Teen Titans (1966) #50

Bob Rozakis (script)

Don Heck (pencils)

Joe Giella (inks)

Jerry Serpe (colors)

Milt Snapinn (letters)

E. Nelson Bridwell (associate editor)

Julius Schwartz (editor)

Writer Bob Rozakis—and I mean this statement as a compliment—has a wonderfully juvenile vibe for Teen Titans. Their dialogue is very groovy, maybe a little too groovy for 1977 (though they are down with disco, thank goodness), and Rozakis seems to be targeting a younger audience than the cast. The Titans are all either post-high school at this point, going to college, or working jobs; Rozakis positions them aspirationally. For example, Kid Flash’s concerns about his parents being able to afford a better college for him aren’t character development fodder for Wally West, rather some didactic storytelling to let the pre-college readers know sometimes you don’t get to go to a fancy college with Robin and Harlequin.

The issue’s setting up for next time, with strong cliffhangers for each team of Titans, and it ought to finish a little less substantial, but Rozakis (and artists Don Heck and Joe Giella) deliver an impressively solid (for a setup narrative) outing. Again, against the grain, if Rozakis were writing for the characters, the issue’s a collection of purposeful vignettes more than a story with rising action. The cover promises the East Coast Titans (Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, Speedy, Harlequin) against the West Coast team. The West Coast team is mostly retired—but still young—heroes: Hawk (without Dove), the original Bat-Girl, Golden Eagle, and Changeling. Though maybe he’s still Beast Boy.

The issue delivers separate stories for each team and no obvious link between their adventures yet—hence why you’ll be back next time.

The East Coast team opens the issue, with everyone in their civvies, riding the train back from Kid Flash and Wonder Girl visiting Robin and Harlequin’s aforementioned fancy university. There’s a strange disaster, followed by a strange villain fight. The disaster is odd, the villain is bizarre, the fight and heroics are just excellent superhero work from Heck and Giella. Their backgrounds are sometimes too sparse, and they lack detail, but the action moves beautifully.

The West Coast team’s adventure involves a levitating aircraft carrier. It’s a big enough carrier to host original Bat-Girl Betty Kane’s tennis match, but not big enough to warrant any crew scenes during the match or levitation sequence outside them, being background for the heroes. Hawk is currently serving in the Navy on the carrier. He and Bat-Girl team up to save the sailors while Changeling and Golden Eagle both get involved aerially.

Rozakis does varying levels of setup on these characters, with Golden Eagle and Changeling getting more than the others (Hawk gets the least, even giving up some of his time to establish he doesn’t know jack about Batgirl canon). The East Coast team will—thanks to their second scene—get the better character stuff, but the superhero team-up action of the West Coast team is superior. The East Coast team basically does solo heroics, West Coast works together.

After the West Coast team meet a couple surprise guest stars, they cliffhanger, and the action returns to the Titans in their headquarters. Rozakis trades Kid Flash and Wonder Girl for Speedy, Guardian, and Bumblebee. Guardian and Bumblebee have their own subplot (including some knowing, toxic masculinity-based decisions), but it’s even more for Speedy. Robin tells him to stop being creepy about women, and Harlequin takes him to task for being a pest. It’s fantastic stuff, and where Rozakis distinguishes himself.

Then they have to go to an action scene, which turns out to be connected to their first action sequence, and—according to the ending tag, anyway—will involve them meeting up with the other team… next issue!

For a Bronze Age teen superhero team comic, it’s hard to imagine it can get any better; the issue’s an exemplar of the category.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1972)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

I’ve been aware of the “Barbara (Batgirl) Gordon becomes a congressperson” storyline in the seventies since Who’s Who in the DC Universe #2 in 1985—I even have an anecdote about buying the issue at age seven—but I’ve never read the arc before or even read about its details.

And now I’ve read it.

And it’s about Barbara Gordon becoming a congresswoman because Batgirl can only lock up the crooks, not keep them locked up forever. Yes, Barbara Gordon is a garbage Republican. I wonder if Chuck Dixon held that ace through Birds of Prey and never got to use it.

After an ex-boyfriend from her youth—who Barbara broke up with ten years ago but then beat up and apprehended two years ago as Batgirl—shows up at the library with an Edgar Allan Poe enthusiasm, she can’t help but hope for the best. Only it turns out he’s just after a famous manuscript she’s shown him and it crushes her confidence in the criminal justice system.

Worse, she’s been helping these crooks get parole as a librarian!

Or something. I glazed over in a combination of shock and disgust. Batgirl is a Karen.

At least as written by Frank Robbins. Though I doubt it’s going to change for decades.

