Dick Gray and Richard Grayson

Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman and an upcoming biography of Bill Finger, co-creator of Batman and Robin, recently alerted me to the sensational character find of 1903: The Boy Wonder, Dick Gray!

Appearing in one story in the pulp magazine Brave and Bold, Dick Gray was “athletic in figure and singularly agile in his movements”—but then so were most other dime-novel heroes.

In the Comic Buyer’s Guide, David Frank reported that “The Boy Wonder, or Dick Gray’s Marvellous Pump” is “about the adventures Gray gets into with his anti-gravity device.” It thus seems to be of a piece with the Stratemeyer syndicate’s Tom Swift series, L. Frank Baum’s Master Key, and similar young men’s tales from that age of technological wonder.

I doubt this 1903 magazine had any influence on the creation of Dick Grayson in 1940. Finger, Jerry Robinson, and Bob Kane weren’t even born when Dick Gray was pumped out. But the similarity of the characters’ names highlights one ubiquitous aspect of American pop fiction until recently: the WASPiness of its heroes and heroines.

Both Baum and Edward Stratemeyer had German surnames, but practically all their main characters had surnames from the British Isles. Two generations later, many of the first generation of superhero creators were Jewish: Finger, Bob Kane (originally Robert Kahn), Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby (originally Jacob Kurtzberg), Stan Lee (originally Stanley Leiber), and so on. But they created heroes with names like Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Denny Colt, Steve Rogers, Reed Richards, and Peter Parker.

That trend in popular culture both reflected and amplified the trend in real life for some Americans to shed their “ethnic” names. Which brings me to a real Richard Grayson.

Back during the national crisis over the edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn published without ethnic slurs, one small electronic press announced the publication of The Hipster Huckleberry Finn. It replaced the “n word” with “hipster.” The editor and publisher of that edition is a writer, teacher, and activist named Richard Grayson.

In this autobiographical essay he explains:

I was born Richard Arnold Ginsberg in Brooklyn on June 4, 1951, two years after my parents, Marilyn and Daniel, had married. When I was six months old, Mom and Dad changed our Jewish last name to the ethnically neutral Grayson.

At that time, superhero comics were in a doldrum. Robin was one of the handful of costumed heroes who continued to appear often in comic books—Batman, Detective, and World’s Finest—but even he had lost his cover slot on Star Spangled Comics.

The Batman newspaper comic strip had stopped years before. The low-budget movie serial Batman and Robin had appeared in theaters in 1949 and then disappeared, and there was no TV show in daily reruns.

As a result, most Americans might not have seen any particular meaning in the name “Richard Grayson,” aside from the “ethnically neutral” quality this man’s parents were seeking.

But as the former Richard Ginsburg grew up, superhero comics came back. He even read them:

I also was a big fan of superhero comic books. I proudly possessed the early issues of Justice League of America, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, and Daredevil. At 11, I would pretend to be The Flash – Fastest Man Alive – as I bicycled around the neighborhood, playing hooky from Hebrew school.

Alas, Grayson doesn’t discuss whether he identified with Batman’s Boy Wonder, or was teased for sharing that character’s name. Perhaps one day he’ll make a story about it.

The Latest Miracle Tech

When L. Frank Baum wrote The Master Key (1901) and The Boy Fortune Hunters in Yucatan (1910, using the pseudonym Floyd Akers), the answer to almost every technical problem his characters faced was that burgeoning technology: electricity!

Guns that stun instead of kill? The ability to fly? Pills that fill all your nutritional needs? Boxes that allow you to look at anything happening anywhere in the world? Those books took advantage of how readers were ready to believe that a hard-working inventor might soon come up with just that device, harnessing the infinite potential of electricity.

In the same era, the Stratemeyer syndicate gave us Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, and Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive.

Half a century later, the new technology with unlimited reach was: atomic power! So it's no surprise that the Tom Swift, Jr., series (1954-1971) featured titles like Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster and Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar.

So what is today's equivalent? Judging by a reading copy of Doc Wilde and the Frogs of Doom, by Tim Byrd, it's: nanotechnology! Do you as an author need your characters to breathe (and, apparently, see) while swimming through an underground stream? To coat an airplane with impervious armor? To heal all wounds and kill all bacteria? Nanotechnology is the answer for you!