I thought Batman broke his hourglass to get them out of a deathtrap during one of their JLA/JSA team-ups. I guess Batman would have been nice enough to replace it, but would he have known to fill it with "energized tachyons"?  Somehow, I think not.

Might explain this:



"YOU IDIOT!!!"

YOUNG JUSTICE 16-20, Jan-May 2000 by Peter David and Todd Nauk

Who’s up for some time travel? I’m interrupting the review of Rex Tyler in HOURMAN--which picks back up with the issue dated December, 1999--for a very quick look at an arc in YOUNG JUSTICE, which had cover dates throughout the first half of 2000. Then we’ll head back to the HOURMAN series where we’re in for some serious original Hourman action!



So why are we looking at YOUNG JUSTICE? Thanks to an early post in this thread from wildfire2099 , I was reminded of a very relevant super-team that appeared there…
“Old Justice” is a team of aged sidekicks or young heroes from the 40’s, including Senator Neptune Perkins (from the Young All-Stars), Dan the Dyna-Mite, now wielding both his own ring and the one he shared with his adult partner TNT in the 1940’s, Merry the Gimmick Girl, who usurped the Star Spangled Kid’s feature at the end of the Golden Age, The Cyclones, who assisted the original Red Tornado when they were little kids, Doiby Dickles, who was the original Green Lantern’s cabby confidante, and none other than Thorndyke Thompkins, now going by the moniker of “Second Sweep”, former Minute Man of America, and officially-billed co-star of the final series of Hourman stories in ADVENTURE COMICS.

I won’t attempt to synopsize this storyline, but it kicks off with a hearing before Congress, Dan catches us up on what became of these Golden Age sidekicks after their comics run ended. Of interest to us are Thorndyke and the Minute Men of America:



We could probably match up some of the Minute Men depicted here to the few named members from the original run, but more likely artist Todd Nauk was just depicting generic 40’s kids. He does grant them uniforms of a sort, which they didn’t have in the published stories: hourglass emblems patched onto their clothing. But it’s Thorndyke who, as always, gets the attention here, and he’s revealed to have attempted to continue a career as a costumed hero, which led to “disaster and an extended jail sentence.” Well, he was indeed operating as a masked hero during those final few adventures with Hourman, and was depicted as having considerable physical capabilities, whether he was augmented with Miraclo or not.

YOUNG JUSTICE: SINS OF YOUTH #1-2, May 2000

In this miniseries, Old Justice does direct battle with the teen heroes of Young Justice. Thorndyke—I mean, “Second Sweep ”--takes on Impulse, noting that even his former partner Hourman couldn’t “beat any sense” into him. That doesn’t exactly jibe with the relationship that was depicted between the two, but presumably Thorndyke went through a “difficult phase” after the feature was discontinued, leading to a break-up and a solo career for Thorny, something that managed to land him in jail.



According to this tale, Thorndyke has access to and is using Miraclo himself:



Later, the teams reconcile and team up against the combined forces of the JLA and JSA, who are turned into tots at the end of the first issue, while the YJ kids are aged to adulthood. A series of specials followed the YJ heroes as they got a brief experience as adults, before the concluding second issue. Thorndyke doesn’t do much in that issue, as far as I can tell, but frankly, I don’t tolerate Nauk’s cartoony pseudo-manga very well, and I may have missed a few things in the painful scan through the cramped, hectic pages.

We’ll never know the details behind Thorndyke’s solo attempt at being a hero, or the reasons behind his stint in the Big House. How he has access to Miraclo will also remain a mystery, but I can speculate! I think we can rule out Hourman giving a supply of the drug to his partner—we saw Hourman’s commitment to keeping it for his exclusive use. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Thorny had been nicking the pills over his years with Hourman. After all, Rex was known to have kept them in a huge candy bowl in the 60’s, would he have noticed a few going missing now and then? But it would be difficult to accumulate enough to last for decades…
So how about this: when Rex did the switch from pills to his Miraclo ray, he might have had a massive supply of it in pill form stocked up. He’d have to dispose of that, and we know how Rex disposes of dangerous chemicals: he dumps them discreetly out in the swamp or someplace! If it was a big enough supply, he might well call on his partner Thorndyke to help with the dumping, or even to execute the disposal on his own. Would Thorndyke have resisted the temptation to keep, or to go back and recover the cache of super-power pills? I think it’s quite likely he relocated the pills to a safe spot only he knew about. Maybe Rex found out, confronted Thorny, and tried to “beat some sense” into him, to no avail. Then, after the partnership was dissolved over Thorny’s defiance, Thorny used the pills to be a real super-hero on his own? We can speculate also that he messed up quite severely in his attempts, leading to his imprisonment.

On his release as a much older man, Thorndyke might have returned to his secreted stash of Miraclo, having used very little of it since his crime-fighting days were so few, and his access to the pills prevented by the prison bars. The Miraclo may well have degraded over the decades, providing a shorter burst of power—from this Young Justice story, we don’t get any details on whether the pills last a full hour or not, only that the Miraclo-granted powers do still expire after some time.

