Superman continuity: decade by decade

[andersonh1]

Have I missed something or have they skipped a chunk of the "Golden Age" and gone straight to the "Atomic Age?" The Dailies for the mid-40s have not been collected have they?

No, so far they've only printed the Sunday strips from the 40s and now the early 50s, the "Atomic Age". They've stated the intent to print everything, and I wish they'd get to the daily strips a little sooner.

I read a fair amount of the Japanese story and it was not nice reading. I can see why DC is reluctant to have that reprinted--although for the sake of historical truth it ought to be published. But the other stories were quite entertaining, from what little I read, and I see no reason why they can't be reprinted.

Wartime propoganda against the Japanese is in full swing, sadly. They're all squint eyed, buck toothed cowards who speak "Engrish". It's not pretty.

[Jim Kelly]

It's interesting how Batman is now supposedly this character who everyone instantly identifies with, while Superman requires a lot more work.

I'm not sure that's really true, but it seems to be a common assumption. Yet in the beginning, it was the other way around. Superman was an instant hit--in fact, the publisher was taken by surprise that this character proved so popular. But once they realized just how big Superman was, DC did everything to exploit his success. And the popularity of Superman wasn't lost on anyone else, as the entire industry rushed to create copies of Superman--including Batman. And probably, if Bill Finger didn't get in the way, the Bat-Man would have been even more like Superman.

Batman was successful--in the same way that Sandman, the Clock, the Masked Marvel and the Flame were successful at that time--but not to the degree that Superman was. Vin Sullivan and Whitney Ellsworth rightly saw that Batman needed some tinkering to achieve anywhere near the same status as Superman. If you look at Batman's first decade, there's always more stuff being added to his legend (the various bat-gimmickry, romantic entanglements, origin stories, sidekickery, butlery, relationship with the law, weird villainy, costumed villainy, headquartering).

By contrast, Superman does not develop at the same pace. Yes, his powers are added to and increased--but not much and only to keep up with these advancements in other super-heroes. We hardly get any more detail about Krypton in the first decade. Once the central cast of characters is established, they're enlisted for life. Superman's relationship with authority is normalized when the U.S. gets involved in the war. But on the whole, it's steady as she goes for Superman. And I think this is because the senior men at DC didn't know why Superman was popular. And as they didn't know what made him popular, they didn't want to tinker too much with the formula for fear of accidentally ruining the product.

I think the younger guys at DC like Mort Weisinger (yes he was young once), being of the same age as Jerry and Joe and coming from the same background in science fiction, better understood the kind of things that made Superman tick. But Weisinger left for his war service, so he really didn't get the chance to tinker with Superman too much during that first decade.

Some day I have to get around to reading the Captain Future stories--which Edmond Hamilton wrote, with input from his editor and the creator of Captain Future, Mort Weisinger. I suspect that some later ideas used in Superman would have first appeared in those stories.

The current version of Batman reflects decades of tinkering, additions, substractions, turning the character inside out, cannibalizing elements from other characters. Batman is like the typical example of an "overnight sensation" who actually puts in a lot of years before finally breaking out as a hit. There was no one fix to the character that made him popular--it's an accumulation of things.