The oppositional structure of civilization versus wilderness has been rendered through a hybrid blend of genres, such as melodrama, film noir, and the Western, bringing them all into alignment with this recent example of action cinema. Furthermore, distinct visual iconography and psychological undercurrents emerge from all these genres through the use of symbols and in various depictions of sadism, masochism, and fetishism, expressed through the mise en scène and plot of The Punisher as it explores divergent forms of family and ritual. These characterizations of men who suffer familial loss and issues of guilt, who seek vengeance when traditional forces of authority prove unable to attain justice, who ultimately life apart from the society they protect—also enacted within the narratives of Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, and The Crow—show that the modern comic book hero is the descendent of the Western hero. Frank Castle fits the mold of a man who negotiates both society and the anarchic wilderness surrounding it. That he experiences both the intimacy of family and the violence of solitary vigilantism is a revision of the Western archetype who can only observe hearth and home from the outside. The former trait, in fact, allies him with comic book characters like Clark Kent and Peter Parker who are part of strong familial structures (despite Frank Castle’s later departure from society). With the film’s modern weaponry and contemporary urban setting, it further revises those found in Westerns; however, the basic narrative impetus, a search for justice, remains the same. In both cases, it is the individual, not the institutions of society, that must act to see this justice done.
Finally, the last scene in The Punisher provides visual and thematic cues to the film’s evocative generic lineage. Castle stands alone, armed, with his car at his side on Tampa Bay’s Sunshine Skyway. In voice-over, he gives notice to evildoers everywhere that they will come to know him well, not as Frank Castle who died with his family, but as the Punisher. As the screen begins to fade to black, we realize that there is a brilliant sunset behind him. Calling up all our genre experience with classic Westerns, we imagine that we can hear the beat of a horse’s hooves pounding in the distance and, if we squint our eyes, the diagonal steel cables of the bridge, soaring into the peaks above him, almost look like mountains.
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Death-Defying Heroes
HENRY JENKINS
Reprinted with permission from The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2006), 65–74.
MEDIA SCHOLARS DRAW AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION BETWEEN MASS CULTURE and popular culture. Mass culture is mass-produced for a mass audience. Popular culture is what happens to those cultural artifacts at the site of consumption, as we draw upon them as resources in our everyday life. Many scholars have focused on how the same mass-produced artifacts generate different meanings for different consumers. Less has been said about the ways our relationships to those artifacts change over time, and the ways that what they mean to us shifts at different moments in our lives. This essay is an auto-ethnography of my relationship to superhero comics. What I have to say here is shaped by my experience of grief over the death of my mother six months ago. I had checked her into the hospital complaining of indigestion, only to discover what turned out to be a tumor in her kidney already so advanced it was no longer possible to operate. All we could do was keep her comfortable and wait for the inevitable.
I bought the comics on the way to the hospice. They were selected hastily, and even then, I felt guilty about the time it took. I was looking for something banal, familiar, and comforting at a time when my world was turning upside down. I read them intermittently as I and the other family members sat on deathwatch, the experience of the stories becoming interwoven with old family memories and the process of letting go of my mother. Retreating from the emotional drama that surrounded me, I found myself staring into the panicstricken eyes of a young Bruce Wayne, kneeling over the freshly murdered bodies of his parents. I have visited that moment many times before, but this time, our common plight touched me deeply.
A year ago or a year from now, I would have written a very different essay, but for the moment I am trying to work through what comics might have to say to me about death, aging, and mortality.
I am hardly the first to draw such connections. In his essay “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco describes the monstrous quality of the superhero who is not “consumed” by time, who never grows older, who is always cycling through the same kinds of experiences, never moving any closer to death. Eco approaches this question formally; describing how the iterative structure of comics creates its own kind of temporality, which he contrasts with the always already completed action of myth or the unique events of the novelistic: “He possesses the characteristics of timeless myth but is accepted only because
his activities take place in our human and everyday world of time.”
