Tag Archives: Superman

Strange Windows: Monumental

Posted on by

“Seven cities contended for Homer when dead, Where Homer living had to beg his bread.”

At least three towns are contending for Popeye.

Above, this statue of Popeye was erected in Crystal City, Texas, in 1937.
Below, this six-foot-tall bronze statue stands in Segar Memorial Park in Chester, Illinois.

[…] whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked and the heart that fed.

Ozymandias, Shelley

Chester was the birthplace of Popeye creator E.C. Segar, as recorded on the statue’s plaque:

Now, let’s examine another Popeye statue in  Universal Studio’s  Island of Adventure, in Orlando, Florida:

…where Popeye’s arch-foe Bluto is also menacingly present:

What differentiates these statues from the ones in Crystal City and Chester?

The Florida Popeye is set in an amusement park. It’s a prop, part of the scenery in a hundred-acre show set.

The Texas and Illinois Popeyes aren’t props. They have a weightier function, civically and semiotically. They are monuments.

Chester is obviously honoring a native son, who went forth into the vast world and achieved renown. This tradition goes back millenia; thus the Greeks of Antiquity would perpetuate the glory of a successful warrior, of a victor at the Olympic games, of a winner at the great theater festivals: that glory was also the glory of his city.

What, then, of Crystal City’s statue– considered so important that it stands sentry before City Hall?

Popeye is credited with saving the town.

Crystal City has long billed itself as the World Spinach Capital. The leafy crop dominates the agriculture of the region. But spinach has always been a hard sell, especially to children — it is bitter. Compound this dissatisfaction with the withering effects of the Great Depression, and Crystal City found itself facing disaster.

Along came Popeye, his great strength attributed to his consumption of spinach (less so in the strips, conspicuously so in the animated cartoons.) Kids all over America — over the world– internalized the sailor’s profession of might:

“I’m strong to the finish, ’cause I eat me spinach; I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!” (Toot toot!)

…and they devoured their spinach with gusto. (I, too, fell for the propaganda. In fact, spinach is, of course, no builder of strong bodies– it isn’t even particularly rich in iron, the oft-cited source of its potency.)

The spinach industry was saved. The grateful burghers of Crystal City, thus, put up their statue as a votive thanksgiving– another monumental tradition.

( That statue outside City Hall isn’t, contrary to its plaque’s assertion, the one inaugurated in 1937; it’s a modern copy, while the original is inside the building.

So it’s a simulacrum of a sculpture of an animated cartoon character based on a comic strip character inspired by an acquaintance…I’m getting situationist vertigo, here.)

Crystal City is by no means alone in its gratitude to this cartoon character. Alma, Arkansas, also claims the crown of World Spinach Capital, and celebrates Popeye in bronze:

According to one report:

Popeye Park, built in a former vacant lot, is a big part of Alma’s image makeover. It is a place where people can get out and look at things. The centerpiece statue is glorified atop a fountain, and according to Mark the park will soon have two kiosks with flat screen monitors that will relate the history of Alma and Popeye. A large mural is planned for the wall of the adjacent water company building, with hidden Popeyes to engage children (and maybe the tour bus drivers).

This is getting out of hand, some may think. And why Alma, anyway? Because it’s the site of the Allen Canning Company, producers of Popeye Spinach:

 

…at one point producers of 63% of the world’s canned spinach.

So the livelihood of many Alman households depend on this brand– this cartoon. What’s wrong with a little sculptural homage?

Yet one might find this unsettling.

As the semioticians remind us, we live in a world of signs; some overt and loud, some whispering, some in the dog-whistle domain of the subliminal.

A monument is a bellowing, gigantic voice in this landscape; it aggressively forces its meaning on us; small wonder monuments are the favorite markers of tyrants’ rule.

Prudence, thus, traditionally presides over the choice and placement of public monuments. Commissions debate them, the public is consulted; they are scrutinized for glorification of the unworthy, or for partisan agendas. Often they are isolated from the city proper, as in cemeteries.

The subjects of monumental statuary tended ever to be divine: gods and saints, the Christ; or heroic– gallant soldiers, philanthropists, poets and other writers. One might legitimately question the sculpted exaltation of corporate cartoon characters. In contrast to the Orlando Popeye, those in Crystal City, Alma, and Chester are free of irony– indeed, almost of playfulness.

Perhaps we should judge these statues by their function. This image of Garfield stands just outside a children’s hospital:

 

Who can object to an attempt to make a sick child smile, or to allay his fears with a familiar old “friend”?

But it’s still troubling when an online search for ‘Garfield statue’ returns more results for the cartoon cat than for the effigies of James A. Garfield (1831– 1881), America’s 20th president, felled by a deranged assassin’s bullet:

We shall later show sculpture inspired by the strip Peanuts.

A different Peanut can be seen below–‘ Mr Peanut’ , the corporate mascot of the company Planter’s.

