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:

Number 1596: Congo Jack and the green and blue attack

This is the second offering from our theme week, Aces Up My Sleeve, featuring early characters from comics published by Ace.*

Congo Jack did not appear in more than a few issues of Lightning Comics in the early forties. This particular sequence, spread over two issues, has a science fiction setting in an underground kingdom. Congo Jack is kidnapped by green men because he is white. (The green men blow up the African tribesmen they first encounter, all part of the unconscionable racial attitudes of the day...natives were “expendable.”) There is a sinister green man who doesn’t want Jack getting the beautiful green queen’s favor. In the second part of the story some blue dwarfs enter the action. And action there is...Congo Jack is good with his fists and there is a lot of sock-bam-pow going on.

Mark Schneider, who signed both chapters in panels every couple of pages or so, is not credited with comics beyond about 1942. I assume he went into the Armed Services during World War II like so many men, but I have no verification. He was a decent artist, and his work fit in perfectly with the still young comics industry.

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

*This is the same Ace that published all of those cool science fiction paperbacks in the fifties and sixties, including the collectible and desirable Ace Double Novels. Publisher Aaron A. Wyn (born Aaron Weinstein 1898, died 1967) started in the pulp magazine business, was active with a comic book line in the forties until quitting that business in the mid-fifties, and is probably best known for the genre paperbacks, crime, romance, Western, and the aforementioned science fiction.

Number 673


Whiz Wilson and his Futuroscope


Lightning Comics, a continuation of Ace's Sure-Fire Comics, was a typical anthology comic of the year 1940. It had a superhero, a cowboy, a magician, and Whiz Wilson, a science fiction hero in the Flash Gordon mold. Whiz had what he called a Futuroscope, a really handy device that could move him around in time and space. I'd like one of those, myself. I wonder if anyone has one for sale on eBay...

Anyway, the Grand Comics Database doesn't have any information on Whiz Wilson, but the art in this episode from Lightning Comics #4, is derivative of Alex Raymond, just like a couple of dozen other comic book features. I really don't know how the earliest comics could have existed without Raymond and Hal Foster's Prince Valiant to swipe from.

Just how tied to Flash Gordon was Whiz Wilson? This is the lead sentence from another episode, as quoted by the GCD: "One day Whiz Wilson sets the dials of his Futuroscope to take him to the planet Mongo, in the year 2300..." Mongo. That's where Flash, Flash's girl Dale Arden, Doc Zarkoff and Ming the Merciless hung out.

This particular adventure has Whiz mixing it up with some post-apocalyptic stone age types in South America.