Scarecrows were on DC Comics’ long list of things presumed to fascinate children, along with gorillas, dinosaurs, puppets, sphinxes, tops, giant props and various other fanciful items.
In The Flash 118 (Feb. 1961), the Scarlet Speedster’s cover gimmick — racing to catch a bullet being shot at a scarecrow from a helicopter — turned out to be just that. That incident is revealed to be nothing but a scene from a Flash movie, so writer John Broome didn’t have to twist his plot around to accommodate the unlikely occurrence.
Offhand, I can’t think of anyplace for the story to go after the Flash successfully speeds to stop a bullet from hitting a scarecrow. Then what? Broome was probably glad to sweep that problem aside.
“Broome used a similar approach in The Skyscraper that Came to Life (Strange Adventures 72, Sept. 1956), where he also treated Gil Kane’s cover simply as a scene in a science fiction movie being shot by characters in the tale,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost.
“Carmine Infantino, the artist of both the cover and the story, also got into the spirit of the switch as well. Infantino’s scarecrow cover is Gothic and sinister. But his story is a sun-soaked, glamorous picture of Hollywood. While the cover shows dark Gothic fantasies from the inner world of dreams, the art in the story seems unusually real. One feels one can reach out and touch the furniture and buildings in the story.”
“The very precisely defined inking by Murphy Anderson gives the story that quality of ‘the art in the story seems unusually real,’” noted Vincent Mariani. “Anderson didn’t work on many Flash stories, but the ones he did were a treat.”
By the way, the venerable scarecrow predates the existence of comic books by some 3,000 years.
“The Egyptians used the first scarecrows in recorded history to protect their vast wheat fields along the Nile River from flocks of quail,” wrote Joyce Kimball in the Concord Monitor. “Their version of the scarecrow was a wooden frame covered with nets. The farmers would hide in the fields and when the quail approached they would scare them into the nets. That would not only save their crop from devastation, but catch quail for dinner that night.
“About 2,500 B.C., Greek farmers carved wooden scarecrows in the image of Priapus, the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, creating a ‘scarecrow’ that was supposedly ugly enough to scare the birds away from their vineyards, ensuring a good harvest.
“Later the Romans copied the Greek scarecrow custom and introduced it to Europe when their armies marched through.
“About the same time, Japanese farmers started making their version of the scarecrow to protect rice fields. No Their scarecrows were shaped like people, dressed in raincoats and straw hats.”
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