The Flash Arrives, In A Flash!
The biggest bastion of the Silver Age!
I’m sure you know the phrase (or at least the song) “New friends silver, old friends gold.” If you’re not, I’m unsure where you’ve been in the past 130 years.
The phrase comes from an old Girl Scouts’ song, derived from an 1890s poem, and alongside a nice lesson about keeping friends and making more, it’s surprisingly relevant for me today.
In Comics, often periods of time (defined by aspects of the comics themselves rather than even splits of years), are considered Ages. The very first, due to some level of nostalgia, is considered the Golden Age. Of course, given that initial name and the convention it created, the next one was bequeathed with the name Silver Age, and the one afterward Bronze Age.
So far, all of my articles have been contained in what most people consider either the Golden Age definitively, or what some call a transitional period between Golden and Silver ages.
However, there’s one particular milestone that most would describe as the biggest Golden-to-Silver turning point: the second Flash!
In Showcase #4, in October 1956, we meet Barry Allen, the new version of Flash. A forensic scientist who was a fan of comics depicting Jay Garrick as Flash!
But wait, I can hear you say, wasn’t Jay Garrick a real guy who was actually Flash in DC?
The answer to that, in fact, is yes! He was, but this arc and a later one make it canon that Jay isn’t real, or really Flash, on the Earth that Barry is from. He’s “real”, but not real? It’s complicated, and cleared up in a bit, but just wait a little.
Anyway, we’ve spent enough time on Jay for now, so let’s get back to Barry. He’s doing some chemical experiments in his lab (as one does, in the 1950s) when lightning strikes, bathing him in chemicals and electricity in the same instant. Because this is comics, rather than Barry being electrocuted, chemical burned, or both, he got superpowers instead!
Suddenly able to move faster than he ever thought possible, he of course has to test his powers, and their limits. In doing so, almost immediately he manages to save his girlfriend Iris from being shot! The bullet was fired by Turtle Man, the “slowest man on Earth”, clearly intended to be an opposite to Flash himself.
As Barry continues to test himself, dream up a costume able to withstand his speeds, and more, he even learns he can run fast enough to run on water! Of course, this comes in handy, and is how Turtle Man is defeated.
Considering the incredible, between-picoseconds feats the speedsters get up to in the most modern comics, it’s very fun to see the kind of things that passed for unthinkably fast in comics from this era.
Particularly since, in the very next story Barry Allen stars in, he’s going fast enough to travel through time! Exactly what that kind of speed looks like has changed over the years, but one of the most fun things DC comics have maintained for both Flash and Superman comics is that there’s a threshold of speed past which you can move yourself forward or backwards in time. They even used to say you could straight up rewind time with that same speed, particularly in Superman comics.
These kinds of shenanigans, with constantly shifting floors and ceilings of speed capability, and time travel shenanigans, would come to define Flash comics for the rest of their existence up until now.
They would even extend so far that by the early 60s, they were used to officially establish a DC multiverse! Barry would meet Jay Garrick, the man whose hero name he used in his own universe where Jay is fictional, and they’d solve a case and stop a cadre of criminals together.
By now, you’re realizing I haven’t mentioned Batman once in this article, and almost certainly asking why. It’s quite simple, really: His Golden-to-Silver-Age transition is an absolute cluster(bleep). When putting together the initial guides for myself to begin this project, the particular opinions on when Golden Age ended and Silver Age started and ended were immensely varied, complicated, and passionately argued. He’s got all kinds of different points toward it, from certain books starting up to certain costume changes to specific authors beginning their runs. There were at least three different eras that could be considered a “Golden Age to Silver Age transition” era by different sources.
He’s not alone in the confusion, but he is notable. For Barry Allen, it’s difficult to argue that any of his appearances are Golden Age, but Bruce has a much different battle. My personal tip, at least when it comes to Bruce, is to sort of let things happen as they may. The Justice League of America, at least, joins Barry’s Flash with the distinction of being essentially entirely Silver, therefore easy to just categorize that way.
For the second half of the 1950s and first part of the 1960s, if you find yourself reading comics set then, just enjoy the boom of sci-fi, frankly ridiculous monster villains and absolute camp. Suspend your disbelief, jump in and have fun. If nothing else, that’s what it’s good for!
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