Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  The intricate pop-Zoroastrian theology of the comic books that Jack Kirby drew at DC Comics in the early seventies (in which Mister Miracle, “Super Escape Artist,” figured prominently) is wonderful, nutty, and hard to summarize. For now I’ll just say that Big Barda, commander of the Female Fury Battalion, was born and reared for a life of perpetual combat on a world called Apokolips by a Dickensian harridan with the cruel-irony name of Granny Goodness. Barda dressed in elaborate armor of dark blue scale mail with a vaguely pharaonic battle helmet, and she carried a fearsome chunk of hardware (admittedly somewhat ambiguous from the Freudian point of view) called a Mega-Rod. As for her eponymous immensity, it was not merely physical; everything she did partook of the bigness that was the essence of her character. She spoke in exclamations and displayed Rabelaisian appetites for food and drink. She was brusque, sardonic, hot-tempered, and did not endure patiently the doubts and tergiversations of anyone less intelligent or quick to seize the moment than herself. And to my knowledge, she was the first superheroine in the history of comic books whose personal courage, moral integrity, and astute intelligence, though they pervaded all her actions, were most joyfully expressed through her willingness, when necessary, to kick ass.

  Say superheroine and most people, I suppose, will think of Wonder Woman. With the possible exception of Supergirl, she is certainly the best known, or maybe it would be more accurate to say the most recognizable of costumed comic-book females. Wonder Woman is strong, and buxom and noble-intentioned, and when necessary she, too, has never hesitated to knock some heads together. When I was a boy, she was, as she remains to this day (because of her ancillary trademark value as a superficially feminist icon), a star in the firmament of DC Comics, far more important than Big Barda could ever hope to be.

  Now, I have heard some women say over the years that growing up they liked Wonder Woman (an affection that says less about the character, I think, than about the thirst and adaptability of young girls seeking female heroes in the relative desert of comic books). But she never came anywhere near reconfiguring, like Barda did, the erotic topography of my brain. (Of course, Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman (ABC 1975–76, CBS 1977–79) is another matter entirely.)

  Wonder Woman’s story just never added up. It made no narrative sense. Her motivation, her purpose in life, her relations to men and their world had been formulated and reformulated by a succession of writers over the years without ever growing any clearer. We were told that she was an Amazon princess of misty origin, a demigoddess, heiress to Hellenic splendor and daughter of Queen Hippolyta herself, and yet she dressed in a costume that appeared to have been aired previously by a burlesque dancer at the Gayety in Baltimore, Maryland, on the Fourth of July 1933. I learned from my reading of Jules Feiffer’s seminal The Great Comic Book Heroes that the early stories, which I read in cheap reprints, had been accused of promoting low morals, and I had noticed that they did seem to feature a lot of scenes of Wonder Woman tying people up or being tied up herself. But at the age of nine, I didn’t get what that was all about. I still don’t, come to think of it. At any rate, Wonder Woman had abandoned bondage and domination nearly a quarter of a century before, her magic golden lasso of compulsion the only surviving trace of those wild days.

  This lasso formed one third of Wonder Woman’s essential toolkit, along with her bullet-scattering bracelets and her invisible airplane. What any of these had to do with Greek mythology, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or one another, only the late Dr. William Moulton Marston, her creator, knew for sure. A lasso! An invisible airplane! Even her secret identity, Diana Prince, felt gratuitous, unlived—she might have abandoned it at any time without cost to anyone, least of all herself. Rooted in mythology, Wonder Woman never generated any mythology of her own; she contradicted herself without struggling against or embodying those contradictions; in other words, she had no story. Only a narrative—only a woman with a narrative—can truly engage the erotic imagination. Everyone else is just a pinup.

  Supergirl, then. She was Superman’s cousin, it may be recalled, Kara El, born and raised in Argo City on the planet Krypton. She was a blonde, well constructed (all superheroines must be well constructed). Always a tad on the perky side, to my way of thinking. She looked nothing like her older cousin; what she looked like was the classic shiksa as envisioned by Jewish men of the day. She had all the classic shiksa accoutrements: a Super-Cat, a Super-Horse, a girlish Super-Room of her own. She hung out with the clean-cut, earnest teenagers of the future—they came from all over the galaxy, and yet they were all goyim—at the thirtieth-century headquarters of the Legion of Superheroes. She wore, one sensed, a formidable brassiere. But Supergirl had more soul than Wonder Woman. It was a sisterly, Laurie Partridge brand of soul: chipper, maybe, but tinged with parental loss. She had the tragic Superman streak, the central existential knowledge that her mighty powers derived from her greatest sorrow.

