From Steel and Shadows to the Flag

Home , Al Avison, Black Bat, Black Condor, Bob Kane, Lee Falk, Millie the Model

Chapter Four From Steel and Shadows to the Flag

Superman’s success transformed the comic book industry, creating a demand for similar heroes to capitalize on his popularity. Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that he single-handedly assured the comic book industry’s success. Responding to the demand created by Superman, small, independent art studios, usually staffed by groups of aspiring artists organized somewhat informally, began to churn out one costumed hero after another, hoping to sell them to publishers like National Com- ics, All-American Publications, Timely Comics, and a host of others. Within months, characters such as Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, the Green Lantern, Plastic Man, the Human Torch, the Vision, the Sub-Mariner, the Shield, the Whizzer, Black Condor, the Ray, and countless more graced the pages of comic books the nation over. As others entered the business of imagining superheroes, however, they unconsciously altered Siegel and Shuster’s vision, imparting their heroes with somewhat different sensibilities. As a consequence, many of the costumed heroes to follow Superman embodied frustrations with the modern world in significantly different ways, minimizing Siegel and Shuster’s spirit of carnival laughter, focus- ing more intently on urban crime and street violence, and employing the racialized aesthetic of the American Gothic as an important element for constructing heroic identities. In this way, they hearkened back to literary tropes and aesthetic elements established by nineteenth-century authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard, and rearticulated in the pulps of the 1930s. Introduction of these darker elements, however, did not amount to a wholesale rejection of the heroic model introduced by Siegel and Shuster. Instead, what resulted was a blending and layering of elements that added dimension to the concept of the superhero while entrenching it

more firmly into the American cultural landscape. Culminating in the con- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright text of World War II, the variegated process that defined the early American superhero took on overtly patriotic concerns. In this way, the superhero

113 Regalado, Aldo J.. Bending Steel : Modernity and the American Superhero, University Press of Mississippi, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4397135. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-02-23 10:44:33. 114 From Steel and Shadows to the Flag

was transformed from a mechanism for inclusion into the broader Ameri- can experience into a symbol of the nation itself. To some degree, regional factors informed the differences between Superman and the superheroes produced by those who followed Siegel and Shuster’s lead. Although Siegel and Shuster did suffer from the economic hardship caused by the Great Depression as well as from the confining realities of segregation caused by anti-Semitism in America, they experienced the latter differently from the bulk of comic book creators, most of whom lived in northeastern urban centers and particularly in New York, where the industry came to be centered. Siegel and Shuster lived in a tight-knit ethic community that was relatively homogenous and isolated from the non- Jewish world beyond its confines. Many of the New Yorkers who entered the comic book industry, however, lived in more mixed and ethnically contentious neighborhoods where violence erupted with some measure of regularity. In a 2001 interview, for instance, original Flash artist Harry Lampert recounted that as a Jewish American growing up in Harlem during the Great Depression, African American children would blame his family for slavery and beat him up.1 Will Eisner, one of the most respected figures in the field of comic books and sequential art, also attests to the realities of ethnic violence in To the Heart of the Storm, his thinly veiled autobiography done in graphic-novel format. In the introduction, he explains, “Perhaps my most indelible memories of those years was the insidious prejudice that permeated my world.” The graphic novel’s images portray a world of ethnically accented street-level struggles over work, politics, culture, and inter- marriage punctuated by verbal aggression, fist fights, and other forms of violence both overt and discreet.2 Eisner captured much of this feel in his famous 1940s comic strip The Spirit, known for the use of shadow and light, which Eisner employed to evoke the atmosphere of urban environments.3 Two other individuals with similar experiences were Bill Finger and Bob Kane who, as co-creators of the famous comic book character Batman, rival Siegel and Shuster in importance with regards to shaping American superhero fiction. Unfortunately, knowing the truth about the creation of Batman is somewhat complicated. The two men collaborated on the character. Finger served as writer, Kane provided the art, and both influenced each other’s work. Kane, however, handled the business end of the rela-

tionship and did so in ways that ultimately sidelined Finger in terms of Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright both attribution and monetary compensation. To some degree, this reality was perpetuated by the individual personalities of the two men. Passive- aggressive, depressive, and somewhat ashamed about writing superhero

Regalado, Aldo J.. Bending Steel : Modernity and the American Superhero, University Press of Mississippi, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4397135. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-02-23 10:44:33. From Steel and Shadows to the Flag 115

comic books, Finger remained relatively silent about his contributions through his death in 1974. Social, ambitious, individualistic, and known for fabricating or embellishing elements of his life and career, Kane was aggressive about taking as much of the credit for Batman as possible, and is therefore an unreliable source at best.4 Nevertheless, examining their stated experiences with ethnicity, urban life, and the Great Depression in consultation with supplemental sources gives us a sense of how regional differences and individual personalities altered the lineaments of the superhero concept put forth by Siegel and Shuster. For better or for worse, we know more about Bob Kane.5 Born Robert Kahn in New York City on October 24, 1916, Bob Kane also experienced childhood difficulties as a consequence of the Great Depres- sion, ethnic strife, and the realities of modern urban culture more broadly.6 Like Siegel and Shuster, Kane remembers the 1930s as days of widespread unemployment and poverty, when “people who had once worked for a living and been proudly independent were forced to stand idly by in bread lines waiting for a handout.”7 Counting himself among the poor, Kane was deeply affected by his father’s struggles during these years:

Dad had to struggle most of his relatively short life to earn a living for our family. To supplement his income, he sold insurance on the side. He rarely took a vacation, and his constant chasing of the dollar left me with a feeling of inse- curity, an emotion common in those from impoverished backgrounds.8

Kane’s reaction to the suffering of the Great Depression, however, was different from Siegel and Shuster’s. While the Superman creators expressed empathy for the plight of the less fortunate and carried that sensibility into their creative work, Kane’s response was more individualistic. Watching his father’s “plight” was Kane’s “strongest motivating force” and compelled him to use his talents to their fullest. “I wanted the better things in life and poverty didn’t fit into my plans.”9 Indeed, for Kane the trauma of the Great Depression seemed to lie in his inability to obtain toys and luxuries, such as two-wheeler bicycles and Flexible Flyers.10 A bookish kid who enjoyed reading history, Kane fancied himself both a scholar and a sophisticate. Deter- mined to realize his self-image and rise above the squalor he perceived all

around him, he requested that his father enroll him in violin lessons. He Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright worked hard to develop his talent as an artist, earning a scholarship to the Commercial Art Studio located in New York City.11 He also adhered to a philosophy of “will to power” that he apparently lifted from Goethe and then

married to the Horatio Alger success story as it was understood in the early twentieth century. In his autobiography, he writes:

In this great country there are many Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tales—mine is one of them. The American Dream can be obtained by most anyone willing to strive for it. What one needs is the desire and ability to reach for the stars, along with the tenacity and perception to attain this lofty goal.12

Then, quoting the aforementioned German poet, he writes:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative [and creation] there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

That moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. . . .

