October 2, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Jeffery Johnson, author of Super-History: Comic Book Superheroes and American Society, tells the story of how the events that shaped America over the course of the 20th century intersected with comic books.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we also love to hear your stories. We feature
them routinely. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites. Jeffrey Johnson is a World
War II historian at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. He's
(00:32):
also the author of Superhistory, comic book Superheroes, and American Society.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
He's here to share this story. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
My name is Jeffrey Johnson. I have a PhD in
American Studies from Michigan State University. I was always drawn
to comic books since I was I guess about ten
or eleven, and then I stopped reading them, and then
I picked them back up during the late eighties and
the early nineties, and then when I started my PhD
in I guess two thousand and four, I started reading
(01:06):
them again and it really just struck me just how
cohesive the narrative is and how I'm very much speak
to the American experience in the way that King Arthur
does for England and Beowulf does for the Ancients and
the Greek gods do for the Greeks and the Roman
gods for them. I mean, they're this mythological force and
they're a narrative driver of that. You speaks to these
(01:28):
heroes that a certain society needs at a certain time.
That speaks to their hopes and their dreams and their fears.
And they're a real mirror to what is always going
on in the greater US mindset and the background of
how we live, which is an amazing thing to have
to attract basically, how the American society changed from nineteen
(01:51):
thirty eight until now through these superheroes. The first comic
book superhero was super Man and he debuted in June
nineteen thirty nine, was the cover date of Action Comics
number one when he came out. There were comic strips
and comic books before that. The first comic strip, which
was a newspaper strip, came out in eighteen ninety six
(02:13):
and it was called The Yellow Kid. But it was
a different art form than what comic books are because
comic strips were different for comic books. Because comic strips
came out daily in the newspaper and they were three,
four or five panels and a strip every day, and
they often touched on politics or things of the day
at the early start, and then they would follow the
daily adventures of somebody, and they were from the beginning
(02:37):
really highly respected, and the people who created them became
pretty famous and pretty wealthy pretty quickly because they were
read by so many people in the newspaper every day.
And most of the people who went into that sort
of artwork, the kind of cartooning artwork, really wanted to
get into comic strips. But in the early nineteen thirties
there were these pulp magazines and then the early precursors
(03:01):
to the comic books, with these little pamphlets that were
put out at newsstands that were very much cheap paper,
very quickly made stories, and often they were reprints of
the comic strips that had been put in the paper.
But the real first major difference of what a comic
(03:22):
strip and a comic book could be was in nineteen
thirty eight, Action Comics number one came out and the
Superhero was introduced.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
That was the first.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Appearance of Superman, and the creators of Superman were two
teenage boys from Cleveland, Ohio. Their names were Jerry Siegill
and Joe Schuster. Jerry mostly wrote the stories and Joe
mostly did the art, and they worked together on Superman,
and they came up with the idea just while that
they were trying to think up a comic strip for
(03:53):
the newspapers, because they really wanted to be comic strip guys,
because they that was where all the money and all
the fame were. And these were two teenage boys who
felt like they were outcast. They didn't really do particularly
well at school. They wanted to have girlfriends, but they didn't.
They were a little bit nerdy. They were two people
who really felt like they needed a champion for them,
(04:16):
someone who could stand up for people like them. And
one of the really interesting things is that Jerry Siegel's
father had been murdered during a robbery, and he had
always carried that with him, and so in some ways
he said later that he created Superman because he didn't
want people to feel like he felt in this fictional
world that he created, and he couldn't do anything about
(04:37):
his father's murder, and he couldn't do anything at actual time,
but he could create this world in which the superpowered
hero could actually fight for the common man and could
be this larger than life's force, who actually worked for
real people and who tried to avenge the wrongs and
tried to stop crime and make up for things that
went wrong. It's fascinating that two teenage boys created Superman,
(05:01):
this first superhero who had created this entire industry that.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
We're still talking about today.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I mean, it came out of nowhere, and yet it's
this amalgamation of.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
All of these different background things.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
I mean, you have Superman, who's, you know, dressed in
this costume that's very much taken from like these circus
acrobat performers and strong men, very bright and colorful and
stin costume. And then you have all of these different
pole heroes like Doc Savage and the Phantom, Zoro, Tarzan,
the Shadow, who all have these secret identities and they
(05:35):
fight crime and they're in the shadows, but they weren't
really Superman because they didn't put it all together. I mean,
you had strong men like Popeye, and you had avengers
like Zoro, or you had people who went on adventures
like John Carter from Mars, and you had all of
(05:55):
the elements were there, but no one ever put him
into one person because it was too fantastical. When Siegel
and Shuster first came up with the idea, they first
tried to make it into a comic strip and put
it into.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
The newspapers, and nobody wanted it.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Then they went around and they tried to get every
comic book publisher to take it, and nobody wanted it
because nobody believed that anybody would want to read something
that was this unbelievable, that was this super And so
they finally found a comic publisher that was run by
two guys named Harry Donnafield and Jack Leebowitz, who started
what was at that time talled National Comics, but it
(06:30):
later became known as DC Comics, and they were looking
for filler for this new comic book they were creating
called Action Comics Number one.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
And you've been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story
of comic books and where it all really began, and
not superheroes, because they'd been around Greek mythology to the present.
But in nineteen thirty eight, a couple of young guys, teenagers,
Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, and they had more than
(07:00):
an idea. They wanted, as Jeffrey said, to create a
champion for sort of nerdy outcasts like themselves. And by
the way, the book is Superhistory, Comic Book, Superheroes, and
American Society. Go wherever you get your books, Amazon or
the usual suspects. And when we come back, more of
the life of comic book superheroes and how they mirror
(07:24):
American life. Here on our American Stories. Here are our
American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business,
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that need to be told.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
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Speaker 1 (07:42):
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American Stories dot Com. And we're back with our American Stories.
(08:12):
And Jeffrey Johnson, who is a World War II historian
at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and he's also the author
of Superhistory, Comic Book, Superheroes, and American Society. We'd left
off with him talking about two teenagers in Cleveland, Ohio,
and this idea for a character and a cartoon and
a comic book called Superman.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Let's pick up where Jeffrey last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Although everybody remembers Action Comics Number one is the first
appearance of Superman. There were multiple stories in there about
detectives and crime, and there was a magic story, and
there was all of these different formats were basically pushed
in this one episode and Superman was basically added to
this first issue because they needed something to put in there.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
What's the story?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And this was Siegel and Schuster's last chance. And so
when Action Comedies came out with the cover day of
June nineteen thirty eight, they did put Superman on the cover.
And there's this incredible cover of Superman picking this car
up and he's smashing it, and you see these guys
in the background with fear on their face and running around,
and I mean, it's not what people think of Superman
(09:22):
now as this you know, person who fights crime and
he's you know, nice to children and he saves cats
from the trees and that sort of thing. I mean,
this is somebody who was terrifying the people on this
cover of this first issue. And the historian side is
much the same way. I mean, you know, Superman goes
around and he he fights these kind of petty street
criminal type crime, and he you know, he fights corrupt politicians.
