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

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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.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Strange Windows: The Suck Fairy will get you if you don’t watch out!

			
						

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You come across it while cleaning out your attic: a book, a CD, a VHS cassette.


My God, you think, that was one hell of a novel/song/movie! Nostalgia mixes with anticipation as you prepare to savor it anew.


But what’s this? It seems to have gone rotten! Phaughhh! Retch! Ptooey!


How on earth were you ever taken in those long years ago by this foulness that sucks like an electrolux? Was your taste that abysmal?


Worry not. You are the latest victim of a virulent virtual vampire: the Suck Fairy.


Jo Walton revealed all about the little monster in a blog post on Tor.com. Go read the whole thing (and the many comments that amplify it); this extract gives us the gist of her warning to mankind:


The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.




I, too, have suffered her bite. The superhero comics I loved as a child count some of her sorriest victims.


These old comics I class into four categories.


The first comprises work that still holds up, mellowed like old port.  Examples would include  Ditko and Lee‘s  Spider-Man, Kirby and Lee’s  Fantastic Four and Thor; though I prize them more now for qualities less appreciated by a child, notably humor.


The next category covers those comics that only interest me through nostalgia, or that tickle my camp funny bone, or that still please me for purely formal reasons such as good draftsmanship: 1960s Curt Swan-drawn Superman,  Steranko‘s S.H.I.E.L.D, Gil Kane’s Green Lantern.


A third category consists of work that simply disappoints today, with no strong redeeming features, entertaining enough for a young boy but without interest for the adult me;  say, Sal Buscema-drawn Marvel Team-Up.


And then, the dread fourth category:


The Spawn of the Suck Fairy.




Suck Fairies casting their curses at ComicCon


 


My library recently acquired a copy of Marvel’s Essential Iron Man, part of that publisher’s welcome line of cheap, phone-book sized black-and-white reprints.


I decided to check out the strips I so enjoyed at age eleven.




Cover art by Bruce Timm


Oh, dear God in Heaven. Zut alors.


After reading a few stories, I felt like gouging my eyes out. That fey bitch had infected every single page with suckiness of a cosmic level.




Ahhh, shut the “!@#§!* up. Take the  Holland Tunnel like everyone else, you douche. Art by Don Heck.


 


I was mystified by how sucky this printed turd was.


I mean, I certainly have a high tolerance for mediocre comics. Here was far from the worst comics art I’d ever seen. (The most atrocious story in the collection isn’t drawn by the series’ regular, the oft-derided Don Heck, but by the excellent Steve Ditko.  Actually, Heck’s art was better than I remembered.)


The scripts were probably no more moronic ( with their Cold War Commie-bashing and brainless plots) than other non-sucky comics of the time (the mid-60s).


Well, thank you, Ms Walton, for revealing the culprit:  the Suck Fairy.


How that destructive little vermin has blighted literature — blighted my most precious books!


When I was 12, in 1966, I had just finished reading The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R Tolkien. I lived that book as one can only at that age.


I was jonesing for more, and Ballantine Books (Tolkien’s publisher) was canny enough to offer me the following:




The Worm Ouroboros is an odd duck of a novel.


Written in 1922 by E.R. Eddison (1882–1945), it chronicles the war between Demonland and Witchland on the planet Mercury. Its prose style is a pastiche of Jacobean writing, gorged with archaism that I found near-impenetrable; but I doggedly forged on with frequent recourse to a dictionary, much to the improvement of my vocabulary:


But a great wonder of this chamber, and a marvel to behold, was how the capital of every one of the four-and-twenty pillars was hewn from a single precious stone, carved by the hand of some sculptor of long ago into the living form of a monster: here was a harpy with screaming mouth, so wondrously cut in ochre-tinted jade it was a marvel to hear no scream from her: here in wine-yellow topaz a flying fire-drake: there a cockatrice made of a single ruby: there a star sapphire the colour of moonlight, cut for a cyclops, so that the rays of the star trembled from his single eye: salamanders, mermaids,  chimaeras, wild men o’ the woods, leviathans, all hewn from faultless gems, thrice the bulk of a big man’s body, velvet-dark sapphires, crystolite, beryl, amethyst, and the yellow zircon that is like transparent gold.


