Casting Call

It seems to me that there's a genre I've been largely ignoring. Let's call it the 'cast list' or something like that. It's simply where somebody imagines who would play whom in a movie made about their favorite characters. This happened before the internet, but the ease with which anybody with access can put together their ideas with pictures, etc., has made the internet the prime medium for this genre.


Superman gets this treatment a lot. There's comic book movie. comic book movie again. there's mtv. comic book movie again.


People feel entitled to a good Superman movie. They put their demands up on the internet. Because of the recent rumor that Christopher Nolan is to be involved in the new film, they write long, long letters and debates about how or why he should be involved.

Religious Interpretation

Superman may or may not be Christ, depending on who you ask.

There are perhaps more books and articles concerning Superman's connection to Christ than there are on any other Superman topic. It all seems to have begun with John T. Galloway, jr.'s The Gospel According to Superman, fixing a title that has probably frustrated other authors since it's 1968 publication. This book set out to prove once and for all that Superman is certainly not Christ, and that claiming him to be so is damaging. It explores the character's actions and history and ultimately concluding that Superman is in no way like Christ.

This was before the 1978 movie.

After that movie, articles began springing up proclaiming Superman's Christ-like-ness. It was all very deliberate on the part of director Richard Donner and one of the writers, Tom Mankiewicz. They saw the parallels in the stories and made them explicit, most famously during Jor-El's speech to Superman as the baby travels to Earth:

"They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show them the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I send them you, my only son."

As a kid of 1 when this movie came out, I completely ignored the subtext there.

So soon after you've got Sarah R. Kozloff's "Superman as Saviour: Christian Allegory in the Superman Movies" (from the Journal of Popular Film and Television, 1981). People saw the parallel, and it either made them happy or mad. Apparently the director got death threats.

Then there's The Man from Krypton: The Gospel According to Superman, by John Wesley White. I haven't read it yet, but it's on its way to me even as we speak.

More recently, there have been lots of these. I suspect the more obvious Christian imagery in Superman Returns and the widened audience for it provided by the internet has sparked the books and articles.

Anton Karl koslovic's "Superman as Christ-Figure: The American Pop Culture Movie Messiah" came ahead of the rush in 2002 in the Journal of Religion and Film. He's all for the subtext, as it points toward Christ.

There's Stephen Skelton's The Gospel According to the World's Greatest Superhero. There's Ken Schenck's "Superman: A Popular Culture Messiah" in the book The Gospel According to Superheroes, edited by B.J. Oropeza. There are chapters in books such as Holy Superheroes by Greg Garrett, and H. Michael Brewer's Who Needs a Superhero? about this sort of thing.

Sort of Related are books such as Christopher Knowles Our Gods Wear Spandex and Don LoCicero's Superheroes and Gods. Both of these books look for early parallels (which they see as forerunners) to superheroes in myths and legends, not specifically in Christ. They both devote some pages to Superman. Also in this category I'd put Josepha Sherman's Once Upon a Galaxy, which does the same thing with various films and has a chapter on Superman.

Aside from a score of newspaper articles and hundreds of blogs and other websites, that's about it. People like to point out how similar Superman is to Christ, and then they like to argue about it.

I actually have a lot more to say about this, as you may expect. I sat down to take what I thought would be a page of notes and found myself with eight pages of a chapter, and I hadn't even gotten to Christ yet. So, no real commentary or analysis here, but there will be a bit in the book someday, I hope.

New Origin

All right. J. Michael Straczinsky is writing a new series of "graphic novel" Superman stories, to be drawn by Shane Davis. It's a retelling of the origin story, which will lead into subsequent "graphic novels" in the future. These are free from the other Superman stories published by DC. I put "graphic novel" in quotes because it's really just a long comic book, on perhaps better quality paper, and probably between hard covers.

Straczynski was interviewed by Newsarama recently. He talks about his love for the character and how excited he is by the job. Here's a section relevant to my own project:

I come from a hardscrabble, difficult and often brutal childhood. I come from the streets, I came from nowhere with nothing, and when as a kid I started to tell people I was going to be a writer someday, the reaction was laughter. ...here was a period when I was about 13 that I literally got beat up every day, because no matter how badly I got beat, I would refuse to give in, so they'd try again the next day....So the idea of someone who could fly away, someone who could be anything he wanted, who couldn't be hurt...all of that had tremendous appeal for me. As a kid, it was pretty much all that sustained me.

