Supergods Read online

  “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 cle
arly 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.