THE READING RHEUM: THE MAN OF BRONZE (1933)

 

One of the most interesting thing about Doc Savage's first novel is how much of the mythology was in place from the first. 

Naturally, I knew that author Lester Dent-- billed throughout the hero's pulp-magazine run as "Kenneth Robeson"-- established right away the backstory of Doc Savage and his "Fabulous Five" aides in basic nutshell-fashion, which "shells" he and other raconteurs would continue to re-use for most if not all subsequent stories. But I'm rather surprised to note that Dent articulated the idea of Doc's "Fortress of Solitude" in the first novel. In contrast to the use that DC's Superman made of the idea-- where the fortress was just sort of a "Superman museum"-- Dent's hero states that this refuge was "the secret of [Doc's] universal knowledge," because the hero needed intense "periods of concentration." One assumes that this concentration was the source of his polymath facility with all of the sciences, though a cynic might say that it was also a way of distancing himself from common humanity. 

BRONZE is also all about establishing the righteous quest of the six heroes, even if it's framed in somewhat juvenile terms, as Doc tells his men, "We first got together back in the War [i.e., World War One, though none of them ever seem old enough.] We all liked the big scrap. It got into our blood. When we got back, the humdrum life of an ordinary man was not suited to our natures." This account slightly skirts a separate motive, in which it's asserted that Doc's father, a rich philanthropist, subjected his son to intensive training in physical and mental development for the express purpose of having Doc become a world-beating do-gooder. In any case, at the beginning of BRONZE, Doc and his men learn that the senior Savage has been killed, thus giving the sextet a concrete case to investigate.

Not coincidentally, the solution to the elder Savage's murder also leads the six champions to an almost endless fortune in gold that funds Doc's endless supply of crimefighting toys. The heroes journey to Central America and find that their enemies are linked to a Mayan civilization that, in true Rider Haggard fashion, has remained intact and isolated from the vagaries of colonist incursions. Yet though that bald summary suggests that Doc and friends may take the form of "ugly Americans" joining in the colonial project, Doc himself is very outspoken about disagreeing with said project. 

It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of deal, you know.

When the good guys meet the Mayans, the natives are mostly well-bred and intelligent, including a sexy princess named Monja, who immediately falls for the unapproachable Doc Savage. The only exceptions are a corrupt warrior class who are behind various assassination attempts on Doc and friends, all with the long-range goal of taking control of the Mayan redoubt away from the rightful rulers. The villains are easily the weakest aspect of the novel, though it's an interesting sociological motif that Dent made ambitious professional warriors his bad guys, in marked contrast to the knightly purity of Doc's group. In the end, once the villains are defeated, the Mayan rulers become the de facto sponsors of Doc's war against evil. This sponsorship is certainly is a fate better than their getting annihilated just to make the hero look like a tough guy, which was a common fate for lost civilizations in thirties pop fiction, as seen in 1935's THE PHANTOM EMPIRE.

A minor surprise: I remember groaning when I watched a scene in the 1975 DOC SAVAGE film wherein Doc pays a sort of left-handed compliment to the beautiful female lead by telling her, "Mona-- you're a brick!" It was a corny line, but its derived from a scene in the book, where Doc says much the same thing to Monja. But it does have a little more psychological heft in prose. Doc is also a chaste knight who won't engage with the female sex to avoid threatening his mission, and since he's slightly aware of Monja's affections, he seeks to distance himself from the sexy young woman by treating her like one of the boys.

WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED SUPERHERO OUGHT TO WEAR

... "ought to wear," that is, in terms of impressing adult readers and thus giving rise to the reception of the genre as a legitimate category of what I've called "adult pulp."

In one of my old JOURNAL essays I started off by noting that superheroes wearing costumes was the one element that made adult readers consider the genre as pulp-fiction of an irredeemably juvenile kind. And there's no question that a lot of adults say that the thing they find most off-putting about superheroes is their tendency to wear their underwear on the outside. (Incidentally, this excuse for a joke made the most sense back when Americans wore "long underwear" of one kind or another.)

