Christopher Reeve

In his autobiography, Still Me, Christopher Reeve doesn't talk about Superman much. It's clear that Reeve liked the role, but didn't like what it did to his career. Following the success of the first movie, he deliberately sought roles that were in no way like Superman. As a result, he selected Somewhere in Time--a movie that evidently flopped on release but now has a very dedicated cult following. I remember seeing all sorts of memorabilia when I visited Mackinac Island, where it was shot.

On top of trying to distance himself from the role, Reeve seems genuinely unaware of how much those movies meant to people. He writes nothing about fans, about people accosting him on the street, etc. You'd think this would have been a major part of his life, but he spends more time describing the comedic stylings of Robin Williams than he spends discussing what Superman meant to people. He gives it one paragraph:

During my stay in Hollywood [for an appearance at the Academy awards; this is after his injury] I entered hotels and buildings through garages, kitchens, and service elevators, and met cooks, waiters, chambermaids, and maintenance crews. Many of them said they were praying for me. Others looked me right in the eye and said, "We love you, Superman. You're our hero." At first I couldn't believe they meant it. Then I realized that they were looking past the chair and honoring me for a role that obviously had real meaning for them. I didn't feel patronized in any way. Clearly a part I had played twenty years before was still valued. The fact that I was in a wheelchair, unable to move below my shoulders, and dependent on the support of others for almost every aspect of my daily life had not diminished the fact that I was--and always would be--their Superman.

Reeve writes about basing Clark Kent on Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, which is awfully obvious once you give it a second's thought. He writes about being the custodian for the character, and that he did his best with it. I wonder what he would think of current comics artist Gary Frank using his face for the comics version of the character in several of the titles now being published.

In all, he devotes about ten pages of 300 to Superman, which shows what his mindset was. For a man who endured a spinal injury that left him quadripeligic, one might think that he would use Superman as an image for the freedom of movement he longed for and could only experience in his dreams. Nope. He mentions his heroes: Charles Lindburg and Harry Houdini, who embodied this longing for freedom for him. The true recurring image is not flying but sailing. He finds it in his dreams every night, and it orders his existence to some extent.

That said, he does report some funny things about Superman:

In the first draft of Superman was a scene in which Superman sees a bald man walking down the street. Thinking it's Lex Luthor, he swoops down to collar him and take him away. But it's Telly Savalas, who says, "Who loves ya, baby?" to the startled Superman and offers him a lollipop.

Reeve is glad they got rid of that scene. And:

The less said about Superman IV the better.

Links

This is but one fan of Reeve Superman, discussing a movie book she found.

Then there's My Enduring Relationship with the Man of Steel, which is about a woman's fascination with Reeve's character. At first, her fantasy is to interview Reeve, as Lois Lane does on her balcony in the movie. After learning that Reeve wasn't really much of a Superman fan, but is everything she hoped he would be as a person, she reconsiders her fantasy:

...while there was always a part of me that wanted to be with a Superman, what became more prevalent was the part of me that wanted to be like him. After all, Superman has given us a role model with qualities that we mortals can emulate without having to bend steel with our bare hands – fortitude, integrity, honesty, humanity.

Random Stuff

The Elephant in the Room spends a livejournal post talking about things that don't make sense when it comes to Superman. His reasons: (1) He can't die, thus no tension (2) Kryptonite makes no sense (3) The costume is silly (4) He doesn't solve real world problems (5) the disguise as Clark Kent is flimsy at bst. The comments indicate that he's not alone.

There's an essay in The Man from Krypton (ed. Glenn Yeffeth) called "Six Things that Plain Don't Make Sense about Superman," published in 2005. That essay lists (1) The Pathetic Inferiority complex of the Kandorians, (2) The Frightening Destructive Potential of Superbaby (3) The Odd Construction of buildings in Metropolsi (4) The odd favoritism demonstrated by Jimmy Olson's signal watch (5) Street level thugs who honestly believe they stand a chance, and (6) The absence of any real world limitations to superhearing.

In other links, here's the solution to the mystery of Superman and the Cyclops.

This one's pretty interesting. It's about how Superman can be boiled down to the description: A police reporter affects the outcome of the crimes he covers, then writes about them, hiding his involvement. (from the same website: who should write superman)

I've seen the story of Superman boiled down to one theme on several occasions. Josepha Sherman distills it to either the moses story (baby set adrift, found and rasied, becomes hero) or the story of a hero learning his heritage--these both in her book Once Upon a Galaxy.

Then there's the discussion between Tim Callahan and Steven Withrow in Callahan's column When Worlds Collide. They go over superheroes as "archetypes". This bit by Callahan is interesting, in response to Withrow calling Batman "the dark knight detective" as if it sums up his character.

But doesn't Batman represent something more primal? The "dark knight detective" aspect is something that comes out of Batman's pulp roots perhaps, but isn't he more like "the god of problem solving"? And he mostly ends up solving the problems by punching them in the face, no matter how much his intellect, planning, or Bat-computer might help him get to that point.

Superman, in many ways the opposite, doesn't have any problems, except those which he manufactures for himself. He could correct any injustice almost instantly, and even the social problems writers saddled him with for years were mostly the result of his attempt to pretend at humanity. To pretend to have those very problems. Had this mythic character never adopted the guise of an awkward newspaper man, he wouldn't have had to trick Lois Lane all those times. And he wouldn't have had any of those dual-identity struggles. Batman punches problems in the face to become superhuman, while Superman creates problems for himself to become human.

Does that mean that it's not just Superman that was necessary to birth the superhero genre, but the duality between Superman and Batman?

Withrow doesn't agree with that last point: But I still think the Batman archetype is a reaction against the Superman archetype. Not simply because Superman came first, but because I believe the world view that underlies Superman is more fundamental to human nature than the world view underlying Batman. We are born with a yearning for Superman as our ideal and must learn (if we ever do) to accept Batman as our reality.

I'd like to draw the parallel here with a comment I quoted not long ago, made by Josh Walgenbach: Batman is a man trying to be a god. Superman is a god trying to be a man.

In the 1970's, writer Denny O'Neil produced a new take on Superman, one that was significantly less powerful and more connected to humanity. Here's a lengthy overview, with lots of scanned pages, of that run.

That about does it for now.

Another Origin

I need to keep this issue in mind. It's time to assemble all the versions of Superman's Origin. This one is Superman 53, from 1948. The site is a review, with a summary and some comparisons to the contemporary continuity. More to come.

George Reeves

George Reeves died, and the details of his death were immediately fashioned into legend. The newspaper headline read "Superman Kills Self," conflating the man with one of his roles. It was, of course, the role that defined his career, but he didn't necessarily want it to define his life. Nonetheless, to this day The Adventures of Superman has a devoted following, and the death of its star is still cause for speculation.



Part of the reason people still talk about it is the so-called "Superman Curse." Supposedly, if you're involved in the production of Superman television or movies, you're doomed. The Unexplained Mysteries (dot com) has a page devoted to the curse. The Superman Homepage offers a page of "common superman misconceptions" related to Superman, which includes sections on Reeves' death and on the curse. Lou Anders writes an article about it in The Man from Krypton: A Closer Look at Superman. The article is titled "A Word of Warning for Brandon Routh," and was written prior to Superman Returns. It's a curiously nonsensical article, which focuses far more on Keanu Reeves than one would think an essay on Superman should focus on a person who has never played Superman (his role in The Matrix notwithstanding). It does, however, have this little bit:



"...it can't be glossed over that it was this injury (to Christopher Reeve) which began the idle speculation that something supernatural existed called the Superman curse. Perhaps man isn't meant to reach too high, the thinking goes, and daring to take on the role of such a super man tempts the gods too much."



I'm tempted not to note here that Hugo Danner, protagonist of Gladiator and often-cited inspiration for Superman, died while tempting the "gods" by cursing them. He's struck by lightning.



Anyway, Greg Hatcher writes about George Reeves' death on Comic Book Resources.

Here's a page about George Reeves' ghost haunting the house where he died, which I don't think I'd encountered before.

The Straight Dope tackles the subject here.

