Separated at Birth 3 - more comic cover cliches

I LOVE COMIC BOOK COVERS, especially those of the 1950s and 1960s. And because I look at so many, I can't help but notice trends, tropes and cliches in the cover concepts of the decade of my childhood. By far the worst offender was DC Comics, the company that was my introduction to American comic books. But as they were firmly aimed at 10-year-olds, they can be forgiven for assuming readers in 1958 wouldn't be readers in 1963. For my part, I began switching over to Marvel Comics around 1964, and later back-filled the issues I'd missed, so I probably only followed DC for about three years.

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. 

As weird transformations go, sticking a lion's head on Superman is up there ... so much so that five years later, DC published a sequel. Because weirder is better. In a kind of cockeyed variation, Action Comics 240 (May 1958) gave us a (stone) lion with Superman's head.

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.

The stories behind the covers: though they appear very similar, the tales in these comics are quite different. In My Greatest Adventure 32 (May 1959) the hand from another dimension is just trying to retrieve its property and the destruction is collateral. In Strange Adventures 110 (Nov 1959), the hand belongs to a benign alien obsessed with saving an Earthman and the hand in Batman 146 (Mar 1962) is a hoax.

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.

The people who live in the Fantastic City are way too scary for readers of 1950s comics, so the Atlas production department altered Carl Burgos' art to put a business suit on arm of this giant denizen of the asian jungles. Somehow, the Alan Class reprint of this cover used the original, unaltered version, so we lucky comics historians get to see both the original and the re-touched art.

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.

The Action Comics cover fronts a Wayne Boring story about a giant robot, written by a young Jim Shooter. The Amazing Spider-Man cover scene is in the comic - they're also giant robotic hands. The Avengers cover is purely symbolic and isn't found in the story.

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.

The birdman alien on the cover of Strange Adventures 67 (Apr 1956) is by Gil Kane and Joe Giella and the birdman on the cover of Green Lantern 6 (May 1961) is by ... Gil Kane and Joe Giella. That's a pretty goofy background alien on the GL cover, too. But even though I was a confirmed Marvel fan by 1967, I still was able to admire Murphy Anderson's take on Hawkman.

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.

It seemed to be a pattern, didn't it? Julie Schwartz would come up with an outrageous science fiction concept for one of his fantasy titles, then a short time later Mort Weisinger would steal the idea for his line of Superman comics. I sure hope DC Publisher Irwin Donenfeld wasn't fooled by Weisinger's shenanigans. 

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.

Gorillas with human brains and intelligent gorillas would be a common concept in Schwartz's covers. In this series of three, the gorilla is restrained in a chair, which indicates to me that this is Julie recycling cover ideas.

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.

The idea of smart gorillas subjugating humans was a common trope in Strange Adventures, pre-dating 1963's Monkey Planet novel by Pierre Boulle, which would also form the basis for the cult 1960s movie, Planet of the Apes. 

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?

Criminal gorillas was another idea that would crop up more than once in Schwartz' fantasy titles, especially Strange Adventures. He liked the idea so much that he would use it in his later superhero titles as well.

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.

One of the best of the early Flash villains was Gorilla Grodd, a renegade from a race of super-intelligent gorillas living in an advanced city in the African jungles. The character would enjoy a long career in various DC comics and appeared in the live action Flash TV show in 2014. 1964's Doom Patrol 86 also featured a gorilla foe.

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.

In Adventure Comics 219 (Dec 1955), a gorilla chances to drink water contaminated with kryptonite and develops x-ray vision. Those kinds of coincidences were commonplace in Otto Binder stories. Later in life, Superman encountered more than one super-powered gorilla.

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. 

If you think Otto Binder's Titano stories are daft, try reading the E. Nelson Bridwell tale of Superboy and Beppo the super-monkey trading physical forms in the above masterpiece, Superboy 147 (Oct 1967).

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.

The Wonder Woman issue above was before the Andru & Esposito makeover of the the late 1950s, and is just too silly to describe, not helped by very crude Harry Peter art. The tale in Batman 114 (Mar 1958) has Batman team up with a smart circus ape to defeat the gang who robbed the circus.

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).

However, just when you think it can't get any dafter, DC gave us ... flying gorillas. Yes, back in 1961, Julius Schwartz had a story in Strange Adventures 125 about gorillas that sport wings and are stealing Earth's atmosphere. As might be expected, the aliens are defeated by a plucky, pipe-smoking scientist. Schwartz would remember the idea and re-tool it to provide a suitable enemy for Hawkman later in the 1960s. 

