"CHALLENGE OF THE GIANT FIREFLIES," MYSTERY IN SPACE #67, 1961)

 

"Challenge of the Giant Fireflies" is not one of writer Gardner Fox's better titles, though he might have emphasized the incredible insects just because big fireflies looked neat on a comic-book cover. The true challenge for hero Adam Strange is a race of fire-creatures who supposedly live in the sun of Adam's solar system, and the big bugs are just the champion's means of "fighting fire with fire."

Adam's regularly scheduled sojourn to the alien world of Rann (and to his beloved Alanna) gets delayed when the means of his cosmic traversal, the Zeta-beam hits a solar prominence and temporarily carries a fire-creature from the sun to Rann. Parenthetically, Alanna mentions that for once, Rann's scientists solved another crisis without input from the Earthman, as a plague of big fireflies presented a danger but were largely quelled by weapons that extinguish the insects' fiery tails. Fortunately for the Rannians, this doesn't kill the bugs, but only eliminates their ability to create conflagrations. Fox skirts the fact that the bioluminescence of the real insects doesn't give off heat, though maybe the mutation of the little bugs into big ones changes that biological aspect.

One of the more interesting aspects of the "Sun-Beings" is that they don't have any desire to conquer or destroy Rann. They're utterly unaware of other worlds until the Zeta-beam snatched one of their number and temporarily deposits him on Rann. The effect wears off and the first Sun-Being goes back where he came from, but because he gained the power of sight on Rann, he talks his kindred into traversing the gulfs of space back to that world. (Bloody lucky they don't just decide to visit the third planet from their domain.) The Sun-Beings' only motive seems to be curiosity, and they presumably don't even understand that they're a danger to the residents. 

Though not a scientist himself, Adam knows his high school science and determines that they can put out the fire-aliens with carbon dioxide. And then the survival of the giant fireflies proves fortunate, so that the Rannians can ride the heat-resistant critters into battle and spray the Sun-Beings into extinction-- except for one, whom Adam allows to escape to make sure its brethren stay in their own solar courtyard. (Again, nothing about Fox's scenario keeps the Sun-Beings from visiting other worlds in the DC Universe.)

Naive as the story may be in some particulars, I find that Fox and artist Carmine Infantino are having some good myth-making fun with the phenomenon of fire, not unlike the way Windsor McCay did with cold phenomena in LITTLE NEMO IN THE PALACE OF ICE. The deviations from actual science don't lessen the mythic discourse, for as I've frequently written, the truths of myth are strong precisely because they are "half-truths."