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Discover J. Michael Straczynski’s Origin Story in the Bold Memoir Becoming Superman
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I’m not sure what I was expecting from the autobiography of J. Michael Straczynski, mastermind behind the seminal sci-fi serial Babylon 5 (among very many other impressive credits, the most recent of which include Netflix’s gloriously queer Sense8, the Clint Eastwood-directed film Changeling, and a long run on The Amazing Spider-Man).
The celebrity memoir is among the most unpredictable of sub-genres, their existence predicated less on the quality of story to be told than on the fame of the storyteller. Surely, a writer/producer with as diverse a resume as diverse as Straczynski’s (everything from Angelina Jolie movies to He-Man cartoons) would have plenty of juicy behind-the-scenes stories of celebrity encounters and production disasters—and there are some good ones, but he saves them for the book’s back half. The lead-up to the successes recounted in Becoming Superman is something very, very different: an unremitting look back at a nightmarish and deeply traumatic childhood that’s as shocking as it is compellingly recounted.
The young adulthood that takes up the bulk of the book is almost unbelievable; the book’s subtitle—My Journey From Poverty To Hollywood: With Stops Along The Way At Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes—doesn’t exaggerate. If anything, the title understates the extent of the young writer’s poverty and the drama that attended his formative years. Straczynski’s cast of characters for this story—his family—is wildly eccentric but in no way charming. With very few exceptions, each member of the extended Straczynski clan is more ghastly than the last, with his father at the top of a nightmarishly constructed pyramid. Near constant physical and emotional abuse are almost the least of the crimes recounted during a stretch of years during which the burgeoning writer encountered, directly or indirectly, everything from incest to infanticide to literal murder (nearly his own), witnessing firsthand the cycles of abuse that are passed down from generation to generation like a disease, festering in poverty and poverty and secrecy.
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Among the family’s greatest secrets is in his facist-loving father’s connection to a historical atrocity, a revelation that born storyteller (and, notably, former Murder, She Wrote writer) Straczynski can’t help but lay out as a mystery—albeit one which he himself was called upon to solve at the time. As someone with my own unconventional and occasionally quite dark upbringing, it takes a bit to shock me, but this writer’s backstory does just that. It’s a story that deserves to be told, and it’s told here compellingly, with as little gratuitousness as possible given the subject matter. By the time he uncovers his father’s damning secret and takes his last beating, the title Becoming Superman seems deserved—and not only because the fictional hero serves as the young Straczynski’s constant inspiration and polestar). Indeed, someone with this much trauma could easily have become a monster, perpetuating the cycles of family violence in a way that would have been sad but understandable. Similarly, the act of refashioning that childhood trauma into a compelling narrative with mystery and even a puckish sense of humor is impressive in itself.
But this is also the story of a writer’s journey, and, for fans of Straczynski’s work, the Hollywood stories offer a welcome relief from all that darkness (fellow famous writer type Neil Gaiman provides the introduction). Early encounters with luminaries like Harlan Ellison and Norman Corwin (by all means, look him up if you’re not familiar) helped steer the writer away from the life he’d seemed destined for. A bit of luck and his own determination saw him getting his feet wet in journalism and then trying his hand at script writing for cartoons like He-Man, She-Ra, and The Real Ghostbusters before he made the jump into live-action TV with shows like Jake and the Fatman and the aforementioned Murder, She Wrote. It was a long road to the franchise that is likely his magnum opus—the scrappy, literate, underfunded Babylon 5, still among the most unapologetically science-fictional shows ever made. That’s the stuff that we showed up for and if it turns out to be slightly less compelling than everything that leads up to it, it’s only because there’s so much more to the origin story than anyone could have imagined.
The title is Becoming Superman, but the real trajectory laid out by Straczynski involves his journey to becoming not a superhero, but a storyteller (although perhaps the two aren’t incompatible—each involves great powers that can be used for good or ill). In that aspect, and that aspect alone, there’s not a lot of suspense to be found in these pages: if his writing credits didn’t already make the case, this fearless, engaging, and inspiring memoir makes clear that J. Michael Straczynski knows how to tell a story.
Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood is available now.