November 1967: The Challengers Get a Head

DC Comics published what you might call a sub-genre of characters who had highly unlikely heads.

My favorite was the gigantic Faceless Hunter from Saturn, who was cover-featured three times in Strange Adventures. We also saw sun heads, Saturn heads, lion heads and computer heads, among others.

The latter may yet come true, if people’s phones get any closer to their faces.

In Challengers of the Unknown 58 (Oct.-Nov. 1967), the adventure team faced Neutro, a giant who had an atomic model for a head and could transmute elements. He turned the Challs’ rocket vehicle the Gallopin' Gizmo into glass and tried to drown them in mercury.

Dauntless by definition, the Challengers encountered many such foes who possessed super powers, and took them all in stride.

The Challengers had by this time traded in their signature purple uniforms for yellow muscle shirts. Their distinctive hair coloring — blond, red, black and brown — made them easy to tell apart, even in identical outfits.

Fearless because they’d already survived certain death together, they were pulp-ish heroes who had skill sets instead of super powers — the muscleman boxer Rocky Davis, the daredevil mountain climber Red Ryan and the test pilot Ace Morgan. My favorite was the scientist-scuba diver Prof. Haley, I suppose because I leaned toward intellectuals even as a kid.

“The Challengers did well enough under the editorship of Jack Schiff, the man who had guided the Batman line since the 1940s,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “For the next several years, Bob Brown (Space Ranger, Doom Patrol) did a fine job illustrating scripts by Schiff's writing stable, including Bob Haney (Metamorpho), Arnold Drake (Deadman) and others, but the series no longer reached (creator Jack) Kirby’s stellar heights. Under a succession of creative teams, it lasted until 1970 as a regular publication, then sputtered through the ’70s in fits and starts.”