The Yin of Mr. Yang

When one makes a living as a freelance writer, one must often write a wide range of things.

In my case, that includes, among other things, comic books, short stories, novels, articles and the occasional foray into non-fiction for the YA market. I've been writing these since around 2001, doing one or two titles a year ranging in topics from science and history to biography and pop culture. The latest, copies of which I just received, is Asian Americans of Achievement: Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!) from Chelsea House Publishers, specialized publishers in the school and library market.

ONE HUNDRED!

Hey, what'd you know...my 100th post (thanks to pal Rob Kelly over at the Aquaman Shrine for the idea of using the above cover to illustrate it...why would I think of such a thing, just 'cause I wrote the comic--well, co-wrote, with Paul Levitz--and a 3-D diorama of the lovely Joe Staton/Dick Giordano cover sits about two and a half feet from my desk) in the form of Part 2 of the Wonder Woman essay:

What Is So Hard About Wonder Woman?! (Part 2)

© respective copyright holder

Not everyone agreed to go along with the idea. Some mocked it with a vehemence that revealed mid-century man’s deep fear of the equal, or, heaven forbid!, dominant woman. In 1954, MAD (then a comic book; it would later evolve into the magazine format more familiar to today’s audience) offered up the parody “Woman Wonder,” by Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder. In it, Woman Wonder is every bit the strong, capable, dominant woman. Her boyfriend Steve Adore is a little weenie of a man, constantly needing rescue by his bigger, stronger Amazon girlfriend. They can’t even make out without his complaining “Ooh, dearest! When you crush me so hard in your strong, sinewy, hairy muscular arms ... I ... I ... I ... I ... break ... something in the side of chest ... something broke, sweetheart!” Diana Banana, this relationship’s obvious top, is oblivious to Steve’s pain as she demands “Give me another kiss!” over and over through his discomfort. Steve fakes his own abduction to drawn Woman Wonder into a trap where he first psychologically berates her for being dumb enough believing her great powers are even possible “both physically and mathematically” (stupid girl!), and then he and his muscle goons beat and torture her for two pages of non-stop hilarity, ending with his stomping on her face “raised so tenderly in tearful supplication” with his hob-nailed boot. “I’ve been planning for years to beat you to a bloody pulp!” he screams as jumps up and down on her, kicking her “back in the kitchen where you belong, sweetheart!” And so we see in the final panel, Steve and Diana in stereotypical comic strip domestic bliss, complete with a houseful of screaming, misbehaving children (including a little girl in a Woman Wonder outfit who is setting fire to her brother), a haggard Diana with baby in one arm, burning dinner with the other, while Steve reclines with a cigar and racing form in the living room. “Diana Banana is now content with the normal female life of working over a hot stove!” the caption reads. “And Steve can even knock her down in boxing!”

Take that, Wonder Bitch!

In all fairness, MAD’s mission statement, as much as one ever existed, was to twist and subvert the conventions and pretensions of their parody subjects. Superman and Batman both received earlier and similar skewerings in MAD, both equally honest in their own ways, but the sheer brutality and misogyny of “Woman Wonder” is, especially in retrospect, disturbing. This is what happens to a dame who thinks she’s better than a man: she gets stomped into submission.

Gloria Steinem worked, coincidentally, for Harvey Kurtzman, writer of “Woman Wonder” in the early-1960s when she was a contributing editor to his humor magazine, Help. There is no indication, anecdotal or otherwise, that Kurtzman, creator of MAD and Playboy’s “Little Annie Fanny” was himself in any way a misogynist; indeed, for it’s overt sexuality, the harassed Annie usually came up the winner in the strip’s battle of the sexists. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of chalking it up to the 1950s zeitgeist, when domestic violence was looked at as understandable and sometimes necessary disciplinary action, or the punch line of every episode of Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners: “Pow, zoom, to the moon, Alice!” Ralph bellowed, his clenched fist in her nonplussed face. Yes, viewers knew – the apologists now contend – Ralph was all bluster, that, in fact, Alice could and would kick his ass if he ever dared strike her, but did the viewers of the 1950s, inured by decades of implied violence against women in the media, know this? How many simply heard the stated message without bothering to dig out its comedic nuance? It was the mass media’s selling of the socially acceptable belief that conflicts in the home could be settled at the end of a fist.

Television was rife with this subliminal message (as were comic books and movies), from the 1950s and continuing through ... well, what year is it? Sometimes, when Ricky lost his temper and loomed menacingly over Lucy, berating her in machinegun Spanish, she would cower, literally in a corner, under his verbal assault. His eyes bulged, veins throbbed in his forehead, he flailed about with clenched fists and the thought is sometimes unavoidable: Oh, my God! Ricky beats Lucy! Why else would she be so fearful of his fiery Cuban temper?

Edith Bunker was another victim, verbally “stifled” by Archie’s bigotry, hatred, and stupidity. Yes, Edith was smarter than Archie ... but Woman Wonder will tell you what happens to girls who don’t hide their superiority from the boys. Even Charlie’s Angels answered to Charlie.

