Challenge of the Weapons-Master! (Part 2)
Page 11. Page 11.
I may be giving more thought to this than the creators did (this is a regular thing with fans) but how come sometimes there are effects from Flash running and other times not? Here he melts the gunbarrel by running around on it. But when he races in a circle just as fast to make a whirlwind, he doesn't dig a trench in the ground with his feet or crack the pavement. I dunno, maybe he can turn the effects on or off?
Page 12.
Gosh, Justice League headquarters sure has a high ceiling. Must be a hard place to keep warm in the winter. There's the grvity beam gizmo up there, still keeping the members locked in their seats. (At this point, Green Lantern is regretting that second cup of coffee. "If Xotar doesnt come back soon, something embarrassing might hppen.") I like Wonder Woman's dismayed expression in the second panel. Its not overdone. Sekowsky sometimes nailed body language just right. Am I the only one starting to see Xotar as looking a lot like Elmer Fudd?
Page 13. Did Aquaman ever think to get a speedboat or motorcycle or something to keep at Justice League headquarters? He is such a nuisance to lug around every time they have to go somewhere in a hurry. For that matter, I imagine J'onn J'onzz would just as soon have picked Aquaman up under one arm and flown there directly, rather than fooling around with that poor sailfish. (By the way, the sailfish was not all that thrilled to be recruited to go hundreds of miles out of the way for this foolishness either. He had to swim back, after all.)
Page 14. And just where do you get a dozen giant octopus in the Panama Canal? Don't tell me they just are also loitering around there, eating snacks thrown to them by people on the ships going through the locks.
Page 15. Wait, what? No. No, no, no. I realize it is difficult to give Aquaman something useful to do, but come on. He summons giant clams to hurry to the scene. How can clams hurry?! And it wouldn't matter if they clamped down on the robot's feet. Look at that machine. It could walk around if hippos were biting its legs. It's not like the clams have a second shell to grab hold of the ocean floor and hold themselves in place with. Meanwhile, our Martian boy is using his breath to make a mirror. Another case of "Oh Come ON!" He did have super-vision to use, which would have been more believable. How do you inhale ocxide of iron or aluminum from soil...?! In early stories, the Manhunter had secret transmutation powers and he could seperate gold particles from seatwater by concentrating. The telekinesis is a bit more plausible than the idea of making glass by breathing well. I have to say Gardner Fox didnt hit the mark on this page.
Page 16. Mike Sekowsky makes clear storytelling seem easy here, something a lot of flashier artists don't quite grasp. The top three panels are easy to follow, you see what is happening almost like cuts in a movie. The fourth panel is not really necessary for the art itself, but a place to stick the thought baloon was necessary and putting it in the bottom would have made it just too cluttered. The whole page, we are in the foreground behind the heroes, looking toward Xotar and the robot almost as if we were standing there watching the action. I know I keep harping on this, but I see current artists who are all slick and polished, with lots of details and nice coloring, but you can't be sure what just happened on the page and have to figure it out rather than flowing with the story.
Page 17. Here is where Green Lantern jumps up and says, "Hang on, let me hit the bathroom before we take off." (That coffee goes right through him.) The useless 1960 Batman is hilarious if you are only used to today's super-competent always-prepred humorless model. Gardner Fox never seemed to have a good grasp of the character, either. To be honest, having Batman the one who is puzzled by the clue ("Sounds like KOOKIE talk to me," referred to 77 SUNSET STRIP) is just wrong; he is a detective who after all has been fighting the Riddler and other crooks for years, solving their most obscure messages. When Wonder Woman repeats Xotar's clue, Batman should have snapped. "Thats Mount Rushmore, of course." But Fox regarded Batman as just another guy in good shape, who knows some judo and boxing, and who wears a belt full of chemicals.
Page 18. There's the good old Robot Plane. Not much about it made too much sense, to be honest. You heard jokes about her invisible plane and how hard it was to find when you forgot where you parked it, but as a kid I figured it was just transparent like space age plastic and you could still see it if you were reasonably close. Looking at the third panel, the cockpit has gauges and dials, so presumably Wonder Woman could read those. Looking at the needle nose of that thing, it's clear Wonder Woman could have killed a Godzilla sized monster just by flying into it at high speed.
