Superman Through the Ages! Forum

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If there is one main flaw evident from the article it is the idea that the "dark vigilante" came about recently. Anyone really familar with the Batman and Superman of the 1938-1940 period knows that they were first cast in this mold. Batman carried a gun and killed a few crooks along the way (See the Golden Age Batman chronology (http://members.surfbest.net/argentium@surfbest.net/batman.htm) for the proof) and it was not uncommon for Superman to threaten some hood by picking up a piece of iron and twisting it into a  pretzel while 'See this? This is your neck if you don't tell me what I need to know.'

The main reason people do not know this is because the comics of that period are so hard to find and read and what has been reprinted is relatively mild.

Well, I think you can argue that the earliest strips were still in a formulative stage as creators tried to find their footing.  Batman lifted very heavily from pulp heroes like the Black Bat, the Shadow, the Spider, the Phantom Detective and so on, and it was pretty much expected then that a "cloaked avenger" would carry a gun.  In other words, Batman and even Superman were more pulp heroes than comics heroes at the beginning.  Through trial and error, what we now know as the superhero formula took a less bloodthirsty form, and despite Wolvie and Punisher (and even the Batman movies), that's still how most of the world thinks of superheroes...good guys who don't kill.

There have certainly always been the violent "heroes"...in the 40s, the Hangman was downright brutal...but they tend to be in the minority, and there's a reason for that.  The Punisher's methods make him popular with some comic enthusiasts, but he'll never catch on in pop culture at large.  And notice that the super-popular Wolverine in the movies is all "warm and fuzzy" compared to his "berzerker" counterpart in the comics.  I think if you want your superhero to catch on in the world at large, you'd better make him relatively virtuous...otherwise he won't meet most people's criteria for "superhero."

Can you say Rambo?  :D He made the Punisher look like Red Riding Hood and he was popular enough to kick off his own subgenre which was lampooned in Hot Shots Part Deux. :shock: Also if you watch the serials of the 1920s though 1955 the majority had somewhat 'ruthless' heroes.  The cowboy hero who dominated this time period in movies and TV was the most ruthless of the bunch - the Lone Ranger was likely one of the few cowboy heroes who didn't leave a series of corpses (usially Native American) in his wake.  The 'spagetti' Western of the 60s - 70s mearly took this to its logical conclusion. The Phantom (who predates both Supermran and Batman) could and did kill though he did his best to avoid it. Captain American in his 1941 origin killed the spy that killed the inventor of the Super Soldier serum and went on to take out a few Nazis permantly (The 1960's retelling of this altered who killed the spy)

The point is that 'violent' heroes have always been popular. Futhermore to claim that superheroes that kill are recent ignores the history of the genre

Okay, then let's look at it from another angle.

It's only recently that it became "chic" for heroes to kill.  Or, to cede you your point, let's make that "kill again."  For decades, decades during which most of America discovered superheroes and formed an opinion of who they were, they did not kill.  (And it's worth noting that most people did NOT discover superheroes through comic books at all, but through other media...which is still the case).

I also think you need to take heroes in the context of their times.  Nobody would blame Captain America for killing Nazis, any more than they'd blame their dads for doing it.  It was a time of war and anyway Nazis hardly count as human...if I met one today I'd probably kill him myself.  And in the old Westerns, shoot-outs were (1) sanitized affairs with lots of noise but almost no blood..."Aghh... ya got me...PLOP!"  and (2) pretty clear-cut in terms of good guys and bad guys.

By contrast, Wolverine...at least when I read the books in the late 70s...killed without much provocation.  (There's that infamous scene where he sneaks up on a guard and "snikt"!, which turns Nightcrawler's stomach).  And in the case of the Punisher, it's made clear in many stories that he's a loose cannon, a self-appointed executioner who is as much of a menace as the men he hunts down.  He's not a hero in any normal sense, though I guess he appeals to kids with anger issues.

The point being, yes Captain America, early Batman and even Superman killed at one point, but always their victims were either characterless ciphers who represented evil (Nazis, vampires, etc) or they were people who were shown to be so hateful and inhuman that "they had it coming." If killing had to be done, they were men enough to do it, but it was just part of the job...they didn't get off on it.  Now there's a whole coterie of superheroes whose entire appeal is that they are "bad boys" who "don't take crap"...they take apparent glee in piling up the bodies, and so do their fans...if they didn't kill someone in every issue, the sales would take a nosedive.  Killing is their raison d'etre; what makes them "heroes" is not their strong sense of right and wrong or any sort of moral center, but the ability to kill people and not lose sleep over it.  The same sort of fine character traits that get you promoted in a street gang...all that counts is how "tough" you are.

