The Superhero Reader

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

  Flying in the City

  The experience of the city (and the comic book) is less one of static order than dynamic negotiation. “Within the network of its rectilinearity, movement becomes ideological navigation between the conflicting claims and promises of each block,” writes Koolhaas.8 The city, in his seductive view, is not the logical place of business that it pretends to be; it is instead a multitude of fantasies projected in three dimensions. The superhero, in his costumed extravagance, muscular absurdity, and hyperkineticism, superimposes the fantastic on the face of the utilitarian, bringing the city back to the fact of its fantasy. First of all, superheroes negate the negation of the grid—they move through space in three dimensions, designing their own vehicles, choosing their own trajectories. To be a superhero, you’ve got to be able to move. Superhero narratives are sagas of propulsion, thrust, and movement through the city.

  New York City is a city of intense circulation. Vivian Gornick finds comfort in its incessant turbulence: “The street keeps moving, and you’ve got to love the movement. You’ve got to find the composition of the rhythm, lift the story from the motion, understand and not regret that all is dependent on the swiftness with which we come into view and pass out again. The pleasure and the reassurance lie precisely in the speed with which connection is established and then let go of. No need to clutch. The connection is generic not specific. There’s another piece of it coming right along behind this one.”9 But while it might be a city of intense circulation, it also quickly became a place of blocked circulation. The grids of Manhattan imposed regularity on the traffic but channeled it into narrow streets that worked against the flow as well as the logic of the island’s narrow, hilly topography.10 And so, not surprisingly, nearly every superhero worthy of the name has enhanced powers of motion. Superman, Green Lantern, Mighty Mouse, and Captain Marvel can fly, Wonder Woman has an invisible airplane, The Flash has superspeed, and Batman swings on a rope, drives the Batmobile, flies the Batgyro, and so on.11 The Spectre can walk through walls, Iceman can ride an ice slide, the Fantastic Four have a hovercar, Hawkman and the Angel have wings, and Daredevil and Spider-Man leap and swing. Some of them can teleport, but I can’t remember who.

  Plastic Man is perhaps the most urban of them all—maybe because he doesn’t seem to own a car. When Plastic Man needs to be somewhere, he runs, and Jack Cole’s art deploys an enormous array of such forms of urban clutter as lampposts, subway entrances, cobblestoned streets, peeling posters, and moldering brick walls. We are often placed so low to the ground that even the curbs loom menacingly. Cole continually varied perspectives on a single page as Plastic Man’s body snaked from panel to panel, his stretched body itself linking the spaces of the panels, the city.12

  The best of them move with more than swift efficiency, their poise and elegance also speaking a kind of poetic appropriation of space. Batman’s eloquent cape, Green Lantern’s slightly arched back, Daredevil’s acrobatic virtuosity, and Superman’s vibrant coloration all speak to more than the business at hand.13 Alan Moore’s “imaginary” last Superman story finds Lois Lane describing one of her innumerable rescues: “What happened next had all the familiarity of a recurring dream. I was falling, and a violet comet was falling alongside me. The reds and blues ran together, you see, so that’s how he looked when he flew … a violet comet.”14 In the consciously mythic Superman for All Seasons, Tim Sale represents Superman’s blurred superspeed with a thick patina of crayon.15 There is an appealing childlike wonder in these kinetic views. Superheroes preserve the order of the city but need not submit to it. What they must do, however, is partake of its movement.

  The Legible City

  Cities were also “word cities,” as Peter Fritzsche calls them, spaces to be literally and continually read. Newspapers, magazines, and comics helped to constitute the word cities of the United States, as did a wealth of private and municipal signage.16 Comics superimpose text on the space of the city.17 In signs, labels, captions, word balloons, and sound effects, words become a fundamental aspect of urban space. Captains are placed in colored boxes, sound effects are depicted in BRIGHT! BOLD! FORMS! These texts compete for the eye’s attention, but the overall effect is usually to guide the eye through the complex space. The reader simultaneously juggles words that are part of the landscape (signs), words that are constitutive of narrative (captions, word balloons), and words that produce sensational impact (sound effects). In the later 1970s, such artists as Walt Simonson and Howard Chaykin refined the interplay of image and text: in American Flagg!, Time2, and Manhunter, reading and looking overlapped as they hadn’t before.

