My Top Ten DCs of the Early 1960s: Part 1

BEFORE I DISCOVERED MARVEL COMICS, way back in the early 1960s, I confess that I was a regular user of DC Comics. It's not something I'm proud of, but the first step to recovery is admitting there's a problem, right?

By the mid-sixties, I was a confirmed Marvel fan, but there's still a few DC Comics that I look back on fondly as a sort of guilty pleasure. And to make matters worse, most of the DCs in my Top Ten were hatched under the baleful eye of DC's Dark Overlord, Mort Weisinger. But in my own defence, I was about nine when I was reading this stuff ...

Here they are ... my Top Ten most fondly-remembered DC stories from the years before I became a confirmed Marvel fan. And I'm not necessarily referring to the cover stories. Intrigued? Read on ... Click image to enlarge.

Let me stress that I'm not saying these are the best National had to offer, just a list of DCs that still resonate with me - on an emotional level - more than 50 years later. If you want a list of The Best, then you'll need to look elsewhere. No "Flash of Two Worlds", "Robin Dies at Dawn" or "Superman Red, Superman Blue" here. I never "got" The Doom Patrol. I don't wish Jack Kirby had stayed on Challengers of the Unknown. And the war stories of Joe Kubert and Russ Heath completely passed me by.

I think it's safe to say that these three are about the best DC stories of the early 1960s. Except, they're not my favourites. In fact, I don't think I ever read these stories at the time, with the possible exception of the Superman one. My tastes ran to some slightly more esoteric choices.

Over the course of a year or two - from 1964 to 1966 or so - I read fewer and fewer DCs and more and more Marvels, so by the back end of 1966 I'd pretty much left DC behind, returning only briefly around 1968 when a flurry of interesting comics drawn by Steve Ditko and edited by Dick Giordano caught my attention.

The DC Archives are expensive, but beautifully produced. By contrast, the DC Showcase Presents series is cheap and cheerful and contains hours of reading material for a reasonable cost. Some DC material from the period doesn't hold up well - especially disappointing was Volume 4 of the World's Finest series that had some dreadful stories by Dennis O'Neill and Jim Shooter and unappealing art by Andru and Esposito.

More recently, I've been seeking out inexpensive DC Showcase Presents volumes, and discovering that a great deal of DCs 1960s output was pretty terrible - whatever you do, stay away from DC Showcase Presents World's Finest Vol 4, some of the worst dreck ever. But I also came across a few stories that instantly returned me to those hazy days of the early 1960s, where school holidays went on forever and the sun always shone ...

So here, then - after a great deal of consideration and research - a handful of my absolute favourite DC tales of that early Silver Age period.

10. WORLD'S FINEST 133 - "BEASTS OF THE SUPERNATURAL"

I have no recollection of where I bought this comic back in 1963, or whatever happened to it. I was certainly one of my first DCs and probably my first World's Finest.

Back in the early 1960s, comics that featured team-ups of heroes were few and far between. One of the longest-running exceptions was World's Finest, which began running Superman-Batman team-up tales back in issue 71 (Jul 1954). Nearly ten years later, I came across a copy of World's Finest 133 (May 1963), which featured a rare magical foe for Superman and Batman, "Beasts of the Supernatural".

Yes, the monsters seem especially goofy, but as an impressionable eight-year old, I thought they were pretty scary at the time. Though I wouldn't have known it in 1963, the whole set-up has the feel of an HP Lovecraft story, just not as well done.

Written by Editor Jack Schiff and drawn by the always reliable Jim Mooney, the story tells how an new radio telescope designed by Prof Bowles to gather radio waves from the constellation of Scorpio is unveiled to the public. Present are Clark (Superman) Kent, in his role as reporter for the Daily Planet, and Batman and Robin. It's not something that bothered me at the time, but my adult self senses some lazy plotting - there is absolutely no reason for the Dynamic Duo to be present. It's just so Schiff doesn't have to have Superman summon them later in the story. But why carp ... that's just how they wrote comics back then.

The proceedings are interrupted when a Dr Gault rushes forward to warn everyone that they're tampering with Occult powers. The disgraced scientist explains to Clark that a sorcerer Jazub once banished three supernatural monsters to the constellation of Scorpio, and Dr Gault fears that the radio telescope will release the creatures on Earth. And he'd be right.

Superman dispatches the first monster pretty quickly, after all this is only a 13-page story. Meanwhile, Batman and Robin are tackling a weird spikey crystal monster. Force doesn't work, as shattering the crystal creature in to pieces just produces five crystal creatures. Acting on a hunch, Batman has Robin ring the town's church bell and the vibrations reduce the crystal monsters to dust.

Once again, it's Batman who figures out what's going on. The monsters are genuine enough, but their reasons for being on Earth aren't. The bluff played out on the evil Dr Gault seemed pretty smart to me when I first read the story. Not for nothing is Batman called the World's Greatest Detective.

Batman and Superman then try to enlist Dr Gault's aid to get rid of the monsters. Gault thinks his computer may be able to recreate Jazub's original spell. Satisfied, Batman sets off in search of Prof Bowles, and arrives just in time to see him menaced by the magenta tornado creature. Even Superman can't stop the monster. Only when Bowles' fiancee Norah throws herself in front of Bowles is disaster averted. The creature suddenly skedaddles. This gives Batman the clue he needs, and in a cunningly contrived denouement, Batman forces Dr Gault to reveal his nefarious intentions ... to appear to be banishing the beasts he himself called forth, winning the admiration and gratitude of Norah and the world. These were simpler times, after all.

