MTYHCOMICS: "MARGO'S STORY" (THE SHADOW STRIKES #24, 1991)

The 1989-92 run of THE SHADOW STRIKES only lasted 31 issues, and so was probably not judged a great success at the time. The title doesn't seem to have many fans today, and there may not be much support for my championing of the (mostly) stand-alone story of issue #24, "Margo's Story."  Back in the day the tale created a slight rumpus in its day for positing that Margo Lane-- a support-character from the pulp-series who assumed iconic status in the radio show-- was actually not a purely Caucasian character, like most of the series' regulars, but a half-black who happened to favor her white father.

I can't assess the racial politics of either the SHADOW pulp or the radio series. A 1934 Walter Gibson story introduces Jericho Druke, an Afro-American agent of the mysterious hero,. so the pulp did have at least one positive image of a person of color. Still, neither the pulp nor the radio show were set up to critique society in any fashion.

Gerald Jones not infrequently addressed topics of race in his comics-work, not always with complete success. However, "Margo's Story" is one of his better attempts. I said that "Story" is largely stand-alone, by which I mean that it takes place in the context of a larger ongoing storyline, though one need not read the encompassing issues to understand the tale. 

At the start of the narrative, Harry Vincent-- one of the pulp-serial's most-used viewpoint characters-- has fallen out of favor with his shadowy boss. The hero's perpetual enemy Shiwan Khan kidnapped Margo Lane in the previous issue, and Vincent denounced his "chief" for letting it happen. The Shadow's response is to exile Vincent from his network, so that none of Vincent's old comrades will speak with him. Yet at the story's outset, Vincent feels somewhat less than liberated. He remembers how the hero saved Vincent from taking his own life, and he describes the life of obedient service he pursued to his master's uncompromising crusade for justice. But when he speaks of breaking free of the Shadow, he imagines that "I'm dead again." 

Unable to do anything about the kidnapping of Margo-- with whom Vincent is half-in-love-- he chooses to investigate who Margo was before she became an aide to the Shadow, as if finding her identity will shore up his own. Ultimately Vincent's quest leads to Harlem, and a new version of Jericho Druke.

Druke, being a Shadow agent, also refuses to speak to Vincent, but by chance the detective gets new information from one of Druke's clients.

Vincent, in the tradition of most hard-boiled detectives, doesn't so much trace down clues as blunder from one milieu to another-- in this case, journeying from Harlem to New Orleans. Clearly Jones chose these two milieus to be complementary images of the Black Experience in the United States, and Jones tries his best to capture that elusive experience in his own terms:

.. he led me-- slowly-- at the pace of the city. Away from the breezes of the river and the fanned air pouring out of the tourist joints, where the air was like hot jello you had to swim through. I thought I knew what "muggy" meant fro, New York, just like I thought I knew what a Negro neighborhood was like from Harlem.

Does white writer Jones capture "the Black Experience?" Maybe not, but as far as melding the generally apolitical "Shadow" mythos with a more politicized understanding of the American underclass, Jones does a better than average job. I appreciate that he makes Vincent a man of his time. He doesn't become enraged at the revelation of white men's injustice, but it moves him because it's something that simply never impacted on his world before. He's shocked to learn that Margo, his possible inamorata, is actually half-black, and he doesn't immediately think that it doesn't matter, though it does explain for him a lot of mysterious aspects of Margo's life, particularly when he converses with Margo's long-unseen mother.

Further, Jones manages to make the fantasy of the Shadow's organization relevant to the political realities, for Vincent concludes that her experience of racial injustice is precisely the thing that makes her join the ranks of the Shadow. And by the story's end, "dead man Vincent" finds that he can only find his own resurrection by joining the ranks of the faithful once more.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT WONDER WOMAN, EXCEPT FOR WONDER WOMAN

This week I finally got around to reading Jill Lepore's 2014 book THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN. Prior to reading it, I'd heard only a few vague comments to the effect that the author had used the story of Wonder Woman's genesis as an excuse for tub-thumbing the history of American feminism.

