The Great Disaster!

The Great Disaster is the rather stupendous Showcase volume from DC which attempts to gather together the sundry tales which relate the retro-continuity saga of how the Earth fell victim to a rather surprising atomic war in October of 1986 and how human society dealt with that.

The book is divided into discrete sections. The first titled "Pre-Disaster Warnings" contains stories from the back of Weird War Tales concerning the "Emperor of Weehauken" by Sheldon Mayer and Alfredo Alcala, a man who travels from the future to our present day, and a Superman yarn which lays out the potential future as hinted at in pages of Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth by Jack Kirby.

The next section called "The Day After Doomsday" offers up over a dozen tiny vignettes from the back pages of Weird War Tales, The Unexpected, and The House of Mystery which give glimpses of life after society has crumbled. There's a distinct Twilight Zone tone to these brief yarns by Len Wein, Steve Skeates and others. My favorite is a trilogy of stories about the last man and woman on Earth named "Adam and Gertrude", with delightful artwork by Jack Sparling.

The third section is titled "Tales of the Atomic Knights" and reaches back to the masterfully crafted vintage stories from Strange Adventures by John Broome and Murphy Anderson. To my knowledge, all the Atomic Knight stories are here and that alone is worth the price of admission to this book. You'll believe that a profoundly average man dressed in an atomically-altered Medieval suit of armor can ride a gigantic mutated Dalmation across a surprisingly benign atomic wasteland -- you really will.

The next section titled "The Gods Return" begins with Jack Kirby's Atlas one-shot for the debut of 1st Issue Special and then offers up all twelve issues of Hercules Unbound.  The first six issues by Gerry Conway, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Wally Wood are lush and vibrant, then the series takes a turn as writer David Michelinie and later Cary Bates finish up the saga with artwork by Walt Simonson under sundry inkers, his own to great effect in the last two issue. It is with these stories that the Atomic Knights return to DC lore, though in ways very surprising.

The penultimate section is titled "More Tales of the Post-Apocalyptic World" and offers up a quartet of stories from the back pages of Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth written by Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, and David Anthony Kraft with artwork by Pablo Marcos and Mike Nasser. These tales feature a young ape named Urgall who teams up with a scheming rat named Otis and comely ape wench called Myra. And that is followed by "The Day After Doomsday" by Robin Snyder and Vic Catan which shows some poor misguided humans with a wild plot to repopulate the Earth. 

The volume closes out with "Alternate Endings" offering a post-Crisis view of the Atomic Knights from the pages of DC Comics Presents when Superman uncovers the "real secret" of the Gardner Grayle. How this one fits into the overall storyline is anyone's guess these days, but it's a snazzy story on its own as written by Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn and drawn by Alex Saviuk and Frank McLaughlin. 

All in all this is a utterly fabulous book,  a truly sprawling collection of disparate stories by some talented writers and artists from the Silver and Bronze Ages of DC. The story of "The Great Disaster" is not all here, there's more revealed in the pages of Kamandi and OMAC and elsewhere, but the thread is here for those who wish to find out more about one of DC's most clever conceits.

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Showcase Corner - Legion Of Super-Heroes Five!

The Legion of Super-Heroes had really been one of DC's more organic successes. The team started out in the late 50's in a one-off story guest-starring with Superboy in Adventure Comics, but soon they were showing up in Action Comics with Supergirl and more and more often in Adventure Comics, Superboy, and elsewhere. That led to their own feature in Adventure Comics, replacing Superboy's feature which had introduced them and they thrived, especially among the young fans of the 60's looking for a fresh take from DC. But as they grewand devleoped and added a seemingly endless cast of characters,  they also began to dwindle in popularity and gave over Adventure Comics to an updated Supergirl. They went on to take up residence in Action Comics, hidden behind the main Superman stories. Then they were shifted over to Superboy's main title and history began to repeat itself as they came to absorb it as well. Superboy was still a significant part of the proceedings but there was no doubt the Legion was the rising star.

DC also was not experimenting with different size comics featuring reprints but also offering up complete reprint comic books. The Legion of Super-Heroes was given a four-issue run which might've been an attempt to test the waters for a push into a title of their own or perhaps DC was just trying to defend its position on the spinner racks with the myriad Marvel comics hitting shelves in droves. Despite the long history of the Legion this was first self-titled series. 

That revival was largely the result of the art of Dave Cockrum. He came to the strip as an inker working with longtime DC great Murphy Anderson, but soon was doing all the art, and bringing some fresh design ideas to the series. 

The Legion was a wonderful Silver Age comic, but Cockrum tooled it to become a wonderful Bronze Age comic. New sleek costumes for heroes such as Colossal Boy, Shrinking Violet, Element Lad, Star Boy and many more. Cockrum had a knack for drawing young characters with fresh handsome faces. He gave Timberwolf a ferocious new look. And new legionnaire Wildfire was designed by him. One of his neatest contributions was giving the Legion a sleek new cruiser evocative of a certain enterprising starship from another franchise which had its ups and downs. In conjunction with writer Cary Bates, they made the Legion exciting again. But Cockrum was only there a little while before jetting over to Marvel to pull off a similar trick with a new set of X-Men. 

Mike Grell stepped in to fill his shoes and he did so wonderfully. Grell's work was not as sublimely elegant as Cockrum's, but it was more dynamic and a bit more exciting to read. His girls weren't as pretty, but they were sure pretty enough. In tandem with Bates and returning writer Jim Shooter, Grell made the Legion a must read. Heroes married, moved into new careers, and even died in these Legion stories, and the stakes were always seemingly higher than in other DC comics. With all of space and time to play with, it's no wonder the Legion of Super-Heroes became a hit all over again. 

Below are some of Cockrum's costume designs alongside some classics. 

The Legion was so successful in the 70's that Val Armorr, the Karate Kid was granted a spin-off title making late advantage of what Kung Fu craze was still left in 1976. Karate Kid featured art by Ric Estrada and one of my favorites Joe Staton. Paul Levitz wrote the initial scripts, his first connection to the Legion as far as I know. This story has the Kid shift his work to the 20th Century where he found life at once more challenging and more fulfilling, at least for a time. 

Here are the covers from this run on which the Legion appears. Many feature the creamy art of Nick Cardy. The rest are by Grell. 

And that wraps my month-long read of the Showcase Legion tales. I've been hankering to get to this one for a long time and it's a pleasure finally get it completed. These are fun stories which speak of their respective eras delightfully. 

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