The Superhero Reader
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Weiner, Robert G. Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.
Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Wilson, 1954.
Witek, Joseph, ed. Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Worcester, Kent. “Superman, Philip Wylie, and the New Deal.” Comics Forum, no. 6 (1994).
Wylie, Philip. A Generation of Vipers: A Survey of Moral Want and a Philosophical Discourse Suitable Only for the Strong and a Study of American Types and Archetypes and a Signpost on the Two Thoroughfares of Man. New York: Farrar & Reinhart, 1942.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2008.
THE SUPERHERO READER
Section One
HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS
ALMOST ALL SUPERHEROES HAVE AN ORIGIN STORY: A BEDROCK ACCOUNT OF the transformative events that set the protagonist apart from ordinary humanity. If not a prerequisite for the superhero genre, the origin story is certainly a prominent and popular trope that recurs so frequently as to offer clues to the nature of this narrative tradition. To read origin stories about destroyed worlds, murdered parents, genetic mutations, and mysterious power-giving wizards is to realize the degree to which the superhero genre is about transformation, about identity, about difference, and about the tension between psychological rigidity and a flexible and fluid sense of human nature.
As Gerard Jones notes, comics historians are “always in quest of origin stories” of a different sort. When surveying the superhero genre, preliminary questions often turn to the problem of roots: What are the origins of the genre? Who was the first superhero? Why did superhero comic books start flourishing in the late 1930s? How did the early cartoonists who worked on the genre see themselves? In what ways did the politics of the era influence superhero comics? What was the audience for superheroes? How did fans interpret the genre? All these questions are taken up in this section focusing on historical considerations.
The search for the origins of the genre has often been frustrated by the murkiness of the genre’s definition. One school of thought sees the superhero as rooted in perennial human impulses to create mythological stories. By this logic, ancient gods like Hercules and Zeus should be roped into the superhero genre. Such a broad definition, however, divorces the genre from its historical context and creates a category that is too large to enable precise analysis.
In his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, Peter Coogan brings a welcome taxonomic rigor to this debate. For Coogan, the superhero is defined by three core constituent elements: mission, powers, and identity. In the classical superhero story, the mission has to be a prosocial one, the powers above those of ordinary humans, and the identity a double one including a private civilian self distinct from the public heroic avatar. Coogan acknowledges that the superhero has precursors in the mystery man genre of popular fiction (with protagonists such as the Scarlett Pimpernel, the Lone Ranger, and the Shadow) as well as the tradition in science fiction of the superpowered posthuman. Still, Coogan insists that all the defining features of the superhero genre didn’t come together until the creation of Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the mid-1930s, culminating in the publication of the first Superman story in Action Comics #1 (1938).
In the excerpt from his book Superhero that begins this section, Coogan looks at precursors to the superhero genre in comic strips and comic books, developing a formalist argument as to why the superhero genre is particularly suited to the comics medium (though also acknowledging that computer-generated imagery has recently enabled the genre to make a more successful transition into film). One might question whether Coogan’s quest for an airtight definition of the superhero doesn’t have the effect of downplaying the messy borders that always surround genres as social phenomena. The superhero genre didn’t just emerge out of the mystery man story and science fiction but also continued to interact with these genres and with many others as well.
In his book Men of Tomorrow, Gerard Jones complicates our sense of the genre’s origin by placing it in a biographical and social context, highlighting the impact of sometimes overlapping social milieus that include Jewish-American immigration, socialist politics, bodybuilding culture, organized crime, and science fiction fandom. Our excerpt from Jones’s book details the fact that, as science fiction fans, Siegel and Shuster were much taken with Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator (1930), one of many early twentieth-century cultural expressions of the idea of the superman. However, as Jones emphasizes and as the excerpt we’ve provided from Gladiator makes clear, Wylie had a sour and satirical take on the idea of the superior being. An H. L. Mencken–inspired debunker and skeptic, Wylie posited that any superior being would be thwarted and defeated by the powerful forces of mass stupidity and venality. If Siegel and Shuster borrowed key ideas from Gladiator, they also transformed those concepts in significant ways, creating a character that embodied a much more positive view of human possibilities.
