2. Byrne distinguishes between several fault lines of counterfactuals in everyday reasoning, such as taking an action or not taking an action, socially acceptable or prohibited actions, and strongly causal or merely enabling relations. It would be an interesting extension of this article to investigate which of these fault lines also underlie the counterfactuals of the superhero multiverse. Note that superhero counterfactuals emerge not only from basic actions like Superman marrying Lois Lane, but also from rather outlandish propositions like alien invasions and purely narrative changes such as a switch of the dominant generic model organizing the text. DC’s Elseworlds series features, besides the multiverse, several counterfactual narratives, such as Superman assuming leadership in the Soviet Union (in Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son) or superheroes getting caught up in the Apocalypse (in Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come).
3. Most superhero personae are tied to a particular costume and mask, and sometimes they also have magical items that afford superpowers. In comics history, these superhero personae are assumed by different human characters. The costume and superpowers of The Flash were donned first by Jay Garrick (from 1940) in the Golden Age and then by Barry Allen (1956–1985) in the Silver Age. Currently, Wally West (1986-) is The Flash [actually, Barry Allen became The Flash once again in 2011, after the writing of this essay—eds.].
4. Since the comics in question are nonpaginated, I quote from the texts according to the following convention: (year: issue, page number).
5. The Golden Age superhero version reproduces Mary Marvel’s costume. Alan Moore himself wrote some of the Judge Dredd stories first published in the British science fiction comics magazine 2000 AD.
6. The “monster group” is a mathematical symmetry group of 196,882 dimensions, which supposedly reflects the structure of the universe (see Roman 2007). “Ghost particle” is a term used by Isaac Asimov in his novel The Neutrino (1966).
WORKS CITED
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A Song of the Urban Superhero
SCOTT BUKATMAN
Chapter originally titled “The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero,” reprinted by permission from Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, 184–223. © 2003 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.
There is a city, a glorious and singular place. Old and yet pristine, ornate and yet streamlined. A metropolis of now and then and never was.
STARMAN #1
IN THE STORIES THEY COME STRAIGHT AT YOU, IN BOLD, BLURRED STREAKS OF color against the ground of the great metropolis. At first glance they are terribly crude—especially in their first decades of existence—but familiarity and developing history endow them with copious nuance. Cloaking themselves in vibrant tones, they come straight at you in a blur and streak across the panel, the page, the city, the mind, and then they stop: wondrous polychrome monuments, somehow intimate and solid and untouchable in the sky.
I find it fascinating, or at least noteworthy, that superheroes, many of whom could, let’s face it, live anywhere they want, invariably reside in American cities.1 Other comics bring us to the ‘burbs (Archie) or beyond known space (Star Wars), but superheroes are homebodies as much as homeboys: Superman is generally content to operate in and around Metropolis, Batman’s name is synonymous with Gotham City, Opal City is Starman’s official place of residence, and for a strange while, all the Marvel superheroes jostled for room (and, presumably, apartments) in—where else?—New York. Crime remains at the level of heists and elaborate capers, the crowd exists only to gawk, and an anticorporatist populism marks the sole intrusion of a realpolitik. In the mid-1980s, creators began to explore the relation between heroic figure and urban ground, and the city became something more than a generic background for superheroic derring-do.2 The superher
o-city link has become increasingly explicit in such recent comics as Kurt Busiek’s Astro City and Alan Moore’s Top 10.
Let me propose that American superheroes encapsulated and embodied the same utopian aspirations of modernity as the cities themselves. Superhero narratives thus comprise a genre that joins World’s Fairs, urban musicals, and slapstick comedies in presenting urban modernity as a utopia of sublime grace. These comics dream impossible figures in ideal cities. Even if those cities themselves were hardly individuated in the first decades of superhero comics—Coast City and Central City served as backdrops more than fully felt environments—still, they were cities, and while superhero comics don’t produce an urban analysis that city planners can use, they nevertheless provide a compelling iconography of a rich urban imaginary, unfettered and uncanny.
