Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Showcase Presents World's Finest, Volume 1

Presenting some of the most off-the-wall adventures starring the Man of Steel, the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder. Aliens, love-sick dames, giant robots and rather unusual new teammates to the trio of heroes make up the list of opponents faced by the World's Finest. 

This black and white collection also contains the first ever meeting between Batman and Superman from the pages of Superman. The original Batwoman, Kathy Kane, attempts to shatter the glass ceiling in competition with Batman and The Man of Tomorrow. Lastly, in an all-time classic, The Joker and Lex Luthor join forces against their arch-enemies.

But where's Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen? The cub reporter was an integral part of the World's Finest issues of my father's that I used to read by the literal trunk-load as a kid. Jimmy and Robin would often have a generational gap competition in the pages of this DC Comics team-up. Not having the ginger teen in these stories is just rather weird to me. Perhaps he'll pop up in volume 2...

One unforgivable disappointment is the overuse of plots. Yes, with comic books, being nearly a century old, it's nearly impossible to not reuse plot lines. But to have so many repeat plot lines less than a year apart in time; things got predictable quick. Maybe if I was a reader in the mid-1950s approaching these as they were published on a bi-monthly basis, I wouldn't have noticed the lack of imagination. But I doubt it.

Still, this was a great collection of 1950s DC stories. Their naive optimism was a nice transition from the bleakness of the Atomic Knight and Great Disaster stories that I had been reading prior to this archive of Golden Age works.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.

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