As a writer, I like to retain,
recycle and recast material I’ve written when it might be useful again, and DC
Comics also long practiced this form of intellectual thrift.
For example, compare the Murphy
Anderson covers of Strange Adventures
35 (The Cosmic Chessboard, Aug. 1953)
and Justice League of America 1 (The World of No Return, Oct-Nov. 1960).
In both cases, heroes are playing
a cosmic chess match that imperils real people, and both stories even feature a
dinosaur fin-headed alien who sports a third eye, (one green-skinned, the other
red-skinned). That’s one easy “tell” for recognizing the hand of particular
comic book artists, by the way. They all tend to have distinctive types of
fantasy aliens that they draw.
For DC, publishing in an era in
which it was expected that readers would begin and then stop reading their product within a span of five to seven years, it
made good business sense to recycle fantasy ideas that had proven popular.
Hence all those intelligent gorillas…
Note, too, the way John Broome’s
Captain Comet story might slyly be read as merely the daydream of a frustrated
librarian.
When Adam Blake offers a
suggestion to a chess player in Midwest City Park, the man sneers at his
intellectual abilities. Then the inconspicuous librarian muses that he is really
a secret superman who saved Earth and other planets in a recent cosmic chess match against an extraterrestrial despot, but of course nobody on this planet
knows that…
Superheroes as wish fulfillment?
Could it be?
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