Secret Origins: The Comic That Made Me Cry

I never wanted a comic book more than the 25-cent DC giant Secret Origins, which was on newsstands in June 1961, the month I turned 7.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone. The comic sold out instantly at my newsstand in Effingham, IL, and I was so disappointed I burst into tears on the spot. Then I was ashamed at having cried.

But we almost never got to read characters’ origins in those halcyon days, and to acquire a bunch of those in one comic would have been a thrill.

I wouldn’t learn until years later than DC’s apparent discomfort with reprinting 1940s material would lead them to cheat a bit on the Secret Origins title, meaning that the real origins of the Superman-Batman team, Wonder Woman and Green Arrow would remain secret.

In fact, the only “Golden Age material” to be found in all 80 pages was an old copy of Flash being chuckled over by police scientist Barry Allen while he ate lunch in one panel.

The earliest story reprinted was the origin of the Martian Manhunter from Detective Comics 225 (November, 1955). The Silver Age characters Flash, Green Lantern, Adam Strange and the Challengers of the Unknown had all debuted in 1956 or later, and their actual first stories were included as well.

But instead of Wonder Woman’s real 1941 origin, we got a reconned version by Robert Kanigher, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito reprinted from Wonder Woman 105 (April, 1959).

Green Arrow and Speedy got even shorter shrift, merely a text page that summarized their origins from Adventure Comics 256 (January, 1959) and Adventure Comics 262 (July, 1959). In fact, of course, they had debuted 18 years earlier in More Fun Comics 73 (November 1941).

Even May of 1952 was apparently too “Golden Age” for the editors. That’s when Superman and Batman actually met in the pages of Superman 76 (although they’d teamed up even earlier on Superman’s radio series). Instead, DC reprinted the retconned Origin of the Superman-Batman Team by Edmond Hamilton, Dick Sprang and Stan Kay that had appeared in World’s Finest Comics 94 (May-June, 1958).

So that dark, sunny June day I had to content myself with the origin of a new superhero in Archie Comics’ Adventures of the Jaguar 1, Detective, the second issue of Charlton’s  Gorgo, the battle between Batman and the super-powered Villain of 1,000 Elements in Detective Comics 294, learning The Secret of Tigerman from World’s Finest 119, seeing the debut of The Legion of Super-Villains in Superman 147 and the exciting third Superman Annual, featuring The Strange Lives of Superman.

That one was almost as good as Secret Origins.

Almost.

Despite its deficiencies, Secret Origins remained The One That Got Away. I hadn’t learned, at 7, that desire often makes the unattainable seem more wonderful than reality can ever be.

Whatever Happened to the Dog of Tomorrow?

By the time I started reading Superman comics in 1958 or 1959, Krypto was already a well-established and well-behaved member of Superman’s expanding “family.”

But he didn’t begin that way.

 Introduced in Adventure Comics 210 (March 1955), Krypto was revealed to be baby Kal-El’s pet puppy, sent into space in a test ship by Jor-El shortly before the planet Krypton’s explosion.

I don’t think anyone here has ever considered naming a puppy “Eartho” or “Terra,” but I won’t quibble about Kryptonian customs in this area.

Superboy is joyful when his pet arrives on Earth, but quickly understands the headaches involved when Krypto playfully rips the wing off a passenger airliner. Finding his dog has fled into space at the end of that first story, Superboy pretends to be glad.

But isn’t.

Krypto would, of course, return soon and for good, playing a role in many Superboy and Superman adventures. In fact, the Dog of Steel would become a member of two distinguished organizations of super-animals — the 30th century Legion of Super-Pets and the Space Canine Patrol Agents.

Krypto would also be the ancestor of a surprisingly large number of superhero dogs that would include Ace the Bathound, Underdog, Dynomutt, Hong Kong Phooey, Marvel’s Lockjaw and (arguably) Disney’s Super-Goof. Radar, Alan Moore’s version of Krypto, could talk thanks to a super-translator installed by Supreme in his dog collar, and is a particular favorite.

Krypto was created by artist Curt Swan and writer Otto Binder, and that seems appropriate. Swan was one of the most iconic artists ever associated with Superman, and Binder, a long-time writer for Captain Marvel, used Krypto to bring a little of that famous Fawcett feature’s heartwarming whimsy to Superman’s “serious” universe. The Big Red Cheese had vanished with Marvel Family 89 (Jan. 1954), just a year before the Dog of Steel arrived on Earth.

Look, I know Krypto’s presence makes Superman even sillier than he already is, but I really don’t care. Given the volumes of anecdotal evidence that attest to canine loyalty and bravery, the idea of a superhero dog has a kind of deep psychological resonance for us.

And Krypto brings a quality of heart to the Superman feature than underlines and counterpoints the recurring theme of the superhero’s loneliness — something Moore understood implicitly.

I defy anyone to read Krypto’s part in Moore’s 1986 story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? without finding that the room has suddenly become unaccountably dusty.

