The Superhero Reader

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

  Such adventures are not symptomatic of a condition among children, who are incapable of making youth the object of retrogressive fancy and who, in their desire to be grown up, are probably left quite cold by this adulation of childhood. These adventures are canards flown in from an adult world.

  The idealization of youth manifests itself in other ways, too, in Wonder Woman. In one issue she qualifies as the heroine of a really redoubtable womanhood by turning over ten times in a somersault without touching the ground. As one adventure begins she prescribes for the whole American scene in a flip analysis, which substitutes faked assurance for insight: “The Amazon maiden believes that America’s greatest need today is more fun, recreation, and health giving amusement.”

  This total athleticism finds its outlet everywhere in the comic world, where one runs across a “blue beetle,” a batman, a star-man, and other mighty cosmic wayfarers, as well as the plastic man we encountered earlier, who can stretch himself indefinitely in any direction. It flowers in the breakfast cereal advertisements that the comics display. It puts the emphasis where the new order likes to have it.

  As an originator of one of the comics himself explains these picture stories feed their readers’ desires for “feeling big, smart, important, and winning the admiration of their fellows.” The same approach and emphasis are reflected when we are advised by the comics’ backers that, “the wish to be super-strong is a healthy wish, a vital, compelling, power-producing desire.”

  The publishers of these strips, acutely aware of the charges to which comics lie open, have of course been stumping for what patriotism they can. Syphoned off a volatile world of wish fulfillment, this patriotism is necessarily of a highly vaporous type. The characters in the strips are occasionally signed up as F.B.I. men or as other government agents so that the flag can be waved at objections. But the headiest patriotism of all is that bottled with the bromide “In the comics, crime never pays.” At the level of reading response at which the comics are propelled, it is plainly questionable whether such a fact is operative or even noticed, and it would be interesting to know whether to the juvenile comic book addict crime means anything more than opposition to the character with the highest emotional appeal.

  Indeed, the constant traffic with the world of crime provides a suitable culture for the paranoiac patriotism which Dr. Richard M. Brickner, writing recently in the Atlantic Monthly, found festering at the roots of recent Germany. It is Dr. Brickner’s considered opinion that the fact that Germany provided environments friendly to paranoia largely explains that country’s present plight. “Clark Kent,” Superman is told, “you’re a pessimist! To listen to you, anyone would think this town was full of crooks!” The guardian of American ideals glances casually over his shoulder. Crooks everywhere. It is not far to go from this world of total crime to the persecution complex of the neurotic.

  Added to all this, the frank exploitation of sex which has become a primary circulation builder in the comic field parallels the neo-paganism with which the super state manipulates the herd. We don’t ordinarily think of it this way, but it might be noted here that the sexy and synthetic pastoralism of Li’l Abner, even in its comic phase, is akin to what has been regarded as a mark of a decadent society in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the eighteenth-century French court. I prescind from the manifest cleverness of this comic, which is another thing.

  Sex exploitation has often taken such sharp turns in the direction of sadism and masochism that groups of interested persons have felt it necessary to protest. Thus a Child Study Association report on the comics calls attention to the objectionable character of the “pictures of chained women, of captive women being driven by men, and other sadistic themes.”

  These are the tendencies. They are not by any means apparent in all the comics, for there remain such features as Gasoline Alley or Blondie that are quite free of the play of these weird forces. But it is disconcerting and sobering to see how these forces have moved irresistibly into the comic field.

  Recent developments have caused no little consternation in quarters where the comics have been considered as one of the outposts, one of the citadels, of the American way of life.

  “Sidney Smith gets a laugh out of the millions because he shows us folks as they are … we are the Gumps,” a magazine writer in 1923 was preaching to Andy Gump’s apparently numerous understudies. This is reassuring. But it won’t work for Dick Tracy or Tarzan or Blue Beetle or Mandrake the Magician, who have shouldered Andy aside but who are not the kind of people you expect to find moving in next door.

  You still hear a gouty protest here and there that the older comics were best. That is not what the comic readers as a whole think. As newspaper publishers have gained experience, they have found it more profitable when the same public which used to be satisfied with the likes of Happy Hooligan is supplied with more and more comics turned out according to more advanced formulas.

  For the audience as a whole is not very discriminating: it likes comics. Just comics. Sinclair Lewis portrays Babbitt in his Main Street home plodding “nightly through every picture” of the comic section “with the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily.” Babbitt read them all. His picture is still being multiplied everywhere and the abiding accuracy of Lewis’s reporting can be checked on every streetcar. A great section of comic readers read them all. There seems to be nothing in the good comics that keeps readers from liking the others. Both kinds slide comfortably along the same neural ruts. It is not unusual for a comic book to feature, as one current book does, Blondie and The Katzenjammer Kids, both humorous, plus Tim Tyler, a typical thriller, and The Phantom, a sex and horror piece—all under a cover displaying only a Katzenjammer Kid honorably engaged in his round of perpetual badgering. The Captain and the Kids, Ella Cinders, and the resolute burlesque of Nancy share another book with Tarzan and a Spark Man piece that ends with a wanton-looking female hung up by the hands. Another book featuring a generous number of humorous pieces displays quite frankly on its cover only a crude sex-lure. In the last winter issue of Wonder Woman, the reader, finished with his heroine’s adventures among the mermaids, turns the page for more satisfaction. There he finds—Mutt and Jeff.

