April 1969: The Return of Adam Strange

I had just turned 5 when Adam Strange’s ongoing Mystery in Space series appeared on the newsstands in June 1959.

While I was old enough to love the title’s flashing colors, I was not really old enough to fathom its stories, which were fairly cerebral for a comic book.

The first time I risked a dime on Adam Strange was issue 68, cover-dated June 1961. I couldn’t resist that cover, which showed a horned alien tiger springing at a damsel in distress even as the colorful rocket-belted hero faded away back to Earth.

Happy days, then, when DC decided to reprint the interstellar archaeologist’s earliest adventures in 1969. At 15, I could fully appreciate what I’d missed.

And now, instead of Mystery in Space, the feature appeared in DC’s venerable title Strange Adventures — Adam Strange Adventures. It seemed meant to be.

And most of the reprints included the visual treat of new covers by Carmine Infantino, Neal Adams, Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson or Nick Cardy. 

Comic book art styles had evolved in the few years since Adam Strange had been first published, becoming less benign and more alarming, for one thing. But Strange Adventures 242 sported the original Infantino/Anderson cover art from Mystery in Space 82 (March 1963). That striking split image — showing Adam Strange torn between stopping a gigantic magnifying glass menace burning Rann and a hydrogen bomb explosion on Earth — could not be improved upon. 

Having an American city casually vaporized by a mushroom cloud in the background was scary enough, even for the late 1960s.

DC published an odd house ad to promote the reprint series, inviting the reader to “Journey to the world of the future!” But the Adam Strange stories weren’t set in the future. They were contemporaneous with the era in which they were published, the late-1950s to the early 1960s. 

The error was understandable, though. The trappings of the feature — those alluring ray guns and rocket belts — were futuristic.

December 1967: A Gathering of Ghosts

 

Things were looking grim at DC Comics in 1967 — at least in terms of cover features.

This house ad pairs the Spectre and Deadman, the omnipotent ghost and the trapped ghost.

Both DC superheroes had the same brutally simple origin: they were murdered.

 

“Deadman must have one of the most compelling origin stories in superhero comics,” remarked Woodrow Phoenix concerning Strange Adventures 205 (Oct. 1967). “Boston Brand, a hard-drinking, tough-talking guy with one or two friends and quite a few enemies, is the star acrobat in a small circus. 

“(A)t the peak of his triple somersault he is shot by an assassin with a rifle, hiding in the crowd beneath! He crashes to the ground but somehow, he doesn’t die. Or more accurately his body dies, but his consciousness doesn’t. The skull-like white mask and blood-red costume he wore in his act are now his permanent identity.”

Circus tights had been associated with superhero comics since the debut of Superman, noted comics historian Don Markstein.

“(A) supernatural entity called Rama Kushna took interest in his plight, and kept his spirit alive so he could find and punish his killer,” Markstein observed. “(H)e gained the ability to act in the material world by ‘possessing’ human bodies (whose owners were left with no memories of the possession after he released them).”

“The story… was written by Arnold Drake (Stanley & His Monster, Doom Patrol) and drawn by Carmine Infantino (The Flash, Elongated Man),” Markstein said. 

“Infantino provided plots for writer Jack Miller to script, and Neal Adams began his first run on a superhero title, turning in some beautifully rendered, photo-crisp and inventively laid-out work that established him as a major talent for the next decade,” Phoenix noted.

Of course, the Spectre, too, was trapped in his way — burdened with a cosmic mission, able to remember human warmth, but unable to feel it ever again. He could seemingly accomplish anything in the universe except escaping his own situation.

August 1967: The Hulk Who Hated Batman

Blockbuster — DC’s answer to the Hulk — struck again in Batman 194 (Aug. 1967). Introduced in Detective Comics 345 (Nov. 1965) by writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino, Blockbuster had previously returned in Detective Comics 349 (March 1966) and then in Justice League of America 46 and 47 (Aug.-Sept. 1966).

