Don’t forget Streaky!
And Biron!
And Krypto!
Yeah, there must have been at least 500 superheroes in the first decade of comics (1936-1946). About a dozen may be in people’s heads today, because they lasted or were part of the Silver Age revival. A few more got picked up later, when the writers went crazy about bringing back oldtimers.
I went through hundreds of comics from that era when I was writing my book on robots and for other stuff like ray guns. People don’t remember that the average comic from the 1940s was either 52- or 64-pages and had at least eight strips in it. The several dozen publishers needed thousands of strips a year to fill space. Most of them didn’t last long, of course, and new strips blossomed like weeds. Almost all of them are deservedly forgotten. I don’t think there are any Great Lost Heroes. Fans and writers have brought back and republished everything worthwhile. Of course, like old rock groups, people will always have favorites that they champion, but there can’t be many left undiscovered.
So I should stop holding out for Tough Kid Squad: the Mition Picture?
This article concurs with you.
By and large, and I say this as someone who’s read quite a few of them, the Golden Age stories that were actually consistently good were the ones that you’ve heard of. Characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Captain America, and the original Captain Marvel — known today as Shazam, whose stories were so popular that he was appearing in about ten comics a month and outselling Superman by a margin that can only be described as massive — stuck around for a good reason. The thing is, they only represent a fraction of what was actually happening on newsstands around the country back in that late '30s, early '40s boom period.
Wow. I was going to say that looked like a ripoff of Simon/Kirby’s Boy Commandos. Sorry. The Boy Commandos. But Tough Kids appeared three months earlier.
The Native American character was, of course, super racist. He spoke like Tonto, if Tonto had been dropped on his head as a child.
That might change when Pierce Brosnan plays him in the upcoming Black Adam movie.
There are a couple of scenes in the first Superman movie serial, from 1948, where it’s obvious that Kirk Alyn is finding the cape to be a huge pain in the ass to work with.
Kirk Alyn wrote an autobiography called A Job for Superman in 1971.
It’s one of the few books in which it is literally true than an unsigned copy would be worth more than a signed copy if you could find one.
He self-published the book and signed each one.
One of the others being The Stand.
At least according to King.
Of course the bestest superhero remains The Dude
Which of course gives us The Dark Man aka The Walkin’ Dude/The Good Man/The Man in Black, his lieutenant The Rat Man, and hanger-on The Trashcan Man, and by extension into the Dark Tower EU his master The Crimson King.