The Boring Life of Pam Grier

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran in Splice Today.
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You’d think Pam Grier’s life would make for a fascinating memoir. Raised working class and rural, subjected to racial discrimination throughout her childhood and raped twice, she nonetheless, through sheer determination, smarts, and astonishing good looks, managed to carve out a career as an actor. Her iconic presence in some of the most successful and influential blaxploitation films made her perhaps the screen’s first female action hero. And along the way to semi-stardom, she dated luminaries like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Freddie Prinze, and Richard Pryor, survived breast-cancer, and hobnobbed, it seems, with everyone who was anyone, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Fellini.

So, like I said, there seems to be a lot worth reading about there. And Foxy: My Life in Three Acts certainly is affecting in parts. As the father of a six-year-old, I found Grier’s account of being raped at that age actually nauseating. Less somberly, Grier’s discussion of one of her visit’s to the gynecologist has to be one of the top gossip anecdotes of the year so far. In her account, Grier explains that the doctor discovered “cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina” and asked Grier if her lover was putting cocaine on his penis. “ Grier responds, “That’s a possibility…. You know, I am dating Richard Pryor.”

Then she admits to the doctor that during oral sex her lips and tongue go numb because, apparently, Richard Pryor did so much coke that it made his semen an opiate.

And yet, despite such moments of interest, the memoir overall is surprisingly flat. Anecdotes are dutifully hauled out — here’s Grier with her church choir at ground zero of the Watts riots; here she is singing with a drunk John Lennon. But the memoir stays on the surface; you get little sense of Grier’s inner life, ideas, or passions. Her discussions of racial and sexual prejudice are for the most part innocuous boilerplate. There are some hints that she has ambivalent feelings about the exploitive elements in her early roles, but those issues are never really explored. She’s politely reverent towards most of the stars she comes across, from Paul Newman to Tim Burton.

Part of the failure here is no doubt the fault of co-writer Andrea Cagan, whose prose never rises above competent. But the main problem is Grier’s personality. In a couple of places in the book Grier notes that she’s a “private” person — which is, like much in the memoir, a significant understatement. Grier is not merely private; she is fiercely, even remorselessly, adamant about protecting her personal boundaries. When one of her first serious romantic interests, the sexy, talented, wealthy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tells her he loves her and asks her to become a Muslim so he can marry her, she takes her time…thinks about it…and finally says no. When the sexy, talented, wealthy, but frighteningly coked-up Richard Pryor wants a serious relationship with her, she takes her time…thinks about it…and eventually walks. In 1977, Freddie Prinze — with whom she’d broken up two years previously — called her to say that he had bought a gun, was thinking of using it on himself, and needed her to come help him. Though she was staying only a few blocks away from his hotel, she refused to go see him. Three days later he committed suicide. Grier notes that she was “heartbroken” and, for a while, guilty, but ultimately concludes “I wanted to save his soul, but I knew that only he could help himself, and he hadn’t really wanted to.”

My point here isn’t to condemn Grier for callousness — on the contrary, all the decisions above seem absolutely reasonable. Abdul-Jabbar, while possessed of many fine qualities, seems to have been a controlling asshole. Similarly, Richard Pryor was, clearly, one of the most catastrophic train wrecks of the decade, if not the century. And even the phone call from Freddie Prinze — your ex with a megacocaine problem calls you up to tell you he’s got a gun and is feeling paranoid, please come over? I don’t think you can be faulted for saying, “you know what? No.”

A U.S.A. Today blurb on the back of Foxy declares “Pam Grier is a survivor.” When you read that, you think of her fierce characters in Coffy or Foxy Brown — fighters who took on incredible odds and beat the system. The thing is, though, in real life, survivors aren’t like that. If you take on incredible odds, you usually lose. Somebody who is going to survive has to pick her battles very carefully — and realize that usually, the best defense is actually just defense. Again and again throughout the memoir, Grier protects her safety and sanity not by embracing violence or revenge, but by refusing to do so. When she is date-raped at 18, she doesn’t tell her family because she fears that if she did, her male relatives would kill her attacker and end up in jail. As an adult, when her cousin and best friend, dying of cancer, asks Grier to read out-loud in church a manifesto attacking her abusive husband, Grier refuses. “I couldn’t open so many wounds and deal with the aftermath,” Grier writes. “I refused to be the one to read the letter and stir the pot — a decision I regret to this day.”

Again, I’m not judging — these are incredibly difficult choices, made under extreme duress, and I don’t think anyone but Grier is in a position to decide whether she did the right thing, or whether there was even a right thing to do. The point, though, is that in most every instance, Grier’s instinct is to avoid stirring the pot — and stirring the pot is exactly what you want to do in a book like this. The most successful celebrity memoirs — such as Jenna Jameson’s riveting and surprisingly insightful 2004 How to Make Love Like a Pornstar — are shameless both in their self-revelation and in their skewering of others. Pam Grier, despite all those exploitation films, doesn’t appear to have a shameless bone in her body. The qualities that allowed her to get where she did — her reserve, her poise, her dignity — are the very things that make Foxy so underwhelming. Still, even though as a reader I was disappointed, I can’t really find it in me to wish that the memoir was better If you have to choose one or the other, after all, a successful human being is surely preferable to a successful book.

A Tea Party Superhero

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

Garry Gianni’s portrait of Solomon Kane

To me, the Tea Party is right up there with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. So I certainly don’t mind watching their superpowers wane as they impotently wage war through shutdowns and debt defaults in their never-ending battle against their arch-nemesis, Obamacare.

But I do feel a personal connection to the Tea Party now. Or at least to one member of their roster. I recently reconnected with an old high school friend via (what else?) Facebook. Our cyber reunion wasn’t entirely Friendly. In the decades since we’d crammed Pre-Calc in his suburban basement, John has converted to an aggressively libertarian brand of fundamentalist Christianity (or, as he prefers to term it, “Christianity”). His profile picture is Obama photoshopped as Stalin. I accused him of melodrama, but he remains appallingly literal in his belief that the President’s re-election constituted a Socialist coup and collapse of the American experiment. Our email exchanges have since petered. But I will honor John and his right wing cohorts with an unlikely declaration:

The first American superhero was a Tea Party superhero.

“Oh! Lord of Hosts,” cried a voice among the crowd, “provide a Champion for thy people!”

That’s Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835. Thy people are his pre-Revolutionary New England ancestors under the tyrannical yoke of King James and his New World minions (AKA the Governor of colonial Massachusetts and his nefarious redcoat guard). In answer to the cry of oppression, Nathaniel conjures the Gray Champion!

“Suddenly, there was seen the figure of an ancient man, who seemed to have emerged from among the people, and was walking by himself along the centre of the street, to confront the armed band. He wore the old Puritan dress, a dark cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, in the fashion of at least fifty years before, with a heavy sword upon his thigh, but a staff in his hand, to assist the tremulous gait of age.”

I know, a shaky old guy, not very superheroic, but hang on. He has superpowers: “while they marvelled at the venerable grandeur of his aspect, the old man had faded from their eyes, melting slowly into the hues of twilight, till, where he stood, there was an empty space.”

Yep. He can apparate. Hawthorne gives us an origin story and mission statement too. “Whence did he come? What is his purpose? Who can this old man be?” whispered the wondering crowd. Glad you asked: “That stately form, combining the leader and the saint, so gray, so dimly seen, in such an ancient garb, could only belong to some old champion of the righteous cause, whom the oppressor’s drum had summoned from his grave.”

That’s right. He’s supernatural too. And while immortality is a nice trick, his real powers are rabble-rousing and monarch-busting: “ his voice stirred their souls,” and before “another sunset, the Governor, and all that rode so proudly with him, were prisoners, and long ere it was known that James had abdicated . . .”

The tale ends as any good comic book should, with the promise of further adventures: “whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again. . . . His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader’s step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come . . .”

That’s good news for John and any like-minded Tea Partiers. Hawthorne places his supernatural do-gooder at their namesake event, the dumping of 342 chests of East India tea into Boston harbor. The old guy makes rounds at the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill too.

I doubt John has read “The Gray Champion,” though I’m fairly sure The Scarlet Letter was on our high school English syllabus. I won’t declare Hester the first superheroine, but she is the first character in fiction to sport a letter on her chest, beating Joe Shuster’s Superman by nearly nine decades. The “A” starts as punishment, but Hester embroiders her own meanings into the symbol, and eventually the town rechristens her “Able” and “Angel” in appreciation of her selfless if not quite superheroic service.

The Gray Champ has her beat though. Midwife to the poor is noble and all, but the Tea Party would rouse our whole land from its sluggish despondency. According to my high school Friend, the harsh and unprincipled administration of Obama lacks scarcely a single characteristic of tyranny, violating the rights of private citizens, taking away our liberties, and endangering our religion. These, apparently, are evil times. Hawthorne agrees:

“‘Satan will strike his master-stroke presently,’ cried some, bemoaning the deformity of any government that does not grow out of the nature of things and the character of the people. On one side the religious multitude, with their sad visages and dark attire, and on the other, the group of despotic rulers. Pray and expect patiently what the Lord will do in this matter!”

A literal Godsend, the returning Gray Champion would probably forgo street protests and broadcast his message nationally. Though he might have trouble claiming a share of camera time. Would even Fox News have room for a bearded Puritan between the soul-stirring voices of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Karl Rove?

He might launch his own website instead, but my friend John already shares regular posts from Political Outcast, Vision To America, and Conservative Byte. The last includes a photoshopped Emperor Obama in a crown and kingly regalia. A commenter adds: “’Dictator’ Obama has infiltrated the entire system of government with radical muslims, gays and completely ignorant self serving idiots pushing their own agendas.”

In fact, who needs the Gray Champion in the age of Facebook? The reason we have the second amendment, shouts John on his homepage, is TO DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST OPPRESSORS LIKE OBAMA. “Government of the people is GONE. People will only be ignored so long, then they will act. God help us all.”

