If you are new to the Band, occult imagery posts are shorter looks at the background and patterns in occult images. For more posts on occult symbolism, click here. For an introduction to the Band and the Dismantling Postmodernism series, click the featured post to the right or check out the archive.
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Stan Lee and John Buscema, inked by Joe Sinnott, Silver Surfer #3, p. 20, December, 1968, Marvel Comics
A few words on Marvel and the occult. The point of looking at Marvel isn't to "take down" 60 year old pulp - the Band has better uses for its time - but to look at a pattern. The real subject is contemporary society, or more precisely, how contemporary society reached a point where a Satanic Celine Dion transforming infants into sexless goblins is even on the table. More succinctly, how moral inversion gets normalized.
Marvel came of age in the 1960s, a decade famous for abandoning cultural stewardship and heritage, but social change at that level doesn't just happen the way t.v. documentaries would have you think. In regular posts, the Band looks at the where and how the inversion of truth and hollowing out of culture happened in Western thought - the rot is too wide and deep to recap here.
NBC's The '60s, directed by Mark Piznarski, 1999
This is a typical example of the everything changed narrative in that it presents the massive upheaval in popular culture as a spontaneous reaction to 50s "repression". But this is a self-justifying narrative written after the fact. The phenomenon known as "the 60s" was a perfect storm of prosperous materialism, collective naivety, and mass media that transformed American society for the worse. But it was not spontaneous. The seeds go back decades.
Media was central. The question to ask is who created and disseminated the media and events that created the public image of the counterculture? Here's a hint - the same people making the history.
The living room in a 1950s American home. Minnesota Historical Society
The ability of universal mass media to create people's understanding of reality was historically unprecedented. It is amazing how quickly the general public built their understanding of the world on what the programmers told them.
Let's Go Shopping, 1958 Wonder Book written by Guyon Brooke & illustrated by Nancy Meyerhoff
The thing about a centralized mass-media culture is that society doesn't spontaneously degrade itself. It's pushed top-down by people looking to replace citizens with consumers, and one way to do this is to replace family or community as influencers.
We know this instinctively because we've seen things flop that were heavily pushed.
Ed Sullivan, TV Guide, June 21, 1958
The illusion is that the popularity is an organic reaction. Exposure comes before demand. The reality is that in a world with three networks, a few studios, a national top 40, and mass consumerism...
the next big thing is given to you.
To change a culture, you have to change assumptions about reality, and centralized mass culture introduced a new way to do that. Media - especially television - plus marketing plus atomized suburban life allowed for the creation of an illusory false "reality" in an audience with no experience or psychological defenses for dealing with this level of integrated, emotionally weaponized manipulation. Click for a good overview of mass manipulation and media. And is started with programming that appeared to conform to American Christian values, but lacked any moral center beyond a bland civic nationalism.
T.V. Kids, 1953
In today's debased society, the prosperous, orderly image of the 1950's is very appealing. As it should be. But the seeds of crisis are already present. Family connections are built from gadgets - the better the stuff, the happier the family. This is literally pure materialism.
But there is a deeper metaphor here. The children ignore the parents for the t.v. - the connection between their two heads and the cathode glow makes up the main focus of the picture. Now look at the "adult" members of the family - jammed in the corner with the forced smiles of a ransom video. what you are seeing is the transformation of the family in the television age, where television replaces family, culture, tradition, etc. as the source of formative values, perspectives, and general worldviews. Idiot children know best while parents are hapless spectators who mindlessly celebrate whatever media fantasy said idiots are acting out.
Dr. Timothy Leary, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, 1967, psychedelic rock studio album, Mercury Records
Mass media in general was very good at continually dismantling the boundaries of social conventions. This was easy, because the world media created was already one without any moral or spiritual center beyond materialism. A counterculture "guru" using mass media to cash in while telling consumers to drop out is a good example of this.
It has been observed many times that the t.v. age reprogrammed the public perception of reality by replacing real experience with televised simulacra. But it is amazing to think about - for the first time, millions visualized things that were completely inaccessible in real life in exactly the same way at the same time. Say "LA" or "Viet Nam War": and countless media images spring to mind - the very conception of these things is media created. And the conception of the world piped into countless materialist paradises was one where American Christian, or any sort of spiritual life, was just... absent. The idea of an atheistic "happily ever after" is ironically comical.
