Brand Echh: The Double Life of Private Strong #1

As the Silver Age kicked off in the late 1950s, DC/National Comics wasn’t the only publisher testing out the genre once again,. All throughout the decade, different publishers had attempted to find success with new costumed heroes with names like Captain Flash, the Avenger and Strong Man. And Archie Comics was no exception. Getting a sense from his distributor contacts and newsstand road men that super heroes were showing some signs of life, Archie president John Goldwater contracted with creator Joe Simon to put together a pair of super hero titles for the company. The first of these, THE FLY, would run intermittently throughout much of the 1960s and the character would make sporadic returns afterwards. The other title wasn’t quite so fortunate.

This other book was called THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PRIVATE STRONG, a title that seems like it was chosen in an attempt to conceal the fact that what Archie was putting out here was a super hero title. The featured star was the Shield, a complete reinvention of Archie’s first patriotic super hero from the pre-war days when the company had been known as MLJ. But this was that Shield in name only. Like the Barry Allen incarnation of the Flash, Simon kept the hero’s name and the broadest idea of what he was about and tossed everything else aside. This new Shield would be a military character, his alter ego having been drafted to serve in the army, thus justifying the unwieldy title of the new magazine.

While they had separated their professional partnership in the wake of the failure of their own company Mainline in the mid-1950s, upon being contracted to package these titles, Simon reached out to his old partner Jack Kirby to work on them. THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PRIVATE STRONG isn’t really a traditional Simon & Kirby production, although both men clearly worked on it. Kirby’s fingerprints are all over this strip, both in its concepts and in the cadence of the actual copy in the stories. While there are portions that feel much more like Simon’s syntax, Kirby did a bunch of the scripting here as well as contributing the pencils.

The new Shield is Lancelot Strong, the son of noted scientist Professor Malcolm Strong who has experimented on his young son Roger, bringing him up in a germ-free sterile environment and subjecting his mind to micro-electrical stimulation designed to enable him to use 100% of his brain power, not just the 1/10th that a regular person can exploit. But when his government handlers learn about his experiments, they are horrified by Malcom’s mistreatment of Roger (and they have a point) and intend to shut him down. Malcolm flees with his child and his equipment ,only to run afoul of sinister enemy agents who run his car off the road, causing the destruction of Malcolm’s equipment and seemingly the deaths of the scientist and his offspring.

But unbeknownst to the enemy operatives, Roger Strong survived the crash that killed his father. Emerging from teh wreckage, he wanders off in search of help, finding his way to the farm owned and operated by Abel and Martha Strong–no relation. It was clearly a snafu that Malcolm and Roger were both named Strong at the outset, as the idea here is clearly that the boy picks up his new name from his adoptive farmer parents. Later on in the issue, Malcolm’s last name is given as Fleming, so there was a change made at some point in the production of the book and not every instance was corrected. In any case, Abel and Martha choose to raise the foundling child as their own and give him the name Lancelot Strong.

One group that wasn’t happy about this new venture on the part of Archie Comics was the crew at DC/National. They quickly reached out through their lawyers indicating that they found THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PRIVATE STRONG to be derivative of Superman. And again, they have something of a point, even if they may be stretching matters. The origin that we’ve looked at so far does seem to parallel that of the Man of Steel if you substitute Malcolm Strong’s lab for Krypton. Whether there was enough merit here should the matter go to court, John Goldwater didn’t want the hassle, and so he killed THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PRIVATE STRONG after its second issue.

In the next story/chapter, the narrative spins forward a decade, where a falling object from space collides with a Russian satellite orbiting the Earth, sending it falling groundward. The object turns out to be a creature that begins to grow in size and power once it makes planetfall. Meanwhile, investigating the area where the crash of Malcolm Fleming’s truck had taken place years earlier, a now-grown Lancelot Strong and his buddy Spud find the remains of Fleming’s equipment and notes, including a special star-spangled costume that the Professor had intended to be worn by the subject of his experiments to protect him from the blowback of his own powers. By a disbelief-straining coincidence, Lancelot dons the uniform intended for him, despite the fact that he has evidenced no special talents throughout his life so far.

