Bottoms Up!

One of the odder bits in the Silver Age seemed to be the obsession with spanking.

There were a lot of comics that featured some form of smacking of the rear, frequently with a hair brush. Professor Lang barely remembers in time that his daughter's a little old for a bit of corporal punishment here:

Pa Kent tried a "paddle wheel" on Supertot:

Pa Kent apparently forgot this lesson later:

And:

Ah, but every boy grows up to be a man and must discipline his own son, as Clark does here:

Lois and Lana take (unsuccessful) turns here:

And more:

In all the spanking sequences this is one of the few that actually resulted in pain to the recipient:




Update: Some amusing letters on the topic of spanking:



Note the interesting arguments: She deserves it versus Superman would never hit a woman. Important social lessons being taught there. I'll have to look around for the baby Lois spanking bit.

This letter and the response drew a reply from the North Shore Corporal Punishment Fan Club a few issues later:

Random Cover of the Day: Detective #406

This is actually the last issue of Detective in the Silver Age, dated December 1970. For those who weren't around then, this was the heyday of the Jesus freaks, and DC, spotting a teenage trend that they hadn't exploited yet, hopped on the bandwagon. Here's the cover over of Flash #198 from earlier that year:



Not saying there's anything wrong with religion in comics, but these were extremely rare examples of it anywhere in comics of the Silver Age. Even Christmas covers and Christmas stories which had an honored history in the 1940s were gone.

Jimmy Olsen #74

Jimmy Olsen was a durable character in the Silver Age. He did not appear a lot in the Golden Age comics, although he was a regular on the Superman 1940s radio series and later on the 1950s TV show, which was why he got his own book. Olsen allowed the DC editors to touch (rather awkwardly) on teenage culture of the time, with Superman as Olsen's regular deus ex machina to get him out of the innumerable jams.

His rather nerdy and unattractive red-headed appearance appears likely to have been aimed at the Archie audience, perhaps as a bridge to bringing them into the Superman fan club. But Jimmy was an interesting character because he combined elements of both Goofus and Gallant. Capable of doing the dumbest things, he could also suddenly perform nobly and well when the situation warranted.

The first story, however, features Jimmy doing a lot of the wrong things. He turns his girlfriend, Lucy Lane, into a midget, swells Lois' head up like a balloon and turns Superman into Cluck Kent:



Of course, it's just a gag by Mr Mxyzptlk who has managed to take over Jimmy via a machine. But the lad figures out a good way to exorcise his demon:



In Jimmy Olsen and the Forty Thieves, our boy is transported back to ancient Bagdad (sic), where he had an unfortunate discovery:



Jimmy is eventually captured and sold into slavery. But there are only two possibilities for a Silver Age character sold into slavery. Either he will be sold to a hot slave-owning babe:



Or the evil villain who's also hiding out in the past. Guess which?



Luthor uses Jimmy to lure Supes back to the past, but his plot to kill the Man of Steel falls apart when Jimmy uses some nifty footwork here:



Jimmy Olsen's Secret Love begins a series of pretty embarrassing stories. The premise for the series is that both Jimmy and Lucy Lane, his girlfriend, are working undercover in disguise when they meet and fall in love. Jimmy is Magi the Magnificent, a stage magician, while Lucy is Sandra Rogers, a beautiful starlet.

Well, the negative with that humorous plot is that it makes both Jimmy and Lucy look pretty boring and unsophisticated versus the fascinating and cultured people they play in this story, as you can see from their rather pedestrian thoughts.

There was at least one more Magi and Sandra story after this.

Look Before You Leap Day

Here's a humorous Peg short from Superman #136 on a leap year tradition:



This sequence from Lois Lane #19 might be a little surprising:



In the story, Lois has been hypnotized into forgetting about her affections for Superman and decides that maybe her co-worker deserves a shot, alarming the heck out of Clark.

Update: In Green Lantern #3 (Nov-Dec 1960) Green Lantern experienced the Leap Year Menace:

Double Trouble

One of the more durable plot ideas of the 1960s was the concept of the doppleganger, the criminal version of the hero. The appeal of these doubles to writers and editors is pretty obvious. Having created these extraordinary characters with "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men", the creators found it difficult to present them with a real challenge. What better solution than to have them face villains with similar qualities?

