the DCU's essential

 

To say that Batman and Robin were a huge commercial success would be a vast understatement. True, Batman sold well for the eleven months he existed prior to adding his now-famous sidekick, but nothing like the household name he would become simply by adding a spunky kid to the team.
The combo was so successful, that every comics company rushed to imitate it, adding junior partners to their established heroes (often just a miniature version of the adult hero)

We had Speedy for Green arrow, Aqualad for Aquaman, Kid-flash to Flash, Hawkgirl 4 Hawkman and so on… 

Green lantern had Thomas kalmaku (a skimo kid that worked with Hal Jordan fixing aircrafts.) you might be like WTF? green lantern had a sidekick? Well yeah… sorta.  You might remember him as Kairo, in earth 1-A, kalmaku was renamed kairo and instead of an Eskimo kid comes from Venus… in Earth 12  Kai-ro is instead the successor of the green lantern and is again from earth and trained by Buddhists monks.

However DC felt that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. Therefore, what had been good for Batman would have to be super for Superman. Enter Nightwing and Flamebird:

Not content to simply go around fixing all of Earth’s problems, Superman decides he needs to also fight crime in the bottled city of Kandor.
The city that was shrunken, placed in a bottle and stolen by Brainiac all before Krypton exploded.

Kandor resides on a table in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, where it sits under a red sun lamp (can’t have a whole city of Supermen running around, can we?). Whenever Superman uses his shrink ray and stops by for a visit, he has no superpowers.
So, how will Superman fight crime in Kandor if he’s not… super? He’ll do it Batman-style. And he takes that lovable doofus, Jimmy Olsen along with him to play Robin.

Superman names himself Nightwing and Jimmy Flamebird, after two Kryptonian birds. He fashions costumes based vaguely on the birds’ plumage. Pretty soon, they have a Nightcave, Nightmobile and even a Nighthound. Of course, Nightwing and Flamebird are a little spoiled by being Superman and Superman’s Pal, so they wear jetbelts that allow them to fly.

What’s really remarkable, is that this concept didn’t just yield a couple of memorable stories and vanish. In fact, Nightwing and Flamebird continued well into the 1970’s- although at that point, Nightwing was Superman’s cousin Van-Zee and Flamebird was Van-Zee’s lab assistant, Ak-Var.

Teen Titans!

 

On one really weird Occasion (I mean… Mr. twister is the villian? seriously?) Robin, Aqualad, Kid-flash and Speedy joined forces to stop a villain known as Mister Twister. However silly the villain was in the end the three Heroes decided to become the Teen Titans! On their first official adventure as Titans, they would meet Wonder Girl a young Amazonian girl, who was tutored by Queen Hyppolita. You see, just like superman had some adventures as superboy when he was a teenager. DC decided to do the same with wonder woman, and had some comics with Wonder woman as a teenage, the adventures of Wonder Girl.

What was so very odd was that the wonder girl from the wonder woman youth years and the teen titans wonder girl looked pretty much the same!

  

To make things worse, The editorial columns of the teen titans comics would state that both Wonder-Girls were the same and only Diana. of course this was the time of the post war and although continuity was becoming sort of popular it wasn’t mandatory… so this little continuity issue was never really clarified except some rare occasions it was mentioned that This Teen titan’s Wonder girl was in fact Wonder Woman’s sister… yet there was NO background what so ever was showed or written for this character.

Though Speedy was present since the team’s inception, Speedy did not always attend team meetings or share in all of their adventures, making him only a part-time member.

 

Geek factoid to note:

The Impossible wonder family. This adventures that started with Diana as a girl, later evolved to adventures of Diana as a very young girl, almost a toddler. Wonder Tot. Then came stories where we’d see Diana at different stages in her life, all in one story… or of young Diana looking at herself in a time viewer, even of her using time travel to catch up to her adult self.

And eventually it became a full-blown Wonder Family. When you have that many different-aged Dianas in the same story — the same panel! — all calling each other "sister," it sure looked like a family to this reader.

DC tried to pass some of the stories off as "Impossible Tales," the Wonder-equivalent to the "Imaginary Stories," we’ve seen in the superman Annuals, tales that were out of continuity. But the "Impossible Tale" label was forgotten on a number of Wonder Family stories.

What the Wonder Family stories showed was a loving family who lived on an island of loving people living an ideal existence (no men!) with advanced science alongside Greek mythology come to life. Everyone encouraged each other in this mystical place where merboys played just off-shore and genies washed up on the beaches. It was magical, it was sweet. And during this era when Wonder Woman herself was so cardboardish (wearing her apron in Justice League comics) It was really the most liberating female experience in comics.

The Crisis

The undeclared crisis, will be the last Crisis from the Silver Age. And its undeclared cos it refers to a certain encounters of characters of the two principal earths that were not exactly catalogued as a crisis.

