Posted By Dan Greenfield on Feb 26, 2022 | 7 comments

The celebrated Mr. K celebrates his cult-fave Superman strips…

By PAUL KUPPERBERG

Once upon a time, it was the ambition of many, if not most, comic book creators to land a syndicated newspaper strip. A comic strip was the pinnacle of the cartooning pyramid, a daily dose of action, adventure, romance or humor by some of the best illustrators in the business, legendary names like Hogarth, Caniff, Murphy and Young. Jack Kirby, Frank Frazetta, Murphy Anderson, Joe Kubert and many others would make the leap from the comic-book page to the newspaper funny pages.

Myself included. Sure, by the time I had entered the comics writing game in the mid-1970s the heyday of the American comic strip was long past, but I had grown up on a combination of the New York Daily News’ bountiful comic page and Sunday color comic sections and the 1965 comedy, How to Murder Your Wife. (The pic stars Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi and, of course, the indispensable Terry-Thomas. Lemmon plays a comic-strip artist playboy living the life of Riley in a fabulous Manhattan townhouse with his faithful butler until in a drunken blackout he marries Lisi, the girl who speaks no English he met after she jumped out of the cake at a bachelor party. Most of it was pretty far-fetched of course, pure misogynist farce in retrospect… but a townhouse in the city [that’s what us Brooklynites call Manhattan] and a butler? I’m for that!)

It would be another 16 years before I got my hands on a newspaper strip of my own as the fifth of the five writers to script the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes Starring Superman syndicated strip for the Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate (April 3, 1978, to February 10, 1985). Instead of a townhouse in Manhattan, I got cruddy apartments in Queens and Brooklyn’s Park Slope. And no butler. Not that I could have afforded either. Writing the strip paid page rate, the same money I got for writing a regular comic book; it came to four pages of paid work a week, with two strips (six panels) equaling one page and the Sunday counting as one page.

The series originally featured DC’s big stars but eventually came to focus on Superman.

But I didn’t care. I had a daily and (for most of the first year) Sunday strip in the newspapers! Except, you know, not in any newspaper I ever saw. By the time I took it over (after Martin Pasko, Paul Levitz, Gerry Conway and Mike Barr), the strip no longer had a very strong base of subscribing newspapers, and the Daily News had stopped carrying it. As of November 11, 1982, the Sunday strip was turned into a puzzle and activity page written by Bob Rozakis.

Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE WORLD’S GREATEST SUPER-HEROES PRESENT SUPERMAN STRIPS:

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January 12, 1981. Though signed “P. Levitz,” the script for this week (and the six weeks that followed) were ghost written by P. Kupperberg. This was my first attempt at writing a daily strip but thanks to a lifetime of reading them, I had absorbed the medium’s rhythm and pace and didn’t have any difficulty slipping into it.

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January 18, 1981. My first (ghosted) Sunday strip.

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January 11, 1982. This was the official start of my run on the Superman strip, and I made sure it included an iconic Clark Kent/Superman moment to kick things off: Clark’s dash into an empty room to change because it’s “a job for Superman!”

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January 17, 1982. My first official Sunday strip.

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May 3, 1982. After four years of the daily (and Sunday!) grind, George Tuska bid his farewell to the strip and we welcomed new artist Jose Delbo to the fold, still inked by Vince Colletta.

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May 27-29, 1982. Jose and Vinnie kick chiaroscuro’s ass!

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September 16-18, 1982. I never want to hear another bad word about Vinnie’s inking!

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November 12, 1982. Sometimes, it was necessary to sacrifice a few precious panels of storytelling to just show off.

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August 25-27, 1983. Injecting some hardcore DC history and continuity into the strip.

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January 26-29, 1984. Explaining Bizarros to the mass newspaper reading audience.

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September 6-8, 1984. From the Toyman continuity. It’s only cute until it starts giving you the stink eye!

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December 25, 1984. The creators stand behind this Christmas greeting, in the back row, where left to right Jose included me (holding the typewriter), himself (glasses and beard), editor Joe Orlando, Paul Levitz, and inker Sal Trapani. And to all a good night!

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January 23-26, 1985. Super-science-self-save!

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MORE

— PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite SHOWCASE #100 Moments. Click here.

— PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite WORLD OF KRYPTON Miniseries Moments — RANKED. Click here.

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Sure, you know Paul Kupperberg as the prolific writer of over a thousand comic books for such characters and series as Superman, Aquaman, Doom Patrol, Vigilante, Life with Archie, Bart Simpson, Scooby-Doo, and dozens more for DC Comics, Archie Comics, Bongo Comics, and others, and that he is also the creator of the series Arion, Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate and Takion, and is a former editor for DC, Weekly World News, and WWE Kids Magazine. But Paul is also the author of numerous books, including the superhero novel JSA: Ragnarok and the comics industry-based murder mystery, The Same Old Story, not to mention (but we will anyway) Paul Kupperberg’s Illustrated Guide to Writing Comics, I Never Write for the Money, But I Always Turn in the Manuscript for a Check, Direct Comments: Comic Book Creators in their Own Words, The Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg and Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg. You can follow Paul at PaulKupperberg.com and at Crazy8Press.com.