Brian Cronin

by Was Superman a Spy?

  Captain Marvel’s powers were similar to Superman’s, and he soon became tremendously popular, spinning off a number of related series, including Captain Marvel Adventures; Mary Marvel; Captain Marvel Jr.; and The Marvel Family. Captain Marvel Adventures was the highest-selling comic book in the early 1940s, with some figures suggesting it sold 1.3 million copies a month in 1944. The sales success is usually attributed to the high quality of the stories and artwork, which were mostly written by Otto Binder, with C. C. Beck being the main artist on the line.

  Harry Donenfeld was not pleased by the success of a comic that he felt infringed on his Superman character: both heroes were superstrong, superfast dark-haired muscular men who were invulnerable. He sent a cease and desist letter to Fawcett, who had received another such letter already from DC, concerning an earlier hero, Master Man. They had complied then, but now Fawcett Comics fought back and argued that Captain Marvel was different enough from Superman to be his own unique hero, specifically arguing that the whole “young boy magically transforms into a adult hero” idea was different enough from Superman to make the character unique, even if Captain Marvel himself appeared similar to Superman. Donenfeld responded by suing Fawcett for copyright infringement in 1941.

  The case did not go to trial until 1948. DC was represented by the famed trial attorney Louis Nizer. In the first trial, while the judge determined that Captain Marvel did, in fact, infringe upon Superman’s copyright, Fawcett’s lawyers argued that due to the omission of a copyright notice on some early Superman strips DC had forfeited the copyright on Superman. The judge agreed and determined that DC had, indeed, abandoned the copyright on Superman.

  DC appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where the legendary judge Learned Hand ruled that DC’s copyright was, in fact, valid. On the infringement issue, though, he issued a mixed ruling. He determined that Captain Marvel himself was not a copy of Superman, but the style of Captain Marvel’s stories was an infringement of the Superman stories. By this time it was 1952, and sales of Fawcett’s superhero comics had dropped dramatically, to the point where, in the early 1950s, they were already trying to use more of a horror style in the Captain Marvel line of titles. Fawcett determined that it just wasn’t financially prudent to keep fighting DC, so it settled in 1952, paid DC $400,000, and ceased publication of its superhero comics.

  A few decades later, DC approached Fawcett about using the Captain Marvel character itself, and Fawcett agreed to license the character. However, an interesting twist to the story occurred in the ensuing decades. During the 1960s, Marvel Comics became a major force in the comic industry, and Stan Lee was extremely creative when it came to picking up names that he found striking, taking, for instance, the name Daredevil, in 1964, from an out-of-business superhero comic of the 1940s. In 1967, perhaps inspired by a small company using the name themselves for a short-lived series in 1966, he created a new Captain Marvel character and quickly trademarked the name.

  Therefore when DC licensed Captain Marvel from Fawcett, it could not call its comic Captain Marvel anymore, because Marvel Comics now had a trademark on that name. So the book’s title was changed to Shazam!

  Captain Marvel remained popular, even gaining his own television series in the 1970s (also called Shazam!). Eventually, DC purchased the rights to the Captain Marvel line of characters from Fawcett entirely. Due to the ensuing trademark situation, Marvel knows that it has to publish a comic with the name Captain Marvel on a fairly regular basis (at least once every few years), because if it ever lapses in publishing such a title, DC will certainly swoop in and try to get the trademark terminated. It puts Marvel in an interesting position, as the character Captain Marvel has never sold particularly well for it, but it will no doubt keep trying new versions of the character, mostly just to maintain the trademark.

  EDITOR JULIUS SCHWARTZ was the brains behind the so-called Silver Age of comics (generally considered to be from the late 1950s until the very early 1970s), which began when he started introducing the first new superheroes at DC Comics since the 1940s, starting with the introduction of the new Flash in Showcase #4 in 1956. When revamping characters, he never forgot his creative roots, and in one case paid a particularly interesting homage.

  As a teenager, Schwartz was a fan of science fiction, and in 1932 he started one of the very first fan magazines devoted to science fiction. A couple of years later, while still a teenager, Schwartz became a literary agent for science fiction writers, working with such legendary authors as Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft (the former at the beginning of his stellar career, the latter at the conclusion). During the 1940s, Schwartz got a job working as an assistant editor at All-American Comics, which would merge with DC Comics in 1944. While working at DC, Schwartz always tried to take care of the science fiction writers he knew, getting them work whenever he could.

  Schwartz was tasked with creating new versions of some of DC’s superheroes of the 1940s, and after the Flash debuted in 1956 in a comic anthology, Schwartz gave the writing assignment for the character’s ongoing title to John Broome, a science fiction writer he had known as a teen. In 1959 Broome would relaunch another 1940s hero, with the creation of the new Green Lantern.

  The next relaunch was of the Atom. The original Atom, Al Pratt, was one of the lesser lights of All-American Comics, as he was a short man (five foot one) who learned how to box and then threw on a mask and a cape and fought crime as a member of the Justice Society of America. Eventually, in 1948, probably concerned with his relative lack of powers, he was given super strength.

