The Day Of The Deadman!

Just wanted to showcase these delightful reprints of the Deadman saga from the 1980's in those halcyon days before trade collections were a commonplace. These pricey (at the time anyway) volumes featured the art of Neal Adams on bright white paper for the first time. The Independent market was blooming and both DC and Marvel flooded the field with upgraded reprints in efforts to soak up newsstand space. That's the bad news. The good news is that fans got quality stories in quality condition for the first time. 

More Deadman (of a sort) later today. 

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Showcase Corner - Martian Manhunter!

Martian Manhunter is the first Silver Age superhero. His earliest adventures as a Martian trapped on Earth are contained in Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter Volume One. Most comics historians mark the beginning of the Silver Age of Comics with the publication of Showcase #4 which debuted a brand-new version of the Golden Age hero The Flash in the summer of 1956.

But I'd have to give the nod to the Martian Manhunter's debut in the back pages of the venerable Detective Comics #225 nearly a year before. With only a small cover blurb to announce his coming we get a brand-spanking-new superhero with science fiction roots who also just happens to operate pretty well in the crime genre which was a dominant one in the decade. J'onn J'onzz was from Mars, brought to the planet Earth against his will by a well-meaning but short-sighted scientist named Erdel who promptly died taking with him the possibility of returning J'onn to his Martian home. So he became "John Jones" and took up sleuthing for the local police department in his unnamed city. 

The Manhunter was first written by Joe Samachson and drawn for the entirety of his epic run in Detective and elsewhere by Joe Certa. Jack Miller took over the writing chores with the second adventure and stayed on the strip for many years. Now tucked away in the pages of Detective Comics, hidden from the eyes of only those who already wanted to read a Batman story, the Martian Manhunter proved an able back up. He battled mostly regular criminals in his guise as John Jones a detective working under Chief Harding. He surreptitiously used his myriad Martian superpowers to help his goal of stopping crime. But often he was undone by his singular weakness, one shared by all Martians, an inability to abide fire. A single match could render the Manhunter helpless.

The series plugged along with its comfortable format which often had Jones trying to stop crime and keep his secret at the same time. The stories at first were more crime than science fiction tales but as the series progressed the science fiction and superhero elements became more and more pronounced. And the Manhunter's Martian visage softened with time, becoming less and less alien and more human until he was essentially rendered as a bald human being albeit a bright green one. He had a vast array of powers such as invisibility, x-ray vision, super breath, shape-changing, super strength, and the ability to fly. Essentially if Superman could do it, the Martian Manhunter could do it, everything save have a barbecue for his buddies. 

Policewoman Diane Meade (the Commissioner's daughter we are always reminded) joined the case in 1957 and was supposed to be a minor love interest for Jones, though precious little is made of that. With just six and later seven pages to tell their stories Miller and Certa had little time for too much soap opera. A typical story had Jones get his assignment from Harding and quickly find that he needed to use his secret powers to accomplish it. He'd do so with some alacrity but almost always had to deal with fire in some way, but would overcome that and get his kudos by story's end at which point he'd often break the fourth wall and give the reader who shared his secret a wink. 

But in Detective Comics #273 in 1957 the premise was altered when Martian Manhunter was forced to reveal himself to the public. He'd operated in secret but now the world knew a heroic Martian was among them, but they did not know he was also John Jones. I suppose this change had to happen since a few years later he'd join the Justice League of America, serving nobly in the august team through most of the Silver Age. Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter Volume One gives the reader the first eighty MM adventures in its hefty five hundred and forty-two pages. Also included is weird precusor of a story from Batman #78 in which the Dynamic Duo meet a different Martian entirely. Reading these tales is not unlike eating potato chips, they well-made and go down easily and it's hard to stop at just one. 

Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter Volume Two gives us the rest of J'onn J'onnz's detective adventures and follows him into the House of Mystery. But there were attempts to change up the Martian Manhunter dynamic and among those was to introduce a partner in the form of the interdimensional imp named Zook. Zook could generate extreme heat and extreme cold and was quite pliable and so he and Manhunter took to staying in a hidden cave with only a tiny slot for an opening for Zoot to slither out of. Manhunter just walked through the walls. More and more the focus shifted from his work as John Jones and more onto his work as a superhero against bizarre menaces. Before shifting from Detective Comics to House of Mystery, the identity of John Jones (the actual detective side of Manhunter) was seemingly killed off and the Martian Manhunter eschewed a civilian life for the most part leaving behind his old cast save for Zook. (Save us all.) At the same time the incredible menace of the Idol-Head of Diabolu was introduced. 

It should be noted that just prior to the change of location Martian Manhunter made two appearances in the pre-Batman team-up The Brave and the Bold, once alongside Green Arrow (another hero needing a shove) and again with the Flash. The former drawn neatly by Paul Reinman and written by Bob Haney, I've read thanks to its inclusion in Showcase Presents Green Arrow, but I've never landed a copy of the latter tale. 

