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Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 6): The Fabulous Junkshop

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In our last chapter, we focused on the Western, particularly as presented in the cheap, pamphlet-formatted magazines known as dime novels.  Of course, westerns weren’t the dime novel’s sole adventure genre: tales of pirates, spies, and detectives abounded; the most durable dime novel hero of all was probably Nick Carter, Detective– his adventures ran, in various media, from 1886 to the 1990’s.
 

 
Before leaving the Dime western, however, I wish to dwell on one of its heroes who was a precursor of the modern, cross-media, branded intellectual property character: Buffalo Bill.

William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846–1917)  was an authentic frontiersman, whose adventures were written up by Ned Buntline (1813–1886), the writer often called “the man who invented the West” , in  the 1869 serial Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men for the New York Weekly. The tale was enough of a success to inspire a hit theatrical adaptation in 1872.

Cody was much taken by the play, and agreed to star in person in another Buntline-inked production, The Scouts of the Plains; or, Red Deviltry as it is, co-starring Texas Jack and Wild Bill Hickock. After a very profitable ten-year tour, Cody struck out on his own in 1883 by organising his own extravaganza, part drama, part circus, part rodeo, all Western, all sensational: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

The show was a colossal hit such as the world had never seen. It toured not only the U.S.A., but also Europe, selling over two million tickets in its first London run. Buffalo Bill was, probably, the first true international celebrity entertainer.
 

 
He was also what we’d call a brand. Enormous sums were made from merchandising Bill and his associates’ images; toys, films, crockery bore his stamp; he is thus the forerunner to such other “hero-brands” as Tarzan, Batman, or the Star Wars crew.
 

A Buffalo Bill toy set from 1903. Bill certainly understood merchandising…

 
Of course, Buffalo Bill fiction continued to pour onto the newsstands — it’s estimated that, without even counting unauthorized pirate books, some 557 novels chronicled his supposed adventures. Of these, 121 were written by Prentiss Ingraham (1843–1904) — who also happened to be the press agent for the Wild West Show.
 

 
Long before the phrase was coined, Ingraham perfectly understood the concept of “media synergy.” Thus, just before the show was due to open at the Chicago World’s fair in 1892, he wrote and had released nine new Buffalo Bill novels. Six of these actually dealt with the show itself — publicity and product placement.

Ingraham also understood the value of “spin-off” product: he promoted the fictional adventures of Wild West co-stars Buck Taylor, Nate Salsbury, and Annie Oakley.

He would have been perfectly at home in today’s superhero business ecology.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show reminds us that, though this series of articles has concentrated on the printed word, there were of course many other vectors of popular culture, such as songs, circuses, and the theater. In nineteenth century America, the latter was decidedly democratic in spirit; and the masses clutched to them as their own the plays of William Shakespeare. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted:

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

Such was the popular mania for the Bard that in 1849, a riot in New York over competing productions of Macbeth left 25 dead.

I don’t think it too far-fetched to speculate that early American Shakespeare productions, as mediated by melodrama, are another distant root of the superhero. Consider the many conventions the superhero tale shares with Elizabethan theater: lively heroes and villains, secret identities, disguises that are always effective, fight scenes complete with colorful speeches, and men in tights!

( I was  struck by this theory while watching the first X-Men film, with its glorious use of two of Britain’s greatest Shakespearian actors– Patrick Stewart as Professor X, and Ian McKellan as the arch-villain Magneto.)

The dime novel went into decline at the turn of the last century, for various reasons.

Despite its name, the dime novel generally cost a nickel (5 cents) rather than a dime (10 cents).  Even in 1900 dollars, that didn’t leave much of a profit margin. Furthermore, by that date the dime novels were almost entirely pitched at children and adolescents, a demographic that had little in the way of spending power: thus, this was a medium unattractive to advertisers. (The same problem would bedevil comic books, especially after the mid-1950s, when the Comics Code strictly regulated advertising.)

There were also fresh rivals for the young person’s pennies; most notably the new mass medium of film. Your leisure nickel could now buy you all the excitement of the movies; why spend it on musty, hacked-out pamphlets?

Meanwhile, a writer turned book packager, Edward Stratmeyer (1862-1930), launched series after series of inexpensive books targeting young people: theRover Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys. These were ghost-written by multiple authors and published under house names, such as Victor Appleton. Their success was phenomenal — in a 1922 study, it was estimated that the Stratmeyer Syndicate published the majority of children’s books sold.
 

The books continue to sell well to this day.

(These wholesome adventures attracted what would strike us as bizarrely extreme hostility from educators. The New York Public Library’s chief children’s librarian, Anne Caroll Moore, in 1906 boasted of purging them from the system she oversaw.)

Stratmeyer’s innovations– concentrating on series, farming out manuscripts to freelance writers — would become standard procedure for comic books.

The Coming of the Pulps

The successor to the dime novel was the pulp magazine.

Publisher Frank Munsey (1896 — 1925) saw the writing on the wall. He decided to convert his dime novel line to a new format, thicker and more expensive, aimed at an adult audience that still craved escapist adventure. Because they were printed on the cheapest, roughest paper available– so-called ‘pulp,’ these magazines came to be called pulps.

His Munsey’s (from 1889), Argosy (from 1888) and All-Story (from 1905) magazines were immediate hits. They were anthologies featuring adventure tales set the world over– in the far west, Africa, the Seven Seas, and even on other planets.

Among the most popular — and lasting — writers Munsey’s pulps discovered was Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 — 1950), whose extra-planetary adventure romance Under the Moons of Mars was serialised by All-Story in 1912.
 

It was the first of the popular John Carter of Mars tales, featuring an American soldier mystically transported to the Red Planet, where he battles an array of fierce aliens. The lower gravity of Mars gives his Earth muscles super-strength — a detail later adopted by the creators of Superman for their hero.
 

 
Burroughs later that same year of 1912 introduced arguably the most famous adventure hero in pop history, Tarzan of the Apes, again in All-Story (see image at top of this column.)

All-Story caught lightning in a bottle once more in 1919, when it published ‘The Curse of Capistrano’ by Johnston McCulley (1883-1958), the first adventure of Zorro.
 

 
Zorro is worth dwelling on for several reasons.

In Spanish colonial California, young aristocrat Don Diego de la Vega appears to be a silly young fop; secretly, however, he roams the countryside as the dashing masked swordsman known as Zorro (‘the Fox’), fighting injustice and oppression with flashing blades and sharp wits.

This iteration of the secret hero (probably based on the Scarlet Pimpernel), i.e. a seemingly harmless playboy type hiding a brilliant fighter for justice, was to be repeated many times in super-hero lit; in the pulps (the Shadow, the Phantom Detective, McCulley’s own the Crimson Clown) and in the comics (Batman, the Clock, Mr Scarlet.)
 

 
And in 1920, McCulley’s novel was filmed starring the two biggest movie stars in America, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, as The Mark of Zorro.
 

