Celebrating the Unpopular Arts
 

In the summer of 1966, titans fell (and other stuff happened)

Okay, “titans fell” is a clickbait exaggeration. House of Secrets was never a Silver Age titan and Mystery In Space dropped in quality after Jack Schiff took it over from Julius Schwartz a couple of years earlier. Still, having read the series repeatedly during my Silver Age reread or at least seen their covers online via Mike’s Amazing World, it’s a startling to realize they reached the end of the trail in September, 1966.Lots more would follow in the next few years: Blackhawks, Sea Devils, Patsy and Hedy (Patsy Walker had already bit the dust), Metamorpho. Others, such as Sgt. Fury and Two-Gun Kid would prolong their lives by becoming reprint books. With House of Secrets, the real surprise is that it lasted this long. Despite the novelty of being the only Silver Age villain with his own book, Eclipso’s stories weren’t A-list; back-up feature Prince Ra-Man was down among the G-listers.Mystery In Space was great fun under Schwartz, with Adam Strange as the feature it’s best known for. Under Schiff, however, Adam’s stories were terrible. Ultra the Multi-Alien wasn’t much of a substitute but this last story was a fun one due to the loser he’s battling. The Pied Piper is a would-be dictator whose space fleet got its butt kicked every time he tried to conquer other planets, Now, though, he’s found an uninhabited planet in another dimension so he’s kidnapping people from the Solar System to populate it. He’ll be a tyrant without the hard work of conquering anyone! Needless to say, it doesn’t work out like that.

Otto Binder’s backup story, “The Booby-Trapped Asteroid,” is above-average for a Schiff anthology too. A space liner crashes on the eponymous planetoid, encountering a variety of booby traps and a malevolent monster. This proves a turning point in the lives of various passengers — miser, bankrupt, paraplegic, coward — much in the spirit of those Batman character-study stories I blogged about a while back. It’s stock, but it worked for me.

I also enjoyed that the cast gets off the asteroid with no idea what was going on. Did the monster set up those traps to destroy unwary travelers? Was the asteroid a prison and the traps designed to keep visitors away from the creature? They don’t know and neither do we. It’s a twist that often works for me.

Ironically, while Joe Orlando would successfully revive House of Secrets a couple of years later as a companion to the rejuvenated House of Mystery, Mystery In Space made only a brief, unsuccessful comeback in the 1980s. I suspect the problem is the title: where Strange Adventures could shift to include the Enchantress, Animal Man, Deadman and then four years of Adam Strange reprints, Mystery in Space pretty much has to include space adventure. That’s a lot more limited.

Speaking of Batman, the covers of Detective Comics and Batman for September, 1966, are both exceptional, but neither story inside lives up to them. The Hooded Hangman cover is one of those that haunted me for years because I didn’t have the issue.When I finally read it in a reprint collection it was a disappointment. The Hooded Hangman is a TV newscaster who’s become a masked wrestler as a side hustle (we never learn why). The story involves him trying to unmask Batman so that the Hangman can become the dominant masked personality in Gotham City which is an underwhelming motive. The whole story reads like author Gardner Fox was too rushed to come up with a good yarn to fit the cover.Fox also flops in this month’s Batman. That cover implies one wild, nightmarish adventure; what we get is Batman going undercover to bust a robbery gang that shouldn’t have lasted against him more than a couple of pages. The reason “not even THEY know” is because the gang boss electrocutes the Dynamic Duo, giving them short-term amnesia; too bad for him that a treacherous underling has booby-trapped his getaway car so that he blows up real good.The Spectre got his third outing in Showcase in September and it shows the problems that would recur in his upcoming series. The first two Showcase stories had him battling at a cosmic level; here he’s taking on a ghost that’s snatched Jim Corrigan’s body. Like several stories in the Spectre series, this hand-waves how a common spook is able to take on the nigh-omnipotent Ghostly Guardian; we also get several action scenes where the Spectre indulges himself by taking down ordinary crooks with eye-catching but pointless stunts (I’ll revisit this theme when Spectre is a few issues along).Adventure Comics #348 introduces a major new foe for the Legion of Superheroes, Dr. Regulus. Using solar power channeled through radioactive gold, he has the energy and the brains to take down multiple Legionnaires easily; Sun Boy’s powers cancel Regulus’ energy out but he still manages to escape. This should have led to a major rematch but Regulus didn’t appear until the early Bronze Age.

