December 1960: Distaff Dangers

During the 1950s, DC heroes like Superman, Batman, Tomahawk and Blackhawk all had various cover-gimmick fake marriages, while remaining safely unattainable and aloof.

The antifascist aviator’s turn at the altar came in Blackhawk 155 (Dec. 1960), with Lady Blackhawk — Zinda Blake — as the bride. The other Blackhawks became jealous and broke up the team — and then Zinda awakened. Like Lois Lane, she’d only been having a dream about marrying her dream man.

“Blackhawk, much like Batman, succumbed to an invasion of weird and alien menaces as the issues progressed through the end of the decade,” recalled comics historian Bill Schelly. “A bright spot for teen male readers was the introduction of Lady Blackhawk, perhaps harkening back to a much earlier adventure. Military Comics 20 (July 1943) presented a story about an unnamed woman who attempted to become the first female Blackhawk.”

Two other proto-Lady Blackhawks — Eve Rice and Sheila Hawke, a/k/a “She-Hawke”— appeared during the 1940s and early 1950s.

“In The Lady Blackhawk (Blackhawk 133, Feb. 1959), Zinda Blake trained to qualify for induction to the team, but discovered that the Blackhawk code restricted membership to men,” Schelly said. “Lady Blackhawk returned occasionally as an honorary member, looking fetching in her short skirt and bare legs.”

Like the Blackhawks, the Challengers of the Unknown had their own female quasi-member, June Robbins. In Challengers of the Unknown 17 (Jan. 1961), June came in particularly handy because only she could fight off a genie commanded by the evil magician Malvolio.

Ace Morgan finally figures out that it’s June’s opal ring that the genie fears. He knew that opals were believed to have protective powers and to ward off evil in some ancient cultures.

August 1958: Ranger with a Raygun

Okay, he was no Adam Strange or even a Captain Comet. But Space Ranger managed to hold down the fort in DC’s Tales of the Unexpected and then Mystery in Space for half a decade.

“DC editor Jack Schiff unveiled the Space Ranger in Showcase 15 (1958),” notes the Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes. “The Ranger had a secret identity — business heir Rick Starr — and donned a red-and-yellow space suit with a bubble helmet and a rocket pack to fight futuristic bad guys (the Jungle Beasts of Jupiter and the Alien Brat from Planet Byra, among others, with a cutesy alien pal, Cryll, by his side.”

“The use of a space helmet to disguise the hero's identity recalls the Moon Man pulp magazine short stories (1933-1937) by Frederick C. Davis,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost.

However, by the time I started reading Space Ranger, his secret identity had been largely abandoned as superfluous (a character who was always on yet another weird planet hardly needed a disguise).

Like Batman, Space Ranger had no super powers, but Cryll did, being able to transform himself into any animal, like the later Beast Boy. Since Cryll had the whole densely inhabited universe to choose from, he could essentially transform himself into anything. The Martian Manhunter’s super-powered alien pet/pal Zook was similar.

In place of powers or a utility belt, the yellow-clad, translucent-helmeted Ranger had his all-purpose multi-raygun which seemingly could emit any kind of beam: heat, ice, disintegration, and so forth. Space Ranger’s infinitely versatile raygun anticipated Space Ghost’s multi-beam power bands.

Space Ranger and his super-powered assistant echoed the pulp magazine feature Captain Future, created for Thrilling Publications by Mort Weisinger and written by Edmond Hamilton from 1940 through 1944.

“In fact, Hamilton is credited with writing the first two Space Ranger stories from (Gardner) Fox’s plots (The Great Plutonium Plot and The Robot Planet),” noted Bill Schelly in American Comic Book Chronicles.

April 1958: The New Adventures of Superman

The last new episode of TV’s The Adventures of Superman would air April 28, 1958, and DC Comics was clearly already concerned about the end of the show in 1957, as the somewhat nervous copy in DC’s house ads suggests. 

World War II’s end and the anti-comic book hysteria had helped kill off most of the superheroes Superman had inspired, but the Man of Steel not only survived, but thrived, thanks to the tremendous impetus provided by his TV show (and radio show before that).

“The show benefitted from the fortuitous casting of George Reeves as Superman and brought a great deal of attention to the Man of Steel’s supporting characters,” observed Bill Schelly in American Comic Book Chronicles.

“Lois Lane had been an integral part of the superhero’s stories since his first appearance in 1938’s Action Comics 1. Editor Perry White and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen, however, had both been introduced later and in a somewhat desultory manner. Now, partly due to the necessity of focusing most of the television show on non-superheroic activity, these secondary characters would from this point forward be more important.”

