July 11, 1966: Marvel Comics Introduces the 1st Black Superhero

Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa

July 11, 1966, 60 years ago: Marvel Comics publishes Fantastic Four #52, introducing the character of Black Panther, generally considered to be the 1st black superhero in mainstream comic books.

The name "Black Panther" long predates the character -- and the Black Panther Party, which formed a few weeks later. In World War II, the U.S. Army's segregated 761st Tank Battalion was known as the Black Panthers. And Portugal's Mozambique-born soccer star Eusébio, already world-famous but about to become more so as the World Cup began, was already nicknamed "The Black Panther." (He was also nicknamed "The Black Pearl," as was his fellow Portuguese speaker, Brazilian star Pelé.)

There had been black heroes in comic books before, but no major publisher had dared try it. In 1947, with Jackie Robinson debuting in Major League Baseball and Joe Louis as Heavyweight Champion of the World, All-Negro Comics #1 was published. But it sold so poorly that there was no issue #2.

Marvel, under a previous name, Atlas Comics, had published Jungle Tales, including Waku, Prince of the Bantu, clearly an inspiration for the character to come. But that magazine ran only 7 issues, from September 1954 to September 1955, and, as was all too common at the time, indulged in too many stereotypes. In 1963, Marvel had included Private Gabriel Jones in the World War II-themed book Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.

With the knowledge that the Lone Ranger had been partly inspired by an African-American lawman named Bass Reeves (1838-1910), Dell Comics released Lobo in December 1965. Bearing no resemblance to the later DC character of the same name, which is Spanish for "wolf," this was a gunslinger who bore stylistic resemblances to the protagonists of 2 current TV series: Dr. Richard Kimble of The Fugitive and Captain Jason McCord of the Western Branded: The cover identified him as "Branded for Life: An honest man... blamed for a crime he did not commit!"

On the heads of his defeated foes, would leave a gold coin imprinted with the letter L and the image of a wolf, similar to the Lone Ranger leaving a silver bullet and Zorro using his sword to cut a letter Z on his opponents' shirts.

Lobo #1 was released after the March On Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- but also after the riots in Harlem, North Philadelphia and Watts. It didn't sell well, not even in black neighborhoods. When Marvel released the issue of Fantastic Four with Black Panther, Dell thought to try again, and, in September 1966, released Lobo #2. But that didn't sell well, either, and, except for a brief revival in 2017-18, the character has never appeared again.

A character's in-story origin sometimes gets embellished, but rarely has substantive change. But, as was often the case with Marvel and its boss man, Stan Lee, there is a dispute as to this character's real-world origin. Smilin' Stan said that a black hero was the next step in Marvel's progress.

But Marvel's main artist, Jack Kirby, said, "I came up with the Black Panther because I realized I had no blacks in my strip. I'd never drawn a black. I needed a black. I suddenly discovered that I had a lot of black readers. My first friend was a black! And here I was ignoring them because I was associating with everybody else." Lee's story was backed up by writer Roy Thomas, who later succeeded him as Marvel's editor; while Kirby's story is backed up by documentation, including drawings that predate the issue.

With Black Panther, the in-story origin of the character is not the only thing that matters: There's also the origin story of his homeland, the African nation of Wakanda. At some point in the past, a meteorite landed there. It was made of vibranium, and this fictional material allowed Wakanda to develop technology beyond anything the world had yet seen, including the ability to conceal themselves from the outside world. Their King decided to do this, for fear that the technology could be stolen. (Vibranium would eventually be found elsewhere, and was used to make Captain America's shield.)

In-universe, the title "Black Panther" is a rank of office, chieftain of the Wakandan Panther Clan. As chieftain, the Panther is entitled to consume a special heart-shaped herb which, in addition to his mystical, shamanistic connection with Bast, the Panther Goddess, grants him superhumanly acute senses, strength, speed, agility, stamina, durability, healing, and reflexes. In essence, he has the powers of Spider-Man, without the addition of web-shooters.

In the comics, the King of Wakanda, and thus the Black Panther, is named T'Challa, whose father and predecessor, T'Chaka, was murdered by a rival. Thus, like so many other superheroes, T'Challa is motivated to fight for justice in remembrance of, and to avenge, a parental figure. Just as so many other heroes protect a city -- or, in the case of Daredevil, just one neighborhood -- T'Challa protects an entire country.

In the story that introduced him, he invited the Fantastic Four to Wakanda, and then tested their abilities. The tests passed, he made amends by explaining that he needed to see if they would be worthy allies. They subsequently fought a would-be invader. Black Panther later joined the Avengers, and, for a time, was married to Ororo Munroe, a.k.a. Storm of the X-Men.

T'Challa made his television debut in the 1994-96 Fantastic Four animated series, where he was voiced by Keith David. Djimon Hounsou provided the voice of T'Challa for a 2011 animated series. Chadwick Boseman played the character in 4 live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe films: Captain America: Civil War, in 2016, in which he's on the pro-registration side; Black Panther, in 2018, the 1st superhero film with a black lead that wasn't a comedy (I'm counting Wesley Snipes' Blade films as more horror than superhero films); Avengers: Infinity War, also in 2018, in which he was one of the heroes who was "snapped away" by Thanos; and Avengers: Endgame, in 2019, in which the Hulk snaps him back, and he leads Wakanda's army in the final battle against Thanos.

Boseman, who had previously played black American icons Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and James Brown, became beloved all over the world for his portrayal of T'Challa. Unbeknownst to the world at large, he was already battling cancer during the filming of Endgame, and died in 2020. So, while the character still lives in comic books, in the MCU, the 2022 sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever reveals that their version of T'Challa has died from an incurable illness, and his sister, Shuri, played by Letitia Wright as in the previous film, becomes the new Black Panther. 