Wonder Woman was a symbol waiting to be discovered, both on TV and as a political icon. Steinem, like most kids during the 1940s, read comic books, but was bothered that the women in them were relegated to the role of getting into trouble so the superhero could then rescue them. “I’m happy to say that I was rescued from this dependent fate at the age of seven or so; rescued (Great Hera!) by a woman,” Steinem recalled in the 1995 introduction to Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was the woman girls who followed the muscular world of comic book heroes wanted to be when they grew up, someone worthy of being, unlike “a Technicolor clotheshorse, getting into jams with villains, and saying things like, ‘Oh, Superman! I’ll always be grateful to you!’”

Steinem found Lynda Carter to be “a little blue of eye and large of breast” for the role, “but she still retained her Amazon powers, her ability to convert instead of kill, and her appeal for many young female viewers.”

“Wonder Woman is this enigma within the world of superhero comics. No one seems to ever ‘get her.’ One moment, she is this completely powerful and independent character that stands just as strong (and often stronger) than her male counterpart. Then, she diverts to this out of touch ditz who doesn't even know how to pump her own gas, then sway into a ball-busting man-hater who thinks us dudes are nothing but disgusting sperm banks. Suddenly, she is the leader of an entire race of warrior woman, (and) finally she becomes Superman with ovaries. So, what gives? Which Wonder Woman is the correct Wonder Woman?”

Aaron Duran, 2007 (“What Is So Hard About Wonder Woman?”)

When I assumed editorship of the Wonder Woman comic book in early 1994, the character was in what could only be described as a slump. The character was fifty-plus years old and showing, not her age, but the inability of the boy’s club that is the comic book industry to fully comprehend the needs of a complex, older woman. Girls stopped reading just about anything other than Archie comics sometime in the 1960s; that left the next few generations of comic book creators an almost exclusively male domain.

Writing any character of subtlety and nuance is difficult to do in the often limited scope of mainstream comic books. For a male writer who grew up on the testosterone soaked comics of the last three decades, it was probably asking a lot of him to convincingly write a character of the opposite sex who is supposed to embody everything that is good and virtuous and above all, peaceful in womanhood ... yet stands for the personification of the invincible warrior class. How is a man who probably doesn’t even understand his girlfriend or wife supposed to decode the exemplar of womanhood? It was by no means an impossibility, nor was it for any lack of effort; George Perez managed to come close in a popular and critically successful run of Wonder Woman starting in 1987. Dennis O’Neil, the writer who kicked off a controversial 1968 story line in which she was “de-powered” and played as an Emma Peel karate expert in a white jumpsuit, partnered with a wise little blind Asian martial arts master, I Ching, readily admits to the weakness, saying in a 2006 online interview, “You have to understand, writers like me, we have the best of intentions. We simply don't always know how to do things well.”

O’Neil, one of the most respected writers in the medium, would seem to have shown us the error of those particular 1968-ways. He recalled in a 2007 online interview, “Gloria Steinem, bless her, without mentioning my name, wrote an article about that and after the fact I saw her point, absolutely. At the time I thought I was serving the cause of feminism by making this woman self-made and then I immediately undercut that by having her have a male martial arts teacher. My heart was pure, but I now see Steinem's point. To take the one really powerful [female] character in the comics pantheon, and take away her powers was really not serving the cause of feminism.”

And yet, almost three decades after that fact, Wonder Woman, under the auspices of a talented editor and inventive writer, was reduced to working in a fast food taco franchise in stories published under covers depicting her in various poses of humiliation and defeat. Several years later, down the line of my editorial tenure, a storyline by writer/artist John Byrne elevated Wonder Woman to the level of a god in the Greek pantheon. A large segment of fans were outraged; how dare anyone suggest Wonder Woman could be the equal, or (that troubling concept again) superior, to Superman? He was the male, naturally superior. Wonder Woman would, in the estimation of some, be allowed second place on the superpowers scale. Others busied themselves compiling lists of all the male heroes who are stronger and why; role playing games have given the hardcore accepted standards for the quantification of magical and super-powers to bolster their arguments, which generated considerable heat on the internet before subsequent editors and writers returned her to the comfortable, familiar status quo.

# # #

What is so hard about Wonder Woman?

Is she, in the end, just a fungible fictional character responding to the personalities of whoever happens to be creating her adventures? Or is she the sum total of the reader’s interpretation as they filter the writer’s experiences through their own? After all, every argument for William Moulton Marston being a proto-feminist can be rebutted with quotes from his writings that blatantly and specifically espouse the psychological benefits of bondage and domination, the proof of which can be found in its almost comically obvious presence in all of his Wonder Woman stories; spankings – boy on girl and girl on girl alike – were routine, covers depicting her astride, or bound to, missiles hurtling through the air were plentiful, and lots of characters spent many, many panels trussed up by ropes and chains in a variety of bondage poses. As a dramatic device, Marston said, “binding and chaining are the one harmless, painless way of subjecting the heroine to menace and making drama of it.” Besides, he said, “women enjoy submission.”

Which carries more creative weight: the original intent of the creator, the judgment of the individual reader, or the interpretations of later creators? Comic book characters, like all serialized characterizations everywhere, are kept fresh through the illusion of change; readers and fans want their favorites to go through six different kinds of hell on a monthly basis ... just as long as they emerge exactly as they’ve always been (since the particular reader have been reading it, that is) but different on the other end.

