Gil Kane and Norman Podhoretz By Jeet Heer National Post (January 8, 2004). America's junk culture can be found in superhero comic books, its high culture in magazines such as The New Yorker or Commentary. Yet comics and intellectual journals are often created by remarkably similar people. This is the story of two boys, childhood friends, whose pursuit of cultural achievement took them down very different paths. Eli Katz was born in Latvia in 1927 and immigrated with his family to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1930. Norman Podhoretz was born into this Jewish immigrant neighbourhood that year. Like many immigrant kids, the two friends became Americanized through pop culture. Immersed in a pulp environment, Katz and Podhoretz decided to break into the burgeoning comic-book industry in the early 1940s. This was only a few years after two other immigrant Jewish boys (Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel) made it big with Superman. Katz had some skill as an artist, while Podhoretz dreamed of being a writer. As Katz recalled, "I got a job doing something called Night Hawk. Finally, I wanted to write it and [the publisher] said, 'All right, give me some scripts.' So I went to Norman Podhoretz, and we worked out scripts ... The money was too unsteady though, so he devoted himself to his studies and I did some additional penciling there." Podhoretz's devotion to his studies quickly brought benefits. In the late 1940s, he was a star student at Columbia, and the favourite student of Lionel Trilling, then renowned as perhaps the subtlest literary critic in the American academy. After Columbia, Podhoretz did graduate work at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, that fierce prophet of the saving power of English literature who was easily both the most loved and hated of all modern critics. With the formidable mentoring of Trilling and Leavis, Podhoretz was launched as a writer, and was by the mid 1950s writing reviews for prestigious magazines: The New Yorker, Commentary, Partisan Review. Podhoretz was especially proud to be accepted as a New York intellectual, in influential coterie that included Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt and Ralph Ellison. By 1960, at the age of 30, he was named editor of Commentary. Unlike Podhoretz, Katz wasn't much of a student. He dropped out of high school to become a full-time comic-book artist at age 16. By the late 1940s, he was drawing Hopalong Cassidy and Rex the Wonder Dog. As a comic artist, Katz changed his name to Gil Kane. Taking on anglicized names was a common practice not only in Hollywood and Broadway but also in the comic-book industry. For example, Jack Kirby, the co-creator of Captain America and X-Men, was born Jacob Kurtzberg. As Kane's friend and fellow cartoonist Howard Chaykin noted, "Eli Katz, Brooklyn street kid, all attitude and rough edges, reinvented himself as Gil Kane, a dapper, beautifully tailored urbane gent ... but under the veneer of Connecticut civilization, there remained the combative and angry Brownsville Jew he'd always been." Podhoretz never changed his name, but he too experienced what he called the "brutal bargain" of assimilation. In order to succeed in academia and the literary world, he felt he had to become a "facsimile WASP" and betray his family and boyhood friends. Under the tutelage of a high school teacher who called him a "filthy little slum child," Podhoretz spent long hours learning proper table manners. By the early 1960s, both Kane and Podhoretz were settled in their careers. In anticipation of the decade to come, Podhoretz started making Commentary a voice for the left, to widespread praise. Kane at this time was popular among comic-book fans for his dynamic renditions of The Atom and Green Lantern. The two men were not as wide apart as they might seem. Podhoretz was an intellectual, but he still remained interested in popular culture. Imitating his intellectual heroes George Orwell and Robert Warshow, he wrote about soap operas and opened the pages of Commentary to discussions of cartooning. Dissatisfied with his lack of education, Kane started reading the New York intellectuals who had taken Podhoretz under their wings. As Kane told an interviewer, "I read all of Alfred Kazin, all of Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe ... It gave me a great sense of ... camaraderie, but at the same time, it let me feel I was really at the bottom of the barrel with these guys. I mean, these guys weren't geniuses, but they were so brilliant." Other comic-book artists were in awe of Kane's wide reading and "analytical" skills. Despite their very different careers, Podhoretz and Kane were both following common patterns of their generation. Like so many other immigrant Jews, they were benefiting from the opening up of American culture that started in the 1920s and accelerated after the Second World War. This allowed unprecedented upward mobility to ethnic groups that had previously been marginalized. The meritocratic dream of "a career open to talent" was, at least for those who could pass as white, becoming a partial reality. The cultural industries in particular became open to outsiders, whether they were intellectuals or cartoonists. Whatever differences they had, Podhoretz