The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  Dr. Occult, a Siegel and Shuster creation, served as a kind of trial run for elements of their later hero Superman.13 The ghost detective, as he was billed, debuted in New Fun Comics #6 (October 1935), running in two-page installments to issue #32 of More Fun Comics.14 The strip began as a horror-detective feature with Dr. Occult fighting vampires and werewolves through issue #13. The next four issues change gears, dropping into a storyline that began in The Comics Magazine #1 (May 1936). A masked and caped giant appears out of nowhere over the city skyline. Dr. Occult enlarges himself and “advances upon the other figure poised for battle.” Occult removes the giant’s mask and discovers his friend Zator, who posed as a menace only because he needed to draw Occult to him quickly. Zator informs Occult of a threat to “the Seven” and they whisk off into the spirit world where they encounter monstrous creatures, servants of Koth who offers Occult and Zator a chance to join him against the Seven. The two men refuse and Koth sics his creatures upon them, but the Seven save them. In the next four issues Occult and Zator fight against and defeat Koth’s plan to destroy human civilization as he has done several times in the past. To defeat the evil Koth, Occult, who has come increasingly to resemble Slam Bradley (himself a double for Superman), dons a blue outfit emblazoned with “the Symbol of the Seven”—a triangular emblem encompassing a half-moon symbol—a red cape, and a sword, looking much like John Carter.

  This symbol, which Zator also wears, protects them from Koth’s ether entities as they travel to the Egyptian tomb to secure “a certain belt of miraculous powers.” This belt enables its wearer to fly, to turn people to stone, and conjure an inexhaustible phantom army—all of which Occult does in his victorious battle with Koth. In More Fun #18 (February 1937) Dr. Occult is back on Earth facing “The Lord of Life,” a villain who kills people, resurrects them, and then blackmails them into stealing for him in return for continued injections of the serum that keeps them alive. Flying and wearing a blue and red costume with a chevron, Dr. Occult is clearly a precursor of Superman.

  Another clear precursor to the superhero was the Phantom. Appearing first as a daily on February 17, 1936, and then as a Sunday in May of 1939, the Phantom comes close to being a superhero, but remains a mystery man.15 The Phantom’s mission focuses on fighting piracy. His ancestor, Sir Christopher Standish, while on a trading mission in 1525 to the Far East, is attacked by pirates who take his ship and kill his father. A typhoon in the Bay of Bengal interrupts the pirate raid, and Standish washes up on the coast and is nursed to health by the Bandar pygmy tribe. On the skull of the pirate who killed his father Standish takes an oath of vengeance to fight against the Singh Brotherhood and all pirates and to dedicate his descendants to the same task. Each eldest son since has taken the Phantom identity and continued the fight. The costume is a gray hooded bodysuit with a domino mask, completed by a skull belt and skull ring.16 The Phantom’s skull insignia emblemizes his ancestor’s oath on the Singh pirate’s skull and hence his own repetition of that oath on the same skull. Although the Phantom is tough, strong, and highly athletic, he does not possess true superpowers. Instead he tricks people into thinking he is immortal through the continuing resurrection of the Phantom identity by the sons of the Phantoms. He also pulls stunts that lead criminals to believe he can turn into smoke or walk through walls. As the first true costumed adventurer17 with adventures set in America, the Phantom laid important groundwork for the superhero because in his adventures can be found nearly all the elements of the superhero genre.18

  The Phantom’s debut year also saw the striking of the Clock in Funny Pages #6 (November 1936). The Clock draws heavily upon pulp heroes with a striking resemblance to the Gray Seal. He is Brian O’Brien, a wealthy socialite, who acts as a Robin Hood by recovering riches stolen from wealthy misers and distributing them to the poor instead of returning them. He has a sanctum sanctorum outfitted with torture devices to get crooks to talk, is in the habit of leaving a calling card in the form of a picture of a clock face with the words “The Clock Strikes” printed on it, and has an additional identity as Snowy Winters. His iconic weaponry includes a cane with a spring-loaded knob and a derby hat specially made to protect him against blows to the head. Besides his boxing skills, he can hypnotize criminals into revealing and confessing their crimes.

