June 1969: Bruce Wayne, OSS Agent

 “Ein Fledermausmann! Schiessen! Schiessen!”

It’s the spring of 1969. You pick up a copy of The Brave and the Bold 84 from the spinner rack and open it at random.

What you see is a lushly illustrated, tuxedoed Bruce Wayne on a motorcycle, charging across a World War II airstrip the day before D-Day.

What th — ?

You flip through the issue and find the melodramatic action thrilling (and then realize that it’s been a long time since you’ve been thrilled by the action in a Batman comic book).

The story by writer Bob Haney featured an unlikely team-up between the Caped Crusader and Sgt. Rock, the WWII infantry noncom featured in Our Army at War.

The story featured Batman, in 1969, thinking back on an Allied mission he performed in France a quarter-century before on June 5, 1944.

Continuity problems aside, for me, this was the issue that signaled the direction Batman needed to go.

By 1969, the Masked Manhunter was stuck with a tired and played-out image as “camp,” a legacy of the Adam West TV show that had ended the year before. We long-time fans were aware that that the character needed a complete change — leaving the garish, clownish spotlight behind and returning to the shadows from which he emerged.

And here was just such a change, in both art and story. Nazis, after all, are not the Penguin or Mr. Freeze. They always make perfect villains, and have the advantage of having been real.

The art by a 27-year-old Neal Adams was breathtakingly fresh, and the inking by Sgt. Rock’s  Joe Kubert reinforced the new approach — muting the silliness of the superhero genre by enfolding it into the more “realistic” atmosphere of war comics.

Earth One, Earth Two, Earth Whatever. Who cared? This was one good story.

The idea of Bruce Wayne/Batman as an Allied secret agent had even had a precedent. That was his status in the 1943 Batman movie serial.

June 1965: Gleaming Giants, Redoubtable Rogues

In The Flash 153 and Hawkman 8, the heroes played to their strengths. While the Scarlet Speedster tangled with two members of his colorful rogue’s gallery, the Winged Wonders solved an archeological science fiction mystery.

In The Mightiest Punch of All Time (The Flash 153, June 1965), “The Flash and villainous Reverse-Flash continue their battle for Al Desmond, the former Mr. Element, trying to steer him away or towards a life of crime,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. 

“This is a sequel to Our Enemy, the Flash (#147, September 1964), and it is much better than the original. It is rich in plot inventions of all types.

“In the previous tale, Reverse-Flash had used physical force to coerce Al Desmond, who was virtually his hostage. This second tale is much more science fictional: it involves 25th Century mental control rays designed to influence people towards or away from a life of crime. This is typical of Broome’s approach, in that he takes ideas from an earlier tale, and science-fictionalizes them to construct subsequent story premises.

“Broome shows skepticism about the infallibility of advanced scientific machines. He had written many tales in the sf magazines criticizing computers, and these stories are in those traditions.”

Meanwhile, Hawkman traces a mind-controlling mask purportedly forged by the god Vulcan to Mount Olympus in Greece, where he and Hawkgirl battle a hostile metal giant.

Artist Joe Kubert had introduced the revamped Hawkman to the world, but by the time the Winged Wonder landed his own title, Murphy Anderson had taken over the feature.

“Anderson is not as flashy a stylist as Kubert, but, admiring both Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and everything Lou Fine had done, he is a master draftsman,” observed comics historian R.C. Harvey. “He can portray the human figure in every position from any angle, capturing, in every pose, a classical elegance. If Kubert was Rembrandt, Anderson was Michelangelo. The body English in his pictures amplifies dramatic moments.”

July 1961: Ghosts and Shadows

The Gentleman Ghost,

a character created by Robert Kanigher who first appeared in Flash Comics 88 (Oct. 1947), was an elusive mysterioso foe of Hawkman throughout the late 1940s.

But the postwar world was a new one, facing fears of atom bombs and flying saucers, not things going bump in the night. Eventually, even in children’s entertainment, the supernatural was de-emphasized in favor of the super-scientific.

So Hawkman received a jet-age reboot from editor Julius Schwartz not as an occult reincarnation but as an alien police officer from the planet Thanagar (Brave and the Bold 34, Feb.-March 1961).