 
This was another sign that the superhero spanned various media long before he appeared in comic books — magazines, books, films, radio, comic strips.

In the three decades from 1920, the pulps proliferated– and specialised. Magazines were devoted to every pop genre and sub-genre under the sun: the reader browsed a fabulous junkshop of thrills and chills.

Crime: Black Mask, Dime Detective. 
Horror: Weird Tales, Horror Stories. 
Science fiction: Marvel Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding, Planet Stories. 
Aviation: Flying Aces, G-8 and his Battle Aces. 
Westerns: All-Western Magazine, Blue Ribbon Western. 
Romance: Ardent Love, Love Story Magazine.

There were even strange genre hybrids. Crime + soft porn = Spicy Detective Stories. Western + romance = Ranch Romance.

And there were the ‘character pulps’.

These were magazines dedicated to a single character, and many of these were superheroes.

Harvesters of the Bitter Fruit

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

The Shadow was introduced in 1929 in a one-off story. Street & Smith, its publisher, revived the character in 1930 for its radio show, Detective Story Hour, and followed this the next year with a dedicated magazine. The latter would continue until 1949, featuring 325 tales ascribed to house pseudonym “Maxwell Grant” — most of the novels were in fact written by Walter Gibson (1897-1985).

Playboy Lamont Cranston is the mysterious scourge of the underworld, theShadow. With blazing pistols and mysterious powers (the ability to ‘cloud men’s minds’), he ruthlessly opposes gangsters and such adversaries as Shiwan Khan and the Prince of Evil– teaching them the truth of his motto:

The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay… the Shadow knows!
 

Poster for the Shadow serial. Serial films often featured superheroes, both from the pulps and the comics.

It is especially as a radio show that the Shadow achieved success (Orson Welles was one of the main interpreters of the title role.)  Radio even spawned its own original superhero: The Green Hornet.

A more savage rival to the shadow was the Spider (fl.1933-1944).
 

 
The Spider — principally written by Norvell Page (1904–1961) under the pen name ‘Grant Stockbridge’ — was another idle playboy-turned-vigilante, but whose bloodlust seemed unslakeable. As historian Jim Steranko put it, “His idea of mercy was a bullet between the eyes instead of in the stomach”. His descendants in the superhero line are the ‘grim and gritty’ killers that flourished in the 198?s and ’90s, such as the Punisher, Grifter, or Vigilante. Like them, he was hated and hunted by police and criminals alike.

Another in the Shadow/Spider mold, but more genteel, was Richard Curtis Van Loan, a.k.a the Phantom Detective (fl.1933–1953).
 

 
This dapper sleuth, though no slouch when violence threatened, was more of a true cerebral detective than his pulp colleagues, and he worked closely with the police: a new twist for the superhero, who had traditionally been an outsider. As the illustration above shows, the Phantom is content with a wee domino mask for a disguise, which fools everyone; a convention still current in superhero comics.

The Avenger, The Whisperer,  Captain Zero, The Black Hood, The Cobra, Moon Man…the list of pulp superheroes stretches on. We might linger on one, the Black Bat– the illustration below shows why:
 

 
It would appear that this was the inspiration (to use a polite word) for the comic-book superhero Batman…but the latter first appeared in May 1939, while the Black Bat premiered in July of that year. A case of coincidence that provoked a testy exchange of lawyers’ letters and a live-and-let-live arrangement. (Note, however, that Batman later adopted the Black Bat‘s fin-lined gauntlets in his costume.)

But next to the Shadow, the king of pulp superheroes was Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze.
 

 
However, we’ll leave discussion of Doc for the next installment of this series; note however, the word coined by Street and Smith (publisher of The Shadowand  Doc Savage) to describe this sort of character:

super-hero, the first time this appellation appears.

Blinded with Science

Some of the best (and occasionally worst) of the pulps were the science-fiction magazines. (Indeed, one of the last survivors of the pulp age — much transformed in format — is the SF digest Analog, the renamed Astounding Science Fiction.)

And the type of science-fiction that permeates superhero comics isn’t the cerebral, literate fare of Olaf Stapledon or of J.G.Ballard– no, it’s the extravagant ‘space opera’ of E.E.’Doc’ Smith (1890–1965) and his fellow writers at Amazing Stories.
 

 
Smith’s Lensman series (1937) begins with two galaxies colliding, and builds from there. Exploding planets! Space Pirates! Intergalactic empires at war! And policing it all is the corps of the Lensmen, supermen armed with the Lens, an invincible energy weapon.

(The Lensmen would inspire the space-faring superhero group the Green Lantern Corps in DC’s Green Lantern comics, and the Lanterns’ power rings obviously derive from the Lens.)

Another space opera with superheroic overtones was penned by Jack Williamson (1908–2006), The Legion of Space (1934)– a possible inspiration for DC comics’ Legion of Superheroes.
 

Space Legionaires facing a bit of a sticky wicket

 
This is plausible, because the main early writer of the Legion of Superheroes wasEdmond Hamilton, also the author of the Williamson-influenced Captain Future pulp series; Captain Future was created by Mort Weisinger, the editor of the Superboy comic in which the Legion of Superheroes first appeared.
 

 ;
As this shows, the links between comics and the pulps were close; next installment will illustrate just how close.

Next: Reign of the Superman

 

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

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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

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).

Next: Into the 20th Century– pulps, funnies and radio

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For a thorough survey of the dime novel’s western incarnation, I recommend The Dime Novel Western, by Daryl Jones (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1978)
Stanford University’s Dime Novel and Penny Dreadful online collection is well worth a visit: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/dp/pennies/home.html

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 4): Elementary, my dear Morlock

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Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls

 

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world”– Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four

 

Enter the Detective

Science-fiction was not the only popular genre to soar into prominence in the 19th century. Crime fiction also evolved into a major purveyor of thrills; and, like science-fiction, would be an important source of tropes for the superhero.

Tales of crime had, of course, been told for many centuries before; however, behind a mask of conventional pieties, the reader’s sympathies tended to be guided towards the criminal. This is understandable in that the social structure was widely perceived as oppressive and unjust; the repression of crime was a corrupt and ineffective process accompanied by excessive harshness and cruelty– in 1800 England, one could be hanged for the theft of a handkerchief.

But the establishment of effective police forces, along with the evolution of penal and social reforms, gradually shifted sympathy to the crimefighter. In France, the 1828 memoirs of Vidocq (1775-1857) ,the first true-life detective to set pen to paper, were the inspiration for the whole fictional sub-genre of the police procedural, as later first expressed in the novels of Emile Gaboriau(1832–1873) starring Inspector LeCoq.

>Vidocq

Vidocq– criminal turned policeman

 
The policeman as hero, however, was not a universal taste. A new figure arose, like nothing existing in real life: the amateur detective.

