It was a toy world, too, observed through the wrong end of a telescope. Boring made eternity tiny, capable of being held in two small hands. He reduced the infinite to fit in a cameo, and he did this in service to the great insight of the Weisinger era: that human emotions can grow to overwhelm the vastnesses of space and endless time. Wayne Boring’s tight, repressed lines were necessary to contain and shape the thunderous outpouring of Dionysian Sturm und Drang that animated the pages.
These stories were all about emotion. Fifties Superman plunged into great surging tides of feelings so big and unashamed that they could break a young heart or blind the stars. The socialist power fantasies, the jingoistic propaganda and gimmick adventures that had defined the previous twenty years of Superman adventures, gave way to cataclysmic tales of love and loss, guilt, grief, friendship, judgment, terror, and redemption, biblical in their scale and primal purity. And always, Weisinger’s godlike Superman became more like us than ever before. He was fifties America with its atom-powered fist, its deadly archenemy, its brave allies. Like America, he was a flawed colossus, protector of Earth from the iron-walled forces of tyranny and yet, somehow, riven from within by a gnawing guilt, a growing uncertainty, a fear of change, and a terror of conformity.
Weisinger was in therapy, and he used the material from his sessions as raw plot ore for his writers to process into story material. The editor’s entire psychology was stretched naked on the dissecting table via some of the most outlandish and unashamed deployments of pure symbolic content that the comics had ever seen. Its like would not be truly viewed again, in fact, until the drug-inspired cosmic comics of the early seventies.
For example, there was the bottle city of Kandor. Kandor had been the capital city of Superman’s home world Krypton, thought destroyed. Shrunken and preserved by the villain Brainiac, Kandor was now a tiny city in a bell jar. This living diorama, this ant colony of real people, had great appeal for children, adding to the childlike nature of this era’s Superman. In Kandor, lost memories were preserved under glass, and Superman could go there, in private, to experience a world he left behind. Kandor was every snow globe and music box that stood for every bittersweet memory in every movie there would ever be. Kandor was the tinkling voice of a lost world, a past that might have been, unreachable. Kandor was survivor’s guilt endowed with new meaning.
Fifties Superman found himself domesticated at the heart of a strange nuclear family of friends, foes, and relatives. Weisinger had taken his lessons from Captain Marvel and his Family. Many of his favorite writers, like Otto Binder and Edmond Hamilton, had contributed to the Captain Marvel mythos and were able to adapt that style to suit a new kind of dream world that was more pointed, angular, and paranoid. This was the nuclear family glowing in the dark. No longer the last survivor of a lost alien civilization, Superman was joined by an entire photo album’s worth of new supercompanions. He’d already gained his own superdog, named Krypto, and now discovered that he had a pretty blond cousin named Kara Zor-El, who’d also managed to survive the destruction of Krypton, along with a supermonkey, Beppo. There were stories of Superman as a boy (Superboy) and as a comically superpowered infant (Superbaby). Lois Lane was popular enough to graduate to her own monthly comic book. So too did Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.
The young Olsen had no sooner installed himself within the pages of his own title than he began to experience a series of fantastic physical contortions typical of the Silver Age. A sampling of stories from Olsen’s solo title showed the results as he metamorphosed into a porcupine boy, a giant turtle, a wolfman, Elastic Lad, and a “human skyscraper,” with no pause for reflection. These transformations never produced any lasting ill effects or neuroses.
So great was the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday that even Superboy’s small-town sweetheart, red-haired Lana Lang, the hometown girl deluxe, began her own dual career as Insect Lass, using an “alien ring” to reorganize the slim-legged, petite figure of a Kansas homecoming queen into the bulbous abdomen and crawling feelers of a giant wasp or monster moth, with a shapely human torso and head that made it ten times more disturbing. Like Jimmy, Lana experienced no body horror or psychological trauma when she inflated her trim teenage stomach into a monstrous spider belly, clacked her chitinous forelegs together, and played out superhard silk from spinnerets where her normal midwestern buttocks should be. Had Franz Kafka’s mild-mannered accountant Gregor Samsa been born to the sunshine of the emergent DC universe, he might have pressed his incredible new cockroach powers into action in the fight against crime and injustice. Before too long, he would have been invited to join the Justice League. Kafka never once paused to consider that his outcasts could be heroic like the X-Men, freakishly glamorous like Jimmy Olsen, or as gorgeous as trendsetting Pulitzer Prize winner Lois Lane.
