The Flash's Final Fling--Twice

Here's a real oddity from DC's Silver Age. In March, 1966, Flash #159 bore this cover:

That's something of an unusual cover for DC; we'd expect to see it more from Marvel (as indeed we did several times in Spiderman). But more unusual still was seeing this cover on the next regular issue of the Flash, #161 (#160 was an 80-Page Giant):

Notice, down at the bottom, that Julius Schwartz was advertising another, completely different story, also based on the cover from #159. As the splash page notes:

A couple of comments before I proceed with the review. First, it's worth noting that neither story was written by the Flash's main writer, John Broome. The first version was scripted by Gardner Fox, while the second was contributed by Bob Kanigher. Second, the stories amount to breaking the fourth wall, as announcing that you're publishing a second story based on the cover is admitting that these are fictional stories.

The Fox story starts with Kid Flash and Barry Allen visiting the offices of Dr McNider (aka Dr Midnight), an Earth-Two physician. The doc is pleased to see the Earth-One heroes, but he wonders why Barry's not in his uniform. It turns out that the Flash is no more, because he feels underappreciated:

Dr McNider puts him under and probes to find out the real answer:

It turns out that a future criminal with the improbable name of Frand Mattar had sent a bomb back in time to Central City in 1966, which would explode if a high-speed wave hit it; Mattar had a trigger that would cause this to happen and was blackmailing the authorities to force them to allow him to loot at will. Of course, there was another thing that could cause the bomb to go off; if the Flash traveled at super-speed. Thus the "chronal officer" had hypnotized Barry to make him believe that nobody in Central City appreciated his efforts, so that he would resign.

Armed with this knowledge, Flash and his junior partner travel to the future, defeat Frand Mattar, and return to 1966 just in time to prevent the bomb explosion from destroying the city. Flash gets banner headlines and the key to the city, showing that he is still Central City's hero.

Comments: Some tricky time paradox problems with this story. Wouldn't the future world know that the Flash had saved the city? And why would Frand Mattar send a bomb into the past in the first place (other than to provide Fox with a rationale for the cover)? Wouldn't a bomb about to affect a city in 3780 be more compelling to the people of that era?

However, the Fox effort is a masterpiece compared to the second story. Kanigher compares Flash's relationship with his uniform to that of a soldier and his gun.

Whaaaaat? And even more oddly, Kanigher has the uniform answer:

The scene shifts to the day of Barry and Iris' wedding. Iris has planned things so that even her perennially late boyfriend will arrive on time; she has told him the nuptials take place an hour before the actual scheduled time. But as Barry is walking to the church he spots a super-speed turtle (no, I am not kidding):

He finds himself in a super-speed dimension, where ironically that turtle is considered quite slow. But when he travels back to our dimension, he discovers:

Iris breaks off with Barry, and in the days that follow, he begins to feel like his costume has ruined his life. So he discards it:

He visits Iris in the secluded cabin where they had planned their honeymoon, but when he arrives she is being menaced by a giant bear. He tries to save her without using his super-speed, but is kayoed by the grizzly. Fortunately, it turns out that the bear is a retired circus performer. However, Iris is not thrilled at Barry's effort, and indeed, compares him unfavorably to the Flash. Barry returns to Central City, where his uniform, discovered by a passing hitchhiker, is on display at the Flash Museum:

Moved, Barry puts on the uniform again, just as Iris enters the room, followed shortly by some crooks.  As the Flash, he quickly corrals the villains.  But now Iris will know his secret identity, right?  Well, no:

Cue happy ending, with Barry back as the Flash and Iris back in love with him.

 Comments: Sweet jeebus, this is a wacky story!  Kanigher's anthropomorphizing inanimate objects works in the war stories, but it is wildly out of place here.  One thing that I do find interesting is that Kanigher gives Barry a better reason for quitting (and one that is more in line with what Lee would do with Spiderman a year later in ASM #50).

Face Off

As I have noted in the past, one of DC's major trends of the late 1950s and early 1960s was to add continuing characters to the magazines that did not already feature them. The war books picked up Sgt Rock, Jeb Stuart, Gunner and Sarge, etc., while Mystery in Space added Adam Strange, Tales of the Unexpected featured Space Ranger, and House of Secrets highlighted Mark Merlin.

Strange Adventures, edited by Julius Schwartz, tried something different. Instead of adding one feature which appeared every issue, Schwartz rotated several recurring features: Star Hawkins, the Atomic Knights and the Space Museum appeared regularly over the course of several years. In addition, particularly successful one-shot characters were often brought back. The Faceless Creature was probably the most notable as he appeared on the covers of three* issues over the course of as many years. Those of you who are fans of the Brave and the Bold show on Cartoon Network may recognize him as the Hunter who served as Starro's herald in a two-part episode of that series.

As the first story (Strange Adventures #124, January 1961) begins, two Highway Patrolmen in South Dakota, Jim Boone and Bob Colby, are investigating the disappearance of the heads from Mount Rushmore. The heads disappear along with some other famous giant faces around the world, but then are returned. An alien spacecraft lands and:

After preventing them from firing their weapons as shown on the cover, the alien introduces himself as Klee-Pan from the planet Klaramar, which is a sub-atomic world revolving within a single atom of the Planet Jupiter. He explains that he is looking for a giant head which will unlock a vault where a bomb was hidden by a villain named Chen Yull (sometimes referred to as Chan Yull and also as Chun Yull). If the head is not located, the bomb will destroy the entire solar system in one second.

Well, one second on Klaramar, which is quite a bit longer on Earth:

The mathematician in me couldn't resist calculating that out. If one Klaramar day equals 1,000,000 Earth years, then one Klaramar second equals about 11-1/2 Earth years.

Klee-Pan has tried all the famous giant faces on Earth, but none of them work. Fortunately, Jim realizes the secret:

So he suggests the Woman in the Moon. Of course, most of us have heard of it as the Man in the Moon, but apparently the Chinese and South Dakotans have the gender reversed.

While the trio head to the Moon, Klee-Pan explains how his people became faceless:

That sequence would appear in each subsequent Faceless Creature story. They take the Woman in the Moon to Saturn, but Chen Yull has planned for this and destroys the face with ray guns. But Jim has another bright idea:

And by repairing the face, they are able to open the lock, defuse the bomb, and save the solar system. Klee-Pan offers them a reward, but all they want is for the face on the Moon to be restored.

The Faceless Creature returned in Strange Adventures #142 (July 1962). Chan Yull has learned that his prior plot to destroy the Solar System failed, partially because of the efforts of the two South Dakota Highway Patrolmen. So he creates a new bomb and uses them as the triggers:

But when they arrive the bomb does not explode. It turns out that Jim and Bob were given the power of telepathy by Klee-Pan, and so they had ordered each other not to explode the bomb. Klee-Pan sends them back to Earth with weapons that subdue Chen Yull and send him back to Klaramar.

Jim and Bob find themselves compelled to construct an odd, scientific device. When they turn it on:

Chen Yull heads to the UN Building, where he has a strange demand:

But when they do as he asks:

That seems a very strange quirk indeed. How useful an adaptation is it for a people to only be willing to destroy their own planet? Chen Yull reveals his fiendish plan:

Jim and Bob use the weapons they defeated Chen Yull with in the previous story on each other, shrinking themselves down while sending themselves to Klaramar. Once they are able to communicate with Klee Pan, he defeats Chen Yull and restores the two planets (and the Highway Patrolmen) to their normal sizes.
One other oddity about the series; according to the GCD, the pencils on the three stories were done by three different artists: Mike Sekowsky, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane. I was able to identify the latter two, but the first one really doesn't look much like Sekowsky at all to me except for a few panels. Then again, I noticed how heavy the inks were on that story (by Murphy Anderson), so maybe it's just a case of the pencils being overwhelmed.

*Technically two different faceless creatures appeared on the three covers; Klee-Pan on the first issue and Chan Yull on the other two.

Mystery In Space #81: Another Viewpoint

About a year ago I reviewed Mystery in Space #81. Reader M. Hamilton has some more thoughts on that issue:

That's what "Avatar" and "Alice in Wonderland" were about--going into new realms. new worlds. (Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios President)

That describes the appeal for me of "The Cloud-Creature That Menaced Two Worlds."

Although I enjoyed the recent article on that issue, I was surprised that it didn't include any of the panels which make that issue such an unforgettable visual experience.

When it comes to entering "new realms, new worlds", take a look at the first panel of page 17:

The detail of the background with its narrow color palette of pink, orange and lavender creates a visual impact that, over four decades later, I simply cannot forget. When the story was reprinted in Strange Adventures #241 exactly ten years later, the background was colored differently in light pastel tints which provided a better contrast to Adam's red costume and in no way diminished the beauty of the panel:

If DC ever had an old-fashioned coloring contest, that is the panel which they should use.

Other great panels include:

- Page 12 (the last four panels) which portray Adam falling into an erupting volcanic crater with its searing heat and seething smoke :


- Page 13 (the last two panels) where you can almost hear the hissing of Adam's ray-gun turning water into vapor:


Could anyone ever draw natural phenomena like Infantino? And his work somehow never that had a cluttered look no matter how much detail had been packed into the page or panel:


Concerning the cover of MIS #81, it's totally ridiculous except for the background color. The top edge is an intense lavender which becomes diffused and becomes a light lilac color as it gets lower on the cover. It suggests a desert dawn/dusk and to see a mint cover with its sheen enhancing this color effect is a sight to behold:


That color effect reminds me of the cover of MIS #59 which has an intense green along the top edge, but which get lighter as the eye goes down:


Considering that we are living in times when visual imagery is competing with plot in movies (e.g., Avatar). re-examining the artistic glories of "The Cloud-Creature That Menaced Two Worlds" makes one realize just how far ahead of his time Infantino was.

Comments by Pat: All excellent points! Definitely one of my flaws as a comics blogger at times is the insufficient attention paid to the artwork. M. Hamilton clearly lingered over the drawings on this one. That first page of the third chapter really is something to behold.

Flash #120

The Flash was probably the most interesting DC hero of the Silver Age. Certainly his comic ran the longest of any of Julius Schwartz's reincarnations; Green Lantern was gone by 1972, the Atom and Hawkman ceased publication (after being merged) in 1969. The Flash made it all the way to 1985.

Given that history, it's worth speculating as to why Barry Allen lasted while the others did not. For starters, it pays to be first; Schwartz introduced the new Flash well before his other re-imagined heroes. The Barry Allen Flash first appeared in Sept-Oct 1956, while Green Lantern debuted a full three years later. Similarly, the first two superheroes from the Golden Age (Superman and Batman) outlasted almost all of their contemporaries.

Second, the Flash had an interesting and colorful rogues' gallery, as shown here (from 80-Page Giant #4):

Third, I would argue that the Flash's ability, running fast, is especially suited to exciting the imaginations of youngsters. Who wouldn't want to be able to tear up the miles rather than having to plod home from school? Who wouldn't want to be able to zip ahead to Grandma's house rather than suffer through the interminable car trips?

One element that was probably not a significant factor, was that the Flash had a juvenile counterpart. While I enjoyed Kid Flash, and especially the "moral" stories that he often appeared in, he didn't show up much in the later 1960s outside of Teen Titans

As you can see from the cover above, this is a Flash/Kid Flash teamup. As the story begins, Barry and Wally West are running late for a yachting trip with Iris and an explorer named Dr. Manners to South America. Dr. Manners is looking for evidence to confirm his belief that South America and Africa were once joined. It's worth noting that this theory was still controversial at the time, although it has now become widely accepted.

It looks impossible for Barry and Wally to make it to the yacht on time, but Barry reveals that he knows Wally is Kid Flash, as a prelude to disclosing his own secret:

They are delayed a bit when they have to prevent a plane from crashing into a crowded area of the city, but they still make it. On board, they learn that there's a young girl of Wally's age:

I like that Infantino has them rather pointedly sitting on separate couches in that last panel. Dr. Manners explains their mission here:

And in fact the Wikipedia article on continental drift notes that the existence of the same animals on both continents are part of the proof that Africa and South America were once joined (although it's mostly fossils and earthworms that are cited there, not lemurs and aardvarks).

They dock in South America and journey inland. A tribe of natives warn them about a mountain known as the Sleeping Giant, but Iris dismisses it as superstitious drivel. However, as they make their way into the valley nearby, the Sleeping Giant awakens; it was a volcano, which causes earth tremors and rockslides. When the party recovers, they seem to have been transported far away, as the Sleeping Giant is nowhere to be seen.

