Our Gods Wear Spandex (12 page)

Wylie's fiction is fairly downbeat and pessimistic, reflecting his dim view of American society. He seemed to think that human society was not ready to accept a superman, and that superpowers could only lead to isolation. Although
The Gladiator
may not sound like much today, but it electrified young readers in 1930, particularly the future creators of Superman.

After
The Gladiator
, pulp heroes began to acquire superhuman powers. Some of them did so by scientific means, others through the occult arts. The time for ordinary human abilities was past; so was the time for ordinary street clothes. Boredom with look-alike private eyes led to the development of garish outfits, which also helped to distinguish, and therefore market, the individual heroes. No one could confuse characters like the Shadow, Doc Savage, the Avenger, the Spider, or Black Bat with Nick Carter or Philip Marlowe. A quick glance at the cover told readers exactly what kind of adventure to expect.

It was in this atmosphere that America's first superstar crimefighter, the Shadow, arose. The Shadow appeared in 1930 as a narrator/announcer on a radio mystery program, but soon became a character in his own right with his own radio adventures and a pulp magazine published by Street and Smith. The Shadow was a sort
of gothic variation on costumed characters like the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro. The Shadow dressed all in black, punctuated with menacing splashes of red. A fedora and scarf obscured most of his face so the only visible features were his piercing eyes and aquiline nose. He was merciless, dispatching his foes with twin .45 automatics. He struck terror into the hearts of fictional criminals, satisfying the need for bloody vengeance felt by many urban Americans during the chaos of the Depression. He also possessed mystical powers learned during his travels in the Orient, including the ability to “cloud men's minds.”

The Shadow was created by Walter Gibson, who wrote under the alias Maxwell Grant. A prolific author, Gibson had a deep and abiding interest in occultism and wrote onstage patter for magicians like Houdini, Blackstone, and Thurston, as well as works on mysticism and divination. He drew on all these interests to create the Shadow, molding a character who was a “mystery in himself.” The Shadow combined Houdini's penchant for escapes with the hypnotic power of Tibetan mystics and the stage magicians' talent for creating illusions. “Such a character,” he notes, “would have unlimited scope when confronted by surprise situations, yet all could be brought within the range of credibility.”
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Gibson was also inspired by Rene Lupin, a master of disguise from the French pulps.

The Shadow was featured in two feature films, in 1937 and 1938, as well as a 1940 serial starring Victor Jory. Street and Smith launched a
Shadow
comic quite late in the game (1949) and DC Comics revived the character in 1972, and again in 1985. An unfortunate film made in 1994 proved him a hero for a bygone age. But in his prime, the Shadow inspired a horde of masked and/or superpowered avengers. It's safe to say that without the Shadow there never would have been a Batman.

As the Shadow is the most obvious precursor of Batman, so Doc Savage is the most immediate inspiration for Superman. Doc Savage was also inspired by a Philip Wylie novel,
The Savage Gentleman
. Nicknamed the “Man of Bronze” (as opposed to the “Man of Steel”), the character first appeared in
Doc Savage Magazine
#1 in 1933. Writer Lester Dent (writing under the alias Kenneth Robeson) aptly described him as having “the clue-following ability of Sherlock Holmes, the
muscular tree-swinging ability of Tarzan … and the morals of Jesus Christ”
⁶⁰
The first issue's cover pictured the hero standing in a Mayan ruin, reinforcing the occult and mystical overtones of his milieu.

Doc Savage's origin is pseudoscientific in nature. Like the Gladiator, he is trained by scientists to perform at peak human efficiency. But he also travels to Tibet for the prerequisite study of yoga and hypnotism. Savage then inherits a vast fortune, makes his headquarters on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. Like the Shadow, he and his entourage fight against evil. He also uses his fortune to invent all sorts of technological gadgets, including then-fanciful items like telephone answering machines, night-vision goggles, and automatic handguns. Doc Savage was popular in the Thirties, and enjoyed a renaissance in the Sixties with a series of paperback reprints. He appeared sporadically in other media—comics, radio, even a 1974 feature film. But, like the Shadow, Savage is essentially a relic of the Pulp Age, made irrelevant by commercial air travel and mass media. The Shadow and Doc Savage were followed by copy-cat heroes like the Whisperer, the Avenger, the Spider (cited by Stan Lee as an inspiration for Spider-Man), the Phantom Detective, the Ghost, the Black Hood, Captain Satan, even a female superhero called Domino Lady. As competition increased, these pulp superheroes became ever more flamboyant.

Ironically, all these masked heroes existed on the fringes of the mainstream society they had come to save—masks were for crooks, not lawmen. The pulp superheroes were dangerous, in marked contrast to the wholesome comic book superheroes that came later. They were usually men of science who fight against occult enemies, despite their own occult “mental powers.” Sorcerers and witch doctors were common enemies of the Shadow and Doc Savage. By contrast, the comic-book superheroes of the 1940s were often occult-powered creatures who spend a great deal of their time fighting against evil men of science. World War II brought both undreamed of destruction and unparalleled technological advance. The quaint old pulp heroes, with their Theosophical hoodoo and pseudo-scientific gadgets, were no longer relevant. It was time for new gods.

