They’re not just heroes – they’re art

EUGENE, Ore. – Comic book superheroes such as Superman and Batman used to be little more than a guilty pleasure in American life, a cheap diversion loved by children and looked down on by their parents.

No longer. For years now, the art world has embraced comic books – especially the original sketches behind those early superhero comics – as a compelling form of visual art.

To see how seriously comics are being taken today, you need only look at exhibits such as “Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics” now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or the sprawling “Masters of American Comics,” which brought 900 pieces of original artwork and printed books to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005.

Now Superman and his crime-fighting allies are setting up shop at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

“Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero” runs through Jan. 3 at the Schnitzer, on campus at the University of Oregon.

The exhibition features more than 150 pages of superhero comic art from the 1940s to the present, including several complete stories.

The show is curated by University of Oregon English professor Ben Saunders. It grew out of an academic conference he is organizing this month to examine the role of superheroes in society.

Small idea, big results

Saunders originally had in mind a rather smaller exhibition for the art museum. Then he was introduced to the museum staff.

“To my surprise, they liked the idea and have run with it. It’s become a much bigger exhibition than conference.”

“Superheroes” will include original art from some of the most influential comics in history: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, all the way through today’s Hellboy.

It also will include a rare copy of Action Comics No. 1, the 1938 comic that started it all, which is on loan from a Eugene collector who bought it at auction in 1980. Putting the show together was a labor-intensive endeavor. The Schnitzer staff found itself dealing with numerous private collectors who had varying levels of experience in working with museums.

One of those collectors is Darrell Grimes, who owns two comic book stores in Eugene. More to the point, he also owns a copy of Action Comics No. 1.

Grimes was reluctant at first to take the comic book – now conservatively valued at $525,000 – out of the safe-deposit box where he keeps it.

“I am a little bit shy about letting people know what I have,” he said. “The people at the museum worked on me for a couple of months to get me to loan it to them. They are extremely nice. That’s what won me over. They had me walk through the museum. They said, ‘You know, honestly, this is going to be safer than your safe-deposit box.’ As we were walking along, they were pointing out paintings worth $10 million. I’m thinking, ‘Wow. Holy cow!’ ”

He is also lending copies of Superman No. 1, from 1939, and Famous Funnies No. 1, which came out in 1934 and was one of the first successful comics ever printed.

At the other end of the spectrum is collector David Mandel, a former writer for the TV sitcom “Seinfeld” and now executive producer of the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

He is lending the complete interior art from Amazing Spider-Man No. 26, by Steve Ditko; the cover of Giant Size X-Men No. 1, by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum; the cover of Iron Man No. 1, by Gene Colan; the cover of Fantastic Four No. 59, by Jack Kirby; and Hellboy art by Mike Mignola.

An exhibit catalog will be released this fall with essays by Saunders, Diana Schultz, Michael T. Gilbert, Charles Hatfield and Rebecca Wanzo, as well as biographies of the major artists.

Superheroes are born

Superhero stories arose in a country racked by economic disaster and headed into a world war, Saunders said. Superman first appeared in 1938 in that first issue of Action Comics, which was one of a handful of comics then on the market.

Most people think of superheroes like Superman as a kind of modern pantheon, the equivalent of Greek gods. That’s too simple, Saunders said.

“That tends to overlook the specific historical circumstances in which superheroes arise,” he said. “They arrive on the scene in the late 1930s at a time when the country is going through some very interesting self-examination.”

Franklin Roosevelt was president and was under attack for his New Deal social programs. And the country was involved in a fierce debate about whether to enter the war in Europe.

“It’s at that moment that Superman appears,” Saunders said. “Initially he is about the most aggressive version of a New Deal Democrat that you’ll ever get. In the first year of Superman, he doesn’t have any supervillains. He fights the oil companies. He fights corrupt senators in bed with arms dealers. He fights for better housing in the ghettos. He fights against automobile manufacturers for producing unsafe vehicles. He’s Ralph Nader on steroids.”

American comic books grew out of a melding of newspaper comic strips and the pulp fiction of the 1920s. Pulp characters such as Tarzan and Buck Rogers morphed into newspaper comic strips by the late 1920s. By the late 1930s, a couple of companies had begun reprinting newspaper comics without the newspaper attached.

“And then Superman happens,” Saunders said. “And within a year and a half there were 27 comic book companies in the country. And they were almost all printing original material, most of that fronted by a superhero. It was a $20 million-a-year industry.”

They have secret identities

Almost all of the comic books were produced in New York and New Jersey. The writers and artists were first- and second-generation immigrants, many from Eastern Europe and many of them Jewish, Saunders said.

The secret identity employed by so many superheroes might be a metaphor for cultural assimilation of the immigrant comic book creators, the professor suggests. And their ethnic background might explain the superheroes’ immediate opposition to fascism.

“Superheroes get involved in the war very early on,” Saunders said. “Though Superman, by and large, kept out of the war until after Pearl Harbor. That was a decision on the part of the owners, not the creators. The owners said there were still too many isolationist parents and you might lose their nickels.”

But a year before Pearl Harbor, the flag-draped Captain America, a creation of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, was on the cover of a comic book, punching Adolf Hitler in the face.

Kirby was a pen name and later the legal name of Jacob Kurtzberg, a New Yorker who was the son of an Austrian Jewish immigrant. The Hitler-punching issue enraged American Nazi organizations, and it spurred New York to give police protection to its publisher, Timely Comics (which would later become Marvel). The issue sold almost a million copies.

The art in “Superheroes” is almost all owned by private collectors. That means this show is a rare opportunity to see the work.

“This art was not valued even by the publishers until the later 1960s,” Saunders said. “And not even then, in some cases. No one was really preserving it except for private collectors. The challenge was getting private collectors, who spent a lot of time and money acquiring these works, to let us borrow them.”