The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told: "The Girl in Superman's Past"

The Superman universe of comics exploded in the mid to late 1950's, developing into what we know of it today. Supergirl. Krypto the Superdog. Brainiac. Kandor. Streaky the Supercat.

Jimmy Olsen, Daily Planet cub reporter and Superman's pal got his own comic book earlier in the decade. Lois Lane later got the same treatment, first through a try-out in DC Comics' "experimental, will-it-sell?" comic Showcase in 1957. The Superman comics were always good at bringing in the unbelievable- the writers were stuck with a super-godlike character that couldn't just fight normal villains and have normal adventures, so they went completely over-the-top, to the point of completely messing with their readers. But, with this in mind, Lois Lane comics somehow brought this type of story-telling to a whole new nth level of ridiculousness! The Lois Lane comics are completely and utterly saturated with "what-the...?" moments.

A good deal of Lois Lane comics dealt with her obsession of finding out who Superman truly is, usually with some out-of-this-world schemes, or, with her obsession with MARRYING Superman, which usually involved some other woman getting in the way! Sometimes, she would get Superman to marry her, but the reader would find out that these were "imaginary stories," a brand of what-if situations where things would go dramatically wrong!

This particular story brings the grown-up Lana Lang into the world of Superman. When Superman was a boy living in Smallville, he operated as Superboy- and Lana Lang was his double-L-initialled girlfriend. What would happen if she were to suddenly show up again??? Let the crazy begin!!!

From Showcase Comics #9 (June/July 1957):

First of all, this story must be read as a story of two snarly drag-queens catfighting it out over some poor guy! Mreeeeeow!

"Hussy!" Way to go, Lois! That's a word that ain't used enough!

Lana seems like a cat that won't stop rubbing up against you no matter how many times you kick it!

Super-sweat!

Clark looks deformed in that first panel. And more Super-sweat. I love sweat-beads in comics! Especially, when Superman doesn't break a sweat pushing planets around- yet, these two in a room together will make sweat buckets!

Lois is already scheming...look at her eyes- soooo cold.

Lana casually applying lipstick. Cold.

Clark Kent (alias Superman), it's your own damn fault for getting these scheming bitches together in one room!

More Super-sweat, he's been sweating up a storm since this story started!

Those crazy queens are talking smack and comparing suspicions! It's like Clark wants to be found out!!!

PS: The gay waiter is a nice artistic addition to a bunch of hags reminiscing over their plans of outing Superman.

Lois is keeping her enemies close, real close!

Lana, you moved to Metropolis without a job or place to live???

Hmmmmm....I wonder what people would think of all the pictures of super-heroes I have up on my walls? Would they jump to conclusions and think we're dating?

Lois is touching and caressing Lana's drag costume.

Watch out, Lana! Lois is about to show you her man-parts!

So Lana moved to Metropolis without a job or a home and basically has nothing, yet she still carries around a framed love note from when she was a kid, and brings it out any chance she's got.....that sound's healthy!

Lana, you better get that wig back into place!

Oooooo, here's they get all "Sex in the City!" "He never kissed you--did he?????"

"Of course!" Lana, you hussy!

By the way, Lana you are looking soooo Vertigo Kim Novak- those hefty caked-on eyebrows!

The claws are coming out! Lois, I hope you can match the crazy stalker tenacity of Lana!

Lana, acting all cool again! Reapplying that lipstick again! Signature move!

As you will see, Superman loves to sit down and have a hearty meal!

"Green Horse" Inn? That sounds grosssss. Luckily, Superman can eat anything, as you will see later!

Who's paying for this meal? Superman, you have no place to put a wallet. And Lana, you have no job!

Oh by the way, bitch, you wore that same skanky-ass outfit yesterday!

Superman, you need to stop going out to eat all the time. You are getting fat. You have that big old body and that tiny little head. Too many lunch dates at the Green Horse!

Likely story, Lois. Way to be professional!

