Atomic Comics

Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World

Ferenc Morton Szasz

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780874178791
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

The advent of the Atomic Age challenged purveyors of popular culture to explain to the general public the complex scientific and social issues of atomic power. Atomic Comics examines how comic books, comic strips, and other cartoon media represented the Atomic Age from the early 1920s to the present. Through the exploits of superhero figures such as Atomic Man and Spiderman, as well as an array of nuclear adversaries and atomic-themed adventures, the public acquired a new scientific vocabulary and discovered the major controversies surrounding nuclear science. Ferenc Morton Szasz's thoughtful analysis of the themes, content, and imagery of scores of comics that appeared largely in the United States and Japan offers a fascinating perspective on the way popular culture shaped American comprehension of the fissioned atom for more than three generations.

PART I

BEFORE HIROSHIMA

1

COMIC STRIPS CONFRONT THE SUBATOMIC WORLD

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY TO THE EARLY 1930s

In 1895, German scientist William Roentgen shocked the world by his announcement of the discovery of X-rays (“X” for unknown) that could penetrate solid matter. News of the “Roentgen rays” reverberated throughout Europe and America, much as Charles Darwin's theories of evolution had done a generation earlier. When Roentgen displayed the X-ray photograph of his wife's hand, with her ring clearly visible, at the Wurzberg Physical Medical Society, he disclosed to the public the existence of a subatomic world, a world that seemed to run by its own laws.

The medical applications of this new “photography,” as it was first termed, were obvious to all, and it took only a month before doctors began locating bullets in the arms of wounded soldiers. But the mysterious rays also served as a form of entertainment. It was not long before an “X-Ray Studio” opened on East 26th Street in New York City where patrons could pay to observe their own bones. However, it was also not long before experimenters developed reddened skin and mysterious burns, a clear sign of the dangers that lay behind this new phenomenon. Thomas Edison began experimenting with X-rays the day he first heard about them, and his assistant, Clarence Dolly, has the dubious distinction of being the first known person to die from X-ray-induced cancer. By 1906, experimenters were strongly cautioned to wear protective clothing. It took almost two decades for scientists to determine that X-rays were actually a form of gamma radiation.¹ The cartoonists' response to this scientific breakthrough seems minimal, but the press did print a variety of doggerel that spoofed “the wonderful new electric rays.” The most popular ditty appeared in the Electrical Review in 1896:

X-exactly So!

The Roentgen Ray, The Roentgen Rays,

What is this craze?

The town's ablaze

With the new phase

Of X-ray's ways.

I'm full of daze,

Shock and amaze;

For nowadays

I hear they'll gaze

Thro' cloak and gown-and even stays,

These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.²

But Roentgen's announcement proved only the beginning. In the years to follow, the popular press treated the emerging discoveries of this subatomic world with wide-eyed astonishment. French scientist Henri Bequerel identified uranium rays in 1896, and two years later Pierre and Marie Curie isolated radium. English physicist J. J. Thomson postulated the existence of the electron in 1897, and in 1905 Albert Einstein set forth his famous theory that mass and energy were equivalent. In 1919 British scientist Ernest Rutherford demonstrated artificial nuclear disintegration. In 1932, English physicist James Chadwick discovered the neutron, and the next year Irene Curie (the Curies' daughter) and her husband Frédéric Joliot announced that they had created artificial activity. The culmination came in 1938 when German physical chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann split the uranium atom, correctly interpreted by Austrian physicist Lise Meintner and her nephew Otto Frisch. All these breakthroughs received their share of “gee whiz” media coverage. For example, when the New York Times reported on Rutherford's experiments, they suggested that the energy contained in the nucleus of the atom could either bring forth “an almost illimitable supply of power” or (if it could not be controlled) “spell the end of all things.” As Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth noted in his famous postwar report, by 1940 “all prerequisites to a serious attack on the problem of producing atomic bombs and controlling atomic power were at hand.”³

During the same era, newspaper and magazine circulation increased dramatically, and by the early 1920s the nation's reporters had begun to specialize. Talented wordsmiths such as Ring Lardner and Heywood Broun helped raise 1920s sports reporting to the level of high art. Although the science writers of the era were less well known, they did the same for their subdiscipline, aided by the new Science Service Organization (founded 1921) based in Washington, DC. Of the roughly two dozen science reporters, the three most famous in the interwar years were probably prolific writer Edwin E. Slosson, David Henry Dietz of the Scripps-Howard chain, and William L. Laurence of the New York Times. All wrote extensively about the various subatomic breakthroughs. Trained in both chemistry and literature, Slosson lectured and wrote endlessly on the importance of science until his death in 1929. A frequent contributor to the popular magazine The Independent, Slosson's Easy Lessons in Einstein (1920) inaugurated the age of popular science writing in America. Published on the verge of Albert Einstein's first visit to the United States in 1921, the book professed to explain theories that Einstein himself despaired could ever be widely comprehended. Slosson's book appeared at the right time to catch the “Einstein fever” that swept the nation from 1921 to 1923. The scientist received a ticker-tape parade, and the New York Public Library made all his books available on a long table; every chair was filled for weeks. Crowds in New York and Washington jostled to catch a glimpse of him, and hundreds crowded his lectures (delivered largely in German) at a variety of venues. He even had an official visit with President Warren G. Harding, which produced the headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding.” After this visit, Americans viewed the genial German physicist as an authentic wizard, whose magic lay well beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals.⁴

