8FOLD/HCC: Nonfiction # 1, So I Wished Them Up (USENET-friendly version)

[Tom Russell]

On Saturday, February 23, 2013 5:12:59 PM UTC-5, Andrew Perron wrote:
> On Feb 23, 7:58 am, Tom Russell <joltc... at gmail.com> wrote:

> >    And it is true, Marc Demy, his writer, certainly lacked the literary qualities one associates with the great comics writers of the thirties and forties. His work was primal (some would say primitive), pell-mell, and prone to messy sudden reversals and anti-climax. And yet, Demy was endlessly inventive, springing forth not one superhero, but a dozen.
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> Well now I want to read it. Especially after reading the character
> 
> descriptions.

I've had this idea (what if there was a French superhero comic that was turned into a propaganda tool after the Battle of France) in one form or the other, kicking around for a while. For a long time, I was going to do it "straight"-- i.e., as a story about the actual characters "actually" existing, with the characters actually turning into psuedo-Nazis, etc. But it didn't make any sense without the meta-story conceit. I'm not usually one for the fake essay genre, but I've been warming up to it and Dave's concept challenge just made everything kinda click.

> >    Chief among these enemies is Egalite. A coded and sympathetic Jew in the first three albums, he is now a monstrous Nazi cartoon of Jewishness that extends to a horrifying redesign by Becker.
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> Interesting. Would this really happen, though? I'd expect such a thing
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> to be more of a subversion of the idea; this direct opposition seems
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> too easy to reject out of hand.

Well, a couple things:

1. I kept the behind-the-scenes stuff fuzzy here, but I'd imagine there were strong suggestions from some Germans as to how the character should be portrayed in keeping with their racist ideology. And the Germans, in both art and in war, were not known for their subtlety in this period. Especially if this was seen as a form of propaganda, a way to turn the French "heroes" into a tool for indoctrination, they wouldn't hesitate to use whiplash-inducing opposition. And, as Goebbels once said so famously, people will swallow lies if they're big enough. Whether or not that in and of itself is true (and given the declining sales of the title, it seems that it wasn't in this case), it was an idea that German propagandists certainly believed in, would have acted upon, and would have expected occupied collaborators to act upon.

2. This is the Golden Age of Comics, remember, and even if it is a Golden Age unlike ours, subtle subversions of an idea are not a notable feature of the era. And in fact there are a number of whiplash-inducing shifts in characterization throughout the Golden Age.

> >    Becker had secretly worked on the "real" Demy-authored fifth album while working on the two "Nazi" albums. He knew that in doing so he had signed his own death warrant.
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> ;-;
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> >    At least, this is the story that Madame Becker and their son Paul have perpetrated during the post-war years. It is, sadly, untrue.
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> ...ah. Hm.

I was going for a Samuel Mudd type thing here; Mudd's family, even today, has continued to perpetrate the lie that he was but an innocent doctor who mended Wilkes's leg, and this lie has been perpetrated with great success. Movies and books and popular myth cast Mudd as the innocent leg-mender, when he was in fact a full-fledged member of Wilkes's conspiracy.

> >    But then, out of nowhere, appeared twelve champions dressed in costumes of black and white. For one brief impossible hour, the Societe de l'egalite was real. We need them, so someone wished them up. After that hour, they had disappeared, the German heroes have been utterly destroyed, allowing the allies to continue fighting, and, of course, to win.
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> Eeeeeeeeee <3 <3 <3

Eeeeeeeeee was what I was going for, thanks.
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> >    The albums, from either publisher, are not well-regarded in France. Most readers do not know about the black-and-whites; to them, the story of the Societe de l'egalite is the story of Nazi collaboration.
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> Interesting. You'd think that'd be the sort of thing that'd come out
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> in a big way in the Internet age.

It certainly would in _our_ universe, where superhero comics are a big part of geek fandom. But in a universe where superhero fandom and comics fandom are distinct and separate flavors of the geek continuum, I think the "official" comics would be fairly obscure, the same way Fletcher Hanks was and still is, and the "underground" comics moreso.
 
> 
> So, this is a series of diegetic essays, eh? <3 I love it!

That's the idea. As I said above, I've always had a dislike of the genre (some Borges that the Joltin' One introduced me to aside), but I'm warming up to it, especially as a way to meet high concept challenges. One reason why I participate so seldom in the HCC is that when I write fiction, I "fuss" too much over it, and take too long, and end up not having an entry. Which is the sort of thing the HCC is supposed to prevent, but there you go. Writing a pastiche (as I did here, and for the olympics-themed HCC story, and I guess also for the Tostig story) seems to allow me to complete the entry in a reasonable time frame.

> Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, love!

Glad you enjoyed, and as always, thanks for the feedback.

==Tom