May 1969: The Shadow of Howard and Tolkien

In 1967, Lancer started publishing Robert E. Howard’s Conan in popular paperbacks with titles like Conan the Freebooter, Conan the Wanderer and Conan the Adventurer.

A little earlier, in 1965, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in paperback by both Ace Books (unauthorized) and Ballantine Books (authorized).

Sword and sorcery was clearly a coming thing in American popular culture, and DC was the first comic book publishing company to jump on the bandwagon with Nightmaster, which melded elements of both Tolkien and Howard. 

Written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Jerry Grandenetti and Bernie Wrightson, Nightmaster had a three-issue run in Showcase in 1969. But the genre wouldn’t really connect with comics until the next year, when Roy Thomas brought Conan the Barbarian to Marvel.

January 1967: The End of the Jungle Trail

The superhero fever that had been accelerated by the surprise success of the Batman TV show in January 1966 was already starting to break, but delirium had apparently set in. 

Ads in the early 1967 Showcase issues featuring a new “Jungle Master” promoted the new feature Dial H for Hero (featuring a superhero who becomes everybody) and Mattel’s Captain Action doll (featuring a superhero who becomes everybody).

The two issues spotlighted B’wana Beast, a new character concept created by writer Bob Haney and artist Mike Sekowsky that had late-night coffee stains and cigarette ashes all over it. 

Take Tarzan, slap a gaudy superhero helmet on him and give him the power to telepathically command animals and — to make it all just a little weirder — to COMBINE animals into OTHER, LARGER animals. 

Give him a secret hideout on top of Mount Kilimanjaro and a purple gorilla pal, Djuba. Shrug off any uncomfortable feelings you may have about yet another white jungle god, and ignore the fact that “B’wana” is an East African term meaning “master, or boss.”

And for good measure, wrap things up with a James Bond clinch in which a beautiful girl moans, “Beast … you beast!”

“B’wana Beast started out as game warden Mike Maxwell, who got stuck in a cave on Mount Kilimanjaro,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “First, he drank water that had reached the cave by being filtered through rock, which made him suddenly bulk up like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk, ruining the clothes he’d been wearing. Then his pal Djuba, a gorilla, gave him a helmet that enabled him to order beasts around like the Jaguar, or like the Fly could command insects. He's frequently been compared to Aquaman, who did that with underwater fauna.”

“B’wana Beast was apparently scheduled for the usual three (tryout issues). But reportedly Sekowsky quit after two, citing racism in the concept as his reason for wanting no more to do with it."

February 1966: The Ghost Who Disappeared

In the mid-1960s, DC Comics’ house ads created quite a considerable drum beat for the Spectre, heralding his first Silver Age appearance in Showcase 60 (Feb. 1966).

It was a reappearance, really, because this wasn’t a retooled, updated version of a Golden Age hero like the Flash, the Atom, Green Lantern and Hawkman, but the original 1940s Ghostly Guardian who, we learned, had been trapped in his human host body for two decades.

The art was sumptuous — Murphy Anderson at the height of his form — and the story of The War That Shook the Universe! was the usual fact-peppered super-science stuff that writer Gardner Fox could handle in his sleep (while salting it, this time, with a tinge of the supernatural).

But the Spectre’s audition issues led to only a short-lived title. Something was off, and it was the same something that sometimes troubles the characters Dr. Fate and Dr. Strange.

Jerry Siegel’s Superman was the premiere, the most popular and the most powerful superhero by early 1940, when Siegel debuted his second such character, the Spectre. So how do you top Superman?  With super-Superman, a ghost bent on justice who could grow, shrink, vanish, read minds, catch comets and cause death with a glance. And therein lies a plotting problem, because omnipotence is condition that contradicts suspense.

Dr. Fate, Dr. Strange and the Spectre all have vast but ill-defined powers that always make it somewhat difficult for readers to believe them to be in any understandable peril. The fact that their publication histories have all been sketchy is, I think, no coincidence.

March 1965: Reflections of a Golden Age

 They might have gone in another direction.