I think what I remember most about this story - and others like it at the time - was just how goofy the designs of the monsters were. And it's not just poor old Jim Mooney. There were other DC artists who were just as incapable of drawing a decent monster. For example, while I was reading some DC Showcase Presents volumes recently, I came across another monster design that was uncannily similar to the Crystal Creatures in "Beasts of the Supernatural". 

Left: World's Finest 133 - Crystal creatures that resemble sea-mines threaten Batman and Robin in a story scripted by editor Jack Schiff and Drawn by Jim Mooney. Right: World's Finest 108 - Spherical spikey critters that also resemble sea-mines menace Batman and Robin in a story written by Jerry Coleman and Drawn by Dick Sprang.

In World's Finest 108 (Mar 1960), which also pitted Superman and Batman against oddball otherworldly monsters, there were spikey globe monsters that also menaced Batman and Robin ... this time drawn by Dick Sprang. Coincidence? Editor Jack Schiff designing the monsters himself and handling sketches to the artists to follow? We'll never know.

The Green Arrow stories by Lee Elias and the Aquaman tales by the brilliant Ramona Fradon were always a welcome bonus in these old World's Finest Comics. Even after all this time, the sight of these b-features gave me a surge of nostalgic deja-vu.

The other point that struck me while flicking through the pages of World's Finest 133 was how familiar the backup stories seemed to me. I have a clear memory of the splash page of the Green Arrow story. The giant burrowing machine that smashes through the walls of the Arrowcave brought back a flood of memories, and I was struck by how similar that machine was to another DC Comics machine I'd seen recently from the same era (see "Outcasts of Infinity", JLA 25, Feb 1964).

As much as I wanted that first issue of Metal Men, I also really wanted to read the Brave and the Bold issue featuring the boxing "Strange Sports" story. Which was weird, because as a kid, I was never really much interested in sports.

And the house ads in that issue ... how I wanted that Metal Men comic. Just the title - "Rain of the Missile Men" - and the desperate situation depicted on the cover - made me long for that comic more than anything. I never did find a copy, though, and it would be another fifty years before I'd read that story in my Metal Men Archives Volume 1. But it's just not the same thing as having the comic, is it? As gorgeous as the Archives are, they don't have the house ads, the letters pages, or the ads for "204 Revolutionary War Soldiers" ...

Did anyone else desperately want to own these impossibly exotic toys? Even at "$1.98" - whatever that was in real money - they seemed like an incredible bargain. I'm sure the reality was a lot different. I've seen reports that the "Polaris Submarine" that "sat two kids" was actually a cardboard box.

Even at this point, World's Finest, and the Batman titles in general, were floundering. Probably because of stories that were filled with daft aliens and ever-more implausible situations. Within a year, the title would be taken from Schiff and handed to DC's Dark Overlord Mort Weisinger. Weisinger would get rid of the revolving door of writers and dispense with the services of Jim Mooney, instead commissioning stories from Ed Hamilton and art from Curt Swann and George Klein. The Green Arrow and Aquaman back-up tales were also gone and instead the space was given over to reprints, a sure sign that costs were being cut.

9. HOUSE OF SECRETS 64 - "THE THREAT OF THE HORRIBLE HEX"

To my young and impressionable mind, there was a ghastly "authenticity" about the magic and the barn runes in this Mark Merlin story. As a child of about nine, this tale positively terrified me ... but in a good way.

That this comic is in my Top Ten is a bit unusual, in that it's not exactly a superhero story. My memory tells me that it was among the earliest DC Comics I ever read, but the cover date doesn't bear that out. By 1964, I would have been fully immersed in the Superman Family titles along with Flash and Green Lantern, so it seems strange to me now that I'd have been interested in a "horror comic". Yet, here it is.

"The Threat of the Horrible Hex" is a 12-page Mark Merlin story with a script by Arnold Drake and art by the great Mort Meskin. The character was created by Meskin and first appeared in House of Secrets 23 (Aug 1959), running for six years until HoS 73 (Jul 1965). The first few years' worth of stories went largely uncredited, but the consensus is that Jack Miller did most of the scripting. These earliest tales appeared to be science fiction-oriented, with lots of plots about alien creatures and other dimensions. Then, around issue 56 (Sep 1962), Editor Jack Schiff was off the book, so new editor Murray Boltinoff brought in Arnold Drake as writer, and the stories took on a more supernatural focus.

Mark Merlin was one of DC's few magician characters that merited their own series. In fact, the character headlined House of Secrets, both in his Mark Merlin and Prince Ra-Man reincarnation, through to issue 80 (Sep 1966), a run of seven years.

The story concerns some arcane symbols, painted on a Pennsylvania barn, that preserve the spirits of a trio of three hundred year-old sorcerers. Their curse threatens each generation of a local family on their 25th birthday. Mark Merlin is called in to help and magically takes on the curse himself. Thus, the scene is set for Mark Merlin to battle the malevolent spirits and deduce the secret of the symbols painted in the barn wall.

I think what creeped me out about this story when I was a kid was that the feel of it was sort of Authentic and Believable. What I couldn't know at the time was that such symbols were to be found painted on the walls of barns throughout the "Pennsylvania Dutch" region of the United States, and that they had a supernatural meaning to the locals.

