The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  He was barren of desire to investigate deeper into the philosophy of himself. All people turned aside by fate fall into the same morass. Except in his strength, Hugo was pitifully like all people: wounds could easily be opened in his sensitiveness; his moral courage could be taxed to the fringe of dilemma; he looked upon his fellow men sometimes with awe at the variety of high places they attained in spite of the heavy handicap of being human—he looked upon them again with repugnance—and very rarely, as he grew older, did such inspections of his kind include a study of the difference between them and him made by his singular gift. When that thought entered his mind, it gave rise to peculiar speculations.

  He approached thirty, he thought, and still the world had not re-echoed with his name; the trumps, banners, and cavalcade of his glory had been only shadows in the sky, dust at sunset that made evanescent and intangible colors. Again, he thought, the very perfection of his prowess was responsible for its inapplicability; if he but had an Achilles’ heel so that his might could taste the occasional tonic of inadequacy, then he could meet the challenge of possible failure with successful effort. More frequently he condemned his mind and spirit for not being great enough to conceive a mission for his thews. Then he would fall into a reverie, trying to invent a creation that would be as magnificent as the destructions he could so easily envision.

  In such a painful and painstaking mood he was carried over the Alleghenies and out on the Western plains. He changed trains at Chicago without having slept, and all he could remember of the journey was a protracted sorrow, a stabbing consciousness of Roseanne, dulled by his last picture of her, and a hopeless guessing of what she thought about him now.

  Hugo’s mother met him at the station. She was unaltered, everything was unaltered. The last few instants in the vestibule of the train had been a series of quick remembrances; the whole countryside was like a long-deserted house to which he had returned. The mountains took on a familiar aspect, then the houses, then the dingy red station. Lastly his mother, upright and uncompromisingly grim, dressed in her perpetual mourning of black silk. Her recognition of Hugo produced only the slightest flurry and immediately she became mundane.

  “Whatever made you come in those clothes?”

  “I was working outdoors, mother. I got right on a train. How is father?”

  “Sinking slowly.”

  “I’m glad I’m in time.”

  “It’s God’s will.” She gazed at him. “You’ve changed a little, son.”

  “I’m older.” He felt diffident. A vast gulf had risen between this vigorous, religious woman and himself.

  She opened a new topic. “Whatever in the world made you send us all that money?”

  Hugo smiled. “Why—I didn’t need it, mother. And I thought it would make you and father happy.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps. It has done some good. I’ve sent four missionaries out in the field and I am thinking of sending two more. I had a new addition put on the church, for the drunkards and the fallen. And we put a bathroom in the house. Your father wanted two, but I wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Have you got a car?”

  “Car? I couldn’t use one of those inventions of Satan. Your father made me hire this one to meet you. There’s Anna Blake’s house. She married that fellow she was flirting with when you went away. And there’s our house. It was painted last month.”

  Now all the years had dropped away and Hugo was a child again, an adolescent again. The car stopped.

  “You can go right up. He’s in the front room. I’ll get lunch.”

  Hugo’s father was lying on the bed watching the door. A little wizened old man with a big head and thin yellow hands. Illness had made his eyes rheumy, but they lighted up when his son entered, and he half raised himself.

  “Hello, father.”

  “Hugo! You’ve come back.”

  “Yes, father.”

  “I’ve waited for you. Sit down here on the bed. Move me over a little. Now close the door. Is it cold out? I was afraid you might not get here. I was afraid you might get sick on the train. Old people are like that, Hugo.” He shaded his eyes. “You aren’t a very big man, son. Somehow I always remembered you as big. But—I suppose”—his voice thinned—“I suppose you don’t want to talk about yourself.”

  “Anything you want to hear, father.”

  “I can’t believe you came back.” He ruminated, “There were a thousand things I wanted to ask you, son—but they’ve all gone from my mind. I’m not so easy in your presence as I was when you were a little shaver.”

  Hugo knew what those questions would be. Here, on his deathbed, his father was still a scientist. His soul flinched from giving its account. He saw suddenly that he could never tell his father the truth; pity, kindredship, kindness, moved him. “I know what you wanted to ask, father. Am I still strong?” It took courage to suggest that. But he was rewarded. The old man sighed ecstatically.

  “That’s it, Hugo, my son.”

  “Then—father, I am. I grew constantly stronger when I left you. In college I was strong. At sea I was strong. In the war. First I wanted to be mighty in games and I was. Then I wanted to do services. And I did, because I could.”

  The head nodded on its feeble neck. “You found things to do? I—I hoped you would. But I always worried about you. Every day, son, every day for all these years, I picked up the papers and looked at them with misgivings. ‘Suppose,’ I said to myself, ‘suppose my boy lost his temper last night. Suppose someone wronged him and he undertook to avenge himself.’ I trusted you, Hugo. I could not quite trust—the other thing. I’ve even blamed myself and hated myself.” He smiled. “But it’s all right—all right. So I am glad. Then, tell me—what—what—”

  “What have I done?”

  “Do you mind? It’s been so long and you were so far away.”

  “Well—” Hugo swept his memory back over his career—“so many things, father. It’s hard to recite one’s own—”

  “I know. But I’m your father, and my ears ache to hear.”

