Sunday, April 27, 2014

Golden Oldie: FLASH COMICS #101

Black Canary's ongoing adventures continue with seven thrilling pages of mystery and suspense in Flash Comics #101.


"The Day That Wouldn't End!" is written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Carmine Infantino.


When Dinah Drake and Larry Lance deliver the flowers to James Taylor (probably not that one), they meet his lawyer, Mr. Crane, who tells them Taylor is returning from the hospital.  When the lawyer leaves, Larry accidentally knocks over a desk calendar in which every date is labeled May 16th.

Larry suspects a mystery and needs to get rid of Dinah to investigate.  Dinah, at the same time, needs to shake loose of Larry so she can change into Black Canary and find out what's going.  So they ditch each other, and when Black Canary sneaks around the Taylor mansion, she finds a group of hoods hiding outside.


Inside the mansion, James Taylor is aghast about the date on the calendar and today's newspaper.  Everything, the paper, the radio, even Taylor's lawyer, Mr. Crane, says today is May 16th, and Taylor has been reliving the same day over and over again.  He feels like he's grown crazy.

But Black Canary discovers that the radio broadcast is only a recording, but before she can confront Crane, the goons from outside return to the house.  Black Canary and Larry are knocked unconscious and placed in this month's elaborate deathtrap.


Black Canary and Larry Lance race from the house figuring that Crane went to hide in the flower conservatory.  Inside the greenhouse, Crane tells the goons that he'll frame Taylor for killing Black Canary; Taylor will have no credit what with his complaining about time stopping.


I really don't know what Mr. Crane's plot was or why he chose repeating dates to drive James Taylor crazy.  At this point, the formula for Kanigher and Infantino's stories was so obvious there could have been a table of contents for it:

Pages 1 and 2 - Opens the mystery with Dinah Drake and Larry Lance
Page 3 - Black Canary fights some thugs
Page 4 - The mystery deepens and Black Canary is knocked unconscious
Page 5 - Black Canary and Larry Lance wake up in someone's bizarrely conceived deathtrap
Page 6 - Black Canary uses her locket to escape the deathtrap
Page 7 - Black Canary and Larry Lance stop the bad guy, and Larry explains it to Dinah Drake, not realizing it's the same woman.

This is how the last couple stories have played out, and this will be how the next five stories proceed. Yeah, we only have five more Golden Age Black Canary stories to review!

Come back next Sunday for another Golden Age adventure of Black Canary in Flash Comics #102.

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