In the first Flash Foster story we got an origin story of sorts for the High-Gear Hot-Shots, a group of teens who started a hot rod club. That outing felt pretty lacklustre to me, but let’s see how their second story goes:

The splash image still promises us “Young Men In Action!” and we’re given a scene of Flash racing a car with what appears to be a delirious glee, but one of his tires is bursting. Oh no, watch out Flash! The splash in the previous issue (also a racing scene) didn’t actually happen in the story, it was just an example of the kinds of things that could happen to Flash. Will this be another fake-out, or will for action will be slaked?

It’s another seven-pager, and it picks up weeks or months after the last one. As of the end of the origin the team hadn’t begun their competitive racing career, but now we’re told they do it every Saturday. Flash is a good racer, but the car is letting them down.

The first thing I notice here is that the Model TNT, which was their big star vehicle last time, is no longer treated as a cool car. It’s never even called the “Model TNT” anymore, instead being referred to as the (or a) Ford Puddle Jumper. It’s not good enough, we’re told. It needs to be streamlined, they say. What happened?

It feels like someone’s nephew read the first story and told them that actually kids don’t want to read about old cars. Kids want the sleek, streamlined cars. I do assume that the Model T was originally chosen because it was the cool car of the writer’s youth, but it had to be left behind. Whatever the reason for the change, they swerve into a lane today’s kids can enjoy (by which I mean “today’s kids” of 1953). The change is fine with me. Apart from liking the “Model TNT” name, I had no sentimental attachment to that car. If they want to make some changes to appeal to kids, I say go for it. WITH ONE EXCEPTION! At no point in this issue does Flash exclaim “Popping Pistons!” Has some nephew decided that catchphrases aren’t cool and the creative team taken that to heart? God, I hope not. There must be an in-story reason. Maybe Flash just isn’t up to using his catchphrase because his father is sick.

Oh yeah, I should get to the actual story.

Remember how one of the High-Gear Hot-Shots was a rich kid named Rod Randall? He’s the star of this issue for some reason. It goes like this: Flash’s father is sick, so Flash and his mother are doing a bunch of extra work to stay afloat. This is how we learn that Flash’s mother works as a maid for Rod’s family. I have never been a rich teenager (and it’s getting a little late for me to turn into one) but I can’t help but feel like if your best friend’s mother is your maid that’s weird. Right? Am I wrong about that? I don’t know. Anyway, Mrs. Foster confides in Rod that they need five hundred dollars to get an operation to save Mr. Foster. This is news that Flash himself doesn’t know, so Rod has to keep it a secret.

It turns out that there’s a big race coming up and the prize for it is five hundred dollars! Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Rod should just get his rich father to pay for the operation! Yes, but that’s not what the story is thinking. I suppose that after Rod spent the whole last issue saying “My father could just buy us a car” and Flash kept saying “No, we need to earn this ourselves” that Rod assumes Flash wouldn’t accept money, so it is time for trickery.

The gang insist they can’t win the race if they don’t get a new, sleeker body for their car, but Flash can’t fix the car if he’s so busy with his extra newspaper route work. Rod volunteers himself and the other members of the crew to deliver Flash’s papers while he works on the car. Everybody wins! And indeed everybody does win. The car is fixed up, they enter the race, we get a less-exciting version of the tire-popping from the splash that they have fixed two panels later, and they win. After the race, the gang intend to split the winnings until Rod gives it to Flash’s mother to pay for the operation. Rod even acts like the rest of the team was in on his plan, instead of taking all the credit for himself. Could it be that Rod Randall is a nice person? Weird. Unexpected. Give me a Rod Randall, Teen Millionaire comic!

For the record, two of the other High-Gear Hot-Shots kids from the previous issue show up in this one. The big kid is called Drag and the bespectacled one is called Hub. These are nicknames that prove they are devoted to racing. These are the names of heroes. One character from last time who does not reappear is Sandra, the girl. Granted, she was never a member of the team, but she isn’t in this one at all. It’s like someone’s nephew thinks girls are gross and don’t need to be in the book.

In the end, I must admit that this Flash Foster story is marginally more action-packed than the first. The climactic race gets only a couple panels more than the rainstorm drive did in the first story, but the difference is that that rainstorm drive was sprung upon us suddenly after pages of kids just wanting a car. This time, the story is propelled toward the race from the beginning like, you know, a story. Add in the stakes of Flash’s father being sick and Rod keeping a secret and I could actually see a child enjoying this.

I have still not determined whose uncle was writing these comics, but the Internet knows who drew them. Ed Moline was an artist on a lot of Atlas crime, western, and horror stories. I can definitely see how his style would work well for horror, but his work on Flash Foster seems a minor footnote in his career (it isn’t even mentioned on that page I linked to). He’s not a bad artist by any means, as I feel the images from this issue (with the colours are a lot better than the last) should reveal, and he can draw the heck out of the cars in a way I bet most artists would find tedious. But most important is this paragraph from that site: According to the artist’s daughter, “Dad was a healthy, strong, and very funny man! He often worked at home at a drafting table in his private studio in the basement. I remember he decorated the walls with a drawing of a gorilla eating my mother!” Truly a brilliant artistic mind.