This is essentially true. But this need not have been a strike against Lepore's book. Gerald Jones' 2005 MEN OF TOMORROW manages to talk to address the greater culture of America within which Superman and some of his Golden Age contemporaries were created, and at the same time, he manages to show how the character's mythos grew within the published comics: the evolution of Superman's powers, his relationship with Lois Lane, the utilization of kryptonite, and so on.

Unfortunately, the only facets of Wonder Woman's stories that interest Lepore are those that mirror items from the biography of creator William Moulton Marston, his collaborators ("co-wives" Sadie Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne), or from the feminist literature that had arisen in the early 20th century. If one knew nothing about Wonder Woman's mythos upon starting the book, one's knowledge would be only minimally augmented.

That's not to say that I don't respect the huge amount of research Lepore devoted to the cultural matrices within which Marston conceived his famous character. The author devoted considerable time to the "First Wave" of American feminism and to conservative resistance to this agenda, which included Marson's alma mater Harvard University. Although Lepore could have become bogged down in pointless detail, in my view she keeps just the right amount of minutiae on the people who influenced Marston's intellectual and academic development-- though I suppose some might find fault with the name-dropping of figures only tangentially associated with that development. For instance, William James is mentioned simply because he headed Harvard's nascent psychology department, not because he directly influenced Marston.

Most often, the trivia Lepore rescues is interesting, as when she mentions that Marston briefly worked for Carl Laemmle right at the point when Universal Studios began converting from silent to sound films. True, Marston's involvement in classic Universal horror films was probably confined to making psychological analyses of test-audiences, but Marston's involvement in these early forms of film-fantasy may have contributed to his use of the grotesque in WONDER WOMAN comics.

A much heftier "big name drop" is that of Margaret Sanger, lifelong advocate of birth control and aunt of Olive Byrne, who both lived with Marston and his wife Sadie and bore two of his children, though the public fiction was that they were the offspring of Marston and his legal wife. Sanger admittedly has little influence on the creation of Wonder Woman, even as a philosophical influence on Marston and his family of collaborators. Still, since I've often heard her name linked with an American eugenics movement, I was intrigued to read Lepore's take on it: that Sanger only courted these hardcore conservatives as a means of legalizing contraception. Still, her success there was limited, since she founded an organization called the American Birth Control League, yet ended up being forced to resign from it since the conservative members didn't care for her feminist priorities. I can't help remarking that this would not be the first time a liberal feminist would ally herself to a strangely conservative bedfellow, as per Andrea Dworkin's praise of Jerry Falwell's stance on pornography.

It's perhaps inevitable that it takes Lepore a long time to get around to saying anything much about
Wonder Woman, because Marston wasn't precisely devoted to the profession of creating superhero-like fantasies. Marston had a very peripatetic career, bouncing around from academia to book-writing to seeking practical applications for his most famed invention prior to Princess Diana: the lie-detector. Still, Lepore, despite having had access to many of Marston's personal papers, never gets close to the emotional core of her main biographical subject. Perhaps that's because Marston, as much as his famous character, is secondary in Lepore's mind to her exegesis of American feminism. The one thing that emerges is the sense that if Marston had been successful in any of his earlier endeavors, he probably would not have ended up getting involved with the world of comic books. Lepore sedulously cites the ways in which Marston's bondage fantasies may have grown out of his observation of collegiate hazing, and how he fought to keep those fantasies in the adventures of Wonder Woman, despite the protestations of DC editor Sheldon Mayer.  Yet one never gets any speculation as to why such fantasies were so important to Marston, though Lepore isn't averse to psychologizing him on other matters-- nor whether or not Marston was right or wrong to place such fantasies within the context of juvenile entertainment.

My biggest criticism of Lepore, however, isn't her omission of the Amazon Princess' mythology. It's that she doesn't dole out her criticism of historical figures with an even hand.

For instance, Lepore informs us that DC's psychological consultant Josette Frank allegedly quit the company because she couldn't stand Marston's bondage fantasies. Yet another contemporaneous consultant, Lauretta Bender, had no problem with said fantasies. Lepore makes no judgment of either woman's tastes.