More people know Wonder Woman from the television show than have or ever will read the comic books, but the influence of the creator’s original intent were hard to ignore, even in the event of cross-medium translation in which the receiving medium usually has little or no trouble ignoring exactly what it was that attracted them to the character in the first place. Network television standards and practices kept it clean – there would be no straddling of phallic symbols on the Peacock Network! – but every review, every reminiscence couldn’t help but reference the true star of the show: Lynda Carter’s breasts.

So: Feminist icon. B&D poster girl. Propaganda tool for enlightening the malleable minds of impressionable little boys. Smartass broad who needs a smacking around. Role model for girls. Goddess. Harmless TV entertainment. Jiggle-TV.

Because, in the end, everyone reads into Wonder Woman the qualities they need to satisfy themselves. She is, in the final, clichéd analysis, a fictionalized earth mother. We come to her as viewers and readers and she, in her nurturing way, shows us exactly what we need. Lynda Carter needed a higher meaning to a role as a comic strip character. Gloria Steinem needed a symbol for women’s equality. Harvey Kurtzman needed a strong woman victimize in order to comment on the decade’s misogyny. Dennis O’Neil needed a reminder of how art intersects politics.

William Moulton Marston needed a spanking.

And the writers find what they need to make Wonder Woman work for them: Robert Kanigher, who took over scripting Wonder Woman after Marston’s death in 1947, took the character off into light, romantic comedy mixed with fantasy and high adventure by way of romance comics. Fantasy novelist and Wonder Woman writer Jodi Picoult told Newsarama.com in a 2006 interview, “My thoughts are to sort of give her some mother-daughter issues – because I think all women have those, and to beef up the relationships that she now has in the world of man, as she's assuming an identity given to her.”

Assuming an identity given to her.

That’s something Wonder Woman should be used to by now.

Make A Hawk A Dove, Stop A War With Love...and Big Hooters

Late last year, I ghost-wrote an essay for a book about action-adventure TV shows for a writer friend who was behind the 8-ball and called for volunteers on the writers list we're on to help him out of his jam. Here's the first half:

What Is So Hard About Wonder Woman?!

© respective copyright holder

“In terms of Wonder Woman, I’ve never really had a woman not identify, or identify in a negative way. At least they haven’t come up to me and said anything. That was always a goal of mine, was sort of that sisterhood thing from Paradise Island.”

Linda Carter, 2006 (Wonder Woman, 1975-1979)

On the back cover of the January 29, 1977 issue of TV Guide is an ad for Virginia Slims cigarettes, picturing a good-looking (but not so good-looking as to be threatening to her sisters), fashionably dressed young woman, cigarette between her fingers and the celebratory slogan of solidarity, “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.”

On the front cover, in all her Lichtensteinesque glory, was Wonder Woman, cartoon bullets bouncing off her cartoon bracelets. “From the Comics to TV: Lynda Carter as ‘Wonder Woman’” the copy-line reads. The copy above the logo promises “A Startling Survey: What Criminals Learn From Television.”

The lead article was “When Television is a School For Criminals,” wherein “a surprising nine out of 10 (criminals interviewed at Michigan’s maximum security Marquette Prison) ... actually learned new tricks and improved their criminal expertise by watching crime programs. Four out of 10 said that they have attempted specific crimes they saw on television crime dramas.”

A staggering concept. (Starsky & Hutch as your criminal blueprint? Really?)

Thank Hera the article leading off the back of the book was about someone who could fight television criminals with television justice: “From the Pages of Comic Books ... Comes ‘Wonder Woman’ Lynda (Wham!) Carter, Who Is Scoring A Hit (Zap!) With Children and Their Fathers (Crash!)”

Lynda Carter and Wonder Woman were the media darlings and punch line du jour of 1977. After a couple of uninspired (many say insipid) pilots and TV movies, The New Original Wonder Woman debuted on December 18, 1975 on ABC. The series was set in the days of World War II, copying the look and feel of the comic book original by Charles Moulton (a.k.a. William Moulton Marston) and H.G. Peter. The villains were Nazis, Fifth Columnists, and war profiteers. The tone was campy, though not high-camp, a few notches down from over the top approach that worked so well on Batman, the show that (Wham!), a decade after it had gone off the air (Pow!), remained – as, indeed, it seems to do even today – the public perception of comic book superheroes (Zap!). Wonder Woman was played (unconsciously) cool and (retrospectively) ironic, but the appeal was (unavoidably) sexual.

Readers are made to wait until all the way to the end of the third paragraph of the article to learn that in the line-up of ABC’s comic strip-like TV show stars (Six Million Dollar Man, Happy Days, Welcome Back, Kotter, The Bionic Woman), none of the competition could hold a candle to Ms. Carter in the bosom department. “Lynda’s is an impressive size 38.” Against the likes of Lee Majors, Henry Winkler, Gabriel Kaplan and Lindsay Wagoner, the inclusion of this tidbit smacked of studio-approved pandering; it would be surprising if all of “Lynda’s” measurements weren’t included in producer-approved press material. The paragraph lead off with the information of the “spectacular 6-foot dimensions” of the “ex-‘Miss World-U.S.A.’” All this was in support of probably the only conclusion one could reach about a mid-1970s television show starring a tall, attractive woman costumed in a star-spangled bathing suit and red knee-high high-heeled boots: “...It is not only 9-year-olds who are watching. The Nielsen evidence is that their fathers are also impelled to steal peeks at this particular comic-strip show.”