and Kane were both ambitious and upwardly mobile. Having made the difficult journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan, they were ready to enjoy the full blessings of American success. Entering into middle age, Kane and Podhoretz grew restless and attempted to win greater fame by creating more ambitious works. Podhoretz published the first volume of his autobiography Making It in 1967 when he was only 37. He described it as "a frank, Mailer-like bid for literary distinction, fame and money all in one package." This candid account of his literary rise didn't hide the ambition and drive that took him from a Brooklyn slum into literary Manhattan. Meanwhile, Kane, unhappy with doing comic books for children on cheap newsprint for schlocky publishers, tried to break out with an adult-oriented graphic novel, His Name Is ... Savage in 1968. This illustrated spy thriller was published as a black-and-white magazine aimed at an adult audience -- a cartooning format that had never really succeeded in North America. In retrospect, both Kane and Podhoretz were ahead of their time and suffered the cruel fate of pioneers. In its naked celebration of worldly success, Making It anticipated the yuppie ethos of the 1980s. Yet the book was tonally inappropriate for the hippie- dippy year it was published, and was harshly reviewed. As Mailer noted with typical understatement, "Just about everyone in the Establishment ... [was] scandalized, shocked, livid, revolted, appalled, disheartened and enraged" by Making It. (This reaction was unfair, since the book is actually a minor classic in American autobiography.) Kane's Savage was an attempt to break out of the comic-book ghetto by marketing to a mature audience. Although the story was pulpy, in the fashion of a James Bond thriller, Savage did try to reach an audience outside of adolescent superhero fans. In some ways, it anticipated such future graphic novels of the 1980s as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, both of which successfully crossed over into the mass market. Unfortunately, Savage was sabotaged by mainstream comics publishers, who used the influence of the comics code authority to prevent it from being widely distributed. Only 20% of the copies printed made it to the newsstand. Kane would make further attempts to free himself from the world of comic books, notably the paperback graphic novel Blackmark (1968) and the comic strip Star Hawks (1976). Yet none of these efforts gained him the freedom he sought. After their failures of the late 1960s and 1970s, Podhoretz and Kane both retreated to earlier positions. Kane returned to doing superhero comic books like Spider-Man; Podhoretz became increasingly hostile to the New Left and became America's leading neo-conservative intellectual. He took Commentary back into the politics of the 1950s with a paranoid fear of international communism and an unremitting opposition to feminism, gay rights and black power. A spirit of recrimination and besieged resentment dominated the magazine and Podhoretz's prose. Even in his years of retreat, Kane still remained interested in high culture. He tried to work the language of George Bernard Shaw into Captain Action. In the late 1980s, he did an ambitious comic-book retelling of Wagner's Ring cycle. Podhoretz, for all his hostility to popular culture, remained influenced by the pulp novels of his youth. In melodramatic essays he portrayed Leonid Brezhnev's decrepit Soviet Union as a superpower on the verge of global conquest. More recently, he has called upon the United States to wage a "world war" on Islamic fundamentalism, and overthrow the governments of "Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority." Clearly this is someone who lives in a comic bookish fantasy world. Podhoretz took ideas seriously enough to have fierce breaks with friends, even publishing an entire volume titled Ex-Friends devoted to his numerous quarrels with such prominent intellectuals as Allen Ginsberg, Mailer and Arendt. There is a great sadness to the second half of their lives. In addition to losing friends, Podhoretz also lost readers. As a liberal magazine, Commentary had a circulation of more than 100,000; as a neo-conservative journal, its circulation hovered below 30,000. No longer publishing the best thinkers, Commentary has become increasingly a retirement home for querulous and wheezy neo-cons. During the period of Commentary's decline, Kane had to contend with debts incurred during the break-up of his first marriage. In the last decade of his life he struggled with cancer; he died on Feb. 3, 2000. He received a long obituary in The New York Times. In his last years, Kane lived to see a revival of interest in his work, as his early superhero work was reprinted by DC comics, an artistic resurrection that continues to this day. Fantagraphics Books has also re-issued Savage. Podhoretz is still going strong, and his early work is also being brought back into print: This month the Free Press will issue The Norman Podhoretz Reader, a substantial survey of his career. When this new book is released, Podhoretz will have occasion to look back on his long writing life and wonder at how things have changed since he and the young Gil Kane started off making comic books together.