When not under alien influence, Jimmy Olsen could barely stand to be himself for more than five pages and maintained a much-resorted-to “disguise kit” in times of emergency. Prefiguring David Bowie or Madonna, his life became a shifting parade of costume changes and reinventions of identity. And long before those two performers were challenging the boundaries of masculine and feminine, Olsen was deconstructing the macho stereotype in a sequence of soft-core gender-blending adventures for children that beggar belief when read today.
The three unforgettable transvestite Olsen tales, including “Miss Jimmy Olsen,” can be summed up by the following heart-fluttering caption that opens the lead story in Jimmy Olsen no. 95:
IF YOU EVER WONDERED TO WHAT EXTREME LENGTHS JIMMY OLSEN WOULD GO TO GET A NEWSPAPER SCOOP, WAIT TILL YOU SEE JIMMY IN OPERATION AS A MEMBER OF THE FAIR SEX! YES, READERS. SUPERMAN’S YOUNG PAL UNDERGOES A DRASTIC CHANGE OF IDENTITY AND PUTS HIS HIGH-HEELED FEET INTO A HUGE MESS OF TROUBLE WHEN HE BECOMES THE SWEETHEART OF GANGLAND.
These words accompany a picture of Jimmy mincing past a mailbox in a green dress while a group of admiring men whoop and check out his ass.
“HA! HA! THOSE WOLVES WOULD DROP DEAD IF THEY KNEW THAT UNDER THIS FEMALE DISGUISE BEATS THE VERY MASCULINE HEART OF PLANET REPORTER JIMMY OLSEN!” read the smirking, transvestite Olsen’s thought balloon.
The salacious, winking quality of the phrasing suggested an immaculate deconstruction of the masculine adventure genre into the arena of showbiz, shifting identities, and anything-goes sexuality.
Jimmy became a mobster’s moll, even joining a chorus line and proving that he could high-kick with the best of the showgirls. Bestiality reared its shaggy head when Jimmy was forced to substitute the lips of a slobbering chimp named Dora for his own during a tense romantic moment in a dimly lit apartment. Believing the mouth of the ape in question to be the fragrant glossy red lips of Jimmy Olsen, racketeer Big Monte McGraw melted into the simian’s lewd embrace while Jimmy made a hasty getaway. The level of derangement was high. These were stories that could never happen in the real world, even if there was a Superman. This was now a world all its own, living inside our own, growing, getting smarter and more elaborate.
Artist Curt Swan drew the cub reporter as outrageously attractive in his makeup and a red wig. In heels and stockings, Olsen looked like he’d wandered in off a Pussycat Dolls video shoot. And there were a few gloriously disorienting panels where, sans wig, he was seen talking to Superman while still casually dressed in a pink dressing gown, fluffy slippers, and movie star makeup.
And yet, if it was okay for Olsen, wasn’t it okay? I grew up with this idea of the disguise kit and the performance, the idea of both body and identity as canvas. When I adopted as a role model the shape-shifting, bisexual assassin Jerry Cornelius from Michael Moorcock’s novels, I was following in the footsteps of Jimmy Olsen. Olsen played in bands, and so did I. Olsen was freewheeling and nonjudgmental, even in the fifties, and so was I. If it was cool with Superman’s pal, it was A-OK with me. Clearly these stories were written by perverts with an intent to pervert the young. They were entirely successful.