Yet Lepore DOES find time to assail the reputations of two DC comics creators. She can't find time to actally say much about Wonder Woman's origins, or powers, or villains, but she can roundly condemn the way the character was relegated to the role of secretary in the Justice Society. With no proof whatever, Lepore attributes this development solely to longtime comics-scribe Gardner F. Fox, apparently with the belief that Fox was free to treat DC's characters however he pleased, rather than being under the aegis of his editors. This was a straw-man attack on Fox, as proved by the research of fan-essays like this one, indicating that the minimization of the heroine's role in the Justice Society probably came about because Marston demanded control of all WW stories. As a fan of the work of Gardner Fox, I would say that on the whole most of his work supports the cause of empowered heroines, and that whatever he did with Wonder Woman in the JSA title is most likely the result of editorial priorities.

Lepore is on somewhat stronger ground in painting Robert Kanigher-- the man who eventually took over writing and editing the WONDER WOMAN franchise after Marston's demise-- as being less than passionate about the character. While I can't claim to have read all of his stories with the character, in general  I would certainly agree that WONDER WOMAN was nothing but a paycheck to Kanigher. Yet, Lepore oversells the idea that Kanigher was an unregenerate anti-feminist, conveniently overlooking that he has some strong credits in creating comic-book heroines, ranging from 1947's BLACK CANARY to 1970's ROSE AND THE THORN. Both Kanigher and Fox deserve the role of "anti-feminist reactionary" far less than Frederic Wertham, who viciously berated the Wonder Woman character as "anti-feminine." Lepore might have drawn comparisons between Wertham and many of the other anti-feminists she discusses in the early part of the book, given that Wertham also wanted images of women to reflect domesticity. But Wertham, like Frank and Bender, gets a pass for some reason.

Given that Lepore devotes so little attention to Wonder Woman's mythology, save where it illustrates some point of real-world history, I suppose a better title might have been "The Secret BACKSTORY of Wonder Woman"-- because a "history" it ain't.

THE SUPER SEX WAR

In Bob Hughes' commentary for SUPERMAN IN THE FORTIES, he notes that part of the character's appeal was that he was "a Personality." And I agree that Siegel and Schuster did succeed at imbuing their star with a persona that was inspired by earlier heroic icons (Tarzan, Douglas Fairbanks, myth-heroes like Heracles and Samson), but managed to have its own unique appeal. However, within the five volumes-worth of stories in SUPERMAN CHRONICLES-- which gives one a chronological look at every aspect of the feature's narrative development save the contemporaneous comic strip-- there's hardly anyone else in the feature who possesses any "Personality." Even by the standards appropriate for action-melodramas, Siegel's villains and victims all seem like the equivalent of theatrical spear-carriers, who exist merely to heighten the gloriousness of the hero-- with one exception.

In terms of narrative Lois Lane, being stuck in the middle of a sexual triangle comprised of herself, the hero and the hero's secret identity, was in the same position as the lady loves of earlier heroes like Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. However, there were some differences in the precise persona evoked. I confess I have not read the original prose adventures of the latter two characters, and am dependent on knowing only the cinematic adaptations (as I suspect may've also been the case for Siegel and Schuster)-- but in any case, I suspect that even back in the 1930s few people would've know the names of the female leads in the Zorro and Pimpernel sagas. The movie-versions present the audience with women who are "holding out for a hero" as they scorn the wimpy secret IDs of the main heroes, but the ladies don't seem to have any significance, any personality, independent of the heroes. They are the prizes for which the hero strives.

Lois Lane is different. In ACTION COMICS #1 (June 1938), she is only introduced after Superman has resolved his first two cases: saving a woman and a man from a a false murder charge and then saving a woman from an abusive husband. She's first seen at Clark Kent's workplace, grudgingly agreeing to give him a date after implicitly having turned him down many times. The two of them go out dancing but are interrupted by a tough gangster who takes a liking to Lois and tries, with several buddies to back him up, to shove Clark out of the picture. Lois, a typical spitfire type, repulses the gangster with a slap and storms off in a taxi after expressing disgust at Clark's unwillingness to fight. As with Zorro and the Pimpernel, Superman's rationale for his alter ego's cowardice is to protect his altruistic mission, though the first two heroes have a better excuse in that they are merely skilled mortals surrounded by powerful and hostile regimes. Superman's masquerade is a bit more counter-intuitive, since he is as a god in mortal disguise, who can and does frequently thumb his nose at cops and armies in the early stories. Not surprisingly, critics like Jules Feiffer and Gerald Jones have commented on the apparent masochism of Clark Kent's self-abasement-- but though this is a pertinent notion, it's incomplete as stated.