What the heck is that junkman doing with his junk-truck in front of the Green Horse Inn??? What kind of place do they run??? It's funny, Superman never has to pay for anything!

That's got to be good advertising for one's restaurant. Superman comes and eats at your place, yet he'd rather chew on some garbage from the passing junk-cart!

Lois, don't you be letting him do you that way! Tie you to a kite, what????? I don't care how sturdy it is! Have some dignity!

Now that is what you call a job for Superman....a blow job! (so sorry...)

Lois, no matter how high in the air you are, you are at a new low. Although, being flown on a kite is probably something no other drag queen has ever done before!

Surprise! Superman is eating out again.

Oh, and look, Lana is wearing that hideous outfit for a third day in a row. Must not have had any room in her luggage for clothes with all the Superman relics she brought along.

Superman looks like he needs some Gas-X.

Lois and Lana, you're about to see he hates you equally.

Superman, the one who started de-forestation.

A cool parlor trick---flying with a woman in one arm, and a completely set dinner table in the other, and not dropping either!

What???? A cooking program??? How 1950s of you, Lana! At least you know the way to Superman's heart. Look, that ass is outside your fake studio window, somehow floating in the air and EATING.

Uh-oh, so they realize that he was being nice to both of them! So they are going to take their insidiousness to a whole new level! Well, I hope they at least change their clothes tomorrow!

Nope, same nasty-ass smelly clothes again! Four days in a row.

Dude, don't let them touch your remote controls!!!

Um, if the steamroller and glider are remote-controlled, why do they have drivers' seats???? What are this guy's credentials????

Girls, pretending that you are in trouble is really going to make you look good. "Remember that time we pretended to be in danger and got Superman to "save" us. And then that orphanage burned down because he wasn't there! Hahahahahahaha!"

Superman's about to bring the smack-down!

Drama/Drag queens just hate it when they aren't getting the attention they desire! So mopey! "Oh, he wouldn't care if we lived or died!!!" Boo-hooo! Get a job!

Lois and Lana, Superman likes Jimmy Olsen more.

Ok, Superman, like I've said before, you've only brought this upon yourself!

The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told: "Escape to the Stars"

The third story in this book features an early tale of the Martian Manhunter, one of DC Comics' supposed heavy-hitters- a displaced, pea-souped-colored alien who wears a kinky outfit.

J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter made his first appearance in a back-up story in the November 1955 issue of Detective Comics (#255), one of the homes of Batman. In that particular tale, he is accidentally teleported to Earth by an elderly scientist who almost immediately dies of shock when he sees what he has done. The alien, trapped on Earth, decides to use his superb martian powers to fight crime until the time that martian technology catches up and is able to bring him back to his home planet. He has incredible martian morphing abilities and disguises himself as a human being and takes a job with the local police force as Detective John Jones.

So far, as I've been reading along in the collection, I've taken note the importance of how either identity or role play out in these comic stories. The first story involved Superman and Batman playing out a role-reversal as Superman loses his powers and Batman gains super powers. The second tale I blogged about dealt with the frontier hero Tomahawk disguising himself and posing as the villain as a use of subterfuge. Then with John Jones, there's the whole idea that there is someone amongst us, hiding, who is unknowingly, yet incredibly, alien.

The Martian Manhunter was literally a manhunter in his early stories. He was one of us, hunting down criminals. Rarely did he revert to his original martian form. It's important to note he appeared, along with Batman, in DETECTIVE comics. It wasn't until the dawn of the new sleek and sciece-based super-heroes, like the Flash and Green Lantern, that J'onn J'onzz started fighting crime as his super martian self, not as a disguised human. He was then seen flying around his city protecting it like Superman.

The Martian Manhunter is a creature of duality. He is Batman, the detective; and he is Superman, the alien powerhouse. He just happened to be super-heroing at the right time, being one of the only seven super-heroes appearing in DC Comics in early 1960, that he got to become a founding member of their super-hero team, the Justice League of America.

