Prior to reading all the issues of ALL FLASH on ReadComicsOnline, I might have thought that it might have been a little more venturesome, even for a kid's comic, when the whole forty-something pages of each magazine were devoted to one story at a time. Certainly in the Silver Age, the most mythic stories of the Barry Allen Flash were those in which the writer (usually John Broome) could devote as much space as possible to his imaginings.
But such was not the case. All the "book-length" adventures of the Golden Age Flash (a.k.a. Jay Garrick) were pretty much of a piece with the short stories he'd enjoyed in anthology comics like the original FLASH COMICS. That is to say, the tales had a sort of freewheeling silliness-- one story in ALL-FLASH sports the title "Anything Can Happen"-- but,. following one of the arguments of Coleridge, this was just "fancy," not the deeper form of imagination. Ironically, the only story I found mythic in ALL FLASH appeared during the period when the magazine was once more devoted to three short tales per issue.
"The City of Shifting Sand" starts off with a schtick that hadn't been used in the regular FLASH stories for a time, wherein Jay Garrick relates one of the actual adventures of the Flash to his "liar's club" as if it's a story he made up-- without, of course, mentioning that he himself is the Flash. In a world of superheroes and supervillains, I would think no one would feel the necessity of trying top "reality" in that manner. but such is the conceit.
In contrast to the more freewheeling science-fantasies in THE FLASH, ""City of Shifting Sand" starts off by grounding its wild notion of "sand-people" with explanations of the function of sand in human culture, for glass, pottery, et al. Appropriately for a fantasy, sand's importance to human culture is just the first step to imputing intelligence to the substance.
As the Flash, Garrick comes to the rescue of a man beleagured by the sand-people, but like a number of heroes after him, he finds that sandy villains don't present good targets.
Later, Flash comes across a city of silicone men, who are more like glass than their sandy brethren. They, quite naturally, resent the hegemony of carbon life-forms and plan to eliminate the competition. John Broome, the unbilled author, has some fun hypothesizing that the glass-men are nourished by sunlight, which is one of the weapons they plan to use against humanity.
Like villains of the carbon variety, the sand-men make the mistake of putting the hero into a gradual death-trap, from which of course he breaks free. Having learned that the sand-people store their energy in their hearts, Flash then attacks the silicon beings in such a way as to disrupt their energies. Moreover, he defeats the silicon men in their redoubt simply by "leaving the solar light on," while exposes the creatures to so much energy that they all perish of "overeating."
Compared to some of the better cosmological myths of Silver Age DC, "CIty" may seem to be built on a foundation of "shifting sand." But in contrast to most SF-stories in the comics of the time, the pseudoscience is rendered with an eye toward internal consistency-- even if, in the last panels, Garrick seems so disturbed that his jacket goes from orange to off-white.
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