Tuesday, February 18, 2014

DC Science, Marvel Style!!

I've given DC a fair amount of ribbing for the silliness of some of their Silver Age "science."

But let's face it--Marvel wasn't immune from that particular problem.

Still, when 1960s Marvel rolled out the gobbledygook, they didn't just lay it out in 6 panels of exposition on the last page of the story that brought everything to a grinding halt. Nah, Marvel just rolled with, made the explanation part of the action, and publicly laughed at themselves while doing it.

Case in point: Forgettable villain The Exterminator has trapped Daredevil in some kind of "time continuum" thingie. Let's watch:



We'll skip those "dramatic new events," and...


Thanks for the disclaimer, Stan...







Woo hoo!!

Seriously, if this had been in Action Comics, Superman would have spent 5 of the last 6 panels of the story explaining to Lois or Jimmy how he did something scientifically impossible.

Sadly, we don't have a colorist credit for this issue, and obviously that went a long way towards selling the sequence. So props to Gene Colan and John Tartaglione, and a big shout-out to Colorist Unknown. And to Stan for just relaxing and having fun with it.

From Daredevil #41 (1968)

1 comment:

Martin Gray said...

That is one crazy, fantastic sequence - thanks for sharing it! Writers really should just throw shameless nonsense at us, and sell it.