Stupendo, Secret Girl, and Boston Powers, #5

The Boston Comics Roundtable just published Boston Powers, #5, its latest superhero comic book for young readers. For now it’s available at local events, and there are, alas, few local events, but I hope to share order information soon.

This magazine includes the second tale of Stupendo and Secret Girl, story by me and art by Brendan Tobin. This episode starts almost immediately after the pair’s first published adventure in Boston Powers, #2.

As you recall, Stupendo is a very strange visitor from another planet, and Secret Girl is a youngster from suburban Boston who’s taken on the task of turning Stupendo into a successful superhero.

In this installment, Emma’s parents are worried about her going along on Stupendo’s missions while someone in greater Boston is making things like babies and puppy dogs into gallumphing giants. Is this the end of the team of Stupendo and Secret Girl?

(No, it isn’t. I’ve already written the third and culminating episode in this story arc. But that, too, ends with the question: Is this the end of the team of Stupendo and Secret Girl?)

We’re #2!

Fawcett’s original Captain Marvel debuted in Whiz Comics, #2. There was no issue #1.

The Human Torch’s kid sidekick, Toro, debuted in Human Torch, #2. There was no issue #1.

Amazing Man debuted in Amazing Man Comics, #5, and then headlined Stars and Stripes, #2. Neither of those comic books had #1 issues, either.

Back around 1940, when those periodicals appeared, publishers tried to avoid #1 issues if they could. To newsstand vendors, the first issue of a magazine looked like an unproven product they could skip.

Fawcett published a couple of “ashcan” issues with different titles to secure its Captain Marvel copyrights and trademarks before sending Whiz Comics out into the market. Timely dropped a series after one tepid issue and retitled that magazine after its established star, the Human Torch. As for Amazing Man, the Comic Corporation of America simply started its series further along the number line than 1.

When companies canceled one series of stories and started another which seemed to have better prospects, they often changed titles but kept the numbering. Thus, the first Sub-Mariner Comics evolved into Official True Crime Cases in 1947, Amazing Mysteries in 1949, and finally Best Love, but the numbering climbed steadily from #23 to #33.

After a five-year gap, the Atlas company brought Prince Namor back in 1954, with Sub-Mariner Comics resuming at issue #33. That was neither exact nor logical, but what mattered was reminding retailers this character was an established draw.

Likewise, Daring Mystery Comics ran through #8 and was then succeeded by two series, both launching at #9: Comedy Comics in 1942 and Daring Comics in 1944. At Charlton in the late 1950s, Nyoka the Jungle Girl morphed into Space Adventures after Space Adventures lost its numbering to War at Sea.

That preference for presenting a new comics series as firmly established lasted into the succeeding decades. When Marvel shifted its monster and sci-fi magazines to superhero brands, the company changed the magazines’ titles but not their numbering. Thus, Journey into Mystery, #125, was followed by Thor, #126; Strange Tales, #168, by Doctor Strange, #169; and Tales of Suspense, #99, by Captain America, #100. Over at DC, My Greatest Adventure, #85, led into Doom Patrol, #86.

To be sure, Marvel’s other regular Tales of Suspense feature, Iron Man, got its own magazine with a #1 number and a “Big Premiere Issue” decal drawn on the cover. That presaged a new force on the comics scene—collectors who liked to own the first of something special.

In the 1980s the comic-book industry completed a huge shift from newsstands to specialty comics shops. One of the most visible effects was on the #1 issue. Collectors and resellers like that number. Once a liability, a #1 designation is now an asset. Comics publishers seize any opportunity to restart series and put out new #1s. There are, for example, four magazines designated as Nightwing, #1:

• the first issue of a 1995 miniseries.
• the first issue of an ongoing series started in 1996.
• the first issue of an ongoing series started in 2011.
• the first issue of an ongoing series started in 2016.

Increasingly new fans complain that all these #1 issues and reboots make it harder to follow the storylines and figure out what back issues to seek. But just as economic incentives made comic books designated #1 rarer in earlier decades, for now those forces push the other way.

“Every statement is an overstatement”

This passage appeared in a an essay by Adam Gopnik that appeared in The New Yorker in 2008. I’ve found it to offer one of the most useful observations of the millennium.

Gopnik was discussing how G. K. Chesterton had gone out of style:

The second big shift occurred just after the First World War, when, under American and Irish pressure, and thanks to the French (Flaubert doing his work through early Joyce and Hemingway), a new form of aerodynamic prose came into being. The new style could be as limpid as Waugh or as blunt as Orwell or as funny as White and Benchley, but it dethroned the old orotundity as surely as Addison had killed off the old asymmetry.

