Action Comics #13: Superman vs. the Cab Protective League

 This is part of an ongoing series where I review Golden Age Superman, weekly, issue by issue, starting from the very beginning. 

Another cover with Superman, a mirrored drawing from the cover to #10

   Superman vs. the Cab Protective League begins as a pretty standard, issue-driven Superman story, as Clark runs into some racketeers who are “trying to victimize the independent companies” in Metropolis’ cab world. By page 8, it seems wrapped up- Superman is getting more and more efficient and dealing with mobsters at this point- but then the crooks break out, and Superman has to follow the trail to their boss. Here, we meet Ultra-Humanite, a bald mad scientist who plans to take over the world. He would go on to appear 4 more times within the next ten issues of Action Comics, before being supplanted by Lex Luthor and not appearing again in the golden age. 

    Ultra explains that “a scientific experiment resulted in [his] possessing the most able and learned brain on Earth”. He is paralysed from the waist down, and serves as an intellectual foe who can trap and outwit Superman rather than a physical threat- there wouldn’t be any villains who could go toe-to-toe with the Man of Steel for quite some time. He does manage to knock Superman out with his trap, though; an electrified floor that “was enough to kill five hundred men”. It’s the first time we’ve seen the Man of Tomorrow in any real danger, so it does a decent job establishing Ultra as a threat. A couple of the henchman get killed off pretty violently, not directly by Superman but he is quite non-plussed about it, saying that they got what they deserved. The death penalty was still quite common at this time, and views on justice were quite different. The whole “superheroes don’t kill” trope is something that evolved over time, but in the early days heroes killing villains was not seen as something scandalous or rule-breaking. 

 

    This is Superman’s first recurring villain. Most comics of this era were essentially large collections of short stories, so one-off foes and supporting characters were very common. Flash Gordon had Ming, but aside from that I don’t know of any other arch-nemeses in comics of the 1930s. The Joker wouldn’t debut for another year, and there were still not many other heroes around in general. Giving Superman a recurring foe was a decent idea, even Ultra-Humanite was relatively underdeveloped and eventually left aside. It allows the book to shift from the more grounded crime stories of the early issues into more fantastical, pulpy territory (although madmen with dreams of world domination may have felt a bit less far-fetched in 1939). 

    The unusual structure of it is also something Siegel & Shuster have done a few times, linking small vignettes together rather than a more traditional, 3-act setup for every story. The variations help keep things fresh, and though I often find these fantastical stories less compelling than Siegel & Shuster’s brash takedowns of political injustices, the series does need to be able to tell these kinds of stories as well in order to branch out and keep going. It’s just that if you want larger-than life Superman stories with mad scientists and crazy gadgets, it’s been done better by later writers and artists. 

Strange Tales #117: The Many Traps of Baron Mordo!

This is part of an ongoing series where I will be reviewing Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange, covering his appearances in Strange Tales #110-111 and #114-146. 

    The Many Traps of Baron Mordo! once again pits Strange against his rival sorcerer. Out of 6 stories to this point, all of them have featured either Mordo or Nightmare as the main antagonist. While recurring villains can be useful in building up a heroe’s life and tribulations, there is a bit of a lack of variety so far. Still, it looks great, with most of it taking place at night, playing up the gothic undertones of the arcane arts, and bringing Strange and Mordo’s magic duels into a more firmly surreal conflict, rather than just punching eachother in astral form. It also makes for another intimate chamber drama: the Anicent One shows up very briefly but otherwise it’s just the two of them. 

    Mordo traps Strange’s house in another dimension, which Strange exits in his astral form. Mordo traps him again in a “ethereal cylinder”, which Strange escapes by tunneling through the Earth, and then he proceeds to pose as the Ancient One to catch Mordo off guard, defeating him in a magical duel.

 

    Ditko sticks primarily to 9-grids here despite the 8 pages, using smaller panels to speed up the pace of the action, even breaking down further into a 4-panel row on page 6 as Strange tunnels into the ground to escape Mordo’s prison (shown above). The final page is probably the most visually striking, as the conclusion to their battle takes on abstract clouds of red and purple, and Strange returns to his shadowy sanctum to ponder the results. There’s also pretty heavy use of different colored speech bubbles rather than just white, which is something that pops up in a couple of Marvel books around this period: here you get yellow, orange, green, and purple, fitting within the story’s colour palette while making things look a bit more dynamic. I would’ve liked for them to stick with it longer, honestly. Overall, I still tend to enjoy the Nightmare stories more than the Mordo ones, but these have been steadily improving, each one better than the last. Next week begins a long stretch of brand-new villains, which is sorely needed. 

                 

 

New York World’s Fair Comics #1: Superman at the World's Fair

 This is part of an ongoing series where I review Golden Age Superman, weekly, issue by issue, starting from the very beginning. 