There’s some hilariously dated election fraud, with the mob threatening voters to not vote for Barbara “Boots” Gordon. She’s called “Boots” initially because she’s going to give the crooks the boot, but then it’s the swamp. There’s a whole subplot about Batgirl accidentally endorsing Barbara and then Barbara apparently feeling weird about it.

The congresswoman is the last Robbins and Don Heck arc. The earlier stories in the year have Barbara going to Mexico to bust up a drug ring run by an American mobster dropped from a Dick Tracy script for being too boring. Again, Robbins is weirdly dated.

Heck’s got some good panels throughout. Not really sure his grasp of human musculature and movement is adequate, but he makes up for it well enough. His faces have personality even if they’re a little static. Oddly enough… he really can’t draw Batgirl’s boots. She’s always doing these kicks and he’s always messing up the boots.

Robbins tries the “can you spot the clue to solve the case” bit a couple more times, but with less and less enthusiasm. At one point it’s just at the end of a page, not even a cliffhanger. Though I guess Batgirl doesn’t lose as many fights in 1972. Well… wait. There are some bad losses in here.

But she wins against a killer jai alai team.

I had originally assumed these Bronze Age backups would be disposable except for the some of the art—Robbins has never been good (though he’s been better than some of the original Batgirl writers)—but there may actually be something in here for anyone writing about the characterization of women in male-written mainstream comic books of the seventies.

Though just because you can unpack it doesn’t mean it needs to be unpacked. Robbins is pretty shallow.

Thank goodness I’m through his Bronze Age Batgirl.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1971)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

After a cliffhanger resolve with Gil Kane pencils (Vince Colletta inks, which shockingly is an improvement over previous Kane inkers on the Batgirl backups), Don Heck takes over the pencils with Dick Giordano on inks. Can Dick Giordano inks save Don Heck pencils? It’s not terrible. Even after Giordano leaves and the Batgirl strips are Heck solo, it’s at least a nice nostalgic seventies middling. Low middling. But solidly middling; though Heck’s got some weird costume choices, like when he dresses Barbara up like she’s in Little Women for bedtime.

Frank Robbins writes all the stories for the year (backups in Detective Comics), which have a single moment of character development—Commissioner Gordon discovering Batgirl’s secret identity–while Batgirl has a variety of misadventures.

The opening cliffhanger resolve has some concept of Batgirl as female role model for the young women of Gotham but it’s the one mention. Otherwise, Robbins’s stories start as globe-trotting—off to Spain for the bullfights—then fashion world related (the killer wigs are better than the gangsters out to find out if a supermodel wants to show her legs or if there will be six more weeks of winter), then random Hollywoodish stuff. Oh, and then the one where Gordon finds out; he’s out for a cop-killer and it’s possibly Robbins’s worst writing, which is a statement to make because there’s some bad writing throughout.

Reading Frank Robbins’s thought balloons seems to definitely prove thought balloons are bad, actually.

There are some big bad themes throughout—like random people being able to kick Batgirl’s ass in a fight, which is really just the norm but it’d have been nice if Robbins and Heck got away from it. They dabble in bondage imagery for a couple stories but apparently it was a bit too far and instead settle on doing those lousy mystery stories where they give you the clues and you should be able to figure out the killer because he was holding the gun in the wrong hand.

There are contemporary movie references–The Godfather becomes The Stepfather (no Terry O’Quinn, sorry), what appears to be Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, and John Wayne analogues—where Robbins either tries too hard or not enough.

The best story, art-wise, is the Spain one, where Barbara finds herself in a Spanish manor fighting a Zorro-type. Throw in the romance novel dresses for her and it’s at least a Gothic thriller with some visual flare. Had they done these backups Marvel-style, at least for that one, and had someone write the story over the art… it probably would’ve been better.

The biggest problem with Robbins’s writing is his inability to get to that first cliffhanger. At least two of the stories resolve in between the first and second half, or could if Batgirl just managed not to always get her ass-kicked in the first scene of the second part. Unless she’s held captive in a James Bond villain trap at cliffhanger.

There’s undoubtedly a way to do these two-parter backups well and Robbins just doesn’t know it. Though it’s not all on him—whoever edited these stories (Julie Schwartz it seems like) didn’t do a good job either. Even if you ignore the seventies sexism, the lack of character development over a hundred pages for Barbara is a glaring defect.

It’s even worse when Jason Bard’s along. He’s a bad romantic interest, which isn’t a surprise, and it’s better Robbins isn’t interested in their relationship.

