The Superhero Reader

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

  Mental models are akin to modal logics in philosophy and its possible worlds in that they build models of possibilities. In turn, counterfactuals are alternative sets of such possibilities. Ruth Byrne shows how our reasoning is based not only on mental models but also on our negotiation of different counterfactual possibilities. In what Byrne calls the “rational imagination,” there are a number of “fault lines” along which the counterfactuals of the superhero multiverse unfold are different from those of reality, which Byrne discusses, readers can imagine them as alternative sets of possibilities afforded by a mental model.2 In Wolfman’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, for example, there is Earth-I on which Superman as we know him lives. On Earth-2 Superman ages and marries Lois Lane. On Earth-3 Superman is the villain Ultraman, and his nemesis Lex Luthor is a science hero who defends Metropolis. For each of these storyworlds, one element of its basic premises has been changed. They work as counterfactuals, “what if” versions, relative to one another.

  As Johnson-Laird and Byrne show, alternative mental models are used in everyday reasoning to determine the relative significance and truth-value of different propositions. However, the more possibilities we construct, the more counterfactual scenarios there are to negotiate, the more difficult it becomes to process them in our working memory (see Johnson-Laird 2006: 46–47, 112–13). In written narratives, as Danenberg (2008) has demonstrated, counterfactuals have been present in the novel throughout its history. The novel generally provides a baseline reality relative to its counterfactuals, either in the storyworld (for characters’ and narrators’ speculations and imaginations) or in the actual world (for historical counterfactuals). By contrast, though readers can consider Earth-I and the young, unmarried Superman as a baseline reality from which an infinite number of earths diverts counterfactually, superhero comics like Crisis on Infinite Earths generally do not posit any single storyworld as the baseline reality or textual actual world. Rather, these comics develop mutually incompatible counterfactual versions of their storyworld—and more of these than anyone’s working memory can hold. In one of its most recent treatments, the series 52 (2006–7), the DC multiverse comprises no less than fifty-two distinct storyworlds.

  Constructing counterfactuals is, to be sure, part and parcel of our imagination and reasoning, and this accounts for the readiness with which readers accept the multiple storyworlds of superhero multiverses. Yet the cognitive load imposed by dozens of counterfactuals is immense, and without an established baseline reality it is very difficult to maintain a clear sense of all the different states of affairs that are the case in the multiverse. In order to cope with these challenges of the multiverse, superhero comics need to provide readers with means to identify character versions and the storyworld(s) to which they belong, and they need to present some basis, in lieu of a single, core reality, to which readers can relate the counterfactuals of the multiverse. In the following sections, I turn to Crisis on Infinite Earths, Tom Strong, and Planetary and show how these superhero comics guide their readers through the multiverse with the help of iconography and reader surrogates.

  ICONOGRAPHY AS A SHORTCUT TO KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES

  In his essay, “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco describes superhero comics as cyclical, because their serial nature prevents the heroes from developing, growing, and dying. The novel, in contrast, is linear, and its author can make irrevocable changes, such as having the hero marry, die, or grow old. Even when his essay was first published in English (in a revised version, 1972), Eco’s argument was not quite up-to-date with then-current superhero comics. For the Golden Age superheroes of the 1940s and 1950s, his characterization of comics as cyclical and devoid of development is apt. Yet as early as 1961, DC Comics had already introduced the concept of the “multiverse” with the story of Flash of Two Worlds. In this story, the current Flash, Barry Allen, moves so fast that he enters another storyworld, that of the original Flash, Jay Garrick.3 As DC Comics continued to set its stories in numerous, noncongruent storyworlds, individual development of the superheroes and irrevocable events became possible, because in this way series would not have to end. Superheroes like Kal-El on Earth-2, the DC storyworld based on the Golden Age, could marry and grow old, while Superman on Earth-I, the current DC storyworld, is still young and courting. Different from other serial forms like the TV series or the novel in installments, superhero comics do not need to resolve “the possible” (see O’Sullivan 2009 on “the possible” and serial form); instead, they can keep it unresolved by representing several alternative realities simultaneously in their multiverse.

  Although migration across narrative worlds is possible, each of these superhero versions is anchored in his or her own storyworld. Therefore superhero comics need to provide a way for readers to keep the character versions distinct and to relate each version to its own storyworld. The image from Promethea discussed earlier suggests how readers identify characters and their storyworlds: Grace wears Egyptian-style headgear and antiquish body armor that fit well into the storyworld of 1930s adventure comics; Sophia’s white shirt and jeans, on the other hand, put her at odds with the expectations tied to 1930s adventure comics and show that she is probably an interloper from another storyworld. Here the costumes, or in more general terms the iconography, of the characters allows readers to identify the storyworlds in which they are anchored.

