TRAILER THOUGHTS

 Last year the only superhero movies I saw in theaters were SUPERMAN and FANTASTIC FOUR, not because I thought they were likely to be great movies but because those franchises are two of the most important in Comic Book Land. I've passed on theatrical screenings of other superhero movies of the Big Two-- BRAVE NEW WORLD, THUNDERBOLTS, SUPERGIRL-- but now that I've seen both the DOOMSDAY trailer and a few breakdowns of said trailer, I'm a little pumped to see this one in the theater.

I have no doubt that DOOMSDAY will be an unwieldly melange of maybe ten-twenty plotlines from both MCU feature films and TV shows. But in one way, this could be a good thing.

Way back in 1985, I gave a negative review to Marvel Comics' SECRET WARS, which was probably as banal as DOOMSDAY *might* be-- and for similar reasons, because writer Jim Shooter also dumped together a bunch of unrelated plotlines, none of which proved to have lasting emotional resonance (with the possible exception of Spider-Man's Black Costume). DOOMSDAY will also lead into the MCU's version of SECRET WARS the following year, so it seems a safe bet that *someone* in the DOOMSDAY production team looked at how Shooter had handled the juggling of about forty super-characters. I don't even know if Hollywood types care about SECRET WARS having been a big moneymaker in its day, mostly with toy-buying kids and hardcore readers. All the Hollywood people *might* care about is finding some way to make all these characters work together enough to make a respectable profit.

So both DOOMSDAY and its next-year sequel probably won't be any better than Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS. 

But you know what DOOMSDAY will be better than?

ANY SUPERHERO FILM WITH EXPLICIT POLITICAL CONTENT.

A big splashy multi-crossover film will be concerned almost exclusively with saving multiple universes, and thus there *should* be no time to devote to political pontification.

And-- *that's a good thing.*

Besides, DOOMSDAY/WARS may kill off the Simu Liu version of Shang-Chi, whose existence I regard as a travesty of the original. That alone would make even the most tedious farrago more palatable.    

       

   

THE UNIQUENESS OF '66 BATMAN

Just a forum-post to clarify some of the unique factors of the TV show, responding in part to a claim that the program went downhill because of the number of episodes required in the second season.

______________

I guess we are at loggerheads on the episode thing. In terms of sheer quantity, going from a half-season for a show with about thirty half-hour episodes to a full season of 60 should not have been any bigger deal than an hour-long show with a half-season of, say, 15 episodes suddenly getting a full season order of, say, 30 episodes. 

HOWEVER, I do concede that with BATMAN, even the producers were to an extent making things up as they went along. Doing two episodes of BATMAN a week was in my outsider's opinion far more difficult than doing a weekly hour of even a good western like, say, RAWHIDE. The rules on how to do westerns had been well established long before RAWHIDE. Everyone involved in making the series would have grown with westerns, both juvenile and adult, and everyone would have known what a good western needed.

BATMAN was almost sui generis for television. ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN followed various tropes of comic book stories, but I don't think that show consistently represented the comic book of the early fifties. Some episodes roughly captured the feel of some comic stories, but the low budget meant that overall SUPERMAN couldn't really be that much like SUPERMAN the comic. Similar factors also limited other low budget adaptations like SHEENA and cheap original cartoons like COURAGEOUS CAT.

But BATMAN actually had a high budget (though some accounts claim that the showrunners acted like they had to pinch every penny). The makers could actually make the Caped Crusader as way out as the source material. But most adults had at best a friendly contempt for comic books of all genres. Hence Dozier came up with his two-pronged approach: render the comics tropes as accurately as possible to please the kids but seek to please the adults with ironic humor. Yet that balance was hard to sustain, and as we've discussed, in the end a lot of raconteurs defaulted to zaniness rather than distanced camp. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: NADA THE LILY (1892)

When I was growing up, I occasionally saw cartoons make short jokes about "The Vanishing American," usually showing a Native American slowly fading out of existence. I knew that this was some arcane adult reference, and eventually I learned that the phrase was the title of a 1922 serialized novel by Zane Grey about the vicissitudes of a Navajo tribe, and of a 1925 silent film adapting said novel. Whereas the novel and the film depicted Native Americans being victimized by White Christians who were either condescending or avaricious, the phrase by itself took on the implication that Native Americans were doomed by their own primitivism, a verdict also articulated much earlier in Fenimore Cooper's 1826 LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

In 1892 H. Rider Haggard gave the English speaking world NADA THE LILY, which might be said to be his version of "The Vanishing African." Haggard had lived and worked in Africa for several years, and thus knew enough about the terrain and the customs of the African people to lend verisimilitude to his two best known novels, KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885) and SHE (1886). The star of SOLOMON'S MINES, big game hunter Allan Quatermain, became the subject of seventeen other works-- and the one sequel, ALLAN QUATERMAIN (1887), is also widely regarded as the first novel to feature a "lost civilization." That novel also introduced the mighty, axe-wielding Zulu warrior Umslopogass as a boon friend to Quatermain, though both heroes die at the end of the book.

However, the death of his characters didn't keep Haggard from writing prequel-novels, and just as he wrote several for Quartermain, Haggard also wrote an "origin story" for Umslopogass, of which he is the sole star.

To be sure, his story is told by an interlocutor: Mopo, a witch doctor with apparently real divinatory skills. Mopo's life becomes intertwined by the formidable warlord Chaka during the latter's reign ot terror in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Chaka marries Mopo's sister, but the warlord is ferociously paranoid about being overthrown by kindred, and he regularly slays any of his male progeny. Mopo and his sister arrange a deception by which Chaka thinks his son has been executed, when in fact he is raised as the son of Mopo and Mopo's wife. Umslopogass grows up believing that couple to be his real parents, and that their real daughter Nada the Lily is his sister (when she is in truth his cousin).

Umslopogass and Nada fall in love despite believing themselves siblings, but assorted circumstances keep them apart until their tragic ending (inevitable in terms of continuity, since Nada doesn't exist in the future life of the Zulu hero). Despite being unaware of his royal lineage, Umslopogass pursues a heroic destiny. He journeys to a rival tribe to undergo a ritual combat, in which he wins his formidable axe from the tribe's chief. In his one ambigously supernatural adventure, he encounters a pack of wolves that may or may not be evil human spirits reincarnated as jungle predators. He also befriends a weird "witch man" known as Ghazali, who is an ally to the wolves but also becomes the Zulu's companion. Umslopogass does not get to contend with his wicked father Chaka, who is assassinated more or less in keeping with historical record. 