Of this stories, the most important event takes place here. With the introduction of the NEW red tornado.

JLA 64 & JLA 65

Geek factoids to note

T. O. Morrow First appeared on a Green Lantern / Flash Cross over, where he invented his machine to see the future and used his evil intellect to create “Evil” Robotic Green Lanterns.

Its also a relief to see that this particular crisis does not end on a high “everything is back to normal” note… it ends with a character that has some real existential angst.

Dr. Will Magnus, creator of the Metal men, is later revealed to have been a student of super-villain T. O. Morrow. T.O, Morrow on his hand would be later to be revealed to be colleagues with Professor Ivo. A demented scientist, who in order to achieve Inmortality stole various secret and sacred objects from around the world. Much like T.O Morrow… to accomplish his goal, he created the Android known as Amazo, The androis capable of stealing the powers of each member of the JLA

The creeper makes his first appearance also, he was Jack Ryder Jack Ryder was a Gotham City television talk show host fired due to his outspoken nature. While covering a story he dressed up for a masquerade party wearing the outrageous outfit you see on the image here, There he was given a serum by Doctor Vincent Yatz, a scientist being hunted by the mob. The serum gave him enhanced strength and agility, and a second mechanical device allowed him to phase his costume in and out from his surroundings, so he could become the Creeper almost at will.

In a series that lasted only four issues, appeared the Phantom Stranger a very mysterious cloaked figure, who would prove supernatural events to be hoaxes. However when the supernatural events were real and the Phantom Stranger was given unspecified superhuman powers to defeat them.

He can be described as the most mysterious character of the DCU, there is that no background or complementary information whatsoever, no alter ego, no explanation to his powers or his past… nothing. The Phantom stranger was later  joined by some sort of sidekick, Cassandra Craft, a blind psychic who would help him on occasions.

Catman,  was originally Thomas Blake, a world-famous trapper of jungle cats who turned to crime because he had grown bored with hunting and had squandered most of his fortune as a millionaire. He became a burglar who committed his crimes in a catsuit made out of an ancient African cloth. His costume was modeled after Catwoman’s disguise. Catwoman was none too pleased to have her modus operandi copied, which included Selina Kyle  being wrongly implicated for Catman’s crimes at least once and actually helped Batman get to Catman.

A geek factoid to note, is that Catman, was originally a golden age superhero, published by another comics company. The golden age Catman was David Merryweather, was raised in Burma by a tigress after his parents had been killed, he then acquired super powers and became Catman and was even joined by a young female sidekick, named Kitten. After the company went bankrupt 13 years had passed before DC felt it was safe to use the name and the character.  As you can see by the covers, the character were pretty much one and the same.

Eclipso, was Bruce Gordon, a scientist specializing in solar energy. While in the jungle in order to view a solar eclipse, Bruce was attacked by a tribal sorcerer named Mophir. Before plunging to his death off a cliff, Mophir managed to wound Bruce with a black diamond. After this, Bruce would find himself transformed into the villainous Eclipso whenever he was in the presence of an eclipse. Eclipso could be defeated by shining a bright light over him, which was rather easy. However his stories would prove to be very Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (or in comics terms, he was just like The hulk)… As they often dealt with the internal issues of Bruce Gordon the good guy, trying to tame the Evil eclipso that lied within him.

 

 

Metamorpho

Rex Mason was an adventurer who was hired by business tycoon Simon Stagg to retrieve a rare Egyptian artifact. Mason also started dating Stagg’s daughter, Sapphire Stagg. In an Egyptian pyramid, Rex Mason was knocked out by Simon’s brutish bodyguard, Java, and eventually exposed to a radioactive meteorite called the Orb of Ra, which transformed him into the Element Man. He gained the ability to change himself into any element It was later revealed that Mason was but one of many metamorphae created through time by the God Ra.

Metamorpho briefly had a crimefighting partner: a woman named Urania "Rainie" Blackwell who deliberately exposed herself to the Orb and gained his powers, and called herself Element Girl. She worked with him on a number of cases, before her unrequited attraction to him became too much for her.

She was an agent with an unnamed US intelligence service who volunteered to expose herself to the radiations of the meteor that formed part of the "Orb of Ra".  These radiations had earlier
transformed Rex Mason into the superhero Metamorpho.  Subsequently, Blackwell took the sobriquet "Element Girl".  Both Metamorpho and Element Girl had the ability to transform their bodies into any chemical element or compound found in the human body, and to transform into any shape.  As a side effect of their
powers, their bodies became non-human in color and composition.

    Element Girl had a short career as a superhero, acting as sidekick to Metamorpho, retiring (I believe) with the first cancellation of Metamorpho’s book.

- Neil Gaiman

 

Recommended buy.

While it contains none of the above, this book collects essential JL stories that include how many superheroes join the league, including zatanna, red tornado, green arrow, hawkman and so on.