Yearly Archives: 2013

Can We Have a Different Conversation?

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I really don’t understand why people keep trying to tell Marvel and DC how to do business. These are wholly owned subsidiaries of major multi-national entertainment conglomerates with a poor track record of rewarding the contributions of the individual.

Marvel is owned by Disney – a company that has set industry best practices for selling product to little girls. Does anyone honestly believe that if Disney wanted Marvel to sell more product to that demographic that they would be unable to do so? Or is it more likely that Marvel represents Disney’s inroad into a male demographic?

DC just went through a major branding exercise, which is usually an expensive, complex multi-year process. Is it remotely possible that demographic targeting, genre diversity and price point optimization were not considered during the planning stages? Or is it more likely that DC specifically targeted the demographics that it wanted to target?

Not all comic book companies can be all things to all people. And it is increasingly obvious that Marvel and DC do not want to be anything but superhero publishers selling superhero comics to superhero readers through the supply chain that they have spent two plus decades optimizing to do so. And yes, this limits the amount of money they bring in from demographics outside what they consider to be their core target – straight white males.
But it’s not as if Marvel and DC are the only game in town.

It would be refreshing to see an article that started with “Marvel and DC are not producing the kinds of comics that appeal to other demographics” that went on to say “but there are other publishers that do and you should be supporting them” instead of presenting a carefully thought out argument about how Marvel and DC should completely change their business practices.
Corey Blake , for example, wrote an entire article that basically boils down to “Marvel should start acting more like Fantagraphics” without actually mentioning Fantagraphics – presumably because he still thinks that there are only two comic book publishers in existence instead of more than thirty.

If half of the energy spent tilting at the Big Two windmills was spent pointing out that there is already a pretty diverse selection of comics available for purchase, I think there would probably be more comics readers. But that wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying as bitching about the fact that homogenized corporate IP farms are not paying attention to other demographics, would it?

It’s easier to bemoan what could be than it is to celebrate what is because no real action is needed. “I tried to tell them what to do and they chose not to listen. What are you going to do?” Buy comics from someone else maybe?
A very common phrase that I have seen from some very smart people is “they’re leaving money on the table.” Presumably “they” are Marvel and DC, but “they” could very easily refer to anyone publishing comics that has not put together a comprehensive marketing campaign designed to combat the idea that comics is only superheroes aimed at straight white men.

Where most people see a problem on the part of Marvel and DC, I see opportunities for smaller, more agile publishers to sweep in and cater to these demographics who are clamoring for more diversity. After all, these comics already exist and I think it’s time to change the conversation.
 

DC Comics Batwoman

J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman, the writers of Batwoman, just left the title after DC editorial refused to allow the character to marry her female fiance.


 

Indie Comics vs. Context — Death Match

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Heidi over at the Beat had a post at the end of last week in which she argued that indie comics are rarely examined in cultural context.

And yet, it does seem that indie comics and cartoonists are rarely examined in a larger contextual way. This is possibly because the content involves a lot of what some call introspection, and others emo shoegazing—even the greatest one—and maybe because this kind of analysis if of a secondary interest of most of those creating and consuming indie comics? And to be fair, a lot of indie comics are created by an ethnically homogenous groups of suburban white kids. When they stray too far away from writing what they know, as Craig Thompson did with Habibi, the results aren’t awesome. Even a work as great as Building Stories is a personal story—on a most simplistic level, it’s telling us that it’s better to have a happy marriage than lie in bed every night wondering if you should kill yourself.

I disagree with the vast majority of what Heidi says in that post…but I don’t know that a fisking would really be that productive. So, instead, I thought it might be fun to take her post as a challenge, and try to do a roundtable on indie comics in social context.

