Tag Archives: Superman

Jesus Christ vs. Superman

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Superman20Alex20Ross207

 
Who was the historical Jesus? Recent studies have razored the verifiable facts down to a skeleton so thin I made the mistake of suggesting at a dinner party that there’s not enough evidence to assume a real Jesus ever existed. Isn’t it just a question of faith?

This did not make me popular with the religion professor across the table. She cited the usual witnesses, Josephus, Tactus, Pliny, all nice guys but a bit flimsy on cross-examination. It’s tricky when you see just how many Christs (it’s not a name but a title, “the messiah”) were wandering Roman-occupied Israel during the first century. Add the even longer tradition of pagan godmen born of virgins who die for us and are reborn, and Jesus may be the most rebooted superhero in history.

But if Jesus wasn’t the first self-sacrificing demigod to save the world, he’s by far the most influential. It doesn’t take a biblical scholar to recognize other family resemblances: a Jew found by Egyptians, a Kryptonian by humans; a human reared by apes, fairies, or elves, a wizard by muggles, a king by backwater nobles, the son of God by Jews. The boy is always fated to grow up extraordinary: prophet, Man of Steel, jungle lord, Santa Claus, Voldemort-slayer, King of England, God. Movie directors also love to shoot their spandex godmen in crucifix-evoking poses, Superman especially (Smallville, Superman Returns, Man of Steel), and a Last Temptation motif runs through the screen genre too (Superman II, Spider-Man 2, The Fantastic Four, The Dark Knight Rises, The Wolverine).

There’s enough written on the historical Jesus to crash a Kindle, but the New and Improved Testament of Superman would be simpler. Did a historical Clark Kent ever walk the Earth? Interpretations fall into three camps:

1) Literalists accept the claims of the canonical Media as absolute: Clark was an extraterrestrial with supernatural powers dedicated to humankind.

2) Historicists analyze both canonical and non-canonical Media in search of the so-called authentic Clark, a human being of purely naturalistic ability around whom followers later developed legendary tales.

3) Mythicists reject that any Clark, human or extraterrestrial, existed, arguing that early Superman worship was actually an adaptation of pre-existing practices common to the era.

Literalism dominates popular culture. A 2012 Rasmussen poll found that 86% of Americans believe Clark Kent walked among us, and 77% believe he was resurrected after his battle with Doomsday. While vaguely aware of the academic controversies surrounding the historical Clark, the average comic book reader would never question Superman’s extraterrestrial origins and powers. Literalists prefer the traditional assumption that Superman Media were created through infallible inspiration and that dissecting long-cherished productions is an offense to followers. But no belief system, no matter how deeply ingrained in a cultural psyche, is exempt from intellectual examination. Believers should be willing to combine the faith of their convictions with the rigor of impartial analysis.

Looking first at canonical Media, both Historicists and Mythicists make much of the fact that Superman Adventures contain a lot of internal contradictions. Was, for instance, the infant Clark ever placed in an orphanage? The Adventures According to Max show that he was, but Adventures According to George include no orphanage and depict only the Kent foster parents finding and raising the Superman child. Max never even mentions the Kents. Some Literalists explain the inconsistency by citing Jerome & Joe, arguably the oldest of the Media, when the Kents deliver the foundling to an orphanage and then return to adopt him. Reliance on Jerome & Joe, however, points out other contradictions. Superman’s adoptive mother—Martha in the other Media and in most Literalist ceremonies—is Mary here.

The Media is also inconsistent regarding superpowers. Although tradition maintains that Superman always had the ability to fly, Jerome & Joe list no such power, and Clark’s propensity to “hurdle skyscrapers” and “leap an eighth of a mile”—from the earliest version of the Superman creed still repeated by followers today—implies the opposite. The creed itself has undergone multiple changes, and even DC Entertainment, that bastion of superhero fundamentalism, acknowledges that the addition of “and the American way” to Superman’s pledge to fight for “truth and justice” is an interpolation into George, as demonstrated by the phrase’s absence in the otherwise identical Max edition (Max is assumed to be older because later media tend to expand rather than condense earlier sources).

A study of non-canonical Media, or Apocrypha, raises further issues. While The Lost Episodes of Psuedomax can be dismissed, more has been made of the largely forgotten Adventures According to Christopher. The assertion that George and Christopher are the same creator (based mostly on the misreading of “Reeve[s]” as a surname rather than a title) is rejected by most scholars, but the video still challenges many elements of the tradition. Literalists cite it as an independent source supporting the general narrative of the canonical Adventures, but the Christopher depiction of Krypton varies radically with George and lends support to the growing consensus that all accounts of Superman’s planet of origin are conjectural.

Despite annual re-enactments of the baby Superman’s escape from doomed Krypton in his father’s rocket and the tearful farewell of his self-sacrificing biological parents, there’s little support for the tale’s authenticity. Only George in the Superman Media dramatizes it. Jerome & Joe and Max mention only the fact of the planet’s destruction and the arrival of the rocket on earth. Not only may Superman’s biological parents be inventions, but even the name of the planet is suspect (Krypton, or “Crypt-on,” translates “on or from the unknown”).

