Category: Comics in Context

A clock ticks at an unvarying pace, and yet our subjective experience of time can vary widely. Wait in line for something, and time seems to drag. Hustle to meet a looming deadline, and time seems to fly by rapidly. And a day packed full of interesting events can feel longer ““ in a good way ““ than an average day.

So it is on this first Saturday I spent at Manhattan’s Museum of Television and Radio’s retrospective “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television!” (To learn more about the retrospective, go to www.mtr.org.)

In this afternoon’s screening in the museum’s main theatre, “Comic-Book Classics,” I’d already seen the premiere of The Adventures of Superman from the 1950s and an episode of The Incredible Hulk from the 1970s. These led up to the most celebrated ““ and infamous ““ superhero television show of all: the live action Batman show of the 1960s.

The Museum has numerous Batman episodes in its collection, but on previous visits I’ve made there, if the Museum is showing Batman in one of its screening rooms, it invariably selects the first Catwoman two-parter, “The Purr-fect Crime”/”Better Luck Next Time” (1966 episodes directed by Hanmes Shedon and written by Stanley Ralph Ross and Lee Orgel). And here it is again as one of the “Comic-Book Classics.” Perhaps simple inertia motivated the choice, and it is indeed a good pair of episodes, but it also was appropriate to show them in the summer that Warner Brothers released its new Catwoman movie. This also gives me the opportunity to compare and contrast Catwoman’s depiction on television and in the movies in this week’s column and next week’s.

I’ve always liked the better episodes of the 1960s Batman TV series, most of which are in its first season, though its comedic approach is hardly my first choice for a treatment of the character.

The Museum’s pamphlet for the retrospective notes that the Batman live action show “introduces the concept of ‘camp’ to mainstream audiences and dazzles the eye with its pop art-derived visuals ““ most surprising, considering the character’s violent, grimly realistic origins in comic books.”

Well, first, it’s not “surprising” at all. Once again, the Museum is demonstrating that its staffers are nowhere nearly as knowledgeable about the superhero genre as they think they are. Yes, indeed, Batman’s origin, as first presented in 1940, is “violent” and “grimly realistic.” Starting around 1970 editor Julius Schwartz, writer Denny O’Neil, artist Neal Adams, and others returned Batman to his original role as the grim, driven avenger in a noir world, and that interpretation has prevailed in movies, television series and comics about the character ever since.

But this version of Batman was nowhere in evidence in 1966, when this TV show began. Batman debuted as a grim vigilante in 1939, but within a year his series ““ and the character himself ““ were becoming, well, cheerier. You can see the transition in 1940’s Batman #1, which showcases the first Joker story, depicting the character as a macabre serial killer, and a tale with Batman’s early archnemesis, Professor Hugo Strange, in which Batman actually fires guns at enemies. But Batman #1 also contains the very first Catwoman story. Here she hasn’t yet adopted the “Catwoman” name or a costume; she’s simply a mysterious jewel thief called the “Cat.” Dazzled by her beauty, Batman lets her go, and the story ends with Batman leaning back, smiling, as he thinks about her. This is hardly the implacable nemesis of criminals we see today.

As the comics series continued through the 1940s into the early 1960s, Batman was often shown wearing a wide grin, joking back and forth with Robin as they clobbered criminals. Their world too became less dark: for example, the Joker evolved from a grim serial killer to the jolly criminal prankster, who might still want Batman and Robin dead, but otherwise just wanted to rob banks and get rich. Since superhero comics were then aimed at children, it’s no surprise that the original, “grimly realistic” intentions of Batman’s creators were quickly diluted. Surely the public uproar against comics, including “crime comics,” in the 1950s also had an effect on how “violent” Batman stories could be.

Just a few days ago I read through Mark Evanier’s third commendable compilation of his past columns, with the startling title Superheroes in My Pants, from TwoMorrows Publishing, and in it he traces Batman‘s downward slide in the comics. Batman acquired a “family” including Batwoman and the original Bat-Girl, and even Bathound and the magical imp Bat-Mite; he underwent ludicrous physical transformations into the Zebra Batman (with stripes!), and the like; he fought extraterrestrials and traveled through time.

So by the early 1960s the Batman comic was decidedly silly. When editor Julius Schwartz took over Batman and Detective Comics in 1964, he made the series considerably more serious, reaching out, as he always did, to the more smarter readers. But many years of damage had already been done to the Batman series. In the 1960s Schwartz at DC and, simultaneously, Stan Lee at Marvel, were giving the superhero genre more sophistication, intelligence and depth. But at that period very few adults considered superhero comics any more than rather silly juvenile entertainments.

So it’s not a surprise that the creators of the Batman live action show thought that, too. Mired in the conventional wisdom of their time, they did not perceive the more serious direction in which comics were evolving. Instead they were out to parody superhero comics as they had existed for over two decades from an adult perspective. They were utterly blind to the potential that Batman had as a mythic figure for adults, about whom serious narratives could be created.

It is true that the live action Batman series was the first television series that intentionally adopted a “camp” style. This may need explanation, since “camp” strikes me as one of those words that are continually used in ways that dilute their actual meaning. (I am convinced that the vast majority of people who use the word “deconstruct” have no idea what this term from literary theory actually means.) It seems that not a week goes by without TV Guide describing a sitcom or a movie or an actor’s performance as “campy.” From the context of such references, it seems the writers think “campy” means a broad, comedic performance.

But, consulting the dictionary software that came with my computer, I find that “camp” as a noun, when it isn’t referring to a place, means the following:
1. An affectation or appreciation of manners and tastes commonly thought to be artificial, vulgar, or banal.
2. Banality, vulgarity, or artificiality when deliberately affected or when appreciated for its humor.

And “camp” as an adjective therefore means, “Having deliberately artificial, vulgar, banal, or affectedly humorous qualities or style.”

Those who attempt to write in the superhero genre seriously utilize its fantasy elements as metaphors for aspects of real life. However unrealistic the genre’s outer trappings may be, such writers strive to give the characters and stories a core of emotional reality.

In its “camp” treatment of the superhero genre, this Batman television series’ creators moved in the opposite direction. They stressed ““ or “deliberately affected” ““ its unreality, and hence its “artificiality”; perceiving no serious artistic merit to Batman stories, they regarded them as “banal.” These creators chose to play Batman for comedy, so it could be “appreciated for its humor.”

At its best, though, the Batman show was somewhat more complex. It surely owed its initial massive popularity to the fact that it could be appreciated on two levels. The show’s initial approach to the material was tongue in cheek, but straightfaced. Indeed, a number of the first season’s episodes were direct adaptations of stories from the comics. Younger viewers who took the superhero genre seriously could follow the episodes as heroic adventures; adult viewers who were in on the joke could enjoy the satiric style in which the material was written and played.

In my own first encounters with the show, growing up, I was aware of the obvious attempts at comedy (e. g., Batman dancing the “batusi” at a disco), but appreciated the elements of the comics series that the show got right. In the second season, as if trying to up the comedic ante, the stories became more blatantly ludicrous, the show lost the balance it had maintained, and ratings plunged. Presumably adult audiences grew weary of the basic joke of finding superheroes silly, and the young audiences who sought a real superhero adventure show could no longer ignore the overwhelming silliness.
Nowadays, watching Batman episodes at the Museum or on cable, I pick up on subtler humorous elements that I missed when I was growing up. In this Catwoman two-parter, for example, there’s a bit with Batman donning rubber gloves over his Batman gloves to work with radioactive material. The director and actors don’t draw attention to this throwaway bit of absurdity, but it’s there to be spotted by the attentive viewer. At another point Batman waits patiently in line, like any ordinary citizen, to buy admission tickets for the Gotham City exposition where Catwoman will strike. Adam West’s marvelous deadpan manner as Batman itself symbolizes the balance the show struck at its best: he would deliver absurd dialogue, but with apparent seriousness. At another point in the Catwoman two-parter Robin exclaims that he and Batman could’ve been killed. “Or worse!” adds Batman, leaving it to the more discerning viewers to wonder what he could possibly mean by that and, as the Museum screening’s audience did, laugh aloud.

Articles and reviews of the Batman television show in the 1960s fastened on classifying it as camp. But what we did not see mentioned in the show’s publicity is that “camp” is regarded as an element of gay sensibility. People didn’t talk about such things openly back then, certainly not in articles about a TV series that would be watched by millions of children. Considering Dr. Fredric Wertham’s tirades in the 1950s that Batman and Robin were actually a gay couple, it seems even stranger in retrospect that a Batman show that embraced the designation of camp made it to network TV in the 1960s, in time slots aimed at family audiences.

In its library the Museum has a video copy of a seminar it held about the Batman show in 1995, featuring Adam West, actresses Julie Newmar (who played Catwoman), Yvonne Craig (who played Batgirl), and writers Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Stanley Ralph Ross (the show’s principal Catwoman scripter). But not even in this seminar was the gay aspect of “camp” addressed.

The Museum’s “Superheroes on Television” finds the answer in noting that the Batman show “introduces the concept of ‘camp’ to mainstream audiences. . . .” The show represents the co-opting of the concept of “camp” by the mainstream entertainment industry, which proceeded to water it down. This was “camp” for the heterosexual majority of all ages, who did indeed flock to the show in its first season, and hardly like, say, purer examples of camp like the John Waters movies to come.

Similarly, as the Museum brochure observes, the Batman TV show visuals were influenced by pop art; the famous visualized sound effects (“Bam!” “Pow!”) are the clearest example of this. But what the Batman show does is hardly on the same artistic level as Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol’s appropriation of comics artwork.

In both the cases of “camp” sensibility and pop art, the Batman show represents the mainstream absorption of avant-garde concepts, with only limited comprehension of the originators’ intents, and coming up with thinner, blander versions that the mass audience would find palatable.

When the 1960s Batman was the only version of the character on film or television (apart from the earlier Columbia serials and later Saturday morning animated cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s), there was much more justification for comics fans to disapprove of it. Surely the show did not persuade the mainstream audience that superheroes were silly characters that only children took seriously; that was already the general opinion. But the 1960s Batman certainly reinforced that opinion, making it harder for comic books of any sort to be taken seriously. Now, thanks to Tim Burton’s Batman movies and Warner Bros. Animation’s subsequent television series, a new image of Batman has finally supplanted the 1960s TV Batman in the public mind. Now that the ’60s TV show no longer defines Batman, the show can be more easily appreciated for its own merits.

Still, the ’60s show made such a strong, lasting impression on the public consciousness that its influence on the mainstream’s attitude towards comics still continues to be felt here and there. Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies seemed out to fuse the “camp” treatment of the character with Burton’s darker vision, with disastrous results. And even the Museum of Television and Radio seems stuck in the “camp” approach to the genre. Its exhibition of superhero artwork in the first floor gallery is decorated with “Pow”-style sound effect balloons, and, as we shall see, the retrospective’s programming signals a steadfast refusal to recognize an adult approach to the genre that is not satiric.

The Warners Animation Batman shows are nowhere to be found here.

It’s fun to view the Museum show Batman episodes on a theater-sized screen, far larger than the shows were designed to be seen on. This can work to the show’s disadvantage: on a big screen the caverns in the background in Catwoman’s “death” scene are revealed as a rather shoddy painted backdrop. On the other hand, on a small 1960s TV screen one could not see the detail that the set designers put into the rooms at Stately Wayne Manor, or all the cat-themed bric-a-brac in Catwoman’s lair. It’s also fun, and revealing, to watch the shows with an audience and hear where the laughs come.When I first saw the Batman TV show, I’d only been to New York City, the model for Gotham City, once. Watching episodes today it seems so obvious that this show unintentionally moves Gotham City to Southern California. This is a Gotham virtually without skyscrapers! Often we’re shown the Batmobile driving along streets lined with buildings only a few stories tall. Much of the second Catwoman episode is shot on a roadside location that looks far more Californian than East Coast to me, even apart from the brilliant sunshine.

Whereas the Penguin two-parter I reviewed in a previous installment (see Comics in Context #34) was a political satire, “The Purr-fect Crime” and its rhyming second part don’t have any specific satirical target other than superhero comics themselves.

With few exceptions (like King Tut and the Bookworm), the TV show did not create successful villains of its own, but (with the notable exception of the Joker), it repeatedly came up with imaginative takes on the costumed villains it borrowed from the comics. In Catwoman’s case, the TV show represents a major step in her evolution that has effects lasting through the present day.

First, editor Julius Schwartz had not revived Catwoman since taking over the Bat-books in 1964; he actually rarely used costumed villains in Batman or Detective until the TV show came along. Moreover, she had been little used in the later years of Jack Schiff’s previous editorial regime. Perhaps the TV show’s creators found out about her from the same recent Batman Annual that reprinted the story that introduced Mr. Zero, who became the show’s Mr. Freeze. This annual reprinted a remarkable Sunday sequence from the old Batman newspaper strip in which the Catwoman, first appearing in her boudoir as a slinky 1940s Caniff/Eisner femme fatale, leads Batman in a cross-country chase.

The TV show considerably updated Catwoman’s look in a way that heightened her sexuality. Catwoman’s traditional costume in the comics included a cowl with round ears, a cape, and a billowing, floor-length gown with a cape. Despite the slit on the side of the skirt, this was a costume that hid her figure rather than revealing it. It was an imposing look, but not an erotic one, certainly not from a 1960s perspective. Then again, the comics writers and artists of that time saw themselves as aiming at children.

The TV show’s creators, on the other hand, also wanted an adult audience. They cast actress Julie Newmar in the role and put her in a skin-tight black “catsuit.” Despite its cat-like ears (now pointed), this costume doesn’t look absurd. In “The Purr-fect Crime” we are initially given only glimpses of Catwoman’s gloved hands, amid darkness, building up suspense to the shot that finally reveals her, full face and figure, in bright light. With her spectacular build, Newmar in costume looks impressive, indeed. And the TV show’s creators know it, not only holding a long time on this initial shot but also repeating it in a freeze frame in the second episode’s introductory recap.

(Moreover, Newmar provides a spectacle designed to last. Elsewhere in Mark Evanier’s Superheroes in My Pants he has a column, titled “A Stupefyin’ Evening,” in which he describes seeing a concert performance of the Broadway musical Li’l Abner. Newmar appeared in the original 1956 production and the 1959 film version as Stupefyin’ Jones, the very sight of whom literally stopped men in their tracks. She recreated the role in this 1995 revival and, as Mark says, “She was wearing a flesh-colored body stocking and the audience was. . .well, stupefied” by how little she’d changed over the decades. I saw a performance, too, and can confirm Mark’s report. Maybe like Catwoman, Newmar has nine lives, too.)

It makes sense that since Batman wears a skin-tight costume, Catwoman could, too. When Schwartz finally did bring Catwoman back in the comics, she was in a green bodysuit (Were they legally unable to use Fox’s black costume design?). Schwartz later put her back in the ’40s costume, but it didn’t last. Whether in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, or the animated TV show, her own comics, or the new movie, Catwoman wears variations on the Newmar costume.

Thinking again of the Penguin two-parter I reviewed months ago, notice that Newmar and Burgess Meredith, who played the Penguin, take very different approaches to the task of playing super-villains. Meredith acts the Penguin in a larger than life style, making him a vivid, even Dickensian caricature. Whereas Meredith enthusiastically quacks and waddles, Newmar is quieter and more subtly ironic in her delivery, and moves realistically: her style is more in tune with West’s deadpan manner, whereas Meredith’s sharply contrasts with it.

As a result Newmar’s Catwoman comes off as a more realistic character: genuinely sensual, believably crafty and greedy, impatient and imperious with her underlings (who do look foolish in costume) without resorting to bluster; and credibly evil enough to set up horrible demises for Batman and Robin. In this two-parter look at the way she watches so intently and uncertainly as Batman fights for his life against her tiger. This is not a stereotypical villain’s sadistic glee or gloating. Instead she shows a more realistic reaction, as if this is the moment she has lived for, her triumph over her enemy, and yet she still is not certain it will work.

Despite their different approaches, Newmar and Meredith are united in following a primary rule of successful comedy: not acting as if they know they’re funny. To be more precise, their Catwoman and Penguin each have a sense of humor and make witty remarks, but Meredith and Newmar don’t wink to the audience to let us know they think that dressing up like a cat or bird is ludicrous. They commit to the characters, enabling them to be both truly amusing and believably menacing.

The makers of the Batman show were mocking the superhero genre, but they nevertheless ended up doing a lot of things right. The best performances of the villains, like Newmar’s, Meredith’s, and Frank Gorshin’s cerebral yet manic Riddler, are among these: they still provide our basic impressions of these characters today.

While I’m at it, I want to praise composer Nelson Riddle for the leitmotifs he concocted for some of the major villains: the eerie, sensual meowing music for Catwoman, the jaunty waddling theme for the Penguin, and the laugh-like fanfare for the Joker.

The 1960s TV series captured the color, the action and the sheer energy that Batman should have. In his autobiography Man of Two Worlds, Julius Schwartz talks about the importance of conceiving death traps for Batman to escape. The TV show’s creators may have been inspired by movie serials, but they realized the same thing about Batman.

The first half of every two-parter built to the dramatic peak of a cliffhanger with Batman, Robin, or both in a trap. Though the writers probably never realized it, this also enabled the heroes to enact their own symbolic death and resurrection.

In fact, “The Purr-fect Crime”/”Better Luck Next Time” has a particularly dramatic death trap sequence. Inventively drawing on the famous short story The Lady and the Tiger, the show gives Batman the choice of two doors, with Catwoman supposedly behind one of them. He selects the wrong door, and a tiger emerges. In the first episode, we do not see the tiger and Batman in the same shot. But in the following episode, there is a real tiger grappling with a real person (obviously not Adam West!) in a Batman costume. This is actually happening, and there’s nothing funny about it; even seeing this again in 2004, I’m still surprised by this sequence. Batman finally defeats the tiger by turning up a sound on his “bat-communicator” to literally ear-splitting volume. That too is not funny: it seems a particularly nasty way of disposing of the tiger. (Couldn’t he have just used his knockout gas pellets?)

There’s even a bit in this Catwoman two-parter in which Batman tracks down Catwoman by tracing radiation on her gloves; this is very much a gimmick right out of the Schwartz-era Batbooks.

As I’ve grown older, in viewing the show, I even find things they did right that I wasn’t consciously aware of as a boy. Sequences in some of the early Riddler episodes, for example, have a genuine film noir look.

Even as a boy I was dividing the Good from the Bad in watching this series. Certainly I would not want Batman ordinarily played for comedy, and I recognize that the “dark knight” interpretation is truer to the essence of the character. But perhaps the better parts of the 1960s TV Batman demonstrate that Batman need not be dark and obsessed to work.

The live action TV Batman is neither grim, vengeful nor obsessed, and yet he is still recognizably Batman.

The end of “Better Luck Next Time” draws upon the comics’ tradition of apparent death scenes for Catwoman: unwilling to drop her bag of loot, Catwoman loses her grip and falls into a supposedly bottomless cavern. Also following the tradition in the comics, West’s Batman remarks that Catwoman may have the nine lives a cat is reputed to have, so perhaps she survived (as we discover next season she did).

The idea that someone falls to his or her death rather than forsake his or her greed was surely not original to these episodes. Steven Spielberg disposes of his villainess in almost exactly the same way, complete with bottomless pit, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

There’s a movie in which the sole important female character turns out to be a treacherous, greedy Nazi. And there’s a certain misogyny in Batman‘s first season. too. Consider its only important female characters: the independent but evil Catwoman, consigned to “death”; the more sympathetic villainess Zelda the Great, consigned to prison; the clueless and sexless Aunt Harriet; Bonnie, Commissioner Gordon’s decorative, daughter-like and one-dimensional secretary; and a whole pack of molls subordinating themselves to the various male “guest villains.” Were the show’s creators consciously portraying the boys’ world of comics, or were they not particularly enlightened, either? Two seasons later, in the fall of 1967, matters improved considerably when the TV show brought in Batgirl, created earlier that year in Julius Schwartz’s comics, and a much more positive figure.

Something that now definitely marks the Catwoman two-parter as a product of the 1960s is that Catwoman, though seemingly dressed for action, retreats to the side and lets her male underlings engage Batman and Robin in combat. Nowadays the female action hero ““ or villain ““ who is adept in physical battle as any man, has become a mainstay of popular culture. In the 1960s, a time of transitions in so many areas, such characters were only first beginning to appear (as we shall see in our next installment). The new Batgirl of the 1960s was one of them, yet on TV she was still held back by old-fashioned concepts of femininity. It is said that producer William Dozier thought that punching people was unladylike, so Batgirl kicked her adversaries instead. (So kicking is ladylike? Well, arguably more balletic, anyway.)

From my vantage point of the early 21st century, the Batman live action show seems very much representative of aspects of the 1960s, particularly the mid-1960s, when the generational shift in the culture was just beginning to take hold. Look at how conventional, old-fashioned and “square” the “normal” people on the show are:

Commissioner Gordon, Aunt Harriet, Bruce and Dick in their everyday identities, the extras ““ all dressed as if they were still in the 1950s. I think that the costumed characters now reflect the new 1960s generation: their individualized, nonconformist ways of dressing, its literal colorfulness, their greater openness about sexuality (reflected by the skin-tight costumes), and their refusal to conform to the system. The villains, of course, are in outright revolt against the establishment, but even Batman, who works with the police, doesn’t wear their uniform or follow all their rules. The show pokes fun at high society, politics, and other elements of the old status quo. Even Batman’s strict dedication to law and order is gently mocked, hinting at the outright rebellion to come in the later 1960s. Even the fact that a show based on comic books aimed at kids has been revamped into a trendy prime time television show was a sign that the youth culture was beginning to take over.

TWO SORTS OF DARK SHADOWS

I’ll return to the subject of Catwoman when I discuss her movie appearances next week. But for now, I’m finally leaving my first Saturday at the Museum of Television and Radio’s superhero retrospective behind and jumping ahead to my second Saturday.

By that time the Museum had started a companion retrospective, “Listen! It’s Superheroes on the Radio.” Instead of sitting in a theater in the dark, as I did watching the TV shows, I found myself in a milieu more like a quiet, pleasantly relaxing drawing room. In the Museum’s Ralph Guild Radio Listening Room, visitors sit in comfortable chairs, wearing headsets, listening to the old radio shows they select as cheerful sunlight pours in through the windows.

The first programs offered were two episodes of The Shadow, whose title character is what I’d call a proto-superhero. It was Superman who established and defined the concept of the superhero in popular culture; had Superman not been created, no one would think of the Shadow as a superhero. But, now we can see the similarities between the Shadow and the superheroes who followed him.

The first thing to note is that there are two major versions of the Shadow. In the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, the Shadow was a Depression-era forerunner of Marvel’s Punisher. He was a mysterious vigilante who violently gunned down his adversaries and who presided over a large network of agents. He had a visually iconic costume, though it was composed of conventional clothing: a large black hat, a black cloak, and a blood-red scarf masking the lower half of his face. This version of the Shadow had no super-powers and no real secret identity. A master of disguise, he posed as millionaire Lamont Cranston, but the real Cranston was a member of his organization. Eventually the pulp Shadow was revealed as former World War I aviator Kent Allard, but this Shadow had really given up his “normal” identity and normal life: he had given himself entirely over to his Shadow identity. This version of the Shadow was a direct influence on Batman, as DC Comics acknowledged in 1970s stories teaming up the two characters.

The radio version of the Shadow was very different. He really was Lamont Cranston, led a normal life as Cranston, and had a girlfriend, Margo Lane. (Could her last name have inspired Lois Lane’s?) The radio Shadow does indeed have a double identity in the traditional manner of superheroes. In action as the Shadow, Cranston adopts an intimidating tone of voice and a malevolent laugh, but this seems less the expression of an alternate personality than an act he puts on to scare his adversaries. In fact, in one of the two episodes, “The Werewolf of Hamilton Manor,” Cranston and Margo Lane banter back and forth as if they were, say, Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man movies.

Moreover, the radio Shadow has actual super-powers: in Tibet he learned from mystics how to “cloud men’s minds” so as to render himself invisible to them. In reviewing Jess Nevins’ book about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Heroes and Monsters (see Comics in Context #37), I took issue with Nevins’ contention that H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man did not represent a character archetype. I suggested that the Invisible Man may actually be a science fiction version of the ghost archetype: the unseen, often malevolent presence. The radio Shadow is like Wells’s Invisible Man if he combated crime rather than perpetrating it. I wonder if the radio Shadow was influenced by Universal’s 1933 film version of The Invisible Man. A ghost, of course, is dead, and ghosts in fiction are often shown as trying to kill the living; Wells’s Invisible Man is likewise a figure of death, not dead himself but killing others. The radio Shadow is not a murderer, but frightens his adversaries into thinking he might kill them. But the Shadow only pretends to be ghostlike: the “Night without End” episode emphasizes that the Shadow can suffer physical harm. This underlines the dual nature of the radio Shadow’s identity: he is both superhumanly powerful and humanly vulnerable.

At first I was disappointed that the Museum had not chosen episodes featuring the most famous voice of the Shadow, Orson Welles. Instead it selected “The Werewolf of Hamilton Manor,” with Bret Morrison as the Shadow, and “Night without End” with Bill Johnstone voicing the character. I presume the Museum’s intent was to showcase the Shadow in a supernatural or science fictional milieu rather than battling conventional criminals.

In “Night without End,” an episode from 1938, the year of Superman’s debut in comics, a master criminal has devised a means to block sunlight from reaching the city, presumably New York, thereby plunging it into darkness. This mastermind is motivated not by politics but by greed, hoping to extort money from the city. Yet he has perpetrated an act of terror against the city nonetheless. How often has popular culture envisioned attacks against New York City or fictional cities based on it until such a vision became reality on September 11, 2001?

“Night without End” also underlines the idea that the police consider the Shadow to be a criminal himself; in this episode the police commissioner reluctantly has to cooperate with the Shadow’s attempt to defeat the plot against the city. Later that same day the Museum screened an episode from the television revival of another proto-superhero’s radio series, The Green Hornet. The Hornet actually pretends to be a criminal so as to battle the underworld from within. Hence the Green Hornet is wanted by the police, just as the Shadow is.

Now, Superman and DC’s other classic superheroes, known in the 1940s as “mystery men,” worked with the police and were hailed as heroes by the public. The Museum’s Shadow and Green Hornet episodes led me to wonder if in the 1960s Stan Lee reintroduced something important to stories about masked heroes when he co-created heroes who were regarded by the police, public and armed forces as outlaws, including Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Hulk.

Last year I wrote about another classic 1960s television series, Dark Shadows and about the latest of the annual “Dark Shadows Festivals” that celebrate the show (see Comics in Context #11 & #12). As I reported, it was announced before last year’s Festival that it would be the final Dark Shadows Festival ever, leading to controversy among the show’s fans and even an onstage confrontation during the Festival itself.

Well, there was no “Dark Shadows Festival” this year. Instead there was a “Dark Shadows Weekend” from Friday, August 12 through Sunday, August 15, run by the same people who ran the Festivals. (You can learn more at www.darkshadowsfestival.com.) I attended on Saturday, and as far as I can tell, there is no difference between a “Dark Shadows Festival” and a “Dark Shadows Weekend” save for the name and the fact that the “Weekend” was located not in New York City but in Tarrytown, New York. In a beautiful location along the Hudson River, Tarrytown is not only the site of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but was also where most of the two motion pictures based on Dark Shadows ““ 1970’s House of Dark Shadows and 1971’s Night of Dark Shadows ““ were filmed. The House of the title is Collinwood, which in the movies was “played” by Lyndhurst, the largest Gothic revival mansion in the United States. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art once held a retrospective of the work of Lyndhurst’s architect: how odd to see a picture of Collinwood in the precincts of high culture.) Tarrytown is also located in Westchester County, so this is X-Men territory, and it gave me a better sense of what the area around Professor Xavier’s mansion might be like.

As for the tempting possibility of new Dark Shadows shows, there is the proverbial good news and bad news. The bad news is that a pilot episode of a new Dark Shadows series, rebooting the continuity from the beginning, with an entirely new cast, was shot for the WB Network, but the WB turned it down. For the good news, I remind you of my report last year on Return to Collinwood, a “radio play” performed live on stage by cast members of the original Dark Shadows at last year’s Festival. Written by Jamison Selby, son of David Selby, who played Quentin Collins on the first series, this play picked up the original continuity thirty years later. I was favorably impressed by it, and now the play is out on a two-disc CD set from MPI Home Video. After I get around to listening to it, I’ll probably be reviewing the CD set here (and I have more to say about Mark Evanier’s aforementioned book, as well). (For more information on the CDs, see www.mpihomevideo.com and www.darkshadowsdvd.com.)

As further proof that the world is not divided simply into blacks and whites, but includes a spectrum of grays, there’s also a piece of news that is in a no man’s land between good and bad. A man with a mission named Darren Gross has been trying for years to restore the “director’s cut” of the second Dark Shadows movie, Night of Dark Shadows. Both movies were directed by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis, but MGM cut out well over a half hour of footage before releasing the film. As a result, and as I can attest, Night often seems rushed and hard to follow. (In contrast, the first film, House, is quite a well-made horror film.)

Gross has managed to find thirty-five minutes of deleted Night footage; there’s no sound track for them, but the script exists and the dialogue track could be dubbed back in. Gross wants the full version of Night restored and made available on video; so do Curtis, the surviving actors, and, of course, the Dark Shadows fan community. But Warner Brothers, the present owners of Night, understandably prefers to concentrate on putting together DVD releases of films with potentially bigger audiences than Dark Shadows‘ niche fandom. Still, we’re big enough to support MPI’s release of the entire five-year-long original series on home video.

Had the WB picked up the new Dark Shadows series, Gross told us during his panel, Warners would have been more favorably disposed towards restoring and rereleasing Night. But not now. Hoping that eventually Warners will change its mind, Gross has actually been rerecording the dialogue for the deleted scenes with the surviving actors.

It’s a classic case of a clash between creative artists’ desires for their work and its corporate owners’ different priorities. We’re simultaneously so close to seeing a finished, restored version of Night, and yet so far away. (And there’s more about the restoration project at home.earthlink.net/~moviemandg/)

Only able to spend an afternoon at this year’s Festival ““ sorry, Weekend ““ I felt that I was compressing a full three day experience into a little over five hours, with far too little time to spend with friends I saw there. But if I could only be there for one afternoon, Saturday afternoon was the time to pick. The high point of the afternoon was original cast member Nancy Barrett’s performance of her cabaret act, which she has presented at past Festivals on the East and West Coasts. She’s continued to make improvements in her act, in which she uses songs to recount the story of her life. This year, in the section dealing with her time on Dark Shadows, she performed various songs as her various Dark Shadows characters, choosing selections that aptly expressed their different personalities. And, to the absolute delight of the audience, she contributed a surprising innovation to another section of her act: not only singing a number from Chicago but tap dancing to it!

Now there’s something I’ve never seen anyone do at the San Diego Comic-Con! Maybe I picked the right convention to go to this year after all!

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

I continue to be surprised by the inroads that superheroes have made into popular culture. Recently I caught part of a cable telecast of a 1980 TV movie, More Wild Wild West, reuniting the lead actors of the classic 1960s television series. The villain of the piece employed two musclemen in shorts whose skin was colored green; they were referred to in the dialogue and in the cast credits as “the Hulks.” I sat before my television set wondering: how did they get away with this? (The TV movie, by the way, was a disappointing mess, turning what had been a witty fusion of the Western and the Bondian spy thriller into a dopey and unfunny comedy. And still it was better than the later theatrical film version. The incapability of various Hollywood people to comprehend what makes the concept for a movie or TV show ““ or comics series ““ work can be stunning.)

My guess is that Wild Wild West‘s Hulks were not directly based on the Hulk comics but on the Incredible Hulk live action television series of the 1970s. Recently I took the opportunity to watch a representative example of this show on the big screen.

As readers of this column’s last two installments know, I spent a recent Saturday afternoon attending screenings at New York City’s Museum of Television and Radio, which has been holding a retrospective, “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television!” When I left off last week I had finished watching the first episode of The Adventures of Superman, from 1953, in a screening “package” titled “Comic-Book Classics,” in the Museum’s main theater.

The next show in the “package” was made over a quarter of a century later: a 1979 episode of The Incredible Hulk live action series. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had created the Hulk in 1962, a mere nine years after the start of the Superman television series, and yet the characters seem ““ and are ““ the product of different ages. Created in 1938, at the start of the Golden Age of Comics, Superman was at first a mysterious, even somewhat ruthless vigilante. But he rapidly evolved into the figure presented in the 1950s television series: the noble but humble all-American hero, benefactor of humanity. Beneath the facade of mild-mannered Clark Kent was a man who represented moral and physical perfection. Lee’s Marvel revolution of the 1960s established that superhuman powers could be a curse as well as a blessing, and portrayed protagonists with character flaws ranging from Spider-Man’s neuroses to the Hulk’s destructive rage.

One could regard the Hulk as a nightmarish variation on Superman. Beneath his everyday identity, mild-mannered Clark Kent is a superhumanly strong hero, the perfect man. Beneath his own everyday identity, mild-mannered Bruce Banner is a rampaging, superhumanly strong monster, the dark side of humanity taken physical form. Lee was inspired by Dr. Jekyll in co-creating Bruce Banner, another doctor: Superman has the high-minded personality Jekyll hoped to gain through his experiments; the Hulk is like what Jekyll actually became, Mr. Hyde.

The Superman and Clark sides of Kent’s personality co-exist in a healthy balance, with both selves under his conscious control, and in the 1950s TV series there is little real difference between them. Banner, in contrast, suffers from a self shattered into fragments, none of which is healthy: the “normal” Banner represses his inner anger and traumatic psychological pain, while the Hulk incarnates that pain and rage without restraint.

So, while Superman represents a sunny optimism about humanity’s higher potential, the Hulk represents a darker, pessimistic view of the nature and fate of humanity. We’ve gone from the superhero as member of a happy family/conformist society in The Adventures of Superman to the superhero as angst-ridden outcast in TV’s Incredible Hulk, as if the optimism of the 1960s has deteriorated into despair in the 1970s.

The episode of The Adventures of Superman that the Museum screened was clearly and unapologetically a superhero show. One thing that struck me about watching this episode of The Incredible Hulk. is that it is an object lesson in doing a superhero show while minimizing the superhero elements. The Hulk’s appearances are few and brief. There aren’t any super-villains, and the Hulk basically operates in a realistic world, in which he is the principal fantasy element.

The Incredible Hulk television series instead puts its emphasis on Bruce Banner, whom the show renamed David Banner. (Why the name change? Perhaps it was to avoid the alliteration of Bruce Banner’s name, which may have been thought to make it sound too much like a name out of comic books. Or perhaps it was because decades ago “Bruce” was somehow considered to be a stereotypical homosexual name, before macho figures like Bruce Springsteen and Bruce Willis became famous. Or perhaps it was just a sign of Hollywood’s disdain for comics as source material: the TV show people may have simply liked the name “David” better and saw no reason to be faithful to the comic.)

Recently I listened to director Ang Lee’s commentary track for the Hulk movie DVD. It’s striking to note the disparity between some of the Ang Lee’s intentions and how the movie actually turned out. More than once, Lee speaks on the track about how he sought to give the film “B-movie energy” (and he says this about scenes in which the Hulk doesn’t appear!) and how he conceived of the Hulk movie as “operatic.” Meanwhile, I watched the movie and, when the Hulk wasn’t onscreen, was reminded of how quiet, subdued, slow, talky and mundane most of the movie’s scenes are. Let me put it this way: it may have been a mistake watching this late at night; one would not expect that staying fully awake during a movie about the Hulk might be a problem. At one point I stopped the Hulk movie to see what was being telecast. Lo and behold, I came in on the middle of one of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies on cable, which genuinely did have that “B-movie energy” of a genre action-adventure movie, put in the service of an A-movie, and really did have an “operatic” scale. It was if I had taken a quantum leap upwards from the level of the Hulk movie I’d been watching. Once again, I found myself wondering what the heck Ang Lee was talking about. (He also keeps saying that he finds Nick Nolte’s performance as Bruce Banner’s father funny. At one point Lee acknowledges that perhaps he’s the only one who does. I expect that may be true.)

At another point on the commentary track, Ang Lee declares that nobody really cares about Bruce Banner, whom he dismisses as a “wimp” and a “loser.” This is a prime example of what I think of as the Everybody Syndrome, in which a person assumes that everyone shares his own opinions on a subject. Stan Lee, Peter David, Roy Thomas, Jeph Loeb, and John Byrne, among others, have done interesting work with the tormented personality of Bruce Banner in the comics. Ang Lee seems to me to be projecting his own opinion of Bruce Banner onto everyone else. Yes, the movie, drawing ultimately from Bill Mantlo’s comics work with the Hulk, gives the character of Banner a horrific childhood trauma. But the adult Banner behaves in such an understated, introverted manner that it’s hard to empathize with him. He doesn’t seem like the scientific genius of the comics, deeply committed to his research. He doesn’t seem deeply emotionally repressed, either in terms of anger or sexuality. He doesn’t seem a tragic, suffering figure. The personality of this movie Banner is virtually a blank.

In contrast, the Hulk TV series’s Bruce Banner comes to much more vivid dramatic life. Watching this episode, I was pleased watching the late Bill Bixby’s performance of Banner as a good man figuratively weighed down by a heavy burden, repeatedly trying to conceal his dark secret, feeling distanced from other people, forever a homeless migrant, suffused by continual melancholy. Bixby’s Banner is palpably a tragic figure. He, not the Hulk, is the emotional center of the show.

The Hulk TV show transplants a lead character from the superhero genre into a different sort of story model. The Museum of Television and Radio’s brochure for its superhero retrospective rightly calls the Hulk “a nuclear age Jean Valjean.” Valjean is the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables and hence of the celebrated musical of the same name. Imprisoned for a minor crime, stealing bread to relieve his hunger, Valjean escapes and is pursued for decades by the implacable policeman Javert. Over that time Valjean creates new identities for himself to conceal his guilt.

More likely, though, the Hulk TV show was more directly inspired by another television series, The Fugitive, which was an earlier variant on Les Miserables, and is familiar to a new generation through the later successful film adaptation. In The Fugitive Richard Kimble, who like Banner has the title of a doctor, is unjustly accused of murdering his wife, is convicted, escapes, and is pursued by another policeman, Lieutenant Gerard. Kimble wandered through the United States, adopting false identities, encountering different people and situations and then inevitably moving on. If Valjean was guilty of a minor crime, Kimble was entirely innocent. In fact, Kimble was searching for the real killer.

Following the pattern set by The Fugitive, the TV show Banner leads a nomadic existence, becoming involved with new people in a different place in each episode. Banner flees not the police but an investigative reporter, who is tracking down the Hulk. A reporter isn’t as serious a threat as the police, but represents a different kind of menace in an age of mass media: the public exposure of one’s personal secrets. Like Kimble and Valjean, the TV Banner hides behind false names. Banner has even faked the death of his Bruce Banner identity; ironically, the Hulk is wanted by the law, which blames him for murdering Banner.

But in fact Banner bears the burden of his own dark, monstrous side: he is indeed “guilty.” Kimble can rightly pin the blame for the crime he is accused of on a scapegoat, the notorious one-armed man. But Banner cannot separate himself from the “guilty” party: he is inextricably linked with the Hulk.

The opening of this Hulk episode recaps the TV series’ version of his origin. In this version there’s no “gamma bomb.” In Lee and Kirby’s origin, Banner is a nuclear physicist who has created this powerful new weapon, which has no purpose other than inflicting death on an enormous scale, and he appears to have no moral qualms about this. The bomb can be seen as an expression of the destructive rage within Banner’s repressed personality. The explosion of the gamma bomb is like the bite of the irradiated spider was to Peter Parker: in being transformed by gamma radiation into the Hulk, Banner has become the bomb in humanoid form. As I’ve noted in a previous column (way back in Comics in Context #2), Banner is a modern version of Faust, who symbolically makes a deal with the devil in the pursuit of knowledge, and pays the price.

The TV Banner is more of a noble innocent in his origin. Like Dr. Jekyll, he was experimenting on himself in an attempt to unleash man’s higher potential, not to inflict death. Banner and Jekyll were trying to tap their Jungian “shadow” self, which they saw as buried potential for good; they inadvertently released the destructive side of the “shadow” self instead. Like Spider-Man forever paying for inadvertently causing his uncle’s death, the comics’ Bruce Banner has paid for years for inventing the gamma bomb. The TV Banner is instead the innocent victim of an experiment gone wrong.

In Ang Lee’s movie, the blame for Banner’s transformation is displaced even further, onto a separate person: Banner’s father, who conducted genetic experiments that mutated his child. This genetic engineering combined with the effects of Bruce Banner’s exposure to gamma radiation (not from a bomb) and Bruce’s experiments in nanotechnology. These latter experiments are morally ambiguous. They are intended to enable soldiers’ bodies to repair injuries rapidly. So in a sense the nanotechnology will serve the purposes of war. But it does so through healing, so one could argue that Bruce Banner is conducting experiments to save lives, not take them. It is Banner’s father who is a killer, and whose experiments have evil intent. Significantly, the moviemakers name Banner’s father “David” (in the comics he is “Brian”), presumably as a nod to the TV series. That may also suggest that David is an aspect of Bruce. But it is an aspect he can rid himself of. Towards the movie’s end the Hulk/Bruce destroys David, who has turned himself into a monster. Like the one-armed man in The Fugitive, the movie’s David Banner becomes a scapegoat, who can be blamed and punished for evil and eliminated instead of the protagonist.

By coincidence or not, the episode of The Incredible Hulk that the Museum chose to screen featured its own version of Banner’s father. This predated the first appearance of Banner’s father in the comics, but provides an intriguing parallel.

In Bill Mantlo’s landmark story about Banner’s childhood (In The Incredible Hulk #312, October 1985 ““ now nearly twenty years ago!), Dr. Brian Banner was a physically abusive father and husband, a rage-aholic, who outright killed Bruce’s mother, Rebecca. Peter David, in the comics, picked up on this; later Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus had Bruce’s father murder the boy’s mother in the movie. This was presented by Mantlo and Lee and Schamus as the prime cause of the traumatic rage that became physically incarnate as the Hulk.

In the television series, we see in flashbacks that Banner’s mother was seriously ill, and that young David urged his father, here named D. W. Banner, to take her to the hospital. Inexplicably, D. W. refused, and so the mother died. Dreaming about this, Banner awakes with his eyes turned green, a sign he is about to “hulk out.” Hence, the anger manifested by the Hulk connects with Banner’s anger towards his father over his mother’s death.

Hence, this is a milder precursor of Mantlo’s and Schamus’s later scenes of Bruce’s father directly murdering his mother. I wonder if Mantlo knew this Hulk episode. In all three versions, the Hulk becomes the physical embodiment of Banner’s unresolved Freudian rage from childhood, his Oedipal resentment towards the father for depriving him of the mother.

Now, maybe in the TV version, Banner’s father simply distrusted doctors, or, like a Christian Scientist, was opposed in principle to medical care, or even did not realize just how seriously ill his wife was. Since he did not directly kill her, and presumably did not intend her death, it is easier for David to forgive his father, as he does in the course of the episode.

In fact, before David and D. W.’s actual reconciliation, D. W. comes face to face with the Hulk. One might think that if David still blamed D. W. for his mother’s death, the Hulk would attack him, but the Hulk just stares at him and then runs off. Apparently David’s love for his father outweighs his resentment of him.

The TV episode also gives David Banner a sister. Hugging David and worrying about him, the sister comes off as a protective, maternal figure. She has no visible boyfriend or husband; apart from David, the man she is most closely connected with is their father. In the comics and the movie, Banner, General Ross and Betty form a Freudian triangle; David Banner, his dad and his sister form a similar but different Freudian grouping in the TV show.

In the episode Banner’s sister and father each witness his transformation into the Hulk, yet neither of them is frightened of him. Well, why should they be? The TV Hulk looks like a bodybuilder in green body paint, which, of course, is what he’s played by. Before the creation of the technology used to create the movie’s computer-generated Hulk, this was the best they could do. The TV version doesn’t seem like a massive Hulk or like a monster at all. When he leaves the scene, he doesn’t take those gargantuan leaps from the comics, but just seems to jog away. That’s hardly very intimidating.

It’s interesting that at one point in this episode, David Banner claims to have a radiation disease. So, by extension, becoming the Hulk is a kind of disease. That’s certainly faithful to the traditional Marvel concept that Bruce Banner’s transformations are like a curse.

Maybe that even helps make sense out of the reactions of the TV Banner’s father and sister to seeing the Hulk. They don’t see him as a fearsome monster, a kind of green King Kong, but as a distorted version of a human being.

Watching this episode, I also thought that though Stan Lee says that the Hulk was inspired by Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein’s Monster, the character has another forebear in classic horror. The Hulk is also like a werewolf, the man who transforms into a beast, an incarnation of his dark side; indeed, originally in the comics, Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk at sunset and back again at dawn. Bixby’s portrayal of the Hulk reminds me of treatments of werewolves in movies and television, so often as good people who cannot help turning into monsters, and must continually wander from town to town lest their secret be exposed.

Interesting as its variants on the Hulk mythos may be, this episode was not particularly good. It had the usual dramatic slackness of much of 1970s television, meandering in pace, insufficiently developing supporting characters and dramatic relationships, and visually undistinguished. Here’s a measure of the dullness of the plot: it turns on Banner’s development of a method to speed up the life cycle of bugs so they won’t destroy local crops! Then there was the standard issue corporate villain, dressed in expensive 1970s clothing, that now looks quite repellent, who wants Banner killed before he tampers with the bugs.

