Word: heros
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...applied it to drama in his 1966 play, It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman. Though the show flopped on Broadway--folding after 129 performances--it made stage history of a kind. This was the first time a comic book hero was ever adapted to the stage, and treated as a serious work...
Superman pulls out of his funk at the end of the show of course; his overwhelming desire to do good triumphs in the face of Freudian psychoanalysis. During a song called "Pow! Bam! Zonk!" Superman trounces his foes, returns as Metropolis's hero, and wins the love of Lois Lane--who has been drooling after him throughout the entire show...
THERE IS desperation in this compact novel, and madness too. Tom McGuane is 38 years old now--Panama lunges and spouts like Hero's engine and reads as if the author does not intend to see 40. Chester (Chet) Hunnicut Pomeroy is the scion of an old Key West shipbuilding family, but Chet has rejected all that for fleeting fame in the three-chord world of rock and roll. Or something larger than that: A Mick Jagger-like figure with an equal part of Maharaji Ji and Keith Richard's bad teeth thrown in, he somehow got elevated into...
...have accomplished daring deeds of valor against the enmity of fiends during his lifetime." Worthy sentiments, but that hardly makes the comic Nylon Pindar a fiend. More a shitsucker, in Chet's phrase, more Runyonesque. The Caribbean syndicalist novel is not an art form of the future; after all, Hero's engine never really ran anything; it just went around in circles...
...what follows. Like every other so-called modern western, this one features a trusty old ranch hand (nicely played by Rich ard Farnsworth) who dies to symbolize the passing of the Old West. Like every old-fashioned western, Horseman slowly but surely sends its taciturn heroine into the macho hero's arms. Clark's climax, a plain old Shootout, is surprising only because it is capped by an optimistic denouement that contradicts everything that has come before...