by Val Ross
Hone Heke’s rage was unabated. He’d been talking to Americans in town about their revolution, and had taken to flying the American flag on his war canoe – a reminder that British colonies that were mistreated could always rebel. On March 11, 1845, he and an ally, a respected old warrior named Kawiti, took action again. While Kawiti and his men went to the town and created a diversion, Hone Heke went back up Flagstaff Hill. Perhaps he stripped off the metal sheath. In any case, when the townspeople looked up, they saw their flag and flagpole crashing down a fourth time.
The white people knew that this defiance meant war. Most of them panicked and fled. British ships offshore fired on Kororareka. Dodging cannonfire, the warriors raced through the streets and looted some of the stores and homes. In the evening the sky was reddened by flames as the “hellhole of the Pacific” was set on fire.
The Northern War was now underway, and Hone Heke was a marked man. Yet he, Kawiti, and other rebel chiefs outsmarted the mighty troops of the British Empire time and time again. Armed with guns, many Maori turned out to be brilliant guerrilla warriors. They lured the British troops into ambushes and fired on them from the undergrowth. Good at mimicry, they would yell phony commands in perfect English accents to confuse enemy soldiers. Pretending to be drunk, they lured the pakeha into more ambushes. Knowing how appalled the Europeans were by the old Maori tradition of eating the flesh of their enemies, they taunted the British with calls of “Put the fat boys in front!”
The British were dismayed. Their losses were higher than they had expected, and the Maori were proving to be very good at engineering trenches and fortifications that could withstand British guns. How could mere natives beat British troops? For twenty years the skirmishes raged on. Hone Heke died in 1850 of tuberculosis, a disease brought to the islands by the settlers. Only after his death was a flagpole again raised on the hill overlooking Kororareka. In the end, Maori warriors weren’t defeated so much as overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of pakeha settlers who kept arriving on their shores.
For more than a century, Maori kept up their fight by other means – demonstrations, court challenges, protests, occupations, and political activism. Finally, in 1975, the New Zealand government established the Waitangi Tribunal. Its job was – and still is – to study both versions of the treaty, and to decide on problems resulting from the differences. For example, if a Maori family own a parcel of land, does that mean they own what is under the land – mining rights? Do they own all the fish in the rivers that flow through their land?
Hone Heke, by John Alexander Gilfillan, a Scottish art professor who emigrated to New Zealand in 1841. He drew this in 1846. The next year, his wife and three of his children were killed by Maori, and Gilfillan left for Australia.
The tribunal hasn’t ended the problems, but it has pushed things further toward a resolution than ever before. In 1995 Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, formally apologized to certain Maori tribes for breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. If Hone Heke were still alive, would he be ready to let the flagpole stand? Would he be satisfied that all New Zealanders were trying to read and interpret the treaty in a fair way?
The Evil World of – Comic Books?
IT ISN’T ONLY words and ideas in print that can alarm the authorities. A new form of publishing may seem vulgar or revolutionary, or disrespectful, or attractive to the “wrong” kinds of people. If you think parents are worried about the Internet now, look at how worried some of them got about comic books in the mid-twentieth century.
nly a remarkable publication could be hated by two groups of mortal enemies, the Nazis and the anti-Nazis. Only something outrageous could provoke demands for censorship from Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini – and United States senators, and writers such as George Orwell (author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four). Well, the politics of censorship makes for strange banfellows; all these people disliked comic books – and one in particular, Superman.
Adolf Hitler, the supreme ruler of Nazi Germany, came to power by beating up his enemies, killing them, crushing free speech, and burning books. Into the Nazi bonfires went the writings of the blind and deaf Helen Keller (because the Nazis thought disabled people dragged down the master race). Reduced to ashes were books by the science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, by Albert Einstein, by novelists such as Marcel Proust and Emile Zola, and by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Help! Danger! ! Thousands in peril!!! The once-feared power of comics to depict violence and menace is now being harnessed to retell events from history. This page from the comic Explosion re-creates a tragedy that happened back in 1917. It shows a man trying to warn trains to stay away from Halifax Harbour, where a French arms ship loaded with TNT was about to collide with another ship. The two did collide, causing the largest man-made explosion until the atomic bomb.
