Where Our Superheroes Come From
The starting point for a creative story idea can come form many places. It can be a memory, a character, a problem, tension, fear or conflict that resonates and grows in the writer’s mind. It’s like a spark or the germ of an idea that can then lead to the premise for a good story. When we write fiction, we are transpose our personal material and restructure it into what we call a story. We can see this clearly in the new myths that creative writers and artists. Many are in the form of thtsuperheroes that become our contemporary cultural icons.
Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman , created by William Moulton Marston, is an American psychologist and comic book writer and his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston. She was a very liberated woman for her time who held three educational degrees. Olive Byrne, a woman who lived with them, also influenced the creation of the character. Wonder Woman’s origin story was very personal to this trio. Here’s how the story of how he got inspired goes.
One night around 1939, the clouds of war hovered over Europe. The three had lived through the horrors of World War I and Marston was distraught. The memory of those horrors brought up negative emotions in him. These triggered the idea for a character in a story. He created someone who could help bring an end to the warlike ways of humans. He consulted his wife about inventing a fictional character like Superman who would promote a global revolution by moving away from war to love. She suggested that it be a woman, a liberated character crusading as a Boston career woman. She could be the archetypal Amazon . They eventually name that character Wonder Woman.
While both his wife and Olive Byrne were models for the character, the story of Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, is also steeped in mythology, the ancient Amazons. We can also suppose that Wonder Woman was in some ways Elizabeth Marston’s personal myth. It is a story she believed about herself. A story like this includes who we are, and the purpose and meaning of our lives.
Superman
Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, from similar traumatic roots They were the sons of Jewish immigrants who met in Ohio in the 1930s as foreigners after their homes in Germany were destroyed by the Nazis. Perhaps the horror of that experience in some way inspired the creation of a Superman. Superman’s back story is one of exile. Moments before his home planet was destroyed, Kal-El (Superman’s birth name), is rocketed to Earth where he lives with his adopted parents. . Although expatriated, he uses his super-human powers to help save earthlings in his adopted home.
Other Superheroes
Interestingly, the creators of Spider Man, Batman and Captain America were also Jewish. In fact, Captain America marked his first appearance in 1941 by punching Adolf Hitler in the face. These ideas support Sigmund Freud’s supposition that the motive behind writing creative fiction stories can be a wish fulfillment of sorts. Grant Morrison authored The Invisibles and other books. He said, “We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us…patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.”
What we find is that stories give us the ability to give voice to powerful personal and cultural issues. In some ways, we are the stories we hear and the stories we tell.
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