Showing posts with label Dash Dartwell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dash Dartwell. Show all posts

14 May 2020

That Time They Did A Comic About The Drugged-Out Cheating Harvard Athlete

My, oh, my - how things change with time.

These days a performance enhancing pill popper winning college competitions and breaking records would be viewed as a vile cheat and possibly a scummy addict. 80 years ago - not so much.

Coming to us from Harry Francis Campbell, the man who brought us Dr. Synthe, meet Harvard loser, the scrub of the Track team, Dash Dartwell. With a name like that, you know he grew up dreaming of running fame.

Fortunately, with right drugs...


Of course, when you're popping pills in public, you're likely to attract the attentions of the criminal element...
 

What?
You didn't think Cosmo Cat was the only one to take out bad guys like that, did you?

And so the pill popping and cheating continued...
 

Perhaps even then they realized the rather cringeworthy nature of Dash's powers. By the time we reached his fourth and final tale he had appeared in three different titles. Or maybe it was just that Centaur was on it's last legs and books kept folding on him.

Either way, here's the last time we saw Dash dashing -
 

Yes, i know - it was viewed more as a super vitamin rather than a drug. And science had a better reputation in those days. But it's still odd how perspective so radically shifts in just a few generations.

Let's hope we get some good shifts soon, huh?

Note that while Dash used the Human Meteor moniker, there was another...

page art by Harry Francis Campbell from Amazing Man #s 21 & 22, Stars And Stripes #2, and The Arrow #3 (1941)