Considering how uninspired most of the episode was, its high point displayed unexpected imagination as well as a bigger budget that had earlier been in evidence: Banner transforms into the Hulk while hanging onto a small airplane in flight. Still, the Hulk’s reactions seem surprisingly subdued, and it seems improbable that he would have behaved so intelligently in not upsetting the plane.

There lies a major problem with the TV show as well as the movie: the Hulk is so underdeveloped as a character. In the comics, Bruce Banner is not necessarily dull as Ang Lee contends, but he is of secondary importance to the Hulk. In large part that is because the comics’ Hulk can talk, enabling his writers to explore and develop his personality, and to have the Hulk articulate his emotions and desires. As comics readers know, the Hulk can even manifest different personalities. The most familiar is the traditional childlike green Hulk, who mood swings between his catastrophic temper tantrums, his defiant insistence on solitude, and his lonely longing for companionship. Then there is the more intelligent and Hyde-like gray version of the Hulk.

But the TV Hulk does not talk; the movie Hulk only speaks two lines (one in Bruce’s hallucination). Their personalities seem restricted to a short spectrum of responses: rage at enemies or awkward, confused stillness when confronting a loved one, like Betty in the movie or his relatives in the TV episode. Thus the Hulk really comes across only as a kind of animal, often wild, sometimes tame, whereas the writers of the comic book Hulk can turn him into Banner’s distorted mirror image, a character as complicated as Banner’s “normal” human self can be.

As an example, I am taking this opportunity to revisit another of my columns about the Hulk, which dealt with the initial issue of writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale’s Hulk: Gray mini-series (see Comics in Context #16.) It’s my hope that whenever I review the first issue of a limited series, if it seems interesting enough, to do a subsequent critique of the entire series after its completion.

My original qualm about the first issue was that Loeb and Sale redid scenes from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first Hulk story, with Loeb rewriting Lee’s dialogue. My preference would be to keep the original dialogue intact, just as Sale, without imitating Kirby’s style, adheres to his basic designs for the characters. It seems to me that the major comics companies too often act as if individual creators are unimportant except as sources of raw material that can be reshaped by contemporary writers, artists and editors at will. To my mind, to rewrite Lee’s dialogue from his classic work implies that his writing style has no real artistic value.

However, now that I have the new hardcover collection of the entire Hulk: Gray series, I can see that most of it consists of brand new sequences that Loeb and Sale have inserted into the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours since Bruce Banner’s initial transformation into the Hulk. I have no problem with inserting new scenes or even dialogue into “gaps” in the original story; I’ve done this myself in some of the few Marvel stories I’ve written dealing with past continuity.

Loeb’s expanded tale of the Hulk’s origin is contained within a present-day framing sequence in which Bruce Banner has a session with his psychiatrist, longtime supporting character Dr. Leonard Samson, himself a superhero known as Doc Samson. Through this device Loeb provides insights into Banner’s personality through subtle means that one does not expect in superhero comics, which usually operate in broad strokes. (In the Tuesday, August 10 New York Times is a new article about the ongoing dispute among psychiatrists over the value of traditional talk therapy in this new age of Prozac. But I note that the traditional “talking cure” retains its grip on popular culture, whether in Frasier or The Sopranos or this Hulk: Gray series.)

Claiming that he came because he needed to talk to someone (it is the anniversary of his wedding to Betty Ross, now supposedly deceased), Bruce then tells Samson that perhaps he merely wanted to get out of the rain. Demonstrating his knowledge of French scatological references, Samson replies that “that’s the biggest pile of merde I’ve heard all day.” Here Loeb signals his method to the readers: we are not necessarily to take what Banner says at face value. The Hulk is a manifestation of Banner’s unhealthy psyche; what Banner will say inadvertently points to his psychological problems. In literary criticism, Banner would be classified as an “unreliable narrator.”

For example, Banner responds to the “merde” accusation with an understated warning, “I wouldn’t take that tone with me,” as the colorist gives Banner’s eyes and forearm a Hulk-green hue. Banner tells Samson, “If I were in your shoes, I would be” afraid of him, and then Banner admits to being afraid himself. But Banner is not just talking about how everyone, including himself, fears the Hulk: this was a passive-aggressive threat, the Hulk’s anger emerging into the surface of the Banner persona.

Significantly, the green on Bruce’s forearm vanishes once he acknowledges his own fear of the Hulk and then opens his fist to reveal Betty’s ring: Bruce is afraid of the loss of Betty, which he blames on his life as the Hulk.

In my previous column about Hulk: Gray, I wrote about the following sequence, in which Bruce comments on photographs of General “Thunderbolt” Ross, his longtime nemesis (whose nickname conjures up images of Zeus), and Rick Jones, the boy he saved from the gamma bomb blast, and unwittingly demonstrates the psychological phenomenon of projection. Banner denies hating Ross, but claims that Ross hates him. The General does hate the Hulk, and has often hated Banner, too. But we know that the Hulk hates Ross; surely Banner does too, after so many years of persecution by him. Is Banner in denial about his feelings towards Ross, accusing Ross of the hatred Banner himself feels? Seeing Rick’s photo, Banner hesitates (“um”) and then says “Guilt.” Samson asks if “You blame Rick?” “No,” replies Banner, “he blames himself, don’t you think?” But wouldn’t Banner, at least unconsciously, blame Rick for what happened to him? If Rick had not gone onto the test site, Banner would never have become the Hulk.

For a starting point for their conversation, Samson suggests Bruce talk about his father. “We’ve done that to death, haven’t we?” says Bruce, dismissively. Is this merely Loeb’s way of signaling that he is going to deal with the Lee-Kirby origin story, and not Mantlo’s story of Bruce’s childhood trauma? Or is this Loeb’s sly reference to the story Peter David wrote revealing that Bruce finally killed his father?

From here Loeb and Sale shift to the moment at which Banner was caught in the gamma bomb blast. Banner’s skeleton is illuminated in a green glow by the radiation, not only suggesting the traditional green color of the Hulk, but also making clear that this is Banner’s symbolic death, from which he will be resurrected not as a god but as a monster.

When Banner revives from the blast, Rick thanks Bruce for rescuing him and tells the doctor treating him that Bruce is his “dad.” Since the doctor told Rick he’d get in trouble if he had been “snooping” around the army base, presumably Rick thought it best to conceal his and Bruce’s true identities. Still, the fact that Rick chooses to call Bruce his “dad” is revealing: an orphan, perhaps Rick sees Bruce, the adult who saved his life, as the father figure he’s longed for. This enables Loeb to establish the nature of Rick’s relationship with Banner, dismissing the homophobic Wertham theory about kid sidekicks.

Once the doctor has left, Banner bursts into anger at Rick. The present day Banner speculates that it was because Rick had called him his father, causing Bruce to think of his own father, who is the object of his long-repressed anger. This is a clever stratagem of Loeb’s: the furious Banner is at once rebelling against the idea of being someone’s “father” and yet, by taking out his wrath on Rick, is actually behaving like his father: the abused child finds himself repeating his father’s anger, though not yet his physical abuse. Moreover, Banner’s rage at Rick triggers his first transformation into the Hulk, which begins with Bruce’s eyes turning green, which may be a nod to the television series.

As In the first issue of his series in 1962, the Hulk is colored gray. Commenting on the Hulk’s first rampage through the army base, the present day Banner hypothesizes, “Maybe this was the price I had to pay for unleashing the Gamma Bomb into the world.” So Loeb too recognizes what I’ve called the Faust theme underlying the Hulk’s origin. Whether Lee and Kirby consciously thought this was Banner’s punishment for creating the Gamma Bomb, I do not know. In 1962, the height of the Cold war, perhaps they considered it Banner’s moral duty to devise weaponry for the United States; keep in mind that in the 1960s Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, was a munitions maker. Yet the Faust interpretation fits the Hulk origin.

In issue two Loeb may take it too far in suggesting that in rushing out to save Rick from the blast, Banner was acting out a death wish inspired by his own guilt over creating the bomb. As Banner himself points out, he had given the order for the countdown to be suspended, so he would be safe. He never could have expected that his assistant was a spy and would ignore the order. Perhaps a better question might be why Banner didn’t simply have General Ross send out soldiers to take Rick to safety. Why did Banner choose to do it himself?

Loeb likewise gives Betty Ross, the General’s daughter, who loves Banner but seems nearly as repressed, her own subconscious death wish. Warned of a mysterious threat, Betty nonetheless foolishly opens her door on hearing a knock, only to be confronted by the Hulk. Samson points out that at this juncture she thought that Banner was dead. Hence, subconsciously, she may have felt she had no more reason to live. We could go beyond Loeb and Samson’s hypotheses: perhaps Betty regarded a relationship with Bruce as her only hope of getting out from under the heavy hand of her domineering father. This may be yet more reason why she no longer cares about living. (How appropriate it is that both Bruce and Betty have problems with oppressive fathers, while Rick suffers from not having a father.)

At first Betty is surprisingly brave, defying the Hulk before finally collapsing unconscious in the more familiar kind of reaction for an ingenue in an early 1960s monster movie. Here Loeb may be suggesting the feistier, more independent side of Betty that would emerge in the Hulk series decades later, in more feminist-friendly times.

General Ross arrives and directs an attack on the Hulk. The present day Banner points out that Ross was endangering Betty, whom the Hulk was holding. Ross threatens to kill the Hulk if the monster harms Betty, and yet Ross came close to killing her himself through what seems his own disposition towards using violence, regardless of the consequences.

“We’ll show that ““ Hulk ““ what it means to mess with this man’s army.” Top priority for General Ross seems to be proving he’s a bigger alpha male than the Hulk. How different is this from the Hulk’s mantra about being “the strongest one of all”?

Ross refers to Betty as “my little girl,” which may seem simply a fond, fatherly endearment towards someone who is actually now a grown woman. But on the very next page Ross’s phrase takes on spooky undertones. He finds Betty’s baseball from her childhood and recalls how she “actually wanted to play baseball” as a child; the phrasing suggests Ross’s amazement that she would want to do something so untraditionally feminine. Ross also muses that Betty would ask “why girls can’t be soldiers.” This indicates that Betty, as a child, resisted being confined to traditional feminine roles. But Ross has now given her the sedative that he says her late mother would take when she became “overexcited.” Ross notes that “no one would need to know” about the sedative, and says, “I worry that you’ll be. . .just like” her mother. Can we deduce from all this that Ross actually sedated Betty’s mother whenever she acted in too independent a fashion, and that it is because he fears that Betty will take after her mother that he has been so domineering towards her? General Ross intends to keep Betty as his “little girl,” right there with him on the base, and away from potential suitors like Banner.

Through present-day Banner and Samson’s comments on the flashback in which Rick finds Banner (who awakes after spending the night as the Hulk), Loeb explicitly establishes Bruce’s transformations into the Hulk as a metaphor for alcoholism: Banner too can wake up after wreaking all sorts of damage as the Hulk and not even remember what he’s done. (By the way, usually in the 1960s Banner remembers little or nothing of his experiences as the Hulk, as Loeb acknowledges in the notes at the back of the book. As if he had drunk too much alcohol, Banner in effect “blacks out.” To make this framing sequence work, Loeb must have Banner remember what the Hulk did, at least in those initial hours of the Hulk’s existence. But, as noted, Loeb has indicated that Banner’s memories are not altogether reliable.)

Loeb and Sale recreate an iconic motif from the early Hulk stories, in which Banner has Rick imprison him in an underground cave. The Hulk’s pounding at his prison door, bellowing to “Banner! Let Hulk out! Out of dark!” is a brilliant dramatic metaphor for Banner’s attempts to suppress the Hulk side of his psyche. As usual in the 1960s, the Hulk thinks of Banner as a separate person and an enemy. The Hulk thus suffers from his own form of denial: obsessed with being “the strongest one of all,” he cannot acknowledge he is also the “puny human” Banner. (Oddly, by the opening of the third issue, the Hulk is out of the cave. Loeb and Sale have chosen not to explain why he isn’t still trapped.)

In the opening of the third issue, the Hulk, like a child, has adopted a rabbit as a “friend” and unintentionally kills it by petting it too hard. In the back of the book, Tim Sale ascribes the inspiration for this scene to the Boris Karloff Frankenstein movie. Can this possibly also be an allusion to Lenny, the strong but childlike and retarded character in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men? Whenever you see a cartoon from Hollywood’s Golden Age with a big, not particularly bright character who is obsessively fond of rabbits or other small animals, as in Chuck Jones’s The Abominable Snow Rabbit, that’s a parody of Steinbeck’s Lenny.

In this sequence Loeb introduces another interesting theme. Samson points out to the present day Banner that the Hulk “at least in the way you told the story” (reminding us that Banner is an unreliable narrator), did not intend to kill the rabbit and was “innocent.” Banner denies that the Hulk is ever “innocent.” Burdened by guilt over the Hulk’s actions, Banner, perhaps surprisingly, judges the Hulk more harshly than Samson does or than we might. Loeb and Sale are presenting the traditional 1960s Hulk, who has the personality of a small child, as likely to adopt a pet as to throw a temper tantrum. (In notes at the back of the volume Loeb characterizes the Hulk as a “monstrous child.”) Banner interprets the Hulk differently, it seems: as an evil Hyde-like being.

In notes in the back of the Hulk: Gray hardcover, Loeb observes that the Hulk “transcends the simple Jekyll & Hyde/black and white metaphor because the Hulk has an innocence about him that Hyde never had. There are people-Ross in particular ““ who see the world in black and white. There is a clear line between good and evil. In Ross’s mind the Hulk is a monster. There is no other choice.” It would appear that Banner may agree with Ross on this. But he is wrong, as Samson maintains. The title Hulk: Gray refers, then, not just to the Hulk’s original color but to the notion that the Hulk cannot be judged in black and white terms. In fact, all of the major characters’ psyches are more complex than one might first think.

Samson counters Banner’s insistence on the Hulk’s evil by noting that despite all the destruction that the Hulk causes, no one was ever killed. That’s true of the Hulk into the 1990s. Hulk: Gray isn’t acknowledging the more recent treatment of the Hulk, in which the monster has indeed caused people’s deaths through his rampages, worsening Banner’s sense of guilt.

Despite Banner’s condemnation of the Hulk, in the present-day dialogue he also seeks to shift blame to General Ross. Banner offers to bet that Ross has made more people’s lives “miserable” than the Hulk has; Samson pointedly refuses to take the bet.

Interrogating Rick about the Hulk, Ross finally hits him. Ross is an oppressive father figure: he is literally Betty’s father, and he is symbolically a father figure to Banner and even to Rick. In striking Rick, he is unwittingly repeating the behavior of Bruce’s abusive father. So it makes metaphorical sense that as soon as Ross hits Rick, the enraged Hulk, the personification of Banner’s anger towards his father, bursts in.

In the fourth issue there follows a battle between the Hulk and Iron Man, wearing the bulky golden armor from the early days of his career. (The Hulk’s first issue was cover-dated May 1962, and Iron Man debuted in Tales of Suspense #39, cover-dated March 1963. Hulk: Gray supplies further evidence that Iron Man’s career began earlier in Marvel history than his first story’s publication date would suggest.)

As the Hulk and Iron Man wage furious combat in the artwork, the present-day Banner recounts a story about a collie tied to a tree by his owner, who started firing a gun towards him; unable to escape, the collie was terrified, traumatized, and driven to brutal violence himself. At one point, Banner says, the owner got drunk: this should remind the reader of the previous comparison of the Hulk to an alcoholic. Samson asks which of the two enemies, the Hulk and General Ross, is the collie and which is the owner. Banner replies, “There are days when I can’t tell the difference.”

This dark parable indicates that beneath all of the Hulk’s and Ross’s bravado and blustering threats, each is actually terrified by the other. It’s surprising that Banner recognizes Ross’s insecurity. It’s also notable that Banner is also accusing both the Hulk and Ross of genuinely sadistic behavior towards the other.

What further interests me about this is that since Loeb runs the story about the collie through the fight between the Hulk and Iron Man, perhaps he means us to see both the terrified collie and the brutal owner within Iron Man as well. That’s a very unusual take on a character who is traditionally depicted as a classic hero.

At one point Samson comments on the Hulk’s difficulty in telling Betty he loves her; this reflects Banner’s own inhibitions about telling her the same thing. But the Hulk ends up abducting Betty and insisting that she stay with him. I wonder if this is another example of the Hulk breaking through Banner’s repression, acting on the feelings that at that time Banner did not dare voice.

At the end of the Iron Man-Hulk fight, the Hulk lashes out at Betty, apparently not realizing who he was hitting, injuring her. The Hulk, as his Banner self would, now feels guilty and takes the unconscious Betty to a gas station, searching for first aid supplies. (There is an “Atlas” sign at the station, perhaps a reference to a previous name for Marvel.)

Banner takes issue with Samson for saying the Hulk hurt Betty. “You mean when I hurt Betty,” Banner retorts, “the first time.” So again Banner is blaming himself for the Hulk’s actions, and here linking his guilt over the Hulk’s injuring Betty to Banner’s guilt over the way his marriage to Betty led to her death. (She was given radiation poisoning by the Hulk’s enemy, the Abomination, who symbolically is an evil version of the Hulk.)

Then, returning to the theme of a previous disagreement, Samson contends that the Hulk hurt Betty by “accident” and should be commended for trying to heal her. Banner tells Samson not to “excuse the Hulk’s behavior as ‘an accident.’” Now that’s actually something one might expect a psychiatrist to say: that there are no accidents, and hence the Hulk subconsciously intended to strike her. (And this would be the Hulk repeating Brian Banner’s physical brutality towards his wife.) Moreover, Banner is again refusing to acknowledge the Hulk’s childlike innocence. In refusing to excuse the Hulk for anything he does, Banner is also heaping further guilt upon himself for the Hulk’s actions. (Though this is an understandable reaction, I wonder if Banner’s obsession with guilt is also just as much a means of self-dramatization as the Hulk’s continual boasts about being the strongest.) Loeb significantly places a caption in which Banner forbids Samson to “excuse” the Hulk in a full page panel in which the Hulk tells Betty, “Hulk sorry.” The childlike Hulk seeks redemption; the embittered, cynical adult Banner denies the possibility of forgiveness for the Hulk or for himself. Looking at Betty as she begins to revive, the Hulk looks terrified, and the reader should recall from the opening pages Banner’s own confession of fear of the harm that the Hulk can inflict.

Once more awake, Betty rages at the Hulk, shouting “You are not going to destroy me!” This seems rather Hulk-like of her, and why not? At this point in the Hulk’s history, she’s another inhibited person who’s been bottling up anger inside herself her whole life, and now she has the opportunity to let it out.

Here the theme of the unreliable narrator reaches its apex. Hearing Banner describe Betty’s angry defiance of the Hulk, Samson asks, “is this what happened or is it how you remembered what happened?” Banner finally admits, “The memory of how she was at the end of her life rings truer to me than maybe how she really was back then.”

So, again, Loeb lets us know that Banner is not necessarily recounting events as they actually took place. In Betty’s case, this enables Loeb to avoid presenting Betty as the stereotypical helpless, timid ingenue she could seem in the early 1960s, though elsewhere in Hulk: Gray he uses that very image to show how the domineering General Ross has tried to keep her in a submissive, childlike role. Maybe, in imagining Betty as more assertive and less frightened than she was, Banner is unconsciously trying to lessen his guilt over the Hulk’s actions towards her. Or perhaps the angry Betty he imagines berating the Hulk is voicing Banner’s own self-accusations.

In underlining the idea of Banner as unreliable narrator, Loeb can justify the departures that Hulk: Gray makes from exact continuity. As panels from the early Lee-Kirby Hulk reprinted in the back of the book show, the Hulk was actually more articulate back then than he is in Hulk: Gray. Loeb’s Hulk speaks in the more familiar style, like a small child with a limited vocabulary, that the Hulk spoke when his series was revived in Tales to Astonish. But this, perhaps, is how Banner recalls how the Hulk voiced his simple emotional responses. The idea of Banner’s imperfect memory of these events even excuses the substitution of new dialogue in the recreation of Lee-Kirby Hulk scenes.

Betty pleads with the Hulk to let her go, and the Hulk glowers at her, commanding, “Stay.” Is he becoming as possessive towards her as her father?

Samson points out to the present day Banner that Betty’s reactions, as he described them, including her anger leading to depression, comprise the five stages of grief. We are thus reminded that Betty thinks that Bruce Banner, the man she loves, is dead, understandably unable to recognize him in his monstrous alter ego. She makes her earlier death wish explicit: “Maybe I’d be better off dead. . . .”

Ultimately, decades later in Marvel publishing history, Betty does end up dead (at least for now, since virtually all Marvel deaths seem reversible). Do Banner ““ and Loeb ““ see Betty’s death wish when confronted by the Hulk as an omen of her future? Did Betty actually say this, or is Banner, haunted by her death, imagining that she said it? Considering the way he projected his own emotions onto others in the early scene with the photos, is it possible that the guilt-ridden Banner is really imagining Betty voicing his own death wish, that was established earlier in this series?

As the final issue begins, the Hulk and General Ross confront each other. “Ross hunt Hulk. Hulk find Ross!” says the angry Hulk. There’s brief but interesting phrasing. It implies that Ross and the Hulk have been stalking each other. And in keeping with their game of one-upmanship, the Hulk claims to “find” Ross, implying that he succeeded where Ross failed, though in fact they seem to have simultaneously “found” each other.

Banner recalls, “the only thing I’m sure of is. . .I wanted to kill Ross that night.” The way he puts it suggests that this is an exception to the rule that Banner’s unreliable narration draws the events he describes into question: Loeb wants us to believe that the Hulk really did want to kill Ross.

Banner goes on, “And that either would’ve been the smartest thing the Hulk ever did. . .or something nine of us could have lived with from that point on. . . .” And that suggests that even present-day Banner is still morally conflicted over this moment, that Banner, in his human persona, is still tempted by the desire to murder his nemesis. Ross is a negative father figure who surely reminds Banner/Hulk of his own father. In “smashing” Ross, Banner/Hulk symbolically strikes back at his own father. Soon Banner labels Ross “psychotic,” a description that would presumably fit Brian Banner as well.

Loeb’s Ross keeps calling the Hulk a “monster,” and the Hulk roars back, “Hulk is not a monster!” Can Loeb be alluding to Mantlo’s story, in which Brian Banner insanely thought of his infant son Bruce as a “monster.” In Ang Lee’s film David Banner applies the same word to the movie’s infant Bruce.

Also, as this series has been reiterating, the Hulk and General Ross are mirror images of each other. So, in “smashing” Ross, the Hulk, driven by Banner’s guilt, may also subconsciously be attempting to punish his own dark side.

The Hulk seizes Ross and holds him helpless, while the General defiantly baits him. Ross orders his men to fire on the Hulk, but they hesitate, telling him that Ross is “in harm’s way.” Earlier, Ross didn’t let Betty’s proximity to the Hulk stay his hand, and now he reiterates his order to shoot. So perhaps this is General Ross’s own death wish in action. And perhaps Ross too subconsciously recognizes the Hulk as his mirror image, and that hence to kill one of them is symbolically to kill the other.

Samson emphasizes that, despite the extreme provocation, the Hulk did not kill Ross: the Hulk, in Samson’s view, is simply not a killer. Ultimately, the Hulk gives in to Betty’s plea not to kill her father, but there were long moments before she arrived in the scene when the Hulk was just holding onto Ross, as if frozen in place. Considering how the Hulk so easily gets carried away by his own rage, enough to lash out at Betty without thinking, as we saw earlier, I find it hard to believe that he refrained for so long in this scene from smashing Ross into oblivion.

Maybe this sequence needed more work. Bruce Banner created a nuclear weapon that he knew could kill millions, yet, confronted by the sight of a lone boy in danger of death, Rick Jones, rushed out himself to save him. Is something similar going on here, that the Hulk will gleefully lay waste to weapons but, face to face with a single victim, cannot bring himself to kill in cold blood? Despite Banner’s hatred for his father (and actually killing him in a Peter David story), is Banner/Hulk still cowed by the moral taboo against patricide, even against a symbolic father/authority figure like General Ross?

Infuriated by Betty’s attempt to defuse this confrontation, Ross calls the Hulk a “creature,” thereby denying him his humanity, and calls Betty an “insolent child,” denying her the status of an adult who can make decisions for herself. As for that word “insolent,” “Thunderbolt” Ross storms that Betty is “just like your mother. Confusing defiance with heroism.” Ross, it seems, is a father/authority figure who demands submission and unquestioning obedience from everyone, including his soldiers, his wife and his daughter. Ross sedated his wife and daughter to prevent them from “defying” him. So the Hulk is a particularly nightmarish figure for him: the ultimate rebel (who will turn out to be his potential son-in-law). Readers may see heroism in the Hulk’s defiance of the military that will not leave him alone; Ross castigates those who link “defiance” with “heroism.” (Samson, however, implies that Banner may again be unreliable in describing Ross’s “borderline psychotic” behavior in this scene, as if to justify the Hulk’s murderous rage at him.)

At the end of Banner’s reminiscences, Bruce, back in human form, returns to the base and tells General Ross “I’m sorry” for having been missing for so long. This apology only provokes a torrent of verbal abuse from Ross, who lambastes Banner as “weak” and “cowardly.” The words “I’m sorry” remind me of the “Hulk sorry” line earlier. The Hulk’s remorse over harming Betty is one of his saving graces; Ross regards contrition as a sign of weakness.

The long flashback ends with Betty directly stating one of the book’s themes: “Daddy, you’re as horrible as that Hulk!”

Back in the present, Bruce Banner concludes that he is indeed a “coward” for failing to admit to himself the conclusion he’s drawn from the mirror image theme of this series. Banner concludes that if the Hulk and General Ross are indeed so much alike, then Betty loved him, Bruce, even after finding out he was the Hulk, for the same reason she loved her father: she is drawn to loving “monsters.”

As if referring to the symbolism of the title of this series, Samson cautions that “Not everything is. . .as black and white as you’re saying.” He is warning Banner against oversimplifications. But this concluding sequence of the story is visually depicted in black and white, with green as the color of the present day Hulk, and this reflects Banner’s mindset. Continuing to hate the Hulk and his human self, Banner chooses to believe that Betty only loved him because there was something wrong with her.

Maybe there’s a Freudian rivalry going on here, as if Banner is hurt at the idea that Betty loved him because she saw him as identical to her father. Or perhaps Banner’s fear is that Betty loved Bruce not for his human side, but for his monstrous persona, which he himself detests? Is it that Banner sees Betty as someone who will not break away from a father who abuses her, whereas Banner, as the Hulk, is in outright rebellion against oppressive father figures? Worse, if Bruce thinks that Betty identifies him with her tyrannical father, that may make Bruce see a similarity between himself and the abusive Brian Banner. We’ve already seen Bruce explode into the Hulk’s rage when Rick Jones called him “Dad.”

In the concluding notes, Loeb states that “By the end of our tale, Banner has a new understanding. . .But it’s not necessarily the right understanding.” Banner sees a new aspect to his past, but still lacks a complete vision and comprehension of what happened. Banner’s understanding of his life, of other people, and of himself is fragmented, just as his psyche itself is. He hasn’t pieced together the entire truth no more than he has yet integrated his multiple personas.

So, despite my original qualms about Loeb and Sale’s Hulk project, it ultimately emerges as a true tribute to the stature of Lee and Kirby’s origin story and an object lesson in reinterpreting classic comics work without tampering with the original. So many comics professionals feel the need to rewrite and reboot classic material, so often losing the creative strengths of the originals in the process. In exploring and elaborating upon the themes and characterizations in Lee and Kirby’s original Hulk stories, Loeb and Sale demonstrate just why Lee and Kirby’s best works are enduring classics: they have psychological and thematic depth that have resonated with readers for decades.

Moreover, Hulk: Gray shows how complex and dramatic the characters of Banner and the Hulk can be. The 1970s television series only scratched the surface. The more ambitious 2003 movie still did not go far enough. As yet the Hulk has still received his best work in the medium that spawned him: the supposedly lowly comic book.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

In the last installment of this column, I began my first day attending the Museum of Television & Radio’s summer retrospective, “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television.” I had had high hopes for this exhibition, but found myself dismayed by the Museum’s display of art from bad 1960s superhero animation and Underoo designs.

Finally, it was three o’clock, and the retrospective’s Main Event of the day commenced in the MT & R Theater on the Museum’s Concourse level (below the street floor). This is the New York branch of the Museum’s largest screening room, a genuine auditorium where television shows are projected onto a movie-sized screen.

The size of the projected images and the setting, a theater within a midtown Manhattan museum, alter the experience of watching television shows. Watching television at home is a more intimate experience, since one watches alone or with one or a few other people. The smaller size of the screen (for those of us without those huge home theaters) makes television seem less important than a wide-screen movie. And watching television is an everyday experience, one that you can get for free (on broadcast channels as opposed to cable, anyway), and so it’s easy to take TV for granted.

But here, at the Museum, watching old television programs can be like watching film, an artform with higher cultural standing. Marshall McLuhan would contend that film is a “hotter” medium than television: one relaxes more with the “cooler” television medium, but concentrates more on film. So one watches film with a different kind of attentiveness, and presumably watches television programs shown as if they were films that same way. A while back I saw the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” on the Museum’s big screen during its horror retrospective, and it came across as if it were a feature film. It’s also interesting to watch television shows as part of an audience in a theater: for example, to hear the laughs at Joss Whedon’s witty dialogue.

So, this first program in the Museum’s main theater was titled “Comic-Book Classics,” and comprised three early television adaptations of iconic superheroes from the comics.

The first show in this triple bill was from the 1950s television series The Adventures of Superman, starring the late George Reeves as the Man of Steel. The Museum made a good choice in selecting the very first episode of the series, Superman on Earth, from 1953, a recounting of Superman’s origin that provides interesting points of comparison with other versions of the Superman mythos in the comics, movies, and later television series.

Superman is meant for storytelling media that can transform fantasy into reality. On the comics page Superman can perform any feat his writers and artists can conceive. Superman worked well on radio, back in the classic era of radio drama, when writers and actors created a theater of the imagination, conjuring fantastic visions within the listeners’ minds. The Max Fleischer cartoons were perfect for Superman: animation could depict superhuman spectacles long before the rise of CGI.

So how, then, could Superman work on low budget 1950s TV?

Considering the obvious limitations, this first episode succeeded quite well. It began with the familiar opening to the series, which simply and effectively evokes the epic, cosmic scale of the Superman concept. There is the opening shot of Superman standing against a background of large planets in the black void of space, as if he is a god. As the narrator describes how this “strange visitor from another planet” masquerades as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, the image of actor George Reeves as Superman fades into that of Reeves in his Clark Kent guise, complete with glasses. That simple dissolve evokes the idea of Superman as a god who descends to Earth to become human, this reiteration of a mythic motif that can be found in Greek mythology and the Bible.

This first episode recounts Superman’s origin, and the narrator informs us that the planet Krypton is populated by “a race of supermen.”

This notion goes back to Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s original version of his origin. In the more familiar versions since the 1930s, Kryptonians had no superhuman powers on their native world. This first episode actually treats the question rather ambiguously. We are told that the Kryptonians are “supermen,” and yet they display no super-powers in the Krypton sequence. Certainly they do not fly off the planet to escape its doom! Still, the narration plants the idea in the viewers’ minds that Krypton is, in a sense, a world of gods, an Olympus heading towards doom, Asgard on the verge of Ragnarok.

That doom does not come about through the now-familiar scenario of Krypton’s explosion. There is no talk of Krypton’s uranium core, as in Silver age Superman comics, or of the doomsday weapon that John Byrne established as the cause of Krypton’s destruction in his rebooted continuity. These were surely inspired by the atomic age, the bombing of Hiroshima, and fears of nuclear war, all of which came about years after Superman’s first appearance in 1938.

Instead, in this television version, Krypton is going to fall into its sun. That’s perhaps even a grander and more horrifying apocalypse than the planet’s explosion: surely the Kryptonians would have been incinerated before the planet was actually consumed. This scenario, however, does not account for the creation of Kryptonite, the radioactive fragments of the destroyed planet, which had already been introduced on the radio show. Had no one thought of introducing Kryptonite into the television series as yet? Moreover, just what caused Krypton to start falling out of its orbit towards the sun? Perhaps there’s another reason why the explosion scenario prevailed in the Superman legend.

Now there is the traditional scene of Superman’s father, the brilliant scientist Jor-El, standing before Krypton’s ruling council (which will be called the Science Council in later comics stories, indicating that Krypton is a technocracy). Since this show was made in the 1950s, everyone on the Council is a male Caucasian, most well along in years.

Jor-El plays the same role that Cassandra did in the Trojan War, warning about a future disaster but believed by no one. (Unlike the unfortunate princess of Troy, Jor-El does have one person who believes him, his wife Lara.) This scene, in its many versions, is a dramatic part of the Superman legend. Anyone can relate to Jor-El’s situation who has been unable to persuade people in power to recognize what seems to him or her to be an obvious truth. The ruling council represents any established body of power run by people with closed minds, whether in politics, religion, business, or any other field. They are the managers and bureaucrats, not the visionaries. They are the establishment, who will not and can not look beyond the status quo, or beyond maintaining their own power within it.

John Byrne once stated that the sterile, repressed Krypton he depicted in The Man of Steel “deserved to die.” Other versions of Superman’s origin portray Krypton as a lost paradise. But the ruling council seem to bring their own doom upon themselves through their blindness. Jor-El is a Campbellian herald, issuing the call to adventure, to leave their world and save themselves. And as Joseph Campbell warned, when people refuse the call to adventure, they risk grave consequences.

Krypton has often been depicted as a technocracy, ruled by scientists, presumably an appealing notion for various science fiction aficionados of the mid-twentieth century. But notice how in this episode, and so often in other versions of this scene, the Council members refuse to examine Jor-El’s evidence. This is strange behavior for scientists. The Council members’ complacent insistence that Krypton is safe, and that those tremors in the ground are just minor nuisances, seems nearly ideological. They refuse to consider the ideas that Krypton is vulnerable, that their knowledge is inadequate, that their security is an illusion. They so want to be right so they will not consider any evidence to the contrary.

Those of you who have been reading the 9/11 Commission’s report about the United States’ preparedness against terrorism before the September 11 attacks should see the parallels here.

The ruling council scene (and Jor-El) were not part of the “original” version of Superman’s origin. Yet I wonder, since Superman is a creation of the late 1930s if Siegel and Shuster consciously or unconsciously had been thinking of isolationist Americans and Europeans who did not foresee that the menace of Hitler would lead to World War II. Indeed, Superman has repeatedly been regarded as a symbol of the immigrant. Krypton’s destruction and Superman’s escape to Earth, specifically to America, could easily be a metaphor for the Nazis’ destruction of the “world” of European Jews, save for those relative few who had gone to the “New World” of America.

This pilot episode presumably had a bigger budget than the standard installments of the series, but not that much more. But considering my expectations were low, the Kryptonian scenes were okay. The ruling council set and costumes were decent enough. Jor-El and Lara’s home hardly looked alien or even well furnished, but their costumes were serviceable and their rocket wasn’t embarrassing for its time.

The actor who played Jor-El looked quite young, as if he were a Superman who could’ve been had he gone to Earth. Perhaps that was the intention.

In this episode the ruling council has vetoed Jor-El’s plan to construct great spaceships to evacuate the population of Krypton before the disaster strikes. Jor-El has only constructed a “model” spaceship, that can hold only one adult. If it’s supposed to be a scale model, why was it built to hold a full-size adult, why does it have life support equipment that can sustain that passenger, and how come the rocket actually works? Perhaps “model” was the wrong word for the writers to use.

In America’s Space Age Superman readers might have wondered why more Kryptonians did not escape in spaceships. Krypton was supposed to have a more scientifically advanced civilization than our own. Earth was taking its first strides towards space travel; wouldn’t Krypton have mastered it? Back in the early 1960s, the explanation was that Krypton had halted its space program after the destruction of one of its moons, which the Kryptonians had colonized. (This atrocity had been the work of Jax-Ur, the leading criminal in the Phantom Zone.) I suppose the moon’s destruction could be regarded as a harbinger of Krypton’s own end; it also seems like an anticipation of the space shuttle disasters of later decades.

For decades not just science fiction writers and readers but Americans in general assumed that the nation would continue its space program indefinitely: first men would land on the moon, then there would be lunar bases (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and then it was on to other planets in the solar system. Pop culture visions of the future (even The Jetsons) took space travel for granted.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the first landing of men on the moon. Of course, neither the United States nor any other country has sent astronauts to the moon for decades. The attitude appears to be Been There, Done That, and that we’re better off spending money on projects here on Earth.

So nowadays I find Krypton’s lack of a space program more credible. They presumably came to the same conclusion about space travel that America has.

To my surprise, the current television series Smallville has established that Krypton did have an interstellar space program, and even that Jor-El visited the town of Smallville as a teenager. So in the Smallville continuity, the question remains: why didn’t more Kryptonians than baby Kal-El escape?

Oddly, in the first episode of the 1950s Superman, Jor-El initially wants to send Lara to Earth, not their baby Kal-El, the future Superman! Now there’s an Oedipal nightmare situation. Lara insists that they send the baby. Jor-El then wants to send her and the baby in the rocket, but she insists on staying with Jor-El.

Now, this has traditionally been considered an expression of the deep love between Jor-El and Lara: she would prefer to die with him than live without him. But how many people have considered this: shouldn’t she go to Earth to take care of the baby? We know that Kal-El will be found and adopted by the kindly Kents, but Jor-El and Lara don’t know what will happen. Yes, in various versions of the origin, Jor-El and Lara know that Kal-El will gain super-powers on Earth. So then he won’t be harmed, but a baby doesn’t yet have the intelligence to take care of himself. And in other versions, including the Byrne reboot, Kal-El has no super-powers on Earth as a baby, and only develops them as he grows up.

So, here’s another Freudian dilemma: Mom prefers dying with Dad to staying with her son. Does it ever occur to Superman that perhaps he should resent this? The problem does not arise in those versions of the origin in which the spaceship is only big enough to hold the baby are preferable.

Now, though the Superboy series was established in the 1940s, and the episode does use the name Smallville for the town where Clark Kent grows up, the show reverts to the original version of the Superman legend, in which Clark had no teenage superhero career as Superboy. Despite the long, popular run of the Superboy comics, more recent versions of the Superman legend, beginning with the 1978 movie, and including the Byrne reboot, the Lois and Clark TV series, the 1990s Warners Animation series, and now the Smallville TV series, all return to the original concept that Clark did not begin his costumed career until after he reached adulthood.

In the Adventures of Superman episode Jor-El and Lara launch the rocket towards Earth as earthquakes, or, rather, Kryptonquakes, begin shaking their planet. Landing on Earth, the rocket is sighted by Jonathan and Martha Kent, who show up under their original names from the comics, Eben and Sarah Kent. They are, perhaps condescendingly, portrayed as hicks, given to such expressions as “Land sakes alive!” How different this is from the more recent portrayals of the Kents. Even in the early 1960s, the Kents had given up their farm to run a store in town. Maybe the editor and writers did not want the Kents, then portrayed as elderly, to be shown engaging in hard physical labor, or perhaps they wanted to make the Kents and Smallville seem less rural. In Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright Martha is sufficiently au courant with contemporary technology to communicate with the adult Clark via the Internet. In the current Smallville TV series Ma and Pa Kent may be farmers, but they look youthful and sexy, and certainly aren’t given to archaic colloquialisms. The billionaire Luthors have a mansion in town; there are computers everywhere; there’s a hip hangout for teens, the Talon; and townspeople regularly visit Metropolis. Even in the 1978 Superman film Smallville seemed to be far from the beaten path, surrounded by vast wheatfields. The 21st century TV Smallville seems more like the suburbs.

Since this episode was made in 1953, baby Kal-El arrived in Depression-era America of the late 1920s. This is another point to keep in mind when considering this version of Smallville, which hardly seems the prosperous, sophisticated town of the current TV series.

In the 1950s TV origin, the Kryptonian rocketship blows up, rather than surviving as proof to the grown Clark of his alien descent, as in other versions. In this origin episode Clark presumably never finds out about Krypton. This version of Clark thus assimilates so totally into American – and human – society that his past “ethnicity” might as well not exist for him.

But lest we assume that this version of Superman is an unquestioning example of 1950s conformism, there is a striking scene in which Clark, grown to age 12, asks his foster parents why he is “different” from everyone else, possessing powers that they don’t. Young Clark does not seem happy about this, either.

This is an intriguing anticipation of the Smallville series, in which Clark initially thought of himself as a “freak”; antagonists who learn of his powers label him that way, and he keeps his superhuman abilities secret so he and his foster parents won’t be hauled off by government investigators.

In Smallville this treatment might appear to demonstrate the influence Marvel’s reconceptualizing of the superhero genre has had even on Superman. It’s as if Clark were a mutant like the X-Men, afraid of exposure; indeed, various other super-powered characters on the series, genetically altered by exposure to Kryptonite, are in effect mutants.

On a featurette on the X2 DVD, Chris Claremont points out that X-Men‘s theme of the majority’s prejudice against mutants, dating back to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original stories in the 1960s, may be a response to the McCarthy period of the 1950s, with its political “witchhunts” against people suspected of being Communists. I’ve read speculation by cultural historians that various, seemingly superficial TV situation comedies of the 1960s dealing with magic and science fiction gimmicks, might have worked subconsciously as rebellions against conformity in postwar American society. So it is that Samantha Stephens keeps secret the fact that she’s a witch in Bewitched, Uncle Martin hides his true identity as a Martian in My Favorite Martian, and so forth.

So here, in a popular television show of the 1950s, is another character with paranormal abilities who has to keep them secret. Clark’s fears of being treated as a “freak” in Smallville don’t just reflect the Marvel influence but, whether consciously or not on the part of the current show’s creators, descend from this surprising scene in the first Superman episode of the witchhunting 1950s. It’s striking to think that 1950s fears of persecution for being “different” have resurfaced in the treatment of the Superman legend a half century later.

In this same episode, Clark lives at home with his foster parents until he has reached the age of twenty-five (!), at which point George Reeves takes over the part. Doesn’t this seem a little long to keep living with the folks? Or does this reflect different attitudes from those of the present? Did sons stay on family farms and then take over running them after the fathers retired? (Some other TV series of past decades depict a similar unwillingness of adult children to leave the nest. J. R. Ewing may have been a feared oil tycoon in Dallas, but he (and his wife) still lived with his mom and dad. Carolyn Stoddard on Dark Shadows felt stifled living in the family mansion in a small town in Maine, but it never seems to have occurred to her to go to college or get a real job or move to the city.) How odd it is, too, to see Clark dressed in overalls, as if he were going to become not Superman but Li’l Abner.

Finally, the 25-year-old Clark leaves home after Eben dies. It is as if Clark cannot assume an adult role until his father is dead. There’s another strange Freudian aspect to the Superman saga. That too is true to the earliest comics version of his origin, in which Clark does not begin his career as a costumed hero until after his foster father’s deathbed speech, instructing Clark to use his great powers to aid humanity. (This prefigures Uncle Ben’s “power and responsibility” lecture to Peter Parker, although Clark dies not bear partial responsibility for his foster father’s death. Or does he? In Silver Age Superman continuity, in which Clark had a teenage career as Superboy, he tries desperately to save his foster parents’ lives from a rare disease but fails. Psychologists would surely say Clark/Superboy would therefore partially blame himself for their deaths.) In the 1978 Superman movie, too, Clark remains with his foster parents until his adoptive father dies. (Apparently Clark thinks he had to keep both parents company, but now that his foster dad is gone, his adoptive mom can fend for herself.)

In the 1950s TV origin, there is no deathbed speech by Eben, who dies off-camera. The deathbed speech could have been presented as a key element in motivating Clark to pursue his career as Superman. As the episode stands, we learn that Ma created the Superman costume, but we don’t see how and why she and Clark decided he should be a costumed superhero. This may well be in keeping with the standard assumption in superhero comics of the 1940s and 1950s that people would just automatically decide to fight crime once they gained super-powers. (Part of Marvel’s revolution was to supply credible motivations for such unusual career choices.)

So Clark bids farewell to Ma Kent and heads to Metropolis by train. (Why doesn’t he simply fly there under his own power?) So, on arriving, Clark is very much the Country Boy in the Big City. Consider how different this makes him from so many other superheroes. It’s not just that the Kents taught him the traditional values of the American heartland.

It’s that he comes from an idyllic rural America, a very different milieu than the crime-ridden modern city. In contrast, Bruce Wayne grew up as part of the city, which claimed his parents’ lives, as did Peter Parker and classic Marvel heroes including Captain America, Daredevil, Nick Fury, and the Thing.

Not until Clark arrives in Metropolis does he first don his disguising glasses. So I wondered the same question that should plague viewers of Smallville; won’t the people who knew Clark in Smallville recognize him as Superman?

