Celluloid Superheroes: the First Hundred Years

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

The 2015 bombardment of superhero films is over. It was a relatively light year, just Avengers 2, Ant-Man, and the franchise-flopping Fantastic Four. But Warner Bros. and Marvel Entertainment have twenty superhero films in various states of production, all of them due in theaters by 2020.

Back in 1978 superheroes were so rare in Hollywood, the first Superman included the subtitle The Movie. So you may think of costumed do-gooders as relatively recent invaders of the silver screen, but they leaped to theaters long before landing in comics. 2016 promises Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Captain America 3, and X-Men: Apocalypse, but 1916 saw three rounds too.

In Arthur Stringer’s The Iron Claw, Creighton Hale plays “an easy going idiot” working as a millionaire’s personal secretary by day, but at night he dons the guise of the mysterious Laughing Mask. By the end, he’s wooed his boss’s daughter and thwarted the nefarious Iron Claw.

Francis Ford joined Hale as the similarly clad Sphinx in The Purple Mask, only this time the masked hero has a masked anti-heroine to woo too, Grace Cunard’s lady thief and so-called Queen of the Apaches, the first celluloid superheroine. She leaves her purple mask as a calling card.

But the first most influential superhero film award goes to Louis Feuillade’ Judex—a partial reversal of The Iron Claw since Judex begins as a vengeance-seeking blackmailer disguised as a personal secretary before falling for his boss’s daughter. I like to show my class the original unmasking scene, Yvette Andréyor creeping into the hero’s batcave of a bedroom and discovering his make-up kit. Nowhere nearly as dramatic as the Phantom of the Opera unmasking, but shot a decade earlier.

My favorite superhero silent film, the 1927 classic The Russian Affair, won Best Picture in 2011.

That’s because it exists only in the opening sequence of director Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. But the invented film shows how popular masked heroes were in the early 20th century. The Russian Affair—as well as glimpses of its equally pretend sequel, The German Affair—features the fictional silent star George Valentin in tuxedo, top hat, and domino mask—the quintessential costume of the pre-comic book superhero. Raffles, Tarzan, Robin Hood, Night Wind, Gray Seal, Lone Wolf, they all transformed themselves into silent superheroes, most unheard now. Except for Zorro, which The Artist inserts into Valentin’s fictional filmography, replacing the very real Douglas Fairbanks.

Judex had barely exited American theaters before Fairbanks was skimming issues of All-Story for his own pulp hero to adapt. A year later, the Judex-inspired Zorro was an international icon. Hazanavicius even reshoots the best action sequence, dressing The Artist’s Jean Dujardin in Fairbanks’ Zorro wardrobe. The Mark of Zorro didn’t win Best Picture in 1920 only because the Academy Awards didn’t exist for another decade.

The 1928 Alias Jimmie Valentine was going to be a silent adaptation of O. Henry’s gentleman thief tale, but MGM called the stars back to record the studio’s first talkie instead. Fairbanks’s 1929 Three Musketeers sequel included his spoken prologue, but his talking Taming of the Shrew flopped later that year, as did his final Private Life of Don Juan. Hazanavicius’s gives his alter ego a tap-dancing afterlife, a superpower not in Fairbanks’ repertoire, so the real Fairbanks was replaced by a new breed of action heroes, some of them actual supermen.

Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller took his last gold medal in 1928, Buster Crabbe in 1932. Both went on to play Tarzan. I watched Weissmuller on my aunts’ TV, one of those crate-sized machines that flickered as the cathode ray tubes heated. I’m thankful my aunts didn’t keep the battle scenes I doodled on scrap paper, all those blowdart-blowing savages gunned down by white hunters. All Hollywood sandpits, I surmised, were seven feet deep, designed to swallow everything but a victim’s groping fingers.

MGM did the same to Fairbanks and every other ex-star unable to adapt.Not that the superhero sound era was an easy transition for Hollywood either. MGM only started their talking Tarzan franchise because they had the footage.

Trader Horn, the first big budget film shot on location, was a disaster. The production team returned from Africa with scene after scene of inaudible dialogue, a star infected with malaria, and the suitcases of crew members devoured by crocodiles and trampled by rhinos. They also had miles of jungle footage, way more than could ever fit into a single movie. Trader Horn came and went in 1931, but to capitalize on all that location shooting they’d already paid for, MGM rolled out Tarzan the Ape Man the following year. It was a cheap hit that spawned five low-budget sequels that returned Burroughs’ superman to the pop culture spotlight.

