FRED Entertainment

Over the last few weeks I have been examining Danny Fingeroth’s new book, Disguised as Clark Kent, which examines how the superhero genre reflects the Jewish-American background of many of the genre’s founders. As a lapsed Catholic, I have no trouble spotting the religious imagery in say, fellow Catholic Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again, but I can use the help of Fingeroth’s book in understanding how Jewish-American culture influenced the work of Stan Lee (who wrote the book’s introduction), for example.

A measure of Fingeroth’s success is that he has opened my eyes to looking for such influences even in works outside the scope of his book, which is devoted to the superhero genre. For example, the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, which was hosting half of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit last year at this time, is now presenting “From the New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig,” marking the centennial of his birth. One of Fingeroth’s themes is that being Jewish in American society confers an “outsider’s” perspective. It is therefore illuminating to consider Shrek, both in Steig’s book and in the movies, as a representative of the minority group member as outsider. In Steig’s book, Shrek embodies an adamant refusal to conform to mainstream society’s norms: it is a fable that takes a defiantly comedic stand against assimilation (see “Comics in Context” #186: “Le Petit Chef”).

Then there’s the new computer-animated film about anthropomorphic bees, Bee Movie, whose auteur is unmistakably comedian and television icon Jerry Seinfeld. Various reviewers have mentioned the exchange of dialogue that obviously signals that Seinfeld’s bees are, in part, metaphors for Jewish-Americans. On an expedition outside the hive, protagonist Barry B. Benson (voiced by Seinfeld) meets Vanessa Bloome (voiced by Renee Zellweger), a kindly human with a symbolic last name: she is the flower to his pollinating bee. (She even owns a flower shop.) On a literal level, though, they start a platonic romance. (Computer-animated films have had varying levels of success in depicting humans. DreamWorks Animation has succeeded in making Vanessa look appealingly pretty and even sexy.) Back in the hive Barry’s mother asks, “Was she beeish?” and Barry states that his new friend isn’t a “wasp.”

A delightful surprises in Fingeroth’s book is his discovery of parallels to Jewish-American culture in what initially seems a highly unlikely source: Marvel’s Thor, which is about the gods of Norse–and Germanic–culture. Back in the 1960s, series creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby devised a longrunning subplot in which Thor had fallen in love with the mortal woman Jane Foster, despite the opposition of his father Odin, monarch of the gods.

When I interviewed him for Publishers Weekly‘s Comics Week, Fingeroth told me, “Immigrant families are often concerned that their children will marry within the group. Jews, with their small numbers, are famous for this concern. So when I reread the Thor stories about Odin forbidding Thor to “˜intermarry’ with mortal Jane Foster, it just seemed plain to me that this was reflective of the conflicts that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. . .had to have experienced in their own lives and families.”

Fingeroth also points out in his book that the initially forbidden romance between Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four and Crystal. who belongs to a different racial community, the Inhumans, similarly reflects this conflict. (Of course, this theme isn’t restricted to Jewish-American creators: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet find themselves in similar situation.)

So, then, Barry’s leaving the hive to explore the outside world is like someone moving beyond his ethnic community to investigate the majority culture. Barry’s platonic romance with Vanessa is a metaphor for a Jewish-American man falling in love with a Gentile woman.

But, although the mainstream reviews I’ve read take no notice, the Jewish-American themes extend much further than this in Bee Movie. Barry discovers that humans are “stealing” honey from the bee population. This is a metaphor for the majority culture’s exploitation of the labor of a minority group. It’s not surprising to find this as a subject of an animated film for families. But, startlingly, Seinfeld and his collaborators go further.

Bee Movie establishes that humans harvest honey from hives in what the dialogue calls “work camps” for bees. Of the mainstream critics whose Bee Movie reviews I read, only Rex Reed in The New York Observer came close to finding the buried subtext, referring to “a honey farm that is like a Nazi work camp staffed by slaves”. The movie shows us that before the humans remove the honey, they gas the bees. We see smoke get released and watch the bees collapse. It’s not lethal, but, considering that the Vanessa subplot has already likened bees to Jews, the metaphorical implications should be obvious.

Horrified by the exploitation of the bees, Barry fights back by initiating a class action suit against the human race. During the trial the racial subtext becomes more explicit. The opposing lawyer is a caricature of the stereotype of the racist Southerner, who openly argues against granting bees “equal rights” and publicly exposes the relationship between Barry and Vanessa to foment bigoted reactions. In the trial sequence Seinfeld and company appear to be likening bees to African-Americans as well, as Barry refers to the bees as the humans’ “slaves.” The climactic point of the trial comes when Barry produces a “bee smoker” in court, which gets triggered: in full view of everyone present, bees in the audience are gassed and collapse. even in the context of a “funny animal” movie, it struck me as startling, even somewhat shocking. For a moment Bee Movie had become Maus.

Do you think I’m reading too much into this? In his review in The Onion (Nov. 8-14, 2007) film critic Nathan Rubin missed the Holocaust imagery but nonetheless observed, “Yet the darkness endemic to Seinfeld [the TV series] manifests in some satisfying, unexpected twists” such as “a loopy dream sequence that ends tragically”. He’s referring to a strange sequence in which Barry dreams of Vanessa attempting to fly, as he does, but in a one-woman aircraft which crashes in flames. Watching this I wondered why this sequence was in the movie, since Vanessa is in no danger in the story. But Rubin may be right that there is a dark undercurrent beneath Bee Movie‘s bright, shiny surface.

Moreover, Seinfeld told PBS’s Charlie Rose (on the latter’s show on November 5, 2007) that he was surprised that children liked Bee Movie so much because he had principally aimed it at adults. He told Roger Ebert, “To be honest. . .I wrote it for adults”. It seems strange that he would think that there was a large enough adult audience for what is basically a funny animal animated film to make Bee Movie a commercial success, but this does indicate that Seinfeld wasn’t averse to dealing with “adult” subjects in the film.

