The Little Men Who Were There: The third Golden Age Vigilante story for me and a Kirby-esque noir by Mort Meskin and Joe Kubert. I had seen the Dummy before in a couple of panels in JLA 100. Here, he's obviously a freaky homicidal midget, although in some panels he does look like a doll. In the 80s Roy Thomas hinted that there was something supernatural about the Dummy, which robs him of any pathos. Also, the shrinking ray weapon is a little silly in the context of a straight crime story but Stuff the Chinatown Kid, is an appealing sidekick for Vig, with a gritty, hard-nosed quality. Frankly, I think he could beat up Speedy but Wing would have him.
Doctor Fate: The art credit is Howard Sherman and I suspect the writer was Gardner Fox. It opens with an imposing, majestic shot of Fate and his crystal ball. An amphibious being emerges from the sea - a fishman from the sunken city of the Nyarl-Amen dynasty! This is pure Lovecraft and it's what sets the strip apart from The Spectre. Fate sues for peace but has to utilise mystic flame to wipe out an army of fishmen attacking a naval base. This sequence and the climax in the underwater city reminds me enormously of The Sea Devils, the Doctor Who serial screened about six months prior to this issue (although obviously the Fate strip predates it by thirty years!) In the end, Nyarl-Amen, the "Wonder Wisdom", literally falls on his own sword. What makes this story so effective is the status of Dr. Fate- he keeps "watch on the world" and "guard(s) mankind from the weird threats of eerie evil". His power is described by a naval officer as " awful". I'm surprised Len Wein didn't develop a Fate back-up in the Seventies. Again, like Wildcat, he's such a potent character with his colourful garb and implacable mask; he could have been a vibrant transfer to the JLA.
The Human Fly Bandits: A Joe Kubert story from the late Forties; it looks great but the antagonist is less memorable than the death-trap. Hawkman is wearing the yellow mask that says "Earth-2" to me; I wonder why his original headgear was ditched? It was so much more dramatic and iconic than this bland cowl, although I actually prefer the version worn in the early Katar Hol stories. Did Roy Thomas really never write a story about it? He could have tied it in with Ultra Boy's emblem...
The villain here is one John Rotor, a debonair-looking villain in jodhpurs and cape, who can walk (and drive) up walls. The climax of the story reminds me of the Adam West Batman series, with the Hawks imprisoned in a giant thermometer.
The letters page teases new, non-reprint material and "experimenting"; ENB also suggests serializing a JSA story, if there's reader demand.Editor Bridwell admits issue one's stories might have been "better" but he only had "a very short time to prepare it". Not a confession you'd hear nowadays!
Last summer, I blogged that I couldn't decide now whether I had got comics in Galloway in Glenluce, as I thought, or Castle Douglas. I was convinced I got Wanted 4 there, along with Weird Worlds 4, in July or August of 1973- but maybe it was Easter. Or somewhere else altogether! Who knows?!
Wanted 4 is another all Golden-Age issue, with a suitably macabre and terrifically detailed cover.
Fighters Never Quit: This is the third Golden Age GL story I'd read and the third villain (after Icicle and Harlequin), so I had the sense he had quite the rogues gallery.
Solomon Grundy has been used as a Hulk-analogue at DC for some time (even in the JLA animated series) but here he is a fusion of Frankenstein's Monster and "It": Theodore Sturgeon's 1940 swamp creature.
This story (adapted by Roy Thomas, of course) appeared in Marvel's Supernatural Thrillers 1 the very same month as Wanted 4 and inspired the trope that resulted in the Heap, the Glob, Man-Thing and Swamp Thing. Grundy's Karloffian dialogue (" The loud noise, the light.. that is killing, yes? It is good!...we kill more, eh?") his ragged clothing and his brutal appearance combine to create a monster far less pitiful and appealing than Ol' Greenskin.
Comedy cabby Doiby Dickles has an important role; for once a comic relief sidekick steps up and is prepared to stand in for the "Lan'trin" at the "thundering finish". On the Materioptikon, I plan to revisit Grundy's battle with the JSA in the spring.
Kid Eternity: From 1949, cigarette-smoking Master Man is an instrument of the Devil and summons history's greatest villains with his magic word "Stygia" (the name, of course for Egypt's ancestral kingdom in the Conan Canon). I can see why ENB liked Kid Eternity: the sophisticated art, the educational aspect and the cool name but I still find the character rather diluted. Master Man, his evil counterpart, is just more interesting. He's very in tune with the Satanist strand in 70s Pop Culture that Marvel were exploring more boldly-since he's dispatched to Hell at the end.
The letters page is cut in half for this ad featuring Kamandi 2 (my first issue). Infantino was so eager that Kirby's stuff should sell...
ENB now says that there have been more requests for older stories, implying no new material will appear after all. A twelve-year old writes a sweet letter about reading issue 1 in school ( as I would do in High School) and requests Clayface, which was a great suggestion, presuming it wasn't the movie murderer version.
Coming soon: more Bronze Age mags, including the second-scariest comic I ever read!
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