Hawk and the Dove #6

As the 1960s drew to a close, DC was under continuing financial pressure to raise prices due to inflation. As a result, many titles were discontinued in 1969: Angel and the Ape, Atom and Hawkman, Bat-Lash, Captain Action, Beware the Creeper, Metal Men, Secret Six, Spectre, Windy and Willy and the Hawk and the Dove. In fact this was the final issue for the title. Ditko and Skeates, the original creative team on the title were gone by this time; according to the GCD this issue was both scripted and drawn by Gil Kane, with inks by John Celardo. As the story begins, Hank and Don discover that their father being beaten by a hood, who apparently intended to kidnap him. Don stays with Dad while Hank impetuously chases the mugger, giving Kane the opportunity to do what he does best:

Smek? Unfortunately, the creep is tougher than he looks and he gets away. The next day, the boys arrive home from school to find that he's returned, and this time he managed to abduct Pops:

The lads try to track down the kidnapper in their own ways; Hank beats up hoods in an effort to find out who had it in for the judge, while Don does some detective work:

Both of them come to the conclusion that their dad has been kidnapped by the son of a man that the judge had sentenced to prison. Sure enough:

They don't really have much trouble kayoing the guy and rescuing their father, who of course kvetches about the danger they put him in:

The story ends on an ominous note:

As mentioned before, this was the final issue of the Hawk and the Dove. They made semi-regular appearances in Teen Titans for the next few years.

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Green Lantern #24

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. when I was assembling my collection, I picked up most of my early-mid 1960s DC from a friend of mine named Jon, and his neighbor, Eric. They had long runs of the comics they were interested in, but every now and then there was an issue or two missing. I don't have a clue as to why; perhaps they had just forgotten to go to the newsstand that month, or perhaps they had been broke, or perhaps they had just used the money for a new baseball mitt or something else.

This was one of the issues I never found, and since I wasn't fanatical about completing my Green Lantern run like I was about Batman, it was only a few years ago that I finally found a low-grade copy cheap enough to justify the purchase. IIRC, the first story was reprinted in the 1970s, but I don't think that cover story was until the relatively recent advent of the Archive and Showcase Editions.

The first story is The Shark that Hunted Human Prey. An accident in an atomic station on the coast led to a sudden emission of radiation that hit a passing shark:

Now of course, as far as the science goes, that's absurd. Evolution is a slow, torturous process with many missteps along the way. Still, it's in keeping with the science of comic books, in which Ben Grimm can turn into a pile of orange rocks (and occasionally turn back again).

The Shark discovers he has extraordinary powers, but he retains his essential nature:

After dropping the heavyweight champ without raising a fist, the Shark uses his awesome mental powers to locate a foe worthy of his abilities:

The Shark contacts Hal mentally and issues a challenge. Hal quickly changes into his fighting duds and recharges his ring in the locker room, but:

And for much of the battle that ensues, the Shark maintains his desire to induce fear in Green Lantern. He demonstrates that GL's ring has no power over him as he can block it with his mind. Indeed, his mental powers seem unlimited:

GL realizes that the air in the room is not colored yellow, so he stuns the Shark with a bolt of compressed air. But the Shark recovers and ups the stakes:

His intent was to make Hal afraid, but instead the threat just redoubles GL's resolve to win. He condenses the water vapor in the room and creates a block of ice with which to kayo the villain. Then he uses his power ring to devolve the Shark back into his normal state:

Comments: I found the concept of a shark evolved into a human somewhat ludicrous, and that costume is inane. However, that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the character development was excellent and the story itself, with the threats to those Hal holds near and dear, is compelling.

The second story is the cover one, and it is pretty simple and straight-forward. While traveling through space, Hal encounters the planet, which suddenly forms a continent that looks like him. It shoots a rocket at him and one grazes him, forcing him to the ground. He encounters visions of Pieface, and several of his enemies. Finally the planet itself finds a way to contact him directly:

It was an intelligent planet who had searched the stars for more intelligence, and GL was the first it had ever encountered. It just wanted to make a friend, but couldn't find a way to express that at first. GL helps it by removing a volcanic core that was causing earthquakes, and they part as buddies.

Comments: Cute story, and the concept of a living planet would be "borrowed" a few years later by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Mighty Thor series.

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Face Off

As I have noted in the past, one of DC's major trends of the late 1950s and early 1960s was to add continuing characters to the magazines that did not already feature them. The war books picked up Sgt Rock, Jeb Stuart, Gunner and Sarge, etc., while Mystery in Space added Adam Strange, Tales of the Unexpected featured Space Ranger, and House of Secrets highlighted Mark Merlin.

