Not-So-Secret Origins of the JLA Week- The Flash

For many comics historians, Showcase #4, October, 1956 is the "Day the universe changed". Or at least one of them. The publication of this little number ushers in The Silver Age. The Flash is widely regarded as the first new superhero of the Silver Age. Especially by DC. I'm not sure why they withhold their love from poor little Johnny Jones, Manhunter from Mars. After all, he did debut almost a full year earlier than The Flash. Perhaps, as a back-up feature to Batman he just didn't bring in the sales figures of a coverboy like Flash.

At any rate, in Showcase #4, DC takes it's first steps towards creating a new age of heroes. And they did it by looking towards the past. The Flash was a remake of a previous DC hero from the 1940's whose book had been cancelled (in fact, Barry Allen is reading one of his comics in the story). This process is old hat these days, but in 1956, comics had only been around for 2 decades. As you'll see tomorrow, it was successful, because DC went back to the same well time and time again.

Enjoy the beautiful dynamic art of Carmine Infantino, inked by Joe Kubert (more commentary after the feature) :
















I have to say, Barry Allen is a likeable guy. While The Flash is a very physical sort of hero, his alter-ego is a genuinely nerdy police scientist and comics geek.

There are many ways to show a man running fast but Infantino seems to have mastered the technique of depicting The Flash's speed through blurred motion lines, suggesting that he's moving faster than the eye can keep up with.

My favorite panel in this issue? Top of page 5, with the food floating in mid-air. Comics don't actually move, like film or TV, so it's remarkable how well Infantino captures the moment here. I think the coffee really sells it. It would have been very easy to draw this scene and simply rely on captions to tell you what was happening, but this picture actually tells you that everything is standing still except Barry.

Tomorrow: Green Lantern.

"I Hate Flash's Girlfriend!" and other observations

Several years ago, back when your Mild-Mannered Reporter was in his mid 20's, I used to have a job doing telephone customer service for a famous children's magazine. I worked at a dilapidated call center on the second floor of a barely-insulated warehouse and took phone calls all day mostly consisting of "I didn't get my magazine" and "I didn't order this magazine!!".

Luckily, I had a co-worker who sat near me who shared my passion for comics. He and I would read comics between calls and on our breaks and lunches. Sometimes we'd swap for the day. One day, we discovered that another co-worker, Rufus was a comics fan. Rufus was at least 20 years my senior and was a hard-working family man who just happened to have been a big fan of Silver Age comics during the Silver Age itself. Rufus would borrow our comics, sometimes the newer ones to see what was going on with his favorite characters of yesteryear, but mostly he wanted to read any reprints we had of "the good stuff". He preferred DC to Marvel because, as Rufus put it, "I prefer my heroes heroic."

One day, I brought in a re-issued 80-Page Giant of The Flash. Rufus was all over it like white on rice. When his break rolled around, I looked up to see him leaning over my cubicle. "Well?" I said, Rufus handed the comic back to me, thanked me, smiled,shook his head and said "I HATE Flash's girlfriend. She gets on my nerves."

"WHY?" You ask. "Why would Rufus dislike Flash's girlfriend Iris West so very much?"

Well, friends, I've anticipated your curiosity. Here are just a FEW examples:


She's rude...



She has no respect for Barry Allen's carreer as a Police Scientist...

I know this was before all those forensics shows on TV, but what the !@#$ does Iris think Barry does?? He's HELPING CATCH THE BAD GUYS!!


She's an immasculating shrew:


And, even though she seems to think The FLash is all man compared to Barry, she'll throw him over in a heartbeat...

Um, Iris, you're drooling.

So, yeah, I can totally understand why Rufus hates Flash's girlfriend. You know what? I hate her too.

Gorillas Don't Have Sideburns. Flash #106

Gorilla Grodd may be the best-known talking gorilla supervillain in comics. He started off pretty inauspiciously, though. He didn't even get the cover of Flash #106 and gorillas almost ALWAYS got the cover.



Grodd's first appearance was as a second feature in Flash #106. Grodd arrives in Central City Park at the controls of an "all-purpose craft" which flies, submerses in water and bores through the Earth. immediately, the citizens of Central City begin reporting strange gorilla sightings.

These sightings trouble actor Fred Pearson who plays a gorilla on the stage in a play "The Great Gorilla" (I'm not generally a devotee of live theatre, so maybe I'm a poor judge, but does anyone out there think a theatre is going to pack the house every night with a dude in a gorilla suit?). Pearson keeps blacking out after and sometimes before the show and now people are seeing a gorilla in the streets at night. Fred calls his friend, policeman Barry Allen (aka the Flash) for some help.

On his way to meet with Fred, Flash spots a gorilla and gives chase, but the gorilla out-maneuvers the Fastest Man Alive in all-purpose craft. Flash then goes to meet with Pearson and hears his strange story first hand.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to Grodd who spends a lot of time thinking expositionally to himself about how he came from Gorilla City- a secret, hidden city in Africa populated by super-intelligent gorillas. Grodd is Gorilla City's lone criminal mind and he has come out into the human world seeking Solovar, the missing ruler of the gorillas. Solovar alone holds the power to control others by "force of mind". using his own telepathy, Grodd locates Solovar as a captive in a circus. Grodd rips the secret from Solovar's mind and returns to Gorilla City.