There's a lot more to this. A book was written about it: Hollywood Kryptonite: The Lady, the Bulldog, and the Death of Superman. This book seems to have been the primary inspiration for Hollywoodland, a film that creates a fictional detective to investigate the case. The book pretty much goes for a murder verdict, the film concludes suicide. The book also goes over a lot of the rumors about Reeves.

There's so much more to this. The rumors persist. In her recent Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine, Valerie D'Orazio writes about her contemplation of suicide: "Oh, how was I going to do it? Window. Sixth floor. I think George Reeves died like that, no? Took LSD, thought he was really Superman? or was that an urban legend?"

I could link to websites all day, but this seems to cover the important facets.

Was Superman a Spy?

Brian Cronin writes a blog called "Comics Should Be Good" for the site Comic Book Resources. As a feature on this blog called Comic Book Legends Revealed, Cronin regularly explores "comic book legends" and 'reveals' them as either true or false. It's pretty good. And as one of those blog things that becomes a book, the feature was published by Plume last April under the title, "Was Superman a Spy? and other comic book Legends Revealed."

This reads like a history book, whose focus is less chronological than by topic. There's a section on DC, with chapters on Superman, Batman, and one on everybody else the company publishes. There's a section on Marvel, with chapters on the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, Captain America, X-Men, and also one on everybody else. Then there's a section on other companies, including a chapter on Disney and a chapter on everybody else.

A book on legends about comic book characters and history should be right up my alley. It's a quick read, and there's interesting stuff (65 legends directly from the blog, 65 new to the book are explored). However, it's not really about legends in the strictest sense. There are no legends told here. There's merely the revelation.

Let me explain, using the latest entry (from January 21) as an example. On the blog, each entry begins like this:

Comic Legend: The musical "It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman" was inspired by the success of the Batman TV series.

STATUS: I'm Going With False.

Then Follows the explanation of why Cronin has chosen true or false as the status. This has to do with the dates of the musical's Broadway opening followed by the original air date of the Batman series, both in 1966. Cronin reasons that Broadway lead time prohibits the show as an influence. That makes perfect sense. He also quotes some of the people involved in the musical to prove that they intended to play it straight, not camp it up like Batman.

All well and good. The book, however, usually neglects to print the legends, nor does it give Cronin's opinion as to the legend's truth or falsehood. So the entries are interesting, but quite often I have no idea what the legend he's revealing was. Some are obvious, some obscure, and some seem just like straightforward anecdotes about comics history, characters, and behind-the-scenes drama. It's not very satisfying on a that level, as I found myself often wondering what the legends were rather than being glad to know the truth at last.

On other levels, I was disappointed that there was no mention of the legend/rumor that George Reeves committed suicide because of all the children getting hurt pretending to fly as he did in The Adventures of Superman.

Also, one of the legends, put on the back cover, is that Wolverine was intended to be a real wolverine by Len Wein, his creator. The book confirms this, but Wein himself has said it's false. Cronin posted this on his blog, but this was after the book's printing, so the book reflects the mistake.

Still, there's some good information here. I'm not sure how I'll use the 30 or so pages on Superman (I can't imagine I'll get a lot of use out of the fact that Superman drawn by Jack Kirby had his face redrawn by somebody else), but I'm glad I have access to them.

September 11

There's a book called The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi. It's a book about what the American responses to 9/11 revealed about us as a nation. It's also largely about the myths we tell to get us through crisis. These myths aren't always healthy, as Faludi demonstrates with overwhelming evidence. It's fascinating.

A while back I posted some fan art of Superman grimmacing in pain because of his impotence in the face of the attacks on the world trade center. Here's some more.

It's called 'And Where the Hell Was Superman?' by Hardy Ecke. It seems to be on display in DC somewhere, but my information may be out of date.

Ecke explains the picture on his website: What causes me to fix the catastrophe in a painting is not that an attack on the civilized world is surrounded by unanswered questions, but insted that the saviour of the world became too tired to protect America from evil anymore....A Rambo and a McClane with all the other Hollywood comics cannot rescue the world because if they cannot reach victory with the brain they cannot succeed with the sword.

It's an interesting image, though I don't think it conveys the ideas (at least to me) that he wanted it to convey. I see in this painting an image of a symbol of heroism that is dated and tire, one that can no longer save us, which is evidently what he wanted to paint. But maybe my concept of Superman is different from his. Superman is different that Rambo and John McClane--both reference in his explanation. These guys are all muscle and tactics. Superman is violent, to be sure, but he stands for something more.

This is from Gregoy McNeill, writing on the Superman Homepage: Since then [9/11], our concept of what a hero is has changed. Living with the fear of future terrorist attacks and uncertainity has made us ask "Where's Superman?" The truth is he does exist. It's not the powers nor costume that defines Superman, it's the morals. Superman has evolved from the embodiment of America to what we as human beings can strive to become if we can constructively use our talents and potential in a positve light....All of us are superheroes when we take a stand against injustice. All it requires us to have is courage and faith. Superman is within us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we want to use it.

I think Superman as a moral exemplar is a more common conception than Superman as a brute. There's a therapeutic technique named for him, "What Would Superman Do?"; an English professor counsels the same thought exercise, There's Valerie D'Orazio's blog, Occasional Superheroine, where she titles a post, "Why Superman not Telling a Lie Had Such an Impact on My Life." She ends the post with the question, what would Superman do? (it's at the bottom of the page here). A Google search of "What would superman do" reveals over 5000 hits, though not all of those are immediately relevant, they're interesting.

And I return, as so often, to All Star Superman. A running theme is Brain Vs. Brawn, Luthor vs. Superman. In Issue 12, Morrison reverses it, when a weakened and dying Superman outsmarts Luthor and says, "Brain beats brawn every time," a line Luthor uttered several issues earlier (Issue 1, maybe). Of course, Superman is punching Luthor when he says it.

but back to Terror Dream...Faludi titles a chapter "The Return of Superman." This book would have been published about a year after the film Superman Returns. There's a lot to the book, about how 9/11 affected women in particular. The chapter relevant here is about how we had to search for heroes after the attacks. When none presented themselves in an obvious manner, we (meaning, largely, the media and government) had to invent them. We invented them in a mold that we had long held to be valuable and glorious, a mold cast on cowboys and superheroes. Into that mold stepped Bush and his cabinet, Giuliani, and others.

Also cast in that mold were the men on United 93. We sought evidence that the mold fit, and we found it in statements such as this one, spoken of Lou Nacke on Dateline: "When he was a little boy, he love Superman. And he'd actually had a cape on and went through a glass window pretending to be Superman." He also had a tattoo on his shoulder. So he must have been a hero.

I do not question Nacke's heroism. Nobody really knows what happened on that plane. When Congress tried to award medals to four of the men, whom the media had decided were the heroes who overthrew the highjackers, others protested. Eventually, all the passengers on the flight were given posthumous medals. Lots of other people, too.

Faluid writes that this search for heroes and the apotheosization of them reveals "a deep cultural unease beneath the hero worship." We were constantly looking for new heroes after attacks that "left us with little in the way of ongoing chronicle or ennobling narrative. So a narrative was created and populated with pasteboard protagonists whose exploits would exist almost entirely within the realm of American archetype and American fantasy. There was a danger to being honored with such manufactured laurels, particularly for the tragedy's survivors; for the fantasy to hold, citizens would have to stay in character, never mind that their roles were constrained and deforming, never mind that the command performance prevented them from expressing what they really had witnessed and suffered that day."

There's a danger in casting real people as imaginary characters. They can never deliver fully on the promise of the role. None of these people is Superman (neither, seven years later, was Obama), who would have saved the day. That's why the moral example is so much more important than the warrior. Faluid calls superhero stories the fantasies of adolescent boys, but that only refers to the power the character possesses. If the Superman who returned after 9/11 had been the embodiment of morality instead of the misguided muscle of the governmental reaction, things would have been different indeed.

