Nineteenth-century French writer Jules Verne could see over the widening technological horizon of the industrial age to the “superpowers” that would enable humanity to travel beneath the waves, through the air, and from the Earth to the Moon.
Captain Nemo, the central figure in Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, serves as both a proto-superhero and proto-mad scientist.
His genius has enabled him to wield super-weapons like his electric gun and to create a super-vehicle, the Nautilus, which can sink warships with its ramming prow and is mistaken for a sea monster.
He has a secret identity and is really the Indian Prince Dakkar (“Nemo” being the Latin for “no one”).
And he has a moral mission that combines the advancement of scientific knowledge with the destruction of British imperialism. The fact that the logic of his mission drives him to become a super-terrorist only illustrates the moral complexity of pursuing melodramatic aims in the real world.
“Nemo is neither unilaterally villain or hero, but a complex amalgamation of both,” notes Mike Perschon in his Finding Nemo: Verne’s Antihero as Original Steampunk. “The captain of the Nautilus is not engaged in aggression for the sake of power or glory, but for revenge, a continuance of the resistance he started in 1857 (in the Sepoy rebellion).”
“On the surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous laws, fight, devour each other, and indulge in all their earthly horrors,” Nemo declares, with the sort of bombast that would be echoed in comic books. “But thirty feet below the (sea’s) surface, their power ceases, their influence fades, and their dominion vanishes. Ah, monsieur, to live in the bottom of the sea! …. There I recognize no master! There I am free!”
Nemo’s motives remain sketchy until the sequel The Mysterious Island (1874), but were controversial even before the first novel was published.
Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne’s publisher, “…worried about Nemo’s motivations, feared his violence — specifically, his cold-blooded sinking of a ship he saw as an enemy,” noted Herbert R. Lottman in his book Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography.
“Verne had originally planned that the mysterious Nemo would reveal himself as a Pole dedicated to vengeance against the Russians who occupied and ravaged his land,” Lottman noted. “Hetzel had vetoed that; Russia was a friend of France, and Russians subscribed to his Magasin. Therefore, Nemo had to remain an enigmatic figure, his fierce behavior left unexplained, or inadequately explained.”
Verne defended his character, saying that Nemo didn’t kill for the sake of killing but responded to attacks. That moral dilemma —how many people you should kill to save how many others — is a recurring one, and became the central conflict in Alan Moore’s Watchmen.
Verne’s story about Captain Nemo, “with its sunlight split into rainbows in the depths,” inspired writers like Arthur Rimbaud and undersea explorers like Dr. Robert Ballard for generation after generation — not to mention movie studios and comic book companies (including Marvel, which published 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island in 1976 as part of its Marvel Classic Comics title).
Verne’s “scientific romances” supplied several of the melodramatic elements we’ve seen in superhero stories ever since — including the primary one, the wish fulfillment of high adventure.
“Perhaps Verne envied his character Captain Nemo,” Lottman wrote. “Unhappy with the humdrum aspects of his life, a predictable domestic existence singularized only by (his son) Michel’s disruptive behavior and confronted by a literary world that had shown no signs of adopting him, Jules Verne may have sometimes wished he could sail out of the bay and never again set foot on a continent.”
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