But here, then, another batch of oft-repeated comic cover idea from DC Comics, with the occasional offering from Marvel. Let's start with ...
LION'S-HEAD REVISITED
Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, DC's dark overlord Mort Weisinger struggled to know what to do with the omnipotent character Superman had become. So he manufactured a whole supporting mythology around DC's superstar hero - Kandor, The Phantom Zone, Red Kryptonite, and so on - and made exposure of Superman's secret identity the single biggest threat to the character. Oh, and weird transformations.Of course there's only so many transformations Superman can undergo, so it's inevitable that occasionally we'd get repeats. Like having his head replaced with a lion's. 'Cos that really believable, right? Action Comics 243 (Aug 1958) presented a tale in which Superman turns down an impulsive marriage proposal from the descendent of Greek sorceress Circe and is punished by being transformed into a human lion. Turns out Circe's technology is Kryptonian and Otto Binder and Wayne Boring's tale tries, a little unsuccessfully, to mine a "Beauty and the Beast" theme. Five years later, DC offered a sequel, sort of, in Superman 165 (Nov 1963). This later story, by Robert Bernstein and Curt Swan, takes the core idea and reworks it. But some of the references to the earlier tale don't quite fit the facts, and it turns out to be another Mort Weisinger hoax tale and not an actual appearance by the real Circe at all. Such was the way of early 1960s Superman Family titles.
LET'S GIVE THEM A BIG HAND
Another widespread cover concept was the "Giant Hand from Nowhere". This oddball cliche turned up on many DC fantasy covers during the early Silver Age, but also - with a slightly different spin - on some later Silver Age Marvel covers.Titles like My Greatest Adventure and Strange Adventures presented mild horror and science fiction tales in which square-jawed Earthmen combatted the oddest threats from inner space, outer space and other dimensions. More than once, these menaces were big hands from Elsewhere ... sometimes attached to a giant, sometimes not.
Sometimes the horror wasn't mild enough. Back in 1956, a year or two into the rule of the Comics Code Authority, Stan Lee tried his own take of the giant hand story. It was cover-featured on Astonishing 50 (Jun 1956). The Code deemed the cover too horrific for young impressionable minds and insisted that the giant arm be given a suit sleeve and a wristwatch ... because that's much less frightening, right? Even if the scene on the cover had appeared in the actual story, the Code revisions would have been rendered even more nonsensical as this was supposed to the giant arm of a jungle native.
Later on in the 1960s, the giant hands showed no signs of going away. DC comics continued to feature the occasional giant hand and Marvel too used the idea, although in a more symbolic way.
By the time we got to 1966, Superman was going through a bit of a rocky patch. Doubtless there were reasons why Weisinger brought back artists like Wayne Boring and Al Plastino to draw the lead Superman feature in Action Comics, but even to my 12 year eye, their respective drawing styles seemed to belong to the previous decade. The front cover image is almost certain to be a Weisinger idea that apprentice scripter Jim Shooter had to write a story around. It's not very good. The Spider-Man cover is deliberately misleading. The story would have us believe Spider-Man has been shrunk to six inches tall by Mysterio. But anyone who knows the villain would realise he's former special effects guy, so it's unlikely that Spider has really been miniaturised.
ALIEN BIRDMEN
OK this one's a bit of a cheat, because both examples are by the same artist ... the brilliant Gil Kane. No one typified the house style at DC better than Kane. Always at his best when paired with slick inkers, like Joe Giella and Murphy Anderson, Kane had a bit of a blind spot when it came to aliens.These birdman examples are typical of Kane's goofiness. I thought the idea of giant hawks with human heads battling a man with a hawk's head in Hawkman 18 (Feb 1967) a far more intriguing idea.
