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American Superhero Comics:
Fractal Narrative and The New Deal
A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Lawrence W. Beemer
June 2011
© 2011 Lawrence W. Beemer. All Rights Reserved.
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This dissertation titled
American Superhero Comics: Fractal Narrative and The New Deal
by
LAWRENCE W. BEEMER
has been approved for
the English Department of Ohio University
and the College of Arts and Sciences by
______________________________
Robert Miklitsch
Professor of English
______________________________
Benjamin M. Ogles
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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ABSTRACT
BEEMER, LAWRENCE W., Ph.D., June 2011, English
American Superhero Comics: Fractal Narrative and The New Deal (204 pp.)
Director of Dissertation: Robert Miklitsch
Coining the term "fractal narrative," this dissertation examines the complex
storytelling structure that is particular to contemporary American superhero comics.
Whereas other mediums most often require narrative to function as self-contained and
linear, individual superhero comics exist within a vast and intricate continuity that is
composed of an indeterminate number of intersecting threads. Identical to fractals, the
complex geometry of the narrative structure found in superhero comics when taken as a
whole is constructed by the perpetual iteration of a single motif that was established at
the genre's point of origin in Action Comics #1. The first appearance of Superman
institutes all of the features and rhetorical elements that define the genre, but it also
encodes it with the specific ideology of The New Deal era.
In order to examine this fractal narrative structure, this dissertation traces
historical developments over the last seven decades and offers a close reading Marvel
Comics' 2006 cross-over event, Civil War.
Approved: _________________________________________________________
Robert Miklitsch
Professor of English
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PREFACE
On Wednesdays, my faith in flight and right’s inevitable victory over wrong is
refreshed. I look forward to Wednesdays; it’s the day that new comics make their way
into the shops, and I’ve been reading these brightly colored and vividly illustrated tales of
costumed crusaders for over thirty years.
When I was first beginning to read, I would tag along with my grandfather, who
was the chief of police in the small town that I grew up in and who was the closest thing
to a superhero that I’ve ever met. Grandpa would make himself available to the
community by spending hours at a lunch counter in the center of the village, and he
would bring me along. While he smoked, drank coffee, and talked to the locals, I sat
beside him and drank milkshakes while swiveling back and forth on a chrome plated
stool. The store had a tall rack of comics at one end of the counter, and I was allowed to
read them all before picking one or two to purchase. Sgt. Rock and World’s Finest were
my favorites, and I would almost always choose those. Archie was lame.
As a kid, my favorite activity was reading comics while enjoying hours of
solitude in my room. I didn’t just read comics; I read them, reread them several times,
memorized them, and I even tried to counterfeit the illustrations. This was in the late 70s
when no one considered comics a collectable or an investment opportunity. I remember
going to yard sales and flea markets where one could buy a brown shopping bag of
assorted comics for a dollar. When I got home, I would filter the new comics into the
stacks that I already had; I sorted them numerically and by title, and then I would read
every comic book I owned as one continuous story. As it turns out, my early forays into
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obsessive compulsiveness proved to be exactly the reading strategy one needs to bring to
contemporary American superhero comics.
Superheroes have been a staple in popular culture for over seventy years, but it is
really only in the last decade that they have become the subject of serious consideration.
This is partly due to the unbelievable box office success of the film adaptations; advances
in CGI have recently made it possible for movies to convincingly depict images that
could only have been hand drawn in years past. More importantly, the generation that
witnessed a remarkable development of production qualities in comics while in their
adolescence have come of age and have begun to assert themselves as academics and
cultural critics. Generation X's once eclectic tastes have gone mainstream.
Several books dealing with superheroes have been published in the last ten years,
and each has offered a distinct approach to the subject. Several methods of literary
criticism have been employed: new historicism, psychoanalysis, reader response,
structuralism, etc. Ironically, some critics have even resorted to approaches, like
classicism and Arnoldian humanism, that embody an attitude that has been historically
dismissive of popular culture. These critical approaches were designed for different
purposes, and when one examines a comic through a lens intended for novels or movies,
one's view of it will inevitably be distorted. Critics have done great work in terms of the
genre's generalities and by performing close readings of singular texts, but such
approaches frequently neglect the key feature of superhero comics, continuity. This
dissertation proposes that the content of most comic books is far less important than the
relationship among those comics.
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Whether it's insisting on Aristotle's unities or making sure that a set is dressed
consistently throughout a film shot out of sequence, continuity is a key feature of
storytelling. Without attention to continuity, a story can become disorientating or entirely
illegible. Superhero comics make use of continuity on a scale that cannot be found in any
other text. Their narrative construction is entirely unique; the storytelling in superhero
comics requires consistency across innumerable publications that are composed by an
equally countless number of writers and artists over protracted periods of time. Whereas
all other forms of storytelling can be diagrammed as simple arcs or tangents, superhero
comics defy Euclidean geometry.
My argument is that a superhero comic cannot be read independently of every
other superhero comic that has ever been published. I have coined the term fractal
narrative and use it to describe the geometric structure that emerges through the
intersections of long-standing continuities mutually shaping and informing the contents
of individual publications. This structure, which has been developing since the
introduction of Superman in Action Comics #1, is the main obstacle for anyone
attempting to read a comic for the first time, but it is also what makes comics the rich and
remarkable texts that they are. It demands a new critical strategy that emphasizes
interrelatedness over individualization.
Superman is the first character of his kind, and although there have been hundreds
of superheroes created since 1938, each has been a slightly varying iteration of the
original template. In addition to capes, powers and secret identities, Action Comics #1
supplied the genre with a specific ideological framework. Superman was first heralded as
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a "champion of the oppressed" and clearly embodied The New Deal. This particular
political alignment has remained a persistent feature of the very definition of
superheroism. Although the focus of political urgency has shifted several times since the
conclusion of The Great Depression, superheroes have remained constant in the way they
challenge the different issues of changing times.
Of course, comics aren't limited to the portrayal of superheroic escapades.
Graphic novels dealing with a variety of non-fictional topics have gained a good deal of
notoriety and critical attention in recent years, and serialized publications, like Garth
Ennis' Preacher and Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, have excelled at exploring
different genres. Japanese manga has enjoyed a rapid increase in popularity in the United
States. While each of these deserves attention in its own right, this project focuses solely
on American superhero comics, which represent the vast majority of comics publications
and adhere to structural conventions that cannot be found in any other genre or medium.
The Superheroic Subject
The first chapter of this dissertation establishes the perspective from which I will
examine the materials in the subsequent sections. A survey of several existing critical
works will help to situate and differentiate the particular aims of this project. This chapter
distinguishes between graphic novels, which generally enjoy high regard, and superhero
comics, which continue to be dismissed as mere pop culture. By looking at the narrative
strategies employed in stand-alone texts and mythology, a case is made for fractal
narrative being the only appropriate descriptor for the continuity found in and between
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superhero comics. Finally, this chapter engages the issue of whether or not superhero
comic books can or should be considered Art.
A Terse History of Tights
The second chapter begins with a discussion of Steven Johnston's "sleeper curve," which
is a term he uses to illustrate popular culture's trend toward ever increasing complexity
and sophistication. The chapter presents a selective history of comics from the
publication of The Funnies in 1929 to the first cross-over events in the mid-80s.
Particular attention is paid to the persistence of New Deal ideology despite shifting
historical contexts and to the layering, interruption, and intersection of comics that
produce the genre's geometric structure.
A Case Study in Civil War
The final chapter examines Civil War, a 2006 cross-over event produced by Marvel
Comics. This event exemplifies the current state of superhero narrative. The story unfolds
over a period of a year and is composed in excess of one hundred individual comics. The
histories of the major characters are explicated in order to show how comprehension of
the story is dependent on several decades worth of foreknowledge and to illustrate the
resoluteness of superheroic politics despite the writer’s desire to craft a story that
undermines that essential characteristic.
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Everything I do is dedicated to my wife, Cristy.
This particular work is also dedicated to my grandfather, Larry Muller,
And to my son, Jackson Parker Beemer.
Superheroes past and future.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am, of course, indebted to my dissertation committee which was chaired by
Robert Miklitsch and composed of Roger Aden, Samuel Crowl, and Eric LeMay. I would
also extend my gratitude to Tom Newkirk for his direction and insight and to Barbara
Grueser for her guidance through the administrative morass of graduate school. Thanks
also to David Lazar for encouraging me to choose an unconventional topic, but one that is
important to me.
I would also like to express my bottomless appreciation to my mother, Janet, and
my step-father, Mike, for their perpetual love, encouragement, and support. Lastly, I
would like to offer my thanks to the myriad writers, artists, and editors of comic books
who have given me a lifetime of inspiration and entertainment.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………3
Preface…………………………………………………………….…..…………………...4
Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………9
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………....………10
List of Figures......…..……………………………………………………………….…...13
Chapter One: The Superheroic Subject…………………………….…………………….15
Chapter Two: A Terse History of Tights………………………….……………………..51
The Golden Age……………………………………….…………………53
War and Tights…………………………………………..……………….66
The Seduction of the Innocent…………………………….……………..70
The Silver Age….......................................................................................75
The Justice League of America……………………………..……………79
The Marvel Age……………………………………………………….…85
Society as Super-Villain………………….……………………………...91
The New Guard………………………………………………………….95
The Death of Gwen Stacy and the Birth of the Bronze Age………....…103
The Dark Ages…………………………………………….……………107
Event Horizon………………….……………………………………….118
Chapter Three: A Case Study in Civil War………………………….…………….……125
Foundation………………………………………..……………....…….126
Registering Mark Millar………………………………………………..134
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Military-Industrial Complexity………………………………...……….141
The Superhero’s Superhero…………………………………………….150
Convergences…………………………………………………………...166
Collateral Damage……………………………………………………...174
Race and Class………………………………………………………….177
At the Center of the Web……………………………………………….185
Appomattox……………………………………………………………..191
Afterword……………………………………………………………………………….194
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….196
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LIST OF FIGURES
1. Panels from The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller……………………………25
2. Panels from Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth by John Cassaday……………..27
3. Sierpinski’s Triangle from Wikipedia.org……………………………………….40
4. Cover, Detective Comics #1 by Vincent Sullivan (March 1937)………………...55
5. Cover, Action Comics #1 by Joe Shuster (June 1938)…………………………...57
6. Cover, Detective Comics #27 by Bob Kane (May 1939)………………………...59
7. Cover, All-Star Comics #3 by Everet Hibbard (Winter 1940-41)……………….62
8. Cover, Captain America Comics #75 by Gene Colan (February 1950)…………69
9. Cover, Showcase #4 by Carmine Infantino (September 1956)…………………..76
10. Cover, Showcase #22 by Gil Kane (September 1959)…………………………...77
11. Cover, Brave and the Bold #28 by Mike Sekowsky (February 1960)…………...80
12. Cover, Amazing Fantasy #15 by Jack Kirby (August 1962)…………………….87
13. Cover, Hero for Hire #1 by John Romita (June 1972)…………………………..93
14. Cover, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #4 by Jim Steranko (September 1968).95
15. Cover, Wonder Woman #178 by Mike Sekowsky (September 1968)…………..98
16. Cover, Green Lantern #77 by Neal Adams (April 1970)……………………....100
17. Page 19 from Amazing Spider-Man #121 by Gil Kane (June 1973)……...…...105
18. Cover, Hulk #181 by Herb Trimpe (November 1974)………………………….110
19. Cover, Squadron Supreme #1 by Bob Hall (September 1985)…………………113
20. Cover, X-Men #1E by Jim Lee (October 1981)………………………………...117
21. Cover, Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars #1 by Michael Zeck (May 1984)…118
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22. Cover, Uncanny X-Men #210 by John Romita, Jr. (October 1986)……………120
23. Panels from Uncanny X-Men #210 by John Romita, Jr. (October 1986)………123
24. Panels from X-Factor #9 by Mark Silvestri (October 1986)…………………...123
25. Cover, Civil War #1 by Steve McNiven (July 2006)…………………………...125
26. Cover, Authority #13 by Frank Quitely (May 2000)…………………………...131
27. Cover, Tales of Suspense #39 by Jack Kirby (March 1963)……………………143
28. Cover, Iron Man #128 by Bob Layton (November 1979)…………………...…145
29. Cover, Captain America Comics #1 by Jack Kirby (March 1941)……………..150
30. Cover, Avengers #4 by Jack Kirby (March 1964)……………………………...154
31. Cover, Captain America #250 by John Byrne (October 1980)………………...158
32. Page 18 from Captain America #175 by Sal Buscema (July 1974)……………162
33. Cover, New Avengers: Illuminati by Gabrielle Dell’Otto (May 2006)………...167
34. Cover, Captain America #134 by Herb Trimpe (February 1971)……………...178
35. Cover, Uncanny X-Men #282 by Whilce Portacio (November 1991)………….181
36. Cover, Truth: Red, White, and Black #1 by Kyle Baker (January 2003)………183
37. Panels from Amazing Fantasy #15 by Steve Ditko (August 1962)…………….191
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CHAPTER ONE: THE SUPERHEROIC SUBJECT
I have a small problem. I’ve been engrossed in one of the best stories that I’ve
read in years, but there’s hardly anyone I can share it with. The few friends that I have
that read superhero comic books are already reading it too, and the rest of the people in
my life would find it nearly impossible to decipher. This is in no way meant to disparage
anyone’s ability to comprehend comic books, but the shape of the storytelling has
evolved into a geometric complexity that is particular to the genre and it requires a very
specific and dogmatic type of reader. Nobody, except for a comic book reader, can pick
up a comic and read it today.
The story I’m reading is called The Blackest Night and it is an eight issue mini-
series written by Geoff Johns; it features Green Lantern fighting zombies. However, this
is a tremendous understatement. The situation depicted in The Blackest Night is only the
most recent development along a string of serialized events that spans back to 2004 when
Johns brought the Silver-Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, back to life and took over the
writing duties for the newly resuscitated and renumbered Green Lantern comic. Apart
from having to have followed John’s Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps for the last
five years, a reader must be steeped in Green Lantern lore; the story requires familiarity
with dozens of obscure characters and with all of the major trials and tribulations suffered
by the various Green Lanterns of space sector 2814 over the last twenty-five years. For
example, the title of the series, The Blackest Night, harkens back to a prophecy that is
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foretold to Hal Jordan’s predecessor, Abin Sur, in an eight-page story from 1987’s Tales
of the Green Lantern Corps. Annual #3.
The strict linearity of the serialized comic book and the demand that it places on
the reader’s ability to recall the details of every depicted character’s history is
compounded by the fact that a single character’s narrative tangent intersects with dozens
of other characters who have their own rich histories and are featured in their own
separately published comics. This lattice of interwoven texts has grown increasingly
dense over the last decade and seems to have been deliberately constructed in a manner
that restricts access to the stories to only the most loyal and fully initiated readers. A
casual relationship with superhero comics has simply become impossible. The sheer
volume of essential foreknowledge that is required, the ability to follow a story that spans
dozens of supplemental texts over an extended period of time, and the actual monetary
cost of keeping up with the tale have each contributed to the daunting and prohibitive
qualities that have become the essential characteristic of the contemporary Superhero
narrative.
The Blackest Night, for example, is being told through its own self-titled mini-
series in Green Lantern and The Green Lantern Corps, but the story is also unfolding in
every other title that DC Comics is currently publishing as well as in a slew of three-issue
micro-series and one-shot comics. At a price of nearly four dollars a comic, The Blackest
Night, which as of this writing has yet to conclude, has already cost in excess of two
hundred dollars to read. Of course, this figure only includes the comics that are published
under the Blackest Night header and, as stated, one would have had to have been reading,
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at the very least, the prior five years of Green Lantern comics in order to have the
foggiest idea as to what’s going on.
At both of the major publishing houses, Marvel and DC, this is the present state of
superhero comics. It’s ultimately irrelevant whether this complex macro-structure is a
naturally occurring geometry that’s produced by the intersections of dozens of
simultaneously serialized narratives or is a business strategy to milk every last penny out
of an ever-shrinking but hardcore fan base; if you want to read about the exploits of your
favorite hero, then you have to get ready to get totally immersed in it. The structure of the
narrative is in and of itself remarkable. The American superhero comic book has evolved
into a method of storytelling that is entirely unique and specific to the genre. Even the
most sophisticated television dramas may exhibit multi-threaded structures, but those
threads seldom persist for more than five or six years, and they do not exert a direct
influence on the narratives of other programs. In literature, only Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha County stories place demands on its readers that are similar to what’s
experienced by the modern comic book audience. Faulkner’s elaborate and intertwined
histories and genealogies are confined to about a century within a postage stamp size
territory in rural Mississippi; in contrast, current DC Comics require complete historical
knowledge of an entire universe and at least an awareness of that universe's fifty-one
additional parallels.
Mainstream comic book structure and the expectations it imposes on both creators
and readers is known as "continuity." This term refers to the consistency of plots and
characters over time and in relation to all of the other overlapping stories within a
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particular publisher's fictional universe. What a writer can create is ultimately limited to
what editors can and cannot allow to occur within the confines of continuity. In order to
follow the stories, the audience must exhibit an almost post-cognitive omniscience within
the context of the entire universe in which any particular story takes place. A
conscientious reader already knows everything but the outcome in advance of reading a
comic. This makes superhero comics particularly difficult to explain to anyone who isn't
already steeped in the subject. The knowledge of any one detail is predicated by the
knowledge of an indeterminate number of other details; to attempt to explicate a single
story is to slide into a strenuous spiral of summaries.
Although the dense narrative structure, continuity, is the key feature of
mainstream American superhero comics, it tends to be overlooked or avoided by critics
of the subject. Previously, criticism has fallen into two camps. Historical surveys like
Bradford Wright's Comic Book Nation, David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague, and Gerard
Jones' Men of Tomorrow tend to focus on the writers and publishers and treat the comics
as a string of singularities that emerge from the context of their particular moment of
production rather than as an ever-expanding geometric form. In contrast, close readings
of the texts themselves are often of the archetypal or mythological kind and focus
attention on important but ultimately anomalous examples.
Comic book criticism has developed primarily by adopting and adapting the
language and techniques of existing art, film and literary criticism and, as a result, it has
become a loose amalgam of practices that, with few exceptions, is not particularly well
suited to its task. One cannot underestimate the value of the few critical works that have
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been produced that focus on this often neglected subject, but even criticism that deals
specifically with the superhero genre has been hampered by a myopic “great books”
approach and an unhealthy fixation on a few celebrity creators. If there is an accepted
canon of great superhero comics, then Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns would sit atop that list. The two books may be the
most celebrated superhero stories of all time and both have become centerpieces of
virtually all of the available criticism. Mila Bongco’s Reading Comics: Language,
Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books offers a chapter-length
explication of The Dark Knight Returns (TDKR); Richard Reynolds’ Super Heroes: A
Modern Mythology lists Watchmen and TDKR as two of “three key texts.” A full third of
Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why centers on just these two texts
and the remainder of his book traces how their so-called revisionist approach to the genre
has influenced the subsequent generation of comics writers. It would be entirely
negligent to write about American superhero comics without including some
consideration of the mammoth impact of Watchmen and TDKR. It would be equally
negligent to ignore how absolutely atypical these texts are of both the genre and medium
they are frequently employed to represent. To focus as narrowly as comics criticism has
on these two texts can be misleading and counterproductive.
Different narrative elements of both Watchmen and TDKR will necessarily receive
treatment at different points throughout this book. At this point, it suffices to mention the
one structural characteristic that makes them uncharacteristic of the bulk of superhero
comics; they are designed so that they can be read independent of the sequential and
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intertextual continuities that make superhero comics the uniquely complex narratives that
they are. The first of three “key texts” that Richard Reynolds considers in Superheroes: A
Modern Mythology is Chris Claremont and John Byrne's collaboration on The Uncanny
X-Men. Even as Reynolds applauds this sequence of comics as the “model of how a team
superhero comic should be conducted,” he still finds that:
The X-men was still constrained by the demands of continuity and consistency
with its back issues and the rest of the Marvel universe. The Dark Knight Returns
and Watchmen, the second and third key texts, are self contained graphic novels,
which as much as any other single feature, explains the scope of their break with
the traditional way of doing things. (95)
“Graphic novel” is a term that gets bandied about whenever anyone attempts to have a
serious discussion about comics, but it’s seldom used correctly. Neither TDKR nor
Watchmen are graphic novels; they are both technically “trade paperbacks” because they
were both originally published in serialized formats and have since been bound into
single volumes. The term “graphic novel” became popularized after it appeared on the
cover of 1978’s Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner; it
specifically refers to a narrative that is published complete and in a single self-contained
format. Although called novels, narratives of this type are not necessarily fictional and, in
fact, the most successful graphic novels to date have all been memoirs. “Graphic novel”
certainly sounds more weighty and prestigious then “trade paperback” or “big comic
book,” and it is because the phrase seems to create an illusion of artistic or literary merit
that it has so frequently fallen into misuse.
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The constraints of continuity and consistency that Reynolds observes in regards to
Claremont and Byrne’s The Uncanny X-Men are precisely the characteristics that define
the unique structure of the mainstream superhero narrative. It’s a mistake to think that
because a comic occupies a position in an expansive and sequential continuity that there
is an intrinsic limitation on its potential; for most comics, it is precisely the relationship to
a larger literary body that is its most essential trait. In their efforts to establish themselves
as unique stand-alone texts, both Watchmen and TDKR attempted to divorce themselves
from broader continuities and in both cases their creators took full advantage of the
opportunity to fully realize and impose their own singular artistic visions. In a 1988
afterword to an early collected edition to Watchmen which has been reprinted in Absolute
Watchmen, Alan Moore explains:
In its simplest form, the notion was simply to take over a whole comic book
continuity and all the characters in it, so that one could document the entire world
without worrying about how his plans could be fitted in with the creators of other
titles his characters were currently appearing in. Regular comics, with their
insistence upon rigid, cross-title continuity, present a lot of annoying limitations
to the creator. The worst of these is that nothing can ever happen in an individual
story that has any lasting effect on the world, since it is the same world inhabited
by every other character in the company’s line. Having a whole cast of characters
in a self-contained world would solve these difficulties.
In its earliest incarnations, Watchmen told the adventures of a number of pre-existing
characters that had been acquired by DC from Charlton Comics in 1983. Although DC
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eventually chose to disallow the use of the Charlton characters in Watchmen, they clearly
remain templates for Moore’s characters and the resemblances between them are
unmistakable.1 There was a distinct advantage to creating his own set of characters;
Moore was essentially free to do with them as he pleased and there would be no
repercussions outside of his own creation. Whatever happened in Watchmen stayed in
Watchmen. He could even kill his characters without consequence, but who would care?
Moore quickly discovered that he would:
Be missing some of the poignancy of the idea that went with having a long
established continuity to lend nostalgic weight to the concept. It was only when
[Moore] realized that if [Moore and Dave Gibbons] were smart enough [they]
could manufacture the appearance of a continuity stretching back years that the
idea started to finally come together.
In other words, despite the great liberty Moore gained by working outside of an
established continuity, the characters and the world they occupied would seem flat and
insubstantial unless he could also craft and implant a sense of the history and complex
intertextuality that is the hallmark of contemporary superhero narrative.
Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns operates on a principle that is distinctly
different than Watchmen. Moore’s work gains its independence through pure invention; it
isn’t tied to a continuity because the universe in which it takes place does not exist prior
to or after the occurrence of the narrative. Whereas Watchmen is centered on characters
who were created specifically for that one story, Miller tackles one of DC’s most well
1 Dr. Manhattan is Captain Atom, Ozymandias is Thunderbolt, Nite-Owl is Blue Beetle, Rorschach is The
Question, The Comedian is Peacemaker, and Silk Spectre is Nightshade.
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established and clearly defined heroes, The Batman. In order to stake out its
independence from a series of comics that had been in continuous publication for nearly
fifty years, TDKR skips ahead of the series and takes place in a theoretical projection of
Batman’s future. Hypothetical stories have not been uncommon in superhero comics; DC
had been occasionally interjecting “imaginary stories” into their lines since the 1940’s
and Marvel’s What If? has enjoyed an on-again, off-again popularity since its first
publication in 1977. Comics in this vein explore alternatives to what has occurred within
the established continuity by altering one or more significant details in an already
published story and observing how the previously known sequence of events would
change as a result of the alteration. Examples of this type of story can be found in
World’s Finest Comics #172, which considered what would have happened if Bruce
Wayne had been adopted by the Kent family and raised as Superman’s brother and What
If? #24, which showed what would have happened had Spider-Man saved the life of his
high school sweetheart Gwen Stacy and averted one of the most tragic events in that
character's life. DC has also had some success with a number of “Elseworld” mini-series
and short self-contained books; these stories take the major icons of the DC Universe and
relocate them to different eras and/or locations. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight features a
Victorian Batman in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, and Superman: Red Son speculates on
what the world would be like if the infant Superman’s rocket crash-landed in the Soviet
Union and he had been raised as a Stalinist instead of as a Kansas farm boy.
The advantage to creators who work outside of continuity is only matched by the
advantage to the comic book critics who spend the bulk of their attention on stand-alone
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texts. By selecting a single text that has a clear beginning, middle and end, critics can
apply the same hermeneutical skill set that they would employ if they were analyzing a
film or a novel. A single text is significantly more manageable; it can be treated as a
static object, held in the critic’s hands and scrutinized from all angles. Furthermore, one
can fully appreciate a stand-alone text without acquiring additional outside knowledge.
Watchmen would be completely comprehensible to someone who had never read a
superhero comic before, but the larger a reader’s frame of reference is the more he or she
will be able to extract from the text. Watchmen is ultimately about itself being a
superhero comic book in the same way that James Joyce’s Ulysses is about itself being a
novel and, in both cases, the basic stories are entirely eclipsed by the manner by which
they are told.
The more one knows about Batman, the less intelligible The Dark Knight Returns
becomes. Featured in over 875 issues of Detective Comics, over 700 issues of Batman
comics, and appearing in too many other comics over the last sixty-eight years to
reasonably tabulate, Batman is simply bigger than any one person’s interpretation of him.
Miller may envision himself as one of the generation “who gave Batman his balls
back”(Comic), but there are incongruous moments throughout his TDKR, The Dark
Knight Strikes Again (DK2), and All-Star Batman and Robin when it seems that he fails
to understand some of the most fundamental aspects of The Caped Crusader. The clearest
example of this is near the beginning of the second chapter of TDKR when Batman blasts
a criminal with an M-60 machine gun and says something snarky to his corpse. Batman
comes into being at the moment his parents are gunned down in front of him; firearms are
25
simply anathema to the Caped Crusader’s modus operandi. Miller’s moment of apparent
confusion is compounded later as Batman is shown scolding one of his disciple
vigilantes; he snaps a rifle in half and declares “This loud, clumsy, stupid thing—this is
the weapon of the enemy. We do not need it. We will not use it” (173).
Figure 1. Panels from The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
A close reading or explication of TDKR can really only illuminate TDKR; a
narrowly focused approach shines a light on a single, albeit a crucial, facet of The
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Batman, but it cannot reveal anything substantial about superheroes in general. The
medium is always the message, and in the case of American superhero comics, the
medium is entirely shaped by serialization and intertextuality; criticism that fails to
consider or entirely avoids these essential traits will inevitably miss the message.
Unlike literary or film studies where one examines a character in order to deduce
its contribution to the overall meaning of a text, the analysis of superheroes must assume
an inverse approach because a vast multiplicity of texts may all be contributing to a
complex structure of meaning contained within a single character. Rather than Frank
Miller as an author or TDKR as a principal literary text, the focus of the criticism
becomes Batman himself. This may sound like a simple switch of perspective, but it is
necessary when considering the particularly problematic nature of superheroes as signs.
By adapting strategies from Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s crucial cultural studies
text Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, Will Brooker’s Batman
Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon and the essays contained in Roberta Pearson and
William Uricchio’s The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and
his Media implement more flexible methodologies that prove particularly effective in
dealing with The Caped Crusader.
Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth illustrates
the difficulty faced by any critic who wishes to discuss Batman; one might not be entirely
certain which Batman he or she intends to discuss? In the Ellis/Cassaday comic book,
The Planetary Organization, archeologists of the twentieth century’s secret history, have
gone to Gotham City to investigate a “partial multiversal collapse” in which a number of
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parallel universes overlap causing elements of different realties to exist within a single
congruous space. Because of rotational shifts from one parallel universe to the next,
Planetary investigators can encounter Batman even though he isn’t a character in the
reality in which they normally operate.
With each pulse of the inter-dimensional disturbance, Batman shifts into a
different historical iteration of the character. At different moments he appears as Frank
Miller’s brutal and ancient giant, as the ultra-campy 1966 television character, as a more
realistic Neil Adams rendition, and as the original sleek and scary figure that first leaped
from Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s imagination in 1939. Each of these versions of the
character initially seems fundamentally different than the others. While the Adam West
portrayal of the character wields an aerosol can of “Bat-Shark Repellent,” Frank Miller’s
depiction drives a tank and snaps bones with his bare hands, yet both are immediately
recognizable as The Batman. They are the same character with different qualities
emphasized.