That part about being able to fly away sounds sort of like run away from the people beating him up, but that's not how I think he meant it. He connected to the character as an escapist fantasy, as a lot of people do.

Interestingly, his interview draws a lot of ire from people in the comments section. I won't go into it here.

Even more interestingly, a part of the interview where Straczysky discusses altering the destruction of Krypton incites one reader to write a reply called "Leave Krypton Alone, JMS." Here Graeme McMillan discusses the origin and how he thinks it's wrong to make the destruction of Superman's homeworld "a hit job on a planetary scale." He's got his reasons, and he does a good job of explaining how it would affect the character.

The interesting thing to me is that people are invested in the origin story. They consider it on very deep levels, both in terms of the character and in terms of their own lives. It's important. And because it's important, it gets retold a lot, always from a perspective, always for a purpose. Always as somebody new wants it to be retold, which isn't always how the readers want to read it.

Edit: I have to add this link, to Newsarama. Today they posted an essay by Straczynski where he writes about the meaning of Superman, and Wonderwoman, two comics he will soon be writing.

The (auto)biography

People involved in Superman productions seem to want to tell their stories. Probably the earliest is Kirk Aly's A Job For Superman. Alyn starred in the Superman serials of the late forties. He was the first man to play Superman in front of the camera. As with several of these books, I haven't read this one. It's sitting in IU's Lilly Library, which means I'd have to devote several hours to sitting in the library and reading it. It's a special rare book library, and you can't check out its contents.

Next is Noel Neill's Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Neill toured the country speaking to colleges and whatnot a few decades ago. She was one of two actors to play Lois Lane on The Adventures of Superman television show in the fifties. She's still known as Lois. Last year, during the Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Il, the local dignitaries, Neill, and Superman ceremonially broke ground on the site of a new statue, one that will depict Lois Lane as played by Neill. It's right up the road from the famous Superman statue at the Metropolis courthouse. Haven't read it.

I've actually got pictures of the groundbreaking, but not with me. Darnit.

Then there's Superman on Broadway, by Bob Holiday and Chuck Harter. Holiday starred as Superman in the short lived It's a Bird, it's a Plane, It's Superman broadway show. Evidently this has been revived periodically, and was filmed for television, resulting in what's considered the worst of all Superman productions. Haven't read this one, either. Three strikes.

Then there are two books by Christopher Reeve: Still Me and Nothing Is Impossible. I have read these, mostly because the local library has them. They're less about Superman than I assume the others must be. Reeve tried to distance himself from the role somewhat, though he can't avoid it in these books. The second is more interesting since it essentially gives Reeve's interpretation of the character. The first gives Reeve's perspective on the films' production.

Since I've read two out of five of these books, I don't have a genre description or contents breakdown. They're sort of memoirs, sort of autobiographies. There are biographies of Reeve out there, which I am trying to convince myself I don't have to track down. The production histories operate as a kind of biographies of the shows and movies, so they complement these books since they delve deeper into the actors' lives than production histories can.

Then there's George Reeves. He's got a small industry going in the book publishing world. There's Speeding Bullet: The Life and Bizarre Death of George Reeves. There's Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady, and the Death of Superman. There's Behind the Crimson Cape: the cinema of George Reeves. There are entries on him in The Hollywood Book of Death and others of that kind. The only one I've read is Hollywood Kryptonite, which is more or less a conspiracy theory kind of book.

In Other News:

Here's an interesting article explaining why the author, Robert Cargill, thinks Christopher Nolan should not be involved in producing a new Superman movie. Nolan, as you may know, recently directed two Batman movies, the second of which became one of the most profitable movies of all time. The author's reasons for wanting Nolan off the project are five in number, but are really just one: Nolan's previous films are all very different and darker than Superman should be, in his opinion. He's right in that they are all quite dark and different from Superman in genre, theme, and mood. This, of course, doesn't guarantee that Nolan's involvement in a Superman film would make it like his other projects. What's even more interesting is this statement:

2) Superman isn't a detective. Nolan thrives telling noir-ish detective stories. Superman isn't a detective. He's a reporter. He hits things. Hard. And flies fast. And burns holes in things. And blows cold air that freezes things. Thinking? That ain't his style. He's not dumb, but a good Superman story isn't about him tracking down criminals; it is about a world in peril with only one man who can save it.

