Debuting in Amazing Spider-Man #56 (Stan Lee, John Romita), Captain George Stacy is an excellent example of something I blogged about a few weeks back, that major changes to comics in the late 1960s are now bar-trivia material. Gwen’s father was an important supporting character for close to three years; looking back, he’s a footnote (even given that he’s shown up various ways in more recent decades).
The retired police captain debuted during Dr. Octopus’ first post-Ditko story arc, as part of a task force for stopping Otto Octavius’ latest scheme. Like Jonah’s son John Jameson, who’s also on the task force, Stacy believes Spider-Man’s a good guy, even after the webslinger apparently joins forces with Dr. Octopus.
This isn’t surprising. Marvel routinely showed the cops as more supportive of Spidey than Jonah or the man on the street; possibly this had something to do with the Comics Code rules that comics shouldn’t disrespect legal authorities. What is surprising is that when Peter meets him — Stacy is, of course, Gwen’s dad — they bond in a way Peter hasn’t done with anyone else.
Typically for Spidey in this era, adding him to Spidey’s great supporting cast only made Peter’s life more complicated. A few issues later the Kingpin brainwashes Stacy into stealing information from police HQ for him. The only way Peter can think of to thwart the scheme is photograph Stacy in the act, which of course outrages Gwen. Ironically she’s happier with Spider-Man, who saves both her and her dad from a death-trap.
I like the idea of Stacy as a father figure to Peter but it’s weird how Peter doesn’t even think of Uncle Ben or compare them. In “Spider-Man No More” it appeared that for a while Peter forget Ben Parker existed. Here, again, we have no suggestion Peter once had another father figure. I suspect they’d write it differently today.
“The Flash — Fact or Fiction” in Flash #179 (Cary Bates, Ross Andru) introduced not a new face but a new world. After “Flash of Two Worlds” introduced Jay Garrick and the Justice Society as real heroes living on a parallel world to Barry Allen, the comics routinely referred to Earth-One as “our” Earth. In Jay’s return appearance for instance—
the story opens with a comet striking the sun. The captions inform us we don’t know about it because it didn’t happen on our Earth but on Earth-Two. We were living on Earth-One. Go figure.
#179 changed that. Fighting a bizarre alien (drawn by Andru in uninspired fashion), Flash suddenly finds himself in New York, and everyone around him knows his secret identity. He eventually figures out he’s on our real “real world,” one where superheroes are only comic-book characters. Convincing Julius Schwartz he’s the real deal, he gets the editor to shell out on parts for a new cosmic treadmill, which Flash uses to get back to Earth-One. While Earth-Prime would never play as large a role as Earth-Two, it would get visits from superheroes semiregularly until the Crisis erased it from existence (and with it the idea we lived there).
Another first in this story is that the alien monster Flash is fighting feeds off the aura that protects Flash from friction. It wasn’t the first story to use the aura as a McGuffin: the backup tale in Flash #158 has Professor Ivo duplicating it in a scheme to steal the Justice League’s powers.
Bates, however, really liked the idea. After he became regular Flash writer in the early 1970s, he turned out multiple stories over the years that hinged on some strange property of the aura. Which makes #179 a landmark in another, smaller way.
#SFWApro. Spider-art by Romita, Flash art by Infantino except Andru’s cover for #179.
