Trivia Quiz #34: What Do They Have In Common?

1. The Silver Age Green Lantern and the Golden Age Flash?
2. The JSA and the Frightful Four?
3. The Doom Patrol and the X-Men? (not that they were led by men in wheelchairs)
4. Sea Devils and the Fantastic Four?
5. Whitey Ford and Frank Sinatra? (Yeah, it's off-topic, but it's one of my favorite trivia bits.

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Doom Patrol #92

As covers go, that's not exactly the most dramatic. DC had numerous villains with that clock-face thing going on; Robin battled one on several occasions in the Golden Age, and Green Arrow had faced a very similar one in World's Finest only a few years earlier.

As the story begins a toddler has been locked inside a timed bank vault. There's a switch on the inside but the youngster can't operate it. Larry calls the others and is annoyed when Rita is late (she was at the hairdressers) and Cliff doesn't show up at all. Changing into Negative Man, he easily gets into the vault and flips the switch, but an electrical charge knocks him out, and for some reason the vault does not open. So Rita changes into a giantess and yanks the door open, saving Larry and the baby.

We learn that the real reason that Larry's ticked off at Rita is that she's got a new beau, who is the fifth richest man in America. Rita's apparently decided that Steve Dayton, aka Mento, is too egotistical and it looks like things are looking positive for Negative Man. But Cliff, who has noticed Rita pining for Dayton, has other ideas:

We are introduced to Dr Tyme in the second part of the story. He has invented a ray that slows down time inside the beam. In his first crime, he slows down a plane and everybody in it, then bails out with a shipment of precious gems that were on the airliner.

As Rita and Steve Dayton are ending their date, they spot Dr Tyme escaping with a payroll. Steve tries tackling the guy, but instead finds himself floating in air as time is stopped around him. Rita shrinks down and tags a ride on the crook's car, but she's caught when she accidentally brushes against one of his clocks, setting it off.

Meanwhile, the Chief has figured out that the secret to the crimes is a time-ray. Mento contacts the Doom Patrol, letting them know that Rita is missing, and begging to be allowed to help them find her. We get a look at the rather unique vehicle the Doom Patrol uses:

Sort of a cross between a rocket ship and a VW van; certainly somewhat oddball. They go to Dr Tyme's hideout, which is one of those abandoned castles that dot the supervillain landscape. He's got some defenses:

The Doom Patrol plus Mento make it through to face the villain. As they fight him the Chief radios an urgent warning: Under no circumstances should Larry release Negative Man. In the heat of battle Larry disobeys the order, and Negative Man is trapped in the beam, meaning he'll never get back to his normal body in time to survive. At the same time, Rita is incapacitated while giant-sized by gas.

Mento captures Dr Tyme and makes him slow things down for Larry's body, too, so that Negative Man will be able to get back without Larry dying first. The crook informs Robotman and Mento that there is a bomb set to go off in 15 minutes. Since Rita is too large and heavy to carry out, this means she'll die. But the Chief realizes that Mento can use his mental powers to command Rita to shrink to normal size, and everybody escapes, including Dr. Tyme. As the story ends, Larry is telling Mento not to use his powers to control Rita again.

Comments: I enjoyed the story quite a bit more than I expected. Although the Doom Patrol is clearly riffing on the Fantastic Four with all the squabbling, for whatever reason it works here, and I absolutely love the Bruno Premiani artwork. I also enjoyed the focus on the romantic triangle between Negative Man, Rita, and Steve Dayton.

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In Memory of Arthur Reeves

As the Silver Age came to a close, a dramatic shift happened in the Batman stories. Gone were the aliens and the weird transformations that had marked the Schiff era, and the camp style of the Batman show. Gone too were Sheldon Moldoff and Bill Finger, Robin and the Batcave.

But with every subtraction comes an addition, and one of the major additions at the end of this era was Denny O'Neill, whose scripts would revitalize the character for the 1970s. O'Neill sensed that Batman needed an official antagonist outside of the criminal underworld, and so he came up with Arthur Reeves, the Public Works Commissioner of Gotham City.

Reeves fits in with several characters from fiction. He's something of a bumbler a la Inspector Lestrade of the Sherlock Holmes movies (Lestrade was less of a buffoon in the Conan Doyle stories). You could also compare him to McGonigle, a Gotham City cop who plagued Batman for a few stories in the 1940s, or to J. Jonah Jameson, Spiderman's longtime nemesis.

