I would think the Liberalism line was changed for the reasons mentioned, but I’m sure it was a way to have Waid’s political views in there by identifying Cap with the “virtues of” liberalism.

It really is a sad statement that they didn’t get it was coming from the Skull’s warped view on things, and that the views of a bad guy aren’t supposed to be acceptable. That’s why they’re bad guys.

And though, while I agree he wouldn’t necessarily call his people MASTERS OF EVIL, I wouldn’t necessarily say he sees what he is doing as right and virtuous. As opposed to just about all the other Marvel villains, what made the Skull unique to me was that he was the one guy who really accepted he was evil, and embraced it. His goal was to subject the world to his evil viewpoint. Almost a nihilistic viewpoint, thought not really bent on destruction of the world, but of virtue and good. Magneto thought he was doing right, Dr. Doom thought what was best for Doom was best for the world. But the Red Skull was a corruptor, plain and simple. His pure evilness made him the perfect counterpart for Cap.

I wonder what the general feeling in places like Germany are toward characters like Captain America; icons of the American ideal and with a strong history of fighting Germans; albeit Nazi Germans?

This isn’t showing in the regular CBUL archive list. You might want to fix that.

Is this one true?

I suppose you could quibble about what ‘born out of’ means, but it sure sounded to me at the time like he was giving Wolfman credit. Amazing how perspectives can change and evolve over a 20 year period…

Thanks for that quote. I didn’t know that there was any dispute over the creation of Lex.

For what it’s worth, he never seemed like a knockoff of Kingpin to me (though I didn’t know Kingpin at the time). I always thought he was inspired by Robert Vaughan’s character in Superman 3.

I own a dictionary published in 1978 called “The Super Dictionary”. Aimed at children, is stars the DC Comics Super-Heroes…along with some interesting additions.

For instance Zatanna has been replaced by “Conjura”, and African-American enchantress with the same powers and “backwards speak” gimmick.

She’s joined by several other heroes of Latino, Native American, and Asian ethnicity, none of whom I can recall appearing in any other DC project.

Were they created just for this dictionary?

And are they the most obscure DC super-heroes -ever-?

Oh, Byrne you funny, funny man.
This bothers you, yet you had no problem taking the “Lois & Clark” royalty checks for coming up with LexCorp… especially when Elliot Maggin came up with that one first.

Butbutbut…Brian:

1) the revamp of Vandal Savage you’re describing is nowhere to be found in those two issues you cite. In Action 515-516 Vandal Savage has changed history to become ruler of a dystopic world where Superman is his one-man goon squad.

2) I know there’s advanced planning and all, but 3 years doesn’t make sense.

3) Action 542 (1983) is the first appearance of the Luthor-like Vandal Savage as corporate tycoon whom the world doesn’t know of his misdeeds…which also jibes with the timing of the Luthor and Brainiac revamps.

Whatever source you’re clinging to I think got its issues wrong. The actual content doesn’t conform to your facts.

Gotcha, Graeme!

No, dumb it down and just make him “bad guy” and make Cap “good guy.”

Yech.

Waid’s writing is true to life. Good for him for taking his name off that crap.

Good point, that could well be it, but as this was Page One, it might be a little of both.

Gokitalo, on the post–Crisis retcon of Luthor (and I acknowledge that he’s quoting John Byrne):
1. “[ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, written by Marv Wolfman] was then going to be ACTION COMICS, with a new title created for the team–up book.” I thought at the time that the only reason that they dropped the title of DC COMICS PRESENTS, the Superman team–up book, was the combination of the following factors: they had agreed to give Byrne a new #1 for SUPERMAN, they didn’t want to drop the numbering sequence of the then–current SUPERMAN, and they (then) didn’t want to create a fourth Supes series. Hence, the team–up format went into ACTION. Or was the original plan for what we now know as ADVENTURES to take the DCCP format?
2. The first of Wolfman’s two stipulations: “Either I [i.e., Byrne] accept his proposal in its entirety, or I take nothing from it. He was very insistent on this point: he wanted my promise that I would use nothing from his proposal if I did not take all of it.” Subsequently, John indicates that Marv being willing to drop the Lois–as–Lex’s–mistress part when he himself found it unacceptable was in contradiction to this. However, what he says Marv said clearly means, “Don’t say no then use part of it yourself after I’m out the door,” not, “I do this exactly as I outline it or not at all.” I challenge anyone with no bias to find the latter in Stipulation #1 as put forth by Byrne. Did John’s paraphrasing grossly misrepresent whar Wolfman actually said, or is Byrne simply that dense?

I agree with DanCJ that this dispute over credit for the post–Crisis Luthor is news. But I deny that it deserves to be argued over. At the time (again) I saw the new Luthor as a paraphrase of Marvel’s Kingpin, and every comics fan I mentioned this to agreed the simularities were there. This reminds me of somebody filing a complaint with the Writer’s Guild and getting Gene Roddenberry’s name removed from the writing credits of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, that is, it’s literally not worth fighting for.

