ABSTRACT
In October 1955, Variety reported that by the end of the shooting schedule for the Adventures of Superman, a television series broadcast during the 1950s, National Allied Publications, the corporate owners of Superman, had $3,000,000 invested in the series (18). The company also had a host of further Superman investments in other media. In fact, by the mid1950s National had developed a highly lucrative production model that saw the company operating across a range of media industries, exploiting particular industrial and cultural conditions that allowed the comic book proprietor to produce Superman texts as components of a larger transmedia story world. Such was the degree of confidence in this model that by the aforementioned date in mid1955, Whitney Ellsworth, the company’s editorial director, boasted: ‘With Superman, I don’t think we can reach a saturation point’ (Variety, 1955: 18).
