The Great Comic-Book Heroes

Comic Books, World War Two, the Depression and I all got going at roughly the same time. I was eight. Detective Comics was on the stands, Hitler was in Spain, and the middle class (by whose employment record we gauge depressions) was, after short gains, again out of work. (I list the above for the benefit of those among us who, of the items cited, remember only comic books.)

Eight was a bad age for me. Only a year earlier I had won a gold medal in the John Wanamaker Art Contest for a crayon drawing on oak-tag paper of Tom Mix jailing an outlaw. So at seven I was a winner--and didn't know how to handle it. Not that triumph isn't hard to handle at any age, but the younger you are the more of a shock it is to learn that it simply doesn't change anything. Grownups still wielded all the power, still could not be talked back to, still were always right however many times they contradicted themselves. By eight I had become a politician of the grown-up, indexing his mysterious ways and hiding underground my lust for getting even until I was old enough, big enough and important enough to make my bid for it. That bid was to come by way of a career (I knew I'd never grow big enough to beat up everybody; my only hope was to, somehow, get to own everything and fire everybody). The career I chose, the only one that seemed to fit the skills I was then sure of--a mild reading ability mixed with a mild drawing ability--was comics.

So I came to the comics field with more serious intent than my opiate-seeking contemporaries. While they were eating up Cosmo, Phantom of Disguise, Speed Saunders and Bart Regan, Spy, I was counting how many frames there were to a page, how many pages there were to a story; learning how to form phrases like:@X#?/; marking for future reference which comic-book hero was swiped from which radio hero--Buck Marshall from Tom Mix, the Crimson Avenger from the Green Hornet, and so on.

There were, at the time, striking similarities between radio and comic books. The heroes were the same (often with the same names: Don Winslow, Mandrake, Tom Mix); the villains were the same (Oriental spies, primordial monsters, cattle rustlers)--but the experience was different. As an apprentice pro I found comic books the more tangible outlet for fantasy. One could put something down on paper--hard-lined panels and balloons, done the way the big boys did it. Far more satisfying than playing the radio serial game: that of making up programs at night in bed, getting the voices right, the footsteps and door slams right, the rumbling organ background right, and doing it all in soft enough undertones to escape being caught by that grown-up in the next room who at any moment might issue his usual spirit-shattering cry: "For the last time, stop talking to yourself and go to sleep!" Radio was just too damn public.

My interest in comics began on the most sophisticated of levels, the daily newspaper strip, and thereafter proceeded downhill. My father used to come home after work--when there was work--with two papers: The New York Times (a total loss) and the World Telegram. The Telegram had Joe Jinks (later called Dynamite Dunn), Out Our Way, Little Mary Mixup, Alley Oop--and my favorite at the time: Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs, whose soldier-of-fortune hero, Captain Easy, might have set the standard for any role Clark Gable ever played. Except for the loss of Captain Easy, I felt no real grief when my father finally abandoned the Telegram to follow his hero, Heywood Broun, to the New York Post. The Post had Dixie Dugan, The Bungle Family, Nancy (then called Fritzie Ritz) and that masterpiece of sentimental naturalism: Abbie 'n' Slats. I studied that strip--its Sturgeslike characters, its uniquely cadenced dialog. No strip other than Will Eisner's Spirit rivaled it in structure. No strip, except Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, rivaled it in atmosphere.

There were, of course, good strips--very good ones--in those papers that my father did not let into the house: the Hearst papers; the Daily News. Cartoons from the outlawed press were not to be seen on weekdays, but on Sundays one casually dropped in on Hearst-oriented homes (never very clean, as I remember) and read Puck, The Comic Weekly, skipping quickly over Bringing Up Father to pounce succulently on page two's Jungle Jim and Flash Gordon. Too beautiful to be believed. When Prince Valiant began a few years later, I burned with the temptation of the damned: I begged my father to sell out to Hearst. He never did.

