The Man of Tomorrow in Yesterday's Wars

Superman and the countless characters he inspired were champions designed to deflect the deadly one-two punch that had been inflicted on the world in the 1930s — the Great Depression and World War II.

Picking up Roy Thomas’ hardcover Superman: The War Years 1938-1945 at Midgard Comics, I was interested to see that it begins with the Man of Tomorrow’s first adventure in Action Comics 1 (June 1938). And why not? War was with him from the very beginning.

After smashing into the governor’s mansion to win a stay of execution for an innocent man, this mysterious superhuman crusader for social justice knocks a wife-beater senseless, indicating it will be healthier for the cops if they don’t discover his secret identity (“It would be just too bad if they searched me,” he says ominously, while waiting for the police and donning his Clark Kent disguise).

After discouraging some roadhouse hoods by smashing their car with them in it, Superman heads to Washington, D.C., where he spies on the corrupt Sen. Barrows, who is being bribed by a lobbyist to embroil the U.S. in a war. Dragging the evil lobbyist into the air, Superman attempts to leap from the Capitol Dome to another building, and falls short…

In the second issue of Action Comics, Superman recovers from his fall, having frightened the lobbyist into confessing that the war is being engineered by munitions industrialist Emil Norvell.

While Superman gets his bearings atop the Washington Monument, the lobbyist phones Norvell, warning, “You’re about to receive a visit from the most dangerous man alive.”

Norvell is forearmed, futilely. Superman wades through machine gun fire to seize Norvell, suggesting that the industrialist accompany him to San Monte, which is ground zero for the war he’s engineering.

“You see how effortlessly I crush this bar of iron in my hand?” Superman points out. “That bar could just as easily be your neck. Now, for the last time, are you coming with me?”

Superman forces Norvell to enlist in one of the warring armies in South America. It’s a technique he would use more than once — forcing a wealthy and ruthless predator to suffer the consequences he’d intended to inflict on the common man.

With his own shells exploding overhead, Norvell screams, “This is no place for a sane man – I’ll die!” Superman replies dryly, “I see! When it’s your own life at stake, your viewpoint changes!”

Point made, Superman drags the two warring generals from their tents and orders them to fight it out between themselves, taking time out to smash a fighter plane out of the sky, shield the captured “spy” Lois Lane from a firing squad and hurl a military torturer thousands of yards to his death.

In Action 17 (October 1939), Superman ends a European civil war while recovering a nerve gas formula, watching the spy who stole it die as the sole victim of the gas. Trapping the negotiators of the belligerent nations, Superman demonstrates that, like Samson, he will topple the pillars that support the ceiling over their heads unless they agree to an immediate truce.

In Action 22 (March 1940), Superman stops a false flag submarine attack designed to draw the U.S. into a European war. With characteristic subtlety, he hoists one of the plotters over his head and says, “Confess! Confess that you and Lita Laverne planned the bombing of neutral vessel – or I’ll bash your brains out!”

In the next issue, Superman defuses a world war planned by some mysterious “super-genius” named Luthor.

“My plan? To send the nations of the Earth at each other’s throats so that when they are sufficiently weakened, I can step in and assume charge,” Luthor explains.

“The only thing you should step into is a straight-jacket,” Superman replies, shortly before crashing Luthor’s dirigible and leaping to safety with Lois Lane.

Over the next few years, Superman will repel attacks by Hitler’s trained sea serpents (!) and defend Metropolis against an actual Nazi invasion disguised as a fake Nazi invasion.

War, as one of the greatest tragedies that can befall ordinary men and women, always finds an implacable enemy in Superman.

The Man of the Hour Back in the Day

Created by writer Ken Fitch and artist Bernard Baily in Adventure Comics 48 (April 1940), DC superhero Hourman had the potential to be an interesting variation on the superman theme then flooding the new market for comic books.

Biochemist Rex Tyler was a real Clark Kent — that is to say, he was a timid, nervous fellow, literally afraid of the dark. But the Miraclo drug he discovered not only gave him superhuman strength, speed, stamina and senses, it altered his personality, making him bold and aggressive for an hour at a time.

