DC SUPERHEROES FROM FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL

This weekend’s light-hearted and escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at the best new superheroes from DC’s First Issue Special, in which they introduced new characters to see if they drew enough fan response to get their own series.

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #12 (March 1976)

Title: Starman

Synopsis: A blue-skinned alien from the warlike Tradlavian race, Mikaal Tomas, was sent to Earth to start laying the groundwork for his planet’s invasion of our world. His female mate Lyssa was slain by his own people when she showed compassion for previous planets conquered by the Tradlavians and tried to warn Earth. 

Disillusioned with his own race following that, Starman battled and defeated the first wave of the Tradlavian invasion and prepared to defend Earth from the impending additional attempts. The energy crystal he wore granted him superpowers like flight, the ability to shoot energy blasts from his hands, a degree of superstrength and rapid healing.

NOTE: After this one appearance, the Mikaal Tomas Starman went unused by DC until 1995, when they brought him into the latest comic book series featuring some of their other heroes who used the alias Starman.   

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #8 (November 1975)

Title: The Warlord

Synopsis: U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Travis Morgan was attacked by enemy fighters while piloting a secret mission over the Soviet Union. He headed north past the Arctic Circle, where he had to eject from his damaged aircraft.

He parachuted down through a strange mist that transported him to a dimension called Skartaris, a sword & sorcery realm filled with strange creatures. Travis met Tara, a beautiful warrior woman who taught him the language spoken in Skartaris while they shared a series of adventures.

After facing sorcerous peril in a city called Thera, the Warlord Travis Morgan and Tara set out to reach her homeland.

NOTE: This character was so popular right off the bat that his own series The Warlord #1 debuted in February of 1976. It ran for 133 issues, ending December of 1988. Additional volumes have launched periodically since then.

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #11 (February 1976)

Title: Codename: Assassin

Synopsis: Jonathan Drew is really the costumed and superpowered government operative whose codename is simply Assassin. After a few non-powered years using conventional weapons in a one-man war against organized crime as revenge for the murder of his beloved sister, Drew was experimented on by the government and granted superpowers.

One of those powers was the ability to levitate objects up to his own weight, which allowed him to walk on air but not actually fly. He could levitate other objects but not while using that power on himself. The other power was a form of incomplete telepathy, which did not let him read minds but detect the presence of another person’s thoughts around him, preventing him from being ambushed.

The Assassin could also get a surface read on a person’s current emotions and their immediate intentions. In addition, he was armed with state-of the-art guns and other weaponry, was very stealthy and was a master of unarmed combat.

NOTE: In this first adventure for Jonathan Drew as a government agent, he took down two supervillains called Powerhouse and Snake. Even though this character would have been perfect for the Suicide Squad, Assassin did not show up again until 2008.

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #1 (April 1975)

Title: Atlas

Synopsis: In a vague, long-ago, sword and sorcery time period like Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, a young man named Atlas survives an attack on his seaside community by the Lizard King Hyssa and his army. An elderly man named Chagra raises Atlas to adulthood, during which time he manifests incredible superhuman strength and stamina. 

In this first adventure, Atlas and Chagra arrive in the Lizard Kingdom with our hero seeking revenge on King Hyssa. The king is not on hand, but one of his subordinate nobles tries to have Atlas killed. The title character defeats a superhumanly strong gladiator named Kargin, and then the presiding nobleman sics the Lizard Kingdom’s archers and slaves on Atlas.

NOTE: Naturally, Atlas survives and resumes his quest to find and kill King Hyssa. DC Comics would not use this Atlas character again until 2008, believe it or not.

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #4 (July 1975)

Title: Lady Cop

Synopsis: Liza Warner witnesses her roommate’s murder at the hand of a serial killer called the Ace of Spades Killer. This motivates her to join the police force and then on the side try to track down and nab the Ace of Spades Killer while taking down other criminals in the meantime.

In this issue Lady Cop also clashes with a youthful street gang.

NOTE: Lady Cop did not appear again until 2007, when she became a supporting character in the latest series of DC’s superhero the Atom. Liza becomes the Chief of Police. By then the serial killer who murdered her roommate had changed his pseudonym to the Man in Boots Killer and was finally brought to justice.

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #5 (August 1975)

Title: Manhunter

Synopsis: DC was trying once again to reboot their Manhunter series from the 1940s. Back then he was Paul Kirk, a former big game hunter who became a costumed crimefighter hunting the most dangerous game of all – human criminals. In 1973 DC tried relaunching the series by making it about a secret cadre of Paul Kirk clones, some “good” and some “evil”. All of the clones wore fancier new costumes. 

Now in this issue, the one and only Jack Kirby tried retconning things so that the Manhunters were all agents of an interstellar organization which fought the forces of evil. It was a pretty pointless rehashing of the Green Lantern Corps concept, but what can ya do? 

Lawyer Mark Shaw is recruited into the Manhunter Sect aka the Shan, which he’s told is ancient as well as alien in origin. He wears the costume of the original Paul Kirk Manhunter (at right), but in place of all previous Manhunter weaponry, this version wields a Power Baton which shoots concussive energy blasts as well as paralysis bullets. Manhunter defeats a crime lord called the Hog in his first adventure.

NOTE: DC tried changing the Mark Shaw Manhunter’s nom de guerre to the Privateer in his next appearance in 1977, but that didn’t quite stick.

