Quotations: Community Edition, Part 2

The only reason I slammed Jeff's head against the table was because I wanted to feel like an adult.
--Annie









I refused to give Santa a Cristmas list because I didn't want to depend on a man for anything. Now look at me. I'm betty Crocker. I'm Martha Stewart. I'm one of the Steppenwolf wives.
--Britta.

You guys, you create fun, and I destroy it. Of course a silly little joke ends with a dead body on the lawn, I should have known that, but I wanted to do it anyway, cause I wanted to be like you. I wanted to be funny. Knock knock! Who's there? Cancer. Oh, good, come on in. I thought it was Britta.
--Britta

I just yanked a little dude out of my friend.
--Britta









I have two boys, and when we have a serious discussion I find that a brownie helps them to relax. So...why do you hate me and Jesus?
--Shirley

Oh, look. Britta brought what she believes in. Nothing.
--Shirley


Don't you get it, Jeff? They're not evil people that are good at foosball. They're good at foosball because they're evil. It's an evil game that brings out the worst in us, like out of town weddings where the reception is in the same place as everybody's rooms.
                                                                                          --Shirley





Bonus Anthony Michael Hall quote from the first season Christmas Episode...

My life is a gym!

If this dude doesn't show up we're definitely going to Applebees, cause I'm getting into a fight today no matter what.
--Mike

Own Worst Enemy Tonight

I'll be out of town next week, so I doubt I'll post anything.

However, tonight at the Bishop (corner of 4th and Walnut in Bloomington), I'll be screening the film Own Worst Enemy. I wrote it with Mike Judd, who directed it with his wife Jessica. Everyone is welcome.

In the interest of keeping some Superman content, here's a story from the AV Club about one guy's identification with Superman. I might make reference to this in my book, if I ever get around to revising it for publication. By which I mean, if it ever gets accepted for publication, at which point I would get to work revising it immediately.

The AV Club story, by Todd VanDerWiff, is a lengthy story about his own experience with Superman comics, which didn't begin in earnest until he was in his 20's. He's trying to capture what makes Superman resonate with people, and he does a pretty good job. Here's how he concludes the article:

We’re all constantly walking forward through a life that keeps stripping everything we have from us and asking us if that’s all we’ve got. For every joy we have, we will have just as much despair, and for every good day, there will be a dozen bad.
But we’ve all been sent here for some reason. And maybe someday, we’ll figure out how to fly.

Like I said, pretty good stuff. He focuses on the inspiration component of Superman, and how that ties into the resonance of his situation. He gets at the idea that Superman lives beyond the media in which he appears, and his point is that this is why it happens. In essence, he's building up to the same points I try to make in my book. But where he uses his own personal experience and speculation/vague anecdotal evidence for his argument, I use fieldwork. That's not a criticism, by the way, it's just a different method. Good stuff.

Never Ending

Ahhh...the internet. Like the 24hour cable news network, the internet requires that the people there always have something to say. So people say things. They have to. Sometimes it's their job. Sometimes it's because there's a medium, which is a vacuum. And culture abhors a medium vacuum, so people fill it. They fill it with things like this...
  
Why There Will Never, Ever Be Another Great Superman Movie

This is labeled news, and I guess it qualifies if you're writing for E!. It's that weird thing on the internet where somebody writes an opinion in wildly overblown hyperbole. It should be on a comment forum for something, or on somebody's blog. But it's on E!. Which is weird. If you read the article, there's an argument there, and there may be some merit to it. What the writer, Joal Ryan, is saying is fairly simple: Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie was pretty fantastic, and because it was the product of its time, and because times have changed, there will never be another movie like it. The reason it was fantastic was because of the sincerity with which the character and superheroism was handled. We live in a more cynical time, where sincerity makes us uncomfortable. So we won't have another movie like this. Ever.

This quotation should sum up  his point nicely:
Above all, Superman is a confident, unburdened hero because Donner and his writers let him be. And Donner and his writers let him be because, all those years ago, they didn't have graphic-novel-prescribed psychoanalysis to answer to or sift through.

Today, the modern movie superhero is a wreck.

He (and it's still almost always a he) must be touched by a form of madness in order to get to the point where he dons a suit.

The Superman in Superman: The Movie, by comparison, just does it.

