The Superhero Reader

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

  Such visual punctuation abstracts the contents of the panel from their context, a process which is helped on its way by the absence of any detailed backgrounds—although the panel in which Bruce and Dick agree to investigate the first bridge collapse shows both figures against a schematized New York skyline, the city they have pledged themselves to defend. The central conflict of the story is resolved in two circular panels on the last page. They are placed one above the other, although separated in narrative space by the two intervening panels that form the left-hand side of the bottom row. The upper circular panel shows Vreekill in the act of grabbing at the bare electric wire, destroyed by the forces he intended to exploit. The lower panel shows the triumphant Bruce and Dick, delivering their final homily on the virtues of the World’s Fair. The reader is invited to participate, along with the story’s heroes, in the alliance of knowledge and social order that the narrative has made visible.

  NOTES

  1. Superman has been in continuous publication since 1938, Batman since 1939. Wonder Woman has been in continuous publication since 1941, barring a short hiatus in 1986–87.

  2. The Comics Journal, edited since 1976 by Gary Groth, is the premier fan publication—its intellectual range and acuity of critical discourse are very impressive. The New Comics (Berkley Books, 1989) is a collection of interviews with notable artists and writers from the pages of the Journal.

  3. When does a comic become a graphic novel? “The most useful distinction in comics is to be drawn between periodical and book-style publication. A periodical is comprised of issues, one of which always replaces the previous one. The title is continuous, but one issue always differs from another. A book is a publication in which the title and issue are the same. A new printing does not require abandoning the contents in favor of a new set. A graphic novel is a unified comic art form that exploits the relationship between the two: book and periodical” (Steve Edgell, private communication to the author, 1992).

  4. Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27, 1939; Wonder Woman in All Star Comics #8, 1941; the Sub-Mariner in Marvel Comics #1, 1939. The Arrow first appeared in Funny Pages #21 (1938), Shock Gibson in Speed Comics (October 1939), and the Masked Marvel in Keen Detective Funnies #11 (1940).

  5. Captain America first appeared in Captain America Comics #1 (1941). The story is reproduced in Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes.

  6. The Golden Age lasted from 1938 to 1949 [Reynolds’s precise end-date here is not universally agreed upon—eds.]. The Silver Age is agreed as having begun in 1956; there is no agreed terminal date, but most would accept that it lasted until around 1967–70.

  7. Plastic Man also survived the slump of the early fifties, but never cashed in on the new impetus of the Silver Age: publication ceased in 1956.

  8. EC’s major horror titles were Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and Crypt of Terror (later Tales from the Crypt), all launched in 1950.

  9. Although Seduction of the Innocent was published in 1954, Wertham had been campaigning against violence in comic books since the late forties. In 1948 he presided over a New York Department of Hospitals’ symposium called “The Psychopathology of Comic Books.”

  10. The hearings took place as part of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States.

  11. Flash reappeared in Showcase #4, October 1956. This date is usually regarded as the beginning of the Silver Age.

  12. The Green Lantern returned in Showcase #22, October 1959.

  13. Supergirl premiered in Action Comics #252, May 1959.

  14. The Justice League of America first appeared in The Brave and the Bold #28, March 1960. The super-team acquired its own title in October 1960.

  15. The Fantastic Four made their debut in Fantastic Four #1, November 1961.

  16. Spider-Man made his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, August 1962—the very last scheduled issue before this title was axed. Amazing Spider-Man #1 followed in March 1963.

  17. The X-Men made their debut in X-Men #1, September 1963.

  18. The Mighty Thor first appeared in Journey into Mystery #83, August 1962. In March 1966 the comic was retitled The Mighty Thor, though keeping the numbered sequence from the earlier title.

  19. The Incredible Hulk burst on the scene in The Incredible Hulk #1, May 1962.

  20. Captain America returned to action in Avengers #4, May 1964. The Sub-Mariner had resurfaced earlier, in Fantastic Four #4, May 1962.

