NEAR-MYTHS: "SEALED IN BLOOD" (SGT. ROCK ANNUAL #2, 1982)

For the last Memorial Day, I decided to read some random war comics from DC, few of which I ever sampled previously. I was aware that in the late 1950s, DC's war titles, generally under the editorship of Robert Kanigher, began to evolve a regular lineup of featured characters, some of whom then began to cross over frequently in the sixties, seventies and eighties. The particular 1980s crossover I encountered was not surprising for its crossover of heroes, but for the way that Kanigher-- who certainly was not given to the Stan Lee method of endlessly recycling even the most obscure antagonists-- decided to exhume a "bad guy" so obscure, she isn't even indexed in Grand Comics Database.

So far as I can tell, the one and only time Nazi officer Helga Voss appeared in a comic was SGT. ROCK #422 (1978.)

 Lieutenant Helga Voss introduces herself to the redoubtable Rock by machine-gunning a small squad of Brit soldiers, fighting with the sergeant, and then trying to get him killed by a patrol of her countrymen, all of whom Rock kills. All the backstory we get is that Helga's father and brothers died in the field, so she took their place. Rock takes Helga prisoner and returns with her to his unit.

 

Once Helga encounters Easy Company, she finds it "easy" to make all the grunts drool over her, except for Rock-- and according to Kanigher's hints and Frank Redondo's art, even Rock is not insensible to her charms. Despite his refusal to let her cozy up, she still takes him by surprise, steals a gun and kills one of Rock's men. (Not one of the well-known ones, of course.) She leads the "feldwebel," as she repeatedly calls him, into a German ambush, but Rock triumphs even though Helga escapes. Though she swears to make another run at Rock, Kanigher apparently dropped her as a potential menace.

     Four years later, Kanigher and artist Dan Speigle launched SGT ROCK ANNUAL #2-- which I assume had a #1 under some other title. In the story proper, a flashforward scene shows Rock in the same situation seen on the cover-- Rock hanging from a cable-car while being menaced by a man with a gun-- but now we learn that that the would-be killer is Frank Rock's only brother Larry, who's fighting in the same war, but in the Philippines.

A montage, apparently in Rock's mind, rehearses how Larry, despite grievous wounds, saves the famed General MacArthur from an assassination attempt. Larry later saves MacArthur from a second attempt, and the creator of "Enemy Ace" gets into heavy poetry, using fraternal imagery to describe  Larry and the pilot of a zero plane as "murderous twins," until their bond is severed by the breaking of an "umbilical cord of madness."

Back in Rock's terrain, he gets two sets of orders (one open, one sealed) from fellow warcomics-star Lieutenant JEB Stuart and his "Haunted Tank," complete with the tank's resident Civil War ghost.  
   

When a battle temporarily incapacitates the Haunted Tank, Easy Company proceeds to follow the already opened orders, to seek out a German castle and to liberate a prisoner there. They encounter a ten-foot-tall Kraut robot whom the soldiers nickname "Goliath" before eventually taking him out with their guns. 

After the robot's demise, another pitched battle erupts, but this time Easy gets help from frequent guest-star Mademoiselle Marie, as well as returning evildoer Helga Voss. Given that Kanigher and others had already established an ongoing relationship between Rock and Marie, it's tempting to think that the only reason Kanigher revived Helga for just a few pages was to portray a machine-gun "catfight" between the French brunette and the ice-blonde Nazi.

    In order to justify the third hero-crossover, Rock gets an air-lift to the German castle by "Navajo air ace Johnny Cloud," while the rest of Easy keeps footing it overland. Somehow Marie and Cloud both know that Rock carries sealed orders that he can't open till he reaches the castle. Once Rock infiltrates the castle, he makes two discoveries. One is that Rock's frequent sparring partner The Iron Major is present in the schloss. The other is that the orders tell him to kill the prisoner if he can't rescue him. A page or so later, Rock makes a third discovery-- the identity of the prisoner-- but the more astute readers will probably have figured that Kanigher didn't keep bringing up Larry Rock for no reason.

          

As a minor twist, Kanigher reveals that the Iron Major is of an older German echelon and so doesn't approve of Nazi depravity. The depraved Nazi colonel orders the Major executed, so Rock has to save his enemy from his other enemies, and then clobber the Major when the more cultured villain gets in the hero's way. Surprisingly, Kanigher rushes past the revelation that the prisoner is Larry Rock-- maybe he thought it was so obvious, everyone would have seen the handwriting on the wall. The two Rocks escape the Germans by cable-car, but Larry's old wound makes him irrational. He demands his brother kill him to keep Larry from falling into enemy hands and being tortured to reveal vital information.  
   