Figure 2. Panels from Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth by John Cassaday (August
2003)
The key characteristics that allows for this recognition to occur is what Will
Brooker calls “branding.” This is the inviolable foundation of the character and as long as
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it remains intact, writers and artists have a good deal of flexibility to exert their own
influence over the character and to address the evolving demands of their
cultural/historical moment. We often focus on the accent of the author or the era and
mistakenly identify it as a fundamental revision of the character or the genre, but the
apparently radical differences are ultimately only superficial.
Batman’s “branding” is a very familiar tale: After witnessing his parent’s murder,
Bruce Wayne becomes a crime fighter who uses his vast family wealth, incredible
athleticism, keen detective skills and an array of gadgets to wage a personal war on
crime, and while doing this, he dresses like a giant bat so that he may strike terror into the
hearts of the criminals he preys upon. These could be called the facts of the character,
they represent a constant, and they are all that needs to be present in order for any
depiction to be recognizable as the Batman. At times he has seemed to be significantly
different and even contradictory, yet his most essential traits remain intact and make
every incarnation seem familiar and correct. Brooker uncovers a particularly vast
diversity of Batmen because his examination includes a broad historical approach and
attention to representations of the character in an array of different mediums. The Batman
in 1940s jingoistic propaganda film shorts, the Batman in campy 1960s television show,
and the Batman in hard-boiled late 1980s comic books seems fundamentally different,
but the differences are less significant than they appear. Brooker casts the Batman as a
sort of “sliding signifier” that takes on new characteristics in order to remain relevant to
different audiences at different historical moments. Batman, in this view, is something
like a chameleon that may alter how he is seen depending on the environment in which he
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is placed. It’s important to avoid thinking in terms of revision as has become the fashion
with comic book criticism; Batman isn’t transformed nor does he take on new
characteristics with each presentation. The character simply exhibits traits that are always
at the core of his composition. He is not one Batman at one point and another later on;
there is no such progress or transformation. In a sense, the character was perfectly
conceived; all the information one needs to understand each and every reiteration of the
caped crusader is contained within his basic brand.
Behind all of the apparent silliness of the 60s television show and the Dick Sprang
and Sheldon Moldoff comics that inspired it lies the complete seriousness of a little boy
whose psyche is irreparably damaged by an unimaginably traumatic event; behind all the
alleged seriousness of most recent representations of Gotham City’s Dark Knight lies the
utter silliness of a man bounding across rooftops in a cape and long underpants. To fail to
recognize that both the comic and tragic sides of the Batman are always present and
operative is to entirely miss the superhero’s richness and complexity as an icon.
Different media have different goals and adopt different strategies to achieve
them. The size and demographics of the target audience are as significant to the
determination of what a cultural product communicates as is artistic intentionality.
Simply put, a Saturday morning cartoon, a PG-13 rated major motion picture and an
advertisement for Hostess fruit pies may feature the same superhero, but each medium
will represent him or her differently in order accomplish its goals and none of them will
represent the hero as he or she would appear within the pages of a comic book. For this
reason, it is unreasonable to expect a character to remain entirely consistent across a
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range of different mediums, but even these differences are as superficial as they are
contextual. Because Brooker’s work focuses solely on the Batman and offers a thorough
analysis of the character in all his many and diverse forms, a multi-media approach is
important. However, injecting content from cartoons, films and video games into a
broader discussion of superhero comics only serves to further confuse an already fairly
unwieldy and complicated topic.
Nearly seventy years in the marketplace have proved Superman and Batman far
more successful than most brand-name consumer goods of any other type, but their real
triumph is the manner in which they seem to transcend their role as mere commodities
and occupy positions within the American (and increasingly world-wide) public
imagination. The concepts and their connotations have been completely dislodged from
their original materiality; even if a person had never had the pleasure of reading a comic
book, the bright red “S” centered on a five-sided diamond would be instantaneously
recognizable and evocative of some sense of the Truth, Justice, and The American Way
that Superman has come to signify. Superman has completely eclipsed Superman™;
through its persistence and seemingly endless repetition, we know the logo apart from its
commodity form.
In his essay “Nostalgia, Myth, Ideology: Visions of Superman at the End of the
American Century,” Ian Gordon “wants to argue that Superman connects a wistful
nostalgia—nostalgia as homesickness, if you will—to a commodity, and in this fashion
subjects both longings for the past, and the past itself, to the ideology of the market in
which everything can be commodified and sold” (Gordon, 177-8). Gordon’s claim, that
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our childhood memories of Superman bind us to the economy that produced him, is
accurate but somewhat incomplete. Nostalgia is one of the most potent forces
contributing to the apparent, albeit illusionary, separation between the concept Superman
and his existence as merchandise, but it is precisely in the fond remembrance of the
character that we forget that our association with him had been based on a monetary
exchange. Nostalgia may be what binds us to the commodity, but it is also what conceals
and denies the real conditions under which we are bound. Although it is still essential to
an appreciation of superheroes that they are recognized as the property of profit-minded
corporations, this is hardly their key characteristic; if it were, then some of our most
prominent cultural icons would be indistinguishable from dish soap. Superheroes, or at
least a small number of them of which Superman and Batman are the primary examples,
have managed to take flight, surpassing the gravity of their dull materiality and have
entered the culture as something far more significant.
“Mythological” is a word that one should be reluctant to employ when describing
comic book superheroes. One can easily see a connection between the ancient accounts
of extraordinary heroism and our own contemporary tales of super beings and the
connection has hardly gone unnoticed in comic book/superhero criticism. Whether it’s in
Gordon’s essay, Richard Reynolds’ Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, or Peter
Coogan’s Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, there is a conspicuous effort to
emphasize parallels between comic book superheroes and classical myths. In his essay
“What makes Superman so darned American,” Gary Engle suggests that “Superman is
the great American hero” and that in comparison to legendary figures such as Davy
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Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink and Pecos Bill and “all the rest who speak for various
regional identities in the pantheon of American folklore, 2 only Superman achieves truly
mythic stature, interweaving a pattern of beliefs, literary conventions and cultural
traditions of the American people more powerfully and more accessibly than any other
cultural symbol of the twentieth century, perhaps of any period in our history” (Engle).
Superman’s significance as a cultural icon is without question, but “mythic” or
“mythological” may not be the best term to describe his role within the public
imagination. Jenette Kahn, president and editor-in-chief of DC Comics from 1981 to
2002, took the comparison even further by heralding Superman as “the first god of a new
mythology” (qtd. in Engle). Kahn may simply be lauding the cultural impact of her
company’s flagship creation, but by doing so in this manner she inadvertently exposes the
widest gap between myth and the comic book superhero. Although he can often appear
god-like and his story has drawn heavily from messianic traditions, Superman is most
definitely not a god.
Classical (specifically Greek) mythology continues to occupy a position of
privilege within the world of academics. Scholars have traditionally claimed that these
are the seminal texts from which a narrow patrilineal history of the whole of western
culture and literature springs. In addition to having one or two of Shakespeare’s plays
under one’s belt and the ability to distinguish the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution from
the Gettysburg Address, it is an expectation, albeit problematically conservative, that a
“cultured” person will have a basic familiarity with Greek mythology. A person is
imagined to be somehow enriched by even the slightest encounter with a classic
2 This comparison is a little weird; both Crockett and Fink were real people.
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(mythical, musical, literary, etc.); however, reading comics has been historically
considered a juvenile vice. It makes a good deal of sense for critics who wish to elevate
the status of superhero comic books to try to link them to more culturally weighty texts,
but this linkage is superficial at best. Classical myths and superhero comic books may
both contain protagonists that find themselves in astonishing situations and who exhibit
powers that far exceed the capabilities of mere mortals, but the similarities more or less
end there. It’s pretty hard to take someone seriously if he or she arrives on piggyback and
if comic book superheroes are to receive the consideration that they deserve, then it will
be crucial for them to earn respect on their own terms rather than inherit the prestige of
their distant relations to which they bear only the slightest resemblance.
Despite some overlapping content, both the structure and the resulting function of
mythology make it fundamentally different from superhero comics. In fact, superhero
comics are somewhat antithetical to myth. Myths are socially and ideologically
constructive; they are foundational to the system of beliefs that allow a culture to
coalesce, but they necessarily cannot be verified. A myth is most typically set in an
inaccessible or imaginary place (Olympus, Hades, Asgard, etc.) or in a distant and
ahistorical period. Often they function as a sort of surrogate for absent historical or
scientific facts. Myths can be used to explain natural phenomenon like the passage of the
sun from east to west (Apollo’s chariot) or the change of seasons (Persephone’s
abduction), and they have traditionally been used to reify a culture’s sociopolitical order
by authoring a rationale for patriarchy (the creation of Pandora) and by supplying a
linkage between the king, pharaoh, or emperor’s lineage and the Divine. Myth offers a
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remote fiction as an indisputable validation of present realities. Because it offers
explanations for both natural and sociopolitical conditions in the same gesture, it draws
an equal sign between them. One could call this phenomenon ideological; it confuses our
ability to distinguish between nature and culture, effectively depoliticizing the later and
encasing both within the apparent permanence of time immemorial.
Whereas mythology’s ahistorical stasis makes it culturally constructive, comic
book superhero narratives are reflexive. Instead of being set in chronologically and/or
geographically inaccessible locales, comics seem to be perpetually contemporary and
familiar. Even on occasions where the stories lead the reader to parallel dimensions, alien
galaxies, or the remoteness of a distant past or future, the narrative is unambiguously
anchored to the here and now. Neither the day the Kryptonian orphan crash-landed in the
Kansas heartland nor the day that Thomas and Martha Wayne were senselessly gunned
down in front of their eight-year-old son are fixed in historical stone. In fact, these dates
continually slide forward along a fictional timeline that runs parallel but not necessarily
synchronous with real time. The historically progressive repetitions and frequent
revisions of events along comic book continuity never completely erase previous
incarnations of the original events which remain latent within their own future negations
and reconstitutions. The continuity that is produced by the long-term seriality and deep
intertextuality of superhero comics is possibly the medium’s most significant
differentiating characteristic, but it is also the most difficult and intimidating obstacle to
overcome for the uninitiated reader. At this point it suffices to say that, unlike mythology,
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superhero narratives continuously reposition themselves forward in history and therefore
remain persistently topical.
In his nearly paradoxically titled essay “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco
illustrates the disjunction between the structures of superhero comics and mythology. Eco
recognizes a fundamental difference between myth and the adventures of Superman by
noting that the latter, despite its mythic appearances, has been infused with some of the
key characteristics of the modern novel. Essentially, his claim is that the superhero comic
book narrative is a product of a dialectical encounter between the primary secular mode
of textual storytelling, the novel, and religious and culturally constructive myths. Myth,
Eco claims, is a closed and sacrosanct narrative. Although details and artistic flourishes
may be added, subtracted, and/or embellished, the audience receiving the myth knows the
tale’s outcome before it begins. Unlike Superman:
The traditional figure of religion was a character of human or divine origin, whose
image had immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny. It was possible
that a story, as well as a number of traits, backed up the character; but the story
followed a line of development already established, and it filled in the character’s
features in a gradual, but definitive, manner. (147)
The underlying structural design of myth is predetermined. The beginning and end of the
story must be preserved if the meaning of the myth and its status as myth are to remain
intact. The tale can be tinkered with to better suit the audience or to inscribe the
storyteller’s accent, but these alterations mustn’t interfere with the myth’s methodical
procession from beginning to its end. Superman may only have half a destiny; he has a
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prescribed beginning, but only his brand, the most basic detail of his origin, has any
permanency. He is and must remain a space Moses and the orphan of a destroyed
civilization that is placed in a bulrush rocket and raised in the American heartland. The
Man of Steel’s story began for the first time in 1938: it has begun again several times
since its initial inception, and after seventy years, it shows no sign of coming to any
conclusion. His apparent sudden death in January 19933 may have come as a highly
publicized shock, but his rebirth less than a year later did not. Even the character’s death
can’t signal a finale. His resurrection was hardly a miracle; it was, in a sense, a mandate.
Superman’s return, as it was rather feebly explained, was simply due to his Kryptonian
genetic makeup. Instead of heading into the hereafter, he merely went into a state of
torpor until his body could be stolen from its tomb and placed inside a Kryptonian
regeneration matrix to recuperate; luckily, his fortress of solitude came equipped with
one of those. It may be the case that the one feat that Superman is incapable of is his own
death. Even Frank Miller’s apocalyptic masterpiece, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,
cannot bring any kind of conclusion to the exploits of the caped crusader; the tale’s end
finds Bruce Wayne entering a new modified phase of his personal war on crime where he
can operate under a single identity because he has finally bridged the psychological gap
between the superhero persona and the millionaire-playboy alibi.
Just as it would seem that immortality is encoded within Superman’s alien DNA,
the open-endedness of superhero comic book narratives has become essential to the
genre. Of course, this is in large part a vital feature of the medium’s commerciality. A
good cliffhanger is, after all, a sure fire way to sell the next installment of a story, but the
3Events culminating in Superman V.2, #75. Dan Jurgens. New York: DC, January 1993. Print.
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marketing technique is now a fully integrated feature of the aesthetic as well as the best
method of selling more comics. This wasn’t always the case; comics in the late 1930’s,
1940’s and early 1950’s contained stories with clear beginnings and endings that were
more or less independent of one another, seldom depended on knowledge of past events
within the life of the character, and never interacted with events in other comic book
titles. The foundations of modern comic book continuity wouldn’t be poured until the
early 1960’s, and it would take another 20 years to begin the construction of the
remarkably complex and entirely unique fractal narrative that we now experience when
we read comics.
Even though Eco wrote his essay on Superman in 1962, when continuity was just
becoming an issue to creators and consumers alike, he was keenly aware of the
emergence of the endlessly repeated pattern and of the importance of how comic books
navigate or refuse to navigate time. The fact that any conclusion to Superman’s story is
perpetually deferred is a symptom of what prevents it from being mythic and how it is
also akin to the modern novel, which “offers a story in which the reader’s main interest is
transferred to the unpredictable nature of what will happen and therefore, to the plot
invention which now holds our attention. The event has not happened before the story; it
happens while it is being told” (Eco, 148). Whereas the audience’s foreknowledge is
essential for its understanding of myth, in order for the modern narrative to work as a
reflection of modern existence, the audience must be a witness to the outcome as it is
unfolding. One could say that Superman is eminently predictable; he seems to be locked
into an ironically Sisyphean cycle of triumph after triumph. However, how the Man of
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Steel will eventually escape that cycle is as perpetually unknown as it is simultaneously
inevitable and impossible. The only thing that is certain about an ending is that it must
never arrive for the tale to remain meaningful.
As Eco has claimed, because the contemporary secular narrative’s audience
utilizes the apparent open-endedness of the story to locate the unpredictability of its own
existence, the mythic is sacrificed in order to produce a type of character that reflects our
own frailty and mortality. The narrative achieves this by highlighting the impending
threat of a conclusion and by deferring it. The product is a character who:
Wants, rather, to be a man like anyone else, and what could befall him is as
unforeseeable as what may happen to us all. Such a character will take on what
we call an “aesthetic universality,” a capacity to serve as a reference point for
behavior and feelings which belong to us all. He does not contain the universality
of myth, nor does he become an archetype, the emblem of a supernatural reality.
He is a result of a universal rendering of a particular and eternal event. The
character of the novel is a “historic type.” (Eco, 148-9)
Both “aesthetic universality” and historicity are intrinsic to the superhero narrative as
well as to the novel, but comic books certainly aren’t wholly or even typically novelistic.
The genre finds its definition in its reluctance to conform to the strictures of either of its
generic progenitors; it contains traces of both, and at different moments, resembles either,
but the superhero narrative is explicitly neither myth nor novel. In terms of its content, it
must successfully manage the interplay of the ordinary and extraordinary without
appearing surreal. One does not get a sense of the real being disturbed by the interjection
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of the strange or the fantastic in superhero comics. In order for the genre to work, typical
and amazing elements need to blend seamlessly. Superman is both alien and familiar and
the tales of his adventures are both mythic and mundane.
If one synthesizes Will Brooker's concept of branding, the absolute consistency at
the core of a superheroic character, with Umberto Eco's observation of the non-mythical
open-endedness of comic book narrative, then one begins to see the basic shape of the
genre's construction. The basic motif is a remarkably simple equation; the protagonist is a
constant and his or her antagonist is a historically shifting variable. To see this in action,
one need only to glance at Superman's arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor. He was a fairly typical
evil scientist for the bulk of his criminal career; in the material excesses and corporate
deregulation of the Reagan 80s, Luthor was recast as a cold blooded CEO, and as a result
of an election in the DC universe that coincided with the American election of 2000, he
became President of the United States. Superman, however, simply remains Superman.
The central motif is simple; the Superhero is challenged by and ultimately
triumphs over some historically reflective opposition. The complexity of the genre is
formed by the potentially infinite repetition of that simple motif. The pattern that emerges
through geometrically multiplying iterations of self-similar patterns is a fractal. The term
fractal was coined in 1975 by Benoit Mandelbrot, but the concept had been evolving
since the 19th century in order to mathematically describe the non-Euclidian geometric
structures that compose much of the natural world. An example can be found in the
diagram of Sierpinski’s Triangle:
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Figure 3. Sierpinski’s Triangle from Wikipedia.ORG.
One takes an equilateral triangle and reduces its height and width by half. When
one places three such reduced triangles inside of the original so that their corners touch, a
gap with dimensions equal to the reduced triangles is produced. This process can be
repeated indefinitely, and the structure becomes increasingly complex with each iteration
of the motif.
Every comic produced over the last seventy years has been an echo of Action
Comics #1; Siegel and Shuster's innovation provides the ur text from which the entire
genre springs. Taken as a separate object, a single comic appears to be a rather simple
thing. However, the attention of the reader is not situated on a single text; his or her focus
is on the labyrinthine structure that is produced by the totality of comics, which are bound
together through the long-term seriality and the elaborate intertextuality of comic book
continuity. No other form of storytelling possesses this level of intricacy in its design, and
most mediums are, for pragmatic reasons, incapable of producing it. This structure, I will
call it fractal narrative, is entirely unique to this particular genre and medium.
Whether the escapades of our spandex-clad titans constitutes fine art is a difficult
issue to reconcile; one would find it equally difficult to compare computer-generated
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fractals, albeit stunningly beautiful in their own right, to an oil painting or marble
sculpture.
American superhero comic books are as unique to this culture as baseball and
jazz; the genre is older than rock ‘n’ roll and the medium is older than television, yet it
has traditionally been overlooked as inconsequential kid’s stuff or it has been assaulted as
a corrupting influence on children and the wicked excrement of mass-culture factories.
Despite their bad reputation, comics are suddenly becoming the subject of
academic study. One reason is Marjane Satrapi’s and Art Spieglemen’s revolutionary
usage of sequential art as a medium for memoir and creative non-fiction. Since the
beginning of the 21st Century, superheroes have laid virtual siege to the cineplex. The
money exchanged for films based on superhero comics and the corresponding
merchandise has produced billions of dollars and it’s anticipated that this trend will
continue for several years to come. The non-fiction is just too highly regarded and the
rest is just too successful to be ignored. The last reason for new scholarly appreciation for
comics is that the kids who were old enough to read Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns,
The Elektra Saga, The Dark Phoenix Saga, and Crisis of Infinite Earths as they were
unfolding are now old enough to be academics, and they know something that a lot of
people don’t: Comics have always been worthy of serious academic study.
Possibly the single biggest problem with the available criticism on comic books is
that the few critics writing on the topic have been determined to raise the public
appreciation of the medium by singling out a few noteworthy examples that can be
lauded as exceptions to the imagined rule: Comics are crap for kids and illiterates. These
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critics have cordoned off tiny portions of an immeasurably vast body of literary work and
insist that we should recognize the beauty and genius of these small portions while
offering the caveat that the bulk of these works is exactly the doggerel most imagine
them to be. To read these critics is to come away thinking that: Comics are crap for kids
and illiterates, but a small handful of celebrated exceptions are not. It’s fantastic that the
number of people writing about comics is rapidly increasing, but there’s a dangerous
precedent being set. The creation of quality distinctions (the good vs. the rest) within the
medium of comics merely duplicates the notion that such a binary opposition is operative
in the culture at large. If one assumes that there can be inherently superior and inferior
comics, then one must also assume the validity of the culturally pervasive system that has
historically designated all comics as inferior cultural products. Traditionally, the obstacle
to the academic study of something like comics, television programs, or video games has
been the essentially elitist idea that the culture is divided into two unequal parts and that
the privileged minority or high culture merits scholarship and the rest, being merely
popular or mass culture, only merits contempt. To attempt to reproduce this sort of
structure within the medium of comics is to hamstring the emerging field of criticism
before it can even get up and running.
Exactly how lines are drawn and categories are formed within the culture is
always a fascinating process to take a peek into and one quickly discovers that the
manner by which divisions become manifest is never entirely innocent. Cultural
taxonomies always reflect the values of the particular authority that imposes the
categories. Simply put, the taste of those in a position to have the say so becomes the
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standard for good taste. There is an identical thesis in books like This Book Contains
Graphic Language: Comics as Literature by Rocco Versaci and Alternative Comics: An
Emerging Literature by Charles Hatfield, but the most egregious examples of this
redundant and elitist approach to comics can be found in Douglas Wolk’s Reading
Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Despite protestations to the
contrary liberally sprinkled throughout the book, Wolk, who by his own admission “likes
to make generalizations and excuses,” develops a reductive dichotomy that basically
mirrors his own rather fashionable taste and pedestrian elitism (121). The book divides
comics into two categories: mainstream and art comics. The choice of designations alone
is sufficient to betray the outright snobbery that permeates Reading Comics. By
mainstream he essentially means comic books about superheroes. Over the seven-decade
history of comics, numerous genres have each had their share of success and failure
within the marketplace,4 but the so-called mainstream has been virtually devoid of
anything but superhero narratives for the last twenty-five years. This isn’t necessarily a
good thing, but it isn’t inherently bad either. Wolk frequently insists that he is only “kind
of sympathetic” to ‘the ‘I’m so sick of superheroes I could scream’ effect” but that he
doesn’t “subscribe” to it (12). This hardly seems to be the case when according to Wolk:
Superheroes are the public and private shame of American comics. They’re a
Peter Pan façade that refuses to grow up, the idiot cousin that the whole family
resents for being the one who supports them and brags about it. They’re eternally
the same; they’re the part that acts like it’s the whole. (100)
4 Crime, horror, superhero, monster, western, war, sci-fi, romance, teen funnies, and funny animals have
been the most prominent.
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Ultimately, Wolk offers a lot of strong opinions (most openly hostile) about mainstream
comics, but he seems unwilling or unable to assert anything that resembles a critical
perspective. It’s difficult to locate the central logic of his claims when within a single
paragraph one finds that “there are a lot of really good [superhero comics]” but that
“they’re usually done badly” (109).
The second category Wolk creates is entirely dependent on the first for its
definition. As opposed to mainstream comics, Wolk introduces the term “art comics,” the
majority of which are more commonly called “alt” or “alternative comics,” but Wolk
rejects those terms because they highlight the subgroup’s dependency on the mainstream
by implying that they are simply a reaction to it. Art does not, as he erroneously
imagines, evolve independent of the culture at large. Whereas the term “alt” simply
indicates a distinction from and a relationship to typicality, the term “Art,” as it is most
frequently used, is inherently evaluative or at the very least socially privileged. Nothing
has ever been dismissed as merely Art.
With its roots in the underground Comix of the late 1960’s and blossoming in
tandem with the post-punk indie/alternative music scenes of the late 1980’s and sharing
many of the discordant aesthetic values with them, the alt-comics movement has gained a
good deal of notoriety. The Houghton Mifflin Company now includes a comics volume
in its The Best American Series and the films Crumb, American Splendor, and Persepolis
have virtually made household names of creators R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Marjane
Satrapi. In 2006, Time Magazine named Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home its choice for the
book of the year over offerings from more widely accepted forms of literature. Thanks to
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works like these and Art Spiegleman’s mammoth accomplishment Maus, which merited
its very own exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1991, the alt comics
movement has earned much applause, but despite its successes it remains somewhat
insecure about itself and relies on the outright repudiation of the majority of the comics
medium in order to stake out an identity. In the introduction to the 2007 edition of The
Best American Comics, Chris Ware, creator of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on
Earth and one of the most acclaimed cartoonists in the “alt” category, refers to superhero
comics as both “the stone tools” early cartoonists had to work with and as the “mind
snot” that is blown free from one’s brain as it matures into adulthood and is refined by “a
number of years of school.” In other words, even according to Ware: Superhero comics
are crap for kids and illiterates (xx-xxi).
Historically, all comic books have served as one of the great whipping boys of
conservative cultural criticism and it’s only in the last twenty-five years that any
publications of the comics type have managed to attract positive attention outside its
small but fiercely loyal fan base. Rather than entering an impossibly labyrinthine
ontological discourse to develop a functional and all inclusive definition of “Art,” it’s far
easier to identify contra-positive examples and to only claim knowledge of what an
object is by putting it into context with a number of other objects that it is not. A similar
semantic dilemma was addressed by the U.S. Supreme court in the famed 1964 case,
Jacobellis v. Ohio; in his final opinion, Justice Potter Stewart wisely wrote that although
he would never be able to intelligibly define hard-core pornography, he knew it when he
saw it and that The Lovers, the film at the center of the case, was definitely not it. Very
46
few people, at least those who know better, would be audacious enough to attempt to
construct an intelligible definition for art. On the contrary, history has given us too many
people that have been all too eager to point their fingers with imagined objectivity and
declare which products are and are not art.
Popular culture is a necessary component in the manufacturing of the very
concept of fine art; pop is high culture’s Other and it’s only by the persistent public
castigation of things like hip-hop, television, video games, and superhero comic books
that things like ballet, painting, and poetry continue to occupy their arbitrary positions of
prestige within the culture at large. The alt-comic movement is as much a reflection of
the so-called mainstream as it is deliberate and conspicuous in its attempts to disconnect
from it. The movement’s most common attributes are basically negations of traits
associated with the superhero genre; superhero books are most often implausible, action-
packed, and fictitious narratives that are presented in full color, serialized over an
extensive period of time, collaboratively assembled, and marketed by a large publishing
company; alt-comics, on the other hand, usually examine the realistic emotional
dimensions of situations, tend to be crafted by a single author/illustrator, and are often
more experimental in terms of formal elements. There can be no argument that the
mainstream and the alternative aren’t distinct from one another, but one must not suppose
that those distinctions carry any intrinsic value.
Writing seriously about comics may seem novel, but the manner by which it is
being done by critics like Douglas Wolk is nothing new. Wolk’s approach is merely an
echo of what conservative and anti-democratic cultural critics like Dwight McDonald
47
were doing over five decades ago. McDonald’s theories designated all comics as among
the worst mass culture had to offer; a half century later, Wolk, who claims to be a
proponent of the medium, can only suggest a small handful of exceptions to this
otherwise categorically negative assessment. Both critics share the belief that the key
difference between art and mass culture is the presence of a single and autocratic artist’s
hand. They have fully embraced the fallacious bourgeois fantasy that art is an enterprise
undertaken and executed by an individual in solitude. Wolk, claiming to appropriate
auteur film theory, suggests that:
The creator of a comic—the person who applies pen to drawing board or (lately)
stylus to digital tablet—is its author, and comics produced under the sole or chief
creative control of a single person of significant skill are more likely to be good
(or at least novel enough to be compelling and resonant) than comics produced by
a group of people assembly-line style—one writing, one penciling, one inking,
one lettering, one coloring—under the aegis of an editor who hires them all
individually. (31)
Why, one must ask, are these comics “more likely to be good?” While bemoaning the
Hollywood studio system forty years earlier, McDonald employed an identical logic to
Wolk’s and claims:
The only great films to come out of Hollywood, for example, were made before
industrial elephantiasis had reduced the director to one of a number of technicians
all operating at about the same level of authority. Our two great directors, Griffith
and Stroheim, were artists, not specialists; they did everything themselves,
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dominated everything personally: the scenario, the actors, the camera work, and
above all the cutting (or montage). Unity is essential in art; it cannot be achieved
by a production line of specialists, however competent. There have been
successful collective creations (Greek temples, Gothic Churches, perhaps the
Iliad) but their creators were part of a tradition which was strong enough to
impose unity on their work. We have no such tradition today, and so art—as
against kitsch—will result when a single brain and sensibility is in full command.
(McDonald, 65)
Both critics are united in their opposition to the assembly-line of Fordism, at least in
terms of its relationship to the arts, but knowledge of the mode of production isn’t a
necessary factor in the evaluation of an art object. If one found a comic in a cave and
could not determine how it came to be, one would certainly still be able to measure its
quality. Furthermore, it seems patently absurd to assume that in all cases an individual
could possess the superior abilities in every technical aspect required for the production
of something as complex as a comic or a film to such an extent that the quality of what’s
produced would suffer rather than benefit from collaboration with other skilled persons.
Although it’s an attractive narrative, no artist works entirely alone. Even the romantic
figure of the starving poet or painter locked away in an imaginary garret is far from being
the sole hand producing his or her art. The artist may channel his or her culture, historical
moment, and artistic tradition in order to manufacture a material object, but that object
does not become Art until it is presented as such by agents and critics and, more
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importantly, until it is consumed as Art by the public. The object becomes Art in
transaction rather than in production.