Reeves first popped up in Detective #399. In the story, Batman is demonstrating his fighting prowess to the Gotham City Police Academy, against a martial arts instructor. The martial artist loses his cool when Batman defeats him easily and they have a serious fight until Batman ends it with the haymaker. Reeves sputters angrily that he's never seen such a disgraceful exhibition, and asks why Batman has to wear a mask:



And that's not even Reeve's most famous humiliation; that comes in Batman #234's classic story, Half An Evil:



Reeves appeared in a fair number of Batman stories in the 1970s. In Batman #229, Julius Schwartz revealed the inspiration for the name, if not the character:



From the Wikipedia entry on Craig Kennedy:

Kennedy is a scientific detective at Columbia University similar to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Thorndyke. He uses his knowledge of chemistry and psychoanalysis to solve cases, and uses exotic (at the time) devices in his work such as lie detectors, gyroscopes, and portable seismographs. Craig Kennedy became the prototype for American scientific detectives and their adventures, influencing the creation of later characters such as Doc Savage and Batman.

Here's a link to a bunch of Craig Kennedy stories.

Public Works Commissioner Reeves popped up on at least several more occasions; according to the Batman Wikia, he eventually ran for mayor, got caught up with Boss Ruppert Thorne's web, and retired in disgrace. As a public works commissioner it had never made much sense that Reeves would be so involved with Police Department business, unless he had political ambitions.

Hat Tip to Fr. Dan, who mentioned Reeves in the comments section of the last post, giving me the idea to do this post.

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A Little Off-Topic

But man does not live by the Silver Age alone. I was doing some rereading of mid 1970s Detective Comics and came across some things that I wanted to mention and put some markers down on. First, I want to establish the first time that Batman disappeared while Commissioner Gordon was in mid-sentence. This has become one of the cliches of the character and the relationship, but I am pretty sure that it never happened in the Golden or Silver Ages of Comics.

I'm not at all sure this is the first mention, but it's a good place to walk backwards from. Detective #449 (July 1975):



What about that giant tree in the Wayne Foundation HQ? I found this early image in Detective #463 (September 1976):



Check out this terrific three-panel sequence showing what happens when you try to mug the Batman dressed up as a woman:



Does Commissioner Gordon realize Bruce Wayne is Batman? Well, we see here that he might have some idea:



And given that we know from earlier issues that he correctly guessed his own daughter was Batgirl, it's no stretch to believe that Commissioner Gordon knew Bruce Wayne was really Batman. But this also hints at how increasingly complex the commish himself was becoming.

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Showcase #57

Of course, DC only dared to reveal the enemy side of World War I; I doubt they would have been willing to do a similar series on WWII. It's tempting to attribute this to the success of the Snoopy versus the Red Baron strips appearing in Charles Schultz's Peanuts comic strip (and the hit songs by the Royal Guardsmen), but according to the Wikipedia entry on the latter, Snoopy's first battle against the Red Baron didn't take place until 1966, while this issue is cover dated July-August 1965. Perhaps there is a third source which influenced both Schultz and Robert Kanigher, the writer of the Enemy Ace stories?

Incidentally, this is not Enemy Ace's debut; that actually came a few months earlier in Our Army At War #151 (February 1965). He's clearly based on Manfred von Richtofen, the famed Red Baron; they're both aristocrats, both the greatest ace of the war for the German side.

As the story begins we learn that Hans von Hammer is a killing machine, and as we watch, we learn how apt that description is. On an apparently uneventful patrol, von Hammer is attacked:



At the same time, he spots a British bomber attacking a German train. Using the bomb blasts as cover, he manages to elude the Hanriot, then shoot it down, followed by the bomber:



This gives you a pretty good idea of the general format of the series. It was long on details about the planes and their armaments, terrific in covering aerial tactics, and very much obsessed with the concept of honor and courage. Von Hammer genuinely admires his enemies, at least those who fight with valor.

In the second part of the story, we see von Hammer alone, recuperating from a wound he suffered during the battle. He meets up with a wolf in the Black Forest, who is also a hunter. Again we get insight as to what the Enemy Ace values in his companions:



Later, he spots two other German fighter pilots running from a single Canadian ace, known as the Hunter. Furious with them, he insists that they answer the challenge with him:



Von Hammer watches on the sidelines as the two German pilots battle the Canadian again. The Hunter brilliantly eludes the German on his tail and loops around to shoot him down. Then he plays a little game of chicken:



The second German pilot blinks first, and the Canadian guns him down, winning the duel. Von Hammer was there as an observer only, but both aces know that the next time they meet, one of them will die. Not that Enemy Ace has any doubt who that will be:



Afterwards, von Hammer shoots down a Spad that had destroyed two German observation balloons. Then it is time for the climactic battle:



And the aerial battle ends with both planes crippled and crashing to the ground. Von Hammer tries to capture the enemy pilot, but:



Comments: This is as good as it gets in the Silver Age; complex characters and thrilling battle sequences drawn by Joe Kubert, DC's dean of war comics, with an intelligent script by Bob Kanigher.

