The King's Arrow!

The Green Arrow was the brainchild of longtime DC editor and infamous bully Mort Weisinger who introduced the lackluster Batman wannabe into More Fun Comics where he held sway for many years even for a time being the cover feature. He was moved over to Adventure Comics where he disappeared into the back pages behind the Superboy feature which was drawn by the same artist - George Papp. Hidden in plain sight, the feature survived the downsizing in superheroes of the late 40's and likely thanks to having an editor as his daddy tumbled along right into the burgeoning Silver Age. But when the Justice League of America was created by Julie Schwartz the Green Archer didn't make the cut immediately. But he did eventually, and it was as part of the the League and later a partner with Green Lantern that Ollie Queen eventually made his bones.

But there was a time briefly in 1957 when Jack Kirby with writer Dave Wood brought a new aesthetic to the world of the Green Arrow, giving the feature a shiny sci-fi polish with some really bizarre concepts. Green Arrow also got his origin spruced up in what became the definitive rendition for many years to come. (To read it go here.) But as quick as it came, the Green Arrow returned to relative obscurity when Kirby left and the reliable Lee Elias took the helm.

The Kirby material has been collected several times by DC over the years. My first encounter was seeing the origin story in various venues, but the whole run got reprinted way back 2001 in a delightful slender reprint which I highly recommend to one and all.

For more money you can have those stories and more in The Jack Kirby Omnibus Volume One which focuses on Kirby's 50's work.

And for the Green Arrow lover the stories are gathered along with many many others in Showcase Presents Green Arrow from 2006.

I have all three, and  I enjoy these yarns almost as much as any the King has ever drawn. He seemed to be really having fun with the Green Arrow feature, giving it an injection of imagination it woefully lacked for most of its time. Green Arrow for a very long time was less than sum of his inspirations of Batman, Robin Hood, and such. When Kirby got hold of him, he caught fire, though briefly.

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In The Zone!

Gary Frank

Superman - Tales from the Phantom Zone is a 2009 collection of vintage Super-Family stories from the heyday of the Mort Weisinger era. Weisinger, an infamous and longtime DC editor was notorious for his almost always crusty and sometimes downright cruel interactions with his staff. He apparently knew what he was doing, or at least knew enough to keep folks around him who knew what they were doing, but his off-putting interpersonal skills have always cast a cloud over his long and highly successful tenure on the Man of Steel.

The Phantom Zone, the place where Kryptonian criminals were consigned to served their sentences after adjudication became a rich and vibrant source of many classic tales. One of the finest characters to inhabit the Zone was Mon-El the Daxamite who had powers nearly identical to Superboy, but who had to be put into the Zone to protect him from his sensitivity to commonplace lead.

Like all gimmicks dreamed up during the Weisinger era, once it was developed it appeared with a high degree of regularity and invaded all the Superman family books. Courtesy of the writing of Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bernstein, Jerry Seigel, Leo Dorfman, and others there was a lot of wrinkles in the rich Phantom Zone concept, and lots of criminals waiting their turn to sneak out and cause trouble. The artwork by Curt Swan, George Klein,  and George Papp codes these stories perfectly for their mostly early 60's era.

I've talked about this before here, but the main reason I picked this collection up was to get a good reading copy of my first Superman comic, issue number 205 (under an uber-exciting Neal Adams cover) which introduced the infamous Black Zero the villain who really blew up Krypton. It's a slam bang story by Otto Binder and the recently deceased Al Plastino, a memorable story which alas has disappeared like almost all the Weisinger innovations from the Superman mythology. But not from my own personal mythology by any means.

Here are the covers of the comics from which the stories in this collection are taken. Most are cover featured. As far as I can tell all the covers below are by Curt Swan and are inked by either Stan Kaye or George Klein, save for the last one by Neal Adams.

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