In order to tell a good superhero story, writers must constantly come up with ways to undermine their protagonist’s built-in advantage in power.
So why not cut the superhero down to size?
Literally.
Among the many superheroes who’ve been reduced to insect size and imperiled are Superman (both as an adult and as Superboy), Batman, Marvel’s Fantastic Four, Archie Comics’ Jaguar and the Fly and Fly Girl. The latter were rocketed to a planet where germs were gigantic, so that amounted to the same thing.
I remember particularly enjoying The Battle of the Bacteria Brutes! from Adventures of the Jaguar 2 (Oct. 1961), penned by Robert Bernstein. Artist John Rosenberger created an array of fascinating and colorful bacteria — both humanoid and non-humanoid — to menace the superheroic master of the animal kingdom.
All these stories, I suspect, own something to the 1940 science fiction film Dr. Cyclops — based on a short story by Henry Kuttner from the June 1940 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories — as well as Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel The Shrinking Man (adapted into the film The Incredible Shrinking Man and released in February of 1957).
Good concepts can often be inverted in superhero comics, and shrinking is no exception. Doll Man, the Atom and Ant-Man all turned that condition into a crimefighting advantage.
“As a boy, I really liked this guy,” comic historian Johnny Williams said of the Jaguar. “His powers were great and I thought that his costume was cool, especially his flying jet belt. The Jaguar, like the early Fly, and the Lancelot Strong version of The Shield were three of my boyhood favorites.”
“He never achieved even the modest success of the Fly, but his comic lasted 15 issues (the last of which had a cover date of Nov. 1963),” noted comics historian Don Markstein. ‘All of them featured the competent but unspectacular artwork of John Rosenberger (who also drew a lot of romance stories for DC Comics and a lot of fantasy/sci-fi for the American Comics Group) and the scripts of Robert Bernstein (whose credits range from Marvel to Dell, and who was scripting much of the Superman line at the time).”
“It’s interesting that during the ‘big hero revival’ at ACP, he only made a single appearance,” remarked T.V. Barnum. “But then his appearances ended in 1963, while the Fly, later Fly-Man (!) continued, although a little infrequently in 1964-1965, through the end of the ACP Heroes line in 1967.”
About Author
