Prole Art Threat: The Gong, Time, Work-Discipline, and the Revolt Against Industrial Capitalism in Batman #55

The Guides, the Wardens of our faculties, 

And Stewards of our labour, watchful men 

And skilful in the usury of time,

Sages, who in their prescience would controul 

All accidents and to the very road

Which they have fashion'd would confine us down

Like engines...

 (Wordsworth, The Prelude)

by BK Munn

The origin of Ed Peale, alias The Gong. He’s shaped like a bell! Comic book supervillains were originally working class rebels, of course. Let's see how millionaire Bruce Wayne teams up with the cops to discipline The Gong’s revolt in ‘The Bandit of the Bells!’ (Batman #55, reprinted in Batman #198) –art by Charles Paris, 1949.

I've written before about how the villains are the only truly revolutionary --or even proletarian-- figures in superhero comic books, and here is another great example.

Here we have a supervillain after my own heart, a rebel against the false industrial time-disciplines of the school and factory punch-clock; an autodidact scholar and historian who schemes to befuddle millionaire do-gooders, banks, and the forces of order. And here we see the delicious class conflict at work within the industrial structure of DC comic book sweatshop production as well. The uncredited writer (probably the great Bill Finger) and artist Charles Paris --both working as "ghosts" for Batman creator Bob Kane, who's signature is on the title page of the story but who had nothing to do with the day-to-day creation of the comics by his "studio"-- are clearly engaging in a bit of fun with their own deadline-controlled world. The ticking clock and figurative bells of all sorts make great villains and what young reader hasn't chafed against their restrictions as against Dickens' Gradgrind? 

But the battle between student/worker goes beyond the schoolyard. The Marxist historian E.P. Thompson wrote eloquently on this conflict, in an essay called "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capital":

"In all these ways - by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports —.new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed.) It sometimes took several generations (as in the Potteries), and we may doubt how far it was ever fully accomplished: irregular labour rhythms were perpetuated (and even institutionalized) into the present century, notably in London and in the great ports.

Throughout the nineteenth century the propaganda of time-thrift continued to be directed at the working people, the rhetoric becoming more debased, the apostrophes to eternity becoming more shop-soiled, the homilies more mean and banal. In early Victorian tracts and reading-matter aimed at the masses one is choked by the quantity of the stuff. But eternity has become those never-ending accounts of pious death-beds (or sinners struck by lightning), while the homilies have become little Smilesian snippets about humble men who by early rising and diligence made good. The leisured classes began to discover the "problem" (about which we hear a good deal today) of the leisure of the masses. A considerable proportion of manual workers (one moralist was alarmed to discover) after concluding their work were left with

"several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please. And in what manner ... is this precious time expended by those of no mental cultivation . . . We shall often see them just simply annihilating those portions of time. They will for an hour, or for hours together ... sit on a bench, or lie down on a bank or hillock ... yielded up to utter vacancy and torpor ... or collected in groups by the road side, in readiness to find in whatever passes there occasions for gross jocularity; practising some impertinence, or uttering some jeering scurrility, at the expense of persons going by ... "

 This, clearly, was worse than Bingo: non-productivity, compounded with impertinence. In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to "pass the time". "

These sound like some of the same critiques levelled by Wertham against the hooky clubs of juvenile delinquents who spent time away from school reading comics books!

Thompson wraps up with a glorious, utopian vision of so-called leisure time and the revolt aginst a puritan view of time-keeping:

"And there is a sense, also, within the advanced industrial countries, in which this has ceased to be a problem placed in the past. For we are now at a point where sociologists are discuss- ing the "problem" of leisure And a part of the problem is: how did it come to be a problem ? Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men's minds with the equation, time is money.128. One recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism, whether bohemian or beatnik, has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable time- values. And the interesting question arises: if Puritanism w a s a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax ? Is it decomposing already ? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists ? 

If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not "how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure ?" but "what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live ?" If we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries. But if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life. And hence would stem a novel dialectic in which some of the old aggressive energies and disciplines migrate to the newly- industrializing nations, while the old industrialized nations seek to rediscover modes of experience forgotten before written history begins."

Heady stuff for a children's Batman comic book, but this is the genius of The Gong!

Solomon Grundy and the Animated Corpse of the Working Class

The Animated Corpse of the Working Class

by BK Munn

We search in vain for examples of the working class superhero. With few exceptions, he is nowhere to be found. In his place, everywhere we find the figure of the superhero working on the side of the bosses, whether as an ideological footsoldier in the armies of the mass media (the Daily Planets and Bugles, WHIZ's and WXYZ's), as a representative of the Repressive State Apparatus (the police and armed forces), or even as the boss himself: we need not enumerate how many capitalists seem to moonlight as masked vigilantes, erstwhile Robin Hoods reduced to acting as night watchmen over the money bins of their fellow billionaires.

Ah, but who do they guard against? Who appears to play the role of Beagle Boy opposite the concerted efforts of these super-powered Scrooge McDucks? The superhero's triumphalist rhetoric of truth, justice, and the American Way must not remain unchallenged --nor can the use of force continue to be monopolized by a single comic book class. At last, a dim figure steps forward to take up its historic role of class antagonism.