  At the same time, Supergirl constituted a betrayal of one of the key elements of the Superman myth—that he was the sole survivor of a destroyed world, the eternal orphan. Inevitably, perky and ample as she might be, Supergirl cheapened the drama of Superman. She gave off a whiff of exploitation, of endless writers seeking endless variations on a theme. She had the elements of a narrative, but it was largely a borrowed one, an echo of that of her superfamous cousin. She did not possess her own mythology so much as belong to Superman’s, right along with Krypto, and the Phantom Zone, and Bizarro, and the City of Kandor in its bottle. She was, finally, ancillary, inferior, a kid. She was not Super woman—there was apparently no room for a Superwoman. She was all-powerful, yet she did not command.

  Across town and in another universe, at Marvel, the pickings were, to be honest, probably worse. It took Marvel Comics years to begin to put together any worthwhile superheroines. To a gal, the first crop was embarrassingly disappointing. They had all the measly powers that fifties and sixties male chauvinism could contrive to bestow on a superwoman. For example, one of these ladies could make herself very, very small. Another could render herself invisible whenever she chose. Several employed witchery or some enhanced form of women’s intuition. One was the black widow type and knew karate. And so on. It was not until a character called the Valkyrie came along in the seventies that a Marvel Comics heroine established herself as entirely her own woman, no one’s wife or sister or daughter or girlfriend, no one’s archenemyess. The Valkryie’s winged horse, Aragorn, you suspected, would have wiped the floor with Supergirl’s fussy, effeminate Comet. A few years after the Valkyrie, a sword-swinging, fiery barbarian named Red Sonja came along, brought to more vivid life than any preceding superheroine by artist Frank Thorne during a glorious eleven-issue run. As I look back, I see that the 1970s were a pretty good time for Amazons.

  I guess it was inevitable that comic book writers and artists, looking for source material, would turn now and then to the Amazon. That was the archetype underlying the very first superheroine (though come to think of it, Wonder Woman’s problem all along was that she never lived up to her Amazon billing), and from time to time in the history of comics—though not very often—independent, freebooting heroines like Sheena the Queen of the Jungle popped up: tough and strong but, more important, beholden to no one. Sheena, the Valkyrie, and Red Sonja were unencumbered by any glasses-wearing, steno-pad-carrying secret identity. There was no unwitting, patronizing lunk of a boyfriend or super-date, no repressive cover story to get tangled in. They did not shy from a fight—on the contrary, they relished conflict. And they demanded to be treated as equals, to whatever extent their mostly male writers and artists were willing to grant. As fond as I may be of this type of character, I’m obliged to concede that the Warrior Woman is, in its way, as sexist a cliché as Shrinking Violet (tininess) or Phantom Girl (insubstantiality) or Light Lass (rendering any substance to the condition of fluff).

  This is where Big Barda comes in.

  Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg in New York City in 1917) was a bit of a ma
dman, a cultural magpie, self-taught, movie-crazy. He grew up scrapping on the Lower East Side. He had seen tough service under Patton. The harshness of the world and the wonder of the movies mingled freely in the comics that he drew. As he got older, his vision turned darker and darker, and his sense of the indifference of a hostile universe to human fortune increased. More and more in his work at Marvel during the late sixties, vast primal forces of Good and Evil fought a perpetual war to whose combatants our earth was at most a bystander, at worst a worthless speck of dust. This endless warfare, this broken universe, left a heavy mark in Kirby’s work on human beings. It took strong people to stand up to it. Kirby’s people grew more and more massive, statuesque. They strode across the panels like tragic Shakespearian giants, beset all around by men and creation, crackling with energy bolts. When they slammed into walls and buildings, the walls and buildings fell down. It was out of this late-Kirby world of grandeur and conflict and sorrow over the brokenness of the world that Big Barda came, brandishing her Mega-Rod.

  Barda was up to the fight—any fight and then some. The world of fire that she was born into and the way she was raised had obliged her to learn to be strong, vigilant, resourceful, and submissive to no one. But her intelligence told her that conflict is a waste, of life and time and energy, and she regretted it. She had her own narrative—a history of sorrow, hardship, and achievement—and though it constituted only one part of the larger mythology of Kirby’s epic, it was her part; she had earned it. She saw the wrongness, the wickedness, the unreasoning cruelty of the world, and though she had been trained to withstand it, her heart rebelled. Mighty, she used her strength and risked her freedom to help the weak. In time she would mutiny against the might-makes-right strictures of her home and attempt to form a partnership of physical and intellectual equals—with Mister Miracle, her paramour, the love of her life. In his company, in rare moments of quiet, she doffed her armor, laid down her Mega-Rod, and made him a gift—both of them knowing full well its value—of her vulnerability, her sorrow, the pain of her childhood and youth. She was a Valkyrie with a brain and an aching heart.

