The Superhero Reader

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

  Batman’s Gotham

  Gotham City, it hardly needs to be said, has no master. It is a city askew, defined by angular perspectives, impenetrable shadows, and the grotesque inhabitants of the night. The screenplay for Tim Burton’s 1989 film sums up what Gotham City had become through the 1970s and 1980s: “stark angles, creeping shadows, dense, crowded, airless, a random tangle of steel and concrete, as if Hell had erupted through the sidewalk and kept on growing.”29 Batman’s nemesis is the id figure of the Joker rather than Luthor’s cool capitalist. Gotham is a city of massed solidities: heavy stone and thick fog cloak its goings-on. The physiognomies here are as warped as the perspectives (Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy was a precursor) but as solid as the buildings. The city became a “backdrop which was sometimes a mood-setting frieze, sometimes an enveloping or even choking atmosphere that mirrored the twisted preoccupations of villains.”30 Here, as in the detective fiction of the Victorian era and the American pulps and early narrative cinema, crime links the spaces of the city—high and low, penthouses and sewers. All of the city’s sunshine and shadow dichotomies are knitted together, and every place is equally susceptible to criminal infection and infestation. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns was central to bringing this version of Gotham City to the fore, with doses of Blade Runner and Road Warrior compounding the sense of nihilistic gloom. Gotham became an even more grotesque, gothic, claustrophobic environment. The bird’s-eye view—Superman’s magisterial, panoramic perception—is insufficiently panoptic. Gotham is a city defined more by its underworld. It’s a concatenation of hidden spaces, corners, and traps. This city needs to be read, deciphered, made legible, and the one to do it lives among the bats in his own subterranean hideout.

  Tom Gunning has shown how around the turn of the century surveillance and counter-surveillance structured the urban detective story. Disguise became a major weapon, and acts of deception and unmasking increasingly structured the narratives.31 Superman’s X-ray vision is too natural, its worldview too rooted in transparency, to get to the bottom of things. Superman’s naturalism yields to the dark ratiocinations and high technologies of Batman. Batman inherits from the urban pulp tradition of The Shadow and The Spider, and there is more than a little Holmes and Dupin in his ratiocentrism. His effects are carefully considered, and his endless training has made him a self-made fighting machine—perhaps more steely than his Metropolis counterpart. He is rational, if monomaniacal, but throws fear around him. Superman, appearing in Action Comics, inspired wonder, curling across the sky like a rainbow. Batman summoned a more sublime terror. But both figures, all of these figures, are lingeringly uncanny—childhood anxieties and desires granted crudely concrete form.

  Terry Castle has argued that the rise of the Enlightenment was inevitably accompanied “like a toxic side effect” by its uncanny underside, and it is indeed striking how quickly the nocturnal figure of the Batman followed the vivid blur of Superman onto the world stage.32 Metropolis and Gotham City were variations on New York, but Gotham was the dark side while the sun tended to shine a whole lot more brightly on Superman’s city. Recent Superman/Batman teamings, beginning with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, have emphasized the dichotomous nature of these two heroes and their two cities. While Luthor and the Joker have their admirers, many revisionist writers have become increasingly intent on exploring the evident (and all too often mechanistic) dualism of these two.33

  The Joker serves as another double, a psychotic funhouse mirror image of the somber and obsessed hero.34 He first appeared in Batman #1, only a year after the Caped Crusader’s own debut: a grotesque figure with a permanent maniacal grin ripped from the posters for Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park, chalk-white features and a green shock of slicked-back hair, all dressed up in a purple flat-brimmed hat and zoot suit. The eerie whiteness of the Joker’s face signals its opposite: it’s the “dark” version of Batman’s removable disguise, even more unnatural against the prevailing gloom. Tim Burton’s film updated him as a jive pimp, but the Joker was always racial ambiguity incarnate—the original “white Negro.”

  Spider-Man in New York

  In an early issue of Spider-Man, Peter Parker decides he needs a study break and sets off, as his arachnid alter ego, to swing around the city for a while. It’s hard to imagine Batman or The Hulk making the rounds for the sheer joy of moving, but Spider-Man is after all a healthy teenager with a need to grandstand.35

  Spider-Man is something of an all-around pariah. Parker began as a nerd’s nerd, overly fascinated with chemistry class and oblivious to embodied subjectivities. A bite from a radioactive spider gave him proportionally great strength, the ability to climb walls, and enhanced “spider-senses.” But the police suspect him, the press is waging a vendetta against him, and the public perceives him as a menace. While Batman courts his vigilante status, Spider-Man has it thrust on him. His first impulse was not to fight crime but to become a TV star, and his self-centeredness led to the death of his beloved uncle. Guilt, rather than righteous vengeance, provides his primal motivation. Not surprisingly, given the level of self-torture involved here, Spider-Man’s main foes have turned out to be his own doppelgangers. As the theme song for the Spider-Man cartoon show once jauntily summed it up: “To him, life is a great big hang-up!”

