The Crooked Earth

The second JLA/JSA teamup took place in Justice League of America #29-30. The first issue features probably my favorite JLA cover ever:



In the first book, we meet the super-powered beings of Earth-3:



Knockoffs of the Flash, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern and Superman respectively, but with one crucial difference. They are evil, and form the Crime Syndicate of America. In fact, on their world there are no superheroes, making it a pretty grim place indeed.

Note as well that this time DC embraces the concept of alternative versions of their flagship characters, Batman and Superman, although they still had yet to do so on Earth-2.

The Crime Syndicate members have been successful in their theft attempts so often, that they are getting careless. And when they learn that there are other Earths vibrating at a different speed from theirs, with superheroes to test their mettle, they decide it will be good training to face the heroes of Earth-1.

By no small coincidence, the JLA members available to face the Crime Syndicate their counterparts listed above, and at first it looks like we'll see straight matchups, but as it turns out, the villains have switched positions for the most part, so it's mixed matches, with the Flash facing Ultraman, Batman against Johnny Quick, Superman against Power Ring, and Green Lantern against Owlman. Not surprisingly, Wonder Woman and Superwoman did get to face each other, since it prevented two man against woman fights.

In each battle the supervillian initially does well, but the superhero responds better to the changing dynamics of the battle and wins. However, there is a trick that each of the villains plays on the hero in the end:



After being transported to Earth-3, the superheroes find that the villains have a home field advantage, and they are quickly subdued. Improbably, the villains, rather than doing the obvious (killing the Justice League members), decide to be sporting and find another earth to host the rubber match. Earth-2 is the obvious pick and so the Crime Syndicate studies it. But this alerts the JSA, who discover the JLA held captive around their conference table. Doctor Fate is able to disrupt the spell holding them with the lightning bolt shown on the cover long enough to learn of the impending invasion from Earth-3.

Gardner Fox rotated the JSA members for this issue. Making their first appearances in the Silver Age were Starman and Doctor Midnight, while Hawkman, Black Canary and Doctor Fate returned. Black Canary's continued presence highlights that DC was still uncomfortable with the idea of a GA and SA Wonder Woman.

In JLA #30, the JSA faces the Crime Syndicate. They manage to defeat the individual members, but as with the JLA, the villains have a trick up their sleeves that makes them the winner either way:



This sets up the rematch of the JLA versus the Crime Syndicate, and this time the JLA wins. They learn that the villains have set a trap if they free the JSA members, and so disable the trap before saving their friends and sealing the Crime Syndicate in a bubble.

Infinite Crises on Infinite Earths

After bringing back the Golden Age Flash in Flash #123's memorable Flash of Two Worlds, Gardner Fox followed up with Flash #137's Vengeance of the Immortal Villain. In that story, Vandal Savage, a major Golden Age villain, had captured the former members of the Justice Society of America and the two Flashes rescued them.

The Golden Age and Silver Age Flash teamups had become an annual tradition by that point, and it was only natural that DC extend the concept to a JLA/JSA teamup, which they did starting with Justice League of America #21-22, the August and September 1963 issues. This was significant in that I believe it was the first time a DC story had covered two complete, book-length issues. DC had experimented with continued tales before, but always in their anthology comics, so that the stories were not book-length.

In that first tale, Golden Age villains The Icicle, The Fiddler and The Wizard teamed up with the Silver Age baddies Mr Element (the pre-reformed Al Desmond), Chronos and Felix Faust. The Fiddler had appeared in Flash of Two Worlds, so he became the first GA villain to make two appearances in the Silver Age.

One notable oddity about the GA/SA characters; DC revived the heroes in new costumes and identities, but there were very few cases of DC bringing back GA villains as new SA characters. I'm wracking my brain here and the only one that comes to mind is at the very end of the SA, the GA Hawkman's villain the Gentleman's Ghost popped up as a new villain for Atom and Hawkman. Anybody? I'm not talking about just the return of the GA villains (like Mxyzptlk or the Penguin) in the SA, I'm talking about new villains roughly based on the GA villains but as recognizably different as Jay Garrick and Barry Allen, and therefore as new as the Barry Allen Flash. Anybody?

