First, here's a link to Part 1 in case you need a link to Part 1.
Now then: In the last twenty-whatever-number hours, quite a few of you have sent me e-mails to tell me about your favorite Superman artist and that's fine. I never argue over favorite Superman artists. But I was probably negligent to not mention some other gentlemen who drew The Man of Steel for a long, long time.
To me, the Third Great Superman Artist was Kurt Schaffenberger, who most folks of my generation probably think of as "THE Lois Lane artist." That job, of course, meant drawing Superman a lot and Schaffenberger turned up in the other Superman family of comics often and I thought he was terrific. If his work was ever dull, it was because the scripts were but even then, he drew them very well.
I liked a lot of the other artists who drew Superman for short periods and I'll mention one other who did him for a long time: Ross Andru. Ross was another artist who — like Bob Oksner, who I mentioned here — was not fully appreciated at the time but is maybe now getting some of his due. Maybe one of these days, I'll talk about some of the other artists who I thought drew a great Superman, unfortunately not for as long a time and Swan, Boring and Schaffenberger.
Right now, I have to tell you about something that turned up in some Superman story I read when I was maybe nine or so. I don't remember which issue it was — they did this several times — but it was the first time I recall reading something in a comic book and thinking, "Wow, that's really stupid!" Here's one of the times this happened in a Superman-connected comic book…
That panel was from a way earlier issue but it's the same scene: Lois Lane, having some reason to need to contact Superman, decides the best way to do that is to jump off the roof or out of a very tall building. Obviously, this was before it was possible to send a text.
Like I said: I was nine or so when I saw her do this in a story and for a moment there, I wanted to haul my entire comic book collection to a store that would pay me two cents each for them and then use the money to take up stamp collecting.
It was, like the caption in the above panel says, downright madness. What if Superman is at that moment being held prisoner in an interplanetary zoo on the planet Glurp twenty-seven-zillion miles from Earth? What if he's battling a phalanx of Kryptonite Deathray Robot Monsters? What if he's saving thousands of people from a volcano whose eruption was triggered by Lex Luthor?
What if just as Lois is plunging, he's rescuing someone in Greenland who happens to be falling off a building?
You could look at the covers of most issues of Superman or Action Comics and see Superman being trapped or engaged in cosmic battle…busy with something that would prevent him from getting to Metropolis in the ten seconds before the Lady Reporter becomes an ink stain on the cement below.
As a kid, I could accept the premise that there was this man who could fly and lift up Chevrolets and he could see and/or burst through walls and let bullets bounce off him like Nerf Balls.®
I could accept the notion that he came from the planet Krypton — which could be found in no science book I ever saw — because his daddy stuffed him into a rocket and sent him into space just before that world exploded. (I could even rationalize it not being in any of those science books because, after all, it had exploded.)
I could accept that he had a superdog named Krypto and a super-cousin named Supergirl, and that he hung out in a group called the Justice League of America with, among others, a guy dressed as a bat, an Amazonian Princess, a guy with a magic green power ring, a man from Mars, a police lab guy who could run around the world eight times in a minute…all that stuff.
But I couldn't buy that Lois Lane, a seemingly intelligent woman smart enough to work for a great Metropolitan newspaper, could be that all-fired, brain-dead, I.Q.-devoid, styrofoam-headed dumb.
And she didn't do this once or twice. She contacted Superman that way more often than I pick up the phone to call my cousin David. She even did it in the second Superman movie when she was Margot Kidder and Superman was Christopher Reeve. That, though, was many years later. All I could think of when I was nine was "That woman's ca-raaa-zy!"
Like I said, I don't remember which comic book I first saw her do it in but it was the first time I grasped that my imagination, which could be stretched pretty damn far when I was nine, had its limits. This morning online, I spotted the panel I've placed directly above this paragraph and I'm not sure if this was from the comic I read then or not but it's very similar to what I remember. It's also from a comic book drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger…my Third Favorite Longtime Superman Artist. It's a stupid scene they made him draw but, of course, he drew it very well.