Lois is the key. Lois is not just a frail flower in need of rescuing, as had been many romantic leads before her, but a heroic Personality herself. She does need rescuing over and over-- so much so that eventually the trope was ripe for parody-- but it's only because of Tyrant Biology, not because she is incapable of heroic grit herself. She's demanding with Clark because she's demanding with everyone, in accordance with another 30s persona publicly nurtured through the cinema: the tough-minded lady reporter. Unlike her later incarnations early Lois possessed no real martial skills, though she was occasionally known to take a poke at this or that thug. But the lady reporter's attempts at heroism aren't viewed as ridiculous, though on occasion she might be judged foolhardy. Admittedly, there are many minor stories where Lois' role is reduced to spear-carrier status, but the number of times that she did show admirable gumption demonstrate that Siegel deemed her a Personality in her own right.

Gerald Jones points out that ACTION #5 (October 1938) is the first time the hero really starts performing Herculean feats: holding up a broken trestle so that a train may safely cross it and blocking a flood of waters from a broken dam to save mere mortals from doom. But this ode to super-masculine power starts out with the declaration of a gender-war between Lois and Clark. Lois (described as being consigned to writing "sob stories" in #1) tries to get her editor to let her cover news of the breaking dam. He refuses her because she's a woman, giving Clark preferment (his reputation for wussiness being forgotten). Lois sends Clark on a wild-goose chase and then rushes into danger in order to prove herself with an eyewitness account. After Clark's editor fires him (temporarily of course), Clark uses his super-powers as an equalizer to catch up to his curvaceous competitor (If Lois thinks she's going to scoop me, she's badly mistaken!") However, by saving the train-- which Lois happens to be on-- Superman makes it possible for her to reach the dam, even while he's busy trying to hold back its torrent. Superman rescues the ambitious lady reporter from the flood and blocks the flood by toppling a mountain into its path, but then he faces a real challenge: a grateful woman, implicitly aroused by his masculine performance. He accepts her kiss after some initial reluctance, but then takes her back to the nearest city with a rejoinder that may not be entirely a joke: "I've got to bring you back to safety-- where I'll be safe from you!" Ironically, his maybe-joking protestation of fear is counterpointed by Lois confessing that she's gotten over the fear she had of him in their first few encounters, and professing her love. Naturally, Superman escapes her attentions with a cavalier wave that some deem sadistic toward his secret rival, but then returns, as Clark, to receive her scorn for not being the he-man that Superman is.

ACTION #6 (November 1938) also contains a brief sequence in which Lois tries to manipulate Clark while Clark lets himself be apparently manipulated while laughing up his sleeve; it ends with Lois trying to pin the hero down once more while he leaves any future meetings "in the hands of fate." Then, jumping over a number of spear-carrier tales, we come to NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR COMICS #1 (June 1939). The bulk of this story is of little interest, until the last pages, when Lois becomes positively aggressive in her pursuit of the Man of Tomorrow. When the hero leaps clear of a crowd of well-wishers, Lois impulsiveness jumps on his back so that he carries her away. Superman's response is a bizarre one: he performs an aerial somersault in the hope of scaring her off. Lois' response once they land is far cooler than the hero's: she suggests that they do it again (which may be the closest the couple would ever get to having sex in that era). She kisses him again. He escapes, though his flustered condition is much more evident than it was in ACTION #5. And just as he did at the end of #5, his return to the Clark identity once more insures him the wrath of Lois' biting tongue-- which I assume Feiffer would judge yet another manifestation of masochism; better the biting tongue than the Toothed Vagina...

