Flash Fridays – The Flash #152 May 1965

I could be wrong, but I think this issue is a one-off rarity in that the entire book from elegant cover to beautiful last page was inked by Murphy Anderson. In all honesty,  I had totally forgotten about this issue and was pleasantly surprised on rereading it to find a Murphypalozza. As recounted here before, I’ve always had a soft spot for Murphy’s art, but I can understand why this issue wasn’t as deeply etched into the little gray cells as other Flash issues have been. In the Spring of 1965 I was a bit distracted by the existential crisis of a looming high school graduation, finding a summer job to earn money for college and getting ready to leave for the aforementioned college. Not to mention hanging out with my future wife and not knowing where the future was taking us. I was busy.

So it was kind of fun to get reacquainted with this issue and enjoy the visual feast it offers. Sadly, the stories, which were always formulaic, were now becoming little more than repeats of stories from previous issues with a bare minimum of details changed. The Trickster story about using toys to commit crimes is practically a carbon of the Trickster’s last appearance. Ditto for the story with Iris’s absent-minded professor father Professor West where a group of criminals, make that spies now, want to use the good professors’s knowledge to further their cause. There’s a fine line of distinction between formulaic and repetitive, but it’s worth noting. This fact was only exacerbated by Stan Lee and Marvel Comics taking the evolution of comic books a little further down the road with each new issue they brought out. But, just looking at each priceless page of Murphy’s inking, somehow made none of the above matter quite as much.