This picture, from 1941, shows a barn in Oley Township, Pennsylvania, painted with hexes to ward off evil spirits. It's likely that the locals would have renewed the paint, as these hexes look pretty fresh for something that would have first been painted in the 17th Century.

There's also the magic spell that Mark Merlin chants when he's lifting the curse from the young victim. I'm sure it's just gibberish, but to this then-nine-year old it felt a great deal more real than the usual "backwards talking with the force am I" schtick used by Zatanna and other DC magicians.

Mark Merlin uses his magical powers of spell casting and levitation to battle the spirits of the long-dead sorcerers. But it's the sudden appearance of victim Henrietta Von Haltz's ancestor Josef that really brings victory (just a thought, but if they're supposed to be Dutch, shouldn't it be "Van Haltz"?)

Of course, our hero figures the whole thing out and is able to call forth the spirit of the girl-victim's ancestor to help battle the evil, sorcerous spirits and the day is saved, the victim is spared and everything ends in a splendid conflagration. And how about that cool house ad of Brave and the Bold 51 taking up the last third of the final story page?

But as big an impression as this made on me back in 1964, I never did follow-up and seek out other Mark Merlin adventures. Later, I would read and enjoy the works of HP Lovecraft, and recognise that there was more than a little of his ouevre mixed into Arnold Drake's Mark Merlin scripts ... not a bad thing, and it certainly gave this story a genuinely eldritch feel.

While Eclipso has never interested me as a character, the House of Secrets 63-67 stories featured the awesome art stylings of the legendary Alex Toth. From issue 68 on, the also-excellent Jack Sparling would take over, contributing a 13-issue run of deftly crafted tales.

There were other attractions in this issue of House of Secrets. The most obvious was the back-up strip, featuring Eclipso. I do recall that I read a few Eclipso stories back in the early 1960s and didn't especially like them. But these would have been the later episodes drawn by Jack Sparling. In any event, at the age of nine, I wasn't really in a position to understand just how good Alex Toth was. Heck, I couldn't even tell one artist from another at that age. And later on, when I did understand that sort of thing a bit better, I would even come to appreciate what a great craftsman Jack Sparling was.

There's also a couple of great house ads - a full page is given over to two 1964 annuals, Batman Annual 6 and Superman Annual 8 (both Win 1963-64), and there's a half page ad for Tomahawk 90 and Rip Hunter 18. Back then I was never really much interested in adventure comics like Rip Hunter, but the 80-page annuals were a different matter. I would spend many hours tracking down as many of those as I could afford. I'll be talking about Annuals when we get to Number 4 in the chart ...

8. ACTION 301 - "THE SECRET IDENTITY OF SUPER-HORSE"

It's only now, looking back, that I realise what a strange child I was. I never really liked DC's war comics. In fact, I can't recall ever reading one during the early 1960s. I much preferred the super-hero comics, especially Superboy, The Legion of Superheroes and Supergirl, possibly because they were closer to my own age. But reading those Supergirl stories now, they were clearly aimed at a female audience, with their focus on emotion rather than on action. In fact, they have a lot in common with the romance stories DC were publishing around the same time. And just in case we were in any doubt, editor Weisinger gave Supergirl a pony.

Action Comics 293 (Oct 1962) was the third appearance of Comet the Super-Horse. But reader reaction must have been positive for Weisinger to feature the creature on the front cover of the flagship DC title.

Comet the Super-Horse had a bit of a shaky start, as though DC weren't sure what to do with him. He first appeared, sort of unannounced in Adventure Comics 293 (Feb 1962), where he was enlisted by The Legion of Superheroes - along with the other super-pets - to battle some "Brain Globes" from outer space who could mentally control humans, but not animals. An editorial note helpfully tells readers that we are getting a glimpse into Supergirl's future life where she will have her own super-pony. That has to be every girl's dream, doesn't it?

Adventure Comics 293 would be the first time readers would see the Legion of Super-Pets, and also the first appearance of Super-Horse, not named as "Comet" at this stage.

But it would take quite a few months before Editor Weisinger would bring back Super-Horse, probably more due to the lag in production time than due to any sloth on the part of ol' Uncle Mort. I've noted before that initial sales figures on comics wouldn't be available until six months after the on-sale date so, given the timing, it looks like the next appearance was actually rushed into production.

The return of Super-horse was an elaborate, three-part epic in the back half of Action Comics, running from issues 292 to 294, quite an unusual move for DC at the time, as they rarely offered continuing stories. Full of ridiculous coincidences, prophetic dreams and alien invasions, the stories were a weird hybrid of girls' romance and superhero action.

Action Comics 292 (Sep 1962) gave us the Supergirl back-up story, "The Steed of Steel", and brought Kara and Comet together for the first time. The super-stallion merely appears to Supergirl in dreams for most of the story, though she notices the strange marking on his shoulder and names him Comet. But, towards the end of the tale, Linda Danvers visits a dude ranch with her parents and actually meets the real Comet, complete with the same strange markings as the super-horse in her dreams. It's the sort of implausible coincidence that most of the stories from the Weisinger machine were based on. Except that ... since Comet has telepathic powers, it was he who was planting the dreams of himself in Linda (Supergirl) Danver's head, as we would find out, next issue.

The extraordinary origin of Super-Horse is told in Action Comics 293 - a credulity-stretching tale of centaurs, ancient sorceresses and magic gone wrong. Just the sort of thing Mort Weisinger and his scripter Leo Dorfman excelled at. Artist Jim Mooney manages to tell the tall tale with his usual mixture of craftsmanship and dignity.

