May 1974: Legacy and the Living Weapon

Iron Fist, a superhero created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane for Marvel Premiere 15 (May 1974), was the result of pop cultural cross-pollination.

The Marvel Age of Comics was already more than a decade old, and to freshen it up the Bullpen tried superhero titles reflecting popular trends. 

Thanks to a relaxed Comics Code, more vivid horror stories could then be published, so Ghost Rider was born in Marvel Spotlight 5 (Aug. 1972).

Martial arts had been popularized by the David Carradine TV series Kung Fu in 1972 and the Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon in 1973. Add the superhero trappings of a lost-child Tarzan origin, a secret identity, a colorful costume and the ability to focus chi into a punch of overwhelming power, and you have Iron Fist.

The character was presented in his Netflix series as a kind of billionaire super-Buddhist. And that may well ring a bell.

Comics readers might remark on the similarity of Danny Rand to Adrian Veidt, the superhero Ozymandias created by by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for their 1986 Watchmen graphic novel.

Well, yes, and there’s a reason for that.

Iron Fist was in part an homage to Amazing-Man, Bill Everett’s original variation on the Superman theme introduced in Amazing-Man Comics 5 (Sept. 1939). That Tibetan-trained super-being also inspired Pete Morisi to create Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt for Charlton Comics in 1966. And Moore and Gibbons used Thunderbolt as the template for Ozymandias.

The history of superhero comics is a wonderfully multi-faceted and multivariate thing.

August 1970: An Echo of Tarzan’s Yell

You might argue that the first Marvel superhero predated even Superman.

Thanks to the spectacular and continuing success of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Lord of the Jungle in the pulp magazines, novels, movies and comic strips of the 1910s and 1920s, the jungles were soon crawling with ersatz Tarzans.

Readers had their choice of Bomba, Bantan, Jan, Jongor, Tam, Tharn, Kaspa, Ki-Gor, Kioga — and Ka-Zar.

Starting in 1936, “Ka-Zar by ‘Bob Byrd’ was also featured in a magazine bearing his name for several issues," noted Richard A. Lupoff in his excellent book Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. “Ka-Zar, like the earlier Kaspa, was raised by lions; like the earlier Kioga, his real family name was Rand; like Tarzan, he fought with apes, befriended elephants and generally ruled a jungle domain.”

Because Ka-Zar (pronounced “KAY-sar”) was owned and published by Martin Goodman, young David Rand slipped neatly into Goodman’s seminal Marvel Comics 1 in 1939, right alongside the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner.

Then, like many another Golden Age Marvel character, Ka-Zar was revived in the 1960s — but not as David Rand. This time he was Kevin Plunder, a lost English lord discovered by the X-Men living with his sabertooth tiger Zabu in the Savage Land, a tropical wonderland hidden in Antarctica. (The X-Men 10, March 1965).

The jungle man knocked around the Marvel universe for five years before landing his own feature in Astonishing Tales, a duplex comic he shared with Dr. Doom.

Ka-Zar’s feature outlasted Doom’s, continuing through October 1973 before being replaced by It, the Living Colossus.

In whatever incarnation, Ka-Zar displays peak physical strength, speed and agility and an uncanny ability to communicate with animals.

“More than two-thirds of a century after his first appearance, Ka-Zar is probably the only one of those 1930s Tarzan knock-offs that is still appearing in new adventures,” comics historian Don Markstein noted. “Pretty good for a guy who only managed three pulp magazines before sinking into oblivion.”

June 1967: The Fiery Frankenstein

I remember a puzzling reference to a 1940s Human Torch in a Mad Magazine parody about retired superheroes. He was said to have found a job lighting cigars for some millionaire.

Wait, you mean there was ANOTHER Human Torch before Johnny Storm?

Indeed, and thanks to Stan Lee’s reprinting of the earliest Marvel stories in 25-cent giants, we fans were able to satisfy our curiosity early on.

Both the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner debuted at the birth of Marvel Comics (Oct. 1939), which was both the title in which they initially appeared and eventually the brand name that would storm the world of popular culture. 

