This series reprints posts from my old site, without revision.
So, today we start.
The JLA debuted in The Brave and the Bold #28, dated March 1960 (and then appeared in #29 and #30 as well). Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky were responsible for the issue, and the team essentially sprang into existence fully formed. The comic was basically several solo stories, loosely strung together, in which the heroes fought an alien starfish. In the panel above, Aquaman summons them by apparently peeing in the ocean.
Batman was in it, but barely.
Also in Brave and the Bold #28: The first appearance of Snapper Carr, the most stilted and annoying white comic book character of all time.
He’d be a major player in the early JLA issues.
In Brave and the Bold #28 and 29, Fox essentially repeated the same formula but threw in a science lesson. Back then, comics were required to at least try to be educational (and had to have at least a page of text-without-pictures fiction as well).
These books sold so well, the League got their own series.
I hope you all enjoy this tribute to DC’s greatest team. I’m going to admit in advance that I don’t have the kind of depth of knowledge about DC that I do of Marvel, so much of this will be new to me–I’ll be reading for the joy of it, not for the trivia. Or at least not as much for the trivia as I did with my tributes to Avengers, Spider-Man, etc.
Next: JLA #1