BHOC: FAMOUS 1st EDITION #C-61

The marketing build-up to the premiere of SUPERMAN THE MOVIE was gathering speed, and one of the benefits of it was this, the final FAMOUS 1st EDITION that DC produced during the 1970s (though they’d bring the format back to a limited degree in recent years.) These were Treasury Edition sized reproductions of the most crucial and most expensive Golden Age comic book in DC’s library. As a kid, I devoured them, loving both this format and this early material. By the time this SUPERMAN #1 reissue came out, I was slightly older but only a tiny bit more worldly, and so it truly hit the spot. I remember that I bought it in a department store, probably Sears, rather than at a candy store or drug store. The size and heftier cover price allowed DC to occasionally get publications such as this one into these venues. The SUPERMAN THE MOVIE tabloid publication was also there, but I never purchased that one as a kid.

Originally released in 1939, SUPERMAN wasn’t intended to be a series at all. Rather, having realized that they had a monstrously popular hit on their hands, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz of DC decided to put out a one-shot that would reprint the four earliest Superman stories as a quasi-collected edition, figuring that the new readers who were pumping up the sales of the monthly ACTION COMICS in which Superman was featured were likely to have missed these earliest installments. They released a print run of 600,000 copies, a pretty huge number by any standard. And they sold out–almost instantly. So they went back to press and did a second printing constating another 200,000 copies. Finally, they did a third printing of another 150,000 copies and that seemed to satisfy demand, at least for the moment. But 950,000 copies sold was far in excess of what National Comics was seeing on ACTION COMICS, and so they immediately looked to do it again, with a second SUPERMAN release. By the third issue, having burned through both the earliest stories and a chunk of the SUPERMAN Newspaper strip material, new stories began to get dropped in, and the book became a regular quarterly publication, soon bumped up to bimonthly.

Because the first Superman story in ACTION COMICS #1 had been repurposed from sample strips that creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had prepared, it started in the midst of a situation, with the Man of Steel racing to the Governor’s home in order to stop the execution of an innocent prisoner on Death’s Row. For its SUPERMAN #1 reprinting, Donenfeld and Liebowitz commissioned Siegel and Shuster to add a number of pages to teh beginning of that story to properly set events up. It also included an account of Clark Kent being hired by the Daily Star newspaper, and an expanded two-page account of his origin.

I had read that first Superman story years before, when DC had issued the first FAMOUS 1st EDITION dedicated to ACTION COMICS #1.

BHOC: LIMITED COLLECTORS’ EDITION #C-26

Because that first story had originally been created as about three weeks of newspaper strip samples that were later reworked into 13 comic book pages, the story ended on a cliffhanger, with Superman and a lobbyist that he’s trying to coerce information from failing to make a leap to a nearby building and plummeting to the ground below. I had always wondered how the man of Tomorrow got out of that crisis–it sort of haunted me a little bit as a young kid. So here, I finally got to learn the answer. And it’s obvious! He’s Superman! The fall doesn’t hurt him at all, of course! Duh! Nevertheless, I was relieved to finally have this information.

The centerspread of this issue invited readers to become members of Superman’s national fan club, the Supermen of America. Response was enormous in 1939, apparently, with more than 100,000 young people sending in their dimes for the membership kid and the chance to be counted among Superman’s followers. The Supermen of America club operated for a couple of decades, although it would occasionally lay fallow in certain periods. But this was another indicator of just what a hot property Superman was at this time. Remember, this was an era before mass media, so for a character to debut and then have a daily newspaper strip and a three-times-a-week radio program and a balloon in the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Day Parade and eventually a series of animated cartoon shorts all in the space of the feature’s first three years of existence was remarkable–and lucrative. Donenfeld made millions from his ownership of Superman, for which he paid Siegel and Shuster $130.00. The pair were decently compensated throughout, but that money was only a small fraction of the revenue that the character was bringing in. Accordingly, even in the good days, Siegel grew embittered over the fact that he’d sold his beloved brainchild for peanuts.

These early Superman stories are really fun in that Siegel and Shuster are figuring out what works and what doesn’t on the fly. In this third Superman story, the character doesn’t appear in costume at all apart from the one panel you see above. It concerns unsafe conditions at a mining operation, and Superman disguises himself as a miner in order to infiltrate the company, suss out the situation, and then correct it. As has been pointed out before, the very early Superman was a Depression-era social crusader who used his enormous might as the champion of the oppressed, the ordinary citizens who were being victimized by the rich and powerful. A lot of the appeal of the character beyond the obvious was in seeing him give it to corrupt landlords and cops and snobbish rich exploiters. Superman in these days was an outlaw, delivering his own brand of justice outside of legal means. The police of the time continually pursued him, but really had no hope of ever catching him, or subduing him if they were to catch up with him. Superman was more of a Robin Hood figure than the Champion of the Status Quo that he would soon grow into as the world readied for war.

The artwork was generally really crude, especially as compared to the first story that had been put together as samples. In that instance, Joe Shuster had all the time in teh world to make those strips look really sensational. But even by this fourth story, you can see him struggling to keep up with the monthly deadines, his work growing more sparse and sketchy as he rushed ahead. In the days to come, Shuster would set up a studio of assistants and ghosts who would help him to pump out the extraordinary quantity of material that was being demanded of him. I have to say, though, as simplistic as it sometimes is, I really love the frenetic energy of these early Superman pages. Shuster is often succeeding on pure verve and enthusiasm rather than legitimate drawing talent, but when better-trained men were brought on to help, a lot of the feature’s energy slipped away somehow. I got a bunch of people online upset a few years back when I conjectured that Shuster (and Siegel by extension) was the Rob Liefeld of his day, but I think it’s true. Like Liefeld, Shuster’s work connected on a primal level with the young audience and his lack of formal training wasn’t seen as a detriment by his fans. They loved the energy and the action.