Unnecessary Vices

The Silver Age of comics, and works that built upon elements inherited from that legacy, in spite of the strengths post-facto analysts recognize, suffered from a number of formulae and conceits that consistently insulted the intelligence. The overuse of some aspect or problem of superheroism made some of these more likely than others; the desire to dumb down logistics or ethics to make them comprehensible to audiences possibly new to the written word brought a number of these about.

We may skip some elements for their over-broadness; for instance, the cop-out reversal took too many forms and existed in too many examples to deserve the name of conceit. Frequency made these things conventions.

Others, however, seemed both loathesome and unnecessary at the same time.

Addlewit Pidgin

Who decided that the dialogue that came out of the mouths of the likes of Superbaby and the Hulk represented the speech of infants or of the mentally challenged?

I've met infants. I've met the mentally challenged. In each case, these people handled the notion of first person pronouns. Kids and special people don't automatically replace "I" with "me" (a la Superbaby) or refer to themselves in the third person (as in "Hulk smash!")

Dozens of Superbaby stories and years of Hulk stories, however, portrayed their characters with their grotesque parody of infantile grammar. Superbaby always said "me" when a real kid would have said "I" ("Me flying!"); Hulk, somewhat more dignified even in the ill-use of bad scripting, forgot the English language after Lee and Kirby had left his stories, and began referring to himself as "Hulk" rather than "I" and stopped conjugating most nouns and stopped using others ("Hulk sorry").

To this category I could add Bizarrosprach, that peculiar speech pattern typical of sixties stories containing Superman's imperfect duplicates, the Bizarros; however, their conception requires that they do everything as incorrectly as they can - so "Us am happy!" does not represent anything out of synch with the intentional stupidity of Bizarros per se.

Batman's @#$% Mask-over-the-Mask

The character Batman demonstrated a number of skills over the years, including those of disguise. Yet well into his realism period, he maintained the ability to disguise himself by putting on rubber masks over his cowl.

Anyone who has ever worn a rubber mask knows that no such item could pass the muster of anyone who can view a face without the aid of a seeing eye dog. Imagine, though, attempting to wear a rubber mask over a cloth mask, and have the result apppear as flesh. Unlikely? Unconvincing? Alarmingly frequent. Batman did this again and again, never once hearing my groans, nor yielding to the bone-breaking sound of my teeth grinding. You need only remember Cesar Romero as the Joker, with the white greasepaint over his moustache, to see how multiple layers of garbage do not conceal nor pass for a face; and this appears a thousand times more convincing, as lame as it appeared, than would the best rubber mask worn over a cloth mask, even with the greatest makeup effects people handling it.

I have to conclude that Batman did this just to annoy me. No other explanation else makes sense. If Batman still wears rubber masks over his cowl, please remain silent on the subject; leave me with my delusion that the Silliness Police finally put away this absurdity forever.

Granted, Marvel dabbled in this vice - one Spider-Man story I know about, and one Captain America story dealt with preserving or creating secret identities with a rubber mask over a mask - but neither hero made complete careers of such brain-deadening nonsense, so we may grant this company some kind of absolution; they sampled this sin and abandoned it.

Secret I.D. uber Alles

This vice, although confined to DC's pages, so thoroughly infested its books that an entire genre of period story dealt with the secret identity obsession. DC's superhero formula required costumes, code names, and secret identities; perhaps Metamorpho represented the first violator of this dictum.

During this one regrettable phase of DC comics, that stalwart publishing house seemed obsessional about superheroes' fears of having their identities revealed. Some mechanisms for protecting these identities became necessary in view of the repeated assaults on the privacy of heroes like Superman and Batman. Superman would usually use his legion of identical robots to take his place as either Clark or Superman; Batman would wear a rubber mask over his cowl; and on one occasion (at least), Batman disguised himself as Clark Kent, but that preceded his discovery that he could wear a rubber mask over his cowl and editors would let him get away with it.

After rescuing their alternate personae enough times with the same old substitution and mask tricks, however, other methods became necessary. So, in the inevitable story where heroes discovered or had to reveal their identities, writers found increasingly ingenious and unlikely ways to undo the damage. Such methods included convincing people they had become insane; hypnosis and mind control devices; ingenious impostures; and everything short of killing whoever breached security.