He was chemist Mark Desmond, whose acquisition of superhuman strength cost him his sanity and made him vulnerable to manipulation by his criminal brother Roland. The twist was that Blockbuster hated Batman, but loved Bruce Wayne, the man who’d saved his life as a child.

I appreciated the irony of the setup — Blockbuster being the one enemy whom Batman defeated not by donning his mask, but by taking it off.

By Batman 194, however, that gimmick had played itself out, and Blockbuster finally figured out that Bruce Wayne and the hated Batman were the same guy.

In the story penned by Fox, Blockbuster batters the Dynamic Duo senseless, but Batman is finally able to defeat the brute by disguising himself to resemble Solomon Grundy, Blockbuster’s fellow monster and friend.

“It was the cover that grabbed me in those ads, of course.  That amazing Carmine Infantino-Murphy Anderson cover, with its impeccably rendered figures of Batman and Blockbuster, its dynamic action, and, most of all, its imaginative (and, for the time, daring) incorporation of the book’s title within the illustration,” recalled comics historian Alan Stewart,  “My nine-year-old self had never seen anything like it. Unfortunately, the interior artwork — credited to Bob Kane,’ as were all Batman stories of that era that weren’t drawn by Infantino — wasn’t up to the standards set by the cover.  At all.”

Actually, the disappointing interior art was by Chic Stone and Sheldon Moldoff. Many readers shared Stewart’s chagrin at finding Infantino covers wrapped around non-Infantino interiors.

“I can’t think of another comic book that I considered as huge of a letdown once I finally got hold of it and read it,” Stewart wrote.

February 1967: When Fear Reappears

Even during his camp TV era, Batman’s covers occasionally relied on a spooky vibe. One such was Carmine Infantino’s cover for Batman 189 (Feb. 1967), featuring the revival of the Scarecrow.

Introduced in World’s Finest 3 (The Riddle of the Human Scarecrow, Fall 1941), Jonathan Crane was not so much a mad scientist as a mad teacher. 

“The fools!” snarls the shabby-looking psychology professor. “Do they think I would give up my precious books just to buy clothes? They think I’m queer and I look like a scarecrow! — a scarecrow! They judge human values by money — if I had money they’d respect me — and I could buy more books!”

Selecting a “symbol of poverty and fear combined” as his criminal persona, the Scarecrow hires out as a corporate hitman. Captured by Batman, Crane escapes prison for another crime spree two years later in The Scarecrow Returns (Detective 73, March 1943).

That was the last we saw of the Dynamic Duo’s fearsome foe until 1967, when DC dusted him off for Fright of the Scarecrow!

Writer Gardner Fox’s cool rationalism — often seen in his highly regarded Adam Strange stories — works well in this exploit, enabling Batman to convincingly counteract the frightful situation in which he and Robin find themselves (blinded and trapped in a room with a panther and a leopard). Batman’s advice to Robin about how to handle fear rings true psychologically.

Had this tale been illustrated by Infantino, instead of Sheldon Moldoff doing his faux Infantino, it might have been a minor classic.

December 1965: Things Go a Little Batty

Something must have seemed oddly familiar to Bruce Wayne, that day in 1965.

Only a couple of years before, he’d been accustomed to being changed into bizarre forms — a King Kong-like giant, or a baby, or an old man, or a genie, or a mummy, things like that. Then suddenly, in May 1964, all that stuff stopped.

Oh sure, since then some pallid telekinetic weirdo calling himself the Outsider had been attacking him with witches and animated Batmobiles and stuff, and his young friend Mark Desmond had been Jekyll-and-Hyding into a super-strong monster called the Blockbuster.

But other than that, things had been relatively normal.

Then, in Batman 177 (Dec. 1965), the old weirdness returned with Two Batman Too Many!, a story penned by veteran scribe Bill Finger.

As usual, the cover’s beautiful art by Carmine Infantino promised more than what would be delivered by the interior, which featured the increasingly indifferent art of Sheldon Moldoff.