The first of these was born from the pen of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), in his 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Therein was introduced the Chevalier Charles Auguste Dupin, a reclusive aristocrat who seems to solve crimes purely for the pleasure of puzzle-solving. This was the template for the amateur sleuth, one who upheld the law without being of the law; thus, the reader was able to eat his anti-authoritarian cake and have it.

The superhero replicates this delicious ambiguity: an outsider fighting injustice with little help, or even outright hostility, from the official forces of law and order, who would like nothing better than to unmask and lock up Zorro orSpider-Man.

Of course, the most renowned detective of all was the immortal creation of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 –1930):  Sherlock Holmes. Here we meet the superman as ultimate rationalist, before whose mind no mystery could stand; also a master of disguise, a formidable pugilist, a drug addict and crack violinist…the tradition of the eccentric hero has one of its most beguiling incarnations in him.

Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes; illustration by Sydney Paget

 

For our purposes, we can note some aspects of the Holmes stories that are (in however distorted a manner) now commonplace in the superhero tale.

The mantle of ‘World’s Greatest Detective’ is often assumed by the masked crimefighter, notably Batman.

With Holmes’ companion (and narrator of his adventures) Doctor Watson, we have a codification of the sidekick– a useful stand-in for the reader, and recipient of much expository dialogue.

Illustrator Sydney Paget introduced the deerstalker cap, curved meerschaum pipe, and Inverness cape that became iconic attributes of the hero, after they were taken up in theatre and cinema adaptations: a hero would have a costume.

In the short story The Final Problem, Doyle killed off his hero; in The Empty House, he resurrected him. Longtime readers of superhero comics will recognise a depressing tradition.

And, lastly, in The Final Problem Doyle introduces another superman, Holmes’ evil equal, the ‘Player on the Other Side’: Professor Moriarty. Here is how Holmes describes him:

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organised. –from The Adventure of the Final Problem

(Note the invocation of Napoleon, whom we’ve pegged as the prototype of the modern superman in part 1 of this series of articles.)

Moriarty is the arch-enemy. Prior to this, there was room for only one superman per story; the adversaries of such as Monte Cristo, Nemo or Roburwere rather blandly good or evil representatives of banal humanity. But here is the prototype for the superhero’s dedicated supervillain, as the Joker is to Batman or Lex Luthor to Superman or Dr Doom to the Fantastic Four.

Holmes and Moriarty! Pity they killed each other at the Reichenbach Falls, as illustrated below by Sydney Paget:

Crime fiction soon diversified into various sub-genres, often along class lines: the middle classes preferring “cosy” tales of detection, the working classes opting for increasingly sensationalist thrillers. It is from this second type that crime and superhero comics flowed; and the simplistic good guys vs bad guys set-up of the superhero comic also derives from this model.

The century wasn’t all given over to science and reason. Spiritualism spread far and wide, with mediums supposedly communicating with the dead or other preternatural spirits. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882, to “scientifically” investigate ESP, hauntings, and other paranormal phenomena.

In fiction, this gave birth to the figure of the occult detective, investigator of the uncanny. The first is thought to be Sheridan Le Fanu‘s Dr. Martin Hesselius (1872), and the line has continued down to the present day via such classic characters as W.H.Hodgson‘s Carnacki the Ghost Finder, or Algernon Blackwood‘s John Silence. The occult detective is well represented among superheroes, by such as Dr Occult, the Phantom Stranger, John Constantine,Hellboy, Dr Spectrum and Dr Strange.

 

 

One occult detective, Abraham Van Helsing, was the foe of the eponymous villain in Dracula, the classic 1897 horror novel by Bram Stoker (1847–1873). The title vampire has assumed the status of modern myth; a perverse and compelling version of the superman, he has a distant affiliation to such superheroes as Batman and the Spectre. (And, of course, Dracula is one of the great supervillain archetypes; indeed, he has himself fought Superman, Batman and Spider-Man.)
 

Der Uebermensch

“I teach you the superman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to superman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape…. The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman shall be the meaning of the earth…. Man is a rope, tied between beast and superman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

Thus spake the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The concept of the superman was finally articulated, and promptly misinterpreted. It is not our concern to present the superman as Nietzche intended; rather, we note that history has sadly recorded how a twisted reading of Nietzsche, coupled with equally wrongheaded interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution, has led to such horrors as eugenics and Naziism.

This rather disquietingly chimes with the superman incarnations we’ve examined so far– fantasies of power answerable only to itself.

It seems odd that there be a direct link between Nietzche’s superman and the comic-book Superman, but such was the case, as we’ll see in a subsequent chapter.

Beyond the superman

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A Martian tripod, from The War of the Worlds

 
We leave Europe with a look at one of the founding masters of science fiction.

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the 20th century; a socialist, futurist, reformer, historian and social novelist. He is chiefly remembered today for his scientific romances, novels written over an astonishing ten-year burst of creativity: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897),The War of the Worlds (1897), When the Sleeper Wakes (1896), The First Men on the Moon (1901), The Food of the Gods (1904).

from the Classics Illustrated adaptation of ‘The Time Machine’; art by Lou Cameron

 
Wells’ tales contributed important themes and tropes to the bric-a-brac of science fiction and superhero comics: time travel (The Time Machine), invisibility (The Invisible Man), the superhumanly strong visitor from another world (The First Men on the Moon), lab-born mutant monsters (The Island of Doctor Moreau), extraterrestrial invasion (The War of the Worlds), and the all-too-prophetic atom bomb (The World Set Free).

Yet the early Wells is no apologist for the superhuman. Far from it! He was, to the contrary, a strong debunker of supermen.

Consider Griffin, The Invisible Man. A psychopathic genius with an astounding power– yet he is unable to prevail against ordinary shop-clerks and innkeepers, and ends up killed by ditchdiggers. Or Dr Moreau, a monster of cold scientific cruelty, who forces adoration of him as a god upon his beast-man creations, yet is killed by them.
^nbsp;

Art by Jim Steranko

 
The invading Martians in The War of the Worlds are as effortlessly superior to humans as we are to ants:

Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

These tentacled, abhuman monsters are the ultimate product of ‘progressive’ evolution– the true destiny of the superman. They are only halted by natural exposure to Earth germs.

And the Time Traveller finds no ‘men like gods’ (to use a titular Wellsian expression) in the distant future, but rather a human race devolved into the effete and brainless Eloi and the cannibalistic, nocturnal Morlocks:

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last.

The War in the Air (1908) finds the unstoppable German conquest by Zeppelin of America almost accidentally halted in its tracks by a silly fool of a Cockney bicycle repairman, who copied some secret plans of an airplane out of sheer boredom.

In his postwar utopias, Wells would abandon this tone of disillusionment for ponderous exaltation of technocratic futures; but these early scientific romances effectively deflate the very idea of the superman. Then why do I bring him up in this study of superhero prehistory?

Scholars of science fiction are given to dividing SF writers into gosh-wow, technophilic ‘Vernians’ and more thoughtful ‘Wellsians’. If we follow this dichotomy, the 20th century superhero definitely derives from Vernian fiction.