When Manhunter debuted in House of Mystery he was the lead feature and he waged a seemingly endless battle against the Idol-Head of Diabolu, an ancient artifact which had magical powers and on the first full Moon of every month unleashed a weird and deadly menace on Earth. Manhunter and Zook became sentinels of sort waiting month by month for the next weird threat to emerge. And they were some doozies as the covers above and below amply demonstrate. Martian Manhunter's feature was expanded to its largest size to give him space and time to battle the peculiar magical menaces. It seemed a genuine push to give the Martian Manhunter something he'd never had, a legitimate chance to win an audience on the newsstand by the power of his image. Alas it was unsuccessful. 

After some truly bizarre covers, the mavens at DC must have crunched the numbers and decided that poor old Manhunter wasn't drawing enough readers, so he began to lose his cover slot. 

Not all at once, but now and again. Sadly the Martian Manhunter who had been hidden from the world in which he lived for so many years and from the us readers on Earth-Prime was about to return to obscurity. 

Three more covers and it was over. The great experiment to give Martian Manhunter a push was done. He continued to battle the Idol-Head of Diabolu and other occasional menaces. He picked up a regular baddie named Professor Arnold Hugo, a former enemy of Batman but one who became a regular foe for Manhunter. 

Aside from a blurb or two the Manhunter's drift into the recesses of back-up limbo continued unabated. Jack Miller and Joe Certa kept the series rolling, with Certa's artwork getting more and more unrefined. He also seemed to be exploring new zanier page layouts in an effort to make the strip feel less old-fashioned. 

With the arrival of Robby Reed and Dial H for Hero, Martian Manhunter was right back where he started so many years before, a steady reliable back-up for another regular feature. He was now just as invisible as he often became in his adventures. Those adventures did switch gears a bit as the Idol-Head of Diabolu was at long last destroyed. In its place was Vulture, an international crime syndicate headed by Mr. V who because of his opaque white mask Manhunter called "Faceless". Manhunter moved to Europe and assumed the identity of Marco Xavier, a jet-set playboy who dabbled in crime. With this identity he waged a new war against the schemes of Vulture with a few stops here and there to remind us all of Zook's existence and to handle an alien menace or three. 

But with House of Mystery #173 it was over. Both Dial H for Hero and Martian Manhunter appeared for the last time. The next month would bring on new editor Joe Orlando and the House of Mystery would welcome its longtime host Cain. On an up note the Martian Manhunter did finally bring Mr.V to justice of sorts thought it came with a twist that didn't really make that much sense. 

That same month of January 1968 the Martian Manhunter made his final regular appearance in Justice League of America. (This is just about the time yours truly started reading some DC comics.) In one of Mike Sekowsky's final issues Gardner Fox cooked up a seriously zany issue which had the League pretending to be Green Arrow and battling a gaggle of their old foes. Manhunter does get several pages when takes on Dr. Light. But his last appearance is in a bold two-page spread as the League put the smackdown on the villains. Manhunter disappeared without comment from the final panels and is not seen again in the pages of the book for ten issues, over a year later in March 1969. 

In what became a farewell to J'onn J'onzz Martian Manhunter, Denny O'Neil and Dick Dillin cobbled together a story which tried to explain Manhunter's sudden disappearance. That it muddled his back story is unfortunate but at least they gave the old green fellow a send-off. It turns out he'd gone back to Mars at long last only to find his people having suffered a catastrophe that dwindled their numbers. He battle the villain responsible named Commander Blanx, but needed help so he went back to Earth to scare up his old teammates. The promptly go to Mars and handle the baddie but it's too late for the Martians who need a new planet and J'onn J'onzz joins his people to search for a new home. He doesn't turn up again until Justice League of America #100 which promised all the past leaguers but he's limited to a single panel on a planet far away regretting he cannot be with his mates. 

We all know now that Martian Manhunter would pop up now and again over the years but it was not until many years later when he and Aquaman gave the world the Detroit Justice League that he'd again be prominent. He's had a few series since then and his look and back story have changed a few times I guess since then as well. 

He even showed up at the end of Zack Snyder's Justice League movie. I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my favorite heroes in the flesh (sort of) though I was a little bummed when I read he only the got the nod because they could not use Green Lantern. Sigh, it's just the Martian Manhunter's luck. But he's still with us and that's grand. Fortunately for humanity, Zook didn't make the cut...yet. 

And that's a wrap on "Mars Month" here at the Dojo. Tomorrow something completely different. 

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Showcase Corner - Showcase!

Comic book lore informs us that DC's Showcase was the birthplace of the Silver Age of Comics. After a robust Golden Age bristling with all manner of superhero types, the tastes of the populace had changed and other genres such as war, romance, and humor had taken over the field with only a few vestige heroes such as Superman and Batman still running along. But in the pages of Showcase which was designed specifically to test new comic book ideas it was thought (after quite a bit of time actually) that maybe it was time to check the waters again and see if maybe, just maybe heroes were once again the order of the day. After much hemming and hawing it proved that they were, but in its earliest days that's not what showcase really showed. 

