Secret Origins: The Lost Wonders

By Dan Hagen

A 1962 "Castle of Frankenstein" cover photo that fascinated me.

I remember how fascinated I was, as a young boy, when I learned of the existence of two things I’d never seen or heard — the movie serials like “The Adventures of Captain Marvel,” “The Phantom” and “Batman” and the radio dramas like “The Shadow,” “The Green Hornet” and “The Adventures of Superman.”

They were virtually gone by the time I was born, and I knew immediately that I would have loved them.

The sweet pain I felt for missing that WWII-era boat couldn’t be nostalgia. What was it then? Proto-nostalgia? Whatever it was, it shook up my childish, present-bound narcissism with the suggestion that wonders had casually come and gone before I had ever even bothered to arrive.
How I sobbed in the summer of 1961 when I missed the special issue of DC Comics' "Secret Origins" giant at the Effingham newsstand, already sold out when my grandfather drove me there to buy it with my week's allowance, a quarter. The origins of the superheroes were largely a mystery then.

But my grandmother was able to tell me, in great detail, something I longed to know — where Superman came from and why he was the way he was — because she remembered the story vividly from the first movie serial in 1948. Family was everything to her, and I now realize that her focus in the saga was not on Superman, but on what his parents and foster parents went through.

Now I own those serials and those shows, and they’re fun, the products of competent hacks. 

Super heroes aren't real? Tell it to him.

And it’s not their fault if they don’t take me to that Lost Continent of Wonder where, as a child, I imagined they dwelt.

I didn’t know, then, that the wonder wasn’t ever there, anyway. I was looking in the wrong direction. It was always here, in me.

Happy the Man

My favorite poem — by Horace, from 
Odes, Book III, xxix. Translation by John Dryden.

What's Wrong with Fox News, Vol. 3, Part 6,797

Ahem. I don't know why Her Majesty's government took so long to learn what I have been preaching for a decade.

What Crows Can Teach

Painting by David Ladmore

By Dan Hagen

I always feel a twinge of sadness at times, like that day last fall, when I see the small, unmoving body of a squirrel on the street outside our house — a long straight stretch where drivers speed along too quickly.

Then later that morning, I saw two large crows dining out on that gift, and I felt better. He would help sustain them from winter's hostilities, and I'm glad the crows reminded me of how things are.

Awareness

Breathe deeply. Fill the senses. Expand the awareness.

The Lord of Games

Given the fundamentalists' utter rejection of science, education, ethics and reason, it's understandable that they would finally dumb themselves down enough to conflate Football Worship with Christianity. Understandable — and pathetic.

The Republican Reptile

Republicans are like pythons who have swallowed a cow of right-wing propaganda and Bible school dogma. They remain intellectually immobilized, just trying to digest it.