Here’s a confession; if I have a least favorite Golden Age comic book publisher (and I’m not saying I do), it would probably be Fiction House. For probably the reason you’d probably expect; no superheroes. Oh sure I read the chapter devoted to them in Richard A. Lupoff’s All In Color For A Dime, but only half a dozen times as opposed to the dozen times I read everything else in it. I admit I was intrigued by Planet Comics, especially Lupoff’s description of the serial that ran in it, The Lost World featuring Hunt Bowman’s one man war to take back the earth from the alien Voltamen ( green guys who’s inverted speech patterns predated Yoda’s by decades and inexplicably went around wearing Kaiser helmets).

Oh, they had great titles, Fight, Rangers, Wings, Jumbo (I mean, how cool is Jumbo for the title of a comic?) etc., but at the time you literally couldn’t have paid me to read comics about regular old two-fisted adventurers. Where was the fun in that?

Of course in the decades that have past since then my tastes are a little more refined and I’ve managed to work my way through the pulp of Fiction House’s output…and they’re still my least favorite Golden Age comic book publisher.

Oh I certainly appreciated them, and admired the high quality of the artwork in them by people like Mort Meskin, Matt Baker, Nick Cardy, George Evans, Bob Powell and Lily Renee. But unfortunately the stories and characters (even by Golden Age standards) were pretty bland with repetitive outcomes. Of course none of that’s a problem when it’s a genre you like, but when it’s one that you don’t, well, reading comic books almost becomes like work.

And as much as I love me some jungle girls, Sheena always kind of left me cold; I’ve always been more of a Rulah man (those Fox jungle girls were a whole lot sexier and their stories a whole lot weirder; but that’s another story).

But of course it took a while for Fiction House to develop that formula and early issues of their comics actually had some pretty strange content, including what they considered superheroes. Which brings up to Super-American, a what almost certainly has to have been created to as a ruthlessly cynical fusion of Superman and Captain America.

That being said, it’s easy to make fun of stories like these (and lots of people online doing just that, but I like the art, dig the plot and am left slightly confused by his costume. I mean, what’s the deal with his empty chest insignia? I’d like to think it’s supposed to represent the uncompleted experiment that is America, but what are the odds that’s what his creators had in mind?

So, um, for no other reason than I like it, Super-American.