Supermen Before Superman, Vol. 1

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Superheroes didn’t begin in June 1938 with Action Comics #1. They didn’t begin with Superman’s crime-busting predecessors of the 1930s pulps either. Superheroes have a sprawling, action-packed history that predates the Man of Tomorrow by decades.

A century before Krypton exploded, the Grey Champion was confronting redcoats in the streets of colonial New England, while the monstrous Jibbenainosay scourged the Kentucky frontier. Spring-Heeled Jack was leaping English stagecoaches in single bounds as Dr. Hesselius administered to the victims of vampire attacks. Add to this Victorian League of Justice the super-detective Nick Carter, a man with the strength of three, surpassed only by Tarzan’s jungle-perfected physique and the Night Wind’s preternatural speed and crowbar-knotting muscles. While the Scarlet Pimpernel was assuming his thousand disguises, the reformed Grey Seal and Jimmy Valentine were turning their criminal prowess to good as modern Robin Hoods.

By 1914—the year Superman’s creators were born—the superhero’s most defining characteristics were already long-rehearsed standards. Secret identities, costumes, iconic symbols, origin stories, superpowers, these are all the domain of the first superheroes. Some of these very earliest incarnations are startling full-blown, some reveal fragmentary foreshadowing, but all are essential to understanding the century-long evolution of the formula that did not begin with but culminated in Superman.

I cover this terrain in On the Origin of Superheroes, but readers should explore it for themselves. So here’s a tentative Table of Contents for “Supermen Before Superman, Vol. 1, (1816-1916)” a would-be collection of the original 19th and early 20th century essentials:

1. Manfred, Lord Byron 1816

Though the poetry-spouting “Magian” isn’t the first sorcerer of adventure lore, he is the first to embody the moral complexity of the post-Napoleonic anti-ish hero type (and, yes, he has sex with his sister).

2. “The Gray Champion,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835

An old, craggy-looking guy, but a great rabble-rouser. His superpower is inspiration! (Also, his literary sister, Hester Prynne, is the first character to sport an identity-defining letter on her chest.)

3. Sheppard Lee, Robert Montgomery Bird, 1836

The guy’s soul can change bodies. Just give him a non-moldy corpse and he’s good to go.

4. Nick of the Woods, Chapters III and IV, Robert M. Bird, 1837

A homicidal schizophrenic hell-bent on murdering Indians in the spirit of Manifest Destiny. He’s Batman in buckskins.

5. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe, 1841

The proto-Sherlock and so the original super-detective.

6. The Count of Monte Cristo (excerpt), Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet, 1844

A wrong-avenging master-of-disguise passing along the racial divide, what’s not to cheer?

7. Les Miserables (excerpt), Victor Hugo, 1862

The guy can pick-up a horse-cart single-handedly. I think it was radiation from the social Gamma bomb of the French Revolution.

8. Green Tea, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

The original occult detective, with a lethal dose of Orientalism.

9. “How Robin Hood Came to Be an Outlaw,” from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howard Pyle, 1883

Yep, Robin Hood. The original noble outlaw.

10 .Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

Nothing superheroic about the ubermensch, but he is the genre’s namesake.

11. Spring-Heeled Jack, the Terror of London, Alfred S. Burrage, 1885

The first Bat-Man, plus the guy has a magic boot and dresses like Mephistopheles.

12. Nick Carter, Detective: The Solution of a Remarkable Case, Frederic van Rennselaer Dey, 1891

Some Captain American level super-strength here, but mostly bare-knuckled detection. No sitting around solving crimes from your French hotel room.

13. “The Ides of March,” E. W. Hornung, 1891

The original Sherlock-flouting gentleman thief, whose spawned a legion of do-gooding imitators.

14. “A Retrieved Reformation,” O. Henry, 1903

More of a supervillain again, but check-out the tropes: alias, dual identity, self-sacrifice, signature skill.

15. “The Hunt for the Animal,” “The Fiery Cross,” from The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, 1904

Okay, this one I deeply apologize for, but (as I’ve discussed plenty elsewhere), he defines the genre.

