Tag Archives: Superman

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

Posted on by

Brown_Ford_Maddox-Manfred_on_the_Jungfrau

Manfred on the Jungfrau, by Ford Madox Brown

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

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

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

As Eco  elaborates:

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

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

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

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

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

 

How did we get from here:

…to here?

Art by Joe Shuster

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

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

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

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

The Classic Hero

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

Heracles Farnese

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

What the classic hero was not was an individual.

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

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

– Herodotus,  History

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

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

 

Too late, Charlemagne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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




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




Portrait of Rousseau by De la Tour




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


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


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


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


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




Dinner service à la française


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




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


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


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


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






Napoleon crossing the Alps, by David




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


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


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


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


          O joyless power that stands by lawless force!

Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate,

Internal darkness and unquiet breath;

And, if old judgments keep their sacred course,

Him from that Height shall Heaven precipitate

By violent and ignominious death.

–Wordsworth,  1809


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


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


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


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


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


Masters of Nature


Welch erbaermlich Grauen Fasst Uebermenschen Dich?


[What vexes you, oh superman?]

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808)


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


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


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








click image to enlarge






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


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


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


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


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

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


 




Frankenstein and his monster; illustration by Theodor von Holst


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


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


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




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


– Shelley, op.cit.




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


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


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


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


Romanticism and the Gothic Backlash


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


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




Walpole’s neo-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill


 

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


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


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


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

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Superman Isn’t Jesus, He’s Moses

			
						

				Posted on   by  			

			
					


				

			
Let me say up front that I loved Man of Steel. Unabashedly. I didn’t realize how much I missed a well-done Superman, someone who is just genuinely a good person, not all broody and conflicted like Batman, nor snarky like Iron Man, but someone who wants to do the right thing, until I was watching the movie and I loved it.


But even in the middle of my love for it, I felt like something wasn’t quite right. The movie was so good, but it wasn’t great. The movie seemed both to love Superman and not quite understand him. Take the ending, where so much of Metropolis is destroyed, so many lives lost, but without any emotional consequences for Superman. I didn’t buy that Superman wouldn’t have at least attempted to move the battle out of town and I surely didn’t buy that Superman wouldn’t have been devastated by those deaths.


But the biggest indication I found that the movie didn’t get Superman had to be when we saw Superman in the church, his head right next to Jesus. This wasn’t the only Jesus reference. Richard Corliss in Time points out the obvious others:


Man of Steel takes its cue from Bryan Singer’s 2006 Superman Returns, which posited our hero as the Christian God come to Earth to save humankind: Jesus Christ Superman. [Script-writer, David] Goyer goes further, giving the character a backstory reminiscent of the Gospels: the all-seeing father from afar (plus a mother); the Earth parents; an important portent at age 12 (Jesus talks with the temple elders; Kal-El saves children in a bus crash); the ascetic wandering in his early maturity (40 days in the desert for Jesus; a dozen years in odd jobs for Kal-El); his public life, in which he performs a series of miracles; and then, at age 33, the ultimate test of his divinity and humanity. “The fate of your planet rests in your hands,” says the holy-ghostly Jor-El to his only begotten son, who goes off to face down Zod the anti-God in a Calvary stampede. You could call Man of Steel the psychoanalytical case study of god-man with a two-father complex.


All these New Testament allusions — plus the image of Superman sitting in a church pew framed by a stained-glass panel of Jesus in his final days — don’t necessarily make Man of Steel any richer, except for students of comparative religion. And as Goyer has noted, “We didn’t come up with these allusions of Superman being Christ-like. That’s something that’s been embedded in the character from the beginning.


Whoa, doggy. That’s just flat out wrong. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster weren’t patterning Superman after Jesus. They were patterning him after Moses. A woman has a baby she cannot keep or he’ll die. She puts him in a small ship, of sorts, and sends him off, hoping some other woman will take him in, raise him, and keep him safe. He grows up to save people.


Pharaoh's Daughter Finds Moses Exodus 2:3-6It’s not a perfect match. Moses’ mom lives. He has a sister and a brother who he hooks back up with later. His culture of origin isn’t lost.


But losing sight of Superman’s origins in a basket in the bulrushes means the filmmakers miss the importance of some of the very things they’re depicting. And they miss opportunities to make Man of Steel into a richer story, because they’re drawing on the wrong archetype.


Let’s be frank. Jesus makes a bad Superman. There are a lot of reasons why, starting with the fact that no one wants to watch Superman standing around lecturing people, being tortured to death, and then scaring the shit out of his friends by appearing to them after he’s dead (okay, maybe I would want to watch that Superman movie, but it doesn’t scream summer blockbuster) and ending with the fact that Jesus, though a really compelling figure, is compelling for his ideas, not his action adventures.


But the most important reason Jesus makes a bad Superman is that, unlike the other men in the “hidden special child” genre, Jesus’ story has a specific arc and a definite end. And I’m not talking about his crucifixion. What I mean is that Jesus has one battle with his arch-enemy, he wins, and the world is over, the end.


Jesus’ story can be retold and reimagined—a crucial component for a good superhero story. But there is no “Tune in next time for another exciting adventure.” Jesus is a one-and-done hero. When Jesus accomplishes his mission, the world is at its end. If Superman is Jesus and we saw his huge fight with his dad’s nemesis, what’s the plot of the next movie?


But, as luck would have it, even if the filmmakers thought they were making a Christ-allegory, there’s enough of the Moses tale still present to suggest some possibilities for further storytelling. We saw Lara, like Jocabed, entrusting her son to a woman she could not know. There’s not a lot about the Pharaoh’s daughter in the Christian Bible, but both Jewish and Muslim lore flesh her out a whole lot more and, though the lore differs somewhat, both traditions show her radically changed by raising Moses, to the point where she throws her lot in with the Jewish people trapped in her country and forsakes the Egyptians.


It would be interesting to see how Martha Kent might throw her lot in with the superheroes, even though she’s not one, in order to keep supporting her son and his cause. Superman stories tend to leave Martha at home, but the Moses archetype suggests bigger possibilities for her.


I think we unintentionally saw the destruction of the Golden Calf when Superman destroyed the drone. And we saw, constantly, Superman surrounded by people who didn’t quite trust him. All this just serves to remind us that Moses has continuing adventures. He does have a good arch-nemesis in the Pharaoh, with a great backstory that ties them both together in a compelling way that adds to their encounters. Is Moses rejecting the culture, and thus the Pharaoh that saved him? How can the Pharaoh retain his power and authority in his own community and deal with a community with God on their side? Moses has a murder for a righteous cause hanging over his head (and really, the death of Zod in Man of Steel is alarming because the movie has spent so much time arguing for Jesus-Superman. And Jesus doesn’t kill people. But there’s no such problem with Moses.). And then there’s the 40 years in the wilderness. There’s a lot of ground to cover, stories to be told. Things you could add or take away or retell in countless ways. The fact that at least three religions already do so proves it’s a rich story that stands up to the type of reuse our superhero stories get.