Superman vs. Tarzan

So there's the Crash Test Dummies' Song:

Tarzan wasn't a ladies' man

He'd just come along and scoop 'em up under his arm

Like that, quick as a cat in the jungle

But Clark Kent, now there was a real gent

He would not be caught sittin' around in no

Junglescape, dumb as an ape doing nothing

[chorus]Superman never made any money

For saving the world from Solomon Grundy

And sometimes I despair the world will never see

Another man like him

Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job

Even though he could have smashed through any bank

In the United States, he had the strength, but he would not

Folks said his family were all dead

Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself

To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going

[chorus]

Tarzan was king of the jungle and Lord over all the apes

But he could hardly string together four words: "I Tarzan, You Jane."

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes

I'll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back

On man, join Tarzan in the forest

But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes

In dirty old phonebooths till his work was through

And nothing to do but go on home

And there's Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle.

That's not a whole lot to work with, I suppose. But there's something to be learned from the comparison between the two characters. Let's start with the obvious:

The began in the early twentieth century.

They're both orphans.

They're raised by adoptive parents.

They wear distinctive outfits.

They're far and away superior to everyone around them.

They rescue people.

I recently read Tarzan of the Apes, the first Tarzan novel that Burroughs wrote. I liked it a lot. I was surprised, since the other Burroughs books I've read have been disappointing. But in this book, he doesn't shy away from the difficulties of the character. And he makes Tarzan learning to read by himself pretty acceptable. He gives Tarzan a real moral dilemma at the end, and then resolves it in exactly the way you wouldn't expect a pulp novel from the '30's to resolve itself. I imagine that the rest of the novels in the Tarzan series have to undo Tarzan's decision to give up Jane and his title as Lord Greystoke, but reading that first one is quite a surprise.

I was also surprised by how superhuman Burroughs makes Tarzan. He's clearly past the potential of even the most physically capable human being. Burroughs acknowledges, though, that even Tarzan is no match for the strngth of the creatures of the African jungle. He has to outsmart them, and this even proves to be an important realization for Tarzan when Western Civilization finds him. He has to come to terms with his humanity.

Isn't that what Superman had to do as well? Is that what the show Smallville was all about for a while? (this is a sincerely asked question. I stopped watching a while ago because of my work schedule) But Superman isn't human. I return again and again to a characterization of the two most important comic book heroes, made by Josh Walgenbach during an interview I conducted with him last year. He said,

"Batman is a man trying to be a god. Superman is a god trying to be a man."

I come back to that again and again. It seems apt.

Sons of the Jungle

It's not so much a good comic as it is interesting. The overall point, possibly not intended by the writer Chuck Dixon, is that we have a destiny, so to speak. It may be written in our dna. It's certainly not a product of our environment. the story begins as in Burrough's first Tarzan novel, with a mutiny that would strand Tarzan's parents (Tarzan is already conceived at this point) on the coast of Africa, far from human settlement. In the novel, the baby is born and the parents subsequently die. The boy is raised by apes (on a side note, I was at first disappointed that Burroughs seemed to have no concept of actualy ape anatomy or behavior; then I realized that he had invented a new species--the apes that raise Tarzan are neither gorilla nor chimpanzee; he calls them anthropoids), etc...

In this comic--a joint effort by Dark Horse and DC--Superman's ship flies across the sky to crash just inside the tree line as Tarzan's mother prays for their salvation. The mutineers see it as a sign to spare the couple, and Tarzan grows up with back in England. He's morose and unhappy. Though he still exhibits the same superiority of physique and intellect that allowed him to survive in the jungle, he hates his life and begins exploring. He makes his way to the jungle where he finds happiness. He journeys with Jane and a reported from Metropolis named Lois Lane. They're on an expedition to find a lost roman colony. I can only imagine that this is a plot from one of the other Tarzan novels (Tarzan and the Lost Empire seems to be a prime candidate).

Superman, on the other hand, grows up among the apes. He's out of place, rejected by both the apes and the few humans he finds. He's confused about his Kryptonian heritage, thinking that all humans are Kryptonians. That's an easy mistake, I suppose.

Anyway, he meets up with Lois and Jane and Greystoke and Greystoke stays and Superman goes back to Metropolis. They each find where they're "supposed" to be.

Crash Test Dummies

This was a bit of a surprise. I hadn't realized that "Superman's Song" begins with most of the first verse about Tarzan, which is why I started thinking about it in the first place.

This song plays more on the "mythological" conceptions of the characters than on actual stories. That's what makes it interesting. Tarzan is the inarticulate brute who starred in the movies. Superman is lonely and unique, not one of several revenants of Krypton, which at the moment in the comics include an entire city that has been saved and placed on a planet near earth. maybe I'm just getting the "lonely" characterization from the tone of the song. It's a funeral dirge (which I thought even before i saw the video).

Note what the song opposes about the characters. Tarzan wasn't a ladies' man, but Kent (notably not Superman at this point) was a real gent. More than just rhyme scheme, this reveals a lot about the conception of the characters. It sets the civilized Kent against the jungle-dwelling Tarzan. However, in Burroughs' novel, Tarzan comments on the lack of civilization among all the humans he meets, thinking that they are no better than the apes and lions he's had to fight for most of his life. When given the chance, he reveals himself as more civilized than the highest levels of western society. And he can still kill lions with nothing more than a knife and a length of rope. He's the master of two worlds. Nonetheless, the inarticulate Tarzan dominates the popular imagination. The movies win out over the books every time. And yet those who adapt books into movies say that nothing they can do will alter the book one bit. Right.

The most interesting thing is that the song removes the "destiny" aspect from Superman. It makes his story all about the choices he makes. He chooses not to rob banks, not to turn his back on humanity. That's what makes the character great, and what is removed in the reading of the character as christ that permeates the current interpretations (stemming, I think from the 1978 movie).

In the end, the afterword to the comic series reveals Burroughs' distaste for Superman. He thinks its a silly character, and he would never put Tarzan in the city as editors asked him to do. But the characters aren't all that different. Tarzan is even once referred to as 'superman.' in the first novel (how in the world did I not write down that page number?).

Yep, I'm about out for today. Here's a picture by Frank Frazetta:

all star puzzle: is leo quintum really lex luthor?

I've got to keep these handy. It's the idea that the character Leo Quintum in All-Star Superman is actually Lex Luthor, who has come back from the future after having seen the error of his ways as a result of seeing the world as Superman does.



Not-The-BeastMaster posted this one last year. Also, this one.



From the Savage Critics. Also relevant are the comments, as it's the first place I've seen theorizing that Quintum is Luthor. Let's see if I can find another...here...and here...we'll throw this one in there, too, though the part on Superman's a bit down the page...and here...and this one is relevant...and so's this, more or less...

I hadn't even thought of this, and after examining the evidence...I have no comment to make either way.

Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine

Valerie D'Orazio began this book as a series of entries on a blog, called "Goodbye to Comics." She expanded and revised these to the book Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine, which is also the title of a blog she writes. The book is a memoir, so it's about her life, but it's also about superheroes, the comics industry, and sex--not just the kind of sex you have, but the kind that's part of your biology. The part that informs but doesn't define your gender, if that makes sense.




You might not get that from the cover, which features a perky young woman with bright red hair and a cape. It looks innocent. The story inside is anything but. This is about D'Orazio's life in all its difficulties. This makes it a hard book to review, since I'm the last person to know anything about the issues with which the author has had to contend throughout her life. It begins with a childhood of abuse by her bodybuilder father and moves through a series of rejections, sexual harassments, drug difficulties.






Scholars don't like to deal directly with such things. They're difficult topics, so most of us abstract the material to make it more comfortable. It would be easy to just write about the parts where D'Orazio discusses Superman and other superheroes and be done with it. But that would do the book a disservice. It's a good book, and deserves to be addressed on its own terms.






There may be more thorough accounts of the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of sexual harassment that occur in the work place, but I haven't read them. In this book, D'Orazio writes about what it was like to deal with harassment in all of its forms at DC Comics in New York, and it's horrific. I can't imagine it. I'm a man, and men's bodies don't display their sexuality in the way that women's bodies do--whether they want to or not. They have to try to hide it. I sympathize when D'Orazio writes about this, though I cannot empathize. I don't have the experience or the mindset. Men do these sorts of things to women every day--the staring, the offhand comments, the innuendo, the "innocent" requests for dinner, the denial of impropriety, and whatnot. The stress is immeasurable, since the harassment saturates every aspect of the woman's life and work. Is she really being passed up for a promotion because she's not good at her job, or is it because she won't agree to have dinner with the supervisor? No one should have to ask themselves that question. D'Orazio refers to it as unprofessional, when it's actually criminal.