16. Man and Superman, George Barnard Shaw, 1904

Again, can’t ignore the translated source of the genre namesake.

17. “Paris: September, 1792,” chapter from The Scarlet Pimpernel, Emmuska Orczy, 1905

Just another cross-dressing socialite secretly using his wealth for aristocratic good.

18. “The Nemesis of Fire,” Algernon Blackwood, from John Silence, Physician Extraordinary, 1908

The first occult detective with occult powers–even if he is more sympathetic to werewolves and Egyptian fire demons than the moronic Brits they haunt.

19. Under the Moons of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912

Find yourself on a mysterious alien planet that gives you super-strength, sound familiar?

20. “The Height of Civilization,” chapter from Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912

First pulp hero actually called a “superman.”

21. “A Midnight Incident,” “The Frame-up,” “A Law Unto Himself,” chapters from Alias the Night Wind, Frederic van Rennselaer Dey, 1913

The first mutant, a cross between Quicksilver and the crowbar-bender of your choice.

24. “The Gray Seal,” Frank L. Packard, 1914

His fingertips seem to have mutant sensitivity, but mostly he’s another urban Robin Hood.

25. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915

Paradise Island minus Wonder Woman (and the yellow wallpaper).

26. Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, Russell Thorndike, 1915

A vicar by day, Scarecrow-costumed avenger by night, plus there’s that whole pirate backstory and prequels.

27. The Iron Claw, Arthur Stringer, 1916

The movie is lost, but the Laughing Mask still debuted in newspaper at the time, doing his mild-mannered routine with his boss and fiance while secretly fighting criminals at night.

Okay, so maybe that’s more one volume’s worth of texts, but this is still in the dream-book stage, and with the magic of unpaperbound e-books, why not?

Utilitarian Review 11/28/15

Posted on November 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on writing Stevie Nicks fan fic as a nine year old.

Chris Gavaler on Frankenstein superheroes.

Me on Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It and the virtues of heterogenous apocalypse. (This was a Patreon supported post, so, if you like it, consider contributing.)

Me on the awesome doomy death and spiritual torment of Immolation.

We were off for pray for woodstock day.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics from summer 1950 (lots of EC.)

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about the documentary Killing Them Safely and how tasers escalate violence.

At the Establishment I wrote about how spewing racism isn’t braver than protesting it, and neither are part of a culture of fear.

At Ravishly I wrote about how Mockingjay can’t imagine non-violence.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—Kelela, Girlyboi, and how R&B has always been everything.

—all the cultural journalists binge watching Jessica Jones.

—how Iron Man won’t save Jessica Jones.

Other Links

Terrell Jermaine Starr on how Ben Carson inspired him as a kid.

Mojo has the first year end best of list. Dylan, Keith Richards, Richard Thompson *and* David Gilmour? That’s a lot of fogeys on there.

And another example of political correctness run amok.

Pray for Woodstock Day

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

We’re off for the Thanksgiving holiday. Have a good day off if you’ve got one; we’ll see you all tomorrow.

Forgotten Spiritual Death

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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On the landscape of pop culture, death metal is an incongruous oozing spiky heap of torment. Too loud and abrasive to be popular; too formulaic and un-ironic to be avant-garde, it’s the exploitation cinema of music—except that folks like Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven long ago took exploitation cinema mainstream. Death metal, on the other hand, remains more or less what it always was; a hermetic low-brow underworld of regimented troll fury.

Even seminal death metal bands, then, are largely unknown to everyone but hardcore fans, and that’s certainly the case with Immolation. Hailing from Yonkers, Immolation was far removed from the central Florida death metal scene that nurtured acts like Deicide, Obituary and Malevolent Creation. Perhaps in part as a result, they’re somewhat unheralded even by hardened metalheads. They show up on “best of” lists now and then, and they’re certainly respected… but they don’t provoke the rabid partisanship of, say, Cannibal Corpse.

