Heroes vs. Monsters - from Germany to America

The above picture got me thinking...

For a long time I've felt that comic-book superheroes were the natural successors of the heroes of legend and, to a lesser extent, myth. They inhabit the same imaginative space that St George or Siegfried or Hercules or Apollo once did. For whatever reason, we like stories about men (and sometimes women) who are like us only better and who fight terrifying monsters on our behalf.

And of course sometimes the heroic re-modelling has been quite conscious and deliberate. Was Superman unconsciously modelled on Jesus? (Or Merlin? Or Moses? Or Cyrus the Great?) Well, possibly! (He was invented by a couple of Jewish teenagers, who'd presumably heard of Nietzsche's original but hadn't read him.) But the comic-book character Wonder Woman is actually an Amazon. And the comic-book Thor is, well, Thor. It's easy to scoff at George Lucas for lifting Star Wars straight from the pages of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (though it's not quite so easy to scoff when one remembers that Lucas became a multi-millionaire on the back of it). But it had all (more or less!) been done before.

But when was the actual point of crossover? Where was the cultural nexus between the old world and the new? More specifically, when did American comics stop being about detectives (like Dick Tracy or, for that matter, The World's Greatest Detective himself - basically Sherlock Holmes in an even sillier costume - in the pages of what were then still called Detective Comics) and start being about "enhanced individuals"?

I suspect it really was in the 1930s and '40s, and as with so much of America culture the source and inspiration came from the old country. And, as with everything "all American", from apple-pie to frankfurters to jelly doughnuts to hamburgers, not to mention marching bands and blond-haired, blue-eyed, lantern-jawed jock-boys, the "old country" in particular was, of course, Germany.

By the 1930s of course Germany's heroes were back in vogue partly thanks to Wagner (who dusted down Siegfried and Parsifal and gave them their own show-stoppers) and partly thanks to Fritz Lang (who first brought the medieval world's greatest dragon-slayer to the big screen). And, let's not beat about the bush, it was partly thanks to dear old Adolf.

It's hardly surprising then that, just as Nazi Germany produced a Third Reich version of Fanta, America produced authentically Yankee versions of Norse/Arthurian heroes - just as Walt Disney would get on a produce his own Americanised versions of the Grimms' fairy stories.

Nihil sub sole novum!