I’d have met, in those early days, other young cartoonists. We’d talk nothing but shop. A new world; new superheroes, new arch-villains. We’d compare swipes—and then, as our work improved, we’d disdain swipes. We’d joke about those who claimed no longer to use them but, secretly, still did. Sometimes, secretly, we still did too. Some of us would pair off, find rooms together—moving our drawing tables away from the family into the world of commercial togetherness. Eighteen hours a day of work. Sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. An occasional beer, but not too often. And nothing any stronger. One dare not slow up.
We were a generation. We thought of ourselves the way the men who began movies must have. We were out to be splendid—somehow. In the meantime, we talked at our drawing tables about Caniff, Raymond, Foster. We argued over the importance of detail. Must every button on a suit be shown? Some argued yes. The magic realists of the business. Others argued no; what one wanted, after all, was effect. The expressionists of the business. Experiments in the use of angle shots were carried on. Arguments raged: Should angle shots be used for their own sake or for the sake of furthering the story? Everyone went back to study Citizen Kane. Rumors spread that Welles, himself, had read and learned from comic books! What a great business!
The work was relentless. Some men worked in bullpens during the day free-lanced at night—a hard job to quit work at five-thirty, go home and freelance till four in the morning, get up at eight and go to a job. And the weekends were the worst. A friend would call for help: He had contracted to put together a sixty-four page package over the weekend—a new book with new titles, new heroes—to be conceived, written, drawn, and delivered to the engraver between six o’clock Friday night and eight-thirty Monday morning. The presses were reserved for nine.
Business was booming. New titles coming out by the day, too many of them drawn over a two-day weekend. Cartoonists throughout the city took their pencils, pens, brushes, and breadboards to apartments already crowded with drawing tables, fluorescent lamps, folding chairs, and crippling networks of extension cords. Writers banged out the scripts, handed them by the page to an available artist—one who was not penciling or inking his own page, or assisting on backgrounds on someone else’s job, were divided and sub-divided—or sometimes, not divided at all. An artist might not work from a script, but write his own story, in which case it would be planned in pencil right on the finished page. Some artists penciled only the figures, leaving the backgrounds for another artist who then passed the page to a lettering man who then passed the page to an inker who then might ink only the figures, or sometimes only the heads, passing the work, then, to another inker who finished the bodies and the backgrounds. Everybody worked on everybody else’s jobs. The artist who contracted the job would usually take the lead feature. Other features were parceled out indiscriminately. No one cared too much. No one was competitive. They were all too busy.
If the place being used had a kitchen, black coffee was made and remade. If not, coffee and sandwiches were sent for—no matter the hour. In mid-town Manhattan something always had to be open. Except on Sundays. A man could look for hours before he found an open delicatessen. The other artists sat working, starving: some dozing over their breadboards, others stretching out for a nap on the floor, their empty fingers twitching to the rhythm of the brush.
During heavy snow storms stores that stayed open were hard to find. A food forager I know of returned to the loft rented for the occasion, a loft devoid of kitchen, stove, hot plate, utensils, plates or can opener, with two dozen eggs and a can of beans. Desperate with rage and hunger and the need to get back to the job, the artists scraped tiles off the bathroom wall, built the tiles into a small oven, set fire to old scripts, heated the beans in the can (which was opened by hammering door keys into it with the edge of a T-square) and fried the eggs on the hot tiles. They used cold tiles for plates.
This was the birth of a new art form! A lot of talk about that: how to design better, draw better, animate a little better—so that it would jump, magically, off the page. Movies on paper—the final dream!
But even before the war the dream began to dissipate. The war finished the job. The best men went into the service. Hacks sprouted everywhere—and, with sales to armed forces booming. Hack houses also sprouted, declared bankruptcy in order to not pay their bills, then re-sprouted under new names. The page rates went up to $15 a page for penciling, $10 for inking, $2 for lettering. Scripts got $5 to $7 a page—few artists wrote their own any more. Few cared.
