My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around July 9, 1981.
Justice League of America #195: This is a good one from Conway and Perez/Beatty and builds anticipation for the next issue. A shadowy someone recruits the Monocle from Earth-2 and Killer Frost from Earth-1 then sends them to recruit Psycho-Pirate, Signalman, Cheetah (her first appearance since the 2-parter that introduced her in Wonder Woman), the Ragdoll, Brainwave, the Mist, and the Floronic Man for a new Sercret Society of Super-villains. It turns out that the mastermind is the Ultra-Humanite whose got a plan to take out selected heroes from the two universes, thus causing an equilibrium reaction that will wipe out all heroes from one universe or the other. Oookay. Of course, Ultra isn't telling the crew everything he knows. Anyway, the JSA and JLA are having their annual mixer, so their guard is down. The villains split up and acquire their targets: Black Canary, Earth-2 Hawkman, and Earth-1 Wonder Woman this issue. This such classic, meat-and-potatoes supers right here.
Krypton Chronicles #2: Bridwell and Swan continue to explore Superman's family tree. In the frame story, Supes figures out the yagrum beast from last issue is only an illusion. Zor-El helps Superman to learn the stories of yet more of his ancestors through a device connected to their headbands, which have absorbed some of their memories in addition to their sweat. He learns about Hatu-El, who helped liberate the Kryptonians from the alien Vrangs; Sul-El, who developed a telescope, saw the Vrang fleet in space, and tried to warn the governor of Kandor; Val-El, an explorer who discovered new lands; and of Val's black sheep brother Tro-El, who led an unsuccessful mutiny and became founder of an isle of pirates. While Superman is living genealogy, Supergirl nabs Black Flame, who has been trying to prolong Superman's and Supergirl's stay until the Cosmic Axis shifts again to prevent them from returning to Earth. Superman and Supergirl leave Rokyn shortly before it vanishes, and Superman tells his cousin he has another plan to get information about his ancestors prior to Val-El.
New Teen Titans #12: The enthralled Wonder Girl and the Titans of Myth attack and defeat the gods of Olympus. Athena brings the other female Teen Titans and the Amazons to Olympus to regroup for a second attack. Starfire frees the captive Zeus, and Wonder Girl is released from Hyperion's enchantment. The Titans abruptly realize the error of their ways and decide to go back to Tartarus, returning Olympus to the gods, and our heroes and the Amazons go back to Paradise Island.
Secrets of Haunted House #41: Better than the last couple of issues, I think, though not by much. Rozakis/LaRoque get the cover with a somewhat humorous tell of a man who finds a toy castle in his attic which somehow grows to full size. When he's captured by the giant there, he has to be rescued by his young son who is aware of it and has done battle with the giant in the past. Snyder and Zamora present a stumbling block just out of the gate, though with a short about a talking dog. Harris and Ditko are up next with a story about a woman and her ex-convict boyfriend fleeing to the a desert house at the end of Devil's Tail Road. The name turns out to be very literally, as the boyfriend tries to seize a rather phallic looking treasure, which turns out to be the literal tip of the Devil's tail. Gwyon and Nicholas follow it up with a confused time travel yarn that has a man from the future coming back to euthanize his bed and pain ridden father, but winding up a bed-ridden old man himself because he changed time.
Finally, there's a Rozakis/Spiegle tale about blood coming from a well, which ties into a Hawthrone story and seems (if we buy E's not wholly satisfying explanation) a hoax in the end.
Superman #364: Swan takes a break, and Buckler is on art chores this issue. Same old Bates kind of story, though. A Metropolis reporter named Rory is upset that Olsen, Kent, and Lane always win the awards, feeling that they have an unfair advantage on the big scoops as they are tight with Superman. Then, when a mysterious amorphous Metro-Monster begins striking the city, it's Rory turn to get the scoop because he gets an exclusive from the monster's secret ID. It turns out the monster is an audiologist whose monster transformation is due to him trying to cure his own tinnitus. Anyway, he gets cured, and Rory and Jimmy become friends.
In the Rozakis and Saviuk Superman 2020 backup, we learn that Grandpa Superman went prematurely gray from exposure to red solar radiation, and he fights valiantly to prevent his grandson from sharing that fate. Who says its hard to find credible challenges for Superman?
Weird War Tales #104: The Creature Commandos are back (well, the Monster Marines) but only in a gag one-pager by Manak. We don't even get dinosaurs this issue. Instead, we get central American revolutionaries stumbling upon a lost city, and at least one of them succumbing to murderous greed, "The Secret Enemy." Kashdan and Rogue present a "moral dilemma" with no answer when a court has to decide what to do with now adult clones of Third Reich leaders. Cavalieri and Dikto present a pirate yarn that asserts the origin of the jolly roger was a skeletal ghost.
The last story is the best of the issue, though that isn't saying much. A pompous Soviet general disturbs the tomb of Tamerlane in Samarkand in 1982, and he and his entire force suffer the vengeance of the ghost conqueror and his undead army.
Wonder Woman #284: The dragon from last issue turns out to be a robot, but we don't find that out until Wonder Woman defeats it. Diana, Steve and Chinese agent Lao Chen investigate and find more weapons stolen from the U.S., including a crate that held a new cruise missile. The three head to China to find the missile and stop the Red Dragon. Soon after the arrive they are knocked unconscious by a sleep-gas bomb hurled by one of the Dragon's agents, who inserts a "control crystal" in Steve's neck. A The Red Dragon launches the cruise missile, which is able to evade all known aircraft, at Peiping. Steve has a device which can control or abort the missile, but the Dragon exerts his control over him and Steve destroys the device, allowing the missile to hit the Great Wall!
In the Huntress backup, the Huntress and the Earth-2 Robin team-up to lean on an organized crime figure trying to frame their senior law partner.
3 comments:
"It turns out the monster is an audiologist whose monster transformation is due to him trying to cure his own tinnitus."
As "weird science accident" origins go, that one's pretty original, anyway. Was tinnitus big in pop science back then or something?
If the internet is to be believed, this was also the first sixty cent issue of Superman. I can dimly recall buying books for a quarter. What's the average floppy sell for now, five bucks? More?
My earliest comics were 45 cents...ah, the days when you could pick up two issues for a buck!
I think you can still get some new issues for under $5, depending (Seattle sales tax generally hikes this up 'round my parts). These days, though, I generally only buy the trade paperback collections.
@JB Seattle charges sales tax on floppies? That's dreadful, periodicals are tax free in New York.
Did they still have those blasted three-book bundles when you were a kid? They may have been gone by the time prices got to 45 cents, the ones I recall were just under a dollar. That was a small discount that didn't make up for the fact that you could rarely be sure what the middle book was - they were tightly poly-bagged and you could generally only see what the two outside books were. They were some kind of distributor deal for newsstands, grocery stores, etc that took unsold books and bundled them more or less at random in an attempt to get them to sell. My parents used to buy them for us as kids, alongside those little digest books from Gold Key and Archie.
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