It should have been a relief, then, when the first regularly scheduled comic book came out. It was called Famous Funnies and, in 64 pages of color, minutely reprinted many of my favorites from the enemy camp. Instead, my reaction was that of a movie purist when first confronted with sound: This was not the way it was meant to be done. Greatness in order to remain great must stay true to its form. This new form, so jumbled together, so erratically edited and badly colored, was demeaning to that art--basic black and white and four panels across--that I was determined to make my life's work. I read them, yes I read them: Famous Funnies first, then Popular Comics, then King Comics--but always with a sense of being cheated. I was not getting top performance for my dime. Not until March 1937, that is, when the first issue of Detective Comics came out.

Although original material had previously been used in comic books, almost all of it was in the shape and style of then-existing newspaper strips. Detective Comics was the first of the originals to be devoted to a single theme--crime fighting. And it looked different. Crime was fought in larger panels, fewer to a page. Most stories were complete in one issue (no more of the accursed "to be continued"). And there was a lot less shilly-shallying before getting down to action.

A strange new world: of unfamiliar heroes, unfamiliar drawing styles (if style is the word), written (if written is the word) in language not very different from that of a primer. It didn't have the class--or professionalism--of the daily strips; but, to me, this enhanced its value, made it a more comfortable world to live with, less like a grown-up's. The heroes were mostly detectives of one kind or another; or soldiers of fortune; here and there, even a magician. Whatever they were, they were tall, but not too tall--space limitations, you see; they were dark, (blond heroes were an exception, possibly because most movie heroes were dark, possibly because it was a chance for the artists to stick in a blob of black and call it hair); they were handsome--well, symbolically handsome. The world of comics was a form of visual shorthand, so that the average hero need not have been handsome in fact as long as his face conformed to the required arrangement of lines readers had been taught to accept as handsome: sharp, slanting eyebrows, thick at the ends, thinning out toward the nose, of which in three-quarter view there was hardly any--just a small V placed slightly above the mouth, casting the faintest nick of a shadow. One never saw a nose, full view. There were never any full views. They were too hard to draw. Eyes were usually ball-less--two thin slits. Mouths were always thick, quick single lines--never double. Mouths, for some reason, were rarely shown open. Dialog, theoretically, was spoken from the nose. Heroes' faces were square-jawed--in some cases, all-jawed--and more often than not there was a cleft in the chin.

With few exceptions, the initial comic-book heroes were not very interesting. By any realistic appraisal, they were certainly no match for the villains--who were bigger, stronger, smarter and, even worse, notorious scene stealers. Who cared about Speed Saunders, Larry Steele, Bruce Nelson, et al., when there were Oriental villains around? Tong warriors, lurking in shadows, with trident beards, pointy fingernails, and skin the color of ripe lemons. How they toyed with those drab ofay heroes: trap set, trap sprung, into the pit, up comes the water, down comes the pendulum, in from the sides come the walls. Through an unconvincing mixture of dumb luck and General Science I, the hero always managed to escape, just barely; catch and beat up the villain--that wizened ancient who, in toe-to-toe combat was, of course, no match for the younger man. The following month it all happened again: same hero, different Oriental, slight variance in the torture. And readers were supposed to cheer? Hardly!

Villains, whatever fate befell them in the obligatory last panel, were infinitely better equipped than those silly, hapless heroes. Not only comics, but life taught us that. Those of us raised in ghetto neighborhoods were being asked to believe that crime didn't pay? Tell that to the butcher! We knew the rules: Nice guys finished last; landlords, first. Villains, by their simple appointment to the role, were miles ahead. It was not to be believed that any ordinary human could combat them. More was required. Someone with a call. When Superman at last appeared (in Action Comics, of June 1938), he brought with him the deep satisfaction of all underground truths: our reaction was less "How original!" than "But, of course!"

The advent of the superhero was a bizarre comeuppance for the American dream. Once the odds were appraised honestly, it was apparent you had to be super to get on in this world. The particular brilliance of Superman lay not only in the fact that he was the first of the superheroes, but in the concept of his alter ego. What made this creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster different from the legion of imitators to follow was not that he could beat up everybody when he took off his clothes--they all did that. What made Superman extraordinary was his point of origin: Clark Kent.

