Our Gods Wear Spandex (15 page)

Like so many “uniquely American inventions,” the modern comic strip was actually born in England. As early as 1731, cartoonist-turned-fine-artist William Hogarth was using sequential pictures to tell stories, first in his cautionary tale on easy virtue,
A Harlot's Progress
, and then with an eight-panel sequel called
A Rake's Progress
, which warns of the dangers of drinking and whoring. In fact, cartoon features, modern political cartooning, and word balloons all first surfaced in 18th-century England. Cartoons were originally used for political propaganda in newspapers, but many cartoons and strips were printed onto single sheets that were sold on the street.
⁸⁸

Cartoons migrated to America and got their start in
The New York World
in 1893. Two years later, Richard Outcault's pioneering strip
Hogan's Alley
appeared in the
Sunday World
, inaugurating the modern Sunday comics.
⁸⁹
Outcault, considered the father of modern comic strips, was the first to use panels and speech-balloons together, and introduced color to the strips.
⁹⁰

Comics got off to a rocky start in America. Christian busybodies attacked them for promoting hilarity on the Sabbath.
⁹¹
Hogan's Alley
was also criticized for its portrayal of immigrant squalor, leading Outcault to create Buster Brown, a more socially acceptable, middle-class sprite who was later appropriated by the Brown Shoe Company for its logo. Despite these early setbacks, however, comic strips survived and thrived.
Mutt and Jeff
, the first major daily strip, created by Bud Fisher in 1907, ran uninterrupted for an astonishing seventy-five years. Mutt and Jeff were the cover stars for
Famous Funnies
#1, the series often inaccurately cited as the first American comic book. The duo also became major stars for the All-American Comics Co., the firm that later would bring pagan gods out of the history books and into the funny books.

Other classic strips include George McManus'
Bringing Up Father
, Chic Young's
Blondie
, Frank King's
Gasoline Alley
, George Herriman's
Krazy Kat
, and
The Katzenjammer Kids
, created by Rudolph Dirks. These strips became wildly popular and have since become American icons. They were immediately tapped for licensed merchandising, a process that eventually led to the creation of the modern comic book. Cartoonists were major celebrities in those days, and many made personal appearances on the Vaudeville circuit. Winsor McKay, creator of
Little Nemo in Slumberland
and one of the very first motion-picture animators, was so talented that he could reportedly draw detailed images and simple animations while addressing an audience. He was also, incidentally, a dedicated Freemason.
⁹²

Like the first comic strips, what we call “comic books” were originally developed in England by collecting reprinted comic panels and strips. Caricature magazines
like
McLean's Monthly Sheet of Caricatures
appeared early in the 19th century.
The Comic News
appeared in the 1860s and
Funny Folks
premiered in 1874, followed by
Comic Cuts
(1890) and
Illustrated Chips
(1891).
Ally Sloper's Half Holiday
became the first true comic book, published in May 1884.
⁹³

In America, comic-strip characters became vehicles for licensing almost as soon as they appeared, and comic books were initially a part of that phenomenon. Most of the earliest comic books were collections of reprints from the funny pages, used as lucrative promotional items for gas stations, toy stores, and soap companies. When the Depression hit, the publishing industry took it hard. A struggling salesman named Max Gaines made a deal with the Eastern Color Printing Co. to produce a comic book called
Famous Funnies
, which he presented as a promotional item to stores and manufacturers. The first issue sold out, inspiring other publishers to snap up every available newspaper strip for reprinting.

Comic books were gravy for almost everyone involved. They were cheap to print and gave printing companies a lucrative way to keep newspaper presses running in hard times. They gave the industry a new revenue stream and advertisers a new way to attract customers. Kids loved the content and parents appreciated them keeping the kiddies occupied on Sunday afternoon.

Although most of the early comic strips were humorous, adventure strips were not long in coming. One of the first, Harold Grey's
Little Orphan Annie
, appeared in 1924. Popeye, the marble-mouthed sailor man, was a superhero prototype who premiered in E. C. Segar's
Thimble Theatre
strip in 1929. Roy Crane's
Wash Tubbs
began as a humor strip in 1924, but evolved into a globetrotting high-adventure strip with the addition of Cap'n Easy in 1929. Chester Gould's hard-boiled
Dick Tracy
made its debut in 1931, complete with sci-fi elements and outlandish villains that inspired later comic-book supervillains.

