Comics Tragedy

Is the superhero invulnerable?

Brian Doherty from the May 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

David Boring is a mysterious yet strangely funny meditation on the nature of narrative, explored through an affectless young man’s obsessive search for a woman to be obsessed with. Like Jimmy Corrigan, David Boring concerns sons, lost fathers, and superheroes. Themes of the nature of narrative vs. real life unfold underneath Boring’s phantasmagoric events, which include murder, incest, and an offstage apocalyptic war. Yet the narrative is strangely calm, and the characters often make telling references to seeing life as a movie or story. Within the context of what the reader knows is a comic book, this could be seen as slyly welcoming the comic book within the canon of acceptable storytelling forms, as valid as a novel or movie.

The mixed figure of the father/superhero is central here, too. David Boring’s father, whom he never knew, was a comic book artist. David totemically carries around a copy of the one comic by his father he owns, a Yellow Streak Annual. (The Yellow Streak is a costumed crime-buster.) Disconnected images from that comic-within-a-comic hint obliquely at themes in David’s own story. It’s as if Clowes is saying one can’t read any comic book narrative without the ever-present undercurrent of the superhero concept in the reader’s mind.

The superhero as a replacement for an absent or failed father also makes an appearance in Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay. Sam Clay is brought before the Kefauver Commission to discuss the supposed link between comic books and juvenile delinquency. He is confronted with accusations that the superhero’s young sidekick represents a homosexual fantasy. (The charge comes from comic books’ greatest arch-enemy, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, whose 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, is an unintentionally hilarious and lamentably long-out-of-print screed against the form.) Clay, himself gay and troubled by that fact, thinks to himself that it isn’t a gay love relationship that the hero-sidekick dyad represents to young comic book readers in the ’40s. It is the fantasy of a healthy, loving, dedicated father-son relationship in a time -- during World War II and afterwards -- when American children were largely apt to lack it.

The father/superhero figure may well be part of the superhero’s enduring appeal, especially among adolescent boys -- an image of a heroic father figure who is not only able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but someone to pal around with between adventures. Such a fantasy may seem unbearably childish; it is, in fact, merely human and underwrites any number of universally acclaimed novels. Literature mavens may groan, but doubtless more people worldwide have been moved by Bruce Wayne’s relationship with the orphaned Dick Grayson than have been touched by Holden Caulfield’s search for a responsive father figure.

Heroes Unlimited

Superheroes infect the imagination of more than just comic book artists. It’s a cultural conceit that can be found in all manner of creative expression -- from rock videos (such as 3 Doors Down’s recent song "Kryptonite," which features aged superheroes on one last mission) to literary short stories in The Atlantic. ("Superassassin" by Lysley A. Tenorio, from the October 2000 issue, is about a comic-book-obsessed kid who starts to injure people in the name of justice.) The superhero motif regularly fuels big-money Hollywood summer extravaganzas, from 1978’s Superman to 1989’s Batman (both of which gave rise to a series of increasingly absurd and shoddy sequels) to 2000’s X-Men to this summer’s Spider-Man.

Last December, M. Night Shyamalan, a film director known both as a box office God and an accomplished auteur after the commercial and critical success of The Sixth Sense, essayed the superhero trope in a quieter way -- so quiet that the movie’s ad campaign sloughed over the film’s main idea entirely. Shyamalan’s Unbreakable tells a classic comic book superhero origin story: What happens to a real man when he discovers, through the intersection of a horrible accident and the intrusions of a mysterious stranger who happens to be a comic book fanatic, that he might have powers far beyond those of mortal men?

Bruce Willis, under the unwanted prodding of Samuel Jackson as the comics fan, gradually becomes a vigilante. Both the futility and glory of such acts in a brutally real world are played out in a straightforward and intelligent way. Shyamalan, like others before him, suggests there is something about obsession with comic books that can lead to twisted behavior, especially if the fan tries to apply comic book scenarios of heroism and justice to the real world.

