Should you have ever had the occasion to ponder Clark Kent and Lois Lane taking up an S&M fetish or an abiding interest in the history of the comics, you will want to take a look at Craig Yoe’s new book Secret Identity from Abrams ComicArts. Yoe has unearthed Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s artwork for the 1950’s, printed in a Queens basement, kink magazine Nights of Terror.

While Shuster’s name did not appear anywhere in the magazine, fans of the early Superman comics will immediately recognize his work and some familiar faces in not-so-familiar situations. My favorites are a Jimmy Olson look-a-like turning a double of Lois Lane’s sister Lucy on to weed and a tied-up-to-a-pole Clark Kent doppelganger, being whipped by Lois’ twin in a maid’s uniform while a cigarette-smoking dominatrix looks on.

If you haven’t had time to read Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow or David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, Yoe’s twenty-five page introductory essay provides a well-written nickel tour of Shuster’s and partner Jerry Stein’s rise to fame and their later troubles with DC over the copyright to Superman and satisfyingly sets the artist’s later work firmly into the context of the 1950s war on comics and pornography where Nights of Terror became the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers trial, a First Amendment, Supreme Court case and an exhibit in the Kefauver hearings.

Yoe devotes a section to the artwork for each of the sixteen issues of Nights of Terror as well as two additional Shuster illustrated editions from the publisher entitled Hollywood Detective and Rod Rule depicting kink varying from humorous to bent featuring whips, knives, electricity and a truly inventive scene depicting a man menacing a woman with a cactus.

Secret Identity will scare away the recession blues in no time. Oh, and skip the one-page introduction by master of the obvious Stan Lee, it will only impede your getting to the good stuff.

Draper, a character of Cheeveresque proportions: successful—though pricked by the foreshadowing of change in the advertising business, mercurial, unhappily married and a denizen of John Cheever’s own Ossining, New York, silently searching—through his philandering—for the meaning of his unhappiness. And O’Hara: a poet who wrote unashamedly—if not exuberantly—of his inability to merge the diversity of his personality into a definition of happiness.  And who, in 1962, was becoming an increasingly important curator at the Museum of Modern Art —appear to be, as the man Draper encounters reading O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency in that Manhattan bar suggests, an unlikely pair.

Matthew Weiner, the executive producer and creator of Mad Men and his group of writers managed to engage us in the unexpected, yet almost profound possibilities of this pairing in the first episode of the show’s second season. Mad Men is, as it has been extensively noted, a work of remarkable verisimilitude— far beyond the traditional historical, social and visual plot cues usually found in the realm of television drama and in many ways nearly erasing the fragile line between the representation of reality and the reality of the era itself—in its depiction of the beginning of the cultural shift in the early 1960’s away from the expectations of the Silent Generation—partially represented by Don Draper, and a cohort to which Frank O’Hara ostensibly belonged—to those of the following generation of Baby Boomers.

The complications of that transition came at a great psychological cost to the members of Draper’s generation when the dust had settled, as noted by Calvin Trillin in Remembering Denny, a memoir of his friendship with Denny Hansen, a college classmate of Trillin’s who became an athletic and academic hero at Yale whose 1957 college graduation was covered in Life, and who in 1991, under what may have been the weight of unrealized expectations, committed suicide:

What the Sequoia [Hansen’s high school] had come to
realize, looking back from the perspective or their early forties.
was that the uncomplicated society they had been prepared for
had changed so much that where they fit into it had turned out
to be painted in those complicated shades of gray. That’s a
common feeling among people my age, I think, whatever they
write on surveys asking them about satisfaction—that somehow
the rules got changed in the middle of the game. What made
it all the more difficult for some of them was that the rules we
were handed had been so simple and clear and presumably
not subject to argument or even examination.

Through O’Hara, Don Draper finds an avenue through which he can begin to examine the value of those rules of assumed success that by the virtue of the character’s history should not have been available or applied to him due to the circumstances of his birth. The child of a prostitute and an unsuccessful farmer turned coal-miner, he has stepped into his upper middle class life through the sheer force of his intelligence and will and through a quickly-decided-upon deception in the assumption of his dead commander’s identity in Korea. Don’s malaise is effectively deconstructed, through the poem and the visual elements of this last scene: Don, after obligingly fulfilling his fatherly expectations in asking his daughter to show him what she has learned in ballet class, retreats to his study. The house is quiet. He is sitting at his desk with a 1957 Grove Press edition of Mediations in an Emergency held in the lamplight, a tumbler of whiskey in the foreground, in voiceover, he begins to read section four (the last), of the poem “Mayakovsky”:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Here Don writes an inscription on the title page of the book: “Made me think of you. –D”. He slides the book into an envelope and walks his dog to the mailbox, continuing with the voiceover:

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

Don drops the book into the mail, pauses and then turns and walks back to his house:

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps, I am myself again.

Looking closely at the first stanza of section four, the existential problem Don has encountered is artfully illuminated:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern

He has delivered himself to the Promised Land, suburban, affluent with a wife and two children; he has everything that American culture has told him he needs. Ironically, as a leader in the profession of advertising, he is the one telling society that these are things to aspire to and post haste. Having arrived he is now not entirely sure that it means anything. It seems to mean even less in light of the changes that are starting to surface on Madison Avenue and in the culture. He fights the hiring of young copywriters who have a differing opinion in regard to business as usual. One of Don’s extracurricular love-interests in the first season was a woman who lived in the Village, leaning toward that first iteration of the counter-culture, the beatnik. He slowly realizes that she is in love with someone younger, with younger ideas. He falls in love, much to his own surprise with a highly intelligent, powerful woman who also happens to be Jewish. A situation that—had he not already been married—would have presented a problem in relation to his social standing within the world of advertising and polite society.

This stanza also foreshadows Don’s later interlude in Palm Springs with the woman, Joy, whom he meets on a business trip to Los Angeles. Joy wanders from place to place, country to country, with her father and their extended family and friends. “Something about taxes,” is Joy’s explanation for being on the move. Joy also represents something new and modern, and perhaps, something that speaks more to Don’s prior expectations: prosperity and the material comforts that come with it along with a relaxed, or a seemingly more sophisticated view of sexuality unencumbered by a traditional marriage, children and a house in Westchester County.

The first two lines of next stanza, “The country is grey and/brown and white in trees,” may provide Don with the realization that as we move through life, rather than becoming easier, it becomes more complex. And then less fun: “snows and skies of laughter/always diminishing, less funny/not just darker/not just grey.” Perhaps, as O’Hara brilliantly points out, this realization also becomes a way to find one’s self again: “It may be the coldest day of/the year, what does he think of/that? I mean, what do I? And if I do/perhaps I am myself again.”