The Twisted Roots of Comics

I first went to the San Diego Comics Convention in 1984. I went as a fan, but also to do some interviews and research on a book Will Jacobs and I were writing, a history of modern superhero comics called The Comic Book Heroes. I'd been to comics conventions before, but nothing like this: more than 5,000 people filling two rooms of a decent-sized convention center, and almost all of them talking about comic books. There were already a few people lamenting the early days, when the con had been small and intimate, but for me it was a thrill.
       The next year I went back as the author of a book of comics history about to be published, with copies of the cover in hand. The year after that I went as a somewhat well-known member of the industry's "fan press." In 1987 I went as what we called a "pro" or "creator," specifically as the cowriter of a low-profile comic book called The Trouble with Girls, which made me feel like a member of an exclusive club. The next year I went and discovered I had fans. In 1989 I went as the writer of a DC superhero series, with more projects in the works to brag about, and it was at the con, in the lobby between the two big rooms, that I learned that The Trouble with Girls had been picked up by 20th Century-Fox. I could plausibly pose as a big shot.
       The convention had its own experience with big-shotism in those years. Comics got hip. Dark Knight, Watchmen, Maus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and finally the Tim Burton Batman. Attendance soared suddenly to 11,000. Two years later, the con moved to the colossal new convention center by the harbor, with its interlocking halls and absurdly high ceilings, and the bigger publishers started setting up towering, flashing, booming displays as if they were at a real trade show. The video game business jumped on board, then Hollywood. By its second year at the new location, attendance had broken 20,000, two years later 30,000. The comic book business itself suffered a bubble-popping and cataclysmic decline in the mid-'90s, but by then comics were a small enough part of Comic Con that it was easy not to notice. 
       My own career didn't follow the same upward trajectory. I found myself much in demand, took on too much, burned out, started doing mediocre work, and became pretty negative about the whole industry. In the lean years it took a lot of work just to find work, and I didn't have the stomach for it anymore. By the end of the '90s I was happy to move my career back to nonfiction, where it had started. 
       Still, I kept going to the con. It was getting pretty unpleasant in a many ways by the time attendance broke 50,000 around the turn of the century (and my the con became more and more just a pretext to hang out with my friend Joe Filice, who lived in San Diego), but I never stopped wanting to go. By then, what kept me most connected to the thing was just what had brought me there in the first place: my love for the medium and its history. I went there to research another book about comics history, Men of Tomorrow, then again to promote it, then again to accept an Eisner Award for it, and several times since to join various esoteric panel discussions of how comics came to be.
             In the past few years, most of my appearances have been about a new book I'm working on with Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, the biography of her grandfather, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, who pretty much founded the American comics industry as we know it. And so it was this year. About 130,000 people attend that thing every year now. I'd guess that the great majority of them have little or no interest in comic books themselves. Even of the many thousands who do love comics, I'd say that only a few hundred are willing to go out of their way to attend a panel on the early history of the field. But those are the few hundred I want to be among.
         This year, our "Twisted Roots of Comics" panel was subtitled "Pulp Magazines and the Birth of the Modern Comics." I moderated, with my cowriter, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, to one side and three experts in their fields on the other: Nathan Vernon Madison, a historian of the pulps and author of Anti-Foreign Imagery in Pulps and Comic Books 1920-1960, Brad Ricca, author of the superbly researched and written Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Creators of Superman, and Michael Uslan, writer, producer, teacher, and a boy who still loves Batman. Here's the audio. If you get a chance to listen, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed doing it (even if it doesn't look like it in the pictures).

Happy 125th, Old Man

One thing I’ve learned about myself as a writer is that I can’t write well about someone unless I’ve come to care about them. There’s a process of building compassion and connection I have to go through that’s not unlike the process of building a friendship—and unless I hang in with it, the story I tell is going to be too cool and too distant to make anyone care.

       I’ve also learned that the strongest bonds are built (and I think this may be true in real-life as well as literary relationships) when I’ve started off by misjudging the person. So it was with with Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, whom I initially dismissed as a colorful oddball who sort of accidentally founded DC Comics and so laid the foundation for the American comic-book industry. It was only after Men of Tomorrow came out that some of the Major’s descendants, especially Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, made me see him as quite another person entirely—a military hero and extraordinary non-conformist, a writer and liver of great adventures, and the true father of the comic book as we know it. A man worth writing a whole book about, in fact. Which is just what Nicky and I are doing now, with a book called Lost Hero.

