It is silly to try to explain why I read comics that week. I had been reading comics every week for some years running. I returned to comics sometime in my mid-thirties—searching for something I couldn’t name at the time. A few years later, when I was diagnosed with gout, and suddenly faced the realization that I was not indestructible and inexhaustible, I found myself drawn passionately back into the world of the Flash and the Green Lantern. My recognition of my own approaching mortality drew me into the death-defying world of the superheroes, who, unlike me, never grew older, never had bodies that ached. The comics function for me as the reverse of Dorian Gray’s portrait—they remain the same while my body ages and decays. And as such, they help me to reflect on the differences between who I am now and who I was when I first read them.
Again, it’s not quite that simple because comics kept coming in and out of my life. To tell the story that way would be to skip over my various attempts to get my own son engaged with comics, all doomed to failure; or the way the release of the Batman films rekindled my passion for that character for a while; or my periodic raids on the comic shops to examine some title that a student brought to my attention. True that there are huge gaps in my knowledge of any given character—and whole series that came and went without my awareness—but I never really left comics. It just took me a while to admit that I wasn’t wandering into the shop now and again to see what was new; I was going there every week and coming away with bags full.
I wasn’t ready to come out as a comics fan. Even though my own work had debunked many stereotypes about science fiction fans, there was a side of me that still believed the clichés about middle-aged comic book readers. That stigma kept me from going down to the local comic shops and setting up my own subs folder, even though doing so would get me a significant discount on my purchases. It also prevented me from bagging, or even organizing, my comics, even though doing so was the only way to combat the clutter of having that many random issues lying around our apartment.
If I have an origin story for my passion for superheroes, I also have an origin story for my fear of becoming a comics fan. And it begins in Tom’s smelly basement when I was in seventh grade and had decided I was too old for comics and ready to move on to more mature reading matter, like Mad or Famous Monsters of Filmland. Tom was a somewhat pudgy kid who lived down the street from my grandmother, and we became friends initially out of geographic accident and emotional necessity—his house was a place to go when I wanted to escape being cooped up with someone who was constantly complaining about her aging and ailing body.
Tom had just moved to Atlanta from Michigan. He read almost exclusively Marvel comics at a time when all of my other friends were committed to DC. (Tom had the last laugh since history has vindicated his tastes over ours.) We would sit in his basement and rummage through this huge mound of yellowing comics, reading late into the night by flashlight, as his two cocker spaniels snorted somewhere in the dark void around us. Every so often when we would explore his basement, we would come upon the fossilized dog turds that gave the space its pungent odor. And to this day, when I go into the dank, dark subterranean shops where comics are mostly sold, I think about Tom’s basement and wonder what my foot is going to land on if I linger too long over a box of back issues.
One day in seventh grade, as we were flipping through Incredible Hulk comics, he told me that he thought he was gay. The next day, I blurted it out around a picnic table on a school field trip to a bunch of the other guys; and from that moment on, our friendship began to unravel until we were punching each other on the playground and getting sent to the principal’s office for squirting each other with milk. I was racked with guilt about betraying his secret identity, even though I wasn’t ready to come to grips with what that secret really meant—and in any case, it turned out to be a false alarm. Somehow, in a few short years, the nature of friendship had gotten much more complicated.
When I was an undergraduate, those comic-geek stereotypes got reinforced through encounters with two friends who were both comics collectors, both guilt-ridden Catholics, and both named Mark. One of the Marks was a square-jawed fellow who wanted to be Clark Kent—not Superman, just Clark Kent. What he wanted, above all else, was to be as normal as possible, to hold at bay anything unpredictable or uncontrollable. He wasn’t just dull—he was desperately dull. Somehow, for him, memorizing as many facts as he could from superhero concordances was one of the ways he could bring his corner of the galaxy more fully under his control. Years later, when I began to collect comics seriously, my wife bought me some reference books at a used book sale. When we examined them more closely, we discovered Mark’s name scrawled on the inside front cover. I am not sure what surprised me the most—that Mark had finally gotten rid of those books or that my interest had grown to the point that I saw a value in owning them. Was I becoming the guy I dreaded in college?
The other Mark took me to his apartment one time and showed me an entire room full of steel boxes, containing thousands of individually bagged comics backed with acid-free cardboard, and gave me a speech about how his comics would be safe and secure long after he was dead. Years later, I visited Mark in Brooklyn and sure enough, he still had all of those boxes of comics and many more. By that time, however, I wanted nothing more than to sit up all night asking him for recommendations or flipping through back issues. The mausoleum had become a library.
