‘Also, I recall the reassuring, almost sacred aura that surrounded product names in their distinctive, emblematic fonts. The Coca-Cola logo, for example, with its curls and swoops, spoke to both classicism and refinement, and would not have looked incongruous above the radiator grill of a prestigious European car. Combine that with a bottle shape almost identical to stone-age sexual fetish figures that I’ve seen, and what you have is an assault upon the individual by semiotic means and with commercial purpose; an intrusion with immense subliminal persuasive power, on many unsuspected levels. When we speak of brand names, we should ask ourselves just what the substance is that’s being branded, that’s to have the sizzling, red-hot logo stamped upon it, if not our own forebrains.

  ‘Finally, it came to me that the heroic costumed characters that had so captivated me when I was small could be effectively reduced, within my infant consciousness, to a chest emblem and a colour combination. Long before I knew Thunderman’s name, I knew the T-shaped cloud and thunderbolt, and would speak of him as “the gold and purple one”. Now, if commercial packaging is styled intentionally to attract and to habituate an adult audience, how much more potent might it be with products that, for forty or so years, were aimed exclusively at young, impressionable children? Might that not be enough to shape and to enslave a generation, keeping them, like junkies, in a needy and infantilised condition where they cannot individuate successfully, or become genuine adults?

  ‘And could that not explain the dwindling colony of people who’ve been harmed by this innocuous comic book conditioning? To judge from the depressive tone apparent in most mainstream comics threads, the audience is no longer enjoying the material that it is nonetheless addicted to. The hardcore comic book habitué appears to have been placed in the predicament reported frequently amongst long-time users of crack cocaine: the strong sense of diminishing returns, with every pipe attempting to get back to the angelic purity of that first hit, with each attempt more disappointing than the last – but simply stopping is, of course, out of the question. What makes the comics fan’s dilemma worse, if anything, is that the “first hit” that they hope to recreate with each month’s issue is the irretrievable, lost rush of their own childhoods.’

  There was more, a page or two, but Worsley figured that he’d read enough. He looked up at the silent phalanx of United Supermen, Vindictives, Freak Forcers, Omnipotent Pre-Teen Militiamen and Unrealistic Fivers crowding on his windowsills or bookshelves, but not one of them saw fit to dignify Finefinger’s diatribe with comment. He knew how they felt. If Finefinger’s hare-brained hypothesis was right, then every fan’s collection – which included Worsley’s own – would be like hoarding hypodermics, blackened spoons and bootlaces; or like those cardboard boxes in that room in Brandon Chuff’s long-gone apartment. Worse, if what Finefinger said was true, it might prove actionable. Irritably, he mulled all this over as he let his barely focussed gaze slide back towards the muted flat-screen television on the room’s far side.

  Antibodies, armoured T-cells, were by now deployed and had reclaimed the glorious debris, with the viral invader forced out into January’s early dusk, and skirmishes all through the violet hour into the black ones after. Scores arrested, scores more injured and five dead, not counting the attending officers who’d take their own lives in despair over the next few days. Fragments of the conglomerated thing were left behind, having in death reclaimed their names and individuality, along with shouting placards and adhesive loud assertions, hallways ankle-deep in slogan and the tatter-litter of flags from both sides in various nineteeth- and twentieth-century conflicts seemingly still unresolved, all of it destined for future musea of American convulsion. The great effort to expose troublesome fact as fiction, while establishing pulp picture-story narrative as universal fact, slowly evaporated over Washington. Into the chill pandemic night, electoral processes resumed their clockwork action, and fatal upheaval gradually subsided to become a hoax, a dream, or an Unlikely Story. Everything would be rewritten, reimagined, retrofitted. There would be no damage to the continuity.

  Examining the cerise tyre tread left across a white paunch by the waistband of his boxers, Worsley Porlock took in none of this. He was still thinking about Milton Finefinger’s contention that fun-loving hobbyists at a convention, of whatever age, could be equivalent to toothless maniacs talking nonsense in a crack den. Worsley threw down the unfinished magazine on to his coffee table, where its impact sent a seismic ripple through the less stable collectibles that were assembled there.

  Finefinger, he told himself, was just another bitter and resentful guy, exactly like Dan Wheems, who couldn’t take the pace of today’s comics industry, and who now seemed intent on spoiling it for everybody else. Well, Worsley didn’t – couldn’t – buy it. The idea that superheroes were like some insidious substance that would stunt their followers’ emotional development was so much horseshit.

