Lois Lane’s Rooftop Riunite

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Wine is not part of the American visual vocabulary of virtue, in the way that breakfast cereals, completely undeservingly, are.

Look there in the bottom left hand corner of the frame. While more a function of product placement than set-design, the Kent family’s box of Cheerios implies happy childhoods and growing children, a story unbrokenly told by generations of marketers through summery television commercials. If a director alternatively placed a Cheerios box amongst domestic strife, it would read like it automatically belonged there. Perhaps it should, complicit as it is in the destruction of small family agriculture in America. Yet marketing triumphs, while the Kents innocently harbor the agent of their coming obsolescence. In a way, the Cheerios box stands alongside Mrs. Kent, also looking out onto the grown Clark, knowing it has raised him well, understanding that he will soon be heading out for the adult world of coffee and hotel breakfast buffets.

I digress. Of course wines are not depicted as a nostalgic childhood artifacts– at least not for protestant, white, American families following WWII. Things are slowly changing, and filmmakers and sitcom directors increasingly picture it on dinner tables, and as a relatable half-vice for full-time mothers– just not often in sight when the kids are around. Light substance abuse is a hallmark of dysfunctional family comedies, and wine’s refined enough to seem a little less scary. Wine can be a part of family, with reservations. Yet when does wine become a part of childhood fantasy and play acting? If there ever was a Champagne or Martini Barbie, its assuredly retired, but that doesn’t prevent young girls from imaginatively filling in the blanks, and the tiny pink play glasses. Wine, consistently portrayed as a feminine and aristocratic drink in America, plays a trickier role in fantasies about masculinity. Bruce Wayne might drink it as part of his alias– but would Batman? Would Professor X from the X-Men, because he’s sophisticated and European? Catwoman, because she’s a femme fatale? These seem the most likely– the image becomes incongruous with the Punisher, Deadpool or Spiderman. Oenophiliac villains would be another conversation, as would romantic interests. Which brings us to the other brand-name consumer good not-so-prominently placed in the 1978 film Superman: A bottle of sparkling white wine with an obscured, and perhaps defaced label, pounded by Lois Lane while anxiously awaiting an ‘interview session’ with Superman.
&nbsp.

Through most of the scenes, the filmmakers turn the label away from the camera, exposing a prominent bar code and a back label likely filled with marketing copy. Lois might live in a penthouse with a landscaped roof deck, but she drinks a reliable, commercial brand. More mysteriously, she’s brought out Champagne flutes, but the bottle doesn’t look like a sparkling wine. Champagne bottles and their imitators typically have long neck foils, and a horizontal label. With the exception of the collar label, it somewhat looks like a bottle of Riunite from the advertisement below, also from 1978.

For those unfamiliar with the slogan “Riunite on Ice, That’s Nice,” Riunite was like the brand-specific prosecco of its day– cheap, fizzy and from northern Italy. Riunite is a prominent brand of Lambrusco, a type of sparkling red wine from Emilia-Romagna, which is northeast of Tuscany. Sparkling red wine is a bit of an anomaly, and while there are a handful produced around the world (particularly in Australia,) Lambrusco might be the most traditional– less a fun experiment, and more of a regional speciality. Different provinces make different variations, which differ in terms of dryness and sweetness, and what kinds of grape varietals are used. Riunite is an example of the sweetest and darkest type of Lambrusco, Lambrusco Reggiano, which is made with a higher percentage of Ancellotta grapes:

This is the wine that took America by storm in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Cantine Riunite of Reggio nell’Emilia, a consortium of co-operatives, succeeded in exporting up to 3 million cases per year to the United States. So successful has Lambrusco been on export markets that special white, pink, and light versions have perversely been created, the colour and alcohol often being deliberately removed.

-Daniel Thomases and David Gleave, The Oxford Companion to Wine

Riunite combated this with the claim that Riunite white “is natural,” a good reminder to natural wine producers everywhere that the term is easily pirated by industrial producers. If Lois is in fact drinking white Riunite, it shows her to be rather tasteless– a charming, bizarre twist on the luxurious tableau she presents to Superman. Her choice is fashionable, but uneducated. It doesn’t look like Lois grew up around wine, or has taught herself wine. Does Lois make enough at the Daily Planet to afford her designer wardrobe and penthouse? Or did she inherit it? Superhero stories are all about origin narratives, but despite Lois’s status as “the archetypal ‘comic book love interest,'” her biography isn’t part of the cultural consciousness (or even immediately discoverable on Wikipedia.) Lois is a well-dressed, spunky career woman living in a beautifully appointed home, partaking of the best known brands of 1978– not unlike a Barbie doll with corporate tie-ins. But where did she come from?

Still, its possible she is not drinking Riunite. The logo isn’t very visible on Lois’ bottle, nor is there a screwcap wrapper. A motivated set crew could have blotted out and removed labels and foils so as to deny Riunite accidental sponsorship, or incorporation into the Superman brand. Its possible they needed a bottle of wine, ran to the nearest liquor store, and picked out a bottle from a prominent case display. It’s hard to know how clued in these guys were to detail, considering that two different sets of wine glasses appear on the table over the course of the interview.

Besides giving Lois a little liquid courage, the wine gives Superman the opportunity to look good abstaining, to make a half-joke, (“I never drink when I fly.”) When she writes up the piece, Lois assumes that Superman doesn’t drink at all, which makes Eve Teschmacher, Lex Luthor’s girl friend, coo with desire. After a bout of disarmingly cute sex banter, supposedly a hard-news interview, Lois and Superman fly over Manhattan and into the night sky, where Lois free-styles a rhyming poem. Utterly smitten after the visit, she monikers him, (“What a super… man.”) The winning performances and odd-ball quality of these moments easily make them the best part of the movie not involving Gene Hackman. After dropping Lois back off at the apartment, Superman swings around as his alter-ego Clark Kent, reminding a dazzled and distracted Lois that they have a date. This affords Superman a chance to make one more joke about the wine, this time at Lois’ expense. “You haven’t been–hmm?” He asks, miming her drinking with his pinky extended, lips puckered, and eyelids semi-closed.

Of course she was drinking. You were there, jerk. And of course you know the real reason she’s swooning. Lois Lane is savvy, but she’s comedic relief. And despite the overblown comparisons of Superman to Jesus, (only exacerbated in the 2013 Man of Steel,) Superman isn’t a saint. He’s duplicitous enough to schedule two dates with Lois as two different people, just for voyeuristic kicks. He seems charmed by her imperfections, but not in awe of her abilities, (although he appreciates her wit.) Superman isn’t a farm boy innocent, falling head over heels in love. He’s effortlessly in control, and he’s amused by her inability to see his true identity, and only passingly guilt-ridden. Superman acts less ‘salt of the earth,’ than like a cheeky business-school brat. Lois is the love interest not because she is ‘super’ herself, but because she’s a normal girl who was there at the right place, at the right time. She makes adorable, and sometimes deadly, mistakes– she publishes Superman’s weakness in the public paper, and can’t think fast enough to escape a broadening fault line. She drinks cheap, trendy plonk while dressed like a timeless Egyptian princess. Lois Lane could be anyone, so why do audiences need to know anything about her? She’s ultimately helpless– a remarkably feminine ‘Common Man’ that Superman dedicates his life to love and save. And drop thousands of feet above the ground. And get mugged at gunpoint. No hard feelings.

And what’s happened to Riunite since 1978? It didn’t age well, but sales are still holding strong in states with more labyrinthine liquor laws, like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Riunite, once advertised as the wine of happening twenty-somethings, is now a proudly-unfashionable staple of the heartland. Riunite’s producers understand that, releasing a highly publicized TAPS campaign for veterans, an RV tour, and a smart line of ads riffing on the datedness of their jingle from 1985. One could imagine that they’d love to be the favorite of Superman’s girlfriend—the Cheerios or Malboros of wine.

This is part of a series called What Were They Drinking? co-posted at my wine and social criticism blog, The Nightly Glass.

Also recommended– the archive of old advertisements on the Riunite website. The theme-song might get stuck in your head, but they’re pretty amazing cultural artifacts.

Words Count

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I read the first issue of Watchmen while it was still on comic shop shelves back in 1986. Though “read” is the wrong word. A total of three words appear on pages five, six, seven, and eight. No captions. No thought bubbles. No dialogue. Just Rorschach mumbling “Hunh,” “Ehh,” and, my favorite, “Hurm” to himself as he investigates a crime scene. The action is cerebral. No heroes and villains exchanging punches and power blasts. Rorschach notices that the murder victim’s closet is oddly shallow, and then bends a coat hanger to measure it against the depth of the adjacent wall. A further search reveals a secret button, and then a hidden compartment, complete with (SPOILER ALERT!) the Comedian’s superhero costume.

That’s just nine panels of Gibson and Moore’s unnarrated 31-panel sequence. I’d never “read” anything like it. Not that Moore had anything against the English language. Look at the pages right before and after the silent sequence. 198 and 199 words each. When chatting, the Watchmen are as wordy as Spider-Man in his 1962 debut. Open Amazing Fantasy #15 and the first two pages clock in at 196 and 234 words each.

Not many letters shook loose in the leap from Silver to Bronze Age. Take a couple of pages from my personal ur-comic, The Defenders #15 of 1974, and you get 232 and 169. When Omega the Unknown debuted two years later, wordage had shrunk only a little, with pages of 156 and (I hope you realize how annoying it is to count these) 177.