But I believe Wells’ skepticism indicates an important reason superheroes never really caught on in European popular culture, except as imports from the States, burlesques, or parodies, like the French Superdupont:
 

Superdupont meets Supe…ah, Zipperman; script by Jacques Lob, art by Neal Adams

 

…or the British Bananaman:

>

Art by Terry Anderson

 
…or the Italian Super West:
 

art by Mattioli

 

Europeans are skeptical about extraordinary individuals — the ‘tall poppy syndrome’– and supermen certainly fit the description. A superman is most likely to be a villain, like France’s arch-criminal Fantomas, created in 1911 by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain.
 

 

And when Europeans did take the superman idea seriously — as did the Nazis — the results were hideous.

No, the modern superhero could only be born in that most modern of nations — a land where the individual could ambition to reach the very heavens , cheered on by his compatriots: the United States of America.

Next: Go West, Young Man

 

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 3): Verne, Villains, Vril

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“Professor,” the commander replied swiftly, “I’m not what you term a civilized man! I’ve severed all ties with society, for reasons that I alone have the right to appreciate. Therefore I obey none of its regulations, and I insist that you never invoke them in front of me!” — Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

When it’s steam engine time, people steam engine. — Charles Fort

The Engineer as Superman

The nascent genre of science fiction found a hospitable place in the nineteenth century serial novel. Every day seemed to bring a new crop of technological wonders: the telegraph and telephone, photography, steam trains and steamships, electric generation and illumination, anaesthesia, vaccination, the internal combustion engine… The reading public was entranced by these tokens of progress, and was eager to see the new age fictionalised.

One author above all embodied this new scientific sense of wonder: the French novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905). His series Les Voyages Extraordinairescertainly lived up to its title, taking the reader Around the world in Eighty Days,Off on a Comet, From the Earth to the Moon, on a Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne remains as of 2012 the second most-translated fiction author in the world, after Agatha Christie.Verne is of interest to us, in this prehistory of the superhero, for two reasons.

First as the populariser of technological marvels, much imitated; a direct descent can be argued from Verne’s adventure tales, through dime-novel Edisonades and science-fiction pulps, to the first superhero comics. And, indeed, we’ll trace that descent in more detail in subsequent installments.

Second, as one more  writer who helped shape the popular figure of the superman. Captain Nemo is the villain/hero of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). He is the master of the Nautilus, a mighty submarine that defies the earthbound nations of the world and their navies, sinking warships at will:

“On the surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous laws, fight, devour each other, and indulge in all their earthly horrors. But thirty feet below the (sea’s) surface, their power ceases, their influence fades, and their dominion vanishes. Ah, monsieur, to live in the bosom of the sea! …. There I recognize no master! There I am free!”

This anarchist has, in effect, declared war on the entire world, reserving particular hatred for the British Empire. The reason for this is not given in Leagues, but in a subsequent sequel of sorts, The Mysterious Island (1874) we learn that Nemo is the Indian prince Dakkar of Bundelkund, whose family was wiped out by the British during the Great Mutiny. But the earlier book disdains such explicit explanation: Nemo strikes us as a superman sui generis, master of men and challenger of the elements.

 

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Nemo and crew fighting a giant squid

 

(Is there an indirect link between Captain Nemo and the aquatic superhero/villain Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who first appears in a 1939 comic book? Both are princes who rule the seas from under the waves, both wage war against the hated ‘surface men’ and sink their ships at will.  Creator -cartoonist Bill Everett (1917–1973) claimed his inspiration was Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and that he arrived at the name ‘Namor’ by spelling ‘Roman’ backwards. But surely there’s an echo of ‘Nemo’ in ‘Namor’, even if an unconscious one?)

A 1976 version of the squid fight; art by Gil Kane and Ralph Reese

Yet another of Verne’s scientific supermen was Robur, who ruled the air as Nemo ruled the sea, from his propellor-powered airship Albatross in the 1886 Robur the Conqueror.

Robur’s Albatross (left) defeating the balloon Go Ahead in a race; art by Leo Benett

 

Robur had turned decidedly villainous, with dreams of world domination, by the time of the sequel The Master of the World (1904); his successor to the Albatross is the even deadlier Terror, which can navigate the air, the land, or below the sea:

 

The Terror (L’epouvante)

 

This is the trope of the Ultimate Weapon, again familiar to superhero comics, generally in the hand of the villain. It is possible Verne was influenced by a derivative work to transform Robur from aeronautic pioneer to would-be world conqueror. This was Edward Douglas Fawcett‘s Hartmann the Anarchist, or the Doom of the Great City (1893), in which a Robur-like evildoer rains death and destruction down on a helpless London from his airship:

illustration for Hartmann the Anarchist.

With eyes riveted now to the massacre, I saw frantic women trodden down by men; huge clearings made by the shells and instantly filled up; house-fronts crushing horses and vehicles as they fell; fires bursting out on all sides, to devour what they listed, and terrified police struggling wildly and helplessly in the heart of the press.

A chilling premonition of the WWII blitz! It is well to remember that the end of the 19th century viewed anarchists with particular dread, and with good reason, much as we today fear terrorists.

Verne’s influence was enormous, inspiring a sub-genre of popular literature that the science-fiction critic John Clute has dubbed ‘Edisonade’, after  Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), the famed inventor of the phonograph, light bulb, motion picture, microphone, and hundreds of other marvellous devices. (Edison himself occasionally turned up in science fiction; he builds a gynoid robot in L’Eve Future, he battles extra-terrestrials in Edison’s Conquest of Mars.)  Edison is the real-life avatar of the mad scientist’s benevolent equivalent in fiction, whose epigones continue in modern superhero tales:  Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four, for instance.

The Steam Man of the Prairies

 

Typical of the genre is Edward Ellis‘ The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), in which the eponymous automaton (pictured above) drags around a crew of intrepid young adventurers to fight Indians and bandits in the old West. The series was hugely popular, and duly plagiarised. We can observe that the Steam Man’s descendants today number such superheroes as Robotman, Steel, Machine Man, Iron Man, or War Machine.

Let’s take note of other European contributions to 19th century popular culture that have echoed down to the present, contributing to the crowded attic of superhero tropes.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1930), in his 1871 novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race,  presents an ancient civilisation living in vast underground caverns. This “coming race”, the Vril-Ya, has mastered a sort of universal force known as Vril that gives them an array of powers, allowing them to fly, heal any wound or disease, animate mechanisms, or destroy an entire city with a thought. In short, the first literary evocation of super-powers with a pseudo-scientific rationale. In modern superhero comics, Silver Surfer and  Green Lantern are today’s most successful wielders of Vril-like energy.

The Vril-Ya live in an underground  utopia. (Underground races and civilisations are staples of superhero comics: see the Mole Man’s and the Deviants’ realms.) However, the human narrator fears that some day they will burst up onto the Earth’s surface and subjugate humanity:

Only, the more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances,–the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers.