So yes, it's wrong to say no superhero ever killed until recently.  But it's not wrong to say that killing only recently became a prerequesite for selling books.  It was such a big fad at one point that John Byrne bent over backwards to create a situation where even Superman could take a few lives.  I don't know, since I haven't read this guy's book, but maybe his point is that superheroes exist to meet the needs of their age, and these days those needs include shedding a lot of blood.  To an extent, we as a society "create" our own heroes by projecting our needs.  In the 50s and 60s we did not need to see people kill for us vicariously.  Now apparently we do.

Before I forget again, I wanted to note here that the Punisher is one of the worst cases of plagiarism in all of fiction.  He is lifted, lock stock and barrel, from Don Pendleton's "Executioner" novels.  Maybe this was considered "okay" the first time he appeared...as a one-off adversary for Spider-Man...but considering how big the character has become, somebody oughtta get sued.

It's also worth noting that the code against killing in comics originated with Jack Leibowitz and Harry Donenfeld at DC, before being adopted industry-wide via the Comics Code Authority.  In his book, "Men of Tomorrow," Gerard Jones suggests this was done in a concerted effort to legitimize comics and keep the civic-minded parents' groups out of their hair.  Since Donenfeld built DC on money he'd made from selling pornography and bootleg liquor, it was kind of important to establish his new comics outfit as a source of "good clean fun."

More accurately they did not kill things that had a 'soul'. In his first appearance Superboy tried to kill Bizarro with Green K and latter did kill him with the remains of the machine that created him curing a girl's blindness in the process. Then you have the ocxational self will machine criminal that superman happily turns into scrap metal because it is 'not alive' These cop outs are only worse than GI Joe cartoon where no one every freaking dies in combat.



Not always. Little Big Man case in point. Also the Spagetti wester was natorious for having 'heroes' who were just as bad as the villians. Watch the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly some time for an example.



Of course by the late 1970's the Anti-hero had become popular as again best demonstrated by the likes of Rambo, Dirty Harry, and the countless man with no name cowboys running around. The Calvery lone=g a good guy was now a villian helping to destory Native American tribes and covering up their screw ups by court marshaling those who knew the truth.

In a way it was a whole back lash against the Vietnam war and Watergate messes. A war where it was Amercian soldiers seemingly shooting helpless prisoners and burning villages (Mei Li). A president who though he was above the law. Rumors of an FBI head named Hoover who had a file list that would have made Himmler of the SS green with envy. As early as the 1960's you had the decline and my 1970s it became mainstream

I remember an early issue of SUPERMAN featuring Superman causing the death of a couple of criminals. Supes was standing in the middle of the street while they were on a car. He didn't move, so they avoided him... falling in a ravine!
Pretty hard to believe that the "no killing rule" arrived only after a few years!

This is the so-called "Mickey Mouse syndrome" (copyright by John Byrne, I think): more a character becomes popular, more he doesn't act badly.

I think this varies on the character and culture. Rambo stayed pretty much the same through out his popularity and Wolverine still can turn somebody into hamburger and the Punisher is as much a loose cannon as he was when he first appeared his releative growth in popularity. Japanese manga heroes are all over the map and many of the popular ones have killed.

It could be that because comics were originally created as an entertainment medium for everyone--much like the pulps they were based from--that of course the superhero stories would follow the mold of more traditional pulp heroes like the Shadow and the Spider. In the '30s there was more of an emphasis on justice over law, and that kind of mentality was tapped with characters like the Shadow who didn't so much reform scum as riddle them with bullets.

 As time went by, comics were seen as children's fare, and thus the champions depicted in the superhero stories were made larger than life and pure of virtue. But as time has gone by comicbooks lost track of who their target audience was supposed to be, and the medium fell out of step beside television and film. As a result, the companies have pandered to the graying of the audience and thus produced fare like Identity Crisis and Countdown to Infinite Crisis, in which the heroes have feet of clay, or kill, or mind-wipe their enemies into harmless caricatures of themselves.

 I think there's a bit of a need to bring our paragons down to our level. It's a bit much to expect that the world's most powerful being would put on a red cape and fight crime rather than make himself a celebrity or a despot of a small island paradise in our cynical day and age. We want good role models, but we hate them a little too. What makes them so pure? As a result, I think most comics today have fallen into the deconstructionist trap that leads to more and more violent characters.

