IST 2020 - Ideas?

[M Fnord]

I'm not gonna lie gang, this one fought me. Like, "this is the thing that's kept me hung up for almost two years" fought me. This chapter is a clear example of overambition: I had drafts that were 30k words or more and still didn't cover everything I wanted to cover! This complete-enough version clocks in at just under 16k - I was hoping for <10k but at this point I'm pretty much at the point where I start losing actually important information.

But anyway, for your reading pleasure please enjoy chapter three, "The Pulp Age."

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A Very Delicate Time
Danger Ace’s lips spread in a broad grin as the twin Allison engines howled, mighty forces shoving the fearless barnstormer back into his seat as the Fury swooped down on the fearsome black Titan hanging low over the canyon. The engine’s cry was almost drowned out by the thunder of guns as .25 caliber fire lashed out, striking the enormous Zeppelin’s ebon hide like a cobra.


The bullets splashed against the armored gasbag like leaden raindrops, bouncing off the surface and falling harmlessly to the riverbed far, far below. The Fury’s radio crackled. “You’ll have to do better than that, Herr Ace,” cackled Baron Zorbo, amusement and irritation mingled in his worlds. “The Black Zeppelin is not my finest creation for nothing, after all!”

Despite the failure of his guns, the grin never left Danger Ace. “Aw c’mon Baron, I’m just getting warmed up!” he riposted. “Whatever you’re planning to do with the dam, you’re not gonna get away with it?”

“’Whatever I’m planning to do with it?’” The Baron echoed, surprised. “I had thought I made my intentions quite clear in my letter to Herr Chandler’s paper. Have you not read it, Herr Ace?” The Black Zeppelin’s own guns returned fire, filling the skies around the Fury with fire, lead and steel. Danger Ace’s lightning reflexes pulled the Fury into a tight turn away from the behemoth, the engines screaming hard as he pushed American engineering to its absolute limits.

“They don’t get the Times in Las Vegas, sadly,” the ace pilot remarked as he dodged death all around him. His voice was cool, almost calculating despite the mayhem bare feet from him.

“Ah, ich verstehe, a coincidence of destiny then,” the mad Baron mused. “Very well, since you were unaware Herr Ace, allow me to enlighten you. I intend, as I informed Herr Chandler, to destroy this thing, to tear it down as thoroughly as the Romans did Carthage. And if I must kill you to accomplish this, then I regret the necessity.” The Black Zeppelin’s fire increased, forcing Danger Ace out of an attack run and down, down into the canyon itself. The Fury dropped to almost to the level of the river before pulling up sharply against the mighty curved expanse of concrete. Her propellers came within a thousandth of an inch from touching the manmade stone, a moment that would have spelled utter doom for the intrepid Danger Ace, before the aeroplane cleared the top of the dam and began to climb back towards the Black Zeppelin.

“Yeah, and that’s what I don’t get,” Danger Ace replied as the Fury wheeled around. If the madman wanted to talk, who was he to tell him to shut up? “You’ve made millions robbing places all over the world and you could make millions more if you sold your airship designs, but you’re out here in the middle of nowhere menacing Hoover Dam. What’s so special about this big lump of concrete, huh?”

“Fool!” the Baron roared, now plainly furious. “A lump of concrete, pah! You ignorant American pig! You’ve no idea the indignity that your engineers have wrought! This dam will disrupt the balance of Nature across this entire region! Plants, beasts, even men will have their existences ended or thrown into turmoil! I have made my calculations: by century’s end the mighty Colorado River will be drained into oblivion by this dam and whatever such works men like you seek to throw in its path! A river that has been here since before the dawn of Man will cease to run, its life and the life it nourishes snuffed out, and for what? That Herr Chandler and all the other vapid jackals in Los Angeles can have more light-bulbs?

“I will not stand for this, Herr Ace,” the Baron continued, his tirade sliding into the silky Hunnic cadence the barnstormer remembered from his days in the War. “So long as I have the power to stand athwart, to prevent men from ruining the Earth for their own convenience, I shall do so. God has given me my genius for this reason. Now, Danger Ace! Pay witness to the triumph of Nature over the folly of Man! Betätigen Sie die Blitzkanone!”

The Black Zeppelin pivoted, an ungainly thing moving with shocking grace as arcs of electrical current and St. Elmo’s fire raced up and down the gasbag. The arcs clustered at the airship’s massive nose, then a moment’s pause before the arcs lashed out in a stream of blue-white fury! An artificial thunderbolt as wide as the Fury struck the dam’s pale concrete, marring the surface with a dish of black vitrified glass!

“A good start,” the mad Baron said. “But Rome was neither built nor burnt in a day. Prepare the charging batteries! We fire again!”

“Oh no you don’t!” cried Danger Ace. The Fury’s guns spoke once more, pelting the flying battleship’s black hide with more bullets as faint specks appeared on the horizon. The fearless barnstormer sighed in relief; reinforcements in the form of his famous Flying Circus had finally arrived from Los Angeles.

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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
— Slavoj Žižek (attributed to Antonio Gramsci)

History remembers the years 1925-46 as the Pulp Age, an almost mythical era where the world plunged headfirst into the downright weird, where the superhero and supervillain were willed into existence by the breathless articles of yellow journalists and pulp magazines were more accurate descriptions of reality than academic texts.

To be fair it’s not the worst way to think of the time. A simplification sure, but not an inaccurate one. The Pulp Age not only stems from the 1924 Event but also from the zeitgeist of the time in which the Event happened. The decade (plus or minus a few months) between the end of World War I and the beginning of the 1930s is often thought of as a moment of calm in a tumultuous century but that’s a surface reading of how things were. The war in Europe had irrevocably changed the balance of power: even a relatively limited conflict (like the ones that closed out the 19th century) would’ve shaken things up, but World War I was not limited by anything other than economic realities. The largest war in continental Europe in a full century, between industrialized peers, had financially and demographically wrecked almost all of the imperial states – the so-called Great Powers who divided the world between them. In order to try and recoup their losses, the European powers squeezed their colonies that much harder, and the colonies felt empowered to push back. Independence movements had always been a thing in the world, especially outside Europe, but now they were popping up faster and were much harder to put down than they had been in the past.

Meanwhile, as Europe tried to rebuild their mauled infrastructure the focus of world power shifted elsewhere. The United States, whose population and industry hadn’t taken any serious hits during the war and whose empire was largely untouched by the aftereffects, was well on its way to becoming the 400kg gorilla in world affairs. Much of the Western economy through the Twenties was backed by American money and American industry, and this maintained about a decade’s worth of prosperity.

In 1924 the world looks relatively stable, but this is for the most part an illusion. If you happen to be the right class, ethnicity and gender then things are looking up for you – certainly they’re looking better than they did ten years earlier. If you’re not the right one of those things then your situation is much more complicated, generally wobbling between “fraught” and “extremely fraught.” The old imperial order that kept things operational since the Concert of Vienna hasn’t collapsed yet – the pedestal is cracked but not crumbling, and everybody with eyes knows its time is coming soon – but the order that will replace it hasn’t truly made itself known. As the empires wobble on their thrones social movements fair and foul are blossoming in the cracks, competing to be the ones who survive the fall.

In retrospect this might be one of the best possible moments for the emergence of metahumanity. It was certainly better overall for the Pulp Age to start before the next big war and not in the middle of it. This period of time isn’t just jazz, flappers and Art Deco – it’s what those things represent: new behaviors, new ideas and new philosophies of looking at the world. The first phase of the Pulp Age was a tense time for all that we remember it as one of excess and leisure; the world was changing and anything seemed possible.

This is the world that the energy wave hit in 1924. While the Event had no immediate effect beyond confusing astronomers and inspiring some interesting art (Salvador Dali’s The Sky Torn Open being one of the most evocative and prophetic images of the moment) the memory would linger on in public consciousness. The metagene had been unlocked but full activation would take time, though not as much as one might think. Vague reports of uncanny events start trickling into the press by Christmas, unexplained and difficult-to-explain things in brief articles sandwiched between advertisements because the editor had space to fill.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings perhaps. But still a beginning.

Historians love to give stretches of time fancy names and then break those periods up into smaller units with their own fancy names. The urge for ever more granular classification is something that has vexed the community for the entire existence of history as a discipline. It’s not something that will go away either, because there’s just too much stuff for the human mind to encompass when you’re talking about the concept of history.

With that in mind, the Pulp Age can be broken down into distinct sub-eras. These then can be broken down into smaller periods of time, regional classifications and so on, but for the sake of our collective sanity we’ll leave that level of granularity to specialists and just stick to documenting two specific time periods.

The Early Pulp Age (1925-31) is the beginning of the story, and is also the least-documented part of it: the early Pulp Age covers the first few years after the 1924 Event and while some historical events are pretty well-known from this time, much of what happened happened away from the eyes of people interested in writing it all down. Still, this is the first point where metahumans are not only known to exist but also are out and about doing things with their powers. As such, while the first supers wouldn’t actually show up until the very end of the period, it’s still a very important time for the development of metahumanity.

