Number 1476: Interplanetary Robinson Crusoe

Writers and aspiring writers, take note if you have problems finding plots for your stories. Just steal. Or if you prefer, call it “homage.” Like this shorty from My Greatest Adventure #24 (1958), written by a fan of author Daniel Defore. It saved a lot of trouble by just taking some incidents from Defoe’s work and transplanting them to a science fiction adventure. Not only that, but it created instant reader identification because Robinson Crusoe is a work so well known it’s practically imprinted on our brains at birth.

I like the artwork by comic book journeyman Jim Mooney, and I got a kick out of the hero finding raw diamonds that look like cut stones lying on the ground. It may have had something to do with editor Jack Schiff telling Mooney to make it obvious to their young readers that the stone were actually diamonds, because the kids might not recognize them as such in their uncut form.

More about →

Tomahawk #81

Add Miss Liberty to my list of unexpected DC female heroines of 1959-62.  I believe she qualifies as DC's earliest masked character with a few arguable exceptions, and none of those made second appearances, while Miss Liberty returned several times in the next few years.

The opening story has Tomahawk chasing down a renegade and his band of Indian followers who have robbed a small settlement.  The quarry splits up into three different parties to make tracking them down harder.  The first band is headed for the forest, where they will be impossible to catch, but Tomahawk has an idea:

He frees the logs and they roll down the hill, blocking the pass so he can capture the first third of the group.  When they have been captured, they reveal that an old medicine man had predicted the means of trapping them:

Mysterious predictions like this one are a staple of DC plots; the entertainment comes from seeing how they come true.  As usual, there are three predictions the seer made, but the first party refuses to reveal the other two. 

A little later they encounter the second group.  Caught out in the open they are forced to improvise until the enemy runs out of ammunition:

And thus we learn what the second prediction had been.  Tomahawk and Dan locate the old medicine man to find out his third forecast:

And sure enough, when they encounter the last group of the renegade's men, the prediction comes true:

Comments: Solid entertainment.  GCD doesn't list the writer, but the art is by longtime Tomahawk stalwart, Fred Ray.

The second story is Tomahawk's Frontier Valet. The basic premise of the story is laid out here:

As you can probably tell from that panel, the gag here is the basic "fish out of water" premise that is very common in TV and movies; The Beverly Hillbillies is a good example.  It's not hard to guess that Tomahawk and Dan will find having a valet a very mixed blessing, although one assumes that on at least one occasion he will prove useful. 

Word comes of Lord Boswell's whereabouts:

Note the stark simplicity and beauty of that panel.  Fred Ray's name doesn't come up often on the list of great artists of the Silver Age, but that's mostly because he wasn't drawing superheroes.

As they set out in search of Lord Boswell, Tomahawk and Dan are captured by the hostile tribe.  And, as I predicted:

Terrific characterization there.  However, he falls from his horse and accidentally destroys a sacred war-club.  The hostiles decide that they must take the trio back to their chief to determine their fate.  When they meet the chief, they discover Lord Boswell is there as well.  He's apparently lost his memory as he does not recognize them.  The chief decrees that they are to die at sunrise.

But Tomahawk escapes, kayos Lord Boswell and disguises himself to look like the English gentleman.  This enables him to move freely about the camp and prepare some surprises for the hostile tribe:

They escape with Lord Boswell, who has recovered his memory thanks to that sock on the jaw from Tomahawk.


Comments: A little gem of a story, where everything meshes perfectly.

The finale is the cover story.  As shown on the cover, Tomahawk and Dan have been captured by a force of Indians and Redcoats, when Miss Liberty makes her first dramatic appearance:

She frees the buckskin-clad heroes and then diverts the attention of the chasers so that Tomahawk and Dan can make their way into the nearby town of Newton.  We learn what has attracted the attention of the British:

We also meet a pretty nurse who's about to journey to the next town with some medicines.  Afterwards, she lingers outside the apothecary shop:

And indeed, the British have prepared a trap for them.  Fortunately, Miss Liberty and some friends of hers have arranged a surprise:

We learn more about her here, including the need for a secret identity:

The British issue a proclamation that any village harboring Tomahawk and Dan will be razed and its inhabitants driven from the territory.  In due course they learn that the heroes are in Wilk's Landing and thus:

But it was all a plan to get the munitions out of the town and to Washington's army:

Comments: Wow, once again terrific characterization; the sacrifice of the townspeople is quite moving.

