The Black Dragon versus the Justice Battalion

I swore I'd never do it again but...

I am going to try to read another Golden Age Justice Society of America comic book (All-Star Comics #12, AUG-SEP 1940), if for no other reason than to dissuade you from ever trying to do so yourself.

Oh gods this is AFTER Flash and Green Lantern left; I'm doomed.

This the first outing of Justice Society as the "Justice Battalion", meaning... well, nothing really.  It just meant FDR gave them a new nickname and permission to fight against the Axis with his blessing (and some coordination by Uncle Sam)

And by that I mean The Federal Government, not the CHARACTER, who had much more important things to do, like give piggy-back rides.

The war was too big to be ignored in comic books and editors had to find ways of making their heroes' adventures fit into war-time storytelling.

Except of course for Batman who always does whatever the heck he wants;
he was playing keep away with Catwoman while other heroes -- government pawns that they are! -- fought Uncle Sam's war.

The Flash and Green Lantern, being popular AND sensible, had gotten their own comic books and so had already left the JSA.  

I guess it makes sense that Jay would be the fastest one OUT of the JSA.

Green Lantern was only in nine issues of the JSA.
That's about the length of an average Geoff Johns story.

As I regularly remind people, the JSA is not so much the JLA's conceptual predecessor as it's conceptual opposite.  The JLA was composed of the DCU's most popular and iconic heroes; the JSA was composed only of characters NOT popular or iconic enough to have their own comic book series. At times, it REALLY shows.

In this issue, actual comic book star Wonder Woman becomes the JSA secretary, 

Starman always had a way with words. And oomphy way.

This not so much because She Was The Woman (like everyone assumes), but to explain why she didn't get story segments of her own, because she was a STAR in her own comic. The POINT of the JSA was to showcase these also-rans and Wonder Woman only did cameos in the hope that her popularity would boost interest.

The cover is proof of that, if proof were needed.

She was already a busy lady and none of these feebs were up to the task of saving Steve Trevor's bacon on the regular.

The premise for this series of stories is that the "Justice Battalion" has been asked by the feds to look into an Axis subversive organization called "The Black Dragon".  Who are they?

A shadowy tong headed by a war-mongering self-centered elder who has a very high opinion of himself, a very low opinion of his countrymen, and wields power through a fanatical cult.
Thanks goodness America is safe from such things!

They also double as a pre-explosion Kryptonian cos-play society.

Major Exposition shows up from the Pentagon to give the JSAers their assignments.

Actually, this was before the Pentagon, but you get the idea.  The JSAers don't care WHERE their assignments come from as long as they GET ASSIGNMENTS. They can't live without them!

There are eight inventors who've been kidnapped along with their war-relevant inventions.

Unlike me!

Eight? How terribly convenient.

"Count me out, boys! While you're off beating up racist caricatures, I'll stay here and battle The God of War himself, along with his divine minions."

I am deeply moved by the sad sight of the godlike Spectre, disappointedly opening what he had hoped was a Valentine from the Little Red-Haired Girl.

I am impressed, however, that even the Golden Age, the writers found the time to call themselves on their own BS, in anticipation of potential reader objections:

Whatever helps you sleep at night, you deserter.

So off "the boys" go to fight the Black Dragon.  Oh, and despite Wonder Woman's clearly superior "star" status, Golden Age writers were not above some standard sex-stereotyping:

"Wistful"? More like dumbstruck by how much their enthusiasm outstrips their confidence.

Tomorrow we join JSA Chairman Hawkman on HIS part of the adventure.  Will he be saving an AERIAL invention, as would be thematically appropriate? You'll see...!

The Glass of Poison, Part 4: Unwarranted Danger

When last we left Speed Saunders, Ace Investigator, he was rummaging around in a(n alleged) gangster's mansion to look for some evidence tied to the poisoning death of exposé author Phillippa Rowen, while his latest sidekick Saunders-Girl (a.k.a. "Betty") holds a gun on said gangster.  It's a bit extreme, but all things are permissible in the Saundersverse in the interest of time and it's not like Speed really needs a warrant.  As the old Ace Investigator saying goes, "A Whim is as good as a Warrant."

Does he find something? Of course he does; he's Speed Saunders and doesn't have time NOT to find something.  And where? The same place he usually does: IN A BOOK.

Well. Isn't that convenient.

Pro tip for murderers manqués; don't underline your murder methodologies as if you're studying for your Social Studies final.  It just MIGHT seem suspicious.

What WOULD Speed do without BOOKS?  They contain all information, all clues, all answers.  I suppose nowadays Speed would spot a "bookmark" on a computer, labelled "prussic acid" and linking to a page on howtogetawaywithpoisoningpeople.com.  

