Spark Comics was a short-lived comics company of the mid-1940s, founded by Ken Crossen, the creator of the prose-pulp hero The Green Lama. In addition to publishing a more overtly superheroic version of the Lama, Spark also published five issues of a boy super-duper named Golden Lad. Most of the hero’s adventures were penciled by the well-regarded comics artist Mort Meskin, while the protagonist’s origin-story “Heart of Gold” is credited by GCD to one Joseph Greene.
None of the stories revolving around Golden Lad himself are worthy of note, and the method of his heroic ascendancy is routine. Orphan Tommy Preston, who lives with his big-talking grandfather in the latter’s antiques shop, has a close encounter with a band of thugs when they rob the shop. By chance Tommy comes into contact with a relic, the Heart of Gold, and touching the Heart transforms the boy into a super-strong, bulletproof costumed hero. This origin marks Golden Lad as a “talisman-type” of hero, who has to have contact with some extrinsic object to transform. Indeed, the story behind the Heart of Gold is more interesting than that of the hero wielding it, despite the fact that this backstory doesn’t even fill two pages.
Tommy, wondering at the provenance of the relic, conveniently comes across a letter from the 1600s that explains all. The letter is written by Don Juan de Seville, a Spanish soldier who served in Mexico with an expedition of conquistadors. Seville is a horrified witness to the depredations of his countrymen as they force the Aztec people to serve as slaves. (Apparently the vignette takes place after the fall of the Aztec Empire.) Seville’s fellow conquistadors come up with a novel—if very impractical—means of terrorizing the locals. Somehow the soldiers take a lot of the gold they’ve stolen from the Aztecs, smelt it into a pool of liquid, and punish rebellious natives by tossing them into the molten gold. This would seem to be a very expensive way of executing one’s political enemies, since it would be difficult to reconstitute all the molten gold into something spendable. But as a mythic image, it’s rather potent, in that the golden pool of death symbolizes the ruthless gold-hunger of the Spaniards.
Seville decides that he will no longer serve this mission. But instead of simply deserting, the soldier decides that he wants to seek out an independent tribe of Aztecs, and that, to prove his good intentions, he’ll take a small sample of gold from the pool to give back to the plundered natives. However, when Seville escapes, he’s fatally shot by a fellow conquistador. Seville still manages to reach the native encampment. The Aztecs accept Seville’s gift as evidence of his good—one might say “golden” heart—and they reshape the glob of noble metal into the Heart of Gold. Apparently, the Aztecs plan to give Seville the Heart to save his life, and if Seville had accepted it, he would have become one of the world’s first leotard-garbed crusaders. But Seville feels himself too close to death’s door, so he predicts that someday the talisman will be used by another hero, who will utilize the Heart’s powers for good.
The main story of Golden Lad’s first outing contains none of these mediations on gold, either as an inspiration to greed or as the symbol of nobility, though I like to imagine that writer Greene might have derived the hero’s name from a famous ironic couplet by William Blake:
“Golden lads and lasses must
“Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”
Even if Greene took some inspiration from Blake, the main story doesn’t make Golden Lad particularly “golden.” But the vignette-backstory is at least worth its weight in mythological motifs.
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