Despite its ambitions, I still found Bee Movie disappointing. Seinfeld and his co-writers labored for over two and a half years on the screenplay, but to my mind the story still seems deeply flawed.

The initial premise is that Barry is a young bee who, having just finished bee college is expected to commit to a job in the hive, which is depicted as a company town run by a corporation called Honex: we are told that once he makes his choice, he will never be able to switch to another job, he will never get a day off, and he will literally work until he drops dead. A Honex orientation guide cheerfully declares, “You’ve worked your whole lives so you can work your whole lives.” Barry rebels at this prospect, as well he should.

Brad Bird’s great animated film Ratatouille starts with a somewhat similar premise: the protagonist, Remy the rat, is pressured to conform to the lifestyle of the rest of his species, which is basically to eat garbage for the rest of their lives. (Again see “Comics in Context” #186: “Le Petit Chef”). But Remy has a driving passion to eat and create fine foods, and he envisions a different, better life for himself, which he successfully achieves.

In contrast, Barry has no ambition or dream he pursues from the start of his movie. Moreover, Bee Movie and Seinfeld himself seem to have contradictory feelings about Barry’s future in the hive. Seinfeld told Entertainment Weekly that “I love utopian societies, which is what they [bees] live in — it seemed like a very ’60s corporate environment to me, where people believed in the company, and government, and society. I love that. To me, utopia is an old Jack Lemmon movie. Growing up, I thought that would be the ultimate life, to have a convertible and work in an office in Manhattan”. Somehow I think that writer/director Billy Wilder would not have considered Jack Lemmon’s character’s corporate life in his film The Apartment (1960) as utopian.

Even though Barry is tempted by the life of a “pollen jock,” one of the macho bees who flies out of the hive to gather honey (a task actually performed by female bees in real life, by the way), he still balks at making any choice that would commit him for the rest of his life.

But this storyline takes a back seat to Barry’s evolving relationship with Vanessa. In speaking to her and thereby initiating the relationship, Barry says he is violating the rules of bee society. Metaphorically, Barry is breaking a taboo about close association with people outside his community. Now you might think that the Barry-Vanessa storyline, with its strong subtext, would become the main plotline of the movie. But no, except for the very brief uproar at the trial over it, and the occasional fits of anger from Vanessa’s human boyfriend, Barry and Vanessa’s relationship doesn’t hold onto center stage. It’s as if Barry had picked up a sidekick to provide him with moral support for the next half of the movie. It’s as if after the balcony scene Romeo and Juliet took off to star in an entirely different play.

So if Bee Movie isn’t really about finding an alternative career or finding love outside your community, maybe it’s about an oppressed people (the bees) revolting against their oppressors (the humans). Here I must issue the requisite spoiler warning: if you don’t want to learn about the last act of the film, skip the next fourteen paragraphs.

Barry triumphs in court, the bees are legally granted possession of all their honey, and this turns out to be disastrous. With all the honey they could want, the bees stop pollinating flowering plants, apparently all over the world. From her apartment overlooking Central Park (And just how can the owner of a one-woman flower shop afford this?), Vanessa shows Barry that all of the plants there are dying. As she explains, this will destroy the entire ecosystem of Earth: if flowering plants die, there’ll be no food, and animals and the human race will perish as well. (Yes, it’s another end of the world movie.) The only flowering plants left alive, she informs him, are the roses that were saved for the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, California.

All right, let’s stop here. Is the movie suggesting that Barry was wrong to sue the human race, and that humans should have continued to exploit, enslave and gas the bees? (By the way, in real life, “Centuries of selective breeding by humans has created honey bees that produce far more honey than the colony needs.”).

Once Barry won the lawsuit, wouldn’t humans have negotiated with the bees to obtain some of their honey? People don’t just use honey for food; it also has medicinal benefits. Since Seinfeld and company have portrayed a bee society that has its own tiny automobiles and television shows, among other trappings of human-style civilization, surely some sort of trade agreement could have been worked out, wherein the bees would exchange honey with the humans for consumer goods. So why would honey production grind to a halt? Besides, even though honey has a long shelf life, wouldn’t the bees eventually have to replenish their stores?

Wouldn’t lots of human beings–and Seinfeld’s intelligent bees as well–have realized, as early as the trial, that if the bees stopped pollinating plants, ecological catastrophe would strike? Wouldn’t scientists have realized this before it got to the point that all the plants in Central Park were dead? Wouldn’t the human and talking bees have reached some sort of agreement to start pollinating plants again long before this point? And if plants all over the world were dying, why would humanity only save the roses for the Tournament of Roses Parade!?! Isn’t food–like wheat–more important?

Does Seinfeld mean to suggest that the bee community (metaphorically representing a minority group) is so lazy that none of them would want to continue working after they won the lawsuit? Considering that he and his co-writers had established that bee society was perfectly happy never taking any time off in their entire lives, wouldn’t retirement be anathema to most of them?

And just how stupid is Barry, the protagonist, that he didn’t notice the ecological catastrophe until it was nearly too late to reverse it? If this movie was aimed at adults, then it has to deal with the kind of logical questions that adults would ask.

Once Barry sees the light, does he first try to persuade the rest of the bees in his local hive that they have to start pollinating again? No, instead he and Vanessa embark in a scheme to steal a truckload of roses from the Tournament of Roses Parade and fly it to New York City. When the plane is in danger of crashing, the rest of Barry’s hive goes to his rescue, and only then does he fill them in on his master plan.

