Superhero Antihero

In 1960, the DC Comics superhero Green Lantern?much like the rest of the United States?was exhilarated by his powers, boastful of his abilities, optimistic for the future: "No one in the world suspects that at a moment's notice I can become mighty Green Lantern?with my amazing power ring and invincible green beam! Golly, what a feeling it is!" He was the perfect superhero for a "super-power nation."

By 1971, Green Lantern?again, like America at large?was sounding older and wiser, far less sure of himself, beaten down by the decade he'd just lived through: "Those days are gone?gone forever?the days I was confident, certain?I was so young?so sure I couldn't make a mistake! Young and cocky, that was Green Lantern?well?I've changed. I'm older now?maybe wiser, too...and a lot less happy."

And he wasn't alone. By the turn of the 1970s, DC's rival Marvel Comics had flooded the comic book racks with a whole new breed of superhero. Call them the superhero counterculture?hip, often liberal, often outcast or eccentric, they were as much antihero as superhero. In the Golden Age of comic superheroes?the years surrounding World War II?characters like Superman had been exemplars of the American establishment, confidently fighting for "truth, justice and the American way." By the 70s, after years of the Vietnam War, racial strife and the counterculture, superheroes were more likely to be downright antiestablishment, questioning the very meaning of ideals like truth, justice and the American way.

Is it silly to analyze how comic book figures reflect and represent the mood of society at large? Comics aficionado Arlen Schumer doesn't think so. Scholars have pored over magazine ads and Hollywood imagery in the same pursuit for larger meaning. Psychohistorians interpret the editorial cartoons in newspapers as though psychoanalyzing the collective dreams of the nation. Why not study the then-pervasive and popular medium of comic books?

On four consecutive Tuesday nights starting the end of this month, Schumer will be making his case in a multimedia lecture series at the CUNY Graduate Center, called "Superheroes in the 60s: Comics & Counterculture." With large-screen computer projections of classic 60s comics images?he calls it "the Roy Lichtenstein effect"?it should be as fun as it is educational.

The last time I talked with Schumer, back in 1991, he'd put together the beautifully designed book Visions from the Twilight Zone. But he's better known as a comics geek ("I was reading comics before I learned how to read," he tells me) who's managed to make a living from his obsession. With his wife Sherri Wolfgang he runs Dynamic Duo Studio, a graphic design firm that specializes in adapting comic book imagery for advertising (HBO's Tales from the Crypt) and magazines that have included Forbes, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine and New York. "It's no different from what I've been doing since I was 10 years old?showing people comic books and saying, 'Look how great this stuff is,'" he says.

Fans call the period his lectures focus on the Silver Age, which he defines as 1956-'70. Schumer says it's a period often overlooked or looked down on by aficionados today. He remembers taking a mid-80s lecture course by Art Spiegelman at SVA that "went from the creation of Superman in 1938 [straight] to 1968" and the birth of underground comics, skipping right over the Marvel years Schumer's concentrating on. Spiegelman clearly felt that period "spelled the downfall of the art form," Schumer recalls. "It was only with the rise of underground comics that the art form blossomed." Schumer says Spiegelman once told him that any study of 60s superhero comics "is akin to studying the signage of Nazi concentration camps. His tongue was in his cheek, but still."

Schumer counters that it's foolish simply to leap over the gap from Superman selling war bonds to R. Crumb's Mr. Natural ragging on his hippie devotees. The changes DC's and Marvel's characters went through in the 60s not only paralleled what was happening in society at large, but led directly to the rise of underground comics and "everything that's come since." Put simply, the Silver Age is when comics grew up.

America's appetite for superheroes had flagged in the years after World War II; in the era of film noir, the Cold War and beatniks, squeaky-clean figures like Superman and Batman had come to seem antique and irrelevant. Around '56 DC Comics sought to revive the genre with new or remodeled characters more fit for the age of the space race and the atomic bomb. Heroes like the Flash, the Atom and Adam Strange ("Earth's First Spaceman") mirrored America's faith in science and technology at the turn of the 60s, our brash can-do optimism and lick-the-commies feistiness. The Atom, surrounded by his atomic symbol, "is a perfect image from that era," Schumer tells me. He reflects "America's attitude toward technology, toward the future, Kennedy-era optimism." Though spiffed up and high-teched, these characters were still essentially as conservative and establishment as Golden Age superheroes had been.

The new spirit wasn't demonstrated just in the stories, but in the revamped look of comic books in these years. Carmine Infantino, a leading DC illustrator, "visually embodied the new ideals of this new age," Schumer has written. "The cities the Flash ran through were stylized compositions of futuristically-slanted spires; suburban homes all came out of advanced California moderne motifs of the era. Infantino's trademark long, low panels filled with trim, lithe figures were as sleek and streamlined as the fins Detroit was sporting on all its models... Everything Infantino drew reflected the crystal-clean images of America promulgated then by Hollywood and Madison Avenue..."