   

For the big dramatic finish, Larry vanishes into the icy mountain wastes, sparing Brother Frank from having to execute the prisoner as his orders demanded. So even if the orders were "sealed in blood"-- that of fraternal blood, blood-ties that couldn't be allowed to trump the needs of the military-- Frank Rock actually defies those orders for sake of brotherly love. Larry actually has no good reason to tell Frank to kill him-- once they're on the cable-car, they're no longer in danger of recapture-- but I guess Kanigher used Larry's head-wound to justify the big sacrificial moment. Yet though it's a very contrived tale, there's just a few myth-tropes here worth preserving. And from what I've heard, I believe Larry Rock comes back later, so the big sacrifice gets overturned for the sake of another story in the Rock mythos. 

 

NEAR-MYTHS: THE CAPTAIN HUNTER CHRONICLE (OUR FIGHTING FORCES #99-105, 1966-67)

I had not planned to honor Veterans' Day with a post on an old war comic-- assuming "honor" is the proper word-- but it just so happened that a few days before Vets' Day, I came across a comics-essay mentioned that one of the first, if not the first, comics titles to take place during the Vietnam War was this very short-lived feature. So, after I read all seven appearances of this feature, I decided to devote a post to DC Comics' first Vietnam-based feature.

I don't think the Vietnam conflict had become hugely unpopular with the American public in 1966. Nevertheless, this feature seems to have taken an odd path compared to DC's other war-books featuring continuing characters. For one thing, the hero, Green Beret Phil Hunter, is almost entirely a loner, one who comes to the aid of other American soldiers but is no longer a member of the armed forces. Though Hunter's tour of duty is up and he has refused to re-enlist, he declines to return to the U.S. Captain Hunter has a Rambo-like mission: to find his lost twin brother Nick, a serviceman who went missing in Vietnam. The U.S. government seems totally okay with Hunter not only retaining custody of his uniform and combat gear, but with pursuing his lone-wolf mission with no oversight. Inevitably he ends up fighting endless supplies of hostile Vietnamese, generally termed "Charlies."

Some war comics have reflected on the ethics and politics of wartime encounters, but even if HUNTER had lasted three times its seven issues, I don't think its creators would have had anything to say about Vietnam. Robert Kanigher, who's credited with scripting all but two stories, probably conceived the basic setup, since it's marked with his over-the-top sentimentality and formulaic tendencies. Hunter is largely a superman, more often seen wading into a half-dozen opponents and thrashing them with his fists, rather than simply shooing them down. Kanigher was sometimes capable of conjuring up some decent pulp poetry, but HUNTER is one of his hack-serials, driven by the very mediocre gimmick that Phil Hunter believes that he has a psychic link with his twin, guiding him to his lost brother. I don't get the sense that Kanigher was very invested in the narrative, which may be the reason why he wrapped up the series in issue #105, wherein Phil does find and rescue his brother Nick. But just in case Hunter's adventures grabbed a few readers, the last story also promotes the exploits of the twins' WWII-serving father Lieutenant Hunter-- and this Hunter's Nazi-busting activities with his team, "Hunter's Hellcats," enjoyed a much longer run than HUNTER.

While Kanigher had no interest in engaging with the politics or culture of Vietnam, he did include one support-character who qualifies as a near-myth. This was Lu Lin, a curvaceous Vietnamese femme who volunteered to lead Hunter wherever he wished to go in Vietnam, to repay him for having saved her life. For most of the narrative, Hunter is suspicious of this inscrutable Oriental, and constantly wonders if she's an agent of the Vietcong, planning to lead him into a fatal trap. Hunter also forms the annoying habit of referring to Lu Lin as a "kewpie doll," and I suspect that this was his deflection from the expression "china doll"-- which even Kanigher may've realized would not track with an Asian who was not Chinese.