What “social context” means is a little unclear; Heidi seems to be particularly focused on issues of racism, sexism, and gender, since she’s responding specifically to the recent discussion of Jason Karns work (Heidi has all the links on her post.) I’d certainly be interested in hearing folks talk about those issues in relation to indie cartoonists, but I’d think other approaches would be useful as well. For instance, looking at comics in terms of their relationship to visual art traditions, or to literary traditions, or, for that matter, to comics traditions, seems like it would qualify. Talking about comics in relation to historical events could work too. I’m sure folks could think of other possibilities.

The term “indie comics” also seems like it’s somewhat up for grabs. We’re trying to avoid mainstream superhero titles, obviously, and genre works (manga or otherwise) seem like they should be out too. Heidi expressed interest in focusing on more recent cartoonists (i.e., not Crumb, Clowes, etc. etc.), though again that’s maybe more something to think about than a hard and fast rule.

So…anybody in? I think I’d aim for early October or thereabouts. If you’re interested, let me know in comments, and maybe mention who you might write about if you have an inkling, since I think that would be a nice way to spark discussion and generate ideas.
 

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Anya Davidson’s School Spirits, which Heidi talks about at her post.
 

Utilitarian Review 9/7/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Jacob Canfield on Johnny Ryan, Benajamin Marra, and lazy thinking in comics criticism.

Piyali Bhattacharya with a short review of Bea Ridgway’s River of No Return.

I celebrate the glorious alienation of Chicago juke.

I explain why Shelby Lynne is not death metal.

Ng Suat Tong looks at Dan Clowes’ short story “Justin Damiano,” about critics and criticism.

Alex Buchet continues his pre-history of the superhero, with a focus on sci-fi from Verne to Vril.

I talk about Kazuo Umezu’s Butterfly Grave and how weak mothers eat their young.

Chris Gavaler on his mother’s superpowers and her aging.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I interviewed Stanley Hauerwas about intervention in Syria.

At Reason I review a love letter to an Afghan warlord.

At Splice Today I talk about

— how the Internet hates you, and what to do about it.

— Dungeons and Dragons and the rule of nerds.
 
Other Links

Robert Reece on black men’s bodies and the white female gaze.

Elizabeth Sampat on why the guys who do Penny Arcade need a swift kick in the shins.
 
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Jack B. on Johnny Ryan and The Appeal of Bullying

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Jack B. just left this lengthy comment on an old thread. I thought I’d highlight it here.
_________

This discussion interested me enough that I thought I’d try to revive it, lo these many months later.

Johnny Ryan’s comment about the bully’s perspective being more interesting than the victim’s perspective has always struck me as really insightful, especially as it comes from a guy whose work can be so dumb. There’s something kind of precious and self-pitting about art with a sweet, sensitive narrator/protagonist, whether it’s Craig Thompson in Blankets or Holden Caufield, that you don’t get when the narrator is Humbert Humbert or Alex in A Clockwork Orange (although the latter two characters are self-pitying themselves). I also agree with Ryan that Lucy is a good character—her dual role as the cause of Charlie Brown’s problems and his psychiatrist was one of the wittiest things about Peanuts. Noah, even before his excellent interview with Ryan, made the point that the strip would have been a drag if it had focused only on Charlie Brown and his melancholy, as some alt-comics Peanuts fans seem to do.

Jacob Canfield’s problems with Ryan seem to involve the victim/bully dichotomy in areas beyond art, and I think I might side with Ryan in some of those areas, too. Like a lot of left-leaning internet commentators, Jacob seems to think that “macho” is a bad thing and that straight white men should be very conscious of their privilege. But speaking as the wussiest “beta male” you could possibly imagine and as an upper-middle-class white person with a fair amount of guilt, I’m not so sure that it’s good to be like me. My experience is that self-confidence and male strength, even on the part of straight white males, is looked on favorably by almost everyone, including blacks and women, outside of left-leaning internet circles. I’m pretty sure that most black, blue-collar workers would prefer working with a confident, macho white guy than with a sensitive Caucasian who enjoys discussing his white male privilege, for example. By the way, Jacob’s line, “It makes comics critics look like macho assholes” struck me as unintentionally funny—they might look like assholes, but I doubt that they’ve ever looked macho to anyone other than Jacob.