DC’s popular revivals of its 1940s superheroes had previously been revamps, stylistically refitting World War II characters like the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman for the jet age. The trend had been so successful it had kicked off a whole new superhero craze in comics publishing.

But in Showcase 55 (March-April 1965), editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox and artist Murphy Anderson decided not to create new “Earth One” iterations of Hourman and Dr. Fate, but instead simply revive the original “Earth Two” superheroes.

After all, Flash 123 had introduced the parallel worlds concept. And in Flash 137, Earth Two’s Justice Society of America — having been rescued from Vandal Savage’s stasis cubes by the Flashes — decided to come out of retirement.

So in Showcase 55, the older but presumably wiser Dr. Fate and Hourman teamed up to corral the original Green Lantern’s formidable archenemy Solomon Grundy.

And in Showcase 56, the Tick-Tock Thunderbolt and the Wonder Wizard battled a new Psycho Pirate who’d learned his skills as a cellmate of the original JSA super villain (something similar happened with Spider-Man’s foe the Vulture).

I loved Hourman and Dr. Fate’s pair of adventures, as well as the subsequent two-issue team-up of Starman and the Black Canary in Brave and the Bold and the revival of the Spectre in Showcase (all of them graced by Anderson’s sumptuous art).

But only the Ghostly Guardian won his own title, and even that was fairly short-lived.

Marvel Comics, which had been born in response to the earlier DC revivals, was by then setting the pace.

One wonders, though. What if Schwartz and company had decided to revamp and update Hourman, Dr. Fate, Black Canary and the Spectre? What might they have come up with?

January 1963: Illustrated For Your Eyes Only

In fact, James Bond 007 probably owes much of his success to comic strips.

Before the films were made, Ian Fleming’s thrillers were popularized in British newspaper comic strip adaptations, and composer John Barry admitted that he created the iconic music for the first film, Dr. No, based only on a familiarity with the comic strip.

In the U.S., Bond made only one official American comic book appearance during the 1960s, and that happened even before the famous film series began. Showcase 43, an adaptation of Dr. No cover-dated March-April 1963, appeared on newsstands in January 1963, four months before the U.S. release of the movie.

The first face of 007

Originally published in the British Classics Illustrated series (158A) and the European Detective series (6), the story reprinted by DC was a sanitized version of the first Bond film, with the sex removed, the violence muted and the Jamaican faces whitewashed. 

The cover by Bob Brown shows Doctor No in a radiation bubble suit holding a gun on Agent 007, who is at the controls of the jamming station, with all the usual DC cover chattiness.

“Another moment, Dr. No, and I’ll jam your signals that would have made the American rocket go wild,” says Bond.

“But you haven’t another moment, Bond. This is your last,” replies Dr. No, so caught up in the conversation that he has apparently forgotten to shoot.

Dr. No was the novel in which Fleming finally made it clear that Bond’s adventures are mythic, iconic on a Joseph Campbell scale. Literally, Bond faces a Fu Manchu villain, a naked damsel in distress and a fire-breathing dragon. And the way Fleming effectively fogs over the obvious fairy tale with brand-name verisimilitude is part of what gives this story its persistent charm.

For the record, my favorite Bond art pieces from the era were the understated and evocative paintings on the covers of the Signet mass market paperbacks.

December 1962: Tommy Yesterday

Tommy Tomorrow was a character who began as something else — in this case as an example in a one-off “future facts” feature in Real Fact Comics 6 (Jan. 1947).

“(I)n fact, Tommy was obviously designed simply as a stereotyped hero to represent the sort of man who might pilot the first rocket to Mars,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Even his name was chosen to project the ‘generic future man’ image.”

Although he was originally described as a 20^th century graduate of the Space Port “West Point,” Tommy’s era was later pushed back to the mid-21^st century.

These days, Tommy can come off as kind of an old-fashioned “future man,” though.

In a 1957 exploit, for example, writer Otto Binder and artist Jim Mooney confronted the hero with the threat of The Girl Planeteer. Essentially under orders from his commander to fail a (gasp!) female cadet, Tommy finds that difficult to do because of the girl’s considerable competence.

