Rick Tyler, Hourman II, is recruited to assist the JSA in issue 33 and in issue 34, he brings us up to date: before the android Hourman left this time period, he wanted to give Rick something to remember him by. One of his gifts is the tachyon-filled hourglass, and it grants Rick the ability to occasionally see one hour into the future. In addition, Rick has developed a new form of Miraclo, with a left gauntlet that delivers the drug through transdermal means. But that was only one of the gifts—the following issue concludes with Rick and the former Sandy the Golden Boy (now only “Sand”), using an hourglass-shaped mechanism on his right gauntlet to activate “Plan B” to escape the Ultra-Humanite.


Issue 36 shows that “Plan B” depends upon the android’s other gift: he has plucked Rex Tyler from the moments before his death and placed him in a chronal stasis field, where Rick has exactly one hour of visitation time available before Rex is returned to face his death.




It's a poignant twist on Hourman's one-hour time limit to have Rex accessible for only 60 minutes. I assume that, like Rick in the Timepoint, Rex's life continues on somehow during the periods when Rick isn't visiting; otherwise, Rex's existence there would jump from one visit with Rick to another. We're probably not supposed to think about it that much, but I'd like to think that Rex has time between visits to putter around in the lab he's been given, in some kind of limbo existence. Seems like it would be very disorienting otherwise. 

I must note that I really like the costume they've given Rick. It evokes the classic Hourman uniform, but with touches like the chevrons on his forearms giving a more modern look, without being as dated as his garish Infinity, Inc. look. 

JSA writers Geoff Johns and David Goyer seem to have a genuine affection for Hourman. It's a really sweet temporary afterlife they've granted Rex here--I know I'd like to have a little time after my official demise to receive visits from my loved ones!

Yes, this thread is getting a little tiresome, I know. What started out as a review and analysis of the evolution of a minor Golden Age superhero has become something more like an overly-detailed wiki entry. These final appearances of Hourman are entertaining enough stories, but don’t merit detailed examination. While the character can’t exactly be said to have “stabilized”, he was a familiar enough character now to serve as a primary participant in this era’s JSA series, suggesting he was popular at least with the creators of the comic.

But there’s not much to actually say about the character now. He’s one of many in the cast, and the comic will be presenting some new developments in his history, as it will do with the many others who are appearing almost exclusively in this comic. None of it is intended to further the character to regain a lead feature of his own, it’s just…what you do with a super-team comic.

But I’ve detailed all the key developments so far, and so let’s quickly review Hourman in JSA #59-64, dated May 2004-October 2004. The stories were all written by Geoff Johns, and penciled by Sean Phillips, Tom Mandrake, and Jerry Ordway.

JSA #59 is a one-off story called “Time and Time and Time Again” (playing off of the title of the novel “Time and Again”, by Jack Finney, writer of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, who was something of a specialist in time travel stories). The main story involves the current JSA facing their time-traveling nemesis Per Degaton. In a sub-plot, Rex is consulting with Ray (The Atom) Palmer, seeking a way to travel back to the Timepoint. Also in on the analysis is Mr. Terrific, the world’s smartest man. Rex seems to share my concern about Rick’s state in the Timepoint, although Mr. Terrific seems confident that Rick is in a state of suspended animation while he’s there. (It seems to me that Rex would have a better understanding of what it’s like to “live” in the Timepoint, but as I tried to figure out before, the separation between the hourglass—which Rex has in the present--and the timing device—which Rick holds in the Timepoint—complicates theories about how this all works.



Anyway, Rex’s motivation is to swap places so that Rick can (hopefully) be healed and Rex can head on towards his fate. Rex also refuses to burden his “widow” Wendi Harris with his miraculous but hopefully short-lived return to the living:



Per Degaton is a potential source of assistance in reaching the Timepoint, but Rex’s attack on the villain leads to his refusal to even consider helping:



Issues 60-62 finally address a long-dangling plot thread: in one of the JLA/JSA team-ups in the 70’s (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #171, Oct 1979), the original Mr. Terrific was murdered by a villain called the Spirit King. The villain got away and was never brought to justice for his crime, and this arc was intended to rectify that oversight.