Artist Todd Nauk seems not to have had much reference material on Thorndyke. He did have a checked hat in some of his early appearances, and Nauk obviously has the trademark turtleneck pulled up over the face, but that face doesn't bear any resemblance to the weirdo that Bernard Baily was drawing last time we saw Thorny. I guess faithfulness to the original design wasn't too important--I can't recall any appearances of Thorndyke that have ever been officially reprinted to this date...other than collections of these very issues of YOUNG JUSTICE!

Thanks for the check! I remembered the reprints from JSA ALL-STARS ARCHIVES, which were pre-Thorndyke, but forgot the zero volume. I was getting a hunch there was something in a SUPER-SPEC, because I think I knew what Thorndyke looked like from somewhere even when I was a teen. Turns out it was this reprint, the memorable Dr. Togg and the Gombezi! I didn't remember all of the Millennium Editions...funny they'd include Starman's debut issue but not Hourman's!

I don't really think it was important to retain faithfulness to how Baily drew Thorndyke, but he did have a particularly odd face and hairstyle, and I thought it was worth noting that Nauk didn't try to evoke that. (And I just now noticed that Nauk violated the one thing about Thorndyke that never changed in the Golden Age: his mouth never emerged from inside that turtleneck!)

As for the art, I try not to disparage something just because it's not in my favored style, and Nauk's work doesn't clash with the tone of YOUNG JUSTICE...or perhaps Nauk's style helped to set the tone, in whatever case, it achieved a degree of consistency. No, it's not a slavish manga imitation, but I think it is certainly drawing from the well of manga's ascendency in North America at the time. I find genuine Japanese manga more tolerable than this Americanized hybrid, which I find difficult to process and unpleasant to look at, but my tastes, flexible though they are, were forged in the 70's, when work like this would have most likely been poorly received, to put it mildly.

I think there's a tendency these days to label any cartoony style as manga-influenced even if it's unclear whether the artist has even read manga. According to Nauck, the deepest influences on his work were Arthur Adams, Rick Leonardi, Alan Davis, and Walter Simonson.

It's possible, but I also think there's an element of Nauck wanting it to look like an all-ages title reflecting the youth element. 

As the new HOURMAN series continued, more and more bits of information relevant to Rex Tyler cropped up, so before we move on to the really important stuff, here's a quick review of some of the most notable things that appeared: 

HOURMAN #8, Nov 1999 “A Week with No Hourman” by Peyer, Morales, and Andrew Hennessy

Hourman appears only in a framed photo with his son and successor, Rick Tyler, as Rex’s widow Wendi visits their son, hospitalized with leukemia supposedly triggered by Rick’s exposure to Miraclo:




HOURMAN #9, Dec 1999 “Where Does the Time Go?” by Peyer, Morales, and Dave Meikis

In the splash, we see a rare scene of Rex in the father role, as Wendi orders the reconstruction of the home that the android Hourman accidentally demolished under the effects of Miraclo:



Wendi reminisces to old newsreel footage of her husband:



The new Hourman appears and offers his apology, then uses his time powers to restore Rex and Wendi’s home as it was in 1973, for one hour, and the two bond. The android later attempts to heal the ailing Rick Tyler, only to discover that his illness is neither leukemia nor Miraclo-induced, and after fighting a Miraclo-crazed Rick, transports him to the “Timepoint”, an unending moment of suspended time where Rick can live without aging, but from which there is no apparent escape.

HOURMAN #10, Jan 2000



In “Bride of the Gombezi” by Peyer, Morales, and Mark Propst, we see the first revival of a villain from the original run, with Dr. Togg released from prison. As revealed in a previous issue, Togg was not actually killed as implied in the original story, but was transformed into a “Gombezi”, Togg’s term for the winged hybrid creatures he created as slaves to enact crimes.
By the end of the story, after fighting Togg and a new brood of Gombezis the new Hourman has restored Togg to his human form, and set him up with a lab in Hourman’s timeship, tasked with finding a cure for Rick Tyler.

HOURMAN #17, August 2000

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Tom Peyer, writer, Jason Orfalas, penciler, and Walden Wong, inker.

This installment is interesting in that it echoes the very first ADVENTURE COMICS tale of Rex Tyler, with the android Hourman using a similar newspaper notice to advertise his superheroic services to the “oppressed”:



Peyer was leveraging significantly on the original Hourman material, while creating a refreshingly unique and entertaining Hourman for the 21st century. Hourman's stories had been only sparsely reprinted, and his history was not familiar territory for comic book fans, so referencing things like Dr. Togg and Rex's newspaper message to "the oppressed" wasn't exactly "fan service", since I don't that many HOURMAN readers of the time were aware of the originals. 

This was a terrific series, but not one fated for a long run. As it wrapped up, it returned with an even bigger focus on the subject of this review thread, the original Hourman, Rex Tyler. 

Coming up next!