Justice League of America

☦️👌Synopsis for ”The Creature in the Velvet Cage!” See story arc
While visiting the Justice Society on Earth-Two, the Justice League heroes learn the untold story of why the Sandman years ago returned to his original crimefighting costume. An experimental weapon in his arsenal had accidentally exploded, transforming his boy partner, Sandy, into a gigantic monster. Overcome with guilt, Sandman had destroyed his purple and gold costume, which had constantly reminded him of Sandy’s plight. Imprisoning the monstrous boy in a chamber which held him unconscious, he had returned to action in his old gas-mask and double-breasted suit. Now, however, the Sandy-creature has escaped his cage, and the two teams combine to recapture him. He evades Superman, Hourman, and Elongated Man at an outdoor wedding, tangles with Batman, the Flash, and the Earth-Two Wonder Woman at a ball game, and finally battles Green Lantern and Sandman himself at a beach. The eight heroes unite to subdue him at last, only to learn that he had been acting to prevent a series of earth tremors at the sites of their battles. Having only now regained his lost power of speech, ”Sandy” reveals that the menacing attitude he had evinced when first changed to monstrous form had only been a temporary side-effect, and a chagrined Sandman realizes that he had kept his partner imprisoned for years for no reason.
Appearing in ”The Creature in the Velvet Cage!”
Featured Characters:
* Justice League of America
* Batman
* Elongated Man
* Green Lantern
* Superman
Supporting Characters:
* Justice Society of America
* The Flash
* Hourman
* The Sandman/Wesley Dodds (Flashback and main story)
* Wonder Woman
Antagonists:
* Horned Owl Gang (Single appearance)
* Sandy, the Golden Boy (Flashback and main story)
Other Characters:
* Amazons (Mentioned only)
* Wonder Woman (Earth-One) (Mentioned only)
Locations:
* Earth-Two
* York City
* Gladstone Park
* Machismo Beach
* Earth-One (Mentioned only)
* Krypton (Mentioned only)
Items:
* Green Lantern Ring
* Lasso of Truth
* Sandman’s Gas Gun
* Wirepoon (Flashback only)
* Miraclo (Mentioned only)
Vehicles:
* The Sand-Car

Synopsis for ”The Case of the Patriotic Crimes”
This story is reprinted from All-Star Comics #41.
The Wizard, after escaping from jail, steals the Liberty Train without a trace. He dreams of making crime triumphant on earth, and has formed a new Injustice Society, recruiting the Fiddler, the Huntress, the Icicle, the Sportsmaster, and the Harlequin. Worse yet, using the Wizard’s ”Mind Eraser” machine, they have six of the JSA members in their underground lair, brainwashed, working as their servants!
In Gotham, the Black Canary, investigating the Liberty Train theft, tries to call an emergency meeting of the Justice Society, but finds their headquarters empty. She discovers the knocked out Harlequin under a table. Harlequin reveals that the JSA has been abducted (mostly by the Sportsmaster, using a lacrosse ball/concussion grenade), and she wants to doublecross the ISW and team up with Black Canary to stop the Wizard’s gang. However unknown to her, the Injustice Society has already learned of her duplicity, and sent the Icicle back to JSA HQ, where he ambushes, freezes, and abducts them both. Icicle brings the girl outlaws back to the ISW’s underground Gotham lair, in an abandoned coal mine. Now the ISW members plan to hold a contest to determine which of them will be the leader, with the one who commits the greatest robbery to be the winner. They plan the thefts of some famous American patriotic objects: the Freedom Bell, Plymouth Rock, Old Ironsides, and the Washington Monument. Most of the villains depart to get started on those crimes, while the Wizard, observing from a secret control room, remains behind.
Left unhypnotized and seemingly unobserved, the girls get free, and the Harlequin uses her special spectacles to hypnotize the brainwashed Justice Society members, and orders them to remember who they are. The revived JSA heroes set off in to prevent the robberies of the American treasures. Unfortunately, the Harlequin’s hypnosis is only temporary, good for only an unknown length of time, and the heroes can be returned to a mindless state at any time, with the snap of anyone’s fingers. Knowing this fact, the Wizard sets off to warn the other members of the Injustice Society.

