Comics Tragedy

Is the superhero invulnerable?

Brian Doherty from the May 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Adult Books?

Both Chabon and Chris Ware, a cutting-edge comics wunderkind whose work is published by the hip independent comics company Fantagraphics, play with the superhero motif while not themselves writing "superhero" stories. That is, their stories are not set in a world of superpowered beings who wear costumes and fight crime. Rather, they are about the people who imagine such worlds. This metafictional remove may be precisely why their works can be widely accepted as artistic, as a step above comic books.

Very occasionally, comic books do connect with a more respectable audience, but usually as a one-shot phenomenon that says nothing about more general acceptance of the medium. Maus, the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, is the most successful example. An autobiographical tale of the artist’s relationship with his Holocaust-survivor father, all of Maus’ characters are drawn as animals. Spiegelman avoided the silly superhero, but embraced the second-most-popular comic art trope: the anthropomorphized animal. He seems to recognize, as other serious comic artists have, that perhaps it is the seemingly childish, but unique, iconographies of comics that give them power. (Spiegelman can’t escape superheroes either: His latest project is an off-Broadway musical about a superhero creator victimized by a ruthless comics company.)

To aficionados serious about the possibilities for artistic greatness within the comic form, both the general cultural condescension toward them and the loss of 50 percent of the industry’s yearly revenue during the ’90s are too much to bear. (In the early ’90s, some individual titles sold 1 million copies an issue -- now selling 100,000 is considered a great success.) A revolution against both popular and highbrow prejudices is in order. Scott McCloud, the formerly obscure creator of the ’80s superhero comic Zot!, is the firebrand of this revolution. He’s garnered an audience outside comic fandom with two clever books about the history, grammar, and possibilities of comics. He writes passionately and convincingly of the uniquely evocative power of cartoon images mixed with words and placed in sequence. His books are literal demonstrations of his point: Rather than writing traditional essays on the history, theory, and practice of joining words and pictures, McCloud makes his case mostly by using cartoon images of himself speaking.

Understanding Comics (1993) became a cult-intellectual hit and put McCloud on the academic lecture circuit. In a new sequel, Reinventing Comics, McCloud cheerleads for a comics universe bigger and more varied than we see now. He wants more women and minorities in the field, more formal innovations, and a greater reliance on digital distribution. But first, comics creators and fans must dethrone the superhero comic, "a genre tailor-made for adolescent boys," says McCloud.

But in discussing the possibilities of a glorious, cornucopian future for comics, McCloud must address the obvious question: If comics have such unlimited potential as a serious art form, why are so damned many of them dominated by heavily muscled men (and the occasional woman) in tights engaging in fisticuffs? The standard history posits that superheroes began dominating the form because greedy businessmen saw Superman’s success in the late ’30s and fell over one another in the rush to cash in. After World War II, the superhero no longer conquered all opposition. Many overarching sociological reasons have been proffered by comics historians -- that the need for stories of conquering heroes faded with Hitler’s villainy vanquished, for instance -- though none is completely convincing. Whatever the reasons, crime, Western, jungle, horror, funny animal, and teen comedy comic books did in fact became increasingly popular after the war. A thousand four-colored flowers were a-bloom, and comics had the genre diversity, if not the aesthetic maturity, that McCloud craves.

Then, in the mid-1950s, the increasing gruesomeness of the crime and horror comics raised the hackles of censors both within the government and without. Sen. Estes Kefauver, head of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, held hearings on the "threat" posed by comics to decent society, most memorably grilling William Gaines, the head of EC Comics, whose horror line was particularly lurid. Famously, Gaines was reduced to defending a cover depicting someone brandishing a decapitated head by effectively saying, Hey, it didn’t show that much dripping blood.

After those hearings, the comics industry adopted the Comics Code, an act of "self-regulation" designed to stave off actual government censorship. But the price, goes the standard history, was a high one: Comics were doomed to perpetual childishness.

In fact, mass-market comics were not, by any real evidence, on a path toward Shakespearean grandeur before the banal Code stopped such progress. See, for examples, William W. Savage Jr.’s entertaining Commies, Cowboys and Jungle Queens, which reprints representative examples of pre-Code comics and analyzes what they reveal of the post-war American psyche. In Savage’s reading, they mostly exude anxiety about the Bomb, Soviet subversives, outsiders of various sorts, racism, and drugs. The war, spy, and jungle stories he reprints don’t seem like an art form on the verge of greatness. If anything, they’re just fershluggener pop silliness that proves non-superhero comics can be as inane as men in tights at their dumbest. Still, for all that, these crude works have a power that fascinates middle-aged academics as much as wide-eyed kids in the candy store decades ago.

The Submerged Superhero

In the wake of the Code’s adoption, goes the standard history, mainstream comics publishers played it safe by sanitizing their superheroes (Batman was rarely left alone with Robin anymore) and rarely wandering into topics and genres that might cause controversy. By the early 1970s, after Marvel comics had revamped and repopularized the superhero for a decade, that genre had established a virtual monopoly on mainstream comic books (though a lively "underground" of often drug-inspired counterculture humor existed). The superhero rules to this day, at least among comics publishers with titles that regularly sell in the tens of thousands of issues. So McCloud and others who hope for an expanded range of possibilities seem to have ample reason to gripe.

Yet in many ways, McCloud has already gotten what he wants. There are, and have been for at least 15 or 20 years, many non-superhero comics around, mostly from smaller independent presses. The problem is, hardly anyone wants to buy them. The creators and their champions tend to blame the association of comics with superheroes for that relative market failure. Certainly it doesn’t help that, over the past two decades and for a variety of reasons, comics have mostly been sold only in specialty stores. Not only does such a situation tend to reinforce the idea of comic books as marginal and slightly perverse, but the shops help create a subcultural insularity among comics fans, and, as important, limits the means by which new readers once entered the world of comics. The old spinner racks that announced "Hey, Kids! Comics!" have largely disappeared from convenience stores, drug stores, and the like.

The superhero’s dominance of the form goes even deeper than one might expect. Even Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan and Daniel Clowes’ David Boring, two recent comic book "novels" published by reputable New York literary house Pantheon and intended for mature audiences, are heavily indebted to men in tights. These are serious works about enduring human concerns; they’re not mere blood-and-thunder adventure tales of square-jawed, Never-Never Landers slugging it out with poorly motivated cardboard villains. Yet neither breaks entirely free of the superhero trope. If anything, they are consciously energized by it.

Jimmy Corrigan is a multi-leveled tale of four generations of American losers (three of them named Jimmy Corrigan), trapped in emotional prisons of their own making. The youngest Jimmy’s life, and those of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, are chronicled in 380 densely designed and marvelously depressing pages, most of which appeared originally in the Chicago alternative weekly New City and the Fantagraphics comic book The Acme Novelty Library.

In a mordant four-page opening sequence, the last Jimmy Corrigan is taken by his mother to a car show where he watches the actor who stars as "Super-Man" on TV. (His costume is not the same as Clark Kent’s alter ego.) The actor ends up coming home with Jimmy and his mother, and sleeping with the latter. He gives Jimmy his mask as he slips out early the next morning, before the mother wakes up. She stumbles into the kitchen, to see her young son wearing her lover’s mask. "Mom!" Jimmy announces, "He said to tell you he had a real good time!" With this weird parody of the primal scene, the "Super-Man" character casts a shadow over the work, both as a symbol of Jimmy’s hopeless quest for an honorable, admirable, loving, and powerful father figure, and as a source of cruel humor.