Showcase #83: Here Comes Bernie

The second issue of the Nightmaster Showcase trial featured the art of Bernie Wrightson, who had just started his comic book career a month or so earlier.  Wrightson's style was obviously heavily influenced by Frank Frazetta, which made him particularly suited for the genre. Frazetta's magnificent illustrations had covered the recent Conan series of books published by Lancer/Ace.

 The story takes up where the previous one left off.  Having learned the passwords from the Ice Witch, Nightmaster and his somewhat deranged guide, Boz, are trying to save Jan from the evil warlocks.  They run into a challenge from a Conan clone:

Note the unusual use of inks there; the straight lines on Nightmaster's face as compared to the cross-hatching on the barbarian's.  This is not original with Wrightson by any means, but it was a style associated with more mature and sophisticated artists, like Al Williamson.

Nightmaster manages to defeat the barbarian by throwing away his sword and using a little judo.  Because he refuses to take his opponent's life, the barbarian agrees to help him.  It turns out he has two additional companions for the party:

 They are sirens, whose voices have been stilled by the evil wizards and locked away in a chest.  So their goals coincide as well. Wrightson was known for drawing exceptionally beautiful women.  Probably his most famous issue had this mesmerizing cover:

They make it to the warlock stronghold, where they stop at an inn.  I guess the CCA was asleep at the switch again on the use of alcohol, as they order ale and:

There's the somewhat obligatory battle with some guards who show up:

Entering the warlock castle, they find the chest holding the voices of the two sirens.  Then they reach the roof, where a moonship is preparing to lift off:

I like the concept of a ship that sails through the air, powered by the light of the moon.  They manage to get over the gunwales before the craft escapes, and Nightmaster discovers that Jan is aboard:

They battle some enchanted warriors, who cannot be defeated, and thus they are forced back to the rails of the ship:

Very nice bit of sequential art there.  The story ends with the moonship sailing away, much to Nightmaster's frustration:

The combination of two of comics' brightest young talents certainly improved things over the previous issue.  This one is not quite perfect, but there are more than a few glimmers of potential that could have resulted in something special had the series been given the time to percolate and develop an audience.  Unfortunately, DC was under rising pressure due to the inflation of the late 1960s (in fact, this was the last 12-cent issue for Showcase) and so had no inclination to wait to see if this series would sell long-term.  Given the success that Marvel had with Conan the Barbarian only a year later, it seems quite likely that Nightmaster could have turned into a winner.

A bit of trivia here: Do you know the last series that Showcase launched into its own book?  It was Windy and Willy, which debuted one issue before Nightmaster.  Can you guess why?  Well, my guess is because DC recycled the old Many Loves of Dobie Gillis series for that comic (with only a few changes to update hairstyles and fashions), and thus it was cheaper to produce than a comic that required new stories and art.

Showcase #82: DC Beats Marvel to Sword and Sorcery

As the 1960s drew to a close, DC found that the superhero genre was waning and began casting about for something to replace it. In fact, the last superhero comic launched by DC's Showcase title was the Hawk and the Dove in #75.

The timing for a sword and sorcery feature was excellent.  JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, initially published in 1954-55, had grown in popularity and become phenomenally successful in the late 1960s.  In addition, the Conan tales of Robert E. Howard had been reprinted by Lancer/Ace Books in 1966-67, to strong sales.

Better still, DC assigned a pretty good creative team to the series, with Denny O'Neill, soon to be considered one of the best young writers in comics, teamed up with accomplished penciller Jerry Grandinetti and Hall of Fame inker Dick Giordano.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters, O'Neill or his editor (Murray Boltinoff) decided to make the lead character a rock star:

Yes, adolescents and teens were fascinated by rock stars.  But real rock stars, with real hits, not some make-believe guitarist.  Note that the band, despite being called The Electrics, appear to be an acoustic band; that stand-up bass would not work in an electric band.  Also note that the story is told in the second person.  Although this is supposed to be more immediate, I always found it distancing.  Sorry, guys, but that is not me.

