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Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 8): A Farewell to Capes

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Art by John Romita,Sr, and Mike Esposito

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.– Paul the Apostle,1 Corinthians 13:11

Over the past seven chapters of this series, we have traced the evolution of the superman from the eighteenth century up to 1938 and the coming of the Superman comic book character: our history stops there, as the comic book medium was soon awash with superheroes, and would remain so until the present day.

Indeed, it is depressing to note, the commercial comic book is overwhelmingly dominated by the superhero at the expense of other popular genres. And the comic book superhero is at present – by  consensus of its aficionados – in a state of decadence.

We’ve seen , with the death of the dime novel, of the newspaper serial and of the pulp magazine, how entire pop media can shrivel away. The comic book magazine may be fated to join these dinosaurs in extinction.

 

If it is, I doubt it will take the superhero with it. Hollywood and the electronic game have claimed this king of the four-color pamphlets. As pointed out in previous chapters, the superhero existed before the comic book, and will continue to exist after. It is a kind of contemporary archetype that resonates with twenty-first-century psyches, not necessarily in a laudable way.

The superhero is a vehicle for power fantasies. That is far from news, of course. And there are other character types that also cater to the reader’s craving for wish fulfilment; tales of business tycoons, brilliant inventors, heroic revolutionaries, boy wizards, femmes fatales, genius detectives, and ugly-ducklings-turned-superstars abound. But the superhero strikes one as being uniquely unhealthy due to the nature of its particular power dream.

When I was a small child — say around eight years old — my favorite superhero was Superboy. Part of his charm lay in the simple pleasure of identification with this kid (like me!) with wonderful powers — a not unwholesome fantasy.

However, consider the cover picture below:
 

Art by Curt Swan and George Klein

 
What does this image tell me about my childhood proxy? He’s alone, unjustly reviled by society (his own parents turn on him), despite his clear superiority to the rabble. Now, the illustration is obviously an exaggeration made to serve one transient story — but it’s the kind of exaggeration that would resonate with a child.

Powerless and dependent, a child craves nothing so much as agency and autonomy. His world is entirely out of his control; he is told to clean his room, finish his homework, stop talking back. Ah, but little do they know of his secret life as a superhero!

The superhero is thus an expression of resentment that the child co-opts. Other negative sentiments it expresses include anger, acted out vicariously by the systematic use of violence to solve all problems.

These ‘bad’ feelings, though, can of course serve to empower a child psychologically. I’m more worried at the persistence of superhero fantasies in the adult. Fictional superman revenge fantasies, as Gramsci pointed out, were one of the roots from which Fascism grew.

Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it  but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality. Although this sort of Mittyesque daydreaming is supposed to cease in maturity, I suggest that more adults than we suspect are bemusingly wandering about with a full Technicolor extravaganza going on in their heads. […]Though from what we can gather about these imaginary worlds, they tend to be more Adlerian than Freudian: the motor power is the desire not for sex (other briefer fantasies take care of that) but for power, for the ability to dominate one’s environment through physical strength […]

Gore Vidal, The Waking Dream:Tarzan Revisited

I’m not necessarily referring to adult comic book fans, either; the enormous success of various superhero movies shows that this figure resonates strongly with the public at large.

No, I doubt that the continuing allure of the superhero will lead to more vigilante ‘justice’, or to a resurgent  Fascism. But it is time for one adult reader and comics lover to say goodbye: me.
 

Art by Neal Adams. An even more self-pitying version…

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As for the superman, he has in recent years taken a new guise, in the movement popularly called transhumanism.

Transhumans — also called post-humans– are postulated future beings of human origin “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”, according to the World Transhumanist Association. The latter also defines transhumanism thus:

  1. The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
  2. The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

Transhumanists foresee humans benefiting from radically extended lifespans (possibly even immortality), direct mind-machine interfaces, astonishingly high intelligence, perfect control of body processes…an entire laundry list of (so far) wishful thinking.

From the transhumanist site euvolution

 
Eventually transhumanity — whether the whole of the human race uplifted, or a tiny elite — may, in this scenario, slip the contingencies of existence and attain godhood.

One Christian author had foreseen such Luciferian hubris, and named it that hideous strength, in the book of the same title:

The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe […] would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.