The cartoonist Jules Feiffer witnessed firsthand what Siegel and Shuster made possible. An avid reader of the new comic book medium, Feiffer got involved in the comic book industry from early on, and in 1946, while still a teenager, joined the shop of Will Eisner, the master cartoonist behind the noir superhero the Spirit. In our excerpt from his pioneering study The Great Comic Book Heroes, Feiffer offers a vivid memoir of the early days of the comic book industry seen from the eyes of a fledgling cartoonist. Like Feiffer, many of the early comic book creators, including Siegel and Shuster, were teens or young adults when they joined the burgeoning industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Feiffer’s account brings to life the youthful enthusiasm of this first generation of comic book artists and the excitement of working in a new art form that was developing its own visual language and techniques.
Though the early creators of superhero comics invested the genre with their energy and passion, not every reader was enthusiastic; in fact the genre drew fierce criticism from the very start. The roots of the superhero in the déclassé and vulgar world of pulp fiction automatically made the genre suspect in more genteel circles. One strong critic of the genre was the Jesuit philosopher Walter Ong, one of America’s leading Catholic intellectuals, who became interested in popular culture through the influence of his mentor Marshall McLuhan. In his 1945 essay “The Comics and the Superstate,” Ong forcefully links the superhero genre with the herd mentality and extrajudicial violence of the totalitarian state. Ong’s essay is worth reading not just for his ideas but also to appreciate the hostility that the superhero genre generated in its early days.
Of course Ong was not alone in his ideological critique of the superhero genre. The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham would gain fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s as one of the most prominent critics of all genres of comic books. In his famous and influential 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham argued that comic books contributed to the moral and intellectual degradation of the children who read them. In the excerpt we have selected from this book, Wertham’s ire is directed at the superhero genre in particular, though he sees the superhero as an offshoot of the larger category of crime comics. Wertham was especially concerned about what he saw as the dubious politics of the superhero, seeing the idea of the superpowered vigilante as all too reminiscent of the Nazi ideal of the superman. A leading opponent of American racism during his era, Wertham argued that the superhero often embodied noxious notions of white supremacy.
Wonder Woman, created in 1941 by the psychologist William Moulton Marston, was arguably the first female superhero (though preceded by Tarpé Mills’s costumed crimefighter Miss Fury earlier that year), and is significant for her long popularity and in particular for her appeal to girl and women readers as an emblem of female power. In her essay on Wonder Woman, historian and cartoonist Trina Robbins details the creation of the character and analyzes what she meant to readers in the 1940s. Robbins also disputes what she s
ees as the tendency of recent fan historians and scholars to denigrate Wonder Woman or to misrepresent her popularity with female readers.
Robbins’s essay helpfully introduces the issue of reader response, a crucial question when dealing with the superhero genre because the feedback of fans has strongly influenced the developments of the genre. In his essay “Fandom and Authorship,” scholar Will Brooker offers a fascinating case study of the origins and development of superhero fan discourse in the letter pages of comics. As Brooker demonstrates, the letter columns that DC Comics introduced in the early 1960s were designed to be sites of fan-building activity. While early columns focused on relatively narrow questions of authorial identity and the development of connoisseurial expertise in recognizing the hidden hand of uncredited writers and artists, later fan letters were devoted to complex critical explications. Perhaps fittingly, the secret origins of superhero scholarship are to be found in these letter pages.
The essays in this section start with a relatively simple question: What are the origins of the superhero genre? During the course of these investigations, the questions become more complex as scholars try to figure out the meanings of the genre and the impact the genre has on readers. These more complex questions will continue to inform the essays found in the later sections of this book.
Comics Predecessors
PETER COOGAN
Reprinted by permission from Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (MonkeyBrain Books, 2006), 165–74.
THOUGH DIME NOVELS, SCIENCE FICTION, ADVENTURE STORIES, AND THE PULPS contain the main predecessors of the superhero genre, the superhero did not spring to life in literature but in comics. Comics—both books and strips—provide the final bit of the prehistory of the superhero.
