The last new episode of TV’s The Adventures of Superman would air April 28, 1958, and DC Comics was clearly already concerned about the end of the show in 1957, as the somewhat nervous copy in DC’s house ads suggests.
World War II’s end and the anti-comic book hysteria had helped kill off most of the superheroes Superman had inspired, but the Man of Steel not only survived, but thrived, thanks to the tremendous impetus provided by his TV show (and radio show before that).
“The show benefitted from the fortuitous casting of George Reeves as Superman and brought a great deal of attention to the Man of Steel’s supporting characters,” observed Bill Schelly in American Comic Book Chronicles.
“Lois Lane had been an integral part of the superhero’s stories since his first appearance in 1938’s Action Comics 1. Editor Perry White and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen, however, had both been introduced later and in a somewhat desultory manner. Now, partly due to the necessity of focusing most of the television show on non-superheroic activity, these secondary characters would from this point forward be more important.”
But as the TV series approached its end, the Superman comic books — now unshackled from the limited cops-and-robbers plots of the TV show — became free to explore the science fictional possibilities inherent in the character’s concept.
“Julius Schwartz was talking to me about Superman and Mort (Weisinger) and said that some of the higher-ups felt Superman was going to end after the TV show as they thought the show was pushing the sales,” Bob Bailey recalled. “So they gave Mort freedom to develop the character more and he used what he knew best from his youth: science fiction! He used sci-fi writers he knew and trusted, among others, to grow the mythos.”
Hence Brainiac, the Phantom Zone, Superman’s robots, Kandor, Argo City, Supergirl, Nightwing and Flamebird, the cyborg Metallo, the tiny Superman Emergency Squad, the gigantic Titano and so forth.
I just noticed that the last new episodes of the 1950s Superman TV show aired in April 1958, just two months after Adventure Comics 247 appeared on newsstands.
ReplyDeleteIt was the end of the cops-and-robbers Superman TV show freed up Mort Weisinger to explore more science fictional plots, so a case can be made that had the TV show not ended then, the Legion of Super Heroes might never have been explored and developed as it was.
Author Tom De Haven: “While television’s Adventures of Superman remained in production, and throughout its run as a top-rated show, Mort Weisinger, in a commercial move counter to his own tastes, scaled back most of the science fiction elements in the comic books, bringing the stories closer in tone, and often in their plots, to the lighthearted trifles kids saw week after week on the small screen. But once (production on) the TV show ended in 1957, Weisinger organized and implemented (with, according to professional legend, the executive flair of Pol Pot) a series of radical changes to the Man of Steel that ushered in the most color and consequential era in the character’s history.”
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