As I mentioned back in May, by 1968 comics were increasingly reacting to their times. In early 1969, Spider-Man tackled campus protests; DC cast its eye on that iconic late-sixties figure, the hippy, in Brother Power, The Geek (I said nothing about the reaction being a good one).
Ross Andru’s cover for Flash #185 is another example. As you can see, it’s got hippies — even better, they’re peacenik hippies resorting to violence ROFL!
I’m guessing it was a “cover first” story as the scene is almost irrelevant to the Frank Robbins/Ross Esposito “Threat of the High-Rise Buildings.” The plot involves aliens stealing various Earth buildings to shut down radio transmissions that are damaging their environment. They try to explain this to us but as their translator interprets all Earth’s tongues as one common language, it sounds like gibberish.
The hippy scene occurs when a criminal scientist stages a hippy protest as a cover for kidnapping the aliens. Not deep, obviously, but it’s telling they figured this would make an eyeball-grabbing cover on the spinning rack.
Nick Cardy’s cover for the debut issue of Witching Hour — cool enough to get me to flip through it — doesn’t suggest there’s anything contemporary to DC’s second horror anthology (edited by Dick Giordano rather than House of Mystery‘s Joe Orlando). Inside, however, Alex Toth shows us that in the 1960s, even witches have a generation gap.
This set up helped Giordano distinguish the Witching Hour stories from HOM — three storytellers, competing with each other for the best yarn. Not that any of them worked for me — DC’s horror anthologies rarely did — or that the stories were radically different, but still.
Relatively minor examples of comics adapting to the times, but there’ll be bigger and better relevance as comics head on toward the Bronze Age.
#SFWApro.
