posted August 09, 2002 04:24 PM    

If I can believe what I've read on the archives board--volume number ones of archives sell better than the following numbers, so a number one of an anthology archive would probably do better in sales (personally though, I think this is because retailers order in more number ones, and not because consumers buy only number ones).

But I see a possible snag in any such project. Since unprinted material has never been printed, there may be all kinds of legal issues that arise when and if DC decides to print this stuff. Material that has already been printed has already been copyrighted, trademarked--the material has been paid for, creators have released their rights, etc. Material that never was printed exists in this kind of no-mans-land. Printing the material may be a way for DC to assert ownership of it, but for this same reason there may be those who might not want this stuff to be printed--at least not without some kind of legal arrangement or big pay-off.

Thinking about the whole Siegel & Shuster mess gives me a headache. Was either party really better served by battling this out in the courts for decades? I think not. If National hadn't been so tight-fisted when Superman started to make huge profits for them--if they had just shared the wealth and handled the boys (telling Siegel & Shuster what they wanted to hear would have cost National nothing)--then it's likely S & S wouldn't have felt compelled to resort to legal means. National may have been legally right, but, recognizing that, they should have seen the bigger picture and tried to mollify the creators.

In the matter of Batman, Bob Kane held some kind of creative rights and stayed with the character for over twenty-five years. In the end, I don't think his creative control amounted to much. National was still able to take Batman wherever they wanted to go with the character. So for all the shocking possibilities that might have arose from the S & S Superboy or a Lois & Clark marriage, I don't really believe we would have ended up in a different place. Shuster with his failing eyesight would have still relinquished control over Superman's image to his assistant, Wayne Boring. Siegel would still have been cowed by his editors into doing what they thought was more commercial.

posted August 09, 2002 06:06 PM    

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Firstly, the story should absolutely be printed.

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posted August 09, 2002 06:18 PM    

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Posted by BuddyBlank:
Which leads into another thought: What if the editors had let S&S tell all the stories they had wanted to tell - with their version of Superboy, Lois knowing the secret ID, "K-Metal" instead of Kryptonite - what what Siegel and Shuster's full-blown vision of Superman have been? I doubt we'll ever know the full picture, but this story is a glimpse of it.

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It's fun to speculate...

Jerry & Joe needed editorial direction, it could be argued. In the first newspaper strip, Superman tore the wings off a plane full of baddies and let it crash in flames. Censorship problems had to be avoided. Whitney Ellsworth imposed editorial controls on Jerry, and, again, it could be argued this was necessary to take Superman to the heights he attained.

In hindsight (and only with hindsight), it would seem a mistake to let Lois in on "the secret" in the early days. (My opinion.)

posted August 09, 2002 07:35 PM    

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Originally posted by India Ink:
bludevil, my guess is that the facsimile edition you mean is the one on the GCD index link below--
http://www.comics.org/browse.lasso?SeriesID=6003

If you click that link, you will see several stories listed. Both Swan and Boring.

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Curt Swan says, from http://theages.superman.nu/swan.html :

"It was around this time that I started filling in occasionally for Wayne Boring, the artist who had taken over Superman from Joe Shuster. But it wasn't until around 1955 that I became the primary Superman artist. The first 3-D comics were making their appearances around that time, because of the success of 3-D movies, I guess, and DC wanted to get a 3-D Superman book out in a hurry. So Boring and Al Pastino and I were all brought on to the project. We only put out one 3-D Superman, but Weisinger was quite happy with my work on it, and soon after that he put me on Superman steady."

So if Curt's memory is to be believed, that question mark next to Al Plastino's name should be removed. He made no mention of Stan Kaye, either...

posted August 12, 2002 01:36 AM    

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Posted by India Ink:
Thinking about the whole Siegel & Shuster mess gives me a headache. Was either party really better served by battling this out in the courts for decades? I think not. If National hadn't been so tight-fisted when Superman started to make huge profits for them--if they had just shared the wealth and handled the boys (telling Siegel & Shuster what they wanted to hear would have cost National nothing)--then it's likely S & S wouldn't have felt compelled to resort to legal means. National may have been legally right, but, recognizing that, they should have seen the bigger picture and tried to mollify the creators.

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But was National so "tight-fisted"? We've discussed this before... I'm leaning more towards the view that Siegel & Shuster hadn't done so badly, and perhaps they should've left well enough alone. I don't believe at all that National gave the creators a raw deal. It bugs me that this is how the situation is summed up by latterday commentators.

It's just too easy and lazy to always see the corporation as the bad guy. (I'm not talking about you, India.)

posted August 12, 2002 01:37 PM    

Of course, Goulart is repeating facts from other sources--it may be that S & S spun the facts for their own purposes. But if we can accept that some of this true, it's possible there was a kind of snowball effect. Where the creators realized they were being lied to and in turn reacted with anger (perhaps without due thought), which caused the publishers to become defensive, which challenged the creators even more and caused them to assert their rights, which caused the publishers to assert their rights, and so on.

