The Science of Superheroes , livre ebook

The Science of Superheroes
Lois H. Gresh Robert Weinberg




John Wiley Sons, Inc.
Copyright 2002 by Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg. All rights reserved. Introduction copyright 2002 by Dean Koontz. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gresh, Lois H.
The science of superheroes / Lois H. Gresh, Robert Weinberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-02460-0 (cloth)
1. Comic books, strips, etc.-History and criticism. 2. Science. I. Weinberg, Robert. II. Title.
PN6714 .G74 2002
741.5 09-dc21
2002071323
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
As always, dedicated in loving memory to Big Daddy Sam, who will always be my Superhero. Special thanks to Dan Gresh, who told me about the 1993 Death of Superman plot. Many thanks to our agent, Lori Perkins, and to Stephen S. Power of John Wiley Sons for letting us write this book.
-Lois H. Gresh
To Larry Charet, who opened the first full-time comic book shop in Chicago thirty years ago and who cofounded the Chicago Comicon in 1976. A pioneer in the comic book marketplace and good friend for three decades.
-Robert Weinberg
On the internet at:
www.sff.net/people/lgresh
and
www.robertweinberg.net
Contents
Preface
A Word about the Law
Introduction Men of Steel, Feathers of Fury by Dean Koontz
Chapter 1 More Powerful than a Speeding Locomotive: Superman
The Superman Legend Begins
What Makes Superman Super?
Alien Visitors
The Drake Equation
Rare Earth?
A Question of Gravity
Chapter 2 Rays-Cosmic and Gamma: The Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk
Humble Beginnings
A Fantastic Foursome
Frankenstein s Monster-Marvel Style
The Perils of Technobabble
The GFP Hulk
Chapter 3 The Dark Knight: Batman
A NonSuper Superhero
The Science of Batman
The Gotham City Earthquake
Chapter 4 Under the Sea: Aquaman and Sub-Mariner
Undersea Heroes
Our Aquatic Ancestors?
Breathing Underwater
Pressure
Fluid Breathing
Talking to Fish
Chapter 5 Along Came a Spider: Spider-Man
With Great Power
The Power of a Spider?
Clones, Clones, and More Clones
Chapter 6 Green Lanterns and Black Holes: Magic, Science, and Two Green Lanterns
Wanted: An Unlimited Power Source
The Life and Death of Stars
The Origin of Black Holes
Yellow Light
Chapter 7 Of Atoms, Ants, and Giants: Ant Man and the Atom
Ant Man
The Square Cubed Law
The Atom
The Atom Exploded
Chapter 8 Fast, Fast, Fast: The Flash
Introducing the Flash
Problems with Logic
The Speed Barrier
Chapter 9 Good, Evil, and Indifferent Mutants: The X-Men
A Victory Snatched from the Ashes
The Case for Evolution
The Truth about Creationism
Creating the X-Men
Chapter 10 Mysteries in Space: Science Fiction Superheroes
Super Science without Super Heroes
The Secrets of Other Worlds, Exposed!
Doomsday on Earth
Across the Ages
The Grandfather Paradox
Chapter 11 The Right Stuff: Donald Duck
The Real Deal
The Duck Man
Appendix A Who Missed the Cut?
Appendix B The Professionals Speak
Bibliography and Reading List
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
Any book dealing with superhero comics requires some slight knowledge of the history of comic books and their brothers-in-arms, the pulp magazines. Consider this brief preface the necessary prep work for a big exam. Or the instructions that airline attendants tell you every time you get on an airplane. Stuff that you don t need to read again and again, but background material available just the same. The proper grounding to make your flight through the rest of the book a lot easier.
Comic book superheroes, like jazz, potato chips, and hard-boiled detective fiction, are a uniquely American invention. Their roots are English and European, and they can be traced all the way back to the adventure fiction of Sir Walter Scott, the Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, the fantastic voyages of Jules Verne, and the science fiction inventions of H. G. Wells. Still, superheroes are most clearly defined by the American dream of the heroic individual. One man against the odds, whether it be the forces of nature, a corrupt government, or foreign invaders, comic book creations like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk are as crisp a reflection of the American character as Uncle Sam-who, for the record, once starred in his own comic book series.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it s hard to imagine what life was like sixty or seventy years ago. The Depression gripped America and the rest of the world. Jobs were scarce, work was hard, and hours were long. It was a time before television. In the early 1930s, weekly radio adventures were still years away. Movies were something you saw on Saturday afternoons, if at all. Baseball was popular, but basketball and hockey were virtually unknown, and football was just starting to stretch its muscles. The main source of entertainment for both young and old was reading.
Libraries were free but offered limited reading choices. The best books often had many people waiting to borrow copies. And few novels were aimed at teens or young adults. For them, there were the pulps.
The pulps were inexpensive fiction magazines published from approximately 1900 until 1955. Prices ranged from five cents to fifty cents, with most costing a dime. There were pulps dealing with every type of fiction imaginable, from westerns to love to sports to mysteries to science fiction. Pulp fiction referred not to the style or type of story published in the magazines, but to the cheap wood-pulp paper used by the publications to keep costs low. The common bond in all pulp fiction was not violence, blood, or even danger. The stories were written to entertain , and for five decades and millions of readers, that s what they did.
In the 1930s, nearly a hundred different pulp magazines crammed the newsstands. Though derided as containing lowbrow formula fiction, pulps were read by millions of consumers every month. Most important to us, the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s were the home of most science fiction and fantasy literature in America. And from these pulp roots came superhero comic books.
Comic strip adventures for children and adults had been running in newspaper serial format for decades. In the early 1930s, Tarzan and Buck Rogers emerged from the pulps. Tarzan, the creation of writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, first appeared in the novel Tarzan of the Apes , which was published in The Argosy pulp magazine in 1912. The story was so popular that it led to numerous sequels, all first published in pulps, as well as a series of movies and eventually a newspaper comic strip.
Buck Rogers was the main character of a short novel, Armageddon 2419 , written by Philip Francis Nowlan. It was published in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories , the first all-science fiction pulp. The cover for that issue, featuring a man hovering over the ground using a flying belt, was reprinted numerous times and came to define science fiction for most people as that Buck Rogers stuff. Interestingly enough, the cover had nothing to do with Buck Rogers, as it illustrated another story in the same issue. A second Buck Rogers story, The Airlords of Han , followed in Amazing Stories in 1929.
The two Buck Rogers stories caught the eye of newspaperman Flint Dille. He contacted Francis Nowlan, the author of the Buck Rogers adventures, and asked if there was any way Nowlan could convert the stories into newspaper comic strips. Nowlan, working with artist Dick Calkins, did exactly that, and soon Buck Rogers was one of the most popular daily and Sunday comic strips in America.
By 1933, the tremendous popularity of comic strips convinced publishers to issue monthly reprint collections. These first comic books, titled Famous Funnies , Popular Comics , and King Comics (named after the distributor), were aimed at readers who wanted t