  The new Atom, however, was a scientist who developed a belt made out of “white dwarf star matter,” which allowed him to shrink to subatomic size. While at this size, he would be able to control his weight, so he could, for instance, while tiny hit someone with the force of his full weight behind him, which was an effective tool for knocking bad guys out. The name of the new Atom was Ray Palmer, which is the name of a science fiction editor friend of Julie Schwartz. The joke was that Raymond A. Palmer was an actual dwarf.

  When he was seven years old, Palmer was hit by a truck, and an unsuccessful operation on his spine resulted in the stunting of his growth (he stood four feet tall) and the development of a hunchback. Palmer found a refuge from his physical problems in the pages of science fiction books, and he soon became a prolific writer himself and the editor of the prominent science fiction magazine Amazing Stories from 1938 to 1949. There he had the distinction of purchasing Isaac Asimov’s first professional story. Palmer was well known for his sense of humor, so he certainly appreciated his friend’s odd homage to him.

  COMIC BOOK COMPANIES have never really done much in the way of market research. For most of the history of comics, there just was not the money in the budget for detailed research into why any title was selling or just what the sales figures for each book were. At DC Comics during the 1950s, deciding why books were selling was the job of the publisher, Irwin Donenfeld, and the methods he used were not exactly the most scientific.

  At one point, early on in the fifties, Donenfeld asked Julie Schwartz about a particular issue of the science fiction comic Schwartz was editing, Strange Adventures. The sales for the issue were significantly higher than for previous issues. The two men brainstormed, and all they could come up with was that perhaps the cover, which featured a man trapped in the body of a gorilla in a jail cell, appealed to children. Perhaps they liked gorillas?

  So they put a gorilla on the cover of another comic book, and the sales went up. They put a gorilla on another comic, and sales went up too. Soon Schwartz was putting gorillas on the covers of so many books that Donenfeld had to step in and make a rule—only one cover with a gorilla on it per month!

  Similar reasoning determined a cover motif that frequently occurred on Schwartz’s science fiction titles: every time the cover showed the earth in an odd position, like from a strange angle or being cut in half or anything of that sort, sales went up. As you can imagine, so
on they were trying to put the earth into as many bizarre scenarios as they could come up with.

  Later in the 1950s, the most popular image to feature on a comic cover was a Tyrannosaurus rex (although gorilla covers were still popular even then). Soon tyrannosaurs were everywhere. You knew things were getting out of hand when Tomahawk, DC’s Western title about a government operative during the American Revolution, had tyrannosaurs on the covers of multiple issues!

  IT WAS BAD enough when DC was making decisions based solely on how covers seemed to sell; it was quite another matter when Marvel Comics became a major sales force in the 1960s. DC had to examine both its sales and Marvel’s sales, and see what Marvel was doing right that they were not.

  The problem was that DC was so used to being the industry standard that it really could not comprehend how Marvel could possibly be passing it by. It did not make sense to them, and some of the ideas they came up with to combat Marvel’s sales seem, in retrospect, quite bizarre.

  The first theory DC developed was that Marvel was doing well because its comic book covers employed “bad art”; that is, art that was so unsophisticated that it appealed to children, who did not want to be challenged by artwork. This might not have been something Donenfeld came up with, but whoever made the determination forced at least one DC title, Wonder Woman, to specifically change its art style to be less detailed and less professional. Since the title went back to its original style within a year, it is unlikely that the change was an effective one.

  The next theory was a bit more informed and was based on the way comics were displayed on store magazine racks or on spinner racks. On a magazine rack, comics would be placed in tiers, with the latest books going on the first tier, and the older books going behind them. The new books would block all but the top of the older books. Likewise, in a spinner rack often all that would be recognizable would be the tops of the books. Donenfeld felt that the best way to use this to DC’s advantage was to make sure the tops of their books looked unique, so he added black-and-white checkered boxes to the tops of all DC comics.

  Apparently, sales went up during the time of the “go-go checks” (as they were called by staffers), but this was just before DC was purchased by Warner Bros. When it was, Donenfeld was out as publisher, and once he departed, the new publisher eliminated the checkered boxes from the covers.

  BY 1963 DC had been publishing Justice League of America (a remake of Justice Society of America), for a number of years. Although it featured a number of its superheroes in one book, the various characters of the DC Universe had kept mostly to themselves. In fact, the editors of Superman and Batman each insisted that their heroes involvement in the Justice League be downplayed (this was the same during the 1940s, when both Superman and Batman were technically members of the Justice Society of America, though they rarely appeared). So when it was published in 1963, The Brave and the Bold #50 was, for the time, significant: that was when the title turned into a team-up book, pairing DC heroes, some of whom had never appeared with each other in a comic book story.

  In the fifth issue using this format, The Brave and the Bold #54, three teen sidekicks of DC heroes meet one another. Batman’s sidekick Robin, the Flash’s sidekick Kid Flash, and Aquaman’s sidekick Aqualad all team up to defeat a villain. Six issues later, the group was back, this time calling themselves the Teen Titans, and with a new member, Wonder Girl, presumably Wonder Woman’s sidekick.