After the obligatory fight with some audience members who appear to be fraternity fascists (very common in the hippie Greenwich Village scene where the story opens), Jim Rook and his girlfriend Janet decide to check out the new restaurant:

And before you can say "John Carter" they are transported to another world, another dimension.

Now that part, I don't mind at all.  It doesn't fit with the Lord of the Rings or Conan, both of which featured characters living in their normal reality, but it does give us a lead character (like Carter) who is as baffled with this new world as we are.

As you can see, Grandinetti just doesn't have the style for the fantasy genre, unlike, for example, Joe Kubert, who did the terrific cover for this issue.

Jim meets a gnome king who explains that he has been summoned to this world because he is a descendent of a warrior from that world known as "Nacht" (German for night).  Nacht and another warrior named Brom had been given weapons of incredible power by some earlier king.  But Brom betrayed the king and it was only through Nacht's great courage that an attempted coup d'etat by him and Farben the Wizard was foiled.  However, Farben had banished Nacht to Earth and the battle between the Wizards and the gnomes (who had originally been human-like, but shriveled under the magical onslaught) had raged ever since.  Only recently had the gnomes been able to open up the dimensional portal and bring Jim into their world.  Can he save them from the final battle?

Well, despite insisting that he doesn't know swordplay, he picks up the weapon of power and before you know it, he's smiting like the dickens:

But when the fight is over, he wants to return to his own world, with his fiancee.

So now he must fight his way to the fair maiden, which requires an initial stop at the Ice Witch, who has the password.  He, and his mildly insane guide, Boz, try to make it to the top of her castle:

And once there, they surprisingly find Jan:

As you can probably guess, Boz has the right read on Jan; she's the Ice Witch herself.  They obtain the password, and it's on to the Wizards' stronghold to free Jim's girlfriend.  To be continued....

Comments:  There are some elements that work here, and some that fail.  Although I am an admirer of Grandinetti's artwork on the war comics, here he flounders.  Ah, but in the next issue, guess who took up the reins? But that, my friends, is where this post leaves off, and the next one will begin.

The First Underground Comics?

DC was able to launch several series in the early 1960s featuring characters without super-powers. Sea Devils, Challengers of the Unknown, and Rip Hunter all had decent runs before giving up the ghost by the end of the decade. But there were several pilots whose chute failed to open, including this one.

Cave Carson was certainly given a chance to succeed; his tryouts spanned eight issues or about 200 pages. That's longer than some characters that did get their own mags, like the Hawk and the Dove or Anthro.

Cave's crew consisted initially of Bulldozer Smith, a former sandhog (underground tunnel expert) and Christie Madison, a geologist (yet another early 1960s DC female character in a non-traditional woman's occupation). Looking at that lineup, you can see the one item missing in the standard foursome as exemplified by the Fantastic Four, Rip Hunter and the Sea Devils. Smart guy (Cave), strong guy (Bulldozer), woman (Christie), but no kid. The team would expand in later stories to include Lena, a pet lemur, and Johnny Blake, Cave's swaggering rival for Christie's affections.

The story begins with Cave trapped below the surface of the Earth. Via a flashback, we learn that Cave had gone down there to investigate some mysterious occurrences. A giant metal tower and some train cars had been sucked down into the ground. He left his two assistants behind to finish work on the Mighty Mole:

Fantastic modes of transportation were pretty standard in the Silver Age, from the Batmobile to the Arrowcar to the Pogo Plane to the Metal Men's flying platform. Kids are fascinated by unusual vehicles and the Mighty Moles' likely prototype was the Hillman car, a 1960s amphibious craft:

Christie and Bulldozer have completed the Mole and bore into the ground looking for Cave, whom they find trapped under some freight cars. After rescuing him, they learn of the cause of the mysterious occurrences:

And from there, the story has them chased from the magnetic monster to a giant lizard to the lava monster shown on the cover, then back to the magnetic monster who destroys the lava monster before being defeated by Cave and the Mole:

The story is standard early 1960s DC, with monsters and more monsters; Bruno Premiani's art is the main redeeming feature. Jack Schiff was the editor for the first five (Brave & Bold) tryout issues, and the stories feature his steady recipe of monsters and aliens.