There are no named White characters in the novel until Quatermain is mentioned at the very end. However, various references make clear that the Zulu way of life is doomed due to colonial encroachment and the superior firepower of Europeans. Nada, who is not especially mythic except as a support-character to the main hero, is also said to have some distant White ancestry. I'm not sure Haggard included this detail in support of his theory of "The Vanishing Zulu," or because he didn't think his readers would buy into the narrative of Nada's incredible beauty if those readers thought she looked like the average Black African woman. 

I'm sure Haggard's work, and his association with European colonial rule, would win him no fans with many modern readers, though it's a vivid tale of love and war in a vanished culture. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge NADA is the first prose novel to focus entirely upon the actions of a Black African hero-- who, given his one encounter with the supernatural, might also be rated "the first Black superhero," or "superhero-adjacent," should one prefer a less general term. 

NEAR-MYTHS: "IN THE GALLOWS OF THE GHOUL" (HANGMAN #8, 1943)

Many superhero comics of the Golden Age possess the extravagant and horrific elements of Gothic prose fiction, and a fair number of them use an expressionist style that's sometimes labeled "Gothic." The series I'm considering here, THE HANGMAN from MLJ, is one with such an artstyle.

The earliest prose Gothics, such as THE MONK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, are noted for emphasizing a particular horror-element: that of incest. Despite the fulminations of comics-haters, most comics of all genres seem innocent of this particular element, in its sexual form.

In other essays I formulated an umbrella-term, "clansgression," to include all literary effects that even suggested incestuous activity or feelings, even if actual sexual transgression did not transpire. One form that did occasionally appear was the form of violence-clansgression. This usually took the form of madness-- fathers killed daughters, or brothers sisters-- but no sexual activity was suggested; such events were mainly melodramatic excess.

On the surface, "In the Gallows of the Ghoul" seems one of these. A madman, Jed Jennings, strangles his sister Mary, and on the next page throws his nephew out a high window. But Mary's plight has come to the attention of the heroic Hangman, and he saves the boy, though he can't prevent Jed's escape. So far, just "ordinary madness."

Hangman then tells his girlfriend the tale Mary told the hero (in his other identity)-- and then the story takes an unusual turn. Jed had been the sole support of his "widowed half sister." But when Mary conceives a child-- presumably from the late, unnamed father-- Jed becomes tormented with worry about being able to provide for both of them. As rendered by artist Bob Fujitani, the uncredited writer shows Jed spiraling down into madness, feeling himself mocked by the outside world-- though it's hard to say why the impoverished fellow would think the world would mock him for being poor. Then Hangman concludes his story, speaking of a "secret" revealed to him by Mary-- only to have the last narration cut off by the madman's appearance. Jed claims that his "secret" is that he suffered from a "brain disease" that made him feel persecuted. The villain kayos the hero, and threatens to strangle the hero's girlfriend the same way Jed strangled his sister. Hangman rises. Jed runs at him with a weapon, Hangman dodges, and Jed takes the same high dive out a window that he bestowed on his nephew, but with fatal results.

Yet the unknown writer created some odd discordances in the narrative, possibly even strange enough to make young readers think twice. The first picture those readers would've got with regard to Jed during the backstory was that when his half-sister was delivering her child, he was pacing the hospital floor "as though he were her husband, instead of her half brother." Then his first words to the doctor express his wish that the child will be born dead. In adult melodrama, these two elements lead to one conclusion: Jed *is* the child's father, but he's so ashamed of his sexual congress with his half sister that he wants all evidence of the act expunged.

Possibly the writer actually played around with using this raw idea-- man wants to murder his sister and sister's child-- but the writer realized he couldn't get away with such adult material in a kid's comic, even a gory one. Thus the script claims that Jed's concern is about having enough money to feed another mouth in addition to that of his half sister. And since worries over money were not enough to motivate a murder-- particularly since Jed could have just picked up and left Mary and her son to their fate-- the writer has to add in the excuse of a "brain disease."

Admittedly neither Mary nor her kid, due to their brief appearances, provide any support for this view. But I find it odd that the writer specified that Jed and Mary were half-siblings. It would make more sense if the two had been raised together, so that Jed felt a responsibility to take care of a full sister. But if they're half-siblings, the reader has no expectation about their having been raised together. Indeed, if they were not raised together, one might expect that sexual inhibitions would not have been naturalized by the so-called "Westermarck effect,"

Is it clear that literal sexual incest occurs in "Ghoul, as it does in Matthew Lewis's MONK. No. But Jed's extreme antipathy for his sister's son would have been a trope that many adults of the period would have recognized within the framework of an adult melodrama, enough to at least suspect some forbidden hanky-panky. The kids reading HANGMAN COMICS probably did not think twice about the matter, and probably accepted the explanation given. But the writer of the story was certainly an adult in the early forties, and one can't presume that he was at all innocent of the tropes used by adult melodramas. Even calling a man a "ghoul" is suggestive, not of a victim of psychological guilt and/or brain disease, but of a being that transgresses against society. And rather that transgressing by eating the flesh of corpses, Jed Jennings seems to commit murder to cover up a very different "sin of the flesh."

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I noted that a lot of film critics have ample ways of authenticating the major developments both in general film history and with respect to particular film genres. When a cineaste like Martin Scorsese talks about a genre like film noir, he can draw upon a wealth of critical writings about the most important exemplars of the genre, and about the overall history of the genre's development. 

In Part 1 I also pointed out that comics-fans have over time generated both general histories of the comic book medium and of the particular genre of the superhero in comics. Yet none of these histories has any impact on the development of superheroes in the film medium, any more than a history of noir books would impact on noir films. And in essence, there is no strong developmental history of superheroes on the big screen, not even when one shows how that history intertwines with the history of superheroes on the small screen.

