June 1967: Captain Marvel By Any Other Name

Readers had been arguing whether Superman could beat Captain Marvel at least since 1940, when the good captain first appeared.

Legally, that question was answered in 1953, when Superman finally sued his most popular imitator out of existence. 

But references to the Big Red Cheese kept popping up in popular culture. Even DC couldn’t resist teasing a Superman-Captain Marvel battle.

In a three-part story beginning in Action Comics 351 (June 1967), Superman faced a bearded bruiser called — in an obvious play on Captain Marvel’s magic word — “Zha-Vam!”

This epic adventure was drawn by the classic Superman artist Wayne Boring and written, ironically, by Otto Binder, who’d penned 986 of Fawcett’s original Captain Marvel-related stories.

Working with the United Crime Syndicate, the mysterious Zha-Vam engages Superman in an earthshaking fight. 

Like Captain Marvel, Zha-Vam’s powers involve an acronym that cites various gods. In addition, he wears a belt bearing lettered buttons that activate various “reserve powers” — the ability to grow to titanic size, for example.

Hard-pressed to handle this bombastic baddie, Superman is temporarily turned to stone by Zha-Vam’s G-for-Gorgon power.

By blacking out the planet with his P-for-Pluto power, Zha-Vam blackmails Superman into super-shouting: “Zha-Vam is the greatest of all superheroes! I, Superman, am nothing compared to him!”

The former Captain Marvel scribe must have been amused to finally put those words into Superman’s mouth.

After Zha-Vam exiles Superman from Earth using Orion’s impenetrable shield, the Man of Tomorrow realizes he can visit yesterday to solve his dilemma.

Time-traveling to ancient Greece, Superman learns that the Oracle at Delphi has revealed his own future existence to the jealous Zeus, who forms Zha-Vam out of clay specifically to outdo the Man of Steel. 

Obtaining his own divine reserve power belt from Neptune, Superman is able to overcome Zha-Vam and dump him back on ancient Mount Olympus, where he is returned to lifeless clay.

Outshone by Superman, the forgotten gods finally fade into limbo. Superman sheds no tears.

May 1967: The Thing that Kept Coming Back

I loved this particular story, and I wasn’t alone.

The tale’s popularity was demonstrated by the number of times it was reprinted — in Superman Annual 2 (Winter 1960), in Superman 196 (May 1967) and in The Best of DC 42 (Nov. 1983), among other places.

In The Thing from 40,000 A.D.!, first published in Superman 87 (Feb. 1954), a shape-shifting blob monster from Earth’s bleak far future invades Metropolis, generally wreaking havoc and finally duplicating even Superman, complete with super powers. 

Writer Bill Woolfolk and artist Wayne Boring gave us a super-battle that remained a thunderous standoff until the Man of Tomorrow maneuvered the Thing to a nuclear test site. In 1938, Superman could be knocked for a loop by a “bursting shell,” but by the 1950s he could shrug off H-bomb blasts. 

The Thing, however, could not.

Science fiction menaces had begun challenging Superman with more frequency during that era — among them The Three Supermen from Krypton in Superman 65 (July-Aug. 1950), It from Action Comics 162 (Nov. 1951), The Machines of Crime from Action Comics 167 (April 1952), the dragon-like Beast from Krypton in Superman 78 (Sept-Oct. 1952), the Return of Planet Krypton in Action Comics 182 (July 1953), the asteroid Menace from the Stars in World’s Finest 65 (Jan.-Feb. 1954, a story also featured on TV as Panic in the Sky).

I suspect it was Hollywood that put the science fiction back into Superman’s stories. Once relegated to movie serials for kids, the genre had reemerged in popular, critically acclaimed films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953). 

Superman’s Thing, specifically, owed a lot to the 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World. The menace there was an extraterrestrial vegetable monster played by James Arness, but in the 1938 story on which the film was based, John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?, the Thing is an alien shape-shifter from 20 million years ago.

