Time Warp

By JONATHAN V. LAST

The New York Comic Con begins today, and with it comes all the geekery one expects of comic-book conventions. But something a bit more serious is going on in the world of comic books. Two new series, Project Superpowers and The Twelve, have taken heroes from the Golden Age of comics and plopped them down in the middle of the modern world, setting up a collision of 1940s values with a postmodern worldview.

Project Superpowers' The Fighting Yank

The Golden Age dawned in the 1930s and was gone by 1950. Historians differ on exactly when it arrived, but the 1938 appearance of Superman in Action Comics is as good a spot as any to plant the marker. Before Superman, comic books were the domain of detectives and jokey juvenilia, the successful titles selling 200,000 to 400,000 copies per issue. Within months, Superman was selling 1.3 million copies per issue. By 1940, he was making nearly $1 million a year for his publisher, DC Comics.

Legions of masked adventurers followed. Many are still part of the popular culture: Batman, Captain America, The Flash among them. Superheroes dominated the industry and simultaneously created a new branch of fiction. The standard superhero was a good-looking man in his 30s with a solid, middle-class day job as a reporter, doctor, lawyer, professor or the like. At night he donned a mask and meted out justice. Many heroes acted as agents of the U.S. government and almost all delighted in thumping foreign saboteurs with Germanic or Japanese names. The first issue of Captain America, published in March 1941, depicted the hero slugging Hitler months before the U.S. formally entered the war.

Golden Age heroes were stern angels. In his first adventure, a six-page story in Detective Comics #27, Batman kills two perfectly pedestrian criminals. As he tosses the second thug into a vat of acid, the Caped Crusader notes that it's "a fitting end for his kind."

Today's comic books are very different animals. For starters, even as superheroes have swamped the cineplex, comic-book circulation has plummeted. A top book these days might sell only 100,000 copies a month. Yet, on many levels, today's comics are superior products. The quality of paper and printing is vastly improved. Hurried and crude cartoons have grown into complicated, often beautiful artwork.

But most striking is the quality of the writing. The modern industry has found a place for professional writers -- including screenwriter Joss Whedon and novelists Brad Meltzer and Jodi Picoult -- to work in the medium. The result has been a steady increase in the sophistication and literary ambition of comics. Simple-minded, patriotic Golden Age heroes like Major Victory have given way to brooding figures like Wolverine and Marvel's popular X-Men, who worry about civil rights and the integration of mutants with Homo sapiens.

There have been other changes, too. Today's heroes, for example, are likely to lack gainful employment. Also, the general worldview of comic creators roughly approaches that of the rest of the creative class. So the mores of comic books have grown more cosmopolitan. Superheroes almost never kill these days, even when confronted with the most dastardly enemy. They also tend to take a more hostile view of authority figures, especially those in the U.S. government.

Yet some Golden Age characters seem to be making a comeback. In the past few months two publishers, the industry giant Marvel and the small independent Dynamite, have launched titles that resurrect heroes from nearly 70 years ago and drop them into the modern world.

Dynamite's Project Superpowers grew out of creative ambition and economic necessity. Looking to expand into more original content, the publisher found a number of forgotten Golden Age superheroes now in the public domain. Then it asked artist Alex Ross and writer Jim Krueger to reimagine these '40s characters. Project Superpowers' principal protagonist is a yesteryear hero named The Fighting Yank, who wears a tri-corner hat and is guided by the ghost of an ancestor who fought in the American Revolution.

While the costume may be old-fashioned, the plot is modern. The Fighting Yank awakens decades later to find that the mission the U.S. government gave him at the close of World War II was evil and has turned modern America into a dystopia, complete with a giant corporation overseeing an antiseptic police state. And his ancestor was in on the con, too: "My ghostly relative from the American Revolution," the Yank muses, "well, he might just as well have been Benedict Arnold." The Yank must free the other forgotten Golden Age heroes from a mystical urn in order to rescue modern America from the fascism he helped create.

In Marvel's series The Twelve, a dozen minor heroes are captured by the German SS in the closing days of World War II and placed in suspended animation. They are rediscovered in 2008 and brought to life in modern America. Created by J. Michael Straczynski and Chris Weston, The Twelve uses long buried characters whose rights Marvel already owned.

In many ways, The Twelve's superheroes are Golden Age archetypes. For instance, there's Rockman, who first appeared in USA Comics in 1941, when his origins were described as follows: "From the depths of the Earth comes a mysterious and powerful figure to inflict terrible punishment upon those who would endanger the peace and prosperity of the world's greatest nation -- the United States of America!"

The Twelve is a meditation on America, past and present. The heroes find themselves in an imperfect modern world but begin to realize that the America they knew in the past wasn't all that great either, shot through as it was with racism, prejudice and deceit. One hero, Mr. E., is a Jew who spent the '30s and '40s ignoring his family and passing himself off as a Gentile in order to live the high life.

Other Golden Age adventures are on the way to comic shops, with Marvel and Dynamite set to begin two more series with characters from the era. Dynamite's Joe Rybandt says that the "simplicity in the Golden Age is refreshing compared to the very gray times we live in now." The old characters become "blank slates" upon which we can project the hopes and fears of the present as well as misgivings about the past.

It's all very serious and introspective -- and certainly both Project Superpowers and The Twelve are wonderfully entertaining. Yet every once in a while it would be nice to see The Fighting Yank deck Ayman al-Zawahiri and toss a few of his henchman into a vat of acid. It's all well and good to critically examine the past. But we do ourselves a disservice if, in our attempts to find nuance, we diminish the virtues of those who confronted darker times than ours and found the will to act.