Now, yes, I know, in real life the glasses wouldn’t fool anybody. They work in the comics medium because most superhero artists don’t draw individually distinctive faces. Just drawing glasses on someone is enough to make him look like somebody else. Having said that, I note that Christopher Reeve was so good at playing a shy, nervous Clark Kent that he enabled the audience to suspend its disbelief over the thinness of his disguise. In the 1950s TV show George Reeves doesn’t give that kind of comedic performance as Kent, but somehow he manages to look and seem just different enough from Superman to allow a similar suspension of disbelief. Maybe in part it’s because, in a decade long before contemporary fashion’s body consciousness, Reeves’ wardrobe as Clark Kent, complete with hat and large glasses, so thoroughly obscured his physique. The idea of glasses and shape-concealing clothing as a disguise also may relate to the stereotypical idea of the dowdy woman who turns out to be beautiful once she takes off her glasses, lets her hair down, and gets what today would be called a makeover.

Watching this 1950s episode, with its version of Smallville as the proverbial sticks, I finally realized what the Superman writers’ original assumption about that small town was. Since Superman debuted in 1938, Clark would have grown up in the 1920s and 1930s, long before the rise of television; even in 1953 television was not yet the mass medium it would soon become. It was unlikely that the citizens of a small town would read big city newspapers like Metropolis’s Daily Planet. And the popularization of the Internet was many decades in the future. So the idea must have been that it was highly unlikely that people in Smallville would see pictures of Superman, who, initially, was a “mystery man” who avoided public appearances. For that matter, the people of Metropolis would have little contact with a rural town like Smallville. Smallville was thus presumably intended to be in the middle of nowhere, a secluded spot where Clark Kent could grow up unobserved by the outside world.

(Exactly where Smallville is is a good question. The 1978 Superman movie visually implied that Smallville was in the American Midwest; John Byrne specified its location as in Kansas. The Smallville TV series follows Byrne’s lead, and indicates that Metropolis is in the Midwest as well. That seems odd, since Metropolis, like Gotham City, has usually been portrayed as a fictionalized New York City. Of course, the 1978 Superman movie even filmed location shots in Manhattan. That means that the DC Universe has three versions of New York City; someone, perhaps E. Nelson Bridwell, established that Metropolis was actually in Delaware, and that Gotham City was in New Jersey, as a kind of “twin city” to New York much like Minneapolis and St. Paul. If Metropolis was on the Northeast Coast, would that imply that Smallville was originally meant to be in someplace like upstate New York or Bucks County, Pennsylvania?)

As the decades have passed, it has become harder to believe in Smallville’s isolation. By the late 1940s, with DC’s launch of Superboy comics stories, Smallville would have become known throughout the world as the home of this amazing new superhero. Superboy comics established that Clark began wearing his glasses and posing as “mild-mannered” from the age of eight. Still, even growing up, I wondered why the news media (never mind that snoopy Lana Lang) didn’t descend on this small town and easily figure out from amidst this highly limited population who Superboy must be. (Maybe this is one reason that DC and Byrne dropped Superman’s Superboy career in the 1980s reboot.) Even if there had been no Superboy career, once Superman stopped being the mysterious urban legend of the 1930s and began appearing in public, surely the citizenry of Smallville would have begun seeing his picture and thinking, why, that’s Clark! Land sakes alive!

In this episode as in various other versions of the saga, Clark applies for a reporter job at The Daily Planet, Metropolis’s leading newspaper (and hence comparable to The New York Times or The Chicago Tribune), without having a journalism degree or much or any newspaper experience. Was it possible once upon a time to get hired for such a job with so little background?

The episode quickly introduces the viewers to the familiar Daily Planet supporting cast, which looks from the start like a surrogate family for Clark: the grumpy “dad” Perry White (a more benign curmudgeon than his later counterpart, J. Jonah Jameson), the “kid brother,” Jimmy Olsen (Spider-Man is, in a sense, a recasting of a Jimmy type of character as the lead superhero), and Clark’s potential wife, Lois Lane. Played at this point by Phyllis Coates (later to be replaced on the series by Noel Neill), Lois makes a strong initial impression by unscrewing the lid on a jar that Perry couldn’t open. That, and her businesslike demeanor, make clear that this 1953 Lois still fits the model of the career woman in a “man’s” field in the popular culture of the time that Superman was created. There are quite a few examples of tough young woman reporters in the movies of the 1930s and 1940s, like the roles played by Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe, and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Clark/Superman is to become the central figure of this “family” unit.

In Superman’s first case on the TV show, he rescues a man dangling from a dirigible. This is something that the limited special effects available can actually pull off. It is probably just coincidental that this seems like an earlier, low tech version of the first public feat that John Byrne gave Superman in The Man of Steel: rescuing the passengers of a “space plane” in danger of crashing, a sequence subsequently adapted into the first episode of television’s Lois and Clark. All three are aerial rescues by Superman.

The 1953 TV Clark gets his job at the Daily Planet by reporting on Superman’s first appearance. This reminds me of Peter Parker’s long career photographing his own appearances as Spider-Man. Stan Lee says that he did not intend to base Spider-Man on Superman in any way, but there are parallels between the two characters, and this is another of them.

There are some nice bits of business in this first episode. Not allowed to get in to see Perry White, job applicant Clark ducks into another room, nonchalantly walks along the building ledge, and then enters White’s office through a window. Can it be that another reason that Clark Kent wears glasses is that his creators were thinking of Harold Lloyd, the great silent movie comedian, whose screen persona was that of an ordinary young man in glasses who could perform amazing feats (including, famously, scaling the exterior of tall buildings)?

When White and Lois want to know how Clark got in, he tells them he came in through the window. They don’t believe him.

At the end Lois asks Clark how he got to the scene of the dirigible rescue before she did. Clark smiles and says maybe he’s a superman. Now Clark does not expect Lois to believe this, and she doesn’t.

So Clark has twice basically told people he’s Superman and they don’t believe it! (Like the Science Council, they refuse to believe facts right in front of them!)

John Byrne once did a Superman story in which Lex Luthor had computers programmed to uncover Superman’s secrets. When the computers deduced that Superman was Clark Kent, Luthor refused to believe it, contending that no one so powerful would masquerade as such an ordinary person.

Similarly, there is an early Spider-Man story by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in which Spider-Man, weakened by illness, is easily overpowered by Doctor Octopus and unmasked in front of witnesses, including J. Jonah Jameson. And none of them believe the evidence before their eyes. They persuade themselves that young Parker was merely pretending to be Spider-Man.

Just this year, there was an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer became a costumed hero called the Pie Man, who threw pies in the faces of the unjust. Ultimately Homer unmasks in front of the entire population of the town, and they react just as JJJ and Doc Ock did to the unmasked Peter Parker. The people of Springfield decide as one that n ordinary guy like Homer can’t be the mighty Pie Man; Homer is just trying to fool them.

The transparency of Superman’s disguise as Clark Kent is really what makes it work dramatically. Clark Kent is Everyman, and Superman represents our true inner self, our potential for greatness, that goes unrecognized. Then the glasses and the flimsiness of the disguise are a joke on everybody who refuses to see one’s true self. The truth is right there in front of people, but they are too locked into their preconceptions about a person, or too narrow-minded and unimaginative, to see it. I note that in the last issue of Mark Waid’s recent Superman: Birthright series, Clark, smiling knowingly, points out to Lois that no one has ever seen him together with Superman, and she misses the real point.

Though the episode’s narrator refers to Clark as timid, he’s not. Watching this episode, I realized what it is I like about George Reeves’ performance as Clark: his Clark Kent is not timid or weak, but is quiet and polite, and appears genuinely humble. This is important. We like Superman because he’s one of us. George Reeves’ Superman doesn’t swagger about his power. The Clark Kent presented in this episode does not seem to be a put-on; he’s not a comedy character like Christopher Reeve’s often is, and certainly not a caricature. The Clark Kent portrayed by George Reeves seems to be what Superman is “really” like: the truly decent person produced by his small-town upbringing, who doesn’t let his physical superiority to “normal” people swell his ego.

So the Superman of the Nineteen Fifties turns out to be Ward Cleaver as Clark Kent. Clark is no caricature, but contentedly conforms to the conventions of his time, as the center of a (surrogate) nuclear family, a cog in the wheel of American business (journalism division), and member of the prospering postwar middle class. Yes, he does every so often depart from conventional behavior to fly about in tights, but he does so to uphold the law, working in alliance with Inspector Henderson, who has not turned up in this first episode, but will become another member of the regular cast. (Notice that Henderson does not play so visible a role in post-1950s versions of Superman; the conventional forces of law and order are de-emphasized in the Superman sagas of later decades.) As long as Superman/Clark can keep anybody from realizing that Clark Kent, proper member of society, and Superman are one and the same, stability will continue at the Daily Planet: this planet won’t explode.

So, just this one episode of The Adventures of Superman provided plenty of food for thought about the Superman mythos as a whole. If only the Museum had chosen to do a complete program of Superman shows, demonstrating how the concept changed over the years. What if they had shown Superman on Earth alongside an episode of Lois and Clark, in which the rather subdued and square Clark and Lois become a youthful, sexy couple in a series that is as much romantic comedy as adventure? Then there’s Warner Brothers Animation’s 1990s Superman, which so masterfully combines the spirit of the Fleischer cartoons with the greater sophistication in story and characterization that evolved in the comics since the 1060s. And then, of course, there’s Smallville. But no, this is an opportunity the Museum overlooked.

Instead, the Museum packaged Superman on Earth with an episode of the 1970s Incredible Hulk television series and a two-parter from the 1960s Batman, two series which represent radical departures from the idealized world of the 1950s Superman, as we shall see in the next installment.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

If we can judge by the publication known as the Newspaper of Record, then comics’ bid for mainstream cultural acceptability is rapidly increasing in momentum. On Sunday, July 11, the cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine was devoted to graphic novels, including interviews with Joe Sacco (Palestine), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan) (all of whom will be reviewed in this column eventually; I’m in this criticism business for the long haul) and Alan Moore (about whom I’ve already written a considerable amount). The piece’s author, Charles McGrath, is no less than the former editor of The New York Times Book Review, and he ventured that “it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be,” following the decline of the novel. ” It might be comic books,” he said, and although he did condescend to the medium at times, to put it mildly (“and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit”), it was overall a very positive piece.

Speaking of the Times Book Review, on Sunday, July 18, it ran two pages surveying a wide range of comics in book form, including the first volume of Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts (another future Comics in Context topic). (This confirms what I’d long thought: if the Times was ever looking for a comics reviewer, I’d never find out in time to apply.)

And then, on Monday, July 26, the Times‘s business section ran a report from the San Diego Comic-Con, focusing on movies adapted from comics, including an interview with Frank Miller, who is co-directing an film of his own Sin City with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. The Times noted, “Mr. Miller. . .commands a nearly mythic status among comic book fans as the creator, writer and illustrator of the Sin City series of graphic novels. . . ” Actually, I think it was Miller’s work on Daredevil and Batman that made him “mythic” (see Comics in Context #30, 31 and 34), but never mind! The Times came close enough! This year’s San Diego Con, from what I’ve read, represents further progress in publicly showcasing the movement of material that originated in comics into the cultural mainstream via film and television.

Well, I couldn’t get to the San Diego Con this year (It’s a long story; next year I’ll definitely go ““ I hope.), but maybe I can find some local event celebrating comics that might offer some compensation. Perhaps I can locate another public vehicle for advancing the cultural profile of comics. There was the third annual MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) Art Fest, which proved to be a great place for renewing contacts with old friends in the comics industry who’ve been dispersed over the years. But is there an event outside the comics world that would pay homage to the medium?

Could this be it? Beginning in June, the Museum of Television & Radio has been staging a retrospective called “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television” at both its Manhattan and Beverly Hills locations; the retrospective runs through October 10. This seemed to be good news indeed.

Before many screenings at the Museum, it runs a video clip of actress Candice Bergen asking us if we knew that before the Museum’s founding, over twenty years ago, there was no institution for the preservation and study of America’s cultural heritage of radio and television programs. Hence, the Museum is a pioneer in the serious appreciation of these forms of American popular culture. In their library I’ve watched examples of high art on television (like Ingmar Bergman’s production of Euripides’ The Bacchae for Swedish television, believe it or not) and videos of Museum seminars about prestigious series like The West Wing. But I’ve also viewed videos of Museum seminars on the writing of science fiction for television (with such luminaries as Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and J. Michael Straczynski) and on fantasy genre series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, and Xena; Warrior Princess. The Museum thus pays respect even to genres to which cultural arbiters often condescend. In another example, some years back the Museum staged a soap opera retrospective, even publishing a book of academic essays on the subject. It has held retrospectives on animation from Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward and Cartoon Network; its library holds a colossal supply of Simpsons episodes.

Surely, I thought, the Museum of Television & Radio will treat the superhero genre with the same dignity and scholarly intent that it has bestowed upon so many other television programs and genres. Attending the various programs in this superhero retrospective should provide ample compensation for not making it to San Diego this year.

But it didn’t. Oh, the Museum is providing plenty of material for me to write about over the coming weeks, and I’ve quite enjoyed some of it. But this “Superheroes on Television” went deeply wrong, as you shall see over the course of these next few columns.

MUTANTS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

Arriving at the Museum’s Manhattan building on a Saturday in June, I started out with the daily program called “Superfun for Families,” billed in the retrospective brochure as a “superhero-themed screening appropriate for all ages!” This day the Museum was screening an episode of Goosebumps, based on author R. L. Stine’s series of supernatural tales for children.

This particular show was titled “The Mutant Attacks,” and its protagonist is a boy who reads superhero comics., or, rather, super-villain comics. His favorite comic was “The Masked Mutant,” so presumably the makers of this episode had some awareness of X-Men. The comic’s artwork was in the style of a run-of-the-mill 1990s Image imitation. But they’d missed the main point of X-Men. The Masked Mutant was a villain, and the implication was that mutants are bad guys. And how many comics have villains as the title characters?

As is to be expected, our protagonist was to some extent a walking cliche of a comics fan: he was out of shape and something of a social misfit,. There is an attractive girl who tagged along with him on his adventure, and, of course, she made fun of his interest in comics. But the comics fan did indeed prove to be the episode’s hero.

Initially this episode bored me. Children’s shows aren’t made for adults, of course, but I like to think that the best children’s literature, whether Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum or J. K. Rowling, has imaginative and stylistic qualities that will interest adults as well. But as the episode proceeded, it did prove to have points of interest. The premise was intriguingly spooky, reminiscent of Twilight Zone plots: the comics fan sees the Masked Mutant’s headquarters and discovers he is being drawn into the world of the comics.

At times the episode used a special effect to show how reality looked to our protagonist as he was drawn (so to speak) into the world of comics: he saw huge spots before his eyes, meant to suggest the tiny dots formerly used to print colors in four-color comics, so beloved by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. This, of course, is long dated, but demonstrates how the concept of what comics are like, originating in the mid-20th century, has persisted for decades in the popular imagination. Now came the best part of the episode: exploring the Masked Mutant’s headquarters, our protagonist came across his captive, a superhero with the nonsensical name of the Galloping Gazelle, played by Adam West, the television Batman of the 1960s! Here was West again, decades later, still employing his wonderful deadpan delivery to convey an ironic tone that adult viewers would more readily recognize and appreciate than the kids watching the show.

This led to the cleverest bit in the episode. With the Gazelle free, the comics fan attempts to become his new sidekick and tries to keep up with his hero as he athletically makes his way through the Mutant’s lair. But the kid, as noted earlier, is out of shape and soon covered with sweat. The Gazelle, annoyed, advises him (in West’s tones of understated exasperation) to start working out. I found this amusing, taking it not as a cheap shot at the overweight (and the kid was not actually fat), but as an affectionate acknowledgement of reality. Growing up we may identify with the hero’s kid sidekick, going off on exploits with the senior hero. But if we were really going into action, we’d be more like this comics fan than the athletic figure like Robin we imagine ourselves to be.

After a brief tussle with the Masked Mutant, the Gazelle decided he was “too old” for this sort of thing and took his leave. Unfortunately, that was the end of Adam West’s contribution to the episode, and the Goosebumps makers did not cast the villain nearly as well. The Masked Mutant himself simply indulged in hackneyed cackling without a trace of wit.

Unable to overcome the Mutant physically, the comics fan plays trickster instead. This is a familiar fairy tale device: tricking the villain into defeating himself, as with Rumplestiltskin. Indeed, that’s how Superman regularly beats Mr. Mxyzptlk (tricking him into saying his own name). Even in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, Wotan captures the dwarf Alberich by tricking him into using his powers in a self-defeating way. So the comics fan persuaded the (incredibly stupid) Masked Mutant that he was actually a stretchable hero like Plastic Man. To cope with his supposedly rubbery foe, the shapeshifting Masked Mutant turned to acid, inadvertently dissolving himself. Yes, it’s a fate similar to that of the Wicked Witch of the West, though Dorothy did not intend to melt her nemesis. It’s rather odd that this children’s program shows its kid protagonist intentionally bringing about his adversary’s death.

At the episode’s end we see that the comics fan really has gained Plastic Man-like powers: he stretches on-camera, using up the rest of the episode’s miniscule special effects budget. I get that this is a metaphor to show that through his actions he actually became the hero he wanted to be. But I wish there’d been some logical explanation. Were this indeed some sort of Twilight Zone for kids, rationales might be unnecessary; the Zone created an eerie world in which various accepted rules of logic and science no longer applied. This Goosebumps episode took a more matter-of-fact approach to its paranormal doings, that led me, anyway, to expect logical explanations: the hero’s final transformation seemed to come out of nowhere.

So, this was not an auspicious start for my viewing of the retrospective, but not without interest. Though recognizing that superhero comics genuinely evoke heroic aspirations in their readers, this Goosebumps episode still treated the costumed heroes and villains of the genre as silly stuff for kids.

And how did the rest of the audience react, you may wonder. This was “Superfun for Families,” after all. Well, I was the only person who remained in the screening room from the time I entered till the episode’s end. Some other adults came in, got bored, and left. There were no kids. This seemed ominous.

A LOST GOLDEN AGE

The next screening in the “Superheroes” retrospective was over an hour away, at 3 PM, so I found other, somewhat related programs with which to pass the time till then.

For one thing, for a long time I’ve thought that puppets are effectively cartoon characters in three dimensions. Puppets are to cartoons as sculpture is to drawing. So I don’t think that puppetry is out of place in a column that concerns itself with cartoon art, comics and animation.

In the fifth floor corridor, outside the screening room for Goosebumps, were a series of large color photographs of the Muppets and puppet characters from Fraggle Rock, Bear in the Big Blue House, and even a British puppet show unknown in this country, all under the exhibition title “Creating Characters That Entertain the World: Photographs of Characters from The Jim Henson Company.”

In retrospect, this seems ironic. It was this same day that I learned the old news (from February) that Disney had finally bought the Muppets (though not the ones from Sesame Street, who’d already been sold to Children’s Television Workshop by previous corporate owners) and the Bear characters. So this was really an exhibition of characters from the Jim Henson Company, Children’s Television Workshop and the Walt Disney Company.

At one end of the corridor was a video wall with multiple screens showing Of Muppets and Men: The Making of The Muppet Show, a documentary going behind the scenes at the Muppets’ classic 1970s television series. Of course it’s fun and interesting seeing the faces and hearing the real voices of the Muppeteers, though founder Jim Henson and his second-in-command, Frank Oz, were already familiar to me, and watching footage of the Muppeteers manipulating their puppets from below as scenes for The Muppet Show are shot. (Somehow I assumed that the puppeteers sat or crouched down, but instead they seem most often to be standing, and even walking back and forth, the puppets held high over their heads.)

If I saw this documentary when it was first televised, I would have had these same reactions. But now, decades after it was made, it takes on a new dimension. It’s a time capsule, capturing what may, in retrospect, be the high point in Muppets history. Jim Henson, the creative visionary who founded the Muppets, died abruptly in 1990, but here he is, on video, alive, enthusiastic, and at the height of his artistic powers. Frank Oz is now primarily a live action movie director, most recently for this year’s remake of The Stepford Wives, but there he is in the documentary by Henson’s side, still a full-time Muppeteer providing major creative input into their projects. The Muppet Show was at this time an astonishing, international success, shown in an extraordinary number of countries. Even with many “Muppet” movies still to come, this was arguably the peak of the Muppets’ success. And yet Henson’s organization is still a relatively small group, with what appears to be a genuine sense of community. On camera Henson talks about how the group is made up of people who like each other, and that their chemistry helps their work. Certainly what the documentary shows viewers bears this out: good feeling abounds. Now, it’s possible, even probable, that there were black sheep in this creative “family,” and one would expect that any proverbial dirty laundry would be edited out of this self-promotional documentary. Still, I’d like to think that the image Henson presents of his company at that time is basically true.

Now consider what has happened in the decades since this documentary was made. Henson passed away in 1990, and his children take over the organization and attempt to keep it creatively vital, moving into new directions while maintaining the viability of the classic characters. But there is no making up for the loss of the founder’s creative genius, as indeed there was not for the Disney organization after Walt’s death. And the question arises as to whether the Muppets are truly evergreen characters, popular with each succeeding generation, or whether they have become dated, at least until the right person comes along who knows how to revitalize the concept.

So, no longer as successful as they once were, the Muppets come under corporate control. First, in the 1990s, the Hensons sold off the Muppets and their other creative properties to a Germany’s EM.TV and Merchandising AG, only to buy them back, after the new owners proved their inability to manage these acquisitions effectively. Thereafter, in 2004, the Henson Company sells the Muppets to the Disney Company, which has long pursued them.

So, in June I read reports about the Muppets’ fate on JimHillMedia.com, a comprehensive online site of Disney-related news. According to him, the Hensons believed that the Disney Company would find the means to revitalize the Muppets for the new century, But, it would seem, apart from the Imagineers who design theme park attractions, Hill says in an April 16 article that “it’s becoming more and more apparent that the Walt Disney Company really doesn’t have a clue what to do with the Muppets.” Worse, due to lack of sufficient work for their company, Hill reports that two thirds of the Henson company staff may be downsized. Hill notes, “Most of these folks initially came to work for the Jim Henson Company because that was where the Muppets were. Now that Kermit and Co. will soon be heading off to Burbank, a lot of these people just don’t know what to do with themselves. They’re worried that ““ once the Disney acquisition deal is completed ““ that their jobs will be eliminated.”

This should strike a familiar note with readers of this column. Sounds like what happened in the world of comics, and more recently, at Disney Animation, ironically enough. It sounds like yet another case of people who got to fulfill their dream of working within a particular creative tradition and then had it taken away from them.

I recently watched a television interview with a filmmaker named Rick McKay, who had made a documentary called, Broadway: The Golden Years. Asked why Broadway’s Golden Age came to an end, McKay wisely pointed out that a Golden Age, by its very nature, must come to an end. In other words, no Golden Age lasts forever. Moreover, pointing out that the Golden Age of the movie musical lasted only fifteen years, McKay rhetorically asked if anyone involved in that particular Golden Age at the time would have believed it if you had told him that it was going to end “in ten minutes”? That’s true in my experience. When one is part of a creative enterprise enjoying success, it seems as if it will go on forever. But it won’t.

LUNAR TOONS

It’s still not yet time for today’s superhero retrospective main event, so I reenter the screening room for a showing of the first of Nick Park’s stop-motion animated films starring Wallace and Gromit, A Grand Day Out, made in 1989 by Aardman Animations for British television (hence its presence in the Museum’s collection). Park’s stop-motion figures are puppets of a sort, and hence could also be regarded as sculpted cartoons.

The two later Wallace and Gromit featurettes, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, are comedic thrillers, with outright villains, and dynamically staged, suspensefully edited action sequences. This first film is more of an exercise in gentle whimsy. All three films pull off the trick of appealing to adults as well as to children; in fact, my impression is that these films are intentionally aimed not at either audience but at both.

Appropriately, then, Wallace and Gromit themselves simultaneously partake of adulthood and childhood. Wallace, the human, is clearly along in years: he’s bald and has an old man’s voice. But there’s something childlike about him. Though he has a cerebral, adult profession, that of an inventor, he’s driven by appetite. Wanting cheese to spread on his crackers, Wallace decides to take a vacation to the moon, which, as we told as children, is made of cheese. (Actually, are we all told this, or are Wallace and I dating ourselves? Do today’s children still get told the moon is made of green cheese?)

So Wallace sets out building a rocket ship in his basement. Not only does he hold the child’s belief that the moon is made of cheese, but he also has a child’s incomprehension of the difficulties of going to the moon.

But perhaps this also parodies the way we’ve grown accustomed to the miracles of science. I recently saw a Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s 1970s play Jumpers, which contends that astronauts’ successful landings on the lunar surface demystified the moon, making it useless as a romantic symbol in the songs sung by the play’s heroine. The moon is no longer unattainable; going to the moon is no longer inconceivable. We grew so used to it we stopped going! Wallace wants to go there, but displays no awe at the thought. His attitude is the same as if he were taking a trip to any of the Earthly vacation spots he had been considering. Actually, maybe even going elsewhere on Earth wouldn’t give him any sense of wonder either. He’s basically going to the moon as a substitute for visiting the supermarket: he’s looking for a place to get cheese so he can have a picnic.

Another childlike aspect of Wallace’s world is that animals, including his dog Gromit, can possess human intelligence. Gromit can’t talk, but he can read, and though Wallace is the inventor, Gromit is clearly the more practical of the pair. Some people treat pets like substitute children, but Gromit seems the more “adult” of the two, with his silent, ironic reactions to Wallace’s naivete. (This becomes clearer in the next film, in which it is Gromit, not Wallace, who first recognizes the criminality of the villain, a penguin boarding in their house.)

Wallace’s attitude towards the moon, as if it were a combination of neighborhood park and cheese shop, might also be intended as a satire on British provincialism. Significantly, the interior of Wallace’s rocket ship is a cozy sitting room much like the rooms of Wallace’s own home. It’s as if travel consisted not of exploring different cultures, but of transporting one’s own environment and lifestyle somewhere else. I also recently saw the original 1950s film adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, in which world traveler Phileas Fogg insists on having his British menu for dinner every day, no matter where he is. It’s like the stereotypical image of British explorers dressing up for teatime in the jungle. Now, long after Britain’s imperial age, it’s the middle-class Wallace and his pet having cheese and crackers on the moon. And yes, I am well aware that this parody of British attitude towards other countries could equally apply to Americans’ similar sort of provincialism.

Could A Grand Day Out even be a gentle jab at imperialism and the British Empire? After all, Wallace and Gromit go to the moon to exploit its cheese resources, oblivious to the desires of any natives they may find there. And they do indeed come in conflict with one of the natives. Oddly, the native is a machine of some sort. Wallace invents and uses machines, so perhaps it makes sense that his nemesis is a machine with a mind of its own.

Oddly, this moon machine seems very Earthlike. It looks like some sort of kitchen appliance, it has a drawer and wheels, and it is activated by inserting British coins! Its existence seems to reflect Wallace’s own inability to imagine a truly alien environment. Since Wallace inadvertently activates the threat by putting coins into the machine, there’s a bit of a Frankenstein motif here.

The moon machine also proves to be something of a counterpart to Wallace: it wants to go on vacation, too. And, as if proving the cliche that grass is always greener on the other person’s side, whereas Wallace wanted to go to the moon, the machine, studying his travel brochures, wants to go skiing, presumably on Earth.

For some moments, the moon machine poses a menace to Wallace and Gromit, trying to prevent them from escaping in their rocket ship. But, after ripping strips of metal from the rocket ship, the machine realizes it can use them as skis. No longer resentful of the two invaders, the machine gestures a happy farewell to Wallace and Gromit. So in this film there is no real villain, unlike the implacable evildoers in the following films in the series. The film leaves the moon machine happily skiing over the lunar hills (which don’t really exist), and perhaps we are meant to ignore the inevitability that the machine will eventually stop when it needs a new coin (as we’ve seen earlier in the film).

There are only three significant characters in the entire film, and Wallace does not talk all that much. The great animated shorts of Hollywood’s classic studio years followed in the tradition of the live action silent comedies of the 1910s and ’20s. This is especially noticeable with characters who don’t talk, like Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner and Coyote, but the craft of constructing and timing visual gags is evident even in talk-heavy cartoons in this tradition, like Bugs Bunny’s. The Wallace and Gromit featurettes often, as in A Grand Day Out, maintain a certain British reserve and understatement, in contrast with the in-your-face slapstick of the American cartoon tradition. But the Wallace and Gromit shorts take the same care in creating humor and characterization and suspense through visual terms, and the climactic tumult of the later shorts matches the larger than life action of the Hollywood cartoons. Gromit is a latter-day silent comedian, neither talking nor barking, communicating through understated facial expressions and body language even when enacting elaborate stunts: he’s sort of a canine Buster Keaton. The Wallace and Gromit animated shorts capture a mastery of visual comedy and storytelling that often seems absent from recent animation; I’m looking forward to their forthcoming feature film, 2005’s ominously titled Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

SUPERHEROIC UNMENTIONABLES

With the time for the afternoon’s main presentation drawing close, I head downstairs to the first floor’s Steven Spielberg Gallery (the Museum has some high profile contributors), which held another part of the retrospective: an art display titled “Saturday Morning Super Cels: Madison Avenue Meets the Superheroes.”

It was not so very long ago that it seemed that any newspaper article about comics had BAM! POW! ZAP! in the title. Headline writers everywhere appeared to think this was clever and original. But in the last several years the sound effects faded away, I noticed at first and was grateful, but I now realize that over time I had taken the headline writers’ newfound respect for the subject for granted. I had forgotten what it used to be like.

To walk into the Spielberg Gallery, however, was to suffer flashbacks. There they were atop the long display texts: pointy balloons with WHAM! POW! PLONK! and the like.

The Museum’s brochure for the retrospective describes this art exhibit thus: “See eye-popping animation cels from various Saturday morning superhero cartoons and commercials from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. . . .” Dear readers, you need not fear that I was in any danger that my eyes would pop out of their sockets and get inadvertently trampled on the floor by the crush of comics enthusiasts, eager to gaze upon dazzling examples of animation art. In fact, much of the art was from Filmation’s DC superhero cartoons, which is less likely to pop one’s eyes than to glaze them over from ennui.

The wall texts disagree with my assessment. One asserts that “the studio’s superhero series of the late 1960s and early ’70s as seen here in examples from Aquaman, Batman and Green Lantern remain cherished fan favorites for the vividly realized look of these classic comic-book characters.” Now I am well aware that virtually any form of comics-related material has its devotees. But I can’t say that I know anyone who “cherishes” Filmation superhero cartoons. The artwork on the walls is bland, mediocre and undistinguished, lacking in any distinctive style. The television sets in the gallery, playing endless loops of the actual animated cartoons, serve as reminders of just how dull and uninspired they were.

And yet the wall texts praise the “strong graphic design and liberal use of rotoscoping” ““ tracing live action movement ““ in the Filmation superhero cartoons. The wall texts acknowledge that rotoscoping is “controversial.” Actually, my impression is that most animation aficionados consider it just plain bad.

Now, whoever wrote these wall texts does have more knowledge about comics history than I would have expected from the Museum. The anonymous author credits the late Julius Schwartz as editor of stories that inspired the early DC superhero TV cartoons (see Comics in Context #32). The wall texts state that in these cartoons, “the lighthearted adventures. . .harken back to the optimism, whimsy, and enthusiasm of classic ‘Silver Age’ comic books (roughly covering the late ’50s through the late ’60s), in which definitive versions of many classic heroes were established.” Yes, but there’s a decided difference between the classic Schwartz “Silver Age” stories and these early TV cartoons. Schwartz’s stories were ingeniously written and stylishly drawn, playing not to the lowest common denominator in the audience, but reaching out to the more intelligent readers, old and young. The Filmation and later Hanna-Barbera Super Friends cartoons look dull and have dull stories; small children might like them but will quickly outgrow them. They are examples of what the general public has long thought superhero stories are: mediocre material lacking in depth or artistic value.

Now there are some features of this exhibit of genuine interest to longtime comics enthusiasts. Here, for example, are drawings that longtime Marvel artist Herb Trimpe did of the Hulk for commercials for Post’s Honeycomb cereal. The wall text calls Trimpe “a legendary comic-book artist.” Well, Trimpe’s comics work on the Hulk is certainly classic, memorable, and distinguished. But is he a “legend”? The Trimpe art displayed here is craftsmanlike but hardly his best, despite the ecstatic somersaults the wall text’s writer seems to have turned in praising it.

I was surprised that the wall texts noted that “Trimpe was one of many older artists laid off by Marvel in the early 1990s when falling comic-book sales forced the company to file for bankruptcy.” That’s true enough; perhaps the anonymous writer saw the article that Trimpe wrote about the Marvel downsizings in The New York Times a few years ago. And were Trimpe or any of them hired back when Marvel financially recovered? The wall texts do not address the subject.

Elsewhere in the gallery comics aficionados will find something else of interest: drawings of DC’s Teen Titans for a projected 1974 Hanna-Barbera animated series that never got made, even Titans characters who are now as obscure as Mal. The drawings were done by Mike Royer, who is perhaps best known as a longtime inker of Jack Kirby’s work, or, rather, as the wall text calls him, the “legendary artist Mike Royer.” Another legend! If Trimpe and Royer are legends, what does this make a truly great artist like Kirby? A myth?

In describing the Teen Titans drawings, the wall texts note there is currently an anime-influenced Teen Titans animated series on Cartoon Network, and that other teen versions of DC heroes have appeared on the live action TV series Superboy (in the ’80s) and Smallville, and the animated Batman Beyond. Yes, indeed. And are any of these series represented in the Museum’s retrospective. No.

But doesn’t Smallville represent a serious, psychologically perceptive reworking of the Superboy concept for teens and adults? Don’t Batman Beyond and Warners’ other recent superhero animated series demonstrate a level of sophistication in writing, art design, and animation technique far beyond the level of any of the Filmation DC shows? Wouldn’t anyone with a reasonably developed sense of appreciation of cartoon art prefer seeing an exhibit of superhero artwork by Bruce Timm and other contemporary Warners Animation artists? Surely examples are available; there used to be loads of them for sale only several blocks away at the Warner Brothers Studio Store on 5th Avenue before it closed.

But the guiding principle behind this exhibition appears to be nostalgia for juvenilia. Another subject covered in the gallery is superhero artwork done for Underoos, children’s underwear. The wall text notes, “Froot of the Loom has also introduced an adult line of Underoos in classic superhero characters, betting that even adults still long to be their favorite superheroes.” (I leave it to my readers to imagine what it would be like to take someone back to your apartment for a romantic evening and discovering, when he/she undresses, that he or she is wearing superhero adult Underoos. Seems to me that might kill the moment.)

The Museum’s retrospective brochure observes that “the spectacle of superpowered ‘long underwear’ vigilantes has resonated with audiences of all ages and inspired debate and analysis in the halls of academe.” Indeed, I agree, speaking as someone who is about to undertake just such analysis in academia. The brochure acknowledges that superhero sagas can be “enjoyed as escapist fantasy or pondered as archetypes of modern myth. . . .”

“But,” the wall text instructs museumgoers, “let’s not get too high-flown. The best value this work embodies is fun.” The text refers to “the invitations from Underoos and Post Cereals to become your favorite superhero. . . .”

That’s my problem with this retrospective. The Museum recognizes that the superhero genre has mythic depths worthy of serious academic study, and chooses to ignore that very fact. The same Museum that directs serious attention to other children regards the superhero genre merely as fodder for small children and adults seeking ironic humor. The retrospective ignores mythic underpinnings in favor of adult Underoos.

But the retrospective will get better, as you shall see in the next installment.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Superman traditionally fights for “truth, justice and the American way,” and he belongs to the Justice League of America. Captain America wears a costume patterned after the American flag and upholds classic American ideals. Will Eisner’s superhero version of Uncle Sam is literally the spirit of America. And now, Spider-Man is being portrayed in his movies as a hero who represents America.

Not so long ago this would have seemed so unlikely. Superman and Captain America are establishment figures, acclaimed by the American public of their fictional worlds. Spider-Man is far from being a member of the establishment. He is pilloried by the news media, in the form of J. Jonah Jameson and his Daily Bugle. Spider-Man is mistrusted and feared by much, perhaps even most, of New York City’s citizenry. Often during his career he has been an outlaw, wanted by the police for crimes he did not commit. He is a vigilante, operating without either the official sanction granted to the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, or even the unofficial cooperation Commissioner Gordon gives Batman.

At the end of Superman II, the title hero carries the American flag back to the White House, having thwarted the takeover of the country by General Zod and his cohorts from the Phantom Zone. As if echoing that image, the first Spider-Man movie ended with Spider-Man executing a spectacular series of web-slinging maneuvers amid the Manhattan skyline, culminating with a shot of Spider-Man and the American flag. At the time the film came out, I assumed that this was a patriotic gesture by the filmmakers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

One of Marvel Comics’ own principal responses to 9/11 was J. Michael Straczynski’s Amazing Spider-Man issue set amid the ruins of the World Trade Center. It was Spider-Man’s series, not Captain America’s, that was chosen for such a story. I would guess that this was because Spider-Man has become Marvel’s flagship solo star.

And now, Spider-Man 2 also ends with flag-waving. (I offer my usual caution: this column about the movie will discuss plot developments and the ending, things that those of you who have not yet seen the film may not wish to read about yet.) As Spider-Man, with his renewed dedication to his crimefighting career, swings through the city, alerted by police sirens to a new mission, the audience sees American flags hanging over one of Manhattan’s main streets. (Intentionally or not, this concluding shot reminds me of similar images that conclude the current Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective of the American Impressionist Childe Hassam: his most famous works are patriotically-inspired paintings of large American flags hovering above Manhattan’s streets.)

The movies’ director, Sam Raimi, and his collaborators are clearly, intentionally making a point about Spider-Man as a symbol of America. It would seem that Straczynski and others at Marvel may be consciously or unconsciously moving towards the same idea.

So what is it that makes Spider-Man a symbol of America?

Part of it is that Spider-Man seems to strike a chord in viewers following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. (In this column we’ve seen the influence of 9/11 in Chris Claremont’s X-Men, Neil Gaiman’s 1602, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again.)

In Newsweek’s cover story on Spider-Man 2 (June 28, 2004), writer Sean Smith contends that “Much has been made of the fact that Spider-Man was the first post-9/11 blockbuster, and the conventional wisdom is that the film was a phenomenon because America needed heroes again. But maybe it’s something more. To the rest of the world, the superhero symbol of the United States is Superman ““ broad-shouldered, unconflicted, virtually indestructible. For decades, we’ve preferred to see ourselves that way, too. Spider-Man is none of these things. He’s burdened by self-doubt. He wants to do the right thing, but isn’t always sure what that is. He’s constantly forced to choose between helping others and helping himself. He looks tough, but he’s easily injured. In America after September 11, Superman was who we wanted to be. Spider-Man was who we were.”

Critic Andrew Sarris in The New York Observer (July 8, 2004) likewise notes that, unlike Superman and Batman, Spider-Man in the new movie “is strikingly vulnerable ““ we get to see him in a state of powerlessness and helplessness….”

For Smith, to turn to Spider-Man is to recognize our limitations as a nation. For New York Times columnist and media critic Frank Rich, Spider-Man is a role model for post-9/11 Americans. In his July 11, 2004 column Rich declares that “Spider-Man wants to vanquish evil, but he doesn’t want to be reckless about it. Like the reluctant sheriff of an old western, he fights back only when a bad guy strikes first, leaving him with no other alternative.” (Rich has here stumbled onto one of the links between the superhero genre, a heroic myth for the contemporary urban United States, and that earlier myth for a more rural America, the western.) Reminding his readers that Spider-Man stars in a Fourth of July movie, Rich continues, “As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. George W. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of Top Gun. There’s nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man. . . .”

Indeed, since the movies’ Spider-Man just sees himself as doing his duty, he does not rejoice in his victories over the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. In the films, moreover, these were both men whom he liked before the accidents that drove them criminally insane. And in the comics, though Spider-Man may have a good laugh over discomfiting a villain, he doesn’t take time to boast or celebrate: there’s always some new problem lying just ahead.

Rich concludes about Spider-Man 2, “It gives us a selfless wartime hero unlike any on the national stage, and it promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness.”

Yet though the Spider-Man 2 movies came out in 2002 and 2004, they are mostly faithful to the spirit of the Spider-Man of the comics, who first appeared in 1962, in the midst of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, which proudly asserted that America “would pay any price, bear any burden” to defend freedom.

How odd that Spider-Man, as described by Smith and Rich, was a product of that time. Or is it? The debacle of the Bay of Pigs invasion had occurred the year before. 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Whether in 1962 or 2004, Spider-Man counters the notion of the American hero who is omnipotent, who is always right, and whose confidence in his goals and choices is unshaken. Perhaps this reflects Stan Lee’s well-known midlife creative crisis just before he co-created Fantastic Four in 1961, when he questioned his own purpose in continuing to work in comics. On a broader scale, perhaps the creation of Spider-Man anticipates the shift in liberal political thought over the course of the 1960s: by the end of the decade millions would be questioning American involvement in the war in Vietnam.

There’s still more to Spider-Man 2‘s revisionism towards America’s standard self-image. I was struck and surprised by something that Peter Parker / Spider-Man tells Mary Jane Watson, the woman he loves, towards the end of the second movie.

Up to that point the film has shown how Peter’s commitment to rescuing people from danger as Spider-Man has had serious negative repercussions on his everyday life. He has been fired from his job, which couldn’t have paid much to begin with; he is failing his courses at Columbia University; he is disappointing and even alienating people he cares about, including Mary Jane herself. He is virtually alone, nearly broke, seemingly doomed to failure in his education, and hence in his future career as a scientist, and in his personal life if he continues along the path of being Spider-Man.

Nowadays, after four decades of Spider-Man 2 comics, with several new issues every month, writers would probably think it boring to keep writing about the perennial misfortune that Stan Lee put into Peter Parker’s life. But the filmmakers did a great job of sharpening our awareness of Peter’s continual troubles, presenting a whole spectrum from minor, annoying mishaps (like the scene in the laundromat) to major concerns, like Peter’s guilty awareness of the deaths he helped bring about: those of his Uncle Ben and his friend Harry Osborn’s father (whom Harry did not know was the criminal Green Goblin). One can see how this continual drumbeat of adversity wears Peter down to the point of renouncing what he regards as the source of all his problems: his life as Spider-Man.So Peter literally throws away his costume, in a new version of Stan Lee and John Romita, Sr.’s classic comics story, “Spider-Man No More,” intending to lead a successful, normal life.

And Peter finds that he can’t: there is a limit to his ability to ignore the urgings of his conscience to help the people around him. The turning point comes when Doctor Octopus abducts Mary Jane right before the eyes of Peter Parker (who at that point seems as if he might have literally lost his super-powers). He resumes his Spider-Man persona and abilities. Later, Peter explicitly tells the rescued Mary Jane that he has learned that one has to do what is right even if it means giving up the “dream.”

This is really an astonishing statement. The concept of the “dream,” or, rather, the “American dream” of success, is so thoroughly a part of American culture, and hence of American popular culture as well. In America, it is said, with ambition, talent and perseverance, anyone can become a success in his career, anyone can become rich, and anyone can even become President, recognized by the rest of the populace as their leader. Despite all the social changes over the last several decades, people in America are still expected to marry the person he or she loves, ideally for life, have children, and get a house in the suburbs.

Typically, we would expect a movie hero to do the right thing, overcome his opponents, and get the girl, win the acclaim he deserves, and gain material rewards as a result of his efforts.

The “dream” is even part of the X-Men legend. Professor Xavier and his students strive towards achieving his vision of a world in which mutants and “baseline” humans live together in peace and harmony, however distant the realization of that dream may be in the future, if ever.

But in Spider-Man 2 Peter Parker rejects the American dream, at least as a goal for himself. He tells Mary Jane that there is something more important than “the dream,” presumably meaning success in leading a “normal” life and even in romantic love. What Peter sees as more important is doing what is right; this is his reworking of his late Uncle Ben’s guiding maxim that “With great power must come great responsibility.”

In his review of Spider-Man 2 in The New York Times (June 29, 2004), critic A. O. Scott says that in the first movie, “the hero was forced to choose between superhuman powers and the earthly charms of Kirsten Dunst,” by whom he means Mary Jane, the character this actress portrays.

His use of the word “earthly” to describe Mary Jane is intriguing. As Spider-Man, Peter Parker is driven by the demands of conscience: having inadvertently been responsible through inaction for the death of his uncle, Peter refuses to allow any other innocent person to come to harm if he can help it.

Uncle Ben has become a saintly figure, perhaps literally so: he even makes an appearance, actual or imagined by Peter, from beyond the grave in this second movie to advise Peter. (The parallel is the late Norman Osborn’s similar visitation ““ real or imagined ““ to his son Harry towards the end of the movie, casting Norman in the role of a devil. Whereas Ben beckons Peter to follow the path of what’s right, only to be rejected, Norman tempts Harry towards vengeance, and Harry is on the verge of succumbing.)

By resuming his duties as Spider-Man, Peter chooses the path of conscience. He is following a higher moral calling than that of most people. In his dedication to moral ideals and responsibilities, Peter/Spider-Man is following what could be termed a spiritual path. Mary Jane could indeed be described as “earthly,” not simply because she represents potential sexual fulfillment for Peter, but because a successful relationship with her is part of the “dream” that Peter believes his life as Spider-Man prevents him from having.