Page 19. Gardner Fox loved doing thing a roundabout way and bringing in little tidbits from the Encyclopedia. It's part of that Silver Age atmosphere. Why is the magnetic bubble drawn to Capella instead of just our own Sun? Why not? What the heck. Little kids reading this now knew the name of a star 25 trillion miles from Earth. It might come up in casual conversation, you never know. The same for Green Lantern freeing Wonder Woman by creating a bolide. Well, again it explains what a bolide is, which I suppose is an educational aside. Of course, Green Lantern may not have been able to just directly affect the yellow bubble, but I don't see why he couldnt have snatched up a boulder or something and popped the bubble with it. Or just landed on top of the bubble, standing on it while he fired his ring up like a rocket blast to force it back down to the ground. Maybe next time.
Page 20. I want to mention here what a pain in the neck it must have been to write these early JLA stories. You had five heroes in the fighting scenes (Superman and Batman just turned up once in a while), and the formula was that there were two pairs of heroes in a chapter each, with one hero getting a solo chapter. So after setting up a menace that had to be fought in several different locations (making the heroes split up into teams), Gardner Fox then had to decide which heroes would pair up and then come up with threats they could both contribute to defeating. It wouldn't do to annoy fans by having their favorite character stand around while another hero did all the work. After Green Arrow and then the Atom joined, with Superman and Batman taking part more often, the system began to break down. Having three heroes run out to fight something didn't feel much different from sending a larger team, and it lessened the then novelty of seeing the Flash interact with Wonder Woman.
This is still another case where JUSTICE LEAGUE re-enacted old ALL STAR COMICS procedure. Originally, each Justice Society member had a seperate chapter to himself but a shrinking page count led to teamups.
Turning out these stories had to have been a headache, I give Gardner Fox credit for making them as fun and enjoyable as they turned out to be.
I may be giving more thought to this than the creators did (this is a regular thing with fans) but how come sometimes there are effects from Flash running and other times not? Here he melts the gunbarrel by running around on it. But when he races in a circle just as fast to make a whirlwind, he doesn't dig a trench in the ground with his feet or crack the pavement. I dunno, maybe he can turn the effects on or off?
Page 12.
Gosh, Justice League headquarters sure has a high ceiling. Must be a hard place to keep warm in the winter. There's the grvity beam gizmo up there, still keeping the members locked in their seats. (At this point, Green Lantern is regretting that second cup of coffee. "If Xotar doesnt come back soon, something embarrassing might hppen.") I like Wonder Woman's dismayed expression in the second panel. Its not overdone. Sekowsky sometimes nailed body language just right. Am I the only one starting to see Xotar as looking a lot like Elmer Fudd?
Page 13. Did Aquaman ever think to get a speedboat or motorcycle or something to keep at Justice League headquarters? He is such a nuisance to lug around every time they have to go somewhere in a hurry. For that matter, I imagine J'onn J'onzz would just as soon have picked Aquaman up under one arm and flown there directly, rather than fooling around with that poor sailfish. (By the way, the sailfish was not all that thrilled to be recruited to go hundreds of miles out of the way for this foolishness either. He had to swim back, after all.)
Page 14. And just where do you get a dozen giant octopus in the Panama Canal? Don't tell me they just are also loitering around there, eating snacks thrown to them by people on the ships going through the locks.
Page 15. Wait, what? No. No, no, no. I realize it is difficult to give Aquaman something useful to do, but come on. He summons giant clams to hurry to the scene. How can clams hurry?! And it wouldn't matter if they clamped down on the robot's feet. Look at that machine. It could walk around if hippos were biting its legs. It's not like the clams have a second shell to grab hold of the ocean floor and hold themselves in place with. Meanwhile, our Martian boy is using his breath to make a mirror. Another case of "Oh Come ON!" He did have super-vision to use, which would have been more believable. How do you inhale ocxide of iron or aluminum from soil...?! In early stories, the Manhunter had secret transmutation powers and he could seperate gold particles from seatwater by concentrating. The telekinesis is a bit more plausible than the idea of making glass by breathing well. I have to say Gardner Fox didnt hit the mark on this page.