The story continues in the very next Supergirl adventure, "The Secret Origin of Supergirl's Super-Horse", in Action Comics 293 (Oct 1962). Starting with Linda Danvers and her parents still at the due ranch run by Mr Greede, Supergirl and Comet bond with a bit of shoe-ing and branding, then go for a ride where Comet reveals that he is both telepathic and formerly a centaur named Biron. As half-man half-horse, he admired the beautiful sorceress Circe from afar and one day chanced to save her life from a jealous rival. In gratitude, Circe had intended to transform Biron into a man, but the evil rival sorcerer messed with the potion and hapless Biron was instead changed into a horse. To try to make up for the error, Circe conferred the powers and immortality of the gods upon him. So it turns out that Comet is in fact thousands of years old and not Super in the Kryptonian sense. At the end of this second part, Comet is sold to a Hollywood animal trainer for a thousand dollars by Mr Greede, so we end on a bit of a cliff-hanger.

The epic adventure wraps up in the following issue of Action Comics when Comet, in his new career as a Hollywood super-star, loses his memory of Supergirl, and forgets he ever had super-powers. Nothing Supergirl does seems to restore Comet's memory and readers are left waiting for some future issue to resolve the dangling plot thread.

This odd mix of sorcery and sci-fi has Comet transformed into a man, and saving a non-powered Supergirl on the planet Zerox. The second half of the tale has Supergirl meeting Comet in his human form, as rodeo rider "Bronco Bill".

All of which is a long pre-amble into the actual subject of this chart entry. Action Comics 301 (Jun 1963), featuring the Supergirl supporting story, "The Secret Identity of Super-Horse". Comet had his memory returned in the previous issue, Action Comics 300, but I hadn't read that story back in 1963. And in fact, I hadn't known about Comet's amnesia until I did the research for this blog entry. Issue 301 is where I came in, and for some reason, the romantic nature of the tale appealed to me as a nine-year-old. The plot has Supergirl and Super-Horse despatched to the sorcery planet Zerox (yep!), to pay back an old debt to its ruler, Prince Endor. Under Zerox's red sun, Supergirl will have no powers, but as Comet will, she should be safe enough. The mission is successful and a grateful prince offers Comet his own choice of reward. Comet's wish is to be human. The Prince grants this, but only when a Comet is in the heavens will Super-Horse become an ordinary human. Back on Earth, Comet is transformed into a man by a handy passing comet, and decides to keep this part of his life secret from Supergirl. But Supergirl - led to a rodeo by friend Lena Thorul's ESP powers - fails to recognise "Bronco Bill" as Comet, despite a suspiciously similar "birthmark" on the man's shoulder.

Weisinger and his scripter Leo Dorfman managed to pack more plot into eleven and a half pages than most modern writers could squeeze into a year's worth of comics. It's not necessarily the best approach to creating comics, but at least readers got their 12 cents-worth.

Bill's uncanny abilities as a horseman earn him the title of "King of the Rodeo" and Supergirl is named Queen, leading to a ceremonial kiss between the two. Finally, after Supergirl has left, the comet finishes its pass of the Earth and Bill begins to transform back to a horse, momentarily appearing as a centaur. Despite being captured by rustlers, once fully back in his guise as Super-Horse, Comet easily escapes and when next they meet, Supergirl is none the wiser about Comet's extra ability.

Hokey though all this is, it's surprising to me that I remember this story some fifty-odd years after I read it. It stands out in my memory far better than the Superman tale that preceded it in this issue of Action Comics. In fact, reading the entire book again, I had no memory of the Superman story at all (something about Superman being on trial for murdering Clark Kent). 

"The Secret Identity of Super-Horse" wasn't the best tale to come out of the Weisinger stable, but a worthy number eight in my DC favourites chart.

7. SUPERBOY 98 - "THE BOY WITH ULTRA POWERS"

Though I'm including two covers here, the story that I will be covering in this section is the first one, the first appearance of Ultra Boy in Superboy 98 (Jul 1962). The cover on the right is the one I thought I'd be talking about.

It's funny how your memory can play tricks on you. I have a strong memory of the first time I saw Ultra Boy, later to be a key member of the Legion of Superheroes. It involved him travelling back to Smallville - sometime in the late 1940s from the look of the cars and the fashions - to discover the secret identity of Superboy. The story actually happened in Superboy 98 (Jul 1962), but before I did the research for this piece, I would have sworn up and down that the incident actually happened in Superboy 117 (Dec 1964), just because I remember that cover so well.

The plot of the story has Ultra Boy, and an older guy in a similar uniform, showing up in Smallville with the stated intent of discovering Superboy's secret identity. We're led to believe that the pair have some sinister intent. Also in the mix is Pete Ross, a schoolmate of Clark's who secretly knows Superboy's identity. That's pretty much it.

In Superboy 98, writer Jerry Siegel (probably with the blessing of Mort Weisinger) misleads readers into thinking that Ultra Boy has sinister intent when he declares his mission is to discover Superboy's secret identity. However, this also seems to be an error, as I believe Superboy/man's identity is a matter of historical record in the 30th Century. A cheat or a mistake ... you decide.

