Our Hero by Tom De Haven

Author:Tom De Haven [Haven, Tom De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16300-1
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

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Discussing the science fiction that characterized Weisinger’s Superman comics (in Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero), Danny Fingeroth observes that it “had a feel that harked back to the past. [His] stable of artists were all competent, even gifted, but their work had a sensibility reminiscent of the future seen in the pulps of the ’20s and ’30s” (83).

Did it ever. All of the resplendent cityscapes—whether in Kandor, on Krypton, or on Earth in the thirtieth century—were obviously inspired by the architectural and dioramic visions of “tomorrow” on display two decades earlier at the 1939 World’s Fair, and the rocketry, gadgetry, and haberdashery, not to mention the never-ending parade of Bug-Eyed Monsters, seemed recycled from the illustrations young Mort Weisinger had thrilled to in magazines like Astounding and Super Science and then later purchased himself for Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Narratives, too, were closely modeled upon Depression-era pulp formulas. Premises and stakes were clear, plotting was tight, endings were neat, humor was absent, dialogue was functional and flat. Men were manly, and women, in general, icky nuisances. (They were also noticeably slender and modestly endowed, in striking contrast to their zany voluptuousness in contemporary superhero comic books.)

Weisinger started his career as both a writer and editor of magazine prose fiction (as had most editors at DC Comics before 1970), and he usually privileged the word—in dialogue, in captions, even, as time went on, in expository footnotes—over the picture. (In The Krypton Companion, a fan’s history of “Silver Age” [fifties and early sixties] Superman comics, Will Murray writes that since Weisinger was creating a product for kids, he “felt the need to explain every abrupt change of scenery or to recap a villain like Brainiac’s origin every time he appeared” [13].) While Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Bernard Kriegstein, Harvey Kurtzman, C. C. Beck, Carl Barks, and others toiling as cartoonists for DC’s competitors created stories with pictures, pictures in temporal sequence (setup, development, payoff), Weisinger’s principal artists—Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, George Papp, Jim Mooney, and Curt Swan—operated more like old-fashioned magazine and book illustrators, producing unshowy clear-line drawings that identified a story’s key moments. Time was arrested, marked, but rarely generated. The result was legible, uncluttered exposition, and frozen, no-fizz Polaroid storytelling.18

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