Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, by Glen Weldon (2013)

A few weeks ago, we looked at Glen Weldon’s delicious The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture.  We enjoyed it so much, we moved onto Weldon’s earlier book on the world’s first superhero, Superman: The Unauthorized Biography.  With Batman, Weldon had hoped to put nerd culture into some type of larger perspective; his Superman book is less ambitious, but more focused and successful a production.  If you are a Superman buff, it is highly recommended.

We here at The Jade Sphinx have always much preferred Superman to his darker counterpart.  This is a prejudice we suspect that Weldon shares, as his book on Superman is relentlessly amusing, affectionate and reverential.  Superman’s creators, Siegel and Schuster, says Weldon, saw their creation as quite simply, the ultimate American: a Gatsby who’d arrived on a bright new shore, having propelled himself there by burning his own past as fuel.  The Old World could no longer touch him, and now it was left to him to forge his own path.  Throughout the book, Weldon’s prose seems charged with a powerful nostalgia for a simpler, and perhaps wiser, America.  One that still believed in heroes and other symbols of hope; and, we suspect, one where childish delights were viewed in perspective by adult fans, and not with the soul-crushing scrutiny of today’s Perpetual Adolescents.

One of Weldon’s strongest passages concerns science fiction writer Larry Niven’s 1971 essay on the possible outcomes of Superman having sex with Earth women.  The essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, made excruciating (and amusing)  conclusions, and it can still be found and makes for great reading.  But Weldon places this now 45 year old work in contemporary perspective:  The gag, of course, is the deadpan, painstaking manner in which Niven lays out his thought process.  This is where you end up if you take this stuff too seriously, he seems to say: killer sperm from outer space.

Looking back on Niven’s humorous essay today, it’s impossible to see it as anything but a chilling harbinger of the high-level weapons-grade nerdery that would seize comics in the decades that followed.  All too soon, legions of fans and creators adopted Niven’s let’s-pin-this-to-the-specimen-board approach and proceeded to leach humor and whimsy and good old-fashioned, Beppo the Super-Monkey-level goofiness out of superhero comics, leaving in their place a punishing, joyless, nihilistic grittiness.

Weldon sees Superman as an ever-changing figure, who always reflects a constantly evolving America.  The New Deal crusader of the late 1930s is different from the patriotic boy scout of World War II, and very different indeed from his Jet Age counterpart.  What Weldon sees as the core of Superman is not his persona, but his motivation.  And that is, simply, that Superman always puts the needs of others over those of himself, and he never gives up.  That is the definition of a hero.

Weldon also posits that Superman has long ago transcended the various media that deliver him to us: he has become an idea that is bigger than the comic books, cartoons, TV shows and movies that feature him.  It is an idea that has weathered 75 years, and Weldon predicts that will last at least another 75 more.

It is this protean quality that makes Superman much like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula or even Ebenezer Scrooge: each generation can find something new and vital to say about him, and, in doing so, say something about their own era.

Fortunately, Weldon is also laugh-out-loud funny.  We had the giggles paging through most of this book.  Here he is on the sexy aesthetic of Legion of Super-Heroes artist Mike Grell: Detractors have dinged Grell’s designs for their Ming-the-Merciless collars, bikini bottoms, and pixie boots (and that’s just on the men) – and it’s true that in some panels, Legion HQ crowd scenes seem more like the VIP lounge at Studio 54, but his designs made the book look like nothing else on the shelves.

Here he is on Superman writer Marv Wolfman’s prose: Wolfman proceeded to slather on the pathos, gilding the emotional lily so fervently it makes Dickens’s death of Little Nell read like an expense report. 

It would be hard to imagine a better guide through Superman’s complex history, and we look forward to hearing from Glen Weldon again.

Superman: The War Years 1938-1945, Edited by Roy Thomas

We’ve spent so much time with Superman this week that I couldn’t resist a look into a book I picked up at the New York Historical Society’s exhibition, Superheroes in Gotham.  It is Superman: The War Years 1938-1945, edited by comics historian Roy Thomas.  It is, in short, terrific.

This deluxe, coffee table book has design style to spare, and one has to get past how wonderful looking it is before making any effort to read it.  It may be crammed with kid’s stuff, but it’s glorious kid’s stuff, and can by savored by all and sundry without any shame.

The War Years collects about 20 comics, mostly culled from Action Comics and Superman, along with covers, comic strips and even some ads.  All of this is divided into four sections, each with an introductory essay by Thomas, putting the tales in their historical context.

The comics themselves are great fun.  The art would be considered crude by today’s standards, but it had an energy and brio that is sadly missing from today’s product.  Some of the stories are drawn by Superman co-creator Joe Schuster, and this steely-eyed, square-jawed avenger is quite a change from the softer, more sensitive Superman of today.  Other artists included in this collection are Ed Dobrotka, Fred Ray and Wayne Boring, each of whom brings something unique to the table.

The real challenge for Superman’s writers during the 1940s is how to position a near god-like figure who can do no wrong in the context of a world conflict, without having him in some way resolve it.  Included here is the classic strip where Clark Kent fails his enlistment eye-test, thanks to his reading the chart in the next room.  In other stories, the Man of Steel explicitly states that he did not join the world war because America’s soldiers could do the job without him, and he was better utilized fighting saboteurs and scientifically-created monsters at home.  This, of course, is simply another example of how America at the time prized the concept of the Everyman, the average American Joe who was equal to most any occasion.  This figure – so central to the American psyche of the time – has been lost, thanks largely to Identity Politics, Political Correctness, and other cancerous notions born of the 1960s.  In the 1940s, Superman was a projection of our best selves, in 2016, he is a tragic reminder of what we once were.

The Superman found in these pages – so soon after his creation – is part social reformer (Kent is a militant FDR Democrat), and part super-soldier.  He pulls no punches, and the stories are stronger for that.  Also fascinating is Lois Lane.  While Feminism would like to claim that images of strong women did not exist before the likes of Gloria Steinem, Lane was a strong-minded career woman who was Superman’s equal in nearly every department.  Talented, smart, fearless and adventuresome, Lane is another reminder of perhaps how we had it right before the social upheavals of the 1960s.

While the comics and others materials are themselves quite wonderful, the other great delight of this book (other than its champion design) is the commentary by Thomas.  Informative, casual, and complicit with the reader, he pulls off a wonderful balancing act of great insight and lack of pretention.  The whole book is a fun read, and Thomas is an important part of the experience.

Highly Recommended!

Superheroes in Gotham at the New York Historical Society

The oldest museum in New York City is also one of its finest: The New York Historical Society.  This terrific venue on the Upper West Side just across the street from Central Park routinely creates stunning exhibitions, all of them in some way connecting to New York.

The museum also regularly provides film shows (the life’s blood of any museum – there is nothing better for cultivating a crowd of ‘regulars’), free lectures, and special events and days for children; it is, in short, as much as a cultural center as an exhibition space.  The smartest museums have come to realize that even the finest exhibitions draw only so many people; it is continuing programs and attractions that drive membership and attendance, and the NYSH has managed this balance with a savvy mix of dignity and razzmatazz.

There is a terrific show at the NYHS right now that shouldn’t be missed.  Regular readers of The Jade Sphinx know of our interest in the history of comic strips and comic books, as well as our soft-spot for those Titans in long underwear, superheroes.  Deftly curated by Debra Schmidt Bach and Nina Nazionale, Superheroes in Gotham argues that superheroes and New York are inseparable.

The show opens, of course, with the first and greatest of them all, Superman.  Created by youngsters Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster, Superman’s adopted base of operations, Metropolis, is clearly a stand-in for the Big Apple.  (In fact, some of the earliest stories are set in New York, rather than Metropolis.)  We move quickly onto Batman, where Gotham City is certainly New York’s seedier sections, at night.  (An old DC Comics editorial guide used to insist that writers think of Metropolis as New York around Rockefeller Plaza, and Gotham as New York, under 14^th Street.)

The show then charts the rise of heroes who are explicitly New Yorkers, including Brooklynite Captain America, Queens-boy Spider-Man and Iron Man, with his Manhattan home and Lone Island offices.

For a small show (three good-sized rooms), Bach and Nazionale have densely packed their treasures.  On hand is the original costume of George Reeves (1914-1959), worn during his run on television’s The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958), as well as Julie Newmar’s Catwoman suit from the series, Batman (1966-1968).  There is stunning production art created for the Batman series, original drawings of Superman by artist Schuster, pages of original Spider-Man art (by controversial artist Steve Ditko), as well as Jerry Siegel’s typewriter, incubator for the very first superhero stories.

Also on hand are original animation cells, film posters, schoolbooks featuring doodles and/or finished drawings by comic artists while still schoolkids themselves, and a host of other treasures, including the Batmobile used by Adam West (born 1928) in the television series. 

It’s not surprising that the genre was born here in Gotham.  This Metropolis was the home to many of its creators; in fact, of the first generation of creators, Will Eisner (1917-2005), Stan Lee (born 1922), Bob Kane (1915-1998) and Bill Finger (1914-1974) had all attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.

The exhibition underscores beautifully how essential to the overall myth of the superhero New York City has become.  Larger-than-life heroes need a suitably large background canvas, and New York has so often been shorthand for the grandiose, the dramatic and, sometimes, the absurd.

There is also a raw energy on hand here that comics (and superheroes) no longer seem to possess.  It is as if the cauldron of the Great Depression, a gleaming art deco city (home to the world’s tallest building), and a still-possible American dream galvanized a legion of First Generation Americans to actually create our myths for us.  These have since been corrupted into mere corporate commodities, made slick and unmemorable by loud, over-produced films and stridently-seeking-relevance comic books.  But that crude power found in the original works is astonishing to behold.

If comics and superheroes are both as exciting and oddly poignant to you as they are to us, then this is a show not to be missed.  It runs until February 21, and more information can be found here:  www.nyhistory.org.