As I said recently, the late 1960s were a tough time to be DC Comics. They’d been the top dog in the industry for most of their existence; now their status seemed unstable and uncertain. Marvel was hip and cool; they were the stodgy older generation whose efforts at hipness were laughable (you can find several examples in previous Silver Age reread posts). Efforts to imitate Marvel’s style couldn’t duplicate the magic.
The solution? Try something new … only they weren’t sure what. Much like the 1950s, when the superhero boom had faded and nobody knew what would replace it, DC was willing to greenlight all sorts of unlikely (and usually unsuccessful) concepts. A decade earlier, characters had to last through several rounds of tryout issues in Showcase before getting their own series. Now one issue was all it took.
Bat Lash, for example, jumped from Showcase #76 to seven issues of his own title. As I said when I blogged about him three years ago, this lying, cheating scoundrel was wildly different from any other Western hero of the era. Gambler. Ladies man. Thief. A man who can shoot you down before your gun clears its holster but also one heck of a cook. A running element in his showcase debut (written by Sergio Aragones, drawn by Nick Cardy) is that having shot a pheasant, he’s trying to drum up the ingredients to cook it in aspic and waxing enthusiastically about how good it’s going to taste. Nobody else cares. Even for an antihero Lash was out of the ordinary. So was the tone of the book, which slid from tongue in cheek into black comedy.
In #2, for instance, Lash steals a dead man’s coat to get through a snowstorm. The man’s young daughter, PTSDed from his death, believes Lash is her daddy, still alive. Lash tries to get rid of the little girl which looks to everyone else like he’s a monster abandoning his child. The story ultimately shows that antihero or not, Lash does have a heart buried under his cynical shell.
As I said in that previous post, the fatal flaw was Aragones (of whom I’m otherwise a fan). A lot of the background art and the plotting would have worked in Aragones’ Groo; this book needed a more somber tone. Which is not to say it would have succeeded — lots of second-stringers at DC were buying the farm in ’68. It would take Jonah Hex a few years later to pump fresh life into the comic-book Western.
Howie Post’s Anthro, the story of a stone-age boy, got to six issues of his own book. I never read it and have nothing to say about it.
I’d have loved to read the debut of Angel and the Ape (by John Albano and Robert Oksner) but the eBay prices, for whatever arcane reason, are way higher than I’m willing to shell out. Their series made it to six issues, then ditched Sam Simeon and turned into Meet Angel for its final issue.
Even in this environment, some concepts did not get the go-ahead. The Marv Wolfman/Joe Gill PI adventure Johnny Double, for instance.
Johnny did later show up in Wonder Woman and then in Kobra a few years later without ever becoming a thing.
Dolphin didn’t even do that well. The only writing project by veteran romance artist Jay Scott Pike (who also drew the book), she vanished into years of obscurity, not much affected by her cameo appearance in Showcase #100.
That was it for Dolphin until Marv Wolfman revived her, appropriately enough, for his Forgotten Heroes in 1984. As a teen, her very obscurity made me curious about her, more so than a generic PI like Mr. Double. Alas, even though she became an Aquaman supporting character in later years, giving her a somewhat higher profile, her Showcase has never been reprinted and it’s not on the DC app.
I’m not sure if this enigmatic ad indicates DC thought she was an intriguing new character find or they couldn’t think of anything interesting to say about her.
Also launching unsuccessful series after a single Showcase issue: Hawk and the Dove and Beware the Creeper. 
Launching without a tryout issue: The Secret Six. This was a Mission: Impossible riff which imagines the team members have all been pressured to join, and that their mysterious leader Mockingbird was one of them. But which? I’ve been picking up the issues on eBay — they’re much cheaper than Angel and the Ape — and I’ll be blogging about the team eventually.
Of course, the thing about flinging lots of stuff at the wall is, sometimes some of it does stick.
Deadman debuted in 1967, in Strange Adventures #205. While he didn’t make it to the end of the Silver Age, the story of a murdered acrobat hunting his killer was head and shoulders above most of the books here. I’ll be blogging about him soon too.
Three years after his two-issue Showcase tryout in 1965, Baron Hans von Hammer, the Enemy Ace, got his own slot in Star-Spangled War Stories. Like Deadman, he didn’t have a long run (though he’d be revived several tmes) but it’s a memorable one I’m glad to have in Archive editions (though I agree with Jeff’s comments on the series here).
DC would try lots more new stuff over the next couple of years. Sword-and-sorcery. Horror anthologies following in the wake of the revamped House of Mystery. The Phantom Stranger (like I said, some things stick to the wall). Plus shaking up various established characters. I’ll get to them in due time.
#SFWApro. Covers by Nick Cardyx2, Howie Post, Robert Oksnerx2, Jay Scott Pike, Joe Staton, Frank Springer, Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubertx2.
I don’t think I’ve read any of these, but I love that they exist. Very much appreciate the breadth of the DC tapestry.
Me too. I do wish I knew about the behind-the-scenes aspect — were any of these passion projects (“At last! I have my shot!”) or was DC begging people to pull something out of their butts. Or both.
I think it’s interesting that most of these later-1960s DC series borrow one or two of Marvel’s signature Silver Age storytelling elements: a sense of serialization and/or a degree of melodramatic internal conflict.
Enemy Ace and Deadman have the internal angst, and Deadman has some elements of serialization.
When I think of the classic DC Silver Age stuff — the books edited by Schwartz, Boltinoff, or Wiesinger — there’s a lack of cliffhangers and a tendency for characters to have the same general outlook across the story.
These books work a bit like the TV sitcoms and dramas of the era, taking on a distinct problem or plot in each installment, but wrapping everything up by the end of that installment. New running characters are introduced, but typically with stable situations so that they can drop in or out of the book as needed.
They’re very well-plotted on an issue-to-issue basis, but any given issue is, for lack of a better word, “skippable.” If you miss one month’s Flash or Detective Comics, you can pick up the next one without feeling you’ve missed much.
Marvel’s emphasis on cliffhanger endings — used as early as Fantastic Four #3 — and the characters’ angstier, but also more mercurial attitudes likely helped keep readers hooked. The downside is the perfunctoriness, even arbitrariness, of the action plots. But I think what Marvel managed to create, issue to issue, was what we now call FOMO.
Enemy Ace, along with Deadman and the other Arnold Drake books tended to push back on that. There was more of a sense that you might miss some surprise development in the plot or decision by a character. Of course, Enemy Ace is ultimately quite static, more static than the classic DC superhero books of the time.
But Deadman ended up as a heavily serialized story, with even his guest appearances in other books feeling like they were consequential for the character in some way. And Drake likewise tended to add notable serialization elements to his other books.
You have a point. There’s a Superman story starting at the end of ’68 that has a standard premise — Superman forgets he’s Clark Kent — but it spins it out over several issues with him trying different identities.
Marvel’s fondness for continued stories was a secondary reason I didn’t buy them as much as DC. At only two comics allowed a week, I couldn’t guarantee getting the Continued installments. Better not to buy any.
The Dolphin story has one of those “or is it?” endings in the final panel.
However, the story itself reads like a done-in-one, the kind of thing you’d see in an anthology book like House of Secrets.
I suppose the idea was that Chris Landau would continue to seek out the mysterious Dolphin, but that’s the kind of storyline that can’t really develop much by definition, not least because it relies on her interiority remaining obscure to Chris — the actual protagonist — and to the reader.
Reading the synopsis at Mike’s Amazing World I see your point. Maybe there’s a reason Pike didn’t get many writing assigments.