.... well, you start seeing strange things when you eat the peculiar salad. Just say no, kids!
So, the Resentful District Attorney Clifford Devoe becomes the Thinker. Fanboys will note that DC would recycle the name later in the Silver Age (not to be confused with Marvel's "Mad Thinker"). Turns out he doesn't think things through very well, especially for an attorney, so the name might be ironic (like if someone called me "Slim").
See, it's bad enough that he was busted for the crimes Jay knew about, but he willingly coughs up evidence of other crimes he was plotting. The best doctors make the worst patients, I suppose.
I have to admit I've been a little disappointed in All-Flash Quarterly. Sure, there have been some bright spots, but for every Roy Revenge there has been a slew of generic gangster bad guys that painfully proved to me once again that a hero is only as interesting as the villains he fights. Which is why Batman is so awesome and Superman is so lame.
But every so often, just when I'm about to dutifully go through an issue of All-Flash Quarterly with zero expectations, I'm given issue #12.
HUNK NORVOCK! That is the greatest name ever.
And this is the worst district attorney ever:
Wow. Way to fold up your tent there, Clifford. It's one thing to see that your case is in trouble, but it's a whole 'nuther thing to waive a white flag once you're in trial. Clifford lost some serious cred there with the public who holds an election every four years to determine whether or not Clifford will still be doing that job. Thusly:
I don't know why Clifford is looking all resentful. The man did everything short of wet his pants and lay in the fetal position in the middle of the courtroom. Did he expect anything else?
But then Clifford goes completely off the rails and decides that not only is being a prosecutor not his bag, but he's now going to resort to a life of crime. Of course, he could always just do something else in the legal profession, go back to school and enter a different profession... there are many attractive options out there. But not Clifford.
Clifford likes him some whiskey and rye, it appears.
So, I'm singin' "Bye, bye, Mr. Prosecutor Guy,
In a hurry, told the jury
Norvack's witness wouldn't lie
And now your career has taken a dive
I guess now you'll lead a life of criiiiiiiime
Soon as you finish your whiskey and ryeeeeeeee"
It took me a few minutes to come up with something that would fit into the chorus of "American Pie" like that. If Clifford had put that kind of effort into preparing his case, he wouldn't be staring resentfully into his shot glass like that.
So I'm leafing through All-Flash Quarterly #8. You may recall that the powers that be put a poll in the book, asking readers to weigh in as to how they felt about Winky, Blinky and Noddy as well as whether they wanted to see full-length stories or four shorter ones. Winky, Blinky and Noddy (unlike Jason Todd) were given a vote of approval by the readers, while readers were reportedly evenly-divided as to the length of the stories. So, they cut the figurative baby in half and announced that future issues would have two longish stories of 32 pages (rather than four 16-pagers or one 64 pager), disappointing everyone equally.
I, for one, wanted short stories but I was about 70 years too late to cast a meaningful ballot. I wasn't in favor of long stories because that meant when a story opened with something like this:
... you were stuck with it for 64 pages.
What struck me as funny about this is that the kid was blind and was having complications from an operation designed to restore his sight. The upshot was that if he couldn't stay awake without stimulus (no Mountain Dew for him!), he wouldn't survive. The kid's mother remarked that the kid was a huge fan of the Flash and so Jay shows up to tell him a story. Because kids never fall asleep when you tell them a story while they're laying flat on their backs in a bed.
Which meant that we got a lot of stuff like this:
I don't know what kind of "quick relief" he's talking about, but the look on his face is telling me I don't want it.
It didn't get any better, even in a "it's so bad it's good because I can make fun of it on CMNS" kind of way. As you might expect, the kid regains his sight and realize that Jay and the Flash are one in the same.
And now that you can see, do I have any boogers?
Okay, I'm better than that. My point with the panel is that Jay was talking to the kid as the Flash the entire time and isn't quick enough to stop the kid's chatter before he gets out everything but the last syllable? That room still has the doctor and the kid's mother in there, so I'm pretty sure the cat's out of the proverbial sack.
Here was an ad I saw for the second issue of Wonder Woman:
Well, I was going to skip it, but ALICE MARBLE, WORLD'S FORMER AMATEUR TENNIS CHAMPION IS THE ASSOCIATE EDITOR? Well, put a gun to my head, why don'tcha? That rocks on so many levels!
Men and women have strong yet polarized opinions regarding the literary value of the "Twilight" series...
Dang straight, you are.
From Pep #2, a little Fun with Out of Context Artwork! (tm!):
Hmmmmm... I'd feel a little less creepy about it if it weren't for the location of his left hand there and the expression on her face. Don't act like you don't see it. All we need are some quotation marks. Thusly:
Meanwhile at home: Connie and Kayo "talk things over."
See what I did there? It's a gift.
Hey! It's time for Fun with Out of Context Dialogue!:
Continuing All-Flash Quarterly #6 , we have the first ever multi-panel Fun with Out of Context Dialogue! (tm!):
This next one doesn't have any double meaning (unless you just find something perverse in everything), but it was pretty dang funny:
That's a meme in the making somehow. I'm not sure how, but it's going to take off. Maybe not in my lifetime, but just remember, you read it here first.
