The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  7. Science as magic

  This feature is fundamental to the nature of the universe that the superhero comic portrays. Science is treated as a special form of magic, capable of both good and evil. Scientific concepts and terms are introduced freely into plots and used to create atmosphere and add background detail to artwork—but the science itself is at most only superficially plausible, often less so, and the prevailing mood is mystical rather than rational. Explicitly “magic” powers are able to coexist quite comfortably with apparently scientific ones. A good example of this is the partnership between Iron Man (science) and Thor (magic) developed over the years in Marvel’s Avengers title.

  Although further removed from the character of the heroes themselves than the other points raised above, the depiction of science as magic is crucial to the way in which the superhero comic mythologizes certain aspects of the society it addresses.

  These seven headings can be pulled together to construct a first-stage working definition of the superhero genre; a definition that at least has the authenticity of being constructed from the motifs of the first ever superhero comic.

  1. The hero is marked out from society. He often reaches maturity without having a relationship with his parents.

  2. At least some of the superheroes will be like earthbound gods in their level of powers. Other superheroes of lesser powers will consort easily with these earthbound deities.

  3. The hero’s devotion to justice overrides even his devotion to the law.

  4. The extraordinary nature of the superhero will be contrasted with the ordinariness of his surroundings.

  5. Likewise, the extraordinary nature of the hero will be contrasted with the mundane nature of his alter-ego. Certain taboos will govern the actions of these alter-egos.

  6. Although ultimately above the law, superheroes can be capable of considerable patriotism and moral loyalty to the state, though not necessarily to the letter of its laws.

  7. The stories are mythical and use science and myth indiscriminately to create a sense of wonder.

  Turning some of these laws on their heads, such as three and six, would give us a good working definition of the superhero’s opponent, the supervillain. Such characters are implicit in the set of governing codes supplied to Superman in his first ever appearance, although they did not become a regular feature of superhero comics until around 1940.30

  The early Superman stories were a resounding success. Readers asked for more of “that magazine with Superman in it.” Publisher Harry Donenfeld—initially skeptical—realized that he had a phenomenal success on his hands. The superhero market boomed. By 1942, several dozen superhero titles were on the American market, forming the largest share of the 150-odd individual comic book titles on sale. Some were blatant copies of Superman: a lawsuit killed Fox Features’ Wonderman, and another case was soon outstanding against Fawcett’s Captain Marvel.31 Other characters only derived from the Superman model in the most generic way: famous heroes already well-established included Batman, the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Hawkman, Wonder Woman, and the Green Lantern.32 The new medium had created a new genre all its own, and one perfectly suited to the comic-book’s ability to create unfettered fantasy at a price that even children could afford. Moreover, the idealistic but law-abiding superheroes fitted the mood of a United States about to go to war against the fascist powers.

  Budgetary considerations make the superhero particularly suitable for the comics medium. Parallels can be drawn between the comic book and the cinema, but in one respect the two media are totally unalike. Film is an expensive art form. Budgets for feature films today rarely go lower than $4 million—they may go as high as $50 million or more. Comics are cheaper, and they are cheaper just where the cinema is most expensive. It costs DC comics no more to have John Byrne draw Superman replacing a space-station in orbit or bathing on the surface of a star, than to show Clark Kent crossing the street on his way to the office. Clearly, any film producer has a much tougher and tightly constrained set of choices to make about a project which may be perfectly sound when viewed simply from the angle of character and plot development.

  The comic artist develops a familiarity, indeed almost a casual ease, in handling extraordinary and exotic locations. Such scenes can be casually introduced, for a few panels only, or a bewildering variety of settings can be made use of in one story, if required. The film producer, having decided to let his director build one or two expensive sets, is more or less obliged to “shoot the money”—i.e. to make all this costly set-building pay off as part of the climactic action of the movie. Often this presents no insoluble problems, but it remains an additional pressure on story structure from which the comic-book artist-writer team remains refreshingly free.

  Superman and the superhero emerged at the end of the Great Depression and during the run-up to the outbreak of the European war. Millions of Americans had experienced poverty and unemployment; millions more had had their faith in the notion of uninterrupted economic progress seriously undermined. Avenging Lone Wolf heroes abounded in popular narrative of the 1930s and 1940s on both sides of the Atlantic: from Doc Savage to Philip Marlowe, from Hannay in Hitchcock’s 39 Steps to the Green Hornet, from Rick Blain in Casablanca to Captain Midnight of the radio serials.33 A new kind of popular hero had emerged: the self-reliant individualist who stands aloof from many of the humdrum concerns of society, yet is able to operate according to his own code of honor, to take on the world on his own terms, and win. For Americans, the historical path from Munich to Pearl Harbor coincides with the emergence of Superman and Captain America—solitary but socialized heroes, who engage in battle from time to time as proxies of U.S. foreign policy. A darker side of the Lone Wolf hero is embodied by the Batman, a hero whose motivations and emotions are turned inward against the evils within society, and even the social and psychological roots of crime itself. The tension between these two veins in the superhero tradition remains to the present day.

