Yuku free message boards
Username or E-mail:
Password:
Forgot
Password?
Sign Up
Grab the Yuku app
Search:
RSS
Email
Collected Editions Discussion Forums
>
Collected Editions Discussion and Review Board
>
The DC Comics Time Capsule: October 1963
1
Point
Search this Topic:
«Prev
1
2
3
4
5
…
10
11
Next»
Jump
Forum Jump
Masterworks Message Board
DC Archives Message Board
Crisis On Infinite Comics!
BLAMMO! Message Board
Uncollected Editions: The Homegrown Hardcovers Binding Forum
Polling Central
CE Watchdog: All-Purpose Collected Editions Complaint Forum
Collected Editions Discussion and Review Board
The Vault
Binding Vault
<< Previous Topic
Next Topic >>
Re: The DC Comics Time Capsule: October 1963
Author
Comment
Commander Benson
Justice League of America # 24 (December, 1963)
#1
[-]
Posts
: 248
Oct 9 13 6:38 AM
Reply
Quote
More
My Recent Posts
“Decoy Missions of the Justice League”
Editor: Julius Schwartz
Writer: Gardner Fox
Art: Mike Sekowsky (pencils); Bernard Sachs (inks)
JLA Roll Call
Primary members:
Aquaman, the Atom, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman
Sidelined members:
Batman, Green Arrow, J’onn J’onzz, Superman
This Justice League tale actually begins with the most recent adventure of the space-hopping archæologist, Adam Strange. In fact, many of the developments of “Decoy Missions of the Justice League” involve the fabled Champion of Rann.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In “The Super-Brain of Adam Strange”, from
Mystery in Space
# 87 (Nov., 1963), chief scientist Sardath devises a way to nullify the zeta-beam radiation which saturates Strange’s body when he is transported to Rann. Typically, when the zeta-beam radiation wears off, Adam is instantly returned to Earth. Neutralising the radiation will permit Strange to remain on Rann for as long as a year.
Though, in theory, Strange could stay on Rann for as long as he wished, his time on the planet is limited by the events of a previous adventure. In “The Planet That Came to a Standstill”, from
Mystery in Space
# 75 (May, 1962), Adam ran up against Kanjar Ro, one of the earliest foes of the Justice League of America. With the help of the JLA, the Champion of Rann emerged triumphant, as always. But a blast from Kanjar Ro’s power rod contaminated Strange. If he remains on Rann longer than a year, the planet’s alien environment will kill him.
As it turns out, Adam won’t have to keep track of the calendar after all. Sardath’s procedure for nullifying the zeta-beam radiation also pushes the space-faring hero a few millennia along the evolutionary scale, turning him into a future man. Sardath is forced to return Adam Strange to normal, but not before all of Rann is menaced by deadly streaks of light in the atmosphere. These destructive rays, termed “sky frequencies”, are a side-effect of the powerful mental energies of Adam’s super-brain.
All over the planet, Rannians flee in terror, as their cities are blasted by tremendous bolts of devastating force cast by the sky frequencies. That is, in every city but one---and that’s where “Decoy Missions of the Justice League” kicks off.
That fortunate city happens to be the one which contains the prison holding Kanjar Ro, who was placed there after his defeat by Adam Strange and the Justice League.
The peculiar alien brain of the former dictator of the planet Dhor
absorbs
the violent energies of the sky frequencies. It spares the city from destruction, but the “cure” is likely to prove more threatening to Rann---and to the Earth---than the “disease”.
The sky-frequency radiation boosts Kanjar Ro’s intellect to an incredible degree. “Ah! My super-brain now understands all the mysteries of nature and the universe,” he discovers.
With his newly acquired mental powers, Kanjar Ro converts the bars of his prison cell into duplicates of the weapons he wielded against the Justice League in his first unsuccessful encounter with the Justice League, ‘way back in
JLA
# 3 (Feb.-Mar., 1961). But that’s only step one.
Step two is to use his incredible psychic ability to remove his body’s natural aura and solidify it into a separate existence. As an exact replica of its host, it is indistinguishable from the flesh-and-blood Kanjar Ro.
