But the Man of Tomorrow was central to the titles Action Comics, Superman, Adventure Comics, Superboy, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and World’s Finest.
Important additions to the Superman mythos might appear in any one of them — the tiny Supermen in Jimmy Olsen, the Phantom Zone in Adventure, Bizarro in Superboy and Luthor’s sister Lena Thorul in Lois Lane.
The Mort Weisinger-edited Silver Age Superman mythos probably reached its zenith when the Superman Emergency Squad was introduced in 1960.
We’d already seen the arrival of Brainiac, whose shrinking ray gave us the Kryptonian bottled city of Kandor, to be stored in another recent innovation, Superman’s arctic Fortress of Solitude (shamelessly lifted from Doc Savage).
Krypto the Superdog had arrived even earlier, and Supergirl more recently. Her own expanding mythos would give us Streaky the Supercat and Comet the Superhorse. Lori Lemaris, Superman’s lost collegiate love, was available if we happened to need telepathic assistance from a mermaid.
Kandor would be the source of further mythic evolution for the Man of Tomorrow. The tiny city would become the urban bottlescape for Superman and Jimmy’s Batman-and-Robin adventures as Nightwing and Flamebird.
And, in Jimmy Olsen 48 (Oct.-Nov. 1960), it would give us the Superman Emergency Squad, a silly team I loved.
In this Otto Binder story with art by Curt Swan, we met Superman’s tiny flying army from the Kandor.
After shoving their way out of the corked bottled, they swarmed to the rescue dressed in Superman costumes (which would actually make them uniforms, I suppose).
Initially someone insisted that they should all look like Superman too, which seems a bit fetishistic even for Silver Age comic books.
Bob Doncasterwrote: Now I want a Superman Emergency Squad/Atom team-up.
ReplyDeleteBruce Kanin wrote: I never tire of reading the Silver Age Superman Family tales, although by about 1966, coincidentally when the Go-Go Checks arrived, they began to grow repetitious and tiresome. Plus, the more realistic Marvel was beginning to compete with DC.
ReplyDeleteMort Weisinger was a genius of sorts, but ultimately I think he & his writers, again around 1966, had strip-mined virtually all that they could via (as you wrote) Kandor, the many varieties of kryptonite, artifacts of Krypton (esp. the Phantom Zone), etc.
Still, I can re-read the earlier Silver Age stories, put my mind back in that silly but innocent era quite comfortable, and enjoy them once again, as if it was the first time.
Mark Engblom wrote: I enjoyed the Squad, too! The lookalike factor didn’t bug me at all, considering the Weisinger-era Superman met a lookalike every couple of issues anyway!
ReplyDeleteIt also strikes me as curious that the most powerful and capable man in the universe would need so much back-up! In addition to the Squad, he had Supergirl, Krypto, and a whole fleet of Superman robots!
Seriously, though, the Squad had an extra bit of emotional heft considering it was something the people of Kandor did on their own as a gesture of gratitude and love toward their devoted guardian.
Salvatore Marlow wrote: The bottle city of Kandor was a great concept. Nightwing and Flamebird, it was fun to see Superman as Batman of a future world. The Superman Emergency Squad was a better way then having little Supermen shoot out his fingers. The only misstep DC made was taking the bottle city and making it New Krypton. They should have left them small.
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