DC was worried, at first, that having Batman and Superman appear in too many of the JLA stories would overexpose them, and so used the Martian Manhunter as a substitute Superman, and Green Arrow in for Batman. However, as the 1960s moved on and the big two started to appear more and more often, it made those other two a bit redundant- and in the case of J'onn J'onzz, he fell entirely off the comics radar. It wasn't until the mid 1980s that he significantly appeared again, as a sort of a respected, elder amongst super-heroes.

"Escape from the Stars," first printed in Detective #228 (Feb 1956), is one of his earlier tales, printed at a time that comics weren't doing super-hero so much. As I read this story, I kept in mind some of the 1950s(ish) political and cultural subtext of the time. The House of Un-American Activities. The golden-age of television. The written works of James Baldwin. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The alien movie genre: War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Godzilla. I think so many of these concepts can be applied to an alien being transported to a land he does not belong to, however, I think I may be elevating the comic material just a bit! Anyway, that's in my mind when I think of the Martian Manhunter...(although Darwyn Cooke gets him spot on in his series "DC: The New Frontier," which I MUST spotlight here in my blog- as soon as I get a new copy or get access to all my comics and books in storage...)

In this tale, John Jones is told to get a lead on some thief, Alex Dunster who has eluded the entire police force, his super-self included. He uses his powers to find him but is discovered because Dunster was using a super-giant hearing aid to hear Jones walking through walls!

Jones has to start over, but soon his manhunt leads him down a dirt road to a cabin (because its in the middle of the woods that the most amazing scientific discoveries are made as you can see...)

The machine that first brought him to Earth!

He has a chance to get back home!

But his nobility and a simple little glass test-tube destroy his hopes!

No way!!!! That's how we got stuck with the Martian Manhunter...

The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told: "The Black Cougar!"

The second story in the collection is a Tomahawk story drawn by the great Frank Frazetta! In the 1950's comic book companies were relying less and less on super hero stories and were putting more effort into other genres. Tomahawk is a fine example of the frontier comic. I guess he's supposed to be like the legendary Daniel Boone with the coon-skin cap and all. He's got a side-kick named Dan....hmmmmm, maybe in the DC re-writing of history, Daniel was his boy wonder!

This tale is about an evil, two-faced warden who works secretly with the criminals he's supposedly capturing, and who, at the same time, is also dressing up in a giant black blanket or cloak as the Black Cougar to run guns to stereotypical Indians. He does this by placing them secretly into the contents of covered wagons that Tomahawk is leading. Tomahawk and his little buddy Dan figure this out, but they don't figure out that the warden, the insidious white guy with a mustache and goat-tee, is the evil trouble-making Black Cat, someone who would sell his fellow palefaces out to the easily upsettable Indians.

What I enjoyed most about this story was the use of the term "black cougar" and the ferocious little portrait that went along with it in the panel above!

The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told: "The Super Bat-Man!"

"The Super Bat-Man!" is the first story in the collection of DC's Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told, and, oh boy, what a great one to start off with! The premise of the story is that Superman loses his powers, while Batman gains super-powers! The fifties were secretly, or not so secretly, a time of identity flip-flopping!

Here's the cover of the issue it was originally printed in, World's Finest Comics #77 from July/Aug 1955 (art and cover by the late great Curt Swan):

The story starts off in Metropolis where Clark and Lois are going off to get some grub, when all of a sudden Clark (Superman!) overhears some hooligans talking about some professor and a machine he made that will "fix" Superman. Of course, as Clark is listening Lois thinks she's being ignored by him,and so she has a hissy fit and conveniently walks away! Anyway, after a quick change Superman is off to find this Professor Pender who has set up shop in some seedy part of Metropolis. You would think that with his super planet-crushing abilities he had back then, that Superman would have been procured by the city planning department to work on 1950 urban renewal plans! Well, bam, Superman walks (I mean busts a brick wall down) into a trap and gets zapped and loses his powers. Coincidently, Batman and Robin show up at the same time and Batman gets in the way of a power-ray that was meant for the professor and becomes overwhelmingly strong!

