Lancelot Strong, the Shield, has a place of honor among the annals of short-lived superheroes.
He wasn’t just short-lived once. He was short-lived twice.
Created for Archie Comics, this Shield began in 1959 as a revised and refreshed version of the 1940s Shield, Joe Higgins. The Shield’s revamping by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby paralleled what DC Comics had done with the Flash successfully three years before, and this new Shield would also echo Simon and Kirby’s most famous creation, Captain America.
A new Simon and Kirby character, the Fly, was introduced at the same time.
“The Archie publisher asked Simon to create and package a pair of costumed character titles, telling the writer/editor/artist, ‘Superheroes are about to come back,’” noted Jon B. Cooke in The MLJ Companion.
“The second book I proposed to (Archie) was The Double Life of Private Strong,” Simon recalled. “He was an Army private who did superhero chores in his spare time in a colorful red, white, and blue costume which was, more or less, a salute to Archie’s old Shield character. Private Strong was … sort of like Captain America. (The Archie publisher) hadn’t forgiven Captain America for wiping out the Shield sales-wise. I hated the Shield concept. (The Archie publisher) loved it.”
The super-powered Lancelot Strong, lost and raised by a kindly farm couple, earned the publisher a cease-and-desist letter from DC Comics claiming the new Shield was too similar to Superman. So the new Shield ended with his second issue while the Fly ran on for 31 issues (and the Shield did pop up again inside that title, quietly and briefly, before vanishing entirely).
But Lancelot Strong reappeared in 1983, this time alongside the original 1940s Shield, as a member of the Mighty Crusaders in Archie’s Red Circle Comics, an imprint created to exploit the new direct sales market.
So now we had two Shields extant in similar costumes. The publisher had planned to call the Simon and Kirby creation “Captain Strong” to differentiate the two, but for whatever reason that didn’t happen.
The character appeared solo in two issues of Lancelot Strong, the Shield, then turned up in Shield-Steel Sterling 3 for the sole purpose of kicking the bucket. Ill and weak, Lancelot Strong sacrificed his life to stop the Soulless Samurai and Deathstar.
The character’s design and ultimate rarity fascinated me. So in the 1950s, Lancelot Strong lasted two issues, and in the 1980s he lasted three.
Some superheroes just can’t catch a break.
About Author