  All this high-flying neurosis would have been impossible to take without the exuberant depictions of Spider-Man swinging through New York City. New York: not Metropolis, not Gotham City, not Coast City. Real neuroses demand a real city (or vice versa, I’m not sure which). And New York is a complex organism that, especially by the 1960s when Spider-Man and other Marvel Comics heroes appeared, defied easy apprehension. Superman’s magisterial gaze and Batman’s profound urban knowledge were revised by Spider-Man’s more improvisational, sensational style. When his spider-sense tingles, something’s up.

  Spider-Man, particularly as drawn by original artist Steve Ditko, is a more tactile hero than Superman or Batman. He clings to buildings, and Ditko clearly relished the opportunity to further skew the perspectives of the city. Ditko’s other creation was Dr. Strange, a mystic master who lived in a great Greenwich Village brownstone. Ditko rendered Strange’s ectoplasmic conjurings with peculiar solidity, while in Spider-Man the physical space of the actual city became utterly unstable. Walls became floors and verticality was close to being entirely lost in his swirling circular forms. One small Ditko panel gives us a rear view of Spider-Man in the air over the city. His artificial web snakes slackly through his hands: this is movement in progress, not an arrested bat pose. Two buildings flank his body in the lowest part of the frame, no more than jutting corners against the open space. The superhero’s body is marvelous and sinuous, as curved as the web but poised and muscular. No wonder he likes to get out of the house.

  More than other heroes, Spider-Man makes me reach for de Certeau’s “Walking in the City.”36 “To walk is to lack a place,” de Certeau argues in a famous passage. “It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city an immense social experience of lacking a place.” Spider-Man indeed lacks a place. Superman and Batman are guardians of the urban space, but Spider-Man is a trespasser. He is not the master of Metropolis, as is Superman or Luthor; he is not a part of the city’s power elite, as is Bruce Wayne. He is not as omnipresent as Batman, and he doesn’t own a skyscraper like the Fantastic Four. What de Certeau calls the strategies of institutional control (by governments, for example, or corporations) are not his to command. He is, at best, an interloper, making his own path across the spaces controlled by others (The Kingpin, for example).37 The tactics of spatial trespass, de Certeau reminds us, constitute the art (the essential art) of the weak.38

  That same early issue that began with Peter’s study break ends with Spider-Man standing, alone, on an isolated chimney, wishing he could simply let everyone know who he really is. “To walk is to lack a place,” Certeau writes, but the a
nonymity implied by one’s lack of place is precisely what permits that trajectory across the range of positions that only the city allows.39

  Crusaders for the City

  William Randolph Hearst was more than just a maverick millionaire, publisher, and comics devotee; he also cast himself in the role of social crusader. From an 1887 editorial in his first paper, the San Francisco Examiner: “Examiner reporters are everywhere; they are the first to see everything, and the first to perceive the true meaning of what they see. Whether a child is to be found, an eloping girl to be brought home or a murder to be traced, one of our staff is sure to give the sleepy detectives their first pointers … the Examiner reporter is a feature of modern California civilization. His energy, astuteness and devotion make him the one thing needed to redeem the community from the corruption that seems to have selected this period as its peculiar prey.” His energy, astuteness, and devotion—Hearst’s reporters were already superheroes, redeeming the community from corruption (and San Francisco was probably a pretty good place to start).

  In a way, then, Superman and his alter ego, crusading journalist Clark Kent, are fighting the same fight using the same methods: ubiquity, speed, enhanced powers of vision and comprehension, and incorruptibility. Early Superman stories often begin with Clark tackling a major social problem—corrupt politicians, slum clearance, racketeering in the taxicab industry—with Superman on hand to confront the danger and solve the problem. Here’s an example from Action Comics #12:

  Panel 4. “Clark telephones the city’s mayor—” [a diagonal split screen effect]:

  Clark: Why has our city one of the worst traffic situations in the country?

  Mayor: It’s really too bad—but—what can anyone do about it?

  Panel 5. “Later, in the privacy of his apartment, Clark Kent dons a strange uniform, transforming himself into the dynamic SUPERMAN—”

  Superman: I, for one, am going to do plenty about it!

  It was almost inevitable that Clark would reappear in the final panels to receive the accolades, get caught in traffic, or strike out with Lois Lane. In a strong sense, Superman is the mighty newspaper.

  And now we have Spider Jerusalem, the hero of Warren Ellis’s postcyberpunk Transmetropolitan. Spider is a crusading journalist of another kind—more Hunter S. Thompson than William R. Hearst. He’d been hiding out on a mountain for five years (“Five years of shooting at fans and neighbors, eating what I kill, and bombing the unwary”),40 but circumstances necessitate his return to the City, a crackling environment of shrill media, downloaded personalities (foglets), revived citizens from the twentieth century (nobody cares), and all manner of streetwise creatures. “This city never allowed itself to decay or degrade. It’s wildly, intensely growing. It’s a loud bright stinking mess. It takes strength from its thousands of cultures. And the thousands more that grow anew each day. It isn’t perfect. It lies and cheats. It’s no utopia and it ain’t the mountain by a long shot—but it’s alive. I can’t argue that.”41

