Showcase Presents

When I was a very young child my favorite television show was the Super-Friends.* I'm sure this comes as a shock to many of you. I loved Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin. My favorite game was to play superheroes, casting myself as Superman and doling out the other parts as a sign of ranked friendship. While I've outgrown sucking my thumb and having accidents, I have not outgrown superheroes or comics. My fascination with both message and medium will either lead to my destruction, as a stack of bagged and board comics will invariably topple over and crush my vulnerable skull, or it might lead to some form of marginal academic success. At least, maybe an article in The Journal of Popular Culture or MELUS.

However, before I go on about possible future additions to my CV or my broken skull, let me talk a little bit more about The Super-Friends.** When my parents got cable in my early teens, besides being taken by Comedy Central and MTV, I was enthralled by The Cartoon Network. They aired reruns of The Super-Friends and although I watched them religiously during the summer, I was really taken aback by just how incredibly lame they seemed. It wasn't like I remembered it at all. Compared to the comics there was hardly any story. Compared to the Paul Dini animated Batman and Superman cartoons there was hardly any violence. It wasn't that I wanted a bloodbath, but I was expecting a little bit of punching at the very least. Even the animated credits of the Adam West Batman show had punching. "What's the point of having super strength when you never use it?" I mused. Superman & Co. never really fought anyone. Instead of using direct physical force against the Legion of Doom,*** they always ended up fighting jungle animals. Correction: They ended up fighting robots that looked like tigers. At the time, I was a teenage know-it-all and I interpreted the lack of violence as the interference of some well meaning but misguided parents group. While the show did not encourage children to hit each other, it did encourage animal cruelty, or at least cruelty towards machines that looked suspiciously like regular-old animals.

Having transformed from a teenage know-it-all to an undergraduate pedant, to hopefully something a little more humble, a little more intelligent, I have come to understand that with age comes knowledge, but more importantly the wisdom that as you learn, you understand just how much you don't know. Making this point ever apparent to me is the arrival of DC's Showcase Presents titles. Collecting over 500 pages of material (or about two years worth of comics), these inexpensive reprints provide a glimpse of what comics were really like in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Having just completed the first two collections, Green Lantern vol. 1 and Superman vol. 1, I have to say that neither of these titles provide the violence that I so wanted to see in junior high. While this supposed lack was probably due to the power of the official censoring board of the industry, The Comics Code Authority, I can't say that the stories are really harmed by the lack of physical encounters. Instead of dwelling on Superman's invulnerability and strength, the stories collected in Showcase Presents: Superman understand the appeal of the Superman character is not that he's strong per se, but that his strength may give out. What makes these stories successful is that they understand that the true themes of Superman are impotence and insecurity.

One story that illustrates this perfectly involves Superman developing a new superpower, a miniature double of himself that has all of the Man of Steel's regular superpowers, while leaving Superman himself normal. Superman becomes so jealous of his doll-sized helper that he anguishes, "Everyone's impressed. . . except me! Don't they understand how I feel playing second fiddle to a miniature duplicate of myself. . . a sort of super-imp?" Indeed, Superman's jealousy is so intense that when the little imp sacrifices himself to save Superman, the Man of Tomorrow cannot even muster the super-empathy to feel sad for his dead partner. As the miniature doppelganger fades from existence, Superman thinks to himself, "I wonder. . . did it have a life of its own which it sacrificed for me, or was it just carrying out my thoughts. . . before I could put them into words? I . . . I'll never know!" That's the best Superman can muster: "I wonder if somebody died for me. Oh well, best not to think about it."

It is the funnier, crazier, and wackier stories that work best in both collections. My favorite of the Green Lantern anthology uses the conventions of the Lois Lane/Clark Kent/Superman romance. Green Lantern's brother Jim is being pursued romantically by a reporter who is wrongly convinced that Jim is really Green Lantern. Of course she can't prove it, but whenever she's around Jim, he disappears (usually knocked out by a mobster) and all of a sudden Green Lantern shows up. While the super-imp issue is near and dear to my heart, my favorite of the Superman collection would have to be the issue where Superman gets amnesia and cannot remember that he is Clark Kent and so masquerades as an Englishman named Clarence Kelvin. What is great about this conceit is that Kelvin decides to work for The Daily Planet. Superman's disguises are so convincing that none of them recognize him as either Clark of Superman. Even better, Superman can't recognize himself as Kent even after seeing a picture of himself in his Kent disguise. This is perfect.

While these editions are printed on less expensive paper and in black and white, the amount of material reproduced here is well worth the price. These stories are fun to read and are much more affordable than DC's Archives line or trying to hunt down the actual back issues. This is an excellent purchase for anyone wanting to read 1960s comics or who need to do archival work in comics research. This would be me and about ten other folk.

*There really needs to be Super-Friendster. Superheroes need to keep in touch too. I'm sure it's been a long time since Captain Comet got to knock back a few with Bobo the Detective Chip.

** Those feeling like Beatrix at the end of Kill Bill vol. 2 when she screams "How much longer does this last?" when Bill is giving his monologue about Superman are totally in the right at this point.

*** Why is the Right so much better at organizing? The Villains had an entire Legion, a Legion of $%#^in' Doom! The superheroes only had a social hall. They might as well have been Quakers.

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