Who's This? A man with precious skin.
The facts: First appearing in Green Lantern #38 (July, 1965) by Gardner Fox and Gil Kane, Keith Kenyon is a scientist collecting gold to create weapons and an elixir of invulnerability. He won't drink it and become "Goldface" until issue #48, then sit things out for almost a hundred issues. In the early 80s, however, he not onlu shows up for an extended Green Lantern storyline, but also fights the Flash, a move that will eventually make him appear fairly often in Wally West's adventures in the early 2000s.
How you could have heard of him: Goldface has appeared in both Green Lantern and Flash comics of the current era, his last appearance in Dark Crisis. He's also shown up in the DCAU and the Arrowverse.
Example story: Green Lantern #145 (October 1981) "Golden Death!" by Marv Wolfman and Joe Staton
After more than 4 pages of blissful cohabitation between Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris, we finally get down to tough cookies, by which I mean Goldface in his HQ somewhere* fighting his own men like he's the Kingpin.
*Somewhere is up higher on the same mountain that Hal's new crib is. What were the odds?! And he's unhappy with his trainers, but at least realizes that because he's super-strong and invulnerable, they never had a chance. No, he needs to go after someone who can actually give him a challenge - Green Lantern. This is going to be his big post-Silver Age comeback! But just because we haven't seen him around, doesn't mean he hasn't been busy. In fact, it looks like he's been hoarding wealth and profiting from terrorism, arms sales and drug trafficking. And only working with people who have some form of "gold" in their names:
If I were him, I wouldn't be thinking about getting into the supervillain game. Looks like business is doing well. But villains gotta vill. And he sounds a lot like Dr. Doom in this thing. Very vill. He's got a criminal in a cage down in the basement, someone who will help him to become criminal overlord of the entire West Coast... if he agrees to help. It's mystery (beyond the mystery of why you'd need this if you also had a global criminal enterprise going). Meanwhile, Green Lantern is looking for the Tattooed Man's killer -wait, did Goldface do this? He's got a lot to answer for! As it turns out, he didn't do it personally, but the actual gunman is found dead. Covering his tracks? GL does follow the clues back to Goldface's HQ so he didn't do a great job of it. Of course, the problem is, Goldface owes his existence to GL's weakness to yellow. There's no reason to have a completely yellow villain armed with a gun that turns things yellow. So how's Hal going to handle this fight? Pretty stupidly, actually.
Hal, use the ring on material you can wrap your enemy in. This is what I thought he was doing based on the art, but the dialog tells me that no, that's just his robe whipping about. Hal is just setting himself up for a splash.
No gold gun here, just a lot of punching. Goldface gloats that he's used science to enlarge his body (yes, I got that email too) and strengthen his muscles (the Atlas method!), and he DOES seem pretty huge now that we can compare him to Hal Jordan.
Hal drops the ceiling on him, but even that doesn't stop him. Nope, as we wrap the issue, GL is being fitted with a golden coffin so he can be buried in it. I guess this is where the Green Lantern series ends? No?
Good on Wolfman for trying to do something with one of GL's most gimmicky villains, even if it's a little all over the place. "Gold" does evoke wealth, and making him more of a crime boss is a good idea. He's invulnerable to the ring, which does create one-note battles, but at least we've gotten away from just covering things in gold. Making him a brick instead doesn't really match Hal's particular skill set, but as shown here, it does protect Goldface from having heavy stuff dropped on him, so our hero will just have to use his smarts to outwit him. (Hal? Smarts? Oh boy.)
Who's Next? Space lizards.
Comments