These days the medium of comics has become synonymous with the superhero genre in ways that, frankly, annoy me. I hear people refer to the latest Marvel movie as a “comicbook movie” or they refer to the silly tropes of superhero stories as the sort of thing that happens “in comics”. But superhero stories are a genre, not a medium. Saying that a movie is a “comicbook movie” is as nonsensical as saying that a movie based on a novel is a “prose movie”. Gibberish.

Comics can do any genre. Comics should do every genre. Because of that, I have a fascination with the era between the end of World War Two and the 1960s when superheroes fell out of fashion in mainstream American comics. It was an era filled with horror and sci-fi comics, my favourite genres, but also westerns, romance, comedy, crime, and more.

I want to do a look into that era, to see what it may have offered that has been swept aside for our costumed crimefighters. And if I were to pick a single issue to examine that might best represent the between-superheroes era, I’d have to choose Young Men #21, the June 1953 issue. Why that issue? Well, because I own a copy of Young Men #21, which sure makes examining it more possible than if I didn’t. Anyway, let’s check out the first story in that issue to see what comics were providing for the children of the 1950s.

Oh yeah! Check out that splash! Cars racing! A bold declaration of “Young Men In Action!” A paraphrase of Rudyard Kipling! Surely this is going to be a rollicking good time!

This seven-page story is an origin for Flash Foster (real name Frederick Foster Jr.) and his custom hot-rod, the Model TNT. Sometimes character origins are great stories, that’s why superhero movies spend so much time on them. Less than a decade after this issue, Marvel will give us Spider-Man’s origin, one of the all-time greats. Does Flash Foster have a similarly excellent origin?

He does not.

It’s like this: Flash sees a hot rod drive by and decides that he and his friends should start a hot rod club, so they do. Okay, fine. I guess technically the origin also includes how he gets his car, so I’ll add that: they want a car for a while but can’t afford one, but then Flash finds a farmer with the beat-up remains of an old Model T. They buy that for cheap and then fix it up.

I feel like a comic, especially one that promised us action, could have condensed that previous paragraph to a single page. Or even a few pages if it wanted to sprinkle in some character bits. This comic waits until the second-to-last page to introduce any conflict beyond Flash wanting a car. That conflict? A young boy is sick, the doctor needed to save him is in a different town, and there’s a storm raging! Now we’re talking! Action at last! Here, I’ll show the single most action-packed segment of the comic:

Okay, we get that cool panel of Flash, sweat pouring down his face, driving intensely through the storm. Sure, the narration ruins it by saying that most of the trip was actually smooth, but don’t worry because the next panel also ruins it by cutting directly to the destination. Our dramatic climax is over and that one cool panel of driving is our reward for listening to this kid pine for hot rods for the rest of the story. (The trip back is even worse, a single panel of the car driving without any of the impressionistic fun).

Well, what about Flash himself? Is he at least a compelling protagonist? A cool hot-rodding rebel? A charming rogue who loves to race? The kind of kid who takes an old Model T and upgrades it into what he calls a “Model TNT” must be fun to read about, right? Let’s try something: here’s a handful of quotes that a kid like Flash might say about his chosen hobby. Try to pick out which one is really from this issue:

1. “We’re not doing this just for glory […], it’s so we can learn to do things on our own!”
2. “Now we can speed down the open roads! We can be free for the first time in our lives!”
3. “Racing is work! Anything good is work!”
4. “And we obey traffic laws! Yep, proving we’re not a menace is a big part of our job!”
5. “I took care to make it safe as well as fast! All serious hot rodders do!”

So which one is real? I tricked you! All of these are real quotes except #2. That’s right, Flash said all those things about hard work and safety, but not the one about the freedom that cars would bring him. Flash Foster is a little wiener kid.

There are no credits on the issue, so I don’t know who the writer is, and I can only eliminate artists who were working in this era but whose art I can tell this is not (it’s not Kirby, Ditko, or Colan, for example). I don’t know who created Flash Foster. But I can tell you this, they were definitely grown men who thought they were creating a good role model here. To be clear I, Patrick D Ryall, want young people to learn about the value of safety and respect and stuff, but I can tell you who wouldn’t love that: ten-year-old boys.

I admit, there are kids out there who will find themselves drawn to a goody-two-shoes type of character. I was that kind of kid. But I’d argue that those kids don’t need the lessons taught here as much as the reckless kids. If you want a protagonist to reach those kids, you’d need make Flash cool first and then smuggle the positive lessons in through the story. The kids who need to learn the value of car safety are not the ones who will see Flash saying “Car safety rules!” and say “Yeah, this guy gets it!”

Oh wait, I just remembered that Flash’s catchphrase is “Popping Pistons!”

I take it all back. This kid is cool as Hell.

Now to address the “and his high-gear hot-shots” part of the title. Flash Foster does, inexplicably, have friends. The majority of them are not named in this issue, but one is fat and one has glasses, so you can predict the kind of personalities they will develop if they make it into the next couple issues. There is also Sandra, a girl and enthusiastic friend of Flash who is not actually part of the hot rod gang, but her uncle is a reporter who could give them publicity (this does not happen in the story). The only one of Flash’s friends who is actually notworthy in this issue is Rod Randall, and I can not tell you how annoyed I am by the decision to name one of the kids in the hot rod comic “Rod”. It’s begging for confusion. Anyway, Rod is rich and he spends all his time asking “why don’t we just get my father to buy us a car?” so that Flash can argue the value of earning it themselves.

