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SUPERMAN CREATED BY
JERRY SIEGEL AND JOE SHUSTER

IDW PUBLISHING
San Diego

SUPERMAN: THE GOLDEN AGE SUNDAYS
1943–1946
By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family
SCRIPTS BY JERRY SIEGEL AND DC COMICS
ARTWORK BY WAYNE BORING AND JACK BURNLEY • LETTERING BY IRA SCHNAPP
[Although no records have been uncovered that specify which stories were written by Siegel,
a reading of the text reveal hallmarks of his style in all stories except the “Superman’s Service to Servicemen”
sequence, which corresponds to his induction into the army on July 4, 1943.]
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS
EDITED AND DESIGNED BY Dean Mullaney • ART DIRECTOR Lorraine Turner
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Bruce Canwell • INTRODUCTION Mark Waid
COVERS Pete Poplaski • MARKETING DIRECTOR Beau Smith
STRIP RESTORATION BY Lorraine Turner and Dean Mullaney
IDW Publishing, a Division of Idea and Design Works, LLC
5080 Santa Fe Street, San Diego, CA 92109
www.idwpublishing.com • LibraryofAmericanComics.com
Ted Adams, Chief Executive Officer/Publisher • Greg Goldstein, Chief Operating Officer/President
Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist • Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief
Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer • Alan Payne, VP of Sales
Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing • Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services
ISBN: 978-1-61377-797-8 • First Printing, December 2013
Distributed by Diamond Book Distributors 1-410-560-7100
Special thanks to Mark Waid, Joe Linder, Joe Desris, Sid Friedfertig, John Wells, Mike Tiefenbacher,
Greg Goldstein, Jared Bond, Scott Dunbier, Justin Eisinger, and Alonzo Simon.
Artwork on page one by Jack Burnley from the cover to
Superman #24, September-October 1943.
LibraryofAmericanComics.com
Superman and © 2013 DC Comics. All rights reserved. The Library of American Comics is a trademark of
The Library of American C omics LLC. All rights reserved. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none
of the comic strips in this publication may be reprinted without the permission of DC Comics. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from DC Comics. Printed in Korea.
The strips reprinted in this volume were produced in a time when racial and social caricatures played a larger role in society and popular
culture. They are reprinted without alteration for historical reference.

An Introduction by MARK WAID
By 1938, Superman was dead.
“Dead,” that is, by the standards of the various syndicates
that supplied comics strips to the hundreds of newspapers across
the U.S.A. These syndicates functioned as intermediaries (and,
thus, gatekeepers) between “funny pages” editors hungry for
content and up-and-coming cartoonists ravenous for the fame
and fortune a successful newspaper strip could bring them.
Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy,
Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, and Al Capp’s Li’l Abner
were just some of the daily features that were turning their
creators into men of wealth and celebrity.
Naturally, the competition among would-be syndicated
cartoonists was fierce, but that hadn’t deterred two Cleveland
teenagers from pitching samples of their creation to every
syndicate in the game. Time and again, however, they were
rejected. No syndicate was willing to take a chance on Jerry Siegel
and Joe Shuster’s Superman. It was, to the gatekeepers’ eyes, too
wild, too crude, too implausible. A costumed, caped crimefighter
from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond ours?
Outrageous. Who would buy that?
Eventually, of course, Siegel and Shuster’s “Superman” samples
did see print, albeit in an altered and more obscure form than
originally envisioned. Pulp magazine publishers were, at the time,
experimenting by reprinting licensed collections of newspaper
strips into 64-page “comic books” for newsstand sale, often
peppering these collections with new material as licenses became
scarce. Vin Sullivan, an enterprising editor for the company known
today as DC Comics, talked Siegel and Shuster into selling the
rights to this moribund property, and the boys happily took the
offer. It’s likely no one was more surprised than them when their
“Superman” samples, reformatted to become the first few pages of
1938’s Action Comics #1, sparked a pop-culture revolution
practically overnight. Within a few short months, Superman
proved to be a publishing bonanza.
The gatekeepers re-evaluated. The McClure Syndicate, which
had turned Superman down more than once, quickly offered DC
a contract for a Superman daily strip and had it in newspapers by
January of 1939. Impressed by its surging popularity, McClure
added a color Sunday page on November 5, which was so heavily
anticipated that The Washington Post announced its imminent
debut on the front page of their Saturday edition.
By the time America entered the Second World War,
Superman was featured in nearly two hundred fifty papers
nationwide, with a combined circulation of twenty-five million
readers. Along the way, his powers—and the evils he faced—
had continued to evolve as Siegel, Shuster, and their assistants
churned out as many adventures as they humanly could to feed
the readership’s voracious demand for more. Initially, Superman
could run faster than an express train, leap a twenty-story
building, and lift automobiles. By the war years, he was flying
across continents in less time than it takes to tell, shrugging off
grenade blasts and artillery fire, and in general doing anything
his creators could imagine…
…except enter the European Theater.
Once you link the ideas “Superman” and “World War Two,”
you quickly see the problem. If the mightiest hero in comics
applies his vast super-powers to ending all hostilities, which he
could do in a day, the world of his fantastic exploits ceases to
resemble the real world of his readers. But if he sits the war out,
what kind of man—what kind of Superman, what kind of
American—is he?
His editors and writers approached this in the obvious
manner: they had it both ways. Superman would do anything
for the armed services––short of joining up. And he always stayed
out of the actual fighting––except when he didn’t.
In the stories, the Man of Steel’s failure to enlist was explained
away by a comical mishap involving x-ray vision (shown in strips
259 and 260 herein). But an earlier strip (212) put into Superman’s
dialog a more authentic, more genuinely moving explanation than
has been proffered anywhere else:
“How can you beat soldiers with that sort of
spirit—the spirit that makes Americans fight
against any sort of odds! For me to interfere
would be—well, presumptuous!”
Underscoring this touching sense of “a hero apart,”
Superman comic books rarely addressed the war directly. Instead
they supplied steady escapist entertainment to servicemen and
women overseas, to whom copies were bulk-shipped. The covers
PAGE 5