The main reason I remember the story so well is because I instantly liked Ultra Boy as a character, though he wasn't fully thought-out in this tale. Later, the writers would limit his powers by allowing him to only use them one at a time. That way, he wouldn't upstage Superboy. By the end of the 13 pages, it's revealed that Ultra Boy is undergoing his initiation test to join the Legion of Superheroes. Interestingly, Ultra Boy also figures out that Pete Ross is guarding Superboy's secret, and as a reward for being such a good friend, he's invited to join the Legion as an honorary member. In later issues of Adventure Comics, we'd see Pete attending meetings. Yet Superboy never questions his presence. I don't know whether that plot-hole was ever resolved.

"Now remember ... whatever you do, DON'T mention that I'm secretly Superboy. Got that?" A slightly odd example of discontinuity in Superboy 117, where Ultra Boy and all his Legion chums seem to already know Superboy's big secret.

The other possible error is that in the later Ultra Boy story, in Superboy 117 - also written by Jerry Siegel - we see Superboy cheerily wave to his Legion friends, admonishing them to be careful not to give away his secret identity. It's possible that a Legion story established this over in Adventure Comics, between the two Superboy tales, but I'm just now re-reading those Legion stories and I didn't notice any mention of Superboy revealing his Clark Kent persona to the Legionaires, so I'm assuming it's taught in school history lessons in the 30th Century.

Nonetheless, an entertaining example of Silver Age silliness from the House of Weisinger, despite the cavalier approach to continuity.

6. ADVENTURE 306 - "THE LEGION OF SUBSTITUTE HEROES"

For some reason, this story really resonated with me. Because I was a bit nerdy and read "horror comics", a certain contingent of my classmates went out of their way to make me feel like some sort of outcast ... not quite good enough to mix with regular folks. This would have been at primary school around this 1963 - 1964 period.

One of my favourite Legion of Super-Heroes tales ever was hidden in the back of Adventure Comics 306 as a back-up feature. Though it rated a mention on the cover, in my view it should have been the cover story.

So when I read this tale of a group of super-heroes who "weren't quite good enough" to be accepted into the mighty Legion, I immediately identified with them. The thing is, though ... I didn't think they were "not quite good enough" at all. In fact, I thought they had some pretty cool powers. So, there's:

• Polar Boy (billed as "Polar Lad" in error on the front cover) - has the power to lower the temperature and freeze stuff. He does pre-date The X-Men's Iceman by half a year, though Marvel takes quite a different approach to the idea.
• Night Girl - Ah, Night Girl. Readers of my earlier blog entries will know how I felt (and still feel) about girls with raven hair. But I digress. Night Girl has super-strength when not in contact with daylight.
• Fire Lad - Is able to breathe fire, so probably should have been called Dragon Lad. Doesn't rate a mention on the cover.
• Chlorophyll Kid - Has the ability to make plants grow super-fast.
• Stone Boy - Can turn his body to stone. Unfortunately, can't move when in that state.

The story - script by Ed Hamilton, art by John Forte - has a few hopefuls trying out for Legion membership, and all are rejected. A small group of the unsuccessful candidates meet outside the Legion clubhouse and decide to form their own Legion of Substitute Heroes, so they can help out when the Legion proper is not available.

There's a vibe going on with the Legion of Substitute Heroes that reminds me of the X-Men. They all outcasts, shunned by those they most want acceptance from. They both have a frosty guy and both the female members are the most powerful.

The Substitute Heroes monitor for disasters where they can step in, but Legion members always seem to get to the danger zone first. It's a disheartening experience. But when the main Legion is wrong-footed by alien invaders, the Substitutes manage to thwart a backdoor invasion of Earth without the Legion of Super-Heroes knowing they've been helped. The tale ends with the Substitutes watching and waving at the Legion's victory parade. It's a kind of strange ending. By working quietly in the background, and not taking any credit for fear of detracting from the fame and prestige of the original Legion, it makes the Substitutes appear to be better human beings than the Legion themselves.

In a later appearance, the Substitutes were offered another shot at Legion membership. Yet, by this time, their family bond was so strong, none would leave their comrades behind. That resonated with me, even as a nine-year-old, as being properly heroic. It made the actual Legion look bad, I thought.

The Legion of Substitute Heroes would return, first in Adventure Comics 311 (Aug 1963) and 313 (Oct 1963), then in Adventure 315 (Dec 1963), where they were once again allowed to try-out for The Legion. Only one made it, and they rejected The Legion's offer so they could remain with their Substitute chums. See what I mean about the Substitutes having more integrity than the actual Legion?

One of my favourite heroines of the early 1960s ... the incomparable Night Girl, far and away the best aspect of the Legion of Substitute Heroes.

A big plus for me during these early years of the Legion was the art of John Forte. Something of a figure of fun for some fans, because of his "stiff" figure drawing, I always thought it was Forte's art that made these early Legion stories. 

John Robert Forte Jr (pronounced "Fort") was born 6 Oct 1918 in Rockway Beach, Queens NY, and got in to comics in 1941, after a couple of years as a pulp illustrator, beginning with a few jobs for Timely, pencilling Destroyer stories in All-Winners 5 (Summer 1942) and Mystic 10 (Aug 1942). Later in 1942, Forte drew a few stories for Dell, before joining the US Army and serving in Europe for the duration. Honorably discharged in late 1945, with the Conspicuous Service Medal, he soon joined the Iger Studio, and started a long run on Fiction House titles, such as Jungle and Fight. Towards the end of the 1940s, Forte added Quality Comics to his client roster, also through the Iger Studio, contributing artwork to Modern Comics and Blackhawk. As the 1950s rolled round, Forte began to widen his horizons, selling artwork to Avon and Wanted Comics. In 1951 John Forte drew the newspaper comic strip, South Sea Girl, for Phoenix Features Syndicate.

