NOTES
1. Alan Moore, “Introduction,” The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986).
2. See Les Daniels, Batman: The Complete History (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999).
3. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 4 (Bloom’s emphasis).
4. Frank Miller, interview with Writers on Comics Scriptwriting, ed. Mark Salisbury (London: Titan Books, 1999), 187. I find it useful to separate the superhero narrative from fantasy and science fiction. The former [fantasy] is most often set in a mythical past with a distinct cosmology, whereas the latter [science fiction] is set in the future and often uses science in a completely different manner. The lines are, of course, blurred but some useful distinctions can be made.
5. Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (New York: DC Comics, 1986), 51.
6. Miller, “Batman and the Twilight of the Idols: An Interview with Frank Miller,” in The Many Lives of the Batman, ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 45.
7. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 132 (Bloom’s emphasis).
8. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 22.
9. Greg S. McCue with Clive Bloom, Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context (London: Pluto, 1993), 22.
10. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1954), 15.
11. Ibid, 191. McCue cites these same passages in Dark Knights.
12. See Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked (New York: Continuum, 2000), 101—170, for an extremely sensitive and cogent discussion of homophobia, Wertham, and Batman.
13. See Miller et al., The Dark Knight Returns, 91–92.
14. Ibid., 138.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid, 140 (Miller’s ellipsis).
17. Richard Reynolds, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 68.
18. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 66.
19. Ibid., 55.
20. Ibid., 41.
21. Ibid., 126.
22. Ibid., 127.
23. Ibid., 140.
24. Ibid., 54.
25. Ibid., 106.
26. Ibid., 142 (Miller’s ellipses).
27. Action Comics #1 (New York: DC Comics, 1938).
28. This description is perhaps more accurate for DC than the Marvel universe: Captain America and the Avengers are not vigilantes, whereas Spider-Man and the X-Men do not enjoy social acceptance.
29. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 41.
30. Ibid., 44–45.
31. Thomas Hobbes, “Leviathan,” in From Plato to Nietzsche, ed. Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997), 471–512.
32. Ibid., 120.
33. Ibid., 129—130.
34. Ibid., 135 (Miller’s ellipses).
35. Ibid., 139.
36. See Amy Kiste Nyberg, “Seal of Approval: The Origins and History of the Comics Code” (Ph.D. diss, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994).
37. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 190 (my ellipsis).
38. Ibid., 84.
39. Cf. the end of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, a work that also engages the problem of the rebel’s institution of a new hegemony.
40. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 185–186 (Miller’s ellipses).
41. Ibid., 164.
42. Ibid., appendix.
43. Ibid., 199.
44. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 117.
45. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 199 (my emphasis, Miller’s ellipsis).
46. Ibid. (Miller’s ellipsis).
47. Ibid.
48. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 116.
49. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 96 (my ellipses).
50. This having been said, it would be simply ignorant to deny that Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is a conservative text in the Reagan-era style. It assumes that psychiatric care and civil liberties allow more crime than they prevent, and portrays those trying to curb fascism as Nazis themselves, effectively avoiding debate. Such an inversion of political realities allows comics, and Miller especially, to claim to be attacking what, in practice, they support. Though I believe I offer a persuasive argument for the metaphorical weight of Commissioner Gordon’s Pearl Harbor anecdote and Batman’s imposition of order on the streets of Gotham City, this should supplement, rather than replace, the knowledge that President Franklin Roosevelt’s actions and Batman’s formation of an underground “army” (Miller’s term) represent the obverse of any democratic process. To quote Whit Stillman’s film Barcelona, one probably shouldn’t forget
-the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface completely open and obvious.
They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?
-The text?
-OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.
(Barcelona, dir. Whit Stillman, perf. Taylor Nichols and Christopher Eigeman. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994). Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Black Cat should also be remembered in this context. Like the anti-abolitionist’s short story about the hanging of a black cat from a tree limb, stories exceed intentions.
51. Miller et al., Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 192.
52. Ibid., 25.
53. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 142.
Jack Kirby and the Marvel Aesthetic
CHARLES HATFIELD
Reprinted by permission from Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 124–142, with minor edits by the author.
THE MARVEL MYTHOS
IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID, THOUGH NOT SO OFTEN CONVINCINGLY, THAT SUPER-heroes constitute “a modern mythology,” and that the Marvel Universe in particular called forth or made more obvious this mythic quality. Such arguments are inexact. If Marvel constitutes a mythos, then it is one that does not carry all the meanings that attach, or once attached, to the word: it does not consist of traditional stories built around putatively historical events; it does not constitute, at least not in any sacred or authoritative way, a body of widely shared beliefs about the world; it does not bear the cosmogony or eschatology of a people (though it has its own privileged stories of genesis and Armageddon, making and unmaking). In short, the Marvel mythos does not seem to perform much of the cultural work performed, or once performed, by the traditional mythoi so often invoked for the sake of the comparison. Notwithstanding Richard Reynolds’s useful Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1994) and other, lesser books, no thorough study has yet been done to substantiate the notion of superhero comics as a mythology, at least in terms other than metaphorical.