This Looks Like a Job for Tiny Supermen!

It’s a swarm of bees! It’s a cloud of wasps! No, it’s a hundred tiny Supermen!

The Mort Weisinger-edited Silver Age Superman mythos reached its zenith when the Superman Emergency Squad was introduced in 1960.

We’d already seen the arrival of Brainiac, whose shrinking ray gave us the Kryptonian bottled city of Kandor, to be stored in another recent innovation, Superman’s arctic Fortress of Solitude (shamelessly lifted from Doc Savage).

Krypto the Superdog had arrived even earlier, and Supergirl more recently. Her own expanding mythos would give us Streaky the Supercat and Comet the Superhorse. Lori Lemaris, Superman’s lost collegiate love, was on hand if we happened to need telepathic assistance from a mermaid.

Kandor would in turn be source of further mythic evolution for the Man of Tomorrow. Superman’s increasingly complex and useful robots were also stored there, as was another new element, the Phantom Zone projector.

The tiny city would become the urban bottlescape for Superman and Jimmy’s Batman-and-Robin adventures as Nightwing and Flamebird. And, in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen 48 (Oct.-Nov. 1960), it would give us the Superman Emergency Squad, a silly team I loved.

In this Otto Binder story with art by Curt Swan, we met Superman’s tiny flying army from the Kandor. After shoving their way out of the corked bottled, they swarmed to the rescue dressed in Superman costumes (which would actually make them uniforms, I suppose). Initially someone insisted that they should all look like Superman too, which seems a bit fetishistic even for Silver Age comic books.

They returned in The War Between Supergirl and the Superman Emergency Squad (Action Comics 276, May 1961), a tale penned by Robert Bernstein and drawn by Wayne Boring. The “war” was staged so Superman could gaslight a criminal into thinking himself delusional as a means of shielding Superman’s exposed secret identity.

In the Kennedy era, already having been popularized on TV, radio, movie serials and cartoons and a newspaper comic strip, Superman was featured in seven comic book titles, or eight if you count The Justice League of America, where he was initially downplayed.

But the Man of Tomorrow was central to the titles Action Comics, Superman, Adventure Comics, Superboy, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and World’s Finest. Important additions to the Superman mythos might appear in any one of them — the tiny Supermen in Jimmy Olsen, the Phantom Zone in Adventure, Bizarro in Superboy and Luthor’s sister Lena Thorul in Lois Lane.

Doctor Solar: Gold Key's God in a Lab Coat

In 1962, when I was 8 and all grown up, either the absurdity of superhero costumes was starting to bother me, or I was just looking for a fresh approach to the kinds of characters I loved.

In any case, I embraced Gold Key’s Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom when I ran across his second issue (Dec. 1962).

A scientist altered by radiation even more bizarrely than Bruce Banner had been, essentially into a being of pure energy, Raymond Solar was as breathtakingly powerful as Superman.

Solar could fly at the speed of light. He had radar vision. He could walk beneath the ocean by surrounding himself with an oxygen bubble. He could superheat himself, freeze things, control magnetic forces like Cosmic Boy and fire lightning bolts from his eyes like Lightning Lad.

The scientist discovered through experimentation that he could split himself into multiple, smaller duplicates or grow to gigantic size. We readers got the sense that Solar could pretty much do anything if he put his logical mind to work on it long enough.

Even though Alan Moore based Watchmen on Charlton Comics’ superheroes, the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan was probably closer to Solar than he was to his direct inspiration, Captain Atom.

Solar’s vast power appealed to me. So did Bob Fujitani’s art, which had the restrained, refined clarity of a realistic newspaper comic strip — a style well suited to this character, who wore no costume.

Again like the Hulk, Solar was easily identifiable when charged with radioactivity because he turned green. He also wore a white lab coat, seemingly a required uniform for fictional scientists in the 1950s and 1960s.

Solar had only a single archenemy, one who anticipated the James Bond films. Nuro was a shadowy, Blofeld-like mastermind intelligent enough to suspect the existence of a mystery “Man of the Atom” because his schemes were constantly being thwarted by unexplainable phenomena. Hero and villain were both hidden forces playing cat-and-mouse.

As written by Paul S. Newman, Solar’s adventures had that thin veneer of verisimilitude which helped me appreciate them at the time, and I was eager to find out what new “scientific” powers he’d dream up to counter whatever national or global threat would appear in each new issue.

Until the fifth one. 

I can remember my sense of disappointment when I saw the cover and realized that Solar had, in fact, finally adopted a superhero costume after all, and would now be known to the public as the masked Man of the Atom.

What had made him unique was gone.

I bought that issue, then moved on to the many other superhero titles that were beginning to appear.

I don’t envy the comic book editors of the 1960s trying to understand the vagaries of children’s shifting tastes. Here I was, blaming Solar for having a costume when I had rejected the Fantastic Four for not having them less than a year before.