But Superman? Why hate the Man of Steel? Wasn’t Hitler’s whole crazy philosophy about Germans being a race of supermen with beautiful bodies? About the worship of strength and power? Superman barged through doors, grabbed guns from his enemies’ hands, and ordered politicians to do whatever he wanted. Surely he was just the sort of person every young Nazi wanted to be?
For the Nazis, what mattered was not what Superman did, but what he was: a wise-cracking hero dreamed up by two Jewish American kids from Cleveland, Ohio. The man from the planet Krypton was a Jew! said Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, waving a copy of the comic book in the German government headquarters, the Reichstag, in 1940. The Nazis wanted the Jews to disappear from Earth (and presumably from outer space as well).
But why did some Americans hate comics too? Why did they try to convince the United States Senate that comic books were ruining children’s minds and morals?
Every time a new way of communicating opens up, it makes some people nervous. They sense that it will shake up the social order. The new Korean alphabet alarmed King Sejong’s scholars in the 1400s; translations of the Bible frightened church officials in the 1500s; and in the 1800s, slave-owners tried frantically to stop their slaves from reading. In the 1900s, some people sensed bad influences rising from the pages of comic books.
The censors aren’t being irrational. Ideas are powerful. And there are ideas, sometimes nasty ones, in comic books. Besides, some of the folks who published comic books back in the 1930s and 1940s really weren’t the sort of friends you’d want your children to have. They were sleazy, cigar-smoking fellows with gangster pals. Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, learned this the hard way.
Jerry Siegel was in his mid-teens when he met Joe Shuster at Glenville High, in Cleveland, around 1930. Both boys were what the school’s most popular kids would have labeled losers. Jerry had no friends. His father, a tailor, had been murdered in a robbery at his shop, and ever since, his mother had sat at home in a black depression, while Jerry retreated into a geeky, nerdy world of science fiction and horror comics. When he wasn’t reading trash, he was writing it. As for Joe, his family had moved to Cleveland from Toronto, Canada. Short, nearsighted, scrawny, he was into bodybuilding and drawing the kind of muscles he wished he had. Jerry and Joe met at the high-school newspaper and discovered that they both read pulp novels – Buck Rogers, Tarzan – and comics.
Comic strips had first appeared around 1894, when newspaper publishers realized they could sell thousands of extra copies by running drawings with stories and jokes. Right from the beginning, many parents didn’t really approve of comics. Of course, this only made kids love them more. Those early comics were usually about kids with funny accents or slangy talk, who sassed the grown-ups and got into scrapes.
Then came the 1930s and the Great Depression. Around the world, businesses were shutting down; millions of people lost their jobs. Many felt angry and hopeless. Some turned to political protest. A few turned to crime. Comics shifted from being stories about cute little rascals to being dark dramas about gangster-fighting heroes such as Dick Tracy. Jerry told Joe that he wa
nted to create his own comic, about a special kind of crime-fighter.
The boys worked so hard on Jerry’s project that they flunked their school year. This didn’t stop them. They kept trying new heroes, new plots. “It took us six years to sell Superman,” Jerry Siegel used to say. (Actually it was more like four years, but Jerry was a melodramatic storyteller.) Sometime in 1934 he came up with a script starring a broad-shouldered stranger from another planet who seemed like a nerd but had super-strength. Joe drew the new he-man throwing bad guys around like beach balls.
The boys sent their superhero comic strip off to all the pulp publishers they could think of. No one bothered to write back, but a few kept the proposal in their desk drawers. One was Charlie Gaines. A former school principal, he’d lost his job and was selling comic strips to newsstand distributors.