Imagine the dramatic possibilities inherent in such a mind-alerting super-drug, in a cowardly hero. Unfortunately, in the simplistic storytelling of the day, they were never developed.

Like Bulldog Drummond in the 1920s and the Equalizer in the 1980s, Tyler advertised for people to help in the newspaper, offering his services free to the oppressed.

Like other early superhero features, this one played fast and loose with the secret identity concept. The hero gave himself the long-winded title of Tick-Tock Tyler the Hour-Man.

Encountering Rex Tyler at a crime scene in Adventure Comics 49, a police detective asks, “Tyler? I say, you don’t happen to be Tick-Tock Tyler, the Hour-Man?” “Me?” stammers Tyler.

People who intend to keep their identities secret might be well-advised not to tell everybody their actual last name.

A founding member of the Justice Society of America, Hourman was pushed aside early on in favor of Starman. He inspired two namesakes, his own son Rick and an android from the 853^rd century.

He has the dubious distinction of having appeared on TV’s Robot Chicken in 2007, voiced by actor Seth Green. Promoting an erectile dysfunction pill guaranteed to “make you an hour-man, just like me,” Tyler warned “If you become four-hourman, see a doctor.”

As the Bible says, how are the mighty fallen.

Crowd-pleaser 'Deadpool' Contemporary and Cool

Cross a killing-machine Spider-Man with a raunchy Bugs Bunny and you get Deadpool, a Ryan Reynolds action comedy vehicle that is the latest from Marvel. Rarely have franchise and actor melded so delightfully or broken the fourth wall so frequently (told that he'll be taken to the X-Men's Professor Xavier, Deadpool asks "McAvoy or Stewart?"). 
Violent, vulgar vivacity. 
The postmodern, pansexual superhero has arrived (and leave the kids at home).

The First Time I Saw Batman Comics

The first issue of Batman Comics I ever bought, as opposed to Detective Comics, was 132 (June 1960). I was already familiar with Batman, having purchased Detective Comics 277 (March 1960) and World’s Finest 110 (June 1960).

Artist Sheldon Moldoff and Batman co-creator Bill Finger did the honors, and the cover-featured “Lair of the Sea Fox” was the primary attraction. With his underwater sleds countered by the Bat-Submarine, the purple-clad Sea Fox was an interesting though limited villain, confined to the seas and sewers and so forth.

Batman and Robin had by this time taken to wearing their capes while scuba diving, which was odd, but no odder than many other things they did, I suppose.

The Dynamic Duo also faced “The Martian from Gotham City,” actually a confused actor manipulated by criminals. His disguise should have been pretty easy to see through, given the fact that he in no way resembled Batman’s Detective Comics co-star the Martian Manhunter.

The issue also includes what I am confident is the only Batman story named after a Joanne Woodward movie, “The Three Faces of Batman.” An experimental device renders the Caped Crusader hors de combat when he hears a siren or bell. Actually, with Moldoff drawing them, Batman’s “three faces” look pretty much the same.

The issue included the relatively new feature of a letter column, and the questions illustrated the fact that Superman was the era’s dominant hero. Was Superman ever unable to rescue Batman and Robin? (Yes). Does Alfred know Superman’s secret identity? (No). Does Batman ever use robot duplicates like Superman? (Yes). 

How to Become an Agent

To say that Jonathan Clowes had an unlikely background for a literary agent would be an understatement.

“He was born in 1930, left school at 15, became a Communist and was thrice imprisoned for refusing to do compulsory military service (with spells in Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth and Brixton prisons, where he read avidly, as he’d done in school),” wrote Zachary Leader in The Life of Kingsley Amis.

Clowes in 1970 (photo by Diane Cilento)

An autodidact, Clowes also spent two years homeless. “Clowes was wholly self-taught as an agent, which he became by accident, while working as a painter and decorator. A man on his crew, Henry Chapman, had written a play and Clowes managed to get it to (theatrical director) Joan Littlewood, whom he admired but had never met. Littlewood loved it and agreed to put it on, after which Clowes got another friend’s first novel published by Faber and Faber. He then found a third client, a graphic artist named Len Deighton, whose first novel, The Ipcress File, made them both a fortune.”

