This year’s adult summer reading program theme is Escape
the Ordinary, and superheroes are coming to Massanutten Regional Library! (Find out more about signing up to read and win prizes here.) The
Main branch in downtown Harrisonburg will be featuring Super Screenings of
popular, modern superhero movies all summer long. (Click here for times and
titles.)
Personally, I’ve always been a big Batman fan. I’m dating
myself here, but I grew up watching Batman:
The Animated Series (1992-1995). My brother and I must have watched its
accompanying full-length movie, Batman:
Mask of the Phantasm (1993), a dozen times. However, I’ve never been a big
comic reader, largely because I’m the kind of person who would want to read
every panel from beginning to end, and I find the sheer volume of issues and
story arcs of Batman’s last seven decades a bit daunting, to say the least—and
that’s just the caped crusader.
The history of the comic industry is as complex as the
stories it generates and the characters almost as numerous. From executives to
artists and writers, dozens of people may influence every issue published.
Entire books about industry giants such as publisher Martin Goodman and artists
Stan Lee and Bob Kane, among others, are available in the library’s collection.
This brief and general history of superhero comics probably won’t offer
anything new for the established fan, but it should provide a sufficient
overview for the uninitiated.
The Golden Age
(1938-1954)
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All DC Comics characters and the
distinctive likeness(es) thereof are Trademarks & Copyright © 1939 DC Comics, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. |
The comic book as we know it today was born in the late
1930s from two popular forms of the 1920s and ’30s—the funny pages and the pulps.
(Pulps were short stories—from westerns and adventures to romances and
melodramas—accompanied by illustrations and mass-produced on cheap pulp paper.)
The first comic series with exclusively new material, New Fun #1, was published in 1935; Detective Comics #1 (the eponymous “DC” of today’s DC Comics) was published in March 1937. “Comic
books were the perfect entertainment form for the Great Depression audiences:
their heroic, larger-than-life characters stirred the demoralized masses, and
the very format of the magazines themselves—usually sixty-four pages of
original material for a mere dime—was a bargain during those times of economic
hardship” (Misiroglu 3).
The dawn of today’s superhero coincided closely with the
genesis of the comic book. The widely accepted definition of a superhero is “a
heroic character with an altruistic mission, who possesses superpowers, wears a
defining costume, and functions in the ‘real world’ in his or her alter ego”
(Misiroglu 2). Arguably the first superhero according to this definition,
Superman debuted in June 1938 in Action
Comics #1. He was a natural successor to 1930s heroes of pulp, radio, and
other mediums, including Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Phantom,
the Spider, and Zorro. With the Nazi threat looming in Europe, Americans were
in need of a hero, and the appearance of the red and blue-clad Superman was
well-timed. By 1941, “he was on the radio, syndicated across the funny pages of
every major US newspaper, and selling stamps, greeting cards, coloring books,
bubble gum, board games, and war bonds” (Morrison 11).
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| All DC Comics characters and the distinctive likeness(es) thereof are Trademarks & Copyright © 1939 DC Comics, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. |
Batman followed closely on Superman’s heels in Detective Comics #27 of May 1939. He was
created as a hero of the night in direct contrast to Superman, with visual
inspiration coming from many film and literary sources, including da Vinci’s
ornithopter sketches. Both Superman and Batman, then published under the
imprint of National Comics, were cornerstones for the future DC Comics. One of
many shell companies started specifically to latch onto the hero fad, Timely Comics
publishing Marvel Comics in October
1939. The Human Torch and Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner were the first residents
of the future Marvel Universe. Hero after hero emerged in this Golden Age of
comics. In the 1940s, there “was a superhero or villain for every profession,
every class, every walk of life,” from lawyers to military men to scientists to
taxi drivers to doctors to flower shop proprietors (Morrison 48). (I must
interject that, as far as I know, there were no librarian heroes until Barbara
Gordon, aka Batgirl, came out of the cave in 1967!)