Strange Adventures, edited by Julius Schwartz, tried something different. Instead of adding one feature which appeared every issue, Schwartz rotated several recurring features: Star Hawkins, the Atomic Knights and the Space Museum appeared regularly over the course of several years. In addition, particularly successful one-shot characters were often brought back. The Faceless Creature was probably the most notable as he appeared on the covers of three* issues over the course of as many years. Those of you who are fans of the Brave and the Bold show on Cartoon Network may recognize him as the Hunter who served as Starro's herald in a two-part episode of that series.

As the first story (Strange Adventures #124, January 1961) begins, two Highway Patrolmen in South Dakota, Jim Boone and Bob Colby, are investigating the disappearance of the heads from Mount Rushmore. The heads disappear along with some other famous giant faces around the world, but then are returned. An alien spacecraft lands and:

After preventing them from firing their weapons as shown on the cover, the alien introduces himself as Klee-Pan from the planet Klaramar, which is a sub-atomic world revolving within a single atom of the Planet Jupiter. He explains that he is looking for a giant head which will unlock a vault where a bomb was hidden by a villain named Chen Yull (sometimes referred to as Chan Yull and also as Chun Yull). If the head is not located, the bomb will destroy the entire solar system in one second.

Well, one second on Klaramar, which is quite a bit longer on Earth:

The mathematician in me couldn't resist calculating that out. If one Klaramar day equals 1,000,000 Earth years, then one Klaramar second equals about 11-1/2 Earth years.

Klee-Pan has tried all the famous giant faces on Earth, but none of them work. Fortunately, Jim realizes the secret:

So he suggests the Woman in the Moon. Of course, most of us have heard of it as the Man in the Moon, but apparently the Chinese and South Dakotans have the gender reversed.

While the trio head to the Moon, Klee-Pan explains how his people became faceless:

That sequence would appear in each subsequent Faceless Creature story. They take the Woman in the Moon to Saturn, but Chen Yull has planned for this and destroys the face with ray guns. But Jim has another bright idea:

And by repairing the face, they are able to open the lock, defuse the bomb, and save the solar system. Klee-Pan offers them a reward, but all they want is for the face on the Moon to be restored.

The Faceless Creature returned in Strange Adventures #142 (July 1962). Chan Yull has learned that his prior plot to destroy the Solar System failed, partially because of the efforts of the two South Dakota Highway Patrolmen. So he creates a new bomb and uses them as the triggers:

But when they arrive the bomb does not explode. It turns out that Jim and Bob were given the power of telepathy by Klee-Pan, and so they had ordered each other not to explode the bomb. Klee-Pan sends them back to Earth with weapons that subdue Chen Yull and send him back to Klaramar.

Jim and Bob find themselves compelled to construct an odd, scientific device. When they turn it on:

Chen Yull heads to the UN Building, where he has a strange demand:

But when they do as he asks:

That seems a very strange quirk indeed. How useful an adaptation is it for a people to only be willing to destroy their own planet? Chen Yull reveals his fiendish plan:

Jim and Bob use the weapons they defeated Chen Yull with in the previous story on each other, shrinking themselves down while sending themselves to Klaramar. Once they are able to communicate with Klee Pan, he defeats Chen Yull and restores the two planets (and the Highway Patrolmen) to their normal sizes.
One other oddity about the series; according to the GCD, the pencils on the three stories were done by three different artists: Mike Sekowsky, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane. I was able to identify the latter two, but the first one really doesn't look much like Sekowsky at all to me except for a few panels. Then again, I noticed how heavy the inks were on that story (by Murphy Anderson), so maybe it's just a case of the pencils being overwhelmed.

*Technically two different faceless creatures appeared on the three covers; Klee-Pan on the first issue and Chan Yull on the other two.

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Atom #7

In response to fan demand, DC liked to do team-ups with their heroes. Being DC, they tended to institutionalize the practice by making them annual events. Flash regular team-ups with Green Lantern, so it was a natural for Julius Schwartz to match his third GA reincarnation with his fourth.

The story, written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson, starts with a bit of a puzzle. Some crooks had escaped from a tall building which was too far from nearby rooftops for them to have jumped. There was no sound of a helicopter, so how could they have escaped? They take the puzzle to local physics grad student, Ray Palmer who comes up with an answer:

In Gardner Fox's Wikipedia entry, there is this note:

A polymath, Fox sprinkled his strips with numerous real-world historical, scientific, and mythological references, once saying, "Knowledge is kind of a hobby with me." For instance, in the span of a year's worth of Atom stories, Fox tackled the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the space race, 18th-century England, miniature card painting, Norse mythology, and numismatics.

