The Fly, Archie Comics’ pioneer Silver Age superhero, was a wall-crawler with an alliterative name who was secretly a teenager.
“(B)etween 1961 and 1964, (The Adventures of the Fly and The Adventures of the Jaguar) were practically the only superhero comics NOT published by DC and Marvel,” recalled popular culture author Will Murray.
But while Tommy Troy’s alter ego was a modest success, Marvel Comics’ Peter Parker was a breakaway hit — and that gave Archie Comics ideas.
“(I)n 1965, Archie publisher (John) Goldwater thought he saw an opportunity,” noted Alan McKenzie. “He had been watching the rise and rise of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics and figured, ‘How hard can it be?’ He hired Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel to revamp all of his superhero properties into one line of comics, the Mighty Comics Group.”
The Fly’s teenage alter ego had been abandoned early on, without explanation, and he became an adult attorney, Thomas Troy. But now Archie Comics veered in the direction of Marvel’s most popular character, and changed the Fly’s name to something more suggestive of “Spider-Man” — “Fly Man.”
“Not exactly a title calculated to walk off the newsstands,” Murray observed drily.
Fly-Man’s already numerous super powers were expanded, and he gained the ability to shrink or grow to giant size.
“Starting with the Fly, Siegel morphed him into Fly-Man and pitched the writing style as a bad pastiche of Stan Lee,” McKenzie wrote. “To further beef up the appeal, Siegel included additional superheroes teamed up to help Fly-Man battle the Spider, including Golden Age MLJ characters the Comet and the Black Hood, as well as a revamped version of the Shield ... and of course Fly-Girl.”
“It’s difficult to say now, over 40 years later, whether Siegel was just doing a hack imitation, or was actually lampooning the Marvel approach to comics,” Murray said.
When the Batman TV show pitched camp in January 1966, kicking off the silly season, Fly-Man and friends fit right in.
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