Although he always lived in Superman’s shadow, Zatara the Magician was at least as powerful as the more popular Man of Tomorrow.
Zatara, a Mandrake knock-off feature appearing in Action Comics, was just as omnipotent as that newspaper strip magician had been before Lee Falk scaled back his powers to a kind of super hypnosis.
In Action Comics 35, alone, Zatara used his backwards-babbling sorcery to become invisible, levitate, sprout wings and fly, electrify guns, petrify people, have a chat with the wind and trace criminal movements with his “time vision,” among other things.
How? At age 19, vaudeville stage magician John Zatara stumbled across a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci’s that enabled him to draw power from a magical dimension.
Astounding though his powers were, Zatara represented a sub-genre of character that was commonplace in the early 1940s.
“The Mandrake clones alone could populate a small town,” noted Kurt F. Mitchell in American Comic Book Chronicles. “Dakor, Dr. Miracle, El Carim, the Ghost, Kardak, Magar, Mantor, Marvelo, Marvo, Merlin, Merzah, Mister Mist, Monako, Mystico, Voodini, Yarko, Zambini, Zanzibar, Zardi, Zatara, and the splendidly redundant Warlock the Wizard.”
“The most prolific creator of such characters was Fred Guardineer, the cartoonist behind Yarko the Great (Fox Feature Syndicate); Marvelo, Monarch of Magicians (Columbia Comics); Tor the Magic Master (Quality Comics) and other tuxedo-clad super-magicians,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “The first and longest-lasting Guardineer creation was Zatara.”
“At first, Zatara was considered a big enough draw to wrest a few covers away from the Man of Steel, but he soon settled into a comfortable niche in the back pages,” Markstein said. “He remained there until 1950, when new features and shrinking page counts crowded him out. He also appeared in the back pages of most 1940s issues of World’s Finest Comics, where Superman and Batman shared the covers.”
Zatara began concurrently with Superman, in Action Comics 1 (June 1938). And he left a legacy: his daughter, Zatanna.
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