January 1962: A Bit of a Stretch

When I first met him, Batman was as familiar with alien landscapes as he was with the dark alleys of Gotham City.

“When the Justice League of America was founded in 1960, who would have thought that Batman had more experience with alien races than Superman and Green Lantern combined?” wrote comics historian Anthony Durso. “From 1960 to 1964, Batman and Robin had close encounters with alien life (or in some cases supposed alien life) 27 times! Holy extraterrestrial, Batman!”

In Prey of the Alien Hunters (Detective Comics 299 (Jan. 1962), Batman and Robin are patrolling a Gotham City jewelry exchange when, within only two panels, they are teleported via polka-dotted beams to a “weird, unknown world.” 

There, they find themselves in an interplanetary “Most Dangerous Game,” being stalked by alien hunters who can elongate their limbs, project “magnetic rays” and deploy rainbow-colored “stun spheres.”

Artist Jim Mooney puts the Dynamic Duo through some colorful ordeals with extraterrestrial dinosaurs and whatnot, and Batman ultimately teams up with the hunters to overthrow the planet’s overlord, Kaale.

The story ends with the Masked Manhunter intoning a ringing defense of freedom without even being returned to Earth. Presumably he and Robin eventually got there.

Rounding out the issue were stories about the Martian Manhunter protecting a beautiful spy and Aquaman guarding an old sea captain’s self-esteem. 

Moving over from Adventure Comics, Aquaman and Aqualad replaced the Roy Raymond TV Detective feature that had ended seven issues before. 

The last page of this Aquaman adventure included a house ad announcing the start of the Aquaman comic book. After 21 years, he’d finally landed his own title.

January 1961: Showcasing the Sea King

By 1960, the Flash and Green Lantern had already been revised and revamped in DC Comics’ Showcase. So why not Aquaman too?

Unlike those characters, Aquaman had never ceased publication at the end of the 1940s. Readers remained familiar with him from his appearances in the popular new title Justice League of America, and from backup stories in Adventure Comics in a feature that had, since 1951, been graced with the sumptuous pencils of one of the few female artists in comics, Ramona Fradon.

Although the publishers didn’t need to reintroduce Aquaman, they could use the freedom of a full-length story to expand his scope of operations. So in Showcase 30 (Jan.-Feb. 1961), Fradon and writer Jack Miller treated us to The Creatures from Atlantis.

Aquaman’s brief stories had done little with Atlantis before Showcase 30. In fact, Aquaman had never even visited his exiled mother’s birthplace until that issue, when scaly amphibious aliens seized control of the domed underwater city. They threatened to take control of the whole planet with flying submarines armed with heat rays that could melt skyscrapers, so Aquaman and Aqualad had to try to stop them, despite the long odds.

“From 1958 on, the Superman family under (Aquaman creator Mort) Weisinger's editing started building up a complex mythos,” recalled comics historian Michael E. Grost. “There are signs that during 1959-1960, something similar was attempted for Aquaman.”

“Just as Superman came from the advanced planet Krypton, so do Aquaman's ancestors hail from the advanced civilization of Atlantis, although Aquaman himself was born on the Earth’s surface. Just as the bottled city of Kandor represents a survival of Krypton on Earth, one that can be visited by the characters, so does the domed undersea remnant of sunken Atlantis represent a continuation of that magnificent civilization.”

Scenes like that seemingly endless army of loyal sea creatures parading past teenaged Arthur Curry were arresting to me in 1960, and remain vivid in memory even now.