Remember, Kent was not Superman's true identity--as Bruce Wayne was the Batman's or (on radio) Lamont Cranston, the Shadow's. Just the opposite. Clark Kent was the fiction. Previous heroes--the Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger--were not only more vulnerable, they were fakes. The Shadow had to "cloud men's minds" to be in business. The Green Hornet had to go through the fetishist folderol of donning costume, floppy hat, black mask, gas gun, menacing automobile and insect sound effects before he was even ready to go out in the street. The Lone Ranger needed an accoutermental white horse, an Indian, and an establishing cry of "Hi-Yo Silver" to separate him from all those other masked men running around the West in days of yesteryear. But Superman had only to wake up in the morning to be Superman. In his case, Clark Kent was the put-on. The fellow with the eyeglasses and the acne and the walk girls laughed at wasn't real, didn't exist, was a sacrificial disguise, an act of discreet martyrdom. Had they but known!

And for the alert reader there were other fields of interest. It seems that among Lois Lane, Clark Kent and Superman there existed a schizoid and chaste ménage à trois. Clark Kent loved but felt abashed with Lois Lane; Superman saved Lois Lane when she was in trouble, found her a pest the rest of the time. Since Superman and Clark Kent were the same person, this behavior demands explanation. It can't be that Kent wanted Lois to respect him for himself, since himself was Superman. Then, it appears, he wanted Lois to respect him for his fake self, to love him when he acted the coward, to be there when he pretended he needed her. She never was--so, of course, he loved her. A typical American romance. Superman never needed her--never needed anybody. In any event, Lois chased him--so, of course, he didn't love her. Another typical American romance.

Clark Kent acted as the control for Superman. What Kent wanted was just that which Superman didn't want to be bothered with. Kent wanted Lois, Superman didn't: thus marking the difference between a sissy and a man. A sissy wanted girls who scorned him; a man scorned girls who wanted him. Our cultural opposite of the man who didn't make out with women has never been the man who did--but rather, the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn't. The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, Li'l Abner's or Superman's, was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to help them--and then get the hell out. Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard.

The immediate and enormous success of Superman called for the creation of a tribe of successors--but where were they to come from? Not from other planets; Superman had all other planets tied up legally. Those one or two superheroes who defied the ban were taken apart by lawyers. (Nothing is as super as a writ.) The answer, then, rested with science. That strange bubbly world of test tubes and gobbledygook which had, in the past, done such great work in bringing the dead back to life in the form of monsters--why couldn't it also make men super? Thus, Joe Higgins went into his laboratory and came out as The Shield; and John Sterling went into his laboratory and came out as Steel Sterling; and Steve Rogers went into the laboratory of kindly Professor Reinstein and came out as Captain America; and kindly Professor Horton went into his laboratory and came out with a synthetic man, named, illogically, The Human Torch. Science had run amuck--setting loose a menagerie of flying men, webbed men, robot men, ghost men, minuscule men, flexible-sized men, men of all shapes and costumes blackening the comic-book skies like locusts in drag. Skyman, Sky Chief, The Face, The Flash, Sub Mariner, The Angel, The Comet, The Hangman, The Spectre, Mr. Justice, Uncle Sam, The Web, The Doll Man, Plastic Man, The White Streak--all scrambling for a piece of the market.

Understandably, this Pandora's box of men of steel was viewed gravely by the Superman people. Sadly, the most savage reprisals in comic books were saved, just as in revolutions, not for one's enemies but for one's own kind. If, for a moment, Superman may be described as the Lenin of superheroes, Captain Marvel must be his Trotsky. Ideologically of the same bent, who could have predicted that within months the two would be at each other's throats--or that, in time, Captain Marvel would present the only serious threat to the power of the man without whom he could not have existed?

From the beginning Captain Marvel possessed certain advantages in the struggle. In terms of reader identification, Superman was far too puritanical: If you didn't come from his planet, you couldn't ever be super. That was that. But the more liberal Captain Marvel left the door open. His method of becoming super was the simplest of all. No solar systems or test tubes involved--all that was needed was the magic word "Shazam!"

"Pie in the sky!" retorted the pro-Superman bloc, but millions of readers wondered. If all it took was a magic word, then all that was required was the finding of it. Small surprise that, for a while, Captain Marvel caught and passed the austere patriarch of the supermovement at the newsstands.