But in comic-book history the 60s really belong to Stan Lee's upstart Marvel Comics. Marvel (trailed later by DC) pitched comic books at a new market of college students and adults. Consciously rivaling, and eventually eclipsing, DC's hegemony, Marvel began to churn out a new generation of offbeat superheroes like the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man. Schumer likes to say that the Fantastic Four were as emblematic of the 60s as the Fab Four. Unlike Green Lantern, Marvel characters often weren't at all happy about their super-powers, which were as often as not accidental and unwanted. Their special abilities made them loners and freaks?countercultural weirdoes who were often at odds with establishment society (recall that hippies also referred to themselves as freaks). They weren't omnipotent visitors from another planet, like Superman, but everyday types (see Spider-Man, nee Peter Parker, a teenage nerd turned superhero) who'd had their freakish powers thrust on them.

As Infantino's illustrations had depicted the gung-ho late 50s, the great Marvel illustrators like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby began to bring a darker, grittier, more realistic look to Marvel's pages. In complete opposition to Infantino's futuristic cityscapes, Marvel's heroes moved around in the same drab, dirty urban centers as any other American city-dweller. (The Fantastic Four spent a lot of time on the Bowery and the Lower East Side.) Schumer argues that Ditko's work in the early and mid-60s even presaged the rise of psychedelia a few years later. Ditko was cocreator of Dr. Strange. Schumer writes: "Woven throughout the saga of a washed-up American surgeon who becomes an enlightened super-sorcerer were bizarre, surrealistic visualizations...that had a wide-ranging influence on the proto-counterculture that was beginning to use LSD..." In Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe reports that Ken Kesey used to pore over Dr. Strange comic books, and the first psychedelic poster created for Bill Graham's Fillmore in '67 was an homage to Dr. Strange. DC countered with Deadman, who had a Hindu mentor Rama Kushna and seems a bald attempt to cash in on the Beatles-influenced popularity of Eastern mysticism.

Schumer identifies the apex and in many ways the end of this epoch in the work of Neal Adams, a 26-year-old illustrator given free rein to restyle some of DC's comics as the firm struggled to catch up with the changes Marvel had wrought. Adams injected a new hyperrealism into the design of comics featuring characters like Deadman, Green Lantern and Green Arrow. To Schumer, Adams' work at the turn of the 70s is as reflective of the new, downbeat mood of the country as Infantino's had been of the go-go early 60s. Green Lantern, and even more so his companion character Green Arrow, found themselves dealing not so much with comic-book supervillains as with real-world issues preoccupying the nation at large?the war in Vietnam, racial strife, social injustice, the environment. Green Arrow was even given a teenage sidekick, Speedy, who was a junkie.

By 1972, the formerly gung-ho, all-American Green Lantern had grown into a kind of liberal, antiestablishment avenger. In one remarkable story Schumer sees as capping the Silver Age, the now-enlightened superhero destroys a multimillion-dollar aircraft after an environmental protester chains himself, Christlike, to the wing to prevent its taking off and polluting the atmosphere (mirroring protesters in Seattle who halted production of the SST that same year).

Interestingly, that was the last story in the Green Lantern series. You have to wonder if Adams and scriptwriter Denny O'Neil had gotten too realistic for the market, or for their DC bosses. They had, Schumer writes, "debunked the sterile sanctimonium of the DC characters' universe and brought them all down to earth, from an open-armed acceptance of the benevolence of science and technology to a begrudging awareness of the corrupting consequences of power."

And that was the beginning of the end. Both DC and Marvel went into a long period of decline after the Silver Age?some fans call it the Bronze Age of comic books. Superheroes of several generations, from Superman and Batman to Spider-Man and Spawn, found new lives for themselves all over the movies and tv, but the mainstream comic books that spawned the genre have all but died commercially. Their legacy shifted to underground comics and later to graphic novels, the latter deeply indebted, Schumer says, to Adams' pioneering designs.

Schumer intends to lay this all out in vivid, giant-screen detail in his four-week course. It begins Tues., Oct. 29, 6:30-8:30.

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave. (34th St.), 817-8125; $25 per evening, $90 for the entire course.

Afterwords

Given that its founding editors are the stylish Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien, it's no surprise that the new Bald Ego sometimes looks as much like a fashion magazine as a literature and arts journal (232 pages, $15). It can be hard to distinguish the art photos from the ads for Kate Spade, B Bar and Da Silvano. With its glossy pages and handsome, four-color production values, as well as its references to haute couture, art-celebrity culture and an old-school Soho hipster-gallery culture, this inaugural issue can feel like the Interview or Flaunt of literary magazines.

Take that for what it's worth. There's good poetry and prose here from Patrick McGrath, the late David Rattray and Blagg; cool sketchbook entries from Larry Clark and Duncan Hannah; evocative drawings by Alex Katz and a funny series of drag queen portraits by Roxanne Lowit; plus various kinds of work from O'Brien, Deborah Harry, Douglas Coupland, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, Janos Gat, Anthony Haden-Guest and numerous others. (Subscriptions are $27 for one year, $50 for two, from Bald Ego Publishing, 21 Bond St., 4th fl., NYC 10012.)