Friday, August 12, 2011

August, 1971: Justice League of America #93

Evidently armed with a generous bit of change, I was again able to buy one of the heftier, more expensive comics on the rack, with this "Giant" costing a dime more than the standard DCs of the time. I was becoming more enamored of the many costumed heroes, and with the JLA, I saw I could sample even more of them.
The robot duplicates were an essential part of the appeal, too. Close enough to "monsters" for my tastes (I'd been conditioned by Famous Monsters of Filmland to consider them near-equals to the likes of vampires and werewolves).
The artist on these reprints was Mike Sekowsky, whose work didn't have the "wow factor" of a Jack Kirby or Neal Adams, but had an appealing clarity and efficiency. His style made it easy for me to get comfortable with new characters like Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and the Martian Manhunter, all of whom I was encountering for the first time here. And despite the lesser flair of his work, he produced some sequences that cemented themselves in my young head: I can still see the images of Green Arrow and his sidekick Speedy being ejected from their "Arrowcar" (I probably assumed that all of the heroes shared heroing tips, thus the similarity between Green Arrow's gimmicks and Batman's, which were familiar from the tv show).
This comic was where the disconnect between reprints and current stories caught my notice. In the letters page, there was a masthead proclaiming this page the "JLA Mailroom", and it featured a picture of the Justice League members sitting around a table opening letters. But the membership was slightly different: there was no Martian Manhunter (he had, unbeknownst to me, resigned a couple of years earlier), and there was a character that I would learn to recognize as "Hawkman", who wasn't in any of these stories, and there was no Wonder Woman at all, instead some blonde (who I would learn was "Black Canary"). And Green Arrow's costume was different, as was Green Lantern's if only slightly. I remember composing a letter to the editor asking about all these mysterious differences. I don't think I ever mailed the letter--I probably figured it all out before I got around to posting it--but that was a sign that I was beginning to invest in these comic books a bit more seriously than the casual reader. I wanted to know all about these guys; their fictional histories, their powers, their secret identities, everything. And the only way to learn was to keep heading back to the spinner rack.

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