Wednesday Comics: DC, November 1982 (week 3)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around August 19, 1982.

New Teen Titans Annual #1: This is the conclusion to the Omega Men/Blackfire saga that has been going on over the past couple of months. Lord Damyn's Psion advisor, scheming to take greater control over the Vega System, proposes Starfire fight Blackfire in a duel to the death, ostensibly to decide Komand'r's succession and the fate of Tamaran--though he really plans a double-cross. Meanwhile, aboard the Omega Men's ship, the Titans learn X'Hal's origins which--I hadn't thought about this before, but it fits--seem to have some passing similarities to Phoenix/Dark Phoenix. On Tamaran's surface, the death-duel results in Blackfire's defeat and apparent death but also triggers a series of explosions set by the Psions that will wipe out the Vegan system. Vega is saved only when X'Hal breaks free and detonates the explosives harmlessly. Raven heals the badly injured Starfire. While this is a reasonably well done story, I feel like the arc was paced poorly. I think a Starfire spotlight issue is fine, but sidelining the rest of the Titans for a double-sized annual just for the duel seems bad planning.

Brave & the Bold #192: Barr and Aparo team-up of Batman and Superboy. I.Q. (a villain I have only seen before in the Who's Who) shoots Superman with a special ray that sends the Man of Steel back in time, leaving in his place a very confused Superboy. While Batman is on the case, Superboy tries to visit his family and finds out his adopted parents are dead. Moping, he loses his determination to do this superhero thing. Batman gives him a pep talk and together they confront I.Q., learning of his experiments and using them to reverse the ray. Superboy returns to his own time, and Superman returns to the present.

In the Nemesis backup, our hero assumes the identity of a bad stage actor in order to get close to Council member, Irene Scarfield. We're told at the end of this installment that it will continue in the main story next issue.

Legion of Super-Heroes #293: Levitz and Giffen/Mahlstedt give us Chapter 4 of the Great Darkness Saga. Most of the Legionnaires are searching for the servants of Darkness--and they find them. Though some Legionnaires are taken down, Wildfire burns the cloned Guardian of the Universe to ashes, and Element Lad creates Gold Kryptonite to destroy the Superboy clone. The third with the astro-harness escapes. Brainy has deduced the identity of the Master and his plan--but it may already be too late.

Meanwhile, Chameleon Boy is visited by his Dad in prison. At Legion HQ, the baby that Dream Girl thinks is important is growing up unusually fast.

The Master of Darkness is on Daxam. He's brainwashed the people into his slaves and forces them to remake their world to his requirements. When that's done, he commands them to go forth and conquer the universe in his name--Darkseid.

Green Lantern #158: Barr and Pollard have Jordan looking to replace his destroyed home with a ship, so he goes to Talkor "home of the finest shipwrecks in the galaxy." He gets a distress signal on the way, though from a ship being attacked by a giant, yellow monster. Since the creature's skin is immune to his ring, he lets it swallow him to attack it from the inside, driving it off. He goes with the grew to Talkor's moon where he meets the scientist, Dr. T'Gura who is working on the time travel. The scientist, obsessed with again being with her lost love, tricks Jordan and imprisons him so she can use his ring to power her device. Jordan uses his ring to attract the monster he fought previously. Its attack frees him, destroying T'Gura's machine, but the scientist chooses to stay in the past.

In The Green Lantern Corps backup by Kupperberg and Novick, Charles Vicker saves the insectoid inhabitants of Ftl'yl XI from extinction, but still feels disconnected and unappreciated by the alien species in his sector. A mother thanks him for saving her child, though, and Charles realizes that they don't need to look like humans to have the same sorts of feelings. Charles considers settling on that world.

House of Mystery #310: Another nice Kaluta cover. In I...Vampire, Bennett is back in the present day and apparently so is Mary, because one ring must follow the other. That's a rule that wasn't clear before, I don't think. Anyway, Bennett throws the ring in the ocean to stop Mary time traveling and so she does the same with her ring. So that's that. Bennett has the vampire version of a meet cute with a lonely woman vampire. He tries to enlist her to his cause, but ultimately, she chooses death seeing the sunrise one last time as she feels her hunger is too great for her to stay as virtuous as him.

That story is followed by an interesting but amateurishly drawn story by Skeates and Curry and Smith. The captain of the high school football team gets a dose of reality as his interest in an enigmatic girl at school leads him to discover a fringe group called "The Realists" who reveal to him his true, degraded appearance and that of everyone else thanks to pollution and radiation--an appearance the powers that be hide from everyone with drugs in the water supply. Rather than join the rebellion, the jock runs back to comfortable illusion by chugging as much water as he can. Then he goes to the prom. The final story by Kelley/Bissette and Capital has an unscrupulous used car salesman gets what he deserved at the hands of a surgeon whose wife died in one of the salesman's lemons.

Night Force #4: Wolfman and Colan/Smith have Baron Winter get a visit from suspicious police officer thanks to recent events. Meanwhile, Gold and Caine are still uneasy allies in London, looking to rescue Vanessa. The creepy Zakarig Zadok leads the Soviet interrogation of Vanessa, but her literal demons prove too powerful. By the time Gold and Caine arrive at the estate owned by the Soviets outside of London, the place is in flames and Vanessa has been spirited away to Moscow.

Sgt. Rock #370: Rock and Easy are suffering in the North African heat, nearly out of water and ammo, when the Germans drop leaflets suggesting they surrender. They come across a platoon of German soldiers who appear to have taken the Allied leaflets to heart and surrender to Easy. It's a ruse, though, and Rock figures it out in time to turn the tables on them. Harris and DeMulder follow that up with a tale of Grumman Avenger pilots who pick up some combat tips from their pool games on their aircraft carrier. 

Then there's an uncredited story about submarines and a frogman. Finally, Ron Randall gives us a futuristic tale of an android secret weapon being outdone by the enemy's facility not for quality but quantity in mass production. 

Warlord #63: I went over the main story in this issue here. The new backup feature here is The Barren Earth by Cohn and Randall. Humans have returned to Earth after abandoning for the stars. They find their ancestor's world a desert thanks to the sun having become a red giant. They also discover their enemies, the Qlov, have followed them. As a result of the battle, a group of humans are stranded on Earth, among them our heroine, Jinal.