But it seems as though the uniform unlocks something in Strong, and suddenly he’s zipping through space and unleashing electrical charges from his hands. Strong uses both against the alien creature, which responds by freezing Strong in place with beams of intense cold. But Strong is able to raise his own internal temperature in order to melt his way to freedom. He manifests whatever power he needs much in the manner of the later New Gods. Naming himself the Shield on the fly when questioned by the military men who have engaged the creature, Strong is able to subdue it by creating a vacuum of air by racing around it at super-speed, Flash style. But while the Shield has saved the day, his buddy Spud has perished in a forest fire set during the action. Or maybe not. As what seems to be a sop to the Comics Code, there’s an added balloon from one of the cops indicating that they’ll try to save him, implying that Spud isn’t completely dead yet. And he’s been added in to the first couple of panels of the next chapter/story. No matter–we won’t see him again after that, and his demise is one of the motivating factors that is meant to compel Lancelot Strong to continue acting in his Shield persona.

In that next chapter/story, determined to figure out his strange powers and his connection with the scientific wreckage in which he’d found his uniform, Lancelot returns to the scene of the crash–only to find the area completely scrubbed clean of any evidence of the crash. It’s all been taken by the enemy agents who killed Professor Fleming by running him off the road what is now said to be fifteen years ago. The story continuity in this comic is pretty dodgy, as though changes were made on some bits but not others. Lancelot stops and thinks back, and his super-memory is activated, giving him total recall of all of the events of his life back to his earliest days. Now he remembers who he is, and that his father Professor Fleming had intended him to function as a Shield to protect regular people from all manner of danger. Lancelot swears to himself to live up to his father’s mission for him. And his first act will be to track down those who stole his father’s wrecked equipment.

The Shield tracks the escaping enemy agents to a sub parked off the coast, and uses his powers to recover his father’s journals and to sink it–though his thoughts indicate, in another sop to the Comics Code, that the authorities will pick up the stranded Reds and bring them to justice. But upon returning to his family’s farm, Lancelot learns that his draft notice has come in, and that he’ll have to report for duty in the army.

The following chapter/story not only introduces Lancelot Strong to military life, where he now sports the rank of Private, but also introduces what are clearly intended to be regular supporting characters, Colonel Smith and his niece Georgia, who are clear antecedents to Thunderbolt Ross and his daughter Betty. There’s also Sergeant Griper, who like Captain America’s Sergeant Duffy, chides Private Strong for being something of a foul-up and suffers indignities at the hands of the secretly-powerful recruit. It also introduces the Shield’s first super villain, Doctor Diablo, whose technology can shrink matter and people to tiny size and who commands a menagerie of experimental animals. The Doctor isn’t all that colorful, wearing no distinctive costume or attire, but he provides the Shield with the best fight of his short career through his scientific prowess.

While it didn’t last long, THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PRIVATE STRONG is pretty clearly a precursor to the later characters, Marvel and beyond, that Jack Kirby would bring to life. As such, it represents an important stepping stone towards the Marvel style. Kirby’s penciling here feels tighter and more complete than much of what he would do for Marvel in its early heroic years. The identity of the inker is uncertain, though it’s not impossible that more than one hand was involved. And while Kirby did do the cool filmstrip across the top and right side of the cover, the main image appears to have little input from him. It’s a very sedate and generic image of Private Strong beginning to doff his uniform in favor of his Shield colors in response to danger, Clark Kent style.

This first issue also featured a two-page teaser story for Simon’s other new super hero title, THE ADVENTURES OF THE FLY, also penciled by Kirby (who doesn’t appear to have provided the dialogue, as there isn’t any sign of his specific word-cadence in these two pages.)

ADDITION: As got pointed out to me in the comments, I covered this issue earlier, back in 2021. Oops. For those who are interested, you can see what I had to say about it then at the link below.

Brand Echh: The Double Life of Private Strong #1