June 1969: Bruce Wayne, OSS Agent

 “Ein Fledermausmann! Schiessen! Schiessen!”

It’s the spring of 1969. You pick up a copy of The Brave and the Bold 84 from the spinner rack and open it at random.

What you see is a lushly illustrated, tuxedoed Bruce Wayne on a motorcycle, charging across a World War II airstrip the day before D-Day.

What th — ?

You flip through the issue and find the melodramatic action thrilling (and then realize that it’s been a long time since you’ve been thrilled by the action in a Batman comic book).

The story by writer Bob Haney featured an unlikely team-up between the Caped Crusader and Sgt. Rock, the WWII infantry noncom featured in Our Army at War.

The story featured Batman, in 1969, thinking back on an Allied mission he performed in France a quarter-century before on June 5, 1944.

Continuity problems aside, for me, this was the issue that signaled the direction Batman needed to go.

By 1969, the Masked Manhunter was stuck with a tired and played-out image as “camp,” a legacy of the Adam West TV show that had ended the year before. We long-time fans were aware that that the character needed a complete change — leaving the garish, clownish spotlight behind and returning to the shadows from which he emerged.

And here was just such a change, in both art and story. Nazis, after all, are not the Penguin or Mr. Freeze. They always make perfect villains, and have the advantage of having been real.

The art by a 27-year-old Neal Adams was breathtakingly fresh, and the inking by Sgt. Rock’s  Joe Kubert reinforced the new approach — muting the silliness of the superhero genre by enfolding it into the more “realistic” atmosphere of war comics.

Earth One, Earth Two, Earth Whatever. Who cared? This was one good story.

The idea of Bruce Wayne/Batman as an Allied secret agent had even had a precedent. That was his status in the 1943 Batman movie serial.

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.

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?

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.

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.

February 1961: Wonder on the Wing

I must admit, in December 1960, the house ad copy for The Brave and the Bold 34 had my 6-year-old self hooked.

So this guy flies? He uses cool ancient weapons like maces and flails? He talks to birds the way Aquaman talks to fish? He fights gigantic dinosaur-things that try to steal interstate highway tunnels?

I’m in.

I was particularly intrigued by Hawkman’s weird, unique look — that startling raptor mask over his bare, winged torso. I’d never heard of the 1940s Hawkman, the Flash’s co-star in Flash Comics, so this guy came flying out of left field at me.

And what really sealed the deal was the moody art by Joe Kubert, DC’s war comics artist.

“I felt that the challenge that was involved in the character was one that really pulled me in,” Kubert said in an interview for TwoMorrows’ Hawkman Companion. “(T)aking a guy who has wings and making him seem as if that could really happen, it could really be. And I tried in the scenes of him flying around and having slight physical contortions that he puts himself in, puts himself through, I tried to get that feeling across.”

Rarely was a dime better spent.

January 1961: Fast and Familiar

Older readers would have recognized the two superheroes in this January 1961 DC house ad as former roomies who’d shared a title.

The Flash and Hawkman had co-starred on covers of Flash Comics from 1940 to 1949.

Now in the jet age, a streamlined Flash was the star of his own title (which had picked up on the older comic’s numbering after a 10-year gap) and a revamped Hawkman was trying his wings in The Brave and the Bold.

In The Flash 118 (Feb. 1961), the Scarlet Speedster’s cover gimmick — racing to catch a bullet being shot at a scarecrow from a helicopter — turned out to be just that. That incident is revealed to be nothing but a scene from a Flash movie, so writer John Broome didn’t have to twist his plot around to accommodate the unlikely occurrence.

“Broome used a similar approach in The Skyscraper that Came to Life (Strange Adventures 72, Sept. 1956), where he also treated Gil Kane's cover simply as a scene in an SF movie being shot by characters in the tale,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost.

The Flash visits sun-washed California.

“Carmine Infantino, the artist of both the cover and the story, also got into the spirit of the switch as well. Infantino’s scarecrow cover is Gothic and sinister. But his story is a sun-soaked, glamorous picture of Hollywood. While the cover shows dark Gothic fantasies from the inner world of dreams, the art in the story seems unusually real. One feels one can reach out and touch the furniture and buildings in the story.”

Meanwhile, The Brave and the Bold 34 (Feb.-March 1961) introduces the new space-age Hawkman. Now an alien from the planet Thanagar, he’s pursuing the shape-shifting thrill criminal Byth.