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #2 (May 1975)

Title: The Green Team

Synopsis: In a bad movie spirit, this is my favorite weird-ass attempt at a series by First Issue Special.

Part Prez, part Monkees, part Kids from C.A.P.E.R., The Green Team featured four VERY young – as in pre-teen – millionaires who got into would-be satirical adventures.

Each boy millionaire had a theme.

Commodore Murphy was the son of a shipping magnate and had millions to spend on custom yachts and on small, “toy” boats equipped with actual weaponry. J.P. Houston, son of an oil magnate, was pretty good himself at finding oil to drill for and wielded six-guns. Cecil Sunbeam, son of a movie producer, had a megaphone and also produced his own films for kids.

Abdul Smith, the black member of the team, had, in poor taste by DC, been a shoeshine boy. A bank error provided Abdul with a million dollars which he used to make a VERY quick killing on the stock market before the error was detected. He had by then returned the erroneous money but kept the fortune he had made on stocks.

The Green Team’s adventures were like if Richie Rich and Jackie Jokers were action-comedy stars. The team funded new inventions and projects pitched to them at their weekly meeting. Something would go wrong and the boys would don their uniforms and save the day.

This first adventure featured the team financing an inventor’s Great American Pleasure Machine, which turns out to cause insanity. They also face violent thugs sent by Broadway and Hollywood magnates who fear the machine would replace plays, movies and television. In the end a missile fired from the Commodore’s scale-model toy boat destroys the G.A.P. Machine. 

NOTE: Like various bad movies, there’s just something about the inane, absurd premise of The Green Team. The mind can’t help but reflect on other potential members, like a pre-teen singing star (Michael Jackson and Donny Osmond were already hits in real life), or a girl fashion tycoon who designed her own line of kid’s clothing.

        There were two more Green Team stories written and illustrated but never colored or published. They finally appeared in black & white form in Canceled Comics Cavalcade #1 (June 1978).

        The High Price of Food saw the boys clashing with the Soviet Union, which was cornering the world market in seafood, causing prices to skyrocket. A secret cove of giant, kaiju-sized lobsters was found by the Green Team, who hoped to raise even more of them to bring prices back down to normal. The Soviet navy invaded the cove and the adventure ended with the boys surviving while the Soviet ships and the giant lobsters wiped each other out.

        Lore: We learned that the Green Team’s uniforms were bullet-proof and that Houston’s six-guns fired knockout capsules. Abdul was spending some of his money to feed orphans.

        The Deadly Paper Hanger featured the Green Team in a story that was like the worst of Howard the Duck over at Marvel. The title villain in this ill-conceived, pointless story was … Adolf Hitler, the most infamous “paper hanger” of all time. Though the story’s prologue makes it look like the Green Team must finance his project to avoid ruinous taxes for the year, causing them to become pariahs over associating with Hitler, that idea is quickly discarded.

        How is Hitler still alive? How is he not imprisoned and tried for war crimes, since the disapproving public clearly knows who he is? None of our business, I guess. The Green Team buy a soup kitchen/ poorhouse from a villain who was treating the inhabitants like garbage, which makes you think Hitler would have been the one doing that, but no.

        Instead, Hitler’s invention is special wallpaper with which he redecorates the purchased poorhouse. For some reason, the wallpaper causes apple trees to grow from it. (?) At first the poor people are delighted to have a lot of apples to eat, but then the trees grow to enormous size and start to overrun the entire city like mega-kudzu from Li’l Abner.   

        The Green Team use their attack copters to fight the giant, living trees and ultimately destroy them with pesticide. In the finale, we readers feel we’re going insane when … I almost can’t type it … Hitler sacrifices himself to save the Green Team from Bernard, the villain who used to mistreat the poorhouse’s residents. WTF???

        Both Hitler and Bernard seem to have perished, our boys chalk up another win, and we’re all left wondering why the hell this story was polluted with the presence of Adolf Hitler in the first place. Let alone why he was given a “noble” death saving the Green Team.

        What an insane, warped addition to the many pop culture ventures which feature the Fuhrer having survived to menace the world again. On the lore side, we learned that the Green Team’s uniforms also contain para-gliders.   

After this, the Geen Team did not appear again until 1985, in a cameo regarding DC’s fictional universe. Ambush Bug #3 (August 1985) established that the Green Team were from Earth-12, another alternate Earth which ceased to exist after the whole Crisis on Infinite Earths business.

The boys’ final appearance to date in their original pre-teen incarnations came in Animal Man #25 (July 1990), which depicted the Green Team among the characters trapped in a dimension called Comic Book Limbo, awaiting a reboot.

In August of 2013 the team at last got that reboot, with their ages upped to their teen years. The Green Team: Teen Trillionaires replaced Cecil Sunbeam with Cecilia Sunbeam and added J.P. Houston’s sister L.L. Houston to the team as their fifth member. Abdul was changed to a prince from the Middle East.

This new series lasted 8 issues, ending in March of 2014. More desperate than ever, DC made the Green Team superheroes for that final issue and teamed them up with the Teen Titans.

FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL Vol 1 #7 (October 1975)

Title: Menace of the Human Firefly

Synopsis: This issue was used to try to relaunch the Creeper’s series after its cancellation in the late 1960s. In this story the Creeper fought Batman’s old foe Firefly.

I reviewed this issue along with all the other Creeper stories from the 1960s-1980s HERE.