Along came the Flash, who could run faster than the speed of light.
Things began to melt.
Things began to stream.
CHAPTER 6
ACCORDING TO The Comic Book Heroes, Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs’s seminal overview of the Silver Age, the purveyors of children’s mass entertainment were requested by representatives of the US State Department to cultivate in their readers an interest in science and technology, in an effort to breed a generation of boffins capable of realizing their president’s cosmic dreams.
And so, Kennedy Man: the astronaut, the handsome scientist, the confident, pioneering go-getter with the beautiful wife or girlfriend and an eye on the stars and the shining future. The mad scientist villains of the past were being replaced by the sanest of scientist heroes. As the anxieties of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin yielded to the heroism of John Glenn and the Mercury spacemen by the mid-1960s, a new confidence was shaping the American heroes of the Silver Age. These men and women were already the winners of the Cold War, and their great armies of children were growing up in a world that could promise them the Earth.
DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz was a survivor of the pulps and the early fan scene. A longtime colleague of Weisinger’s, he’d also been a literary agent for cult authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. He brought to comics a calm and sunlit rationality and a love of perfectly constructed sci-fi puzzles often crafted around solutions to chemistry or physics problems. He favored an untroubling style that was neither dark nor goofy.
Schwartz built his team around artist Carmine Infantino and two writers, Gardner Fox and John Broome. Another of their set, Gil Kane, was a rakish wit and dandy with a drawing style that seemed to define a middle ground between Mac Raboy and Jack Kirby. Kane relied on stock poses a little too often, but his work was otherwise clean, fresh, and dynamic. His heroes were built like ballet dancers rather than wrestlers or strongmen, a new feminine grace that Infantino also brought to his American super-pioneers. This was the team that relaunched the Flash.
You may remember the Golden Age Flash as Jay Garrick, who inhaled heavy water fumes, blah blah blah. When it was suggested to Schwartz that he bring the character back with new stories as a way of testing the market response to superheroes, he agreed—but on the condition that he was allowed to rebuild the series from the ground up, keeping only the name and the superspeed powers. When he launched the new Flash in the pages of Showcase no. 4, at the end of 1956, it was an instant hit, a lightning stroke that properly launched the Silver Age.
Barry Allen was the fastest man alive. He could run faster than the fastest car, faster than the fastest jet. He could run so fast that he skipped across oceans like a stone or a rocket-powered Jesus. At top speed, he could race around Earth seven times in a single second, hitting the speed of light, and “vibrating” his atoms through solid objects. With the aid of his wondrous, preposterous “Cosmic Treadmill,” a super running machine, he could break the time barrier itself. Dressed in the red, frictionless bodysuit of the Flash, he used these fantastic powers to protect the citizens of Central City and beyond.
Androgynous, mercurial, sleek, and intelligent, the Flash was appropriately blessed with the coolest costume in comics. A design classic, the Flash costume was a head-to-toe sheath of clinging Ferrari-red frictionless material. His cowl featured decorative “earphones” with little golden Hermes wings that resembled the hood ornaments of some incredible concept car. On his chest was a yellow lightning bolt graphic that split a circle descending right to left in the manner of the kabbalistic lightning flash of magical illumination. The Flash’s one-piece ski jump suit had the effect of spotlighting and outlining the hero-runner’s perfect buttocks. His bright yellow boots had chunky inch-thick ridged treads and little streamlined wings at the ankles. For sheer gee-whiz modernity and graphic beauty, the Flash costume was exceeded only by that of his sidekick, nephew Wally West, alias Kid Flash.
Barry’s own dream suit was compressed into his ring and spat forth when he needed it, clinging like a second skin to his lean musculature. Carmine Infantino drew the Flash as a runner, not a wrestler or muscleman. Infantino broke free of the static, pressurized fifties style with a jazzy, expressive brushstroke, and a battery of new visual effects to suggest the strobing blur of a superfast man in motion. Taking tips from Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and the Futurist canvases of Umberto Boccioni, Infantino’s Flash could become a multilimbed composite image of a body in motion through time. His cityscapes, though, were always poised on two-dimensional, stage-backdrop planes—like cardboard cutouts of modernist skyscrapers, silhouettes, always on the horizon, like jazz-era prints on the walls of young urban professionals.
