I Wish I Had Learned to Like Superheroes

Both Wally Conger and BW Richardson wrote this week about their childhood introductions to Spiderman and their love of superhero comics. I reckon that I’m about the same age as those guys, but I seem to have missed out on superhero comics altogether. I just never got into them. I watched the old Superman series on TV which even a fan of the Man of Steel has got to admit was pretty lame. And the campy Batman TV series was my introduction to Gotham City’s caped vigilante. I suppose it’s no surprise then that I greeted both those superheroes with an “eh”. Underdog and Mighty Mouse were more entertaining to me.

I grew up out in the country and we went into town to trade every other Saturday. When I was in the third or fourth grade, we began to make stops at the Ace newsstand owned and operated by one of our closest neighbors “Sarge” Miller. I would spend what little money I had on paperbacks, especially the Magnum Easy Eye editions of classics by Poe, HG Wells, Stevenson, H Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, etc. When I finally discovered comics, I gravitated to Warren’s Eerie, Creepy and Famous Monsters. I was really into science fiction, horror, and such like. I was, I suppose in retrospect, disturbed. I secretly wished that I were a vampire so I could bite girls on the neck. Had I been born 20 years later I might have been a Goth!

At about the same period in history, there was an afternoon Soap Opera called “Dark Shadows” that featured vampires, werewolves and other aspects of the gothic horror genre. We’d get home from school, watch parts of my grandmother’s “stories” General Hospital and Days of Our Lives, have an ice cold Coca Cola, and enjoy the adventures of the vampire Barnabas Collins and the eldritch goings on at Collinwood. Looking back, Days of Our Lives was creepier.

Another outlet for me was mythology. Hercules, Ulysses and Jason were my heroes, and I loved the stories of the old gods. If Superman had landed on Earth at the time of Homer, would he have been viewed as a god or demigod?

I have since read Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay” http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2000/09/28/chabon/index.html which features the fictional fictional superhero “The Escapist” and I have read everything ever written by Joseph Campbell, including “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”, so I think I understand the attraction of the superhero and how superheroes resonate with boys and men. I just missed the window of exposure at the right age.

One observation and a query. Why are so many supervillians disabled or handicapped, eg the Joker, the Penguin? Like Richard III, they are given some disability that twists them and makes them evil or which is a manifestation of their inner evil. Is this a reflection of a cultural bias against disabled people?