Here's the thing that's interesting to me. This is precisely the same thing that, more or less, happened to comics sixteen or seventeen years before Donner's Superman movie. The superheroes, following the example of Superman, were going along just fine in their straightforward, sincere, and uncynical adventures. Then came the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and most importantly, Spider-Man. They were complicated, and selfish, and flawed, and their psyches were there on the page to see. This is precisely the 'graphic-novel-prescribed psychoanalysis' that Ryan refers to, happening in 1962. Or at least that's the generally accepted story.

From Superman 61, by Bill Finger and Al Plastino

It's not true, of course. Batman, as soon as his origin was revealed, was a Freudian's dream. And when Superman's origin was revisited, so that for the first time the character became aware of Krypton's destruction and the death of everyone in the cosmos who was like him, he gets a host of psychological trouble for it. Both those origin revisions, by the way, were in the 1940's. Both were written by Bill Finger. If you want to see scans of the pages from all the major retellings of Superman's origins, check out the site Superman through the Ages. History is never quite as linear as people like to say it is. Trends are never smooth.

I may be criticizing the unabashed hyperbole of Ryan's article (which may just be a symptom of the internet culture), but there is something to it. What he's really saying is that the psychologically troubled superhero sells right now, so the people who are making big-budget movies will probably stick with that formula. But there's no real reason they have to. Sure, we live in an age suspicious of sincerity, but maybe that will change. Maybe there's a movie out there that can show us the folly of cynicism and remind us that there's value in pure heroism. Times change. Never say never.

 

Better than the Book: Wonder Boys

Michael Chabon is being hailed as a master of the literary form. He moves easily through genres, always keeping a decent style and relying on character and theme more than that pesky necessity called plot. Reading just the first few sentences of his novel about the comics industry, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, reveals his confidence and command of language. Of all his work that I have read, my favorite piece is his introduction to the reprint of D’Aullaire’s Norse Myths. It’s a great book all around, but Chabon’s intro gives an account of his personal relationship with mythology that just made me smile. His characterization of Loki as the god of the eight-year-old boy is simply genius, and I don’t doubt that it will show up in an academic piece I write sooner or later.

 

That being said, Wonder Boys just didn’t work for me as a book. I saw the movie first, and I loved every minute of it. I think a lot of it has to do with Michael Douglas, who simply dominates the movie without being overbearing. All the actors are great, even that guy who plays Vernon Hardapple, whose introduction is perhaps one of my favorite moments in cinematic storytelling (that means storytelling in a movie, not a movie as a story).

 

Steve Kloves gained some success writing adaptations for a little franchise you might have heard of called Harry Potter. In Wonder Boys, it seems like he realizes that sometimes, what you don’t see on the screen is as important as what you do see. Normally, phrase like that would be applied to horror films, where the director keeps the gore and monster off-screen until the end. Here, it applies to the wife. You never see the woman to whom the lead character is married, though Douglas tries to track her down, even going to her parents’ house. In the book, she and her whole family is there, and it leads to the characters partaking in a religious dinner that is frankly too long and not at all interesting. In the film, Kloves turns the scene into a brief but important conversation between Tripp and his wife’s father that is a turning point for Tripp’s character. It’s direct, concise, and important--qualities the novel does not muster for this scene. It’s Chabon’s largest excess in the book, and it was probably obvious that it had to go. Little changes in a similar vein make the film as a whole much more enjoyable, much more effective.

 

One other thing the film has over the book is its soundtrack. It’s as if the book didn’t even try here, while the movie used Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Van Morrison, and a bunch of other guys whose names I don’t know.

I will give Chabon credit, though. His handling of the tuba is inspired. In the film, it is revealed to be the possession of a transvestite whom Tripp’s literary agent meets on a plane to visit Tripp. In the book, the characters merely think it belongs to the transvestite. It doesn’t, and among the many crimes committed by the characters, tuba theft must be added. It stays with Tripp throughout, and is brought to the foreground at all the right moments. The film, on the other hand, uses it for a joke about trunkspace. A good joke, but the book does so much more with it.

I mention this to make clear that the book--as with most of the books I’ll be writing about--has merit. Wonder Boys is a good book. It’s just not as good as the movie.

The 1001 Nights

So I've been reading my way through the 1001 Nights. Or the Arabian Nights. Or the Thousand Nights and One Night. Depending on all sorts of things. I've got the three volume Penduin edition, and I love it. I tried to read Richard Burton's translation a while ago, and just couldn't get through it. Each story was one paragraph, which sometimes lasted over sixth pages. Bleagh.

The Penguin edition is great. Of the first 100 nights, 25 is the best. It's got this proto-Weekend at Bernie's quality that cracks me up.