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.

The earliest example I found was this cover for Strange Adventures 23 (Aug 1952). It would appear eight years later on House of Mystery 102 (Sep 1960), and again on Mystery in Space 102 (Sep 1965), with Adam Strange locked up by hostile robots.

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.

It's probably a good idea to take Superman's powers away before you lock him in a cage. In the slightly daft Superboy story in issue 96, Pete Ross acquires superpowers and usurps Superboy's place in life. The much later Superman story has a double caged by Superman ... or is it the other way round?

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.

I sort of assume the bars of these cages aren't actually fashioned out of kryptonite. Surely, they'd be steel coated with kryptonite paint, wouldn't they? Does anyone know how strong kryptonite is? Should it be indestructible like Superman and therefore completely impossible to carve? Do you actually care?

In Detective Comics 313 Batman is trapped in a cage by criminals when he steps onto a giant record player. Adventure Comics 321 (Jun 1964) shows Lightning Lad locked up in a cage for apprently betraying Legion secrets to their arch-enemy The Time Trapper, but the trap is Lightning Lad's. And The Hawk family are put in a cage by a well-meaning alien when it thinks the heroes are being hunted 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

Separated at Birth 2 - another comic covers interlude

HERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE LIGHT-HEARTED than my more recent posts ... another look at the many tropes, cliches and chestnuts that show up over and over again in the cover designs of our favourite comics. I'd barely scratched the surface of this subject on one of my very early entries in this blog, so I'm giving the subject another outing.

I should clarify that Marvel and DC comics took quite a different approach to how they created their covers. DC had always traditionally created their covers first, often using the idea behind a "grabby" cover to drive the plot of the story inside the comic. Both Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz took this approach with the DC books they edited. Marvel, though, did exactly the opposite, creating their covers after the interior art was completed. This meant that Marvel would often create symbolic covers that might not illustrate a scene from the story inside. But you'll see what I'm getting at as we go along ...

IDENTICAL TWINS

I think it's fair to say that Julie Schwartz was the king of recycling when it came to re-using old cover ideas. During his run as editor of DC's revived superhero titles, he'd regularly plunder the cover gallery of his 1950s science fiction comics for ideas.

Uncanny, isn't it? It's almost as though Schwartz was cynically re-using cover ideas from the previous decade, wasn't it? "Ah, what the hell ... the kids'll never know." Click image to enlarge.

The above 1960s cover concepts are absolutely identical to their 1950s antecedents ... but this is hardly unusual in the comics industry.

CLOSELY RELATED

It wasn't just Schwartz who liked to dredge up old ideas and trot them out for further airings. DC's Dark Overlord Mort Weisinger also loved the economy of using an old idea instead of thinking up a new one.

As before, the top row is the copycat covers and the lower row is their original inspiration. You could argue that the Jimmy Olsen 110 infinity cover is an homage to the 1946 Superman 38 cover ... but who except for the editor and artist would have known that?

Here's a bunch of Superman Family covers enjoying a second roll of the dice. The Superboy covers are just 18 months apart.

MARVEL MIMICRY

I wouldn't want you, dear reader, to presume I'm picking on DC as unprincipled purveyors of parallel portrayals. Marvel have also displayed ill-judged moments of imitation - admittedly, not as many, though.

Is this deliberate? How would John Romita, Gil Kane and Sal Buscema all manage to draw a comic cover featuring The Tarantula in pretty much identical poses? It's a mystery to me.

The first few times Spider-Man villain The Tarantula appeared on Marvel covers, it might have seemed as though the production department were just sticking the same drawing of the character against slightly different yellow backgrounds. But those really are different covers by three different artists.

Over on the Hulk comic, iconic portrayer of the Angry Green One, Herb Trimpe ("rhymes with blimpy"), produced a run of covers that were ... well, pretty much the same, really.

Is it Herb Trimpe who loves a low-angle shot? Or might Stan have been telling him that this point-of-view makes for more powerful covers? It's striking how similar these covers are ... they could almost be different drafts of the same cover.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of Trimpe's work, and of course, it may not be poor ol' Herb who's to blame for the sameness of the above covers. It could be that Trimpe was being given cover direction by Stan ... but it's interesting that the first seven covers of the Hulk's 1968 run - by Marie Severin - all show The Hulk much larger on the page than the Trimpe covers that followed.

