It seems I'm destined to swim against the current.
I started out as a true tomboy, a girl who loved boy stuff. I loved sports, primarily baseball and football, and I fell in love with science fiction and fantasy from the moment I opened my copy of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. (If you want to date me, it was the hardcover three-books-in-one set from the mail-order Science Fiction Book Club with a dustcover featuring some ugly dragon artwork.)
And comics, always there were comics. Some adventure tales, some westerns, but mostly superheroes.
In a world where geeks were looked down on and girl geeks were looked on as rare, freakish things, it was my love of comics that gave me away.
Happily, the world has caught up with me on superheroes though the literary powers that be divide comics in those (sniff!) superheroes and the world of independent publishing, where the stories have more merit.
I never understood that. A good story is a good story, be it contemporary fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, mystery, horror, or romance. And superheroes, as I say in the introduction to Geek Mom: Projects, Tips and Adventures for Moms and Their 21st Century Families, hit us at a very deep level even if grown men and women dressed in garish costumes hitting things doesn't always quite give that impression.
As I was planning out the projects to include in the book, most of them centered on superheroes and most of my work is in the first chapter, "Secret Identities." Inspired by reading about some real college courses that centered on teaching the history of the romance novel, I decided to develop a curriculum for teaching actual American history through the judicious use of superhero stories from Marvel and DC Comics.
I started the history in the 20th century, around the debut of Superman in 1938. I wanted to find books that reflected the culture of their time period but also stories that looked back at certain time periods as well.
For example, the complicated time of the 1950s, which includes the rise of Communism and Joseph McCarthy's Congressional hearings on being un-American, is represented in The Golden Age, a miniseries by James Robinson and artist Paul Smith.
The comic is obviously a commentary on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and also a love letter to the Golden Age of DC Heroes, though no prior knowledge of the characters involved is needed to read the book. The heroes are all struggling with their relevance in a post-war period, particularly one in which a war is being fought in shadows rather than directly. Garish costumes aren't particularly effective in a cloak-and-dagger world. (Except for Batman but, well, he's Batman.)
Superheroes are a touchstone to the moods of America through the years, from Lois Lane's feminist period to Frank Miller's emphasis on "reality" in his Batman work, Alan Moore's need to deconstruct superheroes in Watchmen, and even to the short and ineffective attempt to turn Captain America into a terrorist fighter after 9/11.
They're also a very distinctly American invention, as Americans are continually busy in creating their own mythologies. It's not that other countries can't produce great superhero work – they can – but there's something uniquely American about the idea, particularly the sometimes childish optimism that doing the right thing can change the world.
Perhaps that's why Moore, a native of the United Kingdom, felt it necessary to pull apart the ideals in Watchmen. But Americans keep going back to the superheroes. The Avengers looks to be the highest-grossing movie ever and that's entirely due to the movie being a distillation of imperfect people becoming superheroes and defeating the bad guy.
"Puny god," Hulk says, and he speaks for all of us, echoing the speech given by a German citizen to Loki about there always being someone like him to want to conquer others. And then Captain America shows up and it's an exact counterpoint to Loki's need to use power to conquer. Cap uses his to protect.
This is the American ideal. And superheroes offer incredible perspective on how those ideals have been shaped by and shape American history. Hopefully, my loose curriculum in Geek Mom illustrates that.