Superman Is an Arab

Now this is interesting. A Lebanese writer, Joumana Haddad, has written a book called Superman Is an Arab: On God, Marriage, Macho Men, and Other Disastrous Inventions. There's an interview with her at Now Lebanon. I've never heard of this writer or her previous work, but I'll check out her new book when it comes out in September. Here are a couple of quotes from the interview:

I thought there was a need to tackle manhood, not only womanhood, because, as you might know I’m a third-wave feminist, which means I don’t believe in women’s solidarity; I believe in human solidarity. I believe in partnership between men and women, and if our suffering is going to change it won’t be by women alone.
And it hit me that in the Superman story I always preferred Clark Kent, because he’s real. And I think many of our leaders and religious representatives here in the Middle East think of themselves as invincible supermen.

And this: And God is a superman – that’s my first enemy, the monotheist God. That’s the first Superman we need to get rid of.

You can really see her point of view here.

I wrote about Susan Faludi and her book The Terror Dream a while back. I think the perspectives of these books might have a lot in common, with their view of the dangers of masculinity and the effects that idolizing it can have on a society. It'll be interesting to see how similar they are, and the reactions Haddad gets. It's tempting to offer some comments about her thoughts just on the interview, but it's wiser to wait until I can get my hands on the whole book.

Quotations: Community Edition

So, Community is one of my favorite tv shows. Here's a bunch of things the guys on it have said.



When I was young I discovered that if I kept talking long enough, I could convince people that anything I said was right. So either I'm god or truth is relative.
--Jeff.







Nothing is impossible here. Animals can talk. Your heart is shaped like a heart. And the smell of pie can make you float.
--Abed



















Energon doesn't grow on trees, Jeff. It's harvested by super bees in a buddhist meteor crater.
--Pierce














Sometimes I think I lost something really important to me and it turns out I already ate it.
--Troy

What are those underwear made of? They look luxurious.
--Troy

 Set phasers to 'love me.'
--Troy












Harrison Ford is irradiating our testicles with microwave satellite transmissions.
--Jeff





 Next time on "Quotations"...the women of Community.

Better than the Book: History of Violence

It’s a good idea for a story--a man who can’t escape his past.  That past, in this particular plot, which began as a comic book before being adapted by Josh Olson for David Cronenberg (Viggo Mortensen plays the man, Tom), is indeed one of violence.  And it comes back to haunt Tom after an act of defense (in the book--it’s heroism in the film) brings him national media attention.  People from his past show up, and his family is put in danger. 

I’ll be straightforward here:  The reason the movie is better than the book is that the book has no characters.  It has plot points in the shape of people.  They exhibit no real emotion, intensity, complexity, or pathos, and thus are completely unengaging.  Olson’s adaptation gives them this complexity, which thus makes the story more complex and interesting. 

I’ll give the most obvious example:  the scene where the wife confronts Tom about his past.  He’s been wounded defending himself and his family from gangsters, and they’re in the hospital.  In the book, his son’s there, too.  They say they want the truth from Tom, and he tells it to them.  We learn it in the form of an extended flashback, where we see that Tom does indeed have a history of violence, though he was a bit reluctant to engage in it.  That’s it.  Nobody reacts to the news that their husband or father is a killer. We just move on to the next scene.

In the film, it’s just husband and wife.  There’s almost no mention of what the incident was in the entire film, no flashback, no concern with specifics.  The fact that he killed for reasons other than self-defense is all that’s important, and that he doesn’t want to do it anymore.  If you were his wife, would that be enough for you?  In the confrontation scene, there’s anger, pain, and believable emotion.  Mortensen and Maria Bello do a fine job.  They play real humans, not plot points. 

In both book and film, Tom confronts and defeats his past.  He has made his future safe for his family.  Only the film has the guts to ask if that’s enough.  Can we transcend the choices we made?  Can we become a new and better person?  What are the consequences of twenty years of lies and twists of truth?  The book does not ask or answer these questions in any meaningful way.  It says that we solve violence by violence.  And then we go back home.  The film says that maybe we have to solve violence by violence, but that there are consequences, and there’s a bit of doubt about whether there will still be a home to return to when it’s all said and done.

I’m not sure what I think of History of Violence as a film.  It’s certainly better than the book, by a wide margin.  The book is interesting, but lacks the main qualities that make a story great.  The film has many of them, including a deft hand a creating suspense and tension, but I felt like there was something missing.  Not sure what it was though.  It may just be that the film moved Tom’s new home from Michigan to Indiana.  Not sure why that would bother me.