February 1961: Frankenstein Meets Superman (Sort Of)

Superman editor Mort Weisinger was always alert for the latest child-pleasing trends. He scanned movie posters while strolling on his lunch hour in order to spark story ideas. 

So an encounter between Superman and “Frankenstein’s Monster” was probably inevitable.

Why? Because Weisinger’s editorial reign coincided with the Baby Boomer children’s discovery of the Universal monster movies released 20 years earlier. Kids were seeing the various horror film series on the late night and afternoon local TV movies.

Shock Theater, a package of 52 pre-1948 Universal Studios horror films, was released for television syndication in 1957 by Screen Gems, the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man and the Wolf Man were prominently represented.

That, in turn, prompted the publication of a one-shot magazine, Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. But because the first issue, published in February 1958, was popular enough to require a second printing, the magazine took off and continued for 191 issues. The magazine’s success spawned spinoffs that included Screen Thrills Illustrated, Creepy, Eerie, Spacemen, Favorite Westerns of Filmland and Vampirella.

Written by Otto Binder and penciled by Wayne Boring for Superman 143 (Feb. 1961), Bizarro Meets Frankenstein! actually recorded an encounter between Superman’s imperfect duplicate and an actor playing the Frankenstein Monster. The 1954 Comics Code — banning vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies, among other things — may have made Weisinger skittish about including the “real” Frankenstein Monster in a story.

Finally, in Superman 344 (February 1980), the Man of Steel would battle the actual Frankenstein Monster, along with Count Dracula.

By the way, that same month Superman 143 shared newsstand space with Famous Monsters of Filmland 10, featuring the Phantom of the Opera on the cover and an article by Robert Bloch. 

Pricier than a 10-cent comic book, Famous Monsters would cost you three whole dimes and a nickel.

January 1961: Here There Be Super-Dragons

You might think that a winged, fire-breathing dragon from the planet Krypton would give even Superman pause.

But you’d be wrong.

The last surviving snagriff arrived to menace Metropolis in Superman 78 (Sept.-Oct. 1952), having been injected with what amounted to an experimental immortality serum by Superman’s father, Jor-El.

Although more powerful than Superman, the super-beast posed no direct threat to him because it was distracted by its insatiable appetite for metal, a side effect of the serum.

That appetite proved fatal when the creature swallowed six atomic bombs and was vaporized.

Or was it?

In Superman 142 (Jan. 1961), an identical Kryptonian monster — now called a flame dragon, not a snagriff — attacks Earth, but is disempowered by red kryptonite, frozen by his super-breath and hurled into eternal orbit somewhere beyond Pluto.

Also spotlighted in the house ad above are Superman’s Girl Friend  Lois Lane 22 (in which the girl reporter acquires real “x-ray glasses) and Action Comics 271 (featuring an “electrical alien” hoax meant to trap Superman).

Enter the son of the flame dragon.

When an egg left by the frozen creature hatched in Superman 151 (Feb. 1962), the Man of Steel was able to carry the young beast into the prehistoric past, where it would be at home and couldn’t menace humanity. In the process, its fangs, stronger than steel, injured his hand.

And there’s a good illustration of how frustrating Superman stories sometimes were for readers in the 1960s.

Instead of a battle between Superman and a truly formidable monster (which is what we wanted to see), this story turned out to be yet another secret identity puzzle, with Lois Lane determined to prove that Clark Kent’s hand was visibly injured, just like Superman’s.

Meh.

As for the flame dragon, he ended up starring with Titano the Super-Ape in a knock-off of King Kong Vs. Godzilla in Jimmy Olsen’s Monster Movie (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 84, April 1965)

How the mighty were fallen. 

November 1960: That Thing You Doom

As thrilled as I was by Superman’s first annual in 1960, I was even more excited to see this “All-Menace” issue — finally, foes worthy of Superman’s stature and some real super-powered action!

For the bargain of a mere quarter, you got Metallo, the Invulnerable Enemy, Titano the Super-Ape, Bizarro, Brainiac and my favorite, the Thing from 40,000 A.D.

