I collected a bunch of old Thor reprints on newspaper stock, mainly so I could fill out my sparse Silver Age collection without having to spend a fortune.
There was one issue where Thor takes on The Stranger. I always wondered how that confrontation turned out. Turned out it was CRAP. The writer (Roy Thomas) really phoned it in. Stranger is a cosmic being that collects oddities from throughout the universe, and acts like kind of a prick about it. He kept Magneto and the Toad for a while. Marvel used him as a Deus-Ex-Machina when they wrote themselves into a corner, and this story was no exception.
So, for whatever reason, Thor follows some kind of anomaly tunnel to Stranger’s space station. They get into a tussle, and Thor decides he doesn’t really know how to fight this guy, so he bales. WHAT? THOR NEVER BACKS DOWN FROM A FIGHT!
<ahem> So anyway, Thor flies around and sees a gang of alien trolls around a campfire. He thinks maybe they know something about the Stranger, so he can get tips from them on how to fight him. He then decides maybe he’d better go as Don Blake so as not to alarm them. So now here’s dapper little Don Blake in a suit going up to a gang of uncivilized alien trolls and hoping to hobnob with them. Gee, they don’t seem to like him, so they proceed to rough him up. So, he changes back to Thor and smacks them around. WHAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT???
By this time, the story is down to the last couple of pages. Thor still can’t figure out how to fight the Stranger, so he decides the best thing to do is turn back time so this never happened. He spins his hammer really fast and one temporal hurricane later, he’s back in his digs. One, he’d never done that before. Two, that’s lazyassed stupid shitty writing that any English professor would have flunked and made an example of in front of the class by viciously haranguing the writer until he dwindled into a puddle of humiliation and shame.
So what if it was written 45+ years ago? It still insults my intelligence to this day, that’s how bad it was.
I remember that one. The excuse for that one was that Spidey was very distraught and not thinking clearly, and Daredevil noted that on a different day he’d be getting his ass kicked.
They originally explained it by saying that, just as hurricane winds can drive straws through solid tree trunks, so does the Flash’s speed enable him to pass through solid walls. Then a reader pointed out that those straws leave holes in the tree trunks – small ones, but holes nonetheless. He suggested an alternate explanation: since matter is mostly empty space at the atomic level, the Flash can vibrate his atoms to pass between the atoms of the wall. The editor gratefully accepted this explanation, and it became canon.
Of course, it’s absurd as a whole, but it did have a nugget of scientific fact at its core. Things like that gave me a head start in grade school science. When we got around to learning about the structure of the atom, I already knew it all from the comics. Instead of memorizing new facts, I only had to forget the nonsense parts.
Remember when Wolverine first fought Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers?
Remember they beat the holy hell out of him? So badly that he was hobbled and injured for nearly four issues?
Remember DC made Lobo? A parody of Wolverine that could heal from anything so long as a single cell survived?
Remember Civil War? Remember Nitro burning Wolverine down to ash? Remember Wolverine getting up in the next panel?
Let’s get even simpler with The Flash. He can run really fast. That doesn’t mean he can run 8000 miles, just like you or I couldn’t. He’d tire out in half a second, or however long it takes him to run a mile.
On the other hand, I’d think The Flash should be able to “fly.” I think by doing the “frog stroke” (underwater swimming) he’d be able to stay airborne in our atmosphere.
Except that forgetting all the nonsense parts is actually considerably harder than learning the correct parts from scratch, so you were actually at a disadvantage. If you did well in science class, it’s because of your natural interests and aptitude, and despite the “education” you got from comic books.
This was beautifully addressed in a Donald Duck comic. Donald got superpowers, including speed. So he set out to run around the world, figuring he could do it in – I don’t remember, but let’s say half an hour.
The trouble is that his speed of consciousness is also speeded up, so it would take him as long, subjectively, as it would take someone to run around the world. It would feel like it was taking several hundred days! It’d be immensely boring and lonely! Donald figured that out and came back after only a few miles.
Yeah, that’s right up there with Superman flying around the world so fast he turns back time. No matter how much comic book logic you try to throw out there, it still just doesn’t make any sense, even if it is Superman!