Such commercial images are already omnipresent in our visual ecology, so it is not over-curmudgeonly to hope their monuments do not proliferate, unless it be with the wit of an Andy Warhol or of a Jeff Koons:

Well, at least he offers you a seat.

 

Travel to Metropolis, Illinois, and you find monumentalism tipping slightly towards idolatry.

As readers of the Superman comic know, the mighty hero makes his home in Metropolis– a booming city modeled on Cleveland and New York.

Metropolis, Ill., is a far more modest place. But in 1972, D.C. Comics and the state of Illinois officially declared it to be the hometown of Superman. This was a prelude to a titanically hubristic enterprise: The Amazing World of Superman.

Concept Art by Neal Adams. For more, click here

There were to be a museum and an amusement park dedicated to the ur-superhero,  the whole dominated by a 200-foot-tall statue of Superman. The entire venture collapsed.

Today, Metropolis’ exploitation of Supes is much more modest, but definitely there… as evidenced by this fifteen-foot bronze polychrome statue:

 

Metropolis celebrates  the Man of Steel every way it can. The local bank is “home of super financial services.” The town newspaper calls itself The Planet. A sign in the grocery store informs customers: “Just as Superman stands for truth, justice and the American Way, Food World stands for quality, convenience and friendly service.”

Below, Bill Griffith‘s pinhead clown Zippy pays the statue a visit:

It’s a typical absurdist Griffith gag, but he makes a larger point: it’s wrong to invest your hopes in a fake idol. There’s no Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy, no Superman– even metaphorically.

Metropolis seems to have learned this lesson from the 1972 fiasco. Its exploitation of Superman is mostly limited to photo ops for tourists:

 

…or Supes collector George Hambrich’s ‘Super-Museum’:

 

… or the annual Superman Celebration:

 

Special guest star at the 2010 Celebration:

Yep, U.S. President and lifelong comic book fan Barak Obama.

Incidentally, this wasn’t the first Superman statue erected in Metropolis. First came a fiber-glass 7-footer.

Problem was, the locals took to testing the hero’s noted bulletproof powers, resulting in a sorry Swiss cheese of a statue. It was replaced by the current bronze colossus.

Ah, yes, the Colossus. The need to extract awe from sheer size alone, as Emperor Nero did with the giant gold statue of himself in ancient Rome. All over America, you’ll find colossi of another kind: celebrating the folk giant lumberjack, Paul Bunyan:

 

Bunyan, however, is a prominent example of  ‘fakelore’– artificial modern folklore; in fact, the giant’s tales were all spun by a copywriter for a lumber company. A visual simulacrum (the statue) to represent a conceptual one (the fakelore.)

And the size of the colossus seems to validate this manufactured myth.

In Blue Earth, Minnesota, stands a towering figure drawn from one of our other modern sources of pseudo-icons, advertising:

“Good things from the garden,
Garden in the valley,
Valley of the Jolly Green Giant!
Some are green-snappin’ fresh
Kitchen-sliced to taste the best
Tender beans are comin’ from the valley! (From the valley!)

Good things from the garden,
Garden in the valley,

Valley of the Jolly (‘ho, ho, ho’) Green Giant!”

— Leo Burnett

The Green Giant is the mascot of a vegetable canning company belonging to agribusiness behemoth General Mills.

As with Popeye, the locals in Minnesota show pride and gratitude towards a symbol of their livelihood.

 

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

–William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Perhaps popular enthusiasm goes too far, though, when the locals adopt the name of a mass-media character. This has happened at the town of Idaho Springs, when the residents of its Squirrel Gulch district renamed it Steve Canyon, after the comic-strip adventurer created by Milton Caniff.

In 1950, they persuaded the federal government to commission a giant limestone sculpture of the cartoon aviator for their town. Its plaque reads, in part,

“The United States Treasury salutes Steve Canyon and through him, all American cartoon characters who serve the Nation.”

Say what?

Ah, well, perhaps I’m merely indulging in cultural snobbery.  It’s true that a lot of the statues above are way cool, after all.

And at least they don’t celebrate tyrants:

Stalin

 

 

Lenin

 

Kim Il-Sung

 

Walt Disney

All right, that was a cheap shot… but the juxtaposition of  similar images makes one think.

Disneyland bills itself  “the happiest place on Earth”.  Happiness is mandatory. Well, in what other sort of place is happiness mandatory?  The “workers’ paradises” of Communist countries.

Disneyland also resembles them by its degree of control. The entire park is a panopticon. It even has a ‘secret police’– the security guards are there, but not in uniform.

Disney headquarters, as designed by Michael Graves: the cartoon as slave to the corporation

All four statues show the same gesticulation towards… what?  The glorious future?