  21. The Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow sequence runs from Green Lantern #76 to #89.

  22. See, for example, “Drawing the Line” by Buddy Saunders, The Comics Journal #138, 109–122.

  23. Quoted in “The Man of Tomorrow and the Boys of Yesterday,” by Dennis Dooley, from Superman at Fifty! The Persistence of a Legend!, ed. Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle (Octavia Press, 1987), 26.

  24. Action Comics #1 was cover-dated June 1938. This comic is reprinted in The Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics, ed. Michael Barrier and Martin Williams (Smithsonian Institution Press and Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 19–31. A very similar story appears in Superman #1, Summer 1939. This story is reproduced in Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes.

  25. Action Comics #1, page 1.

  26. Action Comics #1, page 5.

  27. Action Comics #1, page 4.

  28. Action Comics #1, page 10.

  29. See for example The Golden Bough, by Sir James Frazer (abridged ed., Macmillan, 1957), 277–279.

  30. The first appearance of the Joker is in Batman #1, Spring 1940.

  31. This long-running dispute eventually led to the cancellation of Captain Marvel and the whole Marvel Family line of comics in 1953. There have been several unsuccessful attempts to revive the original Captain Marvel since. Marvel Comics’ Captain Marvel is a completely different character, who (paradoxically) was much closer in conception to Superman than Fawcett’s character ever was.

  32. By 1942, there were 143 different comic book titles being published in the United States, with an annual industry revenue of some fifteen million dollars.

  33. Several of these characters have appeared in comic book form. Pulp hero Doc Savage appeared in his own comic in May 1940, when longtime Doc Savage publisher Street and Smith decided to enter the comic book market. The Green Hornet and Captain Midnight—both heroes of the radio serials—entered the comic medium in 1940 and 1942 respectively.

  34. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar (Peregrine, 1987), 259–260.

  35. Fantastic Four #10, page 5.

  36. Quoted in Bob Kane, Batman & Me (Eclipse Books, 1989), 44.

  37. This was a special Batman edition by Kane and Finger, published in the 1940 issue of New York World’s Fair Comics. The story is reprinted in Kane’s Batman & Me, 58–70.

  38. “New York World’s Fair,” p. 1.

  39. “New York World’s Fair,” p. 13.

  40. “New York World’s Fair,” p. 13.

  41. “New York World’s Fair,” p. 1.

  42. “New York World’s Fair,” p. 8.

  43. Ronald Barthes, Mythologies (Hill and Wang, 1972), 109–159.

  The Revisionary Superhero Narrative

  GEOFF KLOCK

  Reprinted with permission from How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, 25–52, by the Continuum International Publishing Company. Geoff Klock © 2006.

  IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, ALAN MOORE gives the reader the first hint toward understanding the relation that this work has with the complex tradition in which it participates. He writes:

  [Miller] has taken a character whose every trivial and incidental detail is graven in stone on the hearts and minds of comic fans that make up his audience and managed to dramatically redefine the character without contradicting one jot of the character’s mythology. Yes, Batman is still Bruce Wayne, Alfred is still his butler and Commissioner Gordon is still the chief of police, albeit just barely. There is still a young sidekick named Robin, along with a batmobile, a
batcave and a utility belt. The Joker, Two-Face and the Catwoman are still in evidence amongst the roster of villains. Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it’s all totally different.1

  Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is the first work in the history of superhero comics that attempts a synthesis of forty-five years of preceding Batman history in one place. Prose summaries giving a sense of how the Dark Knight has been portrayed over the decades have already been written.2 To avoid redundancy, let me cite one example of Batman’s contradictory portrayal as emblematic. The adventures of a superhero are published serially, and thus continuity is established from episode to episode, as in television. Unlike television, however, the serial adventures of individual superheroes have been running for decades, and as fictional characters these heroes do not age. Batman, for example, has remained a perennially young twenty-nine-year-old since his appearance in 1939, even though the environment in which he fights has changed month by month to remain contemporary.