In TV Tropes: Crowning Moments of Awesome, they describe an incident in which the Flash learns that a missile is going to level a town, and in less than ten seconds, he moves every single person in that town five miles away so nobody’s hurt or killed. The person who posted that ended with something like, **Fastest. Man. Alive. **
I’ve seen that scene with the Flash moving the people. My question regarding that is what happens to the people that are moving at the super high speed? I know Flash has enhanced durability to be able to withstand extreme friction and wind flow from high speeds, but what about the people he was carrying?
Funny thing is, that’s more-or-less how Spider-Man beat Firelord - by just pounding away at him with no real regard for the consequences. Daredevil deliberately taunted Spider-Man and angered him. This should have ended with Daredevil in the morgue.
Related, Spider-Man got really angry once and took out Arno Stark in his Iron Man 2020 armor (which I gather was supposed to be more advanced than Tony Stark’s Iron Man armor at the time). Indeed with one well-placed punch he rendered Arno almost helpless and then kept slamming him until his armor was in shreds, supposedly armor that could (and earlier in the issue, did) withstand blasts from high-tech weapons.
One characteristic of Golden Age Superman was the artist, mainly Curt Swan, drew only one facial expression and varied it a little bit depending on the situation. So, Superman always looked bored, even when he was performing miracles that would put Jesus and all the Popes to shame.
In one “What if” type story, Superman decides he needs help to rid the world of evil, so he rigs up a machine that duplicates him into Blue Superman and Red Superman. Together, they rig a satellite system that bathes Earth with anti-evil rays. Subsequent panels show crooks returning items they stole back to their rightful owners. Lex Luthor voluntarily turns himself in to the police and resolves to help humanity, and eventually cures cancer. Mr. Mxyzptlk fixes all the damage he caused and cheerfully says his name backwards, returning to the 5th Dimension. Brainiac is leading a fleet of spaceships to conquer Earth, but then decides to retreat. The panel shows him smiling as he says “Wait, why should we conquer Earth? It’s such a beautiful, peaceful planet. Let’s turn back.” Lastly, Lex Luthor is talking with a policeman from his jail cell. He’s elated that because of his good deeds, his hair grew back.
I think that was one occasion where the DC staff just decided to cut loose and be totally silly.
Just remembered a Batman story that permanently broke my suspension of disbelief. From memory, and I think it’s fairly accurate: For some reason Batman and Robin are confined to a submarine in Gotham harbor. At the end of the story, Batman is shown running through town. He rapidly climbs a skyscraper, then apparently drops dead in front of a crowd of people. Turns out it was a Batman robot, fashioned from the spare parts to be found in any submarine.
At some point they came up with the explanation that Flash can lend the speed force to anything he touches when he’s using it. That way, the things and people being carried don’t explode or turn to mush.
Wasn’t there a comic where Wolverine came back from just a few atoms? That’s unprobable!
I have to disagree with this, too. Curt Swan was a master of facial expression. But he was subtle, and didn’t exaggerate as much as some artists. He could get a lot of emotion across with just a few lines.
A lot of very young readers feel sorry for the characters, and say that they want to see them solve all their problems and be happy. The problem is, removing all the conflict leads to non-stories. I think this particular story was an attempt to briefly give the younger fans what they wanted, and also a lighthearted counterpoint to the grim “Death of Superman” imaginary story they had published a year earlier.
I don’t mean to demean Curt Swan’s artistic talent, but his art had such a rubber-stamp look to it. The anatomy and perspectives are always perfect, as that was the style back then. It just didn’t look that vibrant. Everyone looked like statues, even when they were moving.
I think it might have had something to do with the dryness of the scripts. They were mainly plot outlines and stage directions back then, not full-blown scripts like today. Superman is in the same pose when he rescues a sinking ship, grabs a stray asteroid from orbit, or retrieves Lex Luthor’s giant laser cannon. Kind of the “all in a day’s work” facial expression, and no signs of strain.
Having said that, his art for the Last Superman Story, written by Alan Moore, was vastly better. I think it’s because he was inspired with more passion for artistic expression from the quality of the script and wanted to show John Byrne he would have a tough act to follow.