The book enthralled me.


Jump forward ten years to 1976. I was 22, doing my military service after three years of university, and I picked the book up again. This time I found it easily readable, but rather slight; an enjoyable fantasy.


Cut to the year 2006. Once again, I plunged into the Worm — and stopped after 50 pages. Her Dread Suckiness had struck again.  The book was now a plodding, cardboard-thin gallimaufry of tushery, Wardour Street pretentiousness and outright plagiarism.


“Yet, lo,” she said, as a sweet and wild music stole on the ear, and the guests turned towards the dais, and the hangings parted, “at last, the triple lordship of Demonland! Strike softly, music: smile, Fates, on this festal day! Joy and safe days shine for this world and Demonland! Turn thy gaze first on him who walks in majesty in the midst, his tunic of olive-green velvet ornamented with devices of hidden meaning in thread of gold and beads of chrysolite. Mark how the buskins, clasping his stalwart calves, glitter with gold and amber. Mark the dusky cloak streamed with gold and lined with blood-red silk: a charmed cloak, made by the sylphs in forgotten days, bringing good hap to the wearer, so he be true of heart and no dastard.


Thou suckest, o purple prose. Fie upon thee, sirrah!


(Ah, well, at least the illustrations remain lovely. Here are the Lords of Demonland:)




Art by Keith Henderson




 


The King of Witchland conjures diabolic forces: art by Keith Henderson




 


To be fair, over the end of the ’60s and the first half of the ’70s, Ballantine Books (thanks to their crackerjack editor Lin Carter) revived many wonderful classics of fantasy in paperback: Hope Mirlees‘ Lud-in-the-Mist,  James Branch Cabell‘s Jurgen, Lord Dunsany‘s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, William Hope Hodgson‘s The House on the Borderland and The Boats of the Glen Carrig… all masterpieces immune to the Suck Fairy’s kiss!


(Touch wood…)


I used to re-read The Lord of the Rings every five years , but haven’t done so for the last two decades; you can guess why I am afraid to.


But the Suck Fairy’s master-stroke was her demolition of one of my most cherished loves:




Like millions of 16-year-olds before and after me,  I read J.D.Salinger‘s novel The Catcher in the Rye and knew– KNEW!– that it was about me, me, ME;  its hero, young Holden Caulfield, was me.


All my adolescent longings and heartache and rage against the goddam phonies of the grown-up world were here. I fell in love with a book.


But the Suck Fairy was lurking, biding its time with demonic patience.


 


J.D.Salinger


I next read Catcher when I was 34.


I was repelled and enraged.


That little preppy brat  Holden– I’d  kick his snotty rich-kid ass all over Manhattan.


What a nasty, arch, supercilious volume of egotistic peacockery– compounding its silver-spoon ugliness with a bathetic display of mawkish sentimentality.


Damn you, Suck Fairy! Leave me alone with my illusions and my bottle.


 


*********************************


 


David L. Ulin, in his reflective essay-book The Lost Art of Reading, is troubled by this phenomenon:


I had lost books by rereading them. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, for instance, which I had loved in college but not so much later, when I began to see it as a young writer’s pastiche, less about life as it really is than a naïf’s projection about how life might be.


He is afraid to reread The Great Gatsby– and is relieved to find it as superb as he’d remembered. (I, too, find Gatsby to be better at each fresh reading.)


He finds a possible explanation in Anne Fadiman’s 2005 book Rereadings:


The former [reading] had more velocity; the latter [rereading] had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicated lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it.


Anne, Anne, Anne… that’s all true, all very well and good…


…but it doesn’t protect your literary treasures against the relentless despoiling of the vile, gloating Suck Fairy.


Is there no hope, then? As we all age, our personal troves of culture age, too.


And the evil Suck Fairy grows mightier.


 




Yet… is she so wicked? Doesn’t she serve an essential function in our intellectual ecology…culling the herds?