The High Pulp Age (1931-39) is what everybody thinks about when they hear the words “pulp age.” Not only do the majority of the best-remembered names of the time begin here, this is the era that’s most heavily mythologized by future media. Hollywood in particular will glamorize the supers of the High Pulp Age to the moon and back over the following decades. As an example, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 classic The Century Club was one of the single greatest Pulp Age melodramas and set the tone for nostalgic Pulp Age pictures for the remainder of the 20th century. Aside from this glorification, the High Pulp Age is important because it’s here where the early roots of what would be known as super culture are developed and set down.

Most historians consider 1939 – the formal beginning of World War II – to be the end of the Pulp Age. In truth history rarely has that kind of sharp dividing line. While the war would bring a lot of changes both to supers and the world around them (which we will look at in the next chapter) much of this was an extrapolation of trends already in play in the late Thirties. The war served as a transition phase between the Pulp Age and the incoming Super Age of the Fifties, Sixties and beyond.

SIDEBOX: Sliding Timelines
As already noted in Chapter Two, the Pulp Age is (honestly the bigger) part of the major divergence between this project and the original GURPS IST. In the original text while the 1924 Event happens on schedule metahumans and their associated cultural baggage don’t appear at all until 1941, when the “(s)tresses of military training reveal the first metahumans.” (IST94)

So there’s a couple of things here. First of all, the Event is explicitly stated to have unlocked the potential for metahuman activation (IST94), but there aren’t any for almost two decades afterwards. This always struck me as a bit weird because even if the vast majority of newly-empowered metahumans maintain a low profile statistically speaking there’s going to be enough supers willing to make a splash that it should’ve happened at least once or twice between 1924 and 1941. And it’s not like the era is bereft of fictional role models for metahumans to emulate.

Second, well… if we’re going to blame military training for revealing metahumans we need to address why it takes until 1941 for this to happen. No matter how you slice the chronology that’s several years and a lot of violence into World War II for everybody... except the United States. Now, I get it: GURPS IST is a book about a very American genre written by an American author for an audience that was primarily American. It makes sense in context to make those choices. That said, this is a very Amerocentric view of what’s called out as global events (both the activation wave and the war) and part of the revision process here is to step back from this kind of viewpoint as much as I can. (I don’t promise perfection as I also am Yankee scum writing without a net, but I promise to put my best effort forward.)

And so, in order to square the circle we get the Pulp Age. The timeline has been shunted backwards into the gap between the Event and the war to allow super culture some time to ripen before all hell breaks loose, and it has a more global reach. Not only is there ample precedent for this, it’s also pretty fun.

Ashcan Edition
Starting in 1925 and running into 1927 is the period modern historians call the First Activation. Like the name suggests, this is where the first people with superpowers switched on by the 1924 Event realized that something had happened, and started messing around with their new abilities. During the First Activation about one in a million people had their metagenes activated, and not quite one in ten million had already unlocked their powers.

Estimating the total number of active metahumans is difficult because there wasn’t much in terms of global censuses or population estimates in general until much later. Based on later data collected by statisticians we can estimate that there were somewhere between two and two and a half billion people on Earth-1 between 1924 and 1939. The Event primed the human metagene and, starting in 1925, roughly one in ten million had powers. This gives us a rolling total of between 200 and 250 people with superpowers through most of the Pulp Age.

It’s also in this time that reports of paranormal events start to increase. At the time reports of ghosts, spirits etc. were dismissed as the same sort of spiritualist nonsense that filled the pages of tabloid papers before the war. Much of it remained fakery: the war had caused a general increase in morbid sentiment and while spiritualists weren’t as common as they had been before the turn of the century there were still plenty of spirit mediums and soothsayers around to be ruthlessly debunked by skeptics. However, there remained a small but growing number of cases that couldn’t be debunked by normal means. By the end of the Twenties there was a general consensus that something was going on, even if it wouldn’t be figured out what for another generation and a half.

The original metahumans of the First Activation are – and remain – largely anonymous. A few would go on to be famous for demonstrating superpowers in public, and a handful of supers would claim to have realized their potential around the time of the Event, but so far as history can tell the majority of the First Activation’s metahumans kept their powers to themselves and laid as low as they could. These early methumans were completely ordinary people with lives and problems of their own. Some might have found a use for their power in daily life but as often as not a power could be as much as hassle as it was a boon. Some actively denied the power out of fear it might’ve been a sign of madness, or from a general fear of being shunned by friends, family and community for “unnatural behavior.” On occasion, the descendants of these first metas have reported finding out that their parents or grandparents were metahuman solely from reading diaries or letters well after their passing.

We can safely say these people didn’t have any grand notions, but then we could say the same thing about every metahuman generation that came afterwards. While most of the people involved in the First Activation would spend their time quietly coming to terms with newfound power, others would burst onto the stage quite in a flash of color.

SIDEBOX: The “First Metahuman”
Ichiro Watanabe (1903-75) was an unassuming young man from Nagoya, Japan who worked as a fishmonger and had a “little trick.” Ichiro’s trick was telekinesis – he could move, if a bit clumsily, about as much as he could carry normally up to about two meters’ radius from where he was standing using only the power of his mind. When and where Ichiro activated his power is unknown, though presumably it was somewhere in Nagoya where nobody noticed it. He used his little trick to make life hauling fish easier until one day in summer 1926 when the market’s manager caught him putting ten kilos of frozen salmon on a high shelf without using his hands. Fearing for his employment Ichiro tried to bluff his way out of the situation, but instead of firing him his boss called the Nagoya Shimbun and overnight he became a sensation.

Watanabe’s telekinesis was the first public demonstration of paranormal powers without any kind of trickery or fakery involved. Scientists and skeptics, first from Japan and then the rest of the world, descended on Nagoya in order to figure out his mysterious power. Among the people attracted to Watanabe was master illusionist and arch-skeptic Harry Houdini, who arrived in Japan to great fanfare and examined the telekinetic in front of scientists and Pathé News movie cameras. (This diversion would incidentally mean Houdini misses a scheduled show in Montreal, and thereby survives another 25 years.) Houdini’s frustrated exclamation of “I don’t know how he does it!” would become the headline for hundreds of papers across the globe as news spread.

The “first metahuman” spent the rest of the Twenties being poked and prodded by scientists who were just as frustrated as Houdini. Eventually, as more (and more interesting) metahumans appeared Ichiro left the universities and returned to his job as a fishmonger, sometimes juggling fish with his mind to entertain customers and tourists. Ichiro Watanabe would survive several close calls with the Kempetai, the Imperial Japanese Army and the US Army Air Force during World War II and spend his life afterwards in relative obscurity, passing in his sleep in 1975. His granddaughter Kanae, also known as the heroine Mirrorwoman, became an IST regional commander.

Initial Print Run
Who was the first superhero?

Historians are reasonably sure the first person to don a mask and costume in real life started not long after the 1924 Event, but evidence is difficult to come by. These protosuperheroes came and went without attracting much attention from the outside world. It’s only through the efforts of researchers working half a century or more later going through hundreds of thousands of police reports and newspaper archives from around the world that these individuals are even theoretically traceable. Patterns of criminals apprehended, beaten or (in some cases) killed by persons unknown emerge from available data circa 1924-27; some of this is noise generated by corrupt or lax law enforcement but even accounting for that there does seem to be something in the data suggesting patterns. Sadly, the pattern is all anybody has regarding these mysterious supers. Who they were, whether or not they were metahumans and why they never reappeared once the age of heroism began are unknown and will likely remain so unless somebody develops a time machine.

The best known answer to the question “who is the first superhero” is, of course, New York City’s own Shadow. In many ways the archetype of the mystery man, the Shadow first appeared in the public record in the summer of 1927 after a series of high-profile attacks on Mafia operations in the city that never sleeps. His affably sinister air in his communiques with the press – often relayed by sidekick/aide/impromptu press agent Maxwell Grant – as well as his distinctive black outfit with the red scarf covering his lower face, made him an instant media darling. The fact that he ripped apart the mob and the mob couldn’t touch him made the Shadow into something much more than some punk vigilante with an ax to grind.

It made him an instant legend, and in the wake of one legend others are sure to follow.

Within six months of the Shadow’s first public appearance several dozen more people with similar fashion sense and vaguely ominous names popped up across the United States and Europe. By 1929 there were Shadow clones in just about every high-crime urban area on Earth. Many of these early imitators didn’t last very long. Some made an initial splash then vanished back into the cities from which they came, having accomplished whatever personal mission they set out on. Some were caught by the authorities like Cincinatti’s Prowler, who ended up in prison on aggravated battery charges. And some bit off more than they could chew and ended up dead like the Indianapolis Spider.

A Very Mundane Beginning
The early Pulp Age was the domain of the super normal. The term came into broad use in the Fifties, describing supers who didn’t have superpowers per se but didn’t let that stop them. Super normals remain a large percentage of the super community even into the modern era, but it was in the Pulp Age that they were most dominant.

