The two Silver Flash stories I've previously analyzed, MASTER OF THE ELEMENTS and PLIGHT OF THE PUPPET-FLASH, showed writer John Broome intentionally articulating mythic aspects of each story's respective villain. In LAND OF GOLDEN GIANTS, however, I believe that his conscious intent was only to craft a boy's adventure involving time-travel to prehistoric times. Yet he subconsciously structured it to reflect myth-images with which he might've only had a nodding acquaintance-- particularly, images relating to the Deluge Myth.
As the story opens, a "scientist explorer," Bill Manners, mounts an expedition to gather evidence of the separation of the continents from one another during prehistory. Manners invites Barry Allen and Iris West, who are his "young friends." Barry and Iris for their part invite along their young friend, Iris' nephew Wally West, who became Kid Flash ten issues previous. In fact, GIANTS is noteworthy in the relationship of the older superhero and his mentee, since Barry reveals his true identity to Wally prior to the trip.
No sooner does the party-- consisting of the three adults, Wally and Manners' granddaughter Gail-- arrive at some location in South America than a nearby volcano, located in the Valley of the Sleeping Giant, erupts. The whole expedition is swept up in a landslide, apparently so unexpectedly that even the two super-speedsters are caught off guard. When they regain their bearings, though, the country around them appears radically altered for all five travelers.
Barry and Wally leave the others behind, don their costumes and scout around. This works out well, since they almost immediately must save a primitive tribesman from an outlandish monster. Eventually it will dawn on the duo that they haven't traveled geographically, but temporally; that the volcano explosion cast them back to an earlier era. The cavemen of the tribe try to tell the heroes about another local menace, a horde of Golden Giants, but Flash and Kid Flash find out the hard way.
Fortunately, the crusaders not only to escape their colossal foe, they manage to obtain cables from the expedition-camp, enabling them to pull a Lilliputian act against the golden "Gulliver."
But they're still faced with the dilemma of how to get back to their own time. The two Flashes don't immediately come up with an answer, so they make a super-fast exploration around the whole world. They learn that, propitiously enough, the time-warp hurled them back to the very era Manners sought to learn about: the moment in time when the continents of Africa and South America began to separate. This cataclysm unleashes mighty flood-waves, so the heroes rush back to the cavemen and talk the prehumans into running to higher ground. Just as propitiously, the implied foes of the cavemen, the Golden Giants, show up just in time to get engulfed and exterminated by massive waves. Barry, though a scientist first and foremost, remembers Genesis 6:4 well enough to quote the familiar phrase about "giants in the earth," which foregrounds God's decision to send the flood to wipe out most of humankind, except for a select few.
At any rate, the heroes must return their friends to their own time, and they do so by duplicating the temporal vibration from the volcano. Amusingly, Flash concerns himself with the adults, while Kid Flash saves the age-appropriate Gail. However, once the whole expedition is back in modern times, Iris, Gail and Manners never know that they time-traveled at all, nor do they catch sight of the two Flashes, which keeps the heroes' identities from being compromised. Manners finds some of the contemporary evidence he wanted and never knows that he actually visited the era he's researching.
By virtue of the Genesis quote, Broome demonstrably knew the most basic association between giants and the Deluge, even though the King James Bible does not explicitly link the giants with the sinning humans whom God destroys. And he might have been utterly ignorant of the considerable elaboration of Jewish lore about the giants, originally called "Nephilim" in the Old Testament text:
In apocryphal writings of the Second Temple period this fragmentary narrative was elaborated and reinterpreted. The angels were then depicted as rebels against God: lured by the charms of women, they "fell" (Heb, nfl. נפל), defiled their heavenly purity, and introduced all manner of sinfulness to earth. Their giant offspring were wicked and violent; the Flood was occasioned by their sinfulness. (None of these ideas is in the biblical text.) Because of their evil nature, God decreed that the Nephilim should massacre one another, although according to another view most of them perished in the Flood. One version asserts that the evil spirits originally issued from the bodies of the slain giants. These giants, or their offspring, are identified as Nephilim (See I En. 6–10, 15–16; Jub. 7:21ff.)-- Jewish Virtual Library.
Yet Broome was clearly reworking the most basic trope of the Deluge Myth, in which some are saved and others are destroyed. The function of the Flashes is slightly similar to the role played by the "time-travelers" of Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD novel, where the intrepid explorers intervene to make sure that a race of primitive humans is not enslaved by brutal ape-men. There seems to be no particular reason for Broome to have made the giants "golden," although the color is sometimes associated with a formative period. And the period of the continents' separation is clearly one such period, in which a Deluge sorts out the good tribe from the bad one, and makes possible the stable configurations of modern reality.
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