Top 10 Superhero Movie Lines of All Time

Rank. Title, Year, Screenplay Author. Explanation. Line. Further explanation, if necessary.

10. Batman & Robin, 1997, Akiva Goldman. At the beginning of the film, we discover that, after the destruction of the Batmobile in the previous film, Batman (George Clooney) hasn't built a new one in which he and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) can ride together, as in the comics and in the 1966-68 TV series.

Robin has a motorcycle, but says, "I want a car!" He knows Batman can afford it, but, instead, chooses to justify it by saying, "Chicks dig the car!" Batman responds by saying, "This is why Superman works alone."

Unlike the 1960s TV series, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, and, so far, Matt Reeves' Epic Crime Saga, none of which make any suggestion that there are other superheroes in their world, this line confirms that there are other superheroes in the 2 Batman films directed by Joel Schumacher films, and implies the same for the earlier 2 films directed by Tim Burton. But it also suggests that there is, as yet, no Justice League.

It's a fun line. Unfortunately, the movie goes downhill from there.

9. The Dark Knight, 2008, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Harvey Dent, the District Attorney, tells Bruce Wayne, who he doesn't know is Batman, "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

He already had a point. One of the last episodes of the Batman TV series, in 1968, featured a hypnotized, un-costumed Bruce doing the bidding of a villain. There was the synthetic-Kryptonite-affected Superman of Superman III in 1983. And, under a false impression, people had turned on Superman in a 1993 episode of Lois & Clark. After this, the Arrowverse of 2016-24 led to heroes seeing evil versions of themselves or their inspirations; the 2023 Flash movie saw an alternate version of the hero go too far; and the new Superman movie sees a clone used by Lex Luthor as the villain Ultraman.

In The Dark Knight, Dent ends up being tortured and tormented by the Joker, becoming the villain Two-Face. And, an order to save Dent's reputation, Batman has to let himself be publicly seen as the villain.

Dishonorable Mention, because it's delivered by a villain. In this case, though, it's not the Joker, but the secondary villain: Dr. Jonathan Crane, the evil psychiatrist who calls himself the Scarecrow.

Batman tries to break up a deal between Crane and some small-time crooks -- and two copycats try to do the same. He has to stop Crane, and he has to stop the "copybats" so they don't get hurt. One says, "We're trying to help you!" And Batman says, "I don't need help!" And Crane says, "Not my diagnosis!"

Honorable Mention: The next line is the copybat asking, "What gives you the right? What's the difference between you and me?" Batman says, "I'm not wearing hockey pads!" Translation: I'm wearing armor, you're not, so you're a lot more likely to get yourself killed by pretending to be me.

8. Spider-Man, 2002, David Koepp. It's not the hero who says it. Not Spider-Man, a.k.a. Peter Parker. It's his aunt, May Parker. After the Green Goblin attacks the Parker house, May is hospitalized, and Peter asks, "Can I do anything for you?" She says, "You do too much: College, a job, all this time with me. You're not Superman, you know." Proving that, at least in the universe where Spider-Man is played by Tobey Maguire, DC Comics exist.

Honorable Mention: Stan Lee wrote it at the end of the first Spider-Man story, in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962: "With great power, there must also come great responsibility." It a retcon, it's Peter's uncle, Ben Parker, who says it, and he says it in this film.

Dishonorable Mention, because it's said by the villain. And, Cliché Alert: The Goblin says to Spidey, "You and I are not so different." Spidey says, "I'm not like you. You're a murderer." And the Goblin says, "Well... to each his own."

7. Wonder Woman, 2017, Allen Heinberg. Why Wonder Woman's origin story was set in World War I, not World War II as usual, I don't know. At any rate, Steve Trevor warns her against trying to cross the "No Man's Land" between the Allies' and the Germans' territory, telling her, "We can't save everyone in this war. This is not what we came here to do." And she says, "No, but it's what I'm going to do." And she does.

6. The Avengers, 2012, Zak Penn and Joss Whedon. Iron Man, for the moment without any version of his armor, is taking a big risk by threatening Loki, who is determined to conquer the Earth with his Chitauri army. But the key line isn't when Tony responds to Loki's "I have an army" with "We have a Hulk."

It's right after that, when he tells an overconfident Loki, "You're missing the point. There's no throne. There is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes, and maybe it's too much for us. But it's all on you. Because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damned well sure we'll avenge it." (Which they ended up having to do, in Avengers: Endgame.)

The implication of Stark's line is, "If we lose to your army, we're coming after you, and your army won't be able to protect you from us."

Honorable Mention: A few minutes later, Loki tells the Hulk, "I am a god, you dull creature!" The Hulk grabs his leg and smashes him around the room, walks away, and says, "Puny god." (The Hulk calling opponents, real and perceived, "puny" is a common feature of the comics.)

Honorable Mention: Earlier in the movie, in Germany, Loki tells the people to kneel before him. And an old man, old enough to remember living under the rule of Adolf Hitler, stands, and says, "Not for men like you." Loki, who thinks of himself as a god, not just as a guy with super-powers, says, "There are no men like me." And the old man, correctly, says, "There are always men like you." 

Honorable Mention: Loki tries to blast the old man, and that's when Captain America arrives to deflect the blast with his shield. Cap tells Loki, "You know, the last time I was in Germany, I saw a man standing above everybody else. We ended up disagreeing."

5. The Incredible Hulk, 1977, Kenneth Johnson (who also directed). This film aired on CBS as a pilot for the TV series of the same name, so, even though it was never released in theaters, it counts.

The Hulk's origin story was re-written so that Dr. David Banner (not "Bruce" like in the comics) is believed dead in an explosion caused by the Hulk, so his story becomes a cross between Frankenstein and The Fugitive -- only, in this case, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Kimble, and the Monster are all the same person. Pursuing the man, the creature and the story is an investigative reporter for a trashy supermarket tabloid, Jack McGee.

