Superman Archives, Volume 1

My recent birthday was marked by a non-anonymous donation of multiple graphic novels (I, for the most part, have been exclusively Sandman in that arena up to now) in order to get me jumpstarted on the genre, which I’ve always approved of in theory but managed to miss the age at which one gets in on the ground floor, as it were. So, for the most part, my comics education has been movie-based. Not that there’s a ton wrong with that, but it certainly has limits.

So, I went with comforting and familiar for my first hit. DC’s Superman Archives, Volume 1 contains the first four seasonal collections of the Superman material originally published in the first several Action Comics, as well as some newspaper daily stuff. (Superman in a 3-4 panel newspaper comic? That’s just really weird to me.) A particularly cool thing about the book is that it includes everything in the collections, including ads for contests or joining fan clubs and screenshots for the pages where you can order all kinds of stuff for absolutely free, no money necessary! Apparently, in the late 1930s, a lot of companies had as their business model ‘Get small children to sell stuff door to door for us in exchange for cheap crap that will break in the mail on the way to them’. And people make fun of internet companies that wanted to provide everyone in America with a free barcode scanner? Well, okay, that’s pretty dumb, but still, so is the child salesman approach.

But anyway, comforting and familiar, right? Yeah, I screwed the pooch on that guess. Original Superman is just weird. I mean, yeah, I knew he couldn’t fly yet. The superhearing and vision even waited a few episodes to show up. No kryptonite yet, which made him more than usually overpowered relative to everyone else, but that was certainly a feature in its time, so I won’t judge them negatively on it. And the spontaneous ability to control his heartrate and other such physical functions? Just a precursor of the wackiness that would come in later years. But that’s not really what I mean. No, it’s more the personality of the guy. He was just a freakin’ bully. Kidnapping innocent people for their own good, all kinds of vigilante justice, bodies littering the ground behind him as often as not and the electric chair for most of the people he bothered to bring in. Furthermore, he had all kinds of ludicrous detective-y skills that would have much better suited Batman, if he had been invented just yet. Seriously, the ability to perfectly disguise yourself as other people, only with the use of makeup? I mean, even if I were to cave on that aspect, where would Clark Kent learn how to apply makeup, other than from the magical study manual of Plot Necessity? Oy. Plus, he had a very adversarial professional relationship with Lois Lane. So, it was all very jarring. On top of that, the plots were really kind of twee. This industrialist is trying to corrupt that politician, in order to generate a war that will help sell munitions, or else maybe a construction company is killing folks in order to snag a lucrative contract. I hear rumors of an alternate history Kal-El who landed in a Siberian gulag instead of a Kansas farm, but the fact is, old school Superman was already firmly on the side of the people in their inevitable revolution against the corrupt capitalist system. Kinda redundant.

On the bright side, the end of the book showed promise, in the form of (just as you’d expect, really) mad scientist Luthor. Not that he’d quite worked out how to be a reliable nemesis, but the grandiose plots with extensive collateral damage classified as acceptable losses? Those were present right from the start, to the comic’s overall benefit. In that same span is when Lois turned into her own character, rushing off into danger in a most unladylike fashion at every turn, well ahead of the women’s lib movement. (And, okay, she did require a man to get her out of all these hairy situations, but it was 1939. You can only expect so much.) As she’d only been a foil to reject Clark and make people feel bad for him, that’s a definite improvement. And, towards the end, Superman was showing hints of his squeaky clean Boy Scout image. I know it seems bland and boring, but when contrasted against a figure with sensibilities as dark as Batman’s who also has the power to take over the world if he felt like it? Very uncomfortable to read about that guy in a superhero comic setting. Although it would probably be compelling in the hands of a modern, less pulpy writer.

The actual book is very pretty, although I have the impression that future volumes are drastically overpriced. The insides are also good, with multiple short stories in addition to the all the comics and random stuff I mentioned earlier. A weirdness toward the end is that the short stories and occasional single page comics have nothing whatever to do with Superman, and instead gravitate toward cop/detective or science fiction for the stories and lame cartoons about a wiener dog’s trials and tribulations. (One of the science fiction stories had a bit of awesomeness about someone visiting the Museum of Interstellar Travel, in 1982. When, you see, interstellar travel had been around for so long that it was historical. I love stuff like that.)

One thought on “Superman Archives, Volume 1

  1. Skwid

    Strong echoes, here, of my Skylark In Space review. Smith was writing even earlier, of course, but the same disturbing attitudes are prevalent, it sounds like. It’s strange to realize the vastly different conception of what it meant to be “heroic” our recent ancestors had.

    Reply

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