If one uses the term "superhero" only in its more restricted sense of "the costumed crusader," then in American cinema the genre starts in silent cinema with 1920's MARK OF ZORRO. But that film, and its 1940 remake, were one of a very small number of feature films spotlighting costumed crusaders prior to the 1950s. The main source of costumed crusader cinema were the serials, which also began in the silent era, but which did not make substantial adaptation of superhero (and superhero-adjacent) properties until the late 1930s, the beginning of the so-called "Golden Age of Serials." Zorro put in an appearance in the serial format in 1937's ZORRO RIDES AGAIN. while 1938 saw the cinematic debut of two other prose-derived superheroes, the Spider and the Lone Ranger. Many "superhero-adjacent" comic strips also were filmed around the same time, particularly those of FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS. Finally, in response to the burgeoning popularity of costumed heroes in comic books, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL in 1941 provided the first adaptation of a particular comic book superhero. Comic book superheroes continued to be adapted until the studios quit making serials in 1956, resulting in a list of adaptations that includes Spy Smasher (1942), Batman (1943), Captain America (1944), The Vigilante (1947), and Superman (1948). Serials never indulged in the gory violence seen in many Golden Age superhero comics, but they shared the same basic aesthetic: action, action, and more action.

Serials, which made their money from kids regularly going to the movies to see the latest serial-chapter, were doomed as soon as television began offering serial-style entertainment for free. Yet television in that decade, and through the early 1960s, paid the superhero almost no attention, even as juvenile entertainment. Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. Slightly later, Disney produced in 1963 a three-part limited teleseries, THE SCARECROW OF ROMNEY MARSH.

The same basic dynamic informed the genre of animated theatrical shorts, which appeared alongside theatrical feature films. In the "golden age of cinema," two costumed-crusader cartoon-series predominated, resulting in seventeen SUPERMAN episodes and eighty-one MIGHTY MOUSE episodes. TV's competition with the movies meant the eventual doom of cinematic cartoon shorts and the rise of TV cartoons. On the small screen Mighty Mouse arguably gained a greater following than he ever had on the big screen, enjoying a long run as repackaged Saturday morning fare in the form of 1955's MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE.

There had been a very tiny number of costumed-crusader feature films in the 1940s, such as three SHADOW B-films from Columbia. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were only a smattering of mostly forgotten "masked swashbuckler" B-flicks and two LONE RANGER feature films, the latter issued by the same production company that made the TV show. 

The upshot of all these changes was that even though the Silver Age of Comics had brought new life to the superhero genre in the late 1950s, neither the big screen nor the small screen evinced any strong interest in the genre-- until 1966.

Was '66 BATMAN influenced first by a producer reading a BATMAN comic book, or by Hugh Hefner screening the old Bat-serials for a laugh, or by Pop Art usages of comic book art? Primacy does not really matter. But although "camp Batman" was opposed to the "straight" content of the more streamlined BATMAN comics of the Silver Age, the 1966 show was the first film/TV serial that successfully communicated the appeal of a superhero who continually battled a horde of repeating adversaries. Indeed, one could argue Silver Age Bat-comics began emphasizing the hero's colorful rogues a lot more than Golden Age Bat-comics ever had, and so the 1966 show was very much in tune with that sea-change.

 Later that same year, Hanna-Barbera's cartoon studio jumped into the costumed crusader business with galaxy-protecting superhero SPACE GHOST. The same company would present six other such TV cartoons, among them an adaptation of FANTASTIC FOUR, before concerned parents campaigned against this fancied increase in Saturday morning violence.

But neither the large screen nor the small screen did much else with the superheroes for the remainder of the decade. However, one could posit that most of the superheroes of the 1970s were in the same mold as BATMAN and SPACE GHOST, and at least some of the Silver Age comics: colorful, fairly intelligent adventures with light humor and none of the gory violence seen in Golden Age funnies. This aesthetic embraced not only moderately successful 1970s teleserials like WONDER WOMAN and INCREDIBLE HULK, but also misfires like the 1975 feature-film DOC SAVAGE. Roughly the same Silver Age aesthetic stayed in place for the four live-action SUPERMAN films and the considerably less noteworthy super-films of the eighties, such as LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. During this "late Silver Age" of film and TV, I tend to find most of the costumed crusaders from cartoon-land to be nugatory, with the possible exceptions of 1983's HE-MAN and 1987's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.

Now, one might say that cinema started exploiting the grittier nature of the comic-book Bronze Age with Tim Burton's first two BATMAN films in 1989 and 1992, and maybe even with the 1989 PUNISHER and the 1990 DARKMAN. However, if elements of the comic book Silver Age only appeared in very rough fashion in American comic books of the 1970s through the 1990s, such elements continued to appear alongside the edgier fare in movies and TV shows of the nineties. Thus the other two BATMAN films of the 1990s sought to hearken back to 1966 BATMAN, albeit in a very clumsy manner. Similarly, the hallmark superhero cartoon of the nineties, BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, emulates the tight plotting of Silver Age Bat-comics and, unlike the first two Burton Bat-films, eschews the transgressive violence found in Frank Miller's signature Bronze Age DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The live-action TURTLES films followed the lead of the eighties cartoon, choosing light humor over blood and guts.

As I see it, even in 2023 we remain in a sort of "superhero soup" in cinema and TV, constantly mixing together either the sunny Silver Age motifs (the MCU's ANT MAN) or the dark and transgressive tropes of the Bronze Age (ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE). It's like modern superhero movies and TV can't decide if they want to follow the lead of Stan Lee or of Alan Moore. 

In one respect, modern costumed-crusader films and TV shows have allied themselves with the comic-book "Iron Age." In PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS, I hypothesized that the 2009 "diversity hire" of the MS MARVEL creator marked the beginnings of hyper-politicized comic books. MCU films would not substantially begin following this storytelling model until roughly 2015, but to date the studio has not deviated significantly from said model. I don't know what it would take, in any of these media, to re-orient storytelling priorities enough to produce a "New Age" not entirely beholden to any of the others, but I suspect something's got to change eventually, even if its the extinction of the superhero genre in all its variegated forms.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 1

 In 2019 Martin Scorsese said, in part:

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

I've already responded loosely to aspects of Scorsese's essay in this post, and I won't repeat my response here, except to say that the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

But one problem with critiquing "escapist works" is that it can be difficult to demonstrate how they develop over time. I recently re-watched Part 2 of the director's PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (the only part that happened to be free on Youtube). I noticed that in the documentary Scorsese directed a great deal of attention, at least in the subsection "The Director as Illusionist," to the linear development of various forms of directorial technique, ranging from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock. Today anyone can read comparable histories of the development of film techniques, or particular film genres, because general film history has been analyzed in great depth by many writers, long before Scorsese's analysis.

