#don cameron

[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

BHOC: DC SPECIAL #14

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[judedeluca]

For those who are loving Knights of Guinevere, I'm going to take a gamble and suggest checking out an old comic called Cyberella from the 1990s.

Cyberella is 12 issues long and was written by Howard Chaykin and pencilled by Don Cameron. It was published under DC's Helix imprint, which tried to be the sci-fi equivalent of Vertigo. It was originally called Matrix until the movie came out.

Cyberella takes place at some point in the 21st Century where North America has been taken over by Karoshi-Macrocorp through use of their flagship character Cyberella, who started out as a cartoon called Li'l Ella and before that a child actress named Ella Fiscus who was ripped apart in the 1920s.

The focus character is Sunny Winston, a "Level One Blue Nanostacker" with a better perspective on Cyberella than most. When she's arrested for using unauthorized moves in the Cyberella computer game (which KM uses to monitor all citizens) during her interrogation there's an electrical surge from the recent deployment of Wormhole One which turns Sunny INTO Cyberella. And she has no love to give for her owners as she's forced to fight against the literal hell on Earth they've unleashed.

I can't argue that Cyberella and Knights of Guinevere are truly similar, but the idea of a cartoon character mascot openly rebelling against the people who've gutted and exploited her for control of the world which is now a dump is more than just food for thought.

Fair warning Cyberella leans heavily into the Disney bashing to the point the Walt parody died in a hotel room with child prostitutes dressed like Li'l Ella.

[newearth2]

JSA Related Graphic Novels and Collections for February - March 2026

MR. TERRIFIC: YEAR ONE Written by AL LETSON Art by VALENTINE DE LANDRO and EDWIN GALMON Cover by VALENTINE DE LANDRO $17.99 US | 144 pages | 6 5/8″ x 10 3/16″ | Softcover | ISBN: 978-1-79950-638-6 ON SALE 2/24/26 Before he donned the T-mask, Michael Holt was a grieving genius who’d lost everything. As Michael struggles to find purpose after a devastating tragedy, his journey from despair to heroism takes him from the depths of isolation and selfdoubt to the heights of scientific discovery, all while a sinister conspiracy sets off an explosive chain of events that will rewrite his destiny forever! Written by acclaimed storyteller Al Letson (Monarch: Legacy of Monsters) with stunning art by Valentine De Landro (Black Manta), plus present-day sequences drawn by Edwin Galmon (Superman), this electrifying Year One tale redefines the legacy of a legend! Collects Mr. Terrific: Year One #1-6.

BATMAN: THE GOLDEN AGE OMNIBUS VOL. 3 (2026 EDITION) Written by DON CAMERON Art by DICK SPRANG and JACK BURNLEY Cover by DARWYN COOKE $100.00 US | 784 pages | 7 1/4″ x 10 7/8″ | Hardcover | ISBN: 978-1-79950-767-3 ON SALE 3/31/26 The Dynamic Duo is joined by their greatest ally in their war on crime, Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth! From his very first appearance, the valiant valet proves he will be doing more than just cleaning cobwebs out of the Batcave as he adds valuable insight into cases and shows Batman and Robin that three is anything but a crowd. And the Caped Crusader can use the help, as Gotham is terrorized by familiar villains The Joker, the Penguin, Two-Face, and Catwoman, while a slew of new villains, such as the Cavalier and the Crime Surgeon, make their debut. All this, plus Batman and Robin must battle threats from the underwater world of Atlantis and the far-future world of the 21st century! Batman: The Golden Age Omnibus Vol. 3 collects all the Dark Knight Detective’s tales from Detective Comics #75-92, Batman #16-25, and World’s Finest Comics #10-14 and includes a foreword by iconic Batman artist Dick Sprang.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW 52 BOOK THREE Written by GEOFF JOHNS Art by DAVID FINCH, DOUG MAHNKE, IVAN REIS, and others Cover by IVAN REIS $39.99 US | 488 pages | 6 5/8″ x 10 3/16″ | Softcover | ISBN: 978-1-79950-749-9 ON SALE 2/24/26 Invaders from a ravaged alternate universe, these ruthless beings are on a mission for total global domination…and they won’t let anyone get in their way. As they target and eliminate every hero on Earth in seconds, their victory is all but secured. From the superstar team of Geoff Johns (Green Lantern), Ivan Reis (Aquaman), Doug Mahnke (Batman: Off-World), and more, Justice League: The New 52 Book Three collects Justice League #24-35 and Forever Evil #1-7!