There's a whole lot more to this story. That level of interaction with men follows her throughout her life. She doesn't flinch from describing it, nor from describing herself in less than flattering terms. She does things that, well, aren't so smart. She's the first to admit it, and she often uses a line from a Wonder Woman comic to drive home the point. She has a "fuckitup" button.





And this is where the story gets interesting for me as a scholar who's writing about the uses to which people put the stories that are important to them. She tells her tale, the story of her life, in terms of superheroes. Not merely comic books, either. She refers to Wonder Woman a lot, and Catwoman. D'Orazio has internalized these characters, as well as others such as Superman and Batman. There's a story of Phoenix, from Uncanny X-Men 207, that's also very important to her. Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine is the story of a woman's life as read through superheroes. In this, it is extremely valuable for me.

I wonder...how much of this--of the reading of her life in terms of comic book charactes--actually occurred at the time and how much of it is part of the process of writing the Memoirs?

If anyone wants to really demonstrate the power of literature in a person's life, all they need to do is point to this book. If one were cynical, one might also use it to demonstrate the negative impact of comics, but to do so would require a gross misreading of the book and the people who populate it--not to mention comics themselves. Comics aren't the problem, instead they provide D'Orazio with a way to understand herself and her troubles. And wow, she's got some troubles. Or had. There's a happy ending.




I've been following her blog, so that wasn't a surprise to me. What was a surprise is the "Second Self" that D'Orazio develops first as a defense mechanism against abuse but that later becomes her conscience, her shadow self, her failures, and ultimately, it seems, her salvation. She rejects the second self (she never refers to it as her secret identity or alter-ego, as one might have expected, and I think it's a wise choice; to do so would be to force us to read it as acomic book trope, which would reduce it in ways that I don't think are appropriate, especially considering how the book ends) at first, which seems to be a bad idea. But this is not a book about love, or self-love, or anything like that. It's more about acceptance: of her problems as things she can't ignore, of herself as a person who has troubles but can overcome them, of the imperfection of the world and the ability to change parts of it--including herself.






It's also about telling her story. She's told not to so often, and listens, that the few times she does tell it early on (about the abuse and harassment), it's basically too late. She needs to tell her whole story in order for it to be an effective strategy in her life, and that's what this book is (well, as much of the whole as anyone can ever tell).










Her blog has changed recently, reflecting that the phase of her life chronicled here is well past. It's more about archetypes, symbolism, and specific superheroes now than anything else. Still interesting, though, just like the book. But the picture from the cover of the book that used to be the masthead of the blog, that's gone.

Some links:

Archetypes

Here's an interesting discussion of superheroes as archetypes from comic book resources. It's evidently ongoing, so it's not over. It's part of the column When Worlds Collide. Here's a relevant passage:

Superman, in many ways the opposite, doesn't have any problems, except those which he manufactures for himself. He could correct any injustice almost instantly, and even the social problems writers saddled him with for years were mostly the result of his attempt to pretend at humanity. To pretend to have those very problems. Had this mythic character never adopted the guise of an awkward newspaper man, he wouldn't have had to trick Lois Lane all those times. And he wouldn't have had any of those dual-identity struggles. Batman punches problems in the face to become superhuman, while Superman creates problems for himself to become human.

The discussion suffers from a sketchy definition of the concept of the archetype, which is a sketchy concept in the first place that I don't think really benefits anybody. Also a sketchy grasp of comparative mythology. But still pretty good analysis of Superman and Batman and the Fantastic Four.

Original Graphic Novels

This is something that I might not normall discuss here: a retelling of Superman's origin--and presumably leading into a serialized adventures--in a longer, less frequent format than the monthly comic. I mention it because the discussion surrounding it is interesting. This one, by a Grumpy Old Fan, particularly. It goes into the history of Superman and the changes the character goes through. Fans know of the change and have accepted it as an aspect of Superman. It's perhaps one of the character's defining qualities--his mutability.

Bizarro

Here's the Huffington Post using Bizarro as a way to characterize how Washintong does business. Funny.

This sort of thing is really useful. I wish it were easy to record in conversation, but the easiest way to get it is in popular culture, news, etc. By "this sort of thing" I mean people using phrases, ideas, characters, etc., from Superman in other contexts. Such as the article: "Washington often seems like Superman's Bizarro World where "Us is opposite." They even link to the Wikipedia for Bizarro in case the reader can't figure it out from the context clues. Actually, it feels like the quote should be "Us do opposite." Doesn't it?

This is folk speech, and it shows the extent to which Superman has pervaded public life. We can say "faster than a speeding bullet," "Truth, justice, and the American Way," "Up, up, and away," It's a bird, it's a plane..." " kryptonite, and everybody will have an idea what we're talking about. Or pretty much everybody. Are there other phrases? Bizarro is one of them. Batman's got a few of those, too.

Superman Comes Out of the Phone Booth

This is funny. It's a video.

Literacy

This one's kind of old, but interesting. Comics were used in the army to help troops improve their literacy.

That'll do for now.

Comic Book Fanthropology

Sean Kleefeld recently published a book about comic book fans, and I thought it might be a good one for me to read for this project. It's a pretty good book, overall. He calls it Comic Book Fanthropology. He's serializing it over at the website, or you can plunk down a few bucks for a hardcover, paperback, or pdf over at Lulu.com. Kleefeld also keeps a pretty interesting blog.

The book's title throws me off a bit. Kleefeld isn't an anthropologist, nor does he reference anthropologists in his book. Theoretically speaking, his sources come from media studies (McLuhan and Jenkins) as well as social psychology (Tajfel and Turner) more than anything else. I suppose the title might just refer to anthropology as the study of people more than any particular methodology or theoretical stance. And people like puns in titles.

Kleefeld lays out what he's not doing early on: He's not writing a history of fandom, and he's not writing an academic book on fandom. His theory is used sparingly but well applied. Drawing on social psychology (Tajfel and Turner) he elucidates the fact that fandom exists as a social enterprise in part because people like to share their passions and in part because sharing those passions provides an environment where individuals can affirm their identities and boost their sense of self-esteem and -worth. This is all in the early chapters, which also include a brief history. Despite Kleefeld's wish not to write a history, what he does provide works well for him. It shows the origins of fandom as it arises from people getting together to share their passion. First through correspondence and then in person.

In my opinion, the book breaks down in the last few chapters. The chapter I most looked forward to was on participatory culture. Throughout this book, Kleefeld makes the point that fans engage with comics in more ways than merely reading--more than discussing them with friends as well. While Kleefeld lists these ways (including fan music, fiction, costuming, etc) he provides virtually no examples. There's a photo of a man in a Flash suit, but that's about it. Considering that Kleefeld has apparently read Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers (he cites and quotes Jenkins), this oversight is perplexing.

Perhaps my own perspective will tell you a bit more about why I find this chapter disappointing. I'm a folklorist by training. More than any other discipline, folklore brings to the foreground the texts that are relevant to the discussion. It's not unusual for folklorists to tell whole stories during academic talk, presentations, and lectures. Folklore books include multiple versions of any text being studied. If you want to see an examploe, check out one of the more widely known folklore books, Jan Brunvand's The Vanishing Hitchhiker. This is a classic example of how folklorists work. There are probably ten versions of each urban legend studied in that book. Some people think it's repetitive, and it is, but it's supposed to be. The versions aren't all the same, so you get to see how different people tell the same story. Sometimes, those differences are revealing, sometimes they're curious, and sometimes merely amusing.

Back to participatory culture. Let's look at two examples: fiction and costuming. It's not merely that fans write their own stories about characters they love; it's what's in the stories that's important. Jenkins devotes two chapters to fan fiction, and retells a great many of the stories (and story types) that show up. He's dealing with Star Trek, mostly (which would be important to comics fans). He concludes, in the chapter "Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk," that the women who write these slash stories are doing so because it enables them to imagine the sorts of relationships they would like to see portrayed on screen. These are women writing about characters in shows produced with a male audience in mind. Often these women don't have much choice in what's on the television, so they make the shows into something that suits them. These factors are important, and I would have liked to see Kleefeld at least explore the fiction surrounding one character.

