“Most of these rationales of origin depend, to some extent, on history; they index the advent of Superman, in mid-1938, to various intellectual, social, and economic trends of the Depression years, to the influence or aura of contemporary celebrities and authors, to the structure and demands of magazine publishing and distribution, et cetera. To suit my purpose here, I might construct a similar etiology of the superhero costume, making due reference, say, to professional-wrestling and circus attire of the early twentieth century, to the boots-cloak-and-tights ensembles worn by swashbucklers and cavaliers in stage plays and Hollywood films, to contemporary men’s athletic wear, with its unitard construction and belted trunks, to the designs of Alex Raymond and Hal Foster and the amazing pulp-magazine cover artist Frank R. Paul. I could cite the influence of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne aesthetics, with their roots in fantasies of power, speed, and flight, or posit the costume as a kind of fashion alter ego of the heavy, boxy profile of men’s clothing at the time. When in fact the point of origin is not a date or a theory or a conjunction of cultural trends but a story, the intersection of a wish and the tip of a pencil.

Now the time has come to propose, or confront, a fundamental truth: like the being who wears it, the superhero costume is, by definition, an impossible object. It cannot exist.”

Michael Chabon plays a game with the notion of the superhero’s costume.

…”the intersection of a wish and the tip of a pencil” is a nice phrase. I want to say that most of this is deadpan comedy, a pile of sensible observation encased like a superhero’s body in a seamless unitard of parody. But I may have missed the point, in my endless search for the smartarse my kind of Australian always quietly adores. Our kind of Superman, really. (I first wrote ‘lyotard’ instead of ‘unitard’, which Google reveals as an unintentional joke).

Chabon himself is a fiction writer, who wrote The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. 1988 Wonder Boys (1995), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay2000, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road, both in 2007. He wrote a chunk of the movie Spiderman 2 – a heroic amount given the individualistic Hollywood’s cult of the committee.

Researching him all the way to Wikipedia, I found this note about the craft of the novelist:

“Binelli: There’s this sort of romantic image of writers living on the edge, self-destructive lives. You’ve got this very stable home life –

Chabon: But I think that’s a competing model that goes back into the history of art. You do have that romantic Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Lord Byron model that’s continually being updated and reinvented, going through Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, whatever. But you also have a much more quiet but very present model of the artist as family man. Especially when it comes to novel writing. The novel is a bourgeois art form. It always has been. It was invented to be read by educated, sort of upper-middle-class people from the very beginning, and often it has dealt with the bourgeoisie as its subject matter — questions of home and family relations. It’s often been a very domestic art form. There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they’re big, and they have a lot of words in them.

Binelli: Which is harder to manage when you’re hung over.

Chabon: Yeah. And the best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life. I have to get my thousand words every day. But also, that’s my background. I grew up in the suburbs, very middle-class. That’s what I am, where I come from, what I’m comfortable being.

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