114
RICHARD KLUGER
when he adds, "Had they given us a Wonder Woman with balls-that
would have been something for Dr. Wertham and the rest of us to wrestle
with!" But that is precisely it: she's Billy Batson in drag-the first (and
only) transvestite comic hero. That flat chest, those narrow hips, the
way she delivered an uppercut-and never even a passing reference to
matters of feminine hygiene that one would expect to come up in th'e
natural order of things. WW was a superbly inventive spoof on "the
feminine mystique"-and well before it became modish.
These questions are not idle preoccupations, for it must be remem–
bered that the lure of the comic book h'eroes was most potent in the
years immediately preceding puberty.
In
their veiled way, the antics of
tho~
muscular worthies were our sex surrogates and not merely what
Feiffer calls "our booze," not merely sops for smallfry psyches repressed
by grownups who victimized us at every tum (see Edgar Z. Frieden–
berg
et
aI.).
While
The Great Comic Book Hemes
was evidently not intended as
the definitive comment on the genre, it might profitably have touched
on at least some of the unresolved issues that, hopefully, will be explored
in the future at the doctoral level. Why, for example, did Superman and
the others fail to spearhead the American war effort? Clark Kent was,
after all, an American. Think what it might have done for
GI
morale
if Superman had squashed a dozen Panzer tanks into a ball and dropped
it on GOring's head. Or if Batman had busted in on fifty Nip warlords
stretched on their yelJow bellies plotting fiendish tortures whil'e tiny-toed
Geishas trod on their slimey backs,
There are domestic political questions as well, like why no one has
treated the McCarthyite figure of Captain America, witchhunting across
a bleak countryside for "the vicious elements who seek to overthrow the
U.S. Government." The John Birch Society had its forerunner in the
"Sentinels of Liherty" which one could join for a dime and help Captain
America "in his war against the spies and enemies in our midst who
threaten our very independence. ..." Promising stuff here for a seminar
on The Making of American Zealotry, 1964. And there are dozens of
functional ratner than substantive issues that Mr. Feiffer chose not to
discuss, like why most comic heroes had blue hair.
Blue.
Or how The
Human Torch turned his flame on. Granted, these matters are of less
than great social moment but they are not without interest.
I want to make clear that I am not faulting Mr. Feiffer for the book
he did not write. Th'e book he did has enough problems of its own, not
the least of them its free-form punctuation and inventive speIIing. As a
little memoir of his days as a comic-strip artist, it is amusing enough, if
