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1965-1969
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by JOHN WELLS
Dedication To my brother David Wells, the greatest superhero I know who was born in the 1960s.
Writer: Editor: Logo Design: Layout: Cover Design: Publisher:
John Wells Keith Dallas Bill Walko David Paul Greenawalt Jon B. Cooke John Morrow
TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • 919-449-0344 email: store@twomorrowspubs.com First Printing • March 2014 • Printed in China ISBN 978-1-60549-055-7
American Comic Book Chronicles: 1965-69 is ©2014 TwoMorrows Publishing, a division of TwoMorrows Inc. All rights reserved under international and Pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical. Photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. All reproductions in this historical overview of comic books are copyright by the respective copyright holders, and are used here strictly for historical purposes. Attempts have been made to properly attribute copyrights for use in this book; if you are a valid copyright-holder and have not been properly credited, please contact TwoMorrows so that this can be corrected in any future printings. The viewpoints expressed in the text are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TwoMorrows Publishing. Archie, the Archies, Fly-Girl, Josie and the Pussycats, Mighty Crusaders, Pureheart the Powerful, the Shield, Superteen. TM and © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. The Beatles TM and © Apple Corps Ltd. Dr. Who TM and © British Broadcasting Corporation. Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle. TM and © Bullwinkle Studios. Captain Action. TM and © Captain Action Enterprises, LLC. Mighty Mouse TM and © CBS Operations. Star Trek. TM and © CBS Studios Inc. Casper the Friendly Ghost, Lone Ranger, Richie Rich. TM and © Classic Media, Inc. Dark Shadows TM and © Dan Curtis Productions, Inc. Angel and the Ape, Animal Man, Anthro, Aquaman, Balloon Buster, Batgirl, Batman, Beast-Boy, Black Canary, Blackhawk, Blue Beetle, Brat Finks, The Brave and the Bold, Brother Power the Geek, B’wana Beast, Cap’s Hobby Hints, Captain Atom, Captain Hunter, Catwoman, the Creeper, Deadman, Debbi’s Dates, Dial H For Hero, Dr. Fate, Dr. Thirteen, Doom Patrol, Enemy Ace, Fighting Devil Dog, Firehair, The Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, the Hawk and the Dove, Hawkman, Hourman, House of Mystery, Immortal Man, the Inferior Five, Jimmy Olsen, the Joker, Jonny Double, Judomaster, Justice League of America, Krypto, Leave It To Binky, Legion of Super-Heroes, Mad, Man-Fish, the Maniaks, Martian Manhunter, Metal Men, Metamorpho, Millie the Model, Nightmaster, Nightshade, the Parasite, the Penguin, the Phantom stranger, Plastic Man, Prince Ra-Man, The Question, The Riddler, Robin, Secret Six, Sgt. Rock, Son of Vulcan, the Spectre, Stanley and His Monster, Starman, Superboy, Supergirl, Superman, Swing With Scooter, Teen Titans, Tomahawk, Ultra the Multi-Alien, the Viking Prince, the Witching Hour, Wonder Girl, Wonder Woman. TM and © DC Comics. Vampirella. TM and © DFI. Chip ‘n’ Dale, Donald Duck, Junior Woodchucks, Mickey Mouse, Phantom Blot, Super Goof, Uncle Scrooge TM and © Disney Enterprises, Inc. Grinch TM and © Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP. Peter Cannon TM and © Dynamite Characters, LLC. Tarzan TM and © ERB, Inc. Steve Canyon. TM and © Estate of Esther Parsons Caniff. Feds ‘n’ Heads, Wonder Warthog. TM and © Gilbert Shelton. Dennis the Menace. TM and © Hank Ketcham Ent., Inc. The Banana Splits, Dino Boy, Frankenstein Jr., the Herculoids, the Impossibles, Jonny Quest, Mighty Mightor, Moby Dick, Scooby-Doo, Shazzan, Space Ghost TM and © Hanna-Barbera Productions. Tintin. TM and © HERGÉ / Moulinsart 2013. Get Smart TM and © Home Box Office, Inc. Fighting American, the Fly TM © Joe Simon. Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, Popeye, Secret Agent X-9. TM and © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Junkwaffel TM and © Mark Bode. Avengers, the Black Knight, Black Panther, Blastaar, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Captain Savage, Chili, Daredevil, the Falcon, Fantastic Four, Galactus, Ghost Rider, Guardians of the Galaxy, Homer the Happy Ghost, the Hulk, Inhumans, Iron Man, Kid Colt Outlaw, the Kingpin, Masters of Evil, Mephisto, Modok, Nick Fury, Not Brand Echh, Peter the Little Pest, the Prowler, the Red Skull, Sauron, S.H.I.E.L.D., Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, the Squadron Sinister, Starhawk, Sub-Mariner, the Thing, Thor, the Vision, X-Men, Yellowjacket. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Creepy, Eerie. TM and © New Comic Company. Pogo. TM and © Okefenokee Glee & Perloo Inc. Peanuts TM and © Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Dynamo, Lightning, Menthor, NoMan, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, Undersea Agent. TM and © Radiant Assets, LLC. Dr. Solar, Magnus Robot Fighter, Space Family Robinson. TM and © Random House, Inc. The Monkees. TM and © Rhino Entertainment Company. Fritz the Cat, Keep On Truckin’, Mr. Natural. TM and © Robert Crumb. Herbie, Magicman, Nemesis TM and © Roger Broughton. Alter Ego TM and © Roy & Dann Thomas. Mr. A. TM and © Steve Ditko. Dick Tracy. TM and © TMS News and Features, LLC. Tom and Jerry TM and © Turner Entertainment. Cannon, Dragonella, the Misfits, Pipsqueak Papers, Sally Forth TM and © Wallace Wood Properties, LLC. Woody Woodpecker TM and © Walter Lantz. Bugs Bunny TM and © Warner Bros. Blazing Combat. TM and © Warren Publishing Co. The Spirit. TM and © Will Eisner Studios Inc. Zap Comix TM and © ZAP Comix. Abbott & Costello, Adventures of Bob Hope, Adventures of Jerry Lewis, Ben Casey, The Big Valley, B-Man, Bunny, Captain Venture, Classics Illustrated, Clawfang the Barbarian, The Colossal Show, Dr. Graves, Dragula, Dynamite Joe, the Fab Four, Fatman, Fruitman, Golden Legacy, I Spy, Honey West, Jack Q. Frost, Jigsaw, King Kong, Lobo, Lonely War of Willy Schultz, Man In Black Called Fate, Melvin, Melvin Monster, Miracles, Inc., the Modniks, Neutro, Nukla, Pirana, the Shape, Sick, Spookman, Spyman, Super Green Beret, Tales of the Green Beret, !Teenman!, Thane of Bagarth, 3 Rocketeers, Tiger Boy, Tiger Girl, Tippy Teen, Total War, Tyro Team, Web of Horror. TM and © respective copyright holders.
