Village Voice 1965: The Super-Anti Hero in Forest Hills
An Interview with Stan Lee
In stepping back and looking over the era of the Marvel Age,
we can see that Stan, Marvel’s leading promoter, wanted needed and welcomed publicity.
In speaking to many comic book artists and writers, you discover that columnists
and newspaper writers come to you with their premise or slant that they want to
prove or go along with. If you go along with it that write the article, if you
don’t they either don’t do the article or don’t include you. So the interviewee
learns to go along. Sally Kempton defines the term, or her term “anti-hero” much
differently Stan did, demonstrated a year later in an interview with famous
editor and writer Ted White that appeared in a publication entitled, “Castle of
Frankenstein.”
Ted:
Actually, doesn’t this go back to company policy back in the days in the
Forties when the Submariner and the Human Torch were fighting with each other?
STAN:
Well, the only thing is . . then the Submariner wasn’t that much of a good guy.
It was sort of his personality that he would not get along well. They were
natural enemies. Fire and water.
Ted:
Well, this was pretty unusual. I guess we can say that, in the comics, Marvel
pioneered the whole idea of the anti-hero ... the superhero who isn’t really a
hero.
STAN:
Yes, I think you could say that because I think certainly Submariner is the
first one that I . . . that I can remember. Bill Everett did the first SUBMARINER.
. . he was sort of a hero-villain. He was really more hero than villain ... but
he wasn’t 100% hero in the sense that the heroes are today.
Stan saw the anti-hero as part good guy part bad guy. Spider-Man,
to Miss Kempton is an "absurd" hero, an anti- hero, as she states in her penultimate
paragraph because “unlike other superheroes, has never yet saved
the human race from annihilation. His battles are unfailingly personal,
hand-to-hand combats between’ a young man of precarious courage and the
powerful social forces which threaten to destroy his hard-won security. He has
no reassuring sense of fighting for a noble purpose, nor has he any outside
support.”
Stan was learning that if you want the interview and the publicity, you
had to go along with the idea of the interviewer.
Super Anti-Hero in Forest Hills
By Sally
Kempton
(The Village
Voice, April 1, 1965)
Cult
setting, a branch of the old science of trend spotting, became a
national sport in the days of the old American Mercury, when H. L. Mencken
and George Jean Nathan first, made I fashionable the cultivation of ‘- trivia. Mencken
and Nathan probably invented Pop as well, but since people had other things to think about
in those days, nobody else bothered to record it.
Today, the press having finally I
caught up with Menken and Nathan, both trivia-cultivation; and cult spotting
has risen again to public prominence. Their latest manifestation is pop cult
spotting, which began- in earnest in 1964 when Time magazine spotted the
long-established Harvard Bogart Cult. Since then no trivia-cultist has been
safe from the feature writer’s predatory eye.
Realizing
that if Time was onto I a trend the trend must, be in its death-throes, other
magazines rushed to spot newer pop-cults. The New Yorker came up with the
Sunday: Afternoon-Reruns of the-Lone-Ranger-Cult. The Tribune noted that a
small cordon of “stay-at-home intellectuals” Was’ watching daytime television.
The Times began doing textual analyses of homosexual publications. At this
point, the whole thing got out of hand and, in a desperate effort to stay
e-step ahead of the in cognoscenti, the press turned to cult-creation. Defining
pop as any object of ‘which a normal aesthetic judgment would disapprove’, the
press took to, describing the 18th-century painter Fragonard as the object of a
pop-cult. And, “Everybody on the social scene is working on pop movies,” crowed
Eugenia Sheppard last October, in the Tribune. By “everybody”, she meant the
girls in, Andy Warhol’s, “13 Most Beautiful Women” film.
Master Stroke
But the
Tribune made its masterstroke of pop-cult creation a few weeks later when it
discovered the Golden Age of Comics and announced that “everybody” is buying
old Batman and Superman magazines. Now the Paperbook Gallery has put a six-foot
poster of the Phantom in its window, and the. Old Comics Cult is, presumably,
fact. Two college girls, passing the window last week, looked reverently at the
poster. “That’s the ultimate of pop-art.” One of the exclaimed and with these
words delivered fashions’ coup de grace upon the literature of her childhood.
Real pop art or not the Old Comics
Book Cult has to be a fake. Reading old comics’ books is hard world; is it
possible to enjoy Batman only when you continually remind yourself that you
liked him when you were 12. As for new issues of Batman and Superman they are
thin, even by comic book standards, Superman’s only concession to modernity has
been a formation of a league of super-heroes, a dubious improvement at best and
he is still as addicted to time machines as he was in 1940. Batman has not even
his old childhood self. There is a real Comic Books Cult, but it has: nothing
to do with the old heroes and it has claims on our attention other than those
of nostalgia.
