{"id":6761,"date":"2010-11-03T12:59:39","date_gmt":"2010-11-03T16:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=6761"},"modified":"2010-11-03T12:59:39","modified_gmt":"2010-11-03T16:59:39","slug":"supermen-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=6761","title":{"rendered":"Supermen! Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jack Coles' The Claw<\/p><\/div>\n

When I first read Greg Sadowski\u2019s Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941<\/a>, I was a bit disappointed. My preference is for anthologies that have a strong editorial vision like Art Out of Time <\/em>or The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics<\/em>. Supermen! <\/em>seemed like it was governed less by an editorial imperative than a chronological one. Some of the comics in the book are very strong (especially the stories by Jack Cole, Fletcher Hanks, and Basil Wolverton) but many of them also seemed primitive in a bad way (crude, simple-minded) rather than a good way (Hanks\u2019 vitalism).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve warmed to the book as I\u2019ve lived with it more. In part that\u2019s because leaving aesthetics aside, there is a historical value to old comics. Supermen!<\/em> does an excellent job of a capturing a moment: let\u2019s call it the mystery man moment, after the creation of The Shadow and The Phantom but before Captain America. It was an isolationist pause in America, as war and rumours of war were spreading throughout the world but many in America still hoped to stay out of the fighting. This might explain the incredible racism and xenophobia found in these comics.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ken Fitch and Fred Guardineer's Dan Hastings<\/p><\/div>\n

A good example of this xenophobia is the story \u201cDan Hastings\u201d where the villain is a mish-mash of \u201cforeign\u201d types. His name is Hans Raskow, which is both Germanic and Slavic. He has dark skin, slant eyes, simian features, and buck teeth. By my count, that\u2019s at least four ethnic groups right there. At least you can’t accuse the creators (Ken Fitch and Fred Guardineer) of picking on one group.<\/p>\n

Jack Cole\u2019s Claw is also a remarkable and disgusting racist monstrosity, the \u201cyellow peril\u201d villain taken to the point of ultimate absurdity.<\/p>\n

The racism of these comics can be explained (although not forgiven) in historical terms, but I think there is an aesthetic dimension as well. Racism in old cartoonists often had a stylistic dimension. Virtually every cartoonist of the era was racist to some degree but their racism came through in different styles. Eisner\u2019s racism, for example, tended to be avuncular and paternalistic: Ebony White, Blubber, and the rest were meant to be cute (like little monkeys, one is tempted to say). Jack Cole\u2019s racism, by contrast, tended to be hyperbolic (as did his whole approach to cartooning). If Eisner\u2019s Ebony White looked a little like a monkey, Cole\u2019s Midnight (a knock-off of Eisner\u2019s Spirit) had a sidekick who actually was a monkey. The same principal can be seen in The Claw. \u201cIf I\u2019m going to draw a yellow demon,\u201d Cole seemed to think, \u201cwhy not go all the way and make him as satanic as possible?\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to see future masters like Eisner and Kirby when they were just starting out and before they mastered their styles. It makes us realize the context out of which they emerged. We\u2019re used to a Kirby who could dominate over any comic he drew, but in Supermen!<\/em> he\u2019s decidedly inferior to older artists like Cole, Wolverton, and Hanks. \u00a0In the light of Supermen!<\/em> Kirby\u2019s dominance in the field of pulp cartooning seems like an achievement that he had to work towards rather than a forgone conclusion.<\/p>\n

Time travel is impossible but a good anthology can sometimes be ordered in such a way that we can get a better sense of how works of art looked to their earliest audience. That\u2019s something Supermen!<\/em> achieves, so it\u2019s a book I\u2019m holding on to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first read Greg Sadowski\u2019s Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941, I was a bit disappointed. My preference is for anthologies that have a strong editorial vision like Art Out of Time or The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. Supermen! seemed like it was governed less by an editorial imperative than a chronological one. Some of the comics in the book are very strong (especially the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[66,458,525,601,605,1250],"class_list":["post-6761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-anthologies","tag-fred-guardineer","tag-greg-sadowski","tag-cole","tag-kirby","tag-supermen"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}