Showcase #56
May-June 1965
Cover art by: Murphy Anderson
Story: Perils of the Psycho-Pirate!
Writer: Gardner Fox
Art: Murphy Anderson
Kent Nelson (Dr. Fate) with the backing of Rex Tyler (Hourman) has unearthed the legendary Medusa Masks. Tyler later has them on display during a celebration. Later that evening Rex's fiancee Wendi Harris steals the masks while the crowd looks on dying laughing. Afterward. Wendi nor the party goers can explain what came over them.
Well, I'll tell ya what happened. It seems Roger Hayden was the former cellmate of the original Psycho-Pirate who told him about the existence of the masks, and how to use them. We then see him go through a ritual with the masks at his seacoast mansion. It seems Mr. Hayden has some money already...
Dr. Fate and Hourman decide they will have to figure out what happened. At Dr. Fate's tower he is unable to locate the masks. Fate figures their magic protects them from being found by mystical means. Sucks for him since Psycho-Pirate is about to commit his next crime by robbing a bank. In one of the most rational decisions in comic book history he decides to NOT wear his costume, as that would attract too much attention.
During the robbery Dr. Fate's crystal ball shows Hayden is there. Thinking he may have something to do with the masks, the Champion of Order heads over to the bank to investigate. He crashes into one of the robbers and begins to do the natural thing someone with his power would do. Knock them out with his fists. Psycho-Pirate mixes a couple of emotions (pride and frustration) to have Fate see his old foes reappear before him, but he is unable to defeat him. This allows the Master of Emotions and his henchmen to escape.
A bit later Hourman shows up at the bank, and decides he will track down the bad guys himself. He (prematurely) pops a Miraclo pill, and follows a lead he gets regarding the car Hayden was driving. He finds them at an open-air art display, and Hayden and his crew are robbing this place as well. Once again Hayden's goons get knocked around pretty good before the Psycho-Pirate puts the mojo on Hourman. Hourman ends up helping the crooks load the art into a van, and allowing them to escape.
Fate and Hourman get back together and compare notes. Dr. Fate has used his magic abilities to track down Hayden's “scent” and is now able to track him with ease. Once the pair bust into Psycho-Pirate's hideout. Hayden gives them a bunch of phobias which the henchmen take advantage of. They were given different fears, so they just switch opponents and...I am beginning to feel bad for these guys, but the hoods get knocked out one more time! Psycho-Pirate then conjures up jealousy between Fate and Hourman and they begin to duke it out.
Their fight leaves the pair emotionally drained unable to move. Hayden moves in himself to deliver the knockout blows. He is surprised when his punch doesn't do its job to Dr. Fate, the shock is amplified when Fate wallops him right back. Fate then conjures up his own magic mask over Hyden's so he can no longer use his abilities.
This was a story I had wanted to read for quite sometime, as this is a straight Earth-2 tale. Quite rare for its time. I was pleasantly surprised to find this copy at a very reasonable price a few years back. A real good read. Highly recommended, and apparently it was reprinted in Crisis on Multiple Earths: The Team-Ups (2005) TPB vol. 01.
One last thing this also includes a text piece about the Golden Age Psycho-Pirate as well.
Replies
I loved those Earth 2 team-up books, including the Starman-Black Canary ones.
Those were in Brave & Bold which is where this one really belonged. Doctor Fate became the star of the JLA/JSA team-ups, appearing in most of them and usually in a leadership role. It's weird that he didn't appear in Showcase solo. I believe that he was the second JSAer to be shown married to his Golden Age girl-friend.
Hourman was in this because he was featured in the first JLA/JSA team-up and had no Earth-One counterpart. His gimmick/limitation was acceptable in small doses. But he never had a chance of getting his own title, though he had a brand-new adventure in The Spectre #7 (D'68) which revolved around his one-hour time limit.
I like these stories too, especially the Solomon Grundy one. The second Starman/Black Canary one introduced the idea that the Sportsmaster and the Huntress had married.
There's a page on the artist Boris Artzybasheff here that has an image of an ad, "Disturbing Emotions", that strongly recalls the above story. In my first version of this post I suggested it influenced it (as I've also written in the past), but masks-with-different-emotions imagery was already used on the cover of All-Star Comics #32.
The original Psycho-Pirate appeared twice in All-Star Comics (in #23, #32), and also in an unused story that still partially exists called "The Will of William Wilson". These were all written by Fox. The GCD lists Sheldon Mayer as the editor of the issues in which he appeared, but in this interview Julie Schwartz says he started working at All-American 1944 and plotting stories was part of his duties, so perhaps he worked on the issues with Fox. But he's not clear in the interview as to when he started working on All-Star Comics.
