Giving a glimpse into the formative years of comics and beyond.

Dear Mr. Schwartz

To be frank, I asked myself who is Alvin Schwartz. I thought I knew quite a bit about comic books. After all when I was a kid, I wrote Jerry Siegel a letter in care of a Chicago newspaper; he had been written up in one of his interminable court battles with National Periodical Publications, thanking him for the joy he had brought me by getting the super-hero ball rolling with Superman, and he and his wife sent me some autographed drawings and a photograph. Siegel, the Bard of Lexington Avenue, if that was where National was located in those days; one accepted without much thought that he had been the person shouldering the load. It fit nicely into a niche and few thought to mention other writers when they spoke about Superman in the pioneering days of comic books. Critical thinking got left behind. With a start, I suddenly become aware of Alvin Schwartz's role. My surprise might not have been as great as it would have been if I had learnt that Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare, but it was still a surprise indeed to meet, literarily if not literally, a pivotal shaper of Superman*.

The allusion to Bacon is very apropos when discussing you, for like the former Chancellor of England, you are an original thinker, as I recently discovered when I began reading your column "Exploring the Golden Age". In an Internet site devoted to comic books, one seldom finds a perspective like yours. Each time I use the Internet, I try to read two or three of your columns to capture the current of your thoughts. To explain how I appreciate your writing, I need to withdraw a little from the immediate subject. If one reads the New Republic, the National Review, and the Nation for a year or so, one does not really need to read them any longer. The template is understood and the same conclusions are reached with different circumstances. Thought, as we think of it, becomes tedious. However your point of view is far afield from what I have read before.

Certain factors contribute to the quality of your writing. One is your longevity. Another distinct factor is a post-War tone as we are all affected by our nanosecond in eternity, a tone that is less heard in these dawning days of the Twenty-first Century. Furthermore, you apply your perspective to comic books and couple it with your singular experience as a Promethean in the field. Moreover and perhaps most importantly, you have not stayed stagnant and have continued to develop your thoughts from your observations, experiences and ponderings. I have wondered about the organic growth of Superman. When I saw the awareness of Superman in young children** and in other countries, I realized that there was something transcendental about the concept. An illusion has gradually been dispelled each time I actually meet someone from Greece because the country had become as mythical as the notions that hail from there. There is something boundless in the image of people saying, "Look up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman," despite the counterclaim that Superman is as American as apple pie, as if we could lay claim to that too***.

The origins of Superman have baffled me. The power that image has leads me to believe there must have been some strong undercurrents that prepared the way for the character. I have hazarded a guess that the idea is tied up with ethnicity in the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a struggle to overcome that speaks to us universally. I am unsure the hypothesis can withstand thorough examination. In considering Superman, I am groping towards an answer and feel very much in the cave where Plato cast us. I am intrigued by your concept of Superman as a tulpa. I am dubious of shifting my thinking away from Western ideas, worrying about switching horses in midstream so to speak. However you have impressed me with your thoughts and I must consider the validity of your conclusions. Even if I come to terms with Superman using purely common forms of thought, your contribution will probably not have failed to have influenced me. While I commend your vigorous promotion of discussion on the Internet site, vis-a-vis your column, I am writing to you personally. First I want to thank you for your continuing to make your ideas available. Meanwhile I am reading and profiting from the columns you have previously written. Already they have galvanized me on many fronts and action is almost unavoidable, hence this letter. Writing it has given some order to my musings and I am in your debt again.

I hope all is well with you and yours.

Yours truly, Daryl S. Herrick

* In 1977, an up-and-coming singer in a Rolling Stone profile mentioned that her father had written Batman stories in the 1950s. How could this be? I thought. I had never heard of him. This mystery impressed enough that I remember years later. This is indicative of the aura of secrecy and inattentiveness that was present.

** There is also the awareness of Mickey Mouse in young children but that is a visual connection whereas the connection with Superman is with the things he can do.

*** I have seen a paperback in Spanish on cultural imperialism with Superman on the cover. I have forgotten the author and the title of the book, although it may have had the word "Superman" in the title. A Latin author who deals with cultural influences and whose work I have noted but never read is Ariel Dorf (I believe) and he may have written about Superman as well. I should have given them more attention and offer them as a caveat to my own conclusions

Alvin, at least I hope it's you I'm addressing.

I'll be brief, not being sure it's you I'm reaching. I am very impressed, and in fact have been influenced by both the recounting of your experiences and your insights.

I am interested in the industry that produced comics, but find in the books and other resources available, there is an almost total obsession with the characters, who wrote and drew what - collectors and data gatherer's perspective.

I don't actually think anyone has come to grips with a facinating phenomenon, American comics, with the depth that you have.

Having said that, there are a few questions I'd like very much to ask you. They are mostly fairly pointed YES / No type of things, as I'm sure your time is at a premium. If it is at all possible, could we open up a line of communication, at least briefly.

Thanks, in advance
Michael Feldman

Posted By: Michael Feldman Date: SAT, 8/18/01, 12:29 p.m.

I just contacted Alvin offline and was advised it might be better to post my communications here.

I've followed Alvin's column, and kept up with his books as best I can. I am not a comic fan, in the traditional sense, nor a collector. I am fascinated by the American comic book industry, which is sorely in need of an intelligent chronicling.

Trying to be succinct, I don't think anyone else has ever talked about the comic industry with the depth and insight that Alvin does. There are hundreds of resources that will tell you about every sophomoric costumed character that ever existed. Detailed bibliographies of the artists and where they worked, what kind of brush they used, etc. But the whole gestalt of understanding what really happened in the 20th Century with the growth and development of this new form of expression, has been neglected.

Here's a part of my take on the whole story. Yes, by the Thirties there were newspaper strips that were syndicated and it was big business. At the depth of the Depression, around '31-3, a group of New York City small businessmen, quite possibly graduates from the bootlegging and money laundering business, tripped over the publishing world. Most of them were Jewish, uneducated and not particularly cultured or of the highest level in spiritual aspirations.

They wanted to make a big and easy buck, the WASP legitimate publishing industry, with a few exceptions like Horace Liveright, was as inaccessible to them as Dorothy Parker's Roundtable.

But with some unaccounted for source of cash, they were able to buy out old printing presses, failed magazines, and set up a distribution network using an infrastructure that had been used for something else. If it was illegal booze during Prohibition, nobody's ever mentioned. They started in what they knew they could produce and sell easily, girly mags, trashy pulps, astrology books, racing forms, and other peripheral forms of print. I'll cut to the crux of my thesis. These guys planned to make a good living hopefully as pornographers but ended up getting rich doing children's literature.

It caught them with 'their pants down', so to speak. They never quite comfortably adjusted to their new found and unsought respectability. This to me accounts for a lot of the aberrant behaviour and overall strange Karma of American comics.

I say all this without feeling any superiority to or contempt for these people. They found something profitable and did their best to exploit it. But how it happened always fascinates me. How it affected these people, those drawn into it from the inside as 'toiler in the field' like Alvin. How it generated such a huge audience in the outside world - one out of three newsstand sales in America from 1940 till the mid-50s was a comic book. There is much that I'd like to know and understand about this phenomenon. I consider Alvin Schwartz the most valuable source of insight on the subject. I have a million questions, but maybe I'll be lucky enough to get him to answer a few of them Let's call this my first official communication.

Michael Feldman