And:

He is Mom, baseball, and apple pie, and he stands for "truth, justice, and the American way." There's NOTHING dark about him or his story, only a sadness that drives his overtly boy scout tendencies.

These areCargill's idea of Superman. Not too different from others', I'd guess, but interesting. Sure, he hits things, but so does Batman. And sure, Batman's the detective, but Superman's a reporter, which means he's a writer. And writers think about things an awful lot. There's also a lot of comics pages devoted to Superman doing experiments and whatnot in the Fortress of Solitude. It's partly how he fills his downtime and how he tries to solve various problems on earth. Still, Cargill's right about the Superman of the movies.

Production Histories

Over the next few posts, I'll be writing about the sorts of books other people write about Superman. There are several genres, each of which includes four or five books. Today, I'm looking at the "production histories." These aren't about comics, so much. They're about cartoons, radio, tv, theater, and movies. They're behind-the-scenes looks at the shows.

First up is Gary Grossman's Superman: Serial to Cereal. The title reflects the early film serials and the fact that Kelloggs sponsored the radio and television "Adventures of Superman" shows. His book mostly deals with tv and serials; there's a bit about the Fleischer cartoons from the early forties and the radio show starring Bud Collyer, but not much more. It was published in 1976, part of a series on popular culture edited by film critic Leonard Maltin.

It's got all the conventions of the production history genre: short biographies of the stars and producers (both before and after the show), descriptions of the episodes and the author's appraisal of them, some of the controversies and difficulties. I'm going to assume these are fairly standard for production histories of any show, though I must admit that I don't make a habit of reading these sorts of books. I'm racking my brain for any I've read, and come up with nothing.

Specific to Superman, though, are details of the extent to which the actor becomes typecast. In the case of Superman, however, typecasting seems almost the wrong term. If you're cast as a type, you can at least play that type in lots of different shows. If you're a thug, or an ingenue, there are all sorts of shows that have that type of character. If you're Superman or Jimmy Olsen or Lois Lane, then apparently you're done for. It's more specific than typecasting--it's character casting. Also, I'm guessing that few other shows' production histories go into so much detail about the technology required to make a man fly onscreen. All of these books do, and every one of them details the accidents that happened because of it.

Grossman's is pretty good, though dated. He includes lots and lots of pictures. However, it's also sometimes really boring. Do we really need that much information about an actor who played a villain in one episode of The Adventures of Superman? I suppose some people would say yes.

Next up is The Making of Superman: The Movie by David Michael Petrouare, which I haven't read. No offense to Petrou; it's largely because I can't bear to absorb any more information about the production of Superman: The Movie and its sequels.

I did read Bruce Scivally's Superman on Film, Television, Radio, and Broadway. Not bad. It tries to be more comprehensive that Grossman's. It's more recent, so it's got lists of websites and whatnot. All the components of the genre are there, and it gets all the way to 2006's Superman Returns.

There's Superman vs. Hollywood, by Jake Rossen. This is the most sensationalistic of all the production histories. It revels in the controversies and the rumors/legends that have grown up around the actors and shows. It has its villains and heroes. Again, all the biographies, the behind-the-scenes, the flight technology, etc.

Then there's Flights of Fantasy, by Michael J. Hayde. This one focuses almost entirely on The Adventures of Superman, which was the title of both radio and television shows. It's exhaustively thorough, and does the most debunking of the legends. As such, it was interesting to have read this one prior to reading Rossen's Superman vs. Hollywood, which doesn't even attempt to debunk, say, the story that a kid pointed a loaded gun at George Reeves during an appearance as Superman because the kid wanted a bullet that had bounced off Superman for a souvenir. Rossen reports it as fact; Hayde does a bit of digging and concludes that the story was concocted by Reeves as an excuse for limiting his appearance in costume. Hayde cites interviews with Reeves and concludes that this was a fear the actor developed (justifiable, I think, since both he and Collyer and others had been kicked and hit by kids attempting to test their invulnerability).

