In 1965, Murphy Anderson’s resplendent renderings turned a pair of pairs into a winning hand.
Although the team-ups of Hourman and Dr. Fate in Showcase and of Starman and Black Canary in The Brave and the Bold failed to develop into superhero revival series at the time, they remain highly prized by collectors decades later.
The North Carolina-born Anderson’s smooth, fine-lined work evolved because he’d been influenced by “…many of the slickest artists in the field, including Will Eisner, Lou Fine and Alex Raymond,” observed comics historian Jerry Bails.
In The Brave and the Bold 61 (Aug. 1965), Anderson and writer Gardner Fox gave us Mastermind of Menaces!, a tale in which Starman and Black Canary teamed up to tackle the Astral Avenger’s unforgettable fog-foe, the Mist (who’d first appeared in The Menace of the Invisible Raiders in Adventure Comics 67, Oct. 1941).
“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,” observed Vincent Mariani.
“Thanks to Fox and Anderson, the Golden Age reached a new zenith in the Silver Age,” said Keith Williams.
The two members of the newly reactivated Justice Society of America had seen some changes since the team’s last adventure in All-Star Comics 57 (Feb.-March 1951).
Florist Dinah Drake, who began her costumed career as a sort of Robin Hood-like outlaw, had finally settled down and married her boyfriend, private detective Larry Lance.
And somewhere along the way, astronomer Ted Knight upgraded his original “gravity rod” into a more potent “cosmic rod,” further underlining the character’s similarity to Green Lantern.
“He first put this new instrument to use against the Crime Syndicate of America of Earth-Three, when he returned to action with his fellow-JSAers Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Dr. Mid-Nite, and Black Canary,” noted a two-page text feature in Brave and the Bold 61. “This was the first time he had worked with the Blonde Bombshell, for he had retired before she began her crime-fighting career.”
Later, via retroactive continuity, the pair’s comradely relationship would be recast as an adulterous affair.
Because the audience for superhero comics had shifted from largely children to largely adults over the intervening decades, that plot twist was fairly predictable.
“Predictable but wholly unnecessary in my book,” wrote Johnny Williams. “That insistence upon ‘darkening’ the heroic mythos is not de rigueur for something maturing into more adult fare. They didn’t have to end up sleeping together, and yes, I am very much aware of the ‘flawed heroes with feet of clay’ approach ushered in by Stan and company over at Marvel. Still, even given that, some things just didn’t have to happen. There is middle ground between Pollyanna-ish and darkness.”
“I totally agree that the coupling of Black Canary and Starman was entirely unnecessary,” F-michael Dunne wrote. “One of the principal problems with comics today is that writers are projecting their personal issues into stories. Now that I have the above off my chest, the Anderson Earth Two issues in Showcase and Brave and the Bold were some of the finest comics DC published in the sixties.”
“That’s later (post-Silver Age) retconning by writers who were desperate for ideas, and too frequently came up with and went with bad and ridiculous ones,” said Joseph Lenius. “See also Sue Dibny and Iris (West) Allen regarding their deaths. And also see the ‘Iris is now from the future’ nonsense initiated by the overrated Robert Kanigher either during the Silver Age or immediately thereafter, depending upon where one wants to draw a demarcation line for the Silver Age. And although I (thankfully) never read it, there apparently was that Gwen Stacy and Norman Osborne convoluted ‘affair’ garbage concocted over at Marvel in the early 2000s.”
“It may have been more realistic AND better characterization if they’d felt an attraction but NOT had an affair,” Orson Welk wrote. “It would’ve been more mature of them, anyway. Also, I feel that making Dinah adulterous somehow cheapens the death of Larry Lance in one of my all-time favorite JLA/JSA stories.”
“Some of my favorite comics of the 60s were those Golden Age pairings by Fox and Anderson,” Paul Zuckerman recalled. “The JSA members really got to shine in a way that they did not often do when they teamed up with their Silver Age counterparts.
“The teaming of Black Canary and Starman was unusual because they had never worked together in the old days, as far as it was known then. The later reboots that had them having an affair were disappointing — the Black Canary depicted in those books loved her husband and would never have an affair with someone else! And Starman had his own girlfriend (whom I believe was later shown to be the mother of his son, the later Starman).
“Even though I like James Robinson’s run on the latter-day Starman, I did not care for this change to the GA characters.
“Fox, of course, was familiar with Starman and less so with Black Canary (who 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.
“Would have loved to see that Dr. Mid-Nite and whoever team up. But, at least Fox and Anderson with Schwartz still at the helm could turn their attention to some classic Spectre stories, which remain among the best Spectre tales ever.”
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