Hour-Man Minute by Minute, Month by Month, Year by Year
Jan 10, 2022 10:32:52 GMT -5
shaxper, Roquefort Raider, and 6 more like this
Post by MWGallaher on Jan 10, 2022 10:32:52 GMT -5
Apparently I'm not the only comics fan around here with a fondness for Hourman, created by Ken Fitch and Bernard Baily. One of the founding members of the Justice Society of America and the first to leave it, one of DC's first round of superheroes, Hourman was never a big hit. Like Baily's most prominent other feature of the era, The Spectre, Hourman demonstrates an interesting variation in portrayal as the feature struggled, and eventually failed, to find its way to being a solid success. To appreciate the changes in tone and premise, one needs to dive deep, so I propose to undertake a story-by-story examination of the feature. I encourage those with any interest to read and comment as we spend some quality time with a third-tier hero with, at the very least, a cool name and a striking visual: Rex "Tick-Tock" Tyler, "The Man of the Hour", "Hour-Man", "Hour Man", and "Hourman" (and Jimmy Martin, the Minute Man, and Thorndyke, and Dr. Fate, and Sandman, coming along eventually!)
And we begin with...
ADVENTURE COMICS #48, March 1940
Untitled story written byGardner F. Fox Ken Fitch, drawn by Bernard Baily, credited only as "By Bernard Baily"
Rex 'Tick-Tock' Tyler is introduced in a caption, bypassing a detailed origin: "Rex Tyler, a young chemist, discovers Miraclo, a powerful chemical that transforms him from a meek, mild scientist to the underworld's most formidable foe...with Miraclo, he has for one hour the power of chained lightning--speed almost as swift as thought... ...but unless he performs his deeds of strength and daring within one hour the effects of Miraclo wear off and the Hour Man becomes his former meek self..."
SYNOPSIS:
As the first story opens, Rex has placed an ad in a "great metropolitan daily": "To the oppressed: young man anxious to help the oppressed, offers services free to all who need him. Apply Box 28, Post Office." Of the many responses, he selects a letter from Mrs. John Kennedy (!), whose recently unemployed husband has returned to associating with a gang of thieves intent on recruiting him to a life of crime. John's "becoming a vicious person" and Mrs. K needs some intervention for him.
Rex interviews her incognito, learning that John has been talking in his sleep about robbing Miss Van Shelton's pearls at the Beaux Arts Ball. Rex prepares for his first mission with a tear gas-firing finger ring and a newly-mixed vial of Miraclo, planning to down the fluid one minute before the start of the Ball. Kennedy is at the Ball with the gang, who are in costume for the masked society event, when he receives a paper warning him: "Kennedy! Go home to your wife and kids before it is too late...The Hour Man". It spooks him, but gang leader Randall intends to forge ahead.
Rex, wearing the Hour Man costume we saw in the splash page, powers up with Miraclo. Kennedy kills the lights, and Miss Van Shelton's pearls are stolen in the dark. Hour Man's drug gives him "extra-normal" sight, so he can spot the theft and follow the departing thieves, and then "Tick-Tock" demonstrates his second super power, racing after the fleeing gang's auto on foot.
The police have been alerted as well and are on the lookout for the crooks' sedan. A caption tells us that it's 11:25 p.m., 26 minutes into Rex's hour of power, when his pursuit is interrupted as the police car strikes him, but his chemical enhancement allows him to survive the collision easily. The thugs escalate the situation, firing through their rear window at the cops whose squad care crashes into a storefront at 11:30. Rex follows the gang to its hideout where he demonstrates another of his abilities, leaping directly to the roof of what appears to be a two-story building.
Kennedy reports seeing the jump, but the gang doesn't believe him. Cue Rex's entry, where he uses the tear gas ring to disable the gang:
He grabs the stolen pearls and Kennedy himself before heading for the roof to teach his client's husband that "crime doesn't pay!" 11:55 p.m., with 4 minutes of power left, Rex throws Kennedy off the roof and then, in defiance of Newtonian physics (heck, Einsteinian physics, too!),then leaps off the roof himself, somehow reaching the ground first to catch the frightened Kennedy, who swears he's reformed and heads for home. Right on schedule at midnight, the Miraclo wears off, returning Rex to his "meek, timid self".