Solovar escapes from the circus and seeks out the Flash. Enlisting Flash's aide, Solovar and the Scarlet Speedster rush to Gorilla City where they quickly defeat Grodd. Apparently the spinning attack Flash uses on Grodd jots the force of mind power right out of him.

Flash returns home and tells Fred Pearson that his troubles are over.

This story is really short and really unimpressive. Apart from the fact that it features talking gorillas and a gorilla city, it really doesn't have much about it that speaks of the impact it will have for years to come.

As we have previously seen, evil talking genius gorillas are nothing new to DC at this time. And even an embryonic version of Gorilla City had been previously seen in a 1950's Congo Bill story- albeit a more rustic version made of bamboo and huts. Still, Grodd had something to him that made him return again and again, arguably becoming Flash's arch-enemy (or is that Mirror-Master or Captain Cold?- ask Pat at The Silver Age, that discussion can really drag out!). Even so, gorillas do not have sideburns.

Editor's Note: The Editors of The Flash Knew $#@! About Science!

Flash comics have a lot of "Editor's Note" captions in them. These captions are usually accompanied by a "scientific fact", the most common one being " Editor's Note: The Flash's costume expands on contact with the air, just as a life raft expands upon contact with water". Wrong! A life raft is not like one of those cheesy business cards that's really a compressed sponge. A life raft expands when you activate the compressed air cylinder attached to it. Next!

"Editor's Note: Just as the intense heat of the desert causes mirages, so Captain Cold's cold ray, by lowering the temperature to absolute zero, causes cold mirages." Extremely wrong! Mirages are not hallucinations. Mirages are optical illusions, refracted light which is bent by heat to reflect an unstable image of the sky above. Basically, wavy air reflecting a picture of the sky on the ground, which looks like water.

That's right. Water. NOT big, scary dragons.

Other Un-scientific Stuff:

And speaking of Captain Cold... In his first appearance, Cpt. Cold, aka Len Snart builds a ray gun and then breaks into a laboratory to use their cyclotron. He places his homemade ray gun into the cyclotron and bombards it, then takes it out to see what it will do? Now I'm neither a scientist nor an engineer, but shouldn't you have had to have had a PURPOSE in mind for the ray gun BEFORE you built it? I mean, how would you design a gun to do something without having any idea what you wanted it to do?? Luckily it makes things cold. It could have turned out to be a ray that waxes cars or something.

Also, Captain Cold's costume is very centered on his cold theme. Which is visually, very appealing but how practical is it? I mean, until he fires off that cold gun, he's just a dude walking around in a parka, right? How uncomfortable would that be, say nine months out of the year?


Oh, but I haven't forgotten you, Captain Boomerang (who promoted these guys to Captain, anyway?). Let me just say, that strapping the Flash to a giant boomerang has one obvious result: rendering the boomerang aerodynamically unsound. Also, if it did work, wouldn't the boomerang just bring him back to kick your ass anyway? You have to think these things through.


And, while I'm bashing the Flash's baddies, I don't care HOW slow Turtle Man is. The Flash is capable of not going fast. He's always late as Barry Allen. I think he could manage not to run past this schmuck.

Old Heroes Never Die. They Just Retire to Earth Two.

Okay kiddies, let me tell you all a story about how weird things can get when people care about a little something called "continuity". See, back in the 1940's, There were a LOT of superheroes. So many, in fact, that geeks in the 1960's and 70's-who had discovered the joy of collecting back issues of comic books- dubbed the 1940's the "Golden Age".

Among the alums of the Golden Age years were Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Arrow, The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom and Hawkman, to name a relevant few. They all belonged to a club for superheroes, named the Justice Society of America. As time went on, some of these heroes fell out of fashion. The Atom and Hawkman's back-up features were dropped, and The Green Lantern and The Flash had their titles cancelled.The Golden Age had drawn to a close.


By the early 1950's TV had stolen a lot of thunder from the comics. Dr. Frederick Wertham launched a comic book smear campaign that made it all the way to a senate sub-committee hearing before Joe McCarthy convinced everyone that the Communists had infiltrated the Federal Government. Suddenly, the idea that comics books were the cause of juvenile delinquency seemed like small potatoes.

Superheroes were kind of left out in the cold. Westerns and romance comics carried a greater share of the market. It is sometimes said that only Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman survived. This is not exactly true. They were the only DC Heroes who kept their own titles. DC still had quite a few superheroes in the early 50's. Aquaman and Green Arrow were still going strong as back-up features, guys like Robotman and Johnny Quick were still around. In 1955, Martian Manhunter quietly debuted in Detective Comics.

Then, in 1956 it happened. BIG.