C.S.Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)

While the memory of last century’s racial atrocities endures, let us not be too quick to abandon mere humanity.

Resist the temptation of the superman.

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part Seven): Reign of the Superman

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Art by Joe Shuster

 

Once commentators could discuss the “Superman”, the “Super-Race”, and the “Super-Society” without drawing connections back to the philosophy from whence it sprang, the Uebermensch proved to be a concept able to accommodate any number of competing moral viewpoints. And once Nietsche could become a thinker with answers but no questions, and his philosophy a celebration of power rather than a testament to the need for human wonder, the Uebermensch’s naturalization into American intellectual and cultural life was successfully under way.
– Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche

 

See you in the Funny Papers

In the 1890’s an extremely successful new pop medium took off: the newspaper comic strip.

Millions of readers delighted in the daily comedy antics of the Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, or Mutt and Jeff. The strips ran in black-and-white, but in 1897 the New York Journal published the first full-color Sunday comics supplement. In 1924 appeared what is generally considered to be the first adventure comic strip: Wash Tubbs, by Roy Crane (1901–1977).
 

Art by Roy Crane; click on image to enlarge

 
This opened the way for such classic adventure series as Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, and Dick Tracy.

The man who introduced the superhero to the comic strip was scripter Lee Falk(1911–1999). He created Mandrake the Magician in 1934, a dapper wizard who wielded his stupendous hypnotic powers against such villains as the Cobra and the Deleter.

Art by Phil Davis (1906-1964)

 
Mandrake has been the springboard for subsequent magician superheroes such as Ibis the Invincible, Dr Strange, or Zatara. Sometimes the imitation verged on plagiarism: witness Zatara:
 

Art by Fred Guardineer

 
Falks’ other classic superhero creation was the Phantom of Bengal (1936).

 
The Phantom had an original backstory: Kit Walker was the 21st Phantom in a lineage stretching back to his ancestor in 1516. By adopting the same mask and costume generation after generation, the Phantoms created the legend of an immortal fighter for justice:

Art by Ray Moore (1905-1984); click on image to enlarge

 
The Phatom‘s costume pioneered several of the visual tropes associated with superheroes ever since:  form-fitting top and tights, with the elegant innovation of underpants worn on the outside; a skull-hugging hood; and a mask with blanks hiding the eyes. All he lacked was a cape — which deficiency Mandrake supplied. Compare the Phantom to such later superheroes like Batman and Captain America, and it’s obvious how much the latter owe to Falks’ design.
 

All in Color for a Dime

Comic strips from the start would be gathered into book editions, with cardboard covers, much like modern European albums; they were relatively expensive gift items.

In 1929, Dell Publishing brought out a tabloid-sized newspaper supplement of color strip reprints, The Funnies, which ran for a year; in 1933,  Eastern Color Printing published a reprint pamphlet titled Funnies on Parade, featuring popular strips such as ‘Mutt and Jeff’, ‘Joe Palooka‘, and ‘Skippy‘. It’s considered by many to be the first true American comic book — with minor changes of format and printing technology, 2012 comic books resemble 1933 ones.
 

 
Funnies on Parade was devised chiefly as a way to keep Depression-idled printing presses busy. It was never sold, but used as a promotional giveaway by Procter and Gamble; everybody thought there was no money to be made selling what came free with the daily newspaper.

But Eastern Color’s salesman, Max Gaines, was sure there was a market out there, and so there was issued in May 1934 Famous Funnies, a 64-page reprint magazine retailing at 10 cents. It sold an incredible 90% of its print run. A new media industry was born.
 

Cover illustration by Jon Mayes

 
The newsstands were soon flooded with comic books. It’s not hard to understand their appeal; in our age of i-Pads and portable television, we have to remember that back in the 1930s immersive visual entertainment was limited to movie theatres.

The strip syndicates furnished the editorial content. This posed two problems: first, that the ravenous demand for comic books was quickly using up the available material; next, that the syndicates were charging some $10 per page, which cut cruelly into the profit margins.

The solution was to create new material at, say, $5 per page. Of course, such a fee would never attract established professional cartoonists; but, then as now, a horde of eager youths stood ready to write and draw for miserable wages, perhaps as a stepping-stone to the lucrative strip market. And the publishers were more than willing to exploit them.