(As he often did, writer Gardner Fox exaggerated a real-life scientific theory. To make his point, Fox provides a helpful caption to the readers:
The aura of the human body has been theorized to exist by reputable Earth scientists, some of whom have even photographed it under certain conditions! It is believed that this aura is a manifestation of the life-force in every living thing . . .
.)
To prevent his escape from being discovered, the villain imprisons his solidified aura in the cell. The aural-Kanjar Ro is none too crazy about that, but his real self shrugs off the protests. He’s got something more pressing on his super-mind: getting his revenge on the Justice League of America!
With Adam Strange busy tackling the sky frequencies, there is no-one to stop Kanjar Ro from using his cosmic slave-ship to flee into space. Even at faster-than-light speed, the twenty-five-trillion-mile trip to Earth gives the fiendish despot plenty of time to scheme.
Maybe because of that new super-brain of his, Kanjar Ro comes to a rare conclusion for a JLA foe---there is no way to beat the World’s Greatest Heroes. But this aura thing, he realises, has possibilities. If he cannot defeat the Justice League, maybe he can get them out of his way. All he has to do is create an aural duplicate of the Earth, then exchange it with the real Earth, while the Justice League is too busy elsewhere to notice.
It’s inspired. “What a victory that shall be!” he gloats. “I shall reign over Earth---while they unsuspectingly carry out their duties on a counterfeit Earth!”
Kanjar Ro lands on one of those conveniently remote areas of our world, then with his power rod, backed by his super-brain, he creates a great laboratory and within that, he constructs the
auralikron
. The auralikron will secretly draw the auras of the Justice League members from their bodies and imprison them in five impregnable, transparent cylinders.
Why only
five
chambers? Because four of the Leaguers---Superman, Batman, J’onn J’onzz, and Green Arrow---happen to be away from Earth right now. It’s a fortunate circumstance that fits the renegade alien’s purposes.
Kanjar Ro activates his machine, and in a coruscation of “nucleokinetic energies”, the auras of the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Atom, and Aquaman materialise in the cylinders. Since the auras possess all the knowledge of their respective hosts, a quick mind-scan by the villain’s super-charged brain gives him access to the JLAers’ personal secrets.
With this vital information in hand, Kanjar Ro launches his master plan. He dispatches the auras---each under his mental command---to five destinations. Five locations far away from the populated areas of the Earth.
And, believe it or not, after all of that, we’re only up to Chapter Two.
The operational phase of Kanjar Ro’s sinister scheme kicks off in the Ivy University laboratory of Ray (the Atom) Palmer, when his JLA signaling device receives an emergency transmission from the Green Lantern. Or rather, the aural duplicate of the Emerald Crusader.
“Green Lantern” reports that he is in deadly danger on Quiil, a sub-atomic world. Only the Atom, with his ability to shink to microscopic size, can journey to Quiil and rescue him.
As a precaution, Palmer requires his JLA buddy to provide the coded call-sign worked out between the group’s members. The aural G.L., possessing all of the knowledge of his host, gives the right code, and instantly, Ray becomes the Atom.
Using “Green Lantern’s” emergency signal as a homing beacon, the Tiny Titan shrinks into the sub-atomic universe and lands on Quiil. There, he finds his teammate suffocating in a cloud of noxious yellow gases. As all Green Lantern fans know---say it with me, gang---due to a necessary impurity in the unique metal from which it is made, the power ring is ineffective against the colour yellow.
The Atom knows this, too. He finds a way to dissipate the clinging mists before his fellow JLA member chokes to death. “Green Lantern” explains that he came to this sub-atomic world on a humanitarian mission. The people of this world, he explains, are at the stage of cavemen. One boy, however, has made a slight evolutionary jump; he’s learnt how to make fire, invented the wheel, created the bow and arrow. And the envious members of his tribe mean to kill off this prehistoric Einstein .
