Another Look at the Monster at My Window

There’s something about the thing that’s inexorably approaching that can send a particularly keen frisson of fear straight up our spines.

I remember being impressed by this dramatic technique as a boy watching the otherwise undistinguished science fiction horror 1958 film Monster on the Campus. A woman walking home alone in the evening looks behind her and sees a shadowy, stalking figure moving furtively from tree to tree. Yikes!

The classic 1963 Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, based on a short story by Richard Matheson, frightened a generation. Passenger William Shatner — frightened by some thing, some creature he sees out there on the wing of the airliner — draws the window curtains. Overcome by curiosity, he yanks them open again to find the monster with its face pressed to the window, staring straight at him.

In a 3rd Rock from the Sun sitcom episode from 1999, Shatner, making his first appearance on the series, tells John Lithgow he saw something horrifying on the wing of the plane he just departed. Lithgow replies, “The same thing happened to me!” Lithgow had played the Shatner role in 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The trick works well in literature, too, as in Fritz Leiber’s 1941 short story Smoke Ghost. A man traveling home on the elevated train spots a vaguely menacing black thing on the rooftops that grows closer each day, as he passes. “Leiber very deftly captures that particular experience of riding home at night along suburban train lines, looking out over the roofs and seeing a peculiar high-rise world that is invisible from street level,” critic Maureen Kincaid Speller observed.

But my favorite example of this technique is Jack Kirby’s 1962 cover to Tales to Astonish 34, illustrating Monster at My Window. A hulking alien is crawling across the high ledge of an apartment building toward a frightened man at his window. The cover was memorable enough to earn a 2008 cartoon contest homage from New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss. By the way, the winning caption by Patrick House read, “O.K. I’m at the window. To the right? Your right or my right?”

Actually, the technique goes at least as far back as 1797, when by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Like one, that on a lonely road        

     Doth walk in fear and dread,        

And having once turn'd round, walks on        

     And turns no more his head:        

Because he knows, a frightful fiend

     Doth close behind him tread.

The Secret Origin of Superman

Fascinated though I was by Superman when I was a small boy in the late 1950s, I had no idea where he came from.

My grandmother helped me out with that, recounting Superman’s origin for me — the doomed planet, that poor vulnerable infant in the rocket, the kindly Kents and their adopted son who could haul wagons like a team of horses and find lost objects by peering through hay stacks. She’d seen the story only once, a dozen years before in the 1948 movie serial Superman, but remembered it all vividly.

Interesting to note that in the 1948 serial, young Clark Kent saves his foster father from a tornado. But in the 2013 film Man of Steel, he deliberately lets him die in one. Times, as they say, have changed.

Superman (as an adult or as Superboy) was featured in seven DC titles at the time — Action Comics, Superman, World’s Finest, Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, Superboy and Adventure Comics — yet information on his early years remained oddly hard to come by.

Even when DC began reprinting Superman’s adventures in the first giant 25-cent annual in 1960, the 1930s and 1940s stories were ignored. Superman editor Mort Weisinger said that was because the art was “crude,” but I suspect it was in fact because the legendarily unfair and nasty Weisinger was trying to erase Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, from history.

So I didn’t start seeing Superman’s earliest adventures until about 1965, when cartoonist Jules Feiffer published his hardcover revelation, The Great Comic Book Heroes. There, among other wonders, was the complete account of how Superman saved the Valleyho Dam from a flood in Action Comics 5 (Oct. 1938).

And yes, the art may have been crude, but it was vital and dynamic in a way that the polished, static Silver Age Superman stories were not (as some wag once said, Superman stories had started to look as if they were being drawn in a bank).

Red cape streaming like a banner, Superman sprang, sped, soared, smashed, in constant exciting motion like the Marvel heroes who were about to overtake DC in popularity. He was not the omnipotent, blandly benign figure he’d evolved into by the 1950s. He couldn’t fly, he could be hurt, but you’d better get the hell out of his way.

Clearly an FDR-inspired socialist crusader spawned by the Great Depression, Superman was impatient with injustice and contemptuous of the compromised police. He dramatically deposed dictators, occasionally killing criminals without apparent regret, hurling wife beaters into walls and the owners of dangerous mines straight down into them. He dealt brusquely with Lois Lane and she loved him for it, just as she perversely (but typically) despised Clark Kent for adoring her.

