posted June 30, 2002 04:27 AM    

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In 1954 a psychiatrist treating juvenile delinquents, Dr. Fredric Wertham, argued in his book Seduction of the Innocent that the "unwholesome" elements in comics were responsible for all kinds of social ills. Wertham's main targets were crime and horror comics, but he also attacked super hero comics. Finding fascistic tendencies in the Man of Steel in the comics and on TV, Wertham declared,

"Actually Superman (with the big S on his uniform -- we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and 'foreign-looking' people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. Superman has long been recognised as a symbol of violent race superiority. The television Superman, looking like a mixture of an operatic tenor without his armor and an amateur athlete out of a health-magazine advertisement, does not only have 'superhuman powers,' but explicitly belongs to a 'super-race.'"

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posted July 01, 2002 04:47 AM    

Superman: The Complete History by Les Daniels (1998), p. 131.

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The comics industry responded by creating a self-censoring body called the Comics Code Authority, but the damage was already done. Distribution dried up, publishers went bankrupt, and by the time parental indignation was redirected toward rock 'n' roll a few months later, the comic book industry appeared to be on its last legs. "We were really suffering," said Julius Schwartz. Still, DC was one of the few publishers still standing, and it fell to Schwartz to pump some new blood into the business.

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Just around the corner was one of my favourite eras of comic books.

posted July 04, 2002 07:28 PM    

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The skyscrapers that towered over Superman's Metropolis were inspired not by Manhattan or even by Cleveland, but by Joe Shuster's hometown of Toronto. He had worked as a paperboy selling Totonto's Daily Star, and that was the name of the newspaper where Clark Kent worked until an editorial decision changed it to the Daily Planet. "Whatever buildings I saw in Toronto remained in my mind," said Shuster, "and came out in the form of Metropolis."

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posted July 05, 2002 06:41 PM    

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Originally posted by BruceWayneMan:
Does anyone know anything about Siegel and Shuster's intentions to develop a back history for Superman depicting his adventures as a boy? I know that the Superboy lawsuit occured in 1947, but I'm also aware of Siegel's statement that he and Shuster had plans to introduce Superboy almost from the start. He was described as "Superman before he developed a social conscience" and, now that I think of it, might even have been a precursor for Mr Mxyztplk. Considering the fact that Superman disregarded the law pretty blatantly during his first few years of operation, a mischevious Superboy with a disregard for social convention sounds like a suitable backstory to me.

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Rather than the idea of a mischievous Superboy being a precursor for Mr. Mxyztplk, the imp was inspired by Bugs Bunny (with Superman in the Elmer Fudd role).

By 1941 Siegel was making plans for a feature called Superboy, a look back into the youth of Superman. In accordance with your quote, B.W.M., Superboy was intended by Siegel to focus on an adolescent's practical jokes, and would be about Superman "before he developed a social conscience".

Depicting Superman's adventures as a boy seems to be an intention more of Siegel's than Shuster's. Contributing to Superman after Siegel was drafted during the War (in 1943) was a writer named Don Cameron. Joe Shuster was not drafted due to poor eyesight, and continued to work on Superman.

In 1945 Don Cameron wrote the scripts for a new comic book series about Superboy. The Superboy art in More Fun Comics #101 is unsigned, but is most likely the work of Joe Shuster, who apparently had no objection to DC's version of Superboy.

posted July 06, 2002 04:54 PM    

Was this because National had overstepped their rights in creating a Superboy without Siegel's permission? Did somehow this trampling of creative rights, end up giving S&S their creative rights on Superboy, even though this isn't the exact character they would have created. Whereas by actually creating Superman, S&S didn't have a claim on the character, because their legal rights weren't violated when they signed away their ownership?

posted July 09, 2002 04:53 PM    

What I have so far is an impression -- just an impression -- that Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster actually did VERY well out of their creation in the early days, both in terms of income and fame. They were famous, and not just in comic book circles. Jerry Siegel, in particular, loved this part of the deal, and he enjoyed being popular. The duo, from what I get so far, actually made a truckload more money than they ever thought they would. They made more money than they'd dreamed of when they were trying to get the strip into the newspapers. From where I sit, Siegel & Shuster really did hit the big time.

Superman hit the big time too, of course. Superman, in a very short time, was @#$% HUGE!

Somewhere along the line, Siegel & Shuster became disgruntled. Or so it appears. They sued DC in '47 for $5M and the rights to the character. Why?

