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Because we got a little off-schedule this week, I’m not going to make the big Shazam reveal until tomorrow (sorry, I know). But since my last post may have come off as a little more strident than I intended, a little brief clarification may be in order.

First, I wrote that only one superheroes-grown-up story has ever worked, but to be fair, I might well have missed something or other. (I’ve never read Rick Veitch‘s Bratpack or its sequels, for example, and for all I know, they’re brilliant. And Alan Moore’s early Miracleman comics worked to at least some extent.) And once you’ve got more than one “exception that proves the rule”, maybe the exceptions don’t actually prove the rule so much as they disprove it. So there’s that.

Second, I also kind of gave the game away when I brought in Ursula K. Le Guin. Once you take away the capes and underwear, there’s really no reason that a story with super-powers can’t be successful (and “adult”). Books ranging from Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination to the New Testament have proved that a super-powered protagonist isn’t necessarily a liability. It’s the costumes that cause most of the problems. (But they’re big problems. Green Arrow yelling, “My ward is a junkie!” is bad all enough on its own, but when he’s dressed like Robin Hood while he’s doing it, it’s all over. Wearing that outfit, reading the 9/11 Commission Report would seem ridiculous.)

That’s all, I think, since I don’t want to get too deep into the nerd weeds. I still think my general point was valid, but consider adding these grains of salt, please.

Unrelated bonus: Since Dan brought up Jerry Lewis comics, here’s a memorable comic book moment that’s been making the internet rounds lately, for those who haven’t already seen it: When Jerry Met Kal-El.

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Superheroes and social issues usually don’t mix well. Whether it’s Superman crying because he’s unable to prevent famine in Africa (which actually seems like the kind of problem he could solve if he really wanted to), or the Justice League coming face to face with the fact that being raped by a supervillain can turn a woman into a psychopathic killer (for those who don’t follow superhero comics, that story was actually published, just last year, as DC’s flagship title), their engagement with complicated “adult” problems is generally puerile, hystrionic, and more likely to belittle the issues involved than to clarify them.

This kind of superficial treatment of complicated ideas in superhero comics saw its apotheosis in the 1970s, when writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams (who currently moonlights as a plate tectonics skeptic) teamed up for a series of Green Arrow/Green Lantern adventures, with the heroes joining forces to confront such social ills as racism and drug addiction.

These stories are still celebrated in some circles today as somehow breaking important ground, though they are basically the embarrasingly dated equivalents to the “very special episodes” of bad sitcoms.

Basically, the quest to depict superheroes as “all grown up” is just a bad idea at the outset—so far, to my knowledge, this artistic strategy has worked exactly once. (And no, I don’t consider The Dark Knight Returns to be “grown-up”; that book works best when the reader is fifteen years old. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that.) Superheroes are the vehicle for adolescent power fantasies, more or less by definition.

Which is not to say that the superhero story is a bankrupt genre or that its tropes are incapable of being used to great effect; it’s just that like any other genre, superhero stories have built-in limitations. Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s early Spider-Man stories do a remarkable job within those limits, as do Frank Miller’s later Daredevil comics, at a slightly more sophisticated level.

(More obliquely, Chris Ware has shown that the iconic value of Superman can be used quite effectively to very different purposes in his early Jimmy Corrigan stories, and more obliquely still, Ursula K. Le Guin has shown the very complicated and profound ramifications of power fantasy in her original Earthsea trilogy, despite the fact that it features wizards instead of super-powered aliens. (Anyone interested in the potential triumphs and pitfalls inherent to fantasy for young adults should pick up a copy of her essay collection The Language of the Night posthaste.))

I’ve rambled on far too long already, so I’m going to end this here for now. So far I’ve just been leading up to what I really want to talk about, a sixty-year-old superhero comic that deals extremely successfully with a grave political problem. On Wednesday, I’ll reveal the masterpiece in question. If you can’t wait (and I’m sure most of you can’t, this is so exciting), I’ll leave you with a one-word hint: Shazam.