Things do improve a bit when the series was given further shots in Showcase #48, 49 and 52. There is some character development and hints of depth in this sequence from #48:

By this point Murray Boltinoff was the editor, with Lee Elias on the artwork and Bob Haney handling the plot and dialog. Although I am not a fan of Haney's work on the Brave and the Bold and Teen Titans, he does a decent job here of making the characters more three-dimensional. He adds what would appear to be a long-term villain here:

But although the series improved quite a bit under the new creative team, it was not a hit with the youngsters of the 1960s and save for a few cameo appearances, Cave Carson has largely vanished. I recommend the Showcase issues as worth reading.

Update: An anonymous commenter points to the Pellucidar series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which Abner Perry invents the Iron Mole, a craft that takes him to a world at the Earth's core. This is obviously the inspiration for the Mighty Mole, although the latter does have an amphibious quality that I cannot find in ERB's creation.

Showcase #6: Challengers of the Unknown

Jack Kirby had created a few memorable series for DC in the Golden Age, including the Boy Commandos and the Newsboy Legion, before moving back over to Timely/Atlas. For awhile in the later 1950s he worked again for DC, creating the Challengers of the Unknown, who quickly graduated to their own long-running series.

As the story begins, four men are winging their way towards a radio program. Rocky Davis is an Olympic wrestling champion, Prof Haley is a master skin (scuba) diver, Red Ryan is a circus daredevil, and Ace Morgan is a war hero and fearless jet pilot. However, their plane runs into some rough weather, and:

Despite Ace's efforts, the plane crashes. Miraculously the four men emerge from the wreckage uninjured. Red notices that even his watch is still working, and Ace comments that the men are "living on borrowed time". This phrase becomes the signature of the Challengers series. Figuring that they should be dead anyway, the four men decide to band together and take risks that nobody else would. And in short order, they become famous for their daring.

They fly to northern Canada, where they are greated by a mysterious man named Morelian. He's obviously quite wealthy, having had a castle disassembled brick by brick in Europe and brought to North America and reassembled. Morelian reveals that he's a descendant of the original Merlin, and that he too dabbles in black magic. He explains their task:

It is obvious that danger awaits within the box, or else Morelian would open it himself. The Challengers confer:

They decide to open the box on a deserted island, to minimize the risk to humanity, and settle on a small isle near the Bikini Islands. An aside: Did you know that the name of the bikini swimsuit was based on a pun? From Wikipedia:

Bikini Island is well-known for being the subject of nuclear bomb tests, and because the bikini swimsuit was named after the island in 1946. The two-piece swimsuit was introduced within days of the first nuclear test on the atoll, and the name of the island was in the news. Introduced just weeks after the one-piece "Atome" was widely advertised as the "smallest bathing suit in the world", it was said that the bikini "split the atome".

Rocky gets first crack at the box. The Challengers' safety precautions are not exactly impressive:

Inside the first chamber, Rocky discovers a giant egg. Translating from Ancient Greek, Prof reveals that an inscription says something about a dragon seed. Ace speculates that this may have something to do with the Greek legend of Cadmus, who supposedly planted dragon's teeth in the ground and grew a crop of fighting men. The men decide to let Prof continue attempting to translate the innscription, while they break for the night. But while they are sleeping, the egg begins to crack open.
They discover the egg has opened and a giant has emerged, which grabs Red:

Ace and Prof fly off in pursuit of the giant, leaving Rocky behind to safeguard the box. But Rocky finds the temptation to open another chamber irresistible. As Prof machine-guns the giant, it lets Red go in frustration. He's picked up in a lifeboat of a ship that had been abandoned when the giant came upon it. The men on the lifeboat row Red to the island where the box is located. Red discovers Rocky frozen on the ground. As he explores the island, he discovers:

Red tricks it into following him:

He slips out the side, then seals the sun inside, trapping it.

