Morality in old Superman comics
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Brainster
Penultimate Amazing
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I have a nostalgia blog on comic books, mostly dealing with the 1950s and 1960s. I generally remembered the stories in question, although in this case I did have to check the issue numbers.
Kandor. I have written quite a bit on the subject of Kandor.
Maybe in DC, not so much Marvel - these are just ones I remember from when I was growing up btw:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_(Marvel_Comics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Cage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_(comics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_(comics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_(comics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_(comics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man
His uncle got murdered because of his economic woes, I think he counts doesn't he?
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
Yeah, "Fortress" is high on my list, along with "Land of Terror" "Meteor Menace", and "The Fantastic Island".
ANd of course Bob Kane and Bill Finger stole a awful lot from Doc's Street and Smith compatriot, The Shadow, when they created Batman. And Anthony Tollin ,ever since 2007, has dedicated one volume of his Shadow series to stories that influnced The Dark Knight.
BTW, the pulp Shadow is a LOT different then the radio version. He is much more violent,does not have magical powers, and does not have a "no Killing" policy. In some of the stories, in fact, he is basically a Depression era version of the Punisher.
BTW James Randi will probably be here blasting us if we do not point out that 'Maxwell Grant" was, for most of the Shadow novels, his old friend Walter Gibson, who before he became a writer was stage magician. In fact, he ghosted Houdini's autobiography, and wrote extensively on the history of Magic.
Tollin mentions Randi in some of the articles he wrote for his Shadow volumnes, and would not be surprised if he interviewed Randi.
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
Most of the creators of the American Comic Book were Jewish. Bob Kane ("Batman") Jack Kirby and Joe Simon ("Captain America") Will Eisner ("The Spirit"..and Eisner was doing the off beat, off kilter Comic hero things as early as 1941) and one Stanley Liberman..better known as Stan Lee, who, although he was in the business from 1940 on, would not hit his stride until he turned the world of comics upside down in the 1960's with the Marvel Age of Comics and ended DC's post war monopoly on Super Hero comics.
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
I hesistate to ask what you think of the Post Crisis Superman in which "The Last Kryptonian " angle was stressed, and they dropped almost all of the Weisenger added material was dropped.
To be honest, I am much more of Marvel Man, although I am not close minded about it.
BTW it was Jack Kirby who introduced my favorite Superman foe with Darkseid. The thing about Darkseid is he posed a genuine menace to Supes, after all Kal El was a mere Kryptonian, whereas Darkseid is a God.
In the Excellent "Superman:THe Animated Series" it is interesting that after he was introduced in the Second
Season, Darkseid became the Man of Steel's REAL arch opponent. Supes really wants to KILL Darkseid in a way he does not any other foe, and of course,because Darkseid is immortal cannot.......
All the "DemiVerse" Animated shows are great, and for a DC fan it is the ultimate dream come true. Particularly "JUstice League Unlimited" where they try to work in all the minor and obscure DC heros.
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Vortigern99
Sorcerer Supreme
I don't want to derail the thread here, but as a brief aside I'd like to point out that Jack Kirby's contribution to the creation of Marvel's famous 60s stable of heroes -- the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, X-Men, even Spider-Man according to Kirby himself -- cannot be overstated.
There is a reason Stan Lee seemed to become a brilliant writer/creator almost overnight, and that reason is that Jack Kirby co-created most or all of Lee's famous creations.
To this day, though, Kirby gets credit as the artist -- a ground-breaking, phenomenal artist, which he was -- but this "turning the world of comics [and pop culture] upside down" thing was as much Kirby's as it was Lee's, possibly more so.
/off-topic rant
Do you, perchance, have a citation for that name? I've never seen any item on Stan Lee which gave his original name as anything other than Stanley Lieber. (Lieber, I suspect not coincidentally, is the last name used by his brother, Larry Lieber.)
These look to all be from the early '70s. In the late '60s a new generation of creators began working at both Marvel and DC who were aware of the lack of racial and sexual diversity in comics characters and interested in correcting it. If you'd been a DC fan you'd have noticed DC introducing multi-racial characters at the same time that Marvel did (and the same regarding the introduction of more female lead characters).