The concept is not original with superheroes; Sherlock Holmes had his Moriarty, the crime-creating mastermind to his crime-solving genius. Going back further, God found himself in constant battle with the fella with the horns. We've already talked quite a bit on this blog about Bizarro and
SuperMenace, two memorable DC knockoffs of Superman.

But there were many other dopplegangers. Green Lantern had Sinestro:



Sinestro was a renegade Green Lantern who had abused his power and had his ring and lantern taken away by the Guardians. At some point he acquired a ring that emitted a yellow light and thus was invulnerable to Green Lantern's own beam.

Hawkman had the Shrike:



The Shrike was an interesting double in that his powers were similar to Hawkman's (although the lightning-shooting wings were a significant difference) but his origin resembled that of another DC hero:


Instead of landing in Kansas, this rocket landed among a grudge-bearing tribe of Indians who dreamed of the youngster restoring them to glory, which led to the Shrike (initially) being a criminal, stealing back ancient treasures.

Well, if a doppelganger works, then why not a doppelgang?

The Legion of Super-Villains was a twist on the Legion of Superheroes and specifically the original three members of that group, who were similarly seen voting down Superboy on the famed cover of Adventure #247. This particular concept for a cover (which looks like a game show) was also used in Action #296, and Jimmy Olsen #87, making it something of a doppelgang itself.

Over at Marvel, the Frightful Four were a similar but different version of the Fantastic Four. The Justice League of America had an even more similar opponent in the Crime Syndicate of America of Earth-3.

Two of the more interesting duplicates of the Silver Age were Amazo and the Composite Superman. Amazo debuted in Brave and Bold # 30. He was an android who had been given the powers of the members of the Justice League of America (not counting Superman). But World's Finest #142 introduced a character who topped even that:



The Composite Superman was Joe Meach, a failed high-diver who after being saved by Superman, was offered a position at the Superman Museum as a janitor. But instead of being grateful, Meach resented his lowly status. So when a freak bolt of lightning hit the statues of the Legion members at the Superman Museum and gave him virtually limitless power, he used it in an evil way:



Fortunately his powers turned out to be temporary as is his memory of the experience and so he ends up back where he started, pushing a broom.

Oddly enough, a similarly menial position was the origin of a reverse doppelganger, The Leader. While working a mindless job at a chemical research plant, he was exposed to gamma radiation that amazingly stimulated his brain, making him a being of great intellect but little physical ability, the exact opposite of the Hulk as he mentions here:



Some other famed doubles: Crimson Dynamo/Iron Man/, Titanium Man/Iron Man, Gas Gang/Metal Men. Many superheroes had some sort of real duplicate created by a ray or magic or red kryptonite, so we'll ignore those. I don't see a real Reverse Spiderman or Reverse Daredevil or Captain Russia out there, and while you can argue Loki as the anti-Thor, I don't buy it. That's more a personal rivalry that doesn't really imply similarity in powers. For the same reason I'd argue that Dr Doom is not Mr Fantastic's double, nor is Baron Mordo the equivalent of Dr Strange.

Atom battled a few small villains but I don't think any of his villains really mimicked him beyond that. There were of course several Kryptonian criminals who appeared in the Silver Age as doubles of Superman or Supergirl.

Any others?

Update: Kyle points out Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash. He was in the original post, but somehow an editing mistake left him out. Good catch!

Update II: Here's a different take--multiple androids with the combined powers of the Avengers:

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Depending on your religion, it's either the fifth or the sixth of the Ten Commandments. It came up as part of a discussion over at Comic Coverage of the graphic novel series, DC: the New Frontier and the resulting animated feature based on the comics. I intend to do a long post on the NF series, which is a terrific reworking of the early Silver Age of comics, but for now I'd like to riff on the killing thing:

As Mark noted:

Another "disconnect" for me was Cooke's nonsensical decision to make Korean War fighter pilot Hal Jordan...get this...a pacifist. That's right, Hal made a point of refusing to shoot down hostile enemy aircraft, thereby adding to New Frontier's strange moral paralysis when it comes to its historical view of Communist expansionism and the clear need to contain it.