Meanwhile, the venerable stranger, staff in hand, drew near the advancing soldiers, and as the roll of their drum came full upon his ear, the old man raised himself to a loftier mien, while the decrepitude of age seemed to fall from his shoulders, leaving him in gray, but unbroken dignity. Thus the aged form advanced on one side, and the whole parade of soldiers and magistrates on the other, till, when scarcely twenty yards remained between, the old man grasped his staff by the middle, and held it before him like a leader’s truncheon.

“Stand!” cried he.

The eye, the face, and attitude of command; the solemn, yet warlike peal of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battle-field or be raised to God in prayer, were irresistible. At the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still.

At least that’s what happens in a black and white world of pure good vs. evil. Our world, however, is considerably Grayer.

Unless you’re member of the Tea Party.

Hulk Is The Strongest Flower There Is!

Posted on October 3, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week I wrote about an old Hulk comic in which our green protagonist crushed a female artist who wanted to appropriate him for her gallery, proving that comics are virile and manly and can kick Lichtenstein’s effeminate posterior.

So Hulk wins the battle against high art there…but in comments, Ng Suat Tong pointed me to another tussle where the victory is not so assured.

That’s “Hulk (Wheelbarrow)” a sculpture by Jeff Koons.

When I suggest that Koons has here defeated the Hulk, I mean that literally — at least in terms of the narrative of the comic I discussed last week. Again, in that issue, Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema presented us with an evil temptress/Circe/high artist who turned her male victims into glass. She intends to do the same to the Hulk, and keep him forever in her gallery as a glass sculpture. Hulk is too big and green and pulpy to succumb to her blandishments, whether they involve sex, magic, or the granting of high art validation. So he destroys her and her house and escaped. And then, 20 odd years later, Jeff Koons gets him and puts him in a gallery anyway.

The trasformation is a little different though. Hulk isn’t turned into graceful, fragile, feminized glass. He’s a plastic inflatable — a giant toy. The act of transformation, then, is not actually transformation — it’s simply relocation. Putting the infantile, virile Hulk in a gallery turns him, instantly, into refined prettified high art, with flowers. Koons’ assault on Hulk is even more cruel and insidious than the villainnesses. The glass Circe, at least, felt that Hulk had something she wanted; she acknowledged the value of his virility by wanting to touch it with her glass creating hands and make it her own. But Koons doesn’t even have to make Hulk his; he just has to pick him up and put him in his place. If there’s any value in Hulk, it’s not in his strength, but in his ridiculousness and incongruence. He’s cheap, plastic ephemera. His incongruous worthless is his worth. He’s not a totemic real to be stolen; he’s just a ridiculous prop to be mocked.

Or so you might think. In fact, though, the Hulk is not a plastic inflatable. He’s bronze. Koons made the metal statue, then painted it to look like an inflatable. The Hulk is not a piece of plastic crap; he’s a virtuosic sculpture made to look like a piece of plastic crap.

In terms of the comic, its as if the villain had turned Hulk not into glass, but into an exact replica of the Hulk indistinguishable from the original. Except secretly made of glass. Or, for another comic-book analogy, you might remember the Harvey Kurtzman Plastic-Man, in which the imposter Plastic-Man is accepted as the real Plastic-Man since anything made out of plastic is fake. By that logic, Koons’ imitation plastic Hulk is more real than the real thing, since a kid’s fake plastic Hulks (in comics or outside them) are the real ersatz thing. Or, to put it another way, the Hulk in the gallery, by virtue of recognizing the fakeness of the Hulk in the comic, is more real than the original.

In Harold Bloom’s terms, Koons’ is a “strong” reading of the Hulk. Geoff Klock in How To Read Superhero Comics and Why points to writers like Frank Miller as “strong” rewriters, troping against the accretion of supehero continuity, so that the Dark Knight becomes, in some sense, the only Batman, “‘the powerful reading that insists on its own uniqueness and its own accuracy….[Miller] compels us to read as he reads, and to accept his stance and vision as our origin.'” Where Miller makes Batman more real and powerful and cool and coherent, though, Koons’ strong, bronze reading of Hulk is parodic. The metal Hulk insists on the actual Hulk’s transient blow-up crappiness. The amazing virtuosic reproduction of pop detritus emphasizes that it is detritus. The amount of genius and talent that Koons has put into his Hulk deliberately underlines the hackish ineptitude of Mantlo and Buscema. They ineffectually try to reproduce high art; Koons methodically and perfectly reproduces low art. There couldn’t be a much more devastating demonstration of the justness of that high-low hierarchy.

Or that’s one way of reading it, anyway. It’s worth pointing out, though, that Harold Bloom would really probably hate Jeff Koons, and vice versa. You can see Koons here as parodying the Hulk by employing the virtuosity of high art, but you could just as easily see him as employing the Hulk to parody the virtuosity of high art with its cult of “strong” Bloomian artists. Or, for that matter, you could see him as simultaneously parodying both; the serious metal sculpture disguised as a kid’s blow up doll seems to implicate both the Hulk’s hyper-masculine worship of physical power (via the ridiculous big green muscles) and the traditional art world’s hyper-masculine worship of genius (via the ridiculous virtuosity and heaviness.)

