This a repost of something I wrote here in March of 2006. I totally forgot I wrote it. I think, given the hero-fest that is the summer of 2008, it's worth a look back.
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In my youth, I was a huge comic book fan. Well, that is to say, I loved almost all the titles in the DC Comics line and was intensely allergic to Marvel. What's the difference, say you, the comic book layperson? In a nutshell, DC characters tended to be idealistic, perfect, and clad in costumes that generally stuck to primary colors.
They had ridiculous superpowers and secret origins that seemed a bit less beholden to the dictates of plausibility than their Marvel counterparts. Examples are Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Justice League of America. Marvel, on the other hand, seemed a tad more serious, the characters reflective (sometimes to the point of being self obssessed), and often more thoughtful about real social issues. Examples are Spiderman, The Fantastic Four or The Uncanny X-Men. Again, I'm not a Marvel man.
In terms of movies and presence in the American consciousness outside of the geeky comic realm, the ones that are the longest-lived and have had the most impact on the popular culture are clearly Superman and Batman. Wonder Woman has also made her impact felt. More recently, as cinema has gotten darker and the American moviegoing palate a bit more sophisticated, the relatively darker fare has come to the fore and the older, blander, and simpler stuff of the 1950's left to collect dust; over the last decade alone, we've seen really decent treatments of Spiderman and The X-Men that a global market has really responded to.
The even darker (and I do mean this in the pigmentive sense as well) productions of Dark Horse Comics and other underground companies have also been recently translating over to film quite well, namely in Spawn, Blade, Hellboy, and Alien v. Predator. The latter entry was a true disappointment, but don't confuse that artistic and commercial Hollywood blunder with the concept itself being flawed; the pairing of the Alien and Predator characters has been going on with great creativity and coolness since the late 1980's.
Also, one might note that the only black superheroes who haven't been some white dude or group's sidekick were "spawned" by non-mainstream lines. It's only been recently that mainstream America has been ready for a black man who didn't die in the first action sequence and whose blackness itself didn't need to be referenced in his moniker.
DC's Black Lightning, of course, springs to mind when thinking about such examples. Of course, as a black character at that time, he was expected to be doing "black stuff," but at least he was out there. Note that the coolest action heroes and comic characters don't need to reference the fact that they're black. It might come up, but Blade isn't stuck wrestling with vampire drug lords in the inner city, nor is Storm fixing environmental catastrophes in African countries. The scale of what they are doing is now equally as grand and sweeping as it is for white characters.
Thankfully, there aren't many leftovers of this racialized pattern of thinking that for the general audience to identify with a character, they have to look like what comic companies saw as the majority of their audience, which made all movie "heroes" white, something that is now changing with the recent examples mentioned above, along with that of Halle Berry's Storm character in the X-Men – and it is again, no surprise that hers was not based on a DC character. Even more interestingly, her character is drawn somewhat racially ambiguously, although she is still African-American. The white hair is pretty cool, and having Halle Berry play her was an appropriate choice.
So, if you wanna get old school and trace back some patterns of thinking from the previous century and earlier, it is Superman – and his bigger-than-believable DC compatriots – who is the clearest marker of the American consciousness. If you want to see what America was thinking as well as how it regarded itself, check out what Superman was capable of, what feats he actually performed, and how he was drawn.
For example, in his original iteration, Superman had merely "superhuman" strength, but he wasn't possessed of a God-like immortality and invincibility. He was strong, could stop bullets, and could leap over tall buildings – but he was still just an extremely strong dude.
By the 1950's and the Cold War, I remember (from the books I collected) him coming back from "interplanetary patrol" and noticing that Pluto was a micro-fraction of a degree out of orbit, so he gave it a little nudge; in another issue, he was helping the US Army test out hydrogen bombs by standing in the middle of them to note their effects, and even until I remember in the 1980's, he regularly flew through the sun (!) because it was the only thing that could clean his super-threads (which were untangled and rewoven by Ma Kent into his costume, by the way; they could never be cut). This brought up small problems, such as, "How does Superman shave, if nothing on Earth can cut his super-parts?" which were, for the most part, solved by him using parts of his own powers, or objects/shards from his original planet, Krypton, which brings us to the subject of Kryptonite.
