Golden Age Ray ("Happy" Terrill)

First appearance of his feature: Smash Comics #14, cover-dated September 1940 (and according to the GCD, on-sale date of July 19th, 1940).

And with the following issue, The Ray would occasionally be the main feature spotlighted on the cover.


Unfortunately, The Ray didn't survive all that long as a feature.
The last issue where he had the cover spotlight was Smash Comics #27 (October 1941)

and his last Golden Age appearance was in issue #40 (cover-dated February 1943).


But thirty years after that, The Ray was one of the (former) Quality Comics characters reintroduced on an Earth called "Earth-X" as part of a group known as . . . The Freedom Fighters!

The Ray was featured in the Freedom Fighters series that started in December 1975.



And even gained a solo back-up feature in the pages of Black Lightning.



But 1978 brought about what became known as the DC Implosion in mid-1978. Both Freedom Fighters and Black Lightning were among the many casualties.

I have first seen the modern Ray (Terril) in that Joe Quesada nicely drawn mini-series in early Nineties, maybe 1992/93; I was also planning to buy the Twomorrows book about
the Dc Implosion to read about this collapse of Dc Comics publications, I have only read something about in some issues of Alter Ego magazine, btw do you also have the famous lot of photocopies of the Cancelled Comic Cavalcade comics?

Barry_Allen wrote: . . . btw do you also have the famous lot of photocopies of the Cancelled Comic Cavalcade comics?

Unfortunately, I myself don't own a copy of those two issues of Cancelled Comic Cavalcade.
And there were quite a few books that got cancelled back then that I was enjoying at the time.

The original Ray is, along with the original Black Condor, one of my favourite non-JSA Dc characters. I also really enjoyed his son's brief shot at stardom in the nineties. They both really deserve more exposure.

from Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe Vol. XIX (September 1986)

The Ray's first appearance (Smash Comics #14)

So, did anyone else pick up the Ray's guest appearance in last month's Flash? A nice little flashback to the war, with Happy teaming up with Jay Garrick (and, as a result, the time hopping Wally West).

tony ingram wrote:So, did anyone else pick up the Ray's guest appearance in last month's Flash? A nice little flashback to the war, with Happy teaming up with Jay Garrick (and, as a result, the time hopping Wally West).

No, but now that I know about it, I'll have to look for it whenever I finally get back to the comic book shop.

It's worth tracking down, the characters work well together. I particularly like the contrast between the cynical Happy (a man whose name seems somewhat inappropriate here) and Jay, who is a habitual optimist until the situation he finds himself in begins to wear even him down...