The professor injected Dick Cole with "special vitamin serums" and exposed him to various rays. Some of them were harmful radiation, while others were ordinary sunlight. No one should expect a 1940 comic writer to be an expert on baby science, but two panels into this origin story, it becomes clear Professor Blair is just fucking around. He has all the scientific method of a cat researching an unexpected cucumber. The comic never says how Blair's work was discredited, but his easygoing smile implies it's not the first time he's filled a baby with random poisonous things to see if anything cool happens.
Novelty Press
Now say, "Isaac Sofa King Much."
Dick grew up to be faster, smarter, and stronger than ordinary teens, but no one writing the comic seemed to know what that meant. In some issues he would lose a fistfight to a Japanese spy, while in others he effortlessly yanked the brains from dinosaur robot skulls. Comics have always been sort of like this, but Dick Cole was so outrageously inconsistent that I got suspicious. Was there some kind of coded message hiding in these adventures?
Novelty Press
Or was Dick Cole's archenemy, Reggie, really some kid reading sorcery books and swinging cats? Oh, and the answer to question two is D'Brickashaw American Samoa.
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