 I'm not saying we should throw out mature-minded stories. We just need to realize that certain literary constructs within the medium (i.e.  the superhero) are meant to be inherently juevenille. And that's not a crack, it just means that these stories are meant to speak to kids. To show them morality plays writ large, that there is Right and there is Wrong and the distinction is not difficult to make. I mean, face it, if your average 10 year-old is getting his morality from Spawn we're all in some serious trouble.  :?

 -Def.

Ironically, it's the juvenile nature of many comics creators (and fans) since at least the 1960s (I know that many cartoonists and writers were teens in the 1940s --but that made them more innocent/idealistic, not less) that is largely responsible for the current state --ironic because both are supposedly more "adult" in terms of actual age and point-of-view.  I don't think it is a really mature point of view that decrees superhero comic books as the stage for bloody morality plays and adolescent revenge dramas, or that thinks it artistically daring to graft the concept of the anti-hero or the post-WWII pulp thriller onto a comics-code-approved book (not that I'm a fan of the code) --problems with format, packaging and labelling.  Problems that truly adult material that deals with superheroes, like Jimmy Corrigan and Dan Clowes' The Death Ray (Eightball #23) do not have.

Anyway, this thread seems to be drifting slightly off topic, into the sphere of the various anti-Iron Age threads: maybe because the writer of the book does seem to have a misapprehension of the current state and morality of superheroes like Superman and Batman vis a vis their various incarnations in years past.  I wonder how the author would differentiate between mythic and Christian themes in the comics?

You're right. Consider that Superman was created as a champion of the weaks, who CAN use violence, while the Punisher is basically a villain-killer... He hasn't other ways to fight.
About Rambo: "First blood" featured a desperate man who couldn't insert himself again in a society that doesn't want him anymore. It was very interesting. The other two movies, instead, have removed the complexity from the character... The're videogames, not movies. Here's a situation where the character, more becomes popular, more he becomes violent (anyway, "Rambo II" wasn't so bad... But I really like only the first movie).

I could say something similar about mangas. Do you know Hokuto no ken/Fist of the North Star? It's the story of Kenshiro, a young martial arts master living in a post-atomic age. He is the master of "holy Hokuto Shinken", a fighting arts based on the presence in the human body of tsubos, usually translated as "pressure points". Hitting his opponent's tsubos, a master of Hokuto Shinken can make explode him! It's really a violent series, I guarantee it. In Italy Kenshiro is very popular since the 80s (the same age of Rambo... And Ken is very similar to Sylvester Stallone). I like him, too. The fighting  are spectacular, and I like the characters, too. The plot is simple but interesting: Shin, former friend of Ken, has kidnapped Julia, Ken's girlfriend, and left him with seven scars in his chest similar to the "major bear" constellation (er... I don't know how you call it, sorry. In Italian, this is "orsa maggiore" -Edited to add: it's Ursa Maior in Latin: what a smame, I should to know it!-). Ken is the last heir of a lore started 2000 years ago, but he doesn't love to fight. He'd like to live in peace with his girlfriend. Then, he knows 2 children, Lynn and Burt, and he take them with himself (they're alone). A lot of things happen since that meeting, if you want I can tell you the story.
Let's face it: Ken is a violent character. He kills his opponents with no mercy. But, seeing the series, I understand that, if he could, he wouldn't do this. He lives in a terrible age, where only the strongest can survive, and he has to adapt himself to this rule.

Of course, if someday someone will make the same with Superman or Spider-Man turning them in merciless killers, I'll be very upset. Kenshiro lives in a particular situation, with no rules anymore. Kal and Peter live in a society which consider the homicide a crime. Killing the villains is NOT the solution.

This is totally wrong as a trip to The History of Comic Books (http://www.collectortimes.com/~comichistory/Platinum.html) will show. Comic books have existed all the way back to 1837 (The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck) long before the Shadow and the Pulps he appeared in even existed! This "Victorian Age" (which also saw the first graphic novel) lasted until the Yellow Kid came out in 1897 and actaully coined the term 'comic book' and kicked off the "Platinum Age" which saw the first monthly comic book, the first hard cover comic book, the first massive printing of free comic books (mainly to keep presses running) and first original story (as opposed to simply reprinting the dailies)



Again this is historically inaccurate. The superheroes genre started to decling right after WWII and that is when the perception changed. This is like the view cartoons were always seen at children's fair when in reality this view started in the late 1960's.