Alberto Korda, Guerrillero Heroico, photograph of Che Guevara, 1960
The leftist subversion of media and culture began decades earlier, but got a push with an influx of European intellectuals who came to America around World War II before university attendance skyrocketed with returning military then Boomers. Christian American values were undermined from high and low culture in a new way.
Myron Coureval Fagan, U.S. anticommunist literature addressing the entertainment industry, circa 1950-56
The power of the subversion is revealed in the attempts to counter it. Ham-handed efforts like those of Joseph McCarthy or HUAC correctly identified leftist subversion but fixated on individual minutia rather than looking at the systemic problems. This is partly because they were neither bright nor insightful, but also because the system was already subverted. Media made McCarthyism a dirty word, and the whole effort dismissed as a Red Scare.
Chief Senate Counsel for the US Army, Joseph Welch (left), with Senator Joe McCarthy at the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations' McCarthy-Army hearings, June 9, 1954
Welch's famous huffed outrage - "have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - reads like the Ghost of Cuckservative surrenders yet-to-come. Did the bow-tie flutter or spin?
Missed in all this was that membership in the "Communist Party" was irrelevant to the point of looking like a red herring from the outside. It is credentialism as critique. It's fixating on the Cold War Soviet adversary - which was also a massive threat - and ignoring the more insidious cultural Marxism that rotted American culture from within. McLuhan, like many pop intellectuals, was partly right. On the level of mass-media created consumerist monoculture the medium - media to be pedantic - is the message. What is missed is the content - the values and beliefs programmed into the monoculture. The specific instructions uploaded to the NPCs. This is what makes subversion possible:
The globalist fusion of Marxist cultural subversion, Communism, the American deep state, and the media was already in place.
According to Infogalactic, it was media attack dog Edward R. Murrow (born Egbert Roscoe Murrow) whose programs "contributed to a nationwide backlash against McCarthy and is seen as a turning point in the history of television". Even his name is fake. It's telling that so many media whores change their names.
Described as "an American broadcast journalist and government propagandist", Murrow was actually Director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and a member of the National Security Council.
The fake reality circle is closed when Murrow is buried in media monoculture accolades that turn him into a hero.
It was the "Communists" - but in the sense of the marriage of fake consumerist monoculture, and dyscivic leftist counterculture. And when "McCarthyism" failed, the latter exploded through the former unchecked, and "the 60s" was the outcome. This was all mass-media driven. The lack of moral center, the fake news, the shabby faux avant-gardism of marketed "cool", the hedonism, the creation of conformity, the disconnect from reality - an entire illusory reality built on media, marketing, and manipulation. When there are no values beyond the latest thing, everything becomes relative and there is nowhere to make a principled stand.
The reality is that comics were always subversive. Consider these actual National Comics covers from the 1940s in light of what we know about the sexual abuse of children in science fiction and entertainment.
This is the sort of thing that went without comment from 1950's critics of comic morality, who focused on graphic violence and heterosexual depravity of the sort pushed by the likes of William Gaines of EC Comics.
Some quality EC children's entertainment and, for physiognomy fans, William Gaines:
Vault of Horror #30, April, 1953; Crime SuspenStories #22, April, 1954; Crime SuspenStories #23, June, 1954
Eventually the industry self-policed with a code of ethics called the Comics Code Authority in 1954, which the subversives whined about until they managed to rewrite history. The perv Gaines became a "free speech" hero, and the notion that a culture should oversee its children's formative ideas shuffled off to the side. On one level, this was a sign of the times. Weaponizing "free speech" against culture and values was a big part of 20th century Progress!
Comics Code Authority approval stamp.
"Free speech" is still the line pushed by the "Comic Book Legal Defense Fund". This article claims comics were opposed by educators because children could "select their own leisure reading material". That this piece is written by a professional academic is a whole other issue...
