Hurt feelings, loss, and embarrassment loomed large in editor Mort Weisinger’s Superman titles, and a certain amount of fat-shaming went along with that.
It may well have all started here, in Superboy 24 (Feb.-March 1953). In The Super-Fat Boy of Steel, drawn by John Sikela, all Smallville’s teenagers mysteriously become obese while Clark Kent is off on vacation.
The major characters in Weisinger’s Superman titles — Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Supergirl, and Superman himself — all got plumped up at one time or another.
In the Julius Schwartz-edited title The Flash, the same thing once happened to the Scarlet Speedster. But it wasn’t presented as an embarrassment to Barry Allen, merely a predicament for him to think his way out of.
As superheroes faded in the early 1950s, horror comics flourished.
“What about National horror?” wondered Bill Schelly in American Comic Book Chronicles. “There was none. Editor Jack Schiff’s House of Mystery 1 (Dec.-Jan. 1951) was National’s first such title in the ‘mystery’ genre, the closest the firm came to a horror comic book. The company that published Superman didn’t want to taint its cash cow by associating with anything approaching Grand Guignol, and National wasn’t temperamentally suited to produce that kind of material, anyway.
“In House of Mystery, everything supernatural is a hoax or has a scientific explanation.”
And so it was here in the Leonard Starr story The Deadly Game of G-H-O-S-T (House of Mystery 11, Feb. 1953). The “ghost” turns out to be part of an extremely elaborate, highly unlikely but ultimately successful scheme to expose a murderer.
Scooby-Doo would have seen through that hoax at once.
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