MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERDUPERMAN" (MAD #4, 1953)

Looking through the seminal early MAD issues, one often finds a lot of clever puns and inversions of pop-culture tropes. However, the famous "Superduperman" story goes a little further into the realm of psychological myth than its contemporaneous fellows, like "Plastic Sam" and "Batboy and Rubin." At a time when the superhero genre was at its arguably at its lowest ebb in the history of American comic books-- when said genre certainly was nowhere near dominating the medium as would be the case from the 1980s onward-- Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood crafted a story that embodied the anti-mainstream arguments of Adorno and Wertham: the argument that I summarized thusly:

In elitist criticism, it's a given that all escapist fiction is by its nature a "negative compensation" that insulates the audience from reality, as I've noted with respect to Theodor Adorno in particular. "Positive compensation," if one could put the elitists' convictions into Adler's terms, would presumably be the sort of "high literature" that validates the intellectual's struggle for personal meaning.

Kurtman and Wood, being concerned with gonzo slapstick and puns, don't put forth any grand schemes of meaning in "Superduperman," but by making their spoof-hero a real nebbish instead of a pretend-one, they cast a critical eye upon the idea of superheroes as compensation for one's failures in life-- a fair enough subject for satire, given that creator Jerry Siegel himself framed Superman's appeal in such terms:

Clark Kent grew not only out of my private life, but also out of Joe Shuster's. As a high school student, I thought that someday I might become a reporter, and I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn't know I existed or didn't care I existed.-- Jerry Siegel.

In addition, over ten years before Julies Feiffer suggested that Superman might be a "secret masochist," Kurtzman and Wood present their nebbishy ne'er-do-well "Clark Bent" as the helpless thrall of "Lois Pain's" charms.

Shortly after this encounter, Bent changes into Superduperman and goes looking for the story's mystery thief, "the unknown monster."  The heist artist obligingly reveals himself to be a fellow superhero, Captain Marbles, who has decided to quit fighting crime and to begin looking out for number one. Countless critics have mentioned that the year of this story's publication was the same year Fawcett Comics quit publishing Captain Marvel features as well as discontinuing their comics-line, largely in response to the expensive plagiarism suit DC Comics had filed against Fawcett. It's hard to tell whether or not the outcome of the super-dudes' battle is a comment upon the legal battle, but it's at least significant that Superduperman must resort to a dirty trick in order to win.

Lastly, Kurtzman and Wood undermine the wish-fantasy implicit in the Superman mythos, and in many-- though certainly not all-- superhero narratives. Instead of responding to Superduperman's bulging muscles, Lois rejects the hero and knocks him on his ass just as she did when he was Clark Bent, averring that his super-bod doesn't obviate him still being "a creep."

 I might argue that no single comics-story of the period-- not Kurtzman's war-stories, not Barks' duck-stories-- had more effect on the intellectual development of comics-fandom than "Superduperman." I can't say that it was always the *best* effect. But "genre politics" aside, it's no less a masterful story of its kind.

MYTHCOMICS: "LOST IN THE MICROCOSM" (WEIRD SCIENCE #12, 1950)

My first choice for a "mythcomic" from the House of Entertaining Comics creates some problems. Though I didn't say so when I began this series, it's generally been my intention not to count anything that was a direct adaptation of a story published in another medium. For instance, I consider Robert E. Howard's short Conan story "The Tower of the Elephant" to be one of the great myth-stories of popular fiction. But I would never cite the Thomas-Smith adaptation of the story, published in Marvel's CONAN THE BARBARIAN #4. It's arguable that Thomas and Smith may have added their own mythopeic elements to the mix, but nevertheless, the source of the mythic structure is a prose story, not a comics-story.

Similarly, I would never include any of EC's famous adaptations of Ray Bradbury's work. Yet what about "swipes?" As this Wikipedia entry makes abundantly clear, publisher William Gaines had the habit of delving through published SF-stories and "lifting" ideas, which were then redone as "new" stories by raconteurs like Al Feldstein. The story goes that Gaines lifted one of Bradbury's stories, and that Bradbury wrote him, politely asking for payment for said adaptation-- a bit of indirect dickering that led to several fully approved Bradbury adaptations by E.C.

