Not just DC, and not just silver age. “The team is turned into babies” is a recurring theme in Claremont’s X-Men comics. It still gets lampshaded to this day.
I would TOTALLY get up early on Saturday mornings to watch Justice League Babies. The best parts, of course, would be when they went up against the Legion of Doom Babies. I’d love to see that bulbous-headed headquarters of theirs rising up out of the swamp, surrounded by a playpen…
not to spoil it for anybody, but that’s the villain’s plot in my favorite superhero movie, Sky High.
I noticed the gorillas more than the babies. Someone (Julie Schwartz) discovered that comics with gorillas on the cover sold better, so there were all sorts of them in the 50s and 60s (e.g., Congorilla, Titano, Grodd).
DC also used to fall back on red kryptonite stories for Superman, which happened at least once a year. And though the concept was clearly a narrative crutch, most of the stories were pretty good, setting up a puzzle for Superman to solve. Of course, as far I was concerned, Marvel didn’t exist (our local drugstore didn’t carry them).
I know that by the early 70s, DC was committed to things like Green Lantern/Green Arrow, the Sandman saga (Superman), and Swamp Thing, things that moved away from Marvel’s “Let X fight Y” format.
I was a DC comics reader from 1966 to 1970. From when I was 6 until I turned 11. Only found out many ages later that my childhood reading had been the Silver Age. My first comic book purchase was Wonder Woman, and that issue turned out to be the second part of a two-part series. (WW’s boyfriend was captured by Angle Man, who maneuvered him into thinking she had turned traitor against the USA.) It took me a while to piece out what the first part I missed had been about. I only looked up and read that part recently on the internet.
Likewise, in 1966 the other first DC book I read was the second part of a two-parter! The Justice League of Earth-One had to team up with the LSH from Earth-Two; it was a Crisis on Both Earths. (A mad scientist was going to cause the Earths to collide, except the spirit superhero (name of Spectre? I forget) had to hold them apart. Meanwhile Anti-Matter Man was walking on the spirit’s back. His antimatter wouldn’t cause an annihilation on the spirit superhero, because he was spirit not matter, but the other superheroes had to fight Anti-Matter Man to keep him away from Earth before he got there.) This also I never got to read the first part of until I looked it up on the internet.
So both my introductions to DC books were the conclusions of two-parters where I’d missed the first parts. Well, you’ve got to jump into the stream at some point.
I can confirm that 1970 is the watershed year when everything changed for DC. I was baffled by the introduction of Kirby’s New Godz universe. Its visual impact was like nothing I was familiar with and confused me. The story lines also seemed too far away from what I was used to.
I had been following the recent updates in DC to become more hip and cool and relevant. When Green Arrow first got his beard, when he took Green Lantern on a tour of America to witness and combat social injustices. Arrow began by taking Lantern to the housing projects and introduced him to a poor old black man, who confronted him: “I been readin’ about you… how you work for the blue skins… and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins… and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with!.. the black skins! I want to know… how come?! Answer me that, Mr. Green Lantern!”
GL, looking at his feet, mutters “I… can’t…” and got his consciousness raised in that moment. That scene was unforgettable.
I totally dug this new line of social justice warrior narrative, but just could not warm up to Kirby’s New Godz. About the time I turned 11, I simply stopped reading comic books altogether. Classical music became my new kick and I switched from collecting DC to collecting DG.*
*Deutsche Grammophon
Funny enough the answer is given a little later in my favorite JLA issue. A one-off (at the time) with John Stewart wherein we see that the Guardians don’t want their charges solving everyones problems for them.
As for the SJW aspect of GL/GA…my favorite unintentional reveal is of the hypocrisy of the ultimate 'bleeding-heart compassionate SJW" Green Arrow when he finds his ward is addicted to drugs…and literally assaults him. Add in the cultural appropriation in an “Indian comic” seen elsewhere.
Yeah. I just read the “Superman in the '60s” collection which had Superboy “remembering” his early adventures as a baby who doesn’t know the word “I” and a bizarre story with 1) Lois getting conked on the head and becoming evil-ish, 2) Lois blackmailing Superman into marrying her, and 3) Superman and Lois getting younger and younger, and eventually getting married as babies in strollers (in wedding garb).
(It also has a story in which Superman (temporarily without powers and without memory) gets paralyzed after a bronco-busting accident. Awkward).
I missed the Crisis on Infinite Earths of the 1980s. I am keeping up with the Crisis on Infinite Earths now being played out on crossover TV. But this crisis in the very first Justice League issue I ever looked at in 1966—it must have been the first Crisis on More-Than-One Earth, a prototype for the Infinite Earths stories to come.
Not unless it was an old book when you got it - the first Crisis was in 1963 - Crisis on Earth-One/Crisis on Earth-Two. The 1966 crossover was Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two/The Bridge Between Earths.
… Silly me, I see you described it in your earlier post. Yeah, that’s definitely Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two, not Crisis on Earth-One/CoEarth-Two.
(Is it just me, or is Crisis beginning to look like a non-word to anyone else?)
By the way, while Marvel had better Sulver age stories…D.C. simply had better covers…on the average. So before you start pulling out Fantastic Four links…on average D.C. Had better ones mostly due to Neal Adams and Carmine Infantino doing most of their cover work for DC
Yes, but the OP asked when the “campiness” went away. While Infantino’s New Look Batman did away with the Silver Age goofiness of Bat-Mite and so on, it was washed away by the campiness of the TV show taking over the comics.
To be fair, turning Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants into babies didn’t happen in Claremont’s X-Men, but in The Defenders a couple of years earlier. Actually, Claremont reversed it when Magneto and the others got zapped back to adulthood.
Claremont did play with the meme a bit. Not only in X-Men, but also in Black Dragon. He liked to pose the question “If your body is turned into an infant, and your mind is wiped out, are you still guilty of your previous crimes?”
Ah! Good. Thanks for filling that in.
Of course, by far the most significant “Crisis” in DC history is without a doubt the two-issue “Crisis on Earth-C” story arc where Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew crossed over to Earth C-Minus to assist the JLA.
Not that JLA, of course; the Just’a Lotta Animals, led by Super-Squirrel, Wonder Wabbit and Batmouse.
I was thinking of his 70s stuff.
What 70s stuff of Carmine Infantino where you thinking of? He wasn’t working on Batman in the 70s. I remember him jumping to Marvel in the 70s, working on Nova and some other books, before returning to DC and returning to The Flash for a very long run as artist.
Sorry–Aparo, Dick Giordano & Len Wein.
Don’t know why I was thinking of Infantino.