The World's Best Comics, and No Fooling

I picked up a copy of DC's World's Best Comics archive sampler, and it is chock full of good stuff: Superman (Siegel/Boring, from the early days when Boring was still trying to do Shuster); Batman (Finger/"Kane"); Wonder Woman (Marston/Peter); and Plastic Man (Cole). Only 99 cents, so don't miss it.

The stories are all still from the wildly experimental days of the Golden Age, when people were still trying to figure out what stories they could tell and how. And this means that they are occasionally jaw-dropping.

We'll start with Marston, who gives us what is undoubtedly one of the landmarks in Golden Age exposition:

I do admit to being surprised to see a casual reference to the JSA being dropped into a Wonder Woman story, but mostly my reaction is: She magnetized, the earrings, with her lips. To quote Futurama: "That just raises further questions!"

There was, of course, a reason to labially magnetize Diana Prince's earrings:

Magnetic hearing! If I recall correctly, the other four Scientific Senses are gravitic sight, nuclear touch, atomic taste, and electroweak smell.

The Superman story, I'm afraid, reads like an "OMG I have a deadline!" story. For example, Lois, as usual, tries to get somebody to kick the shit out of Clark Kent, and Clark comes up with an excuse calculated to magnify his effete wussiness:

What's Lois's retort to Clark's ethical stance? Right here:

Either Lois has the rhetorical skills of a second-grader, or somebody forgot what somebody was saying in between panels.

Next, we start with this:

Lois is heading to a stadium opening, which we'll later see is a huge public event with thousands of attendees. Now, Superman already knows that the stadium was built by a corrupt contractor with substandard and unsafe materials, but that's not what I'm posting about. That's just Superman being careless with other people's lives, which is practically normal. No, what I'm going to point out is this:

The corruption of the contractor is matched only by the extraordinary ineptitude of his legal department. The city has taken possession and is using the stadium, but the contractor doesn't have approval to submit his final invoice? Who structured those milestone payments?

This story is, incidentally, notable for being the one where Lois gets a transfusion from Clark, whose blood, it turns out, matches all four types. Also, the doctors don't actually notice that the transfusion is occurring through a vein opened by the donor's fingernail and not by, for example, their inserting a needle, but I'll let you read that for yourself.

The Finger story, incidentally, isn't like the others. It's reaching for some respectability, as in this panel:

Compared to the Siegel story, that's literary, especially when you consider how the nick matters; there's a real attempt at some emotional depth.

It's a Joker story and a pretty good one. It also features what I gather is the standard structure of Joker stories in these early days: You start with explaining why he's not dead from his previous story, and you end with him apparently dying, like a highly stylized serial-style cliffhanger ending.

Finally, the Cole story can't reasonably be excerpted; I am left with only the ability to say that it features a fifty-foot tall, hand-walking paraplegic with a transplanted immortal brain. Also the curt dismissal of an "indecently clad modern wench". So, y'know.

Posted by Greg at April 6, 2008 10:45 PM