Table of Contents Introductory Note about the Chronological Structure of American Comic Book Chronicles.................. 4
Note on Comic Book Sales and Circulation Data.......................................... 5
Introduction & Acknowledgements . ........... 6
Chapter One: 1965 Perception................................................................8
Chapter Two: 1966 Caped Crusaders, Masked Invaders.............. 69
Chapter Three: 1967 After The Gold Rush......................................... 146
Chapter Four: 1968 A Hazy Shade of Winter................................. 190
Chapter Five: 1969 Bad Moon Rising.............................................. 232
Works Cited....................................................... 276 Index................................................................... 285
1965
Perception
Comics, the March 18, 1965, edition of Newsweek declared, were “no laughing matter.” However trite the headline may have been even then, it wasn’t really wrong. In the span of five years, the balance of power in the comic book field had changed dramatically. Industry leader Dell had fallen out of favor thanks to a 1962 split with client Western Publications that resulted in the latter producing comics for themselves—much of it licensed properties—as the widely-respected Gold Key Comics. The stuffily-named National Periodical Publications—later better known as DC Comics—had seized the number one spot for itself although its flagship Superman title could only claim the honor of being the United States’ best-selling color comic book, not the best-seller period. That trophy was claimed by Mad, the black-and-white humor magazine that had been quietly purchased by a National subsidiary in 1964. Through a series of superhero revivals spearheaded by editor Julius Schwartz, DC had also shone the spotlight on a new growth genre. Even publishers whose strengths lied in teen humor (Archie), kids comedy (Harvey), or simply the ability to keep the presses running (Charlton) dabbled in costumed crime-busters to one degree or another. (The defiant ACG rejected the idea of superheroes as did Hallden, whose “line” consisted of Dennis the Menace.) Marvel Comics—under the principal direction of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko—brought something fresh to the concept, though, something beyond the slick artwork and space age premises that DC had successfully marketed. By accident as much by design, the Marvel heroes defied the classical archetype of physical and mental perfection. More often than not, these newcomers had great power that was leavened by disabilities or failings that they had to rise above, situations that could make them brittle and argumentative when they got together. In Julie Schwartz’s DC books, at least, the heroes were welladjusted adults prone to speaking in even tones and using their indoor voices. At Marvel, the stars—whatever their physical ages—were virtually all overgrown teenagers who screamed at the top of their lungs. To kids moving into adolescence with all the emotional turmoil and drama that entailed, the angst of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and company was all too relatable.
CHAPTER ONE
That recipe—also including large dollops of soap opera— was paying off for Marvel in comic books sold, which leapt by roughly one million copies in 1964 and again in 1965 (Tolworthy). Marvel’s titles were distributed by a company named Independent News that, like Mad, was part of the larger National Periodical Publications family. Consequently, DC’s executives were well aware of their competi8
tor’s growth…and more than a little concerned since their own sales had mostly been holding steady since 1962. Since the late 1950s, DC had been expanding and freshening its line by testing new features in tryout titles like Showcase and The Brave and the Bold. From 1957 to mid-1962, in fact, virtually every Showcase creation had been promoted to an ongoing series. After the 1962 debut of the white-hot Metal Men, though, no Showcase tryout had clicked with readers. Moreover, in 1965, three of the title’s earlier successes were discontinued when Adam Strange and Space Ranger were dropped from the pages of Mystery In Space while Rip Hunter…Time Master was cancelled with issue #29 (November-December 1965).
erally in their teens or twenties who found relevance in the Marvel superhero books that they weren’t experiencing elsewhere. “I had first told Irwin that we’ve got to listen to fans to some degree because they were the vanguard,” Drake said. “Irwin’s reply was, ‘Yeah, but don’t forget that they only represent two percent of our audience.’ That was very short-sighted. Leaders are always a tiny majority.
That’s part of what makes them leaders” (Reed 60). DC writer-editor Robert Kanigher— whose Sgt. Rock series in Our Army At War had inspired Marvel’s Sgt. Fury title—dubbed the upstart publisher “CC Comics” (as in copycat) in his letter columns. Attempting to replicate Stan Lee’s brand loyalty campaign, Kanigher even briefly peppered his covers with copy like “DC breaks all
Ironically, The Brave and the Bold— whose sole successes had been Justice League of America and Hawkman—had better luck pinpointing new hits after it abandoned the tryout model in 1963 for a format involving team-ups of various DC characters. Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon’s sly Metamorpho #1 (July-August 1965) followed a twoissue 1964 spotlight in B&B #57 and #58. Haney and Bruno Premiani’s pairing of three kid sidekicks in B&B #54, however, had unintentionally inspired the Teen Titans. And when Haney and Fradon paired Batman and Green Lantern in B&B #59, no one could anticipate that the Caped Crusader would eventually emerge as the book’s permanent costar in 1967. The suggestion by writers like Haney and Arnold Drake that DC might be falling behind was greeted with defensiveness. “I recall Drake and I telling [DC Executive Vice President Irwin Donenfeld] in the first months of the Marvel revolution that we should be aware of what Stan Lee was doing, what was happening to kids, to colleges, to the public pulse, blah blah,” Haney recalled. “For our pains, he snarled that Marvel only did 35 million copies yearly, while DC did 100 million. The rest, alas, is history” (Haney 8). Drake pointed to the audience of diehard comic book fans that had sprung up in the past five years, readers gen-
The Brave and the Bold’s hits included the Teen Titans, Metamorpho, and the first in a series of Batman team-ups. Batman, Green Lantern, Metamorpho, Teen Titans TM and © DC Comics.
9
TIMELINE: 1965 A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.) January 20: Lyndon Johnson is sworn in for his first full term as President of the United States.
February 1: Former National Comics [now DC] publisher Harry Donenfeld dies at age 71. February: Superheroes come to Disney comic books via Super Goof in Gold Key’s New Adventures of the Phantom Blot #2. February 15: Morrie Turner’s trailblazing Wee Pals comic strip, with an ethnically-diverse cast of children, debuts in five newspapers.
JANUARY
FEBRUARY February 20: The Ranger 8 spacecraft photographs future landing sites for astronauts before crashing on the moon.
January 24: Sir Winston Churchill dies at the age of 90. The widely-hailed former British Prime Minister’s state funeral in London is attended by scores of world leaders.
February 25: DC’s The Brave and the Bold #59 unites Batman with Green Lantern, a harbinger of the Caped Crusader’s future co-starring role in the title.
March 23: Aboard Gemini 3, Gus Grissom becomes the first NASA astronaut to fly in space.
April 20: Nine years after being Cartoonist of the Year, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz becomes the first cartoonist to again be honored with the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award. Other winners recognized for their 1964 work include Frank O’Neal (humor newspaper strips, Short Ribs), Hal Foster (story newspaper strips, Prince Valiant), George Lichty (newspaper panels, Grin and Bear It), and Paul Fung, Jr. (comic book category, Blondie).
March: Charlton’s Son of Vulcan becomes the next superhero of its line, beginning in Mysteries Of Unexplored Worlds #46.
April 6: Intelsat I (“Early Bird”) becomes the first commercial communications satellite launched into orbit.
March 2: The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, premieres, eventually becoming one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
May 4: The star of Marvel’s war comic book acquires a second series in the present as Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strange Tales #135).
