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On the Origin of Superheroes
From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1
By Chris Gavaler University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-382-4
CHAPTER 1
IN THE BEGINNING
Action Comics No. 1 was the Big Bang of the Golden Age of Comics, the start point for superhero histories. Except this one. We won't open the first page of Action Comics till closing the last page of this book. We could start in 1883, the year Friedrich Nietzsche discovered God's body in Crime Alley and declared him dead, but we'd miss fourteen billion years that way. Stan Lee says God isn't dead, just sleeping (more on that deistic conundrum near the end of this chapter), but either way, God exploded the universe into existence before losing consciousness. Or universes. To explain the metaphysical underpinnings of superheroes' two-dimensional morality, I wanted to begin this tour of the multiverse in mythological times — but that first requires a Silver Age detour, plus a further definition of terminology.
"Thinkers who entertain the possibility that there are lots of universes," explains Jim Holt, "use the term 'multiverse' (or sometimes 'megaverse') for the entire ensemble of them." Holt writes about science for the New Yorker and is the author of Why Does the World Exist?, so by "thinkers" he means theologians, physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians. He does not mean comic book writers. Though he should.
The multiverse was created in 1957, not by God but by the physicist Hugh Everett. He called it MWI, the "many-worlds interpretation" of quantum physics. Because things get weird and literally unmeasurable at the subatomic level, the multiverse offers a way of explaining paradoxes like Erwin Schrödinger's 1935 thought experiment in which a cat can somehow be both dead and alive. Everett made that impossibility possible by splitting the cat into two universes.
But, unknown to Everett and Holt, DC editor Julie (stands for Julius) Schwartz had produced the same model a year earlier. Only instead of a cat, he used a superhero. DC's Showcase No. 4, cover dated October 1956, introduced the Flash — the Big Bang event of the Silver Age of Comics. The Golden Age Flash had dropped out of circulation in 1949, and though this new Flash resembled him (same name, same symbol, same superpower), he was not the same character (different costume, different secret identity, different origin). Schwartz followed up his experiment with a new Green Lantern in 1959 and split the old Justice Society into the new Justice League in 1960. That's also the year Andy Nimmo, vice-chair of the British Interplanetary Society, first used "multiverse" to describe Everett's clunkier-sounding many-worlds theory. (American philosopher William James actually coined "multiverse" in the 1890s, but that's a very different animal.)
So how can there be two Flashes? Or two Green Lanterns? Or two anythings? Because, Schwartz theorized, the new characters lived on Earth-1, and the 40s characters on Earth-2. Schwartz provided empirical evidence when, in 1961, the Earth-1 Flash vibrated his way into the Earth-2 Flash's universe. It turned out that events on Earth-2 had entered Earth-1 through the dreams of Golden Age comic book creators. Which weirdly matches Holt's description: "quantum field forbids these parallel worlds from interacting in any but the ghostliest of ways."
Schwartz's research was soon duplicated by physicist Richard Feynman, who used it to win a 1965 Nobel Prize. Feynman, like Schwartz, argued for the existence of not just multiple worlds but multiple histories. Apparently new universes pop into existence at every fork in time. When, for instance, Schrödinger's cat both did and did not die. Or when the Flash both did and did not vibrate into a neighboring dimension. Feynman used the less catchy phrases "path integral formulation" and "sum over histories," but DC didn't adopt the actual word "multiverse" until 1976. Writers needed a term for the ensemble of universes they'd spent the last two decades spinning into existence.
Earth-3 (where everything is an evil mirror of Earth-1) bubbled up in 1964. The next year a supervillain created Earth-A (stands for Alternate) in order to eliminate the Justice League. In 1966, after buying Quality Comics, DC decided that subset of superheroes' Golden Age adventures took place on Earth-X where World War II still rages. They gave Captain Marvel his own universe too; starting in 1973, he and all of the 1940s Fawcett Comics characters (DC swallowed up competitors like a black hole) moved to Earth-S (stands for Shazam). Since they couldn't buy Marvel, DC had to create Crossover Earth for team-ups (Superman and Spider-Man were the first in 1976), and they even designated an Earth for the rest of us (Earth Prime).
The list goes on (Charlton Comics eventually ended up on Earth-4, Jack Kirby's New Gods on 17), and I'm not counting all the "Imaginary Stories" that took place in universes left unlabeled because they never came into contact with Earth-1 characters. On Earth-Whatever, for instance, Clark and Lois marry and raise superbabies. And on Earth-Whatchamacallit, the infant Superman is adopted by the Waynes, so Clark and Bruce grow up as brothers. Basically any "what if" can spawn a parallel world.
