A Gathering of Selves: The Spiritual Journey of the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman

by Alvin Schwartz

“Alvin Schwartz is clearly one of the most amazing people ever to work in—maybe even out of—the nutty field of comic books. Channeling first Superman, then Batman, into an astonishing inner life and an equally astounding outer one, Alvin was living his life as a graphic novel before the term ever existed. Quite fitting for this unique talent and singular human being, who started out writing Fairy Tale Parade and made his four-color exit at stage left with Bizarro!”
—Roy Thomas, author of Stan Lee’s Amazing Marvel Universe and longtime writer and editor at Marvel and DC Comics

For nearly two decades Alvin Schwartz lived a double life, one half of which was spent writing the adventures of Batman and Superman, the other half writing novels and spending time with members of New York’s intellectual society such as Saul Bellow and Jackson Pollack. During this period, his characters had taken on lives of their own, and he realized that his writing of their adventures was more like dictation than creation. He found that personalities can be taken off and on like the suits worn by his superheroes and that the lives of Batman and Superman were melding into his own. The journey of inner awareness that Schwartz undertook at the prompting of the tulpa Thongden (who appeared in his earlier book An Unlikely Prophet) evoked a great sense of metaphysical unrest, which is where this story begins. With the aid of his mentor Thongden, Schwartz is carried beyond the ordinary boundaries of personal identity into an interpersonal consciousness inhabited by a multitude of selves, including the dark figure of Batman.

While in An Unlikely Prophet Schwartz was able to channel the ever-present figure of Superman into a positive voyage of self-discovery, in A Gathering of Selves he uses the raw strength offered by Batman to carry him to the next stage of understanding: What we think of as “self” is but one layer of an onion-like structure of multiple selves that coexist, representing the foundation of the fundamental unity of all being.

ALVIN SCHWARTZ wrote Superman and Batman strips as well as many other DC comics during the 1940s and ’50s. In 2006 he received the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. He is the author of An Unlikely Prophet and The Blowtop, which was described by the New York Times as the first conscious existentialist novel in America. Alvin Schwartz has also written a number of screenplays and some thirty docudramas for the National Film Board of Canada. He lives in Ontario.

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2006

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Alvin^^Schwartz

Born in NYC in 1916, Alvin Schwartz wrote his first comics for Fairy Tale Parade in 1939, and wrote extensively for Shelley Mayer, then an editor at Max Gaines’ All-American Publications (later purchased by National/DC in 1944). He had also done a short stint at Fawcett on Captain Marvel. Schwartz wrote his first Batman story in 1942, and his first Batman newspaper strip in Aug 1944 (an assignment he continued on until 1958) and his first Superman newspaper strip in Oct 1944. He had a long association with Superman as the writer of both the Man of Steel’s newspaper strip and many of his comic book appearances, and one of his many enduring contributions to the Superman mythology was the creation of Bizarro, a character who became a part of popular culture, quite apart from comics. While writing most of DC’s newspaper strips between 1944 and 1952, he also went on to do stories for many of their comics magazines, working on characters such as Aquaman, Vigilante, Slam Bradley, Date With Judy, Buzzy, House of Mystery, Tomahawk, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Newsboy Legion and numerous others.

After his 1958 departure from comics, Schwartz took on a whole new role in the corporate world, using the knowledge of plotting gained in comics to open new directions in market research, developing the now well-known techniques of psycho-graphics, typological identification and others, until as Research Director for the famed think tank of Dr Ernst Dichter, The Institute for Motivational Research, he provided structural and marketing advice to some of America’s largest corporations ranging from General Motors to General Foods. He was subsequently appointed to an advisory committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Schwartz also authored three novels for Arco Press, one of which, Sword of Desire, a detective story, won praise for its successful takeoff on Reichian orgone therapy, a popular psychotherapeutic technique during the 40s and 50s. His Beat generation novel, The Blowtop was published by Dial in 1948. Under the title Le Cinglé, it became a best seller in France. He also wrote and lectured on superheroes at various universities and received a prestigious Canada Council Grant for a study on the religious symbolism in popular culture, using Superman as a springboard.

Also in Canada, he wrote feature films and did numerous docu-dramas for The National Film Board for nearly 20 years and did a number of economic and social studies for the Canadian government.

His last two books, written in his eighties, were: An Unlikely Prophet: Revelations on the Path Without Form (published in 1997) — a memoir dealing with some very off-the-wall experiences generated by his years doing Superman which led him to a unique understanding of Superman’s significance as well as some life-enriching possibilities available to every one of us, and the sequel A Gathering of Selves: The Spiritual Journey of the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman (published in 2006).

Schwartz received the first Bill Finger Award for his contributions to comics via writing in 2006. The Finger Award was created by the legendary creator Jerry Robinson to honour his friend Bill Finger (the uncredited co-creator of Batman) and is given to comic book writers as part of the Will Eisner Comic Book Industry Awards in July of each year.

Reviews

[Jason Bergman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I consider An Unlikely Prophet to be one of the best books I have ever read. So understand that it is with a great deal of disappointment that I say this follow-up lacks the magic of its predecessor.

An Unlikely Prophet was the story of a writer who found himself suddenly confronted with a tulpa, or a spiritually created being. It was strange and wonderful, and tied into the Superman mythology in a unique and spiritual way. It's a great book.

A Gathering of Selves picks up shortly after that, but it has a different premise. Instead of someone being suddenly confronted with spirituality that goes against everything they believe, the protagonist is already pretty open to extreme possibility.

Schwartz wrote both Superman and Batman, and by his own admission, he didn't really enjoy writing the latter. I think that comes through here. He uses the Batman/Bruce Wayne story as a way of explaining the various sides to our personalities, but it doesn't really carry through as coherently as his Superman analogies in the first book. Then again, maybe I'm just projecting there out of my own preference.

The story itself is all over the map. Much of the narrative is a flashback to a personality that Schwartz has "bled into" and this story is interesting, but definitely drags on a bit.

It also connects to Tibet, the cold war and the British monarchy, but none of it feels quite as authentic as the events in the first book.

An Unlikely Prophet was charming because it felt like an authentic autobiography, albeit one that took some liberties (or not!) with reality. A Gathering of Selves doesn't deal much with reality. It starts extreme and goes even further out from there.

To be clear, this isn't a bad book by any means. It's entertaining. But after an Unlikely Prophet it's a bit of a let down.

[Jean-Pierre Vidrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

If An Unlikely Prophet challenged the reader's ideas about reality, Schwartz's followup bulldozes them without giving them a chance. Here the author examines his relationship with Batman, a character he didn't actually relish writing as much as he did Superman. Schwartz seems to get lost in his own narrative, and at times I felt like I was reading an espionage novel. But, that's okay, as the author's own experience was something akin to losing his identity. Confused? What actually happened defies short explanation. You'll just have to read the book. If you can stick with the author through his journey, you may end up viewing yourself and the world around you very differently, and possibly much more interestingly.

[Nessa the Messa · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is the "sequel" to an unlikely prophet.

[Scott]

MMMMM, not as interesting as An Unlikely Prophet, and the ending was a little flat. I'd stick with AUP and give this one a pass unless you can pick it up at a library or some such.