As for costuming, again, Kleefeld leaves a lot unsaid. I have conducted two short interviews with costumers, and it doesn't seem to me to be all that hard to get information with which to analyze the phenomenon. People want to talk about this stuff. One woman I interviewed talked about the clash between fans who make their own costumes and those who buy them at the store. She said she doesn't enter costume contests because the emphasis is often on who is the most attractive woman rather than on who has the best costume. She talked about the process of making a costume, substituting one piece for another in the same costume as she makes it, always approaching the "perfect" costume but never quite reaching it. All this and much more from 45 minutes. Sometimes just pointing out the controversies is enough.

This is the fieldwork process, which anthropologists as well as folklorists and other employ to get the data for their analysis. It's what I expected. It is not, however, what Kleefeld promised at any time, except perhaps in his title.

I may be being a bit harsh here. The early chapters of the book are quite good. The discussion of cultural capital is rewarding and thorough. He gives a description of the ritual of buying comic books that I find absolutely wonderful and will quote in my book about Superman. His reading is that this process, engaged in repeatedly and recurrently, provides the comfort and stability that we can also find in rituals. It's more than just habit. I also appreciate his qualification on the definition of being a fan. It's not merely something you identify yourself as; another fan must also identify you as one. This fits both Kleefeld's themes of self-esteem and sociality. Is sociality a word?

Other strong points include Kleefeld's acknowledgment of the diversity of fandom, and his bibliography. This last one may not sound like much, but to me it is. He's found some sources I'll be checking out soon, and for me this is a very good thing indeed. I know it may seem strange, but I also appreciate the index.

He gives a lot of time and space to what it means to be a fan. I just wish he's given more to showing what the fans mean when they express themselves. The book is, overall, a little too abstracted from actual fans--too many hypothetical examples, despite the fan profiles that punctuate each chapter.

I'm a fan of the case study. Kleefeld might have really driven home his points if he'd done one or two of these. Followed fans through the process of buying and reading comics to the participatory culture that follows. He gets closest when quoting and discussing fan "origin" stories. These are great. I wanted more. I wanted Kleefeld to point out how each fan describes entering the world of comics with someone. It's always a social process. This is his main point, I think.

Kleefeld cannot be faulted for not writing the book I wanted him to write. There are some omissions that could be rectified in a revised edition. The strucutre is there, and it's a good one.

Wow, that got really long.

Comics don't sell well

Normally, this isn't a site for my opinions about Superman or comics, but recently I've been thinking about the decline of the comics busines. It's a poor shadow of its once mighty self. There was a time when pretty much everybody of a certain age read comics. Sure, there wasn't much in terms of entertainment competition: little tv, no video games, etc. But that's not the whole story.

Recently, I've been flipping through The Golden Age of Superman: The Greatest Covers of Action Comics from the '30s to the '50s. It's pretty interesting to see just how exciting those old covers were. The covers that don't feature Superman are outstanding. Here's one:

But the ones that do feature him...those are some stories I want to read. Behold:

In case those words aren't coming through in the image. Superman is demanding more hamburgers. Why? Why must he eat so much to survive? Will the Earth have enough food? I want to know.

Compare that to one of the more recent covers. Let's look at Superman: Secret Origin.

Yep, that's some people standing there. If you're Grant Wood, maybe you can pull that off. Gary Frank, however.... Then there's this one, for Issue 3:

Now, you may have missed it, but there's actually something exciting going on in this image. Lois Lane is chewing on a pen.

Compare:

Not only does this issue feature the star power of Pat Boone, but Superman must stop a song from becoming a hit. Why? How? I must know.

That's what a cover should do--compel you to open the book. Demand your attention and make you want to know more. Do those Secret Origin covers accomplish that? Not even close. I wish this were an isolated thing, but it's not. My favorite comic when I was a kid was Thor. Every issue of the recent Thor series has a cover of Thor swinging his hammer. That's about it. Why would I ever want to buy those?

Untold Tales

Thanks to the internet, it's possible to acquire and read scripts for films that will never be shot, plots for novels that will never be written, and ideas for comics that will never be drawn. This is both good and bad, I suppose.



For one thing, it's often funny, as we have seen with the recent revelation of the Nick Cage/Tim Burton Superman Lives movie that never was.



For another, it's often tragic, as with the Superman 2000 proposal by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer. This Superman, by these writers, would likely have been magnificent. Alas, we'll never know if they could have pulled it off together. Actually, we have clues, as all of these writers have worked with Superman since then. Waid's Birthright was powerful. Millar's Red Son is one of the best-selling superman collections to this day (and one that every comic shop owner has pointed to as a constant favorite of customers), and Morrison's All Star Superman has been called "perfect" by a great many writers and reviewers.



So Superman 2000 didn't happen, but you can read about it. And lots of people like to write about it.

And I'm sure some people have incorporated this into their own idea of who Superman is, the residual image formed from all of their exposure to stories about him.

And I thought Nick Cage was unusual...

Ok, so this brief exchange on the Baby Backpack part of Yahoo Answers includes statements by two people that they're naming their babies after Superman in some way. Clark. Kal Alexander.

I had no idea.


Sports
Here's a story about clutch-hitting in baseball, which concludes with the odd comment that a hitter notorious for not being good under pressure wears a superman t-shirt under his uniform every game.



Also, Florida Gators' Tim Tebow Is Actually Human and Not Superman, reads the headline for a column in the Bleacher Report.


A Different Opinion
Then there's this cynical assessment of Superman, made in 1988 upon the 50th anniversary of the character. It's by Gary Groth, and that name alone will dictate how a great many people would respond to the essay. It's notable for its glossing over of mythology in general and Greek Mythology in particular, especially in its assessment of what it would take to be a successor to those myths. Here's a summation: My only interest in Superman, marginal at that, stems from his continuing presence as a symbol of banality and infantilism in the history of the American comic book.


Museum
I should start keeping track of all the superhero museum exhibits that crop up these days. Here's one.


Fiction, and Costumes Then there's this...story? Anecdote? Joke? I'm not sure what to call it. It's obviously fictional--what with the superpowers and whatnot, but it's hard to tell what the genre is. It's from Haaretz.com, Israeli news in English, but it's about a Palestinian Superman meeting a fellow countryman in a bar over whiskey. There's a reference to the drunk superman joke in it.



in the related category of people dressing up like superman for various reasons, this guy is doing so and walking thousands of miles to raise money for homeless veterans. Apparently, from the newsstory, dressing like Superman and running down the highway is something that makes people call the police.



And speaking of dressing up, this Halloween was the first during which I've seen Superman costumes with a six-pack built into them. The Philadelphia Inquirer did a story on this. It's not just Superman. It's Superman with over-the-top muscles and a cinched waist. It's not just Superman, either. I think it was Susan Bordeau who wrote a famous article a while back about the male body becoming as objectified as the female body. That trend isn't going away.



Now this is comedy. A boy pretends to be Superman, climbs to a barn roof. And..."The goat did not survive the experience." It's a column from the Clarksville Online, the voice of Clarksville, Tennessee, by Sue Freeman Culverhouse.

Another Origin

In the early 70's, there was yet another retelling of the origin. This one by Carmine Infantino and Curt Swan...The Bronze Age of Blogs kindly posts the whole thing.

Project Progress

I suppose I should provide some sort of update, in case anyone's paying attention. Despite few recent posts, I've been working hard at this project. I traveled to Boise, Idaho, this past weekend to deliver a conference paper based on a chapter, called The Apotheosis of Our Former Selves. It was about Superman and nostalgia and the need for adults to incorporate some sort of playing in their jobs. Good times.

This was part of a panel on mythology at the American Folklore Society meeting. There's some talk of turning the papers from the panel (three or four, depending on what we decide) into an issue of a journal, sort of like a collection of articles. There's a journal interested. We'll see. It was a good panel, and Boise was pretty cool.

About ten days from now, I'm going to deliver another conference paper. This time, it's about the Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Illinois, and the dedication of Jerry Siegel's old house in Cleveland. This will be part of the Hoosier Folklore Conference, in Nashville, Indiana. The paper's called "When Imaginary Places Become Real."

I'm working on revisions of an article to submit to the journal Western Folklore, whose editor has been more than helpful. And I spent half an hour talking to a book publisher on Friday of last week.

But there's still a long way to go. I've got a good sense of the entire book, and an outline, and a lot of research....still, I figure it'll be a year before I've got a manuscript done and ready to show to anyone. That seems sooooo far away.

Short one

Just needed to keep this link handy. it's a review of All Star Superman that calls it the greatest Superman story.

More about the Secret Origin

Just a couple of links. The first is to the Superman Homepage, which has reviews of pretty much every Superman comic for the last ten years (and more). In this one, there are a bunch of review for Secret Origin 1.

Then there's a discussion of the same series over at Blue Tights Network. Mixed reviews, but most people seem excited about the series.

So why, you may wonder, so many links to reviews of this particular comic book? I'm interested because this project is mostly about Superman as a myth. Myths, unlike much of literature, usually don't have an established, authoritative text. Even the Bible (in English) has lots of versions, each with agendas that influence the translation. And, for example, the four books of the gospels actually contradict each other every so often. Greek myth is harder to pin down, since there's no text. You've got Hesiod and Homer, but those present problems. Later writers were just writing down what they'd heard, or paraphrasing other writers. And these often contradict each other as well. It gets even more compex with a living mythological tradition. So what happens is that everybody has to decide for themselves what's canon and what's not. The church may try, but with all of the different sects out there, there's something for everybody. And you can always try the church down the road if you don't agree with the interpretation being offered in yours.

With Superman, there's the added element of continuity. He's been constantly in publication since 1938, with stories in every medium. And writers try to make the story interesting in every medium, so they add or eliminate elements. Then there's editorial fiat, or stories introduced to boost sagging sales or garner higher ratings. And every so often, something like Crisis on Infinite Earths or Infinite Crisis happens, so the entire history of the character is wiped away, to be written anew. Then, there are things such as Imaginary Stories, which aren't real.

Right.

What we've got are competing versions of a story. The reviews and discussions are largely about how well the latest version works, which means that the readers evaluate it in terms of the expectations of the myth of Superman. Each person has a preconception of that story, which by virtue of their own identity, will emphasize, highlight, obscure, or outright eliminate motifs of the story as they see fit. Sometimes this isn't even conscious. Some people will imagine a Superman who is absolutely perfect, in morality, in physique, in action and in intent. Others will humanize Superman, giving him physical flaws or moral grey areas.

This includes the writers and editors. One of the Superman homepage reviewers postulates that the writers of comics today are particularly interested in the comics of their youth, so much so that they will force the comics they are working on to fit into the same mold, whether or not the story is progressing that way. They will alter characterization, add in nonsensical plot elements, etc, just so the comic feels like the comics of their youth. I don't know the extent to which this is true of Secret Origins, if it is at all, but I have certainly read comics that feel that way.

Nonetheless, readers are free to pick their version. There's a continuity to DC comics that runs throughout a great many titles. but there are elseworlds. There are Superman Adventures (well, not right now, but there used to be) that were outside the continuity driven titles. There's smallville, and cartoons, and other stories. Superman's also kind of like the weather. If you don't like it, wait a while. It'll change. Not much, of course, but it'll change. The last time it changed was Birthright, by Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu. That was way back in 2004.

This variability is one quality that makes a story mythic. I'm not talking about the variability of a single film adaptation of a movie, or even two or three. I'm talking about the fact that there is no fixed text. People can point to an official Moby Dick or Lord of the Rings. They can't point to an official Superman. Would it be this current Secret Origin? Yeah, if you read the comics and adhere to the continuity. For the next five years or so, until they do it all over again because of a universe-shattering battle. But it's not THE Superman if you're only a fan of Smallville, or of George Reeves, or Christopher Reeve, or the Silver Age, or don't read the movies or watch the shows or read the comics but still know about Superman because everybody does. (Seriously, everybody does. Even people with no real access to American media.)

The point of all this is that there is no fixed text. There is no fixed Superman. The nature of the character's existence is to reflect the world because it's a constant product of that world. Sometimes we're awash in nostalgia. Sometimes we need our heroes to be vulnerable. Sometimes we need them to be perfect. And sometimes we need them to have a mullet.

Too Perfect

The notion that Superman is just too good to be interesting is one that pops up quite often. Here's one statement, from Miss Cellania:

While Superman is, well, super, he was always too perfect, and rather one-dimensional.

There's Henry Jenkins, from a while ago.


And, because we're still trying to figure out how to make Supermen...Science!

Another review of Secret Origin 1, by Rokk. The discussion is interesing, particularly for this line:

it isn't like DC's continuity or present-day comics for that matter warrant religious following; you pick and choose what you like, sadly

This list is an intersesting one. Not so much for the content--it's really just a list of Superman comics that the writer likes. It's how it's framed that I find worth noting. 10 Essential Superman comics to help you forget Smalliville. As with any sacred narrative worth caring about, there has to be dissention among the ranks. I think this is worth exploring.

I'm going to have to find this one. What if Superman were raised by apes?

I have to post this. In Italy, a Man Dressed like Superman is arrested for stalking Burlesconi.

Following Links

So I was looking at pictures of the Siegel house in Cleveland (Glenville, to be specific). I came across a few interesting things.

There's evidently yet another documentary about Superman, called Last Son. This one delves into the truth behind the creation of the character. If I'm reading correctly, it's more about the death of Siegel's father than anything else. Looks interesting. Not quite sure how to get my hands on it, though.

Marc Tyler Nobleman, creator of Boys of Steel (a comic book biography about Siegel and Shuster) wrote this little post about the current popularity of Superman's creators. The Last Son guy throws his two cents in.


In an unrelated link, there's this essay on the impact of John Byrne's 1986 variation of the Superman story at newsarama, by tomothy Callahan. He says the legacy of Byrne's changes is the humanization of Superman, and the cumulative stories--continuity, in other words, and character issues instead of just fights.




Here's a lesson plan on how to teach heroism and mythology to middle-schoolers.

Links, and a new origin

Recently, DC began publishing a new origin for Superman, called Superman: Secret Origin. A bunch of people have stuff to say about this.

Here's a good one, by Rikdad. It begins thus:

The artist takes a pencil and traces an oval where the face will be. Rather than touching the pencil to the paper and drawing it in one solid curve, the oval is composed of many shorter arcs, parallel, intersecting, concentric. Each one nudges the outline from where the previous faint lines had begun, adjusting them, repositioning the curve, correcting it. The pencil is flipped and the eraser rubs some graphite off the page; a sleeve wipes the rubber and dust away, and then the pencil goes back to work. At some point, a mannequin-like shape is there, and then a face is drawn inside, outside, and over it, without ever erasing the original imperfect outline. Eventually it will have life. Eventually it will be a face. Little strokes keep touching it up, making it better, or at least different.

Superman is a work in progress.

Which is good. An apt analogy for the process by which Superman has survived. But it concludes in an even better fashion:

Superman is the Great American Hero, and America is a country that was saved by a quirky Constitutional fiat called the Great Compromise. If Superman was being torn apart in a creative tug of war, Geoff Johns has refused to pick sides. He's come down hard on the side of not favoring sides. Ultimately, the kind of tail fins the rocket has don't matter so much as the adoption of a version of Superman that reminds a plurality of fans of Superman. What could be more pleasing to Superman than to have everybody win?

Good stuff.

I'm planning a thorough analysis of Grant Morrison's All Star Superman series. Here's someone who likes it a whole lot.

Here's some more about Secret Origin.

And more still, from Newsarama.

One more time, from Comic Book Jones.

The consensus about this Secret Origin seems to be that it's completely unnecessary, but that it's pretty good.

Completely unrelated, but still useful: the kids parade in Grand Island.

Which reminds me...Halloween's coming up. There will no doubt be kids dressed up like Superman. Time to do more fieldwork.

There's something more to be said about the "science" behind Superman's powers.

