In 2009, it can be hard to understand, let alone appreciate, what superhero comic books were like at their inception.
Sure, DC and Marvel have their various reprint programs allow us to read the original adventures of the most popular and successful superheroes. You know, those that are still alive and selling. But it’s not easy to experience a Superman comic, or even a Captain Marvel or Sub-Mariner comic, without thinking of all that followed them. As tossed off as those stories may have been, they have the weight of a creation myth; to read the first Superman story without thinking of every one that followed, as if you had no idea what Superman was, requires an act of willful disassociation bordering on self-hypnosis.
Which is at least part of the fun of Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 (Fantagraphics Books). Editor Greg Sadowski has collected about 20 stories from the time period, featuring a mess of characters you may have heard of, but certainly don’t know the way you know Wonder Woman or Batman.
These are stories from both the formative years of the superhero, and the gold rush years, when everyone making comics decided to make a Superman of some sort. The genre was still fluid, and hadn’t yet hardened and become solid (let alone calcified).
While the names of the supermen may not be familiar ones, the names of their creators certainly are, and Sadowski has assembled a who’s who of the founding fathers of comics, none of who are working on their signature creations. For example you’ll see Will Eisner, but not on The Spirit, Jack Cole, but not on Plastic Man.
Sadowski includes annotations on the stories, which function as an extremely readable mini-history of the comics industry in those years. I sat down to review this book a couple of times now, but I kept getting pulled in so many directions, wanting to mention every cool thing in it, which is quite difficult, given how many cool things are in it.
So instead, after the jump, I’ll try and say a few words about every single story in Supermen!, a book I honestly can’t recommend enough to any fans of the superhero genre.
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