Gardner Fox wrote superhero stories intended to provide support for the disabled, all the way back to the 1940s.
Contrasting the disabled with the super-abled also provided him with fresh thematic possibilities in storytelling.
In Fame for Bobby Gordon! (Flash Comics 80, Feb. 1947), Fox and artist E. E. Hibbard teamed up the Fastest Man Alive with a boy confined to a wheelchair.
After being struck by a truck, Bobby is paralyzed and despondent. “I’ll never run anymore, or play ball or anything,” he thinks. “I’ll never get used to being in a wheelchair all the time!”
Making matters worse is what Fox calls “the thoughtlessness of youth.” Bobby’s old pals start shunning him. But when his father buys him a set of oil paints, Bobby shows a great aptitude for art, earning the respect of his old friends. However, Bobby misinterprets praise for his talent as pity and remains bitter.
While running away from home, Bobby sees the Flash thwarting a bank robbery, and his quick sketches of the criminals provide evidence against them. That lands him a job in a local newspaper.
The Flash explains Bobby’s situation to his parents. “Well, he thinks people feel he is not only physically handicapped but also mentally affected by his accident, which is nonsense!” the Flash says.
“If anything, his mind has improved… due to the law of compensation, and the fact that he has done a great deal of thinking for his age. He doesn’t want sympathy or pity! He wants — and rightly so — to take his place among people as their equal! And he is going to prove that equality through his art!”
Bobby is thrilled when the Flash commissions him to paint his portrait. But then the bank robbers decide to improve their legal position by eliminating Bobby as a witness to their crime.
As the robbers attack, the Flash, spinning invisibly, whispers to Bobby, “Act tough, as though you were me, Bobby, and I’ll back up any play you make!”
“Oh boy, this will be fun!” says Bobby, as he “magically” snatches a gun from one of the criminals’ hands and then flips him head over heels.
After a split-second pummeling by the invisible Flash, the crooks beg Bobby to let them go safely to jail.
A few years later, the Flash and his girlfriend Joan Williams are listening to a radio broadcast heralding Robert Gordon as one of the foremost painters in the U.S.
“Gee, Bobby certainly overcame his handicaps,” Joan remarks.
“Right, he’s a beacon of hope to countless others,” the Flash replies.
Also in 1947, a man who’d become a real-life hero, Jonas Salk, was recruited by the University of Pittsburgh to develop a virus research program and received a grant to begin a polio typing project.
Bobby’s situation wasn’t uncommon in mid-century America. The scourge of polio, also known as “infantile paralysis,” was becoming one of the most dreaded diseases in the U.S. Even the late president of the United States was a polio victim.
“As the weather warmed up each year, panic over polio intensified,” recalled NPR’s Jason Beaubien. “Late summer was dubbed ‘polio season.’ Public swimming pools were shut down. Movie theaters urged patrons not to sit too close together to avoid spreading the disease. Insurance companies started selling polio insurance for newborns.
“The fear was well grounded. By the 1950s, polio had become one of the most serious communicable diseases among children in the United States. In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died. Hospitals set up special units with iron lung machines to keep polio victims alive. Rich kids as well as poor were left paralyzed.”
Nearly two million children participated in the field trials of Salk’s vaccine in 1954. When the trials were pronounced a success the next year, church bells rang in cities around the U.S. And from 1955 to 1957, the incidence of polio in the U.S. fell by at least 85 percent.
Flash Comics 80 wasn’t the first or the last story Gardner Fox would pen in support of the disabled.
In All-Star Comics 27 (Winter 1945), the Justice Society members help soldier Fred Monday, who had once pitied his handicapped younger brother but learned to think differently after an artillery explosion cost him his right arm. He enlists the JSA members in his cause of boosting the confidence of disabled kids. Hawkman, for example, teams up with a teenage polio victim whose swimming ability enables him to go for help while the Winged Wonder is battling criminals.
“In The Case of the Disabled Justice League in Justice League of America 36, we see five of the team members become disabled in some way, ranging from Hawkman developing asthma to the strange merging of Flash’s two legs into one,” wrote Jennifer DeRoss in Forgotten All-Star, her biography of Fox. “Each team member finds a creative way to overcome their disadvantages while a group of disabled children watch from afar.”
The point of the story was that “…those who have a handicap should be treated equally to those with able bodies,” DeRoss wrote. “Even though the stories aren’t perfect, they show that Fox was attempting to at least include disability in his explorations of equal treatment.”
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