      So it is with affection as well as respect that I wish the “old man” (as his family still calls him) a happy 125th birthday. He was born in another world, the Tennessee of 1890, but he went on to discover and build some things that are still vitally part of the world we know. He was a complex guy, capable of great invention and boldness but also of great overreaching and self-sabotage. He possessed extraordinary knowledge and competence in a wide range of fields, but at the same time a strange naïvété about how the world worked. But it was those contradictory qualities that make him, for me, worth caring about and writing about. I think they were also what enabled him to play such an important role in the complex and often contradictory history of popular culture.

      He never did get his due. His company was taken from him, right before the character he discovered, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman, saw print. His role in history was buried and distorted by the people who took over the industry he founded, then neglected by generations of fans and historians (like me) who didn’t yet realize how deep the roots of comic books run and how far they branch through the soil of American history. Discovering his life has helped me understand a great many things about my country and its culture, as well as about the medium in which I worked for so many years. I’m remembering, today, that it will be good to give a little bit back to him by helping to tell his story to the world. 

Wait for the Sequel, Strongman

Usually, I’m a writer who has a pretty clear idea of what he intends to do and goes pretty directly at it. Men of Tomorrow, for example, started as an idea to tell the story of the battles over the ownership and control of Superman between his creators and his publishers, both as a human story and as a way of looking at how our ways of creating mass entertainment were hammered out messily in the middle of the last century. About the only big shift it went through in the research and writing was that it tilted more toward the birth of the comic book business out of the immigrant Jewish culture, so I blew through a lot of the later parts of the story (e.g. Jerry Siegel’s creative struggles with Mort Weisinger in the early ‘60s) more quickly.
       But I guess just once in my life I had to let myself unmoor the craft, point toward the open water, and see where the wind took me. Because the book I’m pulling together now is nothing like the book I set out to write.       

       The idea came, originally, out of my Men of Tomorrow research. I had become intrigued by the very strange figure of Bernarr Macfadden, bodybuilder turned fitness guru turned publisher of confessional magazines, who represented a lot of what fascinated me about the weird popular culture of the 1920s and '30s but who didn’t really fit into a book about comics. So when I sat down to come up with my next book, I thought of one I called Mad Fortune, about the confessional magazines and other junk magazines as viewed through Macfadden's bizarre life and personality. And that’s the idea I sold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

          I’d barely gotten into the research on that when I began to realize that it wasn’t enough to hold my interest, that it would inevitably become mainly a biography of Macfadden, and I really didn’t want to write just a biography, especially of a guy who was strange and intriguing but not very deep or complex. So I took it more into Macfadden’s relationship with censorship and the whole battle over what people could and couldn’t reveal in print in the early 20th century—especially as that played out in the overlooked but very influential True Stories, True Crime, True Confessions genre, which Macfadden created. Which I also liked because it brought me back onto the turf of Killing Monsters, where I wrote some, but not nearly as much as I wanted to, about the history of our “culture wars" over mass entertainment.

       In researching that, I discovered Anthony Comstock, the great American moral censor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who was Macfadden’s first serious antagonist. I found that particularly interesting, because Comstock and Macfadden’s battles were mostly over the latter’s right to run physical fitness exhibitions and publish cautionary stories about venereal disease, which seem so beneficial to us now but were so threatening to so many people then. Somewhere in there, my working title changed to American Madness.

       So I started to write about Comstock as Macfadden’s antagonist, although I still saw the story as being mainly viewed through the latter. Which, after a while, was starting to bog me down, although I couldn't figure out why. I hit my first frustrating dead spot. 

       Then came the stroke of luck that I’m still grateful for: someone else wrote a biography of Bernarr Macfadden. Specifically, Mark Adams did, with his very entertaining and highly recommended Mr. America. Mark was very generous and gave me a whole stack of notes and research contacts he’d compiled, but even more than that he made me rethink my book. Bernarr Macfadden isn’t like Abraham Lincoln, the kind of guy who’ll support an infinite number of biographies. I knew that I needed to reduce the Macfadden part of my story significantly and crank up the Comstock and other elements, so no one could mistake this for “another book about that crazy bodybuilder from a long time ago.”