Oddly, despite his science fictional origins, Superman went for a long stretch of his early career having few science fictional adventures. Mundane criminals and crusades against social injustice and political corruption occupied much of his day.

By the time Superman 87 arrived in February 1954, things had started to change.

February 1960: At the Waves, Waving Goodbye

Superman’s first great romance seemed a little fishy.

Actually, that bad pun doesn’t do justice to an engaging storyline. In The Girl in Superman’s Past (Superman 129, May 1959) and Superman’s Mermaid Sweetheart (Superman 135, Feb. 1960), artists Wayne Boring and writers Bill Finger and Jerry Siegel introduced readers to Lori Lemaris, a mermaid from sunken Atlantis.

The first story begins with Clark Kent and Lois Lane bundled up to attend a football game at his alma mater, Metropolis University. Clark reminisces how a chance campus encounter with a girl in a wheelchair led him to fall in love with the mysterious beauty, and moon over her. 

One poignant, ironic element of the story has the most physically free man in the world drawn to what appears to be a disabled girl.

But when Clark asks her to marry him and is about to reveal himself, Lori cuts him off by telling him that she’s always known he’s Superman. 

The shocked Man of Steel figures out she’s a telepathic mermaid, and they team up to rescue flood victims before they part.

Finger’s stories about Superman were often memorable, and these added a recurring character to Superman’s universe, despite the built-in contradiction with Superman’s friend Aquaman (Lori’s Atlantis and Aquaman’s Atlantis were clearly not the same place).

It did seem interesting, to me, that Clark Kent’s first real romance should coincidentally involve a being as fantastic and secretive as himself. 

And Clark and Lori have more in common than we might initially think. For one thing, they’re both monsters.

“Like fantasy creatures such as mermaids, Clark/Superman combines categories in ways that technically make him a ‘monster’ without inspiring the kind of fear/disgust that would make him the centerpiece of horror (except, perhaps, to villains),” observed critic Greg M. Smith.

This kind of doomed romance has the advantage of seemingly bringing major changes to a continuing character who will, at the end, be left back at square one. 

November 1959: The Year of the Catty

DC characters tended to share certain bizarre experiences — accidentally acquiring Superman’s powers, getting trapped in the Phantom Zone, traveling in time and space, pretending to die, pretending to turn evil, turning invisible, developing futuristic brains, becoming elastic, attaining giant size, instantly becoming fat, instantly growing older or younger.

 And, unlikely as it might seem, acquiring the head of a cat.

In Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane 13 (Nov. 1959), writer Bill Finger and artist Wayne Boring present us with a mystery for Superman to solve. Why does Lois show up at the Daily Planet for a tearful goodbye to her friends with her head encased in a lead box?

In the vanished reporter’s diary, Superman reads that Lois had confronted a vaudeville sorceress calling herself Circe, only to find that she wasn’t dealing with a fake — that her head had been transformed into a cat’s.

Passing a circus sideshow where people are laughing at freaks, Lois thought, “I can never go back to the normal world I once knew — not with my freakish face. (Sob!) And I could never be Superman’s girl friend again! I knew that though Superman would try not to show it, he’d be repelled by my face!”

Superman discovers that Lois doesn’t have the face of a cat, but only thinks she does — thanks to a drugged lemonade and some hypnosis practiced by the fake Circe.

Despite Lois’s traumatic experience, Superman’s sympathy only extends so far. At dinner that night at a restaurant, he orders Lois a saucer of milk to mock her cat-like curiosity.

The story is a reversal of what happened to Superman 15 months earlier in Action 243’s The Lady and the Lion!, when the real Circe gave the Man of Tomorrow a lion’s head.

It might have seemed to readers that Superman’s writers and editors were spinning in Circe circles.

October 1959: Back to Futuro

Stan Lee once observed that comic book readers do not want change, they want the illusion of change. Certainly that was true when I was growing up, in the case of popular stories like the one in Superman 132.