  The locus of superhero comics was then, as it largely remains, New York. Writers and artists living in the city depict it in their work—so successfully that superhero stories set in any other city may require a certain degree of justification for their choice of locale. The New York of the early 1940s was a place seemingly chosen for the preservation of the values of European civilization, and a destination for large numbers of artists and intellectuals seeking refuge from the Nazi conquest of Europe: Auden, Isherwood, Ernst, Tanguy, Mondrian. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described his reactions on arriving in the city in the essay “New York in 1941”:

  The French surrealists and their friends settled in Greenwich Village, where, just a few subway stops from Times Square, one could still lodge—just as in Balzac’s time—in a small two- or three-story house with a tiny garden in back. A few days after my arrival, when visiting Yves Tanguy, I discovered and immediately rented, on the street where he lived, a studio whose windows faced a neglected garden. You reached it by way of a long basement corridor leading to a private stairway in the rear of a red-brick house. … Just two or three years ago, I learned that Claude Shannon had also lived there, but on an upper story and facing the street. Only a few yards apart, he was creating cybernetics and I was writing Elementary Structures of Kinship. Actually, we had a mutual friend in the house, a young woman, and I recall that, without mentioning his name, she once spoke to me about one of our neighbors, who, she explained, was busy “inventing an artificial brain.”

  If I did not have it now before my eyes, it would be hard to believe that I bought one day a sixteenth-century Tuscan sideboard for a few dollars. However, New York (and this is the source of its charm and its peculiar fascination) was then a city where anything seemed possible. Like the urban fabric, the social and cultural fabric was riddled with holes. All you had to do was pick one and slip through if, like Alice, you wanted to get to the other side of the looking glass and find worlds so enchanting that they seemed unreal.34

&n
bsp; This is the New York (or Gotham City, or Metropolis) that dominates the superhero story and has become its almost inevitable milieu. New York draws together an impressive wealth of signs, all of which the comic-reader (of the 1940s or the 1990s) is adept at deciphering. It is a city that signifies all cities, and, more specifically, all modern cities, since the city itself is one of the signs of modernity. It is the place where—since the comedies of Terence—the author takes the reader in order that something may be made to happen. And New York has always been the great point of disembarkation in the history and mythology of the New World (although today, Ellis Island has been opened as a museum and migration now occurs through El Paso, Los Angeles, or Miami). New York is a sign in fictional discourse for the imminence of such possibilities—simultaneously a forest of urban signs and an endlessly wiped slate on which unlimited designs can be inscribed—cop shows, thrillers, comedies, “ethnic” movies such as Mean Streets, Moonstruck, or Do The Right Thing, and cyclical adventures of costumed heroes as diverse as Bob Kane’s Batman and Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

  Artists and characters might even rub shoulders with each other on Madison Avenue. Marvel under Stan Lee and Jim Shooter has often blurred the distinction between New York as fictional milieu and New York as publishing center—as in Doctor Doom’s appearance in the Marvel offices in Fantastic Four #10, explaining his escape from a runaway meteor.35

  Sometimes a thin disguise is the easiest way of summoning up an all-too-familiar subject. Batman writer Bill Finger describes the origin of a famous by-name in the following way:

  Originally, I was going to call Gotham City “Civic City.” Then I tried Capital City, then Coast City. Then I flipped through the phone book and spotted the name Gotham Jewelers and said, “That’s it, Gotham City.” We didn’t call it New York because we wanted anybody in any city to identify with it. Of course, Gotham is another name for New York.36

  New York, however, couldn’t be done away with so easily. The 1940 story “Batman and Robin visit the 1940 New York World’s Fair”37 is one of the earliest stories involving Robin, the Boy Wonder. The story commences with Bruce Wayne and his young ward Dick Grayson striding towards the Fair, taking in and being impressed by everything they see.

  Dick: Wow I heard it was big, but I didn’t think it was this big!

  Bruce: Big is a mild word. It’s stupendous … Look over there!—the trylon and the perisphere!

  Dick: Say, let’s go inside the perisphere! … And see the city of tomorrow!38

  Clearly, it’s appropriate that Bruce and Dick should spend their time keeping themselves abreast of the latest developments in technology, the better to prosecute their joint war against crime. Where better to do this than at New York’s World’s Fair? But the off-duty Caped Crusaders have barely begun their day of enjoyment when they are faced with an unwelcome interruption: a radio exhibit broadcasting the news that the great Westriver Bridge has just melted away “as if someone had played an acetylene torch upon it.” Bruce and Dick leave the World’s Fair to investigate—but without changing into their costumes.

  Wayne visits Commissioner Gordon and quizzes him about the bridge. While he’s in the Commissioner’s office, a Mr. Travers of Travers Engineering arrives carrying a blackmail note that threatens destruction of a second bridge unless a ransom of $300,000 is paid. Commissioner Gordon advises Travers to ignore the threat—“Probably a crackpot trying to cash in on easy money.” Meanwhile, Dick inspects the site of the disaster. Two men attack a woman. Dick intervenes, only to be informed that both men are detectives—“Sure, we was takin’ her to stir!” After the detectives have gone, Dick begins to have doubts. “Those men didn’t act or talk like detectives! I wonder?”