Let’s hope Walt and Mickey’s statue doesn’t suffer the same fate as Saddam Hussein’s:

A final farewell to the colossus…with the fearsome effigy of cloud-gathering Zeus in the French ‘Parc Astérix’ amusement park:

;

Yet, pass humbly between his divinely titanic legs and look up:

<

Tch! This is the Underwear of the Gods?    Feh.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, we find this effigy of Sylvester Stallone— sorry, of Rocky Balboa:

Bronze, neoclassical pedestal-mounted kitsch or celebration of the human spirit? Celebration of Hollywood, certainly.

And along those lines comes another bad idea.  Detroit will see a statue of Robocop.

What are they thinking over in Motown? The city is depicted in the Robocop films as a hellhole, a behavioral sink rancid with corruption and violence.  (Well, okay, but they don’t have to dwell on it.)

But I suppose such masochism is to be expected. Kneel to our media overlords.

Wow, I’m getting grouchier by the second. Don’t I see any place for public statuary? Actually, I do, as I shall note in my appreciation of the St.Paul Peanuts statues.

St. Paul, Minnesota, is another city that honors a famed native son– Charles Schulz (1922– 2000), creator of the comic strip Peanuts — with a series of bronze sculptures.

But these are anything but monumental: they were specifically designed to be kid-friendly. They exude charm allied with modesty, which was also the case for the strip and its author.

 

 

Along these lines, in Hartlepool, England, we find a statue of their own native son Reg Smythe‘s comic strip hero Andy Capp:

The statue was controversial, actually, as Andy was a wife-beater among other things. And note that his ever-present cigarette was censored.

Now, note the proportions of head-to-body in the statue and compare them to those of the drawn Andy:

About three heads tall for the cartoon, about five for the statue.  Why?

So that people can do this:

That’s right– they can hug it, clink glasses with it… interact with it!  People want to be pals with the cartoons!

Note, too, the absence of a pedestal. The character is on the same footing as us.

This is key: people have strong affection for “their” cartoon characters; they literally take them into their homes, with the newspaper or through the tv screen. So the best cartoon sculptures will promote a feeling of affectionate intimacy.

Here, in Dundee, Scotland,  are Desperate Dan and Dawg:

… and Minnie the Minx:

Again in England– in Ipswich– Carl Giles‘  beloved Grandma character:

But my favorite interactive cartoon sculpture is this one of Mort Walker‘s Beetle Bailey: you can actually sit and have a drink with him.


And my favorite non-cartoon interactive public sculpture is in London. A Conversation with Oscar Wilde is designed as a bench; you’re supposed to sit and tell Oscar the latest gossip:

The statue of Tintin in Brussels used to be on a pedestal in a park; when it was moved to a city street, the pedestal was removed, and you can now have a playful chat with the globe-trotting boy reporter:

 

This more intimate, anti-monumental style seems to be catching on. Here’s James Joyce in Dublin:

 

As a final example of interactive statuary, consider the much-beloved Alice in Wonderland group in New York’s Central Par, over which I scrambled as a child– a tradition that continues, it would seem:


There is more to be said about the curious class of cartoon sculpture; about its polysemic ambiguity, about the colonisation of public space by corporate imagery,about kitsch and irony, about ….
But :

Now its time to say goodbye
To all our company.

Em-eye-cee-

“See you real soon !”

Kay-ee-wy-


“Why? because we like you!”


Em-oh-you-ess-ee
–signoff song for the Mickey Mouse Club

A great guide and source of information about similar curiosities is http://www.roadsideamerica.com/

Sexless Superman

Posted on by

This article first appeared in The Frontiersman #6, © Broken Frontier 2010.
_________________________

Let’s be mature about this. And let’s be honest.

For some time now, Superman has been more than simply a superhero comic book character. That’s not a slight to the medium or a slam to the genre; it’s just a fact. Superman is an icon, an identity, a cash cow, a cottage industry, a brand, and an ideal all in one. What he’s not, what he’s never been, is a sex symbol nor a sexual being. Superman lacks libido.


from Action Comics #592-#593 by John Byrne.

Maybe *somewhere* there’s a stray issue that a mylar-bag Geek-keeper can cite to point out Supes giving a rare leer at a lady — not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story! Perhaps Superman has shown fleeting glimpses of hypothesis-shattering lust. To which, I say two things:

First, the words “stray” and “fleeting” are key; these are by no means general traits of the character. Second, how many devoted readers have read or think fondly of a “sexy Superman” story? At best, such a tale is a trivia-winner; at worst, it’s a back-in-the-bin forgotten day for the Man of Steel.

This sexless Superman, this chaste strange visitor, is far more a function of his comic book adventures than, say, his film or television personae. Christopher Reeve had a subtle swagger to his portrayal of Superman, particularly when slyly commenting on the color of Lois’s underwear. In fact, during the filming of Superman: The Movie, rumor has it that a particular grip was assigned to carefully monitor Reeve’s crotch while in costume: if his package jostled too much as to upset a shot, this keen-eyed professional voyeur would halt the action and call for the scene to be redone. (Better fixed now, logic would have it, than have a super-member ruin opportunities for the editors later.)

