Frank Belknap Long's forgotten fiend: The Living Ghost!

 

 I know it’s a point I bring up a lot, but the influence of the pulp authors on the comics cannot be overstated. Often, pulp writers and artists could be found writing for comics while on their way up or on their way out. Gardner Fox gave us The Flash, Hawkman, The Sandman, Starman, Doctor Fate and dozens of others, Edmond Hamilton gave us Batwoman, The Batmen of all Nations, Chris KL-99 and a bunch of canon-fodder Legionnaires, Alfred Bester gave us the Green Lantern oath, Vandal Savage and some zombie guy, Frank R. Paul drew the iconic cover of Marvel Comics #1, Matt Fox drew some incredible Atlas horror stories, Virgil Finlay gave us Tommy Tomorrow and Frank Belknap Long gave us The Living Ghost.

 The Living Ghost??!!

 Who, or more precisely, what is The Living Ghost?

Boy is that a million dollar question. You see, even Frank Belknap Long and co-creator Fred Guardineer (of DC comics and Lev Gleason fame, not an artist you’d think would be suited to horror, but just wait) didn’t seem to know!

 Just look at him: He’s called a ghost, but he has fangs and claws like a vampire, looks like a zombie (and is that eye supposed to be missing or just blind?) and as we’ll later see, he has cloven hooves and demonic powers. He also has wolves celebrating his misdeeds (and no, that’s not just for symbolism) and apparently likes to steal corpses from graves. It’s every possible monster cliché you can think of! All he needs to be doing is threatening to pour molten lead on that woman (or approaching her with a sacrificial knife) and it would be a perfect pulp cover.

 Vaguely defined and cliché as the Ghost himself may have been, the story that introduced him to the world featured some interesting “firsts”, not the least of which was that it was featured in ACG’s Adventures into the Unknown #1, the first ever continuously published horror comic!

 Here’s the atmospheric cover, and a word from the publisher, partly to welcome readers to the new series, partly to make sure that kids reading this didn’t get too scared by reassuring them that ghosts did not exist, and partly to reassure parents that the writers didn’t take it seriously either (not that that would help in a few years):

 

Now on to the story.

 The whole affair began at a railroad switching station, as the operator was suddenly startled by a ghastly sight:

 After killing the operator, the Ghost switched the wrong tracks, causing a horrific train wreck:

 We’re only a page and a half in and that’s already quite a body count!

 Who could possibly stand up to a being like the Living Ghost? Well, if you’ve ever watched any movies featuring synthetic flesh, devil bats, missing guests, men who could not hang and unfunny slasher parodies, surely you’d know the only person qualified to investigate something like this (besides superheroes or occult detectives) are nosy, story-starved reporters! That nosy reporter in question was Gail Leslie, “The Scoopless Wonder” according to her assistant DA boyfriend Tony Brand, and yes, their relationship was just as cringe-worthy as you’d think:

 

 Gail thought she smelled gunpowder, but Tony assured her it wasn’t a shooting.

 That very night, the Living Ghost committed his second major atrocity. He randomly attacked a couple in lovers’ lane by flipping their car off a cliff with them in it:

 Somewhat low-key compared to causing a train wreck, but pretty chilling just the same.

 Gail and Tony investigated the next morning, and Gail again noted the stench of gunpowder in the air, only this time she wasn’t so sure it was gunpowder, but brimstone:

 What an asshole.

 Gail discovered a hoof-like mark nearby and followed the trail it left, eventually reaching a cave, only to find herself being watched:

 

 The Ghost trailed her home and abducted her, also giving us an unintentionally hilarious glimpse of his dainty little hooves while flying:

 When Tony came to pick her up, he found the name “The Living Ghost” scrawled on the wall and the Ghost’s face embedded into a shard from a broken mirror. That’s right; the Ghost is so ugly his image can embed itself in mirrors! (I’m willing to bet the cops who examined the inside of that flipped car got a similar nasty shock):

 Tony then went to see Dr. Vandyke, a professor of the occult who had heard of the Living Ghost and gave us the closest thing we’d get to an explanation of what he is:

 

  Apparently he was Malevo, “The personification of black evil itself”, more evil than Satan and condemned to wander the earth in “human shape” for eternity. Well…at least it explains the hooves.