The next morning, Tyler's berated by his boss for being such a "timid soul", Miss Van Shelton finds her pearls returned, and Mary Kennedy's prayers have been answered with a husband swearing to go straight. The story closes with a silent image of Hour Man smiling and a pitch to "follow the sensational thrill-packed adventures" in every issue.
COMMENTARY:
Well, that was a pretty low-stakes debut, with under-ambitious villains planning only to steal one string of pearls at a society affair, but coming up with a far-too-complicated scheme to do so when a simple stick-up would have been a lot less risky. The high concept seems to be "super chemist", suggesting that Rex will not only rely on his super-serum, but also other chemistry-derived tools like the tear gas ring. This could have been a good hook to distinguish the feature, but I suspect it will be dropped as the series continues. Coming up with novel uses of chemistry is more challenging than plotting conventional heroics. It would have been a good gimmick, though, wouldn't it? Chemistry sets, such as the Gilbert Chemistry Set shown below, were popular among boys in the 1940s. A superhero that appeals to an adjacent interest seems like it would have been a good bet.
We also have the appeals to the "oppressed", implying that Rex will specialize in assisting the common folk with their problems rather than going after criminal masterminds. It gives the feature something of a modest tone rather than a flamboyant one. Not exactly the tone you'd expect from a lead feature, but perhaps DC thought it would connect better with their readers. It is unfair and unjust that Hour-Man presumes to let John Kennedy off the hook with a good scare, even though he shows no more sign of repentance than his comrades in crime. But there I go presuming things that Fitch and Baily don't actually show: after tear-gassing the gang and frightening Kennedy, the Miraclo wears off and Rex runs home, returning the stolen pearls discreetly. Evidently, he let them all off the hook, accomplishing only the retrieval of the stolen jewelry and scaring John Kennedy from a life of crime. A much more modest debut adventure than I realized on the initial reading!
The time stamps are a clever touch. You don't get a lot of explicit time cues in typical comic book stories other than vague "later" and "the next day" captions, but these seem obvious and essential for a character whose gimmick is having exactly one hour of enhanced ability, which is, of course, awfully convenient and implausibly exact (although it is noted that Rex feels the powers wearing off toward the end of their period of effectiveness). It is a good gimmick, though, imposing an immediacy to the adventuring, allowing the risk of power expiration and the potential for Rex to occasionally lose track of time, leaving him uncertain of when his powers would dry up, and the potential of having to conclude an adventure without the benefit of super powers. (Off-topic aside: time stamps are a critical component of my very favorite modern fiction, Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar Volumes 1-5. Each chapter begins and ends with a time stamp, with the following chapter picking up--in all but a few very special cases--exactly one second later, following a different one of the nine primary character's point of view. MZD has his tale plotted precisely, with the events depicted per chapter convincingly fitting into the allotted time. It's one of countless remarkable feats of authorship on display in the series. Oh, and each volume contains two pages of comics!)
Miraclo is implied to alter his personality as well: as soon as he runs out of steam, he becomes a stuttering, fearful man: "G-gosh it's dark here! I-I-guess I'd better head for home!" If this continues to be the characterization--as I suspect it will NOT--a de-powered Rex would be at a serious disadvantage, adding another nice angle for possible stories. I'm sure there are some other examples in the Golden Age, but it is unusual for the hero's civilian identity to be genuinely timid and trepidatious, rather than this being a ruse intended to hide the character's heroic persona. It gives the premise some Jekyll and Hyde vibes, which leads me to wonder: Have there ever been any "reverse" Jekyll and Hyde characters in the comics, villainous characters who transform into temporarily heroic ones? The closest I can come up with is Robert Kanigher's notorious unpublished Black Bomber series, the one that Tony Isabella talked DC out of publishing, coming up with Black Lightning instead. The Bomber was a white racist who could change into a Black superhero. I'm sure those pages are locked away somewhere, but I'd sure love to see some samples from the unpublished first issue. I'd love to find out who drew the book (Isabella for years avoided identifying the writer, but I had guessed Kanigher long before he spilled the beans). I always envisioned George Tuska and Vince Colletta, but I don't know if Tuska was working for DC at the time. I could also see this being done by Don Heck...but back to Hour-Man!
