When I was a kid, the first team comic I ever read was an issue of Justice League of America in which the heroes fought a magical enemy named the Satin Satan. Cheeeeeesy, I know. My favorite characters among the heroes, though, were those I'd never heard of before. Firestorm and Red Tornado fascinated, but my favorite aspect of the book was the team's magician -- Zatanna. Actually it was her backwards spells I enjoyed the most. It brought a challenge to the reading, and I loved the notion of sounding out those backwards words.
As my fascination with super-hero comics grew, so did my curiosity with their history. DC's "Earth-2" heroes -- figures from the Golden Age -- were particular favorites, and I sought out Silver Age reprints (usually in digest form) as well. After a few years, I learned of Zatanna's earliest appearances, and of her quest for her father, which unfolded in a number of DC titles. I never laid eyes on those stories until now, and it was a real treat to revisit a simpler age of comics storytelling, full of wondrous ideas and colorful characters.
A young stage magician who inherited true sorcerous powers from her father sets out to find her long-missing dad, and she recruits help from the world's greatest heroes along the way. Zatanna introduces herself to Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the Atom, Green Lantern and the Elongated Man, and even falls victim to one of the Batman's foes as well. Each step in her other-dimensional journey seems to end in failure, but ultimately, each leads her closer to the answers she seeks as well. Her quest culminates in an adventure that she cannot possibly handle alone, so she summons all the champions she's encountered so far to her side.
If this book does anything, it spotlights the amazing skill of DC's Silver Age artists, especially Murphy Anderson and the late Gil Kane. They manage to achieve a nice balance between the young Zatanna's sex appeal -- they knew what they were aiming for when the costume was designed -- and her innocence. Cover artist Brian Bolland emphasizes the former with his cover, but there's also a wide-eyed, girlish quality to the character to be found in the interior artwork as well.
The same can be found in the various scripts, but what really comes out in Zatanna's character is her determination and confidence. Zatanna is genuinely charming, and it's easy to see how the heroes would so quickly jump at the chance to help her.
The plotting is far from the more sophisticated storytelling we expect from comics today, but it still offers up a good deal of fun and imagination. The only real weak link in the chain is the Batman and Robin story, which has no real connection to Zatanna (one is retconned in with the final Justice League chapter of the quest). The storytelling is thoroughly accessible; Fox ensured that readers who might have missed one of Zatanna's prior appearances were up on her backstory. The only story in this volume that Fox didn't write, in fact, is the origin story that serves as this book's epilogue. It's unfortunate that there was no Silver Age material that could have taken the place of this later piece, as it doesn't really fit with the rest of the book that well.
