Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
***
To be honest, not a lot leaps out at me from DC's comics bearing the cover date of May 1976.
However, the ones below seem more noteworthy than some.
It surely can when a malfunction in the League's new teleport merges him, the Flash and an alien called the Dharlu into one being!
As for the popularity of this mag, the GCD informs me that this month's sales statement puts the average number of copies sold during the preceding 12 months at 166,000, and that the number reported for the issue nearest the filing date is 173,117.
I know few details of what's occurring inside but it seems the man of steel must face several of his greatest foes, thanks to Xviar's master plan, in The Double-or-Nothing Life of Superman!
Not that I know who Xviar is.
I can report the average circulation for this comic is 644,000, with the most recent recorded issue coming in at 578,311.
It seems so because the Mirror Master's used his mesmerising looking glasses to make the hero think he's a crook.
Thus, the Flash commits several robberies before someone called Dexter Myles shows him he's wrong to believe in his own light-fingered nature.
In red-hot back-up action, the Green Lantern's chasing the Ravagers who attempt to destroy the sun of another world but Greenie soon foils them by using a spaceship's nuclear reactors to ramp up the fusion activity of that sun.
When it comes sales, circulation is reported at an average of 169,000 per issue, with the most recent recorded issue achieving a figure of 166,866.
Sadly, I have no sales data to report.
Possibly, sales data is difficult to collect in the jungle.
We all like a special.
And this is a special.
Gasp as giant super-powered insects invade the Earth and it starts to look like even Superman can't stop them!
That's followed by the Green Lantern who, in an attempt to dodge a marriage proposal, creates a menace which then goes on a rampage!
That's followed by something called The Big House of Monsters!
And all of these tales are reprinted from the 1960s.
Meanwhile, the mag finishes off with a drama called The Marvel Family Reaches Eternity, as reprinted from the distant days of 1946.
However, that's not all we encounter, because, within this book, is also contained a two-page article called What Were the Dinosaurs?
And our answer is provided by none other than E. Nelson Bridwell himself.
But I do know its 18-page thriller is called Welcome Back to Life... Steve Trevor! and is brought to us by Martin Pasko and José Delbo.
I can shed no light upon whether the shock does indeed kill Wonder Woman.


14 comments:
Tarzan & the Champion is a short story contained in 'Tarzan & the Castaways' - the first Tarzan book I ever read, and also ERB's last Tarzan book.
Phillip
I don’t know much about dinosaurs. But I have got to the point that I can tell in a movie or streaming media when they are using real or fake dinosaurs 100% of the time. CH
Of the above comics I had the Flash (#241) which I used to pick up regularly in the mid 1970s mostly for the Green Lantern back up story. From memory this was when Mike Grell was drawing GL and he had to very strange tiny plant sidekick "Itty".
And before anyone says that dinosaurs in films are all fake, I saw a few minutes of The Great Escaper (sic) last night and that was definitely the real Michael Caine.
Knowledge about dinosaurs has been transformed in recent decades thanks to lots of new fossil discoveries. Gone are the days when dinosaurs were portrayed as big lumbering lizards - for example it's now understood that many dinosaurs had feathers.
The JLA cover looks sooo DC with the flying forearm. I mean… were there Marvel covers with detaching body parts?
Charlie - Surely, Marvel's most famous detached body part is Machine Man's missing arm. That appendage went absent for ages! Cover of MM # 17:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/5/5c/Machine_Man_Vol_1_17.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180129035951
Phillip
And what about Curt Connors - growing back his arm = the Lizard!
Phillip
https://www.cbr.com/marvel-spider-man-lizard-facts/
Phillip
In X-Men # 132, Colossus rips Donald Pierce's cyborg arm off, if that counts!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Marvel/comments/sm8f2y/colossus_distilling_the_xmens_ethos_in_two_panels/
Phillip
Don't worry, Steve - I've read Wonder Woman #223 and can assure you Diana is not killed, by shock or any other cause.
Also, it is not much of a thriller. The story - for want of a better word - is fairly perfunctory. But that's not a problem as such, because the point of the issue is to reset Wonder Woman after the end of that long 'Twelve Labours'' arc when she properly rejoined the JLA the previous month.
And so a lot of it is taken up with flashbacks about WW's origin, and the whole depowered/white jumpsuit/amnesiac era; and also generally outlining the Amazon mythos, Hercules nicking Hppolyta's magic girdle, Aphrodite's curse, and all that.
Which could have been a good read, but suffering Sappho, it was all done in a very straight kind of way that was frankly a bit boring. Don't get me wrong, I understand a mid-70s version of that all stuff isn't going to be like, say, Grunt Morrison's 21st century WW.
But it was a more vanilla take than the original 40s version! Mind you, as it happens, so was Grunt's...
-sean
I tend to agree that this is a fairly dull month at DC, which wasn't at all unusual in the early post-Infantino period.
Probably the best comic here is Tarzan #249. I have to say I am deeply ambivalent about a series featuring a white geezer - a British aristocrat no less - poncing around in the jungle like he owns the place. But Tarzan was always so well drawn...
This issue credits the artwork to Rudy Florese, who I know nothing about but he has a style similar to that of the mighty Nestor Redondo (actually, the issues in this run are credited* to either 'Redondo Studios' or Florese, so I assume he was one of the main guys there).
I mean, it ain't Hal Foster or Burne Hogarth, but it looks good.
On the subject of Nestor Redondo, he drew the DC comic that does stand out among the rest this month - but which isn't included here - Swamp Thing #22.
*Over Joe Kubert layouts according to the GCD.
-sean
PS If anyone's interested, a whole load of DC Tarzans - including #249 - are posted here:
https://www.erbzine.com/mag57/5706a.html
-sean
I had that Justice League comic as a little kid, and it confused the heck outta me!
Of course, like all the comics I had as a little spud it disappeared, (probably got read to pieces) and much later I got my trembling paws on another copy when I grew up.
It was fun hunting down those old comics. And comparing my memory of those old comics to what they actually were.
M.P.
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