One problem with the 1950's Superman is that he's boring. You start with foiling bank robberies and deflecting bullets, but that gets old; you move to mad scientists and their diabolical devices, but he bests even Lex Luthor at his own game; if you're a smart writer, you might even come up with ways to "threaten" the Man of Steel where he is weakest – the human heart – so you set up the danger of his secret identity getting revealed and either Jimmy Olsen or Supe's Double-L Harem of Lovely Ladies™ (Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris) being offed in horrible-yet-creative ways. But even that gets old.
(ASIDE: In researching this blog post on the Internet, it came to my attention that a couple collections of Superman comics were compiled together for your retro pleasure. Check out Superman in the Fifties yourself on Amazon if you'd like to buy it. And before I get another complaint about any commercial interests here, no, I am not getting a kickback. It's the least I can do for using images from this guy's book in this post.)
With all his powers, Superman was in desperate need of a weakness. The height of the kryptonite kraze was in the 1950's and 1960's, which made sense for a character (and country) that seemed nearly invincible. This was after WWII and before Vietnam, when America had been undergoing its biggest social, economic, and military growth in its history. The Cold War was on, yet American was confident. Yet the threat of international Communism was a threat that we couldn't escape, we had to deal with. Would I go so far as to say that Communism was America's kryptonite? Naw – that level of specific reading and interpretation I'll leave for the individual; but I will say that a look at some comic covers definitely reveal major patterns in American thought about what is right, what is socially acceptable, and what is common practice.
It's no surprise that in the 1980's, when reality and fantasy seemed too divergent even for comic books, that DC Comics decided to have a huge cleanup of all its ridiculous characters and parallel universes in a so-called Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was a meta-catastrophe that basically hit "reset" on the entire DC line.
It was also the time to kill off Superman and bring him back as a more vulnerable, human character – erm, kind of like what many Marvel characters already were.
When I was younger, I didn't want to hear about Spiderman's alcoholism and depression; but as an adult, I thought it could make the character interesting. As a nation, perhaps America had also grown up and wasn't a nation that matched an indestructible übermensch dressed in psychedelic tights and a cape. But in the end, the Man of Steel was many things to the American people, even if the culture had grown more cynical, jaded, and dragged out of the inward navel-gazing of American exceptionalism into thinking about ourselves in a more global context after 9/11, even if we did so kicking and screaming. For that and many other reasons, perhaps that can explain why it was such a shock to be reminded that the Man of Steel was indeed still a man of flesh-and-blood after Christopher Reeve's horrible accident; but even more than that, when the "real" Man of Steel died last year, I think it was a deflating reminder of how much America had changed since seeing our icon most believably portrayed in his 1977 movie debut, and just how "real" the world had come to seem for Americans when he died last year.
But for those of you who maybe aren't too familiar with the Man of Steel and how "innocent" America was, while at the same time "guilty" of many things we find unacceptable now, here's a reminder, a la the primary source-filled primary document-fests that were my Bubble Sisters and "Why Korean Folks Don't Like Black People" pieces. Behold:
Supes sure seems to be OK with violating his code of not taking human life. But beyond that, certain things are just now considered matters of poor taste, or just aren't in the spirit of Superman.
Whew. But Superman's new love of guns was relatively tame. Take a look at this:
What happened to Batman's solemn vow to never even pick up a gun? Umm, as in the defining moment in young Bruce Wayne's life, when he saw his parents gunned down in cold blood before his eyes? In many Batman stories, eschewing a readily available gun is a key plot element, not to mention the anchorpoint for his identity as a crafty crimefighter. And what's more, I'm sure that mowing people down with a gatling gun while Robin works the ammo belt would qualify as a major violation of the spirit of the agreement. Yet, we get this again:
I know there's a war on, but Batman pimping guns in the jungle? And surely the Dark Knight himself, master of stealth and silent stalking, might have thought that bright, colorful costumes don't make for good camouflage? But check out this even more blatant and frankly illogical display. Here are the main DC main men, all together. I don't think we need Freud here to talk about phallic symbols, do we?