And so the bees use the pollen from the stolen roses to restore the plant life of Manhattan to health. Meanwhile, I found myself thinking, wouldn’t it have been easier if Barry had organized the bees that live in California to use the pollen from all the roses in Pasadena to pollinate plants out there, first? And since presumably there are talking bees out in California too, wouldn’t they have already figured this out? If Earth’s entire ecosystem is in danger, why is it important to start the repollination process in New York City? Okay, granted, as a New Yorker myself, I can sympathize with Mr. Seinfeld’s Manhattan-centric world view, but in this case it’s still wrong.

So, with Story Arc #4 resolved, Bee Movie moves into its happy ending, in which Barry not only runs a law office in the back of Vanessa’s flower shop, but also has become a member of the “pollen jocks.” This brings the movie full circle back to Story Arc #1, but the movie seems to have lost sight of that storyline’s initial point. What about not wanting to be stuck in the same job for the rest of hs life? What about never getting time off or working toll one drops dead? Barry does have his new legal career, but he doesn’t seem enthused about it, and tell the “pollen jocks” that he couldn’t wait to get out of the office.

I suppose that Bee Movie could be interpreted as a fable about a youth who rebels against the ways of his community, but then learns to value them when the community is endangered (by the humans’ oppression), and ultimately rejoins the community. That interpretation would certainly have resonance for the members of a minority group within a larger society. But to me, Bee Movie ends up seeming like a parable about giving up one’s dreams and settling for the status quo.

In Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman writes, “It’s also a fable for our 24/7 worker-bee age. We’re used to animated films like Ratatouille that salute those who don’t go with the flow, but Bee Movie takes a paradoxically fresher tack. In this movie, the power of the individual turns out to be overrated. It’s the system that’s precious, and if that message sounds a tad…reactionary, Bee Movie finds a touching beauty in it. Who’d have guessed that Jerry Seinfeld, the maestro of nothing, would spearhead a fairy tale about the inspiring glory of punching the clock?”
I’d put it differently. Who’d have guessed that Jerry Seinfeld, who did not pursue a conventional career, like that of a lawyer or doctor, but instead followed his muse into the realm of stand-up comedy, and triumphantly beat the odds, co-creating a masterwork of television comedy and becoming fabulously wealthy as a result, would spearhead a fairy tale about punching the clock? He told Charlie Rose in that November 5 show that he is still motivated by the quest to unearth “nuggets of comedy.” Seinfeld’s life is more like Ratatouille, and yet he told Roger Ebert that “I was myself on the TV show and I am in this too, except if I were born as a bee, this is what I would be like”. Really?

I’ve been following my muse into middle age. I may not be rich, but I’m proud of my growing body of work, and think I would have been bored and felt unfulfilled had I not pursued ny fascination with comics and cartoon art, a subject that mainstream culture is finally beginning to take seriously. At the end of Ratatouille, Remy loses his chance at great commercial success, but he continues to pursue his art, and thus the film comes to its satisfyingly happy conclusion. Given a choice between Bee Movie and Ratatouille as a fable for my life, I unhesitatingly choose the latter.

Oh, yes, and at the end of Bee Movie it trns out that cows talk, too, and one of them complains to lawyer Barry that humans exploit them for their milk. Perhaps this is a can of worms that Seinfeld and the other writers should have left unopened, since humans don’t just milk cattle. So would Barry B. Benson put folks like J. Wellington Wimpy and myself on trial for eating hamburgers?

Let’s return to my chapter by chapter survey of Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent. Fingeroth is good at evaluating and explaining away mistaken pieces of conventional wisdom on his subject. For example, he notes that the second syllable of the Kryptonian names for Superman–Kal-El–and his father –Jor-El–sound “like one of the Hebrew names for God” (Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, p. 45). Fingeroth points out that Superman’s co-creator Jerry Siegel is on record as revealing that “Jor-El” is simply a shortened version of his own full name, Jerome Siegel. But Fingeroth acknowledges that “it’s quite possible” that Siegel and artist Joe Shuster’s “memories of childhood Hebrew school lessons” could have “inspired” these Kryptonian names (Fingeroth p. 45). Here we should remind ourselves of one of Fingeroth’s guiding principles in writing this book: the power of the subconscious on the creative mind. Isn’t it possible that while Siegel consciously believed that he named Jor-El after himself, that the name sounded right to him because it subconsciously reminded him of a Hebrew name for God? We can never know for certain, but we should recognize the possibility.

As I argued last week, examining the work of the original creators of the superhero genre may show us whether and how its contemporary practitioners have strayed from the essential elements of the superhero concept.

For example, at one point Fingeroth speculates about Siegel and Shuster’s intentions in creating Superman: “they would have their creation embody the best of the Good Immigrant qualities. “˜Everyone says all Jews care about is money? Well, look at this: we’ve invented the most powerful man in the history of the world–and he still insists on having a day job at The Daily Planet. He is selfless and, by extension, so are we.’ He’s a tzaddik, literally “˜righteous man’ in Hebrew” (Fingeroth p. 47).

The early Superman treated criminals brutally at times, but the character quickly developed a strict moral code of behavior, truly becoming a “righteous man,” as Fingeroth says. In recent years, however, there was Marvel’s X-Statix team, mutant superheroes who were motivated primarily by seeking fame and fortune. More importantly, the “grim and gritty” trend in superhero comics that began in the 1980s and continues through the present day has brought the superhero who is quite willing to kill. Is such a character truly an archetypal “righteous man,” or is he morally compromised? The “goddamn Batman” of Frank Miller’s current All Star Batman and Robin takes a sadistic pleasure in injuring his criminal opponents (see “Comics in Context” #119; “Bats and Spats” and “Comics in Context” #178: “The Whole World Is Watching”). For the genre to progress creatively, the characterizations of superheroes must be portrayed with more complexity and sophistication. But writers must beware of diluting and subverting the superhero concept and genre in the process.