Whether or not actors like Tom Welling, Brandon Routh, or Dean Cain had to suffer similar indignities, they each have engaged in far more physical episodes with their Loises, Lanas, and Kats than their two-dimensional counterpart. In fact, only Cain’s Superman on Lois & Clark has the distinction of sharing Superman’s in-comics marital status: he is married (and that only lasted 19 episodes for Cain before the show was axed). Now, within the bonds of holy wedlock, one might think Superman has license to yearn openly for Lane flesh. However, even this expression of healthy spousal sexuality is rarely shown, with the pair more often longing to hold each other than, frankly, fornicate.

One argument for Superman’s restraint with his own wife could be Larry Niven’s sensational “Man of Steel, Women of Kleenex” explanation: If Superman had sex with Lois, he’d likely kill her, “simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout. Lastly, he’d blow off her head. […] Kal-El’s semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet.” Garth Ennis and Amanda Conner played this for good laughs with the Superman parody the Saint and his inaurgural orgasm in The Pro.

Yet, Superman’s in-continuity encounters with other, shall we say, more durable females has yielded little carnal result. For Action Comics #600, writer/artist John Byrne had Wonder Woman and Superman exchange an entwined, mid-flight, full-mouth kiss with each other… that left the two friends rather cold. (Mark Waid and Alex Ross would have their Elseworlds Kingdom Come peck be even colder, though it leads eventually to a procreative result; Frank Miller would remain outside continuity but fully deliver the aeronautic goods in The Dark Knight Strikes Back and All-Star Batman.)

The scholarly, Ivory Tower academic explanation for this is twofold (so pay attention, students). First, Superman, fashioned in the late 1930s American sensibility, has a strong streak of Puritanism woven into his DNA: Sex is sinful, lust is bad, and love should only be agapic, not erotic. John Byrne tried to breed it right out the Kryptonians in his 1980s reboot, standing for approximately 20 years! John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett say that it is this removal from society, this state of isolation, that characterizes most American heroes from those of the Campellian monomyth. The Lone Ranger must only shoot the guns out of outlaws hands – not shoot the outlaws – and he must keep himself apart (socially, sexually) from the civilization he protects. The same goes for Natty Bumpo, Mary Poppins, and Rambo – do not think of them ever getting a sex scene (separately or together).

The second collegiate explanation for a sexless Superman would likely reference the go-to essay for all superhero scholarship, Umberto Eco’s “The Myth of Superman.” In short, Superman must never age (for a whole litany of reasons, making the essay required reading rather than easily summarized here). And, if Superman were to reproduce, then that would be a very concrete, very Oedipal passage of time; a Superman Jr. would consume Kal-El in a way that fantasy stories like the “Saga of the Super-Sons” or “Son of Superman” do not by admitting to their oneiric haze outside continuity.

But, regardless of those two points, we don’t live in the Ivory Tower, and that’s certainly not where Superman is written and sold. America is continually growing out of its Puritanism (though, some days, it feels like one step forward and two steps back). Even if it weren’t, one could fight fire with fire and accuse Superman’s marriage of being suspect for its lack of reproduction, as the good Lord of Plymouth Rock intended, naturally. To the second point, the rewriting of time (or undoing of time) is now so easy in the superhero genre that a begetting Superman could maintain his never-ending status with a plot loophole as easily as you could say, “Brightest Day,” frankly.

Today, in an era where sexuality need not be the same as lust and our heroes can have fully human lives (whether it’s as Tony Stark playboys or as Matrix-esque monogamous passions), this is the one corner of Superman that has not escaped its origin as juvenile literature. And it’s simply a matter of story and storytelling that prevents it currently – yes, DC Comics, I have a pitch right here on my laptop – not some inherent prohibition in the character. Find the comics creator who can handle it with panache, sensitivity, maturity, and some levity, and we can have a red-blooded Superman equipped to handle adulthood and the twenty-first century along with Lois in a negligee.

For a character with an emphatically phallic origin story, a bevy of L.L. suitoresses, and the most archetypically skin-tight costume, sex is conspicuously absent. Stop teasing Superman for wearing his underwear on the outside and, instead, grow up by putting a little more weight in that package.
______________________
A. David Lewis is a national lecturer on comics, currently receiving his Ph.D. from Boston University. In addition to co-editing Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels and serving as an Editorial Board Member for the International Journal of Comic Art, he is also the co-creator of The Lone and Level Sands and Some New Kind of Slaughter graphic novels.

Adolescent Power Fantasies for Adults

Posted on by

A slightly edited version of this was posted earlier this week on Splice Today.
___________________

Superman was one of those ideas that conquered the world through the sheer force of its elegant stupidity. Kids like to imagine that they’re powerful. Wouldn’t they like it even better if they could imagine that they were…superpowerful? Pulp heroes were strong and fast and handsome…why not make a pulp hero who was stronger, faster, and wore primary-colored tights? Okay, so the last bit didn’t necessarily make a ton of sense. But the rest of it? That was sound.