I didn’t buy the second issue of the FF because I couldn’t tell, from the cover, whether or not they were superheroes. I wasn’t alone and, ever-sensitive to the readers’ desires, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby not only put them in costumes on the cover of the third issue, but dropped them into their own flying “Batmobile” (Why hadn’t Batman thought of that?).

I couldn’t part with my 12 cents fast enough.

The God of Thunder Clouts a Kind of Castro

A weak, vulnerable person is transformed by magic lightning into a caped, Herculean hero who can fly.

Um, could you narrow that down a little more? That could be anybody.

In his second adventure (Journey Into Mystery 84, Sept. 1962), the Mighty Thor exploited his built-in Captain Marvel motif by having Dr. Don Blake trapped before a firing squad, unable to reach the walking stick that would change him into the thunder god. This echoed the many times in which Billy Batson, Mary Batson or Freddy Freeman ended up bound and gagged and unable to utter the villain-vanquishing word “Shazam!”

Having fought off an alien invasion in his first outing, the thunder god flexes his considerable muscles against a modern army this time out. The story is full of those multi-panel feats of staggering strength that Jack Kirby was so good at delivering.

The tale continues the commie-bashing featured in Marvel’s brief superhero revival in 1954, but this time the heavy has a heavy resemblance to Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, who’d only been in power three years. Because DC’s superhero titles usually backed away from real-world politics, Stan Lee instinctively went in the other direction, toward giving Marvel’s characters additional verisimilitude by grounding them in a more recognizable world.

The Marvel Universe Grows as the FF Shrinks

I must have reread Fantastic Four 16 (July 1963) more often than any other issue, and now I think I know why. For me, this was the issue that really cemented the crowd-pleasing concept of what we would come to call the “Marvel universe.”

Two years into their run, the now-familiar and well-loved title characters were joined by another favorite superhero, the Astonishing Ant-Man, to oppose that prince among super villains, Dr. Doom. The Fantastic Four had already met and skirmished with the Hulk and Spider-Man, but this time, confronted by the peril of miniaturization, they called on Ant-Man for help.

Calling in the expert would have been a natural move in the real world, but was still a relatively rare one in comics, where — despite the existence of the Justice League and the World’s Finest teams — superheroes often seemed to pretend that other superheroes didn’t exist. In her own title, for example, Wonder Woman would fend off an alien invasion by herself, with never a thought for the heroes who might help.

With an eye on the insiderish fanboy thrill that crossovers gave readers, Stan Lee was also certainly aware that bringing newer characters into contact with the company’s most popular heroes would be a great way to provide them with wider exposure.

“And there is a lot to tell in this issue — from contacting Ant-Man, to discovering a hidden world, to helping the royal family which Doom has imprisoned to take back their throne,” comics historian Don Alsafi observed. “And yet, as we’ve come to expect, there are wonderful little details as well. For instance, before they embark on their micro-journey, Reed tracks down Ben at his girlfriend Alicia’s apartment to test out a new serum, one that he hopes will be instrumental in someday changing the Thing back to human, permanently.

"Meanwhile, Sue is grappling with the problem that while she can turn invisible, she can still be identified by creatures with a strong sense of smell, such as dogs, and so is seen experimenting with different kinds of perfumes in an effort to ‘deaden’ her own scent. Even Johnny gets a bit of attention when Pearla, the princess they save from Doom's clutches, sends a few flirtations his way before the FF leave their realm. Any hopes that this could be a potential love interest for the Torch are for naught, however, as Pearla’s next Marvel appearance would take 19 years to occur.”

Trouble Nearby? Shine the Signal in the Sky

Ah, the mysterious, looming Bat-Signal. What a fascination it held for readers.

Batman’s flashy-cool accoutrements — Batmobile, Batplane, Whirly Bats, the Batcave with its massive weird trophies, the ever-so-useful utility belt and especially the Bat-Signal — formed a serious part of his long-term appeal, I think.

Introduced in Detective Comics 60 (Feb. 1942), the Bat-Signal had, of course, been inspired by the Phantom Detective pulp magazine of the 1930s in which a red beacon atop a newspaper skyscraper was used to summon the crime-fighting Phantom. Batman editors Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger had edited that magazine, and were well aware of the gimmick.

My only real disappointment with Batman’s sales-boosting “New Look” in 1964 was the addition of a telephone “Hot Line” to Commissioner Gordon. I thought that undercut the importance of my beloved Bat-Signal.

When the TV show debuted as an instant hit in January 1966, I was pleased to see the producers had been smart enough to include both the Batphone and the Bat-Signal.

Here, in Batman 135 (Oct. 1960), we have one of those rare stories in which the Bat-Signal plays a central role. Criminals summon a super-powered sky creature to battle Batman and Robin using a sorcerer’s lantern as a sort of evil Bat-Signal.

The issue includes one of my favorite sub-series, Alfred’s fictional adventures of the second Batman and Robin team. Dick Grayson has become Batman II, and Bruce Wayne and Kathy Kane’s son has become an earnest, ginger-haired Robin whose inexperience drives the plot.

