Jane Austen’s Clark Kent

Posted on June 20, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

“Superman’s powers weren’t unique,” writes Deborah Friedell, “but his schlumpy double identity was,” because “it is the ordinary person, Clark Kent, who is the disguise.”

The assertion is indirectly Brad Ricca’s, whose biography Superboys Friedell was reviewing, but either way, I have to raise my hand from over here in Bath, England where I’m teaching this month, and say, well, actually, no. Jerry Siegel can only claim uniqueness points if you ignore a range of earlier, disguise-reversing characters, including Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel–whose 1934 film incarnation Siegel would have watched before his coincidental stroke of Superman inspiration later the same year.

I’m guessing, however, Jerry didn’t read much by Bath’s most beloved literary daughter, Jane Austen. Which is a shame because she penned the first Clark Kent all the way back in 1817. Austen was more or less on her deathbed at the time, which might explain why she was writing about invalids at a beach resort, and, more sadly, why she never finished.

“Jane Austen left few hints about the direction Sanditon would have taken had her health allowed its completion,” writes Austen expert Mary Jane Curry. “Perhaps future study will suggest why, if Austen family lore is true, Jane Austen called it ‘The Brothers.’” Laurel Ann Nattress thinks the middle of the titular brothers, the very good-looking and lively countenanced Sydney, was “possibly to emerge as the hero.” Maria Grazia agrees (“The male hero seems to be in Jane’s intentions, Sidney Parker”), scolding Juliette Shapiro for her treatment of the character and the subsequent romance (“Rather improbable”) in a completion of Austen’s novel.

Shapiro’s is only one of over a half dozen attempts (including a webseries set in California) to pick up where Austen’s dying hand dropped off. Perhaps so many of them fail because they champion the wrong Mr. Parker. My bets are on Sydney’s kid brother, the mild-mannered Arthur.

He, like his delicately hypochondriac older sisters, has come to Sanditon to convalesce. Charlotte, Austen’s final protagonist, “had considerable curiosity to see Mr. Arthur Parker; and having fancied him a very puny, delicate-looking young man, materially the smallest of a not very robust family, was astonished to find him quite as tall as his brother and a great deal stouter, broad made and lusty, and with no other look of an invalid than a sodden complexion.” That’s a casting call for Christopher Reeve.

Arthur only receives one scene (more than his feckless brother), but it has all the hallmarks of a Kryptonian slumming as a cowardly weakling. His first line is an apology for hogging the seat by the fire. “We should not have had one at home,” said he, “but the sea air is always damp. I am not afraid of anything so much as damp.” Charlotte is fortunate never to know whether air is damp or dry, as it has always some property that is wholesome and invigorating.

“I like the air too, as well as anybody can,” replies Arthur. “I am very fond of standing at an open window when there is no wind. But, unluckily, a damp air does not like me. It gives me the rheumatism.” He is also, he confesses, “very nervous,” an obscure 19^th century condition sadly extinct by the time Siegel was writing, or surely Clark would have suffered it too. “To say the truth, nerves are the worst part of my complaints in my opinion.”

Charlotte recommends exercise. “Oh, I am very fond of exercise myself,” he replies, “and I mean to walk a great deal while I am here, if the weather is temperate. I shall be out every morning before breakfast and take several turns upon the Terrace, and you will often see me at Trafalgar House.” But does Arthur really call a walk to Trafalgar House much exercise? “Not as to mere distance, but the hill is so steep! Walking up that hill, in the middle of the day, would throw me into such a perspiration! You would see me all in a bath by the time I got there! I am very subject to perspiration, and there cannot be a surer sign of nervousness.”

Adding to sweat and humidity, Arthur reveals his most feared form of liquid kryptonite. “What!” said he. “Do you venture upon two dishes of strong green tea in one evening? What nerves you must have! Now, if I were to swallow only one such dish, what do you think its effect would be upon me?” Keep him awake perhaps all night? “Oh, if that were all!” he exclaims. “No. It acts on me like poison and would entirely take away the use of my right side before I had swallowed it five minutes. It sounds almost incredible, but it has happened to me so often that I cannot doubt it. The use of my right side is entirely taken away for several hours!”

Is Arthur duping Charlotte the way Clark dupes Lois? Hard to say. It is clear, however, that the man is masking deeper appetites. Although he pretends, “A large dish of rather weak cocoa every evening agrees with me better than anything,” Charlottes observes the drink “came forth in a very fine, dark-coloured stream,” prompting his sisters’ outrage. “Arthur’s somewhat conscious reply of ‘Tis rather stronger than it should be tonight,’ convinced her that Arthur was by no means so fond of being starved as they could desire or as he felt proper himself.” Arthur has a similar weakness for liberally buttered toast, “seizing an odd moment for adding a great dab just before it went into his mouth.” Wine also does him surprising good. “The more wine I drink—in moderation—the better I am.”

Charlotte, demonstrating the sleuthing skills of a top notch girl reporter, notes “Mr. Arthur Parker’s enjoyments in invalidism,” suspecting “him of adopting that line of life principally for the indulgence of an indolent temper, and to be determined on having no disorders but such as called for warm rooms and good nourishment.” Laurel Ann Nattress (did I mention she has a blog on Austen?) thinks the twenty-year-old has been “cosseted” (presumably by his doting sisters) “into believing himself to be of delicate health.”

That’s the interpretation Bryan Singer adopted for his 2006 Superman Returns. The Man of Steel’s bastard son, the five-year-old Jason, appears to be an asthmatic runt—until he throws a piano at the thug menacing his mother, Lois. Was little Jason just jerking everyone around? Hard to say. But his old man certainly was. The best scene from Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill is David Carradine’s superhero monologue:

“When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. What Kent wears – the glasses, the business suit – that’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak… he’s unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.”