May 10: Former adventure cartoonist Art Sansom goes for laughs in his new comic strip, The Born Loser.
April 11: On Palm Sunday, dozens of tornados strike six Midwestern states with more than 250 fatalities.
March 18: Russian cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov becomes the first man to walk in space.
MARCH
June 6: The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is released in the United States, eventually becoming their first number one hit there.
APRIL
M AY
JUNE
May 3: Kid comic strip Tiger, by Bud Blake, debuts.
March 11: Abandoning its Justice League template, Marvel’s Avengers #16 replaces its headline stars with Captain America and a trio of reformed villains, Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.
April 29: DC’s adolescent sidekicks—now including Wonder Girl—are formally dubbed the Teen Titans in a tryout in The Brave and the Bold #60.
March 8: 3500 U.S. Marines become the first American combat troops set to foot in Vietnam.
March 7: In Selma, Alabama, a violent confrontation between Civil Rights marchers and state troopers becomes known as “Bloody Sunday.” As further marches take place, President Johnson condemns racism and invokes the seminal phrase of the movement: “We shall overcome.”
May 25: Muhammad Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston in a highly-anticipated boxing rematch is mired in controversy over whether the latter took a dive.
Batman, Green Lantern, Teen Titans TM and © DC Comics. Avengers, Fantastic Four, Nick Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D. TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Blazing Combat is TM and © respective copyright holder.
the rules” until future DC writer Cary Bates took him to task in the letter column of Star-Spangled War Stories #127 for the “unnecessary hard-sell.” Drake found a relatively more receptive audience in editor Murray Boltinoff, for whom he wrote Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Doom Patrol, and others. The DP was the furthest thing from traditional superheroes that DC published, with a quartet of crime-fighters who justifiably regarded their powers as a curse. Issues #99 and #100 (November-December 1965) went further by upending the template of the well-mannered kid sidekick via Gar Logan, a green-skinned hero dubbed Beast-Boy who was mouthy and insulting in the extreme. “Beast-Boy was a double entendre,” Drake observed. “He was a brat—a pain in the ass. So calling him Beast Boy was appropriate. […] We wanted a character who could assume many different animal forms, and also wanted a kid in the strip, someone
the kids could relate to. They were starting to talk back to their elders. They were starting to make their elders earn their respect. So Beast Boy was an attempt to picture what I thought was happening among some of the young people” (Mougin, “Arnold Drake” 9). The previous few years (and those to come) had been transformative ones
for the writer’s style, something he later reflected on: “Stan Lee’s success had something to do with it. But only in the sense that I saw it as a signal that much of what I had always wanted to do could now be done. Two other factors were much more important in changing my work.
Beast Boy embodied the generation gap in these panels from Doom Patrol #100. Art by Bruno Premiani. . Beast Boy, Doom Patrol TM and © DC Comics.
10
July: Warren’s hard-hitting war comic book Blazing Combat #1 arrives on newsstands.
August: Tower Comics’ T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #1 blends the superhero and spy crazes into a slick 25-cent package. August: Costumed crime-fighters hit Riverdale when Pureheart the Powerful and Superteen make their respective debuts in Life With Archie #42 and Betty & Veronica #118.
September: National Allied [now DC Comics] founder Major Malcolm WheelerNicholson dies at age 75.
September 6: T.K. Ryan’s comical Western-themed Tumbleweeds debuts in newspapers one day after Howie Scheider’s humor strip Eek and Meek.
October 28: Along with writer Gaylord Dubois, artist Russ Manning begins a revitalization of Gold Key’s Tarzan comic with an origin adaptation in issue #155.
November 8: The enduring Days of Our Lives soap opera premieres on NBC.
November 9: Seven eastern states and portions of Canada go dark in a blackout lasting as long as 13½ hours.
September 9: A hidden race of Inhumans emerges from the shadows in Fantastic Four #45. September 20: Tales of the Green Beret debuts in newspapers as a 12-week mini-series by Robin Moore and Joe Kubert. It returns as an ongoing feature on April 4, 1966.
July 29: The soon-to-benamed Animal-Man debuts in Strange Adventures #180.
J U LY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
September 15: CBS’ Green Acres and Lost In Space premiere the same night as NBC’s I Spy and ABC’s The Big Valley. Other notable TV series debuts of the week include CBS’ Hogan’s Heroes and The Wild Wild West on September 17 and NBC’s Get Smart and I Dream of Jeannie on September 18.
July 30: President Johnson’s Social Security Act of 1965 establishes the Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programs.
NOVEMBER
October 28: Construction is completed on St. Louis, Missouri’s 630-foot-tall Gateway Arch, now the United States’ tallest man-made monument.
August 6: President Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965 expressly prohibits discrimination against minority voters.
September 9: Peter Parker begins his college studies and makes a bad impression on classmates Harry Osborn and Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man #31.
DECEMBER
November 7: The Pillsbury Doughboy debuts in TV commercials. Conceived by Ryan Tanttila and Rudy Perz, the first sketches of the character were drawn by Green Lantern creator Martin Nodell.
September 13: Elliot Caplin teams up with celebrated 1940s comic book artist Lou Fine to launch the hardboiled detective comic strip Peter Scratch.
August 6: The Beatles’ studio album Help! is released in the U.K., with hit singles including the title track, “Yesterday,” and “Ticket To Ride.” August 1: Reed Richards marries Susan Storm in the superhero social event of the season (Fantastic Four Annual #3).
December 9: “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” based the Peanuts comic strip, airs on CBS, defying network jitters to become a beloved critical and ratings hit.
October: Dell’s Lobo #1 becomes the first comic book with a black leading man.
Lobo is TM and © respective copyright holder. Peanuts is TM and © Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Tarzan TM and © ERB, Inc.