“True” metahumans were relatively rare, and their powers weren’t (on balance) up to the same levels as they would be in later generations. Why this was true is still debated among metabiologists, but it’s generally accepted that no matter the reason the metagene went through a “ramp up” period of about 1-2 generations after the Event. The majority of recorded powers in the Pulp Age tended to be mental or sensory in nature: surface telepathy and basic telekinesis were moderately common, as was enhanced sight, hearing and smell. Outliers in this group included the first examples of the brick and atlas archetypes with increased strength and durability.

The handful of active, public metas in the Pulp Age spurred interest in how they gained powers in the first place. Scientists of less-than-stellar moral character found that some metahumans’ powers activated if subjected to physical or mental stress. This “spontaneous mutation” gave rise to the modern term mutate for a meta whose powers activated due to outside factors, as opposed to the mutant who is either born with live powers or gains them through physical maturation. It would also lead to a great mess of trouble at the end of the Pulp Age as these amoral scientists gained the attention of the powerful... but we’ll get to that soon enough. (See sidebar Making Metas the Unethical Way.)

Of interest before we move on are the edge cases. A theory posed by noted author and historian Philip J. Farmer in the late Sixties suggested that many of the super normals of the Pulp Age were in fact mutates of one stripe or another. Many of Farmer’s suspected mutates attributed their nigh-otherworldly physical and mental skills to the use of training regimens that were often intense, extreme and psychologically damaging to the user, the sort of thing that can – at least in theory – bring latent powers to the fore. While Farmer’s theory is a minority opinion among metahistorians and usually relegated to hack media like Ancient Supers and conspiracy Vine, it’s not impossible that there’s some truth to it.

Early Supervillainy
The development of modern supervillainy lagged behind the superhero. For the early Pulp Age the majority of villains were pretty much the same cast of mundane criminals that had existed for most of civilized history. Organized crime groups were in the middle of a boom period thanks to the implementation of Prohibition in the United States, which meant they were the ones most often targeted by the first mystery men. Being put on the back foot by strange people in masquerade costumes didn’t sit well with these established outfits, so they went looking for an effective counter.

The first supervillains who acted the part were, in essence, mercenaries. Their job was to kite the mystery men while otherwise-ordinary mobsters got on with their jobs (i.e. crime) in the background. Some infamous villains like Mentalo the Mind-Taker made their initial marks as hired guns for the Chicago Mob. It was dangerous work, particularly when the local mystery man carried guns, but a successful diversion was worth quite a lot of money. Hiring super muscle became a staple of the criminal underworld and persists to the modern era; third-party entities like the Hotel Continental started offering supermerc services as early as 1930.

The earliest known independent supervillain was the Red Hood, who may or may not have started as a Mob enforcer on the east coast before branching out and establishing one of the longest-lived criminal operations in the United States, outlasting almost every Mob outfit that existed when they began doing their thing. The Hood’s career was an anomaly for longevity, but it set the tone for independent villains for most of the 20th century: flamboyant gimmick, a reasonable number of subordinates and the necessary skills and chutzpah to commit over-the-top criminal acts.

SIDEBOX: Mystery Men and Paragons
Supers come in all sorts of archetypes, but the first two were codified at the beginning of the Pulp Age and these archetypes have survived all the way into the modern era. These are the mystery men and the paragons.

“Mystery man” started as a generic description for all supers regardless of what they did or were capable of, as almost all of them were men and most of them wore some kind of mask, scarf or other concealment that prevented them from being seen. In short, they were mysterious men, which shortened into mystery man before the Pulp Age had barely gotten started. As the years rolled on, the generic term started to become more specific, thanks in large part to the Shadow and his clone army. By the mid-Thirties the definition of mystery man had changed from “every super” to a specific kind of super, one who stuck to the shadows and whose approach to battling Evil tended to involve a lot more bloodshed than others. The non-generic mystery man became somebody in dark clothing, wrapped in shadows with a menacing aspect and usually armed with large guns to put holes in bad guys.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was the paragon. While no less mysterious than the mystery men – very few supers of any sort made their identity public at the time – paragons were a far more approachable type of super. The classical paragon persona hasn’t changed a whole lot in almost a century: the morally-upright, virtuous hero who tells children to be good, helps little old ladies cross the street and gets cats out of trees, etc. Paragons tend towards bright colors, or at least less intimidating costumes, and were willing to engage with the public beyond being weird cryptids.

The super population of the Pulp Age tilted towards the mystery man for the majority of it, though by the beginning of World War II the number of paragons had increased and would ultimately outnumber the mystery men by the Sixties.

SIDEBOX: Avalon Rising
The Event didn’t just unlock long-forgotten genetic potential within humanity, it also altered Earth-1’s metaphysical environment by cracking open doors between the ordinary material plane and more exciting places. The first successful spell likely happened sometime around the autumnal equinox of 1936, and once it happened there was another, and then another, and so on.

Most magical explorations in the Pulp Age were done by the same people who’d been exploring magic (with or without the k) since before the turn of the century. These groups, mostly secret societies of European extraction and Victorian origin, used a mishmash of their own jargon mixed with appropriated Indian, Chinese and Tibetan religious ritual to develop the first “modern” magical systems. Very few of these groups were interested in sharing, and feuds were common through most of the Twenties as initiates happily stabbed each other in the back over scraps of knowledge.

Mystic supers started appearing near the end of the early Pulp Age. Initially mystics were often confused with mentalists as magic and psychic powers weren’t that easy to distinguish at the time – even the mentalists and mystics had trouble with it! The first super to back up their claims of magical origin was the “philosopher hero” Paracelsus, a gentleman from New England who wasn’t quite a sorcerer supreme, but was the first person to publish any sort of public treatise on the nature of magic. The Modern Laws of Magick (1932) is pretty rough by modern standards but is still regarded as a major step forward in the understanding of magic as a force of nature.

The mystics tended to end up in a niche ecosystem of their own. Many started out as crimefighters or criminals, but the increasing complexity of the supernatural world very quickly detached them from more mundane situations. Most of the public mystics were little more than dabblers in the supernatural arts – the true Ascended Masters were more likely to vanish from the material plane altogether and only returned if a serious threat was posed to the plane’s structural integrity.

Inflection Point
The mystery men of the Twenties were – if we’re going to be honest – a fad. For certain people, more often than not young men with comfortable lifestyles and a lot of boredom, putting on a costume and engaging in some reckless vigilante action was the next hot thing to do when goldfish swallowing was passe. While some of the early mystery men were in it for the long haul, most weren’t. They were shooting stars that flared briefly before fading away.

And no fad lasts forever; despite the obsessive attention given to various mystery men by news media over the late Twenties, the initial rush of Shadow imitators began to tail off in the last years of that decade. By 1929 the rate of new supers appearing had gone to effectively zero. Many of the earliest generation of supers were also starting to pack it in after only a few short years; life as a super is demanding even in the 21st century, a century earlier it was even worse. The ones who remained were the most obsessive about it, the ones who saw this as a sacred calling and were willing to keep pushing for the rest of their lives, if need be.

What the world would’ve looked like had the mystery men fad drained away completely is unknown. Some things likely wouldn’t have changed – metagene activations were still happening, so people with powers would continue to appear, and it’s highly probable that many things that happened towards the end of the Thirties would still happen. The super culture might be shaped differently without the initial efforts and examples found in this transition period, which in turn would cause their own changes to broader history. In a world where the Pulp Age peters out by 1930, would the material conditions exist to create the International Super Teams in the Eighties?

Regardless, this didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen for reasons largely unrelated to the metagene or supers as a whole. While the Shadow and his ilk began to occupy their ecological niches in cities around the world, history continued to chug along. A complete record of what happened in 1929 is outside the scope of this document so in the interests of brevity we’ll summarize: World War I had exhausted and damaged most of the European industrial economies, who had most of the world’s money at that time. Europe turned to the United States, largely untouched and sitting on most of the rest of the world’s money, to provide the capital necessary to rebuild and revitalize the continent. The US happily provided that capital – making an absolute killing in the process – and this was the main driver that allowed the Twenties to Roar. Unfortunately it was also a major contributor to overheating the American economy, and in October 1929 the US stock market took a massive dive. This caused panic to spread throughout the rest of the American economy and the whole thing turned blue and fell over. And because large sections of the world economy relied on America not doing that, much of the industrialized world followed suit. The dominoes fell one by one and all of a sudden there was a massive economic crisis everywhere.

At the beginning of this chapter we noted that the Twenties weren’t nearly as peaceful and idyllic as many wanted to remember them. The Great Depression is where that undercurrent of instability begins to break through for people who had been otherwise insulated from reality, and subtext becomes text. The economic crisis led to a sharp increase in things like unemployment and wage reductions, which in turn led to an increase in the number of desperate people out there trying to keep things going for themselves.

As the truism goes, desperate people do desperate things. Crime, particularly in the United States, reached an apex in the early Thirties largely due to the twin effects of the Depression and the continuing of Prohibition. While the latter would be buried with a stake through its heart by 1934, things would not materially improve until the end of the decade. At the same time, there was a marked increase in interest in alternatives to the current system. Many people who weren’t at the top of the pyramid wondered why they were shouldering all that weight; this led to economic and political ideas that might have otherwise petered out in more stable times gaining new interest and popularity.