The story spotlighted a giant Batman and a tiny Batman, explained away as clay homunculi brought to life by a shaman’s magic (an explanation that would have sufficed by itself in the pre-1964 era).

In fact, it was a scheme concocted by Batman to trap numbers racketeer and jewel thief Ed Garvey. The large and small Batmen were revealed to be the Atom and a well-padded Elongated Man — two other characters from the stable of Julius Schwartz, the editor who’d been tasked with revitalizing the Batman titles in 1964 by using fresher art and slightly more “realistic” plots.

September 1965: Animals and Aliens

I was 11 when those aliens gave stunt man Buddy Baker his animal powers in DC’s Strange Adventures 180 (Sept. 1965), courtesy of writer Dave Wood and artist Carmine Infantino.

I enjoyed his adventure then and in The Return of the Man with Animal Powers (Strange Adventures 184, Jan. 1966), despite the fact that his super powers caused cognitive dissonance even in a child.

For example, how could you “borrow” the flying ability of an eagle without also acquiring wings or an avian bone structure? Superman’s powers — mostly amplifications of human abilities — seemed almost plausible by comparison.

But Infantino’s clean-lined, graceful art was always refreshing to the eye, and I also found it refreshing that Baker chose to go into super-powered action without fancy dress. 

Much as I love superhero costumes, the cliché was already becoming a bit shopworn by 1965. I had been attracted to Gold Key’s quasi-omnipotent Dr. Solar, Man of the Atom in 1962 in part for that reason, and my interest waned when he put on red spandex in his fifth issue.

I breathed another small sigh of regret when, in Strange Adventures 190 (July 1966), Baker put on his costume. I didn’t read him much after that. In part it was because with the Batman craze in full swing, we had an embarrassment of superheroic riches.  Just as we have today.

Meanwhile, over in House of Mystery 153, the Martian Manhunter had settled into his first cover-featured run, fighting a giant version of his old archenemy Professor Hugo (introduced battling Batman in Detective Comics 306, Aug. 1962).

“A 1964 editorial shake-up resulted in J’onn J'onzz’s ouster from Detective Comics in favor of a Flash supporting character, the Elongated Man,” noted comics historian Don Markstein.  “The Martian was transferred to House of Mystery, which had hitherto carried only non-series sci-fi/fantasy stories. He started in the 143rd issue (June 1964). After over eight years in comics, he finally held down a lead feature.”

June 1964: A New Look for an Old Bat

 

After a quarter-century of ceaseless crime-fighting, Batman was clearly slowing down.

“Editor Julius Schwartz had helped engineer the superhero resurgence, and (DC publisher Irwin) Donenfeld was fond of his handling of The Flash, a bold, colorful title that had debuted in 1959,” explained Glen Weldon in The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. 

“Donenfeld looked at the team behind that comic — John Broome on scripts, Carmine Infantino on pencils and Joe Giella on inks — and decided to issue an ultimatum. He called Schwartz and Infantino into his office and told them they were taking over the Batman books. If the two men couldn’t turn them around in six months, both Batman and Detective Comics would be cancelled.”

“(Schwartz) suspected that Donenfeld’s threat to cancel Batman was an empty one, given the Caped Crusader’s historical number two status in the publisher’s firmament of intellectual property.”

Nevertheless, however reluctantly, the team took on the assignment. Out went all those alien-ridden science fictional plots, and that cozy extended “Bat Family.” In came a sleeker, more grounded Batman whose chest emblem now included a discreet, colorful oval surrounding the bat silhouette.

“(B)y encapsulating the emblem within a yellow field, Infantino transformed it into an eminently reproducible and trademarkable symbol,” Weldon observed.

The New Look shift showed up in a few more updates within the narrative. Batman lost his butler (briefly) but gained a sportier 1960s Batmobile, and Commissioner Gordon acquired a substitute for the Bat Signal — his Hot Line to the Batcave (called the Bat Phone later on TV). 