Austen is critiquing us too, our laziness and self-serving foibles, but being also a devoted lover of the marriage plot, would she have left poor Arthur to stew in his rather weak brew of humanity? I’m not suggesting the young man was hiding a capital “S” under his shirt, but Austen seems to have hidden something under there. Lois eventually pulled the glasses off Clark. I suspect Charlotte would have done the same with her tall, broad, and lusty invalid.

Doing the Krypton Crawl

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Jaz Jacobi

Noah Berlatsky brings up some interesting points in his essay “Why Do We Love Batman But Hate Superman?”, observing the Superman v Batman trailer as yet another incarnation of society’s desire to see “normal guy” Batman kick Superman’s “alien other” ass. But Superman’s journey from Man of Tomorrow to lame old-timer represents a complicated trail, the character walking a razor’s edge between the ephemera of junk culture charm and the drive to make superhero stories—and likewise their creators and devotees—seem “mature.” There’s a tension: expecting a fictional character to continue to serve as DC Comics’ figurehead, often in the face of public indifference, while constantly facing reinvention in a struggle to maximize corporate gain. If someone can be heard rattling off a list of favorite Superman comic book stories, odds are he or she is over 60 years old. Conversely, my wife, who was 8 years old upon the release of the Tim Burton Batman movie that in many ways is ground zero for mass-marketed superhero cinema, often tells me her peer group “never thought Superman was cool.” (I’m ten years older, so I got to see Superman become a movie star firsthand.) Much like when rock fans speak of Elvis Presley, there seems to be a fear of sounding like an uninformed clod if you don’t pay polite lip service to notions of Superman’s “importance” and “influence,” yet the particulars of just why the Man of Steel had such resonance, and to whom, has become an increasingly distant cultural memory.

Superman maintained a unique position among the raft of superheroes that arrived in his wake, not only enjoying a media profile beyond comic books (newspapers, radio, cartoons, television, stage, movie serials), but also being one of the very few to remain in publication through the Forties and Fifties. Editor Mort Weisinger oversaw the character’s renaissance beginning in the late-Fifties, with enduring concept seemingly introduced every few months (within a year and half: the Bizarro World, Supergirl, the Phantom Zone, Red Kryptonite, the Legion of Super-Heroes, “imaginary stories,” the Fortress of Solitude, the Bottle City of Kandor). The comics took on a sense of craft and charm reminiscent of the Forties’ top-selling superhero, Captain Marvel—fitting, since many of these concepts were originated in the scripts of Otto Binder, looking for work after CM was driven out of circulation by DC’s litigation. In the 1960s, the top 10 selling comic books in America regularly contained all seven Superman titles: the perfect entertainment for 8 year olds, full of arctic hideouts and robot doubles and a city in a bottle and an imperfect duplicate of Earth and bizarre transformations and outlandish coincidences, packing more plot into 8 page stories than some 6-issue “arcs” do today. But the very strengths that made these comics appeal so much to children—whimsy, fairy tale-style fantastic sweep, enchanting emotional drama, majorly unpredictable weirdness—became an Achilles’ heel to the expanding comics fandom who didn’t feel the need to outgrow comic books, but also didn’t want the public to think less of them for their tastes. Many of these young fans became the generation of comics creators who filled the shoes of those who wrote, drew and edited such “kids’ stuff” as they moved on or passed away; the young crowd knew things had to change.

After Weisinger retired in 1970, the difficulty was finding an adequate encore. Current Superman comics were seen by an increasingly older comics audience as bland, workaday filler; no better or worse than the majority of Seventies superhero books, really, but nothing to write home about either. Marvel’s rise to dominance through the ’70s was sold on Stan Lee’s hype job that Marvel was the “collegiate, intellectually complex” superhero line, and DC was increasingly seen as juvenile and tiresome. “Realism” was the buzzword of the day, from Marvel’s strategy of angst-ridden “superheroes with problems” to Neal Adams’ grimacing poses. But the easy appeal of those ‘60s Superman comics shows up the misguided thinking in subsequent attempts to graft contemporary ideas of “character development” or slambang action onto the series. The Marvel-style approach has often been compared to soap opera: heavily continuity-driven, with suspense built by ongoing angsty personal lives and dramatic installment-to-installment serial rhythms. Whereas Silver Age DC stories are closer to the model of the situation comedy, starting at the same default “normalcy” each time, presenting a disruption in that comfort zone, and returning to the starting point upon denouement. Squareness was the point of old-school DC: instead of heroes with feet of clay, these square-jawed, confident crimefighters were most put out by humiliation. Just as likely as villain-of-the-month conflicts were cover gimmicks promising the latest violation of the hero’s sacred dignity (the infamous Flash cover with the thought balloon, “I’ve got the strangest feeling I’m being turned into a puppet!”). Red Kryptonite or a Mxyzptlk curse or a flask of potion could turn Superman or Jimmy or Lois into any number of beasties, grant a third eye, make them fat, what have you—the angst in Silver Age DCs is all about “how do I get through the day without someone noticing my face is a living mood ring,” much more entertaining than Hank Pym’s marital strife. (I wish I could remember which of my friends to credit with the astute observation that, when you hear people complain about DC’s “cardboard characters” in relation to Marvel’s “fully rounded personalities,” it sounds more like they’re speaking of Hanna-Barbera’s TV show Super Friends than actual familiarity with the comic books.)