One was Murray Boltinoff, who tended less to enforce his own style on the writer than did [editors Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger]. He gave you your head, which, with writers like myself, is the way to extract the best. The other factor is that I was allowed to create some of my own titles (Doom Patrol, Stanley and His Monster, Deadman). Perhaps there was a third factor. This all happened in the ‘60s. And if the events of the ‘60s didn’t change your way of looking at things, you had to be dead.” (Reed 58)
Nostalgia Act Halfway through the decade, much had changed in the United States. After generations of institutionalized discrimination, the segregation of black Americans was officially prohibited but many in the country were
fighting hard against compliance. A 1965 clash between Civil Rights activists and state troopers in Selma, Alabama, was only one of many encounters that had turned bloody. The country’s progressive intervention into Vietnam to stem the tide of Communism took a grim turn when the first U.S. combat forces arrived in Southeast Asia. And the nation still mourned the loss of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated on November 23, 1963. “And you tell me over and over and over again, my friend,” singer Barry McGuire fairly snarled, “Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.” The P.F. Sloan-written Eve of Destruction, its chorus surrounded by a litany of recent atrocities, was catapulted to the top of the pop charts in September of 1965 by youthful listeners even as many of their horrified parents wished the turmoil would just go away. 11
If only solutions were as easy as the editorial cartoon featuring President Lyndon B. Johnson that ran in the June 30, 1965 Los Angeles Times. Stepping into a broom closet, LBJ emerged in the third panel dressed as Superman with a speech intended for the United Nations clutched in one hand. “Posing as our mild mannered President,” a bystander declared, “he is actually…Superchief!” The cartoon, a reference to the President’s June 25 speech that called on the U.N. to put greater focus on global crises like birth control and poverty, tapped into Johnson’s ambitious call for the Great Society. Building off initiatives conceived under President Kennedy, Johnson envisioned a wideranging series of social programs that included the reduction of unemployment and improved medical coverage for the poor and elderly. The idealism in those goals and the scope of what Johnson wished to achieve also made him fodder for editorial cartoonists,
1966
Caped Crusaders, Masked Invaders
A superhero walks into a discothèque. “Anything I can do for you, sir?” a star-struck cigarette girl asks. “Check your cape?” The maître d’ offers a ringside table but the masked man declines. “Just looking, thanks. I’ll stand at the bar. I shouldn’t wish to attract attention.” This was Batman. Not the comic book character, mind you, but a film adaptation that was well on its way to becoming the TV phenomenon of 1966. In the months preceding its premiere, though, no one associated with the project could ever have imagined such success. At the outset, the Caped Crusader had been nothing more than a consolation prize, a property that ABC’s programming department licensed only because neither of their top choices (Superman and Dick Tracy) was available (Eisner 5-6). Contacted by ABC’s Douglas Cramer about the possibility of his Greenway Productions putting together a TV series, William Dozier agreed to think on the prospect. Picking up several Batman comic books—some old, some new—for research on a plane trip following his first meeting with Cramer, the producer concluded that the ABC execs “were crazy. I really thought they were crazy, if they were going to put this on television.” The only way it could be pulled off, he decided, was to make it “so square and so serious” that it would work on two levels: as an adventure for kids and as a comedy for their parents (Eisner 6). A New York Times article explained: “ABC could not afford to put the show in an expensive time slot if it only appealed to children; they don’t have the buying power. ‘This is a merchandising medium,’ said Dozier dryly, ‘not an entertainment medium.’ He decided to apply the pop art technique of the exaggerated cliché, laying it on to the point where it becomes amusing to adults” (Stone 75) Lorenzo Semple, Jr., whom Dozier chose to write the pilot, contends it was he who suggested that approach (Eury 62), but both recollections largely sidestepped the fact that the notion of playing Batman for laughs was already out there thanks to the recent movie-house showings of the 1943 movie serial where audiences mocked its deadpan style. Whatever the inspiration, ABC was sold on the pitch. When the series was announced in September of 1965, Dozier anticipated a leisurely development window for a project that wasn’t slated to premiere until a full year later. Unfortunately, ABC’s 1965 fall schedule was sink-
CHAPTER TWO 68
Batmania couldn’t be contained within U.S. borders, as evidenced by this British poster from late 1966 for the U.K.’s theatrical release. When a reported back injury felled TV’s Catwoman Julie Newmar, former Miss America Lee Meriwether stepped into the role for the Batman feature film. Batman TM and © DC Comics.
ing fast, a combination of new series like Gidget, Tammy, and A Man Called Shenandoah failing to catch on and old ones such as Ben Casey and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet running out of steam. During one recent week, the ratings were so bad that the network could claim only one series that was even in the top thirty: The Lawrence Welk Show (Kreiling 15). Out of desperation, ABC executives conceptualized “the Second Season,” a clutch of in-development shows that would be rolled out in January to replace the flops of September. Suddenly under the gun to have their series ready in weeks instead of months, Dozier and company filmed a pilot by the end of October. Thirtyseven-year-old Adam West and 20-year-old Burt Ward starred as Batman and Robin with Alan Napier (Alfred), Madge
Blake (Aunt Harriet), Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon), and Stafford Repp (the created-for-TV Chief O’Hara) rounding out the cast. The series owed as much to the comic books’ old school Caped Crusader as it did to the more serious version edited by Julius Schwartz since 1964. Schwartz’s predecessor Jack Schiff, in fact, “was the one consulted on the material given to them”
(Schiff A67) and he supplied several Batman Annuals full of 1950s stories. Those issues proved crucial since the TV show’s team wanted a “special guest-villain” for each episode and Schwartz had limited his use of costumed crooks to the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, and a few minor newcomers. Drawing on the older content, Dozier’s team revived oneshot wonders Mister Zero (as Mister Freeze) and False Face along with the Mad Hatter and the long-absent Catwoman. That’s not to say that Schwartz’s stories weren’t utilized, too. For instance, the pilot incorporated scenes from a 1965 Riddler story (Batman #171), while “Batman’s Inescapable Doom-Trap” (Detective Comics #346) was the basis for February 9 and 10’s Zelda the Great story.
69
TIMELINE: 1966
April: Comic books’ first black superhero debuts in Fantastic Four #52 when the FF meets the Black Panther.
A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.) March 5: Barry Sadler’s “Ballad January: M.F. Enterprises’ Captain Marvel #1 introduces a split-apart hero with a familiar name.
February 10: Jacqueline Susann’s blockbuster novel Valley of the Dolls follows three actresses on paths to self-destruction.
January 12: The premiere of ABC’S Batman TV series ignites an international craze.
of the Green Berets” begins five weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100.
March 16-17: Gemini VIII astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott achieve the first docking with another orbiting space vehicle but are forced to abort the mission. News bulletins on their reentry disrupt airings of Batman and Lost in Space.
April: Amazing Spider-Man #38 and Strange Tales #146 mark the end of Steve Ditko’s celebrated Marvel Comics run. April 1: President Johnson and other political figures become superheroes in The Great Society Comic Book. April 28: Longtime Tarzan comic book artist Jesse Marsh dies at age 58.
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
April 12: Singer Jan Berry (of Jan and Dean) suffers severe head injuries in a car crash near Beverly Hills’ Dead Man’s Curve.
January 19: India elects Indira Gandhi as its Prime Minister.
January 13: The Bewitched TV show welcomes a new addition when Tabitha is born.
March 28: The Avengers, a British spy fantasy unconnected to the Marvel comic and starring Patrick Macnee (John Steed) and Diana Rigg (Emma Peel) begins airing on ABC.
April 23: Johnny Rivers’ song “Secret Agent Man” peaks at Number Three on the Billboard Hot 100.
March 29: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman opens on Broadway.
May: A new era begins when John Romita becomes the new artist on The Amazing Spider-Man with issue #39 and a story that shows the Green Goblin unmasked.
May 1: The Superman newspaper strip is cancelled after 26 years but a Batman and Robin strip fills the void on May 29.
June: Menthor dies a hero’s death in the landmark T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #7.
May 2: Morrie Brickman’s The Small Society tackles current events in a new comic strip.
May 28: “When A Man Loves A Woman” earns Percy Sledge the top spot on Billboard’s charts.
M AY
June 8: An F5 tornado in Topeka, Kansas claims sixteen lives and surpasses $100 million in damage.
