An a to Z of the Fantastic City by Hal Duncan

Author:Hal Duncan [Duncan, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Writing, Wonders, Essay
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2012-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Metropolis

In 1927, Fritz Lang took a film crew into the city of Metropolis, intending to document from every possible angle the growth of Futurism, the ideology which showed every sign of doing to America what Fascism and Communism had already done to Europe. Little did he know that he would find himself in the midst of a revolution.

Lang’s documentary still stands as witness testimony to the madness that swept across America, the insane idealism of the Machine Age, with robot Maria as the Lady Liberty of its principal city, the virgin mother of a new god, the future. Or perhaps, as Lang would later describe her, the eight-armed bitch-dam of the Kali Yuga, the Hindu goddess of destruction herself, skin blue as that of the workers in the orgone refineries, wearing a necklace of dead miner’s skulls. Lang may have been overstating it but there is little doubt that the Futurist Revolution, in its attempt to overthrow laissez-faire (or as the futurist would have it, simply lazy) capitalism, to replace profit with progress as the great goal of society, treated its blue-collar wage- slaves as mere cogs in the machine. It was inevitable, perhaps, that the Futurist chants of “Progress, Not Profit!” would soon give way to the roar of a crowd fed up with living in the slums and looking up at skyscrapers.

It would have seemed to many in the aftermath of the chaos, that Futurism was a spent force in the US. Then, in 1932, in an attempt to repopularise the discredited philosophy, to render Nietzschean principles such as the “will-to-power” once again palatable to the masses, the Daily Circular commissioned a new comic strip for their “Funnies” section, a break from the usual diet of madcap antics seen in Krazy Felix or Little Orphan Anastasia. Overman, in his All-American red, white and black was to be a Nietzschean übermensch that the everyman could accept. “Faster than a bolt of lightning, more powerful than a dreadnaught, able to leap great chasms in a single bound,” he would nevertheless stand for all the values that conservative America respected most—“Faith, Order and the American Way.”

The exploits of Overman have entertained generations of children now for nigh on 80 years, and he is without a doubt the most iconic comics character of all time. The fascists and the communists fought by this most American of all superheroes—and by other such pulp figures as the Shadow, Doc Savage, Captain America—those Nazis and Reds having now all faded into 20th century history, it is interesting to note that the hero of Metropolis still battles his original arch-enemy, a bald-headed and brutal eagle of a racketeer, a kingpin of organised crime masquerading as a respectable businessman. Pitted against this archon of corporate evil, this dark power of capitalism, Overman, it might be said, carries on the Futurist struggle, the ideal of “Progress, Not Profit!” being alive and well, flying in the skies above Metropolis.

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