Look, Up In The Sky… Superman and Lois Turn 75

I’m looking at the cover of Action Comics #1 and finding it almost impossible to imagine how people saw it back in 1938. A powerfully-built ox of a man holding a car above his head while the other figures in the scene cower or flee in terror? Who is this guy? Is he the hero or the villain? Gaudy circus performer or alien invader? Man or…

Superman has always been a part of my pop culture landscape, from the Christopher Reeve movies to Lois and Clark, from running around with my coat doubling as a cape to reading the comics as I embraced my inner geek. True story: while on holiday in Toronto, I was wearing a Superman t-shirt on a visit to the CN Tower. When the time came for my tour party to stand on the glass floor and stare down at the sidewalk hundreds of feet below, I was asked to hold a middle-aged woman’s arm as she’d be too scared to walk on the glass otherwise. That was nothing to do with me being courageous or strong, but everything to do with the symbol on my shirt.

Those early readers weren’t the only ones figuring Superman out. In that first issue, Superman works for the Daily Star, not the Planet; he can leap one-eighth of a mile but can’t fly; his powers are due to Kryptonians being more evolved, not a reaction to sunlight. Perhaps more importantly he’s more rough and ready than the character’s normally portrayed, less sci-fi and more earthy. Back in 1938, Superman had yet to become the mythic hero of pop culture epics.

April 15th 2013, and social media reels in shock as explosions tear through the Boston Marathon. Among the digital chaos of the first few hours after the bombing, a friend retweets a quote from Fred Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” And I read that and I thought about the horror of that day and the heroism of those who ran to help the injured, and I also thought of Superman.

At least Lois was there. For all this is Superman’s anniversary, it’s also the birthday of Lois Lane. I’ll admit it; I’m a shipper. She’s the voice of humanity in the mythos, a tenacious journalist who fights for justice in her own right; the recent trailer for Man of Steel, amid all the questions about Superman’s role and identity, it’s Lois who sits there confidently getting to the heart of the matter. Heck, she’s one who gives Clark’s alter-ego a name. She’s not just one of the most famous female comic book characters, she’s one of the most iconic characters full stop. Look at the cover of Action #1 again – it’s Lois who’s being kidnapped in that car. It may be Superman’s 75th, but let’s also sing happy birthday to Lois Lane.

Talking of that trailer, there was another moment of humanity that just floored me. The young Clark has just discovered he’s adopted – that he’s not even from Earth. He turns to the man who raised him and asks “Can’t I just pretend I’m still your son?” “You are my son!” comes the reply, and that still gets me, even as I’m typing this. Maybe it’s because I’m a new stepdad, maybe it’s because I’m getting old and relating to fathers rather than sons, but… There’s just so much there, love and compassion and identity and fear, and so much of the Superman story is tied up with the things parents want for their children, whether you’re from Kansas or Krypton.

In a world of grimdark superheroes, it’s easy to overlook how important Superman was and is. He’s been used as a pop culture defence against Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, and when Grant Morrison’s run rebooted Action Comics in 2011, Clark returned to his roots as a social crusader in a time of recession and austerity and the 1%. It’s easy to forget Superman’s relevance – after all, he’s a part of the mass media wallpaper – but while it’s easy to see him as ‘establishment’, there’s also subversion going on – he’s an immigrant, he’s working class, he’s hiding a secret and he’s an outsider.

He’s relevant, in other words. 75 years after he first picked up that car, since he first leapt into action to save Lois Lane, he’s still important, still recognised, still a symbol of heroism and justice; ask him what he wants and he’ll tell you he’s here to help.

I want to help too.

World Book Day 2013

I used to read all the time: seriously, all the time. There was always a book in my rucksack, or under my pillow, or in my hand as I walked, somehow dodging lampposts and pedestrians. I read fiction and non-fiction, following my interests at any given time, and it was glorious.

For me it wasn’t the use of language or the intricacies of plotting and narrative that attracted me to books, it was the ideas. I’m a big geek, so of course I compiled too-big spreadsheets trying to track the whole of human history, just because I read a book that explored what was happening in China and South America while Jesus was being born.

That spreadsheet was part of the problem, I guess, because if I’d spent less time on that and more time on, you know, reading even more, because then I might have sooner developed the wisdom to realise that it’s pretty much impossible to confine the entirety of human experience in an Excel workbook. Books make the world a bigger, busier place, harder to pin down and explain and commodify. They raise questions and send you running down unexplored lanes just to see what’s there; they make you look at one thing and see something else entirely, its atoms and its history.

Now, you can argue that TV and the Internet serve a similar purpose, and that’s true to an extent, but the user experience often lacks breadth or depth; they increasingly provide stuff based on what we like rather than their neighbours on the shelf. With the rise of an experience targeted specifically at an individual, the Internet increasingly becomes domestic, leaving a battered second hand bookstore looking like a Wild West frontier town. I remember when it was the other way round.