I found these interesting at first, but I must admit I'm surprised that there are even this many of them. At most, they deal with comics in a superficial manner. Hayde states that the comics may be great, but that Superman owes his popularity to the producers and actors of Adventures on radio and tv. The information is virtually the same in all of them, though each has its own spin. Some, such as Hayde, deal more with Reeves' death than others (Grossman, for example, barely discusses it at all). In all, the genre caters to fans more than a general audience, which is exactly appropriate.

Super Marriage

Here's an interesting article, It Ain't Easy Being Superman, that compares Superman stories to the role of the United States as a world power. It concludes:

It’s not too late to rethink this. Maybe we can learn something from Haiti, to tap into our country’s instinct to help a neighbor in need, and think more broadly about our long-term relationship with countries that could really stand some bootstrapping assistance. If Superman, Lois, and Clark were real people, their story would have ended up in tragedy without some change in trajectory. We have the opportunity to make that change in our own world, if we would choose it.

Throughout, the writer refers to Superman in the past tense, as indicated above. Nothing against her, but in several versions of the story, Superman/Clark and Lois do change their trajectory, and they're married in current comics continuity. I know, I know, she's using the relationship as an analogy for foreign policy. Still, it brings to my attention that the common conception of Superman still has the love triangle aspect to it, despite any number of shows, comics, and movies. That's how it exists in the minds of a lot of people.

Here's a consideration of the marriage, from Sequential Tart (it's the last section of the page, down a bit):

Especially by bringing in Lois's extended family, the marriage emphasizes the "Superman family" approach to upholding the commonweal in contrast to vigilante crime-fighting. This places Superman's adventures in a larger social context and goes against the grain of the lone wolf hero figure. (Batman has his "family" as well, one that is more wary, even of each other, than Superman's.)

BBC

A while back (1981) the BBC produced a documentary on Superman called "The Comic Strip Hero", and "Batmitey" was kind enough to post it on YouTube. It begins with an intereview with Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. They talk about all sorts of stuff. It's crazy to see Joe Shuster hold up his sketch for the cover to Superman number 1.

Also weird: watching Frederic Wertham become annoyed by Superman. He'd written his book nearly thirty years before this documentary, in which he proclaimed Superman to be one of the worst things a kid could read, and yet he doesn't seem to be able to see beyond Superman's powers and the violence with which he solves problems. He seems especially annoyed that the character isn't real. When asked by the interviewer what he thinks of the fact that people say Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American way (this is in the fifth part, as divided on youtube), he can't even answer the question because it makes no sense to him. "How can it stand for something that doesn't exist..." he starts to say, which isn't the question. Then he goes back to the powers: "He flies through the air..." and he talks about how a woman who's raped doesn't need someone who can fly, but a police officer.

It's an interesting perspective. Again and again, people in the documentary talk about how Superman (and superheroes in general) are for little boys who want to be like them. Even Jerry and Joe talk about this. Also lurking behind Jerry and Joe's comments are their everyday wish fulfillments, such as being noticed by girls.

Then there's the thing that's not talked about, but that Wertham is heading toward with his comments when he talks about what "these two schoolboys" started in the beginning...It's what writer Brad Meltzer keeps coming back to in his novel The Book of Lies...the fact that Jerry Siegel's father was probably murdered. When Wertham refers to what the rape and murder victims need instead of Superman, he seems to forget that the victims often don't get what they need. People do bad things to each other. The law cannot protect everyone. So we imagine Superman, and a world where, when the law fails, there's something beyond it to save us. And wouldn't it be great if that something were powerful and unbound by the laws of nature so it could save us anywhere, any time? Wouldn't it be great if this person, or a whole group of people, didn't try to use their power to take over the world?

"There's no 'g' in 'brazier.'"

I was among the millions of kids who wanted to be Superman. This was largely because of the Reeve movies. I owned very few Superman comics, never watched the old Adventures of Superman show, etc. I liked Superfriends, but it was those movies that did it for me.

So I sat down and watched the first one again. It has been a decade or so since I saw it, and I still like it a lot. There are lots of oddities, like Lois' misspellings (leading to the Perry White line I've used in the title above). Reeve is perfect. After reading that his interpretation is based on Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby, I can see why he chose it. The dynamic between Clark and Lois might as well be that between Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. If I recall correctly, Reeve worked with Hepburn quite a bit.

My favorite parts: Catching the bullet to save Lois, then feigning fainting. The completely straight delivery of "Truth, justice, and the American way." Miss Tessmacher. The many wigs of Lex Luthor. Christopher Reeve's primal scream of denial as he decides to turn back time to save Lois. Great scream.

