Elongated Man
Elongated Man (in the German translation Elastoman ) is the title of a series of comic publications that the American publisher DC-Comics has been publishing since 1960.
In the past, the "Elongated Man" comics were mostly a mixture of science fiction and detective stories in terms of genre . Characteristic for the series was usually a good dose of humor in terms of content and narrative style.
Release dates
The idea for Elongated Man goes back to Julius Schwartz , a senior editor at DC-Comics in the 1950s and 1960s, who had the idea of a "funny superhero comic book" with a character at its center - for "optical jokes" as special suitable respected ability ("super power") - should be able to stretch and deform his body at will.
As a model for the new character to be developed, Schwartz envisaged the superhero character Plastic Man , published in the 1950s by Whiz Comics . Unaware that DC had held the rights to Plastic Man since buying the bankrupt Whiz publishing house in 1956, Schwartz commissioned the writer John Broome and the illustrator Carmine Infantino to clarify his idea and develop a new character, whom they called "Elongated Man".
After Broome and Infantino had worked out their concept for the "rubber man", stories about Elongated Man began to be published as "backup stories" in the back part of the series The Flash (starting with issue # 112) in May 1960 . The stories about the "rubber detective" met with a very benevolent response from readers and critics.
In the further course of the 1960s, an independent Elongated Man series followed with a duration of almost five years. In the 1970s and 1980s, further uses of the material as a "backup" feature followed, this time in the Detective Comics series , before the character in the later 1980s in the "funny" incarnation of the superhero classic Justice, created by Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis League was installed, a series about a team as acting group of superheroes. A high point in the character's "career" was the 1987 anniversary issue of Detective Comics # 527 (Batman's 500th appearance since his debut in # 27), in which Elongated Man, Batman, Slam Bradley and Sherlock Holmes (or an optical double) as the "greatest detectives in the world" (or the "DC Universe") to celebrate the occasion in an over-long story written by Mike W. Barr to solve a tricky criminal case together.
In the 1990s a four-part mini-series followed (1992), as well as some guest appearances.
Plot and main character
The focus of Elongated Man is the jovial private detective Randolph William "Ralph" Dibny. Dibny, an extremely thin and lanky man, is credited with two wishes in his debut story that he already had as a teenager: Firstly, the need to be the center of attention - and the associated tendency to showmanship and "showmanship" - and his admiration for "contortionists", artists with the gift of being able to bend and twist their bodies in extreme ways.
In his endeavors to fathom the secret of "flexible people", Dibny finally discovers that they all have in common the consumption of a "miracle drink" called "Gingold". As a student, Dibny devoted himself primarily to chemistry, so that he was ultimately able to develop a "super concentrate" of the Gingo fruit (from which Gingold is extracted). By taking this concentrate, Dibny finally gains the longed-for ability to deform his body in the manner of the contortionists - only in a much more extreme way: From now on his entire body has a texture like rubber, which enables him to stretch and compress it into To stretch, to inflate or flatten extremely, to "thin" and "thicken", to twist in spirals, or to imitate the shape and shape of other things, and the like. So he can pull his whole body, or parts of it, meters long, "constrict" other people with his arms like a rope, etc. In addition, his body has increased resistance to physical violence, the effects of heat and cold and the like.
Dibny initially uses his newly acquired skills to work as a private detective - together with his wife Sue Dibny. Together, the two all sorts of windy figures put the craft. It is noteworthy that both marry relatively early (in superhero comics, in which the relationship between the hero and his love interest is mostly left with an "eternal flirt", a "rarity" until the 1990s) and that the elongated man is his Identity as Ralph Dibny does not keep secret - so does not have the secret identity that is almost mandatory for the superhero genre.
While Elongated Man was clearly a "fun" character until the 1990s, whose stories always breathed a cheerful and carefree spirit (note, both in DC: on the one hand - with a wink - The Man of Rubber , on the other - rather 'serious created '- The Man of Steel ( Superman )), the stories about the "man made of rubber" have recently taken a distinctly gloomy tone: Sue, who is about to give her husband a pregnancy, becomes part of the series Identity Crisis shot by the insane Jean Lorning and later "revived" as a ghost by her husband with the help of a magical artifact. Since Ralph Dibny himself has been killed in the meantime by a demonic being called Neron and has been wandering around the earth as "astral beings" since then, both of them lead an existence since then as a "ghost couple" investigating paranormal occurrences in its new incarnation form.
Adaptations
Adaptations of the "Elongated Man" material in other media have so far only taken place on television. There the character was used as one of several characters in some episodes of the animated series Justice League Unlimited (US dubbing voice: Jeremy Piven ) and from the 4th season of the TV series The Flash (played by Hartley Sawyer ).
Remarks
- ↑ http://www.bilderundworte.de/de/catalog/rechtesliga-27-die-energie-der-sterne-gegen-die-liga/120025/detail
- ↑ Schwartz later stated that if he had known in 1959/1960 that DC owned the rights to Plastic Man, he would have simply reverted to that character instead of creating a new character (Elongated Man).
- ↑ In 1961, the Elongated Man character won the Alley Award, an important American comic prize, in the category "Best Supporting Character".