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Begin now!13

This, he then claims, summed up the philosophy he adhered to at the beginning of his career as a “fledgeling ‘drawer’ living in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx.”14 Despite his determination, however, Kane confronted limited options. His family’s financial circumstances demanded that he leave school after one year and enter the workforce in order to contribute to the household budget.15 Furthermore, his youth, coupled with the fact that upwards of 65

percent of American businesses and employment agencies pursued anti- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Semitic hiring practices, narrowed the possibility of his finding satisfactory work.16 Thus constrained, Kane initially went to work in his uncle’s garment factory. Kane was not cut out for the culture of modern work. “It’s difficult

to put into words the loathing I felt for this type of operation,” he wrote in his autobiography, “for I knew in my heart that it was not meant to be my destiny. I received ten dollars a week for working in a sweatshop where the factory squalor and the din of the sewing machines was enough to drive me to a psychiatrist, if I could have afforded one.”17 Years later, Kane took a job at Fleischer Studios, which, although initially rewarding, soon proved as boring and as routine as “working on an automobile assembly line.”18 Given his competitive drive to rise above those around him, Kane never considered working-class political movements as a viable option for expressing dignity and forging identity. Indeed, he often expressed disdain for efforts at collective action. As a consequence of his ethnic heritage, his economic background, his individualistic ambition, and his personality, therefore, Kane seemed initially trapped into performing unsatisfying industrial labor and forced to become a cog in the machinery of American modernity. Kane’s ethnicity also became an issue in his daily life on the street, contributing to his sense of competitive individualism. He grew up in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, which the WPA’s 1939 New York City Guide describes as an “old and neglected” neighborhood with a predominantly Jewish population mixed with Irish, Italian, and German residents.19 The Jewish migration into the neighborhood, however, was relatively recent at the time, beginning around 1910 and growing over the course of a decade. This migration—which coincided with the Italian arrival as well as with a more modest influx of other groups, including Puerto Ricans—was enabled by improved public transportation networks extending into the Bronx, as well as by the sale of old estates and the erection of large-scale apartment houses in their stead. One resident recalls those early “immigrant days,” when his family would take in boarders from the Hungarian homeland six months at a time, arranging for them to attend night school, acquire work, and otherwise acclimate to American life before moving on. Their presence, however, along with the rapid urbanization that followed in their wake, was apparently threatening for many older German and Irish American residents of Morrisania, who found their familiar surroundings transformed by the “new immigrant” presence. The resulting cultural and political clashes sometimes led to violent confrontations. The aforementioned resident testified to this as well, commenting that “there were enclaves of one

ethnic group here, and another, different ethnically, there, and woe betide Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright whoever drifted where he didn’t ‘belong.’” Joining in this broader culture of “otherness,” his peer group harassed nearby African American communities even after an African American child of about Kane’s age suggested that he

and his friends “ought to have more understanding” due to the fact that they were Jewish in America.20 Similarly, Kane recounts that “these communities were melting pots composed of different ethnic groups and often one nationality would be pitted against another.” “In order to survive,” he continued, one would “have to join his neighborhood gang for protection, believing in the old adage ‘safety in numbers.’”21 However, Kane’s safety net failed him on one occasion, and he was brutally attacked by the Vultures, a rival gang. Beating him nearly to death, they purposefully broke his drawing hand and arm.22 This incident suggests that ethnically motivated urban violence figured into Kane’s encounter with modernity as much as the monotony, tedium, and constraining nature of industrial work culture. Faced with these circumstances, Kane searched for an avenue of escape. He found it shortly after attending the Commercial Art Studio, when, after working in the commercial art and comics industries for a few years, he was asked to create a costumed hero that could capitalize on Superman’s success.23 Kane was able to seize this opportunity with the help of Bill Finger. Although born to Jewish parents in Denver, Colorado, in 1914, Finger’s family moved to the Bronx when he was young. Consequently, he was raised in environs similar to those of Kane. Both, for example, attended DeWitt Clinton High School, graduating two years apart. Finger’s engage- ment with Depression-era America, however, was somewhat different. Kane seemed obsessed with the notion of achieving material success and status, his energies focused on making the deal and getting ahead. Finger, by contrast, seems to have been more genuinely interested in his craft. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, but he longed to be recognized as a seri- ous writer of novels and short fiction. Economic realities, coupled with life choices, however, led him down a very different path. By the time he met Kane, Finger was already married and had a son to support. Unfulfilled and struggling as a shoe salesman, he met Kane at a party in 1938. Connecting over their shared interest in the comic book industry, they agreed to meet at Edgar Allan Poe Park the following day to discuss the possibility of working together. At that point, Finger agreed to develop ideas with and write for Kane, who would serve as primary artist for their collaborations and handle negotiations with the city’s comic book publishers.24

Finger and Kane collaborated on the strips Rusty and His Pals and Clip Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Carson, but the greatest product of their endeavors was Batman.25 Making his debut in the twenty-seventh issue of National’s Detective Comics, Bat- man appeared as a masked vigilante with an initially unknown identity, “a

mysterious and adventurous figure fighting for righteousness and appre- hending the wrong doer, in his lone battle against the evil forces of society,” which were almost exclusively identified with the city’s criminal under- world. Wearing a black, pointed-eared cloak and cowl, styled after the leathery wings of his namesake, Batman pursues this mission by dint of his athletic prowess, his incredible detective skills, and an arsenal of high-tech weaponry crafted by his own genius. Not until the end of the first issue does the reader become aware that Batman is secretly Bruce Wayne, a disinter- ested young socialite and millionaire. In many respects, the primary motivating force behind the creation of Batman was commercial. Kane and Finger exclusively produced “funny comics” for National until Vincent Sullivan suggested that they turn toward the superhero adventure field that Siegel and Shuster pioneered through Superman. When Kane realized that Siegel and Shuster were making $800 per month compared to his $35, he resolved to create his own superhero in less than a week. Although the precise details of how Batman was imagined are obscured by conflicting accounts, it appears that Kane created an initial version of the character, possibly by tracing the figure of Flash Gordon as he appeared in the Alex Raymond strip of the same name and then adding red tights and trunks, bat wings, a domino mask, and a few other details. Fin- ger, apparently, did not approve of the design and suggested some changes, including making the costume dark grey, drawing the eyes as simple white spots, and replacing the wings with a cape. He also reportedly suggested to Kane that he should “scallop the edges” of the cape so that it would “flow out behind him [Batman] when he ran and it would look like bat wings.” Finger, apparently, also suggested the triangular motif used for Batman’s gloves as well as the ears on the cowl. In terms of his writing, Finger drew from various sources. Like Siegel and Shuster, he was inspired by the popular culture that surrounded him, citing Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Walter Gibson’s the Shadow, Alex- andre Dumas’s d’Artagnan, and Lee Falk’s the Phantom as inspiration. He also drew direct inspiration from the city around him, collecting newspaper stories of crimes and oddities to use in his scripts, and visiting “museums, zoos, planetariums and any other site that might provide a springboard for a Batman story.” Finger, apparently, also named Batman’s city Gotham,

played a large part in the crafting of Robin (Batman’s sidekick), and cre- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright ated (or co-created) some of Batman’s most memorable villains, including Joker, Catwoman, and Penguin. As primary writer, Finger can also take credit for, as Gerard Jones puts it, applying “novelist’s questions” to the

American superhero. Unlike Superman, who is driven by an inherent altru- ism, Batman is motivated by the deep sense of loss that he suffered as a consequence of having his parents gunned down during a robbery. In his Men of Tomorrow, Jones posits that Finger was drawing on his paternal sensibilities, which led him to empathize with a son losing a father. Perhaps Finger was simply letting the modern city speak through him as he trans- lated newspaper stories into superhero fiction. Such musings, however, are relegated to the realm of conjecture as a consequence of Finger’s relative silence on the subject.26 Bob Kane, however, was more open about expressing what Batman meant to him. Crafting the character became an expressive endeavor for Kane, through which he created meaning and sought to navigate his own encounters with the realities of the modern world. Indeed, Kane would later admit that “cartoonists draw themselves or people they know into their strips” and that he drew Bruce Wayne in his own image, when he “was young and handsome,” adding that the story of Batman was also the story of his life.27 Understanding the origins and evolution of the character from Kane’s perspective, therefore, reveals the artist’s unconscious personal strategies for defining the self and for navigating the contours of modern America. The American Gothic was among the tools that Kane employed in imagining Batman. Gotham City, the thinly veiled version of New York City wherein Batman wages his war against crime, was portrayed by Kane in ominous tones—an aesthetic echo that hearkens back to nineteenth-century tensions concerning urban landscapes. The city’s looming darkness conjures the specters of crime, anonymity, and chaos long attributed to the city. As such, it simultaneously hints at the presence of “inscrutable,” “uncontrollable,” “savage,” and dark-skinned ethnics so often associated with urban spaces imagined in such terms.28 This racially tinged meta- phorical blackness pervades the early Batman stories. Often set against the night’s sky, Gotham’s structures are often illuminated only by the light of the full moon. Dark buildings stretch against the gloomy firmament, creating pitch-black alleys in the chasms between them (fig. 4.1). Colonial-style mansions lie hidden in Gotham’s foggy suburbs, enclosed by walls of stone and wrought iron fences. Even Gothic castles—complete with dungeons, secret passageways, and torture chambers—make their way into the early