Meanwhile, Prof figures out how to defeat the giant:

Despite the great dangers they have barely defeated, the Challengers are determined to open the final two chambers of the box. The third chamber contains a "whirling weaver" which quickly spins a cocoon around Ace, then takes off for the mainland. When the Challengers follow, they discover the weaver has already hit Australia:

Note that atypically for DC in this era, a real city is named. Prof notes that there's a dial on the container that held the weaver, and deduces that it's actually a control device. With the weaver under their power, the Challengers head back to the island, where they discover Morelian has already arrived:

But when he flies away, his plane suddenly veers out of control and crashes into the box, killing Morelian and destroying the box. The Challengers realize that the box itself granted immortality, not the ring.

Comments: An interesting and entertaining story. Kirby's art still looks like his Golden Age work, and not like the Silver Age style he made famous. It's notable that the story is broken into five "chapters". This was unusual for comics in the Silver Age; about the only other comic series that had that same format was the early Fantastic Four (which Kirby also drew and plotted).

Oddities: At one point, Rocky is referred to as "Rod" by Prof. And it seems unusual that there is no real villain per se in the story; although Morelian is clearly something of a strange duck, there's none of the usual "Bwahahaha, you fools, you have given me the key to eternal life! Now I shall kill you!"

Showcase #8

This was the great unknown comic. DC reprinted stories like crazy in the 1960s and 1970s, especially Flash Comics, which joined their annuals rotation in 1963. And yet somehow the two stories in this issue were not reprinted until the 1990s, although one of them featured the first appearance of Captain Cold, one of the more significant villains in Flash's Rogue's Gallery. (Correction: As pointed out in the comments by Robert McKinney, DC reprinted the Captain Cold appearance in Limited Collector's Edition #C-39 in 1975.)

Reading it makes it pretty obvious why Julius Schwartz and DC's various reprint editors kept the issue under wraps during the 1960s. The first story, Secret of the Empty Box, while clever, has some obvious problems with the Silver Age Flash. It starts off with Barry late (as usual) for a date with Iris. But he's got a good excuse; a small girl has lost her ring down a storm drain:

Okay, given that it became accepted that the Flash could vibrate his way through anything (including dimensions), that's problematic. The story itself features three magician brothers whom the Flash defeats one at a time as they pop out of the Empty Box of the title:

The story has some interesting aspects, but there's also considerable DC silliness. For example, at one point Barry decides to change into his secret identity of the Flash in one of those old-fashioned "photograph yourself" booths. The sleazy owner thinks he's gotten the golden ring with Flash's secret identity, but:

Uh, if you can change faster than 1/100,000th of a second, why bother ducking into a booth?

The second story, is the Coldest Man on Earth, definitely one of those stories that I craved in the 1960s. Captain Cold was a strong contender for best Flash villain in the Silver Age. I preferred the Reverse Flash, but you could argue that CC was Dr Octopus to Professor Zoom's Green Goblin; the villain who seemed like the top enemy as the Silver Age ended.

Captain Cold pulls off a daring robbery in broad daylight:

The Flash attempts to stop him, but:

In a flashback, we learn that Len Snart was an ambitious criminal who searched for a way to defeat the Flash. This was helpfully supplied by a scientific magazine:

And when he accidentally invents a cold ray, we get this amusing moment:

I absolutely love the idea of the villain trying out nicknames for himself. Further experiments reveal to Captain Cold that he can create illusions from his ray gun, which he uses against the Flash:

But:

And of course, the Flash ends the fight shortly thereafter.

Comments: The first appearance of Captain Cold demonstrates nothing of the characteristic he became noted for in the Silver Age: his desire to impress women. It's another significant negative to the story.

However, there is another three-page story in that issue, that I suspect will not see the light of day again. Not that it's a bad story by any means, it's just not part of the Flash saga. The story is entitled, "The Race of Wheel and Keel," and tells of a race:

So, New York to SF around South America versus St. Louis to SF through "Indian Country," is the basic premise. As you would expect, there are issues:

But eventually the stagecoach defeated the ship anyway, establishing the need for transcontinental travel rather than going around South America. The protagonist of the story is John Butterfield. Despite a somewhat less adventurous life than shown in this story, he did establish the companies that became American Express and Wells Fargo.