Speaking of Batman, Fingeroth references Rabbi Simcha Weinstein’s hypothesis that Batman’s origin was inspired by Kristallnacht, the 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany. As Fingeroth puts it, “Like the Jews in Europe, Bruce Wayne and his family thought they had all they needed to be insulated from the vagaries of life. Yet, like the Jews of Europe, it was all taken away from them in an instant” (Fingeroth p. 56). It’s certainly possible that this provided the inspiration for Batman’s origin.

But who created Batman’s origin? Was it Bob Kane, whom DC Comics officially credits as Batman’s creator, or Bill Finger, who, like Kane, was Jewish, and who co-created most of the original Batman mythos, or even Gardner Fox, who wrote some of the earliest Batman stories? My guess is that it was Finger, who generated most of the concepts for the early Batman, right down to the name Bruce Wayne and major elements of Batman’s costume design. Moreover, Finger’s body of comics work has a darker edge than Fox’s. In his great Silver Age work, Fox never approaches the bleak, haunting quality of the origin story in Detective Comics #33.

Then again, as Fingeroth demonstrates, Batman co-creator Bob Kane went to great lengths to conceal his Jewish background; reading this, it seems to me that Kane may even have been in a state of denial. Since, in the early days of Batman, Finger and Fox worked for him, why would Kane approve the origin story if he thought it was a parable about the plight of European Jews?

Fingeroth also wonders if Joe Chill’s shooting of Bruce Wayne’s parents was inspired by the murder of Jerry Siegel’s father. This is possible, too. Then again it appears that Kane lifted the scene of the murder of Thomas Wayne directly from a 1938 “Big Little Book” called Gang Busters in Action, illustrated by Henry Vallely. So maybe Kane wasn’t copying reality, but another artist.

But here I believe that Fingeroth comes close to a simpler answer to the question. Why couldn’t the story of Batman’s origin simply be a response to the widespread urban crime of Depression-era America? It was the lawlessness of that period that similarly inspired Dick Tracy and the classic gangster movies of the 1930s. The simple concept of a mugger appearing, seemingly at random, and gunning down a prosperous couple is a perfect image of the dangers of a lawless urban environment. It could equally well be an iconic image of the big city in the 1970s, which, not coincidentally, is the decade when the Batman returned to his late 1930s roots as a grim, avenging figure in the comics.

Following the lead of comics historian Gerard Jones, Fingeroth argues that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s creation Steve Rogers a. k. a. Captain America was “a kind of surrogate Jew” (Fingeroth, p. 58). “If Steve Rogers was blond, well, there are blond Jews. . . . “˜Rogers’ could have been a fake name, too. So, maybe despite all outward appearances, an argument could be made for Captain America as some sort of Jewish-inflected character, the “˜weary, old-country survivor reborn as the new fighting Jew,’ as interpreted by Gerard Jones” (Fingeroth, p. 60).

I think that Fingeroth may be pushing this point further than is justified. But he’s on target when he writes that “Perhaps the most “˜Jewish’ thing about Captain America’s stories is the concerted attempt by the creative staff to make every story universal” (Fingeroth p. 59). Since Simon and Kirby intended Captain America to be a symbol of America, then it made sense that they would cast him as a member of the largest ethnic group in the country in that time before multiculturalism: in other words, as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

But yes, it’s true that the earliest Captain America stories reflect Simon and Kirby’s Jewish background. On the cover of Captain America Comics #1 the title character punches Adolf Hitler in the jaw. Though Fingeroth doesn’t, it should be noted that the first issue was cover-dated March 1941, nine months before America’s entry into World War II. Back then there was considerable isolationist sentiment against becoming involved in the war, and so Simon and Kirby’s open opposition to Hitler was rather daring.

Fingeroth is also correct to point out that the creator of Captain America’s “super-soldier serum” was “Professor Reinstein,” whom Simon and Kirby obviously based on the Jewish scientific genius Albert Einstein. Hence, the subtext is clear when, in the origin story, a Nazi agent guns down the Jewish Reinstein, and Captain America then avenges Reinstein’s death.

It’s surprising that Fingeroth doesn’t do more with his observation that the “super-soldier serum” transforms Steve Rogers into “a one-of-a-kind, perfect, Aryan-looking specimen of humanity” (Fingeroth p. 58). Ironically, Captain America physically matches the Nazis’ idealized vision of a member of the Aryan “master race.”

Were Simon and Kirby conscious of the irony? Decades later, the late Marvel writer Mark Gruenwald seemed to be, when he transferred the consciousness of Captain America’s Nazi archfoe, the Red Skull, into a cloned copy of the Captain’s own body: thus the Red Skull became Captain America’s literal evil twin.

Whether consciously or not, Simon and Kirby had turned the Nazis’ image of the Aryan superman to their own purposes. Captain America was not fighting for the dominance of a master race, but for the freedom of a democratic society in which immigrants from other ethnic groups could find refuge from fascist tyranny.

Fingeroth perceptively points to Reinstein’s declaration that Captain America will be “one of America’s saviors” and comments that “the metaphor system at work here is as much Christian as Jewish” (Fingeroth p. 58). So Captain America is a Christ figure, but couldn’t he also be viewed as a Messiah? And since Professor Reinstein remodels the once frail Steve Rogers into a physically perfect soldier, to go out and combat tyranny, couldn’t Captain America also be seen as a variation on a golem? I’ll let you ponder all of this until I continue my review of Dressed as Clark Kent next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

I will be interviewing Tim Sale, the artist who has frequenty collaborated with writer Jeph Loeb (on Batman: The Long Halloween, Daredevil: Yellow and Hulk: Gray, among other projects) and who does artwork for the television series Heroes, on Saturday, November 17 onstage at the Big Apple Con‘s annual “National” convention. The convention runs from Friday afternoon, November 16 through Sunday, November 18 at the Penn Plaza Pavilion at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.