  Like the Phantom, the Clock fits well into the existing mystery man genre, but by appearing in comics he helped to set the stage for the debut of Superman.

  The last comics precursor of the superhero actually overlapped with Superman. Rather than precursor, Will Murray actually identifies Olga Mesmer as “The Superhero before Superman” (1998, 25). He writes, “Superman was not the first superhero. A year before Action #1, another super-character, possessing super-strength and X-ray vision, with roots in a super-civilization from another planet, had debuted in comic strip form. And the publisher was no less than the publisher of Superman!”19 “Olga Mesmer, the Girl with the X-Ray Eyes,” ran in Spicy Mystery Stories from August 1937 to October 1938. The feature was supplied by Adolphe Barreaux’s Majestic Studios, a comics shop that supplied material for Harry Donenfeld, the publisher whose company ultimately became DC Comics. Olga is the daughter of Dr. Hugo Mesmer and the mysterious Margot, whom Mesmer has injected with a soluble X-ray while pregnant. These experiments give their baby superstrength and the added bonus of X-ray vision. Olga’s parents die on the day she is born, and she is raised by her godfather, Hugh Rankin, who counsels her to keep her powers secret. She uses them to rescue a young man, Rodney Prescott, from an attacker, but transfers her superstrength to the injured man as part of a blood transfusion to save his life. A series of adventures reveal that Margot is the immortal queen of Venus. On Venus, the superpowered Olga and Rodney put down a revolt and see Margot married to Boris, Prince of Mars, thus bringing peace to the two warring planets. Murray concludes his article, “Olga Mesmer was an original. The first superhero to see print … definitely the first superheroic in comics history!”

  It is unclear exactly what Murray means by superhero here. Olga Mesmer’s mission is rather limited. She defends herself from her godfather’s attempts to molest her, stops a murder in progress, and helps Queen Margot defeat a revolt. With the exception of the attempted murder of Prescott, Olga is involved in family matters, some of which have a broader effect only due to the position of her mother in Venusian society: this mission is more in line with the science fiction genre than with later superheroes. The only clear superhero convention present in the story is superpowers. But many science fiction superfolk and mythical heroes before Olga had powers equal to or greater than hers, so if she is a superhero, then she is not the first and the superhero genre extends back to the legend of Gilgamesh. As already demonstrated, the superhero genre emerged from a concatenation of conventions in the comic books of the Golden Age. Therefore, there is more to superheroes than superpowers. Further Mesmer lacks the codename and costume aspects of the identity convention. Her tale generically fits within the SF superman (or woman) genre, particularly in the way that she gets her superpowers, seemingly drawing directly on Wylie’s Gladiator for inspiration, but resembling Siegel and Shuster’s earlier villainous superman Bill Dunn.

  Olga Mesmer has been long forgotten and was probably forgotten by the November 1938 issue of Spicy Mystery. Unlikely to have influenced either Siegel or Shuster, Olga Mesmer merely demonstrates the same point that the other comics precursors to Superman demonstrate, that, like the pulps before them, comic books and comic strips contained all the elements of the superhero—the powers, the mission, the identity—but it took Siegel and Shuster to put them all together into Superman. The best popular culture, whether Homer’s epics, Shakespeare’s plays, or the televised adventures of Xena or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, combine preexisting elements in new and exciting ways. They follow the dictates for success in formula, balancing convention and invention to create successful, popular, and archetypal stories and characters.

  NOTES

  1. Bill Bla
ckbeard rediscovered Hugo Hercules and includes examples of two Sunday strips in The Comic Strip Century: Celebrating 100 Years of an American Art Form (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995).

