"Still big sellers, having weathered the storms of the witch-hunt years by adhering closely to the central tenets of the Comics Code and aping the formula of the popular TV show. After Mortimer Weisinger occupied the editorial chair that year, Superman sales overtook even the Disney titles, making him the most popular comic character in the world
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Famously described by comics writer Roy Thomas as “a malevolent toad,” Mort Weisinger had worked as a story editor on TV’s Adventures of Superman before returning to New York to revamp the comic book. While other comics strove to connect with an older audience, Weisinger aimed his books at the gigantic audience of children from the postwar population boom. To keep the bright, active kids of the 1950s engaged, Weisinger and his writers exchanged the pedestrian realism of the TV series and the comic stories it had inspired for the kind of science-fantasy spectacle that couldn’t be duplicated on film or TV. No other popular form existed where spectacular scenes of men tossing planets at one another could be created with any degree of believability. Under Weisinger, a sci-fi fan, Superman reached levels of power previously enjoyed only by Hindu gods.
Even the covers became more exciting, transformed into compelling poster-like advertisements for the stories within. In the forties and early fifties, a typical Superman cover portrayed him in iconic pose: lifting a car, towing a liner, or waving the Stars and Stripes. But Weisinger favored sensational “situation” covers with word balloons and unlikely setups that could only be resolved by purchasing the issue. Oddly, while this cosmic inflation was taking place, Superman stories were becoming more intimate and more universal in their appeal. In tune with the psychoanalytic movement (and to evade the code), Weisinger developed an uncanny ability to transform every dirty nugget from the collective unconscious into curiously compelling narratives for kids.
Superman was now a grown-up, a mature patriarch, drawn in the clean fifties lines of an artist with the unfortunate name of Wayne Boring.
Boring brought us classic Superman. Static. Conservative. Reserved. Gone was the restless, antiestablishment futurist; Boring’s drawings shared the airless qualities of Roman frescoes. Where Joe Shuster had tried to capture the velocity of passing time, Boring slowed it all down, crystallizing single moments into myth. There was a weird formal remove, a proscenium arch, that maintained an even distance between the reader and the action. Wayne Boring’s entire cosmos could be reduced to a two-by-two-inch square. His smooth, polished little planets floated like billiard balls in a compressed, flattened universe where outer space was neither vast nor intimidating but enclosed and teeming with life and color. Using the same, endlessly repeated, running-on-air pose, Boring’s Man of Steel casually jogged across light-years of unfathomable distance in the space between one picture and the next, with the same stoic absence of expression. Centuries of epic time could pass in a single caption. Dynasties fell between balloons, and the sun could grow old and die on the turn of a page.
It was a toy world, too, observed through the wrong end of a telescope. Boring made eternity tiny, capable of being held in two small hands. He reduced the infinite to fit in a cameo, and he did this in service to the great insight of the Weisinger era: that human emotions can grow to overwhelm the vastnesses of space and endless time. Wayne Boring’s tight, repressed lines were necessary to contain and shape the thunderous outpouring of Dionysian Sturm und Drang that animated the pages.
These stories were all about emotion. Fifties Superman plunged into great surging tides of feelings so big and unashamed that they could break a young heart or blind the stars. The socialist power fantasies, the jingoistic propaganda and gimmick adventures that had defined the previous twenty years of Superman adventures, gave way to cataclysmic tales of love and loss, guilt, grief, friendship, judgment, terror, and redemption, biblical in their scale and primal purity. And always, Weisinger’s godlike Superman became more like us than ever before. He was fifties America with its atom-powered fist, its deadly archenemy, its brave allies. Like America, he was a flawed colossus, protector of Earth from the iron-walled forces of tyranny and yet, somehow, riven from within by a gnawing guilt, a growing uncertainty, a fear of change, and a terror of conformity.
Weisinger was in therapy, and he used the material from his sessions as raw plot ore for his writers to process into story material. The editor’s entire psychology was stretched naked on the dissecting table via some of the most outlandish and unashamed deployments of pure symbolic content that the comics had ever seen. Its like would not be truly viewed again, in fact, until the drug-inspired cosmic comics of the early seventies.
