Episode 9: Dizzys Night: Superman, Batman, and Comics’ First Awards

Simon Carver

Welcome to the show, friends. You’re tuned to KDCR, New York—Distinguished Comics Radio—and this is our ninth broadcast, Wednesday night, July twenty-fourth, nineteen-forty. I’m Simon Carver, and tonight I have the pleasure of saying something I’ve been wanting to say for months: for the first time on this program, all three of our regular voices are finally in the same room together.

Robert Reed

Robert Reed here, happy as a kid with a fresh dime at the corner stand. Simon, I’ll tell ya, it took us nine episodes to get the whole infield assembled, but here we are. Chicago in the booth, Cubs spirit in the heart, and enough funnybooks on this table to buckle a railroad trestle.

George Wilson

George Wilson. Present and accounted for. I had to shove aside three stacks of comics and one ashtray just to find my chair, so if this sounds historic, that’s because it cost us some floor space.

Simon Carver

It did. And outside this little studio, the world has not exactly chosen a restful week. Just six days ago, on July eighteenth, Franklin Roosevelt accepted a nomination for a third term and said, “my conscience will not let me turn my back upon a call to service.” Over in Europe, the Battle of Britain has begun in earnest since July tenth—planes over the Channel, raids on the coast, every newspaper map looking grimmer by the day. And only yesterday, July twenty-third, the Welles Declaration laid down that the United States would not recognize the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states. So the air, even here, feels charged.

George Wilson

July tenth. I’m not going to forget that date. Battle of Britain starts, and all of a sudden every story about airfields, sabotage, or secret weapons in these comics lands a little harder. You can feel how close modern machinery sits to panic.

Robert Reed

And when the headlines are heavy, folks reach for stories where a fella can still put his shoulder into the gears and straighten things out. Superman lifting, Batman stalking, Sandman slipping in through the window—same appetite, different hats. That’s why tonight feels right.

Simon Carver

Exactly. We’re stepping out of the regular reading order for one evening and holding our first annual—well, annual in spirit, if not yet in arithmetic—Distinguished Comics Radio awards show. We’re looking back over episodes three through eight: Superman’s expansion through nineteen-thirty-nine, Doctor Occult in the shadows before the cape boom, Batman’s first astonishing sprint through Detective Comics twenty-seven to thirty-four, Slam Bradley as the magazine’s hardboiled foundation, Sandman in Adventure forty through forty-five and the World’s Fair book, and Sandy Kean over on the short-band side of the dial.

Robert Reed

We got trophies, too. Invisible ones, which is better for the budget. We’re calling ’em the Dizzys, and if you ask me that’s a peach of a name. Sounds half honor, half dizziness from reading too many comics under a porch light.

George Wilson

And because we’re civilized men—more or less—we’re not just going to shout favorites across the room till dawn. We’ll vote. Quietly. On paper. Like a parish committee with worse handwriting and better costumes.

Simon Carver

That’s the shape of it. Five main categories tonight, one special salute for the almost-winners, and then our biggest prize: Story of the Year. So settle in, friends. We’re not just reviewing old ground. We’re taking stock of a year that pushed comics from experiment toward identity.

Simon Carver

Before we start engraving imaginary brass, let’s explain the rules. We have spent the better part of this year tracing how these books grew in nineteen-thirty-nine: Superman becoming a line unto himself, Batman arriving like a black knife in Detective Comics, Sandman proving atmosphere could sell beside fists, and the earlier strips—Slam Bradley, Doctor Occult, Sandy Kean—showing the workshop where the whole house got built. Tonight is a pause to ask the simplest question there is: what was best?

Robert Reed

Best according to three grown men with pencils, which is the most scientific system yet devised west of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We got five categories: Best Writer, Best Artist, Best Hero, Best Supporting Character, and Story of the Year. Then a little tip of the cap to the fellas and gals who didn’t make the big board but still mattered.

George Wilson

And we’re scoring it proper. First place gets ten points. Second gets seven. Third gets five. Fourth gets three. Fifth gets one. Anything below fifth gets a sad handshake and no points at all. That scoring matters, because a unanimous second-place finisher can still make the leader sweat.

Simon Carver

George, you grabbed the numbers exactly. Ten, seven, five, three, one—that’s what we’re using for every ranked ballot tonight. And what I like about that spread is it rewards conviction. First place is not just a polite nod. It’s a declaration.

George Wilson

Right. Ten points means you don’t just admire the work. You think it defined the field. Seven says strong runner-up. Five says solid medal stand. Three and one mean, “I see your case, but I’m not marrying it.”

Robert Reed

That’s the Catholic version of mathematics, George. Me, I’m simpler. First place is the fellow you want riding in the sidecar. Fifth place is the fellow you’d still invite to the picnic.

Simon Carver

There’s one more bit of pageantry we ought to establish. For each category, we’re going to talk through the nominees first. Make the case. Push back. Argue a little. Then, on the air, each of us will quietly write down our rankings. We will not read them aloud while writing. That would spoil the horse race.

Robert Reed

I already don’t trust Simon. He’s got the face of a man who’d peek at another ballot if there was a mirror handy.

Simon Carver

I object to the slander. I’m an award-winning library reporter, Robert. There are standards.

George Wilson

Small award.

