With Superman
Returns headed at us faster than a speeding bullet,
Advocate arts and entertainment editor and lifelong
comics fan Alonso Duralde looks at superheroes and
their appeal to gays and lesbians
My oldest sister
was a crappy college student. Don’t get me wrong;
she’s one of the smartest people I know. But
her university years were spent doing lots and lots
of, shall we say, unassigned reading. Lucky for me,
she has great taste in junky pop culture, so as a child, I
was exposed to some of the best the ’70s had to
offer. Namely, comic books.
There was the
darkly funny horror series PLOP! which took Grand
Guignol and punched it up with gruesome twist endings that
Rod Serling and O. Henry would have chuckled over
ruefully. And romance comics, featuring girls in
miniskirts and white lipstick who longed for the
perfect man, despite all obstacles. (Usually he was rich and
she was poor or vice versa, or he was getting over the
drug addiction he’d picked up in Vietnam and
didn’t want to tell her why he always avoided
hospitals. You know how these things happen.)
Best of all were
the Superman and Batman comics she bought,
particularly because, in the early ’70s, DC and
Marvel were having price wars. One of DC’s
responses was to put out mammoth 100-page comics for
just 50 cents. Naturally, you couldn’t fill a book
that big with new stuff, so DC would pad the books
with stories from the vaults, vintage adventures from
the ’40s and ’50s. Those 100-page specials,
combined with hardcover Superman and
Batman anthologies that featured everything
from their origin stories in the ’30s up to their
“contemporary” ’70s incarnations, made
me fall in love with superheroes. When Christopher
Reeve starred in 1978’s Superman, it blew my
little kid mind; so, naturally—so what if almost 30
years have passed—I’m really excited
about Superman Returns.
But as I look
back on my early affection for superheroes, my addiction to
comics doesn’t necessarily scan with the rest of my
childhood. As with the kid in Todd Haynes’s
Dottie Gets Spanked, most of my cultural
tastes tended to lean toward the feminine. I was addicted to
reruns of I Married Joan and old Ingrid Bergman flicks
on the afternoon movie. I was the only boy in my
sixth-grade class to read Are You There, God? It’s
Me, Margaret. Nothing could make me change the
channel faster than an old Rat Patrol or
Daktari episode popping up in the middle of my
afternoon of TV. So why was I drawn to these heroic tales of
adventure and derring-do?
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