November 1965: The Most Dangerous Game

In their second and final team-up try-out, Starman and the Black Canary fought another costumed pair, the Sportsmaster and the Huntress, in a sort of double date of derring-do.

The criminals — one obsessed with competitive athletics, the other with traps and snares — both dated from the late 1940s. 

Introduced in Sensation Comics 68 (Aug. 1947), the Huntress was dedicated to turning the tables on law enforcement by capturing public officials and hunting them down in her game preserve. Wildcat thwarted her deadly desires. 

The ruthless “Crusher” Crock turned to crime after being banned from professional athletics in All-American Comics 85 (May 1947). Although Green Lantern stopped him, the tenacious crook got himself a costume and returned as Sportsmaster in Green Lantern 28 (Oct.-Nov. 1947).

Subsequently married, the crooked couple tries to capture Starman, Black Canary and Wildcat in The Big Super-Hero Hunt.

“A very enjoyable escapade, with no fewer than five golden-age characters on hand, as Wildcat joined with Starman and Black Canary in the course of their conflict with Sportsmaster and (Golden Age) Huntress,” Keith W. Williams observed. “Great fun, with a superbly crafted cover, and interior work to match, by Murphy Anderson. Thanks to Fox and Anderson, the Golden Age reached a new zenith in the Silver Age.”

“One suspects that the two Black Canary and Starman revivals were more done out of a love of the two characters, and a chance to see ‘what they are doing now,’ than from any real expectation that they would be a huge reader hit,” observed Michael E. Grost.

“ (In) The Big Superhero Hunt (The Brave and the Bold 62, Nov. 1965), the Black Canary and Starman team up with another revived hero, Wildcat, to fight against two old villains: the Sportsmaster and the Huntress. After a good opening involving statues of athletes, this minor tale becomes a routine fight between good guys and bad guys. Its biggest merit is some good draftsmanship by Murphy Anderson.”

August 1965: Astral Avenger and Blonde Bombshell

In 1965, Murphy Anderson’s resplendent renderings turned a pair of pairs into a winning hand.

Although the team-ups of Hourman and Dr. Fate in Showcase and of Starman and Black Canary in The Brave and the Bold failed to develop into superhero revival series at the time, they remain highly prized by collectors decades later.

The North Carolina-born Anderson’s smooth, fine-lined work evolved because he’d been influenced by “…many of the slickest artists in the field, including Will Eisner, Lou Fine and Alex Raymond,” observed comics historian Jerry Bails.

In The Brave and the Bold 61 (Aug. 1965), Anderson and writer Gardner Fox gave us Mastermind of Menaces!, a tale in which Starman and Black Canary teamed up to tackle the Astral Avenger’s unforgettable fog-foe, the Mist (who’d first appeared in The Menace of the Invisible Raiders in Adventure Comics 67, Oct. 1941).

The two members of the newly reactivated Justice Society of America had seen some changes since the team’s last adventure in All-Star Comics 57 (Feb.-March 1951). 

Florist Dinah Drake, who began her costumed career as a sort of Robin Hood-like outlaw, had finally settled down and married her boyfriend, private detective Larry Lance.

And somewhere along the way, astronomer Ted Knight upgraded his original “gravity rod” into a more potent “cosmic rod,” underlining the character’s similarity to Green Lantern.

“He first put this new instrument to use against the Crime Syndicate of America of Earth-Three, when he returned to action with his fellow-JSAers Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Dr. Mid-Nite and Black Canary,” noted a two-page text feature in Brave and the Bold 61. “This was the first time he had worked with the Blonde Bombshell, for he had retired before she began her crime-fighting career.”

Later, via retroactive continuity, the pair’s comradely relationship would be recast as an adulterous affair. 

Because the audience for superhero comics had shifted from largely children to largely adults over the intervening decades, that plot twist was fairly predictable.

January 1963: Catman and Company

Batman enjoyed a survivor’s privilege.

As one of a handful of superheroes to endure intact from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Masked Manhunter starred in stories that effectively recycled popular concepts from the fairly recent but by-then-forgotten past.

For example, Holyoke Publishing started Crash Comics in 1940 with a Superman pastiche, Strongman, but replaced him on the fifth issue’s cover with a Batman/Tarzan-inspired character, Cat-Man.

The Golden Age Catman

A year later, he had his own comic and a costumed sidekick named Kitten (who, unlike Robin, was a girl wonder). Catman dropped the hyphen and appeared through 1946, undoubtedly annoying DC Comics the whole time.

So it must have been something of an in-joke when, in Detective Comics 311, DC introduced a villainous Catman with a orange, caped and cat-eared costume strikingly similar to that of the Golden Age superhero.

A bored trapper of big game, Thomas Blake decides to enliven his life by becoming Batman’s adversary. He’s inspired to choose a theme by the Joker and the vanished Catwoman, who hadn’t appeared since Detective Comics 211 in 1954.

The Feline Freebooter’s trick of surviving certain death with his “nine lives” was picked up by Catwoman in the Batman TV show three years later.

That same month, in World’s Finest 131, Superman, Batman and Robin fought the Octopus gang with the “help” of a well-intentioned but inept inventor who called himself the Crimson Avenger. That was also the name of one of DC’s earliest mystery men, a masked newspaper publisher who debuted even before Batman in Detective Comics 20 (October 1938.)

Three years earlier, in Detective Comics 286 (Dec. 1960), Batman, Robin and Batwoman defeated the super-power-hungry Star–Man, and three years before that Batman himself temporarily adopted the identity of “Starman” (Detective Comics 247, Sept. 1957). Starman had been a DC superhero launched with great fanfare in 1941.

Bill Finger wrote three and possibly all four of those stories, so maybe he was going through a nostalgic phase.

December 1941: Too Popular to Stay

Popularity gets you admitted to some clubs. In the Justice Society of America, it got you expelled.

Talk about your reverse snobbery!

Actually, editorial policy decreed that when a character became successful enough to earn a comic book title devoted solely to his adventures, he must step aside so the JSA spotlight could shine on some other superhero.

So it was that in All Star Comics 8 (Dec. 1941), Green Lantern became an “honorary member” like Superman, Batman and the Flash, and Dr. Mid-Nite stepped in. Hourman took a “leave of absence,” giving up his place to the superhero who’d supplanted him on the cover of Adventure Comics — Starman.

“By 1941, the takeover of the American comic book by superheroes was well advanced,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “In fact, Starman, a creation of writer Gardner Fox (The Flash, Doctor Fate) and artist Jack Burnley (a DC regular who had already drawn Superman, Batman and other high-profile features), was no less than the third of that genre to head up DC’s Adventure Comics.”

Millionaire amateur astronomer Ted Knight fought crime with his Gravity Rod, which proved to be a pretty fair stand-in for a “power ring.”

Created by writer Chuck Reizenstein and Stan Asch, Dr. Mid-Nite first appeared in All-American Comics 25 (April 1941), a comic book headlined by a champion of light, the Green Lantern. The green-caped and red-vested Dr. Mid-Nite became its champion of darkness, wielding blackout bombs and assisted by his helpful owl.

With infrared goggles of his own design, the hero was able to see in daylight as well. Like the Shadow, he made the very darkness an ally.

Though technologically savvy, McNider wasn’t very creative with names — he called his owl “Hooty” and sported a nom de guerre that sounded almost exactly like his own name.

But the real origin of his name was a wink at a radio melodrama then being broadcast that boasted an audience in the millions: Captain Midnight.