  Iconography refers to the visual attributes with which one can identify characters and allegories. Pallas Athene, for example, can be identified through her helmet, shield, and spear. The apostle Peter carries a key, and the cardinal sin Wrath is accompanied by a lion in visual depictions. Iconography has been defined by the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1955) as one of the levels on which we understand images. It is closely tied to the cultural knowledge that forms part of the readers’ general world knowledge. For readers with little knowledge of ancient mythology or Christianity’s folklore, it might be difficult to identify Pallas Athene, the apostle Peter, or the cardinal sin Wrath. Readers well versed in these conventions often recognize the figures instantly and tie them in with their general knowledge structures. For example, Pallas Athene can be identified as the daughter of Zeus and goddess of wisdom and rationality, and as belonging to the pantheon of antiquity. The iconography of the image works as a shortcut to the readers’ knowledge of the character and narrative world she inhabits.

  The creators of superhero comics have developed their own iconography of costumes and visual attributes, which can be used to identify character versions and their storyworlds. In Wolfman’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, different versions of The Flash are distinguishable by their costumes: the Golden Age Flash wears a helmet with wings, while the Silver Age Flash wears a red suit, and the current Flash wears a yellow-red suit (later to be swapped out for the suit of the earlier, Silver Age Flash). Readers of superhero comics know which Flash is supposed to wear which costume and can thus distinguish among the different character versions with the help of these iconographic elements. Needless to say, after more than seven decades of superhero comics, the superhero iconography has become at least as complex as the iconography connected to ancient mythology, and at times its interpretation requires a similar degree of expert knowledge on the part of readers.

  In Warren Ellis’s Planetary, the Planetary team are called to Gotham City to investigate a series of gruesome murders (2003: 3). As it turns out, a “partial multiversal collapse” fused different storyworlds together, as well as the bodies of whoever happened to be at the same place (multatis mutandis) at the same time (2003: 3.7).4 The Planetary team hunt down through the streets of Gotham City the culprit who caused this collapse, following him through the different versions of the Batman storyworld created throughout the series’ history. They encounter Batman from 1939 (2003: 3.38), from the 1960s TV series (2003: 3.25), from Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns (2003: 3.27), and from Jeph Loeb’s Hush (2003: 3.40). Readers know that they move through historically different versions of the Batman st
oryworld, because Batman looks, talks, and behaves like the different versions of the character in the Golden Age comics, the TV series, and Miller’s and Loeb’s more recent versions. With the help of superhero iconography, Warren Ellis takes readers on a guided tour through the history of the multiverse.

  In Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, iconographic elements provided a similar navigational function but without actually referring to existing series. Tom Strong is itself a commentary on superhero conventions and traditions. The series also tackles the concept of the superhero multiverse repeatedly. In one instance, Tom Strong’s daughter Tesla wants to take a joyride into the multiverse through the hero’s “search board” (2003: 3). She opens a portal through which multiple alternative versions of her character also step.

  The Telsa of the Tom Strong storyworld we know from earlier stories encounters a cowgirl version, a Golden Age superhero version, a cartoon version, an adventure comics version, and a version inspired by the series Judge Dredd.5 The appearance of these alternative versions of the character allows them to be anchored in different generic contexts, such as the Western, the adventure comic in the tradition of the Tarzan series, or science fiction. With the help of their contrasting superhero costumes and related iconographic features, readers can connect the different versions of characters to the alternative storyworlds from which they come and thus keep them distinct.

  READER SURROGATES, THE PATHS, AND EXPLANATORY MODELS

  In addition to the problem of keeping track of which character version belongs to which storyworld, the multiverse poses a second challenge for readers: the absence of a baseline reality against which various storyworld scenarios might be compared in order to identify the counterfactual versions. The most common version of a superhero character, like Superman working as a newspaper reporter and eternally courting Lois Lane, can be posited as the baseline reality for that character; but superhero comics more often make use of a specific textual strategy to provide a sure footing for their readers: characters who function as reader surrogates.

  As the narratives of the superhero multiverse unfold in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Planetary, and Tom Strong, readers do not navigate these storyworlds by formally constructing a set of premises, as in the examples of logical reasoning that Johnson-Laird presents. Instead, readers usually mentally accompany a character as he or she explores the storyworld or, in this case, the superhero multiverse. I call these characters “reader surrogates.” Surrogates venture on a path through the multiverse. Along this path they are faced with a manageable number of alternative realities, and the path itself connects this constellation of worlds into a larger, more or less coherent whole. Characters cross from one storyworld to another using several means, such as Tom’s “search board,” which rides the “quantum foam” between worlds in Tom Strong (2001: 3; 2003: 3.8), or the “travelstones” of the ship that sails the “bleed” between storyworlds in Planetary (2000: 4.15). Thanks to these devices, characters like Tom Strong and the Planetary team can physically migrate from one storyworld to another. Other means by which worlds in the multiverse are connected include the superpowers of heroes like The Harbinger, who can move back and forth between the alternative worlds of the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the portals that facilitate the change of storyworlds in Tom Strong.

