A Graphic Analysis of the Adventure Comics Superboy Swipes

While making my way through reading all of the Superboy features in Adventure Comics, I've been quite startled at the number of swipes. But some things only become obvious when you look at things in a graphic fashion, and here's a look at what I've uncovered so far:

This may not be a complete look at the swipes, but I am confident I have identified most of them.

There are two obvious patterns in the data:

1. The swipes all fit into the course of 27 issues; in that run, there were 9 swipes. Thus, about 33% of the Superboy stories from Adventure #276-302 were swiped from earlier tales. These issues were published from September 1960 to November 1962. Note that this applies to the story in Superman #145 as well, which bore a cover date of May, 1961.

2. The stories they were swiped from came from the course of 24 issues of Adventure; #176-199, or May 1952-April 1954. The story in Superboy #49, which was swiped in Adventure #276 falls out of this range, appearing in June 1956.

Of course, the question becomes why did Weisinger swipe so many stories during 1960-1962? I suspect the reason can be seen on this cover:

Do you see the clue? It's this:

The comics companies were all under pressure to raise their prices in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dell Comics tried to lead the way to a 15-cent cover price in 1958, but eventually had to go back to 10 cents when the competitors didn't budge. But in December 1961, DC raised the cover price of all its magazines to 12 cents and their competitors followed suit.

I strongly suspect that Weisinger was trying to cut costs wherever he could to maintain profitability. It would make sense that he could pay his writers somewhat less for recycled stories; as I have documented, many of the stories were almost word for word swipes from the earlier tales.

Why did he stop the swipes? I suspect there are several reasons:

1. The price increase reduced the pressure to cut costs. Two cents may not sound like a lot of money, and in all probability DC split the increase with their retailers so that they only netted a penny. But in 1962, Adventure Comics was selling 415,000 copies an issue; that works out to an additional $4,150 in revenue to DC. It's true that circulation did drop with the price increase, from 460,000 in 1961, but if we assume again that DC was only getting half the old 10-cent cover price from their retailers, the net increase is still $1,900.

2. The increasing influence of fandom may have caused Weisinger to cut back on the swipes. Although I was unable to locate a letter in the Adventure letter columns complaining about the recycled stories, I doubt that it went completely unnoticed by the older fans.

And it's not as if Weisinger entirely discontinued the practice; he just became a little more transparent about it. In Adventure #317 this announcement appeared:

The Hall of Fame classics were published until Adventure #345, after which the Legion stories were expanded to book-length.

Incidentally, I first became aware of the Superboy swipes sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s when DC reprinted the story in Adventure #191 and its swipe in Adventure #290. I can see that the latter tale was reprinted in Superboy #147, but the GCD does not show when the former tale was republished. Anybody know what issue that was?

Update: Discovered that Adventure #279 was a swipe from #187; I have updated the graphic and a few other places in the original post.

More about →

Adventure #299

This is an imaginary story. The first two pages tell the familiar origin of Superman, taking us to the point where the Kents drop him off at the orphanage while they try to adopt him. However, before they can:

So the government gets hold of him and the military sees him as a potential weapon but:

Of course he breaks free. But when he seeks out the Kents, he makes a few mistakes:

So they don't want him either. Eventually he encounters an aspiring tyrant:

So they do the classic "We'll pretend to love him so that he'll help us take over the world," routine, but inevitably he discovers their real feelings towards him. Eventually he leaves Earth and becomes the greatest hero on another world. But he's always wondered what would have happened if he grew up with the Kents, so he heads back to find out, but runs into a curious golden meteor:

So when he lands on Earth, he's lost his superpowers. The Kents still adopt him and:


Comments: An offbeat, oddball tale, that still illustrates some of the recurring themes in the DC Silver Age. The curious workings of fate conspire to make Clark need glasses and to become the weakling that he always pretended to be in the "real" stories. And second, this turns out to be the first appearance of gold Kryptonite:

This is the last issue for the Tales of the Bizarro World; effective with #300 the backup feature (soon promoted to the lead) was the Legion of Super-Heroes. The title should bring back some memories to Boomers:

This is a reference to the old TV show, Car 54 Where Are You, which had one of the great song intros of all time:

There's a holdup in the Bronx,
Brooklyn's broken out in fights,
There's a traffic jam in Harlem
That's backed up to Jackson Heights
There's a scout troop short a child,
Kruschev's due at Idlewild...
Car 54, where are you?