There are a few good general histories of comic books, though none that go into a lot of detail about overall diachronic development of genres (say, how superheroes and funny-animals dominated much of early original comic-book content). However, many histories provide a good linear history of superheroes only, which usually breaks down by designated "ages." I supplied my breakdown of the ages in this essay, but there I focused only the "big events" that defined those ages. A more nuanced analysis, devoted to describing how each age responds to the use of artifice-tropes, would go something like this:

THE GOLDEN AGE-- Because nearly all publications are aimed at children, the entire age is defined largely by wild, pulpish artifice and almost no verisimilitude. Even standout comics artists like Eisner, Cole and Barks only invoke verisimilitude conditionally.

THE SILVER AGE-- Possibly in response to the demands of the Comics Code, the long-time editors of Marvel and DC made an effort to explore techniques that lent greater verisimilitude to their still-pretty-wild fantasies. With DC it was greater use of organized motifs of sci-fi or occult fantasy, while Marvel worked on making characters seem two-dimensional. Almost no other companies followed their lead, though.

THE EARLY BRONZE AGE-- Mainstream comics got edgier, and superheroes followed suit. THE NEW X-MEN, for example, often looked as breezy as many 1960s superhero groups, but often Chris Claremont surreptitiously worked in story-elements suggestive of sadomasochism and rape, among others.

THE LATE BRONZE AGE-- What was kept fairly sub rosa in the seventies became big business as mainstream superhero comics embraced the ideal I've called "adult pulp," of which WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS were the exemplars.

THE IRON AGE-- With greater examination, I might end up dividing this era into "early" and "late" as well, since the "adult pulp" tropes from the eighties and nineties are first compromised by a chimera one might call "the Literary Superhero," and later by "the Politicized Superhero." 

But even if one does not agree with my characterizations, it's possible to see how the superhero genre showed definite changes from era to era. 

But superheroes in cinema-- that's a question for Part 2.

NEAR MYTHS: BLACK ADAM/JSA BLACK REIGN (2004)

Though I'd already seen the 2022 movie BLACK ADAM without having read this JSA compilation, I decided I would give the TPB a read in order to determine whether or not the film's writers for the movie had borrowed any important plot or character points. The short answer is that, if one subtracts all the over-complicated subplots provided in the Geoff Jones-Rags Morales graphic novel, there is a rough similarity of the main plotlines. 

In REIGN, Black Adam somehow assembles a small coterie of super-powered aides with which he overthrows the local dictatorship of his native land. (Note: in the comics-character's original appearance in 1945, he was an Egyptian of an archaic era, but at some point in his DC revival he was reworked as an archaic native from a fictional DC country named Kandahq.) Though the character had been reworked in other ways when DC took over the Fawcett library of characters, I imagine that in 2004 Johns probably was not bound by any previous iterations, and so Adam's conquest of Kandahq here may be the "first" time he ever did so in Johns' version. Adam's ruthless conquest of the country suggests that he may planning the conquest of other neighboring nations. To prevent that contingency, about a dozen well-known Justice Society heroes descend upon Kandahq and have an involved battle with Adam's forces. In the end, enough chaos erupts that Adam pledges to the JSA that he will remain within his own borders unless attacked.

In the film, Adam is newly revived by a band of Kandahq freedom fighters seeking to oust a vaguely defined occupying force. Logically enough, Adam does not attempt to collect any allies, given that as a possessor of the "Shazam lightning" he's almost unstoppable. Adam doesn't take any immediate action to take over the country of his descendants, but four members of the JSA descend upon Kandahq on the theory that Adam's very existence is a threat to cosmic order. In contrast to the graphic novel, the JSA heroes and Black Adam are forced to work together against a common menace. 

I won't expatiate on the film further here, since I'll review it separately. BLACK REIGN is a very ordinary superhero punch-em-up, and I say that as a critic who believes that fight scenes can have a lot of extra-ordinary significance. For my taste at least there are far too many subplots, with the result that no single plot stands out, though since some of the issues appeared in the HAWKMAN title, there's a strong emphasis on the contentions between Adam and the Winged Wonder, just as one sees in the movie. The closest thing to a myth captured in REIGN is not sociological, as it is in the film. Johns' script emphasizes psychological trauma about the loss of loved ones and roads not taken, but the only scene that has any resonance takes place when Adam demonstrates to his uncertain ally "Atom Smasher" the fruits of their violence: the preservation of innocents.

NEAR-MYTHS: ["VILLAGE OF THE DOOMED"], PEP COMICS #4 (1940)

(NOTE: the title is an arbitrary one assigned by Grand Comics Database.)

"Village" is a rarity in several ways. One is that unlike the vast majority of Golden Age comics-stories, this one is part of an ongoing storyline, for as the copy explains, in the last issue villains hypnotized the hero into committing numerous crimes. The Comet threw off the spell and killed his manipulators, which didn't prove to be the best idea since that deprived Comet of anyone who could testify as to his fundamental innocence. It's also a rarity in that it's a "social problem" type of story. Jack Cole, who wrote and drew the early COMET tales, didn't attempt this type of story often, but this one's much better than the ones offered by Siegel and Shuster in SUPERMAN.

The Comet, tired of running, turns himself in. However, he gets a fine taste of lynch-justice and has to flee once again.

The wounded hero flies out to some rural area and collapses, but a kindly old man takes him in and believes his story. The old guy then shows Comet how the local mining-community is being exploited by cruel businessmen who refuse to provide safety measures. (Note the gut-punch when Comet can't destroy a boulder pressing down on a miner and has to amputate the man's limb to get him free-- which isn't the most logical course of action, but is surely meant to make readers hate the corrupt owners.) The mine owners claim that the safety measures would bankrupt them, but Comet proves that to be a lie, and in fighting the corrupt main guy Comet's "bouyancy" enables him to bounce off walls "like a rubber ball." (Plastic Man was about a year down the road for Cole.)

The bad guy tries to rub out Comet with poison gas, but again the hero escapes and ends up "unintentionally" executing the evildoer. Comet makes sure that the next guy in line makes the safety alterations, and he's off to the next adventure, despite still being hunted by the law (another element that Cole, reputedly a stickler for law and order, seemed to work into many of his stories).

THE READING RHEUM: THE MAN OF BRONZE (1933)

 

One of the most interesting thing about Doc Savage's first novel is how much of the mythology was in place from the first. 

