Lost Hero (a teaser)

I’ll be at Comic Con in San Diego in a few weeks, and so will Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson. Among other things, we’ll be trying to call attention to our book in progress—Lost Hero: The Adventurous and Tragic Life of the Man Who Invented the Comic Book—the story of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, one of the most remarkable and least known founders of the industry that Comic Con was built on. In advance of that, I thought I’d share a look at it. Not an excerpt, more of a pitch or a teaser. Let me know if you find it intriguing. 


Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson created the comic book as we know it, discovered the first superhero, envisioned the graphic novel, and transformed the popular culture of America and the world. He also lived one of the most colorful lives of any significant figure in pop-culture history. But until now his name has been little more than a footnote in comics history.
       In the usual origin story, the founders of the comics industry were a gang of Lower East Side schlockmeisters scrambling to survive in the depths of the Depression. Major Wheeler-Nicholson’s background could not have been much more different. His grandfather was a Union Army surgeon who founded a newspaper in Tennessee to help heal the wounds of the Civil War. His mother was a suffragist and journalist who knew Theodore Roosevelt and worked with Military Intelligence in the First World War. The young Major himself was a rising star of the U.S. Cavalry who chased Pancho Villa, commanded the Buffalo Soldiers, rode with the Cossacks in Siberia, played championship polo, revolutionized the use of the machine gun in combat, served as a diplomatic attaché in Paris in 1919, and then lost it all when he stood up to his superiors to fight for racial justice in a segregated army. So he became a writer, and he and the beautiful Swedish aristocrat he had married shuttled between Greenwich Village and a villa in France as he turned his own life into a series of high adventure stories.
       He was, in short, a romantic, old-world hero of a type rapidly vanishing in twentieth-century America. But, as his contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”

***

Two forces drove Wheeler-Nicholson lifelong: a belief in his own glittering destiny, nurtured in him by his powerful mother, and a terror of ending up like his father, broke, alone, and drinking himself to death. So he dreamed, he fought, and he overreached. He sacrificed his Cavalry career to a heroic but doomed crusade to reform the Army from within. Then, when he reinvented himself as a pulp-fiction writer and military historian, he found quickly that it wasn’t enough. He wanted to matter, to change the world. Perhaps to compensate for the shattering of his own visions of personal heroism, he made it his new mission to bring high culture to the masses and to make classic heroism relevant to the twentieth century.
       He founded the company that would become DC Comics, published the first true comic book, and pioneered the adaptation of serious novels into graphic form. He personally recruited and mentored the pioneer generation of comics artists, writers, and editors. He discovered the young Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, taught them how to tell a graphic story, and, alone in the publishing world, encouraged their odd idea for a “Superman.” Then, just as their hero was poised to zoom into print—turning the new art form into a national craze, establishing the template for every superhero since, and creating the first youth-targeted industry in pop-culture history—his company was stolen from him in a back-room bankruptcy maneuver by that aforementioned gang of Lower East Side schlockmeisters.
       Even then the old Major had a last chance to remain at the helm of the medium he had created, but his own big dreams and tragic pride brought him down. He would not, or could not, make the compromises required by modern American business. He fought to keep everything and ended up with nothing. The men who took the business from him, who went on to build it into a corporate giant, took credit for what he had done and recast him in the stories they told at the bar and in the boardroom as a buffoon and a blowhard.
       “The Old Man” returned quietly to the writer’s life and never tried to tell his side of the story. Unlike others in comics history who were eager to alert the world to their victimization, his old Anglo-Saxon code made his loss a source of shame to be buried and nursed in silenced. At the end of the 1940s, he took one last stab at the big time, teaching himself chemistry and developing patents for new paints that attracted significant Wall Street capital. But the wounds he had suffered were too deep, and at the last minute, to the shock and outrage of his children, he could not bring himself to sign a deal.    

       The Major was buried in 1965 in a grave that would not bear a headstone for another forty-five years. The legend of the fortune he had allowed to slip away shaped his family’s self-understanding for two generations to come. In the years after he died, comic books arrived at their first acceptability as subjects of scholarship, and the first amateur historians began to piece together the history of the field. Historians, fans, and a new generation of writers and artists launched campaigns on behalf of comics’ creative pioneers—most famously Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the writer and artist of Superman—to restore the credit and rights that had been stolen from them by the same gang who had stolen the business from Wheeler-Nicholson. But even to the people who drove those campaigns, the Major continued to be nothing but a fragmentary, slightly ridiculous figure who flitted inconsequentially through the story of the industry’s first years.
       That story was incomplete, though, not only factually but thematically. Because the natures of the comic book industry, the icon of the superhero, and the artistic capacity of the graphic novel cannot adequately be explained by the usual “born spontaneously of immigrant fantasies and Depression desperation” narrative. Those vital fantasies were the driving forces of the new field, but the comics were able to capture a mass audience and survive their historical moment because they were also given form by another body of ideas, ideas brought by a man who had traveled the world in service of an ideal of heroism then fading into twilight. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson was the missing link of pop-culture evolution, essential to the story but lost to time.