The early Superman lived up to his name, a character of such emphatic momentum that walls, guns, tanks, planes, decades and even centuries could not stop him. 

Who Has Seen Anything Cleaner?

…I wish we could be friends,

  but when he sees me

    daring to look at him

      he opens his strong arms

that are dressed, always, in the darkest ribbons,

  and floats off —

    but only a little way

      and he’s down again on the sandy track.

and who has seen yet anything cleaner,

  bolder,

    more gleaming, more certain of its philosophy

      than the eye he turns back?

From ‘Crow’ by Mary Oliver

The Fox News Idea of a "Real Journalist"

In other words, Megyn Kelly is a lying fascist propagandist, not a professional journalist

What Megyn Kelly represents is at least as dangerous as Donald Trump. What Kelly represents CREATED Trump and Ted Cruz. 

Kelly is a lying propagandist who, in the first Fox News debate, was under orders from Roger Ailes to knife Trump. Nothing that happens at Fox News happens spontaneously or — the very notion is laughable — because of journalistic integrity. Fox News is the Fourth Estate's fifth column. Fox News exists to DESTROY professional journalism.

The First Time I Saw Wonder Woman

I was the first-born child of the Lone Ranger and Wonder Woman. Well, in a way, anyway. They were my parents’ childhood dream selves, just as Superman was mine.

Isolated in a farmhouse miles from town, my dad lived for the 1930s radio adventures of the Lone Ranger, wending their way across the Illinois prairie from Detroit.  He listened so intently that he could virtually recite them decades later. My mother, not quite so isolated, was able to feed her proto-feminist fantasies on the 1940s comic book exploits of the first female superman.

 But the first time I saw Wonder Woman, she was slugging it out with a futuristic giant robot, along with four other members of the Justice League, in the second of the team’s tryout appearance in Brave and the Bold in May 1960. By July, I was ready to give her own comic book a try. I picked up issue 115, coincidentally the first one to follow the reader-friendly trend of offering a letter column.

So here was Wonder Girl — Wonder Woman’s younger self, just as Superboy was Superman — and Wonder Woman, who had her own Lois Lane in the form of Steve Trevor. Making goo-goo eyes at the heroine at every opportunity, Trevor didn’t cut too impressive a figure. What can you say about a guy who actually accepts the explanation, “I’ll marry you, but only after I’ve eradicated crime from the face of the Earth?” Talk about a brush-off.

I appreciated the Amazing Amazon’s strength and speed and her transparent, telepathically controlled jet, but her “gliding on air currents” power gave me pause. Even to 6-year-old, that seemed shaky at best. The flatly inexplicable power of flight somehow seemed a better bet.

Wonder Woman was drawn by the capable Ross Andru, but penned by Robert Kanigher, who wrote spare, moody combat stories for DC’s war line but bizarrely erratic and unsatisfying Wonder Woman adventures. The plots didn’t make any sense, even by comic book standards. Dinosaurs and gigantic clams and electric eels and nuclear missiles seemed to show up and disappear for no reason, and Wonder Girl displayed an unsettling taste for dating teenage males who were half-fish or half-bird.

Take this issue’s tale cover story, Graveyard of Monster Ships, for example. Wonder Woman’s enemy Angle Man — dressed strangely even by his standards in a high silk hat and purple suit, sporting a red cape decorated with astrological symbols — decided to destroy her using a “mechanical brain” (what we called computers then).

While Wonder Woman and Trevor are investigating an underwater area full of lost wooden ships, Angle Man uses his computer to animate the ships’ figureheads — including, weirdly, a Wonder Woman figurehead from a sunken Amazon ship (?). That “mirror image” theme was pursued obsessively in superhero comics, emerging from some unconscious source and repeated so relentlessly that it must have been selling comics.

Wonder Woman is able to defeat the fearsome figureheads by typing on the computer keyboard at super speed, transforming all the hostile carvings into guided missiles that launched themselves into space (?).

Even as a child, I sensed that Kanigher actively disliked Wonder Woman and just kind of threw her adventures at the wall to see what might stick there. Puzzled me 

The Experimental Hulk, circa September 1962

By the third issue of the second title of the Marvel era, The Incredible Hulk, it became clear that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were flying by the seats of their pants here, but doing so brilliantly.

