Kirby and Unions: Captain America Comics #4, 1941

UNHOLY LEGION

Here's an interesting sequence from a very early issue of Captain America where Jack Kirby posits a union leader as a bastion of democracy. I've noted before some of Kirby's post-War quotes on unions and the idea of a comics creator Guild, where he seems lukewarm on the subject, to say the least. But here we have an instance of the pre-War Kirby pointing to unionized labor as an important pillar of the anti-fascist fight against Nazis. The story is a great one, wherein Cap and Bucky uncover a Nazi spy and saboteur ring that disguise themselves as beggars. The very atmospheric discovery scene, where the two heroes witness a legless beggar on a dark street suddenly get up and walk in answer to a bell ringing inside the old city hall where the spies gather to unveil themselves in a secret ceremony, is brilliantly grotesque. I wonder if the politics here are entirely Kirby's or influenced partly by Joe Simon? 1941 was a record year for strikes in the U.S. and the left was divided on Roosevelt's efforts to keep a lid on labour troubles. We can see here that not only were the early Caps advocating for what Howard Chaykin's Blackhawk referred to as "premature antifascism" in reference to advocating for American intervention or aid in the war against Germany, but in this instance at least we see Simon and Kirby creating propaganda of a sort for the idea of a post-Depression "labour truce" in the name of the soon-to-come war effort.

The image up top is Kirby's reimagining of the Unholy Legion for the 1960s Captain America #112, a quarter century later.

"In a nearby state tragedy strikes John L. Green, nationally known labor leader. 'And I say again, Labor must unite to advance our defense program.'"

Batman as Capitalist Security Guard by Zach Weinersmith

by BK Munn

I've often written about superheroes as the enemies of the working class and the paucity of actual "working class heroes" in the history of comic books. The working class characters in comics are most often pegged as villains, or, if they are particularly troublesome, "supervillains":

"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."

Cartoonist Zach Weinersmith has made the observation explicit with this humourous rant from billionaire Bruce Wayne aka Batman, who enlightens his ward Robin the Boy Wonder about true role of the superhero. Weinersmith's webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is very funny and (dare I say it?) highly intellectually stimulating.

Working Class Heroes: Humphrey Bogart and the Steel Fist

I have to thank Humphrey Bogart for helping me find out about another working class superhero. Here's Bogey reading a copy of Blue Circle Comics #3, published in the Summer of 1944. It is cover dated September and has a great image of the mermaid superhero Aquamarie punching an octopus who looks like Hitler. 

At the time, Bogey had just met Lauren Bacall on the set of To Have and Have Not and was starting his whirlwind affair with her. The movie came out in October 1944 and Bogey & Bacall were married in the Spring of '45. I'm assuming the photo was taken sometime around then, but I haven't been able to find a source or date for it. 

It's a great comic, published by one of the smaller comics publishers of the time, and only lasting for a handful of issues. The main draw for me today is a strip by HC  Kiefer featuring The Steel Fist, a crime-fighting factory worker . His secret origin is that Nazis try to blow up the steel plant where he works and when he gets in their way, they stick his hand in a vat of molten slag. The spirit of Justice appears (she looks like the Statue of Liberty) and magically makes his steel hand fully useable. Naturally, he puts on a dumb costume and goes around smashing spy rings and beating up saboteurs, and in this issue he gets a taxi driver side-kick who hits people with a thermos.

As I've discussed before, actual working class superheroes are pretty rare. Most superheroes are millionaires or royalty or work for the government. But not Tim Slade, the Steel Fist! Thanks Bogey!

Read the whole comic Bogart is reading here.

Read The Steel Fist's origin here.

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!

