Review: 'Superman: The Definitive History'

It has been 90 years since writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster adapted their bald, hyphenated super villain Super-Man from an illustrated sci-fi pulp mag prose story into the spit-curled, milk-wholesome, unhyphenated superhero who is now more recognizable than Santa and Jesus put together, and a thousand times more powerful than either of those guys.

Review: 'Zowie!: The TV Superhero Craze in '60s Pop Culture'

Crashing into a Gilligan-and-Jeannie-populated TV scene too dumb to fully recognize how dumb it was, Batman dropped a big load of camp--distinct from Gilligan and Jeannie's kitsch--onto TV screens. Whether you were a hyperactive six year old or a hyper-hip sixteen year old, Batman had appeal, doing dual work as a sincere superhero adventure and a genuine and genuinely funny comedy at a time when such things simply didn't exist on American television. 

Review: 'Cliffhanger! Cinematic Superheroes of the Serials: 1941-1952'

Well before superheroes became staples of feature films, or even TV shows like the Superman series of the fifties or the Batman one of the sixties, muscled men in tights most regularly appeared on screen in matinee serials. Both Superman and Batman got their live-action starts in serials. So did future TV and movie stars such as Captain Marvel, Captain America, Flash Gordon, and Dick Tracy. It was a very sensible way to bring these characters to the screen, as the short, action-packed, cliffhanger-beholden structure of a serial episode was pretty similar to that of a comic issue. 

Review: 'Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling'

This year the studio behind such watershed pictures as The Jazz Singer, Gold Diggers of 1933, Casablanca, White Heat, Bonnie and Clyde, A Clockwork Orange, Superman, and Malcolm X turns 100. Mark A. Vieira marks the event with an illustrated history of the studio called Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling. 

Review: 'The Team-Up Companion'

In 1954, DC halved the page count of its World's Finest Comics and forced Superman and Batman into the same book as if they were a couple of recently divorced bozos sharing a flat. They mostly kept to their own sides of the room, but a new format was inadvertently born: the team-up. This was distinct from crossovers or guest appearances because both heroes were on equal footing in a shared title with both their logos on display. Pretty soon, team ups of everyone from Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter to Supergirl and Wonder Woman to Aqualad and Robin to Richie Rich and Casper to Spider-Man and Dracula (!) began proliferating funny books. 

Review: 'The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom'

In his introduction to The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom, Mark Evanier rewrites a quote from playwright George S. Kaufman to declare, “If you want to get revenge on a publisher, convince them there’s an audience out there for books and magazines about comic book history.”

Review: 'Superman: The Silver Age Sundays 1963 – 1966'

Although we may now mostly think of the Man of Steel as a star of comic books and movies, Supes also had a very unique life in newspaper comics sections. The strips are where Superman first tangled with Lex Luthor without Luthor’s hair getting in the way. It is where he first tricked that fifth dimensional imp Mr. Mxyzptik to say his own name backward. So it was a no small thing when that life essentially came to an end 27 years after it began in January 1939.

The Library of American Comics/IDW’s latest anthology of full-color Superman strips compiles his final adventures as the star of his own series. Coincidentally perhaps, it reads like a Greatest Hits of everything that made his weekend antics such whimsical fun. Once again he travels through time. Once again our hero uses his army of robots made in his own image to get out of scrapes. He blasts into space to deal with weird intergalactic cultures, temporarily loses his powers, and heads back to Smallville one last time. There are also prominent spots for his main friends and foes so that we can wave our final farewells to Lois, Jimmy Olsen, Luthor, and Mr. Mxyzptik, who must have been particularly dear to the heart of editor Mort Weisinger considering how often he pops back into our dimension throughout Superman: The Silver Age Sundays 1963 – 1966. 

Aside from the most fleeting of references to the contemporary conflict in Southeast Asia, The Munsters, and the Sontagian concept of camp, these strips also sit well outside the tumultuous times in which they were created. In other words, they are as timeless as their star. All of this makes for a book that feels like the definitive volume in The Library of American Comics/IDW’s lavish hardcover series of Superman newspaper strips.

