The Universe in a Frame: The Domestic Sublime in Adam Strange and Fifties SF‪.‬

For an era that established suburbia, some of the science-fictional popular culture of the 1950s seemed to ignore its existence. The Batman comics, for example, placed the caped crusader in the city or the country, but almost never in between. The city is depicted as rising from the plains, like a mountain chain, or a mirage separate from and above nature, a dream of humanity that lifts from the lowly grasses and trees. Like some vague extension of the Cold War, environments were either urban or pastoral, as if dualistic politics led to an either-or of imaginary settings. Though one can argue visual reasons (to see the city, you need to eliminate the clutter of what's near), suburbia was still often sidestepped to maintain simplistic comprehensive worlds. The new social phenomenon was contained--and thus managed--by being, in a number of cases, ignored. In Adam Strange, for example, the science-fiction series from DC's Mystery In Space that appeared in the late 50s and early 60s, the futuristic city of Ranagar on its Alpha Centauri planet was literally walled in, kept away from the landscape, like the near-spaceship city of Diaspar in Arthur Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956). (2) Its slim towers and spiraling walkways were placed, slab-like, in a desert or field, and thus seemed an attempt to reach the urban exoticism of the future by way of the pastoral ideals of the past--and thus avoid any social present. Such habits relate to the 50s' treatment of the sublime. Scott Bukatman, in his essay "The Artificial Infinite," explores the connections between the nineteenth century's concept of the sublime, or "experiences calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence or lofty emotion by reason of beauty, vastness or grandeur" (Kuhn, "Introduction" 224), and the special effects sequences of SF films. Bukatman argues that "the precise function of science fiction, in many ways, is to create the boundless and infinite stuff of sublime experience, and thus to produce a sense of transcendence beyond human finitudes" (256). Such functions certainly exist in films like Stanley Kubrick's 2001 from 1968 (as Bukatman argues) but also in the comic-book art of Jack Kirby's New Gods with its speed-line exuberance in the early 70s, and the French Philippe Druillet's staggering poster-like double-page spreads, also from the 70s, of architecture and armored creatures that encompass worlds. (3) These examples expand beyond their boundaries, the frame of the film screen or the comic panel--or page--which are broken through by the forward-plunge into the star-gate corridor, by the exploding planets of Kirby's drawings, or by the monuments of decadent detail that exude from Druillet. But the 50s and even the early 60s generally avoided such psychedelic boundary-crashing. Indeed, the frame as a form of containment is encountered often, the managing and limiting of infinite space. In the television series from the 50s, outer space was seen, in Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, through the circular window of the "control deck" with its decorative concentric panels, or, in Rocky Jones: Space Ranger, through the television-like "vizeograph" that substituted for windows at the pilot's station. And in the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet, a simulacrum of the space around the flying saucer was contained inside a glass globe that sat before the pilot's chair. Even in the landmark SF anthologies published then by Ace Books (like Tales of Outer Space [1954] and Adventures on Other Planets [1955]), editor Donald Wollheim felt the need to "package" the stories in an organizing frame that stressed chronology or outward exploration--they were sometimes labeled in the table of contents with phrases like "To the Moon," "On Mars," or "On a world in the 'Bornik' star cluster."