Crisis Classics #1 - Flash Of Two Worlds

It was striking that it's now 2021 and  been a full decade since I last read some of my most favorite stories in all the comic book world. I know, because at the time I carefully recorded my impressions and thoughts on this very blog. Now I'd like to read those fanciful DC yarns again and since rewriting these reviews would be nonsensical, I rather represent them here with some fresh decoration and perhaps a fresh insight or two thrown in for goodly measure. Le me begin at the beginning. 

For us old comic book fans, the coming of a new year once meant a summer brimming with over-sized annuals filled with extra adventures of our favorite heroes, and over at DC it meant that the Justice League of America would soon meet up again with the Golden Age's own Justice Society of America. My very first issue of JLofA was a crossover, the first issue of the series drawn by Dick Dillin and it introduced me not only to the League, but to the older and sometimes wiser Society. I've loved the JSofA since. I miss those crossovers, eliminated because DC wanted to prune and spruce up their universe, and modernize it back in the 80's for a audience that was slipping away. What I've got planned for the month of January and perhaps beyond is a careful and chronological reading of the beautiful trades DC published over the a decade ago showcasing these crossovers, as well as the one-on-one team-ups that various heroes such as Flash, Green Lantern, and Atom had with their counterparts. Famously the whole Earth-2 concept was born in The Flash #123 when Barry Allen met his comic book inspiration. The team-up was popular enough to spawn a sequel the next year and another the year after that. I'll begin my overview of the JLofA-JSofA sagas with these first of three Flash tales.

From 1961,"The Flash of Two Worlds" in The Flash #123 was deftly written by Gardner Fox and delicately drawn by Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella. Under an iconic Infantino and Murphy Anderson cover, we meet Barry Allen who while doing a benefit for Iris West and some unfortunate kids accidently vibrates himself out of his world onto what will be dubbed "Earth-2". He soon enough realizes that Keystone City, in which he finds himself, is the home of his boyhood comic book hero Jay Garrick, the Flash of the Golden Age. He looks up Garrick in the phone book and soon enough he finds himself sitting in the Garrick home explaining things to Jay and his wife Joan. We discover that Gardner Fox must have been tuned into Earth-2 to create the adventures of the Golden Age Flash, who being several years older than Barry Allen has gone into retirement along with all of the Justice Society of America. But as happens so often in these tales, a threat, specifically the alliance of three classic Flash villains, the Fiddler, the Thinker, and the Shade cause Barry and Jay to team up and predictably defeat the baddies who are shocked to find two Flashes in the way of their schemes to rob and plunder. What is most striking about this story is its gentility. Barry finds himself on another world and very logically and simply finds his counterpart. They meet without rancor or suspicion and with a politeness only seen at the time in a DC comic they meticulously defeat the baddies. It's a whimsical and downright charming encounter.

 

Barry and Jay will get together again and that will be the subject of the next post in this series. 

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