Zatanna Day!

Gardner Fox was born on this date in 1911. Fox was a very important writer for DC and others in the Golden Age. He was a mainstay at DC in the Silver Age as well until he and other longtime veterans were summarily cast adrift. He wrote copious paperback novels of various kinds including sword and sorcery and sexually explicit. The first writer on both the Justice Society and the Justice League it is difficult to measure his impact on the form. 

Once upon a time comic books were isolated islands in a vast ocean. Once in a great while the hero of this comic would cross over into the the title of another and even create teams, but for the most part the heroes battled their own villains in worlds remarkably similar but rarely connected. Marvel changed all that when they created the singular "Marvel Universe" in which the sum was far grander than the sum of its parts. DC trying to catch a sniff of that struggled mightily to find a way forward. "Zatanna's Search" is one such experiment.

Zatanna is the daughter of Zatara the Magician, one of DC's most venerable heroes from the heady Golden Age and the pages of Action Comics. Modeled on Lee Falk's Mandrake the Magician (as were dozens of others) Zatara had  the advantage of the sleek artwork of  creatorFred Guardineer to set him above his occult peers. But by the end of the Golden Age Zatara had vanished for the most part, as had nearly all the Mandrake dopplegangers.

In the early 60's DC was reviving its glorious past with hits like The Flash, Green Lantern, Justice League of America and more. And it came time eventually to dust off the stylish tuxedo of Zatara they went a different way indeed. They did it by giving him a daughter, the gorgeous Zatanna and further they made his current whereabouts a mystery his daughter was trying to solve. She had a quest and that search would take her across the landscape of Silver Age DC.

The story begins in the pages of Hawkman in a story titled "The Girl Who Split in Two!" by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson.

Though not rating a cover appearance, there was no doubt that Zatanna with her backwards incantations and fish-netted gams was the centerpiece of this singular issue of Hawkman. As rendered by Murphy Anderson she's totally pretty, if not quite as thoroughly sexy as she will come to be. In this story we meet Zatanna for the first time as she uses some surprise museum pieces to lure Hawkman and Hawkwoman to her aide and to help her find her lost father Zatara.

The story weaves into the pages of Detective Comics as Batman fights a witch. To be honest this installment of the quest by "Bob Kane" is pretty limited and has all the earmarks of a retro-continuity patch in order to wedge the highly popular Batman into the finale adventure. Zatanna, as such does not actually appear in this story.

Her search continues some months later in The Atom by Gardner Fox and Gil Kane and inker Sid Greene. She convinces The Atom to help invade a sub-atomic world inside a book where she suspects her father might be. Instead the duo find an old enemy named The Druid.

This time Gil Kane and Sid Greene get a gorgeous go at drawing the beautiful magician in her stylish fishnets and his version becomes rather the standard for some years, at least in my mind.

Because it was Kane and Greene who also drew her in Green Lantern as her quest continued months later still in another story by Gardner Fox.

 The pattern is now established. In this story Zatanna and Green Lantern go to another dimension and confronted the scarlet-hued Warlock of Ys.

By now it was normal that very few months Zatanna would surface in some comic and we'd learn a tiny mote more about the ultimate location of the missing Zatara.

It's not in the headliner Batman story when Zatanna  makes her return to Detective Comics.

But rather in the back-up feature starring Elongated Man by Fox and artist Carmine Infantino. Ralph Didny helps the magic girl find some more magic objects which aide her search for her father.

Her saga while continuous has a weird, nearly stealth quality to it. Fans of any one comic miss out on the total yarn which spins across several titles, often unannounced.

Finally the search is concluded in the pages of the Justice League of America by Fox and artists Mike Sekowsky and Sid Greene, and the heroes who have aided her along the way join forces to finally reveal the secret which has eluded them for nearly two years. Batman gets a starring role because he always did during these "Batmania" years.

The elments of the story which have been building are brought together and finally at long last.

The quest is ended as Zatanna and the assembled Leaguers plus Elongated Man (not then a League member) finally penetrate another dimension called Kharma to combat a sorceress named Allura and release the long-lost Zatanna.

DC was kind enough to collect these rare gems together in a delicious trade over a decade ago. I heartily recommend it to any and all fans of the Silver Age of comics. You will rarely find a package which offers a heartier glimpse of the style of stories told at DC during those glorious years. The cover is outstanding (see below) with great Boland artwork and a vintage JLA logo and even those memorable DC checks. 