In short, they have to save Quiil’s first Cro-Magnon from the last of its Neanderthals.
The JLA duo find the young caveman-genius running for his life, as the chief of the tribe, Choggar, and his band of knuckle-draggers bear down on him with rocks and spears. The two heroes swing into action.
The Atom drops all one-hundred-eighty pounds of himself on Choggar’s jaw. While making sure the chieftain is down for the count, the Mighty Mite glances over his shoulder and sees three of the tribesman pursuing the boy into the yellow mists. Before the cavemen can brain the youngster with their clubs, “Green Lantern” power-rings a cage around them.
This sets alarm bells ringing inside the Tiny Titan’s noggin. Once the rest of Choggar’s men are dispatched, the Atom takes advantage of the respite to snatch the power ring off “the Emerald Gladiator’s” finger. That’s the final proof that he needed. The Atom wills the power ring to render the aural-G.L. unconscious.
The Atom suspected something wasn’t on the up-and-up when he saw “Green Lantern’s” power ring work on that trio of cavemen, even though they were surrounded by the yellow mists. The clincher was when he was able to grab the power ring; the ring of the real G.L. cannot be removed from his finger.
With his prisoner in tow, the World’s Smallest Hero increases their size, Earth-bound, where he is determined to solve the mystery of how an impostor could duplicate Green Lantern and his incredible ring almost perfectly.
That sets the pattern for the rest of the chapter. In turn, a Justice Leaguer is lured away from the Earth’s surface by an emergency signal from another member, who verifies his identity with the private code signal known only to each other.
The Flash, using cosmic treadmill, arrives in the year A.D. 9140, in response to a call from “Wonder Woman”. Alien plants, brought to replenish a dwindling food supply, have rendered the population of the future Earth immobile. The plants have spread all over the globe, even to the Arctic, and only the Scarlet Speedster can move fast enough to help “the Amazon Princess” destroy the vegetation before the petrifying effect becomes permanent.
Green Lantern answers a distress call from “Aquaman”, on the planet Tharl. The sea-borne super-hero got embroiled in the war on Tharl when the invading force from the planet Grondd landed its space-cruiser on Earth to take on raw materials from the ocean bottom. “The Sea King” explains that he managed to stow away on the ship for the ten-hour space flight to Tharl, and now he needs Green Lantern’s aid in saving the peaceful people of this world from their would-be conquerors.
Wonder Woman receives an S.O.S. from “the Atom”, who was accidentally whisked into another dimension, where the slightest sound causes intensely destructive vibrations. Not surprisingly, the fragile crystalline-people of this dimension are doing their damndest to kill the pint-sized hero. Fortunately, Wonder Woman had the foresight to attach a marker balloon to the spot in the sky that provided her entrance into this world. After a few harrowing experiences, the Amazing Amazon snags the balloon with her magic lasso, snatches up “the Tiny Titan”, and tightrope-walks their way back to Earth.
Aquaman, on the high seas, gets “the Flash’s” call and is surprised to see his JLA pal on board a pleasure cruiser, fighting off an army of statuary and ship’s figureheads, animated into some sort of pseudo-life. When the animated figures flee to the ocean bottom, the Justice League pair dive beneath the waves in pursuit. After a protracted battle, and aided by a battalion of sea creatures summoned by the Marine Marvel, the heroes defeat the living statues and then pierce the inky depths to track down the source of their bizarre mobility.
And as with the Atom’s experience with “Green Lantern”, the other four aural-doubles commit infractions which alert the genuine Justice Leaguers to the deception.
The aura of Wonder Woman fails to leave footprints in the polar ice of future Earth.
“Aquaman” did not succumb to his hourly need for water despite his ten-hour journey through space.
“The Atom” does not adjust his weight to help Wonder Woman maintain her balance as she wirewalks her magic lasso.
“The Flash” remains underwater for half an hour without having to surface for air.
