Children tend to anthropomorphize their world, projecting human characteristics onto animals, cars, trains and even natural phenomena.
“As Piaget has shown, the child’s thinking remains animistic until the onset of puberty,” wrote Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.
“His parents and teachers tell him that things cannot feel and act; and as much as he may pretend to believe this to please these adults, or not to be ridiculed, deep down the child knows better… The sun, the stone and the water are believed to be inhabited by spirits very much like people.”
“Subjected to the rational teachings of others, the child only buries his ‘true knowledge’ deeper in his soul and it remains untouched by rationality; but it can be formed and informed by what fairy tales have to say.”
And by what comic books have to say.
The Julius Schwartz-edited titles at DC Comics made good use of that childhood trait by investing various inanimate phenomena with sentience.
Over at what would become Marvel, they were busy creating rock monsters, water monsters, fire monsters and so forth. And DC had a taste for cloud monsters.
In Mystery In Space 81 (Feb. 1963), writer Gardner Fox and artists Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson gave us The Cloud-Creature That Menaced Two Worlds!
In a convoluted plot, Adam Strange thwarts a thousand-year-old Rann despot Alva Xar while encountering a conjured duplicate of his fiancé Alanna, a mind-over-matter device called a cyberay and a cloud monster over Tasmania.
Because he’s holding the device, Adam discovers he can simply will the attacking cloud creature to vanish — another metaphor designed to wink at the fairy tale power of childhood imagination.
Even earlier, in The Flash 111 (Feb.-March 1960), writer John Broome and Infantino and Anderson gave us The Invasion of the Cloud Creatures!
Adam Strange also had another anthropomorphized weather phenomenon for a recurring archenemy — the sentient whirlwinds called the Dust Devils.
Jackie Edward McFarland said: Kept my eyes on the clouds for a long time after that comic came out!
ReplyDeleteSam Kujava said: Though fantastic and menacing, DC's cloud creatures were less frightening to children than the rocky swampy giant beasties that populated early Marvel Comics.
ReplyDeleteMark Engblom wrote: Similarly, Superman #190 saw the Man of Steel go up against "The Element Enemies," four humans transformed by the evil alien Amalak into representations of Fire, Earth, Air and Water. Perhaps writer Jim Shooter's close proximity to childhood (he was only about 15 at the time) was channeling that same animistic fear Piaget identified (or creating an ersatz Fantastic Four to fight Superman)!
ReplyDeleteTony Parker wrote: The best examples of DC "humanizing the elements" were in the creation of the heroic "Metamorpho" and the Doom Patrol supervillains known as the "Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man" and "Mr. 103".
ReplyDeleteCheryl Spoehr:
ReplyDelete"Until puberty"... maybe that explains why I have never stopped being an animist? But how to explain the similarity of my natural animism to Japanese Shinto? Why does Shinto have so much of my own thoughts and feelings in it? Why do I still feel stuffed animals can feel and even think, in their own ways? Why have I always felt that if something is loved, it loves back? And I always loved the animism in DC Comics.
Bob Bailey:
ReplyDeleteThis was the best series of 1959-1964.
Mark Engblom:
ReplyDeleteIn the pages of JLA, DC’s super team met not only an evil Tornado Tyrant but also an heroic Tornado Champion, who eventually became the android Red Tornado!
Shawn Douglas:
ReplyDeleteNice write up. That book seems like one I would be interested in reading. When I was in University taking courses in Ethics, the difficulties presented by anthropomorphism cropped up quite a bit.