See? Marie Severin, who was pinch-hitting for Stan as Marvel's in-house corrections artist and was also laying out covers before John Romita took on the role officially, took quite a different approach from Herb Trimpe on how her covers looked.

Researching hundreds of covers to this blog entry, I was struck by how some themes kept coming up. It's as though certain types of subject matter call out to comics editors ... "use me, use me!" Here's some of the more common ones.

YOU SHOULDA PUT A RING ON IT

I have no idea whether Mort Weisinger was a fight fan, but he sure used a lot of boxing and wrestling themed covers on the Superman family books.

Look at this collection of ringside covers ... whether it's Jimmy Olsen getting KOed, or Jimmy knocking Superman out. Or Superman being beaten up by unlikely antagonists, they all share a certain sameness. You'll never see anything like this on a Marvel cover.

I would guess that Weisinger's thought process was, "Two boxers on a comic cover is dull. Put a superhero in a boxing ring, that's interesting." Having heroes in unusual but slightly mundane situations was a constant theme in DC covers from the 1940s right the way through to the 1970s. There were other examples ...

Superheroes in a boxing ring? I can't imagine Marvel would ever
dream of going down that route, would you?

THEY OUGHT TO BE LOCKED UP

Something else Weisinger liked to do was to lock his heroes up in jail. It's astonishing that he didn't add a speech balloon to this type of cover to have Superman say, "Aw, not again!" Here's a small selection of just some of the convict Superman covers I was able to uncover ...

A lot of the time, it was Clark Kent banged up so as to reveal his secret identity (incidentally, I never understood how it was that people even realised Superman had a secret identity. He must've told them, right?) Sometimes, it was Superman imprisoned, taken for a criminal. The World's Finest 156 cover with the bizarros freeing the Joker I included because it's just so goofy.

But it wasn't just Superman who found himself wrongly (or rightly) imprisoned. Other DC superheroes also got in on the act.

"I'm innocent, I tell you. Innocent!" In all fairness, it should only take Batman about ten seconds or so to free himself from a standard jail cell. So why were we so worried?

OK, mostly Batman ... but you get the idea.

DC GIANTS - BUT NOT 80-PAGE

Another common DC cliche is turning their characters into giants. It happened so often that you wondered why any of the supporting characters might be surprised. 

Ooh, a giant Batman in a Giant Batman comic. This was a reprint of Detective 243 from 1957 in which Batman became a giant. Later in Batman 177 (Dec 1965) he became ... a giant. Jimmy Olsen also became a giant in JO 53 (Jun 1961), in a cover that looks awfully close to a cover of the pulp Thrilling Wonder Stories, merely a remarkable coincidence, I'm sure. A very similar image also showed up on the cover of Superboy 30 (Jan 1954). What are the odds?

I think the idea started out in Julie Schwatrz's old DC mystery stories of the 1950s, then somehow made its way into the Weiseinger edited superhero titles during the Sixties. These covers must've sold books, or they wouldn't have done them ...

GIANT-SIZE MARVELS

Over at Marvel Comics, Stan avoided all the DC-style body dysmorphia madness, though he did like covers that depicted his characters as giants, just in a metaphorical way. So you'd often have the huge figure of Doctor Doom towering menacingly over the Fantastic Four, or Magneto and his Evil Whatchamacallems looming threateningly over The X-Men. But that didn't mean that they were actual giants, okay?

The trope of showing characters, especially villains, as giants on the covers of Marvel Comics was started by Jack Kirby. Perhaps this was some kind of hangover from all those monster covers he drew for Strange Tales and Amazing Adventures. The thing is, we kids knew that Dr Doom and the Mandarin weren't actually 50 foot tall ...

This trend would continue throughout the 1960s and even into the 1970s, though once Stan was no longer involved in the day-to-day running of Marvel, the figuratively colossal characters tailed away. And strangely, it wasn't really a look that DC went for. The closest I could find to this was in an old Justice League cover which is almost - but not quite - depicting the characters as giants for dramatic effect.

... and though Kirby might have started the trend, it continued with other artists, so we'd get giant Spider-Men as well as big villains. Look how similar that later Avengers cover is to the Justice League artwork below it. And how about those two brilliant Steranko covers on the right hand side?

Here's a whole other bunch of cover tropes that loomed large during my favourite period of comic ... The Silver Age.