The editors included also a later for both Zatara and Zatanna which were produced new for one of those highly entertaining digests DC offered up in the Bronze Age. This one is in actuality a secret origin of sorts by Gerry Conway with art by Romeo Tanghal and Vinnie Colletta, which over decade later reveals how Zatanna first learned of her father's disappearance and how she began her quest. Again alas, it seems DC was always working overtime to make sure that Zatanna's story reached as limited an audience as possible.

And just because it's so lovely here's a better glimpse at Brian Bolland's evocative cover art for the trade. Not everyone can make this costume work, but Bolland has cracked the code with gusto and panache.

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December!

The barbarian welcomes you to the bleak month of December. The year of 2024 has been a memorable one to this point for all the wrong reasons. I want to right the ship and give us all something to smile about. That Neal Adams illustration of Robert E. Howard's famous Cimmerian is a tip off. It's nearly all barbaric action this month -- fantasy with a finishing blow.  

In the somewhat warmer climes of Narnia, we reach the end of that delightful children's saga by C.S. Lewis. For Lewis this all leads to a dramatic final battle which is good news for many of us. 

Frank Frazetta gets represented a few times this month. One is with Thun'da, the one comic book that the great artist illustrated all the way through. That's on tap as well as more recent sequel by other talents. 

Idyl by the late Catherine Jeffrey Jones is poetry. I don't pretend to understand it all, but revisiting these supremely crafted pages which originally appeared in National Lampoon are always intriguing and in the end heart-warming. There are other things from Jones as well such as I'm Age from Heavy Metal. 

And speaking of heart-warming, one needs look no further than Peter Beagle's magnificent and elegant The Last Unicorn. A striking mythology for a modern time sorely in need of it. 

It's the allure of more ancient myths which attract the reader to Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword. This magnificent saga was first published in the same year as Tolkien's great yarn about Hobbits, and some hold it higher regard. 

No wants to see Groo the Wanderer. He's a mental deficient who poses a threat to all those who come in contact with him. He blithely wanders (hence the name) through life creating havoc not only for villains, but heroes and bystanders as well. He's a barbarian they can't kill -- no matter how hard they try. I take a glance at one of the sturdiest barbarians in comics. 

One of my favorite Marvel yarns is when the Hulk got shrunk and found love and courage in a strange sub-atomic world. This turned into a downright saga. I was a downright Hulkamaniac back in the day, and this one always stood proud among the many tales about old Jade Jaws. 

And speaking of shrinking, the master of being little -- The Atom found himself having to retool to survive when he's stranded in a tiny world for a time. He finds adventure and romance in the smallest kingdom on the planet. 

The Viking Prince featured the astounding artwork of Joe Kubert, who caught the feel of the bygone age with a deft but firm touch. These tales are vivid when often comics of the time were quite timid. 

Kubert supplied the covers for DC's Nightmaster stories in Showcase, but it was left to an up-and-coming Berni Wrightson to draw the story. 

But Nightmaster was just DC sticking its collective toe into the Sword and Sorcery genre. In 1975 they took a deep dive when they cobbled together their "Adventure Line" which was filled with vintage crimefighting, prehistoric tales of survival, and scuds of swords and oodles of sorcery. I want to take a look at each of the comics that DC launched in this campaign, and I want to do it in the order they pictured above beginning with The Avenger and Justice Inc and sliding right all the way to Kong. 

This should be a ton of fun and is a project I've been thinking about for quite a while. I just needed a few comics to make it happen and now I have them. 

And I haven't forgotten about Neal Adams who kicked off this introductory post. He'll be popping up here and there as the final month of 2024 tumbles along to its inevitable conclusion. 

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Manhunter - The Completed Saga!

My personal manhunt is finally over. And as a little extra-special find for my birthday this year, I located a delightful copy of Manhunter - The Complete Saga from the small Excalibur publishing outfit. This was the very first reprinting of the amazing series by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, and the only version of the Manhunter story I didn't already have.  And it's a much better package than I expected. There are great pencil drafts from Simonson when he was designing the character. And the late great Archie Goodwin supplies both a great foreword and afterword for the volume. And the short but sweet saga of Paul Kirk performs quite well in black and white. We are even treated to a full page of Goodwin's own distinctive cartooning. This was produced in 1979 by the Excalibur gang, not a time when upscale comic reprints were all that common. It was less than a decade since the original stories had appeared. 

