PARTISAN REVIEW
87
the Big City have fed the imagination of a
gene~ation
of novelists
and poets just now coming of age. Such
write~
have been especially
impressed by the urban wilderness of Superman and Captain Marvel:
that crime-ridden megalopolis--so conveniently supplied with phone–
booths for quick costume changes, and seen always from above–
through which Siegel and Shuster's superhero has been pursuing his
foes for a quarter of a century now; and that similar one-seen from
below, from the abandoned subway tunnel (once more we are
underground, which is to say, mythologically at home)-in which the
newsboy Billy Batson, saying "SHAZAM," becomes Captain Marvel.
But the
task
of mythologizing the threat of the City remains
divided up in our world- a function shared by the movies, the
comics, the novel. Reynolds and Lippard and Sue were moviemakers
and cartoonists (with some aid from their illustrators) and makers
of fiction in one, encyclopedic pop artists competing with no one
except each other. Besides, the mythological city they evoked was
still fully erotic,
still
female
as it were--neither desexed by technology,
nor transformed by the skyscraper into an ikon of a kind of permanent
and sterile male tumescence endlessly repeated against the sky. Wom–
en could be had,
if
only in terror-raped, seduced, even killed in
passion-in the mythic city of the 1840's; but in the comic book
metropolis of post World War II, they could only be eternally fled
in a general flight from passion. Sex, the female principle, persists
only as the mechanical womb of the telephone booth or the subway,
in which human flesh
is
converted into a kind of superplastic, in–
vulnerable to bullets or love. No wonder that it was necessary to
pretend that the pop-horror of the 1950's was intended for
kids
only!
Interestingly enough, there has been an attempt in the dying
six–
ties to introduce sex-even portnography-into the comic books
themselves; but
this
has so far been confined to certain "head"
comics, produced for a special audience, the hippy community for
whom Mr. Natural seems a more useful symbol than Captain Marvel
himself
or other more recent inventions for the mass audience like
Su~Mariner
or The Hulk.
For the
subpornographe~
of the 1840's, however, the essential
image of the mystery under the city was the Gothic whorehouse: a
hidden place where, among
all
the other commodities for sale in
the great urban marketplaces,
daughte~
and
siste~
and wives are
being offered to the purchaser rich enough to acquire them. Typically