Notes: Towards A Short History of the Cartoonist Guild

by BK Munn

I had a nice Thanksgiving mini-holiday and of course bought some old comics, including a couple issues of The Little Scouts by Roland Coe. The series was published by Dell in the 1950s and is kind of a milder version of Little Lulu. Very charming. It was based on the magazine cartoons by Coe, who was well-known for his very family-friendly advertising and gag panel work. He died in 1954 and so is not widely-known among old-time comic art fans, but digging into his life it seems he was sort of an interesting guy and maybe even a pivotal figure. As a result of this digging, I've started researching the short-lived (1936-1939) Cartoonist Guild of America, a leftist grouping of mostly New York City magazine artists that organized to standardize payment rates for gag cartoons, etc. It predated the more conservative National Cartoonist Society by about a decade but seems to have embodied the same spirit of fraternity and good-time hijinks the Society is known for. The Guild was also quite militant, with many members marching in protests and engaging in other forms of activism. They published a blacklist of low-paying magazines, picketed College Humor magazine*, and some were even arrested, as reported in the New York Tmes and in some of the stories below.  The group published its own magazine/newsletter, called OK, copies of which I have not seen. I hope they exist!

There is not much easy-to-find info about this group; its membership eventually numbered in the hundreds before World War II threw everything into chaos. The Guild was part of a large wave of labour movements taking place during the Depression, and mirrored what was happening among other culture industry folks like newspaper workers (Newspaper Guild) and workers in the animation industry (the Screen Animators Guild led historic strikes against Warner Bros and Disney in the 30s). 

Union agitation was on the defensive during the post-War/Cold War, with organizers branded as communists and blacklisted.  What happened to the comic book industry in the 1950s is well-known, as are attempts by Neal Adams and others to unionize comic book creators in the 60s and 70s. There was another Cartoonist Guild that started up as part of the anti-war movement during Vietnam and included many underground and even New Yorker cartoonists but its reason for existing seemed to fizzle out in the 70s. 

It's heartening to learn of cartoonists (many of whom are among my all-time favourites) who did manage to effect postive change through group action, even if it was 80 years ago now.

I've dug up some anecdotal quotes and articles that mention the Guild. It seems that Vernon Greene, a journeyman cartoonist who eventually took over Bringing Up Father from George McManus in the 1950s, was involved in the Guild (as well as its successor, the NCS) and there are some Guild records among his papers at Syracuse University, which I would love to examine some day. 

Here's what I've found so far:

"Janice Duncan was as politically left as her husband, and both were strong supporters of workers as they fought to form unions in the 1930s. Gregor Duncan had been a founding member of the Cartoonists’ Guild, a precursor to the National Cartoonists Society, in March 1936. The Cartoonists’ Guild, led by President Roland Coe and Vice President Ned Hilton, fought for better working conditions for artists, including a $15 minimum fee for magazine cartoons. The guild also kept a watchful eye out for “scab cartoonists” who would take the place of one of their own who went out on strike in sympathy with the unions. One of Duncan’s best friends, New Yorker cartoonist Charles E. Martin, who signed his work “CEM,” was also a member of the guild, along with another friend, Gregory d’Alessio. Duncan was an active member of the guild, both politically and through his contributions to OK, the official publication of the organization. He contributed ink and litho crayon portraits of Gregory d’Alessio, Garrett Price and Fritz Wilkinson to the “Thumbnails” feature of the magazine in 1937, as well as a lithographic image titled “Longshoremen.” The magazine regularly featured fine art examples of the cartoonists’ work, such as Duncan’s lithograph. The Cartoonists’ Guild patterned its constitution after that of the American Newspaper Guild, cofounded by journalist Heywood Broun. The two groups often met together, in support of causes that affected their respective memberships." --Tom Heintjes
___