The concept of an artist or author as a singular, heroic genius is only a relatively
recent historical development and is a direct effect of the proliferation of capitalism and
the emergence of the middle classes over the last two centuries. In the absence of the
strong traditions which McDonald suggests compelled artisans of the past to participate
in “successful collective creations” like “Greek temples, gothic churches, and perhaps the
Iliad,” modern artists find themselves alienated and needing to compete in order to
survive in the marketplace. The artist must now create for his or her own sake rather than
for the sake of fealty to patron aristocrats or religious institutions, but ironically he or she
must insist that the creation is still purely for the sake of service to a higher purpose, the
abstract concept of art or literature itself, and otherwise outside of social exchanges lest
the fetish quality disintegrates and his or her product is exposed as the base commodity
that it is. In order to persevere under market conditions, modern artists must make
themselves appear indispensable as individuals by branding their creations and
capitalizing on their own name until, finally, the signature on the work eclipses the work
itself. This has become increasingly true of comics creators as well.
If one wishes to uplift comic books to the privileged status of the fine arts, then
one should combat and invalidate the cultural structures that designate them as an inferior
medium instead of reincorporating (re-reifying) those same structures. Rather than
pursuing the irresolvable task of establishing concrete guidelines for greatness and
concerning ourselves with the nonsensical labeling and ranking of the abstract, fetishized
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qualities of materially identical goods, we should recognize, as Raymond Williams did,
the ordinariness of culture and that "nothing has done more to sour the democratic idea,
among its supporters, and to drive them back into angry self-exile, than the plain
overwhelming cultural issues: the apparent division of our culture into, on the one hand, a
remote and self-gracious sophistication, on the other hand, a doped mass" (Williams, 24).
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CHAPTER TWO: A TERSE HISTORY OF TIGHTS
Superhero comic books have certainly not always been as they are today. Just as a
fractal becomes increasingly complex with each iteration of its basic motif, superhero
narratives appear simple at their point of origin and grow increasingly complicated with
each new installment. One can only say that the earliest comics "appear" simple; they
may not have yet found themselves embedded in the rich intertextual continuity of
contemporary comics, yet even the most basically structured stories offer commentary on
the complex socio-political issues of their day. In fact, the general popularity of
vigilantism in American popular culture is, in itself, remarkable.
Even before the advent of the internet, comic book readers had to develop a sense
of hypertextuality in order to fully comprehend the narrative that was unfolding before
them. As explained in the preceding chapter, one does not read a single comic book so
much as one appreciates the vast geometric construction, the fractal, of which the
singular comic is only the tiniest part. A comic book reader's specific literacy is not
unlike Willy Wonka's great glass elevator; it must be able move up and down, forward
and backward, and sideways and slantways within the fractal at all times.
Before one can delve into the narrative complexity of a contemporary superhero
comic book, which is the aim of the next chapter, one needs to arrive at the subject
carrying some of the resources that the genre requires the reader to possess. Rather than
attempting to begin at the destination and being overwhelmed by strange faces and
unexplained details, it is more prudent to start at the point when the generic motif was
first established and then trace it through its innumerable iterations along a linear history.
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The trend toward intellectually demanding popular media has been tracked in
Steven Johnston's Everything Bad For You Is Good. Borrowing his terminology from the
title of the classic Woody Allen farce, he calls the developmental tendency "The Sleeper
Curve." In his book, Johnston examines the sort of popular media, such as video games
and television programs, that are often dismissed as a waste of time. By examining and
graphing historical changes in the structure and content of generically similar television
shows, Johnston illustrates a tendency toward an ever-increasing complexity in narrative
design. Whereas an early crime drama like Dragnet (1951) had two principal characters
and each episode offered a single and self-contained story, Hill Street Blues (1981)
featured a small ensemble of equally important characters and each episode included
more than a half dozen loosely knit narrative threads. Although some threads tied one
episode to the next, Hill Street Blues offered fairly self-contained weekly installments.
HBO’s The Sopranos (1999) greatly multiplied the potential for intricacy in crime drama.
This show intertwined the narratives of more than a dozen significant characters and
continued to develop their stories from episode to episode and even from season to
season. The Sopranos required its viewers to be fully devoted to its complexity in order to
follow it.
As complicated as The Sopranos was, it pales in comparison to the structure of
contemporary American superhero comics. The crime drama ran for six seasons, which is
less than one tenth of the number of years that either Batman or Superman have been in
continuous publication. The Sopranos may have followed more than a dozen characters,
but there have been at least twice as many characters claiming membership in the X-Men
53
alone. Most importantly, events occurring in The Sopranos did not inform or affect
events in other shows; one wouldn’t expect or anticipate the murder of Big Pussy to be
relevant to The Wire or to Entourage. The intertextual and fractal development of
superhero narrative is unique in its scope to the comic book medium.
The current state of superhero narrative is the product of a protracted historical
process. Just as today’s reader of comics must be versed in the biographies of all the
characters he or she is reading about in order to understand the structural intricacy of the
contemporary narrative, one must become familiar with the manner in which it has
developed.
No retelling of history can ever be complete; it is ultimately an exercise in
omission. The following chapter is no exception. The aim here is not to create a
comprehensive account. Instead, this chapter will trace a line between a number of
significant events in order to map two distinct, yet parallel developments. The political
and philosophical dimensions of superhero narrative have become increasingly explicit in
direct proportion to the increased complexity of the narrative’s fractal property. Although
one of these changes deals with content and the other with structure, both are
symptomatic of a major demographic shift in the genre’s audience. Since their creation in
the late 1930s, comics have been crafted with progressively older audiences in mind.
The Golden Age
The primary organization of superhero comic books is by broad historical
groupings. These ages, as they are most often called, are used to signify paramount shifts
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in the tone, style, content, and commerciality of the entire genre. The neatly delineated
history of superhero comics promotes a narrative progression from the past to the present,
but it is far more convenient than it is precise. Although there is a general consensus in
regards to the duration of the first two ages, known respectively as the Golden and Silver
Ages, there is a fair amount of debate concerning how the last three decades and the
immediate present should be classified. In addition to the Golden (late 1930s through
early 50s) and Silver Ages (late 50s through early 70s), there has been a Bronze Age
(early 70s through mid-80s) and a Dark or Iron Age (beginning in 1985). Arguments
have been made, particularly in Peter Coogan’s Superhero: Secret Origin of a Genre and
Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, that comics have recently
entered a fifth age; Coogan has designated the present moment as a “Renaissance.” While
this moniker may dovetail nicely with “Dark Age” on a timeline, one should be reluctant
to believe that any such epochal shift has occurred and that the genre and its marketing
are pretty much the way they’ve been since the 1980s. Although sometimes appearing in
radically exaggerated forms, the narrative and commercial practices that one may see in
comics today have remained more or less consistent for the last two decades.
The Golden Age of Comics began in the spring of 1938 and can be said to have
concluded in either 1950 or 1951.5 The publication of Action Comics #1, dated June 1938
and containing the first appearance of Superman, radically altered comic books by
introducing the genre that would dominate the medium for the next seven decades. The
history of comic books, however, begins nine years before the arrival of the Man of Steel.
5 The last issue of either Captain America Comics (#75, 1950) or All Star Comics (#57, 1951) is a suitable
marker for the end of the Golden Age of Comics.
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Dell Publishing’s The Funnies (1929) was the first comic book and, like all of the earliest
comic books, it was a cheaply produced anthology of reprinted newspaper comic strips.
For the most part, the earliest comic books were a way for small publishers to squeeze an
extra dime out of second-hand materials that they could acquire cheaply from the
newspaper syndicates. Comics were like any other Depression-era entrepreneurial
collection and recycling effort. The early comic book publishers were essentially selling
scrap. The fledgling industry was only barely lucrative at the outset, but once its potential
profitability became apparent, the newspaper syndicates cut the small publishers out of
the process and began to reprint and repackage their own properties rather than license
them out. The only way for these small publishers to stay viable was to begin producing
their own original material.
Figure 4. Cover, Detective Comics #1 by Vincent Sullivan (March 1937).
The first issue of Detective Comics was published in March, 1937. Its cover was
dominated by the visage of a villainous, fanged and grey-skinned Fu Manchu stereotype.
Gazing out from the magazine rack, his hypnotically pupilless eyes promised the danger,
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exoticism, and adventure contained within the flimsy pages of these “Brand new! Action-
packed stories in color!” An escape to whole new worlds of mystery and excitement
became available to anyone capable of scrounging up a dime. Even though there was
nothing about the crime, horror, and adventure stories that began to take over the market,
the words “comics” and “comic book” stuck and began to describe the whole medium
regardless of its content. The publication of Detective Comics signaled a paradigm shift
in the industry; crime fighting replaced comedy and funny animal stories as the dominant
narrative mode. Mutt and Jeff and The Katzenjammer Kids were pushed aside by
characters like Slam Bradley and Speed Saunders as the comics began to draw inspiration
from salacious pulp noir rather than from the Sunday funnies.
Like the majority of Golden Age comics, Detective Comics was presented in a
showcase format, which contained several short, unrelated and self-contained tales that
were written and drawn by independently contracted production teams. Under work-for-
hire contracts, production teams sold their labor to publishers outright; they were paid per
page, received no residuals from future reproductions, and retained no ownership over the
plots and characters they created. Two of the stories in that first issue of Detective
Comics were written and drawn by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster who, unbeknownst to
anyone, were on the verge of introducing America to the character that would redefine
the medium and would become one of its most significant and long-lasting
cultural/commercial icons.
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Figure 5. Cover, Action Comics #1 by Joe Shuster (June 1938).
Siegel and Shuster had been trying to sell their comic strip, Superman, into
newspaper syndication since they began collaborating as teenagers in Cleveland, Ohio.
Although they had found steady work in the comic book industry, they had hoped their
creation would be published in the more lucrative and prestigious daily newspaper strips.
They found themselves rejected repeatedly. When the publishers of Detective Comics,
now calling themselves DC, found themselves in need of a feature story for their
upcoming second publication, Action Comics, they warily agreed to publish Siegel and
Shuster’s far-fetched tale of a space orphan that battles crime in a red cape and blue
circus tights. Superman had originally been drawn and formatted as a four-panel daily
newspaper strip, but given the opportunity to see their creation in print, Siegel and
Shuster quickly cobbled together the first thirteen pages of Action Comics # 1 from what
they had already produced. Narrative progression is much slower in daily strips than it is
in monthly/quarterly comic books and as Superman was converted from one format to the
other, numerous panels (particularly those that detailed the destruction of Superman’s
home planet Krypton) were excised and other panels were redrawn, rewritten, or
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rearranged in order to accommodate the comic book’s full-page layout and significantly
more rapid pace. The first issue of Action Comics is probably most famous for its cover;
Shuster’s depiction of Superman holding a sedan over his head and smashing it down as
horrified onlookers cower and flee is as instantaneously recognizable as Emanuel
Leutze’s painting of Washington crossing the Delaware.
Superman was an immediate and unparalleled success. Although it draws
inspiration from numerous popular and traditional genres (mythology, science fiction,
adventure, noir, etc.), Siegel and Shuster’s particular synthesis of several distinct
narrative elements produced something historically unique. Despite the obvious influence
of ancient myths and legends and of pulp-magazine characters like The Shadow and Doc
Savage, Superman is truly the first of his kind. His first appearance may have only
occupied a mere thirteen pages of Action Comics #1, but these pages have become the ur-
text from which an inestimable number of superhero comics have sprung. It is the point
of origination for virtually all of the significant generic characteristics one would
associate with superhero narrative. Action Comics #1 introduces the reader to secret
identities, cogent origins, costumes, extraordinary feats, and, most importantly, the hero’s
codified adherence to a personal sense of an absolute Good that frequently, but not
necessarily, coincides with the political authority of the state.
Superman, and therefore the American superhero comic book in general, began as
a product of Depression-era populist popular culture, but it was at the outbreak of World
War II that the Man of Steel and his superpowered colleagues seemed to find the role
they were best suited for. The response to the decade that began with men leaping from
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tall buildings on “Black Tuesday” was a man who could leap tall buildings in a single
bound. In 1938, Superman seems to emerge from the same structure of feeling as John
Steinbeck’s character Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath. Like Joad, Superman can “be
everywhere, anywhere you look” and, wherever injustice appears, “he’ll be there.” In his
earliest adventures, Superman employed disguises in order to infiltrate sites of crime and
corruption; he would make it appear as if the victim was suddenly imbued with the force
to topple his or her oppressor. The message in these earliest adventures was clear: the
superman was concealed within the everyman. The early Superman, also similar to Joad,
was a bit of an outlaw; he may be fighting on the side of the angels, but he usually had to
flee the scene of his triumphs in a hail of policemen’s gunfire. It should be noted here that
in his original incarnation Superman was heralded as “The Champion of the Oppressed.”
His “never ending battle for truth and justice” began in the Max Fleischer Studio cartoons
(1941) and his concern for “the American way” did not appear until George Reeves put
on the costume a dozen years later in television’s The Adventures of Superman (1953).
Figure 6. Cover, Detective Comics #27 by Bob Kane (May 1939)
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Superman is the character that launched an entire industry. DC, inspired by the
popular and financial success of Siegel and Shuster’s creation, commissioned a second
costumed crime-fighter. Created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger, The Batman
swung into action in his first adventure, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” in
Detective Comics #27 (1939). Any discussion of the American superhero comic book
will necessarily include special attention to Superman and Batman. The dialectical
relationship between the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight synthesizes and occasionally
unsettles the structures defining the entire genre under which their own exploits are
categorized. These two figures define the parameters by which we can understand the
specific signification of superheroes in general. Superman is the first and should be
understood as the prototype; Batman is introduced specifically as a response to
Superman’s success and, rather than being a copy of the original, he is a negation or
antithesis. Although both characters are immediately recognized as heroes, they are, in a
sense, opposites and each shapes the definition of the other as well as their myriad
progeny. For example, Superman is a physically powerful immigrant who is reflective of
the quasi-socialist New Deal response to the Great Depression. Batman, in contrast, is
mentally powerful, native born, and a socially responsible capitalist. Superman and
Batman are fundamentally distinct characters and the cities that they patrol and the social
issues that they address are radically different. Superman draws most heavily from sci-fi
traditions and Batman springs from noir detective stories. The manner in which the
characters are depicted reflects this; Shuster’s Superman is brightly colored and contains
little shadowing and Kane’s Batman is overpowering in its persistent darkness. Together
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they represent both the origin and historical/cultural endurance of the superhero genre,
and if the lights should ever go out on superhero comics, it’ll most likely be these two
characters that will be left behind to stack the chairs and lock the door on their way out.
Within a few months of the publication of Action Comics #1, dozens of little
publishing imprints suddenly appeared and a deluge of heroes burst from the newsstands
and entered the popular imagination. The Golden Age of comics certainly had its share of
failures (The Green Lama?), but many of its creations have endured and have remained
vital and relevant for nearly seventy years.6 A number of Golden Age characters may be
familiar, but the comics that record their exploits share many characteristics that would
make them feel strange to a contemporary reader. The narrative focus in this period is
essentially reversed from what we see in today’s tales. Since the early Sixties, comics
have become increasingly focused on the psychology, personal development, and the
private lives of the characters; in stark contrast, Golden Age comics were entirely focused
on plot. In terms of personality, one would be hard pressed to tell The Flash and Green
Lantern apart. Costumes, powers, and secret origins aside, most superheroes of this
period were essentially identical wise-cracking do-gooders with a uniform sense of both
humor and moral outrage.
6 Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and Captain Marvel, to name a few.
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Figure 8. Cover, All-Star Comics #3 by Everet Hibbard (Winter 1940-41)
If Action Comics #1 is the single most important comic book of all time, then All
Star Comics #3 is the second. Written at the end of 1940 by one of pop-culture’s greatest
unsung heroes, Gardner Fox, All-Star Comics #3 features the first appearance of The
Justice Society of America (JSA). The team, which is a precursor to the more
contemporary Justice League of America (JLA), was originally comprised of The Flash,
Green Lantern, The Spectre, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Hour Man, Sandman, The Atom, and
Johnny Thunder. The significance of this book was that each of these heroes, whose solo
adventures were chronicled in other showcase comics, suddenly occupied the same
universe and interacted. Of course, the main purpose of the first “Team” comic was
commercial; by putting popular and unpopular characters in a group together, DC hoped
that additional exposure to the less known or less popular characters would lead readers
back to the showcase books that regularly featured their solo adventures. Once characters
achieved notoriety sufficient to warrant the publication of their own bi-monthly title,7
7 I.e., a loyal fan base was established and it was no longer necessary to promote the character as
aggressively.
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they graduated from active membership in the JSA and became “honorary” members. By
1940, both Superman and Batman appeared in their own self-titled magazines in addition
to their regular appearances in Action Comics and Detective Comics; neither of these
characters appeared in All Star Comics, but both were frequently cited as lifetime
honorary members of the JSA. When The Flash and Green Lantern earned their own self-
titled magazines, they too graduated from active to honorary ranks,8 making room for
new members like Starman, Dr. Midnite, and Wonder Woman.9
Marketing strategies aside, the decision to create the first super-team laid the
conceptual, albeit primitive, foundations for contemporary comics’ single most important
and unique narrative attribute. Continuity, as it is used to describe superhero narrative,
doesn’t simply refer to the chronological progression of events from one issue to the next;
it is spatial as well as temporal. Superheroes that appear under the same publisher’s
imprint occupy the same fictional space, called “Universes.” Each individual comic book
serves as a peep hole into a much larger universe and the amount of knowledge of that
universe a reader can acquire is only limited by the number of peep holes the reader is
willing or able to pay to peek through.
The Golden Age of Comics established the entire repertoire of literary tropes,
structures and devices that define the superhero genre. The most obvious and, perhaps,
key feature in comics is the superhero’s reliance on violence as his or her exclusive
8 Flash and Green Lantern graduate in issues #6 and #8 respectively.
9 Starman and Dr. Midnite are added to the roles in issue #8. Wonder Woman is also introduced in a
separate feature in issue #8, but doesn’t appear in conjunction with the JSA until issue #11 and even then
she is often relegated to secretarial functions.
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methodology.10 As Bradford Wright argues in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation
of Youth Culture in America, the hero and his or her social environment are often at odds
with one another and this conflict reconciles itself through violence:
Superman’s America was something of a paradox—a land where the virtue of the
poor and the weak towered over that of the wealthy and powerful. Yet the
common man could not expect to prevail on his own in this America, and neither
could the progressive reformers who tried to fight against injustice in this system.
Only the righteous violence of Superman, it seemed, could relieve deep social
problems—a tacit recognition that in American society it took some might to
make right after all. (Wright 13)
Wright’s observation is important, but it is necessary to temper his remark by
acknowledging that the superheroic violence that presents itself in comics is preceded by
and is a response to the very real violence and oppression that permeates the culture at
large. Neither Superman nor any of the characters that emerged in his wake seeks to
establish a utopian alternative to the system in which they operate; they react violently in
a fictional way to fictionalized representations of violence that have already erupted in
reality. Once subdued, criminal offenders in comics are placed into the custody of the
established powers that are either unwilling or unable to exercise authority on their own.
Many simply deplore comic book violence as irrational adolescent tantrums and see them
as offering oversimplified solutions to complex socio-political issues, and many would
outright reject violence in itself as a strategy for change, but unfortunately there are a few
10 Violence is defined here as any forceful imposition of one’s will against another, oneself, an object, or
nature.
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situations where violence is the only available and/or effective avenue for conflict
resolution. Perhaps superheroes merely serve as surrogates for their readers who in turn
find catharsis for violent impulses that they are unable to act out, but comic books may
also provide a map to sites of conflict where violence seems to be an imperative.
The earliest Golden Age comics provide the rudimentary equation that serves as
the motif in the ever expanding and self-reflexive complex of superhero narrative. Every
superhero since the introduction of the first, Superman, has been an iteration of Siegel
and Shuster’s source code. This isn’t to imply plagiarism or copyright infringement; there
is a great variety of superheroes, but the fact that any of these characters are identifiable
as a superhero at all is indicative of that character’s relationship to the generic motif of
which Superman is the original template. On the surface, Batman and Superman appear
to be as different as night and day, but a closer look shows that former is the
photonegative of the latter.
It is in the pages of Golden Age comics that the definition of superheroism is
established, and, as Batman proves, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with
powers. Superheroes are extra-governmental agents for social justice; they intercede with
violence on the behalf of victims whether their assailants are criminal or the socio-
political establishment itself. This is a vital concept. Superhero narrative is political,
sexually charged, and violent at its heart, and as the narrative structure expands and
complicates itself, these key traits become increasingly explicit.
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War and Tights
The Superhero genre is rooted in the Great Depression, but it really flourished
during the Second World War. Comic book sales increased from approximately fifteen
million issues sold in 1942 to approximately twenty-five million in 1943 (Comic).
Comics were widely circulated among American servicemen during the war; Bradford
Wright quotes the New York Times as reporting “That one of every four magazines
shipped to troops overseas was a comic book” and “at least 35,000 copies of Superman
alone went to servicemen each month” (Wright, 31). These figures are impressive on
their own, but when one multiplies it by the inestimable number of hand-to-hand
exchanges among readers at home and between soldiers abroad, the actual size of comic
book readership is staggering to consider.
Superheroes led America’s charge into WW2 and assumed an aggressive stance
against totalitarianism years before the United States entered the war. In a two-page
feature published in a 1940 issue of Look Magazine,11 Superman “ends the war” by
swooping into Germany and the Soviet Union, carrying Hitler and Stalin off by their shirt
collars, and depositing them before the League of Nations like dangerously misbehaved
children. In March, 1941, Timely Comics published the first issue of Captain America
Comics which showed that star-spangled sentinel of liberty smashing into Nazi
headquarters and cold-cocking Adolph Hitler months before his national namesake
entered the conflict. The urgency with which superheroes entered the war certainly
reflects the demographics of their creators, who, for the most part, would have been the
11 Reprinted in Siegel, Jerry and Joe Schuster. Superman in the Forties. New York: DC, 2005.
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very targets of Nazi anti-Semitic atrocities, but it also insinuates the clear absence of a
peaceful or diplomatic solution to the threat of brutal totalitarian regimes. Michael
Chabon, author of Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, has offered a rather odd
observation on this point and claims that:
There was a sort of irony in the fact that many of these characters in the golden
age had been evolved to fight the Nazis were themselves very much in the Nazi
ideal. The idea that you can solve problems through physical strength, by being
stronger and more dominating, more powerful, that is Fascism, that’s it, that’s the
essence of Fascism and I don’t think the creators of superheroes or the kids who
were reading them at the time were the slightest bit aware of it. (Comic)
Chabon’s assertion that violence directed against fascist violence is in itself fascist is
ludicrous on its face and belies a dangerously ahistorical pacifism. Although one would
prefer to give peace a chance, the most basic ideology of Nazi and fascist movements
effaces the possibility of passive resistance. To paraphrase George Orwell’s reflections
on Gandhi, the spectacle of individuals subjecting themselves to possible harm (hunger
strikes, blocking armored columns with their bodies, etc.) cannot hope to influence an
opponent that has already resolved itself to the slaughter of millions of those same
individuals. Essentially, Hitler and his cohorts made an institution of man’s capacity for
horror and that regime could only be engaged with an equally potent and formal violence.
The spread of totalitarianism in Europe radically altered America’s self-
conception as a figure in international affairs and this change was mirrored by its
superheroes and its popular culture in general. Totalitarianism’s most significant trait is
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the fervor with which it attempts to universalize and depoliticize itself. In order to
maintain its illusion of totality, it cannot recognize or negotiate with any entity outside of
its own ideological parameters; it considers itself as a singular and absolute value. Prior
to WW2, Superheroes dealt with contentious social issues such as corruption, labor
abuses, and crime; the emergence of Nazism and Fascism prompted a distinct ideological
shift. Heroes no longer combated purely legal and ethical injustices; they found
themselves ensconced in a moral system of diametrically opposed categorical absolutes.
To put it bluntly, the Nazis were “evil” and, therefore, anyone who fought them were
“good.” Even a butcher like Joseph Stalin could temporarily don the proverbial white
cowboy hat so long as he stood in opposition to Hitler and his ilk. Superheroes appeared
to shed their political complexity in the 1940’s; they had previously been vigilantes, de
facto criminals in reverse, clashing with institutional injustices; the war transformed them
into a choir of American angels. Long after the war ended and the scourge of Nazi evil
had been vanquished, America continues to insist on its mythologized self-conception as
an apolitical, unequivocal, and wholly moral force for good in the world. This residual
attitude of righteousness has become plain in American action-adventure films, in
superhero comics, and in historical moments such as Ronald Regan’s “Evil Empire”
speech12 and George W. Bush’s naming of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the “Axis of
Evil.”13
Comic books peaked in popularity in the early 1950s; sales exploded from
twenty-five million comics sold a month in 1943 to nearly one-hundred million by 1953.
12 March 8, 1983.
13 January 29, 2002.
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Despite the surge in readership, superheroes nearly became extinct. Because they had
become almost synonymous with the war in the public’s imagination, once the war was
over interest in the genre dwindled and was replaced by tales of crime and horror. Once
the ultimate super-villains, Nazis and Fascists, were expelled, there seemed to be no need
for the costumed heroes who had challenged them.
Figure 8. Cover, Captain America Comics #75 by Gene Colan (February 1950)
The only characters to enjoy uninterrupted publication during the 50’s were
Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Some titles attempted to shift genres in order to
survive the lax interest in superheroes; the last two issues of Captain America Comics
became Captain America’s Weird Tales and featured horror stories. Atlas Comics,
formerly Timely Comics, attempted to resurrect their principal WW2 characters (Captain
America, Sub-Mariner, and The Human Torch) in 1953. These comics followed the
formula that had been established a decade earlier and simply inserted Commies as a
substitute for Nazis. The new stories of these old characters failed to resonate with a
public that was already growing weary of the witch hunt for Communist sympathizers
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and Atlas halted publication of practically all of its superhero titles within a mere eight
months.14 Simply supplanting the genre’s latent leftism with a right wing agenda
produced a commercial failure. Ironically, it is the mid-50’s campaign to censor and ban
comic books that may have saved the superhero genre. Just like an examination of the
rings within a fallen tree can indicate the years of drought and abundance within the
tree’s life, the periodization of comic book history can point out and offer explanation for
the uneven, interrupted, or accelerated development of the genre’s structure.
The Seduction of the Innocent
Dr. Frederic Wertham’s name has become poison to the ears of comic book
creators and fans alike, but much of the hostility aimed in his direction comes from the
trivialization and over-embellishment of his intentions and findings. The legendary Stan
Lee suggests that:
[Wertham] had the title doctor in front of his name and people listened to him. He
was a good huckster. He got a lot of publicity and it almost destroyed the comic
book business and a lot of people were saying “good riddance if that happened.”
(Comic)
In the introduction to the Absolute Edition of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank
Miller’s opinion on the subject is considerably more hostile:
in the early 1950’s, a pop psychiatrist wrote a truly crappy book that traumatized
my lovely art form for a generation….That crackpot shrink and his truly,
14 The only exception is the Sub-Mariner revival which lasted a year and a half (Final Issue, Oct. 1955).
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relentlessly crappy book aren’t worth naming. The world has forgotten both.
(Miller i)
Of course, Miller is talking about Wertham and his 1953 treatise on comic books and
juvenile delinquency, Seduction of the Innocent. Both Lee and Miller, two of the most
significant figures in comic book history, rely on simple ad hominem attacks to degrade
Wertham’s significance rather than engaging the content of his work. Wertham hardly
qualifies as a “huckster,” a “pop psychiatrist,” or a “crackpot shrink.” In fact, he was one
of the most prominent and powerful figures in American psychiatry at the time and he
held the title of senior psychiatrist in New York City’s Department of Hospitals and was
the director of mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue and Queens General. Eclipsed by his
crusade against comics, Wertham’s most important work was in the effort to establish
racial equality in access to psychological services. Believing that regardless of race or
socio-economic position, all people deserved access to psychiatric care, he established
and directed the LaFargue Clinic in Harlem; his article “Psychological Effects of School
Segregation” was introduced as evidence in the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown
vs. Board of Education.
Despite Frank Miller’s assertion, the world has hardly “forgotten” Seduction of
the Innocent; it is necessarily featured in virtually any discussion of comics and it has
become the principal subject of a number of recent publications. Seduction of the
Innocent is a remarkable text and its return to print would be a vital asset to the
furtherance of comic book studies. Of course it remains a highly problematic book and it
is certain to make any reasonable opponent of censorship cringe, but when one reads it,
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it’s startling to discover how progressive it is concerning the adverse representations of
race and gender. Furthermore, Wertham felt that the institutionalization of youthful
offenders was akin to child abuse and claims that:
Not only is it cruel to take a child away from his family, but what goes on in
many reformatories hurts children and does them lasting harm. Cruelty to children
is not only what a drunken father does to his son, but what those in high estate, in
courts and welfare agencies, do to straying youth. (Wertham 13)
He seems here to have a sincere concern for children and believed that keeping comics
out of their hands was something that he could accomplish in order to prevent them from
being exposed to a far more dangerous experience, juvenile detention. Wertham was
clearly over-zealous and the dozens of uncited and unsubstantiated case studies and
anecdotes that he provides contribute to his thesis so neatly that one is forced to question
their authenticity. He also allows himself to get mired in ill-conceived aesthetic questions
about the quality of art and is overly concerned with how “more sophisticated” European
nations view American pop culture.