Yet a swipe doesn't have to be an exact reproduction of the original story. I have not to my recollection read the 1936 Henry Haase prose tale "He Who Shrank," but this blog-summation of the story suggests to me that writer Feldstein and artist Kurtzman only swiped the basic idea of a protagonist who is (a) exposed to a element that causes him to shrink endlessly, and (b) because of this, finds himself plummeting through a host of recursive micro-universes.

The dominant Campbellian function evoked here is the *cosmological,* in that Feldstein's protagonist Karl is constantly witness to all the wonders of the microscopic world, seen for the first time on an equal footing. I can't prove it, but when he shrinks into the "sweat ducts" of his mentor and learns that the older man has tuberculosis, that sounds a bit more like Kurtzman's wry sense of humor than Feldstein's-- though for all I know it might appear in the Haase story.

In addition, the story is particularly accomplished in the psychological arena, in that Karl is constantly shifting from being a godlike giant, able to cause havoc to lesser beings with no more than a sneeze, to dwindling into relative nothingness-- which is perhaps a little further than even Jonathan Swift went with the basic "relative size" trope.

Interestingly, the story's conclusion holds out some meager hope that someday Karl may shrink into some super-advanced cosmos where he can be cured of his affliction-- though the dominant effect of the story is to remind the story's interlocutor (who listens to Karl's story) that even Earth's advancements may pale before "what exists in the infinite cosmos."

ONLY AN ARCHETYPE CAN BEAT ANOTHER ARCHETYPE PT. 4

In this essay I defined stereotypes in terms of simple functionality and archetypes in terms of super-functionality. With that in mind I might re-state my title as "only super-functionality can beat super-functionality."

I won't say that the same is the case for stereotypes. It's more common for one stereotype to overcome another, but an archetype of sufficient power can eliminate, or at least mitigate, the power of stereotypes. In this essay I advanced the hypothesis that the archetype of "the African slave as demonic rebel" that permeates Melville's BENITO CERENO was essentially nullified by a more popular archetype, that of "the redeemed slave." In the Judeo-Christian tradition the first descends principally from literary takes on Satan, while the latter may be traced more directly from the Biblical Messiah-tradition.  Yet if Leslie Fiedler is correct in believing that UNCLE TOM'S CABIN is the first American novel that presents black characters as developed narrative presences, then CABIN's influence made it harder to promulgate that view. Wikipedia notes how the minstrel shows attempted to ameliorate the impact of the novel:

Tom acts largely came to replace other plantation narratives, particularly in the third act. These sketches sometimes supported Stowe's novel, but just as often they turned it on its head or attacked the author. Whatever the intended message, it was usually lost in the joyous, slapstick atmosphere of the piece. Characters such as Simon Legree sometimes disappeared, and the title was frequently changed to something more cheerful like "Happy Uncle Tom" or "Uncle Dad's Cabin."

In the 20th century minstrel shows passed out of favor, arguably as part of a very graduated response to the consciousness of "black people as human beings" that the novel promoted. Ironically, before the minstrel shows died, they left behind a reactionary legacy by making the name "Uncle Tom" into a stereotypical shorthand for a "cringing bootlicker to White Massa"-- which the character in the novel is not. But the fact that the character of Uncle Tom is a prophet not honored in his own hometown does not nullify the greater impact of the novel.

I said earlier that the franchise-character of Superman-- who of course is something of a palimpsest, changing his persona according to the proclivities of his authors-- combined both stereotypical and archetypal characteristics. All fictional characters possess the potential for both, from those of Willie Shakespeare to those of Mickey Spillane.  I'm sure that there are critics who choose to view the character's status in American culture to be independent of his archetypal nature; who see his success as purely the result of clever marketing. This pat explanation does not explain why the character became popular in his early ACTION COMICS appearances even though for the first eleven issues the character is only cover-featured three times (though his name is occasionally added in the background of some generic pulp-adventure scene). Earlier I have identified Superman's primary mythic appeal for Americans of the 1940s as a trope I termed CHRIST WITH MUSCLES-- a trope Superman certainly did not originate but one that he came to exemplify better than any previous pop-culture character.

This archetype, though, was to some extent conquered by an archetype closer in tone to the "suffering servant" archetype found in UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. Superman's appeal has never completely vanished, but it has been eclipsed in large part by Stan Lee's trope of the "suffering hero," who is best exemplified by the Amazing Spider-Man.