And eight odd decades later, it’s still sound. For evidence, you need only look to Hollywood, where every third film seems to be a superhero fantasy, with tights or without.

The latest entry in the genre is Limitless, a film whose power fantasies are almost as nakedly crass as those of Siegel and Shuster themselves. Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a wastoid wannabe novelist with writer’s block, one failed marriage, and a girlfriend who’s leaving him. But then…an ancient wizard gives him a magic word of power, he is bitten by a radioactive stock broker and subsequently eye-fucked by ghostly ninja warriors who pass him their skills in their ninja semen . And everything changes!

Okay; there are no ghostly ninja warriors, nor radioactive words of power. There’s just a pill, NZT-48, which increases brain capacity, because you only use 20% of the brain of your scriptwriters in coming up with some stupid pseudo-science explanation, and then, hey, you’re off to impress and then screw your landlord’s bitchy wife and write your novel in four days and then clean your apartment and get a shave. Also, extreme sports. For now you are…Superyuppie!

Or, to put it another way, Limitless demonstrates with depressing finality that the power fantasies of adults are much more banal than the power fantasies of children. Super strength, super speed, heat vision, beating the bad guys and saving the day — they’re clichés now, sure, but they still have an exuberant charm. Wanting those things doesn’t make you dumb or boring. It just makes you a kid, or somebody who used to be a kid. My seven-year-old just yesterday looked at me and said, “Daddy, I wish I could fly.” And I laughed because it’s true enough to always be a surprise. Everybody wishes they could fly.

But the power fantasies in Limitless aren’t big, reach-for-the-stars daydreams. They’re cramped and puerile; Superman curdled. As soon as that landlord’s wife appears, looking less like a typical dowdy Hollywood landlord’s wife and more like a typical Hollywood hot-young-transient-fuck, you know that Eddie is going to get some. And the rest of his successes unfold with a similar dreary predictability. He starts stock trading and makes oodles and oodles of money. He gets his old girlfriend back…and then indulges in a wild round of debauchery, canoodling (with admirable political correctness) women of varying melanin, culminating in an especially hot blonde socialite who could be in movies. Which, of course, she is.

The walk on the wild side is, we are assured, Out Of Character; it’s a side-effect of the wonder drug and not of course related to Eddie’s actual real power fantasies no no no. Besides, he is punished for his hubris and his satyrism and, one hopes, for Bradley Cooper’s smug smile, which is insufferable even by the standards of the smug smiles usually distributed to scruffy, raffish, second-tier leading men. And since it isn’t really him doing the bad things, and since he is punished with headaches and withdrawal and the threat of being tortured by the inevitable sadistic gangsters, we can forgive him and cheer him on as he lopes inevitably to chemical-powered victory. Right?

I think that’s how it’s supposed to play, anyway. Something goes rather awry in the delivery though. Maybe it’s Eddie’s utter lack of anything resembling an individual personality — even in his wry, self-deprecating voice over he doesn’t manage to say anything either witty or memorable. For that matter, when he’s on the superdrug that makes him supersmart, he comes across not as a genius but as a superbore. The movie shows landladies dropping their pants for him and stockbrokers struck with awe…but Eddie never actually inspires awe in the viewers. When a upwardly-mobile Eddie Murphy wowed the upper crust in Trading Places, you could sort of see it, because Murphy has charisma. Cooper though — all he’s got is a pretty face. One comes away from Limitless with the sneaking suspicion that maybe the NZT-48 is really just cocaine. Even when Eddie’s making a fool of himself, it lets him think he’s the most brilliant guy in the room.

The real reason it’s difficult to sympathize with Eddie, though, is not that he’s a bore. It’s that he’s kind of an evil schmuck. Blessed with superintelligence, he doesn’t try to cure cancer or develop cold fusion, or even devote his life to the art he ostensibly values. He just scrabbles for cash and then runs for political office.

Along the way, incidentally, he maybe possibly kills a woman — that blonde socialite mentioned earlier. After he slept with her she shows up murdered, and Eddie can’t remember whether it was him who did it or not. With his recently acquired millions he hires a high-powered lawyer and beats the charge, but it seems quite possible that he was responsible. Nonetheless, he shows no particular remorse. He does vomit after he hears she’s dead, but this seems as related to withdrawal symptoms as to conscience, and he certainly seems to experience no long term guilt.