  The city’s many layers are also made legible in the superhero city. Superman tunnels through the city, and the reader is given a cross section of buildings, streets, substructures, and even the rocky substrate. The Hulk shoves The Thing down a manhole, and Jack Kirby divides the panel to show both the street above and the embarrassin’ space below. Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira is set in a postapocalyptic Neo-Tokyo rendered in meticulous detail. Broken slabs of steel-reinforced concrete, jumbled slabs of asphalt, and the dense underpinnings of the city are all newly exposed to harsh light.

  Further, superhero comics are filled with schematic diagrams, like the one of the Fantastic Four’s high-rise headquarters. Everything is carefully labeled, from the Giant Map Room and the Hidden Elevator to the Fantasticar Hangar, Trophy Room, and Weapon Collection and the Long Range Passenger Missile (able to reach any point on Earth in minutes). These schematics provide a way of reading the city and are great instances of skyscrapers as both rational and fantastic spaces. The Baxter Building is the Fantastic Four’s place of business. The labels are signs that this is a working environment (they’re also a further set of signs in the legible city), and they also provide some tantalizing clues as to how the environment works. But, while my childhood mind could well imagine that skyscrapers contained Conference Rooms and Computers, did they also have Missile Monitoring Rooms? The Hidden Elevator ran up and down the length of the building, which the Fantastic Four shared with other, presumably less fantastic, tenants, and another label explained how “Rocket exhaust travels down these pipes to expend its heat in fire pits beneath the city surface.” Fire pits beneath the city surface? Wow! So labeling gave me a rational city that was anything but, while cutaway views showed me high-tech hiding places nested within the modern spaces of adulthood.

  The superhero city is experienced in a rush but opened to contemplation: it is distinguished by this dialectic of exuberant motion and a legible stasis. By exposing and labeling the multiple layers of the city, superhero comics enact something equivalent to the superhero’s panoramic and panoptic gaze, just as the dynamic organization of figures and panels enact something of the city’s constant hustle.

  The City in Our Grasp

  Before there was a Giant Man, an Ant Man, or an Atom, McCay’s Little Nemo grew to the size of Manhattan’s rising skyline, as he and Flip stepped over the buildings like toy blocks. Decades later, Bill Watterson’s Calvin underwent a similar metamorphosis.18 In the comic strips, fantasy and dreams explicitly licensed the transformation: superhero comics relied on radioactivity or Red Kryptonite to do the same job. Whatever the cause, scale is constantly refigured in the superhero’s city.

  Bill Finger, a Batman cocreator, was fond of battles at trade exhibitions, where the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder would hop along the keys of giant typewriters. The expanding list of Kryptonian survivors included the entire city of Kandor, which had been shrunk, bottled, and stolen by Brainiac before the planet exploded. The citizens of Kandor live their normal, albeit tiny, lives on a shelf in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, apparently undismayed by the giant faces of Superman or Lois Lane peering down at them. The most uncanny aspect of Kandor was not simply its portability, although that was pretty interesting, but the notion that a city could be detached, isolated, and removed from its surroundings. The city was a clearly bounded, self-enclosed, self-sustaining environment, someth
ing like Manhattan Island without the outlying suburbs. Who feeds the people of Kandor, and how do they dispose of waste? Do these people have jobs? What do they do in there? While these are the kinds of questions that earthbound urban planners might well ponder, Kandor’s secrets remain its own. Susan Stewart reminds us that the miniature erases labor and cause and effect; it also arrests time.19

  Humans loom above Kandor, a display city, Krypton’s Futurama. In a recent Batman animated film, the Joker and Batman do battle at the abandoned site of the Gotham City World’s Fair in a Futurama-style exhibition space.20 The antagonists are the size of buildings. The Joker even wears the spire of the Chrysler Building, just as its architect, William Van Allen, did at a 1931 masquerade ball. The city, then, becomes a toy, a pocket city, a dream house. The body of the child, as with Nemo and Calvin or the ostensible adults of the superhero comics, becomes adequate to the size of the city. The city moves from sublime unknown to marvelous object, its blocks now children’s blocks to be rearranged at will. These shifts of scale put the body into a fundamentally different, more tactile relation to the city. “The hand is the measure of the miniature,” Susan Stewart writes.21 Enlarging the body or diminishing the city permits one to “grasp” the city as whole. “To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it out within sets of contexts, none of which is determinative.”22

