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[John C]

The short version of this message is that I wonder why so few companies seem to have had speedsters in the Golden Age.  I know there are some, of course, but once you get away from DC and Marvel, for a character concept generally acknowledged to be so primal, they're really obscure and rarely taken seriously.  Red Robbins?  Dash Dartwell?  Zippo!?  C'mon.

So, am I missing characters (yeah, Silver Streak and MAYBE Quicksilver) or is there some reason for the gaping hole in most lineups?

So that's the short version.  Longer...

I can remember back when I first got some insight into DC's Multiverse idea, and I would have looseleaf paper folded over into columns (what, I'm going to spend a day figuring out whatever third-rate spreadsheet we had for the Commodore 64?  And think about comic books in the living room!?), where I dutifully filled out each column with characters known on that Earth, then not only tried to find the most appropriate counterparts (tempting though it may be, the announcer on the Superfriends was NOT the Earth-1 counterpart for Starman), but tried to extrapolate out to the Crime Syndicate's Earth-3 and beyond.

Yeah.  I thought that the writers were working from a predictable system, and not making stuff up as they went along.  What can I say?  I was young and naive.

Anyway, I recently caught the bug again when I was looking at DC's Golden Age especially, and started to see a lot of similarities between the National and All-American lines.  Sure, it might be a small stretch to say that Wonder Woman is the answer to Superman (though it does explain why DC has never figured out what to do with her), but Dr. Mid-Nite even looks like Batman (with some Robin influence in the tunic), Johnny Quick has the Flash, Hawkman has the Shining Knight, Dr. Fate has Sargon, and so forth--there are very few major characters from either side of the fence without a somewhat prominent reflection.

And that makes some sense, because the heroes do typically represent archetypes from other media, so I started looking at the other companies, figuring this should be a breeze.  And in a lot of cases, it is.  More than one were defeated by the mighty injunction, but in the same class as Superman and Wonder Woman, you have Quality's Wonder Boy, Fox's Wonder Man, most of Fawcett's lineup, but mostly Master Man, and Dell's Supermind and Son.  Mister Scarlet isn't quite the dark-clad avenger that Batman is, but Dell's Owl sure is, as is Quality's Raven.  Black Condor and Bulletman hit the Hawkman button, and Bulletman even brings his girlfriend along.

But where the heck are the speedsters?  Fawcett has the obligatory mystic (El Carim), the archer (Golden Arrow), and even the guy who can create stuff at will (Diamond Jack), plus a couple of patriotic-themed characters, which DC has conspicuously lacked.  But they don't have a speedster.  Quality might have Quicksilver, but I don't think I've read a story where I was convinced he had any powers.

And that seems odd, since--as I mention before--everyone seems to agree it's an obvious idea that has direct appeal to kids.  It exaggerates something kids like to do (run) and tells adventure stories around it.  And yet, it seems like once you get away from the Flash and Johnny Quick, the pickings are mighty slim, limited to...uhm...Silver Streak.  I mean, would we know who the Whizzer was if Roy Thomas didn't bring him back in seven different contexts...?  Or would he have all the recognition of Red Robbins?

What?  We're out of colors.

[Rajah]

...plus a couple of patriotic-themed characters, which DC has conspicuously lacked.

DC did have patriotic heroes. What about Mr. America, Liberty Belle, The Star-Spangled Kid, and Stripesy?

Can't think of many speedsters besides the ones you mentioned. Marvel also had Hurricane and Mercury (who were later retconned into one guy, Makkari of the Eternals). But beyond that, there's not a lot.

Maybe we think of speedsters as one of the classic character types today because of how popular the Flash has become and how many characters he's inspired. Did Jay Garrick have that level of popularity or does the popularity of the speedster concept come mostly from Barry Allen and the Silver Age revival? Jay was popular enough to have his own book and a JSA spot but was he enough of a success that other publishers would want to emulate him, the way they did Superman and Batman? Maybe there weren't enough unique hooks on the super-speed gimmick that you could create a speedster without him seeming like a second-rate Flash.

[darkmark]

Quality had Quicksilver.
Lev Gleason had Silver Streak.
I forget a lot of the others, but Roy Thomas name-dropped a lot of other GA super-speedsters in his Flash origin in SECRET ORIGINS, which see.

[John C]

...plus a couple of patriotic-themed characters, which DC has conspicuously lacked.

DC did have patriotic heroes. What about Mr. America, Liberty Belle, The Star-Spangled Kid, and Stripesy?

Sorry, I meant prominent characters.  There's that short shopping list and a few others, but they're nobodies in terms of the universe at large, rather than being leaders and symbols as you'd expect.

And you're right that we don't know how influential the original Flash (or Johnny Quick) was, but in most histories, they talk about the Flash as an idea long in coming, blah blah.  That may be (as is most history) just back-projecting what's popular today, but it seems an odd omission, given how many other characters are copied.  Shrinking heroes?  Plenty.  Flying heroes?  Disturbingly abundant.  Guys who can race a car...?  To paraphrase that phone commercial, where dey at?

I'll see if I can track down that Flash issue, in the meantime.  I must have it somewhere.  But it still seems like something that'd be more visible.  And I'll have to go back to the Quality scans to see if I missed him running, because I can't recall ever seeing it happen, for some reason, until DC starts using him.

[phabox]

The Star-Spangled Kid was expected to be a BIG 'Star' created by the same writer as Superman the company had high hopes for him headlining a title named after him (Star-Spangled Comics) and having not one but TWO strips per issue as well as being a charter member of the Seven Soldiers of Victory.

Of course things never went as planned, when Simon and Kirby's Newsboy Legion showed up in issue seven the kid was relegated to second banana status and was ultimately pushed out of the book and into comic book limbo by his own sister Merry the Gimmick Girl  .

-Nigel

[jfglade]

 I think the logic I see the most is that "every good team needs a speedster" (especially in super-hero role playing groups, but most neo-fans don't realise (or care) how few speedsters there were in the golden age. As for the relative paucity of characters who could claim to be the "fastest man alive," during the tail end of the thirties and the fourties (and even the early fifties, delpending on when someone feels the golden age ended). It probably should be noted that the "M" in "Shazam" stands for Mercury, who even popped up now and again in a few stories in 'Whiz Comics' and 'Captain Marvel Adventures' (and possibly in other stories which I haven't seen). In some cases far-greater-than-average-speed was part and parcel of an entire bundle of inherently unusual abilities, and Superman could be said to be the original speedster, racing to a mine disaster on foot in his third appearance. Wonder Woman also outruns an automobile in her first adventure in 'Sensation Comics' and characters as diverse as the Flag and Tornado Tom were capable of great bursts of speed. Characters who's only unusual ability is great speed are rarer than those who sometimes exhibit great speed as one ability among many.

Quicksilver did have super-speed in early stories, but he never particularly used it in memorable ways or at least usually only in combination with acrobatic stunts which tended to take away the focus on his speed.  Eventually he became nothing more than anothrt costumed acrobat.

But, by and large, you are correct; it is taken for granted that speedsters are a very common sub-genre of "super-heroes" and have been since comic books featuring "super-heroes" first appeared but, like a lot of assumptions, the proof of that isn't in the pudding. There were golden age speedsters, but only the Flash was prominent among heroes of that era.