So it is no surprise that I was able to locate an article from Time Magazine in 1927 on the European fad of balloon jumping:

Walk along the ground with a breeze at your back, approach a fence, bend your knees, spring lightly into the air when you feel the tug of the balloon. You will sail over the fence so easily and land so gently that you will be surprised. Barns and trees can be surmounted with more vigorous leaps, usually requiring a light second push-up with the tip of the toe on the barn's roof or on the tree's outlying branches.

Balloon jumping is already a popular sport among the English gentry, and is attracting the attention of playful Long Islanders.

Later, while Jean and Ray are out bird-watching, they experience a strong earthquake. They also notice a bird that is out of the normal for the Atlantic Flyway.

Meanwhile, Hawkman has also noticed some birds out of their migratory routes. When he asks them why:

Using some special contact lenses he has designed, Hawkman is able to see the radiation is coming from the East Coast and:

We learn that explorers had found the Cosmitron on a world ruined by war. It gave off radiation, but aside from that the scientists from Thanagar could not determine the machine's purpose. Hawkman contacts Shayera, who is on Thanagar and tells her to check to see if the Cosmitron has been stolen. Then he heads east to find the source of the radiation.

The Atom is at the police station when a call comes in about the balloon robbers. He accompanies them to the scene:

Okay, now that's just a bit silly on Gil Kane's part; there's no way a couple of tiny balloons like those shown could lift even a fraction of a man's weight. Here's a look at what is actually required.

So the cop shoots Atom up into the air with the speargun, which is actually a pretty cool idea. He starts popping the balloons, but by the third crook they're over the getaway boat and so the man makes a quick getaway. Meanwhile, the Atom is so far out to sea that he wonders if he will be able to swim back to shore. Fortunately, he's plucked out of the air by... Hawkman!

The Winged Wonder and the Mighty Mite make short work of the balloon crooks, then Hawkman hurries off in search of the Cosmitron. He locates it lying on the ground in a woods, but as he approaches, tiny men in a space ship attack him:

The aliens manage to kayo Hawkman and get away with the device. Hawkman meets up with the Atom at police headquarters and tells his story. Meanwhile, the aliens are hovering above the Earth. We learn what the Cosmitron does:

They transmit a warning to the United Nations. They were the original rulers of our planet and they intend to resume control. If the UN does not capitulate, they will cause terrible disasters to strike our planet. Perhaps this is an optimistic view of the response of the delegates:

The aliens take a knife to the globe, causing a huge furrow to appear in the ground. We get a page or two of explication on the history of the aliens. They had used the Cosmitron to get control of many planets, but eventually the power (provided by earthquakes) ran out and the Thalens were overthrown. Many years later their descendants had recovered the Cosmitron and intended to resume their conquest of the galaxy.

Since Hawkman's spaceship is gone (with Shayera back on Thanagar), he cannot get to the alien ship, but the Atom can, in a model of Hawkman's craft. Once inside, he steals the Cosmitron:

And after a fairly easy battle, the aliens are defeated, the Cosmitron destroyed, and even the furrow repaired.

Comments: I loved the little bits of backup information that Fox provided, and the artwork is terrific. The Cosmitron is an interesting piece of technology. Atom and Hawkman had several other team-ups in the future and eventually shared the Atom's magazine towards the end of the Silver Age.

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Detective #395

Often cited by those who are big on dividing lines as marking the end of the Silver Age Batman, Detective #395 includes the first O'Neil/Adams team-up on Batman. It's a terrific story, amazingly illustrated, and is featured (deservedly) in many "Best of Batman" collections.

But the idea that this is far from the rest of the (late) Silver Age Batman is a bit silly. Following the demise of the Batman TV show in early 1968, Julius Schwartz found that he needed to reinvent yet again the character he'd inherited as editor just before Batmania hit. And this time he hit on the correct formula: Bring in strong artists like Irv Novick (and occasional guest stars like Adams and Gil Kane), and return Batman to the nighttime man of mystery that he had been in the early Golden Age. This he did starting with Batman #204-205's solid (if not classic) Operation Blindfold. The stories published in Batman and Detective from about mid-1968 on all are pretty high-quality, especially compared to what came before.

