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Sunday, March 31, 2013

Adventure Comics #228 - Sept. 1956

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Comics Weekend "The Floating Hall of Fame" by Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon.

It's Adventure Sunday!


This month in Superboy: The Man with Disturbingly Long Arms Gets All Up In Kal's Business!


Further along in the issue, however, Aquaman gets involved in a little bit of history, in more ways than one:

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Ol' Sydney Greenstreet there isn't the only one who thinks that way about the statues, for we see the very next day someone else tries to steal them from the Floating Museum! But Captain John, upon Aquaman's orders, waves a code flag at a flying fish, and suddenly a flock (the captions says thousands, but it's dozens at best) of the form a giant SOS in the sky, calling Aquaman to the scene of the crime!

The Sea King stops the crooks by derailing their boat with a wall of turtles, knocking them into the drink. Later, Aquaman meets back up with Captain John:
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...and so ends another adventure with Aquaman!


According to both the GCD and Mike's Amazing World of Comics, this story was written by none other than Bob Haney, making his (I believe) debut on Aquaman! From the script it's hard to tell--this plot is pretty much like any other Golden Age Aquaman story of the time--but of course Haney was still pretty new to comics, the rigid format was established, and psychotropic drugs were probably harder to come by (although Aquaman's gloves do change color on the final page, so maybe I shouldn't assume anything).


If this truly is Haney's first Aquaman story, he picked an (accidentally) interesting moment--according Mike's Amazing World, this is the last appearance of the Golden Age Aquaman! But we'll get into all that next week!


2 comments:

Anthony said...

An interesting story, but yeah, doesn't seem like a typical Haney tale (read: bizarre to outright insane ;-) ).

And yes, per various sources/suggestions online, this tale also marks the final Earth-2 Aquaman story, as the next issue is usually described as the first Earth-1 tale, for which I'd have to agree. Of course, the Silver Age is different from Earth-1. The Silver Age denotes a change in writing styles/themes; Earth-1 is a continuity construct, and includes various stories published in the Golden Age---such as every Superboy story ever, going back to the 40s. Thus, the first Silver Age story might be more debatable (though #260 might fit the "change in themes/writing style" definition better...).

Re: Superboy: Speaking of Earth-1's first superhero, this issue sees Clark assigned a bodyguard to protect Clark until he can testify at a trial, which interferes with his Superboy duties.

Unknown said...

Viva Adventure Sunday!

And Viva that Zany Bob Haney! This may actually be the least zany story he ever wrote. Guess he was still getting his flippers wet. Something tells me we're going to be in for an ever-increasing number of flabbergasting plot twists as we enter the Silver Age.

James Chatterton