In a clip that got played in the opening sequence of every episode, McGee makes Banner angry, and Banner, trying to stay calm, because he already knows what will happen if he doesn't, says, "Mr. McGee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." The line has been associated with the Hulk ever since, and has been used, and even parodied, in the 21st Century Marvel movies.

4. Superman, 2025, James Gunn (who also directed). After he's beaten Lex Luthor, who still considers him not human and a threat to Earth -- or, at least, to Luthor's plans, and that much is true --  Superman explains it to him, in a way that not only affirms Superman's humanity, but exposes Luthor as full of shit: "I'm as human as anyone. I love. I get scared. I wake up every morning, and, despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other, and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time. But that is being human. And that's my greatest strength."

3. Watchmen, 2009, David Hayter and Alex Tse. In prison, vigilante Walter Kovacs, a.k.a. Rorschach, has just defended himself from an attack by a fellow inmate in the cafeteria. Everyone is staring at him, and he says, "None of you seem to understand: I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!"

2. The Dark Knight Rises, 2012, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Just before Batman (Christian Bale) takes off in the Batcopter to get the bomb away from Gotham City, Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) tells him, "I never cared who you were." Batman says, "And you were right."

Gordon: "But shouldn't the people know the hero who saved them?" Batman: "A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders, to let him know that the world hadn't ended." That's when Gordon remembers being a young cop, 30 years earlier, putting his coat around a boy named Bruce Wayne, who had just lost his parents.

It's the kind of line we wouldn't expect from dark, brooding Batman. It's a reminder that, under the cowl, he's still human.

But we would expect that kind of line from Superman:

1. Superman, 1978, Mario Puzo. Superman (Christopher Reeve) catches a falling Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), and says, "Easy, Miss: I've got you." And she says, "You've got me? Who's got you?"

Honorable Mention: When the sequence is done, Lois asks, "Who are you?" Clark, not yet having chosen a name -- it's Lois who comes up with "Superman" -- simply says, "A friend."

Superhero TV Shows vs. Superhero Movies

David Corenswet

Today, the new Superman movie was released, directed by James Gunn, and starring David Corenswet as the greatest superhero of them all.

UPDATE: Truth: It's great. Justice: It's been done, to both the character and his fans. The American Way: Trump is gonna hate it, but my Dad, who grew up on the comics and George Reeves in The Adventures of Superman, would have loved it.

Are superhero TV shows are better than superhero movies? I say yes, because they don't have to follow the same rules:

1. You can take 45 minutes to show the origin story, and instead of, "Enough already, we want to see the movie!" that's your pilot episode. You're allowed to do that.

2. You don't have to pack all of the action into 2 hours. You can have the hero -- and the villain -- talking plans over with the people they work with, and instead of sounding like some foreign film from the 1960s that doesn't make sense even when you add subtitles, it's "The West Wing meets the Super Friends," and it works. The Arrowverse proved this, even if Smallville (in my opinion) didn't.

3. You can have 5 different villains over the course of a season, develop their characters as well, and bring them back.

4. If you throw in a guest superhero, it works -- especially if it turns out to be the main hero's love interest, who then becomes part of the main cast.

5. It doesn't get ridiculous if the hero has a new love interest every season, the way it would if he had a new one every movie. (This was one of the problems with the Burton-Schumacher era of Batfilms, 1989 to 1997. And with the James Bond films.)

6. There's no pressure to fill 15 minutes of the first hour and the last half hour of the movie with punches and explosions. You can pace yourself. You can have 3 or 4 episodes in a row with no major battles, and it works. And a 3-minute fight in a 1-hour episode can be just as effective as a 15-minute fight in a 2-hour movie.

7. It doesn't have to be the ultimate battle -- indeed, it can't be. Science fiction writer David Gerrold made the point that, in a standalone movie, this has to be the most important moment of the life of the hero, super- or otherwise. Or else, why would we watch the story?

But if it's a series -- Gerrold used both Sherlock Holmes and James Bond as examples -- then none of these adventures has to be the biggest battle of them all, because you want to keep the fans coming back for the hero. Save the ultimate battle for the series finale.

April 19, 1954: "Seduction of the Innocent" Is Published

April 19, 1954, 70 years ago: Dr. Fredric Wertham publishes his book Seduction of the Innocent. It turns the world of comic books on its head.

Born on March 20, 1895, in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, as Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer, he anglicized his name to Fredric Wertham in 1927, after moving to America and becoming an American citizen. Subsequently, he married an American sculptor, Florence Hesketh. He had studied at the University of Munich and King's College, London.

He joined the senior staff at New York's Bellevue Hospital, famous (or infamous) for having America's best-known psychiatric ward. In 1946, he opened a low-cost psychiatric clinic in the basement of a church in Harlem, specializing in improving the mental health of black teenagers, and was successful at gaining charitable contributions for it. To this point, he seemed like a good man doing good work.

But that work led him to look into the causes of juvenile delinquency. And in 1954, he published his book, saying he'd found a source. Not rock and roll music, which was then in its infancy. Not movies about young criminals, like the ones starring Marlon Brando and James Dean. Comic books.

He specifically cited "crime comics," which he used to describe not only the popular gangster/murder-oriented titles of the time, but also superhero and horror comics as well. He asserted, based largely on undocumented anecdotes, that reading this material encouraged similar behavior in children. He said that 95 percent of children in reform schools read comics, so that must be what caused it. The logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc: "After it, therefore, because of it." A was followed by B, so A must have caused B. Not necessarily.

He went after superheroes. Since the creation of Batman's teenaged crimefighting partner Robin in 1940, people had joked that the Dynamic Duo were what would now be called a gay couple. But Wertham wrote it, making the suspicion, which he believed, part of the public record.

