Yeah, Wally West was named by Flash editor Julius Schwartz, who was well known as a prominent member of scifi fandom’s earliest generation in the 1930s, and founder of several early scifi fanzines, and so for that reason, there are all kinds of call outs and references to classic era pulp science fiction inside of Silver Age DC Comics. Since many of these authors and concepts are now in obscurity, people often forget they are references and call outs at all. How many people today would know that the Supergirl enemy Black Flame was a call out to Stanley G. Weinbaum’s novel, for example, or that Vulthoom was originally from an Edmond Hamilton novel as a sinister alien plant? The point is, if you’re a pulp scifi fan, you’ll see a lot of references to it in 60s DC Comics. I wonder how many of these sources of inspiration will be forgotten as pulp recedes further and further back in time with the march of ages.
But yes, the reason Wallace West got a call out was that he specifically created a key trait of how the Flash’s superspeed was shown to visually work when the character was revived in the 1950s: the idea that the Flash would move normally, but everything around him looks frozen and paused. This “moving in between the ticks of a second” concept that we now see in a lot of media came from Wallace West’s “End of Time” and “Time Lockers,” which played with how time is mostly a matter of perception.
Here’s a picture of Flash editor Julius Schwartz in the 1930s with two other First Fandom brothers: the pugilistic Mort Weisenger (who became editor on Superman and brought “Planet Smasher” Hamilton to write for them), and the diminutive Raymond Palmer, who stayed in the pulp scifi world and eventually became editor of Amazing Stories (where he kicked off the most bizarre moment in scifi fandom history, the Shaver Mystery, but boy, is that too much to get into right now).
Yes, the tiny superhero, the Atom, was named after Raymond Palmer above, yeah, but the Atom’s main deal, being able to shrink enough to the point he can pass through atoms or even find a subatomic world, that comes from Ray Cummings’ “Girl in the Gold Atom.” It’s really fun to trace these ideas in old scifi pulps.
By the way, if you asked Julius Schwartz what his proudest creative achievement is, he never mentioned reviving the superhero at DC when the concept was mostly dead or seen as a wartime fad. Rather, Julius Schwartz said his proudest moment was discovering a young Ray Bradbury as a literary agent. I always liked this because it shows how the 50s-60s comics world and the scifi pulp world was really intertwined.
In fact, I think it’s pretty accurate to say that DC Comics in the 1950s and 60s, behind the scenes, were merely an extension of the scifi pulps, and the hyper scientifically literate young fans and members of science clubs who created them like Schwartz. I always thought it was extremely cool that you could learn a lot of real science from DC Comics in the Silver Age. It was sometimes like Encyclopedia Brown, where the hero solves the mystery by remembering some obscure piece of science trivia, like how plasma is the only phase of matter besides solid affected by magnetic fields.
After all, nearly all writers from that era were guys with a background in scifi pulps. Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton, husband of Leigh Brackett, wrote Superman and others in the 60s. Gardner F. Fox wrote Robert E. Howard-inspired horror sword and sorcery in none other than Weird Tales. Otto Binder, a reliable DC Comics writer, was best known in the pulps for creating Adam Link, a robot who was accused of murdering his own creator and put on trial to determine if he was actually an intelligent being.
In fact, you may be wondering at this point, what the scifi fandom and nascent comics fandom thought of the scifi-pulp infused DC Comics of the 50s and 60s. What did they say about it? There was no internet, true, but we still know what they were talking about, there are many fanzines left over from that time, the most famous of which were Alter Ego and Batmania. The answer is simple: they spent most of the 60s constantly pushing DC for a revival of the pure scifi comic, Adam Strange. Adam Strange topped the list of characters to revive, even over the Hulk, who had a comic canceled in the early 60s.
Today, Adam Strange is kind of a minor DC character at best, an awkward inter-genre scifi comic throwback who is only a superhero by proximity to the DC scifi characters. But fandom at the time was obsessed with him because he was (to use a modern term) “a nostalgia property.” Adam Strange was essentially an update of John Carter or Mars mixed with Flash Gordon, and so he was a favorite to 1960s-era adult comics fans who were kids in the 1940s and remember their childhoods. The outsized degree to which the organized fandom loved him is fascinating.
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