  “I saved a man pinned under a wagon. I saved a man from a shark. I pulled open a safe in which a man was smothering. Many things like that. Then—there was the war.”

  “I know. I know. When you wrote that you had gone to war, I was frightened—and happy. Try as I might, I could not think of a great constructive cause for you to enter. I had to satisfy myself by thinking that you could find such a cause. Then the war came. And you wrote that you were in it. I was happy. I am old, Hugo, and perhaps my nationalism and my patriotism are dead. Sides in a war did not seem to matter. But peace mattered to me, and I thought—I hoped that you could hasten peace. Four years, Hugo. Your letters said nothing. Four years. And then it stopped. And I understood. War is property fighting property, not David fighting Goliath. The greatest David would be unavailing now. Even you could do little enough.”

  “Perhaps not so little, father.”

  “There were things, then?”

  Hugo could not disappoint his father with the whole formidable truth. “Yes.” He lied with a steady gaze. “I stopped the war.”

  “You!”

  “After four years I perceived the truth of what you have just said. War is a mistake. It is not sides that matter. The object of war is to make peace. On a dark night, father, I went alone into the enemy lines. For one hundred miles that night I upset every gun, I wrecked every ammunition train, I blew up every dump—every arsenal that is. Alone I did it. The next day they asked for peace. Remember the false armistice? Somehow it leaked out that there would be victory and surrender the next night—because of me. Only the truth about me was never known. And a day later—it came.”

  The weak old man was transported. He raised himself up on his elbows. “You did that! Then all my work was not in vain. My dream and my prayer were justified! Oh, Hugo, you can never know how glad I am you came and told me this. How glad.”

  He repeated his expression of joy until his tongue was weary; then he fell
back. Hugo sat with shining eyes during the silence that followed. His father at length groped for a glass of water. Strength returned to him. “I could ask for no more, son. And yet we are petulant, insatiable creatures. What is doing now? The world is wicked. Yet it tries half-heartedly to rebuild itself. One great deed is not enough—or are you tired?”

  Hugo smiled. “Am I ever tired, father? Am I vulnerable?”

  “I had forgotten. It is so hard for the finite mind to think beyond itself. Not tired. Not vulnerable. No. There was Samson—the cat.” He was embarrassed. “I hurt you?”

  “No, father.” He repeated it. Every gentle fall of the word “father” from his lips and every mention of “son” by his father was rare privilege, unfamiliar elixir to the old man. His new lie took its cue from Abednego Danner’s expressions. “My work goes on. Now it is with America. I expect to go to Washington soon to right the wrongs of politics and government. Vicious and selfish men I shall force from their high places. I shall secure the idealistic and the courageous.” It was a theory he had never considered, a possible practice born of necessity. “The pressure I shall bring against them will be physical and mental. Here a man will be driven from his house mysteriously. There a man will slip into the limbo. Yonder an inconspicuous person will suddenly be braced by a new courage; his enemies will be gone and his work will progress unhampered. I shall be an invisible agent of right—right as best I can see it. You understand, father?”

  Abednego smiled like a happy child. “I do, son. To be you must be splendid.”

  “The most splendid thing on earth! And I have you to thank, you and your genius to tender gratitude to. I am merely the agent. It is you that created and the whole world that benefits.”

  Abednego’s face was serene—not smug, but transfigured. “I yearned as you now perform. It is strange that one cloistered mortal can become inspired with the toil and lament of the universe. Yet there is a danger of false pride in that, too. I am apt to fall into the pit because my cup is so full here at the last. And the greatest problem of all is not settled.”

  “What problem?” Hugo asked in surprise.

  “Why, the problem that up until now has been with me day and night. Shall there be made more men like you—and women like you?”

  The idea staggered Hugo. It paralyzed him and he heard his father’s voice come from a great distance. “Up in the attic in the black trunk are six notebooks wrapped in oilpaper. They were written in pencil, but I went over them carefully in ink. That is my life-work, Hugo. It is the secret—of you. Given those books, a good laboratory worker could go through all my experiments and repeat each with the same success. I tried a little myself. I found out things—for example, the effect of the process is not inherited by the future generations. It must be done over each time. It has seemed to me that those six little books—you could slip them all into your coat pocket—are a terrible explosive. They can rip the world apart and wipe humanity from it. In malicious hands they would end life. Sometimes, when I became nervous waiting for the newspapers, waiting for a letter from you, I have been sorely tempted to destroy them. But now—”

  “Now?” Hugo echoed huskily.

  “Now I understand. There is no better keeping for them than your own. I give them to you.”

  “Me!”

  “You, son. You must take them, and the burden must be yours. You have grown to manhood now and I am proud of you. More than proud. If I were not, I myself would destroy the books here on this bed. Matilda would bring them and I would watch them burn so that the danger would go with—” he cleared his throat—“my dream.”

  “But—”

  “You cannot deny me. It is my wish. You can see what it means. A world grown suddenly—as you are.”

