A Legion of Losers Takes a Bow in Adventure

In the Smallville Mailsack page of Adventure Comics 304 (Jan. 1963), reader Buddy LaVigne of Northbrook, IL, wrote, “I suggest a new character, Polar Boy, who has the power of freezing to ice anything in his area.”

From that suggestion came not just a new character but a new team based on a fresh and contradictory concept: superheroes who were inferior.

Winners who were “losers.”

Created by writer Edmond Hamilton and artist John Forte in Adventure Comics 306 (March 1963), the plight of the Substitute Heroes touched me at once.

Like every high school wannabe who ever mooned over a quarterback or a cheerleader, the Substitutes obsessed about the idols who rejected them. I immediately found their adventures more interesting than those of the super-club they were so desperate to get into because they added an extra element to the drama: poignancy.

After all, movies and young adult novels don’t get written about in-crowds, but about the people who are trying to get into them. In-crowds are, frankly, kind of boring.

“The Legion of Substitute Heroes was founded by Polar Boy, Night Girl, Stone Boy, Fire Lad and Chlorophyll Kid, five young heroes whose powers were not sufficient to earn them membership in the Legion of Super-Heroes — Night Girl for example could only use her powers in the dark,” Wikipedia notes.

“After receiving a Legion flight belt as a consolation prize, the five disconsolate teenagers decided to form a group that could pinch hit for the Legion. After several failures as a team, the Subs managed to save the Earth from an invasion by Plant Men while the Legion was off planet fighting a decoy armada of robot spaceships.

“At first operating in secrecy, the Legion of Substitute Heroes was gradually recognized by the real Legion as a valuable asset, most notably after the assault on the Citadel of Throon when the regular Legionnaires were all defeated and it was left to Polar Boy and Night Girl to lead an effective attack and end the siege. The Substitute Heroes saved the Legionnaires from such threats as the Taurus Gang and the lethal League of Super-Assassins.”

Keith Giffen later treated the team as a joke, missing the point of their outsider appeal, I think. This-series-within-a-series originally offered a useful moral: that being rejected by the people you want to like you doesn’t mean you can’t make a mark in your own way, and still be happy.

Oddly enough, the “underdog superhero” theme would also be explored in a comic book character who got his own title the same month the Subs debuted.

His name? Spider-Man.

More Giant Turtle Men Than One Would Expect

You can thank — or blame — Mort Weisinger for all the giant turtle men who used to wander around tearing up highway bridges.

The first was cover-featured in the July 1940 issue of the Weisinger-edited pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories, an illustration for Out Of The Depths by H.L. Gold.

In 1941, Weisinger moved from Standard Magazines to National Periodicals as editor of the Superman and Batman titles. That’s why Superman’s pal became a giant turtle man in Jimmy Olsen 53 (June 1961).

Superman might have had a sense of déjà vu, because he had also confronted a giant turtle man in Superboy 30 (Jan. 1954).

As the Curt Swan/Bill Finger story The Giant Who Came to Smallville! opens, a turtle the size of a Volkswagen clamps onto the Smallville mayor’s car, prompting Superboy to sort things out. The Boy of Steel returns the turtle to its owner, a local scientist named Willis, who complains that no one in Smallville takes his growth serum seriously.

“They all think my giant turtle is just a freak — an accident!” he says. “And they call me a crazy scientist!”

Can’t imagine why. It’s not like he would leave his growth formula in a temptingly shiny test tube next to the baby crib where his infant son could drink it.

Oh wait. He did.

It would prove to be Willis’ last mistake. While the baby was drinking the stuff, his parents were being killed by a volcanic eruption at the remote location to which they’d moved.

The baby, now grown to giant turtle manhood, wanders off to Metropolis, where he plays with an ocean liner as if it were a toy boat. Superboy has his hands full trying to protect the innocent child from being killed by military planes while shielding the public from the giant and finding a way to corral it. With characteristic compassion, he does so by finding a way to befriend the giant boy, not by frightening him.

Superboy develops an antidote to shrink the creature back to normal and arranges for the Smallville mayor to adopt the orphan, while keeping him in the dark about any colossal reptilian incidents in the boy’s past.

Cross-index this one under Monster Toddlers, a category that includes the Fantastic Four’s Infant Terrible and Captain James T. Kirk’s Squire of Gothos.

The story worked a little better here than when it was retooled for Jimmy Olsen. After all, Jimmy had to be not merely expanded into a giant turtle man but also “babyfied” in the brain.

