Cliffhanger! Cinematic Superheroes of the Serials

CLIFFHANGER! CINEMATIC SUPERHEROES OF THE SERIALS: 1941–1952

by Christopher Irving

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ADVENTURES OF

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CLIFFHANGER! Cinematic Superheroes of the Serials 1941-1952

By Christopher Irving Writer/Editor And Richard Fowlks Designer/Asst. Editor

Written and Edited by Christopher Irving Front cover design by Michael Kronenberg Book design by Richard Fowlks Proofreading by Kevin Sharp

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com ISBN: 978-1-60549-119-6 First Printing, March 2023 Printed in China CLIFFHANGER! Cinematic Superheroes of the Serials, 1941-1952

©2023 Christopher Irving and TwoMorrows Publishing. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication, except for limited review use, may be reproduced in any manner without express permission. All quotes and image reproductions are © the respective owners, and are used here for historical presentation, journalistic commentary, and scholarly analysis.

Batman, Robin, Alfred, Joker, Shining Knight, Blackhawk, Military Comics, Superman, Hop Harrigan, Shazam, Spy Smasher, New Fun, All-American Comics, Congo Bill, The Vigilante, Real Fact Comics, Bulletman, Superman and the Mole Men, The Adventures of Superman, Lois Lane, Jor-El, Krypton, Clark Kent, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Batgirl, Dr. Occult, Watchmen, and all other DC Comics characters and logos are TM & © DC Entertainment.

Superman: The Movie and all logos are TM & © Warner Discovery. The Spirit and all related characters and logos are TM & © Will Eisner Estate. Funnyman and all related characters and logos are TM & © Siegel and Shuster heirs and all respective copyright holders. Captain America, The Avengers, Iron Man, and all other Marvel Comics characters and logos are TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Young Romance and all other characters and logos are TM & © the Estate of Joseph H. Simon and Estate of Jack Kirby. The Flying Irishman and all related logos are TM & © RKP Pictures LLC and/or any respective copyright holders. Flash Gordon, Ming the Merciless, Dale Arden, Secret Agent X-9, The Phantom, Jungle Jim, and all related characters and logos are TM & © King Features Syndicate. Dick Tracy and all other Tribune characters and logos are TM & © Tribune Content Agency. Buck Rogers and all related characters and logos are TM & © John F. Dille heirs and/or respective copyright owner. Doc Savage, The Shadow, and all related characters and logos are TM & © Street & Smith. Coca-Cola and all related logos are TM & © Coca-Cola Company. It Happened One Night, the Columbia title and all related logos are TM & © Columbia Pictures. The Mummy’s Hand, Dracula’s Daughter, and all other Universal characters and logos are TM & © Universal Pictures. Pep and all other logos are TM & © Kellogg’s.

Select stills from Republic Pictures’ serial productions Adventures of Captain Marvel, Captain America, Spy Smasher, and The Mysterious Dr. Satan courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

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Table of Contents

Introduction by Christopher Irving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 CHAPTER 1: When Mediums Converge! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 CHAPTER 2: The Adventures of Captain Marvel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 CHAPTER 3: Fleischer Superman Theatrical Cartoons . . . . . . . . . . 48 CHAPTER 4: Spy Smasher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 CHAPTER 5: Batman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 CHAPTER 6: Captain America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 CHAPTER 7: Hop Harrigan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 CHAPTER 8: Vigilante . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 CHAPTER 9: Superman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 CHAPTER 10: Congo Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 CHAPTER 11: Batman and Robin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 CHAPTER 12: King of the Congo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 CHAPTER 13: Blackhawk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 CHAPTER 14: TV Takes Over . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Select Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 3

Introduction

B

Batman, by Gray Morrow. Note his tendency to draw the mask similar to the serials’ version with area around the eyes.

Image scan courtesy of Marc Svensson.

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efore television took America’s kids by storm in the early ‘50s, the movie serials were chapter plays dispensed one at a time at the local movie theater, usually a series of twelve to fifteen that made a mega story. Each chapter, in a ploy to get kids to keep coming back, ended on a cliffhanger, where the hero or one of his (and it was almost always a “he,” though there are some fantastic exceptions like Nyoka) friends were about to meet inevitable death. The serials also, through the work of directors like Spencer Bennet, William Witney, and John English, perfected the action sequence in film. With low budgets, the best serials (particularly from the studio Republic) leaned on the best people to make them exceed their limitations–particularly the stunt performers.

They were not high art, not considered cinema. They still aren’t.

The worst of them were unwatchable, but the best of them made do with very little and were technical masterpieces of cinematography and action filmed on shoestring budgets and over a month packed with 16 hour days.

But they were all important, not just as cultural artifacts (to me, they are, created three decades before I was born), but also in charting the evolution of comic book adaptations and the superhero’s journey to film.

Like early comics, there’s a punk rock feeling to them, with the most valuable asset the talent of the actors and craftspeople making them. Both the juvenile serial and the superhero comic book erupted around the late 1930s, and both were crafted by talent mostly in their twenties. Those two parallels may be what made them such a natural fit.

Republic Studios was where it was at: they produced Captain Marvel, Lone Ranger, Spy Smasher, The Crimson Ghost (a skull faced villain in a robe), and a ton of Westerns. Republic had less money than most, but their head directors William Witney and John English had the benefit of the best stunt people in the business. They were tightly edited, better scored, and had the best fights. Heroes leapt across rooftops, swung across rooms, jumped down from ledges and staircases, and onto moving vehicles.

Anytime they wind up in a diner, tables and chairs get broken into splinters, and a parking garage or warehouse become the scene of a knock-’em out battle. Trains are still looked at as potential harbingers of death and scale models bring catastrophes and explosions to life.

Spy Smasher ran along the top of a moving train and swung down through the window to engage in fisticuffs with a Nazi spy, forcing him out the back door. When the fists stop flying, he bumps into his twin brother. Kane Richmond plays both and sells it: he was too high caliber an actor for B’s. He should’ve been a leading man.

Columbia’s fare was but a fraction of the quality, cranked out at an even lower budget than Republic’s, but that studio’s production resources made up for it. There are a couple exceptions, though: The Superman movie serials were given the production the Man of Steel deserved and, in reality, they couldn’t afford to make a poor serial.

But they did make poor serials, and those are in here, too, appreciated as pieces of high camp by today’s standards. Batman and Robin was vastly inferior, but it’s still important as a pop culture artifact in the superhero’s evolution to the big screen.

The serials were oddly ahead of their time, giving superheroes serialized storytelling before most of their own comic books did, and crafting the high-octane action and editing that runs through the DNA of the modern action movie.

But there’s enough in other sections for that thesis! Just be aware: this book focuses on those characters who originated in comic books, and with a nod to the comic strip forebears that paved the way.

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While thriving in the hearts and minds of kid audiences, the new comic book medium was exploding with its own proprietary genre of men and women in tights–the superhero. It’s no surprise, then, that the superhero made the leap to movie serial screens, the repercussions of which are still felt today.

Cliffhanger! started as my attempt to merge the history of both superhero comics and these early film versions in one handy volume aimed at those new to the grand old serial medium. I’ve plugged away at this for over fifteen years, shocked at how much has become available online since I started.

Harmon on his friendship with Kirk Alyn; Jay Dee Whitney for his encouragement and help in learning about his father William; the late, great Dick Donner; and especially James Bond movie producer Micheal G. Wilson for sharing time from a super-busy schedule to talk about his father, Lewis. Kenneth Marks and AnnaRose Einarsen were generous in helping me celebrate Gloria Dea. For serial histories, I leaned on the work of Leonard Maltin, Gary Grossman, Jack Mathis (his Valley of the Cliffhangers is vital!), Raymond Stedman’s excellent The Serials, and the rigorous work of the aforementioned Mr. Hulse. When it comes I’m on the tail end of Generation X and not of the generation to comics, I’ve been fortunate enough to have interviewed lucky enough to have grown up with serials upon their first many of the Golden Age creators when they were alive, and also release, or to excitedly scour prints of them or catch them went back to my dog-eared collection of comics history books regularly broadcast on TV in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The best I had and magazines. was finding a videotape reissue of the 1943 Batman or 1941 A huge shout out goes to Cindy Jackson of Virginia Captain Marvel serials. In those pre-Internet days, I still had to Commonwealth University’s Special Collections for all her do some digging, but it was nothing compared to that generation help and support over the years. Cindy passed away in the final of fans who kept the serials alive and passionately studied, editorial stages of this book and I wish so much that I could gift rewatched, and collected anything and everything about them. her with both a final copy and a large hug.

This book is intended as an introduction to the world of Finally, to all of my friends and loved ones who stuck with superhero serials and early film, yet I wrote it with a huge wink me through the years I worked on and off on this book: my to that first generation who crowded into small apartments family, Cat Mallicote and Grayson Irving, Shaun, Meagan, and arthouse theaters to watch these. One of those fans was Mom, Ely, Taylor, and Christina; friends Bill Murphy, Mike legendary comics artist Gray Morrow, who passed away in 2001.

Allred, Reilly Brown, Michael Clayton, Simon Fraser, Ken I never had the fortune to meet Gray directly; I wrote a tribute Hopson, Denis Kitchen, Brian McTamaney, Ken Quattro, Alex article to him for Comic Book Artist Ross, Glen Cadigan, Lawrence Lee, magazine and, in the process, got to Dalfonzo Williams, Jeff Baker; know Gray’s wife Pocho really well. colleagues Jason Bennett, Shanika Pocho gave me a box of Gray’s movie Chattar, TyRuben Ellingson, Nicholas serial collection, taped off television Frankel, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, over the years, and for a while I Oliver Speck, Kevin Hershberger, came home from work and watched Josh Tyree, Matt Wallin, and all my a chapter after a long day. students; my mentors (at one time or Without that stack of beloved another) Will Murray, Tom DeHaven, videotapes all those years ago, I the late Dr. Thomas Inge, and Trent wouldn’t have spent over a decade Nicholas; comics pals Mike Broder, plugging away at the book you’re Jon B. Cooke, Marv and Marsha about to dive into. I trust Gray is Humphrey, Marc Svennson for flying a rocket ship into a series of the Morrow art scans and years of next chapters loaded with ray guns, friendship, Tommy Donovan and villains, and kick-ass women.

Phillip Hillis of Richmond Comix.

This book is dedicated, with Many of the stills in this book love and respect, to both Gray and Gray Morrow, photographed in costume, in a self-made were donated by P.C. Hamerlinck of Pocho Morrow. the Fawcett Collectors of America composite shot. Morrow would sometimes “put” himself in and he saved me an immense amount Another huge thanks goes to as a character in photo stills. Courtesy Pocho Morrow. of time in providing them. historian Ed Hulse, a stellar historian A huge thanks goes to Adam of both the serials and and the folks who toiled to bring the Silverman for helping me get organized on the manuscript fantastic to life. Ed has not only been an amazing resource, but years ago. And kudos to John Morrow, my publisher, for taking an absolute gentleman in helping verify the difference between on this project. history and speculation. I am so fortunate to have had him as a My dear pal Rich Fowlks, designer extraordinaire, is the only resource and can not recommend his books, his journal Blood person I’d want to work on any book with, and he went above ‘N’ Thunder, or anything else through his Murania Press enough. and beyond on this one. I also have an immense thank you for His Facebook group, B Movies and Serials, has also been Michael Kronenberg’s expert and stunning front cover. You two nothing but supportive and I’d like to extend my hearty thanks to make me look good. everyone there. Historian Jerry Beck exuded absolute enthusiasm Brett Carreras of the VA Comicon has been there since I for this book from the get-go, and I look forward to finally revisited this project and always been an unflinching supporter, catching up with him again. pal, brother–and amazing godfather to my son, Grayson.

Over the years, I was lucky to get to interview and talk with Finally, I owe all of my love of pop culture to the support and historians and folks who were there or related to those who encouragement of my late father, Elliott Irving. I wouldn’t have were: the late Johnny Duncan was generous with his recollections written this book without him. of working on Batman and Robin; the late and great Jim Love to you all.

INT RO D U C T I ON

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B

y the 1930s, America’s cultural landscape–tempered and radically changed by the Great Depression–was redefined by its emerging popular culture and media. The newspaper comic strip, designed to tell a continuing story from day to day, was accessible to even the cash-strapped, and created a shared public experience. Radio was in its Golden Age, with the airwaves dominated by every variety of genre, from kiddie fare to crime thrillers.

Then, there was the movie serial. Once a medium that engaged adult audiences and both created and promoted in tandem with newspaper publishers, these shorts told a serialized singular story. Each chapter ended with a protagonist’s apparent or imminent demise—known as a cliffhanger—and engaged viewers to come back the next week to their local theater. The shorts eventually lost adult audiences to feature length films but, for a short while, silent movie serials were king.

Or, in the case of many of its lead heroines, queens.

Thomas Edison debuted a 12-reel serial What Happened to Mary in 1912, with the stories appearing concurrently in Ladies’ World magazine. The serial’s first major commercial success came with 1913’s The Adventures of Kathlyn. The first chapter debuted on December 29, 1913 and ran until July the next year.

The Adventures of Kathlyn followed a loyal daughter trying to save her retired Kentucky colonel father from an unscrupulous native chief. The whole point of the “cliffhanger” was to create a hook to get the audiences to come back the next week to see how the protagonist would escape certain death…oftentimes by literally hanging off of a cliff. When Colonel William N. Selig of the Selig Polyscope Company announced his plans to produce Kathlyn, William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire approached him about sponsoring the series and cross-promoting it through their Chicago newspapers. The Chicago Tribune swooped in and grabbed the contract from under Hearst and created a short-lived model for serial production: that of newspaper sponsorship that benefited from cross-promotion far stronger than word of mouth or a small ad. Kathlyn’s prose

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counterpart chapters garnered the Tribune approximately 50,000 new readers.

The Perils of Pauline became the first widely successful serial in 1914, thanks in part to the star’s death-defying stuntwork—and the sponsorship and backing of the Hearst papers. This silent film serial starred the first Serial Queen, actress Pearl White, and tagged along with the young heiress through twenty chapters of unprecedented big screen thrills.

The formula established itself quickly enough: the infamous cliffhanger became the end of a chapter, with the subsequent chapter picking up where the last left off, explaining the hero’s sudden escape from death (apparent or anticipated). Sometimes it turned out the hero was not really caught in that explosion (courtesy of a neverrevealed escape not shown in the cliffhanger’s end), or someone would stoop in at the last second in a very deus ex machina way to save them.

Pearl White Pearl White started acting with the French-owned Pathé films in 1910, and was the daughter of a Missouri farmer. She took to acting to support her family, and found herself making an astronomical $3,000 a week upon Pauline’s success. The profit didn’t just come from her salary (which was $250 a week); Pearl very cannily requested a small percentage of royalties from the films, which ultimately wound up making her an astronomical $10,000,000.

While profiting greatly from her serial work, White apparently frowned upon the movie serial itself. She was so put off by the format that she used to sneak into the Biograph film studio on 14th Street where it was filmed in New York, hoping to not be seen by passersby.

Due to her athletic performances in Pauline and several other actioners (including The Exploits of Elaine, immediately after Perils), age eventually required the use of a stand-in for the more

(left) Thomas Edison was also a pioneering innovator and producer of early film, with the goal of owning the film industry. (right) An illustrated poster for another installment of The Perils of Pauline.

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demanding stunts. During the filming of Plunders of Pauline on August 10, 1922, 38 year-old stuntman John Stevenson died while attempting a dangerous stunt before a crowd of onlookers and extras. An immediate rumor of White’s own demise spread like wildfire in a cliffhanger’s last minute, but was soon extinguished and overshadowed by the controversy over her use of a stunt double in the first place.

The stunt in question involved Pauline’s jumping from the top of an elevated bus, and grabbing a girder above. Stevenson was wearing a blonde wig and white dress when he missed the girder. The New York Times cover story from August 11 explains it best: The bus rumbled under the [elevated structure], where the conductor usually calls out to those on top, “Low bridge, hold your seats.” Once under the big steel framework the blond-haired figure in the front seat poised for the leap which was calculated to provide the thrill and jumped, hands outstretched to grip the overhanging girder…

In the twinkling of an eye he was flung forward in the wake of the bus, probably after missing his hold in dust collected on the bar. The crowd heard one frightened cry – that of a man. The wig was wafted to the ground, and a second later the body of the supposed Pearl White was lying prone on the pavement, about twenty feet away from the elevated. The momentum of the swing apparently had carried him far beyond his objective, adding greater weight to the fall.

Had he dropped in a straight line from the structure he would only have fallen about twenty-two to twenty-five feet.

Stevenson landed on his head and suffered a cerebral concussion and skull fracture. Pathé denied the accident, and held true that White did all of her stunts, despite the presence of Stevenson’s crushed body, taken into a nearby apothecary shop before being carted off to die in a hospital.

One death-defying stunt was performed by an amateur, and it led to him becoming a staple of the movie serials.

Spencer Gordon Bennet was about 19 when he answered an ad for the Edison company for someone to double for an actor and make a 62-foot jump from a cliff and into water below at a rate of a dollar a foot.

After the first take failed, Bennet performed it again and earned twice as much.

Bennet was born on January 5, 1893 in Brooklyn.

His father was Canadian and, in 1910, Spencer moved across the border for two years. He returned in time to work in the new serials.

Spencer continued to perform stunt work in the serials, landing at Pathe, and working in the second half of The Perils of Pauline. He continued to work, eventually connecting with groundbreaking serial director George B. Seitz.

Pearl White, one of the earliest “movie stars,”endorsing Coca-Cola.

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A lobby card from the legendary silent serial, The Green Archer, directed by the equally legendary Spencer Bennet.

Chasing Shadows One stunt in 1916’s The Shielding Shadow involved a fiery set and resulted in Bennet receiving serious burns. Bennet, playing a sailor, wore an asbestos garment under his costume drenched with inflammable liquid. The suit inadvertently acted like a wick and sent flames upwards on Spencer—and towards his head. He spent half a year at a hospital in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

“We lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Spencer would come over to visit after work, all skinned and beat up,” Bennet’s nephew, famed cinematographer Linwood Dunn, recalled. “Once he came over with his face totally covered in bandages, with just holes for his nose and eyes; he’d been running through a burning ship and had gotten burned. The family was positive he was going to be horribly scarred; my mother, Spencer’s older sister, cried and cried over it. But he healed without a mark.”

Oddly enough, the heavy make-up used on film actors at the time kept Bennet’s face safe.

Spencer left to serve in the AEF during World War I; from an article by George Geltzer: He trained at Camp Gordon, Georgia, as a dispatch rider and part of the training was to ride a motorcycle through sand traps and artificial shell holes, and over plank bridges eight inches wide, at 60 mph. In France his tides were more hazardous.

For a while Bennet served in a brigade headquarters unit with the AEF’s most famous soldier—Sgt. Alvin C. York. After the Armistice, Bennet made a grand tour of southern Europe as chauffeur for Brig. General Julian R. Lindsay.

Upon his return from Europe, he went back to his life of stuntwork and film production. It wasn’t long until Spencer took

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up second unit directing and, with the serial The Sky Ranger, a brief acting stint.

Seitz’s production company washed up and the screenwriter was soon back at Pathe. He then left Pathe for Paramount, leaving a job open at his old studio. Serial writer Frank Leon Smith advocated to Pathe’s higher-ups for Bennet to become the director on 1925’s Play Ball: “Bennet has served his apprenticeship in more than 20 of your biggest serial productions. He knows every detail of the business and he’ll be one of the finest directors you’ve ever had.”

After Play Ball, Bennet directed the wildly successful murder-mystery serial The Green Archer. His strengths as a director were that he could visualize a scene well enough in advance to shoot it for the editing room. There was an economy to his work that kept budgets manageable and also saved time in post-production. He knew how to stage a fight from his earlier days and understood making films beyond what happened between “Action!” and “Cut!” “Spencer was a wonderful director,” Dunn, who learned under Spencer, recalled. “I learned so much from him. His crews loved him and that tells you a lot. I mean, I’ve worked on shows where the director is a bastard and everybody is at everybody else’s throat. But if Spencer had an actor who wasn’t up for it, he wouldn’t say anything to him or embarrass him, he’d simply move to another scene and the next day there’d be another actor.

“Spencer did more trick shots in the camera than I did outside the camera. He could get more over by cutting than anybody else could by showing it.”

Pathe stopped making serials in 1929 and Bennet went on to direct B-movies and Westerns, noted for his ability to manage a budget and stretch a production dollar.

But the movie serial was far from done with him.

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Port of Carl When Carl Laemmle came to America from Germany at age 17 in 1884, he was a poor immigrant whose dreams merely stopped at owning a chain of five and dime stores. On February 24, 1906 Laemmle bought his first store, The White Front, in Chicago.

On Saturday nights he started showing fifteen minutes of the short, silent movies, as well as a song accompanied with color slides. Before Laemmle knew it, he was showing about twenty shows a day on Sundays. At five cents a head admission, he grossed an average of $192.05 in an average weekend (about $5,796 by 2021 standards).

Expanding to buy more nickelodeon theaters, he soon went into the film distributing business with his Independent Motion Picture concern. The nickname given within the trade was the unfavorable acronym of “IMP.” In 1911, Laemmle’s first films shot in Hollywood were on a makeshift outdoor stage roofed over with muslin across a wire frame. The hodge-podge studio was soon upgraded when Laemmle merged IMP with a few other corporations. The combined Universal bought 265 acres on the outskirts of Hollywood. With 300 actors and laborers soon living on the land, Laemmle was able to get it deemed a township, and he christened his town Universal City in 1915.

Their first successful serial was 1914’s Lucille Love: Girl of Mystery, which was made for $30,000 and netted $1,500,000.

It involves the innocent Lucille trying to clear her boyfriend of espionage charges, brought about by her villainous Uncle Hugo, himself an international spy. The film, which began as a two-reeler Western picture, was expanded to a fifteen-chapter serial that brought the characters from the Philippines to (of all things) an underground kingdom. Universal was savvy enough to jump on early in the game, and kept the cameras rolling on the serial format.

Movie serial conditions 100 years ago were far from ideal, often with actors taking the risks stunt performers would later do for them: One example is from the 1918 Universal serial The Lion’s Claw, where actress Marie Walcamp’s back was torn up when a lion sprung on her.

She held herself up and, bloodied, asked the crew “Did you get it?”

The serials continued to thrive as a medium and attracted unlikely celebrities for its short chapters: Henry Houdini starred in 1919’s fifteen-chapter The Master Mystery by Octagon Films, and boxer Jack Dempsey in 1920 with Pathé’s Bennet-directed Daredevil Jack. The tendency to cast athletes and celebrities remained in practice by the 1930s, when both Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe and lion tamer Clyde Beatty were cast in landmark talkie serials.

But, with the birth of the feature length film and advent of the sound “talkies” in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, the serial format itself was grasping on for dear life. The “double feature” exhibition of talkie films that were more mature than the silent exploits of Pearl White offered more sophisticated fare for adults. Kids, in the meantime, didn’t want to endure adult films, and adults outgrew the serialized format as movies matured.

(top) Universal’s own Carl Laemmle, the movie mogul whose whose studio would make an indelible mark on the movie serial. (bottom) Harry Houdini proved he could escape convoluted plot twists in his own movie serials, starting with The Master Mystery.

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Q the Automaton tops this trio of stills from Houdini’s serial career.

The exodus of kids from movie theaters led director Henry McRae to create the first all-talking serial aimed at a juvenile audience with 1930’s The Indians are Coming. Indians proved worth about $20,000 to the industry and gave the serial format a new lease on life with a younger audience.

Can You Hear Me Now? The transition from silent to talkie increased production costs up up to 50 percent: an average 1936 serial budget weighed in at about $165,000 to $250,000. The juvenile serial tapped into an enormous demographic hungry for their own movies, and the format helped establish a regular audience of viewers, even if they were getting in with their weekly allowance.

Because of their now-juvenile slant, a strict code emerged for the serials by 1936: heroes could never utter the curse word “darn,” smoke, lie, or murder. Nor could the hero seek flat-out revenge on the villain, and must always bring them to justice. The best description comes from Jim Harmon and Don Glut—two men who grew up with the serials—in their seminal book The Serials: Their Sound and Fury: A hero could not take the law into his own hands in most cases. When caught in time, such characters were changed in the scripts to official secret agents before being granted approval by the censorship board. Heroes should not drink or smoke... Bullets could not be shown striking a man’s body; the gun and the human target had to ·be separated by cuts from one camera angle to another. (This meaningless cop-out devised by some bureaucratic mind was also later applied to comic books, where the gun and the victim had to be in separate panels.) The same rule held true for a man being struck with a club; the swing of the gun butt or blackjack had to be shown from one angle, the victim falling from another.

Another rule of the censoring body spelled out that the hero could kill more villains than the crooks could kill good guys, but the hero had to accomplish the slaughter through the use of fewer bullets. (Remember: the only crime is inefficiency.)

The censors were squeamish about the details of how murder was done being shown. Care had to be taken so as not to show the youthful audience how to actually do away with their parents (or maybe even the censors). For example, you could show a close-up of a fuse sizzling toward a dynamite keg set to blow some good guy to Kingdom Come; but you could not show a close-up of the match lighting the fuse. H kids ever found out how to strike a match, the Establishment seemed to feel it was in big trouble.

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The Future Looks Bright

(top) Buck Rogers survives on future Earth in this strip by Phillip Nowlan and Dick Calkin’s May 6, 1929 installment. (bottom) Amazing Stories from August, 1928, where Anthony Rogers debuted and began his ascent to pop stardom.

Science fiction also exploded as a genre in the 1920s and ‘30s. It developed with the industrialization of the world in the 19th century, through the work of novelists Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Jules Verne (Voyage to the Center of the Earth and Around the World In Eighty Days), and H. G. Wells (War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man). But it wasn’t the novel that parented its development: it was the less sophisticated pulp magazine. The pulps were magazines that first came out in 1896 with Argosy magazine and were stuffed with often hacked-out content, named so due to the cheap quality of the paper they were printed on.

Because of their more disposable nature, they were also adopted by the younger audience and were in many ways the predecessors of the comic book.

In 1926, pulp magazine Amazing Stories premiered and was dedicated to the new genre of scienti-fiction. The August, 1928 issue featured “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” by Phillip Francis Nowlan, a cover story that featured the exploits of 20th century man Anthony Rogers. After succumbing to a freak coal mine gas-induced coma, Rogers awakens 500 years later in the middle of a future war.

“Armageddon” caught the eye of National Newspaper Syndicate head John F. Dille, who hired Nowlan to turn the story into the first science fiction comic strip. Buck Rogers, written by Nowlan and drawn by artist Dick Calkins, premiered on January 7, 1929.

But as successful as Buck Rogers may have been, it was soon eclipsed by the new kid on the Sunday page: Flash Gordon.

Exactly twenty years after The Perils of Pauline thrilled post-Victorian audiences, the kids of the Great Depression thrilled to the exploits of the dashing Gordon, whose color Sunday comic strip premiered on January 7, 1934. Written in a far-fetched manner by Don Moore, artist Alex Raymond’s beautifully delineated artwork grounded the strip, making it an aesthetically pleasing vision of an ideal hero in a romantic alien world.

Flash Forward Flash Gordon was a world famous polo player who, upon saving fellow passenger Dale Arden from their meteor-stricken aircraft, goes straight from the frying pan and into the fire as they land at the rocket launch site of Dr. Hans Zarkoff. It seems that the alien planet, Mongo, is on a collision course with Earth and it’s up to the trio of brains, beauty, and brawn

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to defeat Mongo’s ruler – the Fu Manchu-ish Ming the Merciless and his Flash Gordon’s January 7, 1934 debut strip by Don Moore and army of soldiers and monsters.

Alex Raymond. This original sold at $480,000 in 2020.

Flash Gordon may not have been as well written as Buck Rogers, but its success obviously lay in the superiority of Raymond’s draftsmanship over that of Calkins. Conversely, the “and then...” plots of Gordon couldn’t compare to the intentionally hilarious melodrama of Rogers. Where Calkins’ figures were more “cartoony” in appearance, Raymond’s men all stood powerfully, feet planted four feet apart with panther-like muscles rippling, and his women were all voluptuous figures often draped around the necks of their male counterparts. Both may have contained pulp-ish stories, but Flash Gordon looked more like a pulp transferred from a kid’s head and onto the comics page than Buck Rogers.

“Poverty Row” applied to the smaller studios who produced B films and were mostly located along Gower Street in Hollywood. Ned Levine, head of Mascot Pictures,created the juvenile movie serial with the first serial with partial sound, King of the Kongo, in 1929. The next year, Universal’s The Indians are Coming came out and cemented the popularity of the genre.

But Mascot remained the top serial studio with a roster of star cowboys like Johnny Mack Brown, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix. Levine rented out the old studios of producer Mack Sennett and established a headquarters for his expert crew of directors, stuntmen, and special effects.

Mascot latched onto science fiction for the 1935 serial The Phantom Empire. Chances are they weren’t entirely convinced that science fiction alone would sell tickets, so they produced a twelve-chapter serial that was a hybrid between sci-fi and Western. Featuring singing cowboy Gene Autry in his first starring role, Phantom Empire followed the adventures of Gene and his kid pals Frankie and Betsy, as they contended with either radium-hungry Professor Beetson (played by Frank Glendon, complete with a sinister goatee and pith helmet) or the mysterious

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Mascot founder Mack Sennett.

underground empire of Murania with its horse-riding army of Thunder Riders. In the first chapter alone, both Beetson and Queen Tika of Murania come to the mutual conclusion that they need to keep Gene Autry away from doing his successful 2:00 radio program, so that he’ll lose the contract and the ranch will be forced to shut down. Phantom Empire unapologetically mashes sci-fi and Western elements together to create an absurd and surprisingly addictive viewing experience.

The underground world of The Phantom Empire stands on par as a smaller version of the silent masterpiece Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 German Expressionist science fiction tour-de-force. Flash Gordon’s influence is deathly apparent in the sci-fi settings of Murania; soldiers wear Roman-styled armor and helmets like the soldiers of Mongo, while even Queen Tika takes a fashion note from Ming the Merciless, wearing lacy versions of his tweaked-out robes. What Tika (played by Dorothy Christy) lacks, however, is the charisma of Raymond’s comic strip world.

“Gene Autry must die!” according to the baddies in The Phantom Empire.

Back in a Flash Flash Gordon wouldn’t wait long. Ignited by the success of their first comic strip adaptation, Tailspin Tommy, Universal procured the rights to produce a serial based upon Flash Gordon for $10,000 and then spent an exorbitant $350,000 on the serial’s budget. Head of serials Henry MacRae got it as part of an optioning blitz of King Features strips, Serials were generally budgeted at $18,000 to $37,000 for all chapters, while Flash’s budget was more on par with a feature’s average $375,000 budget.

At that point, Universal had not only produced the seminal war film All Quiet on the Western Front, but also (through general manager, Carl Laemmle, Jr) launched their iconic line of horror movies, including Dracula with Bela Lugosi, and The Mummy and Frankenstein with Boris Karloff. The monster films came in handy for saving on Flash Gordon’s relatively large budget: many of the sets had been earlier used in The Mummy and The Bride of Frankenstein, while the musical score was also lifted from the horror films.

Flash himself was personified in Olympic swimmer-turned-actor Larry “Buster” Crabbe.

Growing up in Hawaii, Crabbe was a high school athlete who mostly excelled in swimming. Crabbe placed fourth in the 1928 New Amsterdam Olympics, and then won the gold medal in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics for the 400-meter freestyle, breaking the record set by Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller. Before that, Crabbe set 16 world and American swimming records, winning 35 national championships in the process.

Crabbe was not only Weissmuller’s successor in swimming, but in playing Tarzan, when

Buster Crabbe and Jean Rogers as Flash and Dale from the blockbuster Flash Gordon serial.

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The Universal Pictures title card from 1927-1936. he was cast in 1933’s serial Tarzan the Fearless for Principal Pictures. From there on, Crabbe was a Paramount man, starring in ten Westerns based on the work of author Zane Grey from 1933 to 1937. Universal very wisely borrowed Crabbe for the Flash Gordon serial and the role elevated him to becoming the first King of the Movie Serials. He played Flash with a sincerity and authority that, despite his lack of fine acting skills, furthered the serial’s own verisimilitude.

“An actor of the serious tradition might have betrayed his lack of belief in the part,” Raymond Stedman wrote in The Serials, “but nothing in Crabbe’s manner or voice could be interpreted as a message to the audience that the whole thing was nonsense.”

Charles Middleton’s Ming the Merciless set a precedent for the science fiction villain. He oozed sinister as the cold-blooded villain who never managed to off Flash and his friends, as his flair for dramatic death traps ironically wound up hampering his chances for success. Middleton was born on October 7, 1879 in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, just a bit more than a decade past the end of the Civil War. His father raised thoroughbreds and, since Charles grew up handling them, he eventually became a professional rodeo rider. While riding at the St. Louis Exposition, he met his wife Leora Spillmeyer.

Charles’ stage acting led into his first film role in 1920’s silent serial The $1,000,000,000 Reward. He continued to work in both stage and film, landing his first talkie role in The Bellamy Trial in 1928. Movie serials snagged him in the type of roles he’d become best known for: the villainous mastermind, as seen in legendary screen cowboy Tom Mix’s final serial, The Miracle Rider in 1935.

Rounding out the cast of Flash was the stunning Jean Rogers as a blonde Dale Arden (they dyed her hair brown in the sequel to more closely resemble her comic strip counterpart), and Frank Shannon as the fatherly and wise Dr. Hans Zarkov.

Flash Gordon opens with natural disasters that take Flash, Dale, and Zarkov in the scientist’s rocket to the planet Mongo to keep it from colliding with the Earth, which feels the destructive effects of the hurtling planet through the use of stock footage.

After their ship lands, they barely escape from being eaten by giant lizards, and find themselves captives of Ming the Merciless, ruler of Mongo. The model ships were awkward and jerky in their flight (courtesy of the strings they hung from) and the oversized lizards were tiny reptiles filmed in close-up. The lasers were scratched into the film, and the costumes were garish and skimpy by pre-Code standards, but it nailed the aesthetic of Raymond’s designs. Crabbe’s powerful physique, and the scantily clad costumes worn by the women, replicated the romance of the strip—even if the serials were completely absurd.

The Flash Gordon strip pushed comic strips into new worlds that were unprecedented on the Sunday comics page and was an enormous commercial success for Universal, apparently earning the studio more money in 1937 than any production save one (Three Smart Girls, starring Deanna Durbin). Most importantly, Flash further cemented the fantastic comic strip world as possible and profitable fodder for kiddie audiences.

Charles Middleton oozed evil as Ming the Merciless.

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Smoke, Screen It started with a tobacco poster tacked to a wall, letters emblazoned with the slogan “If you’re not smoking Sloan’s blow the smoke the other way.” It was 1893.

Thirteen year-old Herbert John Yates was determined he could do better, Yates went straight to the company’s head, D.H. McAlpin.

“McAlpin was a man in a spotted vest who had an unerring aim at a spittoon,” Yates recalled in 1940. “When I came in he said ‘Son, anybody that works for me has to chew Virgin Leaf.

Here are five packs and come back Monday.’ So I came back on Monday with a cut not just on one side, but on both sides. Been chewing it ever since.”

Yates rose through the ranks to become assistant vice president of sales for Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company, retiring after twenty years in the company, at age 35.

Apparently not content with retirement, he invested in some film processing companies and merged them into Consolidated Film Industries in 1915 during the explosion of silent films.

At Consolidated, independent studios could develop their film stock on credit, a godsend for many companies that only received their profits on the back end and couldn’t afford to buy film stock through Eastman Kodak’s cashand-carry policy. Many of the companies that employed him were on “Poverty Row,” the label slapped on the underdog studios that hastily churned out low budget flicks and skated by the skin of their teeth.

Yates was bald and with a wide forehead, smiling with a large grin for publicity photos, in contrast to how he carried business dealings. As history shows, he was a shrewd businessman whose philosophy included “never underestimate the power of good, old-fashioned intimidation.”

By 1934 he developed an idea to merge six Poverty Row studios together into one more efficient (and smallerstaffed) company. He went after Monogram, Liberty, Majestic, Chesterfield, Invincible, and Mascot, but only got Liberty, Monogram, and Majestic on board. Yates coined the new company Republic Pictures, and was able to get ahold of the reluctant Mascot Pictures shortly after. From Mascot, Republic gained the movie serial department from founder Ned Levine, who came on as the head of production and would not stay long before resigning and moving to MGM. On March 12, 1939, Yates officially bought the old Mack Sennett studio for $500,000.

Mascot, known for their Westerns, also brought real-life cowboy and stuntman Yakima Canutt with the merger.

Born in 1896, Enos Edward “Yakima” Canutt mastered the rodeo circuit while in his twenties and won the “World’s All-Around Cowboy’’ in 1917, 1919, 1920, and 1923 (he was serving on a World War I minesweeper in 1918). “Yak” moved in front of the cameras as an actor for independent studios; what he lacked in acting ability and appeal, he made up for with his sheer physical prowess through forty-eight silent films. He also suffered vocal cord damage from his time in the service that affected his voice and his acting ability for sound Westerns.

Canutt doubled for several cowboy stars—especially John Wayne—and became known for devising fight scenes and coordinating stunts. When director John Ford cast Wayne as the Ringo Kid in his now-classic 1938 Western Stagecoach by

United Artists, Wayne recommended Yak for stuntwork. One of the many results was the iconic scene of an Indian, felled by Ringo Kid’s bullet—in actuality Yakima Cannutt, hanging by the stirrup and dragged behind the horse. His greatest stunt revolved around the stagecoach itself: dressed as an Indian, he jumps from horse to the two front horses of the moving stagecoach, then drops down and is carried on the bottom, before letting go and letting it pass over him. Then, dressed as Wayne, he jumps from the coach and works his way up to the lead horses.

“I had it pretty well figured out how I could do it without getting hurt,” Canutt said. “I wanted to see how fast I could drag on my back without rolling. If I rolled either way, of course, I was dead. So I rigged up a drag on the back of an automobile and found that by relaxing my legs I could get up to fifty miles an hour without rolling. The horses couldn’t run that fast.”

He also devised fight scene choreography more convincingly than had been established: by positioning the camera at an angle and facing one of the two fighters, it looked more convincing for a flying fist to smash into a jaw and blocked the gap to the camera.

The movie serial, by nature of format, created a regular movie event for theater owners and kids. If the serials were engaging enough, those same seats would be warmed by the same bunch of kids from weekend to weekend.

(top left) H. J. Yates, (bottom) the Republic title card, and his top stuntman: (top right) Yakima Canutt.

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“Movie serials were really important to the kids of the ‘40s,” historian Jim Harmon reminisced. “We would just live from Saturday to Saturday to see the serial, and we’d try to imagine how they’d come out. It was pretty obvious that the hero would jump out before going over the cliff. We’d wait anxiously for a new serial. My impression, as a kid, is that serials went on too long.

They were fifteen chapters, which amounts to almost four months, so after about two months, it would start to get tiresome and you’d wait for the new serial. Where I was at, they’d always show the last chapter of the old serial, and then the first chapter of a new one.

“In big cities, I’ve heard that they’d have two features and sometimes show as many as three serials. Where I was at, they showed one feature, which was always a cowboy movie with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or Johnny Mack Brown and then one chapter of the serial, and some cartoons and a comedy like The Three Stooges or Edgar Kennedy.”

Republic Pictures debuted their first serial, Darkest Africa, in 1936. Much like the Dempsey and Houdini serials, it starred a non-actor – lion tamer Clyde Beatty – as he fought a lost civilization of Batmen in Africa. The studio’s special effects guru Howard Lydecker devised the gliding Batmen through use of lightweight mannequins set on a wire and pulley system.

Hard-Nosed Dick Republic licensed Chester Gould’s iconic plainclothes cop Dick Tracy for the silver screen in their fifth movie serial. At the tail end of an article announcing Republic’s slate of 1937 films, (including 30 feature films, 24 Westerns, and four serials), the Dick Tracy “chapter drama” was then entitled Spider Ring featuring Dick Tracy.

Dick Tracy was not the second comic strip adaptation: Universal’s Tailspin Tommy, based on an aviation comic strip

by Glenn Chaffin and Hal Forrest, was the first in 1934. But the style in which Dick Tracy was made helped set the tone for the comic book-based serial.

Premiering in the October 4, 1931 funny pages of The Detroit Tribune, Dick Tracy was the brainchild of cartoonist Gould, and was mid-wifed by Chicago Tribune Syndicate editor Captain Joseph Patterson. Gould had originally wanted his violent crime strip dubbed “Plainclothes Tracy,” but Patterson pulled rank and imposed the pun-nish “Dick” on the lantern-jawed crime-fighter. When Tracy’s fiancé Tess Trueheart’s father is murdered, and she is kidnapped (and apparently victimized) by mobsters, Tracy unflinchingly pursues them, rescues Tess, and dispenses his own brand of violent justice. Becoming a member of the police department, Tracy continues to fight crime in his dark and violent world.

The Oklahoma-born Gould left his rural upbringing to make it as a cartoonist in Chicago. He arrived on September 1, 1921 with $50 in his pocket and a determination to make it big. A decade later, he submitted the prototypical “Plainclothes Tracy” to Patterson, and the rest is history.

“Like all things new, it took a couple of months to catch on,” Gould said. “Then it grew like wildfire…However, from the very beginning I would receive letters saying what a ‘horrible’ strip I was doing.”

The success of Dick Tracy lies in his relevance to the Great Depression: his brutal sense of justice fit right in with the lawlessness of the time, where organized crime’s foothold in American society became firmly entrenched as far back as the start of Prohibition in 1920. Dick Tracy didn’t exist in an idealized hypothetical America: the darkness of his real world (yet stylized surroundings with deep blacks and angular shadows) was further reflected in his Rogues’ Gallery of freaks.

The handsome (above middle) Ralph Byrd was perfectly cast as Dick Tracy, seen (above right) in Chester Gould’s November 20, 1931 daily strip.

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Apparently faced with hundreds of hopeful actors auditioning for the role of Tracy, Republic selected the tall, striking, and athletic Ralph Byrd. Byrd, a fourletter high school athlete, actor, and former Boy Scout District Commissioner (as a Scout, he’d earned up to 37 badges) rounded off with acting chops, would find himself living the rest of his life around the fateful role.

Born in Dayton, Ohio on April 22, 1919, Byrd’s stint as a soloist in the Dayton church choir brought him to working in radio and to his first stock company job with the local Albright Players. Following that up with a band-singing career, he landed in Hollywood in 1934, where he was promptly discovered by a scout.

The Dick Tracy serial was not quite as gruesome as the comic strip, due to censorship regulations. These regulations forbid showing bullets going into or through bodies, heroes couldn’t smoke or drink, and people could not be directly shown getting shot (both the shooter and the victim would have to be filmed in separate shots). Fortunately for Tracy, though, the hero could kill more villains than the villains could kill good guys but only through the use of fewer bullets (the reason serial heroes are such darn good shots).

Dick Tracy premiered in theaters on February 20, 1937, and was directed by Alan James and Ray Taylor. The Film Editor on Dick Tracy was Bill Witney, (later known as William Witney) who would arguably become the inventor of the modern action movie.

“Every time I talked to William Witney, film Witney,” the late historian Jim editor on Dick Tracy, Harmon said, “he talked about being ashamed of making would pioneer action serials. For years, he didn’t in the sound serial. take any pride in them, and then he found out that people were interested in them. At the time, he wasn’t interested in serials because he’d wanted to do films. It was a secondary position to be an actor or director in one.

They liked to be paid, and it was a job, but I don’t think anyone took a lot of pride in working in serials.”

William Witney’s first exposure to the movie set was in 1933, when he visited his sister in Hollywood. Her husband, Bert Clark, was a director at Mascot Pictures and cast William as an extra in screen cowboy Johnny Mack Brown’s Fighting with Kit Carson serial. He quickly became a messenger boy at Mascot, and stuck around through the birth of Republic. Witney graduated to film editor and then script supervisor, a position that led to his directorial debut on the ill-fated 1937 production, The Painted Stallion.

The serial required the cast and crew to travel out to Utah, which at the start of shooting was hip-deep in snow. On top of any climate difficulties, the director Ray Taylor’s alcoholism got the better of him, and he was sent home. Witney, then only a 21 year-old script

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The Painted Stallion’s troubled production proved an opportunity for William Witney, marking his directorial debut. supervisor, was saddled with the directing chores. After successfully wrapping the serial, Witney was offered a director’s contract with Republic: “The contracts in those days were a little one-sided in favor of the studio,” he said. “They were for seven years. The law said that more than that was slavery. They had six-month options and were for twenty out of twenty-six weeks, which meant that they could lay you off for six weeks without pay in any twenty-six week period.”

His contract paid $75 a week, $30 more than his pay as a film editor.

The mid-‘30s also marked the arrival of serial director John English, who was often teamed with Witney. Pictures of English show a tall, dark haired man with a neatly trimmed mustache wearing suits that loosely hung on his thin frame. According to Witney, “I don’t think he weighed 120 carrying a suitcase full of lead.”

Born June 25, 1903 in Cumberland, England, English moved to Canada when young, and found his way down to the United States.

He had worked as a film cutter at MGM and, not seeing a chance to advance there, struck out and worked with a few Poverty Row studios as director. English first teamed up with Witney on 1937’s Zorro Rides Again, a modern-day Zorro tale starring John Carroll (a fine actor who’d just been unwillingly released from his RKO contract, apparently due to his innate arrogance).

The two directors, the more rough-hewn Witney and the seemingly delicate and reserved English, became a dynamic directing team with the two of them alternating days on the shooting schedule. While Witney would shoot one day, English would prepare for the next when he would have a turn at the camera. It usually worked out that Witney would handle the action scenes, while English the scenes with dialogue.

“Witney was dynamic,” actress Louise Currie said. “Always gesturing. Acting scenes out with body movements. English was the opposite. Quietly authoritative, he would guide us to the effect that he wanted. Their styles complemented each other.”

“He never had to ask the script girl what scene was to be shot next—” Clayton Moore, who started in serials before eventually

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being cast as the Lone Ranger, wrote in his memoir. “He was sharp, organized, knew the script like the back of his hand. Bill always knew exactly where the camera should be set up and how the scene should be played.”

