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Sunday, October 07, 2012

Adventure Comics #202 - July 1954

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Comics Weekend "The Menace of the Freak Fish!" by George Kashdan(?) and Ramona Fradon.

It's Adventure Sunday!

Aquaman learns first-hand the dangers of radiation in this month's adventure:

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Reporters, being a cynical lot (and this was before Watergate!), are sure that Aquaman won't be able to keep all the hybrid fish safe from having to be killed. Shortly after, a shark with the beak of a sawfish heads for their boat, and they signal Aquaman.

The Sea King manages to distract the saw-shark away from the boat, turning to chase him. Just as it lunges for him, Aquaman jumps into the air, landing on the creature's back, covering it's eyes and using a handy lasso he brought along:
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...and with that, so ends another adventure for Aquaman!

Turns out this whole thing was a ruse, with Aquaman being a good egg and helping out the Navy test one of it's handy-dandy, sure-to-have-no-side-effects bombs.


I'm not sure who has been writing these Aquaman stories (no website that's interested in such things seems to know), but whoever it is really had to know a lot about Maritime Law--there's almost always at least one mention of such in every story, and how it effects the plot. I wonder if Aquaman knows all this stuff by heart or does he have massive, hardcover reference books back at the AquaCave?


3 comments:

Anthony said...

Quite a ruse, indeed. I wonder what Lois Lane at the "Daily Star" made of the Earth-2 Arthur's little shenanigans, though... ;-) (There would've been a fun "Mr. and Mrs. Superman" story!)

As for who wrote this, comics.org says Otto Binder wrote the Superboy, Johnny Quick, and Green Arrow stories in this issue, so maybe he wrote this one, as well?

Re: Superboy's plot: from my source: "an unnamed city is finally named after Superboy, but the monuments its citizens make to Superboy are formed from a strange blue meteor that may doom them all."

Joseph Brian Scott said...

Strange blue meteor or no, I doubt even Superboy could tolerate the obnoxiousness of having statues of himself placed every 40 feet along the street.

I LOVE that monster in the splash panel! I wonder if Haney/Purcell were maybe inspired by it when they created Tyros for B&B #51 (Dec. '63/Jan. '64). I'm almost sorry it didn't actually show up in the story, though I have to say I appreciated the hoax resolution.

Unknown said...

Viva Adventure Sunday!

I'm with Joseph...I love the big winged turtle. Great design work from Fradon there. Hmm...a giant flying turtle, now there's an idea.

I'm amazed that we're still only up to 1954 here. It feels like so much has been going on since Ramona Fradon took over, that I figured we were in the late 50's for sure.

James Chatterton