RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 4

Drake's next collaborator on the PLASTIC MAN title was the not overly exciting Win Mortimer, though to be sure he had his moments. And since the writer had already launched the feature with no hero's origin, for issue #2 he gave his readers three tastes in one.

First there are four pages in which Drake once more sets up Plas' main support-characters Gordon Trueblood and Micheline DeLute, and his main villain Doctor Dome, who makes another attempt on the contorting champion's life.

After the attempt flops, Dome's daughter Lynx commiserates with him. Then Dome gets a brilliant idea: go back in time and kill Plas when he's a child. He doesn't actually know who Plas was, so he decides to have his daughter wheedle the info out of the three persons rumored to know the hero's true nature. So he splits her in three so she can glean info from all three witnesses in jig-time. (The decision to make one of Lynx's incarnations a full-grown woman dressed like a little girl is, uh, rather odd.)

I doubt any 1967 readers were surprised to learn that this was going to be a "Blind Men and the Elephant" schtick, where three different people narrate origins for Plastic Man, none of which are true. First, the police chief tells Lynx One that he once met a crook named "Eel" who helped the chief capture a crook named "The Spider." During the fracas, the supposed crook got transformed into a stretchable superhero.

Then Micheline's nawsty mothah tells Lynx Two that an undercover cop posing as a gypsy fiddler helped her against a reincarnation of WII propaganda, The Japanese Beetle. Again, weird chemicals are at the root of the transformation.

Then Gordon tells Lynx Three that as a small child he encountered a guy who rescued Gordon's scout troop from a felon named The Frog, who seems to have popped out of one of DC's funny animal books. Another chemical catalyst is the source of the change, this time involving contaminated yogurt (!)

Drake doesn't really come up with any sterling lines this time out, and then the whole things winds down with the dopey revelation that Dome actually was afraid that Plas was going to downgrade his villain status-- which the hero does. All told, a pretty lousy sophomore effort after the interesting first issue. (And why is Lynx still wearing the kiddie-outfit after finishing her assignment?)