Wertham’s basic premise is often misinterpreted or misrepresented. He did not
argue, as is often reported, that there was a direct causal link between reading comics and
juvenile delinquency; he saw the contents of comics as “far more significant as symptoms
than as causes” of pervasive social maladies like violence, racism, and sexism (395). He
saw numerous bad lessons being repeatedly taught through comics that could be
interpolated by children along with other social factors in a way that may foster
psychological abnormalities. Wertham’s opposition to displays of graphic violence and
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sexuality in comic books, much of which would seem quaint to today’s largely adult
readership, is the focus of contention for many of Wertham’s critics. An anti-censorship
argument would almost certainly include the claim that the representation of an action
does not automatically produce a real-world repetition of the depicted action, but
Wertham doesn’t really make this claim. Because he found little or no positive value for
children in comics and felt that under certain conditions they could contribute to aberrant
beliefs or behavior, he proposed that access to comics should be limited to people over
the age of fifteen. It is his reasonable insistence that children are simply incapable of
processing adult material as an adult would. To Wertham, the potential for a negative
impact outweighed the absence of positive effects.
Wertham provided key evidence to the 1954 session of the U.S. Senate Sub-
Committee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency. As a result of pressure from Wertham, the
government, the media, and concerned parents groups, the comic book industry
established the Comics Code Authority, which would maintain its own strict censorship
guidelines and would certify comics that met their criteria with its seal of approval. This
stamp, which appeared in the top right corner of a comic’s cover, was a signal to retailers
and parents that the material was suitable for young children. As one would suspect, the
code limited the representation of overt sexuality, graphic violence, profanity, and drug
usage, but the code also sought to de-politicize comics as well. Not only did the code
restrict depictions of zombies, vampires, and werewolves, it banned negative
representations of politicians, law enforcement, and other “respected” organizations. It
also forbade suggestions that crime could have rational motivation, was glamorous, or
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could triumph over the law. The industry essentially guaranteed that it would only
produce kids’ books, and although it’s been a long time since the readership of comics
has been primarily pre-adolescents, it is a cultural stigma that persists to this day.
The most significant casualty of the Comics Code was a publishing company
called EC.15 Best known for books like Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science, EC’s
legacy is the superior quality of the illustrations that accompanied its ghastly,
sensationalist, yet generally morally driven tales. It was the first company to shed a
“house style” by encouraging its artists to develop their own idiosyncratic approaches to
illustration. In the Golden Age of Comics, pencilers often remained anonymous; at EC,
artists not only signed their work, but were encouraged to cultivate their own following in
one of comics’ first published fan letters page. The Comics Code seems to have been
specifically tailored to torpedo EC which published many of the crime and horror comics
that Wertham and the Senate had explicitly targeted. Virtually nothing that EC submitted
could get CCA approval, and when the CCA refused to certify “Judgment Day,” a sci-fi
commentary on race relations that in no way violated any Code strictures, EC realized
that it had been essentially blackballed by the industry. In 1956, less than a year after the
implementation of the code, EC ceased publication of all of its comic book titles.16
15 EC first stood for Educational Comics and later became Entertaining Comics.
16 EC’s humor/satire publication, Mad, was increased in page size, marketed as a magazine rather than as a
comic and, therefore, fell outside of the CCA’s scrutiny. Although ownership of Mad has changed hands,
EC’s publisher, William Gaines, retained editorial control over the magazine until his death in 1992.
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The Silver Age
With the popular crime and horror genres sanitized into extinction and with its
most significant competitor driven out of the industry, DC ushered in the Silver Age of
Superheroes in the fall of 1956. Under the editorial guidance of Julius Schwartz, DC
revamped a number of its Golden Age characters including The Flash, Green Lantern,
and Hawkman. Unlike Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics, which failed to reinvigorate
interest in the genre a few years earlier, DC took its characters in what seemed to be a
new direction. Due to the Comics Code, many of the genre’s crime elements were either
downplayed or completely removed and its science-fiction characteristics became the
emphasis. In Showcase #4 (Oct. 1956), DC introduced its audience to a brand-new Flash.
The original Flash, Jay Garrick, was a former college athlete who sported a helmet like
Hermes; the new Flash, Barry Allen, was a forensic scientist and was drawn in a scarlet
space-age body suit that was concealed in his ring, expanded upon contact with air, and
covered him from head to toe. In addition to the nearly obligatory freak accident which
grants the hero his or her superpowers, Showcase #4 contains one rather remarkable
detail. Before a lightning bolt strikes a rack of laboratory chemicals and transforms him
into the fastest man alive, Barry Allen is shown enjoying an old issue of Flash Comics.
Apart from illustrating how the new hero selected his name, this signifies a deliberate and
distinct historical separation between DC’s past and what it set out to do by reintroducing
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its characters. The Golden Age is depicted as a fiction embedded within the newly
established “reality” of the Silver Age.17
Figure 9. Cover, Showcase #4 by Carmine Infantino (September 1956)
The ultimate triumph of science is the leitmotif in the Silver Age Flash comics.
Whether armed with a cold gun, a weather wand, an array of refractory mirror weapons,
elemental transmutation rays, or specially designed boomerangs,18 Flash’s collection of
super-villains, “Rogues,”19 usually represented a single aspect of the physical sciences
which could threaten, but never thwart, Flash’s clever uses of his own velocity. Although
the origin of the Silver Age Flash and four of his earliest adventures were written by
Robert Kanigher, the character truly took shape in the hands of artist Carmine Infantino
17 This will become more significant as DC’s continuity expands extra-dimensionally and it is revealed that
the Golden Age characters do in fact exist but on a parallel Earth (Earth-Two). The concept of DC's "Multi-
verse" is introduced in Flash #123 (1961).
18 Captain Cold (Showcase #8), Mr. Element/Doctor Alchemy (Showcase #13), Mirror Master (Flash
#105), Weather Wizard (Flash #110), and Captain Boomerang (Flash #117) respectively.
19 Initially used by Flash as a blanket description for his enemies, “Rogues” has come to mean a specific
subset of villains working together for mutual protection. Not all of Flash’s opponents are strictly enabled
by their use of gadgetry, and a number of them fall outside of the “Rogue” category. For example, Gorilla
Grodd (Flash #106) is a super-intelligent and telepathic ape bent on world domination and is never
associated with the Rogues.
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and writer John Broome, who was already an accomplished science-fiction writer and a
close friend of Julius Schwartz. Broome, who took over the writing duties once Flash was
given his own title in February 1959, was particularly attentive to the scientific elements
in his stories and frequently inserted pseudo-educational editorial notes called "Flash
Facts" which provided definitions for technical terminology and a scientific rationale for
the extraordinary actions that the Flash’s powers allowed him to perform. Additional
editorial notes linked events in one comic to events in an earlier episode; this narrative
device allowed Broome to begin to fashion and solidify a sequence of events in his Flash
comics and would eventually be used to bridge events in multiple titles, which created an
overall sense of congruency and linearity between DC’s publications. The design of
superhero narrative began to shake itself free of its Golden Age stasis and the roots of
contemporary comic book continuity began to take hold.
Figure 10. Cover, Showcase #22 by Gil Kane (September 1959)
Seven months after the publication of the first issue of The Flash, John Broome
was tapped to resuscitate another of DC’s Golden Age heroes, Green Lantern (Showcase
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#22, Sept. 1959). Broome’s Green Lantern was an entirely different way of envisioning
the character’s premise and was even more tilted toward sci-fi than the Flash. The
original Green Lantern’s powers were magical and the lantern which was the source of
his emerald ring’s power was meant to be evocative of Aladdin’s lamp; the new
character, a Chuck Yeager-esque test pilot named Hal Jordan, was recruited into an
intergalactic police force by a cadre of space aliens called Guardians and was tasked with
patrolling space sector 2814, of which Earth was just a tiny part. The Flash’s fleet feet
were, for the most part, firmly planted in the terrestrial setting of Central City, but Green
Lantern took his superheroism and power ring to the stars and beyond.
Repression only leads to explosion. The near extinction of the superhero genre
insulated it against the worst attacks on the medium; Fredric Wertham’s onslaught
against crime and horror comics created a vacuum in the marketplace in which the
superheroes could flourish. Although the Comics Code Authority was explicit in its
efforts to curtail direct political commentary, especially anything critical of established
authority, the superhero genre, which was forged for precisely that purpose, continued
repeating its motif by employing the sort of thinly veiled metaphors routinely found in
science fiction. The Silver Age saw many old characters refashioned for a post-Sputnik
“New Frontier.”
The gap in publications during the 50s resulted in the addition of a remarkable
new layer to continuity. There was a new Flash and a new Green Lantern, but older fans,
including the writers themselves, were left asking what had happened to the old ones.
DC’s answer to this question was only possible with the increased emphasis on science
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fiction. The old heroes continued to exist and could even interact with the new ones, but
their home was on an alternate Earth in a parallel dimension. This became the answer to
virtually every question of continuity in DC’s universe and the number of alternate Earths
began to multiply. The reader was no longer only required to recall the prior exploits of
numerous heroes, but he or she must also be able to distinguish between numerous
versions of each of those characters and to understand the intricate intersections between
them.
The Justice League of America
Since the superhero genre was making a strong comeback and was attracting a
healthy readership, Julius Schwartz saw an opportunity to revive one of its most
important titles. The Justice Society of America, which appeared in All-Star Comics #3-
57, had been the ultimate Golden Age super-team and their Silver Age reincarnation
would be no less spectacular. The name of the team was altered because to Schwartz
“society meant something you found on Park Avenue. [He] felt that ‘league’ was a
stronger word, one that readers could identify with because of baseball leagues” (Qtd. in
Gambaccini, 5). In March of 1960, The Justice League of America (JLA) made its debut
in the pages of DC Comics’ The Brave and the Bold #28. The JLA was made up of DC’s
most popular and financially successful characters. Although the team’s roster has
expanded and changed over the last forty-six years, its core membership has remained
relatively intact. These members are Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Green
Lantern, Batman, Flash, and Martian Manhunter. The Brave and the Bold #28 can be
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regarded as the quintessential example of Silver Age comics; it deliberately and
conspicuously adheres to the mandated conventions of the Comics Code Authority.
Unlike the Marvel Comics that would begin making their way onto newsstands just a few
years later, the adventures of the JLA (as with virtually all DC comics of this period)
seems to be written with the youngest possible audience in mind. The Brave and the
Bold #28 is about “the world’s greatest heroes team[ing] up to battle Starro the
Conqueror,” a giant extraterrestrial starfish who attempts to enslave our planet.
Figure 11. Cover, Brave and the Bold #28 by Mike Sekowsky (February 1960)
With their extraordinary powers and pat dialogue, a team of people in outlandish
underwear battling colossal echinoderms may sound silly. It is. It’s very silly, but The
Brave and the Bold #28 is, consciously or unconsciously, symptomatic of the very real
and serious political issues of its day. In order to conquer the world, Starro attacks the
United States and attempts to steal its nuclear weapons and scientists and, like many
popular films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Starro infiltrates the suburbs
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and turns the hapless inhabitants of Happy Harbor into his mindless slaves. Like all of
the various zombies, aliens, and robot invaders that preoccupied American popular
culture in the 50s and early 60s, Starro the Conqueror is obviously a metaphor for the
widespread cultural paranoia regarding the influence of the specter of Communism.
However, the alien menace can and should be read simultaneously as post-war American
capitalism’s aggressive efforts at cultural homogenization, which were being organized
through rapid suburbanization and the encouragement of excessive consumerism. Either
way, the liberty of the individual is sapped, reduced to nil without the individual’s
knowledge and inserted into an institutionalized program of collectivization. Either way,
it falls to the superheroes to oppose it.
Although it is, superficially, a remarkably simple and childish story, The Brave
and the Bold #28 reveals an entire constellation of complex ideological questions. Like
our own notions of America as the great melting pot, the JLA is a huddled mass of
immigrants. Even though they hail from such diverse places as Atlantis, Themyscira,
Thanagar, and Krypton, for the purposes of their union they identify themselves as
“American.” It is also interesting to note that in the pages of this comic book, as with
much of our popular culture, an invasion of the world begins with an invasion of the
American suburbs. Aside from the obvious “It could happen here” threat which is
intrinsic to invasion fantasies, this sort of depiction helps foster the ideological
supposition that America has become a stand-in for the “world” and that its defenders
have become the world’s defenders.20 Starro the Conqueror and the myriad other
20 The fantasy fosters both paranoid and patriotic reactions. A real or imagined threat is “out there” waiting
to attack us, but it also reifies the sense that we are significant precisely because we are worth attacking.
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extraterrestrial forces that populate the comics and science fiction of this period are
metaphors for earthborn anti-democratic philosophies, but the very alienness or otherness
of the personifications serves to reify the belief that there are fundamental and organic
differences between us (Americans) and them (whomever they may be). The Brave and
the Bold #28 also teaches us that all aliens are threats and should be combated unless, of
course, they are fully Americanized aliens like the Martian that disguises himself as a
human detective, the Amazon that sports star-spangled hot pants, or the Kryptonian that
calls Kansas his home.
Lastly and most importantly, The Brave and the Bold #28 illustrates, despite its
best efforts to the contrary, a left-leaning and anti-authoritarian political position that is
inherent to the superhero narrative. Considering Aristotle’s famous assertion that the
state exists by nature and that “anyone who by his nature and not by ill-luck has no state
is either a wretch or superhuman,” one must wonder: if there were superhumans in the
world, would they be, according to Aristotle’s own method of categorical syllogism,
wretches or would they be independent and stateless entities?
Reading the Silver Age adventures of The Justice League of America, one could
easily view these comics as unremarkable, innocuous, and politically benign or as
dangerously uncritical and violently pro-American propaganda. Although both of these
readings are arguable, it is important to introduce a third possibility. Like the lone gun-
slingers, hard-boiled private eyes, and Robin Hood gangsters that precede them, the
proliferation of superheroes in American popular culture is an indication of the
unconscious cultural anxiety that government and law enforcement are wholly impotent
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and incapable of offering any protection to the populace. To put it simply, a cultural icon
like Batman would be unnecessary if the Gotham City Police Department were capable
of keeping the madmen and criminals at bay.
Superheroes are a supplement to the official governmental authorities. As
supplements, superheroes expose and highlight the state’s deficiencies; if the state were
sufficient, then it would be unnecessary for its culture to craft fictional adjuncts to its
powers. Bradford Wright notes that DC gave virtually all of its heroes respected positions
within the culture’s infrastructure when they weren’t in costume and, therefore, he
believes that the company essentially propagandized for the established hegemony. DC
may have spent considerable effort to curtail the notion that its heroes were decidedly not
rebels or vigilantes by giving them day jobs within the police force, the military, the
scientific community, and the media, but by doing so they further highlighted the
inefficiencies of those agencies and cultural entities. Furthermore, because the heroes are
embedded in these organizations and it is still necessary for them to don their masks and
capes, these comics signify that any changes to a society must come from forces that
assert their own autonomy against the strictures and systems of that society.
The very presence of superheroes brings into question the legitimacy of the
government’s authority. It can’t do anything on its own to vanquish Starro the
Conqueror, but it can’t really do anything about the obvious need for the JLA either. If
one accepts Weber’s formulation that “a state is a human community that (successfully)
claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”
(Weber 78), then The Justice League of America, which holds no official commission
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and employs violence, violates that monopoly and invalidates the state’s claims to its sole
authority. Superheroes are a parallel authority; contemporary author Brian Michael
Bendis may have articulated the role of the superhero best: “[they’re] not anti-
establishment, but [they’re] not establishment—[they’re] counter-establishment” (New
Avengers: Illuminati, 5).
The early JLA comic books, such as The Brave and The Bold #28, strictly adhered
to the conventions set forth by the Comics Code Authority and yet they remained fertile
and provocative sites for political and ideological discourses. The Silver Age adventures
of the JLA are often held up as prime specimens of what comics were during the era of
the Comics Code. Wright, for example, uses the JLA to paint a picture of DC Comics as
a culturally conservative, politically naïve, and blatantly pro-establishment company,
arguing that during the Silver Age:
Comic book superheroes remained a fantasy grounded in real world assumptions
and concerns. DC aligned its superheroes squarely on the side of established
authority, with which it naturally equated the best interest of American citizens.
There was nothing unusual about that…popular culture still tended to reinforce a
blandly optimistic consensus vision of America premised on the virtues of anti-
communism, corporatism, consumption, domesticity, and middle-class social
aspirations. This was the consensus embodied in the spirit and, in some cases, the
letter of the comics code, and it was the consensus that DC championed. (Wright,
184)
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Wright paints a very particular picture of what DC comics stood for in the early 1960’s. It
isn’t an entirely inaccurate view, and it seems that Wright accentuates the politics (or
ostensible absence thereof) in DC comics in order to highlight the significance and
necessity of the emergence of DC’s main competitor, Marvel Comics. The alleged
ideological divide between these two companies has become the central myth on which
the neatly narrativized version of the history of comic books depends. Wright is correct in
his assertion that Silver Age JLA comics appear, at least superficially, as a stalwart
exponent of the established authorities, but what he fails to consider is the rebelliousness
that remains intact despite its seemingly conservative content. The counter-establishment
core in superhero comics remains present even if its creators actively try to suppress it,
and even among other popular cultural forms, comic books have always been met with
contempt. Because real world authorities (parents, teachers, senators, and the psychiatric
community) have expressed such public disdain for the medium, the simple act of reading
a comic is a somewhat dissident act whether the comic’s message attempts to be pro-
establishment or not.
The Marvel Age
According to legend, DC’s publisher, Jack Leibowitz, was touting his company’s
success with Justice League of America while playing a round of golf with his friend and
business rival Martin Goodman, who immediately went back to his offices, now called
Marvel Comics, and told his wife’s cousin, Stanley Leiber, to develop a super team of
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their own. 21 Leiber, who is better known by his pen name Stan Lee, and legendary artist
Jack Kirby adopted the basic premise and style of a comic that Kirby had created for DC
called The Challengers of the Unknown, gave them idiosyncratic personalities and
powers that resembled the four classical elements, and launched The Fantastic Four in
November, 1961. 22Unresolved issues of uncredited collaboration and some conspicuous
inspiration drawn from competitors aside, Stan Lee entered an intensely prolific creative
phase which lasted for the duration of the 1960’s; he wrote or plotted and edited nearly
every one of Marvel’s publications during this decade. In addition to scores of
remarkable villains and supporting characters, Lee had a personal hand in the creation of
many of the most significant and enduring superheroes in comic book history, and by
1964 he had introduced the world to The Incredible Hulk, Dr. Strange, The Mighty Thor,
The Invincible Iron Man, Daredevil, The Uncanny X-Men, and of course, his greatest
triumph, The Amazing Spider-Man.23 These new characters were tailored to appeal to the
Baby-Boomer audience in particular, and Boomers began to think of DC’s line up as
outdated, out of touch, and their father’s heroes; if Superman and Batman could be
equated with Frank Sinatra, then Marvel Comics were The Beatles. It followed that the
generational gap that the two rival companies came to represent was politicized in the
minds of the consumers, and DC and Marvel found their corporate identities transposed
over the contentious polemics of this politically energized era. Suddenly, Superman, who
was forged as an adjunct of the semi-socialist New Deal, seemed like Barry Goldwater in
21 Although the event is unverifiable, it is firmly planted in comic book folklore. DC's Irwin Donenfeld has
also been thought to be Goodman's golfing buddy in the story.
22 I always felt that Mr. Fantastic being representative of water was a bit of a stretch.
23 Iron Man, Spider-Man, and other Marvel heroes are discussed in more detail in this book’s next section.
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comparison to Spider-Man. Whether or not Marvel was truly the maverick that most
comic book historians make it out to be is debatable; however, the deftness with which it
helped propagate that reputation is not.
Figure 12. Cover, Amazing Fantasy #15 by Jack Kirby (August 1962)
Stan Lee cultivated a kinship with his readers and seemed to breach the usual
barrier between producer and consumer. He accomplished this by assuming a posture of
complete familiarity and by always appearing every bit as enthusiastic to share his tales
as his audience was to read them. Of course, Marvel was in the business of making
money, but it always seemed like they were having a blast in the process. The creators
were often given humorous or alliterative nicknames like “Smilin’ Stan Lee” or “Jolly
Jack Kirby,” and Lee’s editorial notations were written in his trademark self-deprecating
tone. For example, when introducing his readers to a brand-new character in the pages of
Amazing Fantasy #15, Lee writes, “Like costumed heroes? Confidentially, we in the
comic mag business refer to them as ‘long underwear characters!’ And, as you know,
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they’re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our Spider-Man just a
bit…different!” (1).
The Amazing Spider-Man was significantly more than “just a bit” different. Lee
may have presented himself as on his audience’s level, but he was actively raising the
fan’s status at the same time. Typically, Golden Age superheroes were paired with a
costumed sidekick like Batman’s Robin, Captain America’s Bucky, or The Human
Torch’s Toro; it was the expectation that the young audience would identify with the
sidekick as its proxy in the narrative and would recognize the hero as a pedagogue and a
paternal authority. Because many of its creators had been with the company since the
very beginning, DC continued to operate under this directive during the early Silver Age.
The new Flash got a Kid Flash to accompany him, and Gardener Fox, who had written a
lighthearted character name Johnny Thunder into most of the Justice Society’s adventures
in the 1940’s, continued the tradition by haunting the Justice League with a young tag-
along hipster named Snapper Carr. DC’s audience had to watch in awe as grownups did
their daring deeds; by making Spider-Man a mere fifteen years old, Stan Lee, in a very
Kennedy-era gesture, empowered his audience and made them aware of their own
potential for heroics.
In keeping with the sense that he and his colleagues were almost peers to their
fans, Lee’s prose was far more developed than what had been the status quo in comics. In
an interview with fellow Spider-Man editor and scribe, Tom DeFalco, Lee explains:
I was intentionally writing the kind of stories that older readers would enjoy. By
that I mean I was trying to write realistic dialogue. In the past, everybody in
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comics spoke the same. You couldn’t tell a hero from a villain or a girl from a
boy…I was also trying to write stories that involved characters with more
personality. I wanted to do stories that made sense and were still escapist fantasy.
If you could suspend disbelief and accept the fantastic angle in my stories,
everything else was realistic. I tried to make them fairy tales for grownups. I even
decided to use intelligent vocabulary. I didn’t worry if the readers would
understand me. If I wanted to use a word like misanthropic or cataclysmic or
verisimilitude or whatever, I would. (DeFalco, 20)
Lee essentially inverted the generic paradigm of the superhero comics. The narrative
structure had previously been centered on plot; the hero remained a constant and was
inserted into a variety of events. The proto-continuity one finds in the Silver Age stories
of writers like John Broome may have linked events together in chronological order, but
the hero remained utterly unchanged by his or her experiences. Lee’s shift to character
centered narratives is a pivotal moment in the maturation of the genre. The characters
were suddenly subject to progressive development and the life the hero led outside of his
or her costumed identity became just as important as his or her superheroic escapades.
Marvel’s comics replaced the infinitely cyclical pattern of heroes triumphing over a
villain in one issue only to face and triumph over a new villain under superficially
different yet ultimately identical circumstances in the next issue. The superheroic aspect
of the stories still tended to follow this pattern in Lee’s writing, but underneath the
masks, the characters’ lives and relationships with the people around them continued to
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develop in an open-ended and serialized fashion that was more akin to 1950’s television
soap operas than to Golden Age comics.
Peter Parker, as Spider-Man, occasionally finds himself entangled in the
malevolent mechanical tentacles of Dr. Octopus, but he still needs to make money to pay
his Aunt’s rent and has to make it to chemistry class at Midtown High every single day.
The Marvel characters needed a setting to befit their more ‘realistic’ attributes, so their
adventures were staged in a hyper-realized depiction of New York City. Although the
first issue of Fantastic Four has the team living in the generically named Central City,24
with the introduction of Spider-Man, whose home is in the Forest Hills area of Queens,
Marvel’s characters all became situated in and around the Big Apple. The DC universe
was composed of fictitious cities25 that were designed to operate as relatively simple
signifiers that reflected the overall tone of the superhero stories that were set inside them.
Gotham is a perpetually deteriorating, crime-ridden urban nightmare and Metropolis is an
optimistic dream city of the future; in contrast, New York is an overwhelmingly complex
signifier that broadcasts both of these characteristics simultaneously. Because the Marvel
comics were set in a real city, albeit a hyper-real fiction and perhaps even more so
because of this, Marvel offered stories that were several degrees closer to being realistic.
Social and political issues that remained implicit, even if unconsciously, in DC’s universe
became overt and at times even radicalized in the comics published by its upstart rival.
24 Not to be confused with Flash’s Central City.
25 Over time, all of the real American cities have been incorporated into the DCU as well. This creates a
rather surprising map; Metropolis, for example, is located in Delaware and Gotham is in South Jersey.
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Society as Super-Villain
If Marvel can be said to have entirely eclipsed DC in one area, then it would be its
willingness to introduce racial dimensions into its comics. DC’s Silver Age America was
demographically homogenous; there just weren’t any black people to be found in Gotham
or Metropolis. Tenuous race and class relations are a significant part of New York City’s
character and, subsequently, would factor heavily in Marvel’s comics throughout the
1960’s and 70’s.
The earliest introduction of race discourse was somewhat indirect. The X-Men,
which premiered in September 1963, depicted a group of five superpowered teenagers
who were openly discriminated against by the public because they happened to be born
with special abilities. The X-Men was a remarkable comic because although the team
fought its fair share of villains, their real obstacle was the consistent prejudice they
experienced as mutants. The central conflict, discrimination, was depicted as a multi-
lateral discourse with a number of distinct ideologies competing to shape the future. The
X-Men’s leader, Charles Xavier, professed a peaceful integrationist solution; the team’s
most significant rivals, Magneto and the Brotherhood of Mutants, were militant
supremacists; angry mobs rallied around their anxieties, ignorance, and hatred of
naturally born differences; and factions within the government targeted the mutants for
extinction. More positions were introduced to the polyphony as the series progressed;
there were the Morlocks, who were social drop-outs because their physical mutations
would not let them pass for human, and there was the Hellfire Club, decadent aristocrats
that profited from the conflict itself and manipulated all sides of it. The X-Men operated
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as more of a simile than as an allegory and its symbolism has been flexible enough to
cover race, issues of sexual identity, and the traditional contempt and disregard many
comic book readers experience from their peers and the culture in general. It’s the
flexibility of the simile that has made the X-Men the top grossing superhero team of all-
time.
Marvel introduced the first black superhero,26 Black Panther, in Fantastic Four
#52 (July 1966); Falcon, Marvel’s first African-American hero and Captain America’s
long-time partner, followed in September 1969.27 The inclusion of black characters was
certainly groundbreaking, but despite the progressive intent of the gesture, it was laden
with a performative contradiction. Without being parodic, the heroes were still ultimately
caricatures that exhibited a specific embellishment of their “blackness” that was identical
to what is found within 70s cinema’s blaxploitation genre and the most commercially
successful hip-hop. Stereotypes may be lionized instead of vilified in these cases, but
they remain stereotypes and continue to validate and reify suppositions about race as a
signifier. A year after the runaway success of Shaft and the same summer as the release
of Superfly, Marvel unveiled its quintessential black superhero in Luke Cage: Hero for
Hire #1 (June 1972). Cage is the first black superhero character to be featured in an
eponymously titled comic book.
26 Black Panther is the first black superhero, however, Waku-Prince of the Bantu from Atlas Comic’s
Jungle Tales (Sept. 1954- Sept. 1955) is the first black character to star in his own adventures.
27 Falcon’s first appearance was in Captain America #117 and he received equal billing on the comic’s
cover starting with issue #134 (Feb. 1971). Both Black Panther and Falcon will be discussed at greater
length in the next section. It should also be noted here that a non-super powered African-American
character, Robbie Robertson, was introduced as a significant supporting character in Amazing Spider-Man
#51 (Aug. 1967). Robertson was an editor at the Daily Bugle who functioned as an occasional mentor and
ally of Peter Parker and as a calm and rational counterpoint to J. Jonah Jameson, the Bugle’s hot-tempered
publisher.
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Figure 13. Cover, Hero for Hire #1 by John Romita (June 1972)
The man who would become known as Luke Cage, Carl Lucas, grew up as a two-
bit hood on the hard streets of Harlem, and was incarcerated for a crime he didn’t
commit. When a racist guard tampers with experimental machinery hoping to kill Lucas,
he inadvertently gives him super dense and nearly impenetrable skin. The newly forged
hero’s power is literally his black skin, the outward expression of the character’s identity.
