What If Every Character Who Ever Got a Showcase Try-Out Teamed Up?

CBR

By Brian Cronin

Published Dec 29, 2018

In their latest spotlight on bizarrely awesome comics, CSBG looks at a team-up of almost all of the characters who ever got Showcase try-outs!

In every installment of I Love Ya But You’re Strange I spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!

Today, we look at a comic book that somehow teamed up all SIXTY characters that were given their own try-out feature in Showcase!

As you all know, Showcase was a comic book series that DC Comics introduced in the mid-1950s that would, well, you know, showcase comic book characters in the hopes that perhaps they could be given their own comic book features. When it began, DC was a very diverse company. They still had superhero comics, of course, including Superman, which was pretty much THE most popular comic book series of the era. There was also Batman, Wonder Woman and Adventure Comics, but that was just a small sampling of the 30-40 titles that DC published at the time. Thus, when Showcase debuted, it had non-superhero characters in at first. However, the way that the book also worked was that it had multiple editors who were each responsible for their own try-out features. Mort Weisinger, Robert Kanigher and Julius Schwartz split the book between them. Weisinger and Kanigher opened the series with "normal" adventure characters (a fireman, a Navy Seal, that sort of thing) before Schwartz used the fourth issue to introduce a new version of the Flash and, well, let's just say that it went over very, very well. Soon, Showcase was introducing a number of superhero characters, including giving older characters like Aquaman their own features.

Okay, so this brings us to the 100th issue. Paul Levitz, longtime DC Comics writer and executive, is one of the biggest just flat out comic book FANS around and he thought it would be a blast to have a story in Showcase #100 that would team-up all of the characters who had a try-out feature and then graduated to their own series from the first 93 issue of the series (it was canceled at that point and had only recently come back from its cancellation with a Doom Patrol reboot and a Power Girl feature). Levitz ended up having to write it with Paul Kupperberg, while Joe Staton drew the whole thing.

However, they ended up expanding the approach to also feature a whole bunch of other characters.

The concept is that an evil alien is pulling the Earth out of its orbit and in the process, it is messing with time and space. The Justice League (four of which, Flash, Green Lantern, Atom and Aquaman, all got their own series out of Showcase), the Teen Titans (had a one-issue try-out before their series debuted) and Rip Hunter (who had his own series after his Showcase debut) all see the trouble with the Earth. They briefly show the time and space problems (we even see Fireman Farrell, from the first issue)...

Meanwhile, Lois Lane begins to investigate the origin of the attack on Earth. She is aided by the Challengers of the Unknown and the Creeper...

As most of the superheroes try to stop the attack on Earth from outer space, they meet the Space Ranger from the future...

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Time and space is all messed up, so Lois Lane runs into a big variety of weird characters from the pages of Showcase, including the Archie knock-off, Binky...