Cover by Curt Swan & Stan Kaye
Although it has no relation to the cover above, today being
Halloween and all that made me think of one of the Superman’s sixties and
seventies stories aspects I enjoyed more when I was a kid: his weakness when
confronted with magic. In some way I find hard to explain, his susceptibility
to the supernatural was something that resonated with me much better than the
more prosaic kryptonite. But then again, maybe because DC (mainly during the reign
of Julius Schwartz) is so closely associated with the material world of
science, whenever the supernatural intruded its effects were much more chilling
than, say, in Marvel Comics.
Maybe that’s why Deadman, The Phantom Stranger, Etrigan,
or Solomon Grundy had a more lasting effect in me than Ghost Rider or Morbius,
the Living Vampire. Marvel, obviously, excelled with Lee and Ditko’s Doctor
Strange, and few characters left a more iconic impression of villainy than The
Green Goblin (again, through Ditko’s horror attuned imagination), but few
stories had more impact on me than Wolfman and Perez’s Brother Blood Saga from NEW TEEN TITANS back in the early
Eighties, or the initial run of SWAMP
THING by Wein and Wrightson.
Except, maybe, for the one I have the fondest memory
of: “The Monsters Among Us!”, written
by the same Len Wein (with Paul Levitz), and penciled by Curt Swan (inked in this issue by Frank Chiaramonte), from SUPERMAN
# 344 (cover dated February 1980). That’s the story I always remember each time
the leafs fall from the trees and the full moon rises behind the naked branches
of crooked trees on Halloween night.
So, Happy Halloween, folks!
Though I like the basic idea of kryptonite in its original context-- as discussed on my blog awhile-- I certainly don't care that much about the dozens of kryptonite bullets and kryptonite ray guns that followed in the wake of the first few stories. Red kryptonite, though, was arguably more interesting because its effects were like magic, wreaking weird transformations upon the offspring of Krypton. But real magic, whenever it became firmly part of the Superman mythos, was certainly more malleable, even in the siller manifestations, like that great Lois Lane story where Catwoman uses a wand to change Superman into a cat.
ReplyDeleteI reread the Lois Lane story, and it's close to embodying a "near-myth" about the female of the species. though it's not quite as good as it might have been. And I agree that DC's magic was often more evocative than that of Marvel, outside of the Doctor Strange books. A lot of Marvel magic isn't that "enchanting."
Hi Sherman,
ReplyDeleteIt's been almost a year since we were discussing Martin Scorsese's remarks on my blog, so I thought I'd ask-- did you decide to watch the SHANG CHI movie yet?
I almost watched a library DVD today, but it wouldn't play...