By 1939, the double-barreled triumph of Superman and Batman had knocked the infant comic book industry on its car. The idea that heroes nobody had heard of a few months before could suddenly sell hundreds of thousands of copies was just too tempting to resist, and before long publishers large and small were flooding the newsstands with a cascade of costumed characters. DC had established a new genre with its super heroes, and the competition would be fast and furious.

A rival might come from anywhere, even the same building. Victor Fox, an accountant for DC, saw the sales figures and promptly opened his own office just a few floors away. He hired Will Eisner, later one of the most respected talents in comics, to write and draw a deliberate imitation of Superman called Wonder Man for Wonder Comics (May 1939). Eisner never suspected this might be illegal, but DC did and promptly Sued Fox for plagiarism. "We beat him," says DC's Jack Liebowitz, but Fox didn't even wait for the 1940 judgment and canceled Wonder Man after his first appearance. Fox had some success later in 1939 with the Blue Beetle, who got his strength from vitamins.(Les Daniels, © 1995 DC Comics, Bullfinch Press; p46)

For just as the movie studios had their individual trademarks their way of lighting, their special approach to subject matter by which, they could be identified even if one came in at the middle, so did comic books. National, who produced the D.C. line, was the MGM of the field. It had the great stars, the crisp-brittle lighting, the elder statesman touch smoothly exciting, eschewing the more boisterous effects of its less wealthy competitors. Superman was the best, but the most humorless of the super heroes (befitting his position); Batman was the best, but the most wooden of the masked heroes (a bit of early Robert Taylor there). Neither was quite touchable. They were State Department White Papers of the mind. And National, who issued them, was the government in power.

The opposite extreme was Fox, the Monogram Studios of the industry. Fox had the best covers and the worst insides. The covers were rendered in a modified pulp style: well-drawn, exotically muscled, half-undressed heroes rescuing well-drawn, exotically muscled, half-undressed maidens. The settings, often as not, were in the conventional oriental-mad scientist's laboratory; hissing test tubes going off everywhere; hulking multiracial lab assistant at the ready to violate the girl; the masked hero crashing through a skylight, guns, aimed at nobody, flaming in each hand; the girl strapped to an operating table, screaming fetchingly, not yet aware that the crisis was passed.

Since the covers of Fox books were drawn by good men and the insides drawn by bad men, the hero on the cover could only be connected to his facsimile on the inside by the design of his leotards. Fox, like Monogram, had few stars and a deeply felt plot shortage. It pushed hard on the Green Mask, a slender, inadequate-looking hero who beat up slender, inadequate-looking criminals. While this business of fighting crime within one's weight division had something to recommend it, The Green Mask, somehow, never caught on.

To recoup, Fox made a star of the Blue Beetle, a Green Hornet derivative (in this case, a cop in real life), who, in order to fight criminals outside the reach of the law, liked to dress as a beetle, this being his idea of a symbol that would strike terror into the hearts of evildoers (not the first cop to work outside the law, but one of the few who had the decency to take off his uniform while doing it). As it turned out, and unpredictably, evil-doers were impressed with the Blue Beetle. His sign, the shadow of a great beetle projected into the evildoer's line of vision, struck terror into their hearts. He wore a Phantom-type uniform, with scales-rather unpleasant looking without being impressive. He was a great favorite for a far longer time than he deserved.

Fox titles included Mystery Men Comics, Wonder World Comics, Science Comics, Fantastic Comics-all of them washed out, never looking quite alive or quite finished existing in a mechanical limbo. The good men working for Fox soon moved elsewhere. titles included Mystery Men Comics, Wonder World Comics, Science Comics, Fantastic Comics-all of them washed out, never looking quite alive or quite finished existing in a mechanical limbo. The good men working for Fox soon moved elsewhere.(Jules Feiffer, ©1965, The Dial Press; p29, 30)