Superheroes, Their Movies, and Why We Love Them

For The Icons Of Comic Book History

Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Stan Lee and hundreds of other writers and artists who created the rich Superhero culture we enjoy today.

Edited by

Pat Studinger

Special Thanks

Pastor Kevin ‘Joker’ Bruinsma

Matt Tate

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Copyright 2018-2021

The Last Great Movie Company

Hollywood, CA

Contents

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Author’s Preface

Charles Dewandeler

Photo by Pat Studinger

Me as Batman age 12.

When I was a little kid, my parents would bring us to church on Sundays and promised if we behaved, afterward they’d take us to 7-Eleven and buy us a treat. At first my treat of choice was a Snickers or other candy bar. Entering the store, I always passed a rack of comic books. One week I asked my Dad if he’d buy me a Superman comic book instead of a candy bar. I wasn’t sure he would go for this because the comic book was slightly more expensive, but he did.

A couple weeks later, I saw ‘Detective Comics No. 620’ featuring a skull wearing the Batman mask. I remember thinking, Wow, is this the issue where Batman dies? It was a dollar, and even though candy bars at the time were typically $.60, my dad again bought the comic book. I couldn’t wait to get home and read it, and (of course) when I did, I saw that Batman did not die. I learned that sometimes comic book covers are designed to trick you into buying the comic book by making you think something is going to happen that doesn’t actually happen. Even though I was disappointed by the misleading cover art... I was hooked.

From then on, every week instead of a candy bar, I asked my dad to buy me a comic book. I knew for me this was a great deal, because instead of getting a $.60 piece of candy I could eat once and it would be gone, I was getting a $1 comic book I could keep and re-read over and over and over again.

This was the start of my superhero fandom. I was just a kid when the first Batman (1989) movie came out. I had been watching the Superman movies on VHS, that’s right, VHS. The way cavemen used to watch movies. As a little kid I loved Superman, I loved dressing up as Superman, I loved wearing my red cape before bedtime, running around the house pretending I could fly by jumping off of things. But when I saw the movie trailer for Batman, I thought, Wow, that is so cool! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up the original Batman movie trailer. Imagine seeing it for the first time, in the late 80’s, when nothing like that had ever been done before.

I couldn’t wait to see the new Batman in a theater. My dad was hesitant to take me because I was only eight years old and he heard it was kind-of scary. He feared the scene where the Joker electrocutes a guy would traumatize me. It did not because I knew it was a movie and everything was pretend. This film made me a full-fledged Batman fan. He became my favorite superhero and I started getting Batman comics every week.

Eventually I would start using my own money to buy more comic books, and not just at 7-Eleven. My dad would take me to the local comic book store. There I could choose from an assortment of comics including previous issues of Batman, which had come out a couple of years before. Over the years I went on to collect thousands of comic books. I have more Batman comics than anything else, but I also bought Superman, X-Men, Spider-Man, Spawn, and several others.

All these years later, I still enjoy comic books and superhero movies. I don’t think it’s anything I will ever out grow. Actually, it’s something I wish I was more involved in. I’ve always dreamed of working in the comic book industry and one day directing a Batman movie.

One of my Vomit Comics from High School.

In middle school and high school I made my own comic books. My dad would make copies for me so I could give them to my friends. When producing my feature film Parody Movie (2011) one thing I made sure to include was a spoof of Superman and Batman.

Me behind the camera directing Curt Green (Supernovaman) and Julian Gant (The Dark Bat) in Parody Movie (2011).

When I created my YouTube channel Spoof Troupe, I continued to produce and direct spoofs of various superheroes including Batman, Superman, Avengers, Wolverine, X-Men, Wonder Woman, Flash, and others. Not as disrespect for Batman or the other characters because I like all these characters so much I wanted to make any video I could, even a spoof. Our Batman and Justice League videos have been viewed millions of times. Our Avengers: Age of Ultron Parody has been viewed 20 million times.

In 2016, I produced a comic book called MotorCity Saint, based on a real guy in Michigan. I wrote the script and hired an artist to draw the 22-page comic book. We sold a few hundred copies in paperback and also released a digital version through Kindle and ComiXology. Our goal is to one day get a publisher to release this as a monthly series.

My first professional comic book ‘MotorCity Saint’.

In this book, ‘Superheroes, Their Movies, And Why We Love Them,’ I will share not only why I love superheroes (and superhero movies), but also explain why I believe they are popular with hundreds of millions of fans around the world. It is not my intention to cover every superhero and superhero movie ever created. That would be an impossible task for one book. So please don’t be disappointed if your favorite is not covered. Instead I will focus on some of the biggest, most influential, record-breaking superheroes and movies. I will also cover their influence in popular culture, some of the behind-the-scenes rumors and some of my own thoughts.