As of the mid-1980s, notions of DC’s second-class-citizen status mostly held steady with the fan populace, but with an increasing view that Batman was the exception that proved the rule. Morphing from corny Caped Crusader to menacing Dark Knight, Batman was seen as a rare example of a “badass”/”complex” superhero amongst DC’s largely cool/cerebral personalities—DC’s only real competition for Marvel’s “dangerous”/”gritty”/”street level” Wolverine/Punisher types in those pre-Lobo times. DC’s few thriving sellers tended to be from the dustier corners of their continuities, spun on the appeal of the X-Men-style team book dynamic—Teen Titans, Legion—and the Superman/Flash/Green Lantern DC mainstream that was so appealing during the ’60s seemed to remain in print more out of habit than honest enthusiasm. The Crisis on Infinite Earths “event” was designed to “clean the cobwebs” from DC’s backlogged continuity (read: eliminate the goofier aspects to prevent fan embarrassment). Superman and his pals were presented as having the biggest need for this push, so away with Supergirl, pets with capes, Bizarros, and so forth. “Post-Crisis” attempts to reinvigorate what came to be known as the “Big Three” did wonders for Batman, via the efforts of Frank Miller et al, but even the appointment of fan favorite creators couldn’t reverse the lasting impression that Superman and Wonder Woman were for squares.

By the ’90s/21st century, the party line on Superman within an increasingly influential fan populace was that he was to be condemned as “the Big Blue Boy Scout,” a clueless, morally-uptight fossil looking lost in a time of antiheroes and fashionable ultraviolence. A counterrevolutionary, if you will. Younger fans tended to observe Superman as an empty personality-free shell merely occupying a necessary merchandising trademark, like they might with Mickey Mouse. From the distance that I observed the megaselling “Death of Superman,” those millions of comics seemed to sell to A] aging former readers of Weisinger’s comics who hadn’t touched the stuff in years and/or B] investors eager to resell these comics—actual enthusiasm among current comic book readers seemed difficult to pinpoint. And of course, the press releases implicitly sold the line to a cynical public that Our Hero’s worth had been exhausted in this cold, hard world, and it was time to do away with the poor old relic. (Veteran comics readers had been led down this garden path a few times and knew better—he wouldn’t “stay dead” for long.)

Today, selling fanboys on the idea that Superman is at all interesting, let alone “cool,” always seems to involve some menacing, “intense” image, all gnashed teeth and smoldering laser-beam eyes; a far cry from the placid, smooth Curt Swan model of prior decades. The occasional well-received effort, like Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman, seems to have an easier time gaining traction with older readers—and, tellingly, invoke the long-abandoned tropes of those still-intriguing ’60s stories, with their reliance on “silliness” like super-pets and signal watches. Another take is to remove as much of the superficial resemblance to the franchise as can be achieved—the marketing for TV’s Smallville (and the producers’ pithy mantra, “no tights no flights”) seemed designed to scream, “This is not your father’s Superman.” 2006’s Superman Returns consciously attempted to wipe away memories of the ill-received third and fourth Christopher Reeve films by following up plot threads of Superman II—perhaps not coincidentally, just about the last point in time the larger public’s finger was on the pulse of a Superman story.

The frosty reception for Superman Returns seemed to be painted by some as evidence of the character’s lack of appeal or relevance to modern audiences, leading to that major overhaul in the face of commercial panic, the “reboot.” (After Hollywood was caught off guard by the blowback over Michael Keaton’s casting as Batman, making fandom unhappy has been seen as the quickest route to monetary oblivion.) The Man of Steel movie gained much controversy over its fatal climactic moments, with much online debate about “destruction porn” and proposing ways the story could have been led to avoid Superman taking deadly action. But the makers of the film seemed to coldly calculate exactly the effect they were looking for—giving audiences who aren’t wired to like Superman the shock effect of a Man of Steel who kills. Inserting Batman into MoS’ sequel seems like a box office insurance clause as much as a response to any desire to see the two duke it out; the view that DC has spent decades following Marvel’s lead isn’t abated by the impression created by cramming four more heroes into what is nominally “a Superman film,” just so Warner can fast track their own “cinematic universe”.

Striving to navigate the appealing fantasies of childhood into escalating “darker” territory keeps leading to nastier dividends. Witness Identity Crisis, a miniseries that proposed that, behind the veneer of kiddie-comic cheeriness, those buffoonish villains in tights you read about as kids hid rapist impulses; it was truly depressing to overhear the comics-shop water cooler conversation turn to this being the way “DC should have done it all along.” The cliché goes that audiences like Batman because anybody can work out and build gadgets and blow stuff up (as long as you’re a millionaire who lives in a fantasy setting, I guess), but supposedly nobody can relate to Superman because he’s “too powerful” (the usual complaint about past incarnations of the Man of Steel is that he could “juggle planets,” even if nobody can offer an example of this actually happening). It becomes about the usual concerns of “who can beat up whom,” the appeal of Superman assumed to be that he’s stronger than everybody else while struggling to maintain drama by coming up with somebody strong enough to fight back.

Almost every reboot attempt goes further in making Superman less connected to his Kryptonian heritage, more a “regular guy” like Batman, depowered to reduce those godlike abilities and make for more thrilling fisticuffs. But the “childish” fantasy of Weisinger’s Superman—who could destroy planets with a sneeze or perform plastic surgery with his fingertips!—didn’t make for less interesting stories; that “anything can happen,” wild card element led to the most outlandish and unpredictable plots imaginable. Those looking to recapture the appeal of Superman could do worse than learn from the successes of the past, rather than refute them.

World’s Best Cinecomic

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Julian Chambliss

The return of Arrow and The Flash from their midseason break continues the love-fest each program has enjoyed with fans. The CW’s dynamic duo (sorry) has sparked hopes of a DC cinematic universe by bridging the gap between diehard fans and casual viewers. Nothing illustrates this point more than this season’s semi-crossover event. Skillfully executed and action packed, each character visited the other’s show. Oliver Queen’s darker persona coming into contact with the “brighter” world inhabited by Barry Allen (and vice versa) reminded fans of World Best Comics #1 (Later World Finest Comics) that featured Batman and Superman in 1941. This comic hinted that Batman and Superman lived in the same world. Ironically, it was only the covers that placed the heroes together; they did not actually appear in the same story until 1952. Embellishing episodes that are already deeply informed by decades of stories and developed and produced by the same creative team, Arrow and The Flash deliver a better experience.