It’s a fine batch of friends. One can see this gang developing into a cast with personalities that play off each other like the Riverdale kids or something, but in this origin story they all have to take a back seat to Flash’s responsible car ownership.

So, is there anything in this story that I think would appeal to kids? Well…

If you’re a little 1950s kid who is into cars and likes thinking about cars and wants to read a comic where people talk about car stuff, this story mentions a bunch of car stuff. Come and get it!

A final aside: Marvel owns these guys, right? So you may wonder if Flash Foster exists in the Marvel Universe. Well, yeah. There’s a different “Flash Foster”, who was like a footballman or something, who appeared in the ’40s and I believe he has been referenced in modern comics, but out little hot-rodder here has not, to my knowledge. But the policy as I understand it is that characters like this are considered to exist in the Marvel Universe as long as nothing in canon contradicts their existence. So if they ever want Johnny Storm to go back in time to the ’50s and do a hot-rod race against some teens, well we’ve got the teens right here ready to go.

If I’m rating how this story stacks up against the superhero genre, I have to admit that nothing here makes racing stories seem like a winning genre for the medium. Still, we there are still two more issues of Young Men with Flash and friends and they simply HAVE to be more action-packed than this one. It would simply not be possible for them to be less so.

In this one, America tells Japan that their cartoon can beat them up.

After the opening (it’s the new nature-themed one again) this short is basically just a montage of Superman sabotaging Japan (it’s apparently okay when he does it). Our intrepid reporters are prisoners in Japan, but every night Clark secretly busts out of the room he’s being kept in to bust up all the boats and bridges and stuff. I’m all for Superman wrecking up violent empires, but I could stand to see it with less wanton destruction. Take “How Superman Would Win The War” in which he strikes directly at the leaders of the aggressive nations. There at least he doesn’t kill a bunch of soldiers and destroy cities. Maybe you say that he can only do that in a sort of What If scenario like that short story because in the real world he can’t end the war? Well, to that I say maybe Superman isn’t the best place for this particular kind of propaganda then.

But hey, speaking of propaganda, we are still dealing with racist depictions of Japanese men, with the buck-teeth and so on. I’d take wanton destruction if we could get rid of that.

Anyway, they try to stop Superman by saying they will kill Lois if he keeps it up. He keeps it up. They put Lois in front of a firing squad, but just in time to block the bullets Superman arrives and beats them up and saves her. He brings her back to America, where she notes that Clark is still captured in Japan, but Superman will be there to protect him. It’s genuinely a sort of never-give-up bit of badassery that people like in superhero stuff and it would go down soother if not connected to the racist propaganda.

Gale Frazer is a woman who has seen some of the worst that humanity has to offer. Her father and her brother died in WW2 and the Korean War respectively, and when we meet her in this episode she is recently returned from serving as a nurse in ‘Nam. She has a plot of land in a rural area that she clearly hopes she will get to live on in peace, but that plan comes crashing down like a flying saucer when she witnesses a flying saucer come crashing down. When she finds a survivor at the crash site, even though he looks human, she infers he is an alien of some kind. But still, her nurse instincts are strong so she makes every effort to keep this guy alive.

The alien who survived the crash is going by Blake. He was only supposed to be delivering another Invader, one who had a courier mission, but that guy died in the crash so now Blake has to take over. He has to deliver a box to a nearby mine. While Gale keeps him healthy, he forces her to help him. As always I’m interested in seeing things from the Invaders’ point of view, so it’s interesting to hear Blake describe humanity as fighters and killers and betrayers who act that way because of the emotions we have. We know from a previous episode that their kind can develop emotions and the ones that do are ostracized, but Blake believes that his kind’s emotionless style makes things run a lot more smoothly. Gale’s opinion on humanity isn’t so great either given all that she’s been through.

When David Vincent inevitably rolls into the scene and tries to convince Gale to either let Blake die or at least take him to a doctor who can study him, Gale doesn’t go along with it. Not to short-change that aspect, which is the bulk of the show, but Gale eventually learns her lesson after Blake kills her potential love interest and reveals that he would be perfectly happy wiping out all humans on Earth if his plan doesn’t work. After that Gale admits to Vincent that probably she was in the wrong here. (For the record I need to note that the mission Blake was on was part of an experiment that, if successful, would have made the Invaders immune to the toxic effects of oxygen and allow them to exist on Earth in their natural forms. No go for that.)

The episode ends with a chase through some tunnels during which Blake’s human disguise is melting away, which will be slow but fatal since they can’t exist in their natural form on Earth. When some of Blake’s allies show up and find out the experiment was no good, they casually intend to kill Blake because he is no longer of any use, but he kills them first and then begs Vincent to kill him more quickly than the decay of his human form would. Vincent obliges.

As ever I wonder about the true forms of the Invaders. At this point I don’t think we’re going to see them, since this story in which Blake was “reverting” would have been a chance but all we get is his humanoid shell getting all. Probably for the best, since the show would almost certainly have to disappoint me. What we DO get is Vincent making a reference to a human who saw their true form and went mad. Did that happen in an episode? I don’t remember it. I’ll say this, it’s definitely proof that these Invaders are a cosmic horror threat more than standard sci-fi invaders. (I looked it up, it’s a reference to the guy who looked in the car way back in Genesis. I think I must either not have got that that was what happened when I saw that episode, or just forgot.)