  The city is shrunken and distilled in the superhero comic in ways that recall the distilled urbanism of world’s fairs. The World of Tomorrow, in the guise of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, had opened to the public only one year after the appearance of Superman, the Man of Tomorrow. Fairs organized the city into a set of panoramic views, with ample opportunities to see it all from the air. Towers and Ferris wheels and parachute jumps swept the visitors aloft to experience a “fiction of knowledge” and to satisfy “this lust to be a viewpoint.” And the fair was the city reduced in scale, open to view, an educational, sensational, but nonlinear immersion in an ideal urban experience. They were progressive and nostalgic in exactly the ways that superheroes were. They humanized the future in terms of the past. Two issues of World’s Fair Comics appeared, with Superman and Batman sharing the covers, and the fair marked the first public appearance of a “live” Superman (played by Ray Middleton) as part of 1940’s “Superman Day.” And then there was a short-lived superhero called The Fantom of the Fair, who lurked in utopia’s basement (ok, its substructure), fighting crime at, well, world’s fairs. In the last decade, a striking number of superheroes have managed to visit the 1939 fair: The Squadron Supreme, Superman, the citizens of Terminal City, and Batman all return to this locus of American urban utopian aspiration as if they recognized their ideological complicity in producing a distilled, controllable urbanism.23

  PART TWO: SUPERHERO CITY TOURS

  Superman’s Metropolis

  Superman was inevitable. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had already tried the name out on a mad villain, which made some kind of sense against the background of an incompletely grasped Nietzschean philosophy and the growing sense of impending war in Europe. Even two Midwestern lads could sense a change in the air. America needed a Superman of its own, an American Superman—a boy’s Superman. Actually, they gave us a pretty good one.

  Superman entered a substantial tradition of hero AS America. With his ability to fly and his inhuman endurance, he became a worthy successor to Lindbergh, while he was also, like Babe Ruth, a power slugger. He was a fine and willing celebrity, frequently sighted by ordinary citizens (“Look! Up in the sky!”). For consumers he incarnated the dreams of personal flying machines, and he was always comfortingly collectible. In a country dedicated to propositions of progress and the “new,” Superman appeared with his invulnerable body: the body that retains no marks, on which history cannot be inscribed.

  Superman’s city, Metropolis, was named for the darkly modern urban center in Fritz Lang’s 1926 film, but our Metropolis is more democratic and far less decadent. Its vertical lines cut cleanly to the sky. Our Metropolis is soaring lines and vivid colors. Superman belongs here. Kryptonian skyscrapers tumbled like dominoes in the first panel of Superman’s first daily strip. Jor-El bundled his only begotten son into a prototype rocket and aimed it toward Earth. The little rocket, streamlined and slightly bulbous, resembles Siegel’s skyscrapers, and the little baby, of course, becomes something of a skyscraper himself. The icon of Superman and the icon of the modern American skyscraper are closely associated. (Superman is raised in the Midwest by Jonathan and Martha Kent before setting out for Metropolis. Immigrant Kryptonian orphan and rural American: Superman comes to the city from both directions.) Shortly after his arrival in Metropolis (which went unnamed until 1939 and Action Comics #16), Clark Kent took a job at the Daily Planet, whose building probably wasn’t designed by Raymond Hood but might have been.

  Superman is a skyscraper, “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” as I just mentioned: a monument of the modern city, to be gawked at as part of the landscape. He is blessed with panoramic perception, a magisterial gaze upon a known and controlled urban landscape. His body is clothed in a skintight uniform, ornamented only by a functional S and a red cape cum banner. There are no hidden secrets to his power—he just hovers there, a Super-Every-Man. Light informs him, from his brightly colored togs to the yellow sunlight that endows him with strength and the beams of heat vision that he can direct at will. No mask hides his face with false ornament: his features are clear, his focus direct. The magisterial gaze becomes democratic, and the “inhuman” skyscraper is mastered by a visibly human body.