But this is a releatively recent development coming after Crisis and Secret Wars I when they publishers went after teh collectors with gimics like multiple #1s, Issue #0's, special covers and all the other nonsense.



Yet Japanese manga which has all the elements above is taking the US audience by storm. Just as the white-black hat ideal died in the Western the idea of the 'perfect' hero with no faults (or worst didn't admit to the faults they did have as per Silver Age Superman) got put out of its and everyone else's misery.

My favorite (if you can call it that) example is "The A-Team," which offered machine gun firefights on a weekly basis without anyone ever getting hit, good guy or bad guy.  And the villains were forever driving their cars off a huge cliff, only to get out of the vehicle at the bottom of the ravine and shake their heads as if to say, "Boy that was a rough ride."  And of course the entire show was so juvenile it was obviously aimed at 8-year-olds.  Message: "be as violent as you want, kids, there will be no ramifications."

Yes, there's a lot of examples of Superman and others "killing" androids and other "borderline" life forms, then musing, "...and it's not really killing, because he's a robot" or whatever.  (I always felt these asides were being made to the arbiters of the Comics Code rather than to me as a reader).  



Granted, but here I'm comparing the *traditional* Western with old-style superhero comics.  Both were at their most popular when their heroes were straight-shooting good-guys.  "Little Big Man" and the works of Sergio Leone were a purposeful poke in the eye to the traditional Western.  They were deconstructionist re-tellings of America's most cherished myths, with notions of good and evil turned upside down.  In that way, these 60s and 70s era Westerns were very much like the comic books of the 90s and today, which are similarly concerned with taking the air out of icons and bringing formerly virtuous heroes down into the gutter with the rest of us (which further assumes WE are in the gutter, of course).  And notice what happened to the Western after those films...for all intents and purposes it disappeared as a film genre.  There's a lesson there, I think.



Yes, but in World War II you had the US firebombing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, Japanese-Americans interred on American soil without due process, and for years after that cross-burnings, lynchings, and other not-so niceties.  And as far back as the Revolution, you had guerilla fighters among Tories and Rebels alike who torched, dismembered and skinned their neighbors.  Darkness and evil have been with us since Day One, from the guy next door to the White House.  But the real question is why we stopped striving for better in our heroic mythology.  Once, our heroes represented everything we hoped to be -- good and virtuous -- even when we weren't...no, especially when we weren't.  They weren't supposed to be like us, they were supposed to be better than us, an example to us.  Now if you try to write about a superhero who knows right from wrong, respects life in all forms, etc it's dismissed as "juvenile" and simple-minded.



Only if you mean he always had long hair and was played by the same meathead actor.  As Genis points out, Rambo starts out killing sheriff's deputies and federal agents in "First Blood"...he's shown as a guy as pitiful as he is "cool"...he's a killing machine the government made and now he's come back to haunt them.  By his last film, he's mutated into more of a hero and less of a head case.  He only kills Russians, so it's okay for us to enjoy it.

Obviously he was talking about the U.S. pamphlet-sized comic (1930 to present) in general and the superhero/adventure genre of comic book (1938-present) in particular.  I think that, despite what actual sales figures show (ie, that servicemen and other adults comprised a large part of comic book readership at least until the mid-50s), a large part of the public perception of comic books was that they were for kids.  The moral panic that Wertham contributed to would not have been as severe if adults were seen as (or actually were) the majority of comic book readers.

That a writer like Marston (Wonder Woman) specifically targetted his work to a child's psychology should be an indication of the target audience for super-hero comic books in general in the 30s/40s/50s.

That being said, I think it enriches all of our experiences of ALL comics to think of the art form as existing at least since the 1830s, if not earlier.  And that most comic art historically has been adult in flavour.  A rich heritage of cartooning!

Actaully  the *traditional* Western played fast and loose with this turning the likes of Billy the Kid into heroes and the Earps into villians. While the Earps got a better shake in 1946 many 'villains' of old west history were still (and many still are) being portraid as heroes.




Well considering the Western had been chugging along for well on to 50 years by that itme it could be the genre had simply reached the end of its lifespan and thanks in part to Star Wars/Star Trek the Scifi genre took its place.

Much the same thing happened to the Enlightenment and Gothic genres - the public simply got tired of them.