In the story, Bizarro #1 and his son vacation on Earth as police officers, where they are under the command of Captain Bloke (the real commanding officer in Car 54 was Captain Block). They perform terribly, as indicated by this scene where they supposedly frisk a prisoner:

But since they are invulnerable and super-strong he finds himself unable to get rid of them. But when he's struck on the head and becomes convinced they are good officers, he gives them a golden badge, which of course:

Comments: Nothing special, but the cultural mention of Car 54 does give this story an added something.

More about →

The Legion of Super-Romances

In their first several appearances, the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes were somewhat asexual. This is not that surprising, since they initially encountered Superboy, who almost never acknowledged an interest in girls.

However, we learned over time that they could be just as hormone drenched as real teenagers. The first hint appears to be in Action #276, where Supergirl and Brainiac 5 are inducted into the Legion together. Later:

In Action #289, we learned that at least one Legion romance led to the altar:

In Adventure #311, we learned that Night Girl, a member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes was sweet on Cosmic Boy:

In #316, Phantom Girl expresses her admiration for Ultra Boy:

The very next issue of Adventure features the first appearance of Dream Girl, and all the boys go gaga over the platinum blonde:

Especially Star Boy (with fateful consequences much later).

In Adventure #321, Bouncing Boy loses his powers, slims down, and picks himself up a plumper:

Of course, much later he'd, err, pair up with Duo Damsel.

Shrinking Violet didn't shrink away from Duplicate Boy, even though he was supposedly the leader of a gang of crooks:

In actuality, however, Duplicate Boy and the rest of his group had been duped into attacking the Legion, and in the end of the story, Violet and he appear to be starting a romance.

Adventure #326 featured The Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires, a zany story where the girls are hypnotized into destroying their male counterparts. As part of their plot, the gals pretend to be interested in some of the boys. For example:

But the romances are all phony, and none of the gals were later romantically linked to their chosen victims in this case. In fact, Light Lass (shown kissing Element Lad there), met her chosen beau in the next issue:

In Adventure #329, a reader wrote in requesting more romance:


That takes us through the first 30 issues of the Legion in Adventure, and seems like a good breaking point. Still more Legion love to come!

More about →

Adventure #231

I'm not much on the Superbaby stories as a rule, but this one is definitely top-notch. Superboy decides as a teenager to repay some kindnesses that he experienced as a boy. For example, Cal Bentley, who now runs an amusement park, once saved baby Clark from destroying a train and revealing his secret identity:

Another man rescued the tot from his first encounter with Kryptonite:

Not surprisingly, Clark refuses payment for helping these men out as a teen. However, one of the men (now a wealthy miser) who saved him from losing Pa Kent gets a nasty surprise when Superboy presents him with the bill for mowing his lawn:

However, it's all for a good cause, as the penny-pincher learns:

Superboy even thinks of the boys he's beating out for the jobs that he takes for the people who helped him out as a baby:

Nice little touch there. And in the end, there are just two people left to thank:

Comments: A superb story, with wonderful characterization for Superboy. The way he repaid the miserly rich man was particularly deft.

The Aquaman story is one of many from the Silver Age about a predicting machine:

As must happen in all such tales, the first two predictions come true. Will Aquaman really experience "dying" at the hands of one of his finny friends? Sort of:

The dye gets all over him, get it? Comments: Cute, if formulaic.