The first few appearances of the web-slinger are replete with references to the Superman mythos. Sometimes they are straightforward, in that Peter Parker wears glasses like Clark Kent, and at other times they are inverted, in that Parker really is a 98-pound weakling, rather than a strapping fellow who merely pretends to be a weakling.  In some cases the Superman tropes are a little of both: Parker continues to make his living in roughly the same way Kent does-- working for a big-city newspaper-- but Kent works for an editor who is a nice guy beneath his bluster, and Parker works for a conceited windbag with inferiority issues.

At a quick glance some fans might see the Lee-Ditko Spider-Man as a satirical jab at the Siegel-Shuster hero. And there are moments of satire present in early Spider-Man, particularly through the authors' focus on the character's money problems. Clearly, even though both heroes are fantasy-creations, Spider-Man's authors are claiming greater verisimilitude, showing that when their character becomes a costumed superhero, that transformation doesn't obviate all of his other problems.  At an equally quick glance, this might seem to be the same strategy pursued by Harvey Kurtzman in his full-blown satires, such as MAN AND SUPERMAN, discussed here.

Nevertheless, this particular Kurtzman short story is merely stereotypical in the simplicity with which Kurtzman addresses the lack of verisimilitude in comic-book superhero stories. Lee and Ditko's criticism of Superman's lack of "real-life problems" is only one aspect of Spider-Man's mythos, for Spider-Man as much as Superman must deal with such non-realistic worries as preventing mad scientists from creating Bizarro duplicates or turning themselves into giant lizards. Thus Spider-Man is not a satire of Superman, but an attempt to evolve a new ethic for the costumed hero; to show that Spider-Man is more of a hero precisely because he deals with both medical bills and lizard-men.  I don't claim that Lee and Ditko thought about their new approach to heroes in such lofty terms at the time. But I am claiming that both of them drew on a deep reservoir of narrative strategies from various genres-- superheroes, crime, horror, and science fiction-- rather than sticking too close to the superhero model as that had been defined prior to the Silver Age.  This openness to narrative strategies also made them open to the power of the archetype that most defines Spider-Man: the aforementioned "suffering hero."

Superman's emotionally imperturbable archetype once influenced dozens of epigoni. But in the wake of Spider-Man specifically and other Marvel characters generally, that archetype no longer inspires more than a handful of imitators-- and some of those make conscious appeal to nostalgia, rather than celebrating the archetype of "Christ with Muscles" in new forms.

 I won't say that it is impossible to conceive of a modern costumed hero who doesn't juggle both realistic and unrealistic problems, but it has become the "new norm," despite mitigating influences from Miller, Morrison, and others.

Of course, in the case of many Spider-Man imitators-- the 1970s character Nova, for one-- the archetype of the suffering hero has been dumbed down to an array of stereotypical devices, and any archetypal potential goes unrealized.  Even the new breed of cinematic superheroes have inclined toward "Marvel style" rather than "DC style," as shown by such films as SUPERMAN RETURNS and MAN OF STEEL, which failed to mount a persuasive cinema-archetype for the Man of Steel.

ONLY AN ARCHETYPE CAN BEAT ANOTHER ARCHETYPE PT. 2

In TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME, I printed a few excerpts from the 1951 Harvey Kurtzman story, "Man and Superman."  I did not, in that essay, address any questions of "stereotype vs. archetype," as my focus was on contrasting the two principal forms of transcendence as outlined by Aldous Huxley, "vertical" and "horizontal" transcendence.

However, "Man and Superman" works equally well to describe a battle between, not archetypes, but stereotypes about popular tropes.

Despite the use of the name "Superman" in Kurtzman's oh-so-Shavian title, the only trait of the DC hero being guyed here is the character's ability to defy scientific law by acquiring an unscientific level of physical density-- physical, that is, as opposed to the even greater mental denseness of the comic foil Charlemagne.  But though Kurtzman deserves credit for a clever satire, it is a satire that, as I pointed out earlier, depends purely upon a "reasonable and agreeable" conception of scientific law. There is no symbolic complexity to be found in Kurtzman's conception of scientific law: it's simply an amorphous taskmaster, set to punish those who try to step outside its unforgiving bounds-- which is indeed the fate of Charlemagne, who is stomped into nothingness by Imperial Entropy.