With a less-than-modest budget and phone-book sized script, serials were shot at a breakneck pace, about four weeks for a five-hour serial.

“The script was our bible,” stuntman Davy Sharpe said. “It allowed us to be totally prepared and shoot fast on location with a minimum of wasted time.”

Bloody Knuckles Witney, meanwhile, came to a conclusion about directing fight scenes – the typical fight scene direction involved having the actors literally duke out the choreographed fight while the camera rolled. The results were sometimes a sloppily choreographed skirmish that didn’t fool anyone and left the actors exhausted. If someone flubbed the fight while the camera was rolling, it could (if the director was motivated) lead to reshoots— which cost money from the already nonexistent budget.

A trip to the Warner lot, to have lunch with a friend, apparently led to Witney’s new approach towards directing onscreen skirmishes.

Famed musical director Busby Berkeley was rehearsing a dance number with about forty dancing girls; in between rehearsals and make-up touch ups, he would call individual dancers over to the camera and have them do a specific dance step. At the end of collecting these close-ups, they ran through the entire dance number, with the camera rolling.

Witney hung around and watched the rehearsal and filming the rest of the day.

His conclusion: like Berkeley, the sequence would come out of the editing bay just as much as the soundstage.

“I thought we should use the same technique on our fights,” Witney wrote. “On the next picture we started to choreograph

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our own fights. Each cut might be only fifteen seconds: a punch, cut, a fall over a chair, cut, a charge into someone and over a desk, cut. Each time you saw ‘cut’ in the lines above represents a close-up of one of the leads.

“The stunt people caught on fast. It made their work easier.

A fall over a table could be done with precision and without the chance of being off balance as they hit the table. A fall off a balcony could be done safer because when they fell they knew their takeoff point was exactly where it should be, and after the fall there was no scramble to get up and continue the fight” Witney’s approach included extreme close-ups of fists hitting faces, with the actors moving in slow motion while the camera recorded at “normal” speed, using about sixteen frames per second rather than the usual twenty-four. Because of these innovations, Witney has been considered the father of the action film, something made possible through his experience as a film editor.

“Film editors are a director’s best friend…” Witney said in his memoir. “They can cover your mistakes. They sometimes see things in a scene that have escaped you in the heat of battle. They have a way of building a scene with various cuts or taking a weak scene and, with a snip here and there with a pair of sharp scissors, can speed up a dull scene or make a chase more exciting.”

Stunts were the serial’s cinematic language at Republic. Many serial stars were cast according to which stuntman would be on board. The measurements of stuntmen like Dale van Sickel, Davey Sharpe, and Tom Steele were posted in Republic’s casting office for when it came time to cast leads.

Sets were rigged accordingly: breakable glass was made of sugar, furniture made from yucca wood (but still packing a helluva punch at the right angle); hats were attached to heads with elastic bands (note how men in serials rarely remove their hats inside: it was to make the substitution of a stuntman easier); and padding was worn on elbows and knees.

After establishing a set with the art department and then with breakable furniture for the fights, William Witney approached his stunt coordinator with a basic direction for the key fights (called donnybrooks) and a copy of the script. Witney then broke the fight down for filming, so that stuntmen could perform isolated movements without the exhaustion of a traditional fight direction— where they were let loose and filmed by the director.

Republic did not own its own chain of theaters like the majors did, so Yates targeted smaller independent theaters in rural and middle-class neighborhoods. These theaters needed more movies to keep up with the release schedule and Republic’s short features and low budget audience-pleasers were designed to easily turn a profit and fill a niche.

“We have no theaters to take our products when they are bad,” Yates observed in 1940. “We have to make good pictures because the picture houses will turn them down if they are not worth-while entertainment. We have never made a propaganda picture nor fought the Nazi battles. We don’t believe that is entertainment.”

Republic reported a gross of two and a half million dollars for their first year. They were a B movie studio, producing low budget films at a breakneck pace that were profitable for exhibitors and the studio. Republic itself, in a 1938 merchandising section in the Hollywood Daily Reporter, stated “The barometer of its bank balance is truly the box office.”

Despite the thriftiness of Yates’s philosophy, Republic did not skimp on camera equipment, sound design, orchestral music, or overall polish. They also had talent who elevated even the juvenile fare of the movie serials into something exceptional.

ACTION speaks louder than WORDS! Every exhibitor knows that a serial depends on its red-blooded action rather than on a barrage of ‘talk-talk.’ That is why the serial has endured since the inception of the industry, and no doubt it will outlast any other type of motion picture composition. In fact, serials became more popular year by year with audiences.

Serials must have a staff which is temperamentally suited to this action type product. THe personnel must live, breath and love their work, and they firmly believe that every serial is equally as important to audiences as Gone with the Wind.

The outstanding success of Republic serials has been largely due to the organization of our incomparable technical staff, who apply themselves diligently and conscientiously to a job that they enjoy. Here’s to Action Product! REPUBLIC STUDIOS. —Republic exhibitor production guide, 1942

District of Columbia Republic’s biggest serial rival was Columbia Pictures, whose serial division was started in 1937 by producer Jack Fier, formerly of Republic. Fier started out as Nat Levine’s right-hand man at Mascot and stuck around when Yates took over. Fier was succeeding where the Weiss Brothers (Louis, Max, and Adrian) had recently failed to produce serials that could compete with Universal and Republic. He made his first splash with The Spider’s Web, featuring pulp hero The Spider.

At that point Columbia was growing out of the Poverty Row label.

Columbia Pictures was founded by Harry Cohn, a high school dropout at age 14 who grew up in Manhattan in Harry Cohn. the early 1900s. He worked as everything from streetcar conductor to singer before deciding to found his own film company: the unwieldy Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Films with his older brother,

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Jack, and their partner and friend Joe Brandt (all three of whom had earlier worked for Universal’s Laemmle).

By 1924, Harry set up CBC’s “film department” in L.A.’s Poverty Row, and was soon dubbed “C.B.C. Corned Beef and Cabbage” by the larger studios. They wisely adopted the Columbia Pictures name that year. Cohn had a tactic for funding his films: he focused on paying money for the right scripts, actors and directors, but let the sets and costumes (often re-used from production to production) take bottom priority.

Their big break came with the 1934 Frank Capra screwball comedy It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, about a spoiled heiress and cantankerous newspaper reporter stuck together on a road trip through Depression America. It was a commercial success that earned them an unprecedented top five Oscars (best picture, screenplay, director, actress, and actor). It wasn’t shabby for a film that boasted a diminutive budget of $325,000 and was shot in a month.

1934 boasted the beginning of another Columbia success: They signed The Three Stooges on to produce their own slapstick brand of two-reeler comedies. Columbia became one of the underdogs of Hollywood, a small studio that boasted a few jewels in the rough.

“Probably the closest, warmest [studio] of all was Columbia, perhaps because it was a small studio,” Our Gang star Tommy Bond said in his memoir, Darn Right It’s Butch “It was a closeknit studio right in the heart of Hollywood, and we all knew each other. It was so small it didn’t have a commissary.”

With the success of The Spider’s Web (starring pulp mysteryman The Spider) in late 1938, Fier established Columbia’s serial division, which was eventually given to a pair of producers, Larry Darmour and Sam Katzman. According to historian Ed Hulse: [Their] primary interest was chiseling extra money for themselves out of already shrunken budgets. Large chunks of future funds earmarked for Columbia’s episodic thrillers went toward the purchase of screen rights to highly marketable characters from other media.

This will include comic book superheroes. Not all onscreen depictions will prove flattering.

Universal Pictures serialized another comic strip detective, Secret Agent X-9 on April 12, 1937, two months after the more successful Tracy’s silver screen debut. Created by crime writer Dashiell Hammett (of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man fame) and cartoonist Alex Raymond to cash in on and compete with Dick Tracy, X-9 starred dashing Scott Kolk and Gordon’s beautiful Jean Rogers in the lead roles. While it might not have had Tracy’s success, it’s obvious that Universal was hoping another Raymond-based serial would repeat the success of Flash Gordon. The comic strip and pulp-based serials were an inadvertent proving ground for when the superhero called for live-action translation in just a few short years.

That year also marked Columbia Pictures’ foray into serials with outdoor adventurer Frank Buck’s Bring ‘Em Back Alive.

Over the next couple of decades, Columbia produced serials that generally didn’t equal up to those of Republic or Universal, mostly due to a combination of lower budgets and less resources.

Republic continued to enjoy an unexpected success as the underdog of the film industry, primarily profiting off of their Westerns. The key behind their relative success was a cross between smart budgeting and grassroots marketing.

“Show business started in a tent,” Republic head H.J. Yates declared in 1940. “Today they have everything overcapitalized.

You don’t have to spend $3,000,000 to make a good picture or build a $10,000,000 cathedral to show it in.”

Where some studios had their own “cathedral”-like movie houses to distribute their films, Republic was reliant upon producing movies that ensured theater owners wouldn’t be doomed by empty seats. By keeping the budgets low, stories traditional, and shooting schedules short, their films were more likely to turn a profit.

“Sure, the story is pretty much the same,” Yates admitted. “But you can change it around a little, give it new trimmings. You’ve got a formula the public likes and it’s as standardized as granulated sugar. If you like sugar in your coffee, why use salt?”

But the real genius of Republic Pictures was in the personal appearance tour.

(left) It Happened One Night put Columbia on the map, thanks to the trio of director Frank Capra and actors Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. (right) The Spider’s Web brought the pulp to the screen, in this gem starring Warren Hull.

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(left) The comic strip connection to the Secret Agent X-9 serial is no mystery in this ad. (right) The spit-curled face that launched a genre: Superman makes his debut in Action Comics #1, 1938.

Gene Autry’s cross-country touring got him in front of more fans than the average Hollywood A-lister, and helped him build a dedicated fan base. It was the same for Roy Rogers, Smiley Burnette (Gene’s funnyman sidekick who made 1,000 appearances in a six-year period), and Don Barry.

To make it financially worth their stars’ while, Republic didn’t take a percentage of the money made at the appearances, encouraging their stars to do their PR for them.

Another clever move on Republic’s part was with their producer and scout Armand Schaefer, who sought out regional acts to appear in their serials and films. Basically, Republic would fly these acts onto their studio lot for a weekend, shoot their cameo and pay them about $1,000 to $1,500 for their time. They sent them back to their native region, relying upon the act’s own penchant for self-promotion to get the word out about whatever film they’d appeared in.

Republic’s budget for all sixty pictures produced in 1940 was only $9,000,000, or an average of $150,000 a picture.

Enter The Scourge Of The Newsstands: The Comic Book!

“Actually, the comics started with the whole Superman/ Batman thing in the middle of the Depression. If you were a married homeowner, you’d be making $20 to $30 a week and living a good life. We were getting $5 a page and all we had to do was invent the character, write the script, letter it, erase it, and wait ninety days for $45. There were surprises, and everybody was taken advantage of.

But, hey, we were working, making $75 a week, $85, $90.

“The only problem was, all the guys I knew (including myself and especially Jack Kirby) wanted to be steadily employed. I guess we were a product of our times and the whole Depression. We had to make our work, and manufacture and imagine it.”

—Joe Simon

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The comic book, a pamphlet that reprinted newspaper comic strips in the 1920s, started printing original comic strip material towards the mid-‘30s. Any success that the comic strip-derived medium had enjoyed prior to June, 1938 would soon be overshadowed by the blue-and-red clad cultural behemoth that stood on the cover of Action Comics #1. Holding a large automobile over his athletic wrestler’s body, wearing a dark blue bodysuit with a dramatic red cape billowing out and off of his powerful shoulders, Superman took the newsstands by storm and launched the superhero genre.

This powerful figure from another planet emerged from the minds of two bookish teenagers from Cleveland, Ohio. The story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s stormy career as Superman’s creators is as iconic as their own creation and full of tragedy, triumph, and disappointment.

Jerry Siegel was born to Lithuanian immigrants Mitchell and Sarah Siegel on October 17, 1914, growing up in the Cleveland suburb of Glenville. That same year, Joe Shuster was born in Toronto, Canada and his family would cross the border to Cleveland, Ohio when he was only nine.

Both boys latched on to the emerging field of “scientifiction” with editor Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. The August, 1928 issue affected young Jerry Siegel for the rest of his life: the cover featured a red-clad man with a rocket pack strapped to his back from writer Elmer Smith’s (with co-writer Lee Hawkins Garby) serialized story “The Skylark of Space”—also the same issue as Anthony Rogers’ debut in “Armageddon 2419.” The next year, an inspired Jerry created what may have been the first science fiction fanzine: Cosmic Stories, mimeographed and featuring Jerry’s hyperbolic stories and editorials.

In 1932, Jerry’s life was forever changed when his father Mitchell was held up at the haberdashery shop he owned and shot in the chest. After his mother and cousins basically swept the murder under the rug and refused to dwell on it (the unsolved murder was changed to “a heart attack” in some stories), Jerry found himself even further withdrawn, and often holed himself up in the attic while writing his science fiction stories.

Joe Shuster, meanwhile, struggled on the streets of Cleveland as a paperboy to support his family. His father, an unsuccessful

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Siegel and Shuster’s first Superman, a mentally powered villain, from their 1933 fanzine. tailor, brought scraps of paper and brown bags home for Joe to draw on the back of as the Shuster family could rarely even afford regular drawing paper. Joe, a scrawny kid, decided to focus on bodybuilding, perhaps to compensate for his social awkwardness; it was a hobby he pursued for about four or five more years.

It was a fateful day in 1930 that the two met in the office of their high school paper, the Glenville Torch, introduced by Jerry’s cousin. They were cut from the same cloth: both shy, awkward, maladjusted 16-year-olds who found their refuge in the escapism of early science fiction.

“When Joe and I met,” Siegel observed in 1983, “it was like the right chemicals coming together.”

Jerry and Joe began collaborating on everything from comic strips (sent by a hopeful Jerry to Syndicates) to pulp fan magazines. Their most significant early collaboration was their January, 1933 fanzine, Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization, which included the story “The Reign of the Superman.” This prototypical version of their iconic hero had more in common with their villain Ultra Humanite than Superman, however: he was a bald villain with great mental powers gained through scientific means. Joe provided illustrations in which a vagrant is experimented on by a mad scientist and given great mental powers. Facing off against a crusading journalist by a crusading journalist during his bid to rule the world, he returns to vagrancy when he realizes that his powers are only temporary and on the verge of fading away.

Another influence emerged in Jerry’s life in 1932, when he read and reviewed Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator, a novel about a superman who is the result of his father’s eugenic experiments.

Given bulletproof skin and super strength, he struggles through life trying to make a difference to the greater man. Instead, he encounters mankind’s own cruelty, selfishness, and limitations on his journey. Reading Gladiator, the similarities between it and the future Superman are impossible to not notice.

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Noble Savage Another influence popped up around that time: Doc Savage, the pulp hero advertised as a “Superman,” made an appearance in a house ad in Street & Smith’s The Shadow pulp. Doc Savage was the perfect human, raised by his father to fight crime and evil the world over. He was also an adventurer with bulletproof skin, backed up by a team of five specialists, and also possessed a secret Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic.

Siegel figured the future of science fiction and comic entertainment would be in the newborn comic book, rather than the strip, and set out to create an original hero for the comic books called The Superman. Before Superman could even start to leap in the comic books, comics history took off in a flurry of publishing attempts.

After the highly successful Famous Funnies, a comic book composed of reprints of popular comic strips, but in a size that soon became standard (at 7 11/16” by 10 1/2”), other publishers started to come out from between the cracks of the New York sidewalks.

Pulp writer and former military man Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson went into the newborn business with New Fun Comics, the first comic book to consist of solely original material (announced on the cover as “All Original…All New!”) but sized at an unwieldy 10” x 15”. Each single-page strip was sized to bring the Sunday comics experience to the comic book format and was broken up with occasional ads and articles.

Renting an office on Fourth Avenue, and first hiring editors Lloyd Jacquet and Sheldon Stark, who left after a short period of not receiving any pay, he soon replaced them with Vin Sullivan and Whitney Ellsworth. Only Sullivan stuck around, and would be the catalyst of change in comics.

Not only had he and Ellsworth edited the first color issues of More Fun (the newest name for New Fun), but they also made it a more tightly-edited and polished publication, a far cry from cobbled-together showcases of comic strip knock-offs that were the norm.

The comic book only made it six issues before it tanked in sales. Wheeler-Nicholson’s National Allied Publishing was failing and in need of a new distributor, so the Major partnered with distributor Harry Donenfeld’s Independent News to keep in business. With his two titles New Fun and New Comics (the “international picture story magazine” that was eventually

Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson’s past as a soldier (bottom) and pulp pioneer has most recently been uncovered by his granddaughter, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson. rechristened Adventure Comics in November 1938) failing to bring in enough money, Wheeler-Nicholson was so in debt that he was forced to take Harry Donenfeld and his attorney Jack Liebowitz on as partners. Harry Donenfeld had been publishing several pulp magazines, as well as the covers for the Major’s books and also had the benefit of owning the printing presses and a large stake in distributor Independent News.

Their new business venture went from being called National Allied to Detective Comics, Inc. after the 1937 debut of Detective Comics.

Sporting a close-up of a stereotypical, Fu Manchuesque leering Asian villain, Detective Comics #1 was far more lurid than its more “fun” counterparts, eschewing funny animals and funny pages knock-offs for crime and suspense stories.

Wheeler-Nicholson was involved for the first year of Detective’s existence, but was forced out of the company by

Donenfeld and Liebowitz.

But first, he engaged Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster about the character who would change an entire industry.

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Super Funded “Right around that time, the world was in pretty bad shape,” Jerry Siegel said in 1981. “Nazism was rising up, and innocent people were being killed…I felt that the world desperately needed a crusader, even a fictional one…A very clean-cut guy who could rule the world, and is powerful, but uses his powers to aid the helpless and the deserving, rather than the exploit them.”

Siegel’s more heroic Superman went through a few revisions before evolving into the hero now known the world over.

The prototypical Superman resembled his future counterpart in dashing dark looks and powerful build, but didn’t wear a costume and sported a striking streak of white among his black locks. The only surviving image of this Superman is that of the shirtless hero (looking more like Doc Savage than the follow-up Man of Steel) launching himself at a gun-toting heavy. It’s the work of a young artist: Shuster’s foreshortening and perspective on the Superman figure are awkward at best, while the mugger and victim almost seem like they’re on a different plane.

After a publisher reneged on interest in it, an upset Joe Shuster reacted in a disappointed and destructive manner:

New Fun #1 featured original comic strip style strips in one comic book package.

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“A couple of months after I published this story,” Siegel said. “It occurred to me that a Superman as a hero rather than a villain might make a great comic strip character in the vein of Tarzan, only more super and sensational than that great character. Joe and I drew it up as a comic book — this was in early 1933. We interested a publisher in putting it out, but then he changed his mind, and that was the end of that particular version of Superman — called The Superman. Practically all of it was torn up, by the way. Joe got very upset and tore up and threw away most of it.”

But for the next incarnation of Superman, Joe had become too discouraged to do the strip, so Jerry turned to Buck Rogers ghost artist Russell Keaton. This Superman, as conceived by Jerry and outlined in a letter and script from June 12, 1934, was more akin to Buck than Doc Savage. Rather than coming from the doomed planet Krypton, Superman is the son of a scientist from the future who sends the 3 year-old back in time to 1935. The strip follows the same general course of what Siegel later wrote for Shuster to draw.

The toddler is discovered by the elderly Kents when his rocket crashes. After they leave him at an orphanage, Clark’s incredible strength terrorizes the staff. When the Kents return to adopt the odd orphan, the staff is naturally relieved to get rid of the mini Hercules.

Clark babbles in a dialect completely alien to the Kents, Sam and Molly, and they simply assume he’s from another country. There’s even a tablet written in an unknown language in his still-intact rocketship, later kept in the Kents’ cellar.

News of Clark’s absurd strength (on display when bending metal bars in the orphanage, and by hoisting a local bully over his head with one hand) frightens the neighborhood, and the Kents decide to keep Clark’s strength secret. After Clark rescues Sam from a runaway automobile, Sam and Molly realize their responsibility is to raise this “Superman” to use his powers for good. Years later, the adult Clark Kent is reviewing the mysterious tablet, still unaware of his origins.

“It’s no use!” Clark monologues. “I’ve puzzled over this unintelligible note, which holds the secret of my origin, hundreds of times. But I’m no closer to its secret.”

As Clark places it in a box, a prowler watches from the outside. When the prowler breaks in and awakens Clark, he is shocked to find Clark’s impervious skin break a sword taken off a nearby wall in two!

And that’s where Jerry’s original set of scripts ends.

Keaton drew samples of the first installment for Jerry, but then left the project because of Siegel’s inexperience. Shortly after, Joe Shuster came back and produced the strips that later became the basis of Action Comics #1.

Siegel and Shuster’s final version of Superman is the lone survivor of an alien planet who arrives on Earth as an infant with powers far beyond those of a mortal man. It was originally meant as a comic strip, yet was turned down by syndicates. Perhaps it was Shuster’s crude artwork that didn’t make the strip appealing enough to editors, but it may also have been the indefinable genre which Superman lived in: he wasn’t exactly a science fiction hero like Flash Gordon, nor was he an action hero like Captain Easy.

Meanwhile, the pair landed some work for Major WheelerNicholson, producing strips like “Slam Bradley,” an adventurer who was a blatant knock-off of Roy Crane’s mighty hero Captain Easy (Shuster’s style is also an obvious homage to Crane, the artist who put action in adventure strips, as

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Superman and Captain Easy may well have been separated at birth), or Doctor Occult, who fought werewolves and vampires and donned a costume and cape in later adventures.

Despite the work for the then-fledgling comic company, Jerry and Joe were far from rolling in the dough and made about $10 a page. Shuster, who already started to suffer from sight problems at a young age, lived in an apartment that he couldn’t afford heat for; according to Siegel, Joe would often have to wear gloves and layers of sweaters to draw in. Even his first comic stories, stories with Henri Duval and Dr. Occult, were drawn on the back of wallpaper scraps and brown wrapping paper.

During their initial pitch, Jerry and Joe tucked in a drawing of Superman for the Major. Recently uncovered letters reveal the Major encouraged them to develop Superman as its own feature in a new comic book. At the same time, Jack Liebowitz was also writing to Jerry (unknown to the Major), all the while the Major was forced out of Detective in court.

Eventually, the Superman strip was waved under the nose of Detective Comics editor Vin Sullivan, by McClure Syndicate’s Charlie Gaines and editor Shelly Mayer (eventually an accomplished cartoonist himself, Mayer was likely the first to realize the strip’s potential). At this point, the pitch had made the rounds with several publishers.

In a letter to Jerry dated January 10th, Sullivan wrote: The one feature I liked best, and the one that seems to fit into the proposed schedule, is that “Superman”. From the drawing I can readily see that Joe Schuster was the person who handled the pen-and-ink end of the job…Joe, of course, seems to have the proper touch in putting your stories on drawing paper, and if it were humanly possible I’d like to have him turn out this “Superman” for the new magazine.

At the time, Shuster was drawing 27 pages for other Detective publications, yet he went ahead on Superman. Sullivan bought the prototypical superhero from the duo, so long as the strip was reformatted for the comics page. Their total earnings from the sale was only $130 for the spit-curled face that would launch the superhero genre.

This third incarnation of Superman disguised himself in his everyday garb of nebbish Clark Kent, reporter for the Daily Star newspaper. Wimpy and prone to fainting spells, Clark pined for female reporter Lois Lane, who despised him and shunned his advances in favor of the uber-masculine Superman. Shuster had claimed that Clark Kent was named after actors Clark Gable and Kent Taylor, though it could be argued that he was named after the secret identities of pulp characters The Shadow (Kent Allard) and Doc Savage (Clark Savage).

The real genius of Superman isn’t in the Man of Steel himself, but in the clumsy alter ego that was a collective reflection of the two awkward kids from Cleveland.

“In the case of myself,” Siegel admitted, “like Joe, I was quite meek and mild, and there were attractive girls around who didn’t care I existed…Wouldn’t it be great if I were a mighty person, and these girls didn’t know that this clod was somebody special?”

Superman, in his first appearance, wasn’t quite the altruistic figure we know today, as he fought for the little man instead of the whole world. His inaugural story has him beating the tar out of a wife beater, threatening to drop a criminal

(top) Siegel and Shuster in their Superman days. (bottom) Another early proto-Superman, seemingly more in the vein of a pulp hero.

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if he doesn’t get the information he needs, busting into the governor’s mansion to get a last-minute pardon for an innocent convict about to go to the chair, and taking on a lynch mob. He was the perfect hero for the Great Depression, an unflappable powerhouse who used his strength to take care of the down-on-their-luck citizens and fight for social change on the streets of Metropolis.

And so, it was that Superman appeared on the cover of Action Comics #1 and launched an imitation in Wonder Man by unscrupulous comics publisher Victor Fox of Fox Comics. Drawn by future creator of The Spirit Sunday comic, Will Eisner, Wonder Man premiered in Wonder Comics #1 with a May cover date, just a few months later. Detective took Fox to court for copyright infringement and won.

It was the first time they took another publisher to court, but it would not be the last.

Once every year, the Republic writers, directors, and front office held a meeting to decide the titles of their upcoming serials, as well as what properties to pursue as a license, many of which were derived from radio or comic strips. The proposed five or six titles would then be presented to the front office, who would then pick which four (and in what order) to produce.

Afterwards, the writers and producer got together and had a brainstorming/plotting session referred to as “the Wienie,” where chapter details were assigned to a team of writers. Every morning, they would meet and review details to make sure that they meshed in the form of an overall story. The formula would always be to produce the first chapter at roughly half an hour, giving the required time to establish characters and plot elements, while subsequent chapters were fifteen minutes. Of those fifteen minutes, three of those minutes were dedicated to the opening credits and forewords or overlaps, which reviewed the final moments of the previous chapter but revealing the “takeout,” where the hero managed to escape certain death.

One of these initial meetings produced a desire to make a Superman movie serial, with the character’s star quickly on the rise. On January 16, 1939 the Superman daily comic strip premiered (gaining enough momentum to have a circulation of 20 million newspapers by 1941) and, on February 12, 1940, the Superman radio show (sponsored by Kellog’s Pep cereal) hit the airwaves with Bud Collyer voicing the Man of Tomorrow.

Detective Comics created Superman, Inc., led by agent Paul Kohner, to negotiate getting the Man of Steel on the big screen.

(above) Superman, Joe Shuster style. (right) Doctor Occult, an early Siegel and Shuster hero, took to wearing a cape and flying belt in 1937. From More Fun Comics #16.

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A bidding war in late 1939 between Columbia and Republic saw Columbia the potential victor (outbidding Republic’s $5,000 with an offer of $6,000), but that studio was reluctant to grant Detective the approvals and percentages demanded.

Republic came back with an offer of $7,000, countered by Universal (home of the successful Flash Gordon serials) at $7,700. Matching that, Republic sweetened the deal by offering to bring a Superman, Inc. writer on board.

The serial, as envisioned by Witney and Republic, would feature Superman taking on an entire army of robots as they invaded his city of Metropolis, combining actors in robot suits with animated long shots of the invasion, all within their budget.

“We had started to look for an actor to play Superman and had interviewed every bodybuilder in Hollywood who was over six-foot-four,” Witney revealed. “We had already decided that Clark Kent, the lead and Superman, should be two people, one smaller than the other, but who looked alike. But when he came out in the Superman outfit, he would be awe-inspiring and have muscles bulging. We would dub in the voice of the person playing Clark Kent. The writers were instructed to hold Superman’s dialogue down to a few grunts if possible.”

April, 1940 saw an acceptance of the offer by Kohner and The Adventures of Superman was announced by Republic in trade magazines. Late the next month, Republic assigned Joseph Poland and Sol Shor to lead the team of six writers for all the chapters. Republic announced it by early June to the trades.

Superman, Inc. wanted an unprecedented amount of control on the serial: approval of casting for Superman and Clark Kent; Superman’s name in every chapter title; an obligation for Republic to use Lois Lane, Perry White, and Jimmy Olsen in the serials; and, finally, for Republic to forego any rights to rerelease or repurpose the material (such as in a feature length).

The July 31 deadline went by without Superman, Inc. signing the final contract.

Around two weeks later, Superman, Inc. signed with Paramount for the Fleischer Brothers to produce the Superman cartoons.

A mere four weeks before production, the production team was informed that Superman was a wash-up, and that they had to get something together within that time span as a replacement. The first seven episodes were already scripted and would require rewrites while also producing the final eight—all by the September 20 start date.

(top) This 1939 “ashcan” for Superman Comics was published by National to secure the trademark for that title. The insides reprinted seven pages from Action Comics #8. (bottom) This teaser, promising more Superman adventures, is from the end of his debut story in 1938’s Action Comics #1.

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Deal With the Devil The next title on Republic’s list of future serials was The Mysterious Doctor Satan, so the decision was made to rewrite parts of the Superman script for this fifteen-chapter serial.

Motion Picture Herald, on August 24, noted: Republic will make “Dr. Satan,” a 15 episode serial, in place of “Superman,” previously announced but shelved because of restrictions imposed by copyright owners.

Doctor Satan starred sickeningly handsome Robert Wilcox as Bob Wayne, who avenges the governor who raised him by

adapting his late father’s crimebusting identity as the Copperhead. He wears a simple chain mail mask that does a surprisingly convincing job hiding his features, but despite his tendency to throw it over his normal clothes, no one seems to figure out his dual identity. Doctor Satan is played by Eduardo Cianelli (billed as “Edward”) who also has top billing. This Italian actor started as an opera singer (after deciding to not pursue being a doctor, even though he’d received the training) some years before and brought a sinister sophistication to the role. Rounding out the cast was the beautiful Ella Neal as newspaper reporter Lois Scott, and her photographer “Speed” Martin, played by bit actor William Newell.

It’s highly likely that Neal’s casting as Lois Scott is left over from the aborted Superman production. Her striking dark features and fair skin make her a dead ringer for the Joe Shuster-drawn Lois Lane. Unfortunately, she’s an inexpressive ornament for most of the serial, but finally does get her chance to shine in the penultimate chapter.

The first chapter opens with the murder of the governor by one of Doctor Satan’s men, right after the governor has a chance to pass the mantle of the Copperhead on to Bob Wayne.

It seems that Wayne’s father was a crimefighter who was misconstrued a criminal by the public, and Wayne decides to clear his father’s name through catching the villainous Doctor Satan. Lois Scott and Speed Martin are introduced as newspaper people in the first chapter, but that is soon left to the wayside as they focus on surviving the not-so-good doctor’s machinations.

Some remnants of the Superman production are the lone prototype robot created by Satan

(left) Kellogg’s sponsored The Adventures of Superman, as seen in this stand-up ad. (right) Film Daily reported on the Superman deal with Republic in April, 1940.

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The Mysterious Doctor Satan failed to deliver on Superman’s promise. (who plans on building more, but never gets around to it, a budget-saving excuse thought up by head writer Ron Davidson), which Witney referred to as the “man in the hot water heater.”

It was a cross between an iron maiden and a puppet that was awkwardly operated. It ambles through the scenes blindly and crushes its victims in its silver arms.

Republic wasn’t about to give up on Superman: Variety from August 21, 1940 reported: Republic is substituting ‘Dr. Satan’ for ‘Superman’ on its 1940-41 cliffhanger sked. Reason behind the move is said to be Rep’s inability to clear the rights to the ‘Superman’ from its newspaper strip owners at a price satisfactory to the valley studio.

‘Superman’ was to have been made in 15 installments. There is a possibility that a deal will be set later, in which case Rep will resked the vehicle for 1941-42.

Republic advertised their plans to do a Superman serial in 1941’s promotional Republic Pictures Advance Serial Promotion Book, featuring storyboards in a two-page ad, but that would also not come to pass. Apparently, Paramount held all rights to Superman on the big screen, and Republic decided to look elsewhere for their first big screen superhero.

As the superhero genre continued to thrive on the four-color page for a dime, it soon found its way onto the silver screen in the form of the red and blue clad harbinger of four-colordom himself and his greatest competitor.

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A

fter failing to procure the Man of Steel two years in a row, Republic was still able to become the first to squeeze out the first live-action superhero. Since they couldn’t get Superman, they snatched up his red-suited competitor: Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel, when that publisher approached them shortly after the Superman deal fell apart in 1940. The end result is one of the most beloved movie serials of the era, and one of the most complex and long-running legal cases in comic book history.

Fawcett began publishing in 1920 with Wilford Fawcett’s digest-sized joke magazine Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. By the next decade, Fawcett’s other magazines included True Confessions, Smokehouse Magazine, and Mechanix Illustrated. When the comic book debuted in the ‘30s, Fawcett hopped on the bandwagon with Whiz Comics #2 in February 1940. The star of the book was the red-suited Captain Marvel, clad in a militaristic uniform with a red shirt-flap, golden gauntlets, and a short white-and-gold trimmed cape slung over his left shoulder. A powerful lightning bolt was emblazoned on the front of his crimson tunic, and his cape flapped as he tossed a large blue car into a brick wall. It may not have been as iconic as Superman

The good Captain makes his debut, from the cover of Whiz Comics #2 (Feb. 1940).

Art by C.C. Beck.

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lifting a car over his head on the cover of Action Comics #1, but it came pretty darn close.

Fawcett decided to start publishing comic books in August, 1939 and appointed William “Bill” Parker editor of what would become Whiz Comics. He tasked Ralph Daigh and Al Allard with getting the line a major superhero.

The creation of Captain Marvel was far more planned than that of Superman’s: Originally envisioned by Fawcett staff writer Bill Parker as a team of superheroes led by Captain Thunder, the decision was then made to whittle the group (reports vary from four to six) down to just Captain Thunder himself. Conceived by Parker, the Captain’s alter ego would be a poor orphan boy to create a firm contrast to the superhero. When Charles Clarence (C.C.) Beck came on as head of cartooning, he devised close to two dozen concept designs. For the Captain’s good looks, Beck turned to the likenesses of movie star Fred MacMurray; Roscoe Fawcett would later liken the good Captain to Cary Grant.

The writer of Captain Marvel’s adventures, Bill Parker joined Fawcett in 1937 as a magazine editor and was not a fan of the comic book format. The growing costumed hero trend found Parker assigned with editing and writing the first Whiz Comics, where he co-created Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher, Ibis the Invincible, and Golden Arrow with artist C.C. Beck.

Ashcans for Fawcett’s 1940 trademark attempts for a title, both of which were taken by other publishers.

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Perhaps it was Parker’s detachment from the fantasy and hero genres that gave Captain Marvel that tendency to not take itself too seriously.

Beck called his hometown of Zumbrota, Minnesota as a place Walt Disney would have loved, a small American town with a Main Street, wooden sidewalks, and live music playing in the park. Founded by German and Scandinavian settlers in 1856, Zumbrota’s current claim is that they have Minnesota’s only remaining original covered bridge. On June 8, 1910, Charles Clarence Beck was born to a school teacher mother and a preacher father. Beck was the proverbial “doodler” and avid reader of the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression comics pages, leaning towards more simplistic humor strips than highly-detailed action ones.

Mostly self-taught, Beck went to the Chicago Academy and the University of Minnesota. Shortly after, he got his first art job tracing comic strip characters onto hand-drawn lampshades. By 1933, he was a staff artist at Fawcett Publications, working on many of their humor magazines (including the infamous Whiz-Bang).

“I had nothing to do with either the characters or their actions,” Beck claimed, denying any claim to character creation. “I simply put them into picture form…They were conceived in Parker’s mind; I was just the doctor who held them up and slapped them on their bottoms to make them draw their first breaths.”

The first story was drawn with the Captain Thunder name, and printed in disposable black and white in-house

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“ashcan” copies of the first issue to establish copyright and to sell distributors on the upcoming actual book. It was initially titled Flash Comics and, after Detective Comics’ sister company All-American came out with their own Flash Comics in January 1940, they reprinted it entitled Thrill Comics. They settled on both the Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel names, respectively, in time to print the first “second” issue.

Publisher Roscoe Fawcett laid claim, in an interview with Fawcett Collectors of America’s P.C. Hamerlinck, to have come up with the character’s unique twist as a young boy who would merely speak a magic word and become a Herculean powerhouse. Fawcett has made that claim, and it has been supported by Beck in an interview with the Fawcett Collectors of America magazine.

Golly, Gee Whiz (Comics)!

A mysterious stranger in a black trench coat and slouch hat leads homeless paperboy Billy Batson onto a magical neon-lit subway car. At the end of the trip, Billy finds himself in a strange cavern, where statues of the Seven Deadly Sins lead to a dais. Seated on a throne, a cement block suspended overhead by a fraying thread, is the bearded and elderly wizard Shazam. His name is an anagram for the gods and demi-gods which he gained powers from: Solomon’s wisdom, Hercules’ strength, Atlas’ stamina, Zeus’ power, Achilles’ courage, and Mercury’s speed.

“All my life I have fought injustice and cruelty, but I am old now – my time is almost up,” Shazam proclaims. “You shall be my successor merely by speaking my name you can become the strongest and mightiest man in the world – Captain Marvel!”

Billy Batson follows a creepy stranger into the subways, from Captain Marvel’s debut in Whiz Comics #2. Art by C.C. Beck.

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The Captain’s stunning debut, story by Bill Parker with art by C.C. Beck.

Speaking the magic word, Billy finds himself transformed into the strapping superhero, Captain Marvel. By story’s end, Billy exposes criminal scientist Dr. Sivana (with buckteeth, Coke bottle glasses, and oversized bald head, he looked like a near-sighted Nosferatu) and procures a job at radio station WHIZ as a boy reporter.

Captain Marvel clearly wasn’t the already-standard superhero: the stories really belonged to Billy Batson, who appeared in the majority of each tale, with Captain Marvel the genie released via the magic word. Rather than lean towards the pulp magazines and comic strips for inspiration (as had Superman or Batman), Captain Marvel’s basis was in fairy tales and mythology, each story following Billy on whatever screwball conquest dreamt up

by Parker or another Fawcett writer.

When Variety reported the Superman serial’s failure to take off on August 16, 1940, Fawcett’s western manager, E.J. Smithson took action and approached Republic about adapting Captain Marvel. On October 9, Republic entered an agreement to produce The Adventures of Captain Marvel. The agreement proved favorable to Republic: they received the rights free of charge, were given feature film and studio rights for a period of seven years, and could also produce two further sequels in return for buying advertising space in Fawcett’s movie magazines ($2,100 for the first sequel, and $4,200 for the second). They were also given creative freedom so long as the serial was properly credited to Fawcett as the publisher, featured “Captain Marvel” in the serial’s title, and was released within the next year.

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Having a hero who transformed from a kid to a muscular adult, Republic faced casting two different actors: one for Billy Batson and the other for his caped alter ego.

Former child star Frank Coghlan, Jr was chosen for Billy, his acting credits reaching back to his infancy in the silent era. Born March 15, 1916 in New Haven, Connecticut, one of Coghlan’s earliest parts was in a movie serial, boxer Jack Dempsey’s 1920 Daredevil Jack. In 1925, he starred in the silent comedy Bobbed Hair from Realart Pictures, stuck with a bobbed haircut ala Jackie Coogan in Charlie Chaplin’s famous film The Kid from four years earlier. Coghlan also acted in a number of producer Hal Roach’s classic Our Gang film shorts and also played a younger James Cagney in 1931’s iconic crime film The Public Enemy. “Junior” (as he was often known) was even granted a five-year contract by legendary director Cecil DeMille in 1935.

It seems an interesting career path, to go from movie serial to Our Gang to Public Enemy to DeMille, and then back to serials again. In the end, Billy Batson became the character Coghlan was the most associated with for over half a century.

Coghlan was filming Men of Boys Town for MGM when he got the call to come in and interview for the role at Republic. Hopping into his car while still in costume, he made a frenzied drive to Republic studios on his lunch break. Producer Hiram S. Brown, Jr, and directors Witney and English met with Frank about a role he knew nothing of. He’d never read a single issue of Whiz Comics, but grabbed one at a newsstand on his way back to set.

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By the time he’d gotten home that evening, Republic called and offered him the part.

Cast as Captain Marvel was established B-Western and movie serial star, as well as competitive weightlifter, whom Republic had considered for the ill-fated Superman role a year earlier. The story of Tom Tyler, cowboy star and eventual superhero, is one full of triumph and tragedy. His story starts with the silent era of the ‘20s and ends in the early ‘50s.

Tyler was born Vincent Markowski on August 9, 1903 in Port Henry, New York, his father was a Lithuanian immigrant who worked in the Republic Steel mines. On September 11, 1918, the Markowskis moved to Detroit to work for the Ford Automotive plant and settled in the Polish community of Hamtramck.

Tall and powerfully built, with a high forehead and piercing gaze, Vincent’s family claimed he was every bit the introvert, shy, quiet, and oblivious to the girls who noticed him.

Vincent was 15 when his family arrived in Detroit, and already dabbling in sports and weightlifting when not watching Western movies at the local theater. When a talent scout noticed Tom at an amateur weightlifting competition at the local Martha Washington Theater, the nearly 10 year-old took the agent’s advice to go to Hollywood. Apparently given money by his sister for the trip, Vincent and his neighborhood friend Emil Karkowski left Hamtramck in the summer of ’23 to find their fortunes. The two young men made it as far as Colorado before Emil decided to make the return trip home.

When Vincent did arrive in California, it wasn’t long until he’d landed a bit part in MGM’s 1924 film Three Weeks. He changed his stage name to Bill Burns, and then worked as an extra in the 1925 silent film version of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

An agent from Film Booking Office of America (FBO), a producer of B Westerns, spotted Vincent and recruited him into working at FBO. Having lied about his experience on horseback, Vincent had to take a crash course in riding before going in front of the cameras. His first FBO role was starring in 1925’s Let’s Go, Gallagher, a silent Western that paired him with child actor Frankie Darro, who later co-starred in Gene Autry’s Phantom Empire.

Silent cowboy star Tom Tyler made the transition to talkies, but not with the success he may have hoped or deserved.

Strong and Silent At age 22, the newly renamed Tom Tyler was a cowboy star at FBO, starring in ten more films by the end of 1926. He also won four consecutive heavyweight AAU competitions in Southern California, as well as the national championship in 1928. Clocking in at 6’ 2” and 200 pounds, Tyler cut an impressive figure both onscreen and competitively.

It was also during this period that he met his future Captain Marvel co-star, Frankie Coghlan, then a young boy: “[Robert de Lacy’s] wife Lama was my mother’s best friend,” Coughlin said years later. “Many times when we had the de Lacys over for dinner, they would bring the tall, strapping, shy, handsome bachelor Tom Tyler with them. So, we were friends for a number of years before we co-starred in Captain Marvel.”

With forty films under his belt by 1930, Tyler left FBO for Syndicate Films to star in even more silent Westerns. By 1931, however, he found himself at Mascot, starring in the serial Phantom of the West, his first talkie.

When Al Jolson spoke the words “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” in the first motion picture with audible sound, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the age of the “talkies” began. Although the transition from silent

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Tyler got wrapped up in the role made famous by Boris Karloff for 1940’s The Mummy’s Hand. to sound wasn’t immediate, the impact was felt by the early ‘30s, and some silent stars with lackluster voices found themselves without work. With his Lithuanian accent (likely a contributing factor to the actor’s personal shyness), Tyler was having difficulty gaining roles, reportedly having to sell his car and move out of his Beverly Hills home. It was actor Frank Glendon (later to play the villainous scientist in Phantom Empire) who gave Tom professional voice lessons, with the pair becoming friends in the process.

Working for Poverty Row studio Reliable didn’t launch Tyler to stardom in the ‘30s, either, with the actor pulling in roughly $500 a week. He continued appearing in several B Westerns and serials, apparently on par with Buster Crabbe in terms of popularity.

While Tyler never really hit it big, he had the potential to become the next Tom Mix. By 1936, a New York Times reviewer considered the actor “among the most widely respected cinema interpreters of the changing West.”

Tyler also married one-time costar Jeanne Martel on September 8, 1937, and then toured with the Wallace Brothers Circus as a strongman/cowboy combination for about a year.

But by the end of the decade, he progressively starred in fewer movies.

One of those movies was director John Ford’s Stagecoach, a Western masterpiece that was the breakthrough role for John Wayne. Tyler played the villainous Luke Plummer, who Wayne’s character the Ringo Kid kills in vengeance at the end of the film.

He even appeared in Gone with the Wind in ’39, and in 1940 was in The Grapes of Wrath.

One of his most notable pre-Marvel roles was actually in a horror film, The Mummy’s Hand, for Universal in 1940. He took up the bandages of the title character that Boris Karloff had made famous. It took hours for the Mummy make-up, and it was so painful that Tyler could only work for roughly three hours at a time.

But by late 1940, Tyler’s casting in a movie serial would even have been considered a further step down from his prior film work.

However, many consider his portrayal of Captain Marvel iconic, and the serial itself is a technical achievement in genre film.

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The brilliant Louise Currie.

Rounding out the cast were the obligatory love interest and comic relief in the forms of Louise Currie as Betty Wallace and William Benedict as Whitey, respectively.

With her high cheekbones and distinguished air, it’s understandable why Currie was likened to Katharine Hepburn.

Louise was born in Oklahoma City in 1921. Her college career led her to Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York in 1940. There, she was discovered by legendary Austrian stage and film director Max Reinhart, who used her in a few of his shows. Her next break came at Columbia, where she costarred in a few Westerns. It’s possible that Currie could have had a huge go at stardom, or at least regular acting work, had she not valued her independence.

“My first [job] was at Columbia,” she said. “And I played the heroine in a Western with Charles Starrett. And, that was at Columbia under the auspices of Harry Cohn, who owned and ran Columbia at that time. I was offered a film contract and I declined.

I was probably one of the few that ever declined Mr. Cohn, but I didn’t want to be an actress under his auspices, and I said I would do it ‘my way’. And if other major studios didn’t want me, I would be a freelance player, which I was. And it was kind of more fun for me because I was able to pick and choose and do what I wanted.”

Currie was also savvy as the owner of a small business: Louise Currie Interiors of Los Angeles, where she continued to work as an interior designer while still acting.

William Benedict (who played Billy’s pal Whitey) would act in over one thousand films throughout his career, including over 80 of the low budget Dead End Kids films. Active in film since he was 17, the youthful Benedict often played characters younger than his real age.

