It all began with Kryptonite: Today’s Tidal Wave of Superhero Culture by Nigel Brown

In November 1966, readers buying the 80 Page Giant Superman # 193, reprinting “The Greatest SUPER-stories published during the last 28 years!” were also treated to three original art panels in the 10 year old story “The First Superman of Krypton” (first published in Action Comics # 223, for sale in October 1956).

Why did those three original panels replace the three that were there before? And why did DC bother to do this when most of the readership wouldn’t notice, or care?

The answer reveals one of the earliest rumblings of a seismic change in the comics industry, the effects of which are still being seen around the cultural world today.

To understand this, we must first consider the comic book industry of the 1940s.

Compared to today, comics were then mass-market items, with sales of the most popular titles (Superman, Action Comics, Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and the Timely Captain America etc) regularly attaining circulations above 1 million. In comparison, a popular comic book today will only sell in the region of 100,000 copies – that’s a drop in the scale of one tenth (of course, there are the odd exceptions).

The reasons for this are well known, involving the demise of comics distribution from commonplace outlets into specialist comic stores (but that’s not under discussion here).

Being mass-market, the aim of the comic publishers was to appeal to the greatest number of consumers. Editors like DC’s Mort Weisinger, with his roots in the world of the science fiction pulps (along with one of his favoured Superman writers, the respected science fiction writer Edmund Hamilton), well understood the primacy of entertainment in his comics.

A cursory search of the Internet, and anyone can see the impressive array of comics and magazines (pulps and other) that covered walls of newsstands in the 1940s and 1950s. Every comic was in a Darwinian battle for survival against its competitors.

Julius Schwartz (another DC editor) confirmed in his book ‘Man of 2 Worlds’ p.87, that the early comics industry was serving children with an average age of 8 to 12 ie. pre-teenagers, as we think of them today (the notion of ‘teenager’ didn’t exist until it was created as a marketing term in 1944).

Combining the factors of a customer base aged 8 to 12, along with a mass market product, along with every comic book being offered as the most entertaining item the editors and publishers could possibly make it, it’s not surprising that any concerns about minor breaks in continuity between comic book issues was of relatively little importance.

The comic book publishers were in the business of making money by selling as many comics as they could; they weren’t interested in pursuing a higher calling of constructing a detailed, intricate ‘secondary fantasy world’ as postulated by JRR Tolkein (who spent most of his life detailing the intricate stories of Middle Earth, including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and, most especially, the writing that made up his Magnum Opus of the imagination, The Silmarillion).

When Edmund Hamilton sent Mort Weisinger his script for a new Superman story “The First Superman of Krypton”, that Weisinger later placed as the lead story in Action Comics (the comic title where Superman began), it was another of Hamilton’s science fiction based tales.

Superman discovers a fragment of his destroyed home planet containing part of the laboratory of his father, Jor-El. He salvages Jor-El’s laboratory films. When he plays them it’s revealed that Jor-El constructed an Earth-like environment on Krypton to test Earth as a potential new home for the doomed Kryptonians. There, Jor-El discovers he has super-powers, defeats similarly super-powered evil Kryptonians, and therein lies the story.

But our interest lies with the first page of the story. Superman lands on the fragment of Krypton, roots through the wreckage and discovers a find that takes the story forward. The kryptonian ground he stands on is a luminescent white, showing to their best effect the colourful pieces of skyscraper, an orange rocket and Jor-El’s desk and desk chair.

No doubt the story, featured in Action Comics # 223, dated December 1956, was a hit with readers. And no surprise that when DC decided to produce an 80 page giant, featuring “The Greatest SUPER-stories published during the last 28 years!” (ie. since the first Superman story in 1938), Hamilton’s “The First Superman of Krypton” was reprinted in the 80 Page Giant Superman # 193.

But not quite a reprint. Unnoticeable by readers at the time, and unless they happened to have that, by then, decade-old copy of Action Comics #223, three of the panels on the first page of that story had been re-drawn by the original artist of the story, Wayne Boring.

Wayne Boring was available at the time to do redo his artwork. He started drawing Superman since the early days of the Joe Shuster studio, directly working for DC from 1942, and continued through the 1950s as Superman’s main artist, not officially leaving DC until 1967. (As an aside, given Weisinger’s now notorious reputation for badly treating his creative staff, one wonders if Weisinger paid Boring for those extra panels.)

But why, only 10 years after the original publication, did Weisinger bother at all?

The first answer that springs to mind is that, as any Superman fan – or even non-fan – will tell you, the atomic explosion that destroyed the planet Krypton changed its material composition, and any kryptonian remnants (including artefacts) into ‘kryptonite’, generally a green glowing material fatal to super-powered Kryptonians. For a Kryptonian, you can’t go home again.

So, for the reader of early 1967, it was expected that Superman – in the redrawn panels – can’t approach the deadly wreckage of his father’s laboratory. Instead, lucky for him (and the rest of the story!) Superman in the redrawn version finds a lead box from Jor-El’s laboratory that’s drifted away from the main body. As Superman explains to the reader:

“Fortunately they drifted away from the kryptonite… and they were saved from the explosion in this lead box.”

And so the rest of the story continues on, unchanged from its debut in 1956. And continuity with the established Superman mythos of 1966 is saved, after the pre-kryptonite era of 1956, when the story was first published.

But it’s wrong to think that 1956 was a pre-kryptonite era.

The concept of kryptonite, as a deadly substance to Superman, first appeared in 1943, a full thirteen years before the Hamilton story’s first appearance. That was in the Superman radio show ‘The Adventures of Superman’, in the episode ‘The Meteor from Krypton’, first broadcast in June 1943 (a mere 5 years after the first appearance of Superman himself).

It took another six years for kryptonite to appear in the comics (in the story “Superman returns to Krypton!” featured in Superman #61 Nov/Dec 1949) written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger. Kryptonite was coloured red in this first appearance (NOT ‘Red’ kryptonite). It became its signature green colour in Action Comics # 161, by Aug. 1951.

So the concept of kryptonite was established by the time of Hamilton’s 1956 “The First Superman of Krypton” story.

Was this an oversight by Hamilton? And if so, why wasn’t it corrected by editor Mort Weisinger? There’s no doubt that the story of Superman finding the wreckage, as depicted originally, is a slightly more straightforward version. The core of the story is Jor-El’s adventure as a ‘Superman’ of Krypton. The beginning, with Superman himself, is only a framing sequence. (There’s an argument that, dramatically, it’s not required. The story could have been part of an ‘Untold Tale of Krypton’ story, and had it been produced in the 70s, it may well have been. I suspect editor Weisinger felt that the presence of Superman himself was necessary at the beginning of the story (in 1956) as the readers would have expected to see him there, and to give them confidence to buy the comic in the first place (remember that Darwinian newsstand struggle I mentioned earlier?).

So I think that Weisinger simply wasn’t bothered too much about this discrepancy over kryptonite. It’s even possible he would have felt this gave some unnecessary complexity to the beginning of the story, not trusting the 8 year old target audience to fully understand why Superman should be harmed by fragments of Krypton, but his father Jor-El wasn’t.

You might excuse Weisinger due to the expectations of the comic book industry that the readership was aged 8 to 12. That meant that there was a 4 year window whereby there would be a general turnover of reader every 4 years, so comics more than 4 years old (and these disposable items weren’t expected to be kept around for long, in those days) would be unread by the current readers. The Action Comics # 161 Aug. 1951 kryptonite story was published five years before the “The First Superman of Krypton” story, so who cared?

But not so fast. Superman’s vulnerability to kryptonite was well-known even outside the realm of the comic-book.

By the 1950s, Superman had begun to feature in television’s popular ‘Adventure of Superman’, with George Reeves as the eponymous hero. Television is undoubtedly mass-market, especially across America in the 1950s. The TV show was first broadcast from 1952-1958, and kryptonite first appeared in the episode ‘Panic in the Sky’ (originally broadcast Dec 5, 1953). More significantly, it also appeared in the episode ‘The Deadly Rock’, first broadcast June 2^nd 1956, which was about the time Hamilton’s story would have been worked on.

So Weisinger not only ignored previous comics’ continuity, about also Superman’s background as established on radio and on television.

He did this, because it REALLY didn’t matter.

So something happened between 1956 and 1966.

In a word, fandom.

Letter columns in DC comics were only introduced in 1958. Similar to the way that Hugo Gernsback’s inclusion of letter writer’s names and addresses in the letter column of the first all science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, this allowed numbers of comic book fans to find each other and to grow a fan network. The first comic book convention was held in the USA in 1964, so by November 1966, when the 80 Page Giant Superman # 193 was published, a vocal and letter writing group of comic book fans was present on the scene.

Little did Ian Baker and myself know at the time, but those who had their letters printed were often rewarded by editor Julie Schwartz with a gift of original artwork. Otherwise, incredibly, it was incinerated in a furnace in the basement of DC’s office. So, for the cost of a scribble on a blue air mail letter, we could have received original art from our revered comics… an exception to the doomed artwork were those pieces which were secretly rescued by comic fans who’d taken temporary jobs with DC. They smuggled them out of the building under their clothing.

But one of these comic fans had a more permanent job at DC, as Mort Weisinger’s assistant. His name was E.Nelson Bridwell. Unlike the other long-time staff working at DC, he was a keeper of the flame of the Superman mythos. He took the concept of Tolkein’s secondary world seriously, and became an expert in all things Superman. Weisinger was happy to use his expertise, and to use his knowledge of Superman stories to pick out the stories for the occasional themed reprint 80 pagers that DC produced at the time.

Which brings us to 80 Page Giant Superman # 193. The theme of “The Greatest SUPER-stories published during the last 28 years!” pointed easily to Edmund Hamilton’s 10 year old story.

But Bridwell and Weisinger (by then) knew that if they hadn’t altered those early panels of Superman standing unaffected on a fragment of Krypton, the Action Comics letter column would have been hotter than a heat blast from Superman’s infra-red vision. So Boring supplied the new artwork, and maybe Bridwell himself wrote the new dialogue.

So the key point is that this change was primarily fan orientated.

Later years would see more and more fans of the comic books joining the comic book industry itself. As the older group of original creators retired, they replaced those that had grown up without comics with their fan-orientated perspective.

At the other end of the comics industry, when comics – for reasons not concerning this article – found themselves without the general distribution they’d enjoyed for decades, they found refuge in the willing arms of fandom itself. Direct distribution of comics to dedicated comic shops meant that, on the one hand, they were assured of a guaranteed ‘sell through’ of their comic books (with the juicy opportunity to sell more premium items to the fans in the comic shops to make up for the loss of volume sales to the general public), but on the other hand they lost a potential general readership who had access to a general distribution, but didn’t live within reach of a comic store.

But that’s not the end of the story. Consider the ubiquity of comic book characters today. The Marvel film franchises, and the DC films, and the TV series, and the cartoons… everyone’s heard of ‘super-heroes’. And the movers and shakers behind these cultural waves are – in many cases – fans of comic books, not just general readers.

And this cultural wave, a global tsunami in the film industry, shows little sign of receding.

Yet its first ripple was the replacement of three panels in a Superman story, that was barely noticed at the time.

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Addendum : Dec 10 2020

Thanks to quadibloc's comments re another change spotted in the republished version, as shown here.

copyright.Nigel Brown