Anyway, in this story the GA villains meet some SA villains and they decide to combine operations. The Fiddler has a note that will open up the barrier between the two worlds, and they realize that this takes care of a major problem for them:



Now that is a cool concept for a story. But eventually the GA crooks on the SA world (Earth-1) decide to take on the JLA. At first they succeed, in fact trapping the heroes in their clubhouse. But fortunately there's a crystal ball there and the Justice League heroes summon the Justice Society stars to help them out:



In the second story everything seems to work out fine for the heroes, but this turns out to be a trick to get the Green Lanterns (both GA and SA) to use their powers to free the two Flashes. This gives the villains a chance to imprison all the heroes:



Note in particular the SA heroes presented and the ones that lack a real GA counterpart. At the time, DC still had not quite embraced the concept that there was a difference between the GA Superman and the SA Superman. Ditto with Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Aquaman. What do those five characters have in common? They were the only five DC superheroes to be published continuously from the 1940s to the 1960s. Of course the Martian Manhunter lacks a GA equivalent as well, but he was a strictly new SA character, not a revival.

It was easy for DC to say that there were two Green Lanterns (in fact there were a multitude of them), or two Flashes; it didn't take a genius to tell the difference between Alan Scott and Hal Jordan. But with Batman or Superman establishing a dividing line can be extremely tricky, as DC would discover over the years. DC would eventually accept the idea as we shall see in later instalments.

Next in this series: If there's an Earth-1 and an Earth-2, can Earth-3 be far behind?

Unknown Worlds #25

I've talked a little bit about American Comics Group, a small publisher that managed to put out about 1,150 comics from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. They put out comics in just about every genre, from teen to romance to funny animal to war. But their specialty was the kind of light fare that passed for horror in the Silver Age. Unknown Worlds was a late entrant for AGC in the horror field, coming on the heels of their long-running Adventures into the Unknown and Forbidden Worlds comics. I thought I would take a detailed look at one issue of Unknown Worlds from August 1963.

The opening story is entitled "The Specter of Colonel Clay". William Ames' family is forced to abandon their Oklahoma farm during the Depression. They decide rather than head to California like everybody else is doing, they'll go southeast. After an angry experience with a farmer who wants them to live in old slave quarters, they find an abandoned antebellum mansion which they hope to fix up and farm. But the mansion is haunted, and they are nearly killed a few times.

The young boy of the family manages to talk to the ghost, who had been a colonel in the Confederacy. The ghost is bitter at the Yankees who plundered his farm during Sherman's march through Georgia, and at the Southerners who refused to help him when he attacked in a suicidal raid, and determined to frighten away the Ames like he's frightened away other people who tried to live on his land. But this family is made of sterner stuff:



Art by Ogden Whitney.

The colonel is of course unable to resist the little tyke's pleas, and they become friends and opponents across a checkerboard. He helps out the boy's dad when some young toughs decide to take over the farm, and in the end he realizes his hatred is misplaced and he joins the rest of his family, at peace in the cemetery.

The second story is "Gentle Brute". A husband and wife team of anthropologists come across a hidden valley where cavemen and dinosaurs live. They help a caveman, and in turn he saves them from a tyrannosaurus rex, teaching them that cavemen were capable of noble feelings.

The artwork on this story was by John Forte, at the time in the middle of his run on the Legion of Super Heroes.

"Tiny Mermaid" is a one-pager. A girl and a guy discover a mermaid in an seashell, but then a tidal wave washes over them so that they have no evidence.

In "Weird Walking Stick", a UFO is shot down in a cornfield. A hayseed manages to pull a strange, glowing stick out of the flying saucer. It has odd powers and seems to automatically do whatever its owner desires. However, it is stolen by a greedy carnival operator whose use ends up destroying the stick.

Teen Idol in White Bucks

Pat Boone was seemingly made for DC, with his squeaky-clean earnest image. From 1955-57 he recorded several #1 hits. In 1959 he branched out into TV and movies, with a memorable performance in Journey to the Center of the Earth. He also published a self-help guide for teenagers called Twixt Twelve and Twenty.

