The Superhero Reader
Page 1
THE SUPERHERO READER
THE SUPERHERO READER
Edited by Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2013
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The superhero reader / edited by Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-802-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-806-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-803-7 (ebook) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. 2. Superheroes in literature. 3. Superheroes. I. Hatfield, Charles, 1965– editor of compilation. II. Heer, Jeet, editor of compilation. III. Worcester, Kent, 1959– editor of compilation.
PN6710.S87 2013
741.5’9—dc23
2013004069
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Comics Predecessors
PETER COOGAN
Men of Tomorrow
GERARD JONES
Gladiator
PHILIP WYLIE
The Great Comic Book Heroes
JULES FEIFFER
The Comics and the Super State
WALTER ONG
The Superman Conceit
FREDRIC WERTHAM
The Great Women Superheroes
TRINA ROBBINS
Fandom and Authorship
WILL BROOKER
II. THEORY AND GENRE
Literary Formulas
JOHN G. CAWELTI
Crowds of Superheroes
ROBERT JEWETT AND JOHN SHELTON LAWRENCE
The Epic Hero and Pop Culture
ROGER B. ROLLIN
Masked Heroes
RICHARD REYNOLDS
The Revisionary Superhero Narrative
GEOFF KLOCK
Jack Kirby and the Marvel Aesthetic
CHARLES HATFIELD
Navigating Infinite Earths
KARIN KUKKONEN
A Song of the Urban Superhero
SCOTT BUKATMAN
III. CULTURE AND IDENTITY
Wonder Woman
GLORIA STEINEM
Invisible Girl
LILLIAN ROBINSON
Love Will Bring You to Your Gift
JENNIFER STULLER
Batman, Deviance and Camp
ANDY MEDHURST
Color Them Black
ADILIFU NAMA
Comic Book Masculinity
JEFFREY BROWN
The Punisher as Revisionist Superhero Western
LORRIE PALMER
Death Defying-Heroes
HENRY JENKINS
List of Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks go to our contributors, as well to Bart Beaty, Walter Biggins, Paul Buhle, Jon B. Cooke, Craig Fischer, Ian Gordon, Karen Green, Tom Hart, Dean Haspiel, Gene Kannenberg, Jr., Jude Killroy, Guy Lawley, Andrei Molotiu, Heather Nunnelly, and Julia Worcester. We are pleased to dedicate this book to Michele, Robin, and Amy.
INTRODUCTION
To wrench the human soul from its moorings, to immerse it in terrors, ice, flames, and raptures to such an extent that it is liberated from all petty displeasure, gloom, and depression as by a flash of lightening: what paths lead to this goal? And which of them do so most surely?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1967 [1887]: 139)
For if ever there does appear upon this planet a tightly knit minority of really superior people, it will be the end of all the rest of mankind and mankind knows it, not having come through a billion-odd years of evolutionary struggle for nothing.
PHILIP WYLIE (1942: 139–40)
COMICS IS AN ART FORM; SUPERHEROES ARE A GENRE. THIS TERSE DISTINCTION lies at the heart of current scholarship on comics.1 While some readers still conflate comic books and superheroes, the recent emergence of interdisciplinary comics studies presupposes that comics, including their long-form incarnation, graphic novels, can be much more. Indeed, comics can advance myriad storytelling agendas. It is no surprise that, until recently, the most compelling contributions to comics scholarship focused on historical, political, autobiographical, avant-garde, and other “serious minded” comics, for it is precisely these kinds of studies that complicate or upend longstanding suppositions regarding the medium’s inherently juvenile and unserious nature.2 If journalists typically depict the world of comics through the lens of box office receipts and costumed convention goers, it makes sense that academics might concentrate on material that is less likely to be mocked on the evening news, or by colleagues.
The struggle for professional respectability has had a high cost, however. Even as academic specialists have rightly insisted on the depth and range of comics, some persist in downplaying the superhero genre’s expressive potential, metaphoric adaptability, and historical durability. Superhero comics are not the same thing as comics per se, but they are integral to the development of the American comic book, and therefore to the history of the form. Admittedly, the genre has roots outside of comics: antecedents for the superhero can be traced back through pulp literature to ancient myths and legends, what Joseph Campbell called “the basic images of ritual, mythology, and vision” (18). But superheroes are intertwined with comics history to an extent that is not true of other major multimedia genres such as science fiction, horror, romance, or the western. All of those genres, and more, have been very important to comics, but the superhero stands apart. From the standpoint of English-language comics, at least, the superhero is not just another genre, but one that has made all the difference.