HIKING HIGH-RISES
Who wouldn't be captured by the thought of a building that just ups and strolls around? Certainly not comics readers. The idea must've worked for DC, because they used the concept more than once.The first time was on the cover of Strange Adventures 72 (Sep 1956) for a story by John Broome and Sid Greene that has aliens giving a movie producer a preview of their invasion plans. So spectacularly daft was the idea that Mort Weisinger pilfered it a year later and reworked the whole Living Building thing into a Superman cover for Action Comics 234 (Nov 1957).
GORILLA TACTICS
One of DC Editor Julius Schwartz's favourite gimmicks was the intelligent gorilla. Obviously, he had some kind or research or intelligence that "proved" to him that gorillas on the covers of comics sold. Or maybe he just monitored the sales and drew that conclusion for himself. Whatever the reason, it seemed that every other Strange Adventures cover featured a smart ape.The earliest appearance I could find was Strange Adventures 8 (May 1951). Legend has it that Schwartz put a gorilla on the cover and Publisher Irwin Donenfeld was delighted at the bump in sales. He asked Schwartz to repeat the idea. Pretty soon, all the DC editors wanted to put gorillas on their covers, and Donenfeld had to limit them to one gorilla per month. It's a great story, but the evidence doesn't really bear it out.
There are a few gorilla covers on other DC comics of the early 1950s, but it was on Strange Adventures that the idea would crop up again and again, then abruptly stopped around 1960. The variations on a theme would include intelligent gorillas, criminal gorillas, intelligent criminal gorillas and technologically advanced gorillas. Had gorillas suddenly become old hat? Had they stopped selling comics? Or was Schwartz just fed up with them?
Well, not quite ... Schwartz would give the idea another try in his revived superhero titles of the late 1950s, pitting The Flash against the super-intelligent gorilla, Grodd, but as the second half of the 1960s swung around, the idea seemed to completely fall out of favour and disappear.
Even if Julius Schartz was tired of gorillas, they did crop up in some of Mort Weisinger's titles right through into the late 1960s. Never really one for sophistication, Weisinger would often use gorillas, or people changing into gorillas, as comedy relief.
We'd also see the occasional super-gorilla. The first super-ape was yet another survivor from Krypton, who'd landed on Earth as a baby and was brought up by kindly gorillas in the African jungle. As he grew up, Supergorilla became protector of the animals and was eventually relocated to a distant uninhabited world - along with other surviving supergorillas from Krypton ... then never heard from again. A couple of years later, Superman discovered another supergorilla, this one a giant about 15 feet tall. The creature turns out to be a Kryptonian scientist, accidentally turned into a gorilla. The cover scene - with the supergorilla dressed in Superman's costume makes for a great cover image, but doesn't actually appear in the story.
Not all super-powered gorillas disappeared into obscurity. One notable exception was the King Kong swipe Titano, who was twenty feet tall and had kryptonite vision. Not technically a gorilla, but a chimp grown to monstrous size by cosmic rays, Titano also (miraculously) had kryptonite vision, which of course he menaces Superman with. Superman renders him harmless and dumps him in the Jurassic era. A year and a half later, Titano is back and causing trouble in Metropolis again. Once more, Superman carts the ape back through the time barrier to live with the prehistoric monsters, just like King Kong.
Gorillas also turned up in such unlikely titles as Wonder Woman, Batman, and even in a later Julie Schwartz-edited Detective Comics, issue 339 (May 1965). The Gardner Fox-Carmine Infantino story has an amateur scientist accidentally give a gorilla human intellect and the creature goes on a crime rampage in Gotham City.
Just what it was about gorillas that captured young reader's imagination, I couldn't really say. It wasn't a particular draw for me at that age ... though I have a nostalgic fondness for The Flash's several battles with Gorilla Grodd, and thought Gorilla City was a pretty cool concept. But other than that, the over-use of the idea just seemed a bit silly to me.