World Best Comics Vol. 1 #1 (March 1941)

The shared universe idea that developed from the 1940s onward grew more complex drawing in fans and accommodating new characters and worlds. Creators hope this legacy means fan engagement with these cinematic adaptations will impact engagement on other platforms. Yet, as recent research about the transmedia idea explains whatever the technological tools and industrial alignments shaping storytelling, these products cannot escape the sociocultural context informing the audience experience.[1] While Arrow and The Flash are satisfying action adventure serials, this season’s crossover also highlight the historical burden linked to the superhero genre.

DC Comics characters inform the popular imagination about the superhero. For years adaptations of DC characters have served as vehicles for generational discourses. Batman’s 1960s television series and Superman’s 1970s film highlight this tradition. The Batman television series leveraged the Pop Art Movement to create an “exaggerated cliché” that delighted children and amused adults.[2] At the same moment, Roy Lichtenstein blurred the boundary between high culture and commercialism using comic book panels in his images.[3] Derided at the time, his work, like TV series, resonated with the public reflecting societal tension with the postwar conformist message in America. By the time Richard Donner’s Superman graced the silver screen in 1978 the United States had been disabused of its global preeminence by failures abroad and domestic politics splintered by protests from the left and the right. Americans were uncertain and as Jimmy Carter famously explained, a crisis of confidence casted a “…growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives” and the “unity of purpose for our nation.”[4] Donner’s Superman offered an affirmation of American ideas. Not surprisingly, Carter lost his re-election campaign and adjusted for inflation Superman remains the highest gross adaptation of the Man of Steel on film.[5]

Showcase Vol 1. #4

The circumstances that shaped the pro-social mission in the original Superman and Batman reflected depression struggles and wartime triumphs. In a similar manner, the superhero comic book revival associated with Barry Allen’s debut as The Flash reflected the postwar experience. Created by Robert Kanigher, John Broome, and Carmine Infantino in 1956, Allen was the second Flash and sparked a superhero renaissance that re-imagined 1940s characters for the atomic age. Allen’s earnest commitment to family and community along with his civilian identity as a “police scientist” affirmed the moral standard established by The Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). The CMAA’s regulatory arm, the Comic Code Authority worked to eliminate corrupting images and ideas critics linked to comic books. Famously articulated by Dr. Fredric Wertham, comic books became seen as central cause of juvenile delinquency in the early 1950s. The resulting hysteria led to Congressional hearings investigating comic publishers in 1954.[6] Recent work by Amy Kiste Nyberg does an excellent job of demonstrating how Wertham was as much a symptom as a cause of Americans’ suspicions. The confluence of Cold War tension, postwar affluence, and youth culture provided ample opportunities for parents to worry and children to rebel. Those kids endangered by comics would embrace the disruptive rhythm of rock ‘n’ roll music and go off to college and protest…everything.

As comic book publishers strove to keep this dynamic youth engaged, they continued to revamp their characters to reflect changing time. Green Arrow, created in 1941, was more “Batman-lite” than an iconic character until Neal Adams and Dennis “Denny” O’Neil re-designed him in 1969. Oliver Queen had been a rich man with a teenage sidekick who employed trick arrows and worked from secret headquarters called the Arrow Cave (with an Arrow Car of course). The “new” Green Arrow lost his fortune, discovered his ward was a drug addict, and in the classic series paired with Green Lantern travelled the country in the early 1970s confronting crimes rooted in “real world” concerns like racism and environmental damage.[7] The link to ‘relevance’ in superhero comics has never left Green Arrow, but arguably his frustration with authority has shifted in recent years from the ardent liberalism of the 1960s to a disillusioned libertarianism today.

In Arrow and The Flash this history informs the narrative world we see on the screen and shapes the shared universe they inhabit. Allen’s Flash and Queen’s Arrow approach their mission differently, a point made clear when each hero applies their methods in the other’s city. Allen retains the expectations and aspiration associated with postwar America, but slightly modernized. Despite the tragic circumstances he has faced, he is committed to making his world better. Arrow has taken Green Arrow’s social justice narrative and re-oriented it with a criminal justice lens. Like the country as a whole, his grievance with “the system” has grown at once more and less complex. He struggles with morally questionable actions in his past as he pursues a heroic future. Informed by contemporary culture, both adaptations are a prism on values inscribed in each character. As Arrow and The Flash continue to create a richer world, the evolution of their narrative legacy provides a roadmap of how the contemporary audience’s concerns about security and community contend with changing millennial realities. The popularity of the shows makes sense as a catharsis exercise. That the superheroes will triumph is not the question. Instead, how they win and remain heroic becomes the key. Queen’s Arrow doesn’t want to be a killer that relies on torture to protect those things he loves and Allen’s Flash doesn’t want to be so afraid he is unable to act. For all the fantastic excesses linked to superheroes, the broader questions they are in dialogue with matter to us all.
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[1] Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), viii–viii, http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/transmedia-archaeology-carlos-scolari.

[2] Judy Stone, “Caped Crusader of Camp,” New York Times, January 9, 1966.

[3] Peter Sanderson, “Spiegelman Goes to College,” PublishersWeekly.com, April 23, 2007, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/1-legacy/24-comic-book-reviews/article/14675-spiegelman-goes-to-college.html.

[4] “WGBH American Experience. Jimmy Carter | PBS,” American Experience, accessed December 26, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/.

[5] “Superman Moviesat the Box Office – Box Office Mojo,” accessed December 26, 2014, http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=superman.htm.

[6] “1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books),” accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html.

[7] Jesse T. Moore, “The Education of Green Lantern: Culture and Ideology,” The Journal of American Culture 26, no. 2 (2003): 263–78.