       Which was hugely liberating, because that’s when I realized how stifled I was feeling by having to focus everything on the crazy bodybuilder. And I hadn’t been able to see that, because I was holding onto this idea that the book shouldn’t change too much from my original conception. Like I said at the beginning, I wasn’t the kind of writer who did that kind of thing.

       Luckily, my patient and forgiving editor, Eric Chinski, supported me in the new direction, and the book was reborn as The Undressing of America. Now it was about the whole cultural battle over exposure, concealment, sex, health, privacy, the body, and all that stuff—a battle we’re still feeling the repercussions of—as it developed through the decades of Comstock and Macfadden's careers from 1865 to 1930. The focus would still be on those two, and their legal conflicts would still be the central action, but it would include a huge number of other people around them: Mencken, Dreiser, Ziegfeld, Rutherford B. Hayes, all kinds of people.

       Which is the book I proceeded to research and write, and when I revise it I think it’s going to be a really good book. But it’s not the book I’m rewriting now. Because while I was writing that book, a whole other book happened.

       The thing was, the more I wrote about Anthony Comstock, the more I realized that he just didn’t make sense to a modern consciousness unless you understood where he came from. His moral thinking was so preposterously black and white, his assaults on the most innocuous (and most valuable) material were so violent, that he could only come off as some sort of delusional crank—which made it impossible to understand how he had so much public support and so much political power. 

       To make that comprehensible, I had to tell the story of the antebellum reformers from whom he sprang and who provided the momentum for his crusade, those complex and extraordinary people who launched the temperance movement, the YMCA, and abolitionism—and first made “indecent” publications a target of holy wrath—because they believed they were founding the Biblical millennium on earth. Which required a new front section of the book, a sort of long prologue, that I at first thought could start in 1851 (founding of the YMCA), then realized would have to start in 1840 (arrival of a man named Morris K. Jesup in New York), and finally would have to stretch back to 1827, when moral combat broke out over a ballet dancer’s lifting skirt.

       At a certain point, after I’d researched most of that and written a big chunk of it, I realized that this was all just too much for one book to handle. I found the story of “America’s first culture war” more interesting (at least for the moment) than any of the rest of it, and I knew that I could never give it its due if I had to squeeze it into the first quarter of a book covering an entire century.

      The punchline of all of this is...a book that started essentially as a biography of Bernarr Macfadden won’t have Bernarr Macfadden in it at all. This one’s going to have to cut off before he was born. I still have (and like) the rough draft of the book in which he’s a major player, the original Undressing of America, and I’ll be happy to see that one published as a follow-up to this one. With this book to stand on and refer to, I’ll feel much more confident about telling Comstock’s story. (And, if nothing else, I’ll understand Comstock’s background much more myself. One of the functions of writing a book is so the writer can understand his own material...but that’s another post.) 

       Basically, I’ve written a book and its sequel. Except I wrote the sequel first, so the book that gets published first is the one I wrote second. I’ve spent years researching and writing two big books at once, neither of which will look much at all like the book I originally contracted to write. Hardly what I set out to do—but now I can’t really imagine doing it differently.

       The hard part now is the title. The Undressing of America was conceived for the second half of the story, and it’s a perfect title for that. But after years of hyping “my next book, The Undressing of America,” it’ll feel strange to come out with some other book and have to explain that Undressing is still out there. But that I think I’ll discuss with my editor. 

       Of course, there’s also the other “next book,” Lost Hero, my collaboration with Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, which I’m certain will be pretty much what it's been planned as, because Nicky’s going to make damn sure it is. I’ve kind of forgotten what that feels like, honestly. It’ll be a nice change. 

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. 

Still Undressing (After All These Years)

I had a great year in 2013: rich and sane and productive, full of wonderful people, good work, and just enough adventure. But there’s one part of my life that didn’t go the way I hoped. I really, really, really thought that ’13 would be the year I finally finished The Undressing of America. And yet, here I am, even as I’m already starting my next book, still adding to it.

       This wasn’t due to a lack of work, nor to throwing it out and starting over (as I did more than once before). I wrote a good draft of a good book. But it became very clear at a certain point, as I was trying very hard to convince myself that it was good enough, that it had the potential to be a much better book. And having glimpsed that other book, I just couldn’t bear to let it never happen.