I am reminded of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its later seasons, in which one of the supporting characters abruptly has an epiphany, and realizes that Buffy will never have a good, prosperous job. The reason is that she has to devote most of her time to the higher purpose she has been assigned: the role of the Slayer in combating supernatural evil. I’ve long thought that Buffy is influenced as much by Spider-Man 2 as by X-Men: here’s a case in point. Season 2 even ended with a variation on “Spider-Man No More,” with Buffy, her personal life having collapsed in ruins, takes a bus out of town, abandoning her duties and even as we learn in the first episode of Season 3, her identity. (In that same episode she undergoes the same kind of moral reawakening that Peter has in Spider-Man 2 and resumes her Slayer career.) Occasionally the Buffy season would even remind the audience that with her life of continual combat, its heroine could not expect to live even into middle age.

Leading his life as Spider-Man thus becomes an ongoing form of self-sacrifice for Peter Parker. He gives up his own chances for conventional forms of success in order to ensure the safety of others, so they can lead normal, happy lives instead.

Whether in the comics or the movies, Spider-Man 2 is not an explicitly religious series. But superhero stories are a form of secular mythology, and they do deal with moral values. In sacrificing the normal goals of material success and sexual fulfillment in order to pursue a higher moral purpose, Spider-Man is even like a priest or monk. George Lucas thinks along the same lines in his Star Wars mythos, depicting his Jedi Knights as celibate members of a pseudo-religious order dedicated to serving the Force.

Or think of the end of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn receives the conventional rewards for heroism: kingship, marriage to his true love, acclaim by his people, wealth. As for the two lead hobbits, Frodo and Sam enact a similar archetypal pairing as that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the quester pursuing a vision of duty, and his loyal, more practical-minded servant (hence Sam’s continual references to “Mr. Frodo”). Sam is the more “earthly” one of the two, and it is he who achieves a conventional middle-class vision of happiness as his reward: a wife and children and their own home in the ‘burbs, er, the Shire. In contrast with these two, Frodo, permanently changed by his experiences, apparently cannot return to a “normal” way of life or find happiness and fulfillment there. Instead he ends up sailing off with Bilbo, Gandalf and the elves to a land of the immortals, which, especially considering that Bilbo seems near death, appears to be a metaphor for the hereafter. Having followed something of a spiritual quest (to destroy evil), Frodo can no longer stay in the material world.

So “earthly” Sam finds love in the mortal world; “spiritual” Frodo does not. Similarly, whereas George Lucas leads us to expect a possible romance between Luke and Leia in the original Star Wars, he ends up establishing them as brother and sister. The Jedi Knight (and spiritual quester) Luke remains single (in the movies, anyway), and Leia instead becomes romantically involved with the decidedly “earthly” Han Solo.

If J. K. Rowling follows this archetypal pattern, who do you think is more likely to wind up as Hermione’s boyfriend in the last Harry Potter book: Harry or Ron?

(And now to go off on a momentary tangent, comparing the Tolkien and Rowling mythologies to Spider-Man reminds me that these two fantasy writers both employ gigantic spiders as horrific monsters. Aside from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, spiders tend not to be positive figures in fiction. Though this may not have been Stan Lee’s conscious intention, I wonder if part of the reason for the general mistrust of Spider-Man in his series is the fact that people have a negative reaction to spiders, especially if they are as big as or bigger than human beings.

Comics aficionados may be so used to Spider-Man that they overlook the idea that a human being who scurries up walls and shoots webbing might well seem monstrous at first glance. Stan Lee has stated on numerous occasions that he initially met resistance to naming the character “Spider-Man” because he was told nobody likes spiders. And in Spider-Man’s comics stories, most people don’t like Spider-Man.)

Though written in the 1950s, The Lord of the Rings first achieved widespread popularity as a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s, as Spider-Man did. Recently seeing the Spider-Man 2 movies and rewatching the recent Rings movies, I am struck by a major parallel. Frodo does not embark on his quest out of a sense of adventure or a longing for glory, but out of a sense of moral duty and a realization (that others confirm) that he is the only one capable of bearing the evil Ring to destruction while resisting being corrupted by it (better than others could, anyway). He takes no pleasure in his quest: being the Ringbearer is a burden that increasingly weighs down upon his spirits, inducing anguish, depression, and even, towards the end, despair. Like Peter in “Spider-Man No More” and Spider-Man 2, Frodo even tries to give up this moral burden (as when he offers the Ring to Galadriel) only to discover that he can’t. In the third film and book, when Sam has carried the Ring for a while, Frodo even takes it back from him, explaining that the Ring would “destroy” his friend. (Surely some critic has likened Frodo’s dilemma to the Gospels’ scene in the Garden of Gethsemene.) As noted above, bearing the Ring has rendered Frodo unfit for conventional happiness in the “normal” world: he is sacrificing himself so that Sam and others can enjoy the kind of happy, normal lives he will never have.

So too, as I explained in last week’s installment, the movies’ Peter Parker seems to take no real joy in being Spider-Man. Watching the first film again last week, I noticed that sometimes Spider-Man utters an excited whoop when he swings through the city, but that’s not dramatically interesting. In the first film Spider-Man also makes some stabs at the familiar Spidey witty repartee, which falls flat. In the second film the whoops and most of the attempted witticisms are gone.

Now Spider-Man’s “power” and “responsibility” are both burdens, ruining his personal life. A. O. Scott rightly observes in his review that Peter is suffering from “depression.”

That reminds me of the controversial sixth season of Buffy. Normally in the first five seasons she, like Spider-Man in the comics, took a certain pleasure in exercising her powers in battle while verbally jabbing at her opponents with jokes. But in Season Six, though the word is rarely used, Buffy falls into a serious state of depression and increasingly neglects her Slayer responsibilities; even after reaccepting these duties, she remains somber in outlook in Season Seven, far removed from the master of repartee of the earlier years. And remember how the TV series ends: now that other women have been endowed with Slayer powers, Faith and Willow point out to Buffy that she is no longer the sole “Chosen One” for her mission, and we are left with the sight of Buffy smiling in relief that her burden has been lessened.

No such luck for Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2, who resumes his moral responsibilities but does so realizing he has to surrender the “dream.”

This is true to the spirit of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s first Spider-Man 2 story in Amazing Fantasy #15 back in 1962. This remains a startlingly dark and disturbing story. The first movie, which retells Spider-Man’s origin, includes his redemption by becoming the hero who defeats the Green Goblin and saves Mary Jane, a tram full of kids, and many others. Lee and Ditko’s first Spider-Man 2 story provides no such happy ending: it concludes with Spider-Man’s discovery of his own role in his uncle’s death, and with the hero walking into the darkness of night, weighed down by a sense of patricidal guilt and remembering Ben’s words about responsibility. It is clear at that moment that Spider-Man’s crimefighting career will really be an endless effort at expiating his own sin. (The second movie has a strong scene in which Peter confesses to Aunt May how he failed to stop the Burglar who killed Uncle Ben. She eventually forgives Peter, but it is clear he has not forgiven himself.)

The comics’ origin story even addresses the topic of the “American dream” of fame and fortune. Spider-Man/Peter initially uses his new super-powers for personal gain. In the first movie Peter simply enters a wrestling contest to win enough money to buy himself a new car with which to impress Mary Jane. The wrestling world he enters is a tawdry, small time milieu. In Lee and Ditko’s origin, Peter thinks bigger: he goes on from the wrestling match to launching himself into a high profile show business career, appearing on television. But, though this is more upscale than the wrestling, Spider-Man’s show business career is still portrayed as crassly materialistic, and worse, as immoral. In the movie Peter Parker lets the Burglar escape out of a sense of resentment towards the man the Burglar robbed, who had just cheated Peter. In the comics version, it is show biz Spidey, a male diva in the making, full of his own ego, who lets the Burglar escape out of a sense that he’s too important to sully his hands with matters that are none of his business. So we see that the dual personality aspect of Spider-Man/Peter has already emerged. In fact, show biz Spidey was far different in personality from everyday Peter than superhero Spidey is. Show Biz Spidey really was Peter’s version of Mr. Hyde: after all those years of being bullied, now he turns arrogant, taking on the same mindset as the Big Men on Campus who lorded it over him. Despite his claims of wanting to make money for Ben and May, this Peter Parker was really out for Number One. (In the 1980s Peter B. Gillis wrote a remarkable What If story in which Uncle Ben was not killed, and Peter Parker became a nasty, amoral Hollywood mini-mogul.)

Ben’s death shakes Peter out of his complacent, egocentric selfishness. Show Biz Spidey was a particularly American form of the dark side of the ubermensch concept: the man who sets himself above other people as their superior. After Ben’s death and his capture of the Burglar, Spider-Man recognizes himself as a member of the community of mankind. He will sacrifice his own happiness and welfare to ensure that no one else comes to harm.

Ironically, as Lee and Ditko begin showing in Amazing Spider-Man #1, after Ben’s death, once Peter dedicates himself to helping others, his show business career collapses, largely due to the way J. Jonah Jameson turns the fickle public against him. When Spider-Man was chasing fame and fortune, the public loved him; after he becomes a true hero, Jameson accuses him of being merely a “glory-hound.” It’s as if Spider-Man will pay for the rest of his career for that aspect of his initial arrogance as well.

So it is that Lee and Ditko quickly establish the money worries that have plagued Peter Parker off and on ever since. The first movie was remarkable in dealing with this theme of people’s economic vulnerability.

Uncle Ben was downsized at an age when it would be difficult for him to find a new job. Mary Jane must work at a downscale waitressing job, clearly beneath her real abilities. Jameson characteristically tries to pay Peter as little as possible for his photos, and even tries to persuade him that working freelance, rather than as a regular staff member, is a Good Thing. (And doesn’t that hit home with some of us?) Even the wealthy Norman Osborn, at the other end of the economic spectrum, faced the threat of being forced out of his own company. (This was one of the reasons his mind snapped and he became the Green Goblin.) The second movie continues the theme of economic instability. While Peter’s contemporaries are doing better than he is (Harry was born rich, Mary Jane is doing well as an actress and model), Peter loses his bottom-of-the-barrel job as a pizza delivery boy. Unable to get a loan from her bank, Aunt May loses her home. (How can Peter afford attending Columbia University? Though the movie does not say so, he must be on full scholarship, which he presumably would lose if he keeps failing his courses.)

(Here’s another tangent. Why is it that Spider-Man 2 shows Mary Jane acting onstage in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest?

I expect the ghost of Dr. Frederic Wertham might say this is a coded indication of gay sensibility in the film, but I don’t think so. One easy answer is that Earnest is in the public domain, so the filmmakers didn’t have to pay for the rights to excerpt a play. Nor did screenwriter Alvin Sargent have to invent an excerpt from some fictional play. In his column in The New York Times (July 11, 2003) critic Frank Rich points out the film’s positive attitude towards literature. “In Spider-Man 2 they seem determined to remind us that it is a civilization, not merely a crowd of extras, that is the target of attack. The hero, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), turns to poetry to woo his girl next door, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). She is an actress appearing in The Importance of Being Earnest” Rich might also have mentioned that Dr. Octopus’s wife Rosalie is an English teacher with an especial interest in the works of T. S. Eliot; it is after she dies that he goes mad, as if having symbolically lost the sensibility she represented.

But here I think is the real reason Earnest turns up in Spider-Man 2. In an excerpt we see Mary Jane perform, there is a reference to “secret lives.” Earnest is a comedy in which the two male leads tell false stories about themselves, and one even adopts a false name, in order to court young women (including the one MJ plays). In other words, this is a play involving secret identities. In the end one of the male leads even discovers the truth about his mysterious parentage, and hence his true identity. So surely you can see the relevance of Earnest to the story of a young man with two identities who loves a young women, and how they both come to accept his dual personas.

Spider-Man debuted in 1962; compare him to another iconic pop culture figure who first made the transition from novels to the movies that same year: James Bond. Not only is Bond presented as the embodiment of cool, which Peter Parker has never been, but he is also an emblem of economic success. Just how Bond does it is unclear: either he is independently wealthy, gets paid an enormous salary for a government employee, or has an unlimited expense account. Yet Bond seems to have all the trappings of wealth and the high life that he could want, as well as an endless succession of women as lovers. As noted, this is decidedly not true of Spider-Man. Then again, though serving his country, Bond is not particularly idealistic or spiritual: he is in fact a cold-blooded killer. Though he operates on behalf of his nation or the free world, Bond seems unconcerned with the welfare of individuals he does not personally know, whereas Spider-Man would risk his life for a stranger as a matter of moral principle. Bond has an “earthly” moral code and “earthly” rewards.

The ’60s were a time of prosperity, and Bond fits right in. Perhaps Peter Parker’s money worries reflect the fact that Stan Lee was a child of the Great Depression of the 1930s. (Now, of course, the movies’ concern with economic hardship reflect the problematic state of the U. S. economy since the year 2000.) But Lee and Ditko also seem to be questioning what is the point of following a career track to prosperity if it means sacrificing morality? In this, the Spider-Man 2 comic, created in the early 1960s, seems to anticipate the attitudes of the counterculture that arose among Baby Boomers later in that decade. (Many of you may wish here to consider how Lee’s and the Boomers’ attitudes towards careers and wealth may have changed again following the 1960s.)

But, you may argue, is the “dream” really out of reach for the movies’ Peter Parker, at least as far as true love is concerned?

Recall how the end of the third Star Trek movie explicitly reversed the apparent moral of the second. In the second “the one” ““ Spock ““ sacrifices himself for the sake of “the many.” In the third, “the many” ““ Kirk and the “Enterprise” crew ““ risk their lives for the sake of “the one,” to bring Spock back to life.

Similarly, the end of Spider-Man 2 reverses the seeming point of the end of the previous movie. At the end of the first Spider-Man 2 Peter rejects the idea of a romantic relationship with Mary Jane and tells her they can only be “friends.” He’s decided that if any of Spider-Man’s enemies found out who he was and that he loved her, her life would be endangered. (And indeed, the Green Goblin had nearly murdered her earlier in the movie.) I wasn’t the only one dissatisfied with this ending. Indeed, Peter’s happy smile as he walked away from the deeply distraught Mary Jane in the cemetery seemed to convey the wrong message: that loving a woman wasn’t important compared with Guy Stuff like beating up super-villains.)

But in the second movie, though Peter tries to keep Mary Jane from learning he is Spider-Man, she nonetheless learns the truth. (This is another parallel with Tim Burton’s Batman.) He insists that they cannot become a couple, and, indeed, she’s already been attacked in both films by super-villains who know she’s connected with Spider-Man/Peter Parker.

And so Mary Jane is set to marry her alternate choice, astronaut John Jameson, son of Jonah. There is a fancy wedding scene, conveying that the two Jameson men and their social circle represent the Establishment in wealth and prestige. Marrying into this world would be achieving the American dream of success. And the traditional end of a comedy is a wedding, about which the community gathers.

But this is the Wrong Wedding: this is the Old Order that Mary Jane must abandon, and so she does. Instead Mary Jane never arrives at the ceremony, but runs off in her wedding gown. Critic Andrew Sarris correctly points out to the feminist angle here: “If Mary Jane is to leave him her fianc¿ (at the altar as so many of her Hollywood sisters did in the past), she’ll have to do it on her own and without any help from Peter or the scriptwriters.” It’s entirely her decision. It’s like the end of The Graduate if Katharine Ross’s character had run out on her wedding without Dustin Hoffman’s character prompting her to do so.

Fleeing a ceremony exemplifying wealth and social success, Mary Jane arrives in the realm of poverty, the world of a person excluded from that society: Peter Parker’s apartment. There she tells him that she chooses him as the right man for her, and that she is willing to risk the possible dangers he warned her about. It’s notable that she’s still in the wedding gown: this scene isn’t literally a marriage, but figuratively it is the wedding that concludes the film, the union of the hero and heroine. She is in a sense proposing to him, and he accepts.

And why does this work for the movie? In his review of Spider-Man 2, Andrew Sarris gets the point exactly: He notes that Spider-Man and Mary Jane each at times face possible death, “a fate they face with superheroic sangfroid. This is the grace note of their final union ““ Mary Jane Watson is found to be worthy as much as he is found brave enough to make a commitment to his sweetheart, despite the danger in which his crime-fighting prowess places her. We’re back in the Middle Ages of knights and lady loves. . . .” Significantly, Sarris goes on to speak of “the overwhelming spirituality of the camera’s love affair with Ms. Dunst. I haven’t seen such luminous close-ups since the great screen stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Who would have thought that Mr. Raimi. . .would light up the screen with such a chaste depiction of love, and without a trace of lechery?”

Spider-Man 2 is not following the archetypal pattern of separating the “spiritual” higher moral mission from the “earthly” life of love and family. Peter and Mary Jane can be united because she has effectively joined his mission. Her courage and the strength of her love for Peter enables her to be willing to accept the potential dangers he and she would face together. As Sarris says, she has proved “worthy.” She participates in his mission by accepting it, and becoming Peter’s confidant and main support; maybe that’s one reason Sarris senses a “spirituality” in the way Mary Jane is depicted in the film. Sarris is also right that Peter demonstrates bravery in accepting Mary Jane’s offer of romance: having lost Uncle Ben, he is now risking further emotional pain should harm befall Mary Jane.

Now one might say that the happy ending of Spider-Man 2 is cheerfully ironic: Peter Parker had to renounce the “dream” in order to receive it. But has he really achieved the “American Dream”?

The Times review of political writer David Brooks’ book On Paradise Drive (June 23, 2004) quotes Brooks as writing, “Born in abundance, inspired by opportunity, nurtured in imagination, spiritualized by a sense of God’s blessing and call, and realized in ordinary life day by day, this Paradise Spell is the controlling ideology of American life. . .Just beyond the next ridge., just with the next entrepreneurial scheme or. . .the next political hero. . .or the next true love. . .there is this spot you can get to where all tensions will melt, all time pressures are relieved, and all contentment can be realized. . . .” The reviewer, Joyce Maynard, then asks, “Who would ever mistake that for a description of any country but the United States?”

That’s not Peter Parker’s United States. He’s never going to arrive at Paradise. The day after the final scene of Spider-Man 2, he’ll still have trouble making his rent, the Daily Bugle will still be smearing his reputation, and he still risks being gunned down any night by any common crook.

The difference is that now he has a loving companion with whom to share his life. Sam Raimi told Newsweek that “Peter’s living a life out of balance. He thinks he’s got to make this journey alone, but he doesn’t realize that to love someone is nor to shield them from the truth, but to share it with them.”

Yet there is no guarantee of living happily ever after with Mary Jane. Shortly before the final scene of Peter and MJ’s union, we see Harry Osborn confronting the (real? imagined?) ghost of his father, symbolically seeing Norman in place of his own reflection in a mirror, and (with further symbolism) finding the Green Goblin’s equipment behind that mirror. Even as Peter and Mary Jane happily acknowledge their love for each other, Peter is aware that Harry knows he’s Spider-Man, whom he holds responsible for Norman’s death. And Harry knows that Peter loves Mary Jane. The very kind of danger that Peter fears for MJ is already arising. (And how about the appearance of Dr. Curt Connors, complete ““ so to speak ““ with missing arm, in the new movie, in a clear set-up for Connors’ other self, the Lizard, to show up in Spider-Man 3?)

So Peter and Mary Jane face a future far from “paradise,” and perhaps it will never be attainable. At least they will find comfort in making the journey that Raimi mentions together.

So what kind of American hero is Spider-Man? Spider-Man is the hero of mature disillusionment, who strives to do what’s right despite the realization that simply having power does not ensure happiness, that one can make damaging mistakes, that one’s ability to change the world is necessarily limited, and that earthly “Paradise” may be forever out of reach. Spider-Man is the American hero who places morality above material success, who will sacrifice his own happiness for the welfare of the community of which he is a part. Spider-Man is not the ubermensch of the United States as the world’s only super-power. Spider-Man is the American Everyman, who would rather struggle in leading a morally upright life than lead a comfortable, morally complacent one. That’s the spirit of democracy, a system in which people, no matter of what social or economic level, ideally work together for the common welfare. In the comics and in the movies, Spider-Man 2 acknowledges that not everyone will achieve the “American Dream,” but there are more important things about being an American, and that with sufficient moral dedication, anyone can act heroically. Peter Parker is repeatedly castigated ““ even by comics writers and movie critics ““ as a nerd, a dork, a loser, a misfit. To understand Spider-Man 2 properly is to realize that dividing people into winners and losers according to their degree of “earthly” success is irrelevant. It’s how one handles the responsibilities that his or her abilities (powers, if you prefer), however great or small, give him or her that’s important.Spider-Man 2 thus communicates a surprisingly subversive point of view towards conventional thinking about the “American Dream.” Certainly it’s amazing that Sam Raimi and company can convey this message in a big budget movie produced by corporations like Sony and Marvel. The Newsweek cover story informs us that Tobey Maguire “earned only $4 million for the first movie,” was contracted to make the second film “for only $8 million,” but ended up getting “about $17 million.” Seems far removed from the philosophy of the movie, doesn’t it?

Spider-Man was a hero created in the 1960s who is vitally relevant today. And perhaps he is a pop culture figure who draws on an archetype that underlies another heroic figure who has fascinated readers for centuries. In the July 12-19 issue of The New Yorker, critic Anthony Lane, discussing Spider-Man 2, writes, “There is only one young man I can think of who was more torn about his purpose in life, and he, regrettably, was taken off the case by Laertes.” Lane is talking about Hamlet, and Frank Rich also described Peter Parker’s “inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero” as “playing Hamlet.” I noted two columns ago that Stan Lee has said he was influenced by the bravura of Shakespeare’s language. In Peter Parker’s character, the 1960s youth who, as Roger Stern points out in that same column, questioned everything, perhaps we see another, possibly unconscious, influence of the Bard on the founder of the Marvel Age of Comics.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

What better subject could there be to mark the first anniversary of this column than the new Spider-Man 2 movie? Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times proclaimed it to be “the best superhero movie since the modern genre was launched with Superman (1978).” Critic Richard Schickel of Time (July 5, 2004) went even further, pronouncing it “probably the best special effects extravaganza since Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

In the immediate aftermath of seeing Spider-Man 2, I think it’s too early to judge whether it reaches a status as exalted as that. My enthusiastic responses on seeing the movie are still relatively fresh in my memory. Time must pass in order to judge how it matches up against Richard Donner’s Superman or Tim Burton’s Batman or even the first Spider-Man movie.

But Spider-Man 2 definitely belongs in the first rank of comics-based movies. Ebert perceptively refers to the “classical workmanship” of the film’s director, Sam Raimi, and its writers, screenwriter Alvin Sargent, and the three noted superhero aficionados credited with the story: novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) and the television writer/producer team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville). Spider-Man 2 was built to last; I have little doubt that it will indeed be regarded as a classic in decades to come, while various other comics-based movies that misfired will recede into obscurity.

From the very first installment of this column, one of its concerns has been how the mainstream media evaluate comics and comics-based movies and television. To my surprise, the major film critics’ reviews of Spider-Man 2 that I’ve read have been warmly enthusiastic, with only occasional, minor traces of condescension towards the material.

Why is this? In Tom DeFalco’s book Comics Creators on Spider-Man (see Comics in Context #44), he observes that many of the comic’s writers see themselves as writing “The Adventures of Peter Parker,” more than the exploits of Spider-Man. Raimi and his writers followed the same route to success. Spider-Man 2 has brilliantly staged action scenes, but not as many as one might have expected from this kind of action-adventure blockbuster. Raimi and cohorts so successfully seize the audience’s attention with the story of Peter Parker’s life that it becomes the basis, indeed, the heart of their film. It’s what Ang Lee and his collaborators tried and failed to do with their Hulk movie: they neither created sufficient empathy for their lead characters nor successfully created suspenseful, exciting action sequences. Raimi’s new film succeeds on both counts.

What various critics said in their reviews bears this out. In Newsweek (June 28, 2004) Jeff Giles expresses his welcome astonishment that Spider-Man 2 is “a summer action flick that’s actually smart and deeply felt.” He goes on, “For a man directing a Fourth of July movie, Raimi spends an unusual amount of time letting emotions have center stage” and credits Raimi and company “for hunting for the highest common denominator” in their audience. Schickel comments that “the effects, though handsomely managed, don’t overwhelm the story and characters.”

Ebert notes that “the dialogue is more about emotion, love and values,” and asserts that “The movie demonstrates what’s wrong with a lot of other superhero epics. They focus on the super-powers, and short-change the humans behind them. (Has anyone ever been more boring, for instance, than Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne?)” Comics enthusiasts with knowledge of important work done with Superman and Batman will challenge Ebert’s assumption. But it is thanks to the example set by Stan Lee’s groundbreaking work with Spider-Man in the 1960s that later writers would delve into the personalities of the longrunning DC heroes.

Even New York Times critic A.O. Scott warmed to Spider-Man 2. The title of his review (June 29, 2004) sums up the point that the others are also making: “Putting Action after Feelings of a Superhero.” He declares himself “happy to report” that the movie’s “distinguishing features. . , are strong characters and honest feelings.” In contrast to other summer blockbusters, in Spider-Man 2, he says, “the extravagant action sequences are subordinate to the narrative rather than the point of the movie,” which he calls “a touching and disarming love story, full of grief, longing and sweet confusion.”

I wonder if there’s something more behind the positive critical reception that Spider-Man 2 has received. Perhaps it’s that there have been enough superhero movies over the last several years that film critics have grown more accustomed to the genre, and less likely to dismiss it out of hand. There have also been noteworthy recent movies in similar genres, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter films. They’re learning how to “read” these genres. Rather than being put off by the costumes and fantasy elements, they’re learning to see the emotional and psychological elements underlying them. Scott refers to Spider-Man 2 as a “superhero allegory” with “surprising emotional realism.” “Allegory” is technically not the right word, but he is right to view this superhero story as a metaphor for emotional realities. In other words, they’re learning to appreciate Stan Lee’s achievement in transforming the superhero genre into a means of personal expression.

Spider-Man 2 is an excellent movie, possibly better than the first, as various critics have contended. But the first Spider-Man movie was quite good, too. Perhaps the real difference is that mainstream reviewers have grown more open to taking movies like these seriously.

THE FILM’S FOUNDATION

Possibly expecting Spider-Man 2 to be a kiddie movie, Times critic A.O. Scott brought his nearly eight-year-old son to a screening. Scott reported in his review that his son said afterwards, “But there was one part. . .that I really didn’t like.” Scott explains, “That was when Peter Parker threw his costume in the trash and declared that he was ‘Spider-Man’ no more. ‘He can’t do that,’ my son complained. ‘It’s not right. We need Spider-Man.’”

The string reaction Scott’s son had to this moment testifies to the ability of Spider-Man’s co-creator Stan Lee at his height as a storyteller to tap the emotions and concerns of his audience. Spider-Man 2 takes as its villain Doctor Octopus, an early creation of Lee and artist Steve Ditko. But the heart of this movie derives from Lee and artist John Romita, Sr.’s classic story “Spider-Man No More!” from The Amazing Spider-Man #50 (July, 1967).

In fact, I was surprised on the Saturday morning after the movie’s opening to see John Romita, Sr. appear on the Today show. The program did a split screen, placing Romita’s drawing of Peter Parker walking down the alleyway, his costume stuffed in a trash can, against a still image of the same scene from the film; Raimi had recreated the image exactly.

Actually, in the first Doctor Octopus story (Amazing Spider-Man #3, July 1963), he initially bested Spider-Man so badly that Peter Parker decided to quit his superhero career. It was listening to a speech given by the Human Torch (who is the same age as Parker but had been in the superhero business a bit longer) that refired Peter’s determination to carry on as a costumed crimefighter.

“Spider-Man No More” was a more thorough, far more dramatic treatment of the same idea of Peter Parker giving into despair, this time due not to defeat in combat but by the emotional and psychological toll that his years of being Spider-Man had taken on his personal life. I expect it is no coincidence that “Spider-Man No More” appeared in the fiftieth issue of the magazine. Stan Lee presumably sought to create a landmark event in the life of Spider-Man suitable for marking the anniversary of this unexpectedly successful series.

It likewise makes sense that Sam Raimi and his collaborators chose “Spider-Man No More” as the basis for their second movie. The first was about how Peter Parker became Spider-Man and a crimefighter; the second is about the point at which he wonders if he made the right choice for his life, whether it is worth the price he has to pay in his personal life, and whether it is still possible to go back.

I have a great deal to say about Spider-Man 2, but before I discuss the surprisingly iconoclastic themes of this movie, I want to devote this column to a different subject: the ways in which the movie versions of Spider-Man and his leading lady, Mary Jane Watson, differ from the traditional versions in the comics. The changes lead to somewhat different interpretations of these characters in the movies, as you shall see. (And, as usual, it will help if you’ve seen the movie first, since I will discuss much of the plot.)

PETER PARKER ZONES OUT

The first Spider-Man movie inspired some controversy by changing the nature of Spider-Man’s webbing. In the comics, Peter Parker devised “web fluid” which he projects from “web-shooters” in Spider-Man’s gloves. In the movies, Peter’s own body generates the web fluid, which shoots from his hands. This had a precedent: in the 1990s writer Peter David had his co-creation, Spider-Man 2099, the web-slinger of an alternate future, generate his webbing the same way. Similarly, the movie Spider-Man has tiny (presumably retractable) claws on his hands (and, I assume, his feet) that enable him to cling to walls. This, too, follows Peter David’s example with Spider-Man 2099. (But can these tiny claws really extend through the soles of his boots?) Back in the 1980s The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe instead stated that Spider-Man somehow (psionically, I’d think) controls the interatomic attraction between himself and the walls he clings to, but Marvel writers have taken no notice of this.

I would guess that Stan Lee wanted Spider-Man’s webbing to be artificial because he might have thought it too grotesque to have the fluid emerge from Spider-Man’s body. People who criticize the movie’s changes in the webbing argue that the fact that the comic book Peter invented the web fluid demonstrates his scientific brilliance. Indeed it does, though it is somewhat hard to believe that, once he was endowed with his spider powers, Peter succeeded in figuring out how to create this amazing webbing virtually overnight.

Longtime Spider-Man readers are familiar with scenes in which Spider-Man runs out of web fluid. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the movie Spider-Man. Does he lose weight by generating lots of web fluid? Could he dangerously dehydrate himself by expending too much of the fluid? If he creates a large web, does he feel hungry or thirsty?

Spider-Man 2 persuades me there is at least one advantage to the movies’ version of the webbing. In this second movie Spider-Man does indeed come up empty on a few occasions when he tries to shoot webbing. Roger Ebert said in his review that “It’s kind of neat that Spider-Man never does find out why his web-throwing [sic] ability sometimes fails him.” In fact, a doctor explains the reason onscreen. Peter’s doubts about whether he should continue his career as Spider-Man are subconsciously blocking his ability to produce the webbing.

Now, consider what the web fluid looks like before it solidifies into webbing. (In his review in The New Yorker, critic Anthony Lane jokes that he’s glad the movie wasn’t titled Spider-Man 2: Still Not Quite Sure What to Do with All His Sticky Stuff.)

There may be a conscious or subconscious sexual metaphor behind this sticky near-white liquid Spidey shoots. (Consider too the scene in the first movie, in which Peter tries to keep Aunt May from seeing the “experiments” he’s conducting in his room, which we see filled with those sticky strands of webbing.) So, Spider-Man’s self-doubts are rendering him symbolically impotent. It’s likewise significant that it is when Doctor Octopus kidnaps Mary Jane that Peter’s powers finally return full force, as if in a surge of sexual feeling for her.

Spider-Man’s self-doubts even prevent him from clinging to walls, So the tiny claws must indeed be retractable and have failed to emerge. Actually, in this case the Marvel Universe Handbook’s implication that Spider-Man’s clinging abilities are psionic would have worked even better in this context.

What surprised me is that once Peter gives up being Spider-Man, he has to wear glasses again. In the comics, Peter still wore glasses after gaining his spider-powers, but, after breaking his glasses in one issue, discovered that he no longer needed them. There was no explanation, and it’s likely that Lee and Ditko simply thought he’d look better without them. In contrast, the first movie made it clear that the metamorphosis Peter underwent after being bitten by the genetically altered spider cleared up his faulty vision.

To prove to the movie audience that Peter has not just returned to wearing glasses on a personal whim, when his powers fully return, Raimi gives us a shot from Peter’s point of view, demonstrating that now his vision is blurry with the glasses, and clear without them.

This all reminds me of a theory that John Byrne had about Superman: that his powers were actually psionic. Byrne never explicitly stated this in any of his Superman stories (DC surely would not have let him), but he implied it in a story line in which Superman becomes an amnesiac on Apokolips and is unable to utilize his powers.

So it would seem that when Peter gives up his Spider-Man career, he actually loses his superhuman powers. This takes Stan Lee’s original “Spider-Man No More” story even further on a literal level. Does this mean that all the physical changes that Peter Parker underwent have gone into a sort of remission? Is it possible those tiny retractable claws have entirely ceased to exist?

It also takes “Spider-Man No More” further thematically. It suggests that Peter has chosen to revert to the person he was before he became Spider-Man, the kid in the glasses. In becoming Spider-Man, Peter not only gained superhuman abilities but also, eventually, his sense of duty and responsibility. In forsaking his life as Spider-Man, Peter is rejecting that sense of duty. The super-powers can be read as metaphors for the ability of an adult to effect change; certainly Spider-Man’s sense of duty stands for an adult’s moral responsibilities. In abandoning his Spider-Man career, Peter may be consciously seeking a normal life, but symbolically he is attempting to return to childhood. And this can’t be done.

Certainly Raimi and the writers make clear that giving up being Spider-Man doesn’t solve Peter’s personal problems: they immediately show him experiencing yet more examples of his characteristic bad luck. One could argue that giving up being Spider-Man is a necessary step in his maturation: that he must reconnect to people in his personal life and pay attention to responsibilities at work and school and to his friends and family..

But in showing Peter visually reverting to his pre-Spidey self, the kid in the glasses, Raimi & Company are making clear that he has really taken a step backwards, retreating from personal growth.

They also strongly dramatize the power that guilt has on Peter Parker’s psyche. Take the scene in which Peter witnesses a mugging and forces himself to walk away without intervening. If this happened to non-super-powered people like you or me, we probably couldn’t do anything to help save looking for a policeman. But this scene reminded me of something I see every week: people who pass by beggars on the street without even acknowledging them. Peter Parker cannot so easily ignore other people in distress.

Later, Peter comes across the scene of a building on fire with people trapped inside. This should remind the viewer of a similar situation in the first movie, in which Spider-Man went to the rescue. Raimi dramatizes Peter’s crisis of conscience in this second fire scene. Peter begins to pull open his shirt, as if by automatic reflex, and is surprised to remember he isn’t wearing his costume, or, metaphorically, he has given up that side of his identity. But he nevertheless goes into the burning building as himself and rescues a child. Peter learns afterwards that someone else died inside; perhaps had Peter come as Spider-Man with his full powers, he would have found and saved this victim, too. So arguably once again someone has died through Peter’s failure to act as fully as he could have. It is as if signifying that until Peter reassumes his Spider-Man persona, his efforts to fulfill his moral duty will be inadequate.

Over the Fourth of July weekend I looked in on some episodes in the Sci-Fi Channel’s The Twilight Zone marathon, and came across Rod Serling’s episode “Walking Distance,” in which an adult in what today would be termed a midlife crisis literally travels back in time to the days of his childhood and discovers he cannot remain there. Serling’s closing narration acknowledges the longing to undo “growing up” and rejects it as impossible.

In making Spider-Man’s powers dependent on the state of Peter Parker’s psyche, Raimi and his writers are saying that Spider-Man is more than a set of physical powers. Being Spider-Man is a state of mind. In this movie Peter Parker tries to repress the Spider-Man side of his personality, and it works for a while. But in the end he has to accept that Spider-Man is now who he is; he cannot go back to the time before.

In Amazing Spider-Man #50 Stan Lee gave Peter’s decision to be “Spider-Man No More” a twist that the movie does not deal with at all. The comics’ Peter convinces himself that being Spider-Man was actually a sign of immaturity, and that by giving up his costumed career, he is putting childish things aside and facing adult responsibility at last. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the adult who faces such difficulties in achieving the idealistic goals he had as a youth that he is tempted to abandon their pursuit and settle for a more practical way of life. Perhaps “Spider-Man No More” reflected Stan Lee’s own, well-known doubts in 1961, the turning point of his life, as to whether he should continue writing comics. One could even read this story as a metaphor for the superhero comics reader’s own dilemma as he grows older: am I getting too old to be reading this stuff?

But the comics Peter Parker had gotten it backwards. Even if the superhero genre began as a means of entertaining children, the Marvel Revolution redefined the superhero as a sign of accepting and implementing the responsibilities of adults to their community. The moral ideals we are taught as children retain validity in adult life. Stan Lee in the comics and Sam Raimi in the movies may treat Peter Parker’s “Spider-Man No More” identity crisis in different ways, but they, and Peter, end up with the same solution.

LAUGH, SPIDEY, LAUGH

New Yorker critic Anthony Lane comments that “What with the mournful [Alfred] Molina,” who plays Doctor Octopus, “the hazed-over [Kirsten] Dunst,” who plays Mary Jane, “and the puffy uncertainties of [Tobey] Maguire, “who plays Peter Parker, “we in the audience are the only ones who still believe, without qualification, in thrill and spill.”

Lane is onto something here. Something important is missing from the portrayals of all three major characters.

Certainly the two Spider-Man movies convey great, visceral joy in the scenes of Spider-Man swinging through the city on his webs, conveying the kind of speed and acrobatic movement that the static comics page can only begin to suggest. In the first film Peter Parker had moments of infectious glee as he tested out his newfound ability to leap from building to building.

But apart from that, the movies’ Peter Parker seems to take no pleasure in being Spider-Man. The joyfulness of the spectacular web-swinging sequences is the director’s, the CGI crew’s, and the audience’s, but Spider-Man himself does not indicate he’s enjoying himself.

Similarly, Spider-Man 2 is full of humor. Whereas in the first movie J. Jonah Jameson seemed a peripheral character, here he comes into his own as the colorful comedic figure we know from the comics. (Indeed, Raimi and his writers seem to make a point of giving all the recurring characters more to do, ranging from Aunt May’s greatly enlarged role to Betty Brant’s getting more scenes in which to do walk-ons. The movies’ Norman and Harry Osborn may not have the kind of hairstyle that Steve Ditko gave them ““ in real life, does anyone? ““ but it’s amusing to see a live action Betty Brant sporting her distinctive Ditkoesque hairdo.)

The movie gets plenty of comedic mileage out of the everyday mishaps that beset Peter Parker in both his identities. One high point is the scene in the elevator after Spider-Man, temporarily unable to emit his webbing, has to use it to get down from a high building. Unwilling to consider the possibility that this is the real Spider-Man, his fellow passenger assumes Spidey is a masquerader and asks about his costume. A weary Spider-Man, perhaps grateful for someone to talk to, confesses to certain uncomfortable aspects of his outfit.But notice that even here, Spider-Man is not making jokes. He’s simply stating the truth, which turns out to be funny. In his first battle with Doctor Octopus at the bank, Spider-Man gets off a few lame bits of repartee. Otherwise, this Spider-Man is no comedian at all.

In my review of Tom DeFalco’s new Comics Creators on Spider-Man, I noted how writers Marv Wolfman, Roger Stern, and Paul Jenkins all emphasize the importance of Spider-Man’s sense of humor. Stern speaks of the side of Spider-Man’s personality that he compares to Bugs Bunny. Like Bugs, Spider-Man outwits and mocks self-important, violent, often bigger opponents. This should remind us that Spider-Man is what Kurt Busiek has called an “urban trickster.” He’s a positive, benevolent version of the trickster archetype. (The Joker is a negative version.) Hence, humor is an essential part of his character. Jenkins even argues that it is Peter Parker’s ability to laugh at his misfortunes that enables him to act as Spider-Man.

The first two movies portray their villains, Norman Osborn/Green Goblin and Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus as modern Jekyll/Hydes. This, indeed, is true to their origins in the comic books. But Spider-Man/Peter Parker also has a dual personality. The difference between Spider-Man and these two villains is that in the villains’ cases, the evil personality entirely supplants the good one. In contrast, Spider-Man’s persona and Peter Parker’s are integrated with each other. But the movies treat Spider-Man as exhibiting the same personality whether he is in costume or not. He may act in a more spectacular manner as Spider-Man, but he still seems as introverted, even glum, as Peter Parker does.

In contrast, in the comics, Spider-Man and Peter Parker are traditionally portrayed as different aspects of the same personality. (Marv Wolfman points out in DeFalco’s book that the two sides of Peter/Spidey even have different styles of humor.) Spider-Man is more extroverted, more uninhibited, and, wearing his mask, can get away with saying things that the more subdued Peter wouldn’t. Like a comedian who uses jokes to cope with his unhappy past, Peter Parker finds a means of escape from life’s everyday miseries through becoming Spider-Man. This certainly does not mean that Spider-Man never has problems or suffers tragedy. But as Spider-Man, Peter Parker can swing acrobatically around the city, and physically defeat his adversaries in combat. The comics have long made the point that Parker enjoys the freedom that being Spider-Man affords. And certainly Parker exults in Spider-Man’s humor. Being Spider-Man is a release for the usually downtrodden Peter Parker.

Spider-Man is not only in the tradition of Bugs Bunny, but of live action silent movie comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd: “little guys” who contend with bigger, more powerful opponents and end up performing spectacular physical feats. Spidey is also fits into the tradition of the fast-talking comedian in talking pictures like Bob Hope or Woody Allen, who makes fun of his adversaries. Whereas Hope and Allen portrayed comedic cowards, Spider-Man is like a fusion between the smart aleck comedian and the traditional action hero. He can outdo his nemesis both verbally and physically.

Spider-Man’s sense of comedy is also yet another factor that set him apart from the stolid DC superheroes of the time like Superman. It’s true that Batman and Robin from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s would engage in humorous banter while fighting bad guys. But Stan Lee’s Spider-Man had an individual style all his own, or, rather, Stan Lee’s own, which subsequent generations of Spider-writers learned to imitate. That style has been watered down over the decades, until today there’s nothing vivid or surprising about Spider-Man’s repartee in the comics. Maybe that’s why Spider-Man isn’t witty at all in the movies.

Lee and Ditko’s 1960s Spider-Man was an ironic take on the standard conventions of the superhero genre. Irony can be grim: Peter Parker was inadvertently responsible for the murder of his uncle. But irony can also be humorous, as in Spider-Man’s jibes at his enemies or at the absurd aspects of the idea of a guy dressing up as a spider to fight crime. Irony is part of Stan Lee’s and Spider-Man’s world views. Spider-Man’s humor expresses an important side of his outlook on life. Spider-Man’s comedian side is such an essential part of his character that it’s baffling that the movie almost entirely ignores it.

Perhaps it has to do with Raimi’s focus on the “great responsibility” theme. His Spider-Man is so focused on his moral duty, and so driven by guilt, that being Spider-Man is no emotional release for Peter Parker at all. The Spider-Man costume is merely his uniform for doing his job. In or out of costume, he is still the same gloomy soul.

Maybe this will change. The Spider-Man of the first movie decides that his duty precludes the possibility of love with Mary Jane. By the end of the second movie, Parker has decided he can have both. I wonder if in the third movie he will have achieved enough balance in his life that he can allow himself to make jokes, to cast off inhibitions, and, when he is not beset by disaster, to have a good laugh.

YOSEMITE OCK

In Newsweek‘s June 28, 2004 cover story on Spider-Man 2, Alfred Molina says, “I felt very strongly about keeping the rather dry, sardonic humor he has in the comic books.” To which my reaction was: what the hell is he talking about? Stan Lee’s Doctor Octopus is not known for having any sense of humor, and subsequent writers have followed his lead. He instead indulges in Lee’s standard kind of dialogue for his more intelligent villains: a combination of chest-thumping boasts, egocentric self-praise, grandiose visions of his goals, dire threats, contemptuous insults, and boilerplate bluster. Maybe this is the sort of thing Molina finds funny, but it doesn’t fit the description of “dry, sardonic humor.”

However, Molina is on target with his other observation about Octopus in Newsweek: “He’s a bit like Richard III, who tells you exactly what he’s going to do, how he’s going to do it, and how he feels about it. Like all great villains, he’s completely transparent.” In DeFalco’s book, Stan Lee talks about how Shakespeare’s language influenced his own writing. While Lee’s Doc Ock doesn’t reach the grandiose heights of Doctor Doom, Molina is quite correct in intuiting that Lee was attempting to endow Ock with an elevated, theatrical speaking style comparable to that of Shakespearean villains. (The comics’ Spider-Man is Shakespearean in his own way, with his characteristic self-searching soliloquies.)

As I mentioned in one of my 1602 columns, this kind of stylized language seems to be out of favor nowadays, and all too often Lee and other Marvel writers made it seem corny. But Doc Ock’s tirades are important to the comedic side of Spider-Man. Ock is Spider-Man’s straight man, as are many of Spidey’s other foes. Doc Ock represents the dark side of the ubermensch concept: the superhuman who sees himself as superior to ordinary people. Spider-Man, though, is the superhuman as everyman, who remains down to earth, grounded, one of us, and who fights on our behalf. So it is right and appropriate that Spider-Man forsakes dramatic, elevated language for colloquial humor, and cuts Doctor Octopus’s self-important boasting to ribbons with his sharp shafts of ridicule. It’s like Yosemite Sam yelling that he’s the roughest, toughest, sharp-shootingest hombre west of the Rio Grande, only to be informed by Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon.”