  2. Strangely, Hugo Hercules speaks different in his balloons versus the accompanying caption which runs underneath each panel. His closing comment on September 7, 1902, portrays him as a New York tough, quite in contrast to his generally refined appearance and speech in the panels: “Don’t mention it lady. I’m Hugo Hercules, the boy wonder, and stoppin’ trolley cars is me long, strong suit.” Even more pronounced is the contrast between the balloon speech versus the caption speech on October 26, 1902. The second panel shows Hugo lifting a car so that a young man can kiss his girlfriend who stands at a window placed some feet up the wall. Holding the automobile, Hercules says, “I could do this forever.” The caption below reads, “Soy up dere. You’ll have to hurry. I could hold dis machine for two years, but I hear somebody’s fadder a-comin’. Break away.” In the third panel Hugo replies to the young lover’s thanks with his catchphrase, “Just as easy,” but in the caption below the panel says, “Dat’s all rite, young felly. I can raise yer oughterknowbetter a plaguy site better’n I kin raise me rent, and that’s no kid, either.” The contrast between his relatively refined balloon speech and his rough caption speech is puzzling. The captions were discontinued after November 7, 1902.

  3. Jerry Siegel listed the animated Popeye as an influence in his creation of Superman (see Thomas Andrae, “Of Superman and Kids with Dreams: A Rare Interview with the Creators of Superman: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster,” Nemo: The Classic Comics Library, August 1983, 10; Mike Benton, Comics of the Golden Age: The Illustrated History. Taylor Publishing, 1992, 12; Les Daniels, Superman: The Complete History. Chronicle Books, 1998, 18).

  4. In the discussion following, by “comics” I am referring to cartoon-based comics, the traditional pen-and-ink, printed-on-paper comics, not sequential art forms such as fumetti, which use photographs.

  5. In superhero novels, the full costumes of the superheroes are rarely described. Instead the picture on the book’s cover is relied on to convey the heroes’ costumes. Radio has the same limitations in depicting costumes that prose has, and fantastic feats of strength and superpowers are essentially visual, not auditory, experiences and so cannot be duplicated well in sound only, as the Superman radio show demonstrates.

  6. A similar point may be made about painting, but comics can be painted and even in painted comics the costumes work in the same way. Because neither cartooning nor painting is capable of achieving the same level of mimetic realism as the photograph, the slight distancing of both these art forms make possible the believability of the superhero costume and fantastic feats that other media do not.

  7. The two recent Spider-Man movies directed by Sam Raimi (2002, 2004) and Batman Begins are exceptions to this trend. They appear to presage workable superhero costumes in live-action media.

  8. The same is true in prose. To accurately describe a superhero’s costume would entail describing or specifying the fabric of which it is made, thereby making it seem too particular or artificial and thereby puncturing the suspension of disbelief needed to imagine costumed people who do not look silly. In comics the fabric of the costume need not be specified, so the illusion of a realistic appearance can be maintained.

  9. The 1996 Phantom film starring Billy Zane did a similarly good job on the costume, but the costumers were still unable to reach the similarity of costume and clothes achieved in the comics.

  10. One difference between the earlier Adam West or George Reeves and Christopher Reeves or Dean Cain is that the latter two actors were in considerably better shape than the former two actors, so they physically resembled the superhero body type to a greater extent, although George Reeves accurately resembled Superman as he was depicted in the comics of the 1950s.

  11. In Dave Sim’s Cerebus the title character, a furry cartoonish aardvark, appears with the same level of surface realism and believability as the other characters. Perhaps an even better example is the character Lord Julius. Julius is “played by” Groucho Marx. That is, the character is based upon the characters played by Groucho in a number of Marx Brothers’ films. He attains a level of believability in comics that he could not attain in another medium. In prose, the author could describe him and hope that the reader would understand that the character is Groucho Marx, but if the character Lord Julius were actually identified as looking like Groucho or as Groucho, this identification would break the reader out of the imaginary world the author has constructed. If there were ever a filmed version of Cerebus and a look-alike actor played Groucho playing Julius, the double removal would similarly break the viewer out of Sim’s imaginary world. Perhaps a computer-generated Groucho, using re-combined speech or synthesized speech, would be able to achieve the same level of believable illusion as Sim’s comics currently do. Groucho-the-actor is Lord-Julius-the-character in a way that cannot be duplicated in prose or film. Perhaps radio could achieve a similar level of believability realism by employing an actor to duplicate Groucho’s voice, but doing so would completely sacrifice the visual element that makes comics so powerful.