Simon Carver

Small award, yes, but honestly won. So that’s the spirit tonight: affectionate combat. Nobody here is trying to sink anybody else’s favorite. We’re trying to pin down what made nineteen-thirty-nine feel different. Why these strips started sticking in the mind. Why a cover like Detective Comics twenty-seven or Action Comics thirteen feels less like a pamphlet and more like a turning point.

Robert Reed

And I like that we’re doing it now, in July of forty, because you can already feel next year’s comics getting bigger bones. More confidence. Cleaner hooks. Stronger villains. Looking back at thirty-nine now is like standing on the curb after the parade and seeing which float folks keep talking about.

George Wilson

Which means we should get to the first category before Robert starts awarding a Dizzy to his own metaphors.

Simon Carver

Fair enough. Pencils ready, gentlemen. Best Writer.

Simon Carver

If this category has a front-runner, it’s Jerry Siegel. And I don’t say that just because Superman is the loudest success on the board. I say it because Siegel writes with a kind of moral velocity. His plots can be sketched in one line—a crooked lobbyist, a mine owner cutting corners, a cab racket crushing independents, an epidemic spreading panic—but on the page they move like they’ve been shot from a gun.

Robert Reed

That’s it exactly. He doesn’t loaf. In Action Comics number two, it’s arms dealers and a phony war in San Monte. In number three, it’s miners trapped underground because a boss values profits over shoring up the tunnel. In number five, a dam’s cracking and Lois is in a car getting swept to kingdom come. He takes bread-and-butter injustices and turns ’em into headline melodrama. Real American stuff—bosses, crooked politicians, unsafe jobs, neighborhoods in danger. Black and white. Good and bad. I love it.

George Wilson

But “black and white” is part of why some people might hold back. The villains can be broad. A munitions man isn’t just greedy, he’s greed with eyebrows. A mine owner isn’t conflicted, he’s practically wearing a sign that says “I hate workers.”

Robert Reed

Sure—but that’s the point! He’s writing for speed. He’s not painting an oil portrait. He’s marching a band down State Street.

Simon Carver

And I’d add that the simplicity is strategic, not careless. Siegel came up through science-fiction fandom. He put out Cosmic Stories in nineteen-twenty-nine, took rejections from pulp magazines, wrote “The Reign of the Superman” back in nineteen-thirty-three before the heroic version fully took shape. That fan-magazine energy never quite leaves him. Every Superman story asks, “What if one impossible man crashed into an ordinary social wrong?”

George Wilson

The thing I keep coming back to is the phrase from Action one: “champion of the oppressed.” That’s the whole engine. Not conqueror, not king, not policeman in tights. Oppressed. Once you say that, the targets choose themselves—abusive husbands, crooked senators, exploitative businessmen, people turning public systems into private gain.

Simon Carver

“Champion of the oppressed.” That line is the token I can’t shake either. It explains why even when Siegel is clumsy, he never feels cold. The stories are animated by a moral preference. Somebody weak is being leaned on, and he wants to reverse the pressure.

Robert Reed

And he writes Superman like a fella who solves things in public. That matters. Batman creeps. Sandman arranges. Superman barges in. Governor’s mansion in Action one. Factory floors. Streets full of plague panic in Action nineteen. He shows himself. Like Superman saying, “No, pal, you’re gonna feel the heat of being wrong right in daylight.”

George Wilson

I’ll give Siegel another point: he makes Lois Lane matter immediately. Action one, she’s at the dance hall. Action two, she’s facing a firing squad in San Monte. Action five, she’s in the flood. He doesn’t just hand Clark a desk and call it characterization. He builds a social world around him.

Simon Carver

And by the time we get to Superman number two—the Larry Trent boxing comeback, the peace-championing international plot, the expanding confidence of the solo title—you can hear a writer who understands not just a hero, but a tone. Urgent, reform-minded, weirdly hopeful. So yes, gentlemen, Jerry Siegel is a formidable candidate.

Robert Reed

I ain’t saying where I’m ranking him yet... but let’s just say his pencil’s already warm in my mind.

Simon Carver

Now, if Siegel is the populist thunderclap, Gardner Fox is range. We’ve seen him all over the map already—Batman stories in Detective Comics, Sandman stories in Adventure, pulpy structures that can hold hypnosis one month and industrial sabotage the next. Fox doesn’t always give you the emotional blunt force Siegel does, but he’s awfully good at construction.

George Wilson

Construction is the word. Fox knows how to lay track. Detective thirty-one moves from Julie Madison’s strange behavior to the ocean voyage, to the Monk’s castle, to the giant gorilla and the batplane without the thing collapsing under its own foolishness. Sandman at the World’s Fair does the same trick with stolen plans, a boat pursuit, and industrial sabotage. He can stack pulp contraptions neatly.

Robert Reed

And Fox likes gadgets and systems. You can feel it. Sandman’s gas gun, Batman’s batplane and autogyro business, hidden laboratories, strange formulas. He writes like a fella opening the hood on a machine and saying, “Now hold on, there’s one more compartment.”

Simon Carver

Then there’s Bill Finger, who is tougher to separate because his name is not always blazing from the marquee, but the Batman material bears his fingerprints all over it—if you’ll forgive the obvious pun. The darker costume refinements, the detective flavor, the little touches of Gothic atmosphere, the idea that Bruce Wayne’s grief matters, not just his fists.