Thus forewarned, each Justice Leaguer is able to capture the aural-duplicate of his JLA comrade. The five flesh-and-blood heroes unite at the Secret Sanctuary and stare in puzzled amazement at their
doppelgängers
.
Meanwhile, back on Rann . . . .
Adam Strange has pulled the plug on the menace of the sky frequencies (
literally
, as we see at the end of
MiS
# 87), and he takes the time to tend to some of his regular duties. One of these is a routine check to make sure Kanjar Ro is still securely imprisoned. When Adam tests the strength of the bars of the cell, he discovers that they are not constructed of Dhorite, the villain’s weakness.
It’s a short-lived mystery, for the imprisoned aura of Kanjar Ro, still pissed off over being left in jail, is more than willing to spill the details of his host body’s evil plan. Strange takes in the account, but before he can do anything about it, the zeta-beam radiation in his body wears off.
Instantaneously, he is transported back to Earth.
At least, that’s the way it usually happens.
It goes a little differently this time. Adam Strange stares up into the nighttime sky---and sees
two
moons! Surprise gives way to the chilling realisation that he has, indeed, returned to Earth. However, his home world now occupies a different sector of space.
Kanjar Ro has succeeded in stealing the Earth out from under the noses of the Justice League of America! While the JLAers were decoyed by the heroes’ aural-duplicates, the evil renegade absconded with the real Earth, leaving behind an indistinguishable aural-Earth for Our Heroes to return to.
What Adam doesn’t know is that, when the dissipating zeta-beam radiation sent him back to the real Earth, his own aura was separated from his body and returned to the aural-Earth---due to a natural affinity that Kanjar Ro had not anticipated.
In the Secret Sanctuary of the Justice League---actually, the
aural
-version of it---the quintet of super-heroes are still pondering the situation. They are joined by Superman and Batman, Green Arrow and the Martian Manhunter, who have returned from their off-world missions. The new-arrivals, like their fellow members, have no idea that they stand on a duplicate of the real Earth, which is now hidden somewhere in the universe.
Still under the mental command of Kanjar Ro, the auras of Aquaman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and the Atom have remained silent and immobile, presenting the JLA with an impenetrable riddle.
Meanwhile, the aural-Adam Strange has been doing what Adam Strange---real or aura---does best: thinking. He discovers that the natural attraction of auras allows him to sense the presence of other auras. Rocketing through the skies, he homes in on the auras of the five JLA members. He bursts in on the Justice Leaguers, still scratching their heads over the situation.
A hasty explanation from the aural-Adam fills in the blanks, but leaves Our Heroes with a new set of problems. Where is the real Earth? How do we find it? And where is Kanjar Ro?
The aura of Adam Strange has a suggestion. “Don’t forget Kanjar Ro’s aura on Rann!” he reminds them. “It seemed mighty annoyed at being left in jail! It seemed willing to talk!”
As quick as Green Lantern can create a protective space-bubble for his fellow members, the JLA and the aural-Adam Strange flash across the vast void of space, to Rann. There, they find Kanjar Ro’s aura is only too glad to throw a wrench into his true self’s scheme by telling the heroes everything it knows. The aural-duplicate doesn’t know anything of what Kanjar Ro did after they were separated, but it is fully aware of what the villain planned to do, while they were still joined.
“I know he intended to hide Earth near the star Arcturus!” reveals the aura.
After another trillion-mile trip to yet another star system, the Justice League finds a single planet in orbit around Arcturus, but the continents and oceans are all wrong; it can’t be Earth---or can it?
It can, indeed, as Superman’s X-ray vision and J’onn J’onzz’s Martian-vision confirm when they pierce the illusionary topography with which Kanjar Ro camouflaged the world.
But now another problem presents itself. They’re up to page twenty-four of a twenty-five-page story, and there’s still a whole planet to search for their foe. Fortunately, the razor-sharp mind of the Batman has been working on that.
“I have a hunch it would give Kanjar Ro great amusement,” suggests the Gotham Gangbuster, “to make our secret hideout his own headquarters!”
