My ongoing mission: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of September 8, 1983.
Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld #8: Mishkin/Cohn and Colon give us a bit of the history of Gemworld, and we discovered that the humans originated on Earth and fled to another dimension as magic began to fade. Citrina, it turns out, was the one that led the ritual. Meanwhile, the mysterious Emissaries of Varn, working as mercenaries for Dark Opal, attack and destroy the House of Diamond. Amethyst and her allies are unable to stop the Emissaries and their magic absorbing power, but they are given a reprieve by the sudden appearance of one of the priests of Diamond.
Blackhawk #265: The editorial a few issues back was just a preview as Evanier and Speigle final get around to dealing with some of the lingering racism in Chop-Chops portrayal in story. Unfortunately, it also culminates in him appearing to get written out of the story. As the Blackhawks try to track down Merson through his finances, Chop Chop is uncharacteristically irritable, feeling like he's a second-class member of the team. His attitude forces the other Blackhawks to reflect and realize he has been treated differently. After playing a pivotal role in their capturing Merson, Chop Chop makes a formal announcement that he wishes leave to go fight the Japanese invaders in his home country. Blackhawk presents him with his on Blackhawk uniform for the first time and the group salutes him, addressing him under his real name for the first time in print, Wu Cheng.
In the Detached Service backup by Evanier and Boyette, Chuck's plane gets stolen, and he's stranded in Europe for a couple of days, while he tries to get it back. He finds some of his plane in a black-market warehouse being run by a sleazy black marketeer Dmitri Hocking. He forces the man to help him retrieve the other parts, but things don't go smoothly, and they run into Nazis. Chuck is forced to assemble a patchwork plane of disparate parts for a dogfight before it's all over.
DC Comics Presents #64: Scientist and TV host Victor Epoch's (his show Astro seems a Cosmos stand-in) time experiment brings portions of the After Disaster future to present-day Metropolis, including Kamandi. He teams up with Superman to fight off the time-displaced Great Caesar and his tiger troops. This is Kamandi's last appearance prior to Crisis, courtesy of Evanier and Saviuk/McLaughlin.
Justice League of America #221: Conway is back again with Patton/Marcos and a particularly violent and bloody story for the JLA. The JLA members individually encounter and seem targeted various sorts of anthropomorphic animal people, and those guys don't pull punches. A rhnio man impales Flash on his horn, a flock of birds push Elongated Man into a press, and scorpion men fighting Hawkman impale a bystander bloodily. Firestorm meets the only animal woman, a cat woman named Reena, who seems opposed to the others. He convinces her to come back to the satellite and tell her story. We don't hear what that is this issue, but we meet the mastermind behind this all: a lion man named Maximus Rex who's ordering around a scientist named Dr. Lovecraft.
Wonder Woman #310: Mishkin and Beachum/Marcos have Wonder Woman considering revealing her secret identity to Steve Trevor and talking it over with Black Canary during a game. Canary is against it, but Wonder Woman tells a story of the Amazon Artemis and how Ares was able to manipulate her through her love of a Greek soldier Cleon into opening up Themiscrya to attack.
The Cavalieri and Burgard/Rodriguez Huntress backup continues the story of the baby-selling ring run by Earthworm, but not a lot happens this installment other than we see how Earthworm prays upon the desperate and addicted to get the infants he sells.
6 comments:
Seems like a light week this time around, and I don't recall seeing any of these on the rack back in the day. Was mostly reading indie books at this point anyway, so a lot of Big Two flew under my radar.
Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld #8: Not my cup of tea but still the best cover of the week.
DC Comics Presents #64: I'd probably have grabbed this if I'd seen it, as I was a big fan of Kirby Kamandi and kept hoping (futilely) that the magic would come back for years after he left. Does Kamandi find an opportunity to tell Clark where his suit winds up in his timeline? "Yeah, gorillas worship your long johns. Weird, huh?"
Justice League of America #221: One wonders how happy Firestorm was to get a catgirl instead of a hyena for a change. :)
I agree this looks like a light week. I bought that Justice League sometime after the fact, but that's it.
That Amethyst cover is pretty great. Ernie Colon doesn't get enough credit as a comics artist. Maybe because he's a little 'bigfoot' compared to say, a Neal Adams. He sure can draw. I don't know if "The Medusa Chain" came before CoIE but that was one of the better DC graphic novels.
Amethyst has been a pleasant surprise. I ignored it as too "girly" at the time, but it stands with DC's other fantasy titles of the era (which may be damning with faint praise). It's generally better than Arion, I feel like.
I dropped Anethyst after nine issues and wish I had stuck around longer. I liked it better than Arion where I lasted about 3 issues.
I skipped on Amethyst back in the day as well, and after reading some of it years later I don't really regret missing out. We're also coming up on the end of my reading both Warlord and Arion (both of which had been going downhill for a while) although I stuck with Arak to the end. The historical elements in the latter were a big draw for me.
It remains astonishing that Conway & Patton got that JLA 3-parter past the Comics Code! (Albeit with the help of a couple of silhouettes and blood coloured *purple*..!)
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