Hey! It's time for more Fun with Out of Context Dialogue!(tm)!:
That will make you a hit with the ladies.
Anyway, back to the story. You may recall that Winky, Blinky and Noddy had somehow (AND I'M NOT ASKING YOU TO EXPLAIN IT AGAIN, GARDNER FOX!) developed a machine that caused people to exchange personalities. Here we see that the Flash managed to switch personalities with all three of the guys at once:
This is presumably because they barely had one brain between them, which was actually rather clever. And the look on Jay's face right there makes this well worth your dime.
Speaking of which, check out the Flash button they gave you for free. FREE!
WANT.
All you had to do was fill out this handy coupon. Of course, that meant destroying your copy of a Golden Age comic that would result in a net loss of thousands of dollars, but they didn't think in those terms back in the day:
Now for me, with the exception of the "Roy's Revenge" story, I would prefer the four individual tale format rather than the one book-length feature, but that's just me. As to the "Three Dim-wits," . . . well, they do give some much needed comic relief, and there's only so many times you can watch Jay rescue Joan, so I'm hoping the readers went for it.
There are actually come pretty decent replicas of the button you can get for a couple of bucks online, but I'd want the real deal. There's only so much room on Adam's shelves. Here is what I believe to be a shot of the original issue:
Thanks for bearing with me, everyone. Work had really gone crazy for a while, but I think that things are starting to level out. I hope you enjoyed Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog. I watched it for the first time over the weekend, and since it was put out by Joss Whedon of The Avengers movie fame (which, I'm embarrassed to admit, I still haven't yet seen but I totally will) I thought it was worth passing along.
So I'm reading All-Flash Quarterly #6 and apparently I missed out that the three idiot henchmen in the last issue were going to be recurring characters. They're called Winky, Blinky and Noddy and between that and their rhyming last names, they pretty much had to hang out together.
Like most Liberal Arts majors, they didn't have any marketable skills, so they decide to start a "personality building" business:
... which sounds ridiculous, until you realize that "life coach" is actually a thing now.
Apparently, this involves either being a compounding pharmacist, alchemy, or just the desire to drink whatever you can get your hands on:
That exchange reminded me of the last line of the opener to David Lee Roth's Yankee Rose video. Is everyone old enough to remember that?
Oh, what the heck. Here it is:
They played music videos on MTV when I was a kid. Scarred me for life.
Anyway, the boys invent some kind of personality machine, that Gardner Fox explains in typical Gardner Fox detail:
And, as usual, I don't understand nary a word. But I am going to work in the phrase "my emotions are rioting inside of me" at the next available opportunity.
And I'm not sure how this fit in, but the Flash encounters a social worker who likes to take her work home with her:
I was a social worker once and I never actually took a child home with me. I'm just saying. That's a little odd. As in "does Social Services know this woman is helping herself to a little orphan boy?" kind of odd.
Of course, things go wrong, but the fast-talking Winky, Blinky and Noddy are too clever not to buy themselves some time:
I would be the portly guy in the middle. What do you mean we went to have ice cream? I don't remember having any ice cream!
Hey! It's time for some Fun with Out of Context Dialogue! (tm!)
Yes, the child said "gollywobbles." And he says it a lot. Nearly every panel in which he appears has that phrase, and I'm skeptical I can make that phrase popular.
But you know I'll try.
I looked it up, by the way. This guy has a blog by that name, so someone else must have said it somewhere. I saw that it may be a bastardization of the nonsense word "collywobbles" which is "a state of intestinal disorder, usually accompanied by a rumbling stomach." Which, of course, makes it awesome.
That's not very American of you, Flash. We're all about interfering with the life choices of others if we don't happen to agree with them. That's as American as spray-tanning.
More on this story tomorrow. Oh, did I mention that the machine started switching people's personalities with one another? Like in Freaky Friday? Yeah, that's happening. That's probably important. Sorry I didn't mention it before.
Happy Monday, my lovelies! You know what I just finished reading? This:
Cardboard by Doug TenNapel
Yeah, I know it's for a younger audience... probably your "tweeners," but it had great art, fast pacing, sharp dialogue... I don't care if it was for my tired old eyes or not. I was entertained, and that makes it a winner.
Let's finish up All-Flash Quarterly #5. I'm getting the impression that writer Gardner Fox decided that, what with the talking horses and all, we just can't take things too seriously, so he indulged himself in silliness a bit:
Now that's some old school villainy right there!
Here's a good two-panel joke that'll slip right past you if you aren't careful:
Then, because it is a Gardner Fox story, we once again get a little too detailed with the explanations:
Wait. What?
Well, I can't argue with success, but I can't follow that now, much less when I was the target age for this thing. I appreciate that Gardner had this confidence in the comprehension level of his readership, but I'm afraid I would be a terrible disappointment to him.