Veteran actor Nigel de Brulier appeared in the first chapter as the wizard Shazam, having started in silent films and safely

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made the transition to talkies. He is perhaps most famous for playing Three Musketeers villain Cardinal Richelieu four times and briefly appearing in Republic’s iconic serial Zorro’s Fighting Legion.

The William Witney and John English directed production started filming on December 23, 1940, and ended 39 days later, on January 31, 1941. The rushed production was typical of the movie serial, directors often speeding through one take with the cast and then moving on. It took something as serious as freakish inclement weather to delay the filming by a few days. With a script as thick as a “Los Angeles telephone directory” (according to Coghlan), and twelve chapters to film, it required the cast and crew to put in long workdays. The long hours are most likely why they went with a baby-faced adult like Coghlan rather than an actual child actor.

The preview for The Adventures of Captain Marvel opened with the explosion of Billy’s first transformation into the good Captain, white font in a Whiz Comics style announcing the hyperbole of a dozen “startling never-to-be-forgotten episodes!”

Kids were treated to Captain Marvel walking into a hail of gunfire and flying to tackle two goons. It was hailed as Republic’s “outstanding serial of all time.”

Captain Marvel opens in the Valley of the Tomb where the Malcolm Expedition has arrived to learn the secrets of the ancient Scorpion Dynasty. An army of natives attacks the five-man expedition, along with young Billy Batson and his pal Whitey, Malcolm’s secretary Betty, and turbanned native guide Taj. The quick action is put on hold when Taj gets the army’s leader, Ramin, to call the attack off on a technicality. The Scorpio volcano will erupt when the white man has defiled the tombs, and it has yet to erupt, making the attack unwarranted and dishonorable.

While in a tomb, the stern Taj (played with stoic mastery by white actor John Davidson) warns Malcolm and company about not heeding a warning plaque which guards something that is to stay unseen “for all time.” Billy Batson, the only level headed one in the bunch, refuses to go further, as he feels it would be disrespectful. “Billy is the wisest of us all…I shall follow his example,” Taj declares as he remains in the anteroom of the tomb.

What is the secret hidden behind the plaque, one that will haunt everyone for a dozen chapters? A metal scorpion with five lenses that, when positioned in line with a shaft of sunlight, forms a destructive ray. The expedition finds this out the hard way when they set off a small avalanche in the tomb and are trapped.

Meanwhile Billy, looking for safe ground, is led into a hidden door that shuts behind him and traps him in a room with a large in-wall sarcophagus. The scorpion-embossed coffin opens to reveal – Shazam, the ancient wizard! He knows Billy’s name (by virtue of being all-wise and ancient), and bestows upon Billy the powers of Captain Marvel. Showing Billy a magical inscription on the wall (which magically turns from an ancient cuneiform into English) Shazam reveals the source of Captain Marvel’s power: nothing less than abilities borrowed from Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury!

Of course, they’re all Greek deities and demigods, with the exception of the Biblical Solomon, and oddly not located outside of Greece. We can guess that Billy wasn’t up enough on his ancient mythology, or was just too polite to question the old wizard.

After following the old wizard’s order and saying his name, Billy is ensconced in a flash and puff of smoke and transformed

The Captain Marvel suit, on display at Bob Burns’s private museum.

Photo courtesy of Glen Cadigan.

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Tyler’s Captain Marvel is more in line with Superman than his comic book version. He’s much tougher, serious and immune to wisecracking. The goons are mere fodder to him, as he barrels through them in inventive and harsh ways: he knocks a door down after fleeing bad guys by throwing one of them into it, throws an engine block on top of another, and even tosses one off a roof (an obvious mannequin with a Wilhelm scream dubbed in). The most inventive death comes when Captain Marvel throws one goon’s gun against a wall, and it accidentally goes off and shoots the man. Surprised, Captain Marvel shrugs it off and keeps going with his mission.

Looking Sharpe

Malcolm (Robert Strange), Billy Batson (Frank Coghlan), and Bentley (Harry Worth) discuss the ramifications of the powerful scorpion. into the mighty Captain Marvel! He immediately runs off and moves the enormous slab blocking the entrance to the Scorpion chamber and frees the expedition before saying the magic word and reverting back to himself.

Later, at the camp, Taj translates an ancient scroll that the Scorpion can transmute things into pure gold, as well as destroy them. The scientists decide to split the five lenses up amongst themselves, with Billy taking the scroll. That way, no one person can abuse the Scorpion’s power.

“There’s evil in the air tonight,” Taj says as he smokes a cigarette with a guard. And right he is, for a figure in a black hood and cloak with scorpions emblazoned on his chest, signals for enemy agents to catapult in. In the fracas, one of the expedition is killed, and the metal scorpion itself stolen. As the enemy army attacks, the expedition holds them off as the British Cavalry charges onward to rescue, courtesy of lots of stock footage.

Billy dashes off and turns into Captain Marvel and starts a display of onscreen superhero power rendered believable by Tyler’s powerful presence and the stunt mastery of Davy Sharpe.

The fight that breaks out with Captain Marvel is a combination of amazing feats and actions that are unlike the character. He expertly takes out a few machine gunners with their own machine gun, something the cheery Captain would never do in the comics.

The members make it back to the States, where the Scorpion reveals to his henchman Barnett that he’s actually a member of the expedition! In typical Republic style, the Scorpion proceeds to kill off each member, as the viewers have to guess which one is really the hooded villain.

The cliffhangers usually involve Betty or Whitey, with Billy stuck in a few, and are grand in scope, even including an entire cave melting down on Captain Marvel’s head. One inventive cliffhanger involves Betty calling Captain Marvel on a radio, while Billy lies bound and gagged, ironically helpless as a plane hovers overhead to drop a bomb on their heads.

The last few chapters take the survivors of the Malcolm Expedition back to the Valley of Tombs to get the last piece of the Scorpion…and reveal the true identity of the villain.

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The Adventures of Captain Marvel is a standout serial through the work of stuntman Davy Sharpe, the Lydeckers’ groundbreaking special effects and Witney’s mastery of editing. To show Captain Marvel fly, they combined footage of Sharpe taking off (in one instant, by jumping/diving off a cliff); a harnessed and suspended Tom Tyler in front of a rear-projected screen showing clouds; and shots of a Captain Marvel dummy “flying.”

Sharpe, the “King of the Daredevils,” started on the vaudeville stage at a young age. The vaudeville stage of the early 20th century, due to its demanding physical requirements and dependency upon slapstick humor, gave cinema many of its physical comedians and stuntmen, including Buster Keaton. The conditions of which the actors worked were often unsafe and left little margin for error.

Standing at 5’7”, Sharpe was lithe and powerful. He started at a young age, winning both the 1925 and ‘26 U.S. Tumbling Championships by the time he was 16. He was trained at the Los Angeles Athletic Club under a coach and, because of the presence of silent movie stars, found himself performing as a stunt double.

“If one of them was doing a picture with a little kid, or a little girl, or an old lady who had to fall, they’d say ‘Hey, get the kid down in the gym,’” Davy told Mark Hall in 1973. “Mother would take me to the studio, I’d do my bit and leave. I wasn’t terribly impressed.”

He even learned under Douglas Fairbanks and appeared in a few of his films, including Thief of Baghdad, and performed in several comedies for producer Hal Roach. That work dried up during the Great Depression until Sharpe found himself doubling silent star Harold Lloyd. Performing most of his own stunts, Lloyd nonetheless began using doubles to reduce the risk of injury—which would halt a picture and lose a countless amount of money.

When Republic hired Sharpe in the late ‘30s, it was Davy Sharpe. as an actor with some stunt training, appearing in two Dick Tracy serials and the serial Daredevils of the Red Circle.

So, why did Sharpe become a full-time stuntman instead of an actor? Head stunt master Yakima Cannutt convinced him he’d make more money that way.

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(clockwise) Captain Marvel keeps the scorpion from becoming a symbol of “death and destruction” in the final chapter. Davy Sharpe in the Captain’s costume. Sharpe perfects a flying leap off a roof. The Captain tackles two thugs.

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In The Adventures of Captain Marvel, one of Dave Sharpe’s most famous stunts were in a fight scene in the first chapter: in battle with two raiders, he performs a backwards aerial somersault, simultaneously kicking both men in the chins. He even doubled for Louise Currie, with the miracle of editing and long shots kept him from being “discovered” by the audience.

Witney recalled Sharpe’s “good luck” habit: Dave would smoke an Optima brand cigar and, when the director called for him to perform a stunt, he set the still-lit cigar on edge, performed the stunt, and came back to it.

It’s a good thing that Sharpe was able to double for Tyler, as the athletic and gentle Tyler was a bit on the clumsy side. Not only did he often knock props over, but his punches sometimes accidentally connected with other actors in fight scenes.

Captain Marvel’s flying scenes, considered primitive by today’s computer-generated standards, employed everything from mannequins to rear-projection screens. The main technique was derived from Darkest Africa a few years earlier, when Republic’s special effects geniuses the Lydecker brothers created the flying “Batmen” by using hollowed out mannequins on wires.

The Captain Marvel dummy was made of lightweight papier-mâché and sculpted at seven feet (from head to toe).

The dummy had originally been made for the twice-aborted Superman serial, and was outfitted from a Superman costume to a thin silk Captain Marvel one (with the top made of cotton to give it the required form). It was based off the work of Captain Marvel Jr. artist Mac Raboy, with arms outstretched and back arched.

With four pulley wheels attached to each shoulder and calf, the model was strung up via rope to slide down from rooftop to rooftop, rooftop to ground, or whatever the shot called for. The dummy was even weighted so that it would travel down of its own accord. For shots of Marvel flying upwards, the dummy (and film afterwards) was simply reversed with the cape weighted down.

Tyler reportedly spent hours suspended from wire, in front of the rear-projection process screen of clouds with a fan blowing back both his hair and cape to denote flight.

Having obviously cranked the cloud footage at a slower speed, it played back as accelerated, giving the illusion that Marvel was flying at incredible speeds. When Columbia produced the Superman movie serial years later, they went an even cheaper (and less convincing) route. However, the Lydeckers’ technique would be well aped for The Adventures of Superman television show of the early ‘50s.

Squibs, or small explosives often placed next to blood packets on actors, were used instead of bullets, (but sans the blood packs) to show Marvel’s invincibility. One scene, the first in which Marvel is fired upon, has Tyler sporting a huge grin and walking into the firing bullets and towards the gun-toting thug. Rather than trying to save him, he lets the baddie plunge to his doom, off the side of the dam they’re fighting on.

The Billy-to-Captain-Marvel transformation was amazingly simple, yet dead-on to the comic book version:

The Captain’s a total dummy, thanks to the ingenuity of the Lydecker Brothers. These shots are of the Superman-turnedCaptain Marvel mannequin in action.

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(top left) Tom Tyler becomes the first actor to fly as a superhero onscreen. (bottom left) Billy’s transformation was about as old-school as it gets, in this behind-the-scenes photo. (right) Whitey makes his comics debut in 1941’s Whiz Comics #22.

America. One line casts doubt towards the serial’s events being considered canon: Billy tells Whitey “We were on the Malcolm expedition together the time we made the movie about Capt. Marvel.”

Whether the serial story was a movie in the world of the comics, it got a sequel from the man who would become The Big Red Cheese’s main writer from 1942 to 1953, Otto Binder.

You Otto Be in Comics Otto Binder, born in 1911 in Michigan, was one of six kids in

Billy would stand, fists clenched out to his sides, utter “Shazam!”, there’d be a quick pop and flash followed by a pillar of smoke…and the robust Captain Marvel was revealed, ready to clean house through the next chapter.

The effect was simply a flash powder charge set off in front of Coghlan, a stop of the camera, a switch with Tyler, with another flash charge activated while the camera rolled again. It was all edited together as one continuous shot.

Coghlan once got caught upwind of the detonating charge, and had a few eyebrow hairs singed off.

Whiz Comics #22, out around late summer of 1941, introduced Whitey in the only story both written and drawn

by C.C. Beck. A sequel of sorts to the serial, it involves Whitey and Billy going to find Mr. Malcolm in Central

an Austrian family that had just moved to the States a year prior. Like Siegel and Shuster, Binder and his brother Earl cut their teeth on the newly minted science fiction genre, devouring the pulps as young boys now growing up in Chicago. Both Binder brothers, under the pseudonym “Eando Binder” (for Earl and Otto) published their first science fiction short story, “The First Martian,” for Amazing Stories, in 1932 (although it had been sold a couple of years earlier).

Otto maintained the Eando moniker, and published well over 100 pulp stories, primarily Otto Binder. starring the sentient robot character Adam Link.

When Otto’s brother, Jack, entered the comics industry in the late 1930s, Otto followed, landing at Fawcett Publications in 1940. Otto wrote many of their lesser features, such as “Golden Arrow” and Bulletman.

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Otto’s first Captain Marvel work was writing the FawcettWilliam Witney and John English gave the first livepublished Dime Action Book (a 4” x 5” book with 192 pages action superhero adaptation a pedigree that holds up close to of alternating text and illustrations), Captain Marvel and a century later. the Return of the Scorpion, where Captain Marvel faces the It was clear to Detective Comics that Captain Marvel was return of the villain from the serial in this charming piece of giving Superman a run for his money, and legal shenanigans transmedia storytelling. Working with Mr. Malcolm to save came to the surface during production of The Adventures of Betty and Whitey from the mysterious back-from-the-dead Captain Marvel.

Scorpion, Captain Marvel (and Billy) travel back to Siam Herbert Yates, still stinging from the failure for Superman, where the villain is manipulating Rahman Bar and his Inc. to sign the contract on time, sought damages in December, tribesmen into giving him access to Radium. The characters 1940 for breach of contract. Republic sought $5,388 to recoup (save for the good Captain, who is his usual comic book self) the costs of writing the screenplays (with no mention of the are all drawn to resemble their actors. scripts’ retooling for Doctor Satan) and a speculative $50,000 Binder then took the writing reins of the Captain Marvel in lost profits. comic books, contributing such mainstay characters as Mary Superman, Inc.—represented by Louis Nizer—wrote a cease Marvel (Billy Batson’s long-lost twin sister), Tawky Tawny (a and desist to Republic over the then-screening Adventures of talking tiger in a leisure suit), Mr. Mind (an ultra-intelligent Captain Marvel. After being ignored, Superman Inc. went after psychic worm with spectacles and a voice box), and Black both Fawcett and Republic in a September, 1941 lawsuit.

Adam (an evil prototype Captain Marvel from ancient times who “There was no question that Captain Marvel derived from escaped exile for one appearance before turning to dust upon Superman,” former Fawcett publisher Roscoe Fawcett once said. saying “Shazam!”).

“So why did Superman’s publisher The Captain Marvel adventures pick on us? Simply because we were were colorful, bright and funny. beating them in sales!”

He was accompanied by his sidekicks Mary Marvel and Captain Judge August Hand, who presided Marvel, Jr. (a crippled paperboy, over the 1941 case, decreed that Freddy Freeman, he gained his while Captain Marvel was an powers by saying “Captain infringement upon Superman, Marvel!,” making him the only National Comics1 (the new entity formed when Detective Comics superhero who couldn’t say his absorbed sister publisher Allown name). The Man of Steel American Comics) couldn’t sue usurped the formula of Captain since the McClure Syndicate, who Marvel’s “Family” years later, published the Superman strip, failed when he gained a sidekick in his to issue a copyright statement on teenage cousin, and the stories a few of the strips, thus a sign of took on a lighter tone. Even though National’s abandonment of the they weren’t direct knock-offs, the Superman copyright. The judge also strong influence was there. dismissed the claim against Republic, Captain Marvel spun off into anstating “Republic produced a serial other title, Captain Marvel Advenmotion picture photoplay, using the tures in 1941, earned two sidekicks, comic strips of ‘Captain Marvel’ Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel, which had appeared in Whiz Comics.”

Jr., and eventually outsold Superman.

Basically, it was decided that, while The stories, first drawn in Beck’s Fawcett was infringing, it was an clean style, and then by an army of irrelevant charge because Superman assistants, were light-hearted romps; was no longer legally copyrighted while Superman stories were and (technically) not fully owned by about Superman with Clark Kent National. National kept the lawsuit included as necessary, Captain Marvel stories were about Billy The Scorpion does return, in this Big Little Book going for another decade.

Republic had every desire to Batson, with Captain Marvel only

by Otto Binder. produce a sequel to Captain Marvel, coming in when needed. Captain but refrained due to the ongoing Marvel was modeled after actor Fred litigation. Their first serial option’s 1942 deadline was extended MacMurray, lean and noble but as the series progressed, the

by Fawcett for every year the lawsuit continued. good Captain would gain a slight paunch and become known as Serial competitor Universal was not scared away from “The Big Red Cheese”. His costume lost the shirt flap after a few Republic properties, however, and offered Fawcett $5,000 appearances for a more traditional superhero costume that was in June, 1941 for rights to both Spy Smasher and Bulletman. form-fitting instead of militaristic.

Fawcett’s E.J. Smithson turned around and offered the rights to The sales of Captain Marvel Adventures were boosted by the Republic for an immediate $1,500. serial: selling 2,291,629 in 1941 and up to 6,874, 650 the next They began developing Spy Smasher that August, but decided year. The Adventures of Captain Marvel serial was was not against Bulletman by August 19 in a conversation with Republic’s only commercially successful, but treated the superhero with a head of production, Morris Siegel. seriousness that made his feats believable to audiences.

1

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From here on out, Detective Comics is referred to as National.

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Bit the Bullet The decision to scrap a Bulletman serial came from a fear of further litigation: National may claim Bulletman’s ability to fly was further infringement on Superman. National would settle with Republic in December, 1949 for $15,000 prior to the case going to court for breach of contract.

The copyright suit against Fawcett and Republic was another matter: federal judge John Coxe’s 1950 decision off the 1948 hearing claimed National abandoned the Superman copyright when the McClure Newspaper Syndicate failed to put proper copyright notice on some of the newspaper strips.

After Republic was awarded $1,000 by Coxe, National appealed the decision.

On August 30, 1951, Circuit Judge Learned Hand (ironically, brother of August, from 1941) reversed the previous dismissal, and cited the National Comics lawsuit against Victor Fox for creating Wonder Man as precedent. Also, because McClure was not a direct affiliate of National, he didn’t feel it was just to hold National accountable for abandoning the copyright. Before further hearings could be scheduled, Fawcett and Republic settled out of court in May, 1952. Fawcett Publications, ready to stop publishing comic books anyway, agreed to cease publication of all things Captain Marvel.

Republic was required to pay National $15,000 and not release the Captain Marvel serial to television or create sequels. Since the original agreement’s theatrical rights were still honored, it allowed Republic to eventually release The Adventures of Captain Marvel on home video— something unforeseen in the 1950s.

The serial format lent itself to superhero comics for the first time with “The Monster Society of Evil,” a serialized story that started in March, 1943’s Captain Marvel Adventures #22 and ran a staggering twenty-five issues to May, 1945’s #46.

When Captain Marvel fights Captain Nazi over the crown jewels of a princess from the Middle East, his enemy is working at the behest of a mysterious voice broadcast from a fortress in outer space. Each chapter pits Captain Marvel against a different villain on his path to uncovering the true mastermind, and it’s something not even his wildest dreams could conjure: the hyper intelligent, bespectacled alien worm Mr. Mind! Written by Otto Binder and with pencils by C.C. Beck, it was a tour-de-force in superhero storytelling and set the stage for creating a long-running continuity in monthly comics.

Created during wartime, “Monster Society” is rife with racial stereotypes, including Japanese agents and Billy Batson’s Black sidekick Steamboat. When DC Comics was about to publish an overdue hardcover collection in 2019, they canceled it over those dated and harmful depictions.

The final Captain Marvel comic to hit the stands was The Marvel Family #89 in late 1953. The cover features a young boy, in a plaid shirt, looking at the blank silhouettes of Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., and Mary Marvel. “Holy Moley!” he calls out. “What happened to the Marvel Family?”

(top) This ad in Master Comics #14 (May, 1941) announces the serial to readers. (bottom) Bulletman and Bulletgirl’s serial hopes were dashed before they could begin. Art by Mac Raboy.

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Frank Coghlan, Jr. served as a Navy pilot in World War II, and served in the Office of Information post-war as liaison between both the Navy and Hollywood. He retired at the rank of Lieutenant Commander in 1965, and became a regular commercial actor. His main gig was as a spokesperson for electronics company Curtis Mathes.

Fate wasn’t as kind to the powerful Tyler, unfortunately. He continued to act in Westerns for Republic after Captain Marvel, signing a year contract in July 1941, and landing a prize role in Republic’s Three Mesquiteers series. As a contract player, Tom was only earning around $150 a week, followed by $200 a week the next year.

In 1943, he suited up to play Lee Falk’s famed comic strip character The Phantom for a Columbia serial. The serial, despite its shortcomings (e.g.: The Phantom grappling with a man in a gorilla suit in a later chapter), casts Tyler as a robust and powerful “Ghost Who Walks.”

Tyler also divorced his wife around this time, and his contract with Republic expired as the Mesquiteers films was discontinued. Work became harder to find, with only six roles from 1945 to 1947. 1948 brought about six more roles, including small parts in John Wayne vehicle Red River. He followed it up with a memorable, though short, role in the Wayne-starring film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as a Civil War soldier being operated on in a moving wagon train.

From there on, the former cowboy hero was demoted to playing owlhoots and badmen in Westerns starring the new breed of cowboy. William Witney, in 1950, provided Tyler with his last bit of onscreen cowboy dignity in The Trail of Robin Hood, a Roy Rogers tour de force that culminated in all of the Republic cowboys from years past joining together to help Roy out.

By the early ‘50s, Tom was down and out, and had a chance encounter with an infamous Hollywood icon: cross-dressing low budget film director Ed Wood. The meeting was recalled

by Wood’s actor John Andrews in Wood biography Nightmare of Ecstasy: [Eddie is] driving down Melrose, he’s a little under the influence, daytime, and he runs into a pedestrian.

Knocks him down, picks him back up, puts the thing in park, goes over, and picks up the pedestrian. The pedestrian argued, he didn’t want any help. Eddie says, “No, you have to have it.” He gets him into the car, he says, “I insist on driving you home.” They’re driving along, and Eddie keeps staring at the guy. Finally, it hits Eddie who this man is. He says, “You’re Tom Tyler.”

He says, “No, no.” He denied it twice. Eddie says, “Oh, No, come on, come on, you’re Tom Tyler.” Finally he says, “Okay, I’m Tom Tyler, alright.”

(top) Mr. Mind proved himself more than just a worm in “The Monster Society of Evil” storyline. (bottom) The Marvel Family’s final cover proved prescient.

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The result of that traffic accident was Tom’s supporting role as a deputy in Ed Wood’s TV pilot Crossroad Avenger: The Adventures of the Tucson Kid. Tyler, then in a weakened state, moved back home to Michigan as he began suffering early symptoms of scleroderma.

Scleroderma is a rare autoimmune disease that manifests itself in a hardening of the skin. The most obvious signs are a tightening of facial skin to the point where a person not only has trouble smiling, but also appears far older. It can tighten the skin on the hands to the point where the affected person can’t even bend their fingers. It also affects internal organs, creating scar tissue in the esophagus and restricting breathing.

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Tyler had to move in with his sister in the Polish district of Detroit.

With little more than the clothes on his back, Tom went from riding horses and saving damsels in front of cameras…to spending days sitting in a sunroom or on the front porch, barely able to move.

Tom Tyler died on May 1, 1954, of heart failure caused by the damage scleroderma caused to his once-powerful and then-withered frame.

The World’s Mightiest Mortal remained invisible for a good twenty years, until DC Comics brought him out of the mothballs in 1973 in a half-hearted attempt at a revival.

Co-creator C.C. Beck was hired to draw the new adventures, but only stayed on for ten issues, before leaving the book out of disgust over the scripts.

“I could see from the start that the stories were pretty bad,” Beck told interviewer Tom Heintjes. “They got worse and worse, and finally I refused to illustrate them. Only Sol Harrison ever spoke to me after that; the others would have nothing to do with me. I would write them letters, and they wouldn’t even answer them. They pretend I don’t exist.”

Beck himself maintained a personal crusade against realism in comics, produced a column for the industry magazine The Comics Journal, and edited the fan magazine Fawcett Collectors of America, until his death in 1989.

(top left)Tom Tyler cut an impressive Phantom in 1943 for Columbia. (top right) The New York Times reported on his tragic death on May 1, 1954. (bottom) Creator Jerry Ordway made the classic current with The Power of Shazam!

Despite his 1970s comic book shortcomings, Captain Marvel experienced a slight resurgence with a low-budget live-action Saturday morning show, titled Shazam! (Marvel Comics registered the trademark on Captain Marvel in ‘60s).

Captain Marvel still flies at DC Comics, done as more of a straight superhero than Parker and Beck ever intended him, and endures a constant stream of reinvention. He was introduced into the DC Universe proper in 1986 by writer Roy Thomas and artist Tom Mandrake, and more successfully by writer/artist Jerry Ordway in 1994’s The Power of Shazam! graphic novel and consequent comic book series. Ordway’s take restored the original flap on the costume, and was a tip of the hat to the Republic serial.

He was officially named Shazam as part of DC’s company-wide reboot in 2012. Written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Gary Frank, the current version has Billy Batson accompanied by Mary, Freddy, and three of their foster siblings as a new Marvel Family. It was successful enough to serve as the basis of a 2019 film and a 2023 sequel.

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T

he Superman theatrical cartoons are firm testimony to the success of the newborn superhero genre and came hot on the heels of Captain Marvel’s big screen debut. Produced by the pioneering Fleischer Brothers, their influence can still be felt over eighty years later.

The seeds for the Fleischer Studio were planted in 1915, when Max Fleischer, then the editor of Popular Science Monthly, invented the Rotoscope. This device allows an animator to trace actual film onto an animation cel, creating more lifelike and naturalistic moment. It is the first example of motion capture technology in film.

All three Fleischer brothers, Max, Joe, and Dave, arrived in the United States with their European immigrant parents in 1887. With Joe’s mechanical aptitude, and with Dave posing as the subject of their inaugural cartoon, Koko the Clown, they successfully combined the naturalistic movements of film with the expressiveness of animation. Koko became the guinea pig for the brothers’ experiments in animation, combining traditional animation footage and clay to create a collage effect. Oftentimes, the brothers themselves “starred” in the live-action segments.

Partnering with John Bray, an animator who was packaging work for Paramount Studios, the Fleischers produced a series of cartoons (titled Out of the Inkwell), starting in 1919. By 1921, Max and Dave broke off as their own studio, with Max handling the business side and Dave the creative. Whether

Max and Dave Fleischer in the studio.

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Koko and his dog, Fitz are beheaded by a crazy sheik, or running against the backdrop of a live circus to find a missing girl, these “Inkwell Imps” (as they were soon called) always wound back up in the ink bottle in the end.

Aside from the revolutionary rotoscope technology, the Fleischers also used “in-betweeners,” or staff artists to draw the “in-between” motion of the animated figures. Many of the future Golden Age comic book artists, including Jack Kirby and Sheldon Mayer, got their start as in-betweeners at Fleischer.

The Fleischers held their own in the sound transition, debuting Betty Boop in the 1930 cartoon Dizzy Dishes. Betty Boop was a sexy and flapperish creation of the Fleischers who, with her short dresses and garter belts was deemed too sexy after the censorship codes of the 1930s. They also licensed Popeye the Sailor man from King Features Syndicate for a string of highly acclaimed short cartoons. Many of the Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons used Fleischer’s trademark and revolutionary 3-D approach, the Three-Dimensional Set Back. The machine was simply a camera set with a pane of glass that an animation cell could be hung against (there were pegs over the glass, and corresponding registration holes on each cell), and the glass was set before a model/ miniature placed on a turntable set against a backdrop. This way, the cameramen could move the scenery along a track or the turntable, the drawn cartoon figures “imposed” via the glass, to create the illusion of movement. As a result of this device, the cartoons combined live-action models with animated figures, giving the cartoons a sense of foreground, midground, and background…and an eerie and effective sense of perspective and realism.

A 1930s color documentary shows Max Fleischer in the camera room, referred to as “Popeye’s filmland poppa”. At this point in his life, Max is a distinguished man of thick build, wearing a gray suit and glasses, his temples smartly grayed and a neatly trimmed moustache on his upper lip. In contrast, Dave was once described as “short, mild-mannered…Easy to approach and confident.”

By 1939, the Fleischers used their rotoscope and 3-D techniques to produce the classic animated adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, their first feature that was an attempt to compete with Disney after the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs two years before.

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Straight Outta Krypton Republic lost the Superman license a second time because Paramount was apparently willing to outbid them. When Paramount asked the Fleischers how much they’d need to produce Superman, the disinterested pair gave the exorbitant budget to produce the first short “I couldn’t figure out how to make Superman look right without spending a lot of money,” Dave Fleischer said. “I told they’d have to spend $90,000 on each one.”

This was three times the cost of an average Popeye short, and the brothers were shocked when Paramount agreed to it. Every following short was budgeted at $100,000 per roughly ten-minute cartoon. One cost-saving measure was to draw forms based on blocks and wedges rather than circles and ovals.

Superman, only a couple years after his debut, had become enough of an institution for National Comics publisher Harry Donenfeld to form Superman Inc. Sales of Action Comics doubled within nine months, and Superman was given his own

(left) Koko gives a sad farewell to Betty Boop’s Snow-White (1933). (right, top and bottom) 1939’s Gulliver’s Travels was the Fleischers’ foray into feature length.

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Model sheets for the Superman cartoons.

quarterly title with Superman #1 in Summer of 1939 (which, alone, turned out 900,000 copies a month). By this point, a yellow field had formed behind the “S” in his chest emblem, his lace-up gladiator boots were replaced with angular form-fitting ones, and his costume became just a tad bit brighter. The boy from Krypton had already become a pop culture icon.

Before the character was even a year old, National was talking with the McClure Syndicate about a daily comic strip, and Jerry Siegel was demanding more money for he and Joe. According to Jack Liebowitz, the pair was already getting $4 more a page than their contemporaries (who normally made $6 a page) with their $10 rate, and that Jerry’s request for a $15 rate was unreasonable: As I have pointed out to you many times, our company has very little to gain in a monetary sense from the syndication of this material. Also bear in mind, that we own the feature “Superman” and that we can at any time replace you in the drawing of that feature and that without our consent this feature would not be syndicated and therefore you would be the loser in the entire transaction.

The Superman comic strip premiered in 1941, with a daily circulation of 20,000,000 from 300 newspapers. A syndicated radio show premiered on February 12, 1940 with an introduction that announced “It’s a giant bird!

It’s a plane! It’s SUPERMAN!” The intro was written by writer Allen Ducovny and DC employee Robert Maxwell, and echoes and variations of it are still being used today. Superman and Clark Kent were played by actor Bud Collyer, who dropped his voice a level when “transforming” to Superman from Clark Kent. Joan Alexander voiced the snappy Lois Lane. Both would lend their voices to the new cartoons.

Early episodes of the show awkwardly explained Superman’s origin in a way radically different from the comics: Rather than Superman arriving to Earth as an infant, he arrives as a full-grown adult, costume and all. In no time at all, Superman became a radio success story, and would have an irreversible effect on both the comics and other media. Superman coined the phrase “Up, up and away!” (spoken by Superman to illustrate his taking off), and “This looks like a job for Superman!” If the comics got the Man of Steel’s name out there initially, the radio show broadcast it to enough young ears to turn him into a household name.

The radio show resulted in Superman’s world growing and changing, sometimes a matter of the tail wagging the dog. Radio-created characters like Daily Planet editor Perry White and cub reporter Jimmy Olsen were added into the comics.

Eventually, radio took Siegel’s editorially rejected 1940 idea for K-Metal, a metal from Superman’s home planet that could kill him, and presented it as Kryptonite. The original idea for K-metal may have flown, had that first story not had Superman revealing his identity to Lois Lane, recruiting her as a regular ally.

The Fleischers, in translating Superman’s world to the silver screen, gave it more realworld elements, via shadows and dark hues that more reminiscent of Superman’s inaugural Bud Collyer. were appearance in Action Comics #1. They may have only had the early appearances to work with when first designing the cartoon: Superman’s bodysuit is a dark navy blue, the boots and cape a deep red, and his chest emblem features the later “S” style, but with the original black background with a yellow border.

Siegel and Shuster were now making a living off of Superman, complete with a ten-year contract. It might not have been all they wanted, but it was enough to start a studio of four other artists to assist on Superman. Joe Shuster definitely needed the help, as his failing eyesight made a normal workload difficult to maintain. The

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(clockwise from top left) The iconic Fleischer Superman. A drawing for the episode “Terror on the Midway.” An animation cel from the debut short, also known as “The Mad Scientist.”

A key photo from the debut. (bottom) Metropolis was an art deco dream in the Fleischer Superman cartoons.

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The Daily Planet goes from being a nondescript skyscraper to the classic image of the newspaper in the fourth cartoon, a large ringed globe atop the building’s spire. Interestingly enough, Metropolis wasn’t the name given to Superman’s city in “Electrical Earthquake”: it was referred to as New York, specifically Manhattan Island, although it did have the Metropolis name by the fifth cartoon, “The Bulleteers.”

Superman, in the comics, began to fly rather than merely “leap tall buildings in a single bound,” which was reflected in the openers, beginning with July 10, 1942’s “Volcano.”

That same cartoon was also the final one that billed Superman as a Max Fleischer Cartoon. The brothers were unable to pay back the production loan granted for the failed Gulliver’s Travels, which caused Paramount to take over the studio (without the now-fired brothers’ involvement) and rename it Famous Studios.

While “Terror on the Midway” had Dave credited as director (as he had been on all previous cartoons), it was the final one with the brothers’ On Sept. 26, 1941, movie screens full involvement, but they definitely flickered Superman’s onscreen went out on a high note. One of the origin for the first of many times: more atmospheric entries, “Midway” “In the endless reaches of the has Superman helping quell a universe, there once existed a planet mass escape of circus animals, known as Krypton, a planet that culminating in a fistfight with a burned like a green star in the gigantic gorilla. Someone else may heavens…” the self-titled first Superman #19 (Nov.-Dec., 1942) features a hilarious have stepped in to finish things up cartoon announced, the camera from Dave Fleischer, as this one story where Clark must keep Lois from discovering features more close-ups than usual, panning through space to a shot of the planet. Within a matter of minutes, his secret identity–in the cartoons. By Jerry Siegel, with the action usually filling up and Krypton blows up and Superman’s flowing beyond the frame.

Joe Shuster, and John Sikela. origin is quickly recapped, announcing From there on, the cartoons “the infant from Krypton is now the Man of Steel!” An abbrevitook on a propaganda slant, with America’s recent entry into the ated form of the opening would appear in front of every Superman Second World War against Japan, Italy, and Germany. Animator cartoon from there on out, first presenting the classic phrases Seymour Kneitel directed the following “Japoteurs,” with “Faster than a speeding bullet” and “Look, up in the sky!”

“Showdown” afterwards the first with the Famous Studios name Where Joe Shuster’s Superman lived in a straightforward on the credits. The Fleischer episodes had contained more standard world, where buildings world, where buildings were usually superhero fare, but the Famous Studios ones had Superman going generic slabs and cars were often of one make and model, against the Japanese (the excellently paced “The Eleventh Hour” the Fleischers had Superman living in an art deco paradise and “Japoteurs”) and spies (in “Secret Agent”). Of course, a killer, with shadows dramatically creeping around objects. Joe’s reanimated mummy, a Superman decoy, African tribe, and strange Superman was dynamic in concept, while Max and Dave’s hawkpeople were thrown into the mix for good measure. The in execution.

Famous Studios shorts, while slightly weaker in the animation, The rotoscoping technology further developed with Gulliver’s were definitely stronger in plot; the Fleischer shorts mostly Travels was applied to the Superman cartoons to awesome effect featured Superman against a conflict (nature, mad scientists, etc) as the Man of Steel plummeted gracefully from the sky. He was with very little exposition and heaps of action, while the Famous often fighting mad scientists or techno-gangsters who always Studios told an entire short story in the span of eight minutes. managed to find hideouts on nearby islands, complete with large By the time the final cartoon, “Secret Agent,” screened on subterranean lairs and weapons of mass destruction. It was the August 30, 1943, the entire seventeen-cartoon series had cost stuff of early science fiction: man versus technology, be it killer $530,000 altogether. Even though the production became beleaflying robots, magnets that pull killer asteroids towards the Earth, guered toward the end, and the cartoons more wartime propaganda or Earthquake-inducing death rays. Superman didn’t have time to than just escapist entertainment, the Superman cartoons remain a fight domestic violence or lynch mobs; the closest he’d come to high bar for superheroes in animation, and the first time the Man that in the cartoon series was in taking on an escaped gorilla. of Steel took over movie theater screens. duo were now faced with churning out fifty comic book pages, and all of the Superman daily and Sunday comic strips a month.

For consistency, Shuster inked all of the character faces.

Jerry continued to write other comics for Detective, creating Robotman (a robot with a man’s brain), Red, White and Blue (a patriotic crime-fighting trio, each from a different military branch) and, most notably, the baleful Spectre (the revenge-driven ghost of a dead cop who, like Superman, also didn’t have time for women).

Despite any editorial setbacks, the boys did have a “created by” byline on the comic and upcoming cartoon; unfortunately, the credit wouldn’t remain for much longer. The cartoons are the last time they received credit for their creation for decades.

The Fleischer Brothers’ romanticizing of Superman for the silver screen not only proved the visual power of the character, but also pushed him further towards iconic status and brought both him (and the cinematic superhero) to new audiences.

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U

p until America’s entrance into the war, motion picture producers refrained from identifying countries with whom we were at war on the screen by specific name.

However, now that there is no question as to who is our enemy, the film writers can bluntly name their enemies. And Republic’s new serial, “Spy Smasher”...is one of the first films in which Nazis are Nazis.

—Republic Press book for Spy Smasher 1941 was an eventful year for William Witney; John English temporarily left movie serials behind for the greener pastures of Republic’s motion picture wing, leaving him to work without the partner he developed a system of serial creation with.

And Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, officially pulling America into World War II. Witney had already been approached about a commission to work with a marine photographic unit out of Washington, D.C. The combination of Captain Marvel’s earlier success and the oncoming storm that was World War II had Republic taking on another Fawcett Publications character, the begoggled Spy Smasher.

Spy Smasher, along with Captain Marvel, made his first appearance in Whiz Comics #2. Created by Bill Parker and drawn by C.C. Beck more realistically than his Captain Marvel, Virginia sportsman Alan Armstrong (who Beck modeled off famous actor Errol Flynn) donned an aviator helmet with goggles, long cape, and a flight suit to become the mostly silhouetted Spy Smasher.

Creeping around in the shadows in his first appearance, Spy Smasher was more somber than the headlining Big Red Cheese, foiling foreign agent The Mask in a noir world.

“Spy Smasher”’s beauty was in the intense and heavy shadows rendered by Beck, contrasted with bright primary colors. Even though Spy Smasher flew around in the “Gyrosub,” that little bit of fantasy seemed grounded in relation to the character’s mortality and semirealistic foes. When the strip fell into the hands of artist Pete Costanza (a regular inker of Beck’s work) by 1941, it lost the romance of the earlier Beck strip. The stylized-by-Beck aviator uniform became a more standard superhero costume at the tip of Costanza’s pen.

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Spy Smasher even went toe-to-toe with Captain Marvel in March, 1941’s Whiz Comics #15. The Mask, hobbling around on crutches from their last encounter, captures Spy Smasher and zaps him with his Brainograph, ordering him to “work AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT!…KILL all the generals!”

In a shocking moment, the programming proves itself a bit too well, as Spy Smasher clobbers Mask to death, and then goes on his mission of sabotage. Captain Marvel comes onto the scene in the next issue, drawn by Beck, and the titans tussle for three more, with Beck drawing the Marvel chapters, with Smasher’s

by Charles Sultan. The result was a mish-mash of styles with Beck’s mastery of design and simplicity far beyond Sultan’s straightforward superhero work.

Luckily for both Spy Smasher and America, the brainwashing wore off in time for his own title with the cover date of June, 1941.

The Adventures of Captain Marvel was still in the midst of its run when Universal Studios made Republic an offer for both Spy Smasher and Bulletman at $5,000. Pleased with Adventures of Captain Marvel, Fawcett’s E.J. Smithson gave Republic’s William Saal a take-it-or-leave-it-on-the-spot offer to license both at $1,500 on June 11, 1941. Continuing the mutual relationship was a no-brainer for both parties.

Bulletman was police criminologist Jim Barr, who used a brainpower-enhancing formula and gravity-defying bulletlike helmet to fight criminalsby slugging or essentially headbutting them. Launching into the air and flying like his namesake, Bulletman was also impervious to bullets (thanks, as well, to his helmet).

(left) Gray Morrow’s personal illustration of Spy Smasher. Scan courtesy of Marc Svennson. (right) Spy Smasher fights from the shadows, from his debut in Whiz Comics #2. Art by C.C. Beck.

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(top to bottom) Kane Richmond and Marguerite Chapman strike a publicity pose. Stills of Richmond as Spy Smasher.

After Republic passed on Bulletman, for fear his ability to fly would leave them vulnerable to further legal shenanigans from National Comics, it was knocked down to a $750 option for Spy Smasher alone. They signed the final contract on August 28, and it came in at an unprecedented 42 pages. Republic was obligated to use Spy Smasher’s name and costume, and it also came with a decade-long option for a serial. For $100 a week, Harrison Carter was hired to write the 15,000 word treatment that would then go to the serial’s writing team.

After completion of the first draft estimating script (written to figure the budget), producer Hiram S. “Bunny” Brown left Republic to serve in the Army Signal Corps and was replaced with William O’Sullivan. It may have been behind John English’s desire to leave the serial unit and finally move into film, leaving Witney to solo direct with a producer he wasn’t personally fond of either. His condition for O’Sullivan was that he had the cooperation of the producer in directing the film. For $175 a week, Witney directed the estimated $120,000 production over the winter, with exceptions for the holidays.

“The costume he wore made me laugh,” Witney recalled, but Republic was contractually bound to have Spy Smasher wear it in the serial. To boot, the script “had put in the kitchen sink and the toilet.” Spy Smasher quite easily could have been the worst serial Witney ever directed.

Despite the director’s coldness towards Spy Smasher, he delivered a standout serial that holds up surprisingly well. The production benefits from a perfect leading man type in Kane Richmond, Witney’s dynamism behind the camera, and some of Republic’s best fight scenes.

Pure Kane Sugar Kane Richmond had all the features of a popular leading man: he was strapping and muscular at six feet, granite-jawed, steelyeyed, and an amazingly good actor. Richmond was born as Fred W. Bowditch in Minneapolis on December 23, 1906.

Fred grew to excel in sports, and graduated from the University of Minnesota.

Working as a film booker for the TiffanyStahl Motion Picture Exchange in Minneapolis when 24, Richmond became the west coast representative for Kane Richmond.

Columbia Pictures.

He was noticed by an executive from Universal, who got him a screen test. The Republic press book for Spy Smasher put it this way:

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The company for whom he worked thought he could pep up their business on the Pacific Coast, but, once he arrived, studio executives had a still more practical use for his talents; they placed him under contract as an actor.

According to an article in Screen Thrills Illustrated, Bowditch bumped into an agent friend who took him to Universal in July, 1930 and he was cast as the boxer Kid Roberts.

Soon after, he landed a small role in 1932’s Behind the Mask with Boris Karloff. Fox awarded him a starring role in action film Devil Tiger in 1933, alongside rising star Marion Burns. An article in The New York Times very succinctly detailed Kane’s biggest hurdle of filming. There was a scene that called for his hero to be wrapped in the coils of a venomous python: Kane Richmond was engaged to play the hero of our story – and on the way out here he told us that he hated the sight of a snake…Yet, three times in the last three days, Kane Richmond has struggled with a thoroughly alive and businesslike python, twentyfive feet in length. On his feet, on the ground, on his feet again, he has succeeded in holding the snake’s snapping mouth away from his face, while fighting to free himself from the triple coils around his body…[Kane] still hates snakes, but, apparently, he dislikes doubles even more, for it was at his own request that [director Clyde] Elliott allowed him to fight the python in person.

Richmond told a different story to Screen Thrills in 1963, which noted it was the producers’ idea to have him perform his stunts: They kept the snake in a big trunk with a cloth sack over his head. Then a team of men would remove the snake, coil him around me, remove the sack and start filming. It took ten men to unwind the snake before he’d crushed the life out of me.

Devil Tiger, in many ways, proved Kane Richmond’s undoing and sabotaged his career.

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Devil Tiger was helmed by Clyde E. Elliott, who had just enjoyed the success of Bring ‘Em Back Alive, and Fox producer Sol Wurtzel personally lobbied for Burns as co-star. Burns, then married to actor Bruce McFarlane, and Richmond began an affair while filming in British Malaya.

They stayed after the production left in March, 1933 and apparently charged the expenses to the studio. They returned to the States and secretly married on May 22, 1933, and publicly again the next year.

Wurtzel at Fox was angered at their move and (according to Richmond’s account to Sam Sherman) virtually blackballed the actor.

Two years later, in 1935, he played sidekick to a horse and a dog in The Adventures of Rex and Rinty, a Rex the King of the Wild Horses and Rin Tin Tin, Jr. serial that was Kane’s first role in the genre. Not long after that, he had an uncredited bit part in the final chapter of Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars before acting in a number of Columbia and Poverty Row studio films. Wurtzel did offer him a contract at Fox in 1939 but used it to punish him by placing him in supporting roles in B pictures. He left Fox and resumed freelancing, where he became a top player for Republic.

Kane Richmond exuded a confidence and vulnerability that elevated the material. He earned $450 a week for his four weeks filming Spy Smasher.

Hand-Picked Femme The beautiful Marguerite Chapman, reminding Witney of serial star Frances Gifford, was cast as love interest Eve Corby and earned $225 a week for her co-starring role.

“I know from my father that her nickname was ‘Slugger’,” Marguerite’s niece, Norma Dolan, said. “She was a tomboy and loved baseball. She grew up with four brothers — Frederick, Harold, Edward (my Father) and Alfred and, being the third child, she had two older brothers to contend with.”

