Thanks to his seven comic book
titles, his newspaper comic strip, his movie cartoons, his movie serials, his
radio show and finally his TV show, Superman’s preeminence in the DC Comic
universe was indisputable by the mid-1950s.
An epiphenomenon of that preeminence
was the odd fact that so many other DC characters also acquired super powers at
one time or another —Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Lex Luthor, Batman,
Robin, Batwoman, cats, dogs, monkeys and horses.
Even as a child, it struck me as
weird that they would always accidentally acquire Superman’s EXACT powers — not just super-strength,
flight and invulnerability but X-ray vision, super hearing, super breath, the
whole bit.
This applied even to characters as
far removed from Superman as two of DC’s three “hawks” — Blackhawk and
Tomahawk.
In Blackhawk 125 (June 1958), the crusading aviator accidentally got
super through exposure to the Mole’s ray gun beam. The story also off-handedly
established that Blackhawk — a character acquired from Quality Comics, after
all — existed in the same universe as Superman. Shared universes weren’t always
apparent in the 1950s, but in this case Blackhawk remarked that he had gotten
powers “…like Superman.”
Tomahawk, being an 18th
century frontier fighter, had of course never heard of Superman, but he
acquired powers anyway through the attentions of a wise and kindly medicine man
in Tomahawk 68 (May-June 1960).
Tomahawk, like many other comic book heroes, also borrowed from Batman, always
going into action with a boy sidekick, Dan Hunter.
In both cases, the heroes’ powers
faded before the final showdown with the heavies, enabling them to demonstrate
with their resourcefulness that they didn’t need Superman’s powers after all,
thank you very much.
Fan of Superman that I was, I was
more likely to buy a comic if the protagonist acquired super powers, so the
sale gimmick worked for me.
I wasn’t aware until later that
Blackhawk’s super accident was something of an in-joke. In the Columbia movie
serials a few years previously, both Superman and Blackhawk had been played by
the same actor, Kirk Alyn.
How ironic, as they used to say in
the comics.
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