 Vandyke said that because Malevo was only part human (based on the story, shouldn’t he not be human at all?), there was no way to stop him, no way at all…except for an olive branch that could render him mortal, that Vandyke conveniently happened to have.

 Well, that was suspenseful.

Meanwhile, back at the cave, Malevo decided not to kill Gail but to instead make her his queen. In order to impress her, he decided to demonstrate his power by summoning forth all the evil spirits who were in his debt. While needless to say that seeing something like that failed to impress (only terrify) Gail, his display certainly did impress someone: The reader.

 Fred Guardineer went all out showing the various ghoulies answering Malevo’s call. Here’s the whole page:

You can just hear "Night on Bald Mountain" playing

 

 Sure they’re mostly just skeletons, but that page alone probably made any reader who was disappointed thus far with this issue feel they had gotten their money’s worth. I love how it’s mostly silent and Guardineer makes sure to show the same creatures we saw rising show up in line. Keeping panel-to-panel continuity was no small feat back then. Definitely the highlight of the story.

 Meanwhile, Tony was passing through and witnessed the parade of monsters heading toward the cave and followed them. He saw what was going to happen, so he did the logical thing: He decided to infiltrate them by smearing mud all over himself. Somehow it worked (I like to think the other ghouls didn’t say anything because they thought he died very recently and wanted to be accommodating to the new guy).

 When the monsters arrived at the cave, Gail was so repulsed she gave in to marrying Malevo, so long as he made the other monsters go away.

 However, by sending all the others back, Tony’s ruse was exposed. A fight ensued, with Tony eventually robbing Malevo of his powers and trapping him under a huge boulder.

 And now for the craziest part of the story: Rather than just leaving him there, Tony called the cops on the fiend, who saw to it that the centuries old villain was tried, convicted and sentenced to death! (Now that would have been a trial to see).

  But suddenly!

 

  Yes, The Living Ghost’s powers returned, and he swore he’d be back for revenge next issue!

 

  Yes indeed folks, The Living Ghost was no one-shot anthology story villain, he actually was intended to become an ongoing feature in Adventures into the Unknown. And I bet all this time you thought I was covering some non-series horror story just because Long wrote it.

The sequel began with Tony and Gail at a mountain retreat, trying to forget their strange encounter, although if you ask me, constantly referring to him as you know who and making asides to “his ghostly kind’ being gone for good isn’t the way to go about it.

 Of course, Malevo was up to his old tricks, and tried to abduct Gail again that very night, only to get socked by Tony (You know you’ve fallen on hard times when you’re older and more powerful than Satan himself but can be knocked off your feet by a punch from an ordinary man).

 Still, Malevo triumphed and made off with Gail. Tony later decided to investigate rumors of smoke that smelled of brimstone coming from the same mountain where Gail had been abducted.

 Sure enough, it was Malevo, who is apparently so scary even bears and mountain lions fear him:

 Unfortunately, Malevo had placed zombie guards everywhere. Tony decided to get help from Dr. Vandyke again, but he didn’t exactly have the most comforting things to say:

 Until that is, Tony happened to spy a painting of another vaguely-defined ghost/demon/sorcerer thing; The Dark Phantom, who was Malevo’s greatest enemy.

 Tony hit upon the idea to enlist this being as an ally despite him supposedly being more evil than Malevo. Vandyke claimed that little was known about the Phantom, only that he was destined to be destroyed by a human who carried around an ancient symbol of destiny- - -which Vandyke conveniently happened to have again.

 

 Tony then met up with a medium named Mavelli, who contacted emissaries of the Phantom’s, who then took him to their dimension:

 The Phantom was initially hostile, until Tony told him he could lead him to Malevo. The two flew off together to hunt down their mutual foe.

 

 The most badass fight of all time ensued, at least, when it comes to fights between skeletons wearing dresses :

The Phantom eventually overpowered Malevo, and imprisoned him in rock.

