Comic Book Review: Adventure Comics #502 edited by Nicola Cuti
We are getting towards the end of the digest version of Adventure Comics, and presumably the people putting these together were already aware of this, but there’s no hint about that in this issue.
“Plastic Man” (no subtitle) written by Martin Pasko, art by Joe Staton & Bob Smith, starts with the shape-shifting hero helping out construction workers by acting as a living wrecking ball. The townhouse he’s tearing down was recently purchased by the federal government, so he’s basically on the clock, but there’s a surprise. Behind a brick facade is a corpse! A mummified one with a bunch of stab wounds stuffed into a garbage bag. This looks like a case for the NBI.
Plas consults with the Chief and it’s established that the body was building contractor Alonzo van Rivett, a man suspected of ties to organized crime, who went missing two years ago. Also missing since two years ago are contractor Terrence Cotta and his foreman Mason Stucko, who worked on the building that was just demolished. (Cotta and Stucko are visually reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre respectively.) The stab wounds have dried mason’s mortar in them, suggesting that the murder weapon was a trowel.
Plastic Man has tracked down a woman who worked with Cotta, Cindy Bloch. I think you can see the name theming if you try. Woozy Winks was eavesdropping, and decides to look up the dame himself in an effort to steal a march on his partner. Later that evening, Woozy enters the building where Bloch works, not noticing the red, yellow and black colors of the carpet. But he’s not even the second person here.
Cotta and Stucko have arrived to inform Bloch that they will no longer be paying her blackmail. The authorities are now aware that van Rivett was murdered, so there’s no reason for them to keep it quiet anymore. However, they don’t quite say that they’re the murderers, so Plas is holding back. It’s at this point that Stucko spots Woozy’s shadow and kicks a door into his head, knocking him out.
Cotta decides he’ll deal with this snooper while Stucko get rid of the dame. They drag their targets off. Plastic Man decides Bloch is in more immediate danger, and trails that pair to the city dump.
Stucko reveals that he lost his hand to an attack by van Rivett that also disfigured Cotta. He decided against a standard prosthetic, and instead had a sharpened trowel attached, the same one he used to kill van Rivett. He’s about to do the same to Bloch when Plas interferes.
The stretchy sleuth is able to knock the crook out, and Bloch is grateful, but Plastic Man isn’t interested in kissing right now–he needs to know what’s going on with the murder.
Meanwhile Cotta has taken Woozy to the 47th story of a building that is still under construction. I should mention here that while we saw a photo of him from sometime before the murder, his current day features have been in shadow until now, as we learn why the syndicate goons call him “Brickface.” He wants to know who Woozy is working for and how far the investigation has gotten, or he’ll dump our chubby friend off the building. Cliffhanger!
“The Renegade Superhero!” written by Ed Hamilton, art by John Forte, is our first Legion of Super-Heroes story for the issue. Superboy arrives in the 30th Century as some of the Legionnaires practice their special abilities. Most notably, Element Lad turns some stone to gold so that Lightning Lad can sculpt it into a memorial statue for Proty, the shapeshifting creature that sacrificed itself for him.
Chameleon Boy has already acquired Proty II (as we saw in last issue’s Jimmy Olsen story) off-panel. This is never explained.
Force tubes appear in the sky at various points on Earth and steal things, including the top floors of buildings. Superboy and Ultra Boy check in with the Science Police, then scan the skies with X-ray vision and penetra-vision. We’re reminded that penetra-vision is able to see even through lead, and Ultra Boy segues into his secret origin.
He claims, as he did in his debut, that his birth name is Jo Nah of Rimbor, and he was swallowed by an energy beast in space. The Galactic Patrol got him back out before he could be digested, but the incident caused his body to be altered by ultra-energy. At first, he could only use it for penetra-vision (the only power he used in his original appearance) but now can use it for multiple powers such as superstrength, superspeed, and invulnerability. With the catch that he can only use one power at a time.
(Side note: This inspired a rule in the Champions role-playing game. If you had a Multipower that allowed you to switch energy points between various powers, but a particular power slot always used a fixed number of energy points, that slot was called an “ultra”.)
Superboy finds nothing with his vision, and Ultra Boy says that he cannot tell the Legion anything about the marauders except that they must have terrific powers. The pattern of their thefts indicates they’re most interested in advanced scientific instrumentation.
