Heroes of the drawing board

Before there was Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” there was the early comics industry that inspired it -- a chaotic, lawless, backstabbing mess of a business that Gerard Jones documents in “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.” A former comics writer who’s written extensively about the relationship between children and mass media, Jones has drawn on industry lore and long-buried documents, and dug up some remarkably juicy stories about the creators of Superman, Batman, Captain America and Wonder Woman as well as the men who published the first comic books. And he considers the meaning behind the fantasies of power and escape that children of the ‘30s and ‘40s found realized in superhero comics’ crude but potent four-color pages.

You point out in “Men of Tomorrow” that the creators of the comic book industry were mostly sons of Jewish immigrants. Why do you think they were the ones who invented comics?

It had to be Jews, in a way. There was a particular emphasis among Jewish immigrants on bookishness. Kids like Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, could stay in their rooms and write and draw and communicate by mail. They were in touch with the Jewish oral traditions of violence and heroism; they were craving a greater sense of physical power, and because of the constraints of their upbringing, they tended to take their aggressions and their desires into a more cerebral realm. And the children of immigrants were still outside the American system and scrabbling for a piece of it, willing to do what the old Americans considered beneath them or didn’t think was a good risk.

You also mention that most of the early comics creators had absent fathers. How did that play into the superhero tradition?

At the most basic level, the superhero is a symbol of adult potency that represents what we wish we could do or know. But it suggests that the kid who’s doing the daydreaming doesn’t have a clear, realistic model of how to become a potent adult. So it becomes wild fantasizing, involving hopelessness and self-mockery. Jerry Siegel lost his father to a murderer in adolescence; other cartoonists’ families broke up, or their fathers didn’t flow well into the New World, or were trying to make a living and absent, and it left the boys to figure out what American manhood could be. The superhero is a reflection of their having to make up American manhood on their own.

Boys made the early superhero comics more or less for other boys; why were girls drawn to them too?

It’s easy to say that Superman represents what boys wanted and Wonder Woman represents what girls wanted, but when you dig back to the sales reports and internal memos, you discover that Wonder Woman’s readership was about 90% male and Superman was maybe 60% male. Wonder Woman let boys play with their fascination with and fear of female power. In the early ‘40s, there were big shifts in the ways the genders related -- a lot of male anxiety -- and Wonder Woman was a way to fetishize and eroticize it, although very few male readers would have consciously done that! Superman speaks to a more general desire among all kids to be impervious to pain, meek and mild on the outside but powerful within.

Which parts of the early comics’ fantasies of superpowers are still viable in popular culture? Which aren’t?

The double identity is still viable, but it’s interesting: Movies based on comics put much less weight on the necessity of preserving the secret. Being two people, Peter Parker and Spider-Man, is very important, but in “Spider-Man 2,” there are moments where the secret seems to be blown, and everyone says, “That’s OK, we won’t tell anybody.” If you connect that to the way we talk about sexuality and addiction and psychological dysfunction and oddball family arrangements, that’s how it’s going: You don’t lead with it when you meet someone, but there’s not this shame about “What if someone finds out?” There’s a much more porous wall between the inner and outer self.

The element of superheroes that’s more relevant now is physical transformation. The X-Men, with their scary mutant powers, reflect the shift from a social model in which you’re a kid, then figure out how to be an adult, to a model in which we’re all constantly reinventing and reexamining ourselves. The seduction and power of change has become a big part of the superhero myth.

How do you think comics have affected the rest of popular culture?

It’s interesting that the comic book keeps going, because those fantasies are now so widely available in video games, TV shows, movies.... Before “Star Wars,” you really didn’t find much outside of comics that would give you these really raw, flamboyant power fantasies. In the last 30 years, these images of transformation and double life, of hidden super powers, of global destruction, are all over -- they’re in every action blockbuster. What keeps superhero comic books alive now is people who love that particular medium, but the fantasies Siegel and Shuster were making up in the 1930s are everywhere now.