Naturally, I knew that author Lester Dent-- billed throughout the hero's pulp-magazine run as "Kenneth Robeson"-- established right away the backstory of Doc Savage and his "Fabulous Five" aides in basic nutshell-fashion, which "shells" he and other raconteurs would continue to re-use for most if not all subsequent stories. But I'm rather surprised to note that Dent articulated the idea of Doc's "Fortress of Solitude" in the first novel. In contrast to the use that DC's Superman made of the idea-- where the fortress was just sort of a "Superman museum"-- Dent's hero states that this refuge was "the secret of [Doc's] universal knowledge," because the hero needed intense "periods of concentration." One assumes that this concentration was the source of his polymath facility with all of the sciences, though a cynic might say that it was also a way of distancing himself from common humanity. 

BRONZE is also all about establishing the righteous quest of the six heroes, even if it's framed in somewhat juvenile terms, as Doc tells his men, "We first got together back in the War [i.e., World War One, though none of them ever seem old enough.] We all liked the big scrap. It got into our blood. When we got back, the humdrum life of an ordinary man was not suited to our natures." This account slightly skirts a separate motive, in which it's asserted that Doc's father, a rich philanthropist, subjected his son to intensive training in physical and mental development for the express purpose of having Doc become a world-beating do-gooder. In any case, at the beginning of BRONZE, Doc and his men learn that the senior Savage has been killed, thus giving the sextet a concrete case to investigate.

Not coincidentally, the solution to the elder Savage's murder also leads the six champions to an almost endless fortune in gold that funds Doc's endless supply of crimefighting toys. The heroes journey to Central America and find that their enemies are linked to a Mayan civilization that, in true Rider Haggard fashion, has remained intact and isolated from the vagaries of colonist incursions. Yet though that bald summary suggests that Doc and friends may take the form of "ugly Americans" joining in the colonial project, Doc himself is very outspoken about disagreeing with said project. 

It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of deal, you know.

When the good guys meet the Mayans, the natives are mostly well-bred and intelligent, including a sexy princess named Monja, who immediately falls for the unapproachable Doc Savage. The only exceptions are a corrupt warrior class who are behind various assassination attempts on Doc and friends, all with the long-range goal of taking control of the Mayan redoubt away from the rightful rulers. The villains are easily the weakest aspect of the novel, though it's an interesting sociological motif that Dent made ambitious professional warriors his bad guys, in marked contrast to the knightly purity of Doc's group. In the end, once the villains are defeated, the Mayan rulers become the de facto sponsors of Doc's war against evil. This sponsorship is certainly is a fate better than their getting annihilated just to make the hero look like a tough guy, which was a common fate for lost civilizations in thirties pop fiction, as seen in 1935's THE PHANTOM EMPIRE.

A minor surprise: I remember groaning when I watched a scene in the 1975 DOC SAVAGE film wherein Doc pays a sort of left-handed compliment to the beautiful female lead by telling her, "Mona-- you're a brick!" It was a corny line, but its derived from a scene in the book, where Doc says much the same thing to Monja. But it does have a little more psychological heft in prose. Doc is also a chaste knight who won't engage with the female sex to avoid threatening his mission, and since he's slightly aware of Monja's affections, he seeks to distance himself from the sexy young woman by treating her like one of the boys.

NEAR MYTHS: "HOLLYWOOD ATTACKED" (SPEED COMICS #23, 1942)

I might have listed this hero-crossover under "curiosities," but there's a little mythic appeal to the idea of having all the Harvey heroes in SPEED COMICS come together in one story, even though Lev Gleason had executed the same idea the year before  with DAREDEVIL BATTLES HITLER. 

Just as the Lev Gleason story was technically a Daredevil tale in which all the other featured characters were guest stars, this story stars the Black Cat, whose spy-busting adventures mostly took place in and around Hollywood. The idea of both the Japanese army and navy invading Hollywood, and only Hollywood, is amusing by itself, as is the idea that the Cat and her fellow stars-- Captain Freedom, Shock Gibson, disguise-artist Ted Parish and the Girl Commandos-- thwart the invasion without any help from U.S. armed forces.

That said, the unbilled writer did put a little thought into his premise, as seen on this page, where one hero suggests that they play the Japanese army and navy off one another-- an idea I can't remember having seen in WWII comics before. There's also a little "girl power" involved as the Black Cat and the Girl Commandos team up.

One other tidbit: at one point, a Japanese soldier uses the term "shimatta," which has more than one meaning but seems in context to mean "shit!"

NEAR-MYTHS: THE JUDAS CONTRACT (1984)

 

  

 

 

I referenced this TEEN TITANS story-arc in my essay NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD PRO, where I talked about the futility of imposing moralistic restrictions on transgressive content in art. More recently, I decided to reread JUDAS CONTRACT and review it. I was certain that it was not a mythcomic, but was it just a near-myth, like many other stories in the Wolfman-Perez corpus, or a null-myth, like the narrative I reviewed here?

 

My verdict is that although writer Wolfman’s focus here is the same as in “Trigon Lives”—the almost Manichean presence of sheer evil—here his focus is a little better because he embodies his evil not in some road-company Satan, but in a teenaged superheroine, the junior to the older teens (and non-teens) of the Titans group. This is “Terra,” who is admitted into the ranks of the Titans despite her generally snarky attitude and occasional outbursts of uncontrolled rage.

 

According to Wolfman’s public statements, he meant to fake out readers by making them believe that Terra would fulfill a role not unlike that of Kitty Pryde in Marvel’s X-MEN. I don’t how many readers were fooled back in the day—Wolfman is not exactly known for the subtlety of his writing—but the fact that one established Titan, Beast Boy, was deeply in love with the minx probably helped put the hoax across. After a handful of issues in which Terra serves as an apprentice member of the super-group, the first issue of “Judas Contract” reveals that she’s a mole, using a miniature eye-camera to take pictures of the Titans’ routines and local haunts. She then funnels this intel to one of the heroes’ worst enemies, Deathstroke the Terminator. The same issue also reveals that fifteen-year-old Terra is not only Deathstroke’s partner in crime, but also his partner in bed.

 

Once Wolfman tips his hand in the first part, a great deal of time is devoted to depicting the ways in which Deathstroke systematically captures capture of most of the heroes, all of whom look rather stupid for not harbored any serious suspicions of the teen traitor—not Raven, despite her empathic powers, and not the former Robin, with his detective training. I say “former Robin” because it’s also in this story-arc that Dick Grayson assumes his new (and still current) superhero identity of Nightwing. He’s the only Titan to escape capture, though he’s only able to secure the release of his friends with the help of yet another “new member.”

