Recently Read: The Superman Chronicles, Vol. 10

 

In (sadly) the last volume of DC's Superman Chronicles, reprinting early Superman stories in chronological order, one half of the team who created the character is nearly missing. Joe Shuster only pencils one of the twelve collected stories. The others are penciled by Leo Nowak and John Sikela, each of whom does an okay job mimicking Joe's (more cartoony) style.

The stories are all written by Jerry Siegel, though, and the series at this point still holds a lot of charm. Lex Luthor shows up, as do an assortment of early, more obscure villains. Either out of boredom or a desire to branch out, Siegel's last two stories here work on a meta level: the first involves Clark and Lois seeing a Paramount Superman cartoon in a movie theater (how can Clark prevent Lois from seeing the scenes in the short which show Clark changing into Superman?). The second is a parody of the cartoonist Li'l Abner and a parody of its creator, Al Capp (here called Al Hatt), a premise resulting in a great panel in which Superman slugs Abner! Was the story a response to Capp's popularity and notorious ego? Probably.

Recommended.

Pin It

Tweet

Recently Read: The Superman Chronicles, Vol. 9

In the second-to-last volume of DC's missed chronological reprintings of the adventures of Superman, cartoonist John Sikela does a good job attempting to keep the book looking like co-creator Joe Shuster's work.

Fortunately, Jerry Siegel's still writing every story and the work has a charm missing from today's interpretations. In this volume, Lois and Clark take on car dealers who purposely sell unsafe cars, take inner city kids out for a day in the country, rat out a fake astrologist, and help a budding baseball player start his career. This down-to-earth and humanist take on Superman is just what's missing in the stories I've read in the past several decades (although Grant Morrison's run started promisingly).

These are also the first reprinted stories I've read which use material created for the Superman radio show as orthodoxy. Jimmy Olson and the Fortress of Solitude are used in the stories as if they've already been introduced on the page; rather, they were apparently created for the radio show first and transferred to the comic books (and comic strip?). I'd love to hear from comics historians about this particular transference from radio to comics.

Pin It

Tweet