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Superman, the 1948 Spencer Gordon Bennet & Thomas Carr science fiction (sci-fi) comic book superhero serial ("A Columbia Serial"; "Rocketing Into A Mighty Adventure!"; "Challenged by treachery!"; "Racing toward doom!"; "By arrangement with National Comics Publications, Inc."; "Based on the Superman adventure feature appearing in Superman and Action Comics magazines, in daily and Sunday newspapers coast-to-coast and on the Superman radio program broadcast over the Mutual Network.") starring Kirk Alyn (in the title role as Superman/Clark Kent), Noel Neill (who later reprised her role as Lois Lane in the TV show), Carol Forman (as "Spider Lady"), Tommy Bond (as Jimmy Olsen; best remembered as Butch the bully from the Our Gang series), Pierre Watkin (as Perry White), Wheeler Oakman, Nelson Leigh (as Jor-El), Luana Walters (as Lara), Virginia Carroll (as Martha Kent), and Ed Cassidy (as Eben Kent). Note that Superman was created in 1938 as a comic book hero, but it took ten long years for a movie to be made depicting him (perhaps moviemakers were deterred by the expensive budget required to have Superman perform his great feats of strength and flying!). This item is from that very first movie, the serial entitled "Superman"! Republic Pictures had tried to make a Superman serial in 1941, but DC wanted more money than they were willing to pay, and they ended up making a Captain Marvel serial instead. Two years later, they made the first Batman serial, and it would not be for five more years before they finally made this serial!
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

Important Added Info: Note that we have provided several images from this pressbook, always including the cover and the poster pages, and of course, the winner of this auction will receive the entire single pressbook we are auctioning (plus any supplements or heralds described above)! Also note that this pressbook is complete and uncut! Given that theater owners received pressbooks partly in order to create their newspaper advertising, and quite frequently cut them up for that purpose, it is rare to find a pressbook that IS complete and uncut! Also, note that a knowledgeable collector believes that Glenn Cravath created the art for this item. However, we cannot be 100% certain. If anyone has definitive proof such as signed original art, please e-mail us and we will post it here.

Note that we are auctioning 74 pressbooks in this Part II of our March Major Auction. 62 of those come from a single collector who was attempting to assemble EVERY pressbook from movie serials that were based on either comic book or comic strip characters, and he spent many decades doing so, and he came very close to getting every one there is! These include many that we have never auctioned in all our years of auctioning, and may well never auction them again! This is a very rare opportunity for collectors to acquire these ultra rare pressbooks (which are even more rare than the posters from these same serials, likely because they were sent to very few theaters, and likely most of those theaters immediately threw them out). If one started to try to assemble a similar collection without purchasing any of these pressbooks, they would likely spend many years before they could acquire even a small percentage of them. That is how rare these are!

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