Saturday, May 12, 2018

Happy 80th, Superman


Dated June 1938, the first issue of Action Comics became available to the public in May. It featured a brand new character.  In its pages Superman was born, eighty years ago this month.

Jerry Siegel was 20, the son of poor immigrants in Depression Cleveland, searching for ideas for a comic strip character that he and his friend Joe Shuster could sell to newspaper syndicates. Grabbing elements of characters and how they looked from other comics, B-movies and science fiction pulp magazines and novels, he added some unique features to his choices.

In the 1890s H.G. Wells reversed the usual plots in scores of forgotten Mars stories: instead of sending humans to Mars, he brought Martian invaders to Earth. Siegel made a similar move. Instead of a hero like Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter whose exploits took place in the strange societies of Mars, Seigel brought the strange visitor from another planet to the familiar streets of everyday life on Earth.

As the ultimate illegal immigrant from outer space, he could have powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary humans. But to mix with humanity he would need a secret identity: somebody that didn’t look like a superhero, somebody—like Siegel and Shuster—who wore glasses.

They talked about how Superman should look and Shuster drew him with the signature S on his chest. The costume was futuristic, like Flash Gordon, but it also made his powers coherent to his 1930s audience. For where did people see beings of immense strength, who could leap through the air, and had other powers bordering on the mystical and magical? Only one place: the circus. So Superman had the aerialist’s tights, the underwear on the outside of the circus strongman, and the magician’s cape.

But Superman was a Depression product in a more profound sense. In 1934, when Siegel first started dreaming up the character,  he was influenced (as he later recalled), by “President Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats...being unemployed and worried during the Depression and knowing hopelessness and fear. Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany...seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden...”

Siegel was also reading about crusading heroes and seeing them in the movies. He wondered how he could help these victims of the 30s. “How could I help them, when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer.”

This became the key to Superman’s character that has endured many reductions and perversions over the years but has somehow survived. His first adventure in Action Comics involved saving an unjustly condemned woman from the electric chair. His next was stopping a wife-beater.

In his 1930s adventures, he rescued miners in a cave-in, battled stock market manipulators and munitions manufacturers fomenting wars to sell their wares. He fought crime, but also poverty and unsafe labor conditions. He battled crooked politicians and lobbyists, slum lords and corrupt industrialists and labor leaders alike. He came to the aid of individuals in trouble, and was devoted to the common good. He was a compassionate, high-spirited and humorous hero of the people.

According to author Thomas Andrae, Superman was “neither alienated from society nor a misanthropic power-obsessed nemesis but a truly messianic figure...the embodiment of society’s noblest ideals, a ‘man of tomorrow’ who foreshadows mankind’s highest potentialities and profoundest aspirations but whose tremendous power, remarkably, poses no danger to its freedom and safety.”

Superman became so immediately popular that barely more than a year later, he appeared at the New York World’s Fair and his huge balloon image flew over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

 Just two years after that first comic book story, Superman was the star of his own radio show, and a year after that, he was the star of the first animated adventures shown in movie theatres in the ground-breaking Fleischer Studio cartoons.

from the 1940s Fleischer animations
Clark Kent and Lois Lane at the Daily Planet in Metropolis were in the original comic book stories. (Lois Lane was derived from a B-movie heroine called Torchy Blane, and the Cleveland girl Shuster hired to model for her depictions in the comics became the woman he later married.) 

But radio and the animated cartoons added new characters (Jimmy Olsen, Perry White) and elements (kryptonite), including Superman's ability to not just leap tall buildings in a single bound, but fly.

Still, the original impetus for the character of Superman remained. Versions of the opening made famous on television began in radio, but with significant additions.   On the very first radio broadcast Superman was described as "champion of the oppressed...who has sworn to devote his existence on Earth to helping those in need."

Later on radio he would be described as “ champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice.”  In 1946, a 16-episode series had Superman battling an organization based on the KKK ("The Clan of the Fiery Cross.")  Reputedly based on descriptions by an actual reporter who infiltrated the Klan, it exposed its secret rituals as well as its crimes.  The series was credited with reducing KKK recruiting.  Notably, immediately after the war, it related this domestic racism to Nazi racism.

