My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around April 22, 1982.
Brave & the Bold #188: Kanigher and Aparo team Batman with Thorn (as in Rose & Thorn). After taking a group of any city kids to do some environmental clan up, Batman investigates the murder of a former Nazi spy and the theft of a canister of a deadly, biological warfare gas. Batman meets Rose Forrest as she's weirdly being attacked by birds, then investigates the theft of her father's corpse from its grave. At the cemetery, Batman tangles with a group of Neo-Nazis and he is assisted by Thorn, Rose's alter. Together, Batman and Thorn defeat the Nazis, but Batman decides to continue his investigation alone.
Legion of Super-Heroes #289: The Legion searches for its five members who are lost on an icy asteroid. Lightning Lad and Chameleon Boy both engage in some self-flagellation on how their leadership got the group here. Saturn Girl and Timber Wolf, trapped on the asteroid get close, which is easily misunderstood by Light Lass when she arrives with the rescue party. Meanwhile, the darkness teased a couple of issues back is about to make itself known. Levitz and Giffen/Patterson are handling both the character stuff and foreshadowing their epic well.
Green Lantern #154: Barr and Staton/Smith have a distress signal taking Hal to planet where he saves some natives and takes them to their tribe, whose chief thanks him for protecting them "again." Only problem is Hal's never been here. After he helps them out again they offer him a throne and jewels. It turns out they mistaken him for a Green Lantern, named Dalor, who shows up and tells Hal that he is in Sector 2813 instead of 2814. Dalor explains that the tribe's offerings are merely his payments for his services. Hal's not happy about that and demands Dalor to accompany him to his spatial base.
Dalor's a new Green Lantern, but he explains all the planets have been paying him for his services, so he thought was the way it went for Green Lanterns. Hal wants to tell the Guardians, but there's another distress signal from the planet. Dalor tries to beat Hal to attend to the emergency, but he falls unconscious, just like the rest of the tribe, due to a sulfur cloud. Hal fans out the gas and saves everybody but the chief, who died by intoxication. Hal lays into Dalor for his behavior, but the projection of a Guardian appears in front of them, saying that they'll judge the one responsible.
House of Mystery #306: Jones and Sutton bring Andrew Bennett and Mary to Victorian London. Bennett is immediately mistaken for Jack the Ripper, and Mary is murdering woman in the name of the ripper to try to kill the ancestor of Dr. Barr who made the cancer cure that's killing vampires, so he'll never be born. Turns out the doctor who helps Bennett is actually Jack the Ripper, and his housekeeper (the sister of a prostitute Mary kills is Barr's ancestor.
The next story by Cavalieri and Patricio is better and certainly less convoluted. Government agents are interrogating a Private who stole a file on the secret Project: Ultra. They give him an experimental truth serum, which allows him to see all truth. The final story by Gwyon and Curry has a young boy told all his life by his vain and neurotic mother only to find it it's true--as he bleeds to death from hemophilia. As someone with hemophilia, I don't particularly find the story offensive, but it is dumb and terribly inaccurate in its portrayal of the condition.
Sgt. Rock #365: Kanigher and Redondo have Easy in a tough spot in the desert, but they're saved by a gungho kid from Appalachia who loved the arm so much he wants to stay in 30 years. He doesn't get to, but breaking the usual formula, he isn't KIA, but gets a ticket home due to injuries. He guips he got 30 minutes of action instead of 30 years. Mandrake is on art duties for the next story, a sci-fi yarn where a woman fleeing invading aliens is helped out by the geyser, Old Faithful. Between this and Brave & the Bold this month, I suspect Kanigher has an environmentalist streak.
In "Destruction from Below" a violent leader of a Stone Age human tribe leads them underground, but then he falls into some weird mushroom patch and sleeps for a looong time. When he awakens, he attempts to lead the degenerate descendants of his band, but the modern world is too much for them to handle when they emerge in a city park. In the final story with art by DeMulder, an F-4 Phantom pilot's dream of a dogfight with a dragon is symbolically prophetic of the way he escapes an enemy in a dogfight the following day.