And it’s not even like Robbins is atrocious. For the time period, he’s bad but he’s not, like, spectacularly bad. He’s a lot less sexist in his characterization of Barbara than previous Batgirl writers. Sure, some of it is because he’s disinterested in her character development and she’s just a pawn to move around the board, but… it’s not like she ever screws anything up because she’s trying to look pretty.

She screws things up. But because the story requires her utter, should-be-fatal incompetence to get to the next page. Not because she’s a girl.

Presumably. The only other action heroes are Commissioner Gordon, who gets hoodwinked so his screw-up is disqualified, and Jason Bard, whose bum leg—which inevitably causes him to trip, fall, let the bad guy get away—disqualifies him too.

Maybe the Giordano-inked Zorro-esque story would have been worth a read in the floppy, but it’s hard to imagine looking forward to the Batgirl backups every month of 1972 in your Detective Comics. Though it was the seventies so who knows.

The Flash 295 (March 1981)

The Flash #295 Heck gets lazy on the strangest stuff for the feature in this issue. It’s not the super gorillas or all the different locations in Bates’s script… no, it’s the people. Whenever Heck is drawing a person, it just doesn’t work out. It’s like he spent all his time on everything else and rushed through the faces.

The feature story has an odd structure too and it never quite recovers from it. Bates relies on deceiving the reader to get create drama at the end, but he also weighs down the front of the story. There are a couple lengthy action scenes as Grodd is brainwashing Flash and the good super gorilla; these scenes are quick and pointless and Bates gives them too much time.

He just moves too fast through the story, which is too slight anyway.

The Firestorm back-up has Conway suffering pacing problems too. And the art’s mediocre.

CREDITS

In Grodd We Trust; writer, Cary Bates; artist, Don Heck; colorist, Gene D’Angelo. Firestorm, By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Dangerous Sea; writer, Gerry Conway; penciller, Jim Starlin; inker, Bob Wiacek; colorist, Jerry Serpe. Letterer, Ben Oda; editor, Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.

The Flash 294 (February 1981)

The Flash #294 The super gorillas. I forgot about the super gorillas. If Bates likes writing anything more than strange applications of Flash’s powers, it’s got to be these super gorillas.

But the super gorillas aren’t interesting to talk about, because it’s just the overdone dialogue and the gorillas talking about their intelligence. The Flash’s powers and their applications? At least in those scenes Bates is trying something. It’s a decidedly not visual way to express the powers. Artist Heck doesn’t do anything special with these scenes either. The feature story’s visually unimaginative.

Luckily, Bates has a good plot. It’s multi-layered, it’s got a lot of neat plotting tricks. It works out well, even though Bates probably shouldn’t have started foreshadowing the cliffhanger so early in the book. Not so obviously.

The Firestorm backup has terrible art from Jim Starlin and Bob Wiacek. It’s impossible to ignore it and the story suffers.

CREDITS

Fiend the World Forgot; writer, Cary Bates; artist, Don Heck; colorist, Gene D’Angelo. Firestorm, The Typhoon Is a Storm of the Soul; writer, Gerry Conway; penciller, Jim Starlin; inker, Bob Wiacek; colorist, Jerry Serpe. Letterer, John Costanza; editor, Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.

The Flash 293 (January 1981)

The Flash #293 Conway fills in on both stories–one where the Pied Piper comes up with a new plan to get rich, with Heck on art, and then the Firestorm team-up, with art from Perez and Rodin Rodriguez.

The Firestorm team-up is goofy, with Conway not giving Perez much to draw, though I suppose there’s an interesting deep action scene with events happening in three places. Conway also seems to be writing it to bring regular Flash into the regular Firestorm backup, given the characters don’t really mesh, and it’s an odd perspective.

The feature’s quite a bit of fun, however. Conway has a great time with the Flash figuring out the Pied Piper’s plan and then the plan itself. It’s sort of obvious, sort of not. There’s a lot of amusing dialogue too. It’s a shame the second story didn’t get any of these touches.

It’s definitely a mixed bag.

C+

CREDITS

The Pied Piper’s Paradox Peril!; artist, Don Heck; colorist, Gene D’Angelo; letterer, Gaspar Saladino. The Deadliest Man Alive!; pencillers, George Perez and Rodin Rodriguez; inker, Rodriguez; colorist, Jerry Serpe; letterer, Milt Snapinn. Writer, Gerry Conway; editor, Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.

The Flash 292 (December 1980)

The Flash #292 Bates sure does try hard to get the reader to pay attention. He has another sequence this issue where the Flash discovers some clue and Bates calls out the reader to try to figure it out too. There’s only one problem with it… Bates still writes the revelation scene like the reader didn’t figure it out. So if the reader has figured it out, he or she has wasted some engagement time.