Marvel literalized that "what if" theory in 1977 with What If? The first issue (my eleven-year-old self bought it from a rotating 7-Eleven rack) asked: "What If Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four?" Instead of killing cats, the omniscient Watcher used a hit-and-run example to illustrate how any single event leads to multiple realities. The accident bystander:
(A) does nothing, and the victim is killed,
(B) pushes the victim to safety but is struck himself, or
(C) gets both himself and the victim to safety.
Or D. All three. Which is what Feynman said happens. Our reality, Earth-1218 in the Marvel multiverse, is somehow the averaged sum of all events. Or maybe that's Earth-616, where most of Marvel's comic book characters live. Or Earth-199999 and their movie incarnations. Marvel has a lot of hit-and-run worlds to average out.
But What Ifs and Imaginary Tales are not the same. In fact, they reveal how deep the DC/Marvel cosmological divide runs. Marvel's multiverse looks like a quantum theory multiverse, while DC's fits the inflationary model because Earth-S and Earth-4 and Earth-X were not created at points of divergence. Those worlds were floating out there all along. Which, oddly, is the more impressive theory because it has actual data to back it up. Holt explains:
measurements of the cosmic background radiation — the echo left over from the Big Bang — indicate that the space we live in is infinite, and that matter is spread randomly throughout it. Therefore, all possible arrangements of matter must exist out there somewhere — including exact and inexact replicas of our own world and the beings in it.
A variation on the inflationary theory goes even farther and posits isolated pocket universes, each born from its own Big Bang. Eventually each universe (ours too) will collapse in its own Big Crunch or, preferably, a Big Bounce, causing a new universe to be rebooted in its place.
At least that's the theory. Except in comic books where it's verifiable fact. It happened in 1985. The twelve-issue series Crisis on Infinite Earths ended with all the surviving worlds of the DC multiverse imploding and reforming as "New Earth." Only this time there were no additional pocket universes connected to it, so no more multiverse. Sure, DC couldn't resist a few Imaginary Tales (newly termed "Elseworlds"), but superheroes from Earth-1 — or I guess it would just be "Earth" now — never (okay, almost never) interacted with their counterparts from parallel Earths. Which is why DC cleaned out its multiverse in the first place. All those JLA and JSA team-ups were getting tedious. DC prefers "reboot" over "Big Bounce," which is fair since physicists didn't start using the second term till 1987, after DC's new universe had stabilized.
Meanwhile, Marvel has been drifting into the inflationary model with its larger Megaverse and the crunching of its own alternate Earths. It's hit the refresh button a few times, but not as impressively as DC restarting all titles at No. 1. So now there are two Action Comics No. 1, one dated 1938, one 2011, both the products of the many-markets interpretation of quantum publishing. That last reboot even popped the multiverse (now called the Multiversity) back into existence, including Earth-2. Or, rather, a rebounced Earth-2 in an infinite range of Earth-2 variations, all of which DC will eventually publish, though not necessarily here on Earth Prime.
* * *
In March 2014, astronomer John M. Kovac, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, thought his team spotted evidence of the Big Bang. Telescopes positioned on the South Pole detected gravitational waves, wrinkles in the space-time fabric made in the universe's first moments of existence. It turns out they were only interstellar dust. But comic book astronomers are way ahead of Kovac. Krona, a rogue scientist from the planet Oa at the center of the DC universe, witnessed the hand of God forming creation before his observation machine fragmented into the multiverse. Galen, of a pre–Big Bang civilization, steered his ship into the convergence point of the Big Crunch before emerging as the planet-eating Galactus, sole survivor of Marvel's Big Bang.
Dave Sims's Judge was there too. I was a fan of the independent Canadian comic Cerebus, until Sims mailed my wife insults to her reader comment letter and used his editorial page for misogynist rants. For Cerebus No. 109, Sims draws a Big Bang creation myth in which the Void unthinkingly rapes the Light, exploding her into a multiverse of bastard stars. The Sumerians' god of wind has sex with a mountain with similar results. Hesoid's void, Chaos, somehow gives birth to the elements all by itself. The Egyptians called that empty sea Nu. Genesis 1:2 opens with a black hole too: "the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep," followed by God's "Let there be light," the biblical Big Bang.
Most mythologies start with the formless horror a blank page, until an artist draws the universe in human terms. Marvel personifies the Big Bang's offspring as Eternity, an aspect of the four-faced Living Tribunal, who oversees the larger multiverse while working under the One-Above-All and delegating assignments to Magistrati. It's only slightly more complicated than Gnostic Christianity's team of Demiurgos, Aeons, and Archons. Comics are only the latest mythology to anthropomorphize the workings of the universe. We've always preferred our gods in human form.