I suspect writer Gardner Fox, wanting to recapture some of that 1940s magic, created an arch-criminal similar to the Ghost whose powers would be pseudo-scientific rather than supernatural. He debuted in Brave and the Bold 36 (June-July 1961). In both cases, Joe Kubert did the art, and the covers are among his best.

So Carl Sands, after saving alien explorer Thar Dan of the Xarapion dimension, was rewarded with a Dimensiometer, a device that transformed him into the intangible, incorrigible Shadow Thief.

Of course, it could be that the parallels between the Gentlemen Ghost and the Shadow Thief are accidental. Superhero comics frequently play variations on a theme, and concepts get reincarnated as least as often as Hawkman and Hawkgirl.

Hawkman’s mission to capture Sands was more urgent than he realized, because only the comic book’s readers were told that overuse of the Dimensiometer would wreck human civilization by causing global climate change.

Hard for even a spook to compete with a scare like that.

February 1961: Wonder on the Wing

I must admit, in December 1960, the house ad copy for The Brave and the Bold 34 had my 6-year-old self hooked.

So this guy flies? He uses cool ancient weapons like maces and flails? He talks to birds the way Aquaman talks to fish? He fights gigantic dinosaur-things that try to steal interstate highway tunnels?

I’m in.

I was particularly intrigued by Hawkman’s weird, unique look — that startling raptor mask over his bare, winged torso. I’d never heard of the 1940s Hawkman, the Flash’s co-star in Flash Comics, so this guy came flying out of left field at me.

And what really sealed the deal was the moody art by Joe Kubert, DC’s war comics artist.

“I felt that the challenge that was involved in the character was one that really pulled me in,” Kubert said in an interview for TwoMorrows’ Hawkman Companion. “(T)aking a guy who has wings and making him seem as if that could really happen, it could really be. And I tried in the scenes of him flying around and having slight physical contortions that he puts himself in, puts himself through, I tried to get that feeling across.”

Rarely was a dime better spent.

January 1961: Fast and Familiar

Older readers would have recognized the two superheroes in this January 1961 DC house ad as former roomies who’d shared a title.

The Flash and Hawkman had co-starred on covers of Flash Comics from 1940 to 1949.

Now in the jet age, a streamlined Flash was the star of his own title (which had picked up on the older comic’s numbering after a 10-year gap) and a revamped Hawkman was trying his wings in The Brave and the Bold.

In The Flash 118 (Feb. 1961), the Scarlet Speedster’s cover gimmick — racing to catch a bullet being shot at a scarecrow from a helicopter — turned out to be just that. That incident is revealed to be nothing but a scene from a Flash movie, so writer John Broome didn’t have to twist his plot around to accommodate the unlikely occurrence.

“Broome used a similar approach in The Skyscraper that Came to Life (Strange Adventures 72, Sept. 1956), where he also treated Gil Kane's cover simply as a scene in an SF movie being shot by characters in the tale,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost.

The Flash visits sun-washed California.

“Carmine Infantino, the artist of both the cover and the story, also got into the spirit of the switch as well. Infantino’s scarecrow cover is Gothic and sinister. But his story is a sun-soaked, glamorous picture of Hollywood. While the cover shows dark Gothic fantasies from the inner world of dreams, the art in the story seems unusually real. One feels one can reach out and touch the furniture and buildings in the story.”

Meanwhile, The Brave and the Bold 34 (Feb.-March 1961) introduces the new space-age Hawkman. Now an alien from the planet Thanagar, he’s pursuing the shape-shifting thrill criminal Byth.

“The shape-changing is not just a gimmick exploited for color; its logical consequences are woven into the construction of the plot,” Grost noted. “This is typical of (writer Gardner) Fox’s looking at the deep science fiction implications of his ideas.”

June 1960: All In Color for a Dime

The Justice League of America tryout issues of The Brave and the Bold flew off the newsstand shelves and supermarket spinner racks in late 1959 and early 1960.

And one of several reasons for that was the appeal, to small children, of the superheroes’ colorful costumes.

These superheroes had the same gaudy glory that delights children in hummingbirds and goldfish. And if their adventures finally made no sense, well, neither do fairy tales or dreams. The superheroes were surrealism for kids.