(09:44):
There's a portion of Action comics Number one with the
villain is a lobbyist who's corrupt, and Superman basically holds
him upside down on a wire and tries to scare
him to death. That's very different from the Superman that
most people think of, who pushes planets around, to a
guy who's worried about a lobbyist who's kind of make
a bad backroom deal. But I mean that's what Superman
(10:05):
was in the beginning. He was someone who stopped petty thieves,
and he stopped corrupt slumlords, and he took on gambling
dens that put slot machines for our children to use.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
I mean, he.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Worried about street level crime, because that's what Siegul and
Shuston were worried about. They were worried about the things
that they saw every day. I mean, this was nineteen
thirty eight. This was in the midst of the Great Depression, right,
things were going terribly in the US economy. The crashed
back in nineteen twenty nine, so you have almost a
decade of breadlines and soup lines and massive amounts.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Of people out of work.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
So when it came out Harry Donnafield and Jack Leiba,
was printed two hundred thousand copies, and they printed it
as an overprint. They thought they'd have a lot extra
sent back, and then it immediately sells out and the
retailers are asking them for more. So they printed more
for issue too, and they sold out of that, and
they printed more for issue three, but nobody knew that
it was Superman selling the issues because there was so
(11:05):
many different stories in there. And then by issue six
they finally got numbers and they were able to figure
out that it was Superman, and they went around and
they talked to a news stand dealers and they said,
the kids don't know Action Comics. They asked me for
the one that's got Superman in it. And by Action
Comics number six they were selling about five hundred thousand
(11:27):
copies each, which was up from that two hundred thousand
print run for the first one that they thought was
wildly optimistic. I mean, Superman took off in a way
that I don't know if American culture has ever seen before.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
It became a mania of.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Just how popular, how quickly he became. He got in
Macy's Dad Parade balloon, like within a couple of years.
Pretty soon he gets his own show on the radio,
and he's got Radio Adventures, and I mean, and then
really quickly, in the summer of nineteen thirty nine, he
gets his own comic book. Superman number one comes out
(12:03):
basically a year from the first issue of Action Comics
number one. I mean, this was grassroots. This wasn't marketing.
Nobody went out and asked people what they wanted, or
tried to do these surveys or tried to, you know,
come up with something that people wanted. This was a
vision of these two kids who changed the entire world
in some way by by creating these superheroes. There were
(12:26):
soon dozens and dozens of knockoffs Superman, and one of
the first Superman knockoffs was actually done by DC itself.
I mean, when that they saw how popular Superman was,
they quickly talked to writers and tried to figure out
if they could get another superhero to make more comics about.
And so they talked to a guy named Bob Kane
(12:48):
as the story and he came back after a weekend
with this idea for Batman, and Batman couldn't be any
different from Superman. They wanted a Superman knockoff. But I mean,
Batman is not superpowered. He's a millionaire playboy who is
everything that Bob Kane, the A writer who created him wanted.
(13:08):
He wanted to be rich and popular and be able
to do all these things. He's wished fulfillment for Bob
Kane in the way same way that Superman was for
Siegel and Schuster, but in the exact opposite way. So
you have this really interesting dynamic now that you have
these two DC superheroes that.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Couldn't be any different.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
You have Superman, who's eventually shown as being this Kansas
farm boy who's from a place that's so quaint and
so Middle America that it's called Smallville. He's adopted by
these wonderful couple who teach him the values and who
teach him that he's supposed to fight for right and
for truth and justice and all this stuff. And I
say the other stuff because they didn't start say in
(13:49):
the American way until the Adventures of Superman TV show
with George Reeves came about in nineteen fifty three. And
then you and Batman, who sees his parents murdered and
he's got all of this money and all of the
things that he could want, but he's in this city
that basically the crime of the city killed his parents,
and now he has to start this war on the
(14:12):
city and the crime that's in it. So, I mean,
you have these two heroes, but they do reflect these
two sides of this American mythology that's been around since
the very start of.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
Who We Are.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
What's fascinating about Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster is they
were immigrants, as were almost all of the early creators
of comic books. They both had parents who fled different
countries because of the anti semitism of where they were from.
Speaker 5 (14:41):
As did a lot of the early creators.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
I mean, Bob Kane was of a Jewish background and
his parents fled where they were from because of problems
I talked about the publishers some national comics. They both
came from different countries to the States when that they
were young, and they fled because their parents thought that
they could have a much better life in this country.
And one of the creators were going to talk about later,
(15:02):
Jack Kirby. He was from New York and his parents
were also immigrants, and they came to America because of
a better life. And stan Lee was born Stanley Lieber
and he was of a Jewish background too, So I
mean a really large portion of the early creators were
from Jewish backgrounds and where people really understood how things
(15:22):
could go wrong in places other than the US, and
they came to the US really wanting a better life.
By the end of the nineteen thirties and the early
nineteen forties, there were literally dozens of not hundreds of
knockoff comic book superheroes. I mean people like the Black Hood,
Cat and Man, sub Zero Man, Hydro Man, Voltron, the
(15:44):
Human Generator, the Phantom Lady, Major Victory, the Human Bond,
and Vapo Man. Are you know some of the great
names that come out of that era. But I mean
there were also some that were really successful. One of
the most successful one is on Shazam or Captain Marvel's
He's No Sometimes, who came out of Whiz Comics number
two and nineteen forty and he was a Superman ripoff,
(16:06):
but he was done in this very safe, very cleansed
and a very easy read so Shazam, who was created
to look just like Superman, but he's given these much
more child friendly adventures where there was nothing violent or
nothing that parents.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Could feel bad about their their children reading.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
And he was highly popular.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
He outsold all superheroes, including Superman for a while, but
then he was such a Superman knockoff that DC sued
Faucet and then they won eventually, but by the time
the courts had dragged out, this was in the nineteen fifties,
when that his sales had dropped so much that the
effect of DC went in the court case really didn't matter.
(16:48):
So by like nineteen forty and early nineteen forty one,
you have this massive superheroes, right, dozens of publishers who
are publishing hundreds of different superhero who all share some
of the same elements of being superpowered and wearing bright
costumes of fighting crime. They're selling millions of copies across
the boards of these issues. And then you have World
(17:11):
War two come about.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And you've been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story
of how well how our comic books came to be
in America, And again it started with two teenagers in
Cleveland and the next thing, you know, from Superman, we
get a very different character from the same company, Batman.
When we come back more of this remarkable historical look
(17:34):
at America through the lens of comic books.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Here on our.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(18:10):
with Jeffrey Johnson, who's a World War two historian at
Pearl Harbor, and he's also the author of Superhistory, Comic
Book Superheroes and American Society. Let's pick up where Jeffrey
last left off.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
And then you have World War Two come about, and
everything within American society as a general, and for comic
book superheroes in particular, changes, And I mean, you know,
you have this war effort where that everything becomes about
the war, right, I mean, Americans start to ration, servicemen
are sent to war, and so because of this, these
superheroes necessarily have to change. I mean, you can't have
(18:48):
Superman taking on the police or the government at some
time as he did there in the thirties.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
Now that you're at war.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
So I mean, these heroes become super patriotic and they
become part of the war effort, and they sell war
bonds on the covers of their issues, and then on
the cover as you see them fighting Hitler. One of
the early issues has Superman trying to enlist in the
military and his extray vision malfunctions, so he reads the
eye chart in the room next to their room through
(19:18):
the wall, and he's not actually allowed to join because
he's four f and so he decides that the American
service person can actually fight the war far better than
he can, and they don't need them, and so he'll
stay at home and he'll fight the wars and the
crime that is here at home. So there was a
Look magazine article in the early part of the war
with it. I mean he basically it's like a two
(19:39):
or three page story in which Superman basically goes and
he captures Hitler and Stalin and he takes them to
the League of Nations that he turns them in and
he you know, ends the war, which is a great story,
but it's hard to keep telling that story when that
you have, you know, people are actually at war for
a prolonged time.