  On the table, Worsley’s bobble-headed Rottweiler nodded in uncontrollable agreement.

  17. (December, 2012)

  Some Last Thoughts: The Denny Wellworth Interview

  WHEEMS: Denny. How’s it going, man?

  WELLWORTH: Ah, you know. I have bad days, I have worse days. Good to see you, Dan. Thanks for coming in. Is this that interview thing that we talked about?

  WHEEMS: Yeah, if that’s still OK. You’ve got to let me know, though, if you’re getting tired. Don’t want to wear you out.

  WELLWORTH: Don’t worry, Dan. It’s not the interview that’s going to kill me. What was your first question?

  WHEEMS: Yeah, right, sorry. I suppose I’d like to get some background. What was the scene like, when you were first in comics?

  WELLWORTH: The comics scene? There wasn’t one. Oh, there were comics, just like there was bubblegum, but, then, we didn’t have a bubblegum scene either. How things were back then, it’s probably hard to imagine from today’s perspective. I was born in 1940, so I was a teenager in the late fifties when I started trying to find work as a writer. And it was a very working-class environment at that time – not just comic books, but paperbacks and magazines. They had an audience of mostly working people, and it was a field where a wise-ass kid from a working family could maybe find some paying work. I’d hang out in the diners where I knew that writers went to get their lunch, so I met Sherman Glad, Heinz Messner, Artie Leibowitz, all those guys. They did comics, sure, but what I’m trying to get at is, back then, to make a living, we’d do anything that looked borderline legal. Other than inventing all those costumed heroes for American, Sherman turned out pulp paperbacks under around a dozen pen names. He did science fiction, westerns, fantasy, historical adventure, hard-boiled crime, pornography …

  WHEEMS: What, Sherman Glad? You’re serious?

  WELLWORTH: (LAUGHS) Dan, you’re a youngster, so I don’t expect you to appreciate the vast importance of pornography to young, aspiring writers in the 1950s. There must have been two, three dozen publishers who specialised in literary stroke-material back then, before home video or the internet. And then there was Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias! What bliss it was to be young in those golden days! (LAUGHS) No, seriously, you were a struggling writer and you couldn’t sell the Kerouac-copy masterpiece that you were working on, then you could always turn out Teenage Nympho Nurses in a weekend and make maybe fifty bucks. In fact, I’d wager Teenage Nympho Nurses and the like have saved more cherished literary careers than anyone could comfortably admit to. (LAUGHS) So, how it was in those days, you’d take work where you could find it. I’d done comics scripting work for the newspaper strips, and figured I could scale the process up to handle six- or eight-page stories in a comic book.

  WHEEMS: I didn’t know you’d done newspaper strips back then. Which ones?

  WELLWORTH: Oh, well, you know, I wrote eighteen months of Operative Z.

  WHEEMS: I thought that that was what’s his name, who did Zoom Wilson? Andrew Donald?

  WELLWORTH: Yeah. I’d thought the same myself. So had Bill Terensen, the penciller, and Harvey Norse, who inked the thing. We all thought we were Donald’s only help on Operative Z, and it turns out the bastard wasn’t doing any of it! In my life, I never met a sneakier son of a bitch. Even his fatal auto accident, it was a suicide attempt. His second, as it turns out, and both times he’d tried to take somebody with him. No, don’t get me started on the guy. I only mention him to illustrate that back then you could find yourself doing all kinds of work. The time I most enjoyed, working in comics, that was working for Roy Shaw on Inappropriate and Disturbing. I’m not saying Shaw was any better than the others – like, the pay was nothing special – but he always treated me OK. He trusted you enough to let you follow up on your ideas, you know? It was a lot of fun, working with people like Slim Whittaker and Robert Novak and the rest, trying out new things and improving myself as a writer. Sure, I made a lot more money later on, but later on was when the comics industry had turned to something different, and the work got less and less enjoyable, until we reach the present situation where the superhero movies rake in more and more, while all the superhero comic books are haemorrhaging readers by the month. No one knows what to do. Nobody ever thinks, ‘Hey, maybe if we did, like, better comic books, then things don’t have to end in smoking ruin!’

  WHEEMS: I know what you mean. Where did the comics business go wrong, do you think?