JUNE May 16: The Beach Boys’ influential album Pet Sounds (including singles “Caroline, No,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”) is released.
May 2: Former Bizarro and Legion of Super-Heroes artist John Forte dies. April 26: On Stage creator Leonard Starr wins the National Cartoonists Society’s 1965 Reuben Award. Other winners include Gus Arriola (humor newspaper strips, Gordo), Roy Crane (story newspaper strips, Buz Sawyer), Jim Berry (newspaper panels, Berry’s World), and Wally Wood (comic book category, Blazing Combat).
June 27: The gothic soap opera Dark Shadows premieres on ABC, later acquiring a cult following when it introduces supernatural elements.
Batgirl, Batman, Captain Atom TM and © DC Comics. Fantastic Four, Spider-Man TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc. Flash Gordon TM and © King Features Syndicate, Inc. Space Ghost TM and © Hanna-Barbera Productions.
Unlike the sober good guys in the series, the villains had free rein to chew scenery and did so with abandon. Stand-up comic Frank Gorshin’s manic, giggling Riddler—first seen in the pilot—virtually defined the character both on film and in comics for a generation as did Burgess Meredith’s cackling, impeccably costumed Penguin. Along with Cesar Romero’s Joker and Julie Newmar’s Catwoman, they formed the nucleus of the TV show’s rogues gallery. Even with return engagements and secondary bad guys, the series was trotting out original-to-TV menaces like King Tut (played by Victor Buono) and the Bookworm (Roddy McDowell) by the end of Season One in May. Schwartz’s 1964 revamp of Batman had restored a great deal of dignity to a character who’d often become lost in a science fiction haze. Even with that, though, the dialogue in any given story was there to advance the plot rather than evoke any sort of naturalistic tone. Simply by directing their cast to earnestly deliver such lines, Semple and Dozier were well on their way to achieving the humorous tone they wanted. Next, they punched up the dialogue with melodramatic flourishes. Criminals were “dastardly” and Robin reacted to every situation with specially-tailored exclamations like “Holy flypaper!” The creative team cranked up the absurdity to ten in the opening two-parter. Not content with the image of Batman in a The cover of Life’s March 11, 1966 issue amply demonstrated the . Batman TV show’s frequent lack of dignity. TM and © DC Comics.
70
July: Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon #1 from King Comics recalls the glory years of the Alex Raymond-created feature.
August: At the hands of Steve Ditko, Captain Atom #83 de-powers its eponymous hero while introducing the new Blue Beetle in a second feature.
September: Secret agents continue to thrive on TV with the first episodes of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. (Sept. 13: NBC) and Mission: Impossible (Sept. 17: CBS). September 1: After a ten-year courtship, Barry Allen marries Iris West in The Flash #165. September 2: Veteran comic book writer France Edward Herron succumbs to cancer at age 48.
July 4: President Johnson signs the Freedom of Information Act, allowing full or partial disclosure of many previously classified documents.
J U LY
November 7: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is confronted by dozens of anti-war students while speaking at Harvard University. October: The Black Panther Party, an aggressive branch of the civil rights movement, is founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. December 15: Entertainment mogul Walt Disney dies of lung cancer at age 65.
October 10: The Beach Boys’ signature song Good Vibrations is released as a single. August 5: The singles “Yellow Submarine” and “Eleanor Rigby” highlight the Beatles’ Revolver, regarded by many critics as their career-best album.
AUGUST
September 3: “Sunshine Superman” gives Donovan his first and only Number One hit on the Billboard charts.
SEPTEMBER
July 14: Eight student nurses are murdered by Richard Speck in Chicago.
October 17: Celebrity-laden game show Hollywood Squares begins on NBC.
OCTOBER
September 12: NBC’s musical-comedy The Monkees wins big with young viewers despite critics who dismiss the Beatles-inspired quartet as the Prefab Four.
July 31: Neal Adams’ Ben Casey comic strip ends as its hero ships off to Vietnam.
September 10: Superheroes conquer CBS’ Saturday mornings with cartoons including Space Ghost and Dino Boy and New Adventures of Superman. September: Fantastic heroes abound on TV with the debuts of Star Trek (Sept. 8: NBC), The Green Hornet, The Time Tunnel (Sept. 9: ABC), and Tarzan (Sept. 9: NBC) while Marlo Thomas’ That Girl (Sept. 8: ABC) offers a lighter alternative.
November 29: A new Batgirl makes her million-dollar debut in Detective Comics #359.
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
November 5: The Monkees’ “Last Train To Clarksville” hits Number One in the Billboard Hot 100 songs.
December 18: Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, narrated by Boris Karloff, is faithfully adapted as a CBS animated special.
Ben Casey TM and © respective copyright holder. Grinch TM and © Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP.
discothèque, Semple then proceeded to have him dance the Batusi with the villainous Molly (played by Jill St. John) and turn into a weepy drunk after imbibing spiked orange juice. Arriving at the very moment when TV networks were converting the last of their programming from black and white to color, Batman took full advantage of that palette. Beyond the costumes and backdrops, the series also peppered its fight scenes with superimposed sound effects (by fittingly-named DC letterer Joe Letterese) that evoked the comic book experience as much as they did some of the paintings in the pop art movement. Many scenes were even shot at an angle to simulate the visual variety of a dynamic comic book page. The pilot was given a failing grade by test audiences three consecutive times, its straight-faced comedy lost on the viewers. “The network executives panicked,” Dozier’s assistant Charles FitzSimons recalled. “They
had bought an entire run of episodes, and this was going to be the biggest bomb in history” (Eisner 7). In desperation, ABC launched a publicity campaign the likes of which had never been seen before in TV history. “Skywriters emblazoned Batman Is Coming in the heavens above the Rose Bowl game,” it was reported in the January 28, 1966 edition of Time Magazine. “Every hour on the hour, TV announcements bleated the imminent arrival of the Caped Crusader.” As Robert Greenberger later observed, “You had to be in a coma not to know that Batman was coming to TV in the New Year” (9-10). Evoking the movie serials of old, the typical Batman adventure aired in two parts, the first ending on a cliffhanger while a portentous narrator (vocalized by Dozier himself) played up the crisis to the hilt, avowing in the pilot that “the worst is yet to come!” CBS’ new Lost In Space series—airing opposite the Dynamic 71
Duo—featured cliffhanger endings, too, but Batman one-upped it by concluding each episode exactly 24 hours later. For the entirety of its first two seasons, the series would run two nights a week on Wednesdays and Thursdays. (ABC’s primetime soap opera Peyton Place was actually running three nights a week during the 19651966 TV season.) Putting things in meteorological terms, it was the perfect storm. The mid-1960s turmoil with its wars and protests and change had created an environment of nostalgia for ostensibly simpler times that in turn fueled the proliferation of articles throughout 1965 on collectors of old comic books and the heroes of yesteryear. Add a healthy dose of newfound cynicism and you had a receptive audience that laughed uproariously at the corny old Batman serial and found relevance in the less-than-perfect Marvel Comics heroes. Stir in the colorful Pop Art movement. Most directly, ABC’s lousy fall season and its
1967
After the
Gold Rush
Lightning, TV networks and comic book publishers alike soon discovered, did not strike twice, at least when it came to superheroes. On the birthday of its premiere, Batman celebrated with its first three-parter (January 11, 12, and 18, 1967). The episode, titled “The Zodiac Crimes,” notably paired the Joker and Penguin but is perhaps best-remembered for one of its cliffhangers where Robin was swallowed by a giant clam.