In "Destruction from Below" a violent leader of a Stone Age human tribe leads them underground, but then he falls into some weird mushroom patch and sleeps for a looong time. When he awakens, he attempts to lead the degenerate descendants of his band, but the modern world is too much for them to handle when they emerge in a city park. In the final story with art by DeMulder, an F-4 Phantom pilot's dream of a dogfight with a dragon is symbolically prophetic of the way he escapes an enemy in a dogfight the following day.
Superman Family #220: Supergirl is still trapped in a ghostly state thanks to Master Jailer. She goes to Ivy University and seeks help from Ray Palmer, the Atom, who is able to figure out a solution. Returned to normal, Supergirl goes back to New York. She manages locate the Master Jailer's hideout in the Brooklyn Bridge--but he turns out to be a robot, and the real Master Jailer is still at large.
In the Kupperberg/Delbo Jimmy Olsen, the accumulated inconsistencies lead Jimmy to begin to realize that he is under someone's influence. But he goes to the Planet and accuses Clark of being Superman, as Brain Storm observes from his secret lair. The O'Flynn/Oksner has a reformed criminal Lane helped stay out of jail tipping her off to a job his old gang is pulling. She helps fake his death so they can catch the gang. Finally, in the Mr. and Mrs. Superman story by Bridwell/Schaffenberger, introduce (briefly) a Supergirl stand-in--Liandly from the planet Rolez. She returns to her homeworld at the end of the story, but not before helping Superman against the Earth-2 Colonel Future.
Warlord #58: I detailed the main story in this issue here. In the Kupperberg and Duursema Arion backup, Arion continues on his journey more troubled than before, after learning he was born from cosmic matter. Meanwhile, Garn Daanuth, sorcerer and ruler of the dead city Mu, plots Arion's downfall. While Arion sleeps the sorcerer sends an astral projection to kill him. Arion awakes up but is struck down by Garn. Gemimn and Chaon observe the battle an argue over who they think will prevail.
2 comments:
Almost visceral memory of some of these covers. Must've been a big week at my local convenience store rack even if I only read two or three of them.
What on earth (earth-b) would nazis want with the corpse of Rose Forrest's father? In retrospect this sounds incredibly ominous given her personality challenges in adulthood, but somehow it also helps the character make more sense.
Likewise the LSH issue now feels more central to Darkseid's deep machination and less like a teaser. Clearly corrupting Daxam and almost conquering the universe was just a feint. His real plan was to drive Ayla ("light" lass or the incarnation of levity, graciousness and fun, "the purest of you," everything he hates) away from the team and interfere with Imra's marriage just enough to help Validus happen.
This turns GDS into a family drama disguised as a cosmic epic, which is really interesting. Wasn't Ayla central to the (imo letdown) "quiet" darkness saga as well? Or was that just a Timber Wolf thing? Surely someone will school me in the comments but none of this can be mere coincidence.
I remember cribbing Warlord's ridiculous but striking spiky prisoner-helmet for a D&D NPC the players were trying to rescue. The helmet was enchanted so they couldn't get it off the guy so they had to lead him around blind all the way out of the dungeon, which involved a sewer crawl on top of everything else. When they finally got him back to the noble whose brother he was supposed to be our employer goes to hug him to welcome him back.
Whereupon our catch proceeds to skewer his "brother" with the (poisoned) helmet spikes, then says a command word that lets him take it off and use as a spiky bludgeon to fight us off while continuing to beat on the dying aristo. Disguised assassin all along, and as we discovered after we finally killed he could see and hear normally with the magic helmet on the whole time.
I still keep in touch with a couple of folks from that group, and to this day that incident comes up regularly. One of them is still holding a grudge about getting gnawed on by a sewer alligator while "saving" the "blind and helpless" high-level assassin.
On the plus side, after the investigation the cleric wound up with a really snazzy new metal hat. Kept it right up until they finally realized that it was a signature weapon of a crazy murder cult and was attracting attention they didn't like one bit from both the law and the loonies. Took almost a year before they got to wondering what was up.
So thanks, Mike Grell. Even used that issue as a visual aid.
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