In an interview she gave before the first Spider-Man movie opened, Kirsten Dunst said that she originally thought she would be playing Spider-Man’s first real girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. Now there is testimony to the strength of the Spider-Man legend in American popular culture. Baby Boomers may not like to think about it, but Gwen Stacy died before Kirsten Dunst was born. And yet Dunst knew about Gwen.

Yet perhaps Dunst was intuiting something about the Mary Jane of the movies. The movie MJ has the same name and hair color as the original comics’ Mary Jane. As in the comics, the movies’ Mary Jane lived next door to the Parkers, had an unhappy family life, and went into acting and modeling. She eventually learns that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and by the end of Spider-Man 2 Dunst’s MJ even calls him “tiger,” the comic book Mary Jane’s trademark pet name for Peter. (“Oh, Peter,” Gerry Conway once had the comics’ Mary Jane affectionately say, “I call you tiger because you’re not.”)

But other than that, the movie Mary Jane is very different from Stan Lee’s co-creation. The original comics version of MJ did not go to high school with Peter, though the Ultimate Spider-Man continuity makes her his classmate.

More importantly, the movie Mary Jane does not have the sassy, sensual, good-humored personality with which Stan Lee endowed her, and which won over readers’ affections.

In the original comics Peter Parker did not meet Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane Watson until he started college. While Steve Ditko was still drawing and plotting the series, Gwen began as a variation on Peter’s high school classmate Liz Allan: a snooty girl contemptuous of this new arrival. Subsequently, under the team of Stan Lee and artist John Romita, Sr., Gwen evolved into Peter Parker’s first true love. Lee and Romita turned her into their image of the perfect woman: beautiful, sweet, without faults. Lee says in the DeFalco book that Gwen was the woman Peter should have married.

In contrast, Mary Jane appears to have been the “Bad Girl,” or, rather, the “Not-as-Good Girl” to serve as counterpoint to Gwen’s “Good Girl.” Mary Jane was a “party girl,” though she wasn’t really bad. In 1960s comics under the Comics Code, she could hardly be “bad,” anyway: she couldn’t have been shown sleeping around, although her dalliance with Harry Osborn did not reflect well on her. Gwen and Mary Jane were like Spider-Man’s answer to Betty and Veronica in Archie, or maybe like the 1950s-1970s versions of Lois Lane and Lana Lang. Each duo was competing over the hero, but readers were meant to see Betty and Lois as the worthier of each pair.

What made Mary Jane less perfect than Gwen by the standards of that time was her apparent lack of moral seriousness: the early MJ just seemed to be out for a good time. The 1960s Mary Jane was also more sexually aggressive than Gwen. There was no hint that any of these characters were sleeping together, but it was very clear that Mary Jane exulted in the sexual side of her being. Despite her equally short outfits, and a particularly sexy dance sequence early on (Amazing Spider-Man #47), Gwen was more decorous about such matters.

So Gwen was the Ideal Girlfriend, but, not surprisingly, Mary Jane was more vivid and interesting as a character; her scenes were more fun to read than Gwen’s. As Lee acknowledges in the DeFalco book, the readers responded to Mary Jane more than he had intended.

As a genuine traditionalist, Roger Stern, as he states once more in the DeFalco book, has long opposed Mary Jane’s marriage to Peter in the comics. Stern still realizes that Mary Jane was the (rather tame) “Bad Girl” to Gwen’s “Good Girl,” and insists that Mary Jane should only act as a “spoiler” who resurfaces from time to time to complicate Peter’s life.

In the early 1970s John Romita and writer Gerry Conway decided to shake up the Spider-Man series by having the Green Goblin kill Gwen. This took place in the celebrated sequence at a New York City bridge (in Amazing Spider-Man #121-122 in 1973) that was restaged, with Mary Jane and a happier denouement, in the first Spider-Man movie. (Writer Gerry Conway, who killed Gwen and ““ temporarily, as it turned out ““ Norman Osborn, and turned Harry Osborn into the second Green Goblin, is the great unacknowledged source for the two Spider-Man movies.)

This storyline assured the immortality of Gwen Stacy as a character. Stan Lee had put Gwen up on a pedestal, and it worked in a decade before feminism took hold in American popular culture. But perfect Gwen was too two-dimensional to work as a character in later decades. Killing her off was the best thing for her character. It seems more appropriate for Gwen to seem perfect as the saintly deceased girlfriend, an icon rather than a living human being.

With Gwen gone, Mary Jane was the obvious candidate to become the series’ new leading lady. Conway even did a sequence that seems to anticipate the future, in which Peter, grieving over Gwen’s death, enters an apartment and a somber Mary Jane closes the door after them. Even despite a long period in which Mary Jane was absent from the series, no other credible candidate for leading lady emerged. (Anyone else remember Cissy Ironwood? You see my point.) One could even argue that the Black Cat took over MJ’s role as the Bad Girl, and the Cat really was bad: she was a criminal and she slept around!

By introducing the idea that Mary Jane had figured out that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, Tom DeFalco set the character on her new path in the comics. He also established her unhappy childhood and the nasty father who turns up in the first movie. DeFalco turned Mary Jane into Peter’s confidante, who shared his secret and could empathize with his unhappiness thanks to her own. Mary Jane now had a new depth and seriousness that made it easier to regard her as a potential leading lady for the series. Unlike Gwen, Mary Jane had proved capable of growth and evolution as a character. Although DeFalco had not intended it, he had set her on the road that led to her marriage to Peter in the comics later in the 1980s.

In his subsequent graphic novel, Spider-Man: Parallel Lives, Gerry Conway took DeFalco’s concept further, establishing that MJ had learned that Peter was Spider-Man on the night of Uncle Ben’s death. Conway made it clear that Mary Jane’s carefree “party girl” persona was a construct like Peter Parker’s Spider-Man identity. It was her own “mask” through which she could escape for a time from the unhappiness that scarred her childhood. Of course, MJ’s public persona involved a constant, irreverent wit. It was a variation of Stan Lee’s sense of humor, just as Spider-Man’s was.

So, Conway’s point was that Peter and Mary Jane had each developed dual identities, and that they were actually soulmates, made for each other.

But just as the title character of Spider-Man 2 lacks his comics’ counterpart’s rapid-fire repartee, the movies’ Mary Jane shows few signs of the irreverence and extroverted sexuality that made the comics character so appealing and distinctive. In fact, the filmmakers could easily have tied the movie MJ’s insistence on marrying John Jameson to the comic book MJ’s carefree, fun-seeking public persona. In denial about her continuing feelings for Peter, the movie Mary Jane could have assumed her happy-go-lucky facade in trying to convince herself and others that she’d just go on to the next good marital prospect.

No wonder that the first movie’s Green Goblin ended up dangling MJ from a bridge. It seems appropriate that Kirsten Dunst goes from Mary Jane’s deep red hair in the first film to a blonder color in the new movie. Is Dunst’s character really closer to being Gwen Stacy than the original Lee-Romita version of Mary Jane Watson?Yet the movies don’t turn Mary Jane into the idealized figure that Gwen became. Though in the second movie her face seems to be on posters all around the city, the films’ Mary Jane remains grounded and down to Earth. Peter Parker never told Gwen Stacy he was Spider-Man; perhaps, in keeping with attitudes in the 1960s, he thought she couldn’t handle the truth about him. (Women were considered fragile back then: Peter feared if his Aunt May found out he was spider-Man, she would drop dead!) In the comics, Mary Jane discovered his dual identity on her own, eventually grew to accept the fact, became Peter’s confidant and their friendship evolved into love. She could share his troubles, whereas we never found out whether Gwen could.

The movie Mary Jane proves equally capable of accepting Peter as Spider-Man, and in fact, insists that she can share his potential dangers of his life. In this she is indeed like the Mary Jane of the comics as the character evolved in the 1980s.

And has anyone noticed how the end of Spider-Man 2 duplicates the end of Tim Burton’s first Batman? In each case, the masked hero does not want to reveal his secret identity to the leading lady, but she finds out anyway. Each film ends with the leading lady committed to a relationship with the costumed hero, and waiting as he goes off on another mission. But as Alfred drives her away, Vicki Vale seems accepting but not entirely happy about the situation; she will not return in the next Batman film. On the other hand, Mary Jane enthusiastically approves as Spider-Man, in response to a police siren, swings out to help. This is a partnership that could last.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

On the very day that Spider-Man 2 opened, I filled out and handed in the necessary paperwork for teaching my course in “Comics as Literature” at New York University this fall. NYU is the model for Empire State University, where Peter Parker attended college in the comics. In the movies, however, Peter attends my own alma mater, Columbia University. (Though the movie doesn’t say so, he must be on full scholarship. How else could he afford it?) Nowadays I live not too far from Forest Hills, the site of Peter’s high school, Midtown High (before the current Marvel administration transplanted it to Manhattan, perhaps hoping no one would notice). All this and I share Spider-Man’s first name. Talk about parallel lives.

If you’re interested in the course, it’s listed at NYU’s website.

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

To review a superhero movie like the brand new blockbuster Spider-Man 2 for this column, I intend to examine it in the context of the comics upon which it is based. What does Spider-Man 2 draw from the history of over forty years’ worth of Spider-Man comics? How does it reinterpret the comics’ themes and characters, for better or for worse?

The opening credit sequence for both Spider-Man movies prominently feature the line “Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.” (You’ll notice that’s significantly not the same as “Based on the comic book series created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko,” which, presumably, would have a different legal meaning.) Lee and Ditko created Spider-Man, but the movies also draw on elements of the series as they evolved over the following four decades in the hands of a long succession of other writers and artists. (For example, the climactic confrontation in the first movie, with the Green Goblin threatening to drop Mary Jane Watson from a New York City bridge, is an uncredited reworking of Gerry Conway and Gil Kane’s story of the death of Gwen Stacy in the comics.)

By examining these different writers’ and artists’ intentions in chronicling Spider-Man, we can gain insights into how the series has changed over the years, and how Sam Raimi’s movie versions reinterpret this long heritage.

The DVD set for Columbia and Marvel’s first Spider-Man movie includes a featurette on the history of Spider-Man in the comics. Stan Lee is interviewed, of course, and, not unexpectedly, Spider-Man’s original artist, Steve Ditko, who has always refused to give interviews, is not. But John Romita, Sr., the second artist on Amazing Spider-Man, speaks on camera. As for Lee and Romita’s successors on the characters, the documentary leaps through time to Todd McFarlane, who drew Spider-Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s. John Byrne, who worked on Spider-books shortly before the current Marvel administration took over, shows up. And everyone else in the documentary is a writer, artist, or Marvel executive who has worked on Spider-Man in recent years.

This, it would seem, is the official Marvel history of Spider-Man in the comics. There are the hallowed days when Stan Lee wrote the series, and there’s Now, with, it would seem, almost nothing (and no one) that the present Powers That Be consider to be of note in between. I have encountered this corporate sort of attitude before: that what is published Now is better than what was published Back Then before We took over. But this is not necessarily true.

Those who find this version of history to be so riddled with gaps as to resemble Swiss cheese should instead direct their attention to a new book by one of the people omitted from the Spider-Man DVD. Titan Books has just published Comics Creators on Spider-Man, a collection of interviews with Spider-Man‘s leading writers and pencillers by Tom DeFalco, who himself was an important editor and writer on the character.

Perhaps more importantly, DeFalco was also a longtime editor in chief at Marvel, who restored stability and communal feeling to Marvel editorial after the end of his predecessor’s troubled regime, and presided over one of the publishing division’s most prosperous period. Nonetheless, in yet another example of the Bizarro World rules that now govern the comics business, all that DeFalco is currently doing in comics is writing a series he co-created, Spider-Girl, a well-crafted series about an alternate timeline in which Peter Parker has a teenage daughter who has inherited his powers and succeeded him as a costumed crimefighter. (Marvel has recently released a digest-size paperback collection of the first Spider-Girl stories, if you’d like to see for yourself.)

But just as another Spider-editor in exile, Danny Fingeroth, found a new outlet for his knowledge and experience in comics by writing Superman on the Couch (see Comics in Context #41), Tom DeFalco has now compiled this excellent new book about Spider-Man, with interviews that are unfailingly informative, good-humored, and entertaining. It may amuse American readers that this book about a leading American superhero, since it is published by Titan, a British company, is full of British spellings (like “colour” for “color”).

Now you may ask why Marvel doesn’t publish a book like this itself. That’s a good question, but perhaps it’s just as well they didn’t. DeFalco leaves no gaps in his coverage: he deals with every period of Spider-Man’s comics history from his 1962 debut right through the present. There’s no Ditko interview, of course, and an editor’s note explains that contemporary Spider-Man writer J. Michael Straczynski declined to be interviewed. But virtually every other living major writer and penciller associated with Spider-Man is in the book. I would have liked to have seen interviews with some of the principal editors in Spider-Man’s history. such as Jim Salicrup and Danny Fingeroth, as well. But I can understand that there might not have been room, and the creative roles of editors Salicrup, Fingeroth, Ralph Macchio, and even DeFalco himself, are often mentioned by the interviewees.

This is not necessarily a book for people who only know Spider-Man from the movies or even from Spider-Man comics of the last few years. Though DeFalco provides helpful sidebars explaining various characters and story lines from the Spider-Man canon, this is the sort of book that contains not one but two discussions of a character as obscure as the Rocket Racer. So this is really a book for comics aficionados who already have some sense and knowledge of the four decade sweep of Spider-Man history and want to learn more. I would like to think there’s enough of an audience for this sort of book. Its potential readership could range from old-time fans who may no longer read Spider-Man comics but want to read more about the stories they remember from past decades, to new readers who are beginning to explore Marvel’s Essential and Masterworks reprint collections and want to learn more about Marvel’s rich past.

Unlike many interviewers in the comics press, DeFalco gives the reader a sense of what his interviewees are like as people: he asks them how they first discovered and came to love comics and the Spider-Man series in particular. He questions them about how they broke into comics, and I find it interesting to see how the process changed so considerably over the decades. Len Wein’s interview disturbingly points out how DC was initially more resistant towards the wave of Baby Boomers seeking to break into comics: he recalls that he and his friend, fellow writer Marv Wolfman, were unjustly suspected of stealing artwork from DC and fired simply because they were young. But Marvel seems to have been more welcoming, and DC eventually became more open to new talent. Even into the 1980s, it was still relatively easy to break into comics, with people working on fanzines, making personal contacts in the business, and sometimes even being invited to apply for a job. (That’s how it happened to me.) But times changed as the business grew: J. Marc DeMatteis reminisces affectionately about a devastatingly critical letter Paul Levitz sent him about his first submission in the 1980s, and artist Mark Buckingham recalls how formidable the odds against breaking in appeared by the decade’s end. By the end of the book, Brian Michael Bendis is saying how it took him nine years of trying to become an “overnight success”!

Not surprisingly, DeFalco is interested in exploring the craft of writing and drawing comics, so people seeking to make their careers in the business may find helpful hints from this book. (However, considering the depressed state of the business, maybe they should look elsewhere than comics for work! In his interview Ron Frenz recalls how he gave up a steady job in animation to go into comics. It’s hard to imagine someone doing that nowadays.)

Now, this is not a book that deals in the kind of lit crit analysis that is the stock in trade of this column. Nonetheless, there are gems to be mined in each of the interviews in DeFalco’s book. Let me be your tour guide and point out and comment on some that impressed me. (And then go get the book and find your own favorites.)

The interviews are arranged in chronological order, from the earliest people who worked on Spider-Man to the most recent. Hence it is Spider-Man’s co-creator, Stan Lee, who leads off the book. Now Lee’s interviews vary considerably in quality. There are those in which he is clearly just recycling his rote answers perfected over the decades of talking to the press. But Lee can be much more forthcoming and insightful when speaking with an interviewer with real knowledge of comics and with whom he feels comfortable. Tom DeFalco, his longtime professional colleague, with whom Lee has even worked on stories, fills the bill. I find DeFalco’s interview an illuminating supplement to themes in Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon’s admirable biography of Lee (see Comics in Context #15 and 16).

Asked about influences on his writing, Stan Lee names Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (as if to support Alan Moore’s theory that these authors wrote stories that were forebears of the superhero genre) as well as Mark Twain (which may benefit students of the history of American humor who may try to draw a line from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to Peter Parker). Lee cites great pulp characters who were proto-superheroes, including the Shadow and (of course) the Spider.

“Believe it or not,” Lee continues, “I also read Charles Dickens”; oh, I believe it. Dickens wrote fiction published in serial form, combined melodrama and humor, wrote coming-of-age stories about young heroes, set much of his work in the great metropolis of his country, and, consciously or intuitively, continually wrote stories along mythic patterns. Certainly I see the connection.

As for Shakespeare, Lee said he didn’t understand most of it until later in his life, but that “I loved the sound of his verse, the rhythm and the way his words came together. . . . That kind of dialogue sounded so dramatic to me. I’m kind of corny myself so I related to it.” This also makes sense. Lee’s understanding of Shakespeare’s content may be limited: I hope he’s joking in his apparent inability to distinguish between great poetry and “corn.” Still, he is clearly influenced by the sound of his language, in his grandiose story titles, in the elevated language of characters like Thor, the Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom, and even in the colloquial humor of characters like Spider-Man and the Thing, serving a similar purpose as the prose dialogue of Shakespearean clowns.

One potentially touchy topic is the question of whether Lee considers Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s co-creator. Lee’s answer is revealing in its ambiguity. He accepts Ditko’s contention that he is the co-creator because he designed the character’s visual appearance. In that respect, Lee agrees that Ditko is co-creator; here he is perhaps also bowing to the current belief in the comics industry that the original artist should get creator credit. Nonetheless, Lee also notes that “in my heart of hearts, I still feel that the guy who comes up with the original idea for something is the guy who created it.”

Showing his way with words, Lee describes his intention in creating Spider-Man with admirable conciseness: “I just wanted to do what I thought would be the first realistic superhero.” Of course, the Fantastic Four had preceded Spider-Man, but this nonetheless sums up perfectly what the revolutionary impact of Spider-Man was for solo superhero series.

Yet Lee also points to how what seems a revolutionary event in American popular culture may not appear so dramatic, even to its own instigator, at the time. Recalling how there were new trends for different genres in comics every few years, Lee says that when Fantastic Four became commercially successful, “I just assumed that it was the time for a superhero trend. I never thought it would last more than two or three years, if that long.” What might he have done differently had he known these characters would still be popular forty years hence ““ and making millions for their owners?

Lee also shows us that a writer’s creations do not always work the way he (consciously) intends them to. Asked to compare Spider-Man’s first real girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, to Mary Jane Watson, Lee praises Gwen as an ideal woman and declares that she would have made “the perfect wife” for Peter. Yet he confesses that despite his efforts with Gwen, the readers preferred Mary Jane, whom he describes as “hip and cool.” Perhaps the readers were right: Gwen was depicted as Lee’s idea of the Perfect Girlfriend, coming off as rather two-dimensional, whereas Mary Jane, freed from the necessity of acting the moral paragon, had more sheer vitality as a character, and seemed more real. It’s strange, then, that in the movies Mary Jane may have her comics namesake’s acting and modeling career, but lacks her humor and “cool.” It’s as if Kirsten Dunst was really cast as Gwen; no wonder her hair gets blonder in the second movie.

I’m intrigued by Lee’s own ambiguity towards the comics medium. He says that, yes, indeed, “I was intentionally trying to write the kind of stories that older readers would enjoy.” In another perfect phrase, he sums up, “I tried to make them fairy tales for grownups.” And yet shortly afterwards he confesses that “I always felt that I’d eventually get out of comics. I never felt it was a job for a grown man.” Despite his achievements, he still feels this way, confirming one of the points that Raphael and Sturgeon make about him. Of course, DeFalco points out that Lee is still doing comics projects occasionally, and Lee good-humoredly agrees that despite his efforts to leave, he keeps being asked to do comics and probably will never get out of the business. (He does not quote Al Pacino in Godfather 3, but might as well have.)

The interview with John Romita that follows confirms some things I already had heard: that Mary Jane was visually modeled after Ann-Margret (though I didn’t know Romita was specifically thinking of her in the movie Bye Bye Birdie), and that Lee and Ditko had disagreed over the true identity of the Green Goblin, who Ditko had wanted to be a nobody no one recognizes. (But Lee and Ditko had already done that with the unmasking of the Crime-Master!)

I had always assumed that when Romita succeeded Ditko as Spider-Man artist, a conscious decision was made to make Peter Parker look handsomer and more muscular. So it was a surprise to discover that this is yet another example of how the Spider-Man series evolved in a way that the creators did not consciously intend. Romita confesses that “I tried like crazy to make Peter look skinny and narrow-shouldered, but I just couldn’t do it.”

Again, I already knew that it was Romita who proposed killing off Gwen Stacy to shake up Spider-Man’s status quo. But I hadn’t known till this interview that Romita had been inspired by the unexpected death of the heroine Raven Sherman in Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates decades before. Caniff had with one stroke endowed the adventure comic strip with greater capacity for realism and a wider, darker emotional range; Gwen’s death had a similar impact on superhero comics, as Gerry Conway’s interview in this book emphasizes.

It’s good to be reminded by Romita’s interview that the comic books of the Golden and Silver Ages were influenced by adventure comic strips in their own classic period in the first half of the Twentieth Century, a body of work of which most contemporary comics pros and fans have little awareness. Romita credits Caniff’s Dragon Lady, the memorable villainess from “Terry,” as an inspiration for his visualization of the Kingpin’s wife Vanessa.

Similarly, the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age were an influence on Romita, who explains that he modeled Gwen’s father, Captain Stacy, on the craggy character actor Charles Bickford. It’s intriguing to me that Romita partially based the Kingpin on another character actor, Edward Arnold, perhaps best known now as a corporate villain in Frank Capra’s movies.

And I find it amusing that in designing the visuals for Daily Bugle editor Joe Robertson, Romita envisioned him as an ex-prizefighter. Romita reports that Lee ignored this; the moviemakers certainly didn’t pick up on it, making their Robertson look rather out of shape.

I hadn’t read that many interviews with Gerry Conway, Lee’s first successor as writer of Amazing Spider-Man (not counting a short period when Roy Thomas substituted for Stan), so I was surprised by how intelligently analytical he can be.

Certainly, Conway pins down the difference between Stan Lee and the first two major writers to come to Marvel after the revolution he launched: Roy Thomas, a former teacher, and Denny O’Neil, a future teacher, both of whom were born in a period between Lee’s “Greatest Generation” and the Baby Boomers like Conway. “Stan was something of a primitive,” Conway accurately observes, “and I mean that in a good way ““ he worked from the gut, inspired by instinct. On the other hand, Roy and Denny were both intellectuals of a sort, and their work was more sophisticated. They brought a deeper historical and literary understanding to the material.” This distinction is to a degree true of the Baby Boomer generation of writers whom Thomas would bring into Marvel: they saw the potential for building their own works of personal expression upon the imaginative foundation that Lee and his collaborators had laid.

Not only was Conway the first Boomer to write Spider-Man, but he reminds us that he was about the same age as Peter Parker at the time: still only nineteen! Boomers were growing up reading Silver Age Marvels in the 1960s and then taking over writing these very series in the 1970s.

Conway spends much of his interview discussing the death of Gwen Stacy, and, in particular, the mysterious snapping sound when Spider-Man caught the falling Gwen. Though this would not be made explicit in the comics for decades, the “snap” suggested that the impact of Spider-Man catching the fallen Gwen was what actually killed her. Even more directly than in the case of Uncle Ben, Spider-Man had inadvertently been responsible for the death of someone he loved.

Conway says that he did not think through what it meant when he placed the “snap” sound effect in the scene. But he has enough insight into the writing process to realize “It’s one of a very few inspired moments in my career when my subconscious mind made a choice that meant so much more than my conscious mind ever intended.”

Indeed, Conway says that he was not fully aware of how that scene altered the history of superhero comics until he read Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels, whose restaging of Gwen’s death is its climactic scene.

Referring to his own version of Gwen’s death, Conway asserts that “in that story, we introduced fatalism and despair into the comics universe.”

Indeed, when I’ve sought to figure out for myself exactly when the Silver Age ended, I come up with three landmarks: Jack Kirby’s departure from Marvel (To me, his “Fourth World” books for DC are not part of the Silver Age but of the period that followed), the end of Stan Lee’s run on Amazing Spider-Man, and the death of Gwen, which brought the optimistic spirit of the Silver Age to a decisive end.

Here’s another big surprise. I had always assumed that Conway had co-created the Punisher to be a continuing character, Marvel’s costumed counterpart to the Executioner, the leading character of a series of novels.

But no. Conway contends that he came up with the Punisher as “an afterthought to the Jackal,” the new criminal mastermind who first appeared in the same issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Originally Conway intended the Punisher to be “a one-shot character.” Once again, a comics character evolved in a direction that his creator had not originally intended. And indeed, the Punisher seems to me the most prominent Marvel lead character who has the least to do with the traditional Marvel spirit, as embodied in Stan Lee’s own scripts and characters.

Len Wein, like other interviewees from the 1970s, speaks of his awe at getting the opportunity to write Amazing Spider-Man. “I was scared. I wasn’t sure I was good enough.” This would be following in Stan Lee’s footsteps, working in the shadow of the classic stories he wrote. This is an awe that the first generation following Stan Lee, the Baby Boomers who grew up reading his comics, felt. It’s not something I detect in the interviews of the younger professionals here, or elsewhere.

Marv Wolfman introduces several recurring themes in this interview book. One is the question of just how old Peter Parker should be in the comics. Brian Bendis, in his interview in this book (as well as recently in his Comics series Alias) claims that Peter is now thirty! I’d be surprised if many others at Marvel agree; I think of him as no more than twenty-five. Considering how many interviewees here think that Peter should not have aged beyond his college years, it’s astonishing that he has nevertheless slowly grown even older over the decades.

Wolfman says that he once discussed this matter with Ditko, and they agreed that Spider-Man should have stayed sixteen years old. “Sixteen is the last year where you’re allowed to be a total foul-up,” Wolfman contends. “If he’s still fouling up as an adult, he just isn’t a hero anymore. He’s pathetic.”

Really? It’s good to know that adults never foul up. I wish someday I’d meet adults like that. I wish someday we’d even elect adults like that to national office. I somehow think that Spider-Man has relevance to people older than sixteen.

But Wolfman’s insistence that Spider-Man should have stayed sixteen may relate to his perception of a bigger, more serious problem: he says that “kids are no longer buying comics.” As a result, he says that series like Spider-Man are now aimed at an adult audience, and as a result “don’t sell or work quite as well.” Wolfman points out that series like Spider-Man can be written in a way to appeal both to younger readers and to older, more sophisticated ones. “I think we slowly weeded out the younger readers over the years by writing stories they couldn’t understand or be interested in,” Wolfman asserts.

I think Wolfman’s right about this. It’s important that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies don’t make the same mistake. Middle-aged movie critics like them, and so do the small children I saw at the Spider-Man 2 showing I attended. But how many young kids would respond as enthusiastically to current Spider-Man comics, even the Ultimate versions allegedly aimed at new, young readers? I don’t know if the main problem is the level of sophistication. I suspect it’s that over the decades superhero comics writers, with their emphasis on psychological themes and angst, have neglected the craft of entertaining their readers. How many adult fans of the Spider-Man movies, who respond to the joyous web-swinging sequences, the kinetic power of the fight sequences, and even the sheer romantic fervor of the love scenes, would find anything in the comics that create the same visceral impact?

If the writers of the 1970s and early 1980s were intimidated by the idea of living up to Stan Lee’s example on The Amazing Spider-Man, Wolfman accuses more recent writers of straying too far from what Lee intended. Wolfman begins by talking about the necessity of getting a character’s individual speaking style correct: “If you don’t get the nuance of the dialogue right, the entire character falls apart.” (So, one might ask, does the movie Spider-Man, who refrains from his familiar Stan Lee-style witticisms, really sound like Spider-Man?) From there Wolfman moves to the greater issue that, as he sees it, “today’s writers are more concerned with writing a book in their own, individual style than in preserving a character.” Wolfman contends that various contemporary writers are more interested in “making a splash” in writing a long-running character than in maintaining the character’s consistency, and that “Strangely enough, the companies seem to encourage this attitude.”

Maybe that’s not so strange nowadays when characters get rebooted and revised over and over, or get spun off into alternate versions as in Marvel’s Ultimate books. Classic stories that shaped the characters’ personalities are summarily dumped from the official canon. Even Stan Lee’s own classic stories get rewritten, altering the dialogue he crafted to express the characters’ personalities.

Quite rightly, Wolfman declares that “Writers and artists should consider themselves temporary custodians of the characters, and changes should only be made for the long-term health of the title.”

The problem is that a lot of changes that people might well argue were mistakes ““ aging Peter Parker to (possibly) thirty years old, marrying him to Mary Jane, killing off Aunt May (temporarily, as it turned out) and then revealing his secret identity to her after her resurrection, and the infamous Clone Saga ““ were all made by people thinking they were good for the “long-term health” of the series! Even Stan Lee himself approved of the idea of Peter’s wedding! What’s really needed are editors and writers who have enough analytic ability to understand what makes the character and the series work, and enough sense of historical perspective to realize what kind of changes might be good in the short run but damaging in the long run.

One of the worst problems is the hubris of certain editors and writers who will kill off a character or destroy a major element of a series on the assumption that just because they think the character or element has run its course, no one else will ever want to use it or imagine anything good to do with it.

Wolfman also initiates what becomes a recurring discussion of Spider-Man’s sense of humor. It is, Wolfman says, the way for Peter to express his “inner silliness.” Wolfman incisively observes that “Peter’s jokes were very inward and almost negative towards himself. Spider-Man’s humor was exactly the opposite, because he was free to say whatever was on his mind.”

There’s a great deal to Spider-Man’s humor beneath the surface entertainment value. The humor is a form of release for Parker’s introverted, troubled personality. Certainly in his early stories, Peter Parker is shy, inhibited, even repressed. Becoming Spider-Man affords him physical release: swinging from rooftops, fighting his enemies. Spider-Man’s jokes provide a different kind of release. Rather than suffer in silence under life’s burdens, he can laugh at them. Instead of having to endure J. Jonah Jameson’s tirades as Peter Parker, he can pull pranks on him as Spider-Man. Peter Parker has to follow all of society’s rules; Spider-Man can merrily overturn them. Even as he physically battles adversaries like Doctor Octopus, Spider-Man verbally cuts them down to size. countering their egocentric bluster with witty ridicule.

The humor is a key to understanding that Peter Parker and Spider-Man represent different sides of the same personality. Wolfman realizes that Peter’s jokes should differ from those Spider-Man makes. Peter’s own jokes are self-deprecating ones, efforts to make light on his own troubles, which actually express the gloom and pessimism in his personality. In the wonderfully funny scene in the elevator in Spider-Man 2, in which Spider-Man makes fun of how uncomfortable wearing his costume could be, those are more like the kind of jokes that Wolfman attributes to his Peter side. Then again, perhaps that’s appropriate, since the other guy in the elevator doesn’t realize he’s talking to the real Spider-Man.

Usually, though, putting on his mask enables Peter Parker to act in a more extroverted, uninhibited, and daring way than he would in his everyday identity. The masked Spider-Man turns his humor outward: escaping his preoccupation with Peter’s miseries, he has no qualms about mocking other people who are deserving targets.

In his interview Roger Stern pursues this theme. “Being Spider-Man is a release for Peter.” Stern says, “He can put on a mask and get away with anything he wants. He can even act like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.”

Way back in the 1980s, in my column “The Enchanted Drawing” for the magazine Comics Feature, I did an article finding similarities between Bugs Bunny and Spider-Man. They’re both modern versions of the trickster archetype, little guys who outwit and outmaneuver bugger, stronger, more self-important opponents.

It’s a cliche, but with a certain degree of truth to it, that comedians ““ many of them at least ““ use humor to compensate for unhappiness in their lives. It’s certainly true of Spider-Man. It’s important to the concept of the character that Spider-Man is a comedian. So it’s strange that the movies mostly ignore this side of his personality. He can go completely berserk.

Recalling how he first became interested in comics, Stern recalls that “I started buying comic books because they were. . .just a dime! Anyone could afford that!” And thus Stern concisely sums up how the demographics for comic books have changed since the 1960s. Comic books have gone from being a source of entertainment that any kid could easily afford to an expensive hobby for adults with more than enough disposable income and time.

Stern is the sole interviewee to take a strong stand against the way that Mary Jane has evolved in the comics from the “party girl” whom Stan Lee first wrote. “She worked best as a spoiler,” Stern argues, “an old girlfriend who would occasionally appear to mess up Peter’s life,” and, indeed, that is how he used to write her.

It was DeFalco himself who revealed that Mary Jane had long known that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and who filled in her personal background, revealing that MJ used her “party girl” persona as a means of escaping from her personal troubles just as Peter used the masked persona of spider-Man to rise above his own. Gerry Conway built considerably on DeFalco’s foundation in his Spider-Man: Parallel Lives graphic novel about Peter and Mary Jane. It was creating this other, more serious side to Mary Jane that made her later wedding to Peter in the comics possible, and in the movies the “serious” MJ has almost entirely supplanted Stan Lee’s original characterization of her. I rather wish that DeFalco and Conway had discussed the evolution of MJ, or that DeFalco had debated Stern on her characterization: one of the few important omissions in his book is its failure to more fully explore her personality.

My favorite part of Stern’s interview comes when he shows how though Spider-Man is an enduringly relevant character, thematically he is very much a product of the time in which he was created. “Spider-Man was a book about me!” Stern exclaims. “Spider-Man transcends my generation, but he was really the first superhero of the Baby Boomer generation. Superman and Captain America came out of my father’s generation, but Peter was a real child of the Sixties. He endlessly questioned what he was doing and why he was doing it. He questioned everything.”

That’s true indeed, but I’d amend what Roger says to make this point. The Boomers growing up in the 1960s embraced Spider-Man and his fellow Marvel heroes, and, like Conway, some Boomers soon found themselves writing these characters they so loved. But Spider-Man and the other classic Marvel heroes of the 1960s were created by Stan Lee and his contemporaries: in other words, by middle-aged men. The Silver Age Marvel heroes found an audience among the Boomers, but they were the creations of their fathers’ generation, the “Greatest Generation” that had grown up through the Great Depression and World War II. Couldn’t Spider-Man’s questioning of himself and his world also reflect Stan Lee’s own questioning of himself and the world having reached the midpoint of his life? Do Spider-Man’s ““ and, presumably, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s ““ angst, uncertainty and disillusionment reflect those of a generation who endured the Depression and World War but still found themselves dissatisfied in life, seeking to do what’s right but wondering which path to take?

In his interview artist Ron Frenz reminds us of an important point that many recent writers on Spider-Man (even in the movies) have forgotten. It seems as the decades have passed, adult life has taken on the value system of high school: it is now conventional wisdom to brand the school-age Peter Parker as a “nerd” or “geek’ (words that became popular after the 1960s), as if everyone had decided that Parker’s high school nemesis Flash Thompson was the arbiter of social standards.

Frenz points out that “If you look back on Stan and Steve’s original stories, you’ll see that he may have been introverted, intelligent and misunderstood but he wasn’t a nerd. . . He was just us. He was one of the many invisible people that populate a high school, someone for the popular kids to torment.” In other words, don’t blame the victim for his mistreatment by his tormentors. To condescend to Peter Parker is to miss one of the points of Stan Lee’s stories.

In his interview Len Wein laments that nowadays comics writers and artists don’t have influences outside comics. This isn’t entirely true: in the rarely-seen documentary I worked on, Sex, Lies and Super Heroes, Neil Gaiman, a contemporary comics writer who clearly reads much more than comics, makes a similar complaint about American comics writers before the medium’s British invasion.

Still, how often do you see an interview with a mainstream comics artist who talks about influences from in the fine art world? (Artists in that realm may not have dealt in the craft of storytelling through sequential art, but they surely provide examples in other aspects of art.)

At least in his interview in this book, Todd McFarlane refers to leading illustrator Norman Rockwell: it’s not Rembrandt, but at least it’s outside comics! And writer J. M. DeMatteis reveals that he based his interpretation of Kraven the Hunter in the classic “Kraven’s Last Hunt” on the works of Dostoevsky.

DeMatteis provides the perfect counterpoint to Marv Wolfman’s argument that Spider-Man’s struggle to do what’s right reflects only the mindsets of the immature teenager. Yet to DeMatteis, that struggle is “one of the reasons why I identify with him so much. I really strive to be a decent human being, to live my life the right way, but, God knows, I screw up as much as or more than anyone else. And when I do something that I think is wrong or if I hurt someone’s feelings ! can easily collapse into a puddle of remorse and guilt. Well, that’s Peter Parker! Stan Lee injected him with a very healthy dose of Jewish guilt.” Works for lapsed Catholics like myself, too. DeMatteis sees just why Spider-Man’s saga remains relevant for readers from teenagers through middle-age. (And again, remember that it was a middle-aged writer, voicing his own emotional concerns, who co-created Spider-Man in the first place.)

Artist Mark Bagley and writers Howard Mackie and DeMatteis each reminisce about the tremendous enthusiasm that they and their colleagues had about the notorious “Clone Saga” of the 1990s. It had by now sunk in that having Peter marry Mary Jane (a) made him too happy, whereas Peter works best as a character when he is plagued by life’s problems, and (b) made him seem too mature, whereas Peter Parker should always seem young. So it was decided to simplify Spider-Man’s history and revitalize the series by revealing that the Spider-Man/Peter Parker who had appeared in the comics since 1975 was really a clone. Thus the Peter who was happily married to Mary Jane could be sent off to live Happily Ever After with her, and the “real” Spidey could return to live the lonely, angst-ridden life that the creative team realized he should have. To his credit, editor in chief DeFalco initially resisted this idea, but he eventually gave in.

With perhaps bitter irony, Mackie reports that “The marketing and sales geniuses . . .wanted us to stretch the story out. ‘Do more clones. Clones are great, we love clones.” I find myself exasperated by the current conventional wisdom that the Marvel comics of the early 1990s were all dreadful books cynically churned out by greedy creative teams. Mackie and his cohorts make it clear that they thought they were engaged in an exciting, imaginative, genuinely daring creative project, and Mackie reminds us that initially it was a great commercial success. If everyone hated the Marvel books of the early 1990s, then who was buying them?

Yet as DeFalco and Stern agree in the latter’s interview, the Clone Saga was ultimately a bad idea. That was no surprise to me at the time: Marvel was effectively telling every Spider-Man reader who’d come on board after 1975 that the stories he’d read didn’t count! I suppose the real surprise was that whereas DC had gotten away repeatedly with consigning past continuity to oblivion, Marvel was unable to get away with a similar tactic.

But it’s interesting to read interviews like Mackie’s to see how so many creative people can get so swept up in enthusiasm for a direction for a series that only a few years later is regarded as so wrongheaded. Mackie also reports that he had wanted Peter and Mary Jane to have a child. Yet consider Danny Fingeroth’s persuasive case in Superman on the Couch that Peter should stay quite young, implying he should never get to the point of fatherhood. (It used to be that most people I knew in comics agreed that it was unfair to new, young readers to let the characters age just because we ourselves were getting older. High school age kids should be able to experience Peter Parker as their contemporary just as we did.)

DeMatteis, Bagley and Mackie all defend killing off Aunt May in the 1990s. Yet look at the ways that Paul Jenkins and J. Michael Straczynski have been able to use the character since her resurrection; the movies also underline that May had too much potential to be written out permanently.

Finally, the book concludes with several interviews with Spider-Man chroniclers of the new century. Writer Paul Jenkins discusses several recent Spider-Man tales of his own. Those of you who have read them will realize they demonstrate that neither the character nor his forty-two-year-old continuity is exhausted, and writers such as Jenkins can still turn out memorably good stories, some of which may eventually become classics themselves.

Jenkins brings the theme of Spider-Man as comedian to its culmination in the book, arguing that it is Peter Parker’s ability to laugh at his tribulations that makes it possible for him to be Spider-Man. I’d say that if Parker’s life sometimes includes tragedy, in part Spider-Man also represents the spirit of comedy.

Ultimate Spider-Man writer Brian Michael Bendis’s interview shows us how the Baby Boomer writers’ and editors’ insistence on aging Peter Parker eventually backfired on them. I have observed before that if one pushes a longrunning series too far in the wrong direction, it will eventually ricochet back. And so it is that former Marvel President Bill Jemas, believing that Peter Parker should still be a young student, created Marvel’s new Ultimate line of comics, with their own continuity, in which a high school age Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man in the early 21st century.

So now Marvel is stuck with its own version of Earth-2., and with both an adult Peter Parker and an adolescent version, each with a different and increasingly complicated history. This situation strikes me as being a time bomb that will eventually explode.

Bendis tells an affecting anecdote about being present when Stan Lee first watched the initial Spider-Man movie and seeing him choke up at the end.

Throughout DeFalco’s book there are the expected recurring references to the sad state of today’s comics industry. So many of the interviewees are no longer working for Marvel, and some are no longer even in comics. (It is good to see that Marv Wolfman report that he is writing episodes of Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans series. After all, the series is based on the version of the Titans he co-created in the 1980s!)

But all of them regard their time in comics and working on Spider-Man with affection. Spider-Man writer David Micheline tells in his interview how he once appeared on a panel with three prose writers and amazed them by saying he had written over five hundred published stories. That’s because he was a comics writer, and Micheline says, “I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I was appreciative of what I had when I had it.” Roger Stern exclaims to DeFalco, “Of course, I miss writing comics in general. It was the best job in the world!”

What Tom DeFalco has done in compiling this book of interviews is to showcase the history of Spider-Man comics as a great pop culture tradition to which all these writers and artists were significant contributors. Stan Lee handed the reins to Gerry Conway, and they have been passed down, decade after decade, to new writers and artists, right into this new century. Brian Bendis remarks in his interview that “A lot of pop culture only has a two-year shelf life nowadays. Things go away almost immediately. People love them and then they’re gone.” But Spider-Man has proved an exception. “I wasn’t joking when I compared Spider-man to Shakespeare earlier,” he tells DeFalco. “We have to acknowledge when something becomes a kind of mythology.”

Len Wein puts it best. DeFalco asked him what his favorite thing about his run on Amazing Spider-Man was. Len replies, “My favorite thing about the run is that I actually had a run. I was part of Spider-Man’s history… For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that a full set of [Amazing] Spider-Man comics measures three feet on a bookshelf. Part of the joy I get from my time on Amazing [Spider-Man] is looking at those three feet and knowing that I wrote these two inches right here. Two inches in which I was part of the amazing history of this contemporary fantasy. I have contributed to the lore of an ongoing American myth, and that’s a great feeling.”

So how have Sam Raimi and his collaborators contributed to this great pop culture myth with their new Spider-Man movie? Keep what I’ve said this week in mind, and we’ll examine that subject in this column’s next installment.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

In a recent TV Guide interview (June 13-19, 2004), Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, jokingly complains about the title of the new comics series he is writing for Marvel, Astonishing X-Men. “I kinda wish they hadn’t saddled me with that title. Does it have to be astonishing every month?”

As his interview in the first volume of Fantagraphics’ new Peanuts reprint series reminds us, Charles M. Schulz hated the title his comic strip was saddled with, but not even with all his tremendous success did he ever get to change it. Despite all his clout, Whedon is similarly stuck. (Would he have found it easier to be “uncanny” every month?)

When I left off in my last column, halfway through Astonishing X-Men #1, Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Emma Frost (the White Queen) were in bed together when suddenly Logan (Wolverine) appeared at the foot of the bed and accuses Scott of unfaithfulness to the memory of his deceased (yet again) wife Jean. Royally pissed off, Scott fired one of his optic power beam, blasting Wolverine through the window.

Last time I mentioned that Astonishing X-Men #1, perhaps inevitably, carried echoes of some of Whedon’s past work. Here I am reminded of the way Spike would needle Angel about their past sexual relationships with Buffy.

In fact now the similarity between Wolverine and Spike comes clear: each is an outsider with a violent past, a former outlaw, a rebel by temperament, and an observer with an ironic perspective.

I wonder whether anyone at Marvel is really happy with the Scott-Emma relationship. Rachel in Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men #444, Kitty in Whedon’s Astonishing #1, and Wolverine in both books seem to be voicing not only their own but the writers’ dislike of this relationship. It was other writers who turned Scott and Frost into a couple; Claremont and Whedon have inherited the situation. I wonder how long it will last.

If Wolverine resembles Spike here, then Cyclops is the Angel analogue, reacting the way that Angel might to Spike’s taunts: though he resorts to violence, Scott’s attitude in talking to Wolverine is ““ more proper and reserved, but rage is clearly seething beneath. In fact, Scott, beneath the contained facade, seems angrier than Wolverine.

“This is good,” Scott says, masking his fury beneath understated dialogue. “The guy who’s tried to steal my wife since the day he met us is gonna tell me all about what’s proper.”

Well, to nitpick, Wolverine met Scott before he met Jean: Cyclops helped Professor Xavier recruit Wolverine and the other “new” X-Men while Jean and other original team members were being held captive by Krakoa the Living island in Giant-Size X-Men #1.

It’s more important to observe that there’s also a certain revisionism at work here, and Whedon’s not the only one guilty of this. Chris Claremont toyed with showing Wolverine’s attraction to Jean in his early years writing the series. Later, in Classic X-Men #1, Claremont wrote new scenes set soon after Jean was rescued from Krakoa. In one of these Claremont showed Wolverine making advances towards Jean, and depicted the chemistry between them.