After Christopher Reeve retired his cape following 1987’s catastrophic Superman IV, Tim Burton rebounded with Batman, but otherwise the 90s are a 1930s reboot. Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy. Billy Zane in The Phantom. Alec Baldwin in The Shadow. It’s hard to remember a time when the Marvel pantheon wasn’t pounding box offices, but Hollywood once preferred retro-heroes. Disney’s The Rocketeer sported 30s curves, even though the character debuted in comics in 1982. That’s why Jim Carey threw on a yellow zoot suit along with the 1987 The Mask comic book. When Sam Raimi of later Spider-Man fame couldn’t get the rights to the Shadow, he cast Liam Neeson as a modern master-of-disguise instead. Darkman isn’t any good, but it does show how much comic book superheroes were a mutation of their pulp predecessors, an evolutionary process repeated in film.

It took a couple of decades, but the double flop of Seth Rogen’s 2011 The Green Hornet and Disney’s 2013 Lone Ranger and Tonto may have finally closed the theater doors on the 1930s. According to that math, are Warner Bros. and Marvel Entertainment being over optimistic with their 2020 projections? If the 30s are finally over, how long can DC’s early 40s and Marvel’s early 60s continue to last?

Utilitarian Review 8/7/15

Posted on August 8, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

General News

Middle of summer and no one seems to be much interested in writing…so I think we’re going to take next week off, starting Monday.

Wonder Woman News

Cia Jackson reviewed my book at the Comics Grid. Not a very helpful review, as these things go…

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Subdee on Django Unchained and debt.

Robert Stanley Martin with on-sale dates of comics from early 1945—including Little Lulu and Milton Caniff.

Chris Gavaler on the superheroes politicians love.

Me on Ian McEwan and why he should stick to writing romance.

Me on the greatness of fIREHOSE’s Flyin’ the Flannel.

Roy T. Cook on bad superhero math and what to make of it.

I reviewed and anthology of Chinese experimental music.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about why cultural appropriation isn’t theft (but can be racist.)

At Ravishly I wrote about Little Big Town, Willie Nelson, and same sex love in country music.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—why Rorschach would be a better President than Ted Cruz.

—Sam Harris’ anti-semitic bilge.

Other Links

Tressie McMillan Cottom on TNC’s Between the World and Me is great.

It looks like Steven Salaita’s lawsuit is in good shape.

Gita Jackson on British wizards and American blackness.

Alyssa Rosenber on the conflicted feminism of Miss Piggy.

J.A. Micheline on why she’s boycotting Marvel.

Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music, 1992-2008

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran at Madeloud (a site that I think may no longer be online.)
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The Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music, 1992-2008. I read that title and I think to myself, “This may be great, it may be awful, but either way it’s going to be some weird-ass shit the likes of which I have never heard before in my life.”

Just goes to show what I know. Maybe it’s because, as the liner notes indicate, China’s indigenous cultural heritage was in many ways severed by the Maoist Cultural Revolution. Or maybe it’s because, just as today country music doesn’t mean rural, and rhythm and blues doesn’t mean the blues, experimental music just isn’t especially experimental. Whatever the reason, though, little on this four CD set qualifies as startling. From the first track (Li Chin Sung’s ambient static-and-cricket-noises on “Somewhere”) to the last (Simon Ho’s echoey, ambient, static-and-plane-taking-off-noises on “5”), we’re solidly within the avant-garde laptop paradigm. Some loud feedback, some snips of sound, a little techno bleepery here, a little static there….check, check, check, and check. I should have known; if you want , you need to head for Bollywood or Japanese pop, or, hell, American pop. Anything calling itself experimental is going to be just a little too pretentious to be truly goofy.

Which isn’t to say this set is bad. Four CDs may be more droning and squeaking than I really need in my life right now, but there are definitely a decent number of worthwhile moments scattered throughout. Torturing Nurse, for example, lets loose with some truly crazed shrieking to open CD 3; the rest of the track is 14 minutes of what appears to be a free-jazz combo caught in industrial machinery. SUN Dawei’s “Crawling State”, from CD 2, combines Baaba Maal-sounding African vocals and rhythms with more jittery computerized beats. The following track, Nara’s “Dream a Little Dream,” is very Aphex Twin; frantic bleeps undergirding a melody that’s all lyrical bliss. Fathmount’s “A Yoke of Oxen,” on the other hand, suggests Sonic Youth if the band were forced to ingest a substantial amount of mellowing weed — the detuned guitars gently weave and ploink without ever getting around to the brutal feedback rock climax. I even enjoyed some of the one-liners; I don’t actually want to sit for 4:47 and listen to a crane operate, but I appreciate that someone (a performer known as Fish, specifically) has given me the opportunity.