Does Speed reveal the info he has discovered? Of course not; Speed always keeps info to himself until the last panel, when it all spills out in the info-dump of the Speed-splanation.  

"Thank you, Shoeshine Boy; you're humble and loveable."

Yes, thank you, Speed Saunders. For breaking into my home, accusing me of murder, and holding me at gunpoint while you ransacked my house for evidence against me.  Please, sir; may I have another.  Bettini is clearly bucking for admission into the Golden Age Gentlemen Gangsters Hall of Fame, along with Broadway Bates and Hapsu.

You'll notice, over time, that the moon is ALWAYS full in a Speed Saunders story, which implies that Speed only solves one crime a month and only has 24 hours to do so.  It explains a lot.

Then Speed, moving fast as is his wont, asks Saunders-Girl to stay the to-night.

"That way, you'll have to come and get ME."
Speed Saunders makes James Bond look like an arthritic tortoise.

A lot happens between panels in a Speed Saunders story, that's all I'm gonna say here.

What the--?!

There's a lot to unpack from this panel.  

First, Speed really DOES have only one (non-skiing) outfit: a puce Glenurquhart Estate Check, that Reverse-Barberpole tie, and an orange trilby.  

Second, Speed has an "office" somewhere, which I don't believe for a minute.  My theory is that Speed ALREADY, between panels, accompanied Saunders-Girl ("Betty") back her place from his and he is now RETURNING to his office (which is within his apartment).  Why is he taking the subway, which is highly uncharacteristic of Speed Saunders, you ask? Because he drove her home in the Speedmobile and then ABANDONED IT, which is highly characteristic of Speed Saunders.  Probably left it with his adoptive cousin, Slow Saunders, Ace Auto-restorationist, to have the top of the car re-attached.  

Third, something really bad is about to happen. How do I know this? Because Speed is on public transportation and the only narrative reason for that is: TO SLOW SPEED DOWN.  He's about to be "too late (or just in time) to stop something" and the only way make someone who can shadow-travel and tesseract "too late" for anything is to impede them with obstacles; it's just like in a Flash story.  

Hm. So I guess Phillilpa Rowen was a NOVELIST rather than an exposé writer and to write a .. crime novel (?) she gathered ...  incriminating intel about real-life gangsters (?), who, um, were going to be portrayed in her novel with character expies, and... yeah, I give up.  That's ... just not what novelists do.  That's more like what exposé reporters do and we know they exist in the Saundersverse because Speed's reading one of the right now. 

How on earth a news-writer knows that Rowen had intel on Bettini and that Betty The Secretery (sic) also had access to it -- that I do not know.  This is literally the day after Rowen was murdered, so the news-writer didn't Find This Out, they already knew it.  Maybe.... Rowen was planning on giving the info to the exposé writer, but didn't get to do so because she was murdered? That's really the best I can do with this.

Speed likes apostrophes.  Even unwarranted ones.  Or maybe he just likes unwarranted things, like all his searches of other people's property.

Speed HATES death warrants, because Speed hates ALL warrants, so he has to put a stop to this!

Speed commandeers a uniformed person's vehicle, which is one of his hobbies.  That, Oriental lore, and goldfish.

Saunders speeds to rescue Saunders-Girl! WILL HE BE TOO LATE?!

Tomorrow: Speed is Too Late.

The Glass of Poison, Part 3: Java Jive

Having Seen The Body and Alerted the Authorities, proceeds to dictate reality to the Lesser Beings.

Yeah, McGonigle, you're an idiot, and that's not your job.  I mean, who wears THAT to commit suicide and drinks prussic acid from a CHAMPAGNE GLASS?

You know what else leaves the odor of bitter almonds on your breath, Speed?  An Amaretto Sour, an Almond Negroni, an Alabama Slammer, or any of the host of cocktails you'd make with orgeat syrup or amaretto.  Sure, it would be a little odd to be drinking any of those from a champagne glass, but NOT AS ODD AS PRUSSIC ACID.

"Your petty administrative procedures do not concern me, CLYDE.  Just do as I say while Saunders-Girl  and I capture the MURDERER, you cigar-chomping clod."

TO THE SPEEDMOBILE!

Is the Speedmobile, which has always been a hard-top, a convertible now? Must be a nice night and Speed simply WILLED it to be a convertible.

A-ha! They are off to confront BETTINI. 

Wait, who's Bettini?

Editor's Note: this scene has been rendered in sepia tone to indicate a flashback!

Oh, right; the gangster who is the Prime Suspect.  Carry on, then.  You know, without six months of previews, vlogged rumors, promos, a 24-issue arc and a company-wide crossover, it can be a little hard to keep pace with these old Golden Age stories.  

