Brian Cronin

by Was Superman a Spy?

  The result was House of Secrets #83. During that period, each of the various horror anthologies was “hosted” by a character. Cain was the host of the House of Mystery, and his brother Abel was the host of the House of Secrets. So before one of the stories, Abel tells the reader that the following story was told to him by a “wandering wolfman,” and on the very next page is: “Script: Marv Wolfman.”

  An amusing side effect of Conway’s attempt to mock the Comics Code Authority was that the other writers of the book were a bit displeased. At the time, there were no credits in the DC horror anthologies. So once Wolfman was given one, everyone wanted one, and soon the books were filled with the names of all the creative staff for the issue.

  WHILE THE TEEN Titans gained their own comic book series in 1966, DC Comics gained its own teen titan that same year when it hired Jim Shooter. He was only fourteen years old!

  Shooter was an avid comic book reader, and while recuperating from an illness, he was reading a load of comics and noting to himself that the comics from DC seemed to lack the excitement of the Marvel comics of the same period. So Shooter, at the tender age of fourteen, decided to pick the book he felt could most use his skills (ego was never much of a problem during Shooter’s career) and decided Adventure Comics, which had a Legion of Super-Heroes feature, would be the one. He wrote and drew a proposed script and sent it to editor Mort Weisinger. Weisinger liked the script a lot, and upon contacting Shooter was stunned to find that he was only fourteen.

  Luckily for Shooter, Weisinger was more receptive to children than most people in his position would be. Weisinger was known for surveying children to see what they were interested in, then putting them into the stories of the comics he edited. He would even purchase cover ideas from children, under the theory that if one twelve-year-old thinks it is a great idea, it is likely that other twelve-year-olds would agree. He purchased a cover idea from Cary Bates when he was twelve, and later hired him to write when he was only seventeen years old. So if a kid was going to pitch to anyone, Weisinger would be the one. He hired Shooter, and after some changes were made, the script Shooter sent in was published in Adventure Comics #346. Shooter would go on to write the Legion feature until he retired from comics, a grizzled veteran at eighteen.

  However, he would return to comics in the mid-1970s, and by the end of the decade he was editor in chief of Marvel Comics, a position he held for a number of years. Shooter would go on to create three new comic book companies over the years: Valiant (which was purchased by Acclaim Entertainment for sixty-five million dollars in 1994), Defiant, and Broadway.

  In 2008 the fifty-six-year-old Shooter returned to the Legion as the regular writer of DC’s Legion of Superheroes.

  WHILE CLEARLY NONE of his other creations will ever be as popular or as influential as Superman, Jerry Siegel helped created a number of other lasting characters, with and without Joe Shuster. One of the Shuster-less creations was the Spectre, who made his debut in 1940, in More Fun Comics #58. The story behind the Spectre is that hard-nosed cop Jim Corrigan is murdered, but finds his way to Heaven barred. He has to stay on Earth as the ghostly Spectre, meting out vengeance on the evil and armed with powerful magic abilities that allow him to come up with creative ways to hurt the bad guys.

  The stories with the Spectre were fairly gruesome by the standards of comics in the 1940s. He had strange and cruel ways of punishing evildoers, starting with the men who murdered Corrigan. The Spectre was a popular character throughout the early part of the 1940s, but by the middle of the decade his popularity had waned, and for a time, he was forced to play guardian angel for a bumbling character called Percival Popp. Then, just before World War II ended in 1945, Jim Corrigan somehow enlisted in the army, and the Spectre disappeared for decades.

  The Spectre was one of a few 1940s characters brought back in the 1960s, after the success of the early reboots like the Flash and Green Lantern. He received his own title again in 1967, but it was short-lived. He would not return again until an editor at DC Comics had an unfortunate encounter on a New York City street.