For example, there was the bottle city of Kandor. Kandor had been the capital city of Superman’s home world Krypton, thought destroyed. Shrunken and preserved by the villain Brainiac, Kandor was now a tiny city in a bell jar. This living diorama, this ant colony of real people, had great appeal for children, adding to the childlike nature of this era’s Superman. In Kandor, lost memories were preserved under glass, and Superman could go there, in private, to experience a world he left behind. Kandor was every snow globe and music box that stood for every bittersweet memory in every movie there would ever be. Kandor was the tinkling voice of a lost world, a past that might have been, unreachable. Kandor was survivor’s guilt endowed with new meaning.
Fifties Superman found himself domesticated at the heart of a strange nuclear family of friends, foes, and relatives. Weisinger had taken his lessons from Captain Marvel and his Family. Many of his favorite writers, like Otto Binder and Edmond Hamilton, had contributed to the Captain Marvel mythos and were able to adapt that style to suit a new kind of dream world that was more pointed, angular, and paranoid. This was the nuclear family glowing in the dark. No longer the last survivor of a lost alien civilization, Superman was joined by an entire photo album’s worth of new supercompanions. He’d already gained his own superdog, named Krypto, and now discovered that he had a pretty blond cousin named Kara Zor-El, who’d also managed to survive the destruction of Krypton, along with a supermonkey, Beppo. There were stories of Superman as a boy (Superboy) and as a comically superpowered infant (Superbaby). Lois Lane was popular enough to graduate to her own monthly comic book. So too did Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.
The young Olsen had no sooner installed himself within the pages of his own title than he began to experience a series of fantastic physical contortions typical of the Silver Age. A sampling of stories from Olsen’s solo title showed the results as he metamorphosed into a porcupine boy, a giant turtle, a wolfman, Elastic Lad, and a “human skyscraper,” with no pause for reflection. These transformations never produced any lasting ill effects or neuroses.
So great was the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday that even Superboy’s small-town sweetheart, red-haired Lana Lang, the hometown girl deluxe, began her own dual career as Insect Lass, using an “alien ring” to reorganize the slim-legged, petite figure of a Kansas homecoming queen into the bulbous abdomen and crawling feelers of a giant wasp or monster moth, with a shapely human torso and head that made it ten times more disturbing. Like Jimmy, Lana experienced no body horror or psychological trauma when she inflated her trim teenage stomach into a monstrous spider belly, clacked her chitinous forelegs together, and played out superhard silk from spinnerets where her normal midwestern buttocks should be. Had Franz Kafka’s mild-mannered accountant Gregor Samsa been born to the sunshine of the emergent DC universe, he might have pressed his incredible new cockroach powers into action in the fight against crime and injustice. Before too long, he would have been invited to join the Justice League. Kafka never once paused to consider that his outcasts could be heroic like the X-Men, freakishly glamorous like Jimmy Olsen, or as gorgeous as trendsetting Pulitzer Prize winner Lois Lane.
When not under alien influence, Jimmy Olsen could barely stand to be himself for more than five pages and maintained a much-resorted-to “disguise kit” in times of emergency. Prefiguring David Bowie or Madonna, his life became a shifting parade of costume changes and reinventions of identity. And long before those two performers were challenging the boundaries of masculine and feminine, Olsen was deconstructing the macho stereotype in a sequence of soft-core gender-blending adventures for children that beggar belief when read today.
The three unforgettable transvestite Olsen tales, including “Miss Jimmy Olsen,” can be summed up by the following heart-fluttering caption that opens the lead story in Jimmy Olsen no. 95:
IF YOU EVER WONDERED TO WHAT EXTREME LENGTHS JIMMY OLSEN WOULD GO TO GET A NEWSPAPER SCOOP, WAIT TILL YOU SEE JIMMY IN OPERATION AS A MEMBER OF THE FAIR SEX! YES, READERS. SUPERMAN’S YOUNG PAL UNDERGOES A DRASTIC CHANGE OF IDENTITY AND PUTS HIS HIGH-HEELED FEET INTO A HUGE MESS OF TROUBLE WHEN HE BECOMES THE SWEETHEART OF GANGLAND.
These words accompany a picture of Jimmy mincing past a mailbox in a green dress while a group of admiring men whoop and check out his ass.
“HA! HA! THOSE WOLVES WOULD DROP DEAD IF THEY KNEW THAT UNDER THIS FEMALE DISGUISE BEATS THE VERY MASCULINE HEART OF PLANET REPORTER JIMMY OLSEN!” read the smirking, transvestite Olsen’s thought balloon.
The salacious, winking quality of the phrasing suggested an immaculate deconstruction of the masculine adventure genre into the arena of showbiz, shifting identities, and anything-goes sexuality.