Marguerite was born in Chatham, New York on March 9, 1918 to an engineer with the New York Railroad and a housewife. At 19, Marguerite was working as a telephone switchboard operator in White Plains after attending a New York millinery (hat-making) school. After being urged by friends to pursue modeling, she landed a gig for a local agency.

“She became a model for the John Powers Agency in 1939,” Dolan said. “That’s where her career turned to acting. Sherman Fairchild (with whom she had a long romantic affiliation)

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introduced her to [film producer and director] Howard Hughes, who gave her a screen test at his Long Island studio.”

Again, per Republic’s PR department: One day Howard Hughes happened to be visiting an artist friend of his. There was Marguerite posing on a bench, demonstrating the advantages of a fingernail polish while the artist was putting the scene on canvas.

Hughes was impressed, and before Marguerite knew what was happening she was on her way to Hollywood for a screen test.

Shortly after, Marguerite landed roles in several pictures, apparently placed under exclusive contract by Hughes.

Marguerite made the rounds, socially. On a professional note, she became one of the seven-member Navy Blues Sextet for the war film Navy Blues, in June of 1941. One of the other members was serial queen Kay Aldridge, who would star in Republic’s serial Perils of Nyoka the next year. Per her contract for Spy Smasher, Marguerite was to receive no less than second billing for the serial.

She was 21 at the time of Spy Smasher and, according to the press book, still living at home with her family.

Sam Flint rounded out the cast as Admiral Corby while Tristram Coffin appeared as Drake, the Nazi agent who works for a mock news station. Coffin would become a huge presence in movie serials and television in the next decade.

The fight scenes in Spy Smasher were crushing and required a veritable army of stunt performers. Davy Sharpe built a team of close to eighteen, including Yakima Cannutt in his final stunt role (he went on to stunt coordinator and eventually became a second unit, then full director), and Tom Steele.

(left) Marguerite Bennet in one of many pin-ups from her career. (right) Kane Richmond, unmasked, as Spy Smasher.

Tom Steele, who ended his career with 48 Republic serials under his belt, performed many of the seemingly superhuman stunts. Steele came to Hollywood in 1928 with the hope of getting work in Westerns since he was experienced with riding horses. When he was snubbed for a starring role, he went off and worked construction for a year, and then came back and landed stuntwork in the Errol Flynn film Captain Blood in 1935.

Yates was so taken with Steele’s leading man looks that he became the only stunt player at Republic with a contract.

In a year, his signature stunt work merited him the unbilled starring role in The Masked Marvel, an entire serial developed around his stunting ability.

While still in the early production phase, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover was going J. Edgar Hoover. to deliver a prologue that placed Spy Smasher’s fictional role in the all-too-real encroaching war:

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Unlike almost every other country in the world, the United States has never resorted to the use of spies except for purely military purposes when we are not actually at war. Unfortunately for the peace of the world there are nations that do not hesitate to use not only spies but their more sinister companions, the propagandist and the saboteur. Today is a time of crisis; a period during which all Americans must be alert to these enemies within our borders as well as the dangers from without. Only by the utmost vigilance can we safeguard our liberty and maintain our national unity. While this picture you are about to see is entirely fictional, its hero Spy Smasher symbolizes American patriotism in action against those subversive forces which may be far from imaginary.

The attack on the American naval base of Pearl Harbor on December 7 by Japan finally pushed the United States to engage in the war, and also rendered Hoover’s introduction unnecessary.

It was dropped by the first day of shooting on December 22. The production would ramp up for a grueling 38 days.

The opening salvo of Spy Smasher starts in German-occupied France, where a mysteriously clad figure rifles through papers in a darkened office. Spy Smasher is caught by Nazi guards

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and, despite his best efforts at fighting them off, is captured and tortured in the Gestapo dungeon. Refusing to admit to being an American agent, Spy Smasher is sentenced to death by firing squad. Befriended by a French resistance agent, Spy Smasher fakes his death and heads off to America to stop the notorious Nazi plans to deluge the U.S.A. with counterfeit money.

And that’s just in the first five minutes, before Spy Smasher reveals himself to his twin brother Jack on a train after saving him from a Nazi spy. Alan Armstrong had faked his overseas death, and continued to fight Nazism as Spy Smasher while in France.

Back in the good ol’ United States, he teams up with Jack, who is engaged to Eve Corby, daughter of Naval Intelligence head Admiral Corby, whom they must constantly save from Nazi agents.

After saving Corby, their fight to prevent The Mask’s sabotage through counterfeit money leads them to a hidden warehouse under the front of the Acme Café, as well as bringing Spy Smasher back to France. From there, the plot gets entangled in everything from a secret experimental Bat Plane (that ironically resembles Spy Smasher’s comic counterpart’s GyroSub) to the kidnapping of Admiral Corby to recovering stolen gold.

Spy Smasher deviated from the source material, with both the creation of Jack and his position as Eve Corby’s fiance, and Alan’s overseas operations as Spy Smasher— after having faked his own death. The premise makes Spy

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Smasher more unique than his more standard mystery man comic book origins as a playboy archetype.

The Mask, played by German actor Hans Schumm, rarely wore his trademark white mask – during his rare encounters with Spy Smasher, and always when doing televisor broadcasts (the favorite tool of serial villains from Ming the Merciless on…this “television phone” that allowed visual communication and spying ability still shows up in today’s kids’ cartoons) – and it is obviously shoehorned in by Witney and company. His thick German accent and bulldog-like features made him a formidable foe physically. It’s a shame that he didn’t do more of the heavy lifting against his arch-foe.

The fight scenes were, in typical Republic fashion, brutal: The train fight scene in the opening chapter has Spy Smasher and a Nazi agent punching it out through a train car, out the back, and over the edge to his apparent death.

When Spy Smasher goes to rescue the kidnapped Eve in Chapter 11 (“Hero’s Death”) he ends up pursued by Drake and two henchmen on a rooftop. Shadows creep across the character’s faces in the nighttime pursuit, the tension enhanced by noir-ish lighting. Running towards a descending ladder, Spy Smasher is shot several times, ultimately falling off the roof and crashing on the sidewalk below. Unlike most movie serial heroes, he doesn’t get out of this chapter…

When the next, and final, chapter opens, we learn that Jack posed as Spy Smasher to save Eve. The vengeful Spy Smasher arrives in time to kill two of Jack’s assailants and capture Drake himself. Eve stoops over her fiancé’s body as, gasping, Jack reveals that he’d knocked Alan out and taken his place. The climax of the serial doesn’t involve Spy Smasher going face to face with the Mask, but engaging in a knock-down, drag-out fight with Drake on a speedboat while going to stop the fleeing Mask in the Nazi’s own sub.

Spy Smasher is an exceptional serial, with no small credit going to the exceptional cast. Kane Richmond is convincing as two separate characters, while Marguerite Chapman’s acting chops shine as Eve Corby. Even though it was kiddie fare that was shot on a killer schedule, Spy Smasher embodies “A” movie performances.

“We both loved Jack,” Spy Smasher admits to Eve at the end, as Admiral Corby bestows a medal on his uniform. There’s no glory in this somber ceremony, and no triumph in the tired Alan’s face.

Filming for Spy Smasher began on December 22 and proved intensely grueling, even by serial standards, stretching out into five weeks’ worth of sixteen-hour days that started at 6 AM and often wrapped by 10 PM. The athletic and tough Richmond endured, apparently doing many of his own stunts. He also had to do the work of two actors, in playing both Armstrong brothers.

“It wasn’t just all those goddamned fights,” Richmond told historian Alan Barbour. “I’d have to go through all the moves in the Spy Smasher outfit, then change into the suit and do everything in the same scene as the brother. And I was damn lucky whenever I got more than three minutes to change!”

But overall it was simply an extremely tiring serial to shoot, and the crew was relieved to celebrate wrapping over drinks in the Little Bohemia bar after a celebratory meal.

“This is the first picture where they should have shelved the picture and released the producer,” Witney joked, minutes before the final punchline to the entire joke was quite literally delivered.

(top) “Hero’s Death” was actually not a hyperbolic title. (middle) In the final chapter, stuntman Davy Sharpe dives after an escaping motorboat, hanging onto a rope and trailing behind. Sharpe was dragged into the water more than anticipated and nearly drowned. It became a running joke between him and director Witney. (bottom) The somber final minutes of Spy Smasher.

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Ralph Oberg, a construction boss who didn’t get along with Witney, was also there and extremely drunk. When Witney came back from the bathroom, Oberg sucker punched him and Richmond replied with his own punch, delivering “a punch I can still hear,” Witney said decades later.

But it took an overhand swing administered by Witney’s wife, Maxine, that allegedly knocked Oberg out cold.

The Republic brass also experienced a knock-out in watching early screenings between March and May and many deemed it Republic’s best serial. However, Yates and Siegel opted to not make a sequel after balancing the budget required with the box office revenues. The comics fared beautifully: Spy Smasher #1’s circulation started at 338,935 in 1941 and spiked to 1,114,526 the next year.

In the end, Spy Smasher was a surprising hit for Republic. Even though Witney may have despised working on the serial, it has been regarded as one of the better serials in the medium. He left directing to film combat photography for the U.S. Marines; Witney returned to directing afterwards, but his serial days were mostly behind him at that point, with the exception of 1946’s excellent The Crimson Ghost for Republic.

Richmond co starred in Brenda Starr, Reporter in 1945 before playing pulp and radio hero The Shadow in a series of three light-hearted Monogram short films: The Shadow Returns, Behind the Mask, and The Missing Lady. While the Shadow made few appearances, Richmond shone as the fast-talking and witty Lamont Cranston, amateur criminologist. Pierre Watkins (who later played Perry White in the Superman movie serial), appeared as Commissioner Weston. The next year, while Spy Smasher was making some of his final comic book appearances, Richmond wrapped up his serial

(left) Kane Richmond as the title character in Spy Smasher. (right) Kane Richmond cut a smooth Shadow, in his rare costume appearances in The Shadow Returns.

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(top) Kane Richmond, director William Witney, and cast between takes. Photo courtesy Jay Dee Witney. (middle) Spy Smasher at the hands of Nazis.(bottom) Spy Smasher about to escape death in a mine. career by starring in Brick Bradford, based on the science fiction comic strip character.

In 1948, he became part owner and manager of a dressmanufacturing firm and never looked back. Richmond died on March 22, 1973 in Corono Del Mar, California at age 66.

Marguerite Chapman continued to lead the life of a starlet and pin-up girl, most notably touring bases with the USO and entertaining troops. She was deemed everything from “The Girl With Whom We’d Like to Keep an Appointment in Berlin” to “Miss Breathless of 1943” by U.S. troops, and a “cinemadonna” by famed columnist Walter Winchell. Her gorgeous looks unsurprisingly made it on the cover of Yank, The Army Weekly twice in a year’s time.

She received a leading lady role in 1943’s Destroyer, alongside Edward G. Robinson and Glenn Ford, 1945’s Counter-Attack with Paul Muni, 1950’s Audie Murphy film Kansas Raiders, and Appointment in Berlin with George Sanders. She would appear in the Marilyn Monroe film The Seven Year Itch in 1955, with her final film role in the B-movie The Amazing Transparent Man. Chapman continued a second career as a socialite, and her dating life made the gossip columns rounds. By 1948, she left her contract at Columbia (during an industry recession) and married the lawyer G. Bentley Ryan, a marriage that lasted less than a year before she left citing “extreme cruelty” on Ryan’s part. It didn’t keep her from success, as she worked regularly in a variety of dramatic roles on television. Marguerite left acting full time to sell real estate in 1956, and married a television director in 1964. She started to dabble in painting, and was soon displaying her work in West Coast art galleries, winning a few awards in the process.

After leaving her third husband, John Bremerkamp, in 1972, she remained single and lived in North Hollywood with her dogs. The movies came knocking on her door in the mid-1990s when she was asked to audition to play the older version of Kate Winslet’s character, Rose, in James Cameron’s record-breaking film Titanic. Unfortunately, Marguerite had become too ill, and had to pass on the role that would have been a fine bookend to her life and career.

Marguerite passed away on August 31, 1999. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“She had a wonderful (and somewhat naughty) personality,” Dolan said of her aunt. “She was demanding at times and generous as well. She was still very attractive at 81 years old, and loved to socialize. She always wanted her pictures taken from the side, chin slightly up if she had control of the pose.”

Spy Smasher, the comic book hero, endured through the Second World War and was unsuccessfully rechristened Crime Smasher in 1947. He faded away into comic book obscurity a year later but still pops up from time to time in the pages of DC Comics, especially in Jerry Ordway’s The Power of Shazam comic book in the late ‘90s.

Ed Hulse’s “Anatomy of a Serial: Spy Smasher” was an invaluable resource for this chapter and is the definitive in-depth essay on the making of. It can be found in Blood ‘N’ Thunder’s Cliffhanger Classics, Volume 2.

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B

atman was a pulp response to Superman’s science fiction roots, created by an ambitious young cartoonist and his uncredited writing partner. If Siegel and Shuster’s story was an inspiring one of brotherhood, Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s was a cautionary tale of opportunism.

Born Robert Kahn in the Bronx in 1916, Bob Kane’s father was an engraver for the New York Daily News. Bob attended DeWitt Clinton High with future comics genius Will Eisner. Changing his name to the more Americanized “Bob Kane” at age 18 (one rumor has it that it was in honor of serial star Kane Richmond), his cartoonist dreams weren’t to even become good – Bob was more intent on attaining a level of comic strip artist celebrity so he could live the easy life.

Kane’s work was in more of a “Bigfoot” vein – meaning he drew in what today would be considered a “cartoony” style – and even once worked as an in-betweener at the Fleischer Studios.

When Eisner and his business partner Jerry Iger formed the first comic book studio, Bob came on board and drew anthropomorphic dog strip “Peter Pupp,” and a few strips for Detective Comics and their sister publisher, All-American Comics: “Ginger Snap”, “Oscar the Gumshoe”, and “Professor Doolittle”. Kane’s Milt Caniff-inspired Rusty and His Pals is the bridge that carried him from funny stuff to dark action, a transition that carried him through the rest of his career.

Looking at a 1938 “Peter Pupp” from Jumbo Comics #5, the strip has a German Expressionist by way of Walt Disney feel. As The Monster Man, Zula (a cloaked figure wearing a wide-toothed devil mask with a droopy moustache), cavorts amongst electrical globe and other Universal monster movie devices in his lab, the fruits of 40 years of work, a 30-foot robot with dual death rays in each hand stands tall by the sixth panel. The awkward lettering of Zula’s dialogue, the spare room in

Bob Kane.

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his balloons, and the weird Caniff-ish use of blacks hint at the atmosphere that will later infect the Batman strip.

With the wildfire-like success of Superman, Kane approached Detective editor Vin Sullivan about making the switch from funny animal to costumed hero. Sullivan asked Kane to produce a new hero on a Friday, on the condition that he have it by that Monday. Kane, hungry to break out of the $40 a week fill-in existence he’d known for a few years, enlisted the help of part-time writer Bill Finger, who had been ghostwriting “Clip Carson” and Rusty and Her Pals. The differences between the two are uncanny: the free-wheeling, suave Kane was out chasing skirts at age 22 while the brilliant Finger was supporting his wife and son by selling shoes at age 24.

“Bill was a very delicate guy, and I don’t use that word in a pejorative sense,” Irwin Hasen, the artist who created Wildcat with Finger, recalled. “He was a very good-looking, handsome, little guy, a short man. I’m 5’2” and he was maybe 5’4”. He was a very elegant dressed man, erudite and tragic. I use that word in a very sad sense, because Bill was always behind on his work,

but he was always behind the 8-ball, and always late on his deadlines, always in debt, but the sweetest, gentlest guy you’d want to meet, and such a creative guy.”

“Bob may have been a fine talent,” Batman assistant and ghost artist Jerry Robinson laughed. “But Bill became my friend, and my culture mentor. I was a really young kid, 17, just out of high school and in New York for the first time. He took me, for the first time, to the Met, to MOMA, to foreign films, to the Village. That was exciting.”

The debate over who contributed what to the initial Batman concept apparently entails Kane designing a Superman-like blonde man in a domino mask and red tights with stiff bat-like wings attached to his back. Kane claimed for years that he had been influenced by everything from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr to Leonardo Da Vinci’s ornithopter to a 1930 film titled The Bat Whispers, which features a villain in a head-to-toe bat costume.

Finger’s recollection, in historian and comics legend Jim Steranko’s The Steranko History of Comics reads that Kane’s initial Batman drawing “looked very much like Superman

Bob Kane’s early work on “Peter Pupp” showed a competency in his use of shadow. It would serve him well for Batman.

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with kind of ... reddish tights, I believe, with boots ... no gloves, no gauntlets ... with a small domino mask, swinging on a rope.

He had two stiff wings that were sticking out, looking like bat wings. And under it was a big sign ... Batman.”

Other reports have the character’s original name as “Bird-Man,” but were changed at Finger’s suggestion.

“Batman was very crude at the beginning,” Kane said in 1989. “He had stiff bat wings stuck behind his shoulders; he looked like a bat, actually. But I showed Vincent Sullivan my first crude sketches of Batman that Monday. He loved it and said, ‘Okay, let’s go!’”

Contributions made by Finger likely included the distinctive bat cowl, the bat emblem on the chest, the scalloped gloves, turning the stiff wings into a bat-like cape, and even naming the alter ego Bruce Wayne, apparently in honor of Kane himself.

Without Finger’s knowledge, Kane struck a long-term deal with Vin Sullivan that gave himself more of a stake in the character than Siegel and Shuster had with Superman.

The terms, while mostly speculation, involved a set page Bill Finger. rate and amount of Batman pages owed to National a month, as well as a sole ownership credit for Kane on Batman.

It would be an early example of Kane’s doing things without the knowledge of his collaborators: for years, he kept each of his “ghost” artists from one another, and allegedly did very little drawing on the strip itself.

“He was a very vapid, shallow, egotistical man who was lucky enough to have his father insist that he gets his rights to Batman,” Hasen noted. “It’s one of those strokes of luck. The publishers even regretted it! The whole thing was a lie.”

Effective Comics Detective Comics #27 in the Spring of 1939 featured a black and gray-clad, pointy-eared hero stiffly swinging over the city, a thug head locked under left arm, and more frightened thugs in the foreground of the rooftop this dark hero was about to alight upon. Kane’s cover art was possibly more dramatic than Shuster’s Action Comics #1 cover, but it wasn’t entirely original: Batman’s pose was swiped from Alex Raymond’s the January 17, 1934 Flash Gordon daily strip.

The blond space adventurer had gone from swinging around on Mongo to whizzing by modern city rooftops in a batsuit.

The debut story, “The Case of the Chemical Crime Syndicate,” starred a much more dark and grim Batman than today. He wasn’t a superhero, but a pulp character in a garish costume.

It opens in the home of Commissioner Gordon as he entertains his socialite friend Bruce Wayne. They’re reclining opposite one another, respectively smoking cigar and pipe, when Gordon mentions this mysterious “Bat-Man.” The

Bob Kane’s cover was a swipe of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, but at least he picked an iconic pose. Batman makes his stiff-winged debut. Story by Bill Finger, art by Bob Kane.

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phone rings, and Gordon decides to bring Wayne along to the scene of a crime: chemical king Lambert has been knifed by his own son. The son reveals to Gordon that he came home, found his father dying of a knife in the chest and his safe rifled through, the man’s final word being “contract.” One of the three remaining partners calls Gordon about a death threat he received. Wayne departs, and it cuts to the partner getting shot by a sinister man in a pinstripe suit, who then grabs a paper from the safe and escapes out the window.

“Did you get the paper?” his confederate asks the pinstriped man, as he climbs a rope to a higher level of roof. “Yeah,” he replies, and then they turn to notice a third figure, “standing behind them…It is the ‘BAT-MAN’!” He poses, arms crossed, stiff batwing cape hanging off of his shoulders. After taking care of the thugs, The Bat-Man avoids the cops, and makes his way back to his lair.

By the end of the story, Bat-Man has saved one of the two remaining partners from a gas chamber death, and reveals the mastermind as the other remaining partner, Jennings. It turns out Jennings was killing the partners off to gain control of the company without having to buy them out, given the unique deal that shifted each share to a surviving partner (and not an heir) in the event a shareholder kicked the bucket. Struggling with the villain, Bat-Man knocks him into a vat of deadly acid.

“A fitting ending for his kind,” he remarks before taking off into the night. After the unsurprising reveal that Bruce Wayne is Bat-Man, his debut appearance comes to a close.

The Bigfoot cartoonist was trying hard to be an action strip man, stylistically borrowing from Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy but combining it with the smoke and shadows of a Warner Brothers film noir. Figures stood at grotesque angles, their movements more marionette-like than human. The only thing he drew well was crudeness, a quality that fit well into a world where spooky avengers watch men fall to their deaths in vats of chemicals.

Finger managed to successfully combine the darkness of pulp magazines like The Shadow and The Spider with the newfound superhero genre. The amalgamation of his writing with Kane’s crude artwork made Batman just creepy enough to not seem too absurd.

“Chemical Crime Syndicate” was on the nose but, as revealed just recently, too on the Shadow’s beakish nose.

Finger had once acknowledged “Chemical Syndicate” was a “take-off of a Shadow story,” but the parallels between that and “Peril” transcend that of an homage. Both stories open with the murder of one of the partners, and the alter ego casually chatting with it about their respective commissioner (in The Shadow’s case, Lamont Cranston and Commissioner Weston), but it’s mostly broad strokes from there. Finger took the high points of the story in adapting it for six pages: like “Partners in Peril,” the bad guys are after paperwork in a safe; the assistant to one of the partners tries to gas his victim in an identical large glass dome that lowers from the ceiling, only to have the hero swoop in at the last minute to clog the gas vent and break through glass; and both have the identical M.O. for the killer.

Why was it such a rip-off? With the story done over the course of a weekend, it’s possible they viewed it as an audition—with Finger adapting the story without thinking of it ever seeing print.

But, given Kane’s aptitude for swiping figures from cartoonists like Alex Raymond and Hal Foster, as well as pulp artist Henry Vallely, he likely wasn’t too worried about infringement in a medium that wasn’t expected to last into the next century.

Bob Kane, years later, would attest to historian Will Murray how both the pulps and movie serials had a profound influence on Batman: “As a matter of fact, I read all the pulps that Bill Finger read.

He’d give me his magazines and I did read them. I was influenced

by Doc Savage and the pulps, to some extent. And I loved mystery movies, like The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney. I was a real movie buff as a kid. That influenced me to create Batman like a movie serial.

Batman is like a movie serial.

“When I was a kid I couldn’t wait for next Saturday. I was very influenced by the early movie serials.”

Much like Superman brought elements of science fiction comic strips and pulp characters together in a pastiche in four-color form, Batman was the product of influences culled from Finger and Kane’s own youth as pulp fans. It’s what came after the first couple of years of Batman’s existence that started to gel into something more unique and original.

Amongst the most influential of Kane’s staff artists was Jerry Robinson, who came on board in the summer of 1939 at 17 years of age. Jerry was taking a vacation at a resort in the Poconos, wearing a jacket adorned with cartoon characters he’d drawn, which was noticed by fellow vacationer The Shadow would inspire Batman in more than Bob Kane.

“I felt a tap on my shoulder and superficial ways, as “Partners of Peril” shows. he asked if I did the drawing’” Jerry The story is lifted directly from recalled. “Without turning around, I “Partners in Peril,” a November 1, 1936 pulp story from was worried I would be arrested because I couldn’t remember The Shadow Magazine, written by ghost writer Theodore Tinsley, as discovered by Shadow and comics historian what I drew. The voice said ‘Those are pretty good.’ It was extraordinaire Will Murray in 2007.

Bob Kane.

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Robin makes his debut in 1940’s Detective Comics #38.

“I had applied to Columbia, Syracuse, and Penn and was accepted at three; I couldn’t decide on where to go, and finally decided on Syracuse, which was more of a college town. He said ‘Oh, it’s too bad, because if you’d come to New York, you could work on this comic book with me.’ I’d never read comic books.

“So, we went to this store in the nearby village, where they sold comic books. He showed me Batman, which I wasn’t terribly impressed with. But, he told me he needed someone on his staff, because it was just him and the writer, Bill Finger.”

Recruited to work for Kane in New York, Robinson decided on Columbia University for a degree in journalism. Finger and Robinson often went to see German Expressionist films, a silent film movement with exaggerated sets, costumes, and a dark and foreboding atmosphere. Key German Expressionist films include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Nosferatu. The films’ influence heightened the visual effect of the strip: “I remember, specifically, trying to be more interpretative and more impressionistic,” staff artist Jerry Robinson recalled to Mark Heike. “I was influenced particularly by the German films that Bill took me to. And we kind of disdained those artists that were using photographs, literally. We used them for reference…but we were forced to learn and visualize and dramatize by ourselves.”

Detective Comics #33 revealed Batman’s tragic origin.

Announcing “Who he is and how he came to be!” the two-page sequence flashes back to a darkened night alley, fifteen years prior, where Thomas Wayne and his wife and son are walking home from a movie.

“W-what is this?” Thomas demands of a cap-wearing thug brandishing an automatic.

Thomas jumps out to stop the robber, and is shot. The thief then coldly shoots Thomas’ wife, leaving the young boy alone with his parents’ grotesquely splayed out bodies under the dim streetlight.

Days later, Bruce kneels by the side of his bed, hands clenched in prayer, and makes a solemn vow to spend the rest of his life “warring on all criminals.”

Bruce becomes a “master scientist” in the years that follow (which involves looking at test tubes in an eerie and atmospheric laboratory that only the Batman shop could deliver), and trains his body to physical perfection by holding an enormous set of dumbbells over his head.

Bruce Wayne sits in his den wearing a smoking robe, pondering how to pursue his mission against crime, he makes a grim and rather poetic observation: Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts.

I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible..a…a…

Suddenly, a huge bat flies in through the open window, and the inspired Bruce declares “A bat! That’s it! It’s an omen…

I shall become a BAT!” Kane and company’s distinctively crude art made Batman a visually distinctive pulp hero (and he was, before the superhero

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became a mainstay of comics, possessing of all the trappings of a pulp hero like The Shadow), while Finger’s origin gave the character a vulnerability and manic bent that hinted at a complex figure. As much fun as Superman was, he lacked the psychological underpinnings of the Dark Knight.

Finger, prone to drinking and late scripts, was sometimes replaced in the script-writing department by attorney-turned-writer Gardner Fox, who contributed elements such as the Batarang and Batman’s distinctive crime-fighting gear to the mythos. Fox was first brought to Detective via his old pal Vin Sullivan, and was soon writing several features for both them and sister company All-American. He co-created mainstays the Flash, Hawkman, and Dr. Fate, and was the main writer on All-American’s superhero team the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics.

Batman lightened up when his sidekick Robin, a young acrobat whose parents were murdered by a gangster, was introduced in Detective Comics #38 (April, 1940). The idea for Robin came from either Bill Finger on his own, or Bob Kane, or perhaps it was at Kane’s insistence, and designed by Jerry Robinson. Robin was created to not only give Batman someone to talk to, but also to lighten up the strip and provide a character for the kid readers to connect with.

The Boy Wonder sparked a flurry of boy sidekick imitators: Captain America had the eerily similar Bucky, Human Torch had Toro, Blue Beetle had Sparky, Sandman had Sandy…Sidekicks proliferated in the Golden Age because of Robin’s influence.

Batman gained his own comic book title later that year, swinging across a yellow-skied Gotham with Robin on the first cover. Fighting an array of Dick Tracy-ish villains like the Joker and Hugo Strange in the now-dubbed Gotham City, Batman became the heavy-hitter both Vin Sullivan and Bob Kane were hoping for.

Columbia, or more specifically producer Rudolph Flotow, picked up the rights to do a Batman movie serial during wartime for a 1943 release. Since censorship codes kept Batman from being the vigilante crimefighter of the comics, he was now a crimefighter for Uncle Sam. The director, Lambert Hillyer, had directed the critically acclaimed Dracula’s Daughter in 1936. This sequel to the Bela Lugosi classic has the Count’s daughter struggling to break free of her vampiric curse. It is atmospheric, beautifully shot, full of pathos, and in some ways superior to Tod Browning’s original Dracula.

Batman, however, was a different animal.

(top) Lewis Wilson in the cape and cowl. (bottom left) Director Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter remains a hidden gem. (bottom right) The U.S.S. Shaw, bombed during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Photo courtesy the Library of Congress.

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Cast and Cowl Lewis Wilson, wearing a costume patterned after the Detective Comics #27 appearance, played both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Born in Framingham, Massachusetts on January 28, 1920, Wilson remains the youngest actor to ever wear Batman’s cape and cowl.

“He came from a family that was well established in New Hampshire,” Michael G. Wilson said. “His grandfather was David A. Gregg, who was a major economic power in the state (Lew’s mother was the Gregg), and his uncles were fairly important. One uncle became the governor of the state [Hugh Gregg, from 1953 to 1955]. Then, his son, Judd Gregg, was a congressman for many years, then governor, and then a senator for three terms. His father was a minister well-known in the area.”

When studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, Lewis met Dana Natol, and the two married on June 7, 1941 in New York City. When Lewis registered for the draft the next year, he listed his home address care of a friend in New York, but his place of employment was with the Rangely Play House in Quossoc, Maine—likely working in a summer stock company.

When Japanese forces attacked the military airbase in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on the morning of December 7, 1941, Dana was pregnant with their son Michael.

Amidst the wreckage of battleships, destroyers, and almost 200 aircraft were 2,335 American military personnel dead. It marked the United States’ entry into the Second World War. Along with several small roles in Columbia features in 1943, Lewis won the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman in a serial that embraced the patriotic tone running through movies, comics, and radio around the country.

Ironically, World War II would get in his way after filming the Batman serial.

“I think the world was his oyster and he got this job, and then thought it would be a springboard,” Wilson noted. “But then he went to the Army and I think the experience of being in the army did affect him.”

Robin’s elf shoes were filled by Douglas Croft, a teen actor who’d practically made a career out of playing younger versions of older actors like James Cagney and Ronald Reagan. His head was full of curls nothing like Robin’s straight hair, but his small build worked well in contrast to the much taller Wilson.

Wilson and Croft were allegedly not Kane’s top choices for the roles: “My frustration began with the casting,” Kane wrote in his autobiography, Batman and Me. “The actor playing Batman was an overweight chap named Lewis Wilson, who should have been forced to go on a diet before taking the role. Robin, played

by Douglas Croft, was equally miscast, a man in his twenties trying to play a fifteen year-old boy!”

Kane likely confused the pair with the second pair of Batman actors from the follow-up serial years later: Wilson was six foot and 180 pounds per his 1941 draft card, while Croft would have been around 17 or 18 at the time, still the youngest actor to play the Boy Wonder.

Kane, after all, was never known for his propensity for the truth.

Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend Linda Page (a character who rarely appeared in the comics after her debut in Batman #5), was played

by Shirley Patterson. Born in Canada the day after Christmas in 1922, Shirley moved to L.A. at age 3 and primarily grew up as an athlete first and beauty second.

She was a championship archer (winning California’s junior archery championship) and amateur model. Her beauty got her a spot in the Miss America competition, winning the 1940 Miss California title.

The publicity got her noticed by agents, and it was Columbia who snagged her for a contract. Batman was, undoubtedly, just her next assignment at Columbia.

J. Carrol Naish made a career out of playing ethnic types, primarily villains, and the villainous Japanese agent Dr. Daka was just one of many Asians the Irish actor portrayed.

(clockwise from top) Batman players Douglas Croft, Charles Middleton, and Shirley Patterson.

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Born in 1897 and growing up on the tough streets of Harlem in New York, Naish dropped out of school to join the Navy in World War I. After serving his time, he made a life out of drifting around Europe before arriving on the West Coast on a tramp steamer. A brief stint as an actor or stuntman inspired him to make it to Broadway in 1926. He emerged in Hollywood in 1930 as a character actor, primarily of ethnic types.

Horror was Naish’s primary niche, playing everything from mutants to hunchbacks. Naish brought a subdued and chilling theatricality to his performance in Batman, giving the serial a believable threat in the fanatical Dr. Daka.

Charles Middleton, mostly known as Ming the Merciless in Universal’s Flash Gordon serials, joined the cast as scientist Ken Colton for three episodes. The classical acting credibility that Naish brought to Batman was paralleled by the genre credibility Middleton brought to the picture as a gun-slinging old cowboy.

The story for Batman, was credited to Victor McLeod, Leslie Swabacker, and Harry L. Fraser. However, an article from The Paris News in Paris Texas, dated June 3, 1943, reported that Murray Boltinoff, former DC Comics editor and then private first class, created an original story with fellow DC editor Mort Weisinger. It is unclear if elements of a published Batman story (perhaps about mind control) were lifted for the serial, or if it was an unpublished story idea. Weisinger, however, would more officially mingle with the serials in the coming years.

Batman comes alive with Lee Zahler’s atmospheric theme over the opening credits. Moody and operatic, it provides that slightly sinister touch that predates composer Danny Elfman’s version for the 1989 film version.

All conjured images of sinister cloaked figures are eliminated with the opening shot of the Dark Knight himself – sitting in his Bat’s Cave, propping his head up with his hands, elbows on the table. His cowl is a light gray in his black and white world and its color inconsistently and inexplicably changes from the lighter tone to a black in-between scenes. Robin hops onscreen, introduced via the narrator, and launches into a montage on how Batman and Robin stand for America and fight the Axis powers. Since serial censorship codes didn’t allow for vigilantes in conflict with the law, the writers made them “secret agents,” or G-Men in tights.

Captain Arnold of the police department gets a call from Batman, who has popped open a police call box, and tips him off to the three goons he’s just captured. As he and Robin are tying the three up, one announces “Dr. Daka will get you for this!”

“Who’s Dr. Daka?” Batman demands.

“You’ll find out,” another goon threatens.

At the Gotham City Foundation’s office, lovely Linda Page wraps up her secretarial job, and waits for her arriving fiancé, Bruce Wayne, and his ward, Dick Grayson. Bruce is a hopeless fop, lazy and unreliable, never getting out of bed earlier than noon.

He considers a trip out to pick up her Uncle Martin, fresh out of jail, more exercise than a man of his position should endure.

After Linda leaves the room, Bruce reminds Dick of why Linda must think of Bruce as totally useless, and why she can’t ever find out their secret identities of Batman and Robin. They have a mission for Uncle Sam that declares their identities are kept secret, and that Linda would worry too much if she knew of their night-time activities. As Bruce, Dick, and Linda leave the building, a tall and skinny paperboy, with a shock of black hair, comes out and offers them a paper.

It was Bob Kane’s first, and only, cameo in a Batman film.

At the prison, Uncle Martin stands outside the gates and is tricked into riding off with a couple of goons waiting for him.

With Alfred the butler driving, Bruce, Dick, and Linda are unable to catch up with the kidnapping goons and Uncle Martin is touted off to the hideout of Dr. Daka.

The narrator introduces the “Little Tokyo” section of Gotham, where all of the “shifty-eyed J*ps” have been rounded up (translation: it was a big internment camp). The Japanese House of Horror wax figure exhibit nearby, where a car takes the passenger through dioramas of Japanese soldiers terrorizing white people, is actually the hideout of the villainous Dr. Daka. This “sinister J*p spy” with a “twisted Oriental brain” has gathered a group of “dishonored men,” all industrialists with criminal records, to help Japan take over the United States from within. Linda’s Uncle Martin (who’d owned a chemical factory) is invited into the group and, when he refuses, is reintroduced to his former partner – who has now been turned into a mindless zombie henchman via Daka’s machinations.

Racial stereotypes of the Japanese were prevalent in wartime popular culture and media, especially in the comics themselves (one has to only look at Captain Marvel versus the Monster Society of Evil, or practically any wartime superhero comic), as Allied forces faced the threats of Italy, Germany, and Japan.

Tragically, American citizens of Japanese descent, as a result of February 19, 1942’s Executive Order 9066, were rounded up into internment camps. Around 120,000 people of Japanese descent were affected, with many of them U.S. citizens.

Casting white actors in Asian roles had long been a custom in film (and would continue well into the 1960s and 1970s) and the Fu Manchu type of Asian villain had long been a staple of American popular culture. Dr. Daka is as emblematic of that practice as is the villain of Republic’s 1943 wartime serial, Sakima, in The Masked Marvel.

While often painful to watch through 21st century eyes, Batman is emblematic of the fears and prejudices facing the United States at the time it was filmed and released.

In 1943, Ansel Adams photographed Japanese residents of the Manzanar Relocation Center in California.

Courtesy Library of Congress.

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Batman and Robin get patriotic in this 1942 cover to Batman #12.

Naish’s Dr. Daka holds Wilson’s Batman, captures Linda, and oversees his evil empire. A trope in the ‘40s, Dr. Daka does not hold up today.

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Daka has invented a weapon to take over the USA with, a hand-held Atom Smasher gun that looks an awful lot like a flashlight, and needs radium to run. Daka’s men, along with a zombie henchman, break into the Gotham City Foundation to steal it from a wall safe.

Needless to say, Batman and Robin come in on the henchmen attacking Linda and stealing the radium, and the fight makes its way to the roof. The first chapter ends with Batman thrown off the roof by the bad guys…and luckily landing on a painting scaffolding at the beginning of the second chapter. Not explained is what happened to the painter accidentally knocked off during the shot, leaving viewers to assume he made it out okay. Batman and Robin, despite being easily beaten, manage to snag both the radium ray and one henchman to interrogate, leaving him locked up in the Bat’s Cave with Batman’s pet bats.

The first chapter of Batman is grade-A B film material: all of the principal characters and their motives are introduced, the expository dialogue flows well enough to be half-convincing, and the casting was not as on par with Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel or Kane Richmond’s Spy Smasher.

Especially of note is Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler. Alfred was originally a rotund man with a penchant for crime novels and a desire to pitch in on Batman and Robin’s missions. He was cast with the tall and thin William Austin, whose very presence had an effect on the comics themselves.

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He plays the prissy Alfred up for pure laughs as the trusty butler who is always in over his head and even thrust into going undercover for Batman and Robin.

A good example is in chapter three, where Alfred poses undercover in a trap to ensnare Daka’s men. At the same time the hapless butler gets a gun drawn on him, before Robin knocks a goon through a skylight and into the room. It erupts into a full-out melee that ends when the nervous Alfred gets his hands on a loaded gun and fires wildly, scaring Daka’s remaining men out.

Charles Middleton starts off strong as the cowboy prospector Ken Colton in chapter six, but seems to tire out by the time he’s killed in the ninth serial.

Wearing a huge beard and cowboy hat, it’s almost hard to believe it was the same actor who’d ordered Flash Gordon’s death numerous times a decade prior.

Something the Batman movie serial caught on to, which no other subsequent film versions ever picked up on, was his tendency to don a disguise and go undercover into the underworld. Such was the case with Batman’s shady alter ego of “Chuck White,” which was basically just Lewis Wilson with a prosthetic nose, a cigarette hanging off his lower lip, a shabby suit, and a tendency to talk like a washed-up boxer.

By the final chapter, Batman confronts the sinister Daka in the spy’s own hideout, and the zombies are freed (Daka’s henchman, for some weird reason, are middle-aged men in turtlenecks and slacks).

Batman was one of the better produced Columbia serials, made at a time when the studio was willing to throw relatively more money and thought into their serials than as they would a few years later, when ultra low-budget producer Sam Katzman took over. It was pretty loyal to the characters, despite the lack of a Commissioner Gordon or appropriate Batmobile.

The fight scenes lacked the panache Republic brought to film; it wasn’t helped by the ragged and poorly-tailored costumes for Batman and Robin.

Wilson far from cut a formidable Dark Knight; his accent and high voice made him sound like Boston’s own bargain-basement Batman. What he did nail, however, was Wayne’s apathy and foppish act.

The real charm in Batman, as well as the serial’s greatest strength, was in the feeling that Batman and Robin were at least having fun while fighting crime and going undercover as hoodlums.

The most significant aspect of Batman was in its effects on the comic books themselves. The short and stout Alfred Pennyworth (Bruce Wayne’s butler and confidante) went from being a short and rotund man in the comics to a slender one with a moustache, patterned after William Austin’s portrayal in the serial. Introduced in April-May 1943’s Batman #16 (by writer Don Cameron and artist Jerry Robinson), Pennyworth was slimmed up by January, 1944’s Detective Comics #83, and has stayed that way since. Also, the Batcave (along with the entrance behind a grandfather clock) was officially introduced in the serial and made its way to the comic books in that same issue.

Detective Comics #83 (Jan. 1944) sees the newly-thin Alfred Pennyworth and the Bat Cave.

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Suited for Com-Bat

This glass slide was meant for projection in movie theaters.

Courtesy Heritage Auction.

At one point, Batman artist Jerry Robinson was flown from New York to Los Angeles to serve as a script consultant.

“I was still very young, a kid, and I remember sitting down and the writers were plotting a story…” Robinson said. “They had ideas we wouldn’t even consider comic-book-worthy. It was so amateurish. I remember suggesting a couple of ideas, just ordinary things we were doing in the comic books every day, and they thought I was a boy genius. They just didn’t know how to plot it.”

Croft’s Dick Grayson and Robin were pretty much the same character, but he played the spunky kid well enough.

It was just disconcerting when his stunt double would obviously take over, and hunch over in the hopes of becoming as short as a 17 year-old boy.

Jerry Robinson. Very little is known about Croft’s post Batman life.

According to his tombstone in San Diego, he served in the army during World War II and died at the very young age of 37 in 1963 from alcoholism.

Naish stole the show as Dr. Daka, playing the role with a combination of cold danger and dark comedy. His dry humor shone through, particularly in a revealing scene when, after running out of food for his pet alligators, he is about to throw his brainless henchman in before one of his goons interrupts.

After Batman, Naish received two Academy Award nominations (in 1943 and ’45), and starred in 1950s television shows Life with Luigi and Charlie Chan. He continued to act as everything from Japanese to Native Americans, until his final movie: Dracula vs. Frankenstein in 1971. He died of emphysema in 1973 at age 76.

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Lewis Wilson served three years in the Army right after the Batman serial, from 1943 to 1946. Wilson’s platoon was caught up in the Battle of the Bulge on December 16, 1944, a counteroffensive by the German army designed to counter the allied advances made through the invasion of Normandy. The battle was waged until January 25, 1945 and resulted in around 90,000 losses on both American and German sides, with the smaller British presence suffering 1,408 (wounded and killed).

“He was in a tank brigade and had a BAR—the Browning Automatic Rifle, I guess you’d call it a light machine gun and, because he was a big guy, they gave it to him. He said he didn’t like it much because it made such a racket and would attract all the fire!”

The BAR is a gas-operated rifle that first saw use in World War I. By the Second World War, it measured close to four feet in length and weighed almost twenty pounds. It could be used for single shots or to fire up to 650 rounds a minute.

“He was in the platoon that supported the tanks: the infantry support for the tank squads,” Wilson recalled. “He saw action in the Battle of the Bulge during the winter of 1945 and suffered a severe case of frostbite.”

Lewis Wilson returned stateside to his wife and son to once more perform in summer stock groups.

“They did a play every week and rehearsed during the day before doing the previous one at night,” Wilson said. “It’s a good experience for actors. It was very demanding: they were working day and night and I was up there with them.”

Lewis decided to once more try his hand in Hollywood and found a G.I. house in Pomona, where they lived for a couple of years.

“They worked a bit at the Pasadena Playhouse, but it was hard work and they couldn’t make any money,” Wilson said. “Eventually they split up and got divorced (I was about eight) in 1950.

We moved into Hollywood, living right in the middle of town.”

Like many veterans, Lewis may have come home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (referred to, at one point, as shell shock). PTSD was not widely acknowledged, even by the government: filmmaker John Huston’s 1946 documentary Let There Be Light, which focuses on veterans dealing with psychological issues, led the government to ban it.

“People didn’t understand Post Traumatic Stress. My mother told me she didn’t really understand, at the time, what was going on.”

“I didn’t see much of my dad; he was living with my uncle (my mother’s brother) and they were a couple of guys trying to get ahead. My Dad did some films, and I went into boarding school. His parents put me in military school when I was in the seventh and eighth grade.

“During that time, my dad had a couple bit parts in movies, as well as my mother, but those are lost in the ether.”

One of the bit parts he had was in an unaired Western TV pilot, Trigger Tales, in 1951. He played a henchman who gets killed in his one scene, while Dana had a meatier role as a conniving stepmother. Both Lewis and Dana were also in Wild Women (also known as Bowanga Bowanga), a jungle adventure film with Lewis leading a trio of men who encounter a tribe of white women in Africa. It’s absolute 1950s B-movie schlock, with Dana playing the queen of the lost tribe and is delightful by “so bad it’s good” standards.

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Batman (Lewis Wilson) and Robin (Douglas Croft) drop in on Linda Page’s Uncle Warren (Gus Gusmire).

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Lewis’s Boston accent, at this point, is more subdued, but still betrays itself every few syllables.

Wilson gained a break in 1952, serving as co-star in a television version of the literary detective Craig Kennedy, Criminologist. Wilson played sidekick Walt Jameson to Donald Woods’ Kennedy.

After the 26-episode order ended, Lewis Wilson gave up on acting.

“That was really the end of his acting career,” Michael Wilson noted. “From then on he got a job working at a pectin plant in Hollywood and had another family [with] four kids. That was his life.”

Working at the pectin plant was physically demanding, as Lewis would dump industrial-sized bags of pectin into large vats. It contributed to back problems that, along with heart issues, led to his retirement at 55.

“He was very frustrated, I think, with his life, and then his wife died from cancer with less than twenty years of marriage,” Wilson said. “It really affected him badly. He also had heart conditions and was one of the first people to have open heart surgery with putting in new arteries; he had that done when he was 55 but he continued smoking, so they did that again when he was 65.”

After his second wife’s death, Dana remained supportive of Lewis. She remarried in 1959 to film producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and moved to England. She also encouraged Michael to keep in touch with his father.

Lewis died on August 9, 2000 of an aneurysm at the age of 80.

