Showcase #6
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeShowcase #6 marks the debut of the Challengers of the Unknown — Ace Morgan, Prof Haley, Rocky Davis, and Red Ryan — making it the first appearance of a Silver Age super-team and, by most accounts, the first wholly original concept to emerge from DC's celebrated try-out anthology. The team's defining premise — four specialists who survive a plane crash and dedicate their 'borrowed time' to confronting the unknown — introduced an existential undertone to adventure comics that was strikingly novel for 1957, and it arrived just two issues after Barry Allen's Flash had signaled the Silver Age's beginning. Many historians argue that Kirby later reworked the concept's core DNA with Stan Lee to produce the Fantastic Four in 1961, giving this issue an outsized influence on the entire Marvel Age that followed.
In "The Secrets of the Sorcerer's Box! [Chapter 1]," Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, and Dave Wood launch a thrilling mystery with Kirby’s dynamic art and inks bringing to life a surreal, high-stakes adventure. The Challengers face a bizarre new threat — a spinning tube that weaves city-entangling ribbons — only to uncover a hidden dial and a dangerous truth behind the box’s fourth chamber. With Kirby’s cover art capturing the eerie grandeur of the sorcerer’s device, this 1957 Showcase #6 is a standout early showcase of the creative team’s inventive storytelling.
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The issue appeared on newsstands in late 1956 with a cover date of January/February 1957, edited by Jack Schiff, and ran without any writer credits. Scholars credit Jack Kirby as the driving creative force — Kirby is believed to have brought the team concept to DC himself — but the scripting question remains genuinely unsettled: Kirby historian and comics journalist Mark Evanier suspects the first issue was scripted primarily by Kirby and Joe Simon, while Dave Wood is cited as the writer in DC's own Archive edition credits, and the Comics Journal identified a Kirby-and-Dave-Wood collaboration. Inking credits are similarly contested: the DC Archive lists Marvin Stein, but Stein himself denied the assignment in conversations with researcher Greg Theakston, and Evanier and Nick Caputo both note evidence that Kirby may have inked some pages himself.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance and origin of the Challengers of the Unknown — Ace Morgan (jet pilot and war hero), Prof Haley (master skin diver), Rocky Davis (Olympic wrestling champion), and Red Ryan (circus daredevil and mountaineer).
- First appearance and death of villain Morelian, described in-story as a descendant of Merlin, who hires the Challengers to open a dangerous alchemist's box and is ultimately killed when he claims its fourth chamber for himself.
- The issue is structured as four connected chapters — 'The Secret of the Sorcerer's Box!', 'Dragon Seed!', 'The Freezing Sun!', and 'The Whirling Weaver!' — each chapter releasing a different supernatural menace from the box.
- Cover pencils and interior art are by Jack Kirby; the story ran entirely uncredited on the original publication.
- The issue also contains two single-page humor comic strips — 'Shorty' and 'Moolah the Mystic' — both by Henry Boltinoff, as well as a fact page illustrated by Mort Drucker.
- Considered the first Silver Age hero team and the first original-concept series to debut in Showcase, DC's dedicated try-out title (Showcase #4 had debuted Barry Allen's Flash only two issues earlier).
- The origin story has been reprinted in numerous DC collections including Secret Origins #1 (1961), The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told, Challengers of the Unknown Archives Vol. 1 (2003), Showcase Presents Challengers of the Unknown Vol. 1 (2006), and Challengers of the Unknown by Jack Kirby (2012/2017).
- The issue's core concept — powerless adventurers living on 'borrowed time' after a near-fatal crash — is widely cited as a direct forerunner to the Fantastic Four (1961), which Kirby co-created with Stan Lee at Marvel.
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The third menace is a tube that releases a whirling weaver that spins ribbons that snarl entire cities. The Challengers pursue, then discover a dial on the weaver's tube and slow it to a halt. Returning to the island, they find Morelian has opened the fourth chamber for his own selfish reasons. He got a diamond ring of immortality; he'll live forever. Except the inscription on the box is vague, "contained in me, find immortality". Morelian flies off, but his plane stalls and crashes, killing himself and destroying the box. The box granted immortality, but the ring was certain death.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).
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