Review: 'American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944'

The lingering aftermath of the Great Depression, a rise in organized crime, and especially, the country’s entry into World War II ensured that the early 1940s was a tumultuous time for the U.S. With such grim business rushing around them, many Americans found solace in escapist entertainment, and few entertainment mediums exploded as comics did between 1940 and 1944.

A timeline of this period is like a checklist of the most important developments in comics. These brief five years saw the debuts of Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Arrow, Archie and his gang, Captain America, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, Hawkman and Hawkwoman, Sub-Mariner, Aquaman, Plastic Man, The Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, Pogo (before moving to newspapers), and many more of comics’ most celebrated characters. While we’d have to extend the timeline back just a year or two to include the medium’s two-most famous heroes, we would not have to in order to account for such foes and friends as Robin, The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, Alfred the Butler, Lex Luthor, Perry White, Clay Face, Hugo Strange, Scarecrow, and Two Face. This period also saw the first significant rumblings of a major backlash against funny books with Wonder Woman as the most frequent whipping-girl. Was there ever a more crucial half-decade for comics?

Interestingly, TwoMorrows Publishings’ American Comic Book Chronicles series has been issuing volumes for six years but is only now getting around to this key period of 1940-1944. Because so much happened during these years, the storytelling seems to rush through the material faster than a speeding bullet, but Kurt F. Mitchell and Roy Thomas actually make the tale reasonably thorough, reasonably critical, and politically sharp. Along with the cavalcade of legendary characters, the writers make room to name-check such forgotten oddballs as Supermouse, Kangaroo Man, super-witch Spider Widow, and Snowbird, the Strangler’s coke-addicted lackey. Mitchell and Thomas refuse to succumb to the thoughtless jingoism that defined so many of the comics of the era they cover. Like all volumes in this series, American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944 is also a gorgeous, hardcover package, swelling with tons of full-color art beautifully and authentically reproduced.

Review: 'Superman: The Golden Age Dailies: 1947-1949'

When we last left Superman: The Golden Age Dailies a year ago, our hero had wrapped up any war-time business to contend with arch nemesis Lex Luthor and get goofy with the likes of Mr. Mxyztplk and a pair of invisible imps called the Ogies. As IDW's series continues with more golden age adventures ranging from 1947 to 1949, Supes is no longer grappling with his most famous foes, though the whimsical post-war tone basically continues. 

Aside from a reappearance of the Ogies (who materialize in corporeal form as twin pin ups), the bad guys are more mundane with a preponderance of machine-gun toting gangsters. Consequently, there's a bit more violence this time, and things get particularly grim when a plot to off Lois Lane involves electrocuting a cat. Hiss! 

However, wackiness still abounds, and Superman: The Golden Age Dailies: 1947-1949 is at its most fun when Superman is digging a bizarre underground maze to protect a youth serum or constructing a giant sea monster to foil a scheme that involves a yegg who must marry Lois Lane to save his own life. Most hilarious of all is a story in which Superman makes a series of uncharacteristically vain and idiotic decisions that end up with him agreeing to wrestle Clark Kent in order to protect his secret identity. In another bonkers tale, Superman is sent to jail and forced to perform hard labor...for the crime of speeding. Then there's the storyline titled "Superman: Male Escort". I kid you not. 

While the sexism of some of these stories has aged badly (in one infuriating strip, he spanks a woman, which of course, she thinks is charmingly masculine), the lunacy of them is just what we need in an age of overly serious superheroes and their overly serious fans.

Review: 'American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1990s'

Considering how forcefully comics have driven the pop culture of the twenty-first century, it is kind of amazing to review the state of the industry at the very end of the twentieth. Comics companies were stuck in a rut, catering to collectors rather than readers with cheesy “limited edition” stunts or pandering to audience’s basest instincts with brutal vigilante violence and bra-bursting sexism. Cinematic adaptations of The Phantom, Judge Dredd, Barb Wire, The Shadow, and Steel were sucking wind at the box office while The Flash could barely complete a single season on TV. Marvel, the company that practically holds a monopoly over the Hollywood of today, filed chapter 11. Comics sales as a whole slumped.