  All these narrative devices provide physical paths that connect storyworlds. As readers follow reader surrogates on their paths through the storyworlds of the multiverse and experience events with or rather through them, they understand together with these characters that they have moved from one storyworld of the multiverse to another. But readers do not merely follow their surrogate characters experientially on their physical paths through the multiverse; they are also privy to the explanatory models of the multiverse that these characters either develop on their own or have conveyed to them by others. In Crisis on Infinite Earths, the superheroes aboard The Monitor’s satellite are told how the multiverse emerged and how anti-matter and the villain, appropriately named The Anti-Monitor, threaten to annul the many worlds of the multiverse one by one. Only merging the multiverse together into one storyworld again, and uniting all the superheroes to take up the fight against The Anti-Monitor, will save the day. Hence The Monitor and his helpers, The Harbinger and The Pariah, explain to the superheroes, and by proxy to readers, how the multiverse was formed, what threatens it, and how they can work against it (see Wolfman et al. 2000: 114–15, 182–90).

  Tom Strong and Planetary feature more abstract explanatory models. When Tom Strange, Tom Strong’s alternative version from a storyworld called Terra Obscura, is introduced in Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, readers learn that Terra Obscura relates to Tom Strong’s world in the same way that a particle relates to a “ghost particle” (2003: 4). As Tom Strange arrives in Tom Strong’s world, Strong explains to his family that Strange is like a mirror image of him and that Terra Obscura developed similarly to their own storyworld. Later on Tom Strong gives the physical explanation of the ghost particle to Tom Strange. The mirroring of storyworlds in particle and ghost particle provides an explanatory model that is based on a continuous spatial expansion partitioned by a limitation, that of the mirror, into different realities or worlds.

  In Planetary, meanwhile, the explanatory model is the “snowflake.” The main storyworld of Planetary is embedded in a multiverse structured in the shape of a “snowflake,” as the ship explains to one of the characters (2000: 4.15). At this point in the narrative the comic portrays such a snowflake, reflecting light in many different colors. These reflections represent each storyworld within the snowflake. As readers learned earlier on, a group of 1930s pulp heroes reproduced this snowflake of reality in order to end the Second World War. A projection shows the snowflake as one of the pulp heroes explains the plan to his fellows and by proxy to us readers (2000: 1.19). Like Tom Strong, then, Planetary draws on an explanatory model of the multiverse that is rooted in physics and geometry and suggests a continuous space within which the multiverse unfolds, be it in the mirror reflection of the ghost particle or in the monster group symmetry of the “snowflake.”6 As in Tom Strong, in Planetary this physical model is explained to characters who function as reader surrogates.

  Reader surrogates can form a replacement for the lost baseline reality of the multiverse. Even though no storyworld works as a textual actual world in the multiverse against which all the other storyworlds might be contrasted as counterfactual, reader surrogates can provide a basic point of departure for the process of constructing a mental model of the multiverse. The surrogates’ path through the multiverse limits the number of alternative storyworlds with which readers need to be concerned, even as the explanatory models encountered along those paths provide keys to navigating the multiverse.

  CONCLUSION

  Superhero comics feature surprisingly complex storyworlds. Because their adventures have been narrated serially over the last seven decades, these characters’ initially continuous narrative worlds have diversified into a vast multiverse. This multiverse holds different versions of different characters from different epochs and different series, in comics written by different authors. Indeed, like the characters’ double identities and superpowers, the multiverse has become a convention of the superhero genre.

  The multiverse is a set of mutually incompatible storyworlds. In principle these storyworlds can be viewed as counterfactuals: changing particular elements of the characters’ situations, they relate to one other as “what if” versions. But because a baseline reality is often difficult to discern within this constellation of worlds, the multiverse poses considerable processing challenges. On the one hand, the iconography of superhero costumes provides readers with something of a shortcut, helping them identify and distinguish between different character versions. On the other hand, reader surrogates take paths through storyworlds that, in conjunction with explanatory models they (and thus readers) acquire along the way, enable interpreters to connect these worlds into the l
arger whole of the multiverse. As the narrative unfolds, readers can with the help of surrogates construct a more or less continuous mental model of the multiverse, incrementally moving through its different parts and sets of possibilities.

  Drawing on our capacity for imagining and reasoning via mental models, the creators of superhero comics have developed strategies to facilitate storytelling—and story understanding—in the multiverse. These strategies provide new ways of characterizing, or contextualizing, the “intuitive belief in classical cosmology” that Ryan (2006) describes. The one-world commitments of classical cosmology stem from the coherence and parsimony of the mental models grounded in that world picture. But as superhero comics show, those same mental models can be adapted and extended to accommodate the imaginative wealth of the multiverse, which invites us to inhabit a different, postclassical cosmology.

  NOTES

  1. Note that the two animals no longer bear their riders and that Grace’s sword is in her left hand in the top panels, but in her right hand in the lower panel.