In the final scene Eddie, now a Senatorial candidate, outmaneuvers and humiliates ruthless tycoon Carl Van Loon, played by a text-messaging-it-in Robert De Niro. It’s the final wish-fulfillment fantasy; beating big bad daddy at his own game and taking his place. Our hero started out a hollow narcissist without the focus to achieve his boring ambitions, and he ends up a hollow narcissist with the drive to be Senator — and maybe someday even President. It’s a triumph for us all, I suppose. Still, I think I might have enjoyed the movie more if he’d, I don’t know, gone back to being a loser, or been shot in the head by gangsters. Maybe I’m just a traditionalist at heart, but if it’s going to be a dumb old superhero power fantasy, I’d prefer that the good guys win.

Months Later and You Still Smell Like Mutant Wolverine Fart

Posted on by

A slightly edited version of this appeared a while back on Splice Today. It’s something of a homage to the inimitable Tucker Stone.
_____________________________________________________

Batman and Robin #13
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Frazer Irving

Grant Morrison kicks this off with Bruce’s mother lying on the ground dead, Bruce beside her, and Thomas Wayne standing over them muttering triumphantly. And if you need a scorecard to tell you who the characters are and what’s wrong with this picture, you’ve wandered into the wrong primal scene, jack. This is for people in the know, returning to their childhood toys as the super-patriarchs they used to pantomime, ritually defiling their dreams in the name of celebratory nostalgia and a simulacra of naïve wonder gushing decadence and cyberpunk. Thomas Wayne is the evil daddy, the Joker is the evil daddy, some guy with a pig face is an evil daddy. Gordon’s the good daddy and the old Robin’s the new Batman trying to take the place of a daddy for the new Robin who has issues. Frazer Irving’s stiff figures, waxy flesh tones and over-saturated colors give the whole thing the air of plastic surrealism; a perfect self-referential Freudian fugue with action figures taking the place of fathers. It’s not Thomas Wayne who’s your papa, Bruce, but the toy you got in your Happy Meal. Play with it till you get old and bored, cut off its head, and then declare loudly that it’s more profoundly entertaining than ever when it self-referentially sits there.

Spider-Man #12
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: David LaFuente

Marvel has ret-conned and alt-universed Spider-Man so many times it’s a wonder poor Peter Parker has enough brain cells left to pull his red tights out of the way when his nether web spinner incontinently dribbles. In theory this story is about an exact duplicate who’s replaced our favorite web-slinger, but I prefer to think that it’s just the same old Peter bashed one time too many in the head by the latest creative team and trying desperately to recover. There’s some strong evidence for my position — for example, “false” Peter references lines from old, old sixties scripts (“Face it tiger, you’ve hit the jackpot”) which he could only know if said scripts were still shuttling about painfully through the hollowed out shell of his continuity addled cortex. Because writing a teen adventure melodrama with somnolent shout-outs to the wannabe-hip patois of forty-five years ago — that would just be stupid, right? No, it’s much more likely that Stan Lee is actually a sentient self-replicating tapeworm that Bendis ingested with his morning Starbucks, and the Man has been slowly replacing his host’s tissues with slithering segments of hype and misattributions of co-authorship. Eventually the worm will grow so enormous that its tail will come thrashing bloodily out of Bendis’ forehead in a giant fountain of brain bits and achingly slow dialogue. “Faaaaacccceeeee itttttt tigggggeeeeeeerrr, yoooooooovvvvvvveeeeee hiiiiiiiiiittttttttttt ttttthhhhheeeeee….blaaaaaaaaarch!”

Superman #701
Writer: J. Michael Straczynski
Artists: Eddy Barrows/J.P.Mayer

Superman is an adolescent power fantasy. Some of us have adolescent power fantasies that involve beating up bad guys and rescuing damsels in distress. Some of us have adolescent power fantasies that involve walking across the country dispensing hippie wisdom about how you’ve got to take a stand where you are and you shouldn’t kill yourself if you think you’ll still have one good day in your life and Thoreau said something profound which only a humble seeker wearing his underwear on the outside can truly understand.

J. Michael Straczynski’s power fantasies are of the second kind. His Superman isn’t a hero; he’s an insufferably smug guidance counselor/guru, getting in touch with the real America by serving it a steady diet of flatulent koans and end-of-episode heartwarming morals. Don’t you wish you could dispense flatulent koans? Don’t you wish you could win arguments with a quiet wisdom indistinguishable from contempt? Don’t you wish you could walk on and on until you “run out of road”? If you do, could you please go off and write a self-help book or join the Peace Corps or go to the far north to join your fortunes with the wild lonely musk ox? Just don’t write comic books, okay? Because they will suck.

Can’t Fail. Can’t Die. Balding. Can Dance a Little. (The Pointless Inevitability of Hero Fiction)

Posted on by

Hi, everyone, I’m Jason Michelitch, a semi-regular contributor over at Comics Alliance and a longtime-reader/sometime-commenter here at Hooded Utilitarian.   Noah kindly invited me to write this guest post for HU, which I’m going to kick off by admitting openly how many times I’ve watched the movie Face/Off, inviting the scorn and dismissal of you fine, educated people.  Let’s boogie!