[cantsayidont]

April 1960. In the first 15 years of the Superboy strip, Lex Luthor appeared only once, in a 1957 story in SUPERBOY #59 that showed him as an adult while Superboy was a teenager. This story in ADVENTURE COMICS #271, written by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, completely redefined Superman's relationship with Luthor, showing that the two were about the same age (rendering the 1957 story apocryphal), had first meet as teenagers, and for a time were actually friends.

This story says almost nothing about Luthor's family (about which more would be established later), although Luthor is described as "a recent newcomer" to Smallville, and he describes himself as a farmboy. When Superboy first meets him, Luthor is driving a tractor on his family's farm, which proves fortuitous; a Kryptonite meteor lands in the field, immediately paralyzing the Boy of Steel, but Luthor saves him by using the tractor to push the meteor into a quicksand pit. Afterward, Luthor reveals that he has idolized Superboy for years, calling him "the greatest boy in the world," and explains his interest in science, conducting experiments in a laboratory in his family's barn. In gratitude for Luthor saving his life, Superboy builds him "a modern experimental laboratory" and stocks it with "rare chemicals, some still unknown, which I burrowed out of the ground, at super-speed!"

Superboy jokes, "I could easily peek at your formula with my super-vision-- ha, ha-- but I wouldn't do anything to... er... snoop!" Luthor replies, "Of course, you wouldn't... ha, ha!" Superboy then flies away, as Luthor marvels at his good fortune. Then:

Later recaps of this story (with the notable exception of Elliot S! Maggin's 1978 prose novel SUPERMAN: LAST SON OF KRYPTON) tend to omit or skim over the details of Luthor's experiment, but this is obviously quite significant: Luthor has created a living being, a crude protoplasmic entity. Naturally, he's ecstatic, and grateful to his benefactor for making this possible:

Then, disaster:

This story is often mocked for attributing Luthor's bitter, violent enmity toward Superman to the loss of his hair, but as these panels make clear, that is expressly not the only thing Luthor is angry about, nor even the most important one:

Superboy's contrition notwithstanding, this is a pretty reasonable thing for Luthor to be angry about: He created a living creature that is now destroyed because Superboy tried to put out a chemical fire by blowing on it. The loss of his hair, aside from the social impact of being rendered permanently bald at the age of 15, is also a reminder of Luthor's more consequential loss. In the LAST SON OF KRYPTON novel, Maggin describes his reaction like this:

He would never grow hair or a beard again. He would laugh or cry or become enraged when pansy philosophers wondered, in the future, whether laboratory life could have a soul. He knew that such life would have no less than the soul of its creator. Lex Luthor chose, from the moment his creation died, to hate the being who had saved his miserable life, who was responsible for the loss of his brown curls and his child. It was the only way he could walk slowly, one millimeter at a time, from the abyss of madness.

Written 18 years later for a different audience, Maggin's prose version is more emotionally charged than Siegel's, but it's mostly quite consistent with the original account, although Maggin doesn't mention the paranoia that's evident in this story. Luthor's insistence that Superboy deliberately sabotaged him out of envy is irrational, but not wholly without basis; Superboy's response to the fire (which he should have immediately known was a chemical fire, since he was the one who stocked the lab) was not at all sensible, and Luthor has paid a heavy price for it.