DC, sensing a hot property, decided to create a comic book about him. Well, sort of.

Pat Boone was more like Tiger Beat for the 1950s. It had way more text than any comic of the time with features on hot upcoming stars (and teenage girl heart throbs) like Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Jimmie Rodgers. It had comic stories but they didn't feature full word balloons, instead just lines to the text, much like Doonesbury.



They also had features on dating, fashion, and Pat even contributed an advice column. We also met some of the Pat Boone Fan Club "Prexies on Parade".



There were five issues in all. Why didn't it last longer? I suspect there were a couple of reasons. First, although Boone was only 25 and had recently graduated from college, he was also a very married man with four daughters. And second, the hits just stopped coming, at least in 1959 and 1960.

One notable thing about the Pat Boone comics; they were ahead of their times racially. Here's a picture of Pat clowning around on the set of his show:



If that's not the only photograph of a black person in a DC comic in the 1950s, it's gotta be very close. And this might be the only one on the cover of a DC comic of the 1960s:



And Pat discusses racism here:



Note in particular that phrase "light my life"; his daughter Debby would years later have a monster hit called "You Light Up My Life".

The Amazing Miss Arrowette

I wrote recently about the end of the Green Arrow feature in World's Finest. One of the tragedies in GA's demise was that a budding recurring character named Miss Arrowette went down the drain with him.

Miss Arrowette first appeared in World's Finest #113, November 1960. Bonnie King is crowned Miss Arrowette due to her proficiency with the bow. She hopes to help Green Arrow in his fight against crime, and indeed she succeeds at first. Typically for the time, DC gave her a more feminine approach to arrows:



And typically, she must screw up at some point, revealing that she's NOT QUITE READY.



Kind of a metaphor for women in the early 1960s, although their time was coming. But she also shows pluck and smarts:



And quite a set of, um, arrows, that's what I was thinking of:









Art by the wonderful Lee Elias. Predictably the man (GA) decided that the woman (Miss A) was not ready for crimefighting and equally predictably the woman agreed. But the story held out hope for another adventure with Miss Arrowette, with Green Arrow remarking: "I can't help wondering, Speedy, if we've seen the last of this girl archer!"

Fortunately for this post, they had not. World's Finest #118 featured The Return of Miss Arrowette with more tricks:





Unfortunately, she misread the situation and caused trouble for the Emerald Archer:



Note that in this story only, Bonnie is a blonde; in the other two she's a redhead.

She made her final appearance in World's Finest #134, June 1963. This time she shows some powers of deduction:



But we don't see much in the way of new arrows from her. A mascara arrow performs the function of leaving a trail that the hair dye arrow did in the original story.

There were only three more Green Arrow stories left, so Miss Arrowette did not reappear (according to the GCD) for another 30+ years.

Dying Features

We've talked a lot about the rebirth of old features in the Silver Age, like the Flash and Green Lantern, and of course Captain America, Namor and the Human Torch. But many, many features did not survive to the end of the Silver Age, and I wanted to touch on a couple of these.

Green Arrow was one of the few superheroes to make it all the way from the 1940s to the 1960s. He had started out in More Fun #73, and by that issue's #77 began a run as the cover boy and lead feature. He was also included immediately in Leading Comics #1's feature, The Seven Soldiers of Victory, and added to the World's Finest lineup with #7.

He was bumped out of More Fun after #107, when that title went more to a humor format, and the feature moved over (along with the new Superboy stories) to Adventure #103, where it replaced Starman. But after that, Green Arrow settled down for a very long time. Although he was not an original member of the Justice League of America, he was added to that cast with issue #4. Unfortunately, about the same time, he was dropped from Adventure comics after a 167-issue run. He did get to appear in the first superhero teamup in Brave & Bold, along with another doomed hero, the Martian Manhunter.