And you know what? Listening to Tats Lau’s “Face the Antagonist” again, I realize that it actually does sound like some sort of odd computer-nerd version of Bollywood, complete with earnest, soaring vocals, industrial clanging, and an odd warped mouth-harp-like twanging throughout which may or may not be entirely synthesized. That is pretty weird, after all.

False Mathematics and Comic-book Fiction

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

Every so often Marvel attempts to explain some of the weirder aspects of the fictional universe described in their comics by invoking some more-or-less obscure bit of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. I am concerned with the mathematics today, and in particular the way that the mathematics of the transfinite has been used (abused?) to explain the relative power status of various ‘cosmic’ beings (e.g. how can one omnipotent being be more powerful than another?)

One such incident occurs in Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #21, where it is implied that the Marvel multiverse is made up of the transfinite numbers. Transfinite cardinal numbers – presumably the authors don’t have ordinals in mind – are the numbers that measure the size of infinite sets (the finite cardinals are just the numbers that measure the size of finite sets – that is, 0, 1, 2, and so on). Since there is an infinite series of larger and larger infinite sets, there is an infinite sequence of transfinite cardinal numbers. Georg Cantor, who was the first mathematician to study transfinite numbers, himself makes an appearance on this page, although for some reason he is transformed from a German mathematics professor to a Russian monk (I doubt Cantor ever wore a cool hood like the one in the art – Cantor did in fact go mad, however). But the page makes a deeper mistake: a tranfinite number is not a (cardinal) number greater than infinity, but rather a (cardinal) number greater than any finite cardinal number (thinking about the etymology of the word should have made this clear: “transfinite” is “beyond the finite”, not “beyond the infinite” – presumably they meant something like Cantor’s notion of the absolute infinite, which is beyond all the transfinite numbers, but whose existence is highly controversial amongst mathematicians and philosophers who work in this area).

Things get a good bit more confusing in other, later comics, however. In the page reproduced on the right, Kubik is explaining the nature of infinitely powerful cosmic beings to the newly formed Kosmos (I think it’s from Fantastic Four somewhere – please school me on the exact reference in the comments!) First off, Marvel seems to equate omnipotence with being infinitely powerful (already problematic). But then, since on this reading of “omniscient” there are lots of omniscient beings in the Marvel multiverse, and some of these are clearly more powerful than others, an explanation of this discrepancy is required. Cleverly, Cantor’s hierarchy of transfinite numbers is wheeled in to do the job.

So far, so good. But the problem is this: they get the math wrong – badly. Here is the relevant bit of the conversation between Kubik and Kosmos:

Kubik: Consider then, the set called whole numbers ~ 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. Is it not infinite?

Kosmos: Obviously.

Kubik: Then consider the set called the even numbers ~ 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on – how long is it?

Kosmos: Why, infinite, of course.

Kubik: Half of infinity is still infinity. And the same would be true of the set of odd numbers?

Kosmos: Of course.

Kubuk: Both sets are infinite, and yet the set of whole numbers contains both subsets, and is therefore twice as large as either subset alone.

Kosmos: …? … !

Kubik: Thus are demonstrated two levels of infinity. There are, of course, an infinite number more.

[Admission: I like to interpret the fourth panel – the close-up of a shocked Kosmos where she utters “…? ….!” – as depicting Kosmos’ dismay at what a crappy mathematician Kubik is, especially for an infinitely powerful cosmic being. But I suspect that is not the reading the creators intended – see below!]

Basically, the infinitely powerful Kubik has achieved a cutting edge level of mathematical expertise – or would have, were it about 1600 AD. The confusion here is pretty much what has come to be called Galileo’s paradox: How can the collection of even numbers be both half the size of the collection of whole numbers, since we obtain the evens by taking every other whole number, and also the same size, since we can match up each even number to exactly one whole number (and vice versa) as follows:

1 <–> 2

2 <–> 4

3 <–> 6

4 <–> 8

5 <–> 10

and so on.