Criticised by some fans for his curious "frozen" style of art, Forte was an accomplished and versatile artist, drawing romance, westerns and horror - as well as his better-known super-hero tales. Forte gave the early Legion of Super-Heroes a distinctive polished, and rather attractive, look. He drew especially gorgeous girls, probably due to his years of experience on romance titles for DC.

By 1953, Forte was working for Atlas/Marvel, drawing stories for a wide variety of Stan Lee's books - like Strange Tales, Uncanny Tales and Journey into Mystery. Quality went out of business in 1956, and Forte focused on drawing for Martin Goodman's Atlas Comics. But in 1957, the great Atlas Implosion meant that Forte had lost his most important customer. Barely missing a beat, Forte switched to DC, and began drawing romance tales, beginning with Girls' Love Stories, then progressing on to Heart Throbs and Secret Hearts. At the same time, Forte also began drawing for ACG on titles like Forbidden Worlds and Adventures into the Unknown. Forte toiled away on DC romances for over three years, augmenting his income selling a lot of material to second-tier publisher ACG. Then, in 1961, he got a break and was assigned a story by DC's Dark Overlord, Mort Weisinger, in Superman 143 (Feb 1961). Within a couple of months, Forte had his first regular DC gig ... Tales of Bizarro World, starting in Adventure Comics 285 (Jun 1961) and running to issue 299 (Aug 1962). But the cancellation of the series didn't bother Forte. The very next issue, he started as the regular artist on Legion of Superheroes, and continued to draw The Legion until his death from cancer on 2 May 1966. He was 47. His last Legion story was in Adventure Comics 339 (Dec 1965).

The Substitute Heroes would continue to appear, evolving with new members as it went, but for me, the original lineup was the best.

So ... once again, I've run out of time and space, so I'll need to leave the Top Five of my Ten Favourite DC Comics of the 1960s till next time.

Next: They just get better and better

Why were Silver Age Marvels so much better than Silver Age DCs?

SO ... IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1965, I had discovered Marvel Comics and thought they made DC Comics look like kids' stuff by comparison. But then I was ten years old and didn't have a clue why Marvel Comics seemed quite a bit more grown up. It's possible that now, almost fifty years later, and having worked as an editor in comics for something like fifteen years, I may have a better insight into why that might have been. But for the moment, I want to continue to retrace my first steps through my transition from a casual DC reader to a fully-formed Marvelite …

Now, this wasn't some kind of magical, overnight transformation. Through 1965, as I started to look for more of those cool Marvel Comics, I was still reading a smattering of DCs. In 1964, when I first discovered Marvel, one of the DCs that still stands out in my memory was an issue of World's Finest, issue 139, "The Ghost of Batman". It had one of those typical early Sixties DC covers that make you want to find out how this incredible scenario came about.

While we were happy to accept the idea of costumed superheroes, the concept of ghosts was plainly preposterous.

My mum had given me a shilling to get something to eat. I can't remember the exact details, but for some reason she wasn't going to be at home when I got back from school, and I was supposed to buy myself a snack to tide myself over until she could get home and cook the supper. Of course, I spent ninepence of that money on this issue of World's Finest, because I really wanted to know how Batman could be a ghost ... my mum was not best pleased when she found out.

The other thing I was noticing in 1965 was ... girls. Although I was only ten, I was beginning to notice that some girls were prettier than others. This held true in the comic stories I was reading too. Probably the first woman in comics that struck me as attractive was Star Sapphire from the Green Lantern books.

"Star Sapphire" was the amnesiac alter-ego
of Hal Jordan's fiancee Carol Ferris, whose hatred
for Green Lantern was in direct conflict with her
love for test pilot Jordan.

Clad in a fetching purple leotard, Star Sapphire was a persona thrust upon hapless Carol Ferris, love interest of Green Lantern's alter ego Hal Jordan, by a bunch of slinky intergalactic feminists, the Zamarons. They wanted Carol to be their Empress, but first she had to defeat Green Lantern.

Maybe it was because Gil Kane drew her as an elegant, raven-haired beauty that caught my attention. Or more likely it was because she was a good girl forced to be bad. I may have only been ten, but I had quite sophisticated tastes.

Another example of good girls going bad was in the Legion of Superheroes story "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires" in Adventure Comics 326. The premise was another of those Mort Weisinger covers that they'd evidently concocted before the story was written, then tried come up with an explanation for the ludicrous situation.

In the story inside, Superboy doesn't fly overhead, eavesdropping. If he had, maybe he would have thwarted the plot.

Legion stalwart John Forte wasn't the best artist in the DC stable, but that wasn't really the point. It was the depiction of the "good" girls of the legion using their - I'll say it - sexuality to trap the boy legionnaires that gave this story its frisson. And true to my form, it was the black-haired beauty Phantom Girl that I had eyes for. In the story, she takes Star Boy as her target and just when he thinks his luck's in ... it runs out.

So, the girls choose their targets and Phantom Girl goes after Star Boy ...

There's some shenanigans around an exploding poisonous plant which Phantom Girl avoids with her intangibility power, while Star Boy makes himself heavy and sinks into the ground.