 

As if to compensate for the loss of Terra, he and Wolfman debut the character of Jericho, who can possess the body of most if not all living beings and usurp their wills. Just to ramp up the soap operatics, Jericho also happens to be the son of Deathstroke. The arc also reveals the origin of the Terminator and his own tangled familial history, but neither Deathstroke nor his superhero son rise to the level of mythic presences.

 

Prior to the inevitable scene in which the captive heroes are released by Nightwing and Jericho, Wolfman twists the knife for his protagonists by having Terra strut around, gloating about how easily she tricked them. When the rescue comes off, followed by the usual pyrotechnics, Terra goes berserk, lashing out at Deathstroke as well for supposedly betraying her. In her big death-scene, Wolfman leaves no doubt that she’s a “Bad Seed” with no real motive for her obsessive hatred of all things good: “Due to the fault of no one but herself, she is insane. No one taught her to hate, yet she hates… without cause, without reason.” At least one later writer chose to claim that Deathstroke had driven her mad with a drug meant to enhance her powers. But even though Wolfman’s portrait of destructive behavior lacks any psychological depth, I prefer the idea that this “nasty Kitty Pryde” is just evil for the sake of being evil.

 

On a side-note, Wolfman and Perez seem to have had eye-symbolism on their minds during this arc. The first section of the arc repeatedly emphasizes “The Eyes of Tara Markov,” meaning the camera-implant with which the traitress records everything she sees while spying on the Titans. Jericho also uses “the windows of the soul” to make his power work, since he must catch the gaze of anyone he wishes to control. During the big end-fight, Jericho possesses his evil father and makes him slug Terra, after which she tries to kill him as well as the escaping Titans. Then, if all this eye-stuff wasn’t enough, Beast Boy commits a classic “injury to the eye.” Even though the shapechanging hero doesn’t believe that Terra’s truly corrupt, he turns himself into a small insect and assails the camera-lens in one of Terra’s eyes. Instead of making her more vulnerable, the minor injury enrages her so that she loses control of her powers and kills herself. Though Wolfman and Perez could have chosen a lot of ways to inflict this injury, and even though Beast Boy isn’t being vindictive when he assaults her, the attack on the traitorous “eyes of Tara Markov” provides an ironic way for the simon-pure heroes to vent their wrath on the rogue heroine—and to pave the way for a new member who knows how to use “the power of the gaze” for the forces of good.

MYTHCOMICS: “A PIECE OF NIGHT” (SKORPIO,1993)

 

In terms of visual tropes, the character of Cybersix—created in 1993 by two Argentinians, artist Carlos Meglia and writer Carlos Trillo—appears to be composed of pop-culture quotations. The heroine wears a slouch hat (The Shadow), leaps about a city’s rooftops while wearing a really long cape (Batman) and high heels (Batgirl) and maintains a civilian identity in part by obscuring her face with glasses (Superman). To be sure, none of these characters concealed their identities through cross-dressing, and the grotesque cityscape drawn by Meglia makes Gotham City look like a playpen. Yet, more importantly, Meglia and Trillo are also oriented on making their genetically-engineered character into a meditation on the nature of identity.

The Cybersix origin story—not officially translated into English, but available on the Net in fan-renditions—sets up the character less as a standard hero than as an often pathetic (albeit smoking hot) monster. When Cybersix initially begins patrolling the vaguely European city of Meridiana, she’s not seeking criminals to bring to justice; she’s seeking victims to prey upon, just to stay alive. Though her monstrous nature is not in any way her fault, she’s haunted by a sense of anomie from the sphere of normal life.

The character is first seen in her “Clark Kent” persona, that of Adrian Seidelman, a male teacher of literature at a Meridiana high school. Though her femininity is concealed behind glasses and beneath bulky men’s clothes, even her hidden charms attract the attention of a randy teenage girl, and this predicament in turn leads to Adrian being hassled by some of the teen girl’s classmates. Adrian is then “saved” by fellow teacher Lucas Amato, whose build is as big and beefy as Adrian’s is slight and unthreatening. Because of her singular nature, Adrian/Cybersix has no friends. But Lucas happens to need a confidante, and he bends Adrian’s ear about his new discovery—which just happens to be the rumored existence of a weird woman in black leaping around the rooftops of Meridiana. Though Lucas is employed at the school as a biology teacher, Lucas also has a “double identity,” since he became a teacher in lieu of his true passion, journalism. After much dancing-around about who and what Cybersix is, she finally divulges at least part of her story to Lucas, much as Superman disclosed part of his history to Lois Lane.

The proto-heroine owes her genesis to ex-Nazi mad scientist Von Reichter, who perhaps ended up in Meridiana after deciding that a hideout in Argentina was just too cliché. Whereas the Nazis of the Third Reich sought to convince ordinary men that they were supermen, Von Reichter decided to make his own super-beings via genetic manipulation. In addition, the scientist designed his artificial “children” to blend in with established society in order to slowly build power for himself. But some of his projects proved less successful than others. He destroyed an entire group of experimental servants, the “Cyber” line, because they weren’t obedient enough to suit him, and later bred a more servile group, sometimes called “Technos.” Of the original Cyber line, only the female designated Cybersix survived, thanks to the intervention of one of Von Reichter’s human servants—not coincidentally, an African Black, who becomes Cybersix’s surrogate father. To further complicate her survival, all of Von Reichter’s creations can only endure if they get regular doses of a serum called “sustenance.” Cybersix’s father steals a supply of sustenance that lasts through her childhood, though eventually she has to find a new source.

Like Superman before her, Cybersix conceals the part of the backstory in which she gets a double identity. Even in her youth she realizes she must journey to Meridiana and harvest sustenance from her Techno “brethren,” but that she cannot enter the city without identification. She chances across a wrecked car in which a father, mother and male youth have all perished, so young Cybersix poses as the slain boy Adrian Seidelman.

The imposture proves successful enough that Adrian establishes her credentials in the city. However, on the first night that she seeks to plunder a Techno for sustenance—which she takes, orally but non-fatally, in approved vampire fashion—Cybersix realizes that sooner or later she’ll compromise her cherished civilian identity. Because this particular Techno works in the capacity of a prostitute, Cybersix raids the hooker’s closet, stealing all the accoutrements she will use in her night-stalking persona: the hat, the long cape and dark bodysuit, and the high heels. Indeed, at one point in the story Cybersix flashes back on posing as an actual prostitute in order to lure other Technos into her web, so that she can harvest them. Whereas a real prostitute trades sex for money, Cybersix vamps her victims for a one-way transaction—though one could argue that she’s stealing back the life her “Bad Father” would have denied her.

