Perhaps not, but Flash #210’s Murphy Anderson cover did raise a few eyebrows. I mean, WTF, Flash-creators — we’re in 2971, John Wilkes Booth just shot Abraham Lincoln and Adam Strange is flying by in the background?
In Flash #203, we learned “The Flash’s Wife is a Two-Timer,” sent back as a baby from the 30th century to escape what looked like inevitable nuclear war. #210’s “An Earth Divided” (Cary Bates, Irv Novick) was the first of several stories Bronze Age Flash scribe Cary Bates would write about that far-flung future. In comments on my post about #203 (and here on Alan Stewart’s blog) nobody has any enthusiasm for that retcon. It might have vanished into oblivion exce[t Bates clearly liked it enough to keep it canonical.
By the time the Allens arrive in the future this issue, Earth-West (the Democracy of Justice), is seeking to broker a peace with Earth-East (the Dictatorship of Doom). Earth-West creates an android Abraham Lincoln in the hope he can reunite the world as he reunited America, giving him the added advantage of Mad Thinker-like computer-precog abilities. Earth-East’s counter-move is an android Booth.
No sooner do the Allens meet her birth parents again than Flash gets caught up in the madness. In a nice touch, Iris isn’t the least fazed when he’s apparently doomed — she knows her husband — and concentrates on covering the action for the future news service she helped set up.
As for Adam Strange, he’s not in it; Murphy Anderson drew a flying man on the cover and without thinking turned it into Adam — he had, after all, inked the old Adam Strange series for years.
The cover did provoke some outrage in the letter column a few issues later. Obviously the creators went with the classic approach of creating an eye-grabbing cover, then hammering together a story to fit. Nope, the reply said, this was a story-first case. Which I believe: Schwartz’s cover-first covers usually had a simpler visual hook.
Covers by Anderson, Anderson, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane.