were another matter. They became reliable monthly propaganda
posters in which Superman rode missiles to their targets, punched
German tanks, physically dominated Hitler and Tojo, and waved
the American flag.
The newspaper strips spoke more directly to the home
front––to friends and loved ones who worried and prayed but
were powerless to protect the young soldiers plucked from their
lives. Perhaps sensing an appetite for wish fulfillment, the
creators of this era’s Sunday strips (believed written by Siegel
and DC editor Whitney Ellsworth, drawn by former Shuster
apprentice Wayne Boring) began in the summer of 1943 a series
called “Superman’s Service for Servicemen.”
Ostensibly inspired by a real-life sergeant who wished
Superman could whisk him to his distant home and back on
his meager one-day leave, the strip’s editors staked out a simple
format. Real servicemen would send their real wishes to the real
newspaper, and the Man of Steel would use his powers to grant
them on the page. Breaking the fourth wall, Superman himself
invited “soldiers, sailors and marines—and that includes you
women in service, too” to submit “any particularly tough
problems you’d like me to help you solve.”
For the next two years of Sundays, the Man of Steel
delivered mail (by air), did soldiers’ chores (at super-speed), and
interfered in romantic problems (with a grudging reluctance).
He delivered a fresh cake to a lucky birthday boy, flew a busload
of showgirls to a military base dance party, tamed a horse, and
whisked an expectant father home just ahead of the stork. He
undertook most of these feats at the urging of Lois Lane, who
read all the incoming requests with a special eye toward uniting
sweethearts. Superman also seemed to be dramatizing pleas
from the War Department, as when he influenced one town to
write letters to its lonely soldiers and another to evict a gang of
gremlins whispering temptations that would weaken wartime
morale.
This Man of Steel anticipates later interpretations. He
is welcomed everywhere by law-abiding people, like the
Christopher Reeve Superman who delivers a sputtering Gene
Hackman to appreciative prison guards, due process be damned.
He rubs elbows with the highest rungs of authority, like the
Silver Age Superman who arranges for President John F.
Kennedy to preserve his secret identity by impersonating Clark
Kent. Even the wartime enemy looks up to him...and that’s
where things get ugly, and not at all like the latter-day
Metropolis Marvel.
In a storyline beginning April 23, 1944, a Japanese army
commander invites Superman to a Pacific island to provide
entertainment for his weary troops. Pretending to honor the
request, the Man of Steel cheerfully sets them up for a lethal
ambush by allied forces. But that’s not the ugly part; this is
war, after all.
This is where we should warn readers of Asian descent
and/or nervous dispositions and/or a speck of human decency
that these were different times, a period of American history
where patriotism and outright racism were too often, too easily
conflated in popular culture. Most entertainment of the day
trafficked heavily in mocking America’s enemies—particularly
the Japanese—and the funny pages was no exception. That such
treatment makes an enemy seem less human and therefore easier
to kill is an unsettling idea all these decades later, and it makes
you wonder how we apply it in our wars today. But the really
upsetting thing is seeing Superman—the friendly cop, the
gentle older brother, the very symbol of power merged with
kindness—buy into this trope as the war wears on, culminating
in a scene where he pulls off a gleefully nasty impersonation
(strip 307). We can say in the Man of Steel’s defense only that
he and his writers and artists knew they’d gone too far; after the
war and to this day, Superman has appeared in dozens of public
service announcements preaching brotherhood and tolerance
for all races, and today the character is practically synonymous
with fairness and equality.
World War Two ends before this volume does, and we get
to cleanse our palates with a retelling of the origin. This is a
compact version that faithfully merges all of the agreed-upon
elements up to this point, even revisiting the Jack Kennedy
(that name again!) murder case from Jerry Siegel and Joe
Shuster’s very first Superman story.
From there the mood lightens considerably. Superman
watches over Lois Lane as she embarks in an experimental
rocket on a space exploration that ends up on an advanced
planet ruled by a tyrannical queen. After that, it’s off to the
circus, where a sad clown risks his life for the love of a
glamorous acrobat. With the war’s lasting consequences yet to
be felt, we gaze at the Man of Steel’s feats under the big top with
amazement and relief.
PAGE 6

The Superman Sunday page began on November 5, 1939 and the first 183 Sundays
were reprinted in a handsome horizontal edition by DC Comics and Kitchen Sink Press.
Our series begins with Strip #184 from May 1943 and will continue until the series
ended in May 1966. At that time, we will return to the first 183 Sundays and present
them in a vertical format that matches the rest of the series.
We invite you to enjoy these marvelous Sunday pages that have never been
previously reprinted.
—Dean Mullaney, Editor

STRIP 184 • MAY 9, 1943 PAGE 9

PAGE 10
STRIP 185 • MAY 16, 1943

STRIP 186 • MAY 23, 1943 PAGE 11

PAGE 12
STRIP 187 • MAY 30, 1943

STRIP 188 • JUNE 6, 1943 PAGE 13

PAGE 14
STRIP 189 • JUNE 13, 1943

STRIP 190 • JUNE 20, 1943 PAGE 15