THE READING RHEUM: FANTOMAS (1911)

I've heard for many years that the character of Fantomas, originating in a series of French novels (forty-three in all), has been pegged as one of the important "proto-superheroes," for all that he was an unregenerate villain, unlike "gentleman-thieves" along the lines of 1905's "Arsene Lupin" and 1914's "Gray Seal." I've now read only the first of the novels, and there's some evidence that Fantomas is an important transitional figure. However, one of the primary visual tropes to which superhero fans respond-- that of costume-- does not apply in the case of the initial prose version of Fantomas. The cover of the first book edition, showing the villain wearing evening dress and domino mask as he looms over a city, is not borne out in the prose, nor does he wear the hooded garments seen in some if not all of the Feulliade silent serials.

Instead, Fantomas's costume, if he has one in the first book, is that of being "a man of many faces." Now, being a simple "disguise expert" is not enough to mark a protagonist as belonging to what I've termed "the superhero idiom." In past essays I've noted the existence of various characters who went around in masks, some of whom belonged to the idiom, like the Durango Kid, and some who did not, like Oldring's Masked Rider. By the same token, there are various "men of many faces" who do make my cut for belonging to the idiom, like the 1934 pulp-hero Secret Agent X--

--while others do not, like "Paris" from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

The original FANTOMAS novel does, I believe, create the sense of strangeness needed for any character relevant to the superhero idiom. Indeed, when the novel begins, various ordinary French citizens are discussing the rumors of Fantomas, and the first thing they mention is his penchant for disguise:

In these days we have been distressed by a steady increase in crime, and among the causes we shall henceforth have to count a mysterious and most dangerous creature, to whom the baffled authorities and general rumor have for some time now given the name of Fantomas. It is impossible to say exactly what or to know precisely who Fantomas is. He often assumes the form and personality of some particular and often well-known individual; sometimes he assumes the forms of two human beings  at the same time. Sometimes he works alone, sometimes with accomplices; sometimes he can be identified as such and such a person, but no one has ever gotten to know Fantomas himself.

Later novels do unveil aspects of the master villain's history, but as far as the first novel is concerned, Fantomas is a shadow that constantly looms over law-abiding civilization, committing crimes with impunity, despite being pursued by a resourceful detective, Juve, who also dabbles in disguises himself. Imposture seems like a disease spread by the evildoer. One of Fantomas's early victims, a young man named Charles, is framed for a murder probably committed by the master villain, and to escape prosecution the youth must, with Juve's help, take on a fictitious new identity, that of Jerome Fandor, who often joins Juve in future novels to pursue Fantomas. Indeed, for reasons that are never entirely clear, the fictitious cognomen "Fandor" is explicitly taken from that of the master criminal.

In this novel Fantomas is even less "on stage" than other famous villains, like Dracula in Stoker's novel or Fu Manchu in the Rohmer series. Usually the criminal's misdeeds are discovered long after he is gone. Only in one sequence does a victim confront for some time a disguised criminal who may or may not be Fantomas, but the only reason that the villain maintains the confrontation is to suss out where the victim's valuables can be found. During this encounter, the maybe-Fantomas speaks of himself in lofty terms; when the victim says that he "must" leave, he replies, "Must? That is a word that is not often said to me."

A preface to my edition of the novel mentions that in later works, the malcontent attacks victims with such devices of plague-rats and sulfuric acid stored in perfume-spritzers. There are no gimmicks in the first outing, though. Even more important, though, for the determination of a character's relevance to the superhero idiom is that there is also an absence of spectacular violence.

In contrast to the Fu Manchu novels that began the very next year, all of the villain's violent acts are committed off-stage. There are sporadic incidents of violence, but no combat in the sense of the combative mode. This isn't surprising, since the narrative seems more allied with that of the detective tale, so that it's quite as if the authors had sought to create a series in which the Great Detective's lauded foe Moriarty received his own universe in which to play games upon the righteous.

FANTOMAS by itself is a good if not exceptional proto-pulp story. Upon reading further novels, I may be able to determine whether the character deserves to be associated with the combative idiom of superheroes and their supervillain adversaries, or whether he belongs to a side-category of "subcombative supervillains."