Superman: That Thing You Doom

Oddly, despite his science fictional origins, Superman went for a long stretch of his early career having few science fictional adventures. Mundane criminals and crusades against social injustice and political corruption occupied much of his day.

By the time Superman 87 arrived in February 1954, things had started to change.

In this classic tale by writer Bill Finger and artist Wayne Boring, a shape-shifting blob monster from Earth’s bleak far future invades Metropolis, generally wreaking havoc and finally duplicating even Superman, complete with powers.

Their super-battle remains a thunderous standoff until the Man of Tomorrow maneuvers the Thing to a nuclear test site. In 1938, Superman could be knocked for a loop by a “bursting shell,” but by the 1950s he could shrug off H-bomb blasts. The Thing, however, could not.

Science fiction menaces had begun challenging Superman with more frequency during that era — among them The Three Supermen from Krypton in Superman 65 (July-Aug. 1950), It from Action Comics 162 (Nov. 1951), The Machines of Crime from Action Comics 167 (April 1952), the dragon-like Beast from Krypton in Superman 78 (Sept-Oct. 1952), the Return of Planet Krypton in Action Comics 182 (July 1953), the asteroid Menace from the Stars in World’s Finest 65 (Jan.-Feb. 1954, a story also featured on TV as Panic in the Sky).

I suspect it was Hollywood that put the science fiction back into Superman’s stories. Once relegated to movie serials for kids, the genre had reemerged in popular, critically acclaimed films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953).

Superman’s Thing, specifically, owed a lot to the 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World. The menace there was an extraterrestrial vegetable monster played by James Arness, but in the 1938 story on which the film was based, John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?, the Thing is a alien shape-shifter from 20 million years ago.

The blog Confessions of a Superman Fan noted that The Thing from 40,000 A.D. is, “…a fast-paced story with solid art by Wayne Boring and a rare physical match for Superman. It’s also very much a product of 1954, what with the flying saucer angle and story elements prefiguring two sci-fi cinema classics: The Blob (1958) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). And of course there’s the chilling cameo by the dreaded H-Bomb, very much on everyone’s mind at the time.

“Someone must have liked the story, because it was reprinted in Superman 196 (May 1967), and while reprints were not such a rare thing back in the day, they usually didn’t get a second go-round as the lead story, earning the cover spotlight twice.”

The story was also republished in the second Superman Annual (Jan. 1961). As thrilled as I was by the first annual in 1960, I was even more excited to see this “All-Menace” issue — finally, foes worthy of Superman’s stature and some real super-powered action! For the bargain of a mere quarter, you got Metallo, the Invulnerable Enemy, Titano the Super-Ape, Bizarro, Brainiac and my favorite, the Thing from 40,000 A.D. 

The Super Foe in the Mirror

What’s strange is that with one mirror-image antagonist Superman — Bizarro — already an established character, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Curt Swan would introduce another one in Superman 137 (May 1960).

And what’s even stranger than that is how well the story would work.

As with his The Death of Superman and Superman’s Return to Krypton storylines, Superman’s creator would prove he could still supply plenty of angst and depth in stories about his brainchild two decades after the Man of Tomorrow’s debut.

Here, a mysterious alien spacecraft created a duplicate of Kal-El’s space rocket on its journey to Earth. We readers forgave Siegel the implausibility of the notion that a second Superman could have been raised secretly on Earth because of the intriguing idea this unlikely event permitted him to explore: what if someone other than the kindly Kents had raised Superman?

And in the age-old nature versus nurture debate, Siegel comes down firmly on the side of nurture.

The child raised by the criminals Wolf and Bonnie Derek becomes Super-Brat, inundating a town with giant snowmen, and then Super-Bully, a juvenile delinquent who releases the big cats from Smallville Zoo just so he can bat them around.

Finally, as the adult Super-Menace, he defeats and nearly destroys Superman with kryptonite. The Man of Steel’s life is spared only because Super-Menace’s super hearing reveals that his foster parents had always loathed him and were only manipulating him to satisfy their powerlust and greed. The unloved, heartbroken energy being buries the kryptonite with his super-breath and then — as they scream and plead for their lives — explodes himself at his foster parents, destroying them as well as himself.