George Wilson

Detective Comics thirty-three is the evidence for me. That origin isn’t just plot. A boy sees his parents murdered, kneels by them, vows war on crime, trains his body, and then the bat through the window gives him an image to live inside. That’s not just structure. That’s myth-making. And myth with a wound in it.

Robert Reed

Yeah, and Batman’s no sunshine kid after that. You get why he’s in the dark. You get why he scares people. It ain’t arbitrary. It’s grief with a motor in it.

Simon Carver

Before we mark ballots, let’s salute the supporting nominees. Mart Bailey handled two issues of Slam Bradley, and while he’s not likely to crack the top tier, he helped keep that rough-and-tumble strip alive. Bert Christman, who we’ll talk about more in Best Artist, also deserves a writer’s nod for several Sandman efforts. Clean, efficient, moody. But I think we all know this race centers on Siegel, Fox, and Finger.

Robert Reed

Alright then. Heads down, pencils up. Quiet ballots, boys. First through fifth. Ten, seven, five, three, one. Don’t be peeking, Simon.

George Wilson

I fold my paper like a confession slip. Nobody’s seeing mine till the count.

Simon Carver

And... pencils down. I have the totals. Third place in Best Writer, with seventeen points—Gardner Fox. Strong showing, lots of breadth, but not enough first-place thunder.

Robert Reed

Seventeen. That’s a sturdy number. Means all three of us respected the workmanship, even if he didn’t own the room.

Simon Carver

Second place, with twenty-two points—Bill Finger. A very serious challenge. One first-place vote, two other ballots keeping him high, and the Batman material carrying enormous weight.

George Wilson

Twenty-two. That’s not “honorable mention.” That’s “one more lucky bounce and he steals the pennant.”

Simon Carver

Which leaves our champion. With twenty-seven points, your first Dizzy for Best Writer goes to Jerry Siegel.

Robert Reed

Attaboy, Jerry. Champion of the oppressed and champion of the typewriter too.

Simon Carver

Best Artist begins, for me, with Joe Shuster. Not because every early Superman page is polished—some are rough, some are plainly rushed—but because nobody in this field draws motion with more conviction. He makes Superman feel like a force crossing a room, not a man standing in costume waiting his turn.

Robert Reed

Yeah! He draws him like a fastball. Action thirteen—that cab racket story—we’ve got Superman running along rooftops, crashing into racketeers, hauling men out of cars, then leaping clear while the cape snaps behind him. And in Action nineteen, with the Purple Plague, even when the scene is doctors and hospital beds, he keeps the figure alive. Superman’s always entering from somewhere, always landing, lifting, lunging.

George Wilson

What I notice is how elastic his cities are. Metropolis—or the Daily Star city, depending which early issue you’re in—doesn’t feel mapped the way later crime comics do. It feels built to be vaulted over. Fire escapes, window ledges, tenement roofs, bridges, dams, laboratory skylights. Urban space becomes a springboard under Shuster.

Simon Carver

“Elastic” is a perfect word. He bends the ordinary city around the hero’s momentum. And he’s good with faces too, in a broad newspaper-strip way. Lois can go from scorn to fear to admiration in three panels. Crooks blanch. Editors bark. Professor Traver in Action nineteen looks exactly like a nervous, overreaching scientist ought to look—spectacles, strain, too much brain and not enough conscience.

Robert Reed

And think about the line from where he started. Joe Shuster was a Toronto kid working as a newspaper boy for the Toronto Daily Star, scavenging discarded paper—wallpaper scraps and whatnot, if his own recollection’s to be trusted. That homemade quality is still in the pages, but by the time you get from Action one to Superman one and two, the confidence is way up. Bigger splashes. Cleaner silhouettes. Better staging.

George Wilson

I’m never going to forget the improvement from those earliest cramped pages to the Superman number one package. The revised origin breathes more. Krypton has architecture. The Kents feel human. Clark’s body language sells the disguise. That’s not just more pages. That’s more control.

Simon Carver

And his action iconography is almost genre-defining already. The car overhead in Action one. The train in Action thirteen. The giant mechanical threat in Action nineteen. Even before flight becomes the full-time mode, his leaping figure is unmistakable. Chest forward, cape thrown, fists set. A whole new pictorial grammar is arriving on cheap paper.

Robert Reed

And I got a soft spot for how American it all feels. Strongman body, clean jaw, circus color, but dropped into cities and factories and governor’s offices. It’s not fancy illustration. It’s working illustration. Like a shop foreman who suddenly learned to draw miracles.

Simon Carver

That may be the best case for Shuster in one line: he draws miracles like they belong in the morning paper. A powerful contender for the Dizzy.

George Wilson

Now if Shuster owns momentum, Bob Kane owns silhouette. Batman’s first year works because before you understand the man, you understand the shape. Detective twenty-seven’s cover—May nineteen-thirty-nine—already has it: the black wings, the cowl ears, the body carried between flight and fall. Later, in Detective thirty-one and thirty-three, Kane gives you castles, autogyros, moonlit roofs, giant bats of cape cloth, and a figure who can dominate a page just by standing in a doorway.

Simon Carver

Yes—Batman as design object. Kane’s pages can be crude in places, even ungainly, but the theatrical instinct is strong. He understands black shape against yellow moon. He understands how a cape can become architecture. In the Monk saga—Detective thirty-one and thirty-two—the hero often reads first as a moving blot of shadow, and only second as a man.