Which is a shame, because Immolation’s debut album, 1991’s Dawn of Possession is solidly, idiosyncratically ferocious, from its demons-raping-angels tacky airbrushed cover through its obsessively anti-Christian lyrics. While many death metal bands of its era, like Deicide, embraced propulsive speed and whiplash, Immolation took a slightly different approach. The percussion still sounds like someone is pouring amphetamines into the drummer with a funnel, and the arrangements are jittery and proggy and clearly thrash-ready. But the whole thing keeps downshifting, the guitars thick and minor key and clotted, like massive primeval roadrunners stumbling into viscous tar pits.

There are other doom-death bands, of course—the amazing Autopsy, most notably. But Immolation feels less like they’ve fused doom and death, and more like they’re trying for death but doom has come upon them. Parts of Dawn of Possession suggest a kind of bifurcated torment, in both lyrics and music. The five-minute long “Those Left Behind,” opens with a slow, screeching, painful dragging guitar figure, like a tomb rasping open. The band then kicks into a parody of high gear, a swollen swagger that suggests classic rock performed by corpses. And all the while they rasp out the praises of Jesus:

I lift my soul joyfully

If not, my life will end painfully

Extol He who rides above the clouds

Majestic and glorious

Reigning victorious

The song goes on like that, jerkily taking painful fight and then sinking under the gravity of coveted failure.

Jesus Christ

You are Lord

You are God

But have You won over sin and death

Victory’s crown shall be ours

For we are those

Those You’ve left behind

The singer lets out a distant shriek at the end, and the music cuts out to just the drum thunking emptily, until the next song, “Internal Decadence” comes in seamlessly with its despondent chorus “Twisted brain/Abstract world of pain/Anguish of the mind/Tortured afterlife.”

Obviously, Dawn of Possession is an atheist document, but the tormented weight with which the music is pulled agonizingly first towards heaven, then towards hell seems close to the experience of some of the great Christian doubters. Take Gerard Manley Hopkins’ terrible sonnets, for example: “Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse”—that’s totally a metal lyric.

In fact, listening to Immolation’s album full of prayers and sighs, wishes for hell and fears of heaven delivered against a backdrop of music constantly lumbering from defiance to crawling despair—listening to that, you start to wonder if it’s really the volume and the harshness which has sidelined death, or whether it might be something else. Neither pop nor the avant-garde has much room these days for spiritual torment, at least expressed in such an explicitly theological context. Maybe Dawn of Possession is forgotten not like a pop culture curiosity, but like a dark night of the soul.

He, She, and Apocalypse

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This post is my first Twisted Mass of Heterotopia column, supported by my Patreon subscribers. If you think it’s the sort of thing you’d like me to write more of, consider contributing (and thank you!)
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Marge Piercy’s 1991 novel He, She, and It isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic novel; her future world doesn’t end, and doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s about to in the near term. Still, there are a lot of little apocalypses scattered around in it—small scale disasters, of perhaps mildly more intensity than those you can see anytime you turn on the news. The greenhouse effect has pushed temperatures up worldwide; the sky is no longer blue, and going out into daylight without protective gear is potentially fatal. Plagues, famine, and infertility caused by toxic waste and radiation has reduced the earth’s population by half. Most dramatically, a nuclear terrorist attack and subsequent war utterly destroyed Israel and most of the Middle East.

In a recent post on HU, Jimmy Johnson pointed out that most mainstream apocalyptic visions ignore the existence of indigenous people, and, therefore, the existence of prior apocalypses. From the perspective of Native Americans, the European invasion looks a lot like the end of the world—and not less so because that end, with all its violence and humiliations, has been grinding on for 500 years and counting. Fury Road, The Walking Dead, Y: The Last Man, and other big apocalyptic narratives often reference or nod to this colonial past—The War of the Worlds explicitly mentions England’s colonial adventures, for example. But indigenous peoples, or for that matter the oppression of marginalized peoples, is mostly ignored, erased by the giant whomp of one-size-fits-all-world’s-end. Everyone on earth is flattened in the same way; the earth becomes one, united in despair and disarray by an end that doesn’t play favorites, and so is unable to assimilate all those ends that did.