And both were monster men as much as supermen — the Torch a confused android who burned whatever he touched, and Prince Namor an angry loose cannon almost as likely to murder innocent people as to save them.

Comic book character concepts were less rigid in the experimental days of the 1930s. Initially amoral, unpredictable and just plain weird, both the Torch and the Sub-Mariner reflected Universal’s popular monster movies as well as the new hit character Superman.

The Torch’s origin, reprinted in Fantasy Masterpieces 9 (June 1967), was crudely drawn but had a fascination of its own. Carl Burgos gave us a willful child of a Torch, one who declares that the sound of fire alarms amuses him and that the blast of a fire hose tickles. 

Recruited by criminals for an extortion racket, the naïve Torch eventually catches on and burns some of them alive.

Children’s fascination with fire proved sufficient to sell 80,000 copies of Marvel Comics 1, prompting a second print run. Eventually 800,000 copies sold.

When Lee and Jack Kirby revamped the character concept for The Fantastic Four in 1961, the Human Torch became actually human. But the “monster hero” theme would be echoed in one of his teammates, the Thing, and then again in the second Lee/Kirby title of the Marvel Age, The Incredible Hulk.

August 1951: Who that Masked Man Really Was

The first of 2,956 radio episodes of The Lone Ranger premiered on the Detroit radio station WXYZ on Jan. 30, 1933, the creation of station owner George W. Trendle and writer Fran Striker.

The immensely popular character eventually branched out to movie serials, feature films, television, novels, a pulp magazine, a comic strip and, of course, comic books.

Dell Comics published 145 issues of a Lone Ranger comic book beginning in 1948. At first, the comic book was just newspaper strip reprints, but original material began in issue 38 (Aug. 1951).

It’s testimony to the character’s popularity that his partner Tonto got his own comic book title in 1951, and even his horse Silver landed his own title in 1952. More than 30 issues of each spinoff title were published.

The action in the comic books was muted, too restrained to generate much excitement. But the painted covers were beautiful. Sometimes photo covers featured Clayton Moore from the 1949-57 TV show, which was the highest-rated television program on ABC in the early 1950s.

Thirty years later, my father could recall details of radio episodes he’d heard, remembering how his champion would shoot the guns out of outlaws’ hands, then snap, “You’re not hurt!” when they moaned in protest.

We all have our childhood dream selves. My father’s was the Lone Ranger and mine was Superman. And my mother’s was, of course, Wonder Woman.

That very point got a clever nod in the underrated 2013 Lone Ranger film, which opens in 1933 with a scene of a small boy wearing a cowboy suit and a black domino mask at a carnival sideshow, approaching the now-ancient form of Tonto (Johnny Depp).

“Kemosabe?” Tonto asks hesitantly.

Who was that masked man? That’s who he was, that boy. That’s who he’s always been.

Ad for the Lone Ranger pulp magazine in 1937

 

December 1939: Tom Swift in Cape and Mask

In 1938, DC Comics had introduced a spectacularly successful superman whose powers were physical, so MLJ countered a year later with another superman whose powers were mental.

The son of a patriotic American “first family,” Blane Whitney invented a steel-burning super-substance for President Wilson when he was only 14, thereby speeding the end of World War I. 

College instructors “marvel at his brilliance.” A clean-cut all-around star athlete, he is also “popular with the young ladies,” we’re assured in Top-Notch Comics 1 (Dec. 1939).

I know, I know, he’s starting to sound insufferable. 

But wait, there’s more.

“Starting in early childhood, he worked to develop a ‘Super Brain,’” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “As a result of his rigorous training, he gained clairvoyance, psychokinesis and other powers that appear magical. Naturally, his extreme intelligence told him the best use of these powers would be to join the burgeoning throngs of superheroes.”

“When first seen, the Wizard looked more like Mandrake the Magician (comics’ first successful costumed, super-powered adventure character) than Superman (who is generally held to have kicked off the genre),” Markstein observed.