That was an up-to-the minute reference to the presidential “hotline” that had recently been installed to connect the Pentagon with the Kremlin. Made a priority because the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, the hotline was a Teletype system that became operative in 1963. The system was intended for text only because of the fear that speech might be misinterpreted.

May 1964: I Spy, You Spy, We All Spy

DC Comics found itself ahead of the superspy bandwagon without ever quite managing to hitch a ride on it.

I was attracted to Showcase 50 (May-June 1964) by its striking Carmine Infantino/Murphy Anderson cover, which showed a spotlighted, trench-coated secret agent firing an automatic as he parachuted down to a castle while gunfire just missed him.

The art inside was also by Infantino, but even at age 10 I could tell it somehow seemed just a little old-fashioned. Curious how an artistic style can evolve perceptibly in only a decade — or maybe it was just the clothing styles. Fedoras were forgotten by ’64.

The stories inside were from Danger Trail, a Cold War spy title that had lasted only five issues in 1950-51. I liked the hero’s name — King Faraday — even though by 1964, the obvious pun escaped me. 

Queen for a Day, a radio and TV game show, was still on the air, but about to be cancelled. Its heyday had passed.

For the first reprinted story, DC picked Spy Train, a Robert Kanigher-penned adventure set on the Orient Express. And why not? From Russia With Love had been a box office sensation only a year before. Goldfinger would blow off the roof that December.

Various superspy TV projects were already in the works, and The Man from UNCLE would premiere that September. I-Spy was what DC called its new version of Danger Trail, but even that name would be co-opted by a 1965 TV series.

Marvel and other companies would later launch successful comic book superspy spinoffs, but DC’s I-Spy died after only one more tryout issue. DC’s heroes — Superman, Batman, the Martian Manhunter, Hawkman and even Jimmy Olsen — would, however, go on to battle various SPECTRE-inspired baddies.

The irony is that back in 1963, DC had published a Showcase comic book adaptation of a new movie featuring some suspense novel character named “James Bond.”

Summer 1963: The Fastest Men Alive

As wish fulfillment, speed rated high with kids.

Speed, fueled by their boundless energy, was after all the one area where children could outdistance the somewhat worn-out adults who talked down to them, punished them and generally looked after them.

But just imagine what you might do with some real speed…

Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Harry Lampert, the Flash was among the first of the shtick superheroes.

In just two years, Superman, Captain Marvel and their various copycats had already covered the ground of the all-purpose superhero who wielded an array of powers. By 1940, to get ahead, a super being had to have a gimmick. So the Human Torch burned and the Submariner swam, Hawkman could fly, Doll Man could shrink, Wonder Woman could be female and the Flash could run really, really fast.

College student Jay Garrick was one of only three characters I can name who became a superhero by smoking, by the way.

In a chemistry lab, while breaking football training with a cigarette, Jay accidentally knocked over some beakers and further polluted his lungs by breathing in fumes that turned him into the Flash.

The Flash could run up the sides of buildings and across water. He could catch bullets, create multiple images of himself, become invisible and — eventually — even vibrate through walls. His one power turned out to make him nearly as omnipotent as Superman’s many.

For me, the early adventures of this seminal superhero are difficult because of the underdeveloped, cartoony art.

But by All-Flash 31 (Oct.-Nov. 1947), an artist named Carmine Infantino had arrived to make the Scarlet Speedster’s adventures a pure pleasure. Infantino would carry the character, in his second and even more successful incarnation of Barry Allen, through the 1950s and 1960s.

By 1963, the new Flash was popular enough to have earned his own giant annual, which included an adventure of the original Flash and this feature page spotlighting famous Flash covers.

May 1963: You’ll Never Lay a Glove on Him

“Like all comics readers, I was allergic to sports, but I LIKED Strange Sports Stories!” recalled Robert Rivard. 

“I first saw them in the 25-cent DC Special that reprinted some B&B stories, and then bought the series when it came out a few years later. I thought it was a great change of pace with some interesting sci-fi twists!"