Speaker 5 (19:57):
And then on the twentieth of December nineteen forty, this.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Other comic book come out. It's called Captain America Number one.
Speaker 5 (20:04):
Land Me Stress.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
This is December the twentieth, nineteen forty. This is a
year before Pearl Harbor. Basically, this is before the US
is officially entered via war, and you have this cover
of Captain America punching Adolf Hitler in the jaw and
taking on the Nazis, Which doesn't seem that incredible now
because we know how the war ended and we understand
(20:26):
exactly what everything was. But a year before the US
entered the war, you have a comic book character who's
punching a world leader in the face in a magazine
meant for children. It's pretty incredible, and it shows you
how creative and also how fearless. A lot of these
comic book creators were the people who created Captain America.
(20:47):
One were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. He was Jewish
and he grew up in the streets of New York.
But he was this rough and tumble street kid who
used to get into fights. There was this little bitty guy,
but he was fearless and rough and tumble. There's this
great story that while they were working at what was
then called Timely but would later change his name to
(21:10):
Marvel Comics, they got a phone call that there was
somebody down in the lobby who said that he didn't
like what Captain American Comics was saying about Nazis, and
he was gonna bomb the building. And Kirby immediately picked
up in the phone and he said, wait down there,
because I'm gonna come down there and to beat the
stuffing out of you. That's Jack Kirby, fearless, and it's
(21:30):
really telling that. I mean, much like Superman and what's
like the other creators, Kirby was this immigrant whose parents
knew about oppression and knew about all of these terrible
things that had happened to them in the place they
came from. But the problem was after the war, there
really was nowhere for a lot of these comedy books
to go because, I mean, you have these incredibly powerful
(21:54):
heroes who are fighting society's wrongs, and they became very
patriotic during the war, and then once the war's over,
people want to move on. I mean, you have this
generation basically from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen forty five
had only known depression downtimes in war. Suddenly the war's
over and the US is the one country who comes
(22:15):
out of the war really prosperous. Suddenly, for the first
time in a lot of these people's lives, they have stability,
they have quiet, they have peace, they have all of
these things they had dreamed about in their whole life,
which is really great for the country and really great
for a lot of people, but it's bad for the
people who have to write stories for these superheroes, and
sales drop tremendously. A lot of these publicators go out
(22:38):
of business. Captain America, they try to turn him to
this anti communist hero. His comic book has changed from
Captain America to the title of Captain America Commedy Smasher.
But you know, it doesn't work. So in the early fifties,
Captain America is canceled, as is a lot of these heroes.
(23:00):
The Superman and Batman still continue to sell. Well, what
Superman and Batman begin to do is they start to
mirror this nineteen fifties stereotypical working man. You know, has
a family in the suburbs, and you know they certainly
don't have a job in the way that I'm talking,
but I mean they take on extended families. I mean,
(23:22):
Batman gets Robbin and then Superman gets this incredible extended family,
whether they you know, he's got Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen.
He gets a cousin from Krypton named Supergirl, and he
gets this whole zoo of pets, Crypto, the Super Dog, Streaky,
the Super Cat, Comet, the Super Horse, and my favorite
dumb Bepo, the Super Monkey. That's very different from the
(23:45):
nineteen thirty eight nineteen thirty nine version of these social
Avengers who were trying to affix society. Now they want
to make sure that nothing changes in society. So basically
from the end of the World War Two to the
early nineteen sixties, you just have an era of whether
people really just want their comic books to be child
friendly and safe enough to make everybody feel good about
(24:06):
how life is going in the US. So there's this
great story that the person who was head of DC
at that time, Jack Liebowitz, he was playing golf with
Martin Goodman, who was the head of Marvel Comics at
that time, and Jack Liebowitz says to Goodman that he
had just started this new superhero comic called the Justice
(24:28):
League of America, where that they put all of the
superheroes together on one team and they were super surprised
at how well it's sold. So once Martin Goodman gets
finished with his golf game and then he goes back
to Marvel and he talks to his nephew who had
been working for him since the early forties, who had
been this guy who had been there the whole time
and who had basically kept the company running. And this
(24:51):
nephew of his whose name was Stanley Lieber by birth,
but he changed his name to stan Lee because he
didn't want people to know what his real name was,
because he thought that he could be this great American
writer at some point, and he very much wanted to
save his real name for the real novels he was
going to write. He goes back to stan Lee and
he says, I want us to do superheroes again. And
(25:13):
you know, stan Lee, who's at this time just tired
of it all. He says, superheroes are no good, No
one ever reads superheroes. I don't want to do superheroes,
And Martin Goodman's like, no, there's money in superheroes. We're
all gonna do them for a couple of years and
then we'll move on to the next thing. And stan
Lee decides then that he's gonna quit because he's had
(25:33):
him there. And so he goes home to his wife
and he says to her, I'm gonna quit. I can't
take this anymore. I'm gonna go into advertising. I'm gonna
write my novel. I can do something else. And she says,
just this one time, write the superhero story that you
would like to read. And then Stanley says, yeah, that's
(25:53):
what I'll do. I'll blow it up on my way
out and then I'll be finished with it. So stan
Lee goes back and he writes Fantastic.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
Four number one.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
It's almost impossible to overemphasize what a sea change this was.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
In comedicy book storytelling.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Stanley created these characters, along with Jack Kirby, that had
real problems, that fought among themselves, that actually had things
that really made their lives terrible at some points.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
And my goodness, what storytelling. And to think that stan.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Lee was out the door and it was his wife,
just like Steve McQueen who convinced Steve McQueen to do
the Thomas Crown affair and did it in really interesting ways,
it was stan Lee's wife, his bride, who said, hey,
out the door, just write that comic book you would
have always wanted to write before you write the great
American novel. And indeed that's how Fantastic for Number one
(26:50):
comes to creation. When we come back more of this
remarkable look at American history through the prism of comic
books and how our society he changed and the writers, well,
they changed right.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Along with us.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
More with Jeffrey Johnson and the story of comic book superheroes.
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(27:38):
American stories and author Jeffrey Johnson and his book is Superhistory,
Comic book Superheroes and American Society. Let's pick up again
where Jeffrey last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Superman and Batman and all the of the DC heroes.
They fought crime, and they had these really fun lives
and you would love to be them. The Marvel heroes
always had such problems and such often horrific things happened
to them that you felt bad for them. These were
heroes who had flaws and who were human in a
(28:13):
way that heroes had never been before. I mean, there's
a popular culture commentator, Pierre Comtos, who says, of the
Fantastic Four, here's the book that neatly divides the history
of comic books in the two era, everything that came
before and everything that came after. Fantastic Four became a hit.
