MOLE MEN, SLIGHTLY SHORTER THAN Harry Donenfeld, emerge from the center of the Earth after a six-mile-deep oil well is drilled. Though they have bald bulbous heads, they are good-natured. After the Mole Men are mercilessly attacked by suspicious humans, Superman comes to their rescue and lecturers the ignorant mob to “stop acting like Nazi storm troopers.”
The plot was part of a 1951 B movie called Superman and the Mole Men, which tried to convey some sort of a social message: bigotry and racism were unacceptable. The fifty-eight-minute movie, featuring a couple of former munchkins from The Wizard of Oz as the Mole Men, wouldn’t crack the consciousness of most cinephiles. But it would be the first feature film based on a DC Comics character and serve as the pilot for the Adventures of Superman television series. TV was still new and untested, but Harry and Jack knew there was a huge audience of kids out there, kids who were losing interest in comic books because of television. From 1950 to 1951, the number of televisions in American homes jumped from 3 million to 10 million, with Howdy Doody and the Lone Ranger eating into DC’s audience base.
The Superman show, starring George Reeves, would bring the superhero to a whole new generation, those too young to remember Superman’s comics debut in 1938. Branching out into television was a natural progression for the superhero, and the next step in a long line of successes for Harry and Jack.
But for Superman’s creator Jerry Siegel, seeing his beloved character’s new incarnation was torture. He and Joe Shuster had been wandering the wilderness since being ousted by DC Comics after their 1947 lawsuit. They had tried to make it in the comics world without Harry and Jack, but things were not going so well. Funnyman, a Jewish comedian/superhero they tried to launch, was painfully unfunny and died a quiet death after only six issues. The $94,000 they’d won in the Superboy fight didn’t last very long. In addition to the lawyers’ fees and back taxes he owed, Jerry lost more than half of everything he owned when his wife filed for divorce. Bella left him just two months after the settlement, taking the kid, the house, everything in it, and 60 percent of his money.
But Jerry was anxious to get out. A few months earlier, he and Joe had reconnected with their old friend Joanne, the model for Lois Lane. Joe had kept in touch with her over the years and invited her to the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan to the Cartoonists Society ball. Joe even rented her a gown for the event, hoping to reignite their romance. The three old friends had a great time, but Joanne wound up leaving the party with Jerry that night instead of Joe. As soon as Jerry’s divorce was final, the two were married. Joanne thought she was marrying a successful writer, but Jerry’s worst days were ahead.
He and Joe did some freelance work, Jerry writing stories for the G.I. Joe comic book, and Joe dabbling in horror comics. Jerry was hired as the comics editor by another publisher, Ziff-Davis. But their comics division closed after less than a year. Jerry and Joe couldn’t catch a break, back to being the hard-luck losers who’d been kicked around at Glenville High School. Except Jerry was now married to Lois Lane.
The new Superman television show was sure to bring in millions in advertising, but Jerry and Joe would see none of it. Bitter and broke, Jerry wrote a letter to the FBI in 1951, telling them to take a close look at Harry and his associates. J. Edgar Hoover, who had been after Harry years earlier for the sex pulps, wrote Jerry back, saying he believed comics caused juvenile delinquency. He was already on the case.
A backlash against the comics industry had been growing for several years. Kidnapping, tying up victims, and sadism were regular staples of comic book stories. (Some parents even complained of Wonder Woman being underdressed.) Back in the 1940s, to quell any complaints, DC had added child psychologists to its editorial board to advise on what was acceptable reading material for children. Graphic violence was to be avoided, as were provocative female characters.
After years of censorship with his girlie pulps, Harry had learned how to play by the rules. But by the 1950s, the fear of juvenile delinquency was growing with the rising population of children from the postwar baby boom. Though crime statistics didn’t support their cause, J. Edgar Hoover and politicians stoked the public’s fear that radio, television, and, yes, comic books were corrupting their children. Comic book burnings were held by parents, priests, and teachers who claimed their violent content led to juvenile delinquency.
In 1950, a Senate crime investigating committee began looking into whether comics—particularly horror and crime comics—caused actual violence. All the commissioners had to do was look at a back cover of any Superman comic to know that Harry was promoting violence: Full-page ads for BB guns and fireworks had likely helped shoot several eyes out and blow off a finger or two across the country. Leather whips and folding knives were advertised for sale in comics pages. But the content itself?
One of the men leading the charge against the comics was Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German psychiatrist from Nuremberg who had originally come to America in 1922 at the invitation of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins. Now living and working in New York, Wertham had documented dozens of cases of children acting out in violent ways after reading comic books. With his long, pinched face and his black-rimmed glasses, the humorless Wertham never smiled and insisted there was nothing comical about comic books. His 1948 article in the Saturday Review of Literature described a bunch of feral boys tying up a little girl and torturing her after they’d read a comic book. The piece caused quite a stir, catching the eye of several politicians, who questioned whether comic books were inherently good or bad for kids.
“If you want to raise a generation that is half storm trooper and half cannon fodder with a dash of illiteracy,” said Wertham in his heavy German accent, “then comic books are good. In fact, they are perfect.” Wertham believed all comic books were bad, even the ones featuring Superman. “Comics showing superman types of characters are the worst,” he said. “The hero is above all law. He might be a modern Nazi. The villains are small and of dark complexion. Almost any foreigner will do.”
To get to the bottom of the problem, the Senate committee sent out a survey to hundreds of probation officers, child welfare workers, juvenile court judges, police, and prison authorities, as well as those in the comics industry. In a 250-page Senate survey released in November 1950, a few outliers called for the banning of comics, citing a boy from Pittsburgh who jumped off a pole thinking he could fly like Superman and a Wisconsin kid picked up for arson who learned his method from a comic book.
But most officials—who had probably read comics in the military and whose own kids grew up on a steady diet of Superman and Batman—believed they were more of a waste of time than an evil influence, and that bad parents were more to blame than superheroes. Henry Palmieri, chief probation officer in Richmond, Virginia, asked if comic books were really much more violent than the Bible. “Are the comics worse than the stories of David and Goliath, Cain and Abel and some of the fairytales?” Harry and Jack certainly didn’t think so. But to nip the hysteria in the bud, they and their fellow comic book publishers established a code similar to the Hollywood production code: Bad guys couldn’t win. Cops were always good. Women couldn’t be naked or nearly naked.
Ironically, the official Hollywood code was on its way out. In 1952, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that motion pictures were entitled to First Amendment protection, cracking open the door to more risqué films. And setting the stage for the rise of a certain blond actress from California.