TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : JIGSAW

Have you ever read a story of a stretching superhero and imagined – really committed to imagining it, with all your senses engaged – what the skin on their arms must look like? It’s not necessarily an issue with guys like Plastic Man, whose entire body seems to be smooth elastic, or someone not particularly human like Metamorpho or the Metal Men, but I always imagine Mister Fantastic’s arm hair sticking out sporadically across his stretched out pores, a mile-long pink boa constrictor that smells of Irish Spring, sweat and coffee.

As bad as that is, imagine JIGSAW, the 1960’s hero from the Harvey Thriller line, created by Joe Simon and crafted by a collaborative effort between Play-Doh and David Cronenberg.

Colonel Gary Jason of the U.S.Space Force leads a doomed mission to the moon to investigate an alien presence on Earth’s satellite. The aliens are friendly, but the meteors are not, and Col.Jason gets hella effed up. His condition is so bad that the (friendly) aliens on the moon have to rebuild him, despite not having the best understanding of human anatomy.

"More specifically, you should not look like that,
Jigsaw. We did a terrible job fixing you and I admit that."

The end result of their ham-handed tinkering is Colonel Jason (which, no matter how many times I write it, sounds like the host of a paramilitary children’s show) coming out of it looking like a highway map of the United States wrapped around a garden hose on Easter Sunday. His skin has been replaced with shifting multicolored plates covering “a moon mile” of rubbery tendons, with the exception of his still-human head and, just for giggles, I like to suggest his genitals too. Just ol’ “Normal Head and Nuts Gary” they call him, not looking at him if they can avoid it.

The rubber and candy-coating concoction does give Col.Jason the spectacular power of stre-e-e-e-tching his torso and limbs, albeit in such a horrifying way that his friends and colleagues on Earth assume he’s actually a crazy space monster. And well they should, because he is spending most of his time in space now – he’s made a friend among the aliens who reassembled him (Si-Krell, who looks like a trashcan mated with a muppet) and hangs out in their space station for the most part, planning the defense of Earth with sinister aliens and defending the honor of America in the Space Olympics.

Jigsaw was created by Joe Simon (although his adventures were probably written by Otto Binder), which might explain why Jigsaw’s origin was recycled further down the road for Simon’s 70s stint with DC and his “Doc Scary” character in First Issue Special’s The Outsiders, except that guy just got the freaky appearance and none of the powers. Or maybe he did, he only ever appeared in one issue, he might’ve had a rocket butt for all I know.

Oh-h-h-h no, no no no, no no no no no ...