Sinking about as low as a hero could to protect something of so little value - a secret kept from another hero - Green Lantern utilized his power ring to brainwash himself and quondam confidants to erase memories of the revealed secret identities.

The old Superboy canon contained a chink in this monomania, however; he established that a superhero could survive even with someone walking around who knew his secret.

Fiancees-in-Training

Although the Golden Age had handled female characters with at least some respect, DC in the 1960s decided that these characters, generally, motivated themselves solely by a single monomaniacal compulsion to bring a particular alpha male to the altar.

Lois Lane even appeared in an eponymous comic where she repeatedly contrived to ensnare Superman into marriage, while said Superman crassly and opportunistically used every tool in his arsenal to break her heart again and again.

Batman proved to host the worst of these stories. In one truly atrocious sixties tale, paired with the veteran Wonder Woman and the newly-created Batgirl, Batman had to resist both the marital ambitions of both women and stop the recurrent cat-fights between the two, who, evidently siezed by hormones no longer available to the females of the species homo sapiens, squabbled over their inexplicable and irresistable newfound love. Said story ended with both women apologizing, like schoolgirls, for having fallen in love with him.

Wonder Woman deserved better treatment; even the grotesque initial version of Batgirl, created in television and grafted to comics, deserved better treatment. But perhaps DCs editors had some kind of problem with women that did not infect Marvel as thoroughly.

Ridiculous Moral Codes

In the Golden Age, a superhero might think nothing of taking a flamethrower and incinerating a cell of Nazi spies. In modern comics, a superhero might think nothing of taking a flamethower and incinerating a cell of innocent bystanders. However, sometime during the Silver Age, many characters, particularly of DC's stable, took up a code of behavior that prohibited taking human life.

The legalistic interpretations of this technical point against taking life once led to a genre of stories, including the Superman stories where villains tricked Superman into believing he had killed someone so that he might punish himself by self-exposure to the power-destroying rays of gold Kryptonite (including the well-received Last Days of Superman. By this point, this posture had become so dogmatic that superheroes would allow tens, thousands, or more innocents to die rather than risk their oath never to take life, in a strange turn of the their ethos that seemed to rank inflexibility higher than the life this oath meant to protect. Occasional post-Silver Age works dealt with the consequences of these oaths before the rise of anti-heroes made any concern whatsoever about the life of anyone quaint anachronisms.

This code, on the surface, seems plausible enough, but consider these examples from after the Silver Age where writers - and the culprits include critically successful figures who surely knew better, Marv Wolfman and John Byrne - applied the inflexible version of the code:

• Teen Titans: in one issue during the Perez/Wolfman Teen Titans, most of the Titans end up opposing their Russian member Starfire, who sought to put a dying woman out of her misery after someone infected her with a radioactive virus that was dragging her to a horrible painful death. To defend the sanctity of life, the remaining Titans help this plague carrier to enjoy every excruciating moment of her sickness.
• Fantastic Four: During John Byrne's run on the Fantastic Four, one issue dealt with a crisis in which Galactus risked dying by starving to death. Calling on his considerable intellect, Reed Richards decided that his moral code required him to save the devourer of worlds. Richards felt good when he succeeded, although the story did not deal with the billions of billions of victims Galactus would subsequently consume, nor how they would feel about the rightness of Richards' ethic. In essence, Richards had saved someone who had murdered more people than a billion Hitlers because of his belief in the sanctity of life, then set him loose to outdo a billion Hitlers.

Granted, such figures may involve a recognition of mathematical concepts that transcend the knowledge of an increasingly innumerate society; however, Galactus' own words damn him for such crimes. Yet Richards has a warm and fuzzy moment with the devourer of galaxies, a cosmic mass murderer who requires transfinite mathematics to count his victims; for shouldn't friendship transcend such trivia?

Byrne may have written a subsequent story where some self-designated cosmic authority decided to take the accessory-to-holocaust Reed Richards to account, but the silliness and inconsistency in this kind of legalistic moral code still has to sicken a reader who pays attention.

Fairly speaking, I must admit that Wolfman's Teen Titans and Byrne's Fantastic Four postdate the point at which I measure the end of the Silver Age (a vague period shortly after Avengers #97), and therefore do not belong among crimes of the Silver Age; but these examples nonetheless remain consistent with the sixties ethos of the noble hero who preserves life at all costs.