Girls Are From Mars

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I know exactly where my daughter came from. I was cowering, forehead to my wife’s temple, as a doctor lifted Madeleine’s blood- and vernix-dappled body above the surgical drape. I did not peek over while they were sawing a half-foot wound into my wife’s abdomen. I remember the table shaking. I remember the bloody tread marks on the floor afterwards.

These are the kind of details science fiction authors Jack Williamson and Miles J. Breuer avoid. Their literary daughter, Pandorina, emerges from of a metal cylinder. Her adoptive father pulls it from a meteorite’s bloodless crater, not a c-section incision.

“A Girl from Mars” was published in 1929. It was literally the first science fiction story. Pulp publisher Hugo Gernsback, having lost Amazing Stories, launched a new magazine, Science Fiction, with “A Girl from Mars” as its premiere story. It sounds like an obvious name for a magazine, but before Gernsback coined it, the genre was called scientifiction. A term deserving its timely death.

Science Fiction’s readers included high schooler Jerry Siegel, the future co-creator of Superman. A few years later and his own alien child of a destroyed civilization would crash-land on earth to be reared by human foster parents. Miles J. Breuer, a practicing physician when not penning pulp tales, would have been less queasy than his younger writing partner about pregnancy. Though not, apparently, childbirth. Pandorina is a test tube baby, conceived in and hatched from an incubator. Breuer can use the words “ovum,” “sperm,” and “fertilize,” but not “uterus,” “cervix” or “vulva.” Siegel, even less comfortable with the birds and the bees, delivers his sanitized Baby Clark swaddled in a cockpit.

Both birth stories omit female anatomy. Women’s bodies are either missing or sexless. Pandorina is found by a recently widowed husband, Clark by an elderly couple, the wife long past child-bearing years. Instead of vaginas, we get funnel-shaped craters. Instead of intercourse, it’s rocket ships and glass globes shot from interplanetary guns.

But Williamson and Breuer’s narrator seems to love his adopted daughter well enough, rearing her beside his own son. He admires her “rare elflike beauty,” her “soft, red bronze” hair, and her “astonishing aptitude,” all “her inheritance from a higher civilization.” Like Clark, Pandorina passes from infancy to adulthood in less than a page. When I blink at Madeleine—she was just accepted early decision to Wesleyan University this month—I see the same blur of time. Next thing Pandorina’s in love with her adoptive brother, Fred, and glowing in the dark when “excited.” My wife and I haven’t been allowed to check on Madeleine after bed for years and years now, but I suspect she emits a similar “luminosity” behind her closed door.

Perhaps all fathers eventually experience their daughters as alien. After deleting all female genitalia from Pandorina’s birth, Williamson and Breuer’s literary offspring has the audacity to grow her own. My father-tuned ears can hear the unspoken panic stirring under their narrator’s scientifictionally calm prose. Who is this adult woman making herself breakfast in my kitchen before driving herself to school? Where in the universe did she come from?

I’d like to think I’m handling my paternal alienation better than Pandorina’s dad. He sees her entire generation as monsters. Martian men start showing up on the front porch, demanding to wed his virgin daughter. They crash-landed too, one in a farmer’s field in the smallville of Folsom, NJ. The father is horrified as they battle over their would-be bride.

Better they all die, even his own boy Fred, than allow Pandorina to unveil herself on her wedding night. He lures her and the other Martians onto a heavy artillery range where they bloodlessly vanish in the smoke and dirt of an exploding shell. A death as sanitized as their births. I don’t know if Siegel was as terrified by women’s bodies. He avoids opening Pandorina’s box with a sex change operation. Krypton only ejaculates a lone male.

My daughter’s Martian suitors have all been nice boys so far. I try not to embarrass her too much when one steps in from the porch, but it’s hard. Madeleine has ordered us to be “calm” and “not weird,” but my wife and I still gawk. We mumble awkward jokes. Befuddled strangers watching a new civilization take root.

In nine months she flies off to colonize her own planet. God, I’ll miss her.

Superman and Atticus Finch

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Donovan Grant

This scene from Superman vol.2 #81 takes place near the end of the “Reign of the Supermen” storyline, which was the final third of the “Death and Return of Superman” saga from 1993. In it, the real Superman has returned and convinces Lois Lane of his identity by quoting the last thing he said to her before rushing off to his death at the hands of the villain Doomsday. First, though, he references his favorite film. While this serves as a piece of trivia for the character, it also reaffirms the intrinsic nature of Superman, and what he values most as a “Champion of the Oppressed”.

Superman’s status as a defender of the little people was immediately established in his first appearance in Actions Comics #1. The opening scene has Superman using his extraordinary powers to save a woman wrongly convicted of murder, and to put the real killer behind bars.

At every moment of opposition, Superman refuses to let anything stand in his way and barrels through the likes of an armed butler and steel doors in order to set things right, spouting one-liners like “It was your idea!” after meeting the butler’s dare to knock down a steel wall.

This adventure, the first of three in the title’s premiere issue, serves as the perfect debut for the Siegel and Shuster Superman. Righter of wrongs, defender of democracy, this Superman fought everything from drunk drivers to the Ku Klux Klan to Adolf Hitler himself, in one form or another. It’s interesting to me that the very first superhero, the one whom all others would take inspiration from, was in his origins almost totally divorced from the confines of the superhero genre as it’s come to be known. Bring up a costumed crime fighter to an average person who doesn’t read comics, and they’ll imagine someone in a goofy suit with powers stopping a bank robber with an equally goofy suit and powers, with a silly name to go along with it. Hardly ever does a comic hero’s adventures address social injustice, and when they do it’s always presented ostentatiously. In this context, Superman’s roots as a fighter for social justice have been obscured, though not lost entirely.

One story that focused on Superman pursuing social justice is the best episode of the 1996 Superman animated series. “The Late Mr. Kent”. In this story, Clark Kent is presumed dead after a car bomb goes off while he’s in the process of clearing a wrongly convicted man days before his execution.