He escapes, makes his way back to New York, and adopts the alias “Luke Cage” to
remind himself of where he’s coming from. Realizing that someone with his power
would stick out, he decides to dress the part of a superhero. He purchases a costume that
consists of a yellow butterfly collar shirt, which he wears open; Cage accessorizes with
wrist shackles and a heavy length of chain around his waist, obviously symbolic of both
incarceration and slavery. He later assumes the more superheroic sounding name “Power
Man,” as in “black power, man,” in order to attract better media attention.28
28 Luke Cage: Power Man #17. Len Wein and George Tuska. New York: Marvel, February 1972.18. Print.
The title changes from Luke Cage: Hero for Hire after this issue, but the numeration remains consistent.
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From the first moment the audience is introduced to Cage, he is in Seagate’s
recreation yard disrespecting a man named “Shades” who wants him to participate in a
demonstration, but he also refuses to provide information about the “militants” to the
prison administration. One finds superheroes in similar situations throughout the 1960’s.
Heroes, although never entirely neutral, found themselves in the middle against both ends
of the burgeoning culture war. Heroes couldn’t simply align themselves with the
government and expect to be on the side of virtue. American military engagement on the
Indochinese Peninsula was particularly divisive; Stan Lee, who had volunteered to serve
during the Second World War, steered away from the topic and has said, “After awhile, I
don’t think we were quite that sure that the commies were the greatest evil in the world. I
tried to avoid stories about the war. The Vietnam War, to me, was too tragic a thing”
(Comic). Without an obvious and external threat to address, superheroes tended to shift
their attention toward issues of domestic turmoil. When confronted with black or student
unrest, superheroes were always sympathetic to the plights of the people; however, they
were adamantly opposed to the violent expression of the people’s grievances and were
often caught standing in between throngs of rioters and the police. The solution the
comics presented to such situations was problematic at best; the angry masses were
universally shown to be the unwitting pawns of villains like Red Skull or MODOK who
sowed chaos in order to further their own Fascist or criminal agendas. 29 Social unrest as
a symptom was misaligned with imaginary scapegoats and any legitimate justification for
the public’s outrage was dematerialized.
29 MODOK (Mobile Organism Designed Only for Killing) may be my all-time favorite comic book
acronym.
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The moral certitude assumed by America after World War Two had decayed as a
result of Vietnam, and the Eisenhower-era efforts to legislate a homogenous American
cultural identity had, for many, essentially backfired. The content of superhero comics
was growing darker and appealing to a progressively older and increasingly specialized
and loyal consumer base. This shift was accompanied by a significant changing of the
guard within the comic book industry. By the end of the 1960’s, many of the people who
had established the rules of the superhero genre were retiring or moving onto new
projects, and the generation of writers and artists who took their places was about to
break virtually every rule that had been put into place.
The New Guard
Figure 14. Cover, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #4 by Jim Steranko (Sept. 1968)
After writing over one hundred consecutive issues of both Fantastic Four and
Amazing Spider-Man, Stan Lee relinquished much of his writing duties and became
Marvel’s publisher in 1972. Steve Ditko, artist and co-creator of Spider-Man, went to DC
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for a brief period but ultimately returned to the smaller yet competitive Charlton Comics
in 1966. At Charlton, Ditko worked on a number of comics including The Question,
which he used to express Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy. Ironically, when Charlton’s
stable of characters was acquired by DC in 1983 they were transparently disguised and
inserted into the bitterly relativistic and deconstructionist world of Watchmen. Jack
Kirby, who had been drawing or penciling the layouts for the majority of Marvel’s titles,
left the company and reunited with DC in order to begin work on the various Fourth
World publications in 1970. Kirby’s indefatigable figures, impassioned facial
expressions, and intensely detailed sense of composition had become Marvel’s signature
style and had essentially stifled the creative vision of the company’s other staff artists.
Although only producing a scant number of comics, one of the most significant and
innovative emergent talents was Jim Steranko, who began introducing psychedelic op-art,
photomontage, and pop art elements in the Nick Fury stories in Strange Tales (#151-168,
1966-1967) and in Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (#1-5, 1968). Steranko opened up a
great number of new possibilities for what comic book art could be, but until Kirby
eventually left Marvel, most other artists simply drew over his sketched layouts. Kirby’s
absence created opportunities for new talent like John Buscema30 to develop their own
artistic identities.
In 1968, a former Midwestern newspaper reporter named Dennis O’Neil began
writing for DC and completely overhauled the company’s products. O’Neil had been
prompted to write comics by Roy Thomas, who replaced Stan Lee as Marvel’s editor-in-
30 Buscema is one of the key figures in the late Silver Age. In his superhero work, most notably Avengers
and Silver Surfer, he essentially remained a disciple of the Kirby style, but Buscema truly came into his
own working on Conan the Barbarian (1973-1987) and Savage Sword of Conan (1974-1995)
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chief, and O’Neil penned the Dr. Strange stories in five issues of Strange Tales (#145-
149, 1966). He then did freelance work for Charlton until one of that company’s editors,
Dick Giordano, was offered a position at DC and took his best freelancers with him. One
of O’Neil’s first tasks at DC was to revamp Wonder Woman. In order to “modernize” the
character, O’Neil separated her from her mythological origins and took away her powers
and costume; starting with issue #178 (Oct. 1968) she became an adventuring martial
artist and mod boutique owner in order to be closer to her perpetually imperiled love
interest, Colonel Steve Trevor. She was accompanied by I Ching, a dubiously named
Chinese man who was blind, dressed like John Steed from the British television series
The Avengers, and mentored her in karate and spirituality. O’Neil’s remodeling of the
character and her adventures seems to be intended as a pro-feminist gesture; he
transformed the character into a model of a powerful, contemporary, and relatable
American woman instead of an extraordinary and alien other, but he had essentially
disempowered history's most significant female comic book character. Due in some part
to prompting from Gloria Steinem, this incarnation of Wonder Woman was fairly short
lived.31 However, O’Neil’s significance as a comic book writer would far outshine and
outlast this one flub.
31 Not only did Wonder Woman return to her classic costume in issue #204 (Feb. 1973), but DC even killed
off I Ching in order to wipe the slate clean of this rather unfortunate turn in the superheroine’s career.
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Figure 15. Cover, Wonder Woman #178 by Mike Sekowsky (September 1968)
At the same time he was transforming the Amazonian Princess into Emma Peel,
O’Neil took Gardner Fox’s place on Justice League of America, and although the changes
he made were far subtler than what he did with Wonder Woman, they were significant
nonetheless. Starting with issue #66 (Nov. 1968), O’Neil began to highlight
characterization in the traditionally plot-driven comic and began injecting more serious
and socially relevant elements. It isn’t fair to claim that he was simply “Marvel-izing”
DC’s products; O’Neil was advancing the comic book narrative and making it more
contemporary by returning it to its pre-World War Two origins. Because of O'Neil, DC
was going back to its future.
The JLA’s sidekick Snapper Carr suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the
comic; he returned a year later (#77, Dec. 1969) only to be revealed as a traitor to the
League who had fallen in with a conservative movement which sought to stamp out
difference and propagated the creation of a homogenous and wholly average American
culture. O’Neil pushed against the Comics Code expectation that comics were primarily
for children and actively eliminated the sillier and campier qualities of the comics he
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worked on. The popular 1966 television version of Batman had essentially instituted
these ideas for most Americans, and it supplied a starting point for O’Neil and a number
of other artists and writers to begin a re-reformation of the genre. Batman got tougher,
darker, and started relying on his fists and detective skills again rather than an array of
goofy gadgets. The thugs Batman faces are depicted as shocked that they are facing a
dark knight detective instead of Adam West. In JLA #69 (Feb. 1969), a number of
henchmen discover that “[Batman] didn’t give out with no wisecrack as he punched [one
of their buddies]” and ask him “how come you got a rep of makin with the funnies?”
Batman responds by pummeling them and makes a few lame quips because they had
insisted that he “behave like a cornball crime fighter out of a comic mag” (10-11).
O’Neil, with the help of artist Dick Dillin, overhauled one of the JLA’s least
distinct characters, Green Arrow. The character, a wealthy masked vigilante without
powers, had essentially been a Batman with a bow, and he had been without any
discernible character traits of his own. In JLA #75 (Nov. 1969), O’Neil and Dillin
separated him from his fortune and gave him longer locks and a goatee that made him
closely resemble Errol Flynn from 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. Like the
legendary outlaw archer of Sherwood Forest, Green Arrow was cheated out of his fortune
and became a leftist, anti-establishment champion of the down-trodden.
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Figure 16. Cover, Green Lantern #77 by Neal Adams (April 1970)
In 1970, the sales figures for Green Lantern were flat-lining and O’Neil was
given the task of reinvigorating the title. He paired Green Lantern with his revision of
Green Arrow and, along with artist Neal Adams, produced a dozen of the most significant
comics in history. In the “hard traveling heroes saga” of Green Latern/Green Arrow
(GL/GA) the two spandex-clad heroes hit the road like Kerouac and Cassady or Simon
and Garfunkle in order to go looking for America. The comic was conscientiously
relevant, and it highlighted issues such as race, class, religion, and substance abuse with
shocking candor; Green Arrow’s former sidekick was even revealed as a heroin addict.
O’Neil’s inspiration for the comic was drawn from a provocative source; his background
had been in newspapers and as he has recalled in the introduction to an anthologized
edition on GL/GA:
I considered myself as much of a journalist as fiction writer. And there, in the
reporter-fabulist combination, was a glimmer: the “new journalists”—Wolfe,
Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Gene Marine, Hunter S. Thompson, these
men I admired tremendously—weren’t they combining fiction techniques with
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reporting? Could a comic book equivalent of the new journalism be possible?
Probably not. But something? Not fact, not current events, presented in panel art
rooted in the issues of the day?
The politics in GL/GA were contemporary, frank, and explicit, but perhaps its greatest
contribution to the genre was its addition of a new layer of dialectics. Superhero comics
had relied and often still rely on a fairly simplistic unilateral objectivism in their approach
to conflict resolution. Traditionally, the superhero stands alone or in the company of like-
minded partners and confronts individuals or situations which are simply understood to
be “evil.” Although partnered, the Ring Slinger and Emerald Archer were consistently at
each other’s throats. The characters were polarized; GL represented a strictly
conservative “law and order” world view, GA was an anti-authoritarian man of the
people, but both were still to be regarded as superheroes despite their radically different
ideologies. The former was a space cop who took his marching orders from a distant and
indifferent authority, and the later was a populist who refused to fall in line with customs
or laws simply because of their own self-espoused merits.
O’Neil’s comics presented political polemics in a pretty uneven manner, and he
used them as a platform to broadcast his own convictions, but he quickly discovered that
his views resonated with the progressively older readership of the newly emergent comic
book culture. Green Arrow was clearly O’Neil’s personal bullhorn and Green Lantern
was his perpetually stymied straw man, but it was the dialogue in itself that was more
significant than the chosen subject of the monthly discourse. Obviously, the
characterizations were meant to indicate the ideological opposition between the older,
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more conservative perspective and the left-leaning youth culture, but it seems that
O’Neil’s discursive social commentary extends to the superhero genre as well. Green
Lantern is a quintessential Silver Age character; Green Arrow injects a corrective to that
seemingly simpler era that both harkens back to the overt politics of the 1938 Superman
and anticipates the future evolution of the superhero narrative.
Although published in 1970-71, Green Lantern/Green Arrow was very much a
1960’s comic book. The world in which it is set is a much darker place than the Kennedy-
era “New Frontier” of the Silver Age, but despite its grittier view of American life, it
remained optimistic that righteousness would inevitably triumph by the force of its own
virtue. This attitude wouldn’t be carried into the next decade. Hunter S. Thompson may
have described it best in his epitaph for a meaningful America, Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas; the momentum of the late 60s were like “riding the crest of a high and beautiful
wave,” but as the country proceeded into the 70s, one could “almost see the high water
mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back” (68). The zeitgeist of
The Sixties had lost its traction within just a few years. The Vietnam War was a fiasco,
The President was a disgrace, inflation and unemployment soared, the flower children
wilted into decadence, America was violently awakened before the dream it shared with
Dr. King could come to fruition, and the superhero genre joined the country in the
overwhelming pessimism that dominated the 1970s.
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The Death of Gwen Stacy and the Birth of the Bronze Age
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that the Bronze Age of comics begins.
It could be said to coincide with the increase of the price of comics to twenty cents, or it
could be said to have begun with the relaxation of the Comics Code that allowed for the
publication of Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula and the return of the horror genre to
mainstream comics. For the superhero genre specifically, the Bronze-Age begins with a
tiny four letter word near the end of The Amazing Spider-Man #121. The cover of this
landmark issue promised that it was “not a trick, not an imaginary tale—but the most
startling unexpected turning point in this web-slinger’s entire life!” The cover showed the
faces of everyone in Peter Parker’s life and declares that “someone close to [Spider-Man]
is about to die!” This issue marks the return of The Green Goblin, the dark manifestation
of industrialist Norman Osborn’s split-personality and Spider-Man’s most dangerous foe.
The two have a particularly intense personal relationship; Osborn is the father of
Parker’s best friend and roommate, but he has often asserted a kind of surrogacy with
Parker, who he respects more than his own son, and he has tried to encourage Peter to
join him in his wicked ambitions. Like Parker, Osborn is a superpowered scientist, but he
is twisted by his selfishness and ego, and instead of assuming the burden of great
responsibility that must also come with his power, Osborn blames everyone but himself
for his own misfortunes. Most dangerously, Spider-Man and The Green Goblin know
each other’s secret identities. Prompted by financial stresses and his son going on another
LSD bender,32 Osborn loses control and reassumes the Green Goblin mantle. Targeting
32 Harry Osborn has fallen into use of the hallucinogen again after having a nearly fatal episode with it in
The Amazing Spider-Man, #96-98. Stan Lee and Gil Kane. New York: Marvel, May-July 1971. Print.
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his nemesis, he kidnaps Peter’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy and drags her unconscious to the
top of the George Washington Bridge. Spider-Man pursues him, the two engage in a
battle, and Gwen is knocked off the bridge. Desperately, Spider-Man shoots a web to stop
his love’s plummet, but instead of breaking her fall, he breaks her neck. With that one
noise effect depicted by a tiny SNAP, the direction of superhero comics was irreparably
altered. As author Gerry Conway explains in Comics Creators on Spider-Man:
That two part story seems to be a turning point in the history of comic books.
Before those events, we had comics in which heroes were heroes, everything
made sense and it was all for the higher good. In that story, we introduced
fatalism and despair into the comic universe. With the inadvertent, but probably
subconsciously intentional element of Spider-man’s complicity in Gwen’s death,
we presented a hero who was not only flawed, but actually may be responsible for
the death of his girlfriend. It’s a tremendous development. Uncle Ben died
because Peter didn’t use his power. Gwen dies as a consequence of Peter using his
power. The rules have changed. Suddenly we’re forced to look at heroes in a
different way. The good guys are as dangerous as the bad guys. After Gwen’s
death, superheroes are seen as fundamentally flawed—and that’s something that’s
been a part of our collective consciousness for about twenty-five years now. I
think that one story led inevitably to Watchmen, and to the nihilistic approach to
superheroes that was popular through most of the nineties. I wish that I could take
credit for this, but I can’t. Adding that ‘SNAP’ sound effect, at the moment
Spider-Man’s web caught Gwen, was a subconscious decision. I never thought
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about the ramifications when I wrote it, but—boy, a lot of other people sure have
since! (DeFalco, 47)
Figure 17. Page 19 from Amazing Spider-Man #121 by Gerry Conway and Gil Kane
(June 1973)
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Gwen Stacy’s death was certainly a dark turn, but what followed in the next issue
was even darker. Spider-Man hunts the Green Goblin down and beats him within an inch
of his life. In a last act of desperation, the villain uses a remote to command his glider to
charge Spider-Man from behind; the hero evades and the Green Goblin is impaled on his
own device. Seeing his enemy crumple dead at his feet, Spider-Man feels nothing but the
weight of existential absurdity. The death of his girlfriend and mortal foe are just a
“stupid, senseless accident” and because the events don’t carry a transcendent meaning,
“we live in vain.” Spider-Man thought “Seeing the Goblin die would make [him] feel
better about Gwen, [but] instead it just makes him feel empty…washed out…and maybe
just a little bit more alone” (Amazing Spider-Man #122, 19).
O’Neil had made superheroes overtly complicated again; Conway made their
absolute status as heroes an impossibility. Since the 70s, the content of superhero comic
books has been steadily ratcheting up in order to continue to shock an increasingly
desensitized audience. The legibility of the narrative has grown increasingly dependent
on not only foreknowledge of a character’s pasts but also a peripheral attention to every
other character’s past and present. Today, one cannot read comic books without being a
fully initiated comic book reader. Since the death of Gwen Stacy, the subject matter has
grown increasingly tailored toward adult readership; at four dollars for a typical monthly
issue, children have been more or less priced out of the market. If our heroes could
determine that the death of two major characters had ultimately been meaningless in
1973, then one shudders to think about what the comics say about life and death today.
Weekly, whole cities are reduced to rubble, planets are destroyed, and entire universes
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collapse around heroes who routinely die and are reborn with a numbing frequency, and
since the 2001 terrorist attacks, it seems like every Wednesday has become 9/11.
The Dark Ages
The Bronze Age saw the bright colors and simple virtues of Silver Age heroes
immersed in cities that had the look and feel of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. Heroes
maintained their heroic character despite finding themselves in cities overrun with
garbage, corruption, drugs, violent street crime, and racial tensions. They couldn’t battle
with these monsters for long without becoming monsters themselves. The innocence of
comics had been lost with the death of Gwen Stacy, and they would continue to darken
over the next decades. Although this shift mirrored the apparent decay of the social and
political climate of post-Vietnam America, the key factor in both the structural and
compositional changes to comics was a revolution in the way comics were bought and
sold. Prior to the late 70s, comics were treated like any other magazine by retailers; they
were displayed on spinning racks and could be returned to the distributor if unsold. The
“direct market” approach made it so that the comics were essentially sold to the retailer
upon delivery, which made many stores reluctant to carry them.
Direct marketing was responsible for the creation of specialty shops that catered
to the emergent comic book culture. A comic book shop is, for all intents and purposes,
the private collection of whoever owns the shop. Prior to the arrival of comic shops,
readers had to rely on whatever happened to be on the shelves of their local pharmacies
or convenience stores. Availability was irregular at best. With the advent of the comic
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book shop, readers found access to the abundance of mainstream materials and to
independent publications that would have been found to be too risky or risqué to retail on
traditional magazine racks. One cannot sufficiently stress the importance of comic book
shops in shaping the medium. Not only did readers, at least those fortunate enough to
have a shop in their town, find unprecedented access to the media, publishers now had
sites that concentrated and catered to a hardcore fan-base. Not needing to cast so wide a
net to reach an audience, publishers could market and tailor their wares to the wants of a
small and dedicated readership. The necessity of producing comics with general appeal
essentially disintegrated and adherence to the Comics Code actually became something
of a liability for publishers. For better or worse, the kids and the casual readers found
themselves outside the walls of the emergent comic book culture.
Reliable access for readers fostered a more protracted view of superhero narrative
for writers. In the 60’s, Comics had been composed in a self-reflective but essentially
self-contained fashion; the 70’s may have spread stories out over two or three
consecutive issues, but they seldom extended beyond that. Writers of the 80’s began to
compose continuous, soap-operatic sagas that stretched out for years. Whereas earlier
comics depended on stasis and repetition in order to make sense for intermittent readers,
the comics of this period relied on an ever-developing narrative to keep the material fresh
for their dedicated fans. Of the two major publishing companies, Marvel was particularly
effective at this type of sequential plotting. For example, Frank Miller imported his own
affections for noir and Wil Eisner’s The Spirit while revolutionizing Marvel’s “Man
without Fear” during the six years he periodically wrote and illustrated Daredevil. By
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treating the comic as a seamless series of events, Miller found opportunities to delve into
the character in a way that would have been impossible if he had been writing the story in
self-contained snippets. Daredevil became a hero that was burdened by his Catholicism,
haunted by his childhood, struggling to maintain his secret identity as an attorney, and
frequently wounded by relationships. In fact, the loves of Daredevil’s life would prove
more dangerous than most of the costumed criminals that he would combat on the
rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen. His ex, Karen Page, sold his secret identity for a bag of
heroin, and his college sweetheart, Elektra Natchios, became the world’s deadliest ninja
assassin.
Although Miller’s development of Daredevil was monumental, it was dwarfed by
what Chris Claremont accomplished with The Uncanny X-Men in the sixteen years
(1975-1991) that he scripted the comic. Claremont was voted the “fan favorite” author by
the Comics Buyers Guide on five separate occasions and is almost single handedly
responsible for turning what had been a tertiary title into Marvel’s top selling comic.
Claremont’s prose is almost excruciating purple by today’s standards, but it was exactly
this level of romantic attention to the depth and personal pain of each and every character
that made the comic what it was. Of all the characters that emerged during Claremont’s
tenure on Uncanny X-Men, the break-out star of the comic was a 5’5” Canadian super-
soldier codenamed Wolverine. First appearing in The Incredible Hulk #181,“This gaudily
garbed gentleman intrudes upon the scene, claws bared, teeth clenched, his face awash
with almost feral fury.”
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Figure 18. Cover, Hulk #181 by Herb Trimpe (November 1974)
Wolverine was added to the X-Men’s roster during a major revision to the comic
in 1975. The Uncanny X-Men had essentially stalled in the early 70s and Marvel was
reprinting the earlier adventures of their less than popular team rather than producing new
material. Plotted and scripted by Len Wein and penciled by Dave Cockrum, Giant Size X-
Men #1 completely revitalized the comic by trading many of the team’s original members
for an all new and international cast. The original team had consisted of five gawky white
teens; the new incarnation included a weather wielding African goddess, a Soviet man of
steel, a swashbuckling German with the appearance of a demon, and the rugged Canadian
with metal claws and an equally dangerous attitude. Other characters introduced in Giant
Size X-Men #1 (Banshee, Sunfire, and Thunderbird) didn’t enjoy the popularity of the
others and quickly fell by the wayside.
The new X-Men resurrected the failing title and its popularity soared. Although
Claremont’s deftness as the comic’s writer certainly deserves the lion’s share of the
credit, the success of The Uncanny X-Men can be directly attributed to the inclusion of
Wolverine, who tapped into the zeitgeist of the late 70’s and early 80’s. The character’s
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back story was chronicled in a 2001 mini-series, Wolverine: The Origin, and his name
was revealed as James Howlett, but he was simply known as Logan for the first 27 years
that he was featured in comics. His name was ironic as one of his chief characteristics is
his short stature and Logan is the name of Canada’s tallest peak. Small, hairy, and as
ferocious as his animal namesake, Wolverine is, as Claremont reminds his readers ad
infinitum, “the best he is at what he does, and what he does best isn’t very nice.”
Violence has always been an integral feature of superheroism, but it was almost always
limited to bloodless fisticuffs; Wolverine’s augmentations, his claws, signify his lethality.
He was developed to be a weapon for the Canadian military; his mutant powers include
heightened senses and rapid healing and the latter is what enabled his government to graft
an unbreakable metal to his bones. Unlike other superheroes, Wolverine can easily maim
or kill his opponents and he has the disposition to do it.
Unlike America after the Second World War, there was a great deal of uncertainty
regarding the moral stature of the nation in the post-Vietnam era. Were we still the good
guys if we found ourselves doing bad things? This question spirals into an irreconcilable
aporia; any definite answer collapses into ambiguity. Popular culture, which had often
depended on a simply defined conflict between the forces of good and evil, suddenly
found itself straining to reconcile itself with a structure of feeling that saw the basic and
traditional moral polarity as confused, irrelevant, or even non-existent. Violent anti-
heroes were on the rise in American cinema during the 70’s and early 80’s. Characters
like Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry), Paul Kersey (Death Wish), and Travis Bickle (Taxi
Driver) dominated the public’s imagination, and it was only a matter of time before anti-
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heroes would find their way out of the movies and into comics. In fact, it’s fair to say that
Wolverine was modeled after Clint Eastwood; he even wears a cowboy hat and smokes
the same thin cigarillos that Eastwood made famous in Sergio Leone’s “Man with No
Name” westerns.
Wolverine would be followed by dozens of similarly murderous protagonists that
a decade earlier would have been impossible to identify as heroes. The Punisher, who
first appeared at about the same time as Wolverine in Amazing Spider-Man # 129, was a
character who used torture and homicide as his principal weapons in his personal war on
crime. A Vietnam vet who witnessed his own family’s accidental deaths in the crossfire
of a gangland shootout, Punisher was originally cast as a villain; he was used as a dark
reflection of the basic tenets of superheroic vigilantism, and became a foil for characters
like Spider-Man and Daredevil. Although designed as an anti-exemplary figure, Punisher
found great popularity with readers and was morphed into a hero in his own right, albeit
an extremely violent and possibly psychopathic one; he was given his own five issue
mini-series in 1986 and a monthly comic in 1987.
Characters like Wolverine and Punisher challenged fundamental notions of
heroism in a way that shook the entire genre. Failing to reconcile a basic and meaningful
definition for heroism, comic book writers in the 1980s increasingly turned to
deconstruction to further problematize and confound the genre. Within mainstream
continuities, the best example can be found in a 12 issue miniseries titled Squadron
Supreme. The Squadron was a super-team that existed in a separate but parallel universe
within Marvel’s continuity. The team was intentionally similar to DC’s JLA and included
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members that clearly signified figures like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.
They were, in a sense, an allegory for another publisher’s fiction. The Squadron had
occasionally breached the gap between universes and made appearances in comics like
The Avengers and Defenders where they were used as foils for Marvel’s super-teams, but
they never really took on a life of their own until Mark Gruenwald began his own
exploration of the team in 1985.
Figure 19. Cover, Squadron Supreme #1 by Bob Hall (September 1985)
Gruenwald’s miniseries picks up after the Squadron, who in a typically comic
book fashion, had been mind-controlled by a villain called Over-Mind. As a result of
their enslavement, the political and economic structures of the world are left in shambles.
Feeling a sense of responsibility, the members of the Squadron Supreme saw an
opportunity to entirely reshape the social order and to install themselves at its head. Their
intention was no less than the establishment of a Utopia, but ultimately they only deliver
the sort of totalitarian state that any superhero worth his or her tights should consider
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anathema. Most distressing is their implementation of a Clockwork Orange style
rehabilitation program that they use to rewrite the personalities and thought processes of
criminals; in order to foster public safety, they obliterate personal freedom.
On its own, Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme is a remarkable comic, but its
innovation and importance have been virtually eclipsed by Watchmen, which appeared a
year later. Moore’s comic is a much grittier product than Gruenwald’s and is, in fact,
much closer to noir detective fiction than to the traditional superhero narrative. Creators
and their audience too frequently equate darkness with depth, sophistication, and quality
in art. In Squadron Supreme, a hero uses the team’s rehabilitation device to compel a
colleague to love him; in Watchmen, one hero rapes another. Politics, violence, and
sexuality had always been implicit in comics, but as they headed into the second half of
the 80s, these traits became more and more explicit. Killers became heroes, heroes
became depraved, and the audience, mostly young adult males, ate it up.
Watchmen received a good deal of positive attention; twenty-five years later, it is
frequently cited as the best comic ever written, and, as noted earlier, it usually serves as
the centerpiece in criticism of the genre. Mainly because direct marketing found its niche,
there was a major shift in the quality of the writing and illustration of comics which
reached its pinnacle in the mid 80s. Comics no longer had to appeal to general audiences,
and because the target audience was largely composed of adults and young adults that
were dedicated to the medium, the texts could explore increasingly adult themes and
could expect the audience to follow tales over long expanses of time and into several
publications within the same continuity. Comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight
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Returns, which both emerged in the same year, attracted media and critical attention
outside of the confines of comic book shops. The trade paperback compilation of The
Dark Knight Returns was the first comic book to earn a place on the New York Times’
bestseller list and the 1989 film Batman, which was stylistically influenced by TDKR,
broke all box office records. Comic book producers enjoyed some things they hadn’t
really seen since World War Two: profitability and popularity.
The attention superheroes garnered in the late 80’s brought an entirely new type
of consumer into comic shops; speculators, who were not necessarily readers, saw comics
as a potential investment opportunity. Certain comics, particularly Action Comics #1 and
Detective Comics #27, were fetching record breaking prices at auction, and speculators
believed that the contemporary comics that they purchased would, given time, accrue
similarly auspicious values. This did not pan out. A nearly pristine copy of Action Comics
#1 may be valued at just under a half million dollars, but its value is not simply a matter
of the comic containing the first appearance of Superman or because the comic is seventy
years old. Both of these are, of course, factors in the pricing, but its value really comes
from its scarcity; there are less than fifty graded copies of Action Comics #1 in existence.
At the time Superman first appeared, comics were considered a disposable commodity
and the war effort demanded that paper be recycled; few copies were held onto and even
fewer were preserved in their original condition.
The speculators’ failure to grasp the basic relationship between supply and
demand would lead to the production of a glut of materials that specifically catered to
them. Although the moniker “Dark Ages” usually refers to the increase of graphic
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violence and sexual content in comic books, it is also indicative of a level of aggressive
commercialism that can only be described as crass. To capitalize on the speculation
boom, comic book companies began tailoring and marketing products for their future
collectability. Of course, any object designated as a “collector’s item” is virtually
guaranteed to never become one; the production runs of such items always exceed the
demand for them.