  WELLWORTH: I think it’s more it never went right in the first place. I mean, when comics started, they were seen as throwaway junk meant to keep the lower classes happy. I guess the idea was that poor people are stupid, childish and won’t understand a narrative unless there’s pictures with it. And I’m talking here about newspaper strips, before the comic book was a larcenous gleam in Albert Kaufman’s eye. So when the comic book appears, it’s aimed at the same class, and most of its top talent comes from that class, too. With Kaufman, when him and Sid Rosenfeld stole Thunderman from Kessler and Schuman, what they did was found the comics industry using bootlegging as a business model, one that’s largely unchanged to the present day: find someone talented – Kessler and Schuman, Robert Novak, Sherman Glad, Joe Gold, Slim Whittaker, and on and on – then cheat them out of their creations and discard them. If they’re working-class creators like, well, all the guys I just mentioned, then it’s easier to swindle them because they weren’t brought up by families that spent a lot of time discussing lawyers, contracts or percentages. You cheat them, you discard them, you get other guys to write and draw their characters, then you strip-mine the property for all it’s worth until the end of time. That’s how it works, right?

  WHEEMS: If ‘works’ is the word. It’s not working so good at present, from the look of things.

  WELLWORTH: Yeah, well, that’s because the comics business made the same dumbass mistake that all industry made, which was assuming the resource they were exploiting to be infinite and inexhaustible. They figured that they could beat up and rob a Joe Gold with impunity, because there’d be another talent just as good and just as robbable along within a year or two. Now, you and I both know the sun will have grown old and dim and there still won’t have been another Gold, but management are not creative individuals and they have never understood the first thing about how creators work. So, when a new Joe Gold fails to show up, you give his books to artists who can do lame versions of Gold’s style, but can’t invent a single thing that’s new. And when there’s no replacement Sherman Glad, because he tried to form a union so they fired him, then they’re just left with the eager-beaver fans they hired to take the place of Sherman and Heinz Messner and the rest, people like Brandon Chuff. These people, they’re not artists, they’re not writers, they’re just fans of artists and of writers, and the generation that comes after them will be the fans of fans, and so on, to the directionless mess we’re in at present.

  WHEEMS: What you were saying about Sherman Glad trying to start a union, it’s funny – my friend Milton Finefinger has this proposal in up at American, it’s for a series about the old 1940s super-team, the Union of Super Americans, a lot of whom were Sherman Glad’s creations. Milton’s idea was to depict the team like it was really an attempt to unionise the superheroes, with characters from working backgrounds such as Thunderman on one side, and aristocrats and millionaires like Moon Queen and King Bee making the argument against. Milton’s calling it Union.

  WELLWORTH: Yeah, I know Finefinger. That laugh he has, it makes me want to kill him, but he’s a nice guy, and of the current crop, he’s a good writer. And this Union thing sounds like a good idea, almost like it’s referring to the thing with Glad and Messner and the other guys, by making it about their characters. That’s clever, but I’ll tell you what, it’s never going to come out, not in a million years. There’ll be some perfectly good reason why it can’t be published, that’s entirely unconnected with the fact that it’s about forming a union, but you’re never going to see that book. Not from American. If Dave Kessler and Si Schuman had had access to a union, then the entire comics business as we know it never would have happened.

  WHEEMS: Well, I guess we’ll see. You don’t see the industry changing any time soon, then?

  WELLWORTH: No, I don’t. I don’t see where the impetus or energy would come from to do that. It’s like I said, that comics was a medium created for – and largely by – the lower class, but those creators are all dead or have retired, embittered, from the field. So, what you’ve got is comics that are by, for, and about the middle class, exclusively. And as for how well they compare with comics as they used to be, I think that if you look at all the superhero movies that do well, you’re going to find they’re adaptations of things that Joe Gold or Sherman Glad created fifty, sixty years ago. When they run out of old material, what are they going to do? Start making movies out of seventies and eighties junk like Best Guy? (LAUGHS)

  WHEEMS: So you’re not a big Gene Pullman fan, I take it? (LAUGHS)

