Captain Flash
Entry updated 7 April 2025. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1954-1955). Sterling Comics Inc. Four issues. Artists include Mort Meskin and Mike Sekowsky. 36 pages, with four long strips (three featuring Captain Flash and one Tomboy) and a two page text piece – usually fiction, but in #2 a nonfiction piece on the problems of Rocket-powered Space Flight.
#1 opens with Superhero Captain Flash "defender of right and champion of evil" at a circus: lifting elephants, performing quadruple somersaults and skating so fast on a barrel of ice that the friction turns it to water. An enquiry from a crippled child has him recalling his origin story ... at the Atom Lab in Atom City, Professor Keith Spencer (see Scientists) was working on the cobalt bomb (see Weapons, Nuclear Energy) when an accident led to his body being "saturated with ten trillion ergs of [cobalt] radiation". Expecting a slow death, Keith instead develops Superpowers, declaring "I've imprisoned the power of the atom inside my body!" Aside from super-strength and athleticism, the Rays "developed a new enzyme in my body that made me immune to death" (probably meaning invulnerability rather than Immortality). He has other powers, though the claim he can move at "twice the speed of light" in #4 might be hyperbole. Able to turn into Captain Flash by clapping his hands, he has a young sidekick named Ricky – who has no powers.
His first actual conflict is against The Iron Mask, who has hidden a hydrogen bomb in Atom City, due to explode in 14 hours. He provides a set of clues that have Captain Flash battling Robots in adventures which echo those of Ulysses (see Homer; Mythology), eventually locating and disarming the bomb more quickly than The Iron Mask intended, as it was meant to distract Captain Flash whilst he stole the Atom Lab's cobalt. In the third story, scientists are being drained of silicon by a Monster that travels through mirrors (it feeds on silicon, making it a Vampire of sorts). Though called the Mirror Man the antagonist looks like a silver multi-tentacled reptile.
In #2 Captain Flash fights The Black Knight, who despite using advanced Technology (such as riding Rockets and carrying electric lances) wears knight's armour; as do his gang, under protest ("Do we have to wear this silly get-up every time we pull a job?"). The Black Knight is Conrad Kreuger, a brilliant Mad Scientist who – because "he has a phobia about conquering the world" – was committed to a state mental hospital but escaped. Captain Flash defeats him with a giant magnet after challenging him to a duel, knowing his knight fixation makes him incapable of refusing. Another antagonist is The Actor, who uses a liquid that moulds his features into whoever he wishes to impersonate. In the third Captain Flash story, Mirror Man returns (looking more froglike) and once again tries to destroy Earth's best brains.
In #3 there is a boxing match between Captain Flash and "Muscles", a mobster whose boss claims a serum has made him the "most powerful man who ever lived": he is not. The second story has our hero investigating why the quality of African uranium delivered to the Atom Lab has deteriorated. The cause is a local power struggle within the tribe who mine the ore, where a would-be evil usurper (who thinks the tribe should be paid more) diverts Captain Flash and the good King (who thinks they are paid well by the Western mining company) towards a glacier: when Captain Flash shatters it by clapping his hands, Dinosaurs are released ("their blood, unfrozen, has recirculated") and attack; he kills them with relative ease. The gun-toting Sharkmen in the remaining Captain Flash story sadly turn out to be men in shark suits.
#4 has an Alien Invasion, complete with flying saucers (see UFOs). The aliens are Shapeshifters from the troubled planet Imago: "The sun lost its gravitational hold on us ... [the world is] turning back into the gaseous state of 10,000,000 years ago ... a powder keg floating through the universe" – thus "one tiny spark and Imago might be atomized" explains their ruler, whose family has ruled for 2,000,000 years and has no intention of letting the dynasty end with him; thus his desire to conquer Earth. Captain Flash defeats the invaders and thinks the matter is ended, but the reader sees some Imago still remain on Earth disguised as humans, including Atom City's mayor. It is implied that the story would have continued next issue, had there been one. This July 1955 strip was published before Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), but after the magazine version of Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (10-24 December 1954 Collier's Weekly; 1955). The second Captain Flash tale has airliners caught in giant webs built by Robot spiders, with the passengers taken to an Underground city to be its enslaved inhabitants, ruled by Conrad Kreuger (no longer dressing as the Black Knight). The third story is mundane, aside from the Captain's presence.
The comic's fourth strip featured superhero Tomboy, who appears to be in her early teens (some sources say she is ten) and whose alter ego is Janie Jackson, "a perfect little lady" and the daughter of a Police Lieutenant; her elder brother, Bill, sneers at Janie's girlishness, but has a big crush on Tomboy. She has no superpowers but is athletic, seems to know martial arts and is fairly strong, comfortably beating three gangsters at a time. The stories are largely non-genre, save for #2, whose villain is the "master sound technician" The Soundwave, who uses sound to render his victims unconscious, and to shatter the vial of Poison gas locked in a room with the bound Tomboy. The villain in #1, The Claw, has hairy clawed hands; it is not clear whether these are natural or gloves.
Captain Flash was a good comic with some colourful antagonists for the main character, though the stories' resolutions tend to be unsatisfactory as the villains are rarely caught, being hindered rather than defeated; even when they are apparently killed, Captain Flash voices doubts and suggest their likely return. Particularly frustrating is Mirror Man: we never learn what he is nor the reason for his actions. It is notable that Tomboy faces little in the way of sexism from the city folk or criminals (see Feminism; Women in SF), being applauded as a hero by the former and feared by the latter. [SP]
further reading
- Captain Flash – Volume 1 (Hornsea, East Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2014) [graph: collects issues #1-#4 of Captain Flash and issues #1-#2 of The Tormented: in the publisher's Roy Thomas Presents series: illus/various: hb/Mike Sekowsky]
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