As noted before, Superman as Superman is not being spoofed here: Kurtzman mocks only one aspect of the character, his flagrant disregard for scientific law.  And though a myth-critic like myself can find symbolic complexity in many aspects of Superman's mythos, I have no problem admitting that the character is stereotypic in this respect. That he gets his science-defying powers from a yellow sun, or loses them in the presence of a red sun, are stereotypical devices to quickly explain why the hero does or does not have powers.

In neither case does one stereotype "defeat" the other, though. Readers of Superman often know that his powers make no sense in terms of real-world science, and so Kurtzman's satire cannot have any effect upon these readers' willingness to ignore verisimilitude for the sake of a pleasing fantasy.

It is possible for one stereotype to displace another, however. In Will Eisner's celebrated comic feature THE SPIRIT, the artist resorted in large part to "minstrel-show" stereotyping in producing the character of Ebony. None of the characteristics of Ebony-- his mush-mouthed speech, his blubber-lips or his deference to his white boss-- are acceptable stereotypes in modern culture.

However, was the Ebony stereotype displaced by anything comparable to an archetype? I would say that, while such a displacement was conceivable, what displaced the old stereotype was a new one.  Eisner, in this defense of Ebony, implies that the stereotype of the "Malcolm X-style radical" has usurped, or wishes to usurp, Ebony's place in the cultural scheme of things.

Eisner can be fairly criticized for distorting his past representations of Ebony. However, he seems to have been at least near the mark, as the stereotype of the "angry black man" is entirely acceptable to modern readers, however banal its representations may be.  I think this is the sort of usurpation my nephew was thinking about, where a "good stereotype" displaces a "bad stereotype"-- and archetypes as such are not really involved at all.


Next: Archetypes vs. Archetypes.

TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME

Having now devoted over 50 posts to the topic of "the sublime" in one form or another, I find myself giving thought as to whether or not other comics-critics would have any takes on these matters.  I tend to doubt it, though, and the least self-aggrandizing reason I can concoct for said critics' general disinterest in the sublime comes down to their affection for a type of transcendence that I find to be of lesser interest.

Sublimity, as coiner-of-the-term Longinus pointed out, is not something that takes part in the everyday or the "agreeable"-- a term which Kant may have borrowed for his own theories of art and the sublime.  This translation of Longinus says:

A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment, and eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or not is usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no. Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts, are appreciated not by one passage, or by two, but gradually manifest themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if happily timed, illumines an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment of time.


Though all of Longinus' statements on the sublime are significant, they are not all necessarily correct. I believe that all of art exists to "take [a reader/listener] out of himself," but not that every effect that does so is sublime.  In this essay I quoted and/or paraphrased a great deal of Aldous Huxley's 1953 essay "On Self-Transcendence, comparing and contrasting Huxley's concepts of "downward transcendence" and "upward transcendence" with cognate concepts in Carl Jung's system.  In the middle of these two forms of transcendence, Huxley describes "horizontal transcendence" in terms that may compare with Longinus' idea of the "that which is merely reasonable or agreeable."

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds. Horizontal self- transcendence is of the utmost importance. Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, indeed no civilization.

Why does Huxley say that horizontal self-transcendence is "of the utmost importance?" I presume that it is because "self-identification with any human activity" may be deemed the bedrock of cognitive experience. It is the way every human being learns his or her individual propensities: what one likes to do, what one does not like to do, what one is good at doing, and so on. I'm enough of a Bataillean to state a slight disagreement, to the effect that there will always be the temptation to transcend the horizontal plane of the "reasonable and agreeable."  But I take the point-- assuming that I have read Huxley's point correctly-- that there is a primacy to the horizontal plane, albeit not a supremacy.

Unfortnately, most comics-critics are of the view that the realm of the reasonable and agreeable is the one to which all other forms of transcendence should be reduced.  Not that the practice is confined to critics, whom I'll explore a little more in Part 2.  Often it's a prime source for humor.

Harvey Kurtzman's story "Man and Superman" (WEIRD SCIENCE #6, 1951)  is a spoof not of the Man of Steel on that character's own terms-- Kurtzman would produce such a spoof two years later in MAD, with the famous "Superduperman." Rather, "Man and Superman" spoofs the comics medium's happy ignorance of basic scientific principles. Charlemagne, a thick-headed "muscle culture" nut, exposes himself to a physicist's ray, which increases his density to fantastic proportions, just as one sees in countless superhero origins.