Barry Allen was an affable, crew-cut forensic scientist working late one night at the lab when a chance combination of lightning striking a rack of chemicals endowed him with superspeed. His villains were rogue personifications of scientific forces: thermodynamic (Heat Wave, Captain Cold), optical (Mirror Master), meteorological (Weather Wizard), sonic (the Pied Piper), gyroscopic (the Top), chemical (Mr. Element). Stories often turned around some simple scientific fact. Yet there was rarely the feeling of being lectured to. These science facts were exactly what boys of the Silver Age wanted to know, and what better way to learn than with this new avatar of one of our oldest gods? Chemical reactions were acted out as drama, while physics lessons could become dreams of velocity and romance.
This is where I joined the continuity: born at one in the morning on the last, bitter cold January day of 1960. The Flash was always my favorite superhero. Even now, if I could have any superpower, I’d choose his.
The Flash stories I loved most were drawn by Infantino and written by the aforementioned John Broome, who saw where the Kennedy hero was headed. The pioneering spirit that was urging America’s youth into outer space would fuel a corresponding drive toward inner space. Ten years before Stanley Kubrick rocketed Keir Dullea through the celestial kaleidoscope for the final act of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Broome, the elegant stoner, was drawing the connections between John Glenn and 2001’s Dave Bowman, and sending clean-cut heroes like Barry Allen and Hal Jordan (the new Green Lantern) across event horizons of total derangement that young readers had never witnessed before. As Broome typed in a sparkling haze in upstate New York or in Paris, how could his test pilots, cops, and spacemen fail to get high on the fumes?
For crew-cut Barry Allen, the outer reaches of psychedelia were occupational hazards. Like the astronauts he resembled, Barry could be relied upon to travel beyond the frontiers of the reasonable without losing his mind or soiling his scarlet speed suit. Batman might have faced intricate death traps, Superman might have dealt with alien conquerors, but Barry Allen, forensic scientist, could spend whole issues trapped in what amounted to a Salvia divinorum hallucination. In one series of stories, he was transformed into a wooden mannequin stumbling clumsily in his strings, dehumanized. Other episodes brought a curse that left him unable to see any color but green or saw him flattened underfoot to become a living paving stone crying out for help while an oblivious crowd hurried all over him. But the pièce de résistance came with “The Flash Stakes His Life on—You!” in August 1966. It’s one of the first stories I remember as having a profound impact on my young mind. I can trace many of my own obsessions and concerns as a writer back to this particular root.
The cover showed a close-up shot of the Flash. The background was black, without feature or detail. He was holding up his hand into the foreground as if he were standing only feet away from us, almost life sized, addressing us directly. His expression was frenzied. His eyes were those of a saint eyeballing the infinite. His palm extended, almost life sized, to bring us to a halt. He was the Flash—the Fastest Man Alive. The bold red title perfectly placed in the black space above his head told us so.
“STOP!” he cried in inch-high letters. “DON’T PASS UP THIS ISSUE! MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!”
(illustration credit
6.1)
The Fastest Man Alive was ordering us to stop and breaking the fourth wall of the second dimension to deliver his plea. This was the first time a superhero looked out from the flat picture plane into a theoretical higher dimensional space he could not see, only intuit, to ask his readers for help. He even seemed to know that he was in a comic-book publication. His world was not our own, and we were separated by a membrane as hard and permeable as Alice’s mirror. This was genuine Pop Art in its natural mass-produced Platonic form. This was art as product in a way that the gallery works of Roy Lichtenstein could only aspire to, and Infantino’s design would look spectacular in the Museum of Modern Art or the Tate, twenty feet tall.