"Here's the story I was told about Syd Hoff and his mother's three little words that signaled her acceptance of his career:
Bronx-born Syd sold his first cartoon at the age of 17 and didn’t waste any time joining The Cartoonists Guild. The Guild, run by then NY Post cartoonist extraordinaire Roland Coe, was founded as a union for its members. (This is before the existence of/no relation to the current animators' union, also referred to as The Cartoonists Guild.)
When Syd joined in 1930, the prevailing New York City-based magazine gag cartoon rate was between $3 to $5. The Guild had mailed a letter to all of its cartoon markets. The letter asked magazine editors to sign it, pledging a uniform pay rate of $15 per cartoon. Most of the magazine editors acquiesced.
However, College Humor magazine refused to sign. College Humor was an important, major cartoon market. So Coe, Ned Hilton, Colin Allen and other Guild members picketed in front of the College Humor offices. College Humor called the police. The cartoonists were hauled away.
That night, Syd’s mother was at home, oblivious to all this, cooking dinner. The radio, as usual, was tuned to the six o’clock news. She hear the announcer's voice: “There was a demonstration this afternoon. Among the demonstrators arrested was Sydney Hoff.”
And Syd’s mother fainted.
As Syd told it to Bill, it was many hours later; late that night, when Syd was released from the Manhattan holding cell. Syd took the long subway ride back home, and walked back to their dark apartment building. Upon entering, his mother, who had recovered and was waiting up, calmly announced to her son, “Your dinner’s cold!”
Bill would always laugh out loud at this moment of motherly resignation. Syd was, for better or worse, a cartoonist from that point on." --Mike Lynch

___

"Yet, Syd’s mother didn’t find anything humorous about the day when Syd wound up in a holding cell at the local police station after supporting fellow members of the local Cartoonists Guild in a protest against below-scale rates paid by College Humor Magazine.* Although Syd’s prices were at scale, he decided to support his friends and join the protest march on the corner of 48th Street and 5th Avenue – until a police officer decided to haul them off to jail for obstructing pedestrian traffic. As they sat in the holding cell, the group sang “Solidarity Forever,” the popular union anthem originally written for the Industrial Workers of the World. Unfortunately for Syd, this made the evening news, which his parents heard over the radio while preparing dinner. “Among those cartoonists arrested was Sydney Hoff.” My grandmother immediately fainted. Later that evening, Syd was released from jail, and after a long subway ride home he walked through the front to be greeted by his mother’s welcoming words – “Your dinner is cold.” His kid sister, one of his great supporters, was quick to follow, asking “How’s Alcatraz?” " --Carol Edmonston
___

Ned Hilton was a founding member of the Cartoonists Guild of America in March 1936. According to the Times, June 7, 1936, the guild blacklisted six magazines: College Humor, Rockefeller Center Weekly, The Voyager, Promenade, Movie Humor and Real Screen Fun. These magazines refused the guild’s demand to pay a minimum of $15 for comic drawings and to pay for the drawings within thirty days of acceptance. At the time, Hilton was vice-president of the guild.

Eleven days later, Hilton and seventeen other cartoonists for arrested for picketing outside the College Humoroffice. According to the Times, the police confiscated 45 pencils from the cartoonists. After five hours at the police station cells, the cartoonists spent another four hours in the night court detention room. The magistrate dismissed the charge.---Alex Jay
___

The Buffalo Courier-Express, January 3, 1937, covered Coe’s guild presidency:

Artist Leader
Roland Coe Heads Guild

Former Buffalo artist first president of cartoonists: We have with us all kinds from John L. Lewis, champion of industrial unions to Robert Montgomery who captains the glamorous hosts of Hollywood in the Screen Guild. Now a new leader arises, Roland Coe, former Buffalo newspaper cartoonist, to fight the battles of his brother artists as first president of the Cartoonist Guild of America.
March, 1936, in New York City, seven men, headed by Mr. Coe, organized to force from national magazines a minimums price per drawing, second rights, and payment on acceptance. Growing from seven to several hundred in nine months the membership includes well-known men like Sidney Hoff, Frank Owen, William Gropper, Whitney Darrow, Jr., Ned Hilton, Charles Adams and Garrett Price.
So far most of the editors have signed the Guild contract agreeing among other things to a minimum price per drawing and of the guild. --Alex Jay

___

"First Exhibit of the Cartoonist Guild of America A rival of our own International, loaned to Pittsburgh for one week by the Cartoonist Guild of America original cartoon drawings, cover designs, and sketches by Howard Baer, A. Birnbaum, Roland Coe, Gregory D'Alessio, Whitney Darrow, Jr., Jaro Fabry, Hoff , Jay Irving, Melisse, Frank Owen, Garrett Price, Carl Rose, and many others. All of the drawings are complete with "gag" lines, and many have appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, Esquire ,-Life, Judge, Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. Take a few minutes this week for an exhibit of rare humor and interest." --ad in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov 16 1936 pg 11
___

*"College Humor Disputes Guild".  The New York Times. June 10, 1936.