The Vril-Ya, a race of superior post-humans, are also kin to science fiction’s Slans and comic books’ X-men: super mutants, to be feared. This novel, though largely unread today, made a sensational impact at the time; and its influence was  often sinister. Many thought the book was non-fiction. Occult Vril societies sprang up and continue to this day; the book had a decided influence on Nazi ideology. A race of supermen destined to rule the earth!

In 2007, writer Josh Dysart and artist Sal Velluto created the comic Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril, whose eponymous superhero tapped Vril for his fantastic powers to fight the Nazis, themselves bent on acquiring the mystic energy.

art by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond

 

I prefer to dwell on a more wholesome influence: in 1886, John Lawson Johnston named his nourishing beef tea paste Bovril, combining the Latin bos (ox) with Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril. And the writer of these lines can indeed attest to this fine drink’s revivifying powers, particularly on winter days.

 

Early advertisement for Bovril

 

In 1886, the novella Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was published to universal acclaim. This tale of a kindly doctor who changes into an evil, twisted double on imbibing a potion has strongly influenced the modern superhero, with his or her double identities.

Art by Ron Wilson, John Romita, and Ernie Chua

More directly influenced superheroes include the Hulk, the Demon, Ghost Rider, Man-Wolf, the Badger, and  Rose and the Thorn; while supervillains of the type are numerous, such as Eclipso or the Lizard.  Stevenson’s penetrating allegory of humans’ multiple nature thus lives on in the garish jungle of pop culture.

In 1905,  Emmuska Orczy (1865 –1947 ) published The Scarlet Pimpernel;the  novel tells the adventures of Sir Percy Blakeney– a ridiculous fop of a British aristocrat, who leads a double life as the Scarlet Pimpernel, a dashing hero dedicated to rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine in the terror years of revolutionary France.

The Pimpernel was a sensation in print and on stage, and proved equally successful in the movies; so too did Orczy’s numerous sequels.

We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.

The Scarlet Pimpernel has a good claim on being the first full-fledged superhero; we shall return to his influence on such characters as Zorro and Batman.

Next:  Enter the Detective, and the anti-supermen of H.G.Wells

 

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 2): Vampires, Victorians, and Vendettas

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It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass.

—from The Vampyre: A Tale, by John William Polidori

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One summer night in 1816, a group of friends gathered in the Villa Deodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, and entertained themselves by reading ghost stories. They then determined to write each a tale of horror.  Ironically, the two most renowned writers in the party– the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron — never completed their tasks; while the unknownMary Shelley subsequently wrote the justly famous novel Frankenstein: or, the modern Prometheus (discussed in part1).

One other of the group, John William Polidori (1795-1821) produced another classic of horror fiction: The Vampyre: a Tale (1819). It had enormous success and influence, and contributed to another classic literary incarnation of the superman.

The preceding century had already seen something of a craze for vampires; these, however, were generally the crude monsters of folklore. Polidori changed this characterisation at a stroke. His vampire, Lord Ruthven, was not a freakish peasant ghoul but an elegant aristocrat, at home in the loftiest circles. This conception of the vampire quickly caught on, and would reach its apotheosis at the end of the century in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula. The aristocratic figure with a secret, dark identity also finds its descendants in such superheroes as pulp fiction’s The Shadow and comic books’ Batman.

The Penny Dreadful

One very popular variation on the Ruthven figure was James Malcolm Rymer‘s serial Varney the Vampire: or, the Feast of Blood (1845-1847).

Varney was a prime example of the first true mass medium for fiction: the serial novel, which emerged in the 1830?s.

Novels had been serialised before, of course, but mostly in separate, costly volumes, aimed at the growing middle class. But in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, literacy rates among the labouring classes trended ever upwards. According to a bookseller named Lackington, writing in 1790 England:

The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before that period spent their winter evenings in relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins, &cetera, now shorten the winter nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances, &cetera, and on entering their houses you may see ‘Tom Jones’, ‘Roderick Random’ and other entertaining books stuck up in their bacon racks…In short all ranks and degrees now READ.

( Of course,  Lackington is also describing here the gradual eclipse of folk culture by a manufactured popular mass culture.)

The process of advancing literacy  culminated, by the nineteenth century’s end, in universal free public education throughout Europe and America. This created a new mass market for literature, and the latter tended decidedly to the sensational.

In addition, the development of the steam press allowed runs of tens of thousands of copies in record time; paper, which theretofore had been made expensively from rags, now was produced from cheap esparto grass and, later, even cheaper wood pulp.

Varney was an early example of the racy,  excitement-packed publications known as penny dreadfuls or penny bloods. As these names show, they were cheap and they were laden with gore. Often they celebrated the adventures of famed criminals like the highwayman Dick Turpin or the cannibalisticSweeney Todd.

(The public, then even more than now, relished a good villain; the working classes– not unreasonably — viewed the police and magistrates with suspicion and hatred. This instinct is centuries old: think of the ballads celebrating the outlaw Robin Hood.)

By the 1850?s, the penny dreadful was largely aimed at working-class adolescents. Cheap pamphlets featuring daring heroes and villains aimed at an audience of juveniles…does it sound familiar? And indeed, the penny dreadful and its American cousin, the dime novel, were direct ancestors of the superhero comic.

And like the comics, the penny dreadfuls were widely condemned for breeding juvenile delinquency:

The six-pen’orth before me include, “The Skeleton Band,” “Tyburn Dick,”, “The Black Knight of the Road,” “Dick Turpin,” “The Boy Burglar,” and “Starlight Sall.”  If I am asked, is the poison each of these papers contains so cunningly disguised and mixed with harmless-seeming ingredients, that a boy of shrewd intelligence and decent mind might be betrayed by its insidious seductiveness? I reply, no. The only subtlety employed in the precious composition is that which is employed in preserving it from offending the blunt nostrils of the law to such a degree as shall compel its interference.[…]  The daring lengths these open encouragers of boy highwaymen and Tyburn Dicks will occasionally go to serve their villanous ends is amazing. […] Which of us can say that his children are safe from the contamination?

– from James Greenwood’s The Seven Curses of London,1869

Newsvendor.- “Now, my man, what is it?”
Boy. “I vonts a nillustrated newspaper with a
norrid murder and a likeness in it.”

from Punch magazine, 1845

 
Even Greenwood, however, concedes that the dreadfuls were great enablers of literacy (an argument also advanced today by the defenders of the comic book):

     Who says that he is a dunce and won’t learn? Try him now. Buy a few numbers of the “Knight of the Road” and sit down with him, and make him spell out every word of it. Never was boy so anxious after knowledge. He never picked a pocket yet, but such is his present desperate spirit, that if he had the chance of picking the art of reading out of one, just see if he wouldn’t precious soon make himself a scholar?

