Break Up The Bottle-Neck Gang!

Did you miss me? Well, I missed you! Yeah, I kind of forgot to mention on here that I was chairing a fan convention this month and as we got closer to it, my workload for it got bigger, so I had to curb a lot of my blogging.

I promise I wasn't trying to focus on The Flash TV show, but churning out a TV review was a lot easier than doing a comic story breakdown. So now that it's all done, let's get back to Ralph and Sue's adventures.

"Break Up The Bottle-Neck Gang!" first appeared in Detective Comics #335 with a cover date of January, 1965. This issue is available via Comixology and DC Universe and has only been reprinted in Showcase Presents The Elongated Man. And the usual crew is back in action with Gardner Fox writing, Carmine Infantino on pencils, Sid Greene on inks and Julius Schwartz editing.

The splash page shows Ralph taking on three crooks with a single punch. Very dynamic and exciting, pairing nicely with the teaser text alongside it. I like the way Ralph looks here, showing good musculature and his hair parted to the side. Very handsome. You'll notice that this is supposed to show rapid motion by showing many poses of Ralph's fist swinging by the chins of the crooks.

Look a bit closer here on the first page and you'll see that this is not a meeting of the Justice League, but a group of kids who are fans of superheroes. They're dressing up for a costume contest to compete to win best costume. Young Billy Warner has arrived without his Elongated Man costume. The other kids tease him, but he protests that he loaned his costume to the Elongated Man himself.

As we can see, Flash-kid is impressed at the story. Green Lantern-kid has no response. Batkid is a jerk and scoffs at the story.

In those three panels, Infantino focuses on the kids, and there's enough detail to see that these aren't really the Flash, Batman and Green Lantern.

The story cuts to Ralph taking elongated strides in a pose reminiscent of Robert Crumb's Keep On Truckin' art. He indeed has Billy's costume, and his thoughts reveal it will help him bust the Bottleneck Bandits. Too bad they weren't using that alliteration in the title.

The story cuts back to a few days ago where the police ask for Ralph's help as he and Sue are visiting the Warners. They explain the Bottleneck Bandits prepare a bottleneck (traffic congestation) that allows them to escape police pursuit.

I do just need to note how funny it is that Ralph and Sue are friends with the Warner family, and that the current owners of DC Comics is Time Warner. It's entirely coincidental, but also quite amusing.

Ralph of course helps the police by stretching onto the getaway car (the bold bandits actually have taken to telling the police when they'll commit their crimes) and as they escape to the mountains, he pulls their emergency brake.

As the crooks prepare to deal with Ralph, he winds up his arm and does a more stylized round punch than what we saw in the splash panel, though this is the scene matching up with it. While not as dynamic as the splash panel, it's pretty cool to look at.

However, Ralph gets knocked out by a grappling hook from a helicopter... I'm not entirely sure how they aimed that squarely at Ralph's head or even how they aimed it. Or why they didn't try to subdue Ralph while he was knocked out. The crooks make their getaway via said helicopter.

Cutting forward to the night when Ralph borrowed Billy's costume, Ralph follows a lead from a "stoolie" that the cops had and finds the crooks raiding a chemical plant. Putting an audio tracking device in Billy's costume, Ralph sneaks into the plant.

Infantino clearly has some fun drawing Ralph tracking the crooks, having him hide behind stuff and elongating himself. He misses drawing the neckline on Ralph's costume in the fourth panel on the fifth page, though. Well, or Sid Greene forgot to ink it in. Or add it. The colorist tries to put it in, but it looks weird without a line.

Onto page six!

Inside the chemical plant, Ralph is quickly spotted and fired at, but to the crook's surprise, he appears to vanish, leaving his costume behind.

Thinking the nearby chemicals caused it (because they specialize in crime, not chemistry), the crooks take what is actually Billy's costume. Ralph is actually hiding on the ceiling because those crooks also didn't bother to look up.

Okay, Mr. Fox, you just made these crooks really dumb.

The bandits pull off another signature escape and the cops lose them. Luckily, Ralph is still on the case and tracks Billy's costume.

He finds the crooks' hideout at last and their boss is pleased at the news that Ralph is dead. He comments on the small size of the costume, and assumes it stretched to Ralph's size.

While the boss is incorrect, this is the first time in a comic that an elastic hero's costume is inferred to be smaller than he is as it will stretch to his measurements. I can't recall any mentions of such in Fantastic Four, but in the Wachowski Plastic Man screenplay, Plastic Man's costume is described as being sized to fit a G.I. Joe doll. In The Flash TV show, Ralph's costumes are shown to be very small before he puts them on. (But they seem to have normal-sized zippers...) Considering how tight these costumes hug their bodies, it makes sense.

Ralph, at the window, is offended at hearing the boss refer to him in the past tense and pushes his desk back, and the boss with it. What follows is a fight scene where Infantino has a blast drawing Ralph taking on the rest of the crooks by elongating parts of himself, including forcing his ear into a guy's face until he cracks him with his elbow.

There's no panel telling us how Ralph got all these guys to the police. We can assume it happened now that Ralph has rounded them up, though.

Ralph heads over to Billy's costume contest and returns the costume. There's a bit of disconnect with the text and the art as the second panel of the final page tells us that Billy is putting his costume on, but it shows him right next to Ralph. Julius, you're the editor, keep an eye on this.

Anyway, hearing that Billy's costume helped solve a case, Billy's friends are impressed, Flash-kid and Green Lantern-kid wishing Ralph had used their costumes (missing the point, guys) while Batkid just says "Golly" and crosses his arms.

But lest you think Batkid is the only jerk here, Ralph kind of takes that spot as Billy wins first prize for his costume, Ralph thinks a little of that applause is for him.

While Infantino does good art, I don't really like this story. It's all over the place in time periods, how logically it plays out and Ralph having to pull extremely specific tricks the crooks fall for. We know our guys could do better. Plus, Ralph's ego pops up at the worst moment possible here.

Billy Warner will return. Much, much later.

Next issue, a very old friend of Ralph's pops up again.