Of course, Superman also foiled bank robbers, defeated and deflated mad scientists, and rescued people, Lois Lane in particular.

Two mostly live action serials (the flying was animated) for movie theatres came next, with Kirk Alyn and a young and especially fetching Noel Neil as Lois Lane, a role she reprised in all but the first season of the 1950s Superman TV show.

Television was the next natural step, so just as Action Comics pioneered the fledgling field of comic books (only four years old in 1938), The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves was one of television's first major hits. But producers first tested the waters with a 1951 theatrical release, Superman and the Mole Men.  The mole men were probably unintentionally comical looking little beings who lived deep under the Earth, with a few of them emerging from the deepest oil well shaft ever sunk.

from Superman and the Mole Men, seen also as
episodes in the first season of the TV show
But instead of Superman battling the alien Mole Men, he defended them against mobs of crazed humans.  They were essentially helpless and only wanted to go home.  In a startling but very Superman-like move, he accused the townspeople of acting like a bunch of "Nazi stormtroopers."

The syndicated TV show itself premiered with its version of the Superman origin story in 1953.  I was six years old and happened to see it when it aired one Saturday afternoon on a Pittsburgh channel.

a Kryptonian in the origin episode
 It was one of the most memorable afternoons of my young life.  I watched it alone--an aunt and girl cousin were visiting, so there were alternating giggles and screams coming from my sisters' room, and my mother and aunt's chatter from the kitchen.  But I watched, amazed and completely absorbed and mesmerized.

Afterwards I hastened to my room to think about it.  I wasn't sure what I'd just seen, and nobody else was interested.  The girls were engaged in their frenzy of shrieks and running, while my mother was inaccessible in the kitchen with her guest-- If I ventured in, they would either ignore me or, even worse, talk about me as if I wasn't there.

So alone in my room I made the classic kid move: I tied a blanket around my neck and trailed in down my back as a cape.

George Reeves and Phyllis Coates, who played
Lois Lane in the first season
By the time I started first grade I knew the basics.  I was especially taken with the secret identity.  For I was no longer the hero of epics my playmates and I invented as we performed them all day, but had to be meek Clark Kent, and fold my hands and put them in the center of my desk.

But I did not want to keep my true identity secret from a blond girl named Judy, and once stood outside the classroom where I knew she was, significantly glancing to the sky and running off, George Reeves style, to transform into the Boy of Steel.  I somehow believed she would interpret my actions correctly.

I fell deeply into every second of those stories every week, especially the first two seasons.  I have the series on DVD and the opening sequence still had an indescribable effect. The first season had the same producer as the radio show, and both the stories and the style seem derived from radio but also the noir aspects of the Fleischer animations and the movie serials, themselves influenced by crime and suspense movies.

The Adventures of Superman was also an immediate hit, but since it was a favorite with children, a new producer was hired for the second and subsequent seasons who eliminated its moodiness and crime movie violence, and skewed the stories more towards kids (and the approval of meddling congressional committees.)  Still, the second season began with the first comic book plots--Clark Kent proves a man convicted of murder is innocent, and Superman saves him from the electric chair.

Beginning with the third season, the TV show was filmed in color.  There were no color televisions yet so these shows were first seen in black and white.  That accounts for the fact that the characters were all dressed mostly in blue, which transferred to black and white best (and because the shows were shot quickly, often scenes mixed and matched from several episodes at once, the characters tended to have the same basic wardrobe.)  But when color TV sets became possible and popular in the 1960s and 1970s, reruns of the last four seasons of Superman got new life for several more generations.

Most of the memorable episodes are in the first two seasons, but even within the rote plots of the last seasons there are delightful performances and surreal comic moments, as when one thug fantasizes about what he will do with his cut from his gang's robberies: he'll build a big house shaped like a penitentiary so his friends will feel at home.


Under the spell of the TV show, I sent in for my membership to the Supermen of America Club.  I got my letter, membership card, button and the secret code, which I remember as a colorful grid rather than a cardboard wheel.  There were actually nine different codes, one for each planet. They were for secret messages in the comic books. I kept the codes between my mattress and springs.



