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Guest Editor’s Note: Superman’s Brother

2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/711339

2328-207X

Arne R. Flaten,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

Previous articleNext article FreeGuest Editor’s Note: Superman’s BrotherArne R. FlatenArne R. Flaten Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt was the summer of 1972 in Arlington, Virginia. My best friend and I sat across from each other in intense cross-legged dialogue. Doug proudly displayed his copy of DC’s Action Comics starring Superman. I had Dynamo no. 1 from Tower Comics (fig. 1). The calculus that informs six-year-old logic determined that his comic book was better because the quasiomnipotent Superman was universally known. In those years of lunchboxes and recess kickball, one’s stature might reside, if fleetingly, in the question of whose hero could beat up the other’s. I casually explained that Dynamo was Superman’s brother. This is my earliest memory of willful prevarication. It is also my earliest memory of what would become a lifelong fascination with comic books.Fig. 1. Dynamo, no. 1 (August 1966), with cover art by Wallace Wood. Author’s collection. © Tower Comics, Inc. 1966.Of course, Dynamo was not Superman’s brother. He was government agent Leonard Brown, who gained exceptional strength and invulnerability for thirty minutes with the aid of a special belt. (Dynamo was, in fact, closely related conceptually to Hourman, who appeared for the first time in Adventure Comics no. 48 in 1940 and whose power and speed were achieved for an hour through ingestion of a pill containing “Miraclo.”) Dynamo and several other characters, such as NoMan, Menthor, Lightning, and Raven, belonged to the THUNDER Agents line of comic books, which began in November 1965 and which were published by short-lived Tower Comics under the direction of Wallace Wood and a handful of other artists and writers. THUNDER (The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves) reflected our collective national interest in spies and the inevitable neuroses of Cold War America, and they were situationally parallel to Marvel’s burgeoning SHIELD characters (first appearing in Strange Tales no. 135, August 1965) and influenced by the hit TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (which began in 1964). But Tower Comics did not have the bullpen, the resources, or the distribution to pose a serious threat to the DC-Marvel death grip on superheroes, and the company folded in 1969.Even so, Dynamo opened up to me a universe of brightly colored characters that were easy for a kid to understand in the early 1970s, and that presented the world in binary, good-versus-evil terms. (The moral ambiguity and gritty relativism that would define Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow series and challenge the Comics Code Authority was far beyond my comprehension at that point.) My mom encouraged my collection and study of comic books and strips as valid formative experiences and as economical and efficient art teachers.During my second year of graduate studies in 1995, I proposed a course on the history of comic art to the university’s administration. At that time, Frank Miller’s Sin City was relatively new, and I was shocked and delighted at how the industry had changed—the violence, the gorgeous black-and-white brushwork, the inversion of traditional, Comics Code values. In the 1980s, Fantagraphics and other independent publishers blew the lid off the comics industry, so content was no longer dominated by spandex and muscles, Archie or Disney. Comics now gave voice to contemporary issues and personal statements, from the groundbreaking work of Los Bros. Hernandez’s Love and Rockets and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor to the visionary and off-beat styles of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library and Jim Woodring’s Frank, and from autobiographical/biographical work such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis to the subtlety of Dan Clowes’s Ghost World and, more recently, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. With these new options at my disposal, I spent the next ten semesters studying Italian Renaissance art (my doctoral emphasis) and teaching enthusiastic undergraduates the histories, styles, contexts, creators, and influences of US comic strips and comic books. I have continued to teach variations on that theme for university credit at every university where I have worked. From the beginning of my academic career, friends and colleagues questioned why I didn’t publish on comics. My reasons were pragmatic: I didn’t want my promotion and tenure committee to question the legitimacy of my publications; and I didn’t want to become known derisively as “that comics guy.”The world has changed. Twenty-five years ago it would have been unthinkable to devote an issue of Source to comics. Today, comics in one form or another are taught at many colleges and universities throughout the country. Writers, artists, historians, and critics such as Scott McCloud, Lynda Barry, Trina Robbins, Todd McFarlane, Roy Thomas, Neal Adams, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Alison Bechdel, Alan Moore, Chris Ware, and Neil Gaiman are in constant demand at universities nationwide. As it should be.The articles in this issue of Source tug on those initial impressions I had almost fifty years ago, and I suspect the authors share some similar memories of their early interactions with comic strips and comic books. For Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, a relationship with comics is part of her DNA. As the granddaughter of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, the founder of National Allied Publications (later to be called DC Comics), Nicky sheds light on this toweringly famous yet little-understood figure from the genre’s infancy, who introduced pivotal titles such as Detective Comics, Adventure Comics, More Fun Comics, and perhaps Action Comics, among others. Sticking with DC momentarily, Thomas Andrae’s article examines the Bat-Man, who first appeared in Detective Comics no. 28 (1939), as a product of Victorian-era Gothic culture and the various dualisms that informed early horror films in US cinema during the Depression. His investigation also identifies key points in Bill Finger’s career and personality that informed the creation of some of Batman’s memorable villains. Zack Kruse explores the work of the late Steve Ditko, the famously private and reclusive creator of Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and others for Marvel Comics in the 1960s. In Kruse’s article, the contentious interactions between Ditko and publisher-editor Stan Lee reveal Ditko’s later efforts at determining creative authorship in comics. In a counterpunch to mainstream comics, John Cunnally examines seminal women underground artists. Underground comics emerged in the late 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area and Detroit as direct confrontations to the Comics Code Authority, to DC and Marvel Comics, to conservative US culture, and to almost anything that might be called traditional. Finally, Daniel Herman discusses an early attempt to create a “graphic novel,” an effort which significantly predates Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978). Gil Kane’s (and Archie Goodwin’s) graphic novel His Name Is … Savage! (1967) was one of the first attempts to develop an extended narrative in comic book form. Herman explores where Savage fits in as a pioneering effort: how it was produced; how publishers were scared of it; and how the Comics Code Authority tried to kill it.So, Dynamo wasn’t Superman’s brother. But perhaps my face-saving lie forty-five years ago wasn’t too far off the mark. The characters that followed Superman were implicitly his brothers or sisters or offspring to some degree, as was the entire industry. Superman was the litmus test, he was the wall against which conceptual super-spaghetti was thrown. The multibillion-dollar success of comic book–inspired characters in major motion pictures and related ephemera speaks to the themes, the characters, the struggles, the mythologies, and the conversations that understand comic books as relevant barometers, reflections, and catalysts of contemporary culture. As does the current volume. Enjoy. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 40, Number 1Fall 2020The Comics Issue Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711339 © 2020 by Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.