Artist C. C. Beck gave Captain Marvel the light touch. Villains ranged from mad scientist Dr. Sivana (the best in the business), who uncannily resembled Donald Duck, to Mr. Mind, a worm who talked and wore glasses, to Tawky Tawny, a tiger who talked and wore a business suit. A Disneyland of happy violence. The Captain himself came out dumber than the average superhero--a friendly fullback of a fellow with apple cheeks and dimples. One could imagine him being a buddy rather than a hero, an overgrown boy who chased villains as if they were squirrels. A perfect fantasy figure for, say, Charlie Brown. His future seemed assured. What a shock, then, the day Superman took him to court.

The Superman people said that Captain Marvel was a direct steal. The Captain Marvel people denied it, but it was clear from the start their hero was a paper tiger. One wondered if he was beginning to drink. He was losing his lean Fred MacMurray look, fleshing out fast in the face, in the gut, in the hips, moving onward and outward to Jack Oakie. Then, too, there was great disappointment in the word "Shazam." As it turned out, it didn't work for readers. Other magic words were tried. They didn't work either. There are just so many magic words until one feels he's been made a fool of. When the Captain Marvel people finally settled the case and went out of business, I couldn't have cared less. I still had the big two: Superman and Batman.

Batman trailed Superman by a year and was obviously intended as an offshoot, but his lineage--the school of rich idlers who put on masks--dates back to the Scarlet Pimpernel and includes Zorro and the Green Hornet, with whom Batman bears the closest as well as most contemporaneous resemblance. Both the Green Hornet and Batman were wealthy, both dabbled in chemistry, both had supervehicles and both costumed themselves with a view toward striking terror into the hearts of evildoers. The Green Hornet buzzed; the Batman flapped--that was the essential difference.

Not that there weren't innovations: Batman popularized in comic books the strange idea, first used by the Phantom in newspapers, that when you put on your mask, your eyes disappeared. Two white slits showed--that was all. If that didn't strike terror into the hearts of evildoers, nothing would. Batman, apparently, was also in better physical shape than the Green Hornet; less dependent on the rich man's use of nonlethal gas warfare. Batman got more meaningfully into the fray and, in consequence, got more clobbered. Though a good deal was made of his extraordinary stamina, much of it, as it turns out, was for punishment--another innovation for superheroes: there was some reason to believe he had a glass jaw.

But Batman was not a superhero in the truest sense. If you pricked him, he bled--buckets. While Superman's superiority lay in the offense, Batman's lay in the rebound. Whatever was done to him--whatever trap laid, wound opened, skull fractured--all he ever had to show for it was a discreet patch of Band-Aid on his right shoulder. With Superman we won; with Batman we held our own. Individual preferences were based on the ambitions and arrogance of one's fantasies. I preferred to play it safe and be Superman.

What made Batman interesting was his story line--not his strength. Batman, as a feature, was infinitely better-plotted, better-villained and better-looking than Superman. Batman inhabited a world where no one, no matter what time of day, cast anything but long shadows--seen from weird perspectives. Batman's world was scary; Superman's, never. Bob Kane, Batman's creator, combined Terry and the Pirates-style drawing with Dick Tracy-style villains: The Joker, The Penguin, The Cat Woman, The Scarecrow, The Riddler, Clay-face, Two-face, Dr. Death, Hugo Strange.

Batman's world was also more cinematic than Superman's. Kane was one of the early experimenters with angle shots, and though he was not as compulsively avant-garde in his use of the worm's-eye, the bird's-eye, the shot through the wineglass, as others in the field, he was the only one of the National line (Detective, Adventure, Action Comics) who managed to get that Warner Brothers' fog-infested look.

The opposite extreme in comic-book illustration was the Fox line--Mystery Men, Wonder World, Science, Fantastic Comics. Fox had the best covers and the worst insides. The covers were rendered in a modified pulp style: well-drawn, exotically muscled, half-undressed heroes rescuing well-drawn, exotically muscled, half-undressed maidens. The settings, often as not, were in the conventional Oriental-mad-scientist's laboratory--hissing test tubes going off everywhere; a hulking multiracial lab assistant ready to violate the girl; the masked hero crashing through a skylight, guns, aimed at nobody, flaming in each hand; the girl, strapped to an operating table screaming fetchingly--not yet aware that the crisis was passed.