It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and then pretty
(28:34):
quickly Lee and Kirby create other superheroes.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
To fill out the Marvel universe.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
You have the Incredible Hulk that comes out in May
nineteen sixty two. You've got Spider Man, who that there's
some scrawny teenager who has all.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
Of these home life issues and you.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
Know, problems.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
The fascinating about Spider Man is that Martin Goodman, the
head a Marvel, absolutely did not believe that Spider Man
would work. Stan Lee had to beg him many times
to published Spider Man because he was a teenage hero
and teenagers weren't heroes. He didn't think kids wanted to
read about teenagers. They wanted to read about adults. So,
I mean, you know, you have all those, and you
have you know, ant Man, thor Iron Man, The X
(29:12):
Men eventually come out, and then at some point he
puts together a Justice leagu of America type team called
the Avengers, and then they bring back Captain America. He
becomes a member of the Avengers. The Marvel comic books
of the nineteen sixties were often really irreverent and really fun,
and then towards the end they start to take on
some of the social issues of the day, some of
(29:34):
the nineteen sixties and the Vietnam protests and things like that.
But they begin to get more and more serious. And
then as the nineteen seventies hit, there's this sea change
not only in American comic books, but also in the
American society in general. It seems like there are these
films that come out in the day, like you know,
Death Wish or the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movies right
(29:57):
where that show this like backlash against what seemed as
crime being rampidt and this lack of a structure that
can take care of him. Right, I mean, you know,
that's the late nineteen seventies. And then you know, right
about that same era, you also have The Punisher, who's
this Vietnam veteran who doesn't have superpowers, just you know,
(30:18):
he shoots and kills a lot of people, and you know,
he goes after drug lords, he goes after street crime,
he does all of these things. There's a great quote
by one of the people who wrote him, Mike Baron,
that I want to read.
Speaker 5 (30:29):
Baron in nineteen eighty eight, when.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
He was talking about The Punisher wrote, the Punisher embodies
the voice of conservative Americans who see their quality of
life threatened by criminal behavior and the confused thinking of liberals.
This average citizen is concerned with getting through the day
and protecting his family. The police and the courts may
constantly disappoint us, but the Punisher never does. So Read
(30:51):
and enjoy, and don't let liberals make you feel guilty.
The Punisher knows what's right. It's quite simple when you
think about it. Just don't forget to shout afterwards. Now,
heroes aren't just protecting society within societal rules, they're actually
setting their own rules. And the point that this becomes
(31:12):
the most apparent is when by the mid nineteen eighties,
Frank Miller writes this four issue mini series called Batman
and Dark Knight Returns, and it's his take on this
older Batman who had been retired for a while, who
then comes back to this Gotham city that's overrun by crime.
And so Batman's the only one who can take care
(31:33):
of this, and so This keeps going during the nineties, and.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
There are a lot of different.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Stories trying to figure out what comics books should be.
For a while, Marvel ass to go into bankruptcy actually,
and they're on the brink of closing down. It was
a really dark time, both in the storylines of comic
books and the way that comic books are produced and
the way that they were sold. They do catch a
little more of their footing by the two thousand, as
(32:01):
far as the nine to eleven attacks and then the
post nine to eleven world, comic books become a very
fearful place where that it's hard to trust heroes and
then the people around them. There's a storyline called Uncivil
War by Marvel where that Captain America and Iron Man
basically disagree about should heroes have to register with the government.
(32:25):
Captain America is against it, iron Man is for it,
and they basically fight it out, and they basically bring
heroes on to their sides, and then at the very end,
Captain America basically loses.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
He's in and arrested at the end.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
So you have this image of Captain America in handcuffs,
and there's this great quote by one of the writers
where that he says, you know, basically, what this story
is about is where do we draw the line between
safety and freedom?
Speaker 5 (32:54):
I mean, you have stories like that.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
You have the Death of Captain America, where that he
briefly dies and you know he eyes as this sort
of a story about who can be trusted in America
and have things shifted so much that things don't make
sense anymore. I mean, you know, these stories were really
a lot of creators trying to come to grips with
what the world meant after the nine eleven attacks and
(33:17):
then all of the aftermath of that. It's hard to
talk about comic books now as just comic books in
the last decade or so, because you have this merging
of outside media and comic books. Starting in nineteen seventy eight.
You've got this on Superman movie that's probably the first
(33:38):
time where that people really took superhero seriously as a
storytelling device and as a way to tell stories.
Speaker 5 (33:45):
And then you also.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
After that have this nineteen eighties Tim Burton Batman movie,
which is this big budget with big stars movies, right.
I mean, so you would definitely have that, and you know,
the two thousand X Men movie and the two thousand
and two Spider Man movie, and you know Punisher and
Fantastics four. But the really big changes as far as
how American society views comic books as this larger mythology
(34:11):
seemed to be the Christopher Nolan Batman films in two
thousand and five, two thousand and eight, and twenty twelve,
which were you know, critically acclaimed and did huge box
office numbers. And then in two thousand and eight you
have this Iron Man film that comes out from Marvel,
and it's the first of what's called the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now,
(34:32):
you know, there were Marvel films before, but all of
the Marvel films before had been produced by studios that
weren't Marvel. They were Fox or Sony had bought the
rights back when Marvel was bankrupt, and then they were
the ones that put.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
On the films.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
But Marvel, starting with Iron Man in two thousand and eight,
and then you know Iron Man two and twenty ten,
and then thor and Captain America and the Avengers and
so on, created this universe of storytelling that really mirrors
what comic.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
Books have done.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
I mean, each story is a unique story, but they
also fit together to create this bigger universe. So I
mean you can add films in like Guardians of the
Galaxy and Black Panther and ant Man, and it all
becomes part of the same universe. There were really no
films that had done that before, and it's really following
(35:22):
one of the tropes of comic book storytelling. So you
now have this reality where that superheroes aren't comic books anymore.
If forty thousand people read an issue of you name
the Hero, but they watch his film, he's a film
star now instead of a comic book star. That's a
really interesting development that has now created this world popular
(35:44):
culture that now has seen this art form that started
in the nineteen thirties as these street level characters that
were mostly produced by these immigrant kids who you know,
wanted to be part of society, who were outcast and
who didn't know how to get the things that they
thought they wanted, and so they created these narratives where
that these cipherers of theirs could do it for them.
(36:08):
Have now become this worldwide industry and this mythology.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
That I would dare say, I think I think.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Most people know a lot about the Marvel universe and
about the DC universe now in way that I think
maybe superheroes have outgrown comic books, and you know, maybe
comic book books are going to exist as a neat
chart form for a long time. But it feels like
film and television is now their new outlet, and it
feels like a lot of people like that, and a
(36:37):
lot of people really respond to that, and it's created
this mythology that it now is just keeps growing and
growing and growing.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
And a terrific job on the production by Greg Hangler,
and a special thanks to Jeffrey Johnson, who was a
World War Two historian at Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, Hawaii.
He's the author of Superhistory, Comic Books, Superheroes, and American Society.
Get it at your local bookstores or wherever you buy
your books. And it all started with two Cleveland teenagers,
(37:10):
Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster the Fantastic Four. As Jeffrey noted,
that was the dividing line everything before and everything after,
as we got much more complex characters. And then came
the trilogy, the Batman Trilogy by Christopher Nolan, which changed everything,
(37:31):
and those films, my Goodness, three of my family's favorites,
and soon there after Marvel steps in to make their
own movies. Warner Brothers did the Nolan films, but Marvel
stepped in and said, these characters are ours, and now
comic books are sort of like secondary to the movie
business itself and the superheroes brought onto the big screen.