But it couldn't help that the voices defending some standard of morality were so inept they were functionally indistinguishable from jobbers. They focused on the superficial content most likely to get them written off as repressed or square - prurience and violence - and trotted out the old canard that children will imitate violent acts. They missed the real problem - demoralization, as in the removal of American morality from American popular culture.
Consider DC's Superman - the archetypal superhero whose creation by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938 kicked off the Golden Age of comics.
Leo O'Mealia, cover to Superman #1 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, June, 1939
Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 a year earlier, and his popularity led to a second eponymous title. The name echoes early translations of Nietzsche's Übermensch, the superman or overman introduced in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra of 1883.
The two differ - Superman is much more of a physical powerhouse - but both represent something higher or better than humanity. At least Nietzsche's is an advanced human - the comic is a space alien.
Joe Shuster, cover to Superman Vol 1 #3, December, 1939 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
The greatest man on earth.
The Übermensch perceives a higher morality in material existence that replaces belief in God - a kind of secular transcendence that puts perfection in human hands. It is interesting that Superman was originally conceived as a super-evolved human from the distant future sent back in time. This is much closer to Nietzsche that the actual origin story of space alien as moral paragon.
It is interesting that in Siegel and Shuster's first "Superman" collaboration - the "The Reign of the Superman" short story self-published by Siegel in his fanzine, Science Fiction #3 in 1933 - the title character is a villain. Siegel claimed that the decision to make him a hero was for marketability.
Superman's move from hero to moral Übermensch didn't take long - helped by a wildly popular 1940s radio show. People forget about radio. It was the prototype form of mass media in the pre-television era, and the world view of early television largely grew out of radio programming. Superman mythology was shaped by the The Aventures of Superman radio series - Daily Planet characters Perry White and Jimmy Olsen, Kryptonite, and Batman and Robin team-ups all happened here before the comics. The famous motto "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" was also a radio creation before moving to television in the 50s.
Action Comics Vol 1 #58, National Allied Publications (later National Comics Publications, later DC Comics), March, 1943
The line originated with Max Fleischer's 1941 cartoon as a "a never-ending battle for truth and justice." The American way was added to the radio show opening in 1942 and is probably best associated with the t.v. show of the '50s (click for a good summary of this). The theory that it was connected to the war effort is not contradicted by the comics.
But the narrative shifted in 1946, when the enemy became "intolerance" in the radio's "Unity House" story line. One might ask what is wrong with a message of acceptance, but they would be missing the point. We are looking at a pattern, and the pattern is the toxic fallacy that there is no American culture. This the same naive civic nationalism that blinded post-war America to the cruel realities of mass immigration and identity politics. Here's a version of the "Unity House" era opening with a school book cover first distributed to children by the ominously-named Institute for American Democracy Inc. in 1949.
It is easy to see the appeal of the idea of the super-immigrant who is a better American than any American to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two children of immigrant families, but the implications of the origin raise a bigger issue. The perfect man raised by human parents to save us is not a spiritual being but an extraterrestrial who flew here in a rocket. There is no reason for him to be an icon of American values beyond the lessons of Ma and Pa Kent, who are more of an urban characture of small-town virtue than actual early 20th century people. Where is the moral center?
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Superman #14, January, 1942, DC Comics
The war brought patriotic themes to comics as with everywhere else. But the Superman as American ideal stuck.
Truth, justice and the American Way: morality is what the government defines as "American" since this is transitively true and just.
The ideal "American" isn't American, the perfect human isn't human, and values exist without faith.
Examples reveal the process or internal mechanics of a pattern - once you see how it works in one area, you can spot it all over the place. The demoralized universe removes any objective notion of good and evil from judgments about personal behavior. This sets the stage for the moral relativism needed to get to today's popular occult.
Wendy, The Good Little Witch #1, July, 1960, Harvey Comics
This is demoralization at work. Witchcraft epitomizes evil by traditional American moral standards because it is a personal commitment to the opposite of logos - the divine order behind our fallen world that is the basis of morality - making it immoral by definition. "Cute" or "good" witches invert morality from a personal alignment with a higher order, reality, or principles to doing whatever you want, as long as you are decent, whatever that means.
