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.”

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.

July 1959: Adventure in Purple

The Challengers of the Unknown had many of the accoutrements of superheroes — fantastic foes, a secret headquarters, high-tech gadgetry and vehicles, colorful uniforms and an array of special skills. But they possessed no super powers, making them ever so slightly more “realistic” than DC’s various caped champions.

 “The Challengers were Ace Morgan (crackerjack test pilot), Red Ryan (mountain climber and all-'round daredevil), Rocky Davis (heavyweight boxing champ) and Prof Haley (scientist specializing in underwater exploration),” noted comics historian Don Markstein.

“In Showcase 6 (Jan-Feb 1957), where the series was first tried out before receiving its own comic, the four barely survived the crash of a small aircraft, and thereafter considered themselves to be living on borrowed time. They decided to devote their lives to adventurous do-gooding, heedless of danger because after all, they should have been dead already.”

Conveniently, the four adventurers each had a distinctive hair color — blond, brown, black and red — making them easy to identify at a glance.

In the 8^th issue of their title, the members of this this uncanny team were introduced to two of their recurring foes — the scientific despot Drabny in The Man Who Stole the Future and the giant robot Kra in The Prisoners of Robot Planet. Both would become founding members of the League of Challenger Haters, a distinguished group that also included Multi-Man, Multi-Woman and Volcano Man.

“During their first dozen appearances, The Challengers faced a wide variety of dangerous menaces — humongous robots, prehistoric eggs about to hatch into monsters, powerful aliens that wanted to keep them as pets, time-traveling criminals," Markstein noted. “It was kind of like a dry run for Kirby's later Fantastic Four. And then, suddenly, it all — well, it all continued, actually, but without Kirby to drive the stories, it was as if the characters were just going through a set of routines. Kirby had left for Marvel Comics and new projects of his own, and wouldn't return to DC until 1970.”

April 1958: The Canny and the Uncanny

As instantly recognizable as its superhero titles or its science fiction anthologies, Silver Age DC Comics offered another genre that became familiar to its readers — the “uncanny team” comic book.

Actually, the heroes were canny while the menaces they fought were uncanny — alien invaders, giant monsters, mad scientists, what have you.

Without super powers to support them against these fantastic foes, the heroes had to rely on their wits, their uniformly dauntless courage, some mid-century high tech and each other.

Being miniaturized or propelled into other times or dimensions were not uncommon experiences for them, certainly no cause for panic. In the idiom of the day, they were cool cats.

Such uncanny teams included the Challengers of the Unknown, the Suicide Squad, the Sea Devils, Cave Carson’s intrepid band of spelunkers, Rip Hunter’s temporal explorers and — borrowed from Quality Comics — the World War II military fliers the Blackhawks, re-enlisted into the fight against extraterrestrial enemies and super villains.

The Challengers were among the most popular of such teams, running for 87-issue, 20-year run beginning in 1958. In 1977, the team appeared in a mass-market paperback science fiction novel by Ron Goulart.

Often, the uncanny team consisted of the main hero, his strong pal, a young guy and the girl — a configuration borrowed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for what was arguably the most significant team of the 1960s, the Fantastic Four.

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.”