Batman stories, much as they did into Lippard’s tales of the city. From Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright the shadows that engulf the city emerge a never-ending stream of insidious figures to threaten the lives of all Gothamites. Petty thugs engage in acts of theft, murder, and kidnapping; exoticized Asian, Arab, and Eastern

Figure 4.1 A dark knight in the city in Detective Comics, Vol. 1, No. 29 (July 1939). Gardiner Fox (writer) and Bob Kane (artist), reprinted in Batman Archives, Vol. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1990), p. 24. © DC Comics.

Figure 4.2 Gothic accents on the cover of Detective Comics, Vol. 1, No. 29 (July

Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright 1939). Bob Kane (artist), reprinted in Batman Archives, Vol. 1 (New York: DC Comics, 1990), p. 21. © DC Comics.

European criminals, complete with pointed ears and grotesquely deformed faces, usher forth to further the nefarious schemes of their masters, as do killer apes, misshapen giants, and other chaotic monstrosities (fig. 4.2). Remaining within the darkness and operating from their mansions, penthouse apartments, and hidden lairs are the city’s powered elite: wealthy industrialists, criminal masterminds, foreign nationals, mad scientists, and other competitive individuals who attempt to rob and hoard the resources of Gotham’s citizens. In so characterizing the dynamics of city life, Bob Kane and Bill Finger remained true to the themes of smothering darkness and cultural seepage evident in the American Gothic as employed first by authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard and later by writers like H. P. Lovecraft. Kane and Finger, however, also redefined the aesthetic by de-emphasizing certain features and accentuating others. Unlike Poe, for instance, Kane and Finger did not preoccupy themselves with the evils of whiteness. Although white people often committed acts of criminality in these early Batman stories, they were treated as corrupt individuals rather than as metaphors for whiteness more broadly. In contrast to Poe’s Narrative of Henry Gordon Pym, the terror of blackness in Batman was divorced from white original sin. Kane and Finger also dramatically departed from Poe and Lovecraft by featuring an effective white hero that successfully challenges and navigates the encroaching blackness that surrounds him. Thus, Batman stories dispensed with the themes of paralyzed white masculinity that were threaded through the American Gothic for over a century. While Gotham city cap- tures the ambiance of the American Gothic, Batman himself embodies a complex appropriation of the same aesthetic, a dynamic illustrated by his fetishistic use of the bat signifier.29 Although the image of a crime-fighter disguised as a bat might seem objectively bizarre and nonsensical, Kane himself explains that “the batman idea was in the air in the early thirties.”30 Indeed, the image of the bat formed a part of the American Gothic since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conjuring images of darkness, terror, animal savagery, and soul-sapping vampirism, all of which were often linked to notions of ethnic infiltration. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although written and published in England in the late 1880s, made it across the Atlantic only a few years

later. While more work needs to be done on the impact of the English Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Gothic tradition on the American creative imagination, Dracula made the Orientalist image of a sinister, bat-like, Eastern European invader available to American audiences at the same time that “new immigrants” flooded

into American cities.31 H. P. Lovecraft, who equated the “new immigrant” population with alien vermin and feared the potential of cultural seepage, was tormented as a young man by images of leather-winged creatures he called night-gaunts.32 Later, Lovecraft would dedicate these images to print in creatures like the leathery-winged Byakhee that appeared in several of his short stories.33 In the twentieth century, these images were conveyed to larger audiences through film. Roughly concurrent with Lovecraft’s dreams, such images also appeared in The Bat. This 1920 play by Mary Roberts Rinehart featured a group of wealthy white socialites terrorized by a mysterious bat-like figure that threatens to rob them of their inheritance.34 Relatively unknown now, Rinehart’s play was popular enough in its day to inspire three feature films. The first of the two, a silent film also called The Bat, appeared in 1915, while the second (by the same name) debuted eleven years later. The third movie version of the story, The Bat Whispers, appeared in 1930 and served as direct inspiration for the Batman.35 Bob Kane was not the only one affected by such images. A character named the Bat appeared in a 1933 pulp magazine titled Black Bat Detective Mysteries. Another character of the same name also appeared in Popular Detective in 1934, and in 1935 the monstrous figure of the Bat-Man appeared as a nemesis to the famous pulp character known as the Spider.36 Kane’s version of the concept, however, most successfully transformed the traditional racialized aesthetic of the American Gothic to suit the needs of a new class of middle- and lower-class ethnic Americans.37 This appropriation was closely tied to Kane’s aspirations as limited by his ethnic heritage. Like Siegel and Shuster, Kane yearned for broader par- ticipation in American cultural life. Specifically, he yearned to leave behind the realities of the city’s urban industrial landscape, with its ethnic strife, its political corruption, and its class conflict. For Siegel and Shuster, this meant entering American professional life. For Kane, however, professional success was more of an avenue to achieve a type of aloofness associated with America’s traditional wealthy elite. Whereas Siegel and Shuster strove for middle-class success, Kane, like Lovecraft before him, dreamed of upper- class self-sufficiency, sophistication, and detachment. This fact accounts for his aforementioned affection for Batman’s wealthy alter ego, Bruce Wayne, whose name was chosen to connote the idea of “gentry” that Kane associ-

ated with America’s colonial founders.38 The difference is that while H. P. Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Lovecraft and those like him feared the cultural seepage that they perceived as threatening to their rightful inheritance of power as Americans of Anglo- Saxon descent, Kane, as a Jewish American, was perceived as one of the

infiltrators. Whereas the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century version of the American Gothic betrayed Anglo-American desires to keep ethnic Americans out of positions of cultural and social power, Kane employed the same aesthetic as a device to imagine himself breaking in. This dynamic boils down to a convoluted version of American blackface. The standard blackface dynamic involves “ethnic” white Americans partici- pating in cultural performances that denigrate African Americans while serving as rituals of inclusion into a mainstream American culture that does the same.39 In the case of Batman, we find an “ethnic” white American, in this case Bob Kane, casting himself in the role of an Anglo-American, Bruce Wayne. Kane/Wayne then appropriates the racially charged blackness of the American Gothic as a mantle that empowers him, cloaking his identity, and granting him the transgressive power to navigate the contours of American society and culture. Projecting himself into the character of Bruce Wayne, Kane could play out his fantasies and thus focus and sustain his drive to become a wealthy, independent, white American. Furthermore, by having his literary alter ego don the guise of the Batman, Kane appropri- ated the literary darkness employed against ethnically defined “others” in American society and utilized it to confront the obstacles keeping him from fulfilling his dream. In one sense, Batman violently strikes at lower-class urban populations that Kane held responsible for the violence he grew up with in the East Bronx and which he imagined himself surpassing. In this way, Batman adopts the literary blackness developed by Poe in the nineteenth century and refined by the early twentieth-century pulps. He trans- forms it from a paralyzing source of white fear into a weapon of reactionary empowerment that moves to obliterate the threatening blackness of urban landscapes. In another sense, Batman functioned as an inclusion fantasy. Thrice disguised, first as Bob Kane, then as Bruce Wayne, and finally as -Bat man, Robert Kahn could imagine himself infiltrating the places denied him by his economic standing and his ethnic heritage. Slipping past gates, jumping over walls, climbing up the side of buildings, breaking into penthouse apartments, avoiding authority figures, and otherwise penetrating into the hidden lives of the wealthy elite, Kahn-as-Batman reveled in the potential for seepage that others feared. Understanding Batman as a pure distillation of this American Gothic,