However, I've come to think that the costume-complaint may not really be as substantial as I thought earlier. In the pop-culture world as we know it today, there are a lot of characters who have superhero-like powers, weapons or adventures, and who wear commonplace attire. James Bond may be the foremost example of this type, and there's no doubt that the prose novels qualify as adult-oriented pulp. However, Bond's enormous popularity across many cultures stems principally from the movie adaptations, which may have caught fire from being culturally "in the right place at the right time." Before Bond, popular fiction-- prose fiction, movies, comic strips-- played host to innumerable characters who wore ordinary clothes but enjoyed extraordinary adventures, whether they chased down weird masterminds (Doc Savage), mystic menaces (Jules De Grandin, Mandrake the Magician), or just freaky-looking criminals (Dick Tracy). For every one of these that became moderately well known, there are presumably dozens that have been forgotten. The question is, did even Dick Tracy-- arguably one of the most famous "plainclothed crusaders"-- earn any deep and abiding respect because he pursued Flat Top and Pruneface while wearing regular clothes?

Say, for sake of argument, that the leotard-style costume never caught on in comic books. Early sketches of Superman suggest that Joe Shuster originally meant for the hero to wear street-clothes a la Doc Savage, and that the image of the costume that was added later, almost at random, in imitation of  such carnival performers as strongmen and acrobats. Given the appeal of a "modern-day Hercules," it's not impossible that a non-costumed Superman might have begotten an extended  family of mufti-clothed crimefighters, and that costumes might have appeared only occasionally, as they did in the period of the "hero pulps." Assuming that the level of talent and production of such comic books stayed the same, is there any reason to think that comic books full of supermen in plainclothes would have earned any more deep and abiding respect than the costumed versions?

Despite the fact that a lot of adults have scorned costumes as elements of childish make-believe, I think the genre of adventure itself is the real source of contempt. In an earlier essay I referenced Ursula LeGuin's animus toward prose genres like space opera and sword and sorcery, which certainly don't involve "costumes" as such. There are a few 19th-century prose novels in the adventure-genre that have become acknowledged classics-- IVANHOE, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. But it took about a century for academic critics to embrace adventures with metaphenomenal content, such as DUNE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In the last twenty years academics have become somewhat more latitudinarian about the adventure- genre, with or without elements of fantasy. But old attitudes die hard.

There are various "adult superhero" graphic novels out there, and it may be significant that a lot of them aspire to literary quality by using the tropes of irony and satire. I think a great "adult superhero" graphic novel in a purely adventurous mode is still a possibility, but it would have to have the complexity of a Melville novel to overcome the casual contempt so often directed against the genre.

DITKO AND FIGHTIN' FOOLS

I wrote this in response to a CHFB poster who wondered why Ditko had expressed (in a conversation) a dislike of seeing heroes fight amongst themselves, and why he liked Ayn Rand, whose "characters only cared about themselves."

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I've only read a handful of Rand works, but IMO it's not correct to say that the characters only care about themselves. They care about high ideals based in rational choices, and such rationality is conveyed even through the medium of aesthetic accomplishments, such as Howard Roark and his architectural designs. I think Ditko believed that he conveyed such rational ideals through his art as well. 

I don't think Ditko was ever that crazy about the concept of heroes fighting each other. He drew things like Spidey/Human Torch battles because Stan Lee was the editor and Stan, at that time, emphasized heroic crossovers, often with fights brought on by big misunderstandings. I don't think you'll find any such hero-fights in SPIDER-MAN when Ditko began to be credited with plotting. After Ditko left Marvel for Charlton, he created the Question and a new version of the Blue Beetle, but though the characters appear together in mufti in BLUE BEETLE #5, they never team up in costume. In the Question story for MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1, an anonymous character gushes about how great it is to see "heroes with feet of clay," but Ditko frames this enthusiasm so as to make the opinion seem foolish.

Given that Ditko's history shows him to be uncompromising in his ideals-- at least, as much as he could possibly be in mainstream comics-- I would bet that at the very least he resented having to be a tool of the company, being required to hype other characters that he had nothing to do with. (Think of SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1, where he pretty much had to work in almost all the 20th-century Marvel characters into his story.)  Kirby, who co-created so much more of the Marvel Universe, had no problem with working in characters he didn't create, though fan-critics have opined that he never really got the Spider-Man design right. There's no way to be sure whether Lee or Kirby first came up with "quarreling heroes." Either one of them could've been inspired by the example of DOC SAVAGE, as well as remembering the fan-excitement that accompanied the battles of the Golden Age Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. But Ditko just didn't dig that sort of thing.

