Martin Henry Dawson : against a city - and an age - of Super Heroes, the story of an un-superhero

1875 -1965 was an age of Scientism and of Super (hyper) Modernity --- an era of unlimited faith in the abilities of technocratic elites (a view at least held by other technocratic elites).

An epoch hearing many (un-democratic) proposals for elite corps of skygod-like air police to short sharply govern the real world of unruly adults down below.

Fiction writers matched the non-fiction intellectuals by creating imaginary super-heroes doing basically the same job as the proposed  Air Police , to populate the fantasy world of male teens and boys.

It has been largely and deliberately forgotten today* that these schemes for an elite air police force to govern all the world were openly proposed and critiqued by many seriously respected intellectuals such as HG Wells.

It was as if the Greek and Roman skygods of ancient thought were to be adapted to modern times.

Little wonder then that the same young men who read everything vaguely Sci-Fi that HG Wells ever wrote , eagerly took up this idea for their various (Gotham based) comic book super heroes.

It pleasures me muchly then to be able to push hard against this grain and focus in on a story , set in that same Gotham as in the heyday of the Golden Age Super Heroes, that features a crusading scientist who positively oozed un-charisma.

Someone as un-superheroic and as un-skygod like as can possibly be.

Who yet did great things ....

__________

* PD Smith's The Doomsday Men is one sturdy exception .

There have been actually a fair number of other books and authors that have been successful in developing this theme : H Bruce Franklin's War Stars springs to mind.

Successful in the academic world that is , but not yet in the popular consciousness.

One can't be postmodernist (or religious) and still believe in Golden Age Superheroes

The era of Modernity (1875-1965) was the Golden Age of Superheroes almost by definition : the fictional kids' comics simply mirrored the grownups' view of how the world really worked.

But eventually most of even the grownups really grew up and saw that the world's problems couldn't be solved by simplistic violent solutions - and Silver Age comic book heroes evolved in lock step at the same time.

But climate deniers and other elderly wealthy deniers of limits to humanity's powers to bend reality to our every whim are really not much different than the hundreds of millions who claim they simply enjoy new style superhero books and movies as fiction,  but really accept old style superhero thinking at some level of their brain.

Claims that this or that war (including the 'war' on excessive atmospheric CO2) will be won in days, weeks or months is a clear example of thinking that superhero simplistic solutions can actually work in the real world.

Both groups' superman thinking are actually helping to kill this planet's climate - deny it as they may.

Faith communities should not accept super hero media as harmless fodder for immature minds - not if they have agape love for the rest of fellow humanity , no matter how hair brained so much of that humanity seems much of the time ....

Gotham's wartime unfits rescued natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all

Wartime Gotham's concrete jungle was crawling with comic book Super Heroes and their opponents.

After all ,most of today's best known super heroes were created during the war years.

These Super Heroes did their stuff on some very mean streets that also managed to look a whole lot like the actual streets of Manhattan , circa 1940.

(And more than seventy five years later, they still do !)

I find it hard to feel totally upbeat about Super Heroes - they hold too many overtones of 1940 Hitler's Ubermensch to make me very comfortable.

I can't accept that people who aren't physically extraordinary - or indeed not even ordinarily physical fit - can't make perfectly good heroes.

In fact, I'd argue their task of heroism is much harder to achieve .

because they are not blessed with either Superman's gift of super-special physical powers or Batman's extraordinary-honed human skills (and wealth).

In that same concrete jungle that was 1940 Gotham for example ,Dr Henry Dawson's team of unfits could hardly muster a half dozen ordinarily full functioning limbs between them.

But who can say than anything morally greater ever came out of WWII's bad news war than their unlikely success in rescuing natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all from the meanness of the Allied medical-scientific establishment?