however, ignores other facets of his character, among the most important Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright being a swashbuckling demeanor and dramatic heroic style that grounds the dark avenger in a transgressive, circus-like, anti-authoritarian milieu. Like Superman, Batman’s costume liberates him, allowing him to flamboyantly

challenge authority without any repercussions. Although current Batman titles de-emphasize this aspect of the character, preferring to focus on the psychological complexity of the brooding hero, Batman’s playfully transgressive nature was evident as early as his second appearance, which took place in Detective Comics No. 28, published in June 1939.40 In this issue, Batman is approached by police officers on a rooftop crime scene. Turning to them with a smile, an almost happy-go-lucky Batman says, “So sorry, gentlemen, but I’m afraid I have to go now. Good night!” Then, “to the horrified eyes of the police, the ‘Batman’ dives off the roof . . . he turns a complete somersault in mid-air and . . . lands on his feet on the penthouse roof below! He quickly draws a tough silk rope from his belt and twirls it above his head lassoing a flagpole jutting out on a nearby building— the ‘Bat-Man’ swings out into space” and then “drops safely onto the roof of a lower building.”41 This type of daring escape, complete with snappy witticism, masked adventurer, and swashbuckling acrobatic performance, stands apart from the American Gothic with its paranoid visions of death and unavoidable doom. To some extent, this is Superman’s spirit of carnival laughter pulling Batman away from his Gothic roots. Interviews with Kane, however, reveal that the swashbuckling romances of Alexandre Dumas also served as sources of inspiration for Batman’s occasional episodes of derring-do. Featured in films and in new print editions, Dumas’s characters captured the imagination of new American audiences in the early twentieth century and generated imitators of their swashbuckling heroics. Among them was Johnston McCully’s Zorro, the Spanish noble who donned a black mask and wielded a rapier to battle tyranny and corruption in California in the years of the Mexican-American War and who also served as direct inspiration for Kane in creating Batman. Like Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, then, the swashbuckling Batman emerges as an almost invin- cible trickster, pulling the wool over the eyes of his enemies, and dispensing justice in the face of unresponsive, uncaring, or simply incompetent authority figures. This is the Batman who turns power structures topsy- turvy by dedicating his great personal wealth towards a selfless crusade for social justice. Thus, just as Batman taps into the American Gothic, which views blackness with a mixture of awe and terror, he also draws from the

romantic tradition of Dumas, which links to Afro-Diasporic voices yearn- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright ing for freedom and justice in the Atlantic world. In either case, Kane utilized these aesthetics in attempts to mask his own ethnic identity and entrench himself in white America.

Readings of Batman that attempt to link the character to Kane’s process of identity formation might seem far-fetched to some, but Kane’s biog- raphy, as well as his own testimony, lends credence to such efforts. Kane admitted that he read himself into his characters. Kane’s name change was also clearly designed to mask his Jewish ethnicity. Similarly, Batman’s don- ning of a costume had a real-world parallel. Years before he co-created Bat- man, when he was still a part of his local street gang in the Bronx, Kane suggested to his fellow gang members that they name themselves the Zor- ros. The gang agreed and then adopted the practice of wearing masks when attacking rival gangs in order to avoid recriminations from enemies and from authority figures. Additionally, when recounting his nearly crippling fight with the Vultures, Kane styles himself a swashbuckling adventurer, recalling that the films he watched in his youth directly inspired his actions in the lumberyard on that day.42 Arguably, Kane continued to mask his identity as a grown man. His autobiography, Batman and Me, for instance, serves as an instrument of self-invention (or self-affirmation), in which he casts himself as a non-ethnic white American. Never in that work does he relate his Jewish background or his name change, despite the fact that he writes about the important role that ethnicity played in structuring neighborhood life. Instead, he crafts his identity by linking himself to national events, such as the Great Depression, the Second World War, and important moments in American popular culture. He also mentions receiving Christmas presents from his father. Left to stand on its own, this detail could lead the reader to assume that the Kahns were Christian. The tone of Kane’s autobiography, coupled with descriptions of his personality shared by those who knew him, seem to suggest that his autobiographical efforts were sometimes purposefully disingenuous, muting details, and constructing a new sense of self as a means of compensating for feelings of inad- equacy. However, one should guard against generalizing from his example.43 Indeed, countless Jewish Americans attempted to assimilate into Ameri- can society by similarly muting overt references to their ethnic identity. The comic book industry alone provides us with many examples. Leg- endary comic book artist Eli Katz changed his name to Gil Kane, and the now-famous Stan Lee of Marvel Comics started life as Stanley Lieber. The practice was so widespread that Jewish American comic book pioneer Will

Eisner once joked that he must have been the only one of his peers who kept Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright his name.44 Kane’s autobiography, therefore, illustrates a much broader pat- tern of acculturation that transcends the specifics of Kane’s psychological make-up and personality. Instead of exemplifying a shamefaced rejection of

ethnic roots, Kane’s autobiography more likely illustrates his own convic- tion that he was a full-fledged American entitled to unhindered inclusion in the nation’s promise.45 The masking of identity evident in the telling of his life story, therefore, results from a blending of his genuine self-image with the cultural strategies he employed to bypass real-world obstacles that threatened to impede the realization of his heartfelt American identity. No comic book creator exemplifies these dynamics of acculturation and their links to the American superhero more clearly than Jack Kirby. Kirby was born Jacob Kurtzberg to Rosemary and Benjamin Kurtzberg on August 25, 1917. Growing up in tenement housing on the Lower East Side of New York City, the Kurtzbergs were no strangers to poverty and want. Asked in an interview in the 1990s whether they were hit hard by the Depres- sion, Rosalind Kirby, Jack Kirby’s then-widowed wife who had known her husband since their youth in New York City, replied that it didn’t have to as they already lived in what she considered to be Depression conditions.46 Fellow East Sider James Cagney similarly recalls neighborhood life in this passage from his autobiography:

Though we were poor, we didn’t know we were poor. We realized we didn’t get three squares on the table every day, and there was no such thing as a good second suit, but we had no objective knowledge that we were poor. We just went from day to day doing the best we could, hoping to get through the really tough periods with a minimum of hunger and want. We simply didn’t have time to realize we were poor, although we did realize the desperation of life around us.47

To some degree, Jack Kirby associated this life with the immigrant experience. “The immigrants,” he noted, “had to support their families, and they did it on very little, so we had very little.” The Kurtzbergs had even less when the Depression struck and Benjamin lost his job as a tailor. The resulting financial hardships forced Kirby to leave the Pratt Institute, where he studied art, and to take a series of jobs delivering newspapers and running errands to contribute to the family income.48 Like Kane, Kirby experienced the violence of life in New York’s city streets. “It wasn’t a pleasant place to live,” he mused. “Crowded, no place to play ball; You became a toreador at an early age, just dodging the ice wag-

ons.”49 Perhaps more violent than the physical environment, however, was Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright the human environment. The ethnic tensions experienced by Kane were perhaps even more pronounced in the incredibly diverse neighborhood that was Kirby’s East Side. One-time East Side resident Sam Goldberg recalled

that the neighborhood kids “were continually at war,” either among individuals or “with gangs from other districts that were of different races and religions.” “The Irish gangs,” he recounted, “came from the East Side Water- front. They invaded our district with rocks, glass bottles, clubs and all sorts of homemade weapons. Battles would rage in streets, vacant lots, and even some parks.”50 Kirby was a participant in these fights. “Fighting,” like poverty, “became second nature,” and he “began to like it.” “Each street had its own gang of kids,” he recalled, “and we’d fight all the time.” As a member of the Suf- folk Street gang, Kirby crossed rooftops to “bombard the Norfolk Street gang with bottles and rocks and mix it up with them.”51 For Kirby, however, the ethnic nature of these conflicts seemed muted by the larger reality of urban violence. If other ethnic groups perpetrated violence against him and those around him, gangsters and corrupt politicians did the same to people regardless of ethnic affiliation. This violence was taken for granted as part of American society. Cagney attests to this in his autobiography when he reminds his reader that participants in gang warfare were merely normal kids reacting to an environment in which “fighting was a part of life’s every- day fabric.”52 Idolizing tough and successful men, Kirby fantasized about becoming one of them. In later years, he mused on these early fantasies in a fan interview:

Some of my friends became gangsters. You became a gangster depending on how fast you wanted a suit. Gangsters weren’t the stereotypes you see in the movies. I knew the real ones, and the real ones were out for big money. The average politician was crooked. That was my ambition, to be a crooked politician.53

The street, therefore, bred a matter-of-fact acceptance of violence, competi- tion, and the virtues of power and success, as well as a sense of camaraderie and understanding. “I knew people well,” he once said, “I was brought up among throngs of them.”54 For Kirby, the issue was less about ethnic groups and more about individuals. Having to contend with “an ethnic melting pot,” he learned to understand all types of people, finding that there are essentially two types, “good and bad.”55 If this was the American experi-

ment, then, Kirby felt himself an active participant along with all the other Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright individuals and groups growing up in his neighborhood. They were all in the same boat together, and this led Kirby to feel some measure of brotherhood and connection with those around him.

Despite any violence that might have been directed against him for being Jewish, and despite the ways in which his elders might have self-identified, Kirby considered himself an American first and foremost. “People on my block were people that were just becoming Americans,” he once said, adding, “I felt I was an American because I was born here.” Indeed, Kirby was the first of his family born on U.S. soil.56 However, while largely silent on this point, there is evidence to suggest that Kirby’s sense of belonging also had something to do with being white. Most tellingly are his experiences on the battlefields of World War II just a few years later. As a scout for Patton’s Fifth Armored Division, Kirby encountered German soldiers in close combat situations. Despite the shooting, cursing, and yelling evident in those moments, Kirby also felt a sense of connection to the enemy soldiers. They were just “guys,” he noted, seeing them in a similar light to the rival gangs of his old neighborhood. This connection, however, was enabled by the fact that the enemy was European. That type of empathy, he mused, would have been impossible in the Pacific theater. “The Japanese and Orientals were mysterious to us,” he explained. “Considering the communications we had then, every Chinese that we knew was Fu Manchu, [who] is a mysterious person. But we didn’t see them as you and I.”57 Although Kirby is unclear about the exact nature of “the communications” mentioned in the above quote, he might have been referring gen- erally to American popular culture, which definitely shaped his self-image and worldview just as it did those of Siegel, Shuster, and Kane. Like Sie- gel and Shuster, Kirby loved the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and later pulp writers, which he voraciously consumed despite the perception that reading such fiction “made you look like the village idiot.”58 The aforementioned Fu Manchu image, of course, pervaded these books and magazines, as did the trope of the white, individualistic hero. Comic strips also served as inspiration for Kirby, so much so that he took his new name from his favorite series Rip Kirby.59 Movies, however, were perhaps the biggest influence. “I think my entire generation was brought up by Warner Bros.!” Kirby quipped, recalling his favorite characters were the tough men played by actors like his idol, James Cagney.60 Despite the fact that he largely accepted the values of the society that confronted him, Kirby felt the fear, anger, and despair attendant with his

reality. For him, the 1930s were a time of “turbulence and doubt and fear.”61 Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright He felt that the “ghetto” caged him while filling him with “a fierce drive to get out of it.”62 By the late 1930s, events overseas began to add to this ten- sion. Not only was he aware that the Nazis “were beating up thousands of

people on the streets and dragging them around and doing awful stuff,” but he was particularly perturbed that they were doing it “to women and children too.”63 More than mere news, the European war affected Kirby’s lived experience in the United States. The Nazis, he recalled, were “right in America.” He and his artistic collaborator, Joe Simon, watched with con- cern as Nazi sympathizers held rallies in Madison Square Garden, Long Island, and New Jersey, and once the pair began to exhibit anti-Nazi senti- ments in their work, they became direct targets.64 “They used to call me up by phone, you know,” he remembered. “‘We’ll wait for you downstairs,’” they’d say, or, “‘we’ll beat the bejabbers outta ya,’” all of which Kirby considered very real threats.65 The aggregate tensions of his place and time both angered and scared him. They “made me so fearful,” he once noted, “that in an immature way, I fantasized a dream world more realistic than the reality around me.”66 The chief mechanism for crafting these “realistic” fantasies became comic books. This turn was facilitated by an accident of geography as much as by his natural talent. While Kirby began drawing on his own at the age of eleven, his family’s poverty, coupled with the Depression, limited his professional training. Kirby’s neighborhood, however, was a “short trolley ride from where most of the publishers were then located,” allowing him to secure odd jobs with them. Through this association, Kirby came under the influence of professional comic strip artists, who served as mentors for the struggling young man.67 He also received support from his parents and from neighborhood youth organizations like the Boys Brotherhood Repub- lic (BBR), which provided him with a safe haven where he could indulge in art and reading away from the more violent activities on the street.68 His stint as a cartoonist for the BBR newspaper may have affected his artistic style. Backed by various community groups, including labor organizations and Communists, the BBR increased Kirby’s exposure to the muscled forms of working men appearing in pro-labor propaganda. Featuring folk heroes such as the African American steel-driving man John Henry, such literature would have planted the seeds of a pluralistic vision that matured in Kirby’s post-World War II work.69 Much of his style, however, developed from self- study. Greatly frustrated with his limited knowledge of anatomy, Kirby studied the movies, learning from the flexibility of the images on screen

until he could eventually create his “three-dimensional characters.”70 What Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Kirby lacked in professional training, however, he made up for in the energy and passion inspired by his surroundings.71 Commenting on his colleagues’ work, the late comic book artist Gil Kane noted:

Jack does his drawing on the basis of very strong impressions he is continually registering; and what he draws communicates the impression better than a literal interpretation. His drawings don’t depend on academic draftsmanship; they have a life of their own. He’s the one who started this whole business of distortion, the big hands and fists—and with him, they all work, they all have a dramatic quality that makes them believable, creating enormous power in his material—and his distortion is never questioned. . . . The one thing you can see in Jack’s work is an angry repressed personality. First there is the extreme explosiveness of his work—not merely explosive, but I mean there is a real nuclear situation on every page.72

Comic books, therefore, were always a very personal and transparent medium for Kirby, as well as a way for him to think and communicate. “I’m not a linguist,” he once noted, expressing doubts even about his own ability to speak eloquently in English. “But I can communicate well in comics; I can talk to people in comics, and from what they see in the comics they know what’s wrong with me.”73 “In doing these comics,” he continued, “I’m doing an analysis of myself—of things I’d like to be and things I’d like to do. I unconsciously drew upon my own feelings, which were very real, and they came off on the page.”74 What “came off on the page” for Kirby was a visceral reflection of the grim realities that confronted him. Throughout his career, he created hell- ish urban landscapes serving as backdrops for his superheroes, including the Guardian’s Suicide Slum, the Thing’s Yancy Street, and Scott Free’s Armagetto.75 It was through the heroes he helped develop, however, that he most reflected on his personal condition and fantasized about escape, inclusion, justice, and success as a full-fledged American. Of all the characters he worked on, Captain America is the most significant in these regards. Kirby’s work on the character captured the rough- and-tumble individualistic masculinity that he learned on the streets of New York City and focused it in ways that challenged the limitations placed on him by his surroundings. As was the case with Siegel and Shuster’s work on Superman, Kirby largely accomplished this by using Captain America to model a type of heroism that subtly challenged older heroic paradigms based on limited notions of whiteness. Captain America, however, did so

by embracing patriotic imagery, thus linking the concept of the super- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright hero more overtly to nationalism. This feat was made easier by Roosevelt’s increasing support of the Allies and the impending notion that the United States would soon enter the Second World War.76

