An Unlikely Prophet: A Metaphysical Memoir by the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman - Softcover

Alvin Schwartz wrote both the Superman and Batman comics as well as many other comic book titles during the 1940s and 50s. He was the author of two philosophical novels, one of which, The Blowtop, was described by the New York Times as the first conscious existentialist novel in America. A recipient of the prestigious Canada Council Horizons grant, he also wrote a number of screenplays and docu­dramas.

MEMOIR / METAPHYSICS

Writer Alvin Schwartz received a great deal of attention from fans when he began talking publicly about his seventeen-year stint writing Superman and Batman comics. One of the individuals who contacted him was no ordinary fan, but a seven-foot Buddhist monk named Thongden, a tulpa or individual who was thought into being by a Tibetan mystic. Thongden put Alvin Schwartz on the Path without Form, an amazing journey he took in the company of Hawaiian kahunas, quantum physicists, and superheroes. Superman, as it turns out, is also a tulpa, a being created by thought that takes on a life of its own and, in Mr. Schwartz’s words, is an archetype expressing the sense of nonlocality that is always present in the back of our minds--the capacity to be everywhere instantly. Superman is one of the specific forms that embodies our reality when we’re at our highest point, when we’re truly impermeable, indestructible, totally concentrated, and living entirely in the now, a condition each of us actually attains from time to time.

Alvin Schwartz’s story is a personal journey through a lifelong remembrance of synchrony, inspiration, accident, and magic. As it unfolds it puts into vivid clarity the saving grace that inhabits every moment of our lives. The author travels as a stranger in a strange land, whose greatest oddity is that this land is our own.

ALVIN SCHWARTZ wrote both the Superman and Batman comics as well as many other comic-book titles during the 1940s and 1950s. He is the author of two philosophical novels, No Such Mirrors and The Blowtop, which was described by the New York Times as the first conscious existentialist novel in America. A recipient of the prestigious Canada Council Horizons grant, he has also written a number of screenplays and some thirty docudramas for the National Film Board of Canada. He lives in Ontario.