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.

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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.

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Recently Read: The Superman Chronicles, Vol. 6

DC's nearly complete chronological reprinting of every Superman story chugs along in Vol. 6.

These stories are still written by co-creator Jerry Siegel, with an anger and vitality lost in later decade's renditions of Superman (in comics and film). I appreciate the wide range of antagonists and social issues dealt with here, from a spoiled heiress to a hypnotist, Lex Luther and two fascist organizations doubling as Nazis. The stories are formulaic and, frankly, can get tedious when read in bunches. On the other hand, Siegel had to write them at a prodigious rate: the book reprints fourteen stories written within the space of about five months, from May through Fall, 1941.

As mentioned in earlier reviews of the series, the art content of each volume has progressively less charm than the earliest stories drawn by Joe Shuster. The stories in Superman Chronicles Vol. 6 are largely drawn by Leo Nowak (who later also drew the Superman newspaper strip). One of Nowak's limitations as a cartoonist was a reliance on stock poses. His favorite shot is a figure shot from above, with one shoulder above the other. So, we get dozens of panels looking like this:

 

The Shuster Shop (Joe Shuster and assistants, I assume) do ink some of the stories (and reportedly, the Superman heads), keeping the look consistent. One artists' work very much stands out over the others in the book: John Sikela. In comparison to Nowak's tired, repetitious and formulaic art, Sikela used subtle body language and posture that rings truer than most superhero art of the period:

 

 

Several times in Chronicles Vol. 6, Superman is shown jumping or flying underneath cars. Nowak drew it this way:

Sikela not only portrays the scene more realistically, he goes a step further and shows Superman underneath the car, from two different angles, yet.

I have two criticisms of DC's packaging of the book. First, and most importantly, the art restoration in many places is horrendous.Over and over one can see the hand of someone going over the art with hand held (or digital) white-out, resulting in art that looks nothing like the original publication:

 

 

I guarantee even Leo Nowak never drew a tree that looked like this:

I'd prefer it if DC just shot from the original comics, or hired a restorer who has a good track record of being faithful to the original material - like Harry Mendryk, who's been doing a superlative job on recent Jack Kirby reprints from the '40s and '50s for Fantagraphics.

My second criticism is that, literally as I was writing this review, the book's pages began separating from the cover! DC needs to use a stronger glue for their binding.

Lastly, does anyone know if this series has been cancelled? The last Superman Chronicles (Vol. 10) was released in 2012.

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