Except for the most part the US govenment helped keep a lit on such things. And if you tried to bring up such unpleasenties during the war you could have risked treason charges and after the was there was old Republican Sen Joe Macarthy and his House on Unamerican Activities Commity to stomp on your sorry head. Many people who would have brought such images to the screen were blacklisted and had to write and make movies under assumed names.



I think the problem is that we woke up to the fact that mythic heroes had flaws that various forces had tried to cover up despite the truth sometimes being better. I ask you which is better - the idea of some perfect man becoming President of this nation or of a man who failed at nearly everything he did and was at one point was even suicidal but overcame everything and became President and strove to hold the nation together.

The first is the mythic Lincoln while the second is a far more realistic picture of the man. I ask you who is the more inspiring version?

Better the lies that exalt us than ten thousand truths.

In a way, you're making my point for me, though.  There was a time America's myth-makers gave good traits to bad men to make them palatable to audiences.   Now they give bad traits to heroes to make them more "believable."  You could argue that the movie version of Billy the Kid is in direct contradiction to the historical record, but hey people paid to see an entertainment not a documentary.  The point is somebody realized that without making him "nicer" he'd never fly as a hero.

Whether the Earps were heroes or not depends on which side you're on.  It can be argued -- with lots of corroborative evidence -- that they were little better than a rival gang to the Clanton's "cow-boys".  The fact that Virgil and Wyatt had badges didn't really count for much...what went on in Tombstone was pretty much analogous to the "Bloods" and "Crips" of modern-day LA...a turf war.  Wyatt, for instance, tracked down Curly Bill Brocius and gut-shot him in an act of retaliation for shooting Virgil...hardly a defensible piece of "police work", that.

But again, Hollywood saw the bare bones of a good story and re-cast it in terms of good and evil because -- at least once upon a time -- we needed to believe there was a difference between the two.  Is that a bad thing?  Well maybe if you get all your "history" from the movies, but not necessarily if you just take away a re-affirmation that good men can triumph sometimes.



Well, comics have been around longer than that, and competition from video games, etc may be a factor in *their* decline.  But I don't think we can discount their abandonment of the youth audience as a factor, either.  



The government can only "keep a lid" on so much.  It was no mystery to American citizens what had happened to their Japanese neighbors in WWII; they knew full well they'd been hauled off to camps.  The difference is that we hadn't yet entered the culture of self-doubt and self-loathing that has dominated this nation since the 60s.  You can certainly argue that back then we were arrogant and uncompassionate to the plight of others, but I'd argue that constant introspection and knee-jerk criticism of all our actions, in our society or in our government, hasn't improved us much as a nation.  All it's done is sapped our will to do better and our belief that better things can even be done.  Just look at how few people even bother to vote anymore...we've largeley given up and come to expect the worst from ourselves and our leaders.  And for me, that trickles right down to having "heroes" with feet of clay.  If we can't even fashion our comic book superheroes -- a patently ridiculous and juvenile concept from square one, anyway -- as paragons of virtue, then we've lost something, in my book.



To a young child, the mythic Lincoln is more inspiring, no question.  To an adult, maybe the "real" one.  Again, that's my point: Superman and Batman and the like used to be constructed as pure-hearted heroes for children.  Now they're not.  Which is fine for the 30-year-old comics fan living in his parent's basement, but what's left for the kids?

And anyway the truly "mythic" heroes are the fictional ones.  Nobody suddenly "discovered" that Superman and Batman had "flaws" and a weak moral compass...they are make-believe characters who do and say only what writers make them do and say.

Do I want a white-washed version of JFK to be passed off as the real deal? No.  But that's history...in order to learn from it, we have to see it warts and all.  Myth-making is something else entirely.  I want my heroes to be pure.  If we're supposed to believe a guy came from another galaxy looking exactly like us, that he can fly and deflect bullets, that he can fool his closest friends with a cheap pair of glasses and that he would wear his underwear on the outside of his pants, I don't think it's too much more of a stretch to accept that he's a fine person with a strong moral center. Nothing is more hilarious to me than a comic book fan praising Spider-Man, the X-Men or Batman as somehow "realistic."  If they really think those books bear any resemblance to the real world...even in their current forms...then they need professional help.