Yet, if the comparison is too often loosely made, Marvel did draw inspiration from mythology, particularly artist Jack Kirby’s appetite for mythic tales, a hankering seen even very early in his work. From such tales Kirby inherited a sense of scope, a habit of representing moral and philosophical conflicts by using godlike and symbolically counterpoised characters, and a penchant for creating families of such characters that both reinforce and yet also blur the differences between “good” and evil.” Explicit borrowings from ancient myth, including internecine feuds and symbolically opposed figures, structured Kirby’s Thor and “Tales of Asgard,” in which Kirby tended to design characters by the handful rather than singly (ditto for his later Fourth World and Eternals). These myth-making gestures weren’t just tokens of archaism: they were very much at home in Cold War America, testimony to the beliefs and fears of the time. Implicitly, Kirby’s personal mythologies testify to and make sense within the Cold War’s totalizing ideological conflict. This is why Marvel’s vintage superhero comics have a time capsule-like quality. They also attain, not least because of Kirby’s graphic mythopoesis, some of the timeless, deeply resonant qualities of mythology and legend.
Under Kirby, Marvel’s approach to super
heroes became more complex, less settled, and, if I may hazard the word, pantheonic. By this I mean that, over time, Marvel’s heroes and villains came to counterbalance each other, in a sort of rough-hewn grand design defined by symbolic symmetry. All of them, heroes and villains, belonged to a great, sprawling, superhuman family whose interweaving, often violent relationships were tangled and confusing, but also compelling. Good and evil forces were paired in a Manichean struggle in which the victory of the good, though expected and hoped for at the end of each tale, turned out to be temporary, provisory, and fragile. Conflict reigned. The heroes’ omnipotence was not guaranteed (though the coddling moralism of the Comics Code did ensure that heroes almost always won the battle if not the war).
To some extent this pattern of unceasing conflict had always been the case for superheroes; Superman’s career, after all, was famously described as a “never-ending battle.” But the Marvel characters were not blessed with that forgetfulness which, in earlier superhero comics, almost always ushered the antagonists back, in ritualistic fashion, to an atemporal stasis, or what Neil Gaiman has called a “state of grace,” between episodes, so that the beginning of each new story could be a fresh starting point (see “Change or Die!” 195–196). Instead, the Marvel characters remembered—and so did their readers.
Gaiman’s concept of the “state of grace” echoes Umberto Eco’s famed analysis of narrative time in his essay “The Myth of Superman” (“Il mito di Superman e la dissoluzione del tempo,” 1962, re. and trans. 1972), which was one of the earliest and is still one of the smartest academic analyses of superhero comics (and of “time” in popular series fiction more generally). Eco, writing in the early sixties prior to Marvel’s big changes, argues that Superman comics, indeed superhero comics on the whole, embody a “paradoxical” approach to narrative temporality, so as to reconcile the demands of the mythic—that is, the archetypal, the “emblematic,” the fixed and predictable functions of the superhero—with the different demands of the popular romance, that is, the novel. Per Eco, the novel depends on the invocation (yet also violation) of the everyday and “typical,” and thrives on unpredictability, “the ingenious invention of unexpected events,” and, above all, the possibility of development (148–149). The demands of novelistic development call for the hero to accomplish something, that is, “to ma[k]e a gesture which is inscribed in his past and which weighs on his future.” Such accomplishments, such meaningful happenings, constitute, Eco says, “a step toward death”—for to act is to “consume” oneself, to use up or foreclose some of one’s future possibilities and to add to the archive of events that will shape (and hem in) one’s future actions (150). To act is to surrender to time’s passage. Superman comics therefore depend on a temporal paradox, not because the “time” depicted within a given story is odd (though time travel stories were common in Superman comics then) but because the inferred time “which ties one episode to another” is canceled or ignored or continually rewound to a notional status quo, denying change (153). In short, Superman comics—and by extension all superhero comic series of that era, according to Eco—neglected time between episodes or treated it only very selectively. They followed a logic of repetition rather than development: what Eco calls an iterative structure, in which “each event takes up again from a sort of virtual beginning, ignoring where the preceding event left off” (157).
This had already begun to change before Marvel, Tom De Haven argues, in the Weisinger-edited Superman titles circa 1958 and after. During that era, Superman developed a supporting cast of other survivors from his native planet of Krypton, his alien status was increasingly stressed, and the stories tilted hard in the direction of science fiction, focusing on Kryptonian lore. Weisinger, De Haven notes, “devised a preposterous yet consistent series history and culture,” so that, gradually, “the permanent cast members were endowed with charged and significant memories” (115). Indeed memories and revisitations of Krypton proved a reliable story engine for years. Superman and his fictive world were thus greatly enriched: “In depicting, for the first time, Superman as an alien, as an immigrant, as a survivor, and in presenting these attributes as consequential and defining, the comic books […] developed a coherence and an inviting, elevated meaningfulness […]” (117) This, De Haven notes, presaged the development of tighter continuity at Marvel, and had the unintended consequence of hooking a new, more dedicated kind of reader (137).