Barry and Wally discover something odd:

They volunteer to do a little scouting around, not telling Dr Manners that it will be in their crimson uniforms. They come upon a caveman being threatened by a giant bird, and save him. But what are cavemen doing in modern times? Later, they see paintings of prehistoric animals created by the cave people. Have they stumbled into a valley that time forgot? They also learn that the primitives fear a giant named Grodan. And sure enough:

Flash vibrates his way free of the giant. He and Kid Flash use some cables that had been brought on the expedition to truss up the behemoth (as shown on the cover). Then Barry realizes that they are not in some hidden valley that has been missed by civilization; rather they are literally in the past. Sure enough, as they do some more exploring:

Okay, so that's a bit of artistic license. The dinosaurs in fact became extinct about 65 million years ago, well before the time of cavemen. Flash and his younger counterpart race around the globe, establishing that the continents were indeed joined at this period in time. But at that moment the earthquakes begin that separates the continents. They dash off to help the cavemen, who are under attack by the giants. But:

The actual phrase is, "there were giants in the earth in those days..." and it comes from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament.

Barry and Wally rush back to their expedition and try to set up duplicate vibrations to the original earthquake that transported them to the past. We get a rather psychedelic panel here:

And then they're back in the present day (well, 1961 anyway). Dr Manners has photographic proof that the continents were joined, and the juvenile romance subplot has been resolved:

Comments: A terrific and entertaining story by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, with only the occasional anachronisms as negatives.

Single Issue Review: Detective #331

For its first 330 issues, Detective Comics had always published multiple stories, but this issue provides a book-length tale combining the two features that the mag was publishing at the time: Batman and the Elongated Man. It's the fifth issue into the New Look, and the interior (and cover) artwork is by Carmine Infantino, while the story is by Gardner Fox.

As the story begins, Bruce Wayne is visiting a wax museum dedicated to American history, that was funded by the Alfred Foundation (see ending for a discussion of the Alfred Foundation). But when he poses for a picture at the Matthew Brady exhibit something odd happens:

Yet another reminder that Julius Schwartz didn't get rid of all the science fiction elements of the Jack Schiff years. Bruce has temporary amnesia, and around the same time as he's stumbling around the city in a daze:

As you can probably guess, it's a phony Bruce Wayne, who's well-prepared and cons the bank VP into letting him withdraw $500,000 from his account.

Later that night, Robin is forced to battle some jewel robbers on his own. But fortunately for him, Batman recovers his memory and helps out. Now they have to figure out what happened during his amnesia. Robin tells him about the withdrawal from the bank (apparently the bank officer was a little casual about Bruce's privacy).

Meanwhile, Ralph and Sue Dibny have arrived in Gotham and visited the wax museum themselves. Ralph gets curious when he notices a few pictures that his wife took:

Realizing that the man's face had changed dramatically, Ralph smells a mystery. As it happens, about the same time Bruce and Dick have visited the bank, where it turns out that the man in the photograph has been robbed in a similar fashion to Bruce. When they learn that before being robbed he had visited the Matthew Brady exhibit at the wax museum, they change into their fighting togs and head there, meeting up with the Elongated Man inside. The three are attacked by invisible enemies, as shown on the cover. When Batman makes it to the Brady exhibit:

We learn a bit about the "science" involved here from the crook, Boss Baron:

Fortunately, the Elongated Man sticks his face in front of the camera to protect Batman's secret identity. This works, but at the cost of Ralph losing his memory temporarily. Batman and Robin start wiping up the crooks with a little sluggish help from the Ductile Detective:

And in the end, Batman shares a secret with the Elongated Man:

But it's okay, because Ralph will lose his memory of Batman's secret identity when the face-change wears off.

Comments: An interesting and fast-paced story. I confess, however, that the plot device of the face-changing machine (electrofaciograph) seems rather far-fetched.

Postscript: The Alfred Foundation was a charity that Bruce Wayne set up in the aftermath of Alfred's (apparent) death in Detective #328. After he was brought back to life (discussed here), Bruce changed the name of the charity to the Wayne Foundation.