I definitely don’t want to go too far in aesthetically favoring an “alpha” perspective over a “beta” one, though. P.J. O’Rourke once said something to the effect that Jewish American humor is pro-loser while Irish American humor is pro-winner, and he called The National Lampoon a breakthrough in that it succeeded with the latter for the first time in American pop-culture history. I don’t know if there’s anything to his history or his ethnic breakdown, as plenty of Jewish comics from Groucho on have been more aggressive than self-deprecating, but I will say that I love early Woody Allen and can’t stand what I’ve read of The National Lampoon or O’Rourke (I think I’d hate him even without the stupid right-wing politics). So I’m definitely not in the fratboy camp when it comes to humor.

And of course, when it comes to real life, siding with bullies over victims is pretty horrible. I would imagine that one of Johnny Ryan’s main influences is Howard Stern, and Ryan drew this poster of the regulars from The Howard Stern Show: http://www.flickr.com/photos/18176432@N00/990828987/in/photostream/. Those who are not familiar with Stern—or, as I prefer to call him, “Fartman”—may wonder about some of the people depicted on the poster, such as “Gary the Retard” and “Wendy the Retard.” These are actual mentally retarded people that Fartman has had on his show to make fun of; mocking disabled and generally fucked-up people is a major aspect of the show (there used to be a gigantic Wikipedia article describing this aspect in excruciating detail, but it’s been truncated into a tiny one at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wack_Pack). I seem to be alone in this, but I find it extremely disturbing that a guy who has publically picked on mentally retarded people to their faces on the air as an adult has gained Fartman’s level of mainstream acceptance. Whenever a coworker mentions liking him, I actually feel kind of queasy, as if they’re admitting that beneath a veneer of adult civility, they’re much worse than the most vicious junior-high bully you could possibly imagine. Beyond that, I really believe that the relatives of “Gary the Retard” and “Wendy the Retard” should have the legal right to murder everyone, including Johnny Ryan, who has publically fucked with their loved ones. On the other hand, I’m a big Eminem fan, and he’s made plenty of shitty jokes about Christopher Reeve and other unfortunates, so maybe I’m just a big hypocrite.

Some final thoughts on Ryan—maybe I shouldn’t have called for his murder, because I actually like his art a lot and find some of his comics extremely funny. I have to say, though, that I don’t think his overall batting average for comedy is so great. For example, I just looked through a bunch of his altered Chick tract covers (at http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts), and the vast majority of them didn’t make me laugh. However, looking through them was definitely worth it, as the ones that did make me laugh, like “The Letter” (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115761), “The Contract” (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115762), and one that suggests my favorite rapper will not go to Heaven (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115796) made me laugh an awful lot. Batting average aside, he really hits a joke way out of the park every now and then.

Well, those are my thoughts. If no one finds this incredibly lengthy post worth replying to, I’m going to be extremely embarrassed.

 
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Confessions of Electro Woman

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Mad electro woman

“I know a woman whose internal electrical field escapes autonomously. Her basal low level charge kills small batteries: watches, pagers. Her moderate level charge creates worse havoc, even the death of computers. She has high charge levels, as well. The electrical system of at least two cars have not survived the rare but severe escapes of her internal charge.”

The above woman is my mother, writing about herself in third person. I found several print-outs of the passage while emptying filing cabinets in her condo this summer. She moved into assisted living after being diagnosed with moderate Alzheimer’s last spring. The paper was dated over a decade ago. It continues:

“Not too long ago she learned about her grant submitted to NIH (National Institutes of Health) to fund her Health Disparities research. Despite an excellent 172 priority score, the interim Director of the Institute had skipped over her grant and funded others with less meritorious scores. An appeal process is not part of the NIH Policies & Procedures.

