During the final year of World War I, America joined the war, and Clark was transferred to Major Ingalls' outfit. He didn't show his abilities as overtly as he did when he was the Colorado of the Foreign Legion, but he seemed to have lived a charmed life....

Meanwhile, on the front, there was a crying need for blood. Many, less fortunate than Clark, suffered in the carnage of World War I. We know relatively little of Clark's year in American service, save a few highlights that Wylie shows us. It's very possible that there was a crying need for blood. The usual manner of transfusion was "live" then, when friends or family members would volunteer to give blood, be tested for compatibility, and then give. In the battlefield, of course, one usually didn't have the family to appeal to.

Given his general compassionate nature, and his seeming own immunity from being harmed, can there be much doubt that Clark sometimes responded? Knowing that no needle could pierce his skin, he created the opening himself. Surely the medics, in turn, would soon learn he was a universal donor, and use him perhaps once a week. Over the course of a year, practically every member of Major Ingall's company might have received blood from Clark.

(At the time, there were no true blood banks. There were "blood depots" started by the English, which under new perservatives could preserve blood for a few days, but nothing like the blood banks we are used to...and appears to have been only among the English in World War I.)

Here is the timing for the developement in blood transfustion around that time:

In 1912 Roger Lee, a visiting physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital, along with Paul Dudley White, develops the Lee-White clotting time. Adding another important discovery to the growing body of knowledge of transfusion medicine, Lee demonstrates that it is safe to give group O blood to patients of any blood group, and that blood from all groups can be given to group AB patients. The terms "universal donor" and "universal recipient" are coined.

In 1914 long-term anticoagulants, among them sodium citrate, are developed, allowing longer preservation of blood.

In 1915 at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, Richard Lewisohn uses sodium citrate as an anticoagulant to transform the transfusion procedure from direct to indirect. In addition, R. Weil demonstrates the feasibility of refrigerated storage of such anticoagulated blood. Although this is a great advance in transfusion medicine, it takes 10 years for sodium citrate use to be accepted.

In 1916 Francis Rous and J.R. Turner introduce a citrate-glucose solution that permits storage of blood for several days after collection. Allowing for blood to be stored in containers for later transfusion aids the transition from the vein-to-vein method to direct transfusion. This discovery also allows for the establishment of the first blood depot by the British during World War I. Oswald Robertson is credited as the creator of the blood depots.

Now note, Superman would later show what his tranfusions could do. A dying Lois Lane was given a transfusion by Clark---and in a matter of seconds was fully recovered. That was in the fourth story of Superman #6.

In a much later story from 1960, but also by Siegel, "Lana Lang: Superwoman!" Superman gives transfusions to both Lana and Lois, making them temporarily superhuman. Although it suffers from the later exaggerations that are true of all the fifties and sixties' stories---still, it may have contained germs of truth. It seems to have been to protect Lois and Lana who Brainiac had threatened to destroy---and the alternative was that Brainiac destroy the Earth---and that Superman himself not intercept the rays or protect the women. Instead, he made them superhuman---temporarily. With the amount of blood he injected into their systems, he could time when their powers would wear off.

Now let us examine another phenomenom. If there is any truth in the comic book stories at all (and remember, Siegel specifically mentions the Justice League in a story) in the late thirties and early forties there was an explosion of superhuman beings. I don't say there weren't any before then...but they were relatively rare.

Why?

There have been several theories proposed. It has been established in some comics that there are genetic factors at work. The "x-factor" enables benevolent mutations, usually manifesting themselves in adolescence, to hit certain individuals, often called "mutants" for short. Examples are Professor Charles Xavier, Henry King/the Brain Wave, Scott Summers/Cyclops, Adam Blake/Captain Comet. This despite the fact that the mutations, rather than being seemingly random, are all vulnerable to the Legacy virus, and tend to hit in adolescence.

This seems to be the more pronounced version of this genetic wild card.