Speculators wanted to find comics that would appreciate over time; it’s pretty to
think that one could put one’s kid through college by purchasing a one dollar comic and
holding onto it for a few decades, but this just wasn’t the case. In fact, many of the
comics purchased during the speculation boom are actually worth less today than their
original cover price. The publishers did everything in their power to foster the false
reality of the collector’s market. Special issues and instant “collector’s issues” abounded
in the early 90’s; any printing technique that would set an issue apart was employed.
Comics were issued with embossed covers, metallic inks, and holograms. Some comics
were sold inside sealed plastic bags in order to preserve their fictitious potential worth
and to guarantee that some collectors would purchase two copies. Other comics hit the
stands with alternate covers; X-Men #1, published in 1991, appeared with four different
covers that came together as a single panel and with a fifth cover that folded out to reveal
the whole image on one seamless sheet. In addition to the collect ‘em all covers, X-Men
#1 also exhibits another trait shared with comics of this period. After Frank Miller’s
ascension to relative celebrity status, a handful of creators were promoted and admired
with greater enthusiasm than the comics they created. Jim Lee became an instant fan
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favorite from the moment he began working for Marvel in 1986, and X-Men, not to be
confused with Uncanny X-Men which Lee was already illustrating, seems to be
specifically created to showcase his talents. These strategies combined to help make the
first issue of X-Men the biggest selling comic book in history.
Figure 20. Cover, X-Men #1E by Jim Lee (October 1981)
X-Men did not reboot or supplant the narrative found in Uncanny X-Men; it added
another layer to the already existing adventures of Marvel’s merry band of mutants. It
wasn’t even the first spin-off. By the time X-Men appeared there were already several
titles working in concert to form the continuity of Marvel’s most popular super-team. In
order to follow the narrative of one X-Men comic, readers found that they needed to
purchase an additional half dozen comics. This narrative structure proved lucrative for
the publishers, and completed the historical transformation of how readers experience
superhero comics. Comics had originally been composed as non-sequential and self
contained stories; in the 60s and 70s comics occasionally referenced previously appearing
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stories in order to supplement the comic with historical information and context. From
the mid 80s onward, the intersections between the myriad of monthly publications would
become the genre’s key feature.
Event Horizon
Figure 21. Cover, Marvel Super Heroes: Secret Wars #1 by Michael Zeck (May 1984).
Marvel introduced its readership to the cross-over event with Marvel Superheroes
Secret Wars (1984). This twelve-issue story lifted the most popular heroes from the pages
of The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, and The Uncanny X-Men and transported them,
along with an equal amount of super-villains, to an artificial “Battle World” in order for a
cosmic being called “The Beyonder” to learn whether good or evil is ultimately superior.
Unlike more contemporary cross-over events, the year’s worth of comics that makes up
Secret Wars is rather clumsily integrated into Marvel’s continuity; it simply occurs in
between the events chronicled in two consecutive monthly installments of the comics
from which it borrows its cast. The X-Men, for example, see a mysterious portal in
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Central Park and enter it on the last page of The Uncanny X-Men #180 (April 1984) and
suddenly appear in the sky over Tokyo on the first page of issue #181 (May 1984). What
unfolded between these two issues is told over the next twelve months in the mini-series
Secret Wars. The insertion of the event into continuity was somewhat primitive by
today’s standards, but at the time, Secret Wars was a truly remarkable event and it
resulted in at least one significant consequence: Spider-Man returned to Earth in The
Amazing Spider-Man #252 and was wearing the black symbiotic costume that would
eventually become one of his arch-villains, Venom.
The commercial success of Secret Wars led both Marvel and DC to routinely
launch large-scale cross-over events; Marvel perfected the form as a way to orchestrate
its numerous X-Men titles and spin-offs. At any given moment, Charles Xavier’s mutant
students can be found in a half dozen separate X-titles (The Uncanny X-Men, X-Men,
Wolverine, The New Mutants, X-Factor, and X-Force, to name a few) and the editors at
Marvel would bring them together to battle a common threat to their fellow “homo
sapiens superior” on a semi-annual basis.33 X-Men cross-over events (X-Overs) were
highly anticipated and usually included a pivotal moment in the narrative of the
characters involved. At the conclusion of the event the various players would return,
albeit altered by their experiences, to their regular monthly publications.
33 Homo Sapien Superior is a term used in Marvel comics to designate the mutations that represent the next
stage in human evolution that is used in the Marvel Universe.
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Figure 22. Cover, Uncanny X-Men #210 by John Romita, Jr. (October 1986).
In 1986 Marvel ushered in the first of a long string of X-Over events with The
Mutant Massacre (1986). This legendary sequence of comics examined every horrific
detail of a tactical genocide as it was being perpetrated against a large population of
mutant squatters, “Morlocks,” that dwelled together in the labyrinth of sewers and
subway tunnels beneath New York City. Although seldom acknowledged as such, this
story-arc was a major contributor to the sea change within the tenor of superhero comics
that is often attributed to Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. Prior to The Mutant
Massacre, superhero comics reserved death as the ultimate dramatic device; it was only
used in rare and paramount circumstances. The Mutant Massacre began in Uncanny X-
Men #210 (Oct. 1986) with a frightened mutant named Tommy running for her life
through an eerie train depot; thinking she has eluded her anonymous pursuers, she
inadvertently leads them back to the secret entrance to her home in the tunnels. Tommy is
brutally murdered on her doorstep, but she is only the first of hundreds to die at the hands
of the cadre of mutant mercenaries called The Marauders. The brutal civilian casualties
and break-neck pace of The Mutant Massacre truly set it apart from previous events like
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Secret Wars which was filled with epic, but ultimately inconsequential battles between
superheroes and villains. One expects to see The Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom give each
other a sound but cartoonishly harmless beating in one issue after another, but the wanton
and indiscriminant slaughter of men, women, and children found in The Mutant Massacre
marked a shocking departure from the traditional superhero formula. The violence
perpetrated against the Morlock population was met with an equal ferocity by the heroes
who descended into the tunnels to protect them. In order to subdue the onslaught, X-Men
resorted to killing most of the Marauders as they encountered them.
The unusual level of violence itself would be enough to draw critical attention to
The Mutant Massacre, but the manner by which the story unfolds is what makes it a
benchmark for the history of comics. The X-Over event spanned the pages of Uncanny X-
Men #210-213, X-Factor #9-11, The New Mutants #46, Thor #373-374, and Power Pack
#27. The inclusion of Thor and Power Pack is conspicuous and seems to be designed to
bolster the lackluster sales of the then unpopular titles rather than to make a substantive
contribution to the narrative’s design. The story focuses on the carnage itself and how
two distinct superhero teams deal with it separately. Rather than becoming a traditional
“team-up” whereby usually unaffiliated groups or individuals unite against a common
obstacle, the two major teams responding to the massacre, the X-Men and X-Factor (a
splinter group that was composed of the original five X-Men), are virtually unaware of
each other’s presence. Like the recurrent inclusion of Molly Bloom’s charitable hand in
the “Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses, an anchor event is inserted into the separate
storylines in order to show that the events in individual comics are synchronous with each
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other. In Uncanny X-Men #210, Magneto, an arch-villain who was serving as the
headmaster of the Xavier institute at the time, sees X-Factor amidst a crowd. Magneto
comments to himself about the chance encounter and the members of X-Factor talk to
one another about seeing him. This fleeting moment is then played out again in a series of
nearly identical panels in X-Factor #9. By having the exact moment occur in both issues,
the reader can understand the simultaneity of the events depicted in the two separate
titles. Although the scale is greatly magnified, it is through the inclusion of similarly
designed anchor points within the narrative that enable the editors and storytellers at
Marvel to chronologically knit together much larger and more ambitious cross-over
events like Civil War.
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Figure 23. Panels from Uncanny X-Men #210 by John Romita, Jr. (October 1986).
Figure 24. Panels from X-Factor #9 by Mark Silvestri (October 1986).
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After the action of an X-Over event subsided, the heroes would return to their
own titles to lick their wounds and brace themselves for the next event, which would
usually begin twelve months later. Over the last two decades, the gap between cross-over
events consistently shrank and now both of the major publishers seem to be aiming for an
accelerated state of perpetual special event. Presently, both DC and Marvel are using
identical strategies. Unlike the X-Over events of the mid-1980’s which tied together a
small but popular portion of the Marvel Universe, the new approach to cross-over
narrative creates an umbrella premise under which the entirety of the publishers’ products
operate simultaneously and build toward the next event even as they seek to reconcile the
central crisis of the present one. In order to organize such a vast undertaking, a mini-
series is sometimes crafted to serve as a self-contained centerpiece and it includes all of
the most basic elements and most vital incidents within the larger narrative. Although the
mini-series serves as the crux on which the larger narrative hangs, it can only provide the
simplest understanding of the immensely large and significantly more complex text,
which is the event in its entirety.
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CHAPTER 3: A CASE STUDY IN CIVIL WAR
In 2006, Marvel Comics began its largest and most successful cross-over event to
date. Although the primary arc of the narrative is contained within a seven-issue mini-
series written by Mark Millar and illustrated by Steve McNiven, the complete story spans
an entire year’s worth of Marvel’s publications. As seen on the next page, nearly one-
hundred comic books contribute to the telling of this massive and intricate tale.
Figure 25. Cover, Civil War #1 by Steve McNiven (July 2006).
In brief, Civil War is a story about an internal conflict that divides Marvel’s
superhero community. As a result of a battle between an amateurish group of heroes and
a handful of virtually unknown villains, an explosion destroys a school in suburban
Stamford, Connecticut. A storm of anti-superhero sentiment erupts, and a piece of
legislation called the Superhuman Registration Act is introduced that requires all
superpowered individuals to immediately reveal their secret identities to the government
and become fully incorporated agents of the state. Two camps quickly emerge. Captain
America is driven underground and leads a resistance group against the heroes who align
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themselves with the new law and its figurehead, Iron Man. After a good deal of
superheroic soul searching and a handful of spectacular fights between opposing sides,
the story culminates in a final battle in Times Square. Although the resistance forces are
about to deliver their coup de grace, Captain America orders his allies to stand-down, he
unmasks, and turns himself over to custody. Cap sees that his violent resistance to the law
is a de facto endorsement of its necessity.
Foundation
The structure of the Civil War event is typical of what one finds in superhero
comic books today. For the last several years both Marvel and DC have anchored
virtually their entire line of publications to a single premise and used all of their
publications to explore that premise from a myriad of perspectives. This polyphonic
approach to storytelling can be argued as being representative of the very pinnacle of
collaborative composition, but it is largely the product of a wickedly effective marketing
strategy rather than from an impetus to push the boundaries of narrative. Comic book
readers are, by and large, compulsive in their desire to complete their collections and
knowledge on the topic. By tying an otherwise unpopular title into an event, the
publishers are virtually assured a significant boost to that title’s sales.
A seven-issue mini-series, penned by Mark Millar and penciled by Steve McNiven, is at
the heart of nearly the entirety of Marvel Comics’ massive cross-over event, Civil War.
Although his name doesn’t appear on the cover, one could argue that the most important
person on the project was Tom Brevoort, who was not only tasked with editorship of the
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mini-series but was also responsible for corralling dozens of additional writers and artists
that produced the scores of comics that directly tied into it and fleshed out its details. The
following list of comics are those that directly tie into the Civil War event, but the list
grows geometrically when one considers the volumes of material that feed into and
inform this event, which, of course, is only one chapter in story that has been
continuously unfolding for decades.
Febuary 2006
Amazing Spider-Man #529
March
Amazing Spider-Man #530
Fantastic Four #536
New Avengers: Illuminati Special
April
Amazing Spider-Man #531
Civil War Opening Shot Sketchbook
Fantastic Four #537
May
Civil War #1
Marvel Spotlight: Millar/McNiven
Amazing Spider-Man #532
She-Hulk #8
Wolverine #42
June
Civil War #2
Civil War Front Line #1
Civil War Front Line #2
Amazing Spider-Man #533
Fantastic Four #538
New Avengers #21
Thunderbolts #103
Wolverine #43
X-Factor #8
July
Civil War #3
Civil War Front Line #3
Civil War Front Line #4
Civil War: X-Men #1
Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways #1
Amazing Spider-Man #534
Black Panther #18
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Cable & Deadpool #30
Fantastic Four #539
New Avengers #22
Thunderbolts #104
Wolverine #44
X-Factor #9
August
Civil War Front Line #5
Civil War: X-Men #2
Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways #2
Cable & Deadpool #31
Heroes for Hire #1
Ms. Marvel #6
New Avengers #23
Thunderbolts #105
Wolverine #45
September
Civil War #4
Civil War Files
Civil War Front Line #6
Civil War: X-Men #3
Civil War: Young Avengers and Runaways #3
Amazing Spider-Man #535
Cable & Deadpool #32
Captain America #22
Fantastic Four #540
Heroes for Hire #2
Ms. Marvel #7
New Avengers #24
Wolverine #46
October
Civil War: Choosing Sides (One-Shot)
Civil War Front Line #7
Civil War: X-Men #4
Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways #4
Captain America #23
Heroes for Hire #3
Iron Man #13
Ms. Marvel #8
New Avengers #25
Wolverine #4
November
Civil War #5
Civil War Front Line #8
Amazing Spider-Man #536
Captain America #24
Fantastic Four #541
Iron Man #14
Moon Knight #7
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Punisher: War Journal #1
Wolverine #48
December
Civil War #6
Civil War Front Line #9
Black Panther #23
Civil War: War Crimes (One-Shot)
Iron Man/Captain America Special
Moon Knight #8
Punisher: War Journal #2
Winter Soldier: Winter Kills (One-Shot)
January 2007
Civil War #7
Amazing Spider-Man #537
Amazing Spider-Man #538
Black Panther #24
Blade #5
Civil War Front Line #10
Fantastic Four #542
Fantastic Four #543
Moon Knight #9
Punisher: War Journal #3
February
Civil War Front Line #11
Civil War: Battle Damage Report
Black Panther #2
The first thing one notices when he or she picks up a copy of Civil War is the
quality of the illustrations on the cover and on the pages within. McNiven’s drawings,
vibrantly colored by Morry Hollowell, leap from the page and set the tone for the tale.
The style McNiven employs could be called hyper-realistic cartooning; he doesn't attempt
to approach the photorealism associated with illustrators like Alex Ross, and yet his
depictions of the characters, particularly their faces, makes them seem plausible within
the relative implausibility of the narrative. One could say that his renderings feel real
given the unreality of the context in which they are presented. Of course, both male and
female bodies are grossly embellished and hyper-sexualized, but McNiven’s rapt
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attention to even the most mundane background details and textures encourages the
reader to completely suspend his or her disbelief in regards to the uber-idealized
anatomy. Although a tremendous amount of detail is poured into a single panel, it never
seems cluttered; McNiven’s lines are particularly crisp, objects are distinct and
unblended, and his work is completely devoid of the overtly expressionistic tendencies
that dominated comics throughout the 1990's.
McNiven’s particular brand of hyper-realism is perfectly paired with the type of
stories that readers have come to expect from the mini-series’ author, Mark Millar. Millar
had worked on a number of stories for the legendary British comic 2000 A.D. and co-
wrote a few issues of Swamp Thing with his mentor Grant Morrison before completely
taking over the writing of the title himself. Millar eventually found his own signature
voice and a good deal of much deserved recognition when replacing comics wunderkind
Warren Ellis for the thirteenth issue of The Authority. Published under DC’s Wildstorm
imprint, which offers a separate continuity in which heroes are defined by significantly
more controversial and adult characteristics than one would find in more mainstream
comics, The Authority features outrageously graphic violence and explicit sexuality. One
hero, The Doctor, is completely crippled by his addiction to drugs and two others, Apollo
and The Midnighter, who are clearly meant to be representative of Superman and
Batman, are in a committed homosexual relationship. Although Warren Ellis created each
of the members of The Authority and gave each of them the complicated adult traits that
made them compelling to readers, it was Millar who introduced a political dimension and
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all but abolished Ellis’ subtle meta-commentary and replaced it with obvious parodies of
other superhero texts.
Figure 26. Cover, Authority #13 by Frank Quitely (May 2000)
The tone and themes that dominate Millar’s writing are established on the very
first page of the first issue of his run on The Authority; he posits a remarkably simple yet
eminently complex question: “Why do super-people never go after the real bastards?”
(The Authority #13). As discussed earlier, politics and social commentary are always
implicit in superhero comics; Millar tends to make those qualities overt. The Authority,
the name of the team the comic centers on, decides to become a proactive force for social
change instead of simply reacting to alien invasions and would-be world conquerors.
Their logic is that if they are to continue to risk their own lives time after time to save the
world then it should be a world worth saving. To this end, Millar has the team use their
powers with maximum lethality to topple an unnamed Southeast Asian government in
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order to halt genocide. They take it upon themselves to enter a country, kill its top
government officials, and deposit its dictator into the hands of an emaciated and machete-
wielding mob.
Millar gained a good deal of notoriety recasting the traditional notion of super
teams as paramilitary organizations that zealously assert a counter-establishment position
in the face of “real world” political entanglements. Because of this he was the perfect
choice to take the lead on a number of Marvel’s Ultimate titles. The Ultimate comics, like
Wildstorm’s, took place in a self-contained continuity and were Marvel’s way of
rebooting their core characters for the new century in a way that wouldn’t have any effect
on their long-standing continuity. The point was to attract new readers that may not be
familiar with the forty years of textual baggage that most of Marvel’s characters carried
with them and to illustrate what the characters would be like if they came into being in
the new millennium. For example, Peter Parker could once again be fifteen years old, but
instead of being a freelance photographer he would, rather cleverly, be The Daily Bugle’s
web designer. Millar was given reign over Ultimate X-Men in which the key characters
from the original series returned to their beginnings as angst-ridden and sexually-charged
mutant teenagers in a world filled with terrorists and clandestine military branches in
which rival ideological factions compete to secure a place in the future.
Because of his popular success on Ultimate X-Men, Millar was asked to develop
The Ultimates, which updated “The Earth’s Mightiest Superheroes,” The Avengers, with
a similar treatment. The Ultimates was littered with fairly superficial attempts to update
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the story; a liberal sprinkling of celebrity names, pop-culture references and action
sequences appropriated in their entirety from The Matrix and Saving Private Ryan all
contributed to the sense that the tale was unfolding in the “here and now” of 2002, but
unfortunately many of these same details have left the narrative irrecoverably mired in
the “there and then.” Despite the instantly dated references throughout The Ultimates,
two qualities Millar embedded within the text make it a perfect bridge to what he would
later do in Civil War. In an attempt to weave a more adult-oriented and believable
superhero tale, Millar spends a great deal of effort developing nuanced personalities and
detailed rationales for each of the characters, many of whose mainstream Marvel
counterparts will be principal figures in Civil War. Secondly, Millar injects his signature
sense of contemporary politics into The Ultimates and crafts a decidedly Bush-era comic.
In the original Stan Lee and Jack Kirby story, as told in The Avengers #1, the team is
“brought together by a strange quirk of fate” (22). Millar’s version treats the heroes as
members of a state and corporate-sponsored emergency response team; essentially they
are a costumed branch of the Department of Homeland Security. Despite being situated in
a portrayal of the “real” twenty-first century, the comic offers commentary that can be a
bit vague and might even contradict itself in its conclusion. Although Millar, a Scotsman,
clearly illustrates his distaste for George W. Bush and portrays the former President as a
simpleton, the comic ultimately serves as a tacit justification for his national security
policies. The Ultimates is at its most interesting when the team faces no impending
threats. For the bulk of the comic’s initial thirteen-issue run, The Ultimates are an army
without an enemy, having no one to fight except each other, personal demons,
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bureaucratic red tape, and the ever-swinging pendulum of public opinion. As an anti-
terror initiative, The Ultimates come across as a superpowered publicity stunt with a
bloated multi-billion-dollar budget until Millar finally gives them their raison d'être in the
form of a classically Silver Age “other-as-enemy” alien invasion scenario. Millar
illustrates that the threats the team was established to face are in fact a very real, clear and
present danger. From that point forward, the comic quickly devolves into simpleminded
butt-kicking, distasteful homophobic humor, and cliché anti-French sentiment.
Registering Mark Millar
Raising issues such as the relative importance of privacy in relation to a sense of
public security, amplified governmental authority, and extra-judicial detention, Civil War
is a decidedly post-9/11 comic book. Superhero comic books have engaged the idea of
registration or outright bans on masked vigilantism on several occasions; the premise has
been at the center of such diverse texts as Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Disney/Pixar’s
The Incredibles. Millar, however, adds a new dimension to this familiar plot by
introducing the idea of conscription. Instead of simply outlawing superheroic activities,
the government seeks to incorporate the heroes and put them on the payroll of the
international espionage/security agency, S.H.E.I.L.D.; heroes that don’t “volunteer” for
service are subject to arrest and indefinite detention in an extra-dimensional prison.
Albeit severe, the government’s plan seems like a rational reaction to the disaster
at Stamford. Unfortunately, it is exactly the apparent rationality of the premise that locks
the narrative of Civil War into its key logical conundrum. She-Hulk articulates the
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quandary best when she posits the question: “Will we still technically be superheroes
after all of this” (Civil War #2, 4)? The short answer is no. As discussed earlier, the figure
of the superhero occupies a counter-establishment position in the public imagination; if
deputized or otherwise fully incorporated into the state apparatus, a superhero loses his or
her most vital and meaningful characteristic and, therefore, ceases to be what he or she
was. The superhero genre springs from fantasy; if in reality, a man dedicated his life and
fortune to dressing as a flying rodent and throttling the poor and the mentally ill, then the
public would react (one would hope) with significantly more horror than adulation.
Fantasy differs from desire in that the fantasized object is, in reality, ultimately unwanted.
It is by injecting realism into the superhero fantasy that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
succeeded in producing Watchmen, which can be said to have deconstructed the entire
genre. In Watchmen, heroes are shown to be sociopaths, megalomaniacs, sexual deviants,
and/or pitiable clowns; “superhero” becomes something of a dirty word in this context.
As reality seeps into the fantasy, the fantasized object becomes less and less appealing
and finally it becomes repellent.
Of course, Watchmen is a nihilistic endeavor; Moore sought no less than the
complete obliteration of the genre, and it’s difficult to argue that he didn’t succeed on
some level. Millar, on the other hand, wants to inject a degree of realism while preserving
the structure of a more mainstream superhero narrative. Millar’s goal with Civil War is to
produce an amazingly entertaining comic event and he succeeds magnificently, but the
intrinsic political dimension of the genre may actually wrest the narrative free from his
authorial intentions. This is further complicated by the involvement of several writers
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working on the tie-in books who clearly don’t share his position on the central debate of
the comic or the real-world politics that it implies.
Introducing Millar’s intentions for the comic is highly problematic and he may
not be an entirely reliable source. He frequently foregrounds his own political positions in
interviews in order to establish a particular ethos for his work and opinions, but those
positions are relative to the purpose of his commentaries. In his introduction to the 2003
collection of The Punisher, Millar frames himself as a “reasonably intelligent liberal
writer with a passionate belief in gun control and a serious aversion to the death penalty”
in order to imply that even a person of that political persuasion can appreciate the black
humor and over-the-top gun violence that Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon bring to their
rendition of The Punisher, a machine-gun-toting and mass-murdering vigilante. In order
to diffuse the polemics of Civil War, Millar decides to again offer a snapshot of his own
politics to show, as he claims to believe, that “people are more complex than you think”
and that “no one person can really be described as a liberal or a conservative.” To this
end, he claims that “[he’s] a liberal but [that he] believe[s] in the death penalty on
occasions” (Civil War: The Script Book, 92). His serious aversion to the death penalty
reverses and becomes an endorsement of it in order to promote different products.
Most of the quotes one can gather from Millar come directly from interviews that
Marvel stages in its own self-flattering publication, Marvel Spotlight. Another Marvel
publication, Civil War: The Script Book, provides the raw dialogue and textual
descriptors used to produce the illustrations and contains DVD-style commentary from
Joe Quesdada (Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief), Tom Breevort (Editor for Civil War), and Mark
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Millar. The script-book commentaries impose a singular “correct” reading of the text by
emphasizing Millar’s objective for the project; it also deliberately seeks to mute the
obvious political allegory contained in the story and to buttress reader support for the pro-
registration position and particularly for its figurehead, Iron Man. Marvel’s first and
foremost concern is, as it should be, to sell comics and related products; the content of the
interviews and the script-book commentaries that they produce certainly wouldn’t say
anything to undermine their own self interest or potential for future profits. As with most
producers of popular commodities, Marvel recognizes the benefits in attempting to de-
politicize their products; it simply doesn’t make good business sense to deliberately
alienate a significant portion of their audience who may not be personally aligned with
whatever specific ideology the company chooses to promote. Because the pro-registration
heroes ultimately win Civil War and their initiatives and policies will shape the
atmosphere of the entire Marvel universe as it moves forward from the event, it becomes
imperative for Marvel to make the new climate palatable enough to retain its readership.
Also, Paramount Pictures’ film adaptation of Iron Man (2008) was already well into
production as Civil War found its way into comic shops, and it definitely wouldn’t
behoove Marvel to vilify the main character of an upcoming blockbuster cash cow.
Reading Millar’s statements of intention can be slightly disheartening; it’s not
unlike discovering that if he had had his druthers Steven Spielberg would have relied
much more heavily on that silly looking, rubber and mechanical shark in Jaws instead of
having to develop the ingenious and greatly more suspenseful strategies of implying the
presence of the shark without actually showing it. Ultimately, it shouldn’t detract from an
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appreciation of the final product, but it does strike one as odd when the object that one
admires stands in stark contrast to the object that its creator had intended to deliver. In
interviews, Millar strongly endorses the pro-registration side of Civil War’s central
debate and claims that:
What’s funny when you read the main book is that it’s pretty much Tony’s side
that gets the better rep all the way through. A lot of the tie-ins were interesting
because the other writers chose to go against registration, but I don’t believe for a
second people would feel that way in the real world. Would you really want these
guys to be unlicensed? Vigilantes don’t have superpowers and they are outlawed.
Superheroes would be a nightmare. I’d be leading the march down to Washington
D.C. for the sentinels to crush the bastards….So I was backing Tony all the way
(Civil War: The Script Book, 6)
In addition to highlighting the gap between fantasy and desire, Millar brings up a
significant observation. There were dozens of writers and artists producing separate
stories that filled in and fleshed out the larger comics’ event. When read in concert with
Millar’s Civil War mini-series, the comic books that position themselves as anti-
registration and vastly outnumber their counterparts could be said to potentially color the
audience’s reading of the larger text and lock them into one side of the debate. Tom
Breevort echoes this observation and claims that:
In all honesty, I don’t think that Tony (Iron Man) comes across as especially evil
in the main Civil War book—I think that many of the people who feel he’s
coming off that way are those who were reading the assorted tie-ins. But this was
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the compromise I made, good or bad—to let each writer try to address the issues
of Civil War in their own way, telling the truth as they saw it. I think that, overall,
the handling of Tony Stark is reasonably balanced, but especially because we
started out with primarily anti-reg focused tie-in issues, opinions were set early on
that provided difficult to shake off in the long term. So, knowing that now, I
might have tried harder to shuffle some of the tie-ins around more, and I might
have tasked some of the tie-in writers to perhaps rein in their depiction of Tony a
bit (Civil War: The Script Book, 4)
Many of the tie-ins, particularly The New Avengers, Front-Line, and The Amazing
Spider-Man, clearly propagandize the anti-registration side of the debate and they
ultimately vilify Tony Stark. Millar’s work on the central mini-series, if we are to accept
his intentions, should appear as a corrective counterforce to the numerous opposing
narratives, but his argument is completely overwritten by the positions held by his
colleagues and by the New Deal politics that define the genre. This isn’t indicative of a
lack of talent on Millar’s part; despite its awkward but unavoidable climax, Civil War is a
masterpiece of plotting and characterization. Even though both sides of the key debate
appear arguable and one would imagine that Iron Man’s pro-registration stance would be
preferable in reality, he’s dead wrong within the specific context of a superhero comic
book. Marvel has created a universe that presupposes the presence and validity of
superheroes; in this context, strict realism must be as suspended as any doubt over the
dubious physics of Spider-Man's web-slinging.
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Civil War is a political document whether it was Mark Millar’s intention or not.