In the third story, gambling-ring gangster “Wheels” Foster becomes the Wheel, one of those costumed obsessives who were always being inspired by Batman’s own costumed obsessiveness concerning bats. Like the sorcerer’s lantern, this satisfied the readers’ well-established taste for mirror-image reversal themes.

The First Time I Saw the Thunder God

The first time I saw Thor, he was hurtling through the incorporeal form of a gloating Tomorrow Man on the cover of Journey Into Mystery 86 (Nov. 1962), wondering aloud how he was ever going to catch the villain.

A flying, super-strong hero in a red cape? Clearly some kind of a Superman, just the sort of character I loved. Obviously worth a 10-cent investment, despite the fact that the long, blond hair puzzled me. This was pre-Beatles, remember, and I’d never met any Vikings.

As a matter of fact, at 8, I’d heard of the Greek gods, but never the Norse ones. So I was unaware that Thor predated Superman by a couple of thousand years.

However, reading the issue, I was very aware of Jack Kirby’s fascinatingly detailed, idea-rich art.

Here were time machines, futuristic flying scooters, villainous mirrored magnetic rooms underneath trap doors and giant robots that might have been inspired by the 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoons (although I didn’t know it then).

Here too was that joyful exercise of super powers that you only see in the early issues of superhero titles. Before the story really begins in Thor’s fourth comic-book adventure, the hero chases and catches a rocket and, as a military exercise, calmly prepares to expose himself to a C-bomb blast at ground zero.

And here (although I didn’t know it then) was our first glimpse of Odin, the All-Father, as a giant helmeted face in the sky summoned by Thor through a thunderstorm. With that, the paradox of the series became evident.

The character had been introduced in Journey Into Mystery 83 as Don Blake, a lame physician who merely acquired the powers of Thor from his hammer. How then could he actually be the son of Odin, or the brother of Loki (who was introduced in the previous issue)?

Indeed, Odin seemed a little surprised that Thor had forgotten the method by which he could use his hammer to travel through time. The conflict wouldn’t be resolved by Stan Lee until 1968, when he revealed that Blake was merely a personality conjured by Odin to teach Thor humility. 

Even in issue 86, I could see how Thor might have some trouble staying humble. After all, he could fly, shrug off nuclear blasts, create thunderstorms, smash giant robots, fell trees with a slap, spin through time and even deflect the rays of a delta-electron gun with his hurricane force super-breath. To do all that, even I’d wear shoulder-length hair.

Archie: Even a Teen Who Is Pure in Heart...

On my 8^th birthday, my aunt Shirley handed me two comic books, one a Superman title and the other an issue of Archie Comics. She carefully explained that the Superman represented the kind of comics I’d be leaving behind, and the Archie reflected the genre I’d be growing into.

“Uh-uh,” I replied firmly. “Nope.”

My parents and grandparents were a little concerned about my stubborn fascination with superhero comics, and hoped it was something I would grow out of.

I hope they’re not still waiting.

What a sweet and ironic retribution, too, when, about two years later, the “mature” Archie Andrews became a superhero. Finally I was buying Archies, but it brought my loving young aunt little comfort.

Pureheart the Powerful, Archie’s superhero identity, actually offered a rationale for superheroes that made a weird kind of sense. If super heroes exist, why don’t we ever see them in action? Archie anticipated the Men in Black movies with his neat answer to that question.

Inspired by a self-help book, Archie uses the power of his pure heart to transform himself into a caped superguy complete with rocket belt (Archie Comics never liked the idea of people just “flying” without a visible motive power).

But the sheer telepathic force of Archie’s willpower wipes out everyone’s memories when his super deeds are done. That clever angle let Archie’s superhero adventures slip neatly into the comics’ teen humor continuity.

The weakness that robbed Archie of his super powers turned out to be the same sexual feelings that delighted and/or plagued him in his regular continuity. Another neat storytelling trick.

Penned by Frank Doyle and drawn by Bob White, Archie’s crusade against evil began in Life With Archie 42 (Oct. 1965), just ahead of the national Batman craze that followed the premiere of the TV show in January 1966.

“By 1965, the superhero revival in American comic books was in full swing, and even the funny guys were starting to get into the act,” comics historian Don Markstein observed. “That was the year Goofy became Super Goof, Herbie became The Fat Fury, and Archie became Pureheart the Powerful.”

Soon Betty Cooper became Superteen and Jughead Jones a surprisingly effective Captain Hero. The trio had already been super-secret agents a la the Man from UNCLE, so this evolution seemed natural.

“Even Little Archie got into the act — Little Pureheart was first seen in Little Archie 40 (Fall, 1966),” Markstein wrote. “To celebrate this efflorescence of superheroics in Riverdale, the 142nd issue (Oct. 1966) of Archie Giant Series magazine reprinted all these guys’ origin stories.”