I fear that I have reduced Tom and the two Marks into fan boy clichés—not ready to confront the challenges of adult life, obsessed with trivia, determined to preserve their comics at all costs, and vaguely distasteful. And for a long time, those associations colored my memories and fed my own anxiety about admitting that comics were such an important part of my life. Those stereotypes are powerful forces shaping the ways we express and act upon our tastes. Yet, I have come to realize that Tom had shown better taste in comics than I did. Mark 1’s encyclopedias were useful in sorting through more than forty years of encrusted DC continuity; and, as for Mark 2, collecting comics wasn’t terribly different from collecting any other kind of book.
But there is a key difference. Unlike, say, leather-bound books, comics were not made to last. They were printed on cheap paper with bad ink on the assumption that they would be read and discarded. No one ever thought that people would still be reading them decades later, any more than one imagined holding onto old newspapers. Superheroes may be invincible, but comics rot. What makes old comics valuable for collectors is that so many of them have been destroyed. Every mom who threw away her son’s comics increased the fortunes of those who were lucky enough to hold onto theirs. Many fans spend their entire lives—and much of their incomes—trying to recover the issues they had once discarded so casually. And so, fans become preoccupied with the challenges of preserving their collections, with forestalling their ultimate destruction.
To her credit, my mother never threw away my comics. She took them up to the lake house and left them in a drawer. Over the years, they were literally read to death. Young visitors would paw through them with peanut butter-covered fingers. Mice, emboldened by the long months when the cabin was unoccupied, would rip them apart seeking material for their nests. The staples came undone and pages would come off when you tried to read them one last time. The humidity meant that the pages got more and more waterlogged and mildewed. The sun bleached the lurid covers if you left them lying on a window ledge too long. And in the end, not a single one of the superhero books made it past my adolescent years. The Classics Illustrated comics were more expensive than the rest—and came with the aura of high culture—so mom treated them as sacred and eternal, not unlike the way she dealt with National Geographic magazines. Interestingly enough, they are the only comics from my childhood that I still possess. Despite my horror in recalling how many Jack Kirby books got ripped up when a Boy Scout troop got rained in one weekend at our cabin, I still tend to loan out my comics to my students rather than worrying about keeping them in pristine condition. I have
refused to take that last step into fan boy culture. For the moment, I am more interested in reading and sharing comics than in keeping them out of harm’s way. I know nothing lasts forever and you are better off really enjoying the things you love while you can.
These are simply some of the memories that passed through my head as I sat on my deathwatch. I had pushed aside Batman, not ready to face young Bruce’s angst, and turned instead to Spider-Man, only to discover that this particular storyline dealt with the memories stirred up by the anniversary of Uncle Ben’s death. Eco is right: Superheroes don’t move closer to death; they move further away from it. Yet, death still defines the cycles of their lives; it seemed that almost every one of the comics I brought to the hospice dealt—at least in part—with childhood trauma and loss. If comics provide youthful fantasies of empowerment and autonomy, they do so by severing the ties between the superheroes and their parents. Batman takes shape in Bruce Wayne’s mind as he vows vengeance over his parents’ tombstones. Superman’s parents send him away from a dying planet. Peter Parker, not yet aware that with great power comes great responsibility, is too self-centered to stop a crook that runs across his path, allowing him to escape and kill his Uncle Ben. What separated the villains from the heroes wasn’t the experience of loss, but what they did after that loss, how it shaped their sense of themselves and their place in the world. Some were strengthened by loss, others deformed.
Most of the literature of childhood has at its heart a kind of emotional violence: we expose children through fiction to the very forces from which we seek to shelter them in real life. Whether in comics or in traditional children’s literature, the most powerful theme is almost inevitably the death of or separation from one’s parents. Literature helps us to cope with those fears at one level removed. Comic books help us to confront those separation anxieties by depicting their protagonists as moving beyond their initial vulnerabilities and gaining some control over their lives after such losses.
It isn’t that these events occur one time in the distant past; they crop up again and again in comics, because these images of death and mourning define the character’s identities. And this cycling through the moments of death rings psychologically true. In the months that followed my mother’s death, I found myself returning, almost involuntarily, to memories of her final days, the way that a tongue seeks out and presses against a loose tooth—to see if it still hurts. I came away with a new understanding of why the superheroes hold onto their grief, their rage, their anguish, and draw upon it as a source of strength. At one point in my life, I read those stories to learn what it was like to have the power and autonomy of adulthood. Now, I read them to see how you confronted death and came out the other side, how mourning forces you to reassess who you are and what your goals are and what you owe to the people who brought you into the world. My mother’s death made no sense to me; I felt only the injustice of seeing her die so much younger than I had expected; I saw only my longing to be able to communicate with her. The comics didn’t take away that pain; they helped me to make meaning of it. Some parts of what I read touched places in me that were too raw to endure. The reality of my mother’s death had resensitized me to fantasy violence, making it hard to pull back from what the protagonists were feeling. Yet, at the same rime, reading those books helped me to realize the common human experience of loss and recovery.