  Joe Orlando was editing the comic anthology Adventure Comics, and he was debating what new character should take over the lead feature. During this time, he was mugged on the streets in New York. Orlando was furious over what had happened to him, and with his fury came a desire to seek some sort of vengeance upon the crooks, which led directly to Michael Fleisher’s Spectre series in Adventure Comics.

  Fleisher, along with artist Jim Aparo, began a series with the Spectre as the lead feature in Adventure Comics #431. The run was not long (ending with #440), but it was memorable, with Fleisher’s Spectre coming up with increasingly sadistic ways of killing off criminals, like turning them into wood then putting them through a jigsaw, or turning them into glass and smashing them, or turning them into wax and melting them. Whatever their death was, it was always poetic. Orlando must have been delighted to live vicariously through the painful revenge the Spectre delivered to the crooks.

  The series would have a strange postscript, which came about in a comics magazine, the Comics Journal. While being interviewed in 1979, author Harlan Ellison began discussing Fleisher’s Spectre and remarked that to write stories like that Fleisher must be, among other terms (some crasser), “crazy,” “certifiable,” a “lunatic.” Fleisher then sued Ellison and the Comics Journal for libel, ultimately losing in 1986.

  ALMOST TEN YEARS after Wolfman and Wein’s Teen Titans story was pulled (see pages 65-66), DC still had yet to give an African American superhero his or her own series. DC decided to finally address this by creating a title featuring an African American hero, but the first attempt ended with an extremely bizarre (and fairly offensive) concept that luckily never saw print.

  Writer Tony Isabella, who had written a number of issues for two African American superheroes over at Marvel, Power Man and Black Goliath, was approached by DC to take over a new series it had not yet debuted. Scripts were in for the first two issues, and the title was to be called The Black Bomber. It would star a Caucasian Vietnam veteran who, due to the side effects of some experiments he underwent while in Vietnam (to better camouflage troops), turns into an African American man at night and fights crime as the Black Bomber. When he was his normal identity, though, he was a bigot, à la Archie Bunker on All in the Family.

  Isabella luckily convinced DC not to publish the title but rather to let him create a new character. The end result was Black Lightning, who was Jefferson Pierce, a former Olympic decathlete who comes back to his old neighborhood to teach, and finds the neighborhood being run by the 100, a local criminal group. Pierce and a friend devise a costume, along with a belt that would allow him to fire electricity, and he begins to fight crime as Black Lightning.

  Black Lightning has been one of the more popular African American heroes in comics, although he has been unable to sustain his own title for any long period of time. He is currently a member of the Justice League of America.

  Unlike most other creators, Isabella was able to work out a creator-incentive plan with DC for the creation of Black Lightning, resulting in a certain amount of profit sharing for Isabella. One area where he was specifically compensated was for any use of Black Lightning in other media. He would be paid a royalty for use in television or film.

  During the 1970s, DC’s superhero characters were licensed to Hanna-Barbera to use in the popular animated series Super Friends. In the late 1970s, Hanna-Barbera expanded the cast of the show and changed its name to The Challenge of the Super Friends. Hanna-Barbera wanted to use Black Lightning, but DC informed them that if they used Black Lightning, they would have to pay a higher licensing fee to cover Isabella’s separate royalty fee. Rather than pay him the fee, Hanna-Barbera just created their own analogue for Black Lightning called Black Vulcan.

  Alex Toth’s design sheet for Black Vulcan’s appearance in Super Friends, from the personal collection of Ruben Espinosa.

  Black Vulcan also had lightning powers; the onl
y notable difference (besides his pantless costume) was that he could fly. Understandably, Isabella was displeased about this situation, so in an issue of Black Lightning he had a con artist name Barbara Hanna show up along with an impostor Black Lightning. To this date, Black Lightning has yet to appear on any DC Comics-licensed television series.

  SPEAKING OF ANALOGOUS characters, does the following character sound familiar? A young boy with dark hair, who wears glasses and has a forehead scar. The boy is a powerful magician. The boy has a pet owl. Everyone knows who this is, right? It has to be . . . Tim Hunter?

