Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Bring on the Back-ups: "The Sight Stealers!" by John Broome and Sal Amendola

One of the coolest things DC did during the Groovy Age was introduce us young'uns to the Golden Age of comics via their 52-pages-don't-take-less era back-ups. What was really, really cool was when they would occasionally dig up an unused tale from that bygone era and publish it for the first time. Then there's Adventure Comics editor Joe Orlando's style--bring us "new" Golden Age material with a Groovy Age twist. For example, today's post features an unpublished Dr. Mid-Nite tale, written by John Broome and penciled by "artist unknown" rescued from their 1940s "files of the forgotten". The story had never been inked, so Joe handed it to Dick Giordano assistant Sal Amendola to finish, and viola! Golden Age meets Groovy Age. "The Sight Stealers!" finally made its debut in Adventure Comics #418 (January 1972). Check it out!






Later, also in the pages of Adventure, Joe and company unearthed a script for an unpublished, book-length Seven Soldiers of Victory tale, had it drawn by Groovy Age artists, and ran it as back-up for several issues.

Yeah, Ol' Groove'll be sharing that one with ya'll soon. After all, the holidays are upon us and Groove is nothing if not charitable!
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 22, 2011 at 12:37 AM

    I have heard from so many other people on the internet about how much they enjoyed that year or so with the expanded size and all the reprints, along with the 100 Page Super Spectaculars. I hated it when they stopped making them. I don't know what it would have hurt to keep a few going through the years. After all, seems like a lot of us were enjoying them at the time.

    Darpy

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  2. AnonymousNovember 22, 2011 at 6:01 AM

    Thanks (as always), Groove. I DIDN'T care for this story back in the day---and I'm not too crazy about it now!---but I GREATLY appreciated the concept. A lot of my exposure to DC's "golden age" (outside of Superman and Batman) was by means of some of the "previously unpublished" golden age stories that saw print in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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  3. Martin OHearnNovember 22, 2011 at 11:23 AM

    I second the motion on the all-around grooviness of DC's reprints and rescued stories back then.

    Now that I look at Doc running on the bottom of page 2, standing under the telephone pole on the top right of page 3, and socking in the middle of the last page, I'll venture that "artist unknown" is Carmine Infantino. Sal Amendola's inks certainly overpower his pencils everywhere else!

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.


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