Michael graduated with a law degree from Stanford in 1966 and went into international law. In 1972, he joined EON productions, his stepfather’s production company that is responsible for the James Bond film series. Michael became a producer at EON in 1979 and has produced or executive produced every James Bond film since. He is also the president of DANJAQ, LLC, which serves as the holding company for the James Bond film trademarks and copyright. He was named an Officer of the British Empire in 2008 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2022.

Michael recalls one social quirk of his father’s: “He was a creature of his times, like anybody. He had the outlook and prejudices and different attitudes that people had, but he changed with the times, too. He engaged with the world.

He was always telling jokes and, of course, that was a part of a culture from the second World War and before when people would meet you and have a new joke.”

After Lewis died, Michael only had one request: “I said to my nieces ‘He told me that he had a card file with the jokes in it. 400 jokes and they had the opening line and then the punchline, and that’s how he could remember them.’ I said it’s the only thing I want from the estate, but they said they never found it.”

Wilson plays an explorer held captive by a tribe of women in 1951’s Bowanga, Bowanga, but got a much finer turn playing Walter Jameson in 1952’s Craig Kennedy, Criminologist.

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Batman affected a greater and longer lasting change in the comics’ source material than any other superhero movie serial that followed. Warts and all, it’s the greatest example of the media synergy between comics and film, and its influence is just as heavily felt in the Caped Crusader’s 1960s debut on television screens with Adam West as the comics of the 1940s.

The Dynamic Duo’s return to serial matinees in six years, however, was anything but triumphant.

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Was the Joker meant to be in Batman?

Both Columbia’s campaign book for the 1943 to 1944 season, as well as a promotional banner for The Batman featured Batman socking out what looks like the Joker.

Was Dr. Daka meant to be The Joker, but changed at the last minute to create a wartime villain? After all, both have secret headquarters at a carnival.

The press book, and included images by artist Glenn Cravath, were created and published before the serial’s actual production. There really is no definite, documented answer (so far), but it is more likely than not that Cravath was given a Batman comic for reference and just went to town. There is, after all, a Batplane in the banner, but not the serial.

If he painted the image in 1942, it’s also likely he used Batman #12 as his reference issue. It came out around the summer and features stories with both Joker and that design of the Batplane.

Many thanks to Ed Hulse for his information on Cravath and the Columbia Press book.

The “Comic Strip Herald” pressbooks by Columbia featured promotional comic strips for the serials, which made them look far more dynamic than in actuality. Thanks to JM Cozzoli of www.zomboscloset.com.

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“I

was in the service, and the first I heard about it was when I was in Bolivar, and I saw it at a local theater,” Captain America creator Joe Simon remembered a day in 1944. “I didn’t go in to see it, but I saw a marquee that read Captain America. It’s a bitter feeling to see your character in the movie when your name isn’t on it.”

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the powerhouse creative duo of the Golden Age, gave Timely Comics (the company that is now Marvel Comics) their first star in the red, white and blue-clad avenger…and wound up black and blue from the whole ordeal. The Republicproduced serial of 1943 was the first of what grew to be many live-action misfires in adapting the Sentinel of Liberty to film, but is technically one of the better serials produced.

The Simon and Kirby team is legendary.

The team met while working for Fox Comics, a third-rate comic book “publisher” run by the notorious Victor Fox. Simon was an editor, while Kirby was one of the bullpen artists, churning out work like third tier superhero The Blue Beetle.

“I was very young, 24, I think,” Simon recalled. “Kirby was even younger, and was working at the bullpen at Fox. He found out that I was doing this extra work, and asked if he could come over and work with me. I said ‘Sure,’ since I had more than I could handle. I had to get letterers and inkers to help me meet my schedule.”

The two were an odd pairing: Simon a tailor’s son who grew up in upstate Rochester, while Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) was raised in the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. Simon was tall and business-minded, while Kirby was a short scrapper who talked little in comparison. It’s likely they balanced each other out, creatively and professionally.

Operating out of an office in the Empire State Building, 32 year-old pulp publisher Martin Goodman, like dozens of others, took a stab at the new comics field. Starting in 1932, the pulp fan started with his Marvel Science Stories and Marvel Tales, as well as more successful Western and crime pulps, under the imprint name Red Circle.

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Goodman commissioned comic book editor and packager Lloyd Jacquet’s shop Funnies, Inc. to create Marvel Comics #1 in October, 1939. His big stars were the initially volatile Human Torch, an android completely engulfed in flame, and Namor the Sub-Mariner, a pointy-eared half human, half Atlantean prince who angrily wreaked havoc on the people of New York City. Timely Comics held true to their pulp roots, with heroes who meted out justice from the other end of a gun or at the end of a superpowered fist. Goodman needed a star superhero and, after commissioning work from him, Joe Simon was the man to give him one.

“We’d have the main character be second banana to the villain, and that’s how Captain America came out,” Simon recalled in 2009. “I picked Adolf Hitler as the ideal villain. He had everything that Americans hated, and he was a clown with the funny moustache, yet guys were ready to jump out of planes for him.

He was the first choice, and his antagonist would have to be our hero, and we’d put a flag on the guy and have Captain America.”

Joe and Jack worked after-hours in Simon’s small office nearby, mostly on science fiction comic Blue Bolt for Novelty Press. Simon’s claim is that he’d already started on Captain America, story and all, when Kirby came onboard.

“I’d done the story right on the boards, the roughs, and the presentations and everything else. I brought Kirby in, and he did his own wonderful work on it. He tightened up the pencils and did his own penciling. We worked very closely together on it. …That’s how the first issue of Captain America was done; from my little office on West 45th Street, after hours from Fox Comics.”

It was then, Simon claims, that Captain America was submitted to Timely Comics, where Goodman bought the superhero from the duo and appointed Simon editor and Kirby art director.

Captain America’s Nazi-busting cover debut!

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The legendary team of Simon and Kirby Captain America Comics #1 came out with a March 1941 cover date, and hit the stands around December of 1940. While Captain America wasn’t the first patriotic hero (MLJ’s The Shield predated him), he was the first superhero to premiere straight into his own #1 issue.

In an eerie moment of prescience, Simon and Kirby had the flag-clad Cap slugging Adolph Hitler out on the cover, a good year before America entered the war after the December 7th bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. It was the first time a patriotic superhero directly took on Nazism.

Red, White, and Blue-Blooded The origin story in Captain America Comics #1 starts with a bang: the explosion of an American munitions factory by Fifth Columnists. Frustrated at the rampant Nazi sabotage, and the “army spotted with spies,” President Roosevelt informs two Army bigwigs that “something is being done.”

“What would you suggest?” he asks, in a metatextual moment, “A character out of the comic books? Perhaps The Human Torch in the army would solve our problem!”

Roosevelt sends the Army men to witness an experiment in a secret lab concealed behind the façade of a curio shop. In the surprisingly modern laboratory is a frail young man, inoculated with a “strange seething liquid” by Professor Reinstein…a liquid that soon swells his muscles and replicates millions of cells at a maddening speed. Standing in the frail man’s place is a blond powerhouse, a super-soldier – Captain America!

Before Reinstein can go any further, a Nazi spy within their midst kills him. Cap throws him against an electrical panel, and fries the spy to death. With the professor assassinated, the Super Soldier formula dies with him, leaving Captain America to take down the Axis Powers as a one-man army. By the end of the first chapter, Steve Rogers, Cap’s alter ego as an Army private, is caught changing into his Captain America costume by the camp mascot, Bucky Barnes.

In one of the oddest sidekick origins ever, Steve tells Bucky he’s now stuck becoming his partner since he’s in on his secret. After months of training, Bucky dons a blue and red costume with domino mask and also goes by Bucky when in costume.

Cap’s costume experienced some minor tweaks by the second issue. His mask now covered his neck, and his triangular shield was changed to a discus-like circle, that Cap threw at his enemies.

Harry Goldwater, publisher of MLJ Comics (now known as Archie Comics), objected to similarities to their own patriotic hero The Shield, who wore a spade-like shield on his chest, similar in shape to Captain America’s. The discus-like shield ironically became both Cap’s trademark and weapon of choice.

Meanwhile, things weren’t going as well for Simon and Kirby. After Timely accountant Morris Coyne informed Simon that Timely was only paying them their royalties after first charging office expenses to Captain America’s profits, they started looking elsewhere. Simon and Kirby found a home at Detective Comics while working at Timely.

“I was getting a royalty from Captain America, and it turns out that I was being lied to and cheated,” Simon said. “And I

resented it. Everybody wanted us in the business, so I made a deal with Jack Liebowitz at DC Comics. We had a contract with them, while we were working on issue #10. We decided to stay and finish that issue. Timely found out about the new deal, and the brothers surrounded us while we were working on Captain America Comics #10, and they fired us. They said ‘You better finish this issue [first]!’

“Martin Goodman came from a circulation background, along with Goldwater and some of those smaller publishers. [Timely] dealt with the business like, in my opinion, the creative people would definitely not turn out any profit. It turned out that they even took the credit away from us.”

While the comic book industry was profiting from Captain America, Republic decided to give the Sentinel of Liberty a chance. They’d already enjoyed a degree of success with Spy Smasher, so it’s not surprising that they picked up another patriotic character. By 1943-44, however, they were ramping down making films for the war effort, and Captain America was left not fighting the Axis, but a criminal mastermind instead.

Dick Purcell was cast to play Captain America, and his alter ego of—Grant Gardner, District Attorney?

Historian and academic Raymond Stedman noted, in 1971: The Simon and Kirby creation named Steve Rogers had to sneak away from his army base in story after story to fight the Axis baddies. It was an inconvenience equal to Clark Kent’s dressing problem. Grant Gardner... at least did not have to go AWOL constantly.

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In his authoritative Valley of the Cliffhangers, Jack Mathis notes Republic’s reason for the change: The real Captain America legend presented two obstacles: the inherent continuity problem of getting Captain America in and out of the Army camp in each episode and a division of interest which would be caused by Bucky sharing equality with his adult ally. To surmount these difficulties, Republic took the practical approach and invented its own pair of protagonists: District Attorney Grant Gardner as Captain America’s alter ego and Gail Richards as Grant’s assistant, who was alone aware of his dual-identity secret as the single denominator common with Bucky.

Rather than outfitted in Captain America’s chain-mail tunic, winged cowl, and red, white and blue costume, the Republic Cap wore a blue bodysuit (that appeared almost black onscreen) with black boots and gloves. Rather than the distinctive round shield, Republic’s carried a gun.

Captain America’s divergence from the comics gave birth to one theory: the characters and plot sooner fit the Fawcett Comics character Mr. Scarlet, a crusading district attorney.

Similar to the first Superman scripts being morphed into Doctor Satan, Republic could have begun the estimating script stage for Mr. Scarlet, and then dropped it when either Captain America became available, or simply abandoned and then picked back up when Captain America was optioned.

However, in Mathis’s research (which included six years of combing Republic’s files), there was no mention of any paperwork citing this relatively minor Fawcett character who never earned his own title. Mr. Scarlet would possibly have been considered during the deal that led to Republic’s optioning Spy Smasher and entertaining Bulletman, if at all. There’s also the question of an estimation script: one for a failed Mr. Scarlet (or any other character, even the Copperhead from Mysterious Doctor Satan) would have turned up.

Whatever the case, Timely Comics was most perplexed with the changes, with Martin Goodman himself protesting the serial when the first few chapters were distributed in 1943. Their insistence was that Republic lose Captain America’s carrying a gun instead of his trademark shield, and a dubbing over of the name “Grant Gardner” with “Steve Rogers.” The move would cost Republic $10,000 more on a serial that already had already gone four times that over budget. Republic also countered that sample pages provided

by Marvel did not indicate that Captain America did not carry a gun, or that he was Steve Rogers.

The closest tie to the comic book is when Maldor hypnotizes Gail by using a serpent ring, almost identical to one used in a story from Captain America Comics #22 in January 1943 and seen prior in Perils of Nyoka. Having been finished by October of 1942, that may have been the story in question shown to Republic.

Per the agreement with Timely, Republic was only committed to produce one serial of no more than fifteen chapters, based in whole, part, or suggested by Captain America the character. They could also make any changes they deemed necessary for the transition to film. Republic even held TV and foreign rights, which is how Joe Simon stumbled upon it on a theater marquee in Bolivar.

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Patriot Act-ors Originally, Republic approached serial leading man Kirk Alyn to wear the star-spangled costume. His recollection gives a hint at the slam-bam nature of serial production.

“I said, ‘well, certainly,” Alyn recalled to Comics Buyer’s Guide. “So the guy who called said, ‘All right Kirk, we’ll start…’ Well, they had a starting date which was clear, and I had nothing at the time, so I said, ‘That’ll be great. I’m not doing anything at that time. I’ll be glad to do it.’ And then, all of a sudden, they called me saying, ‘Kirk, they’ve got to use the stage for something and we’ve got to move our schedule up thirty days. Can you start Monday?’

I said, ‘Monday? I just OK’d a Dick Purcell. picture. I’ll be on a picture for two weeks.’ He said, ‘Oh, God. Now we’ve got to find somebody else in a hurry.’ So they got Dick Purcell. It was a very quick thing, you know. I would have done Captain America, though. I would’ve liked to have done that.”

Born August 6, 1905 in Greenwich, Connecticut, Dick Purcell graduated from Fordham College. His subsequent theatrical career got him noticed by a Warner Brothers scout and, from

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Purcell, Cap mask and all.

(left) Lovely Lorna Gray. (right) Lionel Atwill from Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.

Nazi regime and came out months before Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in January, 1940. Spy opens with a mock disclaimer: Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle.

1936 to 1938, Purcell became a contract player. Starting low on the casting totem pole in B films like Man Hunt, he soon graduated to starring roles, earning billing for 1936’s King of Hockey and 1937’s Men in Exile. As a Warner’s contract player, Purcell would move from starring to supporting role from one picture to the next. Contract players were the workhorses of the studio, and gave the studio a consistent stable to choose from.

Warner let him go in 1938 and Purcell went on to appear in four films for Monogram, and then freelanced from studio to studio, even appearing in 1938’s Red Barry serial with Buster Crabbe. Purcell could best be described as a “character actor,” capable but not distinctive enough to stand out and become a star.

On August 7, 1939, Purcell was out driving with starlet Veda Ann Borg when his car collided head-on with another. Purcell was fine, but Borg flew face-first through his windshield, her face cut by the glass. After close to a year of plastic surgery, Veda Ann Borg’s beauty was restored and she continued acting.

Purcell’s leading lady in Captain America was the ravenous Lorna Gray, who was born Virginia Mae “Ginger” Pound, and began a singing career with the Roger Pryor Band under her real name. She was discovered by Columbia when modeling in a fashion show in 1939, and became a part of their B unit as Lorna Gray.

Although never becoming an A-lister, Lorna appeared in a few memorable films. She had a bit part in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington her first year at Columbia, and even showed up in a short two-reel film with legendary comedian Buster Keaton (Pest from the West), as well as the infamous Three Stooges wartime short You Nazty Spy!, which featured Larry, Moe, and Curly parodying Goebbels, Hitler, and Goring.

Where Captain America Comics #1 was the first anti-Nazi comic book, You Nazty Spy! was the first film openly mocking the

She only appeared in the short for about four minutes, poured into a black dress, but it’s memorable enough. After leaving Columbia, she did some work for Monogram and was soon cast in Republic’s jungle actioner Perils of Nyoka as sultry villainous Vultura. One of the better Republic serials, it guest starred future Lone Ranger star Clayton Moore, and was Gray at her best.

The villain of Captain America, Dr. Maldor aka the Scarab, was played by veteran actor Lionel Atwill, who was on the tail end of a career practically killed by scandal.

Atwill was born in Croydon, England in 1885, and began a stage career at age 19. Famed British actress Lily Langtry reportedly convinced Atwill to leave the British stage for the Broadway one in 1915, where he became a success throughout the ‘20s. After a few film roles, primarily in thrillers, he abandoned the stage for the silver screen. One of his more famous screen roles was for the film adaptation of the play The Silent Witness, in which Atwill had previously played onstage, a role that was deemed “easy and convincing.”

“Frankly,” the distinguished Atwill said in 1934, “I’ve had my fill of art. It’s all very well in its way, but there’s an entirely different fascination to pictures that I haven’t got over yet.

No doubt I never will. It may be a little childish, but the sheer mechanical ingenuity of the whole thing gets under my skin the way a mechanical toy fascinates a boy. I’ve been having a tremendous good time and I don’t see why I should stop.”

Atwill was deemed the “successor to the late Lon Chaney” as he went from “horror thriller to horror thriller.” While not quite the “Man of a Thousand Faces” that Chaney was, Atwill did become a horror staple, primarily in the Universal horror pictures (particularly the Frankenstein films). He also acted in two Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone: The Hound of the Baskervilles and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (playing Holmes’ infamous nemesis, Dr. Moriarty).

Atwill’s personal life wasn’t so rosy or, quite possibly, just as horrific as his screen experiences. He was married four times by the end of his life, once to General Douglas MacArthur’s ex-wife in 1930 and separated from her in 1939 (she accused him of being “a surly character”). Their divorce was finalized in 1943, but it was the least of Atwill’s problems.

In 1940, Lionel Atwill was arrested and charged for showing “lewd motion pictures at his home,” and having “alleged orgies.”

There was even a charge of a rape perpetrated during the party.

He was convicted of perjury for “lying like a gentleman” to protect his guests. Atwill’s career was all but over.

On April 23, 1943, Atwill was exonerated of his charges, and granted a chance to reverse his original plea from guilty to not guilty. The judge then allowed the perjury charges to be dropped, so that Atwill could finally work again.

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Captain America was his first serial role and likely taken out of necessity rather than choice.

John English was back in the serial division for Captain America, and this time teamed with a director whose work spanned back to the silent era.

Elmer Clifton’s early work as an actor include D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation and Intolerance. He was determined to direct and was finally given a chance to direct a single scene in Intolerance: a double exposure of a girl’s hand playing a harp, with a character asleep on a floor.

With Griffith’s contract with the studio, Fine Arts, about to expire after two remaining films, Clifton made his case to production head Frank Woods, who gave him Elmer Clifton. a chance to co-direct the Dorothy Gish vehicle Her Official Fathers, with Joe Henabery.

When he arrived on set, Henabery was not there, having come down with a bout of appendicitis. Clifton was left to direct the picture himself; it was the start of a successful silent film career for the handsome Elmer Clifton.

He cast future starlet Clara Bow in her first major film role for his 1922 Down to the Sea in Ships.

If anything, Captain America was dramatically lit, as seen in this still of Purcell.

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Just a taste of the action in only one chapter of Captain America.

In 1926, he exuded upon what constitutes an epic picture to Motion Picture Magazine: A picture may be an excellent illustration of good craftsmanship, as many of the so-called epic pictures of today are, and still not be epic if the great thought is lacking. For that is of primary importance. It is something more than art. It is something more than craftsmanship, or tricks of photography. It is the it of the picture, the spirit.

By the 1940s, Clifton was far from directing epic films, creating Poverty Row exploitation classics like Assassin of Youth and Gambling with Souls. Known for meltdowns on set and second-guessing himself, Captain America seems to be his only film serial, and it is surprisingly shot on par with a classic epic.

Captain America opens with the exploits of the main villain, establishing the threat of the film in the first chapter. In this case, it’s the Scarab, who alerts his victims with a small scarab that looks oddly like a spider. Drugged with a hypnotic serum, the Scarab drives the members of a Central American expedition to their deaths with his “Purple Death.”

It’s a darker opening than often seen in the serials, culminating with a gunshot suicide. Captain America is the closest to a superhero noir, as dark shadows creep around the sets, and most of the chapters have a decidedly urban setting.

D.A. Grant Gardner meets with the commissioner and mayor to devise a plan to stop the Scarab. the Scarab is really Dr. Maldor, who kills the expedition out of revenge for leaving

him out of the fame and wealth gained from the trip. His latest scheme is to get ahold of the destructive Thermodynamic Vibration Machine. Lorna Gray’s Gail Richards, the constantly imperiled assistant to the D.A., goes to the scientist’s lab asking to learn more about “the vibrator”. Soon after Gardner changes to Captain America and nearly has a building topple on top of him, via the unfortunately named Vibrator’s destructive rays, he manages to jump to an adjoining rooftop to safety.

There’s also yet another device that the Scarab needs to be kept from getting: the Electronic Firebolt, which is basically a giant flashlight that blows things up.

It only gets crazier as a multitude of McGuffins are thrown into the mix from chapter to chapter. It wasn’t unusual for serials to jump around, but they usually had some semblance of a main thread to follow and didn’t play hopscotch like Captain America, which was a train wreck of unrelated scientific devices, from robot trucks to Perpetual Life Machines.

And there are the shootouts, with Gardner regularly ducking behind armchairs and crates to match bullets against the thug of the chapter.

The Scarab, suddenly obsessed with the idea of eternal life, vows that he must have a Perpetual Life Machine that can bring the dead back to life. It manages to bring one of his goons back from the dead before being destroyed itself. Scarab, devoid of the Perpetual Life Machine and the scientist who invented it, merely shrugs the loss off and moves on to his next hare-brained scheme.

Things come around in a poor imitation of a full circle by the thirteenth chapter: Remember that Mayan expedition from early on? It turns out that one of the members, Hillman played

by John Hamilton (who later played Daily Planet editor Perry White on The Adventures of Superman TV show), accidentally

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dropped a stone tablet and discovered half a treasure map inside.

Where’s the other half? Why, in the possession of the Scarab!

The remaining chapters follow Captain America trying to save Hillman from the clutches of the Scarab and then having the final showdown with his archenemy.

The final fight of the serial, between Cap and the Scarab, goes wide to show the destruction wreaked on the Scarab’s office in the museum. Republic never slacked in the stunt department.

And those fights? They’re punishing and brutal. English and Clifton pan the camera to move with the action, creating a more kinetic experience than usual. Stuntman Dale Van Sickel’s flying leaps, when doubling for Purcell, look straight out of a Simon and Kirby fight, while each blow landed rocks each man with force.

Tight editing, including a variety of shots to crosscut with, give Captain America’s cliffhangers an unusually high (for a serial) tension. Take Chapter 5, where Gail is tied up beneath a guillotine cutter in a box factory, as Captain America fights a thug around the handle. Tied and helpless, the scene cuts back and forth between the frantic Gail in close-up to medium shots of the struggle—a struggle that ends with the lever getting tripped and the guillotine racing towards Gail’s lovely neck.

Similarly, Chapter 7 ends with a boiler about to explode, intercutting close-ups of the rising gauge with the fight scene between Cap and two thugs. The variety of shots in Captain America are more akin to a feature than a serial, and shows where a portion of the budget overage went: to the editing room.

English and Clifton created a serial with frames that featured dramatic angles and compositions more in line with a comic book than the usual serial fare. Technically, Captain America is a marvel. It’s hard to tell where the exceptional editing, cinematography, and shot compositions came from, but it wouldn’t be a stretch for the serial’s craftsmanship to have contributed to it going $40,000 over budget. At the end, its final negative cost was $222,906—the most expensive Republic serial.

Publicity, Stunts Stuntman Dale Van Sickel’s work is another bright spot of the serial. A former All-American football player at the University of Florida, Van Sickel’s trademark move was to launch himself off a wall and “fly” at another actor.

Captain America is not a patriotic serial, but a crime one, which isn’t really the problem: the problem, I think, lies in the casting.There’s nothing heroic about Dick Purcell as Cap, not physically or in his performance. As Cap holds his enemies at gunpoint, Purcell’s Jersey-like accent (where the “r” is always silent) makes him come across as a gangster in a poorly-fitting costume. Sure, Captain Marvel threw hoods off the roof to their death, but there was still something stoic and heroic about Tom Tyler. Purcell lacked those qualities and brought more attention to how poorly the serial translated Cap to the big screen, rather than a reflection on the quality of the serial itself.

Perhaps burned out on licensing comic book properties, Captain America was the last superhero serial produced by Republic, leaving Columbia the only studio left standing for the genre.

(bottom) Dale Van Sickel in the suit.

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Shortly after Captain America, Dick Purcell had a part in the 1944 film Leave It to the Irish. On April 11, a week after shooting for Irish wrapped, Purcell played eighteen holes of golf at the Riviera Country Club. He walked into the locker room drinking

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Purcell may not have cut a convincing Captain America, but the serial’s non-stop action made a convincing case for the superhero.

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a glass of milk, and was soon found dead by a caddy.

The coroner’s report stated that he suffered a massive heart attack at age 38.

Lionel Atwill died in 1946 while filming his final serial role in Lost City of the Jungle. He succumbed to pneumonia before filming completed, so they finished with a double and another actor. He remains a cult figure, primarily in the horror genre.

In 1945, Republic rechristened Lorna Gray as Adrian Booth, and she soon started playing love interests and female leads, rather than villainesses. In 1946 she was a contract worker at Republic and one of their stars. Booth met and married fellow actor David Brian in 1948 and, three years later, was dropped by Republic when Yates was forced to make cuts to staff and contract players.

Adrian Booth became an alcoholic around this time, and it was her involvement with Christianity that empowered her to stop drinking and led her to become an ordained minister. She died on April 30, 2017.

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had greater things in their future.

The duo remained together until the mid-1950s and continued to break new ground in comics, creating the romance comic (Young Romance) and their own unique takes on the Western (Boys’ Ranch and Bullseye), crime (Police Trap), superhero (Stuntman and Captain 3-D), and supernatural (Black Magic).

(top left) Lorna Gray under her new screen name of Adrian Booth. (top right) Gray with the Three Stooges. (bottom right) New York Times reports on Purcell’s passing. (bottom left) Simon and Kirby went beyond superheroes with the groundbreaking Young Romance.

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“After the War, Jack got out earlier than I did, and went back and finished up some work at DC Comics” Simon said. “I was a friend of Al Harvey and had made a deal with Al, all under discussion with Jack Kirby. It’s not that I would go out and sell him down the river. We had a great deal with Harvey where we would become actual partners in profits, but Jack had to wait until I finished out my tour at Washington, D.C. at headquarters.

“There were a lot of times when artists were unemployed in this business, and we had to make our own jobs by creating something off the beaten track, a new type of hero or something entirely different like Young Romance. We were the guys that were up to the task. We were good friends and we enjoyed working together. Jack was married about two years before he got out, and I had just gotten married after I had got out, so we decided we’d make it easy on commuting so we bought houses across the street from one another.”

The team broke up by 1955, mostly due to the sales slump that nearly killed the entire comic book industry.

Kirby went on to create the team of adventurers the Challengers of the Unknown for DC before rejoining Simon for a brief stint drawing The Adventures of the Fly and The Double Life of Private Strong (itself a reinvention of Captain America’s Golden Age competitor, the Shield) for Archie. After that ended, Kirby went back to Marvel, co-creating Marvel superstars The Fantastic Four, Thor, X-Men, and Silver Surfer with writer/editor Stan Lee, who Jack met as Timely’s office boy during the early Captain America run.

Jack even returned to Captain America, reviving the hero (with Stan) in 1964’s The Avengers #4, making the Sentinel of Liberty the leader of a group of Marvel’s heroes. Jack later left Marvel in the ‘70s to hoof it solo at DC Comics, where he created the “Fourth World” titles: New Gods, Mister Miracle, and Forever People. Full of off-thewall and prescient concepts like the teleporting “Boom Tube,” the smart computer the Mother Box, and a mythology of new gods good and bad, his DC work alone is so concept-heavy that it is still being strip-mined by writers decades later. Jack continued as “The King” of comics until his death on February 6, 1994.

Simon took Marvel to court for ownership of Captain America in the early 2000s, after an also-unsuccessful lawsuit in the 1960s. The case was settled in 2003. Joe Simon passed away on December 24, 2011 at 98—five months after seeing Cap come to cinematic life in a big way, in Captain America: The First Avenger.

(inset) Captain America returns, courtesy of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, in Avengers #4.

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C

reated by Jon L. Blummer in All-American Comics #1 in April, 1939, Hop Harrigan was one of many young aviator heroes to pop up in the early days of comics. Unlike many of these nascent kid aviators, Hop had a longer life and the honor of apparently being based off of a real flier.

Writer John H. Lienhard, in his book Inventing Modern, believes that Hop’s origin was based off of a popular news item of the time. Adventurous aviators (such as the more wellknown Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart) had been American heroes for the past couple of decades. One such aviator was Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan, who supposedly flew across the Atlantic by mistake.

Corrigan, flying a decade-old and second-hand Curtiss-Robin plane he’d bought for $325 and rebuilt himself, went straight from California to New York to file for a transatlantic flight.

Skeptical of his old plane, the aviation authorities denied his flight plan.

On July 17, 1938, Corrigan apparently turned 180 degrees and took off over the ocean.

He landed in Dublin, Ireland and claimed to not know where he was or how he got there.

Corrigan’s license was suspended, even though he claimed his main compass went out and he couldn’t read his backup in the dark. Upon arriving in New York on a ship, his license was reinstated and he was given a huge parade. RKO even cast him as himself in the story of his flight, called The Flying Irishman.

Lienhard describes him as “the little guy in his homemade airplane who had beaten the system.”

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Clear Skies Hop Harrigan started life as an All-American Boy in a biplane, flirted with superheroics, and then got caught up in the flurry of World War II comic book patriotism.

In his first appearance in All-American Comics #1, Hop Harrigan started in the care of his no-good neighbor, who gained custody of the boy in order to get his inheritance. Hop’s father was a legendary aviator who mysteriously disappeared on a flight, leaving nothing more than his old biplane. When Hop had to decide between the biplane or his adopted father, he pushed the old man out of the way and jumped in the plane, landing at an airfield run by Prop Wash. Saving the life of mechanic Ikky Tinker, Hop landed a job there. With the help of a rich heiress, Gerry (who eventually won him over) they started the All-American Aviation Company. Ikky was later renamed Tank Tinker, a much catchier name that isn’t a direct knock-off of Captain Midnight’s pal Ikky Mudd.

By June’s All-American #3, Hop Harrigan gained the coveted cover boy status but kicked off in five issues with the premieres of sci-fi hero Gary Concord the Ultra-Man, a helmeted muscleman who wore nothing else but a tight-fitting trunks to fight in. Hop had one more cover appearance on #14 and it was all over by #16 .

Writer Bill Finger and artist Marty Nodell’s Green Lantern, drawn by Raymond imitator Shelly Moldoff for the cover, made

his first appearance and stole the cover spot for the next three years. Hop only had one cover appearance in 1943.

The first mention of Hop’s All-American Flying Club showed up in All-American #17 from Aug. 1940, not long after Captain Midnight’s own Secret Squadron radio fan club emerged. It came with a “golden winged emblem,” which had a central wheel with the “Hop Harrigan” name in the center wheel (around the spokes, split between top and bottom, just like the Code-o-graph), and “All-American Flying Club” around the outer ring with eagle wings coming from the sides.

Like Captain Midnight, Hop was on the radio by August 31, 1942. He also stole Cap’s creators, Burt and Moore, who teamed up with Albert Aley to produce the Hop Harrigan radio program that fit into the 5:00 to 6:00 Monday through Friday time slot.

The adventures often took place behind German and enemy lines, eschewing the fantastic for more realistic antagonists and situations.

1942 also premiered the Hop Harrigan newspaper strip, by Blummer, a short-lived attempt that only lasted about a year.

Meanwhile, things were changing for National Comics and their companion company All-American. All-American head Charlie Gaines sold his share of his company off to Detective, and the merged imprints were rechristened National Comics.

While they would still bear the “DC Comics” logo, they wouldn’t officially adopt DC Comics as their corporate name for a few more decades.

(left) Hop’s first appearance was in All-American Comics #1, with one of his few cover appearances (right) two issues later.

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Test Flight Columbia picked up the rights for a Hop Harrigan movie serial, spearheaded by their newest producer: low budget schlockmiester Sam Katzman. Apparently Katzman produced the serials to help offset Columbia’s major box office failures, and did not receive any upfront money from the studio. The half-a-shoestring-budget philosophy would reflect itself in Katzman’s output.

Cahiers du Cinéma summed Katzman and his films as such: Deserves to be cited as the most prolific of all producers.

His films beat all records for speed of shooting, modesty of budget, and artistic nullity.

Katzman was born on the Fourth of July in 1901 in New York and entered the Hollywood film industry by age 13, performing grunt crew gigs like propman and best boy, and ascending the industry ladder a rung at a time.

Sam could have followed the stereotypical American dream and produced the most fantastic motion picture in the history of cinema, but he didn’t: When he gained enough capital in 1935 to strike out with his own Victory Pictures production company, he cranked out films as low dollar as he possibly could. The sets and casts were always on the cheap, employing lesser names like Captain Marvel’s Tom Tyler, with Katzman even directing some of his own films to save the expense of having to hire someone.

Victory only lasted two years before Katzman went over to Monogram, where he started the East End Kids “kid gang” series of films, and a serving of low budget horror flicks. Katzman’s strength didn’t lie in the quality of his films, but in the profit that could be made from the rushed ultra low-budget production.

“He was a rather unpretentious looking man—he wasn’t small, but he had no chin,” actor Michael Fox said. “I got along splendidly with Sam, although for some reason I think he regarded me as an intellectual. I think anybody who had gone past the sixth grade was an intellectual to Sam.” Hop Harrigan was during the start of Katzman’s career as Columbia’s premiere movie serial producer. All of his comic book based serials were, with one exception, based off of DC Comics characters.

“I did a picture for Columbia in the early ‘40s, and Katzman was Columbia, and was a great friend of mine. I loved Sam Katzman and his cigars,” actor Johnny Duncan recalled. “He was a very slow-moving and very calm guy. Always sat back in a chair with his mustache smoking his cigar, listening and making his decisions. He was really a wonderful guy, and didn’t want to pay actors nothing. He was cheap that way.”

“He was a nice guy, maybe one of the sweetest in the world,” serial actor Kirk Alyn once recalled. “Once we got past the money stage.”

“We’d always be able to dicker with him on salary,” Alyn added. “Sam would say ‘You know I always take good care of you, kid.’”

“Sam was an absolute genius at making low-budget pictures,” actor and future Lone Ranger star John Hart said. “He never made a real good picture, but he always made money. Sam put a lot of money into Jack Armstrong with a five week schedule where most of his serials were made in three weeks. He had a group of actors who were very loyal to him. He hated drinking— anybody who was a boozer didn’t work for Sam.

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“I could just walk in to Sam, if I couldn’t make my car payment or something and say, ‘Hey Sam, can you use me in something?’ He never let me down. I’d always get to do something, big or little. Ol’ Sam was always a friend...When you worked for him he was stingy as hell, but person to person he was generous.”

“Sam was a great guy, a real prince, loyal to those who worked for him,” actor Tommy Bond recalled. “He had lots of experience directing serials. He was also a funny guy. He wore a porkpie hat, sat in the director’s chair, and used a cane to goose anyone who walked by. Then he’d laugh raucously. A strange sense of humor – but he was funny, gagging with you, making jokes, always laughing.”

Katzman carried a cane with a sculpted finger on the end of it, referred to as “The Fickle Finger of Fate” by actor Ralph Hodges.

According to actor Michael Fox, Katzman also inexplicably carried a riding crop around with him.

“If you bent over, I don’t care who you were, he…well, you know,” Gloria Hodges elaborated. “That cane, and nobody would say anything.”

Other recollections of Katzman were not so kind, particularly from actresses cast in his serials, as noted by historian Boyd Magers on the Western Clippings website.

“I don’t have anything nice to say about Sam. He was lecherous. Very,” actress Linda Johnson said. “Not so much to me, because, fortunately, somebody told me when I first started in that business, if you want to be treated like a lady, act like a lady.

So I…frankly, really never had any problems. I never invited any problems. With Katzman, right off, no way...I don’t mean anything serious happened but he was just…crude.”

Katzman produced the Hop Harrigan movie serial in 1946, a little too late in the game to cash in on the World War II fighter aviation craze. William Bakewell, who was 38 at the time of filming, was a bit long in the tooth to play the teenage Hop. Bakewell went straight from graduating the Harvard Military Academy in Los Angeles to acting in bit parts in 1925. Amongst his many roles, the one film of note that he appeared in was World War I drama All Quiet on the Western Front as Kropp, a soldier whose leg is amputated. The 1930 film is a landmark in both the war genre and cinema. Another picture of note that he appeared in (but not for critical reasons) was the inaugural Columbia serial, Jungle Menace in 1937.

Bakewell’s military service during the Second World War, starting in 1942, was mostly stateside. He returned in 1946 to Hollywood and Hop Harrigan was his first foray back in front of the cameras.

Hop’s girlfriend, Gail, was played by Western actress Jennifer Holt. Born in Hollywood in 1920, Jennifer moved around a bit while growing up, and wound back amongst the stars in 1941.

Her debut was in a Hopalong Cassidy movie, and most of her subsequent roles were of the genre: it must have been in her family’s blood, as her brother was famed cowboy star Tim Holt.

Pug-nosed and barrel-chested John Merton often played the heavy, his sense of authority also often placing him as the #1 villain. With credits that ranged from Dick Tracy Returns in ’38 to Adventures of Sir Galahad in ’49, he was at home in Westerns and serials.

Jack Ingram was one of those serial actors who appeared in dozens of roles: by the end of the career, his serial output numbered 48, most of which were for Columbia, while his film work numbered around 250, and were mostly for Republic.

Ingram fought in World War I at the age of 15, and was gassed and heavily wounded. After two years in a French hospital, he returned home with plans to get into law, and was ensnared into joining a traveling show. He started as a stuntman in the late ‘20s with Paramount and transitioned into acting. In 1944, he bought an old ranch in California and built it into a Western street set for film and television studios to rent out for filming. Ingram was an uncredited thug in the Batman serial of 1943, and went to act in a handful of Katzman’s Columbia comic book serials. Even though he only appeared in about a third of Hop Harrigan as Lt. Riley, he was a steady presence in the serial world.

Hop Harrigan’s poster was far more stunning than the serial itself, but that was usually the case.

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All-American Comics #7, with art by Jon Blummer; Van Johnson was a popular male lead in wartime Hollywood.

Hop’s pal Tank Tinker is a dim-witted piece of comic relief (think Lou Costello, but not funny), and their kid sidekick Jackie’s one of those smart-ass kid characters meant to identify with the audience. Since he’s the kid brother of Hop’s business partner and girlfriend Gail, one has to suspect Hop feels the same way but puts up with him anyway.

After a plane circles their airfield for help, Hop and Tank perform a daring air rescue with the double threat of an empty gas tank and stuck landing gear. Climbing out on the wing while Tank pilots, Hop hangs onto the gear and forces the wheel down with his own weight. The passengers turn out to be Arnold, the head of Aviation Finance, his beautiful ward Gwen, and his assistant Craven. They have an enigmatic government contract that, out of gratitude to the brave Hop, Arnold grants him.

After passing on a gold shipment contract to rival pilot Hunter, Hop and Tank take on the unusual assignment of flying eccentric scientist Dr. Tobor to his secret workshop to bring his new source of energy back to Arnold to sell to the government.

Tobor is a masterful character: bald, bespectacled and sporting a moustache, he completely lacks social skills. While Tobor gives Hop and Tank directions in the plane, he insists that they wear blacked-out flight goggles, to ensure they not find his secret lair, and even holds them at gunpoint to make sure they play by his rules. Meanwhile, the gold shipment flown in by Hunter is stolen from Hop’s airfield…and Hop and Tank are about to crash into a mountainside, but avoid it at the last minute.

Inside Tobor’s underground lair, they learn that Tobor and his assistant Retner have lost all trust in other people, once Tobor’s secret weapon that could shoot down “anything in the air” was stolen. They see the raygun firsthand when it’s used on their plane on the way back by rival flier Hunter, who is working for a shadowy Chief Pilot.

Through all of this, not one punch is thrown in Hop Harrigan until Chapter 5. It’s quite possibly the most pedestrian action serial ever made, opting for gunfights as the series progressed, but keeping the action to a minimum. Director Derwin Abrahams’ dull cinematography kept Hop Harrigan from becoming engaging: a few fight scenes on par with the work of Bennet or Witney would have definitely made Harrigan fly—or at least clear the runway.

After a few instances of first Tobor being kidnapped, then Jackie, then Gail, Harrigan picks up steam as Tobor’s paranoia becomes irreversible.

There’s even treachery in Arnold’s midst, as his assistant Craven is a mole for the Chief Pilot.

Luckily, Hop and Tank have Chief Riley on board to help them figure it all out.

After eliminating the Chief Pilot, the real threat is revealed as Tobor himself who, sadly, decides that the best way to save him from his enemies is to destroy the world with his secret power source: concentrated solar energy.

William Bakewell was a strong lead, far too old to play the teenage Hop (but, in all fairness, the script never tries to make Hop any less than an adult), yet Merton stole the show as Tobor.

Alongside an incredible presence, his expert grasp on character acting shone forth, and created a sympathetic character in the mad scientist, and one you were left sad to see die in the last chapter.

All-American Comics #77 announced Hop’s onscreen career, with a Blummer cover featuring both Hop and Tank Tinker leaning against a billboard drawn in their movie likenesses.

“What’s Van Johnson got that I haven’t got?”

Tank asked, referring to the popular wartime actor. The cover was most likely last-minute: Rather than being a lead story that would warrant a cover, Hop’s stuck with his usual back-of-the-book eight-page story.

Without enough interesting elements to keep Hop airborne, both the comic book and radio versions ended in 1948, and he hasn’t been seen or heard in comics since.

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he Vigilante was National’s clever blending of the singing cowboy, the Lone Ranger, and superhero. It’s too bad that Columbia produced the serial, as the character had Republic high-octane movie serial written all over him.

The Vigilante first appeared in Action Comics #42, November, 1941 and was created by writer/ editor Mort Weisinger and artist Mort Meskin. He was Gene Autry-based radio and prairie cowboy, Greg Sanders, who normally acted like a fop, a la Zorro’s everyday identity of Don Diego de la Vega. After Sander’s father was killed by stagecoach bandits, he vowed vengeance on crime as Vigilante, wearing white pants and a blue shirt with a John Wayne-ish flap, and hiding behind a cowboy hat and red bandanna mask.

Meskin designed a powerful, iconic, and eye-catching cowboy, one who passed on a trusty steed and instead stuck with a motorcycle, rushing off with his six guns a-blazin’. In Action Comics #45, Stuff the Chinatown Kid was added to the ranks of politically incorrect comic book sidekicks. They fought their villains, such as the Dummy, a midget who disguised himself as a ventriloquist dummy, in cliffhanger serial-like fashion.

Intended as a mere filler story, Vigilante soon took on a regular slot in Action Comics, with the stories running until 1954’s #198. In 1941, Vigilante became a member of the Seven Soldiers of Victory, a team of other second-string heroes appearing in fourteen issues of Leading Comics.

The writer on the original stories was infamous DC Comics editor Mort Weisinger, a frustrated writer who was one of the editorial geniuses of the Golden and Silver Ages of comics. He also

Mort Meskin.

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happened to leave a trail of wounded creators in his wake.

Weisinger was one of the early comics professionals who came into the medium as a science fiction fan. He was about 13 when he borrowed his first sci-fi pulp magazine from a camp counselor, the issue of Amazing Stories that featured the first Buck Rogers story.

Hooked on the new genre, Mort became part of science fiction fandom, which put him in touch with Julius Schwartz.

Ironically, both boys grew up Mort Weisinger. to become two of DC Comics’ most influential editors but, back in 1932, they were merely two awkward adolescents responsible for publishing early science fiction fan magazine, The Time Traveler.

That year, Mort also sold his first piece to Amazing Stories, marking his beginning as a pulp writer, which he continued through attending college at NYU for Journalism.

Mort struck upon a genius idea when he started an agency that represented science fiction writers, the prescient Solar Sales Service, with Schwartz. The networking gained with this entrepreneurship got him in touch with Standard Magazine’s editor Leo Marguiles who, fatefully, wound up with an open

associate editor position. He hired Weisinger (who handed SSS over fully to Schwartz) to take over the associate job and, after talking his way into a full editor position, Mort inherited newly acquired pulp Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1935. Weisinger cut his teeth as editor of Thrilling, but also worked on titles like The Phantom Detective, which featured a crimefighter in a suit, fedora, cape and mask.

“I edited Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, Captain Future, G-Men, Thrilling Detective, Phantom Detective, Black Book Detective, Popular Detective, Thrilling Adventures, and Thrilling Mystery,” Weisinger told historian Will Murray. “Then I read on all of them, in addition to the ones I edited and closed, did the copyediting and worked with the writers. It was a very good system, because with the training you had there, you were proficient enough to work in any type of medium…It was great experience you could never get anywhere else.”

A Sense Of Thrilling Wonder The Thrilling covers were rife with aliens, or Bug-Eyed Monsters (BEMs), bedeviling mankind. In many instances, Weisinger was saddled with a cover and needed a story written to accommodate it. It was a practice he would bring to DC Comics in the 1950s.

Weisinger started accepting scripts from former More Fun Comics editor Whit Ellsworth, who had just returned from working as a publicist in Hollywood. Ellsworth handled the writing chores on The Black Bat pulp while also working as editorial director at National Comics.

(left) Mort Meskin’s dramatic pitch illustration for The Vigilante comic, around 1940. (right) Thrilling Wonder Stories, from August, 1940, showing Weisinger at his BEM-est.

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Through former sci-fi fandom pal Jerry Siegel, Mort was public. The New York Times, in a December 22, 1946 recommended to Whit as editor of the Superman comics. article decried “The Sad State of the Serial.” By early Weisinger became an Associate Editor at National in 1940, 1947, theaters were “showing fewer serial pictures than set up a desk and typewriter, and co-created a handful ever before in history.” In a post-war reorganization, of characters. Just a few to Universal Pictures (famed for emerge from his typewriter the Flash Gordon serials of were Aquaman (a friendlier the 1930s) cut serials from version of Timely’s Subtheir schedule entirely. By Mariner), Green Arrow (a that point, serial budgets knock-off of Batman, complete were roughly $200, 000 to with themed vehicles and $300,000 and were still kid sidekick), Johnny Quick apparently profitable. (a newsreel man who moved Republic had made $900,000 fast like the Flash, and was off of the $235,000 Jungle delineated by Mort Meskin) Girl, and $1,150,000 off of and modern-day cowboy hero the Lone Ranger serial that Vigilante. cost $285,000. While those Weisinger was a colorful, are impressive numbers driven personality, who on paper, the format could constantly came up with new be seen as failing when ways to advance his position considering that Universal’s in the science fiction field.

