1st Issue Special

If I were to tell you that I was reading up on the Outsiders, there's a good chance that you'd assume I was talking about the team of misfits that Batman put together when he got fed up with Superman's two-bit Justice League and their cowardly refusal to commit international crimes in the name of justice. Heck, if you really wanted to go obscure with it, you might even suggest that I was going all the way back to 1964 and that time that Alfred was killed off and resurrected as a weird gangster Frankenstein called the Outsider. Both are solid guesses, but both are wrong. No, this week's selection is the other other Outsiders, the presumably heroic gang of weirdos who appeared in exactly one issue of 1st Issue Special, and then drifted off into obscurity before half of them even got an origin.

Despite the pedigree of being created by Steve Ditko, the Creeper has never really caught on. You'd think he would --- if nothing else, "What if the Joker was a good guy?" seems like a question that could result in some pretty compelling stories, even if that doesn't quite explain the preponderance of bright red back hair that he ended up with. Still, there's some potential there. It's just a question of how you can go about tapping into it. Well, if you happen to be Michael Fleisher and Steve Ditko and you're writing 1st Issue Special #7 in 1975, you might think that the best way to go about that was to have him fight a third-string Batman villain and hope for the best. And needless to say, that didn't really work out.