The transvestite Olsen stories seem deeply
rooted in the underground world of mimeographed porn mags and the bondage comics of Eric Stanton, whose studio also employed a certain Joe Shuster, Superman creator. The language used recalls stories like Panty Raid (discussed at length by Robert J. Stoller, M.D., in his 1985 book Observing the Erotic Imagination) and other 1950s transgender tales in which hunky young jocks got more than they bargained for when a trip to the sorority house turned into a forced initiation into the pleasures of female underwear and makeup. The difference being that Olsen was fully in control of his transformations and could hardly wait more than a couple of pages to get them under way.
At the same time, Superman’s treatment of Lois became more cruel and misogynistic, while she became more shrewish and snoopy. It was hard to match this often boorish, devious brute of a man to any popular conception of Superman, and yet here he was lying, deceiving, and thwarting her dreams of matrimony over and over again while Lois fumed and plotted.
(illustration credit 5.1)
Superman’s fear of commitment was a significant, perhaps dominant, feature of his Silver Age adventures. It was as if all the sublimated resentment of fifties men, home from the excitement of the war to the nine-to-five and to ticky-tacky houses in suburbia, seethed between the covers.
Those echoes were never louder than in Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane no. 73, which allowed into this fragile world of sanity an image so peculiar that words alone are not capable of doing justice to it. The story inside was tame fare by comparison, but Weisinger’s trademark self-searching ability to transform every dirty subconscious coal into the gem of an idea was never more evident than here. This was a Jungian bowel movement rendered as a story for children. The kind of behavior this primed young boys to expect from their own future girlfriends was more obscene than the blow jobs, boob jobs, and anal entry they now expect as a result of boring old Internet porn. Superman was educating a generation of sadomasochistic swingers with tastes trending beyond the outré.
As we look again in disbelief or amusement at this outlandish image, stop to consider how ten years previously, the portrayal of Lois Lane had been one of a fairly convincing hard-nosed lady reporter in a man’s world, while Jimmy Olsen had been portrayed as a somewhat believable cub photographer making his way on a big-city paper. In that context these images ripped bleeding from the fantastic nightside of the American imagination become even more provocative and outrageous.
Was the hostility Weisinger’s or that of his writers? He was, after all, a notoriously mean-spirited man. Was fifties Superman a product of his age, a backlash against emancipation and a postwar desire to get the working gals of WWII back into the kitchen and the bedroom before they got too serious about building aircraft, voting, or even making comics?
Or was this less an adult approach to sexual politics than an attempt to depict Superman’s attitude toward women in ways—“Ugh! Girls!”—a ten-year-old boy might relate to? Superman and his cast could be all of these. They were in flux, slippery and eager to adapt in order to ensure their own continued survival. As ideas they could change shape to speak to the fears and fantasies of a postwar generation and its armies of children.
There is, of course, a third reason for the viciousness of male-female power relationships in fifties superhero comics. As the Comics Code explicitly states:
Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and base emotions.
The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.
The young men and women who wrote and drew these stories were no fools—they were artists on the fringes, marginalized and despised. Perhaps the rejected outsiders who created these comics were taking their revenge on society by exposing the curdled power politics that lay beneath the clipped lawns, starched shirts, and baking aprons of 1950s America. Maybe the distorted lives of Silver Age superheroes were a deliberate, scabrous attempt to sneak social commentary and satire under the noses of the censors. The creators of post–Comics Code superhero comics followed the diktat of the CMA to the letter, while at the same time exposing postwar relationships as hotbeds of abnormality, where women were ring-chasing harridans and men were quivering puer aeternae terrified of responsibility.
On a particular favorite cover of mine, Superman watched, helplessly emasculated, as his girlfriends Lois and Lana paraded past him, each with a different historical strongman on her arm.
“LOIS! LANA!” Superman exclaimed meekly. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH HERCULES AND SAMSON?”
“WE’RE ON THE WAY TO THE MARRIAGE LICENSE BUREAU!” Lois chirped proudly. “I’M GOING TO BE MRS. HERCULES!”