The tale had Superman, Batman and Robin watching an alternate history in which Krypton never exploded and Kal-El was permitted to grow up there. Logically, that would seem to suggest a superhero story with no superhero.

But of course children — by far the primary audience for Superman then — like reassurance. They like to be told the same stories in exactly the same way, again and again and again. So even though Krypton didn’t blow up, a caped “superman” appeared anyway in the form of Kal-El’s professor, who called himself Futuro after an accident gave him (and Krypto) super powers identical to Superman’s.

“Jimmy Olsen” appeared in the form of Futuro’s pal Kal-El. Kal-El acquired a “spaceman costume” duplicating his familiar super suit, and also dressed in the weird earthly clothes of Clark Kent for a costume party. Lois Lane showed up on Krypton and immediately fell for the super guy. And because Futuro intended to marry Lois and return to Earth with her, he decided to empower Kal-El with that “one last charge” and leave him to guard Krypton as Superman.

Perfectly absurd.

Perfectly satisfying.

Wayne Boring was the Superman artist of my childhood, and although his figures tended to be stiff, he had a wonderful way with those perfectly round, brightly colored planets and asteroids that Superman juggled, those massive transparent globular ray guns and those graceful minarets that soared above the cities of advanced civilizations. His drawings drew me into his universe. I remember being particularly entranced by the white-and-violet color combination of Futuro’s costume as he soared to the rescue.

Futuro’s secret identity, by the way, was “Dr. Xan-Du.” Writer Otto Binder was signaling, as clearly as possible, that this was all wish fulfillment.

February 1959: Titano, Son of Kong

Several super-simians have complicated Clark Kent’s life over the years. 

He tangled with the massive escaped gorilla Gigantic in the 1942 movie cartoon Terror on the Midway. Then in July 1956, he confronted the tragic Super-Ape from Krypton (Action Comics 218). And in October 1959, Superbaby had to deal with the annoying Super-Monkey (Superboy 76).

But towering above them all was Titano.

A King Kong clone, Titano first appeared under the name of “Big Boy” in the Superman Sunday newspaper strip story that ran from March 9 to June 15, 1958.

In that story by artist Wayne Boring, a chimp in a space capsule, having been exposed to cosmic rays and kryptonite gas, gives Superman and Lois Lane a rough time with his ever-increasing size and kryptonite vision. The crisis is resolved humanely, with the promise that Big Boy’s strange condition will wear off.

He showed up in comic books shortly thereafter, now under the name Titano, in a story by Boring and writer Otto Binder (Superman 127, Feb. 1959).

“In addition to offering the spectacle of a giant ape trashing Metropolis, what makes Titano stories enjoyable is their offering Lois Lane an all-too-infrequent opportunity to work alongside Superman, and to share more fully his triumphs and tragedies,” observed Joseph McCabe and Mark Waid.

Although safely deposited in the prehistoric past, the popular menace managed to return the next year to once again threaten Metropolis (Superman 138, July 1960).

Titano had a cameo appearance in Superman Meets Al Capone! (Superman 142, Jan. 1961). Everybody’s favorite super-dog had a go at him in Krypto Battles Titano (Superman 147, Aug. 1961). A Bizarro Titano showed up (Adventure Comics 295, April 1962).

The ape even suffered the humiliation of co-starring with the Kryptonian Flame Dragon in a giant monster movie made by Superman’s pal (Jimmy Olsen 84, April 1965).

Titano’s career was an old story for Hollywood monsters. You start out being scary and you end up playing comedy.

Titano began as "Big Boy" in the Superman newspaper comic strip.

May 1954: The Last Hour of Metropolis

A hidden kryptonite time bomb gives Superman a tense time in One Hour to Doom (Superman 89, May 1954).

The devastation caused by super-bombs was much on the American public’s mind in 1954. In March of that year, the United States detonated the massive 17-megaton “Bravo” hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The story by writer Bill Woolfolk and artist Wayne Boring opens intriguingly, with Superman awakening from a deep slumber under a tree. Returning to Metropolis, the puzzled superhero finds the city streets empty.

