Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and ninety-seventh installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends.
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COMIC LEGEND:
Elongated Man and his wife were based on Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore
STATUS:
False
Identity Crisis was a controversial miniseries that revolved around the murder of Sue Dibny, the wife of the Justice League's Elongated Man. Before they were killed off, we saw a few pages showing why it was a bad idea to kill her off...
The artists for the series, Rags Morales and Michael Bair, did a great job and they specifically made a point of basing characters on real life people.
For Elongated Man and Sue, he used Danny Kaye and Dawn Wells as the basis for their faces...
However, Morales noted that the original basis for the characters was Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, the actors who played the married couple on the famous hit TV series, The Dick Van Dyke Show...
Grant Morrison said as much in his book, SuperGods.
Jay, who writes the awesome Elongated Man website, The Dibny Diaries, asked me if it was true and my answer is a general "nope."
Elongated Man debuted in 1960's Flash #112 (designed by Carmine Infantino)...
Sue debuted a year later, in early 1961's Flash #119 (also by Infantino)...
Their depictions stated pretty much the same from that point forward.
And since the Dick Van Dyke Show did not debut until months after Sue Dibny debuted in Flash #119, I think it is pretty clear that Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore were NOT influences on the design of either Ralph Dibny or his wife, Sue.
Thanks for the question, Jay! Check out his Elongated Man website here!
Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed - Did John Lennon bring his on to the Happy Days set because they were big fans of the Fonz?
OK, that's it for this week!
Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!
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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. -- half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).
The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...
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Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed
See you all next week!