The Superhero as Avatar III: Fighting American and the 1950s

The archetypical fifties superhero must reflect his times and reflect the motion of the medium. To me, this suggests a single contender: Simon and Kirby's short-lived Fighting American of the 1950s.

He dabbled in unselfconscious anticommunism while suggesting elements of the forties (a patriotic superhero with an absurdly-named juvenile sidekick) and the sixties (an approach to stories that included self-parody both of the stories themselves and of the medium to which they belonged). He shared in the doom of the comics superhero that cut heads across the board until little besides Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman remained.

Too much about this character remains inseparable from the state of the culture in his day and the state of comics in his day not to identify this semi-obscure comics footnote as the Avatar of the 1950s.

Other Contenders and Their Failings

Doomed holdovers from the forties, even though they did not originate in the 1950s, reflect a good deal about both their own times and the state of comics in the fifties. Consider Captain America, who, after fighting the good fight on the enemy's playing field, turned his attention to spies, saboteurs, and gangsters of a communist, rather than a fascist, stripe (including a little-remembered communist version of the Red Skull). That nothing could buoy up his sinking title, including a possibly mythical run where Captain America and the Skull, now dead, both continued fighting it out in hell. That the iconic qualities and onetime popularity of the character failed to save him from the demise that almost extinguished his kind tells a lot about the fifties and fifties comics.

Again, Plastic Man made it into the fifties but not out of them. The introduction to a Mad comics parody of the character noted that the great stable of superheroes had mostly passed on, with the possible exception of "Plastic Sam." As Captain America had failed by trying to fight the old fight against more contemporary targets - a fight many may have endorsed but which few cared to read about - Plastic Man failed by ignoring topical material or political overtones altogether; relevance and escapism both managed to fail to rescue the superheroes of yore.

The fact that the characters had remarkable careers in the forties, but nothing special in the fifties, also places them more appropriately in the previous decade.

We find another contender in a small cluster of superheroes original to the decade. Captain Comet, for instance, struggled along for four years in the early fifties before DC gave up on promoting the concept. He would provide an excellent example of the foredoomed nature of the comics superhero in the fifties, except his key components, the science fiction/space opera elements that would so inspire DC Comics in the Silver Age, belong more to that period. Fifties science fiction comics took somewhat a different form, as one might find in researching the early career of the late Wally Wood. Occasional others came and went in the 1950s, like Marvel Boy, but he appeared in his own title and then vanished for over twenty years until Marvel Comics decided to use him as a gimmicky hero-gone-bad villain in Fantastic Four in the 1970s. Such characters represent footnotes more than they serve as exemplars.

Yet a third class fails to fit the bill: The Silver Age heroes who got a head start in the 1950s but endured into the sixties and beyond. With characters like the Manhunter from Mars, the second Flash, and the second Green Lantern, we have pieces that resonate with the comics of a sixties they helped to invent. Their survival argues against their inclusion in a representative fifties superhero canon. They missed the boat of the key supeheroic trend of the fifties: They survived.

Anticommunism and a Grain of Salt

Official retellings of the creation of Fighting American, filtered through the person of Joe Simon and flavored with no small amount of hindsight, claim that the character arose from Joe Simon's and Jack Kirby's desire to work with the nucleus of the Captain America concept in a creator-owned form. As the Axis threat provided a soul and center for the character, so would the Stalinist provide a nucleus for the new protagonist. Both men enjoyed a sincere distaste for the totalitarianist style, probably derived from their own awareness of the human cost that it historically involved. If Captain America had failed as an anticommunist hero, Simon and Kirby felt that they could make another one work, especially one they owned and thus could care about.

As Simon's story goes, however, their enthusiasm slowly became embarrassment. The self-appointed knight of American anticommunism in the fifties, Joe McCarthy, proved little more than a grandstanding hack. After his media-driven clowning petered out in a showdown between McCarthy and the United States Senate over the question of the political credentials of a general who had accomplished much to remove Hitler from his role as would-be conqueror (so that Hitler could follow a more fitting path as a rotting cadaver), that onetime stalwart senator from Wisconsin faded rapidly. He may have hoped for better things - such as a modest future as a two-term president who might someday see his face added to Mount Rushmore - but in the end he became a laughingstock and drank himself to death.