It was no secret that William Marston, creator of Wonder Woman, had given her a bondage subtext. What was a secret was that Marston -- who had died in 1947, and was therefore unable to publicly defend himself or his character -- had lived in a ménage à trois with his wife Elizabeth and their research assistant Olive Byrne.

But Wertham suggested that being a woman but also being so strong -- physically and emotionally -- and independent meant that she was a lesbian. Such was the thinking about gay people in the 1950s, and a psychiatrist should have known better.

Stan Lee, already writing for the company that would become Marvel Comics, recalled that Wertham "said things that impressed the public, and it was like shouting 'Fire!' in a theater. But there was little scientific validity to it. And yet, because he had the name 'Doctor,' people took what he said seriously, and it started a whole crusade against comics."

(Lee didn't exactly have credibility on the subject: Although he respected science enough to make many of his best characters scientists -- Mr. Fantastic, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the human form of the Hulk -- the actual science in his stories made little sense. He was a storyteller, not a scientist.)

The advertisements in comic books didn't help. They sold knives. They even sold air rifles, like the one Ralphie wanted in the 1940-set 1983 film A Christmas Story. You know the tagline: "You'll shoot your eye out!" Wertham claimed that this made kids want these instruments of violence. Had I been around at the time, I would have been with him on this claim, at the least.

(Then again, people said the same thing about video games in the 1980s. I was a video game addict as a teenager at that time. And I haven't gone on to fight invading aliens.)

Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, an anti-crime crusader, called Wertham before his Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. In his testimony, Wertham repeated a call he had made in his book, for "national legislation based on the public health ideal that would prohibit the circulation and display of comic books to children under the age of 15."

The Committee did not blame comic books for teenage crime in its report, and did not draft legislation addressing the situation. Instead, it suggested that the comics regulate themselves "voluntarily." (Quotation marks mine.) This was an implied threat, much like President Theodore Roosevelt, nearly half a century earlier, telling the colleges to regulate their football, or he would act.

And so, just as TR's threat led to the creation of the NCAA and the streamlining of football rules, the publishers of comic books responded to the Kefauver Subcommittee's suggestion by creating the Comics Code Authority, to censor their own content. Much like Hollywood's Hays Code, it dictated that criminals must always be punished.

This was pretty much the end of murder comics and horror comics. Detective comics -- not to be confused with DC, which originally stood for "Detective Comics" and still published (and still does today) a magazine with that very title -- adventure comics (which was also the title of a DC series) and superhero comics became sanitized, their rough edges gone.

This effect was seen on television as well. In its 1st couple of seasons, The Adventures of Superman had some hard-hitting stories about Superman (played by George Reeves) taking on gangsters. They didn't have much of a choice in terms of opponents: The limited TV budgets of the time precluded the appearances of comics supervillains like Lex Luthor and Mr. Mxyzptlk. After Seduction of the Innocent, the show's episodes became sillier in tone. By 1966, the Batman series that developed, while occasionally going "dark," was known, even at the time, as "campy."

After Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1985, DC retconned much of its history. Putting the 1940s superheroes on "the same Earth" as their current heroes, they said that most of the earlier heroes went into a reluctant retirement in the early 1950s, due to Congressional hearings demanding that they reveal their secret identities to the public in order to continue their costumed crimefighting, and most refused. This was Werthamism, disguised as McCarthyism.

In 1971, Marvel published a story about drug abuse in a Spider-Man issue, doing so without the seal of the Comics Code Authority on its cover. This was considered a huge risk. It worked. The Authority wasn't dead, but it was now as defanged as it had once rendered the comics. Two years later, a Spider-Man story showed Spidey's arch-enemy, the Green Goblin, killing Spidey's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. He didn't get away with it, but it did end Part 1 of a two-part story. If Wertham knew about it, he was probably infuriated by it.

After 1954, Wertham continued to look for sources of juvenile delinquency. He decided that television was a bad influence, and in 1959, he wrote The War On Children. Just 5 years after he shook up America, no publishing house would touch his work.

Nevertheless, the comics' killjoy continued to advocate for civil rights, and his writings about segregation were used as evidence in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. He became a senior psychiatrist at the New York City Department of Hospitals, and the director of the Mental Hygiene Clinic at Bellevue.

In his 1599 play Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare put these words in the mouth of Marc Antony at Caesar's funeral: "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones." Dr. Fredric Wertham died on November 18, 1981, at age 86. His work for civil rights, which made him a hero, were forgotten. His work to subdue comics, which made him a villain -- or, at least momentarily, a fool -- live on.

Old-Time Avengers

Gary Merrill and Chuck Connors in Ride Beyond Vengeance, 1966.

This was the closest picture I could find to any of these actors

actually looking like the parts in question.

THE AVENGERS, 1951:

Iron Man: Tyrone Power. The best-known Zorro had the swagger for it.

Captain America: Henry Fonda. Jimmy Stewart might have been a better emotional choice, but he was too skinny. 

Bruce Banner (before the change): Jimmy Stewart. Here, he would be just right.

The Hulk (after the change): Chuck Connors. He was big enough and muscular enough, and it would be too soon for Steve Reeves.

Thor: Kirk Douglas. He would have looked great with the long hair and the winged helmet.

Hawkeye: Humphrey Bogart. He was grumpy enough.

Black Widow: Ingrid Bergman. She could do the accent.

Dr. Strange: Clark Gable. He had the mustache and the style.

Spider-Man: Dean Stockwell. He was 15 then, supposedly the same age that Peter Parker was when he was bitten by the radioactive spider.

Ant-Man: Mickey Rooney. He was so short, he wouldn't need special effects.

Black Panther: Paul Robeson. The only black actor of any note then, and it's a middle finger to the blacklist.

Nick Fury: Woody Strode. If a black actor must be cast, he was probably 2nd to Robeson among them then. 

Loki: Ronald Reagan. He was a liar and a trickster with delusions of leadership in real life, so, why not? Besides, I wanna see him get clobbered.

