My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around March 5, 1981.
Justice League of America #191: As established in previous issues, Zatanna is losing her powers, so she calls on the Atom or help. Why he was the guy to call, I don't know, but let's just go with it. Suddenly though, all the members of the JLA begin to experience the loss of power. The culprit is Amazo, reactivated against his will by the Key, who's stealing the Leagues energies for his own use and to cure the Key of his freakish dwarf body state. In the end, Zatanna shows compassion and cures the Key with some of her magic. She reveals to the Atom her power loss wasn't caused by the Key and is apparently permanent.
Not a bad issue, but it leaves me with the impression the whole "Zatanna is losing her powers" bit was all just a means by which Conway could reduce her powers, perhaps because he buys into the whole "magic is too powerful because it can do anything" idea that shows up in comics fandom and writers from time to time.
New Teen Titans #8: This is a Claremontian :each character does their own thing and deals with their own stuff" slice of life sort of issue. Starfire starts modeling jeans with Donna Troy as her photographer, and we meet Donna's beau, Terry. Cyborg meets some kids with prosthetics at the park and plays ball them. It's all pretty well-paced and well-done. With this sort of story, I can see how New Teen Titans developed the reputation it did for being different and better than a lot of comics in its era. This sort of thing is common place now, and it devolved into soap opera at best and treading water at worst in X-men from late era Claremont on. But this is 1981 not '91, and it feels fairly fresh.
Secrets of Haunted House #37: The cover story by Wessler, von Eeden and Smith has a tipi-dwelling (in the modern day) Native American shaman using magic to turn the tables on an unscrupulous developer bent on murder. A bit better is the story by Charlie Seegar and Barretto/Colletta where a conman charms an old widow but not her adopted daughter. In the end, he discovers his bride is really a pet canary transformed into the semblance of the demonic young girl's deceased caregiver. The girl transforms the conman into a bird, too, so he can be with his new wife forever. In a "weird western" tale by Kashdan and Estrada, a frontier doctor removes a bullet from the arm of a young man, only to find it's silver, and he's saved the life of a werewolf.
In the Mister E story by Rozakis and Spiegle, Kelly returns to the Old Country to help out her aunt who has been thrown in a psychiatric hospital. Mister E mysteriously shows up there, too. It's a good thing, because Kelly's aunt isn't mentally ill, she's being menaced by a leprechaun. Mister E threatens the little guy into leaving her alone.
Superman #360: Yet another story with another group of aliens that we will never see again making an attack on Superman in some indirect way. In this case, making Clark Kent forget he and Superman are the same person. How long has it been since we've have a bona fide super-villain in this title? Either the writers or editorial think Supes' rogues gallery is played, which may be a defensible point, but they seldom replace it with anything worthwhile. I feel like Action is the better of the Superman titles at this time, though neither are spectacular.
The backup is by Rozakis and Saviuk/Colletta is a World of Krypton story. WoK stories have a sort of charm because they tend to accentuate what a crazy place Krypton was. In this story a boy and his father find an odd stone in a river that gives off energy. Unfortunately, it's getting this energy from the sun, absorbing all the sunlight in the day and releasing energy at night. It's destroying Krypton's ecosystem and the Kryptonians don't know how to stop it, until the kid that found it just feeds it to a metal-eater beast in the forest.
Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #2: "Defeat" is an apt title for this Empire Strikes Back installment of the limited series that sees the Guardians defeated by Nekron and the Corps, despite doing well against Krona's troops, defeated by the Maltusian himself. Hal Jordan is the last to fall, but it all seems pretty hopeless. The Barr plot and Wein script seems much more modern than a lot of stuff from this era. The realm of Nekron is reached through a fleshy hole or necrotic lesion in the universe. Staton's design or Nekron is kind of modern, too.
Weird War Tales #100: The main event of this issue is the Creature Commandos getting a little War That Time Forgot action, courtesy of Barr and Hall/Ordway. It's an action-packed tale that reveals the some total of Hall's knowledge of dinosaurs likely comes from King Kong (1933). Their orange and magenta hides probably don't help verisimilitude either. Anyway, in the end, the Creature Commandos act to stop the U.S. military from exploiting the dinos like they've been exploited.
There's a silly one-pager by Snyder and von Eeden/Breeding where a solider cracks under pressure, only to be revealed to be an actor on a set. The last story is a pretty good one by John David Warner and Vic Catan Jr. In feudal Japan, two scavengers are robbing the dead on battlefields which earns them the ire of Death and a samurai army of living dead. They are pressed into service, but manage to make it out alive. No sooner do they promise not to meddle in the affairs of the Spirit Realms again than they are planning to hock stolen demon masks.
Wonder Woman #280: I was wondering where Conway was going with the cult storyline, but apparently he was going to appearances by Klarion, Witch-Boy and the Demon, so I'm satisfied with that. Klarion is behind the cult, to what purpose we don't yet know, but clearly he wasn't giving the head of the Delphi Group use of his legs again out of a sense of altruism. Wonder Woman, who realizes she's out of her depth after fighting a demon, gets help from Mother Juju. She refers the Amazon Princess to Jason Blood, but it's the Demon who's eager to take on the forces of darkness.
In the backup, Huntress has her showdown with Lionmane. The Huntress triumphs in the end, and we learn she had a score to settle since Lionmane had given her mother, Catwoman, a severe beating years ago. While all this is going on, the Huntress's love interest falls victim to the Joker.
World's Finest Comics #269: This issue is pretty good. Conway and Buckler/McLaughlin have Batman buried alive by a crook, and Superman and Robin must race against time to save him--or to show up after he saved himself, because he's Batman. Batman's escape is well done, but Superman's power gets a bit diminished to make the story work. Haney and von Eeden/Breeding have Oliver Queen chasing down a lead about drug smugglers on a fictional Caribbean island, and Green Arrow becomes involved after saving an attractive woman (obviously very attractive, Arrow keeps talking and thinking about it for several pages) from a crook. It turns out the woman's ploy to save her brother is a con, but GA was never fooled. Rozakis, Saviuk and Rodriguez deliver the best segment so far in this Hawkman/Hawkgirl arc, as the winged wonders return to Thanagar so Shayera can save Katar from the bite of a mutant insect in the not very good early parts of this story. The Shazam! family segment by Bridwell and Newton/Adkins has Captain Marvel Jr. defeating Sabbac.
The Red Tornado story is probably the issue's low point, but even that isn't so low. RT is looking for a tool he needs to repair himself so he doesn't fall apart and winds up saving the owner of an electronic store who is being held captive by Marxist terrorists led by Madame Redclaw (who must have inspired the DCAU villain Red Claw). Conway has this goofy thing of having the terrorists make Communist revolutionary sort of statements, only to have them immediately shown to be wrong.
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