This second appearance of the team
was a first for me in several ways — the first time I saw a number of
soon-to-be iconic superheroes, and the first time I was introduced to the
thrilling concept of a superhero team.
I’d missed their first, instantly-sold-out appearance.
The Martian Manhunter I recognized
from the first issue of Detective Comics I’d purchased, number 277, two months
before. I considered him to be kind of a Superman, but green.
I probably also recognized Aquaman
from his back-up features in Superman family magazines. But the thrilling,
brightly colored figures of the Flash, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman were delightfully
new to me.
This was cover-dated May 1960. By
July 1960, I’d be buying my first issues of Flash and Wonder Woman and by
December 1960, my first issue of Green Lantern.
As if five cover-featured
superheroes weren’t enough, the issue also offered some of the attractions that
could be seen in DC’s sleek science fiction titles like Strange Adventures — multicolored interstellar dinosaurs and, joy
of joys, a giant yellow robot with an alien criminal inside his glass tummy.
The fact that the robot also seemed
to have a ray gun for a penis is something of which I was not consciously aware.
The plot was, to my young mind,
perfect. This Flash guy was clearly the hero in the pin spotlight, since he
broke free first and tackled the future supercriminal alone. The Flash had kicked off
the new wave of immense popularity for superheroes, and DC was aware of
it. Martian Manhunter and Aquaman teamed up next, then Wonder Woman and Green
Lantern.
Finally the heroes tackled the
villain as a team, but were turned against each other by an illusion-casting
beam. Yikes!
Yet who should come hurtling out of
the sky but Superman! The Man of Steel grabbed the robot by the feet and jammed
him into the earth. The whole menace wiped out in a mere three panels — that’s
my guy! I hadn’t even been aware that my beloved Superman was a part of this
team. I was in heaven.
By the way, Batman was around on
the sidelines but did nothing. At the time, I probably figured that Batman’s
lack of super powers rendered him useless for any task other than calling in
Superman for a kind of WMD drone strike. It’s probably difficult for today’s
fans to realize that Batman was starting to seem old hat and unspectacular
compared to these shiny new rivals, and that the sales of his two titles were
sinking.
What I didn’t know was that it was
the internecine warfare between DC’s editors that kept Superman and Batman in
the background for the first several appearances of the JLA
I would have been thrilled beyond
containment if I had known that this team was a space-age iteration of one from
the Dark Ages of the 1940s, the Justice Society of America, and that even this
cover idea had been used before by the earlier team.
To a child of 5, a decade ago might
as well be a time when dinosaurs roamed the planet.
The entire subsequent history of
comic books — and of much of American popular culture — is channeled directly
through the three Brave and Bold
tryout issues for JLA. Because publisher Martin Goodman was watching how eagerly
kids like me plunked down their dimes for those issues. He had an idea for editor
Stan Lee…
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