Silver Age Comics

The Flash was probably the most interesting DC hero of the Silver Age. Certainly his comic ran the longest of any of Julius Schwartz's reincarnations; Green Lantern was gone by 1972, the Atom and Hawkman ceased publication (after being merged) in 1969. The Flash made it all the way to 1985.

Given that history, it's worth speculating as to why Barry Allen lasted while the others did not. For starters, it pays to be first; Schwartz introduced the new Flash well before his other re-imagined heroes. The Barry Allen Flash first appeared in Sept-Oct 1956, while Green Lantern debuted a full three years later. Similarly, the first two superheroes from the Golden Age (Superman and Batman) outlasted almost all of their contemporaries.

Second, the Flash had an interesting and colorful rogues' gallery, as shown here (from 80-Page Giant #4):

Third, I would argue that the Flash's ability, running fast, is especially suited to exciting the imaginations of youngsters. Who wouldn't want to be able to tear up the miles rather than having to plod home from school? Who wouldn't want to be able to zip ahead to Grandma's house rather than suffer through the interminable car trips?

One element that was probably not a significant factor, was that the Flash had a juvenile counterpart. While I enjoyed Kid Flash, and especially the "moral" stories that he often appeared in, he didn't show up much in the later 1960s outside of Teen Titans

As you can see from the cover above, this is a Flash/Kid Flash teamup. As the story begins, Barry and Wally West are running late for a yachting trip with Iris and an explorer named Dr. Manners to South America. Dr. Manners is looking for evidence to confirm his belief that South America and Africa were once joined. It's worth noting that this theory was still controversial at the time, although it has now become widely accepted.

It looks impossible for Barry and Wally to make it to the yacht on time, but Barry reveals that he knows Wally is Kid Flash, as a prelude to disclosing his own secret:

They are delayed a bit when they have to prevent a plane from crashing into a crowded area of the city, but they still make it. On board, they learn that there's a young girl of Wally's age:

I like that Infantino has them rather pointedly sitting on separate couches in that last panel. Dr. Manners explains their mission here:

And in fact the Wikipedia article on continental drift notes that the existence of the same animals on both continents are part of the proof that Africa and South America were once joined (although it's mostly fossils and earthworms that are cited there, not lemurs and aardvarks).

They dock in South America and journey inland. A tribe of natives warn them about a mountain known as the Sleeping Giant, but Iris dismisses it as superstitious drivel. However, as they make their way into the valley nearby, the Sleeping Giant awakens; it was a volcano, which causes earth tremors and rockslides. When the party recovers, they seem to have been transported far away, as the Sleeping Giant is nowhere to be seen.

Barry and Wally discover something odd:

They volunteer to do a little scouting around, not telling Dr Manners that it will be in their crimson uniforms. They come upon a caveman being threatened by a giant bird, and save him. But what are cavemen doing in modern times? Later, they see paintings of prehistoric animals created by the cave people. Have they stumbled into a valley that time forgot? They also learn that the primitives fear a giant named Grodan. And sure enough:

Flash vibrates his way free of the giant. He and Kid Flash use some cables that had been brought on the expedition to truss up the behemoth (as shown on the cover). Then Barry realizes that they are not in some hidden valley that has been missed by civilization; rather they are literally in the past. Sure enough, as they do some more exploring:

Okay, so that's a bit of artistic license. The dinosaurs in fact became extinct about 65 million years ago, well before the time of cavemen. Flash and his younger counterpart race around the globe, establishing that the continents were indeed joined at this period in time. But at that moment the earthquakes begin that separates the continents. They dash off to help the cavemen, who are under attack by the giants. But:

The actual phrase is, "there were giants in the earth in those days..." and it comes from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament.

Barry and Wally rush back to their expedition and try to set up duplicate vibrations to the original earthquake that transported them to the past. We get a rather psychedelic panel here:

And then they're back in the present day (well, 1961 anyway). Dr Manners has photographic proof that the continents were joined, and the juvenile romance subplot has been resolved:

Comments: A terrific and entertaining story by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, with only the occasional anachronisms as negatives.