I still read now, of course – blogs and articles and reports for work, but I’ve been infected by the tl;dr bug. “Too long, didn’t read” – I’d blame it on the Internet, but really the only excuse is laziness. I miss reading, and fundamentally there’s nothing stopping me doing more of it; I live in a country with free access to Kindles and libraries and the few high street bookstores that haven’t been replaced by pay-day loan companies.

Maybe that’s the biggest threat to books in the digital age – people like me who don’t read them enough while blogging about the importance of reading.

I really need to put together a reading list…

Geek Urban Myths: Better than real

And so comedian and Doctor Who fan Toby Hadoke today tweeted some news that broke my heart:

“As there are some who still don’t believe it: I’ve just received written confirmation that Harold Pinter was not in The Abominable Snowmen!”

Okay, some context: for years a story has done the rounds of fandom, that Harold Pinter was hired by the producers of Doctor Who, not as a lauded playwright but in his other role as a jobbing actor. Yes, the man who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature was employed to play a yeti-fighting monk. That is, frankly, an awesome story.

Only it’s not true. And I’m gutted.

It’s not that I want all geek myths to be true – I’m glad there’s not really a Munchkin suicide in The Wizard of Oz – but some make the world more interesting. I want Bob Holness to have played the sax solo on ‘Baker Street’; I’m kind of freaked out but intrigued by the idea that the CIA invented a nefarious arcade game. I wish Kate Bush had written a Doctor Who story under a pseudonym, and frankly it now doesn’t matter that Uncle Ben never said “With great power comes great responsibility” in the original comics, the phrase is now deep in Spider-Man’s bones.

Like any other culture, the geek community has evolved a mythology over time. Often that’s based on flat-out misinformation, but it catches on because a need is fulfilled – attaching names like Bush and Pinter to a show traditionally made on a shoe-string grants it a certain legitimacy and credibility; that’s why these stories find themselves embedded in fan culture. It’s probably worth noting that, when Neil Gaiman wrote for Who, his episode got its name from one of the show’s most notorious hoaxes. After all, reinventing mythologies is one of Gaiman’s great strengths.

All of which goes to show, sometimes it’s more fun to print the myth…

Things I See On My Way To Work 1: The People of Walsall Wood

I commute. I commute for the best part of twelve hours a week. And as any commuter knows, you have to find a way to keep your sanity on these epic trips, to hold on to your senses before you go completely postal and drive through a Tesco Express just for the hell of it. I normally distract myself with podcasts, but I’ve recently noticed that my journey is actually interesting. This is the first in a series about the hidden world of my commute.

As you head out of Walsall, along the A461, look to your left. Standing on the bank of the Daw End branch canal is a fisherman. He’s there every day, every night, and while rumours persist he once caught a fish or a boot or even an Olympic Torch, today his line hangs empty. He’s a lonely figure, lost in his memories; spare him a smile as you drive over the bridge into Walsall Wood.

The Fisherman is part of the Walsall Wood sculpture trail commissioned by the local council in 2009 to commemorate the area’s industrial history. He stands at the canal to draw attention to how this waterway was once a thriving artery, transporting resources between the various mining communities along its route, reminding us how this settlement and the wider Black Country grew up around pits and nail making and steel working. It’s in our DNA, and even those of us who ended up desk jockeys can probably trace our lineage back to a miner or two.

Because this is where the Industrial Revolution was born, the whole Black Country maintaining traces of this history in a landscape scarred by overgrown subsidence and criss-crossed by canals. You can see this as you walk away from the Fisherman towards town; first you’ll come across a miner and his whippet, standing some way away from the other ‘people’. He’s a steel and copper image of an image, a metal interpretation of a stained glass window in the nearby St. John’s church.

It’s a reminder of the centrality of local churches in those days, where the iconography of religion existed alongside that of industry. Apparently the church contains a miner’s lantern inscribed with the names of those killed in a local pit disaster; more on that in a future post.

The whole sculpture trail is about memories – memories of an industrial past now long gone, memories of the families who relied on that industry for survival, whose fathers endured brutal work down the mine to feed their kids. Their stories are told among another group of people, just opposite the church. Now we’re talking about micro-history, stories of children dressing as scarecrows and of a monkey that lived in the local pet shop.

This is the stuff of family history, the stories passed down by grandparents, the stories that would eventually have faded had artist Luke Perry not frozen these memories in metal, preserving the past of the area in the very steel that was so important in creating that past in the first place. In that sense it’s appropriate that the sculpture trail ends with a giant replica of the Walsall Wood colliery: everything is leading to the mine, coal and bricks and workers and memory and legend. Everything begins and ends with the pit.

And yet the Coppy Pit mined for less than a hundred years, from 1874 to 1964. Now the site is a trading estate; the railway line that serviced it a children’s play park. From the point of view of a commuter, the sculpture trail is the only obvious reminder of what this town used to be, a town built around industry, where the community opened soup kitchens to feed each other during the General Strike of the twenties. I have vague memories of the miners’ strike, the outpouring of rage and despair at the collapse of communities built around industry. Is that what happened here? Or did mining in Walsall Wood slowly die, locals finding employment elsewhere, in different towns, different industries?