(37:53):
The story of comic book superheroes here on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And we also love to hear your stories. We feature
them routinely. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites. Jeffrey Johnson is a World
War II historian at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. He's
(00:32):
also the author of Superhistory, comic book Superheroes, and American Society.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
He's here to share this story. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
My name is Jeffrey Johnson. I have a PhD in
American Studies from Michigan State University. I was always drawn
to comic books since I was I guess about ten
or eleven, and then I stopped reading them, and then
I picked them back up during the late eighties and
the early nineties, and then when I started my PhD
in I guess two thousand and four, I started reading
(01:06):
them again and it really just struck me just how
cohesive the narrative is and how I'm very much speak
to the American experience in the way that King Arthur
does for England and Beowulf does for the Ancients and
the Greek gods do for the Greeks and the Roman
gods for them. I mean, they're this mythological force and
they're a narrative driver of that. You speaks to these
(01:28):
heroes that a certain society needs at a certain time.
That speaks to their hopes and their dreams and their fears.
And they're a real mirror to what is always going
on in the greater US mindset and the background of
how we live, which is an amazing thing to have
to attract basically, how the American society changed from nineteen
(01:51):
thirty eight until now through these superheroes. The first comic
book superhero was super Man and he debuted in June
nineteen thirty nine, was the cover date of Action Comics
number one when he came out. There were comic strips
and comic books before that. The first comic strip, which
was a newspaper strip, came out in eighteen ninety six
(02:13):
and it was called The Yellow Kid. But it was
a different art form than what comic books are because
comic strips were different for comic books. Because comic strips
came out daily in the newspaper and they were three,
four or five panels and a strip every day, and
they often touched on politics or things of the day
at the early start, and then they would follow the
daily adventures of somebody, and they were from the beginning
(02:37):
really highly respected, and the people who created them became
pretty famous and pretty wealthy pretty quickly because they were
read by so many people in the newspaper every day.
And most of the people who went into that sort
of artwork, the kind of cartooning artwork, really wanted to
get into comic strips. But in the early nineteen thirties
there were these pulp magazines and then the early precursors
(03:01):
to the comic books, with these little pamphlets that were
put out at newsstands that were very much cheap paper,
very quickly made stories, and often they were reprints of
the comic strips that had been put in the paper.
But the real first major difference of what a comic
(03:22):
strip and a comic book could be was in nineteen
thirty eight, Action Comics number one came out and the
Superhero was introduced.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
That was the first.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Appearance of Superman, and the creators of Superman were two
teenage boys from Cleveland, Ohio. Their names were Jerry Siegill
and Joe Schuster. Jerry mostly wrote the stories and Joe
mostly did the art, and they worked together on Superman,
and they came up with the idea just while that
they were trying to think up a comic strip for
(03:53):
the newspapers, because they really wanted to be comic strip guys,
because they that was where all the money and all
the fame were. And these were two teenage boys who
felt like they were outcast. They didn't really do particularly
well at school. They wanted to have girlfriends, but they didn't.
They were a little bit nerdy. They were two people
who really felt like they needed a champion for them,
(04:16):
someone who could stand up for people like them. And
one of the really interesting things is that Jerry Siegel's
father had been murdered during a robbery, and he had
always carried that with him, and so in some ways
he said later that he created Superman because he didn't
want people to feel like he felt in this fictional
world that he created, and he couldn't do anything about
(04:37):
his father's murder, and he couldn't do anything at actual time,
but he could create this world in which the superpowered
hero could actually fight for the common man and could
be this larger than life's force, who actually worked for
real people and who tried to avenge the wrongs and
tried to stop crime and make up for things that
went wrong. It's fascinating that two teenage boys created Superman,
(05:01):
this first superhero who had created this entire industry that.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
We're still talking about today.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
I mean, it came out of nowhere, and yet it's
this amalgamation of.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
All of these different background things.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
I mean, you have Superman, who's, you know, dressed in
this costume that's very much taken from like these circus
acrobat performers and strong men, very bright and colorful and
stin costume. And then you have all of these different
pole heroes like Doc Savage and the Phantom, Zoro, Tarzan,
the Shadow, who all have these secret identities and they
(05:35):
fight crime and they're in the shadows, but they weren't
really Superman because they didn't put it all together. I mean,
you had strong men like Popeye, and you had avengers
like Zoro, or you had people who went on adventures
like John Carter from Mars, and you had all of
(05:55):
the elements were there, but no one ever put him
into one person because it was too fantastical. When Siegel
and Shuster first came up with the idea, they first
tried to make it into a comic strip and put
it into.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
The newspapers, and nobody wanted it.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
Then they went around and they tried to get every
comic book publisher to take it, and nobody wanted it
because nobody believed that anybody would want to read something
that was this unbelievable, that was this super And so
they finally found a comic publisher that was run by
two guys named Harry Donnafield and Jack Leebowitz, who started
what was at that time talled National Comics, but it
(06:30):
later became known as DC Comics, and they were looking
for filler for this new comic book they were creating
called Action Comics Number one.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
And you've been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story
of comic books and where it all really began, and
not superheroes, because they'd been around Greek mythology to the present.
But in nineteen thirty eight, a couple of young guys, teenagers,
Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, and they had more than
(07:00):
an idea. They wanted, as Jeffrey said, to create a
champion for sort of nerdy outcasts like themselves. And by
the way, the book is Superhistory, Comic Book, Superheroes, and
American Society. Go wherever you get your books, Amazon or
the usual suspects. And when we come back, more of
the life of comic book superheroes and how they mirror
(07:24):
American life. Here on our American Stories. Here are our
American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business,
faith and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country
that need to be told.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
But we can't do it without you.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
free to make. If you love our stories in America
like we do, please go to our Americanstories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot,
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we're back with our American Stories.
(08:12):
And Jeffrey Johnson, who is a World War II historian
at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and he's also the author
of Superhistory, Comic Book, Superheroes, and American Society. We'd left
off with him talking about two teenagers in Cleveland, Ohio,
and this idea for a character and a cartoon and
a comic book called Superman.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Let's pick up where Jeffrey last left off.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Although everybody remembers Action Comics Number one is the first
appearance of Superman. There were multiple stories in there about
detectives and crime, and there was a magic story, and
there was all of these different formats were basically pushed
in this one episode and Superman was basically added to
this first issue because they needed something to put in there.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
What's the story?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And this was Siegel and Schuster's last chance. And so
when Action Comedies came out with the cover day of
June nineteen thirty eight, they did put Superman on the cover.
And there's this incredible cover of Superman picking this car
up and he's smashing it, and you see these guys
in the background with fear on their face and running around,
and I mean, it's not what people think of Superman
(09:22):
now as this you know, person who fights crime and
he's you know, nice to children and he saves cats
from the trees and that sort of thing. I mean,
this is somebody who was terrifying the people on this
cover of this first issue. And the historian side is
much the same way. I mean, you know, Superman goes
around and he he fights these kind of petty street
criminal type crime, and he you know, he fights corrupt politicians.