ABC’s snubbed rival networks offered heroes of their own a few days earlier on January 9. CBS’ Mister Terrific starred Stephen Strimpell as Stanley Beamish, endowed with superpowers in one-hour durations by a “power pill.” (If DC objected to use of the name of its old Mister Terrific character and Hourman concept, there’s no record of it.) Meantime, NBC offered mild-mannered Carter Nash (played by William Daniels) as Captain Nice in a funnier series developed by Get Smart co-creator Buck Henry.
Neither set the ratings charts on fire but, then, neither did ABC’s own more serious Green Hornet from the previous fall. A guest-appearance by the Hornet and Kato on the March 1-2 episodes of Batman did little to boost viewership. The last original episode of The Green Hornet aired only a few weeks later on March 17, continuing with reruns into the summer alongside Captain Nice and Mister Terrific before all three faded away. Two hero pilots by Batman and Hornet executive producer William Dozier were never picked up at all. Dick Tracy— starring future All My Children actor Ray MacDonnell with a pre-Brady Bunch Eve Plumb as Tracy’s daughter Bonnie Braids—was rejected by NBC for the 1967-1968 season. Also left behind was a cringe-inducing Wonder Woman pitch portraying the character as a delusional female who only imagined she was a super-heroine. “It’s amazing how many readers seem to have turned against Super-Heroes,” Richard E. Hughes declared in Forbidden Worlds #145 (August 1967). “But then again, maybe it’s not so amazing. You can have too much of a good thing, and the market sure was glutted with this type of story. There’s a further reason for opposing the Big Boys—a reason very apparent with magazines of our special type. For the last twenty years, we have specialized in publishing comics which featured our own private formula—a skillful admixture of the Supernatural and Science Fiction. We were the first to introduce this formula and stuck with it through the years, gathering a large and devoted readership in the process. Our readers resented it when we introduced Super-Heroes, preferring our original formula. That’s
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why we’ve removed heroes and are back with what our readers really want.” Although colored by Hughes’ disdain for the superhero genre, his editorial comment on the events of 1966 was nonetheless spot-on. The comic book racks were sagging under the weight of all those costumed crime-busters and the novelty had worn off. A reluctant participant in the fad at best, the ACG writer-editor cut his ties in the fall of 1966 (issues dated 1967) by discontinuing both Magicman (with Forbidden Worlds #141) and Nemesis (in Adventures Into the Unknown #170). The humor comic Herbie—whose title character had often gotten laughs as the Fat Fury— was cancelled outright with issue #23 (including a reprint of his 1958 debut). The cancellation—abrupt enough that three Herbie scripts went un-illustrated (Vance, “Something…?” 53)—left room for the supernaturaloriented Gasp! on the schedule but it survived only four issues before being terminated alongside the August 1967-dated Adventures Into the Unknown #174, Unknown Worlds #57, and Forbidden Worlds #145. Ironically, Hughes’ defiant editorial in the latter issue amounted to Famous Last Words. After 24 years, the American Comics Group was out of business. The final issues of the ACG books were selling around 155,000 to 162,000 copies per issue, numbers in the same range that got DC’s Sea Devils and Dell’s Thirteen cancelled in 1967 (Miller). “The comic book business had just fallen off tremendously,” ACG publisher Frederick Iger explained, “There was a dry-up of the industry. The small candy stores were going out of business, and comic books were being distributed through supermarkets and things and it was just time to let it go” (Vance, “Forbidden Adventures” 71). Fatman was joined in his series by Tin Man, a teenage hero whose skinny .
Iger maintained his Custom Comics division that cre- alter ego Lucius Pindle wore the same red and blue wardrobe as Captain Marvel’s Billy Batson. TM and © respective copyright holder. ated specialty one-shots for businesses but Hughes needed more than that to make ends meet. ACG had long had a connection with National Comics (DC), both through Like Myron Fass, Lightning hoped to evoke the spirit of its former co-owner Harry Donenfeld and their mutual disFawcett Comics’ original Captain Marvel and their credentribution by the National-owned Independent News Comtials suggested they might pull it off. Bankrolled by former pany. The unemployed writer may have used that connecFawcett Executive Editor Will Lieberson, one-time writer tion to get his foot in the door at DC. The fact that longtime Bernie Miller, and their brothers, the venture also pulled ACG contributors Kurt Schaffenberger and Pete Costanza in key players like editor Wendell Crowley and writer Otto were also there—and drew his scripts for Lois Lane #79 and Binder to develop the line (Hamerlinck, “High Camp HiJimmy Olsen #107—likely helped, as well. jinXXX” 86). For whatever reason, though, DC was not a good fit for The most auspicious presence was Captain Marvel co-creHughes, and the veteran writer left comics entirely after ator C.C. Beck, who was tapped to draw Fatman, the Hupenning tales for Hawkman #23-25, Jimmy Olsen #114, and man Flying Saucer #1 (April 1967). As described by histounspecified suspense stories. According to historian Mirian P.C. Hamerlinck, the hero was “a wealthy and portly chael Vance, “Hughes ended his career and his life writing young man named Van Crawford, still living at home with response letters to complaints for Gimbel’s Department his disappointed parents [and who] spent his days birdStore in New York City” (Vance, “Forbidden Adventures 31). watching, growing orchids, collecting puppets, and raiding He died of myelofibrosis at the age of 64 in 1974. the refrigerator. As Fatman, he was a colossal, lumbering ACG was merely the first (and oldest) publisher to fall durparody of a super-hero dressed in a self-made green cosing an almost uniformly difficult year for color comic book tume. And when he managed to get up a fast enough runpublishers. M.F. Enterprises resurfaced in June to burn off ning start, Fatman was able to rapidly turn himself into a final issues of Henry Brewster #7 and Captain Marvel Presmetal Human Flying Saucer and whisk away into the sky” ents the Terrible Five #5 while Lightning Comics (a.k.a. Mil(Hamerlinck, “High Camp HijinXXX” 86). son Publishing) came and went in the span of five months.
Hello, Goodbye
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TIMELINE: 1967 A compilation of the year’s notable comic book history events alongside some of the year’s most significant popular culture and historical events. (On sale dates are approximations.) January 15: Football’s first Super Bowl airs simultaneously on CBS and NBC.
January 21: Golden Age cartoonist Homer Fleming, whose work appeared in both Detective Comics #1 and Action Comics #1, dies at age 84.
JANUARY
June: The 24-year-old American Comics Group publishes its final issues.
April 14-15: Major protests against the Vietnam War are held in New York City and San Francisco. April 24: The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton’s famed novel about teenage Ponyboy and two rival Oklahoma gangs, is published.