Ineffectual as Superman was here, I was always happy that at least one member of the Superman family immediately smelled a rat whenever Super Menace was around.

You can’t fool Krypto, folks.

The Mystery of the Menacing Mirror Men

“The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

        By Dan Hagen

A riddle worthy of the Batman.

From childhood on, I understood with a boy’s instincts why superheroes had to have colorful costumes, dual identities, spectacular powers, formidable foes, fast and fabulous vehicles, even Fortresses of Solitude and Bottled Cities of Kandor (think tree houses and ant farms writ large).

Only two conventions persistently puzzled me — why these perfectly self-contained superheroes bothered with girlfriends, and why they seemed to be constantly confronted by their doubles.

The girlfriend thing eventuall­­­­y resolved itself, but the seemingly weird obsession with doubles continued to puzzle me.

The theme of doubling was especially prevalent in the comics. The double was built right into the concept of most superheroes in the form of the secret identity or “alter ego.” Superman and Clark Kent, Batman and Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker and Spider-Man, always the two who were one.

And then there were the arch-enemies, who always turned out to be, in one way or another, funhouse mirror dark doubles of the hero.

Thus, Lex Luthor is an evil intellectual superman opposed by a heroic physical Superman. The Joker is a cackling costumed sociopath opposed by a grim costumed crime fighter. Dr. Octopus is a mature, many-limbed creature-themed villain opposed by a teenaged hero whose costume suggests a creature with many limbs.

The Thing battles the Thing.

The heroic magician Dr. Strange saves us from the evil magician Baron Mordo, and both were students of the Ancient One. The heroic Norse god Thor shields us from the evil Norse god Loki, and so forth.

Not only the heroes’ enemies but also their allies often mirrored them. Early on, Batman acquired a Robin and Captain Marvel was assisted by Captain Marvel Jr., Mary Marvel, various Lieutenants Marvel and whatnot. Superman was echoed in Superboy (literally his younger self) and then in Krypto the Superdog and Supergirl, while Batman met Ace the Bathound, Batwoman, Bat-Girl and Batgirl (two different girls, don’t ask). Hawkgirl, Spider-Woman, the She-Hulk, the Bionic Woman, the Greatest American Heroine, the list is inexhaustible.

The mirror-nature of the archenemies and the alter ego and the sidekicks is obvious, but the comic books didn’t leave the double theme there. They underlined it repeatedly and directly with robot doubles, mirror creatures, clones and various other dopplegangers.

Thus Superman faced any number of literal duplicates, the most prominent of whom was Bizarro. Batman, with his Batmobile and Batplane and Bat Signal, fought Killer Moth, with his Mothmobile and Mothplane and Moth Signal.

Wonder Woman battles the villainous Super Woman

The Incredible Hulk battled his equally incredible duplicate gamma-ray monster the Abomination. Spider-Man fought the evil spider guy Venom, who in turn spawned the evil spider guy Carnage. Green Lantern stood against the renegade Green Lantern Corps member Sinestro. The Flash raced against Reverse Flash. The armored capitalist Iron Man dueled the armored communists Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man.

So why were all these doubles redoubled? The answer has deep roots, I think.

Critic Mark Schorer noted that the Gothic tradition, or what Nathaniel Hawthorne would have called the romance tradition, refers to “...stories that are set in a world where we continually move without transition or warning from the actual into the dream, from the real into the surreal, from the natural into the supernatural.”

That’s a description that neatly fits the comic book superhero stories, which shift constantly from mundane and recognizable urban reality to nightmarish mythological battle zones and back again.

“They are stories whose central concern is with the theme of the Doppleganger, the alter ego, and the supernatural is, in fact, symbolic of the world in which that other self, which we cannot ever confront in the busy social world, exists.

“These are stories generally about lonely, loveless people — or, at any rate, they seem to be lonely because they are loveless — who encounter strange, often offensive creatures with whom they are, in one way or another, trapped and whom they cannot and usually do not wish to escape, for these creatures are their selves, their fate, whom they are helpless to shun." 