Harry Potter

My wife and I recently watched all of the Harry Potter movies. We'd both read the books when they came out. In the interest of having something to say about the issue, I thought I'd post the best line in all the films:

Oh, Harry...If you die down there you're welcome to share my toilet.

I'm sure you know the character who says this and what books it's from. That is all.

Ending things

I've been thinking about this Superman project a lot lately. I'm not reconsidering things I've written, or contemplating new chapter or anything like that. I'm thinking about how it's ending. I spent two and a half years working on it, from the spark of an idea in March of 2009 to the manuscript I submitted to a publisher in October 2011. That's really not all that long for an academic book. And I haven't looked at the manuscript, or thought much about it, since October.

Right now, the only thing that will get me working on it again is the promise of publication. My hope is that, one day soon, I get a letter from a certain university press telling me that they want to publish it, and they offer some suggestions on how to improve it. Then I'll start revising it. Or, in many months' time, another press will be interested in it. Should all that fail, I'll probably break it up and make it into separate articles to send to journals.

Regardless, that will be that. But what's got me thinking  now are two things: my subscriptions to Superman comics, and my Superman google alert. Every month, I purchase Superman and Action. Every day, I receive a list of links to websites that mention Superman. And I read them all. So far, in those nine months since I submitted my manuscript, I haven't encountered a single thing that I thought had to be included in my book.

So why do I still do it? I have no attachment to the stories in either Superman or Action. The interest I had when I learned that Grant Morrison would be writing a monthly title faded quickly when I saw Rags Morales' art, and the storyline has been less than I expected. Some people like it, I guess, but not me. And I have not one single good thing to say about the monthly Superman title.

As for the alerts...well, they've become nothing more than a daily list of where to find rumors and pictures of the new Man of Steel movie combined with a catalogue of which athletes have Superman as their nickname. It's not terribly interesting.

Yet I haven't stopped. What keeps me going back to these things? Three years now. Does that have something to do with it?

Movie Screening: Own Worst Enemy

So on Friday, July 13, I'll be screening Own Worst Enemy at the Bishop in Bloomington. 9 p.m. It's a time travel movie. I'll leave it up to you to figure out how someone with a time machine could become his or her own worst enemy.

creators' rights

I haven't weighed in on the issue of creators rights, and that's largely deliberate. In part, it's because I don't know what to say. I have all sorts of thoughts, but they don't lead to a particular conclusion. But, in the interest of saying something, here they are.

1. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster made much the same decision that a lot of people in their position would have made at the time. When faced with poverty and the prospect of their creation never seeing the light of day, they chose quick payment and the promise of future work.

2. The publishers did much the same thing--paid the going rate for work at the time.

3. Neither 1. nor 2. are relevant today.

4. Siegel and Shuster were subsequently treated poorly by the people who published their comics.

4.1 Except when they weren't, which was only sometimes.

4.2 Jerry Siegel sued the publisher. Then he promised not to sue anymore. Then he sued again.

5. It took massive amounts of pressure and the prospect of gaining millions of dollars to get the publisher to give Siegel and Shuster recognition.

6. Corporations aren't people. But there are people involved. Siegel and Shuster did the creative work on Superman. But a lot of other people did the editorial, printing, and distribution work. Nothing is done in a vacuum.

7. Superman today is quite different from Superman in 1938.

8. There have been lots of cases artists, especially those toward the end of their lives, having to deal with poverty while their creations make millions for corporations.

9. People should take care of each other.

10. Laws favor corporations because corporations have enough money to influence lawmakers.

11. The constitution separates church and state. It does not separate wall st. and the state.

12. Even when artists gain an amount of power, it's usually not enough to influence these things. Jim Lee, for example, cannot do anything about these concerns. I have no idea what things are like at Image, but they seem to be better.

13. People make their living by writing and drawing Superman stories today. Sure, they don't make a fraction of what the people who own the publisher make, but who are those people, anyway? It seems to me that there are very specific, named individuals on one side of this story. Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and their heirs. On the other side are...who? We hear things like DC Entertainment and Time/Warner. It would be nice to see some attention on who those names refer to? Who's getting rich off Superman today?

How did DC not exploit their association with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster? Why did they try to sweep them under the rug for so long? Why did it take so long to give them credit? It seems like they would want to parade the creators of Superman around and show them off, right? Make them the face of the company? But it was a different time, when conventions weren't what they are today.