Marvel’s early comic books had an experimental quality rivaling that of the first superhero comics in the late 1930s. It began with the Fantastic Four in 1961 — conflicted heroes, unburdened by credibility-straining comic book conventions like costumes and secret identities, who regarded their powers and each other warily.

The group’s most popular character was probably the embittered man-monster, the Thing, so Kirby and Lee swiftly retooled the concept into a solo title about a man-monster that arrived on the newsstands in May 1962, at the same time as the FF’s fourth issue.

A gamma bomb blast transformed the coldly rational physicist Dr. Bruce Banner into a creature that looked vaguely like the Universal Films Frankenstein monster, an image popular with the era’s children thanks to frequent appearances on the Late Show. But the character shared a tragic fate with another doctor, Henry Jekyll, and Universal’s Wolf Man. Banner’s powerful dark side would emerge each evening as the sun set.

Oddly, the first Marvel character to have a secret identity was the one who’d find it most difficult to maintain one. But with the help of Rick Jones, a teenager he’d rescued, Banner somehow managed it. The scenes of Rick slumped forlornly in front of a massive underground bunker, protecting the creature who pounded relentlessly on the walls inside, have a poignant and despairing quality rarely seen in comics at the time.

In his second issue, in July 1962, the Hulk faced an alien invasion. The monster wasn’t capable of repelling it, nor was he interested in the task. Expressing his hatred for humanity, the Hulk mused about seizing an alien spaceship and raining terror on his own planet. Banner had to play the hero, proving himself more powerful than the Hulk when he constructed a massive Kirbyfied gamma gun that hurled the entire invasion fleet of Toad Man away into space.

By the third issue, the plot constraints of having a hostile character who only gained his powers at night were discarded. Duped by the military into betraying the Hulk, Jones lured him into a space capsule and banishment. But intense solar exposure combined with an electrical accident changed Banner into a full-time Hulk, while giving him a telepathic link to Jones that made him subject to the teenager’s will. Now another flavor of fantasy was offered as the Hulk became a kind of genie ruled by a boy. And to further up the wish fulfillment ante, Lee and Kirby took a page from the earliest Superman comics and gave the Hulk the effective power of flight through seven-league leaps. Such changes would continue through all six issues of the Hulk’s first comic book series, and the character’s flexibility saved him when his title ended. Kirby and Lee kept him in the public eye as an antagonist fighting other superheroes like the FF, Spider-Man, the Avengers and Giant-Man.

The First Time I Saw the Shadow

The first time I saw the Shadow was in 1964, when I was 10 and the aging crime-fighter was at a low point in his fabled career.

My parents and grandparents knew the Shadow well, but had never seen him, having listened to his adventures as an invisible superhero on radio in the late 1930s through the early 1950s. I’d also heard references to the character on television (When TV writer Rob Petrie’s wife Laura began acting mysteriously, he accused her of disappearing “…like Lamont Cranston.”)

From the Shadow's subsequent indignities.

Archie Comics had acquired the comic book rights to the Shadow, and I recognized John Rosenberger’s magazine-sleek art from the company’s other two superhero titles, The Adventures of the Fly and The Adventures of the Jaguar. The cover depicted the Shadow in traditional pulp magazine form, lurking hawk-nosed in a cape and slouch hat. But inside he’d been “modernized,” and not always to good effect.

Following President Kennedy, the men of the era had discarded their hats, and the Shadow followed the fashion. Now a prettified blond with three identities, he used his role as millionaire playboy Lamont Cranston as a cover for his activities as an American secret agent (James Bond had just become immensely popular). And his spy missions were a cover for his superhero activities, an identity he assumed simply by slipping on a black cloak and “blending into the shadows.” No one else knows he’s the Shadow, not even his girlfriend Margo Lane.

His vaguely defined powers included stealth, ventriloquism and a kind of super-hypnotism, and his opponent was his recurring arch-foe from the pulps, Shiwan Khan, restyled as a Bondesque freelance spy villain. The Shadow also displayed a hint of 007’s ruthlessness, hurling one of Khan’s henchmen down a shaft to his apparent death. 

Not as good as the pulp or radio Shadows and disjointed, but not terrible. In later issues, however, penned by Superman creator Jerry Siegel, the character would hit bottom — tricked up in a superhero’s mask and tights, and armed with gadgets that would have embarrassed even Batman (a “power beam,” “weakness gas,” boot-heel jumping springs, and so forth).