I have long read about the intoxicating adventures of the Golden Age Plastic Man. But I'd read too little to get a good sense of it. That's been corrected by the DC Finest volume Plastic Man -The Origin of Plastic Man. For the first time, I got a chance to see the character develop in his earliest days, growing ever more peculiar-and-wild as writer and artist Jack Cole became more and more confident in the direction of the wacky superhero.
I've read Plastic Man's origin a few times, first in Jules Feiffer's epic The Great Comic Book Heroes and later in the Millennium reprint of the first issue of Police Comics. The current volume from DC captures the Plastic Man stories from the first thirty-six issues of Police Comics. Firebrand was picked to be the cover star of the comic but after four issues gave way.
Plastic Man made his full cover debut with issue five of Police Comics and never looked back. This collection from DC contains the first thirty-six adventures of Plastic Man from Police Comics as well as the first two issues of Plastic Man's own comic which offered up four stories each for a whopping forty-four Plas misadventures. Wild stuff!
Woozy Winks joins the cast in the thirteenth issue of Police Comics and the stories by Cole get even stranger. The chaotic nature of Plas himself is invigorated by his new sidekick, a man who Nature refuses to harm in anyway despite his absolute carelessness.
It's interesting to note that all images of The Spirit and Ebony White have been excised from the cover images reproduced inside this collection. More on Plastic Man tomorrow.
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Waaaaaay back in the 1990s, I read a rumor they were developing a Plastic Man movie starring Jim Carrey. This was right around the time of ""The Mask," Ace Ventura," and "Dumb and Dumber," when Carrey was at the height of his popularity.
ReplyDeleteI personally think Carrey's schtick wears very thin very fast... but, wow, he would have been the perfect Plastic Man.