In the spring of 1942, World War II wasn’t going so well.
The Nazis created their first extermination camp, Belzec, in Poland and PT boats evacuated U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur and his family from the Philippines under cover of darkness.
But for American children on the home front, life still had its pleasures. Red Ryder debuted on the NBC Blue radio network. The Ghost of Frankenstein was playing in the movie houses, as was Republic’s 12-chapter superhero movie serial Spy Smasher (now regarded as a classic of the genre). You could also see new Superman cartoons at the movies, The Bulleteers or The Magnetic Telescope.
For the past four years, the superhero had dominated comic books, which were now popular not just with children but with the troops overseas. The garish flying figures were cover-featured on the titles DC Comics regarded as its “Big Eight” — Action Comics, Flash Comics, Detective Comics, All-American Comics, Sensation Comics, Star-Spangled Comics, More Fun Comics and Adventure Comics.
Their covers spotlighted Superman, the Flash, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, the Guardian, Green Arrow and the Sandman (in his new yellow superhero outfit, fighting one of Jack Kirby’s several iterations of Thor).
“But superheroes were a fad during the Golden Age rather than something longer lasting, and fads inevitably end,” noted Jess Nivens in his book The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-year History of the Superhero.
“Even as early as 1942, the warning signs for the superhero genre could be seen. Of the 113 titles that debuted in 1942, 76 were non-superhero. Comic book publishers, new and old, attempted to exploit the market in new ways by pushing genres like humor and ‘funny animal’ that had not been exploited prewar.”
A decade later, superheroes would survive on only three of those DC covers — Action, Adventure and Detective. Wonder Woman would remain in her own title, and Green Arrow would be relegated to the back pages. The rest would be gone.
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