The Wizard was a pioneer in what might be called the Tom Swift school of superheroics. 

“In his earliest battles, against such foreign scourges as the Jatsonian invaders and the equally nasty Borentals, the Wizard used many amazing weapons of his own invention,” wrote comics historian Ron Goulart. “These included Secret Formula F 22 X, the H2-VX-O Ray and his Dynamagno-Saw Ray Projector.”

Hard on the heels of the Batmobile, the prodigious polymath created a massive superhero car that could nip along at 500 miles an hour, and turn invisible.

So did an intellectual superman prove to be as big a draw to America’s boys as an athletic superman?

Need you ask?

He bounced around in comics for five years, sharing a title with the Shield for four of them. In October 1940, he lost his cover spot in Top-Notch to the Black Hood. 

October 1939: Something of a Shock

A flashy first name followed by a regular-guy last name — that durable heroic tradition stretched from Bulldog Drummond to Buck Rogers to Flash Gordon to Shock Gibson, an electrifying Harvey Comics superhero. 

Created by artist Maurice Scott and appearing in three different costumes, Shock fought Nazis, mad scientists, zombies, gorillas, a gigantic beetle, a thinly disguised KKK — you know, the usual.

Debuting in October 1939 in Speed Comics 1, the alter ego of humanitarian scientist Robert Charles Gibson had a nine-year run, outliving the title where he was born.

“He was experimenting to see if electricity, which had already improved people’s lives in so many ways, might also be useful in improving their personal selves, by enhancing their strength, health, etc.” recalled historian Don Markstein. “He found that by proper application of electricity to his own body, he did gain super strength, as well as the ability to emit powerful electrical bolts, magnetize things, weld metal with his bare hands, and even fly. But instead of sharing his discovery with the world, he kept it to himself and became a superhero, using his newly minted nickname, ‘Shock,’ as part of his monicker.”

“Shock Gibson was the cover-featured star for the first couple of years Speed Comics was published. But he was eclipsed as of its 16th issue (Jan. 1942) by one of the Captain America-style flag wearers, Captain Freedom, who hung onto the lead position for the rest of the title’s run.”

Shock also appeared in All-New Comics and finished as a backup in Harvey’s Green Hornet title, where he was last seen in Green Hornet 38 (March 1948) making a trip to the moon.

Shock Gibson was one of the few Golden Age superheroes not revived in the 1960s. 

That in itself was kind of a shock.

August 1939: Fun with a Firing Squad

The most dreaded weapon of World War I, mustard gas, cast its shadow over Superman 2 (Fall 1939).

When Prof. Adolphus Runyan invents a poison gas capable of penetrating any type of gas mask, he’s murdered by the evil munitions magnate Lubane, who intends to use the chemist’s formula to prolong an ongoing civil war in Boravia (a reference director James Gunn winked at in his 2025 Superman movie).

Hitching a ride atop a plane, Superman travels to Boravia and forces the leaders to stop the civil war by threatening to bring the roof down on them literally, like Samson. Superman bombs Lubane’s munitions factory, then destroys the formula after watching it kill Lubane.

While accomplishing all this, the Man of Tomorrow amuses himself by shrugging off the bullets of a firing squad.

Firing squads are emblematic of the fascist regimes Superman opposed, which is why he ran into more than one of them in his early days.

Elsewhere in his second titular issue, Superman builds confidence in a suicidal boxer by assuming his identity, going into the ring and beating up a bunch of prize fighters. (Admittedly, Superman’s ethical reasoning was sometimes questionable).

Then, when crooked builder Nat Grayson causes a series of fatal construction “accidents” on the site of the Atlas Building, Superman grabs him by the throat and chokes him until he sees the error of his ways.

In a two-page text story written by Jerry Siegel, Superman drives Big Mike Caputo out of Metropolis.

Quoting the gangster, Siegel wrote, “I say I can take over this town, and if you two weasels are getting chicken-livered...!’

