The Superhero Reader

Men of Tomorrow

16 Men of Tomorrow gerard JoneS Copyright © 2005 Gerard Jones. Reprinted from Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, 80–88, by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. philip Wylie Was the son of a presbyterian minister Who broke angrily with his father’s God, studied theater at Princeton, dropped out to become a successful advertising writer, lost his career to a dubious paternity suit, decided to write fiction, and sold his first novel, a bombastic indictment of repressed Presbyterians, to alfred a. knopf—all before his twenty-sixth birthday. His second novel, the juicily titled Babes and Sucklings, was a ravaging of his own angry first marriage and a screed against modern morals, and he welcomed the cries of “indecency” from small-town librarians. His writing tilted and pitched as from one page to the next he’d strain to be Sinclair Lewis or H. L. Mencken or Havelock ellis or elinor Glyn. a New York Times reviewer said he wrote in “in a manner reminiscent of the vaudeville man who plays an entire orchestra single-handed.” The next year, 1929, Wylie decided it was time to tackle a grand social allegory . He wanted to show how a truly superior man would be loathed and destroyed by our mediocre society: “great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes . . . the needs of skin, belly, and womb.” His plot was a scientific conceit: a biologist turns his son into “a superchild , an invulnerable man” who grows into a being of incomparable strength and vitality and innate moral superiority. “There, in the forest, beyond the eye of man, he learned that he was superhuman. I’m like a man made out of iron instead of meat.” He tries to give the gift of his superiority the world: to the good he would lend his strength; to the corrupt he would lend his embattled antipathy. He would not be one impotent person seeking to dominate, but the agent of uplift. But mankind is too small for him. Bullies pick fights men oF TomorroW 17 with him, the military presses him into a venal war, women give themselves to him and then run from his power, a little Jew cons him into the boxing racket, Congressmen and lobbyists jockey to exploit him, a money-grubbing Communist calls him, “Fool! Dreamer! Impossible idealist!” He imagines tearing down the Capitol Building like Samson, but knows it will accomplish nothing. Wylie’s use of biological fantasy would later lead science fiction fans to claim Gladiator as a product of their beloved genre, but his models were not Hugo Gernsback’s pulp stories. Wylie mocked junk culture, mocked yellow journalism and Bernarr MacFadden and narcissistic bodybuilders, and he’d surely have mocked Amazing Stories if he’d bothered to notice it. He lifted tricks from the satirical parades of Henry Fielding and William Thackeray, pulled themes from the intellectual allegories of H. G. Wells and Friedrich Nietzsche. Then he fell in love with his hero, his man of “breathtaking symmetry . . . a man vehemently alive, a man with the promise of a young god,” and hurled him into scenes of sexual awakening and combat and political melodrama as clotted and superheated as anything on the pages of Cosmopolitan or Collier’s. The result was a drunken disaster of a novel, dumbest at its most intellectually ambitious and emptiest at its most passionate, in the end lurching wildly into a lamppost of self-pitying nonsense: “Now—God—oh, God—if there be a God—tell me! Can I defy You? Can I defy Your world? Is this Your will? Or are You, like all mankind , impotent? Oh, God!” He put his hand to his mouth and called God like a name into the tumult above. Madness was upon him and the bitter irony with which his blood ran black was within him. a bolt of lighting stabbed earthward. it struck Hugo, outlining him in fire. His hand slipped away from his mouth. His voice was quenched. Hugo Danner wasn’t the only one struck by lightning. So was Jerry Siegel. When other fans called Jerry’s attention to Gladiator in 1932, it had already...