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Show Our Comic Refuse Back To Supermai By ROGER EBERT Collegiate Press Service I don't know. Maybe it's just the circle I move in, which is mostly made of Merit Scholars who washed after they read Catch-22, but I've been hearing a lot lately about Superman and Humphrey Bogart. MAYBE WE'RE just imitating our betters. Since Goldwater got the nomination, there's been a lot of loose talk about returning return-ing to this heritage or that, and I suppose our generation is simply trying, in its naive but charming way, to return to the only heritage heri-tage we can remember. T mean, if you don't remember Pearl Harbor, let alone Normalcy, you've got to make do with Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter. In fact, I even know graduate mathematics students who 'get dewy-eyed with nostalgia every time you mention the name of Bruce Grayson (quick, now: was good old Bruce really Batman or was he Robin?). And a New York station is replavine The Shadow and the Green Hornet. Like everything else on the college campus, the whole business busi-ness is getting to be a status thing. Everybody remembers Jimmy Olsen, the copy boy on the Daily Planet. Or gruff old Perry White, the editor, who kept pounding his desk and shouting "Great Caeser's Ghost! Superman's done it again and Clark Kent's nowhere to be found." Or Lois Lane, who kept dashing around the corner five seconds too late to catch Clark chaneine into his Superman suit in a phone booth. I suppose Jimmy and Lois and the gang have even won a place in the folklore of our generation, along with Joe McCarthy and Tuesday Weld. But what about Lash LaRue? Whip Wilson? Plastic Man' What about the Blackhawks those neo-fascist jet pilots who wore leather boots and kept dashing off to help the Good KinP crush the revolution? 8 IF YOU CAN IDENTIFY half of these comic book heroes you qualiry .or a cup of coffee and a seat around the table in the cafeteria of any student union in the country You're in Thp. hell with Satre, or Faulkner, or Jimmy D'Lan Now about Humphrey Bogart. They're reviving Bogie film, right and left, and at least on my campus (the University o Illinois) nobody is bigger box office than Bogart. What Bogart had was a sneer. He was a Tough Guy like you've never seen a Toueh Guv berore, and the way he had of saying words was something elsee. J. Your Rock Hudson and your Sean Connery are second K the double-feature compared to your Bogie. ALL OF THIS PROBABLY means something. I suppose : going through a stage of some sort, and that it's all tied inf our generation's sense of apartness from our society. Not; . we're Marlon Brando rebels with the dark glasses and all i we're the opposite, if anything. But on the other hand, we're; ting tired of hearing Paul Goodman and Robert Hutchins tfc about how apathetic and conformist we are. Look at it this way: We grew up on network radio serial even a little Captain Video. We had our hero 'in Elvis Pre but that's been ten years ago now. We stop to realize that t Around the Clock" was the top record of 1954, and it son jars us. There's been a whole generation since then, and' Beatles thing is their kick. WHEN WE WERE in high school, there were a cob tunny things going. On one hand, our president was good old- whom everybody loved, but our idea of excitement wasn't at home with Mamie and listening to Lawrence Welk. On oAer hand, there were the Beatniks. The Beatnik mover never dld convert many Qf the ? a!f,ine, U opened UP a wh'e enormous possibility'" you could feel alienated from your society. For some of uv was a revelation. vnimJn Kennedy came along and provided a hero for Pwv,P ' bU,t m0St of us were a little too old f: who L, , n T had real'y needed heroes, we had Ike who was a good guy, all right, but ... anvtr? here we are the autumn of 1964, spenj;! detaif tT nary amount of time remembering, in Pf1' tSn moZT b0k hCreS f 15 yearS aga g What does it mean? Don't expect me to pretend to our UrninTh Very, dangerus generation. We're old ' Sd oTh, ?J Z? that beinS old n bring wisdom and"': fanLies of re Cynica1' but we no Norman Ma . he trusting Superman aPPeal to us, now, not only b book y'nogf rrld-view Presented to us by the was constantlv P0 1S' Wnich never had race riots, but ; gang,terS KrnmP,enled by meteors a"d earthquakes and was'no posS-tv " WaS, a'Ways rescDed by sense of SSsnLs'L" lo? deStrUCtin " There was, of course, Kryptonite. |