“But the glory was short-lived. Pureheart the Powerful/Captain Pureheart lasted six issues, exactly as long as Superteen’s tenure in Betty & Me. Little Pureheart made only three appearances, the last in Little Archie 44 … Jughead as Captain Hero bucked the trend by hanging on for seven issues, but it too was gone as of November 1967, and the entire ‘Pureheart’ scenario became a fond memory for fans of superhero comics.

Their lighthearted adventures delighted me while they lasted, as did those of their Archie’s Mad House colleagues Captain Sprocket and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Even Archie’s rival Reggie Mantle had donned envy-green tights as Evilheart.

Odd name for a superhero, I always thought. 

Do Commies Think They're Playing With Kids?

Marvel Comics’ second groundbreaking title, The Incredible Hulk, was very much a work in progress.

In fact, it’s interesting to consider the several contradictory ways in which this character — conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Frankenstein — might have evolved.

For the first two issues, the Hulk is definitely a monster, while his alter ego Bruce Banner is the protagonist (a relationship DC Comics would echo with Eclipso). The Hulk muses about seizing an alien spaceship and using it to rain terror on humanity, and there’s a dark hint that Betty Ross might be threatened with rape, a possibility that always loomed in the monster movies that the Hulk echoed.

Of course, Banner was almost as much antihero as hero. Although he risked his life and destroyed his future happiness to save a teenage stranger from a bomb blast, he was also cold and haughty scientist. And Banner had, after all, invented a gamma bomb that could potentially wipe out human civilization in a nuclear war. Seen in perspective, that made Banner far more dangerous than the Hulk.

Was the curse of the Hulk, somehow, his fated punishment?

Ah, those poignant, haunting Kirby scenes — his teenage pal Rick Jones, slumped and exhausted, keeping a lonely all-night vigil in an underground chamber as the caged, angry Hulk pounded relentlessly on the thick metal vault door behind him.

In the third issue, the Hulk discovered he had the power of virtual flight, and Jones discovered he had the power to telepathically control the Hulk when the military’s attempt to exile the monster into space went awry.

Putting Jones in the driver’s seat increased possibilities for reader identification — readers could now imagine that they commanded the strongest being on Earth. And the monster was now a robot-like force for good who corralled the Ringmaster’s Circus of Crime.

The character’s course seemed set — and was immediately changed with the fourth issue (Nov. 1962). Marvel certainly kept readers on their toes.

Now the Hulk regained his free will and some of Banner’s intelligence, although his personality remained aggressive. Using a gamma ray to transform at will, the Hulk was free to act as a full-fledged superhero, fighting the commie space robot Mongu and even becoming a founding member of the Avengers.

In his next, penultimate issue (Jan. 1963), the Hulk thwarted an invasion by the underground overlord Tyrannus, then bounced off to battle the Asian despot Gen. Fang while disguised as the Abominable Snowman.

The character would continue to evolve, and even relapse into villainy. When his title ended with the sixth issue, the Hulk shifted from reluctant protagonist in his own feature to formidable antagonist in other superheroes’ titles. The Marvel universe wasn’t about to let him go to waste.

When Batman Battled Superman Back in the Day

Having Batman battle Superman is not a new idea. The teammates clashed at various times during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

In stories like those in World’s Finest 95 (Aug. 1958) and World’s Finest 109 (May 1960), the creators sensibly realized that A) to credibly fight Superman, Batman would require super powers like the Man of Tomorrow’s and B) Batman would have to be deranged.

In other stories, when Superman, Batman and Robin plotted against each other, it was almost always for the purpose of protecting each other from some secret threat. The superheroes — being mature, responsible adults — weren’t given to murderous rage then, and their deep concern for each other was a running theme of World’s Finest.

Each decade had its super-team. In the 1940s, we had DC’s groundbreaking Justice Society of America and, all too briefly, Marvel’s All-Winners Squad. In the superhero-rich 1960s, we had the Justice League of America, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers and the X-Men.

And in the superhero-poor 1950s, we had the minimalist team: just Superman, Batman and Robin. And we were glad to get them.

I Liked the Lad Who Had the Lightning

When I was 6, my favorite member of the Legion of Super Heroes was Lightning Lad, for four reasons:

1)           He was the first of them I saw, when Jerry Siegel sent him to rescue Superboy from Luthor’s Army of Living Kryptonite Men (Superboy 86, Jan. 1961). The Boy from Tomorrow saved the doomed Boy of Tomorrow single-handedly, a deus ex machina if there ever was one.

2)          Unlike the other founding members, LL sported the necessary swashbuckling flourish of a CAPE, in addition to a cool midnight blue costume.

3)          He had interesting red hair. Ginger superheroes were quite a rarity. In fact, I remember being vaguely confused as to whether Lightning Lad might be the secret identity of Jimmy Olsen.

4)          He could project LIGHTNING BOLTS from his HANDS! As a child, I loved lightning and thunder, so what could possibly be better than projecting LIGHTNING BOLTS from your HANDS?

The onset of adulthood brought with it the disappointing realization that however cool it may look, hurling lightning bolts is of extremely limited utility in solving life’s problems. Steel girders just don’t fall on people all that often.