Page 16. Mike Sekowsky makes clear storytelling seem easy here, something a lot of flashier artists don't quite grasp. The top three panels are easy to follow, you see what is happening almost like cuts in a movie. The fourth panel is not really necessary for the art itself, but a place to stick the thought baloon was necessary and putting it in the bottom would have made it just too cluttered. The whole page, we are in the foreground behind the heroes, looking toward Xotar and the robot almost as if we were standing there watching the action. I know I keep harping on this, but I see current artists who are all slick and polished, with lots of details and nice coloring, but you can't be sure what just happened on the page and have to figure it out rather than flowing with the story.
Page 17. Here is where Green Lantern jumps up and says, "Hang on, let me hit the bathroom before we take off." (That coffee goes right through him.) The useless 1960 Batman is hilarious if you are only used to today's super-competent always-prepred humorless model. Gardner Fox never seemed to have a good grasp of the character, either. To be honest, having Batman the one who is puzzled by the clue ("Sounds like KOOKIE talk to me," referred to 77 SUNSET STRIP) is just wrong; he is a detective who after all has been fighting the Riddler and other crooks for years, solving their most obscure messages. When Wonder Woman repeats Xotar's clue, Batman should have snapped. "Thats Mount Rushmore, of course." But Fox regarded Batman as just another guy in good shape, who knows some judo and boxing, and who wears a belt full of chemicals.
Page 18. There's the good old Robot Plane. Not much about it made too much sense, to be honest. You heard jokes about her invisible plane and how hard it was to find when you forgot where you parked it, but as a kid I figured it was just transparent like space age plastic and you could still see it if you were reasonably close. Looking at the third panel, the cockpit has gauges and dials, so presumably Wonder Woman could read those. Looking at the needle nose of that thing, it's clear Wonder Woman could have killed a Godzilla sized monster just by flying into it at high speed.
Page 19. Gardner Fox loved doing thing a roundabout way and bringing in little tidbits from the Encyclopedia. It's part of that Silver Age atmosphere. Why is the magnetic bubble drawn to Capella instead of just our own Sun? Why not? What the heck. Little kids reading this now knew the name of a star 25 trillion miles from Earth. It might come up in casual conversation, you never know. The same for Green Lantern freeing Wonder Woman by creating a bolide. Well, again it explains what a bolide is, which I suppose is an educational aside. Of course, Green Lantern may not have been able to just directly affect the yellow bubble, but I don't see why he couldnt have snatched up a boulder or something and popped the bubble with it. Or just landed on top of the bubble, standing on it while he fired his ring up like a rocket blast to force it back down to the ground. Maybe next time.
Page 20. I want to mention here what a pain in the neck it must have been to write these early JLA stories. You had five heroes in the fighting scenes (Superman and Batman just turned up once in a while), and the formula was that there were two pairs of heroes in a chapter each, with one hero getting a solo chapter. So after setting up a menace that had to be fought in several different locations (making the heroes split up into teams), Gardner Fox then had to decide which heroes would pair up and then come up with threats they could both contribute to defeating. It wouldn't do to annoy fans by having their favorite character stand around while another hero did all the work. After Green Arrow and then the Atom joined, with Superman and Batman taking part more often, the system began to break down. Having three heroes run out to fight something didn't feel much different from sending a larger team, and it lessened the then novelty of seeing the Flash interact with Wonder Woman.
This is still another case where JUSTICE LEAGUE re-enacted old ALL STAR COMICS procedure. Originally, each Justice Society member had a seperate chapter to himself but a shrinking page count led to teamups.
Turning out these stories had to have been a headache, I give Gardner Fox credit for making them as fun and enjoyable as they turned out to be.