The Legion decides to consult the Science Police’s microfiche database of known super-rogues. No one seems to fit the parameters, not even Olen Jor, native of Thar, who has super-hypnotism but is currently in prison. (As far as I know, he stayed there and was never referenced again. When the Legion writers needed a super-hypnotist they created Universo instead.)
But then a slide comes up of Rann Vardal of Rimbor, a thief and jailbreaker with unexplained superstrength who has since vanished. And looks exactly like Ultra Boy. Surely this is some kind of cruel coincidence? Not according to the fingerprints and pore patterns, which match the person we’ve known as Jo Nah!
Ultra Boy doesn’t exactly admit that he’s Rann Vardal, but avoids denying it either. A vote is held, and Ultra Boy is expelled from the Legion for being a criminal. Phantom Girl abstains as she has more faith in Jo Nah (and this is the beginning of their romantic subplot) but that’s not good enough. Superboy and Lightning Lad burn away Ultra Boy’s chest emblem as he vows vengeance.
Superboy has to return to Smallville to handle an urgent matter there (under no circumstances should you try to pin down the rules of time travel in the Legion continuity) but then it’s time to turn Ultra Boy over to the cops to serve out his sentence. Now Ultra Boy resists arrest, and Mon-El is called in to deal with him, since Mon-El can use all his Kryptonian level powers at the same time.
Ultra Boy uses his wits and his knowledge of the Legion’s personalities to evade capture repeatedly, with a special mention of Mon-El’s skill at biophysics.
Finally, Phantom Girl manages to find him on Mirage World, only for the pair to be captured by a force tube. The alien marauders gladly accept the rogue hero’s offer to help them seize the Legion’s secret weapons, much to Phantom Girl’s shock and horror.
Of course, it was all a trick. Realizing that actually battling the marauders would result in too many casualties, Ultra Boy inserted the fake criminal record into the Science Police system, then steered the Legion towards it so they would make his expulsion and turn to criminality believable. This allows him to capture the marauders non-lethally. Yay, he’s innocent and reinstated, happy ending!
When later stories started giving the Legion members more detailed personality traits, callbacks to this story were used as an excuse to make Jo Nah a bit more of a roughneck than his peers, and Rimbor was established as the “wrong side of the tracks” world.
“The Human Hawks” (no credits listed) stars Captain Marvel. Boy broadcaster Billy Batson explains that the age of Great Explorers is coming to an end. The last really unknown place on Earth (above the water) is a valley in the Himalayas that’s surrounded by winds that prevent planes from flying over, and there’s no climbable paths. Ooh, didn’t we just hear about that in a recently read Ray Bradbury story?
But last week, a fellow named Dudley Wright had himself shot over there in a rocket, and now he’s scheduled to return by second rocket, so we’ll finally learn what’s in there.
But when the rocket lands in Nepal, the person inside is a hostile-looking fellow with hawk-like wings, a spear, and an aggressive attitude. He speaks ancient Sanskrit, which (after a quick transformation) Captain Marvel is able to understand. But the hawk man refuses to give any information. Cap turns him over to the Nepalese police and flies over the mountains himself.
When he arrives in the valley, he spots giant flowers, and gathering nectar from them is a girl with butterfly wings. She is suddenly attacked by a human hawk. Captain Marvel rescues her by pouring sticky nectar on the hawk wings, making him unable to fly so he has to walk home.
The human butterfly explains that winged people once lived all over the world, but they were wiped out by ice ages, surviving only in this one valley that the winds have trapped them in. She knows that a wingless human arrived about a week ago, and was captured by the human hawks.
The butterfly people live in homes fashion from the giant flowers, while the hawk people live in a rocky aerie. When Captain Marvel approaches the latter, a horde of human hawks rise up to meet him, too many to make fighting them efficient. He ducks out and returns with a pile of giant flower petals which Cap deploys like chaff so he can sneak past the defenders.
Captain Marvel finds Dudley Wright, but is shocked when the explorer doesn’t want to be rescued. He’s befriended the human hawks and is helping them build booster jets so they can invade and conquer the outside world. Cap is stunned enough by this revelation that he hesitates when one of the hawk men swoops Wright out of the lab and into the darkness of the night.
Even the Big Red Cheese doesn’t have the ability to see in the dark, so he’s unable to find the entrance to the hiding place the explorer was taken to. He decides to transform back into Billy Batson. Sure enough, one of the human hawks spots the small wingless human stumbling around the eyrie and captures him.
