The backup to Man-Bat’s second appearance, the Robin story “My Place in the Sun” (Mike Friedrich, Gil Kane) isn’t particularly memorable. It is interesting, though, that much as Stan Lee was pondering Captain America’s role in the modern world, Friedrich was thinking about Robin’s. To wit, isn’t a young man running around in shorts and calling himself “Robin” hopelessly uncool?
The plot has Speedy visit Hudson U to say how much Dick not joining all his friends in the Teen Titans’ bad reboot impressed him. A fight breaks out, Robin and Speedy intervene and Robin winds up decking the wrong person, a notorious troublemaker who in this case was the injured party. Everyone on campus starts discussing whether Robin left his brains in Gotham City or what, and what kind of schmuck wears that costume and calls himself by a silly name.
Much like Steve Rogers pondering Cap’s role —
— Dick decides he’s not outmoded yet.
(In case you’re wondering, it turns out next issue Robin punched out the right dude after all). Friedrich wrote a number of Robin stories and I think he was really pondering this question. The following year, in Justice League of America #92, he has Dick discuss the question with Earth-Two’s Robin, who’s older and already wearing a new uniform (introduced in JLA #55).
Dick-Two suggests Dick-One try a new uniform by a costume designer he knows.
Instead Robin would stick with the classic look for more than a decade before finally becoming Nightwing.
The cover of Detective Comics #403 is interesting because it looks like Batman’s stumbled into some Gothic supernatural story (horror was everywhere!) but the cover story, “You Die By Mourning,” (Frank Robbins, Bob Brown) is a straight mystery. A woman stumbles into Bruce Wayne’s Victims Incorporated office, tells him she’s mourning her husband’s murder … only it won’t happen until tonight. Then she runs out. After a moment of WTF, dude?, Bruce dons his cape and investigates. The murder plot is absurd but engaging and it does justify all those Gothic trappings on the cover.
Hulk #131 wraps up a story from the previous issue (both by Roy Thomas and Herb Trimpe) in which, for the first time, Bruce Banner and the Hulk are split into separate beings. In this issue, Iron Man helps Bruce and Thunderbolt Ross put Hulk back inside his alter ego as that puts at least some limit on Jade Jaws’ ability to smash things. With Rick Jones now sharing bodies with Captain Marvel, the story also introduces a replacement teen sidekick.
I presume Roy wanted to make Jim a rebel and troublemaker, much like Rick was in his first appearance. However making a black kid a petty thief is an uncomfortable racist stereotype (much as I found Mal in Teen Titans a cliched character, he was a straight arrow). He’d later be retconned as a relative of the Falcon’s and much later died of disease after HIV ravaged his immune system.
In my last images post, I highlighted Neal Adams’ shot of Thor in Mephisto’s Hell. In Thor #181, as Thor finally regains his body from Loki’s mind-swap, we get another very cool Adams panel.
Next we have Captain America #129. Having bought a motorcycle, Steve has left his responsibilities and his girlfriend back in New York to enjoy the freedom of the open road. When he winds up in the middle of the Red Skull’s latest scheme (a farrago involving launching an Arab prince into space to start a nuclear war) he accepts the inevitable.
I find this hysterically funny because by the time I got interested in politics Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned from the White House after a major corruption investigation. Nixon shed him quite handily.
Finally we get this Jack Kirby (inked by Steve Ditko) cover from Where Creatures Roam, one of the reprint books I wrote about recently.
As I’ve said in previous posts, I’m not a fan of DC’s Bronze Age horror anthologies. Reading this issue — more precisely reading the individual stories in Tales to Astonish and the other books they first appeared in as Where Creatures Roam isn’t on the app — confirms my memory I dislike Marvel’s monster/horror books more. The covers are always amazing, most of the stories inside deadly dull. Not only is the story (monstrous statue comes to life from a freak lightning bolt) forgettable but even Ditko’s art isn’t as striking as the cover. And that was the case, over and over. Perhaps I won’t bother hunting down the equivalent stories next month.
Art top to bottom by Neal Adams, Gene Colan, Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky, Dick Dillin, Neal Adams, Herb Trimpe (x2), Neal Adams, Colan, Jack Kirby