Because while the sculpture trail is hyperlocal, the town is still moulded by wider, global concerns. While I was taking these pictures, I stumbled on a stark reminder of that: a small cross with a poppy on it, weathered and stuck in a plant pot. I don’t know if it was a leftover from Remembrance Day celebrations or if it was just left there by mistake, but in it’s own way it’s another act of memory; of the men who worked the pit and the canal who found themselves fighting and dying a long way from home.

Memory is a powerful thing, and so is art. Maybe we need more steel sculptures and small wooden crosses to embed these memories in the streets we walk, on the roads we drive.

Superman, Orson Scott Card and Diversity in Geek Culture

It’s a strange thing, becoming estranged from your own sub-culture. Things happen within a close-knit community that once you’d be in the middle of, but now it feels like it’s happens to other people.

Problem is, sometimes those other people need support; that the stories and characters you love become tainted by association and bad decisions, that your community gets bruised and battered and threatens to tear itself apart.

So when DC Comics announced that their new Superman title would by written by outspoken anti-gay activist Orson Scott Card. As PR moves go, it’s been less than successful, almost immediately attracting a boycott. Do I think DC is fundamentally homophobic? No – I think they hired successful-writer-of-space-opera Orson rather than person-who-doesn’t-like-gay-people Orson, no malice intended. It’s a screw-up.

That’s the problem. And it’s bigger than Orson Scott Card.

Geek culture is often blind to the implications of the media it produces, which leads to things unravelling when people on the receiving end of those implications dare to point them out. Key flashpoints in recent years have been the treatment of women in comic books (with ‘Women in Refrigerators’ being one of the key tropes) and the grief black cosplayers get when they’re dressed as white characters. DC recruiting Card is just the latest controversy that exposes a prejudiced undercurrent in geek culture.

Part of me thinks it’s because of the small-c conservatism of the key geek texts – Superman was created in the 1930s, Lord of the Rings in the fifties, Doctor Who in the sixties, all products of eras with a less inclusive approach to society, their launch years coinciding with Kristallnacht, McCarthyism and Governor Wallace declaring “Segregation forever” in Alabama respectively. Of course their histories are going to have problematic moments; racist caricatures of Japanese soldiers during war time, a lack of decent roles for women or anyone who isn’t white. For the most part, the worst excesses of this get left behind as society moves on; unfortunately, alongside this, stories calcify around particular images and scenarios – they become iconic, in the positive and negative senses of the word.

The problem is, because geek culture holds true to these iconic texts, it creates havoc when, say, a film adaptation wants to beef up the roles of female characters or wants the next Doctor to be black. “That’s not how it’s always been,” comes the inevitable response, and so genres that should be dynamic in exploring possibilities shut down and remain dominated by white men. And while I’ve got nothing against white men (I am one), they don’t exactly give geek culture a multiplicity of voices. And where does that leave you if you’re not one of those voices? Do you get labelled a fake nerd because, say, girls can’t possibly be into comics?

This is where the ‘don’t change the icons’ excuse runs out, because the treatment of people outside the ‘mainstream’ of geek culture can be abhorrent. For a community that has historically been defined by standing on the margins, it’s capable of doing its own share of marginalising.

Superman shouldn’t be about that. More than any other superhero, he’s the one who’s defined most purely by his desire to help and protect others. He’s the guy who gets between you and a killer robot. Or a slumlord. Or corruption or abuse or prejudice. Superman helps people. That’s his job. The key moment of All Star Superman, the best work on the character for years, isn’t a gonzo sci-fi concept, it’s Superman gently and simply talking a girl out of throwing herself off a building. If Superman can’t say “It gets better” then he’s outlived his usefulness. I don’t think he has, but that usefulness has to be more than him picking up asteroids.

I don’t think for one minute DC editorial would let Orson Scott Card use one of its titles to promote a specific political stance. That doesn’t matter. Homophobia has become the elephant in the room, and the fact that Card was even considered for the role, seemingly without anyone considering that it might just be controversial, is problematic. There are already very few black and female creators working in the industry; to pick an outspoken, homophobic author to write DC’s flagship character just adds insult to injury. What does it say to gay creators trying to break into the industry? Heck, what does it say to those who are already established?

Geek culture, in both professional and fan communities, needs to take a good look at itself. Questions of race, gender and sexuality need to be addressed, (and not just by a tiny minority) but more importantly, the community needs to show respect – respect for fellow fans, respect for customers, respect for those who will love Man of Steel this summer but don’t want to buy a comic because it’s written by a homophobe. This isn’t about ideology or politics, this is about humanity.

Superman was once used to fight the Ku Klux Klan for real. We forget the power of our stories; this current controversy acts as a reminder that these characters are important and have meaning for millions of people. Superman is about truth and justice; the moment his books work against that, it’s a problem; it’s even more of a problem that people remain blind to those problems.

Geek culture needs to lose its blinders and live up to its own ideals; needs to be less of a customer base and more of a community. How we go about that will be the real test of whether comic fandom deserves to survive the years to come.