Tom versus the Flash number 138 or come to Blue Valley and be creative to a point.

Welcome back for the Flash number 138th, August 1963 issue, featuring a covered pencil by

Carmen Amphantino and inked by Murphy Anderson. Our first story is The Pied Piper's Double Doom,

written by Gardner Fox, penciled by

Carmen Amphantino, and inked by Jogiela edited by Julie Schwartz. We start in Tower City where they're

celebrating their tricentennial. And as part of that tricentennial, they've rebuilt the tower,

town center stone tower, I guess, that they all used to hide in to defend from

attacks from Indians. This is at a time when Indians were bad guys. Well, they've rebuilt this

tower and they've decided to also make it an attraction by having a foreign country donate its royal jewels to the tower to be displayed.

Now, this isn't a museum, this is just a stone tower.

Now, I don't know what's up with Tower City's sort of tourism board, but if I was in

charge, I wouldn't necessarily have a bunch of people traipsing up to this giant ugly tower up to the top to look at these jewels. Well, it's what they've done. Let's just deal with it. So every night these jewels are in this tower, which is surrounded by a moat, which Indians were never able to figure out how to get over. There's a guard in front of the door. They're locked away. There's no way to get in this place to steal the jewels.

Well, of course, the jewels get stolen. It's a comic book. But how? How did it happen? We see the jewels in the hands of the Pied Piper, who we haven't seen in a couple years, and he's talking to himself, or thinking to himself, that he's figured out a better plan than his old one.

If you remember the last time we saw the Pied Piper,

he was using music to hypnotize various criminals in his stealing stuff for him.

Well, this time, he's decided to hypnotize superheroes into stealing form.

As we flip over the page, we have one of my favorite panels I've ever seen.

It really plays around with layout. On the left

hand side we see Pied Piper's face on the right hand side. We see the tower sort of framing the

story almost kind of like in fables. And in the middle we see what's going on. Pied Piper was at the

opening of the tower, wearing a beret with a cigarette holder. Inc. In conspicuous in Middle America.

You know who else was there?

...