Lucile Love was made for Through it all, though, he was $30,000 in 1914 and made always hoping to break out in $1,500,000 in profits. a more respected, esteemed, “Professionally,” The New and established field than York Times wrote. “Serials comics. That drive would have deteriorated to the point push him to revolutionize where only the inexperienced how comics were done, and young, who beg for the chance, his bitterness towards comics’ or the fading old, who need the lack of legitimacy manifested money, can be inveigled into itself in an abusive streak that playing in them.” is now legend.

It doesn’t seem Ralph Byrd Born in 1916, Mort was either inexperienced or Meskin entered the comics desperate: Like most B actors, field in 1938 working for the he undoubtedly took the lead Eisner-Iger shop and, like in The Vigilante as a job. many of his contemporaries, Having immortalized the role was an alum of the Pratt of Dick Tracy to the point Institute. After a short where he still played the sojourn, he gravitated to the character into the early 1950s, Harry “A” Chesler shop, The Vigilante was really an where his work appeared in in-between project. comics published by MLJ Byrd and his wife lived Byrd’s Vigilante lacked the tailoring of Meskin’s version, but that was in a small ranch in the San (now Archie Comics) and Timely (now Marvel). By the expected from a Katzman production. Fernando Valley, where he time Meskin started working raised rabbits and chickens at National Comics in 1941, he had developed into a and pursued painting and carpentry. He loved to collect formidable comic book artist, with a sophisticated style records (several thousand), as well as a collection of that utilized heavy blacks and fluid figures.

350 pipes. He also had a steak recipe that he was famous around Hollywood for.

Dick Tracy had yielded three serial sequels, and Byrd also enjoyed a turn in the 1941 film A Yank in the R.A.F. that won him both the role of Durga in The Jungle Book and a contract with 20 th Century Fox. With four dozen Katzman was back in the producer’s saddle, again, for the films under his belt, he served in the Army Signal Corps 1947 Vigilante serial. He claimed his own personal test during World War II and taught demolitions at the Missouri market in his younger son, Jerome, who would have to be base Camp Crowder. He left in 1946 as a technical sergeant, stumped by a cliffhanger predicament in order for Sam to and returned to acting. go with it.

An article in The New York Times described Byrd’s perspective By the beginning of that year, there were only two on filming serials: studios left producing serials: Columbia and stalwart Re-

Vigilante Filmmaking

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The greatest headache in serial making, he said, is the demand for speed. If the shooting schedule falls behind a half-day, every one goes crazy…

All of the rough stuff which transpires in the serials, he said, is on the level. The boys really go in there slugging: and, although they aim their blows for the body, an occasional one connects with the jaw.

“But the thing that makes me maddest of all,” said Mr. Byrd, “is when some clumsy guy treads on my toes or kicks me in the back.”

The gawky-looking George Offerman, Jr. came in as Vigilante’s sidekick Stuff, not a stereotyped Asian character as in the comics, but an exuberant white guy. Beautiful and exotic Ramsay Ames, who was half Spanish and half English, played rodeo queen Betty Winslow. Born in New York to parents emigrated from England, Ames began modeling through the Powers Agency when still a teenager. Making the nightclub circuit as a singer and dancer, Ramsay’s first screen role came in the 1943 Columbia pictures comedy Two Senoritas from Chicago.

The next year, she replaced an actress for a part in The Mummy’s Ghost with Lon Chaney, Jr. and John Carradine.

Ramsay Ames.

Although popular as a pin-up model, Ames was mostly relegated to small parts in bigger pictures, or costarring roles in B movies and serials.

ride up on horses and pick a fight with him after falling prey to Byrd’s overacting as the “Prairie Troubador.” During the fight, the camera pulls back to show that he’s on a movie set, with an entire crew led by a trench-coated and spastic director. The owner of the farm they’d been shooting on, Pierce, invites Greg Sanders to a Saturday evening party, right before Greg shrugs off any further shooting and rushes home to his house in the suburbs and gets a call from his assistant, Stuff, who’s undercover trying to break up a car theft racket. Rushing into his house, Greg emerges as Vigilante in broad daylight, and revs his motorcycle up and out of the suburban streets. After he and Stuff bring the bad guys in, we learn that Greg is actually a G-man, the whole Greg Sanders singing cowboy riff merely a cover for his next assignment. His new mission is to get to the bottom of missing jewelry tied into the visiting Arabian prince Hamil, who just happens to be staying at Pierce’s house.

There’s something fishy going on at the café the Pierce owns, as Greg and Stuff learn when one of the men from the car operation turns up shot to death. What they don’t see is that it’s the slick manager of the café, Silver, who shot the man in cold blood.

At Pierce’s house, the Prince grants five purebred white horses to champion rider Betty Winslow, Captain Reilly, Greg Sanders, Tex Collier, and George Pierce. It turns out all five horses were to go to Pierce, according

Jack Ingram was back as another heavy, this time the suave and smooth Silver, aka X-2.

The part of wealthy rancher Pierce was embodied by Lyle Talbot in his first comic book serial role.

Talbot’s life reads like a movie, or the start of a Charles Dickens novel: He was born Lysle Hollywood Henderson on February 8, 1902 in Brainard, Nebraska to an actor father. While he was in infancy, his mother died, leaving a bitter grandmother to kidnap him and raise him under her own surname: Talbot.

The young Talbot was a magician’s apprentice by age 17, and formed his own repertory company, The Lyle Talbot Players.

Shortly after, he found his way into his first film, 1928’s Warner Brothers short film, Nightingale. The dashing actor, with a shock of slicked black hair, signed on with Warner Brothers in 1930, to a contract that began at $300 a week.

He made history in 1933, when he became one of the founding members of the Screen Actor’s Guild. The Guild, which later gained membership from other Warner players like Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Bette Davis, was established to ensure actors worked under fair conditions.

Vigilante opens with Greg Sanders (Byrd) riding his horse up to a hacienda, where a beautiful senorita comes out for a serenade by the guitar-playing cowboy. Three hombres

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DC’s Real Fact Comics (Oct 1947) features a Meskin cover on the making of the Vigilante serial.

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to the Prince’s right hand man Hamid. The man is killed in a scuffle with Pierce in the stable, and Stuff hears the doomed assistant’s final words that the gems are cursed with “one hundred tears of blood.”

With the Prince refusing to let Vigilante know the truth about the “tears of blood,” Sanders and Stuff are forced to figure things out the hard way, while the shadowy villain X-1 plots had plotted all five horses. Operating out of Pierce’s restaurant, with Pierce apparently one of his henchmen, it’s deathly obvious all the way through that X-1 is Pierce himself, before the first chapter is even over.

Greg’s cowboy actor cover is self-centered and lazy, often ticking off his ever-suffering director. The cover is given up pretty early on in the serial, as Greg takes lead in learning the truth behind the horses and X-1’s identity.

Wallace Fox’s direction fulfills the needs of the story, but that’s all. Many of the fight scenes are told in longshot, being more like barroom brawls than the well-edited fights of Republic.

Most of the cliffhangers end with Vigilante merely dusting himself off (he even survives a tumble down an actual ravine, as well as a few car crashes, this way) as he endures the falls and explosions.

Byrd’s presence as Sanders/ Vigilante, as well as Talbot’s sincere performance as Pierce, quarterback the entire serial.

Weisinger stayed in charge of Superman until the late 1970s. He finally had a breakthrough novel, The Contest, which (it was later revealed) was a book Weisinger had plotted and handed a chapter off to separate writers. He died of a heart attack on May 7, 1978, seven months before the release of the Christopher Reeve Superman movie.

Some of Mort Meskin’s most noted work was done with Batman artist Jerry Robinson after World War II. The two teamed up to produce Fighting Yank and The Black Terror for Standard/Nedor; The Black Terror and his kid sidekick, Tim, wore identical black costumes with flared-out capes and skull and crossbones on the chest. Black Terror was an exercise in noir, with heavy blacks permeating panels dramatically. It wasn’t quite as dark as the early Batman tales, but it had its own unique sense of adventure.

Meskin was very shy in person but in his case, it was due to a speech impediment.

He also suffered a series of nervous breakdowns that impacted his career. Joe Simon employed Meskin at Crestwood in the 1950s, after Meskin had stopped working for DC. The artist’s mental and emotional problems had gotten the better of him and left the artist down on his luck and jobless.

Simon gave Meskin a desk with the hope that his friend would finally recover his Weisinger went off to war, drawing ability and produce as well, landing an assignment pages for Simon and Kirby’s at Yale. Jack Schiff (who, like line of comics, after several Ellsworth, was a former editor failed attempts for Meskin to of Major Wheeler-Nicholson’s draw them from home. on More Fun) took Mort’s After days of Mort Meskin place at National for the A promotion Columbia offered movie theaters: kids could coming into the studio, staring duration. While serving his catch the last chapter for free if they caught 1-14. hauntingly at a blank page time, Weisinger continued to on his drawing table, Simon write for Superman, and even came up with a keen solution. Since Meskin couldn’t face had a few pieces appear in Writer’s Digest, articles that a “blank page” anymore, Simon squiggled a few shapes on focused on the transition from the life of an editor to that of the page, and Mort rediscovered his ability to draw. From a military man. then on, every day, someone in the Crestwood bullpen When he returned, it was business as usual as he and would draw lines and circles on Mort’s page and the artist Schiff switched back and forth between editing the Batman or would quickly and dependably meet his deadlines.

Superman titles. In 1953, Weisinger was given Superman and He left the comics industry in the mid-1950s, shortly exclusivity to his own stable of writers and artists. While on after his time at Crestwood and an eleven-year stint back at Superman, he revolutionized the strip by populating Superman’s National. Aside from being a dying field at that point, it’s world with characters like his cousin Supergirl, his pet dog very possible that Meskin was just too sensitive for what Krypto, the Bottle City of Kandor (a Kryptonian city shrunken was a rather cutthroat industry populated by more than a to tabletop size by the alien menace Brainiac), the different few tyrannical and mean-spirited editors. colors of Kryptonite (from the traditional green to red to gold Mort found an art director position in 1965 with the ad to blue to white…each with their own effect on the Man of agency BBDO, where he stayed until his death in 1995.

Steel), Superman’s imperfect duplicate Bizarro, and the While not as widely regarded in the ranks of a Jack Kirby Fortress of Solitude. Some of these elements were all Weisinger, or Will Eisner, Meskin’s unique style helped shape the and some were through writers like Alvin Schwartz or Bill mood and ambience of the comic book medium.

Finger. Mort Weisinger shepherded a mythology for Superman that is still used today.

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fter a few false starts with Republic in the early 1940s, and being beat to live-action by his rival Captain Marvel in 1941, Superman finally began his journey to the silver screen in 1947.

National Comics, still in the midst of their litigation with both Republic and Fawcett, had offered Republic the rights to make a color Superman feature around 1946. They passed, since they were only interested in Superman for serials.

Sam Katzman, fresh off of producing Vigilante and Hop Harrigan for Columbia, snagged the Superman movie serial rights from National Comics. The one provision that came with the deal gave National complete control over the property and final product to ensure character integrity. Katzman’s first stop was Universal, who had produced the groundbreaking Flash Gordon series with Buster Crabbe, and would be well equipped to handle something as major as the Man of Steel. Since they’d left the serial business a year earlier and declined, Katzman found himself knocking back on Columbia’s door. This new Superman serial was “based off” the more commercially successful radio show, very loosely adapting the radio’s “Spider Lady” storyline for all fifteen chapters.

Apparently, serial king Buster Crabbe was offered the role of Superman and turned it down. It made its way towards an actor Katzman had worked with before: the chiseled Kirk Alyn.

Tall, broad-shouldered and black haired, the athletic Alyn was a dead ringer for the 1940s Man of Steel. He was at home building a piece of furniture when Katzman called him to come in and audition. He’d just gotten off a couple of Western pictures that called for him to grow both his hair and beard out and never got around to cutting either. National’s editor, Whitney Ellsworth, was the one who ultimately had to be sold.

“I had done about six films for Sam Katzman” Alyn wrote in his autobiography. “One day he asked me if I’d like to do Superman…

He told me it was a motion picture and if I was interested to go down to the studio right away and meet a couple of guys from the National Comics Syndicate. They wanted to approve the guy who was going to play Superman on the screen.”

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a contract with Paramount. Her film debut was in the 1941 Aldrich family comedy Henry Aldrich for President, based off the popular radio show about a wacky teenager.

In 1945, Katzman, gave her a recurring role in his Teen Agers comedies as a reporter for a high school newspaper.

She had pretty much been playing Lois Lane before getting offered it, and her cute face and snappy delivery made her a natural for the role.

Third billing went to actor Tommy Bond as Jimmy Olsen, who was familiar to audiences as Butch the Bully in the Hal Roach Our Gang shorts of the 1930s. Born in Texas in 1926, Tommy was spotted on the sidewalks of Dallas by an agent for the famed producer in 1932. With an invitation to meet with Roach, Tommy, his grandmother, and an agent friend, hopped in the car and made a ten-day trek to Hollywood.

Meeting Roach in his Hollywood office, the producer Alyn was born John Feggo, Jr. and director (also known for on October 8, 1910, in Oxford, producing the Laurel and Hardy New Jersey. Musical comedy shorts), simply asked him if he and dance somehow got to him liked to fight. Tommy’s spunky while in college at Columbia, “Yeah” of an answer helped get and he decided to pursue that instead of journalism. He hopped him hired. onboard the two-year hit Tommy started as just one of musical, Of Thee I Sing, in 1931 the members of the gang, along and also hit the vaudeville with Spanky, Buckwheat, circuit in-between stints. He Stymie, and Alfalfa. He was even worked as one half of merely “Tommy” for a couple a dance pair for the Tommy of years, left to pursue smaller Dorsey Orchestra, for the famed roles that included voicing a bandleader who later gave a few Merry Melodies cartoons, wiry kid from Hoboken named and came back in 1937 as Frankie Sinatra his first break.

“Butch the Bully.” Walking with Alyn settled in Hollywood stooped head, clenched fists, a after meeting and marrying snarl, and his trademark “Darn actress Virginia O’Brien in right, it’s Butch!” he stuck 1942. His string of supporting around a few more years as the roles ended when he served antagonist of the Little Rascals. in the war in 1944. His return By 1947, Tommy had just to film in 1946 was in the gotten back from serving in Republic serial Daughter of World War II, started college, Don Q with actress Adrian and teamed back up with Booth (the former Lorna Gray).

Alfalfa for a Gas House Kids When casting Lois Lane, film. When Katzman offered Katzman chose an actress him the role of Jimmy Olsen, who became associated with it was made clear that pay the girl reporter for the rest wouldn’t be that much. Bond of her life, Noel Neill. Like was guaranteed four weeks of Alyn, she also got her start in work at $500 a week, a 50% journalism. pay cut from what he’d Born on October 25, 1925 previously made, but he in Minneapolis, Minnesota, (clockwise from top left) Kirk Alyn, Noel Neill, Carol Forman, and claimed the appeal of third Noel’s father was news editor Tommy Bond from his Our Gang days. billing in a “respectable” role of the Minneapolis Starprompted him to take it. Being Tribune, where Noel learned the first on-screen actor to play the ins and outs of the newspaper business. Not long after, Jimmy, he helped establish the cub reporter as always spunky she was writing articles for the fashion trade journal Women’s and always in over his head.

Wear Daily.

While the character of the Spider Lady came from the radio One fateful summer, celebrated crooner Bing Crosby show, where she was an old hag, the villainess was re-envisioned spotted her at NBC, and signed her to sing in his Del Mar, as a sultry criminal mastermind played by Carol Forman.

California Turf Club. She worked a season there before signing If Alyn had any knowledge of Superman before going in, he might have shaved his beard and gotten his hair cut. As it were, Katzman had his secretary scramble for headshots of Alyn, sans the extra follicles, to prove the actor’s look for the role.

At the audition, the unsuspecting Alyn was asked to take his shirt off, and then his pants. Alyn demanded to know what was up with the “funny business”: He didn’t know that Superman wore tights, and they needed to make sure he could fill them in.

After a fifteen-minute audition, Kirk Alyn was awarded the part and taken downstairs to sign the contract. Out of the 125 men who auditioned, mostly bodybuilders who couldn’t speak English, Alyn was the closest fit and was outfitted for the costume the next day.

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Born Carolyn Sawls in Epes, Alabama on June 9 around 1919, Carolyn immediately went to Hollywood after finishing high school and was spotted by an RKO scout while in a play with Pasadena’s Penthouse Theatre Guild. After mostly playing femme fatales, she left RKO after a year for refusing to get on the “casting couch” with a powerful producer. Carolyn went freelance and turned down most of the serial roles offered, under her agent’s well-meaning advice that major studios frowned upon the genre.

Carol married an Air Force man, Robert Forman, early on in her career, and left the much older man after a short time. After him, she briefly married a screenwriter and dramatic critic, with that ending after half a year.

Her first serial role, ironically, was in Republic’s 1947 The Black Widow, and later Brick Bradford with Spy Smasher lead Kane Richmond. Standing at 5’6” with long brown hair, Forman was a knockout.

Charles King, whose film debut started as an extra in D.W. Griffith’s 1914 The Birth of a Nation, played Spider Lady’s henchman Conrad. Charles was cast as a token bad guy by the early ‘30s, his gruff demeanor and 200-pound size making him the suburb thug. His trademark black hair, thick eyebrows, and moustache earned him the nickname “Blackie.” In real life, he had an impish sense of humor and too much of a penchant for alcohol.

Rounding out the cast was Pierre Watkin as Daily Planet editor Perry White. Watkin was a veteran actor, having appeared in everything from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Brick Bradford.

Ironically, he had earlier edited both the Sioux Falls Argus and Sioux City Tribune.

The Superman shoot was handled as seriously as a major motion picture, with a relatively massive budget of $350,000. During the entire four-week long shoot, visitors were not allowed on the completely closed set when Superman was out and “in uniform,” and production secrets were considered privileged information.

The Superman costume, created for black and white film, was brown and gray where it naturally would have been red and blue.

“Budgets were usually around $8,000 an episode,” Bennet said.

“We spent more on Superman. [At Columbia there was] one rehearsal and one take. The minute I would finish a scene, I knew exactly what the next setup was going to be. I would have it all mapped out. I kept the crew busy. I don’t know any other director who cut in the camera as I did.”

In the most P.T. Barnum type manner possible, the studio claimed that they couldn’t find the perfect actor for Superman, so they landed the real Man of Steel to play himself on-screen! Alyn went without billing in the serials yet Variety, on October 18, 1948, hailed Alyn as the “Forgotten Man!” for his anonymity as Superman.

Columbia staples Spencer Bennet and Tommy Carr directed Superman.

Spencer handled the sound unit which focused on scenes with dialogue.

Carr handled the silent scenes, which were fight scenes, car chases, and other bits of action that didn’t require audio to film syncing.

Tommy Carr’s film origins, like Bennet’s, started in silent film. The son of a silent film director and actress, Carr grew up in front of a camera, with his first acting role as a baby, and his childhood practically as an apprentice to his father.

Like many low-budget directors, Carr learned even more tricks of the trade at Republic, mostly through filming Westerns. He would experience a renewed association with Superman in the next decade.

Much of Alyn’s flight may have been drawn, but his takeoffs and landings were graceful.

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More Powerful than a Locomotive?

Alyn was called on to be a virtual Superman, as he wound up performing most of his own stunts. Not only did he and the producers want the audience to see that it really was him onscreen, but his stuntman Paul Stader was taken off the production early on after nearly breaking his leg on his one (and only) stunt. Alyn’s stunts included everything from running through burning rooms, nearly getting incinerated by an electrical bolt, and lying 18 inches away from a railroad track while a train whizzed by at 90 miles per hour.

The actor got just a little worried when the cameraman set things to automatic and gained some distance himself.

“We sat down and talked it over,” Alyn wrote about Bennet and the stunts involved with Superman. “To Spence’s credit he invariably discussed every crazy trick I did with me before I was called on to risk my neck. He was the only director I ever knew who was himself a stunt man before becoming an action picture director.”

With such a lengthy project produced on a tight deadline, the nature of filming was a hectic one, as actors endured 14-hour workdays. According to Tommy Bond in his autobiography, Darn Right It’s Butch: We shuttled back and forth, back and forth, until at the end of the day you didn’t know whether you were coming or going. Really. In the studio, the scenes were shot out of sequence. We’d do scenes in Perry White’s office, with Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen.

We would be working on a scene from page seven, then switch to a scene on page 400, and then back to page 200. One day we shot 103 scenes in Perry White’s office, with dialogue. By 3 or 4 PM our minds had become such blanks we’d be writing dialogue on our hands. We shot scenes in White’s office for three solid days, with everything out of context!

Republic defined the flying effect with Captain Marvel six years earlier. Katzman and Bennet had less luck with Superman, ultimately settling on a far less convincing, if not more off-thewall, solution.

Initially, Alyn wore a breastplate underneath his costume for flying scenes, with the production crew hoping that clear wires and creative camera angles would hide them. Alyn hung without any leg support while in the famous flying pose, for twelve hours of shooting. When the rushes came back the next day, the wires showed clearly onscreen. Furious at the time and money lost, Katzman fired everyone involved and settled on an animated solution. Superman would typically duck behind a car, and a cartoon version emerged on the other side and flew off.

“I remember the animation was $32 a foot,” Bennet said.

“Katzman accepted that. They could have drawn it a little better for twice that amount.”

The preview for Superman announced in captions: “Look!

It’s Superman!” it was all the exaggeration those initial moments needed. “At his MIGHTIEST…as a REAL LIVE HERO on the SERIAL SCREEN!” It was also deemed “One of the GREAT SERIALS of all time!”

The overstated tone of the preview proved more prophetic than hyperbolic, as Superman became the most successful movie serial of all time.

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Alyn, in front of black velvet, for process shots of Superman in air.

Superman opens with a shot of a comic book cover emblazoned across the screen in glorious black and white before it spins off to reveal the title, with Superman himself dropping down from the top of the screen. For the first time kids, in this serial based “off the radio show,” are treated to the destruction of Krypton, a planet that is an amalgam of stock footage of the San Fernando Valley and mat paintings and sketches from the Brick Bradford serial. Head scientist Jor-El, concerned at the recent tremblings of the utopian planet, pleads with the Council in an emergency meeting.

The other men, likewise garbed in leftover costumes from a silent Biblical epic, scoff at the jug-eared and stern Jor-El who states that “derision and disbelief are not new to men of science” before storming off.

Jor-El and Lara, with the aid of the narrator and even more stock footage, place baby Kal-El in a small rocket and send him off-planet – just as Krypton’s Roman architecture shatters, a volcano erupts, a dam bursts, magma flows…and a planet dies in a cartoon explosion.

The animated rocket hurtles to Earth, sliding across a field and behind a rock, where clean-cut middle-aged couple the Kents spot it. After pulling the infant Kal-El out of the flaming wreckage, they decide to keep him as their own.

The narrator steps in and, courtesy of a montage scene,

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chronicles Clark Kent’s childhood and developing powers: Production photos offer a closer look at Jor-El’s lab and the Council. he finds a watch in a haystack as a boy, and saves his father from a twister as a teen (the Kent Farm, interestingly, is a house in the suburbs). When he is a humble, bespectacled After saving Lois, Clark procures a job at the Planet, and adult (now played by Alyn), his wise father tells him he’s the villainous Spider Lady makes her presence known. The a “Superman…you have a great responsibility…You must McGuffin of the serial is a Relativity Reducer Ray created by use them in the interest of truth, tolerance, and justice. The the U.S. government, a powerful laser that the Spider Lady world needs a man of such extraordinary capabilities. That wants for her own nefarious schemes. Dressed in a clingy black is why you must leave this farm. You must go to where they evening dress and occasional mask, her main gimmick is a giant can best be put to use.” electrified spider web. Forman heats up the screen as the sexy His mother gives him a uniform made out of the blankets femme fatale, with her Southern accent emerging every once in a he came wrapped in, a material that is resistant to fire and acid. while and adding to her allure.

As Clark walks off with suitcases in hand, the narrator steps in to There was a reason the first three chapters had so much meat tell that the Kents die shortly after Clark’s leaving. to them, as it was Katzman’s putting his best foot forward to Meanwhile, a train with spunky girl reporter Lois Lane and distributors, hoping it would convince them to pick up the entire incorrigible cub reporter Jimmy Olsen, working on a mining serial package. accident story, comes gunning through Clark’s hometown. The Right after the introduction of Kryptonite (which Clark poor and unsuspecting conductor doesn’t suspect the broken rail is unknowingly exposed to and believed for dead), the waiting to derail the train. serial picks up at a breakneck pace, with the Spider Lady As Kent ponders the broken rail, his thoughts are revealed soon procuring the one known fragment of the deadly rock, in a famous voiceover borrowed from the radio show: “This and Superman constantly pulling Lois and Jimmy’s fat out looks like a job for Superman!” Clark rushes away and emerges, of the fire. for the first time, as Superman!

Another great addition is He speeds to the track as the train the evil Dr. Hackett (Charles hurtles toward him.

Quigley), both he and the In chapter 2, Superman not Spider Lady tenuously work only fixes the bent rail, but also together, well aware each saves a woman from a burning would just as soon stab the building, and tries to get a job at other in the back. the newspaper the Daily Planet Dr. Graham, inventor of the as Clark Kent. In order to earn Reducer Ray, is even kidnapped employment from grumpy editor by the Spider Lady to recreate Perry White, Clark has to cover the ray (the original was dethe same mining disaster in stroyed) as a clever way to keep Metropolis as both Lois and Jimmy, the central plot device alive. and beat them to delivering the By the 15th and final chapter, story. Following the advice of a Superman, Jimmy, and Lois face crazy old miner, Lois finds herself off with the Spider Lady in her trapped with the miners, and is mountain hideout, conveniently soon saved by Superman, who located a mountain with leadspots her with his X-ray vision lined walls that Superman’s Lois (Neill) observes Clark (Alyn) as he perfects and bursts through the mine’s his mild-mannered act. X-ray vision can’t penetrate. rock walls in time.

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(top four stills) Superman (Kirk Alyn) in moments of ACTION! (bottom) Perry White (Pierre Watkins), Superman (Alyn), Lois (Neill), and Jimmy (Bond) are about to listen to a record reconstructed by Superman’s own superpowers.

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Mild Manner(ism)ed Alyn’s Clark Kent has just the right amount of denseness and naiveté, and enough of an understated poker face to be funny.

His Superman is not only imposing and self-assured, but also very graceful in the fluidity of his movements, whether punching a baddie or breaking through a wall. To keep from tripping while running, since he had to face forward as Superman, Alyn performed slight ballet leaps when running.

While it reveals his dance background, it lends a certain lighter than air quality to his Man of Steel.

By underplaying his Clark and overplaying his Superman while opposite Noel Neill’s Lois, he created a dichotomy of character that would be tapped into by the Superman actors to follow.

“I had to do everything as Superman, and very seriously, so that the kids would believe it,” Alyn admitted in a 1981 BBC interview.

“At many times, I felt ridiculous doing some of the things.”

When Superman came out in theaters on January 5, 1948 it was the most commercially successful movie serial of all time, coming right as the genre was in its death throes. It grossed a record $1,000,000, and soon found all 31 reels (which ran over five hours) run off as an entire feature.

The next year, Katzman got wind that producer Arthur Rank was going to produce a “Knights of the Round Table” film and wanted to beat him to the punch with the least amount of effort.

“It looked bad,” Katzman said. “King Arthur and his knights are important to our kids. I knew what would happen. If Rank made the picture, there would be too much history and not

Sir Galahad was Katzman’s Arthurian serial that even lacked a Holy Grail. enough action, and that would spoil it all. So I decided to make The Adventures of Sir Galahad.”

Galahad, which didn’t include the Holy Grail (Katzman was worried over “religious complications”), starred a young actor by the name of George Reeves in the lead. In just a few short years, Reeves emerged as Kirk Alyn’s successor to Superman’s cape and tights.

Katzman also started to earn his new nickname in 1949 after he signed former Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller to play Alex Raymond’s Jungle Jim in a serial. To ensure that the slowly expanding waistline of Weissmuller kept trim, Katzman put a clause in the contract: the actor must weigh 190 pounds or less and, any every extra pound he gained would result in a deduction of $5,000 from the actor’s $75,000 salary, with a maximum of $50,000 (or ten pounds over) deducted.

The Jungle Jim movies were so commercially successful that they earned Katzman the nickname “Jungle Sam.”

Grabs a Pop Fly in a Single Bound

Kirk Alyn in a promotional shot as Clark Kent.

It’s Wrigley Field, 1950. Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Tufts, and Hopalong Cassidy smile back from their black and white newsreel world.

“What’s this? Is it Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, or Stan Musial?” The announcer asks. “Why, it’s Superman!

And then Superman steps up to the plate, and the announcer jokes “He’s kind of disillusioning at the plate, though…” right as Superman hits a home run and takes off.

The nine game series raised money for the City of Hope Children’s Hospital. The two teams were made up of comedians and leading men, with the first game played at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Hopalong Cassidy and his six-shooters served as umpire, while Bob Hope, Buddy Rogers, Sonny Tufts, Wayne Morris,

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Roddy McDowell and Anthony Quinn played, with Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe comprising the ranks of the batgirls.

Gary Moore, host of To Tell the Truth and announcer of the game, called “A pinch hitter – who will it be? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Oh, No! It’s Superman!”

Early on, Alyn was set to hit a specially rigged ball to explode upon impact to not hit the newsreel. He missed (Alyn’s claim was that he was trying to miss hitting the newsreel cameraman), and the audience roared with laughter. Luckily for him, he managed to hit the next ball. National, worried about tarnishing the Man of Steel’s super image, sent a letter requesting that no more strikeouts happen.

While National Comics was dictating the portrayal of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were not.

Two of Jerry’s ideas from the early ‘40s were rejected by his editors, only to show up in the comics shortly after. The introduction of K-Metal, which not only weakened Superman but also granted powers to normal humans, was produced in a stillborn story by Siegel and Shuster. In the 1940 story, Lois Lane learns that Clark and Superman are one and the same and becomes his ally, ala Margo Lane and The Shadow. National wisely killed the story, as it would have destroyed the characters’ defining love triangle dynamic. The similar Kryptonite, however, saw life in a 1943 radio script and was introduced into the comics soon after.

In 1943, Siegel proposed a series of Superboy stories, which followed Superman as a boy as he pulled pranks more often than he fought crime. National trademarked the name immediately and, at the last minute, Mort Weisinger pulled the plug as he felt it would denigrate Superman and set a poor example for the kid readers. Then, two years later, writer Don Cameron penned a tale that introduced Superboy in More Fun Comics #101, most likely drawn by Shuster. Superboy soon evolved into a teenager in his hometown of Smallville and earned his own comic book title within two years.

Aside from that, Siegel didn’t feel that he and Joe were getting their full earnings on Superman merchandise and licensing. While Jerry was also writing two other features, the ultra-dark ghost the Spectre with Bernard Bailey, and kid superhero Star-Spangled Kid with artist Hal Sherman, their successes far from approached Superman levels. Their ten-year contract was up in 1948, and Joe’s eyesight was also failing miserably. All Jerry could think to do was write letters of complaint to National in the hope they would bend and give them the control and money they wanted.

Jerry and Joe had the dream of controlling their property and having him evolve into something beyond the initial concept, while National viewed Superman as a profitable brand that needed to maintain its integrity.

Then, Jerry and Joe came up with their next big thing in 1947, a character they could have a say in: Funnyman, a slapstick-based superhero who fought crime in baggy pants and clown shoes with an arsenal of gag-themed weapons. While National’s chief editor Whit Ellsworth was interested in the character, he couldn’t give the pair the full ownership they

(top) Superman (Alyn) with legendary comedian Bob Hope at the charity baseball game. (bottom) Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman was anything but the success Superman had been.

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wanted. Funnyman was swooped up by Magazine Enterprises, a small publisher founded by editor Vin Sullivan. He even gave them the ownership deal they wanted.

Determined to wrest back control of Superman one way or another, and at the ill-fated advice of an attorney, Jerry and Joe sued National Comics in April 1947 for complete ownership of Superman, as well as $5 million in damages. Siegel and Shuster lost the case, but did accept a settlement over the issue of Superboy. A portion of the $100,000 they were granted went to their lawyer and the pair were blacklisted from National.

The Siegel and Shuster byline disappeared off of Superman and, for all intents and purposes, the pair were wiped away from the company they’d helped build up a decade earlier.

Siegel briefly edited books for the Ziff-Davis line of comics in the early ‘50s and, after that washed up, found himself creating comics for Charlton Press, a Derby, Connecticut publisher infamous for low page rates and shoddy comics. Shuster also briefly found a home there, his work having devolved radically because of his poor eyesight. Joe’s last work in comics was in 1954 for Charlton, while Jerry was out of Charlton a year later.

Siegel kept plugging away, hoping to make a living in the comics industry, while the resigned Joe had no choice but to let his brother support him in his tiny apartment in New York.

Kirk Alyn and company returned for the 1950 follow-up serial, Atom Man Vs. Superman. Things had changed for Alyn: he was apparently able to get twice as much out of Katzman, knowing that they couldn’t pull the show off without him.

Like its predecessor, it was also loosely based off of the Mutual Network radio show. In the radio show’s Atom Man storyline, from around October to November 1945, a vengeful Nazi scientist injects a soldier with a liquid Kryptonite serum. The resulting villain gains the destructive power of generating green lightning and, in his final fight, is dropped by Superman from a great height and to his death.

Katzman and Bennet’s Atom Man was far less spectacular, and was a mere cover identity for the true villain of the serial – the comic books’ Luthor!

Greatest Criminal Mind of Our Age Chosen to play Luthor was Lyle Talbot, who earlier acted in the Batman and Robin and The Vigilante serials. Donning a bald cap, Talbot brought a business-like coldness to the villain, with his powerful voice granting him an intense onscreen presence. While he obviously couldn’t take Superman in a physical fight, you believed he was conniving enough to find other methods of disposing of the hero—and didn’t care who got killed along the way.

In reality, Lyle Talbot and Kirk Alyn shared cooking recipes off-screen, ones that were undoubtedly lacking in Kryptonitelaced chocolate chips.

Atom Man vs. Superman premiered on July 20, 1950. Every chapter opened with a bang: the explosion of an atomic bomb in the desert against the credits and a shot of the painted Superman mural from the first serial.

The opening chapter starts with a barrage of stock footage disasters and spinning Daily Planet headlines, disasters caused by a remote control ray in Luthor’s mountain hideout. Luthor broadcasts his ransom demands on the police band and threatens to destroy a vital bridge if they’re not met. Superman isn’t able to prevent the bridge’s destruction, but he does save a motorist trapped on the bridge, all right before catching Luthor and throwing him in the slammer.

A year later, there’s an insane surge in crime, with metal coin-wielding bandits mysteriously vanishing after committing their crimes. With Luthor still serving his term in prison,

Luthor made his first appearance as a red-haired mad scientist in April, 1940’s Action Comics #23 with a scheme to trick all the world’s countries into warring with one another. “Just an ordinary man— “ Luthor described himself to Superman.

“But with th’ brain of a super-genius!”

A year later, a studio artist hired by Joe Shuster accidentally drew Luthor bald (he may have gotten him confused with Superman’s first mad scientist archvillain, the Ultra-Humanite) and it stuck.

Over the course of the ‘40s, Luthor eclipsed other Superman villains as his primary foe. Two decades later, Luthor would gain the first name Lex, and continues to torment the Man of Steel as his main archenemy.

(clockwise from left) Lyle Talbot, the first appearance of Luthor in 1940’s Action #23, and Talbot as Luthor in Atom Man vs. Superman.

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everyone is completely befuddled as to who could be behind this odd crime wave! On top of that, Luthor has been placed in solitary so other inmates won’t attack him out of resentment for helping the government by turning over some of his patents. Unsurprisingly, the wily Luthor has a coin of his own, which he uses to retreat to his cave hideout and mastermind his crimes, always finishing his devious business before the guards at the prison realize he’s gone.

Lyle Talbot’s Luthor is so business-like that he’s heartless and unaffected by his final scheme to destroy the entire Earth.

The one time he does laugh towards the end, it’s unsettling and creepy.

Talbot, who was known for never turning a job down, later became a regular in the films of low-budget director Ed Wood and appeared in his cult films Plan 9 From Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, and Jailbait. His most famous role was as annoying neighbor Joe Randolph in The Ozzie and Harriet Show from 1952 to 1966.

“He was like the rest of the starving actors in Hollywood,” Batman and Robin co-star Johnny Duncan said of Talbot.

“You get a job and you take the job to pay the damn rent.

Heaven knows you haven’t got what these television actors make [today]. If you were lucky to get a damn part, you’d take it and become that character.”

Talbot continued to act and raise his family (his wife, Margaret, and their four children). He died on March 2, 1996 in a hospital near Houston, Texas, from a combination of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

By the end of the first chapter, Jimmy is kidnapped by Luthor’s goons at the end of their heist and thrown in their getaway TV truck (establishing early on that TV, the feared replacement for movies, was evil) and blown up. Teleported out via coin by the thugs, Jimmy winds up in Luthor’s lair, except that it isn’t exactly Luthor’s – it belongs to Atom Man. It’s actually Luthor in black robes with a trash can on his head and speaking with a false accent. He has created a “main arc” machine that banishes anyone standing beneath to another dimension, Atom Man vs. Superman, in a terrible nothingness not which television is associated unlike the comics’ Phantom with evil, spurred producers Zone, and it is his goal to put into taking the Man of Steel to Superman under it and send the new medium. Kirk Alyn him away for all time. was approached about acting As Jimmy is returned to in the upcoming The Adventures The Daily Planet to issue the of Superman. challenge, he realizes that he “The casting director asked still has one of the coins on me if I wanted to do the TV him. Rather than just zapping A doctored studio promotional image for Atom Man vs. Superman. version, but in a manner that whoever is holding the coin discouraged me from doing back (a pretty simple solution… it,” Alyn said. “You know, ‘Kirk, we can’t pay you a lot, and even for those who aren’t criminal masterminds to figure out). we don’t know if it’ll catch on or not, and…’ So I said, ‘Well, Instead, the Atom Man’s henchmen hound Lois, Clark, and If you don’t know how it’ll do, then there’s no use prolonging Jimmy for the coin. the agony. I’ve got enough troubles anyway. I’m going back Luthor, meanwhile, is granted parole for working with the to New York.” government, and decides to open a television station. Installed Similarly, Tommy Bond was asked to reprise Jimmy Olsen in his new front, Luthor becomes a respectable businessman by for the television show. He turned it down, as he’d started day and secretly zaps himself into his lair to mastermind scheme working behind the scenes in (Luthor would be proud) television. after scheme. He even gets Superman under the main arc twice Tommy remained there until his death on September 24, 2005 (once, Superman fools him, but is caught in it the second time), from heart disease. and even puts Lois Lane on the payroll as a reporter when she Alyn wound back up on Broadway, but only after portraying “defects” from the Planet. He milks the Atom Man identity all one more comic book hero for the serial screen: Blackhawk. the way until the 11th chapter.

“I’m proud I never did anything in my life that made me unhappy,” Alyn reflected. “If I didn’t like it I would quit.

Atom Man vs. Superman is top-notch stuff, mostly due But Superman, unlike Blackhawk and all the rest, was to the acting and clever script; Pierre Watkin is still stodgy something else. I was hard pressed to find a decent role. as Perry White, Noel Neill (now sporting a haircut like her Every place I’d go they’d say ‘Hiya, Superman!’ I didn’t comic book counterpart) is actually a little meaner than think of that at all when I went into it. Not that I regret it; before as Lois, and Tommy Bond continues to scrap about I just didn’t expect it.” as Jimmy Olsen. Kirk Alyn’s Clark and Superman are more The television part went to George Reeves, who stole the role comfortable than in the last serial, and he seems even more from Alyn for the next generation of fans. self-assured in the role.

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Alyn cut a formidable Man of Steel through two serials.

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A

lex Raymond’s comic strip Jungle Jim featured a jungle adventurer with safari helmet and pencil mustache. It’s not surprising that National Comics tapped into that craze with their own jungle man, Congo Bill. Congo Bill may seem an odd choice for a movie serial treatment, until you consider that Sam Katzman was producing this Columbia serial, and that the cheapskate producer had already earned the nickname “Jungle Sam” from the success of his Jungle Jim films with Johnny Weissmuller, and that Bill’s co-creator Whitney Ellsworth was involved with producing Superman.

Congo Bill first crept through the jungle in the pages of More Fun #56 in June, 1940, and was created by Ellsworth and artist George Papp. From his first appearance, he’s a blatant Jim knock-off, from pencil mustache to Papp’s artistic stylings.

The inaugural story opens with Bill and a Professor Kent riding down the Congo River in a boat at night and on the trail of a lost city.

“I’ve lived in Africa all my life,” Bill says, “and I’ve seen and heard of so many weird things that nothing would surprise me!”

Their boat is boarded by attacking natives, and they are captured and brought to criminal mastermind the Skull, who has set up headquarters on a jungle island. His hope is to find the treasure hidden on the island and stay off the law’s radar. With a shrunken face, cut-off nose, and wearing a headpiece that looks like an aviator’s cap, Skull is a Dick Tracy villain thrown into an Alex Raymond strip.

Bill and the professor find the treasure, defeat Skull and his henchmen, and barely get away. Congo Bill’s stuck being content with turning the treasure over to the government and hopes to bring Skull in the next time they meet.

Papp’s later artwork featured bold brush lines and was loosely drawn. His art on Congo Bill’s first appearance is rendered in a style similar to Alex Raymond’s. The main difference between Bill and Jim is actually in Bill’s favor: the Jungle Jim strips were usually beautiful but dully-written affairs, while “Congo Bill” was more action oriented and blessed with Papp’s slick embellishment. George Papp went on to cocreate Green Arrow before going off to serve in World War II, leaving “Congo Bill” in other capable hands.

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Congo Bill made the move over to Action Comics the next year, and was drawn by Fred Ray. Other artists, like future Aquaman artist Nick Cardy came on board, and the comic continued well past the Golden Age. Whit Ellsworth was not only serving as editor of the Superman books, but also as a “Hollywood consultant” for the movie serials. He consulted on both Batman serials, the Superman cartoons of 1941, Superman serials, Adventures of Superman radio show (during World War II) and Congo Bill. It wouldn’t be surprising if he sold Katzman on the property in the first place, especially considering the opening credits list Whitney’s name, in all caps, as the sole creator.

Footing the Bill

(clockwise from top left) Cleo Moore, Don McGuire, and Fred Ray’s original splash page from Action Comics #48 (May 1942)

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Spencer Bennet and Tommy Carr came on board to direct, with actor and future screenwriter Don McGuire taking on the lead role.

Born in 1919, McGuire had already lived a past life as both a journalist and press agent when he entered the film industry at age 26. He’d already had a handful of credits under his belt when he donned the safari hat to play Congo Bill. McGuire left acting in 1950 to pursue screenwriting; his credits include several Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis stand-up comedy routines, as well as Bad Day at Black Rock in 1955, for which he won a Screenwriters Guild award, and the Dustin Hoffman film Tootsie.

Blonde bombshell Cleo Moore played Lureen, the missing American girl that Congo Bill goes to the African jungle to recover. A few years after this, her first speaking role, Moore went on to act in several B pictures, most notably women in prison films.

She was once quoted as saying “I’ve been in so many women’s prison movies that I should get time off for good behavior.”

Jack Ingram appears in this one as the enigmatic Cameron, while Charles King plays the shady Kleeg, who runs the inn and tavern where most of the action plays out.

Leonard Penn plays Andre Bocar, the owner of the Green Parrot and mercenary crime boss of the Congo.

Penn’s deep voice and powerful stature, as well as his fine acting ability, made him a believable menace to Bill. Prior to appearing in B-movies and Westerns, he’d performed on Broadway through for seven years.

Bug-eyed I. Stanford Jolley plays Bernie MacGraw, the crooked circus owner who is out for Bill. With his pencil thin moustache and sinister looks, Jolley was almost always cast as the criminal mastermind, acting in hundreds of B films and Westerns throughout his career.

Congo Bill introduces the trapper extraordinaire through a narrated montage of stock footage showing him trapping wild beasts of the Congo for the Culver Circus. At the winter home for the circus, the

National’s superheroes happy, even if it meant spending a bit MacGraw brothers Tom and Bernie have a year to find the more time and money on the production. circus’s missing heir. Mr. Culver and his family went missing The safari hat-donning hero earned his own comic book in years ago on an expedition to the African jungle; while Tom August/September 1954, which only lasted for seven issues. wants to find the daughter, Ruth, and give her the half a million The stories were drawn by artist Nick Cardy, who had started dollar inheritance, Bernie would rather just keep it (and the working for Will Eisner in the 1940s, and became a DC Comics circus) for himself. mainstay in the 1960s. Cardy couldn’t remember the uncredited That night, Bernie lets one of Congo Bill’s lions loose, writer’s identity, but did recall the writer’s lack of animal hoping it’ll kill Tom and allow him to inherit everything. Bill knowledge: the writer once claimed the hyena was the fastest steps in at the right moment, saves Tom and refuses to take animal, and once had a scene where the herbivorous rhinoceros the blame for the cage’s lock having been destroyed. Bernie, attacked a zebra because it was its “favorite meat.” however, does succeed in getting a gorilla to attack and fatally With his title canceled in 1955, Congo Bill almost surwound Tom. On his deathbed, Tom gives Congo Bill a secret vived the Silver Age by being made a monkey out of, at a letter to give Ruth Culver as soon as he finds her. Before Bill time when DC Comics’ editorial had can pack his bags and leave the circus a penchant for large apes—especially for good, Bernie sends him on an talking ones.

African expedition and plans on having In Action Comics #247 from the trapper meet with an unfortunate December, 1958, Bill’s feature accident while simultaneously keeping was retitled Congorilla when he him out of his hair. partnered with a Golden Gorilla In Africa, Congo Bill stays at the spotted issues earlier. When Bill’s Green Parrot, a tavern owned by the African medicine man friend dies crooked Andre Bocar, who had tipped from injuries gained from falling Tom off to Ruth Culver’s apparent off of a cliff, he promises to imbue life as the “White Queen” of the lost Bill with “the strength of a gorilla” White Tribe (yes, a Caucasian tribe before he dies. in the middle of Africa), and is “Before Kawolo die,” the man pilfering gold from the tribe’s says, laying by a campfire that night. conniving medicine man.