Sure enough, the human hawk takes Billy to where Wright is, but the explorer belts him with a wrench before the lad can say his magic word. By the time the boy wakes up, he’s gagged and tied to a booster jet. He’s being used as a test of the jet, if he gets over the mountains, then the jets are ready to go. And it doesn’t matter if he survives.
Naturally, Billy manages to find a way to free himself and turn into Captain Marvel, then prevent the human hawks from invading the outside world. It’s revealed that the hawkmen fed Wright the local toxic weed that turned him evil (and is part of their culture thus explaining the whole aggressiveness thing) but the butterfly humans have a special nectar that is an antidote. After freeing Wright, they feed it to the human hawks, erasing their evil tendencies. Let’s not think about that too hard.
Dudley Wright gets a medal for his exploration of the hidden valley, with Columbus being name-checked as another completely non-problematic explorer.
“The Parchment of Power Perilous” story by Steve Skeates, art by Jerry Grandenetti & Murphy Anderson, has an extended prologue. In 18th Century England, an apprentice in the dark arts watches as his master performs a ritual said to open communications with the supramundane forces and learn the way to gain limitless power by writing it down. Like many ambitious apprentices, he thinks his mentor is a fool that does not deserve ultimate power, and plans to steal the parchment once it’s written.
He’s startled when the master comes out of the trance, having learned that the way to gain limitless power is in fact, too evil for even this vile old man. The master moves to burn the parchment, and the apprentice remonstrates with him. The master uses eldritch bolt, reminding the younger man of his place. He can’t overcome the elder’s mystical might with his own skills–but the master has no particular defense against a candlestick to the skull!
The master is now dead, but the apprentice reasons that once he gains limitless power, no one will be able to punish him for the crime. He starts performing the steps for the ritual, in the order they’re written down. But the apprentice has made a rookie mistake, not reading all the way through the list first. This becomes apparent when he is discorporated into the astral plane, dropping the parchment. He initially has a tremendous migraine as knowledge forcibly inserts itself into his mind, which levels off as sheer power also enters his body, exponentially increasing his mystical might. However, with his new knowledge, he realizes that a human astral form can’t actually hold limitless power, and he will soon “explode” fatally. He has to get back to Earth and read the last bit of the parchment!
This was all told with some trippy visuals typical of the late 1960s.
In the present day, the Spectre is returning to police detective Jim Corrigan to recharge in his body from a particularly draining mission. Unfortunately, right now, Corrigan himself has not slept in over 48 hours, and is pinned down by three criminal gunmen. He’s not letting the Spectre back into his body until the ghostly guardian bails him out of this mess.
Impatient and cranky, the Spectre uses an area of effect mystic energy attack that stuns the three crooks…and a passing innocent bystander. Neither the Spectre nor Corrigan notices that fourth person, though the police officer does note that the attack was unusually rash for the astral avenger.
That night, the Spectre is pulled out of Corrigan’s sleeping body to a place with pearly gates. The Voice who is his boss upbraids him for almost killing an innocent, then announces the Angel of Vengeance’s punishment. From now on, he will always have a weakness that presents itself in times of stress, to remind him to not act rashly. This weakness will be different each time, to prevent the Spectre from being able to anticipate it.
Meanwhile, the apprentice is approaching Earth, two hundred years having passed in the physical world while only minutes in the astral plane. He assumes the parchment has moved, but once he sets foot on the planet, his vast knowledge will reveal it to him.
The Spectre senses something approaching Earth, but first bids farewell to Corrigan, who’s going after the remaining gang members he was pursuing.
When the now gigantic apprentice draws near, the Spectre is hammered by his evil thoughts, and realizes that under no circumstances can he allow this being to land. They begin a titanic battle, made more difficult by the Spectre going blind in the middle of it, the promised weakness.
The hero ultimately is able to overcome the evil apprentice without killing anyone, then goes looking for the parchment. Turns out that the master was so appalled by that final step that he had stopped writing in the middle of the sentence. We never find out what was so evil even a master of the dark arts could not stomach it.
The Spectre destroys the parchment and scatters its essence across the universe, then moves the apprentice back into the astral plane to have his almost limitless power discorporate, his powerless husk now suspended forever. Corrigan has in the meantime captured the rest of the smuggling gang, and the Spectre muses on being haunted by the consequence of his rash action.
