In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [6]
I revisited my early non-naturalistic tendencies during a recent trip I took through my own juvenilia, or what survives of it. When I say “juvenilia,” I’m not talking about the precocious teenage poems of William Blake or John Keats, but about things I was doing in the mid-1940s when I was six or seven. They centred around my superheroes, who were flying rabbits. Their names were Blue Bunny and White Bunny, and they were modelled upon two unimaginatively named real-life stuffed animals who did indeed go flying through the air, propelled by an age-old technology called “throwing.” But it wasn’t long before these feeble heroes morphed into two tougher creatures called Steel Bunny and Dotty Bunny, who flew in a more conventional superhero way, by means of capes. Steel’s cape had bars on it, Dotty’s had dots. So far, so clear.
My superhero rabbits were pale imitations of my older brother’s more richly endowed creations. It was he who invented flying rabbits—extraterrestrial flying rabbits. His were equipped with vehicles and advanced technologies—spaceships, airplanes, weaponry, the lot—and did battle not only with their hereditary enemies, the evil foxes, but with robots and man-eating plants and lethal animals. The planet where my brother’s rabbits lived was called Bunnyland; mine inhabited a more mysterious place called Mischiefland. Now what impelled me to name it that?
The rabbits in Mischiefland led a disorganized existence. They floated around by means of balloons—unavailable during the Second World War and thus of great fascination to me. Also I had by this time read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which the wizard goes soaring away in a basket lifted by an enormous hot-air balloon. I allowed not only my rabbits but their pet cats to be levitated in this way. (I was not permitted to have a cat, and longed for one, so my rabbits had a lot of them.) The rabbits ate nothing but ice-cream cones, rare and desirable during wartime and the several lean years that followed. And they did tricks: specifically, a lot of twirling in the air, with the aid of their flying capes. They were only fitfully interested in shooting guns, pursuing criminals, saving the world, and so forth, though they did eject the occasional bullet from the occasional handgun, smiling eerily while doing it. But mostly, it seems, they just wanted to have fun and fool people.
Where did we kids discover the knowledge of flying capes, superpowers, other planets, and the like? In part, through the primitive comic-strip superheroes of the times, the most popular of which were Flash Gordon, for space travel and robots; Superman and Captain Marvel, for extra strength, superpowers, and cape-based flying; and Batman, who was a mortal, with a non-functional cape—one that must have encumbered him somewhat as he clawed his way up the sides of buildings—but who nonetheless shared with Captain Marvel and Superman a weak or fatuous second identity that acted as a disguise. (Captain Marvel was Billy Batson, the crippled newsboy; Superman was Clark Kent, the bespectacled reporter; Batman was Bruce Wayne, the very rich playboy who lounged around in a smoking jacket.)
Those—crossed with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a dollop of Greek mythology, and our one small book on the solar system—were probably the sources of our core ideas. The solar-system book was sedate in and of itself, but I should point out that at that time the planets were still relatively unknown, and thus still open for population by extraterrestrial life, which in our case leaned heavily toward hostile humanoid aliens with one eye and three-fingered