1930s political cartoon by Syd Hoff (signed "A. Redfield")

Working-Class Heroes Project Redux

Blogger Will Shetterly has added a bit to the master-list of working-class superheroes I started a little while back (in 2005! holy smoke!) and the list now includes some more contemporary heroes I was not aware of way back when. Still, the paucity of actual poor or proletarian types who worked overtime in the long-underwear biz kind of proves my original point, that despite their origins in the sweat-shops of New York, superhero comics still had quite a bit of middle- and upper-class ideology embedded in their marrow.

I slightly updated my original list in 2006 and can't really think of any more Golden Age heroes to add besides Simon and Kirby's Vagabond Prince, aka Ned Oaks, a down-at-heels poet and writer of greeting card verses, perhaps modeled after the Gary Cooper character in Frank Capra's 1936 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

Of course, the real reason that we seem to have a hard time finding working-class heroes is because superhero comic books are all about rich people beating up poor people,* making the true heroes of the comics, from a class perspective, the villains. I wrote about this too, in a post about Solomon Grundy and "The Animated Corpse of the Working Class."

Maybe we could start a list of Working-Class Villains? The Wrecking Crew, Parasite, Sandman, and many of their cohorts were more prole than all the Reed Richards, Bruce Waynes and Tony Starks of the superhero-industrial complex combined.




*The other major themes of superhero comics, besides class anxiety are identity, violence, and sexuality, in case you were interested.

Marvel Boycott Diary #10: Join the Boycott Bullpen!

The funniest and most intellectually rigorous post about the Marvel Boycott this week comes from The Mindless Ones blog. Blogger "The Doubtful Guest" (aka "Joel") has posted a wonderful political-socio essay on the nature of the 1960s-70s Marvel Bullpen, collectivity, capitalism, and something called "Thrill-Power." Guaranteed to please, or at least temporarily entrance, those who may have a more critical or academic appreciation for Judge Dredd, Herb Trimpe, Marie Severin, and Jolly Jack.

"What I mean here is the concept of the Bullpen as something that entered the comics imagination with the 1960s Marvel Age, and continues to leave its historical trace in every comics Universe. The truncated history goes that, emerging from the Eisner & Iger independent sweatshop/studio, the Fordist assembly line and the 50s post-Comics Code audience exodus, the Bullpen formation was a way for publishers to ensure greater homogeneity and editorial control over their comics lines. In terms of Marvel’s history, it seems reasonable to suggest that the invocation of the Bullpen in the comics (through Stan’s columns, and the general tone of captions and narrative) as well as the real-life office was an attempt to keep that Stan & Jack/Stan & Steve Marvel Method Magic flowing beyond its original creative flush, and, of course, beyond the departures of the two artists. In actuality, it was also a way to ensure three things: vastly unequal profit shares (through those work-for-hire contracts Bissette mentions), a usually strict division of labour, and Marvel’s good old white male hegemony."

In other Boycott news, the cartoonist Frank Santoro (Storeyville, Cold Heat) joins the boycott in his Comics Journal column and Journal editor Tim Hodler has a great link from The New York Times about the efforts of famous musicians and pop stars to regain the copyrights of their old songs in the same way that the Kirby heirs are fighting for Kirby's copyrights.

Elsewhere, Kevin de Vlaming of the Fabler Blog relays a great Scott McCloud (Zot!, Understanding Comics) quote about the Kirby case:

"But hardly any artist in that end of the business was treated fairly in those days (much like in the music industry) and Kirby in particular deserved far more compensation — and RESPECT — than he received over the years from a royal procession of lawyers, asshole execs, and two-faced colleagues.

Anyone contesting that Marvel was largely built on Kirby’s ideas just doesn’t know their comics history."

