House of Secrets #85

House of Secrets #85 (On Sale: February 3, 1970) has a cover by Neal Adams.

Able is visited by brother Cain in this issue's wrapper story, which features some rather good Bill Draut artwork. The wrapper leads into our first real story, "People Who Live in Glass Houses..." by Len Wein and Don Heck. Some kids sneak into an abandoned house of mirrors only to find a mirror which casts no reflection. The kids hide when they hear someone coming. That someone turns out to be Mordecai Gaunt and he steps into the mirror and disappears.

The boys come out from hiding and are pulled into the mirror by Mordecai where they learn that through the power of a stone, the Rock of Ages, which Mordecai killed a Tibetan wizard to possess, Mordecai was able to enter the world of the mirror and gain immortality. His image in the mirror grows old, while he remains young. One of the boys snatch the stone away from Mordecia and he chases the kids out of the mirror. Once in the real world, the kid throws the stone at the mirror, shattering it and the fixed image of Mordecai it now reflects.

The next story is the classic "Reggie Rabbit, Heathcliffe Hog, Archibald Aardvark, J. Benson Babboon and Bertram, the Dancing Frog" by Len Wein and Ralph Reese. This is only two pages, but we get some great funny animal artwork and some great Wally Wood-inspired science-fiction work.

This is Ralph Reese's first work for DC where he would draw almost a dozen stories, all for the mystery/horror books. Ralph Reese began his career at the age of 16 as Wally Wood's assistant. His first solo comic work was for the short-lived but much loved Web of Horror black and white magazine. He also did a number of strips for National Lampoon, including The One Year Affair. He worked at Neal Adams' Continuity Associates between 1972 and 1977 and did a lot of work inking penciler Larry Hama.

In the 1980s Reese worked on the Blade Runner adaptation and an number of the Bantam Books "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. In the 1990s he pulled a stint on the Flash Gordon newspaper strip and did considerable work for Valiant Comics on Magnus Robot Fighter. Reese's last work for DC was in 2009 on The House of Mystery.

The real gem of this issue though is "Second Choice" by Gerry Conway, Gil Kane and Neal Adams. It combines beautiful artwork with a really great story. Abel reads this story from the biographical section of the library in the House of Secrets. It is the tale of Henry Landsbury, born in 989, the son of a scholar, but who for years has lived in a village under the thumb of a dark sorcerer, a masked monster in possession of the Star Ruby, which gives him ultimate power over the people of the land. We meet young Henry the day he tries to stand up to the sorcerer in the streets, only to feel the harsh sting of an enchanted lash. Henry's mother rushes to his side and warns Henry to be less like his father, who died fourteen years ago when he too was fed up living under the sorcerer's rule and tried to do something about it.

As fate would have it that evening Henry overhears a conversation in the local tavern of a white wizard named Glarn who resides at Stonehenge. Henry decides that night to travel to Stonehenge and plead the case of his village to the wizard Glarn. When he gets there Glarn it appears has been waiting for Henry to arrive and asks Henry for a token from his home village that Glarn may use as a focal point for an incantation. He gives Glarn a talisman given to him by his father before he foolishly ventured to the wizard's castle.

With that Glarn opens a gate between Stonehenge and Henry's village and calls forth the black wizard into battle, saying that now that he has a clue to his true nature he will prevail. And battle they do, though finally, in the end, Glarn prevails, the dark wizard is destroyed and Henry returns to his village to live out the rest of his life in peace.

But, Abel finds the ending of the tale unsatisfying, that Henry was more a spectator than a participant in the single most adventurous happening in his life. Abel wonders what would have happened if Henry had not heard of Glarn and had instead yielded to his "second choice," and followed his father's path, sword in hand.

As Henry nears the wizard's castle he is set upon by a flying beast and though shear will alone slays the creature. He is then transported by a dissolution spell to the black wizard's castle, where the wizard taunts him and opens up a pit of hell in front of him. Standing tall with sword in hand, Henry begs the wizard to fight him, but the wizard's spell does away with Henry's sword, leaving him without weapon. Still Henry marches forward saying he will take him on barehanded for killing his father. The wizard laughs at Henry and pulls off his hood just as Henry lands a massive blow to his face, knocking the wizard off balance and back into the hell pit, his face that of Henry's own father.

And now Henry realizes that his father must have defeated the wizard all those years ago. And then he sees the Star Ruby, "The supreme power--the supreme glory...A tempting, near over-powering prize--To be supreme, to own the world...must have been too temping for a man such as my father, a glory seeker... a man like my father... a man like me!"

This story was reprinted in Deadman #2 and Deadman #3. The entire issue was reprinted in Showcase Presents: The House of Secrets Vol. 1 TPB.

Edited by Dick Giordano.

House of Secrets #84

House of Secrets #84 (On Sale: December 2, 1969) has a cover by Neal Adams.