No, give me the cheap gags:
YEAH! Buffoonery is a comedic style that just never grows old. That's why Judd Apatow is a bajillionaire.
Remember, hepcats! Too much jivin' isn't good!
And then we ruin everything with people speaking in unison:
You understand why I can't stand that, right? I mean, have you ever said the same thing as four other people at the same time? And here we even have laughing... in unison. It's so awkward. And frankly, this scene takes place months after the story ended, so how did all those people end up in the same place at the same time, much less spontaneously speaking in unison? And is... is Jay winking at me??
A new feature that Google put on in my absence is the ability for me to check out the stats on my page. It doesn't tell me anything personal, but it gives me an idea of whether or not folks have rediscovered the magic of our little comic book funhouse. I was especially wondering since you folks are so dang quiet in the comments.
Well, lo and behold, traffic is dang near back to where we were in our heyday. So, even though you are a crowd of few words, I appreciate the hundreds of eyeballs that have put me back into your rotation. It's amazing, and very gratifying. So a big "thank you" to everyone for coming back after my lengthy hiatus.
So how can I thank you? By reading All-Flash Quarterly #5, so you don't have to! And it's a surreal one, to be sure. For example, it has talking horses:
And seriously, I know you kids don't believe this, but we comic book nerdlingers were tormented back in the day for reading comics because folks thought they were for people to stupid to read "real" books. I cannot imagine the grief that would have been heaped upon me by my cruel peers had the talking horses come to light. I mean, Gardner Fox is awesome. He gives us goofiness of Billy Haney-esque proportions, but this is just an invitation to a beating for your loyal readers.
A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM CMNS: Know what the most dangerous room in the house is? The bathroom? The kitchen? I would have thought so, but apparently not. It's the darkroom. It's a place where people used to develop photographs back in the time of the Spanish Revolution or something, and it appears it was very dangerous:
A DISCLAIMER FROM CMNS REGARDING THE PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Hmmmmm... I've got a good willing suspension of disbelief, but I Googled "has anyone ever died in a darkroom" and it goose-egged. I presume there was going to be some kind of follow-through. So, never mind. You probably don't have a darkroom in your house anyway. I guess this was the worst PSA ever.
No, wait... HERE'S the worst PSA ever:
Apparently, in the 1950's, the difference between being a homosexual and being a pedophile was a moot distinction. "Dangerous as smallpox," it was!
Actually, before I was distracted by The Adventures of Lazy "Walkin' is for Chumps" Jimmy and His New Best Friend Creepy Ralph , I was looking for this:
What do you think? Eh? Eh?
Hello?
Anyone there?
Okay, back to comics.
The Flash is not fooled by your paltry attempts at Photoshopping, 1940's photographers!
and... AND
That's right, Jay! Any photographer knows that purple grass is a cool dusky... color.
Too much detail. Egad, we've gone from talking horses to a photography seminar.
Enough of that. Remember yesterday when I talked about "electric baseball"? Well....
They were actually pretty close in their artist's rendition! Cool, huh?
This was developed by Jim Prentice, who filed a patent on Electric Baseball in 1927, when he was a mere 17 years old. This particular version was produced from 1938 to 1941. All-Flash Quarterly #4 came about in 1942, so the seed company probably bought out his leftovers for a song.
To be fair, though, I doubt the profit margin on seeds really justifies giving out top tier merchandise as premiums to your sales force. I'm just guessing, of course. I've never been in the seed industry. I probably shouldn't assume, but it seems reasonable.
Finishing up All-Flash Quarterly #4... where Jay forgets the inspiration for his costume:
Derp! Maybe it's the winged helmet and winged boots on the super-fast guy that's got them confused.
Seriously, I went to Google images to find a picture of Mercury, and I couldn't find one where he wasn't wearing the same headgear.
Jay's a scientist, you know.
This caught my eye. It's interesting from a historical perspective, and also a little sad that kids couldn't really escape what was going on at the time:
Of course, we're in the middle of six wars right now, and I'll wager you'll not hear a whisper of any of them in any comic produced this year. It's not funny, of course, but every once in a while something makes me ponder what a different America we live in than back when these comics were made. I'm not saying either is better or worse - both have their strengths and shortcomings. But it certainly is different.
For example, I don't know where I'm going to get my hands on a singing lariat these days:
This is another thing I tried to Google on The Google, and all I can find are references to it as a toy. I presume there was a whistle or something that made a noise when you twirled it (or whatever it is they call it when you're whipping a lariat around), because you can't go wrong with making shrill noises where kids are concerned. That, my friends, is universal. I'm tempted to send in a coupon to these seed people and see if they make good on it.
I had more information on electric baseball games of 1942, but I couldn't find one that looked like this:
Since I wasn't able to find an exact duplicate, I can only presume that the claim "you'll never tire of playing" is an accurate one, because people have to be hoarding them. If anyone recognizes this, let me know, because other electric baseball games from 1942 didn't look like this.
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