The Adventures of Superman: it's Man of Steel Day!

Today is Man of Steel Day because supposedly if you visit your local comic book retailer you can get a free copy of the All Star Superman @1 Special Edition comic book and maybe if you are lucky, free Man of Steel posters and bags.   It's all really just promo for the Man of Steel movie which opens on Friday.

This is a rather glamed up Superman and I know lots of people are looking forward to the new Man of Steel movie, including my own Kiddo.  But I'm just an old fashioned girl who still likes the old Superman comics books and newspaper strips.  Superman, as you probably know, was the brain child of Jerry Siegle and Joe Schuster in the 1930s.  In June 1938, Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1, and by 1939, the Man of Steel had his own comic book.  Once World War II broke out, it didn't take Superman long to become a hero and a defender to "truth, justice and the American way" for kids (and grownups) who were already hooked on both the comic book and the 15 minute radio show that aired almost everyday.

Action #1 June 1938 and Superman #1 1939

Superman ran as a serial on radio from February 12, 1940, syndicated on NYC's WOR, and later, it was on the Mutual Network, where it was broadcast from August 31, 1942 to February 4, 1949.  Called The Adventures of Superman, the 15 minute show usually ran late in the afternoon so kids could listen after school.  And kids loved it.

Superman is 75 years old now and over 1000 episodes of his radio show, The Adventures of Superman, is now in the public domain, which means you, too, can listen to this downloadable bit of pop culture history either on ITunes or the Internet Archive and best of all, it's all free.

Here, for your listening pleasure, is the very first episode called, appropriately enough, The Baby from Krypton.

And well, OK, I will probably go see the new movie Man of Steel, too.  Meanwhile,

Who was that Masked Man, Anyway? by Avi

It is the 1940s and World War II is the thing on everyone’s mind except for 12 year old Frankie, short for Franklin Delano Wattleson. Much to the annoyance of his mother and teacher, Miss Gomez, Frankie is obsessed with radio adventures and serials. These radio shows and the heroes they depict - The Shadow, Captain Midnight, Superman, The Lone Ranger and Sky King to name just a few – are what Frankie thinks being a real-life hero is all about. He has even made up a hero persona for himself - Chet Barker, master spy, and a sidekick named Skipper for his best friend Mario Calvino. The trouble is that between heroic adventures on the radio and those of Frankie’s imaginary Chet Barker, he has no time to do his schoolwork.

So Frankie must rely on Mario, who is not only a straight-A student but who also has a radio in his bedroom. This is very convenient for Frankie when he is being punished and is forbidden to listen to the radio at home. All he has to do is secure a board between their bedroom windows and scoot across it to Mario’s room.

Frankie’s brother Tom is in the army and the Wattleson’s have rented his room out to a medical student, Mr. Swerdlow, for extra money. Mr. Swerdlow has been given the radio Frankie used to listen to. Frankie is convinced that if he can prove Mr. Swerdlow is really an evil scientist, he could get his radio back. Frankie has already been punished several times for sneaking into Mr. Swerdlow’s room to look for proof of his evil doing.

When the Wattlesons receive a notice that Tom will be returning home as a result of being wounded, Frankie is told that he will be moving to the basement so that Tom can have his bedroom. Not happy about this, Frankie must come up with a plan to get rid of Mr. Swerdlow so Tom and Frankie can have their rooms back and Frankie will have his radio again.

Things aren’t much better at school. His teacher, Miss Gomez, is also fed up with Frankie’s radio hero adventures. She often punishes him by keeping him sitting in her classroom after school. There, he first discovers she has a boyfriend named Mitch and later that Mitch has been killed in action. She has also told Frankie that if his grades don’t improve, he will be left back and now she wants to meet with his parents. Frankie must now devise a plan to thwart this.

After Tom comes home, he spends his time in Frankie’s room, smoking and listening to ‘sappy’ music on the radio; a complete waste of good radio time as far as Frankie is concerned. Instead, convinced that radio imitates life, Frankie wants to hear all about Tom’s heroic experiences in the war and doesn’t understand why Tom refuses to speak about it. Until Tom gets fed up with Frankie’s constant asking and tells him exactly what it was like the day he was wounded, a very different picture than the one Frankie imagined. It turns out that radio doesn’t even come close to imitating life. Now Frankie wants to come up with a plan to help his brother.

Altogether, Frankie has a lot on his plate to contend with for a 12 year old, but not for Chet Barker, master spy. He spends a lot of time being punished because people are fed up with his obsession with the superhuman escapades of radio heroes. And coming up with workable plans.

There is not exposition at all in this novel. It is written completely in radio dialogue, complete with commercials, and yet it is not at all difficult to tell which dialogue is from Frankie’s life and which is the actual dialogue from a radio program. This method really provides a sense of radio stories were during the war, but also show how easily a child can lose the boundary between reality and fantasy.