Because the audience for superhero comics largely consisted of adolescent and postadolescent males (as any visitor to a comics shop can attest), explanations of comics’ appeal have stuck to well-worn paths mostly trodden by Oedipus. Superheroes have been regarded as power fantasies for boys who have not yet acclimated socially (as with kids’ fascination with less-than-human/more-than-human dinosaurs). Superheroes are also said to embody the displacement of sexual energy into aggression (which is why comics are profligate with property damage and evenly matched opponents locked in nonlethal slugfests). And of course superheroes are authority and order incarnate, innately fascist at their core (especially Superman, our homegrown übermensch). Still further, superheroes negotiate dichotomous roles: the child (the orphaned Bruce Wayne) and the father (Batman), the servant of the law (crime fighter) and the autonomous outsider (vigilante) are condensed into a single, titanic figure. Displacement and condensation are the real superpowers. Thus have superheroes been reduced to a standard set of psychoanalytic and sociological maneuvers. No wonder they were neurotic by the 1960s.
The stories themselves generally tell it this way (and creators and fans alike generally concur): the superhero is a figure of great independence who chooses to serve the laws and moral values of our society. He is an urban dweller because that’s where the criminals are; he operates beyond the strict parameters of the law the better to enforce its values; he supports the status quo but remains uncorrupted by the constant corruption he encounters. As comics creator Howard Chaykin observed, not inaccurately, “The comic book reader has very proscribed ideas about how comic book heroes behave. It comes back to Raymond Chandler’s line about Alan Ladd: ‘A small boy’s idea of a tough guy.’”3 The superhero is Philip Marlowe in tights.
I would say that as avatars of law and order and justice and authority go, superheroes are a trivial and unconvincing lot. For the most part, nothing really changes through their actions. Their enemies are only marginally freakier than they. The battles leave the “real” problems of society sporadically acknowledged and hardly addressed. Further, if ideas of preserving order are present at all, it is only at the level of narrative: the sequence of images, with their candy-colored costumes, dynamic and irregular layouts, movement beyond the boundary of the frame, fragmented temporalities, sound effects, and further abstractions, insist on a pervasive and appealing chaos, more Midway than White City. The hyperbolic spectacle of the color comics page easily undermines and, yes, subverts, thin fantasies of social order.
Superhero comics present something other than, or apart from, aggressive fantasies of authority and control; something more closely aligned with fantasy and color but at the same time specific to the urban settings that pervade the genre.4
Grids and Grace
To ensure a more rational system of urban growth in New York, in 1811 a gridded projection dividing the entire territory of the island into a system of 155 streets and 12 avenues (a total of 2,028 blocks) was superimposed on the topography of Manhattan: “a blueprint for the island’s manifest destiny,” the architect Rem Koolhaas wrote in Delirious New York. The system was at once totalitarian (only Broadway, cutting a broad diagonal swath across the grid, was allowed to deviate from the system) and democratic (a leveling of irregularities, an erasure of difference), an order that would permit expansion and prosperity. With the advent of the grid, rationalist order ruled the city, or at least that’s how the story goes. Koolhaas, on the other hand, views the two-dimensional array as little more than a blind for the irrational fantasies that lay at the heart of Manhattan, “the neutralizing agent” that structured the “subutopian fragments” of the city upon which urban planning never completely foreclosed. Horizontality was balanced, perhaps even contradicted, by the upward thrust of the city into vast skyscrapers, each disconnected block and each building, every separate floor and room defined by its own unique and grandiose designs and imaginings. “Through the establishment of enclaves such as the Roman Gardens—emotional shelters for the metropolitan masses that represent ideal worlds removed in time and space, insulated against the corrosion of reality—the fantastic supplants the utilitarian in Manhattan.”5 The irrational dreams of the city only seemed constrained by the even tempos of the urban grid.
The urban newspaper was also characterized by the regularity of its columns and the compaction of vast amounts of information within a limited space. In Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s wooing of New York’s vast immigrant and laboring population, the newspaper, once a source of dry information central to the mercantile economy of the nation, became a conduit for fantasies of urban existence. With the introduction of illustrations and multicolumned headlines, the organization of the page owed more to the grid, but this was a grid characterized by new, more open spaces that broke from the strict constraints of even columns. Illustrations and headlines were the signs, lights, and marquees of Broadway and perhaps, too, the invigorating expanse of Olmstead and Vaux’s Central Park or sometimes even the playground of Coney.