DC's new editor, Julius Schwartz decided to add to their pantheon of superheroes, not by bringing back their cancelled characters, but by reinventing them. Calling on Golden Age writer Gardner Fox, DC reintroduced one of Fox's characters from the 40's, The Flash. The new Flash made his debut in Showcase #4 and was an instant hit.


Soon, other characters were re-invisioned;

Green Lantern, Hawkman and the Atom were all brought back, this time with more Science-fiction back-grounds. Soon, even the old Justice Society of America had been resurrected. This time as the Justice LEAGUE of America. But what had happened to those older versions of the superheroes??

Well, in reality, nothing. However, Gardner Fox had planted a seed in Showcase #4 that sprung into something bigger and bigger as time went on. Fox and artist Carmine Infantino had actually had The new Flash, Barry Allen reading issues of Flash Comics which starred the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick. The discarded heroes of the 1940's had become the stuff of fiction-within-fiction.

Then, in Flash #123 "The Flash of Two Worlds", something happened. Barry Allen, traveling fast enough to leave the bounds of his own dimension, stumbled into another world. A world where Jay Garrick was real. It turned out that, in Barry's reality (now DC's main reality), comics writer Gardner Fox, who wrote the Flash Comics that inspired Barry Allen's superhero identity, was able to see another dimension in his dreams while he slept. Using the story ideas he got from his dreams, he had written about the Golden Age Flash, unaware that he was a real hero in another dimension. It seems that in the other dimension, which Barry dubbed "Earth Two", DC's 1940's heroes were all alive and well, albeit middle-aged.

This opened a whole new can of worms. Now, there were two versions of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman as well as an adult Robin. Suddenly, any stories written in the 1940's had actually happened on Earth Two. Soon, team-ups between the Justice League and the Justice Society became a regular event. Not long after, Earth Three was discovered- a terrible place where the Justice League were actually a gang of super-criminals called the Crime Syndicate who battled lone hero Lex Luthor...

Honestly, it was a lot of fun. Problem is, everyone began to take keeping it all straight very seriously. By the 1980's, DC had so many versions of their characters floating around, they decided to do some house cleaning. But they didn't just cancel titles and stop writing about characters they didn't want anymore. No, this time they made it an event.

DC Released a huge, 12-issue mini-series called "Crisis on Infinite Earths" wherein an evil entity destroys every parallel dimension but one, leaving one shared reality for all the characters who survived. Neat idea. Except it still left a huge mess that has ramifications to this day. And, it wasn't long before most of the characters who had been killed off crept their way back in. They killed off Supergirl... now there are like 4 of her.



When I was a freshman in college, some guy in my dorm was talking about comics. I was an avid Batman reader at the time and said something about the third Robin (who was still new) and he says "Actually, there are four Robins. There's the one from the 40's. " He was referring to the Earth Two Robin, who technically was from the 60's. So I said, "well, he's STILL Dick Grayson, so I don't know if he would count. And didn't they get rid of that guy in 'CRISIS'?". Still, he persisted. Now, this was a dorky argument, and my point of view was no more valid than his (well, maybe a little...) but how far was I supposed to go with this? Did I have to acknowledge the Robin II from that one story in Batman where Robin grows up to be Batman II and Batman and Batwoman have a son who becomes Robin II? What about Carrie Kelly, the Girl Wonder from The Dark Knight Returns? Do Burt Ward and Casey Casem's voices constitute unique Robin entities??

No, kiddies. For me, continuity in comics is something that is best used when it suits you and ignored when it doesn't. And remember, the next time some sweaty fanboy argues a point of continuity with you, just tell him "relax... it's a COMIC BOOK".

Lightning Never Strikes Twice. NEVER! Or does it ?

Back in the old days, most of your big-name heroes had kid sidekicks. Batman had Robin, Green Arrow had Speedy, Aquaman had Aqualad, Wonder Woman had Wonder Girl, Superman had his dirty little secret, Supergirl... You get the idea. Well, folks, The Flash was no exception.

No sir, ol' Barry Allen wasn't gonna get left behind just because he was a working stiff Police scientist and not a wealthy playboy with an adopted ward. Barry Allen was going places. Fast. So Barry borrows his girlfriend's little brother and takes him to show him around the police lab. ( clearly it was "change-to-your-secret-identity-and-take-your-girlfriend's-brother-to-work-day".) The crazy part is, just as The Flash is explaining how he was standing by a shelf full of chemicals when he was struck by lightning, thereby granting him the power of super-speed, Lo and Behold! The same thing happens again, only this time to little Wally West!


(I love how he thinks of Barry Allen in the third person. Once they put on a costume, it's like they suffer some sort of personality displacement or something)

Now, suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite when reading any superhero comic, but COME ON!! You're telling me that lightning just happened to strike the police lab, through the same window again? And happened to knock over the same shelf of random chemicals, bathing another person with just the right combo to cause super-speed AGAIN? And I don't want to hear any retcon BS about the "Speed Force" causing it to happen... That's just lame.