Lu Lin's lack of emotion and fatalism really bug Hunter, and a few times he kisses her just to see if he'll get a reaction-- which he does not. Lu Lin is thus of a piece with many pop-cultural depictions of Asians, at once half-condescending and half-admiring, and I would not be surprised if Kanigher modeled the character on figures like Milt Caniff's Dragon Lady. There's also a slight vibe of the conqueror-trope-- kill the male soldiers and then sleep with their women-- though neither romance nor genuine sexual actions are even implied. Indeed, in the final story, Lu Lin-- though she proves herself loyal to Hunter in every tale-- simply disappears from the story with no farewell, remaining as unknowable as in her first appearance. Because I think Kanigher liked the trope of "the woman whose nature is her mystery," I think Lu Lin taps ever so slightly into that myth-trope, and gives the HUNTER strip a slight distinction beyond being DC's first serial venture into the Vietnam Conflict. 

AERIAL ACES, GROUND POUNDERS AND SEA SWABBIES

Before abandoning the subject of Darwyn Cooke’s NEW FRONTIER, I should note that after reading it I found myself giving more thought to the dynamics of the military genre in comic books.

I watched war stories on the big and small screens, and even in my teens began to have a fair sense of what sort of military-themed conflicts were deemed critically respectable. But I didn’t collect war comic books. As a kid my funds were limited, and I’m sure that was a major reason for not investigating that genre. I did devote no small amount of coin to the western genre,, though, so I didn’t save all my money for superheroes and horror-SF anthologies. I remember dimly thinking that most of the war comics of my time seemed repetitious blood-and-thunder, and though I was aware of quality work—particularly that of Joe Kubert-- I just didn’t buy into the genre. Even when war comics included crossovers with super-types, as when Nick Fury met both Captain America and “Doctor Zemo,” I didn’t plunk down any pennies.

Some fifty years later, I have a broader understanding of the high and low points of the military genre in comics, and I can see why Jim Steranko devoted a full chapter to the subject of aerial-war comics. There’s something pristine and liberating about stories of air war, ranging from the crazy pulp-stuff of the Hillman repertoire (Airboy, Sky Wolf, et al) to the mordant, downbeat tone of ENEMY ACE. Steranko implied that the years of the aviation comics ended with the Golden Age, even though DC Comics kept a few pilots in service, notably Johnny Cloud. In any case, the aerial-war comics seem to have been the aristocrats of the battlefield in terms of their emphasis on skill and derring-do.

In contrast, the “ground pounders” have to their credit most of the really long-lived soldier-heroes, represented principally by Sergeant Fury and Sergeant Rock. The infantry, even in the form of skilled commandos, tended to engage the reader on the gut-level, constantly evoking a kill-or-be-killed aesthetic.

As for the “sea swabbies,” they don’t seem to have done well in comic-book serials. I believe DC had a PT boat guy named Captain Storm. But despite the success of fictional series-heroes like Hornblower in prose, seagoing protagonists never seemed to rule the waves of the comic-book market.

Since I’ve barely gleaned the genre even today, I’ve no definite conclusions regarding the overall execution of the genre in funnybooks. But as time permits, I plan to give military comics more than a passing glance in future.

MYTHCOMICS: DC: THE NEW FRONTIER (2004)

I’ve heard good press about the late Darwyn Cooke’s THE NEW FRONTIER ever since the series first appeared (in the abbreviated form of a six-issue periodical back in 2004. But though I knew that Cooke’s work dealt with one of the most important periods of American comic books—the beginnings of “Silver Age” comics in the mid-to-late fifties-- I didn’t rush to explore FRONTIER. Possibly I didn’t quickly warm to promos of Cooke’s art. More likely, though, I was just pessimistic that anyone could find a fresh take on yet another look back into that rather well traveled territory —the debut of Silver Age Flash, of Silver Age Green Lantern, of the Justice League. But I can now say without reticence that Cooke’s magnum opus succeeds—that of celebrating not only the gaudy costumed characters, but also the humbler-looking heroes of the DC Universe: the spies, the G.I. Joes, and, above all, the pilots..

Most multi-character crossover projects, both at DC and at Marvel Comics, tend to focus exclusively upon superheroes. There’s no intrinsic shame in this. For many decades superheroes comprised the only genre that sold decently in the direct market. Thus, when in 1986 Marv Wolfman and George Perez crafted CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, they brought together dozens of characters from DC’s divergent realities with the idea of forging a new, more coordinated cosmos. Amid all of the spandex, Wolfman and Perez worked in a handful of non-superhero characters—largely stemming from war, western, and SF-genres—even though few if any of these characters were still being published in 1986. Characters like Sergeant Rock, Kamandi and the Nighthawk were probably included because the creators thought that the new cosmos would seem more cohesive if it also worked in the cowboys and soldiers. Nevertheless, in CRISIS the non-super-types contributed very little to all of the cosmic contortions.

