It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Supershow!

by Annemarie Conte   
Posted December 20, 2007

Kids used to sneak comic books under the covers to read by flashlight. Now those twelve-cent sagas are valuable art spotlighted in exhibits at the Montclair Art Museum.

How reassuring to find the Man of Steel, blue arms folded over the famous S on his chest, guarding the entrance to the Montclair Art Museum’s Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes. The seven-foot-tall figure (to be raffled off New Year’s Eve) is actually a hollow-bodied Man of Fiberglass that comes from the Sharper Image. But with an invaluable trove of rare comic books on display in the gallery, it’s good to have him on duty.

“If you’re a collector and fanatic, you will salivate,” says Michael Uslan, an Essex County resident who was executive producer of Batman and Batman Begins. He’s one of the aforementioned comic-book fanatics and he knows what is worth salivating over. Providing vintage comics and original art from his own collection, and arranging loans from other noted collectors, he served as principal consultant to MAM chief curator Gail Stavitsky.

“We have the Holy Grail!” Uslan says. Yes, there in a secure display case, is Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman in June 1938. Nearby is Detective Comics #27, in which Batman debuted in May 1939. Estimated value of each: $400,000 to $1 million. Holy Megabucks, Batman!

The undeniable wow factor of this unique show, however, is not monetary, but cultural and even aesthetic. It’s no coincidence that Sunday newspaper comics morphed into color comic books and gave birth to superheroes—who help the oppressed—just as America was mired in the Great Depression.

Today, when political code words like “sanctuary city” are invoked to exploit the issue of illegal immigration, it’s worth reflecting that not only was Superman the ultimate “illegal alien” (from that rogue planet, Krypton), but his creators—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and many other early comic book artists—were of immigrant stock. Where would we be without them?

“Comic books are an indigenous American art form, like jazz, that made a valuable contribution to world culture,” says Uslan.

Curator Stavitsky, who happens to be married to a comic-book collector, divided the material, covering more than 60 years, into six themed sections. “There has been very little done on how mainstream comic books reflect changes in American culture, which is our focus,” she says.

Innocence and patriotism are central in the first section, covering 1938-45. Early Superman took time to counsel juvenile delinquents and even mounted a campaign against “reckless” drivers. Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo took lumps from Superman and Batman and Robin.

The conformist 1950s lumped comic books in with Commies, racy movies, and other presumed threats to truth, justice, and the American way. Dr. Frederic Wertham’s 1954 screed, Seduction of the Innocents, led to a U.S. Senate investigation. Like movies, comic books wound up adopting a decency code forswearing profanity, gore, and especially sex.

But it was okay for Wonder Woman’s hemline to inch higher and higher over the decades. Though she would seem to spring from 1960s and ’70s “women’s lib,” Wonder Woman actually was created in 1941 by psychologist William Moulton Marston. With her cover as Army Nurse Diana Prince, Wonder Woman was the first female superhero.

The first postmodern superhero was probably Spiderman, created by Stan Lee in 1962. Spidey was a brooding adolescent, making up in insecurities what he lacked in acne. Lee clearly had his finger on the zeitgeist. In 1961 he launched the Fantastic Four—Mr. Fantastic, Human Torch, Invisible Woman, and The Thing—who, as one of Stavitsky’s wall panels note, were actually “a rather dysfunctional family.”

Characters such as Green Lantern and Green Arrow allied themselves against racism, poverty, and political corruption as the twentieth century wound down. The exhibit traces the emergence of African-American superheroes and, most recently, comic books by and about Native Americans. A Hero’s Voice follows six young Ojibwe leaders grappling with issues of tribal identity and survival in the modern world.

The aesthetic power and  spatial efficiency of comic-book art comes across clearly in the books themselves, but packs an even bigger punch in the larger-scale, original, pen-and-ink drawings framed on the gallery walls.

Prior to 1970, little value was attached to this work. Uslan notes that after the original drawings were screened for reproduction, they were often used to sop up ink spills or were cut into pieces to hand out to kids on the DC Comics studio tour.

To aficionados, veteran illustrator Joe Kubert and his illustrator sons Adam and Andy are superheroes themselves. Their work is celebrated in a companion show at MAM.

“When I started in this business, it was considered such junk that even the artists were ashamed to admit they worked in comic books,” says the Kubert patriarch. Times have changed. Kubert, 81, runs the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover. Best known for his intense detail on Sergeant Rock, Hawkman, and Tarzan, he has recently published the graphic novels Yossel, Abraham Stone and Jew Gangster. Adam, 48, works on Superman; Andy, 45, on Batman. “I couldn’t be more proud of my two youngest boys,”  Joe says.

Another well-known New Jersey-based illustrator, Greg Hildebrandt (who, with his brother Tim, created the original Star Wars poster in the 1970s), received a MAM commission to make two huge murals featuring DC and Marvel characters. These will be hung in the museum’s illuminated, glass-enclosed stairwell, visible from outside.

Perhaps you have a few cardboard boxes full of comic books somewhere in the attic. Here is what it means to be a real collector: When Uslan was a senior at Indiana University in 1973, he sold 20,000 comic books, which paid for law school as well as his future wife’s engagement ring.

“In the last two years,” he says, “I’ve donated 40,000 comic books from my collection to the rare book library at Indiana University. It’s sort of a payback for allowing me to teach the world’s first college accredited course on comic books there. I am now left with a mere 10,000 of my favorites.”