Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Superman Sunday Classics reprints the first four years of Superman’s newspaper comic strip, which began with dailies in January 1939, adding weekly full-colour Sunday pages in November. The introduction by writer Roger Stern describes the creation of Superman by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster and the leap from comics to far more prestigious and lucrative daily newspapers. Introduced in The Washington Post, Superman picked up sixty more newspapers in the first month. By 1941 he was reaching twenty-five million readers in 230 newspapers. Artists who assisted Joe Shuster in the production of the strips are listed in a footnote as Paul Cassidy, Leo Nowak, Dennis Neville, John Sikela, Ed Dobrotka, Ira Yarborough, Paul J. Lauretta, Wayne Boring and Jack Burnley. Writers Whitney Ellsworth, Jack Schiff and Alvin Schwartz are also cited, but there are no detailed credits given. The contents page only lists each group of strips by title and date for the nineteen stories presented here.

The idea of a man with immense non-human powers is a crazy novelty in these first years, and the strangeness of this blue and red dervish, impervious to bullets, who throws people out of windows or casually overturns their cars with them inside has an exciting, unpredictable charge. Superman himself is darkly, briskly funny as he punches his way through dangerous situations, misjudges his strength and wounds adversaries – “I barely touched him and he’s bleeding profusely!” he exclaims after knocking a towering menace unconscious. He even accidentally kills them, as in ‘The Bandit Robots of Metropolis’ (strips 52-59, 1940). “Let’s see how you’re put together!” he says as he smashes a giant robot in the head, only to find “A MAN – DEAD! Then these robots were merely mechanisms guided by the human beings within them!” In the next panel Superman has tossed the body aside and is piloting the dented giant robot himself. “Now if this blamed thing only continues to work,” he mutters as he steers it into the crooks secret hideout.

The brash, impatient hero of these stories is more inclined to slap the answers out of a blackmailer or a fifth columnist than ask first, so doesn’t have much in common with the Superman we know today. These straightforward tales of sabotage, robbery and extortion foiled by the Man of Tomorrow are a simplistic but fun look at the early superhero genre before the clichés began to pile up.

This book has been republished in hard and softcovers several times since the initial 1999 DC/Kitchen Sink co-production, with different covers. It doesn’t have the extensive, well-researched extra features that made the Batman Sunday Classics volume such a great collection, but it does have one special bonus: the famous ‘How Superman Would End World War II’ strip from the February 27, 1940 issue of Look magazine, which sees Superman snatch up Adolf Hitler from his retreat and pluck Joseph Stalin from his balcony. He carries the two dictators to the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. “Gentlemen, I’ve brought before you the two power-mad scoundrels responsible for Europe’s present ills. What is your judgement?” he asks. “Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin – We pronounce you guilty of modern history’s greatest crime,” declares the court, “Unprovoked aggression against defenceless countries.”