Jimmy became a mobster’s moll, even joining a chorus line and proving that he could high-kick with the best of the showgirls. Bestiality reared its shaggy head when Jimmy was forced to substitute the lips of a slobbering chimp named Dora for his own during a tense romantic moment in a dimly lit apartment. Believing the mouth of the ape in question to be the fragrant glossy red lips of Jimmy Olsen, racketeer Big Monte McGraw melted into the simian’s lewd embrace while Jimmy made a hasty getaway. The level of derangement was high. These were stories that could never happen in the real world, even if there was a Superman. This was now a world all its own, living inside our own, growing, getting smarter and more elaborate.
Artist Curt Swan drew the cub reporter as outrageously attractive in his makeup and a red wig. In heels and stockings, Olsen looked like he’d wandered in off a Pussycat Dolls video shoot. And there were a few gloriously disorienting panels where, sans wig, he was seen talking to Superman while still casually dressed in a pink dressing gown, fluffy slippers, and movie star makeup.
And yet, if it was okay for Olsen, wasn’t it okay? I grew up with this idea of the disguise kit and the performance, the idea of both body and identity as canvas. When I adopted as a role model the shape-shifting, bisexual assassin Jerry Cornelius from Michael Moorcock’s novels, I was following in the footsteps of Jimmy Olsen. Olsen played in bands, and so did I. Olsen was freewheeling and nonjudgmental, even in the fifties, and so was I. If it was cool with Superman’s pal, it was A-OK with me. Clearly these stories were written by perverts with an intent to pervert the young. They were entirely successful.
The transvestite Olsen stories seem deeply rooted in the underground world of mimeographed porn mags and the bondage comics of Eric Stanton, whose studio also employed a certain Joe Shuster, Superman creator. The language used recalls stories like Panty Raid (discussed at length by Robert J. Stoller, M.D., in his 1985 book Observing the Erotic Imagination) and other 1950s transgender tales in which hunky young jocks got more than they bargained for when a trip to the sorority house turned into a forced initiation into the pleasures of female underwear and makeup. The difference being that Olsen was fully in control of his transformations and could hardly wait more than a couple of pages to get them under way.
At the same time, Superman’s treatment of Lois became more cruel and misogynistic, while she became more shrewish and snoopy. It was hard to match this often boorish, devious brute of a man to any popular conception of Superman, and yet here he was lying, deceiving, and thwarting her dreams of matrimony over and over again while Lois fumed and plotted.
(illustration credit 5.1)
Superman’s fear of commitment was a significant, perhaps dominant, feature of his Silver Age adventures. It was as if all the sublimated resentment of fifties men, home from the excitement of the war to the nine-to-five and to ticky-tacky houses in suburbia, seethed between the covers.
Those echoes were never louder than in Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane no. 73, which allowed into this fragile world of sanity an image so peculiar that words alone are not capable of doing justice to it. The story inside was tame fare by comparison, but Weisinger’s trademark self-searching ability to transform every dirty subconscious coal into the gem of an idea was never more evident than here. This was a Jungian bowel movement rendered as a story for children. The kind of behavior this primed young boys to expect from their own future girlfriends was more obscene than the blow jobs, boob jobs, and anal entry they now expect as a result of boring old Internet porn. Superman was educating a generation of sadomasochistic swingers with tastes trending beyond the outré.
As we look again in disbelief or amusement at this outlandish image, stop to consider how ten years previously, the portrayal of Lois Lane had been one of a fairly convincing hard-nosed lady reporter in a man’s world, while Jimmy Olsen had been portrayed as a somewhat believable cub photographer making his way on a big-city paper. In that context these images ripped bleeding from the fantastic nightside of the American imagination become even more provocative and outrageous.
Was the hostility Weisinger’s or that of his writers? He was, after all, a notoriously mean-spirited man. Was fifties Superman a product of his age, a backlash against emancipation and a postwar desire to get the working gals of WWII back into the kitchen and the bedroom before they got too serious about building aircraft, voting, or even making comics?
Or was this less an adult approach to sexual politics than an attempt to depict Superman’s attitude toward women in ways—“Ugh! Girls!”—a ten-year-old boy might relate to? Superman and his cast could be all of these. They were in flux, slippery and eager to adapt in order to ensure their own continued survival. As ideas they could change shape to speak to the fears and fantasies of a postwar generation and its armies of children.
