Hey, who's that on the bottom right of the cover?The Story: "The Day The Earth Screams!" by Mike Friedrich, Dick Dillin, and Joe Giella. Starbreaker arrives on Earth, and Superman, Flash, and Green Lantern go after him, to no avail.
Starbreaker then uses his powers to start dragging the entire Earth towards the sun, to steal its energy for himself. Meanwhile, the JLA licks its wounds back at the satellite, despairing that they can't beat the Starbreaker("We led with our aces..and were trumped!" Batman mutters, uncharacteristically).
Hawkman is disgusted at all this negative talk, and attempts to rally the troops by telling them they need to "examine our origin, the spirit that first united the Justice League." The JLA then decides to go their library to watch a tape telling the story of how the JLA came together:
We then enter a weird section of the book, where new origin story material drawn by Dillin and Giella is mixed with a reprint from JLA #9, with art by Sekowsky and Sachs, of course.
It does the trick, and the JLA is reinspired not to give up, with Batman saying he's come up with a possible solution to defeat Starbreaker. But just then someone unexpected arrives--Sargon the Sorcerer! To be continued!
Roll Call: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Green Arrow, Atom, Hawkman, Black Canary
Notable Moments: The cover is supposedly by Neal Adams and Murphy Anderson, though I don't see much Adams there.
I can only assume that Dick Dillin needed a small break from the massive amount of pages DC was demanding from him every month, so they had to shoehorn this reprint in the book. Friedrich tries his best to make it as unobtrusive as possible, but it reads really odd, to have a bad guy dragging all of Earth towards the sun, and the JLA decides to take in a movie--about themselves.
It's so typical that the Atom and Aquaman would get stuck right in the front, with the worst seats.
ReplyDeleteThey'll come out of there with sore necks and vision problems!
They really need to fix that place up.
next issue ...
ReplyDeletenext issue ...
can't wait 'til next issue ...
From my understanding, this was the yearly reprint issue, albeit shoe-horned into the main issue because Friedrich was running out of space to tell his last story. It also uses up the reprint pages in the back of the book, so we don't get any Wildcat or Hourman stories, right?
ReplyDeleterussell-
ReplyDeleteyeah, no other reprints this issue.
you're probably right, but i just reads so odd, to have new material and reprint all telling one story, sort of.
The whole "original story framing reprint story" thing became somewhat common in the 70's -- Avengers #150 ((largely but not totally reprinting #16)) comes immediately to mind. Was this the first instance of same?
ReplyDelete