CLIFFHANGER! CINEMATIC SUPERHEROES OF THE SERIALS: 1941–1952
by Christopher Irving
KILLER EXCITEMENT! ROBOTS
ADVENTURES OF
CAPTAIN
MARVEL JUNGLE ACTION!
BEWARE
SPY SMASHER!
PLUS
SUPERMAN AND BATMAN HEROES VS. VILLAINS THRILLS AND CHILLS
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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CLI F F H AN GE R! Cinematic Super her oes o f the Ser ials : 1941 – 19 5 2
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
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
C HA P T E R 1 : Wh en M edium s C o nve r g e !
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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. C HA P T E R 2 : T h e A dven tur es of C apt ain M a r ve l
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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. C HA P T E R 3 : Fleis ch er C ar to o ns
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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.
C HA P T E R 4 : Spy S m ashe r
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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.
C HA P T E R 5 : Ba t m an
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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.
C HA P T E R 6 : C apt ain Am e r i c a
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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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