Chestertonian mannerisms—beginning sentences with “I wish to conclude” or “I should say, therefore” or “Moreover,” using the first person plural un-self-consciously (“What we have to ask ourselves . . .”), making sure that every sentence was crafted like a sword and loaded like a cannon—appeared to have come from some other universe. Writers like Shaw and Chesterton depended on a kind of comic and complicit hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement, and understood as such by readers. The new style prized understatement, to be filled in by the reader.

What had seemed charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before now could sound like puff and noise. Human nature didn’t change in 1910, but English writing did. (For Virginia Woolf, they were the same thing.) The few writers of the nineties who were still writing a couple of decades later were as dazed as the last dinosaurs, post-comet. They didn’t know what had hit them, and went on roaring anyway.

In the years since 2008, I perceive, our popular rhetoric has undergone the opposite shift. People now once again speak in hyperbole, especially online. We no longer simply have a fun time; we enjoy “the best Day EVER!” We no longer dislike someone; we say they “deserve to die.” I see people express anxiety about not having enough exclamation points in their business emails.

For someone who learned to write before this shift, I say with characteristic understatement and deflection, it’s a bit disconcerting.

“You don’t expect a benefit”

From Ian Benke’s Authority Magazine interview with James Kennedy, author most recently of Dare to Know:

There is no benefit to reading science fiction. Or at least, I hope there isn’t. And if there is, I hope nobody finds out what it is.

The worst thing that can happen to art is for it to become respectable, to be considered as something that is “good for you.” Science fiction had its golden age when literary people considered the genre to be juvenile, unserious, and embarrassing. Now that science fiction has become more respectable, is it really as exciting? Vital, unruly punk energy resists being enlisted for causes, it rightfully doesn’t want to help you, it goes its own swinging way and if you’re lucky, maybe it’ll let you tag along.

The adventure of art is that you submit to it. You let it take you somewhere. You don’t expect a benefit, you don’t even want one. Maybe you’ll get hurt, maybe you won’t, maybe it’ll be a good experience, maybe bad, but for me, the whole thrill is surrendering myself to it, without any expectation of earning some new virtue or snagging some nugget of information. I just want to be overwhelmed, thrilled, transported.

The “Shipoopi” Problem

Over the holidays, Godson informed me that Godson’s Brother had never seen The Music Man, the stage and screen musical by Meredith Willson. Since Godson’s Brother is now in the business of theatrical production in Britain, I gave him a copy of Willson’s carefully wide-eyed account of developing the show, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory.

At some point I hope to sit down with both brothers to watch The Music Man, ideally in an environment that allows commentary, both wide-eyed and snarky. That brings up a potentially big problem: the “Shipoopi” number.

Back in college, a friend who was cowriting musicals used the word “Shipoopi” almost as profanity, shorthand for a stupid, unmotivated dance number plopped into the middle of a show. And indeed there’s a lot to sneer at in “Shipoopi.” The song title sounds silly, if not scatalogical. The lyrics are sexist. In the movie, the number ends with Marian in Harold’s arms, leaving no reason for them to go separately to the footbridge for their rendezvous.

Even more than some of the other “trunk songs” that Meredith Willson wrote before The Music Man and then tried to find places for, this song’s lyrics don’t arise out of the dramatic situation. They don’t reflect the characters’ emotions. All that granted, I can nonetheless make a case for “Shipoopi.”

Most of the early numbers in The Music Man uncover music in scenes of small-town daily life: the rhythm of the rail, the pitch of a salesman, a repetitive piano lesson, gossips’ prattle, the raised voices of the school committee. In coming to town, the title character brings the latent musicality of River City to the surface.

Of course, Marian the librarian already embodies music. As the piano teacher, she’s the only person in River City who knows about the subject. But her straight job requires, ironically, keeping patrons quiet and still. The town’s other ladies shun Marian for having been too friendly with Old Miser Madison, preferring a player piano to a real piano player.

By promising River City a boys’ band in “Seventy-Six Trombones,” Harold Hill makes the idea of music explicit and appealing. That song doesn’t just reveal the music in daily life; it’s about enjoying music itself. “Shipoopi” does the same in the second act—a whole chorus of townspeople knowingly sing and dance together. Musical subtext becomes text.

The significance of “Shipoopi” differs in the Broadway show and the movie because of when and how the song appears. On stage, early in Act 2, River City’s teenagers interrupt the ladies rehearsing their Grecian urns tableau in order to have a dance—the number shows the younger, more musically inclined generation taking over. On screen, “Shipoopi” comes later as part of a town celebration. It demonstrates community cohesion, not division.

Either way, “Shipoopi” shows how River City has moved to embrace music, an element of life repressed at the start of the story. That foretells the town’s acceptance of Harold and Marian at the end.

(Godson’s Brother said the little he knew about The Music Man made it seem thematically akin to Footloose, which tells me he’ll get this.)