For Koons, then, high art and low art aren’t opposed. Rather, they’re both engaged in the same project of constructing a powerful ersatz masculinity — the dream of inflatable muscles made out of bronze. Koons thinks that’s funny. But he doesn’t just think it’s funny. Surely there’s some affection in those (Blooming?) flowers, picked fresh for the exhibit, and placed in a wooden wheelbarrow that is not an inflatable, nor bronze, but simply a wooden wheelbarrow. The superhero and the superartist — beneath all that roaring and posturing, they just want to give you pretty things. In the gallery or on the comics page, when Hulk smash, it means “I love you.”

The Western Voyages of Sinbad

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

I turned seven the summer of 1973. Sinbad, the sea-fairing adventurer from One Thousand and One Nights, turned 1,207—or at least Huran al-Rashid, the 8^th century caliph who would have reigned during his voyages, did. Sinbad’s a lot older if you think he’s just a Persian reboot of Odysseus, which I don’t. It’s not clear how he anchored in Arabian Nights, since Scheherazade almost certainly didn’t spin any tales about him. Ditto for Aladdin and his lamp. But the first 1880s translations (same decade that gave the Victorians Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, and the Ubermensch) happily include both heroes. The 1940 Green Lantern was originally named Alan Ladd (get it?), but Sinbad didn’t make it to the realm of superhero comics till Marvel adapted his low budget Hollywood adventure, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

My aunts took me. Which probably means I was marooned in their tiny Pennsylvania smallville while my parents were off on their own voyages. I recently streamed the film online, surprised as always by my unfaithful memory. Did I really not notice the Stonehenge replica at the center of the lost island of Lemuria? Or that the King Kong-derivative “natives” were green? Sinbad also barters himself a love interest, AKA sex slave (a disturbing staple of mid-70s fantasy and scifi films—the elite apartments in Soylent Green came with human “furniture” the same year, as did the elite houses in Rollerball two years later). Our virtuous captain, of course, doesn’t exercise any of his property rights, and there’s even a marriage proposal before the credits.

Hindsight also provides certain pleasures—like watching a bunch of pasty white guys evoke Allah every third sentence. Or realizing that Doctor Who is playing the evil sorcerer (the BBC was so impressed with Tom Baker’s performance, he replaced the retiring Jon Pertwee the following year). That evil sorcerer, by the way, is oddly sympathetic, the way Baker writhes and ages a decade or two every time he employs his apparently hard-earned magic—like animating the figurehead on Sinbad’s own ship to battle him. How cool is that! His little flying homunculi were niftier in memory though—as I suppose is true of all Ray Harryhausen stop motion claymation.

The best is when Baker animates the six-armed Kali statue in the natives’ temple (though why exactly are faux Africans worshipping the Hindu goddess of Time, and, oh yeah, why are they green?). I should also mentions there’s a rather rudimentary plot device of finding a missing puzzle piece that will, I forget exactly, unlock the Fountain of Something Or Other. So Sinbad and Baker are racing each other in an overarching A Plot, which is subdivided into episodic B Plots, such as battling evil cyclopean centaurs and sailing around foggy soundstages.

It’s at this point that I turn to my nearest aunt and whisper: “The puzzle piece is inside the statue.”

She probably thought I was nuts (like that time I reflected a flashlight beam onto her bedroom ceiling while making what I imagined were UFO noises), until Kali tumbles and, yep, there’s the golden puzzle piece shining in the rubble.

She was pretty impressed, as was I, still am, though I can’t say I was much of a boy Sherlock. Things I wasn’t noticing at the time include Watergate, the civil rights movement, and my parents’ impending divorce.

I’d shrug it off as a lucky guess. Except it’s the same plot maneuver I encounter several hundred times a semester. How often does an episodic B Plot shatter against an overarching A Plot? More specifically, how often does a storyline sail out of a sub-adventure to continue its main voyage? My first year comp students navigate this map three or four, sometimes five and six times every essay they draft. A body paragraph is just an adventurous subpoint in an overarching thesis. Before exiting to the next island of green natives, shatter Kali to show why you dragged us there in the first place (ie, repeat a central element of the thesis in the last sentence). When you finally row ashore your concluding paragraph, assemble the golden key pieces and unlock the Fountain of the Passing Grade.

I realize that’s a particularly Western way of writing an argument. A Chinese essay, for example, might reflect different norms, so called “high context” ones, where inference and implicitness are an adventurer’s main magic tricks. That means a thesis isn’t necessarily stated or the map to get there isn’t drawn linearly. If Sinbad submitted such a tale in my WRIT 100, I’d have to send him back to Lemuria for revising. But if he’d grown up in my subdivision of Pennsylvania, he’d already know how the puzzle pieces work.

By what age do kids absorb such cultural nonsense as plot formula and argument structure?

I’m guessing seven.

