The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition (4 page)

BOOK: The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF SUPERHERO COMIC BOOKS
Before there were comic books, there were comic strips.
2
Weekly broadsheets in Victorian England, nicknamed “penny dreadfuls,” featured humorous strips in the music-h all tradition. Their popularity with poor workers was a great offense to middle-class sensibilities. A fierce newspaper rivalry in the 1890s between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst spurred the creation of the newspaper comic strips that proved extremely popular with newly arrived immigrants who were only semi-conversant in English. These newspaper strips became highly effective weapons in the circulation wars of the time. In fact, it is claimed that the association of Hearst papers with Richard F. Outcault’s visually striking and popular comic strip character, the Yellow Kid, who even appeared on editorial pages, inspired critics of sensationalistic newspapers to denigrate them with the sobriquet “yellow journalism.”
Despite occasional forays into presenting comic strips in a magazine format (such as a Buster Brown comic book published in 1903, Little Nemo in 1906, and Mutt and Jeff in 1910), comic books did not become firmly established until 1933. At the time, newsstands were filled with extremely popular pulp magazines, which contained an entire original novel for just ten cents. Costs were kept down, in part, by printing on the poor-quality paper that gave these journals their name. There were popular titles devoted to mystery stories, such as
Detective Fiction Weekly
and
Black Mask
(which first published Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler); science fiction, such as
Amazing Stories
and
Astounding Stories
(wherein Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury got their start); horror and fantasy, such as
Unknown
and
Weird Tales
(the home of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and even the playwright Tennessee Williams); and action/adventure titles like
The Shadow
,
The Spider, G-8 and His Battle Aces
,
The Mysterious Wu Fang
, and
Doc Savage.
At the height of their popularity, some pulp titles sold several hundred thousand issues per month, which even at ten cents a copy was big money during the Depression. In this highly competitive environment, George Janosik, George Delacorte, Harry Wildenberg, and Maxwell C. Gaines (a schoolteacher before he became a comic-book publisher) decided to take a chance and reprint the color newspaper comic strips from the Sunday supplements onto standard tabloid-size sheets of newsprint, folding them into a 6 ⅝“ × 10 ⅛” pamphlet (thereby establishing the standard format for comic books, which remains unchanged to this day). The comic book
Funnies on Parade
was distributed with coupons for Procter & Gamble products and similar promotional giveaways, and the popularity of the first print run of 10,000 copies inspired them to stick a ten-cents price tag on another issue and sell them on newsstands. The speed with which these newsstand comics sold out (despite the fact that they contained only reprints of material that had been previously available in Sunday newspapers) demonstrated that there was a future in these “funny books.”
Newspaper comic strips were leased to regional papers through “distribution syndicates,” which controlled the reprint rights to these strips. In order to satisfy the demand for material by comic-book publishers who couldn’t secure (or didn’t want to pay for) reprint rights for newspaper strips, Maj. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson hired a group of work-hungry young artists and writers and commissioned original comic material. These brand-new stories were published as New Fun Comics by National Allied Publications. The drawn, inked, lettered, and ready for-printing comic pages that came out of Wheeler-Nicholson’s studio enabled the publishers to avoid the high rates charged by the then-powerful typesetters unions. Soon, the stories that had occupied the pulp-fiction magazines were being told in graphic form, and comics featuring detective and police stories, horror, funny animals and straight gags, adventure heroes, secret agents, and crime fighters with mystical powers filled the newsstands. These ranks were joined in 1938 by a strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
Superman was the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, two teenagers from Cleveland who dreamed of earning riches through the creation of a popular newspaper adventure strip. Combining attributes from two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s characters, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Siegel and Shuster turned the conventional science-fiction adventure story on its head. Instead of an ordinary Earthman traveling to a strange new planet or the far future (as in the stories featuring Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers), a citizen of a distant world with strange powers came to Earth. This innovation, together with the colorful uniform the hero wore (inspired, perhaps, by the costumed strongmen who performed in circuses at the time) and the then-novel concept of a secret identity for the heroic adventurer, made their strip so original that it was swiftly turned down by every newspaper distribution syndicate they approached. After four years of constant rejection, Siegel and Shuster were desperate enough to try to sell their Superman concept to the decidedly lesser market of comic books. They eventually found a receptive audience in Sheldon Mayer, a young editor who saw potential in the rough, early strips of Siegel and Shuster. Mayer convinced fellow editor Vin Sullivan that this character was exactly what was needed for his new comic-book title that was due at the printer but lacked a lead story. With no time to redo the strip to fit the comic-book format, panels from the two weeks of sample newspaper strips were hastily cut and pasted into a thirteen-page story. With a cover adapted from one of the panels in the strip showing Superman lifting an auto sedan over his head while crooks fled in panic,
Action Comics # 1,
cover price ten cents, appeared on newsstands in June 1938. The rest, to coin a phrase, is history.