The fan boy in me wants to point out all of the exceptions and qualifications to Eco’s claim, starting with the fact that a whole generation of revisionist comics have sought to reintroduce death and aging into the superhero universe. The images of aging Batman and Superman duking it out in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns comes immediately to mind, but most of these books came after Eco’s essay was published and might well have been responding to his argument. Regardless, Eco understates the importance of continuity and, thus, of specific series history; to comics readers the same events may unfold again and again, but there is something distinctive about each issue, and mastering those distinctions is part of what separates comics fans from more casual readers. From time to time, the franchises build up such complex histories that they need catastrophic events—such as the Crisis of Infinite Earths—to wipe the slate clean again and allow a fresh start. Yet, such reservations aside, Eco’s formal analysis hits on some core psychological truth that I want to explore on an autobiographical level.
One could understand the reading of comics as entering into a psychological space that similarly denies death and mortality, that encourages a nostalgic return to origins. Most of our stereotypes about comics fans start from the idea of arrested development, that is, that the fans have somehow sought to pull themselves out of life processes and to enjoy the same kind of iterative existence as the guys and gals in tights. Yet, I want to suggest that we cannot escape or forestall such dreaded feelings altogether, and that in their own way, both as texts and as artifacts, comics become reflective objects that help us think about our own irreversible flow toward death. In short, this is an essay about what it means to consume and be consumed by superheroes.
I am frequently so tired after the demands of my job that when I crawl into bed at night, I fall asleep too fast if I try to read prose. I move through novels at such a sluggish pace that I lose interest well before I reach the conclusion. I had found that I could maintain consciousness, however blurry my perceptions, long enough to make it through an issue of a comic. There is something energizing in the shift between text and images and in the larger-than-life stories so many comics tell. The repeated formulas of the superhero saga mean that each issue is in a sense predigested, but the most interesting contemporary writers—Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker, Geoff Johns—bring a distinctive perspective or unique voice to those characters, offering me what I need to sustain my interest in these familiar characters over time.
Comics are the site of enormous diversity, innovation, and experimentation, and many of the titles I am reading this month weren’t even being published a year ago; but a healthy portion of the books I buy were those I read as a kid. Nowhere else in popular culture can you find that same degree of continuity. Star Trek, currently the longest-running franchise on American television, goes back to the mid-1960s. The James Bond movies, currently the longest-running franchise in American cinema, go back to the early 1960s. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America have been more or less in continuous publication since the 1930s or early 1940s—always fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, despite generations of readers and writers growing up, growing old, and, yes, dying in their company [Captain America disappeared in 1949, was revived briefly in 1953–54, and then again in 1963–64—eds.]. There are, to be sure, enormous variations in the way these characters get interpreted across those various generations, dramatic shifts in styles, successive waves of revisionism, various stabs at relevance or topicality, which mean that the comics are never in a literal sense timeless. Yet, you can go away for decades on end, find your way back to a DC comic, and get reintroduced to the protagonists more or less where you left them. It is often this hope of rekindling something we once felt that draws us aging comic fans back to these titles. It is almost as if we would lose something important in ourselves if watching Batman stalk across a darkened alley or Spider-Man swing from building to building no longer made our hearts beat a little faster.
When I remember my personal history of comics, so much of what I remember are iterative events, the routine patterns that surround comics consumption, rather than specific storylines or particular life experiences.
Curiously enough, my earliest memories of comics tie me back to my mother. When, as a fourth or fifth grader, I would stay in bed with a fever; my mother would go to the local druggist in search of Coca-Cola syrup, which according to southern folklore, was supposed to have remarkable curative powers. In this era before specialty shops and comics “subs,” she would return carrying an armload of comics, selected from a large spinning rack at the center of the store. She bought more or less what she could find, so sometimes she would return with a selection of kids comics (Baby Huey, Donald Duck, or perhaps Archie), other times with issues of Classics Illustrated, and still other times with DC superheroes. I came to associate comics with the sound of my mother’s voice singing me to sleep or her hands feeling my forehead. And I suspect that’s why I return to them now at moments of stress.