Editor Julius Schwartz clearly enjoyed the concept, and promoted the series’ five Brave and the Bold tryout issues heavily in ads. But the series never landed its own title, and this handful of stories by DC’s top talents remain a pleasant curiosity.

In The Phantom Prizefighter (Brave and the Bold 47, April-May 1963), artist Carmine Infantino and writer Gardner Fox introduce us to Paul “Socko” Chase, a farmer who longs to be the heavyweight boxing champion.

Walking home along a lonely country lane, dejected because of his loss in a carnival boxing match, Chase encounters an invisible alien stranded on Earth by a damaged space ship. 

Significantly, the alien turns out to be tall, arrogant and red-skinned — a devil of a fellow who wants not Chase’s soul but his body, which he needs to pass safely pass through a radiation belt. In exchange, he’ll first make Chase an invincible prizefighter.

Weirdly, Chase agrees, but he’s angry when he learns that his invulnerability consists of being made intangible in the ring. 

He is able to defeat the alien with a semantic trick and a fistfight.

The cover image, of a prizefighter’s fist slipping through his opponent’s ghostly body, might well have looked familiar to older readers. Captain Comet had found himself in exactly the same position nine years before (Strange Adventures 43, April 1954) when he suddenly became intangible while fighting the world’s heavyweight champ. 

The superhero discovered that the anomaly was the result of an assassination attempt because a one-eyed, slug-like alien, disguised as an electrical technician, had tried to disperse his atomic structure. 

February 1963: Crowded by Cloud Creatures

Children tend to anthropomorphize their world, projecting human characteristics onto animals, cars, trains and even natural phenomena.

“As Piaget has shown, the child’s thinking remains animistic until the onset of puberty,” wrote Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 

“His parents and teachers tell him that things cannot feel and act; and as much as he may pretend to believe this to please these adults, or not to be ridiculed, deep down the child knows better… The sun, the stone and the water are believed to be inhabited by spirits very much like people.”

“Subjected to the rational teachings of others, the child only buries his ‘true knowledge’ deeper in his soul and it remains untouched by rationality; but it can be formed and informed by what fairy tales have to say.”

And by what comic books have to say.

The Julius Schwartz-edited titles at DC Comics made good use of that childhood trait by investing various inanimate phenomena with sentience. 

Over at what would become Marvel, they were busy creating rock monsters, water monsters, fire monsters and so forth. And DC had a taste for cloud monsters.

In Mystery In Space 81 (Feb. 1963), writer Gardner Fox and artists Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson gave us The Cloud-Creature That Menaced Two Worlds!

In a convoluted plot, Adam Strange thwarts a thousand-year-old Rann despot Alva Xar while encountering a conjured duplicate of his fiancé Alanna, a mind-over-matter device called a cyberay and a cloud monster over Tasmania.

Because he’s holding the device, Adam discovers he can simply will the attacking cloud creature to vanish — another metaphor designed to wink at the fairy tale power of childhood imagination.

Even earlier, in The Flash 111 (Feb.-March 1960), writer John Broome and Infantino and Anderson gave us The Invasion of the Cloud Creatures! 

Adam Strange also had another anthropomorphized weather phenomenon for a recurring archenemy — the sentient whirlwinds called the Dust Devils.

February 1963: The Alien Invasion on the 18th Hole

Having always had somewhat less than no interest in spectator sports, I shouldn’t have been expected to embrace a 1963 comic book called Strange Sports Stories.

That I had any interest in it at all was entirely due to the talents of writers Gardner Fox and John Broome, artist Carmine Infantino and editor Julius Schwartz, who had refined the optimistic, sunlit, linear-landscaped science fiction stories they created for Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space into a distinctly odd sub-genre.

Where else might you find intangible prizefighters, invisible baseball teams or rocket-sledding golfers who had to overcome alien spaceships instead of water hazards?