Marvel did have a considerable lead over DC in one related area though -- the introduction of racial diversity in background characters. The choice to make lead characters mainly white males was somewhat conscious, but the choice to make all the background characters white was more unconscious -- colorists just automatically colored all the characters with "skin" color (i.e. skin color associated with white people) unless the story specifically called for the person's skin to be colored differently (such as a green-skinned alien).
But Marvel, in the early-mid-60s, began (I believe at Stan Lee's direction) including black people in crowd scenes. It was a conscious decision, and I think a praise-worthy one. I was not a big Marvel fan, or Stan Lee fan, but that is something I do admire Stan and Marvel for. DC didn't follow suit until the late 1960s.
Brainster
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I have a big hole in my comics knowledge. From about 1977-1997, the only comics I read were Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. I dropped Batman from my regular list after they stopped the 100-page issues, and Spider-Man during the Wein/Andru and Esposito run around 160. I only got back into it due to the scanning communities that popped up. I've caught up with Batman but I'm not tempted to try to do the same with Supes. He was much better than Batman in the Silver Age, but my read is that in every other age, the Caped Crusader kicked his butt.
I can understand the desire to retcon out all the other Kryptonians; being the last makes Kal more special. Still, I have a warm place for Kara in my heart; her stories during the Mooney and Schaffenberger eras were terrific. What a shame that Sekowsky took over shortly after she got Adventure to herself!
Spidey was the only Marvel character that I really got fanatical about; at one point I had every issue either in original or reprint. I still think the Lee/Ditko issues (1-38) represent one of the great runs in all of comics history, and the Lee/Romita series that followed isn't far behind.
Darkseid was interesting; I have almost all the Fourth World issues. I'm also a huge fan of Kirby's GA work for DC (Boy Commandos, Newsboy Legion), as well as the very early Challengers of the Unknown. I'm a bit blase about Kirby's actual artwork panel for panel, but he was brilliant at page layouts; he pulled you through the story.
Brainster
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Mostly agree here; the thing I'd point out is that the background characters including minorities really started in Spiderman, so I'd be tempted to go more with Ditko as the cause than Lee.
BTW, DC was miles ahead of Marvel in the 1960s in terms of putting their female leads in non-traditional occupations. Compare and contrast:
DC
Lois Lane, Reporter
Carol Ferris, Aircraft plant executive
Iris West, Reporter
Jean Loring, Defense Attorney
Shayera Hall, Policewoman
Marvel
Betty Brant, Secretary
Karen Page, Secretary
Betty Ross, Housekeeper for her father
Jane Foster, Nurse
Pepper Potts, Secretary
You can argue that Sue Storm was a scientist, although that was seldom emphasized (she was played more as simply Reed's girlfriend), and of course Janice Van Dyne... but you know how that goes, if the best counter-example is Jan, that's not much of an argument.
I agree that Jack Kirby deserves a fair amount of credit for making Marvel what it was. But I think Steve Ditko deserves a good amount of credit as well.
Ditko had (and has) a strong Ayn-Randian libertarian world-view which shows through in many of his creations -- notably The Question and Shade the Changing Man, which he had especially strong control of (for mainstream comics work), but also in works he had to less control of such as The Creeper, Hawk and the Dove ... and Spider-Man.
The thing about early Marvel which made it so interesting was that Stan had grown tired of the tired old comics stereotypes and conventions so prevalent at DC then and wanted to break away from these. What would it be like if superheroes really existed? Fantastic Four was one answer to that question (no secret identities; originally no costumes; treated like pop stars, idolized one day and dumped on the next); Spider-Man was a different answer to the same question (costume, secret identity -- but feared rather than idolized, wanted by the police, oppressed by the liberal media, and struggling to make ends meet).
I've often thought it was a mistake to incorporate all the Marvel heroes into one shared universe. Spider-Man (as conceived and co-plotted by Ditko) lived in a different reality than the Fantastic Four (as conceived and co-plotted by Kirby). Forcing them to live in the same reality led to a watering down (and, eventually, loss of) the Ditko version. And even though I disagree almost straight down the line with Ditko politically, I think his version of what it might be like if super-heroes actually existed was at least as interesting as the FF version.