What keeps Cybersix from being an unregenerate monster is that she does have a conscience. At one point in her conversation with Lucas on a rooftop, one of Von Reichter’s assassins tracks the heroine down. The two super-powered warriors fight, and the assassin almost goes over the side of the building. Lucas persuades Cybersix to spare the pawn’s life, and she pulls the killer to safety. The killer attacks again and plunges off the building to his death. Cybersix treats the incident with dark humor-- “Now I’ll go to heaven”—but her sardonicism does not distract from her need to be more human, particularly in the eyes of Lucas. A romantic connection will inevitably be made between the two of them, though arguably Meglia and Trillo are primarily concerned in using romance to give Cybersix the human dimension she lacks.

Trillo draws a loose parallel between Cybersix and real-life Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who sustained four separate authorial identities. In the origin story, Cybersix defines herself by only two personas: the daytime life of Adrian and the nocturnal existence of the sustenance-sucking vampire/prostitute. Her creator defined her as a third identity, that of a failed experiment, even if she turned out to be a Frankenstein’s monster set to destroy her creator’s livelihood. But by the end of “A Piece of Night,” Cybersix has taken a step toward a fourth identity: that of becoming a city-patrolling hero after the examples of Batman and the Shadow. I’ve not read more than the origin tale, but I would still hazard that her struggle to embody heroism took many more unexpected turns than the careers of most American crimefighters.

MYTHCOMICS: DC: THE NEW FRONTIER (2004)

I’ve heard good press about the late Darwyn Cooke’s THE NEW FRONTIER ever since the series first appeared (in the abbreviated form of a six-issue periodical back in 2004. But though I knew that Cooke’s work dealt with one of the most important periods of American comic books—the beginnings of “Silver Age” comics in the mid-to-late fifties-- I didn’t rush to explore FRONTIER. Possibly I didn’t quickly warm to promos of Cooke’s art. More likely, though, I was just pessimistic that anyone could find a fresh take on yet another look back into that rather well traveled territory —the debut of Silver Age Flash, of Silver Age Green Lantern, of the Justice League. But I can now say without reticence that Cooke’s magnum opus succeeds—that of celebrating not only the gaudy costumed characters, but also the humbler-looking heroes of the DC Universe: the spies, the G.I. Joes, and, above all, the pilots..

Most multi-character crossover projects, both at DC and at Marvel Comics, tend to focus exclusively upon superheroes. There’s no intrinsic shame in this. For many decades superheroes comprised the only genre that sold decently in the direct market. Thus, when in 1986 Marv Wolfman and George Perez crafted CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, they brought together dozens of characters from DC’s divergent realities with the idea of forging a new, more coordinated cosmos. Amid all of the spandex, Wolfman and Perez worked in a handful of non-superhero characters—largely stemming from war, western, and SF-genres—even though few if any of these characters were still being published in 1986. Characters like Sergeant Rock, Kamandi and the Nighthawk were probably included because the creators thought that the new cosmos would seem more cohesive if it also worked in the cowboys and soldiers. Nevertheless, in CRISIS the non-super-types contributed very little to all of the cosmic contortions.

In an afterword, Darwyn Cooke asserts that as a young fan that he preferred war and western comics to those of superheroes. Thus, his “fresh take” consists of approaching the seminal events of DC continuity largely from the POV of such characters as Rick Flagg, King Faraday and a quartet of mismatched military operatives known as “the Losers.” Further, Cooke culled the narrative’s central antagonist from one of DC’s most peculiar combinations of the war and science fiction genres: “The War That Time Forget.” In this series, based around a concept rather than a continuing hero, each story started with some unwitting soldiers—usually non-repeating characters—getting marooned on a strange island where prehistoric monsters still dwelled. As FRONTIER commences, the four commandos known as the Losers are sent to the island to pick up a stranded officer, Rick Flagg, and the scientific secrets in his custody. Though Flagg escapes the island with his intel, all of the Losers perish on DC’s version of The Lost World—though not before the soldiers uncover the hidden menace behind the mysterious isle.

Back in the real world, WWII ends, but anti-Communist hysteria begets the Cold War. None of this keeps a young Hal Jordan, years away from his power ring, from wanting to be a pilot like his late father—and though he does become Green Lantern in due time, Cooke is far more preoccupied with Jordan’s history as a pilot, as a hero who depends on a plane, not a ring, to fly. Jordan is one of FRONTIER’s more indispensable characters, and Cooke’s version makes him something of a pacifist type, butting heads with a more hawkish type like Rick Flagg, original commander of the Suicide Squad (whose adventures are retroactively connected to the War That Time Forgot).

Though the artist includes a handful of earthbound warriors, FRONTIER shows its creator’s abiding love for scenes of air action. Cooke also works in numerous other pilot-characters. Ace Morgan of the Challengers of the Unknown. Larry Trainor, later of the Doom Patrol. Nathaniel Adam, fated to become Captain Atom. I’m a little surprised the artist didn’t manage to work in sometimes pilot Rex “Metamorpho” Mason. Ironically, only one character in the story was designed to be a full-time aviation hero—namely, Johnny Cloud, “the Navajo Air Ace.” But after the Native American pilot’s feature was cancelled, he was assigned to the Losers, with the result that this hero’s final adventure takes place on earth rather than in the clouds for which he’s named.

Cooke’s focus upon the allure of aviation dovetails with another aspect of 1950s America: the space race, born out of American’s apprehensions about Communist incursions. This fear also gave shape to fantasies that “little green men” might choose to invade Earth, not to mention reinforcing native xenophobia toward what we now call “people of color.” All of this cultural disquiet leads to the banishment of the 1940s mystery men from the public eye, with the exception of major icons like Superman and Wonder Woman.

However, in the metaphorical wings wait a new breed of “mystery men,” and their appearance is foreshadowed by the advent of a not-so-little green man. In 1955, J’onn J’onzz, the Manhunter from Mars, subsisted in a minor back-up feature, dangling from the cape of Batman in DETECTIVE COMICS. But in the world of overall comics-history, Manhunter became the forerunner to DC’s renaissance of costumed heroes. Many modern comics-writers would rush to show J’onzz interacting with other costumed types right away, and in truth the Manhunter does “team up” briefly with Batman. However, Cooke grounds the character in the more mundane part of the DC Universe, teaming him up with detective-hero Slam Bradley and eventually having him captured by American intelligence agent King Faraday.

