I have to admit that the Nick Cardy cover for this issue isn’t really one of my favorites. Perhaps it’s because the logo panel is chopped off and treated as a separate entity… don’t know. All I know is that it seems a little odd somehow which is unusual for a Nick Cardy cover. That being said, it isn’t nearly as odd as the Flash story inside that bewilderingly took two people to write, J. David Warner and Cary Bates. I’ve never heard of J. David Warner and I suspect it’s one of those deals where Warner provided the plot inspiration/solution as to what was happening on the cover, and Bates took it from there. Since this is just a rather idiosyncratic blog and not a research paper, I guess we’ll never know. The point is that the story isn’t all that great, but I’ll invoke the Roger Bollen (Animal Crackers) rule here which is that you can’t have a blockbuster every time. Words to live by.
The Flash story is simply about how his super speed inadvertently causes problems everywhere he goes that day because of a bet with Iris that he could be on time for everything that day. Without the bet, he shows up late and there would be no problems. In a pointless add-on, at the end of the story he catches some crooks robbing a bank who are using a vibration weapon that is somehow powered by his speed vibrations. Oy.
The Green Lantern story that fills out the issue is a rather pedestrian effort for Denny O’Neil and is a bit of a step backward from his recent (back then) stellar run on the character. The wondrous Dick Giordano art, however, is reason alone to enjoy the story.
I’ll close by paraphrasing a caustic theater critic here by saying that they really didn’t have any good ideas for a comic book that month, but they put one out anyway.
