Superboy #171 (Jan 1971)

As I've said before and will again – and often, no doubt – Aquaman was my first favorite super-hero. As corny as his concept may have seemed to some nay-sayers even then, I was swept up in the adventures of the King of the Seven Seas from the first time I remember seeing him on the Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. So when Aquaboy made his first – and to my knowledge only significant – appearance, in the pages of Superboy, "The Adventures of Superman When He Was a Boy," I was tickled pink. I don't remember if I knew it was coming from some DC Comics house ad, or if I was suddenly made aware of it by seeing it on the stands, but I do remember reading and rereading this comic. I most associate it with the back sun-room of my paternal grandmother's house, which faced across a big field toward my childhood home. When I conceived the idea for this blog devoted to significant comics I remember from my childhood, this issue was among the first to spring into mind. Like the vast majority of my childhood comics, it was lost or sold off – or possibly just fell apart from wear – long ago, so I had to buy it back from my on-line back-issue vendor. In my memory, however, I did not dream that it was significant for more than just the appearance of Aquaboy.

Superboy #171

Cover date: January 1971

Approximate on-sale date: 19 November 1970

Cover by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson

Edited by Murray Boltinoff

It's a powerful image. Of course, I knew that Aquaboy would grow up to be Aquaman, so I wasn't worried … much. As to the artists credited with the cover, frankly I see a lot more Murphy Anderson here than I do Carmine Infantino.

“Dark Strangler of the Seas”

Story: Frank Robbins

Art: Bob Brown and Murphy Anderson

I'm not sure if it had become standard practice all around between early 1969 when the pair of imaginary Superman-Lois marriage stories previously-covered appeared and the beginning of 1971 for DC's creators to receive credit on the splash page (a pun, yes, but that's what the typically half- or as here full-page title page is called) of a story, but they do here, as you'll see below.

The story begins with a couple of fishermen struggling to bring what seems to be a whopper to shore just as Superboy flies across. The “Mighty Teener” lends a hand, only to discover –

Actually, no. The idea that someone would suffocate from having all their pores clogged was indeed current at the time, most famously finding expression in the James Bond film, Goldfinger (1964), where the villain's secretary is murdered by painting her completely over with gold after she betrays him with with the dashing British agent, but it is a myth, as explained most clearly at Snopes.com. And from different angles, it seems that this victim is not completely covered anyway. I imagine he was in distress, however, perhaps from his nose and mouth being clogged with oil, or even the actual potential cause of death were someone to be completely encased in something that simply clogged their pores, slow heat stroke from the disruption of the body's temperature regulatory system of perspiration, so I'll give this a pass. In any case, Superboy flies him to an industrial detergent manufacturer (named “Industrial Detergents Inc.,” naturally) and plunges him in a large vat.

Apparently the boy wearing the attire which would have been familiar to the reader although not yet to Superboy was not aware that the liquid in which he was being scrubbed would not have most likely been water, either, but rather pure detergent! Or would a detergent factory typically have a huge vat of pure water standing around? For the purposes of this story, apparently this one did, because the boy does not burn his lungs - or gills - out and starts talking to Superboy – underwater!

Aquaboy goes on to explain how he came to be in his plight.

Discovering it is crude oil, Aquaboy tracks down the leaking tanker in whose wake "his" porpoise had happened.  Confronting the tanker crew, Aquaboy finds them less than receptive to reason.

“... in years to come the entire Earth may suffer from their criminal neglect!” Superboy finishes, as he and Aquaboy fly off toward the oil-shipping line headquarters. Their pleas for a stop to the wanton pollution of the environment fall on equally deaf ears....

So Superboy flies off with Aquaboy to engage in a bit of mischief. Superboy hijacks the tanker that had accosted his new friend, flies it to return the oil to its source....

What? Polluting the desert is okay? Let's see … hijacking, kidnapping, theft, vandalism, destruction of the environment...

Eh, just go with it.

By the way, this desert nomad is a hoot!

This Middle Easterner is not so much of a "hoot" - but he's just as much of a stereotype.

Meanwhile, Aquaboy having created a network of finny friends to help him locate polluters and notify Superboy, the pair wreak havoc on the world's oil shipping industry. Which makes me wonder why national authorities haven't stepped in yet. Oh well, the Trans-East officials have hit on their own way to lure Aquaboy into their clutches. A decoy oil tanker is filled with a mysterious “new liquid cargo,” and a sea-plane makes a “special delivery” …

Look at that leer on the face of the sailor gallantly helping her deplane! If this was not “Aquaboy's girl friend – Marita”'s only appearance, I'm not aware of any others. A character search of the Comicbook Database comes up … er … dry. Naturally she's red-headed.