In the Green Arrow story, a local manufacturer is producing mini Arrowcars for sale. The local Green Arrow fan club tries them out:

But some crooks take advantage of the opportunity to steal the original, forcing the Emerald Archer and Speedy to use one of the kiddie-mobiles. The fan club helps out:

And eventually the crooks are caught and the Arrowcar returned to its rightful owners.

Comments: I liked the clever use of the mini-Arrowcars.

More about →

Single Issue Review: Adventure #227

It's easy to forget about Superboy from the Silver Age; the current Superman apparently never was Superboy, having only gained his powers in manhood. How much of this is due to the longstanding suits over the rights to Superboy can only be guessed, but certainly Superboy was a major DC character of the Silver Age; in fact it is quite easy to argue that he was as important in that era as Batman.

He, like Superman and Batman, headlined one of DC's three monthly anthology magazines. He also had his own magazine, which wildly outpaced Batman's in sales, except during the Batmania years. To give you an idea, here is where Superboy ranked in sales among all comics starting with 1960: 4, 3, 2, X, X, 2, 3, 3, 4, 3. The two years shown as X (1963 and 1964), DC did not report sales but it is not hard to see that the numbers missing are 2 and 2; Superboy outsold the #3 book (Lois Lane as it happens) by over 100,000 copies in both 1962 and 1965, the years bracketing the missing ones.

As you can see from the cover to Adventure #227, he is still a boy in these stories; to my eyes he looks about 10 or 11. In the story, Superboy learns that Smallville has a contest on about who's its most good-hearted citizen. Not surprisingly the tally thus far favors Superboy heavily, but he feels it's unfair given his powers and so he declines via smoke-signal:



Good characterization there. Since he is out of the running, Superboy is given all the letters nominating him for the award, and as shown on the cover, he is surprised when he finds that many people remember events which he knows did not involve him.



As he tracks down the source of each claim he realizes that there's one person present at each incident:





Of course it's the postmaster. Despite a gruff demeanor he has a heart of gold and a small inheritance he's used to help people out anonymously, making it seem like Superboy must have done it. But now Superboy knows his secret, what can be done? Well, fortunately the postmaster is about to retire anyway and:



Comments: Cute semi-Scrooge story; to be honest I did not notice the postmaster in the background of those shots (which were 3 pages apart in the story). Art by Curt Swan is solid but not special; I am one of those folks who think that Swan got better--much better--as he aged.

The Aquaman story I have to show you the splash for:



It's all a plot to get Aquaman too busy to foil a planned "boat job" by some hoods. Aquaman gives his fans a few underwater grooming tips here:



When I feel the need to shower? And not to belabor the obvious, but who would see him naked in the middle of the ocean?

But the hilarity is just getting started. Aquaman feeds soap flakes to blowfishes so they can provide him with a nice lather for washing his hair. Electric eels heat up a plate of "seaweed" food for his meal. Mmmmm, seaweed! And when he wants to relax:



The crooks ask him to show them how he responds to an emergency on a nearby boat. It turns out that Aquaman has a lantern fish following every boat in the ocean. If there is trouble, the skipper signals the lantern fish, who signals a sea hare who signals a flying fish who signals a giant boxing shrimp, who signals A-man. Whew!

With this knowledge, the crooks can pull their job, as they have a man ready with a net to catch the flying fish and prevent the message from reaching Aquaman. But he foils the plot and explains that he suspected something from the first as their camera exuded bubbles of air when they were filming him, revealing that there was no actual film in the camera. And he has a seagull acting as backup if any of the links in the alert system fail.

Comments: Silly, but entertaining as heck. Ramona Fradon does her usual solid job on the artwork.

The final story features The Green Arrow Mystery Cards. Green Arrow has been handing out collectible cards featuring him and Speedy capturing crooks. Even back then, he knew the value of having a few rare cards:



Obviously this is a nod to collectible trading cards which were very popular in the Silver Age. I can remember buying card sets in the early-mid 1960s that featured such themes as astronauts, good guys and bad guys (from the old west), Lost In Space, and Batman. And of course trading to get the rare ones was a big pastime; I remember getting something like 125 baseball cards for one Moe Drabowsky card.