  12. Rather than preceding Superman, the Phantom Magician might have been inspired by Superman. Mel Graff, Patsy’s cartoonist, had once rejected Siegel and Shuster’s Superman submission (Ron Goulart, “Leaping Tall Buildings: Falling on Faces,” Nemo: The Classic Comics Library, August 1983, 30).

  13. As did Slam Bradley, a private detective adventurer in the Captain Easy mode. Slam Bradley fit solidly within existing adventure genres with touches of science fiction. Instead of being a place to work out the SF concept that they later employed in Superman, it was where they worked on the technical aspects, particularly the action sequences, that they used in Superman. Slam Bradley was in Siegel’s words “a dry run for Superman” and in Shuster’s “the forerunner of Superman, because we turned it out with no restriction, complete freedom to do what we wanted” in terms of page and panel layout (Andrae, “Of Superman and Kids with Dreams,” 11).

  14. New Fun Comics changed its name to More Fun Comics with issue #7.

  15. Even though his first appearance in comic books (Ace Comics #11, February 1938) predated Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1 (June 1938), the Phantom did not exactly inspire an outpouring of similar characters either in comic books or strips. None of the creators of Superman or Batman claim the Phantom as an influence, and he is identified in his stories as a “mystery man” on more than one occasion. He has no superpowers that break the laws of physics. His origin is more of a pulp mystery-man origin than a superheroic one. His skull ring clearly draws on the similar spider ring used by the Spider to mark his foes.

  16. The Phantom’s trademark purple outfit did not come into use until the Sunday strip began in 1939. On May 7, 1936 his costume is identified as gray: “No one sees a gray-clad arm reach for a parachute.”

  17. Mandrake the Magician began as a daily strip on June 11, 1934, and as a Sunday strip in February 1935. He started as a magician with supernatural powers and evolved into an ordinary man who is a master of hypnotism and illusion. The comic strip was written by Lee Falk and drawn by Phil Davis. Mandrake does not need to be discussed here because he is neither a superman nor a dual-identity crime fighter.

  18. An important difference between the Phantom and the superheroes who followed Superman is the focus on crime. The Phantom’s adventures take place in exotic locations and fit in more closely with the adventure strips of the 1930s than they do with the urban crime fighting of the superheroes. Reinhold Reitberger and Wolfgang Fuchs refer to the Phantom as “the forerunner of superheroes” (Comics: An Anatomy of a Mass Medium. Little Brown, 1971, 102). They point out the way that reversed the secret identity pattern developed in the Superman stories. Each new Phantom, they write, “divests [him]self of [his] individual personality in order to become a hero and the hero in turn takes on the additional aspect of Mr. Walker
(The Ghost Who Walks). Superman, in contrast, is first and foremost a hero, and he dons his second identity (Clark Kent, the reporter) to hide his true ‘super’ nature from the ordinary mortals among who he works” (102).

  19. The extraterrestrial aspects of the Olga Mesmer feature did not appear until after Superman’s appearance in Action Comics #1 (June 1938). See Will Murray, “The Roots of the Superman!” Comic Book Marketplace, October 1998: 19–21.

  Men of Tomorrow

  GERARD JONES

  Copyright © 2005 Gerard Jones. Reprinted from Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, 80–88, by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

  PHILIP WYLIE WAS THE SON OF A PRESBYTERIAN MINISTER WHO BROKE ANGRILY with his father’s God, studied theater at Princeton, dropped out to become a successful advertising writer, lost his career to a dubious paternity suit, decided to write fiction, and sold his first novel, a bombastic indictment of repressed Presbyterians, to Alfred A. Knopf—all before his twenty-sixth birthday. His second novel, the juicily titled Babes and Sucklings, was a ravaging of his own angry first marriage and a screed against modern morals, and he welcomed the cries of “indecency” from small-town librarians. His writing tilted and pitched as from one page to the next he’d strain to be Sinclair Lewis or H. L. Mencken or Havelock Ellis or Elinor Glyn. A New York Times reviewer said he wrote in “in a manner reminiscent of the vaudeville man who plays an entire orchestra single-handed.”