Like most kids cartoons, this one begins with a corpse being dumped into a swamp.

Saboteurs! It’s saboteurs again. But this time we’re not told they’re foreign agents or anything, they seems to just be Guys Who Do Crimes. It’s weird for this era of these shorts, but it’s what we’ve got. Anyway, whatever this conspiracy is, they seem to have got into a pretty good position at the Metropolis Munitions Plant. I’d expect that’d be a pretty good position to use for various crimes, but their plan is to blow the place up. I guess they know their business better than I do.

Lois goes undercover at the plant to see what’s going on, and naturally this ends with her being chased through the rafters and getting locked in a torpedo to be killed. Fortunately, Superman is on the case ready to save our intrepid reporter and the munitions plant. It’s pretty standard stuff, without even a rudimentary sci-fi twist to make it more interesting to me. And I have to admit that the animation, while still good compared to plenty of cartoons I’ve seen from the decades since, has fallen a bit since the Fleischer era.

Going into this one I had no strong memories of which it was, so when we see the apparently-elderly night watchman I did think to myself that he looked like he was built exactly like Clark I didn’t realize how right I was. But, of course, I’m no Lois Lane. She sees through the outfit easily. Apparently there’s nothing that Clark could put on that would disguise him from her.

One thing I did remember (though I didn’t know which short it happened in) is Louis. At one point in this cartoon Clark thinks he’s talking to Lois, but there’s actually a goofy little guy called Louis standing there. It’s not especially funny now, but I bet at the times this had kids rolling in the aisles. Let’s bring Louis back in the next Superman movie, people.

To: Meat
Re: Bologna

Look, obviously I respect you, Bologna. My ancestors, I assume, used to stalk the plains and fields, hunting wild bolognas and bringing them home to cook them over the fire that they put in their caves which is a bad place for a fire because it would fill with smoke but probably my ancestors were idiots like that. And then we domesticated the bologna and now it grows in farms where we’re cruel to it to save money because cruelty is always cheaper than not cruelty so we fill our world with cruelty like we filled our caves with smoke. That’s why I respect bologna manufacturers and why I definitely know what kind of meat it is.

And I accept that we spell it bologna but people call it baloney. That’s fine with me. If anything, it makes this one particular kind of meat have one interesting thing about it. You can trick people by asking them to spell it and if they get it correct they are secretly spies. Spies can’t help it because they’re idiots like that. That’s why I accept the discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation for bologna.

With all that said, my issue is this: I don’t eat bologna, so you might as well not make it anymore. Thanks!

With underwear,
Patrick D Ryall

It’s the first Part Two episode of the show! Things continue from the previous episode! How novel!

As established last time, David Vincent and his friend Mike Tressider are dealing with the latest plan by the Invaders. The aliens are flooding earth with radiation except for one place in Scandinavia, so all the world leaders are now having a meeting there to figure out what to do about it, and the Invaders plan to blow up the place and wipe out all those leaders. But on Vincent and Tressider’s side is Ellie, an Invader who thinks the massassination plan is going to backfire and make humans aware of the Invaders so she wants to stop it.

So our heroes get to travel down a cool elevator into the EURAC (“European Allied Command” apparently) base and do espionage kinda stuff. The main Invader baddie in this arc (Alquist) is working for Halvorson, the leader of the host nation which I don’t think is identified, and it turns out that Halvorson is aware that Alquist is an alien! They’re keeping it secret for typical Men In Black reasoning (they think people will panic and riot), but Halvorson believes Alquist when he says that his people are willing to work alongside humanity.

The most important things in the episode are these: 1) There’s an indoor jeep chase. Sure, the production values of the chase are nothing special, but it still happens. 2) Halvorson sacrifices himself to save the day. Imagine a politician willing to do that. 3) My favourite part is Vincent and Ellie debating the merits of their species. Vincent is all “Your people can never know love” and Ellie is like “But we also don’t know hatred. Isn’t that better?” This debate never really comes to a resolution, though we are obviously supposed to side with Vincent, but Ellie points out “Your way is no better.” I love getting glimpses into the way the Invaders see the world, so it worked for me.

In the end, Mike Tressider doesn’t survive the episode, but Ellie defies my expectations by making it. I foresaw her as a probable “tragic female sacrifice” who dies for the cause, but this show is better than that. Instead, after they succeed at saving the day, they part by acknowledging that they are not friends and if they meet again they will be at cross-purposes. She probably does not show up again on the show, but it’s neat that she’s out there.