He and She and It‘s more heterogeneous apocalypse has a little more give. Most of the main characters are Jewish, and a parallel narrative about Prague in the 1600s links the city of Tikva, under siege from multinational corporations in the future, to the violence directed at Jewish ghettos in Europe in the past.

Less central to the story, but significant, is the fate of Israel itself. Though everyone assumes that the nation was utterly destroyed, it turns out a small group of people still live there. Nili, an assassin from the new Israel, explains:

We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days .We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.

In his essay, Johnson suggested that an apocalypse for the colonizers might look like salvation for the colonized. That seems to be exactly what Piercy has imagined. The old order of occupied and occupier was wiped from the earth, and in its place there is, not a two state solution, but a single feminist utopia, obliterating the distinctions between Jews and Muslims, and obliterating too the hoary trope of indigenous misogyny. The mistreated women in their burqas who the west supposedly must save; they’re cloning themselves without men now in vats, and coming back, perhaps, to save you. More, many of the surviving Jews are dark-skinned, since, Malkah, a Jewish grandmother and cyberneticist explains “the black Jews from Ethiopia had a higher survival rate in the catastrophe than any other group. They remembered how to manage in utter disaster.”

Apocalypses are often about appropriation of indigenous experiences; the Martians invading England as England invaded America, the totalitarian nightmare of 1984, built, surely, from Orwell’s experiences being the totalitarian police in Burma. He and She and It, though, doesn’t appropriate other people’s experiences. Instead, it picks up the Jewish history of diaspora and oppression,and tries to imagine a future that honors that history rather than Israel’s current, ongoing colonial infliction of apocalypse.

Honoring the history of oppression means you have to remember the history as oppressor, too, though. Malkah talks about reading “a poem by Mara Shliemann that everybody but the Orthodox use these days, about the heritage we share now of having had a nation in our name as stupid and as violent as other nations: a lament for a lost chance, a botched redemption.” If the Holocaust was an apocalypse, echoing the pogroms in Prague, the Israeli occupation is another. Both are part of Jewish history now, the novel says, no matter what disaster befalls. And that means that any disaster for Jews has to be looked at in at least two ways, and any utopia does as well.

Malkeh journeys to Israel at the end of the novel in the hopes of having her sight restored; the Jewish/Palestinian Israel is behind the rest of the world in some things, but it has made great advancements in artificial enhancements, including eyes. After the apocalypse, we may see better what difference offers. One apocalypse is a disaster, but if you’ve got enough of them, some may be opportunities. As Karmia, a woman who may be Jewish or may be Palestinian, tells Malkeh, “If we can love a date palm or a puppy or a cyborg, perhaps we can love each other better also.”

Frankenstein Begins: The Dark Superhero Rises

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I used to be a lone voice in the pop culture wilderness crying that Frankenstein should be refitted with a cape, tights, and an “F” on his chest. More oddly, I think the wardrobe change would fit equally to the doctor, Victor Frankenstein, as his creation, the Frankenstein monster. But I’m no longer so lonely in my wailings. Opening November 25, Victor Frankenstein makes the case for me.

Personally, I would have called the prequel Igor—since that’s its hook. Former Harry Potter super-wizard Daniel Radcliffe plays the mad scientist’s hunchback lab assistant. You may or may not agree that Harry is himself a superhero (muggle by day, transformed by accident, etc.), but James McAvoy is a no-brainer: the titular Doctor shares bodies with the X-Men’s super-brained Professor Xavier. The young version. McAvoy retains his pre-Patrick Stewart scalp.

Attached to those superhero creds, director Paul McGuigan makes his leap to the big screen in a single bound from the BBC’s Sherlock. For his new dynamic duo, Igor plays Dr. Watson to Victor’s Holmes. Plus actress Jessica Brown Findlay had the power of mind-control on the British superhero show Misfits. If that’s not already a complete body of superhero parts, screenwriter Max Landis cut his teeth on 2012’s Chronicle and the 2011 comic short The Death and Return of Superman.

But how are Superman and (either) Frankenstein related?

Well, the creature did play a gig as a Marvel superhero in the 70s. He teamed-up with Spider-Man, Iron Man and She-Hulk—though the supervillain Kang the Conqueror used him as a mind-controlled minion too (perhaps both McAvoy and Findlay could help him with that?). But Frankenstein and Superman were stitched together before comics even existed. In the 1919 film serial The Master Mystery, Harry Houdini battles Q the Automaton, a robot described as a “Frankenstein” that “possesses a human brain which has been transplanted into it and made to guide it” as a “conscienceless inhuman superman.”

That man of steel wasn’t the Man of Steel, but a pop cultural version of Nietzsche’s ubermensch. The German philosopher prophesied in 1883 that a breed of superhumans would evolve and take the world away from Homo sapiens. Mary Shelley was decades ahead of him. The author of Frankenstein wrote in 1818 that “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” That’s why Victor refuses to make a mate for his monster and why his monster declares himself his and humanity’s “arch-enemy.”

It’s the original Professor X vs. Magneto match-up. Or Superman vs. Lex Luthor, since Victor is also the original mad scientist, a character type so pervasive in comics it’s hard to keep track of them all. Like Victor, they’re usually a good guy who accidentally creates a monster—though, unlike Victor, the monster tends to be themselves.

The Dr. Jekyll/Frankenstein merger culminated with Reed Richards when he transformed himself and his pals into the Fantastic Four. The Thing was so popular, Marvel created the Hulk next—fulfilling the Shelley/Nietzsche prophesy of an expanding race of monstrous supermen. When Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk for the first, artist Jack Kirby drew a Boris Karloff knock-off with a flat head and grey skin (Marvel flipped to a green complexion the next issue because the ink looked better).

Karloff’s stitched corpse was never part of Shelley’s plan though. Her Victor doesn’t even know how to reanimate flesh: “I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” His creature wasn’t human-sized either: “As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved . . . to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height.”

Early stage productions even draped him in a Greek toga—the first of a new god-like species. His “limbs were in proportion” (a big turn-on for early nineteenth-century readers) and the doctor “had selected his features as beautiful.” Sure, his skin was transparent yellow and his face a fit of twitching muscles, and next he’s serial murdering his creator’s loved ones—but, hey, when has a mad scientist’s scheme ever worked out exactly as planned?

Look at the twitching pile of recent superhero movies that include some nut job trying to take over the planet with a new species of devilishly superior uber-monsters:

Ian McKellen’s Magneto planned his mutant conquest, complaining that “nature is too slow” in the firstX-Men.
Michael Fassbender’s Magneto was still complaining in X-Men: First Class, but under the tutelage of Kevin Bacon: “We are the future of the human race. You and me, son. This world could be ours.”
A month later in the first Captain American film, Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull gave Cap the same lesson: “You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind. Unlike you, I embrace it proudly. You could have the power of the gods!”
Weaving’s Agent Smith had already explained to The Matrix fans: “As soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization. Which is of course what this is all about. Evolution. . . . The future is our world.”
Iron Man 3’s supergenius Aldrich Killian wanted to turn himself and his minions into the “new iteration of human evolution.”
Just like Dr. Connors, aka the Lizard, planned to “enhance humanity on an evolutionary scale” and “create a world without weakness.” “This is no longer about curing ills,” he said in The Amazing Spider-Man. “This is about finding perfection.” Unfortunately, “Human beings are weak, pathetic, feeble-minded creatures. Why be human at all when we can be so much more? Faster, stronger, smarter!”
And Dane DeHaan, reading from Max Landis’ Chronicle script, declared himself an “apex predator,” ready to wipe out humankind as Victor Frankenstein had feared his creature’s super-race would.

So who will save us from all these Frankenstein Supermen? Other Frankenstein Superman of course. Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, even the X-Men’s radiation-saturated DNA, they all started as lab experiments. That’s the core of the Marvel superhero formula. Stitch a monster into tights and watch him save us from monsters just like him.

There’s a reason we confuse Victor and his creature. Superheroes are both kinds of Frankensteins.