  Tim Hunter was created by Neil Gaiman in DC’s Books of Magic #1, published in 1990. The series follows the young boy as he is met by magical characters from other DC Comics titles, who take him on a journey through the history of magic in the DC Universe, while preparing Hunter for the fact that he might grow up to be the most powerful magician in the world.

  J. K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter book series did not start until seven years later, in 1997. In fact, Rowling has even gone on record as saying that she came up with the idea in the same year that Books of Magic was released (both Gaiman and Rowling are British writers).

  However, while the works may appear similar, it is highly unlikely that it is anything more than an amusing coincidence. A writer who backs up that position is none other than the possible “wronged” party in this instance, writer Neil Gaiman. He has detailed on more than one occasion the fact that he does not believe that Rowling was influenced by his work, but rather that both he and she were drawing from the same cultural influences, specifically T. H. White’s work (particularly The Sword in the Stone, about a young boy who is destined to be King Arthur—also with a pet owl).

  ONE COMPANY THAT was less than thrilled with the similarities it found between its intellectual property and a comic book character was Charles Atlas Ltd., which got involved in a trademark-infringement case via one of the odder routes one could imagine.

  In 1989 Grant Morrison began writing the DC series Doom Patrol with issue #19. The book was not doing very well at the time, so the young British writer was given free rein to try whatever he could to resurrect it, much in the same way that, five years earlier, Morrison’s fellow Brit Alan Moore was given free rein with Swamp Thing. That title had become one of the most critically acclaimed books of the decade. Morrison’s take on the Doom Patrol, a team of out-the-ordinary superheroes, was to make them truly out of the ordinary, adding to the team a woman with multiple personalities (each one having a separate superpower), a little girl with a face like an ape who had powerful “imaginary friends,” and a living street.

  The book became even weirder as Morrison got more comfortable in his run, but the results were increased sales and critical acclaim. In 1990, in Doom Patrol #35, the team encountered Flex Mentallo, who was a parody of the famous bodybuilder Charles Atlas. Essentially, Mentallo was what became of the “wimp getting sand kicked in his face at the beach” from the famous Charles Atlas ads.

  The character proved so popular that even after he left the title, Morrison wrote a critically acclaimed 1996 miniseries starring Flex Mentallo, in which the reader discovers that superheroes exist, but they are hiding in our imaginations, in fear of a being called the Absolute. All four issues of the series examine the very notion of what it means to create something. It is a brilliant work, so good that a fan of the series thought that the people at Charles Atlas would be thrilled to hear that their founder was involved in such a brilliant work. Well, they were not thrilled.

  Charles Atlas Ltd. sued DC Comics for trademark infringement. Although DC was ultimately granted a motion for summary judgment using a “parody” defense, since the trial DC has refused to reprint the series. Morrison has also made amends with the fan, who certainly did not mean to cause such a problem.

  BEING A SUBSIDIARY of a large corporation has made DC Comics a bit conservative at times when it comes to the content it provides. At the same time, DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint of “mature readers only” titles, including the aforementioned Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, and Books of Magic, is one of the most diverse lines of sophisticated comic book stories produced by a mainstream publisher—so they are not complete sticks in the mud. Still (as already noted on page 31), DC is familiar with pulping comic books for various interesting reasons. Here are three of their more notable pulled comics.

  As noted a couple of times already, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing was an acclaimed comic book series in the 1980s. The title began as a standard horror comic book in 1972, but an incredibly well-crafted horror comic, with strong stories from writer Len Wein and dark, moody artwork by Bernie Wrightson. The book was popular enough to merit a film adaptation in the early 1980s (directed by Wes Craven). Based on the release of the film, the Swamp Thing was given his own series again. The original story was that a scientist, Alec Holland, was working in a lab in the middle of a swamp when he was caught in a chemical explosion that transformed him into a, well, swamp thing, a humanoid made up of vegetable matter.

