The Comics Rack

QUICK!

You're Clark Kent and you must change to Superman immediately!

Where do you go?

Well, if you said phone booth, you would be partially right...

Seems that one of the great misconceptions about Superman is that he always changes from his Clark Kent identity to Superman by ducking into a nearby phone booth: an idea that I thought was first seen not in a DC comic, but in the Sunday newspaper strip in 1942:

A bit of further sleuthing shows, however, that the phone booth clothing swap actually first appeared in The Mechanical Monsters, one of the Fleischer cartoons that appeared in...1941!

The Fleischers used the phone booth in one other cartoon, phone booths figured (sparingly) into the radio show and from there, the idea that Superman ALWAYS changed in a phone booth became so fixed in the minds of the public that it became part of the mythos, even though, in actuality, it was used very infrequently in the comics.

Kind of makes you go HUH?, don't it?