What had made the superheroes so resonant and then so equally irrelevant? Was it only World War II that gave the supermen their urgent significance? The end of the war tipped Americans into a new age of plenty and paranoia. The United States had everything, but it shared with its enemies a superweapon capable of reducing even the sunniest suburban garden party to a fleshless, howling wasteland. Is it any wonder that gloomy existentialism captured so many imaginations in the 1950s? In the postwar West, having X-ray eyes would henceforth be a horror movie curse.
We end the Golden Age as it began, with Superman —one of the last survivors of the initial brief expansion and rapid contraction of the DC universe. It had been too much too soon for the superheroes, but although many of them would lie dormant for decades, no potential trademark truly dies. The superheroes, like cockroaches or Terminators, are impossible to kill.
But in 1954 a sinister scientist straight from the pages of the comics tried to wipe them all out and came close to succeeding.
As the lights went out on the Golden Age, characters such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, who’d achieved a wider recognition thanks to serials and merchandising, survived the cull. Because of their status as backup strips in Adventure Comics, second stringers like Green Arrow and Aquaman weathered the storm—perhaps undeservedly—but the survivors did not always flourish.
For instance, a popular TV series (1953’s The Adventures of Superman) had cemented Superman’s status as an American icon, but budgetary restrictions meant that its star, the likeable but ultimately troubled George Reeves, was rarely seen in the air. At best, he might jump in through a window at an angle that suggested methods of entry other than flight, possibly involving trampolines. The stories revolved around low-level criminal activity in Metropolis and ended when Superman burst through another flimsy wall to apprehend another gang of bank robbers or spies. Bullets would bounce from his monochrome chest (the series was shot and transmitted before color TV, so Reeves’s costume was actually rendered in grayscale, not red and blue, which wouldn’t have contrasted so well in black and white.)
Reeves, at nearly forty, was a patrician Superman with a touch of gray around the temples and a physique that suggested middle-aged spread rather than six-pack, but he fit the mold of the fifties establishment figure: fatherly, conservative, and trustworthy.
The problem with Superman was more obvious in the comic books. By aping the kitchen-sink scale of the Reeves show, Superman’s writers and artists squandered his epic potential on a parade of gangsters, pranksters, and thieves. The character born in a futurist blaze of color and motion had washed up on a black-and-white stage set, grounded by the turgid rules of a real world that kept his wings clipped and his rebel spirit chained. Superman was now locked into a death trap more devious than anything Lex Luthor could have devised. Here was Superman—even Superman—tamed and domesticated in a world where the ceiling, not the sky, was the limit.
Fifties comics had taken a turn toward the dark, lurid, and horrific. The story of EC Comics, which replaced the popularity of the hero titles and brought about a nationwide moral panic, is a fascinating one and has been covered in depth elsewhere—David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America has a chilling fifteen-page roll call of artists and writers, many young and promising, who never worked again after the comic-book purges of the fifties. But this book is about superheroes, and for superheroes, times were especially tough.
Imagine the response at a dinner party this evening if you whipped out your rouged nipples and proudly announced a passion for hard-core pedophile pornography. As difficult as it may be to believe today, in 1955 the kind of outrage that would reasonably greet your twisted confession was directed toward artists, writers, editors, and anyone else involved in the business of comic books. Comic books and their creators were painted as cunning corrupters of children, as monstrous artifacts crafted by experts to twist young and impressionable minds in the direction of crime, drug addiction, and perversion.
At the heart of this attempt to annihilate an art form was an elderly psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham who would throw his considerable weight and expertise behind a sustained hate campaign aimed at comic books. His 1954 best-seller Seduction of the Innocent blamed the comics and their creators for every social ill to afflict America’s children.
However, it wasn’t just EC’s often tasteless horror stories that fired Dr. Wertham’s rage; almost inexplicably, it was the innocent, floundering superhero titles that really got him foaming. Like any good predator, he could sense their weakness and knew that no articulate voice was likely to speak up as comic books’ advocate. If an “expert” like Wertham said they were pornography, then they were pornography. With little to offend anyone in the content of these comics, Wertham was forced to dig deep into an ever-fertile loam of subtext in order to justify a fevered one-handed attack that was conducted with the same brutish, ignorant disregard for the truth that was said to characterize America’s enemies.
For example, in Batman’s living arrangements with ward Dick Grayson (Robin) and Alfred the butler, the good doctor was certain that he discerned the “wish-dream of two homosexuals living together.” Perhaps it was the wish-dream of two homosexuals. Only those particular two homosexuals could tell us for certain.
Yes, it’s all too easy from a knowing adult perspective to infer Bruce Wayne’s epicene qualities. It wouldn’t take much pressure to gently dial up all the familiar elements of a Batman story until the fetishistic homosexual undercurrent implicit in the basic scenario of three generations of men living together in luxury and lawlessness stood revealed in all its black rubber glory. Director Joel Schumacher walked some way down that road in his universally reviled 1997 film Batman and Robin, with George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, and Michael Gough occupying the central roles. There’s a case to be made for the satanic and even sexually transgressive appeal of Batman to adults: wealthy, literally Plutonian, and of the underworld, Batman inhabits a subterranean secret lair, dresses in badass black leather, enjoys the company of a small boy in tights, and has no steady girlfriend. Perhaps there remains to be written the great gay Batman story where he and Robin, and potentially Alfred too, are going at it like trip hammers between Batmobile cruising scenes, but the hollow specter of Dr. Wertham can take it from me that the young readers of Batman saw only a wish-dream of freedom and high adventure. It is Wertham whose name belongs in the annals of perversity, not Batman’s.