Three Rules
I realize that
in Making the above statement I risk casting My lot with Eugenia Sheppard and
the Cult-Spotters Guild: Nonetheless, it must be said, for the Marvel Comics
Cult is, under the existing Rules of Pop-Cult Spotting, ripe for exposure: It
conforms to the first rule of pop (see above) and-also to rules-two (“Your cult
must replace a previous, inferior cult”) and three (“No one else must have
publicly spotted your cult”). Furthermore, it is a legitimate cult. College
students interpret Marvel Comics. A Cornell physics Professor has pointed them
out to his classes. Beatniks read them. Schoolgirls and housewives dream about
the Marvel heroes. I myself was deeply in love with a Marvel hero-villain for
two whole weeks. The fact is ‘that Marvel Comics are the first comic books in
history in which a post-adolescent escapist --can get personally involved. For
Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real
World.
Stories
Signed
The
Marvel Comics Group has been in existence less than five years, and during that
time their circulation has risen to about six million a year. As benefits pop
literature in a pop-mad world, the Marvel books are highly self-conscious.
Their covers announce adventures dedicated: “The New Breed of Comic Reader.”
and two pages on the inside of each magazine are given over to advertisements
for the Marvel fan club, the Merry Marvel Marching Society. All the stories are
signed (“Earth-shaking Script by Stan Lee, Breath-taking’ illustrations by Jack
Kirby; Epoch-making delineation by Chick Stone; and the, heroes, who range in
style from traditional action types like Captain America to tragic, ambiguous
figures like the Hulk, seem continually bemused by the way in which their
apparently normal lives keep melting into fantasy. “This is so stupid it could
only happen in a comic book” says the wise cracking monster, The Thing as he
and his friend the Human Torch flee across a collapsing dam with a deadly iron
ball in hot pursuit.
Recognizing
that life has begun to imitate fantasy to such a degree that the public is most
comfortable with fantasy which imitates life, the creators of Marvel comics
have invented superheroes wish discernible personalities and relatively complex
emotions. Further, they have given the heroes a recognizable geography.
Real Rulers
Thus,
a Marvel Comics reader can get the impression that costumed superheroes form a
sizable voting bloc in New York. In fact, one suspects that they are the real
rulers of Manhattan. And they have left the citizens quite bewildered.
A
New York cop, exercising his stop-and-frisk prerogative, never knows when he
may accidentally rip the dark glasses from the powerful eyes of Cyclops. a benign
super-mutant whose refractive ‘lenses hide an X-ray vision which will burn
through the sidewalk if exposed; And, last year, New Yorkers awoke to find that
their city had been take over by the undersea legions of Namor, the ruler of the
sub-continent Atlantis. Washington was ‘afraid to bomb the invaders lest the
bombs injure innocent citizens. ‘’Wait ‘til the Fantastic Four get here!”
murmured a bystander as the submariners marched through Central Park. He was
right: the Fantastic Four ultimately drove the undersea legions back into the
Hudson.
Local
Landmarks
There are approximately 15 superheroes in the
Marvel Group and nearly all of them live in the New York area. Midtown
Manhattan is full of their landmarks. On Madison Avenue the ‘ Baxter Building
(“New York’s most” famous skyscraper”) houses the Fantastic Four and their
various self-protective devices. Further down Madison Avenue is the flagpole
from which Spider-Man swung the day he lost his spider powers. Somewhere in the
east 60s the townhouse of playboy industrialist Tony Stark (alias Iron Man) is
secret headquarters for the, Avengers, a group of traditional fighters for
justice which includes the thunder god Thor. Thor in his human identity Ls the
lame doctor Don’ Blake (whose cane ‘turns into a magic hammer when, he puts on
his Thor costume) who works surgical miracles in an uptown hospital.
The
newspaper run by J. Jonah Jamison, sworn enemy of costumed superheroes, is also
in midtown. And “on the outskirts of ‘ Greenwich Village” Dr. Strange, the most
bizarre super- hero of all, has his secret retreat. Strange is a master of
occult knowledge and often walks around in ectoplasmic form; his creators imply
that he lives in the Village because no one there is likely to become alarmed
at being jostled by a wraith.
Intellectual Elite
....In other
respects besides geography, the Marvel world Mirrors the real world.