The increase in instability in the early Thirties brought with it a desire for things to just settle down for a moment. Revolutionary and reactionary movements would ride this desire as far as they could – in the Thirties it was largely reactionaries that profited, sadly. So too did the super culture. While the situation never reached true anarchy in the majority of the world, it was clear that the entrenched structures of law and order were unable to keep up with the instability, and into this stepped the super.

The people needed heroes; the people wanted symbols. And supers were there to be those symbols.

Available at Every Newsstand
By 1931, supers had stopped being just another weird fad of the Roaring Twenties. While they hadn’t reached the level of cultural penetration they would after World War II, by the Thirties it was clear that that was not just going to go away on its own.

The number of active supers didn’t immediately increase by much – again, this would only happen after the war – but it did stabilize. As supers dropped out of the life for whatever reason, new ones would appear to take their place. A mystery man in the industrial belt would vanish, only for another mystery man to show up a few months later. A mystic might disappear into the Outer Planes on a journey of self-discovery and their apprentice would take up their duties until the master returned. The sum total of supers on Earth-1 didn’t increase by much; estimates made using statistical analysis and endless newspaper archive searches indicate that there were around 400 or so active supers at the peak of the Pulp Age, and around 10% of those were active metahumans.

Statistically this wasn’t even a blip, even back in the Thirties when the population was a quarter of what it is today. But in a broader perspective, this not-even-a-blip was prominent enough to embed itself in global culture fairly quickly. On top of that, this small collection of a few hundred individuals were enough to start building their own culture.

Most of what we consider part of the modern super culture was codified during the Pulp Age, and most of it during the window between 1931 and 1935. The basic staples have roots going back in fiction, philosophy and reality for centuries but the cohesive whole that moderns would recognize as “the super culture” is largely assembled in the Thirties. The basic unwritten cultural rules regarding costumes, secret identities, sidekicks and/or henchmen and the basic rules of engagement between superhero and supervillain make their presence felt by 1932 and are effectively feature-complete by 1937.

(A full explanation of super super culture isn’t outside the scope of this document, but it is a pretty involved topic that would take up far too much space in this chapter. For a fuller explanation of the super culture please consult the supplementary essay Super Culture and You included in the back of this book, thank you.)

Going Public
Early Pulp Age supers were reclusive. Early mystery men might’ve been in the papers, but they weren’t known for sticking around to talk to civilians or give interviews to the press. This was for any number of reasons: it helped protect their civilian identities, it allowed them to take on more than one civilian identity, it enhanced their mystique, and so on. This made for excellent headlines in the Twenties but by the Thirties things had changed. Mysterious vigilantes were still popular – especially when they went out and tormented the seemingly endless number of evildoers now roaming the streets – but the malaise of the time demanded a different response. Something more public-facing. The people didn’t just want men cloaked in shadows; they wanted somebody who could talk to them, be reassuring in the face of calamity.

They wanted paragons, and the super culture would provide.

There had been a few attempts at public-facing supers in the early years, in particular the short, odd career of Nighthawk, but these supers tended to be flash-in-the-pan efforts. The motion-picture industry in Hollywood was notorious for dressing up actors in outfits that looked sort of like what a real super might wear, then parading them around Los Angeles as “actual” mystery men. But these had started to tail off alongside the initial mystery man fad. It wasn’t until 1933 and the public debut of Doc Savage that the first true paragons stepped into the limelight.

Savage is a fascinating character in his own right and books have been written about his life and times. He was in many ways the archetypal paragon: a handsome, well-built man (and one of the few supers of the time to go completely unmasked) who commanded attention just by physical presence alone, and whose public interactions tended to be somewhat aloof and done with a formality bordering on stiffness. Savage’s public affect would eventually be absorbed into super culture as the generic paragon template, a thing that would be copied, lampooned and rebuilt from the ground up multiple times between the Thirties and the 21st century.

While Savage was a bit unusual in the way he came off at times, the fact that he engaged with the public and the press to positive result opened the floodgates for paragons of all sorts to start appearing. This included heroes like the Torch, a man with an astonishing career ahead of him but started as an earnest man in red and yellow helping people in Chicago, and the American Crusader who did similar things on the west coast. These in turn inspired more paragons to engage with the people, causing a feedback loop that continues to persist into the modern era.

For Every Fine Cat, a Fine Rat
In an increasingly superpowered world, instability often means supervillains. At the beginning of the Pulp Age the modern villain didn’t quite exist; while there were people in costumes engaging in crime, these were mostly the subordinates (hired or otherwise) of established groups. An important step in the evolution of the modern supervillain to be sure, but not completely there yet. “True” independent villains like the Red Hood were few and far between before the Depression, to the speed with which some of the more colorful supervillains of the Thirties appeared it is likely that they had been lying in wait for at least a few years, emerging when the situation finally became chaotic enough to support them.

It’s hard to pin down the exact moment when the calculus changed, but the general metahistorical consensus points to the Chicago Coup of 1932 at the turning point. The Coup happened in the wake of Al Capone’s conviction and imprisonment on tax charges in 1931; the Chicago Outfit was left in mild turmoil, and in that moment the supermerc Blackstar decided to make his move, taking control of a healthy splinter of the gang and successfully defending “his” gang from Mob retaliation. This event showed that while the established institutions of crime were large and strong, they were vulnerable to subversion and disruption from within. Supervillains attempting to usurp control of organized crime would be a recurring pattern well into the Sixties, with mixed results.

The Thirties also saw the rise of solo artists using exceptional abilities or gadgets to commit villainy. One of the most famous examples was Lord Redthorn’s Ride, where the eponymous villain did a marathon smash-and-grab robbery spree down the entire length of Philadelphia’s Jewelry Row in 1931, done up in a scarlet version of 18th century highwayman’s clothes and riding a clockwork horse. Redthorn’s extremely public actions – unlike a lot of villains prior to this, Redthorn acted in broad daylight in a part of the city that had tourists and cameras in it – was a definite indication that this new phase of the Pulp Age wouldn’t be like the one that preceded it.

While most villains of the Pulp Age were largely criminals in it for material gain, there were others who had broader philosophical or ideological goals in mind. Some were like the Canadian villain Doctor Lucifer, who believed that there was a natural balance that needed to be maintained between good and evil, and so he became the Adversary to counterbalance the rising heroes. Others had more concrete ideological goals in mind, like Baron Zorbo and his environmentalism, or John Sunlight and his desire for world peace (under his hand as “enlightened” World Tyrant). While exceedingly few in number – estimates of ideological villains in the Pulp Age rarely stray into the high double digits – they would be the best remembered villains of the time both for their goals and for their flamboyance.

SIDEBOX: “They should make comic books about you.”
Popular culture was more heavily affected by the emergence of supers than almost anything else in modern civilization. The “return” of these near-mythic figures to reality had a deep-seated appeal to almost everyone.

Some of the first pop culture institutions to climb aboard the supers train were – to little surprise – comics. The comic book was very young during the Pulp Age, emerging as a commercial art form first as newspaper exclusives starting in the late 19th century and then as separate magazines in the late Twenties. This relative newness probably inspired publishers to take a gamble on documenting the annals of this new phenomenon of mystery men and metahumans when other media were skeptical.

Comics would separate into two distinct branches at this point. The first branch would focus on strictly fictional supers, characters invented by writers and who belonged to the publisher. These fictional supertales would go on to see reasonable success over the years as characters like the Blue Bat and Tom Strange became household icons and inspirations for generations of supers yet to come. The other branch would instead focus on the adventures of real-life supers. At first these adventures were heavily fictionalized if not outright made up in the same way dime novels conjured “true tales” about Western icons like Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson and Wild Bill Hickok; given that few had access to the supers in question, and they were unlikely to compromise their identities to sue for defamation, this was a valid play well into the Thirties.

In 1935 the American Crusader made a formal deal with Fawcett Comics: in return for two percent of the gross profit brought in by their American Comics Cavalcade magazine (half to the hero and half to a charitable organization of his choice) the Crusader would allow Fawcett writers access to his case notes. Not unfettered access, as names of victims and the like were scrubbed from, but more than enough to provide extra realism. Being able to say their comics were “from the real casefiles of the American Crusader!” and a pre-approved statement printed in the front of every magazine caused Fawcett Comics sales to skyrocket, and would eventually lead to the company becoming one of the 21st century’s largest multimedia juggernauts.

SIDEBOX: The Honor Guard Story (Part I)
The story of the world’s finest superteam begins with a man of great wealth, great philosophies and even greater guilt. James “Bunny” Ross was the heir of a fortune built on exploitation, and he made it his life’s mission to see every last penny of that fortune go to the people who’d created it. By 1933 he’d divested the majority of his family money but still had a considerable chunk of cash and real estate he wanted to get rid of. At the same time, Ross saw the emerging super phenomenon and wondered how it might be put towards a more equitable world.

In 1934 Ross contacted four promising heroes, The Torch, Agent X, Johnny Lightning and Miss Miracle, and gave them the pitch: while they were all at the upper tier of heroics at the time, by combining their talents and resources (along with financial backing from Ross) they could create something far greater and far more useful to the common man than the quasi-clubs that already existed. Honor Guard would be the first “modern” superteam in terms of both how it operated and its general role as facilitator and force multiplier for supers.

