Plastic Man!

Oh wow. So I guess this was the prototypical Mr. Fantastic. Plastic Man, an ex-gangster/criminal was drenched in some strange acid that gave him superpowers and he was saved by an order of monks and ends up working for the police department.

I really, really hate super-powered superhero comics with those sorts of origins. I really do. Having been raised on a ton of sci-fi genre materials, every strange/new advancement has some sort of ground--some sort of explanation or origin that would make its capabilities easier to believe. I CAN'T believe that chemicals dropping on some dude will give them superpowers if they can't tell you where they came from. In the real world, if some strong acid drops on you, you'll burn. You'll burn right up. If it isn't strong, good for you; it'll roll off of you like water off a ducks back and maybe cause some irritation later--no biggie. The skin organ is most valuable for its ability to protect the other organs and whatnot from contaminants.

But even putting THAT aside, if I don't know the origins of the character or what he was like before he got his powers or how he changed so dramatically and what the hell monks were doing there when he 'dropped acid' and what his 'unhappy childhood' consisted of, I just don't care. So I tried to suspend my disbelief long enough to understand the world of this comic and the story that runs along with it.

The ones that truly stuck out to me probably stuck out to just about everyone else. The first story, with a child named 'Bright Eyes', was so chock full of child abuse that I had to laugh at the absurdity of it. I don't even think back when this comic was made in the forties that adults would do this sort of thing to a kid. First we see what looks like an infant getting his head dunked in a punch bowl by some guy who can't be younger than his mid-twenties with some sort of huge grudge against him. GET OVER YOURSELF MAN. But this kid isn't two, as his height and proportions suggested. He's probably 6-10 or something. And he has hypnotic blue eyes. Words cannot describe the cheese encrusted in this comic. All it needs are those crappy heroic dialogue one-liners that old Batman was famous for. Oh wait. It has those too. Well, the same kid gets smacked around, threatened with getting his arm broken, and ends up nearly drowning in the sea trying to lead the heroes to the other children. The other children are being sold and kept in self-flooding cages that activate whenever a prospective buyer is about to leave without purchasing a child {or when Sphinx doesn't get heard from in a while}. Then we later learn that Sphinx is Bright Eyes's dad. This strip has shock value written all over it. This strip practically thrives on its attempts to create the most drastic, wretched crime for our hero to solve. But I was far more interested in the absurdity of it all than the hero himself. Plastic Man was still just...fairly generic to me.

The next story I ought to mention is the one with the Super So-an-So. That one just felt like a giant joke, which isn't a bad thing really. I found it more interesting than anything else I read. The hero reminded me of Dopey from the old Loony Tunes cartoons, or that burger guy from Popeye. He's like a stereotypical superhero without the stereotypical personality. He's so vague about his abilities that it's like Cole is making fun of the genre. Even the crime he stopped was a big joke. The killer was trying to take his own mother's life and his mother supports him so much that she even tries to help him kill her in peace. In a house, in a room, in a safe. And it was most humorous.

Finally, there's Wun Cloo, which I tried to read and...well. I read it. I'm sure even a child would be able to make out the racial insensitivity here, but I tried not to let it get to my head. This was the forties. But while reading it I wondered if this was a joke too. The criminal couldn't even be taken seriously. So I put aside my qualms against the whole racism gag and read it as if everyone were of the same origins. It was suddenly an all too typical comic strip again. Wun Cloo was like a toon to me, as everyone/thing else was to me. But that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of racial stereotypes evoked by these strips. I didn't let it get to me. Like I've said before, it was a different time.