Over at Silver Age Gold, there's a post on what a bee-yatch Iris West (later Iris Allen) could be. As I mentioned in the comments, that's true on one level. But if you look at it from the writer's viewpoint, she's a perfect comedic foil for Barry. She thinks he's the slowest man on Earth, while we know (from the cover) that he's secretly the fastest man alive. I noted that this gave the writer a nice little ending for his story.

How common was this ending? I was surprised when I looked.

In Flash #105 the first story is Conqueror from 8 Million BC; here's the ending panel:

The second story is the Master of Mirrors. It too features an Iris finale:

The typical setting is Barry and Iris having dinner at a restaurant, so I won't keep posting those.
In Flash #106, the ending to the first features Barry and Iris at the zoo; the ending to the second has them at Iris' apartment. Flash #107? The opening story ends with Barry alone at home, but the second story ends with the Flash visiting Iris at her office. In Flash #108, the opening story ends with Iris and Barry eating a picnic lunch in the park, while the backup tale has them at a restaurant. In Flash #109, the ending of the opening story shows Iris angrily checking her watch, as Barry is late for another date. The closing to the second story does not feature Iris at all.

In Flash #110, Barry screws up and the Flash arrives for a date with Iris:

The second story is the first Kid Flash tale, but it too has an Iris ending.

The ending to Flash #111's opening tale has Barry getting a rival for Iris' affections:

More on Dr. Summers later. The second story in this issue is a solo Kid Flash tale, so Iris is not featured at all.

Flash #112 has the introduction of the Elongated Man, and ends with the Ductile Detective and the fastest man alive at a banquet, shaking hands as only superheroes can do:

But in fact the panel before shows her introducing the two heroes to the attendees at the banquet. The second story again doesn't count as it stars Kid Flash.

Flash #113 has two stories, both ending with Iris. Here's the first:

And in the second, Barry reclaims his woman from the wiles of Dr Summers:

In Flash #114 Captain Cold gets the, err, hots for Iris, but the first story ends with her and Barry, and the second is another Kid Flash tale.

So putting it all together, in the first 10 issues of Flash, there were 20 stories. Three of those were Kid Flash solo tales and therefore I'll deduct those from the total leaving 17. Fifteen of those stories, or 88% of the total, ended with Iris. And it's not like it stopped, from 115-120 Iris only missed the denouement of one Flash solo story.

So it appears obvious that Julius Schwartz and John Broome approached Iris as essentially a character who told us the story was over. That's not to say that she didn't have some significant scenes early in comics, but in a lot of cases that was to establish the basis for the final conversation between Barry and Iris.

How does that compare with some of the other DC girlfriends? I'll try to take a look at it in the near future.

Update: I meant to mention as well that closing a story with a domestic scene like those is a very common practice. For example, every episode of Welcome Back, Kotter, would end with Kotter telling his wife a joke about one of his uncles, just as every episode of Hill Street Blues would conclude with Daniel J. Travanti and Veronica Hamel sharing a quiet moment together.

This was the great unknown comic. DC reprinted stories like crazy in the 1960s and 1970s, especially Flash Comics, which joined their annuals rotation in 1963. And yet somehow the two stories in this issue were not reprinted until the 1990s, although one of them featured the first appearance of Captain Cold, one of the more significant villains in Flash's Rogue's Gallery. (Correction: As pointed out in the comments by Robert McKinney, DC reprinted the Captain Cold appearance in Limited Collector's Edition #C-39 in 1975.)