Ross also had an ulterior motive: for all his wealth Bunny Ross was a committed socialist, and he was of the opinion that using superheroes to build socialism – or at least build a positive public image for socialism – was a reasonable use of his remaining fortune. In this he would be somewhat disappointed; while Honor Guard’s heroes weren’t unsympathetic to his views (that will come up the next time we pick up this story) they tended to see the team as less political an institution than Bunny did. In particular the Torch saw the purpose of Honor Guard as “to hold back the night” so people with more skills than punching, gadgets or mysticism could do the gritty work of social reform. Over the years this would cause friction between Honor Guard’s leadership and technical owner Ross, but never quite to the point where things ruptured.

Honor Guard was officially founded in the spring of 1935. Ross donated several properties for the team’s use, in particular a pair of five-story tenements at the corner of First Avenue and 46th Street in New York City would become the primary team headquarters for most of its existence. The first few years were somewhat ad hoc, as nobody involved in the team’s founding had any practical idea of how to organize Honor Guard so it could accomplish its objectives. Scheduling meetings also proved difficult given that of the original members only Agent X was local to New York. That said, the team muddled through these early difficulties, winning a significant victory against the Masters of Evil during their aborted strike on Liberty Island in 1936. This victory brought the team to national attention, as well as the attention of other heroes; Honor Guard’s first non-founding members were Polychrome and Captain Midnight, who joined in 1937.

From 1935 to 1952 Honor Guard would slowly build a reputation as one of the heavy hitters in the heroic scene, one that was willing to go wherever they were asked to go and protect everybody they could if it was within their power to do so.

Worldwide Sensations: Supers Beyond the West
The focus has been largely on America through the first part of this document, mainly because America served as the focal point for the emergence of the modern super, both as a cultural force and a tangible thing. But it needs to be remembered that even though America is the fountainhead from which much of this madness springs, supers weren’t a strictly regional phenomenon.

The metagene cares not for ethnicity, religion, economic class, gender identity or sexual preference. If you’re a human being (or have sufficient amounts of human DNA in you) then the metagene is your inheritance. The 1924 Event definitely didn’t care about about geography: the shower of cosmic energy that started this whole thing didn’t simply hit one city, one country, one continent or even one hemisphere, it was a worldwide phenomenon. In this vein it behooves us to take a look outside the West, even if only for a few moments, so we can see what’s going on out there.

When the Shadow and his fellow mystery men start making their presence known to the greater world, people all over the world start getting ideas. The mystery man motif was popular in urban communities, and it didn’t matter if the community was Salt Lake City or Mumbai. Even the Shadow’s name was reused by supers in cities far from New York. (This makes the Shadow’s history even more confusing to the historian, almost to the point where you’d think the original Shadow planned it.)

Even in the Thirties, the world was a big place with a lot of people in it. And as the breathless stories of superheroes and supervillains duking it out in the streets of American cities spread the world took notice. Other heroic traditions – some of which had even made their way into Western-style pulp magazines – found purchase within this fledgling community and influence the nature of supers going forward around the world. Many of the things that happened through the Pulp Age have repercussions that go all the way down the line to the 21st century, and this will be on the test. So with that in mind, here’s a brief look at some of the more interesting things pulled into the light around the world during the Pulp Age.

SIDEBOX: A Caveat
While Truth, Justice and the UN Way is not as shackled to the tyranny of word count and page count as its predecessor, trying to cover the entire world in any sort of comprehensive fashion isn’t really in the cards. Part of me would absolutely love to, but the necessary time to research and synthesize a complete world report for the Pulp Age would take forever and this chapter is already taking long enough to write. So please bear in mind that this is a broad overview of parts of the world which interact with the new world of the super in interesting ways, and not a flat declaration that this was all that was happening in this part of the world at this time.

China: Wandering Heroes
In eastern Asia most of the super action is in China, which was in something of a state during the Pulp Age. The general disorder of the Republic of China during these years (they don’t call it the “warlord era” for nothing) was a fertile breeding ground for supers of all sorts. Like everything else in China in the Twenties and Thirties, supers were divided by the concept of Westernization, sometimes framed as “modernization.” In the major urban centers on the coast where the Republic was strongest, or in the remaining colonial enclaves like Macao and Hong Kong, Chinese supers were far more likely to emulate Western mystery men. Nanjing’s original mystery man hero Yǐngzi was a Shadow rip off all the way down to the name, and there were plenty of other mystery men like him.

Meanwhile, out in the parts of China where the Republic’s authority was thin at best, emerging supers didn’t bother with the mystery man template and became xia. Xia, also known as wuxia, nuxia, youxia, jianxia and so on, is (in brief) a folklore and literary archetype reaching back as far as the 5th century BCE. Essentially, they’re nomadic heroes with a strict code of chivalry (reminiscent of knights-errant in the Western literary tradition) that requires them to fight for justice and righteousness. Where the more Western-style supers defended the major cities as best they could, out in the countryside where the Republic gave way to warlords xia were the primary defenders of the Chinese people, bands of wandering heroes protecting entire regions from the armies that set themselves up outside of the Kuomintang’s reach. This particular of their formation – along with the literary antecedents that both super-normal and metahuman xia happily adopted – meant that the xia had a much more contentious relationship with authority than many Westers supers.

Vigilantism has always been a thing within super culture worldwide. It wasn’t until much later in the century that any sort of formal recognition of supers was put into law anywhere, so for the first two generations most supers operated outside the law or (at best) in some sort of jury-rigged ad hoc relationship with whoever was running the local police force. For the xia, vigilantism was practically hardwired into their way of life. In the stories xia were more often than not in rebellion against a corrupt authority – and as life in China got progressively worse over the course of the Pulp Age, reality started reflecting art more and more. Xia harassed the warlords, the colonial powers, the Kuomintang and anybody else who tried to squeeze the countryside for their own gain.

This would gain the xia a great deal of goodwill from the people of China, but it also assured that as China changed in the years ahead the tension between the wandering defenders of justice and the established powers of the nation wouldn’t ever truly go away.

India: Independence Blues
Journeying to the west (I’m not apologizing) we depart China and land in India. During the Pulp Age, India remains a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of British Empire LLC, but keen observers will note that this is not going to last a whole lot much longer. Nationalist sentiment had been on the rise in India since the beginning of the century, and as the Event danced through the skies in India in 1924 things were starting to come to a head.

Much like everywhere else in the world, supers started coming out of the woodwork in the late Twenties and early Thirties. Again, like much of the rest of the world, these early supers tended to be patterned on Western mystery man archetypes. Unlike a lot of the world though, Indian supers were almost immediately absorbed into the political realm. The Green Serpent, one of the first publicly known mystery men in India, surprised the entire country in 1931 when he went to the papers to endorse the Indian National Congress and complete independence from Britain. For the Western press that picked up the story (which wasn’t many of them, and the story was kept as quiet as possible in the United Kingdom for obvious reasons) this was a very surprising move. While there were ideologically-inclined supers in the West, they were definitely not in the majority; almost all the supers who made headlines did so through largely apolitical actions. Seeing somebody like the Serpent, whose brief career to date made him almost as well known in India as Gandhi, publicly support the independence movement was unheard of.

As the struggle for independence heated up, the nascent Indian super community started to sort itself basically along those lines. Outside of interactions with the standard street crime that most Pulp Age supers concerned themselves with the lines weren’t necessarily superhero and supervillain, they were defined by where any individual super stood on the independence question, which made things especially blurry in the Indian super community. As an example, there were multiple instances of Indian gadgeteers claiming some variation of “Captain Nemo” or “Prince Dakkar” as noms du guerre through the Thirties and harassing colonial shipping in and out of the major ports. These supers were thought of by the West as pirates and supervillains, but they were – and remain – folk heroes to many Indians for their actions.

The central division of pro- vs. anti-Raj was highlighted in one of the first great superfeuds. The Green Serpent’s nemesis throughout the Raj’s final years was the Arrow, an Anglo-Indian mystery man who was considered a hero by the community he served, but whose pro-Imperial stance set him against the Serpent time and again. The most dramatic clash between the two mystery men happened during a protest in Bengaluru in 1934; the Serpent was there to guard the protesters, while the Arrow was with the Army detachment sent to disperse the crowd. This was one of the first super-on-super clashes caught on film, and was a somewhat hair-raising sample of what the world was coming to.

Division within the super culture would be the name of the game as the independence movement gained strength and the colonial experiment ground slowly towards its inevitable conclusion. Not just on the question of independence but also – and more importantly – within the independence movement itself. Like their mundane counterparts while everybody agreed on the one big thing there were dozens of factions with moving parts hidden inside the big tent, and these all attracted supers as the years wore on. This internal fractiousness would define the Indian super community for much of the 20th century.

Africa: Cauldron of Empire
As noted above, the Pulp Age was a colonialist age and this was most apparent in Africa. The division of the continent between the European powers in the 19th century set the stage for those same great powers trying to kill each other on their home soil in the 20th. For the entirety of the Pulp Age Africa was almost entirely under the control of foreign powers, either directly or via client kingdoms. Colonial status bred nationalist sentiment, particularly in the western part of the continent which was itself linked to broader pan-Africanist movements that existed in the greater African diaspora.