The good men working for Fox soon moved elsewhere. Fiction House, a better outfit by inches, was often the place. Its one lasting contribution was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, signed by W. Morgan Thomas (a pseudonym), but drawn--and very likely written--by S. R. Powell, who was later to do the best of the magician strips (not excepting Mandrake): Mr. Mystic. Sheena was a voluptuous female Tarzan who laid waste to wild beasts, savages and evil white men in the jungle of her day--always assisted by her boyfriend, Bob, a neat young fellow in boots and jodhpurs who mainly stayed free of harm's way while Sheena, manfully, cleaned out the trouble spots.

Sheena was the star of Jungle Comics, a book I looked at only when there were nothing but novels to read around the house. Beating up lions did not particularly interest me; my problem was with people. Nor did the people Sheena laid out interest me very much: They were the usual crop of white hunters in search of the elephants' graveyard, a strip of land so devout in its implications to jungle-book fanciers that one could only assume the elephants took instruction in the Church before dying.

Fiction House also put out Fight Comics, Planet Comics and Wing Comics; but its single feature of interest--from this apprentice's viewpoint--was Hawk of the Seas, signed by Willis Rensie (Eisner spelled backward). Hawk was a pirate feature, notable only as a trial run for The Spirit, full of the baroque angle shots that Will Eisner introduced to the business.

Eisner had come to my attention a few years earlier doing a one-shot, black-and-white feature called "Muss 'Em Up" Donovan in a comic book with the flop-oriented title of Centaur Funny Pages. "Muss 'Em Up" Donovan was a detective, fired from the force on charges of police brutality (his victims, evidently, were white). Donovan is called back to action by a city administration overly harassed by crime who feels it is time for an approach that circumvents the legalistic niceties of due process. (Such administrations were in vogue in all comic books of the Thirties and Forties.) Heroes and readers jointly conspired to believe that all police were honest but inept; well-meaning but dumb--except for good cops like Donovan, who were vicious. Arraignment was for sissies, a he-man wanted gore. But, operating within the reach of the law, a hero could get busted for that. So heroes, with the oblique consent of the power structure ("If you get into trouble, we can't vouch for you"), wandered outside the law, pummeled everyone in sight, killed a slew of people--and brought honor back to Central City, back to Metropolis, back to Gotham.

Will Eisner was an early master of the German Expressionist approach in comic books--the Fritz Lang school: full of dark shadows, creepy angle shots, graphic close-ups of violence and terror. Eisner's line had weight. Clothing sat on his characters heavily; when they bent an arm, deep folds sprang into action everywhere. When one Eisner character slugged another, a real fist hit real flesh. Violence was no externalized plot exercise; it was the gut of his style. Massive and indigestible, it curdled, lavalike, from the page.

Eisner moved on from Fiction House to land, finally, with the Quality Comic group, creating the tone for their entire line: The Doll Man, Black Hawk, Uncle Sam, The Black Condor, The Ray, Espionage. Eisner creations all, he'd draw a few episodes and abandon the characters to others. No matter. The Quality books bore his look, his layout, his way of telling a story; for Eisner did just about all of his own writing--a rarity in comic-book men. His high point was The Spirit, a comic-book section created as a Sunday supplement for newspapers.