Synopsis for ”The Cavern of Deadly Spheres!”
This story is reprinted from Justice League of America #16.
A new criminal named the Maestro has been pulling off crimes by arming his hired thugs with musical instruments that compel all in ear-shot to uncontrollably dance. After each member of the Justice League successfully stop each heist, they decide to take their fight directly to the Maestro himself.
(Maestro actually lays an elaborate scheme of deception and science to confound the heroes. He actually didn’t control them with music, but used much higher frequencies in the cosmic ray range to control them. Also, he mentions that there was Kryptonite in the instruments where Superman was weak and dancing. He tells them when the music stopped he turned off the cosmic ray control device.)
Tracking the Maestro to his hidden cave headquarters, all of the JLA members are trapped in indestructible bubbles (ex. Superman’s is made out of Green Kryptonite). However, it is revealed that this tale came from a fan of the Justice League that challenged himself with imagining how the Justice League might be defeated.
The Justice League answers the challenge and imagines how they might counter their fan’s scenario. In the end the Atom finds the weakness in the imaginary villain, and they anticipate that Maestro might have access to Superman’s weakness. (As they begin to try and find a flaw in the imaginary story, Atom remembers that he did not hear music when he had the compulsion to dance. This is exactly true as the sound waves would be much too large of wave length for his tiny little ears to hear them. Of course, cosmic rays can’t control your mind and make you dance, but it makes a nice story, and very much a detective style story, and it reveals clever writing. With that being said, the JLA believes they will come up with a plan to trap Maestro.)So, in the imaginary tale, the team coats Superman in lead in advance allowing him limited protection to the Kryptonite bubble. While the Maestro is busy gloating over his victory, Superman is able to break free and save the others, and they all easily defeat the Maestro and turn him over to the police.
Once the solution is reached Snapper Carr is tasked with logging the story and sending the Justice League’s fan word of how his favorite heroes could even foil his perfect ”plan.”
Appearing in ”The Cavern of Deadly Spheres!”
Featured Characters:
* Justice League of America
* Aquaman
* The Atom
* Batman
* The Flash
* Green Arrow
* Green Lantern
* Martian Manhunter
* Superman
* Wonder Woman
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Justice_League_of_America_Vol_1_113

Oct 1974

DC Comics

113

1

October

1974

Newsstand

15

United States

$0.60

Bronze Age

Magazine

2018-07-02 22:17:37

100 pages

When a Hero Stumbles: The Most Tragic JLA/JSA Team-Up!
ON JULY 10, 2015 BY MARK PERIGARDIN COMICS

Justice League of America No. 113: 100 pages of Super-Spectacular fun.
While the annual Justice League of America/Justice Society of America team-ups were the highlight of many a summer for comic book lovers, they did follow more or less a formula:
A crisis is revealed – usually threatening the existence of one or both worlds – and our heroes gather, split off into smaller teams, regroup for a final battle, vanquish the foes, right the wronged and agree to meet same time next year with a hearty wink and a wave.
Shake, lather, rinse, repeat.
That’s not a knock. There were so many heroes on both teams to choose from, and DC’s stable of writers, for the most part, were so inventive, the stories never got stale.
During his tenure as writer for “Justice League of America,” Len Wein pushed it further, resurrecting such Golden Age greats as the Seven Soldiers of Victory and the Freedom Fighters.

What a fun splash page: Dick Dillin at his best.
One side-effect of these mob stories: Suddenly it seemed as if the Justice League and the Justice Society couldn’t carry their own team-ups anymore. There had to be even more heroes in the mix.
But a publishing quirk in 1974 would interrupt that dynamic, briefly, and result in one of the most heartbreaking stories in the Justice League’s and the Justice Society’s combined histories.
As Len Wein notes in his introduction to “Crisis on Multiple Earths Volume 3,” by the time it came around for him to pen what would be his third and last JLA/JSA team-up, DC had switched over many of its books to “100-Page Super-Spectaculars.”
For 60 cents – granted, a huge sum back then for certain kids (me) – you got a 20-page original story, plus approximately 80 pages of reprints and back-up features, give or take a few ad pages.
For a generation of JSA-lovers born in the 1960s who had been living off the annual team-ups, the “Justice League” spectaculars were glorious treasures – reprinting actual Justice Society adventures not seen in decades. Remember, this was a time when no one had even thought of trade paperback collections, much less hard-cover archives. These issues truly were spectacular.
But as Wein noted, with this format, “Justice League” was being published bi-monthly in 1974 – and a two-part story would eat up a third of the “Justice League” stories for the year.
For you and me, this isn’t a problem, but Wein and DC, it resulted in the first and only done-in-one team-up, “The Creature in the Velvet Cage,” in “Justice League of America No. 113,” cover-date September-October 1974.
Across more than a decade of annual team-ups, the Justice Society had remained pretty much the same – gaining two members (Robin and Red Tornado) and losing two members (Black Canary and Red Tornado). But here was an adventure that actually pulled back the curtain on the private life of one of its founding members with devastating effect.
Wein was curious, wondering why Sandman gave up his garish yellow and purple togs for his original trench coat and gas mask.
Here, after the combined might of the Justice League (Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and Elongated Man) and the Justice Society (Wonder Woman, the Flash, Sandman and Hourman) defeat the Horned Owl Gang on Earth 2, an alarm goes off. Sandman takes off in a panic. The rest of the heroes follow, to Sandman’s secret lair, where they find a glass cell destroyed – its occupant having escaped.

