Yet every time some parvenu publication “discovers” comics, only twenty or thirty years late, untutored and ham-handed editorial twits invariably present the material under idiot headlines of the BANG! SOCKO! WHACK! ilk, reinforcing subliterate stereotypes of a genre that has delighted the rest of the world with our cleverness for three generations.
Every other year in Lucca, Italy, comes October and the town turns into a comic-book festival. The whole town. Guests stream in from around the world. They even issue postage stamps with Prince Valiant and Steve Canyon and Little Nemo on them. In Japan, as common as sashimi are the millions of copies of comic books—called manga—sold every week; some as thick as the annotated Kōbō Abé, read by more adults than children in that most literate of nations, and read as seriously as novels and financial reports. In parts of Africa, Marvel’s ebony superhero, The Black Panther, is looked on as a significant myth figure, in the way Spaniards revere El Cid. In France, comics are held in such high esteem that Metal Hurlant, the graphic magazine, is a bestselling periodical, and the artist Moebius is considered a national treasure.
Ah, but in America, venal televangelists as crazy as fruitbats hold up copies of Miller’s and Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin and scare a video congregation slavering for fresh Satanic menaces (having long since grown bored with the red herring of alleged demonic messages badly recorded backwards on heavy metal albums nobody would listen to without a gun at their head anyway) with assurances that this here now comical book is filled, nay riddled, nay festooned with demonology, bestiality, rampant sexuality and even—whisper the dreaded word—humanism! Yeah, sure; and Mighty Mouse sniffs cocaine…if your head is loose on its bolts.
Everywhere but in the place of its birth, the phenomenon of comics, like the prophet noted in apparently the only book the fanatics can read without the scent of brimstone filling their nostrils, “is not without honor, save in his own country.” For more than a half-century comics in America have been kept adolescent, considered throwaway trash, beneath the notice of “serious” critics of art; paid heed only when the Warhols and Lichtensteins plunder the treasurehouse, self-consciously recasting the innocent and innovative work of creative intellects whose names are unknown to all but an underground of readers, specialty hucksters, Pop Culture academics and wave after wave of bright-eyed naïfs come to work in that slaughterhouse of talent, the comics industry. Their names are unknown to those who stock the Frick and MOMA and the Guggenheim, but not to Fellini, Truffaut and Resnais who constantly pay hommage to the images of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Cole, C. C. Beck, Will Eisner, Bob Kane and Bill Finger.
If those names do not resonate even as clearly as those of Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, or N. C. Wyeth—great American illustrators who worked in mediums popularly accepted and not considered disreputable—then how about these names: Captain America, the Silver Surfer, the Hulk, Superman, Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, The Spirit and Batman?
While your back was turned, while you were busy growing body parts and learning to “interface” with your PC, busy fighting wars and codifying the rise’n’fall of the Yuppie Empire, comic books went whistling past adolescence and reached puberty. They gained adulthood, even as you and I.
In a recent issue of The Hulk, an up-and-coming young writer named Peter David did one of the most powerful battered-wife stories you’ll encounter outside 60 Minutes. Yes, the story featured the tormented Dr. Bruce Banner, whose exposure to gamma rays turns him into the ravening Hulk when he gets angry, but the spur to triggering his transformation was a mainstream examination of machismo, the tyranny of small town bullies, and the brutalization of women.
In the first issue of a marvelous new comic titled The Big Prize, the talented Gerard Jones recasts the Walter Mitty idiom by taking nearsighted, plain-as-soda-water Willis Austerlitz into the wish-fulfillment world each of us has yearned to know: he wins the big prize…a time-traveler from a tv show of the future makes a mistake, lands in our today and awards him the right to visit the past. He goes back to a gentler, more interesting time, the 1930s. Except it isn’t the idyllic dream our memories deliver. It is a time of poverty, racism, the Iowa Farm Strikes, red-baiting. It is the real ’30s, not an adolescent recollection of “good times.”
