FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (1)

By: HILOBROW
March 2, 2024

Some years ago, HILOBROW friend Greg Rowland pointed out that the 1990 movie Dances With Wolves ought to be regarded as a sentimental remake of the 1970 revisionist Western Little Big Man. The series FIRST TIME AS COMEDY will offer additional examples of this recursive (and often, though not always middlebrow) syndrome.

SUPERDUPERMAN vs. WATCHMEN

Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood‘s “Superduperman” (1953). Click for larger version.

MAD, the satirical magazine founded in 1952 by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, was launched as a comic book written and edited by Kurtzman, and featuring illustrations by Kurtzman, Wally Wood, Will Elder, Jack Davis, and John Severin. It was not, at first, a hit with readers. This changed after issue #4 (April–May 1953), thanks to Kurtzman and Wood’s satirical superhero comic “Superduperman.”

Note that in HILBROW’s periodization, 1953 is a “cusp” year between the cultural “decades” of the Forties (1944–1953) and Fifties (1954–1963). “Superduperman” is an early warning signal of seismic cultural shifts.

Kurtzman and Wood’s comic viciously parodies the comic-book superheroes Superman and Captain Marvel — then at the height of their popularity. Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent becomes Clark Bent, an emaciated dogsbody (assistant to the copy boy) at the Daily Dirt. When he’s not being abused by the copy boy (a child), he lasciviously uses his x-ray vision to peek into the ladies’ powder room. He only dons his Superduperman costume to fight the Unknown Monster who threatens the city of Cosmopolis in order to impress intrepid reporter Lois Pain.

Captain “Marbles” won’t be lending Superduperman a hand. He has given up fighting crime in order to prey upon ordinary mortals — whom he has come to despise. In fact, Captain Marbles — whose logo is a dollar sign — reveals himself to be the Unknown Monster! As Superduperman tries and fails to defeat him, Captain Marbles recounts that one day when he was punching his way through a mountain to capture a gang of jewel thieves, “Suddenly it hit me! Why am I punching my way through this mountain?”

Superduperman does triumph over Captain Marbles, eventually. When he brags to Lois Pain that his true identity is Clark Bent, though, she leaves him in the dust. “So what?” she demands. “Yer still a creep.”

You can read the story here.

In a 2005 Entertainment Weekly interview about Watchmen, the 1986–1987 comic which deconstructs and satirizes the superhero concept, and which has been described as “the moment comic books grew up,” Watchmen creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons would explain their story’s inception: “We wanted to take ‘Superduperman’ 180 degrees — dramatic, instead of comedic.”

PS: Though we’re starting out with this example, in a couple of respects it’s an anomalous example of the FTC syndrome. For one thing, Watchmen isn’t earnest, middlebrow, sentimental. For another, Moore himself is the one who pointed out what he’d done.

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FIRST TIME AS COMEDY (1)

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