So the story is set up. Superman falls out a window because he doesn't realize he's lost his powers and Batman has to fly out and save him from splatting!

(Way to go Batman, saying things you can't say in today's comics!)



Since Batman is all super and stuff he decides weakling Superman needs a car to get around and gives him the Batmobile, newly customized and pimped up as the "Super-mobile!" He also punches out a cave for Superman to hide in. Batman loves caves and is grateful for any chance he can create one for someone else!

Superman doesn't stay in the cave, however, smugly cruising the streets of downtown Metropolis in his new Super-Mobile. Lois, sees him driving around, and of course wonders why he is driving a car! She's always so suspicious!

And while Superman is driving his un-super self around in a convertible in broad daylight, what is Batman doing? You know, because he has SUPER POWERS? Well, he decides to sit at home in his millionaire robe drinking tea! He can't handle his powers properly and breaks the table, making Alfred the Butler to clean up the darn mess.

Before he gives Alfred a stroke, he finally decides to head out to find this Pender fellow to fix things up and to put him in jail. Well, being ever vigilant, he overhears that a powder arsenel has caught on fire and is about to blow up. He flies on over throws the entire fricking building in the air as it explodes! Well, then he realizes all the flaming material is going to hit the city below! So he creates and dons a pair of giant metal bat-wings to flap the material away so the ignorant people below wont realize that explosives were about to rain down and them!

Meanwhile, Superman hasn't performed a super-stunt and suspicious Lois is hounding him. Of course she gets in the way of him rounding up some crooks and almost gets her ass killed. Oh by the way, she is saved because we find out that Superman's suit is still super.

There's a great scene with Batman moving an entire orphanage to a new site and there's Robin jumping out the window as Batman is putting it down. Kind of ironic, since both Batman and Robin are orphans!

Anyways, a bunch of other stuff happens where we find out that Superman was only zapped with a fine-kryptonite ray. As long as Superman kept wearing the same clothes that got blasted with the ray he had no powers. So he changed into a spare costume (glad he did his laundry!) and flies Robin around for awhile and finds a cave where Pender and his henchman (I'm guessing poor graduate students) are about to try and give themselves powers. Well, too damn late. Batman shows up, and even though his powers are fading he, Robin, and Superman knock the crap out of them.

To end the story, Lois gets in their faces and says she knows the two were up to something, guessing they were dressed as each other for the day! Superman and Batman smile knowing what a fool she really is.

The art in this story was incredible. But every page and panel is packed TIGHT! Lots going on, and so much dialogue! The word bubbles take up a lot of real estate! Today's comics pages have moved towards a much less dense of a page. Stories like these back then were usually six to eight pages; nowadays, 22, and then will probably continue into another three or so issues after that. As I blog about these stories, I know it will be a bit of a challenge to "decode" and break them down- but, I'm up to it!

Next: Tomahawk by Frank Frazetta!

Summer Reading: The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told

Now that I've restarted "The Quarter Bin," a review dump of the comics that I've read and own, I have hit a bit of a quandary: i.e. my vast comic collection from which I'd like to work from is in storage all the way back in Milwaukee, hundreds of miles from Pittsburgh!

For my drive here, I had thrown in the back of my truck a few of my possessions- a couple of which, luckily for the purposes of this blog, were some extra beat-up hardcover books that collected stories from old comic books. The one I've started reading this week is the one pictured above: "The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told!" A reprint collection put out by DC Comics presenting a wide variety of stories that they published back then.