And it's not as if Adams hadn't been doing Batman in The Brave and the Bold for the last year or so, even if it's O'Neil's first crack at the Caped Crusader. So Secret of the Waiting Graves is not some bolt from the blue; it's a continuation of a trend that had been gathering for about 2 years at the time it was published.

The story begins with Bruce at a party being hosted by a wealthy Mexican couple, the Muertos. The party takes place in a graveyard at night. The first event is a balloon race (yeah, a balloon race in the dark), in which the balloon occupied by one Pedro Valdes, is attacked by hawks and shredded. The man seems fated to fall on the rocks below when suddenly:

Batman's momentum carries the two of them into the river below instead of death on the rocks. Notice how the camera angles are chosen to present the maximum action against a large backdrop?

As the story continues, we begin to understand that the Muertos are not as youthful as they appear:

It subsequently becomes obvious that Valdes himself is definitely a target for murder, when a pottery explodes next to him, revealing the presence of a sniper. Bruce is already suspicious of the Muertos for holding this party anyway, since they are normally hermits. It turns out that they are being kept alive by the Sybil flower, which causes insanity and, oh, by the way, hallucinations:

Anybody, what are they really talking about there? Anybody? Bueller?

Batman saves Valdes and torches the plants:

And they topple into the waiting graves.

Comments: There are some holes in the story. For starters, would the Muertos be so foolish as to have only one patch of the plants that keep them alive? And why would the graves be dug out for them to collapse into? But overall those are quibbles about a tale that certainly does appear to be leading the way into the Bronze Age, with more adult-oriented plots. Adams' art, as always, is spectacular.

The Robin story is a continuation of a two-part tale. It's rather ridiculous. Dick has arrived at Hudson University, only to find a demonstration going on at the registrar's office. The demonstrators are trying to get the Dean to call in the cops, but he is insistent that he will talk with the leaders. A squad car arrives anyway, and the cops inside rough up the protestors. But Dick quickly realizes that the police are phonies as their car has an inspection sticker on it. It's all a plot to give the demonstration ringleaders more credibility with the students, and it appears to be working.

The cops? They're communist infiltrators. No kidding:

Comments: Silly story, enlivened quite a bit by the Gil Kane art.

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Green Lantern #59: Guy Gardner

This story starts with Green Lantern visiting Oa, the planet of the Guardians, for a seminar in advanced Green Lanternship. Hal learns that the Guardians have a machine that can read the minds of dead people. They offer to show him the last thoughts of Abin Sur, the alien Green Lantern who crashed on Earth and offered Hal Jordan the chance to take his place. Abin Sur had two requirements for a suitable replacement. The candidate must be honest and he must be utterly without fear.

To Hal's surprise (and ours) it turns out there were two possibilities: Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner. But as Jordan was on the West Coast, while Gardner was back east, Abin Sur chose Hal. We get the familiar origin sequence:



Hal is intrigued. What would have happened if Guy Gardner had been chosen as Green Lantern? Well, funny you should ask, because the Guardians just happen to have a "What If" machine:



Of course the same type of machine features in two of my favorite Silver Age stories, The Second Life of Batman from Batman #127, and Superman's Other Life, from Superman #132.

Gardner's home base is "East City" continuing DC's coy tradition of fictional town names. Guy's occupation is quite a bit different from Hal's:



They both sure like to punch! We found he would have battled pretty much the same crime gallery: Sonar, the Shark, Black Hand, Dr. Polaris, and Sinestro are shown. But when the Gardner GL returns to Earth following his initial meeting with the Guardians, he takes a slightly different route, and this is where history starts to diverge. He encounters two robots battling, one orange and the other blue, and learns from them that they come from a planet where the Yellow Plague killed off all the adults, and where the children do not age normally, so they have divided into two warring factions.

When Guy first visits the planet he is controlled by the mental powers of the blue faction, but during a battle with the "Orangers" he breaks free and manages to shield his mind from control. After that, it's a pretty simple matter for the gym teacher to get the kids to behave properly, especially since his ring ensures they will start to mature.

Unfortunately:



Guy Gardner must summon another worthy individual, who just happens to be Hal Jordan. Again, this perfectly echoes the Batman and Superman tales, both of which ended with Bruce wearing a cowl and Kal in a cape.

There is a very nice bit at the end. Hal asks for permission to form a friendship with Earth's other Green Lantern and they hit it off after meeting at Guy's health club:



Comments: Cute idea, but it did not get developed in the Silver Age after this; Guy Gardner popped up in a Green Lantern/Green Arrow issue and then basically disappeared until the mid-1970s. But he would become a major character in his own right, with his personality more like the cover of this issue than the ending.

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