However, you don’t get called “dark phantom” because you’re good with children, and the Phantom then decided to kill Gail for the fun of it:

 However, Tony pulled out the destiny stone, destroying the Phantom.

Things seemed fine, except, now that the Phantom was gone, his spells were also undone:

 

What kind of revenge would Malevo seek on our heroes next? What one-of-a-kind magical item would Dr. Vandyke coincidentally have lying around to help Tony?

 Sadly, we never found out. The Living Ghost was never seen again. Apparently it wasn’t because ACG was averse to running a series, as a truly ridiculous and much longer-lived series called “Spirit of Frankenstein” soon popped up in its place.

 The two Living Ghost stories aren’t exactly masterpieces, and I probably wouldn’t be posting about them if it wasn’t for who wrote them and the significance of where they debuted. Still, there are some interesting elements to these stories I find worth exploring.

 One is how Malevo goes about his campaign to conquer the world. He gets off to a good start with the train wreck, but then goes after some random couple in lovers’ lane! Malevo as a character has no depth, and his design is so overdone it’s hard to really find him scary, but there are ways to make “embodiments of evil” like him work, and having him go around committing random murders for the sheer joy of it, regardless of how long it will take him to achieve his goal, is a good way of doing it. Dark lords often do not make for scary villains because the threat they pose is on such a grand scale it’s hard to imagine them coming after the reader and lurking in the hallway. Malevo though, you can easily imagine doing that. He’s in it for sheer sadistic pleasure, even though he could presumably conquer the world easily with the legion of monsters he has at his disposal, and with the Dark Phantom dead, he would presumably have even more power over various supernatural beings.

 Then there’s the lovers’ lane sequence itself.

 Consider for a moment that this story was published in 1948. Today, stories of couples being killed in lovers’ lanes or stalked by some monstrous figure are a staple of the horror genre, with at least two major urban legends (The Hook and The Boyfriend’s Death) attached to it, each with dozens of variations that someone will insist is the one true version. However, most of the research involved in those two legends pinpoints their origins in the early 1960’s, with possible precursors in 1950’s oral tradition (which has proven impossible to date), long after this story was published. What is interesting about those earliest mentions of the legend is that they were in a true crime context, and not a spooky context. This story does provide a spooky context for the murder, and it is not hard to see the outré character of the Living Ghost morphing into the comparatively believable escaped maniac or hook-handed man in retellings.

 Of course, a popular theory is that such “lovers’ lane” legends have their roots in the Texarkana “Moonlight Murders” of 1946, which eventually inspired the film The Town that Dreaded Sundown (soon to be remade). Perhaps Long knew about the crimes and was thinking of them when writing this story, tasteless as that would seem.

 Then again, maybe Long was just remembering 1933’s The Invisible Man, where not only is a car flipped off a cliff, but a train is derailed too. Claude Rains’s “Murders of big men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction” would have made an excellent Malevo line.

 And finally, what are we to make of this bizarre quote from Fredric Wertham when referring to Law against Crime #3 (also published in 1948)? “The wish to hurt or kill couples in lover’s lane is a not uncommon perversion”. Maybe he really had encountered multiple patients who had thoughts of doing so, or maybe he just got the idea, as he would say about his own patients, from reading too many comic books. If he did, this may have been one of them.

 Getting back to the story and away from the world of not-quite-true stories, we also have the enigmatic character of Dr. Vandyke. It’s easy to write him off as a plot device for Tony to receive magical items from, but where did he get all those items? Wouldn’t he be a regular target for various cults? How does he know so much about creatures so obscure they apparently aren’t known in mainstream folklore? Why does he question the existence of the Dark Phantom although he knows of Malevo? Then there’s his passive, sometimes cold and unfeeling attitude, rarely leaving his desk even though he could have easily become part of the action.

 There’s an awful lot in these stories that revolve around Vandyke, but he himself doesn’t appear in them much. One has to wonder if future stories would have repeated the formula of the first two, or if there would be some sort of revelation involving him. He’s one of the more interesting Van Helsing figures in comics, in any case.