Writer/artist Richard Howell has moved his Claypool Comics series about vampires, Deadbeats, to the Internet, and recently reintroduced a character named Edwin, who first appeared in Richard’s indie comic Portia Prinz of the Glamazons. Take a look at strips 79, 80, and 81 and see if you can figure out what they have in common with “Comics in Context.” Here’s a hint: in strip 81 Edwin delivers one of the best worded defenses of continuity I’ve ever read.

And I am pleased to welcome Fred Hembeck back to Quick Stop Entertainment, where he has resumed work on “The Fred Hembeck Show” with episode 101.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Last week I began my commentary on Danny Fingeroth’s new book Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. The book demonstrates that Fingeroth, a former editor and writer at Marvel Comics, has realized two principles that, in my experience, most mainstream superhero comics editors and writers don’t grasp.

One is that the superhero genre works through metaphor. For example, Superman was sent from his home planet of Krypton through outer space to Earth, where he was raised as an American by Jonathan and Martha Kent. This can be read as a metaphor for the immigrant experience; it also parallels the Biblical tale of the infancy of Moses, who was born of Jewish parents, was cast adrift for his own safety, and was found and raised by Egyptians.

The second principle is related to the first. This is that stories may have meanings that their authors did not consciously intend. When I interviewed Fingeroth for Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, I asked him, “Were any of the Jewish comics creators of the Golden and Silver Ages consciously aware of putting themes that specifically reflected their ethnic background in their work?”

Fingeroth, who is himself Jewish, replied, “I don’t think so. I think they were, if anything, trying to divest their work of any such content and make it as “˜all-American’ as possible. But the human mind is a strange and wonderful thing, and years later we can look at the work and tease out all sorts of below the surface meanings that weren’t intended to be there.”

The In his book Fingeroth asserts that “there are and were–for the most part unconscious and subconscious–true Jewish content, meaning, and themes in various seminal superhero works.” (Fingeroth, p. 19). He recognizes that such “content,” reflecting the Jewish-American experience, is present even if the authors deny its presence. “There was nothing overt or conscious about this, of course,” Fingeroth writes about such “Jewish content”: “Even creators who do not share [Will] Eisner’s disavowal of Jewish intent have only come to see it in retrospect” (Fingeroth, p. 18).

Fingeroth declares that “the creation of the superhero seems to have been more than a function of happenstance. The creation of a legion of special beings, self-appointed to protect the weak, innocent, and victimized a a time when fascism was dominating the European continent from which the creators of the heroes hailed, seems like a task that Jews were uniquely positioned to take on” (Fingeroth, p. 17).

Jerry Siegel stated that the Nazi persecution of Jews was one of his motivations for co-creating Superman, although he also points to the economic devastation of the Great Depression, which affected Americans of all ethnic backgrounds: “being unemployed and worried during the depression and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany. . .I had the great urge to help . . . help the downtrodden masses, somehow. How could I help them when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer” (Fingeroth p. 41). However, since Siegel wrote that in 1975, perhaps this is a case of a Jewish-American creator coming “to see it in retrospect.”

Another Hewish comics creastor of note, Neil Gaiman, told Fingeroth that “Jews had been culturally and for so long the underdog that dreams of wish-fulfillment and dreams of power crystallized into superheroes. . . .the oppressed have their stories and fantasies. Those in power don’t need fantasies” (Fingeroth pgs. 143-144).

Fingeroth maintains that, whether Jewish or not, “immigrants have an outsider’s view of a society and so understand it, in many ways, more clearly than someone born into that society” (Fingeroth p. 23). In my interview with Fingeroth, he stated “that the Jewish and other immigrants, as outsiders, were able to see what was important to the majority society, then distill those values and ideas and reflect them back through the vehicle of popular culture.”

The problem here, I suggest, is that the founding fathers of the Golden and Silver Ages of superhero comics were the children of immigrants, not immigrants themselves. Right now America is going through another great period of immigration, with New York City once again as one of its centers. Looking through my New York City neighborhood, I see Asian and Latino immigrant families all around me. What I notice is that the immigrants’ children, who were born and raised in this country, seem thoroughly Americanized. I assume that the superhero genre’s founders, who grew up within American culture, would not have had the same perspective on it as their immigrant parents would have had.

Nonetheless, second and third generation Jewish-Americans would still have felt themselves to be outsiders to some extent since they did not follow the same religion as the majority of Americans. Moreover, anti-Semitism was more overt and widespread in America in the 1930s than today. In his introduction to Fingeroth’s book, Stan Lee writes that he encountered “very little” bigotry in his life, but states that “I certainly had read, heard and known about the prejudice so many Jewish people faced”; significantly, Lee says, “I was very lucky” to have experienced so little of it (Fingeroth p. 10).

Jules Feiffer grew up reading the superhero comics of the Golden Age of the 1940s and began his own career in comics at the Golden Age’s close as Will Eisner’s assistant on The Spirit. Fingeroth quotes Feiffer’s observation that “Superman was the ultimate assimilationalist fantasy” (Fingeroth p. 24). As noted, Superman was an immigrant from another world who was raised out in the countryside, the traditional cradle of American values, to be an American himself. He even acquired a WASP-sounding name, Clark Kent. Feiffer goes on to say that “The mild manners and glasses that signified a class of nerdy Clark Kents was [sic], in no way, our real truth. Underneath the schmucky facade, there lived Men of Steel!” The “fantasy,” then, is that Superman the Kryptonian, who represents Jewish-Americans’ true ethnicity, is not only vital, powerful and downright cool, but that he is also hailed as a hero by the majority culture. (However, as Fingeroth points out later in the book, it was not until 1948 that Superman himself first discovered he was from Krypton. In the 1930s and 1940s the general populace in Superman comics had no idea he was an alien!)

