By Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, Jack Burnley, Wayne Boring, Fred Ray, Paul Cassidy & the Superman Studio (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-426-2
In the second stellar hardback collection the Man of Tomorrow’s earliest groundbreaking adventures, reprinted from issues #21-36 of the epochal anthology Action Comics, the never-ending battle for Truth, Justice and the American Way reaches the middle of 1941, with war ripping apart the outer world but still no more than a looming literary menace for most Americans.
As described in modern-day super-scribe Paul Kupperberg’s introduction, although creators Siegel & Shuster had very much settled into the character by now, the buzz of success still fired them and innovation still sparkled amidst the exuberance.
These stories were largely untitled, but for convenience I’ve added the designations contrived by editors in other recent compilations such as the Superman Chronicles, so the full-on, four-colour magic opens here with ‘The Atomic Disintegrator’ – originally published in Action #21, February 1940 – wherein our restlessly exuberant hero tackled an early secret identity crisis and foiled a deadly plot by old enemy Ultra-Humanite (now creepily residing within the curvaceous body of movie starlet Delores Winters) which was followed by ‘Europe at War’, not only a tense and thinly disguised call to arms for the still neutral USA, but a continued story: an almost unheard-of luxury in those early days of funny-book publishing, which resulted in a spectacular and chilling one-man peace-keeping mission to halt hostilities between the nations of Galonia and Toran – and all explosively revealed to be the Machiavellian fault of a criminal scientist named Alexander Luthor…
Action #24 featured ‘Carnahan’s Heir’, a wealthy wastrel whom Superman promised to turn into a useful citizen, whilst the next told the tale of the ‘The Amnesiac Robbers’; good-guys compelled to commit crimes by an evil hypnotist in a crime wave with political repercussions, sporting a cover by new artistic sensation Wayne Boring, who went on to illustrate the next four too.
In comic book terms at least Superman was master of the world, and had already utterly changed the shape of the fledgling industry by the time of these tales. There was a popular newspaper strip, foreign and overseas syndication, and the Fleischer studio was producing some of the most expensive – and best – animated cartoons ever conceived. Thankfully the quality of the source material was increasing with every four-colour release, and the energy and enthusiasm of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had infected the burgeoning studio that grew around them to cope with the relentless demand.
From Action Comics #26 (July 1940) came ‘Professor Cobalt’s Clinic’ wherein Clark Kent and Lois Lane exposed a murderous sham Heath Facility with a little Kryptonian help, and the next month dealt a similar blow to the corrupt orphanage ‘Brentwood Home for Wayward Youth’. The September issue found him at the circus, solving the mystery of ‘The Strongarm Assaults’, a fast-paced thriller beautifully illustrated by the astonishingly talented Jack Burnley, brought in to help as the Superman newspaper strip took up more and more of Shuster’s time.
Action Comics #29 (October 1940) again featured Burnley art in a gripping tale of murder for profit. Human drama in ‘The Life insurance Con’ was replaced by deadly super-science as the mastermind Zolar created ‘A Midsummer Snowstorm’, in #30 allowing Burnley a rare opportunity to display his fantastic imagination as well as his representational excellence and featured the first of Fred Ray’s scintillating run of covers.
Action Comics #31 featured another high-tech crime-caper as gangsters put an entire city to sleep and only Clark Kent wasn’t ‘In the Grip of Morpheus’ in #31 whilst #32’s ‘The Gambling Racket of Metropolis’ (January 1941) saw the Metropolis Marvel crush an illicit High Society gambling operation that had wormed its nefarious way into the loftiest echelons of Government, a typical Jerry Siegel social drama magnificently illustrated by the increasingly impressive Burnley.
Action Comics #33 and 34 were also Burnley blockbusters wherein Superman first went north to discover ‘Something Amiss at the Lumber Camp’, before heading to coal country to save ‘The Beautiful Young Heiress’; both superbly enticing character-plays with plenty of scope for eye-popping super-stunts to thrill the gasping fans.
Behind a Wayne Boring cover Action Comics #35 saw the artistic return of Joe Shuster – aided by an increasing number of assistants dubbed “the Superman Studio†– for a human interest tale with startling repercussions in ‘The Guybart Gold Mine’, and this volume concludes with Superman mightily stretched to cope with the awesome threat of ‘The Enemy Invasion’; a canny taste of things to come if America entered World War II.
Stories of corruption, disaster and social injustice were typical of the times, but with war in the news and clearly on the horizon, the content of Superman’s adventures was changing and so, necessarily, did the scale and scope of the action.
The raw intensity and sly wit still shone through in Siegel’s scripts which literally defined what being a superhero meant, but as the world became more dangerous the Man of Tomorrow simply became stronger and more flamboyant to deal with it all, and Shuster and his team stretched and expanded the iconography that all others would follow.
Still some of the very best Fights ‘n’ Tights any fan could ever find, these tales deserve pride of place on any bookshelf.
© 1940, 1941, 1998 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.