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superpower was stretchiness. Because he was plastic—he’d suffered from an unpleasant encounter with a vat of chemicals, which is the modern-day equivalent of having a god for a parent, or being dipped into the River Styx like Achilles—he could mould himself into any everyday object, such as a lamp or ashtray; eavesdrop on everything the crooks and thugs were planning; then leap forth, manifest himself, and wrap his entire body around the evildoers like a long rubber band. He was probably the trickiest, wittiest, and least violent of all the superheroes; more Puck than Oberon, a sort of comic party toy.

The fascination with disguise is very ancient. The gods frequently assumed mortal shapes, the better to walk among humankind unobserved. (This habit was taken up later by folk-tale sultans and kings and even saints, most notably Saint Peter.) The first self-consciously disguised character we meet in literature—or the first who isn’t a god, to my knowledge—is the wily Odysseus of The Odyssey, who, having been away from home for many years, dresses himself as a ragged beggar upon his return to his palace, where a large number of insolent young men are eating up his herd animals, raping his maids, and trying to marry his wife. Imagine their astonishment when he strings his own superbow—the magic weapon no one else can handle—steps back into his role of king, and kills the whole lot of them. The two gods who take a special interest in Odysseus are Athene, who values intellect and quick wits, and our old friend Hermes, the trickster god of artifice and jokes.

Which brings us back to the flying rabbits I was drawing and telling stories about at the age of six or seven. Now we understood why the planet they inhabited was called Mischiefland; though, back then, I myself didn’t know why I’d given it that name. Like many artists, I did it because, well, it just seemed right to me at the time. Balloons, flying, superpowers, mischief: they all went together. Though my superheroes were probably the only ones that had long floppy ears and fluffy white tails.

NOTES

1. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) presents a race of superior human beings who live in a vast cavern underground, harnessing an inner, electrical life force called vril for power. (Vril gave its name to the beef tea “Bovril”; bovine vril.) The Vril-ya fly around on vril-powered wings and display super-intelligence; the women among them are bigger and stronger than the men, whom they have to treat well lest the latter fly away.

2. The quotation from C. G. Jung is taken from Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature (Abrams and Zweig, 1991).

3. Mandrake the Magician is said to have been the first comic superhero, but his hypnotic gesturing was anticipated by Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the villains of the two eponymous films that feature their wicked hypnotizing powers.

4. Princess Snowflower was found in the comic strip Steve Canyon.

5. The juvenilia is now in the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto.

6. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900.

7. “The Big Red Cheese” is a nickname for Captain Marvel.

8. Diana the Huntress, Artemis: Roman and Greek moon goddesses characterized by virginity, bowmanship, and an affinity with wild animals.

9. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lesson for a Kinder Society, 2010.

10. The Shakespeare quotation is from King Lear, IV, 1, 32–34.

11. Star Trek: a long-running space serial.

12. The Fields of Asphodel were in the Greek Underworld. The Planet Krypton was Superman’s home planet.

13. Sparkly vampires can be found in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer.

14. The Cloak of Invisibility is a feature in folklore; see Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

15. I first encountered the duplicity of Jonathan Wild in the 1840 novel Jack Sheppard by Harrison Ainsworth.

16. The Scarlet Pimpernel is the hero of the 1903 play and subsequent novel by Baroness Orczy.

17. The Tales of Hoffmann: In the 1881 opera by Offenbach, all of the villains are traditionally played by the same singer.

18.