The Key-Master of the World!

What was so great about finding a cheap copy of Justice League of America № 41 the other weekend, I hear you ask? Well, nobody has asked, but I still feel I should explain exactly why I think this comic is so very cool. I mean, for starters, just look at that cover!

The gigantic figure of a previously unknown key-themed evil villain shoots a strangely contorted Green Lantern with a key-shaped gun, while Superman, Wonder Woman, J'onn J'onnz and Hawkman fly to the rescue!

Wonder Woman shouldn't be flying. And why are they circling round in single file like that, rather than flying straight towards the baddie? But none of these questions matter, really - the job of the cover picture was to grab the attention of kids in the store and convince them to spend twelve cents to read the exciting story it promised! Mike Sekowsky is the artist, and he knew how to do a great cover.

This is the "December 1965" issue of Justice League of America, although American comics were always published a few months ahead of their cover dates. Fifteen years earlier, in All-Star Comics № 57 (dated Dec 1950 - Jan 1951) the final adventure of the Justice League's predecessor (the Justice Society of America) had featured an enemy called The Key. On the symbolic splash page (but not in the actual story that followed it), he's depicted wearing a keyhole helmet and wielding a key-gun.

In Flash № 129 (June 1962), the Flash recollects that old battle as if the splash page had actually happened. So this new Key would have rung a bell with readers who remembered him from just a couple of years ago, as well as the many adult Justice League fans who remembered reading the Justice Society as kids, fifteen years before!

Those are the old versions of Green Lantern, Atom, Hawkman, Flash and Wonder Woman, who had been established by 1965 as existing on "Earth-2". Superhero comics very nearly completely died out by 1951, and all-new heroes using the old names were created in the late fifties and early sixties - these "Earth-1" heroes are the ones in the Justice League. Although that 1962 Flash comic is very ambiguous about there being two identical Wonder Womans; there hadn't been a definitive ruling on her yet by that point - she'd continued to be published all through the 1950s, so it was a bit confusing to fans who took an interest in this kind of technicality.

But basically, Gardner Fox, writer of the Justice League comic, and/or Julius Schwarz, the editor, is throwing in an easter egg for the benefit of readers who know about the old stories. Fox wasn't the writer of that particular old Justice Society story, but he did write the Flash one, and Schwarz was the editor in charge of both.

So let's get back to the Justice League in the present day (1965) - as was still normal in comics, it starts with a symbolic splash page, a sort of second front cover, before you get to the story...

The indicia at the bottom of the page tells us this comic is published "monthly with the exception of Jan., July and Oct.; (semi-monthly Nov.)" That's a lot of punctuation, and it's also wrong. April was also skipped - there were eight issues a year, plus an extra "80-Page Giant" in November containing reprinted stories.

And before you get to the splash page, you can read the inside front cover, which like most DC comics at the time contained a one-page story "published as a public service", in this case teaching kids about the good work of UNESCO in bringing schools to Africa. It's a bit great-white-god-from-over-water, and I can't see a "please accept this native sculpture" without thinking of Father Ted now, but that's just the cynical 21st-century age we live in, I'm afraid. It's a very worthy page.

As for the splash, there were still no writer and artist credits on DC comics in those days, but we did get the Roll Call for this issue! The Justice League had ten members at this point, plus their teenage 'mascot' Snapper Carr (so called because he snaps his fingers and talks in jive dialogue of the type no sixties teenager would have dreamed of using) and all but two of them are in the Roll Call for this issue.

The exceptions are Aquaman and Green Arrow, who are the two asterisked footnotes to the "no superhero survived the 1950s except Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman" rule. Aquaman and Green Arrow continued all through the decade as backup strips (behind Superboy) in Adventure Comics. But they were gone from Adventure now - Aquaman had his own comic, while Green Arrow had lost his solo strip in 1964 and now could only be seen in Justice League comics.

Nearly all the other heroes (except Snapper Carr, of course) had their own self-titled comic. J'onn J'onnz was the lead feature in "House of Mystery" until recently being shunted to the back of the book by Dial H for Hero. Superman and Batman also appeared in multiple other comics. But Justice League was something different - none of the heroes' supporting cast usually appeared; their adventures just featured the ten heroes (or whichever of the ten had shown up to the meeting this month) and Snapper. And, well... character interaction wasn't a priority in these stories.

DC comics weren't like the Marvel comics that were revolutionising superhero stories in the 1960s. The Gardner Fox Justice League adventures have been described as seeing heroes solely in terms of costume and powers. Individual personality traits were something that Marvel did, and did very well; DC had no time for that kind of nonsense. There's no conflict between the superheroes; they always act in perfect agreement in everything they do. Which makes the opening of the story all the better - in their usual cheerful, friendly, identical-sounding way, our heroes decide to disband the Justice League!