But now fly back to the Golden Age. Scan Action Comics #1, and the 1938 Superman only muscles out 94 and 95 words. The mean skyrockets if you average in Jerry Siegel’s two-page prose story in the back Superman #1, but DC was only placating some now obscure publishing requirement. Marvel included a similar experiment in 1975, dropping single pages of prose into Defenders episodes (the improbably advanced vocabulary included “vacuous,” “belie,” and “veritable.”) My nine-year-old eyes barely skimmed them.

Despite varying word counts, the maximum for a dialogue-heavy panel remains about the same through the decades. Clark and his Daily Star boss cram in 30 words. Same number as the more talkative Omega panels. Peter Parker’s would-be manager leans over him with a 38-word speech bubble. And the cops investigating the Comedian’s death spit out some 35 words per panel too. So dialogue is the comic book’s universal constant. Moore didn’t mess with that. When talking, his characters sound like everybody else. The difference is when they shut up.

Before the mid-eighties, comic books were written in an omniscient third person voice. Those pages of prose in 1975 weren’t a freakish contradiction. They were the culmination of the industry’s style, the medium’s secret default setting. The background hum of talk. The author just couldn’t keep his mouth closed. It was as if he didn’t trust all those vacuous little pictures not to belie his veritable story.

“It takes a very sophisticated writer of long experience and dedication,” Will Eisner explains, “to accept the total castration of his words, as, for example, a series of exquisitely written balloons that are discarded in favor of an equally exquisite pantomime.”

There was a lot of castration anxiety from early comic book writers. Jerry Siegel’s Superman captions read like instructions to artist Joe Shuster: “With a sharp snap the blade breaks upon Superman’s tough skin!” Bill Finger’s Batman captions distrust Bob Kane’s pen even more: “The ‘Bat-Man’ lashes out with a terrific right . . . He grabs his second adversary in a deadly headlock . . . and with a might heave . . . sends the burly criminal flying through space.”

Two decades later and Spider-Man was just as redundant: “Wrapped in his own thoughts, Peter doesn’t hear the auto which narrowly misses him, until the last instant! And then, unnoticed by the riders, he unthinkingly leaps to safety—but what a leap it is!” Steve Ditko and Stan Lee tell the core of the origin—the radioactive spider bite—in three panels, speechless but for Peter’s “Ow!” But those three captions cram in 112 words.

Lee understood the complexity of visual story-telling. (The original Amazing Fantasy art boards include his margin note: “Steve—make this a closed sedan. No arms showing. Don’t imply wreckless driving—S.”) But comic book convention mandated narration, regardless of redundancy. Even when working without a script, Ditko covered his pages in empty captions and talk bubbles for Lee to fill in later. In Amazing Spider-Man #1, Spider-Man webs a rocket capsule as it flies past the plane he’s balancing on. The panels are visually self-explanatory, but words were still required. Instead of narrated captions, it’s Spider-Man pointlessly announcing “I hit it!” and “Mustn’t let go!” and “I reached it! But now . . .”

Alan Moore trusted pictures. When captions appear in Watchmen, they contain character speech, usually juxtaposed from a previous panel. When characters stop talking, the frame is silent. Nobody is chattering in a box overhead. The murder victim in the first issue isn’t the Comedian. It’s the narrator.

Unlike most deaths in comic books, this one was permanent. When Jonathan Lethem and Karl Rusnak created a new Omega the Unknown in 2008, they opened with two pages of wordless panels. Although Rusnak says Steve Gerber, the original writer, “raised the since out-of-favor device of caption narration to an art form,” Lethem still “wasn’t interested in captioning—in fact I wanted to mostly work without it.”

That goes for most creators today. Look at Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. Look at Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man. Look at Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead. It’s not just the word counts that changed. Words count differently.

How Do You Say “Superman” in French?

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

March 1939 was a good month for Superman. Less than a year after his debut, Action Comics No. 11 was flying off newsstands, his daily comic strip was starting its third month of syndication, and Superman No. 1, his first solo comic book, was in production.

March is also the year the Man of Steel landed in Europe. Clark’s French pronunciation wasn’t very good though, so the Belgian weekly periodical Spirou must have thought he said his name was “Marc.” Spirou had already introduced Dick Tracy to their readers, and on March 2, they added Superman’s daily newspaper strips in batches of six under the side banner “Marc Hercule Moderne”:

Their translators also switched Kent to Costa, Lois to Jenny, and the Daily Star to the Evening News. The comic book center in Angouleme has this 3-strip installment from the January 2, 1941 issue:

Spirou stopped running the feature later that year. The cancellation isn’t surprising, considering Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940. The occupation ended in 1945, the year Superman returned to Spirou. Belgium deported him again in 1947, due, I presume, to anti-American censorship sweeping French-language comics in the late 40s.

But back in March 1939, France was happy to stamp Superman’s passport. Five days after Marc the Modern Hercules landed in Belgium, those same daily strips premiered in the French weekly tabloid Aventures:

That editor misheard his name too:

Spirou sometimes called him the Man of Steel (le Homme de Acier) or the Superman, within panels, but Aventures was owned by an anti-fascist Italian who had fled Mussolini’s dictatorship; he wasn’t about to print a name associated with Nietzsche’s ubermensch. Plus he thought the exotic-sounding “Yordi” better suited a guy from another planet.

Aventures didn’t like Superman’s American newspaper strip’s layout either. Joe Shuster was drawing four, doggedly square panels a day:

Aventures preferred five. So, back in the Angouleme stacks, you can see the No. 30 issue from July 25, 1939 collects six of the dailies published in the U.S. from May and June, but with the panels rearranged and shrunk to accommodate a five-panel width:

The layout team kept it up. No. 51, from Dec 19, 1939, rearranges six dailies from November and December:

According to at least one account they removed the “S” on Yordi’s chest too, though another source states otherwise. My own eyeball analysis is inconclusive. I’m not sure if I’m looking at a lightly erased chest emblem, or just time-faded newspaper ink:

Either way, Yordi’s fans found better things to worry about when the series halted after the German invasion.

The occupation didn’t end the Man of Steel’s residency in France though. Starting on October 27, 1940, the fifth issue of Les Grandes Aventures introduced “Le Homme de Acier” on their color back page:

Les Grandes Aventures was also running a doctored version of Batman, “Le Justicier,” loosely redrawn from Bob Kane’s Detective Comics art, but their Man of Steel is something different. The art and stories aren’t Shuster and Siegel’s:

Based on my mastery of Google Translate and my daughter’s high school French III, that opening panel reads something like:

“A very ancient legend tells us that once there was an extraordinary man gifted with superhuman strength, and that this man must reappear in hundreds and hundreds of centuries and become the defender of the weak, the administrator of justice . . . and here it is: The man reappears in a large city of Europe in the year 2000. He is called the Man of Steel.”

Although he is invulnerable to fire (“au feu”) and begins his career by catching his Lois Lane (“the girl that is named Marise”) after villains toss her from a skyscraper window, this Homme de Acier sports a red tie and green vest, a far cry from the cape and leotard of his American brother.

Things get even stranger over at Hurrah! in 1941. The Blue Beetle was appearing as the red-costumed “Le Fantome d’Acier” (The Phantom of Steel):

The Beetle’s altered look and name was due in part to the popularity of Lee Falk’s Phantom strip. The French periodical Robinson had probably swapped the purple costume for a red one because the ink was cheaper:

But back at Hurrah!, “Le Fantome d’Acier” transforms into “L’Homme d’Acier” on November 5, 1941 (No. 311):

The Beetle-derived costume is the same at first, but then L’Homme d’Acier starts sporting the cape and briefs of the actual Man of Steel, minus his “S” emblem:

Things are stranger still at Editions Mondailes with the arrival of “Francois L’Imbattable” (the Unbeatable):

This Francois episode is redrawn from three of Superman’s May 1940 daily strips, but with each panel reversed:

Superman, or “Surhomme,” also appeared in the doctored form of Bill Everett’s Amazing-Man.

France doesn’t receive a completely unaltered Superman until well after the war, when the new tabloid L’Astucieux begins reprinting Wayne Boring’s Sunday newspaper pages from November 1944:

L’Astucieux launched itself and baby Superman from Krypton with an introductory four-page issue numbered “00” on May 14, 1947. Angouleme’s copy is badly faded:

No. 1 is eight pages and in slightly better shape:

No. 1 also includes Batman (renamed red wings, “les ailes rouges), but that’s another story. This “Crafty” (how Google translates “austuciex”) Superman, like his twin “Marc” who was running simultaneously in Spirou again, didn’t last long in the post-war wave of comic book censorship.

When the Man of Steel returned in the 70s, he was published by Sagedition, formerly known as Sage, the publisher of the long defunct Aventures. This time they didn’t change his name to Yordi. The Angouleme collection includes one of Superman’s final, 1986 adventures, published months before Sagedition went under:

But don’t worry, Francophiles. France is still receiving heavy doses of Homme d’Acier. Only no one bothers to translate his name into French anymore:

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I’m pleased to report that my one-act play “Crisis on Infinite Earths” premieres at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival this month. If you can’t make it to Pittsburgh but are curious what superheroes, saints, planets, and dinosaurs have in common, here’s the script . . .

(A church. The Virgin Mary stands on a pedestal surrounded by scaffolding and pulleys—or perhaps simply a rope across a flyrail. Three workmen enter, rolling a crate on a cart. ART is over fifty; BOB is in his thirties; CLIFFORD early twenties. During the scene, they will replace Mary with a statue from the crate. They begin by sliding the crate off the cart. The lack of conversation soon grates on Clifford.)

CLIFFORD: If you could have any superpower what would it be?

BOB: What?

CLIFFORD: If you could have any superpower, you know, like heat vision or seeing the future, that kinda thing.

BOB: I don’t know.

CLIFFORD: I’d get super-speed. Like the Flash. He moved at the speed of light. Imagine that. Finish this job in a half second.

BOB: Then what, sleep all day?

CLIFFORD: Yeah. But at light speed.

BOB: You’d be better off mind-reading or seeing the future or something.

ART: I’d want immortality.

CLIFFORD: That’s not a superpower.

BOB: Sure it is.

CLIFFORD: I mean like a superhero superpower. Only gods live forever. That doesn’t count.

BOB: What about Thor? He’s an Avenger.

CLIFFORD: So what would you pick?

BOB: Flying.

CLIFFORD: Everybody says flying. It’s so obvious. Pick something else.

BOB: I’d be Superman. Best overall package. Flight, strength, invulnerability. X-ray vision.

CLIFFORD: But say you can only have one power, pick one.

BOB: I did.

CLIFFORD: Other than flying.

ART: Superman couldn’t fly.

CLIFFORD: Superman?

ART: He couldn’t fly.

CLIFFORD: Big guy in blue tights, cape, “S” on his chest?

ART: Not originally.

CLIFFORD: You ever see the first issue? He’s sailing right over a building.

ART: He was jumping over it.

CLIFFORD: You’re telling me Superman couldn’t fly, he just . . . hopped?

ART: Tall buildings in a single bound.

CLIFFORD: That’s just an illustration of his strength, of his leg muscles. He could jump over a building, he’s that strong.

ART: The original Superman did not fly. He jumped.

BOB: You mean like the Hulk?

CLIFFORD: There, good example. The Hulk’s a jumper. You can tell by his posture. Bulky, no flight lines, no cape. Superman wouldn’t have a cape if he didn’t fly.

BOB: Batman doesn’t fly.

CLIFFORD: That’s different.

ART: I’m just saying after the first few issues they changed his powers. Okay? Now let’s get this lady on her feet.

(They begin to raise the new statue, but Art stops.)

Carefully. This isn’t just some hunk of rock. This is St. Philomena. My grandparents used to pray in front of this statue. This whole church was named after her. Show some respect.

(They raise the statue to a standing position and then step back to catch their breath, before starting to attach ropes to the other statue.)

CLIFFORD: Okay. So when Superman first gets to Earth, he can’t fly yet, he has to learn, he’s a toddler, that makes sense.

BOB: Superman didn’t get his powers till he hit puberty.

CLIFFORD: You agree with him? He couldn’t fly?

BOB: He couldn’t do anything. He was normal until high school.

CLIFFORD: No way. I had a box of my dad’s old Superboy comics. Superboy was a little kid and he had the suit and the cape, all the powers, everything.

BOB: And a flying dog named Krypto?

CLIFFORD: Yeah.

BOB: They got rid of him.

CLIFFORD: They got rid of Krypto?

BOB: They got rid of Superboy.

CLIFFORD: Who did?

BOB: I don’t know. Darwin. The new writers. They rewrote everything. Krypto got cut, Bizarro World—

CLIFFORD: So all those old comics, they’re saying they never happened?

ART: No, they just moved them to Earth 2.

CLIFFORD: Earth what?

ART: When superheroes got big in the 60’s again, they invented Earth 2 and put all the old stories over there.

CLIFFORD: They changed the past?

ART: They had to. Superman and Batman and all of them should have looked like me, old guys with gray hair and beer guts, but they didn’t. They looked more like you two. So they decided all the 30’s stuff happened on Earth 2.

BOB: Actually, they got rid of that, too.

ART: Earth 2?

BOB: All the alternate worlds. It was too confusing for new readers.

ART: What about the earth where all the superheroes are bad guys?

BOB: Gone.

ART: Batman’s daughter?

BOB: Gone.

CLIFFORD: What are you guys talking about?

ART: Supergirl?

BOB: There’s a new one now, only she was never from Krypton anymore.

CLIFFORD: How can they get rid of a whole planet?

ART: Krypton exploded.

CLIFFORD: I mean Earth 2.

BOB: That’s nothing. You know they got rid of Pluto?

ART: Why would the writers get rid of Pluto?

BOB: Not in the comic book, the real one.

CLIFFORD: Pluto? The planet Pluto? Who got rid of the planet Pluto?

BOB: I don’t know. Astronomers.

CLIFFORD: What, did they blow it up?

BOB: They excommunicated it. It’s just a chunk of rock now.

CLIFFORD: That’s like saying the sun’s not the sun anymore.

BOB: Pluto’s nowhere near that old. They only discovered it in the 30s. Same as Superman.

(Looking at St. Philomena)

I bet this thing is older than that.

ART: The whole church is. 1860s. My grandparents were married right over there.

BOB: I thought it was built in the 1960s.

ART: You’re thinking when they changed the name. When I was baptized here, it was St. Philomena’s.

BOB: Why did they have to change—

CLIFFORD: But Pluto was there. It was always there. Not knowing about it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.

BOB: It didn’t exist to us. The same thing, isn’t it?

ART: I thought some committee or something put Pluto back.

BOB: Sort of, they turned it into a “dwarf” planet, not an official one.

CLIFFORD: So it’s back? Pluto is a planet again?

BOB: Yeah, but then they had to make some other ones too.

CLIFFORD: Some other what? Planets?

BOB: Like fifty of them, could be thousands though.

CLIFFORD: Planets?

BOB: “Dwarf” planets. They had to. They meet the requirements. It’s empirical now.

ART: You just mean asteroids? Out past Pluto.

BOB: The biggest is between Mars and Jupiter.

CLIFFORD: They put a new planet between––

BOB: It’s not new. They’ve known about if for like two hundred years.

ART: But it was never a planet before.

BOB: It was, for a half century almost, almost as long as Pluto, before the Victorians got rid of it.

CLIFFORD: Planets are permanent. They’re absolutes. You can’t change absolutes.

BOB: Absolutes change constantly.

CLIFFORD: Name one.

BOB: The sun used to revolve around the Earth.

ART: That’s true. The church said so.

CLIFFORD: That’s different.

ART: It used to be flat.

CLIFFORD: Those weren’t changes, they were mistakes. Before they invented science.

BOB: Einstein said the speed of light was a constant. They changed that.

CLIFFORD: They changed their minds.

ART: The same thing they did to the saints. That’s how Philomena got downgraded to the basement. This church wouldn’t be called Mary of the Assumption right if the Vatican hadn’t changed its mind.

CLIFFORD: What did they do to the saints?

BOB: And the dinosaurs. Remember Brontosaurus? Big green guy, used to sit around in swamps because he wasn’t strong enough to lift its own body? Now they got them marching in herds with hollow bird-bones and whip-action tails.

CLIFFORD: What did they do to the saints?

ART: They got rid of them.

BOB: You know T. Rex looks like a giant chicken now?

CLIFFORD: Who did?

ART: I don’t know. The Jesuits.

BOB: He’s a girl, too. T. Rex is a girl.

CLIFFORD: The Jesuits got rid of the saints?

BOB: And a scavenger, completely harmless.

CLIFFORD: All of them?

ART: Like fifty. They have a special committee do it.

BOB: Those big jaws, they’re only for ripping up dead stuff it finds lying around now.

CLIFFORD: How many are left?

ART: Thousands still. They just thinned the herd.

CLIFFORD: Does the pope know?

ART: Some of the saints were only legends. Like Philomena here. My parents said this was her spot till the old pastor had her taken down. He said some nun dreamt up the whole story after bones were found in a mismatched grave. Philomena never existed. Lots of the old saints didn’t.

CLIFFORD: You mean like Santa Claus—St. Nick.

ART: I mean like St. Christopher.

BOB: Or Brontosaurus.

CLIFFORD: I have a St. Christopher’s medal.

BOB: Brontosaurus never existed. Someone put the wrong skull on a sauropod skeleton and made up the name.

CLIFFORD: My aunts gave it to me. They used to pray to him. I used to pray to him.

BOB: Hey, you know they found the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs?

CLIFFORD: Does that mean none of my prayers counted? Are the cuts retroactive?

BOB: Started the ice age.

ART: They changed it before you were born.

CLIFFORD: Oh my God.

BOB: It’s in Mexico.

CLIFFORD: I was praying to a canceled saint.

ART: My parents still pray to Philomena. The church only took her off the official calendar.

CLIFFORD: What’s the point of praying to someone who doesn’t exist?

ART: St. Christopher never existed now, after the church rewrote the history, but people still like the story of him carrying baby Jesus across a river on his shoulders. It’s a good story.

CLIFFORD: But it’s not true?

ART: It’s a metaphor.

CLIFFORD: I was praying to a metaphor?

BOB: That’s nothing. The Victorians thought T. Rex was a giant bullfrog. Imagine growing up reading about hopping dinosaurs. Pterodactyls used to have snake necks. Iguanodon was a giant iguana—with its thumb claw on the end of its nose. No wonder they died out.

ART: The iguanodons?

BOB: The Victorians.

ART: The Victorians didn’t die out, they. . .