There has also been mention of the "metagene". In comics, many individuals suffer accidents that should kill or maim them, but "luckily" happen to give them super-powers. It was later established that many of them have a genetic link in common, a gene that, when triggered by crisis situations, acts to give some individuals odd powers. Examples are Barry Allen and Jay Garrick, both Flashes, or Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Bruce Banner/the incredible Hulk.

The "metagene" seems to be a lesser version of the "x-factor". With the "x-factor" all you need is the "crisis" of adolescence to trigger the powers. With the metagene, a more pronounced crisis is needed for activation.

We also note that the first generation of superhumans were almost exclusively American, with a very few exceptions, such as Captain Nazi. It was only later, in the seventies', that we started to see a lot of non-American superhumans, and many of them had at least one American parent. For example Ororo Monroe/Storm. Some of the others who popped up around then might have had an American parent or grandparent.

It sounds as if the metagene/x-factor first popped up in America and is slowly spreading to other parts of the world. Still, by far the greater proportion of these are in America still.

One theory is that Superman's rocket, passing over America, may have emitted radiation that affected many unborn children. That's a reasonable one, but one would expect to see more the closer we got to Colorado, and there seems to be no such concentration.

Another possibility is that Clark, in his "Hugo Danner" phase, slept with quite a few women. It's possible that he had some children, but if so, the mothers never contacted him, and if they inherited part of their father's strength, it would make it risky for the mother when her babies started kicking. Many of the superhumans later married, like Scott Summers and Jean Grey, and if they had Superman as a grandfather or great-grandfather in common, it gives a disquieting chance of birth defect...

Besides, many of the first generation of super-heroes have quite explicit pedigrees. We know who their father and mother are, and there is no hint that these are merely adoptive parents on either side.

Now, I have proposed that Kryptonians are actually genetically-altered earthlings transplanted to Krypton. Thus their DNA would have much in common with ours, but also much altered also. In particular, they should be able to tap into whatever vast reservoirs of power Superman can, power much greater than can be gotten from the metabolism of food.

Now, genetic material has been shown to be able to be transferred by viruses, without any sexual contact. If some of Superman's genetic material, his DNA, could be transferred by viruses---especially those in the bloodstream---it could bind with an earthling's normal DNA. Some of the characteristics picked up might be identifical to some of Superman's---vision powers, or strength and invulnerability, or enhanced speed. Yet others might bind with normal DNA in ways unexpected and result in abilities neither Superman nor normal humans have, a genetic "wild card"....

Many of these abilities might be able to tap into those higher energy forces that sheer metabolism of food might not account for. (As I've mentioned before, I favor a tiny amount of the food converted directly to energy...)

A very recent theory proposed is that Kryptonians carried fleets of nanobots in their bloodstream, repairing, strengthening, altering the individual from within. (This wonderful theory was given by Sean M. Breen.) I'm still studying the implications of that, but if that's true, one could see such nanobots doing such direct conversion of energy, travelling with the constantly-manufacturing sperm, lying dormant in an unfamiliar earthly body only to be activated, warped, even mutated under strange circumstances...

At any rate, sometimes the same powers are carried along from generation to generation (examples like Banshee and Siryn's sonic powers, or Jean Grey and Cable's telekinetic powers) and sometimes they warp from generation to generation...(like Charlie McGee of FIRESTARTER, who had one parent who was telekinetic, and another who was telepathic, powers triggered by a drug administered by the government Shop, and Charlie herself was pyrokinetic...or Magneto's children, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who had so-different powers from their father.) Still, we would expect to see those with similar powers in the same family tree...

The timing is suspicious. Only in the generation after World War I, with a few exceptions like Odd John Wainwright (born 1911), were there any examples of any superhumans.

I'm not saying that there might not be other explanations for the superhuman powers of those who appeared from the late thirties' on, but look at this partial list of Major Ingalls' recruits...