The book begins and ends with a nice framing sequence drawn by Bill Draut. The first tale is "If I Had But World Enough and Time" by Len Wein, Dick Dillin and Mike Peppe, a tale of suburbia and the perils and ultimate escape that can be found in watching a lot of television.

That is followed by "Double or Nothing" by Marv Wolfman and Sid Greene. This is a tale about Clifford King who runs a crooked gambling room and learns that even crooked games are no match for a man with the right "system."

Next is "The Unbelievable! The Unexplained" by Steve Skeates, Jack Sparling and Jack Abel. Ruth has a plan to steal her uncle's estate by having him committed and placed into a nursing home. Who can blame her, the old guy was catatonic, staring off into space as if he had seen something too horrible to accept. Shortly after moving in to her uncle's home and shortly after he dies in the nursing home, Ruth is busy looking for the deed to the home when she finds a mysterious key. Once in her had the key begins to throb and Ruth is forced to go where the key demands, in this case to an old house in the fog. There she opens a door and sees something, something beyond description that drives her mad. Somehow she makes it back to the estate, but she is in a catatonic state much like her uncle. Well, ,she coveted everything he had, and she got what she coveted. I liked the way that Skeates was able to immerse Abel into the story on this one.

The last story in the book is our cover-story, "If I Should Die Before I Wake..." by Len Wein and Jack Sparling, the story of Alan Fry, a man who dares not sleep for when he does he is attacked by Morlon in the land of Somnia. Fry tries to find refuge at a psychiatrist's office, but Morlon finds him even there. The entire contents were reprinted in Showcase Presents: The House of Secrets Vol. 1 TPB.

Edited by Murray Boltinoff.

Teen Titans #20

Teen Titans #20 (On Sale: January 23, 1969) has a cover by Nick Cardy.

"Titans Fit the Battle of Jericho" is written and penciled by Neal Adams and inked by Nick Cardy, but that description doesn't even come close to explaining the real pedigree of this tale.

Len Wein and Marv Wolfman turned in a story to editor Dick Giordano which would have introduced a black super-hero by the name of Jericho, but this story was never published. The character was changed to Caucasian and renamed as Joshua. Although the cover still bears the original title: "The Titans Fit the Battle of Jericho."

In The Titans Companion by Glen Cadigan, Marv Wolfman reflects on the story: "The second Teen Titans was a story that no one has ever seen printed. It was a story that Len Wein and I co-wrote that was originally intended for Teen Titans #20. It was 'The Titans Fit the Battle of Jericho'...

"We met with Dick Giordano, and told him our idea of a gang, a black super-hero, and a fairly straightforward type of story, closer to what we were seeing in Spider-Man, but with the Teen Titans. We came up with a black character because DC didn't have any at the time...we grew up with black kids in school. Living in New York, all racers, all creeds, everybody was in our classes, so it was never a matter of 'Why not put a black character in?' it's "Why isn't there one?' I mean, like, 'Duh!' So we just wanted to do that.

"Dick liked the story concept, but knew that there could be some problems because of the time period, and brought us into Irwin Donenfeld's...Irwin said he really wanted us to try to do this, try to make it a multi-parter -- which, in itself, was incredibly exciting -- to really be powerful and very street and very authentic, and try to get down and dirty, get a lit grittier...

"A couple of weeks later we came back, and at that point Irwin had left and there was a new person in charge. Whatever the reasons were, because there are so many differences of opinion on this, the story got dropped...It was all drawn, buy the way. Nick Cardy did one of the greatest jobs I had ever seen him do.

"When it was killed, Dick was in a lot of trouble because of deadlines. Neal Adams took a lot of the pages, added a bunch of new pages and rewrote a story around it; a brand-new story, using Jericho, but no longer black. If you look at the cover, which had already been sent to the printer, all they could do was throw a blue tone over it and all the black characters were put into the background because of that, but they were obviously black on the cover and there were none in the comic anymore...

"At any rate, Neal redrew the story using as many of Nick Cardy's pages as he could. He did it, I think, over a weekend with Nick inking simultaneously. I plotted, secretly, the second chapter which Neal followed and made changes along the way, then he wound up the story on his own...Len and I didn't get work for almost two years from DC."

In Adams' tale, a mysterious costumed crime fighter called Joshua invades Titan Lair and enlists the Teen Titans' aid in stopping a confrontation between police and teenage protesters. All involved are unaware that the protesters are being backed by organized crime figures, who in turn are pawns of the alien invaders from Dimension X. The Titans, together with Joshua and his brother, the leader of the protesters, halt the aliens' scheme to release the Meroul Being, a monstrous giant creature, on Earth, but both the aliens and their criminal underlings continue to plot the team's downfall. Reprinted in Best of DC #18 and Showcase Presents: Teen Titans Vol. 2 TPB.

Edited by Dick Giordano.