Green Arrow continued in World's Finest until #134, a 128-issue streak, then alternated with Aquaman for a few issues before DC decided to go with reprints behind the Batman/Superman teamups. And with that, Green Arrow found himself with no regular feature for the first time in 23 years. Oh, he still had the appearances in the Justice League, but even those were irregular. Speedy, his longtime sidekick, eventually caught on with the Teen Titans, and that was essentially it for their relationship, as is well-documented.

Of course, Green Arrow would change dramatically at the very end of the Silver Age; I have talked about that in the past.

Roy Raymond initially appeared in Detective Comics #153, where he replaced Slam Bradley, which was at the time DC's longest running feature. Roy was a "TV Detective", with a show called Impossible But True that exposed frauds. Ironically, the name of the program was deceptive, since usually it turned out to be Impossible But Phony.

Roy Raymond lasted until Detective #292, when he was bumped to make way for Aquaman's brief run (7 issues) in 'Tec.

Ant-Man was one of the earliest Marvel Superheroes, as I have discussed before. After a tryout in Tales to Astonish #27, Hank Pym returned in #35 for a fairly long run, both as Ant-Man and Giant Man. He held down the cover position until #59, when the Hulk joined TtA. However, effective with TtA #70, Giant Man was bumped in favor of Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner.

The Greatest Hero of the Silver Age

He wasn't invulnerable, he wasn't even strong. Unlike most heroes of the time, he had no swagger to his walk, no false bravado. He spoke with a nervous stammer and a great deal of self-deprecation.



That's him, bottom right. Tin had more heart in him than any other Silver Age character, because he overcame his obvious fears to do the right thing and the brave thing:









As you can probably gather, Tin didn't succeed very often. This does highlight one problem with the Metal Men in general; they might "die" but as robots they could always be brought back to "life".

Letters Columns Bring Continuity?

I've often thought this was so, but decided to take a brief look at it with this post. In the GA and the early Silver Age, DC, like many publishers, had two pages of print in every magazine, apparently in order to get a preferential rate on mailing. For many years they had used this space to print an amazing number of absolutely forgettable tales.

But ACG started publishing letters to the editor in their horror mags and apparently these satisfied the post office's requirements. DC, realizing that free letters from their fans were cheaper than whatever they paid for the text stories switched gradually, over a long period of time, to letters columns.

Superboy #68 (October, 1958) was the first issue of that title to feature a letters column. And oh, boy could you see the future of the Silver Age writ large upon that first page:



Okay, no more melting bullets with his X-Ray Vision (perhaps this is why Superboy developed "heat vision" to begin with? Superboy's adventures are taking place during WWII, so don't show the TV antennas on the roofs. Why can't he just make a couple diamonds everytime a charity needs some money? And we get an amusing letter about Supe's fascination with the LL girls, which turns out to be hugely prophetic.

These letters may not seem like much, but they clearly drove characterization for years. First, we get the careful "can his powers really do that?" that marked the Weisinger era. Next we get promo for an upcoming story. Then a time continuity mistake that DC admits is a boo-boo (as they liked to call it in those G-Rated days).

Superboy #70 had more letters of the same type:



Apparently a common enough complaint that DC decided to do a story about it, explaining that the glass for his lenses came from the rocket that carried him to earth.

And another complaint about the collapsed time problem that bedeviled Superboy:



Of course, the problem is that if you have Superboy reacting to 10-year-old fads he's going to seem awfully drab, and yet DC had to maintain the illusion that his adventures were taking place years ago, before Clark became Superman. It was a circle they never quite managed to square.

You can see the continuity being forced on the editors by the readers, or at least forced to be committed to:

Green Kryptonite Speaks!

Occasionally during the Silver Age, writers got the idea to tell the story from the standpoint of an inanimate object. I've written in the past about how Wonder Woman's Golden Lariat and her Invisible Plane got a chance to tell their stories. It was an original idea, but perhaps carried too far in a series of stories called Tales of Kryptonite.

The series ran for four issues in Superman, #173, 176, 177 and 179, as the chunk of Kryptonite, which had originally been part of a statue awarded to Jor-El, found itself interacting with various members of the Superman family. Hilariously, the Green K here tries mental telepathy:



At the end of the story, Superboy is oddly unaffected by the piece of Green K; it turns out that Lex Luthor had accidentally created a device that made Superman invulnerable to its radiation. But Superboy assumes it's just a rock that looks like Kryptonite and throws it into the Arctic so he won't be fooled by it at some later point.