(09:44):
There's a portion of Action comics Number one with the
villain is a lobbyist who's corrupt, and Superman basically holds
him upside down on a wire and tries to scare
him to death. That's very different from the Superman that
most people think of, who pushes planets around, to a
guy who's worried about a lobbyist who's kind of make
a bad backroom deal. But I mean that's what Superman
(10:05):
was in the beginning. He was someone who stopped petty thieves,
and he stopped corrupt slumlords, and he took on gambling
dens that put slot machines for our children to use.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
I mean, he.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Worried about street level crime, because that's what Siegul and
Shuston were worried about. They were worried about the things
that they saw every day. I mean, this was nineteen
thirty eight. This was in the midst of the Great Depression, right,
things were going terribly in the US economy. The crashed
back in nineteen twenty nine, so you have almost a
decade of breadlines and soup lines and massive amounts.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Of people out of work.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
So when it came out Harry Donnafield and Jack Leiba,
was printed two hundred thousand copies, and they printed it
as an overprint. They thought they'd have a lot extra
sent back, and then it immediately sells out and the
retailers are asking them for more. So they printed more
for issue too, and they sold out of that, and
they printed more for issue three, but nobody knew that
it was Superman selling the issues because there was so
(11:05):
many different stories in there. And then by issue six
they finally got numbers and they were able to figure
out that it was Superman, and they went around and
they talked to a news stand dealers and they said,
the kids don't know Action Comics. They asked me for
the one that's got Superman in it. And by Action
Comics number six they were selling about five hundred thousand
(11:27):
copies each, which was up from that two hundred thousand
print run for the first one that they thought was
wildly optimistic. I mean, Superman took off in a way
that I don't know if American culture has ever seen before.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
It became a mania of.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Just how popular, how quickly he became. He got in
Macy's Dad Parade balloon, like within a couple of years.
Pretty soon he gets his own show on the radio,
and he's got Radio Adventures, and I mean, and then
really quickly, in the summer of nineteen thirty nine, he
gets his own comic book. Superman number one comes out
(12:03):
basically a year from the first issue of Action Comics
number one. I mean, this was grassroots. This wasn't marketing.
Nobody went out and asked people what they wanted, or
tried to do these surveys or tried to, you know,
come up with something that people wanted. This was a
vision of these two kids who changed the entire world
in some way by by creating these superheroes. There were
(12:26):
soon dozens and dozens of knockoffs Superman, and one of
the first Superman knockoffs was actually done by DC itself.
I mean, when that they saw how popular Superman was,
they quickly talked to writers and tried to figure out
if they could get another superhero to make more comics about.
And so they talked to a guy named Bob Kane
(12:48):
as the story and he came back after a weekend
with this idea for Batman, and Batman couldn't be any
different from Superman. They wanted a Superman knockoff. But I mean,
Batman is not superpowered. He's a millionaire playboy who is
everything that Bob Kane, the A writer who created him wanted.
(13:08):
He wanted to be rich and popular and be able
to do all these things. He's wished fulfillment for Bob
Kane in the way same way that Superman was for
Siegel and Schuster, but in the exact opposite way. So
you have this really interesting dynamic now that you have
these two DC superheroes that.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
Couldn't be any different.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
You have Superman, who's eventually shown as being this Kansas
farm boy who's from a place that's so quaint and
so Middle America that it's called Smallville. He's adopted by
these wonderful couple who teach him the values and who
teach him that he's supposed to fight for right and
for truth and justice and all this stuff. And I
say the other stuff because they didn't start say in
(13:49):
the American way until the Adventures of Superman TV show
with George Reeves came about in nineteen fifty three. And
then you and Batman, who sees his parents murdered and
he's got all of this money and all of the
things that he could want, but he's in this city
that basically the crime of the city killed his parents,
and now he has to start this war on the
(14:12):
city and the crime that's in it. So, I mean,
you have these two heroes, but they do reflect these
two sides of this American mythology that's been around since
the very start of.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
Who We Are.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
What's fascinating about Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster is they
were immigrants, as were almost all of the early creators
of comic books. They both had parents who fled different
countries because of the anti semitism of where they were from.
Speaker 5 (14:41):
As did a lot of the early creators.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
I mean, Bob Kane was of a Jewish background and
his parents fled where they were from because of problems
I talked about the publishers some national comics. They both
came from different countries to the States when that they
were young, and they fled because their parents thought that
they could have a much better life in this country.
And one of the creators were going to talk about later,
(15:02):
Jack Kirby. He was from New York and his parents
were also immigrants, and they came to America because of
a better life. And stan Lee was born Stanley Lieber
and he was of a Jewish background too, So I
mean a really large portion of the early creators were
from Jewish backgrounds and where people really understood how things
(15:22):
could go wrong in places other than the US, and
they came to the US really wanting a better life.
By the end of the nineteen thirties and the early
nineteen forties, there were literally dozens of not hundreds of
knockoff comic book superheroes. I mean people like the Black Hood,
Cat and Man, sub Zero Man, Hydro Man, Voltron, the
(15:44):
Human Generator, the Phantom Lady, Major Victory, the Human Bond,
and Vapo Man. Are you know some of the great
names that come out of that era. But I mean
there were also some that were really successful. One of
the most successful one is on Shazam or Captain Marvel's
He's No Sometimes, who came out of Whiz Comics number
two and nineteen forty and he was a Superman ripoff,
(16:06):
but he was done in this very safe, very cleansed
and a very easy read so Shazam, who was created
to look just like Superman, but he's given these much
more child friendly adventures where there was nothing violent or
nothing that parents.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
Could feel bad about their their children reading.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
And he was highly popular.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
He outsold all superheroes, including Superman for a while, but
then he was such a Superman knockoff that DC sued
Faucet and then they won eventually, but by the time
the courts had dragged out, this was in the nineteen fifties,
when that his sales had dropped so much that the
effect of DC went in the court case really didn't matter.
(16:48):
So by like nineteen forty and early nineteen forty one,
you have this massive superheroes, right, dozens of publishers who
are publishing hundreds of different superhero who all share some
of the same elements of being superpowered and wearing bright
costumes of fighting crime. They're selling millions of copies across
the boards of these issues. And then you have World
(17:11):
War two come about.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And you've been listening to Jeffrey Johnson tell the story
of how well how our comic books came to be
in America, And again it started with two teenagers in
Cleveland and the next thing, you know, from Superman, we
get a very different character from the same company, Batman.
When we come back more of this remarkable historical look
(17:34):
at America through the lens of comic books.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Here on our.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(18:10):
with Jeffrey Johnson, who's a World War two historian at
Pearl Harbor, and he's also the author of Superhistory, Comic
Book Superheroes and American Society. Let's pick up where Jeffrey
last left off.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
And then you have World War Two come about, and
everything within American society as a general, and for comic
book superheroes in particular, changes, And I mean, you know,
you have this war effort where that everything becomes about
the war, right, I mean, Americans start to ration, servicemen
are sent to war, and so because of this, these
superheroes necessarily have to change. I mean, you can't have
(18:48):
Superman taking on the police or the government at some
time as he did there in the thirties.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
Now that you're at war.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
So I mean, these heroes become super patriotic and they
become part of the war effort, and they sell war
bonds on the covers of their issues, and then on
the cover as you see them fighting Hitler. One of
the early issues has Superman trying to enlist in the
military and his extray vision malfunctions, so he reads the
eye chart in the room next to their room through
(19:18):
the wall, and he's not actually allowed to join because
he's four f and so he decides that the American
service person can actually fight the war far better than
he can, and they don't need them, and so he'll
stay at home and he'll fight the wars and the
crime that is here at home. So there was a
Look magazine article in the early part of the war
with it. I mean he basically it's like a two
(19:39):
or three page story in which Superman basically goes and
he captures Hitler and Stalin and he takes them to
the League of Nations that he turns them in and
he you know, ends the war, which is a great story,
but it's hard to keep telling that story when that
you have, you know, people are actually at war for
a prolonged time.