Stray Observations:

Superman is a disaster movie. They were quite popular in the late '70's, partly because technology made them possible. And it made Superman's flight possible. So flight and disaster movie, that's Superman. He's our response to "a capricious universe" in the words of Neil Gaiman and Adam Rogers in Wired a few years ago. It's interesting that so many actors who've portrayed Superman have been heavily involved in charity work--attempting to thwart all sorts of disasters both potential and actual. Bud Collyer, George Reeves, and Christopher Reeve (I haven't checked on the others) were all very much involved in these sorts of things.

But Superman is very overtly a disaster movie. The destruction of Krypton is shown in very great length. Lots of people running and falling. The helicopter crash--where he meets Lois--is excessively destructive. And then there's the missile test at the end, where all sorts of avalanches, dam breaking, bridges falling, etc, go on and on and on. There's so much more emphasis on disaster than on heroism, it becomes overwhelming. I know that the greater the disaster, the greater the heroism that saves us from it, but this was excessive.

Not that it makes it a bad movie. I really didn't pay attention to it until I was thinking about the time it was produced and the other kinds of movies that came out during that era. The eighties had very few (more in the nineties--millennial fever?), but the seventies had a lot--notably the Airport films.

Also, they're really showing off those flying effects. The first time we see Superman, standing in the distance of the Fortress of Solitude, he takes off and flies directly toward the camera before swooping away. My guess is that this was showing that they weren't limited by the effects of the old Adventures tv show, where Superman was pretty much always flying in profile, sideways across the screen.

So, it's a great movie, even now, I think. And I hope that's not just nostalgia talking.

Smallville

As part of this study, I really should watch Smallville more. I watched the last two episodes, but I tend to agree with Chris Sims' assessment: it's not very good. But I liked it in the past. I didn't catch the first few episodes, but somewhere near the beginning I started watching. I sort of kept up with it, if I remembered, for a couple of years. Then, as I recall, it got really really bad. I avoided it like the plague, and then I watched the last two episodes, which did nothing to alter my opinion.

But for this project, I have just watched the first four episodes of Season 1, and I liked them a lot. They blend teen drama, superheroics, weird mystery, monsters (of a sort), and a dash of humor. I suppose that the "monster of the week" plots grew tiresome for the fans eventually, and that the overarching plot of Clark finding out about Krypton, Lex trying to figure out Clark's secret, and the romance took over. But then what happened?

So, now that the show's in its ninth season, Clark is living in Metropolis, working at the Daily Planet, flirting with Lois Lane (who, evidently, has been on the show for five years), has a Neo from the Matrix costume, and fights crime, he still can't fly and isn't called Superman. And I must wonder...why not? Oh, and he doesn't wear glasses.

Certainly I'm not the only one wondering about this.

At the Superman Celebration last summer, I talked to a man named Terry who was there with his grandchildren collecting autographs. He told me that they're all fans of Smallville and that they hunt through the internet to find out all sorts of information. According to Terry, the producers have left the costume decision to Tom Welling, who portrays Clark Kent. I have not found confirmation of this.

Others attribute the lack of the red and blue costume to network interference, because the executives fear that a costumed superman in the television would confuse people when a costumed Superman in a movie theater appears.

It's a curious thing. The show seems to have fallen victim to the same problem that plagues so many shows where the characters are high school students: they have to grow up sometime. For whatever reason, they've kept on with the mission statement--a superman show without superman. Some people are happy with this, some find it unbearable. Enough of both camps still watch it to keep it on the air.

I'm not sure of all the details of the story as it fills out in the subsequent seasons. I know that there's something about Jor-El being sort of a bad guy, and Clark must deal with that. My main interest in this comes because of the origin story. If you consider Superman's origin to be the part of the story from Jor-El placing Kal-El into the rocket to Superman's first public appearance in Metropolis (usually saving Lois Lane), then Smallville still isn't done telling that story. Smallville is the single longest version of Superman's origin out there. Siegel and Shuster's first published version, in Action Comics #1, was precisely one page long. So is Morrison and Quitely's All Star Superman origin. But then, neither of those versions aired on the WB, and needed teen drama to pull in an audience.

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.