Sartorially, the Spirit was miles apart from other masked heroes. He didn't wear tights; just a baggy blue business suit, a wide-brimmed blue hat that needed blocking--and, for a disguise, a matching blue eye mask, drawn as if it were a skin graft. For some reason, he rarely wore socks--or if he did, they were flesh-colored. (I often wondered about that.) Just as Milton Caniff's characters were identifiable by their perennial WASPish, upper-middle-class look, so were Eisner's identifiable by that look of just having got off the boat. The Spirit reeked of lower middle class: His nose may have turned up, but we all knew he was Jewish. What's more, he had a sense of humor. Very few comic-book characters did. Superman was strait-laced; Batman wisecracked, but was basically rigid; Captain Marvel had a touch of Li'l Abner, but that was parody--not humor. Alone among mystery men, the Spirit operated in a relatively mature world (for comic books) in which one took stands somewhat more complex than hitting or not hitting people. Violent he was--this was to remain Eisner's stock in trade--but the Spirit's violence often turned in on itself, proved nothing, became, simply, an existential exercise--part of somebody else's game. The Spirit could even suffer defeat in the end. Or be outfoxed by a female foe--standing there, his tongue making a dent in his cheek; in his boyish, Dennis O'Keefe way, a comment on the ultimate ineffectuality of even super-heroes. But, once a hero turns that vulnerable, he loses interest for both author and readers; and the Spirit, through the years, became a figurehead--the chairman of the board, presiding over eight pages of other people's stories. An inessential do-gooder, doing a walk-on on page eight to tie up loose ends. A masked Mary Worth.

Not that he wasn't virile. Much of the Spirit's charm lay in his response to intense physical punishment. Hoodlums could slug him, shoot him, bend pipes over his head. The Spirit merely stuck his tongue in his cheek and beat the crap out of them; a more rational response than Batman's, for all his preening. For Batman had to take off his rich idler's street clothes; put on his Batshirt, his Batshorts, his Battights, his Batboots; buckle on his Batbelt; tie on his Batcape; slip on his Batmask; climb into his Batmobile and go fight the Joker--who in one punch (defensively described by the author as maniacal) would knock him silly. Not so with the Spirit. It took a mob to pin him down and no maniacal punch ever took him out of a fight. Eisner was too good a writer for that sort of nonsense. I collected Eisners and studied them fastidiously. And I wasn't the only one. Alone among comic-book men, Eisner was a cartoonist from whom other cartoonists swiped.

Good swiping is an art in itself. One can, for example, scan the first 15 years of any National publication and catch an album of favorite Terry and the Pirates, Prince Valiant or Flash Gordon poses signed by dozens of different artists. Terry, Pat Ryan, Val and Flash stared nakedly out at the reader, their names changed, but looking no less like themselves even if the feature did call itself Hawkman. Swipes, if noticed, were accepted as part of comic-book folklore. I have never heard a reader complain. Hawkman, a special favorite of mine, gave an aged and blended look to its swipes--a sheen so formidable, I often preferred the swipe to its newspaper prototype, defended the artist on economic grounds (not everybody was rich enough to hire models like those big newspaper guys) and paid his swipes the final compliment of swiping them myself.

I not only clipped swipes, I managed to get hold of and traced their sources. These I stapled together, laid in front of me and with them began my own chain of comic books--Comic Caravan, Zoom Comics, Streak Comics. Each book contained an orthodox variety of superheroes who, for their true identities, were given the orthodox assortment of prep-school names: Wesley, Bruce, Jay, Gary, Oliver, Rodney, Greg, Carter--obviously the stuff out of which heroes were made. You didn't find names like that in my neighborhood.

Each story was signed by a pseudonym, except for the lead feature which, star-conscious always, I assigned to my real name. I practiced my signature for hours: inside a box, a circle, a palette; inside a scroll that was chipped and aged, with a dagger sticking out of it which threw a long shadow. I had a Milton Caniff-style signature; an Alex Raymond; an Eisner. (Years later, when I went to work for Eisner, my first assignment was the signing of his name to The Spirit. I was immediately better at it than he was.)

Though I may have pirated the super-heroes, I never went near their boy companions. I couldn't stand boy companions. If the theory behind Robin the Boy Wonder, Roy the Superboy, The Sandman's Sandy, The Shield's Rusty, The Human Torch's Toro, The Green Arrow's Speedy, and Captain America's Bucky was to give young readers a character with whom to identify, it failed dismally in my case. The super grownups were the ones I identified with. They were versions of me in the future. There was still time to prepare. But Robin the Boy Wonder was my own age. One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better and live better; for while I lived in the east Bronx, Robin lived in a mansion, and while I was trying, somehow, to please my mother and getting it all wrong, Robin was rescuing Batman and getting the gold medals. He didn't even have to live with his mother.