Two and a half years went by and still no one seemed to want Superman. The geeky boys from Cleveland went on living with their mothers, and sending obscure magazines other strips about characters such as a Chinese villain called Fui Onyui (these were casually racist times). Then it happened: Someone in Charlie Gaines’s office saw an outline of their Superman idea, and wrote to see if the boys would like to contribute a Superman story for a new magazine to be called Action Comics. The boys said yes, and worked frantically over weekends and late into the night to produce a strip.
The people who bought Action Comics No. 1 liked Superman a lot. They went back to their newsstands to place their orders for the next edition. Charlie Gaines reported this reader interest to the publisher, Harold Donenfeld, a hustler with connections to the underworld and a background in publishing magazines with half-naked women on the covers. Gaines and his boss, Donenfeld, put Superman into more editions of Action. By Action Comics’ issue No. 5, readers were embracing the Man of Steel.
By now, Europe was on the brink of war with Germany. The Americans were also feeling anxious – and what was more cheering than reading stories about a super-strong man on their side? Like so many Americans, Superman was an immigrant, someone who’d come from a world to which he could never return. He was an outsider always trying to fit in. People at his work even made fun of him. But he could burst out of the humiliation of daily life in a blaze of red-caped glory!
In 1938, Harry Donenfeld summoned the boys to Action Comics’ New York office to discuss a contract. Joe and Jerry, no doubt congratulating themselves on their own genius, took the train to New York City and signed a ten-year deal to produce so many pages a month in exchange for a salary and a share of the net profits.
Donenfeld knew, and the boys did not know, that “net profits” means whatever is left over after the accountants finish paying all other expenses – left over, that is, after Harry, Charlie, and everyone else had taken their cut. In return, Action Comics gave Jerry and Joe a deal beyond their wildest dreams – at least until their dreams caught up with Superman’s success. The boys hadn’t realized that there might be huge profits from spinoffs; they had never thought about T-shirts and TV shows. Television had been invented by that time, but it wasn’t something people had in their homes.
By 1939 Superman had his own magazine, which was selling 900,000 copies an issue. The next year The Adventures of Superman went on the radio. A comic strip about the Man of Steel was picked up by three hundred newspapers. By the end of 1941, with war raging, Superman was reaching about 35 million people, by either radio or print. And cigar-chomping Donenfeld was spending his share of the profits, millions of dollars, in the casinos of Cuba, with his mobster friends.
It was only a matter of time before the newspapers reported Donenfeld’s criminal connections. Then they dug up the fact that Donenfeld had got his start in girlie magazines. The image of comics, never wholesome, now began to seem actually sinister. Meanwhile, parents and church leaders noticed that there were a lot of people flying around in their underwear in comic books, and a lot of violence – all in all, a bad influence on young readers. “Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one,” wrote a Chicago Daily News columnist in 1940, “parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the ‘comic’ magazine.” The Daily News estimated that it had 25 million requests for reprints of this article.
Over in England, the anti-Nazi writer George Orwell warned that Superman fans had much in common with the “bully-worship” that had brought Hitler and Mussolini to power. Yet Hitler and Mussolini weren’t Superman fans either. Das Schwarze Korps, the magazine of Hitler’s ruthless Schutzstaffel police, or SS, published an article describing Jerry Siegel as “intellectually and physically circumcised,” and added that “American youth … don’t even notice the poison they swallow” when they read Superman.
But everyone else loved comics, even soldiers in the U.S. army. Every month, readers pored over Superman and the other new superheroes – Batman, Commando Yank, the Star-Spangled Kid, Captain America, and Wonder Woman – waging patriotic battles against villains with names like Baron Gestapo and Captain Nippon. Wrapped in the flag, the comic-book musclemen (and women) humiliated America’s enemies.
The war ended in 1945. So did the golden age of superhero comics. Suddenly readers turned off, perhaps feeling that the superheroes’ work was done. Instead of selling in the millions, an issue of Superman would sell a mere 700,000 copies. As the soldiers returned to ordinary civilian life, most of the comic strips, an estimated 90 percent, died off.