However, the nineties was also the decade when comics buying went totally mainstream as the tale of Superman’s (extremely temporary) demise flew off shelves and his romance with Lois Lane (by way of Teri Htacher) lit up small screens. It was when Batman did more than very well in theaters and shook up the state of TV cartoons with his Animated Series. It was the decade that saw the debuts of such innovations as The Maxx, The Tick, Hellboy, the artist-owned Image Comics, and the racially diverse Milestone Comics.

In the latest installment of TwoMorrows Publishing’s comics history overviews, Jason Sacks and Keith Dallas survey that topsy-turvy landscape of the nineties. While too many comics storyline summaries trip up the narrative, the fascinatingly troubled tale of the comics industry in the nineties still manages to come together in American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1990s. Sacks and Dallas not only cover the major companies and upstarts but also get deep enough into underground titles to forge a pretty complete portrait of a complex decade. And if you find yourself zoning out while reading those plot summaries that never seem to stick to the consciousness, you can just shift your eyes over an inch or two, because there is always some fabulous piece of full-color art to re-focus on.

Review: 'Superman: The Silver Age Sundays 1959 to 1963'

The Superman comic strip ran in newspapers daily from 1939 to 1966, so IDW’s latest collection of them comes close to the end of the run. As early a 1961, you can kind of sense why a good thing had to wrap up as our hero engages in such inanities as an encounter with a telepathic dinosaur from space who can transform into a rock and yet another insulting storyline involving a character who suddenly becomes overweight.

The silliness of such storylines at least hints that Superman was still more about unfettered whimsy than punching bad guys in the face, and that’s a good thing since the strip was always more interesting as a vehicle for wackiness than as a conventional superhero yarn. A storyline in which Supes is rapidly promoted through the army because of his unusual abilities is like a supernatural episode of Sgt. Bilko. One in which he reveals his longstanding love for a mermaid is both bizarre and oddly affecting—an epic, interspecies love story. Another takes what may be the weirdest turn of all when Lois Lane transforms into a bug-eyed alien with superpowers. Daily Planet Chief Perry White develops superpowers too. Oh, there’s also the one where Superman transforms into a thing with a human body and the head of an ant.

Plus we see Superman face a series of bizarre challenges from a colony of Amazon women, and Lois Lane believing that her love’s secret identity is a Rod Serling stand-in! Yet these stories lean on some more tired devices as once again Superman goes to great lengths to avoid marriage and Lois once again falls victim to a slightly malicious prank. She just can’t get a break in these stories.

Superman: The Silver Age Sundays 1959 to 1963 contains a few clunker plotlines, but for the most part it delivers the usual fun. And also as usual, it’s a beautifully designed, full-color package from IDW.

Review: 'Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978'

DC comics was suffering in the late seventies. Some blamed it on the harsh winter of ’78, a period of incessant blizzards that prevented a lot of kids from visiting the newsstand. Some blamed it on DC’s publisher, Jenette Kahn, whose failed scheme to reinvigorate her company involved swelling page counts, cover prices, and titles. Keith Dallas and John Wells accuse unsympathetic distributors in the epilogue of their new book Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978. However, they mostly stay out of the way, allowing quotations from reams of old articles and interviews to tell the story of a topsy-turvy period in comic history.

What we learn is that DC was not the only company in over its head. Golden-boy Marvel was too, only to be rescued from the abyss when it agreed to publish spin offs of a weird new sci-fi movie by the kid who’d made American Graffitti. However, the main focus is on DC, particularly Kahn’s planned “Explosion” that was to see 22 new titles hit the stands in a new longer format only to be cancelled at the last minute. The titles that were to be included in this infamous Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, where those titles ended up, and the reasons for that cancellation are major points of discussion.

