They might well have gone in another direction.
DC’s popular revivals of its 1940s superheroes had previously been revamps, stylistically retrofitting World War II characters like the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom, and Hawkman for the jet age.
The trend had been so successful that it had kicked off a whole new superhero craze in comics publishing.
But in Showcase 55 (March-April 1965), editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox, and artist Murphy Anderson decided not to create new “Earth One” iterations of Hourman and Dr. Fate, but instead simply revive the original “Earth Two” superheroes.
After all, Flash 123 had introduced the parallel worlds concept. And in Flash 137, Earth Two’s Justice Society of America — having been rescued from Vandal Savage’s stasis cubes by the Flashes — decided to come out of retirement.
So in Showcase 55, the older but presumably wiser Dr. Fate and Hourman teamed up to corral the original Green Lantern’s formidable archenemy Solomon Grundy.
“This comic is one of my all-time favorites,” Klaus Wolf wrote. “Murphy Anderson’s art is atmospherically superb here. The eerie swamp duel is magnificent. Anderson and Infantino had such a talent to evoke vast, luxurious, sometimes lonely and mystical landscapes.”
And in Showcase 56, the Tick-Tock Thunderbolt and the Wonder Wizard battled a new Psycho Pirate who’d learned his skills as a cellmate of the original JSA super-villain (something similar happened with Spider-Man’s foe the Vulture).
“One of the things I loved about DC Comics as a kid was the decades of seemingly endless obscure characters with their strange powers and bizarre backstories,” Matthew Grossman recalled.
I enjoyed Hourman and Dr. Fate’s adventures, as well as the subsequent two-issue team-up of Starman and the Black Canary in Brave and the Bold and the revival of the Spectre in Showcase (all of them graced by Anderson’s sumptuous art).
“The SA Flash, GL, and Atom had already been popular, established characters like their GA counterparts. (Well, maybe not the Atom, so much),” wrote Mark Emery.
“Dr. Fate and Hourman perhaps weren’t popular enough in the GA to merit having updated versions, so their reemergence as Earth Two characters was easier for DC to deal with. Whatever, I always found them to be very interesting because of their uniqueness.”
However, only the Ghostly Guardian won his own title, and even that was fairly short-lived.
Marvel Comics — which, ironically, had been born in response to the earlier DC revivals — was by then setting the pace.
One wonders, though.
What if Schwartz and company had decided to revamp and update Hourman, Dr. Fate, Black Canary, Starman, and the Spectre? What wonders might they have come up with?
“It seems to me that once they brought back the JSA in the pages of the Flash and JLA, the revamps slowed down,” wrote Edward Lee Love. “Why introduce a new Dr. Fate, Hourman, Starman, Black Canary, and Wildcat when you can just use the ones you already have?
“Then, when Zatanna and the Red Tornado were created, they were done so with an in-story tie to the past instead of simply being a dusting off of a golden-age name and/or concept.
“It was the ’70s when we next got a couple of characters with old names (Sandman and Starman) that had no ties to the golden-age characters.”
Steve M. Russo observed, “It’s interesting how popular Hourman had become — making appearances in several of the JSA/JLA crossovers and the Showcase appearances, the solo in Spectre, etc. Not bad for the first JSA member to be pulled from All-Star and the first ‘major’ golden age character to lose his feature (three issues before the Adventure page count drop from 64 to 48 in early 1943).”
“The Showcase tryouts, as much as I love them, were a very bizarre, mismanaged effort,” Mark Engblom wrote.
“As cool as it was to see JSA members share an adventure apart from the team, the pairings always struck me as rather random and mismatched. A mystic powerhouse like Dr. Fate with a brawler like Hourman? Street-level Black Canary with cosmic-powered Starman? Sure, there’s a bit of an Odd Couple appeal with such power disparities, but for the most part, all it did was draw attention to the lopsided pairing.
“I’ve often wondered what it would’ve been like to read a pairing of Dr. Fate and Starman, both immensely powerful champions of their respective realms of magic and science. Or Hourman and Black Canary, who could share their mutual expertise with street-level crime while truly showing off Rex’s power in a way that’s not overshadowed and humbled by Fate. So, I still love these issues, but man, DC really dropped the ball on the team selections.”
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