Superheroes have played a central role in the story of comic books almost from their inception. Moreover, despite the genre’s relative dormancy from the late 1940s through the late 1950s, superheroes have stood the test of time. Indeed the superhero has been a staple of the medium and, since the sixties, the one overwhelmingly dominant market genre. As a result, the sheer volume of superhero comics that have been published over the years is staggering. Indeed, the major superhero universes constitute one of the most expansive storytelling canvases ever fashioned in any culture. Moreover, the characters inhabiting these fictional universes are immensely influential, having achieved iconic recognition around the world. Their images and adventures have also influenced other art forms, such as film, videogames, and prose fiction.
The porous boundary that separates superhero studies from comics fandom may help explain the discomfort that many academics feel in relation to the genre. While fan-based knowledge is increasingly valued in the academy, fannishness is still regarded as, almost by definition, a symptom of a failure to professionalize. But the forward march of comics studies depends not on resisting genre-based storytelling and its attendant fan culture, but on recognizing what superhero artists and writers bring to the table. As Ben Saunders usefully observes in an essay titled “On the Place of Superhero Studies within Comics Studies”:
It will be better for the future of Comics Studies if we refuse to transform generic distinctions into hierarchical ones. We don’t need to have our own version of the fight that some music critics got into back in the 1970s over the merits of rock versus disco (or that a rather earlier generation of literary critics got into
over the merits of poetry versus the novel). The discipline we want to create together can surely be big enough to contain appreciative studies of the “spirituality of the superhero,” shall we say, alongside accounts of “representations of the self in graphic memoir.” (151)
In other words, superhero comics merit considered attention. This is true not only because superheroes have sustained the American comic book industry over a period of several decades, thus enabling comic book stores to carry other kinds of comics, but because superheroes are intrinsically engaging from many angles—cultural, historical, sociological, even literary and aesthetic. As our contributor Scott Bukatman has noted, superheroes “embody social anxiety” as well as our “ambivalent and shifting attitudes towards flesh, self, and society.” Stressing the corporeal aspect of the superhero, he cites the work of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who argued—in a different context, to be sure—that “cultures which frankly develop bodily symbolism may be seen to use it to confront experience with its inevitable pains and losses. By such themes they face the greatest paradoxes of existence.” For Bukatman, superheroes are “mysterious, invested with magical abilities and a metamorphic pliability; if they are marginal bodies in the body of literature, this still should not blind us to their importance” (49–51).
Superheroes thus occupy a magical yet marginal position in contemporary popular culture. For the better part of a century they have offered a seemingly inexhaustible resource for commercial artists, publishers, moviemakers, animators, radio and television dramatists, videogame designers, and other cultural entrepreneurs looking for fantastical, larger-than-life archetypes, tropes, scenarios, and what-ifs to entertain readers, listeners, viewers, and players. Indeed, in recent years the border between the superhero genre and other mass entertainment genres has been smudged: many contemporary icons, including high-tech spies, martial artists, detectives, vampire hunters, and adolescent wizards, seem to possess powers similar to those traditionally wielded by costumed superheroes. Emboldened by advances in digital visual effects, major film studios have been keen to tap the superhero revenue stream and also to blur the distinction between the superhero and the merely heroic. Thus the number of big screen franchises derived from intellectual properties controlled by either Marvel (currently owned by Disney) or DC (Time Warner) continues to grow. Superhero parodies, pastiches, and revisionisms are also increasingly popular, on both big and small screens. In one guise or another the “super-empowered individual” (Friedman 5–6) has become ubiquitous.3
Yet despite their commercial clout and cross-media reach, superheroes have only recently received sustained scholarly attention. The first critical book in English devoted to the “great comic book heroes” appeared in the mid-1960s, and most of the many secondary texts published since have been aimed at hardcore fan-consumers, with an emphasis on commemoration and imagery rather than analysis.4 This has only bolstered a received wisdom that insists that superhero comics are of necessity formulaic, masculinist, melodramatic, and morally reductive. The phrase that neatly sums up this perspective is “adolescent male power fantasy,” a dismissive coinage that suggests that superhero stories are incapable of conveying meaningful ideas or expressing idiosyncratic visions, and that superheroes are inherently superficial and conformist. The fact that graphic novels like Maus (1986–91), Jimmy Corrigan (2003), Persepolis (2007), and American Born Chinese (2008) have earned widespread critical acclaim does not mean that critics, intellectuals, and consumers of alternative or (in fan terms) “non-mainstream” comics have jettisoned their preconceptions. Indeed, some of the harshest critics of the superhero genre are precisely those who have most enthusiastically embraced the literary graphic novel.