Inside the story began. One day the Flash fell afoul of a bad bastard who’d invented a new weapon that caused people to forget about anyone caught in the path of its ray. He tested the device by turning it on his pet cat Jessica, whom everyone promptly forgot, causing the animal to vanish forever like a tree not falling in a nonexistent forest. Giving the cat a name, even though it appeared in only two panels before being banished to forgetfulness, was a typical Broome detail. We, as readers, would remember Jessica forever. It wasn’t long before the weapon was turned on the Flash himself. With no one to remember or recognize him, he began to dissolve like a smoke ring.
“SINCE OUR OWN BELIEF IN OURSELVES IS BASED ON HOW OTHERS FEEL ABOUT US—YOU BEGAN AT ONCE TO LOSE YOUR IDENTITY!” the villain explained to the dwindling superhero.
I could feel the horror. I knew those dreams where I was dragging a leaden unresponsive body in slow motion through air like Gloy gum, and could imagine a weightless, gaseous body being an even worse torment.
So here was the Flash spaced out, vaporized but still barely aware, on the edge of disintegration, a personality attenuated into bodiless abstraction. He could no longer function in the material world, and Infantino drew him as drifting red smoke in the vague form of a man, buffeted and disorganized by the breeze of passing pedestrians. Like an egoless Buddhist, he haunted the streets of Central City as a smear of living disintegrating consciousness. Infantino contrived to make it look how Alzheimer’s might feel. How could our hero get out of this ultimate trap? One little girl, whose dolly he’d rescued from the river that day, still somehow remembered the Flash, and through her he began to reassemble his ontological status—just in case you were wondering.
An adult eye may judge the simple morality, the unlikely motivations, and find Broome’s story light. It’s true that there’s all too often an airy, affectless tone to Broome’s work, but this one had deep resonance. It showed in precise detail the breakdown of the superheroic hard body that was occurring everywhere during the Silver Age. It depicted the end of the trip, the spacey, terrifying loss of self and volition that would be experienced by so many young people unprepared for the psychoanalytical effects of Albert Hoffman’s chemical child in a time of war. And it showed them that the only way back was through kindness, connection, and community.
Flash stories, too, were an entertaining source of so-called Flash Facts: editorial interruptions or features explaining how wind velocity during a hurricane could drive a blade of straw deep into solid wood, or how light took nine minutes to reach us from the sun, so that we wouldn’t know that it had gone out until nine minutes after the fact. Flash Facts were perfect for impressing teachers and parents and for proving that comics had something to offer an upstanding young generation of fresh-faced futurians.
Flash stories were the work of well-adjusted grown-ups who really understood children. In contrast to the titanic but all too often cruel and cloying sensuality of the Superman and Batman tales, the female leads in Schwartz books brought a brisk self-assurance to the proceedings. In the graceful hands of Infantino or Kane, women like Iris Allen, Sue Dibny, and Jean Loring were styled in the finest New Look Paris modes. Their hair was cut to keep up with the latest trends. This was partly a result of fallout from the code, which insisted that female characters be realistically proportioned and modestly attired, but it helped turn the Schwartz heroines into hip and pretty exemplars of the Jackie Kennedy style. Out of costume, their men wore slacks, blazers, and trilby hats or sported short-back-and-sides establishment haircuts. An aesthetic that would one day be called metrosexual was born here in full bloom. They all hung out together, these settled young couples with good jobs, positive can-do attitudes, and crime-fighting double lives they still kept secret from their loved ones.
Schwartz was also establishing a shared universe. Flash was friends with Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. He was also friends with Ivy League physics professor Ray Palmer, aka the Atom, and his lawyer girlfriend, Jean Loring. He also hung out with the Elongated Man (the Stretchable Sleuth) Ralph Dibny and his wife, Sue. They didn’t meet to fight one another as the later Marvel heroes would do. They didn’t overemote. They enjoyed picnics, which were routinely disrupted by oddly small-scale, almost polite, alien invasions—the kind easily repelled by the deployment of some quirky science fact that rendered the invaders vulnerable to common table salt or H2O. Their sexuality was never dubious or in doubt. Relaxed, cosmopolitan, they represented the epitome of our Kennedy Man, our postwar Madison Avenue pioneer astronaut American role model. Hopeful in the clear light of the morning of the Sun King. Poignant in their certainty.
