The Flash is starting to become fun again! Case in point, a really nice drawn and inked Murphy Anderson cover… with Adam Strange (probably my second favorite DC character) flying through the air in the background. How cool! Now I believe I have mentioned here previously that I was a bit distracted at this point in time by the fact that I was still in the early days of getting Funky Winkerbean off the ground, and that preoccupation tended to shortchange my comic book reading. I bought this issue off the rack and read it, but I remembered very little of it. I didn’t realize that Adam Strange was on the cover until I reread the issue in preparation for this blog. Getting busy will do that to you apparently.
The other fun news is that Cary Bates and Irv Novick are really getting comfortable with things and it’s showing in the work. The story has Barry and Iris traveling to visit her parents in the future only to find a simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln being assassinated again. It’s a nifty little SF tale that Bates manages to pull off while still staying true to the history and personalties of the characters. Meanwhile, Novick’s art seems to be finding its feet and is starting to feel right illustrating a Flash story. The whole thing is tied together by the inking of Dick Giordano on the eponymous Flash piece, and his drawing and inking on the Elongated Man story. In fact, I think I liked the Steve Skeates penned EM tale even more than the Flash story. The Elongated Man is settling nicely into a role that emphasizes his armchair detective status as much as his super heroics.
I was even pleased to see the reprinting of The Invasion of the Cloud Creatures again. It’s nice to see the Flash stories at this point coming off better than I remembered them back in the days of yore, and it makes me happy that I’ve embarked on this little project of revisiting a character whose influence on me was considerable.
