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Sunday, October 31, 2004
Covering Fun With The Flash #198
Here’s a look at a superhero comic from 30+ years ago. Nothing too weird for the blogworld, many do it all the time including my fellow ACAPCWOVCCAOE members Jamican Al and Big Rex Friendly . What I think is different is that I’m going to spotlight a book that isn’t just wackiness from the days of Julie Schwartz but also has its own sense of tragedy. Keep in mind unlike other bloggers I don’t have access to a scanner so I can only share with you the cover scan I got from The Grand Comics Database. No biggie, I’m really only going to go over the cover anyway.
The covers of The Flash comics in the 60’s and some of the 70’s could be counted on to be some of the most mind-bending of what some call the Silver Age of superhero comics. One of my favorites is the big head cover which is horrific in its simplicity. They were all gimmicks designed to maximize the sales off the newsstand but many of these covers are still beloved for their mix (crash?) of commerce and imagination.
This one in particular is drawn by the great Gil Kane, an artist who people associate with Silver Age DC books but with characters like Green Lantern and the Atom instead of the Flash. This is one of the few issues of The Flash Kane drew the cover and interiors for and as usual he did a fantastic job (even with Vince Colletta inking). But look at what’s going on. When people talk about Carmine Infantino’s rein as Editorial Director at DC they talk about gorillas on the cover but another staple Infantino put in place was characters crying. Here we have a cover that has out hero crying because he wants to help and yet doesn’t even know if he’s a hero or not. It makes a potential reader want to go through the book to find out what the Hell’s going on. The idea of this human with amazing abilities unable to help out three innocent kids is really hitting the audience over the head with a sense of tragedy. It’s a bit melodramatic but I feel in the context of a superhero book it fits perfectly.
Of course I was also struck by the fact that Flash is praying and the cover invokes the word “God.” The DC superheroes are gods in their own universes. It’s no wonder that Alan Moore, in his unmade Twilight of the Superheroes story, came up with churches for Superman and Captain Marvel. Here was someone that asking for a higher power where he is the higher power to many people, probably those kids. Not to mention he's turning to God for the reason many people do, to look for an absolutely certain sense of self. I may be an atheist but this fascinated me when I first saw this cover. Some may think that this portrayal of a titan with “clay feet” is a tad ham-fisted and I can see where they’re coming from. Yet I see it instead as pretty sincere in a way that seems naïve by our standards.
The story that corresponds with the cover and the back-up are certainly competent but I don’t want to go over them. That’s because there’s a tragedy to the phenomenon of these covers. When we first see them our minds go wild wondering what could possible happen to these characters that they end in such wild situations. When we read the stories inside the fact is that they can never live up to what’s going on in our imaginations. This isn’t to say that the reader isn’t lucky to enjoy the talents of John Broome, Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino and others. It’s just for ever different person who looks at these covers there is a different story. When you open the book there is only one. Well folks maybe you can come up with your own story from this cover (that’s actually a strategy Schwartz used for his writers). I’m sure they will be nothing if not honest.
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