“Hours later, the microwave fan came on autonomously. As she watched the power lights on her laptop, they cycled between battery and house power. The big computer turned itself off autonomously as she learned later. They had both been mortally damaged.

“She sat quietly in the light of candles she had made, as far as possible from electricity-powered items. Feeling drained, she went to bed.”

I had read this before and had heard my mother describe such electrical incidents multiple times. It would be familiar even if she hadn’t. It’s a standard comic book trope. When Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created the supervillain Electro for Amazing Spider-Man #9 (1964), they sent Max Dillon, an electric company lineman, up a utility pole to be struck by lightning while holding two lives wires. This transforms him into a human capacitor.

Spider-Man 9

My mother’s explanation is more vague and so perhaps more plausible. “If you have ever lived with a cat,” she writes, “then you know that sometimes something fires off its plum-pit sized brain, and it suddenly becomes manic, running crazily throughout the home, yowling.  Cats have been used in neurological research (unharmed) as their brain’s electrical wiring is remarkably similar to that of humans. Our brains operate autonomously to maintain the functions of our organ systems, breathing for example. As the human brain does so, electrical impulses skip along and bridge synaptic nerves via neuro-electrical transport systems not yet totally well-understood. Drugs have been developed from research in cats (and from other types of research) that modulate either uptake or release of neuro-transmitters, and thus are used to treat clinical depression and anxiety.”

Under “aspects of this woman which may or may not be relevant,” my mother includes: “deep, encompassing dyslexia; decades of treated clinical depression; creativity characterizes both her medical research and artistic pursuits; in an emergency, she is calm, focused, and solution-focused without conscious thinking.”

In other words, my mom thinks she’s a mutant. She was born with a dyslexia/creativity-related electrical capacity that was tapped and/or augmented by anti-depressant medication, resulting in uncontrolled and unpredictable short-circuiting discharges. I’m tempted to call her Electra Woman, from the 1976 Krofft Supershow, one of the few Saturday morning programs I didn’t watch as a kid (perhaps because it ran opposite The Shazam! / Isis Hour). But Electra Woman didn’t have superpowers; she just operated a multi-functional ElectraCom, just the sort of gadget my mother would have fried.

Electra Woman

“Last night on the way home from work,” she writes, “the car dome light stayed on all the way. I called my beloved engineer—not home. So I tried a new technique. Brute force with my shoe—on the handle which controls all car interior lights—worked quite well.

“There is an unrelenting curiosity about when the next electron-associated event will occur. There is no doubt that such will be the case.

“The only question is when.”

Although I’m skeptical of my mother’s mutant abilities, I did discover a final piece of evidence in her condo. The professional-grade shredder she had bought to destroy her decade-old and so now obsolete NIH research was dead. Her filing cabinets included reams and reams of health surveys, all of which had to be shredded to preserve the privacy of the responders. I drove to Staples to buy a new one.

“At this time I am working on too many innovative manuscripts. There is a skim of anger coating me because I am unable to clone myself. I grow concerned that if I were to concentratedly focus my electrons on an appropriate target—such as the car of a particular individual who could find me a way to funding for someone to help me with all these manuscripts (i.e. type in WORD which has never cooperated with me, or got to the library to find and copy the references I need, etc.) I think I could destroy all things electrical in his car. I wonder if I will be able to contain myself.”   

Electra Woman had Dyna Girl for a helper. My mother has me. I took over her bank accounts, found her an assisted living facility, put her condo up for sale, haggled with a buyer. I’m a great sidekick. I used to work in her lab summer between semesters, spinning blood samples in her centrifuges, logging data in her computers. There was never an accident, no power-bestowing explosion, nothing transformative. If I inherited any of her mutant genes, they are irredeemably dormant. My laptop works fine.

Warner Brothers shot a new Electra Woman pilot back in 2001, about when my mother lost her grant renewal and so her career as a medical researcher. It featured the washed-up superheroine drinking and smoking alone in her cluttered trailer–until a new Dyna Girl rescues her from her depression. The series wasn’t picked up, but I watched the unaired pilot on YouTube after a night of shredding. My mother told me the next day:

“It feels like a part of me has been ripped out.”