In other words, this thing may have begun as a bit of petulance, but it continued to escalate to such an extreme where each side became intractable (and Shuster & Siegel overstated the facts). It's a muddle--like in E.M. Forester's A Passage to India where a muddle, a confusion of understandings, erupts into a big legal mess.

posted August 12, 2002 01:50 PM       

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Originally posted by India Ink:

I'd be interested in some kind of anthology--The Superman Anthology--which would go about gathering together material that either hasn't been printed before, or material that was printed in hard to find publications (giveaways, promotional comics).

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I would buy something like that in a heartbeat!

Does anyone know what DC's next steps are regarding the Archive editions starring Superman? There's been a good 3 or 4 years since the last Superman Archives came out and I was wondering when we might see another one (if at all). They keep printing new editions of All-Star Archives year after year....obviously making money, so does that mean the Superman Archives aren't doing so well? That's quite a sobering thought if that's the case.

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Mark Engblom
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"HA! What Halloween fun we have with my super-dog, Krypto! Us Bizarros scare him with horrible masks of Earth people like President Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Jerry Lewis!"

posted September 19, 2002 02:38 PM    

Like Batman in the Fifties this one was top heavy with material from the end of the fifties. Whereas, I'd prefer either a more even spread of stories from all the years OR material from the early fifties. Yes the late 50s (especially 1959) set up the whole Weisinger era of Superman--but that's really 60s Superman. Shouldn't a book about the fifties get at what made the fifties Superman tick?

Another problem is that these slim volumes carry so much weight (and this is one of the slimmest). Back in the days of Giants and Super-Specs, tabloid editions and digest editions, individual collections didn't carry so much weight because you always knew there'd be others. What was lacking in one issue could be made up for in another.

It just happens by some coincidence that on Tuesday past I was in a comics store looking through their readable sixties comics and I pulled out a few to buy, including Superman 217 (G-60), June-July, 1969--a 64 page Giant that reprints "The Outlaws from Krypton" from Action 194, July, 1954 (by Finger/Boring/Kaye).

So imagine my surprise, the next day--yesterday, when I thumbed through my newly bought copy of Superman in the Fifties to find the first story in that edition is "Three Supermen from Krypton!" (Superman 65, July-August, 1960, by Woolfolk and Plastino (?)). "The Outlaws from Krypton" is actually a sequel to "Three Supermen..." with Mala being the primary character in the story. Returning to Earth and taking on the identity of Clark Kent--not knowing that CK is really Superman--and by some elaborate scheme putting Superman and Lois on a fake Earth that they believe to be the real one, with no people on it but them. What's curious is how Mala so easily becomes Clark Kent--does he really look like Superman or is he a master of disguise? it's not clear.

In my newly found copy of Superman 217 there's also "The Super-Duel in Space" (from Action 242, July, 1958)--and I was quite happy to have that since it's the introduction of Brainiac which I've never read. But then I find the same story in this new fifties collection.

Likewise there are lots of other stories in this volume which I've read in other reprint books ("The Supergirl from Krypton" is no longer a novelty for me).

posted September 19, 2002 06:32 PM    

But I felt sorry for Beppo. The shot of him on the back cover was misleading, since no Beppo story was provided inside.

As for the cover, it continued the tradition maintained by all the others (Superman and Batman) of being very poorly designed.

I like the Wayne Boring Superman on the cover, but like Neal Adams' Superman on the seventies volume, the background art does nothing to enhance the central image. It's like they don't really want to sell these things off the shelves.

The one good thing was the return of the classic Superman logo.

This logo should have appeared on both the sixties and the seventies collections, but instead DC decided to go with the updated logo (I think the update was done in the late seventies).

posted September 19, 2002 11:02 PM    

1) Actually, the logo was changed in 1983 or '84 because it was decided by whoever was in charge of licensing design that it would "reduce" better and somehow look better at all different sizes if it were streamlined--and if the weird drop-shadow on the "E" were fixed. I disagreed and still prefer the old logo--not for nostalgia, but because it's not so "soft"--but some fights, you can't win.

And, technically, the "Silver Age" logo DC's been using here and there (on this book and on some recent statue packaging) ISN'T the actual original logo, it's some weird hybrid. The letters are thicker and the dropshadows are different. Check it out.

2) As the guy who actually picked out most of the stories for this volume (and even moreso the '60s volume), I agree that it'd be nicer to see more material from the early '50s, but it's a budgetary matter. Stats (or, technically, negatives from which stats can be shot) of material from before about 1954 are rare to nonexistent across the DC line. In this volume, both "The Three Supermen" and (I believe) "Superman's Super-Magic Show" had to be reconstructed digitally, which is an expensive and royally tedious process. (Believe me, I know. That panel of "Big Boy" in the intro? Took me two hours, at least, to Photoshop it into b&w from a Sunday page. Granted, I'm untrained, but I got a taste of how hard it is to do.)