In an afterword, Darwyn Cooke asserts that as a young fan that he preferred war and western comics to those of superheroes. Thus, his “fresh take” consists of approaching the seminal events of DC continuity largely from the POV of such characters as Rick Flagg, King Faraday and a quartet of mismatched military operatives known as “the Losers.” Further, Cooke culled the narrative’s central antagonist from one of DC’s most peculiar combinations of the war and science fiction genres: “The War That Time Forget.” In this series, based around a concept rather than a continuing hero, each story started with some unwitting soldiers—usually non-repeating characters—getting marooned on a strange island where prehistoric monsters still dwelled. As FRONTIER commences, the four commandos known as the Losers are sent to the island to pick up a stranded officer, Rick Flagg, and the scientific secrets in his custody. Though Flagg escapes the island with his intel, all of the Losers perish on DC’s version of The Lost World—though not before the soldiers uncover the hidden menace behind the mysterious isle.

Back in the real world, WWII ends, but anti-Communist hysteria begets the Cold War. None of this keeps a young Hal Jordan, years away from his power ring, from wanting to be a pilot like his late father—and though he does become Green Lantern in due time, Cooke is far more preoccupied with Jordan’s history as a pilot, as a hero who depends on a plane, not a ring, to fly. Jordan is one of FRONTIER’s more indispensable characters, and Cooke’s version makes him something of a pacifist type, butting heads with a more hawkish type like Rick Flagg, original commander of the Suicide Squad (whose adventures are retroactively connected to the War That Time Forgot).

Though the artist includes a handful of earthbound warriors, FRONTIER shows its creator’s abiding love for scenes of air action. Cooke also works in numerous other pilot-characters. Ace Morgan of the Challengers of the Unknown. Larry Trainor, later of the Doom Patrol. Nathaniel Adam, fated to become Captain Atom. I’m a little surprised the artist didn’t manage to work in sometimes pilot Rex “Metamorpho” Mason. Ironically, only one character in the story was designed to be a full-time aviation hero—namely, Johnny Cloud, “the Navajo Air Ace.” But after the Native American pilot’s feature was cancelled, he was assigned to the Losers, with the result that this hero’s final adventure takes place on earth rather than in the clouds for which he’s named.

Cooke’s focus upon the allure of aviation dovetails with another aspect of 1950s America: the space race, born out of American’s apprehensions about Communist incursions. This fear also gave shape to fantasies that “little green men” might choose to invade Earth, not to mention reinforcing native xenophobia toward what we now call “people of color.” All of this cultural disquiet leads to the banishment of the 1940s mystery men from the public eye, with the exception of major icons like Superman and Wonder Woman.

However, in the metaphorical wings wait a new breed of “mystery men,” and their appearance is foreshadowed by the advent of a not-so-little green man. In 1955, J’onn J’onzz, the Manhunter from Mars, subsisted in a minor back-up feature, dangling from the cape of Batman in DETECTIVE COMICS. But in the world of overall comics-history, Manhunter became the forerunner to DC’s renaissance of costumed heroes. Many modern comics-writers would rush to show J’onzz interacting with other costumed types right away, and in truth the Manhunter does “team up” briefly with Batman. However, Cooke grounds the character in the more mundane part of the DC Universe, teaming him up with detective-hero Slam Bradley and eventually having him captured by American intelligence agent King Faraday.

Numerous other characters prove central to the action—Superman’s cohorts Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, the Barry Allen Flash, all four of the Challengers of the Unknown (whose presence gives Cooke the chance to homage their creator Jack Kirby), and Rick Flagg and the other three members of his Squad. Numerous other DC figures make what are essentially cameos—the Blackhawks (who don’t get too much air action), Aquaman, Adam Strange, and even the Viking Prince. Even less central are a quintet of DC’s mystic heroes, who only appear to explain to readers their shaky reasons for not participating in the conflict, even though the island’s menace threatens the totality of the world.