Robert Reed

That’s a heck of a trick. Shuster says, “Here comes the train.” Kane says, “Here comes the nightmare.” And both work. But I’ll tell ya, Kane’s got maybe the sharpest cover identity in the game. One glance and a newsboy can bark “The Bat-Man!” without even squinting.

Simon Carver

Then Bert Christman. On Sandman, especially Adventure forty and the World’s Fair material, Christman gives us crisp storytelling and mood without clutter. The gas mask, the fedora, the cape—those are all silhouette-dependent too, but handled differently. Less gothic opera than Batman. More industrial hush.

George Wilson

Christman is economical. He can stage a room so that one doorway, one lamp, and one looming figure do the whole job. Sandman at the World’s Fair is a good example: stolen plans, boats, fair architecture, hidden movement. The pages don’t sprawl. They click. That’s craftsmanship.

Robert Reed

And we oughta say a word for Mart Bailey and Creig Flessel. Bailey’s no favorite for the cup, but he keeps Slam Bradley readable and punchy in his turns at bat. Flessel on early Sandman gives you some nice strong compositions too, even if he only had a couple issues in our range.

Simon Carver

Alright. Quiet ballots again, gentlemen. First through fifth. Best Artist. George, you’re hunching over that paper like it’s a carburetor blueprint.

George Wilson

Because unlike a carburetor, this can actually start a fight.

Robert Reed

Pencils down before George starts adjusting the fuel mix. Let’s hear it.

Simon Carver

Third place, with seventeen points—Bert Christman. A very respectable finish, and proof that mood and clarity carry weight.

George Wilson

Seventeen means he didn’t just sneak onto ballots. He sat there comfortably.

Simon Carver

Second place—this is close—with twenty-four points: Bob Kane.

Robert Reed

Twenty-four! See, that’s what I mean. Sharp as a tack, that Bat-Man look. He nearly swiped it.

Simon Carver

But our winner, by a single point, with twenty-five... Joe Shuster takes the Dizzy for Best Artist.

Robert Reed

One point! That’s a pennant race, Simon. Shuster by the nose. I like it.

George Wilson

By one point, yes. Which means if anybody listening thinks Kane was robbed, they’re not crazy. But the trophy goes to the man who made a city bounce under a cape.

Simon Carver

Best Hero begins where Best Writer and Best Artist both just began: with Superman. Not merely because he is the most successful, but because he is the year’s defining answer to a simple fantasy—what if power served the public?

Robert Reed

Amen. He ain’t a king. He ain’t a masked sadist. He’s public service with shoulders. Action two, he stops a fake war cooked up by munitions men. Action three, he drags a mine owner through his own unsafe tunnels till the man agrees to install real safety. Action five, he fights a flood. Action thirteen, he breaks a cab racket. Action nineteen, he races around a city hit by the Purple Plague. That’s a heck of a résumé.

George Wilson

Let me sharpen that. The list itself—war profiteers, mine bosses, corrupt transit rackets, epidemics—that’s what makes him special. He’s not just strong. He’s pointed at civic failure. The heroism isn’t only in the lifting. It’s in the target selection.

Simon Carver

“Target selection”—yes, that’s the phrase. Plenty of heroes can punch. Superman’s stories ask who deserves punching. Or terrifying. Or exposing. Or saving. And the answers are remarkably social for a boy’s adventure strip.

Robert Reed

Though I’ll push back on one thing, Simon. You’re leaning so hard on the social mission you risk missing the daylight certainty. Kids love him because he’s clear. Red and blue, chest out, no doubt what side he’s on. In these muddy times, certainty’s worth a lot.

Simon Carver

I don’t disagree. I just think the certainty would ring hollow if the missions were empty. If he were only toppling generic crooks, he’d still be fun. But because he topples systems—crooked lobbies, exploitative bosses, fear itself in the plague story—he becomes more than a circus act.

George Wilson

Robert’s right on the icon, though. Action thirteen’s cover—June thirty-nine—Superman bracing against that red train over water, coat-tails and cape whipping, “Another thrilling issue of Superman!” That’s an argument in one picture. The hero is visible. Spectacular. Public. Batman would hide in the roof beams. Superman grabs the locomotive where everybody can see.

Robert Reed

That’s the American way, pal. If a bridge is falling, don’t whisper about it—hold it up. If a sickness is spreading, don’t hand out calling cards—bring the antidote. If a racket’s squeezing the little guy, tear the roof off the joint.

Simon Carver

And yet there’s gentleness in him too, which matters. Superman number two’s Larry Trent boxing story isn’t about smashing a villain flat. It’s about restoring a broken fighter’s dignity. He helps without stealing the victory. That’s heroic in a different key.

George Wilson

I think “Larry Trent” is the token that keeps Superman from becoming too abstractly noble. He can save a city, yes. But he can also be the unseen hand letting one washed-up man stand straight again. That scale-shifting is rare.

Simon Carver

So if the question is Best Hero, Superman’s claim is this: he established that extraordinary power in comics could be directed toward ordinary human wrongs. That’s a mighty standard to beat.

George Wilson

If Superman is public daylight, Batman is private dread. And there’s a strong case that nineteen-thirty-nine needed him too. Detective twenty-seven gives us the strange newcomer. Detective thirty-one and thirty-two give us the Monk saga—hypnosis, castles, wolves, giant gorilla, silver bullets. Detective thirty-three gives us the wound: the murdered parents and the vow. Suddenly this isn’t just a costumed eccentric. It’s grief weaponized.