But the concept never progressed beyond five tryout issues in The Brave and the Bold, so general interest in it was apparently as tepid as my own.

Presumably kids who wanted to play baseball were out doing it, while those who wanted to read comics were sprawled on the living room carpet doing that.

Strange Sports Stories explicitly tried to bridge that gap by providing more than one story (Goliath of the Gridiron, The Hot-Shot Hoopsters) about young intellectuals who become literally fantastic athletes. In Hoopsters  (The Brave and the Bold 46, February-March 1963), undersized kids aged 12 to 14 — certainly part of the target audience for this title — use their scientific knowledge to outperform top college basketball players.

But after all, why be a mere star athlete when, with the same mental leap, you might be a superhero? That left Strange Sports Stories falling short, an idea whose time never came.

May 1962: The Man Who Bested the Justice League

In Justice League of America 4 (April-May 1961), the Flash proposed Adam Strange for membership, despite the fact that no one on Earth appeared to be aware of the secret spaceman’s interplanetary heroics.

Readers who questioned this got their answer in Mystery in Space 75 (May 1962), and this prequel proved to be one of the better stories in the archeologist-adventurer’s run.

“Adam Strange teams up with the Justice League to fight Kanjar Ro, a villain who uses Rann's triple suns to give himself Superman-like powers,” noted comics historian Michael E.  Grost.  “This is a sequel to (Gardner) Fox's The Slave Ship of Space (Justice League of America 3, February-March, 1961). That tale introduced Kanjar Ro, and his battle with the Justice League.”

Kanjar Ro’s powers are, in fact, greater than Superman’s. Justice League superheroes throw themselves against him uselessly while the powerless Strange just stands around, seemingly at a loss.

In fact, Strange is concentrating on the problem at hand. 

Just as the alien despot is about to destroy him, Strange hurls one of Kanjar Ro’s old tools, instantly overcoming the tyrant. Strange had reasoned if material from Superman’s home planet weakened him, the same might be true for metal from Dhor, Kanjar Ro’s world.

Strange’s brains bested the JLA’s brawn, prompting Wonder Woman to remark, “To think I felt sorry for you, seeing you standing there — so helpless.”

The spaceman replies, “I had no super powers to fight with, so I had to take some time out and — think!”

As Mike W. Barr observed, “It’s hard not to be impressed by a guy with no super powers who nevertheless does a job the entire JLA can’t.”

“I've been so frequently disappointed by many of the modern day appearances of Adam, in which the writers downplay his intellect and basically just make him a Shoot-First-And-Ask-Questions-Later space cowboy,” wrote comics historian Gene Popa. “They clearly did not read and grasp his original stories, sad to say.”

May 1962: The Ham of Tomorrow

Thanks to writer John Broome, the Flash’s archenemies often had singular, quirky and engaging motivations.

Captain Boomerang was originally just a talented Australian hired by the Wiggins Game Company to promote a toy craze. Captain Cold was a romantic, forever falling haplessly in love with various women. And the 64th century magician Abra Kadabra also just wanted to be loved — but by an audience.

Abra Kadabra fervently desired to be a performing stage magician in a society so advanced it had completely outgrown them. 

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote — a fact that renders Abra Kadabra’s career dreams hopeless in his own era, obviously.

Remarking on the super-villain’s origin (The Case of the Real-Gone Flash, The Flash 128, May 1962), comics historian Michael E. Grost observed that it’s “…more pathetic than sinister. His various thefts are done not for gain, but to try to publicize his stage act. His need for applause and public celebrity strikes a familiar Broome theme, the corrupting side of the search for fame.”

“Trickster characters like Abra Kadabra often cause difficulties for authority figures, in fiction books and comics. And they are often shown enjoying doing this. However, that is not shown as a motive for Abra Kadabra ... He is instead interested exclusively in fame and applause.”

And if applause isn’t forthcoming, the ovation-obsessed outlaw can compel it with futuristic mind-control technology.

