On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 by Chris Gavaler

Author:Chris Gavaler [Gavaler, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2015-11-01T07:00:00+00:00

Fantômas, 1911.

CHAPTER 6

THOU SHALT NOT KILL

Does your emblem hide the heart of a serial killer? Are you the KKK but in a cooler costume? Are you really just a supervillain in disguise? These aren’t questions you expect on a superhero census questionnaire, because the short answer is always an emphatic “No!” Superheroes are fundamentally good—even while fighting the bad. The Lone Ranger’s creators Fran Striker and George W. Trendle laid down the law for their radio writers: “When he has to use guns, The Lone Ranger never shoots to kill, but rather only to disarm his opponent as painlessly as possible.”

Striker and Trendle didn’t explain their masked man’s motives though. Why not shoot the bad guys? Martin Parker’s 1656 “Robbin Hood” didn’t kill; he merrily separated clergymen from their money and their testicles:

No monkes nor fryers he would let goe,

Without paying their fees;

If they thought much to be usd so,

Their stones he made them leese.

Does that castrating vigilantism still infuse superheroes?

Part of the confusion is the term “vigilante.” Some see a toggle switch: either you’re a lawful hero or you’re a lawless vigilante. I see a spectrum. The 70s Avengers became a department of the U.S. government, each employee earning a tax-financed salary of $1,000 a day. The 70s Punisher, however, constituted his own legal system, marshal-judge-executioner. Spider-Man, like most superheroes, swings somewhere in-between, chasing crooks while cops chase him. But whether the hero kills, castrates, or leaves criminals tied to lampposts outside police stations, my question is the same: Why?

Before Mark Waid took the job of rewriting Superman’s motivations for the twenty-first century, he’d always thought of the first comic book superhero as simply “the epitome of unselfishness,” a guy who “invariably puts the needs of others first.” When his DC editor asked why, Waid didn’t have an answer: “Because . . . because doing the right thing is . . . is . . . is the right thing to do.”

It’s not a question you’re supposed to ask. According to the Napoleon-loving Nietzsche and Shaw, it’s not even true. Supermen aren’t good. They’re outlaws, self-fulfilling villains who act pro-socially only if it happens to suit them. “We are bold robbers,” the real-life outlaw Jesse James told the Kansas City Times in 1872, “and I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte.” James also felt that any man “enough fool to refuse to open a safe or a vault when he is covered with a pistol ought to die”—though he did apologize for accidentally shooting a little girl and offered to pay her doctor’s bill.

Comic book supermen fly above the law too, including the Sixth Commandment. My students are startled by the death count in Action Comics. A gang of “would-be murderers” watch their bullets ricochet off Superman: “Good Heavens! He won’t die!” “Glad I can’t say the same about you,” he answers. “A moment later a dozen bodies fly headlong out the window into the night,

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