Death by Lightning

Reading through Golden Age comics is a favorite pursuit of mine lately. During Grant Morrison's run on Batman, I scoured over a hundred old stories looking for clues and Easter eggs, and found, at the very least, a lot of inspiration for elements in his RIP tale.

Lately, I've been reading up on the early adventures of the superheroes who eventually became the JSA, and found an interesting parallel between the current Flash Rebirth story and an extremely old story.

In Flash Comics #2 (the second Flash adventure, starring Jay Garrick), the Flash intimidates an opponent by flinging a metal lightning bolt into the wall. While those early Flash stories had a light-hearted feel to them, with especially cartoonish faces for many of the secondary characters, there was a lot of death, too. Being the Flash's enemy was not an especially good idea. Some of his enemies die, and he resorts to physical intimidation frequently.

The metal lightning bolt reminded me of the weapon used by the mystery villain in Flash Rebirth #1. It is mounted on a shaft, like a spear, but otherwise is a pretty similar artifact to the one Jay Garrick wielded back in 1940.

A clue? Probably not. More likely a case of "great minds think alike." It seems incredibly unlikely for Jay Garrick to be revealed as a villain. But if it is a clue, here are the two points that connect the line.

Dick Grayson Is The New Batman

When Battle for the Cowl #3 makes Dick Grayson the next Batman, it won't make the first time he has taken over the identity of his mentor. Most current readers recall the Knightfall story that led to Dick spending twelve issues in the cape and cowl in a 1994 story line called Prodigal. But that wasn't Dick's first time going by the name Batman, either. Not even close. If you want to see Dick Grayson suit up in blue and gray for the first time, you shouldn't look to his first appearance as Nightwing in 1984. It was way back in 1951, in Batman #66!

In eight separate stories during the Fifties and Sixties, Dick was seen taking on the Batman identity in an imagined future (the first one set it in 1975, which was then quite a ways off). None of those stories were set in continuity, and employed three different gimmicks to put them in the minds of people who were in continuity. In the first such story, Dick Grayson, after disobeying a tactical order from Batman, had a dream about being "Batman II" and having his own Robin (his real son) disobey him, causing Dick's (imaginary) death. The dream-turned-bad was a morality play that convinced Dick to obey orders more precisely.

The second time around, in Batman #119, it was Batman who imagined the story, hallucinating after inhaling the odor of an exotic plant. In his vision, he awoke as an old man decades later, with Dick having graduated to the Batman role (without the "II" suffix) in a story called "Rip Van Batman". There was a Robin in this imagined story, too, although his identity was not discussed. Right after the elder Batman (complete with a gray beard) helped solve a case, he awoke to find himself back in the present.

The third set-up was provided by a series of stories in which Alfred took out his typewriter and imagined the future. The "II" was back in Dick Grayson's title, but his Robin in this rendition was the son of Bruce Wayne and Kathy Kane. This duo debuted in Batman #131 and ran in six stories, battling crime (even the Joker's son) and culminating in Batman #163, when future Dick Grayson ended up romancing future Betty Kane (who naturally graduated to the Batwoman role). As an indication of how persistent the idea of this imaginary future was, note that the last story was in the very last issue of Batman; the "Batman II" stories were only ended when the "New Look" Batman debuted, complete with a yellow oval.

Those stories ended with Bruce or Alfred noting that the butler's fiction could never be published, because it would give away Bruce and Dick's identities, but end with knowing winks and the question posed to the reader if they might actually come to pass some day. Many decades later, Dick finally became Batman in a story that counted -- in Batman #512. With Bruce sidelined with a broken back, Dick suited up for twelve issues, fighting confidence issues leading to a sort of final exam that pitted him against Two Face.

Battle For The Cowl sends Dick on the path towards putting the cowl back on. The preview for issue 3 offers Dick's thoughts: "Bruce ordered me to stay away from the cape and cowl. And I listened... But Bruce underestimated the psychological effect that Batman had on Gotham." It's easy to connect the dots: Dick is reaching his decision.

I think the outcome of BFTC has been clear for quite some time. At the risk of making a "Dewey Defeats Truman" post, I'll say that the indications are nearly undeniable that we will soon have in our hands the twenty-first comic to show Dick Grayson in the role of Batman.

The Roots of Superman

"comic books suffered... from a bad case of the carbon copies. Everything was a version, sometimes hardly altered at all, of a newspaper strip or a pulp-radio hero... Consequently, the comic book, almost immediately upon its invention, or soon thereafter, began to languish, lacking purpose or distinction. There was nothing here one could not find done better, or cheaper, somewhere else...

Then in June 1938, Superman appeared."

-- Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Number One

What the Beatles are to rock stars, what water is to beverages, what the Sun is to things in the sky -- Superman is to superheroes. The first was the best; the field started at the top and had nowhere to go but down. It's as if the first person ever to play golf had been Tiger Woods. Superman won the argument and the fight afterwards. Superman was painted onto bombers in World War Two and is tattooed onto pro sports stars' arms in the present. Superman was America looking to ancient Greece to say, brimming over with confidence, "You thought Zeus was tough? Get a load of our guy."