I used to want to draw comics. I didn't want to be a professional writer until I was 18. At that point, I had no interest in writing comics. When an idea for a comic book came to me, six or seven years later, it was for a Hulk story. That is the only story I have ever come up with as an adult that involved corporately owned characters. It appeared fully formed in my head at a point in time when I had not read a comic book for about eight years. I wrote it down, tried to get it published, was rejected, and never really thought about it again. I wonder if it's any good. It was called "Where Do Lonely Hulks Go?" There were several pink bunnies in it.

Right now, I can't imagine ever writing for a company like Marvel or DC. I have no Superman stories, no Thor stories, no Spider-Man stories. When I write stories, they're about things that I make up, or about things I steal from history. That's so much more interesting. At least to me. Not, apparently, to anybody else. Except my four-year-old son. He'd be happy if I told him a new story every night, and several times each day, about things drawn entirely from my own brain. I tried this for about a year (just at night), and it was really hard.

All right, so I said there was no conclusion, but there is. People who create things should have control over them and the lion's share of profit. Sure, reality gets in the way, and if you want to make real money you have to be extremely lucky or have the backing of a major distributor. Or be Robert Kirkman. The laws are vague or change, or are determined by people who don't know much about the issue. I think it's obvious that the people who created Superman should be enormously wealthy, but creation involved a lot of people, over a lot of years. Another problem arises because we don't really know just how wealthy they should be.

Better than the Book: Fight Club

For a while, I read everything Chuck Palahniuk wrote.  He did some magazine articles, short stories, a travel book, and novels.  Then, all of a sudden, I was done with his stuff.  I realized that nothing he could write would ever be as interesting to me as the film Fight Club, not even the novel on which it was based.  What’s more, his other stuff was a whole lot less interesting.  Here’s the problem:  the twist.  Once a storyteller establishes that the twist is his thing, the audience expects it and it becomes nothing more than a gimmick. Maybe he's gone beyond this in more recent work, but I don't think I'm going to find out.

The trick to the twist is to make sure that the audience doesn’t even know it’s coming.  That there is a surprise should be a surprise.  Palahniuk, in the last books of his I read, seemed aware of this.  However, instead of tackling a new method, he decided that the best solution was to add surprises, smaller ones, coming earlier in the book.  More gimmicks. 

My distaste for his work culminated in his most recent.  I was given a copy of his book Rant, so I thought I might as well take a look at it.  The word awful does not even begin to describe the type of writer he is becoming.  Disgusting for disgusting’s sake.  Comics, especially in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight, seemed to become gritty because they thought this was realistic.  Palahniuk seems to be doing the same thing with vileness.

That said, I did like the novel Fight Club.  It has the following line:  “Before I met Tyler, I was going to buy a dog and name it Entourage.”  That cracks me up.  However, everything in the film version just works better. 

For example:  In the book the main character (who is often called Jack, but is in fact nameless in both book and film--played by Edward Norton) meets Tyler Durden on a beach.  Tyler is nude (for no particular reason), and is making a strange, hand-shaped sculpture using driftwood so he can sit in its center and be part of perfection or some sort of ridiculous, non-Tyler-Durdeny thing.  It just flat-out doesn’t work.  If you compare that to the way they meet in the film, placed next to each other on an airplane, the book just doesn't hold up.  I’ve had conversations with strangers on airplanes, but if I saw someone without any clothes on assembling driftwood into a sculpture and learned that they were doing so in order to be part of perfection, I’d run in the other direction.  Of course, if Tyler Durden were really the other half of my personality, I wouldn’t get very far.

The book takes some of the plot points and whatnot farther than the film does.  It appears that Marla, book version, really does have breast cancer.  And there’s some stuff about the narrator’s father.  But there’s not much of great value that’s not incorporated into the film.  And the book doesn’t have Meatloaf.

Again, it’s not a bad book at all.  It got me to read others that the author wrote.  Those others, however, went downhill.  Palahniuk has become a cult figure, and it’s easy to see why.  His style is imitable.  He writes as a minimalist, a form that’s easy on the surface to mimic but difficult to execute properly.  And the surprise twist, really, isn’t all that hard to accomplish. 