After the war, their income began to drop. Apparently they viewed this with suspicion, but Superman, along with other super heroes involved in the war effort, was actually in decline (for the moment). This was also the time, as I talked about in a recent post, that Siegel got the pip over Superboy. It's also possible Siegel viewed DC's other super heroes, who had sprung up in Superman's wake, as competition that cut into his income. (Much of this is in Superman: The Complete History (1998) by Les Daniels.)

There is a really interesting tidbit also, for anyone who knows who M.C. Gaines is.

In this attack on DC, the co-creators found an ally in M.C. Gaines. In 1955, years after the lawsuit, William Gaines, the son of M.C. Gaines, said, "As I get the story, a couple of sharp lawyers got ahold of these boys and got them malcontented."

Siegel & Shuster approached Gaines senior with their story of injustice on DC's part, and initially he helped them in their lawsuit against DC. But M.C. Gaines soon dropped Siegel & Shuster like "hot potatoes" when he felt they were misrepresenting certain facts!

posted July 09, 2002 07:36 PM    

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Posted by India Ink:
Now help me understand this. As I understand it, the courts decided that Siegel & Shuster owned the rights to Superboy, but not Superman.

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According to Newsweek, the court had decided that Sigel & Shuster had no property rights in Superman.

A settlement was arranged in which Siegel & Shuster received (jointly, apparently) $100,000 for signing away any claim over the rights to Superman and Superboy.

So what you say, India, may have been the case. In between the court decision and the signing of the waiver, it seems Siegel & Shuster still had a claim on Superboy. Or at least, that's the way it reads...

posted July 13, 2002 10:33 AM    

Over to you, Nelson...

"When we decided to publish a comic magazine featuring the origins of the great DC heroes and villains, we began digging back into the past to find when and where the origins were first printed. We made some surprising discoveries.

Take Superman. His origin was first told in ACTION #1- yet that version was one which had NEVER been reprinted! What a collector's item! So you have it at last- in this mag.

In the first issue of SUPERMAN, a different origin, two pages long, was given. Now we actually see the Kents, who are nowhere in evidence in the ACTION version. They find the child in his rocket and later return to the orphanage where they left him to adopt him. But there is still little about the Man of Steel's real parents, beyond referring to his father as a scientist; they are not even pictured.

There was more development in the origin stories for the daily newspaper strip of SUPERMAN and the novel by George Lowther. IN the strip, Superman's parents were called JOR-L and LORA , while, in his 1942 novel, SUPERMAN, Lowther called them JOR-EL and LARA- names that have stuck ever since, as has his name for their child, the future Superman- KAL-EL. However, the same cannot be said for the Kents. In the SUPERMAN magazine origin, Ma Kent is called MARY; Lowther called her SARAH, and her husband EBEN- but these names have only been used one other time: on the Superman TV show.

The daily strip and the novel were clearly used in the origin story which appeared in MORE FUN COMICS #101 (Jan.-Feb., 1945), when the first of the Superboy stories was published. Here we saw JOR-EL and LARA, and learned that Kryptonians were not super-powered on their own world, but got powers on Earth from its lighter gravity. This idea had been used before, but not in comic mags. It was a necessary change from the earlier idea that all Kryptonians were super on Krypton, because of the more powerful image Superman had developed; if the Kryptonians had been that mighty, the exploding planet couldn't have killed them. A change- only temporary- in the origin had an unnamed motorist finding the child and taking him to the orphanage. And the Kents were given no first names until several years after the SUPERBOY feature started. In fact, they were seldom shown in the early Superboy strips.

Ten years after his first appearance, Superman's origin was again retold in his own magazine. This time there was more detail- but oddly, though SUPERBOY had been running for three years, first in MORE FUN and then ADVENTURE, no mention of his Superboy career was included. And his foster parents' tombstones gave their names as JOHN and MARY (SUPERBOY would soon change them to JONATHAN and MARTHA KENT). Later, in a 3-D edition of SUPERMAN, this story was redone- with the same ignoring of Superboy.

There have been many retellings of the story since then- some with strange differences. It has now been established that Earth's yellow sun also helps to give Superman his powers; and stories of little Kal-El on Krypton have meant having him about two years old when he came to Earth."

Thanks, ENB. THis issue, incidentally, also includes the first two-page Batman origin from DETECTIVE COMICS #33 by Gardner Fox and Bob Kane (and Jerry Robinson?); the first Silver Age Flash story from SHOWCASE #4 by Robert Kanigher, Carmine Infantino and Joe Kubert; and the first Golden Age Hawkman story to feature one of my favorite villains, the (Gentleman) Ghost, by Kanigher and Kubert from FLASH COMICS #88. Hey, wasn't it cool when they still called these things "mags"?

posted July 13, 2002 04:48 PM    

This shows the shift in thinking. In the later stories, being a product of Krypton the rocket would not have been wrecked by crashing into the Earth. And if its star-spanning fuel had exploded into flame, then likely the entire town of Smallville would have been blown off the map.

posted July 13, 2002 05:32 PM    

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Posted by C-Op:
Bridwell's commentary reminds us that much of the lasting Superman lore actually originated OUTSIDE of comic books, and that much of even the earliest background was being contributed by others.