The business stopped being thought of as a life’s work and became a steppingstone. Five years in it at best, then on to better things: a daily strip, or illustrating for the Saturday Evening Post or getting a job with an advertising firm. If you weren’t in it for the buck, there wasn’t a single other reason.
Talk was no longer about work. The men were too old, too bored for that. It was about wives, baseball, kids, broads—or about what a son of a bitch the guy you were working for was: office gas. The same as in any office anywhere, not a means of communication but a ritualistic discharge. The same release could be achieved through clowning: joke phone calls, joke run-around-errands for the office patsy, joke disappearances of the new man’s art work. Everyone passed it off as good fun in order not to be marked as a bad sport. By the end of the war the men who had been in charge of our childhood fantasies had become archetypes of the grownup who made us need to have fantasies in the first place.
The Comics and the Super State
WALTER ONG
Reprinted by permission from Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1945), 34–48. © The Arizona Board of Regents.
IN THE 25,000,000 COMIC BOOKS THAT ARE PRODUCED IN THIS COUNTRY PER month, each to be read by an average of four or five individuals, and in the 6,000,000,000 comic strips that appear every month in U.S. newspapers, there is at work a squirming mass of psychological forces. What all these forces are, no one knows. Nor many people care. We know only that they have been found most effective for attracting men, women, and children in huge numbers.
Unidentified, unlabeled, these forces have been brought together in comic books and newspapers by the trial and error method which fixes its attention squarely on profit and obliquely, not to say ruefully, on a few of the decencies, often pared to or beyond a scant minimum.
Attention to profits in this case means attention to easy reading. With every brief snatch of text locked into position by a picture, the full reaction is made as available to children as to anyone else. Reading habits at a low level of awareness are being indulged more universally now than was ever possible before.
Even if we knew fully the psychological factors in the comic equation, we would be unable to predict the multiple effect of these forces when set loose in a vehicle with the cruising range of the comics, for the area of the reading public over which the comics roll is more extensive than we often like to believe. It is not composed entirely of juveniles. Newspaper comic readers are estimated at between 60,000,000 and 70,000,000; comic book readers at 70,000,000. Time magazine last December printed the estimate that one out of every five adults in the United States is an avid comic book addict. At Army post exchanges, comic books outsell by ten to one Life, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post combined.
Among the most significant forces at large beneath the surface of life today are those which assert themselves in totalitarian, super state ideologies. These forces are available for exploitation, and in America, too. If no one has completely identified the forces which the comics exploit, we do know that, fishing about in the murky depths of mass reactions, one is sure to encounter strong movements of those often unconscious impulses which have powered the various new orders.
This examination is concerned with intangibles, attitudes, and tendencies. I propose these for what they are and no more, but with the reminder that the preparation of a people to accept whole new ideologies is a long and psychologically involved process, which in many corner
s of the mind eludes observation: Hence the potential importance of movements which we commonly do not bother to observe.
We do not have to look far in the present comic field to discover a strong crosscurrent of those forces which the German, and other, super states have found useful. The general drift toward unmasked and pretentious sensationalism is perhaps the most evident component, but various less obtrusive trends are even more pointedly indicative.
Among these trends those exhibited by Superman are perhaps most representative, because back of the dozens of comics exploiting “hero” characters, he stands as the raw, elemental prototype, constructed on a monumentally primitive pattern. And the hero comics for which he stands have been the most spectacular development in picture strip history.
The civilization of the new order is in great part a herdist phenomenon. Its subjects are, ideally, standardized men, men en bloc, men acting and controlled in the mass on the infra-rational plane. The plan of the monolithic super state depends on there being a maneuverable mass of homogeneous beings that acts automatically. This is the herd. Its members must act, not via their intelligences, but from the impulse to be like the next man, the impulse to conformity. In the herd, differentiation is regarded with terror. Those differences that cannot be leveled—on some occasions racial, on other occasions party differences—are purged. To focus the impulse to conformity, everything is centered on one man—the leader, the hero, the duce, the Fuhrer. Herd responses not being on the rational level, this hero does not appeal by argument. He does not explain; he puts on a show. He builds on the herd’s dreams: he hypnotizes. Thus did Hitler and Mussolini.
