That one I absolutely will! It's one of the best spotlights Rex ever got, coming closest to fulfilling the potential the concept had.

SHOWCASE #55, March-April 1965: The Super-Team Supreme: Hourman and Dr. Fate



“Solomon Grundy Goes on a Rampage” by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson!



SYNOPSIS:

While we get our two heroes on the splash, the story opens with a prologue recapping the Earth-Two Green Lantern’s defeat of Solomon Grundy in ALL STAR COMICS #33 (Feb-Mar 1947), with artist Murphy Anderson recreating the original published page:



Chapter 1 gets underway with Grundy’s green prison sphere hurtling to crash on the surface of the Earth, releasing the monster, who immediately sets out for his home territory, where he dives into the depths of Slaughter Swamp, his “birth waters”.

Kent Nelson and his wife Inza are alerted to something going on as they drive toward Dr. Fate’s tower in Old Salem, with the glow of Dr. Fate’s crystal ball visible from the top of the tower. They magically walk through the stone walls of the doorless building, and Kent dons the garb of Dr. Fate. The crystal ball indicates activity in the “radioactive marshlands attached to the Tyler Chemical Company plant!”

Fate’s mystical powers allow him to track the past, leading him to the shattered remains of Grundy’s green prison globe, which Fate mystically recreates.
Now, finally, we turn our attention to Rex Tyler, who enters his secret vault to clothe himself in the costume of Hourman. He pops a Miraclo pill (from what looks like a candy jar full of them!) and goes to investigate the alarm. Why would his company have an alarm in the swamp? Because that’s where they “empty the radioactive waste from our cyclotron!”



(Here's something curious: look at how Murphy Anderson is rendering Hourman's footwear in that first panel. It appears that Anderson doesn't think that Hourman wears striped boots, but rather that he is wearing some kind of calf-gripping sandals over red stockings?)

Sure enough, Hourman finds and recognizes Solomon Grundy. Misjudging Grundy’s offensive strategies, Hourman finds himself slammed against a tree by the gigantic creature, as Dr. Fate arrives to join the battle. Fate’s mystically-animated trees prove to be no match for Grundy’s strength, and Grundy himself—“being only a pseudo-life-form”—is less affected by magic than a human would be.

Fate freezes Grundy in a block of ice, which Grundy easily breaks out of, so Fate tries another approach, allowing Grundy to pick him up so that, once in contact, Fate can fill Grundy’s body with “electrical magic” (!?).

That’s when Hourman recovers and decides to “help out”, only to discover that not only does his Miraclo strength fade—even with more time remaining on the clock—but Fate’s magic flows back out of Grundy and back into Fate!

Thus does Chapter 2 begin with Grundy having defeated our heroes, trudging away as a variety of wooden objects mysteriously float behind him, attracted by the strange glow that has enveloped him.

We leave Hourman and Dr. Fate behind to witness Grundy’s robbery of a bank, his goal not to steal but to attract his enemy Green Lantern, who does indeed arrive. Using the wooden objects that still float around him, Grundy knocks out GL, whose weakness is wood.

Fate and Hourman arrive, and Hourman takes another pill, noting that he can only take Miraclo after the previous dose has been expired for one hour. So this is where that restriction was established: one hour of Miraclo power must be followed by at least one hour of recovery time.

But now Dr. Fate and Hourman find themselves compelled to fight against one another. They knock each other out, allowing Grundy to carry off his enemy. Grundy rejoins his gang and goes on a crime spree, continuing to tote GL over his shoulder!



But what was up with Fate and Hourman getting a mad-on for each other? Dr. Fate figures out—get this!—that Miraclo somehow affects his magic, while magic cuts off Miraclo’s effects. Our Super-Team Supreme can’t be close to each other without dampening both their powers. Rex speculates that the radioactivity of Grundy’s body is causing this effect, so when they fly off together, Fate has to carry Rex in the tail of a supernatural wind stream behind him.

Fate drops Rex at the site of the Grundy Gang’s jewelry store robbery, where he easily dispatches the goons. Take a look at the first panel of this sequence:



(While it doesn’t appear to be an homage to a specific panel, it sure looks like Murphy Anderson was intentionally evoking the work of Bernard Baily, as this was a camera angle Baily often used when showing crooks breaking into a business, and it’s got those huge NYC sidewalks Baily always drew!)

Fate himself heads back to the swamp, finding Grundy lurking beneath the surface of the water. He lures Grundy out with a magical image of Green Lantern.