  Kirby biographers and scholars generally agree that in her substantiality, Big Barda was modeled on a nude spread in Playboy of the actress Lainie Kazan; but in her substance, on the late Rosalind Kirby (née Goldberg), Jack’s wife of fifty years.

  This brings me to the real subject, or object, of these ruminations. After discovering Big Barda, I could never be happy with the run-of-the-mill heroines I encountered in my life, whether they were Amazons or Violets or wasps or invisible girls. Then one night I met this woman who was not—not at all—Big. Five feet tall, she generally went about unarmed. She had been raised not in the suicide slums and battle orphanages of Apokolips but on the maple-lined streets of Ridgewood, New Jersey. It was tough on her; she had been encouraged, like most girls at the time, to learn to shrink, to be witchy, to turn herself invisible. She was pretty much the proverbial slip of a girl—a size zero—but she had, I saw at once, an inner Bigness. Like Barda, she did not suffer fools gladly. She did not carry a Mega-Rod; she didn’t need one. She had plenty of narrative; sometimes it seemed that she was all narrative, stories and incidents and catastrophes and triumphs, like Churchill’s definition of history, one damn thing after another. From time to time the frenzy of battle came upon her, and then the walls and buildings started to rock and crumble. In short, I had never met anyone more fit to command the Female Fury Battalion. Now that passing time, hard-earned wisdom, four pregnancies, and I have all conspired to free her from the cruel-irony dietary and body-image regimes of the Apokolips in which we raise our young women, I think she would fill out pretty nicely, given the opportunity, whatever mad armor Jack Kirby could dream up.

  It’s traditional in Jewish homes on the Sabbath for a husband to chant the poem called Eshes Chayil, “A Woman of Valor.” In ancient biblical language, he praises her, articulating a litany of true womanly virtues: strength of body and mind, compassion, resourcefulness, reliability, artfulness. He praises her costume and her readiness for righteous battle. “She girds her loins in strength,” he says, “and makes her arms strong.” Every week, in every home—traditionally—every husband affirms this central truth to every wife: that she is, as that great Jewish mythographer Jack Kirby understood, his Big Barda. Alas, the chanting of this poem is not, I’m sorry to report, a tradition that my wife and I observe. These words will have to serve instead.

  [ VII ]

  I recently read in a news report that Voyager 2 is about to pass through our sun’s termination shock. I’m not sure what that means—something to do with the limits of the solar wind and the entry into the interstellar medium that fills the space between stars—but it struck me because I’ve been thinking a lot about the two Voyager probes. I happened to listen to a podcast of WNYC’s wonderful Radiolab program not long ago, an episode devoted to contemplating the romance and the grim realities of space travel. Into the latter category Radiolab’s hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, placed impossible distances, unbearable extremes of temperature, implacable laws of gravity and time, and the likely rarity and fragility of spacefaring civilizations. To supply the romance, they presented a woman named Ann Druyan. She had been one of the members of the team that NASA recruited back in the mid-seventies to assemble the sounds and images encoded on the famous Golden Record that was carried on board Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 as a greeting to the galaxy and (necessarily, given the relatively slow pace of travel) as a message to the future. You know the one: whale songs, Brandenburg concertos and didgeridoo, thunder and rain, human heartbeats, and the synaptic crackle of an EEG. Druyan described how the shared sense of intimate grandeur and the freewheeling spirit she experienced while working to produce the Golden Record encouraged her to fall in love with, and eventually marry, one of her colleagues on the project. She revealed that the brain-function and circulatory sounds of a human being featured on the golden disc that NASA sent out into the endless emptiness, now traveling at a rate of 38,000 miles per hour toward the far-flung neighborhoods of the stars AC+79 3888 and Ross 248, were those of her own living body. They were recorded, she told Radiolab, more or less on the day she discovered she had fallen utterly and helplessly and giddily in love with that colleague, the project’s originator, Dr. Carl Sagan. Her heart and brain; their efflorescing love; and the greetings of an entire planet lobbed with the glee of a paperboy across a trillion miles of space that may be home to no one at all.