Archie's Madhouse #22, October, 1962, Archie Comics
Archie gave us a teen-age version who added magic to the group's hi-jinx. Technical, Sabrina was only half witch, which, when you think about it, isn't an improvement. The message is that you can couple with dark powers and the only consequences revolve around whether the offspring fits in.
Bewitched, created by Sol Saks, ABC series, 1964-1972, Sony Pictures Television
Then as now, comics were ahead of the entertainment curve.
Remember, there was no public demand for this. This was something introduced through narrow channels to a huge audience.
Demoralization removes the standards for moral judgement and replaces them with whatever values the monoculture opts to send down the popular culture channels. The idea that "community standards" represent an alternative moral foundation is preposterous when the notion of community is a creation of narrative engineers. Given how people normalize change over time, monolithic mass media upended social norms overnight - suddenly magic is funny and cool, so long as you're nice and have a good standard of living.
Marvel brought the inversion to Christianity, starting with the Silver Surfer before spiraling to the devil himself. And Stan Lee was front and center.
Jack Kirby, inked by Joe Sinnott, cover to Fantastic Four #72, March, 1968, scripted by Stan Lee, Marvel Comics
Kirby had added the Silver Surfer to his Galactus story at the last minute, so he didn't have much backstory beyond being Galactus' powerful alien herald. But the striking design and alliterative name made him a winner with the fans and a recurring character in the Fantastic Four, as in this striking cover - Kirby's last with the character.
John Buscema, inked by Joe Sinnott, cover to Silver Surfer #1, August, 1968, written by Stan Lee, Marvel Comics
Both Kirby and Lee - who scripted the Fantastic Four - were strongly attached to the Surfer, but saw him very differently. Lee's decision in 1968 to write a Silver Surfer solo comic with John Buscema as artist and no input from Kirby was a major factor in Kirby's acrimonious split with Marvel. It's hard to blame him - contract details aside, it is easy to understand the anger of a creator who is stripped of his creations. Marvel's ethical conduct was typical.
The result is two different concepts of the character - the Kirby's short-lived version that turned up in a few issues of the Fantastic Four, and Lee's rethinking that became Marvel canon. Both explicitly invert Christian morality, just in different ways.
Jack Kirby, scripted by Stan Lee, inked by Joe Sinnott, Fantastic Four #48, p. 12, March, 1966
Kirby's Surfer was cold and emotionless being created by Galactus to seek out planets to devour. This changes with a chance encounter with the Thing's blind artist girlfriend Alicia - he flies through her skylight when knocked off a high-rise by the Thing.
Jack Kirby, scripted by Stan Lee, inked by Joe Sinnott, Fantastic Four #49, p. 12, April, 1966
She awakens a sense of compassion that makes him rebel against his master. Condemned to remain on earth by the departing Galactus, he had a child-like purity that made him selfless and gullible.
You can already see the Lee/Kirby split - Kirby was taken by the idea of the blank slate perfect man discovering humanity, while Lee was taken by a vague idea of "nobility". It is never truly defined, but Alicia can sense it intuitively.
The higher order man was a recurring theme with Kirby - Him was a bit of a golden Surfer with hair, right down to the involvement of Alicia. He turns up again in space, where he fights Thor.
Jack Kirby, scripted by Stan Lee, inked by Joe Sinnott, Fantastic Four # 67, p. 10 & 20, October, 1967; Jack Kirby, scripted by Stan Lee, inked by Vince Colletta, The Mighty Thor #165, p. 12, June, 1969
Jack Kirby, New Gods #3, July, 1971, DC Comics
Kirby brought the idea to DC with the Black Racer, though the flying skis and generic superhero costume lack the visual flair of the Surfer. This time the character is the herald of "Death" rather than God.
Kirby described the creation of the Silver Surfer in several interviews where he likened him to Lucifer, since in his imagination, Galactus was essentially God.
Jack Kirby, scripted by Stan Lee, inked by Joe Sinnott, Fantastic Four #48, p. 20, March, 1966
Jack Kirby, scripted by Stan Lee, inked by Vince Colletta, The Mighty Thor #167, p. 18, August, 1969
His first appearance and his settled form. It is unfortunate that he lost the big G. It is comical to think of the Masonic deist God really being Galactus.
