In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn about the fascinating arrangement that Pearl S. Buck made with DC to create a brand new hero, Johnny Everyman.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and fourth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for Part 1 of this installment's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Pearl S. Buck did a comic book hero for DC.

STATUS:

True

Pearl S. Buck was born in 1892 in West Virginia. Here parents were missionaries and so Puck spent most of her first 40 years on Earth living in Zhenjiang, China. She moved back to the United States in 1935, but not before she first wrote the novel, The Good Earth, in 1931, about life in a small village in China at the turn of the 20th Century. The book was the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932 and won Buck the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932. Buck then won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces," becoming the first American woman to ever win the award. In 2004, Oprah Winfrey put the book into her Oprah's Book Club, making the book a bestseller again.

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When she moved back to the United States, Buck was one of the most famous authors in the world, and she used her fame to work on a number of political issues close to her heart. When World War II began, she formed The East and West Association, which was designed to foster friendship between the United States and its Asian allies, China and India, during the war. Buck referred to it as a “critical internationalism” approach to things. During this period, Buck helped push the idea of international adoptions, with a number of Asian orphans were adopted and brought to the United States (James Michener and Oscar Hammerstein II was part of the same program).

Buck wrote in 1942, “In the age upon which the world is now entering, I think superman (not capitalized) is the man who understands best the thoughts and feelings of all peoples, uses the skill of his understanding to help other people understand one another.”

Well, during the 1940s, DC Comics was desperately worried about censorship. They were so successful that they were afraid that people would turn on them and help get the government involved. So they would reach out to respected authors and psychologists and educators all of the time to try to get them to say, "Hey, comics are awesome."

Naturally, then, they turned to Buck and had her serve on their Advisory Committee, which would be advertised in all of their issues.

"Hey, kids, tell your parents that Pearl S. Buck says comic books are okay!"

Well, one of their earliest advisory committee members was psychologist William Moulton Marston and he then created Wonder Woman and so similarly, DC was interested in seeing if Buck would be willing to do comic books, as well.

The end result was Johnny Everyman, a character created by Buck that debuted in 1944's World's Finest Comics #15, in a story written by Jack Schiff (who famously wrote all of DC's public service announcements of the era, which stood out for the fact that they were VERY liberal) and drawn by John Daly...

Johnny Everyman was all about Buck's aforementioned goal of having everyone get along....

There is an amazing story about an African-American serviceman that I'm going to spotlight on its own in the future.

Buck later helped DC develop the educational comic book series, Real Fact Comics, in 1946, the first educational comic book that DC ever actually tried publishing.

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Johnny Everyman appeared in World's Finest Comics #15-26, with two more appearances in #28 and #30 (September-October 1947). It also appeared in another DC anthology series, Comics Cavalcade, from #10-14. I believe Daly eventually just started writing AND drawing the later features.

Buck has got to be the most famous writer to ever associate themselves with comic books during this era, even if she wasn't actually writing the comic book features herself.

The problem for Buck is that once the war was over, a couple of things happened. One, people really didn't care so much about, you know, fostering friendship between the United States and other countries, and two, comic book sales went down without the war boom. Heroes in general were becoming less popular, as horror comics, crime comics and romance comics became more popular at the end of the decade.

So Johnny Everyman ended in 1947. DC then broke up the advisory committee period in 1949 and Buck's The East and West Association closed itself in 1950, as fostering friendship between the United States and China once the Communist Party took over China really wasn't the sort of thing that the American public was supportive of during The Cold War. At the same time, Communist China was also not supportive of Buck, either, as The Good Earth was denounced as "American cultural imperialist." Buck was very upset when was barred from returning to China after 1949. She was not even allowed to visit China with Richard Nixon in 1972.

While her comic book journey was relatively short-lived, Buck continued to fight the good fight the rest of her life, speaking up for civil rights and women's rights, as well, until her death from lung cancer in 1973.

CHECK OUT A MOVIE LEGENDS REVEALED!

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PART THREE SOON!

Check back soon for part 3 of this installment's legends!

Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com

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