I wonder if Clark represents another side of the “ultimate assimilationalist fantasy” for a minority group: being able to blend into mainstream society so perfectly that one’s true background–one’s inner identity–is undetectable. Part of the fantasy is that all you have to do is put on the glasses, adopt the proper set of “mild manners,” wear the same business suit as everyone else, and not draw attention to yourself, and voila! The disguise–and the assimilation– are complete!

As Fingeroth observes, “It’s the traditional immigrant attitude of keeping a low profile, not standing out. To stand out is to be a target, and who needs that?” (Fingeroth, p. 25).

Later, Fingeroth states that “Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, it was the desire to escape from the Jewish past that in many ways led to the creation of the superhero” (Fingeroth p. 34). He points out that “For the Jewish immigrant families like those from which Siegel and [Superman co-creator Joe] Shuster came, the dual identity was more than a convenience. When your history tells you that you can be murdered because of who your parents happened to be, the freedom provided by being able to blend into the mainstream culture is essential to survival” (Fingeroth p. 49).

Last week I showed how John Byrne subtly but sharply revised the treatment of Superman’s dual identity in The Man of Steel (1986). In the traditional view, Clark Kent is the “facade,” as Feiffer puts it, and people cannot see through to his true self, which is Superman. In The Man of Steel Superman is the public persona, and people cannot see through it to his true self, which is Clark Kent.

In justifying Superman’s dual identity in Man of Steel, Byrne appears to be using as his model the celebrity seeking privacy, rather than the immigrant assimilating in order to escape becoming the target of prejudice. But in both the traditional approach to Superman’s dual identity and Byrne’s, there is the sense that the secret identity is protection against a palpable threat. In The Man of Steel Clark Kent adopts his public persona of Superman after he is mobbed by a grateful public after publicly using his powers to save a space plane from crashing. As I noted last week, Clark tells his foster parents that “They were all over me! Like wild animals. Like maggots. Clawing. Pulling. Screaming at me” and confesses to feeling “fear” (Byrne, The Man of Steel #1, p. 28) He describes a physical threat that seems not unlike that posed by a mob of bigots attacking a member of a minority group.

Despite recasting Superman/Clark as a beleaguered celebrity, Byrne still seems to have realized, consciously or not, that the motivating force behind adopting a secret identity is fear of persecution.

Fingeroth recognizes that “To modern sensibilities, that unquestioning need for a disguise flies in the face of, if nothing else, our current ideal of the whole, integrated, non-hypocritical, complete human” (Fingeroth p. 35).

In recent years superhero comics have become more lax in their treatment of the secret identity motif. Think of all the superheroes who have been “outed” or have “outed” themselves lately, including such major figures as Spider-Man, Daredevil, Iron Man and the X-Men. As Fingeroth says, this may reflect a contemporary idealization of the “integrated” human personality. It surely also reflects an American society that has become more tolerant towards racial and ethnic differences than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. Today’s superhero writers grew up in a very different circumstances than the founders of the genre did.

There is also the more recent phenomenon of “identity politics.” The Jewish members of the superhero genre’s founding generation tended to play down their Jewish identities, in many cases even to the extent of adopting new names, in order to fit into a Christian-dominated society. (In his book Fingeroth examines how Batman co-creator Bob Kane continued to conceal his Jewish background as late as 1989 in his autobiography.) As Fingeroth points out in his book’s later chapters, starting with the Baby Boom generation, comics creators such as Howard Chaykin and Peter David are not only open about their Jewish background but even explicitly portray comics characters, like Dominic Fortune and Doc Samson, as Jewish. Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent and other books on the same subject, including Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, are efforts by Jewish-American writers to openly claim the superhero genre as a product of Jewish-American culture. Indeed, nowadays, at least some immigrant groups seek to retain elements of their native culture while settling into American society.

Marvel’s original version of X-Factor may have marked a turning point. This series’ original premise was that the original members of the X-Men posed as humans who hunted down mutants. In actuality, the original X-Men would then train the mutants they found not only how to manage the use of their powers but also to “pass” as ordinary non-mutant humans. Indeed, the original X-Men had “passed” as humans in their civilian identities from the beginning of the original X-Men comic book. But comics fans objected to this premise, recognizing that “mutants” at Marvel were metaphors for members of minority groups, and contending that it was immoral to insist that they hide their true group identities. X-Factor‘s second writer, Louise Simonson, reached the sane conclusion, created a storyline showing that X-Factor’s public stance that mutants were dangerous played into the hands of bigots, and finally had X-Factor publicly renounce it.

Years later in New X-Men, writer Grant Morrison took the next step by “outing” Professor Charles Xavier as a mutant, and thus exposing his Xavier Institute as a school for mutants (see “Comics in Context” #28: “Adapt and Assimilate”). Morrison portrayed this turn of events as a blessing in disguise, enabling the X-Men to openly campaign on behalf of mutant rights.

Since X-Men is about a team of superheroes who represent a minority group, rather than about an individual superhero, Morrison may have been correct in disposing of secret identities in this case. Having Xavier go public may well have been a necessary move in keeping X-Men relevant to 21st century America’s multicultural society.

But as I wrote last week, contemporary writers in the superhero genre may be making mistakes by downplaying or ignoring elements that were inspired by the Jewish-American culture of many of the genre’s founders.

The secret identity trope did not originate with Superman; the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro, among others, had used it earlier. But it’s clear that the secret identity motif had particular resonance, even if unconscious, for Jewish-Americans. As Fingeroth indicates, such elements of the superhero genre that reflected Jewish concerns also proved to have great appeal to the wider audience. Feiffer’s quotation goes on to state that “America cloned itself into a country made up of millions of Clark Kents. and day after day, you could hear them muttering to themselves, I’m not really like this. If they only knew my true identity” (Fingeroth p. 24).