Enter the supervillain, shambling leftward onto the world-historic stage. As an expression of class anxiety, he is unparalleled in art. From his secret origins as the stepchild of the mustache-twirling Oil Can Harry of melodrama and the grand-guignol grotesques of Dick Tracy, the comic book villain embodies all of the perceived threats to the capitalist utopias envisioned by the comic book creator, a world of shiny metropolises, lorded over by masonic fraternities of top-hatted magicians, fetishistic playboys, and patriarchal circus strongmen.

The supervillain disturbs this child-like Eden by introducing a note of the abject to the proceedings. The supervillain, representing the poor and working class multitude, is our window into the world of the superhero. Whether mad-scientist, gun-toting mobster, or costumed gadgeteer, the comic book villain represents "the return of the repressed" in the dream world of adolescent power fantasies. No matter how often or how ingeniously the superhero puts him down, the villainous representative of the working class schemes his way out of his prison and into a new museum heist, nuclear extortion, or revenge plot. The chief lesson of the superhero narrative is that no plot device or deus ex machina can ultimately contain the immense power of the working class, especially when organized or constituted as a corporate mass entity.

The appeal of their forceful presence is almost magnetic. What youthful reader has not experienced a comradely thrill when encountering for the first time such deliciously named amalgamations as The Monster Society of Evil, The Legion of Doom, or The Secret Society of Supervillains? These unions and guilds of the downtrodden lumpen proletariat of the comics form an essential counterpoint to the legalistic Chamber of Commerce-like aura that adheres to the clubby superhero organizations (The Justice League of America, The Avengers, et al).

Nowhere is this more evident than in this charming little epic from 1947's All-Star Comics #33. The two post-War years of 1946 and 1947 were memorable as a time of intense class conflict, as the wartime economic boom combined with an increasingly militant U.S. working class made up of returning soldiers and a Depression-hardened nation. Some of these issues are bound to find their way into the prole art form of comics.

"The Revenge of Solomon Grundy" features the return of the nursery-rhyme-inspired supervillain Solomon Grundy, after a long absence. Last seen imprisoned by Green Lantern in a magical green ball, Grundy personifies the bottled-up desire of working class ambition, on hold during the "no-strike" years of World War II and still frustrated by the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the same time, he represents the refusal of the disciplinary regime of the social factory system --a sort of unliving mass strike.

Grundy's attributes are those of the dreaded poor or proletariat unleashed. From his humble origins as a small-time criminal who meets his ignoble end drowned in a swamp, to his reincarnation as a monstrous, barely articulate agent of vengeance, Grundy is a proto-Hulk, equal parts lovable hillbilly and Luddite loom-smasher. Clad in tattered working-man's clothes, including giant hobnail-style brown boots, the zombie-like Grundy stands in stark sartorial contrast to the dandified glamour of the superheroes, with their capes, primary colours, and bold trademarked insignia. He is the Other to the rich and powerful superhero, a dialectic whose hallmark is violence and confrontation.

The plot of the story is delightfully simple. Freed from his magical prison by a stray bolt of lightning, Solomon Grundy rampages through the countryside and a series of small towns in search of his arch-enemy, the superhero Green Lantern. Alerted by a radio report, the members of the Justice Society disrupt their monthly meeting and split up to search for the so-called "inhuman menace to mankind." Encountering Grundy separately, the members of the Society suffer defeat after defeat, but manage to each solve a number of local dilemmas brought to light by the appearance of the ghostly apparition of Grundy. Thus, the sound thrashing administered to The Flash is the occasion for a local police chief to redeem himself. Likewise, Dr. Midnight's narrow escape from death at the hands of Grundy results in his foiling a pair of safe-crackers.

The locus of the action is largely industrial, with all of the settings having heavy ideological overtones. For instance, the heroes battle Grundy in two factories: Diminutive college student-turned costumed pugilist The Atom engages his opposite inside a shoe factory, where versions of Grundy's giant boots are arranged in rows and the giant seizes the means of production, as it were, to deliver a major beating. In a similar manner, Johnny Thunder encounters a copy-cat version of Grundy at a cereal factory. The other heroes attempt to prevent Grundy's riotous war on private property in the form of a town square, a rich family's mansion, and a newspaper office, with mixed results.

The solution is total banishment: the lesson of the comics is that Grundy, aka the working class, cannot be stopped by bullets or brawn. It remains for Green Lantern to encase him in another bubble and transport him to the moon, in something of an anti-climax.

It is easy, given stories like this, to imagine Solomon Grundy as a mass or corporate figure, his part-human, part-swamp composition a dual metaphor for both the imagined threat posed by an aroused working class --a working class that can only be constrained by a concerted effort on the part of capital, utilizing all of capital's weapons-- and a repressed proletarian subjectivity, reveling in freedom and destruction. In this respect, even the efforts of a penny-a-word pulp writer like Gardner Fox and a team of teenage artists employed in sweatshop-style production, labouring over adventure stories for children, have a part to play in the ideology and iconography of class struggle.