“Congo Bill must take this ring!

Throughout the serial, Bocar’s men It let Congo Bill change identities come after Congo Bill on order by with our tribal god—the Golden Bernie MacGraw, and Bill finds an Gorilla!…When Congo Bill need unlikely ally in the trader Cameron. gorilla strength, he rub ring! Then, Bill is ballsy: after a botched murder for one hour, Congo Bill’s mind attempt, he follows a couple of Bocar’s enters gorilla’s body—while gorilla henchmen to Bocar’s house, walks in mind enter Congo Bill’s body!” and confronts Bocar. Bill is constantly The disbelieving Bill wears the stuck amongst people after him, all ring out of sentiment, and is forced trying to get him killed. Most all of the to put it to use when he gets caved cast members can’t be trusted and have in on the next page. Rubbing the their own ulterior motives: the shady ring for the heck of it, he starts to Kleeg, who runs the Green Parrot, growl and beat his chest like an ape… sells his loyalty to the highest bidder; Things get golden for Congo Bill in the first issue of his meanwhile, Congo Bill finds himself Cameron is after gold of some sort but 1954 comic, as he is made a monkey of by Congorilla. seeing the world through Golden mostly chooses to ally himself with Bill for reasons all his own; and even Art by Nick Cardy. Gorilla eyes. Before the story’s over, Congorilla has saved an actress Bernie and his sidekick Morelli show on a jungle movie set, beaten the up in Africa in later chapters with their poach-hungry producers, and flown a plane to get back to own motives. rescue his Congo Bill half from the cave.

The desired object of the whole serial is the late Tom’s letter, Congo Bill gained a kid sidekick, a village boy named meant for Ruth, which Kleeg steals from Bill’s room and then Janu the Jungle Boy, to watch after his human body while hides it so well even he forgets where he put it. As Ruth leaves he was off playing monkey. His prior solution, as seen her tribe behind, she joins up with Bill and is with him until the in a surprise guest appearance in a Superman story in real good guys are revealed, and all of the bad guys are defeated Action Comics, was to take sleeping pills right before the in the end. transformation into Congorilla. The feature popped around Congo Bill featured the usual Katzman silliness, most in a few different DC Comics, before disappearing into the egregiously in the English speaking tribe of African white jungle growth in 1961, only to reemerge in the next few people. The medicine man even wears a bison headpiece, decades but never as a major character. although buffalo aren’t exactly indigenous to Africa. Yet Congo Things were going much better for Don McGuire than his Bill is one of the nicer filmed and acted Columbia serials. The serial role: he graduated to directing and screenwriting by main reason would most likely be Whit Ellsworth’s involvement. the mid-1950s. McGuire died on April 13, 2000.

It would have behooved Katzman to keep the handler of

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year after Superman’s success, Katzman and Columbia decided to dust off the Dark Knight for another go at a serial with Batman and Robin. Robert Lowery took over the black-heeled boots of the Caped Crusader from Wilson while Spencer Bennet tried his damnedest to make it work.

Lowery was born Robert Larkin Hanks in 1914 in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of an oil investor/lawyer and a concert pianist. Robert had been his parents’ third attempt at having a child, which contributed to his mother’s spoiling him. She read him loads of Lord Byron’s poetry, hoping her son would come out to be a miniature Byron. In her own unbiased opinion, the boy, who grew into a handsome actor, was just that. Robert was a pretty spoiled kid, and a bit of a wiseguy. Without a real pursuit of the academics, he apparently relied upon his charm and athletic ability to make it through his formative years.

Graduating from Paseo High School in 1931 with a fair share of athletic experience under his belt (from boxing to baseball to football), he played with the Kansas City Blues baseball team. A game injury gave him a broken pelvis, a setback that he built himself back to strength over by working in a paper mill.

Robert’s father died when he was still quite young and he and his mother moved to Los Angeles to start his acting career. Between working as a vocalist for the Flatts and Randall Orchestra, he found his way to stage, eventually winding his way to film, starting with a bit part in 1936’s Come and Get It. Becoming a contract player for 20th Century Fox, Robert often played romantic leads in A-list movies. The charming and handsome Lowery, standing at a bit over 6’ and with a “penetrating stare,” would be a shoe-in for stardom. As was the case with many actors, Robert found himself relegated to

Robert Lowery.

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whatever work he could get after returning from the momentum-halting World War II. Lowery, according to his son Bob Hanks, was a “man’s man…he liked the ladies, and they liked him.” He was always seen with a bodyguard, also hung out with “the little man”, and detested phonies. He wasn’t a fan of the Screen Actor’s Guild, or crusading actors, probably because his cavalier and workman-like motto was “Keep your feet on the marks and pick up your paycheck.”

Lowery married twice before finally settling down with actress Jean Parker in 1951.

A combination of back taxes and difficulty finding work got the best of Lowery’s career. It seems that his doting mother, who was also his manager, had been withholding taxes over the years. In debt to the IRS, Lowery found himself doing movie serials and B-movies. His first serial work was 1944’s Mystery of the Riverboat.

Batman and Robin was his final serial foray, and apparently one of his favorite acting gigs.

Katzman brought a young actor he’d known from earlier productions, Johnny Duncan, to play the Boy Wonder. Duncan had acted in eleven years’ worth of Dead End Kids, East Side Kids, and Bowery Boys films that Katzman masterminded, all shot within six or seven days each.

He was definitely equipped to handle Bennet’s lightning manner of getting a film done, but with a squared jaw, arm tattoo, and grimace, he was an odd choice for the Boy Wonder.

Growing up on a Missouri farm during the Great Depression, Johnny learned to tap dance at age 9, taking his act to a local bar called The Sugar Bowl. Stationing himself by the jukebox, Johnny tap danced so people would toss change his way. Johnny’s tap-dancing money allowed his family to cover their $125 mortgage one month and his father was convinced enough to pay for lessons. He started on the vaudeville circuit in 1936, and was soon spotted by an agent for 20th Century Fox, and signed to a six-month contract that was his family’s ticket out of Missouri. “[Katzman] called me up, back when he first started casting,” Duncan recalled in late 2007. “[Bob] Kane the cartoonist said ‘No, he’s too old.’ He never saw me but said ‘26 is too old, we need someone 16.’ They went through four or five hundred kids and couldn’t find one, so Katzman called me and said ‘Just dress like you do for high school stuff and come on over.’

“When I went over and came in, Kane was in the office and said ‘Jesus, that’s Robin! They finally found him!’ Katzman said ‘He’s 26, got a kid, and everything else, but he looks young.’”

Glenn Cravath’s (top) preliminary study for the Batman and Robin movie serial poster. (bottom) The final six-sheet poster.

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Jane Adams made for a stunning Vicki Vale.

(top) Duncan, a little old for Robin, is ready for action. (bottom) Duncan as Robin and Lowery as Batman in this unmasked lobby card.

Incidentally, this Batman and Robin had shared screen time before, back in the 1943 musical “teenage” film Campus Rhythm, a comedy romp about a popular radio singer who returns to college under a pseudonym. Unlike the Batman and Robin serial, it ended in a wacky musical number, rather than a fight to the death.

Commissioner Gordon finally found his way to the big screen with this follow-up, played by character actor Lyle Talbot. After Batman and Robin, Talbot would embody another popular DC Comics’ character.

As Linda Page had come and gone in the comics, redheaded girl photographer Vicki Vale debuted in October/November 1948’s Batman #49 as Batman’s own version of Lois Lane.

Bob Kane claimed to have modeled her off of Norma Jean Mortensen, the model who became Marilyn Monroe, but the colorist had erroneously made her blond. Vicki Vale wound up having a longer lifespan, sticking around until the early ‘60s, and then reemerging in the late 1980s for a brief spell. Jane Adams, with short, dark and curly hair, played a feisty Vicki.

Jane started acting in pictures in the early 1940s (first billed as Poni Page), most notably as the sympathetic hunchbacked nurse in 1945’s House of Dracula with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Lionel Atwill. She stayed in acting until the early ‘50s, even appearing in a 1953 episode of Adventures of Superman.

House Peters Jr. played a henchman in chapters 7 through 15.

Appearing as a Shark Man in two episodes of Flash Gordon, Peters was a regular in serials and B movies.

“I remember one time going with my agent, Jack Pomeroy, to various studios. I remember going to Columbia. I sat in the outer office and Jack said, ‘I’ll go in to see Sam and see if I can’t get you a raise.’ The door was open so I could hear the conversation.

Pomeroy is talking to Katzman and he says, ‘I think it’s about time you gave House a raise.’ I was getting $35 or $50 a day— whatever it was. Jack says, ‘Surely he’s worth another $25.’

“Katzman comes back, ‘I can’t do it, we’re on a very tight budget.’ Just then, Sam says, ‘Excuse me a moment’ and reaches for the phone. He dials the number, and it’s his bookie! He bets $1,000 on a horse—to win, for God’s sake! Usually, win or place, but just to win! He hangs up, turns back to Pomeroy, ‘I’ll do the best I can for House, but…’ [He] can’t give me a $25 raise, but he bets $1,000 to win at the racetrack.”

Spencer Bennet directed the Dynamic Duo’s return to the silver screen under his usual shrinking budget and deadline crunch.

“He was a real friendly guy, but very quiet,” Duncan said.

“I never saw Spence Bennet direct a scene. He would set the camera up, and the actors knew what the hell they were doing because they shot the pictures fast. They were shooting Dead End Kids for about $50,000 to $60,000 a picture. You only paid a dime to see the picture, and it took a lot of dimes to make up $50 or $60,000 bucks.”

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Batman and Robin may not have delivered the comic book level thrills it promised, but it did inspire the character’s camp revival two decades later.

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Com-Bat Pay The making of Batman and Robin was grueling, according to Duncan, it paid poorly but more than made up for it in overtime.

His base pay was around $700 a week, but was supplemented with $1,100 in overtime.

“We did 55 to 60 set ups a day in that serial,” he said of the days that started at 5:30 A.M. “That’s moving the camera and shooting different shots 60 set ups a day. Usually in a B picture, you’ll make maybe 14 set ups a day. In an A [or major motion picture], you might just make three or four.”

“The actors would be given the script on a Friday and you’d start on Monday,” Duncan said. “You couldn’t read the full script, which was as big as the LA telephone book. How can you shoot 55 set-ups a day and do your dialogue right? You’ve got one take, two takes, at the most. He ran that in half the time. It’s a different way…Even a close-up was a big thing. They didn’t take the time for a close-up; it was about two shots, a medium shot, a full shot and a master shot. When they did a close-up, it was something special.”

According to Lowery’s son, Lowery and Duncan did not get along, and Lowery would go in and get through each day of shooting. Duncan’s recollection was contrary, with him referring to the experience as “wonderful” and full of pranks. “[Lowery] was a very handsome man, looked like Clark Gable, talked like Clark Gable, and that’s why he never made it as a big star,” Duncan reminisced. “He did a lot of pictures, but he looked a lot like Gable; if you put a moustache on him, he was a double for Gable. He had the same low voice… “[Lowery] wore a girdle [as Batman], and I used to have to zip him up in the corset and pull the strings,” Duncan laughed.

“I’d put my foot on his ass at about 5:30 to tighten this corset around his waist because he had a little beer belly…Bob named us Fatman and Bobbin and Duckman and Waddles. We had a lot of fun on it. I’d say ‘Come on, Duckman.’ [And he’d go] ‘Okay, Waddles.’

“In the early morning, we’d put snails in each other’s shoes,” he added. “Bob and I would put the damn shoes on and walk a couple of steps and these snails would crunch. We had a lot of laughs.”

With only six outfits to alternate through the entire shoot, Lowery and Duncan had to get inventive.

“We said ‘We’ll never get in these tights again, it was terrible!’ We had to keep pulling ‘em up so that they wouldn’t wrinkle around the knees. We had to [hold] Batman’s ears up with Scotch tape because the wardrobe department didn’t make the ears strong enough, and they’d keep flopping over like a dog’s ears.”

Like many serials, the physical side of things was demanding for the lead actors.

“We were more physical than the Batman and Robins of today, and we were in shape. Bob had a beer belly, but was still strong, and we were lifting weights. I was lifting weights in the 1940s when I was going to high school. I used to be a weightlifter and work on the range. With the dancing, my legs were great, my body was great, and I weighed 135 pounds. I was in shape.

“I did all of my own stunts. We had a second unit, and two buddies of mine worked on the second unit and were both dancers. Lenny Smith was one and Hal Kieser was the other.

While we were filming first unit, the second was always working.

Lenny did some of the train stuff, and Hal jumped out of a tree for me. I was working on the first unit, or else I would have done it, because I was a better stunt man then both of those guys.”

Even Bob Kane was often on set, putting in his two cents as the characters’ artist and co-creator.

“I had my hair combed, one day, right at the beginning of the picture,” Duncan remembered. “We were down in Los Angeles filming and he was in his chair, so I went over and said good morning to him. He reached up and he just ruffled my hair to make the curls drop down in my face, because I had it combed back. In those days, you wore grease in your hair and didn’t blow-dry it, like you do today. So, I had that grease, oil, whatever you call it, and it was all oily. When he did that (I’ve got real curly hair, anyway) and the curls would drop down and he said ‘That‘s what I want’. So, I’d comb my hair in the morning and rough it up on the top so it’d get curly.”

Batman and Robin opens with montage shots of Batman and Robin looking around cluelessly while the opening credits are imposed over them in white type. They spent all fifteen chapters searching for the point of it all.

A crime wave of stock footage and flying headlines scourges the city. The announcer establishes, through use of footage from the first Batman serial, that Batman and Robin are friends of the law (remember, serial code disallowed vigilantism). A completely different narrator then takes over, and pretty much sums it all up with the shot of a suburban house: In the suburbs of Gotham City is the home of Bruce Wayne, known to his neighbors as a wealthy playboy.

Only the faithful Alfred knows the closely guarded secret of what lies below the house: the Batcave, headquarters of those relentless crusaders of law and order – Batman and Robin.

Yes, that’s right: Wayne Manor was traded in for a house in the suburbs. Not even a penthouse apartment in the middle of Gotham, but a suburban home. Batman and Robin run outside in the broad daylight, across the yard, and to Bruce Wayne’s parked 1949 Mercury convertible to fight crime.

Lowery, as Batman, standing in front of a rear projection screen.

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When Commissioner Gordon receives a call about an armed robbery at a research department, he flashes the tabletop-sized Batsignal (Gotham PD must have hit some budget cuts that year) out the window to alert Batman. Bruce feigns tired laziness and sends his girlfriend Vicki Vale off on a mock assignment call, and then enters the Batcave through a door hidden in the grandfather clock. He and Dick Grayson pull their costumes out of a nondescript filing cabinet, and then run off in broad daylight as Batman and Robin.

At the scene of the crime, criminals steal a remote control machine invented by a crazed and paraplegic Professor Hamill.

The machine’s operator can control any vehicle, first illustrated by a toy train and truck in the lab’s main office. Like most serial inventions, it has an unusual and expensive power source: in this case it’s diamonds.

Hamill, who lives in a mansion more impressive than millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne’s suburban home (why it wasn’t used as Wayne Manor and Hamill wasn’t put in the suburban home is anyone’s guess) wheels himself into a secret room with a special electric chair device that allows him to walk again, and then creeps into a secret entrance through his fireplace.

In the villains’ hideout, the three thugs who stole the remote control machine greet the black-cloaked and masked villain the Wizard. In need of diamonds to run the machine, they set off a bomb to break into jewelry depot on Ellsworth Avenue (see what they did there!?), where Batman and Robin happen to be driving by as Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson.

Two of the baddies escape and take the secret submarine to a secret cave where they’re transported to Wizard’s subterranean HQ…with more hoops to jump through than a pack of circus dogs. The Wizard also has a nasty ability to use the remote control ray to blow things up, as displayed at the end of the first chapter when Batman and Robin are trapped in an exploding plane.

On top of that, there’s a news broadcaster, Barry Brown, who has the odd ability to predict the Wizard’s crimes and announce them on his news show. He gets everything from a shipment of experimental explosives to the whereabouts of a top secret professor.

Poor Vicki suffers the same indifference Superman had for Lois Lane in the early Superman comics. In one chapter, Batman offhandedly refers to her in front of a police officer: “Don’t mind her. She’s always going around taking pictures nobody sees.” In another, he saves her life and leaves her tied up while he goes to catch the bad guys.

The Wizard continues to taunt Batman and Robin, even dragging Vicki into things with her brother Jimmy (who’s part of the Wizard’s gang), and kidnapping Bruce Wayne while suspicious of the millionaire being Batman. By the end of the serial, the Wizard is unmasked as the twin brother of a character who we weren’t really sure was the Wizard in the first place.

Even by serial standards, it was stretching it.

It’s not that Batman and Robin didn’t try, but rather it just didn’t try hard enough. While the script is painful and the sets cheap, Lowery and Duncan’s taking the material seriously makes it easier to watch. Their costumes, though cheaply made, have enough working elements to be convincing: even though Batman’s mask looks like it has devil horns, the cape is spot-on, and making Robin’s

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cape black instead of the traditional yellow actually works better on screen.

The fight scenes and scenarios made the first Batman serial look like high art. At one point, Batman cowers when a gun is pulled on him and, in another, he turns from the camera and manages to produce a giant blowtorch from his compartmentless “utility belt.”

Adams is quirky and sexy as Vicki Vale, while Talbot is authoritative as Commissioner Gordon. It would be the only on-screen appearance of Vicki for forty years.

Lowery’s Bruce Wayne is virtually the same as his Batman—just lazier. But his Batman is all business. To his credit, other than scenes when he gets caught up in his cape, he carries the cape draped over and flared out with a slight dramatic flair that recalls a cross between Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and the Batman of the comics.

Duncan’s enthusiasm as Robin periodically shines through his sullen expression. Perhaps because of not having to deal with child labor laws (as they would have with Croft), Duncan has also much more screen time than his predecessor as the Boy Wonder, and is used as more of an equal than a tag-along to Batman. Six out of 15 serial chapters had Robin’s name in the episode title. Chances are the marketing-minded Katzman felt Robin would be more appealing to the kiddie customer.

The Dynamic Do-Over Robert Lowery and John Duncan apparently stayed in touch after shooting for Batman and Robin ended, with Duncan settling down and Lowery remaining the ladies’ man.

“We were both the same age, and both born in Kansas City, Missouri,” Duncan recalled. “We were buddies. I used to go over to his house. All the time he’d have a house or apartment above the Hollywood Boulevard. I’d knock on his door and he’d say ‘Come on in, Johnny,’ (because I’d call before I come over), and he’d have some starlet in bed, making out with her.

I’d go ‘Am I intruding?’”

The money Duncan made off of Batman and Robin allowed him to settle down in a new home smack in the middle of a celebrity neighborhood.

“I had a house across the street from Bing Crosby on Camarilla Street in Taluka Lake in 1949,” Duncan said. “I bought this home from the money I made from Batman and Robin and made the down-payment on this home. [It had] a maid’s quarters, an acre and a Johnny Duncan. quarter and there were the North Hollywood Waterworks at one time. It was a big acreage, and had 32 orange trees on it, and had this beautiful brick home that wasn’t a two story, but was laid out in one. I paid $20,000 for the whole

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home, land, everything. Bing Crosby lived not directly across the street, but two houses up, and Hope lived about seven blocks.”

Robert Lowery and his wife Jean were later doing a joint promotional tour upon Batman and Robin’s wrapping. One of their stops had them staying in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where Robert got just a bit too drunk one night. Their hotel was on St. Charles Street, with a balcony complete with wrought-iron bars. Bob was standing on his balcony late in the night, wearing his Batman cowl and cape, waving his arms and fluttering his cape to a few kids on the street below.

Unfortunately, the cape and cowl were all he was wearing, providing a humorous postscript to Lowery’s serial sojourn, in a role that his son Hanks says his father had been “proud of.”

Lowery continued to take any role he could, most notably playing Big Tim Champion in the television series Circus Boy in 1956, opposite future Monkee Mickey Dolenz. Other Lowery roles included stage and television, often villain roles, with his final film role in 1968’s The Ballad of Josie. He and Jean separated in 1957, having had their son Bob Hanks together.

“I ran into Lowery at a party in Hollywood several years later,” Bob Kane claimed. “I couldn’t understand why he didn’t seem too pleased to see me. When I inquired about this, he told me that because of me and my infernal creation Batman, his career had taken quite a nosedive. The serial had been quite successful and he had been so typecast as Batman that he couldn’t get another role. I felt sorry for him, but I doubted whether he would ever have made it as a big star.”

Robert Lowery’s health started to decline by the late ‘60s as he developed heart problems but kept them from his family. He was still living a block off Hollywood Boulevard in 1971, talking on the phone with his mother (who lived in the same building, a few floors down), when he died of a heart attack at age 57.

John Duncan continued to act until around 1963, before becoming PR director for a West coast engineering company that built indoor archery machines for two years, and then starting in his newest venture of real estate.

“I went into real estate and moved to Las Vegas for ten years and then went to Hawaii for four years and was Chairman of the Board of a company there that had time shares, then went to Dallas, then to Branston and was Vice President of a resort, and retired in 2000.

“For my retirement, I got a 22-acre ranch that I bought with my dad in 1946, in Missouri, 19 miles north of Kansas City. In 1996, I subdivided it into parcels and kept 20 acres for myself so, later on, I sold the other parts. I built a home out here and keep it like a golf course. I retired, when I was 75.”

Johnny Duncan passed away in 2016 at the age of 92.

Talbot went on to co-star in two more comic book based movie serials, while Katzman and Bennet still had a few more ahead of them.

(top) Lowery with Circus Boy star Mickey Dolenz, later of the Monkees, from the cover of Dell’s Four Color Comics #785 (1956). (bottom) Lowery stands ready to pounce.

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n serials, Jungle Sam was the master of stock footage and the king of anachronism and blithe, internalized actions of murky motivation. He probably chose the serial as a form for self-expression because it had characteristics that satisfied his personal concept of drama.

—Richard Thompson, “Sam Katzman”, Kings of the Bs

The penultimate movie serial based off of a comic book started, as Superman had, with Vin Sullivan.

Sullivan had left Detective Comics in 1940 to work for another publisher, Columbia (no relation to the film studio), where he stayed for just a few years. In 1943, he started up his own company Magazine Enterprises, recruiting National Comics writer Gardner Fox as primary wordsmith. ME, as they came to be known, published most every genre, but were most notable for their unusual take on the Western hero. The term “publisher” is loosely used, as the office was little more than a pick-up and drop-off for artists and writers.

With titles such as The Ghost Rider, featuring a marshal who dons a ghastly glow-in-the-dark costume and uses magic tricks to fight owlhoots, and Tim Holt, Redmask, a licensed book that turned the RKO film into a masked hero, ME successfully took the old-school cowboy and blended him with a bit of the superhero/mysteryman to create a new breed of comic book star. The closest approximation was the Lone Ranger, radio and television hero extraordinaire. ME featured artists such as Frank Bolle and Dick Ayers, who brought a narrative sophistication and visual slickness to the Western.

Gardner Fox, whom Sullivan had brought into comics at National, and turned out approximately 8,000 pages of stories while at ME. While not as widely noted as the contributions he later made to National Comics in the mid-1950s through ‘60s, his ME work created one of his most prolific periods.

And then, there were a few ME jungle comics, most notably one created by legendary illustrator Frank Frazetta.

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Born in 1928, Frank Frazetta was already taking classes at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine arts while in grade school. He was 16 when his first comics work was published for small-time publisher Bailey Press, right before he became an art assistant at Nedor Comics, where he did work on The Black Terror and other comics. The Snowman, a feature he drew with mentor John Guinta, was published in Tally-Ho #1, and introduced a cute, boy-like adventurer snowman, with all the trappings of a Frosty by way of a lumberjack.

Coming to ME in 1947, Frazetta drew a bevy of covers and a Frank Frazetta. smattering of stories. His work also graced eight Buck Rogers comic book covers for Famous Funnies, as well as National’s “The Shining Knight” stories in 1950 and ‘51.

Frazetta’s “Shining Knight” follows the adventures of Sir Justin, student of Merlin the Magician from Arthurian times, who thaws out after centuries of being frozen in a glacier. Taking a job at a museum, Justin passes as a modern curator, his secret known only by his kid pal, Butch. “Shining Knight” showcases Frazetta’s diverse range of drawing ability as the stories switched genres, from comedy to adventure to occasional flashbacks to Justin’s Arthurian days, and the artist was called upon to draw everything from kids to flying steeds. Justin’s Pegasus, Winged Justice, showed off Frazetta’s rare and masterful skill at drawing horses.

When he created Thun’Da in 1952, he plotted and drew the first issue with Fox writing the words. It is the only full issue of a comic book ever drawn by Frazetta. Frazetta crossed the classic Tarzan strip

by Hal Foster with a dose of even more Edgar Rice Burroughs with Thun’Da, and the result was beautifully drawn with the illustrative feel of a Flash Gordon or Prince Valiant strip.

Thun’Da Struck World War II pilot Roger Drum crash lands in the odd land of Dawn World in a hidden spot of Africa, one where dinosaurs still exist and the land is populated by the super-primitive missing link Cave Men and the more advanced Rock People. His jet fighter falls victim to a large brontosaurus in this otherworldly land: “Rage floods the jungle monster!” the caption is lettered in the open space above the powerful dinosaur. “His head swings and his jaws tighten! As a dog would shake a rat, he shakes the big plane –and a limp figure drops Earthward…” Right after landing on the soft ground, Roger Drum is attacked by a pack of pterodactyls, barely surviving as he goes to investigate his new land. Resigned to his fate, the nude Roger sits on a log and starts fashioning a bow and arrow with his knife, then trains himself with mile-long runs every day. He emerges after months as a powerful figure in a loincloth, a jungle man whose training culminates in saving the Cave People tribe from an enormous snake.

Frazetta’s stunning art on (top) Shining Knight from Adventure Comics #155 (Aug. 1950), and (bottom) Thun’Da, King of the Congo #1 (1952).

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Using the last of his bullets on the serpent, he slays it, and the tribe declares him “Thun’Da – King of the Lost Lands!”

At the time Frazetta drew Thun’Da, along with several covers for ME, he was also drawing daily strip Johnny Comet.

A handsome racecar driver, Comet smacked of Al Capp’s famed Lil’ Abner strip in design and execution, but crossed with a smack of stylized realism. Frazetta left ME when the company made a deal with Columbia Pictures to produce the serial without his involvement. After Comet folded, he ghosted two weeks’ of Flash Gordon, and in 1954, became infamous cartoonist Al Capp’s assistant on Lil’ Abner (which translated to ghosting the entire strip for Capp).

Thun’Da became just another guy in a loincloth after Frazetta left and Bob Powell took over the art chores. The prehistoric elements of Dawn World were not entirely eliminated, but pushed to the side, as Thun’Da stayed on the other side of the mountain pass that concealed the hidden world. He had to face the typical white man coming to the jungle seeking a lost treasure, a race of warrior women riding prehistoric birds (hearkening back to Frazetta’s original prehistoric world premise), or an ancient alchemic alien robot that turned things to gold.

A rather disturbing trend in the Thun’Da comics was in the views of marriage. On a couple of occasions, men went crazy enough in the jungles to try to kill their wives, and Thun’Da came in to save the day. If the jungle didn’t kill “civilized” men, it drove them utterly insane.

Bob Powell’s work was clean and slick, and sometimes better designed than the rendering. His Thun’Da was more superheroic in stature than mythical, and the women remained luscious and ample. Unfortunately, this newer version of Thun’Da couldn’t meet the level of mastery that Frazetta had put into the first issue: it was like going from a Flash Gordon serial to a Katzman production, which is exactly what happened to serial king Buster Crabbe.

The Jungle or Buster Flash Gordon had been for Buster Crabbe, as the first serial spawned two sequels, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars in 1938, and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe in 1940. He even played Flash’s comic strip rival, Buck Rogers in 1939, and comic strip crimebuster Red Barry the year before.

Crabbe continued to act in serials and Westerns, going to work for low budget studio PRC in 1941 to star in the Billy the Kid film series that formerly starred stuntman Bob Steele. A B-movie flophouse, PRC kept Crabbe in the movies, where he acted in 40 of the Billy films. WOR-TV gave him his own television program in 1951, where he introduced his old PRC films for rebroadcast.

Through it all, he continued to swim in aquacades, including

Buster Crabbe.

the New York World’s Fair of 1940 and his own Buster Crabbe’s Traveling Aquacade.

Beautiful Gloria Dea, who played Princess Pha, was born Gloria Metzner and began performing as a stage magician at the tender age of 7, alongside her paint salesman father Leo Metzner, aka “The Great Leo.” the Oakland Tribune, on November 5, 1929, watched her act as the “youngest working magician in the world”: Gloria, brown-haired, brown eyed, just a mite in size, but erect in a childish way, has all the stage presence...of an old trouper. And how she loves it.

Pirouetting and dancing lightly from one little trick to another, the child is all coy smiles and dimples from the moment she takes up her wand until she closes.

At 11, Gloria and her family moved to Sacramento from Oakland, but she returned for a convention of the Pacific Coast Association of Magicians.

She was referred to performing Gloria Dea, age 11, in 1929. Photo in “a very serious and dignified courtesy Kenneth Marks. manner” in a December, 1929 issue of The Sphinx.

“It was father’s hobby that got me started,” she told a news writer. “When I was a little girl four years old or so he showed me how he could pull coins out of hats, and I got jealous; so I learned to do it, too.”

At that point, Gloria was pulling her pet guinea pigs Anthony and Esmerelda, and her pet pigeon, Juanita, out of her hat.

When older, Gloria moved from the magician’s stage to the dancing stage as a dancer for Earl Carroll’s Vanities in Hollywood, and then swam in Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the San Francisco World’s Fair. She never gave up fully on magic, though, and kept “a bag packed with the accoutrements of her act” according to magic magazine Tops in 1940.

The Las Vegas Review Journal in May, 1941 had this to say: Miss Dea, a petite magician who performs her rites in tights and a small cape, completely mystified the audience with her legerdemain. Her concluding trick, wherein a card jumps from a handkerchief into the core of an orange, was the hit of the show.

Gloria became the first magician to play at a Las Vegas casino resort when she played the El Rancho.

By 1945, Gloria was on her second marriage, to bandleader Hal Borne.

As an actor, her uncredited extra roles in film included 1951’s An American in Paris and 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain. King of the Congo was her first principal role.

“I don’t know how she got into movies, but she did not enjoy it,” Gloria’s cousin Kenneth Marks said. “Probably because she wasn’t very good at it. She’s always said all you do is stand around all day.”

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Both Leonard Penn and Jack Ingram went from one jungle to the next: they had played in Congo Bill together in 1948, and returned to the jungle to play members of a secret communist society headquartered in the jungle. Ingram, in particular, played the same character he had in Bill: King of the Congo, in turn, used some footage from Congo Bill.

Ingram’s health started to deteriorate in the early ‘50s, most likely not long after King of the Congo. He suffered two heart attacks in the late ‘60s and died in 1969. King of the Congo was his next to last serial.

The use of stock footage in Thunda, King of the Congo made it Eisensteinianly clear that the monkeys felt Buster Crabbe’s antics were staged solely for their amusement.

—Richard Thompson, “Sam Katzman”, Kings of the Bs King of the Congo billed itself as “Based on the adventures of the dynamic hero of ‘Thunda’ magazine.”

Beyond Crabbe’s resemblance to the titular character, the similarities stop there.

Of all of the comic book-based movie serials, King of the Congo is the most representative of the low point the serials reached by the 1950s, featuring an insane amount of stock footage and clips from earlier serials sloppily edited together with sparse bits of original footage.

The opening narrations established that, six years after World War II, a new enemy emerged in an unnamed European power. Air Force Captain Roger Drum, played by Crabbe,

goes after an unidentified plane and is forced to take it down after it flies over his isolated radar post. When it crashes, they recover the body of a Communist pilot, along with his coded microfilm and a flight map to Africa. Knowing that the United States government in Washington, D.C. (with a general played by Superman’s Pierre Watkin) cannot avow his existence if captured, Drum volunteers to fly a similar plane recovered in Korea, to enemy territory to infiltrate the gang and stop the Red plan.

Caught in a lightning storm, Drum crash lands and loses his memory, is befriended by a monkey, and taken in by the primitive Rock People. While they restore his memory via a magic crystal ball, the Communist group operating out of the jungle comes after him, believing him their messenger.

In the fight with the Rock People, Drum bangs a large gong with a heavy stone mallet.

Princess Pha, the luscious tribeswoman who first found him, declares him “King Thunda, King of the Rock People.” Legend is that only person who could lift that hammer and sound gong would be their king, the first in sixty years. Drum accepts the honor, and is soon running around in a loincloth, catching up with the Commies and delivering microfilm per his original mission. As a cover, he claims utter memory loss towards the details of the code or the group’s plot specifics. The coded message, of which the group can only decipher the first half, is to cleave Africa in two by running a swath through the center in a “divide and conquer” strategy.

Thunda struggles with the dangers of the jungle, from a stampede to a wild gorilla, while infiltrating the Communists and trying to maintain a fragile trust with the Rock People. There is also a member of the group that is after an apparent invaluable element, more powerful than uranium, and believes Thunda

(left) Gloria Dea after establishing herself as a dancer. Photo courtesy Kenneth Marks. (right) Crabbe and Dea in King of the Congo.

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can translate the other half of the code. When another Russian agent who knew the pilot Thunda is posing as delivers the code, Thunda’s cover is blown. The second half gets going with the subterfuge and follows Thunda leading the Rock People against the Communists.

On top of this, Thunda must contend with the rival Cave Men tribe, all large men with hippie beards and tiger-stripe t-shirts and clubs, who love to terrorize the Rock People.

King of the Congo starts down one jungle plot path, be it a secret radioactive mineral or a truckload of weapons, and gets lost in the overgrowth a few times. In all, though, it’s a bizarre blending of Cold War sentiment with a Tarzan-like jungle story.

Thunda hasn’t truly won until the enemies are all vanquished (thanks, mostly, to the efforts of a stock footage and stuffed panther) and the two tribes are united into a peaceful, democratic, and wholly American coexistence—all thanks to this colonizer in a loincloth.

King of the Congo is a definite low point but saved by the performance of Crabbe, who proves his worth as a Serial King.

One scene, in which he recaps the first ten chapters to a new ally, he delivers the exposition-heavy dialogue naturalistically, looking as at home relaxing in a loincloth and sandals as if he were wearing a leisure suit.

After starring in the TV adventure show Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion from 1955 to 1957 with his son Cullen, Buster switched his focus back from everything from fitness to his own line of swimming pools. His last acting role was in the 1974 Western comedy The Comeback Trail, a film that went unreleased until 1984, because Buster’s discomfort with sex scenes kept it on the shelf.

In this comedy that The New York Times described as “all wet,” two Hollywood producers realize they need to produce a flop (a la Mel Brooks’ Broadway play The Producers), so they hire an aging cowboy (Crabbe as “Duke Montana”) to star in a comeback movie. If he dies during production, they’re able to collect an insurance premium. All efforts, of course, fail and Montana makes it through the end of the movie.

He retired from acting by the 1970s and continued to focus on physical fitness, writing his 1970 book Energetics for the 50-plus arthritic crowd. Buster earned a gold medal in 1981 from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports in recognition of his promotion of fitness.

Crabbe died on April 23, 1983 of a heart attack. It marked the end of an era and the loss of a pop culture icon.

Gloria Dea went back to performing magic and making the rounds in magic circles, while also continuing as a dancer. In late 1952, she had a run performing her magic and dancing act at San Jose nightclub Formingo’s.

She eventually sold all of her magical costumes and gear, married three more times, and took up painting. In 2021, magician AnnaRose Einarsen found Gloria’s magical costumes and gear at an antique store and bought them. After reaching out through Marks, AnnaRose became dear friends with Gloria and invited a friend over to Gloria’s 99th birthday on May 25, 2021: magician David Copperfield.

“Connecting with Gloria has been life changing for me in more ways than one,” AnnaRose recalled. “She was a remarkably talented woman with gifts and talents that ticked many, many

Crabbe and company look towards danger in this lobby card. boxes. I still go over weekly to chit chat and she’s as sharp and spicy as ever. Looking at old magic photos of her when she was my age is indescribable as I can’t help but see myself in her. She enhanced my love of magic, inspires me in my work, and our story makes me believe that magic happens both on and off the stage.”

David Copperfield brought Gloria to a magic show with front row seats and, upon introducing her, got a standing ovation from the audience.

“I don’t know what kind of response she had as a magician,” Marks said. “She didn’t work for several years. And to be appreciated at that stage of her life and maybe never have been honored before? It makes your heart feel all warm and fuzzy. It’s beautiful.”

Frank Frazetta’s best days were ahead of him when at his lowest in the early ‘60s. After parting ways with Capp, he had trouble finding work with many editors deeming his work too “old style.” His colleague and friend, famed illustrator Roy Krenkle, helped him get started on painting fantasy paperback covers. He also got a gig painting a caricature of Ringo Starr for Mad magazine, which led him to a job doing a movie poster for the film What’s New Pussycat? His work also appeared in James Warren’s revolutionary line of black and white horror magazines of the ‘60s.

And then, Frazetta landed an account painting Conan paperback covers in 1967, which further bolstered his career and standing. His work since then included more illustrations, movie posters, and even production work, notably on the 1984 animated film Fire and Ice with director Ralph Bakshi.

Frazetta could arguably be credited with making sword and sorcery fantasy sexy: the curvaceous, ample women in his paintings were always at the side and feet of a barbarian-like hero with rippling muscles and a “don’t mess with me” look about them.

Thun’Da, needless to say, was a mere footnote in his sterling career. Frazetta died on May 10, 2010.

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S

am Katzman got ahold of one final comic book property before the serials ended their cinematic reign with a whimper: Blackhawk, ace aviator and head of a small squadron of similarly dressed aviators who fought evil the world over.

Blackhawk debuted in August, 1941’s Military Comics #1 by Quality Comics.

The splash page is a simple shot of the black-clad uniformed Blackhawk stands out against a white background, his name in red block letters at the bottom over a barbed wire battlefield. The introduction was pure World War II propaganda, but with a more global view than Captain America ever had: History has proven that whenever liberty is smothered and men lie crushed beneath oppression: there always rises a man to defend the helpless…liberate the enslaved and crush the tyrant…such a man is BLACKHAWK…out of the ruins of Europe and out of the hopeless mass of defeated people he comes, smashing the evil before him…

Blackhawk makes his debut on the cover of Military Comics #1 (Aug 1941), with art by Will Eisner and Gill Fox. C HA P T E R 13 : B lackha w k

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In Warsaw, Poland in 1939, a lone aviator fends off Nazi Captain Von Tepp’s air squadron. Von Tepp forces the young fighter down, and then bombs the farmhouse that the man’s brother and sister are in. “You killed them, Von Tepp!” The young man vows. “Just the same way as I’LL KILL YOU someday!!”

Time passes, when the Nazi war machine suddenly becomes victim to the mysterious aviator Blackhawk and his squadron of fighters. Clad in all black leather, with a yellow ascot and bird emblem buckle, Blackhawk traps a Nazi captain and forces him to reveal Von Tepp’s whereabouts.

Blackhawk finally catches up to Von Tepp, as the Nazi is about to execute one of Blackhawk’s men and an English

nurse, his personal army surrounding the Nazi base and singing the “Blackhawk song”: Over land, over sea, we fight to make men free, of danger we don’t care…WE’RE BLACKHAWKS! Freeing the prisoners and capturing Von Tepp, Blackhawk takes them to his heavily fortified island fortress, Blackhawk Island. There he challenges Von Tepp to an air duel that ends with Blackhawk (his plane sabotaged by the Nazi), forcing both fighters to crash. Defeating Von Tepp with a bullet, Blackhawk vows to continue his mission of “justice and death.”

Blackhawk, in his premiere story, with art by Chuck Cuidera.

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(top) An early Spirit story by Eisner, from August 25, 1940. (bottom) Will Eisner, seated, discusses the latest Spirit with Nick Viscardi (aka Cardy, center) and Bob Powell in 1941.

Photo Courtesy Will Eisner Estate. Used with permission.

Image copyright Will Eisner Estate. All RIghts Reserved.

We’ve Got Spirit, Yes We Do! Blackhawk was arguably created in part by comics genius Will Eisner, Bob Powell, and Chuck Cuidera.

An earlier Quality feature, Death Patrol by Jack Cole (where convicts flew missions and were regularly killed off), inspired Quality publisher Everett “Busy” Arnold to request another war aviation strip. The result was the international band of aviators, in a story written by Powell and drawn by Chuck Cuidera.

Like many of the early comic book pioneers, Will Eisner’s parents were European immigrants, coming to the United States from Vienna around 1915. His father had been a painter in the old country and painted everything from theater sets to faux wood grain patterns on metal beds. Will attended DeWitt-Clinton High School with a young man named Robert Kahn, who later changed his name to Bob Kane and co-created Batman for Detective Comics.

Their paths crossed again shortly after when Will, unable to find a job, was tipped off to the publisher of comics magazine, Wow! What A Magazine! by Bob, who had just drawn some single panel cartoons for them.

Arriving at the office in the back of a shirt factory, Eisner met Wow’s editor, Jerry Iger. He hired Will on as production man, when the young Eisner solved a crisis at their engraving plant. When the publication folded shortly after, Eisner combined $10 of his own money with $5 loaned to him by his father, and he and Iger went into the comic book packaging business together.

The Eisner-Iger comics machine went into full-tilt with Iger selling work to publishers, and Eisner producing comic book stories at a prolific rate. Originally, he created every strip and signed as a different artist each time to give the impression of a staff. When Iger and Eisner made it big, however, they did hire an actual staff of artists, including Bob Powell and Lou Fine.

Around 1939, Eisner received a call from publisher Everett “Busy” Arnold, who set Eisner up with the Register and Tribune Syndicate. The Register was looking to sell a comic book style story in the Sunday comics supplement, and they wanted Eisner to package it for them. It was perfect for Eisner, who was anxious to bring the medium beyond the standard kiddie fare and tap into the adult audience that regularly picked up the Sunday funnies.

Selling his half of Eisner and Iger to Jerry Iger, and bringing three artists with him (Powell, Fine, and Chuck Mazoujian), Eisner worked on The Spirit eight-page stories for the Register and Tribune Syndicate, and also packaged and edited comic book stories for Arnold’s Quality Comics line.

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The Spirit delivered a weekly story in eight pages of action, suspense, and plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor. The strip followed a criminologist who returns from the dead to fight crime, wearing a cyan suit, fedora, gloves, and domino mask. It started as a standard adventure strip, but soon developed into something more. Eisner and his studio often used The Spirit as a vehicle for human-interest stories, with the main character sometimes only appearing in one panel.

While Eisner and his shop produced the groundbreaking Spirit supplement, they were also creating characters such as Plastic Man, the Ray, and Uncle Sam for Arnold. Eisner often designed the characters, and then handed them off to his staff to flesh out into a story; other times, he would do the rough layouts himself and have others finish them.

“In those days, people working in this field never thought their characters would go very far,” Eisner said. “By then, Superman and Batman were already becoming very popular, so everybody thought in terms of those. [Busy Arnold and I] published a couple magazines together, where I created Uncle Sam and Police Comics and Hit Comics, and things like that. I never thought really that those characters would go beyond what they were doing at the time.”

Bob Powell got his start at Eisner-Iger as an artist, helping package comics for publishers like Fox Comics, Fiction House (where he created the iconic jungle queen, Sheena), and Timely. He moved over to Quality with Eisner in the ‘40s, and was on staff when Blackhawk artist Chuck Cuidera came over. The general story is that he at least wrote the dialogue for Cuidera’s initial Blackhawk installment and recommended the main character’s Polish background – Powell’s real name was Stanley Pawlowski. A vocal individual, his mouth often got him in trouble; one story is that another artist, George Tuska, once had enough with Powell.

“The only ones who ever got into a hassle [in the shop] were George Tuska and Bob Powell,” Eisner said. “Powell kind-of a wiseguy and made remarks about other people in the shop. One day, George had enough of it, got up, and punched out Bob Powell.”

Losing the case didn’t dissuade the self-prescribed “King of Comics” from trying to continue in the biz.

“In the beginning, after I got out of Pratt,” Cuidera recalled in 1999. “I thought nothing of doing comics, I wanted to be a top-notch illustrator like Harold von Schimidt. There was an old classmate of mine who got me into [comics] and that was Bob Powell, who graduated from Pratt at about the same time.

He was working for Will Eisner, and called me up and said that they liked my penciling and inking. At that time, I was working for Fox Features. Al Harvey was the editor for Fox. One day Al Harvey came to me and said ‘Chuck, you better find another job, Fox is going to go to jail!’

“My heart wasn’t really into comics, to be honest. I stayed there until Bob Powell called me to bring my portfolio over. The publisher, Busy Arnold, wanted to see it. I went over there [to Eisner studios] and they gave me more money! That’s how I got really into the comic end. Bob Powell told me about Will Eisner, who I’d not yet met, and the name Blackhawk, which came from a hockey team. He gave me a gist about what Will Eisner

Outfoxed Chuck Cuidera was born Charles Nicholas Cuidera to an Italian immigrant father and a Jewish mother, and was the only one of three brothers who didn’t pursue a career as a policeman. Having graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1939, he landed his first job working for infamous comics publisher Victor Fox. Victor Fox was typical of the unsavory comics publishers of the medium’s Golden Age. He had been earlier involved in a fraudulent lawsuit, a charter company in 1927, and a “boiler room” scheme in 1929. Fox even tried his line at publishing astrology magazines but settled on comics instead. Right out of the gate, in 1939, National Comics sued Fox for publishing Wonder Man, an intentional knock-off of Superman. Eisner claimed for decades it was Fox’s idea, but court papers surfaced (courtesy of Ken Quattro) where Eisner took the credit and blame when on the stand.

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Wonder Man, the face that launched a lawsuit, from Wonder Comics #1 (May 1939). Cover by Will Eisner.

