Why are superheroes often orphans?

In 2014 the walls of a room in the Foundling museum were decorated with a mural created by the British poet Lemn Sissay. The work, entitled Superman was a foundling (Superman was a foundling), it listed the names of hundreds of fictional characters raised by people other than their biological parents, from Heathcliff and Estella Havisham to Harry Potter and James Bond. Over the next few months, visitors suggested other names, and museum director Caro Howell noted that comic book characters especially tend to have “foster experiences.” This awareness led to the birth of a new exhibition: Superheroes, orphans and origins: 125 years in comics (Superheroes, Orphans and Origins: 125 Years of Comics).

“When you start following this thread, you end up traveling around the world,” explains Laura Chase, curator of the exhibition. The exhibition includes original works and copies of comics from nine countries, including China (I vagabondaggi di Sanmao by Zhang Leping), Japan (Gen di Hiroshima di Keiji Nakazawa), Spagna (paracollars by Carlos Giménez) and Sweden (Schedule by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjoblom). The oldest object on display is a page of Hogan’s Alley by RF Outcault, a strip published in a newspaper in 1895 featuring a homeless character, Yellow Kid. However, the most important historical location for comics that tell stories of foundlings, orphans and adopted children is the United States between the 1920s and 1940s.

Little orphan Annie by Harold Gray was published in 1924. “Orphans are super smart kids and will always be successful, because they’ve always had to make it on their own!” Annie declares in a comic strip. In Gasoline Alley, by Frank King, garage owner Walt adopts a boy abandoned on his doorstep in 1921. “You taught me that I wasn’t even alive before you arrived,” Walt confesses to the boy a year later. In 1932 Dick Tracy welcomes a boy named Junior. In 1933 Popeye and Olivia start taking care of a foundling named Pea. In addition to illuminating the reality of US slums before the advent of federal welfare, this inherently dramatic trope allowed the authors to create characters of children struggling with dangerous adventures and of adults who could have children without the need to describe a marriage. or a pregnancy.

Soon after, with the birth of superhero comics, being an orphan became almost an indispensable trait for every protagonist. In 1938 Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman was doubly orphaned, first due to the explosion of his planet Krypton and later after the death of his adoptive parents, the Kents. Although in later versions of the Superman Martha and Jonathan Kent live to the adulthood of their adopted son. Then came Batman, by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, first appearing in Gotham City in 1939. As the transpositions to the big screen remind us all too often, Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed, as are those of Robin, the Boy. Wonder who moved into Wayne Manor in 1940.

In 1941, Timely Comics followed the trend by introducing orphan Captain America and his orphaned sidekick Bucky Barnes. Years later, Timely Comics would become Marvel Comics, a publishing house of characters such as Spiderman (raised by his uncle and aunt after the murder of his parents), Hulk (raised by his aunt after the death of his mother and the internment of his father in a psychiatric hospital), Wolverine (escaped from home after his father’s murder and his mother’s internment), Daredevil (whose single father is killed by some criminals), Black Panther (mother died in childbirth, father murdered) and so on .

Desire for revenge
There are obvious narrative benefits to creating superheroes separate from biological parents. “They need answers. They want justice. In a way they need a payback, ”explains cartoonist Woodrow Phoenix. “There is also another practical reason for eliminating the parents from the protagonist’s childhood. If there are parents, then there is someone who can say ‘no’ “. But for characters who have passed through the custody system, this scheme has a deeper value. Superheroes are outcasts, They feel different from everyone else. Many of them, like X-Men, create a new family with other people who live on the fringes of society.

In a study included in the exhibition catalog, Sissay tells how he felt very close to Superman when he lived in a foster home and how he later noticed the psychological bonds between himself and the character. “I realized that he too does everything possible to hide his past, that he secretly feels he has split, that he has problems in relationships”.

Superman doesn’t know if he should feel more connected to the Kryptonian parents he never saw or the human parents who raised him. Until the mid-1980s, his friends mostly used his alien name Kal-El. From then on, however, they call him Clark. It’s the kind of change an adopted child recognizes right away, made easier by the cartoon format. Popular strips run for decades, so there’s plenty of time to grow the characters and develop their backstory. “There is no race to the epilogue in the comics,” explains Chase. “Comics just keep going, and that aspect reflects our life.”

The curators of the exhibition point out that the foster children resemble Superman and his “colleagues” in another sense as well. “From the work we do with young people in foster care we know that they have very difficult experiences and that when they leave the system, at the age of 18, they are burdened with enormous expectations. The stamina they have to prove is superhuman, but in the end they often get great results. They are the real superheroes ”.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)