Deepak and Gotham Chopra, in their book “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes,” note that the doubling theme can explore the Jungian Shadow or dark side of the personality.

“At one point a dark symbiote latches onto the heroic Spider-Man. The shadow being brings out Spider-Man’s darker impulses, making him arrogant, vengeful and selfish. His iconic red and blue suit even turns black as he literally takes on a shadowy persona. But eventually Spider-Man, through his own awareness, is able to resist these shadow qualities and sheds the symbiote. It then occupies another being and becomes one of Spider-Man's archenemies, known as Venom, forever stalking him and reminding the great superhero of what he could become if he were to give in to his own shadow self.”

So it’s all a metaphor, unconscious but existentially valid. As we journey though life, those of us who are paying attention can’t help but notice that the greatest constraints are invariably those we place on ourselves.

We wonderful creatures, so noble and daring in our dreams, are self-shackled, self-disappointing. Our most persistent recurring foe, the archenemy of our splendid ideals and aspirations, is always the self.
"A man may conquer a million men in battle, but one who conquers himself is, indeed, the greatest of conquerors."
— The Dhammapada

Sources: Introduction to “Selected Writing of Truman Capote,” Modern Library.

This collage by Hugh Fox.

The Monster in the Mirror

By Dan Hagen

The men who loudly advertise their loathing of gay people are generally ashamed of their own secret homosexual desires.

There’s not really any question about that any more. Everybody seems to know it, except perhaps those men themselves.

It’s classic psychological projection — the Other being despised because you have identified it with the Shadow you have cast out, that dark secret lurking inside you that you dare not even look at.

What’s really frightening these men is the monster in the mirror.

At the University of Georgia, researchers conducted an experiment involving 35 homophobic men and 29 non-homophobic men. All of the men participating in the experiment considered themselves exclusively heterosexual. This study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Volume 105, No. 3, August 1996, described how each of the participants was shown sexually explicit heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian videotapes.

Sexual arousal for the homophobic and non-homophobic men was found to be similar when they viewed both the heterosexual and the lesbian sexual activity. However, when the two groups viewed the video of two men engaging in sexual behavior, a significant statistical difference arose. In this instance, the group of homophobic men showed a considerable increase in sexual arousal while the group of non-homophobic men did not. The clear implication of this study is that homophobia in men is a reaction to their own repressed homosexual urges.

Nor is that study alone. “Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires.” That was the conclusion of physiological studies conducted by scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara. “Individuals who identify as straight but, in psychological tests, show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” wrote Netta Weinstein, the study’s lead author. “In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” said co-author Richard Ryan.

So the men who rant against gays are, all unaware, announcing to the world what their real feelings are.

That would, of course, include people like former Sen. Larry Craig, the fascist FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the vicious Roy Cohn and the Rev. Ted Haggard, Jonathan Merritt, to name a few from an endless and growing list.

All famous conservatives, you’ll note, and that’s no coincidence. Four common psychological manifestations of defensiveness are denial, rationalization, minimization and projection. All are constantly wielded as Republican political weapons. When your policies actually harm the people you are trying to bamboozle into supporting you, they're all quite useful.

Psychological projection is a key tactic of the contemporary GOP. They always loudly accuse their opponents of doing everything they themselves have done, are ashamed of doing, are still doing and intend to continue to do.

Claiming to speak with the authority of God, for example, Haggard encouraged young gay people to despise themselves while he was practicing homosexuality himself. And he did it to get rich.

I can forgive some vicious actions, particularly if they were inspired by the nasty, ancient dogmas that still blind and shackle so many people in this world. Conformity can create creeps. But I don’t forgive leaders in positions of authority who use that authority to victimize helpless people.

On the other hand, I will always admire those gay people who didn’t cower or hide, who summoned from somewhere the courage and the honesty required to stand up to whatever filth government, society and religion chose to throw at them.

Life’s not worth a damn until you can say, “Hey world, I am what I am.” Sometimes you can find wisdom even in musical comedies.

The damage that people who lead inauthentic lives inflict on their society, on the people who know them and on themselves — that, my friend, is what’s truly monstrous.