Rex is taking what pleasure he can in avenging via super-heroics, but still avoids contacting Wendi:



When Jay Garrick proposes that “that’s the Miraclo talking”, Rex confesses to having been a neglectful father, with regrets about his relationship with Wendi. Certain that she wouldn’t forgive him, he pops a Miraclo and goes into action.



Issues 63-64 begin the “Waking the Sandman” story, and it opens with Rex wavering in his vow to continue letting Wendi think he is dead:



Rex is again depicted as quite the powerhouse under the influence of Miraclo:



And at the close of the story, he finally does the right thing and reveals himself to his wife:



(I don't think I've ever mentioned on this forum how much I like the work of Jerry Ordway. He's an ideal artist for updating Golden Age characters because he brings a modern sheen but has a certain wholesome quality to his pages that suits the idealistic qualities that these venerated superheroes of the past should evoke. And he's great at action scenes, quiet scenes, convincing sets and civilian fashions, "character actors", character faces distinct from each other...there's really not a single fault I can come up with to lay on Ordway's work, overall. And I just never got tired of it, like I did so many great artists to whose work I began to feel overexposed.)

Up next, the last major development in Hourman's fictional history. After that, a special treat and some appearances outside of the comics page. The ol' corner clock is almost at the one hour mark!

I just wanted to say this thread has been awesome... If you wanted to give the rest of the JSA similar treatment, it could very easily be a Two Morrows book. Its stuff like this that makes me thankful this community exists.

SOLO 7 2005

“An Hour With Hourman” by Michael Allred, colors by Laura Allred

SOLO was a series designed to spotlight a single artist in every issue. The artists were given the opportunity to create fully original stories or to use existing DC characters with no restrictions on following current in-universe continuity. Allred chose Hourman for the lead spot (although it was preceded by a Metal Men pin-up page and a Bizarro introduction page).

Allred’s Hourman story is a light-hearted romp, and it would do the work an injustice to try to synopsize it, since it’s not a plot-driven episode. Hourman takes a Miraclo pill at 3:00, and the story follows him when he discovers that the “lady in distress” who he heard shrieking in the first panel is just a woman being tickled by her husband, and in no need of any kind of “rescue”.



So the gag is, Hourman is hyped up on Miraclo, with no crime, disaster, or emergency on which he can expend his energy. In a hyper-manic state, he helps out with some menial physical labor, engages in some basketball, etc., managing to burn off 30 minutes of his hour of power. He gets thrown out of a theater (which is showing a Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoon!) when his constant seat-changing annoys the other patrons, and heads to the gym. With 10 minutes left on the clock, he finally finds a disaster in progress—a burning building—and helps out the firefighters, then stumbles upon a bank robbery.

At home again as the Miraclo’s influence begins to dissipate, Rex engages in some grooming and finally goes to sleep in the final panel, the corner clock now spinning to imply a long sleep.



It’s all silly fun, but it certainly is fun, and Allred draws a darned fine Hourman—those black and yellow and red colors pop against a muted background, and his depiction of Hourman’s super-powered activities are dynamic and joyful. His abstracted buildings are a clear nod to the style of Bernard Baily, and the corner clock is present in every panel, its minute-to-minute progression implying just how quickly Rex is moving from one time-wasting, energy-burning activity to another.

Despite the triviality of the story, Allred is addressing one aspect of Hourman’s powers that’s been ignored: what happens if he takes a Miraclo pill but finds his powers aren’t needed? It does make sense that he’d feel pumped up and need to relieve all that energy. It’s obviously not the kind of thing that would have occurred to a Golden Age writer: who wants to watch a superhero with nothing to do? Even Allred can’t bring himself to sustain that, giving Hourman a last-minute opportunity to achieve something worthwhile, a development that also serves to paint Hourman’s Miraclo powers in an impressive light: with only minutes remaining, he still has plenty of time to rectify a disaster and stop a serious crime. That’s a refreshing change from the more predictable “oh, no, my powers are wearing off, how am I possibly going to finish this mission?” But in a story like this, Allred doesn’t even pretend to be building suspense. Instead, he’s casting Hourman in an 80’s style independent slice-of-life comic. I loved seeing Allred delivering such dynamic and whimsical art in service to an unconventional, very low stakes episode. It’s notable that Allred allotted 8 pages for this, the same page count for most of Hourman’s ADVENTURE COMICS episodes.