Abra Kadabra travels back to the 20th century to wow audiences, and repeatedly runs afoul of the Flash, returning in The Plight of the Puppet-Flash (1962) and The See-Nothing Spells of Abra Kadabra (1967).

“Kadabra never deigned to work with the rest of the Flash’s Rogue’s Gallery,” observed Kelson Vibber in The Flash Companion. “He rarely worked with allies of any kind — willing ones, anyway — and Central City’s other criminals were beneath his consideration. They would only hog the limelight.”

March 1962: Let’s Give the Villains a Hand

Early in their runs, the jet age Flash and Green Lantern had already developed surprisingly elaborate mythologies.

Barry Allen’s centered on his highly colorful, idiosyncratic “rogue’s gallery,” which ranged from would-be ladykillers (Captain Cold) to unscrupulous advertising gimmicks (Captain Boomerang).

And foremost among them was Grodd, who added an entire secret city of super gorillas to the mix. By Flash 127, the sinister simian was already making his fifth appearance in the title.

“Grodd sought to overthrow (the super-gorilla chief) Solovar through his impressive psionic powers, which included telekinesis, mind control, telepathy and mental projection,” observed Keith Dallas in his Flash Companion. “He was also a brilliant inventor, constructing various imaginative weapons and gadgets, like the one that caused the Flash to absorb so much moisture from the surrounding air that he turned into a 1,000-pound fat man (The Flash 115, Sept. 1960).”

In this John Broome/Carmine Infantino story, Grodd chooses the unusual weapon of love, using “neo-magnetic radiation” to make anyone who sees him adore him. Cheekily, he even running for governor.

In the next issue, the 64th century stage magician Abra Kadabra would also compel applause, but only because he was a hopeless ham.

The Emerald Gladiator’s mythological superstructure was well displayed on the cover of Green Lantern 11, which featured not just Hal Jordan but an array of masked aliens in vivid and verdant costumes, including a bird humanoid, a fish humanoid, a tree humanoid, a robot and a tiny grasshopper Green Lantern.

Here, Hal’s most formidable foe and opposite number, Sinestro, engineers his exile from the Green Lantern Corps to the evil antimatter universe of Qward. But he succeeds in proving only that the resourceful Hal Jordan can use anything — even the water vapor from his own breath — as the means of escaping a trap.

And of course, as close friends and frequent partners, Flash and Green Lantern were also a part of each other’s mythologies, adding to the fun for fans.

February 1962: Lightning in a Zeta Beam

I am convinced that my life would be materially improved if I just had two things: a rocket belt and a ray gun.

However, the lesson of Adam Strange is that ray guns, rocket belts and pretty red fin-headed uniforms are finally useless when the menaces arrive. Only quick thinking really works.

“I've been so frequently disappointed by many of the modern day appearances of Adam, in which the writers downplay his intellect and basically just make him a Shoot-First-And-Ask-Questions-Later space cowboy, and in some instances he's actually portrayed as little more than a blundering fool,” observed comic book historian Gene Popa. “They clearly did not read and grasp his original stories, sad to say.

“Of all of the DC characters who have been 're-constructed' in the wake of Dark Knight, Adam has been perhaps the most sorely maligned.”

Adam Strange was lightning in a bottle, or a Zeta Beam, in terms of artist (Carmine Infantino), writer (Gardner Fox) and the feature’s jet-age moment in history. Because of the space race, science and reason were then being emphasized in America to a degree we have not, sadly, seen since.

In Mystery in Space 73 (Feb. 1962), Strange’s arrival on Rann coincides with an invisibility plague affecting everyone but him. The invisible alien warriors who caused it are seemingly immune to ray gun blasts. The sharp-eyed spaceman observes that the empty-uniformed warriors never risk hand-t0-hand combat, and deduces that the “warriors” are merely misdirection.

The real enemy must be elsewhere, and Strange tracks him down — a bit of multicolored energy ribbon named Ziathrion, a criminal scientist  from the planet Karthal.