 Also, just one more time, the “monster rally” sequence is awesome, distractingly cute though those bats may be.

 Compared to other villains and monsters who had their own series during the 40s, The Living Ghost doesn’t quite stand up to The Claw, Madame Satan, The Black Widow, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein or The Heap. I don’t even know if I can say he rivals Landor, maker of monsters! Still, he could have done worse….ACG could have brought him back in the 60’s just to get bopped with a lollipop by Herbie Popnecker.

 Let the final fate of Malevo, Tony, Gail and Dr. Vandyke remain a mystery. Long, if he ever even thought about it, probably would have wanted it that way.

"Here I am like a kid out of school, holding hands with a god..."

 

The Great Sharkspiracy of comics!

 You know what I’ve realized about this site? I dwell on negativity too much, and on things nobody else cares about. So I’ve decided, what with it being Spring and all, to show off a kinder, gentler side of this site, and to talk about a subject everyone can get into: God’s fuzzy little creatures.
 

  But then I decided maybe I'd focus on his scaly little creatures.
 

 Or maybe his winged little creatures.
 

  I eventually settled on not-so-little, not-so-fuzzy, and probably-not-made-by any-benevolent-God-creatures; Sharks.
 

 There have been all kinds of oddly recurring character types in comics that you wouldn’t think are widespread, but are. Muck monsters, big-headed villains, armor-clad tyrants, vigilantes in fedoras and blue suits, dead sidekicks and….sharks.

  However, what began as a simple exercise in my OCD has led me to a rather chilling discovery. What is it? Read on gentle readers, read on.

 

 8) The Shark (Centaur)

 First appearance: Amazing Man Comics #6 (Oct. 1939)

 This character here was the first shark-based character in comics, and would you believe it? He debuted the same month and year as comics' most famous aquatic hero, Namor! Now, while it’s true that Namor had appeared earlier in a promotional comic that was never released, they still both have the distinction of being the first aquatic heroes in comics. Actually, considering that Namor wasn’t really a hero in his early stories so much as a villain protagonist, you could still argue that the Shark was the first aquatic hero in comics! Also, while Namor had yet to be retconned as coming from Atlantis, the Shark’s Greco-Roman connections where explicit from the start: He was Neptune’s son.

 It’s also worth noting that he had futuristic technology like a TV screen that could see anywhere, as well as scales on his trucks very similar to Namor’s, but predating them.

 Created by Lew Glanz, The Shark also shared Amazing Man Comics with Bill Everett’s character Amazing Man (obviously) and an adventure strip called Chuck Hardy and the Land beneath the Sea. So in other words, he was quite at home. Lew Glanz may not have been an overlooked genius, but he did have a knack for utilizing big panels at a time when doing so was unusual.

 That said, aside from those distinctions, the Shark was a fairly bland hero without the personality quirks that made Namor so interesting. Still, he gets props for being the first, and since some of the Centaur publications characters have appeared in Marvel continuity or at its old Malibu imprint, there’s no reason Marvel can’t bring him back.

 

 Speaking of Sub-Mariner…

 

 7) The Shark (Timely/Marvel)

  First Appearance: Sub-Mariner Comics #23 (Summer 1947)

 While I’ve sung praises of Bill Everett’s return to his greatest creation in the 1950’s, his initial return to the character in the late 40’s was pretty hit or miss based on what little I’ve seen. One example of this was Sub-Mariner #23, where on the cover by Syd Shores we were promised a hideous, green-skinned, amphibious shark-man:

 And on the inside (drawn by Everett), we got an ordinary smuggler with a big nose and sharp teeth:

 Kind of disappointing, huh? And to make matters worse, he wasn’t even the first animal-themed big-nosed smuggler with bad teeth Sub-Mariner had fought. There was The Fox all the way back in 1942’s Marvel Mystery Comics #27:

 But despite his blandness, Roy Thomas remembered the villain, and brought him back for Invaders Annual 1 in 1977, a brilliant parody (at least, I hope that’s what Thomas was going for) of Golden Age team-up book formats, with each character branching off into their own separate chapter drawn by different artists. The story involved The Invaders investigating three villains who had joined with the Axis; Agent Axis (a Boy Commandos villain Jack Kirby misremembered as being a Captain America villain), The Hyena (a Human Torch villain) and of course, The Shark (whose original story was retconned to have taken place in 1941).