Antic comedy as rich as Pogo or the best of Dudley Do-Right roils and gushes and overflows the pages of William Van Horn’s Nervous Rex, the primordial saga of a henpecked tiny Tyrannosaurus, whose behemoth of a wife devils his every moment, whose world is filled with mud-flies that deliver one-liners in a Mexican accent, with the saurians determined to debase him, with a world very much like our own, in which we find ourselves often unwittingly acting like Caspar Milquetoast when we know inside ourselves that we are capable of courage and heroism.
Doesn’t sound much like what was going on in comic books even ten years ago, does it?
Those are a mere handful of the creations of a cadre of some of the most innovative, wildly imaginative artists and writers this country has ever produced. Work-for-hire talents who have created a vast body of popular art that constantly struggled against Philistine ignorance and marketplace brutality toward High Art. But Siegel and Shuster’s Superman does not hang in the Museum of Modern Art, and the imitations of Warhol and Lichtenstein do. But the former is persiflage, you might say, as the culture mavens at Art Forum would agree, while the latter has solid claim to posterity.
But consider this: if one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is universal recognition, in all of the history of literature, there are only five fictional creations known to every man, woman and child on the planet.
The urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet, the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is; the widow in Jakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Micawber or Jay Gatsby. But every man, woman and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood…and Superman.
This fanciful creation—in 1933—of a pair of seventeen-year-old Cleveland schoolboys, has remained center-stage in the American mythos for more than fifty years. The orphan from Krypton has appeared in animated cartoons for theatrical exhibition, in live-action movie serials, in a radio series, television series, cartoons for television, novels, hundreds of thousands of comic books, Broadway musicals, appeared on lunch boxes, bedsheets, drinking glasses, as Halloween costumes, dolls, plastic models, and made a star of Christopher Reeve.
But Superman is more than just the fanciful daydream of a couple of kids who wanted to break into comics. He is the 20th-century archetype of mankind at its finest. He is courage and humanity, steadfastness and decency, responsibility and ethic. He is our universal longing for perfection, for wisdom and power used in the service of the human race.
Of all the literary creations of American fiction, out there riding solely on the ability to touch people of all ages and all sympathies, Huck Finn and Ahab, Yossarian and Slothrop, Charles Foster Kane and Scarlett O’Hara, none seems more certain of permanence than Superman. After all these years, born of a “disreputable, dispensable” genre, this Jungian archetype of the hero cannot but get posterity’s nod. And that is because, simply put, he is our highest aspirations in human form. He, and the uncounted thousands of creations in comic books have taught more than fifty years of young people about the eternal verities: courage and ethics, right from wrong, good from evil, the values of friendship and leading a productive life.
The comic books have served as primers, the McGuffey’s Readers, of the masses. The picture books of our strange society. And at last, in just the past six years, it has become clear: intelligent adults, lovers of art, discriminating readers, observers of the forces that shape our culture are rediscovering the comic book. At their best, the new work of Alan Moore, Paul Chadwick, Peter David, Frank Miller, the Hernandez Brothers, Dave Gibbons and Steve Moncuse—and a rage of others—are creating a superior library of serious, entertaining, important reflections of our times,
our dreams, our nobility and our depravity.
As the science fiction movies of the Fifties reflected Cold War paranoia, so do the comic books of the Eighties mirror and interpret our contemporary fears and obsessions. In Concrete we deal with individual identity, the cult of celebrity, the venality of the common man and woman; in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns we suffer the terrors of urban blight, random street violence, and the alleged impotence of the average citizen; in The Watchmen and V for Vendetta we are permitted to extrapolate the menace of multinationals running amuck, government by secrecy, the instability of society in the nuclear age…
But that’s getting ahead of the story. It’s only been since November of 1981, and the appearance of the premiere issue of Captain Victory—the first creator-owned superhero comic in the history of the industry—written and drawn by the legendary Jack Kirby—that the exploitative “plantation mentality” of the traditional comics publishers was challenged. A mere seven years since the emergence of the independents, the kick-in of a royalty concept, the advent of the direct-sales market (brainchild of an unsung hero, the late Phil Seuling), and the greening of a creative arena that permitted the newest crop of talents to flourish, to get comics into print that have swept the medium into the mainstream.
