The Flash #206 sports a great looking Neal Adams cover (does he do any other kind?) and at the top a Murphy Anderson illo of The Elongated man. Robert Kanigher continues his run on The Flash with a story that barely involves the Flash. It’s another un- Flash like story involving ghostly aliens and improbable coincidences. Two disparate couples are involved in accidents in which the wife of one and the son of another die. Two ghost-like aliens show up with an offer to the couple to trade their lives with the loved ones they lost. They are given 24 hours of immortality before the aliens return to claim their lives. The Flash improbably runs in to both of these couples on separate occasions and learns of their story. When the aliens return, he offers to trade his life for theirs, and when the aliens prove incapable of pulling that off because of the Flash’s super speed tricks, they decide that humans must be good and leave. Ta-dump! The only thing more boring than that story was having to recap it here. The Irv Novick/Murphy Anderson art registered another pretty good on the trusty artometer. The story also sported a new interior logo design that will take some getting used to.
The second story was an Elongated Man piece that had a much more familiar feel to it. It looked to the past for inspiration and was also a peek into the future because the story was penned by Cary Bates who was still a bit away from settling into his long run on the book. The feel of earlier work comes from the appearance of the Mirror Master who battles the Elongated Man as a way of tuning-up to take-on the Flash. He loses of course, but it’s a cute premise and a tale well told, aided and abetted by the artwork of Dick Giordano. Given all of that, it was by far the most enjoyable of the two stories. The appearance of one of the books core villains bestows a familiar feel to the issue and makes this Flashinado long for more.
