February 1975: Who Knows How to Break In to Comics?

 INT. 909 THIRD AVE., NEW YORK — Day

 New editor Denny O’Neil is shouting inside his DC Comics office.

A 1974 summer hire staffer runs in to check on O’Neil. He finds the writer-editor upset because DC had canceled and then un-canceled the Shadow title, leaving him with a comic book to publish immediately — but no script.

The young staffer realizes this is his chance to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing comics. Bluffing, he tells O’Neil he has a great idea for a story

What is it, O’Neil asks.

The staffer thinks fast. He and his wife had recently honeymooned at Niagara Falls, which daredevils once crossed on tightropes in the 1930s, the Shadow’s era. Could he use that?

“Uh … Picture a fight between the Shadow and a villain on that tightrope over Niagara Falls … at night … the roving searchlights catching a glimpse of him up in that sky!” the staffer improvised.

Good cover there, says O’Neil. Go on. Why are they fighting?

Still thinking on his feet, desperately, the staffer comes up with the idea of smugglers between the U.S. and Canada.

Smuggling what?

Drugs!

How?

In those barrels that people used to use to go over the falls!

O’Neil asks if he could have the script on his desk by 6 p.m. the next day, and the staffer says sure.

The Night of the Falling Death was published in The Shadow 9 (Feb.-March 1975), with interior art by Frank Robbins and a cover by Joe Kubert.

And the young summer hire who wrote it? He was Michael Uslan, who would go on to originate and serve as executive producer on the Batman movie franchise.

The anecdote appears in his memoir, The Boy Who Loved Batman.

December 1965: Catwoman Out of the Bag

You frequently see it reported that, because DC was gun shy about the Comics Code, the Caped Crusader’s archenemy Catwoman didn’t appear from Detective Comics 211 in 1954 until Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane 70 in 1966.

But that’s actually not true — here she is in Batman 176, a reprint giant from December 1965.

The issue republishes Catwoman's Grasshopper Chase, a Batman Sunday newspaper story from 1946.

DC Comics was initially a little leery about reprinting 1940s’ comic book material because somebody there considered it “crude,” but the newspaper strips were produced for an audience of both children and adults, and were of a relatively high quality.

This issue appeared on the newsstands in October 1965, just three months before the Batman TV series would premiere and bring Catwoman back front and center.

 In his memoir The Boy Who Loved Batman, Michael Uslan explained, “It was that same very engine of creative destruction, the Comics Code Authority, that forced DC to retire from comics for years any Bat-villains who seemed too gruesome or menacing, including Two Face and the Scarecrow. It also meant the demise of Catwoman, because she was all the bad things comic book characters were now not allowed to be: a female in a major role; a possessor of no fewer than two exaggerated body parts; a sexy, stacked, bad girl who carried a whip and wore a dress slit up to what my dad would refer to as ‘her pupic,’ suggesting a topic that would give Dr. Wertham overheated conundrums... erotic S&M.”

Uslan noted that, while working at DC in the 1970s, he read a copy of their in-house comic book code, circa 1947, which specifically discouraged the use of females in prominent roles.

“Catwoman was doomed for a generation,” Uslan said. “Any sneak peaks we were given later in the 60s either was some watered-down new thing, or they would use a reprint in an annual of an old syndicated comic strip because comic strips were considered more generally acceptable to family fare than comic books were at that time.”

November 1965: The Superhero Who Came in from the Cold

The double agent, a familiar figure in real-life espionage and spy fiction, made it into Tower Comics’ THUNDER Agents as Menthor, arguably becoming the publisher’s most original superhero character.

Highly intelligent, described as the “finest physical specimen I have ever examined,” John Janus easily passes the tests to become an agent for THUNDER. 

Janus. That name really should have told them something,

He’s actually working for the evil Warlord, and jumps at the chance to utilize the Menthor super-helmet designed by Prof. Emil Jennings.

Wearing a costume strikingly similar to the Atom’s, Menthor discovers he can read people’s thoughts and telekinetically manipulate great weights. But the mind-boosting helmet has a side effect, making him betray Warlord and help THUNDER while he’s using it.

Though unstated, the rationale for the change is implicit. I’d say the helmet transforms John Janus into a highly advanced being, an enlightened person who sees the world more clearly and thereby gains a stronger moral sense.

It’s a promising plotline — the villain who becomes a superhero against his will. And it’s a theme that will be explored to good effect later in Marvel’s Captain Marvel, Thunderbolts and Superior Spider-Man.

Now a better person, Menthor fights his evil brother and a couple of mind-controlling enemies — and then, shockingly, he’s killed (A Matter of Life and Death, THUNDER Agents 7, Aug. 1966).

“(E)verything came together in this one,” observed noted comic historians Michael Uslan and Robert Klein. “(Steve) Ditko’s touch with mood and atmosphere — the shadows, the expressions, the poses and the coloring — all contributed to the drama.”

Trapping Janus without his helmet, Warlord agents plan to use him as bait to lure the other THUNDER super-agents into a barrage from a battery of laser guns. While trying to warn them, Janus is shot repeatedly. He hurls himself into the laser trap just as the super-agents are about to walk into it.

In fiction or in reality, things rarely go well for double agents.

October 1963: Red Planet, Green Arrow

The Brave and the Bold 50 (Oct.-Nov. 1963) began the team-up tradition that would culminate in turning the title into a long-running “Batman and Friends” book.

The art by George Roussos exploited little of the visual appeal that we might have expected in a teaming of the Martian Manhunter and Green Arrow, and Roussos seemed intent on undermining the action at every turn. I’d say either of the characters’ regular artists — Joe Certa or Lee Elias — might have done a better job with the story.

But the idea of teaming and spotlighting two superheroes was a good one, and a logical extension of successful Silver Age team titles like Justice League of America, World’s Finest and Fantastic Four.

In fact, this first team-up was a sort of low-rent version of World’s Finest. Instead of Superman and Batman, we got two back-of-the-book characters who were often compared to them.

The resemblance to the successful World’s Finest formula was probably deliberate, according to Michael Uslan and Robert Klein, writing in the Brave and the Bold Team-Up Archive Edition.

“With his red-clad sidekick, Arrow Car and Arrow Cave, wealthy playboy Oliver (Green Arrow) Queen was certainly at the time being presented as an imitation Batman,” Uslan and Klein observed, “And what superhero was most akin to Superman? But for the fact that his weakness was fire and not kryptonite, the Manhunter from Mars best qualifies. More likely, this was a way to promote the Martian Manhunter, who would soon gain his very own cover-featured series beginning in House of Mystery 143.”

In the Brave and Bold story, the Manhunter and Green Arrow defeat their enemy, Vulkor, with a trick used more than once by Superman and Batman — switching their identities to gain an element of surprise.

Bob Haney’s plot featured an attack on Earth by J’onn J’onzz’ fellow Martians — the same story idea that Bruce Timm used as the springboard for the excellent Justice League animated series in 2001.

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.”