I will disabuse anybody of the notion that Neal and I were the first. There are some Superman stories that are socially conscious — in the way that Warner Bros. movies were back then. . . .And that eye-opening fact eventually led to these famous panels from Green Lantern, #76. (When Superman Was a Leftist, Part 1.)
…the last year I had an editorial job, I was living here in Nyack and it’s an hour and 15 minute drive [to New York City], so I listened to a lot of old radio shows and the Superman radio show was remarkable. The writer in me responded to it: “Wow! They establish everything you need to know every day without slowing down the story.” There were also a number of them that were really socially conscious.
My own memory of my first glimmering of social consciousness was hearing — as maybe a 6-year-old or 7-year-old — Superman on the radio telling me that the difference in skin color was only because of a chemical called melanin and people were all the same. I had never heard anything like that.
Musings about some of my favorite fantasy literature for young readers, comics old and new, the peculiar publishing industry, the future of books, kids today, and the writing process.
26 December 2009
When Superman Was a Leftist, part 2
Scripter Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams are often credited with bringing socially-conscious political themes into superhero comics (or at least into DC Comics’ magazines) with their Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories of the early 1970s. But in this conversation for The Comics Journal, O’Neil noted an important forerunner:
No comments:
Post a Comment