ACTION #22 (March 1940) is the first part of a two-part story which is best known in that the second part introduces Superman's most durable foe, Luthor. The first part, though, is noteworthy in that it's the first time Lois becomes jealous of another woman's attentions to Clark, the "worm" Lois supposedly despises. Indeed, the other woman is the first character in Superman comic books (again, not addressing the comic strip here) to share Lois' "LL" initials: an actress with the doubly seductive-sounding name of "Lita Laverne." Those aware of the Superman mythos will recall how characters with the same alliterative scheme proliferated in later years: plain old "Luthor" finally acquired the given name "Lex," etc. In any case, though Laverne isn't much of a character (the actress moonlights as a spy for foreign powers), she also resembles Lois in being ambivalent toward Clark throughout the story for reasons the plot doesn't really explain. Clearly, she's simply a version of Lois recast as a straight villainess, and thus a continuation of the sex-war.

1940 was also the year when Jerry Siegel submitted the never-published "K-metal" story in which he would've ended the triangle by having Superman reveal his dual identity to Lois, which would've ended with an equal partnership that might have eventually led to the marital status the characters currently enjoy. Since Jones has provided a detailed study of that story (spiked by DC, who preferred the status quo), I refer the curious to his account. But also in that year comes my last example of Lois' status as a character of heroic proportions, for a tale now titled "The Construction Scam" (SUPERMAN #6, Sept-Oct 1940) concludes with Clark saving Lois' life by infusing her with his Kryptonian blood. At the end of the story Lois not only makes a full recovery but adds that "I feel stronger than I've ever felt." It's been suggested by some fans that Siegel might have pondered converting Lois into a "Superwoman" via this transfusion, perhaps for a spinoff feature. Perhaps here, as in the K-metal story, Siegel was trying to give Lois a more substantial role than that of imperilled maiden; one in which she too could participate in the super-powered fantasy (and maybe be a more tenable sex-partner than your average mortal woman). If such was Siegel's intent DC must have spiked that too, for from then on Lois would go on displaying her lady-reporter gutsiness but still needing to be bailed out by a man. This would lead in time to Lois becoming dingy enough, in some stories, to pitch herself off a building in order to make Superman save her, even when he was nowhere in sight.

This, then, is why Feiffer's notion of "the Man of Masochism" is not quite complete. It overlooks the fact that since in those days the characters could never be married or exchange more than kisses, the sadistic/masochistic byplay was not simply a metonymic substitute for sex (metonym: "this is put for that") but a metaphorical evocation of sex (metaphor: "this is that"). And I'd further argue that the conceit wouldn't have worked as well as it did without Lois being a demanding spitfire of a woman, a Beatrice fit for a super-Benedick-- even if both characters would become somewhat blander over time. Arguably in later eras the metaphorical sexcapades took other forms, such as giving both of them numerous clones of one another with whom to enjoy short-lived romances-- Lois getting with some other caped swain, and Superman hooking up with some other lady with alliterative "LL" initials. But all of these were just reiterations of the sex-war in new terms, and of a never-overtly-consummated hieros gamos between a woman of Earth and a man from the heavens. And that symbolic substrate is one of the aspects that still makes the early Siegel-Schuster stories valuable despite all of their other deficiencies.

A SIEGEL SEGUE

This is another segue from my ongoing posts re: a theoretical judgment of "sadism in the comics."

I've coined the term "dynamization" for the purposes of a study that discusses sex and violence in art, but I've done so in order to come up with a term that describes a subjective experience of ego-satisfaction that doesn't call up associations of fictive sex and violence, as I've argued that "gratification" does. The problem of word associations is not a new one: after Freud started using "libido" to mean predominantly-sexual energies, Jung tried to correct that use by asserting that since "libido" meant life, any human activity connected to life (which meant, in effect, every activity) would be "libidinal." But though Jung's logic was impeccable, the Freudian association became dominant. So had I used a term like "libidinization," that too would have suggested naught but sex-thrills.

Dynamization, as I conceive it, is certainly not confined to art. If Person One wants to build a birdhouse, that individual is in a static state with respect to his non-knowledge about birdhouse-building, and he reaches a dynamic state once he has learned the method of crafting birdhouses and does successfully build one. In comics this would comparable to the position of a reader who becomes proficient in understanding the basic rudiments of a given genre; his understanding of that genre dynamizes him and gives Person One (generally speaking) some degree of self-satisfaction. Of course Person Two may come along and tell Person One that what the latter thinks is a dynamic genre is in fact static in comparison to some other genre which Person Two favors. Person Two may even convert Person One to this very belief, but I would argue that the initial dynamization of Person One's learning the genre is a fact within his subjectivity that is not altered by his later change in priorities.