In addition to the one hour time limit, in this first adventure, Rex is hobbled by the evident need to mix up a fresh batch of Miraclo fluid. This helps to enforce the time limit, since he can't stop and whip up a new vial in the middle of battling crooks, nor conveniently operate with a set of spare vials on his person. He'll soon develop a pill form of the drug, which will come with a "one per day" dosage limit. Could he risk an overdose in an emergency when he needs a second hour of power? It's unlikely they'd consider that promising plot twist in the Golden Age, especially given that they got squeamish about having a pill-popping superhero anyway, and later changed from Miraclo pills to Miraclo radiation.
Notably missing from this debut are significant supporting cast members, other than Rex's dismissive boss, whose presence served only intended to emphasize the character's declared timidity (which had been forgotten until the final page). What we do get is multiple monickers: Rex, "Tick-Tock", and "Hour-Man" (or "Hour Man"; the hyphenation is inconsistent; later we'll also see "Hourman"). The powers granted by Miraclo seem intended to be open-ended at this point. We see enhanced vision, running speed, impact resistance, acrobatics, leaping, strength, and, according to the caption box, "insensibility to harm and injury", as evidenced by his shrugging off the impact of being struck by a speeding police car. Oh yean, and the ability to fall faster than another person. (I always wonder when I see stories with things like that: doesn't everyone immediately realize you can't do that, even little kids reading in the 40's? Or does not everyone have the fundamental grasp of physics to be thrown directly into disbelief?)
When Rex interviews Mrs. Kennedy, he does so wearing dark sunglasses and a hat, visiting her home at night. He notes that his address, to which responses to his newspaper ad have been forwarded, has been kept secret. The implication is that this desire for secrecy is the motivation behind his costume, although a caption declares that Rex is "the man who is to win fame as 'Tick-Tock Tyler, the Hour-Man'!". The Hour Man costume design is a pretty strong one, with some interesting novel features: the horizontal red stripes at the bottom edge of his cape, the hourglass pendant around his neck, the somewhat loose cowl masking his hair and the top part of his face. The yellow and black are striking and well balanced, making for an eye-catching look, and the red belt makes for a good accent. Bernard Baily is early in his career, and there are plenty of crude renderings, but it has its charm. It's not as appealing as Baily's Spectre comics, due to the more mundane environment and less spectacular displays of power. The editor must have had some faith in the premise, usurping the Sandman's lead position and cover spotlight, although Wesley Dodds would retain a cameo in the upper left throughout all of Hour Man's reign on the covers, and would return to the cover a couple of times before Starman came along to outshine them both. As we shall see, Hour Man would only get 39 installments in the Golden Age, and a mere 5 appearances alongside the Justice Society of America.
And we begin with...
ADVENTURE COMICS #48, March 1940
Untitled story written by
Rex 'Tick-Tock' Tyler is introduced in a caption, bypassing a detailed origin: "Rex Tyler, a young chemist, discovers Miraclo, a powerful chemical that transforms him from a meek, mild scientist to the underworld's most formidable foe...with Miraclo, he has for one hour the power of chained lightning--speed almost as swift as thought... ...but unless he performs his deeds of strength and daring within one hour the effects of Miraclo wear off and the Hour Man becomes his former meek self..."
SYNOPSIS:
As the first story opens, Rex has placed an ad in a "great metropolitan daily": "To the oppressed: young man anxious to help the oppressed, offers services free to all who need him. Apply Box 28, Post Office." Of the many responses, he selects a letter from Mrs. John Kennedy (!), whose recently unemployed husband has returned to associating with a gang of thieves intent on recruiting him to a life of crime. John's "becoming a vicious person" and Mrs. K needs some intervention for him.
Rex interviews her incognito, learning that John has been talking in his sleep about robbing Miss Van Shelton's pearls at the Beaux Arts Ball. Rex prepares for his first mission with a tear gas-firing finger ring and a newly-mixed vial of Miraclo, planning to down the fluid one minute before the start of the Ball. Kennedy is at the Ball with the gang, who are in costume for the masked society event, when he receives a paper warning him: "Kennedy! Go home to your wife and kids before it is too late...The Hour Man". It spooks him, but gang leader Randall intends to forge ahead.