Nonetheless, for decades since those early days, Wolvy did not seem interested in Jean romantically. For one thing, beginning with Uncanny X-Men #118, way back in 1979, he was in love with the Japanese noblewoman Mariko. But since the first X-Men movie revived the Scott-Jean-Logan triangle, the comics have brought it back. Indeed, from what Scott says here, it seems we are to believe that the triangle has been active all along.

Wolverine responds to Cyclops’ accusation with one of his own, claiming that the only reason” Jean and Scott remained a couple is that she was “too strong to give in to what she really wanted” (meaning her attraction to Wolverine), “and you were too scared.” Attempting to compliment Jean’s strength of character, Logan actually comes off as presumptuous. What if Jean really wanted Scott? Logan’s egotistical enough to think that Jean really wanted him; maybe Scott isn’t the only one in denial.

Then again, by saying she was “strong enough” to resist him, perhaps Logan is actually admitting he would not be good for her. In that case, Logan’s surface egotism covers over his insecurities.

So there’s a question here as to what Logan’s motives are in challenging Scott this way. Are they still fighting over who should have Jean? Or is Logan angry because he believes Jean and Scott belonged together as a couple, and that Scott betrayed her by turning to Frost, even before Jean’s (most recent) demise?

And what does Logan mean by that last part about Scott being “too scared” to give in to what he really wanted?

Does he mean that Scott really wanted a “bad girl” like Frost all along, and that Scott really didn’t love Jean? No wonder Cyclops replies first with an understated threat (“Hey, Logan. That healing power’s about to come in really handy.”) and then an off-camera power blast. For the traditionally introverted Cyclops, actions convey his emotions more powerfully than words.

Notice Scott’s dry wit just before he lets Logan have it with another optic blast: “Hey, Logan. That healing power’s about to come in really handy.” Again, this is not the humorless Cyclops of yore. Moreover, though it is hardly a mature response to reply to insults with violence, Whedon is making an important point here: his version of Cyclops is no wimp.

At times in the past one might have wondered just how suitable Scott is to be leader. Claremont once (in Uncanny X-Men #201) even had Storm defeat him in a duel to determine who should lead the team. How could Scott, who could seem to be teacher’s pet, keep a strong-willed, born rebel like Wolverine in line? Certainly Cyclops does not seem to be a strong leader in the X-Men movies: in X2 he is captured and the team members mostly operate independently of him. Viewers unfamiliar with the comics might even wonder why Jean sticks with the bland movie version of Scott instead of giving in to Wolverine. This romantic triangle is sagging on one side.

Whedon’s Cyclops is tough-minded in his own way, perhaps as much so as Wolverine. It now becomes clear why Cyclops outranks Wolverine on the team.

Watching the two men fight over the absent Jean, Frost comments, “Superpowers. A scintillating wit and the best body money can buy. . .and I still rate below a corpse.” This is a line so good it puts virtually every other superhero writer in the shade. It is the White Queen’s bitter acknowledgement that Scott still does not love her as much as he loves the (repeatedly) dead Jean. Frost has vanished from the panel in which she finishes the line, as if she has disappeared at this moment from Scott’s consciousness.

How about Frost’s throwaway line that she has the “best body money can buy”? And you may have thought that all these super-people with spectacular bodies had them naturally. Considering how Rachel baits Frost for being older than she is (though Emma is hardly middle-aged) in Uncanny #444, I suppose that this may be another reference to her age.

More likely, in these days when even the young get breast implants and plastic surgery, it’s a suggestion that there’s something false about Frost. (By using the phrase “the best body money can buy,” Emma may even inadvertently be commenting on her own sexual morality.) On television Whedon has dealt with heroes self-destructively entangled with lovers who are wrong for them: Buffy with Spike, Angel with Darla. Here’s another such pairing.

The next scene begins with what appears to be a flashback to the reactions of young onlookers watching Cyclops and Wolverine fighting, as the Beast, in the present, is castigating them for battling “in front of the students.” Actually, the girl in front seems to be Kitty, who looks grimly, directly at the senior X-Men, while the three students seem shocked. (To artist John Cassaday’s credit, each person in the shot has a different facial expression.) Grouping Kitty here with the students again emphasizes the dual nature of her position: she’s not that much older than the students, yet she is a member of the faculty. Having returned to her former “home” at Xavier’s she can’t be happy about this turmoil among her elders.

Again, the focus is not on the X-Men themselves as youthful students, but as authority figures dealing with the young. The Beast’s speech to Logan and Scott is on that classic Marvel theme of power and responsibility, but in this context it’s not about a teenager learning to take responsibility as he grows older, but about exercising a kind of parental responsibility towards kids.

Having read Uncanny #444 and Astonishing #1, I wonder if the latter will be the series that will be more oriented around the school side of the X-Men.

Though this issue is primarily a talking-heads story, Cassaday and Whedon use imaginative visual techniques to keep it from seeming static.

One of them is the setting for this scene, a meeting of the senior X-Men. At first the setting is a surprise; not for another page does the Beast explain that they are in the Danger Room, in which, in its current version, holograms can create artificial environments. (It’s comparable to the holosuites and holodecks on Star Trek series.) Here the X-Men look like giants, sitting atop the Hawaiian islands, as if they were chairs. Amusingly, smoke arises from Wolverine’s body: presumably he is sitting atop a volcano. Since his hair style gives him devil-like “horns,” it’s appropriate that he’s giving off smoke, as if he’s seated in hell.

In a nicely understated bit of staging, Cassaday and Whedon have the White Queen sitting to the side, her face turned away from the others. She does not participate in the discussion for two pages, and then interrupts basically just to try to get them to hurry up and finish. Likewise, the others ignore her. Frost may be a member of the team, but she’s not a part of their community or “family,” even though it can contain the feuding Cyclops and Wolverine. Nor, it appears, does she care about being part of the group: Scott is the only one of interest to her.

Scott now begins a long speech. Since the rise of the original Image artists, I’ve been dismayed by the way so many recent comics artists devote huge panels to poster-like images, and then jam action into tiny panels instead. Cassaday and Whedon know how to make the current fashion for such large panels work. They devote a big panel to a shot of Scott uttering a single, simple line: “We’re a team.” This lends emphasis to Scott’s idea and to what seems the confident, idealistic way in which he says it (further emphasized by shooting his face from below, so he seems to tower against the sky).

Moreover, Scott continues, “We’re a super hero team. And I think it’s time we started acting like one.” Kitty looks towards Scott, interested by this idea. Logan looks forward, away from Scott, listening but not as impressed as she is.

Then Logan turns his face just slightly, looks warily at Scott, and says, as if startled, “Ho. Whoa. Wait. Is this gonna be about tights?”

It’s a funny reaction, perhaps suggesting a certain reflexive homophobia on the macho Logan’s part. It’s also the sort of remark one could imagine Spike saying.

And again there’s a certain revisionism at work here. No one forced Wolverine to wear a superhero costume through many of his past solo adventures. Wolverine’s attitude here reflects the movie version of Logan, who found the idea of superhero names and uniforms silly.

Scott reacts to Logan’s comment by dismissing his insecurity about looking silly in tights and taking the theme to a higher level: “It’s about everything. Truth. Perception. We’ve saved the world ““ worlds, even ““ time and again. That’s the truth. That’s what we do. But the perception is that we’re freaks or worse. That we’re Magnetos waiting to happen. We’ve been taking it on the chin so long, just trying to keep from being wiped out. I think we’ve forgotten that we have a purpose. I know the rest of the world has forgotten.”

Scott’s speech is about public relations: letting the world know that the X-Men are a positive force for good. But it’s also an effort to put the X-Men back in touch with another aspect of Xavier’s original vision: that the X-Men fight to save the human race, despite the fact that so many of them fear and hate mutants. Hence Scott’s speech serves as a contrast with Frost’s address to the students earlier in the book. Frost asserted that humans will never trust mutants; Scott, following Xavier’s ideas, argues that the X-Men’s good deeds can win humanity over.

I wonder if through Scott’s speech Whedon is also commenting on the direction of the X-Men as a series. Perhaps he feels it’s also the readership who may have “forgotten” the X-Men’s “purpose.” Is Whedon asserting that the comics have been spending too much time dealing with the X-Men fighting off persecution ““ playing defense ““ and not enough about them taking an active role, protecting humanity from dangers?

Certainly in the movies the X-Men appear to keep to themselves, not asserting themselves publicly as protectors of humanity. In the films the X-Men stay in hiding, not venturing out into battle unless they are fighting against their own kind (Magneto and his Brotherhood in the first film) or are themselves attacked by Stryker in the second).

Despite what Kitty said earlier in the issue, perhaps things have changed at the X-Men’s school. They’ve gotten away from the X-Men’s true purpose, so Whedon plans to put things back the way they were, so that Kitty’s statement that nothing has changed will indeed be true. Again, it’s like John Byrne’s “back to the basics” approach to longrunning comics series. (I would imagine, though, if Byrne were back on X-Men, he would boot his co-creation, the White Queen, out of the team immediately!)

As if anticipating close, analytical readers like myself, Kitty asks, looking at the holograms about them, “Is this like a theme thing, us being so big?” The Beast dismisses the notion with a joke about having misprogrammed the Danger Room. But the metaphor stands: the X-Men as giants. This ties in with the theme of Scott’s speech: superheroes are larger than life, serving a greater purpose, acting as players on the stage of the entire world.

Looking wistful, Kitty says, “Remember when thus place was just flame-throwers and rotating knives. I miss that.” Yes, indeed, that’s what the Danger Room was like when Kitty first arrived at Xavier’s school, back in 1978 in our time. Here is more nostalgia for the Claremont X-Men tales of decades past. So yet again we see the duality of Kitty’s role: the girl who has aged only a few years since joining the X-Men, yet who remembers comics from a quarter century ago. She’s a young person who has gone through experiences that make her feel older than she is. Perhaps, too, she embodies the way an older adult might feel that in ways he or she still feels young, not yet the master of his or her life. “Now I have cloud-hair,” Kitty says, literally referring to the holograms of small clouds floating around her head, but perhaps metaphorically suggesting her role bearing adult responsibilities in the world at large. No wonder she feels uncomfortable at seeming so “big.”

The Danger Room circa 1978 was basically the way that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, its creators, had depicted it in the 1960s. It is appropriate that, as Scott speaks of the original purpose of the X-Men that Kitty should invoke an image that goes back to Lee and Kirby’s original X-Men stories.

Scott began his speech by acknowledging the absurdity of what he was about to propose. Obviously in part he meant that he intends to be part of the same team as Wolverine, despite the current tension between them. Possibly he ““ or Whedon ““ also meant the “absurdity” of the superhero concept, dressing up in costumes to fight evil, but Cyclops, and through him, Whedon, are arguing that the superhero, however absurd on the surface, is something positive. even necessary.

“We need to get into the world,” Scott declares. “Saving lives, helping with disaster relief. . .We need to present ourselves as a team like any other.” pointing out that the public accepts the two leading superhero teams, the Avengers and Fantastic Four. The X-Men would thereby be demonstrating why “baseline” humanity should accept mutants. The idea of “getting into the world” is a fundamental part of Xavier’s vision, which is not about mutants and ordinary humans existing in separate but equal societies, but about racial integration. Grant Morrison, in outing the Xavier and his students, was pushing them to play a more active role in the world, but Morrison’s priority seemed to be turning the X-Men into mutant rights advocates, not as champions aiding the rest of humanity.

Here I wonder how much coordination exists among the current X-Men books. In the final issue of X-Treme X-Men and his new stories in Uncanny X-Men, Chris Claremont has cast team members as official agents of the world’s government in battling mutant menaces. Claremont even has the X-Men refer to themselves as “marshals,” evoking the imagery of the Western. (That’s something one might have expected Whedon to do instead, considering that his Firefly series was explicitly created as a science-fiction version of classic Western motifs.)

Whedon seems so far to have a more positive focus: Scott says the X-Men will “save lives,” whereas Storm’s “marshals” seem to emphasize combating criminals.

But really, Claremont and Whedon are having their teams of X-Men follow similar paths: as heroes operating in public to protect the populace at large. Each writer is working primarily with a different assortment of X-Men, yet Wolverine participates in both series. And all of them are based at Xavier’s mansion. So it’s odd that in Astonishing Scott does not mention Storm’s “marshals,” or that in Uncanny Storm and the others don’t mention Cyclops’ effort to revive the X-Men’s reputation as superheroes.

Once Scott implies that he wants the public to think of the X-Men the way they do of the superhero teams the Avengers and Fantastic Four, Wolverine says, “Here come the tights. . . ,” still troubled by the thought.

“Sorry, Logan,” replies Scott, “Super heroes wear costumes.” Here, through Cyclops, Whedon is recognizing costumes as an important element of the superhero concept. Whedon has stated in an interview that it was not his decision to bring back the costumes. (It seems to have been the idea of Marvel executive Avi Arad, who only a few years ago was publicly disparaging superhero costumes.) But I gets the sense that Whedon is far from displeased about it.

“And quite frankly,” Scott adds, “all the black leather is making people nervous.” That reminds me of an observation former Marvel writer Peter B. Gillis made to me years ago: didn’t anyone notice that the Blackhawks were a bunch of men who dressed in black leather and lived together on an island? (How did Dr. Wertham miss that?) So there’s irony for you: people think it’s stupid to put the X-Men in superhero costumes, so they dress them up in black leather uniforms instead, seemingly oblivious to the kinky implications.

Then Kitty raises her hand, just as a student would: yet again here’s a sign that she occupies this middle ground between the kids and the adults. Kitty says, “I’m not a fighter, not like you guys.” Wolverine replies,: “You’ve been in it plenty, kid. I’d take you at my back any day.”

What’s going on here? Whedon says that Kitty was a major influence on Buffy, yet Buffy is certainly a fighter, and Kitty is claiming she isn’t, or at least not in the same sense as the other X-Men. And am I the only one who thinks that Cassaday, especially in this shot, makes Kitty look something like Buffy’s friend Willow?

Wasn’t the point of the “Professor Xavier Is a Jerk!” story (Uncanny #168) that Whedon referenced earlier in this issue that Kitty insisted on being treated as an equal of the older X-Men, and that she could hold her own in dangerous situations (as in her battle against the alien Sidrian Hunters in that story)? It’s difficult to imagine Chris Claremont contending that Kitty isn’t a fighter.

I’d like to think that in this exchange Kitty is being modest and that Logan is subtly reminding her of Claremont’s Kitty Pryde and Wolverine series, in which he taught her to be a martial artist. More likely, Whedon isn’t remembering it. Then again, maybe he is dealing in revisionism here, consciously dismissing that aspect of her past, preferring to present Kitty as a non-warrior.

Here Whedon’s foreword to the trade paperback collection of Fray, a series he did for Dark Horse, is relevant. In it Whedon discusses his boyhood interest in Marvel comics. “At least in the Marvel universe, where I made my nest,” he writes, “there were very few interesting girls young enough for a twelve year old to crush on.” (Gosh, why didn’t he fall in love with Jean like the rest of us? Then again, my friends and I first read about Jean in 1960s comics, when she was presented as a teenager.) “But it was deeply slim pickin’s,” Whedon continues, “Until Kitty Pryde. She was such a figure of both affection and identification, I even forgave her inability to think of a decent name for herself.” This explains the White Queen’s disparaging remarks this issue about Kitty’s past superhero names.

“If she could be in the X-Men,” Whedon concludes, “then there was no reason a short, skinny, not-overly-hygienic New Yorker whose mutant power seemed to be the ability to whine amusingly couldn’t join up too.”

There’s the key. Kitty is the everyman/woman, the reader’s identification figure. Not only is she the kid who gets to hang out with the adults, but she is our representative: through her we get to hang out with the X-Men. After all, that has always been the basic purpose of the “kid sidekick” in superhero comics. It’s not that the adult superhero is looking for an underage homoerotic sexual partner, as Dr. Wertham famously claimed. The “kid sidekick” was meant as an identification figure for the reader, so he could vicariously participate in the superhero’s adventures. This is why Whedon characterizes her as not basically a fighter, since neither are we, the readers, and she is standing in for us. Since Whedon is having Kitty go into action, but downplaying her role as a fighter, she finds herself standing in yet another middle ground. On one side there are costumed teen combatants like Robin or Bucky on one side, and on the other such noncombatants as Rick Jones in Hulk and Captain Marvel or Snapper Carr in the Julie Schwartz-era Justice League.

Contradicting Logan, Scott tells Kitty, “But you’re not a fighter. Your power isn’t aggressive, it’s protective.” That actually makes her seem like a throwback to pre-Claremont superheroines like the Invisible Girl, who didn’t actually hit people the way that, say, Buffy would. (In Kitty’s case, she can turn intangible.) “That’s good to show,” Scott goes on. “And people like you.”

That’s the point. Scott is designating her as a good public face for mutantkind. In that respect she is the best choice among the five X-Men Whedon seems to be working with in this series. (Presumably the large roster of X-Men is being divided among the various books and their current writers.) Scott points out that Hank looks like a Beast, “Emma’s a former villain” (Do people say “villain” in real life?), and “Logan’s a thug.” Logan immediately agrees, “Born and bred.”: like Spike, he takes pride, at once ironic and defiant, in his outlaw image.

As for himself, Cyclops points out that “I haven’t looked anybody in the eye since I was fifteen.” And while that is not technically true (What about that celebrated sex scene on the mesa in Uncanny #132, in which Phoenix stops his eyes from emitting the deadly power beams?), it’s too good a line to object to, too fine a summing up of Scott’s usual situation in life, and another example of the understated irony with which Whedon has him speak.

Looking somewhat annoyed, Kitty asks, “So I’m what ““ a P. R. stunt?” Maybe she’s right to object. Scott’s intentions are good, but the X-Men will not succeed in gaining tolerance for mutants until “normal” humans can accept mutants who look like the Beast, as well. (I really doubt that anyone connected with Astonishing would make this connection, but Scott has fallen afoul of badly conceived public relations before, in the original X-Factor series.)

Finally, Emma inserts herself into the discussion to take the opportunity to insult Kitty. We’ve already seen she dislikes Kitty, and perhaps now Frost feels provoked by Scott’s praise of Kitty for not being a “villain” like herself.

At long last Scott is exasperated with Frost, too, and tells her to “shut up”: Frost looks surprised and possibly hurt by this sign of anger, while Kitty looks warily at him, perhaps sensing his seriousness, and Logan continues to face forward, taking it in stride.

Looking grim, Scott tells the group that each of them may have “perfectly good reasons” for not wanting to act as superheroes. “But you’re the team I chose. So think about it.” Not only is Scott acting as a strong leader, but as one determined to get his way. He’s not insisting that they participate, but he seems to be implying that the fact that he chose them to be in his superhero team outweighs any qualms they may have about it. Maybe it’s not so much Kitty who’s like Buffy as Scott is: Scott seems more like the Buffy of the final seasons: the hard-edged leader (in a bad sexual relationship!).

The scene shifts to another example of public relations at work, as people insist on putting makeup on a woman who turns out to be geneticist Dr. Ravita Rao before she addresses the press. “Doc,” says one, “you’re about to change the world, you gotta look glam.” Dr. Rao and the X-Men are about to compete in the creation of public images for mutants.

I didn’t realize this until my second time reading the issue, but Dr. Rao is the same doctor from page two of this issue. This is my fault: when she addresses a girl as “Tildie,” I should have remembered that this was the girl from the opening pages. Then again, whereas in a movie or TV show, the viewer will probably recognize a character on his or her return later in the story, the faces of characters in comics tend not to be so individually distinctive.

This glimpse of Dr. Rao being introduced to the press begins a sequence of cinematic intercutting among various characters and settings that persists to the end of the issue.

From Dr. Rao we go to a brief scene between Kitty and Logan that serves as a reminder of the bond they’ve had in the past, ever since Claremont began pairing them together. In the context of Whedon’s work, it reminds me of the friendship between Spike and Dawn on Buffy. Here Logan appears to be referring to his mourning over Jean; that is certainly in character for him, and also happens to parallel Spike’s feelings towards Buffy when she was (temporarily) dead at the start of Season 6.

Dr. Rao begins her speech, “What is a mutant?” From the start of this quiet discourse by an academic we shift to a scene of violence and chaos, with masked gunmen taking hostages.

Back to Dr. Rao, whose talk at first may seem to fit right in with Charles Xavier’s vision of mutants. “They’ve been called angels and devils,” she notes, as if recognizing religious counterparts to the mythic figures of good and evil mutants in the X-Men series.

But Rao’s speech begins to vary from Xavier’s ideas in so subtle a fashion it didn’t register on me at first. She says, “They’ve committed atrocities, and been victims of atrocities themselves.” Is she differentiating here between the terrorist mutants like Magneto and those mutants who are victims of persecution? Or does she mean “they” to refer to all mutants? “They’ve been labeled monsters, and not without reason.” That implies that all mutants are indeed monsters.

“But I will tell you what mutants are,” Dr. Rao says, returning to her theme of defining mutants. At that point Cassaday and Whedon shift to the gunmen’s leader, telling his captives that he plans to rob them, to take (and presumably rape) their daughters, and to “roast” the hostages’ flesh (perhaps for eating?). Cassaday shows us the leader from the back, and then shows him from the front. The leader has green skin: is he a mutant?

Is he defining through his actions what he thinks mutants should be? (And is he the shadowy figure who was watching Tildie in the opening pages?)

Then we shift back to Dr. Rao, seen from the back, addressing the press, in a shot which ominously parallels the gunmen’s leader addressing the hostages. Perhaps Dr. Rao was right to disdain being made to look “glam,” but now we see she wears her hair in a rather prim, old-fashioned bun at the back of her head. A hint of her personality? (Is she playing a destructive superego in contrast to the gunmen’s leader’s rampaging id?)

Finally giving the answer to the question with which she began, Dr. Rao concludes, “Mutants are people. No better or worse by nature than anybody else. Just people.” That seems fine: just the point that Xavier and the X-Men series have always sought to make.

And then comes the well-timed kicker, in a single balloon: mutants are “People with a disease.”

Immediately afterwards we see glimpses of the X-Men changing into costumes, about to appear before the public themselves. These are the people who Dr. Rao claims are diseased.

There follows an impressive double-page spread with the X-Men striding out in costume. Of course, this is designed to show off their new costumes for the benefit of those readers, who, like the Beast, are particularly interested in such things. I find myself more interested in the design of the spread. Most of the space is given over to the wall and floor. Only Kitty and the Beast’s arm and legs make it onto the left hand page.: the X-Men are situated almost entirely in the lower half of the right hand page. Most artists would have had the X-Men figures virtually fill the entire spread. But the use of all the empty space gives an epic feel to the scene, as the X-Men emerge from a brightly lit rectangle, striding out onto this larger stage.

This brings the story to its final page, with rapid intercutting among the three sets of characters ““ X-Men (taking off in their jet), the gunmen and their hostages, and Dr. Rao addressing the press ““ as Rao’s words flow through and unite the series of shots.

Dr. Rao tells her audience, “Mutants are not the next step in humankind,” thereby dismissing Magneto’s rationale for proclaiming the racial superiority of mutants. But one could also use that idea to assert that humanity is naturally evolving into mutants, that it is humanity’s destiny; she is rejecting this idea, too. She also dismisses the fears of the usual mutant-haters in the history of this series, such as the Sentinels’ inventor, Dr. Bolivar Trask: “They are not the end of humankind.”

Instead, she contends, “The mutant gene is nothing more than a disease. A corruption of healthy cellular activity.”

Apropos of this, the June 21, 2004 issue of Time has an article titled “Surviving Cancer,” which contains a section titled, “Identifying Mutations.” The article states that “A tumor is essentially an accumulation of mutations. It grows uncontrollably because its DNA, laboring under the weight of layer upon layer of genetic errors, has become unstable and unable to repair itself. By studying those mutations, scientists can learn quite a bit about how a particular cancer cell became malignant and the molecular pathways it uses to get the nutrients it needs to fuel growth.”

In other words, cancer is a form of mutation. Perhaps this is the basis for Rao’s theory about super-powered mutants. Perhaps Whedon got the idea from reading an earlier, similar article.

But this isn’t a new idea with regard to the X-Men. A few nights ago I watched the X2 movie again and was struck by a scene between Xavier and Stryker, who had wanted Xavier to cure his mutant son Jason. “But mutation is not a disease,” protests Xavier.

This issue concludes with Rao’s declaration that “And now at last we have found a cure.”

Though this is an unusual approach to mutation in the world of X-Men, it too is not unique. I have read one review that asserts that the “cure” idea turned up a short time ago in Marvel’s X-Statix series. More importantly, a few years back Alan Davis did a story line in X-Men wherein the Marvel Universe’s master genetic engineer, the High Evolutionary, “cured” all mutants on Earth.

But the High Evolutionary was motivated by his godlike overview of the course evolution should take. I expect that Whedon is approaching Rao’s movement to “cure” mutants as a new facade for racial intolerance.

Consider that in this issue Whedon shows both Dr. Rao and the X-Men seeking ways to present a point of view to the public. Both sides are dealing in public relations, in image management, and in what politicians call spin. Cyclops wants to “astonish” the public, casting the X-Men as colorfully costumed champions of the whole human race. He wants to make Kitty their “poster child,” as Frost cynically puts it. The face of mutants is a pretty and friendly teenage girl, who lacks “aggressive” powers and who looks conventionally human. As noted, this is something of a distortion of the truth.

But it’s not as bad as Dr. Rao’s image of mutants as, in effect, cancer victims. How clever this is. Dr. Rao is not claiming that mutants are evil, but that they are people, no better or worse than other people, but who are afflicted by a disease. It is the disease that must be destroyed, not the mutants.

Compare this with the Church’s attitude towards mutants in Neil Gaiman’s 1602. The chief clergyman in issue 7 appears to regard those mutants (“Witchbreed”) who are not human in appearance as “monsters.” The clergyman is about to burn the 1602 Magneto, revealed as not only a mutant but as a Jew, at the stake. But the clergyman treats 1602‘s Magneto not as a “monster” but as a “heretic” who rejected “God’s mercy.” In other words, he differentiates between the sinner and the sin, suggesting the possibility that had Magneto been loyal to the Church, he need not have be executed.

Earlier this week I passed by some demonstrators in an Indian section of the city, who had a sign “Islam is the Only Way to End Homosexuality!” I’m aware of Christians who claim to “love” gays but to “hate” their “sins.” Here is the idea of religion as a “cure” for behavior of which other people disapprove.

These are means of demonizing an opponent’s behavior but not the opponent himself. Similarly, Dr. Rao is demonizing the mutation, but not the person affected by the mutation.

But these are false dichotomies. Being a mutant is an essential part of each X-Man’s identity. Being a mutant is each X-Man’s racial identity, just as being black is Dr. Rao’s (It is surely no accident that Whedon and Cassaday “cast” her this way.), or being female is part of her identity.

In each case, that of he 1602 Inquisition or Dr. Rao, differences from the cultural norm are being labeled as disease, heresy, or abnormality, not as an acceptable alternative to the majority lifestyle. It’s like the way King James in 1602 defined any political opposition to him as treason.

Consider the title of this issue of Astonishing X-Men: “Gifted.” Each X-Man’s mutant super-power can be regarded as a metaphor for whatever talents any individual in real life has: whatever makes him or her unique, and enables him or her to contribute something to the world that perhaps no one else can. By the issue’s end Dr. Rao is attempting to redefine “gifted” as “diseased.”

No wonder Kitty looks so somber in our last sight of her in this issue, perhaps sensing that the X-Men are traveling into big trouble.

So, yes, I’m astonished by this first issue and hooked. After such an auspicious start I’m very much looking forward to the rest of Joss Whedon’s twelve-issue run on this title. And who knows? He did it for Buffy: maybe he’ll be motivated to write X-Men: The Musical.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Long, long ago, in other words, a few years ago back in the 20th century, it was relatively easy to break into writing for comics. There was a continual demand for fill-in stories or for short stories for books like Marvel Comics Presents. High school students who got intern jobs at Marvel, if they did well, might get jobs as assistant editors, and once you were “in,” you had the opportunity to pitch stories. Actually, every friend I had who wanted to get into comics eventually did. (Mind you, I have a talented group of friends.) People would ask me why I didn’t write comics stories. I would explain that my talents lie in a different area: I don’t write comics stories, I write about them. They would have none of this: you’re here, you should be writing stories!

After becoming established in comics, some writers tried to move on to careers in writing television or movies, In his article in Back Issue #2 concerning the “DC Implosion” of 1978, Mike W. Barr states that “Virtually all the freelancers ““ and most of the DC staffers ““ claimed that comics were a way station in their careers.” (Considering how little comics paid back then, that was understandable.) Barr recalls having a conversation with writers Len Wein and Marv Wolfman: “‘Oh, we’re not going to be in comics much longer,’ Len replied. ‘No, we’re going to move to Hollywood and write The Love Boat,’ said Marvin.” (As you may know, Chris Claremont first got to write X-Men when Wein, who co-created the “new” X-Men team in Giant-Size X-Men #1, found his schedule was too full, and turned the assignment over to his fellow staffer, who proved to have a revolutionary new vision for the superhero genre.)

But comics writers who went to Hollywood met with radically different degrees of success. As Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon mention in their recent biography of Stan Lee (see Comics in Context #15 and #16), even Stan himself tried to break into screenwriting without success. There have been some success stories more recently, like those of Mark Verheiden and Jeph Loeb, who work on Smallville, a comics-inspired television series.

And Loeb has worked with the man who is this week’s subject, Joss Whedon, creator of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly and co-creator of Angel. (They collaborated on a proposed Buffy the Animated Series, and just what is wrong with the Cartoon Network and various other networks that none of them were interested in picking it up? Whedon has been a subject of this column before, in the 2003 San Diego Con report in Comics in Context #9).

Lately Whedon has started writing comics himself, the latest being Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men #1, the start of a new X-Men series. It is so good that you might wonder why Whedon didn’t start writing comics years ago.

But now we’re in the 21st century, and the onset of Bizarro World rules in the comics industry. I was recently informed that an editor at a major comics company told a friend of mine who had submitted a series proposal that the company was only interested in projects by Somebody Famous.

So here’s the path that Whedon took to get to Marvel: he helped write screenplays for blockbuster films (Speed, Toy Story), and then created three TV shows, one of which, Buffy, has become a cultural icon, and even wrote a revision of the screenplay for the first X-Men movie, which is not used. (Although, reading Astonishing X-Men #1, I again wonder why. It’s got better dialogue than anything in the first film.) And now he’s starting to direct his first feature film, Serenity, based on his Firefly series. Only now, after Whedon reaches this extraordinary pinnacle of success, does he get to write an X-Men comic book! Isn’t this doing it all backwards?

But maybe in this case I should just sit back and enjoy this new phenomenon. Here I am arguing every week in this column that the best comics should be taken seriously as literature. Wein and Wolfman used to say that writers should work their way up to scripting a top title like Spider-Man, although they were talking about writing fill-ins and lower tier comics first. So I should take pleasure in the idea that the X-Men are such a great concept, such a monument in American popular culture, that even someone as successful in other media as Joss Whedon could still aspire to write these characters.

In a news article in The Hollywood Reporter some months ago Whedon explained that he did indeed aspire to writing the X-Men.

“‘There are three reasons why I’m doing this,’ Whedon said. ‘One, I get to write The X-Men, a comic I grew up reading. It’s probably the biggest influence on my work there is. Two, I want to personalize things and figure who these characters are to me now. And three, the character Kitty Pryde. She was not a small influence on Buffy. I get to use her, and that sealed the deal.’”

In doing my characteristic close reading of Astonishing X-Men #1, I will time and again be showing how Whedon’s work with the X-Men reminds me of characters, situations and themes from his past work. This is not meant as an accusation that he is repeating himself. Rather, I am showing how indeed The X-Men influenced Buffy and other Whedon work, and demonstrating a thematic continuity between his “Buffyverse” work and his new X-Men story. Moreover, comparing the Buffyverse and X-Men characters provides some surprising insights into how some of them are founded on the same archetypes.

Astonishing #1 opens with an eerie sequence of a person being menaced by a monster, superbly illustrated by Astonishing artist John Cassaday, who, presumably following Whedon’s staging directions, creates a ghastly mood through understated means: the spattered blood, the creature’s large, inhuman teeth, and the human image somehow reflected in them. It’s a reminder that Whedon is best known for working in the horror genre; this is the sort of sequence one would not expect from traditional superhero writers.

It’s also a reminder that Whedon not only writes for the movie and television screen, but directs for it as well. This is a cinematic montage of extreme close-ups. This and the next page also comprise a teaser for the main story: were this a TV series, it would appear before the opening credit sequence.

And then there are the words of the narrator, who appears to be a child, who finds her mother’s screams “yummy.” The juxtaposition of horror and ironic humor is a Whedon trademark. But I also find myself wondering if this may be a subtle bit of homage to longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont, who also likes to use the word “yummy” or just “yum” in contexts ranging from a villain’s macabre lusts to a hero’s expression of sexual attraction.

On the second page a child, Tildie, wakes up screaming. The first page sequence was apparently her dream. Or was it her memory? Or was it actually happening before the lights turned on? Just who is this enshadowed figure watching through presumably one-way glass?

And who was the “monster”? Is it possible that it is the child herself? Is she a shapeshifting mutant?

This scene has a primal resonance: perhaps all our terrors are extensions of a child’s fear of monsters in the dark.

It also ties in with a scene at the end of this issue, although I didn’t pick up on that until my second reading of the story.

Following the title, “Gifted” (an allusion to the previous name of the X-Men’s home base, “Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,” i.e., young super-powered mutants), the main narrative opens with a close-up on Kitty Pryde, whom Whedon singled out in the Hollywood Reporter piece as a particularly important character to him.

She is returning to Xavier’s school, where she first learned to use her mutant powers, after a sojourn in college in Illinois (as seen in Chris Claremont’s recent Mechanix limited series). Apparently Astonishing #1 takes place before Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men #444, which came out weeks before, and in which Kitty and Wolverine had already returned to the Xavier Institute.

Kitty’s return to her old school, where she spent her high school years, may remind readers of Buffy’s return to Sunnydale High in Season 7 of her television series. Like Sunnydale High, Xavier’s school was also destroyed and recently rebuilt. Each of them thus returned to a place, a school, at which defining events in their lives took place. For that matter, Season 1 began with Buffy arriving at a new high school, and Season 4 with her arrival at college. And Kitty’s return to Xavier’s, bearing luggage, recalls the very first time she arrived at the mansion, back in Uncanny X-Men #138 (October, 1980).

And, one might add, Whedon, who grew up reading X-Men and identifies it as a defining influence on his work, is likewise returning to Xavier’s school. It’s the place where he too spent his formative years.

Kitty’s first words are “Nothing has changed.” There’s that Thomas Wolfe quotation about not being able to go home again. Still, I’ve had times when I’ve revisited places from my childhood and adolescence and am taken back to see that outwardly, at least, they appear to be the same, as if caught in a time warp: it seems at once reassuring and strange. I have changed; why haven’t they?

Now, over the decades many writers, readers and comics executives have insisted that characters and situations in comics change. How often have they tried to sell new issues by claiming that “This issue will change the Marvel Universe” ““ or a specific character in it ““ “forever!”

But there’s a contrary point of view: Stan Lee himself spoke of the “illusion of change,” whereby surface aspects of a series may alter, but the essence of the characters and the series remain unaltered.

Whedon may be siding with Stan Lee’s side of the issue here. By “Nothing has changed,” perhaps he is asserting that there is a consistency to the X-Men series, and that it really hasn’t changed since he himself was a fan reading it.

Kitty continues, “The place was destroyed and now it looks like nothing happened. No time has passed.” On a literal level of meaning, Kitty is referring to the fact that the mansion was demolished towards the end of Grant Morrison’s tenure on New X-Men; following the departures of previous X-Men creative teams, the mansion was rebuilt as if overnight. (The short time it took is even less credible when one considers how slowly “Marvel-time” elapses compared to real time.) Yet the school is an essential element of the series, and Xavier’s mansion an important visual icon. Why the editors let the mansion be destroyed when they must have known or should have foreseen that the next writers would want it back is beyond me. The rapid rebuilding not only weakens credibility but even in retrospect undercuts the dramatic impact of the demolition.

Kitty now experiences memories of her life in the mansion, which take the form of ghostly images enacting scenes from her past. This reminds me of the final scene of Upstairs, Downstairs, with Rose the maid wandering through the mansion, hearing snatches of conversations from past episodes; the ghostly images here make the device work in a visual medium with no sound track. The “ghost” motif has psychological resonance: our past is long gone, “dead,” and yet continues to haunt us. (The issue in which Kitty first joined the X-Men, Uncanny #138, was itself a “memory” issue filled with flashbacks to past X-Men stories.)

“Of course the Professor would have it rebuilt this way. Give everyone a sense of stability, continuity,” Kitty tells herself. “Continuity” has a double meaning in the context of comics: it’s also a reference to the history of the X-Men and the consistency with which they and their world are portrayed. Whedon’s own goal may be to create “a sense of stability,” to adhere to the traditions of the series and recapture its traditional essence. In writing the X-Men, perhaps he seeks to return to a fictional world that he will find reassuringly familiar, as will other longtime readers. This may be his version of what John Byrne calls his own “”Back to the Basics” method when taking over a longrunning series.
The next “ghost” Kitty sees is of her own younger self, shouting, “Professor Xavier is a Jerk!” from the story of the same title (Uncanny X-Men #168, cover-dated April, 1983). Cassaday even recaptures the look of artist Paul Smith in this image.

This is also Whedon’s tribute to the X-Men’s past. Here I’m aware of a slight generational shift. I’m so used to seeing pros do homages to the comics of the 1960s, and the work of creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, that they loved as kids. But here Joss Whedon, from the tail end of the Baby Boom, is paying tribute to the X-Men comics that he read as a kid, the ones that Chris Claremont wrote in the 1980s. Indeed, Kitty is the creation of John Byrne and Claremont, who further defined her as a character after Byrne left the series. (And, of course, Claremont is still very much active, writing two other X-Books, dealing with the same milieu and some of the same characters that Whedon is now handling. See Comics in Context #37 and #39.)

Kitty tells us that “Nothing has changed. Not even me,” as she passes through a wall: this is a clever, surprising way of establishing her mutant power for Buffy fans who may have followed Whedon to the X-Men without prior knowledge of the series.

By saying she hasn’t changed, Kitty means, as she goes on to say, “I’m a kid again, out of my depth, completely overwhelmed by everything here. . . .” Kitty’s following the Joseph Campbell scenario, starting this new hero’s journey from a lowly position.

Of course, all of us change as we grow older, and Kitty has, too: as we shall see, she is returning not as a student or as an inexperienced X-Man in training, but to be a teacher and a full-fledged member of the team.

Perhaps, though, Whedon is signaling that he’s going to treat Kitty as younger than other writers might, in contrast with, say, Warren Ellis, who, when he was writing the original Excalibur series would have had us believe Kitty was having an affair with an adult, Peter Wisdom (not a good choice). Whedon’s Kitty, though older than the other current students at Xavier’s, is still probably a teen.

Here I want to commend John Cassaday for the marvelous way he depicts the mansion’s interior in this sequence. It would seem such an obvious thing to do, but very few comics artists bother to give the interior of Xavier’s mansion a distinctive look. In contrast, Cassaday gives us a real sense of place: the rug with its distinctive pattern, the fine wood paneling, the specific location of the staircase with regard to the front door, the feel of a grand Victorian home (even if it has been demolished and rebuilt umpteen times).

Kitty tells us that what “overwhelms” and surrounds her are “the smaller pieces. The shards of me.” The “shards” are her memories of her past self. The “ghosts” are also like reflections of herself in a mirror. The word “shards” suggests that she feels her self has been shattered, although Kitty seems untroubled for the rest of the issue. Presumably her effort to live on her own, in college, did not work out (Mechanix did not continue). Perhaps she has returned to her home and surrogate family of the past in order to rediscover a sense of self. Whedon said that he wants to “figure” what the X-Men mean to him now. Perhaps Kitty wants to do the same. Perhaps this even suggests that the superhero genre is rich enough to be able to assist a reader’s different psychological needs at different stages of his or her life.

Now Kitty sees another familiar Claremont scene: the “ghost” of her younger self holding mistletoe over the teammate she then loved, Colossus. Whedon does not tell us this, but many readers will know that Colossus is now dead. The camera shifts to a close-up of Kitty, who smiles at the memory. But it is a quiet, understated smile. It’s not the big, childlike grin that artists John Byrne and Terry Austin gave her when she first arrived at Xavier’s doorstep in Uncanny X-Men #138.

So Kitty has changed, and there’s a certain melancholy about her mood. There’s an interesting duality about Whedon’s depiction of Kitty. In the nearly twenty-five years since her debut, she has aged very little in Marvel-time: she is presumably still a teenager, still a “kid.” But she’s also lived through a quarter century of X-Men stories, people she cared for have died (like Colossus), and she herself has been through horrific events (see, for example, Claremont’s Kitty Pryde and Wolverine limited series). Here she is somberly reminiscing about a past that seems long gone, as a middle-aged adult (like Whedon) might, or a fan (also like Whedon) looking back on his favorite comics stories from his youth. Kitty is simultaneously young and old beyond her years.

The sequence ends with the silent panels of Kitty’s face in extreme close-up, looking contentedly at the “ghosts,” and then walking across the rug. So many writers today give us dialogue-heavy talking heads books. Whedon, a director, does it right; he’s sparing of dialogue when he can communicate his idea and mood visually, and he and Cassaday bring this sequence to a close that is both dramatic and cinematic.

On the following page, with Kitty’s entrance into the school meeting, we move from nostalgic evocations of Claremont’s work to full-out Whedon. The mood abruptly shifts from the private and wistful to the public and comedic. Emma Frost, the White Queen, who stands at the podium, immediately chooses to berate Kitty for her lateness in front of the students. Considering the fact that Kitty is to be one of their teachers, this is particularly nasty. Kitty’s retort to Emma is an example of pointed, deadpan irony, a Whedonian trademark; you wouldn’t find this in most other superhero writers’ work.

Kitty’s rejoinder (“I’m sorry. I was busy remembering to put on all my clothes.”) also points to the absurdity of the White Queen’s costume. Even considering that so many superheroes wear skin-tight costumes, just what is Frost thinking when she appears before her young students in another of her Victoria’s Secret-style ensembles?

Again, Cassaday provides a good sense of place: what the school auditorium looks like, with several senior X-Men on the platform: Scott Summers (Cyclops), the Beast, Kitty and Frost. I expect that over the next year I’ll gain a much clearer sense of what the Xavier mansion is like from Cassaday’s work than I ever had before.

Frost announces that Kitty will be teaching computer science (Hey, so did Willow after Jenny Calendar’s death on Buffy!) and will act as a liaison to the administrative staff and as a student advisor (And that was Buffy’s job at Sunnydale High in Season 7!).

In contrast to her frosty welcome from Emma, Kitty, Scott, and the Beast immediately engage in friendly banter. The warm rapport among them is clear. It’s like when one reunites with an old friend he hasn’t seen in years, and the two of them pick up from where they left off as if no time has passed.

“Did I miss the Sorting Hat?” asks Kitty. That’s a reference to the opening day of school at Hogwarts in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, in which the teachers likewise sit up on a platform facing the students in the meeting hall. Whedon here may well be pointing to the similarity between X-Men and Harry Potter, both of which are founded on the same concept of a school where super-powered young people are trained to use their abilities. And, of course, Buffy is based in this archetype, too: not only her own training by Giles, but the seventh season School for Slayers, in which Buffy, fellow Slayer Faith, and her friends start teaching new recruits themselves.

The Beast’s traditional, rather intellectual wit proves a good fit for Whedon. But then consider Whedon’s treatment of Scott, who, in other hands (like, say, the makers of the X-Men movies) often seems dull and wooden. The Beast alludes to this when he makes a dryly ironic reference to “Scott’s scintillating introductory speech.” But then Scott surprisingly comments, “Even I was bored. . . .”.

In other words, this Scott is no longer truly a stiff. There’s a parallel in Giles, who likewise has a certain with a certain ironic self-awareness about his own tendency to be stuffy and bookish. And we shall see still further changes in the depiction of Scott as this story proceeds.

Has nothing truly changed at Xavier’s school? Well. consider this: traditionally, the characters X-Men focuses on have been Xavier’s students. But now Xavier is absent (off on the island of Genosha in Excalibur), and (following the lead of the X-Men movies), the X-Men are now the teachers. The students in this issue are anonymous, presented as a mass, not as individuals. The characters we follow and are to identify with are the teachers.

I recall, back in the day, when Marvel editors argued that Peter Parker should remain a student (albeit a graduate student, which you can be forever, as well I know) because the kids who make up the bulk of the readership won’t identify with a teacher. They’d see a teacher as One of Them, not One of Us. But now Peter Parker is a teacher in the Spider-Man titles that follow classic continuity, and the X-Men are teachers as well. The identification figures for the readers are all decidedly adults. (Perhaps demonstrating a certain schizoid attitude on the subject, Spidey and the X-Men are still students in the continuity of Marvel’s Ultimate line, or, as I will start calling it, Marvel-Earth-2.)

What does this mean? After I reviewed Claremont’s Excalibur #1 I worried afterwards whether I made it sound as if it wouldn’t appeal to the young (though I think it will), since it’s about a middle-aged man. But Astonishing X-Men is likewise about adults. These books aren’t about coming of age; their heroes have already gotten there. Does this mean that the bulk of the comics readership really is now made up of adults, not children and teenagers? Or are today’s comics editors and writers miscalculating who their audience really is?