A quick check by Superman’s telescopic vision shows Batman’s hunch is on the money. With only four panels left to go, Our Heroes ambush Kanjar Ro. All at once, the nine Leaguers gang-rush the villain, just as he sits down at the council table as the new dictator of Earth.
Unfortunately, being a Justice Leaguer is not like being a cop on television; there are still details to handle
after
catching the bad guy.
They have to remove the effects of the sky-frequency radiation from Kanjar Ro’s brain. And the Earth has to be returned to its proper position in our solar system. Then they have to arrange for the five aural-JLA members to be restored to their proper host bodies. And, lastly, they have to take Kanjar Ro back to Rann and reunite him with his own aura.
(Maybe it’s just me, but it often seems that it’s more work for the Justice League after defeating the villain, than it was fighting him in the first place.)
The last-panel wrap-up shows Kanjar Ro being rejoined with his aura behind the bars of his prison cell. And Adam Strange and his sweetie, Alanna, get to be in the smiling group-shot that typically concludes a Justice League adventure.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last issue’s “Drones of the Queen Bee” was the initial effort in Gardner Fox’s third formula for JLA-member participation, but “Decoy Missions of the Justice League” was probably the formula’s most definitive example.
In “Drones”, the Justice League members who missed out on the big action made little more than cameo appearances at the very end, after their buddies did all the heavy lifting to defeat the Queen Bee. But here, in “Decoy Missions”, the sidelined heroes show in time to participate in the case, even if only for four pages. It’s still enough room for them to make minor contributions. The Batman even gets to make one of his patented World’s Greatest Deductions.
This technique of gathering the whole team at the climax enabled Fox to bring a swift close to the case, after the five principal members’ individual adventures consumed most of the page count.
Before moving on to other things, I want to discuss an interesting aspect regarding two of the Justice Leaguers Fox chose to put on the back bench in this story. Something which went right past most of the readers; in fact, I have never seen anyone else raise this point.
When Kanjar Ro kidnaps the auras of five JLAers, he remarks [italics mine]:
“Since Superman and Batman---
and the newly formed team of J’onn J’onzz and Green Arrow
---are away from Earth at this time, I need not concern myself with them just now!”
Maybe other readers missed it, but it sure started a bell ringing in my head. Only two months earlier, DC had changed the format of one of its try-out titles---
The Brave and the Bold
. Instead of presenting new features, the magazine would team up two of DC’s existing stars. The inaugural issue of the new format---
The Brave and the Bold
# 50 (Oct.-Nov., 1963)---led off with the pairing of J’onn J’onzz and the Green Arrow, in “Wanted---the Capsule Master”.
There is some circumstantial evidence which makes the timing of these two issues---
B&B
# 50 and
JLA
# 24---noteworthy. So noteworthy, in fact, that when I put it all down on paper,
Comics Buyer’s Guide
saw fit to publish it as an article in its April, 2007 issue.
The script of “Wanted---the Capsule Master” does not throw Green Arrow and the Manhunter together by chance. The story treats them as heroes familiar with each other, beyond their memberships in the Justice League. They’re aware of each other’s civilian selves and they capture the chief villain by resorting to the old identity-switch trick that Superman and Batman pulled on Doctor Light back in
JLA
# 12 (Jun., 1962).
Taken alone, those details weren’t especially telling. The story was written, after all, by the notoriously continuity-ignorant Bob Haney. But then, in
JLA
# 24, up pops the dialogue about “the newly formed team of J’onn J’onzz and Green Arrow”. Kanjar Ro specifically excluded the Alien Ace and the Battling Bowman from his plot because they were not on Earth at the time; however, at no time in “Wanted---the Capsule Master”, do both of those heroes leave Earth. (J’onn J’onzz does travel to Mars, but only for an hour or so.)
Therefore, the phrase “newly formed team” cannot simply be a reference to
B&B
# 50. It implies an unrecorded
second
adventure of J.J. and G.A., one that took them away from Earth.