Robert Reed

Yeah, he’s the other side of the coin. Superman says, “I can help.” Batman says, “I know what evil looks like in the dark.” That’s a useful fella to have around, even if he’s not exactly Sunday-school material.

Simon Carver

And unlike Superman, Batman is investigative almost to the point of obsession. He watches. He stalks. He uses ropes, gas pellets, batplane, bat-car. He turns surveillance into heroism. That’s a very modern flavor.

George Wilson

Then there’s Sandman, whom I refuse to let get buried in this category. He’s the in-between figure. Wesley Dodds by day, gas-mask phantom by night. No super-strength, no towering legend yet, but real atmosphere. He moves through industrial sabotage, stolen plans, airfield danger, hidden rooms. He’s the mystery man as nervous system of the age.

Robert Reed

I like Sandman a lot. Slick fedora, sleep gas, get-in-and-get-out style. But if I’m being square with myself, he feels like a terrific lane in the highway, not the whole darn road.

Simon Carver

That’s fair. Still, the rest of the field deserves brief mention. Slam Bradley is the workingman bruiser, the hardboiled foundation under Detective Comics before Batman took the covers. Sandy Kean is radio-era civic adventure—sirens, fires, dogs, quick-footed public service in miniature. Doctor Occult is the old weird bridge, one of the proto-forms from Siegel and Shuster before Superman’s daylight took over.

George Wilson

And Doctor Occult matters because he proves the DC toolbox had room for symbols and mystery before it had a full superhero grammar. More Fun twenty-two, especially, is a weird little flare in the dark.

Robert Reed

Alright, enough campaigning. Best Hero ballot time. Don’t anybody make eye contact. Done.

Simon Carver

I have the numbers. Third place, with fifteen points—Sandman. A clean bronze. All three ballots respected him, and that tells its own story.

George Wilson

Fifteen. Three ballots, three third-place finishes. That’s consistency. He never stole the room, but he never got left out either.

Simon Carver

Second place, with twenty-four points—Batman.

Robert Reed

Close race again! I can hear the bat-fans sharpening their letters already.

Simon Carver

And the Dizzy for Best Hero, with twenty-seven points, goes to Superman.

Robert Reed

Truth, justice, and the whole shooting match. Hard to beat.

George Wilson

He wins because he set the terms. Batman answers him. Sandman sidesteps him. But Superman defines the field everybody else is now reacting to.

Simon Carver

Now this is a category I’m especially fond of, because supporting characters tell you whether a strip has a world or just a costume in a vacuum. And to me, Lois Lane is the gold standard on the board. First appearance in Action one, right beside Clark Kent, and instantly she is more than an ornament. She’s a reporter with elbows. She judges Clark. She rushes into danger. She demands scoops.

Robert Reed

And she’s got grit. In that nightclub scene in Action one, Clark acts yellow—on purpose, sure, but she doesn’t know that—so she lets him have it. In Action two she’s nearly shot as a spy in San Monte. In Action five she’s heading straight toward the dam story in a taxi. She’s always moving toward the news like a moth to a porch bulb.

George Wilson

What sticks for me is that Lois is not written as someone who politely waits to be informed. She investigates. And even when she gets in over her head, it’s because she was pursuing the story, not because the plot needed a chair tied to a railroad track.

Simon Carver

“Pursuing the story”—exactly. Joe Shuster modeled her early look on Joanne Carter, and Siegel has admitted inspirations from actresses like Lola Lane and the hard-charging Torchy Blane mode. You feel that newsroom electricity. She’s one of the reasons Superman’s civilian life works at all.

Robert Reed

Now, hold on, because Shorty deserves a mighty loud hand here. Slam Bradley without Shorty is just one more broad-shouldered lug cracking heads. Shorty makes the strip sing. He’s the panic valve, the wisecrack machine, the fella always a step from disaster. Slam is the freight train, Shorty is the whistle.

George Wilson

That’s good—“the freight train and the whistle.” Shorty also gives Slam human scale. When the big man storms a room, Shorty’s the one reacting like a normal citizen. Fear, complaint, bad guesses, comic squeaks. He keeps the strip from turning into pure blunt instrument.

Simon Carver

The other nominees are worthwhile too. Julie Madison matters a great deal to early Batman because the Monk saga becomes personal through her. Commissioner Gordon is essential institutional ballast—without him Batman has no official world to orbit around. And Rose Psychic, in Doctor Occult, helps prove those earliest weird strips were building partnerships, not just lone operators.

Robert Reed

Alright then, top five. And this one, I’ll say, is closer in spirit than folks may expect. Because if Shorty ain’t your cup of tea, you’re probably a little allergic to joy.

George Wilson

Or to concussion. He absorbs a lot of those.

Simon Carver

Ballots are in. For this category, we are only announcing the top two. Runner-up, with twenty-four points—Shorty.

Robert Reed

That little rascal made the podium. Good for him.

Simon Carver

And your Dizzy for Best Supporting Character, with twenty-seven points, goes to Lois Lane.

George Wilson

Right result. Twenty-seven says all three of us knew she wasn’t just “the girl in the strip.” She was the strip’s pressure gauge.

