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IT wasn't that the new DC superhero did indifferently -- why try him again if he had been disappointing -- rather, it was the system that kept the Flash from showing his success quicker.


I'd argue that the main reason Flash was tried a second time was that everything else featured in Showcase up to that point had been an unambiguous and resounding failure, and that even a modest success was grounds for hope. I suggest that if Flash had been more than a marginal success, he'd have been brought back for more than a single issue run in #8--and that in turn if the results of #8 had been more definite, there would have been no necessity for a third attempt in #13-14, which finally convinced DC that Flash was worth continuing. The nearly two year spread covered by this series of test runs was a culturally important period of development in American culture--in popular music and televison, for instance. Same thing for comics.

The same thing happened with Hawkman--the results of the first tryout run in Brave & Bold was somewhat encouraging but still marginal, so a second round was tried. Green Lantern, Justice League, and The Atom, on the other hand, did well enough from the start that from the timing it's clear that the decisions to put them into solo titles (at least in the cases of JLA and The Atom) must have been made before the final tryout issue even appeared.
Who am us, anyway?
--The Firesign Theater