“ ‘But —' interposed the other hireling, ‘— you’re not counting on ...SUPERMAN!’

“ ‘SUPERMAN?’ questioned Caputo. ‘And who in blazes is he?’

“ ‘That's just it!’ whispered Sneer. ‘Nobody knows. He’s a will-of-the-wisp... a phantom of the night. He preys on evildoers who operate in Metropolis... and once that bozo’s on your trail, brother, you're sunk!’”

July 1939: The Green Hornet in Four Colors

When we later Baby Boomers first met the Justice Society of America in Flash 123 (Sept. 1961), Flash 129 (June 1962) and Flash 137 (June 1963), and then again in Justice League of America 21 and 22 (Aug.-Sept 1963), we undoubtedly thought we’d hit the jackpot. 

Our roster of superheroes had doubled instantly!

We swiftly sorted these intriguing “older newcomers” into the variations-on-a-theme heroes (Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom, Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman) and the unique heroes (Hourman, Dr. Fate, the Spectre, Dr. Mid-Nite, the Sandman, and others).

Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Bert Christman for Adventure Comics 40 (July 1939), the Sandman drew on inspirations that predated the smash-hit heroes Superman and Batman. Wealthy Wesley Dodds wore a gas mask, fedora and stylized, caped business suit, wielded a gas gun to kayo criminals and was pursued by police as a criminal. One ancestor was obvious: the dramatic radio hero Green Hornet, who had premiered in 1936 (who was himself inspired by his great-uncle, the Lone Ranger, a radio hero who’d bowed in 1933).

“Wes Dodd (later the name was usually written as ‘Dodds’) and his gas-masked secret identity were introduced in Adventure Comics 40, July 1939 — only one month after Bob Kane's Batman,” Roy Thomas noted. “He became a charter member of the Justice Society of America when it debuted in All-Star Comics 3, 1940.”

“But his primacy was short-lived. For with the advent of Superman —and later Batman, et al — a hero needed a whole costume, as per Hourman, the guy who pushed: Sandman off the Adventure covers within a year.”

The Sandman was “Batmaned-up” with yellow-and-purple tights and a boy sidekick in Adventure Comics 69 (Dec. 1941). But his distinctive pulp hero look was restored, thankfully, during his 1960s JLA revival.

July 1939: The Inevitability of a Batman

At Midgard Comics one Saturday afternoon, I picked up something I’d long wanted to see — the reprinted pulp adventures of the Black Bat, a black-caped, hooded crime-fighter who was coincidentally almost identical to Batman.

The Black Bat’s origin — a DA who’d had acid thrown in his face by a criminal — inspired the Batman villain Two-Face’s. And the Black Bat also anticipated Marvel’s Daredevil. Tony Quinn is thought to be blind. No one knows that a secret operation has restored his sight, or that a weird side effect of the procedure has given him super senses — the ability to see in darkness

The adventures of a “Bat-Man” created for the pulps play a little differently than those of one created for comics. The Black Bat relies on the lethal support of guns. You find less emphasis on spectacular physical derring-do, a slightly cagier protagonist who, because you are now aware of his interior life, seems more anxious and less perfectly self-assured.

Seeing someone as a superman always requires an outside vantage point, a certain distance from their watchful perch on that Chrysler Building Art Deco gargoyle.

The Black Bat’s first appearance in Black Book Detective 1 was cover-dated July 1939, while Batman’s debut in Detective Comics 27 was May 1939. That means the characters were being created simultaneously and independently.

Naturally, they eyed each other warily, but editor Whitney Ellsworth, who had worked for both publishers, worked out a deal — Batman would stay out of the pulps if Black Bat would stay out of the comics.

Batman lived up to his end of the agreement, but the sneakier character, the Black Bat, managed to get into comic books. “Tony Quinn” became “Tony Colby,” and the Black Bat became an owlish superhero called the Mask, for the first 20 issues of Exciting Comics.

I always regard the appearance of the characters as synchronicity. The fates decreed that, one way or another, we were going to have a Batman.