No doubt.

TV Guide critic Judith Crist wrote in November, 1975, “Produced with taste and fine period feeling by Douglas S. Cramer, with a screenplay by Stanley Ralph Ross (one of Batman's better writers) and directed with wit by Leonard Horn, this introduction of Wonder Woman and her role in beating the nasty Nazis is indeed an animated comic strip, but done with intelligence and verve.” The cast is “fine,” and Lynda Carter is described as “luscious.” (In all fairness, Lyle Waggoner gets a reference for playing “handsome Maj. Steve Trevor,” but where handsome is value-neutral descriptive, luscious is plainly suggestive, especially when attached to the actress herself rather than to the character she plays.)

The New Original Wonder Woman garnered respectable enough reviews and ratings ... when viewers could locate it on their dials. When TVs still had dials. Instead of giving the Amazon Princess a berth on the weekly schedule, ABC used the first season’s eleven one-hour episodes as specials to counter-program against the competition on CBS and NBC; one would imagine that decision was not arrived at because anyone thought Wonder Woman offered a compelling historic look at the second World War sure to draw big numbers. Clearly, it was the costume and the spectacular 6-foot dimensions of the ex-Miss World-U.S.A. who filled it that drew its particular demographic: kids and males eighteen to dead. Junior came for the comic book goofiness; dad stayed for the size-38s. John Leonard, television critic for the New York Times, reviewed the 1977 premiere of The New Adventures of Wonder Woman on CBS (Warner Brothers, the studio that owned Wonder Woman, having grown tired of ABC’s lack of commitment to the program picked up their size-38s and took them somewhere else): “Obviously none of this is meant to be taken seriously. And I won’t. Using comic strip exaggeration, the producers are offering another of those escapist fantasies in the mode of grim bionic creatures and camp cartoons that once transformed Batman into electronic success.” It was a bit of a cliché, but a fun, harmless one. “As an actress,” he could not help add, “Miss Carter creates the impression of a sweet little girl disconcertingly trapped in the body of a potential Fellini sexuality symbol.”

Yeah, you’ve sure come a long way, baby.


“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

William Moulton Marston, 1943 (creator of Wonder Woman)

In 1972, Gloria Steinem recruited Wonder Woman as the symbol of the growing woman’s liberation movement by putting the Amazon Princess on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine. Wonder Woman was depicted (drawn by a middle-aged male artist) as a colossus striding Godzilla-like over a small town, brushing aside attacks by the military (meant to represent male aggression, one supposes) and protecting homes while carrying, bound up protectively in her Gold Lasso of truth, all those things that are good and giving (meant to represent female nurturing and strength).

Wonder Woman, created so that little girls could have a “funny-paper heroine to root for” had survived the highs and lows of publishing to be one of only three superheroes to stay in print (Superman and Batman being the others) through a seven or eight year superhero dry spell, comics having been commandeered by readers demands for other genres: westerns, romance, crime, humor, supernatural, funny animals. The popularity of The Adventures of Superman on TV kept DC’s core heroes afloat, but titles such as All-Star Western, Girls’ Love, The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Tomahawk, Mr. District Attorney, House of Mystery, Animal Antics, and Mystery In Space far outnumbered the dozen or so superhero titles.

Wonder Woman came about as the response to a challenge made by William Moulton Marston, psychiatrist, inventor of the lie detector, feminist, and educational consultant to comics publisher All-American Comics (later known as DC Comics). Dr. Marston was disturbed by the overwhelmingly male world of superheroes. Where, he asked, were the role models for the little girls reading comics?

All-American publisher Max C. Gaines (whose middle name, Charles, was combined with the doctor’s to come up with the ‘Charles Moulton’ pseudonym Marston employed on Wonder Woman) turned the challenge back on Marston, offering him the opportunity to create a “wonder woman” to stand with the “super men.” Marston responded with Wonder Woman, the first baby born in ages to the Paradise Island-dwelling race of Amazons and who was blessed by the gods with the gifts of Aphrodite’s beauty, Athena’s wisdom, Hermes speed, and Hercules’ strength. She was, of course, the feminine archetype.

But for whatever inspiration Wonder Woman may have provided to girls, it was believed that the readership for even this “girl’s” comic was likely as high as ninety percent boys. Sheldon Mayer, Marston’s editor at All-American, said in Les Daniels’ Wonder Woman: The Complete History, he felt Marston “was writing a feminist book but not for women. He was dealing with a male audience.” Daniels observed “Marston always felt that males were the ones who needed his message most. If he really did succeed in altering the social climate, it might have been by exposing millions of boys (who would become men by the 1960s) to the ideals of feminism. After all, it’s not much of a surprise that women might want to assert themselves, but it’s quite a different matter when many of the supposed oppressors agree to go along with the idea.”

Continued...