But let's take off the kid gloves, shall we? Here are a few more interesting ones:
"Yesiree, C'pn Marvel, suh! You keeps-a holding 'em, and I'll keeps a-hitting!" Now, what do black people get out of this, again? "We're fighting for freedom from a racist, Aryan supremacist system that would have enslaved us." Hey, waitaminnit – who we talking about again?
Dude – Dr. Seuss? Dr. Seuss?! Yeah. This is how pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment was at the time. Hey – America put its own citizens, who happened to be of Japanese descent, in concentration camps. Are you really so surprised Dr. Seuss got in on the "Jap" action?
Here's another favorite, made for the boys overseas:
In comparison, this comic seems tame to what people with superpowers were doing to "Japs":
Hey! Hands off the white lady! And arms off, too! Ooooh – that's gonna leave a mark.
Stop – I mean start – the presses! It's time to slap a Jap!
I hope he has a parachute, because Supes doesn't look like he's keeping his oath to not kill people.
Here's the ultimate irony – this seems like America now. This cover is especially prophetic. If Superman is America, and America is the president, then we get – Super-Bush! I guess his kryptonite is the combined force of truth, restraint, and rationality?
Special thanks be to Superdickery.com, whose raison d'être is to show that "Superman is a dick." I came across this site while Google image searching for covers I remember collecting, and this site had all the good ones already collected and scanned. Sweet. And before you get your red tights all in a bunch because someone dared called Superman a "dick," take a look at the covers. The site's not an ideological or political one, but rather one that rose after the underground phenomenon that happened when people began looking through old comic covers that became available on a really cool website dedicated to archiving these comics as history, and a few fans with senses of humor began noticing the extremely weird stuff that came up when looked at through modern, cynical eyes. I suggest, however that you don't visit the site, since you will be sucked in and hours of your life will disappear in an instant, never to be regained. But if you do go, I guarantee that you will laugh your ass off. Here's a famous example:
If you don't get it, you might wonder why, when informed that the person each character has "touched" is doomed, each character thinks of the name of their female main squeeze, while Batman's mind instantly turns to Robin. Hmmmmmmmm. One wonders if the writers were running inside jokes with unbelievably obvious innuendos just by accident. I know people used the term "gay" more in its original sense, but still:
You gotta wonder, dude. And for all my insane and expensive comic collecting from my youth (I have 3000+ books in my house to this very day, yes, I do), I never knew this about Jimmy Olsen, who apparently crossdressed like a lot. Here's the funniest example that I found in my searching, from the TGFA Archive, a place that seems to be dedicated to locating old comics just like these that had storylines about gender-bending:
I mean, you really, really gotta wonder just how little these guys knew about alternative lifestyles. Well, people back then were so dense and in denial that anyone lived outside of the realm of "normal" could be as gay as a jaybird, but nobody would go so far as to actually think it could be you. Umm, does this sound familiar (Korea?)
Ah, this digging up of American ideology and rooting around in the 50's has inspired me to finish working on a post I abandoned a long time ago, talking about why, with its still-extant fear of Commies, strict gender roles, and variety show TV, Korea is just so retro...so... so...fifties! I mean we've got cross-dressing, makeup-wearing men who play a king's concubine in an insanely popular movie, who walks, talks, and squawks like a girl – but he's not gay – because there are no gay people in Korea! My question is – what do you have to do for people in Korea to suspect you to be without actually admitting in a nationwide media venue, a la Hong Seok Cheon? Well, Jimmy Olsen went strutting in heels, skirt, and makeup for kicks, and no one thought anything was up. Gosh, that's just so...fifties.
But I guess people were dense. Even straight people apparently didn't object to this little panel, which caused me to giggle insanely. I was thinking, "Are you kidding?!"
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!
Man, I love comics.
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