Jack Miller

Things were weird for everyone in the Silver Age, but they were all the weirder for Aquaman. Living under the ocean, surrounded by sea life, and in an era when accurate science was even less of a priority for comic book storytelling, basically anything could happen to Aquaman as long as it involved water. This gallery showcases some of his strangest moments from the Silver Age, featuring material from Adventure Comics and Aquaman's solo title.

If you read through enough back issues of Detective Comics, you'll run across a guy who seems an awful lot like a rough draft for Maxie Zeus. The only difference is that instead of fighting Batman, this guy decided that it would be a good idea to try and recruit the Martian Manhunter, who has all of Superman's powers plus the ability to read your mind and turn invisible. And it works out about as well as you'd think.

The Academy Awards are almost upon us, which means that it's time for the entire movie industry to rent out a very large room and say, "Good job, Movie Industry" to itself for about four hours. I'm told a lot of people find this very exciting, but as they have never, to my knowledge, even mentioned Bulbasaur's groundbreaking role in Pokemon: The First Movie, it's not really something I'm interested in. Besides, the movies that I tend to enjoy often value spectacle over substance. It might not win any awards, but I've often thought that there's a lot of value in giving audiences something that they just couldn't see otherwise. Which, I imagine, is probably there were film producers in the DC Universe who were once so desperate for cool stunts that they decided to hire an actual superhero to handle them --- all without ever explaining to him how movies worked.

Today is the anniversary of the first appearance of J'onn J'onzz, also known as the Martian Manhunter, the green skinned telepathic shapeshifter who has historically been all but inseparable from DC's Justice League comics. J'onn made his debut in Detective Comics #225, in a backup strip written by Joe Samachson and Jack Miller, and drawn by Joe Certa. In this story, Dr Erdel uses a robot-brain and teleportation to capture something from space --- as one does --- and what he captures is J'onn J'onzz. The man who brings J'onn to Earth dies not long afterwards of natural causes, and J'onn decides that he is going to use his amazing powers to help humanity --- as long as he doesn't run afoul of his one weakness, fire.