However, the upshot of the satire is that Charlemagne ignores the scientist's warnings about how his "expenditures of energy" will cause him to "wilt away."  Not only does his mass constantly cause him to fall through walls and floors-- a consequence of greater mass that Superman never had to deal with-- he, the massive muscleman, ends up evaporating into "rapidly dispersing neutral mesons."

Of course Kurtzman's made-up science is no more probable than that of Superman. What's significant in the aesthetic sense is that Charlemagne's admittedly lunk-headed attempt to transcend the limits of normality is shot down by the author's all-knowing appeal to reason and logic.

In the next essay I'll show how this paradigm informs the reductive principles of certain critics of fantasy-literature, both within and without the medium of comic books.

MYTHCOMICS #13: MAD #19 (1955)

...though we are repelled by the sight of man turned beast... we revel to see beast turned man!"











PLOT-SYNOPSIS FOR "Mickey Rodent!" (writing: Kurtzman; art: Elder): As Mickey Rodent walks down a typical "Walt Dizzy" street, looking for Darnold Duck, passersby watch as cops cart away Horace Horseneck for the offense of not wearing white gloves. Meanwhile, Darnold Duck gets repeatedly beaned by projectiles because when people yell at him to "duck," he doesn't know if they're denoting his name or an action. When told that Mickey's looking for him, Darnold tells the readers that Mickey is only fit for "the old actor's home" and that Mickey never gets featured roles any more. Mickey finds Darnold but instead of saying why he wanted him, simply offers to drive Darnold into town. They pass a swimming-hole, and Mickey suggests that they take a swim to cool off. While they cavort, someone steals their clothes (except for Mickey's white gloves, which are "tattooed" on). The beasts-turned-men follow the thief's trail, but it's all a setup so that Mickey, who hates the duck for outperforming him, can lock Darnold in a duck-pen. Since Darnold is naked, the regular (non-"Walt Dizzy") humans who own the pen decide that Darnold must be a "mutated freak" and speculate about having him stuffed.


MYTH-ANALYSIS: Most of the classic MAD satires remain at the monosignative level in that they simply reverse the game plan of whatever's being satirized. Thus, if Superman is a noble hero, Superduperman is a superficial, sex-obsessed creep. But "Mickey Rodent" shows the authors playing a bit more liberally with the theme set forth in the introductory caption: that of "beasts turned men."

(Actually I really DON'T think readers are all that repelled at seeing human beings act like beasts. But that's another essay.)

The modus operandi of satire is to reveal the base reality beneath the figments and fantasies in which human beings immerse themselves. The first one we encounter is that the creator of the animated animals, "Walt Dizzy," decrees that all his creations must wear white gloves (four-fingered, in keeping with the way most characters have been drawn in the history of animated cartoons). Thus Kurtzman and Elder quickly communicate that the fun-loving cartoon characters of the Disney world are actually just as much under the thumb of a controlling Big Brother as any wage-slave.

The story doesn't waste any time letting the readers see the arbitrariness of this social sign. Moments after Darnold gets beaned by a baseball from "Goony," Goony points out that Darnold is walking around with no pants, causing the duck to rush home and don trousers, which he wears for most of the rest of the tale. Thus clothing, one element traditionally used by cartoons to transform "beasts" into "men," is shown by Kurtzman and Elder to be an arbitrary social construct. Aside from Darnold wearing pants, almost all the other characters-- versions of Goofy, Pluto, and Minnie Mouse-- comport themselves just as the originals do in terms of garments, though Darnold stands in for Kurtzman's ideal reader in that Darnold gets nauseated at the thought of Minnie, a giant rat, wearing eyelashes and high heels. Mickey Rodent is the only other exception: he dresses normally enough but throughout the story artist Elder draws Mickey with unsightly beard-stubble. (He also seems to be missing some teeth in a later scene.) But in Kurtzman's world a dissolute-looking Mickey is fit to take a clever revenge on his rival.

