I also liked the one with Reverse Flash ... .

My cousin always had the best comics.

His dad (and grandad) owned the little gas station-cum-corner market in the tiny hamlet that (in its day) came as close to a South-of-Mason-Dixon Norman Rockwell magazine illustration (if you can think of such a thing -- Rockwell stayed close to home) as anyone could want.

And their market had a spinner rack, as most little-gas-station-corner-markets did back then.

(Read more ...)

And on that spinner rack were DC comics. No Marvels. Just DC and Harvey.

Which was OK. I was only around ten or so when I got to look at ol' Cuz's comics, anyway. FF and Spidey wouldn't have interested me then.

Cuz loved Joe Kubert's Sgt. Rock. He had those Doom Patrol comics I posted on a good 16 months ago. And he had a few Batman and a good many Superman (early Brainiac and Bizarro and Mr. Mfsxvplk -- or whatever -- stories).

I could visit Cuz -- who was several years older and had no time for me -- and just let him allow me time to curl up in a corner with a stack of his old comics for the whole afternoon.

There was one I kept coming back to, a story whose cover I did not see until years later (you think Cuz would let his 10 year old Neph read new ones with covers still on?).

What attracted me was the color (wouldn't it be, at that age?) of the hero in his red-and-yellow suit, with another hero in his red-and-blue suit with a little silver helmet.

The story was called "Flash of Two Worlds" and it was about time travel. Flash could run at speeds approaching light, so he could traverse spacetime. And so, he met his Golden Age (1940's era) incarnation.

Read Buffy S8 lately? How about Fear Agent? I guess it's true -- there are no new stories. But I like to think the comics creators nowadays love to do homage to the greats like Kubert and Gardner Fox, as much as I like to recall those old stories.

Kubert is a legend, of course. Fox wrote a good 1,500 stories for DC. He is one of the all-time greats in the genre, as well. Overshadowed perhaps in his day by the creative geniuses at Marvel Comics, he nonetheless left an indelible legacy.

Kubert illustrated his own scripts (AFAIK), but Fox relied on the able pen and brush of Carmine Infantino*. It was said Infantino would somtimes draw a cover and let Fox write a story to it! I think they probably challenged each other.

Clearly, modern day writers and fans are in the debt of these Silver Age creators.

The memory of their creations, to this eternal 10-year-old, remains ever fresh.

___

*Infantino has since given an interview with a well-known US journal about comics and their creators. The article provides much more insight into the DC "method" than anything else I've seen.

LJ orig.: Nov. 17, 2008