Rather than use the door, Speed travels via his shadow-form with Saunders-Girl (we can't keep calling her "Betty"; it's too confusing, what with them saying "Bettini" in every sentence now) so as to easily pass through walls and windows.

"BY JASPER, JAVA, WHAT ARE YOU DOING GADDING ABOUT IN YOUR PYJAMAS? FIND METAMORPHO! AND STOPPING PUFFING THAT RIDICULOUS CIGARILLO!"

The gangster Big Shot Bettini appears to be some sort of educated missing link creature or a relative of that caveman of song and story, Alley Oop.

Which, believe it or not, is STILL BEING PUBLISHED.

I'm afraid I find it difficult to trust you, Mister Oxmyx.

I assume what Fred Guardineer was going for here was a Sheldon Leonard type, a "Runyonesque" character; the over-obvious thug with pretensions who uses elevated language to disguise his unseemly origins.

"Will this take long?  I've a corn-rowing at the Ancestral Strands Salon in an hour and I'm loathe to no-show, being that appointments are so deucedly hard to obtain."

I love how Speed asserts "I'M ON MY OWN" while Saunders-Girl is standing RIGHT beside him. Apparently Useful Female Informants don't count as people, even when they are the ones holding a gun on the villain.

What Speed means is the Lesser Authorities are not aware of his visit, which is not on their authority; this is hilarious for two reasons. First, Speed needing the police's, or anyone else's, authority is laughable since Speed in the very instantiation of the Platonic Idea of "Authority".  Speed SWEATS authority, or he WOULD, if he ever sweat (and if he did, the LAST thing Speed would sweat would be... authority).  Second, he specifically told Clyde Homicidedivision what he was going to do just five panels earlier (no flashback here, just arrow up if you need to see it again).

There are SO many things going on here, and I don't know what ANY of them are.

 Tomorrow we'll see what amazing discoveries come out of Speed's fisting Bettini's wastebasket.

The Most Ouroborotic Man Alive

Well, The Flash, history's longest-running live-action DC superhero show, 

Oh my god, he's IGNORING "Smallville"!

is wrapping itself up and at last we have finally seen "our" Barry save his younger self from Reverse-Flash the night his mother died.

He's up against Matt Letscher as the Reverse-Flash who, although he is the "real" Eobard Thawne (appearance-wise) and is more believably petty and obsessive than Tom Cavanagh (who was always hard to believe was wasting his time and talent fussing with goober Barry Allen), simply lacks MENACE.  He's more like some **** at the office who ate the last cruller, saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, did you want that? Somebody's havin' a bad day!" After nine years, it's still not possible to believe Letscher and Cavanagh are playing the same character (a problem that Zach Levi and Asher Angel don't appear to have solved in the big screen Shazam films, either).

I'm not entirely certain they weren't told they were doing a new '"Freaky Friday" series.

It was certainly satisfying and surprisingly well done, especially considering that much of this final season has left fans, ahem, underwhelmed, to say the least. Many have theorized that the beginning of the season was crappy precisely because the show-runners were focused on the wrap-up tetrology, but I'm not sure I subscribe to that zero-sum analysis of production quality.

It was, I suppose, how the show had to end. 

You're a closed circuit, Barry;
you're got the answers in the palm of your hand.

But it does highlight a problem with the show and with the Flash in general that I have discussed before. Specifically: the Flash is about...

itself.

Pardon me that tautology, which seems like a stupid statement of the obvious.  What I really mean is that Flash stories are inordinately inward-looking and their subject matter is the Flash mythos itself, rather than external threats and situations.  Batman, Superman, et al.--they deal with threats that arise outside of them and that threaten people and things other than them.  On average, they are not the cause of the problems they have to solve and the problems they have to solve are problems for OTHER people, not merely themselves.  

For example, most of the icons in Batman's rogues gallery (the Joker, the Penguin, Catwoman, Riddler, et al.) are presented as pre-existing, operating criminals whom Batman steps in to put a stop to.

Two-Face's origins are bit more...
complicated.

Similar lists of villains could be made for most heroes. Even Lex Luthor, a villain who is famously obsessed with enmity for Superman, didn't start that way.  He was just a classic mad scientist, whose schemes Superman kept foiling. His later obsession with Superman was rooted in a retcon in Superboy story, twenty years after his first appearance.

Adventure Comics, #271 (1960)
BTW, fire extinguishers were invented in 1819, Lex.

How often is it mentioned "How Great Lex Could Be If Only He Weren't Obsessed With Superman?"

Answer: very often.

This, I'll mention in passing, is why I always so disappointed (angry, really) when fans and writers try to apply this template to the Joker (of all people).  

Frank Miller is to blame for this.
And quite a lot of other things, truth be told.

As if the Joker would be so weak as to be obsessed with ANYONE other than THE JOKER.