February: The Question, Steve Ditko’s hard-hitting new hero, debuts in Charlton’s Blue Beetle #1.
May: Who says a comic book has to be good? Not Brand Echh #1 and Marvel Comics!
May 1: Elvis Presley marries Priscilla Beaulieu in Las Vegas.
February: Pop music is put on notice when The Archies begin performing in Life With Archie #60.
FEBRUARY
January 30: Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson begin their modernization of the Secret Agent Corrigan newspaper strip.
MARCH
APRIL
M AY April 28: Champion fighter Muhammad Ali is stripped of his title and boxing license after refusing military induction.
March 7: The Peanuts comic strip becomes an Off-Broadway play— You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown—with Gary Burghoff in the title role.
April 24: The Little King cartoonist Otto Soglow receives the 1966 Reuben Award at the annual National Cartoonists Society ceremony. Other winners include Mort Walker (humor newspaper strips, Beetle Bailey), John Prentice (story newspaper strips, Rip Kirby), Jim Berry (newspaper panels, Berry’s World), and Al Williamson (comic book category, Flash Gordon).
January 27: Apollo 1 astronauts Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom, and Edward White perish in a fire during a launch pad trial.
June 1: The Beatles’ renowned concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band goes on sale, yielding favorites like “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “A Day In the Life.”
June 15: Lee Marvin tops a huge cast in The Dirty Dozen, a hit movie about convicts turned World War Two commandos.
JUNE June 16: California’s Monterey Pop Festival helps set the stage for the counter-culture movement called the Summer of Love. June 5: The Six-Day War commences, leaving Israel with territories captured from Egypt and Syria. June 3: Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” tops the Billboard Hot 100.
Deadman, The Question TM and © DC Comics. Peanuts TM and © Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Uncle Scrooge, Jungle Book. TM and © Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Dubbed “the only comic hero with three identities,” Fatman wore a costume cut from the same cloth as the Marvel Family, albeit with green replacing the original Cap’s red and a flying saucer icon in place of a lightning bolt. Beck’s art was, if anything, more confident and refined than it had been in the 1940s and 1950s and its clear, cartoony virtues were the highlight of the series. Where the feature stumbled was in replacing the more understated humor of Captain Marvel with the heavy-handed camp of the Batman TV show. Fatman, for one thing, constantly used “Holy” exclamations while his pal Tinman often employed Cap’s old catch phrase “Holy Moley.” The boy-into-man aspect of Cap’s adventures was translated into Lightning’s other effort Tod Bolton Super Green Beret #1 (April 1967), written by Binder with art by Carl Pfeufer. Gifted with an enchanted green beret by his soldier uncle, young Tod
zones around the world, most obviously Vietnam but also Cuba and—by breaching the time barrier—World War Two-era Germany and the U.S. circa 1775. Super Green Beret’s ties to the increasingly unpopular presentday war, though, made the book’s two issues a bit uncomfortable.
Super Green Beret TM and © respective copyright holder.
was transformed into an adult super-warrior each time he placed it on his head. From the safety of his Valleyville home, the boy could telepathically pinpoint crises in war 148
One gets the sense that Lieberson, at least, believed the new comic books should be aimed at the adult audiences who’d laughed at Playboy Club showings of the Batman serial and read Jules Feiffer’s essay in Playboy itself. The publisher used his own men’s magazine Monsieur to promote Fatman (Hamerlinck, “High Camp HijinXXX” 87) and he advertised the star of a planned Captain Shazam title (evoking Captain Marvel’s magic word) as “a turned-on super swinger!” Secretly Steve Thomas (Agent Six) and an amalgam of six murdered agents, the hero would be empowered “through electronic gimmicks and not invulnerable” (Kaler, “What’s
July: “The long hot summer” of race riots escalates with violent uprisings in Newark, New Jersey and Detroit, Michigan.
August: Will Franz and Sam Glanzman’s “Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz” offers a different perspective on war stories in Charlton’s Fightin’ Army #76. August: A year after Carl Barks’ retirement, his last Disney duck script is published in Uncle Scrooge #71.
July: Archie Comics inker Vincent DeCarlo, younger brother of Dan, dies of lung cancer at age 38.
September 11: Gordon Bess’ Redeye newspaper strip features a comical tribe of Native Americans.
August 13: Motion picture taboos on sex and violence are shattered by Bonnie and Clyde, a movie that paves the way for such content to be commonplace.
J U LY
June 21: Former DC artist Stan Kaye, best known for a long stint inking Superman, dies at age 50.
July 8: Buck Rogers’ adventures in the 25th Century cease when his 38-year-old comic strip ends.
September 9: Superheroes continue to thrive on Saturday mornings with the debuts of ABC’s Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and CBS’ Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure.
AUGUST August 29: Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino’s ghostly acrobat Deadman begins searching for his killer in DC’s Strange Adventures #205.
September 11: The Carol Burnett Show begins a celebrated 11-season run on CBS.
October: The latest incarnation of Captain Marvel makes his bow in Marvel Super-Heroes #12.
October 1: Veteran comic book artist Bob Powell dies of intestinal cancer five days before his 51st birthday and a month and a half before the birth of his fourth son Seth.
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
September 27: Former Gumps cartoonist and Dondi co-creator Gus Edson dies at 66. Afterwards, Bob Oksner begins writing Dondi on behalf of artist/co-creator Irwin Hasen. September 16: CBS’ Mannix stars Mike Connors as a Los Angeles detective.
August 29: The finale of ABC’s The Fugitive, when Dr. Richard Kimble catches up with his wife’s killer, becomes the most-watched episode in TV history (until 1980). August 30: Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
September 14: The third and final season of ABC’s Batman adds actress Yvonne Craig to the cast as Batgirl while Raymond Burr returns to TV on NBC’s Ironside as a paraplegic police consultant.
News: 12/66” 3). C.C. Beck reported that the character never made it past the conceptual stage and no artwork was produced (Brown 46).
December 12: Race relations are at the heart of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?, a film about a white woman who introduces her black fiancé to her parents.
October 18: The Jungle Book, the last animated feature overseen in Walt Disney’s lifetime, premieres in theaters.
November 7: President Johnson signs the Public Broadcasting Act, providing federal funding for educational and enlightening non-commercial television programming.
December 21: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Katharine Ross star in The Graduate, the year’s top-grossing motion picture.
November 9: Rolling Stone, a magazine devoted to music and the counterculture, begins publication.
NOVEMBER October 26: Navy pilot John McCain is shot down and becomes a North Vietnamese prisoner of war until 1973. October 17: The Off-Broadway musical Hair brings hippies and the sexual revolution to the stage in New York City’s East Village.
DECEMBER
December 23: Celebrated Captain Marvel, Jr. and Flash Gordon artist Mac Raboy dies at the age of 53.
December 31: Daredevil motorcyclist Evel Knievel’s failed 141-foot leap over the fountains of Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace leaves him in a coma for the next month.
lections of stories ever published. Depending on the page one flipped to, a reader could find superheroes, kid humor, Roman gladiators, miscellaneous single-panel gags, World War One aviation, monsters, funny animals, or hot rods. Indeed, a portion of the content seems to have been cobbled together from unpublished material that the various contributors simply had lying around.
