Grant Morrison, 'Supergods. Our World in the Age of the Superhero'

Excellent book. A history of superhero comics by a creative genius who turns out to be very articulate about his work. He doesn't dwell on his own biography, relating his experiences as a comic book reader and writer only insofar as they illuminate the industry.

He grew up in Scotland under the shadow of the nuclear bomb threat, and explains the appeal of Superman as an imaginative response to that. 

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions ... Traumatized by war footage and disaster clops ... preyed upon by dark and monumental Gods of Fear, we are being sucked inexorably into Comic Book Reality, with only moments to save the world, as usual. .. Could it be that a culture starved of optimistic images of its own future has turned to the primary source in search of utopian role models? (pp. xvi-xvii)

Superman was a hero of the people, but unlike Charlie Chaplin, for instance, he was one who embodied "fantasies of power and agency" (p.7). He was a God. Batman, who came along next, occupied "the territory of the dark unconscious" (p.22). So the comic book pantheon began with the separation of light from darkness.

Captain Marvel represented the "eternal human hope for transcendence":

Eventually, everybody searches for his or her own magic word: the diet, the relationship, the wisdom that might liberate us from the conventional into the extraordinary. (p.33)

Mac Raboy's artwork made him "a lithe Ariel, effortlessly capturing the blue-sky freedom and potential of youth" (p.34).

Captain America was created by a WWII veteran, Jack Kirby.

His memories of war informed his work for the rest of his life, but nonetheless, Kirby portrayed violence as a joyous expression of natural masculine exuberance. (p.3)

As superheroes proliferated and new gimmicks were found for them, there was a "radical enchantment of the mundane" (p.48). They also moved beyond their American origins in a "glorification of strength, health, and simple morality ... born of a corn-fed, plain-talking, fair-minded midwestern sensibility" (p.49). Local legends, for example in Britain the Arthurian legends, "could always be relied upon to produce superheroes from whole cloth" (p.51).

The Golden Age ended with the end of WWII, and comics turned to other genres, though Superman remained iconic. There was an obsession with the dark and the deranged, and comic books were demonised as a corrupting influence.

Superman comics in the Silver Age of the 50s were preoccupied with abnormal psychology. In the 1960s, the US State Dept asked the industry to cultivate the readers' interest in science and technology, and this was embodied in the Flash. Then came Stan Lee's Marvel stable of Promethean superheroes, for whom superpowers brought great responsibility and could be a curse.

The economically depressed 1970s coincided with family break-up for the young Morrison:

I'd watched  men leave footprints on the moon ... but now everything was running in reverse. With no excuse or apology, I was being offered instead of Starfleet a bleak tomorrow of fuel shortages, urban decay, and economic and social unrest. If anything drove the anger of young punks like me with our disaffected "no future" rhetoric, it was partly this sense of absolute betrayal. (p.161)

This is as far as I've got. Morrison is only four years younger than me, so the comics he talks about in the early part of the book are the ones I read as a child/teenager. I'm not familiar with the later material (apart from a recent taste for Gaiman), so I'm not drawn to finish reading the book just now.

Richard Sugg, 'Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires'

Very busy and not much time for reading. Not sure how much longer I'll persist with the unintentionally hilarious Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires by Richard Sugg (Routledge, 2011). 

I was interested to read it because there are frequent Shetland references to the use of bones and soil from the grave in witchcraft in the School of Scottish Studies collections (Tobar an Dualchais). And I did pick up some relevant information, and a general impression of the longstanding use of body parts as remedies in a way that was partly medical, partly magical. My suspicions about those Shetland witches have definitely deepened. After all, David Rorie was able to collect information about grotesque traditional healing practices that were within living memory at the turn of the 19th century, and Shetland seems to have put up a particularly strong resistance to the minister-led modernisation that eventually suppressed folk beliefs everywhere.


Sugg's book is very slight, though, for all its length and the research that's evidently gone into it. It's subtitled The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, and no doubt this literary critic thinks he is doing history, or at least cultural history. But it reads like an annotated bibliography, combined with an expanded version of the quotations in a historical dictionary. Every citation of 'mummy', for instance, is treated to a textual analysis, complete with speculation about the author's intentions and the effect on the reader.


The thing that had me rofling, though, was the brazenness of the author's agenda. He makes it quite clear that his purpose is to show that westerners are no better than anybody else, and preferably a lot worse - we practised cannibalism! How dare we criticise other cultures! 

(He seems to think that cannibalism is a philosophical concept whose meaning can be discerned by observation of how the word is used, combined with earnest reflection. A social scientist would just have declared, "In what follows, cannibalism will be taken to mean ..." That would have cut down a good bit of verbiage.)


Sugg's anachronistic projections of his own leftist pieties onto the past would make any real historian howl with laughter. Some examples:

 "Whilst the tenant families of great estates often languished in squalor and hunger in damp cottages, the aristocrats ... were rigorously scrutinising the excrement of their sporting pets" (p.27)

 "the preparation of the formula would have made vegetarians quail" (p.42, about a 17th treatment)

 "One obvious point about this treatment (aside from its somewhat shaky conception of animal rights) ..." (p.47, writing about a 17th c physician)

Where he's really priceless, though, is his treatment of THE question that anybody with a single scientific bone in their body MUST ask: would it work?

Obviously, ethics prevents any direct approach to the question of whether corpse medicine includes effectual treatments (though there might be scope for post-hoc investigation of African muti patients). But surely there must be people who could have given Sugg a theoretical opinion? And there are lots of relevant questions that are answerable - whether antibodies survive delivery through the stomach, for instance, whether iron is more available from blood if it's fresh, what substances would be found particularly in the blood of somebody who died a violent death, and to what extent any active substance would survive the sort of preparations Sugg describes. Sugg covers the use of faeces in medicine, but I look in vain in his index for Clostridium difficile,  Bacillis subtilis or ulcerative colitis.

Instead we get occasional lines like these:

"The social and medical issues surrounding the claim can be treated together ... one recent author ... does not dispute ... the physician's attempt. If [he] were correct, it would mean that the treatment was considered practically valid" (pp.18-19, about an alleged treatment of Pope Innocent VIII with the blood of murdered youths)

"By their very nature, surgeons were typically dealing with the most practically physical ... class of medical problems. ... We must therefore take seriously the possibility that at this early stage corpse medicines were used because they were seen or thought to work" (p.24)

"From human liver can be 'drawn ... a water ...' ... ' such as are half rotten through diseases of the liver'. (The modern-day persistence of liver transplants for alcoholics and others suggests that this may have worked ...)" (p.44)

I'm really left with the impression that to the literary critic being seen to work and being thought to work are pretty much the same thing anyway.