Except throughout the stories there was a flaw with the moral compass they were given. When I read the comics when I was a kid I often wondered why Superman would blunder into situations where a little use of his powers and some good old fasion common sence would have saved him a lot of grief. Then you have the stories where Lois or Lara would get superpower and instead of encouraging them to use their powers to help people he lets them behave like jerks and even called Lara a 'hussy' in one story. You don't need to be an adult to know right off the bat Superman's moral compass is shot to blazes. When Krypton tech entered the picture things really went south as his is a man who is just sitting on tech that could feed millions, prevent weather cause nature diaster and on and on the list went. You didn't need writers to tell you Superman's moral compass was off in la la land  - any kid with a moderate degree of smarts knew it right away.

Dude, you need to check out this website:

http://www.superdickery.com/

Assuming, of course, that you don't run it!  :D The webmaster obviously shares your view of Superman's less-than-sterling behavior in "The Good Old Days."

Well I am not the author of this site but while a little over the top it does kind of prove my point. The Superman we think existed in the Golden and Silver ages has been largely influenced by the selected reprints that have been made.

To be fair to Superman though you will note that majority of these were in the 'spin off' books of Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen rather than Superman or Action. The Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen (and sadly Supergirl later on) books tended to go for one shot 'shock' stories that didn't really make that much sense given the way the characters behaved in Superman or Action. As for World's Finest, that book was so majorly messed up that the editors had to create a whole Earth (Earth-B) to deal with all the fubared stories that came out of it.

Superman and Action books had some real stinkers too though. How about the one there somehow Superman has been turned into Terra Man (you know the 1880 cowboy who ran around on the space Pegasus.) and his brilliant plan to flush out the real Terra man is to commit crimes so the real deal will show up to stop this pretender. Looks like Sups chucked out the old moral compass in that story.

I agree. Just wich the writers of the Batman movies had realized that rather than killing off Batman's major villians off as they went along. By the four film we really didn't have that much left.

But my point is that we can not the fact that the 'pure true blue' image of the Silver and Bronze age is largely an after the fact myth. Sure by the Code the characters had to behave a certain way but even then their moral compasses tended to go haywire. Superman would sometime play somewhat  cruel games with his friend's emotions or allow them to make total idiots of themselves. Of course that his pal Jimmy Olson was a weirdness magnet not to mention at times a bigger idiot than Sailor Moon it might have been Kal-El's way of dealing with the stress.

But, do you need to be an adult to realize that so called intelligent species have an incredible amount of ambition, tendency to self actualization, and a knack for not equally distributing advancements in social systems or technology?

Would so called Kryptonian science save the world?  Hardly, they had a flawed society themselves, even in the Silver Age, they had conflict and strife...

So I thought that writers were merely venturing plots in a flawed universe, one where all species are selfish and flawed and none could really solve the isssue of "human" conflict...

But a super hero would try...

I never said it was save the world but it certain would have made the world a better place. Weather control alone would save millionos of live not to mention money but Superman happily sits on this technology. Also there were the time Superman acted like a full fledged jerk; hardly the one representing the idea of him being the 'the big blue Boy Scout.' Then you had the problem of Superman being Stupidman so you would have a crime story that lasted more than 4 pages.

Also it was during the Silver age that Luthor changed from simply being evil to being another world's hero (even giving up his freedom to help  them), having a family but still having this warped streak that had him come to earth to commit crimes and maybe kill Superman while he was at it.

Well, maybe the fault is as much that the 1950s-60s mind set was that technology could create a utopia...weather control alters ecosystems that are just as critical to overall global dynamics...even increased human survival introduces massive problems with overpopulation...

I remember my Golden Handbook to Amphibians and Reptiles saying "amphibians and reptiles are fascinating, and while interesting -- if they should all disappear it would not make much difference one way or the other"...

You don't have to be an environmentalist to know that is simple minded...

Of course the world comic took place in was a very simplistic place where these and other consideration never entered inot the pricture. As a child with a disability I still remember how the Legion of Suerheroes gave Supergirl the blow off when to qualify she had to create a tunnel through the Earth and encountered ome Red K which make her age until she was physically 18.

Even then I knew there was something way wrong there. What did it matter how she looked she was still by the calender the same age? Also the only one member a year rule was another piece of stupity that I never understood.  The more you looked at the world of Superman and his friends during this period the more you knew something was not right. Perhaps you didn't know what it was but there was just something well off about the way they acted.

Sure, things were wrong...what was the solution?

Would "realism" made it better?  I don't know, but "real life" today or in the 60s is (was not) a universally wonderful picture...

Plato, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Danta, Hobbes, and Locke (among MANY others) had no answers...

