Superman in Life, but Not in Ace

Here's a two-page spread from the October 14, 1940 issue of Life...

It was part of a story on Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in California. This would have been a little over a year before Pearl Harbor and the subsequent American internment of anybody who looked remotely Japanese. The full article starts off...

The shadow of the treaty by which Japan joined Germany and Italy in military alliance fell more darkly over Washington last week than it did over the flowered fields and coastal cliffs of Southern California. To Americans in the West it sounded a summons for increased watchfulness over the big Japanese minority swelling in their midst.

I can only find one response to the piece in the various Letters to the Editor that followed from the October 28 issue. It refers specifically to the spread I've included above and reads, in its entirety...

In case you can't enlarge the image enough, the photo in the top middle part of that Life spread features three young boys reading a copy of Ace Comics #43. However, the caption says that they're "ignor[ing] papers and magazines from Japan in favor of the U.S. comic strip, Superman." Good eye, Alice Wadsworth.

For the record, that Ace Comics issue is mostly filled with reprints of newspaper strips including The Phantom, The Katzenjammer Kids, Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, Blondie, and Prince Valiant.

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