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Some writing gigs are a pure horror. One such horror was this, a young adult non-fiction book about the building of the Alaska Highway (very short version: authorized right after Pearl Harbor to link North American air bases through U.S., Canada, and Alaska, the highway was begun in February 1941 and finished, 1600 miles later, in September 1941, an engineering marvel spearheaded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). I don't know why. I love history and usually like this stuff. But I plowed through and now that it's done, I think it came out okay:

Building America, Then and Now: The Alaska Highway

© Facts On File

Work Until You Drop
Yet as with all other obstacles faced along this road, the soldiers could do nothing but keep working, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, “We were working, I think, eight-hour shifts. Three eight-hour shifts,” said General Hoge of the official schedule that had been set down for his crews, but the reality in the field was often quite different ... and exhausting. Henry Geyer was a truck driver with the army engineers who recalled this hard duty on “Building the Alaska Highway,” saying simply, “You worked until you dropped.” But, he added, “You had to do the job. You didn't like it. So you figured that you might as well as enjoy it, because otherwise you'd have gone nuts.”

Bob Batey, another engineer interviewed on the (PBS) documentary, agreed. “In the summer, the sun was up all the time,” he said, offering impossibly long 20-hours of sunlight at their northern location. “We were on 12-hour shifts. Half of the company was in the morning, and half at night. We worked all the time, seven days a week.”

“It was slave labor, is what it was,” said Wallace Lytle. “We weren't prisoners, but wanting to get the job done, we'd done most anything to do it.”

ay their heads pretty much wherever they fell. “We was working so hard that by the time you got through at night, you rolled your sleeping bag out underneath a tree or in the bushes, and you crawled in it and sacked out,” said Chester Russell, a former rodeo worker from California and no stranger to hard work.

Alden Hacker was another engineer who vividly recalled the exhaustion that daily overcame these workers. “Seldom did we ever put a tent up and tie all of the corners together. Usually you put them up and just enough to hold them together, because they're only going to be there for the night. The next day, the cooks would have to tear them down, load them up, and move them up the road as close to the front as they could move.”

“We worked twelve and fourteen hours a day in the rain and the flies and the mosquitoes made life miserable for us, particularly in the open mess camps,” remembered Master Sergeant George H. Burke of the 95th Engineers in The Alaska Highway. “We had hardly any free time, and most of what we did have we spent playing cards or pitching horseshoes.”

Everyone suffered from the combination of cold and lack of sleep. Mistakes were common and accidents frequent. While damaged vehicles and machines could be towed to the nearest camp for repairs, there were not enough tow trucks and spare parts to keep up with the demand. Wrecks were left to accumulate on the side of the road and, against Army regulations, some wrecks would be stripped of spare parts to be used in the repair of other vehicles. According to one witness, “each temporary base cap began to resemble a military junkyard.”

Soldiers went for long stretches with no other company that that of their comrades and, though often overcome with exhaustion after the long day’s labors, they keenly felt the isolation. On “Building the Alaska Highway,” army engineer Chester Russell said, “There was nobody. There was absolutely nobody. As far as young sweetie pies up there ... we never seen a lady.” Fellow engineer William Griggs agreed, recalling “We were completely isolated in most cases. At the beginning we were near some Indian villages, but most of the time we were completely isolated.” Despite the hardships, isolation and loneliness, the soldiers understood all too well the importance of the task they had been assigned.

Occasionally, movies would make their way out to some of the camps where men like Burke, who had been a Washington, D.C. film projectionist before he was drafted, who show them on the 16-millimeter projector. Even rarer were visits by USO (United Service Organizations) shows, a charitable, non-profit organization which provides entertainment and recreation to U.S. military stationed the world over. One such show featured violin virtuoso Yehudi Mehuhin in concert in Whitehorse.

But such diversions were few and far between for the men of the Alaska Highway. An article in a 1942 issue of Engineering News Record put the situation in perspective: “There was no recreational program provided for soldiers or civilians, probably none could have been provided. Work, work, work, and more work was the only program – day and night, seven days a week.”

An article in the New York Times from December 31, 1942 said, “The boys who built the Alcan highway ... (are mostly) drafted youth from the corners of America, they do not like to be told now that they are heroic, for their job held no glamour for them. They met it with curses and sweat. But with only their endless work, and their beefs, their checkers and their profanity for amusement they have pounded a road from the outpost of the outside world at Dawson Creek straight through to the heart of Alaska. They have done it despite hell, high water, and above all, loneliness. Many of them are eager to get out of Alcan country and into actual battle. But perhaps no action can be more dramatic or demanding than that which they have faced.”

More important than comfort, convenience or entertainment was speed.

Keeping the troops fed was another problem for the workers scattered along the length of the Alaska Highway. Engineers and workers would often not see fresh food for months at a stretch, relying instead on so-called C-rations, or prepackaged meals which offered few options, usually vegetable hash, meat hash, and chile con carne. But the limited menu soon had the soldiers resorting to the age-old practice of bartering with the locals for some relief from their steady diet of prepared canned meals. “We got so sick and tired of the chili con carne, we would send truckloads of chili con carne down to the Indian village and trade it off for fish” recalled engineer William Griggs. “And they said, ‘We’ll trade, but no more chili con carne.’ They got tired of it, themselves.”

“We lived on Spam and Vienna sausage,” said Fred Mims, while Chester Russell recalled, “Pancakes … was the number one on the list. Pancakes. We ate pancakes three times a day there for about a month.”