Reading it makes it pretty obvious why Julius Schwartz and DC's various reprint editors kept the issue under wraps during the 1960s. The first story, Secret of the Empty Box, while clever, has some obvious problems with the Silver Age Flash. It starts off with Barry late (as usual) for a date with Iris. But he's got a good excuse; a small girl has lost her ring down a storm drain:

Okay, given that it became accepted that the Flash could vibrate his way through anything (including dimensions), that's problematic. The story itself features three magician brothers whom the Flash defeats one at a time as they pop out of the Empty Box of the title:

The story has some interesting aspects, but there's also considerable DC silliness. For example, at one point Barry decides to change into his secret identity of the Flash in one of those old-fashioned "photograph yourself" booths. The sleazy owner thinks he's gotten the golden ring with Flash's secret identity, but:

Uh, if you can change faster than 1/100,000th of a second, why bother ducking into a booth?

The second story, is the Coldest Man on Earth, definitely one of those stories that I craved in the 1960s. Captain Cold was a strong contender for best Flash villain in the Silver Age. I preferred the Reverse Flash, but you could argue that CC was Dr Octopus to Professor Zoom's Green Goblin; the villain who seemed like the top enemy as the Silver Age ended.

Captain Cold pulls off a daring robbery in broad daylight:

The Flash attempts to stop him, but:

In a flashback, we learn that Len Snart was an ambitious criminal who searched for a way to defeat the Flash. This was helpfully supplied by a scientific magazine:

And when he accidentally invents a cold ray, we get this amusing moment:

I absolutely love the idea of the villain trying out nicknames for himself. Further experiments reveal to Captain Cold that he can create illusions from his ray gun, which he uses against the Flash:

But:

And of course, the Flash ends the fight shortly thereafter.

Comments: The first appearance of Captain Cold demonstrates nothing of the characteristic he became noted for in the Silver Age: his desire to impress women. It's another significant negative to the story.

However, there is another three-page story in that issue, that I suspect will not see the light of day again. Not that it's a bad story by any means, it's just not part of the Flash saga. The story is entitled, "The Race of Wheel and Keel," and tells of a race:

So, New York to SF around South America versus St. Louis to SF through "Indian Country," is the basic premise. As you would expect, there are issues:

But eventually the stagecoach defeated the ship anyway, establishing the need for transcontinental travel rather than going around South America. The protagonist of the story is John Butterfield. Despite a somewhat less adventurous life than shown in this story, he did establish the companies that became American Express and Wells Fargo.

Overall, I can see why Showcase #8 remained under wraps for so long. Although the stories are not terrible by any means, they are inconvenient in several ways, since they reveal the way Schwartz and his writers were still experimenting with the character when this issue came out (in May-June 1957).

The stories in Showcase #8 and many other Flash tales are reprinted in:

I had a fairly good collection of the Flash in either original or reprint, but I confess I had never read the first two stories about Daphne Dean earlier, so I thought I would discuss them here. We learn in Flash #126 that Barry is on his way back to his hometown of Fallville to visit his parents, which means that Mr Allen is one of the very few heroes of the Silver Age with a living mom and dad.

By plan, a young Hollywood starlet who grew up in Barry's hometown and who was his childhood sweetheart is also on the train. Her publicity agent thinks it would make a great story for her to fall in love with her former beau. So they are thrown together and revisit some places they used to frequent in the past:



But when they see a tree behind the schoolyard where Barry had carved their initials, they become lost in a weird sort of daydream:



What the heck? But actually this turns out to be a night-time dream that Barry's having in his parents home. The next day, a masquerade ball is planned at which there will be a reenactment of a key scene from Daphne's latest movie (which sounds like a mixture of Gone with the Wind and Mata Hari). A band of union soldiers captures her at the ball and takes her away with them.

But it turns out the reenactment has gone awry, as crooks have taken the place of the actors playing the soldiers, kidnapping Daphne to steal the fabulous jewels she's wearing. Fortunately the Flash comes to her rescue. In the end, Barry tells Daphne about his engagement to Iris and she accepts it, but:



Comments: Barry's parents only appear as shadowy figures as Barry is having his dream about Daphne in the pasture with the bull.

Daphne returned in Flash #132's The Farewell Appearance of Daphne Dean. Iris is initially worried to see that Barry's former girlfriend is in town, but learns that she is not longer in love with Barry, but with the Flash. This may relieve Iris, but it still leaves her fiance in hot water, as we know he's really the Flash.