BOB: Evolved into birds?

ART: Evolved into us.

BOB: Same difference. They’re gone. It’s survival of the fittest. Victorians, Brontosaurus, Pluto, Saint Christopher, Superboy—Darwin got them. Darwin dropped an asteroid on the whole lot.

ART: You can’t say something that never existed died out.

CLIFFORD: Dinosaurs existed.

ART: Superheroes didn’t. And you’re not talking about changes in the past. You’re talking about changes made in history, changes in the history of history.

BOB: Ideas evolve. The good ones, the best stories, they keep reproducing themselves. Like now there’s a new Superboy.

CLIFFORD: You said they canceled him.

BOB: It’s not really Superboy. He’s a younger clone of Superman they made when he died.

CLIFFORD: How can they say Superboy died if he never existed now?

BOB: Not Superboy, Superman.

CLIFFORD: Superman died?

ART: That’s ridiculous. He was invulnerable.

BOB: Not to Kryptonite. Even the old Superman would have died of that.

CLIFFORD: Superman died?

BOB: That stuff’s real too, Kryptonite. It’s on the Periodic Table.

ART: One of those new elements they discovered? They named it from the comic book?

BOB: An old one. The Victorians found it.

ART: How could—

CLIFFORD: Don’t you mean the actor who played him died? The one who shot himself?

BOB: He didn’t shoot himself, he fell off a horse, and no, I don’t mean him, I mean Superman, the Earth 1 Superman.

ART: That supposed to be us, right?

BOB: Only it’s just called “Earth” now. The old Superman, the Earth 2 Superman, they erased his whole universe and sent him into limbo after all the other alternate Earths collapsed into Earth 1.

CLIFFORD: So now there’s no Superman anymore, just some clone running around?

BOB: No, they brought Superman back. He had different powers for awhile. And a ponytail.

ART: You mean they rewrote history again, wrote out his death?

BOB: The computers in the Fortress of Solitude had a seance or something.

ART: They resurrected him? Superman was dead and they brought him back to life? It was a miracle?

(Conversation halts as young priest enters.)

PRIEST: Well. How are things coming along here?

ART: Good morning, Father.

(Bob and Clifford greet him shyly and wordlessly.)

PRIEST: Hello, gentleman. I see Philomena’s happy to be out and about. No more limbo for this little girl. You can’t keep a good saint down, can you?

ART: No, Father.

PRIEST: I wouldn’t mind seeing all the rest of that statuary back up here where it belongs. No reason Mary has to have all the best pedestals, right? I was thinking we would move her outside, into the garden maybe. Or switch her with one of the front statues. If that’s not too much to ask. Lord knows there wouldn’t be a church without men like you to do the heavy lifting.

(Awkward pause)

Well. I don’t want to hold you gentleman up. You’re doing a wonderful job.

(He exists.)

CLIFFORD: God. That guy can’t be much older than me. Can you imagine taking communion from him? Or confession.

BOB: I can’t imagine taking them from anyone.

CLIFFORD: You’re not . . .

BOB: Not since, I don’t know, high school I guess. Used to get the body of God stuck to the roof of my mouth every Sunday.

CLIFFORD: What happened in high school?

BOB: I don’t know. Puberty. I evolved. My superpowers came in.

CLIFFORD: You started flying?

BOB: I started thinking. It stopped making sense, Purgatory, immaculate conception, transubstantiation.

CLIFFORD: But you still believe in . . .

BOB: It was so much easier when I was little and I could just believe whatever my parents believed. Hell, I was an altar boy.

CLIFFORD: Hey, me too. I got to ring that little bell during service. I thought it was to keep people from falling asleep. I even thought about being a priest. My parents wanted me to, but my pastor didn’t think it was such a great idea. I wasn’t, you know. Called.

ART: (Stopping work with sudden annoyance) It’s not fair.

CLIFFORD: What?

ART: Earth 2. It’s not fair. It was just “Earth” in the 30s, right?

BOB: Yeah. They couldn’t know the 60s writers were going to reinvent everything.

ART: But it’s wrong. Naming the second Earth “one” and the first Earth “two” when the old Earth was where all the original superheroes came from. It should have been “Old Earth” and “New Earth.”

CLIFFORD: Oh, right. Like the Bible.

ART: Well, not . . .

CLIFFORD: Old Testament, New Testament.

ART: That’s not what—

CLIFFORD: Because that would make sense. Jesus was Jewish, and he was rewriting the Old Testament. He was upgrading it.

ART: It’s not like that at all. The Old Testament is still there. It’s the foundation. They built on top of it. The Torah. They just changed the name is all. And moved some of the sections around, most I think, and, what was it? They cut—

BOB: Superman was Jewish.

CLIFFORD: No way!

ART: He was created by two Jewish guys, but that’s not the same as—

BOB: His Krypton name is Kal-El. “El.” That’s Hebrew for “God.”

ART: They made that up. The original Super—

CLIFFORD: What’s “Kal”?

BOB: Short for Karl, German root for “man.”

ART: “Godman”? You’re saying Superman is a “Godman,” like, like…

CLIFFORD: Yeah! Like Jesus. I get it. He’s an alien. He comes from the heavens and is raised by humans. Oh my God. It’s the same as Tarzan. Or Harry Potter. Jesus Christ was raised by muggles.

BOB: I was actually thinking about the other godmen around then.

ART: Around when? Jesus?

BOB: It was a crowded gene pool. Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Zoraster . . .

CLIFFORD: These are superheroes?

BOB: . . . Adonis, Attis . . .

ART: Adonis? Are you kidding?

BOB: . . . Horus, Aion—did I say Osiris?

ART: Those are just old gods, demigods, like Thor.

BOB: Right, Thor, he was a son of God, too.

(He points at the Mary statue)

Most of them are born from virgins, in mangers, under holy stars. They perform miracles, heal the sick, turn water into wine, raise the dead. Some lead twelve disciples around until they get arrested and executed on trees. Then they come back to life and save humanity.

CLIFFORD: Which “Earth” is this?

ART: Those are knock-off myths. They were written after Jesus.

BOB: The church admitted they came first. They said the devil planted the stories into older religions so people would be confused when the real Son of God showed up. They even put church holidays on top of the originals. Like Mithras. He was born December 25^th.

CLIFFORD: Mithras—didn’t he fight Godzilla?

BOB: There were even three shepherds there. And Easter. March 25^th, that’s the resurrection of Attis.

ART: Where the hell are you getting this stuff?

BOB: It’s all over the place. Google “ancient godmen” and you’ll—

ART: Oh. The Internet. Right. I get it.

BOB: And books. It’s in lots of books. Same place you get any religion. Same as the Bible.

ART: The Bible is not “a book.”

BOB: That’s all the word means. “Books.” Look it up. The church picked its favorite stories and put them in one volume. Like Reader’s Digest. They could have done it with Mithras or Attis or any of—

ART: You’re really saying Jesus came after this stuff? That’s insane. Jesus—

CLIFFORD: I get it! He was an adaptation, a mutant. Darwin weeded out all the other godguys and put Jesus in charge of the herd. It’s natural selection.

ART: It’s got nothing to do with selection. Those other gods are characters in stories. They’re make believe. Jesus has a real history. The Gospels are eyewitness accounts.

BOB: Nobody wrote a gospel till the 70s. Jesus died in the 30s. And the church cut most of them anyway—like a hundred and twenty gospels they threw out. Some of them had little Jesus killing playmates during temper tantrums and raising his pets from the dead.

CLIFFORD: Wow. Like a toddler Superboy.

BOB: Exactly.

ART: No, not like Superboy. It’s nothing like Superboy. Superboy is made-up. He never existed even before he never existed.

CLIFFORD: So Jesus was a little bad ass, huh?

BOB: That’s nothing compared to some of the other gospels.

CLIFFORD: Like what?

BOB: He had sex with Lazarus.

CLIFFORD: No way! Jesus was gay?

ART: Jesus was not gay.

BOB: He was bi.

ART: Jesus was not bi.

BOB: Batman was bi.

CLIFFORD: Batman was bi?

ART: Batman was not bi!

BOB: That’s why they had to break him and Robin up. A millionaire “bachelor” living alone with his young “ward.” Do the math.

CLIFFORD: (After a silent pause as he “does the math”) Oh my God! They were gay.

ART: It was the 50s. It was another era. Those people were paranoid about everything.

CLIFFORD: So Lazarus, did he become Gay Jesus’ sidekick?

BOB: Probably not. They think that gospel might be fake.

ART: Of course it’s fake. The church only kept the real ones. Those other Gospels aren’t Gospels, they’re just stories. That’s why they got rid of them.

CLIFFORD: So it is natural selection. The true stuff won out.

BOB: It’s got nothing to do with “truth.” The gospels in the bible are just the ones that fit the church’s needs at the time.

CLIFFORD: Right. They were the best adapted for survival.

ART: The only need they fit was history.

BOB: Which was up for grabs. Every sect had its own history about Jesus.

CLIFFORD: So God weeded through all the different Jesuses till he got the best one. The other Jesuses, the “dwarf” Jesuses, they died out.

BOB: They didn’t—

CLIFFORD: God decides everything, right? So he must have selected the Gospels he liked or they wouldn’t have made it into the Bible.

BOB: God didn’t—

CLIFFORD: It’s like finding a bunch of bones. God’s showing us the right way to put the pieces together, which don’t belong. It’s like evolution. He’s guiding us.

BOB: God doesn’t guide evolution. That’s the whole point. It just happens. If God is controlling it, then it’s not natural selection. It’s supernatural selection.

ART: How do you know God isn’t controlling it? He invented it.

CLIFFORD: Evolution?

ART: Life. Scientists have no idea how it began. There’s nothing that comes close to explaining it. And since God knows the future, He knew what was going to happen. He knew everything that was going to evolve and when. How’s that different from controlling it?

BOB: Because you don’t have to believe in God to make sense of nature. It works without him.

ART: That’s not the same as saying that there is no God.

BOB: I didn’t say there wasn’t a God.

CLIFFORD: You said there wasn’t a Superboy.

BOB: I said they wrote Superboy out of Superman. It was a stupid story, so they killed it.

ART: The same way they wrote God out of nature? What’s so stupid about God?

BOB: I didn’t say God was stupid! I said he doesn’t guide anything. Do you think he woke up this morning and decided Philomena was coming out of the basement today?

ART: In a way, sure. He may not be micro-managing everything, but progress isn’t accidental. Things happen for a––

BOB: We’re not answering a call from God. The only call I got this morning was from you. You want me in a church moving statues? Fine. You want me pouring cement? Fine. Just don’t tell me this chunk of rock is different from any other. God didn’t make it. God doesn’t care about it. Shatter the thing into a million pieces, and it won’t make any difference to Him.

ART: I don’t know what planet you live on, but this is Earth. God made it and everything on it. Including this church. I’ve been a member of this congregation since I was born, and I’ll be a member after I die. When you and all your stupid ideas are extinct, this “chunk of rock” will still be standing.

(They work in tense silence for a long while. The tension gets to CLIFFORD who stands between the other two, directing his comments to their backs.)

CLIFFORD: So I’m rethinking the whole super-speed thing. Maybe I should go for super-strength? Or invulnerability. What do you think?

(He waits but gets no response.)

Isn’t Krypton a kind of ice planet, like in an ice age? Like Pluto. You’d have to be invulnerable to live there.

(No response)

They ought to make up some new powers, don’t you think? Stop recycling all the old ones. New superheroes too. Like they do with the saints. They make new ones all the time. Aren’t they making the pope one now?

BOB: A saint? He’s not even dead yet.

CLIFFORD: Not the new pope, the old pope. The dead pope. The new pope, the Earth 1 pope, he’s making the Earth 2 pope a saint.

ART: You don’t just make somebody a saint. It’s not like writing a comic book. A committee has to weigh evidence. It takes years.

BOB: Evidence of what?

ART: Miracles.

CLIFFORD: What do they have to do, like fly and walk through walls and stuff?

ART: They cure people.

BOB: So the pope has to come back to life and heal lepers?

ART: People pray to him and he answers them.

CLIFFORD: So one answered prayer and he’s in? He’s a saint.

ART: Two. So it’s empirical.

BOB: Empirical?

ART: Yes. Empirical. That’s how they sainted Mother Drexel back in 2000.

CLIFFORD: What did she do?

ART: Cured a deaf baby. Doctors couldn’t explain it, but the parents said they had prayed to Drexel.

BOB: How did they know to pray to her if she wasn’t a saint yet?

ART: They saw her special on PBS.

CLIFFORD: Now there’s a superpower. No wonder Saint Nick died out.

ART: Saint Nicholas didn’t die out.

CLIFFORD: Santa Claus?

ART: He’s still a saint. Biggest in the Russian Orthodox Church.

CLIFFORD: Fat guy, raised by elves. Lives on the North Pole. He’s still a saint?

ART: Not that part of the story.

BOB: Superman lives on the North Pole.

CLIFFORD: So what’s out, flying reindeer, the toy shop, what?

BOB: In the Fortress of Solitude. They’re neighbors.

ART: The original Saint Nicholas lived, I don’t know, in Roman times. He was rich and gave it all away. They say he threw a bag of gold through a poor father’s window each time the guy was about to sell one of his daughters into prostitution, so he wouldn’t have to.

CLIFFORD: That got him sainted? No stockings, no deaf babies, no Burgermeister Meisterburger? Why don’t we put him up there? With a sack of toys and a chimney.

ART: He didn’t go down chimneys.

CLIFFORD: So what miracles could he do?

ART: They don’t apply that standard to the old saints.

BOB: You said a committee weeded them out.

ART: Any saint that wasn’t actually a person, a historical person, not a legend.

CLIFFORD: But the real ones don’t have to have miracle powers?

ART: Some do. Saint Olaf, his body kept coming out of its grave, and a spring started running from the spot—no, it was blood maybe. He converted a lot of people, too. They can’t verify them though.

CLIFFORD: The conversions.

ART: The miracles. His conversions he did on a chopping block. Believe in God or your head came off.

BOB: They let him stay a saint?

ART: They had to. He was real.

CLIFFORD: What kind of standard is that?

ART: You can’t revoke sainthood. It’s permanent, like, like circumcision.

CLIFFORD: You said they tossed out fifty.

ART: It used to be by popularity; all the early martyrs got in that way. Stories would go around, getting bigger and crazier, and most of them started from something, a real person, but the ones that weren’t they get rid of.

CLIFFORD: But you can still pray to them?

ART: Sure.

CLIFFORD: So they’re “dwarf” saints.

BOB: Where do they live? Pluto?

ART: They don’t live anywhere. They’re not—

CLIFFORD: What if they change their minds again? What if someone digs up a bunch of St. Christopher bones?

ART: Then I guess they’d have to reinstate him.

BOB: Where’s he go in the mean time? Earth 2?

CLIFFORD: This is so unfair. I bet St. Christopher answers way more prayers than Drexel.

BOB: He just goes by “Christopher” now.

CLIFFORD: Look at the odds. People have been praying to him for centuries. He’s probably racked up a dozen deaf babies.

ART: Those are coincidences. Or the Holy Spirit acting through—

CLIFFORD: He got me through eleventh grade science—the unit test on animal classification.

BOB: What about Philomena?

CLIFFORD: (To himself on his fingers) Plants, lichens, invertebrates, vertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.

ART: She has lots of miracles. Cancer and heart disease and a bunch of stuff. Plus back in the second century, she chose torture and death over marriage to the Roman Emperor.

CLIFFORD: Wow. I still remember that.

(A beat, then he crosses himself)

BOB: She didn’t exist.

ART: I mean—that’s the story they tell about her. Officially she’s not real, but she’s still popular. There are all kinds of shrines and foundations, websites. There’s a revival.

BOB: That’s why they want her up here again?

CLIFFORD: Like an endangered species act?

ART: It’s the new pastor’s idea.

CLIFFORD: Wait. That young guy? He’s the pastor? I thought he was like, a sidekick or something.

BOB: Are they going to rename the church again too?

ART: They shouldn’t have changed it to begin with. It upset a lot of good people. My grandmother, my dad says she cried for months.

CLIFFORD: They should name it St. Drexel. She’s got miracles and she was real. She’s a super-saint.

BOB: Drexel. As in the millionaire Drexels? From Philadelphia? No wonder they sainted her.

ART: She didn’t have millions. She was a nun. She gave it to charity.

BOB: All of it?

ART: They have to take a vow of poverty.

CLIFFORD: I thought it was celibacy.

BOB: She was a millionaire, and she gave it all up to be a nun? That is a miracle.

CLIFFORD: It’s like discovering a new species. The Supersaintasarous.

BOB: You hear they dug up a new plant-eating Velociraptor in Utah?

CLIFFORD: What about John Paul 1? Are they sainting him?

BOB: It has feathers.

ART: No, but John 23 probably. Some people are still sore about Vatican II though.

BOB: Everything has to have feathers now.

CLIFFORD: What about Vatican I?

ART: That was in the 60s, the 1860s, when the pope became infallible.

BOB: It’s not technically a Velociraptor though.

CLIFFORD: Infallibility! That’s the superpower I want.

BOB: It’s a missing link between carnivores and herbivores.

ART: And you don’t think God had anything to do with that? These animals just rose up by themselves. What are the odds?

BOB: Pretty good considering plants started growing around the same time.

ART: And that’s just a coincidence? Plant eaters just happen to show up when the plants do.

BOB: You really have no idea what natural selection is, do you?

ART: I know enough to recognize the hand of God when it’s pointing me in the face.

CLIFFORD: Hey, which came first, the Brontosaurus or the egg?

BOB: It wasn’t a—

ART: The Brontosaur.

BOB: The egg.

CLIFFORD: Then where did the Brontosaurus come from?

ART: God.

BOB: Oh, please. Was it pulling a plow in the Garden of—

CLIFFORD: So where’d the egg from?

BOB: From the proto-Brontosaurus.

CLIFFORD: What’s—

BOB: The animal one step behind on the evolutionary ladder. Brontosaurus was its mutation.

ART: There, see? A ladder. You can’t build a ladder one rung at a time. It has to touch the top before you can step on it. It’s predetermined.

BOB: It’s a figure of speech.

CLIFFORD: A metaphor.

ART: It’s God.

BOB: Okay, so say it’s a ladder. What’s next? What’s the next mutation God has planned?

ART: You think I have the power to read God’s mind?

BOB: You think he cooked up the omnivorous ex-Velociraptor right after sprouting new plant life in Utah. So look around. What’s on the agenda? Bigger stomachs? A third eye? Disposable thumbs?

CLIFFORD: But no superpowers, right?

ART: Smaller brains. Weed out the people wasting everybody’s time thinking up stupid stuff.

CLIFFORD: It would be such an obligation. I’d want something that only affects myself.

BOB: If God didn’t want me thinking, why’d he make me like this? Maybe I’m the next rung.

CLIFFORD: Like celibacy.

ART: Or you’ll die out. Not all mutations are good ones. Most of them are useless freaks.

CLIFFORD: Yeah, they’re like curses. That was the whole point of Spiderman. He’s this sad sack loser. A radioactive spider bites him, and when he tries to cash in on his mutant powers, he lets some random bad guy go, and next thing the guy murders his uncle. What are the odds?

(Bob is about to speak but Clifford cuts him off.)

Or Bruce Banner. He saves some stupid kid from getting hit with gamma radiation, and so he has to spend the rest of his life turning into the Hulk—a big toddler-brained Frankenstein. What kind of deal is that? Even Superman must get fed up with it. When does he get a night off? His super-hearing’s always picking up someone screaming for help. No wonder he moved to the North Pole.

ART: So what powers do you want?

CLIFFORD: I don’t. It would be way too much responsibility. You’d have to give up everything.

BOB: It’s not the priesthood. Superheroes can—

CLIFFORD: You’d have no life. Even if you just wanted to fly, that would mean getting people off burning rooftops al the time, swooping in where the rescue ladders can’t reach. Forget privacy. You’d have to move somewhere crowded to maximize your rescuing potential. Vacations, evenings off, naps—how can you sleep if it means somebody dies? You’d be a savior 24/7.

ART: You’d be a god.

CLIFFORD: I couldn’t handle it. I just want to stay normal.

(Clifford resumes working. Bob and Art, uncomfortable to be sitting without him, join in.)

ART: Well you’re too late anyway. God already gave you superpowers. We’re the same as Drexel.

CLIFFORD: We cure deaf babies?

ART: We got money.

CLIFFORD: That’s a superpower?

ART: It’s all Batman had.

CLIFFORD: I’m not a millionaire.

ART: Neither was Drexel after she gave it away. Same for Saint Nicholas. Lots of the saints weren’t rich, but they gave what they had. How much do you give away?

CLIFFORD: To the church?

ART: To anything.

CLIFFORD: I don’t know. I’m saving for college. But I give, sometimes.

ART: How much do you spend on yourself, after the necessities, the minimum you need for survival?

CLIFFORD: I have no idea.

ART: You got a computer? How many sets of clothes? Air conditioning? How much does your car cost?

CLIFFORD: A drive a twenty-year-old Saturn, okay? It’s a piece of crap. I blew fifty bucks on a tire last week—money I don’t have.

ART: Fifty bucks. That would have saved a kid’s life. Food for a month. You could save tons of people.

CLIFFORD: I can’t fly around the world handing out cash. I can barely pay my rent.

ART: Every time you spend money on yourself you’re not spending it on somebody starving to death, or freezing, or whatever. You have powers. You’re just not saving people with them.

BOB: I don’t see you tossing bags of money through windows.

ART: Didn’t say I was. I got a mortgage, two kids in college. Family comes first.

BOB: You think Jesus cares more about your family than other people’s?

ART: You don’t even believe in Him.

BOB: I’m talking about you. Do you think your family is more important than other people?

ART: Than strangers? I can’t care about people I don’t know.

BOB: Why not?

ART: Because I don’t know them.

BOB: But you think Jesus cares about them.

ART: Jesus is God. I’m just human.

BOB: So it’s the species. We’re hard-wired not to care.

ART: It’s got nothing to do with caring. It’s the way we’re made.

BOB: So God gave us brains that can’t care about strangers? What kind of adaptation is that?

ART: It’s normal. God doesn’t expect us to—

BOB: A tsunami wipes out a million people? A million people, that’s what, three hundred times more than on 9/11? Am I three hundred times more upset? I can send money, I donate, but I don’t feel anything personal. I don’t break down like I did when my dog died. A dog. I give more money to the SPCA than I give to UNICEF. Tell me we’re not the most evil species that ever evolved. You think God planned us? He should drop another meteor. We’re just animals. We’re animals with the ability to recognize that we’re animals. That’s our superpower—

ART: Whoa! Carful with her!

(Bob grabbed the rope and they have no choice but to join him. In a moment, they have the Philomena up and step back winded.)

CLIFFORD: Drexel wasn’t an animal.

BOB: Drexel’s a saint. A super-saint. We’re a lesser species.

ART: Okay. We’re “dwarf” Drexels then, or, no, we’re proto-Drexels, one step behind on the evolutionary ladder. She’s our mutation.

BOB: So?

ART: So we helped make her. We’re part of the process. God’s process. Drexel couldn’t have gotten up there without us.

(Bob and Clifford look up again, as though seeing the statue for the first time. The priest enters, sees them, then the statue.)

PRIEST: Oh my. I had no idea. You did that so quickly. I didn’t think . . .

(Looking at the Mary on the ground, and then up at Philomena.)

I’m so sorry. I don’t know how . . . I just got a letter from the bishop. Today. This morning. Just now. I assumed—we all just assumed . . . The bishop it turns out, he doesn’t agree with, I mean, he’s not in agreement. About the statue. Philomena.

(Finally spitting it out)

The statue has to be taken down. We’re not allowed to display it in the church.

(Looking at them fully)

I’m so sorry.

ART: (After an awkward pause) Should we put the Virgin back up?

PRIEST: No. Ah, not yet. Let’s wait and see, okay? There might be another statue downstairs we can use in this spot. With the bishop’s permission. He’s very old, I’m afraid. He doesn’t like new pastors coming in and turning everything upside down. I hope you understand.

(The men smile and nod.)

ART: So take them both downstairs.

PRIEST: Yes. Please. For now. We’ll be able to tell you soon what’s going to go up there. I’m sure we will.

CLIFFORD: St. Christopher maybe?

PRIEST: I’m sorry?

CLIFFORD: Maybe you have some St. Christophers down there in the basement?

PRIEST: Maybe. Probably. There are so many down there. Why? Do you like him?

CLIFFORD: (Thinking a moment) Not really.

PRIEST: Oh.

ART: We’ll get right on it, Father.

PRIEST: Well. Thank you. Thank you again.

(He exits. The men are silent, looking back and forth between the two statues and the job ahead of them now. They begin.)

CLIFFORD: You got to feel bad for her. Imagine going from sainthood back to basement limbo. It would piss me off.

ART: They closed that.

CLIFFORD: The basement?

ART: Limbo.

BOB: It was real?

ART: All the Old Testament patriarchs lived there. Solomon, David, Moses. And all the unbaptized babies. It was too confusing for new converts, so they moved them all up to Heaven.

BOB: I thought they were all in Hades?

ART: Hades doesn’t exist.

CLIFFORD: They got rid of—

ART: You’re thinking Pluto, god of the underworld. The real one is called Hell.

BOB: Whatever. I thought unbaptized people went there.

ART: Limbo’s a subsection of Hell—but a nice one, no torture and stuff.

CLIFFORD: Why not get rid of Hell?

ART: There’s been talk.

(The Mary statue is in position to be lowered into the crate.)

Nice and easy and now. She’s having a hell of a day too.

BOB: You know they had the original Superman come back and try to restore Earth 2?

ART: The 1930s one?

CLIFFORD: Wouldn’t that mean wiping out Earth 1? Our Earth?

BOB: I guess so.

CLIFFORD: Destroy the whole world?

BOB: Yeah.

CLIFFORD: So they made him the bad guy? Superman’s the bad guy?

ART: Can you blame him? Who wouldn’t want their old world back?

CLIFFORD: But it’s Superman. That’s so . . .

ART: Sacrilegious?

BOB: That’s what the popes did to the old godmen, when Rome went Christian, they made all the old saviors demons. Literally sent them to Hell. One day you’re on top of the world, next they’re pulling down your statues. Imagine what that felt like.

ART: He didn’t feel anything. He never existed.

CLIFFORD: But his followers did. Think of them.

BOB: The Romans burnt every book that wasn’t part of the new history. They martyred anyone who couldn’t adapt.

ART: (Mostly to himself) I’d feel worse for Superman.

BOB: (Also to himself) It was like a meteor hit.

ART: First his whole race is wiped out on Krypton.

BOB: Instant Dark Ages.

ART: And then he loses his Earth.

BOB: Pushed civilization back a dozen rungs.

ART: He’s not even the last of his kind anymore.

BOB: Like an ice age.

ART: He’s not anything. He never existed, and he knows it.

BOB: Just bones to sort out.

ART: Can’t get more extinct than that.

BOB: Nothing’s immortal forever.

(Bob and Art fall into silence while Clifford continues to look back and forth at them. They begin to exit while rolling the cart out.)

CLIFFORD: So can he still fly?

(Lights fade. END.)

Superman Will Seduce You to The Good

Posted on May 31, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Sex and violence go together. Working fist in caress, they can help boost a film from PG to PG-13 and on up into R. They’re both adult, both corrupting, both potentially dangerous. That’s why it made sense when bell hooks looked at a Time cover with Beyoncé in her underwear and declared, “I see a part of Beyoncé that is, in fact, anti-feminist—that is, a terrorist—especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” Beyoncé’s sexuality is violent and damaging; it hurts people, especially young people. Sex is a weapon.