But if you would understand the nature of the chains that are being shattered, come back in time to the days in which those chains were first shackled on. Come back to the origins of the Gulag.
1933. Since the turn of the century, the closest thing to modern comics has been compilations of previously published newspaper strips. Now a New York printing company, Eastern Color, one of perhaps a dozen firms engaged in producing newspaper comic sections as Sunday color supplements, begins issuing books in the modern format—slick covers, newsprint-paper guts in crude color, roughly seven by ten inches in size—as premiums: giveaways for retailers and manufacturers.
A salesman at Eastern named M. C. Gaines notices how popular the loss-leaders seem to be. Gaines is a colorful character: ex-haberdasher, ex-bootlegger, ex-munitions factory worker; a man who marketed We Want Beer! neckties during Prohibition; and the father of Mad magazine’s Bill Gaines. But beyond his flamboyance, he’s canny: he sees how kids seem to clamor for these eight-page tabloids folded down to 32 pages. He tests the market by putting ten-cent price stickers on a few copies and leaves them at two newsstands, just to see what happens. They’re snapped up instantly. So Eastern publishes the first modern comic book, Funnies on Parade; and follows it with Famous Funnies later that year; and sensing they are on to something hot, still later that year go to one hundred pages in Century of Comics.
But these are still reprint books. It isn’t until February of 1935 that the first comic book comprised entirely of original material and continuing characters is published. It is titled New Fun Comics and its parent company is an offshoot of a healthy printing company owned by Maj. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson; he names it DC, short for Detective Comics. You can soon forget the Major, because late in ’37 he folds, and sells some of the DC properties to Harry Donenfeld, who comes to the business with the attitudes of the garment industry—piecework, sweatshop, assembly line—and Donenfeld takes on as an operating partner a savvy accountant, Jacob Liebowitz, who functions as publisher.
I say soon forget, but not immediately forget, the Major, because he plays one additional role in the creation of this eventually multimillion-dollar industry. By 1936, he is using comic strips with titles like “Dr. Occult” and “Slam Bradley” in New Fun, New Adventure and Detective Comics; features written and drawn by Siegel and Shuster. The Major has given the break to the two men who are most responsible for the popular appeal of comic books. Now he passes into the mists of minutiae and we follow Jerry and Joe, those two ex-Cleveland high-school boys who, three years earlier, came up with the concept of Superman.
They’d been shopping the strip. Unsuccessfully. The Major wanted it, but Jerry and Joe were finding him slow-pay and often intrusive artistically. So as early as 1935 Superman was being sent around, even to Dell, the house that eventually would make its biggest splash publishing the Walt Disney comics. And at Dell it was seen by—here he comes again—M. C. Gaines, who gave it a pass. But now it’s December 4th, 1937, the Major is gone, and Jerry Siegel meets in New York with the new DC publisher, Liebowitz. Heed this meeting. It sets the tone for all labor-management relations in the comic book medium for fifty years.
According to historian Steve Gerber (who incidentally is the creator of Howard the Duck): “That meeting resulted in a contract agreement which stipulated that Siegel and Shuster would continue to produce ‘Slam Bradley’ and ‘The Spy’ exclusively for Detective for two years, that Detective would be sole owner of the material, that the creators would be paid ten dollars a page (of story and finished art) for their efforts, and that Detective would have first option on acceptance of any new comics features that Siegel and Shuster might originate.”
Now it’s 1938, Gaines has come over to help Donenfeld get the DC line moving; Superman has grown tattered being shunted around for possible daily strip syndication, but has been universally rejected; Siegel takes it in to DC where Gaines, Donenfeld and Liebowitz look it over and decide to buy the feature and to use it as the lead in their new book, Action Comics.