Comic books could be found during the decade preceding Superman, and some of the titles that became DC's publications roster began about three years earlier. Among the strips devoted to comedy, comic strip adaptations of novels, and pages devoted to trivia regarding science, sports, and various oddities, there were the heroes. They fought mad scientists and smugglers, racketeers and mysterious-looking foreigners. They were masters of intuition and fistfights. Sometimes their stories wrapped up in a few pages, sometimes they ran for several issues. They always caught the bad guy, made witty remarks, and got the girl if there was a girl to get. Their stories had all the adventure a boy could wish for (and not get) in his own life, and they were so formulaic as to lack all suspense whatsoever once you'd read ten of them, which you could do in an hour.

The Creators

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, teenagers from Cleveland, Ohio, were part of that early history. They wrote and drew, respectively, four strips in early comic books: Doctor Occult, Spy (starring Bart Regan), Slam Bradley, and Federal Men (starring Steve Carson).

Taken from those features and the earlier story Reign of the Super-Man (readable here) many elements of the eventual Superman character had already appeared in one way or another in other places. Most notably, Joe Shuster tended to draw all of his heroes the same way, so you would have trouble distinguishing Superman from Slam Bradley, or either of them from Bart Regan, or any of the three of them from Steve Carson. Their women also tended to resemble Lois Lane, and it was a recurring theme for the hero to have a pesky, but attractive woman interfering with -- and inspiring -- his heroics. Their

 heroes, of course, always win in battles of wits and fist fights alike. They even had bald foes, cuing the Man of Steel's first foe, the Ultra-Humanite, and his most enduring foe, Luthor. Interestingly, an unpublished story idea for Superman titled The K-Metal From Krypton would have revealed his secret identity to Lois and made her a partner of his. This, too, was part of the Siegel and Shuster template: Bart Regan and Doctor Occult both acquired female partners, while Steve Carson and Slam Bradley had females tag along to help them on a more temporary basis. Completely outside the context of the Thirties, one Federal Men story had a flash-forward to a possible distant future, and featured a policeman adventuring on Mars under the name "Jor-L", the name introduced in 1939 newspaper strips as the Kryptonian

 father of Superman. Doctor Occult had been seen flying with a cape as far back as 1936, but this was a one-time event aided by a magical belt. And Slam Bradley hailed from Cleveland, also the setting of Superman in the earliest Action Comics before the fictional Metropolis was created to be his home.

Up, Up, and Away

Though many of the elements of Superman were derivative of earlier work by Siegel and Shuster, there were at least four strokes of brilliance separating Superman from any earlier works. One, he was the ultimate American immigrant, hailing from another planet and (great wish fulfillment for boys whose fathers had been born in Europe) being excellent precisely because he was from somewhere else. Two, he had great powers that were a part of who he was, not temporary endowments like the powers that Bill Dunn acquired by ingesting minerals from a meteorite in Reign of the Super-Man or that Doctor Occult acquired thanks to magical devices. Three, the flashy costume. Although he actually wore it only occasionally in some of his earliest stories, Superman became readily identifiable by his costume; a good thing since you couldn't tell him from Slam Bradley otherwise. Fourth, and essential -- the secret identity Clark Kent. While Slam Bradley had a clever but physically puny friend/assistant named Shorty, Superman essentially was his own sidekick, and at the same time, had a metamorphosis that could let the most insecure reader imagine himself shedding his everyday identity and becoming someone wonderful.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the true testament to Superman's success was the avalanche of superheroes who followed. What was a trickle in 1939 became a flood by 1941, with enough heroes being created to fill the sales racks, with their names more often than not being some word followed by "Man".

When a chemical solution is supersaturated, it has more of the solute than really should exist dissolved in the solvent, and when any additional change takes place, the solute suddenly consolidates. This phenomenon -- even its name -- is an apt analogy for what happened with Superman. All of the ideas that had been lying there separate in different characters came together, suddenly, and changed the medium, filling it with more Supermen (even if they had to go by other names like Captain Marvel and Aquaman).

Truth in advertising is rarely so prophetic: An ad in Detective Comics #15 announced Action #1 by saying, "You'll miss the treat of a lifetime if you fail to buy a copy!" Indeed, if you were alive then, you missed a treat of a lifetime if you didn't. Because not only did you miss out on the debut of Superman, but you also missed the opportunity to invest one dime on an object that would later be worth one million dollars.

Pulp Fiction

One of the best innovations that came with Superman may have been an accident.

The stories in most of Siegel and Shuster's early work (especially Slam Bradley) was achingly formulaic, on a par with the other stories in, say, Detective Comics (which ran Slam Bradley and Spy when Batman was not yet a twinkle in DC's eye).  The hero becomes aware of a crime, goes to investigate, and easily defeats the criminal upon encountering him. There was cosmetic variation to this: He might learn of the crime via his boss, or via witnessing it himself. He might be captured before escaping, or he might just win the battle outright.

Siegel's first Superman story began with this same pattern, and you can read that story in Superman #1. However, because of space limitations, that story could not be published in Action #1. Therefore, the first four pages, which fit precisely the pattern, had to be deleted. Consequently, Action #1 begins in the middle of, appropriately enough, action, rather than an editor receiving a phone call that tips off Clark Kent that an injustice is taking place.

While the greatness of Superman has to be judged by the major elements making up the character, it very likely helped him make a splash to have his story break the pattern that was so common and to begin instead with action. Quentin Tarantino cut up his film Pulp Fiction and rearranged the parts to make audiences scratch their heads and think more about his plot. Jerry Siegel had the same thing happen to him by accident in a magazine that was pulp fiction.