By 1960, he had evolved into a space cop whose purple uniform included curious short pants.  

Illustrated by Mooney’s capable, workmanlike art and written by Jack Miller, the tale The Robot Raiders featured Tommy and his partner Captain Brent Wood tackling space pirates armed with giant robot lobsters and hovering eyes — the kind of intriguing mechanical menaces that Blackhawk specialized in combating.

In 1962-63, Tommy was launched toward his own comic in four issues of DC’s tryout title Showcase, but he failed to achieve orbit. Less vivid a character than Adam Strange or even Space Ranger, Tommy’s generic origins worked against him.

But bland though he might have been, Tommy was positively electrifying compared to Johnny DC, the singularly tedious stick-figure company mascot seen introducing him here.

This particular effort at giving the company an appealing brand identity didn’t last long. Stan Lee was light years ahead of DC Comics on that score, over at the upstart rival publisher that was just about to begin calling itself “Marvel.”

September 1961: Those Thrilling, Time-Lost Titans

For the 10-and-under crowd, Showcase 34 contained not only the debut of a new superhero, but a thrilling surprise.

A text feature gave us our first glimpse of something we’d never heard of or suspected: a 1940s superhero team like the Justice League of America called the Justice Society of America.

The Spectre? Dr. Fate? Hourman? Sandman? Weirdly costumed alternate versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman? Just who were these tantalizing titans, anyway? Time would tell us…

The JSA’s founding members ranged from a crime-crushing ghost who was virtually omnipotent and a man who wielded a wish-fulfilling Aladdin’s ring to a stout, tough-talking matron whose mask was a pot with eye holes.

Also on the lower end of that power scale was a undersized college kid whose power was lifting weights — Al Pratt, the original Atom.

“Anyone who knows the Atom in his 1961 incarnation knows the two characters have nothing in common,” observed Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. “I have said that DC used the old name, but appropriated the powers of Doll Man. Doll Man had been moribund since 1953, and then the publisher, Quality Comics, was sold to DC in ‘56.”

The Atom’s Silver Age makeover was a more radical revamp than the Flash, Green Lantern or Hawkman’s had been. The 1940s’ origins of the latter characters had been soft-peddled in their titles, but with the Atom editor Julius Schwartz clearly decided that a fuller explanation was in order.

The three-page text feature included background on the original Atom and the JSA, as well as mini-autobiographies on writer Gardner Fox and artists Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson.

“When my long-time editor Julie Schwartz presented me with the task of creating an ‘Atom,’  I began dipping into a memory that stores the faces of almost every movie star and bit player since the 1920s, and I decided on Robert Taylor as a basis for Ray (The Atom) Palmer,” Kane explained.

September 1961: Shrinking, But Not from a Fight

He was a superhero smaller even than the children who read his adventures, but nevertheless trickier and stronger than the irritating adults who told them what to do.

The formula had worked before, during the 14-year run of Doll Man in Feature Comics and his own title. So editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox and artist Gil Kane redeployed it in the redesign and re-launch of their 1940s super-scrapper the Atom.

No longer an undersized college student with super strength, in Showcase 34 (Sept.-Oct. 1961), the new Atom was Ray Palmer, another of Schwartz’s and Fox’s space-age scientist-heroes dedicated to reason and education.

The first story in the issue told us, in leisurely detail, how an Ivy College physics professor acquired the power to shrink from dwarf star matter and used it to rescue trapped spelunkers.

The second story put him in costume and pitted him against one of those mirror-image foes so favored by superheroes — in this case a diminutive extraterrestrial teleporter named Kulan Dar who, when mentally enslaved by a criminal, resembles a genie from a bottle.

Palmer’s girlfriend Jean Loring doesn’t want to marry him until she’s established herself as a successful attorney, so the help the Atom frequently provides her on her legal cases isn’t entirely altruistic — he’s working to hasten the day when they can wed.

