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Articles Brushes and Bricks by Andy Roberts Comics and My Life - A Work of Insight and Embarrassment by Gav Burrows - part one - part two Closing Shots from a Grassy Knoll by John Robbins Getting Comics in the Art Department - a "Comics in Bookshops" report by Pete Ashton UKCAC97 - a convention report from long distant days... by Pete Ashton Reviews Silver Age Superman reviewed by Pete Ashton Graffiti Kitchen reviewed by Pete Ashton (with Jez Higgins) Goodbye, Cunky Rice reviewed by Pete Ashton Fat, Loud and Stupid - The Cowboy Wally Show reviewed by Pete Ashton The Birth Caul reviewed by Pete Ashton |
SILVER AGE SUPERMAN reviewed by Pete Ashton 1993 saw Alan Moore and chums were messing around with the notion of silver age comics and their more cynical relations 30 years on. While the world went crazy (at least until it got bored) for 1963, a similar, yet completely unrelated exercise was underway in a quiet corner of England. Ed Pinsent was writing the comic of his life - or his childhood at any rate - SILVER AGE SUPERMAN. Let’s start with some background. Thankfully in a spoof lettercol Ed and artist Mark Robinson talk about their motives for doing this. Ed mentions how a part of him, aged six, was touched by the SUPERMAN comics of the 1960s, some part that he’s trying to recover, or at least contact: “I must reincarnate Superman in my own image, ignoring past and present versions printed elsewhere. A very intimate part of me was touched in 1966-67 and I have had to make telepathic contact with it, in order to say what needs to be said at the heart of this story.” Mark also tells the tale of lost youth, comparing the excitement of the “Yank Mags” (a wonderful term!) to the dissatisfaction with the church, where Clark Kent became a more realistic role model than Christ, providing better moral guidance than God who “reminded me of all the other authority figures in my life: parents, teachers, policemen.” It is, however, Ed’s reaching for his inner child which motivates the story and we, the readers, must try to find the heart of the story for ourselves. So we know from the outset that this is no puerile parody. This is a work of love and affection, born out by the meticulous attention to detail - the original 1967 indicia, the copyright 1966 National Periodical Publications, the logo, still with the mysterious “Reg US Pat Off”. The artwork throughout is loyal to the silver age style, effective but simplistic, and the banter between Lois, Jimmy, Perry and Clark is authentic. It looks like it’s just fallen through a hole in time, warped by Ed’s childhood memory which keeps the important things and makes everything else fit. Little things like the Comics Code logo changed to “Liberated for the People by Geniuses” and the altered, almost dada esque, advertisements keep you on your toes, reminding you that something more than a homage is going on here.
So what’s it all about then? Well, we open with Clark remembering his childhood on Krypton where his father, Jor-El, tells him something really important related to gyroscopes and plants, but he doesn’t know what it means. Perry snaps him out of the daydream to assign him to a story about a ‘boy genius’ in Japan who allegedly has supermemory. Clark disputes that the boy is of high intelligence as memory alone is not wisdom. Perry balls him out and then gives him two weeks to complete the assignment. Pondering all this, Superman decides to travel back in time to memorise all Earth’s learning past and present so that he might gain true wisdom. Without giving too much of the story away, Superman does this, finding himself even more confused than before - it seems ignorance is bliss, even when you have supermemory. Jor-El watches from beyond the grave and, fearing his son is hurting himself, enlists the Kryptonian villain Quexor, currently serving ‘time’ in the Phantom Zone, to send him a message which unfortunately gets garbled, confusing Superman even more. At the IBM labs, Superman is hooked up to a monster computer (science’s importance is total in the 60s) which reveals he has a lower IQ than Harold Wilson. Confused, he seeks refuge in the Fortress of Solitude where his father again speaks to him, this time in dreams. Suffering from information overload it looks like Clark will go insane, so he goes to the moon where the young Japanese lad speaks to him, explaining what Jor-El was on about, connecting the memories and forming knowledge from them via the Kryptonian gyroscope. Everything crystallises for Superman and he returns to Earth to hand in his assignment to Perry. Perry loves it and normality resumes, with Clark the butt-of-all-jokes having coffee with Lois and Jimmy. In the last panel he thinks to himself “Just forget it, Clark, forget it.”
The paradox here is, why, after telling Perry that memory does not make a genius, does Superman then attempt to memorise everything in order to find true knowledge? Well, that’s the digest version of the paradox anyway. In his review for ZUM! #8 (Sept 94), Peter Rigg is at despair’s door out over this: “It drives me crazy. The whole comic is some infuriating puzzle - it nearly, but not quite, says something you can relate to about some of the most substantial and weighty topics you can try and get your head round. I just can’t digest it on a rational level. But maybe on an emotional level, who knows. Here I am nearly tearing my hair out over this piece, and guess what - that’s exactly how it is for Superman faced with the puzzle of his insane reality. On that level it works like a charm.” I couldn’t really have put it better myself, other than my reaction was slightly different. I knew there was something deep and personal here that went beyond the rational but that was fueled by it, and having been hooked by it I kept reading and re-reading to try and find it. I think this is what is meant by the term “stands up to more than one reading” when every time you go back you find something new. By approaching the story from a different angle in a different frame of mind it becomes clearer and yet still eludes you, and I don’t think I’m deluding myself into thinking there’s more here than there actually is. I don’t think I’ll ever know exactly what Silver Age Superman is all about - I don’t think I’m supposed to know, or I’d be Ed Pinsent. I do know that this is an excellent comic, which could only come from the small press and which can hit me in the heart, me whose never really read the Superman comics, silver age or otherwise.
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