The button image, by the way, shows Superman breaking chains--another throwback to the circus strongman.  But the motto--strength, courage, justice--was all Superman.

Superman fell on hard times for decades after that.  The comic books got more fantastic--thrilling in their way for awhile, but then downright silly.  Superman's powers grew to an absurd extent, and so he required villains with their own extraordinary powers, usually matched by motives of revenge or wanting to rule the world (or the universe.)  This is the same superhero syndrome we've got today.  So I look back to the otherwise awful episodes of the 1950s TV show to see at least a human scale Superman, who helps those in need.

Superman was also treated as a joke (on Broadway and a short-lived TV show as well as the comics) and then with cynicism and derision.  He wasn't hip or relevant, he was square and establishment and obsolete.  His story was twisted, he and his Earth parents were given cynical motives, his myth seemed outworn and false.

Then in 1978--exactly 40 years ago--Superman came back.

To be continued...

Friday, May 11, 2018

Going Too Far Continued

Weird just keeps getting weirder, and degradation more degraded.  First there was the spectacle of a story about who would speak at Senator John McCain's funeral, while Senator McCain is still alive.  One person--the antipresident-- reportedly would not be invited, and that led to two more bizarre events and stories.

The first was another Republican Senator instructing the McCains on who they should invite, namelythe antipresident.  He later apologized for this obvious act of presumption.

The latest was the reported comment of a White House staffer, on Senator McCain's announced opposition to confirming the current candidate to be CIA Director, who ran a torture program that the antipresident would love to reinstate.  It doesn't matter, the staffer reportedly said, adding Senator McCain is "dying anyway."

The reaction was swift and strong from media and Democrats but not Republicans. Given multiple opportunities, the White House has not denied the statement nor apologized.  The staffer was not fired, and there is no evidence she was even reprimanded.

Though many today focused on Senator McCain as a war hero, this disrespect towards him as a former candidate of the party for the presidency, a long-serving Senator, or just a terminally ill person worthy of respect, is itself scandalous.

But there's more.  I haven't heard anyone say it (but I haven't heard everyone) but it seems a direct reaction to the antipresident purportedly not being invited to the funeral of a man who is still alive.  That's the world we're in now.

John McCain is on Homegrown Hitler's very long Enemies List.  Because of that, not just a White House staffer feels free to disrespect him. The politics of resentment that unites HH and the far right knows no degrees and has no decency: it's scorched Earth all the time.  So there's a far right story making the rounds that while captive and tortured multiple times in Vietnam, McCain provided information to the enemy damaging to the US.  That's the gleeful ugliness in store for anyone on the Enemies List.

I would feel better about some of the outrage today if it had been voiced when Senator John Kerry's heroism in Vietnam was being lied about for political gain in 2004--but then some of the Bush people rightly defending McCain were among the perpetrators and enablers of that scandal, now with its own political verb of swiftboating.

Once again Homegrown Hitler has degraded almost everyone and the entire political culture and tradition along with himself, and once again the latest outrage has been greeted with searing contempt, and the declaration that, this time he's crossed a line, this time he's gone too far.

How many more times will that happen, I wonder.

Wednesday, May 09, 2018

Jim Miller 1947-2016

First, thanks to my Knox classmates of long ago who publicly and privately expressed appreciation for my recent reminiscences here.  (There are more to come.)  I wouldn't exaggerate my feats of memory, however.  I had the program to What's Happening, Baby Jesus? to prod recollections, for example, and as a columnist I was given a full set of Knox Students on more permanent paper.  I still have them for a couple of those years, as well as other source documents.  In my years of paid writing I learned to hoard information, and make use of it. Though from that long ago, what's survived is more serendipity than system.

But one of those messages from classmates also contained sad news.  Chip Evans wrote that he'd recently discovered that our classmate Jim Miller passed away a couple of summers ago.  I'd mentioned articles Jim had written for the Student in 1968 about prospects in Canada for draft resistors.  He wrote other pieces on the Vietnam war as well.