I recall being almost hypnotized by the flashing primary colors of those covers — one character scarlet and canary yellow, another emerald green and jet black. The blond man was in green and bright, scaly orange, while the woman wore a swimsuit of red, white, blue and yellow. A blue cape, boots and trunks contrasted with the vivid green skin of the team’s fifth member.

The cover for Brave and the Bold 30  — written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Mike Sekowsky — also featured a fascinating muscular, genie-like figure dressed in horizontal bands of light and dark green, glowing blue with the superheroes’ absorbed powers being poured into him by the double-barreled ray gun of a lab-coated mad scientist.

Irresistible — if somebody had one left to sell to you!

Professor Ivo, the villain who created the power-stealing android Amazo, turned out to be an early adopter of the preferred method of imprisoning and displaying captured superhero teams. You line them up in large, individual transparent tubes.

It’s so showy, you know.

Meanwhile, in Showcase 26, ancient Egyptians were facing green-skinned, big-eyed alien invaders while Rip Hunter’s time travelers watched. The handsome Joe Kubert cover for The Aliens from 2,000 B.C. was made more intriguing by the fact that the “ancient astronauts” idea was still novel at the time. It wouldn’t be done to death until a decade later.

May 1959: The Years of the Sword

Before DC’s The Brave and the Bold became an audition title like Showcase, it focused on sword-and-shield fantasy.

 The genre was popular during the 1950s in films like Knights of the Round Table (1953), The Black Knight (1954) and The Vikings (1958) and in TV series like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1960), The Adventures of William Tell (1958-59) and Ivanhoe (1958).

“(S)imultaneous with his work on DC’s war comics, Joe Kubert drew the swashbuckling feature Viking Prince, set circa 1,000 A.D., with a hero first written by Robert Kanigher and probably inspired in large part by Harold R. Foster’s Prince Valiant,” noted Roy Thomas.

“Prince Jon, a noble warrior suffering from amnesia, originally appeared in BB 1-5 and 7-24,” wrote Michael T. Gilbert. “His most unusual adventure may have been a unique two-part story pairing the Viking Prince and Sgt. Rock in Our Army at War 162-163 (Jan.-Feb. 1966). Rock discovered the Prince frozen in a glacier.”

This full-page house ad for BB 23 (April-May 1959) emphasized mysterious elements to hook the potential reader.

So why did Prince Jon fight to protect that carving in the Bob Haney story The Figurehead of the Burning Sea? Because the evil sorcerer Jarl Eric had imprisoned the spirit of the beautiful Asa inside it. The Viking Prince escaped with the figurehead as a volcano set the sea ablaze.

That particular brand of heroic fantasy would take a decade-long break from comic books as superheroes proliferated, returning with a vengeance in Conan the Barbarian 1 (Oct. 1970).

March 1947: To Venus With Neptune

What’s the opposite of a bird-man? Well, a fish-man, right?

That very contrast was likely the reason that Neptune Perkins appeared twice in the Golden Age Hawkman feature, first in Flash Comics 66 (Aug-Sept 1945) and again in Flash Comics 81 (March 1947). 

According to writer Gardner Fox, Perkins was the “Webbed Wizard” to Hawkman’s “Winged Wonder.” Joe Kubert handled the art.

Although he couldn’t breathe in water, Perkins was a mutant undersea explorer who had webbed feet and a sodium deficiency that required him to live near salt water. His constant swimming made him stronger than most men. A bestselling nonfiction author, Perkins kept a pet seagull (who proved handy for communicating with Hawkman).

In 1945, Hawkman helped Perkins recover his stolen houseboat. In 1947, Perkins and Hawkman traveled via giant light bulb to Venus, where they saved the Q-tip-headed inhabitants from an avian/aquatic menace (attacks by a gigantic Roc and Kraken).

Writer Roy Thomas revived the character of Neptune Perkins in All-Star Squadron 33 (May 1984) and went on to star him in The Young All-Stars, beginning in 1987.

DC’s tendency to juxtapose bird people with fish people continued into the 1960s, when Mer-Boy’s rival for Wonder Girl’s affections was of course Bird-Boy. And one of the first superhero team-ups in The Brave and the Bold featured Hawkman and Aquaman fighting an aquatic/avian monster in Fury of the Exiled Creature (issue 51, Jan. 1964).