By this light, Eco’s analysis of Superman had already become outdated by 1962. Yet Eco does note that Superman stories take place in an “oneiric climate” that selectively admits time and enables a kind of ritualistic return to and elaboration of the character’s origins and history (153–54). His analysis acknowledges the embroidering of the Superman universe under Weisinger, including Weisinger’s frequent recourse to “imaginary” (what-if) stories and “untold” or retold tales (154–55). What does not happen in these comics, Eco argues, is anything that would draw Superman into developments likely to dictate his future actions. Yes, the Weisinger-era Superman had backstory, that is, a history, but not one that necessarily imposed on each successive installment. Despite the many recurrent motifs and the burgeoning cast of characters in Superman comics during this period, almost every tale was self-contained. New readers could jump on with any issue. Between-issue temporality was still vague or deniable.
In contrast, Marvel became addicted, soap opera-like, to continuing stories and unresolved problems. Marvel’s heroes and villains had baggage. They shared memories and carted them around, seldom forgetting. As Kirby, Stan Lee, and company chased the notion of continuity, those memories often (though not always consistently) impinged on present struggles. For example, the Fantastic Four were haunted by villains-at-large such as the Sub-Mariner and the Frightful Four, whose escapes left the team with troubling loose ends between issues. References to preceding issues became common. Even as intertitle continuity became Marvel’s main selling tool, individual titles such as Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man began to experiment with cliffhanger stories of two or more issues each. By late 1964, Amazing was a nonstop soap opera, and the same was true of the FF by mid-1965. If these series lacked the cohesiveness of the ideal novel, if over the long term they were still indefinitely repeating series rather than whole stories published by part, still they boasted, individually and collectively, an additive and even genealogical quality that turned them into an unending “saga.” A saga, as Eco has said elsewhere, entails the passage of time; it is able to let characters grow, change, and perhaps even die; it is prone to a treelike branching into various narrative lines. Admittedly, an open-ended, commercial saga is still, as Eco observes, essentially “a series in disguise,” repeating, albeit in a pseudo-historical framework, the same old story, the same ideas; there is a contradiction between the saga’s effort toward novelistic development and the series’ effort to avoid consumption, so as to maintain the infinite exploitability of the characters (Limits 87). Yet a saga at least allows the potential to develop an immense, ongoing fictive network, what scholars Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have called a vast narrative (2–3). Marvel, building on hints in Superman and other comics, activated the idea of vast narrative for comics.
This vast narrative—the Marvel Universe—started tentatively, and only later was consolidated and elaborated on by diverse hands. It represents a case of multiple authorship on a massive scale, carried out over the decades following Marvel’s first success. However, some of the elements that made this mass effort possible were present early on in Kirby’s work. Indeed they arose from his drawing board. For example, one of the keystones of the Marvel saga was (and is) family resemblance: the fact that heroes and villains often come from common roots and boast similar or complementary powers. Kirby introduced this idea to Marvel, specifically the topos of symbolic pairings or matches between hero and villain. This fretful dualism spoke to the cultural moment: to the Cold War, to its global diffusion of conflict, its comprehensiveness, and i
ts insistence on ideological opposition and mirroring (clash of civilizations, ahem!). What this meant, practically, is that good villains never stayed dead and never stayed away for long. They became regular supporting characters.
Superheroes had always required super-antagonists, of course. From the forties on, many heroes had faced recurrent signature villains who seemed, always, to escape captivity and renew the old feuds. Batman’s rogues’ gallery is probably the best-known example (Joker, Penguin, et al.). But at Marvel the villains often evaded capture and simply withdrew at the end of an episode, leaving plot points dangling. Earlier superhero comics, by contrast, typically jailed or even killed off the villains at story’s end, only to bring them back later. For instance, the Brain Wave is one of the signature villains for the Justice Society of America (the team featured in DC’s All Star Comics between 1941 and 1951), yet he faced the JSA only four times during the Golden Age, each time ending in “death” or capture. Super-villains who appeared much more frequently, so frequently as to become part of a hero’s supporting cast, were unusual: the best example would be Captain Marvel’s archenemy Dr. Sivana, who appeared continually in Fawcett Comics’ various Captain Marvel series (1940–1953) and who often evaded capture. Sivana’s absurdly comic presence became a staple ingredient of Captain Marvel’s world (this Captain Marvel, note, was no relation to Marvel Comics the publisher). More typical were villains who recurred often but whose presence was not considered essential to a series’ premise: Batman’s Joker, Superman’s Lex Luthor, Captain America’s Red Skull.
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