Count me as another fan of the Earth Two stories from this period when the parallel Earth concept was still fresh and new.
Between the annual JLA/JSA team ups, Showcase and Brave and the Bold a number of Earth Two characters had been revived - any idea why Spectre was chosen as the one to receive his own solo title?
One factor I'm pretty sure has to be that he wasn't a duplicate of an Earth-1 hero at the time. So heroes like the Atom, Flash, Hawkman and Green Lantern were probably disqualified right off the bat.
Of the rest -- Spectre, Dr. Fate, Doc Mid-Night, Hourman, Wildcat, Johnny Thunder -- he might simply have been more appealing to editorial or the creative team for personal reasons...whose adventures would be more fun to write and draw?
And Luke, that Artzybasheff illustration is a great find! It might not have influenced the original composition (and of course, it all goes back to comedy & tragedy masks), but its execution of the concept is very different than the All-Star cover. It might very well have affected how Psycho Pirate was later presented, regardless.
Thanks, Rob.
Regarding doc's question, before the Spectre got his title he was tried out in Showcase #60-#61, #64 in 1965-66. Possibly that was less because Julie Schwartz, the editor of those issues, thought he had star potential, and more because he was assigned those issues and thought the idea of doing the Spectre was good enough. One imagines he was getting letters saying "Hey, when are you going to revive the Spectre?", if only from Roy Thomas and Jerry Bails.
People at DC may have thought that what readers wanted was very powerful characters. The Spectre is the most powerful of all. He could be put into different kinds of adventures than DC's other characters - much more cosmic ones(1), and adventures involving the supernatural - whereas e.g. the Sandman or Wildcat would have had to have Batman-like adventures. He's also the most Superman-like of the Golden Age JSAers.
Finally, he may have been seen as a horror character. Due to the Code there was a horror gap on the stands, so if he could be got past the Code, that will have been a reason to try him. (I wouldn't be surprised if Schwartz didn't reintroduce him earlier because he thought the Code might object to him.) The start of Eerie was very close to his first Showcase appearance; according to DC Indexes Showcase #60 appeared in Nov. 1965 and Eerie #2 (the first newsstand issue) in Dec.
His first two Showcase stories had a strong cosmic element, and also (arguably) a horror one; in #60 he fought a demon, and in #61 Shaytan, the embodiment of evil. The shadow-selling plot element in #61 recalls a German novella called Peter Schlemihl.
He didn't get his title very quickly after his try-outs. According to DC Indexes, Showcase #64 went on sale in Jul. 1966, and The Spectre #1 in Nov. 1967. It also tells me he appeared between them in The Brave and the Bold #72, on sale Apr. 1967. Perhaps the sales of the Showcase issues were OK, and those of the The Brave and the Bold issue also seemed to show there might be a market for him.
(1) According to DC Indexes his third Showcase issue came out between the two parts of that year's JLA/JSA story in Justice League of America #46-#47, in which he played a cosmic role. There's cosmic battle imagery in his earlier two Showcase appearances. (I actually haven't read the first one, but I can say this just from the cover.)
(corrected)
Also, ACG had introduced Nemesis in Adventures into the Unknown #154, as the title's regular star. He has a similar origin. DC Indexes doesn't have the dates of ACG's titles; the issue was cover-dated for Feb. 1965.
If Schwartz had been holding off on using the Spectre for Code reasons, that may have given him confidence he could get him past it. And people at DC may have seen Nemesis as a rip-off of their character. By the time the Spectre got his title ACG had given up on Nemesis, and mostly gone out of business.
Archie's imitation of the Spectre, Mr Justice, appeared as a member of an ensemble cast in The Mighty Crusaders #4-#5 in 1966 and stared in a solo story in Mighty Comics #47 (on sale Apr. 1967).
Speaking of Roy Thomas and Jerry Bails - I need to dig out my copy of Twomorrows Best of Alter Ego that details much of the correspondence they had with Schwartz and Gardner Fox. Both were lobbying for characters they thought should be revived following the success of Flash and Green Lantern. Roy was particularly keen on Hawkman as I recall. To make their case, both Thomas and Bails went so far as to write plot treatments featuring their versions of yet to be revived Earth 2 heroes. The Spectre may have been among that group.
Luke Blanchard said:
If Schwartz had been holding off on using the Spectre for Code reasons, that may have given him confidence he could get him past it. And people at DC may have seen Nemesis as a rip-off of their character. By the time the Spectre got his title ACG had given up on Nemesis, and mostly gone out of business.
I imagine he was confident that the Spectre would pass the Code. If they arbitrarily rejected him he had a built-in defense that they had already opened the door with Nemesis.
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