Superman was a baddie
QUESTION Was the original Superman a bad guy? SUPERMAN author Jerry Siegel (1914-1996) and artist Joe Shuster (1914-1992) were school friends from Cleveland, Ohio, who tried selling stories to comics in a bid to escape Depression-era poverty.
United Features Syndicate rejected their first collaboration, Interplanetary Police. Undeterred, they created Steve Walsh, an adventurer whose underground laboratory contained a Pentascope, a machine that gave him X-ray vision and super hearing, allowing him to monitor criminal activity.
When this was rejected in 1932, they published a magazine, Science Fiction: The Advance Guard Of Civilisation, which they produced on a school mimeograph. The third edition featured their one-off story The Reign Of The Superman (January, 1933). This incarnation was far more Lex Luthor than Clark Kent. Professor Ernest Smalley, a mad scientist, randomly picks vagrant Bill Dunn from a breadline to participate in an experiment in exchange for ‘a real meal and a new suit’. Smalley gives Dunn a potion which makes him telepathic. He becomes intoxicated by his power, kills Smalley (who had, after testing, intended to use the potion himself) and seeks to rule the world. The potion’s effects are only temporary, however, and Dunn cannot recreate the formula. As the story ends, his powers fade and he despairs as he realises he will be returning to his miserable life.
Siegel and Shuster’s magazine ran for only two more editions. They were great fans of Edgar Rice Burrows’s hero Tarzan and it was this that inspired them to change Superman into a benevolent hero.
In 1933, they attempted to sell a new incarnation to the Humour Publishing Co of Chicago, which published a Dick Tracy clone called Detective Dan. This Superman was possessed of superpowers, but he was born on Earth and did not wear a cape. The cover depicted him in a T-shirt and trousers, holding a criminal over his head while machine gun bullets bounced off him. This, too, was rejected. It was five more years before their character finally appeared in recognisable form in June 1938’s Action Comics No 1.
This Superman was incredibly strong, could withstand anything less than a bursting shell from a tank, and could leap an eighth of a mile but was unable to fly.
James Walters, Coventry.
QUESTION We all know the legend of St Patrick but why does Ireland really have no snakes, given Britain does? THE story of St Patrick banishing the snakes from Ireland is just that, a myth.
There’s no evidence snakes have ever lived here and scientific evidence provides the explanation. Up to about 15,000 years ago, Ireland was in the grip of the last Ice Age and what is now the island of Ireland was too cold for snakes to survive. Then the ice began to melt and as the glaciers shrunk, the sea levels surrounding Ireland started to rise, around 8,500 BC, creating what is now the Irish Sea, separating Ireland from Britain.
But before the seas started to rise, both Ireland and present-day Britain were joined to mainland Europe, all part of the same landmass.
This meant that snakes were able to ‘migrate’ to Britain, while in turn, species that were commonplace in Britain moved westwards towards Ireland, including boars, brown bears and lynxes.
While these animals arrived, the snakes left it too late. The rapidly rising sea levels that cut off Ireland from Britain and eventually created the Irish Sea meant that snakes were excluded from Ireland.
The waters were too cold for even sea snakes and the various species of snakes that thrive in most of Britain, such as adders and grass snakes, faced an impenetrable barrier.
The only reptile that managed to survive in Ireland was the common or viviparous lizard, which experts say must have arrived within the last 10,000 years.
There’s also the slow worm – a legless kind of lizard that’s not native to Ireland. It is thought to have been introduced to the West of Ireland in the 1960s. But it doesn’t seem to have spread beyond the Burren in Co. Clare. Other islands where the ocean acted as a barrier to the arrival of snakes include Hawaii, Iceland and New Zealand. Unlike the latter three, it is legal to import snakes into Ireland to have as pets. Jack Garvey, Dublin 8.
QUESTION Is there still a government-sanctioned UFO landing pad in Alberta, Canada? THE earlier answer referred to the St Paul’s landing site’s opening by Paul Hellyer, Canada’s then minister of national defence. Today, Hellyer is a staunch believer in UFOs. In 2005 he told the University of Toronto: ‘UFOs are as real as the airplanes overhead. The US military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning.’ Perhaps he had a cosmic experience the day he landed on that UFO pad.
Jess Coleman, Portsmouth.