The illustrious Man of the Atom makes his long-awaited return to bring us more deep comics lore. Picking up from last time, the tireless chronicler turns his attention from Marvel to DC.
At National Periodicals, Weisinger edited Superman- and Batman-related titles early in his career, and was the long term editor for Superman titles until 1970. Schwartz took over editorial duties on Batman in 1964, shifting the character back to the Dark Detective format. But the top titles (Superman and Action Comics in the lead, with Batman titles following behind both) had been falling in sales since 1950 with the rest of National’s superhero titles. There was a desire to try to re-invigorate sales, especially in comparison to the incredible sales performance of Marvel Comics between 1961 and 1968. Recall what the sales profiles of the top selling books at Marvel and DC looked like over this time.
The only word to describe that chart is: Oof.
While Marvel enjoyed periodic sales bumps to slow its decline – notably from Star Wars and Jim Shooter – DC’s graph looks like a timeline of Conservative culture war victories.
And if you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know those two phenomena aren’t unrelated.
In 1968, Charlton Comics editor, Dick Giordano, came to National Periodicals, along with writer, Denny O’Neil. Giordano was a long-term contributor to Charlton Comics as both an artist and eventually its Editor-in-Chief. In the mid-1960s, O’Neil worked for both Marvel Comics under Stan Lee and for Charlton Comics under Giordano. These two were asked to revamp a number of National’s titles to spark greater sales, and hopefully capture some of the reader engagement that Marvel Comics enjoyed. These were not the only activities of this type, but they were some of the most obvious.
Giordano, a man on the younger side of the Greatest Generation, brought a familiar approach to his new assignment.
Dick Giordano worked on re-introducing horror, mystery/suspense, westerns, and other genres to test the waters just as Marvel did in 1969-1972.
All of the above genres, in their traditional forms, incorporate at least some classical romance elements. It sounds like Dick was on the right track. What about his fellow Charlton alum?
Last time, MotA discussed how the Silents represented a lost generation of comic creators. Denny O’Neil was among the rare Silents to hold major influence in a Boomer-dominated age. Let’s see how his tenure at DC went.
The difference at National for O’Neil as opposed to Charlton and Marvel would be working almost exclusively on Superhero titles. If there is one significant writer at whose feet we can lay much of the change from “Classical Romance” to “Realism” it is O’Neil.
Consider his significant assignment at Marvel Comics after Steve Ditko’s departure in 1966: writing for Doctor Strange. The dimension-spanning multi-issue battle against the tyrannical Dormammu had just concluded with Doctor Strange’s return to his home in Greenwich Village. From the Grand Comics Database, this was Denny O’Neil’s idea for a 3-issue Doctor Strange story just after Ditko left the building following Strange Tales Issue 146. Partial plot synopsis of the Doctor Strange story from Issue 147:
Strange walks the streets of Greenwich Village and after stopping a robbery returns home to find his bills unpaid, his bank account empty, and a city building inspector informing him he has six months to bring his house up to code. He instructs Wong to sell some jewels to pay the bills, checks up on Baron Mordo, thinks back on recent events, and then contacts a theatrical agent, Hiram Barney, about a possible nightclub gig. But he’s told magic is “out”– rock bands are “in”!
[ Battle with Kaluu follows, with plotting help from artist Bill Everett ]
Fantasy is an ordinary man being swept into a strange new world for a whirlwind of adventure and romance. Realism is Doctor Strange returning to old New York to dicker with building inspectors and talent agents.
That tepid mess doesn’t even rise to the level of deconstruction. It’s symptomatic of a limited talent shrinking a larger-than-life character to fit his narrow vision.
And it didn’t stop there.
Green Lantern Issue 76 (April 1970) began the Denny O’Neil take-over of the flagging title. The book was changed to Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Plot lines featured ‘realistic’ events vice the typical interplanetary adventures. In fact, O’Neil pretty much confined GL to Earth to deal with ‘relatable problems’. Plots included the famous copycat drug stories (“Jeepers, Speedy is a heroin addict!”) in Issues 85-86 (Oct-Nov 1971), just a few months after the FDA-requested Amazing Spider-Man Issues 96-98 (May-July 1971) from Marvel Comics (with no Comics Code Authority stamp). These activist-driven issues drew positive recognition from the national media talking about how comics were ‘growing up’, but the media hype around the stories didn’t translate to sales. Issue 89, the environmental awareness issue with its cover featuring an activist crucified on a jet plane engine, was the last Green Lantern for four years.