Henry Allan.
William Fitzpatrick.
Emil Frank.
Henry Garrick.
Richard Grey Sr.
Daniel Grimm.
Tom Higgins.
Jack O'Brien.
Fred Raymond.
Nathaniel Richards.
Charles Sterling.
Phillip Summers.
Lowell Storm.
Will Terrill.
Ira West.
Brian Xavier.
All of whom were the parent or grandparent to a superhuman. (One might also mention that the records indicate that the medic helped Andrew Blodgett Mayfair during one action...and there is reason to believe that "Monk" Mayfair was the grandfather of the Beast, that his mother Edna Andrews was an illigitimate daughter of "Monk".)

Other factors may have helped "trigger" the powers of these descendents, and it may be sheer coincidence in some cases. Certainly many people born of these---Brian Banner, for instance, or Mary Fitzpatrick Parker, Peter Parker's mother---never developed such powers...that such powers may have lain dormant, never activated.

I think the first transfusion happened in 1914, when another American, who also joined French forces, fell in combat, and implored his fellow American for some blood. Clark, always compassionate, decided to puncture his skin and help his fellow American. He gave a pint to the badly injured soldier, who recovered almost immediately. Nevertheless, because of what he had gone through, William Burns Banner---father of Brian Banner and grandfather to Bruce Banner and Jennifer Walters---was invalidated home. (Both Bruce and Jennifer later were given to tremendous strength, leaping prowess, and toughness...albeit without Superman's speed or super-senses and with both a monstrous form and sometimes a lessening of intellect.)

Yet for the most part, Superman did not give blood transfusions to his "brothers" in the French Foreign Legion, being too busy with the super-deeds that made "The Colorado of the Foreign Legion" such a legend. If he had, the Golden Age of Super-Heroes might have happened in France, not America.

Later, when he was transferred to Major Ingalls' outfit, he met many American soldiers. There were the three cousins---Henry Garrick, Nathanial Richards, and Ira West, all would-be scientists of varying stature who had decided to enlist as soon as America joined the war. (Once, Harry's cousin, the chemist Andrew Blodgett "Monk" Mayfair visited, and during that visit, there was an attack. "Monk" was wounded then. In that same attack Henry Garrick was hurt so bad that Clark did a transfusion to both of them, giving up two pints of blood. Both recovered almost immediately, but Henry had some additional injuries that caused him to be invalidated home.) All of them---including Nathanial and Ira would sooner or later be the benefactor of Clark's bloodgiving.

Brian Xavier,(coincidentally William Burns Banner's nephew by marriage) a young soldier who lied about his age, listened in on their talk of physics and began to dream himself...

The senior medic was Dr. Lowell Spencer Storm. He was aided by the young Henry Allen, a would-be doctor. (Henry was really only fifteen, having lied about his age to the recruiter.) Dr. Storm found out about Clark's odd ability to be a "universal donor" rather early in the conflicts, and that plus his "charmed life"---the fact that he was rarely hurt---made Storm want to use him as much as possible. Both Storm and Allen were permitted to do so, on condition that Clark was allowed to "stick" himself---he claimed he had a bad "stick" once, and ever since then, preferred to puncture his skin himself. They thought it eccentric, but Clark's blood, applied to the nearly-dead, seemed to have almost miraculous healing properties....so they didn't question a gift horse too much.

Storm started asking questions that got more and more uncomfortable for Clark, and then Storm himself got injured in an action, and young Henry Allen arranged a transfusion between Clark and Storm. Storm felt immediately much better, but like Garrick and Banner, had to be invalidated home due to some additional injuries. He never got to write the medical article he wanted to on Clark's remarkable universal donor and healing blood.

Lowell Storm had several children, one of which was Dr. Franklin Storm, the father of Susan and Johnny Storm. Another fathered Axel "Brain" Storm, a superhuman who fought the Justice League.

Henry Allen, though young, continued as medic for the unit till the end of the war, and used Clark quite a lot. It's fair to say that almost every member of the unit got some of Clark's blood sooner or later.

