Nerding Day: The Fly

By 1960, we understood how to do comic books, right? Most of our beloved Superheroes had already been thriving for decades, but over at Archie Adventure Series comics, they were still trying to figure out the formula. So, even though we were into the Silver Age of comics by that point, Archie Adventure Comics was firmly holding onto the Golden Age, full of hokey characters with insane backstories like The Fly.

The Fly's cover artist wanted you to know one thing more than any other: he fights large, brown things. But there's more to him than that. The Fly was a simple orphan boy named Tommy Troy who was loaned out of his orphanage to earn an honest paycheck doing chores for the local black magic sorcerer. This was meant to teach him discipline and it did, but more on that later.

The Sorcerer sent him to live in the attic, where he kept all of his miscellaneous magical shit, and among those magical items, Tommy found a ring that could summon an alien, as one did in early comic books. The sky was raining alien rings for boys in those days. If you met a child who wasn’t secretly a Shazam, or a Dial H For Hero, or a Green Lantern, or a Mighty Hercules, it was because he was a real dud.

Turan isn’t really an alien. His people originally lived on Earth and created magic as powerful as an atomic bomb, but one day they were wiped out by a mysterious gaseous explosion. Some escaped to the dimension where they currently live, but the rest were turned into houseflies. So, all flies are the descendants of this enchanted race of people. No one ever figured out what happened or tried to turn them back. Fuck most of this race, I guess. They changed zip codes and moved on.

Now those semi fly-like people of Turan’s race who remain are “at war with tyranny” and want someone from Earth to help wage their crusade against injustice. So, Tommy does that, but even though he has magic powers, he’s still a little orphan boy who sometimes stays out too late fighting crime and gets spanked by his sorcerer foster dad. Here's that discipline I mentioned.

Does that sound like a pretty weird origin story for a Superhero character? All flies are tiny, cursed people, a bit much for you? Well, don’t worry, they threw it out and tried again in issue number 5.

After a tight four issues as The Fly, Tommy put his magic ring away and let crime run rampant so he could focus on law school. He wasn’t even fighting crime on the weekends! The war with tyranny took a little pause, I guess. Also, the entire creative team for this comic was replaced in the very same issue. Nine years later, a now adult Tommy opens his own law practice, and during his first case, learns that his old nemesis, The Spider, has covertly escaped from prison. He decides that The Fly must come out of retirement to capture The Spider.

They left out a lot of the origin story in the reboot, giving us just a few panels from Turan, and none of the sorcerer spanking at all. I think these were good notes. Notes that maybe the original writer should have gotten instead of having to do an immediate hard reboot of the series, but hey, who could have known how comic books worked in 1960, a full 22 years after Superman debuted. Archie Comics knew how to do one thing, and it was make jokes about horny teenagers, yet they skipped over The Fly’s awkward teen years altogether? Way to not play to your strengths.

It turns out The Spider escaped from prison many years ago, at some point during The Fly’s sabbatical, and no one noticed because he replaced himself with a perfect robot replica. After he got out, The Spider decided to lay low and build a career as a famous Hollywood movie director. No one would ever suspect that someone so high up and important in the Hollywood machine could secretly be a criminal!

I think it’s important to note that The Spider doesn’t seem to have any evil motives currently. There’s no master plan; he just wants to get rich making movies. He was basically rehabilitated in prison, and now he’s putting his anger about his past into art by making a movie where giant insects attack an innocent city. Unfortunately, when The Fly hunts him down, that means he has plenty of insect-themed weapons to thwart The Fly with, including a giant fly swatter.

Using his evil mechanical genius to make movies is actually a great way to redirect that villainous energy, but The Fly doesn’t care. He uses his ability to burrow into the ground like a Cicada to escape the giant fly swatter. The Spider’s many bug-themed weapons give this reboot the ability to show off The Fly’s powers and even throw in a few extras that maybe he didn’t have before. Apparently, he doesn’t just have the powers of a fly; he can do other random bug stuff, too. Can he lay eggs? Or taste things with his feet? Is he into sexual cannibalism? You’ll just have to keep reading to find out, kids!

You might be asking what is The Fly’s one weakness? Every Superhero has to have one. Superman has kryptonite, and The Fly has poison gas. That’s right, much like a common insect, he’s susceptible to poison. Also, guns. You could totally shoot The Fly and it would injure him, he’s not invulnerable, but then what would you do with all of these cool giant movie prop insect sprays that we went ahead and filled with real poison gas because OSHA wasn’t established until 1971, so movie sets could still do that back then!

When he runs out of wacky insect-themed gadgets to fight with, The Fly defeats The Spider and returns him to prison, where they probably won’t let the mechanical genius run the mechanical lab anymore. There are a couple of other stories in this comic book instead of one long one. It establishes the new tone they want for The Fly pretty well, which is superhero Perry Mason.

Tommy Troy will get a case, and when he pokes around doing some lawyering, he finds out that The Fly is needed and ends up kicking super villain ass. For instance, a man who doesn’t remember committing the crimes he’s accused of hires Tommy, and The Fly is led to a fortune teller who hypnotizes him into becoming a super villain known as The Bat. You know, "smart," "elevated" superhero stories.

She hypnotized a man into learning to sew! That’s wild. Seems like a lot of time and dedication to put into hiding his identity when Lola doesn’t give a shit if The Fly gets thrown in jail or not. She hypnotized him into learning another valuable life skill! The Bat costume was really good! Check this out. The Fly should go on Project Runway.

By the end of the issue Tommy even gets a new secretary, Miss Morse, adding the first potential recurring character of the series. She’s a former dancer whose life was endangered after she became a witness to a murder. She’s kind of a dumb blonde Lois Lane who will never figure out her boss is The Fly.

In the '90s, when DC rebooted some of the Archie superhero characters, they actually went with something closer to the original version of the story. The one where The Fly is a child who turns into an adult superhero only without the depressing part where he’s an orphan, heavily-spanked indentured servant. Instead, he gets his magic ring from a spooky mythology teacher.

So, that’s the origin story of The Fly, twice. Archie Comics fully rebooted their superhero character immediately and then later unrebooted him. I think the Perry Mason version of The Fly is more interesting. It made me want a version of Murder, She Wrote where Jessica Fletcher has a magic ring that lets her pummel all of the murderers in Cabot Cove. There’s so much potential there! It’s Law and Order, but the Order part is the same people from the Law part in tights kicking ass. Perry Mason/The Fly is clearly the superior super.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Chloe, who could think up fifteen better versions of The Fly in less than a minute but has better things to do, like read the dedication at the bottom of the article. Thanks Chloe!

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