In blogging last week about the Silver-to-Bronze Age transition, one thing I didn’t talk much about is the stuff we didn’t see in the early Bronze Age. That is, the books where the transition was cancellation.
First, a slight detour, to the final issue of Challengers of the Unknown. I’ve no idea why I bought #74, “To Call a Deadman” (Denny O’Neil, George Tuska and Neal Adams), given I wasn’t buying comics regularly in 1970, While I’d read the Challengers before and knew them from house ads, they certainly weren’t a must-buy book for me. Maybe it was Deadman guest-starring, only he wasn’t that big a draw for me. It’ll have to remain an enigma, like me buying Teen Titans #32 a couple of years later.
I remember very clearly how weird I found this issue. The Challs I knew were superheroes; this story was a horror-ish/House of Mystery type yarn (seriously, would that Neal Adams cover have looked out of place on House of Secrets?) about rescuing a girl’s spirit that had been kidnapped by a ghost. There was some woman named Corinne Stark running around with the Challengers and I’d no idea who she was. I didn’t particularly care for the story.
One of the benefits of my Silver Age reread is that this is one of many stories that improves in the context of its time. While I haven’t read any of the previous issues with Corinna, I’ve been looking at the covers over at Mike’s Amazing World so I know this spooky yarn followed several earlier spooky yarns —
— all part of DC riding the late 1960s horror bandwagon.
The appearance of Jonny Double as a random-rolled PI puzzled me too, originally — was I supposed to recognize him? Now I know he was one of DC’s try-something-new characters from the late 1960s, 1968 specifically.
This would be the first of several books he’d wander into — Adventure Comics, Wonder Woman and later Kobra — so someone at DC hoped he’d catch on (he didn’t).
Plus the story is good, involving a third-rate sorcerer posing as a ghost and kidnapping a girl’s soul to force her father to steal a valuable gem for him. I’m not sure if it’s one of those stories I appreciate more with maturity or simply that without all the distracting questions (“Why are the Challengers so different? I don’t get it!”) it’s easier to enjoy it.
Another thing I didn’t realize when I first bought this, or any of the times I’ve reread it, was that it was the end of the Challengers’ Silver Age run. The next three issues were reprints, then DC’s Death-Cheaters vanished for three years, returned in ’73 for three more issues of reprints (which I bought and which converted me to a Challengers fan) and then vanished for four years before the first of their revivals.
Which brings us back to the point I started this post with: the difference between the Silver and Bronze Age can be defined partly by what’s not on the stands. A whole lot of Silver Age stalwards have faded by now. Nick Fury (wrapped up in Avengers)
Dr. Strange (wrapped up in Sub-Mariner and Hulk)
The Atom and Hawkman (wrapped up in Justice League of America).
The long-running Blackhawks gave up the ghost in 1968.
And in 1970, “Enemy Ace” Hans von Hammer got the boot from Star-Spangled War Stories in favor of a WW II character called the Unknown Soldier. One last issue after the one below and von Hammer disappears for four years (given the Unknown Soldier lasted into the 1980s, I can’t say the switch was a bad call).
The Silver Surfer in mid-1970 likewise has one issue left. Captain Marvel is about to take a three-year hiatus.
It makes for a different comics landscape from, say, 1967, but like the changes I mentioned last week, I’m not sure anyone would have seen it as “The Silver Age is dead!” Lots of heroes lost their series before the end of the 1970s — Giant-Man, the Sea Devils, Patsy Walker, Adam Strange, Robby Reed, and Steve Ditko’s heroes over at Charlton. Even if I’d been paying more attention to comics, I don’t think I’d have sensed a seismic shock the way the DC Implosion would feel a few years later.
It’s still worth noting though,
Covers top to bottom by Neal Adams (x2), Dick Giordano, Herb Trimpe, Gene Colan, Joe Kubert, Pat Boyette, Kubert, Trimpe.
