Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre by Peter Coogan - Resources

196 SUPERHERO THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUPERHERO197genre has fully been established and is well on the way to completingthe genre cycle. For superheroes this point came after just two and ahalf years in the November 1940 issue of All-American Comics (#20)with the Red Tornado’s appearance in Sheldon Mayer’s “Scribbly”feature.All-American Comics #21 © 1940 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.The Red Tornado, or “Red Tomato” as she was called, is in realityMa Hunkel, a housewife who dresses in red longjohns with a stockpot for a helmet and takes up the fight against minor neighborhoodvillains. By this point comic books were full of superheroes, and theconventions of the genre must have been quickly absorbed by itsaudience for the Red Tornado to have worked.Another parody of the superhero genre appeared the next yearin Supersnipe.Supersnipe Comics #9 © 1942 Street and Smith.In his stories, Supersnipe was not an actual character but a fantasyprojection of Koppy McFad, the boy with the most comic booksin America. McFad had no superpowers, but dreamed himself intoadventures as Supersnipe. He was a genuine long-underwear herobecause as Koppy his costume was made from red longjohns and ablue towel, which inverts the color scheme of Superman’s costume.Supersnipe thus parodied both superheroes and their fans.The superhero genre could not have reached its refinement stagethis quickly. Instead, superhero comics can be seen as exhibitinga mini-cycle within each stage. Very soon after the beginning ofa stage, the version of conventions developed therein saturate theaudience and become ripe for parody. Perhaps this ripeness arisesfrom the broad distribution of these conventions across adventuregenres, which means that the audience is already largely familiarwith them from other narrative forms; perhaps the genre is morelimited than other genres, and so the creators exhaust each stage’srange of possibilities for the conventions without evolving them tothe next stage.Parody developed quickly at each stage: the Silver Age saw theInferior Five at DC and Not Brand Ecch at Marvel, and the Iron Ageclaims Megaton Man by Don Simpson, many parodies of Batman:The Dark Knight Returns, and Marvel’s What Th?. Interestingly,the Bronze Age appears never to have developed a successfulparody, which might account for its late emergence as an age in thenomenclature of fandom. 103 It remains unclear at this point if theRenaissance Age has spawned any. 104The Reconstructive StageSchatz does not discuss what happens when a genre completesthe cycle, perhaps because when his book came out in 1981none of the genres he discusses (Western, gangster, hard-boileddetective, screwball comedy, musical, and the family melodrama)had definitively or clearly begun a new cycle. Following Schatz’sreasoning, though, it would seem that after the baroque stagewears itself out that a new experimental stage should arise. Thisnew stage has arisen in a number of genres since Schatz wrote,including superhero comics, the Western, the musical, and romanticcomedy. 105I take the name of the new stage from a comment Kurt Busiekmade in Astro City #5. A reader wrote in to ask, “Is Astro City arevisionist superhero work?” Busiek responded:As for whether the book is revisionist—