African nationalism in the Pulp Age was very closely tied to the concept of westernization: there was a generalized belief (certainly one endorsed by the colonizers) that Western cultural norms were somehow superior to everything else, and that European domination of the planet was proof of that claim. Therefore, in order for Africa to successfully throw off her colonizers – or even just get a certain level of respect and autonomy from the European powers – Africans must adopt Western modes of thought and, effectively, beat the colonizers at their own game. (This entire concept is, shall we say, somewhat questionable. But it is important to remember that it was considered a valid line of thought in this time and place.)

The fact that most African westernizers were in fact nationalists – and therefore not acceptable to the colonial powers – was a significant pressure on the emergence of super culture in Africa. Initially supers were no less popular in Africa than they were anywhere else, but as all the main templates came from the West, and were often imported via black nationalist movements in the Americas, this gave African supers enough of an anti-colonialist tinge to alarm local governments. In an age where the identities of mysterious crimefighters was romanticized almost to a fault in the West and East, in Africa colonial authorities were far more enthusiastic about tracking down, unmasking and imprisoning supers than almost anywhere else on the planet. A few supers would slip manage to slip the nets – Lagos’ original Black Bat stayed out of British hands from his debut in 1935 all the way to Nigerian independence in 1960 – but this enthusiasm for arresting supers for “disturbing the general order” would last through to the end of World War II.

The mystery man archetype wouldn’t completely disappear from Africa – it remained moderately popular in the north, particularly in places like Egypt where anti-super standards were relatively relaxed. Included in this is the small (at the time) subequatorial British holding of Bangalla where the mystery-man-slash-local-folktale The Phantom operated more or less in the open and more or less unmolested from 1937 onwards. There were also a handful of white African supers operating, mostly in South Africa (naturally) who managed to work unmolested due to racism. Still, it never achieved the same level of penetration pre-decolonization as it did in other places, and was supplanted by other archetypes in the post-war period.

The association of super with nationalism, and therefore anti-colonialism even more so than it was in India (where the supers were more uniformly divided across ideological lines) added a unique political tint to African super culture. Donning a mask and going out to fight crime, even if it was just to kick out a gang of thugs who’d set up shop in the neighborhood, was treated as a potentially revolutionary threat by colonial authorities. And the supers responded in kind: between the appearance of the first African mystery men in the Thirties and the decolonization movement of the Fifties and Sixties, Africa had the largest concentration of “supervillains” of anywhere on Earth-1, and the vast majority of the people named as supervillains were local protectors or Robin Hood types whose greatest villainy was making colonial governments look stupid.

Outside of the colonial struggle, Pulp Age Africa had continuing issues with super-tourism. Quite a few adventurers drawn to the “mystery of the Dark Continent” after reading a bit too much Haggard and Burroughs spent the Pulp Age looking for the mysterious ruins of long-lost scions of Greece, Rome, Israel or Atlantis they were sure existed somewhere in the great jungles. At the same time, less romantic but no less obnoxious adventurers went into the lightly-policed parts of the continent looking for a few thousand acres they could rule over as god-kings in between crime sprees in more “civilized” parts. This would draw in outside heroes (and sometimes local ones) at which point there would be an extended fight scene well away from the cities and the papers, wreaking havoc on the environment as well as any unlucky villages that happened to be nearby. This sort of nonsense was endemic in Pulp Age Africa, and fundamentally wouldn’t stop until well after decolonization started.

South America: Green Mysteries
South America was one of the calmer places in the world during the Pulp Age. Which isn’t to say it was actually calm – wars were fought on the continent during the Thirties – but compared to the turmoil found in Asia or Africa in the same timeframe things were far less crazy. This relative level of tranquility combined with a high degree of westernization led to South American supers being not extremely different from their North American counterparts. This would eventually change as pride in indigenous cultures became more of a thing in the Sixties and Seventies, but during the Pulp Age the main difference between a mystery man in Cuzco and a mystery man in Seattle is that the one in Cuzco spoke Spanish as his native language.

If anything, Pulp Age South America was famous as a super-tourism destination. There were some foreign supers who had – usually somewhat shady – connections to the area; Doc Savage’s connections to the gold mines of Hidalgo being one of the better-known ones of these. But there was also the fact that the continent’s interior was very sparsely settled and very densely overgrown, this made it mysterious to outsiders, mystery begets imagination and so on and so forth. Much like the tales of the “Dark Continent” inspired by European visits to the African interior in the previous century, South America had its share of adventurers looking for fabled lost cities founded by mysterious elder civilizations where everything was clad in gold and the arcane secrets of ages past could be found for the taking. The Lost City of Z, the latest in a long line of El Dorado myths, was the particular target of British expeditions throughout the Pulp Age that turned up less than nothing.

Admittedly, it didn’t stop the tourism because there were in fact weird things happening in South America at the time. The 1910-11 Maple White Land expedition against all odds actually did find something strange on top of a Brazilian tepui, and managed to make more than one trip to the plateau before it went away in the late Twenties. (See sidebar “Lost Worlds” for more on the nature of Maple White Land and other similar places.) Having found something like that once, the Pulp Age saw an explosion of superscientists, adventurers and eccentrics diving head-first into the Mato Grosso trying to find the next Maple White Land. Sometimes this was just for pure scientific discovery, sometimes it was intended for exploitation and sometimes it was solely for bragging rights; the “lost city quests” were a land of contrasts.

These adventurers tended to draw others in their wake, again much like in Africa. Several supervillains established lairs in the Andes and the more remote places of South America; the small island nation of Corto Maltese started offering its services as a hideout far from the eyes of Western heroes as early as 1938. This inevitably pulled heroes towards the continent, and fights would ensue in the jungles, the distant plains and around the mighty peaks. That this didn’t have a significant deleterious effect on the population has more to do with remoteness than anything else.

SIDEBOX: “Lost Worlds”
Pulp fiction is rife with the concept of the lost world, a place that had been settled, civilized and then forgotten by the world, existing in its own little bubble until some intrepid (and invariably Western) explorer puts together the clues and finds it deep in the jungle or tucked away in an inaccessible mountain valley. Often in the stories these places have artifacts of great power hidden away in their temples, or have science advanced beyond the modern age. They also usually have plenty of gold, jewels and beautiful people to tempt adventurers into leaving the modern world behind.

On Earth-1 the lost world isn’t unknown, but the reality is often less exciting. The remote reaches of various continents do in fact contain cities lost to time and undisturbed by outsiders for generations, and some of these places have histories stretching back to the great kingdoms of the Metalithic (see last chapter for all of that). However, they aren’t refuges of superscience or sorcery; in most cases these “lost cities” are villages built on top of ancient structures that used to be great cities until a shift in the climate or the manasphere caused everybody save the most stubborn to move away. (Think “Macchu Picchu” instead of “The Lost City of Opak-Re.”) Many of these places remained isolated until the late colonial period, and from an anthropological and historical view they’re invaluable... but they’re not what the novels promised.

Which is not to say that there aren’t places like that on Earth-1! The world has long had a deep connection to the strange and while the Metalithic is long gone traces of that strangeness continued to persist for generations. Perhaps the most famous of these was Maple White Land in Brazil, a tepui that contained a strange mishmash of prehistoric creatures, discovered in 1910 by Professor George Challenger. Maple White Land was not an evolutionary island as Challenger had thought; research done in the 21st century concluded that the plateau wasn’t necessarily even a plateau at all, but an extrusion of an ultraterrestrial or interdimensional realm that had gotten stuck to the top of that specific tepui.

Some of these intermittent realms had human populations, often originating from Earth-1. Of particular note is the kingdom of Shambhala, a place famous via its connection to Tibetan Buddhism and one that was “rediscovered” more and more often through the Pulp Age.

West Asia: Sacred Battleground
The ancient crossroads of three continents and ten thousand years of civilization, West Asia was in kind of a weird place during the Pulp Age. The Ottoman Empire had lost its former holdings outside of Asia Minor itself (modern-day Turkiye) and their rule had been replaced by a patchwork of Western colonial administrations and technically-independent-but-we-all-know-the-score countries. Very few people who lived in West Asia were happy about this arrangement, so much like in India and Africa there were nationalist movements filled with justifiably angry people scattered all the way from the Indus to the Mediterranean. The discovery of vast reserves of petroleum in the region, combined with industrial civilization’s increasing dependence on oil as a resource, only made the situation that much more precarious and stupid.

It’s into this world that the super blunders starting in the late Twenties. While elements of an independent Arab/Muslim super culture do begin in the Pulp Age this was largely a North African invention centered around Cairo. Contrary to some reports at the time (and if we’re going to be honest continuing well into the century) Islam had no prescription against metahumans or the use of superpowers. They were weird, sure, but so long as they were used in righteous cause the ulama weren’t really all that worried about that when they had various kings and sultans to try and keep in line as the Hashemites, Saudis, Pahlavis and various others all brawled for hegemony over the region.