May 1, 1971: Spider-Man vs. Drugs

May 1, 1971, 50 years ago: Marvel Comics takes on their most insidious bad guy yet: Drugs.

Previously, the Comics Code Authority forbade the depiction of illegal drugs, even as a warning as to their dangers. But President Richard Nixon wanted to wage war on drugs -- a great idea that turned out to be spectacularly poorly carried out.

Elliot Richardson, then the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, wrote to Marvel boss Stan Lee, and asked him to publish an anti-drug message in one of the company's leading titles.

Lee, already 48 years old, but always willing to stay on the cutting edge, agreed. And so, with The Amazing Spider-Man #96, with a list date of May 1971, he began a 3-part story arc involving drug use.

Smilin' Stan Lee. Excelsior, true believers!

At this point in his life, Peter Parker, secretly the New York-based superhero Spider-Man, is in college, with a side job as a photographer for a newspaper, The Daily Bugle. He shares an apartment with Harry Osborn, and they've been friends for a long time, in spite of the fact that Harry's father, industrialist Norman Osborn, is Spidey's arch-enemy, the Green Goblin, and the Goblin knows Peter's dual identity.

As the 2002 film Spider-Man would eventually show, having the Goblin die would devastate Harry. On top of that, Smilin' Stan was one of the few people in American public life in the 1960s who addressed the issue of mental illness, writing that Spidey knew that Norman's split personality between Harry's dad the genius scientist businessman and the arch-criminal wasn't his fault. So he had to subdue the Goblin without really hurting him with his strength, proportionally that of a spider.

The last time before this that they had fought, Spidey had defeated the Goblin, and Norman developed retrograde amnesia: He didn't remember anything he experienced after becoming the Goblin, including Peter's secret identity.

But Norman's troubles, and his treatment of Harry, led Harry to seek solace in prescription drugs. Peter sees him taking them, and says, "When did you become a pill-popper?" When the pill makes Harry fall asleep, Peter suddenly realizes that Harry had been doing this for a while: Pills to help him sleep, and pills to help him stay awake.

So Lee wrote a monologue for Spidey, as he swung through the City, talking about how drugs could hurt people. And then he sees an example: A black kid on the edge of a roof, stoned out of his gourd. Spidey fails to save him.

That night is the premiere of an Off-Off-Broadway show, starring Peter's girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson, who says, "If it were any more off Broadway, it would be in Hoboken!" Also friends of Mary Jane, Norman and Harry attend together.

So does a black man about Peter's and Harry's age, who knew the younger guy who fell. This man knows that Norman is rich, and has influence to go with his money, and demands that he use it to help ghetto kids. They argue, and this triggers Norman's split. At the end of the issue, Peter and Norman are both in costume, and they know who each other is.

At the end of the 2nd issue, #97, Harry overdoses. At the start of the 3rd, #98, Peter is standing over Harry in his hospital bed, when the Goblin hovers on his glider at the window, ready to kill the uncostumed Peter. Peter shows the Goblin his son, and, in a moment of clarity that he is also Norman, he backs off. They fight later in the issue, Peter wins, takes an unconscious Norman home, and burns the Goblin costume, hoping that will put an end to the Goblin personality. Harry recovers. All is well. With them, anyway.

Until Peter's original girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, returns, during one of Peter's periodic breakups with Mary Jane. And Norman's Goblin personality kicks back in, and he makes a new costume and new weapons. In Spider-Man #121, June 1973, there is no title on the title page. Instead, the last panel shows the title, with Spidey holding Gwen, killed by the Goblin: "The Night Gwen Stacy Died!" In #122, the Goblin dies, in a scene recreated for the 2002 Spider-Man film.

The Comics Code Authority heard about the anti-drug story, and refused to issue its seal of approval, which had been a must for any comic book wanting to stay in business, ever since the publication of the anti-comics screed The Seduction of the Innocent by Frederic Wertham in 1954.

Lee decided that publishing these 3 issues, especially the 1st one, was more important that staying in business. He rolled the dice that people would buy The Amazing Spider-Man #96 without the seal of approval. His roll came up 7: It sold so well that the Authority revised its Code.

DC Comics, Marvel's rival, accepted that they also needed to publish an anti-drug message. So they published Green Lantern #85, with a list date of August 1971, and a headline, "The shocking truth about drugs!" #85 had the title of "Snowbirds Don't Fly," and #86, the conclusion of the story, was titled, "They Say It'll Kill Me... But They Won't Say When."

Green Lantern, in civilian life a test pilot named Hal Jordan, often teamed up with Oliver Queen, a businessman without powers but with great archery skill, who fought crime as Green Arrow. Queen had adopted a teenage boy named Roy Harper, and, giving him a red outfit similar to his own green one, made Roy "Robin" to his "Batman."

Why would a superhero with an archery theme, rather than a speedster, be called "Speedy"? With the 1940s "Golden Age" versions of the characters, Roy once got into costume and out of their hideout while Ollie was still getting his costume on.

But Roy had a secret beyond his crimefighting identity: He had become addicted to heroin. Fans of the 2012-20 CW Network TV series Arrow, which shows Oliver as a more Batman-like, haunted, brooding figure, might be surprised to know that the comics' Green Arrow was, like the 1st Robin (Dick Grayson) and Spider-Man, a quipster, dropping bons mots while taking bad guys down. This time, as Hal suggested, Ollie did not have the answer, aside from taking down the gang that had gotten Roy hooked, and getting Roy to "go cold turkey."

DC had done it well, even taking it a step further by showing a superhero getting addicted to an illegal drug, not just a prescription. But Marvel had done it first, and better. As Smilin' Stan himself would have said, "'Nuff said!"