 Art-wise, it wasn’t too successful at creating a Golden Age feel (except for Alex Schomburg’s Human Torch chapter), but when it came to replicating the gimcrack logic of Golden Age comics, Thomas hit the nail on the head.

 The Shark’s big evil plan in the Sub-Mariner story was…to steal Namor’s speedo, and he did:

 No, I’m not making this up or cutting out some crucial context, read the whole thing:

 Needless to say, his scheme was foiled. Namor would later gain for a far more enduring foe patterned after a shark, but for being one of the few villains who it can be confirmed, in canon, came up with a scheme which involved undressing the hero, The Shark deserves a special place in the supervillain hall of fame.

 

  6) Killer Shark (Quality/DC)

 First Appearance: Blackhawk #50

 

  Boy does this character have a convoluted history. He was a post-War villain (mostly just a pirate and bank robber) from the Blackhawk’s original Quality run who appeared only three times (each with huge gaps between each other) before DC built him up as a major recurring villain once they acquired the rights, then years later he was retconned as a Nazi whom Blackhawk had faced during the war, and then retconned as a separate character from, and then a successor, of the same Nazi villain. It’s funny how in all of their marketing, DC tries to build up Blackhawk as some sort of brooding war comic, when, even back in the Quality days, outlandish adventures with villains like Killer Shark seemed to be the rule rather than the exception.

 Still, as far as villains go, he’s not so bad. In fact, most Blackhawk fans consider him the closest thing the Hawks have to an archenemy. In his early stories he was just a crook, like I said, but he did have an amusing habit of using the same old scheme over and over again in all of his stories: Trying to kill Blackhawk himself with a tank containing a sea creature in it.

Batman wasn't the only hero to carry shark-repellent, who knew?

 

 To be fair, he was a pretty cold-blooded creep (from his debut in Blackhawk #50):

 His coolest moment came in Blackhawk #81 where he sent out a fleet of giant mechanical sea monsters to ravage ships:

 Most of his Silver Age DC appearances had him turning Lady Blackhawk into his henchwoman “Queen Killer Shark” through mind control, which, believe it or not, has endured as an aspect of her character to this day:

 He may not have the best costume, but you gotta respect a character that has lasted so long that most people would consider a poor fit for the series which features him.

 

  5) The Shark (again!) (DC)

 First Appearance: Green Lantern vol.2 #24

 

  Probably the most well-known character on this list, this creature is one of my favorite ridiculous villains, and also a good example of what happens when you try too hard to modernize a character. He was a tiger shark who was exposed to nuclear waste, which somehow evolved him into a humanoid shark (with the ability to change into a human form).

 Now as far as villains go, there’s really nothing better or worse about that origin or concept than any other, but what really made it funny was that he also developed (not kidding) telepathic powers! It resulted in entire stories that could have easily involved Hector Hammond or Sinestro and which made so little use of The Shark being, well, a shark, that it seemed pointless.

 That is, except when he would fly around the city by telepathically summoning waves of water that would float in air and carry him around the city in:

 

 That….that is just the type of totally batshit concept that is the reason people read comics. Actually, scratch that, loads of non-comics readers like that type of nonsense too. Remember the ruckus everyone threw over that Sharknado movie? DC could have reprinted his two silver age stories in a one-shot to cash in on it.

 

 After that, he made most of his appearances in Aquaman’s titles (a far more logical choice) and perhaps most memorably, Action Comics #456 with a cover resembling a rather familiar movie poster, even though the story inside was a fairly typical one, mainly distinguished by featuring short-lived Superman supporting character Captain Strong; a Popeye parody.

