Number 1573: Erling and Hanley

In late March I showed some great comic pages by the late Alan Hanley, scanned from pages published in Alan Light’s The Buyer’s Guide to Comics Fandom in the mid-1970s. Today I’ve got more Hanley in the form of his re-drawings of the origin of Jon Juan, a comic written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by the inimitable Alex Schomburg. I posted the Schomburg version that Hanley used for his drawings, along with another Jon Juan story in 2011. Just click on the thumbnail:

Hanley’s version:

One of my favorite cartoonists appearing in TBG was George Erling, who had a really funny and appealing style. George’s comic strips were filled with surreal characters inspired by cartoonists like Herriman, Holman, Ahern and other screwball cartoonists of a bygone era, yet brought up to date in an underground comix/homage style. These “Clark the Collector” strips are from 1976 and '77. Both Hanley and Erling had the ability to remind one of the past while staying in the present; the best of both worlds.

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Number 1231: Funnyman — tragic, man!

I wrote in Pappy's #798 my opinion of why Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman's creators, created Funnyman in the wake of being sacked by DC Comics, losing their most famous creation.

Funnyman wasn't funny — at least not as funny as the premise of the character made him out to be, a baggy-pants, old school shtick comedian with a secret identity:

Yuk, yuk.

Funnyman is an interesting failure, and also interesting as part of the still ongoing history of the world's most iconic superhero, and the tragic story of its creators.

From Funnyman #2 (1948):

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The Curious Case of the Time Trapper

Faithful readers of the Legion of Superheroes must have been confused at this sequence, which appeared in Adventure #317:

Why confused? Well, it turns out that this was the first mention of the Time Trapper in a Legion story. At the very end of that story (which mostly did not concern TT) came a semi-explanation:

In the next issue, we got our first glimpse of the villain:

Note in particular his physical appearance there. Over the next year or so, we'd see more futile efforts by the Legion to break through:

The Time Trapper turned out to be working behind the scenes in that story, trying to find out the secret of the Legion's super weapon, the concentrator:

But it turns out that he does not have the real secret of the concentrator and flees into the future again. Amazingly, the Time Trapper story would not be resolved until Adventure #338, almost two years after he was first mentioned:

In that story, the Time Trapper has recruited an evil female, Glorith of Baalour, to help him doom the Legion. We get a strong indication of the plot here:

However, when she tries the trick on several members of the Legion, they do not regress in age past babyhood:

Frustrated in his plot to turn the Legion into blobs of protoplasm, he joins Glorith, after first letting Superboy and Brainiac 5 through the Iron Curtain of Time. He leaves them trapped in the future and sets about training the baby Legionnaires to rob for him:

Then he brings them to a planet where elements in the atmosphere will resume their devolution. But this causes problems, too:

But one of the babies has spotted the Time Trapper's ring, which is responsible for keeping Superboy and Brainiac 5 in the future. He switches it off, allowing them to join the group. The Trapper makes a proposal:

Brainiac 5 agrees, but there is a trick:

End of story? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it quite literally is the end of the Time Trapper in the Silver Age; he did not appear again outside of a hallucination sequence in Adventure 363. Which, if you think about it, is very odd. Here's this villain whose confrontation with the Legion had been built up over the course of two years, and yet they dispose of him in a single 16-page story? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So I began digging for clues and speculating a bit. The first clue is that initial mention of the Time Trapper in Adventure #317. It appears obvious that there was supposed to be a Time Trapper story which appeared before that, but which was bumped for some reason. And if we look at the cover to Adventure #317, we get a pretty good second clue:

Speculation: Perhaps the Time Trapper story which appeared in Adventure #338 was intended to appear just before #317, but editor Mort Weisinger belatedly realized that this would give him two consecutive stories featuring Legionnaires turning into babies? This fits, especially when you consider that Adventure #338 was written by Jerry Siegel, while #317 was written by Edmund Hamilton. Weisinger could have instructed Hamilton (or artist John Forte) to include a couple panels mentioning the Time Trapper.

There are certainly still some problems with this speculation. For example, the story does not end with the Time Trapper in the future, creating the Iron Curtain of Time. But this objection is easily overcome; Weisinger simply had the ending of the story rewritten because now it took place after the events in #317, instead of before. Note as well that the story in Adventure #338 did not explain what secret the Time Trapper was supposedly concealing from the Legion in the future.

So my best guess is that the Time Trapper story that was supposed to be published before Adventure #317 was in fact the story that ended up being published in Adventure #338, with some changes. Incidentally, the Time Trapper himself may have been based on the Time Master, a similar character that appeared in Wonder Woman #101:

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The Superboy Legal Case

Covered adeptly by Bill Jourdain. The post contains lots of information that I was not aware of previously, including the fact that DC Comics had formally passed on the Superboy concept, and then published the first stories (starting in More Fun #101) while Siegel was in the army and without his consent.

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Book Review: Boys of Steel

I recently received an email from Marc Tyler Nobleman, the author of this book, and tracked down a copy of Boys of Steel at my local public library.

The book tells the story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's effort to get publishers to accept their Superman character. It's aimed at youngsters from 8 years old and up (although it is suitable to be read to even younger children), but the book entertained and charmed this middle-aged comics fan.

Nobleman creates sympathy for Siegel right from the first page, where we learn that Jerry preferred being at home, with his friends, rather than in high school. Siegel's "friends" were the pulp heroes of his time, like Tarzan and Doc Savage. Eventually he finds another buddy who shares his interest in those types of adventure stories, an aspiring artist named Joe Shuster.

The idea for Superman came to Siegel one night while tossing and turning in bed. He got up to write down some of his thoughts, and the next morning dashed over to Shuster, who shared his excitement in the character. But publishers turned out to be less enthusiastic, and it was only after the S&S boys became established in the comics industry (creating characters like Slam Bradley and Dr Occult) that the company that would become DC published Superman in its first issue of Action Comics. And the rest, as they say, is history, with Superman rocketing to stardom in comics, newspaper strips, cartoons, radio, TV and the movies.

Nobleman has an engaging writing style that makes the book a quick read and he clearly loves his topic. Each page features the retro-30's-style illustrations of Ross MacDonald, which supplement the text perfectly. This is a beautiful book that gives an inspiring message to kids that success may not come easy, but it does come with diligence and persistence. At the end, there are three pages of text only that give the story behind the story, detailing the longstanding efforts by Siegel and Shuster (and their heirs) to retrieve the rights to the character.

Although I was familiar with much of the background, the book did provide some surprises. Siegel's father died of a heart attack while being robbed at his clothing store. This created an additional motivation for Jerry to create a hero who would fight crime and injustice.

Boys of Steel has received numerous positive reviews and awards, which you can see at Nobleman's blog. It is an American Library Association Notable Children's Book for 2009 and A Junior Library Guild Selection. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you'd like to buy it (the book would make a great Christmas gift), consider getting it from my Amazon store:



Marc mentions that he is currently working on a similar biography of Bill Finger, the writer who co-created Batman. I look forward to that volume with great anticipation!

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