The New York Times article of December 31 described the conditions found in a typical camp: “Potatoes are iron-hard and have to be thawed for many hours before they can be cooked. Pancake batter may be freezing on top, and burning where it touches the stove. Returned laundry arrives in a solid chunk, which has to be set beside the oil drum stove for days before a sock or a handkerchief can be pried loose ... At all times the cold is the omnipresent factor, it is cruel to both men and machines.”

Time Magazine reported that “Out in the bush the only recreation is hunting and fishing ... (soldiers) hunt to vary meals of corned beef, potatoes, lemonade, carrots, preserves and dried eggs, by adding moose and bear steaks, lake trout, spruce partridge (Yukon chickens), ptarmigan (a species of game bird), grouse, venison. At Swan Lake, for lack of regular (fishing) tackle a Signal Corps man made a line from telephone wire, hammered a fishing spoon out of a tin can and brought in strings of fat trout over the side of an assault boat.”

African-American Soldiers
African-American soldiers were thought to be especially vulnerable to the cold and harsh conditions they were to face up north. Shockingly, the official U.S. Army position, as put forth by a study made by the Army War College, a training school for military officers, was “The Negro is careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive ... He is best handled with praise and by ridicule."

Indeed, the military was reluctant to even send African-American troops to work on the highway for fear that they would not be able to keep up with their white counterparts on this vital and fast-moving project.

It was, in fact, unofficial army policy to not send African-American troops places like Alaska and Canada because of the mistaken assumption that they were not capable of performing well in the extreme cold. But a wartime shortage of troops right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and before draftees and enlistees could be trained and shipped out forced the use of the black troops on this vital northern mission. Though making up about one-third of the troops assigned to the highway, the African-American soldiers were more often than not assigned the harshest jobs under the worst conditions, including laboring on the brutal CANOL pipeline project. They were used only because the better-trained and equipped whites were needed for jobs deemed more important. Yet the black workers were routinely under-equipped and little thought was given to their physical well-being or safety. It was not unusual for supplies and equipment to go to white soldiers, leaving the African-Americans to make do with hand tools, laboring for weeks at a stretch in brutal temperatures that could reach -60º F for weeks at a time, living on frozen rations and in drafty canvas tents.

“Blacks in uniform had to endure the Army’s discriminatory racial policies,” said historian Heath Twichell. “The frequent expressions of hostility and contempt they encountered from individual whites only made that experience all the more painful.”

For the African-Americans working under white officers trained under these prejudicial beliefs, conditions were even tougher than those faced by white soldiers. According to Twichell, “In the minds of most senior white officers, black troops were not as capable in terms of their technical efficiency and ability to use the equipment. There was an expectation that they would do poorly.” All their work and their every action were a test to prove to the white officers and soldiers that they were as capable as anyone else to get the job done

Of course, as was ultimately proven by such examples as the durability of the construction of the 300-foot (91 meter) Sikanni Chief River Bridge by African-American regiments in less than four days and their records for most mileage built, the army vastly underestimated the intelligence and skill of their black soldiers.

Where Have You Gone John Kemmerer?

Here’s something I found rooting around in archived folders: the manuscript for Mythology Around the World: Mesoamerican Mythology, a non-fiction book I wrote for Rosen Publishing in October 2005. Due to a misunderstanding (meaning I probably didn’t read the Series Guidelines closely enough), the book I wrote was a survey of the myths of all the Mesoamerican cultures when it was supposed to focus on a specific people (I forget which). I was paid a kill fee and this was never published.

Mythology Around the World: Mesoamerican Mythology

© Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 2: “This is the Beginning of the Ancient Word...”

No matter what the culture, regardless of their history, we all share the need to understand who we are and where we came from. While modern man depends on science for his answers, earlier cultures had to rely on their imagination and nature. Myths, traditional stories presenting supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serve as representations of certain types and ideas, are the response of primitive societies to this need to understand their place in the world.

Modern cultures also have the advantage of the accumulated knowledge of the past millennia, allowing us to better understand our place on this planet, this planet’s place in the solar system, this solar system’s place in the galaxy, this galaxy’s place in the universe.

We know that that thunder and lightning is nothing more than the interaction of electrons and moisture in the air. We understand that the sickness afflicting us is caused by a specific one of any number of microscopic organisms that infiltrate and disrupt the body’s natural and normal functions.

Nature and the Gods
Prior to learning these things, people trying to understand their history, their lives and their place in the world and the broader universe had to create the reasons based on their limited understanding of how the world worked. Unable to peer through powerful telescopes out to the edge of the universe, they credited beings created in their own images with responsibility for everything from the stars in the heavens to the crops in the fields. Uncomprehending of the organisms that sickened them, they could only believe that disease was a sign that they had somehow offended a god.

History becomes mythology, changing fact to fiction as it is told and retold down through the generations. A storm that may have turned the tide of a long ago battle becomes the epic tale of a divine intervention that determined the fate of a nation. An eclipse is the hand of a god blocking out the sun to punish a rebellious people.

Traditions and rites of passage are formalized in myths as stories that give them a history and a reason for their observance. Family tales, life lessons, the interactions of man and nature are all explained in myths.