This particular tussle, much like colonial struggles elsewhere in the world, affected the development of supers in West Asia. In general where things were relatively stable independent mystery men could be found; supers openly worked in Damascus and Baghdad through the Pulp Age. Where the situation on the ground was less stable (i.e. most of the region) the supers tended to be more underground; there are tantalizingly brief reports of a costumed avenger or avengers working out of Mecca and Medina in the late Twenties, but these reports also suggest that the supers in question were seen as agents or relics of the recently-deposed Hashemite kings of Hejaz. That would explain why these defenders of the faithful vanish from the record so quickly.

And then there’s the Levant, which is its own absolute mess but at least through most of the Pulp Age was a mundane mess. While the golden age of blowing shit up to get the British out of Mandatory Palestine was well under way by the Thirties, nobody in the Mandate either had or seemed inclined to use supers in their various colonialist or anti-colonialist activities. Which is not to say there were no supers in the area, because there totally were, but for the most part they were itinerants only passing through or staying for short periods while on adventures.

Now Is the Time of Monsters: The End of the Pulp Age
In popular culture the Pulp Age came to an end in the fall of 1939, when German and Soviet forces rolled over the Polish border and World War II officially began. The truth of this is... mixed.

As we touched on briefly at the beginning of this chapter, history rarely has a sharp line that divides one era from another. Even when there is catastrophe, there is fuzziness: things start before the history books say they should, other things linger past their official ending date, etc. While the beginning of the war represents a dividing line, it’s also the culmination of historical forces that started at the end of the previous war, which in turn were the result of historical forces working through the whole of the long 19th century, and so on. These things don’t work on human timescales, and they don’t easily lend themselves to being put into neat boxes.

But history is a narrative first and foremost, and it makes narrative sense to draw these lines. Even though most of the general concepts of the Pulp Age would continue through the coming war, and indeed many of its characters would survive the conflict into the century ahead, 1939 is a good enough place to draw the line and say that this marks the end of an age. In the final years of the Pulp Age we can see the shape of things to come; what follows the storm will be different from what came before, though not in unexpected ways.

Militarizing the Super
It began with small things. That’s how it usually does.

The powers that be weren’t immediately happy with the concept of the superhero for a lot of reasons, but most of those reasons could be boiled down into one overriding thought: supers made them look foolish. For the majority of the Twenties and Thirties any active super was technically a vigilante openly flouting the law and authority. This – understandably – didn’t make anybody in authority very happy. The general response of authorities to this brave new phenomenon was to treat them as criminals just as bad as the people they were going after. “Arrest them all, God or the judge will acquit his own” was the philosophy of the time, and many would-be mystery men ended up imprisoned because they thought the cops would be more grateful than they actually were.

This changed a little in the back half of the Thirties, and it was Doc Savage’s fault. Doc was the most publicly straitlaced super in the entire country, certainly one of its most popular heroes, so it made perfect sense that he sought out and was given special Federal law enforcement powers by the Department of Justice in 1935. The deputizing of Doc Savage was half sincere (on Doc’s part) and two-thirds cynical stunt (on J. Edgar Hoover’s part) but it was also a tipping point. For the first time the powers that be looked at the emerging super community and saw something that could be useful. At first this was confined to major cities, places that already had a super or three operating in the area, and limited to cutting deals not terribly similar to the one the Feds cut with Doc. Arrest authority, limited immunity to charges for things happening in pursuit; this was all flimsy as hell, nowhere near the level of protection given to incompetent deputy sheriffs, and one good legal case would send the entire edifice crashing down. But this was still just enough to keep things going.

The Mystery Corps
The big thing about Doc becoming a deputy agent was that Doc was public. The whole dog and pony show had been recorded for the media, and they made a great deal of noise about it all. Which was the point after all; the government wanted the world to know that (sometimes) Doc Savage was their man.

But Doc wasn’t the only one. By the mid-Thirties governments around the world were comfortable with the idea that supers were more useful inside the tent than outside it... but they might be even more useful if that relationship wasn’t known.

As the world got darker, governments started looking for people capable of working in the shadows and the mystery men were right there. Connections were made, deals were cut. The general public didn’t know (and would remain unaware for decades) that supers lhad been quietly sworn into government service. The brand new “Mystery Corps” wasn’t a superteam in the traditional sense: there were no group meetings, no coordination, no headquarters. But it was the first glimpse of something new, a new way to approach the problems faced by the people who ran the world.

For the most part the members of the Mystery Corps kept up their usual rounds as supers, remaining elusive to the press and antagonistic to the cops on the streets. Despite this, the majority of the cases they worked were on behalf of federal law enforcement or (increasingly) intelligence agencies.

Intelligence agencies – usually military intelligence, as civilian-guided agencies didn’t take off until the war was in full swing – were the first government offices to reap the full benefits of having supers on call. Mystery men made for excellent spies; they were remarkably good at keeping cover, capable of learning all sorts of secrets and also could extract themselves with minimal trouble when the job was done. In many ways the Mystery Corps and others like them were continuing to play the super game but this proved to be beneficial. No one government had a monopoly on hiring mystery men after all and fighting fire with fire is a time-honored tradition. As soon as the Mystery Corps started operating in 1937 others around the world began their own versions. Third parties, usually mercenary supervillains of one stripe or another like the Hotel Continental, also started offering their services as the world grew increasingly dark.

These quiet wars between mystery men would end up shaping the world of espionage in unexpected ways, especially as the battles slid in directions that nobody would’ve expected when all this started. (For an example, refer to sidebar The Archaeology Wars.) But all of this was ongoing under the surface; while mystery men warred against each other in covert battlefields the rest of the Pulp Age seemingly went on without notice.

“You’re here to sing and dance!”
The first supers that we can consider truly military and not covert agents hired or deputized by the government were enlisted as symbols. Every military ever has known the value of symbols, from Roman aquilae to battle flags to Lord Kitchner’s magnificent mustache bristling as it demands that you, yes you join the British Army. A symbol that can not just stand there and exist but also bench-press a car, defy bullets, read minds or cold-cock a charging elephant is perhaps even more valuable.

It was the Soviet Union that first put together a team of military supers for propaganda purposes. The USSR hadn’t been any more immune to the Event and the rise of supers than any other part of the planet, and while the number of visible mystery men was understandably quite low, people with powers were happening there as well. Ever since her first appearance in 1930 the Red Guardian, the Union’s first superhero, had argued time and again that these “New Soviet men” needed to be gathered, studied and above all else given guidance, so they could aid the revolutionary vanguard in developing communism. Due to the passion of her arguments, Red Guardian spent a fair amount of time on the periphery of Soviet power, but likely due to a combination of her powers and her bulletproof popularity with the people she never appeared on any purge list.

In the end, presumably because he’d finally gotten fed up with Red Guardian but didn’t feel secure enough to shoot her or send her into exile or a gulag, Stalin gave in and allowed the Red Army to form the Revolutionary Heroes Brigade (Geroiceskaja Revoljucionnaia Brigada or GRB) in 1933. The GRB was not large by any stretch – only four metahumans and another six super normals were part of it at its founding – but it was the first government-operated superteam in history. It was also, strictly speaking, only a propaganda outfit. The GRB had a modest budget for metahuman research purposes, and a dedicated filmography team to record things, but they were not under any circumstances allowed to interfere with the workings of Soviet justice. “You exist to remind the world that the Soviet is no less civilized than they are,” Stalin is reported to have said to Red Guardian when laying out the GRB’s formation. “Look good for the cameras, and stay out of the people’s way.”

The reveal of the GRB would result in a few things happening outside the Soviet Union, like Doc Savage becoming a part-time government agent or the induction of popular supers like the Torch of Liberty into the military as spokesmen, but while flashy these propaganda efforts weren’t very large or well-supported. Even the GRB, which in 1934 was one of the largest superteams on Earth-1, was considered an afterthought by the Soviet government. The Mystery Corps and similar projects worldwide proved to be somewhat useful, but the full potential of what metahumans could do as tactical or strategic assets had yet to be seen.

Dawn of the Super-Soldier
The fascist nations were – as they often were for many vile and authoritarian things – the vanguard for creating purely military super units. The Japanese military government had been quietly keeping an eye out for more Japanese citizens with paranormal powers in the vein of Ichiro Watanabe’s ever since the First Activation, and when the Nazis came to power in the Thirties they also were on the lookout for metahumans and super normals who were (or could be made) politically reliable. By 1935 both regimes had acquired a small collection of metahumans (about five each) with designs towards crafting support units around this inner core of superpower.

In 1936 the Axis governments unveiled their new toys. Germany went first, taking advantage of the Olympic Games in Berlin to show off the Ubermenschen for the first time. In a quick followup (not wanting to be completely overshadowed), Mussolini traveled to Berlin accompanied by his Praetorian Guard, leading to a historic moment where the leaders of both superteams stared each other down as Hitler and Mussolini smiled for the cameras.

