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Sunday, May 18, 2014

Detective Comics #293 - July 1961

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Comics Weekend "The Sensational Sea Scoops" by Jack Miller(?) and Nick Cardy.

It's Adventure Sunday!

After a decade in a half in Adventure Comics, Aquaman finally hit the big time as a solo star in Showcase and a member of the Justice League of America. But his days as a back-up feature weren't quite over, as this brief run in Detective Comics will attest:
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Aquaman and Aqualad are attacked by the fearsome-named Captain Scobey, who is behind the plot to destroy the Maritime News. Our heroes dive, but Scobey follows them in his sub, firing a torpedo straight at them!
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...and so ends another adventure for Aquaman and Aqualad!


Okay, so what the heck is Aquaman doing in a book called Detective Comics? Sure, you could argue at this point in the Dark Knight Detective's career (check the cover), he really wasn't doing much detecting, but of course that didn't matter. I've never read the hows and whys of Aquaman showing up in 'Tec for a few issues, so I'm just guessing here, but I would be that DC had already had a bunch of short Aquaman adventures in the pipe. The decision to switch Adventure to an (essentially) all-Superman book might have been made abruptly, so they found themselves sitting on a bunch of Aquaman stories already paid for, so they thought let's just stick them somewhere.

Certainly, I'm not going to complain about any Aquaman story drawn by the legendary Nick Cardy, who was kicking off what would be an amazing run on the character, one that would in many ways eclipse Ramona Fradon's. The Aquaman seen here is virtually the same guy seen in Adventure, always willing to help out some of his Surface Dweller pals, no matter how difficult it might be.


4 comments:

Anthony said...

Nice journalism-themed adventure...

Elsewhere on Earth-1 (or the dimensions attached to the Earth-1 universe, in this case):

Re: Batman: The Dynamic Duo and a boatload of people find themselves sent through an odd warp to another dimension, where they help its natives overcome some lizardlike foes.

Chris Franklin said...

Cardy wastes no time in changing Aqualad's hair, apparently. It looks pretty wavy here, compared to Fradon's.

Chris

bribabylk said...

I hope the Shrine will also cover the Aquaman stories in WORLD'S FINEST, when he swam over to that title in May '62; the last of Fradon on Aquaman has not yet been seen.

JBS

Unknown said...

Viva Adventure Sunday!

This is interesting. Cardy was the guy I considered the Aquaman artist when I was growing up. But he didn't rush out of the gate fully-formed on Aquaman like Fradon did. It actually looked like he was trying to skew close to Mooney here. He was good, but he'd be great by the end of the decade.

James Chatterton