Comic-book publishers scrambled frantically to figure out what to try next. Some had already shifted during the war to heavy crime comics such as Crime Does Not Pay (a particularly violent strip whose cover once featured Lucky Luciano, one of Harry Donenfeld’s real-life mobster pals). By 1947, Crime Does Not Pay was outselling Captain Marvel and Superman. True-love comics were another new direction; by 1949 there were more than a hundred of them.
Charlie Gaines, the former high-school principal, thought he knew what readers wanted. He started a company named Education Comics, which put out Picture Stories from the Bible and Picture Stories from American History. But word came back from the magazine sellers that kids were trading ten Education Comics for one issue of Batman. In 1947, while Charlie was roaring around a lake in his new powerboat, he crashed the boat and died. His son William inherited the company, and discovered that it was $100,000 in debt.
Bill Gaines changed the company’s name to Entertaining Comics, and tried out new titles – Crypt of Terror and Vault of Horror. After the real horrors of the war, people were ready for melodramatic, make-believe horror that made them laugh. Young Bill and his team of writers tried to outdo each other with sick humor. In one story, a man wanders into a restaurant and discovers that it is run by vampires, with a menu offering French-fried scabs and blood cocktails. These comics were gross, but they grabbed readers.
Not everyone was amused Fredric Wertham had emigrated from Germany in the 1920s to work in New York as a psychologist specializing in troubled kids. A kind man but a snob, he didn’t think much of American culture from the start. When he noticed that many juvenile delinquents read comic books, instead of concluding that maybe ten-cent comics were all the kids could afford, he began to write articles claiming that comic books were pushing modern American youth into juvenile delinquency.
In conferences and magazines, Wertham kept up his attack. In his eyes, even the Man of Steel was disgusting – in fact, he was a closet Nazi. “Superman (with the big S on his uniform – we should, I suppose, be thankful it is not an SS) needs an endless stream of ever new sub-men, criminals and foreign-looking people,” he wrote. “Superman has long been recognized as a symbol of violent race superiority…. [He] explicitly belongs to a super race.”
Wertham’s claim drove the folks in the comic-publishing industry crazy. From Donenfeld down to Joe and Jerry they were mostly Jewish, and here was some guy with a German accent telling them that their hero was Hitler’s stooge. Worse yet, Wertham’s anti-comic campaigns were having an effect.
Fredri
c Wertham, testifying before a United States congressional committee in May 1954. Not only did he believe that comics could lead to juvenile crime, he predicted that adults would never find any value in them. Wrong on both counts; some vintage comics now sell for hundreds of dollars.
In 1948 the city of Los Angeles announced that there would be a $500 fine or six months in jail as penalty for selling crime comics to kids under eighteen. In 1951 Canada passed a law against importing U.S. crime comics. New York City cops seized thousands of copies right off newsstands. The U.S. National Congress of Parents and Teachers came up with a “plan of action” against “unwholesome” graphic magazines. People in Massachusetts piled comic books on bonfires and cheered as the pages went up in smoke.
Meanwhile, there was trouble right inside Donenfeld’s company. After signing that ten-year contract in 1938, Joe and Jerry had watched as millions of dollars in profits went to the publishers. They felt they had been ripped off. They now had families to support. Joe, who had always been near-sighted, was going blind. But the contract was coming up for renewal. Though sales of comics were down, the Superman radio show was still going strong, and Donenfeld had been talking to Hollywood film producers about a movie. Superman’s inventors wanted their share of the super-profits.
They launched a lawsuit for $5 million and the return of all Superman rights. But they were no match for Donenfeld. They had to settle not for $5 million but for $100,000 – and they owed most of that to their lawyer.
Joe and Jerry were shocked. Superman, their creation, was now other people’s property. The two friends lost their moment at the top. Jerry wrote for Superman for a while but other people were his bosses. The team of Siegel and Shuster was finished, though the two stayed friends for life.