Rex, wearing the Hour Man costume we saw in the splash page, powers up with Miraclo. Kennedy kills the lights, and Miss Van Shelton's pearls are stolen in the dark. Hour Man's drug gives him "extra-normal" sight, so he can spot the theft and follow the departing thieves, and then "Tick-Tock" demonstrates his second super power, racing after the fleeing gang's auto on foot.
The police have been alerted as well and are on the lookout for the crooks' sedan. A caption tells us that it's 11:25 p.m., 26 minutes into Rex's hour of power, when his pursuit is interrupted as the police car strikes him, but his chemical enhancement allows him to survive the collision easily. The thugs escalate the situation, firing through their rear window at the cops whose squad care crashes into a storefront at 11:30. Rex follows the gang to its hideout where he demonstrates another of his abilities, leaping directly to the roof of what appears to be a two-story building.
Kennedy reports seeing the jump, but the gang doesn't believe him. Cue Rex's entry, where he uses the tear gas ring to disable the gang:
He grabs the stolen pearls and Kennedy himself before heading for the roof to teach his client's husband that "crime doesn't pay!" 11:55 p.m., with 4 minutes of power left, Rex throws Kennedy off the roof and then, in defiance of Newtonian physics (heck, Einsteinian physics, too!),then leaps off the roof himself, somehow reaching the ground first to catch the frightened Kennedy, who swears he's reformed and heads for home. Right on schedule at midnight, the Miraclo wears off, returning Rex to his "meek, timid self".
The next morning, Tyler's berated by his boss for being such a "timid soul", Miss Van Shelton finds her pearls returned, and Mary Kennedy's prayers have been answered with a husband swearing to go straight. The story closes with a silent image of Hour Man smiling and a pitch to "follow the sensational thrill-packed adventures" in every issue.
COMMENTARY:
Well, that was a pretty low-stakes debut, with under-ambitious villains planning only to steal one string of pearls at a society affair, but coming up with a far-too-complicated scheme to do so when a simple stick-up would have been a lot less risky. The high concept seems to be "super chemist", suggesting that Rex will not only rely on his super-serum, but also other chemistry-derived tools like the tear gas ring. This could have been a good hook to distinguish the feature, but I suspect it will be dropped as the series continues. Coming up with novel uses of chemistry is more challenging than plotting conventional heroics. It would have been a good gimmick, though, wouldn't it? Chemistry sets, such as the Gilbert Chemistry Set shown below, were popular among boys in the 1940s. A superhero that appeals to an adjacent interest seems like it would have been a good bet.
We also have the appeals to the "oppressed", implying that Rex will specialize in assisting the common folk with their problems rather than going after criminal masterminds. It gives the feature something of a modest tone rather than a flamboyant one. Not exactly the tone you'd expect from a lead feature, but perhaps DC thought it would connect better with their readers. It is unfair and unjust that Hour-Man presumes to let John Kennedy off the hook with a good scare, even though he shows no more sign of repentance than his comrades in crime. But there I go presuming things that Fitch and Baily don't actually show: after tear-gassing the gang and frightening Kennedy, the Miraclo wears off and Rex runs home, returning the stolen pearls discreetly. Evidently, he let them all off the hook, accomplishing only the retrieval of the stolen jewelry and scaring John Kennedy from a life of crime. A much more modest debut adventure than I realized on the initial reading!
The time stamps are a clever touch. You don't get a lot of explicit time cues in typical comic book stories other than vague "later" and "the next day" captions, but these seem obvious and essential for a character whose gimmick is having exactly one hour of enhanced ability, which is, of course, awfully convenient and implausibly exact (although it is noted that Rex feels the powers wearing off toward the end of their period of effectiveness). It is a good gimmick, though, imposing an immediacy to the adventuring, allowing the risk of power expiration and the potential for Rex to occasionally lose track of time, leaving him uncertain of when his powers would dry up, and the potential of having to conclude an adventure without the benefit of super powers. (Off-topic aside: time stamps are a critical component of my very favorite modern fiction, Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar Volumes 1-5. Each chapter begins and ends with a time stamp, with the following chapter picking up--in all but a few very special cases--exactly one second later, following a different one of the nine primary character's point of view. MZD has his tale plotted precisely, with the events depicted per chapter convincingly fitting into the allotted time. It's one of countless remarkable feats of authorship on display in the series. Oh, and each volume contains two pages of comics!)