  There were some precedents. In 1931, the world watched the construction of the Empire State Building, and the photographs taken by Lewis Hine celebrated the young American men who lived and worked in the sky. One figure straddles a guy wire, his right arm stretched above him, his left curved against his body. The city is visible in the distance far below his strikingly casual body. Seven years later, on the cover of Superman #1, a smiling Superman rises above the city in a similar pose, the buildings again arrayed below. And people could climb the Statue of Liberty, or be lifted to the top of the Empire State itself, attempting “to find the machinery hidden in the god and approach a transcendent view of the city himself or herself.”24

  If there is a tectonic honesty to this so-called Man of Steel, let’s note that he represented, in 1938, a kind of Corbusierian ideal. Superman has X-ray vision: walls become permeable, transparent. Through his benign, controlled authority, Superman renders the city open, modernist, and democratic: he furthers a sense that Le Corbusier described in 1925, namely, that “Everything is known to us.” Knowledge depended, for Corbusier, on the mass media, but for Superman “knowledge coincides with sight”—natural sight, I’d add.25 His X-ray vision imposes transparency, and it manages to reinvent and undermine the city as a private space. There are still secrets behind the old stone walls, but Superman punctures the walls with his gaze and fists and brings the secrets to life.

  The aerial perspective provides a powerful liberation. De Certeau wrote of riding to the top of a New York skyscraper that it is “to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law: nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences.”26 Superman is, as much as anything else, a magisterial view of Metropolis, a way of seeing and negotiating the space of seeing. “The exaltation of a Gnostic and scopic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.”27

  Superman seems to be an incarnation of Corbusier’s panoramic authority based on perfect transparency, control, and knowledge. He is democratic, open, and idealistic, carving a space for the little guy. A walking, flying figure of utopian progress, Superman prefigures in his mode of perception and spatial negotiation the development of the city of tomorrow. But fantasies of urban planning were rarely so nobly realized, especially in America, and by the later part o
f the century Corbusier’s vision seemed myopic, overly centralized, and terrifyingly corrupted. Highway systems had displaced the centrality of the metropolis, and the emergent configurations were as distant from the Radiant City of Corbusier as from the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Metropolis of To-Morrow had become the Suburbia of To-Day. Urban “renewal” tended toward the obliteration of both history and nature, demolishing neighborhoods, air quality, and ethnic pluralism in shortsighted obeisance to the engorged networks of automobile circulation.

  Eight years before Superman appeared above the streets of Metropolis, Corbusier polemicized against modernity’s assault on the human sensorium. Using language that first recalls Benjamin, Kracauer, and other nascent critical theorists of the early twentieth century, his shock polemic abruptly turns toward severe social realignment: “man lives in a perpetual state of instability, insecurity, fatigue, and accumulating delusions. Our physical and nervous organization is brutalized and battered by this torrent; it makes its protest, of course, but it will soon give way unless some energetic decision, far-sighted and not too long delayed, brings order once more to a situation that is rapidly getting out of hand.”28 Superman was the New Man, the Man of Steel, the Man of Tomorrow, a “far-sighted” fellow, “not too long delayed” (faster than a locomotive) who could suffer the brutalizing shocks of modernity with neither broken bones nor neurasthenic breakdowns. Superior senses and a body so strong that “nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin” made him the first perfect citizen of the modern Metropolis. But if Superman was the perfect citizen, Lex Luthor is its perfect manager. Lex was retooled in the 1980s and 1990s as the flip side of Superman’s democratic radiance. He emerged as the Master of Metropolis—a corporate city planner discontented with this unpredictable individualist sailing through his skies. Luthor, not Superman, best personifies Corbusier’s call to order and energetic decision. “Metropolis was nothing until I rebuilt it according to my vision,” he ruminates. “All in all, it’s a perfect picture of order.” But Superman, “an alien with freakish powers,” threatens the control of “me, the true Master of Metropolis.” Luthor combined the instrumental reason of Corbusier, the independent bureaucratic clout and self-aggrandizement of Robert Moses, and the ruthless baldness of Edward Arnold in Meet John Doe. And so Metropolis, whether operating under the gaze of Superman or Luthor, remains primarily on Corbusier’s turf.