June 1939: The Cops Corner Superman

Superman had just destroyed the office of a corrupt patent attorney, and the police had him trapped in the elevator.

“Triumph blazed in Sergeant Blake’s eyes… ‘Careful men!’ he warned the officers grouped about him. ‘We’ve prayed for this break for months, and now that it’s come, we don’t want to muff it. He was seen going into that elevator … and he’s bound to come out of that door any minute!’

“ ‘And that’s what bothers me,’ muttered someone. ‘What do we do when he does emerge?’

“Said another: ‘Our guns are useless against him.’

“Nonsense!’ retorted Sergeant Blake. ‘All we’ve got to do is keep cool and we’ve got him!’

“But his glib comeback didn’t satisfy even the Detective Sergeant himself. There were some very wild tales being circulated about this fellow who called himself SUPERMAN. He was said to be a modern Robin Hood … a person who had dedicated his existence to assisting the weak and oppressed. It was whispered that he possessed super-strength, could lift tremendous weights, smash steel with his bare hands, jump over buildings and that nothing could penetrate his amazingly super-tough skin. But of course, pondered the sergeant, these were mere rumors, fantastic fairy tales. Probably SUPERMAN was just an ordinary person whose better-than-average strength had been immensely exaggerated. Without a doubt!”

Blake’s bluster was featured in what was probably the first prose story written about Superman, a two-page text piece in Superman 1 (Summer 1939).

That issue also gave us the first version of the Superman’s origin that mentions Krypton and his foster parents, stories reprinted from the first four issues of Action Comics in 1938 and a biography of Superman’s young creators, Siegel and Shuster, who wouldn’t always remain so popular with the publisher.

The opening of the elevator doors proved to be an anticlimax for the jumpy cops, because all that emerged was “a slim, nervous figure” whose “…meek eyes blinked fearfully behind thick-rimmed glasses.”

May 1939: Of Bats and Men

Pulp magazines and movie melodramas had previously offered us various characters called “the Bat,” but the term “Bat-Man” was a clear nod at the publisher’s breakaway hit character “Superman.”

This house ad introducing the Caped Crusader appeared at the end of the Superman story in Action Comics 12 (May 1939), which featured only the 12^th adventure of the already immensely popular Man of Tomorrow.

Nor was Batman alone in this nominal homage.

In short order after Superman bowed in 1938, we had Sandman (1939), Ultra-Man (1939), Wonder Man (1939), Hawkman (1939), Hour-Man (1940), Catman (1940), Starman (1941) and many others — including a distaff variation on the theme, Wonder Woman (1941).

It probably seemed natural enough. A fireman, a policeman, a Superman or a Batman — all people who would pitch in to help you out in an emergency.

October 1938: A Man Called Midnight

A mystery-man combat pilot who originally flew out of Chicago’s WGN radio in 1938, Captain Midnight’s serial adventures went national in 1940 on Mutual Broadcasting as Ovaltine’s replacement for Little Orphan Annie. 

“By the time Captain Midnight came to Mutual, the adventure serial was firmly established as an early-evening must for millions of Midwestern kids,” wrote John Dunning in Tune in Yesterday. “The show developed the themes they liked best: action, mystery, a master villain and plenty of peer identification. Like the ever-popular Jack Armstrong, Captain Midnight even had a girl along for the ride.”

Developed by Robert Burtt and Wilfred Moore, the show was purportedly inspired by Burtt’s exploits as a World War I combat pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille.

“Burtt conceived Midnight as a man of mystery whose job in the war was so important that not even his superiors knew his identity,” Dunning noted.

Returning from a dangerous solo mission at the witching hour, a young airman earned himself the nom de guerre “Captain Midnight.” 

“For 20 years, strange stories were whispered about ‘a shadowy plane and a mysterious pilot who, whenever trouble started in any part of the world, was certain to come diving furiously from the night sky.’” Dunning wrote.

Immensely popular, the good captain expanded to comic books in Dell’s The Funnies and Popular Comics, but really came into his own when Fawcett gave him his own title in 1942.

In the Fawcett version, Captain Midnight was a scientific genius who wore a red glider suit emblazoned with his clock insignia, and wielded such crime-stopping inventions as a “drill tank,” a flying aircraft carrier, a “swing spring” grappling hook and his “doom beam torch,” used to mark enemies and penetrate walls.

In both the Fawcett comic and a 1942 Columbia movie serial, Captain Midnight was a full-fledged superhero whose secret identity was Jim Albright.

A newspaper comic strip based on the radio program ran from 1942 until the late 1940s.

A 1944 sequence from the Captain Midnight newspaper strip

October 1938: Avengers of Many Colors

The Green Hornet was clearly popular in 1938 — so much so that DC Comics offered two comic book pastiches of the radio superhero.

An urbanized, updated version of the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet had debuted on WXYZ radio in Detroit in 1936. By the spring of 1938, the show was being heard nationally on the Mutual network.

And in Detective Comics 20 (Oct. 1938), the Crimson Avenger took a bow.

“Whereas in reality the Hornet was Britt Reid, daring young publisher of the Daily Sentinel, the Crimson Avenger was Lee Travis, daring young publisher of the Globe Leader,” noted comics historian Ron Goulart. “The only person who knew the Hornet’s true identity was his faithful valet, Kato, and the Crimson Avenger’s secret was shared only by his Chinese servant, Wing. Like the Green Hornet, the Crimson Avenger never used a deadly weapon and preferred to put his adversaries to sleep with a blast from his gas gun. He wore a dark blue slouch hat, a domino mask and an Inverness-style cape of crimson hue.”

Elsewhere in Detective Comics 20, you could find a house ad for the More Fun Comics feature the Masked Ranger — DC’s version of the Green Hornet’s great-uncle, the Lone Ranger.

A little later, in Adventure Comics 40 (July 1939), DC provided readers with another masked, gas-gun-wielding man about town in a business suit. The Sandman added a cape to the ensemble.

“It’s anybody’s guess whether the Sandman was inspired by Superman or (like the Crimson Avenger) the Green Hornet,” observed comics historian Don Markstein.

Hornet or no Hornet, both the Crimson Avenger and the Sandman were examples of an evolution in melodrama already underway in comic books.

“Masks, hoods and villains with colorful names were becoming the norm in the stories even though many of them were still the evil Orientals at this stage,” noted comics historian Steve Thompson.

And Lee Falk’s Phantom had been haunting the funny pages since 1936.

June 1938: A Superman for the Underdog

On the newsstands in May 1938, browsers had their choice of Tarzan in Comics on Parade, Popeye in King Comics, daredevil aviator Captain Desmo in New Adventure Comics or some caped guy smashing a sedan in the new Action Comics.

Readers who opened the magazine met Superman in medias res, running through the night with a bound-and-gagged woman under his arm. That’s because the story was rearranged from a long-unsold newspaper strip by Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

The Man of Tomorrow was racing to deliver evidence that would secure the governor’s pardon for an innocent prisoner on death row.

In the hardscrabble Depression era, this giant of a man was looking out for the little people — the battered wives, the victims of lynch mobs, the abused orphans and prisoners, the citizens betrayed by Washington politicians.

“He stood up for the underdog, the little guy/gal, the downtrodden,” recalled comics historian Johnny Williams. “He was the ‘anti-bully.””

As writer Tom De Haven noted, “When Jerry Siegel wrote every story, Superman functioned as a freelance do-gooder with the demeanor and gumption of a laughing caballero, a rabble-rouser devoted to ameliorating social ills...”

“Whatever he does, he does philanthropically, often for just one poor soul in despair (having been swindled, wrongfully jailed or driven by the powerful to the brink of suicide) but always, too, for the common good. He accepts no reward, modestly waves off any applause.”

Clark Kent wasn’t “virtue signaling,” He was virtuous, in an era when the values of decency and honesty were repaid with poverty and anxiety.

