Gee Whiz, Superman

For some reason Batman has a reputation for scaring the daylights out of criminals, but as seen in this image from World's Finest Comics #2 (circa 1940), Superman wasn't above threatening bad guys with grievous bodily harm in the cause of justice, at least in the early years of his career. I would have talked, too.

Secret of the Super-Sons

Chances are that if you're reading these panels in 2012, you're probably chuckling a little at the unintentional double entendre: to modern eyes, it seems as though World's Finest writer Bob Haney is suggesting that his creations, Clark Kent Jr. and Bruce Wayne Jr., might have an even closer relationship than their famous fathers - insert requisite "wink wink, nudge nudge" here.

But unless Bob Haney is even more clever than he's already given credit for, readers should probably assume that these 1970s tales were not intended as underground endorsement of alternative lifestyles. Indeed, most of the stories of the Super-Sons revolved around the then-current Generation Gap, with Clark Jr. and Bruce Jr. often agonizing about how they could never measure up to their dads and how their square fathers just didn't understand what it meant to be a teen in the swinging 70s. Taken at face value, as these stories probably should be, what we see here is simply close friendship between two young men, men who aren't afraid to express how much they need each other as they lean on one another for emotional support.

In chuckling at this scene and others like it, I have to ask myself if the laughter isn't simply some kind of strange defensive reaction. Intimacy between men, even in these relatively enlightened times, is still seen as somewhat effeminate (another moral land mine - assuming that femininity is somehow "weaker" or a bad thing) or at best, overly expressive. Or at least this seems to be true among WASPs; members of other cultures are often less inhibited.

I suppose the point I'm clumsily trying to raise is this: when we take a work of popular culture out of context and laugh at it, are we saying something about the artifact's failure to transition to our era, or are we saying something about our own inability to work past our own deeply ingrained attitudes and prejudices?

According to Rule 34, someone out there has already answered some of these questions by writing Super-Sons slash fiction. I'm not quite brave enough to look there for answers.

Hero Histrionics

Bob Haney was the true master of histrionic comics melodrama! Poor Batman, so distraught over the death of Batman Jr. that he starts speaking like Lois Lane. And just look at how Superman reacts! The anguish, the pathos! "BATMAN!"

Thank goodness it was all a big mistake.

Pulling the Planet

Sadly the lead story in this issue of World's Finest doesn't live up to the promise of this amazingly dynamic cover, wrought by Neal Adams unless I miss my guess. Sure, it's ridiculous on the face of it - imagine the damage done by the giant clamps locked into the continents - but wow, there's a cover sure to capture every kid's attention at the drug store. Later on Neal did an even better version of this image, featuring a similar Superman-in-harness getup, but aided by a bunch of other DC heroes.

Bonds of the Super-Sons

Back when I was a kid in the early 1970s, World's Finest was one of my favourite comic books. The stories - particularly those penned by the delightfully wacky Bob Haney - were often nonsensical, spat in the face of continuity, and featured bizarre faux-hip dialogue that tried, unsuccessfully, to capture the youth lingo of the day. But they were also delightfully imaginative and surreal.

In 1972 Haney came up with the idea of the Super-Sons, Clark (Superman Jr.) Kent Jr., and Bruce (Batman Jr.) Wayne Jr. The first story of the Super-Sons opened with a text blurb assuring readers that this was not an "imaginary story" or a put-on, that the Super-Sons were "real" - within the context, of course, of the larger DC Universe. Anticipating questions from befuddled readers, Haney explained that not even the myriad stories published by DC about Superman and Batman could cover every aspect of their lives, and this was a heretofore unrevealed aspect of the mythos. Of course every other DC comic steadfastly ignored the existence of the Super-Sons and their mothers - whose identities are never revealed in these stories, their faces always in shadow.

As seen above, Bruce Jr. and Clark Jr. shared a deep emotional connection thanks to their shared anxieties about living up to the legacies of their famous fathers. Viewed through that lens the scene above is understandable enough, but modern audiences will probably snicker a little at Bruce's treatment of poor Debbie and the dialogue that seems to hint the younger Super-Sons share more than mere friendship.

It's a little unfair - Bruce Jr., at least, is portrayed as aggressively heterosexual. Indeed, Haney's treatment of women in this run feels a little off-kilter. I've already mentioned that we never learn the identities of the boys' shadowy mothers, and most other women in these stories are either villainous tricksters or damsels in distress capable of capturing the boys' attention only for a brief time, never for a committed relationship. Given the era this is to be expected from any comic book aimed at children or teens, but unlike other DC books the women in these stories never even get the chance to be treated as friends or equals; there's no room for a Black Canary or a Wonder Woman here.

While other writers pretended that the Super-Sons never existed, Haney had fun writing his own stories his own way, heedless of continuity, ignoring the fact that in contemporary stories Superman and Batman were explicitly childless and that Superman had a relationship with Lois Lane. None of that mattered to Haney!

Ten or fifteen years after the last appearance of the Super-Sons, other writers took it upon themselves to "explain" this odd discontinuity in DC storytelling. It turns out that all of these stories were simply an extremely complex simulation run by Superman and Batman to...well, it's been too long since I've read the story, and frankly I don't feel like digging the comic out of the boxes in the garage. It's not that the story was bad, per se, but the revisionism seemed to me to miss Haney's point entirely: that rigid adherence to continuity could sometimes stifle good (or at least weird) stories. Seen with modern eyes, Haney's World's Finest run can appear absurd and dreamlike, but it held its own rewards for those willing to explore the weird side of comics.