Let’s consider a penny dreadful hero/villain taken from a British urban legend,Spring Heeled Jack.

The eponymous Jack was supposedly a demonic figure that made incredible leaps, breathed flame, and terrorised the population. He was immediately seized on by the twin pillars of sensational fiction, the melodrama theatre and the penny dreadful.
 

In the ‘dreadful’, Jack Dacre is a young man dispossessed of his rightful inheritance by his villainous cousin. He assumes the identity of Spring Heeled Jack to rob and terrorise the blackguard, and finally to bring him to justice.

A description of his costume:

His dress was most striking.

It consisted of a tight-fitting garment, which covered him from his neck to his feet.

This garment was of a blood-red colour.

One foot was encased in a high-heeled, pointed shoe, while the other was hidden in a peculiar affair, something like a cow’s hoof, in imitation, no doubt, of the “cloven hoof” of Satan.  It was generally supposed that the “springing” mechanism was contained in that hoof.

He wore a very small black cap on his head, in which was fastened one bright crimson feather.

The upper part of his face was covered with black domino.

When not in action the whole was concealed by an enormous black cloak, with one hood, and which literally covered him from head to foot.

He did not always confine himself to this dress though, for sometimes he would place the head of an animal, constructed out of paper and plaster, over his own, and make changes in his attire.

Still, the above was his favourite costume, and our readers may imagine it was a most effective one for Jack’s purpose.

– from Spring Heeled Jack: the Terror of London, The Boy’s Standard Weekly

Hmm… an origin story (complete with revenge and justice motivation.)  Super power– the ability to leap extraordinary distances. A striking costume with mask and cape. A secret identity. A sidekick (a sailor unfortunately named Ned Chump.) Daring escapes, lashings of violence, justice triumphant in the end. All in serialised pamphlets aimed at adolescents.

Sure sounds like a superhero comic, doesn’t it? And Spring-Heeled Jack anticipates, in many ways, Spider-Man. Both costumed adolescents taken for adults, leaping prodigiously from building to building, hounded by the authorities though secretly fighting for justice…

Of course, not all serials were sensational or aimed at juveniles; Charles Dickens’ serials enthralled all ages and all classes, as published in his magazines Household Words and All the Year Round.  And across the Channel, France produced perhaps the greatest adventure serial novelist of all time: Alexandre Dumas.

Monte Cristo: superman

 

Alexandre Dumas

 
In 1800, the French newspaper Le Journal des Débats added  to its main political section  a supplement covering arts and science, and called it a “feuilleton” (“little sheet”).  The innovation was much copied all over Europe, and, of course, survives to this day.

Novelists such as Honoré de Balzac and Georges Sand started serialising their upcoming books in the papers. However, the latter were still expensive and thus catered to middle-class tastes in literature.

This would change in 1836, with the launch of La Presse;  it sold at half-price compared to its rivals, in fact at a loss. The idea was to maximise circulation and make a profit on paid advertising (a business model that served newspapers well until very recent years.)

By necessity the papers in this new paradigm had to cast their nets as wide as possible in quest of readership, including the newly-enfranchised working classes. They found a spectacularly successful way to build reader loyalty: the serialised novel, or “roman feuilleton”.

These drew upon every resource of suspense, sentimentality, and melodrama to keep the reader panting for the next installment; a recipe later adopted by film, radio and television serials, as well as comic strips and comic books.

The first breakout blockbuster was doubtless Eugène Sue‘s Les Mystères de Paris, serialised in 1842 and 1843. This sensationalist novel was read by millions worldwide. Its hero, Prince Rodolphe de Gerolstein, succors the wretched and humbles the mighty; Umberto Eco singles him out as a proto- superman, and as the undoubted inspiration for the hero of a classic that enthralls even today, whether in book or film or theatre play: The Count of Monte Cristo.

Alexandre Dumas (1802 — 1870) was a writer of astounding industry; the author of 136 books, several of which top the thousand-page mark. Yet despite much hackwork, the vigor and élan of his storytelling have preserved his name to the present day; who has not heard of The Three Musketeers or The Man in the Iron Mask?

Dumas was a regular fiction factory, and routinely employed ghosts to help him — the most notable of whom was Auguste Maquet. Together, they produced The Count of Monte Cristo, perhaps Dumas’ most celebrated novel, serialised from 1844 to 1846.

The Count is a sprawling epic hinging on that most primal wellspring of human action: revenge.

Edmond Dantès is a young French  sailor about to take command of his first ship and to marry his fiancée. But a cabal of villainous men forge a letter that seems to prove him a conspirator against the Crown, and he is thrown into a prison cell where he languishes for fourteen years. He escapes by taking the place of his friend and cellmate’s corpse, and is thrown into the sea.

His friend had indicated to him the secret location of a fabulous treasure in a grotto on the Mediterranean island of Monte Cristo.

The island of Monte Cristo

 
After securing this limitless wealth, Dantes finds out that his enemies have all, over the ensuing years, risen to the summits of power and riches. He vows revenge; Edmond Dantès has died, and is reincarnated as the mysterious, supremely wealthy and powerful Count of Monte Cristo.  He makes his way to Paris, and contrives to bring about the ruin, madness, or death of his foes.

Monte Cristo, however, sees himself not as an avenger, but as an implacable agent of divine providence sent to dispense justice among the throngs of humanity above which he has risen. His mastery is complete; nothing can stand in his way; his will is that of the superhuman– of the superman:

“You may, therefore, comprehend, that being of no country, asking no protection from any government, acknowledging no man as my brother, not one of the scruples that arrest the powerful, or the obstacles which paralyze the weak, paralyzes or arrests me. I have only two adversaries — I will not say two conquerors, for with perseverance I subdue even them, — they are time and distance. There is a third, and the most terrible — that is my condition as a mortal being. This alone can stop me in my onward career, before I have attained the goal at which I aim, for all the rest I have reduced to mathematical terms. What men call the chances of fate — namely, ruin, change, circumstances — I have fully anticipated, and if any of these should overtake me, yet it will not overwhelm me. ” –Monte Cristo, chapter 48

Small wonder Antonio Gramsci maintained that  Fascists and other worshippers of the superman took their template, not from Nietzsche, but from Dumas! As quoted in Umberto Eco’s Il superuomo di massa, Gramsci points out that “the serial novel replaces (and at the same time favorises) the imagination of the man of the people, it is a true waking dream[…] long reveries on the idea of revenge, of punishing the guilty for inflicted hurts […]“  And today, the bullied kid identifies with Batman beating up thugs that stand as proxies for his tormentors.

To be fair to Monte Cristo, the superman in question comes to doubt more and more the validity of his exalted state and supposedly divine mission; the turning point comes when he beholds that his vengeful machinations have brought about the death of an innocent. Here is the climax of his final confrontation with his odious enemy Villefort:

“There! Edmond Dantès”, said he, showing the corpse of his wife and the body of his son, “there! Look! Are you well avenged…?”