It’s also easier for readers to accept the idea that a toddler might drink a dangerous super-scientific freakish-transformation serum than that Superman’s friends Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Lana Lang and Perry White would do so.

Repeatedly.

And, of course, delightfully. 

The Super Foe in the Mirror

What’s strange is that with one mirror-image antagonist Superman — Bizarro — already an established character, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Curt Swan would introduce another one in Superman 137 (May 1960).

And what’s even stranger than that is how well the story would work.

As with his The Death of Superman and Superman’s Return to Krypton storylines, Superman’s creator would prove he could still supply plenty of angst and depth in stories about his brainchild two decades after the Man of Tomorrow’s debut.

Here, a mysterious alien spacecraft created a duplicate of Kal-El’s space rocket on its journey to Earth. We readers forgave Siegel the implausibility of the notion that a second Superman could have been raised secretly on Earth because of the intriguing idea this unlikely event permitted him to explore: what if someone other than the kindly Kents had raised Superman?

And in the age-old nature versus nurture debate, Siegel comes down firmly on the side of nurture.

The child raised by the criminals Wolf and Bonnie Derek becomes Super-Brat, inundating a town with giant snowmen, and then Super-Bully, a juvenile delinquent who releases the big cats from Smallville Zoo just so he can bat them around.

Finally, as the adult Super-Menace, he defeats and nearly destroys Superman with kryptonite. The Man of Steel’s life is spared only because Super-Menace’s super hearing reveals that his foster parents had always loathed him and were only manipulating him to satisfy their powerlust and greed. The unloved, heartbroken energy being buries the kryptonite with his super-breath and then — as they scream and plead for their lives — explodes himself at his foster parents, destroying them as well as himself.

Ineffectual as Superman was here, I was always happy that at least one member of the Superman family immediately smelled a rat whenever Super Menace was around.

You can’t fool Krypto, folks.

Where Did That Masked Man Go?

“Weighed down by anxieties they were largely helpless to resolve, audiences in the 1950s craved simplicity and clarity,” wrote literature professor Kathleen L. Spencer in her thoughtful book on Have Gun Will Travel. “The Western gave them a world in which social problems could be solved by direct action, including violence if necessary.”

A cover painting from the Masked Rider pulp magazine.

Pop culture historian J. Fred MacDonald observed, “What the TV Western was offering was open warfare, a protracted battle between obvious legality and illegality. At stake was control of civilization. There was neither time nor reason for studied response. The answer to each dilemma was obvious: enough strategy, enough muscle, enough gunpowder. Through the concerted application of the brains and brawn of good men, this form of adult entertainment showed, indeed advocated, an efficient way to tame the savage and rescue humanity.”

Spencer said, “In the process of exploring such issues, the TV Westerns of the 1950s provided models for how a man was supposed to act: protecting the weak, facing down the brigand (whether outlaw, marauding Indian or tyrannical cattle baron) to prevent them from abusing the innocent, even while restraining his own violent impulses within the boundaries of a rigorous ethical code. The Western hero, in his purest form, sacrificed himself to make a better world for others, to transform a nearly lawless frontier into a place where civilization could take hold.”

“There is no way to know how many viewers took these lessons to heart and and acted on them in the real world,” Spencer wrote. “Perhaps some of the idealistic college students who risked their lives to fight for civil rights for blacks  in the South were inspired in part by the Westerner; certainly (as anecdotes reveal) some small but real percentage of the young men who volunteered to go fight in Vietnam were motivated by the television heroes of their childhood and adolescence.”

So why did these cowboy heroes, once so ubiquitous on TV and movies, ride off into the sunset? The answer is they did not. They merely donned disguises.

In all important respects, the western hero has become the superhero, now all dusted off, now streamlined and jet propelled. Civilization is still threatened, but now by forces tricked up as super criminals, alien invaders and supernatural monsters.

Like the western hero, the superhero is still simplistic in his solutions, still self-sacrificing in his ethics and still stands between us and the savage menaces of the frontier, but one that is no longer merely geographical. The superhero’s frontier is, as Rod Serling once intoned, “…a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination." 

Submitted for your Approval: The Phantom Zone

A number of enduring concepts in the Superman mythos were introduced not in titles featuring Superman, but Superboy. And that’s kind of a shame, because we almost never see those key stories reprinted.

Among those concepts were the Legion of Super-Heroes; red, white and gold kryptonite; Krypto the super dog; General Zod; Bizarro and the spooky, evocative Phantom Zone, a realm which provided an intelligent answer to the question of how an advanced alien civilization might avoid capital punishment.

