Boy, that’s an unattractive cover. The Flash seems a bit misshapen, none of the figures is connecting properly with the ground, the sickly green background color is unappealing–it’s got a simple enough message to it, but the presentation is pretty bad. Still, none of that was an issue for me when my subscription copy showed up, folded in half as usual, in my mailbox.
Inside was a relatively minor lead Flash story, noteworthy to me only in that I own the original art for the splash page to this issue, a gift from art dealer and convention organizer Spencer Beck. It’s also the only issue of FLASH published during my formative years that wasn’t exclusively written by Cary Bates, the writer who once saved the life of the Flash and then went on to imperil the JLA and JSA. Here, he’s co-credited with Bob Rozakis. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say that it was Bob who came up with the idea for the central gimmick of this story, but Cary who wrote the actual script.
The story opens as Barry Allen takes his lunch hour on a bench in Central City. Thus, he’s present when a trio of stereotypical 1970s biker-types deliberately attempt to run down a pedestrian. But even Barry doesn’t notice that, at the last second, the victim becomes somebody else, too busy is he becoming the Flash. He delivers the fallen pedestrian to an ambulance for treatment, then goes to work on the three bikers.
Strangely, the man Flash delivered to the ambulance has now become the President of the Security Federal Bank–and reports are coming in of a situation down at the bank. Racing there, Flash finds a man locked in the vault–but the man he rescues isn’t the one who had been locked in, and the vault’s contents have been looted. Having worked out that each victim is being swapped in sequence, Flash makes for the plane flight that the person in the vault had been on, and almost succeeds in capturing the perpetrator, but comes up short.
Back home, and with a hint from Iris, Barry works out he connection between all of these people: they all got their hair cut at the same new exclusive salon that Barry himself had been using. Racing over and taking a look at their appointment book, Flash stakes out the workplace of the next prospective switchee in line, and is there when the villain he has nicknamed Mister Originality makes his swap-in.
And now Flash is ready for the coup de gras. Knowing that he himself is one of the people on Mr. Originality’s list due to his own haircut, Flash races to a jail cell, into which Mr. O finds himself transported. Then, it’s a simple matter of relieving him of the belt of hair samples that enables him to make his switches, and the whole matter is wrapped up. Except, back at the Allen household, Stacy Conwell discovers that pages have been ripped out of her diary, pages revealing her dark secret! What is it? For that answer, we’d have to wait for a subsequent issue!
Meanwhile, in outer space, Green Lantern continued his serial story contending with the alien Olys who are re-enacting the biblical Creation myth in reverse. In this installment, they threaten to crush the Vivarium, in a reverse of creating the sky, thus dooming the millions of tiny creatures who dwell within this space terrarium.
Turns out that the Olys are using Green Lantern’s own misdirected power to do this, so he’s able to keep the sky from falling by drawing all of his energies back into the Power Battery. This issue also introduces Green Lantern’s strangest sidekick, the alien starfish-worm he names Itty. But we don’t really encounter Itty as an individual being until the next chapter.
Oh, and here’s the framed original to that splash page I mentioned at the top.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 