Nixon would eventually appoint Elliot Richardson to be U.S. Attorney General, but he resigned that post in 1973, rather than fire the Special Counsel investigating the Nixon Administration over "the Watergate matter," leading to a series of moves that became known as "The Saturday Night Massacre."

In 1980, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) was split into 2 separate departments: The Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

America In the 21st Century: Was It All Agatha All Along?

So, everything that's gone wrong the last few years...

* All the people we loved who died too soon?

* A much-encompassing war that never seems to end?

* Two nasty recessions?

* Cheating teams winning sports titles?

* The horrible superhero movies made by Zack Snyder?

* Trump becoming President, and all the crap he pulled over 4 years?

* COVID-19?

* The wacko weather?

All of it? Who's been messing up everything?

Was it all Agatha all along?

I gotta say, previously only knowing Kathryn Hahn from Crossing Jordan, this is a big jump, but she pulls it off.

Of course, messing with someone's head this much, knowing that the head in question is already not right, that's some sick shit. WandaVision is pretty dark, in spite of the tributes to happy, silly sitcoms.

But what are superhero stories if not escapism?

In the immortal words of William Shatner, "Get a life, will you, people? It's just a TV show."

A fun TV show. Escapism. Something to take your mind off the things that are messed up in real life.

There's no real Agatha.

Right?

Right?

Requiem for Superheroes

This has nothing to do with sports, but I had to get it off my chest.

I read comic books from age 5 to about 27 -- 1975 to 1997 -- when the DC storylines started getting too complicated for my taste. I still got a charge out of hearing that John Williams theme music in Superman Returns in 2006, and while it wasn't as good as the 1st 2 films in the Christopher Reeve series, Brandon Routh at least had more to work with than Reeve did in his last 2.

(I had given up on Marvel fairly quickly, and while I did see the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, I haven't seen the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies or the various films connected with The Avengers. So I won't get into them.)

UPDATE: I have since seen Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers, and enjoyed them.

But Man of Steel, based on DC Comics' "New 52" reboot, was wrong on so many levels. I liked the twist of Amy Adams' Lois Lane learning that Clark Kent was Superman before she even met him, let alone before he took on the identity. But Lois is not a redhead. Lana Lang is.

Laurence Fishburne made a good Perry White (a character written as a white guy who grew up in a pre-World War II slum, so having a black Perry in charge of a big-city newspaper in 2013 isn't a stretch at all), but he should have had the Daily Planet building evacuated a lot faster.

And I don't have a problem with Superman killing General Zod at the end: Most of us, given the same situation, would not have been able to quickly think of an alternative that would have saved millions of other lives. This is a guy who is, clearly, still learning how to be Superman -- that was the whole point, just as the 2006 Casino Royale showed us a James Bond still learning how to be Agent 007.

And I don't blame Henry Cavill's portrayal of Superman: He played the character as it was written.

And therein lies a problem far greater than these small gripes. Cavill's Superman was as whiny and moody as Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker was in Episodes II & III of Star Wars. He's not a "wooden actor," as many Lucasians complain. He played the part as it was written.

(Same with Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight: I never got the idea that this was The Joker. He seemed more like someone who admired a Joker that Batman defeated long ago, and tried to copy what he thought the Joker was like. Ledger was great at it, but Jack Nicholson's performance reminded me more of the comics' Joker. Even though the 2005-12 Batmovies were better than the 1989-97 ones.)

Cavill played Clark Kent as a reluctant hero. The reason for this is that Kevin Costner's version of his father, Jonathan Kent, was totally opposed to previous portrayals, such as those of Glenn Ford (1978 film), Eddie Jones (1990s TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman), and John Schneider (showing more depth in the 2000s TV series Smallville than he ever showed as Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard).

Ford's version told Clark, "What I know, son, is that you are here for a reason. I don't know what that reason is, but I can tell you this: It's not to score touchdowns." That was believable. There's no way Jonathan Kent would ever tell his son, essentially, "Let them die." Or even, "Let me die."

And, of course, Man of Steel shows what the battle between Chris Reeve and the Kryptonian villains led by Terence Stamp's Zod in Superman II only hinted at: If there really were such a battle, a major city could be ruined.

We saw what the 9/11 attacks did to New York: 3,000 deaths and major infrastructure issues in Lower Manhattan. What Michael Shannon's Zod did to Metropolis with his "world engine" wiped out a big chunk of that city's central core.

Imagine a bomb (not even an atomic bomb, just a conventional bomb with a lot of power) causing an earthquake at 7.0 on the Richter scale, with its epicenter at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue... every 3 minutes or so for half an hour. The main Library, Grand Central Terminal, the Chrysler Building, Times Square, Port Authority Bus Terminal, possibly the United Nations, the New York end of the Lincoln Tunnel, and, yes, the Daily News Building that stood in for the Daily Planet Building in the Chris Reeve movies, either reduced to rubble or ruined beyond repair. Every major Subway line would also be disabled.

I saw one estimate (based on what, I'm not sure) that suggested that, if this movie were a real event that had happened, nearly 120,000 people would have died. In other words, 40 9/11s. Enough people to fill Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, Madison Square Garden and the Barclays Center.

Sure, we like to see explosions, and it was cool to see Reeve catch the TV antenna from the Empire State Building (how'd that get in Metropolis?) in Superman II, and then use it to temporarily trap one of the villains. But do we really want to think about the 100 or so people who must have died in the battle with 1981 Zod, let alone the 100,000 or more who may have been killed by 2013 Zod? No, we don't.

We go to Batman movies to see a guy carry out our fantasies of kicking criminals' asses. But we know, in the end, as Batman does, that this is not an end in and of itself. We go to Superman movies to see Superman save people. We go to see him stop needless destruction, not to avenge it. We go to see him face Lex Luthor, Brainiac, ordinary bank robbers, what have you, and, in effect, give them Gandalf's message from Lord of the Rings: "You shall not pass!" And then insure that they don't pass.