We as a people are mediocre and self centered...we are TERRIBLE at seeing the big picture...

Haunted and self tortured super heros are hardly the answer...

But the nuances ARE interesting... 8)

No but the comics of that time were not protraying 'real life' were they?  (by the code they couldn't) In the case of Supergirl the LSH should have let her join on the basis of her actual age - appearent age was a problem as what did you do if you had somebody who looked 16 but was in fact hundreds of years old wanting to join?

Of course there were many time where the Legion of Superheroes became the Legion of Supermorons. We saw in one issue where the security was so bad they let a guy try out whose whole purpose had been to scan their Headquarters - this kind of idiocy was echoes years later in the Challange of the Superfriends cartoon where Luthor would come on the Trouble Alert screen and rebuke the comment made by a Superfriend.

Ok Superdummies obviously Lex has planned a bug in the place; perhaps it is time to go looking for it. While it could come up with a good story Challange also demonstrated what had been so wrong with the SIlver Age - poorly thought out stories that required aobut half the characters to be dumber than Bizarro.

If you has followed the link to the The History of Comic Books (http://www.collectortimes.com/~comichistory/Platinum.html) that I provided you would know the U.S. pamphlet-sized comic (17" wide x 11 tall") goes all the way back to 1902 and the first Superhero book (a reprinting of the Phantom strip) was in 1936 and the adventure genre was well represented by the likes of Flash Gordon, Popeye, Dick Tracy, Terry & the Pirates, and Mandrake the Magician.

On a side note here are some films that when resummited to the MPPA got an 'R' rating: Tailspin Tommy (1934); Crash Dive (1943) and Apache (1954).This is relevent because it shows that the serials (which lasted all the way into 1955) were pretty violent. Fortunilty the high body count that tended to go with a serial didn't extend to the Superman serials of 1948 and 1950. The fun thing is thanks to National Periodical Publications (DC) refusing Republic in 1941 they blew the chance for Superman to be the first major comic book character in a live action serial. That honor will forever go to Captain Marvel.

Having just presented an academic paper dealing partly with the 18th-Century origins of the graphic novel, I appreciate your repeated linking to the Platinum history web-site.  Now maybe I'll learn something!  :)

(I urge everyone interested in comics history to check out the essay on Platinum/Victorian Age Comics by Robert Beerbohm et al in the Overstreet Price Guide. Beerbohm also maintains a great discussion group on Yahoo about pre-1940 comics.)

But I stand by my original statement: regardless of actual comics history, it seems apparent from the context of his remarks that Defender was referring to what most people think of as the American comic book/superhero (1930s-present). Any other reading is just pointless nitpicking and flame-fanning.  Accidents, one-offs, and contested definitions of superhero (vs costumed adventurer, etc) notwithstanding.  After all, what's a few years between friends?

And for the record, a good case can be made that the first modern-size comic book was actually the first US comic ever, the Brother Jonathan printing of Rudolph Topffer's Obadiah Oldbuck, circa 1840.

And I stand by my original statement that some of the concepts Holy Superheroes review (http://www.baptiststandard.com/postnuke/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=3433) are incorrect. For example the review talks about Batman having an "Old Testament-style justice" but once he dropped the gun Batman never directly killed which contradicts the Old Testament's view of an 'eye for an eye and a life for a life'. Also it is stated that the code against killing was broken only 20 years ago when in fact many examples in and out ide the main stream books can be found (especially in the so called 'clean' Golden Age)  Also the whole moral issue theme is a problem when you deal with some of the more distasteful things Superman espcially did in the Silver and Bronze ages.

Agreed, the article (and, I would imagine, the book) if fairly crappy, if not downright ignorant.

Well the Amazon reviews of Holy Superheroes (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1576835766/qid=1118925584/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/103-0136250-1814225?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) and Who Needs A Superhero? (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801065100/ref=pd_sim_b_1/103-0136250-1814225?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance) are not that promicing but then atain there is really too few revies to got a real idea on either book. Personally I think there there are enough themes in comic books that you could make them portry any idea you had (even some pretty hair brained ones ala Seduction of the Innocent and Seduction of the Innocent Revisited)

The problem is when you really look at comic books you quickly realize they were inconsitant with the way they did characters and were more a reflection of the times they were written. But once you try to link them to an ideal then you have problems.

