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.