Reasoning that Daphne's probably in love with his powers, Flash decides to convince her that he's not really all that fast:



But trouble arises as the Flash spots some crooks about to rob a bank. He distracts Daphne:



And takes care of the crooks, but Daphne suddenly decides to leave Central City. It turns out that she saw Flash dashing off in the reflection of the store window, and realized he was fibbing about his speed in order to let her down easily.



She did pop up one final time in the Silver Age:

In Flash #165 (Nov 1966), Barry Allen and Iris West finally get married. This was not DC's first wedding; Aquaman and Mera had finally tied the knot in Aquaman #18 (Nov-Dec 1964), Hawkman and Hawkgirl had been married when they arrived on Earth, and Ralph and Sue Dibney were wed immediately before the Elongated Man story in Detective #327 (May 1964). Reed Richards and Sue Storm over at Marvel had also married in Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965).

But this wedding was different because it was the first time a superhero had gotten married without his wife knowing his double identity. This created some additional tension for the Scarlet Speedster:



So for the next year we would periodically see Barry musing his dilemma.

Ironically, this point had supposedly been settled before in Flash #156. An alien had arrived on Earth, letting everybody know that Barry Allen was the Flash. But at the end Barry has a chance to go backwards in time and change that memory. But he asks Iris for permission:



Despite that pledge, he finally decides to do the big reveal on their first anniversary. Of course there are only two real ways to go with this kind of moment from a plotting perspective, and DC chose the more amusing one:



The story (as it happens) was also Carmine Infantino's swan song on the Flash, so this is an especially poignant moment.

This is not really a hard thing to work out. First, of course, is Showcase #4, the comic that started the superhero revival that is probably the biggest aspect of the Silver Age. To give you an idea, during the 1950s, DC Comics published 3,397 different comics, of which 849 were superhero-oriented (including Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen). In the 1960s, DC published 3,579 different comics, of which 1,629 were superhero-oriented. The return of the Flash kicked off that surge.



Next up is Adventure #247, which introduced the Legion of Superheroes:



The Legion was one of DC's best features during the Silver Age. The combination of a futuristic setting with super-powered characters proved irresistable to readers of the time and provided seemingly endless plot possibilities.

The third major DC comic of the Silver Age is Brave & Bold #28. Now that DC had brought back Green Lantern, DC combined him with the Flash, Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman and Aquaman into a fighting team called the Justice League of America. This served as a marketing gimmick for the individual magazines featuring those heroes (although at the time both Aquaman and Martian Manhunter were backup features in Adventure and Detective respectively), but it also apparently sold very well on its own, leading Marvel Comics' head honcho Martin Goodman to instruct Stan Lee to create a superhero team, which of course became the Fantastic Four.



The next major DC comic of the Silver Age may not be as apparent as the others, but it's a key to understanding the appeal of the superhero titles during this era:



Prior to this, DC had reprinted almost none of their older stories. Superman Annual #1 gave recognition to the fact that comics had a back story that it was important to understand in order to get the most out of current issues. It also represented a promise from the editors to you, that if you didn't know the back story, DC would fill you in over the years with reprints of their older tales. DC did a phenomenal amount of reprinting in the 1960s and early 1970s. Even Marvel got into the act once their comparatively recent tales were old enough to attract new readers.

The final major issue is obvious:



In the very first appearance of the Flash in Showcase #4, we learned that Barry Allen had read comics featuring the Jay Garrick Golden Age Flash. So it seemed only logical to pair the two up. But there was a problem; Jay Garrick (the gentleman on the right) had been a fictional character only on Barry Allen's Earth. The solution hit upon by Gardner Fox was to postulate an alternate Earth, called Earth-2, where the Golden Age superheroes had reigned.

This opened the door for a slew of Golden Age/Silver Age crossovers, about which I have a post planned for the future. It also created numerous headaches for DC's editors as time wore on, but that was not apparent in the 1960s.