While Grundy fights the simulacrum, Fate must deal with a Grundy-fied Green Lantern, who has been transformed by the swamp into a giant white-skinned, ring-powered brute. A little magic mumbo-jumbo and GL is restored to normal. Hourman arrives, and our heroes team up (at a safe distance!), taking turns batting the beast back and forth between them. Hourman demonstrates not only remarkable leaping ability, but physics-defying direction reversal:



(Although we don't have the ol' corner clock, we are tracking Hourman's "Hour of Power", to pointlessly precise fractions of seconds!)

Finally, Fate and Green Lantern forge a new, stronger prison, integrating energy and ring power to craft a sphere that can hold Grundy “until the end of time”. Hourman wallops Grundy into the interior of the ball-shaped cell, and Fate and GL send it into orbit, where they’ll be alerted by a unique glow should he ever escape.

On the letters page, we get a recap of the origins of Dr. Fate and Hourman. Not that Hourman, at that point, had much of an origin besides “invents Miraclo”, but the article does specify that the hourglass around his neck is used to keep track of the time, and that he has risen to own the former Bannerman Laboratory, running it with business skill and acumen (not to mention flagrant disregard for the environment, but hey, what’s the harm in nuking a crummy old swamp?).

COMMENTARY:

So how might Rex have ended up the literal owner of the business? Being the best chemist in the company is not a likely avenue through which to gain ownership, right? And Rex was usually shown to live a modest lifestyle, renting rooms in boarding houses or apartments. His superheroic missions were never shown to have the potential to produce wealth; he started out an altruistic crusader, and declared the intent to donate contest winnings to charity. He clearly never sold the formula for Miraclo, and his adventures didn’t take him to places where he might recover valuable treasures. So how, indeed, did he rise to be not just the top executive (which is somewhat feasible) but the owner? Perhaps through some shareholding benefits, wise investments, etc., but I speculated earlier that Mr. Bannerman wanted to set up Rex with Regina, his niece (who, I also speculated, was his ward and thus possibly his only heir). Although Rex will soon be revealed to be single in the next issue of SHOWCASE, could Rex have married Regina, inherited the ownership of Bannerman Laboratories through her, and then lost his wife to an accident or illness? A lot can happen in 20 years (since the last Golden Age Hourman story), and those were prime years of Rex’s life, the time that most heterosexual men of the era would have married. It seems a likely scenario, and since I’m not shying away from speculation in this thread, I’ll admit to that being my head canon.

And now the obvious question: why team up these two heroes? It sure seems like a mismatch, doesn’t it? Yes, Dr. Fate wasn’t at the height of the mystic powers he had displayed in the early days of his feature in MORE FUN COMICS, but he was a considerable cut above the physician hero of the latter days of his Golden Age run, a mystery man who mainly relied on running through the air and duking it out with ordinary thugs, occasionally casting a modest magic spell. And Hourman was demonstrating strength beyond what we saw in the final days of his strip, but come on, he’s not in Dr. Fate’s league (but he is in Fate’s Society!).

I have a couple of competing hypotheses.

First, it could be that this issue and the following one were not a pilot for an ongoing series for the “Super-Team Supreme”, but rather a way of having two tryouts at the same time. Julius Schwartz may not have had enough confidence in either, but a hunch that at least one of them would catch on. Or he may have been very confident in both, thinking that he could accelerate the process of graduating them into their own separate features by having them share the Showcase tryout. Perhaps he was counting on reader feedback to convey enthusiasm for one character over the other. Or if the sales were good, he might be more comfortable trying them out then in solo adventures: if a future Showcase Presents Hourman sold as well as the Dr. Fate team-ups, it was Hourman who was the draw, otherwise, Dr. Fate was the one they were interested in.

But what if the high concept was an ongoing pairing? Maybe that’s not so far-fetched, when you consider that the most successful model for an ongoing series pairing two individual superheroes was WORLD’S FINEST COMICS. Were Dr. Fate and Hourman as unbalanced a duo as Superman and Batman? No, they were not. And DC had already shown an intentional effort to replicate the World’s Finest Team with BRAVE & BOLD #50, which teamed their closest analogues to Superman and Batman: J’onn J’onzz and Green Arrow.

Evidently, sales were not sufficient to pursue any of those avenues, as we saw neither a continuation of the Super-Team Supreme (beyond next issue’s follow-up) nor solo tryouts for the characters. It would be over a decade before Dr. Fate would get another chance at a solo story, but only a few years before Hourman got a shot. That suggests to me that Hourman was considered to have the most potential during the 60’s, while Dr. Fate began to look more promising in the 70’s (Dr. Fate, after all, would team up with Superman and with Batman in their respective team-up titles, while Hourman was never offered that opportunity).

