Tag: Golden Age

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Two of my fan interests sort of intersected* with a pair of articles I wrote last night, as I found myself looking at the Flash and Les Misérables in the late 1930s/early 1940s.

I review Orson Welles’ Les Misérables radio play over at Re-Reading Les Mis. Last weekend I stumbled on a cassette recording of the 1937 series, but since I don’t have anything portable to play cassettes on anymore, I went looking online, found it at the Internet Archive’s Old Time Radio collection, and listened to it on the way to and from work for several days. (I wish I hadn’t already used the Cassette…now I remember pun.)

A 1943 Flash comic book features Jay Garrick playing every role at once in a stage play, quick-change style, when the entire cast is quarantined for a measles outbreak. I’d recently updated the scans on an old post on the one-man team trope. The Disneyland outbreak made me think of the story, and I’ve posted a few scans at Speed Force.

*They’ve been intersecting all week, actually, since the actor playing Pied Piper on the Flash TV show is playing Marius on Broadway right now, and has been posting Les Mis-related stuff.

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In the 1940s, comic book publishers would often re-purpose an old series to avoid postal fees for launching a new one. For example, the super-hero book All-Star Comics became All Star Western.

EC’s Moon Girl was infamous. It launched as a superhero title, became Moon Girl Fights Crime! by issue #7, and A Moon…A Girl…Romance with issue #9 as they tried to figure out just what genre audiences wanted.

Eventually it became Weird Fantasy, then Weird Science-Fantasy, then finished its run as Incredible Science-Fiction. It ended with the story, “Judgment Day,” an allegory against racism which the Comics Code Authority tried to censor.

I just read that someone’s reviving it. The original super-hero character has fallen into the public domain, and the new series, described as “‘The Dark Knight’ meets ‘Mad Men,” is being published through comiXology’s iPhone comics…60 years later.

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Golden Age Flash Archives Vol 2Newsarama reports that during the Q&A part of the DC Nation panel at this weekend’s Baltimore Comic-Con, a fan asked:

Are there more Legion, Flash or Justice League Archives coming? [VP of Sales Bob] Wayne said that when you get up to the issues that can be affordably bought by collectors the demand for the Archive Editions goes down.

Okay, this might apply to the Silver-Age material. The four Flash Archives books so far are up to Flash #132 (1962). When I was tracking down back-issues in the #133–140 range (the likely contents of a hypothetical book 5) about 6 or 7 years ago, I seem to remember finding reasonably good copies in the $5-15 range. (Better copies, of course, run into triple digits.)

But there’s still 8 years of Golden-Age material to cover, from 1942–1949: more than 75% of Jay Garrick’s solo run. And those books are much harder to find, with battered readers’ copies often selling for $40–150.

Moreover, those 8 years include the first appearances of every major Golden-Age Flash villain. Continue reading →

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Comic Coverage recently posted a humorous look at the role smoking had in the Golden-Age Flash’s origin. Jay Garrick was working late, took a cigarette break, and knocked over a beaker of “hard water.” Interestingly, later retellings of his origin downplayed and finally deleted the cigarette.

First, here are the original 1940 panels from Flash Comics #1 (copied from Comic Coverage), showing grad student Jay Garrick taking time out for a smoke:

Jay Garrick pauses for a smoke

Four decades later, in 1986, Secret Origins #9 would retell his origin. Mindful of the details, but also concerned about modern sensibilities about health, writer Roy Thomas kept the cigarette break, but added Jay thinking, “I know I should give up these things…”

Jay really wants to quit

A decade later, the cigarette had disappeared completely. Flash Secret Files #1 (1997) featured a condensed retelling of all three (at the time) Flashes’ origins, and this time, Jay simply succumbed to the hour and nodded off, dropping the beaker.

Jay falls asleep on the job

(Via Crimson Lightning)

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Hmm, I wonder how many newsstands displayed these books next to each other:

Flash Comics 6 Smash Comics 16 Crash Comics 5

An explanation: I recently stumbled across a mention of Smash Comics, a series from Quality Comics that ran more or less concurrently with the more familiar Flash Comics. Just for kicks, I searched the Grand Comics Database (which is where I got the cover images) for Crash Comics, and found Crash Comics Adventures, which ran for 5 issues in 1940 before spinning off a series on the original Cat-Man. So the three books would have been on sale at the same time!