Between this and the 2-part JSA episode, Hourman got two excellent and very different send-offs, both of them highly respectful and well executed. You really couldn't ask for more!

Is time finally up? Not quite! The main event is over, but while significant appearances of Rex “Tick-Tock” Tyler had come to an end, Hourman would show up now and then in other comics.

He appeared with the JSA in ALL-NEW BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #7:



Darwyn Cooke devoted a nifty page to the character in DC: THE NEW FRONTIER #1:



Hourman showed up in the various “event” comics, such as 52, INFINITE CRISIS, and FINAL CRISIS, often incidental or as part of “history lessons” recapping stories previously examined here.

An alternate version of Rex Tyler was one of the featured characters in a series of Elseworlds miniseries, JSA: THE LIBERTY FILE, JSA: UNHOLY 3, and JSA: WHISTLING SKULL. In this alternate universe, Rex Tyler was known as “The Clock”:





DC made much use of Rex’s son in the late 2000’s. Rick Tyler, Hourman II. He was spotlighted in JSA: ALL STARS #5, November 2003:



In March 2008, he had another spotlight turn in JSA: CLASSIFIED #34:



With the new Liberty Belle, he co-starred in the second feature running in JSA ALL-STARS (a different series than the previously mentioned one!) issues 2-11, in 2010:



When the DC Universe was overhauled with the “New 52”, Rick was featured in the EARTH 2: SOCIETY series, which focused on the JSA rebuilding a society after transporting the remaining population of their Earth to a new planet. In this alternate Earth, Hourman is Rick Tyler, son of Rex Tyler, whose remarkable Miraclo invention was stolen by that Earth’s Thomas Wayne. He acts as a villain, but that’s because his Miraclo is being supplied by an evil businessman who has laced the pills with something that controls Rick’s mind.



After battling Batman, this version of Hourman joins the team as of issue 12.

The New 52 came to an end with an event series called CONVERGENCE, which touched on a wide range of times and realities over the history of the DC Universe, and Hourman showed up incidentally in a few of the issues that were a part of that. Following that, DC began its “Rebirth”, with the entire universe rebooted. The Justice Society have only recently been reintroduced. The team is to be featured in a new JSA series set to debut in November 2023. It’s reasonable to expect some incarnation of Hourman to be featured, and to get some update on the modern-day interpretation of Rex Tyler in this Geoff Johns-written new series:



A bit more time remains on the clock, just enough to have a look at some unexpected appearances of Rex Tyler on the not-really-all-that-small-any-more screen, after which I'll share some closing thoughts...and perhaps something more...

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:

When I first began reading and collecting comics in 1971, and became hooked on superhero comics, I soon realized I would have to resign myself to not being able to read all of most of my favorite characters' adventures. Oh, I had plenty of chances to jump on the first appearances of new features--Son of Satan, Swamp Thing, Devil Dinosaur, Kobra--and see those through to the ends of their runs, but with the more fascinating characters from the Golden Age, or the ones originating in the 50's and 60's, I would be dependent on the occasional reprints or what limited number of back issues I could find and afford.

This did bother me; it was much later in life that I realized I was, by nature, a completist. If I discover an author I like, I want to read everything they published. My favorite bands? I've got all their releases and know them inside out. But I dealt with what I was certain would be limited access to the thousands of stories I would ideally like to read. And then came the day when reprint collections began to appear: DC Archive Editions, Marvel Masterworks, Showcase Presents, Essentials! And it wasn't just the big guns showing up there! I could read the complete Seven Soldiers of Victory, all of the Manhunter From Mars and Dial H for Hero! I could have the complete Lee/Kirby run of Fantastic Four, Mar-Vell through the green-and-white spacesuit run! Every single page of the Golden Age Dr. Fate!?

It was a glorious bounty, made all the more glorious when many of these volumes made their way to my public library. But it still wasn't everything. I wasn't just a completist, I was the kind of guy who loved the underdog heroes, the less popular features, the oddball concepts, and while the range of reprints was broader than I would have ever dreamed, that range had limits. Collections still had to have sales potential that exceeded the expense of production. If the company had materials that would facilitate easy production, say, complete libraries of production-ready art from which a collection of J'onn J'onzz in black and white, on cheap paper, with no obligations to the deceased writers or artist, that cost-to-profit ratio resulted in my opportunity to purchase. But for older material that required reconstruction, such a collection was unlikely.