Julie Schwartz comes up with a great idea - a winged gorilla - then milks it for all it's worth, having several of them as the antagonists in Hawkman 6 (Feb 1965) and 16 (Oct 1966). |
CAGED IN
Another common image used in early Silver Age comics is that of a human in a cage. Again, the pioneer of this concept was DC editor Julius Schwartz. He'd visit this theme often in the fantasy comics of the mid-1950s, like Strange Adventures, then revive the concept for his early 1960s super-hero books.His friend and colleague Mort Weisinger would also exploit the idea on a number of Superman family titles, from Superman to Legion of Superheroes. Superman in particular would frequently find himself locked in a cage.
Sometimes, it would be a kryptonite cage because, after all, no normal steel cage is going to hold the Man of Steel. And sometimes it would be some other kind of kryptonite-powered deathtrap. The early Legion story in Adventure Comics 267 (Dec 1959) exploits the common feeling of alienation, and has Superboy turned on by his friends, the Legion of Superheroes. Of course, it's all a misunderstanding, and Superboy hasn't really turned into a criminal.
The cover for Superman 160 (Apr 1963) and the very similar Action Comics 377 (Jun 1969) both have a caged Superman being executed by criminals. |
Of course, other DC heroes would find themselves in cages, too. Batman fell victim to a flying cage in Detective Comics 313 (Mar 1963), in a tale by veteran writer Dave Wood and mainstay Batman artist Sheldon Moldoff. These daft Batman tales would shortly give way to the sleek revamp by Schwartz and Infantino. The locking up of Lightning Lad in a cage is the result of another misunderstanding. In Hawkman 3 (Aug 1964), Hawkman and Hawkgirl are caged for their own protection by a "super-intelligent alien bird".
THAT ABOUT COVERS IT
If you think I've unfairly singled out DC Comics for this cornucopia of cannibalised covers, then I can only respond that they were by far the worst culprits of the practice. There's nothing wrong with recycling ideas, I guess, if you're convinced your audience turns over every few years, and you consider publishing comics a business rather than an artform.But I think that goes to the heart of why DC saw their fortunes decline during the 1960s and upstart Marvel start upwards. Stan said at the time he was creating stories for Marvel that he would find entertaining himself. So he figured, Why abandon your readership every five years when you can just keep them and make the kind of comics they'll like just as much when they're 16 as they did when they were 11.
But DC never quite grasped how they were going wrong and even tried to "DC-ise" Kirby's Fourth World books without even realising what they were doing. And that pretty much sums up why I stopped reading DC comics around 1965 when I was ten and switched almost exclusively to Marvels.
Next: Weird One-shots
The thing about Marvel keeping its readers eventually backfired to an extent, I think, Al, in that as the readers aged, they wanted the comics to age with them. By that I mean they wanted the characters to reflect their own lives at whatever various stages they were at, which led to Spider-Man eventually getting married, etc. If you're 10 or 12 years old, you can relate to Peter Parker finding it difficult to get a girlfriend, and being mocked by his classmates. However, once Peter has a supermodel for a girlfriend or wife, and is popular with his friends and colleagues, not many kids relate to that, despite the superpowers. Older readers can, but I think comics were better when they appealed to all ages (kids, teenagers, and some adults) rather than when older readers who became writers were embarrassed by comics and tried to make them more 'mature' to avoid them being seen as publications for mere juveniles. Hey, I'm a juvenile (at least when it comes to comics) and proud of it.
ReplyDeleteThat's all true, Kid ... but we also have to remember that Stan wasn't designing concepts that would last for 40 years. He was just trying to fill his comics with content that he would no longer be ashamed of. The fact that the characters did last 40 years - and more - is what caused the backfire. Victims of their own success ... at least from an Artistic point of view. But you can't argue with the commercial success, even if the result isn't to your - or my - taste. Still we'll always have the glory years of 1961 to 1971 ...
DeleteCertainly can't argue with the commercial success, Al, and victims of their own success is the best way to put it. They were so good that readers didn't want to move on from them as they got older, which was a first. Just a shame that kids got forgotten about along the way though. At least I've still got the facsimile editions, Epic collections, and Omnibus editions to fall back on - plus the original issues I'm lucky enough to have of the classic stories.
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