Clean Boyish Sluggery

A few years ago, my pals Michael Chabon and Diana Schutz were editing a comic book called The Escapist, about the fictional superhero from the former's novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. They both liked my book on the early days of comics, Men of Tomorrow, and asked me to write a mock-historical essay about the original Escapist comics of the '40s, as if such things had really existed. It was a fun challenge, self-parody and parody of someone else's idea at the same time, so I decided I may as well just go into full-on mockery mode and make fun of a bunch of other writers, too. I liked how it came out, as did the Chabon and the Schutz and a smattering of readers.

       I was reminded of it a few days ago, as I was polishing a sequence in The Undressing of America about moral and intellectual attacks on junk culture—risqué stories of the '20s in this case. Rereading the thing, I found myself still liking it, so I thought it would be a good time to pull it out of the back-issue bins. You'll probably like it more if you've read anything about attacks on pop culture in decades past, and even more if you've also read either Michael's book or mine. But even if you haven't read either, I hope it's silly enough to provide a few minutes of...well...escape.


Escaping the Spotlight: The Escapist and the Press
by Gerard Jones
 

From the beginning, superhero comics have elicited reactions from journalists, psychologists, and pedagogues ranging from consternation to bafflement and all the way back to consternation again, providing us with a fascinating glimpse of America’s changing relationship with its heroes. Though much has been written about public reaction to Superman, Wonder Woman, and other icons, no full tally had ever been taken of the greater world’s comments on the Escapist until I researched my recent book, Men of Tomorrow. Regrettably, the lengthy chapter on the Master of Elusion had to be cut from the finished book in order to keep the price point below $27.00 (US) and thereby secure the support of Barnes & Noble’s buyer for Light Nonfiction, Sports and Hobbies. But I am pleased to be able to share some of my most illuminating discoveries here.

       Through what must be only an astonishing coincidence, the first two print mentions of our hero appeared simultaneously in very different publications. In the December 1940 issue of The Fiery Cross, in an article entitled, “New Deceptions to Insnare [sic] Christian Youth,” the Reverend Castigation Lemuel Bixbee noted, “Superman, Captain America, and the Escapist are but a few of the newest baubles dandled at the crossroads of Mongrelization by these Hebrew Deceivers.”  Interestingly, while accurately listing Sam Clay among “those sons of Abraham whose whore-spawn grace these ‘comic magazines,’” the Reverend describes Josef Kavalier as “an obvious Frenchman and therefore no less dedicated to the degradation of the Race.”

       That same month, the holiday edition of Midget Radio Monthly, a trade journal, advised readers to “Take a peep at the Excapist [sic], the latest trick from our own Shelly Anapol of Empire Novelties. Zowie, that ought to sell some midgets!  See you in the funny papers, Shelly!”
       Tom Mayflower would not have long to wait for his first extensive critical analysis.  In “A Stain on American Boyhood,” in the May 25, 1941 Chicago Sun-Times, book reviewer Sterling North (later revered as the author of Rascal) wrote, “Vile as these woodpulp excrescences are with their irrupting boils of lurid ink and mayhem, most ‘comics’ at least celebrate good old American fisticuffs.  We may take some comfort in knowing that the coming generation, bred to savagery though it may be by the likes of Captain Marvel, is at least being encouraged to settle its beefs with clean boyish sluggery. Now comes a new rat to the swarm, a ‘hero’ called the Escapist, to coax our Yankee young down the path of elusion. How will America stand up to the coming horde and hang a fat lip on the face of totalitarianism if our young men are being trained in the virtue of ducking low and slipping out the back like a souse about to be treed by his wife?”