Once Clark's masterfulness got them both in trouble. Two soldiers of a "colored" unit were injured trying to save Clark's company, and Clark insisted, contrary to regulations, that Allen transfer half a pint of his blood to two of them. Major Ingalls gave them both a dressing-down for that, because at the time medical care, like most things for African-Americans, was severely segregated. Clark took the blame for the younger man, and didn't mind it a bit. He thought he had done right, and many would agree with him.

There were other cliques in the unit. Daniel Grimm and Jack O'Brien, coming from fairly poor urban backgrounds, became close friends.

Leonard McKenzie spread the superhuman genes in a special way. McKenzie had joined the navy, but he had reason to be grateful to Clark. He was the unnamed seaman whose life "Hugo" saved in GLADIATOR from the shark on the Katrina. He had kept up a correspondence with the man who saved his life, and when on shore leave, had decided to visit Clark and see if the front was as bad as everyone said. Unfortunately, he showed up during a shelling and didn't reach cover in time. Badly wounded, Clark donated a pint of blood to McKenzie.

McKenzie, a few years later, in 1920, would be in the Antartic where he married a blue-skinned mysterious female who came from the water, who was really princess Fen of an undersea race. A few weeks after their marriage, her father sent a military expedition from their race to get her back. In the fighting McKenzie was badly injured, and Clark wasn't around to give him a transfusion. He was believed dead by Fen, and embittered, she leaped into the sea to rejoin her people.

The sea-breathers were a genetically-altered branch of humanity, and could crossbreed with normal humans. The Princess had a child, Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner. His breathing both air and water was a product of his hybrid nature, but he had super-strength, which neither race had. That was a product of the Kryptonian DNA in McKenzie's blood bonding with his genetic structure. The wings on his feet were a genetic "wild card" caused by the mismatch in some places between the genes...but they were really useless. Sub-Mariner in actuality leapt, and only used the finlike "wings" to determine direction, and to sometimes change his leaps in mid-air.

McKenzie took a year or so to recover, and was heartbroken over the loss of Fen. He knew he would never find her again in the trackless seas around Antartica, and he knew if he did, his fellow humans would try to exploit her race....

To forget, McKenzie travelled the world in ships...and like many sailors, before and after, he had affairs with women on land to forget. Evidently McKenzie was not big on birth control (condoms, in that day). Many of the foreign superhumans were actually McKenzie's children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren. For instance, he got a German girl pregnant. She quickly married a man named Krieger who had been courting her, and the child of the German girl and Leonard McKenzie was Captain Nazi, the super-strong opponent of Bulletman, Captain Marvel, and Captain Marvel Jr. (However, as someone with mostly human DNA, his powers did not really show themselves until he was older, and Herr Kreiger credited it to a "wonder food" he had developed. Nor was he fully a match for Captain Marvel, being only partly "super" due to the mixture of earthhuman and Kryptonian DNA.)

McKenzie had an affair with an highborn Irishwoman, rebelling from her father's stringent rules. She married a Cassidy of Cassidy Keep, but there is reason to believe her two twin sons were MacKenzie's. Certainly the grandchildren, Sean Cassidy/Banshee and Black Tom Cassidy, were mutations with extraordinary powers, as was Sean's daughter, Siryn.

Other of Ingalls' company also family relations that had foreign consequences. The father of John "Steel" Sterling, a policeman, married a Russian immigrant in danger of being deported. The marriage didn't work out, and Illyana Rasputin was deported back to Russia. He married again to the mother of John "Steel" Sterling, before he was shot by gangsters.