The most famous Apocrypha are the much maligned Infancy Adventures. These psuedographics, many attributed to the heretical Super Friends cult, feature a pre-adolescent Clark, or “Superboy,” engaging in acts clearly derivative of the canonical Adventures. Literalist tradition maintains that Clark Kent’s powers manifested with puberty. The Infancy Apocrypha pose no direct threat to Literalism, or even Historicism, but Mythicists use the tales to highlight temporal gaps in the biography. Neither Literalists nor Historicists can say much about Clark until the age of thirty when he dons his ceremonial costume and his followers dub him Superman (a title, Literalist point out, Clark never claimed for himself). It’s hardly surprising no records remain of Clark before the age twelve, but the dearth of information after the initial development of his powers and before his dedication to humankind is odd. It doesn’t, however, lead to the Mythicist conclusion that no historical Clark ever existed.

Mythicists also point to elements in the Superman Media that pre-date the composition of the earliest Adventures and so, they argue, disprove a historical basis for Clark Kent. They trace the name “Superman” to an obscure, German prophet and say the Clark/Superman duality is prefigured by the cult of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Mythicists also spend a great deal of time analyzing pre-Superman superhero prototypes in attempt to show that all portrayals of battles between good and evil must be fictional. Many Mythicists view the Superman Media as allegories showing how to realize you “inner Superman” by destroying your “home planet”(the lowly physical world ) and dedicating yourself to “truth and liberty.” Krytonite represents material distractions that prevent initiates from maintaining their spiritual powers.

Although the Mythicist approach is easy to lampoon, a purely Literalist approach is equally problematic. Historicists may unjustifiably dismiss the extraterrestrial nature of Clark Kent, but their scholarship can peel away inauthentic elements from the historical Adventures to reveal the true Superman. Followers owe it to the memory of Clark Kent to bring Superman worship into the 21st century. How can we dismiss other religion’s superstitious beliefs—with their magic cosmic rays and radioactive spiders bites—without fully examining our own?

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

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Art by John Romita,Sr, and Mike Esposito

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

However, consider the cover picture below:
 

Art by Curt Swan and George Klein

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

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

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

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

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

Gore Vidal, The Waking Dream:Tarzan Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the transhumanist site euvolution

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

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

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

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

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

Resist the temptation of the superman.

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

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Art by Joe Shuster

 

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

 

See you in the Funny Papers

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

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

Art by Roy Crane; click on image to enlarge

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

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

Art by Phil Davis (1906-1964)

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

Art by Fred Guardineer

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

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

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

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

All in Color for a Dime

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

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

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

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

Cover illustration by Jon Mayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nazis were now in power.

Hoch der Uebermensch!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Care for the children.

4. Care for the children’s mothers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man of Steel — and of Paper

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

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

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

click on image to enlarge

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

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

Certainly, that’s how some Nazis saw it:

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

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

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

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

(Das Schwarze Korps, April 25, 1940.)

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

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

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

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

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click on image to enlarge

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

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

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

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

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

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

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

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

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

art by Fred Guardineer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

art by Joe Shuster; click on image to enlarge

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

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

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

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

Next: Inventory and Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The books continue to sell well to this day.

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

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

The Coming of the Pulps

The successor to the dime novel was the pulp magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
Zorro is worth dwelling on for several reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there were the ‘character pulps’.

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

Harvesters of the Bitter Fruit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

super-hero, the first time this appellation appears.

Blinded with Science

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

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

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

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

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

Space Legionaires facing a bit of a sticky wicket

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

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

Next: Reign of the Superman

 

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

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Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls

 

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

 

Enter the Detective

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

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

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

>Vidocq

Vidocq– criminal turned policeman

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

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

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

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

Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes; illustration by Sydney Paget

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Der Uebermensch

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

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

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

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

Beyond the superman

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A Martian tripod, from The War of the Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Jim Steranko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

…or the British Bananaman:

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Art by Terry Anderson

 
…or the Italian Super West:
 

art by Mattioli

 

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

 

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

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

Next: Go West, Young Man

 

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

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

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

The Engineer as Superman

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

.

Nemo and crew fighting a giant squid

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

The Terror (L’epouvante)

 

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

illustration for Hartmann the Anarchist.

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

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

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

The Steam Man of the Prairies

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

art by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond

 

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

 

Early advertisement for Bovril

 

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

Art by Ron Wilson, John Romita, and Ernie Chua

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Penny Dreadful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Punch magazine, 1845

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

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

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

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

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

A description of his costume:

His dress was most striking.

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

This garment was of a blood-red colour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monte Cristo: superman

 

Alexandre Dumas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The island of Monte Cristo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God is for me and with me.”

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

art by Alex Blum

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

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

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

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

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

Art by John Buscema and Ernie Chan

 

Next: Supermen of Science — Verne and  Edison