Oh, No Effin’ Way… Brain Boy!
I have a rule about film adaptations of comic books. And that rule is: No. But this was before Savage Minds’ Kerim Friedman and the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives’ Robert Leopold introduced the anthropologosphere to the astounding Matt Price, Jr.
But Matt Price is no ordinary student of anthropology…
(Didn’t know that anthropologists could fly, eh? We don’t like to brag about that… It’s some pretty serious post-doctoral 36th chamber shit.)
Shortly before Junior’s birth, Matt and Mary Price’s car swerved off the road into a high-voltage electrical tower, killing Mr. Price nigh instantly. Miraculously, Mary Price survived. Even more miraculously, the amazing transformative powers of electricity endowed her unborn infant with superintelligence, telepathy, telekinesis, and the ability to manipulate others’ emotions and behaviour.
At young Price’s senior prom, government agent Professor Chris Ambers tricked the boy into revealing his powers, and through some precursor to PRISP, Price was inducted into the Organization of Active Anthropologists, a cover for a super-secret branch of the Secret Service.
Dell Comics’ Brain Boy (not Price’s superhero name — simply Prof. Ambers’ nickname for him) had a brief run, with six appearances from Price’s first appearance in the April-June 1962 issue of Four Color Comics to the September-November 1963 issue of his own comic book. The image above shows him in the issue #2 (which was really the first issue of his own comic), from July-September 1962 — a little over a year after the Invasion of the Bay of Pigs, and just months before the Missile Crisis. Who’s that soldier in the front remind you of? Speaking of Prices, I’d love to see what David Price would have to say about this…