Roughly three hundred years later, Cantor cleared all this up. Basically, his idea was that two sets are the same size if and only if the elements in the sets can be matched up one-one like the wholes and evens are above, and are different sizes if they can’t. He also proved that for any set (including any infinite set), there is another set that is strictly speaking bigger than the first set. As a result of Cantor’s insights (along with those of other mathematicians including Dedekind, Zermelo, and others) set theory is one of the richest and most productive areas of modern mathematics. But here’s the kicker: the set of all whole numbers, and the set of even numbers, aren’t an example of this phenomenon: they are the same size, or, in more technical jargon, have the same (transfinite) cardinal number, since they can be mapped one-one to one another as shown above (self-serving plug: for a good, rigorous yet readable introduction to all this, see Chapter 4 of this excellent book!)

Now, the obvious explanation of all of this is that the writers at Marvel recalled hearing something about different sizes of infinity in a philosophy course at some point during their alcohol-soaked college years, but couldn’t remember the details (or misremembered them, etc.), and so they just made some shit up. Fine and dandy. But the really interesting question is this: How should we interpret passages such as the one above, where cosmic beings seem to be sincerely explaining the nature of the multiverse in terms of transfinite cardinal numbers, but where they get the mathematics horribly wrong?

The first option is to interpret the incident as one where Kubik just makes a mistake. On this reading, everyone, including infinitely powerful cosmic beings, are fallible, and Kubik just didn’t pay enough attention in his “advanced mathematics of the infinite” course at Cosmic Beings College. But this seems a stretch. After all, setting the mathematics aside, it seems clear that we are meant to take this page to be a sincere and correct explanation of the nature of infinite powers within the Marvel universe (i.e. the creators intended us to interpret it that way and, barring ret-conning or other overt manipulation of the content, it seems that is enough to justify the claim that we ought to understand the page that way).

The second option is to interpret the incident as one where Kubik gets it exactly right. On this reading, the mathematics of the Marvel multiverse is just different than the mathematics that holds in our actual world. Of course, most philosophers and mathematicians think that mathematics is necessary – that is, that the truths of mathematics are the same in any way that the world could have possibly been (further, many think that even in ‘possible worlds’ where the laws of physics might be different, the laws of mathematics would remain the same!) In short, there is a way the world could have been where I was a mathematician and not a philosopher, but there is no way that the world could have been where there are more whole numbers than natural numbers. As a result, Marvel comics are describing a ‘reality’ that is not even possible in a basic, logical sense.

As a result, if we opt for the second reading, then we find ourselves in a conundrum: If Marvel’s comics, and the description of the multiverse contained in them, is a correct description of that multiverse, but is also (from the perspective of the real world) completely impossible – that is, the world couldn’t possibly have been that way – then it is not clear that, in some deep sense, we can understand these comics in the first place. The characters depicted in these comics live in a reality that is so different from our own that it is not clear what it might mean to say that we understand what living in such a world might be like. But of course we do seem to understand what living in such a world might be like, and presumably we think that we get more information about what it would be like every time we read a new Marvel comic. Hence, the conundrum.

Of course, DC might have even bigger problems along these lines – see the Superman panel above.

Alright – discuss!

Old Enough to Be Confused

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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It’s taken me somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years to appreciate fIREHOSE. A friend taped it for me back in the early 90s, maybe a year or three after its release in 1991. I didn’t hate it or anything, and I listened to it a fair amount because my friend said I should like it and I felt like I should keep trying. But it was only when I started to listen to it again last month after that two decade hiatus that I ended up falling in love — and buying all of fIREHOSE’s other albums.

It’s appropriate that I had to wait, and wait, and wait, to really appreciate the band. Most rock at least makes some pretense at aiming for the kids, but fIREHOSE really is music for aging decadents. Bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley were already punk legends when the band coalesced — they’d been two thirds of the Minutemen, before guitarist D. Boon died. The new guitarist and vocalist, Ed Crawford, substituted for Boon’s youthful political charge a jaded, wigged out irony — everything the band does sounds like it’s in quotes. One of their songs, from 1993’s Mr. Machinery Operator is even called “More Famous Quotes.” Another, from 1987’s If’n, is called “For the Singer of REM” and is a gleefully goofy skewering of Michael Stipe, with Crawford burbling about how “the door’s a symbol for/these objects in your drawer,” while Watt and Crawford somehow imitate REM’s folk-rock shimmer exactly while still sounding like their own spiky, funky selves. It’s as if they’ve contemptuously swallowed their target whole.