"All mythology," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in Representative Men, "opens with demigods," the human-yet-divine offspring of flighty imagination and earthbound necessity. The adventures of Gilgamesh were Mesopotamia's first big superhero saga. Fans of Nanabush freely traded his stories across the future U.S.-Canadian border. The tales of Maui island-hopped the Pacific for centuries. Even the Egyptian god Horus roamed Europe before settling in the Nile Valley. He, or some other equally bird-headed godman, debuted in France during the Stone Age. He was a minor character though, relegated to the back of Lascaux, the first comic book in human history. Comics would later become synonymous with superheroes, providing the character type its most enduring home, but the first visual representation of a superhuman is chiseled into prehistory. Humans have been thinking about superheroes for over seventeen millennia.
It would be thematically convenient to report that the first comic book was Big Bang Comics No. 1, but that Golden Age retro-reboot didn't appear till 1994. Lascaux No. 1 has been around since 15,000 B.C.E. It was a single edition, printed on limestone, and arranged in a pair of strips over 128 feet long. The title refers to the medium ("lascaux" is French for "limestone"), but it is also the genre (cave drawings) as well as the specific work of art. Similarly, "pulp fiction" refers to magazines printed on paper made from wood pulp but later came to mean the tales themselves, eventually inspiring Quentin Tarantino to adopt the term as the title of his 1994 Pulp Fiction. The film is about criminals because the magazines were about criminals, the same way comics would come to mean superheroes.
Most scholars refer to the Lascaux creators as "Cro-Magnons," a generic designation which in this case is accurate. The bones of the first so-called Cro-Magnons were found in a hole ("creux" in French) on property owned by a farmer named Magnon in a nearby town. Cro-Magnons are the People of Magnon's Hole. More specifically, the creators of Lascaux were a loose collective of artists of the Neolithic Age who signed their work with a symbol resembling the head of a four-pronged pitchfork. This signature resembles a superhero emblem, but since it also appears in other caves of the region it must denote a clan or congregation and so is closer to a corporate logo — like the globe Atlas Comics used before evolving into Marvel in the 1960s. It may also be an umbrella logo like the circled "DC" icon that linked National Allied Publications with its affiliate branches All-American Comics and Detective Comics in the 1940s.
Since Lascaux appeared before France passed its first law protecting authors' rights in 1793, the artists' heirs retain no proprietary claim. A legal challenge could argue that the 1940 rediscovery of the cave signifies a new "first" publication, but even that copyright would likely lapse while the case was held up in court. Dozens of 1940s superheroes are public domain now too, their publishers extinct. Four Prong went out of business millennia ago and so collects no royalties on the postcards, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and other gift shop memorabilia that appropriate Lascaux artwork.
Legal issues aside, the work has influenced comic books for centuries. Curators liken it to Michelangelo's most acclaimed graphic novel, the Sistine Chapel. The comparison is apt, as the Lascaux artists also painted religious imagery on the ceilings of a temple while lying on their backs suspended by wooden platforms. The scope is also similar, with the largest bull drawing spanning seventeen feet. Michelangelo, however, worked in distinct panels depicting the superhuman adventures of an anthropomorphic God. Lascaux includes no formal frames or gutter, prefiguring Will Eisner's use of open-page space. The absence of captions and word balloons is also apparent in later works by Jim Steranko and Alan Moore.
Walt Disney and Max Fleischer duplicated animation techniques from Four Prong too. Many of the horses and bulls in Lascaux are drawn at angled perspectives, with the closest front leg straight and the second front leg bent and slightly detached from the body to suggest motion. A single animal may be drawn multiple times in an overlapping row, with head or back end incomplete, to evoke forward progression — a technique repeated by numerous artists to suggest the movements of such speedsters as Flash and Quicksilver. When viewed with Four Prong candle technology (a hollowed rock filled with reindeer fat and a juniper wick), the moving figures flicker like nickelodeon frames.
The artists also innovated crushed minerals for their palette, even for black, avoiding the charcoals favored by their contemporaries. Curators comment on the flawlessness of the artists as revealed by the lack of a single false or erased line in all Lascaux. This impression, however, may be due to the now invisible lines produced by one or more pencilers that later inkers obscured as they finalized the art. Credit is also due to the nuanced style of the colorists, whose muted amber bulls prefigure Lynn Varley's award-winning work in The Dark Knight Returns.
Sadly, after its republication in 1940, Lascaux was no longer preserved in its clay-sealed microclimate — the geological equivalent of an acid-free Mylar bag — and so it has been significantly downgraded from its former near-mint condition. As a result, reprints are flooding the market. Lascaux II — a painstakingly reproduced concrete tunnel located near the original — opened in 1983,Lascaux III is currently on tour, and Lascaux IV is in production.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On the Origin of Superheroes by Chris Gavaler. Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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