  While certain writers and artists have had long runs with a single character, each superhero has had a number of different writers and artists over its run, crossing decades in American history. Since no single creator is essential to the continuation of any given character across the run of a series, many successful superhero titles are still in publication. Comic books are open-ended and can never be definitively completed, as even canceled titles might be revived and augmented by creators. This creates a number of interesting paradoxes that the revisionary superhero narrative will deal with uniquely, as we will see. The reader is given to understand, for example, that the Batman fighting crime in 1939 saying, “Well, Robin, he was a pilot during the war”; the cherry, goofy, campy 1960s Batman reciting the proverbial “Good job, old chum” (the basis for the Adam West Batman television show); and the solitary, grim, nearly psychotic, nocturnal 1980s Batman who watches Ronald Reagan on television are one and the same continuous character. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns is a radical move in the history of the superhero narrative because it is the first work that tries to compose a story that makes sense of its history, rather than mechanically adding another story to the Batman folklore. It must participate in the tradition in order to be recognized as a Batman story, but it consciously organizes that tradition in such a way as to comment on forty-five years of Batman comic books. This serves to complicate the assumptions and structure of that tradition. This is why, as Alan Moore notes, every aspect of the Batman that every reader knows so well finds expression here. This reworking organizes the Batman canon’s contradictory parts into a coherent whole.

  The Dark Night Returns is one of the most important works in the tradition of superhero narratives because it is the first strong misreading of comic book history, specifically the history of Batman. Miller’s work, and some of the work of those around him, can be located near Harold Bloom’s concept of revisionary literature, which Bloom describes as “a re-aiming or a looking-over-again, leading to a re-esteeming or a re-estimating. The revisionist strives to see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as to aim ‘correctively.’”3 Bloom’s theory of revisionism is useful in understanding the way recent superhero narratives function, but the important moments will be where superhero comic books differ, rather than line up, with theories of poetry and other literature. An analysis of The Dark Knight Returns will serve as a good introduction to, and paradigm for, the way in which recent superhero narratives function, as it was one of the first, and still one of the strongest, superhero misprisions.

  One difference from Bloom’s understanding of poetry may already be asserted. Miller is not writing a poem within the determination of strong poetic influence, but writing a character whose aspects are literally formed by his predecessors’ works: he cannot come to the character fresh, because everything his predecessors on Batman wrote, on some level, did happen to the character he is writing. Batman, like many superheroes, wears his tradition on his sleeve. The writer of an established superhero finds not only anxiety in past reading (which determines present writing), but in the very bricolage of the character’s previous narrative. Poetic influence, which Bloom primarily identifies in stylistic terms, often emerges in superhero comic books as elements of the ostensible diegetic narrative. Miller’s task differs from, say, strong poetry in America, because his misreading of Batman is an organization of a host of contradictory weak readings of a single, overdetermined character rather than an overcoming of previous strong effort within a poetic tradition; his effort in organizing them is to converge those weak readings into his own strong vision.

  The first aspect of Miller’s reorganization is an intense level of realism, the hallmark of his gritty, hard-boiled work on Marvel’s Daredevil in the early 1980s (more influenced by the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett than by fantasy/science fiction).4 This trend reaches its culmination in The Dark Knight Returns, in which the Bat-mobile is sensibly reconceived as a Bat-Tank, and Arkham Asylum, usually portrayed as some kind of medieval dungeon, becomes an actual hospital for the mentally disturbed, complete with doctors and nurses. Miller forces the world of Batman to make sense. On a broad scale, this means introducing realistic time into comic books in a way never done before. First, Batman has aged, a move unheard of in a genre where characters persist for decades untouched by the passage of time. The Dark Knight Returns is set in Batman’s “future,” where he has been in retirement for ten years and is now in his mid-fifties. Gotham City, which in the history of comics has been a kind of abstract fictional stand-in for any urban setting, is given a temporal and spatial specificity very much in line with the New York City of the mid-1980s: the Twin Towers are a clear part of the city’s skyline, and Ronald Reagan is president of the United States. So, while the reader is intended to understand The Dark Knight Returns as taking place in Batman’s “future,” it is a future relative to his age. The setting is in fact the contemporaneous 1980s. Miller accomplishes this level of realism—taking time seriously—without breaking from the superhero tradition of always setting the story in contemporary urban America. Aging Batman is the only way to accomplish this and still make narrative sense.