Aquaman and Green Arrow are at the meeting. They're there at the table in the first panel, that green hand holding a cup of punch must be Aquaman, and the Arrowplane is flying away along with everyone else when they all leave. I guess it's Green Arrow or Batman's turn to give Aquaman a ride back to the ocean today. But our two absentees don't return for the rest of this story, and that does raise some questions, which I'll come to a bit later.

But now we find out what's going on - the Key has taken control of the Justice League! His super-genius technology is very 1965; to find out that his plan has worked, he had to instruct Snapper to go to a phone box and give him a call. But he monologues to himself that he has discovered "a certain psycho-chemical" which can give him control over anybody! And now nothing can stop his plan to become the KEY-man of EARTH -- the SOLAR SYSTEM -- the UNIVERSE!

I love this villain. On the next page we see how he did it - by the simple means of causing a rockslide to nearly crush Snapper Carr, rescuing him, giving him a drink of water doped with the psycho-chemical and ordering him to spike the Justice League's punchbowl. Then, by turning the right keys on his giant key-board, he can make the entire Justice League do whatever he wants! Just look at that keyboard, "set into a giant electronic brain"!

I love how forward-thinking the Key is. He's already working on his plan to take over Earth, but he knows that ruling the world will soon get boring, so he lays out the next stage of his scheme to gradually take control of the entire universe! That's why, having tested his control over the Justice League by making them disband, he's going to keep them around - he'll need their help to take over other planets eventually. And meanwhile, he's sent them back to continue their normal business, but made it impossible for them to perceive anybody with a key-symbol on their costume, so his Key-Men underlings can steal all the money and equipment the Key needs without any superheroes getting involved.

And the story depicts this by showing Batman and Robin fighting the Wrecker, while the Key-Men operate under their very noses! Which is fascinating in many ways. Robin doesn't usually get seen or mentioned in Justice League stories. He's included here because it plays into a plot technicality that comes up a little later, but it's great to see - makes the DC universe feel like a coherent whole, which it usually didn't in 1965!

And where on earth did they dredge the Wrecker up from?! As the footnote says, he'd appeared in one Batman story, twelve and a half years earlier! And he wasn't a generic destroy-and-loot kind of villain in that one; he was staging a very elaborate hoax crime wave specifically targeting anyone who liked Batman, in which he faked his own murder so as to get the life insurance money. It was the kind of dull and unexceptional story you'd often see in the early fifties, although the costume is distinctive.

That old story had never been reprinted, and hadn't been worked on by Gardner Fox or Julie Schwarz (it was the work of one David Vern Reed, who never really made much impact on comics history, though he returned to Batman in the late seventies for a while). Is this the same Wrecker? Has he been in prison for twelve years, and now going on a rampage of revenge? Or is it someone else stealing his costume? Or - since it's generally agreed that Detective Comics in 1953 was still telling Earth-2 stories - is this the Earth-1 equivalent of the Wrecker? So many intriguing questions, and they're never going to be answered.

Part 1 of this Justice League adventure (the comics in those days were traditionally divided into three parts) ends with a scene of the same kind of thing happening to the Atom, stopping some crooks and failing to see the Key-Men. Then come a range of adverts (Ultra the Multi-Alien starring in "Mystery in Space"; Rocky and Bullwinkle touting the merits of Cheerios; Tyco model kits boasting their official Petticoat Junction train set like you see it on CBS television; Batman's 80-Page Giant issue) and the letters page (everyone loved the story in № 37, in which the Justice League were all wiped out of existence and the Justice Society took over the comic!), and then we're back with Part 2.

Part 2 opens with Hawkman and Hawkgirl battling "Monarch Butterfly" crooks, who have mechanical flying motors, butterfly wings and cool helmets. We never learn the exact nature of their crooked behaviour, nor the reason for their silly costumes. But Hawkgirl (who, like Robin, never normally shows up in Justice League stories) is still able to see the Key-Men who rob a bank nearby! And this is (by Silver Age DC standards) a sensible and intelligent way to plot the story! Hawkman has been instructed by the Key to slip the psycho-chemical into Hawkgirl's drink and then forget he's done it... but this means that when she doesn't drink her milk after all, that's where the Key's remote-control plan breaks down. It makes sense! I like it a lot. Also appreciate the namecheck of Commissioner Emmett (regular supporting character in Hawkman stories) and the use of Hawkman and Hawkgirl's Thanagarian science to figure out what's going on.

They fix the problem with their alien science and stress that it's the kind of alien science that can only be used once and then never again - if the Key turns the right key again, his psycho-chemical will have a permanent effect. This plot point is repeated multiple times in this issue, to keep the tension going, and that bit doesn't really work, I'm afraid.

So Hawkman and Hawkgirl spring into action - knowing that the entire Justice League must be similarly corrupted, and their sidekicks too. Hawkgirl mentions Kid Flash, who wasn't actually a sidekick but a kid who was friends with Flash, had the same powers and used them mainly in his own adventures, backup strips in the Flash's comic. She doesn't mention Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy, but he was presumably drugged too. Speedy had disappeared into publishing limbo now Green Arrow didn't have a strip of his own anywhere - when he returned in the seventies, drugs would become a central part of his storyline, so it all began here, behind the scenes!

