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Superman and Cap'n Strong

Even in an age when comics might defend its intellectual property rights against fairly minor incursions, the tendency to self-reference in the medium invited the occasional risky approach at showing well-known concepts in a context unavailable to their owners. In the much missed heyday of comics author Cary Bates, Action Comics chose to explore the premise of how Popeye would interact in the milieu of Superman's Metropolis.

In two stories (research has yet to turn up a third), a bellicose and populist figure, Cap'n Strong, the sailor, crossed paths with Superman. In the first, Superman had to wrest him from an addiction to a dangerous herb that made Strong into a fist-flinging superpowered sociopath; in the second, Superman had to discover the secret connection between Strong and a giant caveman who had kidnapped Strong's fiancee Olivia and kept coming back, like a herpetic rash, to plague both Strong and Superman.

These interactions did much to throw light on the principal characters who moved through these risky explorations into the frontiers of the pilferage of intellectual property. Both stories, though this, showed that Cary Bates had an excellent grasp on the core of both characters.

The Prototype and Tenure

If Superman stands in an ancestral role to the costumed and powered super-hero, in turn he enjoys ancestors of his own. An anthropologist might shrug at the unique trappings of superheroes, noting that costumes, code names, and secret identities do not completely dissociate them from mythical heroes like Herakles or Achilles. For those who seek a more recent ancestry, the pulp hero certainly provides a model. One need step only a short way from the likes of the Avenger or Doc Savage before one encounters heroes like Batman.

The occasional pop culture historian points to other possible lineages. Some of these posit an earlier action hero - earlier by almost ten years, to date from first publication - who adorned the comics pages of newspapers with fantastic deeds, overblown fist fights, and a nobility of character never quite overshadowed by a tendency to fight for its own sake. This figure might have achieved iconhood even before the first Superman stories appeared in 1938.

While visually not much connects Superman and Popeye, thoughtful analysis can recognize connecting themes, including the essential concept of gallantry. The common concepts seemed obvious enough even to appear in Fawcett's unsuccessful legal defense of Captain Marvel; Fawcett argued that much of what DC claimed as unique elements of the Superman premise had already belonged to the Popeye concept for years. Unfortunately for Fawcett, Captain Marvel had many things in common with Superman that never had attached to any presentation of Popeye.

Popeye's role as a cultural icon made him, in some ways, a peer to Superman. During his days as a Superman scribe, the young Cary Bates did not miss this point. In the early seventies, in a bizarre, yet delightful self-referent exploration of popular culture, he allowed Superman to meet Popeye through the proxy he named Cap'n Strong.

The Dark Side of Popeye

Reading the first Cap'n Strong story in Action Comics, possibly way back in 1973, one can easily visualize Bates lounging on a sofa, watching the ubiquitous Popeye cartoon rerun (it little matters whether one postulates the fair cartoons of the forties and fifties or the dreadful later cartoons from around 1961). However the vision came to him, however, Bates' take included both the nobility of character that formed the core of Popeye's soul and a darker view of the perpetual violence one expects when sailor with anchors tattooed on their arms appear onscreen.

Bates saw as a connecting link the green leaf that Popeye consumed. To one of his generation, the similarity to another leaf, based on its effects on Popeye, would not likely elude a watchful eye. History has lost the moment and couldn't precisely confirm if Bates ever said, "That's not spinach that does him like that, that's coca!" Nonetheless, his treatment of Popeye in the first Cap'n Strong story - Action Comics #420, or something like it - shows that he recognized this potential twist on the premise.

Odd as the notion might seem, however, the Popeye concept had never adhered to enough hard-line realism to mesh with a Superman comic without a bit of translation to make the interface chafe less. Therefore, the inevitable spinach that acts as deus ex machina in the formula Popeye cartoon had to become something that really might transform a man into a superman. Bates therefore posited an extragalactic intoxicant he called 'sauncha,' a magical herb that grew on the ocean floor.

The Resemblance

The Superman comics of this era found definition in Curt Swan's serene and optimistic pencil treatments. The realism of his approach nonetheless made a Popeye-like character somewhat problematic. Popeye, after all, represents rather extreme deviations from the human norm. Enlargement of forearm and calf, if taken to Popeyelike dimensions, would suggest elephantiasis in a flesh-and-blood human. Similarly, the monstrous cleft in Popeye's chin suggests a skull type not known to natural science, at least in the hominid family. Nonetheless, Curt Swan managed to incorporate as much of these distortions as his literally-minded pencil hand would allow. Jaw, forearm, and calf all take on properties usually foreign to his treatment.

Cap'n Strong also matched in other physical attributes, including the presence of a few wisps of utterly colorless hair. If Swan couldn't make himself include the squinty eye or the toothless gums, we can forgive these changes as aesthetic necessities on Swan's part and possibly protective camouflage required by DC's legal goons, who, in spite of the courage allowing this story took, must have encouraged caution to preempt possible litigation based on the Cap'n Strong stories.

