Tag: Superman

“Lois, What’ve You Gotten Yourself Into??”

This is anoth­er one you can file under “ideas that popped into my head and would­n’t go away until I did them.”

I allud­ed in my pre­vi­ous post to hav­ing to look at a lot of Super­man mate­r­i­al while help­ing out with a recent Big Bang Comics project. In the course of doing that, this idea occurred to me: the Gold­en Age Super­man going up against Cthul­hu. And it would­n’t let go.

Final­ly, I had to do it. It’s not the first time I’ve tried to draw this ver­sion of Super­man. You can see it not only in the art I did as a kid (which I includ­ed with the pre­vi­ous post linked above), I also took a shot at him just pri­or to DC’s “New 52” era. So I’ve always had a soft spot for that ver­sion of the character.

To put the Gold­en Age Super­man up against Cthul­hu, I’m hav­ing to bend real­i­ty a bit in order to make it hap­pen. In the real world at this point in time, Super­man’s oppo­nents were still basi­cal­ly reg­u­lar non-pow­ered humans. They all were pret­ty much “one and done.” In the real Action Comics #13, they made their first attempt at intro­duc­ing a recur­ring vil­lain, the Ultra-Human­ite (though he was not yet in the lat­er albi­no goril­la form most fans are famil­iar with). At that point, he was just a very smart old bald guy in a wheel­chair. I think they were going for a char­ac­ter who might serve as Super­man’s Mori­ar­ty, his brains against Super­man’s brawn.

I’m not sure why Siegel and Shus­ter had­n’t yet put Super­man up against a super-vil­lain at this point. I guess they were still feel­ing their way, fig­ur­ing out the rules as they went along. After all, Super­man was the first of his super­pow­ered kind, blaz­ing the trail for a host of oth­er heroes. Messrs. S&S did take a crack at that kind of weird cos­mic hor­ror in one of their ear­li­er strips, Dr. Occult, and Siegel made use of it also in the Spec­tre. Clear­ly they were aware of that pulp genre, and were even fans of it to some extent. So maybe in anoth­er world, they might have thought to pit Super­man against Cthulhu.

Also in the real world, Action #13 was­n’t pub­lished with an Octo­ber 1939 cov­er date. It came out ear­li­er. I just liked the con­ceit of the 13th issue com­ing out in Octo­ber. Call it artis­tic license.

You might find the ver­sion of Cthul­hu here a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from what you’re used to. I elect­ed to ignore any lat­er (post-1930’s) depic­tions, and stuck with a cou­ple of sketch­es I found done by H.P. Love­craft him­self in 1934. I fig­ure some­thing like that is most like­ly what Shus­ter would’ve had access to. A lot of mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tions like to give Cthul­hu two eyes and brow ridges, but I liked how the six eyes Love­craft drew him with made him weird­er and less human-looking.

Hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for stop­ping by!

“Look! Up in the Sky!”

If you fol­low comics news at all, you’ve prob­a­bly heard there’s this big reboot that DC Comics is doing in Sep­tem­ber. They’re start­ing all their books over from #1, redesign­ing all the char­ac­ters and redo­ing their ori­gins. You can’t assume now that you know any­thing for sure about who they are, their moti­va­tions or the over­all scenario.

I’m not going to get into com­men­tary on that here (there’s been plen­ty of that already in oth­er places online). But I’ll admit the idea of the retire­ment of the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters has me think­ing back on them a bit wist­ful­ly. Though tech­ni­cal­ly a child of comics’ sil­ver and bronze ages, I’ve always had a fas­ci­na­tion with the gold­en age era too. Despite the fact that work was often a bit crude in com­par­i­son to what came lat­er, there was a cer­tain life and raw ener­gy to those ear­ly incar­na­tions of the characters.

It’s a lot eas­i­er to lay hands on gold­en age comics sto­ries now. Back when I was a kid, most­ly you just got to read about them (in books like Ster­anko’s His­to­ry of Comics, or All in Col­or for a Dime). If you could lay hands on one of DC’s 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars though, you knew you were in for a rare treat.

Like I say, I’ve long had a soft spot for these ear­ly, pri­mal ver­sions of char­ac­ters like Super­man (the proof is at left; a scan of a fake gold­en age cov­er I did when I was about 12 or 13). And with the DC reboot com­ing, I thought I’d revis­it the orig­i­nal Super­man once again. The new image up top could’ve gone in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent direc­tions, but what I wound up hon­ing in on is a Shus­ter-esque ver­sion, posed more for­mal­ly. It’s been tak­en in the direc­tion of vin­tage poster art from an even ear­li­er era. Because that seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Just my salute to the gold­en age in gen­er­al, and the orig­i­nal Super­man in par­tic­u­lar. Thanks very much, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster!

UPDATE: I recent­ly dis­cov­ered online these neat Super­man pages, drawn by Stew­art Immo­nen some years back. Done in the style of Win­sor McCay’s “Lit­tle Nemo,” they’re not entire­ly unre­lat­ed to what I’m try­ing to do here with this poster. I thought these were real­ly neat, and worth shar­ing. It’s fun­ny how well Super­man works in a style like this!