As that parody suggests, there’s a little Weird Al in fIREHOSE’s makeup — but it’s Weird Al as he would have been if he was more musically talented and more ambitious than any of the bands he parodied. fIREHOSE is undoubtedly joking throughout Flyin’ the Flannel, but the jokes are so fractured and bizarre and cool-as-shit that they end up slipping over into the sublime. It’s the greatest chortling grandpa music ever.

Most of the songs on Flyin’ the Flannel are only one to two minutes long, and they all seem put together out of spare pieces, shards, and novelty items. “Can’t Believe” is a joyful power-pop ode to love into which someone has inadvertently dropped a barrel-full of amphetamines and the lunatic what swallowed them. Crawford wails his Michael Nesmith lines like Rob Halford with head trauma, while Watt and Hurley burp and stutter, turning the wannabe triumphant hook into a series of strutting pratfalls. On the band’s version of Daniel Johnston’s “Walking the Cow,” Mike Watt emotes like a slowed down Elvis, while the band turns the fey original into a faux-soulful stroll, with the meaty bass insisting that there really is a cow lowing over there. “Flyin’ the Flannel” is a cock rock roar about the need for tailors, interspersed with fruity folksy interludes, as Watt’s base meditatively scuffles about in the underbrush And then there’s “Towin’ the Line,” which is maybe the album’s closest song to actual funk. Though it’s still all slowed down and spaced apart, like George Clinton leisurely bouncing around the studio on a pogo stick.

Talking about individual tracks is a little deceptive though. The songs tend to blur into each other, not because they all sound the same, but, again, because they’re each so fragmented. The whole feels less like a whole than like an assemblage, stiched together out of Hurley’s weird shifting beats, Watt’s weird shifting bass runs, and Crawford’s weird shifting riffs and wails. You end up with this tattered, limping thing, which keeps trying to rock and then gets tired and goes off to snark or fart or sit down for a rest, or bellow at the kids on the lawn. Maybe I felt like it was bellowing at me once upon a time, I don’t know. But whatever my problem was, I’m glad I finally got old enough to like my music this distracted and crotchety and glorious.

Romance>Lit Fic

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Ian McEwan secretly writes romance. He’s supposed to be a lit fic author, but most of the books of his I’ve read — The Innocent, Atonement, and Sweet Tooth — all function like category romances, with a bit of meta-fictional trickery (which isn’t exactly foreign to category romance either. The last of these I read, Sweet Tooth, even works as a kind of love letter to the fan fic wing of romance. The book is narrated by Serena Frome, a low-level operative in MI-5 tasked with secretly funding propaganda funds to likely anti-communist literary sorts. She falls in love with Tom Haley, a novelist she’s gotten into the program…and then (spoiler!) it turns out at the end that she isn’t actually the narrator; instead, Tom is the narrator writing as her. The romance trope of switching between male and female protagonist consciousnesses is both tweaked and perfectly fulfilled, as is the fan fic genre trope of telling the same story from different characters perspectives. It’s a tour de force, not because it upends romance conventions, but because it fulfills them so gleefully and perfectly. Quite possibly McEwan doesn’t read category romance or fan fic—but he has enough common roots with the genre that he understands them, and loves them and makes them his own— or, if you prefer, lets them make him theirs.

So it was with some disappointment that I read McEwan’s “Solar”and realized that it was not a romance. It’s just literary fiction. And you can tell it’s literary fiction not because it dispenses with genre tropes, but because the genre tropes of literary fiction are all in place. The aging priaptic professor and his string of wives; the jabs at academic politics, the ironies, the metafictional asides (the main character, Beard embellishes a story “not because, or not only because, he was a liar, but because he instinctively knew it was wrong to dishonor a good story.”) And of course the inevitable, drearily happy unhappy ending, where everyone figures out that the main character is a horrible person and all his lies catch up to him, and so we’re left dangling in media res with disaster delightfully coming. Yawn. It’s almost as drearily cliché as the end of Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World” where the last scene is of the characters literally gazing at a rich tapestry. No, really.

Genre fiction, and especially romance, is generally thought of as predictable and structurally uncreative. Lit fic requires idiosyncratic genius. But for McEwan, at least in the four books I’ve read, the opposite is the case. Romance seems to inspire him to play with the genre; to stretch it out and move the bits around, to see just how far he can push his characters and his readers while still retaining their love. In lit fic, though, the pretense of no formulas seems to mean he can’t even see the formulas, and so he just goes trudging through them, without even bothering with variation or wit or invention. The box you know is there becomes an inspiration; the box you refuse to see is the one that holds you.

