America the Beautiful? Hardly. America, the Ugly Fat Moron.

Here's real America, 21st century style.

It's Called Propaganda

The Monsters Are Due on Main Street

Here, a deranged Superman rips the Joker apart.

What happened to make serial killers, cannibals, vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies such sympathetic figures in 21^st century American popular culture? The right-wing American corporate culture made ruthless evil fashionable. That’s what happened.

Popular culture is a funhouse mirror that distorts — but actually reflects — the society which spawns it. Ruthless predatory behavior is admired and rewarded in American society, so what’s wrong with monsters? Nothing. They just want to tear open the throats of innocent people. Is that so wrong?

Even Superman is only acceptable now if he lets his foster father die and breaks some necks. During the Depression, the hunger for economic justice and anger at inequality were white-hot. Ordinary people, feeling powerless, naturally turned to superhero fantasy. The 21st century Superman, by contrast, is starting to seem indifferent to the suffering of ordinary people.

“What was I supposed to do, just let them drown?”

“Maybe.”

I guess the Man of Steel filmmakers actually expected us to take Pa Kent's answer seriously.

So What Do We Do With Another Werewolf?

Man-Wolf and She-Hulk may have been David Anthony Kraft’s favorite Marvel Comics characters to write back in the 1970s, even though the hirsute hero bore the burden of being the second werewolf in the Marvel universe.

A loosening of the Comics Code had inspired a sudden four-color flurry of werewolves, zombies and vampires. To differentiate his character from the cutely named Jack Russell, Werewolf by Night, DAK took him in the direction of planet-hopping science fantasy.

As I recall, there was some discussion at Marvel about whether the Creatures on the Loose cover image at lower right included sufficient peril, what with the protagonist plunging hundreds of feet into a ravine, followed by a plummeting freight train that also happened to be on fire. Subtlety was a hallmark of 1970s comics. Unlike the better-known She-Hulk, Man-Wolf has the distinction of already having appeared in a Marvel movie, albeit in his other form — John Jameson, the son of blowhard Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson.

Douglas: She Who Must Be Waylaid

Helen Gahagan Douglas

Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former movie star and opera singer, was a principled beacon of liberal light following the death of FDR.

She had once played She Who Must Be Obeyed, and when she ran for Senate in California, Congressman Richard Nixon regarded her as She Who Must Be Waylaid.

Nixon’s dirty tactics — among them smearing Douglas as a Communist and sponsoring calls to ask voters if they were aware that her movie star husband was “a Jew” — earned him the apt, lifelong nickname Tricky Dick. But Douglas was also hampered by her own lofty idealism, and the times were against her, the 1950 election coinciding with both the rise of McCarthyism and the height of the Korean war.

“There was the United States fighting communism and I was the person who said we should limit the power of the military and try to disarm the world and get along with Russia,” Douglas is quoted as saying in Sally Denton’s in The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas.

“The worst moment, a sight I couldn’t shake, was when children picked up rocks and threw them at my car, at me. I knew that in order to survive I would have to accept the rocks and the Nixon campaign, shrug them off and move on. I wondered if I would be able to do it.”

She was, finding herself exhausted but strangely calm after Nixon’s huge victory. “I was so pleased that I had escaped the terrible burden of hating Richard Nixon that I was almost elated,” she said.

Nixon, in later years, at least feigned regret over his behavior in the campaign. “Years later, asked by British publisher David Astor to explain his campaign tactics, Nixon reportedly ‘cast down his eyes with a look of modest contrition’ and explained, ‘I want you to remember that I was a very young man,’” wrote Anthony Summers in The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. “In 1950, (Nixon) was 37 and a veteran of four years in the House of Representatives.”

Douglas summed it up simply: “There’s not much to say about the 1950 campaign, except that a man ran for Senate who wanted to get there, and didn’t care how he did it.”

After Nixon revealed his true character to the world in Watergate, and was driven from office in shame, Douglas had the last laugh. But she didn’t laugh. She mourned. 

“If the national security is involved, anything goes,” she said in 1973. “There are no rules. There are people so lacking in roots about what is proper and improper that they don’t know there’s anything wrong in breaking into the headquarters of the opposition party.”

Radian: The Hero You've Never Seen

Radian might have been a giant flying Japanese prehistoric reptile or a shampoo, but he wasn’t. He was a one-shot superhero created in the Batman-besotted year 1967 by the great Wally Wood, who drew men of steel that somehow looked as if they really could missile through stone walls.

That this one bore more than a passing resemblance to Wood’s hero Dynamo in Tower Comics’ THUNDER Agents hardly mattered — it was always a pure pleasure to see Wood draw those supermen.

Virtually no one’s seen Radian because he appeared only in Wham-O Giant Comics, produced not by a comic book publisher, but by the toy company that gave us Hula-Hoops, Slip-and-Slides and Frisbees. 

The 52-page issue, priced at almost a dollar, offered 1,500 panels of fairly interesting strips, but presented a fatal problem to the comic book collector. It was a 14" x 21" tabloid. Where in hell could you store a thing like that?

Claws of the Cat: Marvel's Forgotten Feline

I have a soft spot for super heroes who never found their audience, and one of them is Greer Nelson, the Cat.

Created by Marvel in 1972 as a feminist heroine (Shanna the She-Devil and Night Nurse debuted simultaneously), the Cat joined a seemingly endless line of cat-themed females, from DC’s Catwoman, to Harvey’s Black Cat (and Marvel’s Black Cat), to DC’s Cheetah, to Republic Studios’ Panther Girl, to Archie Comics’ Cat Girl, to Dell’s Tiger Girl to, arguably, Ian Fleming’s Pussy Galore, “the female who is all feline,” according to Goldfinger’s movie trailer.

As the Diversions of the Groovy Kind blog noted, “Written by the soon-to-be-Mrs. Herb (Incredible Hulk) Trimpe, Linda Fite with art by the incomparable team of penciler Marie Severin and inker Wally Wood, The Claws of the Cat #1 (Aug. 1972) had all the earmarks of another hit for Marvel. A likable, realistic, tragic lead character thrust into the role of a superhero. Story wise and art wise, The Cat #1 was a wonderfully crafted tale that could have come straight from Marvel's Silver Age heyday, but given a ‘modern’ 1970s sensibility. Fite’s plot was heart-wrenching and moody; her dialogue straight from the Roy Thomas/Gerry Conway/Denny O'Neil school of ‘relevance.’ The art by Severin and Wood was lush and as moody as Fite’s story. It should have been a smash hit.”

For somebody who reportedly didn’t care for superheroes, Wally Wood certainly knew how to draw them. His figures are models of convincing clean-limbed power. But the title’s feminism, while well intentioned, may have been a little too heavy-handed. To be effective, the social message has to be in service of the story, and not the other way around.

My own private theory is that the title failed because the heroine didn’t have the traditional alliterative superhero name, like Peter Parker, Clark Kent, Matt Murdock or Jessica Jones. 

Greer Nelson. Meh. Try Greer Garson. Now there’s a name which with to conjure.