More recognizable superheroes found their way into the funnies. Buck Rogers drifted in from the pulps and became the star of the first sci-fi strip in 1929.
Flash Gordon
, created by Alex Raymond, appeared five years later. Both had a huge
impact on superheroes, particularly in the late 1950s, and were frequently adapted into other media.
Mandrake the Magician
—often called the first true superhero—was conjured into the physical plane by Lee Falk in 1934. Two years later, Falk summoned the Phantom, who created the visual model of the superhero in his form-fitting bodysuit, nifty skull logo, and eyemask. The Phantom, called “The Ghost Who Walks,” was essentially a circus-costumed version of Tarzan— the nearly dead son of a British sea captain who is restored to health by a tribe of pygmies. A harbinger of things to come, the Phantom establishes a hereditary secret society whose members are sworn to “fight all forms of piracy, greed, and cruelty.”

The idealistic fantasy of the early comic heroes came face-to-face with real vice during Prohibition. Mobsters were looking for new sources of revenue. Because of their high volume and low cost, comics became an ideal tool for organized crime to launder money through the strictly cash-and-carry news-stand business. The Mob quickly extended their hold on distributors as well. As Jones writes: “The volume of product and cash opened up new opportunities for many of the standby residual benefits—money laundering, cash skimming, smuggling.”
⁹⁴
Indeed, politicians like Thomas Dewey and Fiorello La Guardia went after the pulps, not just for their moral transgressions, but because of their financial relationship to the rackets. Many publishers did have cozy relationships with the Mob, both in business and social settings. Many others ran their businesses with ethical standards hardly better than those of gangsters. The irony is that, while comics and pulps helped criminal gangs financially, they also popularized the vigilante heroes bent on bringing them down.
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This paradox created a strange symbiotic relationship between the mobsters and the new gods.

The pulps not only provided the comics with most of their heroes and themes, they also provided the industry with most of its key personnel, most notably Harry Donenfeld, godfather of DC Comics, and Martin Goodman, founder of Marvel Comics.

Donenfeld started his career as a salesman for a printing company, but soon moved into publishing. He formed an alliance with the distributor Eastern News, which had connections to both legitimate business interests and the mob. Eastern handled feminist and Spiritualist magazines, as well as purported health journals like
Sex Monthly
, catering to the forbidden tastes of a hypocritical American popular culture that couldn't acknowledge its appetite for booze, porn, radical politics, and alternative spirituality. Donenfeld used his extensive business, government, and Mafia connections to keep the business growing, to the point, Gerard Jones writes that, “Margaret Sanger's condoms, Hugo Gernsback's science fiction, and Frank Costello's whiskey could ride together on trucks and on trains and through post offices where the inspectors were on the take.”
⁹⁶

Donenfeld built an empire that included
Paris Nights
and
Pep!
and earned him a reputation as a pornographer in a time when any hint of nudity could cause a magazine to be taken off the stands and its publisher yanked into court. When publishers began to test these social boundaries, Donenfeld was, predictably, on the cutting edge. He paid his artists well and they delivered what discerning gentlemen wanted.

The government crackdown on the Mob in 1936 encouraged publishers with shady connections to legitimize their businesses. Donenfeld was in a particularly vulnerable position because of his relationship with organized crime and the high visibility of his sexy
Spicy
pulps. Convinced that he needed to find a safer line of work, Donenfeld turned to comic books as a safe and profitable alternative.

If Harry Donenfeld was a rakish opportunist, Martin Goodman, founder of Marvel Comics, was a true believer—a pulp fan turned pulp salesman turned pulp publisher. He formed his first company, Western Fiction Publishing Co., with future Archie Comics publisher Louis Silberkleit. His business strategy was
to capitalize on popular titles by publishing knock-offs of them. In 1936, he put out a series starring a blond Tarzan called
Ka-Zar
. In 1938, he played off of
Amazing Stories
with a series
Marvel Science Stories
. The success of
Unknown
and
Weird Tales
inspired him to launch two “shudder pulps”—M
ystery Tales
and
Uncanny Tales
that featured endless retellings of the old girl-tortured-by-fiend yarn.

When the pulps began to flounder, Goodman, convinced that “comic magazines” were the wave of the future, began to run strips in his pulps to test the waters. In 1939, he founded
Marvel Comics
#1. whose success would launch an empire.
⁹⁷
Alarmed by the rise of fascism in Europe, Goodman prompted his young editor Joe Simon and his partner Jack Kirby to come up with a patriotic spin on the popular hero Captain Marvel. They called him Captain America. After a brief legal skirmish over similarities between this hero and a previous character named the Shield, the Captain became a major hit. The world was ready for new gods—and the new gods were ready for the world.