Monte Cristo paled at this horrible sight; he understood that he had just overstepped the rights of vengeance; he understood that he could no longer say:

“God is for me and with me.”

And indeed,  Monte Cristo ends by forgiving his last foe standing, the banker Danglars,after tormenting him for days. Forgiveness? Supermen should be made of sterner stuff. Nietzsche would have turned away in disgust.
 

art by Alex Blum

 
How does Monte Cristo relate to the modern superhero, as Umberto Eco suggested?

He has a traumatic origin story, from which he emerges transformed into a superior being;  he has a superpower– and a pretty realistic one– limitless wealth ; a master of disguise, he adopts several secret identities; he worksoutside the law to bring about justice to evildoers.

And, most importantly, he is a fantasy projection with which the reader identifies, the imaginary righter of his own perceived wrongs.

Nonetheless, his final remorse and doubts set him apart from the American superman, who seldom if ever feels such wimpish emotions.

Another reason why the superhero never really took off in old, conflicted Europe– which yet had much to contribute to its mythology…

Art by John Buscema and Ernie Chan

 

Next: Supermen of Science — Verne and  Edison
 

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 1): Waltzing with Frankenstein

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Brown_Ford_Maddox-Manfred_on_the_Jungfrau

Manfred on the Jungfrau, by Ford Madox Brown

 
“In any case, one can state that much of the so-called Nietzchean ‘superhumanity’ has as its origin and doctrinal model not Zarathustra but the Count of Monte-Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.”

– Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, III, ‘Letteratura popolare”.

This quote  comes from Umberto Eco‘s introduction to the French translation of his 1978 book of essays, Il superuomo di massa.

As Eco  elaborates:

 I found Gramsci’s idea seductive. That the cult of the superman with nationalist and Fascist roots be born, among other things, of a petty bourgeois frustration complex is well-known. Gramsci has shown clearly how this ideal of the superman could be born, in the nineteenth century, within a literature that saw itself as popular and democratic:

“The serial replaces (and at the same time favorises) the imagination of the man of the people, it is a veritable waking dream (…) long reveries on the idea of vengeance, of punishing the guilty for the ills they have inflicted (…) “

Thus, it was legitimate to wonder about the cult of the right-wing superman but also about the equivocal aspects of the nineteenth century’s humanitarian socialism. [tr:AB]

The French title of Eco’s collection is, aptly, De Superman au surhomme– ‘From Superman to the superman’.

But what of the reverse — how did we go from the superman to Superman?

 

How did we get from here:

…to here?

Art by Joe Shuster

The superhero is one of the strongest — and strangest–  modern pop charactertropes;  I propose we dig into its roots– which I maintain go back to the 18th century’s  massive cultural shift: a revolution in politics, thought, and culture.

The superhero is an ultimate narcissist fantasy of identification; it thrives in a modern world of atomised society, where the basic unit is the individual to a historically unheard-of degree. Thus we’ll start with the centuries that enshrined individualism, the better to give a cultural context to our enquiry.

We’ll also examine why the superhero is so dominantly an American cultural artifact; this will lead us into some dark territory.

First, though, we must distinguish the superhero from his heroic predecessors in myth and legend.

The Classic Hero

The idea of the superman was spawned in the 18th and 19th centuries. This statement may strike the reader as historically false; what of the superhuman heroes of myth and legend,  Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Herakles and Achilles, Roland and Rustam, Cuchulain and Tomoe Gozen?

Heracles Farnese

These heroes were enmeshed in the fabric of myth. They were part of the structure of society, of the “great chain of being” that descended from the divine to the infernal, through the human; many were demi-gods, the legitimacy of their power stemming from godly parentage. Others were avatars of a warrior culture– linked through duty and right to the formal, “ordained” structure of the polity: for example,  the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, or the Argives besieging Troy.

What the classic hero was not was an individual.

Indeed, when the hero asserted his individuality — repudiating or even betraying the obligations that hampered and enmeshed him — the result was tragedy. The Greeks spoke of a person’s hamartia, or fatal flaw: very often, this took the form of hubris, pride or ambition so excessive as to invite divine wrath:

“Seest thou how God with his lightning smites always the bigger animals, and will not suffer them to wax insolent, while those of a lesser bulk chafe him not? How likewise his bolts fall ever on the highest houses and the tallest trees? So plainly does He love to bring down everything that exalts itself.”

– Herodotus,  History

Thus Herakles, after drunkenly massacring his family, is punished by enslavement to his enemy Eurystheus; Achilles in his anger withdraws from the Trojan war, so imperilling his fellow Argives and bringing about the death of his lover Patrocles.

Sir Lancelot betrays his liege, King Arthur, by taking the king’s wife as a lover: the kingdom is subsequently torn apart by civil wars. The mighty warrior Roland is trapped with Charlemagne’s rearguard at Roncevalles by an overwhelming force– but pride stops him from blowing his horn to summon help until it is too late, and his army is killed to the last man.

 

Too late, Charlemagne

To deviate from duty, from his proper place in the scheme of the world, brings about the hero’s downfall and inflicts disaster on  the community.

This is decidedly not the fate of the new  character type– the superman.

The Birth of the Individual and the Coming of the New Hero

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world’s business, how they have shaped themselves in the world’s history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did;–on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs.

(…)  For, as I take it,Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns,and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

Thus Thomas Carlyle (1795 — 1881) in Heroes and Hero Worship (1840). For Carlyle, the sole true root of human progress was that man who could rise above the mass, transcend his time and shake the world into a new form– the Hero.  Examples he cites include Muhammad, Cromwell, Shakespeare, and Napoleon.

Unlike classic heroes, these men were not the servants (if often rebellious ones) of fate: they shaped fate. They stood above it.

The individual as giant was the logical extrapolation of the individual per se, who had in the eighteenth century assumed an importance never before acknowledged:

I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself.





I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work.




These are the opening words of the 1769 Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 — 1778).




Portrait of Rousseau by De la Tour




It was something unheard-of:  the Self as subject, in all its raw nakedness, faults and all.


The rise of the individual found political expression in the Enlightenment, as well.  The notion of his or her personal rights was enshrined in such foundational documents as the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution and the French  ’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’.


Individualism also flourished in the wider culture. The school of sentimentality in literature, as typified by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s The Sorrows of Young Werther or Laurence Sterne‘s A Sentimental Journey, valued the enjoyment of emotion for its own sake– not as a source of empathy or catharsis. In parallel, the psychological novel was born — examining the inner life of the self.


The Italian innovation of the apartment,  intimate, cosy and — above all–  private, began to supplant the old houses and manors where many generations of different families and classes would live together.


Diners were less and less eating à la française,  seated at large banquet tables and sharing from common dishes: in the new restaurants, they could be seated and served alone, at their own separate tables.




Dinner service à la française


The dance craze that was sweeping Europe was the waltz;  in contrast to the group dances such as the pavane or the quadrille theretofore prevalent, couples twirled alone.




