Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Wednesday Comics: DC, December 1980 (wk 2, pt 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around September 25, 1980. 


Legion of Super-Heroes #270: Conway's and Janes' story continues with most of the Legionnaires in the hands of the Fatal Five. Timber Wolf warns the others, but Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl are captured when the villains assault the Legion headquarters. Only Light Lass and Timber Wolf remain free to come to the rescue. The Fatal Five, however, are at least somewhat distracted by their resentment at having to take orders from the mysterious Dark Man. Timber Wolf discovers the identity of the Dark Man at the end of the issue: he's an unbifurcated Tharok! Another solid issue from this creative team.


Mystery in Space #114: This issue is a mixed bag. The first story by Wessler and Craig has a couple trying to find a refugee from their world that's imperiled by an imminent collision with another planet, only to fall into the hands of a planetary despot. The woman appears to choose to marry the despot and have her former lover exiled, but that's only a ruse to allow him to escape. The planet they arrived on is the planet their homeworld is going to collide with! The next story by Levitz and Spiegle is slight, but a little more clever. We follow a day in the life of a really nice guy in the future, only to find out it is only for the sake of this good-hearted guy that tentacled, extradimensional horrors haven't yet destroyed the Earth.

The co-creators of Blue Devil and Amethyst, Mishkin and Cohn, team-up with von Eeden for a kind of shaggy dog story about a man escaping a future conquest of Earth in a vessel with a damaged warp drive. It sends him back in time to...Ellis Island. Skeates and Ditko team up for a cynical, EC-esque story about a loving couple leaving a time capsule to be found by future generations. Their heart-felt expression of love only becomes another reason for people to kill each other in the primitive, post-apocalyptic future. Conway and Yeates finish out the issue with a time travel yarn about an attempt to kill Hitler that leads to a worse consequence--which precipitates a chain of assassinations as successive time travelers try to fix the failures of the past.


New Adventures of Superboy #12: The lead story here is weird because Bates seems leave the primary conflict unresolved. A harried Superboy still dressed as Clark Kent winds up saving a rich man from driving off a cliff. The man uses his resources to track Clark down and begins publicizing his heroism and putting down Superboy as not as heroic because he has powers to protect him from danger that the man assumes Clark does not. Neither Clark nor the Kents like all the attention he is getting. This plotline is never really resolved; Instead, the rich man's nephew and heir tries to kill Clark and Superboy stops him. Maybe they're going to deal with Clark still being famous next issue, but I kind of doubt it. The backup by Bridwell and Tanghal relates Superboy's first meeting with Perry White where he reveals to the world in an interview that he's an alien. This story is mainly interesting because Superboy says he revealed his origins to President Eisenhower, thus setting these events somewhat specifically in time.


Sgt. Rock #347: This issue opens with one of Kanigher's blunt and simplistic, but not ineffective, anti-war tales. Easy is saved from a tank by the heroic actions of their CO, but the man is left blind and dumb, if not in something of a vegetative state. With the Germans advancing, the staff plans to leave him in the hospital for the Germans to find and move to one of their hospitals as the rules of war dictate. Rock isn't having any of that, so he personally drives the mute and expressionless officer through a forest, avoiding a German personnel carrier, and nearly getting blown away by a artillery. On the way, Rock talks of his father (dead in a steel mill accident), his brother (dead in a daredevil dive off a bridge), and his other brother (missing since the Japanese took the Philippines). Rock sees his company advancing into the range of the artillery and takes what action he can to save them. After the battle, they find the CO was killed by shrapnel in the drive over. Rock opines he bled to death without a word, as if perhaps that was a measure of his mettle, but the man hadn't spoken since his original injury. It was unclear if he could. Anyway, Easy Company buries him and moves on to the next battle.

In the next story by Kelley and Severin, a bomber going down under fire thinking it's mission to destroy a German refinery was a failure lucks up and hits the real refinery. We get a second Sgt. Rock story or vignette about the Easy Company member Little Sure Shot. There's a one page profile on the Seneca war chief Cornplanter, then a story by Eads and Veitch about the only woman "who ever lead an American armed expedition against enemy forces," Harriet Tubman.


Super Friends #39: The Overlord decides to send evolved clones after the Super Friends. The first proves too powerful for them until they use his advanced traits against him, finally weakening him with concentrated exposure to a trace element in the Earth's atmosphere--krypton. A clever, though perhaps goofy, turn in a definitely goofy story. The Bridwell/Tanghal backup story has the Wonder Twins at a disco and tangling with a DJ and lightning tech using their powers for no good. These Wonder Twin stories are mildly interesting (mildly!) if you think about the roundabout ways they defeat villains. Who would ever think "form of a peacock" would be the right call?


Unexpected #205: This one is pretty good. First up, we get a Johnny Peril story by Barr and Sparling. Young Angela Lake has apparently been possessed for a second time, but Peril smells a rat, not brimstone. It turns out the exorcist is also a hypnotist and has faked Angela's possessions. The story ends with the possibility the exorcist himself might be possessed, though Johnny doesn't buy it. "A Match Made in Hades" by Kashdan and Rubeny has a lovelorn businessman buying a love potion from an old witch. When the object of his affections becomes positively obsessed and scary, he pays a hefty price for the antidote. Only then do we discover that the young woman is the witch's daughter, and it has all been a con. The last story by DeMatteis and Catan winds up getting reprinted in the Best of DC digest in 1981. Bruce used occultism to literally retreat into a psychic realm of fantasy after Cornelia dumped him. But he can't escape reality entirely, and his efforts to do just that cause him to confuse the two, resulting in the tragic death of Cornelia. To pay for his crime, Bruce sends himself to a Hell literally of his own imagining.


Unknown Soldier #246: Haney and Ayers/Tlaloc have the Soldier in Egypt, trying to help defeat Rommel. He winds up chasing a spy named with stolen war plans from Cairo into the desert. There are sandstorms and bandits-- and then the Soldier finds out it was all a trick! He unwittingly delivered the plans to Rommel himself. Luckily, some quick improvising on the Soldier's part makes Rommel think the plans are misdirection, so the Desert Fox is defeated in the Allied offensive, though he escapes to fight another day. Kanigher and Yeates give us a tale of the Vikings where an aging Chieftain discovers his greatest warrior in a recent raid was actually his daughter in disguise. The final story by Burkett and Ayers is continued, but starts off with a classic war comic opening: U.S. aviator is disparaging the "ruptured duck" B-17 he's forced to fly. When they reach the bombing target the bay doors won't open. They are unaware one of their crew (captured after the last raid) is being held in the German installation beneath them.


Warlord #40: Read more about it here. No OMAC back-up in this issue. Instead we get a "Tale of Wizard World."

1 comment:

Dick McGee said...

Only one of these I remember seeing is Warlord, and I was subscribed to that one at this point. Rather liked Morgan's new outfit myself, the color scheme's quite effective with his white hair and all. Goes to show that the fashion preferences of a mostly-naked catgirl are not the best guideline.