And then the president was dead. The golden walls of Camelot collapsed, flimsy as any stage set, to reveal the bloody screaming mires of Vietnam beyond, where two million potential astronauts, artists, poets, musicians, and scientists were being lined up to die in the sacrifice of an American generation.
And with that came the new turn of the wheel, the biggest revolution of all.
The Marvel superheroes had arrived.
CHAPTER 7
AS IF SOMEONE had planned it all along, the new era of superheroes began with these words:
“WITH THE SUDDEN FURY OF A THUNDERBOLT …”
The Promethean age had been announced; the time of men as gods who bore fire in the palms of their hands had come. And with that recognition of the superhero’s Promethean dimension came the acknowledgment of punishment, Fall, retribution, and guilt—themes that would resonate through the experience of a very unusual generation of children. From now on, having superpowers would come at the very least with great responsibility and, at worst, would be regarded as a horrific curse.
Stan Lee had been writing comic-book stories for twenty years and was ready to quit. The business was dead in the water after the Wertham years, latching on to one brief fad after another in an attempt to attract readers. Lee had written Westerns, romances, monster stories, and crime comics until his wife, Joan, suggested he give it one last go, one last all-or-nothing demonstration of the kind of books he wanted to read rather than the kind his publishers compelled him to write.
Superheroes were on the way back, thanks to the Silver Age innovations over at DC and the success of their Justice League of America. This prompted publisher Martin Goodman to throw Lee a new challenge when he asked him to create a team of superheroes like Schwartz’s JLA but modern, fresh, and relevant.
And so Lee, with nothing to lose, gave it a go and in the process founded an empire. He was fortunate to have on his team the finest, most imaginative artists in the field: Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Marvel saw Julius Schwartz’s connected world and built its own, almost overnight; a whole universe that would be a stronger, faster, and smarter evolutionary improvement.
Fantastic Four no. 1 arrived in late 1961, two years before the real Fab Four would arrive from Liverpool. Flaunting tradition from the beginning, the Fantastic Four wore civilian clothes. When finally pressured to give them more recognizably superheroic costumes, Jack Kirby responded with functional blue jumpsuits that owed more to the Mercury astronauts than to circus acrobats and established the FF as a new breed of space-age superheroes with their feet on the ground. Marvel was going back to Jerry Siegel’s original idea. What if superheroes were real? What if they weren’t just fair
y tales for kiddies? What if superheroes appeared here and now, among us, like the Martians—or the Reds, who’d threatened the previous decade? That was the premise.
They were also a family, but unlike the Marvel Family, where everyone was everyone’s friend, or the Superman family, where every day was an epic emotional doomsday, the Fantastic Four quarreled and hugged and stood together like a real family.
The first Fantastic Four cover quoted the cover of Justice League of America no. 1, which depicted the heroes dwarfed by a monster. The Justice League had found themselves up against a giant alien starfish, but here the threat was one of Kirby’s rocky underworld titans.
“I CAN’T TURN INVISIBLE FAST ENOUGH!” came the poignant cry of the postwar independent woman.
“IT’LL TAKE MORE THAN ROPES TO KEEP MISTER FANTASTIC OUT OF ACTION!” boasted a man with weird attenuated limbs who was stretching his way free of a coil of rope. There was no explanation as to how he’d wound up in this embarrassing tangle. The other two characters were a fiery flying man who looked a little like the 1940s Human Torch and an orange-skinned walking pile of rocks named the Thing.
Of the four leads, only two were even faced in our direction. These new Marvel heroes were small; they dressed like us even though they had fantastic physical abilities. They worked on the street, not in the sky.
The whole thing took place on a street corner, a set constructed in the void of the empty background. The creature appeared to be emerging through the page surface itself, uttering the last roar of the dying monster comics of the fifties. It was all mouth, all devouring, and there was no Superman here to lock it up in his interplanetary zoo, no Flash to analyze it out of existence. The heroes of Fantastic Four were barely distinguishable at first from the screaming passersby, or the useless cop on the sidewalk, quailing at the sight of a green arm as big as a container truck shattering the concrete and clawing its way into the daylight world.
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