  Dr. Sagan appears to have been a bit of a pothead, and some have looked at the vast, brilliant, loopy, complicatedly simple interstellar communication schemes he adumbrated during the late sixties and seventies and concluded that marijuana must have been part of the impetus behind them. Intuitively, I feel both the merit and the injustice in this conclusion, for, like the grand schemes of Dr. Carl Sagan, I am myself a child of the 1970s. Toward the end of the summer of 1977, when in turn two Titan III rockets lifted Voyagers 1 and 2 into orbit and sent them on their arcing slingshot courses across the solar system, I was fourteen years old, and my favorite item of clothing was a T-shirt purchased on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland, that depicted a square-rigged galleon in full sail across a sea of space out of whose misty distance there emerged the supernova eyes and nebular bosom of an intergalactic babe. My favorite novel was Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven, in which a genetically lucky female flower child and a youth-drug-addicted, world-tripping old man become lovers and uncover (among other secrets) the hidden history of humankind while exploring a ring-shaped artificial “planet” a million miles in diameter. My favorite comic book was Jim Starlin’s Warlock (1975–6), whose hero was a star-faring, all-powerful, golden-skinned loser trapped in a mutually self-destructive yet strangely empowering relationship with a vampiric gem embedded in his own forehead. It would be another few years before I got involved with marijuana, but when I did, all that I ever found, in a way, was more of what I had already known: that everything, if you stopped t
o think about it, was, like, cosmic, even—if not especially—the power of sex and love.

  There is no more useless activity than that of periodization, the packaging of history, in particular cultural history, into discrete eras—the Jazz Age, the Greatest Generation, the Eisenhower years, the Sixties. Such periods can never be honestly articulated without recourse to so many demurrals and arbitrary demarcations, and the granting of so many exceptions, as to render them practically useless for any kind of serious historical purpose. In times of supposed license, repression reigns freely all around; in eras renowned for their conventionality, oddballs and freaks hoist their banners high. And yet when I heard the gifted and intelligent Ann Druyan wondering, fervently but not without a sense of her own goofiness, if perhaps ages hence some technomagical future alien race might be able to reconstitute, from the record of her brain waves, her feeling of incipient passion for her man and for the work they undertook together, as equals, partners, and lovers—to re-create the sense of how it felt to be Ann Druyan on an afternoon in New York City during those infatuated, boundary-breaking, termination-shock-crossing years—I knew that I was listening, carried as by a lonely probe across the distances, to the voice of the 1970s.

  If we are conducting our lives in the usual fashion, each of us serves as a constant source of embarrassment to his or her future self, and by the same formula, all “eras” can be made to look ridiculous in retrospect. But the seventies have always been prone to more ridicule than their twentieth century cousin-decades, without anyone giving sufficient notice to the fact that it was the seventies themselves that originated the teasing (Annie Hall, Nashville, the Me Decade, “You’re So Vain”). It required no retrospection for the occupants of the zone now understood as the seventies to acknowledge the goofiness in all their pieties and solipsisms, and it is a mark of our own naïveté (at least) to suppose that a straight-faced young tax attorney going out on a Saturday night in 1974 wearing platform boots, glitter mascara, and his hair combed up into a two-foot Isro, for example, did not realize that he looked pretty silly. It’s just that looking like a fool was correctly understood to be a likely if not an inevitable result of the taking of risks. The sense of liberation that resulted from such risk-taking, however conventionalized or routine it became, was felt for a little while to be well worth the price in foolishness. We are crippled in so many ways today by the desire to avoid fashion mistakes, to elude ridicule—a desire that leads at one extreme to the smiling elisions of political candidates and on the other to the awful tyranny of cool—that this willingness to be foolish is hard for us to sympathize with or understand. In this age of Gawker.com, we have forgotten the seventies spirit of mockery that smirks at the pretensions and fatuities of others in a way that originates with and encompasses ourselves. Atom for atom, we are made of exactly the same stuff as all the stars and galaxies. That is one of the cosmic, Warlock-worthy facts that I learned in the seventies. If you drop the S in cosmic, you arrive at the understanding that vanity, pomposity, and foolishness are at once communal and individual, like stardust. And so are our aspirations and our longing, somehow, to survive. The personal is political was a mantra of seventies feminism, but the spirit of that age, embodied perfectly in the interstellar voyage of Ann Druyan’s amorous EEG, might be more accurately summarized as The personal is universal, or The personal is fucking cosmic, baby!