There is also a lot of discussion of pricing and the business-side of comics publishing in this book, but all of those facts and figures are the least interesting thing about Comic Book Implosion. What’s more intriguing are the soap-opera drama, the bizarre and desperate ideas (an African-American superhero named Black Bomber whose secret identity is a white racist? Yow.), and the stray triumphs that emerged amidst the turbulence. We see the successful revival of the Teen Titans, the births of Black Lightning and Firestorm, the mania surrounding Superman: The Movie and its handsome star, and the ballyhooed bout between the Man of Steel and Muhammad Ali. And despite the initial failure of Kahn’s planned Explosion, she did a lot of good for DC, such as her cultivation of younger talent and new titles, her abolishment of lazy reprints, and her implementation of profit sharing.

Although Dallas and Wells did not conduct any new interviews for Comic Book Implosion, they culled their quotes from such a wide swath of sources, and from such an interesting line up of industry folk (including Kahn, Larry Hama, Neil Adams, Carmine Infantino, Archie Goodwin, James Warren, Muhammad Ali himself, etc.), that it doesn’t matter much. Yes, it makes for messy storytelling, but that’s basically the case with all oral histories. And Dallas and Wells’s refusal to editorialize allows us readers to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains, who is lying and who is telling the truth, which makes for more involving reading. The cavalcade of photos and illustrations— which includes an 8-page, full-color spread—makes it fun.

Review: 'Superman: The Golden Age Dailies: 1944-1947 '

While thoughts of war were consuming his adopted home, Superman was intent on soothing America’s troubles with the whimsy that fits him like a red and blue unitard. Once he’s done hawking war bonds in the very first frame of the strips collected in Superman: The Golden Age Dailies: 1944-1947, Supes no longer has any such consequential matters in his spit-curled head. Instead, he’s contending with invisible imps called ogies (good luck not reading that as “orgies”) and the visible one known as Mr. Mxyztplk. He’s referring to his fellow fellows as “chaps” and Lois Lane is calling him “Supie.” He’s constantly on the verge of marrying Lois (though she never remembers their multitudinous engagements form story to story) and confounding Lex Luthor with his invulnerability (how is Luthor still confounded by this?). There’s a cliffhanger every third panel, little sense, and maximum fun.

That these storylines tend to wrap up in fewer than sixty strips further maximizes that fun by cutting out the repetitiousness and meandering subplots that always sink prolonged newspaper comic arcs. Despite their glorious silliness, I still found these stories irresistibly compelling. I was genuinely eager to find out whether or not Superman’s proposal to Lois in the “Engaged to Superman” was genuine or not. And I’m 44. Feel free to judge me all you like.

The only shade that falls on the sunny tone occurs in the final arc, in which Superman must deal with that new bugaboo hyperbolic fogies labeled “juvenile delinquency.” With its unpalatable preachiness and violence against kids, the subtly titled “Juvenile Delinquency” is a hint that Superman won’t be as swell in the fifties. But that’s really a concern for the next volume of this series. This one is almost completely on the beam.

Superman: The Golden Age Dailies: 1944-1947 is another collection from IDW and The Library of American Comics, so it goes without saying that these black and white strips are superbly packaged, printed on heavy stock pages wrapped in a full-color hardcover, and finished off with a ribbon bookmark (I love those). But the killer diller stories are what make this volume a must for Super fans.

Review: 'Superman: The Atom Age Sundays-1956 to 1959'

Superman has gone through all sorts of variations in his 80 years, including— stupidly enough—dark, broody Superman. Like most of the comic book heroes who followed him, Superman was always best when he was at his most whimsical. Delightfully, IDW’s new collection Superman: The Atom Age Sundays-1956 to 1959 catches him at one such point. Without the depressing, often racist baggage of the war years, Superman is free to use the sun as his personal Turkish bath after gaining some extra pounds, match wits with an alien race of talking mushrooms, and testify at the trial of a giant chimp that shoots kryptonite beams from its eyeballs. Even his origin story is told after a wacky visit by G-Men from the future who insist that the "S" on Superman’s chest is for "Shark." Hooray for Superman and the goofy scripting of writers such as Batman-creator Bill Finger!

