Behold, the Silver Age!

Probably my all time favorite era of comic books is the Silver Age. And frankly, what's not to love?

Comics have simply been an evolution of storytelling through print. Illustration had finally merged with text to tell stories through a visual medium. Crime and war comic books eventually gave rise to the superhero comic book, in which a costumed character would—with or without superpowers—take it upon themselves to thwart evil forces at work in the world. Captain America, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern were just a handful of characters created in the Golden Age of comics, which is held to have ended in the mid-1950s.

The Golden Age saw many innovations from various comics creators. Virtually any type of character was on the table. Horror comics existed and went in many gruesome and bizarre directions. Subject matter was fairly open, for example, an early Superman story saw him defend a woman against her physically abusive husband by beating him.

People point to many things as starting the Silver Age, but really, I think we have to give a mind to a book titled Seduction of the Innocent, which blamed comic books for youth delinquency and often misinterpreted things in comics as negative. This gave rise to the Comics Code Authority, which was used as a seal on the covers of comics for decades to come to say as to whether or not a comic book met certain guidelines of acceptability. This was not a requirement, of course, but if your comic book didn't have it, good luck getting retailers to sell it, and advertisers might pull their ads.

Comics would be produced by people who cared about them, then read by people, and some of those people might be young kids who decide they wanted to make comics as well and worked to do it. So as comic books continued, they evolved along with the audience. About six years ago, the major comics companies abandoned the Comics Code Authority and it became defunct.

However, back to the Silver Age. Instead of pushing the envelope for the limits of violence and such they could show, in came monsters, aliens and other fantastic events.

In short, they went for stories that could be viewed as fucking crazy.

National Publications (now DC Comics) would be the big one to reintroduce superheroes. New versions of the Flash and the Green Lantern were introduced, and in fact became the standard incarnations of the characters despite being the second heroes with those names. In 1960, they introduced the Justice League of America, in which their biggest heroes would team up. The Flash would eventually introduce the multiverse concept, which allowed for a lot of amazing stories to eventually be written.

Over at Atlas Comics, writer Stanley Leiber (better known as Stan Lee) would be tasked to come up with a team of superheroes, and he and Jack Kirby created The Fantastic Four, debuting in late 1961. Of course, Atlas was soon rebranded to Marvel Comics. This would lead to the creation and reintroduction of many classic Marvel characters, and the introduction of The Avengers. This led to the interconnected Marvel universe, in which many of the superheroes depicted in their line of comics would live in the same version of New York and interact with each other.

So, basically, not only was the Silver Age extremely fun, it basically set the standard for the modern range of superheroes. What's not to love?

So, as you may have noticed, this blog is dedicated to the Elongated Man. He was introduced in 1961, in The Flash (volume 1) #112. He was a character with the power of elasticity, able to stretch his body to superhuman lengths.

The Elongated Man wasn't the first character to have this power. Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #58 had the titular character exposed to a liquid kryptonite that allowed him to stretch. But previously, Jack Cole had introduced Plastic Man in Quality Comics' Police Comics in 1941. Plastic Man could stretch and generally reshape his body into any imaginable form, including compressing into small shapes. Quality didn't survive the decline of sales thanks to Seduction of the Innocent and sold many of their characters to National, making Plastic Man one of National's characters.

But was Elongated Man a copycat Plastic Man? According to Brian Cronin of Comic Book Resources, maybe, but unlike the common belief, it's not likely that they would have just used Plastic Man if they'd thought of him.

There is a famous story that Julius Schwartz said that he only came up with the idea for Elongated Man because he didn’t know that DC had the rights to Plastic Man. If he had known, he would have just used Plastic Man (DC had purchased most of Quality Comics characters, including Plastic Man, when Quality went out of business in 1956).

However, I think that Schwartz’s story has been misconstrued a bit over the years.

Schwartz’s recollection of it came years later, when he noted that he didn’t know (or that he had forgotten) that DC had the rights to Plastic Man when he came up with Elongated Man. He did note that perhaps he would have named Elongated Man Plastic Man, but that is just an after-the-fact commentary.

So it really comes down to us determining whether we think that actually would have happened. So this is truly just a case of me having to make a judgment call.

As it was, Elongated Man was a one-off character who was never meant to recur. He turned out to be surprisingly popular with the fans, so they brought him back (and he then proved so popular that they eventually gave him his own feature in Detective Comics). It seems highly unlikely to me that Schwartz would have chosen this particular story to revive Plastic Man.

Carmine Infantino recalled to Jim Amash that Schwartz never actually mentioned Plastic Man at all at the time.

So I believe that even had Schwartz known that DC owned the rights, I don’t think it would have affected the story much. After all, Mort Weisigner had already introduced ANOTHER elastic hero recently at the time (Jimmy Olsen’s Elastic Lad), so it wasn’t like it was out of the ordinary to have an elastic hero other than Plastic Man.

Add in the factor that the Elongated Man's debut story features a plot point of him being suspected to be a criminal and the reappearance of a hero character would spoil the reveal.

Anyway, that's the setting that the Elongated Man was introduced in.

Next time, we're going to look at his first story.