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.
Boy hidey, do I hate this Iris-West-is-from-the-future retcon! It may be my least favorite “everything you know is wrong” reset in all of comics — and that includes Mopee. My personal feeling is that superhero comics work best when the cast of supporting characters are human and stay human as part of the stars quo. Giving Lois or Perry or Ma Kent super-powers for a story can be fun for the novelty of it — hell, Jimmy’s Silver Age career was built on his one-issue transformations, and that was what we all loved about it — but when you make the change last for months (see Lois’ recent stint as Superwoman) or worse, make it permanent (as with Lana now in the Super-Family titles), it dilutes the uniqueness of the superhero who’s ostensibly the star of the book and throws the relationship of the superhero and supporting cast members off balance. The superhero NEEDS ordinary humans to relate to and save, as much as he or she needs the colorful costume to stand out from everyone in normal clothes.
Iris being from the future makes her a “special case,” someone extraordinary, someone with a destiny, which puts her a lot closer to Flash in terms of being a sci-fi character than an everyday member of the human race. Then, on top of that, it opens the whole continuity can of worms about what the 30th century was like. The lack of congruity with the long-established future of the Legion (which I’d been a devoted fan of since I was 6) was too much for my 13-year-old brain to absorb. I didn’t want Iris FROM the future or IN the future, and I certainly didn’t want her anywhere near MY LEGION’S future.
The fact that it stuck around and was accepted for years grated on my nerves and still does. So while that issue may not have had the most shocking cover of 1971, I’d say it had the most annoying, irritating, and exasperating cover of that year.
While I’m inclined to agree about the need for a non-super cast, this one didn’t bother me — probably because it didn’t make Iris any different when she was back home with Barry. I’m aware from my previous post (and other online discussion) how many people hate it though.
I agree the mismatch with the Legion, particularly as this was specifically set in the 30th century was annoying (the same point has been made about the “Superman of 2965” stories of a few years earlier). Eventually explained as branching future timelines, of course.