October 1960: Goldfish, Hummingbirds and Superheroes

The Justice League of America tryout issues of The Brave and the Bold flew off the newsstand shelves and supermarket spinner racks in late 1959 and early 1960.

I missed the team’s debut in The Brave and the Bold 28, which was on the newsstands in December 1959, but picked up and was delighted by Brave and Bold 29, with the JLA battling a giant robot who had a ray gun in his belly.

I ogled Brave and Bold 30 and the first two issues of the JLA’s own title in DC’s house ads, but the issues sold out before I could buy them. And one of several reasons for that was the appeal, to small children, of the superheroes’ colorful costumes.

I distinctly recall being almost hypnotized by the flashing primary colors of those covers — one character scarlet and canary yellow, another emerald green and jet black. The blond man was in green and bright, scaly orange, while the woman wore a swimsuit of red, white, blue and yellow. A blue cape, boots and trunks contrasted with the vivid green skin of the team’s fifth member.

These superheroes had that same gaudy glory that delights children in hummingbirds and goldfish. And if their adventures finally made no sense, well, neither do fairy tales or dreams. The superheroes were surrealism for children. But they were about to grow up a little.

The success of the JLA inspired the creation of the Fantastic Four over at what would become Marvel Comics, but writer/editor Stan Lee, in an effort to make such characters fresh and more adult, discarded the costumes. After all, real people who happened to gain extraordinary abilities wouldn’t put on fancy dress, would they?

That proved to be a commercial mistake that was corrected after two issues. Readers demanded colorful costumes, and Marvel responded with something of a compromise — not costumes but team uniforms, in a colorful blue that was relatively understated by superhero standards.