their superpowers generally took the place of magic as a modus operandi in their stories. Schwartz, a lifelong science fiction fan, was the inspiration for the re-imagined Green Lanternhe Golden Age character, railroad engineer Alan Scott, possessed a ring powered by a magical lantern, but his Silver Age replacement, test pilot Hal Jordan, had a ring powered by an alien battery and created by an intergalactic police force.
In the mid-1960s, DC established that characters appearing in comics published prior to the Silver Age lived on a parallel Earth the company dubbed Earth-Two. Characters introduced in the Silver Age and onward lived on Earth-One. It was established that the two realities were separated by a vibrational field that could be crossed, should a storyline involve superheroes from different worlds teaming up.
Although the Flash is generally regarded as the first superhero of the Silver Age, the introduction of the Martian Manhunter in Detective Comics #225 predates Showcase #4 by almost a year, and some historians consider this character the first Silver Age superhero. However, comics historian Craig Shutt, author of the Comics Buyer’s Guide column “Ask Mister Silver Age”, disagrees. Shutt notes that when the Martian Manhunter debuted, he was a detective who used his alien abilities to solve crimes. Although he did ultimately become a charter member of the Justice League of America, originally he was just a “quirky detective”, like other contemporaneous DC characters who were “TV detectives, Indian detectives, supernatural detectives, [and] animal detectives.” Schutt feels the Martian Manhunter only became a superhero in Detective Comics #273 (Nov. 1959), when he received a secret identity and other superhero accoutrements.
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