Jim was my second roommate in Anderson House, either my first or second year, or perhaps parts of both.  We started as freshmen on the third floor with different roommates, the top floor of that storied Victorian Gothic house on West Tompkins St. (I would say it was a magical house, but Rod Barker might accuse me of stealing the word again.)  I still dream about some version of Anderson House as a perennial refuge.  In reality it's been gone for decades, one of my two old homes demolished in the expansion of the college.

I was assigned to the room that included the turret in front on the right (you can see the room but not the top of the turret in this photo that Chip sent me. He was also in Anderson House in those years.) The room was actually two small rooms--a rectangular room with the beds (and no 90 degree angles at all, anywhere) and the round turret room, with the desks.

John Heyer was my roommate.  On the day we first arrived, his father and mine were sitting in the two chairs in the turret room when a photographer flashed in and out.  In that year's yearbook the photo appeared, with John's father identified as a father, and my father as a student.  It's the closest he ever came to being in college.  As for John, I principally remember him rushing in after class every day, and playing "Louie, Louie" on the phonograph.

Eventually many of us hung out in the wood-dark common area on the third floor around the staircase, in the middle of the broken rows of attic rooms.  Someone there once noted that we were the misfits that the college stashed as far as they could from everyone else.  He noted that we included two Jewish students, a few Catholics, perhaps the only African American student on campus (who had the floor's only single room--just a little larger than a broom closet) and three students with Polish last names.  Among others.  I was just learning about such distinctions, so I remembered.

Ted Szotkowski of Chicago lived in the room next to mine, with Ron Haas of Racine, Wisconsin, a romantic place name to me then.  Ted taught me a simple finger picking style on guitar that I still use, with additions. (Don't think twice, it's alright.)  Ted had his acceptance letter to Harvard mounted on the wall, and would sometimes recline on his bed staring at it. I was even more impressed that his high school had a daily newspaper. Once Ted was out in the common area typing a paper, and someone complained about the noise.  Ted promised he'd wear gloves.

On the other side of this common area was Jim Miller and his roommate, Arnie Shankman. Jim was often among us, and though Arnie was pretty studious, he couldn't resist coming out there when he heard us laughing.  Arnie passed away in 1983, only 37, but with a long list of publications and accomplishments at Winthrop College in South Carolina, a commitment to diversity and understanding, and an academic career that included studies at Harvard.  He'd also had several articles in the Knox Student, but on more academic matters.  He was particularly interested in libraries.  (The above link will take you to a reminiscence from a post-Knox friend.)

Also on the third floor were Tim Zijewski and Ron Zaba.  One thing almost all of us had in common, we discovered, was that we were the first in our families to go to college. We were all almost always broke.  Ron once wrote a check for the last 48 cents in his account (as I noted in a letter home.)

I don't know what may have merited Jim's presence among the misfits, except that he appears to have been a year younger than most of us.  Once we started rooming together I discovered his pride--somewhat ironic but very enthusiastic pride--in both sides of his heritage.  He divided the year in half: for the first half he was Czech, the second he was Scottish.  He even constructed little shrines in our room extolling each nationality in turn as the greatest on Earth, and paid homage to it first thing upon returning from classes.

thanks to Chip Evans for photo,
probably Jim's high school portrait
Jim at that time was high-spirited, mischievous and kind.  I didn't make it home to Pennsylvania over every vacation, and Jim invited me to spend one break with him and his family in Berwyn, Illinois.  It was my first (but not last) experience with the Chicago suburbs. I wound up being persuaded to serve as his younger sister Billie's date for a high school dance, for which Jim had already been drafted as a chaperone.

 It was odd to be self-consciously a college guy at a huge suburban high school (Morton West, if I'm not mistaken), so it was a slightly surreal but surprisingly pleasant evening.  I don't know if my presence impressed her classmates but I do remember making an effort to be attentive, without raising her brother's ire.  Billie was sweet and made me hot chocolate when we returned.

Jim and I mostly parted ways after sophomore year, though I recall a moment that must have been graduation weekend when I ran into him outside the dining halls in the student union, in the company of a pretty, very late 1960s-looking young woman.  It turned out to be Billie.  The three of us shared a delighted laugh about it all.