This is one of the things that stick out for me about Silver Age DC, how the writers routinely came up with great villains and barely used them. Not in the sense of discarding good characters, more like they had so many good ideas some of them were bound to lie fallow. By the time the Legion’s run in Adventure Comics ended Jim Shooter had also introduced the Fatal Five, the Controllers, the Hunter, Universo, Dr. Mantis Morlo, Mordru and given us the origin of the Legion of Super-Villains. It’s understandable that even a promising foe like Regulus got lost in the shuffle.

This definitely wasn’t an issue with Ocean Master, who’d show up constantly after his debut in Aquaman #29. I don’t mean that as a slap at creator Bob Haney because the ongoing Ocean Master/Aquaman sibling rivalry is some of his best work from this period. In his version, Orm isn’t an Atlantean but a human, Aquaman’s half-brother from his father’s remarriage. Resentful that his big brother is so superior, he breaks bad, then gets amnesia (the world’s most common disease, as one Korean TV show quipped) which eliminates his last lingering connections to Arthur or anyone else. Aquaman, however, knows it’s his brother and wants to avoid fighting him at all costs. I much prefer that take to making him Atlantean, which always feels like a warmed-over Sub-Mariner plot.

#SFWApro. Covers top to bottom by Jack Sparling, Murphy Anderson, J. Winslow Mortimer, Carmine Infantino (x2), Anderson again, Curt Swan and Nick Cardy.

7 Comments

  1. Jeff Nettleton

    Sgt Fury was never a “reprint book;” rather, it ran reprints, from time to time (sometimes for several issues); but, always picked up with new stories, right up to the end. It certainly has a high percentage of reprints, compared to other series, but was never like Marvel Tales, where it was nothing but reprints.

    Re: Why a newscaster would become a masked wrestler? Because Jerry Lawler and Jimmy Hart annoyed them once too often!

  2. Jeff Nettleton

    ps Lance Russell, the legendary announcer for Memphis wrestling, was the manager of the station where the show appeared, for many years. His co-commentator, Dave Brown, was the weather man, at the tv station that broadcast their show.

    Pro wrestling, in those days, was usually shot in a tv studio,to entice people to come out to the live matches, in the area. Quite often, the announcer was the local sports guy or someone from the broadcast team, if the promotion did not provide their own. When the Poffo family (Macho Man Randy Savage and brother Leaping Lanny Poffo, aka The Genius; plus their father Angelo) ran their ICW promotion, out of Lexington, KY, their announcer, Tim Tyler, was the sports guy at the tv station. His colleague was a local lawyer and politician, Edgar Wallace (not the writer). So, that would be a connection between a newscaster and pro wrestling.

  3. Le Messor

    “titans fell” is a clickbait exaggeration
    I just thought you meant that was when the final issue of The Teen Titans was published.

    “eye-catching but pointless stunts”
    Kind of irrelevant, but I just re-watched The Mummy Returns the other day, and the kid keeps leaving messages for his parents by making sandcastles in the shape of where he’s going next. I thought ‘that’s cool and all, but couldn’t he just write the names in the sand?’

    1. There’s an Astro City issue where the Silver Age superhero Super-Sonic describes the elaborate trick he used to outwit one of his foes; he admits he could have done it much more simply but hey, it wouldn’t have been much fun.
      Generally, being more complicated than necessary is one of those things I don’t mind if I enjoy the story.

      1. Le Messor

        “Generally, being more complicated than necessary is one of those things I don’t mind if I enjoy the story.”

        Oh, yeah, absolutely! After all, without that, where would Rube Goldberg be?

        I haven’t read the Spectre story in question, so can’t comment.

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