So here the parallel is less with the early seasons of Buffy, in which the identification characters were students, than with the final season, in which Buffy has fully taken on the role of authority figure.

The fact that Kitty, Scott, and the Beast are chatting away while Frost speaks signals a certain lack of respect for her; the feeling is mutual, as we shall see later.

Notice Whedon and Cassaday’s cinematic technique in slowly shifting from the bantering X-Men to Frost, as she addresses the students. Frost takes up more of each succeeding panel, moving closer to the center. Finally, the page concludes with another extreme close-up as she utters a single line: “Violence of any kind will never be tolerated.” Notice how Whedon paces his dialogue in comics, sometimes emphasizing a particular line by devoting an entire panel to it, and giving the speaker a close-up.

Sentinels, the gigantic mutant-hunting robots, break in, causing confusion and tumult among both the terrified student body and the senior X-Men: Emma has finally gotten her colleagues’ attention. And these are the Jack Kirby/Neal Adams-style Sentinels, not the inferior versions designed by other artists; hence, this is another tribute to the past, this time to a period of X-Men before the Claremont era began.

It turns out this is just a simulation: holograms created by the X-Men’s “Danger Room” technology. (It is said that Whedon pushed to have the Danger Room in the first X-Men movie, but it was dropped for budgetary reasons.)

Now, one reason for the Sentinel simulation is a practical one on Whedon’s part: so that there will be an action scene, however brief, in an issue that primarily deals in scenes of character interaction. (Indeed, it was Claremont’s character-driven X-Men that showed how a superhero book can hold a reader’s attention in an issue without real action scenes.)

Another reason is that Frost was seeking to make a point to the students. And she did it, characteristically, in a cruel, insensitive way, by gratuitously frightening them. Scott looks grimly at her, and the Beast and Kitty look downright angry. They don’t like being manipulated and tricked by a colleague. But there’s an even more important reason for them to be pissed off at Emma.

Frost tells the students, “We have learned the first lesson. They will always hate us. We will never live in a world of peace.” Frost is thus attacking “Xavier’s dream,” the vision of the X-Men’s absent founder, the father figure to Scott, Beast and Kitty, his hope that someday “baseline” humans and mutants will live together in peace and harmony.

Frost is undercutting their mission: she is teaching the students not Xavier’s dream, but her own cynical agenda. “We must give the ordinary humans respect, compliance and understanding,” she tells them. “And we must never mistake that for trust.”

This is a very interesting stance to take: preaching outward subservience to the humans while resenting and distrusting them. Imagine how people would react if a black civil rights leader advocated that as the way African-Americans should behave towards whites.

Later, alone with her, Scott confronts Frost over her little stunt, but these two are currently lovers, and she easily manipulates him into a change of subject. And by the end of that page, we see Emma and Scott in bed together. Yes, indeed, Marvel’s concept of who the audience is for comics has certainly changed. (Then again, so has the world. I was struck by the end of an article in the June 9 New York Times about Sex and the City. It quotes a passionate fan of the show, who turns out to be only fourteen.)

Of course, as a longtime reader, I am aghast at this sight for a different reason. Don’t the Powers That Be at Marvel realize that the love between Scott and his series-long amour, Jean Grey, is the heart of the book? What were people at Marvel thinking when they killed off Jean (yet again! See Comics in Context #28) and paired up Scott, the book’s traditional heroic lead, with former villainess Emma Frost?

And then comes perhaps the best moment in this entire issue. Scott looks up from the bed to see Wolverine perched accusingly at its end, staring ominously, accusingly at him. He says simply, with grim, deadpan irony, “Which stage of grieving is this?” Amazingly, Whedon and Cassaday can convey the tone of characters’ delivery without spoken dialogue! And Whedon can do timing in a static medium, as the next moment shows. As if in the equivalent of a pause in a Harold Pinter play, Whedon waits for the next panel, focusing on Scott’s scowling reaction, for Wolverine to follow up with a cutting punch line: “Denial?”

And Scott blasts Wolverine with one of his optic beams, as if reacting to a punch to the gut. And that’s just what Wolverine’s two lines were like. Wolverine ““ and Whedon ““ may be exactly right about Scott’s motivation for his otherwise inexplicable affair with Frost.

This brings us to the halfway point in this issue, and also in our discussion. I’ve got to send this column in early. So, in the grand tradition of serial fiction:

“To be continued.”

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Comics and cartoon art can turn up when and where one least expects it. This week I was at Manhattan’s Film Forum, watching a marathon screening (over five hours!) of director Ingmar Bergman’s complete six-part 1973 series, Scenes from a Marriage. And twice there were brief glimpses of Disney comic books: one seemed to have Donald Duck on the cover, and the other definitely had Uncle Scrooge. (The comics seemed to belong to the protagonists’ children, though at one point an adult leafs through one of them.) I had not expected ever to see a Carl Barks-Ingmar Bergman connection, but there it is.

Later in the series, the male protagonist, a middle-aged academic who is being passed over by his superiors, observes, “I’m supposed to be in my prime, brimming with experience.” And that reminded me of the current state of the American comics industry. According to its Bizarro World logic, experience, even working on top selling books, and the wisdom accumulated over time count for little. (The corollary is that executives who come from outside the industry, ignorant of comics as an artform, business or culture, feel free to make decisions that wreak havoc, as the last dozen years have demonstrated.)

Another odd aspect of the American comics business is that even though superhero stories deal in mythic, archetypal characters and themes, comics professionals, in general, don’t look beneath the surface meaning of their work. (It strikes me that this might be the comic book writers’ equivalent of a similar phenomenon among comic book artists: the latter will cite past comics artists, and sometimes illustrators, as influences, but I rarely see an interview in which a contemporary comic book artist talks about studying past masters in the fine art world.) There are some individual writers who occasionally give indications that they’ve delved into the mythic underpinnings of their work: for example, I recall an Astro City letter column in which Kurt Busiek correctly described Spider-Man as an “urban trickster.” The San Diego Comic Con will set up panels on which comics pros discuss and debate certain themes in the genres in which they work, as if in perhaps unconscious imitation of an academic conference. But trust me: I’ve been in the comics business for two decades, and I have never yet overheard comics pros talk among themselves about What It All Means. As far as most of them seem to think, It’s Just Comics, right? My several Ivy League degrees in literature, dealing in this sort of critical analysis, have never impressed people in authority in the comics business. (Actually, to judge from my ongoing job search, Ivy League literature degrees don’t impress anybody. It’s the Bizarro World.) A friend of mine, who used to work in comics, told me that he felt that one particular editor never felt comfortable with him after learning he had a graduate school education in literature. Considering that I keep reading about growing academic interest in studying comics (I will soon be teaching a university course on the subject myself, if all goes well, and am contributing to a forthcoming academic book on comics), you may find this all rather strange.

All of this brings me to the subject of my longtime colleague Danny Fingeroth and his new book, Superman on the Couch, released this spring by the Continuum Publishing Group. Its catchy title might mislead the potential reader into thinking that it is about superhero psychology, or perhaps Superman’s sex life (a prequel to Larry Niven’s Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex?), his shopping sprees at IKEA, or his leisure time spent as a couch potato. Instead, this book is, as its subtitle states, about “What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society.”

Fingeroth is a Baby Boomer who’s been in the comics business longer than I have, writing and editing comics, rising to the position of editor of Marvel’s Spider-Man titles during some of their peak years of commercial success, and later heading a comics line for Byron Preiss. Despite his considerable credits, he, like many other talented comics veterans of his generation, finds himself out of favor in the current comics industry.

So, demonstrating an entrepreneurial drive that I envy, Fingeroth has found new outlets for employing his experience in comics. He teaches a course in comics writing at New York University. He has also created and edits Write Now, a magazine for TwoMorrows Publishing that deals with the craft of writing professionally for comics, science fiction, television and movies. (Full disclosure: I’ve contributed to Write Now, interviewing the aforementioned Mr. Busiek.) And now Fingeroth has written this book, Superman on the Couch.

Moreover, though Fingeroth had always struck me as a comics pro who knew the craft of writing but had no interest in delving into the deeper meanings of the genre, in working on this book he has clearly done a remarkable job of educating himself about literary analyses of the superhero genre. He’s read and absorbed ideas from some of the all too few landmark academic books on the subject, including John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett’s The Myth of the American Superhero and Richard Reynolds’ Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. He cites Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Bruno Bettelheim, whose analyses of myths and fairy tales can and should be applied with equal relevance to the now vast sixty-years-plus body of superhero stories. In his own book, Fingeroth presents ideas he has gleaned from these academic sources in clear, accessible, often humorous and vivid prose, free from the complications of scholarly jargon. (I may have already made the point in my own book, Marvel Universe, that Spider-Man was revolutionary in making a teenage superhero its central figure, but I didn’t come up with Fingeroth’s witty way of phrasing it, “Spider-Man is the Bar Mitzvah of the superhero.”)

More importantly, Fingeroth has successfully learned to think along similar lines himself. He offers up his own ideas and theories to the reader, based not only on his own reading of scholars’ works but on his own examination of what the superhero genre has meant to him through his lifelong career of editing and writing such tales. As he tells us in his concluding chapter, “As I wrote about the heroes and their appeal, I was forced to analyze the phenomenon of the superhero through my own experiences.”

In short, Fingeroth is doing a commendable job of repositioning his career. If the comics business at present does not sufficiently value the wisdom of experience, then he will find new outlets as a teacher and scholar. Some of the rest of us are attempting to pursue a similar path. Denny O’Neil is another example of a longtime comics writer and editor who in time discovered that his comics stories had mythic depths and set out to study their archetypal meanings; when and if O’Neil writes his own book on the subject of superhero mythology, I expect it will become a classic of comics scholarship. There are Trina Robbins’ several books on women in comics, both on the page and behind the scenes. Tom DeFalco has done a book of interviews with fellow Spider-Man writers, soon to be released. And, of course, there’s me, writing this weekly column of exhaustively detailed literary analyses of comics past and present. (And someday perhaps I’ll find someone willing to publish them as a book! Is anyone out there interested?) I also have another book proposal in the works, but I can say no more as yet.

Unlike me, Fingeroth does not deal in the analysis of specific stories in his book. Instead, his interest lies in determining how and why the major characters in the genre ““ Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, et al. ““ work. Along the way he concisely describes the roots of the modern superhero in ancient mythological figures such as Gilgamesh and Beowulf and in prose and pulp proto-superheroes such as the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro. He likewise summarizes the origins of the comic book medium itself, in newspaper comic strips and in early 20th century pulp magazines like The Shadow and Doc Savage.

Fingeroth explores many basic concepts of the genre: the appeal of the secret identity, why so many heroes are orphans, Superman as immigrant and Clark Kent as an example of cultural assimilation, the “dark” hero (like Batman, Hulk, and Wolverine) as vicarious expressions of the readers’ anger, the roots of masks in tribal ritual, the superhero team as surrogate family. Much of this will be familiar to scholars like myself. I think I can best show you what I like about Fingeroth’s book by singling out some of his own ideas and observations and commenting upon them.

Early on Fingeroth makes the incisive observation that readers can fantasize being the villains as well as the heroes. This makes sense, and some comics writers may consciously or unconsciously recognize this. A number of classic Julius Schwartz Flash stories made members of the character’s great Rogues Gallery virtual protagonists, following their thoughts and deeds as they sought to concoct a new means of ridding themselves of the Flash. Schwartz went even further in the Black Hand tales in Green Lantern, narrated by the villain himself, breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the readers. A good current example is Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s Harley and Ivy mini-series, an entertaining buddy comedy turning two of Batman’s nemeses into the protagonists. Through many super-villains, whether they are colorfully comedic like Harley Quinn or noble, even tragic figures like Doctor Doom, the reader has a vicarious outlet for his own id, and can safely exercise his own dark side before his superego, in the form of the story’s superhero, locks the villain and the antisocial impulses he embodies back up where they belong.

Fingeroth does good work in comparing the superhero story to another American heroic adventure genre, the Western. He makes the very good point that thought the Western, like the spy adventure and other action-adventure subgenres, may outwardly seem more realistic than superhero tales, they likewise involve a considerable degree of fantasy. How is it, Fingeroth asks more than once, that so often the good guy in a Western is untouched by the hails of bullets fired at him? With a talent for grounding his arguments in the reader’s personal experience, Fingeroth asks the reader to imagine himself in a fistfight and then to wonder about those fictional heroes, not just in superhero stories but in other action genres, who endure battle after battle without lasting injury. Fingeroth therefore rightly postulates that characters like Dirty Harry, James Bond, Rambo, and Charlie’s Angels (and he could have gone a lot further ““ how about a lot of John Wayne’s roles?) actually inhabit a “middle world” between explicit superheroes and reality. Hence, a great deal of popular entertainment partakes more of the superhero archetype than is commonly recognized.

Fingeroth also makes the valuable point that perhaps one reason why superheroes were created was because the 20th century produced real life super-villains: the likes of Hitler and Stalin. This makes sense, too: the creation of the first superheroes paralleled the events leading to World War II. Think of the cover of Captain America Comics #1, with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America punching out Hitler. Simon and Kirby had created an imagined demigod to oppose a real life devil.

Fingeroth notes that usually in a story, the protagonist undergoes a character change or evolution. In contrast, he points out, not only do comics superheroes not age, or age extremely slowly, but that they do not evolve as personalities. Even seemingly major changes. like the weddings of Clark Kent to Lois Lane and Peter Parker to Mary Jane Watson, he asserts, do not substantially change the characters. (Instead, he pointedly observes, the marriages handicap writers by doing away with the romance subplots!)

Reading this section, I immediately thought of former Marvel editor in chief Jim Shooter, with his insistence that in each story the hero must change in some way as a character. Considering how many stories Spider-Man appeared in every month of every year, and how many writers dealt with him, this always struck me as an impossible task. Fingeroth is arguing that in fact it is an irrelevant goal in this genre, which eternally fixes a superhero at a particular age and outlook on life. Fingeroth could have gone farther with this argument, exploring the nature of story arcs in the superhero genre if the hero himself cannot evolve. (I think of one of Steve Englehart’s great Batman stories, in which Batman is imprisoned for the entire issue, and the tale instead explores the actions of all its other characters, and it is the villain, Professor Hugo Strange ““ who impersonates Batman and becomes the real protagonist ““ who undergoes startling character evolution.)

Fingeroth demonstrates the benefits of studying the underpinnings of the genre when he voices caution about the recent tendency in comics to play down or get rid of the traditional device of the secret identity. He concedes that the secret identity is increasingly viewed as unrealistic. In fact, it’s not just Clark Kent’s glasses that seem a weak excuse at disguise; Fingeroth brilliantly points out just how ineffective even most masked superheroes’ disguises would be in the real world. But Fingeroth makes the important argument that in seeking to make the superhero genre more realistic, writers should not cast aside important fantasy elements like the secret identity that have a primal appeal to the audience. Whereas it is familiar to see attacks on movie and TV versions of superhero series for getting things wrong, here and elsewhere Fingeroth rightly points out that often recent TV and movie depictions of the heroes value important elements of the characters that jaded contemporary comics pros dismiss. So, yes, in the Spider-Man and Daredevil movies the title heroes have genuinely secret identities. Over the years at Marvel, editors and writers have gradually aged Peter Parker from a fifteen-year-old high school student to a man well into adulthood, despite the protests of traditionalists such as John Byrne and Roger Stern, who perhaps even regret that Stan Lee had Peter graduate into college. Fingeroth points out that the makers of the Spider-Man movie recognized that, among other things, the story of Spider-Man is a coming-of-age saga, and rightly portrayed Peter as a teenager.

I’ve long thought that Wonder Woman, even if she is the archetypal superheroine, does not seem as conceptually strong as her peers, Superman and Batman. Fingeroth thinks so, too, and makes the intriguing argument that this is because while Superman and Batman were created by young men from impoverished backgrounds as expressions of their own heroic ideals, Wonder Woman was created by a financially and professionally successful middle-aged psychologist, Dr. William Moulton Marston, as a role model for young girls. Of course, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were middle-aged when they created so many classic Marvel characters. But, as we know, in the early 1960s Lee had decided to start writing the kind of superhero stories he himself would want to read; hence, I would argue, Spider-Man and the rest were expressions of his (and his collaborators’) dreams, fears and ideals. Fingeroth’s contention that Wonder Woman lacks that passionate core to her being because she was created as an adult’s idea of what is good for kids makes sense to me. (I wonder how Trina Robbins might respond to Fingeroth’s argument)

Elsewhere in his discussion of Wonder Woman, Fingeroth insightfully spots her “virgin birth,” sensibly compares her to another World War II icon, Rosie the Riveter (a woman doing a “man’s” role in wartime), and figures out that Xena is a more recent version of the Wonder Woman archetype. (I’d add that Red Sonja is the transitional figure between the two.) I suspect that Chris Claremont and Frank Miller would be startled by Fingeroth’s contention that Dark Phoenix and Elektra perpetuate negative stereotypes that powerful women must be evil. Claremont has been the most important figure between Marston and Joss Whedon in the creation of the positive feminist superheroine. Claremont’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” and Whedon’s “Dark Willow” arc on Buffy, obviously inspired by Claremont’s, hardly sums up either man’s image of women. Still, Fingeroth’s interpretation of the “Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Elektra Saga” is certainly arguable, and admirers of either Claremont or Miller’s work must deal with it.

Fingeroth also persuasively argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the first great superheroine created since Wonder Woman, and one who is much more conceptually sound. (I expect that Joss Whedon created Buffy to be his own concept of a hero, not just one for kids.) Fingeroth correctly links the X-Men, Buffy (with her “Scooby Gang”), and Harry Potter (with his schoolmates) series together as examples of surrogate families in the superhero genre. (I think that Harry is not truly a superhero series, but is heavily influenced by the genre. And, of course, I’d go further and point out that all three series are variations on an archetype of a school for superhumans.)

Fingeroth does make occasional mistakes about superhero continuity, though none that affect the theories and arguments he makes. Considering the vast number of comics that have been and are being published, how expensive our hobby has grown, and the fact that folks like Fingeroth are no longer on the major companies’ freebie lists, a few mistakes here and there are understandable and excusable. (Of course there should be someone at each of the Big Two keeping track of continuity and making the information available to inquiring comics pros, but as I well know, the Big Two don’t see the point.)

Drawing on Reynolds’ work, Fingeroth makes the intriguing claim that superheroes are really defenders of the status quo, whereas the “reformers,” the people seeking to change society, are super-villains: think of Magneto. Fingeroth notes that stories in which superheroes try to change society will lead to disaster, as in Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme. This is an interesting idea, but I there are counter-examples. Though rare, there are important stories about the superhero as revolutionary, seeking to overturn a corrupt establishment, such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and even his Batman: Year One, and Claremont and John Byrne’s “Days of Future Past.” In 1602 Neil Gaiman pictures Captain America as a rebel leader against a totalitarian American presidency. Such tales turn the superhero into a modern day Robin Hood. I suppose that Denny O’Neil’s version of Green Arrow also fits this mold. This is a valid way of portraying super heroes, so perhaps the real question is why it is not done more often.

I like Fingeroth’s contrast between Batman as a figure taking revenge for his parents’ death on the world, and Spider-Man as taking revenge for his uncle’s murder on himself. I also quite like Fingeroth’s observation that readers don’t just identify with the persecuted X-Men out of their own sense of alienation. “Especially in adolescence,” he dryly observes from the standpoint of mature adulthood, “the romantic notion of belonging to a persecuted minority ““ whether or not one really is ““ has great appeal.”

Fingeroth goes on to make the familiar observation that comics fans may also see themselves as a misunderstood minority group, but intriguingly goes further by arguing that “The decrease in comics sales, ironically. . .coincidental with heightened profit-generating public awareness of, and affection for, super-heroes via movies and TV series, only makes fans feel more ‘persecuted’ and more avant-garde for their specialized tastes in pop culture.” I can see why they’d think that way: however popular and financially successful recent comics-based movies may be, comics themselves, the source material, have only made tantalizingly slow progress in achieving cultural respectability.

In fact, the decline of comics as a mass medium is a recurring undercurrent in Fingeroth’s book. He observes that a kid today might come to know and like Spider-Man from the movie and the video games without ever reading a Spider-Man comic. Gloomily (as we shall further see), Fingeroth offers only slim hope that the comics will survive.

But even if the comics die, Fingeroth asserts, the superheroes will live on through other media. To him, the “superhero is forever”; having been created in its familiar form in the 20th century, it is here to stay.

But I’d add that this may not be the entire story. Yes, there have always been superhuman heroes, going back in Western literature to the very beginnings, with Gilgamesh. But what we think of as the superhero did not start until the 1930s. It is a new form that Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces took in the 20th century in response to the mindset of Americans of that time. As Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen shows, 19th century literature is full of forebears to today’s superheroes and super-villains. But could the writers of the 19th century have foreseen the American superhero of the 1930s (even though some of its forebears’ creators, like H. G. Wells and Conan Doyle, lived long enough to see it)? Even the figure of the Great Detective, which seems another eternal archetype to us, really did not exist in literature before the 19th century and men such as Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe.

So, I wonder if at some point in the 21st century, a new form of larger-than-life hero will evolve, as relevant to its time as Superman was to the 1930s and Spider-Man was to the 1960s. Perhaps we will live long enough to see this new kind of superhuman hero, but perhaps few if any of us can imagine what it will be like from out standpoint in 2004. Oh, I expect that Superman and Batman may survive as cultural icons into the 22nd century. But there’ll be some other kind of hero by then, one we cannot envision as yet.

At points it seems as if Fingeroth is declaring that superhero stories are for kids, not for adults. Explaining why Spider-Man’s eternal youthfulness is essential to the character, and why he is best portrayed as a teenager, Fingeroth states that “what a teenager brings to the table is knowledge and experience without cynicism and bitterness.” He continues, “Hope fills Spider-Man’s world, the hope that only a teenager can have. . .It’s the hope that our efforts will probably be for naught, but, by golly, just might succeed. . . .It’s hope despite the fact that our hopes are dashed on a daily basis. Because sometimes, the hope becomes reality. And that ““ that one time in a hundred ““ is enough to keep the adolescent going, to keep him or her coming back day after day.”

In middle age, it seems, Danny Fingeroth has entered his own Grim and Gritty phase: hope, he seems to be saying, is for heroic, idealistic kids, and not for us bitter, cynical middle-aged adults, beaten down by life’s defeats. Hope, it would seem, is for the blissfully naive and immature.

I beg to disagree. Hope is part of religious faith. Hope is part of the American spirit (as I see Joe Klein noted in passing in his column in the new, June 7, 2004 issue of Time). I also note Brent Staples’ “Editorial Observer” piece in The New York Times (Sat., May 29, 2004) about adolescents obsessed with the Internet. Staples asserts that on the Net, “everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.”

What Staples says could be applied to the appeal of secret identities in comics, as well. But when Peter Parker takes on the guise of Spider-Man, he is not just escaping into a more powerful self but taking on serious responsibility. To accept that “with great power must come great responsibility” is a sign of maturity. Spider-Man is not a “false self,” but in some ways, a truer self.

Moreover, it seems to me that bitterness and cynicism are not the sole property of adults, and that to become mired in them might well be a sign of immaturity. Staples’ argument that to blow one’s problems out of proportion is a true sign of adolescent behavior (in its negative connotations) makes sense to me.

To my mind, hope is a sign of a mature attitude; instead of mourning one’s defeats, one keeps on striving, hoping things will improve. It’s why those of us cast aside by the present economy keep searching for new jobs; pessimism won’t benefit our quests. It’s part of why I keep doing this column, casting my bread upon the water. Eventually someone will notice and it will lead to bigger things career-wise. (It already has in a few minor ways). If I, and others like me, keep on writing serious appreciations of comics as an artform. it will slowly but surely gain further respect in American culture. (We have already come further than we could have imagined in the 1960s.) I’m hopeful I can reposition myself as well as Danny Fingeroth has, as a teacher, scholar and authority on comics. As the female protagonist of Scenes from a Marriage says towards the very end, after she has aged from confused depressed youth into hopeful, wiser middle age (it’s a long five hours!), “I persevere. I enjoy myself. . . .I am content with my direction.”

And I suspect that deep down, Danny isn’t as pessimistic as his book sometimes implies. Despite the appeal superheroes have for kids, Fingeroth notes that “the superhero genre is rich with metaphors and parallels that help us recognize and make sense of much of what goes on in our lives.” He admits that “I have deep and complex feelings about the medium and the characters it has spawned.” We may first get to know superheroes when we are children, but as Danny states, “We each have to be our own superhero. It’s the work of a lifetime.”

Superman on the Couch is a good, solid, entertainingly written basic textbook on the superhero genre. But it is merely an introduction to a vast subject on which so much more needs to be written. What Danny Fingeroth says in this book should set readers thinking more deeply about superheroes in comics, movies and TV, and encourage them to range still further in investigating this fascinating but still underrated area of American popular culture. I plan to recommend this book to my students this fall; I’m recommending it to you now.

HOMELESS

Some weeks ago I went to see Home on the Range well aware that it is the last hand-drawn animated film from Disney for the foreseeable future. Since Shrek and the Pixar movies (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo), all computer animated, have been so wildly successful while most of their traditional hand-drawn animated films have been commercial disappointments, Disney and DreamWorks have decided that audiences only want to see CGI animated films from now on.

Keeping this in mind, now consider the plot of Home on the Range. A ranch run by a kindly, elderly woman is in danger of going bankrupt, whereupon all the cattle on the ranch will be sold off. Could this have been an intentional metaphor, at least in the minds of some of Disney Animation’s people, for what they must have feared was the approaching doom of traditional animation ““ and hence, their jobs?

In the movie the ranch is ultimately saved, but in real life doom came to the animators. In recent months, I’ve been reading articles at JimHillMedia.com, a website for Disney aficionados, about the closing of the Disney animation studio in Orlando, where Home on the Range was done. (For that matter, so were Mulan and Lilo & Stitch, the latter being a hand-drawn animated film that was indeed a major success, proving, one might have thought, that audiences do still like traditional animation as long as they find the story and characters appealing.) Hill ran messages from downsized members of the Florida studio, pointing out that while the topmost people will find new work elsewhere in animation, many others will not: says one, “If you weren’t an A-Lister (at Disney Feature Animation), you will get left behind..” Animation people tell Hill that people had come from around the world to Orlando to fulfill a life’s dream by working in Disney animation, that many had mortgages to pay and families to support, that many had put down “roots” in Orlando and did not want to leave, that a happy creative community was being dispersed. Hill comments that “if I had happen to me what just happened to these 200 dedicated, extremely talented artists and technicians at Feature Animation-Florida ““ that a job I loved, a job that I was really good at, just taken away from me for no good reason ““ I’d still be in a fetal ball somewhere, weeping softly.”

This all reminds me of the similar upheavals in the comics industry over recent years. ‘Nuff said.

The metaphor in Home could have been even more biting (which, come to think of it, is an appropriate choice of words, as you will soon see). Hill also reports that people at Disney Animation had wanted to make it clear that if the ranch were sold, the cows (including the three talking cows who are the lead characters) would be sold to a slaughterhouse. It seems the movie, as it now stands, does not make the doom that awaits the cows clear inasmuch as Disney had hoped to get a Happy Meals promotional deal with McDonald’s, which, of course, makes hamburgers from slaughtered cows.

As it turned out, Disney didn’t get the Happy Meals deal anyway, though perhaps that was a blessing in disguise now that the new documentary Super Size Me has focused attention on the decidedly unhealthy aspects of McDonald’s fast food. (I may love hamburgers, but I never eat at McDonald’s unless I’m stuck at an airport with no other alternatives.)

Hill also reports the speculation that Disney underpromoted Home on the Range, which did indeed vanish quickly from theaters, in order to guarantee that its forthcoming computer-animated movie, Chicken Little, will look financially successful by comparison. Well, that’s credible. But if indeed Disney decided not to promote Home as much as it could have, perhaps it’s because the movie really isn’t as good as, say, Lilo was (to give the Florida studio credit for one of its successes).

Part of the reason is, as the Times critic Elvis Mitchell noted in one of his last reviews there, the efforts at humor often seem frenetic rather than funny. I’d add that the characters do not seem distinctive or memorable enough; it’s hard for me to imagine any of them spinning off into their own TV series, say, as Aladdin and the Little Mermaid and even The Lion King‘s Timon and Pumbaa did. Indeed, the latter two have proved to have not only so much appeal but so much depth as characters, that the new The Lion King 1/2 sequel on DVD is really about them; how often is a cast of characters so richly conceived that supporting players can carry their own movie?

Oh, the leading characters, three cows on a quest to save their ranch, and some of their allies are likable; I had a pleasant time watching this film, but no more than that. The lack of depth to the characters betrays the main problem: the lead characters’ story arcs lack the psychological and emotional resonance that Disney feature film heroes’ quests should have. Sure, the three cows are trying to save their home. But do they psychologically change in any important way? Does their quest have metaphorical import beyond its surface meaning? Disney took a gamble here. This is not a coming-of-age story, as so many Disney animated features are. Nor is there a love story at its heart, which may be a major factor that made Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and even Lion King so successful. The three cow heroines are mature adults: one of them is downright matronly. I’d like to think that Disney could do an animated feature about adult characters and make it dramatically involving for both children and adults. Come to think of it, the heroes of the Pixar/Disney films – Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc. and the father in Finding Nemo, plus two title characters in the forthcoming The Invincibles ““ ARE adults!If you want examples of the kind of multidimensional story lines I’m looking for, consult my analyses of Disney’s Brother Bear (see Comics in Context #19) and Pixar/Disney’s Finding Nemo (Comics in Context #40). It’s too bad that Home on the Range doesn’t come close to the mythic depth of either. I’d rather traditional Disney animation had gone out with the proverbial bang.

So, if Disney blames the disappointing box office performance of its recent (non-Pixar) animated features on the fact that they were hand-drawn, what excuse will Disney find if its future (non-Pixar) computer animated films bomb? Maybe there’s more to making the films work than the way they look.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Regular readers of this column should look out for Back Issue #5, from TwoMorrows Publishing, now on sale, for which I interviewed Chris Claremont and John Byrne on the subject of Wolverine, who marks his thirtieth (!) anniversary this year. Mr. Byrne did the striking cover portrait of Wolverine, which should catch your eye as you scan the comic shop racks. This is my second piece for Back Issue, and there are many more to come!

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Lest you forget, this column not only puts comics in context, but also movies and television shows that relate in some way to comics and cartoon art. I can’t really analyze the meaning and structure of a work without dealing with the ending, which not only resolves the plot but completes the ideas the creators were trying to convey. So here is the spoiler warning for those who wish it.

EXTREME MAKEOVER

We begin with the latest animated blockbuster, Shrek 2, which opened last week (as I write) both nationwide and at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places, perhaps in acknowledgement of the excellence and wide popularity of the original film. I should mention in passing that the first Shrek also spawned a witty and cleverly imagined comics series written for Dark Horse by the reliable Mark Evanier. I wondered when I read it why Evanier picked up the Shrek saga with Shrek and his new bride, Princess Fiona, on their way to their honeymoon but not quite getting there. Shrek 2 makes it clear: it opens with the honeymoon!

I got the impression that many movie reviewers liked the original Shrek because they regarded it as an attack on Disney, both the company itself and its canon of animated fairy tales. I agree with the first half of the equation: Shrek‘s villain, Lord Farqaard, was widely recognized as an unacknowledged caricature of Disney boss Michael Eisner. But as for the second half, no. I observe that many people seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against core Disney creations like the animated features and the theme parks. That the Shrek movies kid fairy tale characters is not particularly original: Disney itself tweaks its own versions of them in the TV series House of Mouse, and Jay Ward’s “Fractured Fairy Tales,” from forty-year-old Bullwinkle shows, were far more subversive towards the genre. The real point that Shrek makes is that Farqaard has driven the fairy tale characters out of his realm, leaving his castle (which, yes, resembles Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks) empty and sterile. (So Shrek was a foreshadowing of the current rebellion by so many Disney stockholders against Eisner, whom many accuse of mismanaging the classic Disney legacy.) The Shrek movies are actually pro-fairy tale, kidding them affectionately. In fact, Shrek is at heart a contemporary fairy tale itself.

The original Shrek was a revisionist version of the Beauty and the Beast story. In its usual form, as followed by the Disney animated version, Beauty and the Beast fall in love with each other, and the Beast is rewarded by being transformed into a handsome human being, a form that supposedly represents his true self. If indeed one of the themes of Beauty and the Beast is that outer appearances do not truly matter, then the traditional ending seems somewhat hypocritical. In both Jean Cocteau’s classic live action film version and the Disney animated version, the Beauty has a handsome human suitor who proves to be the real monster, spiritually. It is also said that, after watching the end of Cocteau’s film, in which the Beast turns into a human, Greta Garbo said, “Give me back my beast.” When Disney did a video sequel to its Beauty and the Beast, it was a flashback to a time before the Beast became human again. Similarly, when Disney’s Beast shows up in Disney World or on the House of Mouse animated series, he is back in bestial form.

In Neil Gaiman’s 1602, its counterpart to Reed Richards points out that by “the laws of story,” the Thing can never be permanently returned to human form, because he is so much more interesting as a monster. That principle seems to apply with these two Beauty and the Beast films as well.

In the first Shrek film the outwardly bad-tempered but inwardly sensitive ogre Shrek falls in love with the beautiful human Princess Fiona. She has a secret: she is under a spell that transforms her into an ogre at night. Comics fans may recall that originally Bruce Banner transformed into the Hulk at night (another bad-tempered green “monster” like Shrek!). Night, the time of sleep and dreams, is the time when the subconscious emerges, and perhaps Fiona’s ogre self represented the side of her psyche that she concealed from “daylight.” Is it the “shadow” side of her personality, Hyde to her daytime Jekyll?

In the end Fiona was magically transformed into ogre form permanently. This, it seemed, was her true self, and Shrek was indeed her true love. The “shadow” self turns out to be positive, representing her capacity for love.

So, obviously, Shrek is a contemporary fable about accepting one’s true self, not trying to hide it. It’s a parable about the pressure to conform: it states that one does not have to look like everyone else, it conform to standards that prevent one from fulfilling his or her potential.

And it also seems to be a very American fable, one suited to a multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural society. The ogres are a minority in Shrek‘s world, and they even have differently colored skin ““ green ““ than the human majority, who are white. It’s like the way that X-Men, with its theme of racial tolerance, is particularly American. (So, am I the first person to find similarities between Shrek and Marvel heroes?)

This is not the digression it will at first seem, trust me: when Sex and the City had its final episode a short while back, there was talk that there might be a theatrical movie version. I wrote to a friend that the problem with a movie would be that, in order to create dramatic situations, it would have to tamper with the carefully designed happy endings that the TV series had given each of its four lead characters.

This is part of the problem with Shrek 2, which I enjoyed and found pleasant, but didn’t impress me as being the equal of the first film. (Then again, I didn’t get why so many people liked the first Shrek so much until the second time I saw it, so perhaps my opinion of Shrek 2 will also change on a second viewing.) Though the opening honeymoon montage is a funny and joyful celebration of Shrek and Fiona’s “happily-ever-after” style love, the film ends up having to create discord between them. The excuse is that Shrek and Fiona visit her royal parents in the land of “Far Far Away,” where everyone, including the king and queen, are appalled that she has not only married an ogre but become one herself. It doesn’t seem to me all that convincing that Shrek and Fiona would come anywhere close to breaking up over this. Perhaps it didn’t to the writers either; they don’t even seem satisfied with the King’s deep dislike of Shrek. Instead, they bring in a new villain, a Fairy Godmother, to manipulate matters so as to separate the two newlyweds.I find her something of a disappointment. There was an edge to Farqaard, since people detected his resemblance to Eisner. Perhaps the Fairy Godmother seems too bland a villain to me because she does not seem based on anything more than reversing the motivations of a familiar archetype from kiddie stories. She deals in blackmail and manipulation, but what if the Fairy Godmother had been more Godfather-like, running a criminal “family” of fairy tale bad guys? Or what if she had been, say, more like a caricature of a Martha Stewart type, a control freak who insists on beautifying castles, princesses, and ogres whether they want it or not?

Similarly, the “Far Far Away” setting lacks the bite that Farqaard’s kingdom, based on Disneyland, had. “Far Far Away” is a parody of Hollywood, but there’s no more to it than palm trees, a variation on the “Hollywood” sign, and puns on the names of various high profile companies. But Hollywood is the center for a culture that abhors ugliness, where people are not satisfied with the way they naturally look, where they alter their appearance with plastic surgery, Botox, liposuction, and the rest. You might think that this would be the perfect target for a Shrek movie. But no. The movie doesn’t go any deeper than having Joan Rivers turn up to cover red carpet arrivals of celebrity fairy tale characters.

Still, I’m surprised and pleased that the makers of Shrek 2 chose to build its story around the same thematic concerns as the earlier movie. Shrek 2 is also about the contrast between appearances and the inner self, societal pressures to conform, self-esteem versus insecurity, and prejudices shown towards people who look different from the majority. New York Times critic A. O. Scott compared the scene in which Shrek and Fiona have dinner with his new human in-laws to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the landmark 1960s film about interracial marriage. Shrek 2‘s version is funny, but thematically the comparison is apt.

In the course of the story, Shrek steals the Fairy Godmother’s “Happily Ever After” potion, which transforms both him and Fiona into human form, and as a bonus, Shrek’s companion Donkey into a handsome stallion. Here I should mention a paradox. I admire the beauty and realistic look of the movie except for the human characters. As in the first film, the human figures and their skin just aren’t persuasive. Perhaps if the entire film had a more artificial look, that wouldn’t matter as much, but the awkward-looking humans stick out badly amid the convincing realism of so much else. When Shrek gets turned into human, I don’t know whether he’s supposed to be handsome or funny-looking.

But I should also mention that I’m very impressed by the skill with which characters’ emotions are delineated through their facial expressions. I thought the King looked wooden until he began grimacing in anger: then he came to life. Shrek and Fiona’s expressions are particularly good, and I’m surprised at how pretty the animators make her in ogre form, with soft, appealing features.

So Shrek has changed his appearance in order to conform to what he thinks Fiona (and society) want.

In the end, Shrek and Fiona have to decide whether to make the spell that turned them into human form permanent. Shrek is willing to remain in human form for Fiona’s sake, but Fiona says she wants Shrek to look like the ogre she fell in love with. (This is a nice sentiment, and no one points out that Shrek fell in love with Fiona in her human form.) Thus they allow the spell to lapse, and Shrek and Fiona return to being ogres, the form in which the audience presumably likes them better. Would we really be interested in seeing a Shrek 3 in which Mr. and Mrs. Shrek were both humans?

But I still wonder of Fiona’s choice really makes psychological sense. Perhaps in part it depends on how one interprets the “ogre” metaphor. There is some suggestion in Shrek 2 that ogres are a persecuted minority. During the blissful honeymoon sequence, Shrek is abruptly attacked by villagers, who automatically hate him because he is an ogre. The movie doesn’t do enough with this. There are references to other ogres (Puss in Boots is said to specialize in fighting them), but Shrek and Fiona (who is not an ogre by birth) are the only ones we see.

If being an ogre is a metaphor for being a member of a minority group, especially an ethnic or racial one, then Fiona made the only correct choice. Could you imagine a movie in which two black people were given the choice of magically becoming white and accepted it? That would be horrifying. In choosing to remain ogres, Fiona and Shrek are accepting their true identities.

But what if one interprets being an ogre as a metaphor for being physically deformed? If one were offered the opportunity to have the deformity cured, wouldn’t he or she take it? We the readers know that Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four will never be permanently cured of being the Thing. But we also know that he will always long to be in human form.

Even if being an ogre is just interpreted as a metaphor for being physically unattractive, is there anything really wrong with looking better? Most people don’t disagree with the goal of looking more attractive: otherwise people wouldn’t try to dress well, or stay in shape, or use makeup or good grooming. What many people object to is going to what they consider extreme measures in the pursuit of beauty, like surgery. But Fiona and Shrek are offered the chance of staying beautiful (if indeed that’s what the human Shrek is supposed to be!) without suffering pain or adverse side effects. How many people would really turn down an offer like that?

Put it another way. If characters in a movie were offered a million dollars, with no strings attached, would we believe it if they said, no thanks, we’re happy being poor?

Perhaps the real question, then, is whether or not Shrek and Fiona regard themselves as ugly or deformed. In the first movie Fiona was certainly ashamed of her nightly transformations into an ogress. But then Shrek seems to find her just as attractive, perhaps more so, in ogre form, and that suggests that he doesn’t see anything ugly about ogres. He simply has a different standard of beauty than most humans do. Perhaps if we were ogres, we’d think ogres were handsome.

Still, I find myself more easily sympathizing with Donkey’s joy at being transformed into a stallion, and his disappointment when he returns to his donkey self. If Garbo was voicing the real feelings of the audience about Cocteau’s Beast, which his movie did not acknowledge, perhaps Donkey is Shrek 2‘s devil’s advocate.

The trouble with serious analytical discussions of art is that one may end up neglecting its sheer entertainment value. So, let me make it clear: whatever my quandaries about the philosophical implications of this movie, it was indeed enjoyable, if inconsistently so. Less gruff than he was in the first movie, Shrek himself was not as funny this time round. But I intend to recommend the new Puss in Boots character to all my fellow cat lovers: voiced by Antonio Banderas, he is at once a wonderful burlesque of Banderas’s role Zorro, a funnier parody of Banderas himself than the one Chris Kattan used to do on Saturday Night Live, and a winningly affectionate portrayal of a real cat, from its hairballs to its big, sad eyes. (Actually, most cats I know deal in severe glares, contemptuous of humans, so I guess Puss in Boots’s over-the-top but endearing expressions reflect more what I’d like more cats to be like!)
A particularly subversive gag involving Pinocchio’s lying rightly brought down the house at the showing I attended. And a celebratory musical number and dance, uniting the community, is the classic way of ending a comedy: Shrek 2 raises the roof with the concluding and utterly anachronistic performance of “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Puss and Donkey.

THE PROPER DIRECTORIAL ATTITUDE

In his introduction to Dark Horse’s Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm paperback, Guillermo del Toro, director of the Hellboy movie, says about the character’s creator, “Yes, Mike Mignola is a genius.” He continues, “this introduction. . .will merely point the reader to a few more reasons for groveling at the feet of a comic-book god like Mr. Mignola, here.”

Well. This is so different from the movie professional who makes fun of the comics creator on whose work his film is based, or the movie professional who acts oblivious of the comic creator’s existence. (I haven’t seen any reference to Gerry Conway, co-creator of the Punisher, in any ad or article about the new Punisher movie that I’ve read. Then again, considering the critical reaction to the movie, perhaps Mr. Conway is grateful for this.)

But Mike Mignola as a “genius” and as “a comic-book god”? Mike does indeed do good, valuable work, but if he’s a genius, then what words can we use to describe the likes of Jack Kirby and Will Eisner, before whom surely Mignola himself would bow?

Here again I am reminded of the strange paths that life can take. I can recall back in the 1980s when Mike Mignola was part of the Friday night comics pros groups in New York City that would head out to dinner and/or a movie. (I specifically remember his being there when we saw the dreadful Supergirl movie.) So I used to watch movies with him; now I get to see his name in big letters up on the screen!

But never mind del Toro’s hyperbole. The real point is that he so clearly respects the original comics on which he based his movie. He says in his introduction, “I tried to honor and expand upon the universe created by Mike in his series and in his masterful short stories.” In fact, Mignola was present during the filmmaking. In his interview about his Hellboy movie for FilmForce, del Toro reports, “And Mike was there, just to keep his blessing on everything. I mean, we argued, we argued a lot, and I said to him, ‘Your duty is not to agree. You convince me or I convince you.’ And we won both ways.” And that’s my ideal of how it should be done: a genuine collaboration. Of course, Mignola owns the Hellboy series, so he had more clout than the various Marvel and DC writers who did their stories on a work-for-hire basis and see neither money nor credit when a studio does a movie based on their work. But surely this also reflects well on del Toro, since it’s rare for a director to consult with screenwriters on the set, much less the author of the original material on which the screenplay was based.

It’s an interesting coincidence that the Hellboy movie and Shrek 2 should come out so close together. In the FilmForce interview, del Toro points out that it too is a variation on Beauty and the Beast.

He says, “You have a message that is anti-programming, almost, where they’re telling you to be yourself. It’s a beauty and the beast story where, number one, the beauty kisses the beast at the end, but instead of the beast turning into a prince, she turns into a beast.” He is referring to the final shot in which the fireproof Hellboy and the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman kiss, as both are engulfed in her flames, which here take on sexual symbolism. “The final shot, for me, is beautiful, because it works at the level where you’re telling people it’s okay to be a monster. Just accept it and make it part of yourself. . . To me, the theme of the movie is, what makes you a human is not anything to do with your birth, the place of your birth or what you’re supposed to do, but what you choose to do.”

So, in this respect, Hellboy treats the same theme in the superhero adventure genre that the Shrek movies do as satiric fairy tales. Indeed, in his FilmForce interview del Toro refers to Hellboy as both a “fairy tale” and a “fable.”