Unsurprisingly, Wertham’s blue-movie take on Wonder Woman cast her as an outrageous lesbian, representing an island of perverse militant dykes with a taste for ritual bondage and domination. Astonishingly, he seemed almost oblivious to the more candid kinks of his rival pop psychologist Marston’s lifestyle, gnawing instead at the blatant lesbian shout-out in Wonder Woman’s oft-repeated oath, “SUFFERING SAPPHO!” which no doubt conjured predictable images in the good doctor’s strobe-lit imagination.
But it was Superman—benign Superman—who bore the brunt of Wertham’s hatred. Describing the Man of Steel as a fascistic distortion of truth designed to make children feel inadequate and inclined toward delinquency, he opined obliquely:
“How can they respect the hard-working mother, father, or teacher who is so pedestrian, trying to teach the common rules of conduct, wanting you to keep your feet on the ground and unable even figuratively speaking to fly through the air?
Psychologically Superman undermines The Authority and Dignity of the ordinary man and woman in the minds of children.”
In Wertham’s diagnosis, then, children were too underdeveloped to separate the outlandish fantasy in their comic books from everyday reality, and this made them vulnerable to barely concealed homosexual and antisocial content.
I tend to believe the reverse is true: that it’s adults who have the most trouble separating fact from fiction. A child knows that real crabs on the beach do not sing or talk like the cartoon crabs in The Little Mermaid. A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen.
Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it’s not real.
Wertham’s assault made comics the focus of a nationwide hate campaign. Good Americans who had grown up with the inoffensive adventures of Superman and Batman gathered in howling mobs to burn superhero comics in mountainous heaps upon which the colorful, optimistic dream-people were turned to flame and ash, smoke and soot. (Within ten years, packs of goons just like these would be hurling Beatles albums on similar bonfires with equal brainless fervor.)
In 1954 congressional hearings left horror publisher EC Comics wounded beyond repair. Purged of outlaw content, the remaining publishers banded together for survival and drafted a draconian Comics Code that would ensure child-friendly content. In its mean-spirited, machinelike thoroughness, its precise articulation of dos and don’ts, it was almost—to use the language of the day—Soviet in tone. In many ways, born from similar circumstances, the Comics Code mirrored the Hays Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which aimed to transform the racy, intoxicated Hollywood movies into inoffensive, sexless fairy tales. The Thought Police were marching proudly in the Land of the Free :
Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established Authority.
Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with, walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.
Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered.
And so on. Comics that conformed to code standards were published with a little “Approved by the Comics Code Authority” stamp in the top right corner. Comic books that didn’t carry the code were unlikely to be distributed or given space on newsstands and therefore faced extinction, so it was in the interests of publishers to comply. It seemed now that even the form that had conceived the superheroes, the 2-D universe in which they lived, was in peril.
The Golden Age was over. But the world in which the heroes were dying was a world that needed them like never before. Fifties America was a land of edginess and prowling paranoia hovering as it did on the verge of thermonuclear annihilation. Alone at night, in the midst of unprecedented luxury after a successfully won world war, Americans were more frightened than ever before; there was fear of the Bomb, the Communist, the Homo, the Negro, the Teenager, the Id, the Flying Saucers, the Existential Void. There was the space race, with its launch into the limitless unknown, and Kinsey’s groundbreaking surveys into the sexual habits of Americans, opening the dripping treasure chest of a buttoned-up country’s inner life, revealing a sleep world of polychromatic polymorphous perversity acted out behind a camouflage of pipe-smoking patriarchs and Stepford wives. There were as many different kinds of fear as there were brands of gum.
And as America turned its gaze inward in search of solutions to its sunlit terrors, it found The Shadow, and the multiheaded thing in the cellar emerged blinking in the light : Survival cultists, split personalities, UFO contactees like George Adamski were all admitted to the discourse, and people were willing to listen.
The Dharma Bums and the beatniks had begun to crystallize from the margins into A Movement. The queer, the criminal, the deranged, and the inspired emerged like Morlocks from subterranean nightclub cellars spitting poetry. The spread of psychedelics and marijuana through the jazz underground into the arts schools and the emergent culture of rock ’n’ roll hastened the rise of this fringe. The urge to control and tame the American subconscious was now spawning new things to attempt to control, newer and weirder ideas to understand and explain away.
By the middle of the twentieth century, then, history was happening too fast, at an increasingly heightened pitch, and the tide of futurity seemed unstoppable. Nothing was stable after all. Not the war, not the peace, not the Self. Perhaps only the superheroes could have made sense of an accelerated, mediated world like this, but to a man, to a woman, they were gone, banished beyond the outer dark by their fearful adversaries.
Soon, though, they would return to soar higher, faster, and farther than ever before. So high, so far, and so fast, in fact, that they had to start up a whole new age just to contain them…..”
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