Number 1597: When Flash got the "F" out

This is the final posting from our “Aces Up My Sleeve” theme week, featuring early stories from the Ace Comics line.

This is the issue where Flash Lightning became Lash Lightning. No explanation...it just was.

It is also a story with inconsistencies which seem jarring. Lash drives a car to the Army base. But he can fly and uses that power when he is blocked from entering in his car. Why drive? To show that the road to the base is blocked appears to be the only reason. And the evil Mastermind, who can “project himself anywhere” can project himself on the base, but then climbs into the commanding officer’s window the old-fashioned way.

Despite those weaknesses in the writing, the art is by comics journeyman Jim Mooney, and it is excellent.

From Lightning Comics Vol 2 No.1 (1941):

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The origin story of Flash Lightning from Sure-Fire Comics #1 is here. Just click on the thumbnail:

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Number 1476: Interplanetary Robinson Crusoe

Writers and aspiring writers, take note if you have problems finding plots for your stories. Just steal. Or if you prefer, call it “homage.” Like this shorty from My Greatest Adventure #24 (1958), written by a fan of author Daniel Defore. It saved a lot of trouble by just taking some incidents from Defoe’s work and transplanting them to a science fiction adventure. Not only that, but it created instant reader identification because Robinson Crusoe is a work so well known it’s practically imprinted on our brains at birth.

I like the artwork by comic book journeyman Jim Mooney, and I got a kick out of the hero finding raw diamonds that look like cut stones lying on the ground. It may have had something to do with editor Jack Schiff telling Mooney to make it obvious to their young readers that the stone were actually diamonds, because the kids might not recognize them as such in their uncut form.

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