Needless to say, this was a recipe for dreadful comics: inexperienced youngsters forced to hack out stories as fast as possible to earn a decent living. On the plus side, these tyros had youth’s energy and invention.

Although some new material had been incorporated from the start of the boom, generally the credit for the first all-new material comic book has been given to Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson‘s New Fun comics. It featured a mix of humor and adventure tales; some of the latter were provided by the teen-aged combo ofJerry Siegel (script) and Joe Shuster (art). We shall come back to this pair later on.

The pulps had found formidable competition for the reader’s dime. The more astute pulp publishers were quick to bring out comic books, often cartoon versions of their prose magazines; thus Fiction House simultaneously brought out, in 1939, the science-fiction pulp Planet Stories and its comic book sister, Planet Comics.

As we saw in the last chapter, the pulps had abundantly featured masked super-heroes. It is therefore logical that pulp and comic book publisher Centaur Publications should debut, in 1936’s Funny Picture Stories, the first original comic book superhero: The Clock, the secret identity of society swell Brian O’Brien.
 

 
But far from this publishing sideshow, 1933 is a year chiefly remembered for a dark and world-changing occurrence on the other side of the Atlantic: on January 30, President Paul Von Hindenburg appointed the  leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Adolph Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany.

The Nazis were now in power.

Hoch der Uebermensch!

In the decades since Nietzsche had formulated the concept and the wordUebermensch (generally translated into English as “superman” ), the notion had been warped and twisted into strange shapes indeed.

For Nietzsche, the superman was a spiritual goal for every human being, a new type unhindered by  religion’s focus on the world to come — rather, revelling in the material world, placing body above soul, and dedicated to discovering new values by which to live.

But what the culture at large retained was the word: superman. It became what we would now call a meme. And it came to be attached to the strongest, most world-changing idea of the late 19th century: evolution.

The Darwinian revolution — postulating the emergence and survival of species by mutation and selection — was often misunderstood, and its revelations misapplied. The idea of evolution ( a term Darwin himself was uncomfortable with, preferring “descent through modification”) seemed to imply that humanity could be transforming itself into a superior species — or at least some “races” of humanity could.

Pseudo-scientific racism was spawned in the latter half of the 19th century, from the Frenchman de Gobineau‘s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races(1855) through Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton< and his invention of the concept (and word) eugenics.
 

Illustration for the 2nd Congress of Eugenics (1921). Click image to enlarge.

 
Eugenics is an ideology that calls for the preservation or improvement of human genetic stock by encouraging “superior” individuals, and discouraging “inferior” ones, to breed. From the vantage point of the 21st century, after a hundred years of horror and suffering inflicted by such ‘scientific’ racism, it is hard to wrap our heads around the idea that this was once considered a humane and socially progressive idea; yet champions of eugenics included such forward-thinking persons as H.G.Wells, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw andSydney Webb.

And the first country to forcibly apply eugenics by law? The United States of America, where from 1907 to 1963 64000 forced sterilisations of “imbeciles”, “hereditary criminals” and other “degenerates” were carried out — 20,000 in California alone. (America was also the land where the term “master race” was coined, to justify Southern slavery.)

It remained for certain ideologues to push the folly of eugenics even further, to advocate the extermination of  ‘sub-human’ peoples — Untermenschen — such as the Jews and Gypsies, while seeking to breed a new race of masters– of Uebermenschen — of supermen.

These were the murderous Nazis, who had seized absolute power in Germany.

And their goal of extermination was hideously implemented in the Holocaust.

Their breeding program– the Lebensborn project — aimed at refining a supreme Nordic race. As SS leader Heinrich Himmler detailed it in 1936:

The organization “Lebensborn e.V.” serves the SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified children. The organisation “Lebensborn e.V.” is under my personal direction, is part of the race and settlement central bureau of the SS, and has the following obligations:

1. Support racially, biologically, and hereditarily valuable families with many children.

2. Place and care for racially and biologically and hereditarily valuable pregnant women, who, after thorough examination of their and the progenitor’s families by the race and settlement central bureau of the SS, can be expected to produce equally valuable children.