Years later, the immense popularity of the Legion to a new generation of children puzzled me. Unlike the JLA or the Avengers, the Legion seemed a particularly contrived business.

Why should all superheroes be teenagers? Why should almost all superheroes have only one power? And why should all superheroes who have more than one power have exactly the same set of powers, namely Superman’s? Silly stuff.

What I had missed was that for later readers, the feature neatly combined the adventurous spirit of superhero stories with the time-tested romantic appeal of school fiction (an element later exploited by Harry Potter).

The Man of Iron with a Heart of Glass

Stan Lee said he was surprised to learn that Iron Man was the favorite Marvel superhero of female readers, but it makes sense, really.

Tony Stark was rich and handsome and brave, all familiar ingredients for romantic fantasy. And he had another advantage. Literally, Stark had “a broken heart.” He had all the qualities to be some girl’s perfect mate, but he nobly refused to commit himself to any of them because he might die at any moment.

That poor, poor rich guy. Irresistible.

By the time Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck and Jack Kirby debuted Iron Man in Tales of Suspense 39 (March 1963), the outlines of what would become the Marvel Comics universe had emerged.

That same month, Ant-Man was battling the extra-dimensional tyrant Kulla and Thor was corralling the mobster Thug Thatcher (Funny. You’d have thought it would be the other way around). The Incredible Hulk, battling the Metal Master in his last issue, also crossed over to the Fantastic Four title to fight them. Meanwhile, in his first issue, Spider-Man also dropped in on the FF to put in a job application (after fighting them, of course). In his solo feature, the Human Torch got conned by criminal Carl Zante, the Acrobat, into leaving the FF briefly.

This interconnected Marvel universe, now established, was expanding into both future and past. Zante would return shortly with another con, disguising himself as a long-vanished hero named Captain America.

Each Marvel superhero was distinctive — a monster, a myth, a miniature man, an alienated teenager and now a knight in technological armor. Even the character’s initial bulky, robot-like armor was intriguing. Though hardly stylish, it was the opposite of the customary cape and tights.

Iron Man hit the ground running. By his third adventure, he was already proclaimed as world famous. He’d even repelled an alien invasion by the time-tested Silver Age method of convincing the invaders that everyone else on Earth was like him.

I liked Iron Man from the first, and years later came to realize that he was among the most morally admirable of the superheroes, who are all pretty good eggs, after all.

Like Batman and Adam Strange, Tony Stark had powers, strategies and solutions that came entirely out of his own head, that were created solely by his own determined efforts. Stark was American know-how on steroids.

That’s why the plot of the third Iron Man movie did not entirely work for me. Tony Stark would be the last superhero on Earth to fear that he’s being “taken over” by his heroic identity.

His abilities are not arbitrary. His fate is not accidental. Tony Stark was not bitten by a radioactive spider or blinded by radioactive chemicals. Iron Man is entirely his own conscious creation, his tool, and Stark knows that fact better than anyone.

When Batman Really Sprang Into Action (Comics)

Dick Sprang, the best of the early Batman artists, once said something heretical: that what he liked drawing best were the World’s Finest stories involving Superman.

Why? Because the soaring, science fictional exuberance of Superman’s challenges expanded what he could play with in his art.

Sprang got more of what he wished as the 1950s wore on, because Superman — now a television star — was the dominant figure at DC Comics, the template for success. Even the most unlikely characters temporarily gained powers identical to the Man of Tomorrow’s — not just Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, but also Batwoman, Blackhawk and even the 18^th century pioneer Tomahawk.

Batman acquired his pal’s powers several times, notably in Batman: The Superman of Planet X (Batman 113 Feb. 1958). Teaming with the Batman of the planet Zur-En-Arrh to repel a enemy invasion, the Caped Crusader luckily finds he has super powers there. What are the odds?

The issue also offered a parody Batman (“Fatman”) and the first appearance of a Batman villain who would appear on TV a decade later (False Face, played by Malachi Throne). That was a lot of value for your dime. 

How Green Was My Lantern

The first time I saw the original Green Lantern was in the pages of Flash 129 (June 1962), and I was intrigued.

The gently graying Jay Garrick, the original Flash, was reminiscing with his wife Joan about his last adventure with the Justice Society of America 11 years before. He recalled Hawkman drenching the villain’s henchmen, Wonder Woman hoisting a submarine out of the water and Green Lantern deflecting bullets inside a power-ringed, armored shell.

The idea of having a second Justice League somewhere out there was thrilling to me — and this second Emerald Crusader, especially so.

I have since come to love Gil Kane’s elegant, clean-lined and streamlined black-and-green design for the Silver Age Green Lantern costume worn by Hal Jordan. But taste was not my strong suit as a child, and at 7 I preferred things garish. Alan Scott’s original costume certainly filled the bill, with its sweeping collared cape and dominant purples and reds (a “Green Lantern” dressed in red?).