Phantom Girl gets to gloat evilly, destroy Star Boy's statue with a handy bazooka (adding vandalism to her list of misdemeanours) then she and the rest of the girls have a party where they gyrate in a most salacious manner. Yep, I did enjoy a bad girl back then.

Meanwhile, back at Marvel Comics, they weren't really doing any stand-out female characters. At least, nothing I was aware of in early 1965. It's difficult for me to remember the exact timeline of which Marvels came next, and there's every likelihood I might get some of this stuff in the wrong order, but the next significant Marvel Comic I remember around this time was Fantastic Four 36, cover dated March 1965.

OK, Medusa was pretty bad, but no one could ever accuse Jack Kirby of drawing a sexy female character.

Again, where DC Comics were all primary colours, the Marvels of the same period used greys, purples and maroons. In later years I've often wondered about this. It doesn't make a great deal of sense for Stan to have had the covers - and in many cases, the interiors - of the comics he edited coloured in such a subdued palette. I'd have thought the idea would have been to make the comic books stand out on the racks, so that potential readers would notice the covers and pick up the book. This was the approach that DC Comics took. It wasn't until later, when I read about how Marvel Comics came to be distributed by Independent Distributors, owned by DC, that a possible explanation occurred to me.

A HISTORICAL ASIDE

During the 1950s, Marvel Comics was known as Atlas, named for the distribution company owned by Marvel publisher Marty Goodman (Stan Lee's uncle by marriage). At the time, Goodman was publishing an incredible 53 comic titles, covering every genre - war, western, horror, romance, humour, funny animal and jungle.

Strange Tales was one of the survivors of the great Atlas implosion of 1957 - not many other titles weathered that storm.

Goodman's Magazine Management was also publishing puzzle mags, "men's" magazines, movie and celebrity monthlies and humour publications. In 1956, for some undisclosed reason, Martin Goodman decided to close down Atlas News Company and get his publications to the customers through distribution giant American News Company.

Very soon afterwards ANC, which owned and operated newsstands as part of its distribution business, found itself on the wrong end of a Justice Department investigation. The Justice Department concluded the company was in violation of federal anti-trust laws and ordered it to divest itself of its retail outlets. The immediate effect was that the boss of industry giant Dell Publishing, George Delacorte, decided he would look elsewhere for distribution services. Faced with the loss of their biggest customer and the costs of maintaining massive real estate holdings in New Jersey, ANC liquidated the company. And Martin Goodman was in real trouble.

After shutting down Atlas and doing a deal with ANC, Magazine Management periodicals and Atlas comics would cost the wholesalers and retailers more. So when Goodman needed help, no one was in a hurry to step up. He had to go to his arch-rivals DC Comics and ask them if they would distribute his publications through their Independent News Distributors

DC and IND honcho Jack Liebowitz threw Goodman a lifeline and agreed to distribute his books for him, but only eight comics a month, for fear of diluting his own line of DC Comics. In the space of a few weeks, Atlas went from 53 titles to 16, all the staff except for Stan Lee were let go and Lee had to stop commissioning new material until further notice.

The fledgeling Marvel Comics limped along with its 16 titles, publishing war, romance and monster comics under this arrangement until 1961 when Stan Lee stuck a toe in the superhero pool and tried out Martin Goodman's answer to Jack Liebowitz's best-selling Justice League of America - The Fantastic Four. 

The DC comic covers were designed to be seen from a distance. Even at this size, you can pretty much see what's going on.

With Goodman's operation existing only by the grace of Liebowitz, the last thing he wanted to do was antagonise his distributor by horning in on DC's lucrative superhero comics line. So the earliest Fantastic Four comics featured lead characters who wore street clothes rather than costumes, while the comic itself appeared for all the world to be no different to Marvel's other monster books like Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales.

And Stan Lee's next superhero book The Incredible Hulk also looked very similar to Marvel's other monster titles. So it appears that Lee's plan was to keep his new projects under the radar of DC Comics, by deliberately staying away from the sleek, brightly coloured look of DC heroes like The Flash and Green Lantern.

Over the next 12 months, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko launched the foundation of the entire Marvel empire, building a solid following among readers and racking up sales. Before they knew what had happened Independent News had some major hits on their hands, so curbing Marvel Comics at that point would have made no business sense whatsoever.

AND BACK TO THE BLOG

So, for my introduction to The Fantastic Four I couldn't have picked a better issue than number 36. I had probably seen other issues of FF before this one, but this was the first that stood out in my memory. It was the start of a story that was to wind on for eight months until FF44. Other comics of the period, FF included up to this point, offered stories that lasted no more than a single issue. Many DC comics featured two or sometimes three stories in a single comic. For Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to run essentially the same storyline for 160 pages was unprecedented. Further than that, it sowed the seeds of the Inhumans saga that would kick off properly in FF44 and run on until FF47. This was heady stuff ...

FF36 introduced the mirror image of Reed Richards' family foursome - The Frightful Four. Their leader was The Wizard, a renegade scientist introduced in the earlier Human Torch solo story in Strange Tales 102. The second member of the evil FF was Paste Pot Pete, a comedy villain from Strange Tales 104. The third member was the Sandman. Originally a Spider-Man villain from Amazing Spider-Man 4, he turned up a couple of months later in Strange Tales 115, menacing ... The Human Torch. The fourth member was the mysterious and haughty Madame Medusa, a strange woman with weird living red hair. We'd find out more about her later.