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True. And, besides background, even characters as significant as Perry White and Jimmy Olsen were created on the 40s radio show. Kryptonite was created for the radio show as well.

The inspiration for Kryptonite, however, may have come from an unpublished story by Superman's creators, in 1940, about a substance similar to Kryptonite called K-metal. This story never saw print probably because it contained a scene in which Superman revealed his secret identity to Lois. Obviously, "second thoughts" withheld this development from publication.

posted July 18, 2002 04:32 PM    

"UNder the influence of Earth's environment, I... and everything else from Krypton that came with me... was already invulnerable! I was thrown out of the rocket by the force of the impact... as, in the next second, the rocket exploded! It was only the combustion of its fuel- which had also become "super"- that was able to shatter the rocket into fragments..." [Actually, it remains mostly intact, but the window does crack and some metal is loosened].

By the way, Superman's yellow belt was originally the rocket's seat-belt, and his boots were made from the interior's upholstery. He stitched them together himself using a sliver of rocket metal as a needle.

So that was the official version that week.

This issue was, incidentally, also the first time I recall the Kents talking like inbred hicks, which they never did in the Silver Age, beyond the occasional "Land Sakes!" and such. Pa seems to have flunked grade-school English, saying things like "I exploded DYNAMITE under the BLUE blanket, and it ain't damaged neither!"

posted July 18, 2002 09:03 PM    

I haven't looked at the Martin Pasko origin from the late seventies in a while, and clearly I don't remember telling details. But I'll have to correct that one of these days and soon.

Getting back to the thirties and Gaines, one of my favourite books on comics--besides Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, the anthologies called All in Color for a Dime and The Comic Book Book, and Steranko's History of Comics vol. I & II--is Ron Goulart's Great History of Comic Books (1986).

Les Daniels does an awesome job of bringing together a lot of information, with interesting pictures, in Superman: The Complete History. But the prose are a bit puffy for my tastes at times, and Daniels selects out certain key periods but doesn't dwell on others (periods of Superman I happen to love), while he adds no real insights of his own.

Guys like Feiffer, Goulart, and Steranko have opinions and they'll let you know them. They're writers first, researchers second (in Feiffer case perhaps fourth or fifth). Even if you never agree with such writers, you're guaranteed a fun time reading what they have to say.

On page 15 of Goulart's book we see an ad for Popular Comics, The Funnies, & The Comics, with Sheldon Mayer's lovable alter ego "Scribby" appearing in the ad. "America's Leading Comic Magazines" (as the ad copy reads) were packaged for Dell by M.C. Gaines at the McClure Syndicate. George T. Delacorte was the publisher at Dell, but it was actually Gaines who more or less controlled the content of these mags.

Goulart states (p. 16): "To edit Popular [Gaines] hired Sheldon Mayer, a teenage cartoonist. 'I went to work for M.C. Gaines in January of 1936,' Mayer recalls. 'I had been up to see him the previous summer, and half a year later he gave me a call and offered me a few days' pasteup work.' The few days stretched into a few years, and Mayer was eventually editing Popular and The Funnies and The Comics."

In the second issue of The Funnies, Mayer introduced his own strip, called "Scribbly" which was made to look like a Sunday page (to fool readers into thinking it was a genuine reprint from the funny pages).

In 1938, however, Gaines & Mayer ceased to package work for Dell (production was shifted to the Whitman division of the Western Printing & Lithography Company).

But Gaines had his fingers in many pies. While working for McClure, he was also still working at Eastern Color Printing, which was doing the printing for a line of comics published by another curious personage of early comics lore, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. More will need to be said about the Major at another time.

Siegel & Shuster themselves had found work with Wheeler-Nicholson. Their "Doctor Occult" was published in New Fun Comics no. 6 (Oct. 1935)--signed by "Leger and Reuths." For the first issue of Detective they created "Slam Bradley" and "Spy."

That they never sold their "Superman" to Wheeler-Nicholson (up to this point), may be because they were good businessmen! The Major's books didn't seem to make a lot of money, and he wasn't always able to pay his contributors. Siegel & Shuster, may have realized even then that their "Superman" was a potential goldmine, and they didn't want to waste it on the Major's failing funny books.

