With my newfound wealth, I was able to buy Justice League of America #143 at its new price of sixty cents, but then the money started burning a hole in my pocket the next Sunday after church, even with no new issue of JLA to buy. First, I had to buy some BBs. I had received a Daisy BB gun for Christmas from my mother, and an ample supply of BBs to last quite a while. Fortunately, the same general store that carried my comic books also had tubes of ammunition. At 50 cents each, that gave me an alternative when there were no comics I wanted.
I had taken hunter safety in sixth grade, and already knew how to handle actual firearms safely, so a BB gun was good practice for me, even though I had fired real guns by this time already.
When I wasn’t out shooting up the woods with BBs, I was still reading and drawing all the time. And now that I wasn’t restricted in enjoying superheroes, I started making up my own characters, and even combining superheroes with Star Trek-like ships that I created. After all, the Legion of Super-Heroes had their own cruiser that looked like a cross between the Enterprise and a Klingon ship. It clearly borrowed quite a bit from Star Trek.
When the next Sunday came along and I still had money to burn, I did something that was near-unthinkable. I spent a dollar on a comic book. A whole dollar! It was crazy, but the Neal Adams cover beckoned to me.
Batman and Superman fighting Martians? Eighty pages? I had to have it! I hadn’t seen stories with the Martian Manhunter since I was a little boy, reading Justice League of America. This is why covers are so important. They sell comic books! Sadly, the interior art left me a little cold. There’s nothing wrong at all about Curt Swan’s art. Nothing at all. But he wasn’t Neal Adams. However, there was a logo for the Martian Manhunter which I thought was one of the coolest logos I’d ever seen.
That wasn’t the story that caught my attention the most, though. That was the Black Canary story later in the book. My 12-year-old eyes were drawn immediately to the circular panel.
I think this was the first time I had ever really considered a woman taking her clothes off, let alone a woman superhero, and it made me feel strange. I couldn’t name the feeling or describe it in words at that time, so I just tried to shrug it off and finish reading the comic. But for some reason, I kept coming back that page to stare at it. How many people can name the day when puberty first hit them hard? For me, it was Sunday, March 20, 1977.
