In Caveman Clark Kent! (Action Comics 169, June 1952), Clark and Lois Lane crash-land into an isolated prehistoric society complete with dinosaurs.
Superman’s cast of characters found themselves in Stone Age circumstances more than once. In The Challenge of Stoneman! (Action Comics 201, Feb. 1955), an inventor’s time machine took the Daily Planet reporters and a mobster to the prehistoric past.
On April 23, 1955, essentially the same story aired on The Adventures of Superman TV show as Through the Time Barrier.
In House of Mystery 4, the ever-reliable artist Ruben Moreira gave us The Man with the Evil Eye! The blinded mobster Jim Keene apparently acquires an “evil eye” in a cornea transplant, but it’s all an elaborate police hoax.
Belief in the evil eye was global and venerable. It goes back at least as far as Ugarit, a city destroyed circa 1,250 BC whose ruins can be found in modern-day Syria, according to historian Dennis Pardee. The evil eye is referenced by Plato, Hesiod, Theocritus, Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, among others.
“Though the theory that some possess a more potent glare capable of inflicting harm is quite common in the lore of the evil eye, not all correlate the power with an inherent ill will. Some cultures view the ability to bestow the curse as an unfortunate burden, a curse in itself,” noted Quinn Hargitai, writing for the BBC.
The new title House of Mystery was DC’s subdued answer to the horror comics craze that got rolling in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When the 1954 Comics Code pretty much put horror comics out of existence, DC shifted the tone of House of Mystery and its sister title House of Secrets toward mystery, suspense, science fiction and finally superheroes. The Martian Manhunter and Dial H for Hero both found a home in the once-spooky House of Mystery.
Bob Doncaster wrot:
ReplyDeleteBecause of comics and science fiction I read in my youth I’m still holding out for an island with dinosaurs.