By the way, notice the style of top that “Marita” is wearing as she deplanes. I guess she had a chance to change before her next appearance … or perhaps the villains wanted her to look more fetching for her boy friend when he caught up to the ship an unspecified length of time “later”:

Let's see … Superboy got from “countless miles away” to Aquaboy's location in “milliseconds,” but can't move fast enough to grab Aquaboy and get away? Of course, even Aquaboy's tough constitution, adapted for the pressures of the ocean's depths, can't survive the sudden acceleration to supersonic velocity. That must be why Superboy caves so easily.

Er, no, wait....

I have to admit, that's a flashier way to solve the problem.

To my knowledge, Superboy and Aquaboy would never meet again before they were the adult heroes Superman and Aquaman.

As I said above, I loved this story when I was a kid, whatever its logical flaws. Those are really part of the charm of comic books of that age, a simpler time when the main readership was kids my age then, not (as now) an aging population of geeks like me prone to overanalyze and critique the stories to death.

But wait, this story of the past is followed by an important “Editor's Note” ...

So, as of December 1970-January 1971, the time of generally-fifteen-year-old Superboy was redefined to 1955 in a sliding time-frame fourteen or fifteen years in the present-day Superman's past.

Now, I don't know enough about the modern history of the environmentalist movement to know if the environmental consciousness displayed by Superboy and Aquaboy in this issue are in any way anachronistic – the Wikipedia article on the history of theenvironmental movement makes me suspect that it is, indeed, anachronistic – but here we see a bit of a social-activist Superboy that hints in spirit at the character of Superman as he was originally conceived. And the fact that Aquaboy had the danger of crude oil to marine life dumpedin his face would doubtless have influenced their extreme reaction. Overall the story reads to me like exactly what it is, however – a modern 1970 story imposed fifteen years in the past.

That page-length “Editor's Note” that nails down our date as 1955 signifies something more momentous in comic-book history, moreover, than might be suspected at first. It is followed by two more pages which are given over to a proclamation that “A New Year Brings a New Beginning for Superman – 1971.” I presume that these same latter two pages would have appeared in every other title in the Superman family of magazines, if not all DC comics dated Jan 1971, and as well as anything else I believe they stand for a shifting of the ages.

The question of when exactly the Silver Age gave way to the Bronze Age in Comic Book History is oft debated. There are many candidates. One that I used to always think of as the marker is the death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June 1973), but that's because when I came back into comics big-time after all but drifting away entirely during the 1990s when I was in graduate school, a couple of the first things I acquired were the by-then-a-few-years-old collections of, first, Mark Waid and Alex Ross' Kingdom Come and, second, Kurt Busiek and Ross' Marvels. The death of Gwen Stacy is the climax of the latter story, which retells the early history of the Marvel Universe from the perspective of a man-in-the-street, photographer Phil Sheldon. As quoted in Craig Shutt's BabyBoomer Comics: The Wild, Wacky, Wonderful Comic Books of the 1960s, Busiek opines, “I pick the death of Gwen Stacy as the Silver Age's end simply because it works as a coda, a sign of lost innocence, of bittersweet ending” (p. 201). Other candidates discussed by Shutt in the last chapter of Baby Boomer Comics, “The (Sob!) End of the Silver Age,” are, first, the one he starts with as the “one solid, satisfying spot to mark the closing of the Silver Age's greatness” (p. 200), August-September 1970 which saw, respectively the publication of Superman #229 and Fantastic Four #102. The former was Mort Weisinger's final issue as long-time editor of Superman, while the latter was the last “regular-run” issue of Fantastic Four drawn by the great Jack Kirby. Shutt cites Mark Waid's pick of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #132 (Sep 1970), the issue preceding Kirby's advent to DC and on that very title, as essential agreement. In quick succession, Shutt then discusses and dismisses the “Go-Go Check Era” of DC Comics (Mar 1966-Jul/Aug 1967), an expansion in the number of titles produced by both DC and Marvel in April-May 1968, the cover-price increase from twelve to fifteen cents in June 1969, and even the most unlikely candidate, Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 (Mar 1986), which Shutt proclaims, “Baloney” (p. 202). In the end, for what he admits are in part entirely personal reasons, Shutt comes back to the year 1970 as the end of the Silver Age.