Cooke gives a new name to the Island That Time Forgot, terming it “the Centre.” I suspect he came up with this name just so that he could work in Yeats’ famous line about how “the Centre cannot hold.” However, despite fomenting massive levels of destruction upon the modern world, the menace itself fails to impress. Cooke has various characters—including a clone of Doctor Seuss—experience psychic presentiments about the Centre’s catastrophic powers, all in the approved H.P. Lovecraft fashion. Yet somehow an intelligent, dinosaur-laden island proves a pale substitution for a narrative that desperately needs something on the level of Great Cthulhu. In the final analysis, the Centre is just a make-work menace, something cosmic enough to make squabbling Earthmen forget their fears and work together—thus making it possible for costumed heroes to regain the public favor they’d lost.

Cooke mentions in his afterword that some fans criticized him for overly liberal sentiments. My take is that when he focuses on real issues—relating the tragic tale of an early black vigilante-hero, John Henry—Cooke remains on solid philosophical ground. However, when the artist crafts a scene in which Hal Jordan’s Eskimo sidekick get mad when Jordan uses the name “Pieface”—so mad that said sidekick refers to Jordan by the anachronistic term “whitebread”—yeah, that’s Cooke practicing petty political correctness. He even attempts to have fun at the expense of reactionary fans in a silly six-page backup story, wherein Wonder Woman and Black Canary beat up a bunch of citizens for going to a Playboy Club. I suspect this sort of humor will only be funny to members of the choir. Within FRONTIER he does make some effort to justify the ways of hawks to doves, especially via an improbable friendship between J’onn J’onzz and his captor Faraday, so at least there are times when Cooke puts the brakes on some of his preachifyin’.

A proximate model for NEW FRONTIER might be the Busiek-Ross MARVELS, whose narrative concentrated upon an assortment of purely mundane characters, witnessing their sane world besieged by a flood of superheroic “marvels.” Yet Busiek doesn’t really transcend the standard Marvel narrative. Cooke, by forging a vital link between mundane and supramundane combatants, gives readers a solid vision of heroism as we know it through all manner of pop-culture fantasies. He concludes this vision by printing a famed John F, Kennedy speech regarding America’s need to find its “new frontier,” thus implicitly transferring the ideals of Kennedy to the second wave of superheroes spawned in the sixties. Possibly, one might extend this benison to all the better superhero comics that descended from those illustrious ancestors. But even though the superheroes forced most of the other adventure-genres out of commercial existence, at least here, in FRONTIER, earthbound grunts and air aces are remembered for their part in that evolution.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE KILLER SLOT" (ALL-AMERICAN MEN AT WAR #109, 1965)

The vast majority of DC war comics of the Silver Age-- which I, as a non-expert, perceive to be the heyday of the company's execution  of the genre-- tend to be fairly straightforward "gotta out-tough the enemy" potboilers. Robert Kanigher produced tons of these by-the-numbers combat-capers< But as with his superhero and western works, on occasion he came up with something in a mythic mode. In "The Killer Slot," he sought to work in his (undoubtedly simplified) comprehension of Amerindian psychology into just such a "tough it out" scenario.

"The Killer Slot"-- which is a pilot's name for a zone in which one plane has another at a disadvantage-- begins in media res. WWII "Navajo Ace" Johnny Cloud has been forced to land by another ace, one Von Kleit, Grinning goosesteppers take him prisoner, and for good measure mock him for being a Red Man:

 

Naturally, Cloud breaks free without getting immediately shot dead. Yet, rather than being, like most protagonists, solely concerned with his mission, Cloud becomes morose for having brought shame on his warrior heritage. This conveniently reminds him of an incident in his youth on the reservation, wherein he and his girlfriend rescued a falcon from a marauding hawk. This whole situation takes place near the cave of local shaman-type "Smoke-Maker," and that's where Cloud and his girlfriend take the smaller bird, believing that the falcon is dead. Smoke-Maker claims that even dead birds cannot rest without taking a last strike at an enemy. Providentially, the falcon seems to come to life, at least long enough to attack the hawk, after which both are joined in death.

This doesn't exactly sound like a good omen for the hero of a continuing serial. Having finished this segue into the distant past, Cloud finally fills in the reader on the dogfight that led to his current situation. After shooting down some enemy planes, Cloud sees a lone American soldier on the ground, being menaced by a German tank. Cloud rescues the grunt, with the amusing thought that the tank-gun reminds him of  "a cowboy with a six-shooter." Naturally, this time the "Indian" wins.