The other arbitrary social construct Kurtzman tears apart here seems more vital to the history of "beasts turning men" than clothing was: the construct of language. I won't over-analyze the running gag of Darnold constantly being unsure whether people are calling his name or telling him to duck. But I'll note that it's just one element in Kurtzman's script that points out the absurd nature of language. Perhaps more telling is that Darnold is first seen talking in the incomprehensible quacking voice of the animated cartoons. Then the editors inform the readers that they will translate the duck's voice into readable text, paralleling the transformation that Disney's duck had to pass through when he was adapted to comic strips and books. But it's important to Kurtzman's plot-- as it isn't for the legit Donald Duck comics-- that Darnold should "quack like a duck" at the story's end, so that the regular humans will mistake him for a freakish version of a real duck.







Clothing and language, then, are the twin pillars of the arbitrary civilization Kurtzman gives his Disney characters, and like Samson Kurtzman is more than happy to pull down both pillars. But even when Kurtzman seems to be protesting the injustice of such civilized forms-- "Pluted Pup" has a Shylock-moment where he protests, via signboards, the injustice that he of all the animals isn't allowed to talk-- Kurtzman also implies that without those arbitrary signs of civilization, one's only option is--

To get stuffed.

SATIRE-RIASIS

There's a good discussion here on Groovy Age of Horror, referencing some of the same territory I'm talking about with my Fryean concept of modes: the notion that every genre depends on a set of "logical conclusions," even if those conclusions spring from an illogical set of premises, as is often the case with the superhero genre. Genres and modes are obviously not the same thing, but for the purpose of this argument I'll pass over the differences.

Curt mentions that when Rick Veitch outlined his ambitions for BRAT PACK he spoke of "destroying the superhero." Frank Miller and Alan Moore have made similar allusions to undermining the genre with DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN respectively, and more recently Zack Snyder, following in their deconstructive footsteps, claimed that his WATCHMEN adaptation would be the last word on superhero films.

Such declarations suggest that the speaker is extremely naive, though I've also considered the possibility that they're made with an eye to garnering media-attention. Certainly being the person who has the "last word" is an enormous boost to the ego, rather like the belief of the apocalyptic Christian who rejoices that even if his generation can't have the privilege of being the first, at least they can be the last.

Certainly this sort of hubris was not born with the "grim and gritty" era of comics in the 1980s (which really got started in the 1970s, but that's another story). The earliest practitioner of genre-hubris was probably the fellow whom Alan Moore feted as his favorite comics-creator: Harvey Kurtzman, best known for his satires of superheroes and other pop-entertainments in MAD MAGAZINE.

There's a Kurtzman quote in his longest COMICS JOURNAL interview that I haven't time to look up just now, to the effect that he felt that he had accomplished some great breakthrough when he took the dominant image of the superhero (courageous and supremely competent) and inverted it, so that the superhero (as seen in the classic 1953 "Superduperman") was a loser and a goof.

In the larger historical sense this was, of course, no more a breakthrough when Kurtzman did it than when similar heroic skewerings were undertaken by Cervantes and Voltaire. Both satire and its close cousin comedy depend on the inversion of desired expectations, but this inversion is simply another expectation, not a liberation from expectation, be it that of genre or dominant ideology or whatever.

Kurtzman's MAD satires were, of course, supremely funny, but they didn't disclose any reality but the narrative reality of the satiric mode. And though Kurtzman might have desired to see his "Superduperman" expose the implied banality of its model, his satire probably had no measurable effect on the prosperity of SUPERMAN. Indeed, within three or four years of the satire, the feature became far more inventive, possibly in response to the growing appeal of science-fiction in various media of that decade.

Kurtzman's satires, though, might be deemed as more straightforward than those of Veitch and Moore (Miller is an exception in that he was doing a romance-adventure with satiric elements). Because Veitch and Moore did essay ironic superhero stories with adventure-elements, both had some influence (however good or bad in the long run) on the development of mainstream superheroes. All artists are magpies: they swipe from the creative "nests" of other artists anything that they think will work for them and/or their audience, and any artist who denies this is either a fool or a liar.

Kurtzman would probably have been pleased that the mainstream heroic comics of his time did not derive much (if anything) from his satires (the various spoofy imitations of MAD being outside the frame of that mode/genre). Thus he could go to his grave believing that he had "subverted the dominant" or some such ideological fantasy, and without giving any aid and comfort to the enemy.

Others, however, could not say the same-- the least being any so-called "destroyers of superheroes."