UTHEORY OF : Justice League of America # 104

Ah, the Justice League of the 1970s. Source of so much lasting fandom but also its fair share of goofiness and contradictions. Case in point : JLA 104, cover-date February 1973. Great Nick Cardy cover, although it makes the Shaggy Man appear to be 50 feet tall.

Which brings us to the Shaggy Man, an impossibly powerful creature made of "living plastic" that tangled with the league only 3x in 15 years. Was he supposed to be Bigfoot? No idea. He debuted in 1966, a year before that famous film was recorded. So if the film was a fake, was the creature based on a Shaggy Man comic from the previous year?

And this issue came out a year before CBS ran a bigfoot/Loch Ness Monster special and three years before the classic bigfoot story on the Six Million Dollar Man TV show.

Anyway, in this issue Green Lantern foe Hector Hammond in psychic form releases Shaggy Man and teleports him to the JLA satellite where the league is gathered because they're...cleaning the satellite. Writer Len Wein must have been running out of ways to get the whole gang together.

Excellent art in many fight scenes by Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano. Shaggy Man defeats most of the league and is fighting Superman to a standstill until GL appears to save the days and prevent the satellite from crashing.

Black Canary was a relatively new member here and Elongated Man and Red Tornado wld join in the next 2 issues to complete the league's classic 70s lineup. Shaggy Man wldnt reappear til '81. A super-strong character who was almost indestructible and even when destroyed cld re-grow a new body must have presented too much of a writing challenge. And as an unthinking brute, there was no scheming or dialogue. It was all "Find JLA, punch JLA."

As a gathering place for DC's best and brightest, JLA had some high points in the 70s - as long as you didn't think about it too much...

UTHEORY OF : Marvel Treasury Edition # 15 (Conan)

More Bronze Age greatness...Marvel Treasury Edition 15 from 1977...reprints a classic Conan/Red Sonja tale from 1973 in the barbarian's own title drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith, as well as a John Buscema/Alfredo Alcala epic from a 1974 issue of Savage Sword...middle story from a 1974 ish of Savage Tales - pencilled by Gil Kane with the odd trio of Neal Adams, Pablo Marcos and Vince Colletta on inks - falls a little flat by comparison, but the other two are fabulous...all stories by Roy Thomas...

UTHEORY OF : Superman The War Years 1938-1945

Received this as a gift last year. Superman : The War Years 1938-1945. Published in 2015 by Chartwell Books. Kinda surprising outside companies still are doing their own DC reprint books. Contains 20 stories written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster and other artists. Historical notes by longtime comics writer/historian Roy Thomas...

Shows the evolution of how the war was written about, first using stand-ins for Hitler, etc. and then after 1941 writing abt the war directly. Also explains how Clark Kent tried to enlist but failed the eyesight test when he accidentally used his x-ray vision to read the eye chart in the next room. Classic!

My favorite here has to be "The Conquest of a City" from Superman 18, cover-date Oct. 1942. Story by Jerry Siegel, art by John Sikela. Clark becomes convinced the people of Metropolis aren't serious enough about the war so he writes about it in the Daily Planet. A businessman approaches and suggests staging a fake invasion to prepare the city. Of course, the businessman is a spy who plans a real invasion that Superman has to stop. It's a bizarre story made even more bizarre by the fact that citizens are aware it's supposed to be a fake invasion and are kind of joking about it.

These stories in hindsight seem really innocent, but clearly show how strong a symbol of good Superman had become.