3. Care for the children.

4. Care for the children’s mothers.

–objectives that expanded to the kidnapping of  ‘racially desirable’ children in such conquered lands as Norway, Denmark and Poland, to be Germanised and raised as the vanguard of a new race of superior beings.
 

German propaganda poster, 1942. Note the contrast between the calm, strong “Uebermensch” German soldier and the defeated, multiracial French prisoners in the background.

 
(Before crossing the Atlantic back to the USA, let me repeat that Nietzsche himself was, contrary to popular modern conception, not at all a proponent of the sort of ruthless evolutionary pruning that characterised social Darwinists and eugenics enthusiasts:

There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race. — Friedrich Nietzche, Human, All too Human (1876)

He was also contemptuous of both nationalism and of racism; he proposed to deal with anti-Semitism by shooting anti-Semites in the face.)

Thus the idea of the superman was very much “in the air”– not just in Germany, but worldwide– in the early 1930s.

And this idea would bloom in the imagination of one teen-aged boy from Cleveland, Ohio, who would revolutionise the new comic-book field.

Man of Steel — and of Paper

The science fiction pulps spawned an exceptionally active and intelligent fandom from the start. Many of the greatest writers in SF history started out as teen-aged members of such fan clubs as the Futurians or the Science Fiction League: Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Donald Woolheim, Cyril Kornbluth. Other science fiction fans of the 30’s went on to be editors, some of comic books: Mort Weisinger, Julius Schwartz (both of whom would serve as Superman editors for decades.)

In Cleveland, Ohio, young Jerry Siegel (1914 — 1996) was one of the earliest SF fans: in 1929, at the age of fifteen, he produced what may be the first science-fiction fanzine, Cosmic Stories, on his typewriter– carbon copies were his ‘printing press’. When he was 16, Siegel met teen-aged artist Joe Shuster (1914 — 1992) at high school; they immediately clicked — ‘When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together’.

They put out a mimeographed fanzine together: Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilisation, in the third issue of which — in June 1932– they published the following story, written by Siegel (under the pen name Herbert S. Fine), illustrated by Shuster:
 

click on image to enlarge

 
This Superman was an evil tyrant with psychic powers. Siegel, later in life, recalled how the word and concept of a superman was much discussed at the time, in tandem with the rise of Naziism in Germany. Both Siegel and Shuster were Jews; this evil ur-Superman likely reflected alarm over growing Nazi power.

But the next iteration of Superman was a force for good; in addition to the obvious wish-fulfillment fantasies it represented, I suspect there was also a desire to appropriate and reclaim the idea of the superman from Nazi ideologues.

Certainly, that’s how some Nazis saw it:

Jerry Siegel, an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York, is the inventor of a colorful figure with an impressive appearance, a powerful body, and a red swim suit who enjoys the ability to fly through the ether.

The inventive Israelite named this pleasant fellow with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind “Superman.” He advertised widely Superman’s sense of justice, well-suited for imitation by the American youth.

As you can see, there is nothing the Sadducees won’t do for money!

Jerry looked about the world and saw things happening in the distance, some of which alarmed him. He heard of Germany’s reawakening, of Italy’s revival, in short of a resurgence of the manly virtues of Rome and Greece. “That’s great,” thought Jerry, and decided to import the ideas of manly virtue and spread them among young Americans. Thus was born this “Superman.” […] Woe to the youth of America, who must live in such a poisoned atmosphere and don’t even notice the poison they swallow daily.

(Das Schwarze Korps, April 25, 1940.)

(This was in response to a two-page strip done for Look magazine, in whichSuperman smashes the German army and brings Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations for judgment.)

In 1933, Siegel and Shuster produced sample strips of Superman with a view to newspaper syndication. This version of the character differed visually from the one we know, chiefly in his lack of costume:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
The above illustration shows another strong influence on Superman’s genesis, the pulp hero Doc Savage. Consider the below house advertisement for Doc:

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click on image to enlarge

 
Now began a five-year effort to sell the strip. It was turned down time and again by the syndicates. One editor commented: “The trouble with this, kid, is that it’s too sensational. Nobody would believe it.” Bell Syndicate told them, “We are in the market only for strips likely to have the most extra-ordinary appeal, and we do not feel Superman gets into this category.” United Features said that Superman was “a rather immature piece of work.” 

