Aquaman & Deadman ( Sort Of ) Team-Up

Poor old Aquaman, he never gets any respect. Long seen by many as the most pointless member of the JLA, he never seemed to be anyone's favourite character. Even Family Guy has had a pop at him.
And, personally, compared to his direct opposite over at Marvel, he couldn't ever be as angry, edgy or interesting as Subby.
And before anyone asks, yeah, I saw the film. Meh.
But wait, there was a time in the Bronze Age when Aquaman was briefly cool.
Dick Giordano put together some great teams and comics when he moved from Charlton to DC, and The King Of The Seven Seas got himself Steve Skeates & Jim Aparo, plus previous artist Nick Cardy stayed on to contribute some of the most stunning covers of his career. If I was Aquaman, I'd be praising Neptune every day for a creative team like that.

From the start, Skeates, Aparo & Giordano tried to make Aquaman an experimental superhero book, playing around with form and content, and riffing on westerns, Mickey Spillane, Harlan Ellison, and that familiar trope of the '70's, social relevancy, amongst others. Each issue was a bit different, a bit out there, and for a while there Aquaman could go anywhere, both as a book and a character.
Here's one of the most fun ideas, a kind of jam session between the team and Neal Adams. According to Skeates, Giordano had suggested doing a back-up strip, which immediately meant that every spare writer at DC barraged the team with ideas for it.
Giordano didn't like any of the suggestions until Adams came up with the idea of tying the back-up strip into the main feature, so Skeates deliberately left all the plot threads dangling so that Neal had to finish them off with his now included Deadman back-up. All of which goes to prove you should never volunteer for anything, 'cos you'll always get more to do than you intended.
Everybody involved here contributes dynamite work, particularly Aparo, who's clearly having a blast. Apparently, Aquaman at the time was a book no one was reading, particularly the higher ups at DC, so these guys did more or less what they wanted, and this really feels like a free-form Charlton book like E-Man more than something from the towers of Superman.
Oh, and there's THAT in-joke of all in-jokes splash panel. You'll know it when you see it.

The Poster Plague

Here's the strip that led directly to the creation of one of my all-time favourite Bronze Age books, DC's humour / horror hybrid Plop!
Steve Skeates had tried to sell The Poster Plague to Warren with no success, while over at DC Sergio Aragones was trying to convince Joe Orlando to put more humour strips in House Of Mystery. 
Joe liked Steve's script, and so Sergio finally got a chance to show what he could do, and the piece slipped in, unannounced, into HOM #202.
Readers went nuts ( or Mad or Crazy if you prefer ) and The Poster Plague won the Shazam! award for best short story of 1972.
No fools they, Orlando and Carmine Infantino started thinking about a whole book of this sort of thing, as explained by Sergio in an interview with Dewey Hassell in Back Issue:
' Joe Orlando and I were sitting in a restaurant talking with Carmine Infantino. They wanted a magazine that was different, something about black humour.
Carmine came up with the name. We were talking about it and he said, 'What will we call it?'
And I said, 'We can call it anything, because if the magazine is good, it will stay.'
And he said, 'No, we can't call it, for instance ... PLOP!' ( possibly recalling the sound effect of 'KLOP!' from 'The Poster Plague' )
And I said 'Yes, we can.'
So here's how Klop! got it's start.

The Vigilante

Never could quite figure out The Vigilante. He was a Golden Age hero who'd come out of retirement, yep, got that, but was he an actual cowboy who'd travelled forward in time to the '70's, which would be cool, or just a modern day average wrangler who'd decided to fight crime for no apparent reason?
And what was with that lame ass bike he rode around on? Shouldn't somebody called The Vigilante be riding some big hog like a Harley or something?
Regardless, what was fun about him, apart from the fact his disguise consists solely of a kerchief, was that he went to great pains to remind us that he lived up to his name, as here where he lasso's a bad guy and hangs him off a balcony, while telling him, and us, that: I ain't no cop, so I don't have to mess with such nonsense as rights!

And the tough guy, proto-Punisher fun continues here, where he solves the drug issue not by gathering evidence or making a citizen's arrest, but by the simple expedient of going to the bad guy's office and beating the crap out of him. I'm sure you feel better, Vig, but that doesn't actually solve the problem, does it?