TREASURYCAST #25 – SUPERMAN SALUTES THE BICENTENNIAL
Just in time for the 4th of July, Rob and special guest Michael Bailey check out LIMITED COLLECTORS’ EDITION #C47, where Superman–and most certainly not any other character–salutes the Bicentennial!
Check out images from this comic by clicking here!
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Enjoyed the show, guys. Thanks for posting on the holiday and giving me something to listen to while I ate breakfast.
Fortunately, for me, I bought my copy of this treasury off eBay after the birth of the internet, so I knew what I was getting. I got it for under $10, and I only bought it for the cover. As I type this, I’m wearing my “patriotic” shirt…which is the Superman 14 cover art that was repurposed for the treasury.
Fred Ray is definitely one of the unsung artists of the Golden Age. If you haven’t, use the link on Mike’s Amazing World where you can look for a particular cover artists and admire Ray’s Golden Age work. My favorite cover by him is Batman #8.
Ok, that said, I still think you guys were too kind to the comic. If it had been released as a Tomahawk treasury, fine, but tricking people into buying Tomahawk when they thought they were getting Superman is just…wrong. I really wonder who had the idea for doing this treasury, because it seems like a weird one. I can’t believe someone would think someone would have stopped it along the way. DC risked alienating readers with such a bait-and-switch…kind of like they are doing now with a certain wedding that isn’t going to come off.
Also, couldn’t DC have released patriotic themed Superman stories? Just because it was the bicentennial didn’t mean the stories had to take place during the Revolutionary War. After all, Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles (which, you know, actually featured Captain America battling during the Bicentennial) took place at different times in America’s history. DC could have used the treasury to trot out the Superboy story where he travels back in time to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy. Really, I would have preferred patriotic stories from the World War 2 era.
OH, and I forgot to post this, but, unfortunately for Fred Ray, he has a similar name to a fairly well known director, so it may be more difficult to find stuff on the internet about him. If you just google him, you’ll probably get more hits for the guy who directed Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers.
Great episode guys.
Prepare for me to be the contrarian. I like this one a lot for the Tomahawk content.
I had this one as a kid, pretty sure given to me as a birthday gift. Even then, I was into comics and loved Superman so I was pumped. And yes, at first I was confused by the utter lack of Super-stuff.
But Tomahawk was compeletely new to me. And historical adventures were very new as well. I was cutting my teeth in Mike Grell Legion. This stuff was light years from that. So Tomahawk was a peek at a new section of the DCU and comics. And I didn’t mind it because I already had a stack of Superman comics already.
Plus, these were adventures that maybe could happen. What His sidekick do, maybe I could do. And if Superman was cast as simply the introducer, Tomahawk must be a huge star. (I got confused like this easily; remember I also thought the Warlock Of Ys was a huge Star too).
I read this one to bits.
Macleooooood! I’m gonna steal your Quickenin’!
Bless you, Michael Bailey. Bless you.
It’s my thing.
I bought this comic on eBay two years ago – for cover price! – as part of a package deal. I was really only interested in the JLA tabloid, so I never read this one. After listening to this episode, I trudged down to the basement, brought it upstairs, and cracked it open.
Thanks for inspiring me to read my comics! Hope you had a great Independence Day.
I have bypassed this one due to the bait-and-switch, despite appreciating Fred Ray’s artwork. Tomahawk was in the first Golden Age comic I ever bought, Star-Spangled Comics #99, December 1949, which I think I got for $5 at a flea market in the late 80s. I bought it because Robin was featured, and while he gets a little headshot vignette at the top of the cover, the book belongs to Tomahawk, with a gorgeous cover by Fred Ray! Three issues earlier, Tomahawk had usurped the cover from Robin and his sometimes-co-star in the title Batman! So in effect, Tomahawk WAS more popular than Batman in the late 40s! Amazing and hard to believe, but true!
Fun episode fellas, and the next time I see this one, I’m going to pick it up. Oh, and while I didn’t have this back cover to inspire my Presidential curiosity, I did pick up a Scholastic guide to the Presidents from an elementary school book fair at one point, and read that thing to death!
Chris
Prior to listening to this episode, my only knowledge of this treasury came from your mention of it in earlier episodes. I can imagine the stigma this book must carry due to the whole bait-and-switch aspect, but it does sound like an interesting set of stories. I’m now thinking my daughter might enjoy reading some Tomahawk stories. She studied the Revolutionary War in school this year, and has decided (despite her love of MASH) that it’s her “favorite war.” Though, I’m guessing she’d complain about the lack of female characters.
Thanks for another fun episode.
The Turtle was a real thing! It was the first military submarine used in warfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible)
I hate to have to be the one to correct you guys, but the Turtle was an actual experimental revolutionary war era submarine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible)
Now I haven’t read the Tomahawk story, so I don’t know how accurate their depiction of it is (probably more successful than it was in real life). But the basic idea is at least based loosely on actual history.
Another great show, gentlemen. And this is the first time I’ve ever heard that this treasury was a bait-and-switch, so I learned something new, so thanks for the information.
Looking over the art samples you provided, I will readily acknowledge that Ray’s art is quite good, and that cover is truly iconic, but I agree with a few others here that you’re both being a bit too charitable in your assessment of this book – that was a seriously underhanded thing for DC to do back then, especially since there is no shortage of patriotically-themed Superman stories they could have reprinted.
By the way, as someone who was 7 and then 8 in 1976, I can tell you that frontiersmen and such were still quite popular among the little boys at the time. We all watched reruns of the 1960s Daniel Boone TV show in syndication, and those 1950s Davy Crockett features by Disney were also televised at around that time – one of the kids in my class even knew the Davy Crockett song (‘King of the Wild Frontier’) by heart. Furthermore, I recall that the children’s books in our school library about Boone and Crockett, but also other mountaineers and scouts like Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, etc., were in high demand as well. So reprinting a bunch of stories about a hero wearing buckskins and a coonskin cap at that time certainly made sense – but *not* with Superman on the cover.
Terrific episode, as ever. I remember Fess Parker from Saturday morning TV over here but had never read anything involving Tomahawk until I came across a great ‘Son of Tomahawk’ last year, featuring Firehair.
I’d have been really peeved as a kid, buying a supposed Superman giant comic and getting strips in which Brits are bad. Fake news. Sad.
Oh who am I kidding, history is history and I like many flavours. Did anyone read the Time Masters mini-series in which it ‘revealed’ that Dan Hunter was an investment banker from 1990 who decided to stay in the 18th century after being sent there in a mission for his cousin RIP? Fake news. Sad.
According to the excellent Grand Comic Database the George Washington story comes from Fred Ray’s Valley Forge https://www.comics.org/issue/669724/
A tracker named Thacker!