Like Tower and M.F. Enterprises, Lightning had adopted the thick 25-cent format but bypassed its trademark glued square spine for a stapled package as Gold Key had recently done with its giants. That decision “cost them a small fortune in sales losses,” according to retailers who complained that the Lightning issues were indistinguishable from 12-cent comics on a crowded spinner rack and seemed overpriced at a glance (Kaler, “What’s News: 8/67” 3). Declaring the enterprise “a costly fiasco” that lost its partners their $64,000 expenditure, Lieberson cut his losses and shut down the company (Lage 97), leaving behind a partially completed fourth Fatman issue (Brown 46).
“I’d guess that to kids who managed to convince their parents to shell out the 98¢, it cost new,” former Comic Reader editor Mike Tiefenbacher told American Comic Book Chronicles, “it had all the appeal of the unfocused Joe Simon Harvey issues published during the same period. Not enough superheroes for that crowd, not enough science fiction, or straight adventure or whatever, and definitely nothing that stood out as more important than anything else.” If the comic book had a star artist, it was Wally Wood, who led off the issue with the origin of an “atomic Hercules” called Radian who fought a villain called the Steel Skull. Later in the issue, Wood contributed a fantasy humor strip Goody Bumpkin. Technically, the pair of features ran only a collective five pages but that count was deceptive. Despite the massive dimensions of its pages, Wham-O generally ran its art at a smaller size than traditional comic books. Consequently, one page of Wood’s stories had enough panels to fill three in a standard issue. The art on a few features was literally published at postage stamp-size, most nota-
It seems probable that the publishers of Wham-O Giant Comics #1 (April 1967) didn’t see a return on their investment either but Bill McIntyre (editor), Don Peters (story editor), and Del Potter (art director) surely had to take pride in creating one of the genuine novelties in comic book history. At 48 pages, there had been thicker comics but not one of them had been this big: it measured 21” x 14”! Conceived by the California toy company Wham-O that unleashed the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee on kids in the 1950s, the comic book sported one of the most eclectic col149
1968
A Hazy Shade of Winter
When Kinney Services completed its acquisition of National Periodical Publications in March of 1968 (“Kinney National Acquisition” 14), it became yet another publishing merger in a decade of publishing mergers. From National General Corp. acquiring Grosset & Dunlap and its Bantam Books imprints to CBS’ expanded presence in the book field with its purchase of W.B. Saunders, more than three dozen enterprises either expanded or were consumed over the course of the year (Altbach 239). Ironically, while book sales in general showed a five percent increase, “magazine revenues were down in 1968, particularly among the general weekly and twice-monthly publications” (Merritt 468469). NPP’s Jack Liebowitz had no regrets. As part of the deal, he became a Kinney director and chairman of its executive committee, staying put with each new acquisition and merger for the next two decades. Editorial director Irwin Donenfeld was another story. He and his sister Sonia had collectively held the majority of NPP stock and Donenfeld was aggressively courted to go along with the deal. “They made me all kinds of promises of what I would be in this new company,” he recalled. “And none of those promises came to be.” Frustrated at being marginalized and distracted by the break-up of his marriage, the 41-year-old took the news of Kinney’s impending move of National to New York City’s 909 Third Avenue as the last straw. “I’m not going,” he declared (Evanier, “There’s a Lot of Myth Out There” 27).
“Uncle Jack, I can’t take this anymore,” Donenfeld remembered saying. “I’ve got to leave.” Walking out of the office, he left everything behind, including his personal copies of Action Comics #1, Superman #1, and the other DC comic books he’d accumulated over the years. “I just left and I never moved into that new building, and that’s what happened” (Evanier, “There’s a Lot of Myth Out There” 27). A stunned Carmine Infantino recalled approaching Liebowitz “because I wondered who I reported to now. ‘I said, ‘Who’s running this thing?’ He said, ‘You are.’ I’m thinking, ‘Who’s he talking to?’ [chuckles] And thank you, that was the end of that. That’s how I became editorial director” (Eury, “The Man Who Redesigned Batman” 25). Arguably, even Marvel Comics benefited from the merger. Distributed by National’s Independent News, Marvel had been restricted in the number of issues it could publish per month although it had been allowed to release progressively more comics during each year in the 1960s. Approaching IND during the sensitive Kinney-National negotiations, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman pushed for a higher per-month cap and was delighted when he got
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Sub-Mariner #1 (art by John Buscema and Sol Brodsky), Incredible Hulk #102 (art by Marie Severin and Frank Giacoia), Captain America #100 . (art by Jack Kirby, Syd Shores and Joe Sinnott), and Doctor Strange #169 (art by Dan Adkins). TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
it. Whether it was a case of Independent recognizing Marvel’s great profitability or just a matter of keeping its clients happy while a bigger deal was being made, Goodman benefited from the results.
Even Sgt. Fury got a spin-off in the form of Capt. Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders #1 (January 1968), a Pacificbased series by Gary Friedrich and artists Dick Ayers and Syd Shores intended to contrast the Howling Commandos’ European base of operations. The Western genre wasn’t as lucky. Kid Colt Outlaw #139 and Two-Gun Kid #92 (both dated March 1968) marked the end of two of the Marvel’s three Old-West titles, leaving Rawhide Kid as the last cowboy standing until the 25-cent Mighty Marvel Western series (comprised of Kid Colt, Rawhide, and Two-Gun reprints) premiered during the summer.
Plans were immediately put into place to eliminate Marvel’s trio of double-feature titles and replace them with six full-length comic books. Captain America #100 (maintaining the numbering of Tales of Suspense) and The Incredible Hulk #102 (continuing from Tales to Astonish) went on sale in January along with an Iron Man and Sub-Mariner one-shot that preceded the ongoing Iron Man #1 and SubMariner #1 in February. Captain Marvel #1 spun-off from Marvel Super-Heroes that same month while Strange Tales was divided into Doctor Strange #169 and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 in March. The 25-cent Marvel Super-Heroes continued as part reprint book/part tryout vehicle, with issues devoted to a Ross Andru Spider-Man tryout (MSH #14), Medusa of the Inhumans (MSH #15), a Herb Trimpe-created World War One-era costumed aviator called the Phantom Eagle (MSH #16), and Roy Thomas’ new version of the Black Knight (MSH #17).
Intermingled with the early launches were three issues of something called Groovy, one of the great examples of false advertising in comic book history. Edited by Robert Mende and Chris Johnson under the supervision of Goodman’s son Chip, each issue was composed almost entirely of colorized gag cartoons—some dating to the 1940s—that had first run in the company’s men’s magazines. Hopelessly out of touch with the very audience it was trying to reach, Groovy mostly avoided besmirching the Marvel imprint, only using it on its third and final issue.
Iron Man #1 (art by Gene Colan and Mike Esposito), Captain Savage #1 (art by Dick Ayers and Syd Shores), Captain Marvel #1 . (art by Gene Colan and Vince Colletta), and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 (art by Jim Steranko). TM and © Marvel Characters, Inc.
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