An ideological reading of the text is not merely supplemental to the literal action of the
superhero narrative; both are read concurrently and neither reading has primacy over the
other. Mark Millar has said that “Obviously, there’s a certain amount of political allegory
in a story where a guy wrapped in the American flag is in chains as the people swap
freedom for security, but I really made an effort to just make that stuff gravy” (Civil War:
The Script Book, 134). There’s no reason to for him to drown his text in “gravy” if that
text is already infused with it. Avoiding a heavy-handed allegory is a reasonable concern
for Millar. His first interest is to produce an entertaining and profitable superhero story;
his second interest, which is essential to the success of the first, is to not superimpose a
narrow political perspective that could alienate large segments of the readership or attract
hostile media attention. Civil War isn’t purely allegorical like, for example, George
Orwell’s Animal Farm; it doesn’t attempt to manufacture an undeniably conclusive link
between its fictional elements and a set of real-world counterparts. It was important to
Millar that the characters that he was writing didn’t come out as appearing strictly liberal
or conservative; he felt that his readers wouldn’t want to view their heroes in terms of
polarized “red” and “blue” states. In terms of contemporary politics, Civil War isn’t
completely cut and dry. Rather than a straightforward left-wing reaction to Bush-era
right-wing policies, Captain America’s anti-registration underground could reasonably be
interpreted as representing Goldwater conservatives or the emerging Rhino (Republican
in Name Only) movement and Iron Man’s state-supported pro-registration forces could
signify agendas as diverse as neo-conservatism or so-called “big government” liberalism.
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Many alternate or inverted readings of the text become less plausible when one considers
how firmly rooted the genre is to its genealogy. There is arguably some room for
interpretation in Civil War, but its most basic conflict is concrete. Inevitably distortive
and ultimately suppressive statecraft tries to supplant the very idealism (albeit an
ideological interpolation itself) that it pretends to embody.
Military-Industrial Complexity
In addition to the numerous tie-ins that inform and supplement the central mini-
series, each character and reference contained within Civil War signifies an intersection
with a preexisting narrative. Comprehension of the mini-series is dependent on
information that is always implied but mostly absent. As a reader progresses through the
story linearly, he or she must constantly regard material that intersects with it laterally.
Although this is true for each and every character that makes an appearance in the story,
as well as a handful that don’t, it is reasonable to begin unpacking the tale by focusing on
the figureheads for the comic’s two opposed factions. Both Iron Man and Captain
America have their own richly developed narratives, and one must be knowledgeable of
them in order to fully understand how they converge and construct the conflict at the
heart of Civil War.
Iron Man is the villain in Civil War whether its creators intended it or not. He is
exactly what Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his fellow Americans against in his 1961
farewell address; an amalgam of wealth and weaponry, he embodies the “military-
industrial complex.” Created by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, and Don Heck, Iron Man’s
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origin is detailed in his first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963). Stark is
identified as “both a sophisticate and a scientist! A millionaire bachelor, as much at home
in a laboratory as in high society!” (3). The man “fated to become Iron Man” begins as an
idealization of the Howard Hughes type; he’s rich, a brilliant inventor, and an object of
public envy and fascination. Also like Hughes, Stark is a weapons contractor for the
American military. When we are first introduced to the character, we find him in his
closely guarded laboratory demonstrating the effectiveness of his latest invention to an
unnamed general. Stark believed his devices, “tiny transistors” that amplify the power of
any device they are attached to, are “capable of solving [the general’s] problem in
Vietnam” (2). Stark was sent to Southeast Asia along with his gadgets to oversee their
deployment. While in the jungle he stumbled across a booby trap, was seriously injured,
and was captured by the “red guerrilla tyrant” Wong-Chu. Shrapnel from the exploded
booby trap is lodged in Stark’s chest and cannot be surgically removed; it would fatally
damage his heart and kill him after a few days. Iron Man, like L. Frank Baum’s Tin
Woodsman, is without a heart.
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Figure 27. Cover, Tales of Suspense #39 by Jack Kirby (March 1963).
Although he knew an operation would prove useless, Wong-Chu offered to save
Stark’s life on the condition that Stark design weapons for the guerillas. Sensing the
inevitable double cross, Stark agreed to make weapons for Wong-Chu but quickly went
to work designing a “mighty electronic body to keep [his] heart beating” (6). Fortunately
for Stark, his cellmate was Professor Yinsen, a world-famous Chinese physicist. Yinsen
not only could assist in the construction of the Iron Man suit, he sacrificed his life in
order to distract the guards long enough for generators to power up the armor. Once Iron
Man was up and on-line, he pursued Wong-Chu and used an array of gadgets to subdue
the prison’s many guards. Finally, Iron Man blew up an ammunition dump and
presumably killed Wong-Chu. Like in so many of the final panels of the earliest Marvel
comics, the last time we see the Iron Man he is alone, contemplative, encased in shadows,
and walking away from us like a hard boiled Hemingway hero.
The first story featuring Iron Man is more akin to the short monster comics with
morals that Marvel had been famous for in publications like Amazing Fantasy and
Journey into Mystery. As it is originally told, Stark was imprisoned inside his armor.
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With Vietnamese guerillas pounding down the door, Stark is shown standing in front of a
mirror and thinking, “They’re coming! This is my greatest test! Can this thing I’ve
created survive? This thing which is less than human…yet far more than merely human!
This thing which is Tony Stark!!” With his head held low and his hands grasping at his
helmeted head he continued, “My brain still thinks! My heart still beats! But, in order to
remain alive, I must spend the rest of my life in this iron prison!!” (9). Stark, a weapons
inventor, was a captive in his own creation; he was like a Dr. Frankenstein trapped inside
the body of the monster. The tone of the Iron Man’s story changes immediately after his
first appearance. The metal monster and the tortured man inside suddenly become a
typical superhero with a secret identity in Tales of Suspense #40. Stark freed himself of
the armor and painted it gold so that it would be less frightening to the public. The more
familiar red and yellow armor designed by Steve Ditko appeared a few issues later in ToS
#48. Although he continued to need to wear the chest piece that functions as his artificial
heart, Stark resumed his life as a millionaire industrialist and international playboy and
dons his Iron Man persona whenever the need arises. Although he was a founding
member of Marvel’s Justice League inspired super-team, The Avengers, Iron Man’s
career as a superhero has been fairly unspectacular when compared with many of
Marvel’s other characters.
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Figure 28. Cover, Iron Man #128 by Bob Layton (November 1979).
Iron Man has fought many villains over the past forty years,34 but until Civil War,
his most famous struggle has been against his own alcoholism. For several years, Iron
Man’s defining moments could be found in Iron Man #120-128 (1979). The Demon in a
Bottle Saga, as it is now called, was scripted by David Michelinie and illustrated by John
Romita, Jr. This storyline traces Tony Stark’s descent into substance abuse and reminds
his audience that the man inside the ultimate weapon is all too human. Loss of control is
the recurrent theme in these issues; a business rival, Justin Hammer, the CEO of Roxxon
Oil, uses a remote-control device to force Iron Man to kill a foreign diplomat and Tony
Stark ultimately loses controlling interest in the international corporation that bears his
name. Having hit rock bottom, Iron Man finds himself in the perfect position to
completely reconstruct himself and once regaining control of his personal affairs, he turns
his attentions outward; Iron Man extends his desire for complete self-control to others
and to the world in general.
34 Most notably, his similarly armored Soviet counterparts, the Crimson Dynamo and the Titanium Man
and the nefarious Mandarin.
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At the end of 1987, Michelinie (with artists Mark Bright and Barry Windsor-
Smith) began the story arc that is now collected under the title Armor Wars (Iron Man
#225-231). In this series Iron Man discovers that numerous super-villains have gained
access to the secret technologies that he had developed to give his suit its formidable
powers. Having long since abandoned the production of munitions, Stark is shocked to
realize that his designs have continued to contribute to the deaths of innocent people. He
then embarks on a crusade to eliminate all traces of his technologies. Armed with an
illegally obtained list of people in possession of his designs, Iron Man begins hunting
these individuals down and applies “negator packs” to their armor, which fuse the stolen
circuitry and renders their battle suits inoperable. “ole shell head,” as Iron Man is so often
called by his friends and teammates, tends to be guided by his own arrogance and
obstinacy rather than the senses of immutable justice and responsibility usually
associated with superheroes, and his mission quickly becomes a dangerous obsession.
Although he begins his campaign by targeting known criminals like Stilt Man and
the Beetle, Stark decides that absolutely no one can be trusted with his designs and shifts
his aim toward the destruction of technologies that he had previously licensed for
government uses. In a statement that would seem to be at odds with the position he
spearheads during Civil War, Iron Man asserts that “with the government’s support or its
hindrance…by the law or against it…I’m going to get back what’s mine and heaven help
anyone who gets in my way” (Iron Man #225, 39). Iron Man becomes a wanted criminal
after ruthlessly attacking and disabling several agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the armored
guards at a prison for superpowered felons called “The Vault.” His autocratic obsession
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even puts him into a direct confrontation with his long-time ally and future nemesis,
Captain America. At the time of Armor Wars, Tony Stark was still keeping his identity a
secret and maintained that Iron Man was his body guard and a spokesperson for his
company. In order to insulate himself against his alter-ego’s flagging popularity, Stark
publicly pretends to fire Iron Man from his company and when the government sends its
own armored warrior to apprehend him, he makes it appear as if Iron Man is killed in the
battle. Despite his numerous infractions during Armor Wars, Stark, through deceit, is
never forced to take responsibility for his actions and the only penalty he pays is a
temporary removal from The Avengers. He simply builds a new suit and claims to hire a
new man to fill it.
In order to raise the character’s profile and perennially low sales figures, Marvel
“rebooted” their Iron Man title in January of 2005. This was the fourth time since 1968
that the comic line would start with a number one issue. Although this particular volume
only lasted sixteen issues, it includes a few highly significant revisions to the character
that helped set the stage for Civil War. The first six issues, the “Extremis” arc, were
penned by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Adi Granov, whose cinematic style and
digitalized renderings help establish a very near-futuristic tone that feels both detached
and synchronous with reality. Ellis and Granov make a temporal and geographic
adjustment to Iron Man’s origin in order to bring the character up to date while more or
less preserving his essential branding. Rather than Vietnam, Tony Stark finds himself in
East Timor at the time of his injury. In a rather poetic and karmic flourish, Stark isn’t
wounded by a random landmine on the battle field; his injury comes from a particularly
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dastardly explosive device of his own design. It should be noted here that the Marvel
Universe operates within a chronologically compressed timeline; readers of comics
understand that, although the inaugural events of Marvel’s continuity were first written in
the early 1960’s, the events occurred approximately “ten years ago” in terms of the
current comics’ story-lines. For example, Peter Parker was fifteen years old when he was
bitten by the radioactive spider that transformed him into The Amazing Spider-Man, and
although that event was recorded in August 1962, readers understand that Parker is
presently only about twenty-five years old. It’s essential that the passage of time is only
an approximation because neither the contents of a single issue nor the month between
issues represents a standard increment of time, and any issue published must be relatively
synchronous with every other issue published. On occasion it becomes necessary, as in
the case of Extremis, for the narratives to be “retconned,” a term used in the comics’
culture to signify the retelling of specific stories or the introduction of any events that
retroactively alter continuity. If writers and editors want to keep Tony Stark in his early
thirties, then they must shift the event that makes him Iron Man forward in history; it is
no longer possible for Tony Stark to be in Vietnam in the 60’s, so an adjustment needed
to be made in order to preserve the logical integrity of the Marvel Universe.
In addition to retconning Iron Man’s origin, the Extremis storyline added two
substantive amendments to the character. The extremis, from which the story takes its
title, is a designer techno-organic “virus” that rewrites its host’s DNA in order to
transform and weaponize them. A terrorist cell inevitably gets its hands on extremis; one
of its members injects himself with it and becomes a walking weapon of mass
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destruction. The scientist who developed extremis contacts her old friend Tony Stark,
who engages the terrorist as Iron Man and is beaten within an inch of his life. In order to
overtake the terrorist, Stark injects himself with the same experimental solution. The
character is almost instantaneously transformed from a guy in a high-tech battle suit to
one of Marvel’s most powerful heroes. Stark is no longer a man inside a suit of armor;
the armor is now fully integrated into his biology. His strength and abilities have
increased exponentially and his mind is now connected to every network on the planet.
He is nearly omniscient; he can “see” through satellites and can instantly receive data
from virtually any source.
The second amendment to Iron Man’s character is the introduction of a term that
is used to describe Tony Stark’s particular type of intelligence. The term, which is
introduced in Extremis and echoed throughout the Civil War cross-over event, is
“Futurist.” As it is described in the comics and in interviews with creators, Futurist
thinking is the almost precognitive ability to anticipate historical progress and to develop
technologies to satisfy the needs of the future before it actually arrives. This description
raises a difficult question: How much of this foresight is anticipatory of inevitable events
and how much of it is the so-called futurist’s imposition of his or her own will?
Assuming Stark isn’t a psychic, it would take a particularly arrogant and autocratic
imagination to confuse his own fears and ambitions with the world’s destiny. Marvel
neglects to introduce the specific historical connotations of “Futurism” when providing
their definition. Futurism, as developed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was an anti-
humanist school of art and philosophy that served as an adjunct to Benito Mussolini’s
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Fascist party. It was a celebration of unbridled technological development, of the
obliteration of traditions, of the supremacy of state power, of misogyny and of permanent
warfare. In essence, it was a celebration of a superhero like Iron Man.
The Superhero’s Superhero
Figure 29. Cover, Captain America Comics #1 by Jack Kirby (March 1941).
If there ever was a superhero specifically conceived to crush fascists, it’s Captain
America. In March of 1941, roughly ten months before the surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor and America’s entrance into the Second World War, Timely Comics, which later
became Marvel, published the first issue of Captain America; it was written by Joe
Simon and illustrated by Jack Kirby. The illustration on its cover depicts Cap smashing
into a Nazi stronghold and landing a fierce right cross to the jaw of a buffoonish Adolph
Hitler. On Hitler’s desk is a map of the United States and a folder labeled “Sabotage
Plans for U.S.A.” and in the background one can see a large viewing screen on which a
saboteur is blowing up an American munitions factory. Not only did this cover portray a
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man dressed up as the American flag socking a foreign head of state, but it also clearly
insinuated that Germany conspired to attack the U.S. within its own borders. Captain
America Comics #1 may simply seem like nationalistic war propaganda, but at the time
of its publication it represented a fairly controversial and somewhat inflammatory
gesture; not only had America not yet entered the war, but a significant portion of the
population adamantly endorsed a policy of isolationism.
The first issue of Captain America Comics introduces readers to Cap and his
young partner Bucky and explains the origins of his extraordinary abilities. The young
man who would become Captain America, Steve Rogers, attempted to enlist in the army
but failed the physical exam and was designated 4-F or unfit for service. Given one last
opportunity to serve his country, Rogers volunteered for experiments that would
transform him into the perfect human specimen, a super-soldier. Unexpectedly a Nazi
spy, who had infiltrated the secret government laboratory, drew a pistol and killed the
scientist who had developed the super-soldier serum but who had also failed to commit it
to paper. Newly empowered, Rogers leapt into action and threw the Nazi assassin into
laboratory equipment, which exploded and killed the spy. Although he was intended to be
the first of many, the formula that transformed him was lost with the scientist who
designed it; Cap is one of a kind.
The Captain America Comics of the 1940’s are fairly typical of what one would
expect to find in other Golden Age titles. Each issue contained four separate episodes
featuring Captain America, a short prose piece, and a story or two that featured different
heroes such as Hurricane: Master of Speed or Tuk: Cave Boy. The legendary Stan Lee’s
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first writing credit is on a prose piece that appeared in Captain America Comics #3 called
“Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge.”35 Like many World War Two-era
superheroes, Captain America is, for the most part, a domestic national security figure
and he symbolically carries a shield rather than a sword or a gun. As discussed earlier,
superheroes seldom engaged the Axis nations on their own soil and Cap spent much of
the actual war tackling fifth columnist spies and saboteurs in the United States while
operating out of an army base called Fort Lehigh. Tales of his exploits in the European
theater are largely the product of the character’s revival two decades after the war’s
conclusion. Additionally, Captain America Comics utilizes a sidekick in much the same
manner as other contemporary titles. The hero is meant to be admired by the young
audience, but they are supposed to identify with the hero’s juvenile protégé. Captain
America’s young comrade in arms, Bucky Barnes, was an orphan who hung around as
Camp Lehigh’s “mascot.” When Bucky accidentally discovered that the base’s resident
goldbricker, Steve Rogers, was in fact his hero, Captain America, he donned a costume of
his own and became Cap’s partner. Much like the relationship between Batman and
Robin and other Golden Age heroes and their sidekicks, Cap and Bucky’s partnership
began with Cap serving as a surrogate father to his adolescent ally. In between missions
Bucky was often seen sitting at Cap’s feet while he casually smoked a pipe, the generic
emblem of mid-twentieth century paternalistic authority.
Captain America Comics were remarkably successful and continued to be
published until February of 1950. Because they were inextricably linked with the Second
World War in the public imagination, interest in superheroes ended with the fall of the
35 This story introduced Cap’s now hallmark use of his shield as a ricocheting thrown weapon.
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Axis. With the exception of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, all superheroes
were out of circulation and were replaced by comics in the horror and crime genres. In
order to attempt to stay in print, Captain America Comics became Captain America’s
Weird Tales for the final two issues of the series and told horror stories; Cap appears for
the last time in a single six-page story in the second-to-last issue (#74) in which he
journeys into hell to battle his long time nemesis, Red Skull.
Ten years after the failed attempt to revive the character by Atlas Comics, Captain
America surfaced once again. As it is explained in The Avengers #4 (1964), which is his
first Silver Age appearance, Cap had been in a state of suspended animation; he literally
had been frozen in a block of ice since the final days of World War Two. When a Nazi
super-villain named Baron Zemo launched an explosives-laden drone aircraft, Cap and
Bucky leapt on board in order to disable it. The Drone was booby trapped and exploded.
Until very recently, Bucky was presumed to have died in the explosion and Cap, who was
cast off into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, laid in torpor for decades. Cap’s
escapades in the 1950’s, which no longer could have occurred within continuity, were
simply dismissed as non canonical and ignored; an explanation for those episodes was
introduced much later in Captain America #153-156 (1972). The 1950’s Captain America
and Bucky were imperfect (racist, paranoid, and uncontrollably hostile) imitations of the
World War Two originals.
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Figure 30. Cover, Avengers #4 by Jack Kirby (March 1964).
The basic premise behind the character of Captain America shifts significantly
with the introduction of his long dormancy. Although still very much a symbol of
volunteerism, domestic security, and a set of virtues that are central to the idealized
construction of America, the character takes on new meanings; by “dying” and returning,
he becomes messianic. Upon seeing Cap on the streets for the first time since his
disappearance decades earlier, a policeman swells with tears and sobs, “and all these
years…all of us…your fans…all your admirers…we thought you were dead! But you’ve
come back…just when the world has need of such a man…just like fate planned it this
way!” (Avengers #4, 10). The signification of Captain America becomes similar to the
Arthurian once-and-future king; Captain America first emerges to do battle against
fascism, the world’s greatest threat to freedom and democracy, and then he reemerges
during the nation’s most significant and turbulent decade of social and cultural upheaval.
This American Arthur's reemergence in Avengers #4 comes a mere three months after the
assassination of JFK and the fall of Camelot.
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Steve Rogers, the man behind the star-spangled persona, carries the hallmark of a
character created during Marvel’s Silver Age renaissance; he’s a hero with problems. His
years in stasis, which have grown longer and longer in order to preserve the broader
narrative continuity, have delivered him into a present which he doesn’t fully understand
and in which he may not entirely belong. Rogers is a romanticized “greatest generation”
figure from a supposedly simpler past who finds himself thrust into a dramatically more
complicated and often conflicted world. For people who don’t read comics religiously,
Captain America may be one of the easiest characters to misunderstand. The red, white,
and blue stars and stripes on his costume and shield seem to signify gross nationalism,
but this isn’t the case. Captain America’s loyalty is to the values at the center of
American self-conception, but he often finds himself unable to reconcile his patriotism
with his country’s policies. The gap between theory and practice produces the tension
from which Cap’s narrative springs, and behind his bravado, costume, and shield, Steve
Rogers is an anachronism struggling to retain his substance and vitality. When he isn’t
charging headlong into teaming hordes of villains and henchmen, Cap can often be found
wandering the streets alone and brooding. Stan Lee gave his readers one of the
quintessential peeks into the mind of Captain America in issue 122, “The Sting of the
Scorpion.” Cap is shown meandering around New York’s bowery district and
soliloquizing:
I’ve spent a life time battling for liberty—for justice—but is there never to be an
end to it? How much longer must I go on this way—lonely friendless—never
knowing whom to trust? There must be more to life than endless battle—More
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than facing spies, killers, and super-foes, day after day after day! Throughout the
world the image of Captain America has become a symbol—a living embodiment
of all that democracy stands for! But now—there are those who scorn love of
flag—love of country! Those to whom patriotism is just a square, outmoded
word! Those who think of me—as a useless relic—of a meaningless past! I’m like
a dinosaur in the Cro-Magnon age! An Anachronism who’s out-lived his time!
This is the day of the anti-hero—the age of the rebel and the dissenter! It isn’t hip
to defend the establishment—only to tear it down! And in a world rife with
injustice, greed, and endless war—who’s to say the rebels are wrong? But I’ve
never learned to play by today’s rules! I’ve spent a lifetime defending the flag—
and the law! Perhaps—I should have battled less and questioned more! (Captain
America #122, 1-3)
This passage clearly illustrates the turmoil at the heart of the character. His apparent
depression stems from his growing awareness that he may be emblematic of a
simulacrum, a reproduction of something that may have never really existed. As Marvel’s
current editor in chief, Joe Quesada points out:
Cap is about the American Ideal, not the American Way. As a nation, as the
greatest nation in the world, we are still a work in progress. By no stretch of the
imagination are we perfect, but it it’s that pursuit for the ideals that America is set
up on that makes our nation great. Cap understands that, he sees it every day, and
he above everyone else sees all the possibilities within that ideal. So with that in
mind, Cap has had a history of a character of not always being locked in step with
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the government. He is neither a democrat nor a republican, he’s not a conservative
or a liberal, he is the ideal. (Civil War: The Script Book, 32)
Although Quesada and others may see Captain America as disengaged from
contemporary polemics, recognizing him as an ideal is ultimately a political statement.
The kernel of Steve Rogers’s ideological formation is rooted in his coming of age during
the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe; his core beliefs parallel those of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As one-time controversial decisions and political choices
enter the history books, they become increasingly depoliticized and eventually appear as
de facto imperatives. A non-critical and American-centric evaluation of the history
situates all past events into a convenient sequence of “correct” actions rather than the
outcomes of heated discourses. It is true to say that Captain America is neither a
Democrat nor a Republican, but this is only because he wouldn’t be able to recognize the
contemporary incarnation of either party. Neither of the two major political parties even
remotely resembles what they were prior to Captain America becoming suspended in ice.
The political spectrum in the United States has been shifting further and further to the
right for the last three decades whereas Captain America’s politics, which could have
been seen as moderately left of center at the time of their formation, are firmly frozen in a
historically distant, ideologically interpolated, and mythologized past. To suggest that he
is simply representative of an American Ideal is an unconscious acknowledgement that
the “ideal” can be located in the left-leaning New Deal atmosphere that was responsible
for producing the entire superhero genre and which seems radical when considered within
the context of the current political climate.
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Figure 31. Cover, Captain America #250 by John Byrne (October 1980).
In an unfortunately brief but highly celebrated run, Roger Stern and John Byrne
had the fortune of writing and drawing both the 40th anniversary and 250th issues of
Captain America. Coinciding with an election that would prove to be a watershed
moment in American politics, Captain America #250 was published in October 1980 and
posited the question: What if Captain America ran for president? The idea had originally
been presented to Stern by Roger McKenzie and Don Perlin, who were working together
on Captain America in 1979 with Stern as their editor. They had suggested that Cap
could become president and operate as a superhero from inside the White House for the
next four years, but their idea was rejected. When Stern became writer on the title a short
while later, he resuscitated the idea of Captain America entering national politics. Rather
than have him win the office, Stern created a fictional third party, the New Populist Party,
that would endorse Cap’s nomination because “the people don’t want a politician, they
want a leader” (Captain America #250, 4). Although Cap politely laughs off the proposal,
the party chairman issues a press release and organizes a rally to pressure his reluctant
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candidate. Before a throng of cheering supporters, Cap steps to the podium to announce
his decision and declares that:
The presidency is one of the most important jobs in the world. The holder of that
office must represent the best interests of an entire nation. He must be ready to
negotiate, to compromise twenty-four hours a day, to preserve the republic at all
costs! I understand this, I appreciate this and I realize the need to work within
such a framework. By the same token, I have worked and fought all my life for
the growth and the advancement of the American Dream and I believe my duty to
the dream would severely limit any abilities I might have to preserve the reality.
(16)
By declining the nomination, Cap chooses to remain what he needs to be in order to best
serve his idealism; safeguarding a platonic conception requires him to remain somewhat
independent of pragmatism. He recognizes it is precisely the realities of the social and
political apparatuses that have become the most significant obstacle to the fulfillment of
his idealism. Captain America cannot allow himself to preside over or to be incorporated
into a political system which has become, on occasion, the enemy of the very ideology
that supposedly serves as its foundation.
As a superhero, a counter-establishment outsider, Captain America is often the
perfect vehicle for social and political commentary. Steve Englehart, who wrote Captain
America between 1972 and 1975, used the adventures of the star-spangled sentinel of
liberty to directly express his, and many other Americans’, revilement of Richard Nixon
and the Watergate Scandal. Englehart’s Captain America was remarkable in its level of
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political engagement and dealt with complex issues as diverse as the ideological
generation gap and race relations. Englehart is probably most famous for crafting the
“Secret Empire” storyline (issues #169-76). In this story, a vast conspiracy sets its sights
on the domination of the United States and targets its most iconic hero. Rather than take
him on directly, an innocuously named special interest group, The Committee to Regain
America’s Principles, is created to broadcast anti-Captain America propaganda on
television. Cap is effectively “swift-boated,” and just as public opinion is swayed against
him, the Secret Empire has him framed for murder. On the run with his partner in crime
fighting, The Falcon, Cap encounters the X-Men, who happen to be investigating the
Secret Empire from a different angle, and together they infiltrate the sinister
organization’s headquarters. The organization, a cabal of hooded figures composed of
prominent and influential Americans, is orchestrating a coup by which they will assume
power through the persistent manipulation of public perception in advance of a
manufactured spectacle of their strength. The Secret Empire descends on the White
House lawn in a flying saucer “because the fear of flying saucers runs deep in mankind”
(#175, 8). A battle ensues, Captain America prevails, and the beaten leader of the Secret
Empire begins to flee the scene. Cap chases him into the White House and finally tackles
him inside the Oval Office. Ripping the mask off of the would-be-despot, Cap discovers
that his enemy is none other than Richard Nixon, who commits suicide rather than be
taken into custody. Although Nixon’s face never actually appears on the page, the text
leaves little room for other interpretations. With his faith in his government shattered by
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these events, Steve Rogers temporarily sheds his red, white, and blue Captain America
costume and begins calling himself Nomad, a man without a country.
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Figure 32. Page 18 from Captain America #175 by Sal Buscema (July 1974)
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Having an understanding of Captain America’s inner conflicts is essential to
having an understanding of how the character functions within the context of the myriad
real and imagined conflicts found throughout Marvel’s comic book universe.
Superficially, Cap is a very easy character to misinterpret; it can be difficult to locate the
figure behind the broad stripes and bright star on his shield. For example, in April 2003
Michael Medved published an article in National Review Online titled “Captain America,
Traitor? The Comic Book Hero Goes Anti-American.” It should be taken for granted that
Medved needs to be read with a grain of salt; his writing is typically far more right-wing
and reactionary than reasoned or researched. The comics that prompted his commentary
are Captain America Vol. 4 #1-6 which were written by John Ney Reiber, illustrated by
John Cassaday, and dealt with a series of events following the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001. Because Marvel’s comics mainly take place in and around New
York City rather than in fictional locations like Gotham or Metropolis, the tragic events
at the World Trade Center necessarily factor into the stories that take place in the that
universe.
Although the terrorist attack itself is recounted in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2 #
36 and Cap makes a silent cameo appearance in that issue, his reactions to the first assault
on his country since the war that forged him are fleshed out and chronicled in the
Reiber/Cassaday book. Because Captain America’s reaction to 9/11 isn’t in unflagging
lockstep with the Bush Doctrine, Medved finds the character, the writer, and the
publishers to be “unsettling” and “surprisingly sympathetic to terrorists.” It simply isn’t
the case. Clearly not a regular reader of comics, Medved perceives these issues as a
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“radical rethinking of the company’s signature hero” because they show him as
“disillusioned, embittered” and “uncertain about the nation’s cause” (Medved). In other
words, the character remains consistent with his continuity despite bearing witness to the
greatest tragedy to ever befall the nation he personifies.
The story begins with Steve Rogers digging through rubble and looking for
survivors at ground zero; he’s approached by Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.,
who tosses him his shield and says that he should be half way to Kandahar. Cap quite
typically lashes out at Fury and proclaims that he is exactly where he should be and that
his first responsibility is to the few who may still be alive in the wreckage. He refuses to
simply saddle up and head to wherever the American war machine rolls. Cap is, as he’s
always been, a domestic security figure and the comic springs into action only after a
fictional terrorist organization occupies a small town in the American heartland. The six-
issue arc is essentially a treatise against indiscriminant violence and the deliberate
infliction of civilian casualties. Although it tosses around words like “butchers” and
“monsters” to describe the fictional terrorists and the perpetrators of the attack on the
World Trade Center, it is also willing to indict the United States for its negligent use of
land mines, cluster bombs and for its purely punitive firebombing of the city of Dresden
in February of 1945. Reiber is certainly not attempting to draw an equal sign between Al-
Qaeda and the United States, but Medved, like many who haven’t concerned themselves
with the development of the superhero genre over the last several decades, expects that
Captain America would present itself as a children’s primer for jingoism. He seems angry
that even a comic book isn’t as comic bookish as his own approach to foreign policy.