A tale from the Oaxaca valley warns of the danger of pride in a story about the bat who, though he complained to the gods that he was cold, was in reality jealous of the colorful plumage of birds. The gods asked each bird to contribute one feather each to keep the bat warm. With so many different colored feathers, the bat became the most beautiful flying creature around. Day and night, he spread color across the sky and could even create rainbows.

The bat became insufferably proud of himself and the birds soon had enough of his arrogance. So they flew to the gods and asked that something be done about the bat. The gods summoned the bat to the heavens so that he could show them what he could do. But as the bat demonstrated his abilities, he began to lose his feathers, one by one. Soon, his feathers were gone and he was back to being his old, drab self. To this day, the bat is still ashamed of his ugly, unadorned body and only comes out at night, flying rapidly back and forth in search of his lost feathers.

The Power of Mythology
In his book, The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell, the cultural historian and chronicler of mythology, outlines two distinct orders of mythology. The first is the naturally-oriented myth, created to explain the origin of man and his universe. The second is the socially-oriented mythology that explains man’s place as a member of a particular society.

Together, Campbell writes in The Power of Myth, “they integrate the individual into his society and the society into the field of nature. It unites the field of nature with my nature. It’s a harmonizing force.” These myths may be stories about gods, but these powerful gods are really just metaphors, “personifications of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animates the life of the world.” In other words, “there is a natural order and harmony to nature, and what the individual or group must do is fit in.”

The epic legend of the Popol Vuh, the creation myth of the K’iche’ Mayan, exemplifies the interplay between man, nature, and the gods, determined to inhabit the world with a people who would worship and praise them. After creating the world itself in the first age, the gods made animals. But the animals couldn’t praise the gods so they told the animals that they would therefore be of service to others as food.

In the second age, the gods tried again, this time making a body from the mud of the earth. This too was unsuccessful, crumbling and falling apart and capable only of speaking nonsense. This creation they let dwindle away, until it became “thought.”

In the third age, the gods created manikins of wood, the man of coral wood, the woman of reeds. But though the manikins could walk, talk, and multiply, they had no hearts to love their creators or minds to remember them. So a great flood was released to smash them, and today only monkeys, it is said, are still made of wood and look like humans as a warning that people must have a heart.

Finally came the fourth age when the gods at last understood how to make proper humans. Fox, coyote, parrot and crow bring yellow and white corn to Xmucane, the goddess of corn. She ground it up into cornmeal that becomes human flesh, arms and legs. Their blood is water; the water in which Xmucane rinsed her hands became human fat. These beings can speak and think and, most importantly, praise and thank the gods for having made them.

Here is man’s place in the cosmos: created by the gods to worship the gods, made from the very things that sustain them and tie them to Earth and nature. It integrates, as Campbell believes a myth must, man “into his society and the society into the field of nature.”

The universality of Campbell’s statements can be seen in the many cultures whose mythologies would seem to be drawn from the same or similar sources. It is not uncommon to find the story of a great flood that partially or completely wipes humanity from the planet (which we know as the Biblical story of Noah’s ark) in cultures from all over the world. Is this because they have all experienced a great flood at some point in history, or because the fear of such a cataclysmic event is common to the human experience and, therefore, likely to make its way into multiple mythologies?

The myths surrounding creation also contain common ideas and themes, including the shaping of human beings from nature (clay in the Judeo-Christian world, corn and water in the Mesoamerican) by a superior being. Even the telling of these tales may share surprising common ground. The King James Bible (a translation commissioned by England’s King James I, published in 1611) opens with the sentence, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Mayan Popol Vuh starts with “This is the beginning of the ancient word, here in this place called Quiche (K’iche’).”

But while mythologies may share themes, every culture puts its unique stamp on their myths. Feathered serpents, giant brothers posted at the four corners of the universe to hold up the sky and gods who turn into black ants to bring corn to mankind are only the beginning of the rich and ancient mythology of Mesoamerica.

Spiders? Ick!

As a glance at the sidebar to the left of And Then I Wrote... will show, I also write a bit of non-fiction, mostly for the young adult (5th - 8th grade) market. I seem to do about two of these year, the first dozen or so for Rosen Publishing (a library and school school library publisher) and I'm about to begin on my third for Chelsea House, a division of Facts-On-File. I've done books on the Titanic, spy satellites, disease (in general and one on influenza, specifically), Edwin Hubble, John Glenn, careers in robotics and rodeo clowning (you heard me), the Alaska Highway, the Great Depression, hurricanes, and the origin and creation of Spider-Man. The latest is about Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. It's a wide--and sometimes strange--range of subjects, but seeing as how I enjoy reading books on subjects like salt, codfish, the screw, the library shelf, giant redwood trees, oysters and the history of bookbinding, work I enjoy.

Here's a bit from one of the books closer to my heart than something like, say, rodeo clowns and robotics engineers:

ACTION HEROES: THE CREATION OF SPIDER-MAN

© The Rosen Rublishing Group

Chapter Three: Does Whatever a Spider Can!
At first, Martin Goodman gave him every reason Spider-Man would never work.