Miraclo is implied to alter his personality as well: as soon as he runs out of steam, he becomes a stuttering, fearful man: "G-gosh it's dark here! I-I-guess I'd better head for home!" If this continues to be the characterization--as I suspect it will NOT--a de-powered Rex would be at a serious disadvantage, adding another nice angle for possible stories. I'm sure there are some other examples in the Golden Age, but it is unusual for the hero's civilian identity to be genuinely timid and trepidatious, rather than this being a ruse intended to hide the character's heroic persona. It gives the premise some Jekyll and Hyde vibes, which leads me to wonder: Have there ever been any "reverse" Jekyll and Hyde characters in the comics, villainous characters who transform into temporarily heroic ones? The closest I can come up with is Robert Kanigher's notorious unpublished Black Bomber series, the one that Tony Isabella talked DC out of publishing, coming up with Black Lightning instead. The Bomber was a white racist who could change into a Black superhero. I'm sure those pages are locked away somewhere, but I'd sure love to see some samples from the unpublished first issue. I'd love to find out who drew the book (Isabella for years avoided identifying the writer, but I had guessed Kanigher long before he spilled the beans). I always envisioned George Tuska and Vince Colletta, but I don't know if Tuska was working for DC at the time. I could also see this being done by Don Heck...but back to Hour-Man!
In addition to the one hour time limit, in this first adventure, Rex is hobbled by the evident need to mix up a fresh batch of Miraclo fluid. This helps to enforce the time limit, since he can't stop and whip up a new vial in the middle of battling crooks, nor conveniently operate with a set of spare vials on his person. He'll soon develop a pill form of the drug, which will come with a "one per day" dosage limit. Could he risk an overdose in an emergency when he needs a second hour of power? It's unlikely they'd consider that promising plot twist in the Golden Age, especially given that they got squeamish about having a pill-popping superhero anyway, and later changed from Miraclo pills to Miraclo radiation.
Notably missing from this debut are significant supporting cast members, other than Rex's dismissive boss, whose presence served only intended to emphasize the character's declared timidity (which had been forgotten until the final page). What we do get is multiple monickers: Rex, "Tick-Tock", and "Hour-Man" (or "Hour Man"; the hyphenation is inconsistent; later we'll also see "Hourman"). The powers granted by Miraclo seem intended to be open-ended at this point. We see enhanced vision, running speed, impact resistance, acrobatics, leaping, strength, and, according to the caption box, "insensibility to harm and injury", as evidenced by his shrugging off the impact of being struck by a speeding police car. Oh yean, and the ability to fall faster than another person. (I always wonder when I see stories with things like that: doesn't everyone immediately realize you can't do that, even little kids reading in the 40's? Or does not everyone have the fundamental grasp of physics to be thrown directly into disbelief?)
When Rex interviews Mrs. Kennedy, he does so wearing dark sunglasses and a hat, visiting her home at night. He notes that his address, to which responses to his newspaper ad have been forwarded, has been kept secret. The implication is that this desire for secrecy is the motivation behind his costume, although a caption declares that Rex is "the man who is to win fame as 'Tick-Tock Tyler, the Hour-Man'!". The Hour Man costume design is a pretty strong one, with some interesting novel features: the horizontal red stripes at the bottom edge of his cape, the hourglass pendant around his neck, the somewhat loose cowl masking his hair and the top part of his face. The yellow and black are striking and well balanced, making for an eye-catching look, and the red belt makes for a good accent. Bernard Baily is early in his career, and there are plenty of crude renderings, but it has its charm. It's not as appealing as Baily's Spectre comics, due to the more mundane environment and less spectacular displays of power. The editor must have had some faith in the premise, usurping the Sandman's lead position and cover spotlight, although Wesley Dodds would retain a cameo in the upper left throughout all of Hour Man's reign on the covers, and would return to the cover a couple of times before Starman came along to outshine them both. As we shall see, Hour Man would only get 39 installments in the Golden Age, and a mere 5 appearances alongside the Justice Society of America.