This left American anticommunists, particularly those who had much credited McCarthy's claims of specific spies infiltrating government agencies at the highest levels, in an awkward position. They could claim that McCarthy fell because the communists got to him, and his disrepute represented a successful communist disinformation campaign; they could quietly change the subject and hope that no one noticed the egg on their faces; or they could remember, years later, that they had played on the other side of McCarthy's campaign, pretending to have opposed him all along. Such options offered a choice between ego-attached stubbornness that refuses the enlightenment of facts, avoidance of the problem, or self-serving lies.

Simon and Kirby proved better than that. After the first few deadly-serious Fighting American books, they looked at themselves with the egg on their faces and decided it was funny, and went right on with the project. If the McCarthy's drama had turned into a comedy in its last days, Simon and Kirby would inject some of this comedy into their creation.

None of this demonstrates that either man ever took a liking to any of the forms of communism which they may have encountered over the years. Kirby, for instance, would dabble in communist villains into the mid-1960s, and his original Fourth World pieces cast Darkseid's goal - the "anti-life equation" - as totalitarianism made into a super-power.

Nonetheless, both men seemed to have discovered the inherent dangers of taking themselves too seriously, and they would not repeat the mistake in the pages of Fighting American.

Silly Villains with Stupid Names

Much about Fighting American suggested that Simon and Kirby knew what comics really intended. If the book fails to provide any fun, for instance, both men understood that it had failed. Deep philosophy and arcane self-reference would come of age in a later day, but not at their hands.

Before all else, superhero comics needed to go zap and pow and bang. They needed to contain overmuscled alpha males in skin-tight and garish costumes flinging their big fists at such problems as fists might affect. They needed to get the readers' attention through the vital flow of action and the compelling quality of the nemesis of the day.

The silly villain with the stupid name did much to fulfill all purposes of the superhero comic of this model. The illustration above and to the right makes a point even without words: A huge sour-faced female holds Speedboy in bonds while her assembled midget henchmen help set up whatever horrible fate we can expect to follow.

However, the whole thing works even better once we have the accompanying verbiage. Could someone deconstruct the superhero with a straight face while watching him play smash mouth with villains with names like Rhode Island Red, Poison Ivan, and Hotski Trotsky? One of the little people who hear brandish threatening objects at Speedboy bears the name "Sawdoff," a particularly atrocious pun in books that brimmed over with them.

The intentional stupidity of the nomenclature traveled in the company of episodes within the stories that matched them very well thematically. For instance, when Fighting American and Speedboy, pursuing another communist bogeyman, encountered a roomful of love-starved groupies of a Russian Romeo (or Lothario), they took drastic measures. They threw themselves out a window about 150 feet above the ground, evidently feeling the threat to their purity (or perhaps the sanctions offered by enraged censors) justified the strategy. Speedboy, as the pair plummetted to the ground below, philosophized thusly: "Gosh! We've jumped out of a fifteenth story window! Do you think that was smart?" Rather than roll his eyes and - perhaps - slap the stupidity off Speedboy's face, Fighting American instead shared this tidbit of wisdom: "It's a lot less risky than taking our chances with those screwball women! Believe me, boy!"

Of Such a Time, Such a Man

Even if such characteristic silliness would appear in later Simon and Kirby works throughout their careers, the worldview it expresses bears the evidence of its times. The post-World War II misogyny that served as an enabling philosophy to get women back out of the factories and into kitchens again belongs to this period more than to an earlier era (look closely and you can watch treatments of female characters in entertainment grow increasingly vapid in the decades after the War, though the thirties included a number of pieces that confirmed that this had not yet become an invariable orthodoxy). The unflinching crusade against spies and subversives so identifies its source that it requires no further explanation.

Fighting American may have represented a trick pony with only a few maneuvers in it - silly situations, silly names, flying fists for peace and prosperity - but these riffs speak loudly. The character, in his short tenure of seven issues, chiseled himself a niche that makes him a fitting choice as the Avatar of the 1950s.