Let’s end with the heartening words of Demetrios X, commenting on Ms Walton’s blog:


There is also an extremely rare counterpart to the Suck Fairy, the Anti-Suck Fairy. It’s only happened once or twice, but I have encountered books that I was very disappointed in the first time I read them, and then found I quite liked them on a second reading. That’s not a matter of growing up or being older either. It’s happened to me with books I’ve read as an adult with a gap of only a few years.


Yes,  indeed. The Suck Fairy and the Anti-Suck Fairy are locked in constant struggle, and in the course of a reader’s life may, turn by turn, conquer a book.




Suck and Anti-Suck, in gentler days before their all-out war


 


Like so many children, I was enamoured of L.Frank Baum‘s  Oz books.




An Oz comic strip by its original illustrator, W.W.Denslow


 


But as an adult, I put them behind me, finding in their simple prose little of the cleverness and charm that keeps Alice in Wonderland or the nonsense verse of Edward Lear so beguiling to grown-ups.


But the Anti-Suck Fairy was on the job! Now I delight again in the Oz books, discerning satire and shrewd political commentary behind the fairy-tale façade.


Likewise, the Edgar Rice Burroughs books I devoured as a teenager seemed unreadable in later life; tedious, racist hackwork.




Art by Frank Frazetta


 


But good ol’ Anti-Suck showed me the wit and liveliness that ERB masters  at his best.


I particularly recommend Carson of Venus and Tarzan and the Lion Man. Among other pleasures: the former for its sly attack on eugenicism, the latter for its genial self-parody and savage send-up of Hollywood.


Time to give Catcher in the Rye another go? You bet!


So take heart, my fellow culture vultures, the S.F. is not invincible.


Can you tell me of your own encounters with the Suck and Anti-Suck fairies in the comments below?



					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

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

			
						

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






Art by Don Newton and Alfredo Alcala






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


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


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


BATMAN AND ROBIN

(n., adj.)


1. Inseparable.

2. A leader and his sidekick.

3. Daddy-Son relationship; an older man with a younger lover.


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






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


 Continue reading →

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

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

			
						

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


from the comics and cartoons!




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






Art by Joe Shuster




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


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


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






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




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


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


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


And Zarathustra spake thus unto the


people:


Behold, I teach you the Superman!


The Superman is the meaning of the earth.


 Let your will say:


The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!


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


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


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


Behold, I teach you the Superman: He is that sea.


Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue?


Where is the madness against which you should be inoculated?


Behold, I teach you the Superman:


He is this lightning, he is this madness!




Whew.


Next time, Friedrich, stick to the decaff.






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


Nein– es ist UEBERMENSCH !!!




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


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




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


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


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


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


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




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


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


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




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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


 


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


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




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




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


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


  




Art by Wayne Boring and Charles Paris




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




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






Art by Curt Swan and Stan Kaye




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


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


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


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




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






Art by Curt Swan and George Klein




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


 


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


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


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


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


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


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


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






Art by John Forte




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




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


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


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


Jerry: “So he’s Bizarro Jerry.


Elaine: “Bizarro Jerry?”


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


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


Jerry: “No, it’s still goodbye.” 


— from the Seinfeld episode, ‘Bizarro Jerry”


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


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


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






Superman figure by Murphy Anderson; Billy 


Batson and Captain Marvel by C.C.Beck


 


 






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


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


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


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






Cover by C.C.Beck




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


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


Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces


Captain Marvel had a little sister:






Art by Jack Binder Studio




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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


perhaps, “O damn…!” it’s “Mary…!”.


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


3. A lesbian.


4. A woman – no negative connotations.


5. (gayle slang) Obvious homosexual man.


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


name used by gay men to refer to each other.


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


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


Be there– or be square!


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


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


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


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An incredibly massive resource for research on comic books is The Grand Comicbook Database. Lots of cover eye candy in addition to information on over 200 000 comic books.






Brian Cronin’s charming column, Comic Book Urban Legends, features thousands of offbeat facts; much of it is superhero trivia, but he also speaks of strips and panel cartoons. Many thanks for his info on the Brainiac affair. 






The online gay and LGBTglossary is my source for the Mary Marvel material. A window into a robust and expressive jargon.