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.”