The Married Manhunters get to work filming the other Justice League members as they fight crime and fail to notice the Key-Men. They also somehow fail to notice Hawkman and Hawkgirl fluttering around with film cameras - presumably it's a bit more of that alien science they use, though the narrator doesn't mention it. Flash is fighting the Weather Wizard, a regular member of his rogues' gallery, while Green Lantern battles The Invisible Destroyer, villain of one of his earliest adventures in Showcase № 23 (Nov-Dec 1959). Who was destroyed in that story, returns for one page here, is defeated easily and never comes back.

Then, using more Thanagarian science, Hawkman learns the secret identities of the rest of the Justice League, breaking his promise never to do so, and summons them all to tell them what's going on.

Well, most of them. "Those members of the Justice League not engaged in cases" show up - apparently it doesn't matter if Aquaman and Green Arrow are left under the control of a supervillain. Presumably Hawkman thinks they're useless superheroes anyway. Actually, when the Justice League members developed personalities in later years, Hawkman and Green Arrow were always at each other's throats, so it makes sense with hindsight. I like that he did make sure to include Snapper Carr in the deprogramming, though.

Hawkgirl disappears from the story after this point, leaving the Justice League members to fix things, and Part 2 ends with our heroes discovering that the Key has now set up home in their own secret headquarters!

Let's enjoy some more adverts before Part 3 begins. The Fox and the Crow, last survivors of DC's funny-animal line, are welcoming some new backup strips to their long-running comic. Very shortly, Stanley and his Monster would take over the front covers, and soon after that Fauntleroy Fox and Crawford Crow disappeared forever. DC don't own the rights any more (they were licensed from Columbia Pictures) and they don't seem likely to ever show up in comics again. It's very sad.

Meanwhile, Chuck and his dad, who both look seriously creepy, buy each other a wonderful model car for Christmas - just like you can at home - and Supergirl and Wonder Woman are teaming up in The Brave and the Bold! That's quite exceptional, actually - the Superman characters were jealously guarded by their editor and only allowed to appear in other comics on very special occasions!

Part 3 begins with our heroes finding themselves locked out of their secret sanctuary by an impenetrable forcefield. Even Green Lantern, who created it in the first place, can't break it down without taking some time to concentrate, which seems strange - normally, his magic works based on willpower, and he usually has less of it when someone else is controlling him. But never mind, it gives the Atom an opportunity to do his old trick of travelling along the phone line (the Key hasn't bothered to change the phone number after moving in) and provides us with one of the all-time classic supervillain lines!

"The phone WOULD have to ring just as I was about to turn on the electronic circuits to give me control over those super-heroes!"

And so the Atom gets into the workings of the giant key-board, stopping the big iron keys from turning in their big giant keyholes and making the Key unable to control the heroes after all! In desperation, he unleashes the special individual key-themed weapons he'd held in reserve for if he needs to kill the Justice League, and for a moment they seem to be working.

It's always quite easy to neutralise the super-powerful Justice League. For J'onn J'onnz you just have to set something on fire, which makes him go "OOOOH! Losing my super-powers -- growing weaker...", Green Lantern can't do anything to stop anything painted yellow, Superman falls before the kryptonite that any self-respecting super-villain has an ample supply of. But the weapons for the less vulnerable heroes are quite cool, especially the "black keyhole" which tries to suck the Flash into "some eerie dimensional world!"

But of course our heroes very quickly figure out they just have to take out each other's special keys to save the day...

They way they do it starts out logically enough, but then Flash "grabs up Snapper and whirls him about like a baton"! I'm thinking Flash feels this whole mess is Snapper's fault and is taking out his frustrations. And what exactly motivates J'onn J'onnz to turn himself into some kind of human (Martian) rolling-pin in order to crush the pointy spiked keys that are the Key's last last-ditch defence, I can't imagine.

And then our heroes just beat up the Key-Men, demolish the key-board (what a shame) and reclaim their secret sanctuary. The Key is defeated, but his final thought bubble suggests he's still got one final trick up his sleeve!

Actually, he doesn't come back until nearly three years later, in Justice League № 63, and that story isn't anywhere near as good. That was 1968, by which time DC had decided they needed to scrap the old way of doing comics and move onto something new. With № 66, Gardner Fox was replaced by Denny O'Neil, the heroes started bickering among themselves, and it was never quite the same again.

So let's remember 1965, when DC was still resolutely ignoring the great new innovations of the Marvel Universe, and giving us treats like the Key-Master of the World! And a back cover ad trying to entice kids into re-creating a football game from seven years previously, starring Johnny Unitas - the greatest quarterback in modern pro football!

I can't take Johnny Unitas seriously after that Simpsons episode. This modern cynicism ruins everything, doesn't it?