The idea of villains being reverse versions of the heroes wasn't a new idea. DC Comics had been doing it for years. Flash had Professor Zoom, Green Lantern had Sinestro, Superman had Bizarro. But the Frightful Four were the opposite of the Fantastic Four in every way. The USP of the good FF was that they acted like real people. With the announcement of Reed and Sue's engagement that opens this issue, they were becoming a family. They had their differences and their arguments, but they still had each other's backs. The evil FF were just appalling characters. They clearly didn't like each other very much, they certainly didn't trust each other. They bickered and fought like Reed's team, but theirs was a mean-spirited bickering.

The Frightful Four are a pretty unpleasant people, boorish and aggressive ... Medusa ditched the dominatrix costume after issue 36 of Fantastic Four.

Lee and Kirby cleverly opened the story with scene of Reed's FF at home, starting with the engagement announcement. We see Ben and Johnny arguing good-naturedly, but when a package that may be a bomb is delivered, Ben uses his own body to shield the others from the explosion, though it turns out to be a practical joke by the Yancy Street Gang. Immediately, the scene switches to the evil FF meeting up. By contrast, Pete and the Sandman are at each other's throats straight away, before their fight is broken up by The Wizard. The stark difference between the two groups is jarring. We, the readers, know which group we'd rather be part of.

With the Fantastic Four, the team are supportive of each other and behave like a caring family ...

And the main plot hadn't even started ...

Around the same time, I picked a copy of Justice League of America 32 (Feb 1965) from a little newsagent on a street behind Woolwich Arsenal station. The Gardner Fox story in that comic, "Enemy from the Timeless World", was nothing like "Defeated by the Frightful Four". 

This Justice League adventure would have been one of the last I bought, so unfavourably did it compare to the Marvel Comics I'd started reading. Gardner Fox's script is squarely aimed at the non-discerning 10 year old ... and I considered myself very discerning by this age.

To begin with, there was none of the characterisation of the Marvel books in Fox's script. All the characters in JLA32 talked exactly alike. You could take any of the dialogue and put it any of the characters' mouths. Even in their own books, DC characters all talked alike. It was Stan Lee that pretty much created distinctive speech patterns for comics characters. And that was one of the magic ingredients that made Marvel's stories so different.

The other big difference between DC books like JLA32 and Lee's Marvel Comics was that the entirety of the Justice League story happened in a landscape that wasn't recognisable - a distorted version of the League Clubhouse, and there were no civilians to be seen. By contrast, all the Marvel books showed their characters constantly interacting with real people in a recognisable American cityscape, in the case of the FF ... New York.

THE VERY AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

For someone whose first exposure to US comics was the staid and starchy DC heroes, Lee and Ditko's Spider-Man was a revelation. It was completely unlike anything I'd seen before. I was familiar with Ditko's work and really liked it. His Marvel and Charlton stories were regularly reprinted in the British, black and white Alan Class comics. But Spider-Man was something altogether different.

The first issue I remember reading was Amazing Spider-Man 15. I must have swapped it with a friend, as it was quite a few months older than the other Marvel Comics I was picking up in the newsagents. The villain was unlike any other. For a start, he didn't actually commit any crimes. He just wanted to hunt the Most Dangerous Game - a man. Specifically a Spider-Man. Not realising he was being manipulated by dangerous spy, The Chameleon, one of Spider-Man's oldest enemies, he hunted and battled Spider-Man - more-or-less honourably - for the sheer sport of it.

Spider-Man's adversaries were a weird crowd and Kraven the Hunter was no different -
Ditko's design-sense here is exemplary.

But all that was a bit beside the point. The part of Spider-Man's stories that grabbed the readers - me included - was the way the super-hero Spider-Man managed to do really well, a sixteen year old kid defeating really menacing villains who would happily kill him, while his real-life persona Peter Parker messed up just about everything he did.

In this issue was the first mention of Mary-Jane Watson, as Aunt May tried fix her nephew up on a blind date with her friend's niece. But Peter is too busy trying to court Betty Brant, while fending off the sort-of-unwanted attentions of arch-rival Flash Thompson's girlfriend, Liz Allen. A tangled web, indeed.

Peter's Aunt May constantly worries about her nephew, because of how frail he is ...

Anyway, Betty's nose gets all out of joint when local airhead Liz Allen tries to make school bully Flash Thompson jealous by playing up to "Petey". She won't listen to his explanations and the issue ends with Pete unable to get a date with either girl. Even Mary-Jane begs off with a headache. Personally, I thought Betty was a bit high-maintenance ... which would turn out to be the case when I found out that in an earlier issue Betty blamed Spider-Man for the death of her criminal brother Bennett and berated Peter for being a thrill-seeker just like Spider-Man.

The issue closes with Peter's luck running true to form, all bad, as he fails to get a date with Betty, Liz or even the as-yet-unnamed Mary-Jane Watson.

In the next couple of months, I would read and save many more Fantastic Four and Spider-Man comics. But I hadn't forgotten the character that drew me to Marvel in the first place ... 

Before I turned my attentions seriously to collecting any Marvel Comics with Captain America in them, I had still to enjoy my first tastes of some of Marvel second-string characters. In my immediate future were my introductions to Daredevil, The X-Men and Dr Strange ...

Next: Exactly how many comics does Marvel publish anyway?