We'd have loved to have done more reconstruction. In a perfect world, we'd have run both the debut of Lana Lang and the two-parter from ACTION #141-142, the second appearance of kryptonite and the first Superman continued story since ACTION #1-2--but there was just no budget. Still, I count four never-before-reprinted stories and several others that haven't seen print for over thirty years, so trust me, an effort was made. Hey--if I'm pickin' the stories, I'm gonna put together a book *I* want to read.

posted September 20, 2002 02:03 AM       

I was quite pleased with the collection of stories included in the new TPB. Except for a couple of stories, they were all new to me. Overall, this is a fine collection—good choices all around.

By the way, I know this is off topic, but would you ever consider becoming editor of Supergirl and The Legion? Sure, McAvennie’s shoes are going to hard to fill, but I think you could pull it off.

posted September 20, 2002 05:39 PM    

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Originally posted by Patrick Gerard in the "What is Clark's middle name?" thread:

http://dcboards.warnerbros.com/files/Forum30/HTML/010179.html

Naturally, both 'Joseph' and 'Jerome' are homages to Superman's creators although 'Joseph' was probably chosen in the revamp since it is also the name of a famous Golem in Jewish folklore and there is a thematic undercurrent in Superman that some writers have chosen to pursue that casts Superman as a sort of literary golem created by Siegel and Shuster to cast light on real world social injustice.

It's been primarily a topic of essay but I suspect that writers like Waid and Maggin have and will continue to play with the theme of Superman as golem.

Also:

...a golem is a human-like creature of mighty strength, brought to life to bring about justice for the oppressed.

The comparison has been made before that in two people of Jewish faith creating a mythical hero who guards the oppressed, Superman is a sort of literary golem.

It's a sort of stretch but I think it has often been speculated that Siegel and Shuster may have created Superman in part because they grew up on stories of golems.

I do tend to think that their ethnic heritage may have played a role in Superman's origins.

Consider that in the face of ethnic oppression of Jews worldwide, they chose to cast Superman as the lone survivor of his race. Then, after Israel was founded and Jewish people worldwide slowly emerged out from under the thumb of oppression, we saw more Kryptonian survivors.

I suppose that's one thing that doesn't jive for me with the "lone survivor" status that Byrne reimposed; I see Krypton's destruction as a literary metaphor for the Final Solution of the Third Reich and the revival of the Kryptonians as a metaphor for the renewed, yet guarded, hope of Jewish people in the wake of tragedy.

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This thread seems to be the place where Siegel & Shuster and Superman's origins are discussed -- so I hope Patrick doesn't mind if I quote him here. This stuff is too interesting to just die out in another thread because it's off-topic. I don't personally agree with these (interesting) views, but maybe the regulars of the '30s to the 50s' thread would like to discuss them.

posted September 22, 2002 05:29 PM    

Mark Waid's intro for Superman in the 50s does touch on the Golem as social justice hero of the people myth in Siegel & Shuster (to put it in more cumbersome words than I ought to). And Waid seems to suggest that this function was somewhat abandoned in the fifties (and sixties)--to be recovered in the seventies (and later).

And great to have Mark Waid posting on this thread.

I never compared the logos, but I kinda guessed that the drop shadows and such were not quite right for the true classic logo. But I thought that would be really picky to point out--and at least this mock version of the original is tons better than the presumably mock version of the classic Batman logo on the fifties Batman collection.

And I kinda suspected that it would probably take too much work to try and reconstruct a lot of the early fifties stories--so DC mostly stuck with the already reprinted before stuff. But as a fan I took it upon myself to express my desire for the earlier stuff--just to put that out there.

It's striking that Mr. Waid should be so honest in letting us know that there's virtually no budget for these books. A sad--painful--reality.

I only hope that the archives might do a bit better. If DC archives Superman material first (and gets us old timers to fund these projects by charging high prices on those hardcover volumes), then printing cheaper TPBs should not be so expensive. I imagine it didn't cost near as much to publish Crisis on Multiple Earths since all the material for that softcover had already been reconstructed for the JLA archives.

posted September 22, 2002 06:06 PM    

Luckily, years later, I was able to purchase my own copy.

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I would like to see these volumes re-released in full colour. Or am I dreaming?

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posted September 22, 2002 09:11 PM       

And about Crisis on Multiple Earths....

I know both Crisis on Earth-1, and the Earth-3 story have been reprinted before. The last two might not have, but still, I believe anything from the 60s can be reprinted with minimal effort.

What is the budget for such s book anyway.

I think the fans should vote on the stories, like Marvel did. The votes were alot more diverse.

posted September 22, 2002 09:41 PM       

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Originally posted by Mark Waid:

3) I wrote the intro and the chapter breaks, but not the paragraph about Lori Lemaris. : )

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Sure you didn't.

That's okay though, it's a very understandable typo. After all, both stories (the one from Showcase #9, and the one from Superman #129) were named “The Girl in Superman's Past,” and they are both from the Fifties.