Thoughts upon Completing the Space Odyssey Series

2001 may well be the masterpiece it proclaims itself to be. I was amazed by the descriptions that made me feel as if something was actually happening, page after page of ecology and climate during which no human acted nor any change took place felt as if it were vitally important.

The mystery unfolded into greater clarity than the movie would allow. Kubrick told the end in images, but Clarke laid it all out for us through the perspective of David Bowman. In this, the film may qualify as a myth while the book would be literature, if we define myth as that genre of narrative that comes closest to music because it requires a great deal of intellectual investment on the part of its audience. We all come out of music, as we all come out of myth, with our own interpretation based upon our own mood and history. While this is certainly true of all narrative, the mode of myth is particularly good at it. So while Clarke's description of Bowman's journey through the Monolith is fascinating and compelling, it is also clearly delineated. Bowman doesn't reveal much about those who created the monoliths, but we know all that he knows.

Which is not true of the film.

2010 is pretty good, too. There's stuff going on. 2061, however, was a huge disappointment. The mystery is never resolved to any interesting point, and the compelling component of the series is barely present. 3001 does little to advance it, preferring the plot to the idea. The ideas come in the form of futurity; of world-building and speculation. That's not why I read that book, and even though some reviews I dug up prepared me for a lack of answers, I was still annoyed. The interesting aspects of the story were perpetually deferred. There was little compelling in terms of character, though that is true of the series as a whole, aside, perhaps, for HAL.

Interestingly, Clarke revisits the same passages throughout. His chapter of 3001 called "The Firstborn" occurs in all four books, if I'm not mistaken. And while he proclaims that these repetitions are heavily edited, I'm not willing to check that statement. We revisit the firstborn, the depths of Europa, and the atmosphere of Jupiter, and a dying Astronaut's final words.

I began this series, as you may recall, as part of a study of science fiction versions of the "uplifting" of humanity by aliens. I'm fascinated by the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and tampered with people to make us somehow better, according to their standards. 3001 is the first book in this series that postulates a negative connotation to this idea. The aliens may not be entirely benevolent. They may lack a certain emotion, which might cause them to exterminate us because they don't like the way we've developed. The ideas are put forward, but never really explored. Towers stretching to the stratosphere, on the other hand, are described in great detail. But I wasn't the least bit interested in the towers.

That might have been to do with my own agenda, reading more for the aliens than for the vison of the future; but I doubt I am alone in this. And so, when the epilogue comes round, short and sweet ("'Their little universe is very young, and its god is still a child. but it is too soon to judge them; when We return in the Last Days, We will consider what should be saved.'"), I was more interested than in the 246 pages that preceded it.

What an evocation. It rivals and perhaps betters "My God, it's full of stars" from from the film. Note that it's a quotation. Something is saying that to something else.

We're given few clues. 3001 brings religious themes into the foreground far more prominently than the others. For the first time, the monoliths--especially the first one, from the African hominid chapters of 2001--are cast in a religious light: "This was where--in time and space--the human species had really begun. And this Monolith was the very first of all its multitudinous gods" (56).

There's a character, Theodore Kahn, whose sole purpose is to inject religion into discussions. And then there's Frank Poole's conversation with David Bowman, where Bowman says that "twice I have--glimpsed--powers...entities--far superior to the Monoliths, and perhaps even their makers. We may both have less freedom than we imagine" (233) .

It's not specifically a religious statement, but when freedom--or free will, as Poole formulates it--comes up, religion can't be far behind. Clarke has some interesting thoughts on religion in the future, which has all but vanished in the wake of the curing of mental illness.

So the effort to push humanity to sapience (or Mind, as Clarke first puts it) might be misguided in the end. But humanity fights against extinction. Everything seemed so optimistic in the first novels. By 3001, the violence of the twentieth century becomes the instrument of humanity's potential destruction. In the novel's timeframe, people have moved past such violence, but the length of time it takes messages to travel through space renders irrelevant the advancements of the third millennium. Clarke's message is clear: We can overcome our current insanity, but it might already be too late.

Not a good business model.

My e-mail is awash with reports that there will be no Superman movie in the near future.

This, evidently, is news. Something not happening. Is news.

Everyday, I get messages that there is no plan for a live-action, feature-length, theatrical-release of a Superman movie. There are so many of these reports that I won't even bother linking to any of them.

Why is this important?

Well, according to one poll, Superman is the one comic book film that people want to see.

And the reason there's no Superman film in the works? I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the legal stuff going on.

Science and Superman

In the world of comic books, the greatest villain is Frederic Wertham. His 1953 book Seduction of the Innocent crystallized the public opinion against comics, giving a voice to the distaste that obtained in many minds throughout the United States. It led directly to the Comics Code Authority, a self-censorship board that comics publishers created in order to pre-empt governmental involvement. Wertham objected vehemently to Superman, whom Wertham labeled a fascist who encouraged children to distrust authority (especially their parents) and to engage in vigilante justice. Embedded among these critiques was a subtler one: that Superman taught children incorrect lessons about physics: “Superman not only defies the laws of gravity, which his great strength makes conceivable; in addition he gives children a completely wrong idea of other basic physical laws. Not even Superman, for example, should be able to lift up a building while not standing on the ground, or to stop an airplane in mid-air while flying himself” (34).



Well, this article, The Science of Superman, goes to some length to prove that the science of Superman simply doesn't make sense--which, I suppose, none of us needed evidence of in the first place. Still, it's an interesting thought exercise. It comes from a book called The Science of Superheroes, by Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg. I wonder if they tackle the perennial question, Would Wonder Woman's lariat really make me tell the truth?



This sort of thing--wondering about the possibilities behind Superman and other science fiction stories--is, evidently, a popular pastime among writers. Maybe among readers, too. There was a National Geographic channel special on the subject, as well as a book called The Science of Superman by Mark Wolverton. Here's an article from the USA Today about it. Predictably, a lot of this stuff came out around the time of the last Superman film, in 2006. Brief comparison: Where Gresh and Weinberg try to point out why Superman's powers simply cannot work, Woverton tries to come up with ways in which they could.



I spent a bit of time studying film, and I wonder if any film scholars have looked at it from the angle of cultural/economic focus point. This is more than trendiness, I think, though there is a bit of that going on. When a film comes out, lots of other aspects of the culture industry get behind it. Books appear, news stories and magazine articles explore it. Its history is laid bare for us to follow. And with Superman, it seems that all of a sudden, the putative science behind it became important.



And then there's this:



The strip is called Bizarro. He does a lot of Superman humor.

Fan Culture

I've been struggling with what to do with "fan culture" since it's in some ways the foundation of my project. I'm in the thick of it now. But the problem is that I'm a folklorist who wants my book to be about folklore, not about pop culture. Superman is a strange topic for this, since the character arose in pop culture and has resided there for seventy years.

Well, it's not so much a problem in my mind. One of my goals is to demonstrate how little the boundaries of academic disciplines matter to people in their everyday lives. Medium matters to people, but not the way it does to university departments.

The primary thing that separates folklore from popular culture is standardized production--which is largely irrelevant to most people. Folklore is not mass produced. It doesn't come off the assembly line or the printing press. That's key to the definition of folkloristics as an academic discipline. It's what has historically separated it from others, such as English and film studies, etc. The lack of standardized production means that everytime folklore is performed, it will exhibit variation. Every time you tell a story, it will be different, for a possibly infinite number of reasons. And those differences might be meaningful. Then again, they might not. It's what I love about folklore. Endless possibility.

Fan culture does not so much exist for the performances of folklore. It exists for mediated entertainment, such as comic books. The creations of that fan culture, in the form of fan fiction, for example, would not qualify as folklore because the production, while creative, is standardized. Once you write your story and publish it to the internet, it's always the same. The text doesn't change. Every time someone clicks on it to read it, it's the same (other things may change, but that's a different story).

Yet fan culture does exhibit the variation and multiplicity that I love about folklore. It can come in the jokes told, the costumes made (and endlessly changed, as I'm learning through interviews with people who make and wear them--although there are costumes you can buy at the store, which are quite controversial in the world of fan costuming...), there are tattoos, and anecdotes, and all sorts of interesting bits of folklore. That's what I'm writing about in the first four chapters of my book. It's the stuff generally left out of fan culture studies, which focus on institutional, standardized responses to media.