There is, of course, a third reason for the viciousness of male-female power relationships in fifties superhero comics. As the Comics Code explicitly states:
Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and base emotions.
The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.
The young men and women who wrote and drew these stories were no fools—they were artists on the fringes, marginalized and despised. Perhaps the rejected outsiders who created these comics were taking their revenge on society by exposing the curdled power politics that lay beneath the clipped lawns, starched shirts, and baking aprons of 1950s America. Maybe the distorted lives of Silver Age superheroes were a deliberate, scabrous attempt to sneak social commentary and satire under the noses of the censors. The creators of post–Comics Code superhero comics followed the diktat of the CMA to the letter, while at the same time exposing postwar relationships as hotbeds of abnormality, where women were ring-chasing harridans and men were quivering puer aeternae terrified of responsibility.
On a particular favorite cover of mine, Superman watched, helplessly emasculated, as his girlfriends Lois and Lana paraded past him, each with a different historical strongman on her arm.
“LOIS! LANA!” Superman exclaimed meekly. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH HERCULES AND SAMSON?”
“WE’RE ON THE WAY TO THE MARRIAGE LICENSE BUREAU!” Lois chirped proudly. “I’M GOING TO BE MRS. HERCULES!”
“AND I’M GOING TO BE MRS. SAMSON!” tittered Lana. It was a bold and unforgettable lesson for young male readers: This was what happened when you couldn’t make decisions or offer any lasting commitment. Samson pounced on your best girl. And for Superman, it was a horrific challenge to his modernity. Was he really no better than these archaic toughs? Or could he prove himself stronger, faster than any previous man-god?
As a further irony, girls still read these comics too; for all the stories’ undercurrents of fear, of commitment, and of women as predators intent on robbing men of their independence, the energy that drives them can also be read as essentially feminine, favoring stories about relationships and strong emotions. This made them popular with children of both sexes. These stories liquefied the armored hard body of the wartime supersoldiers and patriotic strongmen. This was Superman on the analyst’s couch after almost twenty years of unconscious adventuring, finally letting the freakishness, the alien-ness, all hang out. America was in therapy too, and along with all the insights and the wonders of the interior, poison was being squeezed out. Fears were being lanced like boils, expressed in the art, music, and popular culture of the time.
Outsider culture, in the form of Lenny Bruce, the Beats, and the bohos, was developing a new bardic language to express things that had until now haunted the echoing four-in-the-morning thoughts of men and women in a world they could barely make sense of from cradle to grave. They said things everyone had felt but never dared articulate because it was forbidden by consensus. A new willingness—an especially American willingness—not to mock but to learn from the fringes was opening up the country to its sexuality, its fears and fantasies of freedom and slavery, emancipation and mind control, man and machine. It was time for new dreams to replace the derelict, bombed-out, and vacant shells of the old. The future would not be denied.
Fifties Superman cheerfully embodied every human terror on our behalf: In a succession of early Silver Age adventures, he became monstrously obese, insect headed, a Frankenstein’s monster, a lion-faced outcast, a dome-headed, emotionless “future man,” and a senile, doddering granddad flying with the aid of a knobbly cane.
In each case, the perfect man was made finally to experience all the horrors of being different, growing old, or mutating into any of the many ugly distortions of normality that haunted buttoned-down Normalville, USA, in those days of monster films and fears of mutation. It often seemed as though the most awful thing one could be in Superman’s world was not a monster or an evil genius but old, fat, and bald. Each new transformation inflicted on him some fundamental human suffering. The strongman went soft at the edge and could no longer contain his own shape. To survive, he had to endure, wait for the story’s inevitable cycle to return him to normality within the new hierarchical structure of the Daily Planet office and Superman’s superlife of pets and fortresses, time machines and alien relatives.
And it wasn’t only Superman: His entire supporting cast of reporters and grocery store owners was subject to inhuman forces of transformation on a monthly basis. Lois Lane became Lois Lane the Witch of Metropolis—a hag on a broomstick casting ghastly vaporous spells in Superman’s direction—or Phantom Lois, Baby Lois, even Super Lois. The familiar faces of Superman cast stalwarts became grotesque, unloved, undergoing cyclical trials that tested their foundational concepts to the outermost limits, in the way that children would stretch an elastic band: so far, not too far, but nearly. The heroes learned their lessons and forgot them in time for the next issue, in order to present those lessons in a new form. This was the world of dreams, complexes, the twilight territory of Dr. Freud’s unconscious, where the body was formless and metamorphic. Adolescent themes prevailed and formed the basis for perfect superhero stories.
Weisinger-era Superman was a remarkable feat of imagination and reinvention. Jerry Siegel himself rose to the challenge, taking his original concept further than ever before. In beautiful stories such as “Superman’s Return to Krypton,” he reached a stylistic peak he would find hard to surpass. As the title suggested, time travel allowed Superman to return to the world of his birth before its destruction. There, powerless under the red sun of Krypton, he met his own parents as a young couple and found his eternal soul mate in the ravishing Lyla Lerrol, a Kryptonian actress whose life was ultimately as doomed as all the others on that ill-starred orb.
“BUT THE FLAMES WITHIN THE PLANET ARE LIKE COLD GLACIERS COMPARED TO THE MIGHTY LOVE BLAZING BETWEEN SUPERMAN OF EARTH AND LYLA LERROL OF KRYPTON.”
The scenes of young Jor-El, Lara, Lyla, and Kal-El toasting the future, “NO MATTER WHAT TOMORROW BRINGS!” had the genuine bittersweetness of school photographs discovered in middle age. When Superman was forced to leave a weeping Lyla behind to die and return to his own time, a new kind of Superman story had been born. These were no longer political fantasies or propaganda, and they were not, as later superhero comic books would become, scoreboards of cross-referenced continuities. These stories had the simple universal appeal of folktales. They never talked down to their intended audience of children or pulled punches on dark matters of mortality, grief, jealousy, and love.
Then there were the so-called imaginary stories that deviated from the official Superman canon (described as “real life” by the comics themselves). In imaginary stories, intriguing what-if? scenarios could play out to comic or tragic effect: What if Superman married Lana Lang? What if Luthor had raised Superboy as his own son? What if Superman had been raised by Batman’s parents and Bruce Wayne was Clark Kent’s adopted brother? Happy endings were rarely guaranteed, which made many of these speculative tragedies more powerful and memorable than the “real” adventures.
The superhero had turned to face the interior with spectacularly inventive results. By turning his back on the political or social realities of the material world, by stealing where it counted from Captain Marvel (both in content and in talent), Weisinger and his team had opened the doors onto a new frontier where the superheroes could soar free. No longer shackled to the rules of social realism, the stories themselves were liberated to become what a generation of young readers demanded: allegorical super–science fiction about how it felt to be twelve. Fifties Superman proudly inhabited and brought order, humor, and meaning to the primary-colored, Jackson Pollock–spattered protocontinent of the great American unconscious. Weisinger had admitted a protean, Dionysian spirit into Superman’s world, and he left that world supercharged, reinvigorated with new ideas and fresh spins on old ones, wide open and reborn into the lysergic dawn of the 1960s.
Before moving on, I have a pet story from this period that I’d like to share, on the grounds that it perfectly sums up this era and Weisinger’s approach to the American drama. The title is “Superman’s New Power.” You might presume the promised new power will fit within the basically scientific range of Superman’s abilities. Maybe he could develop electrical powers or telepathy. No. Writer Jerry Coleman, operating under Weisinger’s instruction, and artist Curt Swan had something quite different in mind.
Superman’s new power was this: He found he could manifest from the palm of his right hand a mute, six-inch-high Superman duplicate, in full costume. Emerging without explanation from Superman’s hand, the mini-Superman rocketed off to thwart injustice and save innocent lives in Superman’s stead. Of course, it did its job even better than Superman could do it, in its weird, mini-me way. What’s worse, when the imp set forth, Superman lost all his powers and was left impotent, only able to watch as his palmtop doppelgänger saved the day again and again and was rewarded with all the kudos and love that Superman thought he deserved.
Feel free to analyze.
Samson’s hair. Achilles’ heel. The oddly elaborate gymnastic contortions that exposed the vulnerable spots of Celtic superwarriors. Even the greatest heroes needed a weakness, or there would be no drama, no fall or redemption.
If nothing could hurt Superman, what could hurt him?
In fact, Weisinger and his writers understood the most important thing about Superman: that his heart was vulnerable, and his self-esteem could be fragile. The Super was the icing on the cake, the sugar coating: These were stories about Man and his role in a new world.
But now that the Man of Tomorrow had achieved near-divine heights of omnipotence, the need for some kind of convincing physical vulnerability was becoming greater. Or so goes the prevailing opinion. The glowing green killer mineral kryptonite had been introduced in the 1943 Superman radio series. The contaminated remains of Superman’s home planet fell to Earth in meteor form—much more often than the debris of a distant world might reasonably be expected to fall, and in sufficient quantities to threaten Superman’s life on a regular basis. As a weapon, it had a certain symbolic resonance: The notion that radioactive fragments of Superman’s birth world had become toxic to him spoke of the old country, the old ways, the threat of the failure to assimilate. Superman was a naturalized American. The last thing he needed were these lethal reminders of where he’d come from; that he, the son of lordly scientists, had been reduced to toiling in a farmer’s field or minding the general store.
Weisinger knew how his young readers’ minds worked and stretched the idea a little further: If there was green kryptonite, couldn’t there be other colors too? The prismatic splintering began with the invention of Red K, the cool kryptonite, possibly because it made literal the master Silver Age theme of bodily transformation. It was mineral LSD for Superman, affecting not just his mind but also reshaping his body into a playground of fleshly hallucination.
No two trips on Red K were the same, in-story logic promised. Red K would affect Superman in a different way every time and theoretically might never become boring. So, under its influence, Superman might develop the head of an ant, scaling the Daily Planet building as the commander of a nightmarish army of giant insects—“BZZ-BZZZ … WE MUST CAPTURE LOIS LANE … SHE WILL BE OUR QUEEN!”—or split into good Clark, bad Superman, or even become goofy for forty-eight hours.
Red K and the Silver Age are inextricable. Red K was LSD for superheroes, and under its influence Superman could unclench his entire being and walk the razor’s edge of joyous self-abandonment and ego-annihilating terror—an American pioneer. Red K served equally as a handy metaphor for the adolescent hormonal shifts, physical changes, and weird moods of elation and despair that were being experienced by its readers.
Other kryptonite variants were created as plot mechanics demanded rather than with any eye to longevity. That’s why gold kryptonite removes Superman’s powers permanently, blue kryptonite affects only Bizarros, and white kryptonite is deadly to plants, which makes it about as interesting as matches, DDT, or a stout spade.
But, of course, Superman’s ultimate weakness was his secret identity. Why wouldn’t shy Clark Kent choose to tear open his shirt and reveal to his unrequited love the potent god-man behind the buttons? Instead he hid the truth from Lois Lane, devising deceptions that became so elaborate as to be cruel: the ghastly tricks of semantics a man-boy might play on a child-woman, all in the guise of “teaching her a lesson.”
A story like “The Two Faces of Superman” showed the hero promising to marry Lois Lane but only if she met him at a particular time outside the church. When she met his conditions, he contrived to seal her car door with his heat vision so that she couldn’t get out. Unable to marry him at precisely the correct hour meant that Lois forfeited her chance. A relieved, chortling Superman took to the skies, having hoodwinked the predator once more.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Tit Tot, and the other creatures of folklore who knew that names held power and kept theirs secret, Superman maintained his distance from Clark and vice versa. Their paths rarely crossed. He hid his heart in a plain suit, behind glasses. For Lois, a girl, to know who he was would be the end. She’d only pressure him into exchanging his gaudy suit and life of adventure for something less embarrassing, more domestic. She would expect him to be home for dinner, when there were stricken ocean liners to rescue. In the end, his self-deceiving fantasies of one day carrying Lois up the aisle were just that, and if he married Lois, he’d be Clark forever. It wouldn’t matter how strong or fast he was, he’d be Clark racing around the globe to pick up groceries.
Robin the Boy Wonder first appeared in Detective Comics in 1940. Introduced as “THE LAUGHING YOUNG DAREDEVIL .…” and “THE CHARACTER FIND OF 1940,” he burst through a circus ringmaster’s hoop held by a grinning Batman. It was an explosion of exuberance that signaled the arrival of a plucky can-do spirit to comics born of the Depression.
Dick Grayson was introduced to readers as a typical Boys Town character; a feisty urchin scrapper; the orphaned son of murdered circus aerialists. Robin was a carny kid, as far from Batman’s class and social milieu as one could get, but he had a stout heart and was as brave as any boy Batman had ever met. So it made sense to team up and share the crime-fighting life.
Robin’s upbeat, enthusiastic charisma obliged the uptight, millionaire Protestant Wayne to loosen up a little. The kid brought a big-top splash of joie de vivre to the mean streets of the urban avenger. The introduction of Robin turned Batman’s story from a shady crime-and-revenge narrative into the thrilling adventures of two swashbuckling friends who were so rich that they could do anything.
After 1940, the formerly dour Batman rarely lost his smile. The Batcave filled with trophies, as outlandish mementoes of his adventures with Robin began to accumulate; there was a Lincoln penny as big as a Ferris wheel, a robot tyrannosaur, several deadly umbrellas from the arsenal of the Penguin, and a collection of remarkable Bat vehicles. The cave became part museum, part mega toy box, part theme park. Seen through Robin’s eyes, the Batman’s harsh, lawless world of shadows, blood, and poisonous chemicals became a Disneyland of crime. Even the attitude of the law changed toward the crime fighters: The Bat-Man of 1939 was a fearsome vigilante, hunted across rooftops by the Gotham City Police Department, but Batman and Robin were proud citizens and sworn GCPD deputies who worked alongside their uniformed, sanctioned counterparts to protect the city they loved.
There was the sense that the young Bruce Wayne, who died emotionally along with his parents in Crime Alley, had finally met a friend with whom to share his strange, exciting secret life. The emotionally stunted Batman found a perfect pal in the ten-year-old orphaned acrobat. Batman was forced to grow up and develop responsibility as soon as Robin came on the scene, and the savage young Dark Knight of the original pulp-tinged adventures was replaced by a very different kind of hero: a dashing big brother, the best friend any kid could have. The outlaw gangbuster became a detective, a man we could trust, even with our children.
Then came the insinuations of Wertham in an atmosphere of paranoia and self-analysis. Only a few superheroes remained in the darkness that had fallen over the face of DC Comics during the era of congressional hearings and public denunciations, turning freakish with the lights out. And it was as if their skeletons had begun to glow sickly green right through their flesh, as radioactive nightside selves came out to play. Not even Robin was immune to the scalding return of the repressed. All the creepiness, the curdled ink, the whispered innuendo floated to the surface as the Boy Wonder gave in, emasculated by the judgment of the sinister Doctor W.
Robin began to show evidence of a fundamental lack of confidence about his permanent role in Batman’s life. In stories such as “Batman’s New Partner,” the Boy Wonder skulked, sulked, and sweated nervously as suspicions grew that he was being phased out in favor of Wingman, an adult who dressed like a pigeon spray-painted by hippies. As this primary threat of being relegated to the sidelines became more frequent, Robin’s reactions became increasingly flustered and teary.
Lacking music and sound effects to punch up emotional scenes, comic books relied on pouring tears and melodrama. Characters really had to blubber to get the point that they were quite upset across to young readers.
Expecting these masklike, often masked faces to convey understatement was like expecting stained glass to act. Emotions were broadcast at maximum volume. With a ban on crime, no room for good old-fashioned brawling, and a desperate need to survive, the superheroes surrendered their dignity to the zeitgeist and began to talk about their needs, their fears, and their [choke!] hopes.
And so, in the fifties, the Boy Wonder transformed from a bounding paragon of vigilante boy justice to a weeping, petulant nervous wreck who lived in fear of losing his beloved Batman to fresher, more accomplished boy partners—or, worse, to the charms of Batwoman. With lower lip set in a permanent sullen pout courtesy of artist Sheldon Moldoff, his world became a schizoid cold war hell where Batman was secretly conniving to betray and dump him any time his guard was down. If he found the Caped Crusader drinking tea, Robin would instantly assume the flask was next in line to replace him at Batman’s side, then burst into tears. Covers show the boy reaching the church only to find Batman and Batwoman exchanging vows at the altar, in full costume, with the dreamlike touch of veil and tux to intensify the surreal indecency of the image. He was shown over and over opening a door only to find Batman and Batwoman with patronizing looks on their faces that suggested he was interrupting something only grown-ups could hope to understand.
“Choke!” was usually all he could manage before hanging on for dear life until the story resolved itself in the usual welter of misconceptions and misread scenarios.
This new image of the crying boy haunted the fascinating and demented stories of this period. Wertham had made innocent comic superheroes aware of their own sexual potential, and like Adam and Eve blinking in the garden, there was embarrassment, denial, and overwhelming eruptions of feelings so new they could only be represented by outlandish monstrosities of a kind that were entirely original. Space aliens, with designs and planetary environments inspired by the spiky murals on the walls of futurist jazz clubs or Village beatnik cellars, began to outnumber the criminals in Gotham City. Robin was besieged by a delirium of fractured shapes and grotesque creatures. The code ruled out realistic depictions of crime, so Batman was maneuvered awkwardly into ever more outlandish confrontations with monsters, spacemen, and … women. With Doc Wertham’s seedy denunciations still ringing in their ears, DC’s editors were keen to validate Batman’s hetero credentials with an injection of estrogen into the book; elderly Aunt Harriet soon replaced the ever-attentive Alfred, but the biggest feminine intrusion came with the arrival of the shapely Batwoman and her partner, Batgirl.