As writer Mark Waid observed, Superman was “…as close as contemporary Western culture has yet come to envisioning a champion who is the epitome of unselfishness.”

Those rejected newspaper panels, crudely reassembled for inclusion in a 10-cent throwaway rag for kids, channeled a power to fire the imagination that ignited an industry, founded a popular cultural genre and still echoes around us in another century.

February 1936: The Ghost in the Funny Papers

That masked, purple-clad champion, Lee Falk’s Phantom, appears to be a cross between Batman and Tarzan.

Created in 1936 as a newspaper comic strip, the Ghost Who Walks became popular worldwide, inspiring a 1943 Columbia movie serial and a 1944 hardcover novel.

In the 1950s, at Halloween, you could dress up as a plastic and vinyl Phantom in a Ben Cooper costume that cost $3. 

If you were lucky, you might even run across a Harvey Hits Phantom comic book. They were rather odd-looking repackaged newspaper strips, and eight Phantom issues were published sporadically, beginning in 1957.

“The Phantom was the first fictional hero to wear the skintight costume which has become a hallmark of comic-book superheroes, and was the first shown in a mask with no visible pupils (another superhero standard),” Wikipedia notes. “Comics historian Peter Coogan has described the Phantom as a ‘transitional’ figure, since the Phantom has some of the characteristics of pulp magazine heroes like the Shadow and the Spider, as well as anticipating the features of comic book heroes such as Superman, Batman and Captain America.”

The Phantom fought criminal conspiracies in the jungle and worldwide without the aid of the super powers possessed by his comic strip “brother” Mandrake, although he pretended to have them to give himself a mysterious edge. Really the 21st in his line of champions, the Phantom posed as being an immortal who’d lived since 1536.

Tough, durable and admirably optimistic even when the odds were against him (which they often were), the Phantom was a pulpish character. 

In fact, like the Lone Ranger and the Black Hood, he could have headlined his own pulp magazine.

The Phantom did finally get his pulp adventures, beginning in 1972 in a series of 15 Avon paperback novels written by Lee Falk and Ron Goulart. The handsome covers were by George Wilson, who’d previously produced similar paintings for the covers of the Phantom comic books published by Gold Key.

November 1933: In the Depression, Was Doc Depressed?

The Shadow fought the gangsterism that grew out of the still-current Prohibition, but his Street and Smith brother at arms Doc Savage tackled the Great Depression itself — at least in one of his exploits.

A mental and physical marvel created by super-science, Doc began his adventures during the worst year of the Depression, 1933. Like the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film fantasies of the era, superheroes served as an emotional antidote to the depressing realities of the Depression.

Although even the cheap pulp magazines were hit hard by economic conditions, Street and Smith Publications’ hero pulps thrived.

“Between 1930-32, an estimated 85,000 American businesses failed, nine million savings accounts were wiped out by bank failures and half a million homeowners lost their houses,” noted author Will Murray. “In modern terms, it was a meltdown. As a result, by 1933 nearly 13 million people were thrown out of work — 120,000 in New York City alone.”

Escapism being the ticket, magazines and movies rarely addressed the Depression directly. But Doc Savage Magazine made an exception to that rule with its November 1933 issue, which featured Lester Dent’s novel The Czar of Fear. 

“Doc Savage in his most savior-like mode,” observed pop culture historian Dr. Hermes. “Instead of stowing away on a Zeppelin to Indo-China or tackling a weird menace in Tibet, he goes to a beaten-down manufacturing town in the Allegheny Mountains. Here, he fights unemployment and despair and hunger. In effect, this story is Doc vs. the Great Depression.”

In the process, the redoubtable Clark Savage Jr. finds himself accused of murder and up against police, gangsters and a mysterious costumed foe, the Green Bell.

With his vast wealth, Doc distributes food and buys up failed local businesses, promising jobs all around. That pits him directly against the Green Bell’s hooded gang, who use terrorist tactics in order to keep the town in poverty so that the Green Bell himself can gain complete economic control of the community.