Yes. And that, I think, is an example of something which should be credited to Steve Ditko.
Got to agree with you there. (But then, I was always more of a DC than Marvel fan, so I'm prejudiced in DC's favor and always happy to be able to say DC was better than Marvel.)
In the early '60 not just the background females, but the lead females at Marvel, all seemed much more stereotypical than the DC females. Sue Storm had the power of invisibility, which wasn't much use in fights -- and fights were what Marvel comics were about. (Marvel even did an early story answering fan complaints about how weak a character Sue was -- in which Reed basically says, but she's a woman, and your mother is a woman, and where would any of you be without your mother having given you birth, so shut up with your complaints. When that didn't work, they upgraded her powers to include the ability to make force-fields -- so she could turn invisible to hide, or surround herself with a protective barrier to stay safe.)
Jean Grey was a telepath, another fairly weak (and at the time stereotypically female) superpower. Again, not much use in fights (or at least in fight scenes). She also had the ability of levitating small light objects -- demonstrated, in her solo story back-up feature, by her using a peeler to peel apples.
And while Ant-Man had the proportionate strength of an ant (and, when that wasn't masculine enough as far as fighting went, gained the ability to become Giant-Man), the Wasp basically just had her sting and her ability to bat her eye-lashes. DC, in contrast, gave Wonder Woman an equal role in the stories (and fight scenes) in Justice League of America.
Rita Farr at DC was one of my favorite characters, and in my opinion one of the best female characters ever. Unlike Marvel's women, who generally took a back seat when it came to fighting, Rita Farr was the strongest member of The Doom Patrol. Yeah, Robotman was strong -- but when it came to crunch time, it was Rita they looked to for the real feats of strength. And there's a great story in My Greatest Adventure # 85 where the boys try to side-line Rita in a movie while they go off adventuring (because the mission would be too dangerous for her...). She uncovers their deception, goes after them, saves their asses, and gives them such a dressing-down that they never attempt that again.
What I especially liked was that Rita was a strong feminist -- without ever using that label, and without every engaging in the heavy-handed feminist rhetoric which both Marvel and DC used in the early 1970s when they consciously began attempting to do feminist characters. Many of the Marvel and DC stories of the late 60s / early 70s in which they attempt to introduce "strong" women characters are painful to read. Rita, in contrast, was a delight because her characterization was so natural and unforced.
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You could be right, but I'm inclined to believe you're wrong. At least as far as what I was referring to -- the coloring of background characters in crowd scenes. If you're talking about supporting characters such as Joe Robertson, that's another matter.
My memory of when various supporting characters were introduced isn't good, so I'd need to look those dates up. But my memory of the coloring of background characters is a little clearer. And my memory is (a) that this happened line-wide in the Marvel comics, and (b) Stan has often taken credit for this, with no one I am aware of disputing it was done on his direction.
And it would need to have been done on the direction of someone such as Stan. There is nothing in the art itself to indicate what color the background characters' skin should be (which has led to occasional embarrassing errors in Marvel reprints, when characters originally colored as Blacks have been changed into Whites). Unless Steve Ditko left instructions on the original art, color this character as Black, color this character as Asian, color this character as White, I don't see how he could have been responsible -- and no one, to my knowledge, has ever mentioned that kind of instruction appearing in Ditko's original art.
Stan, on the other hand, as the editor-in-chief of the line, could easily have given the colorists instructions: when you're coloring crowd scenes, randomly color some of the women and men as Blacks. Which is what I think Stan has claimed he did, and which is what appears to have happened.
Okay, now let me quickly Google to see when Joe Robertson was introduced... Yes, that's what I thought, not until 1967. That's much later than what I was talking about, and by then other Black characters were appearing in other Marvel books not done by Ditko. Are there Black supporting characters appearing in Spider-Man prior to Joe Robertson that you're thinking of? If so, I don't recall them, so you'll need to refresh my memory on that.
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elbe
Illuminator
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They did keep Power Girl around, though they had to screw around with her history because she wasn't kryptonian anymore (though she's officially kryptonian again, and she may be immune to kryptonite now). The daxamites were also retained, which always took away the uniqueness to kryptonians to me.
