This foot race took 39 years to finish.
The first issue cover of Comic Cavalcade showed the anthology title’s three stars — Wonder Woman, the Flash and Green Lantern — running a charity race, with the Amazon winning.
A symbolic cover, it had nothing to do with the contents of the issue. But it probably left the readers of 1942 with a few nagging questions. How could Wonder Woman win a race against the Flash? And why was Green Lantern even in the race at all, facing two super-speedsters?
In 1981, in Justice League of America 193, writer Roy Thomas finally answered those questions.
Cleverly, Thomas has newsreel reporter Johnny Chambers covering this race in front of a crowd of 90,000 people.
“…And Green Lantern running a predictably poor third!” announces the man who is secretly Johnny Quick, DC’s other super-speedster.
Even Wonder Woman wonders about the race.
“I really feel strange about this, boys — even though we were only racing for charity. After all, everybody knows that the Flash is the ‘fastest man alive!’ You didn’t hang back and let me win, did you?”
The Flash replies, “All I did was underestimate you for the first half-second… and that was the ball game.”
And Green Lantern admits, “Me? Even with my power ring, I was never really in it!”
The prize is given by Wildcat, who starred in another of Comic Cavalcade’s features. And the race, naturally, is to help fund the March of Dimes, a charity founded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938 to fight polio. A breakthrough came in 1953, when Jonas Salk discovered his polio vaccine.
This little vignette kicked off the preview of All-Star Squadron, Thomas’ 67-issue World War II series that was one of the bright spots of 1980s comics, a more sophisticated exploration of the original Justice Society’s era.
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