I was hardly reading but I was already a little claymation homunculus. I’m not suggesting Tom Baker was employing me for nefarious ends. I’m just saying cultural magic seeps in deeper and faster than we might think. And some unstated sub-claims might sneak in with it. Like, oh I don’t know, women are furniture, and beware swarthy men (Baker wore make-up). Which is also why it’s sometimes worthwhile to analyze nonsense like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Sinbad, by the way, made at least one more sojourn into the Marvel multiverse. He teamed up with the Fantastic Four for Chris Claremont’s astonishingly ill-timed Fantastic Fourth Voyage of Sinbad in 2001, on newsstands when the World Trade Center tumbled and shattered. Since then I haven’t noticed many cultural representations of good-looking white guys giving thanks to Allah.

A Short Interlude

Posted on October 1, 2013 by subdee

When popular webcomic/sprawling trans-media megatext Homestuck last appeared on this website, we* talked about the enshrinement of internet memes and other pop culture ephemera, the love-hate relationship with low culture, the large and active fandom that sometimes found itself reflected back in an epic narrative. We* also talked Homestuck’s strong logical structure – in which computer and card games, programming logic, and light-dark dualities, among other things, propel a story that’s largely about creation and destruction. (The creative process, in other words.)

All of those things are as true as they ever were, and, in a recent arc, you can see them play out – without knowing anything about the larger story! I thought I’d highlight this arc for you guys because I enjoyed it a lot. It starts here and ends here, so it’s about 55 pages (or panels) long.

First, some shots of the protagonist looking skeptical and offering skeptical commentary on the on-screen action:

The main thing you have to know to make sense of this is that a major series villain is the creator of the story you are reading on your screen. He turns out to embody a lot of the worst fannish impulses – and what’s even worse, to make bad, clichéd fanart.

And on top of all that, he’s a lazy artist – maybe even a plagiarist!

The original protagonist of the series, meanwhile – the guy in blue – has developed the superpower of being able to pop in and out of the narrative, disrupting the logic of inevitable doom I talked about in my last post. Since he exists outside of the framework of the story, he’s able to offer on-screen commentary on the action. Somehow or other, thanks to his powers, he’s found himself in this parody comic the villain is creating. (Don’t ask me how, I don’t know either.)

So far, so not-so-unusual-for-snarky-webcomics. This kind of meta-commentary isn’t even unusual for Homestuck, which divides its narrative arcs using images of screens and curtains and has several characters that exist “on the other side of the screen” and “behind the curtain” (including the author himself).

For that matter, the purposefully bad art isn’t new to Homestuck either: there’s already an absurdist comic-within-the-comic drawn “ironically” by one of the characters… which you can purchase it in a deluxe limited-edition hardcover here.

Another way you can tell John is outside the narrative, however, is through the shift into three-dimensional perspective, through which we can directly observe the crude artificiality and flimsiness of the (literally) two-dimensional story being created by the series villain.

And so on, with apologies to Andrew Hussie for pulling out so many images in a row.

Appropriately for a meta and self-referential comic, we also get some explicit commentary on the way some fans take an interesting piece of art and make it less interesting through their own (gross) interpretations.

Really, with stuff like this on the page, there’s not much left for critics to do.

But on the subject of female characters – and before you start to think that the author-fan relationship has gone irrevocably south – rest assured: the evil villain character responsible for the art in this section – who on top of all his other faults, is a bad artist – has a twin sister who represents everything that is good, or at least harmless, about fannish participation. (She’s a cosplaying fanwriter who just wants to meet the people she’s been reading (and writing) so much about, befriend them, and help them towards a better ending.)

Sadly, compared to her evil somehow-competent-despite-his-stupidity brother, she’s not very effective… but who knows how the comic will play out.

I believe in you, dude!

*”We” meaning me, of course, since as far as I know I’m the only fan around here. Actually, I want to ask: Did any of you guys reading this website take the plunge and start in on Homestuck?

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 5): Print the Legend

Posted on September 30, 2013 by Alex Buchet

Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Selfishness originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)

Superheroes are an American invention, because America is the land of entrepreneurs.

– Life, a.k.a. Chaim Lazaros (2011)

In the first four chapters of this study, I have concentrated on Europe exclusively as a source for the ideas and tropes that would lead to the modern figure of the superhero. Yet few would contest that the latter is overwhelmingly an American phenomenon; why, then, my emphasis on the “old continent”?

In an age when so many either bemoan or celebrate American cultural hegemony worldwide, it is well to remember that the United States was, until the 20th century, very much a backwater in culture– even in popular culture. American pop was generally derivative, where it existed at all; its melodramas came from the stages of London, its novels from Britain and France.

This was due to several historic reasons that were slow to fade away. The new republic was sparsely populated and thus had difficulty sustaining strong media industries; its language was the same as that of one of the cultural giants of Europe, Britain, assuring that country’s dominance. And until 1891 — and the adoption of the International Copyright Act — the United States offered copyright protection to U.S. citizens or residents alone.

The last fact was pernicious both to foreign authors such as Dickens (who complained bitterly about legal American piracy of his books), and to native ones. Why should a publisher spend money on an American writer of uncertain appeal, when he could publish a best-seller such as Jules Verne for free?

(It was a doubly bad deal for the American authors: they received no payment for books published abroad.)

This explains why the factors leading to the emergence of the superhero — the notion of the superman, science fiction, crime fiction, and so on– were overwhelmingly European in origin.