But as the TV series approached its end, the Superman comic books — now unshackled from the limited cops-and-robbers plots of the TV show — became free to explore the science fictional possibilities inherent in the character’s concept.

“Julius Schwartz was talking to me about Superman and Mort (Weisinger) and said that some of the higher-ups felt Superman was going to end after the TV show as they thought the show was pushing the sales,” Bob Bailey recalled. “So they gave Mort freedom to develop the character more and he used what he knew best from his youth: science fiction! He used sci-fi writers he knew and trusted, among others, to grow the mythos.”

Hence Brainiac, the Phantom Zone, Superman’s robots, Kandor, Argo City, Supergirl, Nightwing and Flamebird, the cyborg Metallo, the tiny Superman Emergency Squad, the gigantic Titano and so forth.

February 1957: The League of Death-Cheaters

If Hollywood had turned Jack Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown into a movie in the 1950s, they’d have had to hire Ray Harryhausen. And I doubt that even that stop motion wizard could have done Kirby’s visual spectacle full justice.

Outsized menaces were never much of a challenge for the Challengers. In the uncanny team’s first appearance in Showcase 6, they tackled something resembling Talos, the bronze giant who protected Crete in the story of Jason and the Argonauts (as recorded in the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes). The Challengers could be seen as 20th century Argonauts.

“It was one of the last concepts (Jack Kirby) and Joe Simon thought up together: a team of daredevils who survived an airplane crash, then decided to take further risks because they were ‘living on borrowed time,’ noted comics historian Bill Schelly. “It was yet another S & K team book, but in keeping with the times and the still widely held perception that costumed characters were out, these heroes wore uniforms that resembled ‘normal’ clothes: identical purple shirts and slacks that weren’t skin tight.

Cleverly, the four were already heroes before the near-fatal crash that would unite them. That’s because they were flying to film a radio program called Heroes. So they were well prepared to repurpose their harrowing experiences into brave missions that would benefit humanity.

“Showcase 6 (Jan.-Feb. 1957) presented the origin story The Secret of the Sorcerer’s Box!, a book-length tale divided into four chapters,” Schelly wrote. “The book-length story, little-used at National at this time, was perhaps made more acceptable because the chapter divisions looked like separate stories to the casual browser.”

“Of the six bi-monthly issues of Showcase in 1957, three were devoted to Jack Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown. Oddly, only one issue that year featured the return of the new Flash. Ever cautious, Irwin Donenfeld seemed to have wanted to make sure the good sales of Showcase 4 weren’t a fluke.” 

January 1950: Tarzan of the Dells

Dell Comics specialized in heroes made famous in other media — characters like the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lassie and Tarzan.

The “wholesome” factor was built in.

“Although Dell didn’t submit its comics to the Comics Code Authority, the company developed its own internal set of guidelines mildly known as Hints on Writing for Dell Comics,” noted comics historian Bill Schelly. 

“The document had a section on Taboos which began, ‘Avoid sophisticated and adult themes’ as well as ‘anything dealing with minority races, politics, religion, labor, suicides, death, afflictions (such as blindness), torture, kidnapping, blackmail, snakes, sex, love, female villains, crooked lawmen or heavies of any race other than the white race.’”

They must had have to make an exception for Tarzan, because minority races made up the bulk of the population even in his mythic African continent.

Tarzan first appeared in the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, when artist Jesse Marsh was 5, and so the ape man had already been swinging around for 35 years when Marsh began to draw him for Dell Comics in 1947.

“Writer Gaylord Dubois attempted to blend the Burroughs material with the currently popular motion picture version,” noted comics historian Jim Brancatelli in The World Encyclopedia of Comics. “What resulted was an unsatisfactory hybrid of Burroughs and movies: Tarzan’s son was erroneously called ‘Boy;’ Jane was a brunette, Tarzan lived in a treehouse, and covers sported photographs of Lex Barker or Gordon Scott as the movie Tarzan.”

Tarzan had been a multi-media star since his inception, with the first Tarzan film appearing in 1918. In fact, the date of his first newspaper strip — Jan. 7, 1929 — is considered the birthday of the adventure comic strip (because by coincidence, the Buck Rogers science fiction comic strip debuted the same day).

Superman, Zorro and Tarzan all counted as superheroes when I was a kid in the 1950s, and I still think of them that way.