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In their spotlight on bizarrely awesome comics, CSBG shows the time that Clark Kent was expelled from high school to avoid getting a vaccination.
Today, I look at how Clark Kent got expelled from high school to avoid getting vaccinated.
In every installment of I Love Ya But You’re Strange I spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!
As I noted in a recent Comic Book Legends Revealed, this early Superman panel shows the problem that DC was dealing with when it comes to Superman being vaccinated (you have to love how much of a jerk Superman is to the doctor. “No, just keep wasting needles. The 12th time is the charm!”), as Superman’s invulnerable skin wouldn’t ALLOW him to get vaccinated…
Meanwhile, a smallpox vaccination scar was seen as sort of the equivalent of a “vaccination passport” today. Dave Roos wrote about it for History.com:
In the overcrowded tenement districts of cities like New York and Boston where smallpox spread with deadly speed, health officials enlisted policemen to help enforce vaccination orders, sometimes physically restraining uncooperative citizens. Frustrated with the widespread resistance to vaccination, these vaccine squads began to ignore certificates altogether and go right to the source.
“Because certificates could be so easily forged, they’d insist on seeing the vaccine scar,” says Willrich. “Vaccine scars readily served as a physical form of certification.”
In 1901, respected physician Dr. James Hyde of the Rush Medical College in Chicago wrote an editorial urging public health officials to do everything in their power to eradicate smallpox and proposed using the vaccination scar itself as the sole entry ticket or “passport” to civic life in America.
“Vaccination should be the seal on the passport of entrance to the public schools, to the voters’ booth, to the box of the juryman, and to every position of duty, privilege, profit or honor in the gift of either the State or the Nation,” wrote Hyde.
So what about the Man of Steel, or his younger self, Superboy?
According to the letter columns of the late 1960s, Superman used to fake his vaccinations I wrote about that in that Comic Book Legends Revealed, but reader Allen R. wrote in with two great examples of actual stories involving Superboy faking a vaccination!
CLARK KENT WAS EXPELLED TO AVOID BEING VACCINATED
LANA LANG SUSPECTED CLARK KENT FAKED HIS VACCINATIONS
Thanks to Allen for the suggestion! If anyone has a suggestion for a future I Love Ya But You’re Strange, please drop me a line at brianc@cbr.om
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