Comics-Plastic Man TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos of the travel bug are appreciated.  I will be re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

My youth was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Drawing from that period, this is one of a series of travel bugs made to commemorate favorite characters from comic books, comic strips, movie cartoons, B-movies and animated feature-length movies.  Some of the characters had only a brief existence, some survived as radio and early TV programs and some have been digitally-modernized into some of the blockbuster movies of today.  There were many other characters, but these are the ones on which I was willing to spend my dimes (comic books) and quarters (movie and popcorn).  However, I didn’t pay for the daily comic strips or Sunday funnies that came with the newspaper.

Plastic Man (real name Patrick "Eel" O'Brian) is a fictional comic book superhero originally published by Quality Comics and later acquired by DC Comics.  Created by writer-artist Jack Cole, he first appeared in Police Comics in 1941.

One of Quality Comics' signature characters during the Golden Age of Comic Books, Plastic Man can stretch his body into any imaginable form.  His adventures were known for their quirky, offbeat structure and surreal slapstick humor.  When Quality Comics was shut down in 1956, DC Comics acquired many of its characters, integrating Plastic Man into the mainstream DC Universe. 

Plastic Man's powers are derived from an accident in which his body was bathed in an unknown industrial chemical mixture that also entered into his bloodstream through a gunshot wound. This caused a body-wide mutagenic process that transformed his physiology.  Eel exists in a fluid state, neither entirely liquid nor solid.  Plastic Man has complete control over his structure.  He can change his density at will; becoming as dense as a rock or as flexible as a rubber band; he can stretch his limbs and body to superhuman lengths and sizes; he can shrink himself down to a few inches tall (posed as one of Batman's utility belt pockets) or become the size of skyscrapers; he can contort his body into various positions and sizes impossible for ordinary humans, such as being entirely flat so that he can slip under a door or using his fingers to pick conventional locks; he can also use it for disguise by changing the shape of his face and body; he can open holes in his body and turn himself into objects with mobile parts.

The only limitation he has relates to color, which he cannot change without intense concentration.  He generally does not use this ability and sticks to his red and yellow colored uniform.  His semi-liquid form remains stable at relatively high and low temperatures, provided that the temperature change is gradual. A sudden change induces a complete change of state, creating a truly solid or truly liquid form.  These special powers spawned a whole series of Plastic Man jokes when I was a kid, as in: Plastic Man, while described as a pool table, someone racked his walls, or something like that.