When I was young I was an avid comic reader, originally obsessive about lots of DC comics like Superman and Batman and later Marvel comics like Spiderman and the Avengers. Today I get to see all of these characters on the movie screen, the aging fanboy I guess I have become, without much regard to the quality of the film.
The last thing that would have occurred to me to think about was the fact that the comics were created by actual people with actual lives and actual concerns and issues.
Last night we went to see The History of Invulnerability by David Bar Katz at the DCJCC. The play focuses on the story of Jerry Siegel, one of the creators of Superman in 1938 along with his artist partner, Joe Shuster.
Siegel and Shuster who sold the rights to Superman shortly after creating the comic to the then publisher for $130 ending up with almost nothing from the profits associated with the most popular comic book character in history.
A thread which I thought was interesting but mentioned only briefly in passing were the ties of the publisher to organized crime and as I later looked up the ties between organized crime and some of the early publishers in general.
There are two areas of focus for the play, one which features Siegel and his main character Superman with other characters coming in and out. Here we learn about how the Superman comic was developed, the relationship of Siegel and Shuster, and about Siegel’s estranged son from his first marriage as well as the fact that both Siegel and Shuster were forced into other lines of work for much of their adult life with little revenue coming in from Superman and DC Comics completely cutting them off from other work.
As a bridge to the second area of focus, we also learn how almost all of the creators of the original super hero’s in comics were created by Jewish authors, each character lost their father or father-figure, had powers that could save people/society/the Earth/the Universe, all of whom were ‘outside’ of normal society and none of whom themselves ‘acted’ (or were) Jewish; though all of the Krypton character names were Hebrew (Kal-el, Jor-el, …).
The second area of focus discusses the holocaust with three characters: an old man, middle-aged adult and a boy. While the boy reads Superman comics and expects to be rescued by the Man of Steel from their camp, the reality as we might expect is much harsher.
The leads were quite good, much of the story I was only vaguely familiar with and the details very interesting. That part made for a pretty good play. The tie to the holocaust experience to me was a bit of a stretch, though I could see how having a Superhero outside on one hand who could solve everything and a terrible, unsolvable problem on the other could possibly be an interesting contrast to discuss.
I thought it was worth seeing (though the last day at the DCJCC is today, July 8th).