In 1952, the artist and editor José G. Cruz started a Santo comic book, turning Santo into the first and foremost character in Mexican popular literature, his popularity only rivalled by the legendary Kalimán character. The Santo comic book series (4 different volumes) ran continuously for 35 years, only ending in 1987.
That same year, a superhero motion picture serial was made entitled "The Man in the Silver Mask", which was supposed to star el Santo, but he declined to appear in it, because he thought it would fail commercially. The film was made instead with well-known luchador El Medico Asesino in the lead role, wearing a white mask similar to Santo's silver one. A villain named "The Silver-Masked Man" was introduced into the plot at the last minute, thus the title of the film strangely became a reference to the villain, not the hero.
In 1958, Fernando Osés, a wrestler and actor, invited Santo to work in movies, and although Santo was unwilling to give up his wrestling career, he accepted, planning to do both at the same time. Oses was planning on playing the hero in these films, with Santo appearing as his costumed sidekick. Fernando Osés and Enrique Zambrano wrote the scripts for the first two movies, el Cerebro del Mal (The Evil Brain) and Hombres Infernales (The Infernal Men), both released in 1958, and directed by Joselito Rodríguez. Filming was done in Cuba, and ended just the day before Fidel Castro entered Havana and declared the victory of the revolution. Santo played a masked superhero-type sidekick to the main hero (who was called El Incognito) in these two films, and was not the main character (nor was he depicted as a wrestler in these 2 films). The films did poorly at the box office when they were released, and deservedly so as the films were extremely low budget and not very interesting. Years later however, when Santo's film career took off, the distributors of these two films quietly added Santo's name into the titles. Most people feel Santo's film career really took off in 1961, with his third movie "Santo Vs The Zombies." Santo was given the starring role with this film, and was shown for the first time as a professional wrestler moonlighting as a superhero.
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