What the film does is makes you want to be part of the life its characters lead, then pulls the rug out from under you, exposing that life to be morally bankrupt.  That’s the real twist, one that the novel could not accomplish.  It fails to make Tyler Durden as cool as David Fincher, Andrew Kevin Walker (who did an uncredited rewrite on the script), Jim Uhls, and Brad Pitt make him.  It’s the audience’s initial wish to emulate Tyler that provides the real surprise.  Tyler’s a bit of a fascist--we shouldn’t want to be like him.  And his connection to the narrator is a gimmick that the movie’s “point” or “message” needs to work, but that it doesn’t need to succeed.  All this might be part of the novel, but if it’s there it’s too subtle even for me.  And I revel in subtlety.

Quotes

Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;

That’s all we shall know for truth

Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
--William Butler Yeats, “A Drinking Song”

To absent friends

Lost Loves

Old Gods
And the season of mists;
And may each and every one of us
Always give the devil his due.
--Neil Gaiman, Season of Mists

Love weakens as much as it strengthens, and often that’s very good for you.
--Harlan Ellison, Love Ain’t Nothing but Sex Misspelled

The mind is its own place,

            And in itself

Can make a heaven of hell,

            A hell of heaven.

--John Milton, Paradise Lost

He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing.

--Flannery O’Connor, “Everything that Rises Must Converge”

Superman by Larry Tye

I just finished Larry Tye's Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero. I've read this book before. It was called Our Hero: Superman on Earth, by Tom DeHaven. Or maybe it was called Men of Tomorrow, by Gerard Jones. I read parts of it in Garry Grossman's Superman: Serial to Cereal. Or is that Cereal to Serial. I read other parts in Bruce Scivally's book, and in Michael Hayde's book, and in dozens of articles and memoirs.

In short, there's nothing new here. Well, that's not entirely true. Tye has the advantage of being more recent than any of those others, so he had access to Jerry Siegel's unpublished memoir. And because he's more recent, he knows some more details of the legal battles over Superman. But I read all about those on the Internet already.

So, yeah, a lot of my indifference to Tye's book is that I've been consuming everything about Superman for more than three years. Everything. So I merely sighed as he described what Christopher Reeve ate while bulking up for the role, and I groaned when I realized he was going to describe the difficulties that George Reeves had when they tried to make him fly. The bragadoccio of Donenfeld? Don't need another rehash. How much GI's loved comics? Covered in other places. Wertham and the comics code? Enough already.

There was some promise, in the beginning. Tye says he conducted hundreds of interviews. Too bad these are not prominent. They maybe get half a dozen pages out of 400. Mostly, they're random paragraphs about how somebody really likes Superman. I wanted more. When a guy says that he learned about morality from Superman, what does he mean? You can't figure it out from Superman stories. You have to dig deeper in your interview. It would be easy to fall into the trap Wertham fell into, and just dismiss Superman and the genre as fascist and too devoted to using violence to solve problems. Isn't it important to point out that Superman fans actually feel the opposite? That hitting people is not the right way to do things?

Tye doesn't really have an argument. His main point seems to be that Superman is "America's most enduring hero." This is just plain wrong. 74 years isn't that long, even by American standards. What about Davy Crocket? Paul Bunyan? John Henry? George Washington? Abraham Lincoln? Crazy Horse? Daniel Boone? Teddy Roosevelt? Tarzan? Wyat Earp? Any cowboy, really. None of those guys have gone anywhere. And that one year of existence Superman has on Batman doesn't seem like much these days.

What Tye really accomplishes is the merger of the production history with the comic book history and, say, the religious interpretation among other things. Jones' Men of Tomorrow spliced into Scivally's Superman book with a dash of Stephen Skelton. In doing so, he gives them all the short shrift. But I suppose there's some value to that. Many people would want a more cursory look at the history.

All of this would be excusable if the prose were worthwhile. Alas, it's mediocre. The book's structure leaves a lot to be desired. I have no idea why chapter 9 is called "Back to the Future." And the history is facile. Saying that Smallville succeeded in part because 9/11 had just happened is not really an argument, and if it were it's not supported by anything. If Tye were interested in exploring what sort of hero people really desired in the wake of terrible tragedy, he would find a much more complex answer. He would find that the media provided one sort, and that some people desperately searched for another.

Anyway, as I said, much of my disappointment in this book stems from my own context. When you've read all this stuff, and quite recently, you just shake your head as it's presented one more time, in less depth than elsewhere. Maybe that's my real complaint about Tye's book: it's trying to get everything in there, and really the only part that's served well is the life of Jerry Siegel. But even that is more detailed in other sources. To that extent, I was shocked when I looked at his bibliography. It's pretty extensive, so the part that shocked me was that he'd read all these other books and still thought that his needed to be written.