       I’m not usually a proponent of this kind of thinking. Clearly this kind of thing can lead straight into the treacherous bogs of perfectionism. There’s a saying going around out there, “Done is better than perfect.” I haven’t been able to find out who came up with it. Some have said Mark Zuckerberg, others Sheryl Sandberg; give it a while and, the internet being what it is, I’m sure we’ll see it attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and Nelson Mandela. But wherever it came from, I like it. Because I firmly believe, as another quote has it, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” (Which I’m pretty sure was Voltaire. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Bill Gates.)

       But there’s a spectrum here, surely. Holding something up for months in order to finesse the last few details is neurotic, but banging something out overnight even though it’s a pile of junk isn’t a sane alternative. I presented the world with several piles of junk in my comics-writing days, when I took on too much work and not only didn’t have time to worry about perfection but didn’t have enough even to worry about coherence or originality. One of the hardest parts of any job in which we have to make our own calls about whether something’s done or not is finding that magical balance point where we’re neither excessively driven by a hunger to get it over with nor a mania to make it just right. 

       In the case of this current book, I’ve finally decided that I haven’t reached that point yet. There are downsides to that, professionally, financially, and psychologically. But the downsides to stopping now look bigger to me. Because I may never write about quite this subject again, and the pragmatic realities of my life may never give me this much flexibility again, and I believe there might be real value in the not-finished book I’m seeing.

       Basically, the deal is this: the book tells the story of America’s moral and legal wars over issues of the body, sex, and privacy as they helped shape our culture from the 19th century into the 20th. As conceived up ’til now, it began with Anthony Comstock’s ferocious assault on public discussions of private matters in art, literature, politics, and public health, starting at the end of the Civil War. But what became increasingly clear to me (with some editorial prodding) is that Comstock’s war doesn’t make enough sense without understanding the men who inspired and supported him, and their evangelical crusade to reform the nation in the decades leading up to the Civil War—especially given how deeply entwined that crusade was with abolitionism and the birth of feminism. Nor did the story of his opponents make enough sense without understanding the origins of the free-thinkers and free-speechers from whom they descended, and the way their crusade got all tangled up with the early days of vaudeville and pornography. And after a while it all became just too much to cover in quick backstory.

       So now the book begins at its proper beginning: in 1827, with the arrival of the first ballerina to New York and Samuel F. B. Morse’s public denunciation of her, with Fanny Wright’s flight from her collapsing interracial free-love commune in Nashoba, with the wildfire of Charles Finney’s revolutionary evangelism, and with Elijah Pierson’s mad, doomed mission to save the souls of prostitutes. It will be a long book, and it will be an even later book than it already is. But I believe it will be a good book. Anyway, I owe it the chance to find out. 
       (As for the next book, Lost Hero, about Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and the secret origin of comic books...that one I promise to finish on time. Because on that one I have a collaborator, and she’s not going to let me get away with anything else.)

The Next Book

As I've been editing The Undressing of America I've been thinking about what to write next: there's my idea for the book about online communities and changing concepts of privacy, and the one about the pop-cultural history of romantic love, and the follow-up to Killing Monsters and media violence. But I can shelve the thinking for a while, because the next book has arrived like a gift.
       Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, granddaughter of the man who founded DC Comics and, at least to a great extent, created the American comic book and planted the seeds of the graphic novel, is writing a book about her grandfather and wants to collaborate with another writer, someone from outside the family. Specifically, she wants to write it with me, which I find awfully flattering.
       It will be a relief to be doing a collaboration, with someone else doing nearly all the heavy research, after this monumental Undressing job, where I had to acquaint myself with nearly seventy years of cultural history and dig into the lives of several people. It will also be a lot of fun, both because Nicky herself is a joy and because this grandpa of hers, this Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, lived such an extraordinary life: cavalry officer, chased Pancho Villa, fought in World War I, served at the Paris talks of 1919, married a Swedish countess, got court martialed, turned himself into a successful pulp writer, conceived the comic book, founded DC, discovered Superman, had the company stolen, and became a military historian. For starters.
       The story behind the story is meaningful to me, too, because the reason I started talking to Nicky in the first place is that I got a lot wrong when I wrote about her grandfather in Men of Tomorrow. Somehow, although I can't remember quite how, those conversations eventually led to her asking me to collaborate on the real story, giving me the chance to make amends for sloppy research. Life is generous.