 

 Easy to mock as The Shark is, he was kinda endearing. That is, until Geoff Johns made him a Jaws wannabe who goes around eating people and biting off their limbs with blood spraying everywhere:

 You know, while it may be a logical way of utilizing the character, especially since he’s driven by his predator instincts…doesn’t that just seem like overkill for such a silly villain? He’s just another vicious monster now, and weirdly enough, nowhere near as memorable. Hell, some artists don’t even seem to know what species of shark he’s supposed to be. I guess some villains really are better off being corny and ridiculous.

 4) Kai-Mak (Timely/Marvel)

  First Appearance: Marvel Mystery Comics #23

 

 Unlike Killer Shark or Green Lantern’s Shark, Kai-Mak here only ever made one appearance, all the way back in 1941. Yet, what he lacks in appearances, he more than makes up for in sheer awesomeness.

  Kai-Mak is a big, evil shark with a Hitler hair style who is worshipped by the Zambiji people, all of whom offer him sacrifices during the full moon. He also can come on land, talk and is easily enraged if anyone ever calls him ugly or a coward.

 He fought Aarkus, the Golden Age Vision, to a standstill before having his mouth ripped apart by the hero. This is notable for being one of the first all-out brawls Simon & Kirby ever depicted between a superhero and villain.

 

  Despite his apparent death, Kai-Mak is just begging for a comeback. Couldn’t you see him battling the Agents of Atlas? Or being featured on the cover of Tales to Astonish or something (“I Fought Kai-Mak—the Shark God from the Sea!”)? If a talking tree can become a featured character in a major motion picture, anything is possible.

 

 3) Hook Jaw (Albion)

 First appearance: Action #1 (No, not that Action #1)

 Now here’s a really unusual choice. First, this shark is from a British comic. Second, he’s the protagonist of his series! Now, usually you’d think a comic starring an animal would be a humor comic.

 

  Well, does this look like a humor comic to you?

 Hook Jaw was a series about a shark that hates humans because he got a harpoon stuck in the middle of his lower jaw. It started out as sort of a Jaws-rip off centered around a crooked oil rig company and a hero named Rick Mason, but apparently in its final installments evolved into a bizarre sort of serialized anthology horror comic in the Man Thing vein, with various criminals who would end up eaten by Hook Jaw. I get the impression that fans preferred the earlier stories, but I gotta say, the idea of doing a series about a shark that just happens to keep eating criminals week after week, with a harpoon stuck in his jaw, is one of the greatest concepts I’ve ever heard.

 Hook Jaw’s stories were incredible gory and violent, and topped the polls as the reader’s favorite feature. In fact, they even caused a major controversy in the UK, getting singled out by politicians and even successfully banned in many areas. If what I read is true, that’s even more extreme than anything Wertham did!

 Hook Jaw is such an awesomely fucked up premise. Read it all here, even though it’s mostly the adventure/Mason stuff.

 

 

  2) Tiger Shark (Marvel)

 First Appearance: Sub-Mariner #5

 

  While the Shark may have been Namor’s first recurring (if only by retcon) foe themed after a shark, his most enduring shark-themed adversary had been this guy, and he’s one of my favorite B-list supervillains despite a debut that borders on the laughable.

 The saga of Tiger Shark began with a dazed and injured Namor staggering around an island after battling Captain Marvel, only to be attacked by a giant killer robot.

 The robot belonged to Dr. Dorcas; an evil marine biologist (don’t all marine biologists have killer robot guards?) who planned to siphon Namor’s powers as well as the powers of some tiger sharks into Todd Arliss, a former Olympic swimmer who injured his back while saving an old man who fell overboard. Arliss assumed Dorcas could repair his back (Why he thought a marine biologist would be the person to cure him in anybody’s guess).

Todd immediately went mad with power (I love how Dorcas apparently just had a mask lying around in case something like this happened) and his first battle with Namor started because…he said he was stronger than Namor. Man, and people say the Hulk takes his status as the ‘most powerful one there is’ too seriously.