I couldn’t find any other books with the same pattern in the title. The GCD does substring matches, and “ash comics” only brought up variations on these three series. Though it did remind me that DC resurrected the Smash Comics title for one chapter of the 1999 The Justice Society Returns! event.

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The Worry Wart. One of the characters I encountered early in my exploration of Golden Age Flash stories was Ebenezer Jones, the Worry Wart. In fact, All-Flash #24 (1946) was one of those first two GA Flash books I bid on just to see if I could win. The story in that book referred to previous meetings. If it had been the Silver Age, it would have included a helpful editor’s note telling me “See issue #X,” instead of just a recap.

As I kept watching auctions and looking on sites like the Grand Comics Database, I identified at least two more appearances. I finally tracked down the last of the three in March, and was able to write up a bio of the character.

Who is the Worry Wart? In short, he was an ordinary man who had a case of anxiety so bad it was contagious.

Jones worries about dying in his sleep, and about not getting enough sleep. He gets fired from two jobs because his bosses and coworkers start worrying about every little thing when he’s around.

The Flash gives the Worry Wart his happiness pillsThere’s an odd subtext to the character’s stories, though. The reason he returns to Keystone City is that the Flash had previously set him up with a supply of “happiness pills,” which had run out. In Flash Comics #76 (1946), Ebenezer Jones deliberately overdoses on the happiness pills, causing a euphoric delirium just as contagious as his anxiety.

Looking back on this from 2007, it’s hard not to think of it in terms of the vast numbers of people today taking medications for depression or anxiety. Not to mention people who abuse prescription medications. Or just people who abuse drugs. There’s a disturbing drug-dealer vibe in that panel.

It gets better, though. In the Worry Wart’s first appearance, in All-Flash #15 (1944), the Flash makes him a serum to counteract his anxiety:

The Flash gives Jones a tonic to counteract his anxiety... and it really works.

Yes, that’s right. The Flash gives him a bottle, and he drinks his cares away. No subtext here!

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[The Thinker]After almost 1½ years, my Golden-Age back-issue hunt finally netted a relatively cheap copy of All-Flash #12, the first appearance of the Flash villain, the Thinker. It’s an odd read, because the origin of the Thinker (a mob boss who plans his heists very meticulously) is interwoven with a slapstick story of the Three Dimwits.

All-Flash #12 (Fall 1943)The Thinker story is played more or less as a straight super-hero vs. organized crime story. I’d summarize it, but the Comics Archive has already written it up in their article on the Thinker. Now, imagine the first five paragraphs over there interwoven with a Three Stooges film and you’ll get the idea. The Dimwits end up buying a restaurant heavily in debt to the mob, and accidentally make salads out of an alien plant that make people turn invisible.

It’s incredibly silly, but it ties into the other half of the story: The original mob boss’ henchmen are caught robbing the Dimwits’ restaurant, so he calls in the Thinker to solve his problem before they can rat on him. And of course, once the Thinker takes over, he’s mighty interested in these salads that turn people invisible.

And yet, the feel is so completely different that it seems like two different stories.

The Three Dimwits

An unexpected discovery was a reference to the planet Karma, where the alien plant comes from. I’d seen two other references in other Golden-Age Flash stories, so it’s clearly part of the background mythos. This is one reason I’ve been looking for the source material. It’s relatively easy to find info on the leads, or the major villains, but the minor supporting characters who appear in three or four issues—Deuces Wilde, Evart Keenan, Dr. Flura, Ebenezer Jones—are mostly forgotten.

On a related note, while looking up the Thinker’s other appearances, I discovered that one of the non-Flash titles I’d been looking for, All-Star Comics #37, was reprinted in The Greatest Golden-Age Stories Ever Told—a book I already had. I felt bad that I hadn’t actually read the entire book, but that meant I could cross off two items from my wantlist instead of just one.