Sometimes the comic books you didn’t see were the most intriguing.
For example, I spotted Detective Comics 287 (Jan. 1961) in DC’s house ads, but probably spent that week’s quarter on the second (and best) of the Superman annuals, the all-menace issue.
By the next week, Detective 287 must have vanished from the newsstand, because I remember my disappointment at missing it.
Colorfully costumed figures were still thin on the ground then, just ahead of the Marvel Age, and the bright cover of 287 offered four of them — two bird-themed, one insect-themed and the familiar flying mammal — plus ray guns.
RAY GUNS!
Irresistible.
But not, of course, to long-time Batman fans.
“(I)n the jittery wake of the Comics Code, the Bat-tales were dulled down a bit as DC editors feared to show people getting shot and punching each other,” wrote Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs in The Comic Book Heroes. “In 1957, science fiction came to Gotham City, and during the next few years the Dynamic Duo went haywire.”
Meanwhile, the lead story in Batman 137 (Feb. 1961) might have been called foreshadowing.
“Mr. Marvel” was the rival crime-fighter who stole the Boy Wonder away from the Masked Manhunter. It wouldn’t be the last time that a Marvel gave DC Comics heroes trouble.
The story — Robin’s New Boss by writer Bill Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff — almost made a weird kind of sense in the science fictional universe inhabited by Batman before the “New Look” reset everything in May 1964.
With Gotham City overrun by alien tech, Batman’s ropes and gas pellets might well have seemed a bit old hat. So enter a new masked crime-fighter who relies on force fields, tractor beams and flying cars.
This story, like so many in those years, was really about love, loyalty and an apparent betrayal. Robin had only pretended he wanted to run off with this fancy new superhero, who — surprise, surprise! — turned out to be an alien.
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