In preparation for my review of the Hellboy film, FilmForce arranged to have Dark Horse Comics supply me with review copies of some past trade paperbacks of Mignola’s Hellboy comics. I received Book 3, The Chained Coffin and Others, a collection of short stories, and Book 5, the graphic novel The Conqueror Worm. Alas, once again I find the same problem I encounter over and over in today’s comics: a failure to introduce the main characters and their situation to new readers. It’s as if Dark Horse can’t believe that anyone would read Books 3 and 5 unless they had read Books 1, 2 and 4. But they didn’t send Book 1 or 2; they sent 3 and 5! Is Hellboy a demon? How did he get here? Who are these people he is working for? Well, luckily the movie explains all of this: he is a demon, who was brought to Earth as a baby in a mystical ritual in the 1940s, was raised by a kindly scientist, and grew up to became an operative for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, which combats supernatural menaces.

Although in the comics Hellboy may bare his teeth in an annoyed grimace, and will at times vent his rage, he and the other characters more often have a stoic look: facial expressions are minimal, distancing the readers from them. In contrast, in the movie Hellboy and other characters more visibly emote. The Hellboy in these two volumes seemed, despite his demonic appearance, to have the personality of an American everyman with super-powers, with no really distinctive traits. In reading an interview with Mignola published some years back in The Comics Journal #189, I see that in many stories, this is intentional: Mignola’s principal interest in such stories lies in adapting material from folk tales, fairy tales and mythology from various cultures. “I think of Hellboy as not having a lot of baggage, So I tend to just drop him into the material and let the material work around him.” In the two paperbacks, while Hellboy remains at the center of the action, Mignola seems to take more interest in exploring the personalities of various supporting characters, notably the haunting figure of Roger, the artificially created “homunculus.”

In contrast, the movie concentrates on Hellboy as a character, drawing on his origin tale and presumably other stories not included in the collections that I was sent.

Reviewing the movie, New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell said that actor Ron Perlman, who plays Hellboy, had a “mastery of bad-tempered volubility [that] makes ‘Hellboy’ a kind of screwball-comedy version of the Thing from the ‘Fantastic Four’ comics.” I believe Mitchell may be confused here. It’s not as if, say, the old Stan Lee-Jack Kirby scenes of the Thing being the victim of the Yancy Street Gang’s pranks were the sort of elegant farce that Noel Coward might have written. The Thing, with his irreverent wisecracks and his tussles with the Human Torch, is a far more comedic character than the Hellboy of the movie or of these two volumes, as well as a much more tragic figure. (In none of these three sources does Hellboy wish he were an ordinary human, as the Thing so often does, and at the movie’s end, Hellboy gets the girl, whereas the Thing traditionally has worried that his beloved Alicia would reject him if she could see him.) I would not be surprised if the Hellboy of the comics were inspired in part by the Thing, but, at least in the material I’m reviewing here, he’s not as dramatically vivid or colorful a character as his predecessor.

(I may quarrel with this phrase of Elvis Mitchell’s, but otherwise he did a perceptive review of the movie, demonstrating his knowledge and appreciation of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics; he even makes a point of acknowledging John Byrne as scripter of the first Hellboy series. I quite like Mitchell’s insightful description of Mignola’s “expressionist woodcut cartoonishness.” Mitchell recently resigned from the Times, allegedly in protest after fellow critic A. O. Scott was promoted above him. Mitchell was one of the few writers at the Times, the nation’s leading newspaper, who took the comics artform seriously, and of those, he was the most talented, insightful, and knowledgeable about comics. That by itself is a major reason to regret his departure.)

In the movie, in large part thanks to Ron Perlman’s performance, Hellboy’s personality comes across much more vividly. As a demon, he ages far more slowly than humans. Hence, though he arrived on Earth as an infant in the 1940s, we are told in the movie that he is now psychologically and physically the equivalent of a human at age 30. Perlman, on the other hand, is middle-aged, and even under all the demonic makeup, comes off as a gruff, tough veteran fighter with a heart, puffing on his Kirbyesque cigars: in short, much closer to the Thing. The movie concentrates more on Hellboy’s personal dramas: his longing for Liz, the fellow agent he loves; his mixed feelings towards his adoptive father, Dr. Broom, and his simmering resentment towards the Agency head who effectively holds him captive to do his bidding but does not treat him as human.

The movie sets up a familiar nature and nurture opposition and tries to make us think that Hellboy will turn away from his upbringing by humans towards his demonic heritage, and serve the forces of evil: he even grows long horns on his head. But this is a character who keeps kittens as pets, watches TV, is in love with a co-worker, is clearly devoted to his work of helping others (even if he resents his employers) and seems so utterly human in personality. Does anyone in the audience actually believe he would switch sides?

Both the comics stories and the movie strike me as enjoyable entertainments, but lacking in the kind of thematic depth I prefer. They’re triumphs of visual and storytelling style over literary substance. In the comics I am impressed by the creation of a somber, ominous mood through the variations of darkness ““ the grays, blues and browns in the coloring; the black shadows and silhouettes ““ and in contrast, the occasional bursts of bright light. The stories take on an epic, sometimes cosmic scale through enormous creatures, settings like castles and Alpine mountains, and even panoramas of the starlit sky. Mitchell rightly notes the Lovecraftian influence in the Hellboy comics, and it’s in the film’s grotesque monsters, too. But the movie takes a more direct, action-oriented approach to such menaces. Certainly, the comics have Kirbyesque fight scenes in which Hellboy punches monsters, but they also have what del Toro terms “the moments of quiet, almost elegiac horror,” which OI think that the action-oriented movie lacks. The comics can create a genuine sense of eerieness. Often this is visual: the gigantic werewolf in “The Wolves of St. Aygust,” whose resemblance to an actual wolf is disturbingly exact, or the immense boar in “The Corpse.” Or the various ghostly presences who haunt these tales, like the ghost of a young woman in the same story whose head abruptly becomes that of a wolf. Other times the eerieness is conceptual, like the spirit of “The Conqueror Worm” in the story by that name, taking possession of the body of Hellboy’s homonculos ally. In Mignola’s best writing, the eerieness can even exist within a character’s personality: in “almost Colossus:” Roger the homonculus encounters his sinister “elder brother,” a previous creation, who takes on colossal size: his ranting about being God seems not the usual comics villain’s bluster but a look into true insanity. Or there is the ghostly wolf-girl’s lament that God must hate her to inflict this fate upon her. In “Conqueror Worm” the vision of Earth burnt to a planet-sized cinder seems more chilling than the more familiar sci-fi image of the planet blowing up. Though Mignola says in an introduction that his short story,. “A Christmas Underground,” is based on a folk tale, I see in it a variation on the Greek myth of Hades’ abduction of Persephone to the underworld, and hence I was surprised by its far bleaker denouement. Hellboy’s vision of an encounter between what are presumably his parents ““ a great devil and a human woman ““ in “The Chained Coffin” is perhaps the most unsettling scene in the two volumes.

What impresses me most about the Hellboy movie is something I haven’t seen mentioned in any reviews. In his Conqueror Worm introduction, del Toro says, “I humbly confess that many a time I have aspired to imitate Mignola’s mysterious style in the design of my films, especially the cold, velvet backdrop of darkness from which his characters emerge.” What struck me in watching the movie is the degree to which the movie duplicates in live action terms the look of the Hellboy comics: the look of Hellboy and his fiend Abe Sapien, the red color of Hellboy moving through a blackly shadowed world, the designs of sets and props. We’ve seen a previous movie adapted from Mignola’s art style, Disney’s animated Atlantis, but it is more impressive to me to see del Toro evoke the look of Mignola’s fictional world within a live action movie. (And when the movie shows us a comic book about Hellboy, it is clearly done in an imitation of Jack Kirby’s style, a fine and unexpected homage!)

That in turn changes my standards for evaluating live action movies based on comics. What if the Daredevil movie had genuinely looked like Frank Miller’s artwork? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the forthcoming Fantastic Four live action movie captures the look and feel of Jack Kirby’s art? (What if its set designers, matte painters, and CGI artists modeled their work directly on Kirby’s?) I’m not holding my breath, but it would be so wonderful if it did.

ANALYZING NEMO

Lately I’ve watched the Disney-Pixar Finding Nemo again twice, once in its recent premiere on the Starz! cable network, and before that, on its DVD with a commentary track by its director Andrew Stanton and others.

Now I have a trick for listening to DVD commentaries: I activate the subtitles, so I can follow the movie’s dialogue while listening to the commentators. But when I listened to the commentary track, the subtitles turned out to be transcriptions of the commentary, not the film’s dialogue! Foiled! Then again, the people for whom DVD subtitles are really intended, the hearing-impaired, are no doubt delighted that Pixar, Disney, or both, has thus made it possible for them to follow the commentary, something other DVD makers apparently don’t care about.

Watching the movie (without the track) I once again admired its genuine humor, its appealing characters ““ not only the leads, but even minor supporting cast members ““ and, of course, its sheer visual beauty in depicting its underwater universe. Most of all, this time around, I was impressed by its story construction. There are two major story lines that begin and end together, but diverge for most of the film. The lead character, the clownfish Marlin, has never gotten over the death of his mate and most of their eggs; as a result, he is both obsessively overprotective towards his surviving child, Nemo, and himself fearful of taking any chances in life, or of venturing beyond the safety of home. Nemo, on the other hand, longs to move beyond the boundaries of home, and hence feels stifled by his parent.

When Nemo is captured by divers, their stories diverge. Marlin embarks on a classic, Campbellian quest, leaving his “normal” world, the coral reef he calls home, to journey through a symbolically enchanted realm, the vast ocean beyond, in search of his son. Marlin even spends time in a literal version of Campbell’s “belly of the beast,” in this case, the mouth of a whale.

Nemo, in contrast, has a very different kind of adventure, built on a motif that Michael Chabon would appreciate: an attempt at escape. Nemo finds himself trapped in a fish tank in a dentist’s office and must join forces with new allies, the tank’s other inmates, to somehow get back to the ocean and then home. Surely we are meant to think of prison movies and The Great Escape as parallels.

Marlin and Nemo are each ultimately seeking the same goal: reunion with each other and return to home. But each must take a different route.

Moreover, each is facing his specific fears. Nemo, who felt confined by life at home, is now genuinely imprisoned and must escape. Marlin, so shattered by past tragedy that he never wanted to let go of his son or leave home, has now indeed lost his son and must traverse the great ocean, risking many dangers, to find him and become “whole” again.

Audiences will identify with both protagonists, but kids will no doubt relate more fully to Nemo, while adults will identify more with Marlin. Nemo’s own saga is, unsurprisingly, about learning to function as an independent adult. It makes mythic sense that his new comrades in the fish tank even enact a tribal-style initiation ritual as if to mark his entrance into their world, the adult world.What I find most intriguing is that Marlin and Nemo are each paired with a surrogate version of the other. Nemo is mentored by his cellmate, er, tankmate Gil, who, unlike his father, encourages him to escape their confines and to take chances to achieve his goals. Gil even ends up risking his own life to ensure Nemo’s escape. Marlin is paired with Dory, wan adult fish with a childlike personality, complicated further by her comic difficulties with short-term memory. She embodies Marlin’s fears that his son is too irresponsible to act without him. If you want a sign that this is what the filmmakers intend, consider a dramatic moment in which Marlin angrily scolds Dory for her risk taking and finds himself calling her “Nemo.”

Marlin and Nemo each gets a few symbolic death and resurrection scenes. A particularly good one comes in the scene in the whale’s mouth, in which Dory encourages Marlin to let go and fall down the whale’s throat. That would seem to be giving in to death, but Marlin, who would remain trapped if he remained where he was, nonetheless trusts Dory, lets go, and instead he and Dory are shot out to safety through the whale’s blowhole.

Towards the end, when Marlin and Nemo are reunited, each shows how he has evolved as a character through their rescue of Dory, who in part represents the helpless child that Marlin thought Nemo was. Nemo insists that Marlin allow him to execute his plan to enable Dory and many other fish to escape a fishing net (another escape motif), and Marlin, after initial refusal, consents, recognizing his son’s ability to take charge of his actions, and even helps him out.

As for the Finding Nemo commentary track, I quite like the way that the commentators appear on screen initially, and at times the movie will be interrupted so as to show us video clips of related artwork, or of the voice actors performing their lines, or of other members of the Pixar creative team making observations. Moreover, everyone from Pixar who’s on the commentary track seems genuinely enthusiastic about his or her work and about being part of this creative team. This is clearly a creative group that is a true community, that is performing at their artistic peak, and that isn’t afraid of being shoved out the door by corporate overlords. In short, it reminds me of what the comics industry used to be like. Now if only they needed someone to write The Official Handbook of the Pixar Universe. . . .

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

In the world of comic strips in recent years, there have been major series whose creators brought them to an end (Bill Watterston’s Calvin and Hobbes, Gary Larson’s The Far Side) or who went on lengthy sabbaticals (Berke Breathed’s Bloom County and its subsequent spinoffs). But traditionally the great comic strip artists have devoted lifelong careers to one or two series. In my childhood many of the titans were still active, working on strips they had been doing for decades: Milton Caniff (Steve Canyon), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Al Capp (Li’l Abner), and my favorite, Walt Kelly (Pogo). In recent times there have been such examples of longevity as Charles Schulz, who only retired from Peanuts shortly before his death, and Garry Trudeau on Doonesbury. (Perhaps it is surprising that in many such cases, the creator did not actually own the strip, but was allowed by his corporate bosses to continue working on it.) Followers of such longrunning strips can watch them evolve over time as bodies of creative work. Especially when comic strips comment on real life events, as in Doonesbury and Pogo, or allow their characters to age, famously in Gasoline Alley and also in Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, we readers can see how the strip’s creators respond to changing times and the different phases of life itself. (There will be more on this subject in another of my future, long-gestating columns.)

But such long runs by a single creator are far less common in American comic books. Roy Thomas’s ten-year original stint as writer of Marvel’s Conan titles (now being reprinted by Dark Horse in recognition of their enduring, classic worth) is unusual and remarkable. In fact, I have been told that in some quarters in today’s comic book business it is believed that a creative team should only stay on a series for a year. Had this been the mindset in the 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would never have gotten to do their Galactus trilogy.

The major exception to the rule is Chris Claremont, now approaching the thirtieth anniversary of his first writing the X-Men in 1975, scripting the first “regular” issue of the “new” X-Men, Claremont began his unbroken sixteen-year run on the series now known as Uncanny X-Men, while co-creating and writing related series like The New Mutants, Wolverine, and the original Excalibur on the side. His absences from the X-Men books have been due primarily to editorial and corporate decisions; were it up to him, I suspect he would never have left the X-Men. Even in this ever more fickle comics industry, Marvel has recognized that Claremont’s new X-Men work continues to find a large audience. Thus, in the course of Marvel’s current “X-Men Reload” marketing ploy, though Claremont’s X-Treme X-Men series has wound to an end (see Comics in Context #37), he is now back where he belongs, writing the original X-Men series, Uncanny X-Men, starting anew with issue 444 (cover-dated July 2004 and out right now), teamed up once more with artist Alan Davis, his collaborator on the first Excalibur series.

And, this same month, Claremont has launched a new Excalibur series as well, with a familiar title but a very different premise. (Those series is drawn not by Davis but by Aaron Lopresti.)

The very first page of Uncanny #444 presents a new and welcome variation on a familiar scene from Claremont’s X-Men work. “It’s been a long time since the X-Men have indulged in a game of baseball,” the narrator dryly observes. Indeed, it has. Like the ones he has done in X-Men books in the past, this new baseball sequence provides opportunities for humor that other X-Men writers neglect in order to concentrate on what conventional wisdom deems the X-Men‘s principal stock-in-trade: unrelieved angst. But Claremont, like Stan Lee before him, believes in balancing the dark with the light. Moreover, the baseball games provide a strong sense of the X-Men’s spirit of community. The fact that these outsiders, who feel out of place in a hostile society, find a sense of community, identity, and family within the X-Men is a major source of the concept’s appeal. I used to hear other comics professionals mock what they called Claremont’s “jeans and T-shirt” scenes in his books, but those scenes, with characters happily, affectionately interacting, supplied X-Men with an emotional warmth lacking in many other comics writers’ work.

This baseball scene set me thinking back to one of Claremont’s earliest Marvel stories, way back in Marvel Premiere #24 (August 1975), in which Danny Rand, who is secretly the martial artist Iron Fist, encounters a bearded guy named Chris (the author himself) in a park and joins him and his friends (other Marvel staffers, recognizable to those who know) in a softball game. Marvel’s summer softball games were an annual event in sunnier times, and perhaps Claremont is intentionally harking back to the spirit of the comics community back then in staging new baseball games for the X-Men.

Certainly the sense of community for X-Men readers would be enhanced by seeing the sheer number of characters that Claremont and Davis put into this scene, many of whom are Claremont co-creations, from the original New Mutants as well as the X-Men titles themselves.

The game not only allows for introducing various characters to new readers and, in some cases, establishing their powers (as with Nightcrawler’s teleporting), but also provides opportunities for nice characterization bits, and even subtle references on recent developments in the series. Up at bat, Emma Frost, the White Queen, who was once one of the X-Men’s leading enemies, finds catcher Nightcrawler’s characteristic humor irritating. “One more word, Kurt,” she sneers, “and I’ll banish you to your father’s dimension myself!” There’s a reference to the recent revelation (by another writer) that Nightcrawler’s father was a demon. (Apparently mutation was deemed insufficient to explain Nightcrawler’s appearance and powers, though it should have been enough. So Nightcrawler has been given an origin imitating Hellboy’s, or maybe even Rosemary’s Baby’s.)

The dominant figure in this sequence is Rachel Summers, the daughter of an alternate reality’s versions of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, who were members of the first “class” of X-Men as Cyclops and Marvel Girl. It would appear that the whole convoluted 1990s story line which dispatched Rachel to the far future to become the ancient Mother Askani is no longer relevant, since here she is back in the present, still young. (I assume this has something to do with the alteration of the timeline that originally led to Cable’s future era. This is fine with me: the whole future Cable/Rachel history had gotten too convoluted for the series’ own good. It’s bad enough that we need to have two sets of Scotts and Jeans to explain Rachel’s present-day existence.)

Rachel is not only now calling herself “Marvel Girl,” in honor of the Jeans of this timeline and her own, but she’s calling herself “Rachel Grey.” This is news to me, as it was to the folks at Manhattan’s Cosmic Comics, where I picked up this issue. But I assume that Rachel’s new last name is not only a salute to her mom but a sign of her disapproval of the behavior of this timeline’s version of Scott Summers. “Our” reality’s Jean is dead again, thanks to ex-X-Men-writer Grant Morrison, although with Jean’s talent for resurrection one might well wonder who actually thinks she’s “dead” for good. But even before Jean’s latest demise (collect ’em all!), Scott had inexplicably started a romance with Emma Frost. This is the sort of thing that exasperates longtime readers and makes them wonder what Scott was thinking, or, even better, what in heaven’s name the editors and writers were thinking.

So amidst the overall good spirits of the game, a sort of duel ensues between Rachel, the pitcher, and Frost, up at bat. Though Frost is hardly old, there’s still a generational edge to the conflict here, especially since Davis draws Rachel looking so youthful and sexy. Rachel needles Frost (“Made you flinch”) and, when Emma ignominiously strikes out, makes the point of the duel clear: “That one was for my Mom, Emma!” But though Emma gets genuinely angry, the tone of the duel remains comedic, in keeping with the high spirits of the game. Rachel maintains a sense of humor throughout, Frost ends up falling on her butt in a bit of slapstick comedy, and Rachel bursts into infectious laughter, complete with a thought balloon containing Davis’ caricature of the comically defeated Frost. There’s a more somber undercurrent here, too. Though Claremont doesn’t make this explicit, since Emma, like Rachel, is a telepath, she would “see” Rachel’s image of her; Davis has Emma look momentarily genuinely sad over her moment of humiliation, before she then forfeits any sympathy by bursting into rage at Rachel’s telepathic mention of Jean.

The mixture of tones in this baseball sequence ““ warmth and joy, vengefulness and sadness, comedy and pathos ““ is unusual in comics, but Claremont and Davis bring it off. I also am impressed by the subtlety with which they handle Wolverine’s reactions in the scene. Having been in unrequited love with Jean himself, it is no wonder he disapproves of Scott’s “betrayal” of her with Frost, as demonstrated by his subtle, pointed comments to Scott and Emma in this scene. Scott and Emma don’t seem to understand what he’s getting at, but the attentive reader will. A comics editor once explicitly directed me to write “purple” prose; I much prefer Claremont’s skillful use of understatement in delineating character.

Soon afterwards follows another familiar sort of scene from Claremont’s past X-Men work: the X-Men at leisure around the swimming pool. This too is one of Claremont’s means of showing the X-Men take pleasure in each other’s company, and affords more comedic opportunities: here the Beast’s dive splashes the onlookers.

But look how Claremont and Davis mix the dramatic tones here, as well. Sage, formerly Tessa of the Hellfire Club, appealingly garbed in a bathrobe, sits amid the X-Men’s computer systems, surveying the estate, including the pool area. But initially she does so by tapping into the surveillance systems of various government agencies. On the previous page, Claremont refers to Morrison’s “outing” of the X-Men: the world now knows that Professor Charles Xavier’s school is their headquarters. Morrison presented the “outing” as primarily a good thing, enabling the X-Men to take a more public role in advocating mutant rights. Now Claremont and Davis are showing some of the negative results of the “outing.” The F.B.I. and even the Department of Homeland Security are spying on the Xavier estate; the latter department’s presence is another sign of how 9/11 and subsequent events have influenced comics.

The X-Men now have to cope not only with government surveillance but with intrusions by the news media. We next see a foolishly grinning TV reporter doing a report from what is presumably a helicopter flying over the estate. While on camera, Cannonball angrily orders her, demonstrating a lack of PR savvy comparable to that of the unseen government operative who swung the camera away from Secretary of State Colin Powell during his Meet the Press interview last Sunday (May 15).

Davis provides some interesting overhead shots of the rebuilt Xavier mansion: it’s been redesigned and expanded, presumably to account for where everybody is housed since Morrison radically expanded the size of the student body. (Back in 1963, there were only six people living in the entire mansion!)

In another nice touch, we are shown that the mansion now has a “memorial garden,” where flowers are placed before a photo of Jean, who is not shown alone, as one might expect, but with Scott. One gets the feeling that it is not just Rachel and Wolverine who disapprove of the Scott-and-Emma romance. Indeed, next Sage monitors Scott’s office, inside of which Scott and Emma are busily snogging away instead of being “in conference.”

Think about this scene some more, and it becomes ominous: Sage is spying on Scott’s love life, just as the government is spying on the outside of the mansion.

Here’s another nice bit: various X-Men trainees (all in the original uniforms) look on aghast as Wolverine and Storm undergo a violent session in the Danger Room, while senior X-Man Rogue breaks into a big smile, saying this workout was “mostly. . .just for fun.” Now there’s a way of dramatizing the contrast between newbies and veterans.

Next Storm takes a more serious approach to the theme, stating that “The first generation of mutants needs to take responsibility for their heirs.” We will see more of this generational theme when we look at Excalibur later in this piece. But for now, ask yourselves where else in the Marvel canon you have read a phrase about “responsibility.”

Claremont has the old school Marvel writer’s sense of duty about establishing characters and situations for new or infrequent readers, an especially important task for an issue Marvel is promoting has a “jumping on” point for newcomers. So next he shows us two scenes of X-Men in their new roles as government-sanctioned “marshals” battling mutant criminals. Again there’s a sign of the 9-11 influence: the first band of bad guys, the Weaponeers, are Arab raiders.

These scenes also showcase the fact that after several years of wearing relatively nondescript black uniforms, the X-Men are back in traditional, colorful superhero costumes. I dislike the too-short “horns” on Wolverine’s new outfit, but I quite like the new costume for Rachel. (Its green and yellow colors and boots are also reminiscent of the original Marvel Girl’s late 1960s costume.)

You may recall that around the time of the first X-Men movie, which put the team in black uniforms, Avi Arad and others at Marvel were busy badmouthing traditional superhero costumes as stupid. So the X-Men in the comics were put into black uniforms as well, which look drab and dull in the comics medium. Then out came the Spider-Man movie, a far greater financial success, and not an ill word was uttered about the fact that Spidey wore his usual colorful costume in the film. Now we learn from various sources that Avi Arad decreed that it was “time” for the costumes to return. I suppose this is yet another example of how when comics creators misguidedly try to drop an essential element from a major series, it usually makes its eventual return. I doubt that anyone really thought through the importance of costumes several years ago when they were dropped; we should breathe a sigh of relief that this corporate whim has reversed itself, and the costumes are back.

The ominous aspect of Sage returns towards the end. I wonder if, when Claremont wrote Sage’s dialogue here ““ “Leave their interrogation to me, Rachel. I have ways of making people. . .talk.” ““ it seemed as sinister as it does in the wake of the recent controversy over mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

I can’t say I’m thrilled by the concluding action scenes in this issue: they seem the most conventional part of the book. No, for me what is interesting are the characterizations, the themes, the new look at the X-Men’s place in a changing world.

This is even more true of Claremont’s new Excalibur #1. This, by the way, is not to be confused with his first Excalibur #1, though from now on it surely will be. Claremont’s first Excalibur series began in 1988, but, to judge from the indicia, Marvel couldn’t be bothered to assign the new series a new volume number. This sort of thing has happened so often in the past, complicating the lives of collectors or anyone (surely including Marvel personnel) trying to keep accurate records of the company’s publishing history. And to think that when editor Julius Schwartz revived the Flash comic in the 1950s, he was told to pick up the numbering from where the original Flash comic had left off. Those were simpler and more sensible times.

Excalibur is the name of King Arthur’s sword, and that made an appropriate title for the original Claremont Excalibur, which was about a British-based team of superheroes, a kind of latter-day Round Table. The central figure, indeed, was Captain Britain (one of Claremont’s earliest co-creations), a patriotic icon for the United kingdom just as Captain America is for the United states. The first issue of the new series has nothing to do with Britain or any British characters, though the initial story arc is titled “Forging the Sword.” What connection this new Excalibur may have. literally or figuratively, to the Arthurian legend remains to be seen.

To judge from issue one, the new Excalibur is about Professor Charles Xavier, the founder of the X-Men, and Genosha, the island nation off the coast of Africa that Claremont co-created in the 1980s.

I look at the new Excalibur in terms of a question that must face many comics creators of the Baby Boom generation, who came into the business in the 1970s and 1980s. Can the superhero genre continue to serve as an effective means of personal expression for writers in middle age? (It was for Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who created the Marvel Universe in their middle age.) So many people still think of superhero comics, indeed of comic books in general, as material for children; even the major comics companies seem to be targeting a demographic of teenagers and men in their early 20s. But can the genre be made relevant to middle-aged creators and readers who are seeking more than adolescent nostalgia?

This is a question that faces the world of rock music as well (and perhaps it is relevant that the rise of rock music paralleled the Silver Age in comics). Most of the audience is young, even juvenile, and yet there is an older audience as well, and middle-aged creators who do not simply rely on recycling oldies. Actually, this is a problem that seems prevalent throughout contemporary American culture. The youth culture advocated by the Baby Boomers in their own youth has now turned against them, as movie companies, television studios, and, indeed, businesses in general pursue a young demographic to the exclusion of the middle-aged and seniors.

Consider, then, how unusual and bold Claremont’s new Excalibur is: its central character is a middle-aged man. And he is no fantasy figure of steroid-style musculature and aggressive attitude like other middle-aged Marvel heroes, Cable or the Punisher. Charles Xavier is physically crippled; he’s bald; his strength lies in his mind. Yet he tells us at one point that “My telepathy’s grown too soft. . . .” He blames this on his overreliance on devices like Cerebra, but perhaps we can see it as a sign of aging, as well.

Moreover, this is a story about the dreams, hopes and ideals of youth, something the superhero concept embodies quite well, turning to disillusionment. This is a theme that has been powerfully dramatized in the superhero genre before, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Frank Miller’s original Dark Knight, Paul Jenkins’ Sentry, the final issue of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels, and their predecessor, the recently republished novel Superfolks, not to mention Stan Lee’s “Spider-Man No More” in Amazing Spider-Man #50, which, as one can see from the trailer, is quoted in the second Spider-Man movie. In some of these cases the hero succumbs to disillusionment and gives up the world of superheroes; in others he finds a means to regain his faith and renew his career in that world. What will be Xavier’s choice in this story?

The issue opens with Xavier, eyes shut and jaw set in an expression that looks like mourning, telling us that “once upon a time, I had a dream” of a world in which mutants and “baseline humans” coexisted in peace. “Xavier’s dream” is a familiar phrase from past X-Men stories, and his phrasing, “I had a dream,” might evoke Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”: Xavier, as an non-violent advocate for mutant civil rights, has been compared to Dr. King before. The “once upon a time” phrase is the standard beginning of a fairy tale. Xavier may be suggesting not only that the days when he hoped he could turn his vision, his “dream,” into reality not only seem long past, but that his hopes now seem naive, perhaps even childlike to him, as a fairy tale might seem to an adult.

Turn the page and you will find a double-page spread of Xavier, sitting in his wheelchair, alone amid a scene of devastation. Referring back to his “dream” of a world of racial peace, Xavier says simply, “This isn’t it. This is today’s reality.” It is as if he has awakened from a blissful, youthful dream to face up to a harsh reality in which hope seems naive.

In part, perhaps this scene is another conscious or subconscious evocation of the events of 9/11: it is reminiscent of Superman standing amid the debris of the demolished Daily Planet building in Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, a scene that was clearly a 9/11 reference (see Comics in Context #34).

These are the ruins of Hammer Bay, the capital city of Genosha, a nation of mutants that was obliterated by Sentinel robots dispatched by Xavier’s “evil twin,” Cassandra Nova, early in Grant Morrison’s stint as X-Men writer. So the destruction of Genosha is a testament to the genocidal hatred that Xavier has failed to overcome. It could also be seen as a contemporary, fictional counterpart to the Holocaust.

There is another level of meaning as well, since Genosha, as a fictional concept, was Claremont’s creation. Originally, Genosha seemed to be inspired by South Africa and Rhodesia in the days of apartheid: African nations that were dominated by whites, in which blacks were reduced to second class citizenship. In Genosha white “baseline” humans ruled over a population of mutants, whom they had effectively enslaved.

After Claremont left the X-Men books in the early 1990s, Genosha seemed to become a parallel for Bosnia, with the “baseline” humans and the mutants waging a bloody civil war against each other. Still later, the United Nations turned the nation over to Magneto, in a gesture of appeasement. As Claremont has Xavier tells us in this issue, “It had become the self-proclaimed mutant homeland, presenting itself to the world as a sanctuary and a place of hope.” That might make Genosha sound like the mutant race’s counterpart to Israel, but notice that, despite the Chamber of Commerce-style pictures he shows us of Genosha as a utopia, Claremont is careful to say that this is the image that Magneto’s Latveria sought to present to the world. In fact, under other writers, Magneto made the island nation a base from which he plotted world conquest: Genosha was not the mutants’ Israel but was to him what Latveria is to Doctor Doom.

Finally, Morrison wiped out the population of Genosha, an act that read to me as another example of the tiresome syndrome in which Writer A creates a concept, and his successor, Writer B, dislikes it and wrecks it, either not anticipating or caring that other writers might find the concept useful, or even that Writer A himself might someday return. In this case Claremont is Writer A, Morrison is Writer B, and Genosha was the victim. So Xavier sitting amidst the ruins of a society of mutants might even parallel Claremont finding himself faced with the destruction of one of his own fictional creations. The new Excalibur looks in part to be Claremont’s effort to rescue Genosha and revitalize it as a concept.

Most significantly, the visual image of Xavier amid the ruins of Genosha is a metaphor for Xavier confronting the ruination of his hopes. Looking at this scene of genocide, Xavier must wonder whether all his work on behalf of mutants has been in vain. Is his “dream” dead? Does it lie in ruins like Genosha? On page four artist Aaron Lopresti places Xavier within a panel shaped like a coffin, symbolically entombing him. Claremont has Xavier spend the issue carting a coffin behind his wheelchair. And what is that wrapped, human-sized bundle within the coffin? Here are symbols aplenty of the death of mutants, the death of ideals, and the death of hope.

Cassandra Nova could be dismissed as a single madwoman who does not represent the rest of humanity. But what Xavier tells us about the world’s reaction to the massacre does point to “baseline” humanity’s intolerance towards mutants, which he calls “almost as contemptible as the attack itself.” According to Xavier, the world’s great powers have virtually ignored the plight of Genosha, and are “far more worried about a terrorist response from any survivors.” That seems all too credible. (Consider the current fate of Afghanistan after its supposed liberation from the Taliban.)

What Xavier tells us next may well be inspired by current events in the real world. “I’ve been to war,” he says. “I know firsthand the cost. What matters here isn’t ideology or policies. What matters are people in desperate need. And those with the means ““ and more importantly the will ““ to help.” Like Storm’s line that I quoted from Uncanny X-Men #444, this is, at heart, a reworking of Stan Lee’s famous maxim from Spider-Man’s origin in Amazing Fantasy #15: “With great power must come great responsibility.” Often this line is misquoted, and the “must” is omitted. But “must” conveys the point: it is the moral duty for a person to take responsibility for helping those in need if he or she can. I suspect that Claremont, who has thus alluded to Stan Lee’s maxim in both of his initial “X-Men Reboot” issues, may see it as the prime moral principle underlying stories in the classic Marvel tradition.

Xavier now informs us that in combat he was nicknamed “the Good Shepherd,” because :if you were lost, I’d find you and bring you home safe.” The Good Shepherd, of course, is a character in perhaps Christ’s most celebrated parable, and the character has been regarded as a metaphor for Christ himself. Claremont may be casting Xavier as a Christ figure, though I doubt that Xavier, who seems humbled in this story, is egotistically thinking of himself that way. Instead, Xavier is making the point that he puts his money where his mouth is: he carries out his responsibility to aid those in need, who are metaphorically “lost.” “After a lifetime,” he tells us, acknowledging his age, “that hasn’t really changed.”

Here hope and moral ideals begin to reemerge in the story. The world around Xavier may have changed for the worst, but he remains steadfast: he will not give up. He is a rock solidly fixed amid the chaotic maelstrom.

From there, logically enough, Xavier goes on to describe his role as a teacher, who instructs young mutants in “both the practical and ethical use of their abilities.” This has been Xavier’s role from Lee and Kirby’s X-Men #1 onward. But usually in X-Men stories it is Xavier’s students who take center stage. In fact, through his long run on the X-Men, Claremont repeatedly wrote Xavier out of the series, as if he were not essential to it. Maybe this was even ageism. Now, perhaps because Claremont and Xavier are closer in age, he puts the spotlight on Xavier himself in Excalibur. Through what Storm said in Uncanny #444 and what Xavier says here, Claremont is focusing on the responsibility of a generation that has gained wisdom and experience to aid the younger generation rising up.

As if marking a transition from one act of the story to another, Xavier literally falls and then rises to see the spirit of his deceased lover and colleague, Moira MacTaggart. Xavier does not know if she is “real” ““ a ghost ““ or not; Moira guesses she is a “figment of your imagination.” This reminds me of the story’s opening, with its contrast between Xavier’s dream and the reality in which he finds himself.

Moira’s ghost is an interesting dramatic device, and a familiar one: the ghost who may or may not be real. This reminds me of the ambiguity with which John Byrne initially treated Alfred’s ghost in Generations before finally making clear he was real in the sequel. There’s the meeting between President Bartlet and his recently deceased secretary, Mrs. Landingham, in the Season 2 finale of The West Wing. Going further back, to more literary sources, there’s Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and there are even those who think that Hamlet may have imagined his father’s ghost.

If the ghost is not real, this should raise questions about the living person’s sanity. It is one thing for Xavier to consciously decide to imagine what Moira might say to him. For Xavier to hallucinate Moira’s presence, without knowing if she is real or not, is worrisome.

Still, this is a good scene, and perhaps the heart of the story. Moira is a reminder of the theme of aging, death, and loss, and also of the way past memories provide inspiration for the present and future. Moira’s ghost first appears as a middle-aged woman, in glasses and suit, but then reverts to the appearance of her earlier self, wearing considerably less.

“The way you see me is the way you remember me best,” she tells Xavier: “From when we were young an’ in love. . .an’ our world was rich wi’ possibilities.”

Actually, from her earliest appearances in the1970s, Moira has always represented lost love, lost youth, and lost possibilities She was the woman whom Xavier loved in his university days, but whom he lost to a man she married but did not love. Though Xavier and Moira remained close friends and colleagues, it seemed as if they could not return to the relationship they once had.

Now Claremont has sharpened the tragic aspect of their relationship, having killed Moira off a few years ago, but perhaps seems more willing to explore the themes she represents. That last line, about “when we were young an’ in love. . .an’ our world was rich wi’ possibilities” seems particularly meaningful. Claremont gives us the space of a panel to mull this over before Xavier replies, with understatement, “This isn’t how I thought things would turn out.”

Think again back to that double-page spread of Xavier amid the ruins. Perhaps those ruins also represent his concept of the world, and his plans of how he could help the world, both destroyed by events he did not foresee. Now there’s something that one should learn as he or she ages: that the world will change in ways that you cannot expect. How many people fifty years ago foresaw the coming of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, the end of the Soviet Union, the coming of AIDS, the rise of the Internet, gay marriage, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, or so much more? How many people in their 20s correctly foresee what their lives will be like in a quarter century?

Perhaps Xavier has achieved a quiet epiphany here. Later in the story he tells a young mutant, “Life’s a work in progress. . .It doesn’t always work out the way we plan, or hope.”

Meanwhile, the compulsory action subplot begins stirring, with the appearance of longtime X-Men villain Unus the Untouchable and some anonymous mutant bad guys. How nice to see Unus, a Lee-Kirby creation, back, especially since for a long time Marvel considered him to be dead: in one story he had lost control of his force field and seemingly suffocated to death inside it. I suspect that in today’s Marvel no one who had anything to do with the current story even knew about Unus’s “demise.” But that’s okay: I’m glad to see he’s back.

The unforeseen development that most worries Xavier is the fact that there are now far more mutants on Marvel-Earth than he ever thought back in the X-Men comics of past decades, in which finding a mutant was a comparatively rare occurrence. This may also represent Claremont’s own reaction to another change that Morrison wreaked in the X-Men concept. Morrison clearly wanted to emphasize the idea of mutants as not rare anomalies but as a significant minority group by radically increasing their numbers. Xavier explicitly points to the devastation of Genosha as a symbol of the “backlash” by the “baseline human” majority against their race.

Xavier notes that “Not even cockroaches survived” the annihilation of Genosha, alluding to the conventional wisdom that these bugs would even survive a nuclear war (see Peter David’s Hulk: The End in Comics in Context #2 for an example). As if Moira’s ghost and the ruins of Genosha aren’t enough reminders of mortality, here’s another one.

The notion that cockroaches did not survive the attack on Genosha seems to induce Xavier to wonder if mutants really are the next phase of human evolution, which Morrison and Magneto both claim will outlive and supplant “normal” humanity. Xavier wonders, “Suppose we were wrong about other things? Suppose mutants aren’t the culmination if the evolutionary process, the crest of a coming norm. . .but some aberration? How then will nature deal with us?” Are mutants inevitably doomed? And hence, are Xavier’s efforts on behalf of the mutant race all in vain? This raises Xavier’s mid-life crisis to new philosophical dimensions.

This moment of despair seems to mark another act break, for now Xavier turns from Moira’s ghost to another Jungian anima figure, named “Wicked.” No, Broadway musical fans, this has nothing to do with Kristin Chenoweth. This “Wicked” is a young, female mutant who dresses in “bad girl” fashion and has the antagonistic attitude to match. But in context she comes off not so much as a Bill Jemas-style effort to pandering to the audience for “bad girl” comics, but more as a representation of the way that a person in the mid-life generation might view the rebellious younger generation. (Jack Kirby pictured the youth of 1970 as the peaceful, hippie-like Forever People; in 2004 Claremont gives us instead “wicked” and her 21st century variation on punk.) The name Wicked gave herself is an example of the role of angry rebel in which she casts herself. In Junging terms it also marks her as a “shadow” figure, which Xavier must cope with.

Wicked keeps calling Xavier “old man,” in another way the story emphasizes the theme of age and generational change. From what she says, she appears to represent the young Genoshan mutants’ anger that Xavier could not save them, and, perhaps beyond that, the anger of the younger generation at the failures of their elders. Interestingly, Wicked seems accompanied by real ghosts, presumably of deceased Genoshans. Perhaps this parallels Xavier with his mysterious coffin.

Xavier paraphrases Stan Lee’s maxim once more, “Having powers means assuming the obligation to use them responsibly,” but this time he says it to Wicked, thus demonstrating his goal of teaching his precepts to a new generation.

As they go to attack Xavier, Unus directs his underlings, “Leave him naked as the day he was born!” I wonder how long ago Claremont wrote that line. Had the stripping of Iraqi prisoners been revealed in the press?

Menaced by Unus and company, Xavier rises to the occasion, and interestingly does so by remaining in his chosen role as teacher. When Unus claims to be invulnerable to Xavier’s telepathy, Xavier says, :I could argue the point, or demonstrate it,” like a good academic.

Instead, Xavier has another young mutant, Freakshow, take care of Unus by turning into a giant monster and swallowing him! That’s a clever bit that Claremont came up with, though it wouldn’t have worked had Unus projected his field as far from his body as he did in the Stan Lee/Roy Thomas days.

Xavier even thinks of the fate meted out to Unus as a kind of lesson, though he doubts Unus will learn from it.

Through rising to and winning this battle, Xavier has reasserted himself as a leader, a fighter, and, indeed, as a mentor: he has reclaimed his belief in his life’s work. Again, speaking with powerful simplicity, Xavier says, “I’m a teacher, Freakshow,” and instructs him and Wicked to return tomorrow to begin their “lessons.”

Now, for those of you who need spoiler warnings, read no further.

After all of the symbols of mortality in this issue, it concludes with an act of resurrection. Symbolically, the mysterious coffin glows and rises into the air. And on the last page, out walks the supposedly deceased Magneto. But he is not in costume, not dressed for warfare. Instead he is unmasked, in civilian dress, and shakes hands with Xavier.

Perhaps you will recall that towards the end of his run, Grant Morrison had Wolverine apparently behead Magneto. I was going to say that was particularly unfortunate considering the subsequent, real-life beheading of an American prisoner by Muslim terrorists. But then I remembered the terrorist beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl took place before Morrison wrote that issue. Wolverine really shouldn’t be imitating Arab terrorists.

In any event, now we see that Magneto’s “death” didn’t even last a year. This is further proof that this kind of fake death is becoming meaningless as a dramatic device in comics. Morrison’s “deaths” for Magneto and Jean Grey are just exasperating annoyances.

Now, what does Claremont have in mind for Magneto? In the 1980s Claremont veered away from the traditional portrayal of Magneto as outright villain, and instead stated that he saw him as a former terrorist evolving into a statesman. This was an interesting development, though I think that Claremont took it too far, even turning Magneto into the New Mutants’ new headmaster. But as I have observed about the X-Men’s costumes, if comics creators try to dispose of or radically change an important element of a series, it will inevitably snap back to the way it was. So, in the 1990s editor Bob Harras had Magneto return to his more familiar villainous role. Over the last few years Grant Morrison (in the main continuity) and Mark Millar (in the alternate continuity of Ultimate X-Men) came up with the most evil versions of Magneto to date, ruthless, consumed with hatred for humanity, bent on mutant domination of the world. Millar’s Magneto even fantasized about mutants eating “normal” humans. Though Ian McKellen’s Magneto in the X-Men movies has a certain charm, he too is genocidal, and nearly exterminated the “normal” human race in X2.

Is Claremont changing course with Magneto? I think Magneto works best in the role of Xavier’s former friend turned into his ideological opposite and greatest enemy, the archvillain that the series needs. Neil Gaiman handled this duality well in his treatment of Magneto in 1602. I am nonetheless interested to see where Claremont takes Magneto now. I have no doubt he can explore Magneto’s personality with the same depth and insight he demonstrates with Xavier in this first issue.

So, here was Excalibur #1, a superhero comic book centering on a middle-aged man who faces middle-aged concerns ““ mortality, loss, adapting to changing times, disillusionment and doubt ““ and finding new resolve to continue his quest for his lifelong goals.

In one of the nice examples of synchronicity that occur when I write these columns, today’s New York Times (May 21, 2004) has an Op-Ed piece by Nick Hornby on the subject of middle-aged people creating and listening to rock music. “You’ve heard the argument a million times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being young, and if you’re not young and you still listen to it, then you should be ashamed of yourself.” Hornby says he “mostly” agrees with that description, though it doesn’t take into account “recent, mainly excellent work” by a number of middle-aged rock veterans such as Dylan and Springsteen. But, he continues, he disagrees with the “conclusion” that the middle-aged shouldn’t listen to rock music.

“Youth is a quality not unlike health: it’s found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it. . .I’m talking about the energy, the wistful yearning, the inexplicable exhilaration, the sporadic sense of invulnerability, the hope that stings like chlorine. When I was younger, rock music articulated those feelings, and now that I’m older, it stimulates them, but either way, rock ‘n’ roll was and remains necessary because: who doesn’t need exhilaration and a sense of invincibility, even if it’s only now and again?”

As far as I’m concerned, the same applies to the best superhero comics. Professor Charles Xavier is no longer young and his world is in ruins. But invincibly, exhilaratingly, he carries on, giving his readers of every age hope.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson