January 1966: TV Tiptoes into Capes and Masks

The 1960s Batman TV show was the first true attempt to do really full-blown, colorful comic book superhero fantasy on screen. 

In the 1950s, The Adventures of Superman had been constricted by budget and its black-and-white presentation (even though the later episodes were filmed in color, most TV sets were still black and white).

So if the Batman TV show turned out to be absurd, well, that goes with the comic-book territory. 

And Batman was also, at least at first, spectacularly successfully, achieving top ratings on its pilot episode, which aired Jan. 12, 1966. Star Adam West said when he was at the supermarket that day, he overheard customers buzzing about getting home in time to see the show, and knew they were onto something.

“The reason the show succeeded wasn’t just a kid audience,” wrote Mark Waid. “They already had the kids. no matter how silly or serious it was. What made it a mega-hit was college kids and parents joining in on the fun and laughing with celebrity guest stars they liked.”

The notoriously imitative television industry wasn’t sure what to make of Batman’s success. More ridiculous? The sitcoms Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific failed. More serious? The Green Hornet also lasted only one season.

Television is a medium as tediously ordinary as a living room, and superhero stories are a genre as manically colorful as capes and circus tights. The two have always been a difficult fit. 

Even when costumes are included on the live-action shows, television is often clearly somewhat embarrassed by them, as it was in Batman and The Greatest American Hero. TV is obviously much more comfortable with super powers than costumes — the bionic duo, The Incredible Hulk, Heroes and sitcoms like Bewitched.

I think TV’s latter-day solution to the popularity of superheroes is a logical, if (to me) an unsatisfying one — superhero stories without superheroes. Gotham, Pennyworth, Smallville, Krypton, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter — the list continues to expand.

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.