Sci-fi was being published in the pulps “years before they knew what to call it.”
⁶¹
Hugo Gernsback, a wealthy Jewish immigrant with a degree in electrical engineering, pioneered the genre in his pulp
Amazing Stories
in 1926. He called the stories “Scientifiction” which he described as “the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe type of story.”
⁶²
Gernsback's engineering background ensured that
Amazing Stories
placed a heavy emphasis on gadgetry, in turn influencing other tech-geek magazines like
Popular Mechanics
. Gernsback is considered so vital to the development of science fiction that sci-fi's highest literary award, the Hugo, is named for him.

For young dreamers mired in the misery of the Great Depression,
Amazing Stories
offered a compelling vision of the future. “World of Tomorrow” propaganda became an important government tool for keeping citizens looking beyond the trying times of the Thirties. The yarns in
Amazing Stories
and its imitators often depict a future free from poverty and disease, leaving readers free to worry about more exotic dangers like space aliens and mad scientists.

In 1928,
Amazing
featured Philip Nowlan's first Buck Rogers story and, later, the first stories by sci-fi pioneer E. E. “Doc” Smith (
The Skylark of Space
). Smith's stories of space-faring brotherhoods had a significant influence on comics in the 1950s, especially
Green Lantern
and
The Legion of Super-Heroes
. Gernsback launched
Scientific Detective Monthly
in January 1930, introducing the first of the modern invincible crime fighters, “Miller Rand, the Electrical Man,” a clear progenitor of Marvel Comic's later Iron Man.

Many prominent sci-fi writers—Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury—got their start in the sci-fi pulps and went on to influence both comics and the movies. The imagery and art of the sci-fi pulps had a huge impact on comic artists, who often recycled images directly from the pulps to the comics. The flying spacemen often portrayed on the covers of sci-fi pulps like
Amazing, Startling Stories
, and
Thrilling Wonder Stories
prefigured superheroes like Superman and Captain Marvel. As the new comic Olympians grew in popularity, however, they did so at the expense of the sci-fi pulps.

As the comics continued to peel away their readership, the sci-fi pulps responded by adding sex and horror to the mix. Sci-fi covers went from portraying future technocratic wonders to hosting a bevy of beauties bedeviled by bug-eyed monsters. In fact, the industry found that “pulp” and “horror” were two words that went together beautifully—or more accurately, hideously. Horror and pulp fiction consummated their ghastly marriage in
Weird Tales
, first published in 1922 by Clark Henneberger, an obsessive Edgar Allen Poe fan who saw opportunities in the pulp market for fantasy and horror.

Weird Tales
was nothing if not transgressive. Occult-themed tales leavened with strong sexual and countercultural content were its stock in trade. The magazine exuded a decadent aura, with nudity and depictions of occult activity featured in cover art.
Weird Tales
floundered commercially in its infancy, but soon achieved notoriety when a tale about necrophilia (C.M. Eddy's “The Loved Dead”) got the magazine banned in 1924.

Weird Tales
popularized the occult detective sub-genre with series like Seabury Quinn's Jules De Grandin stories. It also gave birth to the sword-and-sorcery genre—particularly the
Conan
tales of Robert E. Howard—and a new kind of ritualized occult horror typified by the arcane writings of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. As if all this weren't enough, it also acted as the launching pad for the careers of Fritz Leiber (
Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser
) and Robert Bloch (
Psycho
).

Weird Tales
became notorious for its sexy and surreal cover paintings, particularly those of Chicago housewife Margaret Brundage. Fiorello LaGuardia chased Brundage's naked women off
Weird Tales'
covers, only to unleash a parade of occultic images far more damaging to impressionable minds than a little naked flesh. Hannes Bok decorated the publication's covers with chthonic tableaux that seemed like photos from the depths of hell. J. Allan St. John, who worked in a lush and impressionistic fantasy style similar to legends like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, followed suit.

Like any successful pulp,
Weird Tales
inspired a host of imitators.
Ghost Stories
, from MacFadden Co., claimed to publish “true” ghost stories;
Tales of Magic And Mystery
(1927) specialized in stories of the occult and featured articles by Howard Thurston;
⁶³
Strange Tales
(1931) and
Strange Stories
(1939) unleashed hastily written tales of occult horror
⁶⁴
and
Unknown
(Street and Smith) treated the occult as “a kind of science operating under it own laws.”
⁶⁵
Although
Weird Tales
and its occult-oriented progeny fell by the wayside during the idyllic Eisenhower years, they had an incalculable influence on horror, sci-fi, and comic books, as well as on Neopaganism and the occult in general.

Like the comics (and rock ‘n’ roll, and video games), the pulps fell under the scrutiny of the censors. In the early 1930s, President Herbert Hoover sought to divert attention from his disastrous economic policies by forming the Committee on Recent Social Trends, which set about investigating moral turpitude in the pulps. The American public was more concerned with staving off financial ruin, however, so when the effort went nowhere, moral guardians like Fiorello La Guardia took up the cause and were more successful. “By the start of the 40s, with the nation on the verge of war, there was a kind of moral backlash,” says Harry Steeger, “it was the social pressures that killed off the pulps.”
⁶⁶
But it was also economic pressure. The pulps were pushed off the racks by comic books aimed at younger readers and paperback books aimed at older ones.

The pulps never really died, however. They simply morphed into post-war magazines like
Man's Life
and
Stag
, many of which morphed again into the skin mags of the late 1960s, inspired by the efforts of a young midwesterner named Hugh Hefner. And vestiges of the pulps still linger in the form of digest-sized story magazines like
Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction
, and
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
.