Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1399900
TAG MEMBERS SOUND OFF ON THE SUPES MY HERO! Admittedly, going solely by his origins in Action Comics #1 more than 80 years ago, that argument is accurate. Superman and many of his comic book brethren were not created as vigilantes, executioners, or dispensers of questionable justice. Superheroes battled super villains, vanquished the occasional monster, and kept the moral order of the universe intact. POINT OF ORIGIN The idea of a superhero was applied to pulp magazine characters like the "superhuman" Doc Savage, who first appeared on the scene in 1933, according to David W. Tosh, author of Rise of the Superheroes. In addition, "there was a character called the Phantom Magician who wore a superhero-like costume in The Adventures of Patsy [comic strip] in the mid-1930s. And let's not forget The Phantom, the costume-wearing hero [operating out of] Africa, which began in 1936. But it seems the term 'superhero' pretty much began with comic books, namely Superman." Whether in the comics or on Saturday morning TV shows of yore, we tend to think of the Man of Steel as a muscular boy scout. But as midcentury came and went, the superhero landscape began to shift. "Throughout the 1960s, when all the comics at DC and Marvel started getting a little more adult, it wasn't so unusual to see Superman losing his temper on a cover and destroying the world," says Timm. "That was usually a bait-and-switch cover where the story wasn't really about that. Sometimes Superman is going to take a swim in the deep end, but at the end of the day, you always have to trust that he's going to make the right decision, the moral choice." Batman, on the other hand, is a different kind of hero. A certain generation of viewers may think of the Dark Knight as a benevolent member of the Justice League—one of the good guy Super Friends of the Hanna-Barbera-produced animated series that ran from 1973 to 1985. Or the do- gooder hero of the (Wham! Biff!) live-action TV series of the mid-1960s. But the comic book character was considerably more complicated, and the success of the 1989, Tim Burton- directed, live-action movie laid the groundwork for the vigilante Dark Knight to take the animated stage with all his gloominess and angst intact. For Batman: The Animated Series, Timm and his team picked up on the film's retro look and presented Batman as a direct descendant of old characters like The Shadow and The Spider. Indeed, when Batman co-creator Bob Kane dropped by to visit the set, he "I like that Harley Quinn is a flawed character. She's very capable with her bat, and she can kick ass and she can beat guys, but she's not just about that. She's not a one- sided character. She has her ups and downs and she makes mistakes, but then she rectifies and grows from them." – Cecilia Aranovich (Harley Quinn, DC Super Hero Girls) "My biggest influences when it comes to superheroes were actually the X-Men comic books which I just devoured when I was in middle school. They have very intense and complicated interpersonal relationships … that, mixed with having powers, fighting evil, and even the sophistication of X-Men having to deal with the themes of prejudice, was fascinating to me, and it would not have been if those characters had not be so deeply flawed." – Lauren Faust (DC Super Hero Girls, The Powerpuff Girls) FALL 2021 37