Thots on heroes, plot, memory, revision, etc.

[Still testing pens.]

Dear diary,

Who are all these “super-heroes” that everyone keeps talking about? I understand what a regular hero is — like Cops & Robbers, who are, in fact, the only proper heroes of classic literature, as is evidenced by my own Cop-Robber Trilogy (see Pt. 1, Pt. 2, & Pt. 3). So I get what true heroes are; but what’s the deal with these super-heroes?

The Greeks had Apollo & Dionysus, which roughly translate to our modern Cop & Robber characters; but what need is there for, say, a Super Man or Bat Man?

As I understand it, Super Man didn’t gain his amazing strength by training hard at the gym and eating a lot of protein — no, he was simply born on a planet where everyone is strong, so his powers are just a genetic inheritance: he didn’t have to work for them. If you & I had been lucky enough to get born on that same Strong Land, into the same species of Strong Folk, then we’d be every bit as “super” as Mr. Man.

And if more than just Man himself had fallen to Earth in a comet, or whatever carried him here — I say, if some of this Super Person’s childhood friends had been allowed to evacuate the premises along with him, when Strong Land died, then there would be a number of us Strong People living as our neighbors in Minnesota, which is my homeland. And Super Man would have many kinfolk & relatives in the surrounding tri-state area to test his patience.

*

Wow that was kinda fun, just winging it & attempting to remember the backstory of Super Man (the jettisoned space-pod, which I called a comet, etc.); I never read any comic books, neither as a kid nor as an adult, so whatever I know about these things just comes to me from who-knows-where. Hearing rumors floating in the wind, one passes them on as accurate information. — As I’ve repeated recently, I’m fascinated by memory’s functions and malfunctions; and I’ve also lately grown obsessed with the idea of plot, narrative, story (because none of my masterworks contain this popular device, not even my shorter masterworks); so the way that my mind sums up the details about super-heroes is an exemplary blend of bad narrative and faulty memory.

*

So that explains away Super Man... Now what about Bat Man?

I see Bat Man as a billionaire whose parents got killed by the CIA, and now this orphan wants to fight fire with fire: so, being blind to all irony, he becomes a private vigilante to oppose the privatization of government power. — And the whole bat-suit idea comes from his love of the night life, for just because he’s trying to be a “good guy” doesn’t mean that he can’t have an occasional cocktail with attractive seductresses. Also bats are known to fly in the dark, which is when most villains begin their work-shift.

...Moving on to the next super-hero I can recall:

The Incredible Hulk became what he is after being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was walking thru the desert, right when the U.S.A. was testing its bombs. So one of the nuclear weapons fell right in front of Monsieur Hulk, who then turned frog-green from overexposure to radiation. And, ever since that moment, he acquired the talent to become a raging muscleman whenever something annoys him. It’s like a super power that he can almost turn on & off, but his will is weak.

Wonder Woman, I’m not sure about. I know that her jet is invisible, and her rope is golden. (She carries a heavenly rope in her belt that’s a whip and a lasso.) I can’t figure out what would be the difference between her and Super Girl.

And then there’s Cat Woman & Bat Girl, too. All these female heroes baffle me: they seem to lack backstories. None of them appear radioactive; none seem to have been born on distant planets. They all look just like regular working girls in swimsuits or bodystockings. Maybe that’s cuz the comic book writers and illustrators are predominantly males, who don’t have much wisdom or insight into humankind; so when they try to create anything other than a 1950s-era Corporate Executive Man, they end up with a 1950s-era Female Office Secretary, cuz that’s all they know.

Then said Jesus, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Oh, and also there is a Spider Man. He is a boy who…

No, I’m really only interested in studying the story of Super Man, this morning. So I looked him up on the Internet. I used Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (I wonder who composes all those entries.) Here I discovered the official backstory of Super Man — but not only his own personal backstory but the backstory of his backstory: his story’s history. What I mean is that he didn’t even come out fully formed, when his idea first got born. Cuz look: it sez:

The Origin of SUPER MAN

A mad chemist named Smalley wants to do an experiment, but he’s not willing to pay very much for a guinea pig. So Smalley visits a breadline during the Great Depression and recruits a poor man named Bill Dunn. Smalley entices Dunn to be his guinea pig by promising him “a real meal & a new suit”. So Dunn follows Smalley back to his lab room, and Smalley gives Dunn a magic potion. The result is that Dunn acquires the gift of telepathy. Soon Dunn becomes intoxicated by his new strength & seeks to rule the world. As a superpowered man, Dunn uses his abilities for evil, only to discover that the effects of Smalley’s potion are just temporary. So Dunn slowly begins to dwindle back to a normal man. Yet during Dunn’s bid for world domination, he ends up killing Professor Smalley. (We also learn that Smalley had intended to kill Dunn & give himself the same powers.) This is sad for Dunn, as now he cannot recreate the secret formula. So the story ends with Dunn returning to the breadline in a Great Depression that he himself made even greater.