We might look to BRAVE & BOLD #61 and #62 for comparison. Those issues teamed Starman and Black Canary, and it’s a little easier to envision them as an ongoing team, although the fact that Black Canary was married to another man could have made that team-up awkward in the long run. But the second of those trials threw Wildcat into the mix, which I consider evidence that this pairing—or trio—was a trial to see which if any of the characters generated positive reader reaction. If so, then so, probably, was the Dr. Fate and Hourman team.

Once again, I see how Roy Thomas, rather than slumming in the depths of "realism" to create an addiction to Miraclo, was simply addressing what was there the whole time. One pill lasts an hour, he has to wait an hour after the first one wears off to take the second, and yet he takes "a handful" with him? Does he really expect to be out there for a full ten hours - five of which he'll be unpowered for since he has to wait every alternate hour before taking another?

I can't say that if this issue were my introduction to Hourman that I'd be all that impressed.  Though the little time counter is generally an effective storytelling device once the fight heads towards those final seconds, it only serves as a source for amusement when used to confirm that Hourman's battle against Solomon Grundy began at "10:15 PM" and ended at "10:15 1/4 PM".  Really?  Hourman literally lasts one quarter of a second before going down for the count?  He gets back up at "10:29 PM" and is knocked out again at "10:29:03 PM" - why is the story telling us this?!  This is the guy who thought he'd need five Miraclo pills tonight?

He fares a little better against Dr. Fate (which doesn't really do Dr. Fate any favours) but only because this time he actually succeeds in knocking out his opponent just as he gets knocked unconscious for te third time that evening.

So much of this story felt like "You'll just have to trust us when we tell you that under normal circumstances, Hourman would be putting in a much better showing than he is here".  He has a few nice moments towards the climax when he lands a few blows against Grundy, but it doesn't really make up for his earlier embarrassments.


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Thanks for catching that hilarious timer tracking, chadwilliam ! I imagine most readers glossed over it, like me, but now I wonder if it was a very intentional gag--why else go to the fractions of a second?

I found it easy to deduce addictive qualities from the Golden Age stories alone, but yeah, a ten hour supply sends a message. Then again, there were some frustrating moments in the Golden Age run where he seemed pretty dense for not bringing along some extra doses.

I think Hourman gets a much better showing in the next issue, and I'll argue that what we see there could have brought something fresh to DC's mid-60's line...

I was introduced to Hourman with that first JLA/JSA team-up in JLA # 21-2 (Aug. and Sep., 1963). Even though he became one of my favourite Earth-Two characters, I never gave him much in-depth thought until your series of reviews. As I read your commentary and the remarks of the others, it occurs to me that the concept of Hourman, ten years earlier, say 1931 or -2, would've been fertile material for a pulp magazine.

You could move most of the material over to the pulps intact. Keep Rex Tyler and, of course, the Miraclo drug. I would dispose of the costume and I would also get rid of the name "Hourman", except as the title of the magazine. Instead, in the stories themselves, the prose would occasionally refer to Tyler by the sobriquet "the Man of the Hour" or, maybe, also, "the Sixty-Minute Sensation", the same way Doc Savage was often mentioned as "the Man of Bronze".

Miraclo would bestow Tyler with pretty much the same abilities as in the comics---phenomenally increased strength and durability, quickened reflexes, heightened senses. But nothing approaching Superman's might, not even at his 1938 level. You'd want Tyler to be impressively formidable, but able to be overcome by a sufficiently powerful or clever mechanism.

I'm not sure how I'd play the character of Rex Tyler himself. Either as an independent operator, in the Doc Savage or Richard Benson mould, or keep the chemist for Bannermain Chemicals set-up. If I went with the latter, it tends to evoke the idea of Tyler operating as a hero secretly. That raises the idea of a secret identity and reïnvites the need for a costume.

As an independent operator, Tyler would do his stuff openly, with only Miraclo remaining secret.

Clearly, a limit on how often Miraclo could be re-used would have to be imposed, in order to ramp up the drama. I prefer the Silver-Age-established limit of an hour between doses, as opposed to the modern once-a-day nonsense.

Aye, a good pulp writer of the day, I think, could've made lots of hay out of the Hourman concept.

Absolutely! The concept would probably have been a lot more effective in pulp novels than it was in 8-page comics installments. It also would have translated easily to a series of B-movies or Poverty Row movies, serials, or to radio. The feature may have flopped in the comics, but it had so much potential!

Seems to me I read somewhere that Wendi was a soap opera actress... or was that something I came up with for the sample Hourman script I wrote a couple of decades back?

Cei-U!
I summon the dubious source!