Occupationally, of course, it has a heavy concentration of scientists, but
then, these characters are supposed to be members of an intellectual elite and
one cannot blame comic book writers for, idolizing physicists. Within this
larger elite, however, there are subtle gradations. The aristocrats or the
Marvel world are the Fantastic Four, four healthy, attractive, and socially
prominent young people headed by physicist Reed Richards (who is dull but very
dependable and has(great body-stretching powers) and his blonde’ debutante
fiancée Sue Storm (invisibility powers) Sues outside interests are clothes.
novel reading, and doing her nails. Her brother, Johnny Storm the Human Torch,
races can and seems to have a bit of a death wish, but otherwise we cart take
him for the Marvel prototype of a normal adolescent superhero. The Thing,
otherwise Ben Grimm, is Reed’s old college roommate. The cosmic rays which gave
the F. F. their powers turned Ben into a monster, and-he is a trifle bitter
about the whole thing. Still, group loyalty usually prevails over his
resentment, and on the whole, the Fantastic Four are quite aggressively
well-adjusted. Everybody looks up to them.
Neurotic Superhero
The most
popular Marvel hero, however, is much lower on the social scale. He is the
maladjusted adolescent Spider-Man, the only overtly neurotic super hero I have
ever come across. Spider-Man has a terrible identity problem marked inferiority
complex, and a fear of women. He is anti-social, castration.-ridden, racked
with Oedipal guilt, and accident-prone.
Spider-Man
began life as Peter Parker, a brilliant science student at a Queens high school
who lived with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in a Forest Hills split-level. He had
no friends and was plagued by a dominating mother -figure. Then he got bitten
by a radioactive spider and took, on the spider’s climbing, jumping, and
web-shooting powers. Being a child of the television age, he immediately went
on the Ed Sullivan Show (for which he received a check which, having no
Spider-Man identification, he was unable to cash). On his way out of the
studio, he saw a burglar escaping but, having decided to use his power only for
his own benefit, refused to capture him. When he went home, Spidey found his
uncle murdered by the same burglar. So, in a fumbling attempt to expiate his guilt, Spider-Man decided to devote his talents to public service.
Cocky Manner
Cocky Manner
Ill luck has pursued him ever since. His
shyness led hint to adopt a cocky manner which so alienated the other
superheroes that none of them will have anything to do with him. He is always
having trouble maintaining his secret identity. And his powers are so closely
allied to his highly problematic virility that they often seem to be on the
verge of deserting him. His castration complex is constantly tripping him up.
Once, while on the trail of a gang, he was trapped by the sinister villainess
Princess Python. “What am I going to do?” he murmured desperately as she
caressed his neck. “I can’t hit a girl.” Her presence had evaporated his
web-shooting apparatus.
Another
time, while standing on a roof surrounded on all sides by phallic-looking
skyscraper towers, he began thinking about his Uncle Ben and became so consumed
with guilt that he lost his spider-powers entirely. As he crawled home,
thinking that now he could devote himself entirely to his Art May (toward whom
guilt had made him more sub-missive than ever), he received word that Aunt May
had been kidnapped by the evil Doctor Octopus. Eventually the need to act
brought back his powers for Spider-Man is nothing if not a functioning neurotic
Needed Care
Spider-Man’s
most significant adventure took place when J. Jonah Jamison began writing
articles about the hero’s mental, instability. A psychiatrist had told Jamison
that Spidey needed immediate psychiatric care, and Spider-Man became so worried
by this that he went to the doctor for help. The psychiatrist was finally unmasked
as the villain Mysterio, who had been trying to flip Spidey out by pasting his
office furniture onto the ceiling and convincing the tormented superhero, that
he was hallucinating. So Spider-Man escaped with his interior defenses intact
(a psychiatrist can be the functioning neurotic’s greatest enemy, after all)
only to fall, in the next issue, into the arms of a robot controlled by J.
Jonah.
Spider-Man,
unlike other superheroes, has never yet saved the human race from annihilation.
His battles are unfailingly personal, hand-to-hand combats between’ a young man
of precarious courage and the powerful social forces which threaten to destroy
his hard-won security. He has no reassuring sense of fighting for a noble
purpose, nor has he any outside support. Even the public which cries up his
victories invariably deserts him in the clinches. Spider-Man is, God save us,
an absurd hero, fighting with purely defensive weapons against foes he cannot
understand. And, in last month’s issue, he I was finally sabotaged at home:
Aunt May burned his Spider-Man costume so that he is now unable to venture out
of doors.
How
can a character as hopelessly healthy as Superman compete with this living
symbol of the modern dilemma, this neurotic’s neurotic, Spider-Man, the super-anti-hero
of our time.