And yet it was America that gave birth to the superhero, as we understand it.

Why?

The unusual length of the claws, foot, stride, etc., filled Crockett with hope that the bear was a grizzly; a species with which he had never yet measured his prowess, though long anxious for the opportunity. — from The Bear-Hunter; or, Davy Crockett as a Spy

The two quotes that open this chapter offer a clue.

De Tocqueville, by David Levine

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), still considered today one of the greatest analysts of the United States and its society, was — as his quote shows — suspicious of individualism; he also noted democracy’s ability to counter its more invidious manifestations. He saw as well that nowhere in the world was individualism as prized as in America ( at least in theory; he also remarked on the great pressures to conform with received opinion.)

On paper– on the gaudily colored pulp paper of the comic book — the superhero is the ultimate fantasy of the individual, beholden neither to the laws of society, nor to those of physics.

And who is the other quote’s author, Chaim Lazarus (1984- )?

He’s the RLSH (Real Life Superhero) known as Life:

… and the founder of Superheroes Anonymous, a team-up of dozens of New York-based, masked and costumed RLSHs specialised in battling injustice by distributing food and necessities to the homeless.

His remarks about American entrepreneurship dovetail with de Tocqueville’s observations. The great myth of the American — a myth all the more potent for its kernel of truth– is that of the can-do lone wolf, the pioneer, the tamer of wilderness; of the fur trapper and the dot-com starter upper, the inventor, the self-made-man, the superhero.

And this myth had its roots established as long ago as the 18th century.

‘I want Elbow Room!’

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact…print the legend.
— Dorothy M. Johnson, The Man who shot Liberty Valance

Publishing in colonial America was, as mentioned above, dominated by imports from Britain; the few native publishers were booksellers, bringing out the occasional volume to round out their inventory.

This changed during the War of Independance; however, the young republic’s offerings tended to be imitations of British originals. But one bestseller went against this trend, introducing a new sort of hero suited for the growing country:Daniel Boone.

Boone (1734–1820) was a real person. Over his long life, he was a pioneering settler of Kentucky; fought the French, the British, and the Shawnee; and ended as a settler in Missouri. His was an active, often violent life, marked both by adventure and tragedy, studded with both success and abject failure.

A life that was to be transmuted into legend, at the hands of one man: authorJohn Filson.

In 1784, Filson published The Discovery, Settlement, and present State of Kentucky, and one long chapter (based on interviews) was given over to the career of Daniel Boone. The material was factual, but rewritten in a florid, excited style alien to the laconic frontiersman. The book was a hit, and the Boone chapter was excerpted, expanded, and published separately. It was a sensation, much to its subject’s bemusement.

Here was a hero for the New World. Wrestling with bears, alternately fighting and being adopted by Indian tribes, free to stalk the virgin wilderness unencumbered by the sullen strictures of civilisation! Just the thing for the leisure reading of farmboys mired in drudgery, or city clerk‘s apprentices dully laboring in their offices. At any moment one could cast off the chains of societyand stride forth into the wonder and adventure of the frontier! (And kill lots of Injuns!)

This was a fantasy, of course — settling new land meant preparation, capital, and years of backbreaking, boring work. Boone himself spent decades embroiled in lawsuits over land title. But it was a fantasy that resonated strongly. It evoked one of the most powerful allures of American life: the possibility of re-inventing oneself.

(Boone resented this depiction of him as some sort of noble savage: “Nothing embitters my old age like the circulation of absurd stories that I retire as civilization advances….” He would also be appalled at future depictions of him as a bloodthirsty Indian killer. Boone fought Indians, but also dwelt among them in peace and was adopted by the Shawnee nation.)

For the past two hundred years, Daniel Boone has remained a mainstay of American pop culture.

Another frontiersman, supposedly of the same mould, was Davy Crockett(1786–1836) of Tennessee, whose legend outshines even Boone’s. This may be mostly due to his hero’s death at the siege of the Alamo in the Texan War of Independance; but also, largely, to Crockett’s shrewd cultivation of his image. He was, after all, a politician.

“In one word I’m a screamer, and have got the roughest racking horse, the prettiest sister, the surest rifle and the ugliest dog in the district. I’m a leetle the savagest crittur you ever did see. My father can whip any man in Kentucky, and I can lick my father. I can outspeak any man on this floor, and give him two hours start. I can run faster, dive deeper, stay longer under, and come out drier, than any chap this side the big Swamp. I can outlook a panther and outstare a flash of lightning, tote a steamboat on my back and play at rough and tumble with a lion, and an occasional kick from a zebra.” – Speech of congressman David Crockett at the House of Representatives, as reported in DavyCrockett’s Almanac

The above brag fits squarely into a tradition of American folkore and pop culture: the ‘tall tale’, often presenting the ridiculously impossible exploits of supermen: the cowboy Pecos Bill, who lassoed a tornado; or the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, who created the grand Canyon by dragging his pickaxe behind him.

Pecos Bill lassoes a twister. Yee-haw!

These tales show features not dissimilar to those of the later adventures of Superman or Captain Marvel; the popular imagination was thus primed for superpowers and superheroes.