She is now contained in an assisted living studio, where med techs sort and deliver her anti-depressants and other pills every morning and evening. In the comic book version, a final fit of rage would uncap her well of superpowers, and she would rampage through the building and out into the streets to savage the city, until subdued by some friendly neighborhood do-gooder.

Instead she’s sitting in her one-room apartment with her cat, reading and smoking as the magic of her neuro-transmitters continues to peter out.

The Weak Mother Eats Its Young

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A couple weeks back I talked a bit about the tiresomeness of the strong female character trope. And I don’t disavow that: strong female characters, who all know kung-fu and never take no shit, remain tiresome. But Megumi, the main character in Kazuo Umezu’s one-volume manga “Butterfly Grave,” reminds you why, tiresome as they are, those strong female characters are generally seen as preferable to the alternative.

Megumi is the alternative. She is not strong. She is weak…and holy shit is her drippy, unrelenting weakness incredibly annoying. Virtually all she does, throughout the entire manga, is whine, cower in tower, and then, sometimes, for variation, whine some more. Her one character trait is an overwhelming phobia of butterflies, and when she is not shrieking and running from some fluttering assailant, she is trembling and helplessly agonizing internally about how terrible it is that she is always shrieking and running from the fluttering assailants. When even Umezu tires of that, he has her start seeing phantom black butterflies everywhere, resulting in more cowering, additional agonizing, and, if you’re me, a fair amount of fervent wishing that the horror manga would get on with the horror and kill her off in some gruesome fashion — preferably with collateral damage including her colorless father, her colorless boyfriend, the colorless kids at her school, and perhaps (if you’ll forgive me) the banally uninventive manga-ka who has inflicted all of them upon me.

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As this suggests, Megumi’s spinelessness, and consequent shapelessness, is more than just a personality trait; it’s a kind of miasma which infects the entire manga. Umezu’s Drifting Classroom, which focuses on the Bildungsroman of a male protagonist, has a grim, ineluctable structure, racing forward in an ever-rising body count towards an ever bleaker future. “Butterfly Grave”, on the other hand, vacillates in a sodden nowhere. There are events, and more events, but they never add up to anything or go anywhere. Megumi is scared by butterflies; Megumi is scared by the grotesque but harmless gardener; Megumi is scared by a dream in which her dead mother rises from the grave as a butterfly. The whole middle section of the manga is given over to little episodes where Megumi sees an ominous black butterfly, and then disaster strikes (a car loses its breaks; there’s an earthquake.) This seems to be building somewhere…but no. Umezu just abandons it. When Megumi’s fear of butterflies is eventually explained, her predictive powers aren’t so much rationalized as simply forgotten. The story — Megumi’s story — doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t really have a story. She just has the ritual repetition of terror and weakness.

Nonetheless, and almost despite itself, the manga does heave lugubriously into a kind of plot. Megumi’s mother (given to unaccountable fits of terror like Megumi herself) died soon after Megumi was born, killed in a fall from the balcony of the house. Eventually, Megumi’s father decides to remarry a woman he has known for a long time…a woman who, as it turns out, is evil, evil, evil. It is she, the new second mother, who killed Megumi’s actual mother, pushing her off the balcony as she clutched Megumi to protect her. In the climactic scene, this murder is recreated; the evil mother tries to push Megumi off the balcony, revealing in the process a butterfly shaped birthmark. Thus Megumi’s fear of butterflies — it’s all a infantile psychological thingee, don’t you know.
 

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The explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but again narrative closure, or even coherence, isn’t really the point. On the contrary, narrative incoherence is the point. The butterfly “revelation” tends not to provide linear closure, but to turn the manga into a closed fuzzy circle — or perhaps a blurred shadow, like the birthmark itself. Megumi takes the place of her mother as victim. But the mother has also been insistently associated with the butterfly, as in this dream sequence.
 