New York World’s Fair Comics was a two-issue series, published yearly during the World’s Fair. The first issue starred Superman, Zatara, the first appearance of the golden age Sandman, along with a few other comedic characters, while the second added Batman to the mix (the first was published before Detective Comics #27 unleashed the Caped Crusader on the world). It brought DC’s biggest stars together for a 96-page blow-out issue (Detective and Action were 60-70 pages), though without any direct crossover, so the stories could all be produced separately by their original creators. The format proved successful, eventually leading to World’s Finest Comics, a quarterly book that would run separate Superman and Batman stories in the same issue for over a decade until it finally teamed them up in the 1950s.

I'm sure Shuster took some inspiration from Flash Gordon, but this is ridiculous...

Both issues feature the Trylon and the Perisphere on the cover, two modernist structures that were the centerpiece of the fair, which boldly proclaimed to show “the world of tomorrow”. A fitting destination for the Man of Tomorrow, then. In the story, Clark is sent to cover the World’s Fair for the Daily Star. As Superman, he halts a train crash, helps an exhibit get built, and saves Lois from a criminal on the run. There’s not really an overarching plot or theme to it, it’s just a bunch of standard Superman beats vaguely linked together by the Fair itself. Although it’s an architectural exhibition and not an out-and-out commercial, it still feels pretty tacky. Clark really wants to go, basically looking directly at the viewer at the end and telling you to go, and Superman even stands atop the Perisphere (incorrectly captioned as “the Trylon”) to locate Lois at one point, in a very oddly drawn panel. On the cover, Superman has blonde hair and a red shirt. The interior colours are overly high contrast and garish. It’s functional, but it all feels rather slapdash and strung together, second rate compared to the main book.

seriously, what the hell is this silhouette?

Strange Tales #116: Return to the Nightmare World!

This is part of an ongoing series where I will be reviewing Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange, covering his appearances in Strange Tales #110-111 and #114-146. 

Return to the Nightmare World! is a sequel story to Strange Tales #110, as Strange once again must go into the dream realm and battle Nightmare. These dimensional stories give Ditko free reign to create arresting, kaleidescopic imagery, without the constraints of anything resembling the real world. There’s a suitable eerieness to it. Here, Ditko begins to use bigger panels to tell the story, taking advantage of the less restrictive page count. It’s a cross between 6-panel and 9-panel grids, opening with a 6 to set the stage and often alternating between rows of 2 and 3 for the rest of the issue, while sticking to 3 columns. The closeup on Nightmare on the first page is especially unsettling.

Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, together at last!

 The term “Lovecraftian” gets thrown around a lot when it comes to godlike alien beings, generally referring to influences of the godlike alien entities of the Cthulhu Mythos, and while there are elements of that with the pit creature, The Dream Cycle is a bigger point of reference here, with an entire realm populated by strange creatures, only accessible through dreaming. The plot is a bit more straightforwardly heroic than #110, with Strange delving into the nightmare realm in order to save innocent civilians from Nightmare’s clutches. It’s a bit of a change in characterization for Nightmare, who seemingly haunted the dreams of guilty men in a Dickens sort of way in his first appearance, even dressing up like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

 We get the second appearance of Wong, again shown as a passive man-servant who answers the door for Strange. There’s a brief panel showing the Ancient One, who is also portrayed with yellow skin, unlike in previous issues. Strange is contacted by the police here, as several people have slipped into unexplained comas around New York. Like in #110, Strange doesn’t actually fight Nightmare, instead avoiding him long enough to accomplish his goal and then escaping. It gives the feeling that Strange is out of his depth, and unlike with Mordo, he can’t win through a head-on fight. There’s not much in the way of overall character growth or progression, it’s just a good-old fashioned monster of the week type story that lets Ditko’s artwork do the talking, and is all the better for it. Honestly. the hardest part of writing these is trying to stop myself from just posting every single panel of Ditko's art.

Action Comics #12: Superman Declares War on Reckless Drivers

This is part of an ongoing series where I review Golden Age Superman, weekly, issue by issue, starting from the very beginning. 

    Superman Declares War on Reckless drivers continues the Man of Tomorrow’s chaotic streak, as he once again takes matters into his own hands to solve societal problems where the power structures in place have failed. This time, it’s traffic violations. Automobiles were a relatively new phenomenon at the time, having been mass produced for less than 50 years by 1939. Superman is concerned by the damages caused by drunk drivers, hit-and-runs, and unsafe second-hand vehicles. He breaks into a radio station to announce that “henceforth, homicidal drivers answer to me”, arguing that “more people have been killed needlessly due by autos than died during the World War”. Considering that over 8 million soldiers and 13 million civilians died in World War I (Britannica) and the yearly rate of automobile fatalities in the US peaked at 37,819 in 1937 (Wikipedia), that seems like a bit of a stretch, though it is possible the numbers are comparable worldwide. 

    Still, regardless of the exact numbers, it was a rising concern as cars became more and more common and the rate of fatalities were trending upwards year over year. On January 24, 1935, President Roosevelt sent the following letter to each Governor in the US: