Rip Jagger's Dojo: The Golden Age Sandman!

Saturday, August 19, 2017

The Golden Age Sandman!

While the Boy Commandos were the most successful feature that Simon and Kirby developed in their first stint at DC during the Golden Age, Sandman is arguably the most famous of all. Thanks in no small part to the fame which the character has discovered in modern times with starkly different versions, the Golden Age Sandman is a rich figure who started business as a Green Hornet/Shadow knock-off who had the clever gimmick of inducing sleep.

But that sleepy attitude infected the feature in other ways and quickly the editors were looking for ways to make the dapper hero more action-oriented. So Gardner Fox's classic version gave way to something different.

In the pages of Adventures Comics #72 they gave the Sandman a new costume (gold and purple with a cape) and a new sidekick (Sandy the Golden Boy). The first stories were drawn by Paul Norris of Aquaman fame. Alas the new look didn't seem at first to create much stir.

Then Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, fresh from their highly successful stint on Captain America showed up at DC wanting more money and more credit. They got both and quickly too over at Adventure comics debuting on that comic with issue seventy-four, bringing their signature slam-bang style to Manhunter and the Sandman features. It must've been quite a shocker for fans to suddenly find do much action in what had been a pretty sedate outing before that time.

Simon and Kirby took over the comic and the covers with Sandman getting the majority of them though their run. They had the dynamic duo battle all sorts of misfits, gangster, and villains, all of them with some sort of sleep or dream detail. Reading these stories through, I was struck at how clever the S&S team were in coming up with fresh sleep/dream angles for the heroes to pursue.

The Sandman had a motto which is used in many of the stories, at least early on. "There is no land beyond the law where tyrants rule with unshakeable. It's a dream...from which the evil wakest to face their fate...their terrifying hour. - The Sandman". This mouthful did give the feature a nifty pulp gloss, but as the golden hero got more comfortable in his super togs he lost the pulp aspects more and more.

Despite the cleverness of the S&S team, one can see they were running out of gas a bit by the end of the feature and so it's likely good that they moved on.