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#263. The Phantom - Ghost Who Walks #5 (Moonstone)

Plot Summary

 
When people go missing, The Phantom finds himself drawn into what appears to be a slave trade ring, but turns out to be far more insidious. Can The Ghost Who Walks overcome The Eastern Dark, or will the sun set on our hero once and for all?
 

Last days lot of complains about mediafire links, so this time I'm not uploading at mediafire.

Rapidshare

or

Sendspace

or

Megaupload

 It's a GreenGiant-DCP's scans. All credits to original scanners and uploaders.

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Batman #147

I have previously cited this story as perhaps the worst Batman story of the Silver Age. To give you an idea, back when I was really trying hard to push my run of Batman issues backwards, I stopped at #148 because I could not see paying $1.00 or so (at the time) for a comic with such a ridiculous cover.

The opening story is the Plants of Plunder. Batman and Robin encounter some crooks who use seeds from alien plants to commit crimes:

As Batman and Robin chase them, the crooks use another fantastic plant:

It turns out that they have stolen them from an alien who temporarily lost his memory, but regains it here:

It turns out that he was an alien farming scientist who came to Earth to try out his seeds here and got knocked out when the plants grew too quickly.

Comments: Dull and predictable, with a gaping plot hole. The alien initially shows up disguised as a human at Commissioner Gordon's office. He's already got amnesia. So how does he wind up back at the crooks' hideout at the end of the story, where he hits his head and regains his memory?

The Secret of Mystery Island is a pretty straightforward Treasure Hunt. There were a fair number of these stories in Batman over the years. The basic plot is that a dying rich man leaves a clue to the secret location of his fortune, with that clue leading to another clue. In this case, the dying man is an architect (and criminal mastermind) named Briggs, and his henchman Catlin is seeking the treasure, which Batman and Robin manage to recover.

Comments: Although I usually like these types of stories, this one is poorly executed, with clues that seem forced. Catlin looks into one eye of the Buddha, and assumes when he doesn't find anything that Briggs had lied about a treasure. But he doesn't look into the other one, which does hold the clue, which Batman promptly solves. In addition, the story lacks a needed element, which is that there should be some animosity between the dying man and his treasure seeker; otherwise, why put the latter through the wringer of the treasure hunt? But there is no indication of that here:

The cover story is the grand finale. Now, as background, Mort Weisinger had been having some success at the time with stories featuring "Superbaby", that is, Superman as a toddler. It's important to remember that in the Silver Age (as compared to present continuity) Clark Kent always had his super-powers, even as an infant, so that Superbaby could fly, was invulnerable, could lift incredible weights, etc., so his main limitation was that he thought like a baby.

Well, this was not going to work for Batman, clearly, who had no superpowers aside from his brilliant brain. And so the story flows fairly obviously, if ridiculously from the simple idea of regressing him physically but not mentally. Batman and Robin raid the hideout of Nails Finney, where they discover also the "renegade scientist" Garth, who has a surprise for Batman:

No, not the dreaded "eerie ray of light"! Well, before you know it, Batman has shrunk down to Oshkosh Bgosh size:

Due to a "flaw" in the machine, despite being turned into the Diapered Detective, Batman retains his adult mind and strength. He quickly trains to adjust to his new body, makes a few revisions to his costume and:

Later, he captures some crooks on a rooftop by using a large balloon to float him up there, since he doesn't weigh as much as he used to. But of course that makes this scene highly unlikely:

But now it's time for a secret identity crisis, as Kathy (Batwoman) Kane comes calling to see if Bruce Wayne is wearing short pants these days. But she leaves in a huff when she sees his silhouette kissing another woman. Quick thinking, Batman!

Batman and Robin find Garth's hideout, but when some henchmen come running up to help prevent Bat-Baby from reaching the machine:

And eventually Batman regains his normal size by reversing the ray.

Comments: You can argue that this one is played for grins, but it delivers more groans instead. Overall, this issue is the epitome of the worst of the Jack Schiff era.

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