Today, we go back 75 years to find out why in the world would Lois Lane steal Superman's cape just to bind a book with it!
This is "Look Back," where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
Today, we go to May 1947 for World's Finest Comics #29's "The Books That Couldn't Be Bound" by Alvin Schwartz, John Sikela and Stan Kaye, where Lois Lane steals Superman's cape to...bind a book?!?!
Before anything else, just look at how goofy the cover of World's Finest Comics #29 is, as Superman and Batman allow Robin to beat them in a race. This is in a long stretch of covers featuring Batman, Superman and Robin just goofing around, with Superman often messing with Robin (like making Robin think that he can lift a heavy weight because Superman is secretly lifting it. Stuff like that).
Too funny. Okay, onward and upward!
WHAT WAS THE DEAL WITH SUPERMAN'S CAPE DURING THE GOLDEN AGE?
Amusingly enough, early on, there was very little consistency with how Superman's cape was even DRAWN, let alone its origins or how strong it was. Especially sicne Joe Shuster stopped drawing Superman on a regular basis only a couple of years into the series, so with multiple artists involved, consistency was a problem. This was particularly true with Superman's cape, which had multiple different designs in every issue.
Heck, there was one story where his cape was different colors at different points in the same story!
Once Jerry Siegel was drafted into the United States military during World War II, things really got interesting, because now not only was there not a main artist on the series, but now there was no main writer, either. So different writers could have different ideas about things, and back then, with the belief that no one would ever be re-reading any given issue, there was little interest in continuity. So some anonymous writer came up with the idea that Superman's cape and his costume were invulnerable because Superman himself developed the material and created his own indestructible outfit. There was not a whole lot of thought put into this concept, as Superman was never shown with this kind of aptitude before this point. It was just sort of, "Trust us, he has it figured out!"
By the late 1940s, though, the explanation for why Superman's cape and his clothes were indestructible was that the costume was made out of a special material invented on Krypton. This was during a time when Superman's origin was very much up in the air and there was still support at DC Comics for Superman's powers coming from the fact that Kryptonians were just inherently super-powered, so that Superman simply inherited their super-powered genes. Since Krypton was a planet filled with super people, it makes sense that they'd have invented a super-powered material for their clothes and Superman had some of it.
WHY DID LOIS LANE STEAL SUPERMAN'S CAPE?
So keep that in mind for "The Books That Couldn't Be Bound," a story where Lois Lane meets an eccentric book-binder who binds books with material related to the book. Lois runs into the man when she finds a skunkhide copy of Mein Kampf...
It's so funny to see Schwartz go after Hitler, but with such a tame insult. "You're such a skunk, Hitler!"
Anyhow, Superman is convinced to help the bookbinder (as the money he is paid will go to charity) and so Superman gets material from Atlantis for a book about the lost continent...
Superman gets a bone from an animal that the unicorn is based on...
and Superman gets the heaviest material in the universe, but has to do the binding himself...
Superman also insists not to give the book to the guy because it is too dangerous, but he insists, so Superman puts it in his truck and it quickly smashes through it all and falls to the center of the Earth.
So now Lois can get the book bound, but needs Superman's cape. She comes up with an elaborate ploy to get it, but she is surprised (I have no idea why, as the cape being indestructible is sort of a thing, ya know?) when she can't cut through the material, so she just uses ALL of the cape to bind the book, giving Superman a fake replacement...
The fake cape burns up right away and Lois reveals the book and Superman agrees to just make himself a new cape...
I love the idea of Lois just walking around with an indestructible scrap book!
If you folks have any suggestions for June (or any other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972 and 1947 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.