“AND I’M GOING TO BE MRS. SAMSON!” tittered Lana. It was a bold and unforgettable lesson for young male readers: This was what happened when you couldn’t make decisions or offer any lasting commitment. Samson pounced on your best girl. And for Superman, it was a horrific challenge to his modernity. Was he really no better than these archaic toughs? Or could he prove himself stronger, faster than any previous man-god?
As a further irony, girls still read these comics too; for all the stories’ undercurrents of fear, of commitment, and of women as predators intent on robbing men of their independence, the energy that drives them can also be read as essentially feminine, favoring stories about relationships and strong emotions. This made them popular with children of both sexes. These stories liquefied the armored hard body of the wartime supersoldiers and patriotic strongmen. This was Superman on the analyst’s couch after almost twenty years of unconscious adventuring, finally letting the freakishness, the alien-ness, all hang out. America was in therapy too, and along with all the insights and the wonders of the interior, poison was being squeezed out. Fears were being lanced like boils, expressed in the art, music, and popular culture of the time.
Outsider culture, in the form of Lenny Bruce, the Beats, and the bohos, was developing a new bardic language to express things that had until now haunted the echoing four-in-the-morning thoughts of men and women in a world they could barely make sense of from cradle to grave. They said things everyone had felt but never dared articulate because it was forbidden by consensus. A new willingness—an especially American willingness—not to mock but to learn from the fringes was opening up the country to its sexuality, its fears and fantasies of freedom and slavery, emancipation and mind control, man and machine. It was time for new dreams to replace the derelict, bombed-out, and vacant shells of the old. The future would not be denied.
Fifties Superman cheerfully embodied every human terror on our behalf: In a succession of early Silver Age adventures, he became monstrously obese, insect headed, a Frankenstein’s monster, a lion-faced outcast, a dome-headed, emotionless “future man,” and a senile, doddering granddad flying with the aid of a knobbly cane.
In each case, the perfect man was made finally to experience all the horrors of being different, growing old, or mutating into any of the many ugly distortions of normality that haunted buttoned-down Normalville, USA, in those days of monster films and fears of mutation. It often seemed as though the most awful thing one could be in Superman’s world was not a monster or an evil genius but old, fat, and bald. Each new transformation inflicted on him some fundamental human suffering. The strongman went soft at the edge and could no longer contain his own shape. To survive, he had to endure, wait for the story’s inevitable cycle to return him to normality within the new hierarchical structure of the Daily Planet office and Superman’s superlife of pets and fortresses, time machines and alien relatives.
And it wasn’t only Superman: His entire supporting cast of reporters and grocery store owners was subject to inhuman forces of transformation on a monthly basis. Lois Lane became Lois Lane the Witch of Metropolis—a hag on a broomstick casting ghastly vaporous spells in Superman’s direction—or Phantom Lois, Baby Lois, even Super Lois. The familiar faces of Superman cast stalwarts became grotesque, unloved, undergoing cyclical trials that tested t
heir foundational concepts to the outermost limits, in the way that children would stretch an elastic band: so far, not too far, but nearly. The heroes learned their lessons and forgot them in time for the next issue, in order to present those lessons in a new form. This was the world of dreams, complexes, the twilight territory of Dr. Freud’s unconscious, where the body was formless and metamorphic. Adolescent themes prevailed and formed the basis for perfect superhero stories.
Weisinger-era Superman was a remarkable feat of imagination and reinvention. Jerry Siegel himself rose to the challenge, taking his original concept further than ever before. In beautiful stories such as “Superman’s Return to Krypton,” he reached a stylistic peak he would find hard to surpass. As the title suggested, time travel allowed Superman to return to the world of his birth before its destruction. There, powerless under the red sun of Krypton, he met his own parents as a young couple and found his eternal soul mate in the ravishing Lyla Lerrol, a Kryptonian actress whose life was ultimately as doomed as all the others on that ill-starred orb.
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