This was a jarring note for me as well, for several reasons. First, since Hal (in the NF) was a fighter pilot, whose father had been killed in WWII, it seems unlikely that he would have this pacifist streak. And second, if ever there was a DC hero who positively reveled in violence (if not killing), it was Green Lantern, possibly because Gil Kane could draw a punch better than any other artist:



That panel of course shows the Golden Age Green Lantern throwing the haymaker, but trust me, it was a rare issue that didn't feature Hal or his GL identity using his fists.

It is possible that Hal's unwillingness to kill in Korea marks him as suitable for the lantern and the ring, although it raises doubts about his suitability as a fighter pilot.

Early on in the Golden Age, DC's heroes were somewhat cavalier about the fate of criminals. Batman's cold-blooded response to the death of the villain in Detective #27 was, "A fitting end for his kind!" And those early issues frequently showed him tossing villains off rooftops to their apparent death. As I discussed in my (long and getting longer) post on Batman and guns, this changed after Batman #1, in which our hero kills monsters who were once men, and the driver of a truck with a machine gun mounted on the Batplane. As I noted, after that, Batman never shot to kill.

The concept of the hero not killing quickly became established for DC superhero types after that. I am not sure where this originated; it is well-known for example, that Doc Savage, a precursor to both Batman and Superman, used "mercy bullets" in his revolver that rendered his foes unconscious rather than killing (although he was quite willing to perform a little "brain salad surgery" to turn criminals back into productive members of society).

At any rate, this was codified fairly early in the DC Golden Age, and it lasted through the Silver Age.

There were, of course, several stories whereby the hero or his alter-ego was accused of killing somebody, but it was always a mistake or part of some other plot, as in Detective #249's The Crime of Bruce Wayne

But in Adventure #342, we got the real deal:

Star Boy, while on a trip to another world, sees a man kill an explorer he had befriended. The man then turns his gun on Star Boy, explaining that his goal was actually to kill the Legion member. With apparently only one chance to save his life, Star Boy violates the code:

He may be in the clear as far as the law is concerned, but not with his Legion buddies:

That is a pretty sophisticated argument made by Superboy. However, Star Boy's fate is sealed when Brainiac 5 demonstrates a way Star Boy (whose power is to make things super-heavy) could have survived without killing:

Star Boy was expelled. He and Dream Girl, who was not yet a Legionairre, joined the Legion of Substitute Heroes for the next year or so.

In Action #358-359, Superman was accused of homicide for accidentally killing a man whom he boxed against in an exhibition bout. He didn't know that a criminal mastermind had secretly set up the situation. But we did learn a little more about some of the "exceptions" in Superman's code against killing from Lois Lane's startling testimony:

So it's okay, as long as they're "dangerous aliens from space wearing human masks--condemned murderers?"

I will update this post as I find more stories that deal with the general DC code against killing.

Update: Green Lantern's code against killing is discussed by Sinestro, from Green Lantern #7:



Update II: The Avenger Code:



Update III: The X-Men Pledge:



Update IV: More about Superman. In Superman #171, our hero was confronted by two aliens with a very tough choice:



This story features terrific characterization. Superman, faced with the option of going against his code or allowing Earth to die, decides to kill himself by purposely exposing himself to Green Kryptonite. However, the aliens are not going to let him off that lightly, so they change the Green K to another element. They want him to kill someone else. Guess who volunteers?



Wow, terrific characterization for Jimmy. Later in the story, both Lana and Lois attempt suicide (yes, this issue went out with code approval), and in Lana's case she almost succeeds. In the end, Superman decides to "kill" Clark Kent by tying him up near a nuclear test blast. Of course, Clark really survives but he hopes that this will fool the aliens.

