The OTHER Silver Age super-hero: I Wish I were...

[alschroeder3]

The unlikeliest of names and motifs became one of the Silver Age super-heroes who galvanized the late fifties/early sixties. Neither Marvel nor DC, one of the last creations of the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby studio was published by the Archie Adventures series as..the Fly.

We start in a very usual place in a juvenile fantasy....children being mistreated. Let's go to Westcott Orphanage and meet...Tommy Troy.

This was actually based off a concept by C.C. Beck and Joe Simon for a character alternately named Spider-Man and the Silver Spider in the early fifties. In the late fifties, after Flash and Green Lantern helped revitilize the superhero scene, Simon decided to change the Silver Spider to the Fly, and gave Beck's preliminary drawings to Kirby. In the opening session, we are definitely adapting Beck's origin to Kirby's storytelling style.

Child labor laws were a little different back then...and so were rules for fostering children.

Here's where it starts to veer from Beck's ideas. The Silver Spider got his powers from a ring-imprisoned genie. Tommy's origin was somewhat spookier...

What kid hasn't been spooked going into an older person's, maybe a relative's attic, wondering what they might find?

An ancient civilization of sentient insects who harnassed magic the way we harnass nuclear power! Now, THERE was a premise...

Sort of a buggy Captain Marvel--but most kids back then(and being born in 1953, I remember the Fly, but not Captain Marvel) didn't know about Captain Marvel, so this was a new and fresh idea--the kid becoming the super-hero.

A much stranger super-hero than Captain Marvel.

The Fly, crawling up the wall of Westcott Orphanage, attacks the crooks.

But unlike Billy Batson, who went from homeless-on-the-steets-newsboy to world-famous boy broadcaster (complete with racially-stereotyped valet), Tommy stayed an oppressed little boy in a very spooky house with abusive--employers? Foster parents? The March's legal status remained murky...

Tommy shoves the little girl out of the way of some fleeing bandits and then runs into the forest and...

That later evolved to "I wish I were the Fly."

The Fly fights the crooks, and learns he is not bulletproof, as a machine bullet pierces his arm--but he knocks them out with the "silver needles" of his "buzz-gun". He eventually passes out, muttering "Tommy Troy"--and is later found, transformed into a much-better Tommy Troy with only a slight wound.

There he read more about the crooks, who were returning to their crime boss, named, "Spider" Spry. Jack Kirby used a two page layout for the splash page about "Spider", what he called the "Wide Angle Screen".

The Fly proved to be a pretty effective fighter. Here's a very Spider-Man-esque sequence (or since this predated Spider-Man by several years, let's say Spider-Man did a very Flyesque sequence).

Later it was established that the Fly could both command all insects (as Ant-Man would later do) and mimic all their abilities--glow like a firefly, tunnel like a termite, etc. Towards the last, he could even expand and shrink in size.

The beauty of both the phrase AND the ring is that it left Tommy Troy even more vulnerable than Billy Batson--because rings can be taken away!

There were several other artists who worked on the early Fly--Al Williamson, George Tuska--even under Joe Simon's helm. Simon, himself a pretty talented swipe artist, may have done some of the art himself.

Then the Archie producers swept everybody out and new artists and writers took over! The biggest change was the most disappointing to me--they said young Tommy's adventures happened years ago, and made Tommy Troy into a grown man, a lawyer!

Despite that disappointing change, there were points of interest. The new main artist, Rosenberger, was not the greatest superhero artist in the world, but he did do beautiful women. They introduced Kim Brand, a sf movie actress as a love interest..and later, a partner!

Though the Fly never rivalled Superman or Batman, he fit comfortably in the second tier of Silver Age superheroes like Flash and Green Lantern, and was fairly popular. When Marvel Comics became big, Spider-Man was made as a Marvel alternative to the Fly, as Ant-Man was a Marvel alternative to the Atom or the Avengers was a Marvel alternative to the Justice League.

Later, the Fly became "Fly-Man", with orders to make the stories both more like the Marvel comics of the era and like the insanely popular campy Batman TV show of that era---at the same time! Jerry Siegel was given that unenviable task, and former Jack Kirby inker Paul Reinman did awful art that totally undermined the experience.

The Fly was brought back at least twice---once under Rich Buckler (with art later by Steve Ditko) and in a new incarnation on the Impact line--but I will always remember fondly young Tommy Troy, with his magic ring, escaping the drudgery of his life with the spooky Marches--by becoming the Fly!

Comments

[alschroeder3]

And yet the Fly sold well, despite the name and the theme, spawning at least one imitator, the Jaguar, who had non-insect animal powers and mastery (also at Archie Adventures) and the Fly was the star and success story of the Archie Adventures line. Only Spider-Man and radio's Green Hornet, of insect-themed heroes, did better. In retrospect it seems an odd choice--but a hero themed around a spider might seem equally odd.