Radian: The Hero You've Never Seen

Radian might have been a giant flying Japanese prehistoric reptile or a shampoo, but he wasn’t. He was a one-shot superhero created in the Batman-besotted year 1967 by the great Wally Wood, who drew men of steel that somehow looked as if they really could missile through stone walls.

That this one bore more than a passing resemblance to Wood’s hero Dynamo in Tower Comics’ THUNDER Agents hardly mattered — it was always a pure pleasure to see Wood draw those superman.

Virtually no one’s seen Radian because he appeared only in Wham-O Giant Comics, produced not by a comic book publisher, but by the toy company that gave us Hula-Hoops, Slip-and-Slides and Frisbees. 

The 52-page issue, priced at almost a dollar, offered 1,500 panels of fairly interesting strips, but presented a fatal problem to the comic book collector. It was a 14" x 21" tabloid. Where in hell could you store a thing like that?