Unrecorded, or perhaps . . . unpublished.
I’ve mentioned before that Gardner Fox took pains to keep the JLA title consistent with the continuities of the individual heroes’ parent titles. That curious mention of “the newly formed team” has always led me to wonder if DC had been planning to launch a Manhunter-Green Arrow series, along the lines of the Superman-Batman team that appeared in
World’s Finest Comics
. It’s something that Fox quite likely would have known about and would have been convenient to reference in “Decoy Missions of the Justice League”.
JLA
# 24 would have hit the stands before the sales figures for
B&B
# 50 could be tallied. And it’s possible that, when the final numbers did come in, they weren’t impressive enough, so DC tossed the script for a second J’onn J’onzz-Green Arrow tale into the dustbin, along with the notion of making them a permanent team.
Just a thought, guys.
Another noticeable distinction of the story was that it shied away from the usual three-component arrangement which requires the League to divide into sub-teams. This time, each of the front-line members gets an episode to himself (albeit shared with an aural-duplicate of another JLAer).
One has to appreciate the versatility of Gardner Fox’s imagination. Besides the overarching plot, he included five separate and distinctive SF-based situations, any one of which, expanded to eight or ten pages, would have made a suitable tale for a solo hero. But jammed together into a single chapter, their episodic nature worked against the reader. It made the story feel slightly cramped.
Individual-hero sequences work best when they are divided into chapters and demarked as such, as were the Justice Society members’ solo-spots in the early years of
All-Star Comics
. On the other hand,
All-Star Comics
had fifty-seven pages to work with, plenty of room to give each hero his own chapter.
Of course, the big treat for DC fans of the day was the story’s connexion to the then-recent events of
Mystery in Space
. In these days of tightly packed continuity, that’s nothing special, but back then, it was a thrill to see various elements of the DC universe tied together.
Gardner Fox was partial to taking elements from the Adam Strange series and inserting them into the Justice League’s continuity. He had done this twice before, with the aforementioned “The Planet That Came to a Standstill”, and then “The Triumph of the Tornado Tyrant”, from
JLA
# 17 (Feb., 1963). These cross-over tales of Adam Strange and the Justice League stand out in Silver-Agers’ memories. So much so that there is a popular, but erroneous belief that Adam was an honorary member of the JLA.
There’s a significant nostalgia factor at work, as well, in “Decoy Missions of the Justice League”. Old JLA foe Kanjar Ro returns, along with his cosmic slave-ship of space. Kanjar Ro was so well-remembered by the readers that Fox didn’t feel the need to provide a footnote citing the villain’s first encounter with the League in
JLA
# 3. So it’s a little surprising that this story will turn out to be the ex-dictator of Dhor’s last Silver-Age appearance.
Osgood has told us on a couple of occasions that these last few
JLA
issues mark the beginning of his favourite era of the Silver-Age League. It’s easy to see why. Gardner Fox had gotten his second wind and was delivering more novel Justice League adventures, thanks to his more flexible format. Not only that, but after four years, the series had accrued its own rich history to draw from.
Last Edited By:
Commander Benson
Dec 4 13 7:04 PM. Edited 9 times.
<< Previous Topic
Next Topic >>
Forum Jump
Masterworks Message Board
DC Archives Message Board
Crisis On Infinite Comics!
BLAMMO! Message Board
Uncollected Editions: The Homegrown Hardcovers Binding Forum
Polling Central
CE Watchdog: All-Purpose Collected Editions Complaint Forum
Collected Editions Discussion and Review Board
The Vault
Binding Vault
Share This
Email to Friend
del.icio.us
Digg it
Facebook
Blogger
Yahoo MyWeb
«Prev
1
2
3
4
5
…
10
11
Next»
Jump
Collected Editions Discussion Forums
>
Collected Editions Discussion and Review Board
>
The DC Comics Time Capsule: October 1963
Click to subscribe by RSS
Click to receive E-mail notifications of replies