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Thus, mother and step-mother are butterflies, and mother and step-mother end up also being substitutes for each other. And if mother is Megumi, and mother is step-mother, then step-mother and Megumi are also the same…a point underlined when the step-mother, like the mother, and almost like Megumi, falls to her death from a height (a cliff face rather than a balcony, but still).

I’ve been reading several articles recently which reference the work of Nancy Chodorow, a feminist psychoanalyst who argues that female ego-formation is less complete or rigid than male ego-formation; that the boundaries of women’s selves are more permeable because daughters identify with mothers, and eventually with their own daughters/children. Whatever it’s application to real women, Chodorow’s ideas have an obvious application to “Butterfly Grave”, where Megumi both barely has a self and is transposed with multiple mothers, who in turn keep becoming dis-embodied and turned into soft, shadowy things, grotesque butterfly non-forms.
 

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Throughout the manga, Megumi keeps asking herself “Why am I afraid of butterflies?” The answer, diegetically, is that she is afraid of her step-mother. The answer, thematically, is that she is afraid of her mother.

So why is she afraid of being her mother? Mothers are good things you’d think. Megumi’s mother sacrifices her life so her daughter won’t die in the fall from the balcony. This is initially described as an accident; Megumi crawled out into danger, and her mother rushed to save her.

The mother gives her life and saves Megumi…but if Megumi is the mother, or is to be the mother, then the sacrifice is also an imperative that she, Megumi, die — to be a mother is to give up the self. Thus, the mother is the victim of Megumi who causes her fall accidentally, and/or of the stepmother (who is also Megumi) who murders her. But the mother is also the murderer, the woman you will be who demands you give up your self. Mother murders daughter, daughter murders mother, in a perfect glob of girly-butterfly passive-aggressive doom.

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In the manga, the step-mother hates Megumi’s mother because she wants her father — a neat Oedipal drama, if the step-mother is a stand-in for Megumi. But really there’s little energy invested in the het-plot, which seems mentioned only to show us how irrelevant it is. The real change in the step-mother’s behavior comes after Megumi’s attack on hert’s not love which leads to aggression, but loss of self — both in the sense that Megumi is not herself when she attacks, and in the sense that what provokes the attack is the step-mother not being herself, but an amorphous other, which is also Megumi.

The manga ends happily; the step-mother has killed herself, Megumi isn’t freaked out by butterflies anymore, and — significantly — Megumi has her own daughter, who isn’t afraid of butterflies either. The last image is of the mother and daughter looking calmly out the window at a group of butterflies flying past; white rather than black, the blurred, shapeless shapes are domesticated and contained in the comforting grid of window panes, and the domestic arc of the curtains.

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Or that seems to be the last image. In fact, on the overleaf is one final drawing — Megumi’s frightened face, screaming, disappearing into whiteness.

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It’s not clear how this image fits into the story narratively. But thematically and visually, it links Megumi to the white butterflies, and simultaneously replaces domesticity with dread. Maternal peace suddenly becomes merely a continuation of Megumi’s monotonous terror. Megumi’s happy ending is her worst fear; she’s finally a mother, and so her self — which was never anything but her terror — fades to white. Instead of a strong female character, Umezu gives us woman as mother, which is also, in this vision, woman as void.

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 3): Verne, Villains, Vril

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“Professor,” the commander replied swiftly, “I’m not what you term a civilized man! I’ve severed all ties with society, for reasons that I alone have the right to appreciate. Therefore I obey none of its regulations, and I insist that you never invoke them in front of me!” — Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea

When it’s steam engine time, people steam engine. — Charles Fort

The Engineer as Superman

The nascent genre of science fiction found a hospitable place in the nineteenth century serial novel. Every day seemed to bring a new crop of technological wonders: the telegraph and telephone, photography, steam trains and steamships, electric generation and illumination, anaesthesia, vaccination, the internal combustion engine… The reading public was entranced by these tokens of progress, and was eager to see the new age fictionalised.