Another pleasure of The Atom Age Sundays is how fluidly these one-a-week chapters coalesce into complete stories. With the exception of one of the three Lois Lane-centric stories that end the book, there is a minimum of annoying exposition intended to remind the reader of what happened the previous weekend. Since these are Sundays only, every comic is in full color. Consequently, this volume reads more like a collection of comic book stories than newspaper ones, and interestingly enough, the book’s introduction notes that the comic book and newspaper stories were mirroring each other at this point in Superman history (though writers Mark Waid and John Wells can’t reach a definitive conclusion about which medium was the chicken and which one was the egg). As usual, the packaging is beautiful with comic book-style textured paper, ribbon bookmark, and colorful hardcover. All of this makes for one of the very best volumes in IDW’s ongoing series of Superman newspaper comics.

Review: 'Superman: The Golden Age Dailies 1942 to 1944'

IDW’s most recent Man of Steel campaign had the publisher compiling Superman’s full-color Sunday newspaper comics from 1943 to 1956. The final installments in that series zinged with campy adventures that found Supes hopping through time and getting amnesia more often than he changes his red underwear. Well, kids, it’s time to grow the hell up, because IDW is now backtracking to Superman’s daily strips from 1942 to 1944. These strips in sober B&W, and if you check those years, you’ll understand why the subject matter is somber. The very first panel of Superman: The Golden Age Dailies 1942 to 1944 slaps us in the face with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Under these circumstances, Superman doesn’t have time to wrangle flying horses or renovate garbage dumps as he did when we left him last year in The Atomic Age Sundays 1953 to 1956. In his Clark Kent guise, he rushes off to sign up to do his part. Unfortunately, he fails his eye test when he accidentally uses his X-ray vision to read the eye chart in the adjoining medical office.

So, you see, that although the world is at war and there are Nazis and—forgive our hero—“Japs” to contend with, there is still some of that good-old Superman goofiness going on here. When he isn’t dispensing with the buck-toothed, goggle-spectacled, offensive Asian stereotype The Leer or super-Nazi The Monocle, Superman gets to rescue a millionaire nerd, trade snipes with Lois Lane, match wits with her niece in an atypically whimsical arc, and deal with the always-delightful Mr. Mxyztplk in the imp’s debut tale. Nevertheless, the specter of a horrific war looms over this entire collection and occasionally breaks through to shade the relentless action and highjack the fun. One particularly ugly arc involves more of those offensive stereotypes gathered in an American internment camp for Japanese-Americans. More bizarrely, a short holiday arc features Hitler, Goebbels, and Santa Claus, who has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a concentration camp. I am not making this up. At times the darkness even rubs off on the Man of Steel, himself, such as when Superman gives an enemy a face full of poison, kills a nemesis in cold blood by dropping a ceiling on the creep, and terrorizes an old man to find out whether or not the guy is disabled. So be prepared for a grimmer Superman this go round… assuming you haven’t already been tipped off by those swastika-emblazoned bombs on the cover of The Golden Age Dailies 1942 to 1944.

Review: 'Comic Book Fever: A Celebration of Comics 1976-1986'

It may be hard to fathom in an age when adults literally get violently angry about reading bad reviews of the latest big-screen superhero explosion fest, but there was a time when comic books were lighthearted, fun, and almost exclusively intended for children. They could thrill to Superman’s escapades and laugh at Casper’s antics without the requisite shovelful of “darkness” and “grit.” The Dark Knight might hawk Hostess snack cakes in full-page ads and Spider-Man might team up with SNL’s Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Comics could also be just as complex and artfully illustrated as they are today, but they were still generally aimed at kids.