That’s the online recap of the story originally written by Jerry Siegel, which would eventually become what we now know as Super Man. Obviously some revisions would need to be made to this character, to change him into the hero familiar to us — for instance, our Super Man is good, not bad. Yet, speaking personally, just for the record, I think it woulda been interesting if he’d have been allowed to remain pure evil.

SIDE NOTE

& on a side note, I now realize that this same thing might have happened with the character of the LORD, from Genesis onward in the Bible; for he starts out as a bad apple in Eden; then gradually becomes less and less interactive, more and more withdrawn from humankind. In the beginning, we find the LORD “walking in the garden, in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8) with Adam and Eve in their innocent nakedness. And God even routinely picnics with his favorites — see the story of Abraham...

The LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: & he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and he hasted to dress it. And he set it before them, under the tree, and they did eat. (Genesis 18:1-8)

...also consider the episode where Moses brings his people up to the mountaintop to dine with the LORD...

Then went up with Moses, seventy of the elders of Israel: And they saw the God of Israel: There was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand: also they saw God, and did eat and drink. (Exodus 24:9-11)

So the LORD was once a very hands-on God. However, by the end of the Hebrew Scriptures (the so-called Old Testament), he is but an old bearded man in the sky...

I beheld, high up in the clouds: the Ancient of Days, who did sit, and whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head was like the wool of sheep. (Daniel 7:9-14)

...& soon this grandfather God disappears entirely, when he is usurped (or eclipsed, if you prefer) by his nemesis Christ, who weirdly starts out as the good Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark, and then by the end of Revelation has transformed into the vengeful, sword-tongued Warrior from Heaven (all over again?), benevolence having become wholly malevolent; as it is written:

And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS & LORD OF LORDS. (Revelation 19:11-16)

This last passage was writ by the one I call Little Johnny Patmos (“I, John, was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, in the isle that is called Patmos.” [Rev. 1:9-10]). — He does his best to make me hate Jesus.

[End of SIDE NOTE]

...Alright, but now let me give another quotation from Wikipedia (it repeats some of the above info, but I copy it here because it explains why the idea got transformed into its opposite):

In 1933, Jerry Siegel wrote “The Reign of the Superman”, which was self-published in a science fiction magazine. It told the story of a bald villain with telepathic powers. Then, in an attempt to devise something that would sell to newspaper syndicates, Siegel re-conceived this character as a powerful hero, sent to our world from a more advanced society. He then partnered with an illustrator to develop the idea into a comic strip, but it was pitched unsuccessfully.

So that’s how the Super Man turned from bad to good. It was all just an attempt to make some money.

What happened next is that the bigwigs at a shabby publishing firm barked an order at one of their editors: they told him to slap together one of them newfangled comic pamphlets (“Is that what the kids are calling them?”) so that the firm could have something cheap to print off, & they could thus make some easy dough. Of course they wanted their profits fast, so they gave this editor a tight deadline. The man therefore was compelled to fulfill the assignment by using the firm’s own inventory and stockpile pages (as opposed to wasting time seeking out fresh genius). The editor was able to trudge most of the way thru this task without much trouble. Now he was almost done, but he still needed a lead feature. So he called one of his former colleagues on the telephone and explained the situation:

“I got this stupid comic book that I’m supposed to cobble together out of odds & ends, and I already used up the contents of the firm’s ‘miscellaneous’ drawer. Do you happen to know of anything — any old crappy stories lying around unwanted — that I could use as my main attraction, so that I can finish this thing & go get drunk?”

& his friend on the other side of the line answered: “Just a moment. Just a moment.” And while rummaging thru old unwanted material that was scattered in one of his desk drawers, he ended up stumbling upon the rejected Superman comic strips. “How about these, Dave? Will these aborted efforts help you complete your mission?”