This isn’t to say that Solar is utterly without merit; there’s an incredibly funny bit involving sub zero urination and the consequences thereof. But the amusing set pieces never add up to anything interesting, because lit fic’s non formula-formula robs McEwan of invention as surely as his main character is (inevitably) bereft of inspiration and genius. Without genre, lit fic is at the mercy of its formulaic conventions.

Spider-Man vs. Ted Cruz vs. Spock vs. Barack Obama

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I had considered Senator Cruz my least-likely-to-vote-for Presidential candidate ever, until Donald Trump robbed him of the title. Worse, I recently learned from his New York Times Magazine interview that the Tea Party favorite and I share at least one interest/obsession: superheroes. Not only did the former “unpopular nerd” describe himself as “a Spider-Man guy,” but he named his company Cruz Enterprises after Iron Man’s Stark Enterprises—a quirkiness that hovers in the sweet spot between adorable and psychotic.

Cruz might be horrified to learn that his arch-nemesis Barack Obama (Cruz likened him to Darth Vader in one of his filibustering rants) is a Spider-Man guy too. When Entertainment Weekly asked the then Presidential candidate to name his favorite superhero in 2008, the Illinois Senator chose both Spider-Man and Batman. Why? Because, Obama said, “they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.”

President Obama has spent his two terms getting knocked around by Republican-controlled congresses, but, like his comic book role models, he’s won many a battle “against insurmountable odds.” That’s how John McCain described Batman, the superhero the former Republican candidate championed when asked the same question.

The standard answer is Superman. When Darren Garnick and his nine-year-old son, Ari, asked the 2012 Republican primary candidates, “If you could be any superhero in the world, who would you be and why?” Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain all went with the Man of Steel (check-out the six-minute documentary Republicans in Tights for the delightful details). Rick Santorum shook things up with Mr. Incredible, the super-dad from The Incredibles (which, unlike Mr. Santorum, is finally getting a sequel). Only Ron Paul, the only candidate older than comic books, snubbed the nine-year-old interviewer.

McCain was born in 1936, same year as Detective Comics, but most candidates (including Hillary Clinton, who has yet to be asked her superheroic preference) were born in the Golden Age of the 40s. Obama was the lone wolf, born in 1961, the year the Fantastic Four launched themselves to the moon and Marvel Comics into pop supremacy. But now Ted Cruz has him beat. Not that his birth year, 1970, is an auspicious one for superheroes. The comic book industry was in decline, and Vietnam-influenced antiheroes were flooding the market along with a new breed of horror titles.

Cruz’s birth also marks the first year without Star Trek. A fact that doesn’t stop him from preferring Captain Kirk over The Next Generation’s Captain Picard. Why? Because, he told The New York Times, Kirk is “working class,” and Picard an “aristocrat.” That actually makes Cruz a fan of President Obama’s superhero team. Obama’s other reason for endorsing the “Spider Man/Batman model” (his term) was his dislike for Superman’s lazy privilege: “The guys who have too many powers — like Superman — that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy.”

It also turns out that Obama wouldn’t vote for either Kirk or Picard. He’s a Spock guy. When he met Leonard Nimoy during a 2007 campaign event, he greeted him with the Vulcan salute. When the actor died earlier this year, the President eulogized him:

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy. Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time. And of course, Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.

“I loved Spock.”

Cruz isn’t quite so generous about the arts and humanities, but he does like NASA. When he became chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Competitiveness, he announced his desire to expand the U.S. space program—even though he had to laud Democratic President Kennedy in the process. Ensign Chekhov, however, will not be invited aboard the new Enterprise. According to Cruz, NASA’s partnership with the former Evil Empire, Russia, on the International Space Station could “stunt our capacity to reach new heights and share innovations with free people everywhere.”

That’s not as bold as Newt Gingrich’s pandering promise to place astronauts on Mars by 2020 (he was speaking to laid-off NASA employees at the time), but it’s still unclear how the budget-slashing Cruz would finance his space exploration. Perhaps a joint public-private venture with Stark Enterprises? Or is this a job for Superman? Or super-businessman Lex Luthor? Even most comic book readers forget that Lex won the 2000 Presidential race (a fact since rebooted out of existence several times by DC Comics).

A Cruz-Trump White House isn’t more far-fetched, right?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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