George Khoury— and his guest writers, such as Mary Skrenes and Roger Stern— celebrate and eulogize the era in which comics transitioned from child to adult-child fare in his new book Comic Book Fever, presenting a series of topical articles focused on the decade between 1976 and 1986. It begins with Captain America’s goofy bicentennial patriotism, the last gasp of Harvey comics and Archie’s wholesome frolics, moves through a more thoughtful period in which Marvel and the Hernandez Brothers (Love and Rockets) introduced progressive ideals into superhero adventures, and ends with the inevitable “maturing” of the form with Alan Moore on the left and Frank Miller on the right and buckets of blood and aimless cynicism splattered everywhere in between.

Khoury only really criticizes the dark turn comics took in his final pages, but his writing about the industry’s more carefree, youth-oriented days is so celebratory that he makes his preference clear throughout Comic Book Fever. There are certainly few “serious” studies of comics that would make room to laud such wacky side roads as Jack Davis’s “Streetball” ads for Spalding, Rock & Roll comics, toy-based comics (Masters of the Universe, Rom, GI Joe, Strawberry Shortcake...), Colorforms, and Dynamite Magazine. Those of us who don’t take comic reading so deathly serious will relish binging on this nostalgia feast. There’s also fascinating drama in many of these stories, such as the troubled creations of the iconic Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic and Marvel’s KISS series.

Khoury also emphasizes the fun side of the medium in his presentation. Every page of Comic Book Fever overflows with images of comics pages and covers, advertisements, and memorabilia: toys, place mats, pencil cases, lunchboxes, records, greeting cards, and so on. I remember being a kid ogling all this stuff at my local Heroes World, a comics shop chain that Khoury lovingly profiles in his book. I have much fonder memories of thumbing through issues of Star Wars there than I do of seeing Batgirl getting shot through the spine in The Killing Joke. There are innumerable online forums for those who prefer the latter. Comic Book Fever, however, is for kids like me.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 256

The Date: June 12

The Movie: Superman (1978)

What Is It?: The real battle in the very first blockbuster superhero movie is between campiness and gravity. Fortunately, the camp camp wins, making for a very enjoyable romp with Margot Kidder having a ball as Lois Lane and Gene Hackman, Valerie Perrine, and Ned Beatty hamming it up as Team Luthor. Christopher Reeve is iconic as the flying toothpaste commercial and the epic structure flattens out most of the flaws.

Why Today?: Today is Superman Day!

Review: 'Superman: The Atomic Age Sundays 1953 to 1956'

Boy oh boy, do I pity today’s kids. They’ll grow up believing Superman is a dark, tormented soul who goes around destroying cities and murdering his enemies. Had they grown up in the fifties, they might have thought of their pajama-wearing hero as a rapscallion who escorts Lois Lane through the Trojan War or the pilgrims’ voyage to America in a bizarre bid to conceal his identity. They might have been tickled by how he turned a garbage dump into a vacation resort to protect some investors who’d been duped by a diabolical duo from Krypton. They might have seen him help a narcoleptic Hercules save face, ride a Pegasus, or match wits with toddlers. They might have cheered him on during a pro-wrestling match, marveled at how he was tricked into appearing on “This Is Your Life”, or witnessed him getting amnesia for the zillionth time. Basically, they might have thought Superman was fun.

So do that dark, tormented eight-year-old you recently took to see Batman v Superman a favor and get him or her a copy of Superman: The Atomic Age Sundays 1953 to 1956. IDW’s second volume devoted to Superman’s fifties Sunday comic strips is as colorful, kooky, and sweet natured as the first. It’s nice to see how a guy who could punch you through a Formica floor always figures out how to use his wits rather than his fists to solve problems and thwart crimes. He even takes a break from his grander duties to rescue a parrot! There’s a superhero I’d like to hang out with.