Fingeroth concludes, “The concept that in a modern technological society we all had inner Supermen and Superwomen yearning to be revealed was an idea that the world was waiting for even if it didn’t know it” (Fingeroth, p. 42). This society still exists. In a modern nation that encompasses millions of people, in which each of us may seem to be only a cog in the capitalist system’s wheels, in which the power of technology dwarfs that of the individual, the superhero makes sense as a fantasy by which the individual can assert himself and achieve recognition.

Fingeroth argues that “The Siegel-Shuster Superman concept was in its way the diametric opposite of the contemporary [meaning the 1930s and 1940s] fascist and communist solutions to the modern dilemma of finding meaning and identity in mass society. As expressed through Superman, the self was not to be subsumed to the collective” (Fingeroth p. 42). Nietzche didn’t believe that his ubermensch should “be subsumed to the collective,” either, and, of course, the German fascists adapted the ubermensch concept to their ideology. Nonetheless, I think that Fingeroth makes a good point that the American superhero stood for the potential value of the individual in a period when people sought solutions in ideologies that led to totalitarian systems that would crush individual liberty. “The primacy of the individual was what so many immigrants, including Eastern European Jews, came to America to partake of and conribute to” (Fingeroth p. 43).

But I think that the secret identity would have an appeal in a society of any size. You don’t have to be Jewish or a member of a minority group to identify with Clark Kent; all you need is to feel that other people don’t fully understand the real you, and that is probably a universal sentiment. Fingeroth writes of “the fantasy that having a second self touches in all of us. We all want to think there is greatness in ourselves that the world cannot see, or that we cannot allow it to see, that the facades we display in everyday life are just that–masks that society forces us to wear” (Fingeroth, p. 49).

As I have written many times in the past, the duality of human nature, whether it is between one’s “good” and “evil” sides, or between one’s public and private selves, is one of the dominant themes of the superhero genre.

The dual identity also serves as a metaphor for everyman as he is (the “civilian identity,” like Peter Parker) and everyman’s potential to become a success, to achieve his dreams, to become a “hero” (the superhero, like Spider-Man).

Moreover, the dual identity represents the necessary duality in the superhero, who is at once demigod (or demigoddess) and man (or woman). As Dr. Peter Coogan shows in his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of the Genre, the “science-fiction supermen” before Siegel and Shuster’s creation were often threats to society (see “Comics in Context” #165: “The Supervillain Defined”). The concept of Nietzche’s ubermensch, the superman “beyond good and evil,” was easily twisted by the Nazis to their own purposes. Because the American superhero is grounded in humanity through his “civilian” persona, he is our benefactor, rather than a potential tyrant: he is one of us. (Coogan notes that the secret identity is a “customary” element of the superhero genre. See “Comics in Context” #162: “The Superhero Defined.”)

Looking at Silver Age superhero comics, the contemporary reader might be surprised to see how many “normal” people appear in their pages. For example, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby loved to show their thunder god Thor interacting with ordinary folks on the streets of Manhattan. This is in part because Lee and Kirby must have recognized the necessity that their superheroes must be part of the society that they defend. The secret “civilian” identity makes the superhero into a member of that society.

In contrast, nowadays, not only have secret identities fallen out of fashion, but it often seems that virtually everyone in a contemporary superhero comic is a costumed character. This is the situation that Mark Waid and Alex Ross critiqued in Kingdom Come, which depicts a world in which there are too many superheroes, and they fall to fighting among themselves. Back in a 1996 interview for Westfield Comics, Ross said, “I would criticize modern superheroes as being little more than gangs fighting gangs. When they’re removed into their own environments that are all these techno-babble, Kirby-derived playgrounds and you’ve got characters upon characters and not one person looks like they live in the real world, after a while it feels like another planet.” When the Westfield interviewer suggested that “It’s the contrast between real life and the life they lead, in other words, that is the source of what’s interesting about them,” Ross responded, “Yeah, because ultimately, as far as I’m concerned, once you remove them to their own environment, where it’s just a land of superheroes, then it’s literally become as boring as real life [laughter].”

As my regular readers know, I dislike DC’s Identity Crisis and Marvel’s Civil War. But I recognize that each represents a backlash to the fashion of disposing of secret identities and separating superheroes from the rest of society.

In Identity Crisis writer Brad Meltzer directs readers’ attention back to the impetus for adopting dual identities: fear of persecution. He shows that when superheroes publicly reveal their dual identities, they expose their loved ones–“ordinary” people–to attack.

Civil War pulls in different directions at once. By having Spider-Man and Iron Man publicly reveal their secret identities, Civil War actually separates them from the rest of society, since they can no longer lead normal lives within it. (Spider-Man‘s current “One More Day” storyline makes the negative consequences clear.) On the other hand, the climax of Civil War comes when a group of ordinary citizens emerge from seemingly out of nowhere and restrain Captain America from further assaulting Iron Man. These citizens claim that Captain America has lost sight of what the people want, which is greater government supervision of superheroes. I disagree with the idea that Captain America was wrong to fight for individual freedom in Civil War. Yet it is appropriate that the “ordinary” people on the street, who were so visible in Silver Age Marvel Comics, should reemerge to remind the superheroes, who were behaving like what Ross called “gangs fighting gangs,” of their duty towards them.

The psychological appeal of the dual/secret identity should be more evident in this age of the Internet, in which people masquerade behind screen names and adopt alternate personas in virtual worlds like Second Life.

I’m writing this only a few days after Halloween, which is society’s annual celebration of alternate identities. At the annual Halloween parties at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA), “ordinary” people dress as costumed superheroes, thus expressing more assertive, liberated sides of their personalities for an evening. This year, at the party and outdoors on Halloween, I saw examples of that contemporary Halloween trend in which adult women dress in a more erotically charged manner than they would ordinarily attempt.