Robin wasn't skinny. He had the build of a middleweight, the legs of a wrestler. He was obviously an A student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd--God, how I hated him. You can imagine how pleased I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag.

In his Seduction of the Innocent, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, a leading post-War figure in the anticomics movement, writes of the relationship between Batman and Robin:

They constantly rescue each other from violent attacks by an unending number of enemies. The feeling is conveyed that we men must stick together because there are so many villainous creatures who have to be exterminated....Sometimes Batman ends up in bed injured and young Robin is shown sitting next to him. At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and "Dick" Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a "socialite" and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce's ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases....Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown....It is like a wish dream of homosexuals living together.

For the personal reasons previously listed, I'd have been delighted to think Dr. Wertham right in his conjectures (at least in Robin's case; Batman might have been duped), but conscience dictates otherwise: Batman and Robin were no more or less queer than were their youngish readers, many of whom palled around together, didn't trust girls, played games that had lots of bodily contact and--from similar surface evidence--were more or less queer. But this sort of case-building is much too restrictive. In our society it is not only homosexuals who don't like women. Almost no one does.

Wertham goes on to point to Wonder Woman as the Lesbian counterpart to Batman: "For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls she is a morbid ideal. Where Batman is antifeminine, the attractive Wonder Woman and her counterparts are definitely antimasculine." Well, I can't comment on the image girls had of Wonder Woman. I never knew they read her--or any other comic book, for that matter. That girls had a preference for my brand of literature would have been more of a frightening image to me than any number of men being beaten up by Wonder Woman.

My problem with Wonder Woman was that I could never get myself to believe she was that good. For if she was as strong as they said, why wasn't she tougher-looking? Why wasn't she bigger? Why was she so flat-chested? And why did I always feel that, whatever her vaunted Amazon power, she wouldn't have lasted a round with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle?

World War Two was greeted by comic books with a display of public patriotism and a sigh of private relief. There is no telling what would have become of the superheroes had they not been given a real enemy. Domestic crime fighting had become a bore; one could sense our muscled wonder men growing restless in their protracted beatings of bank robbers, gang overlords and mad scientists. Domestic affairs were dead as a gut issue: Super-heroes wanted a hand in foreign policy. At first this switching of fronts seemed like a progressive political step--if only by default. Pre-War conspiracies had always been fomented by the left (enigmatically described as anarchists), who put it into the minds of otherwise sanguine workers to strike vital industries in order to benefit unidentified foreign powers. Now, with the advent of war it was no longer necessary to draw villains from a stockpile of swarthy ethnic minorities: there were the butch-haircutted Nazis to contend with.

The I.Q. of villains dropped markedly as the War progressed. Consistent with the policy formalized by Chaplin's Great Dictator, Hitler was never portrayed as anything but a clown. All other Germans were blond, spoke their native language with a thick accent, and were very, very stupid. Whatever there used to be of plot was replaced by action--great leaping gobs of it; breaking out of frames and splashing off the page. This was the golden age of violence--its two prime exponents: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

The team of Simon and Kirby brought anatomy back into comic books. Not that other artists didn't draw well (the level of craftsmanship had risen alarmingly since I'd begun to compete), but no one could put quite as much anatomy into a hero as Simon and Kirby. Muscles stretched magically, foreshortened shockingly. Legs were never less than four feet apart when a punch was thrown. Every panel was a population explosion--casts of thousands: all fighting, leaping, falling, crawling. Not any of Eisner's brooding violence for Simon and Kirby; that was too Listonlike. They peopled their panels with Cassius Clays--Blue Bolt, The Sandman, The Newsboy Legion, The Boy Commandoes and, best of all, Captain America and Bucky. Speed was the thing; rocking, uproarious speed. Each episode like an Errol Flynn war movie; almost always taken from secret files, almost always preceded by the legend: "Now it can be told."