  When Moore took over the title, he revealed that Holland had died in the explosion, and the chemicals had animated a group of vegetation into thinking it was Holland. After this bizarre turn of events, Moore used the title to explore a number of ecological and spiritual matters, while also using Swamp Thing to explore the darker side of the DC Universe. When Moore left the book, he was replaced by the man who was drawing the comic at the time, Rick Veitch.

  Veitch continued in the same vein as Moore, although his most notable story line had Swamp Thing travel through time, meeting the various DC characters from different time periods (DC had books set in prehistoric times, Revolutionary War times, etc.). However, at one point toward the end of the story line (and soon before Veitch was set to leave the book on his own accord), Veitch had Swamp Thing encounter Jesus Christ.

  The story had been approved by editorial and was already drawn, but, perhaps with an eye toward the current scandal surrounding Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, DC refused to release the issue. Veitch quit the book, and Neil Gaiman, who was set to follow Veitch’s run along with writer Jamie Delano, refused to take over the book on principle.

  THE STORY OF how Alan Moore returned to work for DC Comics at the turn of the twenty-first century is an interesting one in and of itself. After some disputes with DC over various issues (including putting parental warnings on its comics, refusal to pay Moore certain royalties he felt were owed him, and his general irritation that DC planned on keeping his works in print indefinitely, thereby preventing him from ever recovering the rights to them), Moore refused to ever work for them again. It is with that in mind that he signed a deal with comic book creator Jim Lee’s company, Wildstorm, to produce a line of comics called America’s Best Comics. Soon after the deal was signed (and with the books already in production), Lee sold his company to none other than DC Comics.

  After promising that there would be a “firewall” of sorts between Moore and DC, Moore agreed to continue to work for America’s Best Comics. However, the firewall did not hold up for long: DC destroyed an entire issue of a Moore title in 2000 in order to make a change in the book.

  Years earlier, Moore had a dispute with Marvel Comics over work he had done for its United Kingdom branch. Marvel had reprinted some of his work without his permission, and in retaliation he has denied permission to reprint the work since then. He made one short-lived exception in 2002, after some entreaties from Marvel, where he let them put out a volume of his work on their Captain Britain character. Marvel proceeded to leave his credit off of the collection (by mistake, presumably), leading to Moore once again cutting ties with the company. In any event, during the year 2000 there was still bad blood between Moore and Marvel. That was what was in DC’s mind when it saw an ad in the back of its League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5.

  League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a book set in England in the late 1890s, starring notable literary characters that had gone into the public dom
ain, such as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde and Captain Nemo. The book was designed by artist Kevin O’Neill as though it was actually published in the late 1890s, and the back of the issue included historically accurate ads from Victorian newspapers. In #5, O’Neill placed in the back of the issue an actual ad, from an English newspaper of the era, for a female sanitary product with the brand name Marvel.

  Fearing a reprisal from Marvel, DC had the entire issue’s print run pulped and reprinted sans ad.

  IN 2001 DC struck again, this time with a different America’s Best Comic, Moore’s anthology title, Tomorrow Stories, which collected different stories written by Moore and drawn by various artists. This time the tale in question was in Tomorrow Stories #8, and it dealt with Scientology.

  The Church of Scientology has always been fairly quick to litigate to protect its reputation, so DC was concerned that it would be hit with a lawsuit if it included a short story in Tomorrow Stories #8 that involved two characters discussing a story about Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and an event he supposedly took part in with occultist John Whiteside Parsons. The issue had not gone to print yet, so DC removed the story. As a result, Moore, who had begun to slowly mend his bridges with DC and even approved a special commemorative edition of his classic series Watchmen, pulled back from DC once more. The story later appeared in an anthology by Top Shelf Productions (which currently produces the majority of Moore’s new comic work, since he finally cut all ties with DC Comics in 2008).