Yep, Super-Team Family Giant #7...

..is the type of book I was looking for for my first review. There were others, such as Avengers 156 and some Marvel Team-up that I will do later, but STFG#7 from 1976 won the honor.

This book has two of my super-teams The Teen Titans in the first half of the book and the World's Weirdest Heroes the Doom Patrol in the second half. This issue according to the letters page consists of reprints of Teen Titans #31 from 1971 and Doom Patrol #86 from 1964. One from before my ability to read and another from way, way before I was a thought synapse in anybody's mind.

The first story with the Teen Titans titled "To Order is to Destroy" is a tale of the University Psychologist and the Acting President performing what would now be called 'behavior modification' experiments on the student population to make them docile and to keep them under control in the story it's referred to as 'brain operations'. One student overhearing the psychologist, Dr. Pauling, describe what he is doing decides to flee the reception area. Having been told he's been over heard. Dr Pauling orders the student body to find this boy, Johnny Adler, and bring him in. Johnny, finding a hunter's cabin up in the wooded mountains decides to hide out there until he can figure out what to do next.

On a trip back to the campus for food Johnny is discovered and about to be pounced on by 4-5 members of the student body until..... Kid Flash, who in is secret identity of Wally West was looking the campus,Elford University, over as he is about to graduate high school and wants to find a college for fall, steps in to stop the one-sided fight and wisks Johnny back to his cabin in the woods. After hearing the incredulous story and wanting to check it out for himself. He superspeeds into town and brings back Johnny some supplies before heading out.

Kid Flash returns with the other Titans(who at this time in the mighty fluctuating roster of Titans were Lilith, Mal Duncan(black man and this is important as to why I bring this up),Roy Harper(Speedy), and Donna Troy(Wondergirl))in their civilian garb to check out the campus further. Lilith who is a kind of empath/psychic confirms that the minds of the students have been tampered with. So now they decide to go check on Johnny and before they do this they have to change into their uniforms in the woods in case there's action. Well, not only is there not any action, there is also no Johnny. So changing back into the civilian clothes in the woods they make their way back into campus.

Having been spotted by Dr. Pauling and the Acting President as not being students at the college, Dr. Pauling labels them as 'Outside agitators who deserve to be beaten to a pulp!' and then orders the student body to attack the Titans. One student(not Johnny for some reason, who is never seen again in the story)starts to resist the mind control and go after Dr. Pauling.

Now in this one panel(which I promise to get a picture of, I swear) Mal Duncan,black man, and Roy Harper, white man, are each punching out a different male student. Dialogue as follows:
Mal: "Aw c'mon, whitey! You can hit harder than that!"
Roy: "Hey, what's the big idea of telling me what to do? I'm beginning to think you don't know your place!"
So many, many different levels with just that small interchange. Two men comfortable with their friendship and themselves that they can just toss that out there or racial overtones at a time when the social scene was less politically correct. This story did come out in 1971 so who's to tell.

So, during this fight the aforementioned student resisting the modification finds his way to Dr. Pauling and after a brief scuffle manages to unplug the machine which was broadcasting the signal to the chip implanted into the student's brains forcing them to comply. No permanent damage was done to the student's affected.

While leaving, Wally west throughs this bit of dialogue out in the open-
Wally: "Sure, Johnny fought against the computer circuits, but what about all those other students? Is the will of the majority really that weak? Is it really that easily subverted?"

This is what you got from a comic back in the seventies, I'll get to the Doom Patrol story Tuesday, you got superheroes and social relevance of the times. You got the social attitudes from that particular time. There was race(okay, minor), the Big Brother theme, and the "Don't trust anybody over 30"attitude spread out over twenty-two pages all for $.50 with another story I haven't even talked about yet. Some funny bits also; Kid Flash thinking he was to slow at the beginning when actually the fight and the run to the cabin probably only took 5 minutes and Dr. Pauling broadcasting his orders over the college p.a. system. You know, the police should have heard that. Also, Kid flash probably crossed Elford of his list of colleges.

Yet, a little easter egg or humor for fans is the last line spoken by Wally about subversion. Because when the New Teen Titans are formed in the future one of the main reasons it happens is due to Raven making Wally believe he loves her. He doesn't want to join or be a super hero again. So she subverts him into thinking it was his idea.

Next: The World's Weirdest Heroes: The Doom Patrol!

The first book...