Comic books enjoyed their glory days during the 1940s, but by the early '50s they were under attack from multiple directions: the newfound popularity of television, suburban sprawl and the lack of comic-selling outlets nearby to children, and dubious federal government committees on delinquency of those children! In order to survive, comic book companies were forced to experiment with the stories they told and sold. Once popular super-heroes were seemingly breathing their last and were quickly being replaced by westerns, romances, and for a while crime comics. Super heroes only seemed to survive because of the television medium. When the "The Adventures of Superman" starring George Reeves started appearing on the sets across America, there was a renewed interest in the printed tales of Superman. Of all the hundreds of super heroes that fought during the war years, only five continued being published on into the 50s, all of them at DC: the popular Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman- and by fluke, back-up story characters Aquaman, and Green Arrow.

The boundaries of the comic book medium were expanded at this time. The careers of many great artists and writers lifted off during this time, and their work is well-represented in this collection. Murphy Anderson, Ross Andru, John Broome, Ramona Fradon, Frank Frazetta, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Robert Kanigher, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, Shelly Mayer, Dick Sprang, Curt Swan, and Alex Toth are many of the top talents of the day whose work appear within.

With the efforts of these creators, the medium of the comic book survived its struggle for existence and ushered in a new Silver-Age for itself. By the end of the 1950s, new updated versions of older characters such as the Flash and Green Lantern, based on the marvels of science, were introduced to the reading public and became extremely popular. The comics that are being read today are still based on the innovations of the 1950s.

With that in mind, I've decided to focus on the stories within this collection to examine for my blog: an exciting world following the 1950s four-color exploits of the Big 5 and the Flash and Green Lantern, as well as Captain Comet, Martian Manhunter, the Shining Knight, the Phantom Stranger, the Viking Prince, and many others! The next bunch of posts will be me sharing my reviews and insights on each of the individual stories. I have to say, this book is quite enjoyable, especially as I imagine that these tales were once gobbled up by millions of readers all over the country- on vacation, at camp, and under bedsheets with flashlights!

Aquaman Illustration by Steve Rude

Wow! It's been QUITE A WHILE since I've last blogged here at the Quarter Bin! Since I last signed in and posted something here, I've gotten two degrees: one, an associate's in architectural drafting; and two, my master's in urban planning. I've moved from NYC to Madison to Milwaukee and now I'm in Pittsburgh for the summer interning in the city's planning department with the public art manager.

Anyway.... I've had the week off (my boss is at a conference in San Diego), and of course, it's been rainy. I've been spending some time in the house I'm renting a room in looking at how very little I have here. Only three or so comics, and nothing at all on the snot-colored walls! Usually, wherever I'm living, I'll have my framed comic posters and original comic art up. One of my favorites is a piece I commissioned from Steve Rude, a comic book artist most known for his crisp, clean artwork in the Nexus series that harkens to the classic age of American illustration.

Steve Rude came across my comic-book reading radar, not from Nexus (which is great stuff, btw), but from a three-issue "prestige" (meaning, more pages, better page and print quality, and card-stock style covers) mini-series for DC starring the World's Finest team of Superman and Batman. In 1990, the DC comics universe was still slightly fresh after a company-wide shake-up of their super-hero worlds. Superman and Batman had been revamped, to the point where they worked using different crime-fighting techniques. Once where they had been best friends, they now seemed to look at each other with suspicion. Anyhow....blah blah blah...the point is Rude illustrated these differences beautifully- Superman in his sunny Golden-Age, Fleischer-esque glory and Batman as a thrilling vigilante of the night. To this day, these are my visions of the two heroes.

Come October 2008. I got a chance to meet Steve Rude at a comic signing at Westfield Comics in Madison. I just went to say hello and to maybe have him sign a copy of one of my World's Finest issues. Surprisingly, not a lot of people were there. But, Steve was gracious nonetheless and shared stories of his career, as well as drawing techniques. We got to talking and the subject of my cultish fascination with Aquaman came up. Mr. Rude, thought for a moment and realized that he had never drawn the King of the Seas before! Using the cover of a "Showcase" collection of Aquaman stories as reference he hunkered down and put together this amazing drawing!