Just as the principle of subjective dynamization can apply to any activity that gives ego-satisfaction, it also has many manifestations even within what may appear a simple fictive experience. The aforementioned comics-critics Legman and Wertham chose to read nearly all comics that contained violence as "crime comics" and charged them with having the potential to infuse their readers with the seeds of sadism and fascism. Given the multifaceted nature of human beings, it's impossible to say with certainty that NO ONE ever had sadistic or fascist impulses "touched off" by reading a comic book, but one can certainly discern other sources of dynamization than that of sadism.


I've asserted that most of the violence in works belonging to the adventure-genre centers upon a fight between a hero (or heroes) and a villain (or villains). Legman and Wertham take pains to claim that comic-book villains are symbolic substitutes for the forces of organized society-- parents, policemen, other ethnic groups-- in order to make the medium's aggression seem hostile to a civilized society. And yet, the two critics never consider that the readers might, at least in part, actually read the castigations of villains as applying to actual criminals-- such as the unknown burglar who caused the death of Jerry Siegel's father.

As Gerald Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW notes, Siegel never publicly commented on the fact that, long before he was writing fast-paced crimefighting tales, his father was shot to death, presumably by a thief, in a scenario that resembles the origin of Batman more than that of Siegel's most famous creation. Since Siegel did not comment upon his early personal encounter with crime, we cannot presume that he took any especial satisfaction in punishing fictional gangsters with his heroes. On the other hand, had either Wertham or Legman known of Siegel's experience, I like to think that they would have at least conceded that his hypothetical motives for enjoying the spectacle of crime-beatings could have more to do with his personal loss than with any buried urge toward sadism.

Of course, they could also rejoin that few comics-readers personally lost loved ones to the depradations of criminals. But what Wertham and Legman failed to take seriously was that all people capable of at least elementary cognition-- whether children or adults-- know that there is always some possibility that they could be victims of violent crime, particularly (but not exclusively) when they reside in urban centers. Many people, knowing this, still do not love adventure-stories; some people may even be phobic toward scenes of violence, as indeed Legman and Wertham seemed to be. But some readers will feel a sense of dynamization at observing scenes in which a hero, with whom they identify, overcomes a real menace. Some may, as Wertham and Legman argued, disregard the "moral" of a given story, and focus only upon the violence. But it's clearly ridiculous to think that all readers of Jerry Siegel's SUPERMAN were so distanced; that the appeal of the Man of Steel was based in sadism alone.

In one of Alan Moore's JOURNAL interviews Moore took the non-elitist position that there was nothing inherently wrong with the ideals of the Superman comics as pertaining to young readers. He elaborated that as they grew older such readers would surely need to deepen and refine those early, elementary ideals in order to participate in the adult world, which is true enough, so far as it goes. I would add a caveat that the adult world, too, is governed by premises about the way culture and society work, and that many of these too have their roots in garnering a self-dynamizing satisfaction for this or that party. I've objected before to the fallacies of unilaterally preferring the sophisticated to the crude:

'The high/low prejudices can be much more virulent when dealing with works in differing modes that do not have humor as their aim, leading to (for instance) the tendency to reject modes dealing with adventure or melodrama in favor of those dealing with “serious drama"'

I take an even more pluralist view than Moore: the type of subjective dynamizations offered by "sophisticated entertainment" are in no way innately superior to those of "simple entertainment;" they can only be *conditionally* superior in certain particular aspects, and the reverse is also true. There will always be some individuals who like only one of those two broad idioms, but as society we need both-- and not just for the children.

We need both because the world in which we live is a "blooming, buzzing confusion" of conflicting energies, and anything that gives us clarity is essential.

NOTE: Some time after I wrote this, I learned that Siegel's father died of heart failure brought on by a holdup, not because of being shot.  My error.