As I mentioned in my article on Plastic Man’s tangled continuity, DC’s Silver Age Plastic Man had a crossover with Batman in Brave and the Bold #76 by Bob Haney and Mike Sekowsky. It also boasts what may be the goofiest cover Neal Adams ever drew for DC.
One of the things I’ve noticed rereading the Silver Age is that Haney worked very hard at imitating Stan Lee’s style of rhetoric. People remember Haney’s efforts at hip, swinging dialog in Teen Titans but it’s there in Metamorpho too. And Haney’s narration often emphasizes, Smiling Stan-style, that whatever story you’re reading is the coolest, wildest, most awesome and quite possibly ginchiest thing you’ve read this year (side note, was “ginchy” a real sixties slang term or just something people said on Earth-B?).
Which is why this splash page seems to me like Haney’s parodying himself.
“They said it couldn’t be lived, told or drawn … wondrous word and pulsating style” is typical Haney. Spending a couple of lines figuring out “‘they’ don’t exist!” — I get the feeling Haney was writing tongue in cheek, much like his Easter egg reference to Cave Carson in one issue of Metamorpho.
#SFWApro.
“Ginchy” appears to be 1950s slang, rather than 60s, which matches with DC being behind the times; but, I have read a reference that said, without attribute, that it dated back to the 30s, which matches the age of Haney and the editors at DC. Heck, half the teen tropes of comics, especially Archie and the Riverdale gang, date back to the 30s and sources like the Andy Hardy films and the Dead End Kids/Bowery Boys et al. Personally, I think the use of outdated slang makes them seem more timeless than using modern slang.
I’ve noticed the same thing about film scores. Using a classical style (hundreds of years out of date) makes the movie less dated than using current pop / rock. I wonder why that is?
(It’d probably take me about ten minutes thought to figure it out, but I haven’t had my coffee yet.)
Jeff, thanks for that.
You have a point about the old slang. There’s an Oz book “Hidden Valley of Oz” which was excoriated for years because of a character who spouts 1940s slang (which is when it was written) making it feel far too contemporary. When I finally read it, a talking rat speaking in 1940s slang was just as fantastical as everything else in the book.
Ginchy may have been ’50s slang, or even earlier, or it may be entirely fictional. What I know (having been born in 1958) is that I’ve only ever heard it in cheesy TV shows, movies, and comics of the mid-1960s. I think it turns up in beach movies like Gidget, or whenever a TV hippie girl shows up on a sitcom like Gilligan’s Island. I don’t recall ever hearing it in real life.
According to the online Oxford Dictionary, the earliest usage of “ginchy” they could find was from 1959, in a song called “Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)”, written by Irving Taylor and performed by Edward Byrnes and Connie Stevens, from Byrne’s 1959 album “Kookie Star of “77 Sunset Strip” (okay, the info on the Oxford site had a lot less detail, I looked up the song on Wikipedia for more info).
Like Jim, I’ve only ever heard the word ‘ginchy’ used once, in an episode of “Happy Days” (so, 1970s, although the show’s setting at the time was still, I think, the end of the 1950s). I vaguely recall that it involved some girl gushing that Fonzie told her she was ginchy.