Tom versus the Flash number 242 or a letter column is for a bit more rough back then.

Welcome back to the Flash number 242, the June 176 issue featuring a cover by Ernie Chan,

with the entire issue being edited by Julie Schwartz.

The first story in this issue is The Charge of the Electric Gang, written by Carrie Bates, penciled by Irv Novic, inked by Frank McLaughlin.

We begin in a central city bank, getting robbed, of course, but something unusual is going on.

The flash is run inside. He knows there's a robbery going on, but everyone's frozen.

The guards frozen, the teller's frozen, all the people inside the

bank, the customers are frozen. There doesn't seem to be crooks anywhere. A little confusing

at first, then he turns towards the vault and sees exactly what's going on. Coming on the vault

are three yellow electric figures, carrying bags of money, and they are looking to escape.

So all three of them suddenly put their hands down to the ground. Electrical shocks come on of their electrical beings, flying along the ground, shooting up at the flash. Of course, the flash is so fast he's able to run around the bank at SuperSpeed dodging all of the electrical flashes. In fact, he's running so fast he runs circles around our crook, stealing the bags of money, popping him down on the ground and sort of a... He's making some jokes, you know, saying, I don't know how you three managed to electrify yourself. Let's see what kind of charge you get out of a super speed attack. He's taunting them a bit. Well, they do have a plan B. They start spinning their own electrical figures. We'll talk about the fact that while the flash control all his atoms at super speed, they can control all their electrified molecules. So they're spinning and they shoot yellow electrical energy at the flash. Of course, he spins, creating a shield, bouncing it off. But when he stops spinning, they're gone. Where have they gone? What

happened? He turns to look. There's a phone sitting on the counter. It's off the hook,

glowing with the same yellow energy that these electrified beings were made of. He starts piecing it

together, runs outside the bank, looks up at the electrical lines, the phone wires. He sees the same

yellow energy traveling down the line. They made a phone call and then jumped onto the phone in electrified form. Too late to trace the call and the atom is not there. He gets back inside the bank. Everyone seems to be waking up. They're no longer frozen. Customers are groggy. A cop is shown up and he's asking the flash to describe. What happens? Flash describes it and the cops says, well, you did a better job this time than he did a week ago when he fought him. And Flash is confused. I have never seen these guys before. The cops like, okay, they got to be used to some unusual behavior from the Flash, but even he's saying, you can't pretend like it didn't happen. got creamed by these guys last week flash is like uh why don't you tell me about it but at this point

they're walking out of the bank we see a shady figure wearing sunglasses and a bank uh signed to make

a withdrawal from his bank account and i like how the bank immediately went back to business. This has to happen all the

time in Central City. They obviously can't let it completely freeze business or nothing would

ever get done. We see who this smiling figure is from his thought balloon hovering above his head.

It's the infamous mirror master who's thinking it's boring to just

withdraw money from a bank. He's got a really good reason to spend his own money as he's walking

out carrying the cash. We cut to some time after lunch, which Barry has shared with Iris,

...