Behind a Hannigan/Giordano illustrated cover, the story of The Eradicator moves on. As the previous issue ended, the unconscious Flash and Captain Invincible were falling from a tall apartment building following an explosion in the apartment of Creed Phillips aka the Eradicator. The good Captain keeps slapping the Flash on the way down since reviving the scarlet speedster is their only hope of surviving the fall. Captain Invincible succeeds in reviving the Flash, who, with only milliseconds to spare, wraps Captain Invincible’s cape around a flagpole to break their fall. The flagpole jutting out from the side of a building has to be one of the oldest tropes in superhero comics. I can’t speak with certainty about the 1980s, but they’ve gone missing from city buildings for decades now. I suspect that writer Cary Bates was writing from old comic book memories, not the buildings in New York City.
The scene then shifts to a cave outside Central City where we see the Eradicator and the captive Fiona Webb he relates the Eradicator origin story. It’s seems that some gangsters took exception the prosecutor Creed Phillips crime- crackdown, so they kidnapped him and dumped him a radioactive waste pit. Creed climbed out of the pit with his body “irreversibly warped by the nuclear radiation which has bestowed him with fearsome powers… powers that would enable his subconscious to eradicate the molecules of living matter at will!” Meanwhile, Captain Frye/Captain Invincible intercepts a message from the Eradiator for the Flash and heads off the cave hideout to confront him. The Flash arrives just in time to rescue Captain Invincible from having his molecules eradicated. Chastened, Frye finally realizes that he’s not cut out for the superhero game, as the Flash heads off to do battle with the big E.
In the midst of all of they there is a very brief interlude with the Guardians on Oa as they make plane to send the Green Lantern Tomar-Re to warn the Flash of something forebodingly dire that’s about to happen, and in the last panel as the story closes we see Tomar-Re in space heading towards Earth thinking: “I must confess I wish the Guardians had not chosen me to confront the Flash with their grave discovery! It is a task to be dreaded… even by a Green Lantern!”
