Tuesday, July 01, 2014

A Wink from Clark

Reading through the Silver Age Superboy, I noticed how many stories ended with this:




The winks tend to happen at the end of secret identity stories; I'm sure there are plenty of examples in Superman as well.

This is somewhat akin to the "Ending with Iris" bit in the Flash, and the "Bah!" responses from the Joker; a way of letting us know the story is over.

Update: Kirk House points out in the comments that the practice of ending the story with a wink from Clark may have originated with the Superman cartoons of the early 1940s from the Fleischer studios.  Here's the first one in that series, which does indeed end that way:

4 comments:

Kirk House said...

I think that this "wink" routine goes back to the Fleischer cartoons. At least it was often used there... at the very end, when Clark shared with the audience the fact that he was Superman.

Anonymous said...

The "wink routine" also appeared at the end of View Master's "Superman vs. Computer Crook" reel in the late 1960's.

IIRC, it also was a convention in Filmation's Superman and Superboy TV cartoons (1966-70).

Anonymous said...

I remember a letter that appeared in the "Smallville Mailsack," in which a reader pointed out how often Clark or Superboy is shown with one eye shut and wondered if something was wrong with his eye. "Don't you have a sense of humor?" Weisinger replied (somewhat snidely), before explaining that Clark was winking to share a joke with the reader.

I'm sure you could find just as many "wink" panels from this period with Superman and Supergirl.

Jim

Kerry said...

As someone else posted, it was often used by Clark in the New Adventures of Superman/Superboy and in the later versions of that series too (remember Aqualad winking and saying something like "Amen! Eh man?"). George Reeves also did it in the Adventures of Superman episode "The Riddle of the Chinese Jade".