June 1938: A Superman for the Underdog

On the newsstands in May 1938, browsers had their choice of Tarzan in Comics on Parade, Popeye in King Comics, daredevil aviator Captai...

Wednesday, April 4, 2001

April 1961: Far Planets and Lost Worlds

    In the Silver Age, The Flash almost served as a team-up book, with Kid Flash, the 1940s’ Flash, Elongated Man and Green Lantern frequently dropping in to share the Scarlet Speedster’s adventures. 
Land of the Golden Giants (The Flash 120, April 1961) offered a book-length adventure with Kid Flash, a character who’d been created 10 issues before.
“Wally West, Iris’ favorite nephew and president of the Blue Valley Chapter of the Flash Fan Club, was an instantly likeable fellow, due to a slightly tongue-in-cheek origin story including an exact duplication of the chemical accident that gave Barry his speed powers, as well as a heapin’ helpin’ of juvie jive and hipster slang that all us kookie cats in Comicsville could really dig!” wrote comics historian Michael Decker in The Flash Companion. “Clothed in an identical (but smaller) version of the Flash famous fighting fashions, Kid Flash graduated to his own back-up feature with the very next issue.”
In Golden Giants, the superheroes “… help a scientist prove his theories about Continental Drift,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. “This science fiction tale is full of unexpected twists and turns. In many ways, it starts out as another tale in the tradition of Conan Doyle's prose sf novel The Lost World (1912), with a scientific expedition going to the Guyana Highlands, just as in Doyle's novel. But Broome develops his plot in innovative ways.”
Meanwhile, in Challenge of the Giant Fireflies (Mystery In Space 67), Adam Strange’s fans got treated to two menaces for their dime — giant fireflies and sentient sun-beings.
“No movies from that pre-computer effects stone age could hope to match the designs, vistas and details of (artist Carmine) Infantino’s imaginative alien cityscapes and landscapes,” observed Robert Klein and Michael Uslan in The Adam Strange Archives. “Deadpan serious, even in the silliest situations, (writer Gardner) Fox and Infantino kept our disbelief firmly suspended while we visited Rann. Personal and character-driven, Adam’s adventures somehow felt believable.”

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