As Jim Steranko put it, the world’s hottest property was gathering dust on the shelf.

Meanwhile, Siegel and Shuster were making a living in the new market of original-material comic books, telling the adventures of Dr Occult and Slam Bradley. They tried re-tooling the strip for this market; still no success. Shuster, in a fit of despair, burned all his sample pages; Siegel was only able to salvage the cover:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
This act of destruction cleared the way for a new version. There was a new outfit, obviously inspired by newspapers’ The Phantom and by circus performers. As Shuster noted, they had created a  “kind of costume and let’s give him a big S on his chest, and a cape, make him as colorful as we can and as distinctive as we can.” This showbiz instinct was tremendously prescient. The image of Superman is recognised the world over — a marvellous branding success — and has been imitated by countless superhero characters up to the present day.

Joe Shuster at the drawing board, with Jerry Siegel hovering; click on photo to enlarge

 
Finally, the two creators were able to place the strip with Max Gaines at National Allied Publications — the future DC comics. It was looked on almost as filler material — editor Vin Sullivan didn’t have enough strips to round out Action Comics 1. Still, Superman was splashed on the cover — a cover that almost went unused because Gaines felt it was too silly:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

And indeed, even a year later, despite the character’s unheard-of popularity,Superman wasn’t the main cover feature on every issue–as shown in this 1939 house ad:

art by Fred Guardineer

 
The comic came out on April 18, 1938. It was an instant sellout. The age of the superhero comic book was born — and continues today, in a much-etiolated, decadent form, totally dominating popular comic books — to the point where superhero comics are actually termed ‘mainstream’. (Famously, Siegel and Shuster saw the merest trickle of the ocean of money Superman was to generate.)

The Superman of the late ’30s was an angry fellow. He battled crooked politicians and slimy capitalists– once dragging a coal tycoon down into his own unsafe mine. He grabbed generals sending soldiers to their deaths and placed them on the frontline.

This crusading attitude, as much as the dream of unlimited power, explains much of his instant appeal at the time. This was an America still crippled by the Great Depression, with the looming shadow of war causing anxiety. The ‘common man’ was frightened, exhausted, and furious. And here was this mighty champion taking on the bums of the power elite: it was a populist fantasy of revenge — the same one that Gramsci had discerned in the ‘superman’ characters of nineteenth-century popular novels, the same one that colored the dime novel Westerns, with their aggrieved outlaws.

We’ve spent the past seven columns tracing the distant origins of the superhero; a word or two on the immediate influences that fed the imagination of Superman’s creators.

Siegel mentioned, besides the Uebermensch concept, the swashbuckling movie characters of Douglas Fairbanks: among these, as seen in part 6 of this study, was the proto-superhero Zorro. He also cited Tarzan; but the latter’s creator–Edgar Rice Burroughs — surely also contributed the conceit of a visitor to another planet gaining super-strength and the ability to leap vast distances from gravity lower than his homeworld’s, in the John Carter of Mars stories.

The Doc Savage influence is manifest, even in small details: the  name of Superman’s alter-ego Clark Kent echoes Doc’s own, Clark Savage Jr;  Doc had a Fortress of Solitude before Superman did; Doc was billed the Man of Bronze, while Superman was the Man of Steel.

There’s controversy over the influence of a 1930 novel by Philip Wylie(1902–1971), Gladiator.
 

 
The hero of Gladiator, Hugo Danner, exhibits powers identical to those ofSuperman‘s in his first appearances: herculean strength, bulletproof skin, the ability to leap great distances. Danner got his power as a result of his scientist father’s attempt to replicate the proportional strength of insects; now read this early presentation of Superman, with a note at the end on his power:

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

 
Wylie, in a 1963 interview with science fiction historian Sam Moscowitz, claimed that Superman was plagiarised from Gladiator, and that he’d threatened to sue Siegel and the publisher in 1940.

Siegel, for his part, denied ever reading Wylie’s book. It would seem plausible, as the novel had only sold some 2000 copies. And that comparison of insect strength in proportion to our own was already pretty old hat in 1938. But there’s a smoking gun: Siegel had reviewed the book in his fanzine Science Fiction…whose next issue featured ‘Reign of the Superman’.