So it happens that the notion of a “superman” is part of the herdist economy of the Nazi Third Reich. The very title “superman”—as well as its earlier and unsuccessful form, “overman”—is an importation brought into English by George Bernard Shaw out of Nietzsche, the herald of Nazism and the new order, who had seen in his übermensch the salvation of mankind. The Superman of the cartoons is true to his sources. He is not another Horatio Alger hero or a Nick Carter; he is a super state type of hero, with definite interest in the ideologies of herdist politics.
The creature familiar as Superman is the leader of a swarm of satellites separated from him only by a copyright. Scores of comic books feature similar characters—for example, Catman, Bullet Man, The Human Torch, Captain Midnight, Captain Marvel, Black Terror, Blue Beetle, Green Lama, Yankee Boy, and Bogey Man—which follow the Superman pattern of a “hero” who overcomes all obstacles with machine-like precision. Often, victory comes from frankly preternatural powers. These are mostly powers of propulsion and X-ray vision: these heroes’ bull necks are often a pretty fair index of their intellectual prowess.
The cult of the hero and the peculiar manifestations connected with it in this literature have overflowed the bounds of sex. The companion female-hero piece that has recently appeared is in a way more symptomatic than Superman himself. Its calculated conception in the mind of an American educational psychologist as an ideal comic strip shows the fertility of the superman ideology outside Germany. It is indicative that the new piece is called Wonder Woman, not, as one might expect, Superwoman (although the Superman-Wonder Woman publishers have run a few strips by this name to secure the copyright for themselves, just in case). For the heroine of the strip is really a female superman, preaching the cult of force spiked, by means of her pretentiously scanty “working” attire, with a little commercial sex. (Force-and-sex is apparently an approved formula of the super state, which baits its hooks with promises of considerable freedom in the use of both.)
Indeed, although he says she is designed to counteract the “bloodcurdling masculinity” of the other comics and to introduce “love” into the comic field, Wonder Woman is dubbed by her enthusiastic creator an Amazon, while the ambit of her activities excludes the life that most normal women might desire. The name she wears in ordinary civil life—she only takes to the woods as Wonder Woman when occasion demands, as it indeed seems to do most of the time—displays a curt and colorful masculinity: “Diana Prince.” She is no Cinderella, and the clang of the huntress’s name against the mannish cognomen is the kind of note she likes to hear struck. When not in her outré “working” clothes, she habitually wears a suit coat and tie among the jeweled guests at luncheon parties and at formal evening affairs.
However, strange psychological twitches are perhaps to be expected in one with such an errant genealogy: “beautiful as Aphrodite,” her publishers never tire of describing her, “wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules, and swifter than Mercury.” This is strict, if confused, old-pagan syncretism, which, especially with the fine scorn for gender which it manifests, is fitting enough for a professed Amazon, who swears “By Zeus!” and works as one of Aphrodite’s commandos. She takes the bawdy goddess seriously. When things go hell (you can bet they always do, eventually), “Thank Aphrodite,” she prays in dead earnest.
Reincarnated in a woman, the present hero ideal reveals its full bizarrerie. Like Superman, Wonder Woman is a somewhat strange educational genius to set working on children, consciously or subconsciously. They are shown a world bullied into subjection by the crude instincts of the subnormal male. Men in such a world is bad enough off. But woman’s lot is even worse.
The economy of herdism, John Stuart Campbell maintains in The Menace of the Herd, demands a mechanistic identification of man and woman, and the woman in the home in the Third Reich was really there in exile because she did not “make good” elsewhere [Ong has here misidentified the author, Frances Stuart Campbell, which was a pen name for Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn—eds.]. Well, no exile for Wonder Woman. Once in a while she feels the impulse to live by genuine womanly ideals, but she inevitably gains control of herself and returns resolutely to the world of force peopled by her fellow traveler Superman and his cronies.
She is incapable of sustaining womanly standards in the face of the demand for total leveling in the monolithic state ideology. She therefore exists entirely by the standards of males, supplying on the score of her womanhood only the sexiness which the herd of males demands. This is, of course, not a healthy sex directed toward marriage and family life, but an anti-social sex, sex made as alluring as possible while its normal term in marriage is barred by the ground rules from the start. Wonder Woman, it may be said, is not a pioneer in the field of sex exploitation, where she follows rather than leads other comics.
In view of the political bearing of the present hero ideologies, it is particularly interesting that in this strong-arm division of the comics there is a marked tendency to project the cult of exuberant violence and muscularity onto the field of government, and often onto the full field of world or even cosmic politics. The tendency is plain, for example, in Captain America, Wonderman, Wonder Boy, Blue Beetle, Black Terror—even to some extent in the case Tarzan as well as of Buck Rogers and other interplanetary hitchhikers.
There are the titles like Captain America that tie up the destinies of our country with those of a hero. And Superman’s publishers like to circulate testimonials that represent him as the incarnation of an ideal for the whole nation. “As Clark Kent, a typical American,” one of these testimonials reads (Clark Kent is Superman’s name when he wears his tie and glasses), “Superman represents all that modern American youth ever hoped to be, physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually.” An elaborate commercial hocus-pocus circulates this essentially silly but dangerous claptrap in what is calculated to be a serious-minded brochure, fitted with some elaborate educational trappings to give it weight.
Representatives of the ideology of the new order are thus given Lebensraum on American soil and by a slick sleight-of-hand even disguised as native citizens: Superman’s backers do not hesitate to label him the “Champion of Democracy.” The comics’ habit of tinkering with the notion of the hero as the emotional correlative of the whole nation marches exactly the technique of Hitler, who was the prototype and hero of those who wan
ted to be “typical Germans.”
Emotionalism in these comics dreams metapolitical dreams. And the recipes for organization and government are accordingly simple. “I was just realizing how much better it is to reason with these poor wayward fellows,” Plastic Man observes as he drives a left to the jaw. His philosophy is popular.
Occasionally, the feelings that make for a strong-arm government within the government (the “party” of the super state) are catered to by means of private “justice societies,” which young readers are encouraged to join. A modest cash outlay provides them with badges and assurance that they are a part of the management. In achieving its success, the Superman strip has patterned itself not only on the blind hero-worship motif developed by Hitler and Mussolini, but also on the pagan Hellenistic values so useful to a super state. Superman’s permanent orgy of muscularity is a correlative of the glorification of youth that is part of the pagan economy in its original habitat as well as in Nietzsche, Wagner, and in Hitler’s reconditioned Valhalla. (This resurgence of official paganism in Germany was foreseen as a part of the new Germany by the prophet Nietzsche in his vision of the “rebirth in Germany of the Hellenic world.”) Moreover, as Nietzsche and the official civilizations of the Nazi and Russian super states like to do, Superman dreams in accurately adolescent dreams of tomorrow’s world. Indeed, his creators label him openly the “Man of Tomorrow.” This tomorrow is the team world of the maladjusted child, and it is ruled by the steady application of brute force.
The same Hellenistic apotheosis of youth is carried on with great enthusiasm by Wonder Woman, too. This streamlined American Amazon gives evidence of the cult, for instance, in a morbid retrogressive fancy, reminiscent again of proto-Nazi melody out of Nietzsche or Stefan George. This fancy settles upon a return to the child’s world as the most desirable goal in life. Here is the defeatism of the individual overwhelmed by the threat of herd existence at its worst. In Wonder Woman’s dreams, which are staple items in her adventures, the frustrated adult returns to the world of impulse in order to discover a life pattern free of the intellectual activity proscribed by existence in the herd. In this world where adult problems are evaporated as the twitching of the mind subsides, Wonder Woman on one occasion finds herself arraigned before a judge who is an infant still unable to talk. “Da-de, da-dah,” (I quote) is his studied verdict. Here is the new recipe for the good life.
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