Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: jack kirby, joe simon

The Short, Double Life of Private Strong, Up for Auction

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Double Life of Private Strong was a fascinating but all too brief entry in the developing Silver Age.

AS Joe Simon told it in his 2011 bio Joe Simon: My Life in Comics,  as part of a proposed return to the superhero genre for publisher Archie, which would be launched by Simon and Jack Kirby, John Goldwater had asked him for something more like Superman in addition to The Fly. "So I proposed The Double Life of Private Strong," Simon explains. "With that, we'd come full circle, since this was a modern version of The Shield — the character that had caused Archie to threaten Timely with a lawsuit back in 1941."

The original Shield had debuted at MLJ (the company that would become known as Archie) in Pep Comics #1, cover dated January 1940.  When Captain America debuted in Captain America Comics #1 over a year later, his shield, so integral to his iconography, was initially similar to the Shield's uniform symbolism.  Called a "heater shield" in that form, it is commonly believed that Marvel/Timely changed the shape after a complaint from John Goldwater. There were other similarities between the two characters as well.  In the beginning, both were essentially government agents acting under the auspices of the FBI. Captain America Comics #2 debuted Cap's now-familiar round shield shape.

As explained in Pep Comics #1, the original Shield's father was killed in the famous Black Tom Explosion set off by foreign spies during World War I, which caused him to devote his life to shielding the U.S. Government and its people from any harm.  Double Life of Private Strong rebooted the character entirely, giving him a staggering array of superpowers, which derive from the notion that he was the subject of experiments to develop such powers from a very early age.

Double Life of Private Strong lasted only two issues.  According to Simon, "It was rumored that The Shield had once again become involved in a legal situation, this time on the receiving end. Apparently DC had sent a cease and desist, claiming that Lancelot Strong was too much like Superman. (Actually we did have him doing all of these Superman tricks, and the characters did look a lot alike.)"

While it seems fairly clear that the rebooted character's costume is simply an update on the original, and the similarity in powers between this new Shield and Superman seems unremarkable, it's been suggested that one particular aspect of the character's origin caught DC Comics' attention:  His scientist father ended up dying, and as a young child he was found and adopted by a couple on a farm, Abel and Martha Strong.

Subsequent history might give us an indication that the costume was not the problem, as this Lancelot Strong version of the Shield reappeared a year later to team up with the Fly in Adventures of the Fly #8 & 9 — with exactly the same costume.  But if other similarities to Superman were an issue for DC Comics, Archie seems to have chosen to tug on Superman's cape, so to speak, in this brief late-1960 return of Lancelot Strong. In issue #8, the character appears to have essentially no superpowers, but in issue #9, flight, invulnerability, and super strength have all returned.  The Shield even exclaims that he "can move faster than a bullet" during this story.

Lancelot Strong disappeared again after that issue, although his version of the Shield costume would continue to be used for months afterward on the character Bobby Bell, "Captain of the Young Shields of America" who had a regular one-page self-defense feature in Adventures of the Fly during this period.  When the Shield next returned, it was the original Golden Age version that reappeared in Fly-Man #31 in 1965 as part of Archie Comics' Mighty Crusaders hero revival.

Despite all this, in many different ways, Double Life of Private Strong gives us a tantalizing look at what was soon to come from Jack Kirby at Marvel. Affordable copies of both issues of that series, plus a group of early Adventures of the Fly up, are for auction in this week's 2024 May 5-7 Sunday, Monday & Tuesday Comic Books Select Auction #122419 from Heritage Auctions.

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