What Superheroes Were Doing During Super Bowl 1
The first Super Bowl took place on January 15, 1967, pitting the champions of the established National Football League against its counterparts in the significantly younger American Football League. While professional football predated the first Super Bowl by over fifty years, the first Super Bowl gave America its first “undisputed” world champion since the AFL’s founding in 1960. The Vince Lombardi-led Green Bay Packers decimated the upstart Kansas City Chiefs 35-10, thus confirming the NFL’s dominance in the eyes of many. Even after the NFL and AFL merged permanently in 1970, the Super Bowl lived on as the marquee event of professional football.
Of course, pro football wasn’t the only thing changing during the 1960s. In January 1967, the Silver Age of comics was firmly underway. Marvel had already cycled through two rosters of Avengers, while DC’s Justice League of America was nearing the end of its stay at Happy Harbor while slowly expanding its roster. To celebrate the Super Bowl’s 50th anniversary, here’s some of the highlights from the world of superheroes from January 1967.
[Note: All of the comics mentioned have a cover date of March 1967. During the 1960s and 1970s, comics usually had a cover date of two months after when they were shipped to stores. So, comics with a cover date of “Jan 1967” usually appeared on newsstands in November 1966. Likewise, comics with a cover date of March 1967 were actually the newest comics on the stand in January 1967.]