  The question most readers of DC comics asked at the time was, “Who is Wonder Girl?” and it is a question that came about because the writer of the story, Bob Haney, accidentally used a character that did not yet exist.

  As mentioned earlier, the DC titles were generally run like little kingdoms, where the characters were guarded, even from other creators. Therefore, there was no communication between Haney and the writer-editor of Wonder Woman, Robert Kanigher. If there had been communication, Haney would have learned who the Wonder Girl character actually was. Kanigher had done a few flashback stories with Wonder Woman as a child in the late 1950s, and they proved popular. He then did some stories with Wonder Woman as a young toddler, and they too were popular. So Kanigher came up with a rather odd idea, although another popular one, which was that Wonder Woman would team up with herself as a child and as a toddler! Kanigher wrote a number of issues (they were called “impossible stories”) where the three characters would team up, along with Wonder Woman’s mother, Queen Hippolyta.

  When Haney was putting together his team of teen heroes, he saw one of Kanigher’s issues and presumed that the girl was Wonder Woman’s sidekick, not a younger version of Wonder Woman herself. So he added her to the Teen Titans.

  Eventually given her own name, Donna Troy, Wonder Girl would serve as a member of the Teen Titans for years, and over the years many different writers have attempted to explain away Haney’s original mistake, usually just succeeding in making her origins more confusing. It is probably hard to come up with a good origin for a character when her real origin was essentially an “oops.”

  THE TEEN TITANS were given their own series in 1966, but the book soon began to flounder a bit from lack of direction. Toward the end of the decade, while they were trying to break into the comic book industry, Marv Wolfman and Len Wein were given a chance at writing the title. The pair was barely out of their teens at the time (Wolfman was twenty-three, Wein twenty-one). As they were attempting to distinguish themselves, they tried to do something that was yet to be done at DC Comics—introduce an African American superhero.

  Marvel, which was the far looser and more liberal company, only had a handful of African American heroes itself at the time. At the conservative DC Comics of the 1960s, it would be an extremely big deal. The story was written by Wolfman and Wein, and drawn by the book’s regular artist, Nick Cardy. It was about a hooded hero named Jericho, who tries to keep a group of African American gang members from being incited to violence by the mob. Eventually the hood comes off, and he is revealed to be the brother of a member of the gang.

  Right before the book was to go to print, the new publisher of DC, Carmine Infantino, pulled the book. Infantino never went into specifics, saying only that he would not let the book go out as written. Neal Adams, a star artist at DC at the time, attempted to step in and quell the anger that Wolfman and Wein were feeling over their story being rejected, and in the end Adams ended up reworking and redrawing most of the issue in the span of a weekend so the book would be ready to go to press. The new story involved a Caucasian hero named Joshua and gang members that were not race specific. Outrage over the incident resulted in Wolfman and Wein being blacklisted at DC for a number of years.

  Eventually, both men returned to work for DC, and in the 1980s Wolfman had some measure of revenge. He was writing the follow-up book to the Teen Titans, the New Teen Titans, and it was DC’s highest-selling book at the time. A few years into his run, he introduced a new member of the Titans. His name? Jericho. Granted, this new Jericho was also a Caucasian, but still, fifteen years later Wolfman got to use the name.

  MARV WOLFMAN WAS also involved in another interesting incident at DC in the late 1960s; this time it involved the Comics Code Authority, specifically a loophole for getting around it.

  The Comics Code Authority was the result of the public-relations disaster the comic book industry suffered when the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham began a campaign against what he felt was, as he titled his book on the subject, the Seduction of the Innocent. (See page 42 for Wertham’s previous effects on DC’s comics.) Ultimately, Wertham caused a big enough stir that Senator Estes Kefauver, the same man who went after organized crime in the 1950s, decided to have a congressional hearing investigating Wertham’s claims against comic books. Ultimately too frightened about the notion of the government regulating comics, the Comics Magazine Association of America decided to police itself, forming the Comics Code Authority, a committee that rated comic books and judged whether they were appropriate for children. In the 1950s, you needed to hav
e the “Comics Code Approved” seal if you wanted stores to sell your comics.

  The initial Comics Code regulations were themselves practically obscene in what they disallowed. The strict rules demanded that stories were prohibited from including anything that would show disrespect for authority. Drugs were out, even if they were shown to be evil. Also, stories had to end with good triumphing over evil—no matter what. The words crime, horror, and terror were all banned from comic book titles (something that EC Comics’ owner Charles Gaines felt was specifically meant to hurt his comics line, which included titles with each of those words). Most amusingly, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and zombies were all banned from comics, because everyone knows that the number one cause of juvenile delinquency is vampires. It is this last restriction that is at issue here.

  In 1969 Wolfman was contributing stories to DC’s horror anthology House of Secrets (one can only imagine what you had to do for horror stories when you could not use vampires, werewolves, etc.). As noted above, you could not even mention werewolves or wolfmen by name inside the comic. However, a spark of an idea hit Gerry Conway, the editor of the comic. He asked, “Even if that is the fellow’s name?” In that case, they said, it would be allowed.