Tonight on Mr. Leno's show, Diane Lane was promoting her new movie, Hollywoodland, and she said something about George Reeves being the first Superman. She wasn't intending to slight the other gents who played the character before Reeves but she did get me to thinking about the late Kirk Alyn.
Kirk was an actor who had a fairly unspectacular career, primarily in the forties and primarily in serials. He played Superman in the 1948 serial of that character and again in a 1950 sequel. In 1952, he portrayed another comic book hero, Blackhawk, in one of the last serials made…and when the serials went away, so did the jobs for Kirk Alyn. Thereafter, it was mostly bit parts and not a lot of them. At some point, he simply gave up and moved to Arizona.
But that was not the end of Mr. Alyn's celebrity. In a way, he was ahead of his time.
These days, when you go to a comic convention, you're as likely to see famous TV and movie actors as you are to see folks who write and draw comics. There's a thriving autographed photo industry out there. A lot of celebs who aren't working at the moment — and even some who are — are now descending on cons to sell eight-by-ten glossies and — in some cases — autobiographies, many of them self-published. I won't cite any names but check out the guest lists for upcoming fan gatherings. You might see some pretty big stars there…and Kirk Alyn sort of pioneered the practice.
He was the first actor I can recall ever turning up at a comic book convention. At almost every West Coast con for years, you could find him sitting behind a table, selling autographed pix and his self-published autobiography, A Job for Superman. Easily approachable, he would talk to anyone for hours, answering what I gathered were around ten questions, over and over, usually including the painful one: "Why did George Reeves do the TV show instead of you?" Usually immaculate in suit and tie, he looked like a movie star, even if it had been a long time since he'd been one.
I don't recall when he first appeared on the convention circuit…around '73 or so, I'd guess. But at the time, almost no one in the fan community had seen him on film. He was the first film Superman, we all knew, but his two serials were long unseen and unavailable. Around '78 or so — I'm really guessing at these years — someone came up with a 16mm print of an edited version of the first Superman serial. I remember a wonderful evening at a small, local con where they screened it and I played emcee, interrogating Kirk before and after, and even during reel changes.
He had a wonderful twinkle in his eyes that evening. It was just about the first time in close to a quarter of a century that an audience had seen him starring in something, and it was an audience of folks who'd become his friends. The film was long and filled with laughingly-awful dialogue, amateurish supporting actors and the cheapest-possible sets and special effects…but Kirk was good in it and at the end, he received a much-deserved standing ovation — as much for sharing his history with us as for his performance. That evening and the subsequent availability of his Superman films completed his super-stardom in our circle. The next day, he told me that con-goers were treating him with more respect. No one had been disrespectful before but now, they'd seen him actually be Superman and it made a difference.
His two Superman serials — Superman and Atom Man Vs. Superman — came out on VHS some time ago to scant notice, which is not surprising. Each is over four hours long and like most serials, there's a lot of repetition and recapping and padding. You've got to really love that kind of material to make it all the way through. But like everything else that's ever been on film, it will someday be available on DVD and when it is, you might want to take a peek. I don't know that you'll enjoy it but I like the idea of people remembering who Kirk Alyn was. (He passed away in 1999 at the age of 89.)
'Til then, there's another way to remember Kirk. If you go to a comic convention and see some past or present-day actor selling photos of himself, think about Kirk Alyn for a second or two. He invented that.