  Two days later, the Travers Bridge collapses as threatened. $500,000 is demanded—or a third bridge will be destroyed in the same way. This time, Batman and Robin sweep into action and surprise the hoods, who are positioning a box-like contraption on the bridge. As the duo examine the box, the young woman who Dick saved from the “detectives” reappears. She explains that the box is the work of her father, Doctor Vreekill, a scientist who has discovered a short-wave ray that can “decompose the elements that make up steel.” He intends to use his invention to blackmail construction firms into paying protection money. His daughter tells Batman of her father’s plans to “free some dangerous prisoners tonight at the state prison so that they may join his organization! Then he’s going to destroy the half-finished Monarch building!” Batman and Robin foil the prisoners’ escape, then race to the Monarch building site, where they battle more hoods, before flying the Batplane to Doctor Vreekill’s laboratory.

  Who?

  The Batman … about to take you to jail!

  Jail? You’ll never take me to jail! Never!39

  Vreekill electrocutes himself on some bare wires. “Well, he saved the state the job” is Batman’s verdict. The story concludes with another Batman and Robin endorsement of New York’s World Fair.

  It’s got as many thrills as one of our adventures!

  And he’s not kidding! If you want to see something that will not only educate you, but thrill you, by all means see the New York World’s Fair.40

  In its construction and organization, this text is typical of a certain kind of superhero narrative of the 1940s—historically, the period in which the genre was formulating rules and approaches which later artists and writers could obey or flout—but not ignore. The structure and preoccupations of this text are typical of the so-called Golden Age.

  Batman and Robin expend considerable effort and risk themselves in unarmed combat against men with guns in defense of—what? One answer might be “law and order,” but clearly a man and boy who have no official connection with the police force and operate in disguise and through the use of secret identities are not agents of the law in the same way as the heroes of (say) an Edgar Wallace novel. The splash page at the beginning of the story comments:

  Wealth, lust for power, these are the roots of evil that tend to plant themselves in man’s heart and mind … crime, havoc and destruction, these are the fruits. Once again it remains for the Batman and Robin, the boy wonder, to pit their amazing skill against one who would become a king of crime … a king of evil. …41

  These words are positioned over the image of an enthusiastic Bruce and Dick arriving at the World’s Fair, symbolic of rational and utopian values. Crime erupts into this ordered environment, and—significantly—crime against the fabric of the city, undertaken through the misappliance of science: Vreekill’s machine that can “decompose the elements that make up steel.” Though not quite a supervillain, Vreekill’s bald head and functional costume signify him clearly as a “mad scientist.” There is no exploration of the psychology that leads Vreekill to use his discovery for the pursuit of crime:

  With my machine I can become the most powerful man in the world! I can hold it as a club over those who deal in steel constructions.42

  This is clearly not a sociological view of the roots of crime. The mythology underlying the text is that of the Old Testament, and, most specifically, the Temptation and the Fall. Vreekill is a prototype for many “Fallen” characters which Batman and other superheroes have encountered through the years—the Joker, Two-Face, Lex Luthor, Doctor Doom, Magneto, Ozymandias. All are corrupted by power, and power in the particular form of knowledge. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” promises the serpent in Genesis. Barthes, in the essay “Myth Today”43 and elsewhere, has highlighted many of the ways in which mythology can be used to represent culture as nature and thus “explain” as natural and inevitable many of the social and political structures of our society. “Batman and Robin visit the 1940 New York World’s Fair” mythologizes the idea of crime, dramatizing the individual’s criminal potential through the decisions taken from a position of power (i.e., knowledge). If history is to be understood as a progress toward Utopia, a significant tension can be adduced between superheroes (assisting this process) and vil
lains (thwarting the Utopia builders, or “those who deal in steel constructions”).

  This mythologizing of the dangers of scientific knowledge is one of the mainstream currents of science fiction, from Frankenstein through to the famous Spock/McCoy reason/conscience conflict in Star Trek (a conflict which is spuriously resolved by the deus ex machina of Kirk’s overarching “humanity,” which embraces such contradictions and thereby resolves them). However, the more traditional split of knowledge and conscience that is signified by comic book supervillains cannot be so easily reconciled within the confines of the genre. A villain such as the Joker continues year after year, story after story, sabotaging the social order in an endless treadmill of destruction, which Batman struggles to control and contain.

  Such would be the “preferred” reading of a text such as “The World’s Fair.” Clearly, a number of contradictory readings can be advanced. For example, certain oppositional readings identify with the personal exploitation of knowledge and power espoused by Dr. Vreekill. In an early superhero text such as this, however, the difference between the preferred and oppositional readings remains clear-cut. The weight of moral decisions and their preferred interpretation are clearly inscribed in the construction of the narrative. Kane’s art signals moments of moral decision very precisely, often by the use of a circular panel framing the character or the character’s head. This is a narrative device akin to a film director’s “holding” on a close-up, but the tight circular story panel serves the additional function of breaking up the visual flow of the narrative, acting as a giant-sized full-stop.