Shyamalan uses more realistic storytelling than is typical in comic books to relate his superhero tale. There is more focus on the hero’s relationship with his family, more concern for the real-world legal and ethical implications of a vigilante beating up criminals. Playing with how the superhero idea might work in something more closely resembling our real world has been common even in comic books since the mid-’80s, when it was done to spectacular effect by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in the DC series, Watchmen. Even Scott McCloud praised Watchmen for "breaking nearly every one of the tried and true rules." But however sophisticated an adventure story Watchmen was, in terms of audience expansion it was a dead-end. "Sophisticated" superhero comics remain insular works whose resonance relies greatly on a previous understanding and interest in the comic book medium. One most enjoys seeing conventions subverted when one understands the conventions. Indeed, this may help explain why Unbreakable didn’t match the popular success of The Sixth Sense. The Sixth Sense played with the conventions of horror and psychological thrillers and was hence far more accessible to moviegoers.

This doesn’t mean work dedicated to playing with aesthetic convention is necessarily aesthetically inferior -- great novels from Don Quixote to Madame Bovary, for instance, do precisely this. Different communities of readers always understand things differently; comic book fans will appreciate Kavalier and Clay and Unbreakable (and Jimmy Corrigan and David Boring) in ways that non-fans won’t. Those acquainted with or obsessive about details of a form’s history will always see things others won’t. And artists of serious comic book stories, like Ware and Clowes, are probably inspired to use the superhero as a postmodernist metacommentary on their own form -- and also because, as comic artists, they doubtless have that idea infecting their imagination.

Which suggests the real reason comics haven’t yet escaped the artistic ghetto that McCloud decries: Anyone who even aspires to being a comics artist in an American context will by necessity have been steeped in the superhero motif. Ultimately, McCloud’s argument about superhero dominance is similar to what economists call a path-dependence argument, by which "inferior" products are believed to sometimes wrongly rise to dominance in a given market. McCloud grants that the dominance of comics by a single genre might have been inevitable, but stresses that it didn’t have to be the superhero genre. That, he contends, is simply a lamentable historical accident. This line of thinking suggests that the triumph of the superhero over, say, the funny animal comic, is not so different from the way QWERTY keyboards or VHS videotapes won out over superior alternatives.

But there is something suspicious about using path-dependence arguments to say that things ought to be different than they are, and are only that way because of a circumstantial lock-in of a supposedly inferior product. As economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis have shown, claims that a dominant product does not deserve its market position are often self-interested and fail to appreciate the ways in which a castigated product serves consumers. For instance, the source of the idea that the QWERTY keyboard is inefficient was the creator of a rival keyboard (who used spurious studies to bolster his case); QWERTY critics also routinely fail to ask whether the relative benefits of switching to a new keyboard are worth the effort.

So it is with the superhero comic. Indeed, in this case, one might add something more to the mix: Far from choking off the vitality of the comic book, superheroes may be precisely that which has kept the form alive, albeit on a smaller scale than decades ago. Look at the fate of another form of pop entertainment that, along with comics, had a huge following in the 1940s: radio drama. There was no one unique thing that it provided better than any other art form, and it died.

Though McCloud tries to deny it, the serialized superhero comic provides something unique, something that other art forms can’t quite match, even when they try to. (Few familiar with both the comic book and film Batman would disagree that the former is more dramatically satisfying.) As one of the publishers in Kavalier and Clay puts it while looking at Kavalier’s crazily eye-catching art, "Half bad is maybe better than beauteeful." Such an inexacting but heartfelt standard may be key to superhero comics’ unique value and long-lasting appeal: They are attractive and inspire passion because they provide a structurally different kind of aesthetic/storytelling experience than other, more respected storytelling forms.

The sort of non-superhero comics for which McCloud cheerleads do exist, and can be found in most comic shops (and even in many megabookstores). The market has made room for them. It’s just that no one seems to want them on the same scale they want Spider-Man or Superman. Despite a solid audience, no huge popular fan base is crying, "Make Mine McCloud!"