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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).
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.
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.)
-----------------
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.”
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.
