Radian might have been a giant flying Japanese prehistoric reptile or a shampoo, but he wasn’t.
He was a one-shot superhero created in the Batman-besotted year 1967 by the great Wally Wood, who drew men of steel that somehow looked as if they really could missile through stone walls.
That this one bore more than a passing resemblance to Wood’s hero Dynamo in Tower Comics’ THUNDER Agents hardly mattered — it was always a pleasure to see Wood draw those supermen.
“While repairing a defective damper rod in an atomic pile, (Gilman) Graves is exposed to a radiation leak,” recalled comics historian Jeff Rovin. “His associate, Dr. Barbara Scott, decides to act on her long-held theory that the only chance to survive a large dose of radiation is to ‘go all the way and change one’s whole atomic structure.’
“Thus, Graves is placed in a cyclotron and fed radiation until his every molecular particle is mutated. When he emerges, Graves’ body is the consistency of metal. He also finds that he has the ability to jump several stories high or increase his weight dramatically. Topping it off, he possesses super strength.”
Virtually no one’s seen Radian because he appeared only in Wham-O Giant Comics, produced not by a comic book publisher, but by the toy company that gave us Hula-Hoops, Slip-and-Slides and Frisbees.
The 52-page issue, priced at almost a dollar, offered 1,500 panels of fairly interesting strips, but presented a fatal problem to the comics collector. It was a 14″ x 21″ tabloid. Where in hell could you store a thing like that?
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