In other words, just as J.J. Abrams' take on Star Trek is designed to appeal to people who don't like Star Trek, and want a Captain James T. Kirk who blows shit up and takes alien women to bed, without all that high-minded pontificating about peace and man's place in the stars, Man of Steel was designed to make Superman appeal to Batman fans.

Superman isn't supposed to appeal to Batman fans. He's supposed to appeal to fans of superheroes -- and so is Batman. It's like being a fan of a sport first, and your own team second: A Yankee fan like me, for example, should appreciate a great performance by a player on another team: "Hey, did you hear, while Jeter was going 4-for-4 last night, Clayton Kershaw pitched a no-hitter?" Even if it's against your own team: "Man, we couldn't get that guy out. No wonder he was named the MVP last season. He totally deserves it again."

There's nothing wrong with Batman being your favorite superhero, as long as you respect the genre as a whole. There's nothing wrong with preferring DC to Marvel, or vice versa. There's also nothing wrong with being a DC fan first, and admitting that, in terms of making movies, Marvel has its act much more together than DC does.

Or admitting that Batman movies, on the average, are better than Superman movies. It's like baseball, again: Babe Ruth, the Superman of baseball, has had at least 4 movies made about him, and none of them are any good; Lou Gehrig, who should never be called his "sidekick," has had 2 movies made about him, and both are very good.

It's when you're a Batman fan only, and you treat all other heroes as lesser, that, pardon the phrase, you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. It's the idea of "Batman always wins" and its corollary, "Batman can beat Superman." You get locked into a fallacy, and you refuse to get out, even though the key is right there with you.

And let's get this out of the way: No, Batman can't beat Superman. The most cited example of when he does is Frank Miller's graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, in which Batman gets on his high horse -- literally, at one point in the story -- and "beats Superman."

Except Batman has every factor in his favor: Superman's just absorbed a nuclear explosion that almost killed him, Batman's wearing protective armor, he's fighting on his home field of Gotham City, and he still needs to cheat by having Green Arrow shoot a Kryptonite arrow... and Batman still "dies," thus losing the fight at the moment of victory! That whole sequence was nothing more than porn for Batman fans, and made no damn sense.

*

I could have forgiven Man of Steel -- or Man of Stool, as some angry comics fans call it, to suggest that it's a piece of shit -- as a one-time-only abomination, except that it's in line with the "New 52" line of DC Comics, which make the assumption that the reason Batman has become more popular than Superman is that Batman is dark, disturbed, brooding, musing on never being able to "win the war."

Which is beside the point. Remember the opening to the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves? The special effects are laughable compared to what can be done today, and Reeves' Superman mainly fought gangsters instead of supervillains (probably to save money on costumes and special effects), but he never shied away from his responsibility: He "fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way!"

George Reeves as Superman, 1952

People who prefer Superman to Batman do so because he's not dark, disturbed and brooding, and, indeed, embraces his role as protector of Metropolis, Earth as a whole when necessary, even (in some versions) planets he'd never even heard of before. We prefer Superman because, even more than the symbol on his chest as a Kryptonian word, he means "hope." (If little else, that was one thing that Man of Steel got absolutely right.)

People who prefer Batman tend to say that he's "more relatable." As Stephen King put it, "Batman, however, was just a guy. A rich guy, yes. A strong guy, granted. A smart guy, you bet. But... he couldn't fly. I think that formed my preference more than anything else. He didn't have X-ray vision. If you cut him, he would bleed. If you shoot him, he could die."

Michael Keaton as Batman, 1989

It's true: If someone had enough money to buy the training, the equipment, and the facility necessary to house everything he needed (whether it was a house with a big cave underneath it, or something else), then, theoretically, he could become a Batman. (I saw an article once that said it would cost $24 million.)

But none of us came from another planet to Earth, whose yellow sun and lower gravity would make us a superman (either Upper- or lower-case S). We're not going to get doused with electrified chemicals, and if we do, we're going to die, rather than become the fastest man alive, like Barry Allen did to become the Flash. We're not going to get bequeathed a power ring, like Hal Jordan did to become the most familiar version of Green Lantern.

And although women on film from Claudette Colbert to Angelina Jolie, and on TV from Irish McCalla to Lucy Lawless, have been called "amazons," and some women have proven themselves capable of wonderful things, no woman among us is ever going to be Wonder Woman.

In other words, we don't want heroes we can relate to. We want heroes who can do the things we wish we could do. Protect people. Catch killers. Expose racketeers and lead to their being brought to justice. Take on the kind of threats that even gun nuts can't handle. (You know, the kind of people who think they can stop a guy who already has his gun drawn on them.)

That's why the most popular TV shows now are NCIS and Castle. NCIS has Mark Harmon as Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, an ex-Marine who avenged the murders of his wife and daughter, and who's a lot closer to being a Batman-type figure than Adam West was on the 1960s TV series. (Just listen to the way Special Agents Tony DiNozzo and Tim McGee, and forensic specialist Dr. Abby Sciuto, talk about him.)

And Castle has Stana Katic as Detective Kate Beckett, whose mother was killed in a deep, dark conspiracy, and who, aided by Nathan Fillion as mystery writer (and now fiancée) Richard Castle, has finally solved that case, along with over 100 others, including one in which the killer, at first, seemed to be a Batman-type superhero.

But both shows have an element of humor. Both shows get better reaction from their fans when they're not excessively dark, and bad reactions when they are. Sure, we want our heroes to kick ass, but we also want them to entertain us and give us hope. Gibbs and his team, and Castle and Beckett, do this for us. Superman does this for us. Batman is better when he does as well.

Do we really want someone to embody our dark sides? No, we want someone to realize our hopes. Batman frequently does this, and comic book fans love this; people who are simply Batman fans don't love it.