Finally, an unconscious influence may be traced to Siegel’s Jewish heritage. Superman seems like a parody of the Messiah, sent from the heavens to redeem mankind. He is also strongly reminiscent of the legendary Golem of Prague, who with his superhuman strength protected the Jews against their oppressors.

An intriguing theory, but perhaps a far-fetched one.

Next: Inventory and Conclusion

Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 5)

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This is part five of our look at comics, cartoons and language– today focusing on the comic book

Art by Don Newton and Alfredo Alcala

“Jeff and Tom are an item? Isn’t that cradle-robbing?”

“Oh, total Batman and Robin, you know.”

That same online gay and LGBTglossary consulted in part 4 gives the following definitions:

BATMAN AND ROBIN
(n., adj.)

1. Inseparable.
2. A leader and his sidekick.
3. Daddy-Son relationship; an older man with a younger lover.

This last usage chimes with Dr Frederick Wertham’s warnings about the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder.

Dr Wertham, struck speechless by the sheer depravity of comic books

Continue reading →

Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 4)

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And on to comic books, in part four of our series on language 

from the comics and cartoons!

“No, I haven’t finished clearing out the barn! I’m up to my eyeballs in chores– I’m not Superman, you know.”

Art by Joe Shuster

The creators of the Superman comics character didn’t invent the word ‘superman’, but its etymological trail is interesting in itself– again, comics set up a new usage for it.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche (1844– 1900) coined the word Uebermensch to decribe what he thought to be the necessary next step in the evolution of mankind.                                                                                  

He famously defined the Human (Mensch) as a rope between the Ape (Affe) and the Superman (Uebermensch).

Nietzsche himself became a comics character; art by Maximilien Leroy, after a script by Michel Onfray.

The word ‘Uebermensch’ translates literally as ‘above human being’.

Nietzche’s first English- language translator, Alexander Tille, rendered it as ‘Beyond-man’; but in 1909, Thomas Common translated it by taking the Latin root ‘super‘, meaning above or over, and added the Anglo-saxon ‘man‘.

Here is an extract from an English version of Nietzche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra):

And Zarathustra spake thus unto the

people:

Behold, I teach you the Superman!

The Superman is the meaning of the earth.

Let your will say:

The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!

Once,blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers.

To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Behold, I teach you the Superman: He is that sea.
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue?
Where is the madness against which you should be inoculated?
Behold, I teach you the Superman:
He is this lightning, he is this madness!

Whew.

Next time, Friedrich, stick to the decaff.

“Sieh –Da! Dort oben im Himmel!” ” Es ist ein Vogel.” “Es ist ein Flugzeug!”
Nein– es ist UEBERMENSCH !!!

The idea was taken up by much of the intelligentsia of the late 19th century,and mixed with the ideas of Darwinism and Spencerism.

The ‘superman’ translation was popularised by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in his play, ‘Man and Superman‘, which actually predates Common’s usage by several years.

By the 1930s, a far more sinister twist on the superman concept accompanied the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany.

As part of their racist agenda, they talked about breeding a ‘master race’ of supermen.

To the Ubermensch they now contrasted the Untermensch, or sub-human, to be enslaved or destroyed.

A young Ohio science-fiction fan, Jerry Siegel (1914–1996), became fascinated by the idea of the superman, then much-discussed.

In 1933, in the pages of his mimeographed fanzine ‘Science Fiction‘, he published the short story ‘The Reign of the Superman‘ with illustrations by his friend Joe Shuster (1914– 1992):

In this tale, the Superman is a force for evil; as a Jew, Siegel understood the implications of Nazi philosophy.

(The Nazis were well aware of the Superman comic, and they viewed it with emotions varying from amused contempt– the magazine of the S.S.,Signal, published a nasty but witty takedown of the strip– to rage, apparently Goering’s reaction.)

Siegel and Shuster reworked the concept into a comic-strip; note, in this early version, that they retain the definite article: The Superman.

It was finally published as a comic book in 1938– and the rest is history.

Nowadays, we use the term ‘superman’ generally in an ironic sense.

In addition, the popularity of the Superman character has given rise to the use of ‘super‘ as an intensifier. Shops offer us ‘super savings‘, for example; since 1944, a superpower is a state with overwhelming military or economic superiority over other countries; where Hollywood once had mere stars, it now has superstars.

