BHOC: CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #48

Every time that I’d gone to Ed’s Coins and Stamps in the Sun-Vet Mall, I had availed myself of their back issues of DOOM PATROL. They had an extensive run of issues, and I had started out by buying #100 and continuing forward chronologically. But the next issue of DOOM PATROL that I was to purchase, #102, was the second half of a cross-series crossover with CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN. Being flush with cash from my 6th grade graduation, I bought both issues, since Ed had the Challs book in his boxes as well. I’d read a couple of modern day Challengers stories, but I wasn’t particularly enamored of them. They lacked that extra something that DC’s super heroes had in terms of powers and color and personality. But still, they were a mainstay all throughout the Silver Age.

CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN had apparently been the brainchild of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in the final days of their partnership. When the two men split up, they divided their remaining assets, and Jack got custody of the Challengers concept. He thereafter sold the strip to DC, where it debuted in the pages of SHOWCASE #6. In short order, and in no small part due to Jack’s growing prowess as an artist, it graduated to its own series, the first strip launched in SHOWCASE to do so. It also inspired a bevy of imitations–DC was rife with similar four-person teams of human explorers, including the Sea Devils, Rip Hunter and his time masters, the Suicide Squad, Cave Carson and his underground crew, and a couple of others. And the Fantastic Four, introduced by Kirby a short time later, were little more than the Challengers with super-powers and more sharply defined personalities.

Kirby had left CHALLENGERS with issue #8 after having had a legal tussle with one of DC’s editors. In his place, the strip was handed to artist Bob Brown. Brown was a solid craftsman, but didn’t have the same manner of visual imagination that Kirby possessed. The stories, too, by such DC stalwarts as Ed Herron and Bill Finger, began to skew more in the direction of the rest of the line, becoming more lightweight and formulaic. Eventually, Arnold Drake shook out as the more-or-less permanent writer of the series, but by 1966, he and everybody else at DC was being heavily influenced by the success of the live action Batman TV show as well as the growing success of Marvel. So the scripts became more overtly daffy, the situations more over-the-top, and the vibe of the series started to feel just this side of camp. This was the state of play at the time of this particular crossover.

A quick pause at this point for the Challengers’ Mail Chute letters page. Editor Murray Boltinoff had a different approach to his letters pages than the rest of DC’s editors. Rather than simply running a batch of letters and responding to them, Murray tended to print excerpts from a wider amount of the fan mail he’d received. he also set up trading departments, where his readership could swap back issues with one another. In this particular page, he prints a letter giving a call-out to several of the more prominent comic book fanzines of the day, including Alter Ego by Roy Thomas. Roy would soon after have a short two-week career as a DC assistant editor before switching over to rival Marvel, where he made his bones.

This particular crossover was the very first cross-title crossover of the Silver Age. Marvel had toyed with such a thing but hadn’t quite yet pulled the trigger on it. And there had been some cross-book stories in the Golden Age. But Arnold Drake beat everybody else of the period to the punch, uniting the casts of his two regular strips. At the end of this month’s issue of DOOM PATROL, the DP had received an urgent SOS from the Challengers. As this story opens, the heroic freaks have made their way to the Challs’ mountain headquarters, where they find the team on the verge of death. The Chief of the Patrol is able to put the Challs into suspended animation in a “Life Cabinet” at Patrol headquarters. What’s more, he’s able to make contact with Ace Morgan’s slumbering form to find out just how the death-cheaters got themselves into such a state.

Ace tells the Chief that a quartet of the team’s greatest foes, whom they’d had incarcerated in their mountain headquarters, were able to escape custody, almost killing the Challengers in the process. These villains were united as the Challenger-Haters; the shape-changing Multi-Man, Kra the mechanoid, Volcano Man (who is pretty self-explanatory) and Drabny, who once possessed a helmet that gave him mind over matter powers. The Challs were able to save themselves, but allowed the world to think them dead in order to flush out the Haters. (Which raises the question: if the Challs were reported dead, why weren’t the DP surprised to get their distress call?) Multi-Man had gone ahead with a scheme for the group to dominate the oceans, and from there the world, but the Challs showed up alive to intercede. But after a pitched battle, the Challs were struck down by Multi-Man in the form of a gigantic jellyfish. With the last of their strength, the challengers retreated to HQ, and before they all fell into deadly comas, Ace was able to send the SOS that the Doom Patrol responded to.

At this point, the chief has all of the information he needs to diagnose the Challengers’ condition. He dispatches Robotman to engage the Challenger-Haters and to bring back what he’ll need to whip up an antidote: a piece of the stinger-tail of the Multi-Man jellyfish. Cliff Steele is able to retrieve the necessary chunk of tail, and from it the Chief is able to synthesize a solution that gets the Challs back on their feet. The Haters, meanwhile, realizing that they’re now facing two teams of enemies, decide to pack up and leave their hidden base behind, but not before booby-trapping it to kill anybody who might find it. But it’s Drabny who winds up on the receiving end of the fatal explosion when he accidentally sets off the booby trap himself. Oops. The remaining Haters–including now a colossal robotic woman that Multi-Man has constructed and named Multi-Woman–salute their fallen comrade despite his errant stupidity.

But we’re almost to the end of the first part of tis crossover, so it’s now time for a big Marvel-style slobberknocker. The Challs and the Doom Patrol locate the Haters in their new temporary digs and the battle is joined. Elasti-Girl expands to giant-size to go one-on-one with Multi-Woman while her teammates aid Prof, Rocky, Red and Ace against the remaining Haters. As chaos reins, there’s an absolutely hysterical panel of Multi-Man daintily tiptoing away from the battle, running off to save himself. But he’s actually better than that–he gets the drop on the wheelchair-bound Chief and uses him as a bargaining chip to force the assembled heroes to allow the Haters to get away scot free.

But of course, this is merely the first part, and so a blurb tells readers to pick up the story in DOOM PATROL #102 in a few weeks. The story was fun, but the dialogue is trying just a bit to hard to be hip and zippy in a Stan Lee manner. Writer Drake was one of the few who was paying enough attention to what Marvel was doing that was catching on to get it, but in this camp-influenced period, he dialed up the jazz a bit too much, to the point where all of the characters sounded very much alike, making the same sorts of corny jokes while they fought and declaimed. The series definitely had a vibe, but it was a far cry from the more serious-minded early days of the strip.