Overall, I can see why Showcase #8 remained under wraps for so long. Although the stories are not terrible by any means, they are inconvenient in several ways, since they reveal the way Schwartz and his writers were still experimenting with the character when this issue came out (in May-June 1957).

The stories in Showcase #8 and many other Flash tales are reprinted in:

Single Issue Review: Showcase #41

DC had good success relaunching some of their Golden Age superhero characters in the early 1960s, so it was only natural that they'd try the same treatment with some of their sci-fi heroes as well.

Tommy Tomorrow debuted in 1947 in the pages of Real Fact Comics #6, which at least puts in doubt the trustworthiness of the title, because of course his adventures were completely fictional. After a few appearances in that magazine, Tommy got a big break, being promoted to Action Comics with #127. I'd have to look around to be sure, but I believe that he replaced Hayfoot Henry.

At any rate, TT held down the fort at Action for a long time indeed, finally being bumped to make room for Supergirl in Action #252. Ironically, for most of his run, Tommy Tomorrow was drawn by the man who would go on to fame as Supergirl's first major artist, Jim Mooney.

Tommy moved over to World's Finest with issue #102 and lasted for another 23 adventures ending in #124; Aquaman coming over from Detective bumped him, and for the first time in 15 years TT had no home in the DC Universe.

The story begins as Tommy is a lowly cadet at Planeteer Academy, the West Point of the Solar System. In an early test, Tommy apparently pulls out the wrong gun by accident when facing the dragonlike creature shown on the cover. But he later discovers that he was "accidentally" issued two of the same gun, and none of the one he needed. Tommy also meets Lon Vurian, the spoiled son of the commander of the Venusian forces.

In another test, Tommy mistakenly takes water rather than forasic acid into a test chamber. Or did he?



One night, Tommy observes Vurian fiddling with Tommy's controller for a test the following day. But when he accuses the young Venusian, he's embarrassed as the techs test the controls and discover them to have been recently repaired but working fine.

Despite those errors, Tommy is tied with Vurian at the end of the semester for best student. It will all come down to a war game, with the two young men in charge of their respective teams. But there is a revolt in the ranks:



After they land on an asteroid tasked to locate a powerful gem, Tomorrow's men mutter sarcastically that he has probably already sabotaged the other team. Sure enough Vurian's directional finder isn't working. Meanwhile Tommy's team has encountered another problem:



But the young cadet figures out that he can use the local version of giraffes to cross the stream. Meanwhile the Blue team has prepared an obstacle for Tommy's men. They broadcast them about the directional finder, which is the last straw for the Red team, who now refuse to help TT. But Tommy is determined to succeed and eventually he breaks into the chamber where the gem was being held, only to discover Vurian entering from the other side, and the gem missing.

It turns out that Lo Duey, a Martian cadet had been sabotaging both teams, with his goal to steal the powerful gem. He blasts off before the cadets can get back to the ship, but he does cause Tommy and Lon Vurian to join forces:



The gem grants its owner invulnerability when the gem is exposed to the sun. They track down Lo Duey and almost catch him when the sun goes down on a planet where he's stealing something from a hydrogen generator plant. Unfortunately, it looks like Lon Vurian gets killed:



Lo Duey's plan is to create two miniature suns orbiting around Venus so that his powers will work permanently. But Tommy Tomorrow has figured out a plan to get rid of the suns:



And Lon survived the collapse of the lighthouse, so it's a happy ending all around.

Comments: I really like the story in this one, particularly the part where they stop to check the viscosity of the stream. I guessed that Lo Duey was the real villain early on, although mostly it was the usual "Okay, they introduce this guy early on and then don't do anything with him for the next 11 pages, so he must secretly be the baddie." Lee Elias provides the art, in a style very reminiscent of Milt Caniff. About the only major negative to the story is that there are no women; the Planeteers apppears to be a males-only bastion.