Boycott Marvel!

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.

May Day 2007

Happy May Day!

some links about working class superheroes:

-are vampires the real working-class superheroes and are Marxists their arch-enemies?

-software designers for a game company dream up the next big Hollywood properties: The Plumber, Super Civil Servant, and The Fast Food Superhero

-is Spider-Man really working class?

-is The Thing working class?

-The Super-Hero League of Hoboken?

and, in the spirit of internationalism: Not Working Class but Communist Superheroes




-the Great 10

-The Collective Man

-Soviet Super-Soldiers

-Red Star

-Rocket Red

-Crimson Dynamo

-I don't know any Cuban superheroes --maybe Elpidio Valdes?

(top image: Jean-Claude Poirier's Supermatou from the French Communist Pif-Gadget; bottom image: Jaime Hernandez's Comrade 7)

Class, Dismissed

More about the idea of class in mainstream superhero comics, this time from The Absorbascon, a blog that seems to have a thing for the 1980s Hispanic superhero Vibe:

But, somehow, somewhen, the world changed. NASCAR became a "sport"; poker became a spectator event on television; Las Vegas became acceptable; Target & Wal-Mart supplanted Saks & Bloomingdales. Men stopped wearing hats in the streets and started wearing them in restaurants. Women turned in their high heels for sneakers. Ties were replaced by bluetooths and gowns by jeans. People no longer aspire to higher class, but struggle to maintain a lower- class facade, no matter what their finances.

Back in the day, Carter Hall was an archeologically-oriented sophisticate; Ted Grant was a medical student, then a wealthy celebrity. Nowadays, Carter is some sort of barely restrained savage and Ted Grant is some beer-swilling Wolverine-lite, and a reader can only assume that criminals can literally smell either one of them from a block away.

The post tends to conflate the economic realities of class with the trappings of culture, style and attitude that we clothe ourselves in, and often equates education with class, but it sparks off an interesting line of thought and the comments section has some great discussion.

As well, The Legion Abstract has assembled a nice list of recent discussions on this topic here.


(above: College student The Atom contemplates the power of the proletariat, art by Jon Chester Kozlak, All Star Comics #33, 1947)

Class Conflicts in Superhero Comic Books

Steven at The Roar of Comics makes some interesting points about class in superhero comics, with particular attention to Superman/Clark Kent:

Superman did and does fight for social change. In the Superman Archive, he clearly starts out as a populist hero, a champion of the working class, taking on war profiteers, state-run orphanages, crooked boxing promoters and poor mining conditions. Watch Superman lead a party of upper class twits into a mine and then bury them alive to teach them a lesson and tell me that's not a guy who fights the power.

And today he fights against class elitists like CEO (and ex-PRESIDENT) Lex Luthor and monarchic dictators like Darkseid. Compare that to Batman's typically lower class, obviously criminal, more anarchic villains. Superman fights against those who would impose their own version of order on the world, while Batman fights those who would destroy the order HE imposes on Gotham.

And while Matthew's right, it would be morally repugnant for Superman to enforce social change, Clark Kent can and does champion those changes from his job as a reporter for the Daily Planet.

Clark, after all, had a lower middle class rural upbringing and a strictly middle class life style once he became a reporter. Sure, it's a "glamor" career that makes him somewhat famous, I'm guessing he doesn't actually make that much money (Lois might). He might not have Peter Parker's money problems, but Clark almost certainly knows what it's like to worry about the bills.

But Superman is the exception here, not the rule. By nature, a superhero is someone whose unique abilities places them apart and above, sometimes literally above, most of society. That these unique beings then go on to be vigilantes, placing their own personal definition of justice above that of the police and democratically elected government, is elitist, aristocratic, and borderline fascist (I'm looking at you, Batman).

My own feelings on the issue were sketched out here, but I would tend to disagree: Superman is the basic template for all things superhero, including manifestations of class, and while not exactly aristocratic, he is certainly "king" of the castle in the superhero world and in the real world of corporate properties. Also, I'm not sure what a "class elitist" is but I'm not going to pick favourites in a fight between a middle-class vigilante alien who can make diamonds and a capitalist kingpin.