The scientist's genial demeanor, openness, and largely unkempt appearance met with widespread US approval. The oft-reprinted 1921 photograph of Einstein visiting Hopi House near the Grand Canyon (wearing a Plains Indian headdress) only cemented this view. It was not long before the term “Einstein” entered American English as a synonym for “genius.” Easy Lessons in Einstein began the nation's atomic awareness. The year 1919, Slosson suggested, would eventually be remembered less for the overthrow of the German Empire than for the overthrow of Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravitation. Sooner or later, he predicted, “the Einstein physics cannot fail to influence every intelligent man.” But Americans should not worry, he assured readers, for scientific revolutions “do not destroy; they extend.”⁵

Slosson's contemporary David Dietz continued along similar lines. A native of Cleveland, in 1921 Dietz became the nation's first “science editor” for the Scripps-Howard newspapers. From 1923 forward he wrote a daily syndicated column, and over the course of a lengthy career penned scores of books and millions of words in an attempt to explain science to the average person. In 1934, he helped create what became the National Association of Science Writers and also served as its first president. For almost four decades, Scripps-Howard supported his travels to various science conferences and research laboratories, where he interviewed many of the pioneers of atomic energy, including Einstein himself. From 1923 through the 1950s, Dietz was widely syndicated. In fact, the day after Hiroshima he essentially told the nation: “I told you so but no one believed me for twenty years.” After the war Dietz covered the 1946 US atomic test at Bikini Atoll for both newspapers and radio. He also published two popular introductions to the subatomic world: the hastily compiled Atomic Energy in the Coming Era (1945) and the more thoughtful Atomic Science, Bombs, and Power (1954), which argued that wise decisions could only be made by a scientifically informed public.⁶

Lithuanian immigrant William L. Laurence is probably the only interwar science writer still recalled today. A former aviation editor for the New York World, Laurence moved to the New York Times in the early 1930s. A skilled interpreter, he introduced the fissioning of U-235 to American readers in a May 5, 1939, front-page story in the New York Times. He also penned an essay for the Saturday Evening Post on the same theme (September 7, 1940). Laurence boasted such a stellar reputation that Manhattan Project head Major General Leslie R. Groves tapped him in July 1945 to serve as the official reportorial witness to both the Trinity atomic test in New Mexico (July 16, 1945) and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). He also wrote most of the official press releases for these events, which earned him the local nickname of “Atomic Bill.” In addition to his newspaper and magazine essays, Laurence also wrote several popular science books. The Hell Bomb (1951) warned of the dangers of the cobalt bomb, while Men and Atoms: The Discoveries, the Uses, and the Future of Atomic Energy (1959) predicted a rosy atomic future. In fact, Laurence argued that the development of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s had made peace “inevitable.” His firsthand account of his experiences with the Manhattan Project, Dawn over Zero (1946), earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and the book ranks as a model of popular science writing yet today.⁷

As Slosson, Dietz, Laurence, and others discovered, however, it was no easy task to make subatomic physics clear to the general American public. As early as 1921, Mississippi senator John Sharp Williams publicly doubted that even his colleague from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge (who had a PhD from Harvard), could comprehend Einstein's theory of relativity. A Yale economics professor sadly agreed: “Astronomers and physicists must fight it out and the rest of us must wait.” As British mathematician Bertrand Russell noted in his The ABC of Relativity (1925), “Everybody knows that Einstein did something astonishing, but very few people know exactly what it was that he did.” This befuddled understanding of Einsteinian physics took on more serious overtones in 1938–39 with the discovery that the U-235 atom could be fissioned to release enormous quantities of energy. With this, scientists and science writers began an active search for striking metaphors that the public could comprehend. For example, French Nobel laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie spoke of his hope that a pound of uranium would produce as much energy as 1,250 tons of coal. Another science writer suggested that the energy from a pound of uranium might equal five million pounds of coal or three million pounds of gasoline. But numbers like these rarely stuck in the memory-gasoline, for example, is seldom measured in pounds-and as a result, the most common comparisons involved far more dramatic analogies. The best were: If tapped, the energy in a gram of water could raise a million tons to the top of a six-mile mountain; a puff of air could power a plane for an entire year; a fistful of snow could heat an apartment complex for a year; the energy in a railway ticket could run a passenger train several times around the globe; and so on. In time, however, the two most common popular catchphrases became: With atomic power, energy would become so cheap that it would no longer be necessary to read meters; and, once tapped, the energy contained in a glass of water could power an ocean liner across the Atlantic.⁸

The role of the science writers in the interwar era has never been properly appreciated. To begin with, they introduced the nation to regular scientific newspaper columns; indeed, after 1928 the New York Tribune inaugurated a popular “Science for the People” series. Science Service also sponsored a variety of regular radio programs that summarized the “Scientific News of the Week.” But the collapse of capitalism during the Great Depression meant that science writers had to fight for space with the social scientists (economists especially) and with the politicians.⁹ They never reached the audience they thought they deserved.