Context, interest, and the attempt not to get so deeply into detail probably all worked together to limit how much of the Popeye supporting cast made it into the two essential Cap'n Strong stories. Nonetheless, the Popeye equation had come to require the relationship with Olive Oyl, who appeared in the second Strong story as Strong's fiancee "Olivia Tallow". Beyond making her thin and brunette, Swan didn't attempt to approximate the pipe-cleaner build that defines Olive Oyl to the eye. Years would pass until the beginning of the eighties, when the American concept of female beauty would begin to expect an unhealthy thinness bordering on anorexia. Had Swan attempted a more literal treatment of Olivia/Olive, he might have had to depict her as a skeleton covered with skin, which would push the tone of the book more towards the senescent horror comic than the aging super-hero comic.

Sauncha and the Corrupting Effect of Power

Popeye cartoons took a very pro-Popeye view of things. Bates' imagination allowed him to explore how the whole business might seem to someone Popeye, or his proxy Cap'n Strong, had beaten up one too many times.

Superman first encountered a dangerous and belligerent Cap'n Strong whose superheroic rampages - his sociopathic sauncha rages - required the sternest kind of intervention. The themes of nobility corrupted by a substance abuse problem weighed as heavily in this piece as one could expect from a code-approved Superman book of the early seventies. In essence, Cap'n Strong had beat too many people too often, had done too much damage, and even reached the indefensible point of exchanging blows with Superman himself. Proxy to an icon or not, few figures in a DC comic get away with direct confrontations with their emblematic alpha male and defender: Such folly typically ends in a prison cell.

Therefore, a contained and repentant Cap'n Strong swore off the stuff even as older readers might either snicker or groan at the portrayal of the character as a rampage-prone drug addict. To Bates' credit, he neither intended nor delivered some vile slander on the original; perhaps we should view Cap'n Strong's relationship to Popeye not unlike the relationship of the Watchmen to the Charlton superheroes.

Clark Kent, the Anti-Popeye

We can see as another moment of brilliance the use of Clark Kent, rather than Superman, as Cap'n Strong's foil. The Kent persona in those days represented the sneaky, image-conscious, and quirky side of Superman. Superman's sense of humor expressed itself through Kent, whose deliberate and self-consciousness mildness sometimes seemed as a passive-aggressive attempt to provoke and annoy people that Superman couldn't necessarily deal with by the unstoppable might of his fists. Hence not only did Kent try to fail in the necessary human virtue of courage; he also pursued an aesthetic geared to annoy others. He ruined haute cuisine in restaurants by burying it under mounds of ketchup. He chose books and music carefully geared to bore and alienate the onlooker. If someone took the time to do the study, one might find a few pages from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in the person of the Kent of the seventies, a manifestation of elements of Superman's personality generally absent from post-Byrne treatments of the character.

Combine this character with Popeye or a close substitute. The original Popeye concept, and one which treatments generally have respected in the 71 years since his first appearance in print, cast the sailor with little in the way of social wealth. Orphaned as an infant (though his father would later appear in Popeye strips), he had no upbringing worth mentioning. His abuse of the language made Popeye the speaker of a one-man dialect (said dialect remaining a feature as recognizable as his monstrous chin), putting an inevitable social barrier forever between himself and educated high culture. Furthermore, both as the original character and in the vicarious role of Cap'n Strong, the character dealt with the everyday ugliness of human interaction in a direct, honest, physical fashion that would inevitably place him in a cell.

The foil serves a role in literature as a mirror by which one character's traits become clearer. He serves as a mirror. Typically and classically understood, the foil, even when serving as narrator (as did John Watson in Sherlock Holmes literature) remains a secondary character. Comics, less constrained by literary formalism, need not keep the focus so unerringly directed on a single central character; and the Strong-Kent relationship allowed each to play foil to the other. Strong, as Kent's temporary roommate, entered the dynamic of a number of formula Clark Kent events, such as the bully problem. However, as (perhaps) a human, Strong couldn't resolve the bullying problem by making someone's ballpoint pen explode ink all over his shirt with heat vision. His two triphammer-like fists served a broad spectrum of functions which Superman-Kent might finesse with a broad repertoire of superpowers.

Guilty Pleasures and Absolution

We might do well to temper the guilt of such guilty pleasures with the understanding that an appreciation for silliness done well remains one of the endearing properties of the human character and a central feature of a sense of humor. A world in which everyone feared to snicker at the inside jokes in a piece of this nature would probably contain little more than scowling faces.

This much acknowledged, truthfulness still compels the admission of the Cap'n Strong stories as a guilty pleasure. If a reader admits to enjoying such a piece, he betrays some things about himself: His sense of humor has a tolerance for silliness that once earned adolescents and grown-ups no small disapproval. Furthermore, he admits to more knowledge about comics (through having read enough Superman stories to encounter one of these pieces), more knowledge about comic strips and/or cartoons (through recognizing Popeye's likeness) than seems safe to display, and even some knowledge about the drug-of-choice of prosperous decadents in the seventies (modern drug education makes folks a bit more likely to recognize in 'sauncha' a caricature of Popeye's spinach with more in common with the illicit products of the coca leaf).

However, folks who judge others harshly by what their targets know or remember essentially make memory itself a vice. One might rightly deride the pursuit of escapist entertainments to the exclusion of all other pursuits. The logic resembles yelling at the only juror to show up for jury duty as if he bore responsibility for all of those who failed to show.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

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