Essentially unknown today, J. Koerner’s [actually William H. D. Koerner’s—eds.] Hugo Hercules ran in the Chicago Tribune from September 7, 1902 to January 11, 1903, and was the first positive presentation of a heroic superman in comics.1
Hugo Hercules’s introductory episode, a six-panel Sunday strip titled “Hugo Hercules Obliges Beauty in Distress,” opens with a young woman attempting to board a speeding streetcar, which does not heed her plea to stop. Hugo—dressed in striped pants, a dark jacket, bow tie, and a hat that seems to be a cross between a fedora and a cowboy hat—replies to her request for aid with “I’m a real stopper.” He bounds after the streetcar and jerks it to a halt, sending its passengers flying into disarray. He closes the day’s strip with his tagline, “Just as easy.”2 Hugo’s adventures follow this pattern. Someone asks for help in a relatively minor matter, and Hercules obliges by using his strength in a humorous way.
Most of the time very little is at stake in any of his adventures, although he occasionally does aid someone in a dangerous situation: he stops a runaway carriage; he catches a falling safe; he escorts a woman to her carriage in the rain by removing the portico from her house and using it as an umbrella; he lifts an elephant so a lady can retrieve her dropped handkerchief, which the elephant is standing upon; he lifts a car so a man can kiss his girlfriend, who is in a window some ten feet up a wall; he carries home a woman and her many bags during a cab strike; he puts a derailed train back on its track; and he carries home a party of iceboaters and their iceboat when the craft crashes.
Twice he defends himself from attackers: the first time he faces down armed muggers by fetching a cannon and threatening to fire it at them; the second time he wrestles and defeats a bear who announces “I’ll tear him in two” (“Hugo Hercules Wrestles a Bear”). In two instances his strength both creates and resolves the crises: attempting to kick a football, Hugo misses and sends a house flying, which he catches and returns to its foundations; attempting to break “all bowling records” at a New Year’s bowling contest, Hugo hurls his ball through the back of the alley, where it derails a street car and overturns two wagons, one loaded with policemen (“Hugo Hercules at New Year’s Bowling Contest”). Hugo Hercules does not seem to have been much of an influence on the superhero, coming and going so quickly as he did.
The next cartoon strongman had considerably more influence in comics and specifically on the superhero.3 Introduced into Thimble Theatre in 1929, Popeye soon took over the long-running strip. While not quite achieving the level of Hugo Hercules’s might, Popeye’s strength is superior to that of just about any comic strip character since the dapper strongman. Popeye once lifted the corner of a house to demonstrate his strength to Bullo Oxheart, the “strongest man in the world,” while in contract negotiations for a prizefight. A few years later another boxer, Curley Gazook, the state champ, has designs on Olive Oyl and wants to prove to her that he is stronger than the sailor. He brings a weight to her house and tells her to come to his place that afternoon and she will see that Popeye cannot lift the weight the boxer carried with ease. Gazook bolts the weight to the floor, which foils Popeye, but the sailor goes down to the basement and lifts the house, with Olive and Curley, over his head. Later that year while out walking with Toar, a monstrous brute of a man who has come for a visit, Popeye encounters a crippled boy on crutches who has to walk a mile to and from school each day. Popeye and Toar take pity on the boy and solve his problem by carrying the school, loaded with children and a teacher, to the boy’s backyard. Creator E. C. Segar played Popeye for laughs and social satire, so his feats of strength did not need to conform to a realistic depiction.
A third comic-strip strongman appeared in 1933, the cave man Alley Oop. Like Popeye, Alley Oop was drawn in a cartoony style and his comedic adventures were not tainted with realism. Also like Popeye, Alley Oop’s feats of strength are primarily expressed in defeating men and monsters many times his size. Unlike Popeye, Oop’s strength, while superior to most of his caveman companions, is not unique. After traveling to the present day via a time machine, Ooola, Oop’s girlfriend, saves a G-man from an avalanche by grabbing him and leaping into a tree. Oop is very strong, able to snap steel handcuffs, wrench iron bars out of a window to free himself from jail, and uproot a tree. He is tough, able to survive falls from planes and pterodactyls, but not so invulnerable that he can resist being knocked out by a blow to the head from a stone axe.
