Mysterious boxes are releasing monsters, like a violent Bizarro Pokémon, and in Challenger Mountain, the injured Prof. Haley manages to fight one off, but is then trapped in an airlock by five more. That gives him to recap the last few issues: Red Ryan had quit the team, after fighting with Rocky Davis over 'honorary' Challenger, June Robbins. (Urg, 'honorary.' June wasn't an original member and was a woman, but her treatment seems pretty Stone Age even for the time!) The team then investigates the first mystery box in Canada, accompanied by Swamp Thing (!) and unknown to them, Deadman: after fighting the monster, the Prof. had discovered the box was from the future. The far future; like the year Twelve Million A.D.! For a consult, the Challs go to visit Rip Hunter: they don't find him, but his time sphere returns, with the skeleton of someone from the future. The team takes the sphere to investigate, and the Prof. realizes the monitoring equipment was in the next room...with the monsters!
The Challengers and Swamp Thing, in the future, are confronted by an obviously controlled Rip Hunter and future "sub-men." Deadman possesses one, to give the others time to escape, but they catch a beating at the hands of the "Persuader," which was more robot than human, so Deadman couldn't take it over. The big cheese, "Sunset Lord," thinks the new prisoners could be useful in crushing rebel "Lucas Lawspeaker," so Deadman starts looking there. Back in the past, the Prof. uses an exo-suit to fight the monsters, while Red Ryan faces another box in mid-Metropolis, by turning a mini-cam into a laser! (He was the team's electronics expert, but that still seems iffy.) In the future, Deadman had pieced together the backstory: people were created "in somethin' called a gene vat, like some kinda human yeast." The Sunset Lords had inadvertently created a batch of monsters, and the arrival of Rip Hunter gave them a means of getting rid of them, by dumping them into the past. Deadman then checks out the slum "Black Alley," and meets Lucas Lawspeaker, who surprisingly, can read his mind! To be continued...
Part of the reason I do this blog is to shore up my memory; since I'm virtually positive I have the last few issues of this series somewhere, yet it didn't ring a bell when I read this! I'm glad I picked it up at that toy show, then. This was pretty early Giffen art, so it might not be the style you're familiar with: this was a couple years before his Legion run.
Well damn. There's definitely some synergy going on here, as I just watched a YouTuber named Overlord Comics recently upload a retrospective video covering the first 10 years of Swamp Thing's publication history (1971-1981) before Alan Moore graced him with his presence. In that retrospective he covered Swampy appearing in the Challengers book after his first series ended, which I assumed meant he joined the team along with Deadman. Gary on his blog set me straight, and said he only helped the team, never officially joined them.
ReplyDeleteAnyhoo, very cool of DC editors to include him & Deadman in the book, even if they weren't official members. Definitely seeds the early spark for the Justice League Dark book doesn't
it?
Idk about you but I definitely like & enjoy early Keith Giffin art, especially during this era before he went full-on Kirby imitator.
I think it was more that Gerry was writing Swamp Thing and Deadman in their most recent appearances than any sort of editorial decision. He did that with Justice League too, putting his stalled or cancelled characters on the team (both regular Justice League and the Detroit team). Don't get me wrong, it worked out well- Gerry Conway's one of the few who did good work for both Marvel and DC but still.
ReplyDeleteIt's times like these that I'm glad I have a full collection of Who's Who, just to keep track of everybody. I love that DC has such a rich library of characters (I second googum's notion about putting a whole bunch of these kind of characters together in one book) but it can admittedly be confusing without a scorecard sometimes. I maintain that the late 70's/early 80's was DC's best era though, both in respecting their past and looking forward to the future.
I know I personally always preferred Who’s Who over Marvel’s handbook.
ReplyDeleteMost definitely- they put a lot of care and effort into those first few volumes and made sure that each entry was unique. Of course, that meant that it took them decades to figure out how to do a reprint, whereas the Marvel Handbook's been reprinted 2 or 3 times already.
ReplyDelete