“The shape-changing is not just a gimmick exploited for color; its logical consequences are woven into the construction of the plot,” Grost noted. “This is typical of (writer Gardner) Fox’s looking at the deep science fiction implications of his ideas.”

October 1960: Goldfish, Hummingbirds and Superheroes

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.

I missed the team’s debut in The Brave and the Bold 28, which was on the newsstands in December 1959, but picked up and was delighted by Brave and Bold 29, with the JLA battling a giant robot who had a ray gun in his belly.

I ogled Brave and Bold 30 and the first two issues of the JLA’s own title in DC’s house ads, but the issues sold out before I could buy them. And one of several reasons for that was the appeal, to small children, of the superheroes’ colorful costumes.

I distinctly 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.

These superheroes had that 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 children. But they were about to grow up a little.

The success of the JLA inspired the creation of the Fantastic Four over at what would become Marvel Comics, but writer/editor Stan Lee, in an effort to make such characters fresh and more adult, discarded the costumes. After all, real people who happened to gain extraordinary abilities wouldn’t put on fancy dress, would they?

That proved to be a commercial mistake that was corrected after two issues. Readers demanded colorful costumes, and Marvel responded with something of a compromise — not costumes but team uniforms, in a colorful blue that was relatively understated by superhero standards.

August 1960: The Monsters Beneath Your Feet

The Earth is full of monsters.

In one month alone, for example, you might run into a Lava Creature, a Giant Sea Beast and a Magnetic Monster down there.

And that month would be June 1960, when The Brave and the Bold 31 went on sale at newsstands.

That issue, written by Ed Herron and drawn by Bruno Premiani, introduced spelunker Cave Carson and his intrepid yellow-clad band (Bulldozer Smith, Johnny Blake, and Christie Madison). 

In coming up with Carson, DC followed the path blazed by Edgar Rice Burroughs a half-century before. When you’ve used up Mars, Venus and the jungle as locales, why not go underground?

Without super powers to aid them, DC’s various “uncanny team” heroes had to rely on their wits, their uniformly dauntless courage, some mid-century high tech and each other as they battled alien invaders, giant monsters, mad scientists, what have you.

Prof. Calvin “Cave” Carson also had the help of a super-vehicle, however — the laser-equipped “Mighty Mole” he designed to travel on or in land and water.

Unlike several of DC’s other uncanny teams, Cave Carson’s crew never managed to dig out a permanent place for itself in a series. The only tryout issue that even tempted me was this one, and that was because of the paradoxically cool-looking Lava Man featured on the cover.

I guess I had a thing for burning red monsters, including Marvel Comics’ Dragoom, the Challengers of the Unknown’s Volcano Man, and Space Ghost’s first foe, the Heat Thing.

Premiani’s relatively “realistic” artistic style was an asset for the subterranean adventurers.

“The man who fled two countries to escape political persecution and who briefly found a home in the United States has been claimed by comic book scholars in three countries, with fans all over the globe,” observed Glen Cadigan in TwoMorrow’s Teen Titans Companion.

The countries he escaped, by the way, were fascist Italy and fascist Argentina. You could find some monsters there too.

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 1959: When Suicide Could Be Fun

Without super powers to support them against fantastic foes, DC's "uncanny teams" had to rely on their wits, their uniformly dauntless courage, some mid-century high tech and each other. 

Being miniaturized or propelled into other times or dimensions were not uncommon experiences for them, certainly no cause for panic. In the idiom of the era, they were cool cats.

Such uncanny teams included the Challengers of the Unknown, the Sea Devils, Cave Carson’s intrepid band of spelunkers, Rip Hunter’s temporal explorers and — borrowed from Quality Comics — the World War II military fliers the Blackhawks, re-enlisted into the fight against extraterrestrial enemies and super villains.

And in Brave and the Bold 25 (Aug.-Sept. 1959), writer Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru introduced us to the Suicide Squad, a/k/a Task Force X, a team headed by pilot and military intelligence officer Col. Rick Flag (clearly a hero from the “Mike Hammer,” “John Shaft” and “Peter Gunn” School of Coincidental Naming).

The team included physicist Jess Bright, astronomer Hugh Evans and military nurse Karin Grace, “all the last living members of their respective crews, all willing to die to save the world and uplift their lost friends’ legacies,” as C. David noted. “They’re basically a crew powered by pure survivor’s guilt.”

They proved to be just the kind of plucky people you might hear say, “Never thought we’d be trying to save a whale from a flying dinosaur!”