Tidbits of Steel

Dr. C has an interesting post about the kinds of effects a childhood exposure to comic-books might subsequently have on a person as an adult. Though I read quite a few comic-books as a child, my main interests were the artwork (really; I thought the tears in love comics were the ultimate in emotional expression on paper) and the flying. I really wanted to fly.

Nevertheless, I have some bits and pieces to contribute to the topic, taken from an excellent book in my possession, The Physics of Superheroes, by James Kakalios (2005). The best parts of the book are, of course, those explaining superhero flight (especially why the Angel’s wings wouldn’t work. Darn!) and all of the chapters about Ant-Man. Awesome! None of which has anything to do with Dr. C’s post. Below are the bits that do relate somewhat to what he’s talking about:

The original incarnations of various superheroes [Superman, Captain Marvel, etc.] in the late 1930s and 1940s were products of their time and reflected life during the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, soldiers who had acquired a comic-book-reading habit while overseas continued to buy comics after returning to the States, and certain publishers catered to this older audience with adult-themed stories featuring more graphic violence. Some of the young comic-book writers and artists had also been drafted into the armed services, and their wartime experiences resulted in a more serious, and in some cases darker, tone to their postwar work. From their inception, comic books were intended to attract a younger readership. In 1945 Maxwell Gaines ended his association with National Comics and started a new publishing firm called Educational Comics, printing such titles as Picture Stories from Science, Picture Stories from American History, and Picture Stories from the Bible. After his untimely passing in 1947, his son William Gaines changed the firm’s name to Entertaining Comics (EC) and shifted their inventory to such comics as Tales from the Crypt, Crime SuspenStories, Weird Science-Fantasy, and The Vault of Horror. These comics were neither suitable nor intended for the same audience as Captain Marvel. It was just a matter of time before someone noticed and complained.

Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1953 best-selling book, Seductions of the Innocent, forcefully argued that such lurid stories corrupted the minds of young children, leading them directly to careers as juvenile delinquents. In a cycle that appears to repeat itself in every generation, there was a growing concern among parents and authority figures in the post-World War II era over the coarsening effects of popular culture on the attitudes and mores of teenagers. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, headed by the ambitious Sen. Estes Kefauver, held hearings on the connection between comic books and teenage crime. Initially the committee intended to focus solely on horror and crime comics, but Wertham, a consultant to the subcommittee, brought super-hero comics to the senators’ attention. Seeking to avoid the imposition of federal oversight and regulation, the major comic-book publishers created a self-regulatory agency called the Comics Code Authority (CCA).

Ray Girvan covers a lot of that same material (Wertham et al)  in his Wondering post of not too long ago.

In addition to employing accurate science, comics from the Silver Age often had scholarly nuggets from other learned disciplines buried within their stories. For example, the plot of “The Adventure of the Cancelled Birthday” in The Atom #21(written by Gardner Fox, who was both a lawyer and a writer for the science-fiction pulp magazines) revolved around the obscure fact that in 1952, when Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar to replace the Julian calendar, eleven days were omitted during the transition. That is, September 2, 1752, was followed the next day by September 14, in order to regularize the British calendar with other parts of Europe. (Britons, distrustful of their government and believing that they were being cheated, rioted with the rallying cry, “Give us back our eleven days!”)

Young readers were thereby introduced through this superhero comic to facts and historical figures not typically covered in their history classes. Two issues later the letters column in The Atom printed a complaint from one such fan, arguing over the poor choice of historical characters, such as the obscure Justice Fielding. The editor of Atom comics, Julius “Julie” Schwartz, responsible for reintroducing the Flash in 1956, defended the story in the letters column, pointing out that it was high time that the reader become acquainted as had the Atom, with Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones.

… The Hugo Award winner Alfred Bester, author of science-fiction classics The Demolished Man and The Stars, My Destination, also wrote comics during the 1940s and penned the original Green Lantern oath. In an autobiographical essay, Bester tells of spending hours browsing through reference books in the New York Public Library, searching for odd historical tidbits around which he could construct a story. Knowing a lot of trivia could also help these pulp-fiction writers’ financial bottom line, as these authors were paid by the word. Consequently they would frequently pad their work with all sorts of barely relevant tangents as reflected in this joke:

Q: How many pulp-fiction writers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The history of the light bulb is a long and interesting tale, beginning in 1879 in the quiet town of Menlo Park, New Jersey, and continuing on to the present day …

While the Sliver Age comic-book writers may have had an economic incentive to be verbose, it is also likely that they were motivated by considerations of self-preservation to inject educational elements into their stories. As mentioned above, the introduction of science facts and principles into these stories may have stemmed from a genuine desire on the part of the writers and editors to educate, or perhaps simply from a survival instinct to avoid any further congressional attention.

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In the early years of Action and Superman comics, Siegel and Shuster gave voice to the revenge fantasies of their young and economically disadvantaged Depression-era readers. Superman first used his powers to fight corrupt slumlords, coal-mine owners, munitions manufacturers, and Washington lobbyists. In his very first story he psychologically tormented a lobbyist by holding him as they both fell from a tall building. At this early stage of his career, the story lines indicated that only a few people knew of Superman’s existence, and the lobbyist believed that the fall would be fatal. He willingly divulged the information Superman was after rather than risk another such fall. By the 1950s, in addition to selling millions of comics per month, Superman had become a star of radio serials, movie shorts (both animated and live action), and a popular television program. Around this time his adversaries morphed into criminal masterminds with colorful personas and costumes, such as the Toyman, the Prankster, and Lex Luther, whose schemes for grand larceny or world (or in the case of Brainiac, galactic) domination Superman was able to foil while keeping the corporate power structure safely undisturbed. As befits the escalating capabilities of the villains he faced, Superman entered a superpower arms race, eventually growing so powerful that it became difficult for writers to concoct credible threats to challenge hs near godlike abilities. Radioactive fragments of his home planet, known as Kryptonite, became a frequent device to extend any given story beyond the first page of the comic.*

*How a radioactive element from his native planet would affect Superman so strongly, while he remained immune to radioactive isotopes found on Earth, is more an issue of literary necessity rather than physical plausibility. Kryptonite was first introduced in the radio serial Adventures of Superman in 1943, when the overworked radio actor portraying the Man of Steel wanted a vacation. The radio scriptwriters created Superman’s mineral nemesis so that another actor could portray the stricken superhero by groaning into the microphone.Several years later the comic-book writers adopted and adapted this creative device, and a rainbow of Kryptonite (green, red, gold, silver, and others) with a broad range of effects on Superman was introduced in the comic-book universe.

All this super, super, super. Why doesn’t anybody else like Ant-Man as much as I do?

[Somewhat related, if you're really into Superman, is this comparison of  Jerry Siegel, co-creator (with his childhood friend Joe Shuster) of Superman; and Miguel de Cervantes, author/creator of Don Quixote.  link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/