(Contrast this with the traditional use of the ‘super’ prefix keeping its sense of ‘above’ or ‘over’, as in supervise, supersede, superfluous, superannuated, etc.)

In Britain, “Super!‘ became an exclamation of admiration on the order of “Great!” or “Terrific!”

We’ve come a long way from Nietzche! And, in fact, when the latter’s work is discussed by scholars today in English, the untranslated term Ubermensch is used.

In the 1950s, a new translation by Walter Kaufman introduced the term ‘overman’;  Kaufman fumed bitterly at how ‘superman’ had been co-opted by Pop culture. Wie schade!

“Perhaps they calculated that winning health care would strengthen them for climate change, like Popeye after a helping of spinach. But the political effect, at least in its immediate manifestations, was more like kryptonite.” — Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker, Feb 7  2011.

Of course, Superman has a dread weakness: the mineral kryptonite is deadly to him.

(Green kryptonite, that is; as every scholar knows, there are five colors of kryptonite, each with different properties. I publish the following guide as a public service for today’s woefully ignorant youth:)

(Interestingly, kryptonite originated not in the comic, but on the popular Superman radio show.)

That same radio show also gave birth to expressions such as ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ and ‘Up, up and away!‘)

Kryptonite’s powers are so famously dangerous to the Man of Steel that the word has passed into common speech to indicate something strongly repellent.

Art by Wayne Boring and Charles Paris

The Kryptonite line of bicycle locks is supposed to deter thieves, for example:

” John’s a fairly good student, but his sister Anne is the real brainiac of the family–chess club, computer club, honors roll…”

Art by Curt Swan and Stan Kaye

One of Superman’s deadliest foes is the evil android Brainiac, a super-genius, first appearing in 1958.

Brainiac is also high-school slang for an exceptionally intelligent student.

Did the slang term come from the comic book? The jury’s out on this one.

Brainiac was also the name of a kit computer for students, introduced in 1956; the name obviously derives from early computers such as Univac.

Now, in the panel below, note the strange caption at the bottom.

Art by Curt Swan and George Klein

‘Brainiac is also a trademark registered by Berkely Enterprises, Inc, manufacturers of the famous “Brainiac Computer Kit.” See Metropolis Mailbag, in this issue, for details.– Editor’

What happened? Berkely Enterprises, the manufacturer of the Brainiac kit, made some nasty legal overtures to DC Comics over trademark infringement.

The publisher managed to soothe the irate computer-maker with a nice dollop of free publicity.

So — did the ‘brainiac‘ appellation come from the computer or from the comic?

I’ll bet on the latter (and so will the dictionaries)… but who knows for certain?

(For the full story, go to Brian Cronin’s thorough reporting here, my source for this usage.)

“It’s some kind of bizarro flu bug– my doctor can’t make head nor tail of it”

The use of bizarro as an adjective dates to the early 1970s, though the comic-book Bizarro and his Bizarro World came about in the 1950s in the pages of Superman; the Bizarros had their own series in Adventure Comics.

Art by John Forte

On Bizarro World, everything is backwards, according to the Bizarro creed:

Did the slang use come from the comic, or is it just an extension of the word “bizarre” — as ‘weirdo’ is from ‘weird’?

Probably the latter– although the Bizarros became prominent when championed by their fan Jerry Seinfeld on his hit T.V. show, Seinfeld, in the ’90s:

Elaine: “He’s reliable. He’s considerate. He’s like your exact opposite.”

Jerry: “So he’s Bizarro Jerry.

Elaine: “Bizarro Jerry?”

Jerry: “Yeah, like Bizarro Superman, Superman’s exact opposite, who lives in the backwards Bizarro world. Up is down, down is up, he says hello when he leaves, goodbye when he arrives.”

Elaine: “Shouldn’t he say badbye? Isn’t that the opposite of goodbye?”

Jerry: “No, it’s still goodbye.”

— from the Seinfeld episode, ‘Bizarro Jerry”

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“I love the microwave oven. You press a button, and shazam! Instant cooked dinner.”