As a teacher of history, however, one of the things I emphasize from the beginning is the artificiality of such organizational schemes. Not that they are not useful, mind you, only that it must always be kept in mind that any such division of the past into “ages” is a “modern” construct, a product of the human mind's need to impose order and organization on what is essentially a mass of disordered, unorganized data. The present is always “modern” to contemporaries. And people seldom if ever have a present awareness of a sudden passing of one age giving way to another. “It's not like somebody woke up on such and such a date, say 1 January 1500,” I tell my students, “and said, 'Ah, well, the Middle Ages are over, it's now the Renaissance'!” Rather, to continue that historical example, aspects of the Middle Ages were giving way to remarkably modern ideas and institutions as early as the 12^th century, and vestiges of the Middle Ages could be said to linger until 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia put the final nail in the coffin of any meaningful concept of “Christendom” as a socio-political ideal. The shift in what are later considered historical ages is typically a gradual thing, and depends very much on what you define as the essential characters of the respective ages. The same is of course true for the shift from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age in Comic Book History. As to the definition of those ages, I would refer you to the respective Wikipedia articles (Silver Age, Bronze Age), which also necessarily discuss the transition.

Nevertheless, with thought I find myself in agreement with Shutt that the year 1970 was central to the shift from Silver Age to Bronze Age. Partially it is because in the past decade or so I have become more aware of the changes that were occurring in what was, in historical perspective, fairly rapid succession during that time. Of course, for a eight- or nine-year-old boy the rate of change was not nearly so apparent. To Shutt's above examples of Superman #229 (Aug 1970) and Fantastic Four #102 (Sep 1970) as marking the passing of one age, I would add such things as Green Lantern #76 (Apr 1970) (the beginning of the Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams Green Lantern-Green Arrow team tackling significant social and political issues of the age) and Conan #1 (Oct 1970) (Roy Thomas and Barry Smith's non-super-hero whose stories, in the context of the times, were quite a bit more “adult” than your normal mainstream comic book fare). And, as Shutt quips in a side-bar on page 201, the cover of Superman #233 (Jan 1971), which with the new year boldly proclaims “Kryponite Nevermore!,” “should [really] have said … 'Silver Age Nevermore!,” removing as it did (at least for a time) the hoary old Silver Age mainstay weakness of the Man of Steel, green kryptonite – and along with it the corny old Silver Age McGuffin red kryptonite.

On the right-hand page of the double-page feature finishing out this issue, of course, are advertised that last, as well as what would come within a few months, long-time newspaper reporter Clark Kent of the Daily Planet becoming a television reporter for the Galaxy Broadcasting System (Action Comics #398, Apr 1971), as well as Jack Kirby's advent on Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen with #133 (Dec 1970), the beginning of the new “Rose and Thorn” feature as a back-up to Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane in #105 (Oct 1970), a new costume for Supergirl (hideous as it may have been) in Adventure Comics #397 (Sep 1970), and the transformation of World's Finest Comics from a Superman-Batman team-up book to a Superman-and-whomever team-up book (like Brave and Bold was for Batman) with #198 (Nov 1970). And that's not all! “New Superman features in the current issues of Action Comics! **** The Legion of Super-Heroes in Superboy! **** Untold tales of Krypton in Superman!”

Together, all those changes did, I believe, make those last months of 1970 and the beginning of 1971 indisputably the period of transition from Silver Age to Bronze Age for the Superman corner of, and by extension, DC Comics as a whole. This issue of Superboy, teaming the Teen of Steel with the (already) self-proclaimed “Ruler of the Seas” in a story taking on, however bluntly and superficially – and in the context of the time-line, anachronistically – , the new environmental concerns of the age, is very much part and parcel of the new concern for relevance.

* * *

To give a feel for the other kinds of good stuff that would appear in DC comics 'way back then, here are scans of the big text house ad – “Direct Currents” – and the “Smallville Mailsack” letters column, which appeared on facing pages between pages 14 and 15 of this story.

I particularly liked “Direct Currents” - perhaps it was on that page in some other comic that month that I learned of the appearance of Aquaboy - which was in addition to the various half-page illustrated house ads for other DC comics. Not to mention the other cool ads, for everything from model rockets to plastic model kits to Hot Wheels cars and tracks to diamond rings – diamond rings?! –

Could I possibly be making this up? Diamond rings!

And with that bombshell.... Cheers!, and Thanks for reading!