from ‘Piercing the Fog’ by Wally Brington

Even for a medium that exists to make the unimaginable manifest, the Beacon’s existence as an enduring cultural figure strained credulity. Just one of many heroes created in that spiritually depressed period during and following the American Great Depression, the Beacon faded into obscurity rather quickly following the first set of issues. Created by Herbert Dresden in 1932, the hero was stalwart, stoic, not very talkative, and quick to take decisive and authoritative action against anyone he perceived as a threat to the “eventual reinstatement of the American superiority.” Of course, it’s somewhat unfair to indict these early Beacon stories without a consideration of the sociopolitical climate in which they were written. Siegel and Schuster’s inimitable Superman—often credited as the first true American superhero— was still years away, and the American repository of mythology was running dry. The nation was craving a figure to rally around, a body onto which they could see their own trials and anxieties represented, a hero for an age bereft of hope.

If one of the principle signs of genius is the ability to recognize a lack and fill it, then Dresden would certainly qualify. Rather than dwell on the uncertainty and inequity of that dark time, Dresden looked back to a period of adversity overcome, of evil defeated. The brilliance of this move is apparent—for a nation that emerged afresh from the tangle morass of civil war could certainly again rise from the depths of destitution and lack. In a 1933 interview—when the Beacon’s popularity was rising—Dresden said he intended the character to “ignite the fires of hope under a despondent populous.” It was clear that Dresden has a poetic sense of self-heroics from the beginning, a trait we find common in analogous men of ambition.

One could argue that Dresden indeed forged the template by which other superheroes—most notably Siegel and Schuster’s Superman and the creations of Marvel’s Stan Lee—would be created. In Lee’s stories, the genesis of heroes are centered on pre-existing cultural anxieties about the advancements of science and the mysteries of atomic power. Dresden’s analogue is the growing acumen of American industrialists at the end of the Civil War and during the reformation. The Beacon himself emerges from an industrial accident as a freak of genetics and nature, a man concurrently blessed and cursed with the strangest of physical dispositions. Put simply, the Beacon possessed the ability to absorb all ambient heat energy from the space around him. In a mechanical sense, he was the perfect machine, able to convert ambient energy into work with one hundred percent efficiency. In a world predicated on the power of its emerging class of machines, the Beacon was the perfect specimen.

-a bit from the big pile of The Beacon work I’ve got sitting disheveled on the floor.