 In the very next issue, Tiger Shark tried to become Atlantis’s new warlord, but ended up getting his ass kicked by Namor. The fight scenes are pretty good, but none can really match the fury of John Buscema’s cover:

Tiger Shark would spend the next few issues making cameos in an Atlantean insane asylum, before escaping. His sister Diane would become a longtime supporting character, and Dorcas would be a mainstay of Namor’s rogues gallery; even teaming up with his creation and Attuma to form the “Slayers of the Sea” in Super Villain Team-Up #1:

 Even though the implications of Tiger Sharks’ early appearances were that he was insane and might someday be redeemed, he was mostly used as a straight up villain thereafter. He even polished off Namor’s human father at the behest of a villainess called Lyra:

 Despite some silliness and letting the character’s sympathetic qualities decay, Tiger Shark has a lot going for him as a villain. His gill slits and sharp teeth make him a lot more menacing than your average Silver Age villain, his costume is simple but striking, and the fact that he’s a spiteful ex-Jock make him a good fit for Namor, a character known for his arrogance.

  Like Green Lantern’s Shark, Tiger Shark also got a gritty reboot. His came during Jae Lee’s 90’s run, which I have to confess, is my favorite post 70’s take on Namor because of its sinister, over-inked, Lovecraftian vision of Atlantis. Tiger Shark’s gritty reboot was pretty cool though, as gritty reboots go; he became a genuinely creepy looking hybrid creature who called himself “Arlys Tigershark” and for a time, was portrayed as something of an anti-hero and used as dark comic relief:

 

 I liked how his thuggish personality contrasted with the more regal characterization of the other Atlanteans. As far as gritty reboots go, I wish more were like this.

 

 1) The random anthropomorphic shark Jay Garrick was a jerk towards. (DC)

 First Appearance: All-Star Comics #3.

 In the JSA’s very first appearance (which was just them recounting stories), The Flash told the story of how he went looking for some undersea treasure (Hawkman wasn’t the only JSA hero who had weird underwater adventures), and this happened:

 ????

 

  Is it a joke? Are we meant to assume it was just some random shark and Jay was doing the voice in his retelling to be funny? Or are we meant to accept that the shark really could talk?

 

 Logically, it should just be chalked up as a weirdly out of place gag panel. That's what I thought at first.

  But maybe—just maybe, something far more sinister is afloat, I mean afoot.

 Note how this shark was separated from his mother, and seems unusually smart for one of his species. What if he was traumatized by losing his mother, developed an intense hatred of superheroes because of it, and then years later, grew up to be the same shark that got exposed to nuclear waste and became Green Lantern’s villain?

 

  Or who knows, maybe he was one of the very tiger sharks Dr. Dorcas used in his experiments? Todd Arliss wasn’t driven insane. He was possessed!

 

 The big problem is how he got from Earth II to Earth I and then the Marvel Universe. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. Perhaps he is one of the children of Kai-Mak, and losing both his mother and his father has caused him to plan revenge on every superhero in the multiverse! Perhaps Hook Jaw takes orders from him. All these shark-themed supervillains? All are somehow possessed by his will. The few shark-themed heroes like Lew Glanz’s Shark? They’re in on it!

 

  Even the ‘cute’ sharks may be part of this vast conspiracy! Sherman of the Sherman’s Lagoon newspaper strip? Sleeper agent!

 

 Jabberjaw? Well, has anyone ever seen those kids he hung out with? They didn’t just fade into obscurity and end up addicts like the kids from Speed Buggy.

 Beware of his wrath. For soon he might decide to leave the fictional universes, and come to ours! Even your fishbowl may not be safe!

 

 And have you noticed how crappy Shark Week has gotten over the years? And all the attention that gets paid to movies like Sharknado and Mega Shark VS Giant Octopus? It’s his influence I tell you! His!

  He may look like some silly cartoon shark that appeared in another wise serious superhero story, but behind that poorly-drawn exterior lies one of the most cunningly evil brains in the universe, affecting both Marvel and DC. And can it be a coincidence that his first appearance was also the first appearance of the Justice Society? I think not.

 

  Pay heed! Pay heed! The day of the Multi-versal shark attack doth draw near!

 

  Whose side are you on?