Anytime a Pop Cultist laments the SJW takeover of comics and tells you the medium needs to go back to the 90s, remind him how Denny O’Neil pozzed up Green Lantern in 1970.
Being conditioned to think within a narrow Overton window is the handicap that hamstrings both Conservative politics and the various ‘Gate movements. See author JD Cowan’s extensive series on fandom to understand the sclerosis in the latter.
Neither returning to the 90s, nor the 60s, nor the 40s – nor any kind of cultural revanchism, will heal Western culture. Even if such backtracking were possible, it would only slap a Band-Aid on a mortal wound.
As MotA, Appendix N author Jeffro Johnson, and JD have pointed out, we must regress to a point before the deviation and blaze a new trail that avoids past mistakes.
And if horror, mystery/suspense, and Westerns – with a healthy dose of sci fi – sounds appealing to you, read my award-worthy weird adventure novel Nethereal.
I feel like there might an amusing game to be made of “O’Neil-ing” works of fiction.
Book two of the Space Trilogy: Ransom returns to Earth to find that his mortgage payments are well behind, his niece is addicted to heroin, and a new coffee shop just opened up down the street. Truly daring and enlightening!
Thanks for the boosts, Brian!
Thanks for the thoughtful article!
BTW, I’m on Father Brendan’s side.
“Ouch. Though now that I think about it, most of the Denny O’Neil stuff I’ve liked has been street level heroes like Batman and Daredevil, where a little more realism works. Heck, it even works okay with Green Arrow solo. But to chain Green Lantern to Earth is… boring and wrong.”
O’Neil considered himself “as much of a journalist as a fiction writer,” (Jones and Jacobs, The Comic book Heroes, 1997). and Green Lantern, despite ““noble intentions, … still a cop, a crypto-fascist”(ibid.)
Yep. I remember the quote–had that book an age ago.
When I read O’Neil ‘Green Lantern’ books fresh off the stands I was thinking the equivalent of “leftist pap”, even though I wasn’t old enough to know the term.
Even a die-hard GL fan like me wasn’t sorry to see the title cancelled after that.
Hmmm. “1997”.
Green Arrow and Lantern were merged to begin with because of poor sales. This, clearly, didn’t help in that aspect.
Then again, I’ve always been down on DC beyond their Golden Age beginnings. Destroying Captain Marvel and preventing his original classic run from being re-released and gutting and neutering characters like The Question quickly became their bread and butter way too fast.
Better to just stick with the animated shows.
There was more to approximately 40 pages of Charlton’s ‘Question’ under Steve Ditko than O’Neil could manage in his entire run at DC.
Truthfully, Giordano still has my ire for bringing the ‘Action Heroes’ to DC. Obscurity for the Charlton superheroes would have been a better place than what DC did to them.
You’re referring to the later Watchmanification, I take it?
Actually, no.
The retooling of Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Nightshade, Judomaster, Peacemaker, Peter Cannon, Sarge Steel, and their supporting casts were much as with the Question.
DC skin-suited the Charlton characters.
Examples:
– Captain Atom was a traditional patriotic character, with supportive military and civilian leadership. Turned into a former Woodstock hippie working with a military that hates him, using his abilities for their own nefarious purposes. His powers made into some ridiculous pablum of pop-science and eastern philosophy by 4-year humanities grads who were afraid of the word ‘physics’.
– Blue Beetle was a skilled scientist (a wise-cracker as BB) dedicated to fighting crime, due to a promise made to the dying original Blue Beetle, and likely to be married to his lab assistant, Tracey. Turned into a skirt-chasing bachelor clown.
– Peacemaker. A character actually dedicated to peace. His alter ego was a diplomat (and engineer) who used his skills to avoid conflict and war, and only became Peacemaker when there was no other option. Turned into a crazed third-rate Punisher with a Nazi grandpa in his head.
As is typical of the Hollywood producer tired of “green”, once he finds something “blue”, does his best to turn it “green”. (Stolen from Mark Evanier.)
Skin suit behavior. It’s not new either.
I have a relative who is full on woke. He viewed the Sad Puppies campaign as an attempt to terrorize women, he is shocked when people object to BLM burning down buildings, he turned on a dime against JK Rowling the second she ran afoul of the gender loonies, etc.
But even he thinks that the “You never bothered with the Black Skins” Green Lantern was heavy handed and dumb.
O’Neil was given Ditko’s The Question and turned him into a Buddhist because his beliefs were destroying him, one of the earliest attempts at deliberately usurping another creator’s creation in order to refute the very philosophy which grounded them to begin with.