It is hard to remember when superheroes first entered my life. I suspect it must have been 1966, the year that Batman first appeared on television. I was seven or eight. The series rapidly became an obsession among the neighborhood kids. One of my aunts had given me a recording of the theme music, which my playmates and I played at full volume, bouncing up and down on the bed, biffing and powing each other, and tumbling backward into the pillows. Mother had given me an old leotard, sewed a cape and cowl, and cut me a batarang out of plywood. We didn’t always understand what we saw. Once we heard an announcement for a forthcoming appearance of King Tut and thought the announcer had said King Duck, and so we spent a week battling it out in the backyard with web-footed foes before discovering that there was this Ancient Egyptian guy. Who knew? My father would peer out from behind his newspaper, expressing mock horror to have discovered that Batman and Robin had died that very day—frozen to death in a giant snow cone or in some other death trap. And every time, I would fall for his joke, bursting into tears, since I could never make up my mind which side of the dividing line between fantasy and reality Batman stood. I suspect it bred in me both an intense desire to be able to read the paper myself and some lingering suspicion that the journalists were pulling my leg.
Some of the boys in the neighborhood formed a superhero club. I remember us swearing an oath of loyalty over a stack of comics in my treehouse. We each chose the persona of one of the members of DC’s Justice League. The guy who lived across the street was unnaturally big and strong for his age and was quickly cast as Superman. The kid next door was small, wiry, and fast on his feet, and he became the Flash. I had tired of Batman by this point and aligned myself with the Green Lantern for reasons long forgotten. We each spent our weekly allowance on comics and would pass them around. I have reread some of the stories of the era, only to be disappointed. We had fleshed out their personalities through our play, and most of what I recalled so fondly wasn’t to be found on the printed page. A few contemporary writers add some of that clubhouse camaraderie into their books, and for a few moments I feel as if I were back with the old gang, drinking Kool-Aid and trying to second-guess the Joker’s perplexing secret code, which almost always turned out to be something you could read if you held your comic up to the mirror.
Most of those kids have disappeared from my life and rarely reenter my thoughts. One of them (Superman) tracked me down on the Internet; we got together recently. We talked in big breathless gulps about boyhood days and then suddenly, silence fell over us. We looked at each other blankly as if we were suddenly confronting not the boys we were but the middle-aged men we had become, and we ended the evening early. Neither of us has called the other since. But, we both still read comics.
As I sit down to write this, I am haunted by a curious memory—one of the few memories of comics that centers on a unique event rather than a pattern of repe
ated experiences. It is early summer and I am sprawled out on the floor of my family’s cabin in the north Georgia mountains coloring a picture of Batman as my mother watches television across the room. I have spent most of the day thrashing about in the water pretending to be Aquaman and am now awaiting bed, when a news report interrupts the show my mother is watching to tell us that Robert F. Kennedy has been shot. Why are my memories of my mother’s tears over Bobby’s death so firmly linked to my memories of superhero coloring books and fantasy play? Is it because at such a moment—which would have come when I was in sixth grade—I suddenly realized that a line separated the silly plots of the campy television series from the harsh realities of adult life? What had it meant to me as a boy to see my mother crying and not know how to comfort her?
You could say that what drew me to comics the week my mother died was nostalgia—which Susan Stewart describes as a desperate hunger to return to a time and place that never really existed, a utopian fantasy through which our current longings get mapped onto the past. Comics were comfort food, like the southern cooked vegetables my mother used to fix for me when I came home for holidays. Yet, these comics offered me little comfort. I hurt every place my mother had ever touched me and I found myself unable to separate out the comics from the memories they evoked. If comics brought me back to boyhood, then they brought me closer to an age when my mother’s love had been the most powerful force in my life.
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