At time, Frankie was very funny, but there were times when he really annoyed me. He is completely self-centered, wanting what he wants and disregarding everyone else’s feeling. It is up to his war damaged brother to give him a lesson in reality, telling him what it truly means to fight evil and that it isn’t all heroic in the sense that Frankie’s programs present it to be.

Avi has a great talent for creating a sense of life on the home front during World War II for his readers. He successfully did this in Don’t You Know There’s a War On? using newspaper headlines to convey the feelings of fear and anxiety. Here we see one of the ways that these feeling could be dealt with that would be appealing to a young kid like Frankie – escapism.

I didn’t expect to like this story, but in the end I enjoyed it every bit a much as I did Don’t You Know There’s a War On? Avi is a very creative, prolific, imaginative writer. He has written a number of historical novels and Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway? is one that I highly recommend. I only wonder how many of his younger readers know what the title means, or for that matter, know who the Lone Ranger is nowadays.

Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway? received the following well deserved honors
1992 Booklist Editor’s Choice
1992 Best Book School Library Journal
1992 NYPL One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing
1992 Kirkus Reviews, Pointed Review
1992 Bulletin for the Center of Children’s Books, Starred Review
1992 School Library Journal, Starred Review
1993 ALA Notable Book
1993 American Bookseller Pick of the List
1993 Booklist Starred Review

This book is recommended for readers ages 9-12
This book was borrowed from the Hunter College Library

London Calling by Edward Bloor

When his hated All Soul’s Preparatory School in New Jersey is finally let out for summer, Martin Conway, 13, becomes what he calls a basement dweller. Living in the basement bedroom previously occupied first by his manic-depressive uncle and later by his alcoholic father, he only leaves to eat, occasionally to go to the store, and once to attend his grandmother’s funeral. At the funeral, he learns that she has left him the old Philco cathedral style radio that his grandfather used when he was assigned to the US Embassy under Ambassador Joseph Kennedy in London during World War II.

Martin takes the radio home and sets it up by his bed. He tunes it between stations and falls asleep listening to the static and looking at the amber glow of the dial. One night he ‘dreams’ that he is speaking to an 8 year old English boy named Jimmy, who asks Martin “Johnny, will you help me?” He has already spoken to Martin’s grandmother when she was alive, and she had said that Martin would be able to help him.
Martin finds himself somehow transported back to London during the Blitz in 1940. Jimmy is quite a talker and mentions all kinds of everyday things that only a person living then would know. The next day Martin begins looking for information about these things, and, to his surprise, many turn out to be real.

Altogether Martin sees Jimmy three times – always in London and each time Jimmy asks “Johnny, will you help me?” and tells Martin that they are at a point, a critical point. 8 September1940 is the first night of the Blitz and the two boys go to the US Embassy where Martin sees how Jimmy and his father, a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), interact. On 15 September1940, as the Blitz continues and the RAF has its first victory over the Germans, Jimmy and Martin again go to the Embassy and witness some questionable behavior among the generals working there and a woman named Daisy Traynor. Finally, on 29 December1940, the night that St. Paul’s Cathedral escaped total destruction despite the incredible fire bombing in London, Martin realizes why Jimmy needs his help.

London Calling is a novel about critical points, as Jimmy keeps reminding Martin. A critical point is that point in time when a crucial decision must be made; in London Calling, each visit provides Martin with information that turns out to be factually correct but historically inaccurate, prompting Martin to asks his sister Margaret so many years later
“Who decides what ‘the real history of a time’ is?”
“Martin, that is a brilliant question. And the simple answer is – the winners decide…” (page 109)

Jimmy (symbolically, a point of time from the past) guides Martin (symbolically, a point of time from the present) through his process of uncovering real truths, and he begins by calling Martin by his real first name – John. It is a significant beginning – Martin was named John Martin Conway - John after his “un-heroic” alcoholic father, Martin after his “hero” grandfather General Mehan.

I liked this novel once I got into it, particularly the main character, but there is just so much going on that it is almost impossible to give a simple bare bones summary of it. It is a classic coming of age story that includes time travel, Catholicism, mysticism, bullying, and father/son relationships. Bloor brings in more historical information than most novelists who write about World War II for young readers, so it would be a field day for a social studies teacher to use.

There are also a lot of parallels and coincidences in the story, for example, the endurance of both the old cathedral radio and St. Paul’s Cathedral during the war, the continued appearance of Rembrandt’s painting of Abraham and Isaac and father and son struggles, and Jimmy’s question “Will you help me? and Britain asking the US for help to fight the Nazis and Ambassador Kennedy's unwillingness to support war aid to Britain. This is viewed as America turning its back on the UK and is symbolized by Kennedy leaving London during the bombings. Sometimes there are a few too many coincidences or the action is a little too far fetched, but I don’t mind that in a fantasy novel. The majority of the story takes place in the present, with three chapters in the past, but these chapters are just packed with action and information. Interestingly enough, I thought, as I read the book, that Edward Bloor was a British writer, and was surprised to discover he is American.