“Through the vast, echoing canyons, Superman goes — with no sound to break the stillness, no echo of another human voice!”

In a flashback, we learn that Superman had been rendered unconscious by Luthor’s kryptonite bomb test, even as the gloating criminal scientist broke into all TV channels to announce that he intended to detonate a similar bomb, hidden and vastly larger, in an hour.

Learning of the peril from Lois and Jimmy, Superman searches the city to no avail.

With three minutes left until detonation, Superman halts his frantic search and simply sits on a park bench, thinking.

“What a fool I’ve been!” Superman says, springing into the air. “Racing around in circles trying to find the bomb, when the answer has been under my nose all the time!”

Later, following a gigantic green explosion, Luthor and his radiation-suited henchmen move in to loot the city, but get a surprise.

Whirling the criminals senseless, the Man of Tomorrow explains that the explosion was merely 10,000 green firecrackers he’d detonated after he’d hurled the real super-bomb into space.  He’d realized that Luthor would have had to hide the lead box containing the bomb in an inconspicuous place — the Metropolis Hospital vault where radium was kept in similar lead boxes.

One Hour to Doom, a story packed with earthshaking events, might well have been a book-length adventure a decade later. But in 1954, everything got compressed into 10 dizzying pages.

January 1954: Superman’s Pal Runs the Show

The popularity of Jack Larson as Jimmy Olsen on TV’s The Adventures of Superman elevated the character’s prominence in the comic books.

The show debuted in 1952, and DC Comics rewarded Jimmy with his own comic book title in 1954.

Comics historian Mark Engblom observed, “Although Jimmy Olsen has been banished to the status of window dressing for the past three decades or so, he was clearly a major star from the late ‘50s through the (Mort) Weisinger years, and quite a ways into the ’70s. It’s hard to fathom today how a cast member could carry a solo series, to the point where I can’t think of anything comparable since the Jimmy and Lois Lane series.”

Even several months before Jimmy’s own title debuted, the cub reporter starred in a story written by Bill Woolfolk and drawn by Wayne Boring — Jimmy Olsen … Editor! — in Superman 86 (Jan. 1954). 

An almost identical story written by David Chantler — Jimmy Olsen, Boy Editor — aired Feb. 13, 1954, on the TV show.

In fact, the sharing of plots between the comics and the TV show caused some friction. 

Screenwriter Jackson Gillis, who wrote several of the series’ best episodes, was blunt about it. “The comic book began to rip them off,” he said. “This was before the Writer’s Guild was beginning to get after that kind of stuff.” 

In both the comic book and TV stories, Jimmy is elevated to the editorship of the Daily Planet as part of a Metropolis city program in which young people temporarily assume important positions. And in both stories, Jimmy stirs up trouble by looking into an old, unsolved criminal case.

“I was a big Superman comic book fan,” Larson recalled in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “My dad said to me when I was doing the Superman television show, ‘Hell, they’re not paying you anything. You’re just getting back the dimes I gave you for that comic book.’”

March 1950: Superman Proves Invulnerable

Superhero comic books were on the decline in 1950, but Superman was not, thanks to a multi-media presence established early on.

The Superman newspaper comic strip was in its 11th year, at one point appearing in 300 daily newspapers and 90 Sunday papers. Superman’s print career even extended to a hardcover book by George Lowther, published in 1942 and marking the first novelization of a comic book character.

The Adventures of Superman radio show had been on the air for a decade, and was then being broadcast on ABC. 

Just as Superman's true identity remained a secret, the identity of radio actor Collyer was also kept quiet from 1940 until 1946. That’s when Bud Collyer did a Time magazine interview about Superman’s crusade for racial and religious tolerance.

Superman’s impressive Paramount movie cartoons had run their course, with the last, Secret Agent, having been released in 1943.  But Columbia’s second Superman movie serial, Atom Man vs. Superman, would be released on July 20, 1950 (with veteran actor Lyle Talbot playing the screen’s first Luthor).

