The Superhero Reader
Page 30
Alan Moore has moved from the darkness of Watchmen, in which the fantasy of superheroes was tinged with pathos, to work that emphasizes the playful, colorful grace of the genre. His Promethea, a heroine of stories, pulp magazines, and comic books, is physically manifested through those who chronicle her adventures, each time incorporating the persona of her latest “creator.” To write about her is to write her into existence. In another Moore comic, the character Supreme hides behind his secret identity as a superhero comic book artist who draws the adventures of “Omniman.” (“I mean, you just put on glasses and nobody recognizes you!” gasps his girlfriend. “Is everybody just, like, stupid or what?” “I’ve wondered that myself,” Supreme answers.)65 In Promethea and Supreme, Moore has incorporated the comic’s creator—the mythmaker—into the myth, in a movement that goes beyond postmodern parlor games of reflexivity to a deeper acknowledgement of our own imbrication in the life of our fantasies.
To Be Continued …
Superheroes are vehicles of urban representation; they embody perceptual paradigms. Through the vehicle of the superhero, as through cinema and sociology, one recovers the city as new and shifting ground. Urbanism was defined as a way of life by sociologist Louis Wirth in 1938, the year that also saw the appearance of Superman. Superheroes exist to inhabit the city, to patrol, map, dissect, and traverse it. They are surprisingly proper guides to these cities of change: invulnerable yet resilient and metamorphic, they hold their shape. They hold their shape as do the other skyscrapers and monuments of the metropolis, perhaps accreting some fussy ornamentation, some new functionality or relevance, but still managing to embody a dignified history that is occasionally sandblasted back into visibility.
Surely the colors should have faded by now, yet superheroes are still in the air and on the T-shirts on my chest. When I look in the mirror, I see Superman.
NOTES
1. With an occasional “good neighbor” nod toward Montreal, Mexico City, or London.
2. Four titles figured most significantly in a brief explosion of postmodern urban renewal: American Flagg! by Howard Chaykin, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, and Mr. X by Dean Motter and the Hernandez brothers. I discuss some of these, as well as Judge Dredd and the comics of Moebius, in Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
3. Interview with Howard Chaykin, “The New Superhero,” Spin 4.5 (August 1988):49.
4. I have relied greatly on histories of comics by Jules Feiffer, Mike Benton, Jim Steranko, and Les Daniels.
5. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Monacelli, 1994), 104.
6. They included Little Nemo in Slumberland, Polly and Her Pals, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Tarzan, and Prince Valiant (and these are only a few examples).
7. With some exceptions (Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Cole, Hergé, and Carl Barks) it wasn’t until the later 1960s that the panel was superseded by the page as an explicit unit of composition in comic books. Panels were increasingly fragmented into diagonal shards, incorporated into larger graphic elements, or generally organized against the grain of a strict linearity. [Other examples predating the late 1960s can also be found. See Joseph Witek’s essay “The Arrow and the Grid” in Heer and Worcester, eds., A Comics Studies Reader (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009.—eds.]
8. Koolhaas, 104.
9. Vivian Gornick, “On the Street: Nobody Watches, Everyone Performs,” in Approaching Eye Level (Boston: Beacon, 1996): 15.
10. A more effective design would have used the broad avenues to link the rivers, for example.
11. Batman is the fully accessorized superhero, much like Barbie: both are outfitted with clothes, car, dreamhouse, and a useless appendage (Ken, Robin).
12. See Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits (New York: Chronicle, 2001); as well as three DC Comics’ reprint volumes; Jack Cole, The Plastic Man Archives (New York: DC Comics, 1999 and 2001).
13. Editor Denny O’Neil allows Batman artists to play with the character’s iconography, especially his sensuous cape: “We now say that Batman has two hundred suits hanging in the Batcave, so they don’t have to look the same” (quoted in Les Daniels, Batman: The Complete History [San Francisco: Chronicle, 1999], 159). Nobody has ever drawn more graceful flying figures than 1960s Green Lantern artist Gil Kane. His superheroes seemed to float above the page. Daredevil’s artist through the 1970s was Gene Colan, whose swirling lines created remarkable kinetic effects, within the frame and across the page. Superman’s coloration was a function, and a virtue, of the primitive printing in the earliest comic books.
14. Alan Moore and Curt Swan, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? (New York: DC Comics, 1997), 17 (reprints material originally published in 1986).
15. Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, Superman for All Seasons (New York: DC Comics, 1999).
16. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1.
17. See David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Fritzsche.
18. Several of Calvin’s other fantasies shrank him to bug size.
19. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 60, 67.
20. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993).
21. Stewart, 46.
22. Ibid., 56. For Scott McCloud, the flat colors that until recently defined comics also evoke a child’s perception by emphasizing the shapes of objects and reveling in “the wonder of things.” Comics present “worlds fairly glowing with that mystery of first encounters. Any wonder then that comics in America has been so reluctant to ‘grow up’?” (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art [Northhampton, MA: Tundra, 1993], 188–189).