Instead, Jerry and Joe were shopping around their comic strip to various syndicates, which is how it ended up with Gaines at the McClure Syndicate.

Again Goulart's book (p. 86), quoting Mayer, "' It came into the McClure Syndicate, offered as a strip. I went nuts over the thing. It was the answer; it was the thing we were all looking for. It struck me as having the elements that were popular in the movies, all the elements that were popular in novels, and all the elements that I loved, you know.'"

Despite Mayer's persistence, neither Gaines nor the McClure bosses took the strip seriously. Finally Gaines took a look at the strip--"'He took it and looked at it and read it, and he said, "You think this is good?" And I said "Yeah!"'"

Gaines decided instead of trying to persuade the McClure Syndicate to use it as a strip, he would take "Superman" to the comicbooks so Gaines & Mayer could get the printing on it.

At right about this time, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was almost ready to give up on the comicbook publishing game--selling his share to his partners, Donenfeld and Liebowitz.

Gaines went up to Harry Donenfeld and showed the strip to him, and convinced him to put it in their new comic magazine, Action Comics. Or at least that's one story. Vin Sullivan was the editor for this new Action[/] mag and he tells a different story which has Gaines showing him the strip.

However it really happened, it seems clear that Gaines was the agent by which "Superman" ended up in [i]Action.

As Goulart tells it (on page 87), the strip was pasted up as comic pages and "the cover was adapted from a panel in the story. 'When Harry Donenfeld first saw that cover of Superman holding that car in the air,' Mayer recalls, 'he really got worried. He felt that nobody would believe it, that it was ridiculous...crazy.'"

The covers for the next few issues, in fact, didn't show Superman. No one at Detective Comics, Inc.--other than Siegel, Shuster, and Mayer (all young artist types)--really expected that the strip would do so well as it did!
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posted August 09, 2002 06:56 AM    

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Posted by BruceWayneMan:
In 1940, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster produced a story in which Clark Kent is forced to reveal his secret identity to Lois Lane as only the immediate intervention of Superman can keep her and a group of criminals from suffocating in a mine. Although the gangsters die by the end of the story, Lois from here on in, would be left with the knowledge that Clark Kent is really Superman. The story also introduced kryptonite although it was refered to as k-metal.

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Well, I've already talked about the story on this thread:

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The inspiration for Kryptonite, however, may have come from an unpublished story by Superman's creators, in 1940, about a substance similar to Kryptonite called K-metal. This story never saw print probably because it contained a scene in which Superman revealed his secret identity to Lois. Obviously, "second thoughts" withheld this development from publication.

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I think, in the daily strip, Lois & Clark were once married. That particular plot development also went by the wayside.

posted August 09, 2002 03:22 PM    

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Originally posted by Aldous:
How would you suggest interest be "sustained"? I'd be happy to discuss the K-Metal story, but without the actual comic to read for ourselves, we don't have a lot to go on...

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Which is entirely the point. The discovery of this story is on a par with the discovery of a lost Beatles album, or of a fifth Gospel, or a new scroll of the old testament. Its historical importance can not be overstated. Its existence is noteworthy (nay, absolutely incredible) for a number of reasons:

Firstly, the story should absolutely be printed. But will DC ever make it available? I certainly hope so. Its inclusion in an upcoming archive would certainly boost the sales of the book, or maybe DC should print it as a one-shot? Or in a "1942 Annual"?

Also, since S&S came up with this story, in a sense, this is the "canonical" version of "how Lois learned Superman's secret ID." Although such a story has been told a few times since, this is the first (and original) version.

But it also raises some questions: What would Superman's continuity look like now if that story had run? What would have happened next? Would Lois have been hit on the head with a rock the next issue and then forgotten the secret? Or would she still have known? Would she have kept it a secret or blabbed it to the world? Would she have been killed? Or would she have eventually married Clark? The 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, etc, Supermen could all have been very different from the way they were.

Which leads into another thought: What if the editors had let S&S tell all the stories they had wanted to tell - with their version of Superboy, Lois knowing the secret ID, "K-Metal" instead of Kryptonite - what what Siegel and Shuster's full-blown vision of Superman have been? I doubt we'll ever know the full picture, but this story is a glimpse of it.

If we know about the existence of their version of Superboy (never published), and if we've just learned about the existence of this story (never published) - what other stories don't we know about? What other ideas did they have which were shot down? How many other Siegel and Shuster Superman stories are sitting lost in the backs of file cabinets, or are collecting dust in the backs of closets?