So sex and violence, in media, are commonly seen as continuous. But should they be? A little bit back I was talking with a class at Lakeland College about superheroes and violence. The teacher (and sometime HU writer) Peter Sattler, showed some clips from The Man of Steel, and asked the students to talk about the treatment of violence in the film. But the first reaction when the lights came up had a different focus. Taylor Levitt, one of the women in the class, pointed out that Henry Cavill was something special. “Wow,” Julie Bender, agreed, “I didn’t know Superman was so fine!”

Henry Cavill’s fineness is widely agreed on (students weren’t even shown jaw-dropping image of him wandering about with his shirt off.) But what’s interesting in this context is the extent to which that hotness is superfluous to, or off to one side of, the film’s violence.

The genre pleasures of Man of Steel largely involve the usual action film devastation — things blowing up, cities being leveled, good guys hitting bad guys and vice versa. There is also, though, a line through the film about Superman restraining himself; gallantly refusing to use his powers, or refusing to fight back. And a lot of the energy, or investment in those scenes seems to come from Henry Cavill’s hotness; the pleasure of watching this perfect physique in spandex rendered all restrained and submissive. Superman even allows the authorities to put handcuffs on him, supposedly to reassure them, but perhaps actually for the pleasure of a clearly enjoyably flustered Lois Lane, acting as audience surrogate. You may go to the movie to see Superman commit hyperbolic acts of violence in the name of good. But you can also go, it seems like, to see Henry Cavill be sexily passive — to witness an erotic spectacle that is about seductive vulnerability, rather than destructive terror.

William Marston, the psychologist and feminist who created Wonder Woman, deliberately tried to exploit (in various senses) this tension between sex and violence. The original Wonder Woman comics are filled with images of Wonder Woman tied up elaborately with magic lassoes, gimp mask, and sometimes pink ectoplasmic goo. The point of all this, as Marston explained in a letter to his publisher, was to teach violent people the erotic benefits of submission

“This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.”

Marston believed women were better at erotic submission than men, and that therefore women needed to rule so that men could learn from them how to submit. In his psychological writings, Marston referred to the women who would erotically lead the world as “love leaders.” Love leaders would use their sexuality to seduce the world to goodness and peace — just as the soulful-eyed, bound Henry Cavill guides viewer’s thoughts away from the super-battle plot and towards gentler pastimes.

Of course, Marston was kind of a crank, and, in any event, it’s quite clear from Man of Steel that you can have eroticized submission and uber-violence both; you don’t have to choose one or the other. Still, you can choose one over the other if you want; it is possible, to use the erotic to undermine a narrative of violence. This is what happens in Twilight, for example — and it’s part of the reason that many people find the series’ ending so frustrating.

Stephenie Meyer wrote about super-powered vampires, and builds her series towards a climactic, brutal, all out battle. But the focus of Twilight is on the romantic relationship between Bella and Edward; on love, passion, and sex. As a result, Meyer doesn’t feel she needs to follow through on the genre promise of violence — the big all out battle never happens. The series has other interests, which makes a non-violent outcome possible. It’s not a coincident that Bella’s vampire power is literally to neutralize other violent powers, just as Marston hoped erotics could neutralize force. In Twilight, romance and conflict are set against each other, and romance wins. Sex trumps violence.

Vampire_bella_cullen

It’s tempting to conclude hyperbolically by calling Beyoncé a love leader whose command of the erotic will bring about world peace. But that’s no more convincing than calling her a terrorist. Sex isn’t going to save us anymore than it’s likely to doom us. Still, eroticism remains a powerful thing. It seems worth thinking about it not just as a danger, but as a resource — a way, at least, to imagine a world in which heroes don’t always end up hitting each other.

You can keep your hammer, Thor.

Superman: A Twentieth Century Messiah

Posted on May 25, 2014 by Tyler Wenger

(Editor’s Note: This was originally a paper for Chris Gavaler’s superhero class. We’re pleased to be able to reprint it here.)

One may find it hard to look at the red underwear-clad Man of Steel as anything more than a super-powered illustration on the pages of Action Comics and the light of the big screen. However, when ignoring the tights and cape and analyzing Siegel and Shuster’s character closely, Superman can be seen as more than Jerry Siegel’s brainchild, but as the savior of the imagination of this young Jewish writer. Superman, or Clark Kent, first appeared in Action Comics No. 1 in June of 1938 right before World War II began in 1939, a time in which Jewish people needed a savior more than ever. In Superman Chronicles, vol. 1, a compilation of the earliest appearances of the Man of Steel, Siegel and Shuster introduce Superman, a modern messiah. Though the caped crusader’s stories are extremely dramatized and embellished when compared to his robed counterpart, the parallels of defending the oppressed, possessing unequalled power, and ultimately ushering in peace remain strong. Yet Siegel’s messiah surpasses his notion of the biblical messiah, Jesus Christ, through Superman’s conquering and avenging salvation of men. While both characters fulfill the messianic prophecies, Superman embodies the man of action that the oppressed Jews await. Here we see the pen of Joe Shuster and the mind of Jerry Siegel produce a fictional messiah comparable to Jesus of Nazareth in mission and grander than His spiritual salvation through physical action.

Jesus Christ and Superman both play the role of messiah, or leader and savior of a group of oppressed people. While salvation through Jesus is spiritual and salvation through Superman is physical, the mission of saving the oppressed remains constant. One of many messianic prophesies in The Holy Bible claims that the Jewish people “will cry to the Lord because of oppressors, and He will send them a Savior and a Champion, and He will deliver them” (New American Standard Bible, Isa. 19.20). Christians believe that this “champion” of the oppressed Jews came in the form of Jesus to deliver men from sin and to pave the way to heaven in His blood. In Action Comics No.1 when Clark Kent first dons his red and blue, Siegel introduces him as: “Superman! Champion of the oppressed. The physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!” (Siegel 4). Superman, like the prophesied messiah, is described as champion of the oppressed, but the deliverance he brings remains entirely physical and does not go beyond earthly oppression. In one of Superman’s earlier cases, he frees miners from the tyranny of a sadistic boss after which the newly enlightened boss, Blakely, asserts, “You can announce that henceforth my mine will be the safest in the country, and my workers the best treated…” to which Kent replies, “Congratulations on your new policy. May it be a permanent one! (If it isn’t, you can expect another visit from Superman!)” (Siegel 44). Superman caused Blakely to consider the abusive and dangerous conditions that he puts his workers through day in and day out, ultimately delivering them from their oppression. The Holy Bible proclaims: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him” (English Standard Version, Acts 10.38). Though biblical Jesus did free the oppressed from the grasp of the devil and sin, the Jewish belief is that this deliverance is meant more tangibly in freedom from their worldly oppression, which Christ did not bring in their eyes. Though deliverances by Superman such as the salvation of Blakely’s mine workers in Action Comics No. 3 meet the Jewish stipulation obliging physical salvation, Christians believe that their spiritual deliverance is more than enough to call Him the champion of the oppressed. Whether physically super or spiritually godly, both men succeed in fulfilling this prophecy in their own way.

Though not quite as defining as the act of salvation, one of the most universal, unquestioned aspects of a messiah figure is the possession of unrivaled power and dominion. Powerful is an understatement when talking about “Superman, a man possessing the strength of a dozen Samsons!” (Siegel 84). He is a warrior and a powerful leader, capable of overthrowing corrupt rulers and strong-arming the evil. To the defenseless Jewish people in Europe, and even to these Jewish artists in the United States, these qualities made Superman the perfect messiah. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Siegel references Sampson’s strength, represented biblically when “a young lion came toward him roaring. Then the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, and although he had nothing in his hand, he tore the lion in pieces as one tears a young goat” (Judg. 14.5-6). Having already granted enormous physical power upon one of His servants, the Jewish people expected God to send a messiah with even greater physical power to lead them in battle against their oppressors. Again, Jesus’s power comes in a less tangible medium than His bulletproof analog. Superman, however, was granted this physical prowess by his Jewish “fathers,” continuing to directly allude to the story of Samson when “with incredibly agile movement, he twists aside, seizes Leo by the scruff of his neck… ‘Wanna play, huh?’… And carries the ferocious carnivore back to its cage as though it were a harmless kitten!” (Siegel 95). Instead of physical power to fight a lion, the gospel characterizes Jesus with the power and strength of character of God. He is called “Immanuel (which means, God with us)” (Matt. 1.23). As God on earth, Jesus is given “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28.18). The bible seems to define power as spiritual authority rather than the physical strength of Superman Chronicles. Given that Jesus did not decide to use His authority to physically free the Jewish people from their Roman oppressors, instead choosing to defend men in spiritual warfare, it is not hard to see why some Jewish people of the time and in biblical times would prefer the tangible power shown by Superman. These passages do not only allude to Superman’s association with Old Testament prophecies, but they suggest that Siegel and Shuster considered these prophecies and stories during Superman’s conception, consciously creating a messiah figure.