I am pretty surprised that he would even comment on the Avengers fighting amongst themselves. I have a dim memory that he did a few make-work AVENGERS issues, so maybe even at that late date he was rather discouraged to see that Stan Lee's meet-and-fight trope was still regnant. 

As for Hawk and Dove, Ditko could've used the same excuse he used once for Spider-Man's faux pas: that they were too immature to know better.The Atlas character you remember, the Destructor, starts out as a punk but quickly gets religion and becomes a stand-up guy.

NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA BATSEX!

Ah, time for a break from heavy stuff. I'm once more indebted to Noah Berlatsky, for making these silly statements about the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries.

Batman isn’t only an object of desire on the 60s television show; he’s actually the only object of desire. The show includes gratuitously scantily clad lovelies...But the lovelies are never identified within the dialogue as objects of erotic interest; Batman and Robin are impervious to their charms... 

Never identified? Berlatsky starts out his observations by noting that when King Tut's consort/henchwoman Nefertiti drools over Batman, the evil Egyptologist is filled with "ire." Should one assume from this that Berlatsky believes that the villain has no "erotic interest" in his beauteous queen? How about in the episode "King Tut's Coup," where Tut kidnaps Lisa (Lee Meriwether, later one of the show's three "Catwomen") because he's convinced that she's Queen Cleopatra?  I thought I  saw some pretty good flaring of the nostrils there. For that matter, it isn't all one-way: in this episode Tut's handmaiden Neila (Grace Lee Whitney) sets Robin free from bondage. Why?

Frankly, Robin, I don't give a darn about you, but I want her outta here. King Tut may be fat, lazy and extremely lewd, but he's all I have. And with her here, I don't even have that.

Further, the Phony Pharoah is not unique in this wise. The majority of male villains have glamorous molls hanging around, and though one rarely sees the villains becoming romantic, the molls certainly aren't being kept around for their brains.  These "lovelies" aren't just floating around like empty signifiers: they're being kept around because they're hot babes. There's even a extra-diegetic marker that frequently shows up whenever a voluptuous woman struts her stuff: one of those woodwind-sounding tunes (la la la la LA la) that's meant to be marginally classier than the brassy notes one associated with strippers (wah wah wah WAH wah).

Berlatsky also says:

This is the case with virtually all the other leading ladies as well; Julie Newmar as Catwoman wears a skin-tight, jaw-dropping outfit, but no one’s jaw drops; the Moth, one of Riddler’s associates, wears a skin-tight, eye-raising outfit, but no one’s eyes are raised. The only sex object which is acknowledged as a sex object is the Batman himself. In this show, it’s women, not men, who visibly lust. 

What Berlatsky seems to want is some sort of comic overreaction: some scene in which men are show with their tongues hanging out like a Tex Avery wolf.  A close reading of BATMAN the series, of course, would show several instances in which both of the central heroes are at least moved by feminine charms, though they rarely if ever give in to them. But this is a long way from saying that only the women "visibly lust."

The romantic reticence of the Dynamic Duo may have had something to do with the producers' attempt to captivate a juvenile audience as well as an adult one.  Still, in structural terms BATMAN wasn't really all that different from other adventure-oriented shows of the period, be they westerns like BAT MASTERSON or SF-shows like STAR TREK. Gene Barry in the former and William Shatner in the latter are both positioned as smooth operators who can't help but inflame the loins of almost every female guest-star who shows up.  Dozier's Batman is only different in his psychological outlook: he's an Adonis who's trying to be a chaste Hippolytus, trying to put aside lust and devote himself to crimefighting even as the aforementioned son of Theseus tries to focus all his energies on being a chaste worshipper of Artemis. This archetype is probably just as widely dispersed throughout pop culture as the archetype of the smooth seducer: off the top of my head, most of the adventures of Doc Savage position the pulp-hero as being desired by many "lovelies" but never (well, hardly ever) succumbing to temptation.

Still, though Berlatsky's wrong on this matter, his observations do open up another line of thought as to the structural functions of sexuality in the adventure-mythos, which I'll address in Part 2.