The Superhero Book by Gina Misiroglu

Author:Gina Misiroglu
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Visible Ink Press
Published: 2012-06-21T21:00:00+00:00

The Brave and the Bold #58 © 1965 DC Comics. (Cover art by Ramona Fradon.)

Following two successful issues of The Brave and the Bold, Mason—now calling himself Meta-morpho—graduated to his own comic, which went on for seventeen issues. A typical Metamorpho story involved Mason, the Staggs, and Java traveling around the world, from one luxury villa to another, and somehow blundering into an inevitable tangle with bizarre wrongdoers. Among this motley band of villains were the likes of Stingaree, the Balkan Brothers, Dr. Destiny, Achille le Heel, and Mason’s female counterpart, Urania, the Element Girl. As their names suggest, this was a superhero strip with its tongue firmly lodged in its cheek, and despite his macabre appearance, Metamorpho was usually one of DC’s more light-hearted heroes. In fact, with its settings on the French Riviera, in Africa, and in America’s high society, the strip was reminiscent of that staple of swinging 1960s cinema, the caper movie.

Much of the feature’s appeal derived not just from Haney’s entertaining writing but from Fradon’s charmingly inventive artwork, and when she left comics to raise a family, the comic suffered a slow decline, finally going under in 1968. Metamorpho’s savior was to be editor Murray Boltinoff, who had a tendency to stick the character into whichever comic he happened to be working on at the time. This meant that Metamorpho guest starred in numerous adventures with Batman and Superman, as well as enjoying short runs as a backup feature in Action Comics and World’s Finest. In the 1980s, he became something of a superteam specialist, joining first the Outsiders and then the Justice League. In one mid-1980s issue of The Outsiders, Metamorpho and Sapphire finally married, a satisfying resolution to one of DC’s more enduring (and endearing) courtships. In Justice League Europe he was stationed in France and was very much the star of the team, enjoying a series of suitably quirky adventures and fraught tussles with the locals. This exposure led to a short-lived series in the 1990s that, misguidedly, adopted a darker approach and failed to engage fans.

Author Neil Gaiman (Sandman) and artist Mike Allred (Madman) collaborated on an unusual Metamorpho serial in DC’s Wednesday Comics (2009). Metamorpho has appeared in animation on the television series Justice League and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. —DAR

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