Newspaper comics, whether in their initial single-panel incarnation or later horizontal sequences, also offered entertainment and respite for eyes regulated by columnar precision, although their legibility also depended on the grid’s regularity. In his New York Journal, William Randolph Hearst pushed sensational stories, multicolumned headlines, and plenty of multicolumned illustrations. The papers increasingly reflected the kaleidoscopic experience of life in the city, and the Sunday color supplements gave readers a fantasia of familiar urban types in sumptuous settings. While newspapers established their centrality as a set of information discourses through reportage, advertising, and editorials, comics remained distinct: aesthetically through their color and varied organization; and in their content, which generally stressed fantasy, if not outright metamorphosis. Comics were the most conspicuous noninformational feature, or at least the only one that had no pretensions about uplifting the masses. In their deployment of color and fantasy, they were a deliberate departure from the rest of the paper.
The most visually striking strips luxuriated in the space of a full page, and artists frequently played with (and, in the case of one memorable Winsor McCay strip from 1905, exploded) the grids and boxes that dominated the rest of the paper.6 The fluid metamorphoses that mark nearly all of McCay’s Little Nemo pages introduce the reader to built environments of surprising yet inevitable complexity. Nemo summons thoughts of visionary architecture, but the pages are also reminiscent of the ornate and singular facades on the apartment buildings of the belle époque. In contrast, the compressed and formulaic pages of early comic books suggest the overcrowded tenements—democratic, graceless, and durable—that defined immigrant neighborhoods.7
The superhero city is founded on the relationship between grids and grace. The city becomes a place of grace by licensing the multitude of fantasies that thrived against the “constraining” ground of the grid. Grace is a function of elegant precision but also implies a virtuosic transcendence of the purely functional, and the city thus possesses a grace of its own. Superheroes are physically graceful, but they are also graced through their freedom, their power, and their mobility. Superhero comics embody the grace
of the city; superheroes are graced by the city. Through the superhero, we gain a freedom of movement not constrained by the ground-level order imposed by the urban grid. The city becomes legible through signage and captions and the hero’s panoramic and panoptic gaze. It is at once the site of anonymity and flamboyance. Above all, soaring above all, the superhero city is a place of weightlessness, a site that exists, at least in part, of playful defiance of the spirit of gravity.
PART ONE
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SUPERHERO CITIES
The twentieth-century city put new concentrations of information into increasingly rapid circulation, coincident with new modes of perception and social definition. The now familiar litany of modernist tropes usually includes the problem of mapping an urban space that had become so big, complex, and dynamic as to evade easy comprehension by both its residents and its ostensible controllers. There were anxieties about urban concentration and the concurrent impact of new technologies on mundane life. The city was a contradictory field: the humans within it were reduced to economic units of undifferentiated labor value, and yet, as Georg Simmel famously argued, liberation might lie within this anonymity. The city was its faceless masses, but it was also the new opportunities to make (or remake) a self (or selves). Cities were hardly panoptic spaces of total control: the perfect gaze of the authorities worked most efficiently in fiction that still seemed to posit an amateur sleuth as the last, best, hope.
In fiction, journalism, and cinema, the uncentered city appeared as a dark maze or labyrinth, a site of disappearance and murky invisibilities, a giant trap for the unwary, but it was also a stage for spectacular, kaleidoscopic experience. The city was described in a set of clichéd but not inappropriate dichotomies: the familiar and the strange, the sunlit and the shadowed, the planned and the chaotic, the sublime and the uncanny. This was the poem of the city, so compelling that one could almost see the crosswalks filled with bedazzled, entranced citizens, all struggling to retain their balance on the mesmerizing streets of modernity. Flying over the horizon relatively late in this history, superheroes nevertheless inherit and embody many of these paradoxical tropes. Some define perceptual paradigms and tactics of negotiation appropriate to city life.
The Superhero Reader Page 26