Superman and the Mole Men, the first feature film based on any DC Comics character, would be released Nov. 23, 1951, becoming a springboard for the popular syndicated Adventures of Superman TV series.

The disappearance of the innumerable other superhero comic book characters he’d inspired undoubtedly helped shift the spotlight back to the original. Batman — who’d crossed over into all the same media with the exception of movie cartoons and hardcover novels — also chugged along through the superhero desert of the 1950s.

Meanwhile, back in the comics, boy-who-cried-wolf Orson Welles has trouble getting anybody to believe that he’s actually been kidnapped by Martians (Superman 62) and Luthor kidnaps Lois Lane to lure Superman into a synthetic kryptonite trap (Action Comics 141). 

To loosen Luthor’s tongue about Lois’ whereabouts, the Man of Steel hurls him straight at the propeller of an airliner in flight.

Obviously, Superman’s many powers included the power of persuasion.

June 1948: Mything in Action

Superman would eventually run into any number of living mythological figures, but in Superman Versus Atlas (Action Comics 121, June 1948) the titular titan turned out to be a trickster.

The schemer was William Sharp, “…a racketeer and confidence man who passes off a sideshow strong man as the legendary Atlas — and then stages a cunningly rigged super-strength competition in which ‘Atlas’ appears to be mightier than Superman,” noted Superman chronicler Michael L. Fleisher. 

It was all “…an elaborate scheme to establish Atlas as the world’s mightiest mortal so that Sharp can launch a lucrative racket selling his victims ‘protection’ from Atlas. The strong man, who is only an innocent dupe in the scheme, helps Superman apprehend the crafty Sharp.”

Artist Wayne Boring’s conception of Atlas has him wearing a Tarzan-like leopard skin garment — the same raiment he would provide the real Hercules when Superman met him more than a decade later, when the Man of Steel’s adventures became more fantastical. Both Hercules and Samson would make several appearances in the Superman titles.

After all, as comics historian Michael E. Grost observed, “Comics did not invent the idea of beings with special powers: Greek mythology was full of them.”

November 1940: When Superman Wasn’t So Tough

Even by 1940, Superman wasn’t quite so super.

Two years after his debut, the Man of Tomorrow could still be rendered unconscious with a diabolical gas developed by the evil scientist Kotzoff (Superman 7, Nov. 1940) or the fiery “globe gun” wielded by the Middle Eastern conqueror Zolar (Action Comics 30, Nov. 1940).

Elsewhere in the Superman title that busy month, the Man of Steel corralled Nick Norton, a gangster who tried to frame a Metropolis prosecutor for murder, and protected another honest lawyer, Bert Runyon, who was attempting to clean up public corruption. Superman also ended a string of brutal night club robberies performed by the hooded thugs of the Black Gang, exposing their leader as Peter Peeker, a gossip columnist on the Morning Pictorial.

The two comic books appeared on the newsstands in September 1940. 

Meanwhile, on radio, Superman was involved in the adventure of Professor Thorpe’s Bathysphere. In his daily newspaper strip, Superman battled the Hooded Saboteur, a fascist terrorist. “By wrecking utilities, he hoped the sick and weak would die, making civilization return to a simpler, hardier way of living!”

And in the Sunday newspapers, trouble brewed when Lois Lane inherited 5,000 acres of land from her uncle. 

The land turns out to be rich in radium, but Lois elects to remain a “sob sister” and gives the millions to charity.

Her deceased uncle’s name? Bill Bixby.

That same month, in Hollywood, production began on what would have been the first Superman movie serial, The Mysterious Doctor Satan.

“(B)ut the license National Comics provided to the Fleischer Studios to make their Superman cartoon series was exclusive and therefore prevented other film companies from using the character,” Wikipedia notes. “The script was subsequently reworked with a new character standing in for Superman. The Copperhead’s love interest, Lois, had only her surname changed between these drafts, while his secret identity, down to the surname, mimicked Batman’s Bruce Wayne, National’s other major comic book character.”