However, Cloud's heroic action leaves him open to his plane being forced down by two German fighters, and thus we return the reader to the present time. Cloud wanders around a while, moping about being shamed because he didn't manage to strike back against the enemy, and then finds the soldier he saved. The unnamed fellow expresses his shame for having failed his own martial attempts, at which point Cloud realizes that white people also feel the same shame as Indians over failure, which presumably soothed the egos of the readership.

The soldier, even in his wounded condition, helps Cloud regain his downed airplane. As the Navajo Ace takes off, he only has a split second to shoot down the enemy ace Von Kleit (never actually seen on-panel) before he Cloud falls victim to the Killer Slot. Probably no readers were surprised when Cloud, in taking down his enemy, did not suffer the fate of the dead falcon. But even if "Killer Slot"-- graced with somke really nice aviation-art by Irv Novick-- doesn't transcend the formula of the "tough-guy war-hero," Kanigher did somewhat better here in melding the psychology of shame with the imagined warrior code of a Native American hero.

NULL-MYTHS: THE SILVER AGE SUICIDE SQUAD (1959-66)

In this essay, which contains an explanation of my term "null-myth," I mentioned that Mark Millar's WANTED was one of the few works I considered inconsummate in every way, that is, in terms of all four literary potentialities. Now here's another one.

I hate to knock this omnibus collection of the Silver Age SUICIDE SQUAD, which, as most DC fans will know, indirectly gave rise to the SUICIDE SQUAD concept of the Late Bronze Age. Since to my knowledge none of these stories were reprinted before, the collection is of great benefit to the devoted comics-historian who wants to know the origins of everything. These tales were almost entirely executed by editor-writer Robert Kanigher and his possibly-favorite artist-team Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. (There's one story written by another writer and a couple of entries by Joe Kubert and by Gene Colan.) One group of stories were set in the 1960s, featuring four government agents, who usually battled recrudescent dinosaurs. The other group concerned an assortment of non-recurring characters who belonged to a secret commando squad, and who-- also usually ended up fighting dinosaurs. To be sure, the later batch belonged to an overarching serial concept, also mostly by Kanigher, "The War That Time Forgot," in which American GIs kept encountering big saurian monsters whose modern presence went largely unexplained. Of the two concepts, the 1960s one was a direct influence upon the Bronze Age concept, which took the first serial's stalwart hero Rick Flag and put him in command of a team of DC supervillains. I really have nothing to say about the WWII tales, except that I found them all very boring, even the one with an early version of that curious DC creation, "the G.I. Robot."

The stories of the "Rick Flag Squad" are no better, but it's historically interesting to show how poorly Kanigher works out his concept. First of all, he selects his four adventurers-- Flag, nurse Karen Grace, and scientists Evans and Bright-- for all having one thing in common: survivor guilt, after having witnessed other persons perish while the future Squad-members themselves survived.  This sounds a lot like the idea Jack Kirby and Dave Wood debuted for the long-running 1958 feature CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, wherein the four heroes all survived brushes with death. However, whereas the Challengers all pretty much forget about their trauma in their quest for fun exploits, it becomes a source of ongoing melodrama in the hands of Kanigher.

Naturally, Kanigher doesn't have any of these survivor-victims literally court death; "suicide" is only a tag-line to suggest how dangerous their missions are. To supply optimal melodrama, Kanigher comes up with a romantic schtick in which Flag and Karen ache with mutual love for one another, but cannot be seen together. Why not? Well, their other Squad-members, Evans and Bright, are both in love with Karin too, though neither man ever seems to make the slightest pass at Karin. However, virtuous Flag insists that the Squad's missions come first, and therefore he and Karen cannot wed. 

Kanigher rolls out this trope over and over with no development, as if each pseudo-romantic encounter were produced via Xerox machine. The group's menaces are the same: they're almost all dinosaurs that have survived somehow, sometimes with super-powers. The last adventure has the characters, who have never functioned as crimefighters, threatened with death by a gang-boss who pays a villain, "the Sculptor Sorcerer," to turn the quartet into gold statues. It's not a good story either, but it's certainly better than any of the dino tales.

I've often pointed out that Kanigher had an unusual ability to breed real poetry out of his endless repetition of pulp-tropes, which often seems  a minor miracle, given how much junk Kanigher wrote. But the only significance of the Silver Age SUICIDE SQUAD is that of providing a template for the superior Bronze Age creation.