Who Is...The Odd Man!

There was a moment in time when DC Comics was my "favorite" comic book publisher, whatever that means. I bought my Marvels with deliberation and I chased Charlton with ardor, but in an era when cover price changes were coming almost on a monthly basis, it seemed to me only DC was attempting to offer up variations in its product which attempted to add value to their offerings. Then just as quickly as the thought occurred to me what we now call the "DC Implosion" struck and it took much of that added value with it. DC had offered up a lot of its lesser-known heroes in nifty back-up series and in the aborted effort to bring Steve Ditko's The Creeper back to the newsstands the extra was a little something called "The Odd Man".  (You can see him tucked neatly in the center of the ironic ad by artist Joe Staton for "The DC Explosion".)

The one and only Odd Man story appeared first in the second issue of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, the infamous in-house publication of just thirty-five issues produced to secure copyrights on a large batch of his unpublished material. Much of this "unpublished" stuff has now over the decades been published in various collections and so it is with Odd Man which finally saw the light of day in its original albeit black and white form in the second volume of The Steve Ditko Omnibus reprint tome. 

An altered version had been published back in the day in the pages of Detective Comics #487, so that was where I'd first encountered him. 

He's just as the name implies, an "odd" man, a detective who breaks out one of the most wildly colored costumes to fight crime yet seen. He uses weird props like extending coat tails with lead weights to knock out surprised foes and gloves that pop off with mist or some such. 

In civilian life he's Clay Stoner (I cannot imagine Ditko meant to imply what that does indeed imply-- but maybe) who is a gumshoe in River City when he's not otherwise in his brightly colored togs for fighting crime. He's like a clown of crimefighting, a reverse Joker so to speak. 

I really enjoyed the Odd Man and sorry there wasn't more of him. 

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