The first three issues of Showcase are pretty forgettable events. They are not bad comics by any means, in fact they are very well produced comics in a variety of genres which might well be called in the light of the modern day a bit mundane. Fireman Farrell was a brave sort who wanted to be a fireman like his dear old Dad and does just that. We are treated to three stories by Arnold Drake and John Prentice that are exceedingly well crafted but dull as dishwater. They read like episodes of Dragnet, the Dragnet of the 60's with all the moralizing. Then the second issue gives us trio of stories about critters by artists who at the time mostly did war stuff. Joe Kubert, Ross Andru and Russ Heath make some beautiful stories and the one about the runaway bear is quite entertaining, but it's pretty low octane. It's gets better in the third issue drawn by Heath when we get a full-length tale about a young man wanting to be a frogman and earning his way through some downright suicidal missions. But it's not anything new. 

Supposedly its's the fourth issue that marks the beginning of a new way forward. But I'm not convinced actually. Yes we get a "new" superhero in The Flash and it does indicate a conscious break with the past since the original Flash from only a few years before is now relegated to the comics pages of the comic story. The stories aren't anything really to get all that  excited about though. The Turtle, the first Flash villain is actually quite lame. It's mostly science which is on display. 

Following the Flash we get yet another familiar format with some crime tales all cobbled together under an unconvincing "Manhunters" title. If Showcase is supposed to quicken the audience for new things, this seems a particularly poor effort to do that. 

In the next two issues of Showcase though things begin to heat up. Jack Kirby was dabbling at DC at this time making some fine art for some heady science fiction stuff and then he and writer Dave Wood come up with the Challengers of the Unknown. And for my money it is the debut of the Challs that marks the real beginning of a new age, one that will one day be dubbed "Silver". The Challs are fresh and their adventures are delightful blend of science fiction and a little sorcery bonded onto a high adventure format that sings. These are full-length stories which is important in order to give the Challs time to show themselves as the plucky blokes they are, able to fend off fear and threats with equal aplomb.  

The Flash is back for another go and despite the arrival of a for real rogue in Captain Cold it's still less impressive to my eyes than the new look that Kirby brought to the Challengers stories. 

Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane debuts in her own series and while they prove successful as most things "Super" did back then, the stories are decidedly old-fashioned and despite competent art by Al Plastino and Wayne Boring among others there is no sense of anything new. 

The Challengers return in the nick of time for two more titanic issues, and prove to me that they are the breakouts in this series so far. They feel new and crisp and offer stories which I'd argue appeal to a wider ranger of readers than either the Lois Lane stuff or the Flash really. There's a hint of the war format found in "Frogmen" but blended with raw gleaming science fiction. The Challengers will break out into their own title, only a month after Lois Lane did likewise. They are the first truly new feature to do so. 

The Flash is back yet again for another try-out and it's really to Julie Schwartz's credit that he kept banging along on this. Ultimately he will be proven to have been right, superheroes were wanted again, but as Schwart clearly also knew science ficiton was what sold. 

And that is evident by the next three new characters to debut in the pages of Showcase. Space Ranger is a likeable comic with a familiar format which feels like a superhero story though it is set in the future. He has a secret identity as the son of a rich industrialist and along with his lovely secretary Myra and his shape-changing alien sidekick Cryll battles crime across the solar system and beyond. He has a good and sturdy rocket called the Solar King and he's one hundred percent good guy. His pulp roots are all too evident. 

But fresher than Space Ranger is Adam Strange. Adam is an archeologist who is whisked to the distant planet Rann by a random Zeta-Beam and he quickly finds a girl in the lovely Alanna and a purpose when he is called upon again and again to save all of Rann from all sorts of threats and disasters. He quickly dons a sleek and handsome suit and takes is place among the best heroes ever concocted. The artwork by Mike Sekowsky isn't as sleek as what will come with Carmine Infantino when Adam gets his own ongoing series, but it's very modern compared to the competent but somewhat lackluster efforts by Bob Brown for Space Ranger. The "Adventures on Other Worlds" feel more sophisticated and they are. 

This volume ends with yet another sci-fi concept given form with Rip Hunter Time Master. Rip and his allies Jeff Smith and Bonnie and Corky Baxter ride the time sphere back to prehistoric times and mingle with criminals and dinosaurs. It's old-fashioned adventure with a sci-fi garnish. The second adventure has the team tumble back into time finding Alexander the Great, Circe the Sorceress and even seeing the demise of Atlantis. Jack Miller wasn't stingy with the concepts and the artwork by Ruben Moreira in the debut and Sekowsky in the follow-up is fine. But this isn't as strong as Adam Strange or the Challs. 

But it does show that was was selling was science fiction, and the superheroes who would dominate many of the future issues of Showcase were as much science fiction concepts as they were superhero ones. Green Lantern, The Atom, Sea Devils, and The Metal Men will dominate the next many issues and like what preceded them the common factor is science fiction. 

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