The Joker #7 (1975)
I can't believe I'm saying this, but ELIOT S! MAGGIN shows here a more sophisticated and deeper understanding of the Joker and Lex Luthor than most modern, pretentious writers.

In fact, most of Flash history was written like all the other heroes.   His classic foes

Unimaginatively called "The Rogues"

follow the traditional model of "existing crooks whom the heroes intervenes against".  Their particular flair or gimmicks may be informed by the fact that they have to face a superhero, sure.  But that's not their GOAL. It's neither their origin nor their purpose.  They aren't ABOUT the Flash.

That's this guy's job.

That's the Reverse-Flash's literary function. He has NO other origin or purpose other than messing with Barry. It's right there in the name.  He was DESIGNED to be what Luthor evolved to be: a perfect "anti-fan", but one who is also a mirror version of the hero.  Luthor is very much NOT Superman.  

Usually.

Other heroes have such villains, of course.   Batman has a score of them, most obviously Catman.

Deadshot, with his mean-girl taunting action, will always be my favorite.

Just kidding! No one can EVER replace Killer Moth in my funny bone of funny bones.

But Eobard Thawne is way better than all of those poseurs, and there is a reason. The Reverse-Flash is the combination of FOUR separate concepts: the Hater (the character who was created to and exists to hate the hero); the Stan (the character obsessed with the hero); the Competitor (the character designed to be the hero's threatening competitor); and the Anti-Hero (the character designed to be the opposite of the hero).  It's like somebody made Superman a smoothie out of Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, Vartox, and Ultra-Man. 

Which would still smell and taste 100% like Vartox, by the way.

Eobard Thawne's a triple-espresso with cane sugar and any character in any of those categories is going to pale in comparison; "Sure, but he's no Reverse-Flash!"

So, you can't fault the Flash Mythos for having one villain who is its hero's perfect counterpart and using him as such.  Flash may have more powerful villains but none can possibly be more symbolically resonant.

The Reverse-Flash is where it started. But just as Eobard Thawne became increasingly obsessed with Barry Allen/the Flash, so too did Flash storylines. Over time they became more about Barry Allen and his twins and descendants and Iris and his supporting cast and persecution by Thawne and Iris's murder and Barry's trial for his murder of Thawne (with its own absurd outcome, absurd even by Flash standards).  When Wally became the Flash, it was really more of the same because, naturally, Wally was... another obsessed Flash fan, worried about his legacy and THEN... the SPEED FORCE concept hit, and ...

Well, since THAT, it's been a runaway train to see how far and how fast and how frequently the Flash can shove his head up his own mythos.  

Often an impressive feat.

Everything is about a problem WITH or FROM the Speed Force, or a threat to IT or the Flash (or his supporting cast).  Almost to a point where an objective observer would step back and say "you are not the solution, you are the problem; if the Flash and everything associated with him went it away, everyone else would not only be fine but much better off" (which is really not a situation you want your hero to be in).  Unsurprisingly, the show wound up having the same problem the comics did.

I'm fond of many things about Geoff Johns' approach to mythic consolidation, but his retcon of Barry Allen's origin contributed enormously to this problem.  In case you don't already know, "Reverse Flash killed Barry's mother and framed his father who went to jail which is why Barry became a CSI and thereafter the Flash" is a wholecloth invention of Geoff John's Flash Rebirth.  It has zero pre-Crisis precedent.  Pre-Crisis Barry needed no tragic backstory.  He was on the police force and got superheroes, so of course he fought crime; what ELSE would you do with a superpower?!  The only hero who needed a tragic backstory was Batman, because it gave him a reason to develop his "powers".

But Johns's retcon turned the Flash mythos inward-looking tendencies and now set the baseline at "fetidly inbred".  Reverse-Flash and the Flash created each other.

Where on earth did a young Geoff get such a ridiculous idea?

I mean, yeah, if there is any two characters for whom it's in character it's Flash and the Reverse-Flash but... that's the problem.  It's an ouroborotic mess that makes for a lovely sci-fi short-story, but as the basis for a superhero mythos it's constricting.

"Ouroborotic" is a Classicist polite way of saying "self-fellating".

There are various interpretations of What the Myths of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, et al. symbolize. I've discussed many such theories myself.  But none of them have been "two comic books fans pissed off at each other about which one has their favorite hero right" which is pretty much what Barry (fan of Golden Age Flash) versus Eobard (fan of Silver Age Flash) is about.

Now every time I try to check in on what's going in Flash comics it's an impenetrable wall of Speed Force / Flash Legacy /Speedster Character jargon that I shut down.  

Nobody writes comics like THAT any more.

I still remember that issue of the Flash, even though I read it 30 years ago.  How many of the comics you've read lately (Flash or otherwise) will you be able to say that about...?