Luthor pretends to calm down, but he then retrieves the Kryptonite meteor and attempts to use it to kill Superboy, which fails, ironically, thanks to the last dregs of Luthor's Kryptonite antidote. Afterward, Luthor challenges Superboy to arrest him, but Superboy refuses, declaring, "No! You saved my life once! Now we're even!" Then:

(I believe the final panel of this story may have been the first time that Luthor had ever been given a first name; his earlier appearances, and some after this, just referred to him as "Luthor.")

At first blush, Luthor's protoplasmic creation is an odd feature of this story, which is probably why it was often dropped from subsequent accounts. However, it's tempting to see it as a kind of echo of Siegel's own feelings. It was Siegel who had first conceived the idea of Superboy in the mid-1940s, and the character was a significant factor in Siegel and Shuster's first unsuccessful lawsuit against National-DC over the rights to Superman in 1947. According to Les Daniels (in SUPERMAN: THE COMPLETE HISTORY), Siegel had intended Superboy to be quite different, a kind of mischievous super-brat, but editor Whitney Ellsworth hadn't liked that, and had had Don Cameron rewrite Siegel's initial script (for the story published in MORE FUN COMICS #101, pictured below) without Siegel's knowledge or approval, an unwelcome reminder that Siegel and Shuster didn't really have control of their creation. (DC now officially credits the story solely to Siegel and Shuster, although that may reflect the outcome of their most recent settlement with Siegel's family.) After the failure of their lawsuit, Siegel and Shuster were shown the door, although a decade later, editor Mort Weisinger hired Siegel as a freelance scriptwriter for a while. Much of that would probably have happened anyway (Siegel and Shuster were also unhappy that their work was diminishing as National was raking in money on Superman adaptations and merchandise), but Superboy was certainly one of the catalysts.

Mort Weisinger, who was notoriously brutal with talent and staff and had a low opinion of many of the writers and artists who worked for him, called Siegel "the most competent of all the Superman writers" and "the best emotional writer of them all." One of the reasons for that was that Siegel put a lot of himself into his stories, and in this respect, his relationship with Superboy was not unlike Luthor's in this story: He had created something crude but vital, with enormous possibilities, and Superboy had effectively destroyed it.

Besides Maggin, one of the few later creators to remember the actual details of this story was, surprisingly, John Byrne, who incorporated it into his origin of the post-Crisis Supergirl. In SUPERMAN #22 (October 1988), the final issue of Byrne's run, Superman learns that Supergirl is really a protoplasmic matrix, an artificial life form created by the Lex Luthor of the Pocket Universe in the image of his world's late Lana Lang. (In the Pocket Universe, Luthor didn't arrive in Smallville until after Superboy was dead, so the accident depicted in the Siegel story never took place, and Luthor completed his protoplasmic experiments in Superboy's own lab.) This is why that version of Supergirl, whose powers included the ability to change shape, was subsequently called "Matrix."

[p-c-ba-dcforever]

December's marks 80 years of the first Lady of the All-Star Squadron, Liberty Belle! Let's celebrate her with a bunch of DC greats!

[ufonaut]

No use going to a lot of trouble when this way’s more efficient, and... look out!

Johnny Quick & Tubby Watts in World’s Finest Comics (1941) #224

(Don Cameron, Ralph Mayo)

[i-r-readcomics]

Superman

Volume: 1 #30

Superman Alias Superman

Lois Lane: "The Arch-Swindler"

The King's Substitutes

The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk!

Writers: Don Cameron, Bill Finger, Jerry Siegel

Pencils: Ira Yarbrough, Ed Dobrotka

Inks: Stan Kaye, George Roussos, Ira Yarbrough

Colours: Liz Berube, Anthony Tollin

Covers: Jack Burnley

Featuring: Superman (Clark Kent), Lois Lane, Mister Mxyztplk

DC

[dynamic-duo-deposit]

(Batman v.1 #37)