  “I, father—”

  “You have not avoided responsibility. You will not avoid this, the greatest of your responsibilities. Since the days when I made those notes—what days!—biology has made great strides. For a time I was anxious. For a time I thought that my research might be rediscovered. But it cannot be. Theory has swung in a different direction.” He smiled with inner amusement. “The opticians have decided that the microscope I made is impossible. The biochemists, moving through the secretions of such things as hippuric acid in the epithelial cells, to enzymes, to hormones, to chromosomes, have put a false construction on everything. It will take hundreds, thousands of years to see the light. The darkness is so intense and the error so plausible that they may never see again exactly as I saw. The fact of you, at best, may remain always no more than a theory. This is not vanity. My findings were a combination of accidents almost outside the bounds of mathematical probability. It is you who must bear the light.”

  Hugo felt that now, indeed, circumstance had closed around him and left him without succor or recourse. He bowed his head. “I will do it, father.”

  “Now I can die in peace—in joy.”

  With an almost visible wrench Hugo brought himself back to his surroundings. “Nonsense, father. You’ll probably get well.”

  “No, son. I’ve studied the progress of this disease in the lower orders—when I saw it imminent. I shall die—not in pain, but in sleep. But I shall not be dead—because of you.” He held out his hand for Hugo.

  Some time later the old professor fell asleep and Hugo tiptoed from the room. Food was sizzling downstairs in the kitchen, but he ignored it, going out into the sharp air by the front door. He hastened along the streets and soon came to the road that led up the mountain. He climbed rapidly, and when he dared, he discarded the tedious little steps of all mankind. He reached the side of the quarry where he had built the stone fort, and seated himself on a ledge that hung over it. Trees, creepers, and underbrush had grown over the place, but through the October-stripped barricade of their branches he could see a heap of stones that was his dolmen, on which the hieroglyph of him was inscribed.

  Two tears scalded his cheeks; he trembled with the welter of his emotions. He had failed his father, failed his trust, failed the world; and in the abyss of that grief he could catch no sight of promise or hope. Having done his best, he had still done nothing, and it was necessary for him to lie to put the thoughts of a dying man to rest. The pity of that lie! The folly of the picture he had painted of himself—Hugo Danner the scourge of God, Hugo Danner the destroying angel, Hugo Danner the hero of a quick love-affair that turned brown and dead like a plucked flower, the sentimental soldier, the involuntary misanthrope.

  “I must do it!” he whispered fiercely. The ruined stones echoed the sound of his voice with a remote demoniac jeer. Do what? What, strong man? What?

  The Great Comic Book Heroes

  JULES FEIFFER

  Reprinted by permission of the author from The Great Comic Book Superheroes (Bonanza Books, 1965), section nine.

  HAD I ONLY BEEN SIX YEARS OLDER I COULD HAVE BEEN IN COMIC BOOKS FROM almost the beginning: carting my sample case in the spring of 1939 instead of 1945; a black cardboard folio with inside overlapping side sheets, secured tight with black bows on its three unbound corners, containing 14 x 22 pages of Bristol board on which could be drawn typical adventure swipes of the day, inked with as slick a Caniff line as one could evoke at sixteen—a series of thick and thin brush strokes wafted onto the paper with the lightest, most characterless of touches. Draftsmanship was not the point here—this was technique!

  Going the rounds then: checking the inside glossy covers of comic books for names and addresses, riding the subway out of the Bronx in the morning rush, my portfolio on the deck, squeezed tightly between my legs so that the crowd could not bruise it, nor art thieves steal it. The bigger houses—so official looking—would have scared me, and then dismissed me for lack of experience. How are you supposed to get experience when no one will give you experience? The answer: to begin low—at one of the countless schlock houses grinding out the junk in small, brutal-looking offices all over town. These, the cheapie houses, were where one got the first breaks. Not being worth anythi
ng, no one else worth anything would hire you. But the schlock houses operated as way stations for both the beginners and the talentless.

  Artists sat lumped in crowded rooms, knocking it out for the page rate. Penciling, inking, lettering in the balloons for $10 a page, sometime less; working from yellow typescripts that on the left described the action, on the right gave the dialogue. A decaying old radio, wallpapered with dirty humor, talked race results by the hour. Half-finished coffee containers turned old and petrified. The “editor,” who’d be in one office that week, another the next, working for companies that changed names as often as he changed jobs, sat at a desk or a drawing table—an always beefy man who, if he drew, did not do it well, making it that much more galling when he corrected your work and you knew he was right. His job was to check copy, check art, hand out assignments, pay the artists money when he had it, promise the artists money when he didn’t. Everyone got paid if he didn’t mind going back week after week. Everyone got paid if he didn’t mind occasionally pleading.

  The schlock houses were the art schools of the business. Working blind but furiously, working from swipes, working from the advice of others who drew better because they were in the business two weeks longer, one, suddenly, learned how to draw. It happened in spurts. Nothing for a while: not being able to catch on, not being able to foreshorten correctly, or get perspectives straight or get the blacks to look right. Then suddenly: a breakthrough. One morning you can draw forty per cent better than you could when you quit the night before. Then, again you coast. Your critical abilities improve but your talent won’t. Nothing works. Despair. Then another breakthrough. Magically, it keeps happening. Soon it stops being magic, just becomes education.