In Superman #177 things get even more improbable. A plane carrying Clark Kent over the Arctic is about to crash, and the passengers bail out. Clark lands near that same piece of Green K, but manages to escape with a rather cool method:



Improbably, this trip turns out to be the one that convinces Supes to build his Fortress of Solitude, so it's a significant event in the life of the Man of Steel. But this piece of Green K is bound for even more glory, as a professor uses it to create a ray that neutralizes Kryptonite against Superman. Unfortunately it turns out to make the Krytonite deadly for humans.

In the end Superman uses a pair of lead tongs to hurl the chunk into space. But it goes through a red "cloud" in space which turns it into red kryptonite and sends it hurtling back to Earth.

The Red Kryptonite appears in Superman #177. At first Superman can detect no ill effects, but then he discovers that he's unable to speak or write in English, only in Kryptonese. How can he avoid exposing his Clark Kent identity to Lois when he shows up in the newsroom speaking and writing this strange tongue?



Answer: By exposing Krypto to talking dog Red Kryptonite!

The series finally finished in Superman #179. A mysterious ray transforms the Red K, now apparently harmless to Superman (since it only affects him once) into Gold Kryptonite, which will rob him of his powers permanently!

Up till this point the series had been rather silly and pedestrian, but the finale redeemed things a bit. Seening the Red K transmute into Gold K, the Kandorians devised a plan of action. They would send one member of the Superman Emergency Squad (a group of Kandorians who were on call to be tiny, super-powered assistants when needed) to use a Phantom Zone projector to dispose of the dangerous element.

The person would be protected in a lead suit. As it happens, Jay-Ree is chosen, but his girlfriend Joenne insists on accompanying him. While getting rid of the Gold K, they are both briefly exposed to the rays and decide to make their home on Earth for the good of Kandor:



Of course, that's good characterization but awful genetics; acquired characteristics are not handed down to the next generation. This was in an age when nobody was supposed to notice that Superman was of an alien species and quite probably could not breed with Lois. And of course it leaves unanswered the question of just who Jay-Ree and Joenne's children are going to marry.

But despite this obvious glitch, the rest of the story charms, with the little couple doing all sorts of cute stuff. Jimmy Olsen builds them a miniature home inside his pad, and Superman himself presides at their wedding. At the end, Gold Kryptonite threatens to return, but I believe that this was the end of the Tales of Kryptonite.

The Supreme Villain

Of the Silver Age was undoubtedly Adolf Hitler. Of course he mostly appeared in World War II comics like Sgt Fury and Our Army at War, but there were several occasions where he popped up in the more modern world.



In this story from Blackhawk #115 (Aug 1957), a series of daring attacks sends a rumor around the world: Hitler is alive! However, it turns out to be a hoax as a gang of crooks have plotted to steal the Nazis' hidden treasure which is in the hands of a fanatical Hitler supporter.

Hitler made a memorable appearance in Adventure #314. A criminal manages to evade the Legion's elaborate security system and steal their only time-bubble. He heads back into the past to gather some of the greatest villains of history: Nero, Dillinger and Hitler. When they come to the present he manages to switch the minds of those three villains into the bodies of Mon-El, Ultra Boy and Superboy respectively. But Saturn Girl senses that the villains can be defeated by informing each of the weakness of the others (Superboy to Kryptonite, Mon-El to lead, Ultra-Boy to radiation). Sure enough they all kayo each other and their minds are transferred back into their evil bodies:



Der Fuehrer also popped up in Jimmy Olsen #86. Jimmy is shocked when watching an old WWII film to discover that he had a double on Hitler's staff and decides to go back in time to investigate. He arrives on D-Day and sees Eisenhower on the beach (a goof, since Eisenhower did not travel to Normandy until the day after D-Day). Jimmy convinces the Germans he's one of them, and after some amazing predictions of his come true (all learned from the history books), is rapidly promoted up the ladder to the German High Command. He was that German general he saw in that film.