Banishment to an eternal incorporeal existence seems almost worst than execution, in a way.

In a neat reversal, the Phantom Zone even saved the life of Superman’s “brother,” Mon-El, by removing him from exposure to lead, a substance fatal to him that is widespread on our planet. Mon-El’s fate had that offhandedly haunting angle that periodically appeared in these early Silver Age comics. To survive, Mon-El would have to endure hundreds of years of immaterial existence with only psychotics as companions.

And in a gift to the comics’ plotters, the Zone provided a means to periodically unleash super-powered villainous hell on Earth. That had first been done in Superman 65 (July/August 1950) when, in the story The Three Supermen from Space, the Kryptonian criminals Mala, Kizo and U-Ban were accidentally freed from suspended animation in a prison rocket ship. The evil trio returned in Action Comics 194 (Jul 1954), when their prison ship was whanged by yet another piece of space debris. Clearly this was a cumbersome means of retrieving menaces from Krypton.

The Phantom Zone was also a way of making Superman vulnerable, and those are always welcomed by writers (Supergirl too, in her 1984 movie).

The more efficient, elegant solution of the Phantom Zone was introduced in the comics in Adventure Comics 283 (April 1961) by Robert Bernstein and George Papp. But that wasn’t really its first appearance.
An identical concept had been introduced in the movie serial Atom Man vs. Superman (1950) as an invention of Luthor’s (Lyle Talbot) called the Empty Doom. The tell is that both the serial Superman and the comic book Superboy escaped from the ghostly trap the same way — by telekinetically manipulating the keys of a typewriter to send a message back to Earth.

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).

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.

The Many Resurrections of the Ghost Rider

So Ghost Rider is a supernatural motorcyclist who made a deal with the devil to save his father, and got a flaming skull-head for his trouble?

Well, no. At least, not to America’s dime-store cowboys back in 1949.

Originally, Ghost Rider was an Old West lawman turned trickster dressed in spectral white. The character’s evolution illustrates just how arcane the history of a comic book superhero can be, 80 or 90 years into the genre.

Rex Fury, the Calico Kid, was already a western hero in a backup feature in Magazine Enterprises’ Tim Holt comics. But in the 11^th issue, artist Dick Ayers and writer Ray Krank upped the ante by turning him into a 19^th century mystery man superhero.

Nearly killed when criminals disguised as Indians hurled him into a waterfall, Fury finds himself in a hidden cave and, like Will Eisner’s the Spirit, decides to return and ride for justice as his own ghost.

Ghost Rider’s dramatic design — a caped white figure with a full face mask, a pale wonder horse and lots of ghostly tricks — proved popular enough to propel the character into a respectable four-year run in 14 issues of his own comic book, plus appearances in other titles. He might have survived longer if the new Comics Code had not driven most horror comics out of business.

The character’s trademark lapsed and, in 1967, writers Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich joined with Ayers to bring Ghost Rider to Marvel Comics. This time he was one Carter Slade, tricked up in a costume identical to the original and fighting masked bandits instead of supernatural monsters. With westerns dying in popularity, the title ran for seven issues.

Then, in 1972, Thomas, Friedrich, and artist Mike Ploog used only the name of the character when they created Johnny Blaze, the long-running supernatural Ghost Rider who’s been featured in two Nicholas Cage films.

When the Carter Slade adventures were reprinted in 1974, he couldn’t be Ghost Rider, so — retroactively and unfortunately — he became Night Rider. Too late, Marvel realized that the white-clad, masked “freedom fighters” of the KKK had also called themselves night riders.

Oops. Another retroactive name change quickly ensued. Now Carter Slade was Phantom Rider, a title he came to share with a half-dozen successors, including one in the present day.

Meanwhile, AC Comics has reprinted the adventures of the original Rex Fury Ghost Rider, renaming him the Haunted Horseman to avoid conflict with Marvel. And the Carter Slade character even made it into the 2007 Ghost Rider movie in the person of actor Sam Elliott. In the film, the cursed Phantom Rider is a skeleton in a cowboy outfit riding a skeletal horse.

The late Dick Ayers said Ghost Rider remained his most requested art commission. Unfortunately, he saved none of the original merchandising the character inspired, as he told Comics Journal.

“I had three young sons that played cowboys, and they always wanted to be the Ghost Rider, so my sample drifted off,” Ayers said.

Tolerance and Respect: A Radical Notion in 2012, But Not in 1954

Superboy would like to have a word with the Tea Baggers.