Kathy Kane, Batwoman, made her debut as a plainly obvious beard for a Batman who had (let’s remind ourselves) no real need to prove his heterosexuality, on the grounds that he was a creation of pen and ink made to entertain children and had no sex life on the page or off it. What made this era of kissy-kissy Batman-and-Batwoman-at-the-altar story lines even more bizarre than the alien worlds and jagged modernist design aesthetic was Kathy Kane’s mannish civilian identity as a circus-owning daredevil who wore jodhpurs and rode a motorcycle. Kathy Kane was Marlon Brando in drag, Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore from Goldfinger ten years before the movie. And just like Pussy with James Bond, Kathy had fallen head over heels for Batman.
Smitten or not, Kathy was hard as nails. Batwoman detourned the image of the atom age housewife by packing her handbag with laser lipsticks and dainty cologne sprays that could chemically castrate you there on the spot. Kathy Kane was the weaponization of the Stepford Wife, the Avon lady as a Special Forces commando: pixie boots, fringed leather gloves, high-gloss lipstick so red it was jet black and reflective. If Bettie Page were the scourge of the underworld, she would look a little like this. No wonder Batman fell in love and the Boy Wonder’s stuttering tongue kept snagging on the same expletive:
[Choke!]
Kathy’s niece was a fluffy blonde named Betty Kane, who later gave up crime fighting to become a tennis pro, and yes, it’s easy to imagine Wertham’s inventive neurons hastily reconfiguring to provide this new and potentially more perverse tangle of relationships with a thrilling porno twist. Far from replacing the troubling Bruce-Dick-Alfred bachelor three-way with a respectable family unit, including Mom, Dad, Sis, Junior, and Dog (a resourceful and masked German shepherd named Ace joined the cast around this time), the Wayne-Kane era comes across in a welter of mind-warping, emotionally charged psychosexual hysteria. The two adults’ cruel treatment and emotional manipulation of a clearly distressed Robin in stories like “Bat-Mite Meets Bat-Girl” motivated Les Daniels to observe in his book Batman: The Complete History: “If a comic book could actually turn people gay as Doctor Wertham had suggested … this one might have had the power to do it.”
If rebellion against the Comics Code took the form of these devastating, coded analyses of America’s psychosexual temperature, it was only to be expected. Squeezed down and controlled by conformity cops, comic-book creators chose the Hermetic route. Transforming their insights and rage into fables for children, the debts to the queer underground and the echoes of the narcotic, psychedelic visions of Ginsberg and Burroughs are still hard to miss.
Imagine the tight-lipped, plausible Batman played by Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan’s twenty-first-century movie series facing some of the adversaries encountered by fifties Batman: a Rainbow Batman, a Zebra Batman, a Creature from Dimension X that resembled a one-eyed testicle on stalk-like legs. With titles including “The Jungle Batman,” “The Merman Batman” (“YES, ROBIN. I’VE BECOME A HUMAN FISH”), “The Valley of Giant Bees” (“ROBIN! HE’S BEEN CAPTURED AND MADE A JESTER IN THE COURT OF THE QUEEN BEE!”), and “Batman Becomes Bat-Baby,” it was an anything-goes atmosphere. And there’s more where they came from: a whole decade’s worth of unfiltered madness as DC writers used every trick in the book to keep Batman away from the crime-haunted streets where he belonged.
Weisinger’s fluid bodies, his foregrounding of intense emotions, laid the groundwork for the Silver Age of comics and the arrival of a jet-powered, supersonic LSD consciousness that would turn the world’s largest-ever collection of young people into self-proclaimed superhumans overnight.
But before that, and for the therapy to be successful, the process of miniaturization, compression, and self-annihilation had to be completed. A collapsing star, a black hole, was created, from which only a god could escape, or an idea. Not even light can escape from a black hole. The event horizon marks the limit of human science, not human imagination.
Along came the Flash, who
could run faster than the speed of light.
Things began to melt.
Things began to stream