The biggest difference between Moses and Jesus, one with important implications for the Superman story is that, while Jesus can go anywhere people are—earth, Heaven, Hell—Moses never entirely fits in with the people he’s leading. He wasn’t raised with them, he wasn’t an adult among them at first (remember, he runs off and lives in Midian for forty years), and he can’t go with them into the Promised Land. It’d be interesting if these were the people of Earth. But imagine the story you could tell if these were the Justice League. What would it mean if Superman were leading them toward a goal he could never meet?


I saw referenced multiple places that Man of Steel was yet another movie that attempts to tell 9/11 with a happy ending. Okay, so if Superman can be used to talk about big tragedies people are still trying to grapple with, why not more explicitly let Superman grapple with the unimaginable tragedy of the destruction of his people in ways that mirror how Jewish people have wrestled with the Holocaust?


I’m not arguing for a one-to-one mapping. Obviously that wouldn’t work. But there are writers who could pen a compelling story—because they know that story—about a guy who, as far as he knows, is the only person in his culture left, who must wonder if he resembles his grandfather or whether he got his love of science from his aunt, who must wish he knew old folk songs or what the people in his family’s neighborhood ate at holiday meals, and who can’t ever get complete answers to those questions.


And then, what happens when Kara shows up? Do you rejoice in the found family member? Do you find her presence a sharp reminder of the rest of your loved ones’ absences? Of their ultimate fates?


-1


Superman can have hope because he’s corny Jesus-dude made of hope or he can have hope because the alternative is to give into despair. The second choice makes for a more real movie, and one that, I’d argue, is truer to Superman’s roots, both mythically and in the lived realities of his original creators.


But the thing I find most fascinating and appalling about taking something with its roots in Moses and declaring that its roots were in Jesus all along is that this is such a common approach—not to superheroes, but to theology—that there’s a word for it: Supersessionism.


The belief that the new covenant between Jesus and his followers supersedes the old covenant between God and the Jewish people is fundamental to most forms of Christianity. Even if Christians don’t know the term, it’s the reason we eat cheeseburgers. And it’s an incredibly tender sore spot among Jewish people, who aren’t that excited to hear all about how, when God said he was keeping a perpetual covenant with the children of Israel, he meant “perpetual until some better people come along.” Jewish scholars and theologians have argued—and rightly so, I think—that the Christian belief that Christians now have the special relationship with God that supersedes the Jewish relationship is an important part of the foundations of anti-Semitism (because, in part, it implies that God’s fine with whatever terrible things Christians want to do to Jews, because God doesn’t love them best, or at all, any more).


Superman isn’t a Jewish myth, but he’s a cultural figure with strong Jewish roots—created by two Jewish guys, given an origin story that draws heavily from one of Judaism’s central figures. Neglecting those roots and grafting on Christian ones instead is problematic. It makes for a less compelling story (like I said, if Jesus/Superman has defeated Satan/Zod, what can happen in the next movie that still keeps Superman a Christ-figure?), it neglects the rich mythology Superman’s creators drew from, and it perpetuates a troubling theological stance.


But I think the worst thing is that it indulges its majority Christian audience in this country in a lie we often tell ourselves without realizing—that Jesus is the center of all things and we, being close enough to the center, should be the people around which the whole country revolves; all stories are our stories or can be taken and made to be. In the end, using Superman to reinforce Christian supremacy in the United States probably isn’t going to ruin Superman. But it is a lie that comes from and leads to ugly places. And it’s a shame to see it at the heart of Man of Steel.

______

Betsy Phillips writes for The Nashville Scene‘s political blog, “Pith in the Wind.” In her spare time, she makes up spooky stories. Her fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine and Qarrtsiluni. 


First illustration unknown artist; 2nd from Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely All Star Superman”


 

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Krypton vs. Kypton

			
						

				Posted on   by  			

			
					


				

			
Man of Steel


There have always been two flavors of superhero: Marvel and DC. When my dad was reading comics in the 40s, Marvel (AKA Timely) threw anti-heroes into DC’s original, and so much blander. good guy mix. When I was reading comics in the 70s, Marvel put out the sophisticated stuff, DC the embarrassingly childish. My twelve-year-old son reads the occasional comic now but mostly takes his superheroes in movie form like everyone else in the 21st century. But Marvel and DC are still the reigning flavors. Only these days Marvel Entertainment tends toward the comically playful, Warner Brothers the pretentiously somber.


Look at Iron Man 3, an incoherent but highly entertaining comedy. The slapstick moment in The Avengers when the Hulk punches Thor after teaming up to fight alien invaders made me snort so loudly I embarrassed my teenaged daughter. Dark Knight Rises on the other hand, not so much with the uncontrollable laughter. Ditto for Man of Steel. Is that a bad thing? Well, it means my wife writhed in her seat for 143 minutes, tweeting updates of her torture. My son at least enjoyed the fight scenes.


I’m not a big Zack Snyder fan. 300 enraged me, Watchmen bored me. But Man of Steel I can mostly live with. Except for the shot after shot after World Trade Center-inspired shot of collapsing New York. When the hell did  9/11 get downgraded to CGI fodder?


But aside for the drone Superman downs in the epilogue because the government keeps trying to invade his privacy, Snyder isn’t interested in the War on Terror. He, like so many recent superhero writers, is stuck in World War II. General Zod is this month’s Hitler reboot. If a field of human skulls is too subtle a Holocaust allusion, Superman spells it out: “You’re talking about genocide.”


There’s been some internet kvetching about the damage the movie does to old Superman mythology. Aside from a few four-winged dragons, I disagree. For all his pretentious somberness, Zack Snyder gets Jerry Siegel. Superman was born to battle eugenics, and eugenics is what Man of Steel is mostly about.


Snyder’s Krypton isn’t a luckless ice planet dying of old age. It is the pinnacle of selective breeding, a planet whose inhabitants have taken the reins of evolution and engineered themselves into a race of violently amoral ubermensch. They breed scientifically, culling only the so-called best from a gene pool Registry. As one of Zod’s sidekicks quips: “Evolution always wins.”


Siegel said as much in Superman #1: “Superman came to Earth from the planet Krypton whose inhabitants had evolved, after billions of years, to physical perfection!” In Superman’s newspaper comic strip premiere, Krypton is “a distant planet so far advanced in evolution that it bears a civilization of supermen—beings which represent the human race at its ultimate peak of perfect development!” How can aliens represent the human race? Easy. They’re not aliens. The original Krypton was Earth:


“In his laboratory, the last man on Earth worked furiously. He had only a few moments left.


“Giant cataclysms were shaking the dying planet, destroying mankind. It was in its last days, dying . . .