Boone, Crockett, and other frontier adventurers such as Jim Bowie were fodder for chapbooks, pamphlets, and almanacs. Boone was also the model for the hero of America’s first international hit fiction: Natty Bumppo.

The Deerslayer, illustrated by N.C.Wyeth

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) wrote the novels grouped as the Leatherstocking Tales, chronicling the woodsman Bumppo’s adventures in colonial America; the best-known remains The Last of the Mohicans (1826). This was one of the best-selling novels of the 19th century, both in the States and in Europe.

It’s intriguing to note that Bumppo, throughout the books, is known by many names: Leatherstocking, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, La Longue Carabine. In America your identity was fungible; you could remake it as you pleased. Small wonder the next century’s superheroes briskly adopted sobriquets. Thus Clark Kent becomes Superman, Bruce Wayne Batman, Steve Rogers Captain America. (And society at large is depicted as remarkably complaisant in accepting these names, whereas in the real world such sobriquets are generally bestowed by the press– rarely in complimentary terms, sports figures apart.)

The Leatherstocking tales were published as quite respectable, middle-class oriented novels, though they attained vast popular acclaim. However, there wasa growing ‘sub-literature’ of a less respectable cut that was poised to exploit the opening of the frontier and develop one of the most successful popular genres in history: the Western.

Go West, Young Man, in your Mind

Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

Thus Horace Greely, in an 1865 editorial in the New York Tribune. Although the third sentence is what has come down to us as a much-repeated quote, it’s instructive to pair it with the first and second ones. Greely was as much blasting the new urban America as praising the West qua arena of the nation’s future.

We mythologize the United States of the first decades after the Civil War as the scene of a vast epic of westward expansion…buffaloes, cowboys, mining camps, noble Sioux braves, gun-toting outlaws, wagon trains of settlers– all the colorful bric-a-brac of the legend of the West.

But legend it remained, though again, as with all legends, there was a grain of truth to it around which accreted romance and glamor, as nacre accretes round a grain of sand to make a pearl.

The salient change in late 19th century America wasn’t the settling of the West; it was the powerful urbanization and industrialization of the East. In 1860, the United States had thirty thousand miles of railroads and produced ten thousand tons of steel a year. By 1900, it had 200 000 miles of railroad and turned out six million tons of steel, overtaking Britain as the world’s top producer.

But a city schoolchild or factory wage slave still needed a mythical space for his or her dreams; and the Western appeared in pop culture to service this escapist need.

Its arrival coincided with America’s answer to Britain’s penny dreadfuls, the cheap and sensationalistic pamphlets we know as dime novels.

The term is generally agreed to have sprung up in 1860, in the title of Beadle’s Dime Novel series. The dime novel flourished circa 1860 to 1910, not becoming extinct until around 1925. Yet its decisive influence — both in content and in format — on popular fiction up to the present day merits a detailed overview; indeed, the comic book is the direct descendant of the dime novel, in more ways than one.

Post- Civil War America ushered in a golden age of magazine publishing. New printing technologies allowed enormous press runs and attractive graphics, often featuring color; railroad networks enabled, for the first time, real national distribution across the vastness of the republic. Literacy was universal (possibly higher than it is today.) A growing middle class had more money to spend on leisure, and the magazines stood ready to provide them fitting entertainment.

For the highbrow, Harper’s or the Atlantic provided choice literature; middle-class families enjoyed the weekly ‘storypaper’ anthologies that serialised romantic or historical novels, such as the New York Ledger. As for respectable young folk, they could turn to equally respectable children’s magazines — the Riverside Magazine for Young People or the St Nicholas’ Magazine, for instance.

But what of those deplorable young people who craved fare that wasn’t respectable?

The weekly dime novel offered its raffish lowbrow charms.

Some aspects of the dime novels point to the future– ultimately, to the adventure comic book, and hence to the superhero comic.

In contrast to the storypapers, which appealed to all members of the family, the dime novels quickly succumbed to market segmentation; and, though some of them were aimed at a feminine audience, and many adults read them, they were predominently catering to boys aged 9 to 16, mostly from the working class.

They appeared weekly, bi-weekly, or occasionally monthly, and were distributed on newsstands and in dry-goods and candy stores– the “mom and pop” mainstays of comic-book distribution until the 1970?s.

They featured, issue after issue, the death-defying adventures of the samecolorful heroes, often operating outside the law: this was the norm in the dime Westerns.

Upon closer acquaintance with Westerns as presented in dime novels, their differences from their twentieth-century equivalents are enlightening. Yes, we have battles with Indians and cattle rustlers; but the latter are more often than not mere spear-carriers for the real villains: the rich.

The outlaw hero is typically a young man of sterling character who has been dispossessed by scheming plutocrats, and forced into a Robin Hood life of high-minded crime. The law and its representatives– judges, sheriffs– are wholly corrupted by moneyed interests; the only recourse of our hero is to take the law into his hands.