Engagement time–there’s no reward to figuring it out. It’s a DC no prize.

The story itself is a neat one, with the Mirror Master outsmarting Barry for a while. Heck doesn’t do great on the art and Bates writes the new love interest real annoying… but the main plot works out well.

The Firestorm backup is all action and lots of good Perez composition. He and Conway pack the limited pages. The pluses outweigh the lackluster finish.

CREDITS

Mirror, Mirror, Off The Wall…; writer, Cary Bates; artist, Don Heck; colorist, Gene D’Angelo; letterer, Milt Snapinn. Firestorm, The Hostages of Precinct 13!; writer, Gerry Conway; pencillers, George Perez and Bob Smith; inker, Smith; colorist, Lynne Gelfer; letterer, Ben Oda. Editor, Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.

The Flash 291 (November 1980)

The Flash #291 Even though Bates comes up with a lot of excitement for the Flash this issue–and the reader too–there’s something off about the feature story. Bates and Heck (inking himself to questionable success) put Barry through a bunch of different types of action. There’s a couple regular fights, a supervillain fight, a mid-town disaster sequence with a helicopter getting shot out of the sky, plus all the stuff with Barry’s neighbor thinking he’s trying to kill her.

But it’s almost too much. Bates gives up on any attempt at character development, save one scene with Barry’s neighbor (not the girl, but some dude), and the action goes so fast it’s hard to find any footing.

It’s a darned interesting approach–giving the readers their money’s worth–but it’s messy.

And then the Firestorm backup has a lot of character development, but it doesn’t leave Conway time to give Perez anything phenomenal to draw.

B-

CREDITS

The Sabretooth is a Very Deadly Beast!; writer, Cary Bates; artist, Don Heck; colorist, Gene D’Angelo; letterer, Milt Snapinn. Firestorm, The Hyena Laughs Last; writer, Gerry Conway; pencillers, George Perez and Bob Smith; inker, Smith; colorist, Lynne Gelfer; letterer, John Costanza. Editor, Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.

The Flash 290 (October 1980)

The Flash #290 The way Cary Bates writes The Flash, there’s nothing super-speed can’t accomplish. But it’s so darn likable, it’s hard to get stopped up by the severe gaps in logic. Maybe not gaps… canyons. Canyons in logic.

This issue has the incredible story of a young woman believing Barry Allen is out to kill her. The Flash, understandably, doesn’t think she’s got it right so he decides to help her. Bates paces the story beautifully, with some opening exposition, then some action, then more exposition, then maybe more action (or exposition). It’s a full story, even though it’s not the full issue.

Bates also has a nice way of working in the character development. He takes good shortcuts to get the girl established quickly.

Decent enough art from Heck and Chiaramonte, especially considering the absurdity.

Conway rushes the Firestorm origin recap a bit but the Perez pencils are absolutely gorgeous.

CREDITS

“Will You Believe Me When I’m Dead?”; writer, Cary Bates; penciller, Don Heck; inker, Frank Chiaramonte; colorist, Gene D’Angelo; letterer, Milt Snapinn. Firestorm, The Secret History of the Nuclear Man; writer, Gerry Conway; pencillers, George Perez and Bob Smith; inker, Smith; colorist, Jerry Serpe; letterer, Shelly Leferman. Editor, Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.

The Flash 289 (September 1980)

The Flash #289 Cary Bates sure does like exposition. It’s practically endless in the Flash feature, with Bates writing really long paragraphs of thought balloons explaining why The Flash can do what he can do. None of it makes any sense, but it sounds scientific.

The story has The Flash trying to sort of two villains who are battling each other. There are a lot more details–like they’re astral twins and so on–but he doesn’t really do anything with that relationship. It’s just another piece of the story requiring a whole lot of explanation, which Bates then provides.

The art from Don Heck and Frank Chiaramonte is decent and everything works out pretty well. It’s just goofy and Bates can’t hide it.

Then there’s the Firestorm backup with gorgeous George Perez art. Besides the lovely action intro, it’s a origin retelling. Gerry Conway’s writing is solid, but the art’s the thing.

CREDITS

The Good… The Bad… and The Unexpected; writer, Cary Bates; penciller, Don Heck; inker, Frank Chiaramonte. Firestorm, Firestorm is Back In Town!; writer, Gerry Conway; penciller, George Perez; inker, Romeo Tanghal. Colorist, Gene D’Angelo; letterer, Ben Oda; editor, Len Wein; publisher, DC Comics.