       A year later came a more positive assessment from none other than William Moulton Marston, maverick psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman. “The Escapist,” he told an interviewer for Family Circle magazine, “captures that which is truest and sweetest in our modern children’s literature: the sight of the strong and willful man in tight clothing, regularly bound, trussed, fettered, chained, manacled, leashed, strapped, cuffed and hogtied. Surely no better proof could exist that every healthy young man dreams of nothing more avidly than images of captive submission—a lesson that all publishers would be shrewd to heed!”
       Five months later, folklorist and vibrator developer Gershon Legman, writing in the Freudian journal Neurotica, responded to Marston that the Escapist’s “masochistic constructs would seem rather to reflect the avid dream of Mr. Samuel Clay that the next generation be composed principally of buggerers and inverts like himself.” This appears to be the first public mention of Clay’s sexual preferences, which would earn him much free publicity a decade later thanks to the US Senate.
       But the most astonishing nugget of my literary diggings was this analysis from the great German culture critic Theodor Adorno: “Although promising ontologically an escape by the epistemic subject from the deception of constitutive subjectivity, this Elusion-Master in fact reconstitutes the escape fantasy as a commodity supportive of identitarian thought, so that in the dialectic of ‘Escapist,’ ‘captor’ and ‘victory’ social antagonisms are made both subject and object, and the archvillain is finally not the Mechanist but the category of reflection itself.” (From Wahrheitsgehalt und gesellschaftliche Darstellung als Bestimmte Negation und Selbstbesinnung des Widervernunft im des Überhelden als Kulturindustries Irrvolkshelden, never published in English in its entirety, although a portion appeared in the January, 1947 Readers Digest under the title, “If You Think the Movies Are Bad, You Should Read the Comics!”)
       Astonishing it was, for I, like other comics historians, had always believed that the great Adorno had ignored our beloved medium entirely. According to correspondence found posthumously in the papers of Max Horkheimer, however, Adorno discovered comics while enduring the “Hollywood exile” shared by so many left-wing German intellectuals during the Second World War. Accompanying his colleagues Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg to a pitch meeting with Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox in 1943, he happened upon a dog-eared copy of The Escapist no. 17 on an end table and began leafing through it. Seized by the concept, Brecht and Schoenberg immediately began developing ideas for a Technicolor Escapist musical starring Don Ameche as the hero and Alice Faye as Luna Moth.

       The project might have changed the fortunes of the Champion of Liberation and his creators forever, had not Adorno, famed already for his impromptu intellectual virtuosity, leapt atop a cigarette machine and launched into a critique of superheroes as “fetishizations of contradiction that serve the exploitative needs of late capitalism,” which effectively smothered his friends’ enthusiasm. In the end they pitched Zanuck on a musical adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a vehicle for the ascending Betty Grable. When that project died in the face of objections from Fox’s star musical director, Busby Berkley (“I can’t be sure, D.Z., but I think those little Commies are trying to put something over on us”), Schoenberg lamented in a letter, “Bertie, we should have stuck with the superhero.” Alas that they did not. 
       The best known of all commentators on comics, of course, was the criminal psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Although he neglected to discuss the Escapist in his classic Seduction of the Innocent (reputedly because an intern took the file copies home where they were mistakenly thrown out by his mother), Wertham did once credit the series with playing a vital role in his selection of comics as a field of study. In an article for The Ladies Home Journal in March 1952 entitled, “Why Your Child Will Probably Grow Up to Be a Homicidal Sex Deviant,” the doctor explained, “Once we held a violent boy in solitary confinement in our mental hospital. One night he pried the bars from his windows, escaped the room, and set fire to the premises. I asked myself, ‘Where can he have gotten this idea?’ It was then that I realized that, barely a year before, he had read a magazine entitled The Escapist.  The connection was undeniable.’”

       (Though it cannot be proven, it is likely much more than coincidence that this article was shortly followed by the memo recently unearthed in DC Comics’ archives by Robert Beerbohm, in which Jack Liebowitz enjoined editorial director Irwin Donenfeld that “Batman should never again be shown escaping from a trap,” suggesting “maybe stories about dinosaurs or space aliens instead.”)
       Mentions of the Escapist grew fewer thereafter, as the hero fell from regular publication and faded from popular memory. Readers will of course be familiar with Ken Kesey’s 1960s ruminations on the “Neon Escape”: “Kesey riding high in the shotgun seat with the meth freaks and acid heads unfurling like flags around him, rapping about Tom Mayflower slipping the bonds of the Iron Chain like Ornette Coleman slipping the bonds of tonality or Burroughs the bonds of sense, übermenschen of self-extraction vaulting through the nearest window to find themselves dropping past the edges of reality.” (Tom Wolfe, “Some Notions Are Better Than Others,” Esquire, May 1967.) And who among us has completed a year of college without being required to read literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s psychosexual investigation of Kavalier and Clay’s work, “Come Back to the Raft and Untie Me, Tom Honey”? 
       But in the years to come, even as mentions of him grew more numerous in dittoed, stapled fanzines, to the press at large (with the exception of a single story from the March 17, 1971 Beaver Falls Trumpet & Clarion headlined, “Pow!  Zap!  Biff! Local Lad Sells Old Comic Book for $50!”) the Master of Elusion ceased to exist. And perhaps this is the ending our hero would choose. For being held to the judgments and interpretations of others is surely a form of bondage, and what else should the Lord of Escapism do but slip the snares of the world’s attention?
       (I have heard mentions of a minor novel based on the early lives of Kavalier and Clay published some time in the past five or six years, but as it sounds like little more than an ambitious fan project I haven’t yet put the energy into tracking it down. Any reader with information on this book or its author, however, is welcome to pass it along.)

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Gerard Jones is the author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (Basic Books), described by one commentator, for a modest fee, as “the definitive history of comics for our time.”