It’s a shame because Cowan’s artwork (no relation) was stunning. His covers are some of my all-time favorite. Just a shame that the writing was determined to spit in the original creator’s face.
O’Neil likely had the same disease as Alan Moore did. Sad. Many such cases.
See, I’m glad that I found sensible people who realise that Moore isn’t all that, because the first time I encountered him was on TVTropes, where he’s practically fawned over as a god.
I only know a little of Moore’s work–his pre-Crisis DC stories, the first volume or two of Tom Strong. They’re well crafted on the surface, but there’s a cynicism and subversiveness lurking just below that, and I expect it comes to the surface in a lot of his later and less self-consciously ‘pulp heroic’ work.
And of course, the mere concept of Lost Girls should be disqualifying …
Don’t read his Marvel Man/Miracle Man. Vile.
You can safely stop right there. I’ve read V, Watchmen, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. They are, on the whole, a waste of time.
At best, Moore’s work is subversive. At its worst, it’s sewage. He seems to have a hangup about sexual violence, to put it nicely,.
A true sign of growing up is realizing that Alan Moore’s is one of the most overrated comics writers of all time. I’ve gone through the same cycle with him, but it was a series of comics ostensibly about Lovecraft that finally broke me of him. I still have the LoEG, but currently planning to offload them as soon as I can. Also gone through the same leaving behind of Grant Morrison and especially Warren Ellis. What wastes of money and time.
I still own copies of V and Watchmen. We checked LoEG out of the library. I don’t think even think they’re worth donating anywhere. Perhaps, for Lent, I will throw them away, as an exercise in detachment. My wife and I are bibliophiles, so throwing a book away is much easier said than done. On the other hand, if they’re not worth reading, they’re not worth keeping.
If you can’t bother reading it a second time or it deteriorates with subsequent readings, then it probably isn’t of much value keeping it.
As with O’Neil’s superheroes, many stories by the authors you mentioned just don’t stay fresh in the can.
You have a good point.
I honestly wonder the same thing about Neil Gaiman now, given that his name is also attached to the Miracleman stuff. I haven’t read much of his work and now rather doubt I ever will.
When you need to cry for help, but you were hired to write for comic books:
https://imagesvc.meredithcorp.io/v3/mm/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.onecms.io%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F6%2F2020%2F06%2F12%2FDenny-ONeil.jpg
Romance + a Christian foundation cannot be beat. Style is the rocket, story is the payload (Tom Simon)
Yes, the GL/GA comics were daffy and hamfisted, but it’s weird that this column ignores all the great and important work O’Neill did on Batman.
Frank Robbins did the important work on Batman in the 70s. O’Neil’s work was good, but Robbins brought the Dark Detective back. Robbins’ efforts laid the ground work for Frank Miller, not Denny O’Neil’s material.
The co-creation of Ra’s al Ghul, Talia, and Leslie Thompkins wasn’t important? “There is no hope in Crime Alley” wasn’t important? What about “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge?” Or reviving Two-Face?
I never said Robbins wasn’t important. But to say “Denny Destroys DC” while not mentioning his 70’s work on Batman is strange. And of course you know, but don’t say, that O’Neill edited The Dark Knight Returns and tapped Miller to write Batman: Year One.
“Favorite Batman Stories” was not part of the original discussion for a reason. My fault for answering your original question with what sounded like my writer/artist preference instead of clarifying ‘why no O’Neil successes’, so I offer my apologies for offending you by bringing any comparison in my first reply.
As to the reason why these things were not present, it’s not strange at all. I said O’Neil did good work on the Batman in my original article, but the characters and story lines he introduced were not the topic of my discussion.
The core discussion involved the subversion of Classical Romance tropes of the Superhero by Silent and Boomer creators’ modernist philosophies (O’Neil’s included) introducing the poison of Realism into comics. This resulted in the change in culture within comics due to those creators not understanding or rejecting the Superhero tropes based on Classical Romance themes.
That failure sits square in O’Neil’s lap among others, and there are plenty of other examples of similar “spirit of the age” writing through the 80s and 90s by O’Neil and other Silent and Boomer generation writers to nail that statement to the wall.
His handling of Wonder Woman, JLA, Green Lantern in the 70s and his singular failure to understand (or unwillingness to write to character) on the Question in the 80s showed he wasn’t willing or capable of writing to mythic-stature characters, or to those that didn’t conform to a narrow political philosophy. His editors on all of those books also own an amount of blame and are also culpable for those failures of losing the bead on Superheroes in comics.