Artist, writer, and businessman Joe Simon, who founded the studio that employed Kirby as its primary artist, provided Kirby with the opportunity to work on Captain America. Simon also served as the star-spangled superhero’s co-creator. Born into a Jewish household in Rochester, New York, in 1915, Simon went to work for the Rochester Journal-American in 1932 as assistant art editor under Adolph Edler, who taught him everything he “needed to know about reproduction, scaling, cropping photos, layouts, and retouching.” Even in those days, Simon was aware of the dangers that Adolf Hitler posed to European Jews. Although the allegations proved untrue, Simon’s co-workers circulated rumors that Edler, his mentor, was secretly a member of the German American Bund. Simon took the artistic and mana- gerial skills he learned from Edler (as well as from subsequent employment for newspapers and comic book studios) and employed them in starting his own studio in New York City. Brainstorming on ways to capitalize on the success of Superman and other “long underwear boys,” Simon hit upon the idea of using Adolf Hitler as an archenemy. According to his memoirs, this led him to envision and draft the concept art for the star-spangled superhero that became Captain America. Selling the idea to Martin Goodman of Timely Comics, he was on the verge of assigning the character to Al Avison and Al Gabriel when he noticed that Kirby was visibly upset. “I acceded to Kirby’s wishes,” writes Simon, and “I was lucky that I did. There might have been two Als, but there was only one Jack Kirby.” Simon goes on to describe how he wrote the first issue and did some of the penciling, while Kirby “did his thing, building the muscular anatomy, adding ideas and pepping up the action as only he could. Then he tightened up the penciled drawings, adding detailed backgrounds, faces, and figures.”77 Produced for Timely Comics, the first issue of Captain America was released in March of 1941.78 Although comic book writers of the time gen- erally shied away from specifically condemning Nazi Germany, preferring instead to make vague references to unspecified foreign aggressors, Timely permitted Kirby and Simon to pit their superhero against Hitler on the cover of their first issue (fig. 4.3).79 Jumping into the Reichstag and punch- ing Hitler in the face while dodging bullets from multiple SS officers on the cover of the magazine, Captain America dispensed with earlier subtleties, carrying his American brand of masculine aggression straight to villains

that Kirby and Simon considered akin to neighborhood bullies on an inter- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright national stage. That Captain America’s manly aggression emerged from Kirby’s neighborhood experiences is evident in the following quote taken from a 1987 interview:

Figure 4.3 Captain America versus Nazi Germany in Captain America Comics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 1941). Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (artists), reprinted in Captain America: The Classic Years, Vol. 1 (New York: Mar- vel Entertainment Group, 1998), p. 1. © Marvel.

When I was a very young boy, I used to wait for three guys to pass and figure out how to beat them up. How does one guy fight three? I would do it in Captain America. How does one guy fight ten guys? That was an element in Captain America I felt everyone would connect with. They’d seen it in movies, felt it in their own bodies and in their own brains. Many entertained those thoughts and of course never have done anything about them. But if you come from a restricted and unsophisticated area, you will entertain those thoughts in a confrontational way and endanger yourself just to see if they’ll work! And that’s what I did.80

Displaying such manliness, however, was only one ingredient to the character’s success. Another was wrapping him in the flag. Wearing a star-spangled red, white, and blue costume with miniature eagle wings on the sides

of his cowl, Captain America overtly suggested that his brand of masculine Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright prowess was somehow fundamental for defining American identity. The Nazis, however, were also of key importance to defining Captain America. Simon, who took a far more commercial approach to the crafting

of his characters, revealed as much in response to a question about the inspirations for Captain America:

We were just trying to do comics, trying to make a dollar. . . . It was a long shot to come up with a winner, so what we did was to take advantage of the patriotic fervor that was sweeping the country. Of course we weren’t in the war yet, but Hitler was really the villain. We started off with the villain and built the superhero character around him. Captain America was a G.I. in those days. I thought that was a very human thing to do with the guy, to make him a regular soldier and not an officer. The trick was that he’d come out of his role of peeling spuds to become a Captain.81

The Nazis, therefore, served as European “others,” their ideologies of tyranny and racism serving as a counterpoint to highlight what Kirby and Simon believed to be true American ideals of justice, freedom, inclusive- ness, and opportunity. Captain America’s modest G.I. status also placed the hero among the masses, further suggesting that America had an ethos of giving those at the bottom the chance to break boundaries and become equal participants in America. Delving deeper into the character’s formulation reveals other ways in which Kirby and Simon’s creation resonated within the evolution of racial discourse in America. Like Tarzan and Superman, Captain America’s alter ego, Steve Rogers, is phenotypically white. Unlike Tarzan and Superman, however, the specifics of his ethnicity are left ambiguous. All we know is that he is an American. Even his Anglo-Saxon-sounding name reveals little of his ethnicity since, as evidenced by Jacob Kurtzberg/Jack Kirby and many others, names are mutable. Also unlike Tarzan and Superman, Rogers does not possess hereditary manly prowess. Instead, Rogers is born so weak and fragile that he is rejected for military service. Impressed by his patriotism, however, government officials offer to enroll him in a secret super- soldier program. After being injected with a super-soldier serum, Rogers is transformed into the paragon of human physical and mental perfection. In so doing, Kirby and Simon broaden the concept of what it means to be an American superhero by suggesting that allegiance to nation, not ethnic origins, is the source of masculine empowerment.

Kirby and Simon drew from the American Gothic for their work on Cap- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright tain America in much the same way as Kane and Finger did in their Batman stories. Although the city was more overtly Gothic in the Batman stories than in the Captain America comics, Kirby and Simon’s work featured their

Figure 4.4 Captain America versus “the Other” in Captain Amer- ica Comics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 1941). Joe Simon (writer), Jack Kirby (writer and penciler), and Reed Crandall (ink- er), reprinted in Captain America: The Classic Years, Vol. 1 (New York: Marvel Entertainment Group, 1998), p. 48. © Marvel.

share of moody streets, graphic murders, and monstrous ethnic villains crawling from the shadows. Even in the pre-Pearl Harbor years, grotesque Asian giants with pointed fangs and sharp talons stalked the city streets, terrorizing the American citizens of Captain America’s New York, while gangsters were singled out in their villainy by apelike faces denoting their savagery (fig. 4.4).82 Eastern Europeans were similarly depicted as savage and barbaric, such as in the issue that involved Captain America in battle against a tyrant named Ivan the Terrible. One particularly unfortunate story pitted

the star-spangled hero against Black Talon, a once-peaceful painter named Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Pascal Horta who was transformed into a serial killer after losing his hand in a car accident and having it replaced with the hand of an African Ameri- can murderer known as “Strangler Burns.”83 The most persistent images of