Evolutionary biology teaches that random mutations can lead to the creation of new species. When these new species exhibit superior adaptation to a changing environment, they can quickly dominate an ecological niche. Similarly, the superhero comic book struck a resonant chord with Depression-era readers, and was an instant success. Soon the newsstands were full of superhero comics, featuring characters possessing a dazzling array of powers and abilities.
All of these new characters shared one crucial attribute: differing sufficiently from Superman in order to avoid joining Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel in a lawsuit over copyright infringement by National Publications (which owned the legal rights to Siegel and Shuster’s creation). Many of these newborn heroes had a single superpower, such as superspeed (the Flash, Johnny Quick), flight (Hawkman, Black Condor), superstrength (Hourman, Captain America), or none of the above (Batman). Some of these heroes gained their superpowers via “scientific means.” The Flash of the 1940s, for example, became superfast after a chemical laboratory accident in which he inhaled some “hard water.”
3
Chemist Rex Tyler developed a pill that provided enhanced strength and speed for sixty minutes, enabling him to fight crime as Hourman. The 4F-army-reject Steve Rogers became the superhero Captain America, following a series of injections with a “super soldier” serum (nowadays, these would probably be described as “steroids”).
Much more common, though, was a mystical or supernatural origin for the characters’ abilities, due to the acquisition of, or exposure to, a magical object from some hidden corner of the globe. In this way, as they would throughout their existence, comic books merely reflected the popular cultural zeitgeist. For example, in the 1940s the Green Lantern was a hero who had come into possession of a mystical lantern originally from ancient China, from which he fashioned a ring that endowed the wearer with a wide variety of powers but was ineffective against wood. Viewed in the cultural context of the times, the world was a bigger place back in 1940. To the adolescent imagination, the “Far East” and the “Congo” were still vast repositories of powerful secrets and mysterious artifacts. When the Green Lantern character was reinvented in 1959, he was given a new costume and origin, and his lantern and ring became extraterrestrial artifacts. The ring’s vulnerability to objects that were colored yellow was now attributed to a chemical impurity in the ring’s composition, which could not be removed without making the ring ineffective.
4
Similarly, the Green Lantern’s colleague, Hawkman, was a reincarnated Egyptian prince in 1940, while the 1960s version of the same hero was an intergalactic policeman from the planet Thanagar.
This origin transition continues today. In 1962, Peter Parker gained the powers of Spider-Man when he was bitten by a spider that had accidentally become radioactive in a physics lab demonstration, while in a 2000 reinterpretation of the same character (as well as in the 2002 film version), the fateful bite was from a genetically engineered superspider that escapes during a molecular-biology lab demonstration. Thus the one constant would appear to be that the creation of the superhero is a way of binding the cultural anxiety of the day, whether of the “distant other” in the 1940s, radioactivity in the 1960s, or genetic manipulation today.
The original incarnations of various superheroes 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. 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 young audience as Captain Marvel. It was just a matter of time before someone noticed and complained.
Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1953 bestselling book,
Seduction 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 superhero 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). The publishers developed a set of rules governing acceptable comic-book content, with explicit instructions that gore, lewdness, drug use, zombies, and vampires were prohibited in any comic book bearing the Comics Code Authority seal of approval on its cover. Many of the guidelines created by the CCA seemed designed solely to ensure the destruction of nearly the entire EC line of comics (the only survivor being a relatively new comic satire magazine by the name of
MAD
). All comic-book stories had to be submitted to the CCA (whose staff was funded by the publishers) for approval before being published, similar to the current ratings board that vets motion pictures.
While it played an important role in the 1950s and 1960s in convincing parents that comic books could be viewed as “wholesome” entertainment, the influence of the Comics Code Authority has waned over the years as the average age of the typical comic-book reader has increased. This is reflected in the decreasing size of the CCA seal on comic-book covers. In 1964, the seal took up an area roughly that of postage stamp, or two thirds of a square inch (as it was a prominent marketing tool to assure parents that the story contained within was acceptable for their children), while it was less than a quarter of a square inch in 1984 and is a barely detectible tenth of a square inch in 2004 (for DC Comics, that is; Marvel Comics quit its participation in the CCA in 2001 and employs a self-determined labeling system roughly equivalent to the PG, PG-13, and R ratings used by movies).
BOOK: The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition
13.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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