The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, was the last place I expected to find a reference to Namor, but there he is, in the middle of Wolfe dubbing the teenagers of Kesey’s generation “Superkids”: 

But of course–! the feeling – out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night — it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world — only 15, 16, 17 years old [...] — with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics — Postwar American suburbs[...].  One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression — but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was common any longer — The Life!  A glorious pace, a glorious age, I tell you!  A very Neon Renaissance — And the myths that actually touched you at that time — not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas — but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash — but of course!  On Perry Lane, what did they think it was — quaint? – when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as the honest American myths?  It was a fantasy world already, this electro-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs.  There they go, in the family car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan — the family car! — a huge crazy god-awful-powerful fantasy creature to begin with, 327-horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven nights of lubricious luxury brougham seduction — you’re already there, in Fantasyland, so why not move off your snug-harbor quality-bed dead center and cut loose — go ahead and say it — Shazam! – juice it up to what it’s already aching to be:  327,000 horsepower, a whole superhighway long and soaring, screaming, on toward … Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future … Billy Batson said Shazam! and turned into Captain Marvel.  Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental gas in the research lab …

… and began traveling and thinking at the speed of light as … The Flash … the current fantasy.[...]

Wolfe doesn’t contrast that generation with the one which created those characters, but I will.  His Superkids, who never knew life without the Golden Age superheroes, saw them not as responses to the oppressions of the wartime world, but expressions of the postwar world’s ever-expanding potential.  According to Wolfe, these Superkids weren’t so much rebelling — at least not in their own eyes — as they were embracing this potential.

A similar theme of self-imposed repression runs through Wolfe’s seminal 1979 work The Right Stuff.  The book focuses on the test pilots who became the first American astronauts, and in particular the peculiar unwritten code of conduct that manifests itself as a supremely self-confident, daredevil spirit.  According to Wolfe, the embryonic space program saw those pilots as convenient test subjects, wanting nothing more from them than to be “spam in a can.”  It’s a little more complex and ironic than that, of course, but the book’s about the struggle of that unexplainable stuff to manifest itself somehow within the confines of the Mercury program.

Darwyn Cooke has cited The Right Stuff as an important influence on The New Frontier, and I suspect it goes beyond the insights into test-pilot Hal Jordan and the Edwards Air Force Base community.  True, Hal’s “I’ll never be an astronaut, but here I am in space” storyline looks superficially like Will Smith’s from Independence Day, but it’s more about Hal being able to transcend the planes and rockets and focus his will through that magic wishing ring.  Likewise, the rest of the future Justice Leaguers find their own ways to break through the rules of a society both wide-open and repressive.  Sounds Nietzschean, to be sure, in the mold of all the old arguments, but the other characters’ arcs center around building trust between them and the normal folks, which I think helps take the super-fascist edge off.  It’s a decent bookend to the Superman-versus-the-UN climax of Kingdom Come, which of course started off with its own Superkids maximizing their collective potential in the form of rampant mayhem.  Next to that Wolfe passage above, Mark Waid and Alex Ross look like, well, grumpy old men…. 

Still, Kingdom Come was directed pretty specifically against certain trends of its day, not the superhero genre as a whole.  In particular, it wasn’t designed as legislation.  By that I mean something more targeted than just saying “it didn’t impose any rules on the characters,” because of course it did; don’t behave like you’re at Image apparently being Rule No. 1.  The distinction I want to make goes more to the type of rule. 

As Elseworlds, Kingdom Come and New Frontier were non-binding resolutions centering around the acceptance of superheroes by society.  By contrast, the standard in-continuity Big Event typically lays out a new set of “laws;” that is, rules regulating the various aspects of superhero stories.  I have written often about the past few years being wearying, because by and large DC has concerned itself with such rulemaking — sometimes even becoming, to carry the legislative metaphor just a little further, the graphic-storytelling equivalent of C-SPAN.  Maybe that’s just me, so plugged into the process that I only see the gears turning, but I was ready for 52 to end the cycle when here comes Countdown.  The constant state of setup has to end … doesn’t it?  Every process is an explanation, every explanation is a restriction, and every restriction is a step away from opening up the family car! to get at all of those 327,000 horses….

Many generalizations in that last sentence, I know.  Since the end of Infinite Crisis, DC has tabled its legislative impulses in favor of reacquainting readers with its characters.  Still, I do think that DC and Marvel continue to be seem more worried about the explanations than they are about the end results.  If Marvel’s main mission statement is With great power there must come great responsibility, DC’s should be Just imagine.  Next to You will believe a man can fly, I’d say that’s one of the company’s most potent mantras.  Moreover, both emphasize the experience, not the underlying mechanics, and that’s what got us all interested in the first place, right? 

If you haven’t realized it by now, the Wolfe passage is, literally, an adolescent’s power fantasy, bursting with that teenaged I’ve-got-it-why-can’t-I-use-it ache.  For the Merry Pranksters, it led to lots of LSD and Doctor Strange.  As a responsible adult, and one who has even started to mutter under his breath about “kids today,” it feels odd for me to say it, but maybe we superhero fans should demand more stories that feel like joyriding in Dad’s car past curfew.  Like Wolfe’s Superkids, we have been bequeathed a genre born of a need for liberation and nurtured in a hothouse of potential.  Like the test pilots Wolfe chronicled, we should want to exploit that potential as far as it will go, rules be damned.

 

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