While this episode is rightly lauded for its taut direction, film noir atmosphere and insight into the mind of Clark Kent as opposed to Superman (to reference an age-old debate), one thing that never gets brought up is the racial themes that are implicitly addressed. The man, Earnest Walker, is a low-level thief who has been on death row for five years for murdering a woman and is now scheduled for the gas chamber. He claims to the interviewing reporter, Clark Kent, that he’s never hurt anyone in his life, and found the victim’s necklace outside his door and fenced it, concluding that he was framed. Right away Clark senses a calm heartbeat and figures he’s telling the truth. When Clark begins to investigate, everyone from the police detective to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen maintain Walker’s guilt. Later when Clark researches Walker’s alibi of eating pizza at home, he learns that this went uninspected by his public defender.

Clark finds Walker’s alibi on the Pizza Delivery company’s record disk and drives to the governor’s mansion, at which point his car explodes. With a witness seeing his car fly into the ocean, the dilemma of exposing his identity to save Walker’s life comes into play. After flying by his adoptive parents’ home and secretly attending his own funeral as Superman, Clark decides to explain the situation to the governor, secret identity be damned.

Of course that doesn’t happen, and the revelation of who’s behind the conspiracy soon arrives. At the end of the episode however, Superman is too late to stop the governor from attending Walker’s execution, so he bursts through the chamber and sucks the gas out into the sky where it disperses. The attending crowd is initially horrified at Superman’s sudden act of random destruction.

This takes the Siegel and Shuster story one step further, proving Superman wrong when he said that only the governor could save the condemned woman. This Superman doesn’t loudly boast threats or crack jokes at his opponent’s expense. He maintains a quiet resolve. Earlier in the episode he admits to himself that he wanted the exoneration of Walker to be a victory for Clark Kent and not Superman, yet he came to his decision to reveal his identity on his own.

In this, Superman is Atticus Finch in animated form. Nowhere do we see any sort of vaudeville comedy act with the Clark Kent persona differentiating the Superman persona. Like Miss Maudie says of Atticus, Superman is the “same in his house as he is on the streets”. The same quiet dignity that is often ascribed to Atticus can be found in Clark’s patient inquiries to Detective Bowman and the Pizza worker. He seeks justice to the best of his ability, first through his job as a reporter, then as Superman with the knowledge that his double life will come to an end should he further pursue Walker’s freedom. Whereas Atticus at his best failed to win Tom Robinson his freedom and ultimately save his life, Superman at his best brought the slain woman’s killer to justice and cleared Walker’s name.

Ultimately the episode ends with nowhere near as substantial a statement on race as To Kill a Mockingbird did. As I said before, virtually no one has commented online or on the series DVDs about the fairly visible comment on wrongful arrests and executions. To have it addressed in a Superman cartoon couldn’t have been a complete accident however. Although I highly doubt it was done as a roundabout way to tie in to the reference of Superman’s favorite film in the comics at the time, the social justice angle of the episode is too explicit to ignore. While the character would see a return to his roots as a “Champion of the Oppressed” in the pages of Action Comics vol.2 written by Grant Morrison, I like the more measured approach taken here. It feels more resonant and important to have Superman saving wrongly convicted black guys rather than kicking rich businessmen into street lamps. It teaches us, however obliquely, to oppose racial bias and always try to help the less fortunate. It’s a way to have us learn from Superman’s example, in the same way that Atticus Finch had us, and Superman, learn from his example.

Transsexual Supervillainy

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

So John Simms is now Michelle Gomez. Presumably Time Lords have always had the regenerative ability to change sex, but it took a half century of Doctor Who adventures before anyone dared to notice. The villain’s new body also gives the former Master the ability to stick her tongue into Peter Capaldi’s mouth. The Guardian’s Mathilda Gregory wasn’t shocked: “Discovering the Master had kissed the Doctor and called him her boyfriend didn’t seem odd, because there has always been sexual tension between the two, but seeing Missy being able to express it made it clear how heteronormative TV can be.” Matt Hill at ScienceFiction.com was more irked: “If this is the way the Master felt like treating the Doctor, why is it the only time we see a kiss [is] when the two participants for all intents and purposes fit a heterosexual norm?”

I agree, but I’m intrigued by a larger pattern of villainy. Why do evil homicidal men keep turning into evil homicidal women?

I’ve been catching up on old episodes of Syfy’s Haven with my wife and son, and 2012’s season three features a serial killer dubbed the Bolt Gun Killer (a possible homage to and/or knock-off of the cattle gun-wielding Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men). He not only murders women, but he slices off his favorite parts to stitch into a new body. The Killer is clearly male—the blurry surveillance image proved it even before detective Tommy Bowen is unmasked—but that Frankenstein body he’s making isn’t his bride. It’s himself. Like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, he’s sewing a new skin so he can become a woman. Except the Haven writers (I seriously doubt Stephen King had any influence on this plot arc) gender flip the gender flip by revealing that the skinwalking killer was originally a woman who now slides in and out of birthday suits, male or female, while busy assembling one that looks like her old self.

She wants to impress her returning husband (he spent a few decades in a magic barn and/or alternate dimension), and her plan more-or-less works. But no one comments about the Bolt Gun Killer’s gender and sexuality ambiguity. When “she” slips on a man is “she” still a woman? Or is she a man with a female gender identity? Since the Killer’s spousal devotion is constant, does that mean she changes sexual preference when she changes genitalia? In the Troubled universe of Haven, are gay men and straight women the same under the skin?

Chris Carter belly-flopped into similarly murky waters in the 2008 The X-Files: I Want to Believe. A pair of gay villains, Janke and Franz, abduct women to extract and sell their organs on the black market. Except sometimes Franz needs a whole body for himself—everything but the head (which Janke buries in a field for the FBI to find with the help of a psychic pedophile priest who molested Janke and Franz as altar boys). Franz’s first and presumably male body may be in that ditch too, though it’s unclear how long his team of assistants has been removing his head and reattaching it to new bodies. Women’s bodies. Are women just easier for Janke to abduct? Or does Franz have a female gender identity? And if so, how does Janke, a gay man, feel about his husband’s new vagina? In the outed truth of Carter’s Catholic universe, are gay men just straight women attached to male heads?

Again, Carter and his co-writer, like the Haven writers, don’t comment on the implications—they don’t even seem aware that their fantastical sex change operations sew up anything but plot holes. There are other examples—the female H. G. Wells from another Syfy show, Warehouse 13; Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank N. Furter, that “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” landing on Earth via The Rocky Horror Picture Show—but I prefer the original transsexual supervillain/ess because s/he is also the original comic book supervillain.

When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Ultra-Humanite debuted in Action Comics No. 13, he was a bald guy in a lab coat and wheelchair. All those seemingly unrelated adventures during Superman’s first year—a crooked football coach, a war-profiteering munitions manufacturer, a circus-foreclosing loan shark—were all part of the retconned Ultra’s improbable plot for world domination. Superman thwarts him four more times in 1939, ending with the villain’s explosive death in No. 19. He’d mysteriously vanished from plane wreckage in No. 13, but this time Shuster draws the corpse. “Dead!” declares Superman.

Action Comics No. 20 introduces Dolores Winters, a Hollywood actress who lavishes Clark with thanks then cold shoulders him the next day. “It doesn’t make sense!” he exclaims. “Females are a puzzle—movies queens in particular!” After the “vixen” kidnaps a yacht of millionaires and threatens to murder them, Shuster draws the first wordless panel in Superman history.

“Those evil blazing eyes,” declares Superman, “there’s only one person on this earth who could possess them . . .! ULTRA!”

The “person” confirms: “My assistants, finding my body, revived me via adrenalin. However, it was clear that my recovery could be only temporary. And so, following my instructions, they kidnapped Dolores Winters yesterday and placed my mighty brain in her young vital body!”

Although Shuster draws that young vital body with his standard vixen proportions, Superman can’t drop the male pronouns. “He must have as many lives as a cat!” he says after Ultra’s inevitable escape, wondering “will he continue his evil career?” But when Ultra returns in the next issue, the captioned narration accepts her sex change, mentioning “her last encounter” and “her hideaway.” Even Superman adjusts, calling her a “madwoman.”

Ultra expressed no sexual desires before his operation—so 1939 readers, like 2014 Doctor Who viewers, would have assumed he was straight. But given all the young vital bodies available for transplantation, why did he instruct his minions to stick his brain inside a gorgeous woman’s skull? Next thing he’s using his new pussy (a cat trapped in a fence) to seduce a male scientist—but that’s just to get the scientist’s atomic-disintegrator, right?

Ultra pulls on a pair of pants before leaping into a giant vagina–I mean, volcano–at the end of No. 21, but the next issue begins the two-parter that introduces Lex Luthor to the Superman universe. Ultra never returns. “It all seems to be a terrible nightmare!” declares the pussy-freeing scientist. Superman doesn’t want to talk about it: “Well, leave it go at that.”

I’m thinking Siegel’s cisgendered editors wanted to leave it go too and told him to flip villains. 1939 wasn’t ready for transsexuality. 2014 may be past it.

Ultra, Franz, and the Bolt Gun Killer have one thing in common: a brain. The rest of their body parts are detachable, but their skull-housed sexualities and gender identities seem constant. Franz is a straight male brain. Bolt Gun and Ultra are straight female brains. None of them actually change. The Master is different. I’m not sure exactly what happens inside a Time Lord’s cranium during regeneration, but the brain–the physical organ–must transform with the rest of the body. Only the mind remains. Which means a Time Lord’s identity transcends anatomy: the Master is neither female nor male, neither gay nor straight. Time Lords have no baseline sex or sexuality. The Doctor Who thought experiment posits a universe in which cisgendered-heteronormality isn’t even a possibility.

The Master is also the first sex-changing villain whose sex change isn’t a manifestation of his villainy. Franz, Ultra, and Bolt Gun are variations on Buffalo Bill–a character so two-dimensionally vile, audiences root for Hannibal Lecter instead. Bill is subhuman, and his homicidal attempts to become a woman are his only defining feature. Except possibly his thigh-tucked penis:

The Mistress stands apart from Bill, Franz, Ultra and Bolt because she didn’t abduct and murder actress Michelle Gomez to get her body. Missy is still a homicidal psychopath, but her sex change isn’t monstrous. The character may be evil, but not the transsexual transformation. That’s a first in pop culture supervillainy.

Inside Gozilla’s Rotting Carcass

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Nicolas Labarre

In 1999, Warren Ellis, John Cassaday and Laura DePuy explored the Godzilla imagery in the second issue of Planetary, “Island”. The series was still in the process of codifying its relationship to its readers and was very open about its objectives and methods. It sought to present the archeology of fiction by conflating the narratives of popular texts and their very existence as popular objects, and having the heroes of the series excavate and interpret these condensed remains.

The carcass of Mothra, in Planetary #2 (May 1999)

Thus, when the Planetary team meets Godzilla, they also encounter Godzilla, the cultural phenomenon. The history of the monster merges with the history of the monster genre and the demise of the latter mean the former have turned into rotting carcasses. In the series, these rotting carcasses are to be found on Island Zero, where the Planetary team is summoned in order to stop a sect, whose members intend to feast on the corpses of the Kaijus. By the time the team arrives, the members of the sect and the local Japanese soldiers have killed each others, positioning the heroes as spectators. Only at the end of the issue does the reader get a modicum of explanation, through a piece of expository dialogue:

Jakita Wagner: It all started the day after Hiroshima. […] We can’t say it was an atomic bomb. We can’t say these things are radioactive mutants. I mean, that’d be stupid. […] But five years later, island zero was populated by great monsters. They died off for some reason. They never left the island and they died.