Like Popeye, Alley Oop helped to establish comics as a medium in which fantastic feats could be depicted, even though neither strip strove for plausibility.4 Within the world each cartoonist established, feats of incredible strength fit in well. The comic-strip strongmen resolve the savior/ruler/destroyer conundrum of the SF superman in a way different from the “bigger Indian” solution of Aarn Munro and the Lensmen. The superman’s titanic strength can be contained if it is limited in some way. Comics offer a possibility for depicting the superman that was seemingly not available to the prose fiction writers or to the artists working in other narrative media, such as radio or film. Comics can depict the fantastic with equal realism as the mimetic, so things that might not be acceptable or might look ridiculous in another medium do not appear so in comics. In comics, everything—whether a building or a talking tiger—can have the same level of surface realism.
An excellent example of this aspect of comics that is of particular reference to the superhero genre is the depiction of the costume. A costume, no matter how well described, cannot appear as striking when described in words as when it appears in pictures. The costumed nature of the superhero cannot be as constantly signaled in prose as it must be in comics, and hence the superhero cannot stand out from a story’s “civilians” as he can in comics form.5 So comics promote the separation of the superhero and other super-characters from the rest of the character cast. On the other side, the superhero’s costume can appear much more normal in comics than it can in the more realistic medium of film or television.6 Until recently, in live-action films or television shows superhero costumes have looked a bit silly. They never seem to attain the level of equivalent surface realism that they attain routinely in comics (and animation).7 Because they are made out of the same material (ink, paper, color), Clark Kent’s suits
and Superman’s costume come across with the same level of realism.8 But on television, even in the relatively successful costuming of Lois and Clark, the superhero’s costume looks a bit silly.9 This silliness is even more pronounced in the costumes of supervillains. The live-action Flash television show was able to achieve a reasonable hero costume, but the costumed supervillains, such as the Trickster, just looked ridiculous. This point is even more marked when looking at live-action superheroes of the past. The costumes used in the Superman and Batman television shows and movie serials do not make their wearers look more heroic than the civilians in the show.10
Perhaps a better example of the effect comics can have in depicting realistic and non-realistic elements equally would be the use of animal characters alongside human characters. Tawky Tawny the talking tiger has the same surface realism as Captain Marvel. Even in a photo-realistic comic book such as Kingdom Come, the animal-based characters and the human characters interact easily and neither appears more or less believable than another.
In the last decade film has begun to be able to achieve this effect in movies such as Jurassic Park, in which the dinosaurs appear as real as the human beings. These dinosaurs are, of course, animated. As recent superhero movies such as the Spider-Man films show, computer-generated imagery—instead of prostheses, costuming, and makeup to portray the heroes—can achieve a similar level of equivalent realism or believability.11
Appearing in the spring of 1935 in Mel Graft’s The Adventures of Patsy, the short-lived Phantom Magician was the first of several clear precursors of the superhero.12 Graft introduced the Phantom Magician to pull Patsy and her boy sidekick Thimble out of scrapes in the fairy-tale kingdom of Ods Bodkin. The Phantom Magician’s powers include flight and invisibility. He wears a costume of black tights, pirate boots, gloves, a tunic with a double-V-shaped chevron, a cape, and a domino mask. After a few months, Graft and his editor decided that the fantasy elements were not working, and Patsy was reworked into a Shirley Temple—style Hollywood strip. The Phantom Magician put on a business suit, turned into Patsy’s uncle Phil Cardigan, and abandoned superheroing. While the Phantom Magician does roughly fit the mission-powers-identity triumvirate, the comic strip’s fantasy basis kept out the conventions that would have marked it as generically distinct from other fantasy land adventures, like Alice in Wonderland or Little Nemo in Slumberland. So, while the Phantom Magician could, possibly, be considered the first superhero, he was not the initiator of the superhero genre. Interestingly, Ron Goulart proposes a connection between the Phantom Magician and Superman. He relates, “Graft had once been approached by Jerry Siegel to work on the Superman project. He declined, convinced the public would never take such a character to its heart.” Thus Superman might have been the inspiration for the Phantom Magician, further strengthening Superman’s position as the progenitor of the superhero genre.