A new exhibit, "Superman and American Comic Books," opens

Friday at the Jefferson County Museum, 540 Water St., Port Townsend.

To complement the exhibit, Bill Tennent, Jefferson County Historical Society executive director, will present a lecture the same day about "Superman and the History of American Comic Books."

One of the First Friday Lecture series, it will start at 6:30 p.m. in the City Council Chambers of Port Townsend City Hall, 181 Quincy St.

The exhibit will be mounted in the

Collector's Corner, a space in the museum that was created to highlight collections of all kinds, either from the Historical Society's holdings or from individuals in the community to share their personal collections with the public.

The exhibit of Tennent's private collection will focus on Superman with issues dating back to the 1940s.

Stories include the pivotal events in Superman's life such as "Superman's Return to Krypton," "Superman Goes to War," his eventual wedding to Lois Lane and the dramatic "Death of Superman" in the 1990s.

Tennent says, "I collected most of them when I was a kid in the late '50s."I'm just grateful that my mother didn't throw them out when I went off to college."

While mostly devoted to Superman, the exhibit will include other popular superheroes and titles from several publishers including DC and Marvel.

Superman first appeared in Action Comics No. 1 in 1938. Jerry Siegle and

Joe Schuster of Cleveland created him. Siegle and Schuster were inspired by Samson and Hercules, and they designed a costume based on Flash Gordon and a circus strong man.

Superman quickly became one of the best-known characters in the world, featured on everything from bubble gun and underwear to radio shows and motion pictures.

Other superheroes soon followed, and by 1946, 168 comic book titles were being read by 50 million readers every month.

One collector has offered $1.5 million for that first issue of Action Comics for which Siegle and Schuster were paid $130.

The exhibit and the lecture will explore the history of comics, which some collectors would argue goes back to the 1400s, when sequentially drawn narratives first appeared in European culture.

However, most comic scholars agree that the first modern comic books, as we know them, appeared in the late 1800s when "The Yellow Kid" appeared in a supplement to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.

Over the years, comic books have faced many challenges to their popularity from other forms of entertainment.

In the 1950s, the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency questioned Batman's sexual orientation and accused comics of "causing moral and ethical confusion in children's undeveloped little minds."

But comics have survived and grown and changed over the years, and they remain a vital and colorful part of America's literary tradition.

The exhibit can be seen at the Jefferson County Museum beginning March 6 during normal visiting hours, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. daily. Admission to the lecture is by donation.