Hourman got a share of that wave, as a part of the single published volume of THE JSA ALL-STARS ARCHIVES. This remarkable book ensured that, following the reprinting of the complete adventures of the Justice Society of America, readers had access to at least the first five installments of every single member of the 1940's JSA. If they didn't have their own Archives editions (Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Spectre, Sandman, Starman), they at least got a share of this multi-hero collection of the first five tales of Wildcat, Red Tornado, Johnny Thunder, The Atom, Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, and Hourman!

But if I wanted to read all of Hourman in 2022, I wasn't going to find a collection, and my read of the market suggests I'm not likely to see one published in my lifetime. I have most of the post-1971 appearances in my collection, and several of the 1960's adventures either in back issues or reprint, but I'm not going to ever have copies of ADVENTURE COMICS #48-83. For that, as I presume everyone realized, I relied on digital scans online. I'm unapologetic about that, and I don't suffer from a bad conscience even though this availability may violate a particular corporation's copyrights. A third party has shared their legally purchased copies with me, in the form of scans so as to protect the physical integrity of these fragile collector's item antiques.

And so, finally, I have now read all of the original Hourman stories, and hashed over them in what has probably been more detail than they merited. And I appreciate those who have or who will read this thread.

There are three distinct phases I detect in this set of adventures. In reverse chronological order:

1990's-present: In the modern era, Hourman was another of a huge number of older properties to be mined for use in establishing legacy characters, protecting trademarks, building contemporary stories around past-time settings, evoking other eras, and establishing massive superhero populations for universe-building. Almost every superhero concept from DC's and Marvel's past played some part in this trend, and Hourman was one of the most "fortunate" of them. He was never distorted irreparably, or turned into a villain, or humiliated as a joke. He did serve as a sacrifice character, but those sacrifices were undone in a more satisfying way than many others were undone, and he was given a respectful, optimistic send-off. Hourman had a "patron" who was in high regard at DC in Geoff Johns, a writer who realized a lot of potential of the character in Tom Peyer, who wove Rex Tyler neatly into the mythos of his spin-off series featuring the android Hourman.

1960's-1980s: In the Silver and Bronze Ages, we had Hourman complying with the standards established for DC's "Earth-2" cadre of characters. Stories were generally respectful of what established continuity there was, attempts to modernize the character brought some additional baggage, retcons were contrived to explain away unexplained elements and events from the character's published past, and he served as a component in the expansion of the DC Universe into a multiverse.

1940's: The Golden Age run was a typical 2nd rate superhero feature, one that began in the uncertain early days of the genre, before all the tropes and norms had been established, trying to find a hook beyond its essential premise, and evolving into a conventional and inconsequential imitation of more successful comparable features. From promising headliner to Batman imitator, but along the way trying out a variety of approaches, often under incompetent scripting, but often to oddly appealing results.

I've always liked Hourman, since my first exposure to him in one of the annual JLA/JSA team-ups. He had an easily-grasped premise: he takes a pill and gains exactly one hour of superhuman enhancement. Why exactly one hour? No, it didn't seem likely, but it was far from the most far-fetched notions a comic book fan had to swallow. The effects of drugs wear off; why not a drug that just so happens to wear off consistently in one hour? I'm willing to buy it, just like I'm willing to accept Aquaman's hour of air-breathing.

He had an eye-catching costume: that bold black and yellow, with highlights of red! The cool hourglass medallion instead of the usual chest emblem! The strange mask/hood/cowl, the bared hands suggesting a hands-on, hard-scrapping approach to adventure, this design worked well. Bernard Baily's later refinements, making the hood into a tight mask, and then into an over-the-ear design, were less appealing, but not as radically detrimental as the changes to Dr. Fate's or Hawkman's headgear.

He had a catchy name, even if the creators took their time settling to a consistent one word, non-hyphenated "Hourman". It doesn't immediately explain the character until you read the premise itself. I can't quite elucidate why "Hourman" strikes me as a strong codename for a superhero, it just does, it just always has.

