American dreams of mutants: the X-Men--"pulp" fiction, science fiction, and superheroes.

REVIEWING AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO POPULAR CULTURE OF THE twentieth century, the critic Martin Williams identifies "motion picture drama, jazz, a special kind of musical theater and its associated music and dance, the modern detective story, the comic strip, to name only the most obvious" (3). No less obvious, and a glaring omission from these claims, is science fiction, for "two genres acquired their recognizable form in {American "pulp" fiction magazines}: the detective noir and science fiction" (A. Boyer 92). Despite the European/Old World antecedents of H. G. Wells, who wrote scientific romances, and Jules Verne, who wrote merveilleux scientifique, the term "science fiction" was coined by Hugo Gernsback, editor of the American magazine Amazing Stories in the 1920s. From these pulp origins, science fiction moved "inexorably towards the center of American culture" (Franklin 3), a movement marked by the detonation of an atomic bomb at Hiroshima in 1945, when "thoughtful men and women recognized that {they} were living in a science fiction world" (Gunn 174). And, as Bukatman remarks, there can be "no overstating the importance of science fiction to ... a moment that sees itself as science fiction" (Terminal Identity 3). Reviewing those opinions expressed by critics and commentators in the 1950s, Edward James found acceptance that science fiction was a serious literature--although privileging ideas over literary expression--concerned with mankind's present plight and problematic future ("Before the Novum" 27).

The pulp fiction origins of science fiction and detective noir, James observes, were shared by American comic books: "The pulps indeed spawned the comic-strip heroes of the 1930s ... the super-hero, in fact, was one of the most prominent creations of the pulp era" (Science Fiction 48).

The pulps of the 1930s featured such "men of mystery" as Doc Savage, "The Man of Bronze," and his Fabulous Five (Doc Savage Magazine #1: March 1933), and "The Spider," a caped vigilante (The Spider #1: October 1933), (1) while the comics introduced Superman, "The Man of Steel" (Action Comics #1: June 1938), and Batman, "The Caped Crusader" (Detective Comics #27: May 1939). The debuts of Superman and Batman, the more successful and enduring superheroes, were followed by those of The Human Torch and Namor the Sub-mariner (Marvel Comics #1: October/November 1939) to establish a "golden age" of comics. These superhero stories--produced, Bukatman alleges, "largely by young males for somewhat younger males" ("X-bodies" 95)--have been considered to be science fiction albeit, as James contends, "shorn of all sophistication" (Science Fiction 83). But these stories are more properly fantasies; the superheroes retained the mysticism of their pulp predecessors (Lang and Trimble 165) and, although set in plausible worlds where even "the irrational or the strange is still explicable in quasi-scientific or everyday terms" (Abercrombie, Lash, and Longhurst 123), superhero stories used science as "an alibi for magic" (Reynolds 53). Both science fiction and fantasy are estranged genres--possessing an "imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical framework" (Suvin 60-61)--as opposed to naturalistic genres (Parrinder 37), but separated by the notion of cognition inherent in "the Gernsbackian idea of fiction with a scientific explanation" (Parrinder 37).

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the American science fiction short story, but the 1940s saw the science fiction story honed by writers chosen by editor John W. Campbell for publication in Astounding Science Fiction. Science fiction began appearing in "masscirculation magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post" (P. Boyer 257), but many general readers continued to consider science fiction as escapist or unrealistic, which contributed to a "ghetto" mentality among fans. This "ghettoizing" of science fiction was not entirely imposed from without; many science fiction writers and readers regarded "the bulk of their own society as mistaken, ill-informed, and probably ineducable" (Shippey 101). Nevertheless, the 1950s saw "the emergence of science fiction from its paraliterary ghetto" (A. Boyer 96) with the publication of socially conscious and critical stories and novels. Yet, this serious and sophisticated literature coexisted with unsophisticated paraliterature, such as articles and stories that encouraged a "cult of irrationality and UFOism" (Seed 9). These stories were published after the Second World War by Ray Palmer, who succeeded Gernsback as the editor of Amazing Stories. Serious science fiction survived the crash of science fiction magazines (which dwindled from forty to a mere six or seven in the late 1950s {Sadoul 217}, due in part to the failure of the major magazine distributor American News Company), the decline of mass-circulation magazines such as Collier's, and the rise of television.

Unsophisticated superhero comics, by contrast, flourished for the golden age before and during the Second World War. The Axis threat was countered by a roster of patriotic superheroes--including Captain America, the Eagle, the Shield, the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, and Uncle Sam--who provided "fantasies of superhuman power {overcoming} the devastatingly dehumanizing forces associated with Fascism" (Schmitt 155). But this golden age ended in 1954 with the publication of Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, "397 impassioned pages detailing the pernicious effects" of comics (Ross 110). American comic books were subjected to a scare campaign, one of those "moral crusades of the McCarthy era" (Brown 18) that tapped "the general cultural paranoia of the period through the continual and effective use of the popular press" (Parsons 71). Although this "comic scare" undoubtedly damaged the comic trade, television had contributed to the decline of comic sales by "siphoning off the comic book audience" (Parsons 72) with programs such as Captain Video (1949-53), Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950-54), and Space Patrol (1950-56). Comic book publishers, "to escape the witch hunts with what little audience they had left" (Brown 21), submitted to "a busybody review board and an insufferable code that amounted to the emasculation of comic books" (Richler 306).