It is wearisome to see newspaper or television reports on San Diego’s Comic Con that give the impression that everyone there is in costume, rather than the one percent or less who actually are. But New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, who attended this year’s San Diego Comic Con, has the right perspective on Comic-Con cosplay (July 28, 2007). “Every day we wake up to navigate through a faceless, inhuman, Made-in-China existence,” she wrote, with a certain political incorrectness, but “events like Comic-Con. . . give men, women and children of all ages permission to dress up and act out.” Like Halloween, Comic Con suspends the normal rules of society, enabling people to outwardly assume different identities. Dargis described Comic-Con as a place “where people can give physical form to the passions that the rest of the year remain safely hidden from the cruel world.” (So what happens at Comic-Con stays at Comic-Con?)

Yes, this happens at fantasy and science fiction cons, too. But the superhero genre, which originated in comics, is the area of pop culture that is most identified with the concept of alternate identities. Writers and editors of the superhero genre should be wary of departing from one of the major factors in the genre’s psychological appeal.

New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella recently wrote that “Art is personal; it makes people think about their secret lives” (Nov. 5, 2007). Intelligently handled, the superhero genre can deal with exactly that: the “secret lives” of the characters, the writers, and the readers. This, Acocella is saying, lies at the heart of art.

Turning to the creation of the superhero genre, Fingeroth observes that “There are the legends surrounding the golem, and surely these were part of the superhero mix” (Fingeroth p. 33), noting further that Michael Chabon deals extensively with the golem in Kavalier and Clay. In Jewish folklore a golem is a superhuman being created from clay (as in the name of Kavalier’s partner?), soil or mud by a holy man (thereby paralleling God’s creation of Adam) to serve him. Golems are of low intelligence and are potentially dangerous. In the most celebrated golem story, Rabbi Judah Loew creates a golem to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution; the golem eventually begins attacking and killing people, and the rabbi deactivates him. Fingeroth asserts that the golem legend was “riffed on in Frankenstein,” meaning the 1931 movie, though he doesn’t demonstrate a direct connection. I see that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel was first published in 1818, whereas the story of Rabbi Loew’s golem first appeared in print in 1847. In any case, the two tales parallel each other.

I wonder how much the golem legend really is applicable to the superhero genre. Although the “science-fiction supermen” (like Frankenstein’s monster) that preceded Siegel and Shuster’s Superman could be dangerous, like the golem, the American superhero isn’t a threat to the public at large. I suppose that one could say that Siegel and Shuster, in creating Superman, were comparable to the holy men of legend creating a golem to combat evil and protect the innocent, albeit in a fictional world. But within the context of the stories, the superhero is usually neither unintelligent nor a servant of a master who created him. Perhaps one could say that the typical superhero is his own golem, creating a heroic identity for himself in which he goes out to perform good deeds.

In fact, it seems to me that the early superhero who is most like a golem may be Wonder Woman, whose creator, William Moulton Marston, wasn’t Jewish. Wonder Woman originated as the figure of a child, molded from clay by the Amazon queen Hippolyta, and endowed with life by the Olympian gods. But was Marston thinking of the golem, or of the creation of Adam? Considering the role of Greek mythology in the Wonder Woman mythos, Marston may have been thinking of the story that Prometheus created the first human beings out of clay. (It suddenly strikes me that in Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, the Forgotten One, a benefactor of humanity who was punished by Zuras, may in part be based on Prometheus.)

Fingeroth contends that “there’s little evidence of [Carl] Burgos’s Jewish roots” in his stories about his creation, the original Human Torch (Fingeroth p. 65). But the original Torch’s origin (in Marvel Comics #1, 1939) certainly parallels the golem legend: a modern version of the wise man of legend, a scientist named Professor Horton, creates an android with superhuman powers, which breaks free and goes on a rampage before finally settling into his career as a superhero.

In writing about Jerry Siegel, Fingeroth reveals something that had escaped my notice before this: that Siegel’s immigrant father, Mitchell (born Michel) Siegel, died during a robbery of his store, either from being shot or from a heart attack. Fingeroth correctly argues that the loss of his father gave Jerry Siegel strong psychological impetus to create a fictional superhero. Oddly, Fingeroth overlooks the fact that Siegel wrote not one but two deaths of father figures into the pre-Byrne Superman legend: Jor-El dies in saving his son from the destruction of Krypton, and Clark Kent’s foster father makes a deathbed speech instructing Clark to use his powers to benefit humanity.

At the MoCCA Halloween party, I was taken aside and asked my expert opinion: is Superman like Moses or Jesus? I gave the same answer that Fingeroth does in his book: Superman has parallels to both. Fingeroth says that “Moses is viewed by some theological thinkers as a precursor to Jesus, both figures having been sent as babies to save their people and change the world” (Fingeroth p. 44).

Here I can draw upon my background as a Catholic. Not just “some theological thinkers,” but also the whole Catholic Church finds many parallels in the Old Testament to the life of Jesus, and interprets them as precursors to Christ. Hence, for example, Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale for three days foreshadows Christ’s death and subsequent resurrection on the third day.

What’s really going on is that Biblical figures like Moses and Jonah and even Jesus are following archetypal mythical patterns, and it should be no surprise that Superman, a figure from modern “mythology,” likewise parallels elements of the lives of Moses and Jesus.

Next week I will further explore the ideas in Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent, which should be a key book for students of the superhero genre.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Titan Books has just published Steve Saffel’s lavishly illustrated coffee table book Spider-Man: The Icon, which covers the web-slinger’s history in comics, movies, television, records, toys, and every other relevant form of media and merchandising. You can read my interview with him for Publishers Weekly‘s Comics Week here.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson