I have this theory.

I've noticed, over the years, that nearly every hard core comics aficionado over the age of, say, thirty, maybe thirty-five years -- old enough, in other words, to have had their earliest comic book tastes "set" by sufficient exposure to classic Silver Age material -- will tell you, if asked: no matter who their "all-time favorite" comics character may be , Right This Very Nano-Second In Time... the first spandexed super-hero to really grab their pre-adolescent attentions was "The Fastest Man Alive" -- a.k.a., The Flash.

It was that way for practically every kid in my old neighborhood, certainly (back in the days when a brand, spanking-new off-the- spinner-rack comic book cost you a piddling twelve cents, American, and -- therefore -- practically every kid in the country did pick up the occasional comic, every now and again. Don't get me started.); and, working on the baseline assumption that my peers and I were -- if not "normal" (at least, to hear our respective parents tell the tale), at least moderately representative -- I imagine the same formula was being distilled in job lots throughout countless other neighborhoods of the day, as well.

Now, then: you could easily rationalize such a blatant skewing of the readership "odds" by fair means or foul, certainly; any and all theorems ranging from the basal ("The Flash could run faster than anyone else in the whole, wide world. All kids love to run. Therefore...") to the baroque are fair game, in this particular sort of Monday morning quarterbacking. And I suppose my own pet theory -- I did have one, you'll doubtless recall; quit thrashing about long enough for me to spit it out, if you will, and I promise to stop kneeling on your chest and screaming -- is no more demonstrable, under laboratory conditions, than anyone else's, really.

Still: "everyone else" can pontificate on their own bloody web sites, can't they...?

Theory Mine: the single, signal storytelling element of the Silver Age FLASH comics that proved so overwhelmingly addictive to an entire generation of readers was the fact that -- in the title character's own little "corner" of the DC universe -- science and magic were virtually one and the same.

This will, I am certain, strike the fiercest of the Silver Age FLASH devotees out there as nothing short of the rankest sort of heresy. It is one of the immutable "givens" of Silver Age lore, after all, that the John Broome-scripted tales of the period -- packed fit to bursting with the writer's patented "Flash Facts" (arcane bits of scientific effluvia, all having to do with the inherent properties of velocity and inertia) -- were as studiedly "scientific" as a comic could decently get, without each issue requiring a separate syllabus. I imagine the mob is already passing out the requisite number of torches and pitchforks, even as I type these words.

However: I am by no means positing that the scientific story elements in THE FLASH were either faux or inept (they were neither; the aforementioned Mr. Broome was a well-read and exceptionally "tech"-savvy individual). What I am saying is: in the monthly FLASH comic, Arthur C. Clarke's dictum -- "any form of science or technology, sufficiently advanced, is virtually indistinguishable from 'magic' " -- was as much part and parcel of the proceedings as were the monthly quota of super-villains and/or alien despots.

The example of ongoing Flash foeman "Abra Kadabra" -- a hard-luck would-be stage magician from "the 64th century" -- utilizing the sleight-of-hand tricks of his era to transform the Scarlet Speedster into a wooden puppet [see panel, above] is a classic example of this, surely... as is, too, the instance wherein arch-nemesis "the Mirror Master" somehow (I do not even pretend to follow the argument) applied his criminal mastery of the principles of reflection and refraction in such a way as to alchemize the Flash into an actual, bottle-dwelling genie [see panels, accompanying].

Surely, little (pseudo-)scientific conceits such as these -- as ingenious and enjoyable as they undeniably were -- are a far cry, indeed, from the sort of stuff the late doctors Sagan and Asimov would recognize as being "science," proper. I'm just sayin', is all.