The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer

In July 2010, a regional theater company revived and “retooled” the musical in Dallas, Texas. Superman would eventually make it to Broadway, in a 1966 musical “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane-It’s Superman!” which managed 129 performances. Then during the 1950s, the pathbreaking television series Adventures of Superman starred Steve Reeves. Later in the 1940s, Columbia Pictures would create cliff-hanger serials and a feature film. There was a 1942 novel, by George Lowther. As early as 1940, Mutual Radio broadcasted 15-minute adventures during the next three years, the Max Fleischer studio produced 17 animation shorts. During World War II, the Army’s Library Service purchased and distributed only Superman comics to servicemen among their approved “magazines,” accounting for at least 10 percent of its sales. DC Comics arranged for a “Superman Day” at the 1940 World’s Fair. A blitz of merchandising, with at least 33 licensed products by 1941 made Superman toys, games, and other products as ubiquitous as those of Walt Disney characters. By 1941, Action Comics alone was selling 900,000 copies a month. As the pioneer comic book superhero, appearing as a newspaper strip as well as in books, others would be measured against his lead. Yet even in the earliest years, Superman would outdistance other costumed crusaders trailing in his wake he appeared in three different titles, and their sales quickly took off. Savage succinctly put it, “The impact of the Superman character upon the subsequent development of the comic book would be difficult to overestimate.” None of this could have been predicted when teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster had their inspiration about a costumed character with a secret identity in 1934 and prevailed on Harry Donenfeld to publish Action Comics #1 in June 1938. Many comics scholars echoed them, studying Superman as embodying the “American Monomyth,” “The Man of Tomorrow.” As William W. Who else so purely embodies male consciousness at its highest, most protective, most intensely spiritual peak?” Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison included Superman among the five fictional characters most universally known, along with Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and Robin Hood.

When Superman entered his fifth decade as the United States’ premier comics superhero, DC Comics president Jenette Kahn enthused: “He’s better known than the president of the United States, more familiar to school children than Abraham Lincoln.

The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer