JSApril Tie-In! Siskoid and Chris Franklin’s coverage of The Brave and the Bold continues with issue #61 (September 1965) by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson, starring Starman and Black Canary! It’s “Mastermind of Menaces!”.
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Here’s my team star man and black canary
Fall get sent to Wild West via explosion in Star man’s lab . Where the meet the old west Star man who is gun fighter who hunts crooked officers and collects there badges as trophies he wears along with him is his new partner a from show girl .now turned outlaw calling herself the Prairie Canary, real name, Rachel Lance . (Prairie canary is my original charcter for this story as far as I know there was know there is know western black canary.) and last member of this posey is Melinda lash the un official daughter of batlash now a teenager last seen in batlash vol 1 issue 2 January 1969 in the story Melinda’s doll . She’s a teen calls her self miss lash and likes both guys and gals .and acts a lot like bat lash . They have to team up to save a starving town and send the future heroes back home .
Are we doing Amalgam concepts? I did a whole thread on the DCUGuide message board games board in 2018. Only one person played along. Most of my concepts were Golden Age mashups. The one I was proudest of creating was Capt. Steel. It was GA Superman and Jonah Hex combined with obscure Timely characters John Steel and the oneoff Capt. Wonder.
The thread is called Make Mine Malgam if anybody wants to check it put on the DCU guide message boards.
I suppose Starman teaming up with Green Arrow would be interesting. also teaming up with the Fantastic Four would be fun as Ted Knight seems to be kind of like Reed Richards without the team. Black Canary? maybe Dr. Midnite or Daredevil.
Great show, guys! This fun little story, which I reviewed on the Flowers and Fishnets blog, like, a damn decade ago, always serves to remind me that as far as super-couples go: I like Black Canary and Starman better than Black Canary and Green Arrow. Dinah and Ollie are too monochromatic side-by-side and their powers aren’t different enough from each other. Ted’s costume is a bold contrast to Dinah’s, and his powers open up avenues for larger-in-scope stories.
Heroes fail their Stealth roll. Dinah, looks at Ted with frowning expression.
I’m only in the past year really seeing and appreciating the art of Murphy Anderson as more than just part of “Swanderson”. His realism and attention to details is amazing. I don’t know why he isn’t more well known.
This team up vaguely reminds me of The Greatest American Hero setup with William Katt as Starman (the one with power from the stars), Connie Sellica as Black Canary (the powerless hero who was also the brains) and Robert Culp as Larry (the one with direct association with law enforcement).
What a great story! I’ll definitely look it up if DCUI-UI-O ever adds it. Dang bizarre omissions, as usual.
Was a Starman/Quasar team-up proposed yet? They could have a sufficiently cosmic adventure, but each wondering “geez, this guy is so bland.” (I say that out of love, because I adore Wendell Vaughn’s Quasar, and that was part of his deal.)
For Black Canary, I keep thinking of more modern characters like Black Widow and Mockingbird. But for golden age, I’d like to see a Ma Hunkle Red Tornado story. Ma first meets Dinah in her flower shop, and the two hit it off without knowing each other is a superhero. But Canary and Tornado get in each other’s way with their drastically different styles, until they embrace the other’s strengths. I admit I’m thinking of a story in some 80-page giant that featured these two plus Wonder Woman and Phantom Lady, and it was delightful. A full-size story with just these two could bring some new magic.
The Brave and the Bold Starman/Black Canary team-ups ARE on DC Universe Infinite, if you have an ultra subscription. They are in the Black Canary: Birds of Prey TPB collecting her earliest stories, from the Flash Comics tales up through the Adventure Comics stories drawn by Alex Toth.
The first LCS I ever visited was called El Dorado Comics. I begged my Dad to take me there as much as he could stand, because this store had hundreds of boxes of back issues, something I had never seen before! It was a wonderland.
I only had a few bucks to spend per trip, so after I got newer comics I would scour the boxes for the cheapest back issues I could find–and one of them of was B&B #62, the second part of this story! I was just learning about comics history so I don’t think I even knew that B&B had ever featured anything other than Batman team-ups.
I don’t think I ever bothered to read the first part, so thanks for catching me up, albeit 40 years later.
I still hate that James Robinson bit with the affair – the JSA are supposed to be shining heroes, the greatest generations. Yes, this kind of thing happened in real life, but Starman and Black Canary should be better than the likes of me. Leave the affairs to the likes of that cheap and tacky Jean Loring.
I love this comic, though, thanks for taking us through it.
I don’t know why James Robinson thought Starman and Black Canary had an affair. He offered her his miniature rod and she turned it down….right there on the page. Trust the guy whose entire social circle is women who consider me one of the girls….no woman wants a guy who is going to give her a miniature rod. Hey, you were all thinking it. I was the only one sleazy enough to say it.
Seriously, though, I read this issue after Robinson’s retcon. My opinion on the cheating on Larry was informed by Black Canary stories that came out after this issue but that I read before. Obviously, Canary was so distraught over Larry’s death that she left Earth 2 to join the JLA. Mostly, though, my reluctance to accept the Starman/Black Canary affair comes from Brave and the Bold 91. Canary is so eager to love the Earth 1 Larry, who may be a little different than the Earth 2 version she fell in love with. I don’t want to go into more detail and spoil the issue for anyone who hasn’t read it. If Dinah loved her Larry that much, she would not cheat on him. This was before Roy Thomas convoluted Black Canary with the awful daughter business in JLA.
I think I may have gotten this issue and its follow-up in a lot with some Batman Brave & the Bolds. I’ve never been a huge Black Canary fan because she almost always came with Green Arrow in tow. My mom taught me not to say anything if I didn’t have anything nice to say, so I won’t talk about that arrogant, irritating blow-hard Green Arrow. I do recommend the above-mentioned B&B 91 because A) there is no Green Arrow and B) the issue has absolutely gorgeous Nick Cardy artwork. Cardy sometime gets forgotten by fans because he came between Adams and Aparo, but he delivered some beautiful artwork on B&B. Dinah never looked better.
For once, I’m late but not as late as usual to comment…Siskoid and Chris inspired me to drop what I was doing while listening and drop this line!
Great coverage of one of my favorite non- “Batman and ______” issues! Maybe it is my own mental retconning, but you can see where James Robinson got his idea of the Dinah/Ted affair. I agree with Martin that it didn’t sit well with me at the time, but there is no arguing it added a level of realism to the comic.
As you guys mentioned, Anderson’s art was exceptional and I always did yearn for more of him beyond his inking. I loved his early Justice League of America covers, especially his knack for reappropriating earlier covers he and others drew for Mystery in Space and other Golden Age titles. MiS #17 and JLA #19, Mis #18 and JLA #22, and Sensation Comics #109 and JLA #10 are the ones I can think of. He didn’t pencil a couple of them but inked over Sekowsky.
Lastly, I lived in Salt Lake City for a few years and Park City is about 30 miles outside of SLC in the mountains. It was the host of several of the 2002 Winter Olympic events. The Earth-Prime Park City is much more of a resort town and does not resemble the Earth 2 Park City much at all, though!