CATALOGUE OF CLICHES

That's right, there are many different themes for comic covers that would crop up more than once. Because of the way DC worked - identifying ideas that they knew would sell books, then building their stories around that - it was more frequent to experience deja vu if you were a DC reader. Stan did it too, as we've seen, but was strangely less formulaic with his covers than you might imagine, given the notorious lack of imagination on the part of his publisher Marty Goodman.

Still ... try some of these out for size.

Holy gurgle: Batman enjoyed this deadly water trap in Batman 166 (Sep 1964) so much that he tried it out again just four years later in Batman 207 (Dec 1968).

Up periscope: It's a a pretty arresting image, so it's not too much of an assumption to suggest that cover artist on Sub-Mariner 11 (Mar 1969) Gene Colan may have - consciously or unconsciously - swiped Jack Burnley's cover idea from Superman 23 (Jul 1943).

Gone fishing: As a kid, I hated fishing. Yet I clearly recall that the House of Mystery 94 on the right is the very first American comic I ever saw on a newsagent's counter some time during 1960. My mum wouldn't buy it for me.

Between Two Worlds: This is unusual. More often the superhero comic borrows an idea from an old mystery title. This time it's the other way round. The Adam Strange cover on Mystery in Space 82 is dated March 1963. The Strange Adventures 181 is October 1965. Weird couple of worlds, isn't it?

I'm a Robot: Here's one so odd, you wonder why DC used it twice. You wake up one morning and find that you're a robot. It first turned up on Action Comics 282 (Nov 1961) and returned on Green Lantern 36 (Apr 1965). Maybe an unconscious acknowledgement of body dysmorphia?

I have literally dozens more examples of comic covers that were separated at birth, more than enough for an additional post, so I think I'll leave the rest for another time.

Next: Something Inhuman this way Comes ...

Silver Age DCs: Robin the Boy Bystander

I was going to do an overview of Marvel's Thor, starting from the earliest days of the Journey into Mystery issues, for October's blog entry, but having the builders in the house has meant my scanner is packed away, which was a bit of a roadblock. So I've decided to offer a pictorial special instead.

Back in the early days of my obsession with comics, before I stumbled across Marvel's titles, I was a reader of Batman and Superman comics. Looking back on those early 1960s DC covers I've noticed some weird tropes and trends. One of the oddest was Sheldon Moldoff's ever-present drawings of "Scaredy-Robin". Nearly every cover of Detective Comics from 1959 to 1963 had a profile image of Robin, apparently frozen in terror at the situation depicted on the cover.

Sheldon Moldoff's trademark Robin portrait found its way onto too many Detective and Batman covers at the beginning of the 1960s.

Why this was is anyone's guess. Perhaps it was Moldoff's way of quickly demonstrating to readers that Batman was in terrible peril. Or maybe the artist had a rubber stamp of that Robin drawing. Whatever the reason, the gimmick got pretty old and disappeared when DC revamped Batman in 1964, and the old, goofy sci-fi stories were out, and Carmine Infantino's sleek crimefighter was in.

So enjoy these crazy covers from a time when DC's Batman was more clown than crusader.

1940s

Probably just a coincidence, but the earliest example of Scaredy Robin I could find was from a 1945 issue of Batman. The art was pencilled by Jack Burnley and inked by Charles Paris, who would be a staple inker of the Batman titles right through to the early 1960s.

Batman 28 (Apr 1945) was the first appearance of Scardey Robin, though the image wouldn't become a trope for another 13 years, when Sheldon Moldoff made the image his own.

1950s

We wouldn't see that image on another Batman cover for another 13 years, this time by ... Sheldon Moldoff. Batman 116 (Jun 1958) was one of those classic goofy covers that had Batman and Robin threatened by Bat People on an alien planet.

Here's Robin again, completely useless in the face of a weird threat on a weirder planet. You'd think the queen would be more concerned with the attacking Bat People than she would about the restrained Batman and Robin.

Less than 18 months later, Moldoff again put a scared Robin on a Detective Comics cover. This time the menace was a weird old hermit who projects electric bolts from his fingertips.

"The Hermit of Mystery Island", Detective Comics 274 (Dec 1959), was another of DC's crazy concept covers, that featured Shelly Moldoff's oddly stilted figure drawing. And there's Robin, gauntletted hand frozen halfway to his mouth, being completely useless.

