Number 728


The apes of Ape-ril


As you read in Pappy's #705, I've got some weird thing for simians in comic books. I'm apparently one of many ape fans, because as I've said more than once, DC Comics found out years ago that putting gorillas on the covers of comic books sold more comic books.

I have three stories for you today: From DC's Strange Adventures #8, 1951, a tale of evolution* by Gardner Fox, illustrated by Bob Oksner and Bernard Sachs. Moving forward along the evolutionary scale we have Nick Cardy's drawing on "Experiment 1000" from House of Secrets #6, 1957. We swing from the branches, away from the DC experimental lab to the Gold Key jungle and a 1964 Boris Karloff tale, starring the Great Man himself, Karloff! chasing after the great white ape in "The Mystagogue." The art is by Frank Thorne.

Chuck Wells' is joining in with his Comic Book Catacombs Going Apeshit jungle story here.




























*Yet another take on Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved," here.

**********

Say...what?

And here's an extra, from Smash Comics #11, 1940:




By Jove, Captain Cook...a rare chimpanzee with transplanted owl eyes trained to steal green so he could eventually steal the royal emeralds would have been my choice for the culprit, too!

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The First Letter Published in Lois Lane

Hmmm:



Hank Weisinger? I'm guessing it's Mort's son, because Mort himself was from Great Neck, as mentioned here:

For many years before and five years after that globe was constructed, Mort Weisinger drove from Great Neck towards that incredible city of towers and terrors, his mind filled not with the grandeur of the metropolis before him, but with the problems of plot... how could he get an almost invulnerable character into and out of dangerous situations this month?

Update: Two terrific comments on this post. CMN points out that Phyllis Coates only appeared in the first 26 episodes, not 52 as stated by Weisinger Pere. And an anonymous commenter points out that Weisinger's son, Hendrie (Hank), wrote a comment on a blog post here where he states:

Also, many of the letters in the mailbags he made up, many times signing my friend's names. He would often do this to plant ideas and to develop the superman mythology.

Incidentally, that blog post goes into some detail about Weisinger's difficult nature (he apparently browbeat his writers and artists), and while I don't disagree about that, I do disagree with this:

But Weisinger had very little talent -- less, say, than a writer coming up with a funny dream sequence for The Dick Van Dyke Show. The Weisinger neuroses poke thru the stories like broken bones thru skin. God, are they painful. There's no aesthetic payoff, just the fascination of the awful. But, okay, I'll settle for that.

You can detect some detachment from the time, as the writers for the Dick Van Dyke Show were far from untalented; they won Emmy Awards in 1962, 1963, 1964 and 1966, and were nominated in 1965.

So too I think it is with the writer's assessment of Weisinger's talent. It can be difficult to see as an adult in 2010. Yes, if you've read Watchmen or DKR, those 1960s Superman tales seem banal and juvenile by comparison. But that's the point, we hadn't read Watchmen back in the 1960s, and we were juvenile.

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The Other Supermen Era At Action Comics

I happened to be flipping through some old Action issues today and noticed this trend. In Action #254-255 we have the first appearance of the adult Bizarro Superman. In Action #256, we see the Superman of the future. In Action #257, Clark Kent becomes a "second" Superman:

In #258, Superman encounters Cosmic Man:

Who turns out to be a robot. In Action #259, the other Superman is Superboy:

After a few issues off (#260-262), the Bizarros return for another two-parter in #263-264. It's Hyper-Man's turn in Action #265:

Then in #267-268, there's a two parter featuring a Superman of the past:

After that, the stories mostly get back to normal, but it's striking that there were so many tales with a similar theme over the course of about a year and a half.

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Number 727


"Jeepers! A dame--!"


This story had a panel reproduced in Fredric Wertham's Seduction Of the Innocent, from 1954. The panel lacked attribution in SOTI, but had appeared in Crime Smashers #1, 1950, from Trojan Magazines.

Dr. Fredric Wertham's infamous screed is a good example of the Law of Unintended Consequences: although it succeeded in its original intention, focusing public attention on the contents of comic books, it's now a cult classic. Comics containing panels referenced or shown in Seduction Of the Innocent are collectors' items for comic book fans.

The girl in the panel also owes something to 1948's Pay-Off #1.

In Straight Arrow #13, 1951, she showed up here:

For being dead, this gal gets around!

"Sally the Sleuth" is a character brought forward from the 1930s, where she appeared in two-page snippets in the pulp, Spicy Detective, drawn by Adolphe Barreaux, later the editor of Crime Smashers. Sadly, in this story she doesn't find her way out of her clothes (her main talent in the pulps), otherwise Dr. W. would have really had something to squawk about.

The fascinating story of how DC Comics plays into Trojan Magazines is told here. DC Comics came out of the comic book controversy fairly well, but not completely untouched (Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman and Robin came in for criticism), some comics with financial ties to DC helped bring about censorship. There were wheels within wheels in the comic book industry of that era.

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