“The last man placed his infant babe within a small time-machine he had completed, launching it as—


“—the laboratory walls caved-in upon him.


“The time-vehicle flashed back thru the centuries, alighting in the primitive year, 1935 A.D.”


That’s the script Siegel mailed Buck Rogers artist Russell Keaton in the summer of 1934. After drawing a few test scripts, Keaton turned him down, and Siegel crawled back to his high school pal Joe Shuster.


But his Superman wasn’t from a galaxy far far away. He was barely even scifi. After the German invasion of Poland and France, William Marston wrote that Siegel “believed that the real superman of the future would be someone with vast power who would use his invincible strength to right human wrongs.” That phrase, “the real superman of the future,” is literal. The Superman was the stated goal of eugenics.


Krypton’s Registry, the Codex of the genetically fit that General Zod wants so desperately–that’s literal too. American tycoon John Harvey Kellog (yes, you’ve eaten his cornflakes) and his Race Betterment Foundation started it back in 1915. Long Island’s Eugenics Registry Office opened in 1910, advocating the prevention of unfit breeding through immigration restrictions, racial segregation, anti-interracial marriage laws, sterilization, and “euthanasia.” The committee recommended every American smallville have its own gas chamber.


By the time Siegel was writing, Germany had adopted that American model and was expanding it into Auschwitz. That’s the Krypton Siegel was fighting against. His Superman was literally the Nazi Superman, plucked from the eugenic future and redirected to fight the superpowers who evolved him.


So I get why Snyder’s take is light with the laugh track. But didn’t we already win World War II? I wouldn’t mind a history lesson–in fact, yes, let’s please correct all the U.S. History textbooks that have conveniently written out the U.S.’s leadership in the eugenics movement. Eugenics was still taught in high school biology classes even while we were at war with the movement’s ultimate champions. A Superman fan in the late 30s and early 40s would have gotten Siegel’s allegories. But of the millions who saw Man of Steel opening weekend, how many registered anything but a Dark Knight-esque scifi romp? We should understand General Zod as more than just some alien supervillain. He’s us. He’s America’s darkest potential. I’m not sure even Snyder knows that.


I don’t necessarily object to Hollywood using the Holocaust and 9/11 to rake in profits. But I do expect something in the trade. Maybe some sly introspection? A little under-the-current thought-provocation on the socio-political issue of the film-makers’ choice? Instead, we get more destruction and a Superman who indifferently pulverizes his own Smallville and Metropolis during his ubermensch slugfests. Are we really not supposed to think about the collateral body count in the convenience stores and skyscrapers? There’s a lot of reasons not to laugh during this movie.


I was being partisan as kid when I duped myself into thinking Marvel was so much more sophisticated than childish DC. Maybe I’m still duping myself. Marvel Entertainment has no trouble cranking out its own brand of pretension. But superheroes remain a goofy genre, endlessly championing CGI fight spectacles over story and character.There’s a rather low, Hollywood-imposed limit to what such a movie can do. Zack Snyder’s somber palette and frowning ubermensch (did I mention the Christ motif?) aren’t pushing any of those boundaries. Neither are the members of the cheerier, Joss Whedon team. But when I go to my smallville theater to watch some guy in a cape, I prefer to come out giggling.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Summer Blockbusters: The Quest for Peace

			
						

				Posted on   by  			

			
					


				

			
WatchmenBlood


I am a rational and even-tempered man by nature. Nonetheless, I can be driven to anger in certain extreme circumstances, such as the screening of films. 


Even now, I can vividly recall my last episode: it was at an early afternoon show of 2009’s Watchmen, adapted from the original Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comics by David Hayter (a contributing writer to various X-Men– and The Mummy-related projects) & Alex Tse (his sole theatrical film credit), and directed by Zack Snyder, a specialist in bombastic medium-budgeted geek-friendly franchise work, semi-revered at the time for his kinetic opening reel to 2004’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, in which Romero’s buckshot satire ably transitioned into a gory round of Crazy Taxi. 


Watchmen ’09 was a horrible piece of shit, the absolute nadir of Snyder’s career, attributable mainly, I think, to dispassionate studio maths: Geek-Friendly Director + Superhero-Experienced Writer = Superhero Movie. The possibility that Snyder’s bodies-in-motion/all-sensation aesthetic might prove incompatible with a comic book series renowned for its slow, precision control likely did not enter into the mind of anyone capable of making a decision on the matter, because superhero movies, fundamentally, are specialty-branded extensions of action movie formulae – which is to say, the ‘superhero’ aspect is a means of allowing advancements in special effects and facilitating expansive franchising opportunities. Deviations in tone are at the indulgence of the individual director — provided they are not working for Disney/Marvel — with little discernible need to consult the source material. A superhero comic is a superhero comic is a superhero comic.


Or, perhaps we might say an fx blockbuster is an fx blockbuster is an fx blockbuster.


Superman1


My hands shook in rage at the climax to Watchmen ’09; it was the part where they annihilate the city, and I had no refills left on my popcorn. I couldn’t have cared less about the fucking squid — and even now, close to half a decade later, where the befuddling fandom acceptance of that misbegotten project has faded into a sheepish Oh Well, you are still guaranteed to have any objection to the climax of the film met with ‘get over the fucking squid’ — because all I could see in front of me was sparkling-clean CGI decimation: New York vaporized into a bloodless field of stone rubble. Heresy! Travesty! People say the problem with the film is its hidebound adherence to the comic, but this is only half the problem: it is notionally ‘faithful,’ but lacks many of the specific visceral cues of the original work. The Moore/Gibbons Watchmen was as subdued in its violence as it was in its page layouts, until that awful moment where the blood POURS and the grids EXPLODE into booming splashes, forcing us to feel the transgression to which its superheroes are party, shaking the very foundations of their comic book universe. 


That said — because I am vulgar, but not so much an auteurist — I cannot blame Zack Snyder as a purely affirmative actor. He had $130 million studio dollars under his oversight, and having an “R” rating withheld for depicting a holocaust as a holocaust would be tantamount to chucking bushels of cash money into the furnace of an engine careening toward a sheer cliff. Of poverty. The irony, of course, is that ‘important’ topics are frequently given a societal nourishment’s leeway in ratings considerations, but a superhero movie? Forgive me for repeating myself, but again: there is no substantial difference between Watchmen and Green Lantern in the fx movie calculus, they are superhero movies, and it is already a goddamned miracle that one of them snuck away without a PG-13 restriction, which *only* happened because a pair of half-billion-dollar-grossing Frank Miller adaptations could be processed as ultra-stylized Crime and War pictures. Suddenly, the ferocious opposition authors gave to the notion of a comic book ratings system around the time of the Moore/Gibbons original makes a lot of sense.


