Elliot S! Maggin: SWAT! and the Seduction of the Innocent

So I came across this article at the always excellent Superman through the ages website about Elliot S! Maggin and the work he was planning on doing for Awesome. Maggin was a longtime Superman writer in the 1970s, who went on to write several influential Superman novels. He also happened to be good friends with Awesome Publisher Jeph Loeb, who convinced him to come and do some work for the company.

Maggin had the idea of playing on the ideas Moore had established in Supreme, especially in the 1950s. He proposed a 48-page one-shot called Seduction of the Innocent:

"It's Supreme and Fighting American and a lot of Alan Moore characters like Professor Night and the Fisherman and what was going on in the real world at that time. A major character is President Eisenhower. Some other minor characters are Bill Gaines, Jack Kirby, and [Red-baiting U.S. Senator] Joe McCarthy. It involves the Army-McCarthy hearings. I can't tell you what the story is about, but what it is really about is people with specific agendas imposing them upon the rest of the world in order to advance their own careers."

In Seduction of the Innocent, Maggin proposed that Supreme and the Fighting American find themselves the subjects of Congressional hearings, much as comic books were investigated in the real world by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The comic, of course, takes its name from the book of the same name, written by Dr. Frederick Wertham in the early '50s. Wertham's book purported to expose sexual overtones hidden in the comics of the day and claimed comics could and did cause children to become juvenile delinquents. The book led to Senator Kefauver's hearings, and it was these hearings that led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, which set strict and often abusrd guidelines about what was and was not acceptable content for comics, which Moore's Swamp Thing was one of the first DC comics to take off of their cover.

"[Kefauver] was the guy that caused a lot of my friends to spend about ten years among the walking wounded.  Kefauver brought up this comic thing in order to get the [Democratic Party's] Vice Presidential nomination in '56, and this was a major tool in what he perceived to be his elevation in the world," Maggin says. "The way to there was to screw up the careers of a lot of guys.  And in the course of doing that, these [politicians] don't know what they are doing.  They don't know what they're playing with, the lives they're screwing around with." 

Maggin loved what Moore was doing in recreating a history for the Awesome heroes.

"A friend of mine who is a hot writer now with a larger company is saying things like, I wish this company wouldn't behave as if it didn't have a history.  And what Awesome is doing is creating their history.  They're doing it retroactively every day.  They're unloading the backstory.  And giving the public a chance to noodle around with history." 

Maggin also was working on a series called SWAT! which got a preview in the back of Fighting American: Rules of the Game #2. It's essentially Kickass before Kickass. Here's how Maggin explained it:

"Bruce Wayne without the fortune.  It's about the idea that you can be a superhero by training hard and being smart and going to the hardware store and buying lots of cool, cheap stuff.  It was created by Dan Fraga. He did a five-page promo on the idea and I said, geez, this could be really good.  And Dan said, I want to work with a writer.  So I said, okay, I can do that.

"It's about this 14 year old kid who has this mad crush on the head cheerleader, who is a head taller than he is, and his SAT scores are through the roof.  And she's got this notion that she is in the world to do good in it.  And that's what it is, these two kids that have decided that they are going to save the world.  Or at least their little corner of it.  And they do some good stuff.  They never get screwed up, because their hearts are pure.  There's nothing wrong with them.  They're like the Nineties' Billy Batson."

You can read the promo below. Nothing came of SWAT! or Seduction of the Innocent, as they were swallowed up in the Awesome financial crisis of early 1998.