But it's not enough that DC Comics has been taken over by writers who took the characters we loved into dark and/or ridiculous directions with The New 52 in 2011. They've made Superman short-tempered, as if his weakness isn't so much Kryptonite as the fact that he hasn't fully grown up.

They've also made the prominent female characters less mature, more impulsive, and racier. Particularly offensive was the recent Wonder Woman "selfie" cover, showing Princess Diana of Themiscyra taking a picture of herself with her arm wrapped around a statue (possibly of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom), with her tongue hanging out as if she was Miley Cyrus in her current Bangerz phase.

And these writers don't mean it as a joke.

No, that's not enough. The defenders of this crap make it even worse. Today, I saw someone post a comment one of these defenders made: "When Wonder Woman was a boring nun-like character nobody gave a crap about her book, at least people are buying it now. Only the weakling, effeminate gays want her to go back to being a pacifist."

Seriously.

*

If the guy who said that wants to read about people who put on costumes and go out to kick an enemy's ass, and if any civilians are helped by this, that's fine, but secondary... there are plenty of stories he can get into.

But when a person's first choice is to fight, to engage in violence, to go on the attack, that person is not a hero. And anyone who prefers that kind of story is no friend.

Wonder Woman was once written as saying, "We have a saying, my people: 'Don't kill if you can wound, don't wound if you can subdue, don't subdue if you can pacify, and don't raise your hand at all until you've first extended it.'"

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, 1976

It's why it pisses me off when some Star Wars fans actually root for Darth Vader. Yes, he looks cool, sounds cool, and is a serious badass. He's also a maniac who has personally murdered countless innocent people.

You wouldn't root for the Borg in Star Trek, would you? You wouldn't root of the Nazis in Casablanca, would you? You wouldn't root for Barzini in The Godfather, would you? True, the Corleones were criminals, and they were killers, but mostly in defense of their own.

And, I'll admit, in The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West had a point: Dorothy, however unintentionally, did kill her sister. And, by any legal rights that we would recognize, those ruby slippers belonged to her, not to Dorothy.

Sometime in the early 1990s, in the comics, after Clark Kent told Lois Lane his identity, and she agreed to marry him, she asked him, "Why are you Superman?" He said, with no hesitation, "Because nobody else can be."

People like Clark, Bruce Wayne, Princess Diana, Barry Allen, Oliver Queen and so on do what they do because they have what so many of us have, the desire to help; but they also, unlike the vast majority of us, have the means to actually carry that help out, whether it's through powers or through the money to produce gadgets.

People like that, their desire to help is aided by wealth or supernatural circumstance. Peace is their first choice, but more dear to them than peace is justice. They stand for those who, for whatever reason, cannot stand for themselves.

That's what a hero does, whether costumed, uniformed, or ordinarily dressed. That's what Kevin Vickers, the Sergeant-at-Arms in Canada's Parliament, did yesterday: He would have been satisfied if he had lived out his life in peace, with 99 percent of the world never knowing his name; but, yesterday, he had to save lives, and we'll never know how many he saved, but he became a hero (if, that is, he wasn't one already).

Somebody else once gave me another definition: "A villain takes his pain, and makes others try to feel it; a hero takes his pain, and tries to keep others from feeling it." Bruce Wayne knew that being wealthy didn't stop his parents from being murdered, and it didn't stop him from suffering because of it. But he wanted to prevent others from suffering the same fate.

He chose a bat because, in his words, "Criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot," and that, as a symbol, he can scare them, and thus make them less effective in fighting him. "I shall become a bat," he said. The Batman was the form he chose, but he chose the mission because someone had to do it, and he had the means to do it.

In contrast, Peter Parker was not rich. But he was granted powers, by accident: He was bitten by a radioactive spider, and became Spider-Man. He realized too late that, as Stan Lee wrote in the last line of Spidey's debut appearance,  said, "With great power there must also come great responsibility." But he lived by that lesson thereafter.

Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, 2002

It was a new way of saying something timeless. Even the Bible says it, in Luke 12:48: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Even the 1st live-action version of Superman, the 1948 film serial, Clark (Kirk Alyn) is told by his father -- here, named Eben Kent instead of Jonathan (and played by Edward Cassidy), "Because of these great powers -- your speed and strength, your x-ray vision and super-sensitive hearing -- you have a great responsibility."

The great heroes of the world, real and imagined, regular and "super," get this. Captain America got it before most costumed heroes did, back in the World War II years. In 2009, when Marvel brought back Captain America from his apparent death at the end of the Civil War storyline, his former sidekick Bucky Barnes made the point that Cap wasn't a hero because he was Captain America, he was a hero because he was Steve Rogers.

Chris Evans as Captain America, 2011

And that's why I used the "real" names of the DC heroes above: As Dean Cain put it on TV in 1995, "Superman is what I can do, Clark Kent is who I am."

And those of us who would like to be heroes, but don't have the opportunity, we want to read books, and watch movies and TV shows, about people who get the opportunity, and make the most of it.

We like Superman not because he's strong of body, but because he's strong of heart. We like Batman not because he kicks ass, but because he does so to protect the innocent. Certainly, we want Wonder Woman to be happy, and it would be great if she found true love. (Sometimes, she ends up with Steve Trevor, but not always.) But passion is not limited to physical desire, and her passion for the betterment of humanity knows no bounds, and that's what drives her to be a hero.

And if that's not the kind of "superhero" story you want to read, then go watch a Michael Bay movie, and watch "good guys" blow up as much shit as the bad guys, bringing themselves down to the villains' level -- indeed, lower, because good guys are supposed to know better. Go read and watch that kind of stuff.

Let us have the heroes who have earned our admiration. We still think that DC will see their falling sales, and see the error of their ways, and start over.

The Big Red S... and the Bat-Signal, and the Eagle that Wonder Woman wears... still mean "hope."