That’s the kind of shit you have to deal with when you’re Zack Snyder. Half the thirteen-year olds in the United States of America imbibe exquisitely gory martial violence every single day whilst calling each other faggots during marathon gaming sessions, and that’s because dorky, costly video games — unlike movies and comics — initially faced sluggish acceptance as a valid avenue for mass culture, allowing it to bypass much of the heavy breathing over its societal impact until it was already established as a gigantic capitalistic force. As such, if you’re chasing an audience which now equates ‘thrills’ with ‘nonstop violence’ — and if a movie studio gives you $130 million dollars, guess what, you’re chasing it — you need to make things as sensational as possible while also bypassing those niggling concerns over beloved cinema as a pollutant of mental hygiene. 


And there’s an old, easy solution to that: make the violence clean. That’s why nobody uses squibs anymore to simulate gunshot wounds – if you use CGI, you can scrub away the nasty effects of shootings when necessary so that they register as murders in a white hat/black hat western. It’s just that there’s more of them. Lots more. An absence of blood in extraordinary quantities! As an accomplished, successful director of films of the type, Snyder has doubtlessly internalized these techniques, and imparted such wisdom to his crew, in the unlikely event they — professionals all — were not already hip.


Superman2


This is why arguments were made as to whether Watchmen should even have *been* a movie, but I suppose that’s not so much asked about superhero comics anymore.


***


Anyway, now everyone hates Zack Snyder, largely due to the next live-action film he directed: 2011’s Sucker Punch, which he also co-produced and co-wrote. It was the obligatory passion project you get to make after serving xx number of successful years as a good soldier: his Inception, in more ways than one. Tracking the queasy travails of young, exploited girls through numerous cross-pollinating levels of masculine dreamtime fantasy, the film married intense images of geek culture sexualization to furious denunciations of the male gaze in a profoundly bizarre manner. Watching it was like seeing a filmmaker struggling nakedly with his indulgences, and at best fighting them to a draw – idealizing women in a Chaplinesque manner which, by their profound suffering, strips them of agency. Names as diverse as Lucile Hadžihalilovic and Lars von Trier spring to mind in comparison, with all their clashing ideological baggage crammed into the trunk of a speedy genre vehicle. 


There was little nuance to the film’s reception, though. Sucker Punch is one of the most widely-loathed films in recent memory, overtly *hated* to the extent that Snyder’s prior films became tainted by association. Duly empowered, dissenters to the sexual violence of 300 and the general cluelessness of Watchmen broadened and intensified the scope of their criticisms to the point where “Zack Snyder” became synonymous with “trash.” I can understand why it happened: Sucker Punch is indeed a broken, fucked attempt at a feminist statement. Yet it worries me that the film’s attempts to be a feminist statement carry no apparent rhetorical value, and, moreover, are commonly misidentified as a brazen, belching effort at the ultimate in deliberate objectification, with little reference to the ‘text’ of the film beyond Just Look At It. I did look at it! I swear! And what I saw was an opportunity for a detailed analysis of what did and didn’t work — a ‘teachable moment,’ to be condescending as hell — falling by the wayside in favor of wholesale denunciation on the basis of received wisdom. I tried, nobody bit. 


The message to Snyder, and the people in any position to fund his efforts, must have been very clear: do not try this shit again. Play it safe next time. Go back to what you were doing before. 


So we can blame you more when you do.


***


Superman3


I’m not in any place to defend Snyder’s Man of Steel; I haven’t seen it. From what I’ve been reading, both inside and outside of the nerd conversation bubble, there’s a big debate brewing now over depictions of sanitized violence and the ethics of lethality in popular cinema. I welcome this, although I do find it funny that it was necessary to have a man dressed as the American flag whooshing around disaster areas to prompt such widening concern; so much for the argument that superhero movies are unnecessarily blunt! 


Also, I can’t help but wonder why similar concerns didn’t crop up for such critically-acclaimed action bonanzas as director J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, which opened the same year as Snyder’s Watchmen, and featured as a particularly zippy set piece the destruction of the planet Vulcan and the obliteration of billions of humanoid alien-persons. That’s a Star Wars trick, granted — and look what Abrams is directing next! — but it sat heavily with me as I realized the film’s screenwriters had absolutely no substantive emotional fallout planned: it was merely the signal of pathos necessary to allow some mild identification with fan-favorite corporate holding Mr. Spock. A box was checked, and then onward – to greater adventure!


It is a systemic problem. Perhaps it is only visible now because Superman carries a particularly weird set of viewer expectations, and Snyder is a very easy, zero-cost target for criticism at the moment; no death threats for fucking with him. 


As luck would have it, though, there *was* a blockbuster-style fx movie in play this summer that offered a real alternative. A genuine response to all that plague us. 


It was derided by critics to a spectacular degree.


After1


I will be blunt. After Earth — an M. Night Shyamalan film, written by one-time video games journalist and occasional comics writer Gary Whitta, with Shyamalan himself (among various uncredited helping hands), from an original story by co-producer/star Will Smith — is not a particularly good movie. This, I admit, is reason enough for critics to reject it, though the conversation surrounding the film has not fit the mold typically set down for a summer flop. There is palpable glee to the denunciations, doubtless owing to some combination of: (1) the film’s relationship to Scientology; (2) the general air of circus ridicule that follows M. Night Shyamalan, who’s mocked in only the way a weird dude who got praised too much too early ever is; and (3) Will Smith’s own efforts at breaking his son Jaden into movie stardom by sheer force of indulgence, an acceptable practice in Bollywood, maybe, but not in these here United States, where everyone succeeds by the sweat of their brow and effort always correlates to reward, save for with those few bad apples who perpetually demand plucking. 


Regrettably, After Earth is also the only would-be tentpole this year directed by and starring non-whites, which adds an extra drizzle of WELCOME TO EARF and “Shamalamadingdong” jokes to the comments section mix. Worse, it is arguably a non-Judeo-Christian work (by non-whites) that insists on operating as a serious religious allegory; much attention was paid to a recent Shyamalan interview in which he claimed to have ghostwritten the 1999 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle She’s All That, but the real juicy tidbit was the director’s profession of admiration for Terrence Malick’s brazenly churchy The Tree of Life. That’s fitting, given Shyamalan’s disposition as an artist; reared Hindu, he is nonetheless fascinated by the emotive and mystic capabilities of the Catholic and Episcopal faiths that surrounded him growing up in Pennsylvania. Thus, he would make the perfect collaborator for Smith, who is not officially a Scientologist but obviously sympathizes with the gathering in an intense, here’s-my-money fashion. 


There are some who deny that After Earth is Scientology-based. Indeed, the Church of Scientology International’s own director of public affairs pooh-poohed such readings, claiming that the film contains themes “common to many of the world’s philosophies.” Which… of course! Why wouldn’t M. Night Shyamalan, good student that he is, suggest (say) Scientology’s focus on clearing the analytical mind of wicked engrams from prior days and prior lives to ascertain the state of the present as parallel to the karma yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, promoting perfection in action through disassociation with Earthly qualms and attachments? Fear is an illusion, after all. 


