Gladiator

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Alaska

I think I’m going to have to find a copy and read this:

On the shelf of Hollis Mason — the original Nite Owl, turned car mechanic — are three books: his memoirs, Under the Hood; Automobile Maintenance; and Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel, Gladiator, which many argue is the original inspiration for Superman.

…

Reading Gladiator now, as someone who takes Superman for granted, is an almost disorienting experience; it’s almost as if Siegel and Shuster took Wylie’s work and surgically removed, even inverted, all of its dark, lost generation irony.

t…he tone of Wylie’s novel couldn’t be further from a four-color comic book. When Danner joins the French Foreign Legion at the start of the Great War — which certainly sounds romantic, doesn’t it? — he ends up killing German soldiers. Many, many German soldiers. When his friend dies in an artillery barrage that he survives, he goes into a berserk rage and tears apart his enemies with his bare hands. It feels like digging his hands into warm cow manure.

–Isegoria, Gladiator

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One Response to Gladiator

  1. freddyboomboom says:
    October 4, 2015 at 7:38 pm

    It’s on Project Gutenberg as an ebook.

    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42914

    Free, even.

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