In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [7]
As for disguises, I note that our rabbits seldom felt the need for them: being short and young, we were our own Billy Batsons, and I assume that projecting your child ego onto a flying rabbit was enough of a dédoublement for us.
But where did the creators of the superheroes in the funny papers get their own ideas? I now find myself wondering. Ex nihilo nihil fit: from what ur-stock did these early superheroes descend? Evidently there were some key gene pools: Superman came from the Planet Krypton, so was clearly a child—in part—of the science fiction of the 1930s, which was filled with the letters K and Z and Y and X and Q—those oddities of the alphabet.
Captain Marvel’s magic word, SHAZAM, was composed of the initial letters of a number of classical gods and one non-classical figure—Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury—so he descends to us, in part, through ancient mythology. Indeed, Captain Marvel’s mentor, the wizard Shazamo, once palled around with the enchantress Circe, she of the man-to-pig transformational powers in The Odyssey. I think the creators of the Big Red Cheese must have read the same books that I myself read as a child. (Wonder Woman also sports this line of descent, with her links to the goddess Diana the Huntress, she of the chastity and silver bow, the bowstring of which must have become—we just know it!—Wonder Woman’s potent lasso. In her early life—that is, in the comic books of the 1940s—Diana Prince, Wonder Woman’s alter ego, turns to jelly and loses power whenever kissed by her love object, Steve Trevor; virginity being an attribute of the original goddess.)
Batman, on the other hand, is born of technology alone. He is entirely human and therefore touchingly mortal, but he does have a lot of bat-machinery and bat-gizmos to help him in his fight against crime. The contemporary magazine most pertinent to him would thus not have been Weird Tales but Popular Mechanics. He is also—from the point of view of style and decor—the most futuristic of the superheroes: Gotham City, in its first iterations, was highly streamlined, with pronounced art deco influences.
Mythology, science fiction of the other-planetary kind, and modern technology: they all do fit together. At first glimpse, mythology might seem to be the odd one out, being ancient rather than ultra-modern; but as we have seen in the cases of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, this is very far from being the case.
In fact, all of the most salient features of these early comic-book heroes—and thus of my own flying rabbits, closely related to them except for the ears and tails—have deep roots in literary and cultural history, and possibly in the human psyche itself.
OTHER WORLDS
Where do other worlds and alien beings come from? Why do young children so routinely fear that there is something horrible under the bed, other than their slippers? Is the under-bed monster an archetype left over from prehistory, when we were hunted by cave tigers, or is it something else? Why do young children also believe that such inanimate objects as spoons and stones—let alone their stuffed teddy bears—have thoughts like theirs, and good and bad intentions toward them? Are these three questions related?
The ability to see things from the point of view of another being has been receiving a lot of attention from biologists lately, most notably Frans de Waal in his book The Age of Empathy. It used to be thought that only human beings could imagine life from the position of another, but not so, it seems. Elephants can, and chimpanzees,