Numerous other characters prove central to the action—Superman’s cohorts Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, the Barry Allen Flash, all four of the Challengers of the Unknown (whose presence gives Cooke the chance to homage their creator Jack Kirby), and Rick Flagg and the other three members of his Squad. Numerous other DC figures make what are essentially cameos—the Blackhawks (who don’t get too much air action), Aquaman, Adam Strange, and even the Viking Prince. Even less central are a quintet of DC’s mystic heroes, who only appear to explain to readers their shaky reasons for not participating in the conflict, even though the island’s menace threatens the totality of the world.

Cooke gives a new name to the Island That Time Forgot, terming it “the Centre.” I suspect he came up with this name just so that he could work in Yeats’ famous line about how “the Centre cannot hold.” However, despite fomenting massive levels of destruction upon the modern world, the menace itself fails to impress. Cooke has various characters—including a clone of Doctor Seuss—experience psychic presentiments about the Centre’s catastrophic powers, all in the approved H.P. Lovecraft fashion. Yet somehow an intelligent, dinosaur-laden island proves a pale substitution for a narrative that desperately needs something on the level of Great Cthulhu. In the final analysis, the Centre is just a make-work menace, something cosmic enough to make squabbling Earthmen forget their fears and work together—thus making it possible for costumed heroes to regain the public favor they’d lost.

Cooke mentions in his afterword that some fans criticized him for overly liberal sentiments. My take is that when he focuses on real issues—relating the tragic tale of an early black vigilante-hero, John Henry—Cooke remains on solid philosophical ground. However, when the artist crafts a scene in which Hal Jordan’s Eskimo sidekick get mad when Jordan uses the name “Pieface”—so mad that said sidekick refers to Jordan by the anachronistic term “whitebread”—yeah, that’s Cooke practicing petty political correctness. He even attempts to have fun at the expense of reactionary fans in a silly six-page backup story, wherein Wonder Woman and Black Canary beat up a bunch of citizens for going to a Playboy Club. I suspect this sort of humor will only be funny to members of the choir. Within FRONTIER he does make some effort to justify the ways of hawks to doves, especially via an improbable friendship between J’onn J’onzz and his captor Faraday, so at least there are times when Cooke puts the brakes on some of his preachifyin’.

A proximate model for NEW FRONTIER might be the Busiek-Ross MARVELS, whose narrative concentrated upon an assortment of purely mundane characters, witnessing their sane world besieged by a flood of superheroic “marvels.” Yet Busiek doesn’t really transcend the standard Marvel narrative. Cooke, by forging a vital link between mundane and supramundane combatants, gives readers a solid vision of heroism as we know it through all manner of pop-culture fantasies. He concludes this vision by printing a famed John F, Kennedy speech regarding America’s need to find its “new frontier,” thus implicitly transferring the ideals of Kennedy to the second wave of superheroes spawned in the sixties. Possibly, one might extend this benison to all the better superhero comics that descended from those illustrious ancestors. But even though the superheroes forced most of the other adventure-genres out of commercial existence, at least here, in FRONTIER, earthbound grunts and air aces are remembered for their part in that evolution.

WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED SUPERHERO OUGHT TO WEAR

... "ought to wear," that is, in terms of impressing adult readers and thus giving rise to the reception of the genre as a legitimate category of what I've called "adult pulp."

In one of my old JOURNAL essays I started off by noting that superheroes wearing costumes was the one element that made adult readers consider the genre as pulp-fiction of an irredeemably juvenile kind. And there's no question that a lot of adults say that the thing they find most off-putting about superheroes is their tendency to wear their underwear on the outside. (Incidentally, this excuse for a joke made the most sense back when Americans wore "long underwear" of one kind or another.)

However, I've come to think that the costume-complaint may not really be as substantial as I thought earlier. In the pop-culture world as we know it today, there are a lot of characters who have superhero-like powers, weapons or adventures, and who wear commonplace attire. James Bond may be the foremost example of this type, and there's no doubt that the prose novels qualify as adult-oriented pulp. However, Bond's enormous popularity across many cultures stems principally from the movie adaptations, which may have caught fire from being culturally "in the right place at the right time." Before Bond, popular fiction-- prose fiction, movies, comic strips-- played host to innumerable characters who wore ordinary clothes but enjoyed extraordinary adventures, whether they chased down weird masterminds (Doc Savage), mystic menaces (Jules De Grandin, Mandrake the Magician), or just freaky-looking criminals (Dick Tracy). For every one of these that became moderately well known, there are presumably dozens that have been forgotten. The question is, did even Dick Tracy-- arguably one of the most famous "plainclothed crusaders"-- earn any deep and abiding respect because he pursued Flat Top and Pruneface while wearing regular clothes?

Say, for sake of argument, that the leotard-style costume never caught on in comic books. Early sketches of Superman suggest that Joe Shuster originally meant for the hero to wear street-clothes a la Doc Savage, and that the image of the costume that was added later, almost at random, in imitation of  such carnival performers as strongmen and acrobats. Given the appeal of a "modern-day Hercules," it's not impossible that a non-costumed Superman might have begotten an extended  family of mufti-clothed crimefighters, and that costumes might have appeared only occasionally, as they did in the period of the "hero pulps." Assuming that the level of talent and production of such comic books stayed the same, is there any reason to think that comic books full of supermen in plainclothes would have earned any more deep and abiding respect than the costumed versions?

Despite the fact that a lot of adults have scorned costumes as elements of childish make-believe, I think the genre of adventure itself is the real source of contempt. In an earlier essay I referenced Ursula LeGuin's animus toward prose genres like space opera and sword and sorcery, which certainly don't involve "costumes" as such. There are a few 19th-century prose novels in the adventure-genre that have become acknowledged classics-- IVANHOE, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. But it took about a century for academic critics to embrace adventures with metaphenomenal content, such as DUNE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In the last twenty years academics have become somewhat more latitudinarian about the adventure- genre, with or without elements of fantasy. But old attitudes die hard.

There are various "adult superhero" graphic novels out there, and it may be significant that a lot of them aspire to literary quality by using the tropes of irony and satire. I think a great "adult superhero" graphic novel in a purely adventurous mode is still a possibility, but it would have to have the complexity of a Melville novel to overcome the casual contempt so often directed against the genre.