Liebowitz then sends a release form to the boys that reads as follows:
I, the undersigned, am an artist or author and have performed work for strip entitled ‘SUPERMAN.’
In consideration of $130.00 agreed to be paid to me by you, I hereby sell and transfer such work and strip, all good will attached thereto, and exclusive right to use the characters and story, continuity and title of strip contained therein, to you and your assigns to have and hold forever and to be your exclusive property and I agree not to employ said characters or said story in any other strips or sell any like strip or story containing the same characters by their names contained therein or under any other names at any time hereafter to any other person, firm or corporation, or permit the use thereof by said other parties without obtaining your written consent therefor. The intent hereof is to give you exclusive right to use and acknowledge that you own said characters or story and the use thereof, exclusively. I have received the above sum of money.
The garment center sweatshop work-for-hire mentality comes early and ferociously to the new land, AKA, the Gulag.
On March 3rd, 1938, Jerry and Joe sign the release and lose, for all time, any and all claim to whole or partial ownership of Superman, the creation on which they’ve pinned most of their hopes and dreams for five years.
To forestall any Yuppie denigration of Siegel and Shuster’s acceptance of such ludicrous terms for a property that has netted for DC (by conservative estimates) more than a billion dollars (it is impossible to arrive at even a ballpark figure, even for DC, but a knowledgeable source who continues to work in the field suggests that in just the twenty years from 1960 to 1980, more than 250 million dollars was logged by DC for royalties accruing from Superman geegaws, collectables and tchotchkes), remember that we’re talking about 1938. The Depression was in full swing. Gasoline cost 15¢ a gallon. A loaf of bread was 7¢. If you bought a house and spent $5000, you owned a mansion. In today’s currency, that $130 would be equivalent to two thousand dollars. And don’t forget: these were two naîve, hungry Ohio kids, trying to make a living in a fledgling industry. No one could have imagined what Superman was to become.
In a 1975 press release on the occasion of the purchase of rights to Superman by Ilya Salkind and Pierre Spengler for the first Man of Steel motion picture, a film originally budgeted at fifteen million dollars (eventually fifty-five million), a deal from which Siegel and Shuster never realized a cent, Jerry Siegel wrote, “I can’t stand to look at a Superman comic book. It makes me physically ill. I love Superman, and yet, in my mind, he’s been twisted around into some kind of alien thing.” And that was more than a decade before DC unleashed the arrogant revisionism of John Byrne on the character.
At the time of that press release, Siegel and Shuster were 61 years old. Siegel was working in a mail room in Los Angeles, making $7000 a year. Shuster was legally blind, unemployed, and being supported by his brother. They lived in what historian Gerber reported as “a shabby apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, from which he ventures out only occasionally.”
Today they both live in Los Angeles, and DC Comics, now a division of Warner Communications, sends them an annual stipend…as long as they make no public statements about their history with DC, their feelings about the last fifty years, or contribute to the perpetuation of said sordid history. Needless to say, I was unable to obtain any statements from Siegel or Shuster during the preparation of this article. As their seventy-fifth birthdays approach, fear of retaliation insures that Siegel and Shuster, whose work does not hang in the Guggenheim, will not add to DC’s ongoing weight of albatross guilt.
Nor is there, without verification from Siegel, any way to prove the truth or falsity of the long-standing story that the infamous $130 for the buy-out on Superman was actually money owed to Siegel and Shuster by DC for work previously done; money that was withheld as an extortive spur to their signing the release. This bit of ugliness has circulated in the industry forever, but remains unverifiable, because DC has that press blackout clause in the annuity deal with two elderly, no-doubt-weary gentlemen.
But for those who dote on stories that wallop you in the heart, here are a couple that have been authenticated in the New York Times, the Washington Star, by the Associated Press and on NBC’s Tomorrow program:
The Harlan Ellison Hornbook Page 35