Once the Sixties kicked in, Moldoff, often inked by Paris, cut loose and added Scaredy Robin to just about every cover he could.

WHO THE HECK IS SHELDON MOLDOFF?

Shelly Moldoff was born in Manhattan, New York on 14 Apr 1920, though he was raised in the Bronx, living in the same apartment block as Bernard Bailey who, himself would go on to a stellar career as a DC Comics artist. "I was drawing in chalk on the sidewalk," said Moldoff told Alter Ego magazine in 2000, "Popeye and Betty Boop and other popular cartoons of the day—and he came by and looked at it and said, 'Hey, do you want to learn how to draw cartoons?' I said, 'Yes!' He said, 'Come on, I'll show you how to draw.'"

Sheldon Moldoff pictured during his 1940s heyday.

By the age of 17, Moldoff had begun making money out of his art. "My first work in comic books was doing filler pages for Vincent Sullivan, who was the editor at National Periodicals." This would have been 1937, before National, Detective Comics (DC) and All-American merged to form DC-National Publications. Within a year or two, Moldoff was contributing covers to DC, including the cover of All-American 16 (Jul 1940), the first appearance of Green Lantern.

Though Green Lantern was created by Martin Nodell, with Bill Finger, Moldoff was selected to draw the first cover appearance of the character.

Moldoff would create Black Pirate for Action Comics, but found his natural home when he took over Hawkman from series creator Dennis Neville with Flash Comics 4 (Apr 1940), at the instigation of publisher Max Gaines, and repaid his boss by creating Hawkgirl.

Hawkman's girlfriend Shiera first appeared in a Hawk costume in All-Star Comics 5 (Jun-Jul 1941), but wouldn't officially become Hawkgirl until Flash Comics 24 (Dec 1941).

Though he'd been contributing many covers to DC, he didn't draw his first Hawkman cover until four months into his run. The wings look more like fur than feathers, but the Alex Raymond style is quite apparent.

"Max Gaines took a shine to me ... He's the one who said, 'We're going to put you on Hawkman, and do whatever you want with it. Do a good job; I know you can do it." And that was it! ... But when I looked at Hawkman and read a couple of stories, I said to myself, 'This has to be done in an Alex Raymond style.' I could just feel it ... I'd saved the Raymond Flash Gordon Sunday pages and the dailies for years! ... Gaines liked my style; he liked the realism ... I spent a lot of time on it. I had books on anatomy and shadows and wrinkles; I studied, and I worked very hard on it, and I think it showed."

Pretty quickly, Hawkman became the co-star of Flash Comics, featuring on
more-or-less alternating covers of the series.

Hawkman also became a mainstay of the Justice Society of America, starring is his own chapters in All Star Comics, also drawn by Moldoff.

Shelly Moldoff was one of DC's principle artists until 1944, when he was called up for military service. By the time he returned to civilian life in 1946, his mentor/sponsor had departed DC and set up Educational Comics. So Moldoff rejoined his old boss and created Moon Girl, with DC stalwart Gardner Fox.

Sheldon Moldoff created Moon Girl for Max Gaines at EC Comics. The first couple of issues featured covers by Johnny Craig, even though all the interior art was by Moldoff. This one is the first by Moldoff.

But it all went wrong at EC after Max died and is son Bill Gaines took over. Sheldon Moldoff created the format of the EC horror comics, designing horror hosts for the books, on the understanding that Gaines Jr would pay him a royalty on the books. But Bill reneged and there was an acrimonious split.

A couple of years later, after jobbing for companies like Fawcett and Standard, Moldoff joined the Batman team at DC, ghosting in Bob Kane's style on both the Batman comics and Detective. In fact, it was Moldoff's art that defined the look of the Batman titles during the 1950s, creating Batwoman, Bat-Mite and Ace the Bat Hound. 

"I worked for Bob Kane as a ghost from '53 to '67," Moldoff told Alter Ego magazine. "DC didn't know that I was involved; that was the handshake agreement I had with Bob: 'You do the work, don't say anything, Shelly, and you've got steady work'. No, he didn't pay great, but it was steady work, it was security. I knew that we had to do a minimum of 350 to 360 pages a year. Also, I was doing other work at the same time for [editors] Jack Schiff and Murray Boltinoff at DC. They didn't know I was working on Batman for Bob ... So I was busy. Between the two, I never had a dull year, which is the compensation I got for being Bob's ghost, for keeping myself anonymous."

