In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [9]
One method of approaching Other Worlds would be to trace their literary lines of descent—from the Mesopotamian underworld to the Egyptian Afterlife to the Domain of Pluto to the Christian Hell and Heaven to the Utopia of Sir Thomas More to the Islands of the Houyhnhnms and Dr. Moreau, and finally to Planet X and Gethen and Chiron. But Other Worlds have existed in many cultures, within which they can trace many separate literary and cultural lines of descent. Could it be that the tendency to produce such worlds is an essential property of the human imagination, via the limbic system and the neocortex, just as empathy is?
THE OUTFITS
Once upon a time, superhuman beings wore robes, like angels, or nothing, like devils, but the twentieth-century superhero outfit has more proximate fashion origins. The skin-tight clothing with the bathing suit over the abdominal parts, the wide, fancy belt, and the calf-high boots most probably derive from archaic turn-of-the century circus attire, especially that of high-wire artists and strongmen. (With pleasing circularity, the stars of World Wide Wrestling now dress up in costumes similar to those of comic-book characters whose own colourful and six-pack-disclosing attire recalls that of earlier bemuscled showmen.)
The cape may descend from the knights so prominent in the Pre-Raphaelite art that would have been familiar to the originators of these figures, or—closer to hand—from stage magicians, or, at a stretch, from Bela Lugosi as Dracula, in the black-and-white film of that name, back when vampires were vile and smelled bad rather than being sparkly in the sunlight and love’s young dream, as they seem to have become today. There was also the Cloak of Invisibility that featured in old folk tales, resurfaced in modern scientific-discovery dress in Wells’s Invisible Man, made a reappearance in its original magic form in the Harry Potter books, and became a new kind of camouflage material in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. But none of the early 1940s comic-book superheroes had a Cloak of Invisibility, probably because it was hard to draw a picture of a person being invisible. (The closest we come is perhaps Wonder Woman’s transparent helicopter, indicated by a dotted line.)
The mask was not obligatory for superheroes: neither Superman nor Captain Marvel needed such an identity-concealer, as each had a whole other body to slip into. (Clark Kent’s ability to peel off his reporter suit in a phone booth and suddenly expand into someone a great deal bigger and more muscular, like one of those dried-gel Santa Clauses you drop into water, was never adequately explained.) Batman’s mask may have come from the commedia dell’arte tradition, or from knights-incognito such as Ivanhoe. Or—and these are more sinister origins—from the Phantom of the Opera, or from Fantômas, a masked and also French evil genius from the turn of the century. Or possibly just from the standard masked robber of the comics. As Batman himself was mortal and did not transform from one bodily shape into another, you can see why he would need a mask.
Outfits—or special costumes and regalia—are of course very old. We are familiar with ceremonies such as university graduations—you are presented with a hood item or hat or scroll, and thus become something you weren’t before. At the investiture ceremonies of popes, the new pope is given the Fisherman’s Ring, the wearing of which grants him, in the eyes of believing others, a huge