Look back at 1941 and you'll discover a time when comics were just for kids. As long as the kids were interested in poor drawing and inexplicable stories, that is.

POLICE COMICS is a collection of over ten short superhero/action-adventure stories, each one more poorly-conceived and facile than the next.

Take the adventures of "711", a man who substitutes himself for his lookalike in order to go to jail and then is trapped there by his lookalike's death. He tunnels out of prison, but realizes that "the outside world is no longer for him". Obviously the only course left to him is to adopt the identity of "711" (after his prison number, not his favorite convenience store) and fight crime, using the prison as his base of operations. Then there's "Firebrand," with his sexy see-through shirt, who nobody seems to notice has exactly the same off-sider as his rich playboy millionaire secret identity - the undisguised "Slugger" is continually at the side of both Firebrand and millionaire Rod Reilly, but of course nobody suspects a thing...

Not even the first appearance of Jack Cole's Plastic Man is free from this shorthand version of writing. Eel O'Brien is a crook who has acid spilled on him during a getaway, and who is saved by a friendly monk who inspires him to turn over a new leaf. O'Brien then discovers he can stretch his body like rubber and concludes it must have had something to do with the acid (as if there's A direct connection between the two. Imagine: "Hey, my wrists and ankles are sprouting WINGS! It must be because of that peanut butter sandwich I ate for lunch! I'll become 'The Masked Man!'") Instead of doing the normal put-longjohns-on routine, Plas returns to his criminal compatriots as Eel O'Brien and joins them on a bank-robbing job. He then "surreptitiously" uses his Plastic Man identity (stretching his arm out of the getaway car he's driving and back into the other window to grab all the bad-guys) to capture the gang. And of course, nobody suspects it's Eel for a moment, even though he's the only one not in jail with them.

The thing about debut strips is that they often aren't as polished or well-rounded as work the artist does later in his career, by which time he's worked through a few of the shakier aspects of his craft. By thivs token, Cole's four-page strip - while head and shoulders above the others in this book, in terms of concept and execution - is inferior to his later Plastic Man work.

Another example of this is "Chic Carter," an unsigned six-pager by Will Eisner. "Chic" is really a by-the-numbers mystery with convenient resolutions (we think the hero is going to go over the edge of the parapet, but luckily it's the villain who tumbles to his death). And it's not worth any fuss unless you're the worst kind of Eisner completist.

Of course it's unfair to compare this comic to the standards of the medium today, but the fact is that this is a year-2000 reprint of a 1940's comic. Apparently someone decided that it was important for people to once again have access to the stories contained within this comic, but it's hard to work out why they thought that. Sure, a sense of history is important in understanding the medium, but this books is so by-the-numbers and cliched (and when it's not cliched it's just dumb) that there's very little by way of historical education contained within, aside from a feeling of how far things have come since 1941. More likely it's simply the completist urge that desires its own reprints of the first appearance of Plastic Man, which would explain the banner heading on the cover: "Plastic Man makes his Riotous Golden Age debut". Sure that sounds interesting enough, but the story's only six pages long and it's not that action-packed, really, more like a teaser. To top it off you have to wade through the other dime-a-dozen heroes to get to the Plastic Man story, making the whole package seem somehow not worth the price of admission.

Not recommended at all, not even a little bit - if you're into Plastic Man better to get the hardcover Archives collection.

Adam Ford is a staff writer for PopImage.

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