..that really turned me on to reading more was a neat little gem hidden in this book DC Comics Presents number 26 with Superman and Green Lantern. A special free preview of The New Teen Titans. I absolutely devoured this book. (Which I will review at a later date.) As cool as the adult heroes were in the stories it was the younger ones that gave you inspiration that you could do more and be more than what you were. My faves were always Robin, Kid Flash, Speedy, and Aqualad. Wondergirl was always a girl's hero. To be honest I don't remember Wondergirl being in to many comics back then that I ever saw. My sister usually picked up Wonder Woman and I don't recall her ever being in there. I do believe there was an 8-page Huntress backup which didn't mean anything to me until I found out she was the daughter of the Earth-2 Batman and Catwoman.(Who were dead! Dammit how did that happen?) Anyway, the preview of this New Teen Titans team was the first time that I ever looked ahead in getting a book. Before we just got whatever was on the rack that peaked our interest that particular Sunday. Which now meant that I was going up to our 7-11 during the week not just to buy baseball or football cards but now I had to check the comic rack in back of the store before I left.

Finally, it arrived ladies and gentleman the book of all books. Forget Batman, Superman, the Justice League of America, the Avengers, Captain America, Spiderman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, the Flash and whatever else was on the rack. The greatest comic book that had ever graced a spinner rack was now here, The New Teen Titans. Taa... Daaa!!

This was exactly the effect that I experienced as I spotted it on the rack in the back of the store. Big as day Robin the Teen Wonder front and center and next to him Kid Flash along with Wonder Girl and four other heroes who i had no clue of except for seeing them in the aforementioned preview insert. This also marked my very first purchase of a first issue of a comic.

A fine action packed issue with plenty of action but what is this at the end. Foreshadowing for the second issue.

Second issue?

It killed me waiting for this issue. Now I have to wait another month. At the age of 10 am I ready for this level of commitment?

Up till now I just picked what was cool looking. I never worried whether I was getting consecutive sequential issues.

My, then 7 year old, sister was though. She had a preety consistent run of Wonder Woman(and Richie Rich, Casper, even HotSuff she had a little run for.)

Well, if Robin was going to kick ass every month with the rest of the Titans, I was going to stick with him so next month I was back and picked up

number two, and then three, followed by four, actually made it up to five but missed six. Which made me angry because it was the payoff for the overall story of the first five but was back on board for seven and so on till at least issue fifteen.

However, as much as I loved this comic it was still just something to read a put in a corner. It was a fun read and I enjoyed comics. Later on as I made more money I bought more comics and even worked in a comic book store for five years and bought copious amounts of comics but the industry has grown and is beyond what it used to mean for me. That first issue of the Teen Titans that I bought for .50 cents back then they would expand the story to three or four issues today and charge between $2.99 and $3.99 per issue. That's when it becomes an investment and it means more to the company, the publisher, the artist, the writer and everybody else who gets paid off it.

I have 40 boxes upstairs and a little time on my hands. So what I'm going to do is dip back into the Ghost of Comics Past and review most of those comics whether it be Arak, Son of Thunder, Flash Gordon, Marvel Team Up with Spiderman, King Conan, Action, Detective, Warlord, Flash or any others. While those comics were on a rack aimed for kids and adults there is a great social element in the time in which they were written that will also be nice to revisit and some shock value. Aquababy was killed by Black Manta in an issue of Adventure Comics. How does the murder of a child slip by the comic code authority. There is racist and sexist overtones in many of the issues that came out in the 1970's and early '80's but there are many more positive issues that were dealt with also such as Cyborg, Victor Stone, of the Teen Titans mentoring disabled kids that actually helps him cope with being half-man, half-machine. Plus there is plenty of butt-kicking.

So stick around..

I have two things.....

....a little time and a room full comics from reading over the last 30-plus(almost 40) years.

My heroes growing up were the ones that were mostly on television the most in the early to mid-seventies: Batman, Superman, Superfriends, Tarzan, Spiderman, Fantastic Four and all the Filmation cartoons (with the Justice League of America, Aquaman, Teen Titans, Hawkman, Atom, and again Superman.) I knew no distinction between competing companies and there paritcular heroes. It never mattered.

My first exposure to comics was what I got for the car rides for vacation trips. They were just something given to me to keep quiet during a 17-hour car trip from Maryland to Disney Land. Needless to say this was a lot can happen to a comic on a 17- hour trip. I still have the comic but it doesn't look like this anymore. The coolest thing about this comic for a me is the particular hero behind the Flash, bottom left hand corner. Holy Smoke! Robin is all grown up. Almost like Batman but still his own hero. I loved that costume. I couldn't understand why there wasn't a comic just about him. I understood they were travelling to different earths but I knew nothing about their Earth-1, Earth-2 concepts, I was only five years old. I just wanted to see some punching out of the bad guys. It was probably over 25 years later before I got the conclusion to the story.

Other trips produced cool comics such as these-

and eventually other heroes from both companies. (You never knew whether it was going to rain on camping trips and my folks weren't taking chances.)

After that my comic collections grew from Sunday walks to the 7-11 with my Dad, sister, and our dog during football season to get the Washington Post. Yet it was never more than about reading that particular comic or comics and then setting them aside in a box or a corner of the room to be reread again at future dates. Even as I got older in my teens when I had more money and I bought more comics it was always just about the "Read" and not the "Collect".

To be continued.......