The first and most successful of Schwartz’s Golden Age superhero revivals, the Flash, worked up any number of crime-fighting tricks with his super speed, so the Atom played similar crowd-pleasing variations on the theme of shrinking.

While retaining his full-size strength, he could ride the winds by reducing his weight. The effective invisibility provided by his small stature proved useful to the CIA. The Atom could shrink into subatomic worlds, and even paradoxically appear as a giant there. His neatest trick was the ability to ride along on a telephone call, meaning that he could virtually teleport himself instantly to almost any spot on Earth.

January 1961: Showcasing the Sea King

By 1960, the Flash and Green Lantern had already been revised and revamped in DC Comics’ Showcase. So why not Aquaman too?

Unlike those characters, Aquaman had never ceased publication at the end of the 1940s. Readers remained familiar with him from his appearances in the popular new title Justice League of America, and from backup stories in Adventure Comics in a feature that had, since 1951, been graced with the sumptuous pencils of one of the few female artists in comics, Ramona Fradon.

Although the publishers didn’t need to reintroduce Aquaman, they could use the freedom of a full-length story to expand his scope of operations. So in Showcase 30 (Jan.-Feb. 1961), Fradon and writer Jack Miller treated us to The Creatures from Atlantis.

Aquaman’s brief stories had done little with Atlantis before Showcase 30. In fact, Aquaman had never even visited his exiled mother’s birthplace until that issue, when scaly amphibious aliens seized control of the domed underwater city. They threatened to take control of the whole planet with flying submarines armed with heat rays that could melt skyscrapers, so Aquaman and Aqualad had to try to stop them, despite the long odds.

“From 1958 on, the Superman family under (Aquaman creator Mort) Weisinger's editing started building up a complex mythos,” recalled comics historian Michael E. Grost. “There are signs that during 1959-1960, something similar was attempted for Aquaman.”

“Just as Superman came from the advanced planet Krypton, so do Aquaman's ancestors hail from the advanced civilization of Atlantis, although Aquaman himself was born on the Earth’s surface. Just as the bottled city of Kandor represents a survival of Krypton on Earth, one that can be visited by the characters, so does the domed undersea remnant of sunken Atlantis represent a continuation of that magnificent civilization.”

Scenes like that seemingly endless army of loyal sea creatures parading past teenaged Arthur Curry were arresting to me in 1960, and remain vivid in memory even now.

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.

November 1958: The Thinking Man’s Superhero

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

“Strange, an adventuring archeologist, is caught in an alien experiment and hurled through 25 trillion miles of space to Planet Rann in the Alpha Centauri system,” comics historian Matthew Grossman said, summarizing Showcase 17 (Nov. 1958).

“Strange falls in love with beautiful Rannite Alanna, daughter of the scientist whose experiments with Zeta-Beam technology resulted in his extraplanetary teleportation, and — armed with a jet pack and a ray gun — becomes Rann’s champion against a series of bizarre science-fictional menaces.”

I was an adult before it suddenly dawned on me that Adam Strange worked as an exact mirror-reversal of the same company’s flagship character, Superman.

Instead of someone sent to Earth from an exotic planet to act as a savior with his superhuman powers, we have someone sent to an exotic planet from Earth to act as a savior with his human powers.

Art by Mike Sekowsky

Superman overcomes all obstacles with his superior physical powers, but Adam Strange has none. Thanks to his access to alien technology, he does have a rocket belt and a ray gun, but they provide little or no help in fending off the overwhelming alien menaces that appear whenever he returns.

Lacking Superman’s brawn, Adam Strange relies solely on his brain, reasoning his way out of every dilemma, no matter how difficult.

“In many ways the character was a crowning jewel of the Silver Age vision, an adventurer whose courage and intellectual skills embodied an optimistic view of moral action wedded to science,” Grossman observed.

“And while close in essence to pulp science fiction figures like John Carter and Flash Gordon, two other Earthmen whose adventures began with otherworldly abduction, Adam Strange operated within a fully superheroic universe, as observed by his sleek costume, frequent visual depictions in flight, and the ways his stories followed classic genre rules.”