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11/16/2004: RIP
Harry Lampert, dead at age 88.
Lampert was the co-creator (i.e., the original artist; Gardiner Fox was the original writer) of the Golden Age "Flash I" (as he's known in the DC Universe), or Jay Garrick (as he was known in his secret identity). I don't know, offhand if "The Flash" was the original super-speedster (though it seems to me that if he wasn't, the Don Markstein Toonopedia article I've linked to would say so, so he probably is), but he's always been the iconic one. At least until the Barry Allen Silver Age "Flash II" hit the scene.
Now, what with the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Barry Allen is dead, and Wally West's taken over the Flash mantle. Damn, it's getting hard to keep track of the players without a scorecard.....
Hat tip to one of my favorite hat wearers, Brock Sides, for the notice....
Len on 11.16.04 @ 09:08 AM CST
Replies: 4 comments
on Tuesday, November 16th, 2004 at 9:39 PM CST, mike hollihan said
Keeping track of all the Flash's is worse than you think: http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/ The Flash was (still is!) my favorite superhero. I think the movie technology is finally there for a film. Did you see the Smallville episode with a young Wally West as a Flash-like character? Not bad.
on Wednesday, November 17th, 2004 at 6:59 AM CST, Len Cleavelin said
I don't watch Smallville; I probably should but I'm out of the habit of watching episodic TV.
My current bedtime reading (just finished last night) is "The DC Comics Encyclopedia", and through that I caught up with some of the "second tier" Flashes (Jesse Quick, Impulse/Kid Flash II, etc.), but the "Encyclopedia" didn't even begin to cover some of the third tier (and lower) speedsters. Thanks for the Webpage reference; I see I'm not getting much work done today. :-)
Mentioning a movie (I agree that it's high time for one), did you catch the 1990 series (only one season, alas) starring John Wesley Shipp as the Barry Allen Flash? (According to the IMDB, Howard Chaykin did some of the writing for the series, which says something good about it right there.) I thought that was pretty well done (and the special effects were pretty good for the time). To show you how good it was, my then wife enjoyed watching it with me, and she thought my fascination with comic book superheroes was pretty silly.
If you haven't caught it, the 2 hour pilot and two 2 part episodes (one of the two parters features Mark Hamill guest-starring as the villian, "The Trickster") have made it to VHS video and can probably be found for rental if one looks hard enough.
Personally, I think they ought to release "The Flash" series in DVD, but there may not be a big enough cult audience out there for it.
on Wednesday, November 17th, 2004 at 10:52 PM CST, mike hollihan said
Midtown Video has the Flash pilot / two-hour movie! It's still pretty good. I did like the effects and the effort made to try to keep to the original idea. But I think Shipp, while not a bad actor, was badly miscast as Flash. Flash should have a runner's body, and not a muscle-builder's one!
There was talk earlier this year about making a Flash series for the WB (home of Dawson's Creek and Smallville, etc.). But they would have made the Flash a time-traveller, sending him into history every week. Ick!! Glad that one died....
If you get the chance, the Bart Allen (I had the wrong name earlier.) appearance on Smallville will likely repeat sometime soon. Give it a shot, it wasn't too bad. Wednesday night, 10PM, on UPN 30. The effects are good and the Flash *is* faster than Superman! Yeah!
BTW, on Chaykin. Did you ever read his American Flagg series? Totally over the top Cold War satire, with sex, talking cats, robots, lesbian Popes, unrestrained capitalism, Russian capitalism, and sex. Very funny and kinda prescient. It would've made a hilarious series or movie, if done right. Well worth looking for.
on Thursday, November 18th, 2004 at 8:45 AM CST, Len Cleavelin said
I've not read "American Flagg!" yet, but by an interesting coincidence I'd stumbled across the Toonopedia entry on Flagg, and was intrigued enough to Google him further. Via the Google results I learned that Dynamic Forces, Inc. is coming out with a reprint of the first 12 issues of "Flagg!", plus some additional never-before-published material by Chaykin. Due to be published later this month (may actually have been published by now, since Amazon's estimating an approximate Nov. 22 ship date).
I was so intrigued by what I read on the Web about "American Flagg!" that I ordered it in hardcover as part of my Festivus gift to myself this year (I gift myself during the holidays since I don't have any friends to do it for me :-) ). Also looks like it's available in two paperbacks (paper edition seems to lack the additional material by Chaykin, though), but the price differential isn't all that great; the marginal price increase seemed to me to be well offset by the additional material in the hardcover edition.