Manhunter by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson is among the most treasured comic yarns in my long experience in the form. As Goodwin describes in his introduction to the 1979 reprint, the freedom to create something fresh and unusually lively was a result of two factors. One was that the series appeared in Detective Comics, which at the time was suffering a sales slump and so change was seen as good. And the other was that Manhunter was the back-up piece and so seen instantly as less important overall. So, things could change, and in the Bronze Age changes in the status quo of comics was much ballyhooed but rarely done with total commitment. Here was a hero who could do things other Comics Code approved heroes might not be able to get away with, hidden as he was in the shadows of a dangerous world but also in the back of a familiar comic.

I have now collected the Manhunter in all its forms. I picked up several of the chapters in real time as they first appeared and have filled in the gaps since. I've picked up the 1984 DC reprint, the 1999 reprint titled Manhunter: The Special Edition which hard on the sad news of Archie Goodwin's untimely death offered a new chapter, wordless but no less important to the core saga. I more in more recent years picked up the story in a collection of Archie Goodwin's best DC stories, and I even popped for the magnificent "Artist's Edition" which showcases Simonson's tasty pages in their full black and white glory. I love this little saga. I loved it then and I love it still. I am not alone.

The story taps so many of the pop-culture vibes of the era, with a Golden Age hero named Paul Kirk who has grown disillusioned and then dies in a tragic accident. He is revived by a cabal of evil men who seek to use him and his genetic make-up to help them conquer the world. He turns against these men and turns his back on power and immortality to recapture that which they seem to have stolen from him, his fundamental sense of self and his basic human need to shape his own destiny as much as he can. 

The notion to connect Manhunter directly to the vintage Golden Age hero of that named made most famous by the Simon and Kirby team was brilliant. Ironically though the Goodwin-Simonson Manhunter has been reprinted numerous times, the Simon and Kirby Manhunter tales have never been collected though they'd fit neatly into a single slim tome. It's an oversight on DC's part for certain. We've gotten good reprints of the Boy Commandos, the Newsboy Legion, and Sandman, but for some unknown reason no similar package for Manhunter. 

I first noticed something different about the writing of Archie Goodwin in his early Iron Man issues back in the late 60's when fresh from Warren he dabbled a bit for Stan "The Man". There was a deceptive simplicity to his writing that though it felt like it had not personal style was in fact rich with and inviting for that very reason. When he took the editor's seat at Detective Comics, I took notice and could feel that a more adult approach was evident in both the lead feature and the back-up. 

And then there's Walt Simonson who made his bones on Manhunter, a quick little series that lasted only a brief time but brought many awards and critical recognition to its makers. Simonson did not waste the heft the series gave him and went on to become a significant force in comics of the era. Reading Manhunter in various formats is like listening to a great piece of music in different performances, the greatness is always evident regardless. 

If they sell Manhunter again, I likely will buy it all over -- the music is so very, very sweet. 

Below are the splash pages for the series and the covers of the Detective Comics issues in which they appeared. All but one of the Manhunter chapters was in a 100-Page comic and those were absolute troves of wonderful stories from across the decades. Maybe that richness added to my ardor for the series. I don't know. 

The inventiveness of Simonson's pages is remarkable and reminds me of Will Eisner's delightful Spirit splashes and he was just getting started. (The story "Cathedral Perilous, the fifth chapter was specifically inspired by Eisner's Spirit stories, according to Goodwin.) Three of the seven Manhunter stories won Shazam awards (Chapters 1, 5 and the finale) and garnered best writer awards for Goodwin in 1973 and 1974. This series is so good that it has withstood all of the reboots by DC over the intervening decades. A remarkable saga indeed. Goodwin and Simonson returned to the character in the late 90's but before Goodwin could script the final pages by Simonson he passed away. Simonson refused to have anyone else write the story and it was published without dialogue of any kind. The storytelling is so keen that none is needed. The collection which featured this final new Manhunter tale also won awards. 

Comics don't get better than Manhunter! Now if DC would only reprint those classic Golden Age Manhunter stories. I have the few in magazines here and there, but we need a collection. 

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