May 1963: You’ll Never Lay a Glove on Him

“Like all comics readers, I was allergic to sports, but I LIKED Strange Sports Stories!” recalled Robert Rivard. 

“I first saw them in the 25-cent DC Special that reprinted some B&B stories, and then bought the series when it came out a few years later. I thought it was a great change of pace with some interesting sci-fi twists!"

Editor Julius Schwartz clearly enjoyed the concept, and promoted the series’ five Brave and the Bold tryout issues heavily in ads. But the series never landed its own title, and this handful of stories by DC’s top talents remain a pleasant curiosity.

In The Phantom Prizefighter (Brave and the Bold 47, April-May 1963), artist Carmine Infantino and writer Gardner Fox introduce us to Paul “Socko” Chase, a farmer who longs to be the heavyweight boxing champion.

Walking home along a lonely country lane, dejected because of his loss in a carnival boxing match, Chase encounters an invisible alien stranded on Earth by a damaged space ship. 

Significantly, the alien turns out to be tall, arrogant and red-skinned — a devil of a fellow who wants not Chase’s soul but his body, which he needs to pass safely pass through a radiation belt. In exchange, he’ll first make Chase an invincible prizefighter.

Weirdly, Chase agrees, but he’s angry when he learns that his invulnerability consists of being made intangible in the ring. 

He is able to defeat the alien with a semantic trick and a fistfight.

The cover image, of a prizefighter’s fist slipping through his opponent’s ghostly body, might well have looked familiar to older readers. Captain Comet had found himself in exactly the same position nine years before (Strange Adventures 43, April 1954) when he suddenly became intangible while fighting the world’s heavyweight champ. 

The superhero discovered that the anomaly was the result of an assassination attempt because a one-eyed, slug-like alien, disguised as an electrical technician, had tried to disperse his atomic structure. 

February 1963: The Alien Invasion on the 18th Hole

Having always had somewhat less than no interest in spectator sports, I shouldn’t have been expected to embrace a 1963 comic book called Strange Sports Stories.

That I had any interest in it at all was entirely due to the talents of writers Gardner Fox and John Broome, artist Carmine Infantino and editor Julius Schwartz, who had refined the optimistic, sunlit, linear-landscaped science fiction stories they created for Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space into a distinctly odd sub-genre.

Where else might you find intangible prizefighters, invisible baseball teams or rocket-sledding golfers who had to overcome alien spaceships instead of water hazards?

But the concept never progressed beyond five tryout issues in The Brave and the Bold, so general interest in it was apparently as tepid as my own.

Presumably kids who wanted to play baseball were out doing it, while those who wanted to read comics were sprawled on the living room carpet doing that.

Strange Sports Stories explicitly tried to bridge that gap by providing more than one story (Goliath of the Gridiron, The Hot-Shot Hoopsters) about young intellectuals who become literally fantastic athletes. In Hoopsters  (The Brave and the Bold 46, February-March 1963), undersized kids aged 12 to 14 — certainly part of the target audience for this title — use their scientific knowledge to outperform top college basketball players.

But after all, why be a mere star athlete when, with the same mental leap, you might be a superhero? That left Strange Sports Stories falling short, an idea whose time never came.