Anyway, the fad has caught the attention of that older fella getting out of the car, and he's quite willing to pay top dollar to get some of the rarer cards in the set. He gets the kid to part with his "Flight of Peril" card for $5 and a toy, but the gal who has "Green Arrow Captures Diamond Thief" is made of sterner stuff and won't trade for anything. But the old man is determined, and one of his henchmen burgles the girl's house to get the card that night.

It turns out however, that Green Arrow and Speedy had not intended for those cards to be particularly rare; it appears that somebody is cornering the market on them. Unfortunately the plates and original photos for those particular cards were destroyed in a recent fire. So Green Arrow decides to duplicate the pictures with the aide of a photographer.

The first two shots go off without a hitch, so the only one remaining is to capture the jewel thief. In the original, a thief had stolen the Sun Diamond and was about to throw it out the window when Green Arrow shot and cleaved the diamond in two, with the two pieces then missing the window. A nearby man scooped up the diamonds and handed them to GA. They reproduce the event with the Moon Diamond (since the Sun Diamond is already cut in two, and the man scoops up the diamonds but:



It turns out that Green Arrow was suspicious all along, and so he intentionally cut the diamond a little off-center and knew something was wrong when the crook gave him two perfect halves.

Comments: Excellent, well-executed premise for a story, with art by longtime GA artist, George Papp.

More about →

The Legion Rejects: Part II

In Part I of the Legion Rejects, I noted the four basic reasons that the Legion rejected applicants:

1. Fake powers.
2. Undependable powers.
3. Useless powers.
4. Limitation on powers.

Bizarro Superboy was rejected in Adventure #329 for reason #2. Of course, it wasn't so much that his powers were undependable as that he himself was undependable.

The next group Legion tryout after Adventure #325 came in #330.



Ethel was an eyeful, alright! And the Mess seems obviously a rip-off of the old Charlie Brown character, Pig-pen. Both were clearly rejected for reason #3. Update: Norman points out in the comments that the Mess probably took his rejection with a "What, me worry?" attitude. ;)

In Adventure #331, Dynamo Boy (a villain) has successfully gotten rid of all the members of the Legion, and conducts his own tryouts. He adds a reason #5 for rejection:



5. Incorruptibility.

Obviously, this is not normally a disqualifier for the Legion. I'm not sure if Animal Lad (whose powers were changing humans into animals, and taming animals) ever came back for a tryout after Dynamo Boy was captured and expelled.

However, Dynamo Boy does use the normal criteria for some of the other applicants:



Golden Boy is a reason #3 reject, as is the Polecat:



The Tusker:



Rejected for reason #2 after he found himself unable to withdraw his tusks from the tree.

The next Legion tryouts came in Adventure #337. Four Legion members had gotten married (Lightning Lad/Saturn Girl and Ultra Boy/Phantom Girl), and replacements were needed. This was all a plot to get three evil aliens to join the Legion, and so the rejects were just Night Girl and Chlorophyll Kid again being rejected for reason #4 and #3 respectively:



In Adventure #342, Calamity King got gonged for reason #2:



While Color Kid was a #3 reject:



He later proved that his power had some value. In Adventure #351, a green Krytponite cloud surrounded earth during the Legion era and Superboy and Supergirl were forced to resign temporarily. However, he came up with a solution in #352 by turning the cloud to blue Kryptonite, which only affects Bizarro.

Adventure #346 introduced a new wrinkle.



Qualifying tests presumably meant that there would be fewer rejects, and indeed the four applicants show above (Princess Projectra, Ferro Lad, Karate Kid and Nemesis Kid) were all accepted into the Legion, although Nemesis Kid could arguably have been rejected for reason #4:



Indeed, I remember one occasion where he was captured by Duo Damsel, precisely because while he could defeat any one opponent, he was a wimp when facing multiple foes.

That takes us through Adventure #350, another good breaking point.

More about →