“Can This Be Death?..” story by Steve Skeates, art by JIm Aparo, opens with Aquaman waking up in a place that looks kind of like a Steve Ditko Dr. Strange dimension. He flashes back to returning from Alaska to Atlantis to find Mera outside the city, with Ocean Master by her side.
Orm claims that his amnesia has cleared up, and he remembers that he and Arthur are brothers, but he was still amnesiac when he contacted…them! Who are…they? Ocean Master doesn’t know their names, but they agreed to help him fight Aquaman, oh and it’s too late, they’re already here! They zapped Aquaman with some kind of ray that caused pain and unconsciousness, and now he’s…nowhere?
The first sign of life he sees is a giant amoeboid thing that seems to want to have Aquaman for lunch. His command of sea life has no effect on it. A humanoid-looking woman shows up to help with a crossbow, but she’s not shooting it in the obvious weak point of the central eye. The woman appears to be immune to telepathy, not receiving Aquaman’s words and he’s not picking anything up from her. He grabs the crossbow and shoots the eye, finding out too late that the critter explodes when you do that.
Now that he’s not stressed, Aquaman can sense some garbled telepathic signals from a great distance, so starts swimming that way. The woman follows him. Soon, they approach a city of people who look and dress similarly to the woman, but Aquaman is still getting no response from his telepathy. Oh, that building is the source of the garbled signal!
The signal is drawn as the names of various DC Comics artists and writers in a funky font. The guard outside the building shoots Aquaman with a bubble gun. The bubbles cling to him, restricting his movements and sapping his strength, but not enough to stop Aquaman from knocking the guard down to swim past.
Inside the building, there’s a large room full of people conversing telepathically with each other. The woman from before can now “talk” to Aquaman. Turns out their religion forbids the use of telepathy outside this one building, so everyone’s been trained to lock down their thoughts elsewhere.
It’s also a very insular community, with no concept of the outside world. There is only the city and the wilderness, there are no other places. (We can infer that there are people who live in the wilderness that are not part of the society and need the rules explained to them because the woman doesn’t seem shocked by Aquaman not knowing.) Aquaman asks if there is anyone more knowledgeable he can talk to. There is “Brother Warnn”, but the woman seems frightened by him, and we only see the shadowy silhouette of that man when the chapter ends.
“Zatanna the Magician!” story by Len Wein, art by Gray Morrow, opens at Shadowcrest, home of the Zatara family. Giovanni Zatara was a mystic hero of the Golden Age, now retired to a life of study. But now he’s been ambushed by…something.
His daughter, the modern hero Zatanna Zatara, is practicing her stage magic act. Her manager, Jeffery Sloan, is again griping about her not using her real magic in the act. The narration reminds us about the plotline where Zatanna worked with various members of the Justice League of America to find her missing father.
They head up to the study to offer Zatara coffee, only to have the old man call his daughter “accursed witch” and banish them. He then reports to a mysterious master.
Zatanna and Jeffery find themselves in another dimension that the manager describes as “a bad Fellini set.” Zatanna’s magic is being dampened, so she can’t just magic them back, but if she can get them to a dimensional juncture, that will be their ticket home.
They start with a flying carpet, but the natives bring it down with spears, and our protagonists are soon knocked out, which apparently is what “the master” wanted.
“The Menace of Dream Girl!” story by Ed Hamilton, art by John Forte, is our second Legion story. It opens with Saturn Girl realizing that there isn’t going to be a quorum for the next meeting, so requests that Legionnaires who aren’t on urgent missions to return to Earth. Brainiac Five and Lightning Lass quickly finish up carving a mountain Mount Rushmore style (but notably at the request of the natives.)
Matter-Eater Lad and Star Boy put off their exploration of a planet where atomic war killed off the population. Superboy and Mon-El don’t hear the call, as they’re in the time stream trying to get past the Iron Curtain of Time, a barrier that the mysterious Time Trapper has set 30 days from the present of the Legion to prevent them from…it’s not clear what. This is the first mention of one of the Legion’s greatest enemies, and his power is demonstrated when neither Kryptonian nor Daxamite might is able to pierce the barrier.
The two most powerful Legionnaires return to “the present” and the meeting begins with a quick review of the Legion Constitution. Then it’s time for new applicants! The first is a young scientist who’s developed a formula that makes feathers as heavy as lead. He’s rejected because that’s not actually a power, and also, Star Boy can increase the gravitational pull of any object so it’s redundant.