One author above all embodied this new scientific sense of wonder: the French novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905). His series Les Voyages Extraordinairescertainly lived up to its title, taking the reader Around the world in Eighty Days,Off on a Comet, From the Earth to the Moon, on a Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne remains as of 2012 the second most-translated fiction author in the world, after Agatha Christie.Verne is of interest to us, in this prehistory of the superhero, for two reasons.

First as the populariser of technological marvels, much imitated; a direct descent can be argued from Verne’s adventure tales, through dime-novel Edisonades and science-fiction pulps, to the first superhero comics. And, indeed, we’ll trace that descent in more detail in subsequent installments.

Second, as one more  writer who helped shape the popular figure of the superman. Captain Nemo is the villain/hero of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). He is the master of the Nautilus, a mighty submarine that defies the earthbound nations of the world and their navies, sinking warships at will:

“On the surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous laws, fight, devour each other, and indulge in all their earthly horrors. But thirty feet below the (sea’s) surface, their power ceases, their influence fades, and their dominion vanishes. Ah, monsieur, to live in the bosom of the sea! …. There I recognize no master! There I am free!”

This anarchist has, in effect, declared war on the entire world, reserving particular hatred for the British Empire. The reason for this is not given in Leagues, but in a subsequent sequel of sorts, The Mysterious Island (1874) we learn that Nemo is the Indian prince Dakkar of Bundelkund, whose family was wiped out by the British during the Great Mutiny. But the earlier book disdains such explicit explanation: Nemo strikes us as a superman sui generis, master of men and challenger of the elements.

 

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Nemo and crew fighting a giant squid

 

(Is there an indirect link between Captain Nemo and the aquatic superhero/villain Namor, the Sub-Mariner, who first appears in a 1939 comic book? Both are princes who rule the seas from under the waves, both wage war against the hated ‘surface men’ and sink their ships at will.  Creator -cartoonist Bill Everett (1917–1973) claimed his inspiration was Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and that he arrived at the name ‘Namor’ by spelling ‘Roman’ backwards. But surely there’s an echo of ‘Nemo’ in ‘Namor’, even if an unconscious one?)

A 1976 version of the squid fight; art by Gil Kane and Ralph Reese

Yet another of Verne’s scientific supermen was Robur, who ruled the air as Nemo ruled the sea, from his propellor-powered airship Albatross in the 1886 Robur the Conqueror.

Robur’s Albatross (left) defeating the balloon Go Ahead in a race; art by Leo Benett

 

Robur had turned decidedly villainous, with dreams of world domination, by the time of the sequel The Master of the World (1904); his successor to the Albatross is the even deadlier Terror, which can navigate the air, the land, or below the sea:

 

The Terror (L’epouvante)

 

This is the trope of the Ultimate Weapon, again familiar to superhero comics, generally in the hand of the villain. It is possible Verne was influenced by a derivative work to transform Robur from aeronautic pioneer to would-be world conqueror. This was Edward Douglas Fawcett‘s Hartmann the Anarchist, or the Doom of the Great City (1893), in which a Robur-like evildoer rains death and destruction down on a helpless London from his airship:

illustration for Hartmann the Anarchist.

With eyes riveted now to the massacre, I saw frantic women trodden down by men; huge clearings made by the shells and instantly filled up; house-fronts crushing horses and vehicles as they fell; fires bursting out on all sides, to devour what they listed, and terrified police struggling wildly and helplessly in the heart of the press.

A chilling premonition of the WWII blitz! It is well to remember that the end of the 19th century viewed anarchists with particular dread, and with good reason, much as we today fear terrorists.

Verne’s influence was enormous, inspiring a sub-genre of popular literature that the science-fiction critic John Clute has dubbed ‘Edisonade’, after  Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), the famed inventor of the phonograph, light bulb, motion picture, microphone, and hundreds of other marvellous devices. (Edison himself occasionally turned up in science fiction; he builds a gynoid robot in L’Eve Future, he battles extra-terrestrials in Edison’s Conquest of Mars.)  Edison is the real-life avatar of the mad scientist’s benevolent equivalent in fiction, whose epigones continue in modern superhero tales:  Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four, for instance.

The Steam Man of the Prairies

 

Typical of the genre is Edward Ellis‘ The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), in which the eponymous automaton (pictured above) drags around a crew of intrepid young adventurers to fight Indians and bandits in the old West. The series was hugely popular, and duly plagiarised. We can observe that the Steam Man’s descendants today number such superheroes as Robotman, Steel, Machine Man, Iron Man, or War Machine.

Let’s take note of other European contributions to 19th century popular culture that have echoed down to the present, contributing to the crowded attic of superhero tropes.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1930), in his 1871 novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race,  presents an ancient civilisation living in vast underground caverns. This “coming race”, the Vril-Ya, has mastered a sort of universal force known as Vril that gives them an array of powers, allowing them to fly, heal any wound or disease, animate mechanisms, or destroy an entire city with a thought. In short, the first literary evocation of super-powers with a pseudo-scientific rationale. In modern superhero comics, Silver Surfer and  Green Lantern are today’s most successful wielders of Vril-like energy.

The Vril-Ya live in an underground  utopia. (Underground races and civilisations are staples of superhero comics: see the Mole Man’s and the Deviants’ realms.) However, the human narrator fears that some day they will burst up onto the Earth’s surface and subjugate humanity:

Only, the more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances,–the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers.

The Vril-Ya, a race of superior post-humans, are also kin to science fiction’s Slans and comic books’ X-men: super mutants, to be feared. This novel, though largely unread today, made a sensational impact at the time; and its influence was  often sinister. Many thought the book was non-fiction. Occult Vril societies sprang up and continue to this day; the book had a decided influence on Nazi ideology. A race of supermen destined to rule the earth!

In 2007, writer Josh Dysart and artist Sal Velluto created the comic Captain Gravity and the Power of the Vril, whose eponymous superhero tapped Vril for his fantastic powers to fight the Nazis, themselves bent on acquiring the mystic energy.

art by Sal Velluto and Bob Almond

 

I prefer to dwell on a more wholesome influence: in 1886, John Lawson Johnston named his nourishing beef tea paste Bovril, combining the Latin bos (ox) with Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril. And the writer of these lines can indeed attest to this fine drink’s revivifying powers, particularly on winter days.

 

Early advertisement for Bovril

 

In 1886, the novella Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was published to universal acclaim. This tale of a kindly doctor who changes into an evil, twisted double on imbibing a potion has strongly influenced the modern superhero, with his or her double identities.

Art by Ron Wilson, John Romita, and Ernie Chua

More directly influenced superheroes include the Hulk, the Demon, Ghost Rider, Man-Wolf, the Badger, and  Rose and the Thorn; while supervillains of the type are numerous, such as Eclipso or the Lizard.  Stevenson’s penetrating allegory of humans’ multiple nature thus lives on in the garish jungle of pop culture.

In 1905,  Emmuska Orczy (1865 –1947 ) published The Scarlet Pimpernel;the  novel tells the adventures of Sir Percy Blakeney– a ridiculous fop of a British aristocrat, who leads a double life as the Scarlet Pimpernel, a dashing hero dedicated to rescuing aristocrats from the guillotine in the terror years of revolutionary France.

The Pimpernel was a sensation in print and on stage, and proved equally successful in the movies; so too did Orczy’s numerous sequels.

We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That demmed, elusive Pimpernel.

The Scarlet Pimpernel has a good claim on being the first full-fledged superhero; we shall return to his influence on such characters as Zorro and Batman.

Next:  Enter the Detective, and the anti-supermen of H.G.Wells