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(left) Al Bryant’s Blackhawk #14 cover (1944) and (right) Reed Crandall’s art on Modern Comics #70 (1945). wanted. I did the first story, which Bob Powell wrote most of for me [dialoguing, after the fact]. I thought it was pretty good, even though I didn’t have a flair for comics at the time.

“After the first one, Will Eisner got back [from a trip] and the first story came out, Busy Arnold called me in and gave me more money! I worked for Busy Arnold after that, and stayed with him until he closed shop.”

The general consensus (and bone of contention between Eisner and Cuidera) was in regards to whom officially “created” Blackhawk. Eisner has been cited with laying out the first ten stories, with Cuidera polishing up Eisner’s roughs. Eisner’s recollection was that Powell, being Polish, wanted his nationality reflected in this emerging team of international fighters. The story Cuidera tells is that he created Blackhawk and his friend Powell dialogued the strip after the fact. Cuidera apparently wrote the first year and a half of Blackhawk, and was then joined by writer Joe Millard.

Moving beyond the question of the aviator’s conception, he continued to star in Military Comics with his team of specialists gaining names and identities: there was Olaf, Hendrickson, Andre, Stanislaus, and Chuck. In the spirit of ethnically offensive sidekicks was Chop-Chop, an overweight Chinese man drawn with buck teeth and speaking in dialect.

Blackhawk gained a new penciler with Military Comics #12 in 1942 when Cuidera went into the army. Reed

Crandall’s association with the black-clad spy buster would eclipse Cuidera’s, despite Cuidera’s subsequent return and near 30-year association with the aviator.

When Crandall first came to Quality, he primarily served as inker on Lou Fine’s gripping covers, but soon graduated to penciling Blackhawk, where he stayed as primary artist until 1953. At that point, Crandall made his way to work for EC Comics, publisher of Tales from the Crypt and Mad magazine.

Blackhawk finally gained his own title in 1944, with Crandall remaining his main artist. Cuidera joined Crandall and Blackhawk as the book’s inker when he returned stateside in 1946.

There was also a short-lived and obscure Blackhawk radio show in 1950 on the Mutual Network, which ran about sixteen episodes total. Actor Michael Fitzmaurice (who took over voicing Superman on radio for the show’s final year) voiced Blackhawk and, speaking in different accents, the one other member of the team he was working with that episode. The weekly serial only ran for 16 episodes on ABC radio, from September 13 to December 27, 1950. Katzman and company heard a recording of the show, and decided to take away the character accents for the movie serial for fear they wouldn’t sound clear enough for the kids to understand.

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Taking Flight Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Justice was the final serialized attempt at a comic book character. When it came out in 1952, movie serials were four years away from their dying breath.

Blackhawk is very much a rehash of the first Superman in more ways than one: Kirk Alyn dons the black uniform and visored cap as Blackhawk while Carol Forman goes from Spider Lady to the sultry spy Laska. They even fight over another secret ray gun created for the government.

Michael Fox, who played the intellectual villain in three Katzman serials total before moving moving to television, plays Laska’s double agent William Case.

“Blackhawk was shot at a studio right near the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard,” Fox said. “It was owned by Columbia and Katzman leased it. The interiors were shot there, the exteriors at Columbia Ranch. The serials were terribly hard work. 15 episodes in 17 days. That’s the equivalent to five features in 17 days.”

As usual with Katzman productions, Spencer Bennet was behind the camera, this time accompanied by co-director Fred F. Sears.

Previews promised a thrill-packed ride “a smashing new super-serial THRILLER” with “thrill-hot cartoon adventures.” Not only did Kirk Alyn get credit in the preview (unlike his anonymous billing in Superman), but so did Reed Crandall, as artist of the Blackhawk comics magazine.

Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Freedom opens with a shot of a propeller soon imposed over with the Blackhawk logo, and footage of a plane taking off with a clip of the Blackhawks running around an oil rig. With a sharp cut to a shot of Blackhawk and company, the narrator introduces them as: The Blackhawks, with no weapons but their strong fists and alert minds.

The narrator introduces the Blackhawks’ headquarters in the southwest United States, where they operate out of a hidden air force powered with super-powered engines. The pilots only use superior skill as opposed to guns. Due to budget constraints, most of the serial about a team of aviators is spent with the Blackhawks driving around in a black car, or occasionally using their one plane, and makes use of some footage from other serials.

After Blackhawk saves a visitor to Blackhawk HQ in a daring mid-air rescue,

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the man delivers a letter to the Blackhawk Stanisklaus. Klaus’ friends from the old country (which is now, in typical ‘50s Cold War style, overrun by the Reds) are in need of his help. Blackhawk and his Chief Assistant, Chuck, let Klaus go with the man, even though they smell a trap. The old friend Klaus meets with in the old country is none other than the luscious Laska, an old flame who tries to lure him to the Commies. When he refuses, a fight ensues, and Blackhawk and Chuck arrive in time to help out.

However, the Commie agents switch Klaus with his look-alike, Boris, who returns to Blackhawk HQ with them. He stays in bed at HQ, apparently recovering from the fight, while the Blackhawks take off to foil the same agents from sabotaging a helium plant.

It’s here where we see the Blackhawks’ #1 strategy: They arrive in a black car and rush the enemies en masse. Later, when they follow the villains to their hideout, they rush the front door the same way. Not only do the enemy agents report to a mysterious leader unimaginatively named Leader, but also as the Blackhawks rescue Klaus, it’s revealed that Boris is his evil twin brother!

Chop stumbles on the conniving Boris and is taken prisoner. In saving Chop they stumble on another enemy hideout, armed with a time bomb, which is exactly identical to the previous one they’d raided. It’s never explained why, but every secret headquarters of the enemy is exactly identical. The real reason is far less nefarious, though – it’s called a ridiculously low budget.

After catching Boris, the Blackhawks are then dragged into protecting Professor Rolph and his special ray gun from the Commie agents.

After Rolph falls into the Commie trap, the Blackhawks rush to save him. Both Blackhawk and Chuck are zapped by the ray and apparently killed, but it actually puts them in a state of suspended animation until the first minute of the next chapter.

It takes a few chapters to tie things up with Rolph before the Blackhawks are dragged into saving the experimental jet fuel Element X from the bad guys, even duped by evil double agent William Case (who uses a mock hearing aid that’s really a listening device). At one point, Chuck and Blackhawk have a dogfight with a flying disc: it’s actually reused animation of the flying saucer from Atom Man vs. Superman, and is promptly dispensed of by Blackhawk’s handgun fired from his cockpit. It’s the usual method of dogfights in Blackhawk, as none of the planes are equipped with guns.

The search for Element X takes Blackhawk and Chuck to Mexico, where they’ve chased the enemy agents. The entire team reunites in the

Kirk Alyn looking snappy in costume.

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last couple of chapters, chapters and ultimately bring Laska and the other agents to justice.

When Chop playfully tosses a firecracker to the feet of the unsuspecting Blackhawks at the end of the final chapter, it’s the biggest bang comic book movie serials went out with, for no more comic book characters would be adapted as serial heroes afterwards.

Blackhawk suffers from a decreasing budget. It’s obvious that Bennet was shooting to edit under a lower dollar than even Batman and Robin; the fight scenes are all generally long shots, which required less editing and, in turn, less money. The enemy’s hideouts, although in different locations, have the same interior – it’s regularly noted by the

characters, but never explained, to the point where it becomes more of a running joke than plot point. In all likelihood, Bennet had done too good of a job keeping the budget within Katzman-prescribed constraints.

“Spencer always prided himself in coming in under budget,” historian and Bennet friend Jim Harmon said.

“So, when they kept giving him the budgets, they’d cut them back more.”

Also amusing is the Blackhawks’ approach to fighting: by mob rule. When they all jump out of their black car, it’s a cross between the Keystone Cops, a clown car, and a chauffeur’s convention.

Blackhawk and crew, in this cover by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera, were fighting sci-fi threats by late 1956.

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There are times where Alyn’s seriousness in delivering silly dialogue conjures images of future B-movie star Bruce Campbell, while Forman’s monotonous tone as Laska (which doesn’t even change when she kills an associate in cold blood) makes her a true ice queen, far more dangerous than the average serial villainess.

Carol Forman soon left acting to raise the three daughters from the previous marriage of her third husband, producer William Dennis. They lived in Texas, and then back to California, where Dennis died of a heart attack in 1977.

Both the Masquers Club and the Hollywood Appreciation Society honored Carol in 1984. She passed away on July 9, 1997, having become so ill that she only let friends and family see her.

It’s rumored that Alyn was once in discussion to star in a Blackhawk TV show that never happened, although he would have a couple more brushes with Superman in the coming decades.

“Busy” Arnold gave up publishing comics in the late 1950s, when he licensed Blackhawk, Plastic Man, and other Quality staples to National Comics, where they resumed the numbering of the Quality series with 1957’s Blackhawk #108. The title maintained itself for another decade, including a very painful year where the team was decked out in full superhero costumes.

Will Eisner worked in comics until The Spirit ended in 1952, and he went to package educational comic book material and edit P*S magazine for the military. Will reemerged in 1972 in time to meet the new breed of underground comic artists at his first convention. The meeting inspired Eisner to return to comics with his graphic novel in 1978, the semi-autobiographical A Contract With God. Aside from teaching the sequential arts, Will Eisner authored the textbook Comics and Sequential Art and several more graphic novels. He passed away on January 3, 2005, doubtlessly with several more stories left to tell.

Bob Powell remained in comics, producing the Mr. Mystic strip for Eisner’s Spirit section until 1943, when he went into the war. He returned as a freelancer, drawing books such as The Avenger and Thun’Da, King of the Congo for Magazine Enterprises (he got the Avenger gig by undercutting original artist Dick Ayers on his page rate), and Marvel Comics.

His thick, clean line work was seen on everything from Daredevil to The Avengers. He was editor of Mad magazine emulator Sick for six years when he died in 1967, at the age of 51.

Cuidera and Dillin both followed Blackhawk to National, with Cuidera sticking around until 1968. Dillin became a mainstay National artist through the 1970s, mostly noted for his artwork on Justice League of America. Dillin passed away in 1980.

Cuidera left comics to become a city planner for Essex City, New Jersey, where he stayed until 1998. Having retired in Florida, Cuidera passed away on August 25, 2001. His bitterness over his Blackhawk credit was resolved at a panel with Eisner at the 1999 San Diego Comic Convention, where Eisner gave credit to Cuidera for “making Blackhawk what it was.”

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T

he serial demands and produces, by its very nature, the multi-climax: a climax every week, but a climax that breeds anticipation of the next installment. This economical form has no room for extensive character delineation or subtle, detailed plots...

Despite their lack of pretensions, serials are still some kind of folk art, a reflection of American life; for four decades they were, in not the opium, the television of the people.

—Richard Thompson, “Sam Katzman”, Kings of the Bs

“After the war it was different. Television started to boom. It hurt the Saturday matinee, the afternoon shows when all our serials ran. After mine, studios made a few more with edited stock footage and a leading man just to tie the story together.

It was television that caused the serials to fade out, the same way vaudeville disappeared when talking pictures emerged.”

—Kirk Alyn “By this time, serials were no longer the draw they had been. Television was making a serious dent in the movie-going audience. Before television, kids couldn’t wait for Saturdays so they could catch the next episode of a thrilling cliffhanger.

But television series were offering the same kinds of situations—for free.”

—Clayton Moore The New York Times reported in late 1951 that only about half the movie theaters in the United States still showed movie serials, and those only had limited Saturday and Sunday showings. The format was on its way out, and was soon replaced by the new technological kid on the block: the television.

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“Serials, on the whole, never really created that much revenue,” historian Alan Barbour wrote. “The average episode was rented to a theater for only a few dollars as an incentive to take additional features from the producing company. These few dollars did mount up eventually, but as the years progressed the number of theaters running serials dwindled from thousands to a matter of hundreds.”

“The economics of the film business changed post-World War II,” historian and film producer Michael Uslan surmised.

“It no longer needed to take up time by showing newsreels and B pictures, cartoons…because television was now offering these kinds of things. In order for theaters to save themselves from the onslaught of television, they had to fit in as many screenings in a day or evening as they could, or the primary picture that was getting even more expensive to make. It dictated that everything other than the picture or trailers disappear.”

One of the movie serials’ greatest success stories, Dick Tracy, was the first to defect from the weekly chapter plays and onto the small screen. The television show, starring Byrd, first aired in 1950 was shoddily made and lacked a fraction of the atmosphere of either the Republic serials or subsequent RKO films. However, it benefited from a prime time slot on ABC for its first half-year, and ran on Saturdays until March 31, 1951. Afterwards, it went into syndication.

Ralph Byrd died on August 18, 1952 after a battle with cancer.

Look, up on the Screen!

The serials’ largest star followed Tracy to the small screen. Since he was Superman, he had to start big, with a one-hour feature starring a completely new cast and serving as a theatrical pilot for a syndicated television show.

Superman vs. The Mole Men starred George Reeves, newly cast as the Man of Steel, and was written by Robert Maxwell, with Superman comics editor Whitney Ellsworth under the pen name of Richard Fielding.

Reeves was born George Bessolo in Ashland, Kentucky in 1914. His family moved to Southern California when he was still a boy, where he grew to love acting through taking part in local theater groups. George was balancing dreams of becoming an actor with those of a boxer, and he entered the Golden Gloves competition in 1932, but pulled out of the competition at the last minute because his mother was worried that potential damage to his face would hurt his acting career.

After six years of acting in the Pasadena Playhouse, George landed a small role in Gone With The Wind, playing one of the Tarleton twins and an admirer of Scarlett O’Hara.

George, now billed as George Reeves, continued to act for Warner Brothers in everything from historic films to war pictures (three of which were with James Cagney), until he landed a contract at 20th Century Fox. Fox gave him bigger, meatier roles for the year he was there, after which he continued to freelance.

George Reeves may have become a star, had World War II not interrupted. When he came back in the late 1940s, he experienced a few roles of worth, but found himself reduced to playing Sir Galahad in producer Sam Katzman’s serial.

Superman producer Robert Maxwell and Tommy Carr screened several applicants, and were apparently sold on George Reeves from his striking profile with a Roman nose, thin lips, and strong jaw.

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Phyllis Coates, a former dancer with high cheekbones, hourglass figure, and long legs, was cast as Lois Lane.

A Warners Brothers director, Richard A. Bare, offered her a screen contract and a steady role in the one-reel Joe McDoakes comedy shorts from 1948 to 1953, where she played comedian McDoakes’ wife. The comedies followed the sometimes-quarreling McDoakes in a multitude of satirical shorts, and were more like ten-minute sitcoms than short films.

Phyllis Coates as Lois Lane.

Where Noel Neill was adorable, cute, and conniving…

Phyllis’ Lois was vampish, shrewd, and fiercely independent.

While the radio show tackled more adult subjects and was more socially relevant than normal for juvenile fare of the airwaves, Superman and the Mole Men set the equally dark tone that the television show would follow in its first season.

Superman and the Mole Men opens with serious, percussionriddled theme music playing during a painted title card sequence of star field with animated comets. Superman’s origin is told over the animated sequence, with a shot of Superman and then Clark Kent. It was an early version of the Adventures opening sequence that doesn’t reach the excitement of the earlier radio, or eventually TV, version.

With no Metropolis in sight the entire movie, the action takes place in Silby, a small town that’s also home of the deepest oil well. Lois and Clark arrive at the oil well for a story, but only to learn that foreman Bill Corrigan has mysteriously shut the well down.

It just doesn’t sit right with Clark Kent, so he and Lois Lane go out to investigate that night and find the watchman dead from a heart attack. While Clark goes out to snoop around the mine, Lois sees the cause of the watchman’s death: two “mole men,”

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The Mole Men, in a world that won’t accept them.

small creatures with fur-covered bodies, angled and bushy eyebrows, and large foreheads. They look like little people in fur suits with zippers showing on the back to us, but they’re still scary enough to elicit a shrill scream out of Lois.

Lois automatically assumes assumes they are there to kill her, even though Clark isn’t so quick to judge. Left alone with Corrigan, he finally gets to the bottom of things: the drill had gone so deep that it broke through Earth, hanging down into the center of something belowground. To top it off, whatever was down there was radiated with Iridium, and could pose a toxic menace to the citizens of Silby.

The townspeople of Silby, upon hearing of the Mole Men, gather at the hotel. Incited by the town rabbler Benson, they become determined to kill these creatures.

“You don’t know anything about these creatures,” Clark interferes, to the disgust of Lois and the lynch mob. “We must look just as strange as them, but so far as we know they don’t mean us any harm. All of these things happened because you were frightened.”

As the movie progresses, Superman must stand against Benson and the entire town while protecting a wounded Mole Man, shaking off their messages of hate and standing up for the Mole Men who suffer the curse of merely being “different.”

Superman and the Mole Men’s message of acceptance and social prejudice is in line with the radio program’s knack for social relevancy (one of the more acclaimed episodes of the radio show featured Superman going against a white supremacist group), and Reeves is a serious, sometimes grim, and very authoritative Superman.

Reeves’ Clark Kent was far more assured and much tougher than Alyn’s, who was closer to the comic book version. Clark, even though prone to occasional fainting spells, could be relied upon to vehemently pursue a story and bravely get stuck in the middle of a dangerous situation. When it’s considered that the following TV show only had just under half an hour for each episode, giving Clark a spine as a crusading reporter helped move the story along.

The special flying effects, using wireworks and clever editing, are far superior to the hokey animation of the movie serial.

Where the movie serial was a make-believe world, Superman and the Mole Men had make-believe elements in the real world. George Reeves made Superman a leader, and someone so righteous and mighty that you’d have to believe in him.

Superman and The Mole Men led into the television series The Adventures of Superman in September of 1952. Originally sponsored by the cereal company Kellogg’s, Superman was budgeted at a mere $15,000 an episode, Tommy Carr came on board and directed several episodes. The production itself was much more and greater care was given to the final product than in a Katzman production, even though it was about as rushed.

“As far as my work was concerned,” Carr said, “I felt I had more control over television than Katzman serials.

He didn’t care what the pictures looked like. His idea was to just get it on film as cheaply as possible. That never set well with me.”

The best, and most ironic, example of the serial connection is in the opening scene of the first episode, “Superman on Earth.” After the iconic opening sequence (“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive…”) it cuts to Krypton, where Superman’s father Jor-El is warning of

(middle) Jor-El (Robert Rockwell) delivers a familiar speech in a familiar costume, dressed in an old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon suit. (bottom) Gogan (Stuart Randall) is wearing Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel costume with a Flash Gordon collar.

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Krypton’s imminent end to his peers, standing in the GrecoRoman “Hall of Wisdom.” The handsome Jor-El is actually wearing a leftover Flash Gordon costume, and many of his contemporaries are donning the togs of Captain America and Captain Marvel, many of which are topped over with more Flash Gordon collars.

The Adventures of Superman combined the heart and soul of the radio show with the adventure of the movie serial.

The first season was far darker than would be expected from a kids’ show, with shadows permeating alleyways where mobsters hid with guns in hand. It was the type of world that was in need of a Superman, and therefore a surprisingly believable one.

Also on board were a new Jimmy Olsen and Perry White in the persons of Jack Larson and John Hamilton, respectively.

Olsen’s Jimmy was pure comic relief, adding more color to the Adventures of Superman cast than realized when watching it as a kid, and Hamilton was an old character actor who brought an abrasiveness to the Daily Planet editor. He often refused to learn his lines, and (at least early on in the show), would read his lines off of a conveniently placed newspaper on his desk.

With a lag between the first two seasons, Phyllis Coates had committed herself to act in a television pilot and couldn’t return as Lois.

Coates continued to act, most notably in Republic’s Panther Girl of the Kongo in 1955. By that point, the serials had become even more reliant upon stock photography, and many scenes were simply cobbled together from the earlier Perils of Nyoka.

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Shortly after, Coates became a Kleenex commercial spokesperson, and then faded out of acting.

“I did love acting,” she told writer Gary Grossman. “But I don’t understand people who think those of us from serials and television couldn’t act. They’re wrong. Years ago, I was visited backstage by some agents after a performance. One said, ‘You can’t be the same girl who does all those Westerns and Superman crap. You can act!’ “‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘You don’t know what it takes to pitch in and do the kind of work we do.’”

Superman’s producers went back and contacted Noel Neill to reprise her role as Lois Lane.

“There were probably a lot of reasons,” Neill told Mike Fitzgerald. “One side of town didn’t know what the other side was doing. Bob Maxwell talked National Comics into making 26 and then he did a very naughty and he was canned.” Neill did not explain the specifics.

“Whitney Ellsworth was sent out from New York to retrieve everything. He called and said, ‘You were the original Lois Lane, so if you’d like to reprise the role?’ and I said, well, why not? (Laughs) Thirteen weeks work…yeah…”

(clockwise from top right) Reeves and Neill as Clark Kent and Lois Lane, Superman and Coates’ Lane on an adventure, Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent in the show’s second episode, and Reeves as a Superman with authority.

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George Reeves was the iconic Superman for an entire generation.

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The Final Chapter

When George Reeves allegedly held out for a better salary one season, the Superman producers looked to the original actor from the serials.

Superman, and Dick Tracy weren’t the only serial stars jumping “I know that when George Reeves went on strike for more ship. Many of the directors, actors, and other crew members money, they offered it to Kirk again,” Jim Harmon related. “He from serials saw the potential in this more stable medium. said he didn’t really want it because he’d been typecast, and There were a few actors who didn’t make the transition well: that ‘I want the same thing that George wants.’ I don’t think he Charles King, the beloved Western and serial heavy, experienced wanted to undercut another actor. He was offered it twice and a slump in work when B Westerns stopped production. He tried turned it down. It probably wasn’t a good move, because he was to kill himself twice: once with typecast and he said he was in a .22, then in an attempt to hang some picture in a supporting himself from a tree. Both failed, role. He came on the screen and and he ultimately died in a the audience began to laugh, hospital from chronic alcoholism. because they couldn’t take his In 1955, Sam Katzman role seriously.” produced and had Spencer The Adventures of Superman Bennet shoot a sequel to The continued to be a commercial Phantom serial with John Hart success, keeping the Man of in costume as the Ghost Who Steel going strong while the Walks. When King Features comics industry started to apparently wanted more money, crumble under the weight Katzman reshot the Hart of censorship and low sales. sequences in a slightly different Whit Ellsworth became producer costume (adding pants and an with the second season, and aviator’s cap) and rechristened the episodes gained more it The Adventures of Captain comic book elements, such as Africa. It still maintained Kryptonite, yet still remained the use of Phantom stock rather dark. With the third footage, however. season, the show went to color, Republic’s final serial, King and became more and more of the Carnival, also came out juvenile, to the point of absurdity that year and used footage from by its final season in 1957.

Daredevils of the Red Circle.

The show was set to return Yates wasn’t as notoriously for another season, but tragedy cheap as Katzman, but understruck when George Reeves stood serials were on the way out died of mysterious circumand gave them budgets to match. stances on June 16, 1959, The final movie serial filmed, apparently the victim of a 1956’s Blazing the Overland self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Trail, came out by Columbia George was two days shy of and was directed

by Spencer getting married, and also facing Bennet himself. a few potential directing jobs.

Columbia devised a brilliant The general belief was that plan to roll with the punch he was despondent over his television swung at the film typecasting as Superman and industry. They created their couldn’t grab any further work.

Screen Gems subsidiary for “I’d seen him just a couple of The news of Reeves’s death from the Pittsburgh Press the purpose of selling older film days before and he was happy for television airing, and we were going to work on June 16, 1959. properties with the profits made then again, had scripts out from New channeled into the production York already for another 26,” of new films.

Neil said. “He loved everybody. He was too nice for his own good. That may have been part of the problem. It was a shocker, I’ll tell you.”

Whit Ellsworth noted how Reeves had been in a car accident two weeks prior, and may have become affected after mixing Republic was faltering, in more than just the serial division. painkillers with alcohol. Some think it may have been his Herbert Yates’ insistence on making a star out of his relationship with the wife of MGM’s general manager, Toni much-younger studio actress-turned-wife, Russian figure skater Mannix, who had been left Reeves’ entire estate.

Vera Ralston, was partially to blame for Republic’s financial Reeves’ death remains a complete mystery, and may always losses. She was in twenty-six pictures, with only two deemed remain a cold case. successful—in large part or all to her co-starring with John

Fall of the Republic

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Captain Africa, formerly The Phantom.

Wayne. Wayne’s refusal to make any more pictures with her was a factor in his falling-out with Republic in 1952.

By 1950, Yates let go of the Lydecker brothers and much of his other staff. Republic’s shareholders were questioning his spending and demanded cut his own salary.

In 1958, the shareholders took Yates to the Supreme Court for allegedly drawing an additional $50,000 in bonuses on top of his $150,000 salary. By that July, they were no longer making films for theatrical release, and renting out sound stages to TV productions.

The Hollywood Reporter finally called the death of the once great studio:

Blazing the Overland Trail was the end of the road for movie serials.

Yates expects Republic earnings to rise from sales of films to television, rental of studio space, and film laboratory services. But the company is shutting down its exchanges throughout the world and will make no more pictures.

This isn’t exactly news. As a film studio Republic had been slowly dying for years. Yates merely signed the death certificate.

Could Republic have been saved? Observers point out how Republic failed to meet the demands of a changing industry.

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Republic was ideally suited to turn out TV films at a low price, especially Westerns. But the studio backed off. Instead, the lot was rented to MCA’s Revue Productions and Republic collected only a rental.

Yates was removed as President in July, 1959. He died seven years later.

Davy Sharpe continued to do stunt work and second unit directing well into the 1970s. While directing the second unit on 1949’s Mighty Joe Young, his fearlessness helped quell an escaped lion.

“We were shooting some action stuff on a nightclub set which featured lions, tigers, elephants, and apes in cages around the

table area,” he said. “We had trained lions to run from one side of the set to the other. One of them broke loose, jumped onto the top of his cage and grabbed the trainer by the throat. I was in the camera cage. I pushed the iron door open, raced across the set and punched the lion in the face. I guess I shocked him so badly he let go, turned tail, and ran into his cage.”

Sharpe was honored with the Yakima Canutt Award for stunt performers through the National Film Society in 1979. He was by then suffering from Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS) and died from it the next year.

Sam Katzman kept chugging out the low-budget flicks after the movie serial’s demise through his uncanny ability to foresee pop culture crazes while still in their nascent phases.

Batman and Robin returned to serial screens, embraced by the counterculture.

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“If you were to X-ray every Oscar,” he told Time magazine in 1952, “You’d find every one of them has an ulcer inside.”

By then, “Jungle” Sam Katzman had made ten Jungle Jim films with Weissmuller and had still not spent more than half a million on a picture’s budget. Each Jungle Jim film only cost an average $300,000 to produce, and often grossed about a million each.

The “bulb-shaped,” cigar-chomping Katzman held reign over five soundstages on Columbia’s subsidiary lot, producing schlockfest after schlockfest, be they sex-ridden horror or goofy science fiction. He averaged about 10 films a year, yet signed a contract in 1952 to produce 3 serials, 17 features (including the Western Jesse James Meets Bill Dalton), and one more Biblical epic.

But then, the cultural landscape changed, and Katzman was canny enough to adapt with it.

In 1951, disc jockey Alan Freed widely coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll” (itself an African-American slang term) to refer to this new blend of jazz, swing, and rockabilly that was encroaching on the post-World War II generation of teenagers.

Considering that his Teen Agers films of the ‘40s tapped into the World War II youth culture, it’s not surprising that Katzman continued to milk the teen market for their movie money in the ‘50s. The producer was driving a cream colored Jaguar and, according to LIFE magazine, was well aware of the brand of schlock coming out with his name.

“Lord knows I’ll never make an Academy Award movie,” he admitted, “but then I am just as happy to get my achievement plaques from the bank every year.”

He produced a string of science fiction and horror movies but he had the greatest impact on pop culture, with his hastily made rock ‘n’ roll-based films. The 1956 cult classic Rock Around the Clock (titled after the Bill Haley and the Comets’ hit single) was his, as well as Elvis Presley movies such as Kissin’ Cousins and Harum Scarum.

Katzman admittedly repeated past successes over the course of two generations, citing that “We got a new generation, but they got the same old glands.”

Sam Katzman passed away on August 4, 1973. The effect that he had on popular culture is irrefutable.

Pop culture itself was changing: a generation of kids grew up to become the first organized wave of comics fandom, creating fanzines (particularly Alter Ego by legendary historian Dr. Jerry Bails) to study and share the comics and media from twenty years earlier. The serials were often edited down into movie length and aired on local TV stations.

“My first exposure to movie serials came about when I was a kid growing up in the New York Metropolitan area in the 1960s.” movie producer and comic book writer/historian Michael Uslan recalled. “I didn’t know they were movie serials, but just black and white shows where you got to see Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers in particular. Occasionally, on kids’ TV shows in the New York market they would show chapters from serials. Sometimes chap-

ters, and sometimes the edited film versions, especially on the Dick Tracy ones, would turn up on TV. “As I hit seventh grade, in the ‘60s, along with a friend of mine Bob Klein (who has become a renowned comic book historian), we became early members of comic book fandom that was just beginning to grow. In the fanzines there were articles on the movie serials. I want to say that it was in the fanzine Batmania, though it could have been Rocket Blast Comics Collector, they had chapter by chapter of the Batman serials. It was there that I learned there was a Spy Smasher serial, and so many others that I hadn’t seen. Everybody was discovering the history and backstory of this aspect of comic book collecting.”

Uslan attended the first comic book convention with his friend Klein in 1964 at the Broadway Center, a “fleabag hotel” in the Bowery: “Bobby and I were walking through this wonderful lobby in Broadway Central, and there was a sketchy bar off to the side.

We looked in and there was Otto Binder sitting at a bar with this other guy...We go in and he has us sit at the bar between us and this other guy. He goes ‘Boys, how’d you like to meet the creator of Batman? Meet Bill Finger.’

“That was the first time I got to meet Bill Finger...He was a super nice guy. He didn’t have any need to be friendly to two thirteen year-old boys who looked at him as if he were God. The more I learned about his contributions to the Batman mythos, the more and more impressed I became. As I became more of a fan, studied it, and became a historian, and learned how many characters and stories that he did, and his contributions to Batman and other comics — it was incredible.”

As comics fans were organizing in the lobbies of fleabag hotels, a generation serial fans were reading Warren’s magazine Screen Thrills Illustrated, which celebrated the serial and B-movies in slick layouts not seen since the pressbooks of the 1940s–and getting together to view whatever film reels of the old serials they could get their hands on.

The Batman serial flickered across movie screens once more in 1965. By that point, an entire generation—now in college—grew up with edited versions of the movie serials on TV. They were just crazy enough to sit through four and a half straight late-night hours of Lewis Wilson and Douglas Croft as the Dynamic Duo. One of those college kids was Michael G. Wilson, then a student at Stanford Law. “I went to see it when I was at Stanford Law School,” Michael remembered. “I was 23 years old when it came out in San Francisco and was the same age he was when it came out. I went with my wife and friends and we watched all thirty episodes [of the two serials], which was interesting.

“I did the same thing with my son when he was 23; he looked just like Lew did at Michael Uslan. that time, and had all the mannerisms.

It was amazing.”

Today, a poster from chapter 15 of the Batman serial lives on one of Michael’s walls.

“I keep that around so my boys can remember and the grandchildren when they come around,” he said.

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(top) Adam West’s poker-faced Batman and Burt Ward’s charismatic Robin redefined the Caped Crusaders, and superhero media, for decades. (bottom) Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl made herself known in the third and final season.

Na-Na, Na-Na, Na-Na, Na-Na... BATMAN! When the Batman TV show aired on ABC on January 12, 1966, the next year, Adam West’s straightfaced Batman and Burt Ward’s overly-enthused Robin ended the episode with Batman appearing too late to save a captive Boy Wonder from death by circular saw. The announcer (producer William Dozier) demanded viewers tune in to tune in “Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Station!” to see if Robin survived. It gave a tongue-in-cheek, straight-laced interpretation of Eisenhower-era Batman comics with the camp and format of the Katzman serial.

Producer William Dozier claimed it was Pop Art, but everyone knew it was pure camp. The problem for Dozier at the time was that camp had connotations of homosexuality. A genre of gay entertainment, such as drag shows, the Batman TV show repurposed camp for a mainstream audience. Adam West’s performance is a master class of a biting self-awareness of the material’s own absurdity.

The New York Times, reporting ABC’s screening for celebrities like Andy Warhol at a discotechque on East 79th Street, deemed Ward’s Batman `“the caped crusader of high camp.”

The BIFF! BAM! POW! emanata put on screen during fight scenes became the show’s trademark, and would haunt superhero media for decades after.

The Times also lists Batman as “Bob Kane Heroes” with no mention of Bill Finger.

Finger would, however, write a two-part episode in the second season and finally receive a credit on a Batman story.

Bill Finger died a short time after in 1974. Bob Kane lived until 1998. It wasn’t until 2015 that Finger was officially credited by DC Comics as the co-creator of Batman.

Donner’s Party In 1978, the superhero film was redefined with a Man of Steel and a director who planted his feet firmly in verisimilitude. Richard Donner filmed Superman on location in Calgary for Smallville, and New York City for Metropolis; combined with groundbreaking special effects and a grounded performance by new Superman Christopher Reeve, it balanced the realism of the New Hollywood film movement with the fun of the serials. Superman was not an adaptation of the comics so much as elements of the various Superman media (from radio to TV) celebrated through a contemporary lens as—in Donner’s words—an American Fable.

“Superman didn’t... think about the era that he was in when he participated in all of these wonderful, wonderful stories,” Donner reflected in 2020. “So I wasn’t trying to do anything except bring a sense of dignity to a hero that I was brought up with and

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generations to follow, have both been brought up in. So I do speak everything to be as truthful to the comic book to the story to what Siegel and Shuster wrote, as possible.”

Donner grew up off the old Superman and considered it an “honor” to have Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill cameo.

“If I remember right.

Somebody in publicity came to me and said that they were still around and can I find a place for them? At the time I had just gone to Calgary to shoot and I was doing the train sequence and how better than that shot?”

It gave the original Superman and Lois Lane a planned return to the big screen, even briefly, as Kirk Alyn and Noelle Neil played the parents of a child Lois Christopher Reeve as Superman.

Lane. Seated as a train that high school Clark Kent runs by in the second act, their cameo was cut out for the final cut, but later restored to home video.

“We didn’t get along too well. He was a little conceited.

I saw him not too many years ago on a CBS This Morning interview [in 1988],” Noel Neill said of Alyn.

“He’d matured a little. He made a good Superman visually and doing stunts, I’ll say that for him. But on interviews and at conventions, he’d dream up things, so to speak, to make it interesting.”

By the time of Superman’s release in 1978, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had both their credit to Superman and dignity restored. With Jerry Robinson, Neal Adams, and others rallying behind them, a deal was struck with DC Comics’s parent company Warner Brothers to not only restore their credit, but also provide them a $20,000 a year stipend with built-in cost of living increases until their deaths. Walter Cronkite announced the news to the nation on December 24, 1975.

Joe Shuster passed away in 1992, and Jerry followed him four years later.

Spencer Gordon Bennet, whose workman-like approach to filmmaking brought Jerry and Joe’s creation to the big screen for the first time, found himself stuck in B-movies for the rest of his career. Bennet’s final film, 1965’s Western Requiem for a Gunfighter, starred Rod Cameron.

In retirement, he still went to the gym daily, often playing rounds of handball.

Bennet died on October 9, 1987 at age 94. His life encapsulated almost the entire lifespan of the movie serial, and he himself directed a greater amount than any other.

Bennet’s entire career can be encapsulated with the birth and death of the movie serial. It’s ironic that he started working on Perils of Pauline, and ended with directing Overland Trail in 1956. Bennet himself passed away on October 8, 1987. His tombstone reads “The final chapter.”

Director Richard Donner on set with Margot Kidder as Lois Lane and Christopher Reeve as Superman.

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William Witney had returned from World War II to direct just one more serial, 1946’s The Crimson Ghost, featuring serial queen Linda Stirling and future Lone Ranger star Clayton Moore (as a pin-striped heavy, nonetheless!). Featuring a robed villain wearing an absurd skull mask, Crimson Ghost could have ventured into the realm of the ridiculous, but Witney and his co-director Fred Brannon produced a dark and somewhat urban crime serial. It was an interesting send-off for Witney and the format, though chances are he had his eye on a series of Roy Rogers Westerns he filmed for the next five years.

After the terrors of World War II it was a welcome change.

Like most veterans of that war, he never talked about it.

“He was in charge of the combat camera unit and they were on their way for the invasion of Japan,” his son, J.D. Witney, remembered. “And then they dropped the bomb so the invasion of Japan never happened but he saw quite a bit of Kamikaze action. The only reason I know this is Victory at Sea was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid as I was a World War II buff.

“I’m watching victory see one day and there’s Kamikaze action going on, and my dad walked by the television. He stood there and looked at it. And he went ‘I shot that,’ and he walked away. Oh my god, that was it. That’s the only discussion we ever had about the war. I mean, there were a few songs he came back with that we used to sing when we were going on vacation or something like that. He did not talk about the war. He was a Marine till the day he died. The Marines could do anything and anytime [there was] a conflict going on he said to send a platoon of Marines in to straighten it up right away. I mean, that’s how much of a marine he was.”

Witney’s greatest film, and the one he was the most proud of, was amongst his last for Republic.

1956’s Stranger at my Door involves a frontier minister faced with a fugitive outlaw in his home, but it is a sequence with a cowboy breaking in a wild horse that serves as the best postscript to his long career. A wild black stallion tears through his trainer and goes on a rampage across the ranch, only being broken when the hero jumps on the horse’s head and quite literally hangs on.

It has to be seen to be believed.

He went on to direct for American International Pictures, the low-budget studio that was home to Roger Corman, as well as helming several episodes of TV shows like Bonanza and The Virginian.

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(left) William Witney (picture left) with his camera unit during wartime. His direction on (right) Stranger at my Door is top-notch and quite possibly Witney’s best.

He also performed second unit work, according to his son, but kept it uncredited; he was worried about getting shoehorned into just secondary work. that included included The Last Command and Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. His wife, Maxine Doyle, died from throat cancer while he was filming I Escaped from Devil’s Island in Mexico. He remarried, this time to Consuelo Mujica that September, whom he met in Mexico and they lived in Cuernavaca.

Witney’s final film was a far cry from his first: Darktown Strutters, a 1975 blaxploitation musical comedy that tried to come across as a live-action MAD magazine satire of the genre, complete with undercranking of the camera and slapstick humor. The script was written by George Armitage (director of Grosse Pointe Blank) as “one uninterrupted full sentence with no punctuation.”

“I think I wrote it in three days...Joe Viola started as the director, but he felt the production was too loose and there was almost a terrible accident. He left, and they brought in a famous Western director named William Witney, and he finished the picture. I thought it was a fun film. I remember we had a screening and we invited Richard Pryor because we thought we might be able to get him to punch up some of the dialogue. I looked over at the aisle and Richard was crawling out of the theater! I took it that he was not totally crazy about the movie. After the movie was over we went outside and he was driving away in some sort of Ford Land Rover thing, wild eyed because he thought we were going to try and stop him.”

A year after Strutters, William divorced Consuela and was left with $6,000 and a double-wide mobile home in Newbury Park, California. He married a third time to Beverly J. Trouba later that year and she stayed with him for the rest of his life.

In retirement, Witney embraced the serial fandom that emerged, attending conventions and panels to talk about his career at Republic. In 1995 he wrote it all down in his memoir, In a Door, into a Fight, Out a Door, into a Chase. Written in a chatty, gregarious tone, it’s practically a verbal history of his time at Republic as serial director.

William Witney died on March 17, 2002 at age 86.

CLI F F H AN GE R! Cinematic Super her oes o f the Ser ials : 1941 – 19 5 2

The Superhero,Redefined The 1980s weren’t as kind to the superhero film as the Superman series, without Richard Donner at the helm, devolved into camp.

It was in 1986 that changed how superheroes were widely viewed with the two postmodern works Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley. Taking an adult approach to not only the superhero as genre, but in terms of the media, both works were big enough to make the mainstream notice. At the same time as Miller’s middle-aged Batman was pounding the crap out of futuristic Mutant street thugs, director Tim Burton was preparing his non-comic book and German Expressionistic Batman film for 1989 release.

But it wasn’t until 2008 with the release of Marvel’s Iron Man that superhero cinema started to reflect superhero comics’ storytelling.

When Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury walks out of the shadows after the credits start rolling, promising Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark there is a “bigger world,” he was talking metatextually.

Marvel built a cinematic universe from the seed of that one film, leading one into another and culminating in 2012’s blockbuster hit The Avengers. The films fell under a “Phase” construction, where each film was released in a sequence and culminated in a lynchpin. They were serialized but, at least at first, loosely so, but like the old serials, they created a demand to catch the next installment on a movie screen.

On the television front, with the introduction of tighter-knit season-long story arcs in the early 2000s, DC Comics’ Green Arrow launched into his own show with Arrow on the CW network. Arrow began sprouting a cinematic universe on television at the same time as Marvel was creating one on film screens.

Within a decade, the work begun by both Marvel and DC in film and television resulted in a complex series of interconnected movies, television shows, and character arcs. As of this writing, both are creating short television series for streaming channels that are serialized to form a cohesive arc and, yes, sometimes they have cliffhanger endings.

And none of these could have been predicted in the 1930s.

Where Kirk Alyn and even Christopher Reeve couldn’t escape typecasting after playing the Man of Steel, it’s now expected for a major actor to put on a mask and costume. They’re big business and dominate film and television, not just for the initiated fans of the source material, but the everyday viewer.

Most effects are created virtually, through greenscreen, digital compositing, and motion capture—technology undreamed of when the Lydeckers were building lightweight mannequins and detailed scale models—and finally able to meet the visual demands brought out of a bottle of ink and a comic book creator’s mind.

Marvel’s Iron Man launched the modern day “shared cinematic universe.” Watchmen #1 by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

Is there a tie-in between the modern superhero film and its 1940s ancestors? The serial demanded regular viewing habits of its audience and, for better or for worse, created three to four months of steady advertising for the actual comics.

The modern television show exists on a continuous narrative structure that, thanks to streaming, is not dependent on viewing at a specific time.

However, the escalation of digital effects’ capabilities often results in a hyper-real unbelievability on the screen, and can make an emotional and climactic fight devolve into a video game.

There was never a question of humanity in the old serials, whether in Tom Tyler grinning at a hail of bullets in Captain Marvel, Kane Richmond cradling his dead brother in Spy Smasher, Kirk Alyn fainting at the sight of Kryptonite in Superman, or even Lewis Wilson’s playful Caped Crusader in Batman, there was a humanity to the low budgets and practical effects, a spontaneity to the actors having to get it right in one take, and a charm in not everything looking like real life.

They were the serials and they gave comic book heroes their first chance at the big screen when the genre was only a handful of years old.

end

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Select Bibliography

W

ork on this book began in 2006 and, while this is not a complete list, these are amongst the most significant sources. I recommend seeking these out to dive even more deeply into the world of the movie serials and early superhero comics.

Hulse, Ed. Partners in Peril: Walter Miller and Allene Ray, King and Queen of the Silent Serial

Alyn, Kirk. A Job for Superman

Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book

Barbour, Alan G. A Thousand and One Delights Chapman, Mike and Bobby Copeland. The Tom Tyler Story: From Cowboy Star to Super Hero Crouch Jr., Bill. Dick Tracy: America’s Most Famous Detective Daniels, Les. Superman: The Golden Age Glut, Donald and Jim Harmon. The Great Movie Serials, Their Sound and Fury Grossman, Gary. Superman: Serial to Cereal Hamerlinck, P.C., Editor. Fawcett Companion: The Best of FCA Harmon. Jim. Radio Mystery and Adventures and Its Appearances in Film, Television and Other Media Hulse, Ed. Blood ‘N’ Thunder’s Cliffhanger Classics, Vol. 2

15 8

Hurst, Richard. Republic Studios: Between Poverty Row and the Majors

Mathis, Jack. Valley of the Cliffhangers McCarthy, Todd and Charles Flynn (editors). Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System Rainey, Buck. Serial Film Stars: A Biographical Dictionary, 1912-1956 Simon, Joe with Jim Simon. The Comic Book Makers Stedman, Raymond William. The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Installment Vaz, Mark Cotta. Tales of the Dark Knight: Batman’s First Fifty Years Witney, William and Francis M. Nevins. In a Door, Into a Fight, Out a Door, Into a Chase: Moviemaking Remembered by the Guy at the Door

CLI F F H AN GE R! Cinematic Super her oes o f the Ser ials : 1941 – 19 5 2

Author’s Bio

Christopher Irving teaches comic books and media in Virginia Commonwealth University’s department of Communication Arts as an Assistant Professor. His work as a historian includes The Blue Beetle Companion, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics, Comics Introspective: Peter Bagge, Mike Allred: Conversations, and Larry Hama: Conversations. He has also written several magazine articles for Comic Book Artist (as associate editor), Alter Ego, and Comics Buyers’ Guide. Irving lives outside of Richmond, Virginia with his partner, Cat, and their son, Grayson.

Photo by Kai Eason.

15 9

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Hurtle back in time to witness the birth of both the comic book and movie serial, as their secret origins intertwine with one another over the decade of the 1940s.

Cliffhanger! Cinematic Superheroes of the Serials uncovers the dual histories of both media, along with a critical perspective of each comic book character serial. Learn about Captain Marvel’s rise as the first live-action superhero; see how The Adventures of Superman radio show led to the first on-screen depiction of the Man of Steel; witness both times Batman and Robin fought crime in weekly installments; and marvel at the misfires and tribulations of studios like Republic and Columbia in their attempt to bring the comic book to life.

Christopher Irving (Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics, The Blue Beetle Companion, Comic Book Artist magazine) begins with the birth of the silent serial and onwards to the advent of the television serial. Along the way, you’ll meet the actors, directors, comic book creators, and (especially) stunt performers who brought two young mediums together to collide in the precursor to modern day superhero cinema.

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TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

ISBN: 978-1-60549-119-6 $39.95 in the U.S.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-119-6 ISBN-10: 1-60549-119-5