After2 


So let’s play a game right now. Let’s set aside, for a moment, our concerns about Scientology, and divine from the resultant Smithian text a solution to the blockbuster problem. 


Fundamentally, After Earth rejects the idea of ‘raised stakes’ as a necessary component to the fx extravaganza. What is at risk in the story of the film — seeing Jaden Smith’s anxiety-ridden, anime-like lonely child protagonist, complete with Neon Genesis Evangelion plug suit, stranded on the wild, overgrown, anti-humane landscape of a far future Earth, racing against time to raise a beacon to save himself and his similarly-stranded military hero dad (Will Smith), all the while stalked by an alien beast that tracks its prey by sensing its fear — is nothing more than the lives of two people. There is no galactic threat, no planetary devastation, no mission to eradicate the monster alien race, or reclaim the Earth, or win a war. There *was* a war with the aliens in the past, and it claimed the life of Jaden’s sister, and he is haunted. He does not want to lose his father, or his own life.


In other words, every life is sacred. It is a *terrible* thing when people die. ALWAYS. Candidly, the film could have done better to emphasize this message. There is a considerable amount of time spent near the beginning of the film with the crew taking the Smiths across space, and none of them are particularly memorable; there is little emotional punch to their deaths when the ship inevitably crashes. A cynic might accuse the film of only really valuing the lives of the famous movie star Smiths, so intense is the focus on them. Yet it is nonetheless extremely clear that the deaths of the crew — the absence of lives — has a ready and palpable effect on the mission Jaden is forced to undergo. And we do see some bodies, strung up by the alien monster. PG-13, yes, but not invisible. 


Not emotionally sanitized either. Jaden Smith has been lambasted for bad acting, but this is mostly a problem of hesitant and uncertain vocal delivery. In terms of bodily acting, facial expressions, reactions – the kid is pretty good at playing a nervous wreck. He is absolutely terrified for four-fifths of the runtime, hyperventilating in a sickeningly realistic manner, and at one point writhing and grimacing under the sway of toxins, his face swelling into a grotesque CGI mask that ably magnifies his natural expressions of agony until he throws himself onto a syringe of antidote. Warfare, battle, survival: After Earth posits these scenarios as FUCKING SCARY, and, moreover, situations in which one must rely on others to survive. Jaden of course has his dad’s stranded voice to inspire him, but he also encounters a more immediate ally in the form of a large, intelligent bird, who repays his small kindness with a selfless moment of aid. 


It is almost a parody of the far more consumptive flying thingy/humanoid relationships in James Cameron’s Avatar, for Whitta & Shyamalan are prepared to extend the capacity for empathy to all smart things.


After3


Ah, but what about the alien? The antagonist Other? Obviously the monster is intended to represent the limitations on human transcendence, but can’t it also be a handy means of demonizing all manner of corporeal foes? Is this not just a softer hymn to battle, to conquest? 


(Hang on while I jump off the high horse and crack an M. Night Shyamalan joke like it’s 2002.)


TWIST: I’m not actually opposed to violence in movies! I’m not even opposed to sanitized violence! They pulled that shit all the time in old issues of 2000 AD, and those comics are like my personal Silver Age! Fuck Superman! As originating editor Pat Mills (specially thanked in the collected Watchmen) once wrote of his killing machine hero robot Hammerstein, I am “programmed to enjoy action and destruction.” But just as Alan Moore grew wary of popular films when he saw how the budgets of undemanding entertainments swelled to rival the GDP of small nations, so did the anonymous killings of summer and summery movies begin to wear me down. At least when Django Unchained leers at its dead you can see their faces.


Religious texts are generally not opposed to depictions of battle either, which is one capacity by which they can become instruments of oppression. Yet the climactic struggle of After Earth, perched on the trembling precipice of a mighty volcano — potent symbolism in Scientology, as that is where Xenu detonated nuclear bombs to release the thetans of his prisoners for indoctrination into bad religion — is marked by a distinct ambivalence. Yes, Jaden does clear himself of material concern and slay the beast, and it is the film’s great failing as entertainment that this development in his character seems utterly abrupt, divorced from any satisfying sense of dramatic build or character development.


But then, as he and his father are soaring away, Jaden tells Will that he does not want to be a warrior anymore. He does not want to fight things. He would rather divorce himself from violence. It is allowed, because there is no need for a sequel, a franchise. It’s not how you keep conversation buzzing, to let controversy feed the anticipation for your next move, but if critics are serious about their stated qualms, if they are not themselves tackling an outrage du jour to rustle momentary hits as justification for their declining wages, but interested in addressing underlying questions of motivation and depiction, the steaming husk of this capsule fallen to Earth is worth a closer look.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
50 Shades of Superman

			
						

				Posted on   by  			

			
					


				

			
shusterfetish


Of all the images to feature in this month’s review of Brad Ricca’s Super Boys, The New York Times went with one of “the kinky illustrations Shuster was reduced to doing for sleazy magazines in the mid-1950s,” specifically one that, according to editor Peter Keepnews, “looks for all the world like Lois Lane preparing to whip a trussed-up Superman.”


Craig Yoe had the same idea, choosing an even more overt image for the cover of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster: Lois in high heels and underwear not preparing but full-on whipping a chained and bare-chested Clark. The Man of Steel shattered identical chains on Action Comics every month, but this Shuster illustration is working toward a very different climax.


Yoe’s title is a bit of a dodge though, and Keepnews’ “kinky” is no better. Yoe reproduces Shuster’s 1954 illustrations for Nights of Horror, a typo-strewn black and white cranked out of Shuster’s neighbor’s basement, but unlike almost anything else related to superheroes, this is not “Fetish Art.” Zorro dressing up in a mask and cape to keep his sword erect? That’s a fetish. Hooded men assaulting bound and weeping women? Frederic Wertham termed it “pornographic horror literature.” I call it rape and torture.


Nights of Horror


Craig Yoe is less coy between the covers: “These BDSM (bondage-discipline dominance-submission sadism-masochism) tales were an equal opportunity employer. Women were tied up, whipped, and spanked, but could eagerly be the tie-ers, whippers, and spankers, too.”


Well, not exactly “equal.”


Of Shuster’s 108 illustrations, I count seventy-one that depict women dominated by men. The reverse occurs nine times.  Add another nine scenes of women dominating women for a grand total of eighty female victims. Shuster draws only one incident of a man dominating another man (with a woman as the primary focus, so the men are not—gasp!— a homoerotic pairing) for a total of ten victimized men. Check my math, but an eighth is a lot less than “equal.”