I hope you will enjoy reading the book and it brings you a greater appreciation of these characters, their creators, and those who bring them to life on the big screen.

Disclaimer: some of what you’re about to read is rumor and speculation. The reason they call it rumor is because we may never know the true dealings behind the scenes. Please don’t get mad at me if any of these rumors may not be true. I’m not trying to make up fake news. I get most of my rumors from the most reliable source I know... the internet. More specifically Wikipedia, which (believe it or not) is apparently 80% accurate. But don’t worry, the non-rumor portions of my book are 120% accurate so it all evens out.

Our ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron Parody’ has been viewed over 20 million times on YouTube, Starring L.B. Rai (Nick Fury), Julie David (Black Widow), Minchi Murakami (Hulk), David Lautman (Captain America), Scott Vogel (Iron Man).

NOTE: This book was originally published in time for Christmas of 2018. However, the version you are reading now has been updated with new information from 2021, including the release of Avengers: Endgame and Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Chapter 1

Superman, The First Superhero?

Photo credit:  Brendan Hunter / istockphoto.com

The first known American comic book prototype was The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, published in hardcover in 1842. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s small 8 page, black and white comic magazine tabloids became popular in Britain. Other countries followed suit. In 1929, Dell Publishing (an American company) published The Funnies, a 16 page, four-color, re-print of newspaper comic strips and this ‘tabloid magazine’ was given away as a newspaper insert. Other American companies began to print their own four-color comic ‘tabloids’.

Side Note: What is ‘four-color’? That’s in reference to the four colors of ink used in ‘old-school’ newspaper printing presses, they are; Cyan (bluish), Magenta (red/purple), Yellow and Black. If you wanted white, you’d just leave that part of the page blank and the white paper would show through. If you wanted Cyan, Magenta, Yellow or Black, the printer would print 100% of that ink. But they could simulate other colors by combining different inks using tiny dots. The naked eye would interpret these dot patterns as up to 64 different colors. But if you looked at it under a microscope it would look like a Georges Seurat painting. With the four-color process, the colors which looked best on the page were Yellow, Red, Blue, Purple and Green, which is why these colors were commonly used in characters’ costumes. In the 1970’s, new printers were developed which could print 128 colors. By the mid 90’s printers could produce any color without visible dots. This is the reason comic books can now be colored in Photoshop and printed to look like photographs if they wanted to.

Perhaps the precursor and early inspiration for comic books were Pulp magazines (published from 1896 to the 1950’s). Pulps were typically 128 pages and featured short stories with little or no illustration. According to Wikipedia, At their peak of popularity in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue. Pulps included a wide variety of topics; detective stories, horror stories, westerns, love stories, and included several popular characters Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Popeye.

Finally in 1933, Eastern Color and Dell Publishing released what is believed by historians to be the first true American comic book, Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics. This 36 page book didn’t have a price listed on the cover but is believed to have sold for 10 cents. More ‘Funnies’ books began popping up and were so successful publishers began hiring writers and artists to create new material for their comic books, rather than re-print material already seen in newspapers.

The Phantom is believed to be the first ‘costumed hero’, published on February 17, 1936, created by Lee Falk. Also in 1936, The Clock debuted as a masked detective. By this point there were several heroic characters in popular literature, pulp magazines, comic books and novels. Many of them fought crime, had superhuman abilities (i.e. Super-strength), or traveled through space. Here are some of the most notable ones listed in chronological order of their debut:

1902 – Hugo Hercules   

1911 – John Carter of Mars  

1912 – Tarzan   

1919 – Zorro    

1928 – Buck Rogers   

1930 – The Shadow   

1931 – Dick Tracy   

1932 – Conan The Barbarian

1933 – The Lone Ranger

1933 – Doc Savage

1934 – Flash Gordon   

1936 – The Green Hornet

1936 – The Phantom

Was Superman the World’s first hero with superhuman abilities? No. If you want to go back to mythological times, Hercules was probably the first superhuman hero. Was Superman the first ‘superhero’? Technically Yes, because the word ‘superhero’ did not exist before Superman. He was the first character to be branded with that distinction. His debut was monumental for the comic book industry, not only because he was the ‘first’ of his kind but because he marked the beginning of what we now refer to as The Golden Age of Comic Books (1938-1956).

For his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster it had been a journey of over 5 years. In high school they wrote a short story called ‘The Reign of the Superman.’ In their story a poor man obtains psychic powers and becomes a powerful super villain. But