to cash his check. And things get even tougher with the first appearance of his longest-running nemesis:

The inspiration for J. Jonah Jameson is probably found in the works of Ayn Rand. In the book The Fountainhead, Howard Roark runs afoul of a character named Ellsworth Toohey, who sees it as his duty (as a socialist) to tear down heroic individuals in favor of the ordinary working man. Ditko was famously a Rand fan, and echoes of her philosophy often appeared in Spiderman and in the Question series, as I discussed here.

Jameson's son is an astronaut (note: astronauts were huge celebrities in 1963), and is being launched into space shortly after Spiderman is basically drubbed out of the entertainment biz. But his space capsule develops a problem and he appears to be doomed until Spiderman steps in:

He commandeers a plane and a pilot from a nearby base and:

He rescues Jameson's son and emerges a hero to all, right? Well, yes to the former, but Stan and Steve haven't finished off their pile of stones:

Jameson has trumped up a patently ridiculous charge that Spidey had caused the problems with the capsule in the first place, so that he could look like the savior. So our friendly neighborhood Spiderman remains treed:


In the backup story, Spiderman tries to join the Fantastic Four, figuring that he ought to command a good salary with them. But:

The remainder of the story features Spiderman's first battle with the Chameleon, a quick-change artist. At one point, the Chameleon impersonates Spiderman himself. Peter captures him but the Chameleon gets away and does another makeover. We see the first appearance of Spider-Sense here:

The Spider-Sense is an ingenious gimmick that would become an important weapon in Spiderman's arsenal. But when he catches the phony cop, the Chameleon claims loudly that Spiderman is really the Chameleon in disguise again. This results in Peter fleeing, angry and hurt:

Like I said, the stones never stopped coming.