(All this started from a post about class in the future at Legion Abstract, apparently.)

As well, interested readers should check out this article by the great Jeet Heer on Red Son, a mediocre Superman comic from a few years back that re-imagines The Man of Steel as a communist.

Labor Day Cartoons, Comic Books, & Superheroes

(I thought this would be a good time to repost The Working Class Heroes Project from last year:)


"The super-hero comics of the 1940s also had this rough, working class quality. A cartoonist like Jack Kirby is a perfect example. His characters -- Captain America, for example -- were an extension of himself. Kirby was a tough little guy from the streets of New York's lower East Side, and he saw the world in terms of harsh, elemental forces. How do you deal with these forces? You fight back! This was the message of all the comic strips created during the Great Depression of the 1930s, from Popeye to Dick Tracy to Superman." --Robert Crumb, quoted in The R. Crumb Handbook

Working Class Heroes

In honour of Labour Day in Canada and the U.S., a few notes on the dearth of actual, blue-collar workers among the legions of superheroes created since the 1930s. The Working Class Heroes Project is a work in progress.

Introduction:

Most superheroes were created by working-class cartoonists in the sweatshops of the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Ironically, very few superheroes are actually working-class. Outside of Bob Burden's Mystery Men, where are the superheroic truck drivers, mechanics and steelworkers?

While many superheroes held down day-jobs as white-collar workers or professionals of various stripes, very few secret identities would qualify as blue-collar, industrial workers. At their point of origin, and as wish-fulfillment fantasies, superheroes are generally a privileged lot, and seem to fall roughly into four categories: playboy millionaires/royalty; educated professionals (doctors, journalists, pilots, scientists); professional athletes, entertainers, and broadcasters; and agents of the state (soldiers, police).

As Ariel Dorfman writes in The Empire's Old Clothes, "the superhero's triumph is based on the omission of the working class, the elimination of a community or collective which could transform the crisis and give it a meaning or new direction."

Here, then, is a tentative list of the rude mechanicals and producers of wealth who moonlight as superheroes, be they prole or lumpen.

(Thanks to Jeet Heer and the various Oddball Comics and Superman fans who have contributed thoughts on this project).

The List:Shoeshine Boy/Underdog -- shoeshine boy
Luke Cage/Powerman --Hero for Hire
Johnny Chambers/Johnny Quick --newsreel camera operator
Fred Drake/Stuntman --stuntman and movie double/extra
Pat Dugan/Stripesy --chauffeur to rich kid Sylvester Pemberton (Star-Spangled Kid)
Freddie Freeman/Captain Marvel JR --crippled newspaper delivery boy
Barbara Gordon/Batgirl --librarian
Louise Grant/The Blonde Phantom --secretary to P.I. Mark Mason
Buford T. Hollis/Razorback --truck driver
Ma Hunkel/Red Tornado --housewife/mother/grocery store owner
Kato --limo driver
Dinah Lance/Black Canary --florist
Hollis Mason/Nite Owl I --mechanic
Obelix --menhir delivery man
Peter Parker/Spider-man --photographer
Diana Prince/Wonder Woman --princess who works as nurse
Penrod Pooch/Hong Kong Phooey --janitor
Popeye --sailor
Chuck Taine/Bouncing Boy --delivery boy
The Steel Fist --factory worker

The Vagabond Prince --greeting card writer

Update:

Please feel free to add additions or corrections to this list. I am especially interested in heroes from the "Golden Age" (1930s-40s) or earlier (even Hercules cleaned stables --and David herded sheep).

Quirky Caveats

Masked adventurers and comic-strip stars welcome. Please note: for the purposes of this list, I am only interested in heroes with working-class jobs (ie, blue-collar/pink-collar/"proletarian"). I will accept tradespeople, factory workers, farm workers, unemployed/poor, craftsmen, etc. NO white-collar workers, rich people, politicians, government agents, or cops. I will accept Private Eyes and small business owners ("petit bourgeois") in a pinch.