“For months I had been toying with the notion of a new super-hero, one who would be more realistic than most, despite his colorful superpower,” recalled Stan in Excelsior! “So I did what I always did in those days, I took the idea to my boss...I told Martin that I wanted to feature a hero who had just a touch of superstrength but his main power was that he could stick to walls and ceilings...I also mentioned that our hero, whom I wanted to call Spider-Man, would be a teenager, with all the problems, hang-ups, and angst of any teenager. He’d be an orphan who lived with his aunt and uncle, a bit of a nerd, a loser in the romance department...Except for his super-power, he’d be the quintessential hard-luck kid. He’d have allergy attacks when fighting the villains.”

Creative Differences
Goodman was less than enthusiastic. He told Stan that teens could be sidekicks to adult superheroes but not superheroes themselves. He pointed out that heroes did not have personal problems, which, in any case, only served to slow down the fast-paced action of superhero stories. Stan’s nerdy, allergic Spider-Man was, at any rate, a comedic character not a hero. And anyway, nobody wanted to read about a character named Spider-Man; people were creeped out by spiders. They didn’t want to be reminded of them while reading a superhero comic book story.

Stan was not deterred. He wrote, “I couldn’t get Spider-Man out of my mind. That’s when I remembered the final issue of (the anthology title) Amazing Fantasy, which we were then prepping. As you can imagine, when a publisher prints the last issue of a title, no one much cares about what goes into (it).

“So, just to get it out of my system, I gave Jack Kirby my Spider-Man plot and asked him to illustrate it. Jack started to draw it, but when I saw that he was making our main character, Peter Parker, a powerful-looking, handsome, self-confident typical hero type, I realized that wasn’t the style I was looking for. So I took Jack off the project. He couldn’t care less because he had so many other strips to draw at the time, and Spider-Man wasn’t exactly our top-of-the-line character.”

A Question of Credit
Jack Kirby’s memories of the Spider-Man experience are significantly different from Stan’s. In a July 1982 interview with legendary comics creator Will Eisner, Kirby said, “(Spider-Man) was the last thing Joe (Simon) and I had discussed. We had a script called ‘The Silver Spider.’ ‘The Silver Spider’ was going into a magazine called Black Magic (which was cancelled) and we were left with the script. I believe I said this could become a thing called Spider-Man...so the idea was already there when I talked to Stan.”

Joe Simon, Kirby’s former partner and co-creator of Captain America and countless other characters and comic titles had yet another take on the origin of Spider-Man, although one that still owed more to Simon and Kirby than it did to Stan Lee. According to Simon’s memoir of his comic book career, The Comic Book Makers, the Simon and Kirby creation The Fly (for Archie Comics) had begun as a character they had called first “Spiderman” and then “The Silver Spider.” As Simon told the story, ”As I learned years later, Jack brought in the ‘Spiderman’ logo I had loaned to him before we changed the name to The Silver Spider. Kirby laid out the story to Lee about the kid who finds a ring in spiderweb, gets his powers from the ring and goes forth to fight crime armed with The Silver Spider’s old web-spinning pistol.”

When Kirby turned in his first batch of pages, Stan saw the artist had given him a muscular young man instead of the skinny teenager he had envisioned. Plus, the new character shared far too many similarities with The Fly.

Simon continued, “Ditko ignored Kirby’s pages, tossed the character’s magic ring, web-pistol and goggles into a handy wastebasket, and completely redesigned Spider-Man’s costume and equipment. In this life, he became high school student Peter Parker who gets his spider powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.”

By the time Spider-Man made his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15, the only thing left of Jack Kirby’s contribution was the name (with the addition of the hyphen) and the cover that he had penciled for the issue.

Steve Ditko, Co-Creator
Stan tapped his Amazing Fantasy cohort Steve Ditko to replace Kirby. In an essay that appeared in an issue of Robin Snyder’s History of Comics, Steve Ditko wrote that the five Kirby-penciled Spider-Man pages he received from Stan “...showed a teenager living with his kindly old aunt and hard, gruff, retired police captain uncle...who was hostile toward the boy.

“Next door or somewhere in the neighborhood there was a whiskered scientist-type involved in some kind of experiment or project. The end of the five pages depicted the kid going toward the scientist’s darkened house.”

Ditko saw an opportunity to do a richer and more complex character than the one initially envisioned by Lee and Kirby. “Steve Ditko...working from a synopsis and Kirby’s pages, produced an inspired visual take on the character that drove its story for decades—bottle-thick glasses, slumped shoulders, and a homemade costume,” observed Raphael and Spurgeon in Stan Lee. “...The Spider-Man millions of readers came to know and love got his youth and voice from Stan Lee and his human frailty from Steve Ditko...”

The artist knew the importance of the visual aspect of a character in this most visual of mediums. In his 1990 essay, Ditko wrote, “One of the first things I did was to work up a costume. A vital, visual part of the character. I had to know how he looked, to fit in with the powers he had, or could have, the possible gimmicks and how they might be used and shown, before I did any breakdowns...I wasn’t sure Stan would like the idea of covering the character’s face but I did it because it hid an obvious boyish face.”

Stan was more than pleased with Ditko’s contributions to Spider-Man, finding his “toned down, more subtle, highly stylized way of drawing...perfect for the way I envisioned Spider-Man...Steve did a totally brilliant job of bringing my new little hero to life.”