Robert Reed

No argument here. She’s got more hustle than half the heroes in the rack.

Simon Carver

Before we get to the biggest category of the night, I want us to do something the scorecards don’t always do well: honor the stepping-stones. Dr. Occult, Slam Bradley, and Sandy Kean did not carry the main trophies tonight, but they matter enormously to the shape of these comics.

George Wilson

Doctor Occult is the prototype shop. Secret lore, trench coat, then cape, then occult iconography, then hints of flight and larger stakes. More Fun twenty-two in particular has that early weird-fiction electricity. You can almost watch Siegel and Shuster trying on pieces of superhero grammar before they find the red cape.

Robert Reed

And Slam Bradley—boy, we’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again—he helped teach Detective Comics how to move. Those early issues, then late-run numbers like twenty-eight and thirty-four, they’re roughhouse crime strips with real snap. Slam’s public, loud, and direct. He’s the work gloves in the toolbox before Batman starts showing up with theatrical black lacquer.

Simon Carver

“Work gloves in the toolbox”—that’s one to keep. And Sandy Kean, however modest the feature, feels like a little civic pulse of the era. More Fun thirty-six gives us radio-squad urgency—fire sirens, the burning warehouse, the recumbent watchman thought doomed, then the dog Brutty finding him, then the rescue through smoke. It’s not grand myth, but it is energetic public-minded storytelling.

George Wilson

The thing I appreciate about Sandy Kean is scale. More Fun thirty-six isn’t trying to save the planet. It’s trying to save a man in a fire and catch an arsonist. In a medium racing toward capes and world-shaking menace, that grounded urgency is worth saluting.

Robert Reed

And without features like those, you don’t get the big headliners fully formed. Everybody likes to talk about first appearances like lightning from a clear sky. But comics are more like a garage band. Somebody had to make noise before the big tune arrived.

Simon Carver

Exactly. These also-rans widen the DC toolbox. Weird occult detective. Two-fisted crime bruiser. Radio rescue hero. They prove the publisher—National, Detective, what we loosely call DC now—didn’t arrive at superhero dominance by accident. It tried lanes. It tested voices. It let the audience teach it what to keep.

George Wilson

Which brings us naturally to Story of the Year. Because that category isn’t just “which issue did we like?” It’s “which issue best shows comics becoming themselves?”

Simon Carver

Beautifully put. Our ballot there is ten stories deep: Detective Comics twenty-seven, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, and twenty-eight; More Fun thirty-six; Action Comics thirteen and nineteen; Superman number two A; and More Fun twenty-two. Time to open the big file.

Simon Carver

Let’s start with the Batman side of the ballot, because this is where one new feature barged into Detective Comics and changed the temperature of the whole magazine in about six months. Detective twenty-seven is the obvious first stone. “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.” Commissioner Gordon at home, Bruce Wayne the “young socialite friend,” murder among chemical partners, and then that weird figure of the night appears. No origin, no hand-holding, just impact.

George Wilson

And the final image of that first case still lands. The killer plunges into the acid, and Batman thinks it’s a fitting end. That’s not Superman ethics. That’s pulp vigilante justice. Twenty-seven matters because it doesn’t ask permission. It arrives fully strange.

Robert Reed

Plus the cover! May thirty-nine, Batman swinging in, crook under one arm, gunman aiming from the side. That thing is a bugle call. You see it once, you know the magazine just hired a new headliner.

Simon Carver

Then Detective thirty-one and thirty-two—the Monk saga. I’m almost inclined to count them as one long fever dream. Julie Madison under the sway of the Monk, the liner to Europe, the castle on the cliff, wolves, giant gorilla, hypnotism, Dala, the batplane, the batarang beginning to act like a signature instrument. It’s Batman discovering he can carry full Gothic horror.

George Wilson

Thirty-one is the invitation. Thirty-two is the payoff. And the payoff is brutal. Silver bullets. Batman choosing to end a supernatural menace rather than merely handcuff a crook. That’s a huge tonal declaration.

Robert Reed

Yeah, but if I’m picking just one of the Monk pair, I lean thirty-two because the whole stew comes to a boil. Castle walls, wolves, Julie in danger, Batman dead set on finishing the job. It’s got mustard.

Simon Carver

And then there’s Detective thirty-three, which may be the most important single Batman story in the run even if it is not the wildest adventure. The issue gives us the parents in the alley, the vow at the graveside, the years of training, and the bat through the window. That origin recasts everything around it. Suddenly the costume is not gimmick but answer.

George Wilson

I keep coming back to one token there: the alley. Once you see the alley, Batman’s whole year changes shape. Twenty-seven becomes the beginning of a mission. Thirty-one becomes a man channeling grief into nightmare. Thirty-three gives emotional weight to the silhouette.

Robert Reed

And that happened FAST. That’s what amazes me. From May thirty-nine to November first, cover-dated thirty-three, he goes from “hey, here’s a bat-fella” to “oh, this is a foundational hero with a wound and a code.” That’s one heck of a sprint.

Simon Carver

Which is why so many Batman stories hit this ballot at once. Twenty-seven is first impact. Thirty-one and thirty-two are range and atmosphere. Thirty-three is meaning. No wonder the feature swallowed so much oxygen.

Robert Reed

Now let’s bring Superman back in, because Action thirteen and Action nineteen ain’t here by accident. Action thirteen—June nineteen-thirty-nine—is the cab racket story, and that one just hums. Independent cabbies getting squeezed, windshields smashed, drivers beat up, syndicate muscle leaning on the little guy. Clark sniffs it out, Superman starts busting up the works, and before long the whole city’s being shown exactly who the rotten apples are.

Simon Carver

The image I can’t shake from thirteen is that red train cover and then, inside, the racket itself. What sounds small on paper—taxi monopolization—turns into a civic morality play. That is Jerry Siegel at his best. He takes a local injustice and treats it like something a hero should care about as much as a meteor from space.

George Wilson

And the fact that it’s a cab combine matters. City transportation. Public movement. Everyday working stiffs. That’s not abstract villainy. That’s organized pressure on ordinary labor. Superman steps in not because the case is glamorous, but because it’s unfair.

Robert Reed

Then Action nineteen—the Purple Plague. December thirty-nine. Streets clogged with death wagons, the Daily Star screaming “Purple Plague grips Metropolis,” Professor Henry Travers and the so-called Ultra-Humanite tangled up in a medical nightmare. Superman racing from hospitals to laboratories to airships. Boy, that one’s got everything except a brass band.

Simon Carver

“Purple Plague grips Metropolis.” That headline panel is one of the year’s most memorable things. Because suddenly Superman’s strength isn’t enough by itself. He’s facing fear, contagion, crowd panic, scientific arrogance. It’s a physical hero confronted with something nearly invisible.

George Wilson

And unlike some plague stories, nineteen keeps the villainy human. Travers wants his name eternal. Ultra-Humanite wants domination through fear. The disease becomes a tool of ego. That’s why the story lasts in the mind.

Simon Carver

Now on the non-caped crime side, Detective twenty-eight and thirty-four keep Slam Bradley in the race. Twenty-eight is a sharp reminder that before Batman fully became the magazine, Slam could still deliver clean, fast action. Better pacing, stronger cause and effect, and that sense that the whole city is a wrestling ring.

Robert Reed

And thirty-four—June forty if I recall the cover date right, though the material’s still our backward-looking window—shows the old strip still had gas in the tank. We got inheritance, fake legacies, a poisoned tale or at least the suspicion of it, hidden passages, Shorty asleep after a feed, and Slam stomping through one last spooky house routine like a batter who still knows how to drive in runs.

George Wilson

What matters there is not that Slam beats Batman head-to-head. He doesn’t. It’s that Detective thirty-four proves the older crime-strip DNA did not become worthless overnight. There was still room for a hardboiled, comedic, room-to-room mystery.

Simon Carver

So our intermediate picture is getting interesting: Batman dominates the emotional and atmospheric lane. Superman owns the social and spectacular lane. Slam reminds us where the whole magazine came from. We are not tallying yet—but the board is getting crowded.

Simon Carver

The last set of contenders are the stories that widen the vocabulary. More Fun twenty-two is Doctor Occult—Siegel and Shuster in proto-hero weird-fiction mode. We only have a few pages in the surviving look at it tonight, but what pages: Senator Barrows, a faked haunting, the governor, Clark-like investigatory drive before Clark is Clark, and that old ghost-detective machinery of revelation.

George Wilson

What makes More Fun twenty-two special is not polish. It’s possibility. You can see the creators experimenting with hidden identities, staged fear, public corruption, and a larger-than-life investigator who will not leave bad men alone. It’s primitive compared with Superman, but primitive the way an early engine is primitive—full of the future in rough form.

Robert Reed

And More Fun thirty-six, our Sandy Kean candidate, wins on pep. Warehouse fire. Radio car screaming to the scene. Sandy racing in. Brutty the dog finding the unconscious watchman. Then that whole business with the pyromaniac and the poor sap Larry trying to stay straight. It’s not grand opera, but it’s sure-footed.

Simon Carver

You know what I like about thirty-six? The dog. Brutty isn’t just cute decoration. He finds the recumbent man when everyone else thinks the fellow is doomed. That concrete detail—the dog making the rescue possible—sticks in the listener’s mind far more than a vague “and then they saved him.”

George Wilson

Exactly. Brutty is the token. He turns a routine fire-rescue strip into something you can recount over coffee the next day. “The dog found him in the smoke.” That’s memorable construction.

Robert Reed

Now here’s where I’ll be the heel in the room: in a year like thirty-nine, I still lean action over mood. I admire Dr. Occult’s atmosphere. I like Sandy Kean’s civic snap. But when I’m deciding Story of the Year, I want impact. I want something that hits you like a drum major turning the corner.

Simon Carver

I hear that, but mood can be impact. Detective thirty-one and thirty-two live on mood. Sandman lives on mood. Batman’s whole rise depends on it. A story can change the medium not because it ran the fastest, but because it taught readers a new feeling.

George Wilson

I’m between you two. Mood without forward motion is perfume. Action without atmosphere is a fistfight in a blank room. The stories we’re really discussing for the top spots have both. Action nineteen has plague panic and propulsion. Detective thirty-three has origin solemnity and forward drive. Even Action thirteen has civic outrage wrapped in slam-bang pacing.

Robert Reed

That’s fair. And it means the wild cards probably won’t take the whole thing, but they’re not dead weight. They keep the year from feeling one-note.

Simon Carver

Which is the right note to strike before the final vote. We’ve talked Batman, Superman, Slam, Doctor Occult, Sandy Kean. Time now to rank the ten and live with the consequences.

Simon Carver

Gentlemen, this is the big one. Story of the Year. Ten nominees. Rank your top five only. First place ten points, second seven, third five, fourth three, fifth one. Quietly now. Robert is staring into the middle distance like a man choosing between the flag and his mother.

Robert Reed

That’s because you loaded the ballot, Simon. You put Action nineteen and Detective thirty-three in the same footrace and told me to pick one. That’s crueler than beaning a batter in a spring exhibition.

George Wilson

I finished mine. That either means I’m decisive or wrong.

Simon Carver

Very well. The papers are in. I have the totals, and we will reveal them from fifth place to champion. Fifth place, with five points—Action Comics number thirteen, the cab racket story.

Robert Reed

Good. It belongs on the board. Even if it didn’t crack the upper crust, that story’s too alive to miss the count altogether.

Simon Carver

Fourth place, with ten points—Detective Comics number thirty-two, the climax of the Monk saga.

George Wilson

Ten points exactly. That says one of us loved it, another respected it, and the third maybe found it a little too batty even for Batman.

Robert Reed

“Too batty for Batman” oughta be printed on a poster.

Simon Carver

Third place, with twelve points—Detective Comics number twenty-seven, Batman’s first appearance.

Robert Reed

There it is. The debut medal. Makes sense. Historic as all get-out, even if later issues deepen the fella.

Simon Carver

Second place, with twenty-two points—Action Comics number nineteen, “The Purple Plague.”

George Wilson

Twenty-two. That’s a monster number. Which means the winner had to be something special.

Simon Carver

It is. Your Dizzy for Story of the Year, with twenty-five points, goes to Detective Comics number thirty-three—Batman’s origin.

Robert Reed

I can live with that. I went another way on my own ballot, but I can live with it. Thirty-three changes the whole strip in retrospect.

George Wilson

And that’s why it wins. Not because it is the noisiest, but because it re-keys everything around it. The alley, the vow, the training, the bat at the window—once those are in place, Batman’s earlier stories gain spine and his later ones gain gravity.

Simon Carver

Yes. Action nineteen may be the better social panic story, and Detective twenty-seven may be the cleaner bolt from the blue. But Detective thirty-three matters in the larger direction of comics because it proves a hero can be defined not just by costume and action, but by trauma, memory, and purpose. That feels very much like the road into nineteen-forty.

Robert Reed

In other words, the comics are growing bones. Bigger heroes, stronger villains, and now inner lives too. Even if I still think Superman’s plague story could whip it in a fair alley fight.

George Wilson

Every category with you ends in an alley fight.

Robert Reed

That’s because alleys sort things out, George.

Simon Carver

So there we are. Looking back over nineteen-thirty-nine from the vantage of July twenty-fourth, nineteen-forty, the shape seems clearer than it did while we were wading through the stacks. Comics spent that year moving from experiment toward identity. Superman proved the superhero could be a public moral force. Batman proved darkness, grief, and theatrical fear could thrive in the same young medium. Sandman, Slam Bradley, Doctor Occult, Sandy Kean—they each held a necessary tool while the craft box was still being assembled.

George Wilson

And the villains got better too. Ultra-Humanite. Doctor Death. The Monk. Not just one-panel crooks with derby hats, but recurring threats, scientific brains, Gothic nightmares, men with motives larger than “take the till and run.” That’s a serious step.

Robert Reed

And the storytelling got more confident. Better covers, bolder layouts, stronger hooks. You can feel the publishers learning what sells at the newsstand and what sticks in the craw after supper. Less fumbling, more punch. Or maybe I should say more wallop. Nice clean wallop.

Simon Carver

Which leads us to our next regular program. We are finally stepping into nineteen-forty proper with Superman. But we’re going to slow things down a little. There’s simply too much good material there to gallop over in one night, so our next episode will be Superman in nineteen-forty, part one.

Robert Reed

Fine by me. Give the big guy room to breathe. If nineteen-thirty-nine built the machine, nineteen-forty looks like the year they start giving it chrome.

George Wilson

And since this is a serial program, we’d love to hear where you think we got it wrong. If you believe Action nineteen was robbed, or Batman won fair, or Shorty ought to have taken the whole station hostage till we crowned him, write us.

Simon Carver

Yes—send your letters to distinguishedcomicsradio@gmail.com. Our editor still insists that address is entirely normal somewhere in the future Mr. Moore keeps hinting at, and until proven otherwise we shall continue trusting the postal miracles of time.

Robert Reed

If Mr. Moore really is out there in tomorrow, tell him Robert Reed says keep the Cubs in mind when he places any long-term wagers.

George Wilson

And tell him if he sends back any more voting results, he can at least include cigars.

Simon Carver

For Robert Reed, for George Wilson, and for all of you listening out there with a stack of comics on the arm of the chair, this is Simon Carver saying thank you for spending the evening with Distinguished Comics Radio. Keep your dimes handy, keep your eyes open, and keep faith with the stories that still know how to stand up straight in uneasy times.

Robert Reed

This is Robert Reed, saying good night, keep your chin up, and don’t let the bad actors run the joint.

George Wilson

George Wilson. Good night, and watch the rooftops.

Simon Carver

You’ve been listening to KDCR, New York—Distinguished Comics Radio. Good night, friends.