  Historically, the “healthy” comics seem not to have retained an isolated group of followers but to have fed their readers into the indiscriminating audience where the tendencies we have examined earlier are welcomed and given free play.

  If we are at a loss to explain why this change has taken place in so “healthy” a type of reading as the comics were, it is perhaps because we have developed some mental squints toward them. We have a hard time seeing them as they really are. Responsible for this are several beliefs that have acted as blinds behind which the ideology of the new orders could safely enter the comic field.

  The first is the normalcy superstition. This belief holds that a taste for the comics is an indication of a healthy emotional life because it is “normal,” that is, because everyone indulges it. This superstition plainly makes an objective evaluation of the comics impossible. It deflects our attention from the comics to ourselves; instead of making us sharp-sighted, it makes us self-conscious and worried about our own reactions.

  The operation of this superstition can be seen in a current writer who settles the value of the comics by a deft blow which clubs his readers into line: if you are “inclined to deplore” the influence of the comic strips, you are a “snob,” he says. That settles it. The conclusion is completed before examination of the comics has begun. You will never notice very much about the comics that way.

  Another and a related belief which has developed in us a mental squint toward the comics is the folklore superstition. A recent plea for the comics, for instance, tracks witches, cruel stepmothers, and wholesale poisoning from the comic strips back to their lairs in the older folk literature, such as Grimm’s fairy tales. That makes everything all right.

  This path has been worn smooth by defenders of the comics. The comic strips
are supposed to have “created some of the towering figures of our American mythology,” and “they are definitely a part of our native folklore,” newspaper articles assure us.

  There is, of course, an intelligent interest in the folk: an intelligent love of one’s own people and culture we are best capable of loving, since we know them best. This interest in one’s people thrives on study and mature emotion. Itself a product of a genuine cultural tradition, it is capable of discerning the valuable products of that tradition from its byproducts. Being intelligent, it can evaluate its own performance, and expects to do so.

  This is not the folklore superstition.

  The folklore superstition is pretty sloppy about artistic or social values. You can recognize it by its thoroughgoing indiscrimination, its persistent refusal to bother seriously about forming really critical estimates. If it can father a literary or any other work on the Volk, the Volk will be the work’s entire justification. Mass approval has a magic value, and one must ask no questions.

  One current writer observes that a recent report on the comics by a group of sociological, educational, and psychiatrical experts was rather awesome “until we realized that they were merely saying that the reason for the success of comic strips (and books) is that they fill in our generation the place of the old folk tale.”

  Here is the superstition.

  Only say that the comics are like folk tales, and all misgivings vanish. The taut muscles of the mind relax. The mind bows before its fetish and is reassured. Why? The reason seems traceable, historically as well as logically, to an attitude toward das Volk on which the new orders build.

  In the nineteenth century many scholars were so blinded by notions that the masses of men were endowed with magical powers that they constructed a spurious pedigree for the so-called “popular ballads.” These pieces of folklore were supposed, according to this pedigree, to be the result of some magic, resident in the herd: things that “grow,” that “fall out of the air,” creations that “spring from the very heart of the people and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all that continue nearest to the natural state of man.” Miss Louise Pound pointed out the inaccuracy of this pedigree some years ago in her Poetic Origins and the Ballad (the quotations just given, from Andrew Lang and Theodor Sturm, are to be found in this book). When you realize that, as she points out, in every case where we can trace their origins, the ballads are not of such lineage at all but are confused or even quite incoherent versions of “art poetry”—that is, poetry composed like everything else, including the comics, by someone who sets himself down to a definite task—and that the “art poetry,” before it got transmogrified into a popular ballad by being passed around with no great care from mouth to mouth, was almost always better work than afterward; when you realize, in other words, that contact of an imaginative work with large groups of people who pay only passing attention to it does not make the work inevitably worthwhile—when you realize all this, you are not so scrupulous about regarding all folk literature as an automatic artistic and sociological success.

  But the new order is scrupulous about this. Men such as Wagner, whose work has got itself sufficiently entangled with folk superstition, were all snapped up as props for the official civilization of the Third Reich. The defense of the comics, which adopts as the ultimate criterion of worth an indiscriminating enthusiasm for mass likes and dislikes, is in the same tradition. To the proto-Nazi herdists, the ballads were beyond cavil because they were seen “flitting from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses …” The present-day defender of the comics, aware of his audience’s prejudices, falls back on the same dodge, almost word for word. Here is no people critical of itself, but only a turgid and luckless mass made to bear the weight of a bogus infallibility.

  As one reflection of the folklore superstition, there is abroad this belief: that readers will find their native shrewdness whetted when they apply themselves to the better comics. But even rid of the normalcy and folklore superstitions, it is hard indeed to find instances where the comics give reason for this belief. Close scrutiny of even the best comics does not reveal anything that would lead to the conclusion that their readers are inoculated against infection with any of the notions blowing about in the most miasmic geopolitical wind.

  However wholesomely some comics may bring out the good points in our civilization, they are powerless to evaluate any factors in the civilization on any other terms than those of its own prejudices. Since the reader must never be unseated from his easy chair, the standards he takes for granted are beyond question. Mr. and Mrs. and other family comics poke fun a lot in the American home, but their creators are acutely aware that they must do so only in unposted territory where the audience feels its position so secure that it can afford to indulge a self-complacent laugh. Such questions as divorce, for instance, or the aberrations of our educational efforts, or our national pride which makes us often odious as a nation to other groups of people—things which a serious satirist of our way of life could never keep clear of—are studiously hushed.

  Al Capp’s satirization of the gruesome mores of his synthetic hillbillies in Li’l Abner is irrelevant enough to be amusing: when he poked fun at Margaret Mitchell, he had to apologize in full Sunday color and shut up. What would happen if he began to show his whole audience what he really could do with their mores and folkways makes an engaging subject for macabre speculation.

  The most wholesome comics have to follow the marked trails, and the satirical strips have to direct their fire at specified targets. Yet the comics do create the illusion of giving an overview of life. To many persons, they seem critical. Orphan Annie does not philosophize into thin air but into readers’ opened ears. All the while, there can be no keenness without depth, and depth is too much to require of the comic strip audience. The result is that an un-edged satire and unconditional surrender to the least common denominator of readers’ ideals, far from developing really canny readers, encourages instead habits of self-complacency and cultural narcissism.

  The plain fact is that the comics, although for a time they exhibited no very objectionable phenomena, impose on their audience reading habits that are dangerous. Our attitude toward the comics may often make little difference in itself, but it is important as an index of our attitude toward the great mass of reading which operates at the same level of awareness—reading made for effortless absorption, reading on the level at which propaganda moves. We are inclined to forget that when a man gives himself to reading, he has to keep his wits about him or at least to collect them from time to time. Otherwise he is not safe. Neither is the man next to him.

  This is not a condemnation of everything in the comics nor a plea to abolish them. Neither is it an attempt to picture the publishers of the comics as diabolic schemers designedly attempting to foist herdist ideals upon America. Even the worst of the comic publishers are essentially businessmen intent only on making money. This is simply a plea to recognize the comics for all that they are, to face the facts, but all of them.

  The comic publishers’ wares are in great part not devices for warming man’s five wits but drugs that tend to induce intellectual anesthesia. Like other drugs, they can often build in the addict a false confidence while they are crystalizing the very habits that blunt his powers of perception. The rocketing popularity of the comics among servicemen under the abnormal strains of war is itself evidence of the qualifications of the comics as a soporific.

  We cannot wipe out literature prepared for this level of response. But a lot depends on our outspoken awareness of what it is. As matters stand, instead of scrutinizing the comics, we too often make over them. We make over them so much that workbooks built around sensational comic characters have been in use in schools. It may be unlikely that the comics will overpower all other educational devices; but the ease with which they can be presented as an educational nostrum shows how far gone is the uncritical attitude toward them. In our educ
ational processes there will be more encouragement than ever to combine technological accomplishment with a sprawling literary helplessness. Military victory or no, this is preparation for the age of the new order.

  The important point is not that so many forces at work in the comics today fall into a herdist pattern. The herdist pattern serves here only as a general area of reference to show how an uncontrolled type of reading will reproduce and magnify the forces lurking in the hidden corners and back alleys of civilization. The important point is that the comics are a sounding box where the infra-rational waves of human behavior irresponsibly amplify themselves, and we must be aware of this fact.

  A vague uneasiness about the comics is common enough today. Most discussions handle this uneasiness in either of two ways. Some proffer a set of ready-made windmills for the uneasiness to spend itself on: comics pervert grammar, they stunt vocabulary growth, they are “unartistic.” Such windmills induce fits of harmless and irrelevant activity that wears off the uneasiness and supplants it with a sense of achievement. Other discussions of the comics simply asphyxiate the mind in the vapors of truisms and prejudices. Thus one magazine writer can conclude his study of the comics with the motto “Know folks if you want to sell something to them.”