  Miller also finds ways to synthesize Batman’s confused and contradictory history on a smaller scale. Batman appears throughout The Dark Knight Returns in a number of different uniforms, with various Bat-Shield chest emblems reflecting forty-five years of costume design. In one amusing example, readers are finally given an explanation for one of the confusing aspects of the garb, the eye-catching yellow Bat-Shield on a uniform meant to blend in with shadows. When Batman takes a rifle shot to the chest, which any reader assumes would kill him instantly, it reveals metal shielding. Batman says. “Why do you think I wear a target on my chest—can’t armor my head,”5 and with that one line a thirty-year mystery dissolves as every reader runs mentally through previous stories, understanding that plate as having always been there. This example of Miller’s realism is paradigmatic of his revisionary strategy and is more clearly illustrated by the way he incorporates violence into his narrative.

  Miller has often stated that the only thing contemporary comics have learned from The Dark Knight Returns is the extreme level of violence it presents.6 His own work is not so much violent as it is more graphic and more realistic about the violence that has always inhabited superhero narratives. With The Dark Knight Returns, the reader is forced to confront what has been going on for years between the panels. Miller’s realism operates as a kind commentary on a genre that has treated its inherent violence with kid gloves. Take, for example, the fact that Batman has in the course of his history gotten into many fights in which he is outnumbered and his opponents are armed with guns. Using only a Batarang and his fists, Batman manages to defeat them all without breaking a sweat. Miller never treats his hero so gently—his Batman is almost always wounded, sometimes badly, and the Batarang is reconceived as a kind of bat-shaped throwing star that disarms by slicing into the forearm, rather than its
former, sillier portrayal as a boomerang that disarms criminals by knocking weapons out of their hands. The strength of Miller’s portrayal leaves readers with the impression that all of Batman’s fights must have been of this kind, but that they have been reading a watered-down version of the way things “really happened.” It is important to note that powerful reading in superhero narratives often functions in this way, making all other readings appear to have “fallen away” from the strongest version that is retroactively constituted as always already true.

  In [Umberto] Eco’s oneiric climate [as described in his essay “The Myth of Superman”], strong work comes to define truth, as narrative continuity is fuzzy at best. Miller’s revisionary realism is only another version of what comic books often accomplish in the narrative, a literal revising of the facts of a comic book character’s history on the basis of recent interpretation. Take, for example, the design of Superman’s home planet, Krypton. The rendering of a “futuristic” world looks very different today than the rendering done in 1938. Today, however, Krypton is portrayed anew and is expected to be understood by readers as the true rendition of how Krypton has always looked. Miller’s writing is very conscious of this process and actively strives to participate in comic book tradition, invoking various recognizable aspects in such a way as to recast readers’ understanding of what they have seen before. Harold Bloom’s remarks on Milton are amusingly relevant. Substituting Miller for Milton, the reader may conceive that—within its field of signifiers—The Dark Knight Returns has “the true priority of interpretation, the powerful reading that insists on its own uniqueness and its own accuracy. Troping on his forerunners’ tropes, [Miller] compels us to read as he reads, and to accept his stance and vision as our origin, his time as true time.”7

  Miller’s work internalizes not only fictional determination but also intertextual/historical influence. Early in The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce Wayne finds the film The Mark of Zorro on television,8 and the reader is given to understand that this was the movie from which Bruce Wayne and his parents were returning when his parents were killed. Batman creator Bob Kane has admitted that The Mark of Zorro (1920) was an influence in the creation of his superhero.9 Miller makes the trail of influence in Bruce Wayne’s creation of the Batman persona within the fictional history parallel the influence on Kane’s portrayal of the character. This is only the first example of how The Dark Knight Returns engages and synthesizes not only the fictional tradition of its main character but also the very real history that has surrounded the comic book as a medium.