World's (2nd) Finest Heroes: The Flash and Green Lantern

The trendsetters of a dynamic duo of differing backgrounds forming a lasting bond through a series of adventures together would be Superman and Batman. They were the World's Finest Heroes, with the Earth-One pair having their tales told in hundreds of published pages, while their Earth-Two counterparts mostly had their's told via radio form, with occasional published stories.

And there would be other prominent couplings of costumed crimefighters... on Earth-One Green Lantern and Green Arrow traveled across America when not crusading together as part of the Justice League of America. Another example is Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, each originally a solo mystery man, who early in their careers teamed up and then together joined the Seven Soldiers of Victory. Each worthy of note.

Then there was the off-and-on meetups of each world's Flash and Green Lantern. On Earth-One, the pair had already met and worked together in the Justice League, however through a chance encounter and later reunion in their civilian identities, the two superheroes fought off alien invasions from the Spectarns and the Myrmitons. These warring extraterrestrials used mind control and power disruption to attempt to manipulate the duo. They next joined forces versus the Mikrids then met sinister scientist T.O. Morrow and later Major Disaster. For awhile, the Scarlet Speedster and the Emerald Gladiator would lend support to one another twice a year versus various threats... from criminals to amoral aliens, sometimes aided by Green Lantern's pal Thomas Kalmaku.

On Earth-Two, while the Flash and Green Lantern were teammates of the Justice Society of America for decades, as to the adventures where just the two were involved, these were few and far between. They did have a number of meet-and-greets throughout the early to mid 1940s, displayed on the covers of Comics Cavalcade, although these always involved a third hero... or rather heroine... in Wonder Woman. And during these tales, they would be racing one another (which led to their battling Solomon Grundy) and then performing in a special circus (when they faced the Evil power of former boxer Joe Morgan). Most of these instances were lighthearted and inconsequential.

Interestingly, in the spring of 1944, Flash's old foe the Thinker escaped from prison, and hatched a complicate cacophony of capers. Having inexplicably developed a time machine, the Thinker used it to bring first dinosaurs and then other threats from various centuries to the modern day. Pinning these distracting events on the trio of troublemakers Winky, Blinky and Noddy, the Thinker as Professor Feend played mind games with the trio. Making them think they were fabricating a fanciful story in real life, this would then occupy his old enemy the Flash while he commenced a new crime wave. During this adventure, extradimensional creatures appeared to disrupt the tale, perhaps pulled in by the experimental time machine itself. Yet despite all these events occuring simultaneously, the Flash was still able to uncover the culptrit... while in the background Green Lantern and his pal Doiby were overseeing events from a distance. Apparently, the Society members were "hands off" in the affairs of each other's cities, unlike the Leaguers.

In fact, the only other adventure they both were involved in was after the Flash defeated his frequent foe the Thorn, with the villianess reverting to her alter ego of Rose Canton. Seeing that she needed treatment for her mental health condition, Flash recruited Green Lantern into transporting Rose to Paradise Island, where Wonder Woman and her people could help her.