In thinking about superheroes, it helps to separate two distinct propositions that are often conflated. The first is that comics is an aesthetic form capable of thoughtful and diverse expression; the second is that superheroes warrant sustained attention. Both of these propositions may be true—we believe they are—but they are not interchangeable, nor is one necessarily the corollary of the other. As a survey of the critical literature readily shows, one may argue the first without conceding the second. Conversely, scholars may take a serious interest in superheroes for reasons unconnected to aesthetic interest in comics. Such a position may now be a minority one, but both academics and public intellectuals—such as Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Fredric Wertham—have taken superheroes seriously without taking seriously the idea that comics can be art. Their interest in superheroes grew out of social and moral concerns, as did much of the early academic criticism of comics generally. In fact, some critics, for example John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in The Myth of the American Superhero (2002) and Captain America and the Crusade against Evil (2003), regard the superhero as a value-laden symbol rather than a codified narrative genre. Such critics tend to be indifferent to the specific qualities of superhero comics as such.
One may study comics from an aesthetic angle without granting pride of place, or indeed any place, to the superhero genre. Vice versa, one may explore what superheroes might mean socially, culturally, or ideologically without making any general claim regarding comics as an art form. This is because there are different kinds of seriousness one may take as a rationale. An ideological seriousness about what superheroes mean is not the same as an artistic seriousness about comics. Superhero studies does not automatically benefit from the proposition that comics is an art form. Different kinds of study demand different warrants, that is, different sorts of justification.
In the wake of cultural studies, the proposition that superheroes merit our attention will probably be granted readily enough. The genre, both on the page and on the screen, is widely understood to be ideologically freighted: a mirror, and perhaps a shaper, of cultural and moral values. The study of such things can take either an adversarial or sympathetic stance, depending on the researcher’s perspective. However, the claim that superhero comics can reward close study on formal and aesthetic grounds remains controversial, even among scholars who have committed their careers to the study of comics more generally. A warrant on the grounds of aesthetics, form, or genre poses different questions than one based on sociological and political concerns. A number of prominent cartoonists and comic book writers, notably Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar, but also others, have concluded that the superhero genre is essentially fascistic and/or absurd and therefore deserves a pitiless shellacking. This would still be a form of seriousness.
Suffice to say that even in this age of blossoming comics study, the superhero remains a divisive topic. Comics studies has not quite granted the necessity or even fitness of studying superheroes from aesthetic or humanistic perspectives such as the literary or art-historical, even though few academics interested in cultural studies would deny the ripeness of the genre for study on semiotic and ideological grounds. Studies of the superhero remain an outlier within the fast-growing literary discourse on comics. As a result, some comics scholars, despite the field’s inroads to legitimacy, still continue to decry what they see as the cultural elitism of the academy. The treatment of the superhero is a ready focus for such complaints. In other words, the hoped-for elevation of comics as a research topic has not happened evenly for all genres, or across all disciplines, and the superhero has certainly not been the main beneficiary of the proposition that comics can be art. There persists, and will probably continue to persist, resistance to superhero comics and superhero analysis on both ideological and aesthetic grounds. This is likely to remain a fault line within the field, and indeed treading along that fault line, examining and questioning its persistence, could be a productive area for future metacritical work.
As our bibliography makes clear, though, there is no shortage of current scholarship about the superhero. A substantial chunk of the work now being done by younger comics scholars in North America takes the superhero, and more broadly the so-called mainstream comic book tradition of which the superhero is the core,
as its polestar. Journal articles on superheroes have begun to appear in greater numbers only recently—see, for example, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics’s 2011 issue on “Superheroes and Gender”—but conference papers on the genre have been commonplace for many years. In addition, much scholarship based in fandom, which lies outside the rules and criteria of academe, continues to orbit around the genre. Superheroes are not exactly underserved by contemporary scholarship, even though the number of cutting-edge publications about the genre does not proportionately match the amount of interest it generates at conferences, online, and within fan culture. Superhero studies has long been a major if not the predominate focus of comics studies that do not reach the threshold of scholarly book publication.
Over the past few years, however, the number of scholarly books on the genre has exploded. Academic monographs that have raised the bar for superhero studies include Matthew Costello’s Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America (2009), Charles Hatfield’s Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (2011); Roz Kaveney’s Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Film (2008); Adilifu Nama’s Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011); Ben Saunders’s Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes (2011); and Marc Singer’s Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (2011). In addition, several noteworthy essay collections have recently appeared, including Angela Ndalianis’s The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008); Terrence Wandtke’s The Amazing Transforming Superhero! (2007); and Robert Weiner’s Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero (2009). While some of these titles were issued by university presses, many were published by independent houses that are known for supporting popular culture studies, such as Continuum, Routledge, and McFarland. Building on earlier works by Brooker (2000), Pearson and Uricchio (1991), and Reynolds (UK 1992; U.S. 1994), as well as Feiffer (1965), this new critical literature has laid the groundwork for a smarter, less impressionist, and more analytic approach to the superhero genre in particular and genre studies more generally. Although these books vary greatly in agenda, methodology, and tone, the majority focus equally on the social significance of superheroes and the recognition that the genre represents a distinctive aesthetic tradition. Such studies offer a way out, or rather multiple ways out, of the impasse between cultural studies and aesthetic appreciation.