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...
The War of the Gargantuas came out in 1966 too.
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