A 1970 profile in The Guardian noted, “When he began in 1960 with books by two friends of his — Fred Ball’s A Breath of Fresh Air and a play by Henry Chapman — Clowes had never seen a contract in his life, bluffed his way through every situation by staying silent and getting others to do all the talking, and had only heard of one publisher ‘which explains why Fabers took all my first books,’ he says.”

“It was with The Ipcress File that Clowes negotiated his first film deal,” Leader wrote. “The producer Harry Saltzman sent him an enormous, largely incomprehensible contract. Clowes sent it back three times, each time with the message: ‘this is totally unacceptable.’ By taking careful note of how the contract improved with each rejection, a process which took a year, Clowes learned how to negotiate a film deal.”

“Clowes stuck out for a good deal and got it, but the struggle became so intense during the year of negotiations that both parties fell ill,” the newspaper noted.

“I know I am alarming,” Clowes told the newspaper. “People never know what I’m thinking, but that is a distinct advantage.”

Clowes went on to become the agent for the novelists Kingsley Amis and his wife Jane Howard. When American publishers proved skittish about publishing Amis’ 1984 novel Stanley and the Women, which was perceived as “anti-woman,” Clowes turned an obstacle into a stepping stone. He contacted the New York Times and passed along news of the novel’s rejection as “a form of censorship.” The controversy not only got the novel published, but increased its sales.

“The qualities that make a good agent are a good business sense combined with an ability to help a writer aesthetically,” Clowes told the newspaper. “A lot of agents have one without the other.”  “Very few people know what an agent does,” Clowes once said. “I’ve had lots of people asking what I do and when I answer, ‘Sell the rights of books,’ they say, ‘Is that a full-time job?’”

Cosmic Man and Underestimated Girl

Either main story in Action Comics 258 (Nov. 1959) might have been cover-featured.

In The Menace of the Cosmic Man, writer Bill Finger and artist Wayne Boring confronted Superman with another of those mirror images that appear constantly in Silver Age superhero stories. This time it’s Cosmic Man, who was really a robot designed for an assassination plot. Lois Lane even gets the rare treat of kissing the big guy, but only because he had to feign jealousy to protect his secret identity.

But the cover spot went to the Supergirl story, Supergirl's Farewell to Earth!, and it showed the Maid of Might being hurled into space because she’s displeased Superman. Seems strange to us now, in this post-feminist era, that she’d so meekly accept banishment as the price of violating Superman’s arbitrary rules. Writer Otto Binder and artist Jim Mooney turn the tables in the tale, however. It’s all been one of Superman’s many elaborate hoaxes, this one designed to see if Supergirl can be trusted with the secret of his identity. The fact that Supergirl had already discovered he was Clark Kent left Superman red-faced in the final panel.

The issue’s third feature starred Congo Bill, DC’s answer to Alex Raymond’s Jungle Jim and a character who’d been kicking around since 1940. In January of 1959, in a nod to the renewed popularity of superheroes, a witch doctor granted Congo Bill the power to switch minds with a giant golden gorilla and fight as Congorilla. That became the strip’s new title, with art and story by Henry Boltinoff.

The issue also offered Metropolis Mailbag, a letter column then only a year old. Reader John McGeehan of Santa Ana, CA, wrote in to say that he was sorry that our world has nobody like Superman to make it a better place, but that he was glad we have no Lex Luthor.

Editor Mort Weisinger replied, “Amen!”

Sometimes It's the Comics You Don't See...

Sometimes it was the comic books you didn’t see that seemed most intriguing.

For example, I spotted Detective Comics 287, cover-dated January 1961, in DC’s house ads, but probably spent that week’s quarter on the second (and best) of the Superman annuals, the all-menace issue.

By the next week, 287 must have been vanished from the newsstand, because I remember my disappointment at not finding it. Colorfully costumed figures were still thin on the ground then, just ahead of the Marvel Age, and the bright cover of 287 offered four of them — two bird-themed, one insect-themed and the familiar flying mammal — plus ray guns.

Irresistible. 

I found the comic a few months later in a used magazine shop, and learned that it also included a story that provided the Martian Manhunter with his own “Superboy,” J’onn J’onzz's young brother T’omm. Never was a nickel better spent.