No such luck, but it doesn't really matter as the aliens weren't really planning on destroying Earth:



Yep, these are the same gamblers Rokk and Sorban, who were featured in the nutty World's Finest issue I talked about last year. They were also supposedly behind the Flash/Superman race in Flash #175, although we found out at the end two of Flash's major villains (Abra Kadabra and Professor Zoom) were impersonating the two aliens.

Goodbye, Green Lantern!

The late 1960s were a time of change for DC Comics. This became startlingly obvious in Green Lantern #49, the December 1966 issue. GL's main cast of characters had stayed steady since his introduction in 1959--sidekick Pieface (Tom Kalmaku), love interest Carol Ferris, and secret identity, test pilot Hal Jordan. But that all got shook up quite a bit in this issue, starting with the girlfriend:



I can't think of another DC comic where a hero had been thrown over permanently by a long-standing girlfriend in favor of another man. Oh, sure, Bruce Wayne's gals had a habit of dropping off the face of the earth every few years. Aquaman had gotten married, as had the Flash (mentioned briefly in this issue). So this was really something different. But that was not all the goodbyes in store for us in this issue.

Hal decides that he cannot stay in Coast City with Carol married to another man, and so he strikes out on his own, resulting in this poignant farewell:



I'll have to do a full post on Pieface sometime, but he was a pretty unique character in the DC universe. Although his name suggests the buffoonish sidekicks of the Golden Age, like Doiby Dickles or Winky, Blinky and Noddy, Pie was played straight, as a serious character.

And even this was not the end of goodbyes. An even more startling departure came at the end of Green Lantern #61 (June 1968). It wasn't announced other than with this small note at the end of the story:

Gil Kane, who had drawn every panel of every Silver Age Green Lantern story, was now out of the picture. This was part of great DC reshuffling of artistic duties in mid-1968 that I will have to cover in depth at some later date. Apparently, DC's artists and writers had been pressuring the company for health and pension benefits, and in an effort to head that off, DC decided to switch around the assignments, probably feeling that the long-term association of artists with characters gave the former too much clout.

Many of the switches worked, but this one appears to have been a failure, as Kane was back at the old stand by mid-1969, although he only got one more year with the character before the advent of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams.

The 3/4 Shot

Mark Engblom has a very cool post up about Robin, and the seemingly endless ways he appeared on DC covers looking on and commenting as Batman performed some amazing feat. The on-looker in a 3/4 shot was an important part of making the panel or the cover seem three-dimensional. It gives us a close, recognizable person so we can gauge the relative size and nearness of everything else in the view. This is used endlessly throughout the Silver Age. Look at every panel on this page:



You can see that in every case there is somebody standing in one or the other bottom corner who is the closest to the "camera", thus giving us scale. But notice that they do not have always the same angle that they're looking at. In the first panel, a salesman is looking directly left. In the second, Lois is looking back and left. In the third, the professor is looking forward and left Then we see Lois looking right, then left, then the professor looking forward and left.

I tend to think of the camera angle where the person in the foreground is mostly facing away from us as the 3/4 shot, because the onlooker is 3/4 looking away from the camera. In this page the third and sixth panels are used this way. In the ones Mark has posted of Robin, I believe that if you look closely at them, you'll see that every one is a 3/4 shot. Granted Moldoff doesn't make this clear always until you look at the set of the shoulders.

Now, here's the thing. The world's worst comics artist at drawing the 3/4 shot has to have been Wayne Boring, one of the major Superman artists of the Silver Age of Comics. And the main reason why was because he just could not place the eyeglasses on a character to save his life.

We have two examples right on the page I posted above:



You can see the problem, right? The angle is all wrong on the glasses; they look like they're about to fall off his nose, rather than balanced on the bridge. This is a major artist, on a major character who often wore glasses (as Clark Kent), and the artist just couldn't get it right:





And it went on for years. We all bow down before Weissinger, who undeniably created an amazing decade for Superman, but how do you ignore the fact that he let this travesty go on with the glasses?



It's not as if DC didn't know where to put the glasses; Al Plastino knew where they belonged:



Boring was a terrific artist in the Golden Age, and I would not have been able to draw anywhere near as well as he did on his worst days. But he almost never got the glasses right.