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June 15, 2005
Crazy Retro Cool: Strangest Sports Stories Ever Told
I picked up two DC Specials that I really loved as a kid: Strangest Sports Stories Ever Told. One of DC's best qualities in the 60s and 70s were there anthology titles covering humor, horror, romance, westerns, and war. I never forgot these two collections, DC Special #7 from June 1970 and DC Special #9 from Dec. 1970. The stories are crazy, combining sports with crazy SF themes. One of them features a team of baseball players from another planet that challenge the New York team after they win the World Series. The trick: the aliens are invisible but still wear baseball uniforms! The catch: the aliens want to win the NY team’s championship flag which holds a “proto-globe” device vital to their survival. They can’t touch it or take it by force (thru a hokey plot device) so they play baseball. It’s wacky fun, and if you like baseball and gorillas there’s a story here for you. Gorillas evolve and play baseball but it’s only the first step to conquering humanity. There are stories covering many types of sports, including golf (on Mars), boxing (fighting an alien), football (berries transform a weakling into a quarterback), and racing (a 1890s horseless carriage travels thru time and wins the Indy 500).
While the stories may be outrageous, what carries the reader thru them is the artwork by Carmine Infantino. Infantino was great at drawing comics in a variety of genres; here he combines his best science-fiction style (from Adam Strange) with the modern era of the 1960s. There are no capes, no super heroes here. Sports stories were pretty difficult to convey in comics until Carmine Infantino came up with some creative ways to solve the problem. His technique was to use silhouettes inside the captions, explaining something about a particular sports move. He also used it to show crowd reactions or explain a pseudo-scientific concept. While Infantino used similar techniques in other comics, I think its greatest impact was in the sports genre. He was the master at clear storytelling; using hands on captions in the Flash to point out specific plot points and making it look exciting. Today’s artists would do well to study this man’s work.
If you are a Strange Sports Stories expert, click on the Comment link below this post and tell me: Where did these stories originally appear? And were these the only two DC Special collections?
Comments
Apparently the sports stories were in Brave and Bold during the 60s. Only 2 DC Specials, but there was another series later.
There is a thread on this subject over at CBR:
http://forums.comicbookresources.com/archive/index.php/t-1494.html
Posted by: Brother Voodoo | June 15, 2005 9:58 AM
