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A couple of cool locally drawn Danish Superman covers from 1952.

Here's a beautiful, painted cover on the Danish Superman # 2 from 1966 by Spanish artist Jorge Penalva, who did many covers for European publishers back then. It's based on a panel from a story in World's Finest # 145, which is printed inside. This cover has, as far as I know, never been printed in any other countries than Denmark.

Yes, a 6.5 of the Mexican Spider-Man wedding issue sold in the fall for $ 35,000.

They changed the translation because X-Mændene sounds way too gendered in Danish, as 'mænd' is plural for 'mand', which literally means a male, as opposed to the more generic, less gendered 'man' (human) that you have in English. And since the team consists of both men and women the name Projekt X was deemed to be more fitting. This reminds me also of the Danish translation of the classic French sci fi series Valérian, which is not only about Valérian but also his partner Laureline, so when this series was introduced in Denmark in 1975 the Danish editors decided to change the title to Linda & Valentin.

Here you can see how a panel from the Superman story "The Modern Nostradamus", originally published in Action Comics # 125 in 1948, is redrawn into a new, locally designed cover on the Danish Superman # 2 from 1952. And how the panel on the pages inside is altered from its full color US version to the Danish black/white/red version, which is how these Danish Superman were printed in the early 50's. Notice also that the speech balloons and text boxes were redrawn in the Danish edition.

Great books! I translated the second Danish edition of Miller's Wolverine many years later. The second edition has the same cover as the US # 1. Notice that they removed the crossbow on the cover of the first Danish edition. Seeing that Hulk with the first Wolverine also makes me feel all nostalgic, as I remember buying that as a kid and wondering who the heck this 'Ulvemanden' was. Back then I really had no idea who the X-Men were, as they didn't have their own series here at that time. They'd been briefly published here in 1973-74 as X-Mændene but I was merely an infant then, and then they were re-introduced in 1984 as Projekt X. Here's a beat up copy of one of the X-Mændene.

Figured out the cover to # 6 is derived from the first splash page inside.

And then we didn't have any EC until many years later where we had two short runs, Gysertimen in 1987 and Skræk in 1994.

Here, by the way, is the Danish edition of the EC Big Book of Horror. This was published in 1974, and it's the first time we had EC stories published in Denmark, even though Haxthausen had already mentioned them in his book almost twenty years before.

And I already feel deeply guilty about that because the terrible thing is that this book is really difficult to find. ;) I've only stumbled upon it once, and that was when I found my own copy. I was lucky to find it at a flea market here in Copenhagen, though, in a pile of books where the seller didn't seem to know what it was. I did a podcast recently on the moral uproar over comics in Denmark in the 50's but unfortunately it's in Danish so I'm not sure many here would find it meaningful to listen to. If there are a few here who speak Danish you can find the podcast through this facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/vildhistorie/posts/pfbid02CKgi7ksP919U733nbo8eCAR7LUJGpA82W645cbyuMKsC4dnfrpG3mRTcUjrUiVVAl

Some fun Danish Superman books from the 60's with locally designed covers.

And here's a news photo from when comics and a huge figure of the Phantom were burned in Enghaveparken in Copenhagen in the summer of 1955 only a few feet from where I live now.

The influence of Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent wasn't limited to American soil but extended all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to a small country slightly to the north of where Wertham himself grew up in Germany. Namely Denmark where a book heavily inspired by Wertham's was published the year after his by Danish journalist Tørk Haxthausen. The title of the book was Opdragelse til Terror, which roughly translates as something along the lines of Raised to Terrorize, and it landed in Danish book stores in 1955 creating a moral uproar similar to what was seen in America and culminating in an autodafé at Enghave Plads in Copenhagen, only a few meters from my apartment, where jubilant parents would burn their children's comics. Here are some pictures of the book and interior pages with additional information added to each image. In fact, the book was so shaped by Wertham's that it also included examples from EC and other pre-code horror books, even though these had never been published in Denmark at the time. It's a pretty rare book today.

And the first Marvel superhero to ever appear here was Daredevil in January 1967. The cover proudly proclaimed that here was "a whole new superhero from space for the first time in Denmark!" I guess the editors had no idea what they were about to publish. Spider-Man was removed from the cover since he was about to be published here by a competing publisher a few months later.

The first Danish edition to ever sport an American superhero on the cover was Skipper Skræk # 34, published in August 1946. This book included both Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel, in Danish known back then as Atomdrengen (Nuclear Boy) and Atompigen (Nuclear Girl).

And another fun curiosum. The first appearance of the Legion of Super-Heroes (originally printed in Adventure Comics # 247) was printed in Danish Gigant # 16 in 1968.

Superman first appeared in Denmark in a woman's magazine Familie Journalen in 1940-41 with early Sunday pages but that was put to an abrupt end due to the German occupation. After the war he turned up in one of the earliest Danish comics anthologies Kong Kylie from 1948-51, with both daily strips and Sunday pages. Only 3 of these carried him on the cover. Notice how they reformatted the panels to create a half-page as opposed to the full American Sunday pages from the 40's. Furthermore the Danish edition almost solely used red as the only color, as did the early Danish Superman editions from 1950-52.

These locally designed covers were based on panels inside as you can see here (where I've put the Danish editions next to the IDW Sunday pages edition).

Here are some other early Danish Superman covers from the anthology title Kong Kylie 1951.

Thank you. It must have been taken when I was about 8-9 so somewhere around 1981-82, I think. My mother made the costume. Up, up and away!

I've now reuploaded some of the photos so hopefully you should be able to see them now.