I was watching Face/Off the other day, for maybe the baker’s dozenth time since catching it first run in the theater in ’97, and in the middle of the film, I began to wonder, “Why am I watching this?”  I mean, the broad answer was obvious:  I love Face/Off.  I would watch it anytime.  I would watch it right now.  But why?

Continue reading →

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

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

from the comics and cartoons!

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

Art by Joe Shuster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Zarathustra spake thus unto the

people:

Behold, I teach you the Superman!

The Superman is the meaning of the earth.

Let your will say:

The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!

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

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

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

Behold, I teach you the Superman: He is that sea.
Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue?
Where is the madness against which you should be inoculated?
Behold, I teach you the Superman:
He is this lightning, he is this madness!

Whew.

Next time, Friedrich, stick to the decaff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Wayne Boring and Charles Paris

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

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

Art by Curt Swan and Stan Kaye

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Curt Swan and George Klein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by John Forte

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

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

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

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

Jerry: “So he’s Bizarro Jerry.

Elaine: “Bizarro Jerry?”

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

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

Jerry: “No, it’s still goodbye.”

— from the Seinfeld episode, ‘Bizarro Jerry”

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

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

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

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

Superman figure by Murphy Anderson; Billy 

Batson and Captain Marvel by C.C.Beck

 

 

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

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

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

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

Cover by C.C.Beck

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

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

Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Captain Marvel had a little sister:

Art by Jack Binder Studio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

perhaps, “O damn…!” it’s “Mary…!”.

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

3. A lesbian.

4. A woman – no negative connotations.

5. (gayle slang) Obvious homosexual man.

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

name used by gay men to refer to each other.

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

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

Be there– or be square!

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

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

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

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

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

An incredibly massive resource for research on comic books is The Grand Comicbook Database. Lots of cover eye candy in addition to information on over 200 000 comic books.
Brian Cronin’s charming column, Comic Book Urban Legends, features thousands of offbeat facts; much of it is superhero trivia, but he also speaks of strips and panel cartoons. Many thanks for his info on the Brainiac affair.
The online gay and LGBTglossary is my source for the Mary Marvel material. A window into a robust and expressive jargon.

Time Capsule, Part 1

Posted on by

I turn thirty this month, which means I’m officially an old fart. And like all old farts, I enjoy reminiscing about the past when everything, especially comics, were better. It’s time for some good, ole’ fashioned nostalgia. And since nostalgia tends to be infantile, why not look back at the comics being published during my first days as an infant? For the next two weeks, I’ll be reviewing the mainstream comics of September 1980, starting with the output of DC Comics.

Batman #327
Writer: Len Wein
Pencils: Irv Novick
Inks: Frank McLaughlin

I don’t care for Irv Novick’s artwork. It’s genre hackery at its most tiresome: generally competent, but lacking any sense of location, character, or emotional intensity. Backgrounds are practically nonexistent, and not for any creative reasons that I can detect, but probably because Novick is lazy. To avoid drawing backgrounds, he brings the action close to the characters or fills the panels with talking heads. On the plus side, I’m amused that his depiction of Dr. Milo resembles an anorexic Moe Howard.

The shitty artwork is all the worse because it drags down a half-way decent story. Wein appreciates that Batman straddles the line between superheroes and pulp crime, and he liberally steals ideas from the latter genre. Rather than a straightforward hero vs. villain slugfest, the narrative is mostly a detective story with disguises, drugging, and identity confusion.

Unfortunately, the main story is only 18 pages long (to make room for a tedious Batman and Robin back-up), so Wein has to rush through the plot, spending just a few panels on each of the pulp crime tropes. The result is a story that practically begs to be a two-parter. On the other hand, that would require reading another issue drawn by Novick.

Action Comics #511
Writer: Cary Bates
Pencils: Curt Swan
Inks: Frank Chiaramonte

I’ll lay out my prejudices at the start: Superman is boring. He’s a boring character who stars in boring stories. Action Comics is probably not the worst comic being published in any given month, but I can’t remember when it was ever any good. And judging this comic solely as a superhero adventure, it largely confirms my bias. Lex Luthor goes good (I’m guessing it doesn’t last) and helps Superman in an unremarkable fight against two unremarkable villains. There’s also a section devoted to Clark Kent’s job as a TV anchorman, which is sadly no where near as entertaining as it could be. At the very least Curt Swan’s art  is attractive, but he can’t elevate tedious plot or characters.

But for all it’s faults, I was actually entertained while reading this comic, thanks to to the fact that it’s incredibly gay (more so than Superman usually is). The opening splash page features Lex Luthor relaxing in a room decorated entirely with pictures of Superman doing heroic things, like flying, punching, um … standing, and … I’m not quite sure what he’s doing on the right. Rolling up a newspaper? Maybe it’s supposed to be an iron rod (insert your own joke here).