Other comics that were crucial to the Silver Age DC, but perhaps not as critical as these:

Showcase #22, featuring the origin of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern. Lost in the memory of the Silver Age is the fact that it took three years after Flash's debut issue for DC to bring back its second GA hero in a new form. After this the pace quickened, with Aquaman, Atom and Hawkman all getting new launches.

Detective #225, with the first appearance of the Martian Manhunter, which actually predates Showcase #4. However, MM was a new character, not a rebirth of an old one.

Detective #327, with the "New-Look" Batman. Certainly the Batman TV series had a huge impact on DC Comics, but it is hard to say that this really spawned the show. Indeed, it is arguable that far more influential was Batman #155, which started the practice of bringing back Batman's Golden Age rivals (in this case, the Penguin).

Action #242, with the introduction of Brainiac. This is arguably the beginning of the Silver Age Superman under Mort Weisinger, although his name would not appear as editor for another few months. Weisinger's tenure running the Superman books was extremely influential, as he standardized the looks and mannerisms of the characters and presided over a substantially more serious hero than had been the case in the past. Superman in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps influenced by Captain Marvel, had a touch of whimsy to it. Under Weisinger most of that was gone (with the notable exception of the Lois Lane series).

Was seldom presented so starkly by DC in the 1960s as with the Flash and the Reverse Flash. The Reverse Flash, also known as Professor Zoom, was a criminal from hundreds of years in the future who had stolen a Flash costume from a time capsule. By amplifying the super-speed wave patterns he found in the costume (don't laugh) Zoom was able to gain the speed power himself. The Flash managed to defeat him in Flash #139 (September 1963), but he was back a year later in Flash #147 for a terrific story called Our Enemy the Flash.

The story also featured the return of one of the Flash's earliest villains, Al Desmond, who had appeared in both Showcase #13 and #14, the last two tryout issues before Barry Allen was granted his own title. It is worth noting that Desmond appeared as two villains, both Mr Element and Dr Alchemy, in those issues. He was one of two DC characters I can think of who changed his supervillain identity in the Silver Age; the Signalman/Blue Bowman was the other.

But by Flash #147, Al Desmond was on the straight and narrow, and in this respect he was pretty unique in the DC universe, although of course Marvel had probably dozens of characters that started as villains and became heroes--the Scarlet Witch, the Black Widow, Hawkeye and Quicksilver to name just a few.

Professor Zoom, who lost his superspeed in the prior battle with the Flash, manages to hypnotize Desmond and forces him to bring him back to the past. He has discovered a metal called Element Z which allows him to travel at hypervelocity, but unfortunately it is unstable and thus he can only maintain the speed for awhile. So he naturally seeks out Mr Element for his chemical abilities.

And is dismayed to discover that Al's become a goody-two shoes. So he forces Desmond to commit a couple of crimes after which, improbably, Mr Element solves the problem of Element Z.

Professor Zoom heads back to the future leaving a despondent Mr Element behind. But the Flash, who suspects the truth behind Desmond's suddent lapse chases him on his cosmic treadmill. He defeats Zoom and returns to the past. Meanwhile Desmond has turned himself in along with the proceeds of his crime wave. Thanks to the Flash's explanation, Al is freed.

The Reverse Flash/Mr Element/Flash story continues in Flash #153's The Mightiest Punch of All Time. In this story, Professor Zoom is about to be freed from prison after being subjected to a "cerebro scanner" that reveals that he has been entirely rehabilitated. Not surprisingly, Zoom had managed to scam the scanner. He decides to resume his battle with the Flash by corrupting Al Desmond with a criminality-inducing ray.

The Reverse Flash manages to capture Barry. Desmond, realizing that he can only help as Mr Element, dons his costume and commits a crime. This gives Zoom an idea: Why not allow Mr Element to destroy the Flash? But the good side of Desmond wins out and he frees the Flash, who kayoes his evil counterpart. Flash then takes Al to the future, to undergo scientific rehabilitation. This time the cerebro scanner works properly and Desmond is finally free of his criminal past.