In their second and final team-up try-out, Starman and the Black Canary fought another costumed pair, the Sportsmaster and the Huntress, in a sort of double date of derring-do.
The criminals — one obsessed with competitive athletics, the other with traps and snares — both dated from the late 1940s.
Introduced in Sensation Comics 68 (Aug. 1947), the Huntress was dedicated to turning the tables on law enforcement by capturing public officials and hunting them down in her game preserve. Wildcat thwarted her deadly desires.
The ruthless “Crusher” Crock turned to crime after being banned from professional athletics in All-American Comics 85 (May 1947). Although Green Lantern stopped him, the tenacious crook got himself a costume and returned as Sportsmaster in Green Lantern 28 (Oct.-Nov. 1947).
Subsequently married, the crooked couple tries to capture Starman, Black Canary and Wildcat in The Big Super-Hero Hunt.
“A very enjoyable escapade, with no fewer than five golden-age characters on hand, as Wildcat joined with Starman and Black Canary in the course of their conflict with Sportsmaster and (Golden Age) Huntress,” Keith W. Williams observed. “Great fun, with a superbly crafted cover, and interior work to match, by Murphy Anderson. Thanks to Fox and Anderson, the Golden Age reached a new zenith in the Silver Age.”
“One suspects that the two Black Canary and Starman revivals were more done out of a love of the two characters, and a chance to see ‘what they are doing now,’ than from any real expectation that they would be a huge reader hit,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost.
“ (In) The Big Superhero Hunt (The Brave and the Bold 62, Nov. 1965), the Black Canary and Starman team up with another revived hero, Wildcat, to fight against two old villains: the Sportsmaster and the Huntress. After a good opening involving statues of athletes, this minor tale becomes a routine fight between good guys and bad guys. Its biggest merit is some good draftsmanship by Murphy Anderson.”
Any number of aficionados agreed that the Murphy Anderson art gave the mid-1960s JSA revivals a classic touch.
“Murphy was the perfect artist to bring them up to date, while retaining hints of their Golden Age ‘feels,’” Johnny Williams said.
“Anderson’s artwork remains the highlight for me, despite my perplexity over DC’s bizarre choices for pairings,” noted Mark Engblom. “The team-ups between top-shelf powerhouses (Dr. Fate and Starman) and street-level brawlers (Hourman and Black Canary, respectively) really never clicked with me and, I suspect, many other readers of that era. How many of us would’ve rather seen Dr. Fate and Starman team up? The ‘sorcery vs. super-science’ angle alone would’ve sold it for me!”
“Fox, of course, was familiar with Starman and less so with Black Canary (whom he had never written in the Golden Age), but you would never have known it from the story. He treated both characters with respect and affection,” wrote Paul Zuckerman. “I think Anderson was at the height of his penciling work in this period. Some of his later work was a bit looser and not as precise, though his inking remained unsurpassed.”
“Gardner Fox had been heavily involved with Starman in the 1940s, but had never written any Black Canary solo tales before this, as far as I know,” Grost said. “He pleasantly tries to include all her old mythos, including the flower shop and Larry Lance. He makes the characters be more middle class than the old urban noir characters of the 1940s. This is in keeping with the change in the American economy itself, and the huge rise in mass prosperity between 1948 and 1965.”
“Everything Anderson applied his skills to back then became instant classics; the JSA heroes, Hawkman, the Spectre, Atomic Knights, JLA covers, and inking on Carmine Infantino’s Adam Strange and Girl Kane’s Atom,” Vincent Mariani observed. “Anderson’s style would match the ambience required to depict these heroes. His work was far more refined than what had been seen in these characters’ heyday, but seemed to evoke just the right kind of mood needed in these comics. Unfortunately, these revivals of the originals were not to be a continuing effort. But they were emblematic of mid-1960s comics, in an environment where there seemed to be no limit to where superheroes were heading, and a growing respect for where they had come from.”
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