Comics are made to rot and decay. They are such a vital part of our developing imaginations that we try to preserve them forever, but despite our best efforts, they slip through our fingers. The comics of our childhood are impossible to recover. Even if you hold onto your comics, the stories on the page are not the same ones you remember, because our memories are so colored by the contexts within which we encountered them, and especially by the ways we reworked them in our imagination and our backyard play. Eco’s claim that superheroes are not “consumed” by death helps to explain why we imagine them as a point of return to bygone days. Yet, even though we change and they don’t, we find something new and different each time we come back to these stories. In this case, the death-defying superheroes helped me to model a process of letting go.
CONTRIBUTORS
WILL BROOKER is director of research, film, and TV at Kingston University, London. He is the author or editor of eight books on popular culture, cultural context, and audience. Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon (2000) is continued in Hunting the Dark Knight: 21st Century Batman (2012).
JEFFREY BROWN is an associate professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University, where he serves as the coordinator of graduate studies. He is the author of Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their Fans (2000).
SCOTT BUKATMAN is an associate professor of art history at Stanford University. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993), Blade Runner (1997), and Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the Twentieth Century (2003).
JOHN G. CAWELTI taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, where he helped pioneer the scholarly study of popular culture. His books include The Six Gun Mystique (1971), Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976), and Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture (2004).
PETER COOGAN is the founder and director of the Institute for Comics Studies, as well as the cofounder and co-chair of the Comic Arts Conference. He is the author of Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (2006).
JULES FEIFFER is a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, children’s book author, and cultural journalist. He was the first cartoonist commissioned by the New York Times to create comic strips for their op-ed page. His books include Passionella (1957), Harry the Rat with Women (1963), The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965), Tantrum (1979), and Backing into Forward: A Memoir (2010).
HENRY JENKINS is professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts at the University of Southern California. His books include Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age (2006), The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (2007), and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008).
ROBERT JEWETT is visiting professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg, and the coauthor (with John Shelton Lawrence) of The Myth of the American Superhero (2002) and Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (2003).
GERARD JONES is a freelance comic book writer and author. His books include The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books (1996), Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence (2003), and Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (2005).
GEOFF KLOCK is an assistant professor of literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. He is the author of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (2002) and Imaginary Biographers: Misreading the Lives of the Poets (2007).
KARIN KUKKONEN is a postdoctoral research fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford University. Her research focuses on the interactions between literature and the human mind. She is the author of Storytelling beyond Postmodernism: Fables and the Fairy Tale (2010).
ANDY MEDHURST is a senior lecturer in media, film, and cultural studies at the University of Sussex. His books include Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction (1997), A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities (2007), and Coronation Street (2008).
ADILIFU NAMA is associate professor and chair of the African American Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (2008) and Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011).
WALTER ONG (1912–2003) was a Jesuit priest, a professor of literature, and a philosopher. He served as the president of the Modern Language Association in 1978–1979. His books included Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957), The Barbarian Within (1962), and Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971).
LORRIE PALMER is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her research interests include movie genres, global cinema, and representations of masculinity.
RICHARD REYNOLDS is a senior lecturer at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. He is the author of Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (1994), as well as a number of academic papers and non-academic works on comics and other aspects of contemporary culture.
TRINA ROBBINS is a comics artist and writer, and cultural historian. Her first comics appeared in the East Village Other, and she helped establish the first all-woman comic book, It Ain’t Me, Babe Comix, in 1970. Her books include Women and the Comics (1983), A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993), The Great Women Superheroes (1997), and The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley’s Cartoons from 1913–1940 (2009).
LILLIAN ROBINSON (1941–2006) was the principal of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and a professor of women’s studies at Concordia University. Her books included Sex, Class, and Culture (1978), Modern Women Writers (1996), and Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (2004).
ROGER B. ROLLIN taught literature and popular culture at Clemson University for many years. He is the author of Robert Herrick (1992). He served as the president of Popular Culture Association of the South, and president of the American Culture Association.
JOHN SHELTON LAWRENCE is professor emeritus of philosophy at Morningside College. He is the coauthor (with Robert Jewett) of The Myth of the American Superhero (2002) and Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (2003).
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