"It was morning in Moscow. Even the sun was gray."
Robert Mayer's seminal superhero novel Superfolks is full of these kinds of lines, almost throwaways in the background of the story of a retired superhero facing one last challenge.
There's a lot of rhetoric around the book, from outright accusations of theft (see Grant Morrison's take on Alan Moore's work from this perspective, or Mayer's own thoughts on The Incredibles), to claims of influence of Biblical proportion, to the author's own thoughts that the book really was meant to be funny, not paradigm-shifting.
But I don't want to talk about that stuff. Yes, of course, I see in this story influences on so many of the superhero stories I love. Honestly, the plot is actually pretty much what Moore uses in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, so much so that it's hard to take his protestations seriously. However, I find this to be a similar situation as that faced by the aforementioned Mr. Morrison in the wake of the release of The Matrix, a film that really does seem to be telling Morrison's The Invisibles, in part and in different order. After the initial anger, Mr. Morrison noted that this kind of radiation of influence is really exactly what should happen with art. We're so much concerned with ownership and credit that we often forget that one of the major purposes of art is to be built upon.
Many have built upon Superfolks.
It is, most assuredly, a funny book. The inclusion of so many figures from American popular culture as side and background characters, makes sure that we never mistake this world we're reading about for the one we inhabit. This is an iconic, albeit decidedly ironic, superhero universe. There is a physical edge to the universe (a la the Source Wall), superpowers are acknowledged, if not common in the setting (a la Watchmen), and the hero is, for all intents and purposed, Superman.
But was it a good book? Well, yes, absolutely, obviously. It's definitely a niche read. I'm considering giving a copy to a non-superhero, non-comic-reading friend, just to see if it has crossover appeal. For fans of the genre it is a treat, though, given the year it was published, it's commenting on much older superhero stories than what we read now. That's the whole point, right? Superfolks created in so many ways the cast of the genre over the last 40 years or so by commenting on the 40 year prior. We all credit Watchmen with being the pinnacle of this kind of deconstructive reading, but Mayer beat Moore to the punch almost a decade earlier. The problem is that this is, 100%, not the kind of story that could have been published in comics at the time. There's often, I've found, a bit of hesitance on the part of comics readers and scholars to attribute too much influence to comics from outside of the medium. We'd rather talk about how current comics were influenced by the Modernist ideas of Krazy Kat than T.S.Eliot (whose Prufrock is liberally deployed as commentary on the existential crisis of main character David Brinkley). It's not an overstatement, though, to suggest that without this novel, we, quite literally, would not have the comics that we have now. I suppose, based on one's sense of taste, that's either a good thing or a bad thing. For me, I'm thankful, though I kind of wish the Grim'n'Gritty(TM) comics of the 80s had had a bit of the sense of humour that Mr. Mayer's novel does. It might have made Dark Knight, or Watchmen, a bit more palatable is they weren't taking themselves soooo seriously the whole time.
Definitely highly recommended. If you're a long time comics reader, or have immersed yourself in an almost unhealthy fashion in the hobby, there are so many rewarding moments in this book. I can find very little information on Mayer himself, though he notes that this was written from the memory of his childhood reading comics. This explains Plastic Man/Stretch O'Toole's primary role in the story, as well as the prominent superheroes featured in the "cameos" throughout the book.
It's also a notable piece because I think it must be one of the first novelistic takes on the superhero that was not simply an attempt to adapt the comics form to the written page. Which, I don't have to tell you, never works.
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