Most common torture device: a whip. Eighteen of the twenty-two appearances are used against women. Other devices used to torture women (in alphabetical order): air hose, alligator pit, ball and chain, cactus, chains, corset, electric wire, fingernails, gun, hairbrush, hot poker, hypodermic needle, iron maiden, knife, paddle, paddle machine, spiked bed, spiked gloves, switch, and water hose. Additional techniques to dominate women: champagne, hypnotism, marijuana, opium, and polygamy.


Men are whipped, spanked, paddled, clubbed, and one anticipates the removal of a toe. Three more display submission by kissing a woman’s shoe, kneeling with a tiny chain attached to his ear, and (my favorite) serving a woman breakfast in bed.


The nudity is almost exclusively female. Only four illustrations feature clothed women. Another ten reveal partially exposed underwear, usually from a forcibly raised dress hem. Some seventy-one (by far the standard) are women in nearly identical see-through bras, panties and those mid-thigh pantyhose and garter belt contraptions I’ve never really understood. The remaining twenty-three or so feature full or partial nudity, which usually means exposed breasts, but occasionally buttocks, and very rarely a vaguely drawn crotch. So vague, in fact, as to seem sexless. (Women were not, to the best of my very limited my knowledge, shaving their pudenda in the mid-50s).


The one image of full male nudity is also oddly sexless—or at least gravity-defying. The more disturbing anatomical features are the women’s freakishly tiny hands and feet. And their high-heels which appear to be permanent growths of their otherwise naked bodies.


Stan Lee (he wrote Yoe’s introduction) looks at these pictures and sees a “disillusioned and desperate” Joe Shuster “forced to accept commissions to draw what amounted to S&M erotic horror books.” Although the unemployed Shuster was financially desperate in 1954, his arrangement with Nights of Horror was sounder than his one with DC Comics.


He was paid $100 for each of Nights of Horrors issue, for a total of $1800. Less than twenty years earlier, his bosses at DC had written him a check for $130, which he split with his partner Jerry Siegel. That was in exchange for the permanent, multi-million dollar rights to Superman. Shuster drew an average of six illustrations for each Nights of Horror. That’s a page rate of just over $16. He and Siegel were splitting $10 a page back in 1938. DC grudgingly raised it $15 when the Action Comics spin-off Superman sold 900,000 copies the following year. Nights of Horror boasted a print run of only 1,000, including the 2,650 backlog confiscated in a book store police raid.


By any accounting system, Nights of Horror was a far more financially ethical employer than DC.


As far as disillusionment?


Shuster’s Nights of Horror illustrations are not hack work. He’d didn’t doodle a half dozen half-hearted sketches in exchange for that week’s grocery money. Despite his failing eyesight (what finally pushed him out of comic books in the late 40s), these pages have been pored over. The detail is at times lovingly and so disturbingly precise—reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s own obsessively rendered female figures of the following decades. The best here easily exceeds the rawer material he rushed off for Action Comics. Joe was getting more out of Nights of Horror than a paycheck.


I don’t care to imagine the nuances of Shuster’s sexual life, but I will guess that it was primarily a solitary activity. Yoe documents his preference for tall women (he was short), and his brief marriage to a former Vegas showgirl in 1975 (they look the same height in their wedding photo). Superman provided his best pick-up lines. According to biographer Gerard Jones (I haven’t read Ricca yet), he would hang out at soda fountains and hand girls (the tall ones presumably) sketches of his Man of Steel before asking them out. At least one fifteen-year-old said yes. Shuster was 25 at the time.


He was forty in 1954, and working alone. His studio of assistants dispersed after he and Siegel lost their lawsuit against DC in 1948. Nights of Horror was some of the only art he’d sold since Superman. Although not paneled like a comic book, the illustrations are often sequential and depict narrative movement. Two sequences conclude with heroic rescues of female victims by Superman-like saviors. A sadistic film producer collapses from a detective’s bullet, and a bearded cult leader succumbs to a punch on the jaw. Only one woman defends herself. She rushes at her captor with a knife and seems to have the upper hand—briefly. She’s bound as he whips her on the next page.


I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that Shuster did not collaborate with a model for these illustrations. The stock repetition of body type and undergarments suggests an internal, idealized projection, one with rounder hips and thighs than any of today’s anorexic supermodels. But even when a live human being posed in front of his canvas, Shuster always saw what he wanted to see. A teenaged Jolan Kovacs answered his 1935 ad for a model in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He wanted to practice his Lois Lane sketches before retooling Superman for a new round of newspaper syndication submissions. Kovacs couldn’t fill out her sister’s baggy swimsuit, but Shuster’s sketches do not share the shortcoming. The picture of Scarlet Pimpernel actress Merle Oberon in his head was bigger than the breathing woman before his eyes.


That didn’t stop him from asking Kovacs out on a date. Nothing much came of it then or ten years later when he asked her to the National Cartoonists Society’s costume ball. She wanted to come as Lois Lane, but Shuster and Siegel were in the process of losing their lawsuit. But Joanne (she changed her name for her modeling career) and Jerry (he attended the ball too) were very happy to see each other again. A few months later they were married. It was a City Hall event, so Shuster didn’t have to stand up and mumble through a best man’s toast. Six years after the ceremony, Joe and his Superman partner were done with each other, and Joe was drawing S&M for his neighbor’s underground porn pulps.


I can identify only six of the 108 illustrations that depict scenes of consensual sex. (Call me Puritanical, but I am eliminating the reefer-smoking Jimmy Olsen in the early stages of pot-fostered date rape.) Of the six, two are heterosexual, and four lesbian. There are twice as many lesbian images of women dominating other women, but even in those the content is less violent than elsewhere. Nights of Horror lesbians tend to spank with hairbrushes and bare hands rather than whips or switches.


The lesbian imagery is, of course, for male consumption. Which apparently eliminates the need for other reader-titillating taboos. Twice the girl-on-girl action is interrupted by a man bursting through the girls’ closed door—the thinly disguised desire of the perceived reader.


Even when the male presence isn’t literalized, Nights of Horror foregrounds its voyeurism. Only one page in the collection depicts a lone figure, and she’s not preening just for her mirror.  Other pages are more overt: an eye in a peep-hole, a man leering through a window, a grinning boy at the corner of the frame watching a spanking. That’s us.


Shuster draws himself too. A painter stands before his canvas, brush in hand, staring at his model (one of the very few women not in high heels). The sketch on the canvas is nearly identical to the actual model. They are made of exactly the same black-on-white pen strokes. Yoe includes a caption:


“At last he had her posed to his satisfaction.”


Joe Shuster

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Top 5 Superman Songs of All Time

			
						

				Posted on   by  			

			
					


				

			
The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.

______________________


 


The word “superman” premiered in a play about a modern Don Juan. So it’s fitting that most Superman songs are love songs. Despite all of its anti-marriage ubermensch rhetoric (marriage is an obstacle to ideal breeding blah blah blah), George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 Man and Superman ends when the girl lassos her Clark in the final act. Since then, lovedumb Supermen have been crooning through the decades.