  WELLWORTH: Gee, Dan, that’s remarkably perceptive. What gave me away? Was it how I left Massive for American when I got ill, because at Massive under Pullman they refused to let me have medical cover? Or I have I got some other subtle little ‘tell’ that I’m not consciously aware of, like the way I automatically mime strangling or stabbing someone if his name is mentioned? (LAUGHS) Did I ever tell you my Gene Pullman story, of why I should probably be the most hated man in comics? No? This was the seventies, when I was editor-in-chief at Massive, right before I got promoted sideways to direct their more creator-friendly Legend line. So anyway, I was there in my office up on Lexington, having a script conference with Mark Shane, and we’re going over stuff, and suddenly Gene Pullman marches in, flings the door open, real dramatic, and tells me he’s angry, like I couldn’t have deduced that by myself. Now, bear in mind that Pullman’s just a junior writer at this point, OK? So, he starts yelling how one of the characters in some book, maybe it was Freak Force, has done something that Pullman thinks is immoral, something he would never do. I think they’d, like, annihilated an entire parallel universe or something, which, to be totally fair, is something I would never do myself. But that’s beside the point. Pullman demands that I pull publication on the book, or else he’s going to quit there and then. I tell him I’m not going to do that, but that I accept his resignation. Pullman looks stunned, as if he’d not imagined in a million years that his dramatic gesture could work out like that. He turns, completely speechless, and he staggers from my office like he’s going to the gallows. Me and Mark get back to what we were discussing, and then, like five minutes later, Pullman literally crawls back in to beg me for his job back. When I say he crawls, it isn’t even on his hands and knees. He’s prostrate, flat down on the floor, and the guy’s weeping. What was worst, you know how Pullman’s sort of … wide? Like from the front he’s in CinemaScope, but side-on he looks kind of flat? Well, you’ve got no idea just how disturbing Pullman looks until you’ve had him crawling at you, sobbing and face down. Honestly, Dan, it was like an unusually wide and lumpy rug was halfway through developing a nervous system. Frankly, it was hard to look at. In the end, I told Pullman to get back to whatever he was working on and we’d forget the incident had ever happened. Naturally, years later, I’m at a convention with Mark Shane and he says, ‘Denny, you do realise that if you’d not cancelled Pullman’s resignation all those years ago, you’d have spared everyone at Massive from the hell they’re going through? You’re like one of those bastards who passed up the chance to stab Hitler to death when he was eight years old.’ (LAUGHS) What could I say? The truth was, I felt sorry for the guy. Also, I couldn’t bear to see him undulating on my floor a second longer. He looked like a mollusc that worked out.

  WHEEMS: You know, when I first started reading comics, when I was, like, twelve or something, I liked Massive, sure, but what I liked best were the ones my parents wouldn’t let me read, like Inappropriate or Disturbing.

  WELLWORTH: Dan, I’m blushing. I feel like we ought to get a room or something.

  WHEEMS: No, I mean it. Back then, if you mentioned comics to someone, they wouldn’t automatically assume that you were talking about just one genre, about superheroes. There were horror stories, war stories, science fiction and a dozen other kinds of story. How come it was superheroes came to dominate the industry?

  WELLWORTH: Beats me. I’ve always done my best to dodge the fucking things. What is it about superheroes? Let me see. Well, they’re a home-grown American phenomenon that never really seemed to take ahold anywhere else. It’s like they’re something that emerges naturally out of our culture. Partly I think that they’re from our constitutionally guaranteed entitlement to American sneakiness. Like, if you’re going to do a thing that might conceivably land you in trouble, then it’s best to do it with a mask on, or dressed up like something else, or both. If it’s the Boston Tea Party, we dress up as cartoon Red Indians. If it’s a torchlight rally with the Klan, then we dress up as ghosts. So if we’re self-appointed vigilantes with a taste for beating up the underclass, it’s only natural that we should dress as foxes, beetles, bees, attack dogs, or, I don’t know, platypuses or whatever. Also, there’s our attitude to violence. It’s a country where, since the frontier days, nobody trusts anybody else, and so we sleep with guns under our pillows, and our ideal way of settling a situation is to shoot someone from ambush. We’re not fond of conflicts where we haven’t got some kind of tactical advantage, so the superhero fantasy of being indestructible or having huge, retractable steel teeth is kind of reassuring. They’re our dream life. They have morals, they help the oppressed, and, with their special powers, are outstandingly good at something – all the things we haven’t, don’t, or aren’t. They are our negative space, ethically, and simultaneously they are the American Dream’s most apparent white supremacist embodiment. No, no, please don’t protest. I’m on a roll. As for what the superhero means to its contemporary audience of largely adult hobbyists, I’m not so sure. I think for some of them, they took it up around thirteen as an alternative to normal puberty, a way they could duck out on all the trials – and also on the personal development – by relocating to United Supermen headquarters for the next ten, thirty, fifty years, until all of the social responsibility was over. They’re a way to maintain emotional stasis, and to stay connected to a relatively carefree childhood in the face of a progressively more complex and more alienating world. I think that’s why they’re so important to the readers, but I think there’s something else as well. I think that characters like Thunderman are actually important to the fabric of America.