But the unwritten success story of the War was the smash comeback of the Oriental villain. He had faded badly for a few years, losing face to mad scientists--but now he was at the height of his glory. Until the War we had always assumed he was Chinese. But now we knew what he was: a Jap; a Yellow-Belly Jap; a Jap-a-Nazi Rat--these being the three major classifications. He was younger than his wily forebear and far less subtle in his torture techniques. (This was war!) He often sported fanged bicuspids and drooled a lot more than seemed necessary. (If you find the image hard to imagine, I refer you to his more recent incarnation in magazines like Dell's Jungle War Stories. where it turns out he wasn't Japanese at all--he was North Vietnamese!)

The War in comic books, despite its early promise, its compulsive flag waving, its incessant admonitions to keep 'em flying, was, in the end, lost. From Superman on down, the old heroes gave up a lot of their edge. As I was growing up, they were growing tiresome: more garrulous than I remembered them in the old days, a little show-offy about their winning of the War. Superman, The Shield, Captain America and the rest competed cattily to be photographed with the President; to be officially thanked for selling bonds, or catching spies, or opening up the second front. The Spirit had been mutilated beyond recognition by a small army of hack ghosts; Captain Marvel had become a house joke; the Batman, shrill. Crime comics were coming in, nice artwork by Charles Biro, but not my cup of tea. Too oppressive to my fantasies. Reluctantly I fished around for other reading matter and stumbled on Studs Lonigan.

In the years since Dr. Wertham and his supporters launched their attacks, comic books have toned down considerably, almost antiseptically. Publishers--in fear of their lives--wrote a code, set up a review board and volunteered themselves into censorship rather than have it imposed from the outside. Dr. Wertham scorns self-regulation as misleading. Old-time fans scorn it as having brought on the death of comic books as they knew and loved them: for, surprisingly, there are old comic-book fans. A small army of them.

So Dr. Wertham and his cohorts were wrong in their contention that no one matures remembering the things. Other charges against comic books--that they were a participating factor in juvenile delinquency and, in some cases, juvenile suicide; that they inspired experiments, à la Superman in free-fall flight which could only end badly; that they were, in general, a corrupting influence, glorifying crime and depravity--can only, in all fairness, be answered: "But of course. Why else read them?"

Comic books, first of all, are junk. To accuse them of being what they are is to make no accusation at all: There is no such thing as uncorrupt junk or moral junk or educational junk, though attempts at the latter have, from time to time, been foisted on us. But education is not the purpose of junk. It is a second-class citizen of the arts, intended to be nothing else but liked.

A child, simply to save his sanity, must at times go underground. Have a place to hide where he cannot be got at by grownups. A place that implies, if only obliquely, that they're not so much; that they don't know everything; that they can't fly the way some people can, or let bullets bounce harmlessly off their chests, or beat up whoever picks on them, or--oh, joy of joys!--even become invisible! A no man's land. A relief zone. And the basic sustenance for this relief was, in my day, comic books.

With them we were able to roam free, disguised in costume, committing the greatest of feats--and the worst of sins. And, in every instance, getting away with them. For a little while, at least, it was our show. For a little while, at least, we were the bosses. Psychically renewed, we could then return aboveground and put up with another couple of days of victimization at the hands of teachers and parents. Another couple of days of that child labor called school. Comic books were our booze.

Comic books, which had few public (as opposed to professional) defenders in the days when Dr. Wertham was attacking them, are now looked back on by an increasing number of my generation as samples of our youthful innocence instead of our youthful corruption. A sign, perhaps, of the potency of that corruption. A corruption--a lie, really--that put us in charge, however temporarily, of the world in which we lived; and gave us the means, however arbitrary, of defining right from wrong, good from bad, hero from villain. It is something for which old fans can understandably pine. It's almost as if having become overly conscious of the imposition of junk on our adult values--on our architecture, our highways, our advertising, our mass media, our politics; and even in the air we breathe, flying black chunks of it--we have staged a retreat to a better-remembered brand of junk. A junk that knew its place was underground where it had no power and thus only titillated, rather than aboveground where it truly has power--and, thus, only depresses.

Copyright © 1939 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1939 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1939 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1940 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1939 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1940 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1940 by Marvel Comics Group

Copyright © 1942 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1939 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1940 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1940 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1940 by Marvel Comics Group

Copyright © 1941 by National Periodical Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1949 by Will Eisner