The propaganda value in these teams was obvious and immediate; while the rest of the world had more supers per capita, the Axis had their supers locked down and loyal. Which was true enough, at least at the time. Still, there was a key difference between the two fascist teams that wasn’t immediately recognized. Mussolini’s Praetorians were strictly about propaganda and personal protection; they existed to look good for cameras and defend the dictator from assassins. In this they weren’t all that different from the GRB and other propaganda efforts.

The Ubermenschen on the other hand were a paramilitary unit. Once the initial core metahumans had been located, their existence was handed over to Heinrich Himmer, commander of the SS, consistently one of the top five people in the Nazi regime, occultist nutjob and a man whose tentacles seem to be everywhere in the late Pulp Age. The whole idea of people with strange and uncanny powers was like catnip to a man like Himmler, and once his power was secure he put a lot of energy into cultivating metahumans whenever he possibly could. Giving them the same military training as regular SS units transformed the Ubermenschen into something new and terrible.

Intelligence analysts outside the Axis sphere saw the potential for what the Ubermenschen could do given superpowers and military training, and flags were raised. The seeds for what would become the Los Angeles Project in the US were planted almost as soon as the first newsreels of Axis supers posing for Olympic cameras hit the coastline. But operations like the Los Angeles Project were slow to take off: it was still 1936, and while Hitler was a worrying prospect the world (or at least the bits the great powers cared about) was still largely at peace. While the new Axis superteams were intimidating they were (so far as anybody knew) still mostly for propaganda purposes. No one had any real idea of what they were capable of in actual combat; it was still possible that they might prove to be duds.

SIDEBOX: Making Metas The Unethical Way
As governments became invested in the idea of having their own metahumans, there was a deep and abiding interest in figuring out how to make metas from scratch. Initial scientific studies indicated that some sort of catalyst was required, but what that catalyst was seemed to vary from meta to meta. The closest anybody got to a unified activation scheme in the Pulp Age was a vague theory of “hormones” being responsible, though how and why this worked was anybody’s guess.

This hypothesis resulted in the infamous “training camps” developed by the fascist nations, which would later be co-opted by the Soviets and the West during the war, designed to churn out as many metahumans as possible by exposing “likely candidates” to extreme physical stress until they either broke or gained powers. This would be the norm for activation attempts in Germany and the Soviet Union; when the US got their hands on the program they “civilized” it by resorting to direct injections of synthetic hormones to unhealthy levels.

To be as clear as possible, this was a horrible method for creating new metahumans. Not only was it a scheme designed for packaged and concentrated cruelty, it didn’t even work most of the time. Some metahumans would be created through the stress method but by and large this was because the training camps cycled large numbers of people through them constantly, ensuring that you’d get one activation per x number of people. Many of the “trainees” were left mentally or physically shattered, rendering them useless for actual duty on top of that.

And of course, let’s not forget that in many cases these camps had “test subjects” for their methods who went in and never came out again.

Perhaps the most infamous moment for these training camps came in 1938, when a pair of German communists infiltrated the Ubermenschen’s main testing and recruitment site outside Ingolstadt. The duo successfully came out the other side of the training with superpowers, which they then used to demolish the site and escape to the Soviet Union. The reports and records the pair brought with them were used to establish GRB training centers during the runup to the war.

SIDEBOX: The Archaeology Wars
The covert super conflicts of the late Pulp Age, when they weren’t just espionage with masks and capes, often circled around things of power. Usually these things were very old and had some religious significance, based on what the (largely Western) magical community of the time believed. To make a very long and confusing story short, artifacts of historical or legendary note, particularly those known in Jewish or Christian folklore, were thought to be extremely powerful and imbued with the might of capital-G God. This set off multiple waves of adventurers scouring West Asia and North Africa looking for these artifacts, drawing all sorts of rivals, opportunists etc. in their wake and making life difficult for the people who actually lived there.

This all reached a fever pitch in the mid-Thirties after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Heinrich Himmler used his newfound power in government to send large teams of heavily-armed graverobbers into West Asia to find objects of supreme power like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Eye of Ra and other such sundries. This in turn aroused the interest of parties in America and Britain, many of whom didn’t believe in this guff but had a vested interest in the Nazis not getting lucky. Neither country sent the kind of quasi-armies Himmler liked to throw around, instead sending mystery men or solo adventurers off to disrupt Nazi efforts, if not actually find and retrieve the objects first.

The Archaeology Wars ran from 1935 all the way up into the first years of World War II, when Himmler’s attention was forcibly pulled back to the war effort and his “archaeologists” were sent to invade Poland and/or France, depending. How much was actually found or recovered during the conflict is unknown, but former American adventurer Dr. Henry Jones Jr. liked to boast that “there was nothing Hitler found that I couldn’t take away.”

Stop The Presses
While the German and Italian super-soldiers posed for the cameras in Berlin, Japan’s metahuman soldiers were busy. The Japanese super-soldiers were funneled into a brand-new specialist unit of the army dubbed Unit 81, nominally attached to the Kemeptai but in essence its own command. Like other government-branded supers Unit 81 had their propaganda value and initially were seen as ceremonial guards for ministers and high-ranking military commanders (often both, given the nature of the Japanese government at the time). However, the supers of Unit 81 had undergone the absolute best training that Japan could provide; in terms of actual skill the six supers of Unit 81 were better-off than any of the Ubermenschen, much less the Praetorians.

The Japanese government, recognizing that propaganda can be found in other ways than just having supers demonstrate their powers, and unwilling to have wasted all that training, assigned Unit 81 a new task. In the fall of 1937 the unit was given orders with great pomp and circumstance: they were to travel to China and reinforce the Central China Area Army as it advanced on the Republic’s capital city Nanjing.

The full tale of the Nanjing Massacre is far, far beyond the scope of this document to relate. Other scholars have done a much more thorough and damning job of describing what happened over the four months the Japanese army spent destroying the city and its people. For our story, the important part is that Unit 81 participated in the massacre. The overall effect of the IJA’s superteam wasn’t very large, a ladleful in a swimming pool of nightmares, but it was visible. Which was the point of the exercise: like we said above, propaganda can be found in other ways. Unit 81’s run through Nanjing was probably the best-documented part of the entire campaign, and the choicest excerpts of Japanese super-soldiers tearing through KMT soldiers and Nanjing’s local supers were widely distributed in order to remind people of the might of the Japanese Empire.

Not wanting to be left out, the Nazis would deploy the Ubermenschen as a proper military unit for the first time in 1938. The German super-soldiers were some of the first to enter Austria after the coup. While there was no fighting – the seizure of power was fast enough and the idea of German unification popular enough to prevent real resistance – the sight of the Ubermenschen in their stylized uniforms marching alongside the Wehrmacht through the streets of Vienna was a much more intimidating sight than their previous propaganda appearances. Later in the year they would make an appearance in the annexation of Ruritania and the Sudetenland.

The Ubermenschen’s actions during the Ruritania crisis are more important overall to the way events developed, if we’re going to be honest. Their presence during the Anschluss was more menacing than they had been two years prior, but still fell more or less into the same propaganda role as had their appearance at the Berlin Games and in newsreels afterwards. In Ruritania they were allowed to fight. Or “fight,” as the case may be. The Ubermenschen were given the opportunity to threaten a few Ruritanian border forts and this resulted in some very impressive property damage and terrified opposition soldiers. Which again, was the point: German newsreels made a lot of hay out of shots of Ubermenschen raining lightning down on (empty) Ruritanian bunkers and tossing armored cars around like balls in the context of a military operation.

Footage of the Ubermenschen in Ruritania and Unit 81 in China got the attention of, well, everybody. Metahumans, while rarer than hen’s teeth, had proven themselves to be terrifying combat units. Facing the prospect of a new arms race, governments began to quietly build up their own metahuman screening and training regimens. President Roosevelt authorized the Army to start headhunting volunteers for metahuman activation experiments (see sidebox Making Metas The Unethical Way) in the fall of 1938. Similar crash programs were put into place in the UK and France. While the famous programs like the Los Angeles Project wouldn’t begin until the war was well and truly on, these early projects illustrate exactly how seriously the world was taking the potential threat of super-soldiers.

The Chimes At Midnight
By 1939 many of the superscientists who had made the 1934 World’s Fair a strange marvel of unlimited progress had seemingly faded into the background. Some had gone to ground entirely, and others had been quietly recruited by serious men in dark suits to begin work on things their governments would need when “events in Europe” took a turn for the worst. No small number of mystery men also seemingly vanished from public eye by 1939; the Lobster, one of the original mystery men on the East Coast, dropped completely off the grid by 1937 and it wasn’t until 2001 that his remains were found in a shattered Austrian castle. The European mystic community found itself sharply divided between those who wanted to involve themselves in the mounting troubles and those who wanted to remain hermits, and those who wanted to involve themselves were divided between which faction they wished to support.

The world remained more colorful than the one that existed before the Event, but those colors were cast in a darker, more sinister hue than they had been at the beginning of the Pulp Age. When Nazi forces entered Prague in the spring of 1939, with the Ubermenschen at the front of the formation, everybody knew the war was just about at hand. It was only a question of when.

On the first day of September, 1939, the Wehrmacht crossed the border into Poland. Two weeks later the Red Army joined in from the east.

What happened next was history, and death.