Here are their high notes:


 


MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA


5. The Kinks, “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman”


The Kinks with a disco beat? It was 1979 and so not entirely their fault. I didn’t hear the song till their live album a year later. The year the Kinks were ret-conned into Rock continuity. That’s right, the Kinks did not exist before 1980.  Van Halen’s “You Really Got Me” wasn’t a cover until it appeared on One for the Road, an album of rock classics retroactively inserted into the AOR timeline. First time I heard “Lola” from a radio speaker, a stadium of fans were la-la-la-ing the chorus. I felt like the lone survivor from some parallel universe. I’d been listening to Pittsburgh’s WDVD for a couple of years, memorizing playlists, band line-ups, discographies. Reallocating the area of my brain previously devoted to superhero teams and baseball rosters. The Kinks? Never heard of them. But suddenly there they are strumming between the Who and the Rolling Stones since the 60s. I pretended like nothing was wrong. The Kinks? Sure, yeah, love ‘em. That’s Adolescent Survival 101. Next thing my first-ever girlfriend and I are cheering them in the Civic Arena, and wearing our matching concert T-shirts on our anniversary every month after clueless month. If everyone jumps off a cliff, of course you jump off too. Doesn’t matter if you can fly or not.


“Hey girl we’ve got to get out of this place


There’s got to be something better than this


I need you, but I hate to see you this way


If I were superman then we’d fly away”


 


REM-Superman-40233


4.  R.E.M., “Superman”


I had way too many Black Sabbath albums to get my head around R.E.M in high school, but college was another planet. The year I first kissed Lesley Wheeler. We meet in a student center utility closet moonlighting as our literary magazine office space. She liked R.E.M. and so soon I did too.  Apparently this “Superman” was a cover of an obscure 1969 single from some band named the Clique. Another ret-con, but nobody was pretending otherwise this time. Despite all the Superman hubris, it’s an underdog’s song. Mike Mills, the bassist, sings lead. Michael Stipe is slouching by a back-up microphone, a cup of coffee in his hand, tambourine in the other. Lesley was dating someone else, but we kissed once, during a party in her honors dorm, and then she flew away for a semester abroad. R.E.M. wouldn’t have their breakthrough till the following year, when it wasn’t just our college DJs twirling “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” The whole multiverse was about to explode. I might not have had her grades, her scholarship, none of the spark bursting through her poems. But I knew to fly after her. I knew what was happening.


“You don’t really love that guy you make it with now do you?


I know you don’t love that guy ’cause I can see right through you.


If you go a million miles away I’ll track you down girl.


Trust me when I say I know the pathway to your heart.”


 


Jimmy Olsen's Blues


3. Spin Doctors, “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues”


Our kitchen calendar said 1991, but it sounds like the 70s rebooted, Steve Miller Band, Aerosmith, even a little Lynyrd Skynyrd, all of it seamlessly synched together by the dance beat thumpings of a double bass drum kit. An analog amalgam at the dawn of the digital sample. When Lesley and I moved in together that year, the hardest part was merging our record collections, deciding whose redundant copy of which David Bowie was less scratched, less nostalgically vital. I’d thought CDs were a passing phase, like 8-tracks, but was now giving in to fate. A rotating CD rack perched on a speaker the size of an end table. Pocketful of Kryptonite sold 5 million, its four singles muscling through the airwaves. We hummed them in the car, in the kitchen, in the backs of our heads as we drifted asleep. We found a caterer, a baker, a quaint historical house to rent for an August afternoon. It rained in the morning, pushed the heat back all day, then poured again that night as we drove back to our apartment with the wedding loot. The Spin Doctors’ second album flopped.  Doesn’t matter. After the readings and the vows, I slotted Kryptonite into the reception CD player with some other new releases and hit “random.”


“Lois Lane please put me in your plan


Yeah, Lois Lane you don’t need no Super Man


Come on downtown and stay with me tonight


I got a pocket full of kryptonite”


 


Lazlo Bane


2. Lazlo Bane, “I’m no superman”


Actor Zach Braff discovered the song, an obscure indie tune that premiered in a 14-second snippet over the opening credits of Scrubs before it made it to the band’s second album. Lazlo Bane (I’d thought it was a person) originally said no to the TV deal. Didn’t want to sell out.  But somebody must have talked some sense into them. Three weeks after 9/11, a sitcom’s exactly what the country needed. Lesley and I had just moved into the house we live in now. American flags flapped up and down the block. Our son was one, our daughter four. We had to explain to them that terrorists were not going to blow up skyscrapers in Lexington, VA. We didn’t have any. We’d moved to Smallville, after rocketing away from the New Jersey Metropolis where we’d fallen for each other. We hunkered through Afghanistan, Iraq, prayed Obama could save us all. NBC dropped Scrubs in 2009, but ABC rebooted it for a ninth and final season. They shuffled the cast and hired WAZ (I’d thought he was a band) to rerecord the theme. It didn’t matter. We’d stopped watching years before.


“You’ve crossed the finish line


Won the race but lost your mind


Was it worth it after all


I need you here with me


Cause love is all we need


Just take a hold of the hand that breaks the fall”


 


Sufjan Stevens, “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”


1. Sufjan Stevens, “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts”


I thought Sufjan was Cat Stevens recording as his Muslim alter ego (which is Yusuf Islam). I was never hip, but now I’m old too. My son is twelve, my daughter sixteen. She sits across the dinner table, describing mutant subgenres I never dreamed of. I had to borrow the album from my metrosexual neighbor. It was already old, part of Stevens’ abandoned project to record fifty albums about fifty states. Apparently, Smallville is in Illinois. A legal dispute delayed the 2005 release. They had to put a sticker over Superman on the cover art. It came out in vinyl first—technology made cool by extinction. Our 80s vinyl lines the back shelf of our closet. We play them during dinner sometimes, the needle crackling like a victrola through speakers the size of furniture. The Illinois CD has no sticker, just a blank space, the past waiting to be rebooted again. Clark Kent used to be a joke, a Kryptonian’s caricature of humanity. They reversed that in the 80s, made the boy grunt his way through adolescence like the rest of us. I don’t know what the story is now.


“Only a real man can be a lover


If he had hands to lend us all over


We celebrate our sense of each other


We have a lot to give one another”


???????????????????????????????


