If you were a DC super-hero in the Silver Age, you knew you had made the big time when you were asked to join the Justice League of America.



Every Silver-Age super-team had its own method for inducting new members---and I’m going to be sprinkling in looks at most of them over the next few months---but it was the Justice League’s which was the most formalised. There wasn’t a more exclusive club of super-heroes. You couldn’t set out to join. There wasn’t an…

The new Teen Titans were three issues into their relevancy phase. No flashy outfits. No super-powers. No traditional super-villains. These were parables on the evils of social injustice, and editor Dick Giordano and writer Robert Kanigher had been none too subtle about the ultimate rightness of social sensitivity.



Thus, the story within Teen Titans # 28 (Jul.-Aug., 1970) was something completely unexpected.



Or, as Giordano put it in the…