Yet Illyana, though neither of them knew it, was pregnant when she was sent back to Mother Russia. Her son Nicolai Rasputin was a farmer, like other farmers in Russia. Yet her grandson, Piotr (Peter) Rasputin, like Steel Sterling, was a mutation who could become similar to living metal. (Steel, after his father died, supposedly developed a serum that would turn his body into steel-like hardness, and later plunged into a vat of molten steel to finish it. It worked...but can anyone doubt that someone as vastly patriotic as Steel Sterling, who fought Baron Gestapo among others, would have turned such a formula over to the US government for use in World War II, unless he tested it afterwards on test subjects----hopefully just animals---and found only he was so changed? That there was something unique about him? The Shield, Joe Higgins, found the same thing about the S.H.I.E.L.D. formula---that for some reason it "only" worked on him, otherwise he would have donated it to the government. In both cases, all the formula did was stimulate latent superpowers the two of them had.)

I suspect Mark Raxton, the Molten Man, an opponent of Spider-Man's, of being Steel Sterling's illigitimate child, by the way...

Speaking of the Shield, FBI agent and chemist Tom Higgins had two sons, Joe and Al. Al was a few years younger than Joe and was adopted by some cousins named Pratt, after Higgins was gunned down by criminals in the late twenties'. Both Joe Higgins and Al Higgins Pratt were red-haired patriotic Americans who developed super-strength and toughness, distinguished only by their height...Joe was average height, whereas Al was only five feet tall at most. Joe's toughness and strength was activated only for a few years before it seemed to "wear off". Al Pratt started out as a costumed athelete, but contact with radioactivity later caused him to manifest super-strength later in his career as the first hero named Atom. Al also became one of the more regular members of the Justice Society.

Philip Summers started out in the infantry, in Major Ingalls' unit, but later transferred to the Air Service, which became his love. (He was later to run a air shuttle service in Alaska.) It was he who lent a biplane to "Hugo" at the end of the war, the biplane Clark never used, where he was intending to invade Germany and end the war once and for all---when the war ended without his final efforts.

Phillip married twice. He first married a woman named Roberta Dickering, but she died after her second boy was born, leaving Phillip with his two sons, John and Robert. Phillip desired to move to Alaska, and Roberta's brother argued against it, that little John and Robert would be safer in New York, with his family. Phillip, restless and a dreamer, finally agreed that John and Robert would be safer in NYC, and thus allowed them to be adopted into the Dickering family.

Phillip married another woman in Alaska named Deborah, and she was the mother of his third son, Christopher Summers, who became a pilot, before he and his wife, Kathyryn Anne, were taken by aliens from the Shi'ar interstellar Empire. (Why did they pick Christopher? Did their sensors detect that he had advanced potentialities and want to explore them?) Christopher never displayed any advanced powers, nor did his half-brother Robert (who nevertheless became a vigilante called the Hangman) but Christopher's two sons, Scott and Alex Summers did, as did Christopher's other half-brother, John Dickering.

John Dickering, a chemist, supposedly found a substance a thousand times lighter than hydrogen, that enabled him to make immense leaps. The buildup of the substance, though, behind his eyes, made him start to emit destructive rays from his eyes that could only be stopped by special glasses. (The only "gas" lighter than hydrogen would be collections of ions, and if he was injecting that into himself, no wonder the Kryptonian DNA reacted, to keep him from being electrocuted---evidently giving him super-strenth in his leg muscles and activating a warped version of Superman's heat vision.)

He fought crime as the Comet for a while, but died, and his brother became the Hangman to avenge his death.

Scott Summers, like his uncle the Comet, developed (as part of a spontaneous mutation in his teens) destructive beams that erupted from his eyes, that could only be stopped with special glasses. He may have also modeled his costume's headgear on the Comet's headgear. He later became deputy/field leader of the X-Men under Professor Xavier. His brother, Alex, would later manifest similar powers, only not concentrated in his eyes, but in concentric circles that erupted over his entire body, and called himself Havok.