The invulnerable Ziathrion gloats as he shrugs off the effects of all weapons, but then Strange seizes him just as the Zeta Beam is wearing off, and both are teleported to Earth. There, far from Rann’s triple sun, Ziathrion is vulnerable, just as Strange had reasoned.

The Champion of Rann leaves Ziathrion under a tree, forever inert.

Adam expresses confidence in his ability to solve any problem with reason. 

June 1961: Infantino’s Heroes

This DC house ad from June 1961 showcases two features that relied on the considerable talents of artist Carmine Infantino.

The Flash 121 gave us a return engagement with the merrily villainous Trickster, who’d been introduced a year before in Flash 113 (Danger in the Air!, June-July 1960).

Believe it or not, he was walking on air — and usually mocking the earthbound speedster. The blond, harlequin-costumed super-criminal drew my brightness-fascinated young eye and therefore my dime. The Trickster was caped, yellow-clad, flying — three things I loved.

Mystery in Space 68 was the first issue of that title I bought. I was fascinated by the Infantino-Murphy Anderson cover scene, which showed a horned alien tiger springing even as a colorful rocket-belted hero with a ray gun was teleported away, leaving behind a damsel in distress.

Much too much to resist.

And inside, even more! The issue introduced Strange’s recurring foes the Dust Devils — sentient, sinister, semi-anthropomorphic whirlwinds perfectly designed to inhabit the dreamlike mental landscape of a child.

Adam Strange was the thinking man’s superhero of the late 1950s, rendered with a sleek, space-age elegance by Infantino and written with a reassuring respect for intelligence by Gardner Fox.

But we were, in fact, approaching the end of an era, and Adam Strange’s loss would be Batman’s gain. In early 1964, Infantino would move on to revamp the flagging Batman titles, leaving Strange behind. By 1967, when Infantino also left the Flash feature, the best years of both characters were clearly behind them.

In June 1961, of course, we readers didn’t know it was the end of an era. But then, one rarely does.

April 1961: Far Planets and Lost Worlds

    In the Silver Age, The Flash almost served as a team-up book, with Kid Flash, the 1940s’ Flash, Elongated Man and Green Lantern frequently dropping in to share the Scarlet Speedster’s adventures. 

Land of the Golden Giants (The Flash 120, April 1961) offered a book-length adventure with Kid Flash, a character who’d been created 10 issues before.

“Wally West, Iris’ favorite nephew and president of the Blue Valley Chapter of the Flash Fan Club, was an instantly likeable fellow, due to a slightly tongue-in-cheek origin story including an exact duplication of the chemical accident that gave Barry his speed powers, as well as a heapin’ helpin’ of juvie jive and hipster slang that all us kookie cats in Comicsville could really dig!” wrote comics historian Michael Decker in The Flash Companion. “Clothed in an identical (but smaller) version of the Flash famous fighting fashions, Kid Flash graduated to his own back-up feature with the very next issue.”

In Golden Giants, the superheroes “… help a scientist prove his theories about Continental Drift,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. “This science fiction tale is full of unexpected twists and turns. In many ways, it starts out as another tale in the tradition of Conan Doyle's prose sf novel The Lost World (1912), with a scientific expedition going to the Guyana Highlands, just as in Doyle's novel. But Broome develops his plot in innovative ways.”

Meanwhile, in Challenge of the Giant Fireflies (Mystery In Space 67), Adam Strange’s fans got treated to two menaces for their dime — giant fireflies and sentient sun-beings.

“No movies from that pre-computer effects stone age could hope to match the designs, vistas and details of (artist Carmine) Infantino’s imaginative alien cityscapes and landscapes,” observed Robert Klein and Michael Uslan in The Adam Strange Archives. “Deadpan serious, even in the silliest situations, (writer Gardner) Fox and Infantino kept our disbelief firmly suspended while we visited Rann. Personal and character-driven, Adam’s adventures somehow felt believable.”