Superman’s arch nemeses are on short order. The only recurring villain is the less-than-formidable Prankster. There’s a nice amount of Lois Lane, though, and the stories are consistently amusing and outlandish. As was the case with the first volume of the Atomic Age series, extras are sparse with another short introduction from Mark Waid and another selection of Wayne Boring comic book covers, but the main attraction is lovingly presented and a timely reminder that Superman is supposed to inspire joy, not existential dread and migraines.

Review: 'Superman: The Atomic Age Sundays 1949-1953'

Pooh-pooh to the dark knights of today’s comics. I prefer it when superheroes get goofy, and there’s no super hero superer than Superman, and he gets super goofy in IDW’s new anthology of his Sunday comic adventures from 1949–1953. Thank artist Wayne Boring and writer Alvin Schwartz, who had enough refreshing disrespect for the Man of Steel to pit him against Arthurian knights and pose as a mustachioed minstrel named Clark of Kent or whittle giant marionettes so he could put on the puppet show that saves a country girl from marrying a smarmy con man. Superman hides Clark Kent robots all over Metropolis and makes a big brass monkey to thwart some thugs. He gets caught in the web of a giant caterpillar. Lois Lane rescues a parrot. It’s fitting that the only arch villain who appears in this daffy volume is that slaphappy, dimension-hopping imp Mr. Mxyztplk.

Without interruptions from B&W daily comic strips following their own story lines, Superman: The Atomic Age Sundays 1949-1953 reads like a proper comic book anthology, especially since the Sunday comics from this period are full page stories that minimize awkward recapping of the previous Sunday’s events. There is much wit, imagination, and heart in Schwartz’s writing as Superman goes about his zany business and criminals meet with more forgiveness than they usually do in the superhero realm. Just don’t expect Superman to settle down and get married. That’s one thing for which he has no forgiveness in these pages!

The book comes with IDW’s usual quality and authenticity: no digital altering of the artwork; grainy paper that recalls the texture of classic comic book pages without the thinness; a slick ribbon bookmark. A few extra extras aside from a brief though informative introduction from comic writer Mark Waid and a selection of Boring’s covers for Superman and Action Comics would have been nice, but you’d be a super jackass to complain too much about a volume as super as The Atomic Age Sundays 1949-1953. 

Review: 'The League of Regrettable Superheroes: Half-Baked Heroes from Comic Book History'

I like to believe there’s some bizarro world where grown men line up in front of cinemas to see the latest Dr. Hormone or Brother Power the Geek movie and plucky girls don red-cross-emblazoned masks every Halloween to impersonate Pat Parker, War Nurse, and the names of Superman and Wonder Woman elicit nothing more than a nonplussed shrug for all but the most hardcore comic book geeks. I suspect Jon Morris feels the same way. He has compiled a wittily written and lavishly illustrated encyclopedia of such D-list crime fighters from 1939 to 1997 called The League of Regrettable Superheroes.

Regrettable? Well, maybe Doctor Vampire, a confusingly named full-time vampire killer and part-time racist, was a bit regrettable. But what about Amazing Man, the near-naked marauder known to bite snakes to death and beat up “green Nazi gorillas”; Bozo the Iron Man, a super murder-bot who bashes sharks against walls; or Captain Tootsie, who teaches kids to operate assault rifles while buzzed on a diet of Tootsie Rolls ©? What’s regrettable about that lot? Or how about their super nemeses? What about Mr. Lucifer, a circus clown with delusions of demonic grandeur; Rossinoff, a donkey man his enemies call “Assinoff”; Dress Suit, an unoccupied yet deadly jacket and tie combo; and an undefined menace named Johnny Boom Boom? Those guys warrant a similar volume of their own!

I firmly believe that each and every one of these heroes and villains were worthy of careers as long and fruitful as those of Superman and Wonder Woman and the rest. Sadly, a lot of these failed superheroes were forced to put their capes in mothballs not because of their inherent jack-assedness but because their publishers simply went out of business. Perhaps if Harry “A” Chesler Publishing hadn’t gone belly up, The Black Dwarf would still be offering criminals “a bite of knuckle pie” today. In the bizarro world of my dreams, he is.