Scott later married both Madeline Pryor and later, Jean Grey. Madeline was a clone of Jean Grey, but it was Madeline who had the child who became the time-lost Cable, or Nathaniel Dayspring Summers. Jean (and Madeline's) family line also descended from Major Ingall's company. Their grandfather was Richard Grey Sr., explorer. Richard married a Sarah Jong, sister of Washingtonia Jong (see Olaf Stapledon's ODD JOHN) and had three children, among them John Grey, who became a professor of literature on Annadale-on-the-Hudson. Then Sarah Jong Grey died, and Richard remarried a fellow explorer named Anne. They travelled to Mongolia, leaving John and his two sisters with relatives, and Richard and Anne had a baby while travelling, which they named Richard Grey Jr.

The Greys, unfortunately, were slaughtered by Mongolian bandits, and Richard was found and raised by some condors that the Mongolian bandits had found and released in a caravan they raided, that was bringing some South American condors to a zoo in Asia. Later he was found by a monk, and returned to America as a grown man in the early forties'. He became known as the Black Condor. Like his niece, Jean Grey, he was a mutant who could levitate at least himself, the Kryptonian DNA merging with the earthborn DNA in a way that promoted telekinesis.

This is not to say that other explanations for the powers are now obselete. Matthew Baugh, in his "Super-Powers in the Wold Newton Universe Explained: Part II: Stretching Things" had an excellent suggestion of how "Eel" O'Brien gained his stretching powers...that the formless liquid poured into "Eel" O'Brien's wound was really one of the Founders, the shape-shifting aliens who appeared in STAR TREK as well as---perhaps--- John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" That he in turn may have fathered Ralph Digby, the Elongated Man.

Still, the Kryptonian DNA within him, as the son of Jack O'Brien, might have aided him in surviving where other men would have died from the shock to his system. Certainly Ralph Digby was one of those effected when an alien bomb rendered those with the "metagene" ill.

Reed Richards and several others gained similar powers, without any contact with the "Founders", indicating that it is possible to gain such powers in other ways. Speaking of Reed...

Reed was the son of Nathaniel Richards and his wife, Elaine Zharkov. When Elaine died, Nathaniel remarried and had two other children, Nathaniel Jr. and Tara (later, Huntara of the Fantastic Force). Reed fought with the O.S.S. during World War II, and later went on the fateful rocket flight where emissions from the experimental engine worked with cosmic rays to "trigger" his powers, and in that of his fiance, Sue Storm, her brother Johnny, and his best friend, Ben Grimm.

Nathaniel's second marriage was somewhat unhappy, and before he disappeared in 1932, he had a French mistress that he supported also, a habit that some millionaires of the time had. Through her he had two daughters, born just a year or two before he disappeared. One was Mme. Rouge, who became part of the international Brotherhood of Evil. The Brotherhood's leader, the Brain, examined her blood and saw certain potentialities there, and exposed her to a treatment, that enabled her, like Reed or Plastic Man, to alter her features and elongate her body.

Her sister was a freak and shunned and abandoned by her mother, with reddish hair and bluish skin. She grew up to become the mutant called Mystique, who could alter both her features and coloring to resemble anyone she wanted, able to do naturally (as well as color change) what Reed and Mme. Rouge would have to be stimulated to do---alter the shape of her body.

Assuming another, more normal form, she married a German man named Eric Wagner. Their son was Kurt Wagner, the mutant known as Nightcrawler, the DNA becoming even more mutated with each generation.

Other family trees are being explored, and may appear in a sequel to this article. There were frequently intermarriages between descendents of the original company, who met through their father or grandfather's meeting each other. Yet the transfusion of Kryptonian DNA to nearly an entire company of American soldiers over the course of a year may explain the explosion of superhumans that marked the Golden, Silver and modern age of super-heroes.

PARTIAL LIST OF SOURCES:

Of course, TARZAN ALIVE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Philip Jose Farmer.

GLADIATOR, Philip Wylie.

"Super-Powers in the Wold Newton Universe Explained: Part II: Stretching Things" by Matthew Baugh.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. Superman is owned by DC Comics, Warner Communications, and the Siegels. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.