STEEL #6 – The Tom Brevoort Experience
As before, here’s another chunk of CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE #2, the home-printed collection of material intended for print but spiked by the DC Implosion, created to secure copyright and trademark on the material.
This time out, we’re looking at material intended to comprise STEEL: THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN #6, written and created by Gerry Conway and illustrated by Don Heck. STEEL was one of a number of new characters/series that Conway had conceived of during this time. Others included FIRESTORM, which like STEEL ran for 5 issues, and VIXEN, which never released a single issue.
STEEL was something of an odd duck series, a wild combination of the Six Million Dollar Man, a DC war title, and Captain America. It was set entirely during World War II and featured a hero who had been put back together as a cyborg and who ran around in a patriotic-themed metal costume. It’s release was ill-timed as things turned out. DC was having a difficult time getting retailers to stock and display new titles, and so much of what they launched during the mid- to late 1970s failed and folded within a couple of issues. STEEL was no exception.
A number of years later, Roy Thomas would incorporate some of the pages from STEEL #6 into two issues of his own wartime series, ALL-STAR SQUADRON #8 and #9, though they were somewhat rescripted and redrawn for that appearance. But the entire story has never been published in its original form.
Don Heck is an underappreciated artist in the history of comics, but he does some very nice work here. Heck wasn’t always the most comfortable doing super hero work, in particular in the jack Kirby-derived manner of Marvel. But he was excellent when it came to genre pieces: westerns, romance, war features, etc. STEEL gave him the opportunity to illustrate a lot of period material, which was in his wheelhouse.