Plus, it ends with manly hand-holding…

Bros 4 Life

And in-between, Superman and Lex fight a gay, space cowboy. I suppose unintentionally entertaining is better than nothing.

Wonder Woman #271
Writer: Gerry Conway
Pencils: Jose Delbo
Inks: Dave Hunt

Poor Steve Trevor. DC would kill him off, only to bring him back, and then kill him off again in a desperate bid to wring some drama from Wonder Woman. Apparently, issue 271 was a big deal, because Steve Trevor is brought back to life (again). Except it wasn’t the “real” Steve Trevor, but another Steve from a parallel Earth who crashed through a dimensional barrier.

I don’t give give a shit about the DC multiverse, but I approve of this plot point. If there’s any real benefit to having parallel Earths, it’s that they provide a quick and easy way to throw out the previous writer’s terrible ideas. And then the current writer is free to introduce his own terrible ideas, which comprise the rest of this issue.

Justice League of America #182
Writer: Dave Cockrum
Pencils: Dick Dillin
Inks: Frank McLaughlin

I really liked this, even though Dick Dillin’s artwork is uneven, and even though the the main plot was a rote conflict with Felix Faust that I already forgot. What stands out is the B-plot, starring DC’s premier asshole, Green Arrow. In the real world, nobody likes an asshole, but assholes are an essential ingredient for any great superhero team. Assholes get the best lines, assholes create drama, and, unlike the other good guys, the assholes possess something resembling a personality. And it’s always fun to see an asshole get his comeuppance.

The best part of this comic comes at the end. In an earlier issue, Green Arrow threw a temper tantrum and quit the Justice League. He spent most of this issue whining because he got stuck helping the other heroes save the world. After they defeat Faust, Superman offers Arrow a place on the League again, but, being an asshole, Arrow throws the offer back in his face. Then he reacts with outrage when he learns that Black Canary, his girlfriend/enabler, wants to have a life of her own in the League.

What an insufferable prick. I am entertained!

Jonah Hex #40
Writer: Michael Fleisher
Pencils and Inks: Dan Spiegle
Colors: Bob Le Rose

Even though superheroes dominated its line-up, DC never entirely abandoned the other genres. Jonah Hex was DC’s (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to keep a Western in continuous publication. Why and how the Western genre declined across all media is a topic for another blog post. For the purposes of this post, I’ll note that Jonah Hex is a pretty good Western. Fleisher and Speigle don’t do anything groundbreaking, and they don’t have to. The tropes of the Western are simple, and they either appeal to the reader or they don’t: Indians, revolvers, saloons, and rugged individualists imposing order on a lawless environment. All Fleisher needed to do was take the tropes and construct a morality play where Hex acted tough and the villain was punished in a suitably ironic manner. Fleisher did just that, but he also added a comedic touch by treating Hex as a reckless idiot who managed survive mostly due to dumb luck.

I’m not familiar with Dan Spiegle, but his work on Jonah Hex is impressive, particularly the rich backgrounds and expressive faces. But much of the credit should also go the colorist, Bob Le Rose. Rather than the vibrant palette of the superhero genre, Le Rose used muted colors and earth tones that evoked an earthier, more “real” appearance for the Old West. And the colors add a darkness to the story, even during the daylight scenes, that echoes the darker, more brutal themes of the genre.

House of Mystery #284
Writers: J.M. DeMatteis (story 1), Carl Wessler (story 4)
Pencils and inks: Noly Zamora (story 1), Jess Jodloman (story 4)

That is a great cover.

House of Mystery was DC’s long-running horror/thriller/dark fantasy anthology. I’ve already talked at length about horror comics here, so I won’t belabor my earlier points. Suffice to say, comics are not an ideal medium for scary stories. Perhaps the best a cartoonist can hope for is to create a story that’s unnerving.

The lead story, “Ruby,” had some potential. DeMatteis crafted a decent plot about an evil little girl (20 years before the Japanese cornered the market on stories about evil little girls). Noly Zamora provided dark, atmospheric artwork. But at only seven pages, the story has no room to develop. Racing from one plot point to the next, what should be creepy descends into camp. And DeMatteis’ corny narration doesn’t help matters:

It’s worth mentioning that Alan Moore’s narration in Swamp Thing was equally overripe, and yet he somehow avoided diminishing his own story.  But perhaps that’s an unfair comparison.

The rest of the issue consisted of similarly disappointing short stories. The last one, “Deadly Peril at 20,000,” is memorably solely due to its unabashed sexism (women are prone to violent hysteria, and the best way to deal with hysterical women is to kill them).

________________________________

Overall, September 1980 seemed like a lean month for a struggling DC. Marquee titles like Action Comics were stuck in perpetual auto-pilot, and the company’s non-superhero efforts were a mixed bag.  But in November DC would launch New Teen Titans, which grew into an X-Men-sized hit.

And speaking of X-Men, next week I’ll take a look at what Marvel was doing 30 years ago.