I love digging into back-issue bins for the old anthologies nobody talks about anymore. The ones that crammed eight or nine features into a single issue and then got boxed up once the cover character wasn't popular anymore.
One of those issues just happened to give DC two of its biggest heroes on the same day.
More Fun Comics #73 carries a cover date of November 1941, and the Grand Comics Database dates the actual newsstand release as September 19th, 1941, working from the U.S. Copyright Office filing. GoCollect lists November 10th with no sourcing at all. A sourced date beats an unsourced one, so September 1941 is the safe call. The 19th is GCD's call, and it's the best one I could find.
That means that today marks 85 years (give or take a few weeks)!
Aquaman debuted in that issue, as did Green Arrow, and Speedy. Three characters that are still in print today, still getting movies and TV shows, and all three were introduced in the same comic.
What may surprise you (I know it did me) is that none of them got the cover!
The cover went to Doctor Fate, who was the headliner at the time. Green Arrow didn't make it onto the cover until issue #77. The rest of the book was Johnny Quick, the Spectre, Radio Squad and Clip Carson, per the DC Database rundown. Nobody buying it off the rack for a dime had any idea what they were holding.
Collectors figured it out eventually. The Mile High copy, graded 9.4 and the highest in existence, sold for $460,127.65 through ComicConnect in September 2025.
The Aquaman in that issue is the son of a famous undersea explorer, a human one, who found the ruins of Atlantis and went digging through what was left. Per Wikipedia's account of the original story, he narrates it himself: "From the books and records, he learned ways of teaching me to live under the ocean, drawing oxygen from the water and using all the power of the sea to make me wonderfully strong and swift."
No Atlanna. No Tom Curry. No throne. No kingdom (and nobody to be king of). He wasn't even named Arthur!
The half-Atlantean lighthouse-keeper's-son version, the one that made Jason Momoa's whole movie possible, didn't show up until the Silver Age, roughly eighteen years later.
His 1941 job was the war. Those early stories have him sinking Nazi U-boats and picking off Axis crews, then moving on to pirates once the war ended. His longest-running enemy for years was Black Jack, a modern-day pirate.
Mort Weisinger wrote the first story and Paul Norris drew it, but open a modern Aquaman comic and the legal line reads "created by Paul Norris" with NO Weisinger. Mark Evanier addressed it in his obituary for Norris: "The absence of Weisinger's name is apparently a legal problem on DC's end, not a case of Norris squeezing out his former collaborator." The movies credit both men, so at least he's getting credit there. Funny that the films are more accurate than the comics for a change...
Weisinger wrote the Green Arrow story too, with George Papp on art, and Wikipedia's history of the character lists the sources: Robin Hood, the 1940 movie serial The Green Archer adapted from Edgar Wallace, and Batman. He "retooled the concept into a superhero archer with obvious Batman influences."
The borrowings run to a sidekick, an Arrowcar, an Arrow-Plane, an Arrow-Cave for a headquarters, a wealthy-playboy alter ego, an Arrow-Signal in the sky, and a clown-like arch foe named Bull's Eye. It's as if somebody at DC looked at Detective Comics and just typed "arrow" in front of everything!
The debut story is a murder mystery, and it's kind of rough. A killer picks off victims whose names line up with how they die. Speedy is in it and spends the story building a ladder. Oliver Queen isn't named once. The Arrowplane makes an appearance, but is described as a car…
That version of the Green Arrow lasted almost thirty years. The version most of us picture didn't arrive until 1969, when Neal Adams gave him the Van Dyke and a new costume. In 1970, Dennis O'Neil took away his fortune and turned him into an argumentative left-wing loudmouth who fought with Hal Jordan about politics. Every screen that Oliver Queen has appeared on since, Arrow included, descends from that rebuild.
Speedy has been rewritten too. Brave Bow the Navajo medicine chief, the forest-ranger father who died in a fire, the archery training in the desert, all of it is backfill from the Silver Age.
And More Fun Comics itself started in 1935 as New Fun, the first American comic book to run nothing but original material. It's where Siegel and Shuster published before Superman. The superhero features all moved to Adventure Comics with issue #108 in 1946.
Which 1941 detail surprised you more, the Arrow-Cave or Aquaman having a human dad who just read the manual? If you've actually read #73, tell me about the Doctor Fate story!
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