“I hate each Julie Andrews film they’ve made. I’m just a nasty narrow-minded jade. Don’t think that I will smile at it, I’m not a weak-willed hypocrite. I’ll say I’m bored!” From I’m Bored, written by Vivian Stanshall.
Before we had letter columns, before we had copy-riddled promotion pages and heartfelt missives from publishers and editors, we had text stories — one page (sometimes two) that told a nice little story about one of the superheroes regularly featured in the title, uncompelling at its best, but occasionally written by someone familiar with the character.
They proliferated in comics though the 1960s or so, but neither I nor my friends nor anybody I’ve ever met had read more that a few of them. And back then we were so bored we even read Roy Raymond TV Detective in the back of Detective Comics.
We have been told that publishers needed some sort of text feature in order to qualify for second-class mailing privileges. That story has been repeated so many times most of us think it’s true — and it probably is. Subscribers needed their comics delivered to their homes at a reasonable time, and publishers wanted to keep their postage costs as low as possible. But it’s hard to tell. Back then no two post office officials interpreted the rules governing those permits the same way with any consistency or logic, and often one could shop around for a friendly bureaucrat.
During the heart of Werthamism in the early 1950s, those same bureaucrats did catch on to one of the publisher’s most deceptive cash-saving stunts. They renamed titles but did not change the numbering, which would trigger the need for a new permit. For example, the “first” issue of DC’s Star Spangled War Stories kept the numbering from the Star Spangled Comics superhero series. After three such issues the Post Office made them restart the numbering to reflect the new title — but they changed with the fourth such issue, which DC numbered “three.” So there were two issues of Star Spangled War #3. I gather Irwin Donenfeld was not the mathematician that Jack Liebowitz was.
Amusingly, decades later when DC changed the title to The Unknown Soldier, they kept the numbering.
Okay. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. To be specific, July 10, 1942. On that day MLJ released PEP Comics #31, cover-featuring The Shield and The Hangman. I read that book far more recently — this past weekend. I’m a fan of Bob Montana’s Archie stories, and the OG Carrottop occupied six pages therein. While wafting through Irv Novick’s Shield story and Paul Reinman’s Bentley of Scotland Yard, I encountered a Shield text story that I found noteworthy. This story, whose author is unknown, is all about Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, and one of the very best pieces of America’s music history, Sing Sing Sing, written by Louie Prima.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been the Archie story: America’s typical teens were hep to that jive. But The Shield was as red, white and blue as anybody — including Captain America, who succeeded The Shield’s debut. The Shield even had his own Robin-Bucky in a kid named Dusty. The kid was hanging around a record store with his pal and he previewed a platter of the Goodman/Krupa masterpiece… and rapidly realized somebody had substituted strange, off-beat solos into the tune. To make a dumb story short, it was part of a Nazi spy plot…like everything else in 1942 comic books.
I doubt anybody who read the story back then was surprised at the music references (Erskine Hawkins was noted as well), but then again I doubt many readers read it in the first place. You got 68 pages, including covers, for one thin dime, so you need not spend time with the filler material. But from the prospective of a music maven who was born eight years after that story, it was great to see a swing music fan monetize his hobby.
Sing, Sing, Sing is an instrumental, so adapting it into a comic book or graphic novel might be challenging. Having met Mr. Goodman, he was a major asshole and I wouldn’t ask him for permission for the outhouse key, but I’d listen to him play that clarinet any time, any place.
1942 was the year George Lowther’s novel “The Adventures of Superman” was published, and it might have been the first novelization of an American comic book superhero. Don’t let the wonderful Joe Shuster illustrations fool you: a lot of Superman history was established or consecrated in that book. Lowther was the lead writer on the Superman radio series and is believed to have created or co-created a great many cornerstones of Man of Steel lore.
We still publish new superhero novels— for example, the new Marvel Crime novels — and I’d like to talk about Alex Segura’s highly enjoyable Daredevil tome. Sorry, Alex. I’ve run out of etherspace.