The scientists and science writers of the day, however, had a distinct rival in their efforts to make subatomic physics comprehensible to the wider public: the humble newspaper comic strip. New York World artist Richard F. Outcault, who, incidentally, began his career as a technical illustrator for Thomas Edison, is credited with creating the nation's first cartoon character-Mickey Dugan, the “Yellow Kid”-in 1895. Although the “Yellow Kid” lent his name to the reckless journalism of the 1890s, he did not survive as a cartoon figure. (The first successful six-day-a-week comic strip was Mutt and Jeff, created by Harry “Bud” Fisher for the San Francisco Chronicle in the fall of 1907.) Still it was not long before the newspaper comic strip achieved a life of its own as the Yellow Kid's successors garnered a cadre of faithful followers. Humorous comics, such as Fisher's Mutt and Jeff, George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Chic Young's Blondie, Rudolph Dirk's Katzenjammer Kids, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, and Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals, all saw wide syndication. As publisher William Randolph Hearst III later noted, newspaper readers can skip over editorial writers they dislike, but few can avoid cartoon images, for they, much like public art, virtually “force” people to look at them.¹⁰

Because people usually purchased a newspaper on a daily basis, cartoonists could create long-running adventure strips that relied on regular readership to follow the story line (something that is no longer possible). Thus the late 1920s/1930s emerged as the heyday of popular newspaper adventure comics, such as Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, and Milton Canniff's Terry and the Pirates, just to name a few. Occasional nuclear references aside, the daily adventure newspaper strips began to seriously overlap with the subatomic world in the late 1920s/early 1930s with the arrival of two of the most famous cartoon characters of the day: Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. More than any other popular medium, these two comics strips helped convey “atomic” ideas to literally millions of American readers.

In August 1928, the relatively obscure writer Philip F. Nowlan published “Armageddon-2419 A.D.” in the science-fiction pulp monthly Amazing Stories, which introduced the adventures of “Anthony Rogers” to American audiences. Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback realized the appeal of Nowlan's character and informed readers in a sidebar that the tale “holds a number of interesting prophecies, of which no doubt, many will come true.” He also urged the author to pen a sequel. Nowlan did, indeed, pen a sequel, “The Airlords of Han,” which Gernsback published in the March 1929 Amazing Stories. But Rogers did not reach a mass audience until January 7, 1929, when the slightly renamed Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. began as a syndicated newspaper feature, the nation's first daily scientific adventure comic strip. The appeal was such that a Sunday color feature-with a separate story line-began in March 1930. Nowlan retained total control over his characters. He provided the story lines for both the daily and Sunday strips until his death in 1940. A number of artists, including Dick Calkins, who later drew the aviation adventure strip Skyhawks, and Zack Mosley, who in 1934 would begin his own adventure strip, Smilin' Jack, also worked on Buck Rogers. Indeed, the strip became so popular that Famous Funnies (usually considered the first authentic comic book) began by reprinting several weeks of the Buck Rogers Sunday episodes. They continued to do so until 1965.¹¹ In 1940–42, Buck Rogers also briefly starred in a separate comic book title of his own.

Even after seven decades, the Buck Rogers stories have lost little of their appeal. A veteran of the Air Service in the Great War, recently discharged Buck Rogers was hired by the American Radioactive Gas Corporation as a mine inspector. While investigating a mine in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania near Scranton, he was suddenly over-come by a “curious and unidentified radio-active gas” that preserved him-rather like Rip Van Winkle-for five hundred years. Awakening in 2430, Buck discovered a world filled with unpleasant villains, such as Killer Kane and his evil-hearted female companion, Ardala. But he also met the well-meaning scientist Dr. Huer and the lovely Wilma Deering, a member of the twenty-fifth-century Air Patrol.¹²

Although human nature remained essentially the same, twenty-fifth-century technology had produced an authentic new world. Inertron—an antigravity synthetic element-fell away from Earth just as gravity attracted objects to it, and this allowed people to fly. Rogers's rocket pistols, as well as the even more lethal rocket guns, could instantly destroy an area up to two miles in diameter. The enemy of the day-the Red Mongols—possessed a deadly “disintegrator beam” that “reduced everything it touched to nothingness,” leaving blast scars as deep as one hundred feet.¹³

An integral part of America's popular culture for thirty-eight years, Buck Rogers's science-based adventures soon spread out to other forms of popular media. From 1932 to 1947, Buck Rogers radio adventures ran, on average, four times a week. The radio sound effects engineers proved especially imaginative as they created the roar of rocket ships taking off, the buzz of the deadly disintegrator beam, and even far-off atomic explosions. From radio, Buck leaped to film, beginning with mu...