6. BONUS TRACK: “You’re a Superman!”


I don’t know the singer’s name, just that she’s a redhead in a green dress. The nightclub doesn’t have a name either, but Lois Lane is there, ready to scoop Clark on an exclusive interview with Superman. Clark thinks it’s their first date. “Tonight I’m going to introduce a song that is sure to be a hit,” the singer announces. “Swing it, boys!” Action Comics No. 6, cover date November 1938. The Andrew Sisters had a hit that year. So did Ella Fitzgerald. It’s her voice I hear over Joe Shuster’s drawings. It’s no ballad. Just look at the angle of the trombone silhouetted in the background. Jerry Siegel is writing the love song no one ever sung to him. Girls found him creepy in high school. But now with Superman going into newspaper syndication, the girl next door—literally, her name is Bella, and she lives across the street from the Siegels—suddenly she’s not out of his bold, new reach. They’ll be married in a year, divorced a decade after that. It’s the only perfect Superman song, unblemished by its soundless performance. “Clark glances sideways at Lois. Enthralled by the magic of the song, her eyes have a distant, charmed look . . .”


“You’re a Superman!


You can make my heart leap,


Ten thousand feet!


“You’re a Superman!


But I’m the one girl who kin,


Get under your skin!


“When you crush me in your arms, I must reveal


I’m only flesh and blood and not resisteless steel!


“You’re a Superman!


Your ardour’s stronger than,


A human man’s!


“You’re a Superman!


And when you spring to me,


I am in ecstasy!


“Some day you’re gonna leap,


To the altar at my feet . . .


Then the whole world will know,


‘Cause I’ll tell all I know,


That I want ‘em to know,


That you’re My Superman!”

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Super-Blogger Clark Kent Saves the World One Sentence at a Time

			
						

				Posted on   by  			

			
					


				

			
I can restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in three words.


But first a lesson in grammar.


Passive voice. Ever heard of it?


Super-grammarian Geoffrey Pullum has. Daily Planet editor Perry White has too. But White, according to Pullum, has no idea what it is. In J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis’ Superman: Earth One, Mr. White explains to cub reporter Clark Kent: “Active sentence structure versus passive structure. A good reporter always goes for the former, never the latter. It’s ‘A dog was killed last night,’ not ‘Last night, a dog was killed.’”

 


Clark Kent and Perry White discuss passive voice


 

And then Pullum swoops in through a window: “It looks as if the editor of The Daily Planet thinks that it is passive sentence structure to use any adjunct constituent set off by commas. So he would condemn sentences like Michael Corleone’s You’re out, Tom, or Today, I settle all family business, for being passive!”


In his Chronicle of Higher Education article “Passive Writing at the ‘Daily Planet,’” Pullum bemoans the sorry state of grammatical knowledge among not just fictional newspaper editors. Your “freshman-comp TA” and writing gurus Strunk and White get it wrong too. Pullum considers it a serious educational issue.


I teach first-year composition, but my concern isn’t educational. It’s moral.


Passive voice is evil.


If you accept Stan Lee’s superhero prime directive, “With great power comes great responsibility,” then passive voice is a supervillain’s weapon of choice.


Which might explain why politicians use it so often. The Fat Man and Little Boy of literary examples were both launched by the Nixon administration. When press secretary Ron Ziegler was discussing Watergate, and when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was discussing Vietnam, both deployed the same phrase:


“Mistakes were made.”


Who made the mistakes? Impossible to say. The sentence is missing its subject, the agent, the actor of the action. And there lies the villainy. Passive voice erases responsibility. It’s how bad guys make their escape.

 


mysterio


 

Look at Mysterio. He routinely eludes Spider-Man by dropping smoke bombs and ducking away in the confusion. If you rewrite the sentence


“Mysterio dropped a smoke bomb,”


as


“A smoke bomb was dropped,”


then Mysterio (subject and villain) vanishes twice. He ducks away in the syntactical confusion. Passive voice writes him right out of the sentence.


Perry’s example, “A dog was killed,” actually IS passive voice (whether it happened last night or not), because the sentence masks the identity of the dog-killer. Did Mysterio kill the dog? Did Richard Nixon? Nobody knows.


Which is why reporters like Clark Kent sometimes use passive voice. The police, like the readers of the sentence, are still searching for the killer.


But what if the information is known and the writer obscures it?


That’s where things get ugly.

 


palestine-israeli-conflict-3rd-edition-beginners-guide-dan-cohn-sherbok-paperback-cover-art


Reaching past my shelf of comic books, I have The Palestine-Israeli Conflict in hand. Instead of dual-statehood, Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami settle for dual-authorship. And that’s about all they agree on. Each pens his own history. The book is a journey down the same river twice, but in very different boats.


When describing events of 1948, Dawoud El-Alami writes: “Jewish terrorist organizations . . . carried out a massacre of men, women and children in the village of Dier Yassin.” That’s active voice. The subject of the sentence carries out the massacre. In contrast, Dan Cohn-Sherbok describes the same incident with the phrase: “the policy of self-restraint was abandoned.” That’s passive. Who abandoned self-restraint? His syntax doesn’t want to tell.


Cohn-Sherbok goes on to describe a similar incident from 1982: “More than three hundred refuges were massacred.” Passive again. And Dawoud El-Alami, to no surprise, employs active voice again: “The militia massacred between seven hundred and one thousand people (some reports say two thousand).”


Technically, the two pairs of sentences don’t contradict (even mathematically, since two thousand is “more than” three hundred). But Cohn-Sherbok employs passive voice at its immoral worse. His syntax erases responsibility.


Now I’m not suggesting that the “Palestinian Perspective” half of The Palestine-Israeli Conflict is any more accurate than the “Jewish Perspective.” Dawoud El-Alami has his own array of rhetorical maneuvers for ducking blame.


If you’re wondering about my political biases, I find myself agonizingly sympathetic to both sides. The most guilty party is England, who, desperate to fight Nazi Germany, promised the same homeland to two different aspiring nations. The results were horrifically predictable.


But if you don’t think England is responsible, then this is a job for passive voice:


“The Jews and the Palestinians were promised the same land.”


Promised by whom? By Mysterio’s trademark cloud of syntactical smoke.


At least Clark Kent isn’t fooled. He recently escaped the grammatical misinformation of Perry White to strike out on his own as a blogger. It was big news. Last November, after a discussion of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire, NPR’s Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan explained:

 


After more than 70 years as a mild-mannered reporter, Superman quit his day job at The Daily Planet. A fed-up Clark Kent delivered a diatribe in front of the entire newsroom on his way out the door. ‘I was taught to believe you could use words to change the course of rivers,’ he said, ‘that even the darkest secrets would fall under the harsh light of the sun.’


 


Clark quits the Daily Planet


Are you listening, Dan and Dawoud? Your words are changing the course of rivers. Take responsibility for your subjects, even their darkest secrets.


That’s the first step in this English professor’s plan for world peace:


Ban passive voice.


supermanblogger


[And for the super-grammarians out there, I should point out that both “The dog was killed” and “The dog was killed by Richard Nixon” are examples of passive voice, even though the second sentence apprehends the killer. Only the first, the agentless subgroup of passive voice, is evil. The second is just criminally clumsy.]