Speaker 5 (19:57):
And then on the twentieth of December nineteen forty, this.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Other comic book come out. It's called Captain America Number one.
Speaker 5 (20:04):
Land Me Stress.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
This is December the twentieth, nineteen forty. This is a
year before Pearl Harbor. Basically, this is before the US
is officially entered via war, and you have this cover
of Captain America punching Adolf Hitler in the jaw and
taking on the Nazis, Which doesn't seem that incredible now
because we know how the war ended and we understand
(20:26):
exactly what everything was. But a year before the US
entered the war, you have a comic book character who's
punching a world leader in the face in a magazine
meant for children. It's pretty incredible, and it shows you
how creative and also how fearless. A lot of these
comic book creators were the people who created Captain America.
(20:47):
One were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. He was Jewish
and he grew up in the streets of New York.
But he was this rough and tumble street kid who
used to get into fights. There was this little bitty guy,
but he was fearless and rough and tumble. There's this
great story that while they were working at what was
then called Timely but would later change his name to
(21:10):
Marvel Comics, they got a phone call that there was
somebody down in the lobby who said that he didn't
like what Captain American Comics was saying about Nazis, and
he was gonna bomb the building. And Kirby immediately picked
up in the phone and he said, wait down there,
because I'm gonna come down there and to beat the
stuffing out of you. That's Jack Kirby, fearless, and it's
(21:30):
really telling that. I mean, much like Superman and what's
like the other creators, Kirby was this immigrant whose parents
knew about oppression and knew about all of these terrible
things that had happened to them in the place they
came from. But the problem was after the war, there
really was nowhere for a lot of these comedy books
to go because, I mean, you have these incredibly powerful
(21:54):
heroes who are fighting society's wrongs, and they became very
patriotic during the war, and then once the war's over,
people want to move on. I mean, you have this
generation basically from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen forty five
had only known depression downtimes in war. Suddenly the war's
over and the US is the one country who comes
(22:15):
out of the war really prosperous. Suddenly, for the first
time in a lot of these people's lives, they have stability,
they have quiet, they have peace, they have all of
these things they had dreamed about in their whole life,
which is really great for the country and really great
for a lot of people, but it's bad for the
people who have to write stories for these superheroes, and
sales drop tremendously. A lot of these publicators go out
(22:38):
of business. Captain America, they try to turn him to
this anti communist hero. His comic book has changed from
Captain America to the title of Captain America Commedy Smasher.
But you know, it doesn't work. So in the early fifties,
Captain America is canceled, as is a lot of these heroes.
(23:00):
The Superman and Batman still continue to sell. Well, what
Superman and Batman begin to do is they start to
mirror this nineteen fifties stereotypical working man. You know, has
a family in the suburbs, and you know they certainly
don't have a job in the way that I'm talking,
but I mean they take on extended families. I mean,
(23:22):
Batman gets Robbin and then Superman gets this incredible extended family,
whether they you know, he's got Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen.
He gets a cousin from Krypton named Supergirl, and he
gets this whole zoo of pets, Crypto, the Super Dog, Streaky,
the Super Cat, Comet, the Super Horse, and my favorite
dumb Bepo, the Super Monkey. That's very different from the
(23:45):
nineteen thirty eight nineteen thirty nine version of these social
Avengers who were trying to affix society. Now they want
to make sure that nothing changes in society. So basically
from the end of the World War Two to the
early nineteen sixties, you just have an era of whether
people really just want their comic books to be child
friendly and safe enough to make everybody feel good about
(24:06):
how life is going in the US. So there's this
great story that the person who was head of DC
at that time, Jack Liebowitz, he was playing golf with
Martin Goodman, who was the head of Marvel Comics at
that time, and Jack Liebowitz says to Goodman that he
had just started this new superhero comic called the Justice
(24:28):
League of America, where that they put all of the
superheroes together on one team and they were super surprised
at how well it's sold. So once Martin Goodman gets
finished with his golf game and then he goes back
to Marvel and he talks to his nephew who had
been working for him since the early forties, who had
been this guy who had been there the whole time
and who had basically kept the company running. And this
(24:51):
nephew of his whose name was Stanley Lieber by birth,
but he changed his name to stan Lee because he
didn't want people to know what his real name was,
because he thought that he could be this great American
writer at some point, and he very much wanted to
save his real name for the real novels he was
going to write. He goes back to stan Lee and
he says, I want us to do superheroes again. And
(25:13):
you know, stan Lee, who's at this time just tired
of it all. He says, superheroes are no good, No
one ever reads superheroes. I don't want to do superheroes,
And Martin Goodman's like, no, there's money in superheroes. We're
all gonna do them for a couple of years and
then we'll move on to the next thing. And stan
Lee decides then that he's gonna quit because he's had
(25:33):
him there. And so he goes home to his wife
and he says to her, I'm gonna quit. I can't
take this anymore. I'm gonna go into advertising. I'm gonna
write my novel. I can do something else. And she says,
just this one time, write the superhero story that you
would like to read. And then Stanley says, yeah, that's
(25:53):
what I'll do. I'll blow it up on my way
out and then I'll be finished with it. So stan
Lee goes back and he writes Fantastic.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
Four number one.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
It's almost impossible to overemphasize what a sea change this was.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
In comedicy book storytelling.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Stanley created these characters, along with Jack Kirby, that had
real problems, that fought among themselves, that actually had things
that really made their lives terrible at some points.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
And my goodness, what storytelling. And to think that stan.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Lee was out the door and it was his wife,
just like Steve McQueen who convinced Steve McQueen to do
the Thomas Crown affair and did it in really interesting ways,
it was stan Lee's wife, his bride, who said, hey,
out the door, just write that comic book you would
have always wanted to write before you write the great
American novel. And indeed that's how Fantastic for Number one
(26:50):
comes to creation. When we come back more of this
remarkable look at American history through the prism of comic
books and how our society he changed and the writers, well,
they changed right.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Along with us.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
More with Jeffrey Johnson and the story of comic book superheroes.
Here on our American stories, and we continue with our
(27:38):
American stories and author Jeffrey Johnson and his book is Superhistory,
Comic book Superheroes and American Society. Let's pick up again
where Jeffrey last left off.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Superman and Batman and all the of the DC heroes.
They fought crime, and they had these really fun lives
and you would love to be them. The Marvel heroes
always had such problems and such often horrific things happened
to them that you felt bad for them. These were
heroes who had flaws and who were human in a
(28:13):
way that heroes had never been before. I mean, there's
a popular culture commentator, Pierre Comtos, who says, of the
Fantastic Four, here's the book that neatly divides the history
of comic books in the two era, everything that came
before and everything that came after. Fantastic Four became a hit.
It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and then pretty
(28:34):
quickly Lee and Kirby create other superheroes.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
To fill out the Marvel universe.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
You have the Incredible Hulk that comes out in May
nineteen sixty two. You've got Spider Man, who that there's
some scrawny teenager who has all.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
Of these home life issues and you.