I have a soft spot for the early golden age superman stories. Superman would go to oddly extreme measures to "fix" a problem, like poverty (Action Comics #8), safety standards (Action Comics #3), or war profiteering (Action Comics #2).
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ZirconBlue
Sole Survivor of L-Town
Yes, evil comes in many forms, whether it be a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin, but you can't let the package hide the pudding! Evil is just plain bad! You don't cotton to it. You gotta smack it in the nose with the rolled-up newspaper of goodness! Bad dog! Bad dog!
It's been a long time since I've read that, but it seems based on faulty premises. Just because Superman has super strength, doesn't mean every bodily function is necessarily "super". He doesn't create gail force winds every time he exhales, for example. Nor do you ever hear about all the toilets or urinals he's destroyed.
And a fetus, not having been exposed to the sun would probably not have any superpowers.
Brainster
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I can't be 100% certain, but I am about 90% that making some of the background characters black started with Ditko. That Stan takes credit for it is hardly surprising or conclusive, as I'm sure you're aware.
I went searching through old Spiderman issues (using the Marvel collection on CD-ROM that was issued about 5 years ago). The first case I could find of black characters appearing was in #4. One of three crooks on page 2 is black. On page 17 there are several cops; one of them is black. And on the final page there's a scene where a bunch of people are talking about JJJ's campaign against Spidey; one woman is black.
Looking at the next several issues we see black characters in the background here and there; an onlooker to the Spidey-Vulture fight in #7, one of the rioting prisoners in #9, a cop in #11, a man fleeing Doc Ock in #12.
So using the cover date ASM #4 (Sept 1963) as a reference point, I started looking at FF issues starting there (with FF #18). The FF certainly does not lack for crowd scenes, but the only black character I could locate through #30 was a cop on page 4 of FF #23.
Obviously, Gabe Jones complicates matters, as he debuted before ASM #4, but again, we're talking background characters now, not supporting ones.
rwguinn
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lomiller
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DC wrote stories about Superman and in them he occasionally appears as Clark Kent, while Marvel was writing stories about Peter Parker and how being Spider-Man effected his life. This meant that supporting characters play a much bigger role in Spider-Man and Marvel stories in general.
Then there was the 90’s and Marvel became all about “cool” poses oversized guns and humongous… shoulders.
All the X-Men were pretty weak back then and Jean was exclusively a telekinetic to start with and stayed that way until issue #60 or so when Professor Xavier dies (later to be revealed as an impersonator) and “gave” her some of his telepathic ability off screen.
Yeah… X-Men storied were pretty bad in the 60’s even by the standards of the day and the book was effectively canceled in 1969. It continued as reprints until 1977 when the All new all different X-Men were introduced in #97
Marvel didn’t really start with “strong” women characters until Chris Claremont started writing the X-Men. He had a habit pf not only focusing on his female characters but making them ridiculously overpowered. When he introduced Kitty Pride he actually did so as a part of a bet/challenge to keep at least one female character on a relatively normal level.
Then there was the 90’s and Marvel became all about “cool” poses oversized guns and humongous… shoulders.
All the X-Men were pretty weak back then and Jean was exclusively a telekinetic to start with and stayed that way until issue #60 or so when Professor Xavier dies (later to be revealed as an impersonator) and “gave” her some of his telepathic ability off screen.
Yeah… X-Men storied were pretty bad in the 60’s even by the standards of the day and the book was effectively canceled in 1969. It continued as reprints until 1977 when the All new all different X-Men were introduced in #97
Marvel didn’t really start with “strong” women characters until Chris Claremont started writing the X-Men. He had a habit pf not only focusing on his female characters but making them ridiculously overpowered. When he introduced Kitty Pride he actually did so as a part of a bet/challenge to keep at least one female character on a relatively normal level.
ponderingturtle
Orthogonal Vector
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Most breathing is a much more conscious control that ejaculation. What about when he sneezes?
Maybe he pisses on his hand to break the force down... Could be very messy though..... Maybe he just goes somewhere remote and pisses there.