After our time at Anderson House, Jim roomed with Chip Evans, and was on the swim team with him.  According to information Jim's younger brother Jerry provided to Chip, Jim went on to teach English in Japan, and later worked in southern California and Chicago, where he returned in the early years of this century to care for his ailing mother, then in her 90s.  He continued swimming competitively (Chip wrote that he last saw Jim at a masters swimming meet in the 1990s) and according to Jerry, he returned to the pool regularly until a few months before his death in July of 2016.

Tuesday, May 08, 2018

Going Too Far

Journalists covering Washington as well as citizens like me have been wondering out loud and with some alarm, is anything the administration does ever going to be perceived as going too far?

For any one of the usual half dozen stories a day involving corruption, lies, political extremism and chaotic incompetence would have brought down another administration.  The President of the United States paying to silence a porn star is only one example of a headline that would have shaken the nation to its foundations in past times.

Yet this administration remains, apparently politically potent enough to scare the party into fealty.  It's not too surprising that the EPA Secretary's outrageous corruption hasn't gotten him fired, or the Energy secretary's merging of family business and diplomacy abroad, since the antipresident's corruption and that of his daughter and son-in-law are of a similar kind.  But this is the fear that shakes the foundations of the American system: the lack of any accountability.

So we're asking more and more, it is possible for anything at all to be perceived as going too far?

We do have some new candidates, some novel situations, all emerging on Monday. First of all, the teasing of a Tuesday announcement from the White House on the fate of the Iran deal to erase the threat of that country developing nuclear weapons for the next decade.  Will rejecting that be going too far?

It might, but in slow motion.  Given what has happened in the past two weeks, I expect the following to happen if the antipresident doesn't get cagey with some halfway measure but effectively takes the US out of the deal: the European signatories to the deal--especially France, Germany and the UK--will immediately announce their disapproval of the US action, and their intent to keep the deal, and perhaps even to take actions that counter the effect of renewed US sanctions.  Iran has already signaled that if Europe sticks with the deal, so will Iran.

The Iran president's statement is dripping with contempt for the US administration, and the European announcements, while likely to be a bit more diplomatic, will be effectively expressing the same contempt. What this contempt says is that the US is making itself irrelevant.  A photograph of European leaders with Iranian leaders as they reaffirm the agreement could be a very telling graphic representation, in more ways than one.

 This could be the most public demonstration so far of the growing isolation of the US in the world, which has been quietly growing since the antipresident's attempted withdrawing of the US from the Paris climate agreement.

Will that be perceived as going too far?  Maybe not immediately, but it might lead to situations that do.  A reaction to snubs that supercharges the nationalistic wing of the Rs may also result, and voters may eventually see this for the dangerous and self-defeating path it is.  And that's even without the spectre of warmongering that Europe and other nations will no longer even pretend to support.  This could cut it.

But two or three other stories may get there first.  Foremost among them for possible "going too far" disgust is AG Sessions announcement that children will be separated immediately and permanently from their parents at the border if they are illegal immigrants.  Taking babies from their mothers may be going too far.

Then there's the bizarre and still evolving story of a very scary security firm using deceptive tactics to get dirt on two mid-level former Obama administration officials to in some way help justify the US pulling out of the Iran deal.  Early Tuesday, yet another person revealed that she was warned by intelligence operatives that partisans of the antipresident were going to try the same tactics on her.

This is yet another strange twist to an ongoing onslaught of stories of political extremism, lies and now dirty tricks.  It's hard to predict which specific story could turn out to be the one that gets the response that this is going too far.  But this one may be it.

Finally, there is the Big Story that Jonathan Chiat believes is building: that says that the antipresident's shady business deals in the past involved such grievous crimes, including money laundering, that he could be--and probably is being blackmailed by those who could make such deals public, namely Russian oligarchs and therefore the Russian government.

It seems evident that his treatment of women or anything related to it is not going to be the tipping point. Slavishly trying to destroy the natural environment, cheapening the office and showing contempt for the law with open corruption, open cruelty to the poor and to entire nationalities and religions also have proven to so far not be tipping points.   But money laundering and blackmail very well could be, even given the ongoing attempts to attack the credibility of the various Mueller and grand jury investigations.  That just might be enough to make all--or nearly all--Americans deeply ashamed.