Jerry Siegel...had this very dream-like quality about him, a phantasmagorical sensibility where absolutely nothing was considered too unbelievable or "far-out".
That's Terrrible. PHANTASMON The Terrible, that is... "and his Alieog-laboids". Which, as a matter of fact, is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that. To see that name splashed across the cover of FLY MAN #35 in a big bold caption is fair warning regarding the territory you're about to enter. Welcome to the dreamscape -- you're in JERRY'S world now.
And that's what Silver Age Marvel comics must have looked like to Jerry, from his perspective... not unlike seeing a Silver Age BATMAN comic book through the fish-eye lens of a William Dozier. But Jerry had the genuine ability to just let his imagination wander, no matter where it took him. He had fewer boundaries hemming him in than most adults, which is how he came up with Superman in the first place, and you could still see it in his Silver Age Superman scripts. It probably helped if he had an editor who just let him run with it, and do things his own way. But that also (by way of contrast) says everything about why his Superman concept collected rejection slips for years before Vin Sullivan saw a glimmer of possibility in the idea, and took a chance on it -- most adults (and even some older kids) cannot see the world that way. Oddly enough, Jerry Siegel doesn't seem all that different from Winsor McKay in his ability to commit to the dreamscape.
Jerry Siegel was a member of First Fandom, the first generation of science fiction fans. A lot of them had a similar "sense of wonder", like AMAZING Stories editor of the 1940s Ray Palmer. When you look at the early science fiction stories that inspired them, and look at the first wave of Golden Age superheroes, you can see that unbridled "sense of wonder", that dream-fantasy quality in common with a lot of that stuff. Certainly Basil Wolverton's
Spacehawk and the work of Fletcher Hanks stand out as a monumental examples of what I'm talking about, but it's also the core kernel of what made the Captain Marvel and Marvel Family stories what they were. You can see it in the wildest examples of Jack Kirby's cosmic sci-fi stories, too. From the beginning to the end of the 1960s though, it's amazing how much changed in the general level of what was acceptable (as far as the willing suspension of disbelief goes) to the average reader of comic books.
For me personally, what immediately riveted me about the Mighty Comics Group "ultra-heroes" was just the mere discovery of an entire (unknown to me) universe of superheroes existing beyond DC and Marvel... AND one that had a history going back to the Golden Age (no other companies besides DC, Marvel, and Archie Comics could make that claim in the 1960s). Even though Jerry's reboot of
The Shadow (beginning with issue No. 3, November 1964) as a superhero pre-dated his similar reboot of
The Fly into
Fly Man (beginning with issue No. 31, May 1965), and the two characters never appeared together, they felt like part of the same universe -- and it was Jerry's universe, filled with resurrected MLJ heroes like the Comet, the Shield, and the Black Hood, (who would soon form the Mighty Crusaders), as well as later resurrected heroes like the Hangman (reformed after a brief career as a villain), the Web, the Fox, and Steel Sterling. Jerry wrote the bulk of everything (together with the art of Paul Reinman, a MLJ veteran from the Golden Age, fresh from a stint inking Jack Kirby at Marvel), from
Fly Man #31 through the end (
Mighty Comics #50, September 1967), all edited by Victor Gorelick (still with the company after all these years). Those 20 issues, plus the 6 issues of
The Shadow (#3-8), and 6 issues of
The Mighty Crusaders.
Even then, Jerry Siegel wasn't quite finished with superheroes, and he went over to Western/Gold Key where together with artist Tom Gill, he resurrected the old Dell
Crackajack Funnies superhero THE OWL for 2 issues in 1967-68, and created the one-shot super-heroine TIGER GIRL together with Jack Sparling. Also during this same time period (1965-1969; i.e. the late Silver Age, but after Jerry had become
persona non grata at DC comics again), by some means that isn't clear to me, Siegel made a connection with English publisher IPC, and took over the writing of a supervillain character (he didn't create the character) called THE SPIDER, appearing in
The Lion.