Unfortunately, Jimmy neglects to tell Hitler about the plot on the latter's life by the German generals and he is about to be killed when the time travel mechanism he used (a Professor Potter "time bomb") returns him to the present.

In Fantastic Four #21, Stretcho and the gang battle the Hate Monger, a man who is stirring up hatred in the US and a revolution in South America. In the end, the villain is killed by his own supporters and revealed:

The World's Finest Teamups--Part I

In the Golden Age, DC put out a couple oversized, omnibus books. Comic Cavalcade (initially) was dedicated to the All-American superheros: Flash, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman, while World's Finest (called World's Best for the first issue only) featured Superman, Batman, Boy Commandos and several other features. These comics cost a little more (15 cents instead of a dime), but they contained 92 pages, so it was worth the extra nickel.

Initially, there were no Batman and Superman teamups in World's Finest, with the notable exception of the covers, which generally featured Batman, Robin & Superman behaving like, well, teenagers. Here's a particularly amusing example:



But inside the book there would always be a Batman story and a Superman story, with no crossover.

That changed with World's Finest #71, July-August, 1954. DC decided to slim down the book to the standard 36 pages (including covers), and pare the price back to a dime. They maintained a couple of the backups (Green Arrow and Tomahawk), so to fit the other two features they were combined into one story.

This was not technically the first crossover of Batman and Superman. There was a one-shot teamup in Superman #76, in which (improbably) Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent share a room aboard a ship and accidentally discover each other's identity. However, outside the comics Superman and Batman had often paired up in the Superman radio series.

The first seven issues (WF #71-77) were illustrated by Curt Swan, who would go on to the great Superman artist of the 1960s and 1970s. But in WF #78 the series was (mostly) turned over to Dick Sprang. Sprang had been a longtime penciller of Batman stories and his style worked with Superman as well.

Sprang's specialty was perspective, and he always seemed to have the "camera" aimed in the right direction to give the reader the most entertainment. Here's a terrific example from WF #80:



Note that in the first shot, we get the crowd looking up at Batman and Robin, and in the second, we get almost exactly the opposite angle. This was a continuing theme with Sprang.

Sprang would go on to do the lion's share of the next 40 issues of World's Finest. Along the way there were a couple of significant stories.

In WF #88, Luthor and the Joker teamed up in Superman and Batman's Greatest Foes, a story in which the respective nemeses apparently go straight and set up a robot-building business together. Of course, it's just a front for a new criminal endeavor. This is the first super-villain team-up of the Silver Age and one of only a handful in DC history at that point.

World's Finest #90 featured The Super-Batwoman, the story where Batman decides to allow Batwoman to continue her crime-fighting career. He had forced her to retire in Detective #233 by discovering her secret identity, but now he was convinced that she had what it took to handle criminals.

In World's Finest #113, Bat-Mite and Mr Mxyzptlk teamed up. Although neither was truly a villain, this is still a significant early crossover. The Joker and Luthor got together again in WF #129, while Bat-Mite and Mr M renewed their acquaintance in #123.

By this time the editorial reins had been handed over to Jack Schiff and the stories suffered for a number of years with the same monsters, aliens and weird transformations that plagued Batman and Detective of the era. Dick Sprang only did three stories after WF #119, including WF #135's The Menace of the Future Man, his last work in the comics for many years. Schiff's own finale as editor was #140; in the next issue Weisinger took over this book, and that's a pretty good breakpoint.

Kid Flash

The DC Silver Age superheros appeared to have teenage sidekicks almost at random. Batman did certainly, Superman did sort of, but Green Lantern, Atom and Hawkman all eschewed the buddy combination, as did later DC heroes like the Spectre, Metamorpho and the Creeper.

But Flash got Kid Flash, and since it became so significant an event in the DC Universe, it is worth looking back on. Kid Flash first appeared in Flash #110. Wally is Iris West's nephew and Barry feels an affinity for the young lad, who's clearly one of the Flash's biggest fans. But when the Flash appears himself (of course Barry slipping away), lightning does strike twice.