Overall the Silver Age Tomahawk is not that fondly remembered, due to some of the sillier elements of apes, monsters and weird transformations so common to the time infecting the series.  But this issue is superb, with three great stories and excellent art throughout by Ray.  In fact, I have no hesitation in dubbing this one of the Silver Age's:

More about →

Detective #288

On the most obvious level, this issue is part and parcel of the horrific "monster of the month" era in Detective Comics that characterized a good part of Jack Schiff's tenure as editor of the Batman family of magazines. And make no mistake about it, that's the primary (and exceedingly silly) plot.

The story starts with a lightning bolt hitting a pool of chemicals causing a strange transformation:

The bit about life arising from chemical wastes is probably inspired by the movie, Godzilla. Batman and Robin encounter the creature and their initial attempt to defeat it reveals that it is more powerful than it looks:

So by this point in reading the story, I'm already yawning at the transparent absurdity. But then something interesting happens. The creature heads towards the house of an old actor who's become wheelchair-bound. Batman moves to help him, while sending Robin to the town to get help.

The actor is somewhat fatalistic, until he sees Batman in trouble:

And in town, Robin discovers that the only official around is a mere clerk, who doesn't think he can handle the crisis until:

There are quite a few Batman and Robin tales from the Golden Age that follow this pattern, and they are among the classics of that era. While the stale art and the monster focus prevent this story from reaching those heights, the subplots did make it quite a bit more entertaining than I expected.

The third subplot involves a bank robbery featuring an ingenious method of escape:

"Nothing can stop us now," is of course begging for trouble, and the creature flies into the blimp, grounding it. Batman and Robin capture the crooks, and help the clerk calm the local citizenry, then electrocute the creature. And in the end:

The Roy Raymond story (one of the last in that long-running series) sees Roy solve the case of an heiress who has been cursed with the gaze of Medusa, causing anyone she glances at to be turned to stone. Of course, it's all a plot by a guardian to steal her inheritance.
The Martian Manhunter story is rather bizarre. MM's good friend Larry Loder has fallen for a swindle. A bunch of crooks sold him some treasure-finding inventions, with which he hopes to pay back the investors who lost money with him earlier. And when you see the inventions, it's not hard to believe that he's a pretty poor financial advisor:

J'onn takes pity on him and makes the inventions seem to work. But it turns out that this was stage two of the crooks' con job:

So the Martian Manhunter makes sure that the final invention works in such a way that the crooks are caught by Larry. The reward money ensures that Loder will have enough funds to pay back all his investors, who presumably reinvested the funds with him in a bagful of magic beans.

More about →

Still More Schiff Recycling

I've talked a few times in the past about how editor Jack Schiff would take a story from Batman and run it in Blackhawk (or vice-versa). Here's another good example.

Consider these two covers:



And:



Not hard to see the similarities; in this case the Batman story was the earlier one, appearing in the March 1959 issue of that mag, while the Blackhawk version comes from December 1960. Both tales are "dream" stories; that is to say that they did not really happen, but were a dream of one of the characters; Robin and Lady Blackhawk. Both dreams end with disaster. In the Batman tale, Batwoman's identity is exposed, thus indicating to the world that Batman must be Bruce Wayne. And the marriage of Blackhawk and Zinda ends up causing the dissolution of the team.

At the end of the Blackhawk story (after Zinda has awoken from the dream), Blackhawk asks her to go out to the movies with him, but she has a better idea:

More about →

Batman #162

The penultimate issue of the Jack Schiff era, this comic symbolizes many of the problems that plagued the Batman series for most of the Silver Age. Obviously the cover is a tribute to (or swipe of) the finale of King Kong.

As the story begins, Batman encounters two robbers who seem more like animals than humans:

The pair escape when the ape-looking one grabs a lamppost out of the ground and wraps it around Batman and Robin.

We learn the secret of the animal-like humans here:

When this second pair of monsters attacks, Batman follows them in the Whirly-Bat. He tracks them down to the canyon where the crooks have their hideout, but:

As you can probably guess, it transforms him into the creature shown on the cover. Robin tries to protect him here:

Of course the real likelihood of fighter jet pilots actually hearing him (with their canopies closed, no less) is nil.