23. Jack (Starman) Knight has a poster for the Fair on the wall of his Opal City apartment.
24. Stewart, 90.
25. Franco Minganti, “1939: Flying Eyes—Flight, Metropolis, and Icons of Popular Imagination,” Storia Nordamericana 7.1 (1990): 100.
26. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” translated by Steven Rendell, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California, 1984), 92.
27. Ibid.
28. Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning (New York: Dover, 1987), 86.
29. Cited in Daniels, 164. The screenplay is credited to Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren.
30. Rick Marschall, Foreword to Batman Archives (New York: DC Comics, 1990), 1:5.
31. Tom Gunning, “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle 19.4 (1997): 25–61.
32. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 80.
33. Such writers include Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Howard Chaykin, Paul Dini, Dave Gibbons, and Kurt Busiek, among others.
34. And note that Batman is usually accompanied by his brightly attired “sidekick,” Robin.
35. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, “Where Flies the Beetle …,” Amazing Spider-Man #21 (February 1965). Reprinted in Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, The Essential Spider-Man, vol. 2 (New York: Marvel Comics, 1997).
36. De Certeau, “Walking in the City.”
37. The Kingpin, an enemy of both Spider-Man and Daredevil, set the standard as an Edward Arnold-style ward boss and gangster well before Luthor’s makeover.
38. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.
39. New York is also home to Daredevil, another Marvel hero with enhanced senses.
40. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan #1 (1998), 5.
41. Ibid., 14.
42. Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan #2 (1998), 2.
43. Warren El
lis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan #32 (2000), 5, 6.
44. De Certeau, 103, my emphasis. The City is also the name of the place that the great comic and cartoon hero The Tick has sworn to protect.
45. Motter et al., The Return of Mr. X (East Fullerton, CA: Graphitti Designs, 1986).
46. De Certeau, 13.
47. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 339.
48. Ibid, 334.
49. James McCabe, “Imposters,” in Writing New York: A Literary Anthology, edited by Philip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 1998), 260 (excerpted from James McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York Life [1872]).
50. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 183.
51. Ibid. The internal citation is Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, edited by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 39. The text by Roger Caillois is Man, Play, and Games, translated by Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).
52. Castle, Masquerade, 186.
53. Ibid, 37.
54. Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (New York: Dial, 1965), 18–19.
55. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 7.
56. Zorro, Batman, and the Green Hornet pretend to be dandies in their “secret identities,” but they’re all still dandies, right? (especially Zorro and Van Williams’s TV incarnation of the Green Hornet).
57. Garlick, 19.
58. Watchmen, Squadron Supreme, and The Golden Age come to mind. I should also mention that recent revisions of the Superman mythos have placed new emphasis on his learning how to live with (and live up to) his superhuman powers.
59. Walter Kaufmann, translator’s introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 7.
60. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 153. See also Nietzsche, Gay Science.
61. Is it a bird? “The ostrich runs faster than the fastest horse, and even he buries his head gravely in the grave earth; even so, the man who has not yet learned to fly. Earth and life seem grave to him; and thus the spirit of gravity wants it. But whoever would become light and a bird must love himself, thus I teach” (Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 304).
62. Alan Moore, Howard Chaykin, James Robinson, Frank Miller, Alex Ross, Kurt Busiek, Grant Morrison, John Byrne, Neil Gaiman, Walt Simonson, and Todd MacFarlane are only a few of those who have spun out eloquent and varied alternatives.
63. The title refers to the Elseworlds titles, which allowed creators free reign to reimagine DC’s classic characters outside the constraints of “normal” series continuity.
64. Other than this, however, the series lacked any sense of irony about its own iconography.
65. Alan Moore, “Suddenly, the Supremium Man!” Supreme: The Return #5 (May 2000), 5.
Section Three
CULTURE AND IDENTITY
AS HENRY JENKINS NOTES IN HIS ESSAY ON “DEATH-DEFYING HEROES,” WHICH closes this volume, superheroes “have been more or less in continuous publication since the 1930s or early 1940s.” “Nowhere else in popular culture,” he says, “can you find that same degree of continuity.” Comics fandom takes this decades-long history quite seriously, as witnessed by the fact that comics conventions routinely host panels on Golden Age comics, fan publications often feature interviews with industry veterans, and comic book stores usually carry at least a sprinkling of reprint volumes. It makes sense, then, that this Reader’s opening section is concerned with the genesis and development of the superhero genre.
Theoretically informed writing on superheroes came later, but has gained significant traction over the past decade or so. This book’s second section thus brings together major essays on the tropes, conventions, and embedded discourses of the superhero genre. The field of comics studies has increasingly embraced theoretically sophisticated approaches, and it seems likely there will be a further outpouring of ambitious superhero commentary in the coming years. Recounting plots, recycling anecdotes, and positing vague connections between real-world events and superhero storylines are no longer sufficient, if indeed they ever were. As description has given way to analysis, the bar has been raised. This is a welcome and no doubt overdue development.
