Sarasota Arts & Culture Magazine - September/October 2007 - (Page 60)

“faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” along with his superhuman abilities. It was an important difference, making him more emotionally accessible to the readership. In 1938, people needed a new kind of “New Deal” hero that represented America’s growing economic and military might. He represented democratic justice in a world threatened by Fascism and Communism: Superman was Franklin D. Roosevelt in costume. A hero who entered into the imagination of children everywhere, “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” Siegel and Shuster’s creation went on to live in radio, television and film. Superman first ran in Action Comics No 1., cover dated June 1938, and transformed the infant comic book industry. Then came Batman in Detective Comics No. 27, drawn by Bob Kane and written by Bill Finger, and a pantheon of heroes of all stripes soon followed; the list is endless. Of all the superheroes, perhaps the most interesting in terms of her creation was Wonder Woman. In 1941, DC Comics asked Dr. William Moulton Marston, a Harvard psychologist and one of the inventors of the lie detector, to consult on the creation of a “female Superman.” An established writer, Marston was one of the first defenders of comic books from charges that the genre was psychologically damaging to children. Going beyond the role of advisor, he went on to write and develop the character of Wonder Woman. During the summer of love in 1967, an estimated 75,000 young Americans put on velvet bellbottoms, Indian shirts and flowers in their hair, and headed for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It was the birthplace of psychedelic street theater and it captured the attention of many cartoonists, who having had their drug-induced epiphanies, headed for the City by the Bay. One of them was Robert Crumb, who arrived in the Haight District of San Francisco in January 1967. Dissatisfied with his life and occupation as a cartoonist for American Greeting Cards in Cleveland, he realized San Francisco was where he had to be. Crumb is the creator of the bestknown counter-culture icon of all time, Mr. Natural. A long-graybearded old man in a smock and hiking boots, he represented both the free speech movement of the time and at a deeper level, celebrated what Crumb called, “the raging Id … blatant sexual images became a big thing, still happy and positive at first. But as time went on, I moved further and further away from mass entertainment. The sexual element became increasingly sinister and bizarre.” Crumb’s underground comic strips combined the radical politics of the time with his penchant for putting his female characters through comic contortions that somehow indulged his own private sexual fantasies. Contemporary with Crumb was the psychedelic imagery of Victor Moscoso, appearing in issues of Zap Comix. Moscoso strips read backwards and forwards, right side up and up side down: brilliant drawing. Like Crumb, freedom of speech was inexorably connected to overt sexual and violent imagery. Spain Rodriguez had a similar approach to Crumb: the opening caption to his Down at the Kitty Kat reads, “They were all there, the pimps, the fags, the whores, the curious, the alcoholic, the weird of the late ‘50s, blues lovers, Canadian bikers, thrill seekers, junkies, insomniacs, hepcats, and, uh, oh ya, the North Fillmore intelligentsia.” In an almost detached, flowchart graphic style, Chris Ware’s comics continue the ‘60s underground tradition of Crumb and his generation. Describing his approach, he writes, “I make my pictures look cold and dead because I believe that only as you read them they come alive… The closest analogy is with music notes on a paper. They’re just marks, unless you understand music, can read them, and then it becomes music … inside your brain.” Over the last 60 years, the development of Japanese manga comics and its influence on youth culture is comparable only to that of DC Comics in the 1940s. Manga’s emphasis on 60 : : arts and culture magazine

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