Jon Morris wrote, “A red blouse dotted with yellow insignia, a purple collared cape with emerald green lining, forest green pants, red boots, yellow laces and a broad leather belt made up most of the outlandish costume, accented with his purple domino mask and, lest anyone mistake his color scheme or purpose, a detailed image of a green lantern smack in the middle of his chest.

“The costume served Alan Scott well enough through the end of his popularity, at which point he was effectively replaced in the pages of his own book by a crime-fighting dog.”

Martin Nodell’s concept for the character — a superheroic Aladdin complete with lamp and ring — was an excellent one. Beyond all the claptrap about “will power,” Green Lantern’s ability was one he would share with all his readers — the power to wish for things.

But when I finally read the original GL’s earliest adventures decades later, I was disappointed. Beginning with the hero’s origin in All-American Comics 16 (July 1940), the art was crude, the opponents pedestrian. His vast, fantastic powers seemed to be deliberately played down, as if dullness was actually supposed to be the point of the stories.

As with many DC Comics superheroes, the stories produced after World War II, in the twilight of the Golden Age, were much better. The whole tone of the comics improved considerably.
With talented writers like John Broome and the Hugo Award-winning Alfred Bester and accomplished artists like Carmine Infantino, Alex Toth and Irwin Hasen, Green Lantern now faced memorable menaces like the unstoppable swamp zombie Solomon Grundy and the cheeky rogue Harlequin, who diverted GL’s crusade against crime into a battle of the sexes.

The Man Who Hated Wonder Woman

Early on, I realized that Robert Kanigher hated Wonder Woman, the character he wrote and edited for 22 years.

Many stories were written with a randomness that suggested contempt, the plots taking illogical left turns — people gliding on air currents, dinosaurs and giant birds showing up for no reason. That was nothing like the loving care Kanigher lavished on his DC war comics.

In fact, as author Jill Lepore noted, Kanigher sneeringly referred to her as “…the grotesque, inhuman original Wonder Woman.”

He may well have resented the assignment. Thanks to clever contract negotiation by William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, DC was forced to continually publish the character or lose the rights.

And Kanigher’s distaste for the Golden Age Wonder Woman, with its overripe art by H.G. Peter, wasn’t entirely unfounded. Marston’s admirable promotion of peace and equal rights was, after all, delivered with an admixture of S&M fetishism about the glories of “loving submission.”

“It’s a really big transition time for comics anyway because after the Second World War — this is sort of like what happens to the Cold War in spy films — superheroes have no one left to fight,” Lepore told National Public Radio. “Wonder Woman carries on, though. And Kanigher reimagines her in the 1950s as a kind of daffy, besotted, lovestruck girl, who — all she wants to do is marry Steve Trevor, who’s the guy she’s rescued, which … brings her to the United States in the first place.”

Nevertheless, every dozen issues or so, Kanigher managed to turn out a decent story, always enhanced by the strong art of Ross Andru. And one of them was The Proving of Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman 131 (July 1962). The tale had underworld ghosts, Jove hurling thunderbolts, a trident-wielding Neptune and a gigantic, green, three-headed dog. What more, really, could a kid ask?

Funny how often, from her origin on, Wonder Woman would be required to prove herself in some test or other. That was in part merely a story angle made possible by the fact that other Amazons were available to replace her, I suppose. But she’s one superhero who always had to keep resubmitting her application.

When the Tiny Tackles the Titanic

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s irradiated giant monsters from the 1950s would occasionally rampage into their irradiated superhero titles in the 1960s. Liking them both, I was happy to see that happen.

Case in point: Tales to Astonish 39 (Jan. 1963). It’s yet another example of the “mirror image enemy:” an insect-sized hero pitted against a gigantic intelligent insect. 

Made titanic in both stature and intellect, the Scarlet Beetle forms an insect army and turns it against humanity, with termites cutting off communications and bees and spiders attacking and immobilizing police and public officials. Can even the Astonishing Ant-Man stop him?

Turns out he can, although not without being redundant (Note to Dr. Pym: all telepathy is mental)

The tale’s conclusion even manages to be a little touching, as Hank Pym releases the de-powered and re-sized insect, who’d after all merely been a pawn of fate, to crawl away on his lawn. It’s perhaps the best ending since the Fantastic Four turned the Skrulls into cows and left them mooing in a pasture.

The Adventures of the Fly and Another Guy

Despite the immensely popular Adventures of Superman TV show, the 1950s were kind of a desert for superheroes.

They were characters who’d had their heyday in the Great Depression and World War II, upheavals so vast they seemed to require superhuman champions to set things right. But afterward, with Americans in conformist retreat to the suburbs and wary of annihilation by a war between the actual super powers, superheroes’ colorfully costumed melodrama must have seemed out of place.

Like DC with the Flash and Green Lantern, Archie Comics caught the first wave of the coming Silver Age with its Adventures of the Fly in 1959. Tommy Troy was a boy magically transformed into an adult superhero, a winning concept that was going begging since Fawcett Comics had stopped publishing Captain Marvel five years before. Oddly, that angle was dropped after a couple of issues, and Tommy was rushed through law school to become an adult attorney.