The parallels are obvious, and even readers with a passing knowledge of the daikaiju genre are likely to notice the similarities between its history and Jakita’s story: the Japanese giant monsters movies appeared after World War 2, with Godzilla in 1954, and the giant pterodactyle Rodan (a stunning sight in the last page of the Planetary issue) in 1956, then spawned a popular series of films until the mid-70s before a prolonged eclipse; although the genre was very popular in Japan, it also remained profoundly insular, exotic imports in the rest of the world, it “never left the island”. The “five years later” reference does not quite match, though it could be a reference to 1948 Unknown Island, a little known RKO film by Jake Bernhard, in which a group of adventurers stumble a lots island populated by (giant) dinosaurs, in the form of cheap costume-wearing extras.

Unknown Island (1948) trailer

Planetary thus transmuted the history of the genre – a history shaped by Western perception, which means the 80s renaissance of Godzilla, which was barely distributed abroad, can be ignored – into a history of the dead monsters on Island Zero. This strategy, which the series applied to a variety of popular genres and cultural objets, has been since praised by critics and academics as a challenging, complex and satisfying bridge between meta-fiction and popular texts.

I suspect that in the last few years, this conflation of Godzilla and Godzilla has become the default mode of engagement with the character. This is at last what the two most recent film incarnations of the King of the monsters suggest. Indeed the most interesting sequences of both Godzilla Final Wars (Ryuhei Kitamura, 2004) – the final Japanese entry in the franchise – and Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014) both introduce the history of the franchise in the diegetic world. In both cases, this insertion occurs during the opening credits, setting the tone for the whole film.

During the credits of Godzilla Final Wars, excerpts from previous films in the franchise are intertwined with rolling dates, from 1954 to the present. The status of these images is not made explicit, but the construction of the sequence connects the chosen excerpts to suggest a continuous narrative rather than a collage. The movies blend into each others, are presented out of chronology, accompanied by prominent dates (1960, etc.) which do not correspond to any film, and create an artificial continuity. Godzilla is thus presented as having been a continuous presence since 1954, a description which can only be applied to the cultural phenomenon it represents, and is incompatible with the premise of most of the movies compiled in these sequences. Godzilla’s death at the end of the first movie, but also the various reboots, are glossed over, the better to repurpose existing images. Plots, foes and stories are briefly cast aside in order to foreground the cultural icon trough its five decades of existence, archetypally stomping over cities and soldiers. Though the movie itself includes numerous homages – and even a match versus the 1998 Emmerich version – it never develops this idea explicitly.

In Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, the process is slightly less overt. As in the case of Godzilla Final Wars, the credit sequence opens with images of an atomic blast footage, before inserting Godzilla into actual footage from the 1950’s atomic tests in the Bikini islands. 1954 is only mentioned later in the film, in a passage of blunt exposition. Nevertheless, popular-cultured spectators are expected to understand that the discovery of the creature roughly coincides with the date of Honda’s first film.

True, this is a revisionist reading of the origin of the creature and of the American role in particular. In Edwards’s films, based on a script by Max Borenstein the tests did not disturb Godzilla, they were an attempt to destroy the creature. However, this history again acknowledges the age of the franchise, its historical origin. Incidentally, this is also, as in the case of Planetary, an example of redacted, or secret history. We are invited to re-read what we thought we knew: we thought we were familiar with the Bikini tests, we thought we knew Godzilla, but a new light will be shed on both.

Godzilla (2014), opening credits

Although both films purport to be modern takes on the king of monsters, it is striking that they both emphasize the age of the franchise and its now removed point of origin. In doing so, they acknowledge the fact that the Godzilla franchise – a familiar series of cultural objects, with a well-established connection to the atomic trauma in Japan – is bigger than any specific movie. The success of both endeavors is predicated on the existence of an audience eager to connect with the franchise as a whole rather than with a specific film or series of films. The story of the Japanese Godzilla may have been rebooted in 2000, but it is hard to conceive of a spectator going to see Final Wars with no awareness of the previous films. Neither film is a period piece, though: Godzilla is at once current and historically grounded, as if some of Planetary’s erudition and esteem for its readership has seeped into both productions. Still, while Planetary made the exploration of the link between history and stories the center of its narrative, the movies contain it in a space where they can still claim plausible deniability. The ambiguous space of the opening credit seems perfectly appropriate to negotiate this tension.

The comparison with the 1998 Roland Emmerich version is enlightening. That film tried to imagine a modernized origin, one which would transpose the story of the original films with no respect for the film as film. It is hard not to see this as another expression of the changing conception of the audience among mass media producers. The subculture connoisseur may not be the target audience, but he or she is important enough to warrant the creation of these two opening sequences.

More generally, this embrace of history also sheds a light on the cultural status of various icons of popular culture. Godzilla is a 1954 creation and the movies acknowledge it, yet it seems unimaginable to have a major Superman or Batman film taking the thirties as a point of origin (Captain America is a somewhat complex exception here, since the character is both of the forties and the sixties). DC did produce a short film doing for Superman what the opening credit of Godzilla Final Wars tried to achieve, but crucially, it was distributed separately from Man of Steel, thus maintaining a clear distinction between the character in the story and the character in cultural history.

Superman at 75

It may be that Superman and the other superheroes have a less overt relation to their historical points of origin. It may also be that these characters haven’t been consistently used a mass-media franchise over the course of their existence – Superman Returns did touch on the tension between diegetic and non-diegetic time. It may be the fact that explaining a 50+ year-old Godzilla is more acceptable than a 70+ year-old Batman. Or it may be that a franchise with a history is less likely to be repurposed as entirely in a different setting as super-heroes have been over the last 16 years.

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