Finally, the biblical Jesus and comic book Superman differ greatest in the nature of the peace reached through their actions. While both saviors usher in peace, the dichotomy of the spiritual repercussions of Jesus’s actions and the physical actions of Superman continues to appear. The Old Testament verse promises that the messiah “shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples…nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isa 2.4). In biblical times, people believed that this promised peace between the Romans and the Jews, among other nations, and this would give them their salvation and deliverance. Though Superman uses a vast amount of violence, he is constantly fighting for peace. In one of the Man of Steel’s most broad—and possibly his most destructive—rescues, he attempts to save the slums when he discovers that “‘the government rebuilds destroyed areas with modern cheap-rental apartments, eh?’ Building after building crashes before his attack! ‘Then here’s a job for it! – When I finish, this town will be rid of its filthy, crime-festering slums!” (Siegel 109). This passage acts as the perfect image of the messiah figure riding into battle to create peace among his people through completely active, violent, and destructive means. While Superman, or rather his writer Jerry Siegel, seems to prefer this method of justice, comic book readers can discover examples of peace through diplomacy. In Action Comics No. 2, he even settles a war between nations by bringing the opposing war-lords together and explaining: “‘Gentlemen, it’s obvious you’ve been fighting only to promote the sale of munitions! – Why not shake hands and make up?’ And so, due to the conciliatory efforts of Superman, the war is halted” (Siegel 30). Shuster draws Superman as a logical, supportive mentor, helping men to choose peace themselves rather than forcing it upon them. In the same way Jesus, King of the Jews, sought to bring His people to spiritual and eternal peace through His defeat of death in the form of resurrection. He points back to the prophecy in Isaiah by reassuring His disciples that “I [Jesus] have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16.33). This promise does not assure that God’s people will live life on Earth in utter peace and harmony, at least by the society’s definition, but rather looks to the peace granted by admission to the eternal paradise of heaven. However, Jesus does additionally promise peace on Earth in the form of the Holy Spirit, referred to the Spirit directly as “Peace” in reciting: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give you” (John 14.27). Though this peace is more physical than that spoken of in the passage above, it remains a spiritual peace in that it perpetuates as an inner peace despite the trials and tribulations of life. The peace brought by Superman does not deal with the spiritual or how people deal with situations, but focuses entirely on eliminating as many tribulations as possible; therefore, Superman’s goal of peace is yet to be realized. Regardless of the completion of his goal, the physical and spiritual missions perpetuated by Superman and God-as-man yield sufficient peace to bestow both heroes with the title of a messianic peace-bringer.

While Siegel found inspiration for the last son of Krypton in the only begotten Son of God, the two differ in one very distinct way: Jesus is the spiritual savior of eternal life while Superman is the physical savior of life on earth. In their defense of the weak, their strength in battle, and their strides towards peace, it is fitting to call Superman the Messiah of the twentieth century, at least in the fictional comic book world. With Nazi Germany attempting to enslave and oppress the Jewish people, the physical salvation of Superman would understandably sound more appealing to some than a spiritual salvation, just as it may have to the Jews of biblical times under the heel of the Roman empire. Just as the Christian messiah reshaped the religion of those Jews who accepted His teachings, “Superman is destined to reshape the destiny of a world!” (Siegel 16)… at least in the comic books and in the minds of his avid readers.

Works Cited

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010. Print.

Holy Bible: Updated New American Standard Bible. Anaheim, CA: Foundation Publications, 2007. Print.

Siegel, Jerry and Joe Shuster. Superman Chronicles. V1. New York, NY: DC, 2006, Print.

(Tyler Wenger is an upcoming sophomore at Washington and Lee University from Franklin, TN. He is a pre-med student planning on majoring in Neuroscience and he has been both a Christian and a die-hard Superman fan for his entire life.)

Superman on the Throne

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Jerry Siegel stole Superman’s 1938 tagline “champion of the oppressed” from Douglas Fairbanks. The silent film star’s 1920 The Mark of Zorro opens with the intertitle: “Oppression—by its very nature—creates the power that crushes it. A champion arises—a champion of the oppressed—whether it be a Cromwell or someone unrecorded, he will be there. He is born.”

You can quibble with the superheroic logic (is oppression always self-defeating?), but the word that made me pause (literally, I thumbed PAUSE on my remote) is “Cromwell.” As in Oliver Cromwell, the man who chopped off King Charles’ head in 1649 to become Lord Protector of England until his own, kidney-related death a decade later (after which Charles’ restored son dug up his body and chopped off his head too). All perfectly interesting, but what, you may ask, does that have to do with Zorro?

Johnston McCulley doesn’t mention Cromwell in The Curse of Capistrano, the All-Story pulp serial Fairbanks adapted. Some American Fairbanks trace their name back to the Puritan Fayerbankes, proud followers of Cromwell since the 1630s, so maybe Douglas was just carrying on family tradition. Except The Mark of Zorro isn’t the first Cromwell mention in superhero lore.

George Bernard Shaw lauds him in “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” an appendix to his 1903 Man and Superman, the play that first gave us the English ubermensch. Shaw (or his alter ego John Tanner, the Handbook’s fictional author) declares Cromwell “one of those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in spite of the interference of Man’s blundering institutions.” A devout eugenicist, Shaw/Tanner longed for a nation of supermen, “an England in which every man is a Cromwell.”

By the time Siegel was copying Fairbanks’ intertitles in the 30s, “Cromwell” and “Superman” were synonyms. Biographer John Buchan (better known for his Hitchcock adapted Thirty-Nine Steps) called him “the one Superman in England who ruled and reigned without a crown.” P. W. Wilson extended the comparison to modern times, ranking England’s Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin “among the supermen,” and likening his overseeing of Edward VIII’s abdication to Cromwell’s regicide.

Alan Moore extends the superhero connection even further. In a 2007 interview, Moore (like Shaw’s John Tanner) identifies himself as an anarchist (“the only political standpoint that I could possibly adhere to would be an anarchist one”) and so longs for a society with “no leaders” (he’s literally anti “archons”). He traces his inspiration to 17^th England when underground religious movements were espousing the heretical view that all men could be priests, “a nation of saints.” And, Moore explains, “it was during the 17th century that, partly fueled by similar ideas, Oliver Cromwell rose up and commenced the British civil war, which eventually led to the beheading of Charles I.”

Guy Fawkes (inspiration for Moore’s V for Vendetta) had tried to kill Charles’ father, King James, a half century earlier, but Guy was no Oliver. Moore revels in the thought of headless monarchs, but Buchan celebrates the executioner, “an iron man of action” with “no parallel in history.” Cromwell ignored his own council of commanders during the civil war and, after making England a republic, he ignored Parliament too. “It was too risky to trust the people,” writes Buchan, “he must trust himself.”

That’s the ubermensch Shaw adores. Not a champion of the oppressed, but a champion of the self. And it’s a quality still central to every superhero, all those iron men of action who trust only themselves, ignoring and sometimes defying law enforcement to maintain their own sense order. Zorro opposed the colonial regime of a corrupt California governor. Cromwell fought for religious freedom against a tyrant who persecuted anyone who did not conform to the Church of England.

But what happens after oppression is crushed? Fairbanks’ Zorro retires into happy matrimony. McCulley rebooted his Zorro for more oppression-opposing adventures—inspired by Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, an iron man of action dedicated to rescuing noble necks from the kind of execution blade Cromwell wielded. Once enthroned, the Lord Protector imposed his own, literally Puritanical order on England. He closed taverns, chopped down maypoles, outlawed make-up, fined profanity, and, as a real life Burgermeister Meisterburger, cancelled Christmas.

When Alan Brennert wrote his 1991 graphic novel, Batman: Holy Terror, he kept Cromwell on the throne another decade, creating an alternate universe in which the U.S. is an English commonwealth run by a corrupt theocracy. It seems Supermen in charge are not such a good thing for the common man. Look at Garth Ennis’ The Boys (2006), or Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come (1996), or Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme (1986), or, best yet, Alan Moore’s Marvelman (AKA, Miracleman, but let’s not go into that right now). I bought No. 16 from my college comic shop in 1989, a year after I graduated college. It’s the last issue before Neil Gaiman took over and I stopped reading the series. Gaiman is great, but the story was over. Marvelman has rid the world of nuclear warheads, money, global warming, crime, childbirth pain, and, in some cases, death. He’s not king of the world. He’s its totalitarian god.

Marvel Comics is re-releasing and completing the series now, and, what the hell, I’ll probably pick up where I left off. But my worship of Moore is long over. I considered him the reigning writer of the multiverse for decades, but his rule grew increasingly idiosyncratic and, less forgivable, dull. His last Miracleman, “Olympus,” is a tour of the dystopic future. From Hell offers similar tours, literally horse-drawn, which, while aggressively non-dramatic in structure, basically work. But my heart sunk when the third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman devolved into a balloon ride over yet more of Moore’s meticulously researched esotoria. Yes, the dream-like Blazing World is ripe with 3-D nudity, but this is no way to conclude a plot. When Promethea, my favorite of all Moore creations, plunged down the same rabbit hole, I couldn’t make myself keep reading. Moore was running his own imprint at this point, America’s Best Comics, with no Parliament or War Council left to ignore, and no corrupt tyrant to oppose.

Heroes need oppression. Even Fairbanks’ son, Douglas Jr., knew that. After his father’s death, he wrote, produced, and starred in The Exile, a 1947 swashbuckler about Charles II, the son of the king Cromwell beheaded. He hides out on a Holland farm and falls in love with a flower monger while battling Cromwell’s assassins before Parliament calls him back to his throne. It’s a happy ending made happier by the fact that Fairbanks didn’t follow it with a sequel. After Charles started waging wars and suspending their laws, Parliament regretted their invitation.

Every Cromwell—by his very nature—creates the Cromwell that crushes him.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Superman