monstrous “otherness” in the Captain America stories, however, remained those of the Nazis. Repeatedly appearing in the comics as insidious spies, Nazis virtually invaded Kirby and Simon’s fictional New York. Their most villainous operative was the Red Skull, whose crimson skeletal visage often appeared in the title and whose henchmen were often depicted as ape-like and brutish.84 Like Siegel, Shuster, Finger, and Kane, therefore, Kirby and Simon defined a more broadly conceived white identity by contrasting it against ethnic “others.” However, they also attempted to marry the racialized Gothic aesthetic to American foreign policy concerns by blending the type of violence traditionally depicted as part of the American urban scene to the violence the Nazis were perpetrating against the Jews in Germany. More than any other superhero from the 1940s, therefore, Captain America presented a model of white masculinity that was more inclusive (yet limited) in its definition and national (rather than individual) in scope. Captain America was also amazingly successful. The first issue of the character sold out, and he rapidly became one of the most recognized characters of the era. Just as National organized young fans into the Super- men of America, Kirby and Simon organized kids into Sentinels of Liberty clubs, a strategy that boosted sales and patriotic sentiment. Following the characters lead, companies began flooding the market with Captain Amer- ica clones, hoping to capitalize on his success. Captain America, therefore, added a dimension of patriotism to the concept of the superhero that Siegel and Shuster articulated through Superman in 1938.85 In addition to giving articulation to this new brand of national masculinity, comic books also created opportunities for expressing new types of national femininity. Significantly, this opportunity arose out of concerns about the violence appearing in superhero comic books, which by the early 1940s began to elicit strong negative reactions from social critics. In May 8, 1940, for example, Sterling North published an article in the Chicago Daily News, attacking comic books as “a national disgrace” and calling them an exercise in “graphic insanity,” the appeal of which depended “upon may- hem, murder, torture, and abduction.”86 Furthermore, he argued that “the effect of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant” and that unless “we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together

to break the ‘comic’ magazine.”87 Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright This public outcry against the violence in superhero comic books did not slow the industry’s growth, but it did lead William Moulton Marston, a prominent psychologist of his day and inventor of the lie detector test, to

conceive of Wonder Woman, a character that promised to articulate a new type of national womanhood. Born in 1893, Marston was considerably older than most of the aforementioned comic book creators, and his sensibilities were somewhat different. Marston believed that “there isn’t love enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully” and hence grew mildly critical of comic book heroics, a view that he made public in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at Comics,” published in the popular woman’s magazine, the Family Circle.88 More than criticism, however, Marston offered suggestions on how to improve the moral value of comics. Intrigued, Max Gaines con- tacted Marston, seeking advice on how to make comics more acceptable. Within months, Marston had agreed to write his own comic book, wherein he would feature the morally upright adventures of Wonder Woman. Marston referred to Wonder Woman as “America’s woman of tomorrow,” possessed of “all the allure of an attractive woman but with the strength also of a powerful man.” He hoped that Wonder Woman would serve as “a psychological propaganda for the new type of woman” who should, in his estimation, “rule the world.” Women’s bodies, Marston reasoned, contained “twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms” than those of men. While he accepted the notion that women lacked “dominance of self assertive power to put over and enforce her love desires,” he perceived this as a cultural trait rather than a biological one. He therefore kept Wonder Woman “loving, tender, maternal and feminine in every other way” but imbued her with a “dominant force,” hoping that she might serve as a model for change. Wonder Woman’s accoutrements underscored her mission. Marston explained:

Her bracelets, with which she repels bullets and other murderous weapons, represent the Amazon Princess’ submission to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty. Her magic lasso, which compels anyone bound by it to obey Wonder Woman and which was given to her by Aphrodite herself, represents woman’s love charm and allure by which she compels men and women to do her bidding.89

Thus armed, Wonder Woman’s mission was to travel from Paradise Island to “man’s world” and advocate for a new, nonviolent society. Clad in a red,

white, and blue star-spangled uniform, she was also meant to inspire spe- Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright cifically American women to follow in her example.90 Marston’s vision, however, was limited. As Bradford Wright has noted in his Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America,

Wonder Woman’s adventures did not advocate “female self-sufficiency,” but rather employed the idea of womanhood “as a restraining influence on aggressive men.”91 In this way she arguably reinforced early nineteenth- century notions of Republican Motherhood. Furthermore, Wonder Woman stories, “rife with suggestive sadomasochistic images like bondage, masters and slaves, and men groveling at the feet of women” seemed less of “a pitch to ambitious girls” and more of a vehicle for “male sexual fantasies and fetishes.”92 Nevertheless, despite Marston’s Victorian notions of female virtue and the dictates of his sexual fantasies, Wonder Woman did inspire a generation of women to empower themselves in new ways. Sports figures, such as tennis pro Alice Marble and Olympic swimmer Helen Wainwright Stelling, read and endorsed the character, holding her up as a model for “every girl.”93 Singer, songwriter, actress, writer, and social activist Judy Collins says of the character that she read in her youth: “Wonder Woman was everything I aspired to be. She was brave, she was wise, and she was ethical. She had the strength, power, and intelligence of the gods. . . . From the beginning Wonder Woman was a female mentor who showed girls like me that women could be free, could break out of their bondage and cast aside their traditional roles.”94 Wonder Woman did not, however, just “give young girls a model” in life and give “young boys who read comics a new way to look at girls.” She was also an attempt to make both boys and girls look differently on American society.95 In many ways, she challenged traditional norms by employing a more pronounced spirit of carnival than Superman. Even while reifying stereotypical ideas about womanhood, Marston playfully challenged the notion that masculine aggression and dominance was the solution to the world’s problems. Completely dispensing with cynicism, Wonder Woman pursued her mission with minimal violence. Although she occasionally punched her foes, most of the violence in her early comics involved breaking down barriers, snapping chains, and otherwise thwarting attempts to contain her spirit. Furthermore, Wonder Woman often diffused violent situations in completely nonviolent ways. When a group of Nazi spies cap- tures her friend, Major Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman recruits a college girl marching band and leads them right into the Nazis’ secret base. Upon arriv- ing they talk the men into dancing and once in close quarters they restrain

their foes with handcuffs (fig. 4.5).96 Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Despite Wonder Woman’s example, however, the brand of violent masculinity championed by characters like Batman and Captain America was more popular. Having redefined whiteness in more inclusive terms,

Figure 4.5 Wonder Woman parades for justice in Sensation Comics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (February 1942). William Moulton Marston (writer) and Harry G. Peter (artist), reprinted in Wonder Woman Ar- chives, Vol. 1 (New York: DC Com- ics, 1998), pg. 32. © DC Comics.

American superheroes consolidated these gains for their creators by increasingly resorting to traditional strategies of pitting white masculine heroes against racially defined “others.” This trend became even more pronounced as the Second World War created opportunities for marrying more inclusive notions of whiteness to a national cause. This dynamic is dramatically evidenced in the Superman animated features produced by Fleischer Studios in the early 1940s. Although early comic books referred to Superman as a general “Champion of the Oppressed,” the Fleischer cartoons feature a Superman whose battle for truth and justice had become more narrowly associated with “the American Way.” The yel- low color of his belt and “S” chevron notwithstanding, the predominance of red and blue on his uniform and the whiteness of his skin facilitated

this transition by serendipitously matching the patriotic colors of the flag Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright and nation. Darker than the original comics in tone, the Fleischer cartoons introduced the American Gothic to the previously bright and optimis- tic world inhabited by the Man of Steel. Metropolis’ city streets suddenly