I suspect what happened was a suggestion from the publisher for a Kid Flash character, because that is one of the lamest origins for a DC character ever. Oh, by a wild coincidence he got hit while by lightning standing in front of some beakers and test tubes, just as Barry did? That's lame and intentionally so.

Like all of DC's young heroes, he starts out as a boy and quickly becomes a teen. In Flash #110 he looks to be about 8 years old; by the end of the 1960s he will be clearly a man.

The Five Most Important DC Comics of the Silver Age

This is not really a hard thing to work out. First, of course, is Showcase #4, the comic that started the superhero revival that is probably the biggest aspect of the Silver Age. To give you an idea, during the 1950s, DC Comics published 3,397 different comics, of which 849 were superhero-oriented (including Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen). In the 1960s, DC published 3,579 different comics, of which 1,629 were superhero-oriented. The return of the Flash kicked off that surge.



Next up is Adventure #247, which introduced the Legion of Superheroes:



The Legion was one of DC's best features during the Silver Age. The combination of a futuristic setting with super-powered characters proved irresistable to readers of the time and provided seemingly endless plot possibilities.

The third major DC comic of the Silver Age is Brave & Bold #28. Now that DC had brought back Green Lantern, DC combined him with the Flash, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman and Aquaman into a fighting team called the Justice League of America. This served as a marketing gimmick for the individual magazines featuring those heroes (although at the time both Aquaman and Martian Manhunter were backup features in Adventure and Detective respectively), but it also apparently sold very well on its own, leading Marvel Comics' head honcho Martin Goodman to instruct Stan Lee to create a superhero team, which of course became the Fantastic Four.



The next major DC comic of the Silver Age may not be as apparent as the others, but it's a key to understanding the appeal of the superhero titles during this era:



Prior to this, DC had reprinted almost none of their older stories. Superman Annual #1 gave recognition to the fact that comics had a back story that it was important to understand in order to get the most out of current issues. It also represented a promise from the editors to you, that if you didn't know the back story, DC would fill you in over the years with reprints of their older tales. DC did a phenomenal amount of reprinting in the 1960s and early 1970s. Even Marvel got into the act once their comparatively recent tales were old enough to attract new readers.

The final major issue is obvious:



In the very first appearance of the Flash in Showcase #4, we learned that Barry Allen had read comics featuring the Jay Garrick Golden Age Flash. So it seemed only logical to pair the two up. But there was a problem; Jay Garrick (the gentleman on the right) had been a fictional character only on Barry Allen's Earth. The solution hit upon by Gardner Fox was to postulate an alternate Earth, called Earth-2, where the Golden Age superheroes had reigned.

This opened the door for a slew of Golden Age/Silver Age crossovers, about which I have a post planned for the future. It also created numerous headaches for DC's editors as time wore on, but that was not apparent in the 1960s.

Other comics that were crucial to the Silver Age DC, but perhaps not as critical as these:

Showcase #22, featuring the origin of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern. Lost in the memory of the Silver Age is the fact that it took three years after Flash's debut issue for DC to bring back its second GA hero in a new form. After this the pace quickened, with Aquaman, Atom and Hawkman all getting new launches.

Detective #225, with the first appearance of the Martian Manhunter, which actually predates Showcase #4. However, MM was a new character, not a rebirth of an old one.

Detective #327, with the "New-Look" Batman. Certainly the Batman TV series had a huge impact on DC Comics, but it is hard to say that this really spawned the show. Indeed, it is arguable that far more influential was Batman #155, which started the practice of bringing back Batman's Golden Age rivals (in this case, the Penguin).

Action #242, with the introduction of Brainiac. This is arguably the beginning of the Silver Age Superman under Mort Weisinger, although his name would not appear as editor for another few months. Weisinger's tenure running the Superman books was extremely influential, as he standardized the looks and mannerisms of the characters and presided over a substantially more serious hero than had been the case in the past. Superman in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps influenced by Captain Marvel, had a touch of whimsy to it. Under Weisinger most of that was gone (with the notable exception of the Lois Lane series).