Speaker 5 (28:49):
Know, problems.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
The fascinating about Spider Man is that Martin Goodman, the
head a Marvel, absolutely did not believe that Spider Man
would work. Stan Lee had to beg him many times
to published Spider Man because he was a teenage hero
and teenagers weren't heroes. He didn't think kids wanted to
read about teenagers. They wanted to read about adults. So,
I mean, you know, you have all those, and you
have you know, ant Man, thor Iron Man, The X
(29:12):
Men eventually come out, and then at some point he
puts together a Justice leagu of America type team called
the Avengers, and then they bring back Captain America. He
becomes a member of the Avengers. The Marvel comic books
of the nineteen sixties were often really irreverent and really fun,
and then towards the end they start to take on
some of the social issues of the day, some of
(29:34):
the nineteen sixties and the Vietnam protests and things like that.
But they begin to get more and more serious. And
then as the nineteen seventies hit, there's this sea change
not only in American comic books, but also in the
American society in general. It seems like there are these
films that come out in the day, like you know,
Death Wish or the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movies right
(29:57):
where that show this like backlash against what seemed as
crime being rampidt and this lack of a structure that
can take care of him. Right, I mean, you know,
that's the late nineteen seventies. And then you know, right
about that same era, you also have The Punisher, who's
this Vietnam veteran who doesn't have superpowers, just you know,
(30:18):
he shoots and kills a lot of people, and you know,
he goes after drug lords, he goes after street crime,
he does all of these things. There's a great quote
by one of the people who wrote him, Mike Baron,
that I want to read.
Speaker 5 (30:29):
Baron in nineteen eighty eight, when.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
He was talking about The Punisher wrote, the Punisher embodies
the voice of conservative Americans who see their quality of
life threatened by criminal behavior and the confused thinking of liberals.
This average citizen is concerned with getting through the day
and protecting his family. The police and the courts may
constantly disappoint us, but the Punisher never does. So Read
(30:51):
and enjoy, and don't let liberals make you feel guilty.
The Punisher knows what's right. It's quite simple when you
think about it. Just don't forget to shout afterwards. Now,
heroes aren't just protecting society within societal rules, they're actually
setting their own rules. And the point that this becomes
(31:12):
the most apparent is when by the mid nineteen eighties,
Frank Miller writes this four issue mini series called Batman
and Dark Knight Returns, and it's his take on this
older Batman who had been retired for a while, who
then comes back to this Gotham city that's overrun by crime.
And so Batman's the only one who can take care
(31:33):
of this, and so This keeps going during the nineties, and.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
There are a lot of different.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Stories trying to figure out what comics books should be.
For a while, Marvel ass to go into bankruptcy actually,
and they're on the brink of closing down. It was
a really dark time, both in the storylines of comic
books and the way that comic books are produced and
the way that they were sold. They do catch a
little more of their footing by the two thousand, as
(32:01):
far as the nine to eleven attacks and then the
post nine to eleven world, comic books become a very
fearful place where that it's hard to trust heroes and
then the people around them. There's a storyline called Uncivil
War by Marvel where that Captain America and Iron Man
basically disagree about should heroes have to register with the government.
(32:25):
Captain America is against it, iron Man is for it,
and they basically fight it out, and they basically bring
heroes on to their sides, and then at the very end,
Captain America basically loses.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
He's in and arrested at the end.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
So you have this image of Captain America in handcuffs,
and there's this great quote by one of the writers
where that he says, you know, basically, what this story
is about is where do we draw the line between
safety and freedom?
Speaker 5 (32:54):
I mean, you have stories like that.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
You have the Death of Captain America, where that he
briefly dies and you know he eyes as this sort
of a story about who can be trusted in America
and have things shifted so much that things don't make
sense anymore. I mean, you know, these stories were really
a lot of creators trying to come to grips with
what the world meant after the nine eleven attacks and
(33:17):
then all of the aftermath of that. It's hard to
talk about comic books now as just comic books in
the last decade or so, because you have this merging
of outside media and comic books. Starting in nineteen seventy eight.
You've got this on Superman movie that's probably the first
(33:38):
time where that people really took superhero seriously as a
storytelling device and as a way to tell stories.
Speaker 5 (33:45):
And then you also.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
After that have this nineteen eighties Tim Burton Batman movie,
which is this big budget with big stars movies, right.
I mean, so you would definitely have that, and you know,
the two thousand X Men movie and the two thousand
and two Spider Man movie, and you know Punisher and
Fantastics four. But the really big changes as far as
how American society views comic books as this larger mythology
(34:11):
seemed to be the Christopher Nolan Batman films in two
thousand and five, two thousand and eight, and twenty twelve,
which were you know, critically acclaimed and did huge box
office numbers. And then in two thousand and eight you
have this Iron Man film that comes out from Marvel,
and it's the first of what's called the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now,
(34:32):
you know, there were Marvel films before, but all of
the Marvel films before had been produced by studios that
weren't Marvel. They were Fox or Sony had bought the
rights back when Marvel was bankrupt, and then they were
the ones that put.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
On the films.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
But Marvel, starting with Iron Man in two thousand and eight,
and then you know Iron Man two and twenty ten,
and then thor and Captain America and the Avengers and
so on, created this universe of storytelling that really mirrors
what comic.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
Books have done.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
I mean, each story is a unique story, but they
also fit together to create this bigger universe. So I
mean you can add films in like Guardians of the
Galaxy and Black Panther and ant Man, and it all
becomes part of the same universe. There were really no
films that had done that before, and it's really following
(35:22):
one of the tropes of comic book storytelling. So you
now have this reality where that superheroes aren't comic books anymore.
If forty thousand people read an issue of you name
the Hero, but they watch his film, he's a film
star now instead of a comic book star. That's a
really interesting development that has now created this world popular
(35:44):
culture that now has seen this art form that started
in the nineteen thirties as these street level characters that
were mostly produced by these immigrant kids who you know,
wanted to be part of society, who were outcast and
who didn't know how to get the things that they
thought they wanted, and so they created these narratives where
that these cipherers of theirs could do it for them.
(36:08):
Have now become this worldwide industry and this mythology.
Speaker 5 (36:13):
That I would dare say, I think I think.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
Most people know a lot about the Marvel universe and
about the DC universe now in way that I think
maybe superheroes have outgrown comic books, and you know, maybe
comic book books are going to exist as a neat
chart form for a long time. But it feels like
film and television is now their new outlet, and it
feels like a lot of people like that, and a
(36:37):
lot of people really respond to that, and it's created
this mythology that it now is just keeps growing and
growing and growing.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
And a terrific job on the production by Greg Hangler,
and a special thanks to Jeffrey Johnson, who was a
World War Two historian at Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, Hawaii.
He's the author of Superhistory, Comic Books, Superheroes, and American Society.
Get it at your local bookstores or wherever you buy
your books. And it all started with two Cleveland teenagers,
(37:10):
Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster the Fantastic Four. As Jeffrey noted,
that was the dividing line everything before and everything after,
as we got much more complex characters. And then came
the trilogy, the Batman Trilogy by Christopher Nolan, which changed everything,
(37:31):
and those films, my Goodness, three of my family's favorites,
and soon there after Marvel steps in to make their
own movies. Warner Brothers did the Nolan films, but Marvel
stepped in and said, these characters are ours, and now
comic books are sort of like secondary to the movie
business itself and the superheroes brought onto the big screen.
(37:53):
The story of comic book superheroes here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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