Typical is the case of ‘Deadwood Dick‘, the popular creation of Edward L. Wheeler, first appearing in 1877. Young Edward Harris is swindled out of his inheritance by the Filmore brothers. As he explains:

I appealed to our neighbors and even the courts for protection, but my enemy was a man of great influence, and after many vain attempts, I found that I could not obtain a hearing; that nothing remained for me but to fight my own way; And I did fight it.

He becomes the masked highwayman Deadwood Dick, who, after many adventures, finally manages to capture the villainous Filmores. He serves them his own brand of justice:

Now, I am inclined to be merciful to only those who have been merciful to me…Boys, string ‘em up!

And his gang hangs the wealthy malefactors. The reader has been maneuvered into cheering on lynch law.

Thus, the populism of the dime Western has its darker side. Class resentment on the part of their proletarian readers leads to an exacerbation of individuality; the law is a plaything of the rich, and so to be discarded altogether; what remains is the revenge fantasy.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to the more ought law to weed it out — Sir Francis Bacon

Consider the following lynching by a self-described “mob of one”:

Lighting a fresh cigar, Dick watched the convulsions of the two men until they had ceased, his wild glances gradually becoming less wild, and by the time both forms had become motionless in death, his eyes had become as mild and gentle as those of a gazelle. His desire for vengeance had been appeased! His sense of duty and justice satisfied!’ — from Daredeath Dick, King of the Cowboys, by Leon Lewis

This is vigilantism, the privatisation of justice and of vengeance. It is an implicit premise of every crime-fighting superhero to this day.

(This glorification of outlaws also alarmed the establishment; dime novels extolling criminals such as Jesse James, the Daltons, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made the fortunes of publishers Frank Tousey and Street & Smith, until, in 1903, public outrage and the threat of the Postmaster General to revoke second-class postal privileges caused the cancellation of all ‘true outlaw’ novels.

One may legitimately wonder whether the authorities were more alarmed by the praise of lawbreakers, or by the populist, subversive ideas that permeated these books.)

Vigilantism is known worldwide — see the Vehmgerichte of medieval Westphalia, or the White Hand death squads of modern Brazil — but it is seen, abroad, as a source of terror; in the U.S.A. alone is it romanticised.

This may partly be due to the necessity, in vast wild territories under little more than nominal control of government, of appealing to civilians to defend the country from attack, whether military or criminal. That necessity informs the second amendment to the United States Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The problems arose when militias were not “well regulated”. There were legal frameworks, most famously the law of “posse comitatus” enabling a sheriff to commandeer any able-bodied man in his jurisdiction for purposes of law enforcement: thus the “posses” galloping through Western movies.

A real-life 1922 posse in Arizona, with two captured murderers

But irregular vigilante groups abounded in real life: the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, the Montana Vigilantes, the Bald Knobbers of Missouri all resorted to clandestine murder and other terror tactics against lawbreakers, generally to the applause of the populace and the fury of the authorities.

Small wonder the vigilante found himself cast as a hero of American pop literature, first in the dime novels, then in pulp magazines, and finally in the modern-day comic book. Deadwood Dick is a direct ancestor of the Punisher and other vigilante superheroes — which is to say, of nearly all of them.

From Action Comics 43 (December 1941): art by Mort Meskin. As direct a link as can be between the old West and modern superhero vigilantes.

The United States of the dime novel’s heyday was undergoing immense upheavals. Gigantic corporations — the ‘trusts’ — came to dominate the economy: Armour, International Harvester, Standard Oil, United States Steel.The immense wealth of cattle barons and of what we now call ‘agri-business’ was choking the life out of traditional smallholding family farms and ranches. The modern Labor movement was coming into a painful and violent birth, against a backdrop of falling wages due to automation and mass immigration amid severe, recurring recessions.

And ironically, just as the Western reached the pinnacle of popularity, the Frontier had closed. As the historian Frederick Turner noted in The Frontier in American History (1920), this closing heightened ” the sharp contrast between the traditional idea of America — as the land of opportunity, the land of the self-made man, free from class distinctions, and from the power of wealth — and the existing America, so unlike the earlier ideal.”

Is it any wonder that powerless working-class adolescents should subscribe to dreams of summary justice dealt by outlaws to evil, moneyed malefactors? Or that this dream should linger into the twenty-first century?

Let us end this chapter by taking note of one of the most vicious and evil vigilante organisations of all time: the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan was formed after the Civil War defeat of the southern Confederacy, in 1865, as a secret organisation bent on terrorising freed Black Americans and Republicans, as well as Catholics and Jews. Their ‘Masked Riders’ secretly murdered and tortured. A rump of this vile gang lives on today, still spreading its doctrine of hate.

The Klan had its spectacular — some would say ridiculous — side. At their meetings, or ‘klonclaves’, masked members ( with titles like Wizard, Dragon, Titan, or Fury) would burn crosses and chant slogans.

A masked Klansman before a burning cross

Let’s see… masked vigilantes with colorful names hiding their secret identity… sound familiar?

I think it’s inescapable to conclude that something uniquely American led to both the formation of the KKK, and the emergence in the U.S.A. of the superhero.

That’s right: the first major superhero film is D.W.Griffith‘s The Birth of a Nation (1915).