The first and rather obvious one is that the German word for “welcome” (the only German word in the entire story?) is misspelled. It’s supposed to be “willkommen.”

The second one is perhaps more subtle, but there is no way that people would have put that particular mix of English and German on a banner in the 1940s. Whenever there was an obvious translation of a foreign name, that’s what people would automatically use. Or, alternatively, if the Germans felt it necessary to greet Caps with his native name, they would simply have translated everything and written “Welcome Captain America.” The tradition with localized names was very strong in Central and Northern Europe until about a generation ago, when it started to get more lax, and today it’s almost completely gone.

If you want to trace history backwards, you can compare this recent German comicbook cover

http://www.parnass.scram.de/neu_07_99/indus2_kleinrechts.jpg

to this one, presumably from the early 1970s, where they still used the German spelling of “America” but someone decided that the word “Captain” sounded cooler if it was in English. (It’s not a literal military rank, after all.)

http://www.meinesammlung.com/user-pics_300/david79/250106121536_AddUt.jpg

and I’m almost certain that in the 1940s anything but “Kapitän Amerika” would have been unthinkable.

1) the revamp of Vandal Savage you’re describing is nowhere to be found in those two issues you cite. In Action 515-516 Vandal Savage has changed history to become ruler of a dystopic world where Superman is his one-man goon squad.

2) I know there’s advanced planning and all, but 3 years doesn’t make sense.

3) Action 542 (1983) is the first appearance of the Luthor-like Vandal Savage as corporate tycoon whom the world doesn’t know of his misdeeds…which also jibes with the timing of the Luthor and Brainiac revamps.

Whatever source you’re clinging to I think got its issues wrong. The actual content doesn’t conform to your facts.

And, really, it is way too contentious (and way too difficult to prove one way or the other) to get into.

From the FAQ section of John Byrne’s site:

[quote]JB: It went like this: Marv Wolfman was offered the Second Chair on the Superman relaunch, to write what was then going to be ACTION COMICS, with a new title to be created for the team-up book.

Marv called me to discuss something he had in mind for Luthor, a “fix” he had been working on in his head for several years. Before he would tell it to me, however, he had a couple of stipulations:

1) It must be all or nothing. Either I accept his proposal in its entirety, or I take nothing from it. He was very insistent on this point: he wanted my promise that I would use nothing from his proposal if I did not take all of it.

2) If I decided I did not like his version of Luthor, he would decline the Second Chair and we would have to find someone else to write ACTION.

I agreed to both these terms, since they seemed very fair, to me. Plus I always like it when all the cards are on the table up front. That’s how I play.

Then he told me his version of Luthor in exactly these words:

“Outside Metropolis, on a high mountain, in his palatial Xanadu-like estate, lives Lex Luthor, the world’s richest man, and his mistress, Lois Lane.” He paused, for dramatic effect, I suppose, then said “See, she’s drawn to power!”

It took me about 3 nanoseconds to say “No.” I said I liked the “world’s richest man” angle, but what he was proposing was more of a reboot of Lois than it was of Luthor, and I already knew who I wanted Lois to be — or, more exactly, what I wanted Lois to be: likeable ! And the Lois he presented was not my definition of “likeable”!

So I said “Thanks,” and suggested maybe there would be some project in the future that we might work on together, and I was about to say “Good-bye” when Marv said “Well, we don’t have to use that part!”

“But you said we have to use all of it,” I reminded him.

“Oh, no! If you don’t like the part with Lois, we don’t have to use it!”

Huh.

So I told him I would think about it, and over the next few days, after discussions with a number of people (including Roger Stern and Mark Gruenwald) who all heard the story as I have told it above, and who had suggestions on what I could do with Luthor as “the world’s richest man”, I decided that basic four-word seed was a good place to go with the character. Of course, since I saw Metropolis as New York (quite literally) I didn’t want any mountains poking up along side the city, so that went away, and I built the character as a cross between Donald Trump, Ted Turner, Howard Hughes and maybe Satan himself!

Later, when everything was launched, and ACTION COMICS had become the team-up book and Wolfman was writing ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (the title was my suggestion, to invoke both the George Reeves’ TV series and the old ADVENTURE COMICS home of Superboy), I found out that he was claiming sole credit for “creating” Luthor. I shrugged it off. It did not seem important enough to worry about.

Years later I found out Wolfman got paid a bonus for his “creation” of the new Luthor. Something that, somehow, no one at DC had thought necessary to tell me about.

After a most unsatisfactory first year of “collaboration” Wolfman’s contract was not renewed, and I took over writing ADVENTURES, with Jerry Ordway doing a fair bit of the plotting.
[/quote]

So while Marv Wolfman did come up with the idea of making Luthor a ruthless businessman, Byrne “built” the character.