It's Adventure Sunday!
Superboy finally gets around to, you know, actually fighting crime on this Adventure cover, something his co-stars have been doing every single month. In this, er, adventure though, Aquaman just isn't fighting crime, he's taking on the #1 scurviest dog of the sea...Black Jack!
The two pilots watch Aquaman smack Black Jack and his crew around a bit, which is always ratings gold. But then they realize they are televising an area of the sea called "The Secret Zone", which is not to be revealed to the general public(?).
In their haste to skedaddle, one of the butterfingers pilots drops a wrench(!), which happens to land right on Aquaman's head(!!). Black Jack takes advantage of this by tying up the Sea King while he's unconscious.
Aquaman finally awakes, and while Black Jack gloats, he makes use of the part of him they didn't think to tie up:
In their haste to skedaddle, one of the butterfingers pilots drops a wrench(!), which happens to land right on Aquaman's head(!!). Black Jack takes advantage of this by tying up the Sea King while he's unconscious.
Aquaman finally awakes, and while Black Jack gloats, he makes use of the part of him they didn't think to tie up:
...and so ends another adventure with Aquaman!
One of the goofier tales in the Golden Age Aquaman's playbook, with an ending that feels like Samachson realized he only had one page left and had to wrap it up.
And let's not even get into the coincidence of a wrench dropped from hundreds of miles up landing on the six-inch space that is the top of Aquaman's head, right at the exact worst moment. Years later in the old super-villains home, Black Jack would tell this story, and no one would believe him.
One of the goofier tales in the Golden Age Aquaman's playbook, with an ending that feels like Samachson realized he only had one page left and had to wrap it up.
And let's not even get into the coincidence of a wrench dropped from hundreds of miles up landing on the six-inch space that is the top of Aquaman's head, right at the exact worst moment. Years later in the old super-villains home, Black Jack would tell this story, and no one would believe him.
2 comments:
What's weirder than the wrench bit is the idea of an old sailors' home having a television set in 1947, when TV itself was still a "novelty"/in its infancy, and most of the country outside of New York, Los Angeles, and maybe Chicago didn't even have TV *stations* yet. Let alone a *color* TV set, apparently (the US didn't start broadcasting in color until the mid-50s)! Oh, well...
Re: Superboy: Funny descriptions, though (to be a killjoy/a Superboy fan), some of his earliest Golden Age stories were similar to some of these covers, as "slice of life" stories, mixed with fighting Smallville gangsters. Like someone here said earlier about the Golden Age Aquaman, the more well known Superboy elements---Krypto, more space aliens, the Phantom Zone, his meeting a teenaged Arthur Curry, etc.---didn't start appearing until the mid-to-late 50s (early Silver Age)...
This confirms it. These are definitely adventures set on Earth-Two (the "goofy" Earth). I believe that every rest home on Earth-Two had a television set by 1916 there. And most of their programming was supplied by "television planes". Another clue that places this story on Earth-Two rather than Earth-One is the peculiar aerobatic properties of the Earth-Two wrenches. Just consult the Schwartz-Fox "Guidebook of the Earths".
Love Adventure Sundays!
P.S. Crisis on Infinite Earths never happened. pass it on.
James Chatterton
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