Even after the Julie Schwartz revamp of the character in Detective Comics 327 (May 1964) and Batman 164 (Jun 1964), Moldoff would continue to pencil Batman stories, ghosting for Bob Kane. In fact, Moldoff also drew the cover for the first revamped Batman issue, though in a much more Infantino-esque style.

DC fired Moldoff in 1967, along with Superman stalwarts Wayne Boring and George Papp - presumably because they were "old-fashioned". Moldoff turned to storyboarding animation for TV and worked on Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse. He also produced promotional comics for the Burger King, Big Boy and Red Lobster restaurant chains. He returned to DC thirty years later to draw a segment for Superman and Batman: World's Funnest in 2000.

1960s

As 1960 kicked in, Moldoff was drawing all the covers and much of the insides of the Batman titles. And in even more of those covers, there was that same illustration, in that same pose - sometimes close-up, sometimes in long-shot - of Robin looking scared and useless.

These Shelly Moldoff covers, published in the early part of 1960, all included Robin in that characteristic pose.

The first half of 1960 gave us three examples. The second half gave us six. It was though Shelly was warming to the idea and wanting to include it on every cover he reasonably could, without raising the ire of editor Jack Schiff.

It did seem that Robin's sole role in these old Batman tales was to react fearfully
to whatever situation Batman found himself in. 

What was curious during this period was that Moldoff's art had become stiff and posed. Where his Hawkman art of the 1940s looked for all the world like it was produced by the Alex Raymond studio, this Sixties art was curiously stilted and lacking in any kind of flow.

These comics were published in October and November of 1960 ... all show Robin in that same pose, all facing to the left, whether in close-up or long-shot. What could Moldoff have been thinking?

Moldoff had mentioned that the page rate for this material wasn't great, so perhaps he was knocking it out as quickly as possible. Or perhaps he was consciously imitating Bob Kane's stiff figure drawing. But whatever the reason, the look certainly defined a particular era of the character.

Between January and April 1961, Scaredy Robin made three appearances. 

The following year brought a  bumper crop of these trademark Robin figures. There were nine of those pesky images included in the Batman titles that year. Just three appeared in the first quarter of the year. The rest featured on Batman covers in the latter part.

Here he is again, reacting to the situation instead of being part of it. It's like the editors thought of Robin as a Damsel in Distress instead of being an active part of the dynamic duo. These covers appeared from August to December 1961.

1963 was Moldoff's last great shout on the Batman titles. Almost as if he knew the countdown had started, he pulled out all the stops and managed to squeeze his trademark Robin image into another seven covers that year.

Another gaggle of goofy early Sixties Batman covers, covering the first half of 1963 ... a catalogue of bizarre aliens, 5th Dimension imps and freakish Batman transformations, all with Robin facing to the right.

But the writing was on the wall for this bizarre era in Batman's career. Sales had been dropping steadily since the late 1950s and the DC bigwigs were giving serious consideration to cancelling the Batman titles. However, they decided to give the character one last shot. Julius Schwartz, who had successfully rebooted the Golden Age characters Flash and Green Lantern - with sleek modern makeovers - to a firm financial footing was drafted in to solve Batman's problems.

The tail end of 1963 would see the end of the space rockets and the whacky Batman transformations. And not a moment too soon. DC's management were unhappy with the sales and were hinting that the character could be consigned to limbo.

Out were the hokey Batman family - Batwoman & Batgirl, Bat Mite and Bathound - the aliens and their planets, and the weird transformations of Batman. In came standard crooks, death-traps and a polished New Look, courtesy of Carmine Infantino.

Though Moldoff wasn't quite out the door - he'd last another three years - he would have to abandon mimicking Bob Kane's style and follow the Infantino template to bring more a fluid grace to Batman.

"Robin Dies at Dawn" in Batman 156 (Jun 1963) was an uncharacteristic break from the hokey claptrap on either side of it, a fondly-remembered masterpiece by the great Bill Finger.

And though it's very easy to mock the naivety of these comics today, they weren't without their charm. There was even the odd classic story. And, of course, in 1966, the fortunes of the character were transformed by that TV show, and once again Batman (898,470 per issue) was a top-selling title for DC, even outstripping his stablemate Superman (719,976 per issue) in sales for 1966.

How differently things might have turned out had Julius Schwartz not turned the fortunes of Batman and Detective Comics around in 1964.

Next: Marvel goes mythical (promise!)