For one, brief shining moment, DC Comics had something of an Arthurian ambience. Even Superman ran into it.
In Superman 124 (Sept. 1958), the Man of Tomorrow unearthed a warrior of yesterday from a glacier.
“I thank thee, sir flying knight,” said the masked, armored figure. “The magic of your strength hath broken the spell of living death which Merlin cast over me when he entombed me in this gaol of ice a thousand years past!”
Later, in Metropolis, the Black Knight sets about pillaging with his purportedly enchanted sword, cutting the door off a safe and slicing through the engine block of a police patrol car. When Superman confronts the knave, he’s apparently wounded in the arm and leg.
In fact, as you may have guessed, it’s all part of a complicated scheme to catch a crook, in this case, gang leader Bull Mathews.
“Perry White poses as the evil Black Knight of Arthurian legend and pretends to wound Superman with his supposedly ‘enchanted sword’ to entice Mathews into attempting to purchase the sword with identifiable loot from a previous bank robbery,” recounted comics historian Michael L. Fleisher. The Daily Planet editor had conveniently left on vacation in the first panel of the story.
Two years later, the tale would be retold in the Superman newspaper strip.
“This is an archetypal story of Superman versus a supernatural villain,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Its plot was recycled many times in subsequent Superman family stories. The Superman family did not accept or believe in the supernatural. It regarded it as superstition. It would accept stories involving magic or fantasy, especially if they were comic and tongue-in-cheek in tone. But it tended to reject all supernatural elements as fakes. Stories involving the apparent ‘supernatural’ were usually explained away at the end as purely natural phenomena. Sometimes they would be hoaxes; other times they would reflect unusual scientific phenomena.”
Of course, there were rare exceptions to the rule. For example, just the month before in Superman 123 (Aug. 1958), Jimmy Olsen had acquired an ancient, bejeweled totem that enabled him to send Superman’s ghostly form back in time to Krypton, restore his stolen superpowers, and conjure a “Super-Girl” from thin air.
The same month that The Super Sword was published, the Silent Knight was fighting for Camelot over in DC’s Brave and the Bold 19.
Swashbuckling Arthurian adventure was also popular on screen in the 1950s, with Knights of the Round Table (1953) and The Black Knight (1954) on the big screen, and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–57) on the small one. The Black Knight film probably inspired Marvel’s comic book of the same name (1955-56).
In 1960, the musical Camelot would debut on Broadway, running for 873 performances. That beat the 129 performances of a musical that would open six years later on Broadway — It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman!
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