Thursday, September 1, 2011

September, 1971: Action Comics #406

As the summer vacation came closer to its end, and I prepared to enter 6th grade at Whitney Elementary School in Memphis, Tennessee, it was becoming apparent that more and more of the spare change I could get my hands on would be going toward comic books. With this purchase, I was staying in familiar territory: good ol' Superman, but with my favored monster-leaning touches, in this case, the headless ghost of the Man of Steel, and, once again, I took advantage of the more generous DC 48 page package to insure that I got plenty of reading material. I plucked this one off the spinner rack of the Big Star supermarket on the corner of James Road and Overton Crossing, while my mother did some quick shopping. I remember that place fondly; in the 60's and early 70's, there was not only the comic book rack to tempt a restless child, but at the checkout, there were displays of lots of goodies: Bubblegum cards featuring Wacky Packages, Batman, and sports stars, paddle balls, monster finger puppets, plenty of Wham-O products like the Wheel-O and Monster Magnet, Superballs, Clackers, yo-yos, and candy. And of course if you couldn't afford any of those, or talk mom into buying them, there were machines ready to accept any pennies you might have saved up for jawbreakers and gumballs.
I don't remember much about the lead story here, "The Ghost that Haunted Clark Kent," but I do vaguely recall the effective atmosphere generated by artists Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. I flipped for the backup reprint, featuring a team-up of Flash and the Atom, from an old issue of The Brave and the Bold. I really liked the Atom a lot; his unique power of shrinking fascinated me, and between him and the Flash, we had two of my favorite costume designs of the Silver Age. There was also something that always intrigued me about one of the visual effects that was prominent this story, when the Flash was being absorbed into an "expanding planet", that is, as drawn by artist Alex Toth, the Flash being sucked bodily into a large sphere, sinking beneath its surface, like Patrick McGhoohan's The Prisoner being overtaken by the sinister "Rover". Those kinds of images would often prove an irresistable and haunting draw to my young eyes, and would crop up in more than a few comic books. In fact, a similar image had already been burned into my mind, in a comic book I had glanced at years earlier: Strange Tales #157 was a comic that I flipped through back in 1967, while waiting on my mother to pick up a prescription at the Rexall drug store (Stage Road & Whitney: you can see this drug store in the movie The Firm!). I didn't know any of the characters then, but in a Dr. Strange story, his mentor The Ancient One was absorbed into one of the stones of Stonehenge, leaving his disciple with the advice to "Remember the forelock!" That image gave me the heebee jeebies, and I remember the episode not only for that imagery, but because, upon returning to the car, I remember asking my mother the meaning of the word "forelock".

No comments:

Post a Comment