  It’s Spider’s endless regard for the noisy plurality of the urban environment that made Transmet one of the most romantic comics around (despite its, and Spider’s, surface nihilism). The covers repeatedly posed Spider against the background of the city—Geoff Darrow’s cover for issue #22 is a particularly fine example: a slightly oblique, somewhat high-angle view of Spider sitting on the edge of a huge electric marquee, laptop ready, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers, toasting us with his second bottle of whiskey, his two-headed cat by his side, smiling out at us. Behind him the city simply exists through the incredible density of detail that is Darrow’s hallmark—bumper to bumper traffic, mounds of bagged trash and scattered litter, graffiti on every street-level surface, radioactivity warnings, jumpers, advertisements, and, in one open window, a guy on a couch with his pants open, empty beer cans and leftover pizza strewn about him. This isn’t Metropolis, and Spider Jerusalem, armed with his effective “bowel disruptor,” is no mild-mannered reporter, even if he sometimes refers to himself as one.42 His column may be called “I Hate it Here,” but he is deeply proud to serve as the voice of “the new scum,” the underclass created by The City’s new economics, technologies, and moralities.

  What is best about Transmet, and what it lifted from the best cyberpunk, is its refusal of the city as a totalitarian site of control. Despite the constant mass media bombardment, there is always something more to see, and whenever Spider feels trapped by his new position as crusader, “media element and TV celebrity,” he knows just what to do. “Do what I always do. Get the city under my feet. Become alive.” In other words, he takes a walk. Michel de Certeau would be proud. I see them strolling the city together, sharing their thoughts: “I only ever experience the city properly on the street,” Spider says. Michel agrees: “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. … Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’. All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken, and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of unlimited diversity.” Spider answers, yeah, I know what you mean: “It only ever speaks to me here. … Just let it talk, in all its languages.’”43 Michel continues: “the relationships and intersections of these exoduses … intertwine and create an urban fabric … placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City.”44

  Journalists aren’t the only crusading superheroes. In the early 1980s there was Mr. X, architect of the now-corrupted psychetecture in the city of Somnopolis.45 “The subtleties of my psychetecture … destroyed” he laments, as he tries to restore his creation. The shaved head and tinted shades of Mr. X prefigure Spider Jerusalem’s basic look: both are outsiders returning to the cities that mark their principle obsessions, becoming what de Certeau called “foreigners at home,” trying to negotiate a barely contained chaos.46 “This city was not meant for people,” moans one Radiant City dweller. As an avenging superhero, Mr. X is on a crusade to repair the city, but in Mr. X and Transmet, such fantasies of megalomaniacal control have become self-evidently outmoded, damaging, and useless, especially in light of Spider Jerusalem’s enunciation of urban diversity.

  PART THREE: OF MASKS AND CAPES

  (Secret) Identities

  Superheroes are all about multiple identities and so embody the slippery sense of self that living in the city either imposes or permits. Simmel, of course, set the tone for a pervading ambivalence in his recognition that the quantification of the urban population in terms of productive labor power represented only a very partial accounting of the men and women in the crowd. The city was a place of aspiration and anonymity, a site of failure and rebirth. “It is the function of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict” between a definition of the city dweller as an object of economic relations and as an autonomous, free, and unique being.47 In the city, “the individual’s horizon is enlarged”: the crowd becomes you, and you wend your way through the crowd.48 The instrumentalities of individual capitalism define the human with precision but not completeness. As a place of being, the city offers room to move.

  Who reveals this better than the superhero? Whether in their “true identities” as a mild-mannered reporter, a bored millionaire playboy, a crippled paperboy, or a policeman or incarnated in their more spectacular forms, superheroes play a continuous game of deception and duplicity that could only be played out in the city. Admittedly, none of these characters approach the ambiguity of The Shadow of the pulp magazines; his identity as “Lamont Cranston” was itself only another disguise (perhaps). The city is a haven for imposters: by the early nineteenth century, physical mobility had made a mockery of social standing. “One cannot mingle much in society here without meeting some … mysterious individual, who claims to be of noble birth,” James McCabe observed in 1872.49 The city attracted them all: false noblem
en, deceptive charity workers, strange and disguised visitors from other planets.

  Clearly, it is the potential for hubristic comeuppance, and nothing else, that forces Superman to don a pair of spectacles, comb his hair, and therefore transform himself into Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter. In later years, they tried to convince us that Superman made his face vibrate ever so slightly, which was why nobody twigged to his looking a lot like Clark Kent. Yeah, sure. We know that Clark’s anonymity was a function of a sturdy pair of eyeglasses and, mostly, the very nature of life in the city. Perhaps, by the twentieth century, it no longer mattered who you really were as long as the mask fit. The Spirit, the resurrection of the seemingly deceased police detective Donny Colt, dons a small black mask, and no one seems the wiser—no one even seems to care.

  The perfect urban hero is, again, probably Plastic Man, a one-time crook who can remold his face and body at will (something to do with some acid). He has used his power not only to forsake crime but to fight it (something to do with a monastery). One could certainly, in the cities of Poe, Doyle, and Batman, imagine the reverse effect. Plastic Man is really more of an “Indian Rubber Man!” as his own comic calls him, but “plastic” is more appropriately modern, more descriptive of a personal malleability: a new man for a new city.