In the first issue I bought, Adventures of the Fly 8 (Sept. 1960), I was delighted to find two superheroes for the price of one (then a dime). The Fly teamed up with the Shield to fight the Monster Gang. Movie monsters too! How good could this get?

I remember being puzzled by the fact that the Shield seemed to come from nowhere, because he had no title of his own. In fact, he did — The Double Life of Private Strong by Simon and Kirby, which lasted only two issues in 1959. The revamped Golden Age character now boasted flight, super-strength, invulnerability, super-vision and the ability to project lightning, and was the orphaned son of a scientist who’d given him his expanded-mind powers. Lancelot Strong had also been adopted and raised by a kindly farm couple.

Sound familiar? DC Comics thought so and threatened legal action, banishing the Shield to near-limbo. He did, however, show up for a couple of guest spots with the Fly. The same thing happened with the Black Hood, another Golden Age superhero I’d never heard of, despite the fact that he’d once had his own comic book, radio series and pulp magazine.

Turning Back Time with Superboy

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Superman’s formidable powers increased steadily to some point just short of omnipotence.

By 1960, Superman, Superboy, Supergirl and even Krypto could freeze lakes with their breath, push planets around and see through time. Writer Denny O’Neil recalled the era with a joke, asking, “How do you write stories about a guy who can destroy a galaxy by listening hard?”

Actually, there were ways, one of them illustrated in Superboy 85 (Dec. 1960).

Although Superboy could travel through time, comic book metaphysics required that he be unable to alter events in the past (a rule abandoned in the 1978 Superman film, obviously). The real reason was dramatic necessity — Superboy’s Earth would become radically different than our own if history’s tragedies were to be retroactively averted, and reader identification would suffer.

That stricture would seem to preclude suspenseful storytelling, but in the right hands, it need not.

In The Impossible Mission, Superboy attempts to thwart the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Meanwhile, Superman’s archenemy, the adult Lex Luthor, has fled to the same era to escape the Man of Tomorrow (a nickname that’s literal in this instance). Mistakenly believing Superboy is pursuing him, Luthor paralyzes him with red kryptonite, only to learn the truth, to his horror — that his fear of Superman has caused the murder of the Great Emancipator.

The story (written by Superman’s co-creator Jerry Siegel and drawn by George Papp) suggests previously unexplored depths in Luthor’s character — that while he may be evil, he doesn’t consider himself to be a monster and is appalled by the role which history has forced him to play. Here, he reminds me of the embittered character of Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, railing against his inescapable, shameful fate.

This was one of several efforts made at the time to suggest there was more to Luthor than his 20-year obsession with  murdering Superman might suggest. We learned that he had a psychically gifted sister, Lena Thorul, from whom he kept his identity a secret. Lena was another Siegel contribution to the mythos. And we would shortly find that Luthor could play the hero himself and even enjoy the role, on a distant planet, as long as Superman remained far, far away.

Fascinated by the Face That Wasn't There

Sometimes the comic books you saw in ads but didn’t get to read could be as fascinating as the comics that you actually paid your dime or 12 cents to buy.

At times, they could even be more compelling, because not knowing the story behind the covers forced you into the delightful practice of using your imagination and speculating — of writing, in effect, just the way Gardner Fox and John Broome did.

Such was the case with Strange Adventures 124 (Jan. 1961), which introduced the Faceless Creature.

By 1961, mere aliens from other planets had gotten rather old hat in DC Comics’ Strange Adventures. So the Faceless Hunter wasn’t merely from the planet Saturn, but from Klaramar, a sub-atomic world revolving within an atom on Saturn that operates within a different temporal field than the Earth. Now THAT’S what I call an alien! One Klaramarian day equals a million Earth years (a fact that renders the two sequels to the first story impossible, but we’ll forget about that).

The first Faceless Creature was Klee-Pan, a benevolent alien who inexplicably seems to be stealing the faces from terrestrial monuments. In fact, he is seeking a bomb that will destroy the solar system, one has been locked by the evil Chen Yull into a vault which can only be opened by some giant head.

Visiting Mount Rushmore, Klee-Pan teamed up with two South Dakota Highway Patrolmen, Jim Boone and Bob Colby, to save our worlds. As a reward, Klee-Pan enabled the two police officers to telepathically communicate with each other. The two would return in Strange Adventures 142 (July 1962) to battle Chen Yull himself, and then Chen Yull would return to threaten humanity again in Strange Adventures 153 (June 1963).

Mike Sekowsky, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane did the artistic honors for the Fox stories.

Elegantly designed, weirdly powered, smooth-faced, pleasantly orange giant aliens, recurring human protagonists who gain superhuman abilities, and DC’s customarily reassuring “cozy catastrophe” science fiction scenarios — I was right the first time. If I’d had the chance to read these tales when they were published, I would have loved them.