Superman’s big rival was Captain Marvel, ‘the World’s Mightiest Mortal’ — who actually outsold the Man of  Steel in the 1940s; this irked National (DC), Superman’s publisher, who sued its upstart rival out of existence.

Captain Marvel’s alter-ego, Billy Batson, transformed into the superstrong ‘Big Red Cheese’ by shouting a magic acronym formed from the names of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury:  SHAZAM!

Superman figure by Murphy Anderson; Billy 

Batson and Captain Marvel by C.C.Beck

 

 

(The above cover shows that rivals can kiss and  make up; in 1972 DC leased Captain Marvel from its owner, Fawcett Publications.)

At any rate, ‘Shazam!‘ became a magic formula, akin to ‘abracadabra’, hinting at an instant transformation.  The  word got a big boost in the 1960s as the favorite exclamation of T.V.’s Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C,  acted by Jim Nabors, and in the 1970s from the Shazam! kid’s television  show.

“Nine o’clock already? Holy Moley! My wife’s gonna kill me!”

Captain Marvel’s own favorite exclamation was ‘Holy Moley!‘ I was surprised to find that this now-common idiom, which I thought predated the comic, apparently originated with it.

Cover by C.C.Beck

It’s possible the editors at Fawcett didn’t want to use the common ‘Holy Cow!’,’ Holy Mackerel!’ or ‘Holy Smokes!’, aware of their blasphemous connotations (the first two insulting the Virgin Mary, the third insulting the Holy Ghost), and thus elected to invent their own meaningless but euphonic utterance.

“If I were you, I’d stay as far away from the police as possible. What do you think they’d say when they saw that outfit, Mary Marvel?” — John Kennedy

Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Captain Marvel had a little sister:

Art by Jack Binder Studio

To understand the quote from the Toole novel, consider the scene: the hero, Ignatius O’Reilly, has been forced into a job selling hot dogs, and has to wear a ridiculously camp pirate costume. The speaker of the quote is a Gay man taunting him about his outfit. But why ‘Mary Marvel’?

I go online to a dictionary of Gay and LGBT slang, and find this on the use of ‘Mary’:

1. An effeminate homosexual male, as used by other homosexuals to affectionately

“nickname” him. The term is very widely used, sometimes mockingly (indeed,

perhaps, “self-mockingly”). It is a greeting “Mary! How are you, dear?”

In its adj. form, “Is she ever mary,” it states that the male

homosexual is very feminine. It is also the one word that “slips out” when a

homosexual is vexed with himself or what he is trying to do; instead of,

perhaps, “O damn…!” it’s “Mary…!”.

2. A male homosexual who takes the passive, feminine role.

3. A lesbian.

4. A woman – no negative connotations.

5. (gayle slang) Obvious homosexual man.

6. A term of endearment or greeting: “Hi Mary!”. Also, a standard camp

name used by gay men to refer to each other.

It seems to me that “ Mary Marvel” is a variant on simple “Mary”, and that definition number 1 applies here.

A Gay friend informs me that the usage is now obsolete, but the same doesn’t apply to a certain Dynamic Duo’s place in Gay terminology… as we shall see in part 5 — where we also encounter the Lone Ranger, Vladimir Putin, Baby Huey, Dr Wertham, Alfred E. Neuman, Tubby, Wikileaks, and Zippy the Funny Pinhead .

Be there– or be square!

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This is part four of a seven part series; click here for part 1, part 2 and  part 3, dealing with American newspaper comic strips; part 5 , like this part, looks at comic books; while  part 6 concerns gag panels and editorial cartoons; part 7 covers British cartoons; and there’s an index.

I would like to have a part 8, consisting of French, Italian, and other European colloquial languages enriched by their cartoons.

If you have any suggestions for cartoon-derived idioms along the above lines, please mention them in comments– or e-mail me at the yahoo dot com address alexbuchet

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An incredibly massive resource for research on comic books is The Grand Comicbook Database. Lots of cover eye candy in addition to information on over 200 000 comic books.
Brian Cronin’s charming column, Comic Book Urban Legends, features thousands of offbeat facts; much of it is superhero trivia, but he also speaks of strips and panel cartoons. Many thanks for his info on the Brainiac affair.
The online gay and LGBTglossary is my source for the Mary Marvel material. A window into a robust and expressive jargon.