So in Kirby's theology, God is an evil planet-eater who can be defeated or even killed by human a clever plan and a McGuffin and his fallen angel the hero of the piece. The moral inversion is so basic as to be boring, were it not an index of a larger pattern.
These are material rather than spiritual beings. They are "not physical" in the way that pure energy is, rather than a soul. Galactus, it is revealed, came from the universe before the Big Bang - Kirby's "God" is a product of sci-fi pop science, not anything divine. And his "fallen angel" a blank-slate babe in the woods who has to learn the most basic aspects of human life. Edward Scissorhands with cosmic power.
Jack Kirby, scripted by Stan Lee, inked by Joe Sinnott, Fantastic Four #55, p. 6, October, 1966
Whatever he is, the Surfer is a material being. He returned after just a few months seeking out Alicia to explore his new feelings. The Thing walks in on his John Mayer routine, setting up a Kirby heavyweight fight.
Lee's Surfer is based on a different Biblical archetype - a kind of secular Jesus whose New Age message of world healing was tragically ignored by the humans he was condemned to dwell among. His appearance also changed from Kirby's powerful figure to Buscema's more slender, less imposing design. Launched with much fanfare, The Silver Surfer was to be Lee's magnum opus - his philosophizing on nobility and the human condition without any input from Kirby or Steve Ditko. The result was underwhelming - pages and pages of boring speechifying that revealed Lee's ceiling as a writer more than anything.
Stan Lee and John Buscema, inked by Joe Sinnott, Silver Surfer #1, p. 7, August, 1968, Marvel Comics
This is the debut issue of the popular new character. It isn't a surprise that The Silver Surfer was canceled after 18 issues. Lee refused to allow anyone other than him to write the character for a long time, so the Surfer was limited to guest appearances until the'80s.
Whatever he is, the Surfer is a material being. He returned after just a few months seeking out Alicia to explore his new feelings. The Thing walks in on his John Mayer routine, setting up a Kirby heavyweight fight.
Lee's Surfer is based on a different Biblical archetype - a kind of secular Jesus whose New Age message of world healing was tragically ignored by the humans he was condemned to dwell among. His appearance also changed from Kirby's powerful figure to Buscema's more slender, less imposing design. Launched with much fanfare, The Silver Surfer was to be Lee's magnum opus - his philosophizing on nobility and the human condition without any input from Kirby or Steve Ditko. The result was underwhelming - pages and pages of boring speechifying that revealed Lee's ceiling as a writer more than anything.
Stan Lee and John Buscema, inked by Joe Sinnott, Silver Surfer #1, p. 7, August, 1968, Marvel Comics
This is the debut issue of the popular new character. It isn't a surprise that The Silver Surfer was canceled after 18 issues. Lee refused to allow anyone other than him to write the character for a long time, so the Surfer was limited to guest appearances until the'80s.
This Surfer wasn't a stranger to human emotion - he was a human-type from an alien planet that agreed to abandon everything and serve as Galactus' herald in exchange for sparing his world. The tragedy is his lost girlfriend Shalla Bal, who he pines for incessantly while trapped on earth. It was not a winning formula - whine about humanity, whine about being trapped, whine about Shalla Bal, have a fight or adventure, sermonize nobly, repeat.
Stan Lee and John Buscema, inked by Joe Sinnott, Silver Surfer #1, p. 36, August, 1968, Marvel Comics
This makes him a tragic figure who gave up his heart to save his world. A redemptive sacrifice so to speak. It makes the Kirby Alicia storyline awkward, but compensates with material for endless laments. Noble ones.
In the fourth issue, the Jesus archetype gets explicit with the introduction of "Mephisto", a demon whose harvest of souls is threatened by the Surfer's noble example of selfless goodness. This is not made up.
Stan Lee and John Buscema, inked by Joe Sinnott, Silver Surfer #3, p. 7, December, 1968, Marvel Comics
Although never referred to as Satan, he does refer to the Surfer as a forsaken martyr. The temptations are familiar too.
The secular messiah gets his own devil.
Still no sign of the divine, but Satan followed soon enough:
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