Now that I've read them all, it's easy to choose a favorite style of story, if not a specific favorite: the weird menace stories were always the most fun. Maybe it was second-hand Spectre, but who better to handle that than the guy who drew the Spectre contemporaneously? The Golden Age creators see-sawed between weird menace and social justice stories. The social justice seemed to be where their hearts were, what was truest to the initial concept, but they weren't able to pull it off. One could argue that they weren't able to pull off the weird menace stories all that well, either, but bizarre ideas will cover up weaknesses in ways that are much harder in stories trying to focus on real-life problems. My least favorite were the final batch, with Hourman and Thorndyke as Batman and Robin, forced into contrived death traps with unconvincing escapes. The most incompetent early stories were at least fun to laugh at, the faux caped crusader stories were usually just hum-drum. But even those had some good points now and then, such as the story where two thugs exposed themselves to Miraclo rays.

The feature hit on some ideas with potential that went unfulfilled, as I've commented on several times. Rex as a chemistry wizard, whipping up appropriate chemical tools to rely on, would have been an interesting element to capitalize on, but I suspect that may have required familiarity with some scientific concepts that eluded Ken Fitch. The Minute Men of America could have provided Hourman a motive to travel the country and encounter a good variety of problems in a bigger range of environments. The feature never made much use of its limited supporting cast (other than Thorndyke). Regina never caught on as the love interest, and Mr. Bannermain was mostly just an annoyance.

A few mysteries lingered after the Golden Age, and I am not satisfied with later attempts to resolve them. Why did Hourman request a leave of absence from the JSA? Why did he change from a pill to a ray, and how did he create the ray? And did Jimmy Martin and Thorndyke get Miraclo powers or not when they stood next to Rex in front of the machine?

Of my posts in this thread, I was proudest of my speculative therapy session. I think my interpretation of the feature's development explained the problematic aspects of the Miraclo pill better than any canonical retcons ever did, based entirely on what was there in the printed pages, without invention or unjustifiable speculation. I was also happy with my proposal on the true origin of the Miraclo ray: the fact that Rex had tangled with a mad scientist who used a ray projection device months before Rex's change to the ray machine, and that the story explicitly stated that Rex had the villain's device in his posession made my explanation, I contend, much stronger than Roy Thomas's contrivance of Phantom Lady's ray accidentally triggering traces of Miraclo in Rex's system. My explanation--and the therapy session--gave some consequence and impact to the sequence of stories that wasn't exploited before.

For all the disappointing stories I had to wade through, I'm still happy that I made myself into an Hourman expert, and I maintain that the premise was a solid one that a better writer could have made into a longer-running headline feature. I don't blame Bernard Baily--or his ghosts--for the feature's ultimate failure. He gave the feature a consistency and a distinctive character that, if not up to the quality of the best Golden Age artists, was superior to most of the competing back-up features as well as headliners (like Hal Sharpe's painfully bad work on Star-Spangled Kid).

I do wish that we'd have seen an Hourman solo in SHOWCASE drawn by Murphy Anderson or Dick Dillin and Sid Greene, and a Haney & Aparo Batman team-up in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. I'm glad that we got a bit of Wally Wood Hourman, and Darwyn Cooke Hourman, and Michael Allread Hourman, and that the inevitable Hourman legacy character turned out to be as enjoyable as Peyer's and Morales' HOURMAN series was. I'm grateful that the character was ultimately treated with respect and appreciation, and was given an unambiguously positive ending. I loved seeing small details like Hourman's vault and "candy jar" revisited in later eras. I got a kick out of seeing Miraclo pills stamped with an hourglass shape in latter-day depictions. Hourman's original costume served as the template for some very cool looking superhero fashions as worn by his son.

I think I covered just about everything important, but there's a possibility I missed a significant tale or two. I feel I should mention Minute Man from DC's recent ONE STAR SQUADRON miniseries, a down-on-his-luck would-be hero scrounging low-grade Miraclo that only gave him a minute's worth of super powers per pill. I didn't expect that this project would end up taking eight months, but the scope grew, and I kept finding more and more relevant appearances.

My next comics research project is going to be something very different, something comprehensive but in a very different sense than examining every significant appearance of a specific character. Maybe in mid-2023 I'll explore another lower-tier character for whom I have particular fondness, though. If I do, I'll probably limit the scope to the original run (which was my vague intention this time, before I got carried away). But for now, I'm happy to be hitting the stopwatch on Rex "Tick-Tock" Tyler, and repeating my appreciation for those of you who have encouraged this thread, read this thread, and/or participated in this thread.