For example if Superman was some sort of moral giant where was he during the Korean and Vietnam wars? DC's out of the JSA disbanding as the result of a Mccarthy-like witch hunt (which has never really been explained) doesn't work for Superman as since he never wore a mask there was no reason to believe he had a 'secret idenity' (an idea never really delt with until after the Bronze Age).

Of course this is the problem when you 'plug in' Superheroes into our history. Once you add Superheroes to the equation then you have a lot of problems trying to get history to follow our course. Watchman did it right in making a world very different from our own as a result of the Superheroes' actions. Because they were seen as a national asset Mccarthism never happened and comics largely abandoned the superheroe genre and went to story lines that made EC's stuff look like Little Orphan Annie by comparison.

Marvel which has  tried to plug its heroes in the 'real world' has similar problems. In anything like our world the first time a Sentinal went out of control would have been the last time with the whole Anti-mutant movement relegated to the likes of the KKK or Aryan Nation. Instead the Sentinal program continues and the public continues to support it evenafter some Mutant take over the world loony showed how easy it would be to reprogram the robots.

I wouldn't sell Annie so short.  One of the most political comic strips ever, Little Orphan Annie's right-wing politics, religious themes, and innovative story-telling make it one of the most adult, relevant, and entertaining comics in US history.  Certainly moreso than Superman.  Check out any Annie collection from 20s-30s (or read some of the 50s strips to get a handle on how Annie and Harold Gray "reacted" to the post-war McCarthy era).

But this goes back to the point I was raising to begin with (which is why I used Little Orphan Annie as opposed to something like Life with Father wish looks like it is still around under the title Mags and Jigs) - our perception of what we thing something was and what it really was are often at odds. For example if you look at strips like Dick Tracy in the 1930-1950 they are by modern standard increably violent even when heavily edited as with Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy (1970) and yet people will claim that this period was 'golden age' of comic where there was little if any violent comics around. You wander just what those people are smoking.

Getting into this conversation late...by the way, I have a lot of those Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen issues, and they mostly have shock covers, and not shock stories.

As a Christian myself (though I don't always like Christians) Superman is my favorite fictional character, because I agree with the philosophy of Superman, in much the same way that I agree with the philosophy of Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King. By reading Superman stories, I am reminded of the type of person that I should be.

I think Mark Waid said it best...Superman should possess a super morality. Sure, the character has changed over time, but in the beginning he was the "champion of the oppressed"...is that not what Christians should be? He went on to fight Nazis, the KKK, Nuclear Weapons, and the Devil himself (C.W. Saturn.) The oath against killing is an added bonus. What if Christians were to tackle all the world's problems, like Superman Red and Superman Blue?

Heck, Superman was even put to death by Continuity Pharisees. But that's for another post...

The problem is the solution Superman Red and Superman Blue come up with is roughtly the same one Neo-Queen Serenity used and in all likelyhood eventually have the same disasterous results. In fact there was another Superman story in which a group of aliens retroactively eliminate all evil and effectively throw Earth back to the stone age because without evil and conflict you wind up with a Lotist Eaters effect - there is no drive to improve things. This why the insanely weak Dark Moon Family was able to virtually conquer Earth in the 30th century but got their heads handed to them in the 20th; instead of improving the powers of Neo-Queen serenity and her Sailor Senshi had actaully deminished because there was nothing to challange them.

The old EC comics had a similar story where a good Christian doctor dies and of course goes to heaven. But his drive to help his fellow human beigns is so strong that the perfection of heave drives him nuts. Taking an old back stair to Hell he promply sets up practices and makes a general nucence of himself. Tied of the doctors antics and unable to do anything to him since he does not belong in Hell in the first place the Devil sends the guy back to Earth. In his hospital bed when asked what it was like he thinks of the of the fire and brimstone of Hell and replies "It was Heaven."

Twilight Zone had a similar theme in "A Nice Place to Visit" where a petty crook named Valatine gets everything he ever wanted. Here is the way the episode ends:

Rocky Valentine: 'There must have been a mistake.  Send me to the Other Place because if I stay in Heaven one more day I'll go crazy.'

Pip: "Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven Mr.
Valentine?  This is the Other Place!"

A episode with a similar theme shows up in Night Gallery: "Hell's Bells"

A hippy dies and finds himself in a room with Lawrence Walk records as far
as the eye can see, and boring man and then two vacationers come in with
their 8,500 slides of their Mexican trip.  Yelling for the Devil he is told there is an identical room Up There for people for which this would be heaven as which point the Devil leaves the hippy to his own personal verison of Hell.