Here's some stuff I've found about fan cultures:

There's a guy named Henry Jenkins who wrote about Fan Culture a while ago. He's got a blog with several entries about Superman. This one, written in response to the 2006 Superman Returns film, is particularly useful.

Then there's Matthew Pustz' book Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers.

Sort of about fan culture are the works of Lawrence and Jewett: The Myth of the American Hero and The American Monomyth.

Then there's Bill Schelly's The Golden Age of Comic Fandom.

A chapter of Martin Barker's Comics: Ideology, Power and the critics is called "Reading the Readers." I haven't gotten to this yet, but it might be relevant to fan culture.

Christopher Knowles' book Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes isn't of much use, but it does have a few passages about fans, especially about Alex Ross as a fan-turned-creator.

Speaking of fans as creators, Lauire Cowan's documentary Participate: The Revolution of Fan Culture is not too bad. Mostly interviews from a comic con in New York.

For me, the Holy Grail of Superman responses is the fan who posts to the internet something along the lines of "What Superman Means to Me." It's not as common as I'd like, and I get plenty of it from interviews. This essay by The Onion's Noel Murray is a good one, and it concludes thus:

The appeal of Superman–again, maybe just to me, though I think to others as well–is that because he can do everything, he doesn't have to do much at all. He can take care of business and then chill out, solitude-style, at his Arctic clubhouse, where he tinkers with robots and obsessively arranges his souvenirs into a massive monument to himself. Or he can spend a whole day thinking up the perfect birthday present for Batman. Or he can make publicity appearances, while dodging Lois' attempts to find out his secret identity. The stakes are pretty low in those forty-year-old Superman stories–even in the "imaginary tales" where some bored staffer figured out a way to end the endless Superman saga, at least for a week. And if somebody today wants to know how to write a Superman story, it shouldn't be that hard. Just ask a ten-year-old boy what he'd do if he were Superman, and take notes.

There's other good stuff in there, but this strikes me as something I might quote one day--especially that last line.

Links

Nicknames

I've been staying away from the topic of nicknames lately. There are far too many, and they largely aren't interesting or worthy of comment. But two of them strike me as worth posting:

The Superman of volunteerism, Justin Brownlee.

And a commentary on Dwight Howard and Shaquille O'Neill, both called Superman, I suppose. Though I hadn't heard Shaq called that (he does have the tattoo). The writer thinks Howard should wait to take on the mantle until Shaq retires.

In Other Links

Here's an article that calls the Siegel house "A Shrine to Superman."

If I ever compete in mixed martial arts, I'll know how to perform the Superman punch.

Who Owns Superman?

There's a legal battle being fought for the copyright to Superman, and there's a concomitant internet debate about who should have the copyright.

Here's a basic statment of the issue. here's another.

This writer thinks a Superman in the public domain is a good thing, for "culture." He continues his argument here, the foundation of which can be summed up as follows:

Creative endeavours ultimately are the property of the commons, the public.

A great many things are wrong with that sentence. But, moving on...

There's no new information in this article, but the title is telling: "Writing and Ownership, Why Superman has Abandoned us."

And one final article, which sums up the status of the current legal situation, gives a nice timeline (though it's from Wikipedia, it seems ok), and has a strange prediction: Marvel will publish Superman.

Copyright is currently one of the more compelling issues in folklore. Who owns traditional culture? Who can determine what's done with it? Who gets the money from its display?

There seems to be three opinions to the matter.
1. Superman belongs to Time/Warner, who own DC Comics, who, under a different name, bought the character from Siegel and Shuster in 1938 and have renewed their ownership ever since. This is the corporate stance.
2. Superman belongs to the creators and their heirs, despite having sold the character long ago and being paid the contracted amount. They have tried to regain the character at several time since. This is the creator stance.
3. Superman belongs to everybody. This is the, um, public good stance.

Mark Twain argued in favor of eternal copyright, extending unto the descendants of writers. In his formulation, a business created by an individual could be run in perpetuity by that individuals descendants, so why on earth would the creations of a writer be any different? I'm sure other writers have chimed in on this stuff.

Let's talk about mythology.

If Superman is a myth, then everybody already owns the character. The most recent ruling has to do with the particulars of the origin story, which is perhaps the most often told story of the last century. I'm not talking about just the movies and the comics, but also about public discourse. Think of Obama's joking speech of last year, where he denied being christ but insisted that instead he was rocketed to earth from Krypton. That sort of retelling goes on all the time, in every medium as well as in everday conversation. Telling the story in that manner does not infringe upon copyright, as no one's making money from it. And parody is, of course, protected. Then there's the pastiche, such as Alan Moore's Supreme stories. Or Kurt Busiek's Samaratan. Or about a thousand other comic book characters.

There are academic retellings, there are political retellings, there are comedic retellings. And it's all fine. Thus making the third position both correct and irelevant. Unless somebody wants to publish their own Superman comic, or make their own Superman movie, to turn a profit.

As for positions

Aliens Among Us

I recently came across the transcript of the conference where George Lucas, Steven Speilberg, and Lawrence Kasdan sat down and hashed out the details of a little flick called Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's an amazing, 120 single-spaced pages of instructions on how to work out a story. But interestingly, right in the middle there's a reference to Erich Von Daniken.

Von Daniken wrote a book called Chariots of the Gods, published first in 1968. His basic premise is there's a single answer to all of the mysteries from humanity's prehistory. Evidently everything we can't explain--how the Egyptians built the pyramids, why the Mayans abandoned their civilization, what early artwork is all about, what's the truth in the stories of the gods...--can be solved: Aliens.

Aliens probably seeded earth with humanity, and returned at various intervals to help along the processes of evolution. Our destiny is in the stars, and getting there will involve mining the past for its wisdom. (Much debunking has occurred; see this article for particularly funny stuff)

(Ok, the relevance to Raiders comes in that Von Daniken thought that the Ark was built as a radio transimitter to god--the aliens--a point made by Belloq in the scene where he tells Indy to "sit down before you fall down.")

Also published in 1968: 2001 A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke (the Kubrick film came out the same year). It's a story about mankind's evolution being guided by aliens.

Twelve years later, astrophysicist David Brin published his first book, Sundiver. It's a story set in the future, when humanity has successfully guided the evolution of dolphins and chimpanzees to the point of sentience. They've also been contacted by a number of alien species. Basic to the book (and its sequels) is the idea that no species has attained sentience without the aid of extraterrestrial intelliences. I haven't gotten through the whole of the Uplift series yet, but it's hinted that there is a "mythical" alien species, referred to only as The Progentiors, that got the whole thing started billions of years ago. One of the mysteries of the series so far (I'm only on the second book, Startide Rising) is who, if anyone, "uplifed" humanity.

I'm sure there are a number of other stories that play with this idea: that humanity has been tampered with in its evolutionary path by aliens. I'll seek out as many as I can. As far as I know, Von Daniken is the only one who has taken the idea seriously. His book is a riot, full of "evidence" in the form of pictures of ancient artwork. HIs basic logical argument goes as follows: "Look at this picture! Doesn't it look like an alien!" Or, "We have no idea how the Egyptians got the idea of life after death, so it must have come from aliens."

Oh, right, what's this got to do with Superman?

Well, it seems like Superman is an alien who comes to earth. Now, he doesn't seem to deliberately mess with evolution...but on the other hand, he's always trying to get Lois Lane to go out with him (as Clark Kent). And dating is all about mating.

I'm not an expert in the history of Superman comics, so I don't know if this issue has been broached before. But I do know that in Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely/Jamie Grant's All Star Superman, Superman does eventually record his genetic code and give it to Leo Quintum, super scientist. The purpose of this is ostensibly, or perhaps putatively, so that Quintum can merge Superman's genes with human genes and create a hybrid race so the world will be ok without him. A World without Superman is a recurring trope in Superman comics.

It might just have been me, but I got the impression that Superman wanted Quintum to impregnate Lois Lane with a superbaby (one, presumably, that because it was created in a lab wouldn't give Lois the problems that Larry Niven spelled out in Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex).