Sometimes the absolute random craziness of DC's 70s anthologies was part of the attraction. Here's World's Finest 249, cover-date March 1978. That's a great Jim Aparo cover! A vampire Superman tangling with Batman n Phantom Stranger! Take my dollar!
Page one has the WF heroes welcoming Creeper to the comic. Gotta love DC cheesiness! Then 20 pages of Supes, Bats and PS battling underwater vampires courtesy of Bob Haney and the unlikely cartoonish art of Kurt Schaffenberger inked by Tex Blaisdell. Haney wrote almost 1,000 stories for DC from the mid-50s to early 80s, but his superhero work didnt begin til the mid-60s. That's when the wackiness truly began. The man cld write fast-paced stories taking his heroes in any direction. And his disregard for continuity was legendary. Whaddaya mean Batman never had a brother or a son? Do you want a good story or what? Story here is equally bizarre, but Schaffenberger's style makes it seem like an episode of Scooby-Doo...not that that's a bad thing...
Then 20 pages of Green Arrow n Black Canary fighting Hellgrammite - who oddly enough was more of a Creeper foe - and a gangster who somehow thinks Ollie Queen is Batman, leading GA to spend most of the issue in a Batman costume. Story by Gerry Conway with art by Trevor Von Eeden n Vince Colletta...
The Creeper - one of my favorite characters - makes his return in an 8-pager written n drawn by the legendary Steve Ditko...goofy story abt sabotage at the TV station where Creeper alter ego Jack Ryder works...Ditko was so excited to have a feature again that he gets the villain's name mixed up by the end...
Wraps up with 15 pages of Wonder Woman n Sgt. Rock (!) battling Dr. Psycho during WW2...more bizarre stuff written by Conway with art by Mike Vosburg n Bob Smith...The dollar-sized WF was many things in the 70s, but it was never boring...
No comments:
Post a Comment