This issue's guest appearance by The Phantom Stranger brings us also the artist most associated with that character at that time--Jim Aparo, with a genuinely creepy cover.
I was just 19 years old when this issue came out and still reading comics. Bob Haney's goofy plots and dialogue aside, it was books like this issue that kept me around.
A recent letters page warned that we'd be losing Vig and sure enough. Here, he's replaced by The Creeper so...Beware!
The Kurt/Tex art combo continues and we get this nifty double page splash. The plot is as inane as you might expect, though, leading to the silly ending in the panel below in which Superman simply refuses to help Batman pull his plane from the ocean...like he's never helped Batman before> Jeez. We could go back through the blog and count the times!
This, as previously stated, was quite the growth period for DC with new SHOWCASE series, Power Girl soling (without her window) and, seen below, the debut of Firestorm.
No separate stories this time but we do have bad guys who determine that Oliver Queen is secretly the superhero...Batman!!??
DC did a pretty good job on promoting the upcoming SUPERMAN movie and thanks to, among others, Neal Adams and Jerry Robinson, they even settled that pesky rift with the character's creators...at least for the time. Wonder if Neal's returning to do some work for DC was part and parcel of that deal?
Steve Ditko hs never returned to Spider-Man. He has never returned to Dr. Strange. He did, however, return to BEWARE, THE CREEPER! And the results were mixed. Although some of his best work in ages at the time, no one would confuse the art with his earlier version and his always idiosyncratic storytelling was already headed toward the extremes it eventually reached.
One of THE big events of the seventies in comics! Again, by Neal Adams. The finished cover shows a gaggle of celebs and DC workers. I think I figured up a while back that a dozen or so are now Facebook friends of mine.
Mike Vosburg was a fan artist of great renown who had around this time become popular for his work in Mike Friedrich's "ground-level" comics. He was (and is) known for his attractive female characters and brings that to polay here for the most iconic female hero of them all. Not sure it works 100% but definitely interesting.
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