Peter Pan was the original superboy, so it was probably inevitable that he’d meet the other one.
And yet, disappointingly, he didn’t in Superboy’s Flying Rivals (Adventure Comics 226, July 1956).
Despite the Curt Swan cover image of Superboy racing Peter Pan in flight, nothing but a statue of the 1904 J.M. Barrie character appears in the story inside.
Maybe DC Comics didn’t want to risk a legal tangle with the owner of the Peter Pan trademark, even as the comic book company very much wanted to put Peter Pan on its cover.
Wiki suggests why: “The original 1954 Broadway production, starring Mary Martin as Peter and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook, earned Tony Awards for both stars. It was followed by NBC telecasts of it in 1955, 1956, and 1960 with the same stars, plus several rebroadcasts of the 1960 telecast.”
Also, the famous Disney animated movie was released in 1953.
“I remember at least one of those broadcasts and loved Mary Martin,” recalled Bruce Kanin. “She was in the original Broadway cast of The Sound of Music that my parents took me to see, plus she was Larry Hagman’s mom.”
“Those Peter Pan broadcasts were a big deal for baby boomers back then, like the TV showings of the 1930s King Kong and The Hunchback of Notre Dame films and Disney’s Davy Crockett series,” observed Vincent Mariani. “When I was in grade school, even The Untouchables made a big splash with all the boys in class when the show debuted. It was a shared experience that kids had.”
Writer Otto Binder’s story is pretty silly even by Superboy standards.
At a Smallville mythology exhibit, Krypto is sulky because his statue has been left out of a display of famous flying beings (including Icarus, Mercury, Pegasus, the giant roc, a witch on a broomstick, a magic carpet, and Peter Pan). A week later, the various statues actually begin to fly, carrying criminals away from the scene of their crimes.
Professor Moulton, who organized the exhibit, has been selling the criminals his “anti-gravity batteries,” but they’re actually as bogus as he is. The “professor” — really a swindler, Con Connors — has befriended Krypto and trained him to haul the statues through the sky as a game.
Peter Pan returned to the cover of Adventure Comics in issue 279 (Dec. 1960), with a 50th-century robot teacher instructing his students that Superboy, like Peter Pan, was merely an imaginary character. The assertion prompts a “Great Scott!” from the Boy of Steel, who is standing nearby.
And of course, Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane compared Christopher Reeve’s Superman to Peter Pan in the 1978 movie.
“Peter Pan flew with children, Lois, in a fairy tale,” Superman explains as he lifts them into the night sky to give Lois the ride of her life.
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