became ominously dark and moody, often concealing the threatening plots of racialized “others” bent on destroying the city and otherwise bringing chaos to white America. Now more overtly aligned with America’s mainstream white culture, Superman fought to preserve rather than tear down and reconfigure urban centers. In the cartoon “Terror on the Midway,” a giant ape escapes from a circus and attempts to harm Lois Lane.97 Remi- niscent of King Kong and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” this cartoon resonates with the long-standing British and American practice of describing people of African descent by associating them with sav- agely imagined apes who threaten to metaphorically rape and murder white women.98 In “The Mummy Strikes,” Africans are more overtly vilified when black mummies erupt from a museum exhibit and go on a rampage.99 “Elec- tric Earthquake” features a Native American who threatens to blow up the island of Manhattan unless it is returned to him, its rightful heir.100 The Fleischer cartoons also included Asians in the mix, marrying the culture’s longstanding Orientalist streak to the exigencies of wartime propaganda. The primary victims in this case were, predictably, Japanese soldiers who Superman battles to the death in “Eleventh Hour.”101 He also does battle against Japanese American businessmen, who are portrayed as harbor- ing hidden and violent agendas against their adopted country.102 In each of these examples, the new white American, who is also “a strange visitor from another planet,” proves his patriotic allegiance to the nation by bat- tling those traditionally defined as “other” in the United States. Perhaps the strangest of the Fleischer cartoons in this regard, however, is “Jungle Drums.” In this cartoon, Lois Lane is shot down over Africa by a Nazi commander who is secretly operating out of an African village. Don- ning white robes akin to those worn by the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi poses as a sort of high priest and incites the villagers to do his bidding. Subsequently, Lois is retrieved by the tribesmen, who are portrayed as subservient, super- stitious, and idolatrous. After a brief interrogation, the Nazis turn her over to the villagers. The tribesmen tie her to a stake and start to burn her alive while dancing to the beat of “jungle” music that sounds more like something out of a Harlem dance club. As the Africans dance around Lois, sporting bones through their noses and contorting their disfigured bodies in fren- zied and impossible ways, Superman arrives. The Africans are paralyzed by

Superman’s mere presence, which allows the Man of Steel to rescue Lois and Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright then focus his attention on Nazi “Klansmen.” As Superman does battle, Lois communicates the location of the German submarines to the U.S. Air Force via the base’s radio, thus saving the Allied convoy from certain destruction.

Figure 4.6 Patriotic Superman. Fred Ray (artist), Superman, Vol. 1, No. 14 (New York: DC Comics, January 1942), cover. © DC Comics.

The bizarre elements evident in the cartoon are employed to various significant ends. As is the case in the aforementioned episodes, Superman’s Americanness is highlighted through his struggle against ethnically defined enemies—in this case, the stereotyped Africans. The use of contempo- rary music in the torture scene, however, serves to link the urban culture of African Americans to the clichéd image of the savage African. In this way, “Jungle Drums” marries domestic and imperial racism into a cohesive whole, which is then employed to cast Superman’s whiteness in relief on a far more epic scale. Furthermore, the cartoon manages to subtly engage the sins of America’s racist past, while simultaneously displacing them onto white “others” represented by the Germans. An American problem in the real world, the specter of the KKK is projected onto the racist regime of Nazi Germany. Superman, then, is allowed to combat and triumph over the

transplanted evil of racism, unthinkingly denying it as a part of his own Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright cultural heritage. Meanwhile, the cartoon follows in the old tradition of employing stereotypically rendered Africans to define the power of Ameri- can white masculinity.103

In addition to bolstering the role of the superhero as a vehicle of inclusion for ethnic whites, the onset of the war was good for the comic book industry. As Bradford Wright notes, the era was marked by “a rare conver- gence of interests between publishers, creators, readers and government policy.”104 Unequivocally supportive of the war effort, comics continued to serve as propaganda pieces, promoting the rationing of domestic policies, advocating for vigilance at home, backing America’s Germany first strategy, supporting pro-imperial policies that would allegedly maintain order in Allied colonial territories, vilifying the enemy, and championing Ameri- can troops (4.6).105 Obviously, these themes played well to audiences on the home front, anxious to support their loved ones overseas, but comic books also had a ready-made clientele of soldiers who were provided opportunities to acquire them for morale purposes. Given this confluence of factors, industry profits soared even in the face of paper rationing. Despite the undeniable boon superheroes imparted to the comic book industry immediately before and during the Second World War, the popularity of these colorfully clad adventurers and crime-fighters began to show signs of vulnerability by the early 1940s.106 Imperceptibly at first, demo- graphic, political, economic, and cultural changes wrought by World War II began to transform the social and cultural environment that produced and sustained their exploits. With young men enlisting in the military, many young women assumed traditionally male roles in the workplace, thus enhancing their purchasing power as consumers and expanding notions of female empowerment in the culture more broadly. Striving to maintain prewar successes, the comic book industry responded readily to what it perceived as the tastes of this potential female audience. Following Won- der Woman’s prewar lead, comic book companies stepped up the presence of female superheroes by introducing characters such as Miss America, Sheena, and the Blonde Phantom. They also produced teen-oriented “dat- ing” comics starting in the early 1940s. Although superheroes maintained a ubiquitous presence throughout the war years, “adolescent girls were in the driver’s seat” by 1945, with comic book concerns publishing the adventures of “working girls” such as Millie the Model, Nellie the Nurse, and Tessie the Typist.107 Military enlistment affected comic books in another significant way,

siphoning off the creative forces that initially produced the superhero.108 Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright Although artist Joe Shuster was passed over by the army due to his ailing eyesight, the Superman creative team was sundered when his partner, Jerry Siegel, was drafted into service and assigned as a reporter for the army’s

newspaper, Stars and Stripes.109 Captain America artist Jack Kirby was also drafted into service, ultimately fighting on the front lines of the European theater as a scout for the Fifth Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army.110 Enlisted in the Coast Guard, Kirby’s partner, Joe Simon, was soon patrol- ling up and down the East coast of the United States “keeping an eye out for Nazi subs or landing parties” rather than writing and drawing the exploits of costumed adventurers. Although a few notables, like Batman artist Bob Kane, remained active in comics throughout the war, Simon claims that so many creators left for military service that there was nobody left to “give the same flavor” to the characters they had originated.111 Whether possessed of the same flavor or not, comic book companies not only continued to publish older superheroes, but they also flooded the market with countless clones of Superman, Batman, and Captain America. Although some of these imitations, like Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, garnered a great deal of audience acclaim, many proved formulaic and uninspiring, arguably diluting audience enthusiasm in the long run. Furthermore, the type of violence offered by superhero comics seemed unsatisfying escapism for many of the enlisted men about to face real world violence on the battle- field. Many companies began publishing adventure stories more rooted in the realities of war, while others opted to re-emphasize humor strips as a means of laughing off the more frightening and now undeniably present reality of military conflict. Once in the military, for instance, original Flash artist Harry Lampert began an army camp-oriented comic strip to help his fellow soldiers through the experience of military life. Rather than resort to the “blood and thunder” tales appearing in superhero comics, Lampert chronicled lighthearted comedic adventures of Droopy, The Drew Field Mosquito.112 Working hard to cultivate this G.I. audience, comic book companies began to diversify more heavily in other genres.113 When the war ended in 1945, comic book creators returned to an industry that had grown as a consequence of a wartime economy eager for reas- surance and nationalistic propaganda. However, they were also confronted with the fact that their characters did not belong to them but rather to the comic book publishers. Some, like Siegel and Shuster, sued for control and lost. Others, such as Harry Lampert and Will Eisner, forayed into advertis- ing and commercial art. Many, like Jack Kirby and Bob Kane, continued to

work for the comic book industry. For the most part, however, they were not Copyright © 2015. University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved. rights All Mississippi. of Press University 2015. © Copyright working on superhero comics. Born in the crucible of the Great Depression and growing in prominence through wartime, superheroes no longer spoke directly to national concerns. As a consequence, they waned in popularity.

In 1949, Timely Comics canceled the adventures of the Human Torch, Sub- Mariner, and Captain America. Likewise, DC Comics ceased publishing the adventures of the Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, Starman, and countless others, joining their competitors in publishing crime, romance, war, Western, and horror comics. Only Superman remained prominent during the 1950s, largely as a consequence of his presence on television. Apart from Superman, only Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Plas- tic Man continued to carry their own comic books in this period. In many respects, although fondly remembered by many, the superhero seemed a