Batwoman tames him with tears and fruit, and he helps her and Robin catch the next set of monsters. They let one of the beasts go free, with Ace, the Bat-Hound tailing it back to the canyon. At first things look grim there, with the crooks freeing a rhino and a tiger, which look likely to make short work out of Batwoman and Robin. But Batman arrives as well, and kayos the other two beasts, after which Robin turns Batman back to normal with the ray.

Comments: Although the weird transformation bit is one of my least favorite plot devices, I have to admit I enjoyed this story more than expected. Part of it was seeing the devotion that both Robin and Batwoman have towards Batman, and their horror at seeing him turned into a monster:

That's very nice characterization.

The backup story features Robin's New Secret Identity. We learn in the opening that Robin shaves points, not to make money from gamblers, but to keep from looking too good:

We can see that Dick chafes a bit at being unable to show his true abilities. Later, he realizes that there is a way. He disguises himself as someone different and gets into a pickup game where he performs like Michael Jordan's more athletic brother. But late in the game, he's stunned and loses his memory. As he walks around trying to remember who he is, he comes upon Batman saving a woman from a fire. But her baby's still in the house, so Dick (disguised) chips in with a spectacular rescue:

Later, when Batman returns home and discovers that Dick has still not returned, he realizes the red-headed youth he had encountered earlier is his ward. As he hurries back to Gotham City, he spies some gangsters and the Boy Wonder, so he kills two birds with one stone:

Comments: A nice, little story with terrific characterization for Robin.

More about →

Guest Post: More Jack Schiff "Recycling"

Here's an solid post from commenter Jim building on some themes we have discussed here in the past:

In an interesting post (December 16, 2009), Pat pointed out how several Silver Age Superman stories appear to have been deliberately "synchronized" with Batman stories published around the same time, and he invited readers to send in other examples. His post inspired me to look more closely at something I'd noticed a few years ago, but hadn't bothered to investigate further. Here's what I found.

Submitted for your consideration: the cover of Blackhawk #151, dated August 1960 and edited by Jack Schiff.

Here we see Lady Blackhawk, with super-powers, "flying through the air -- and smashing [a] boulder" (as Blackhawk rather superfluously points out to the reader).

Now let's move ahead a few months and look at the cover of another comic edited by Jack Schiff -- Tales of the Unexpected #56 (December 1960).


I don't need to belabor the similarities between the two covers.

Now what might have given Schiff the idea of running two covers featuring female supporting characters -- pretty blondes in short skirts -- demonstrating super-powers to the consternation of their male counterparts?

For an answer, let's go back a year or so and take a look at the iconic cover of Action #252 (May 1959) -- the issue that introduced Supergirl:


It was obviously important for Silver Age editors to come up with eye-catching covers. There were a lot of comic books being published, and they were competing for the limited pocket change of their (mostly) juvenile readers. I'm sure Julius Schwartz wasn't the only editor who assumed that if a particular issue sold well, it was on account of the cover.

I'm guessing that Action #252 sold well -- at least well enough to justify keeping Supergirl as a regular "second feature." And I'm speculating that its strong sales inspired Schiff to put super-powered blondes on the covers of two of his titles at the earliest opportunity.

At this point, I began wondering about another book edited by Schiff -- Challengers of the Unknown. June Robbins was an "honorary Challenger" who regularly joined Ace, Rocky, Red, and Prof on their adventures. I didn't recall any story in which June gained super-powers, but I thumbed through my longbox and came up with this issue -- dated August/September 1960:


June's a brunette, but as a "lady giant" she has superhuman strength -- and she's using it to save her male partners from danger. (And we have another one of those charmingly redundant word-balloons that were such a common feature of Silver Age covers.)

As Pat said: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time it's a trend." I believe I spotted a trend -- and an example of the working of a comic editor's mind during the Silver Age.

Comments from Pat: This ties in with several of my past posts. I talked about Jack Schiff's habit of recycling covers and story elements between Blackhawk and Batman on two separate occasions. And I also talked about the sudden influx of women into the comic book superhero world of the late 1950s here.

Great job, Jim!

More about →