Yet the most striking aspect of the superhero genre may be the passions it stirs, not only among core readers, but also within the culture at large. Just as some folks make a point of seeing every superhero movie, visiting their local comic book store on a weekly basis, and attending comics conventions—sometimes in costume—many more disdain the genre, and its attendant subculture, altogether. Superheroes undoubtedly resonate, but they also polarize to an extent that is not quite the case for other mass-market genres. As a result, fan culture stereotypes have become ubiquitous, from The Simpsons’s Comic Book Guy to the young scientists on The Big Bang Theory. While these caricatures typically construct the superhero audience as male, straight (or sexually ambivalent), Caucasian, and middle class, the truth is more complex, and much more interesting. Superhero comics attract all sorts of readers, and these readers extract all sorts of messages from costumed adventure tales. The multifaceted audience is integral to the larger story of the genre.
As this section makes clear, many essayists and scholars have reflected on the superhero genre from the standpoint of different social locations and subject positions. While superhero storytelling offers a window onto the (recent) past and can provide grist for rigorous, theory-inflected investigation, superhero tales also represent a means by which individuals can interrogate and articulate their own feelings, experiences, and social relations. Granted, the superhero is not the only genre that evokes strong emotions—as Lorrie Palmer and others have pointed out, the Western once occupied a pivotal role in the emotional life of the mass audience—but its tenacious grip on the imaginations of millions of children, adolescents, and adults is worth exploring.
This section’s opening essay, by the prominent feminist writer Gloria Steinem, explains how the early adventures of Wonder Woman “rescued” Steinem from the notion that heroism is a male prerogative and that the “ideal life” for women involves “sitting around like a Technicolor clothes horse.” While she notes that these stories “are not admirable in all ways”—they strongly implied that women are essentially, intrinsically, better than men, and reproduced the aggressive ethnocentrism of midcentury U.S. culture—she also proposes that William Moulton Marston’s iconic Amazons provide “psychic evidence” of “stable and peaceful agricultural societies,” led by women, that “resisted the patriarchal age.”
The following essay, by the late Lillian Robinson, is similarly positioned at the intersection of feminist commitment and superhero storytelling. Her piece explores the “saving irony” associated with the sole female member of the Fantastic Four, Sue Storm, who is otherwise known as Invisible Girl (and, subsequently, Invisible Woman). Robinson’s nuanced essay—excerpted from her book Wonder Women—deploys an admirably light touch in examining the ways in which “stereotype and innovation work together” in the Silver Age stories of “Marvel’s first female superhero.”
In “Love Will Bring You to Your Gift,” freelance writer Jennifer Stuller explores the relationship between superheroines, love, and “three intertwined themes: redemption, collaboration, and compassion.” She pays particular attention to how Xena the warrior princess, Buffy the vampire slayer, and Max Guevara (from television’s Dark Angel) have all pointed the way toward a more “egalitarian” and “reciprocal” form of heroism than is typically modeled in superhero comics. Acts of compassion, she says, “can change lives, heal past wounds, and ev
en save the world.”
Examining the Batman mythos from the standpoint of an “interested outsider,” Andy Medhurst makes a bracing case for why he favors the televised, Adam West version of the caped crusader (1966-68) to “that whole portentous Dark Knight charade.” The “incongruities, the absurdities, the sheer ludicrousness of Batman were brought out so well by the sixties version,” he says, “that for some audiences there will never be another credible approach.” Medhurst, writing from an avowedly gay perspective, celebrates the reading strategies of gay Batman audiences and the campy irony of the television version, which invited queer readings. Finally, he decries the insistent, even homophobic, reassertion of Batman’s “straight” identity in subsequent versions of the character.
Adilifu Nama, in an excerpt from his book Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes, investigates the exploits of superheroes of color in mainstream comic books from the 1970s onwards. Resisting “linear and reductive” readings of comics and racial categories, Nama shows how characters like Black Lightning and John Stewart, the first nonwhite Green Lantern, evolved, as artists, writers, and publishers grappled with “the cultural politics of race in America.” He also highlights the “unpredictably complicated” work of Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams in the landmark Green Lantern Co-Starring Green Arrow comics of the early 1970s, which “forever changed the boundaries of the superhero genre.”
Jeffrey A. Brown has also written extensively on black superheroes, but here, in an excerpt from his book Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, he focuses as much on reader reception as character development. Drawing on ethnographic research he conducted in the 1990s, Brown considers how superhero fans distinguished depictions of gender roles in superhero comics published by two high-profile companies that were launched in the early 1990s, Image and Milestone. While Image’s comics tended to promote “hypermasculinity,” the Milestone line, he suggests, worked to “infuse gentler, more responsible, and more cerebral qualities within the codes of dominant masculinity.” While Brown’s ethnographic methods presage those of many subsequent studies, his attention to the intersectionality of race and gender remains rare in superhero studies.