This might come as a surprise to readers with long term memories, as in his only other appearance, Star Boy’s powers were nearly identical to Superboy’s. Apparently his long absence was because the creative team was trying to find ways to make him non-redundant.
Next up is Dream Girl, of the super-scientific planet Naltor. She wants to use her power of “dreaming” to join the Legion. There’s some painful gender stereotyping here, as all the boys immediately see how pretty Dream Girl is and go ga-ga over her, while the girls become jealous and hostile. To a certain extent we have to take it as written that Dream Girl is that beautiful, though she is clearly modeled on glamour girls of the time this story was written, and her costume is risqué by early 1960s standards.
It’s clarified that her dreams are precognitive, with 100% accuracy. Dream Girl demonstrates by going into a coma, then announcing that two emergencies are about to happen. In the southwestern desert, giant monsters are hatching that will be hostile to humans, and there’s about to be a massive fuel explosion at the Metropolis Spaceport.
Star Boy, who is especially infatuated with the newcomer, deals with the first emergency by pinning down the monsters with his increased gravity until the Science Police are ready to pick them up. He also recaps his new origin, being born in a space observatory as a mutant affected by stellar radiation.
Superboy deals with the second problem by tossing the fuel tank into the upper atmosphere moments before the explosion happens. Having proven her worth, Dream Girl is admitted to the Legion on a strict gender-line vote. The boys compete to show her the group’s secrets, including their emergency plans, but the new member is most interested in studying the constitution.
Mon-El and Saturn Girl attempt to cross the Iron Curtain of Time again, to no avail. Dream Girl is asked if she can look beyond it, but admits her power works at most a few days in advance. She’s also abruptly much less charming, coldly cutting off Star Boy when he asks further questions.
A bit later, Dream Girl and Lightning Lass are sent to check a new experimental power generator. Despite DG certifying it as safe with her advanced science, the generator abruptly malfunctions, and LL loses her electrical abilities. Per the Legion Constitution, which Dream Girl has on her at all times, Lightning Lass must be expelled from the Legion as long as she is powerless.
Triplicate Girl suspects Dream Girl of deliberately engineering the situation, but recklessly accuses her colleague before getting proof, which results in TG getting expelled herself. When Star Boy asks Dream Girl if she’ll consider dropping the charge, she threatens him with expulsion for interfering with a Legionnaire performing their duty.
Matter-Eater Lad gets suspicious, and after checking with Brainiac Five to make sure the pattern of behavior makes sense, starts watching Dream Girl’s behavior for possible anomalies…like almost sitting in the absent Chameleon Boy’s chair.
Saturn Girl tries to mitigate harm by sending Dream Girl on a boring solo mission, but the newbie suddenly claims to have a premonition of a strange valley on Vondra that requires her to be on that mission instead. She secretly takes an antidote ahead of time that protects her from the aurora that turns Lightning Lad, Bouncing Boy, Shrinking Violet and Ultra Boy into toddlers. They develop the weird “baby” patois that the Superman comics used for toddlers.
Superboy arrives to help, unaffected by the aurora, but by the constitution, the affected Legionnaires must also be expelled until cured. Back on Earth, one too many coincidences trick Matter-Eater Lad into falsely accusing Dream Girl of being a disguised Chameleon Boy. She isn’t, and he’s expelled.
Star Boy finally tracks Dream Girl down alone, and discovers her distraught. Her coldness was a ruse. It turns out that DG’s precognitive abilities are not just in her dreams, and she had a vision a couple of weeks ago of several Legionnaires dying in a rocket explosion. The ones she had expelled.
That roster clicks for Star Boy. It turns out there are robot duplicates of those Legionnaires on a rocket hidden in the asteroid belt, meant as a decoy in case of emergency. The two go to check, and arrive just in time to see the decoy explode due to a meteor accident. What a relief!
Since Dream Girl lied to join the Legion, she must now be expelled, but all her victims are reinstated/brought back to normal. Except Lightning Lass, who it turns out only had her powers switched to making objects lighter, making her now Light Lass. Dream Girl did this due to the “no duplicate powerset” rule in the Constitution, allowing both LLs to remain in the Legion.
Star Boy still simps for Dream Girl, as he will do for decades to come, and she hints that she might return after honing her powers. (She did.)
A text feature by Paul Levitz explains the firsts in the Legion stories, then lists a bunch of one-panel cameos of the Legion that were skipped over for this reprint series.
The two Legion stories are important to the lore, but the other reprints are relatively rare, so collectors might want this one.