So the publishing firm’s editor, whose name is Dave now apparently, thanked his friend Hal the Prince and then initiated a teleconference with Siegel, the story’s author (also the illustrator of the Superman comic was invited to the meeting, but I’m trying to avoid mentioning his name cuz I myself am more of a text-guy than an image-guy, therefore I hate all illustrators they are my eternal enemies); and Dave proposed to make a covenant with Siegel which had the following “if-then” terms:

IF mister Siegel and his illustrator buddy can paste their creation into 13 comic book pages, THEN the bigwigs at the publishing firm will buy said pages. (And the price that the bigwigs shall pay is one peanut per page.)

At this point in the Wikipedia article (which covers all the same stuff that I’m saying, only much boringer), the contents of those thirteen pages is given in the form of textual descriptions. I don’t know why these types of summaries are so attractive to me, but now I wanna copy them out, here below — I guess I like the idea of converting blatant, lucid, comic images into the elusive world of text.

Moreover, as I share the following descriptions of Mr. Siegel and his partner’s intellectual property, I shall freely vandalize them, instead of conveying them faithfully. And here is what I will be thinking while I do so: Since Super Man is the #1 Comic Hero of the USA, and Jesus Christ is the USA’s Tragic Fallen Star, I must add the latter savior into these excerpts, lest I fail to amuse myself.

[And I wanna ponder, as I copy all this junk, how these pages of comic-book illustrations create a narrative, & how well they do so; whether they succeed or fail with me as a reader. Let me ask myself at least the following two questions: “What effect does all this stuff have on my memory? And what effect does my memory have on all this stuff?” Also, maybe later in this essay or tomorrow, I would like to compare and contrast such material with other canonical stories. This will, I hope, spark new thots about story & plot; cuz I really am desirous of learning more about this territory.]

1. Baby Jesus is sent to Earth by his scientist Father in a “hastily-devised manger, fashioned out of bulrushes, in the shape of a comet” from a distant planet which was overrun with creditors and “destroyed by old age”.
2. After the manger crashlands on Earth, “a passing motorist, discovering the sleeping baby within, turns the child over to a temple”.
3. A passing scholar espies the action of the above motorist & remarks: “This practice of giving human beings to the temple is a form of exposure. Strictly speaking, it involves getting rid of children, as well as of women, old people, and other unwanted individuals by casting them off so that they may die or be killed by wild animals.” [Gelb, Ignace J. 1972 “The Arua Institution,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale 66: 1–21)]
4. The baby Jesus lifts a large chair overhead with one hand, astounding the temple attendants.
5. When Jesus (now named Christ) reaches maturity, he discovers that he can “leap 1/8 of a mile”, hurdle skyscrapers, outrun a train, and that “nothing less than an exploding radioactive bombshell can penetrate his skin”. Additionally he finds that he is preternaturally wise.
6. Christ decides that he “must turn his titanic wisdom into economic gains that might benefit mankind,” so he pens a manifesto & titles it The Gospel, which gets widely distributed to Christian bookstores, in order “to champion the oppressed.”
7. A double-panel centerfold depicts “the scientific explanation of Jesus Christ’s amazing sagacity”. These panels do not name Christ’s home planet as Heaven or explain how he was elected to be The Messiah.
8. Christ is shown attempting to save an innocent woman who is about to be executed by the U.S. justice system. To save this life, Christ delivers the real murderess, bound and gagged, and leaves her on the lawn of the state Governor’s mansion after breaking thru the door to his house with a signed confession.
9. The next page shows Jesus coming to the aid of another lady, named Liberty, who is being beaten by her husband, named Debt. The husband faints when his knife shatters on Jesus’ radiant skin, even tho there’s already a wound there.
10. Next, Christ is shown rescuing his favorite scribe Lois Lane (who also debuts in this issue) from a bat-suited gangster who abducted her after she rebuffed him at a nightclub. This leads to the cover scene where Jesus lifts the batmobile overhead.
11. Christ is then shown visiting a swamp in Washington, D.C., as his disciples urge him to investigate a conspiracy among some Senators who they suspect are about to slay Caesar. Christ prompts a confession from their ringleader Cassius while using “techniques of enhanced interrogation” on the terrified fellow. This leads into the next issue, “Caesar...Cassius...CHRIST!!!” where all three titular characters merge into an Holy Trinity.
12. The penultimate panel shows the ex-Nazirite Jesus miserably failing to keep his alter ego Jehovah out of the newspapers.
13. Jesus is shown moving to South America.