True confession time as Sandman reveals the secret of the Velvet Cage.
Sandman confesses: The monster he caged, the behemoth now on the loose, is his own ward and partner Sandy Hawkins, the Golden Boy.
Years earlier, they had been testing an experimental weapon – “a silicoid gun” – when the weapon malfunctioned and transformed Sandy into a sand-based monster.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I test an experimental weapon, I like put some distance between the two of us – a lead shield, a sand dune, maybe even another state. Sandy was apparently staring down the barrel so closely, he could read the registration.
Sandman was able to subdue Sandy and imprisoned him in a special cell in which gases left him pretty much comatose. Out of guilt, he abandoned his garish duds and returned to his Golden Age apparel.
Our heroes split into smaller teams to recapture Sand. There’s a bit of unexpected comedy in these side-quests, perhaps to balance out – or to punctuate – the somber nature of the ending. A bride throws pies at Sandy; the muscleheads at “Machismo Beach” try to impress their girls by jumping Sandy and get tossed aside like dirt. Come to think of it, that bit might have been a riff on those Charles Atlas ads that were so ubiquitous in comics then. Here the bully is tossed aside by sand itself.
Sandy hasn’t been terrorizing strangers for the fun of it – he sensed a disturbance in the fault lines across the city and was trying to stop an earthquake that would cause catastrophic damage.

Super-sewing is one of Superman’s least-known powers.
And here we get a fun bit of super-heroics you’d only find in pre-1980s comics or “Avengers” films: Superman borrows Wonder Woman’s golden lasso and sews up the fault line with his super-strength!
The crisis averted, we get our kicker and it is brutal: Sand reveals he came to his senses shortly after being transformed – but the gases in the cage prevented him from telling Sandman.

You know you’re upset when you cover your masked face with your hands.
Wracked with guilt, Sandman stands alone, trying to grasp all the years he cost his ward.
There’s no happy ending, either, just a hopeful one, as Wonder Woman offers to call upon Amazonian technology to cure Sandy. But it’s clear Sandman will carry this failure with him the rest of his life.
“The Creature in the Velvet Cage” remains a powerful story, and I would argue the most influential 1970s Justice Society story to such modern-day writers as James Robinson and Geoff Johns. This story proved the Justice Society was more than capes and cowls who happened to resemble the Earth 1 heroes. They had their own histories, stories, foibles and flaws.
Sandy would regain his mortal form, but the repercussions of this story would haunt him and the team for years in the “JSA” title.

https://markperigard.com/2015/07/10/when-a-hero-stumbles-the-most-tragic-jlajsa-team-up/

(Last pic frame)How does one restore a soul, or give resurrection life to a dead soul? For those with a conscience like Wesley Dodds, the grief of such actions could be unbearable. Fortunately, it is a comic book, and not real life, but we do have things just as bad in the real world. It was great writing on the part of Len Wein, and a twist to cause you to think in the end. The story does end with a very heart twinging moment and a time to ponder as does Batman.

(Eph 2:1-7, NASB) And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

(Heb 4:12, NASB) For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

(Matt 10:28, NASB) Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.

(Matt 16:25-27, NASB) For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and WILL THEN REPAY EVERY MAN ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.

(Rom 7:21-8:11, NASB) I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin.
Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you

~$20.00

2025-08-02

2018-07-02 22:17:37