Even so seemingly trivial detail as shoe size underwent the individualistic evolution; in prior centuries, shoes were undifferentiated between left and right foot, and came in few standard sizes. Now cobblers were literally tailoring each piece of footwear to the specific foot.


Yes, heady times for the individual! All the headier after the French Revolution sent shock waves rocketing through Europe, ripping up the ancient structure of the world, bringing terror and war in its train.


The old order was  shattered; the new citizen was deprived of “natural” superiors to look up to, the King, the aristocrats and the clergy. This was a vacuum waiting to be filled.


Came the moment, came the man — the Hero as Carlyle later conceived him, who bent the forces of history itself to his will; the true progenitor of the superman– Napoleon Bonaparte.






Napoleon crossing the Alps, by David




The armies of  revolutionary France were marked by a new kind of professionalism: an officer’s commission was no longer secured by genteel birth or outright purchase. Thus men rose in the ranks through merit– and in the case of the artillery lieutenant Bonaparte, he would rise to the throne of the world’s mightiest empire.


Nothing seemed able to stop him; destiny was clay in his hands; nations fell or were born at his word. He elicited worldwide admiration even from his enemies. (To this day, the British, his most tenacious foes, allude to Waterloo as if it were a defeat — ‘He met his Waterloo in the 2008 election’– rather than the greatest victory in British history; and it is a compliment to call a man, say, ‘the Napoleon of finance’.)


Wordsworth, Goethe, Beethoven, Byron– they were excited by this seemingly superhuman figure who was poised to sweep the old corrupt order onto the trash-heap of history.


(Great was their disgust and sense of betrayal when the former revolutionary crowned himself emperor:


          O joyless power that stands by lawless force!

Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate,

Internal darkness and unquiet breath;

And, if old judgments keep their sacred course,

Him from that Height shall Heaven precipitate

By violent and ignominious death.

–Wordsworth,  1809


The moral being: don’t expect too much from supermen, and you’ll not be disappointed.)


It is a cliche of the lazy writer or  cartoonist to depict a lunatic as one persuaded he is Napoleon;  yet there have been hundreds of  such cases documented, from Napoleon’s own time to the present, attesting  his power over the imagination. Napoleon himself was a canny curator of his own image. That famous pose with the hand tucked under his shirt? It was suggested to him by an actor. That hat? He had dozens of them, to be left as souvenirs wherever he travelled.


(He is also the exemplar for world-conquering villains; there is a direct line of descent from Napoleon to Doctor Doom.)


Napoleon formed a template for the superman; and he further smoothed the path for the latter by radically institutionalizing meritocracy, “career open to talents” as embodied in the Grande Ecole  schools of France or in the University of Berlin, institutions of excellence set to turn out the genius leaders of tomorrow.


A new elitism was in the shaping, and the idea of the superman largely sprang from it into the cultural zeitgeist.


Masters of Nature


Welch erbaermlich Grauen Fasst Uebermenschen Dich?


[What vexes you, oh superman?]

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808)


The eighteenth century was also marked by a growing mastery over the physical world. The very idea of progress flourished as never before; for most of history, it was thought that mankind had regressed from a long-vanished golden age. (Mark how the classic heroes all belonged to the past.)  Human beings now, however, were going from strength to strength with no end in sight.


This was the age of the Industrial Revolution.  Steam power gave men the might of Titans;  nature seemed to yield more and more of its secrets to the natural philosophers not yet given the new name of “scientists” ( coined in 1833).


Let us consider the below painting, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, painted in 1768 by Joseph Wright of Darby (1734 – 1797):








click image to enlarge






A cockatoo is trapped in a glass jar from which the air is gradually pumped out, leaving the bird slowly to die, suffocating in the vacuum.


Note the two weeping little girls to the right, distressed by such cruelty; but one of the experimenters is at hand to explain how this suffering is necessary for the progress of science. The other experimenter stares out at us — challenging us, perhaps, to dare contest his will to knowledge.


This painting presages another avatar of the superman: the scientist, wresting control of the secrets of the universe as the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods.


Yes: a modern Prometheus… as an 18-year-old Englishwoman dubbed her fictional challenger of Heaven:


So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

–Victor Frankenstein, in Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley


 




Frankenstein and his monster; illustration by Theodor von Holst


Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851) published her novelFrankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus in 1818.


The title hero usurps God’s privilege by creating life: a monstrous, manlike creature endowed with reason.


Yet, to do so, Frankenstein eschews the occult, magical methods of the Fausts  of previous fiction. His power derives from a mastery of the elements attained by rational study and experiment– from science.  He aims to join that near-Godlike elite of researchers so admiringly described by his teacher Waldman:




They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air that we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its shadows.


– Shelley, op.cit.




No need for bowing to demons to do his bidding. Frankenstein is free of God and Satan alike. (Shelley was, in her youth at least, an atheist.)  He replaces God, in fact; and though the novel shows him punished for his deeds, it is clear that his destruction comes not from a vengeful heaven, but from his own flawed character– Shelley, like her female equivalents in the Darby painting, could see the cruelty in the scientist’s will to power.


Victor Frankenstein points forward to other, future ‘scientific superman’ characters; to Verne’s Captain Nemo and Robur the Conqueror, to Wells’ Griffin (the Invisible Man) and Dr Moreau, to countless Mad Scientists and scientific heroes like Tom Swift, Doc Savage or Captain Future.


(As for his tormented monster spawn, he too has superhero descendants, in the ‘monstrous’ vein: the Heap, the Hulk, Swamp Thing…)


Indeed, many literary historians credit Mary Shelley with creating a new literary genre:  science fiction, of which more anon. She was also writing within the perimeters of another new genre: the Gothic.


Romanticism and the Gothic Backlash


Not everyone welcomed the new industrial age. The rapid changes of the modernising world alarmed and alienated people of all classes. There came to be a yearning for nature, for sublime landscapes and ruins, for an idealised past; to the cold new rationality were preferred the warmth of feelings.


The literary expression of this backlash was the Gothic novel, the first of which is generally agreed to be that of  Horace Walpole (1717–1797), The Castle of Otranto.




Walpole’s neo-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill


 

There followed a flood of spectre-haunted volumes, many of which featured brooding predecessors of the superman: the title character of William Beckford’s The History of the Caliph Vathek,  who dares to invade Hell; Charles Maturin‘s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820),  a damned, dark near-immortal;  Lord Byron‘s Faust-like Manfred, who defies God and Satan alike; and perhaps the most proleptic of all, Byron’s secretary John William Polidori‘s The Vampyre (1819).


The Gothic novel was also the first narrow commercial genre of popular fiction.


The nineteenth century saw the rise of the first true mass media, and the birth of literature for the masses;  Polidori’s book will serve as a useful transition to the next chapter.


Next, in Part 2:  The true birth of the superman.