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The implicit argument in Medved’s article is that America’s response to 9/11
should be simple and direct and that introducing complications or debates hampers that
response. Had he put this argument in the foreground he could have possibly authored an
interesting, albeit highly debatable, article. His opinions are his own prerogative.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t enter into an amenable discourse; he uses his article to lambast
the comic as unpatriotic and to align it with the imaginary cabal of “hollywood activists,
academic apologists, [and] the angry protesters who regularly fill the streets of European
capitals” and he employs some rather duplicitous rhetorical strategies to accomplish this
(Medved). Chief among these strategies is his frequent use of selective presentation; he
often employs direct quotations to make his point, but he distorts the meaning of the
quotes by extracting them from the context in which they are presented whenever that
context would explicitly contradict his intentions. For example, Medved quotes Max
Allen Collins’ introduction to the trade edition which compiles these six issues into a
single volume. He points out that Collins “praises Marvel for its edgy content. [Collins]
cites the determination to ‘take this classic character of a simpler time into the smoky
aftermath of September 11th, and ‘this story’s courage and ability to examine the
complexities of the issues that accompany terrorism...specifically, not to duck the things
America has done to feed the attacks”’(Medved). This would seem to support Medved’s
claims that these comics are apologist and sympathetic to terrorists. In the very next
sentence Collins continues and says, “that is not to say that Reiber offers justification for
terrorism. Rather, he insists that we examine the root causes in a more complicated,
grown-up manner than one might expect from a superhero comic book” (Collins, ii).
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Despite its many factual, rhetorical, and intellectual flaws, Medved’s article, along with
Andrew Klavan’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece drawing frighteningly reasonable
parallels between the movie The Dark Knight and the Bush presidency, are important for
no other reason than they indicate that the mainstream media is beginning to grasp the
political implications contained within the superhero genre.
Convergences
The first rumblings of Civil War occurred in The Illuminati, a one-shot written by
Brian Michael Bendis. This comic, a supplement to Bendis’ New Avengers, borrows its
title, which translates as “the enlightened,” from a short-lived secret society established in
1776 by Adam Weishaupt. The organization’s views more or less reflected the period; it
was anti-monarchical and pro-secularization. Although the historical Illuminati was
effectively crushed by the Bavarian government and failed to survive into the nineteenth
century, it has thrived in conspiracy theory and popular culture. The Illuminati has
become a generic signifier for any unseen hand that influences and manipulates world
events; it is the ultimate shadowy overseer and is central to a plethora of diverse texts
such as Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s sci-fi epic The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Dan
Brown’s theological mystery novel Angels and Demons, Steve Jackson Games’
Illuminati card game, and Disney’s afterschool animated series Gargoyles. Bendis’
appropriation of the term for his comic book title has a cynical quality to it; The
Illuminati is almost universally vilified and used as an antagonist in whatever fiction or
conspiracy theory it appears, but Marvel’s Illuminati is a secret organization of politically
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powerful heroes. Although the title of the one-shot and subsequent mini-series is titled
The Illuminati, the heroes who make up the group never identify themselves as such. The
first meeting of the group occurred just after the Kree-Skrull War, a several million-year-
old conflict between two alien races that spilled over onto the planet Earth. The Kree-
Skrull War is one of the major historical events in Marvel’s fictional universe and was
recorded in The Avengers #89-97 (June 1971-March 1972).
Figure 33. Cover, New Avengers: Illuminati by Gabrielle Dell’Otto (May 2006).
Due to the compression of time that is instrumental to the logic of Marvel’s
continuity, readers recognize that the event occurred on a non-specific timeline; it was
vaguely “several years ago.” The formation of Marvel’s Illuminati was ret-conned into
the Marvel Universe thirty-six years earlier than the publication of the story that
describes the event; it is now understood to have been in operation since the two alien
races turned the Earth into their own free-fire battleground. The group was Iron Man’s
brainchild; his proposal was to create an inherently anti-democratic command and control
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apparatus for the Earth’s mostly unaffiliated community of superheroes in order to better
deal with future crises of a global scale. This initial proposal, which is rejected outright
by the assembled group, is nearly identical to what Iron Man will achieve for himself as a
result of Civil War. The group he gathers consists of himself, Doctor Strange (Earth’s
Sorcerer Supreme), Professor Xavier (leader of The X-Men and the world’s most
powerful telepath), Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic of The Fantastic Four and one of the
world’s greatest scientific minds), Black Bolt (the king of the incredibly powerful
Inhumans who live in near isolation on the Moon), and Namor (the Sub-Mariner and the
ruling prince of the underwater kingdom of Atlantis). Iron Man also invited King
T’Challa, The Black Panther, to join the group, but he refused membership. T’Challa,
who has become something of a benchmark for calm reason, warns the others of the great
risk involved in any organization that is arrogant enough to elect themselves as the
world’s keepers and urges them to disband.
The Illuminati continues to occasionally meet behind a veil of secrecy and despite
internal disputes, particularly from the perpetually hot-tempered Namor, it arbitrates
ethically murky issues. For example, they decide for themselves that Bruce Banner
cannot control himself as the Hulk and that he poses a grave threat to the safety of
innocent people and to himself. To remedy the problem, they trick Banner into repairing
a “damaged” satellite and then exile him to another planet. Whether it is for the good of
the world or not, it’s a treacherous act and it ultimately comes back to haunt them after
Civil War in yet another mass cross-over event, World War Hulk. The group seemingly
dissolves after Iron Man presents a draft of the Superhuman Registration Act prior to the
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tragedy at Stamford and suggests that his colleagues join him in endorsing it before it
becomes adopted.
How this particular bill becomes a law is hardly reminiscent of that little song
from Saturday morning’s School House Rock; the path it takes is riddled with duplicity
and subterfuge. “Whose Side Are You On?” the tagline that Marvel used to advertise the
Civil War event, carries an obvious allusion to the Florence Reece protest ballad “Which
Side Are You On?” Both are more or less rhetorical questions; given the context, the
answers should be obvious. Iron Man’s approach to the legislation and its enforcement
reflects his status as a prominent figure in corporate capitalism and can hardly be called
heroic, super or otherwise; he is autocratic, he firmly believes his own futurist forecasts
are history's only feasible destination, and he is willing to adopt virtually any means to
achieve his calculated ends. In other words, he’s the very model of a modern
Machiavellian. If one focuses entirely on the seven-issue Civil War centerpiece, then it
becomes slightly more plausible that one could logically develop some sympathy for the
pro-registration position; however, the larger text drowns that position under a myriad of
ethical complications.
Tony Stark’s identity as Iron Man could be called a publicly known secret; over
the course of his career he has revealed, concealed, and re-revealed himself numerous
times. For a brief period (Starting with Iron Man Vol. 3 #73-75, December 2003 and
ending in Avengers # 501, August 2004) Stark even served as the U.S. Secretary of
Defense and made his armor-clad alter-ego known. After his service in the Cabinet, he
reestablished his secret identity and then revealed it again to show support for the
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Registration Act. Because of his multiple roles as a corporate industrialist, a major figure
in the superhero culture, and a recent Washington insider, Stark works directly with the
executive branch and gives testimony to a closed congressional sub-committee session on
the drafted registration act. He brings Peter Parker with him to Capitol Hill (Amazing
Spider-Man #529-531); Stark had previously brought Peter and his family under his wing
and had even asked Peter to work with him as his right-hand man. Before they depart,
Stark asks Peter to keep their purpose and destination a secret from their teammates and
from Steve (Captain America) specifically. Iron Man claims the mission to Congress is to
stop the Registration Act from becoming law, but he orchestrates a series of spectacles
that simultaneously derail his lackluster effort to prevent the ratification of the law and
seems to grant him even greater authority as the future law’s reluctant enforcer. Iron Man
hires one of his long-time nemeses, Titanium Man, to attempt an assassination of Tony
Stark. Of course, he knows that Peter, as Spider-Man, will be able to anticipate and
thwart the attack; Stark also knows that a device that he had implanted in Spider-man’s
costume will record the battle as well as Titanium Man’s scripted monologue that
declares how the passage of the law will cripple the superhero community’s ability to
combat villains such as himself. Stark presents his manufactured evidence to the sub-
committee only to have its impact blunted by his own right-hand man. Stark chose his
companion well. Knowing Spider-man’s temperament, sense of personal responsibility,
general disregard for authority, and lack of formal diplomacy, Stark could reasonably
anticipate that Spider-man would attempt to make an appearance before Congress.
Although Spider-Man feels that it is his duty to articulate an impassioned plea on behalf
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of himself and other superheroes, his testimony is stricken from the record because he
refuses to be unmasked and sworn in; Spider-Man's reluctance to identify himself is used
to more or less prove the government’s case. Even if a superhero’s personal mission
corresponds with the aims of the established political system, the very idea of
superheroes is ultimately incompatible with it.
After the disaster in Stamford, the Superhuman Registration Act quickly passes
and Iron Man volunteers to take the lead in its enforcement. How he conducts his war is
problematic at best; one could call his actions downright dubious or even constitutionally
criminal. In order to rapidly gain support in the superhuman community, Stark convinces
Spider-Man to remove his mask on national television. Spider-Man’s identity is his most
guarded possession, but Stark promises him that his wife and aunt will be protected from
the inevitable fallout. There is a shallow threat buried in Stark’s promise and he uses it to
leverage his protégé; if Spider-man doesn’t remain loyal and unmask, then his family will
no longer be guaranteed quarter and Iron Man would be legally compelled to pursue
them. Stark, albeit unsuccessfully, uses the same simultaneous promise and threat to
attempt to strong-arm another past ally, Luke Cage. This is the same underlying logic as
in any other classic protection racket.
This isn’t the only form of compulsion employed to fill the ranks of Iron Man’s
growing army. Similar to Robert Aldrich’s 1967 classic The Dirty Dozen and perhaps a
little too similar to John Ostrander’s classic DC comic, Suicide Squad (1987-92), Iron
Man conscripts a motley crew of death-row inmates to fight for his cause. The
Thunderbolts, a team of villains pretending to be heroes, had been in existence since their
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first appearance in Incredible Hulk # 449 (Feb. 1997), but it had always been composed
of rather unremarkable characters. Appearing on the final page of Civil War #4, the
newest incarnation of Thunderbolts brings in some significant star power and includes a
number of Marvel’s most nefarious ne’er-do-wells like Venom and Bullseye. These
villains may relish being issued a government license to hunt down the same heroes that
they’ve been battling for years, but they are hardly exercising their own free will. Iron
Man has the bloodstreams of each of his criminal agents infected with microscopic
nanobots that monitor the villains’ every move and can instantly carry out their death
sentence if they do or say anything outside the parameters of their assignment.
The most powerful new ally that Iron Man makes is literally of his own making.
Thor, the Norse god of thunder incarnate and a founding member of The Avengers, had
been missing and presumed dead since Thor Vol. 2 #85 (Dec. 2004). With the assistance
of Hank Pym and Reed Richards, Stark clones Thor from a strand of hair he had been
holding onto for nearly a decade.36 If one can say that Victor Von Frankenstein’s creation
of a man from dead matter is the ultimate emblem of the God complex, then what can be
said of the men who attempt to manufacture a god? The Thor clone, an abominable
amalgam of myth and science, is beyond his maker’s control. In what becomes a major
turning point in Civil War, the clone remorselessly kills Goliath, Bill Foster, for resisting
arrest and would probably have killed others if Susan Richards, Invisible Woman of the
Fantastic Four, had not dramatically switched allegiances and interceded on behalf of the
resistance (Civil War #4, 8-10).
36 It's explained that Stark collected the DNA sample after the very first meeting of The Avengers.
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Iron Man’s most frightening venture should strike readers particularly close to
home. Stark Enterprises and Fantastic Four Inc. receive nearly two billion dollars in the
form of no-bid contracts to construct a secret detention facility for unregistered
superhumans. The prison is simply known as 42. The numeral code name signifies the
prison’s rank on a list of one hundred ideas that Stark, Reed Richards, and Henry Pym
conceived to construct a “safer world” (Civil War #7, 28). One can’t help but suspect that
the name of the prison also implies a slight jab at 52, DC’s far less successful cross-over
event, which was being published at the same time as Civil War.
The 42 complex sits inside a largely uninhabited parallel universe called the
Negative Zone. It is essentially an inverse reflection of our own universe; whereas our
universe continues to expand, the Negative Zone is experiencing a terminal contraction
that has transformed it into a vast wasteland of fragmented worlds suspended in an
infinite void. The superheroes incarcerated within 42 find themselves suspended in a
legal limbo that is every bit as desolate as their surroundings. Euphemistically designated
as “Occupants,” the prisoner’s status is interpreted as existing outside of any jurisdiction
and therefore, his or her right to legal counsel and due process is disestablished.
Superhumans who fail to register and those that aid and abed them are simply
apprehended, expatriated to a secret location in another dimension, and indefinitely
detained without the benefit of a trial. Similarities to the Bush Administration’s execution
of the War on Terror are too obvious to dwell on.
Captain America’s war is far less complicated. The passage of the law doesn’t
have any effect on Cap personally; his identity as Steve Rogers is public knowledge and
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his frequent cooperation with S.H.I.E.L.D. and membership in the Avengers makes him
an occasional de facto government agent. However, his ultimate loyalty is to the core
values that have been ascribed to the nation that he represents. Even if those values are a
historically constructed and de-politicized mythology, they must be perceived as utterly
inflexible in order for them to have any foundational significance. He recognizes that the
actions and interests of his government may not necessarily coincide with the nation’s
most basic values, and he understands that there have been points in his nation’s history
when the majority of his fellow citizens have been misled or have simply been wrong.
Democracy is an adjunct of justice; it isn’t justice in and of itself. Although it is endorsed
by the majority of Americans, the Superhuman Registration Act is anathema and it is
Captain America’s duty to be inflexible and to combat it. Cap’s position reflects the
position of the American superhero comic book genre; right’s responsibility is to fight
wrong.
Collateral Damage
A strong sense of a house divided and its inability to stand permeates the entire
text of Civil War. Spider-Man’s battle with the Titanium Man prior to the enactment of
the law takes place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and during a pause in the action;
he takes a brief moment to consider the depth and significance of what is inscribed on the
monument’s base. The politics of the Registration Act seep into the personal lives of all
of the heroes involved; this is best illustrated in the pages of Fantastic Four. Since its
first publication in November of 1961, the comic has been about one thing: the endurance
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and travails of family. This is the quality that is highlighted in the issues (#536-543) that
tie-in to Civil War. Written by J. Michael Straczynski, who was also simultaneously
writing Amazing Spider-Man and who made a name for himself as the creator of
television’s Babylon 5, these issues focus on the strain that dire polemics can put on a
household. As anti-superhero sentiment is growing in America, Human Torch is attacked
by a mob outside of a club in New York and put into a coma. While the Invisible
Woman, Torch’s older sister, and Thing, whose relationship with Torch is more like
siblings than a mere friendship, are visiting their injured comrade in the hospital, Mr.
Fantastic, Invisible Woman’s husband, withdraws deeper into his work on the
implementation of the Registration Act. Aside from being somewhat enamored by Tony
Stark’s gravitas, Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, lends his faith and support to the pro-
Registration side because he has constructed an intricate mathematical model of social
dynamics that proves that an unchecked expansion of the superhuman population can
only result in an apocalypse. His worldview is entirely founded on utilitarian equations
and he struggles with the choices of individuals when they fall outside of the strictures of
his computations.
In an anecdote that appears in both Fantastic Four #541 and Amazing Spider-Man
#536, Reed recounts the story of an eccentric uncle who belligerently refused to testify
before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was subsequently jailed and
destroyed; Reed’s position, although it appears to distress him emotionally, is that his
uncle should have cooperated with the HUAC investigation whether he felt it was right or
wrong. Laws are laws to Mr. Fantastic whether they are social or scientific; he believes
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that failure to adhere to the laws can only result in the catastrophic failure of the systems
he believes are in place to support and safeguard the world. His wife and counterpart, the
Invisible Woman, is emotionally transparent; opposites attract. At first, she is an
extremely reluctant ally of the pro-Registration heroes and is quite vocal in expressing
her complete disapproval of her husband’s actions, but seeing the death of Goliath at the
hands of the Thor clone as the final testament to the Registration movement’s
irresponsible and fascistic exercise of power, Susan leaves her children for their own
safety and joins the underground.
The Thing is caught in the middle; he is often used as a mouthpiece for a gruff but
honest working-class New Yorker’s perspective and declares:
Registration is wrong and I won’t support a law I don’t believe in. But I’m still a
patriot, I’m not gonna fight my own government or let the government say I’m a
criminal. (Fantastic Four #539, 22)
After a battle between the rival forces breaks out in his old, lower-east side neighborhood
on Yancy St. and the leader of a street gang he had been affiliated with is killed in the
crossfire, The Thing temporarily leaves the country. In one of Civil War’s brief moments
of levity, The Thing expatriates to Paris and aligns himself with a French parody of
D.C.’s Justice League. Politics aside, The Thing clearly doesn’t want to choose sides
between two of his dearest friends. He returns to the States for the final battle in the
superhero civil war, but he’s not there to support either position; he works to prevent the
citizens who get caught up in the mayhem from becoming casualties. It is also in this last
battle that Reed Richards is seriously injured when he intercepts a bullet that was
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intended for his ideologically estranged spouse. Civil War may have strained the familial
ties that bind The Fantastic Four, but once the dust settles, the group immediately begins
taking steps to repair their relationships.
Race and Class
The effects of Civil War are personally felt by virtually every hero in Marvel’s
universe. It sunders families and pits comrades and allies against one another. As both
Mark Millar and Tom Breevort have remarked, the fault line also corresponds with the
basic class divisions found in the United States. Millar’s vision of Captain America is
drawn from Jack Kirby’s representation of the character from the late 1970’s; this
particular version frequently reminds the audience of Cap’s humble beginnings as a blue
collar boy growing up in The Bronx. Breevort highlights the ideological differences that
contribute to the conflict concerning Iron Man and Captain America and suggests that:
There is an element of class between [those] two. Cap grew up in a Depression-
era tenement, whereas Tony was born with a silver spoon, and all that. Once you
strip away the shields and the armor and the powers, these are two guys whose
perspectives on the world were shaped from totally opposite ends of the
sociological spectrum. (Civil War: The Scriptbook, 88)
The heroes that join forces with each of these figures also often mirror this pattern of
division. Many of the members of Iron Man’s group already enjoy government sanction
and celebrity while operating from the somewhat aloof seclusion of installations like The
Baxter Building or The Avenger’s Mansion/Tower. Cap’s people are “mostly the heroes
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who work close to the street like Daredevil and Luke Cage” (Civil War #1, 22). The
comics event can easily be read as the government and big business’s effort to subdue the
little guys who have the audacity to stand up and tell them they are wrong.
Figure 34. Cover, Captain America #134 by Herb Trimpe (February 1971).
Although the creators of Civil War draw attention to the class struggle that
permeates the story, they are surprisingly silent on how the conflict between the heroes
reflects racial divisions. Marvel has historically been progressive on representing issues
of race; one could even reasonably claim that since 1963 their title The Uncanny X-Men
has operated as an extended metaphor for an integrationist solution that stands in
opposition to both the explicitly racist power structure and the hostile impulse to
radicalize against it. Captain America found himself at the center of racial discourses
throughout the 1970’s; Cap met his long-time partner in crime fighting, Falcon (Sam
Wilson), in Captain America #117 (Sept. 1969). Falcon, a black man, is Cap’s partner in
the truest sense of the word and the two characters received equal billing in their comics’
title; from issue #134 (Feb. 1971) to issue #222 (Feb. 1978) Captain America became
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Captain America and The Falcon. The nature of their partnership was often a topic in the
comic; Falcon didn’t want to be perceived as a Cap’s sidekick or, in his own words,
Cap’s “Tonto.”
Be it Queequeg, Jim, or Chingachgook, there has been a long-standing tradition in
American literature that pairs a white hero with a subordinate of another race who guides
him spiritually and/or through the uncivilized wilderness of the native. Captain America
and Falcon frequently and aggressively confronted that literary tradition; each character
may have been symbolic of one of the two Americas, but they worked together in
imperfect unison to address problems that faced the country. Falcon found himself
frequently chastised as an “Uncle Tom” by other black characters, particularly his Afro-
centric militant love interest Leila, because he was paired with a hero who appeared as, at
least superficially, emblematic of the oppressive power structure during a racially
tumultuous era. Falcon also suffered from occasional feelings of inadequacy as a
superhero while fighting alongside Cap; he has no powers apart from his amazing
fighting skills, which Cap taught him, and the jet-powered wings that were a gift from
T’Challa, the Black Panther and king of Wakanda.
Wakanda itself offers an interesting commentary on race and geo-politics. This
small African nation first appeared in Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966). Despite its small
size, Wakanda is the world’s most technologically advanced country because it managed
to expel all European influences early on and was able to develop on its own terms in
relative isolation. Wakanda is also one of the only sources of an extremely valuable and
alien metal called vibranium. The Wakandans financed their technological development
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by selling minute quantities of it to other countries. A small portion ended up in the hands
of a young scientist named Dr. Myron MacLain, who used it to develop the vibranium-
iron alloy from which Captain America’s shield was forged; one could go so far as to say
that there is a portion of Africa embedded within Cap's emblematic shield.
The black superheroes of the Marvel Universe are almost unilaterally aligned with
Captain America. There are two exceptions. Firstly, James “Rhodey” Rhodes, who has
been a long-time friend and employee of Tony Stark and who has donned an armored
costume as the character War Machine, is conspicuously absent from Civil War. The only
black character to join Iron Man’s side is Bishop. Lucas Bishop made his first appearance
in Uncanny X-Men #282 (Nov. 1991) and was, despite being a mutant himself, a mutant
hunting police officer from a dystopian future in which mutants are branded and kept in
concentration camps. He entered the Marvel Universe’s present while pursuing a fugitive
mutant across time. His history as a law enforcement agent and his sense that his past
(i.e., eighty years into the future) is a historical inevitability made him a rather awkward
addition to the X-Men. His time on the X-Men was fairly short and he left them to
assume a post with the F.B.I. He eventually joined the Office of National Emergency
(O.N.E.) which is charged with “safeguarding” America’s few remaining mutants by
concentrating and surveilling them. Just after Civil War, Bishop reveals himself as an
enemy to his own people and attempts to murder an infant who he believes is the key to
preventing the existence of the future from which he comes.37
37 Messiah Complex was a thirteen chapter X-Over event that ran between October 2007 and January 2008.
It spans Uncanny X-Men #492-494, X-Factor #25-27, New X-Men #44-46, and X-Men #205-207; the event
was preceded by a X-Men: Messiah Complex one-shot.
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Figure 35. Cover, Uncanny X-Men #282 by Whilce Portacio (November 1991).
The first two heroes that the audience sees being targeted by pro-Registration
forces are both black men. Luke Cage is the first to be attacked. He is approached by Iron
Man and Ms. Marvel, who implore him to sign up, but he rebukes them. When Iron Man
informs him that the Registration bill will become a law at midnight and that he will be
subjected to arrest, Cage replies, “Getting pulled out your home in the middle of the night
for being different is the same now as it was then…is it Mississippi in the 1950’s now?”
Iron Man is aghast at the implication of racism and declares that what he is doing is
different because he is enforcing a law and Cage reminds him that “slavery used to be a
law” (New Avengers #22, 3-4). A few seconds after midnight, a full platoon of specially
trained and equipped “Cape-Killers” come knocking on Luke Cage’s apartment door.
One of the first battles of the Civil War erupts and spills out into New York’s uptown
streets. The embattled Cage is joined by Captain America, Falcon, and Daredevil
(actually Iron Fist) and the four men escape together to establish the resistance.
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The second hero to be assaulted is a character called Patriot.38 The young
character is seen fleeing across rooftops from a helicopter gunship. When tranquilizer
rounds fail to bring him down, the Cape-Killers explode a gas bomb that temporarily
subdues him and blows out the windows of an office building. Patriot, Eli Bradley,
models himself after Captain America, but although this would be significant in and of
itself, he isn’t merely a homunculus of the Star-Spangled Avenger who happens to be
black. Eli is the grandson of Isaiah Bradley who was the first Captain America during the
Second World War. Isaiah’s story is told in Robert Morales’ Truth: Red, White, and
Black (Jan.-July 2003). Although originally penned as a stand-alone mini-series, Truth
has been retconned into Marvel’s official continuity. In an early attempt to create the
process that would be used to transform Steve Rogers into Captain America, the military
sequesters an all-black battalion of soldiers and subjects them to horrific experiments.
Bradley is the only survivor; his fellow prisoners either die gruesomely because of
imperfections in the experimental process or they are machine gunned and buried in a
mass grave in order to preserve the secrecy of the government’s project. This series
clearly offers commentary on both the often under-acknowledged mistreatment and
segregation of blacks who volunteered to serve their country in WWII and the atrocity of
the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.
38 Patriot is targeted twenty-four hours after the passage of the law in Civil War #2.
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Figure 36. Cover, Truth: Red, White, and Black #1 by Kyle Baker (January 2003).
The racial dimensions of Civil War are most pronounced in the tale’s climatic
moment. The death of Goliath, a black man, at the hands of a blonde and blue-eyed clone
god provides an image that is all too easy to decode. Once again Mark Millar reminds us
that, in terms of strict legality, the anti-Registration forces are “out there breaking the law
and, essentially, endangering lives…and Goliath was a casualty of resisting arrest” (Civil
War: The Script Book, 98). Although this is true to an extent, it must be acknowledged
that it is also true that the Thor clone and, by implication, Iron Man’s agenda are guilty of
employing excessive force. The clone is an awesomely powerful figure and one could
reasonably assume that it could have taken any number of actions to subdue its target,
but, instead, it shocked and awed its opponents and shot a lightning bolt through
Goliath’s heart. The very mention of Goliath as being a “casualty of resisting arrest”
should immediately evoke a sense of the innumerable and often acquitted cases of lethal
brutality perpetrated by white police officers against young black men like Amadou
Diallo and Sean Bell.
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The death of Goliath is pretty explicit in its symbolic content, but it operates in
more subtle ways as well. The biblical Goliath is described in The First Book of Samuel
as a giant and Bill Foster’s power is his ability to radically increase his own size; the
biblical figure is killed by David, who, although significantly smaller in stature, is blessed
by the divine, and the Thor clone is a god of sorts. This scene may depict an obvious
parallel between the comic book and the bible, but what is remarkable about it is that the
story is inverted in its retelling. The biblical Goliath is a Philistine agent of oppression
and David, with God in his arsenal, is an agent of resistance and of the desire to be
legitimated on his own people’s terms. These roles are reversed in Civil War. The pro-
Registration powers are clearly endowed with the state's authority and they can claim to
have a god on their side, but it is a false and man-made god that they have manufactured
for the purpose of empowering their cause. Once Iron Man’s team sees their mistake in
unleashing their manufactured deity, Reed Richards issues the shutdown code for the
clone, “Richard Wagner Eighteen-Thirteen to Eighteen Eighty-Three” (Civil War #4, 11).
The invocation of Wagner is particularly poignant in this scene; Wagner is a composer
who often used his work to retell Teutonic lore, but he is also recognized for having
inadvertently provided the soundtrack for Nazism.
In terms of Gustav Freytag’s famous pyramid, the Thor clone’s unrestrained
outburst of murderous violence and the resultant death of a superhero is clearly Civil
War’s climax. Freytag was dealing specifically with Greek and Shakespearean drama and
his rigid structural analysis may generally be viewed as passé, but Millar’s miniseries is
undoubtedly organized as a seven-act play. The identity of the protagonist could
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theoretically be ambiguous; it could be reasonably argued that the story illustrates either
Iron Man’s comedy or Captain America’s tragedy or both simultaneously, but it is
apparent that Goliath’s death signifies the turning point in the drama’s momentum. The
death forces a number of characters to reconsider the positions they’ve assumed.
Convictions are tested when political differences become a matter of life or death.
Confronted with the seriousness of their situation, Nighthawk, a third-rate character at
best, and Stature, a teenage hero whose powers are identical to Goliath’s, abandon
Captain America’s cause. On the other side of the conflict, heroes who had never fully
believed in the Registration Act or in the methods by which it is implemented but who
had reluctantly enforced the law because it was the right thing to do, join the resistance.
Susan Richards, accompanied by her younger brother, is compelled by her beliefs to
leave her children with Reed and align herself with her husband’s enemies. Most
significantly, Spider-Man also breaks ranks with Iron Man’s agenda and, as if to put an
exclamation point next to the racial undertones of the saga, he arrives at the meeting of
the newly formed “Secret Avengers” wearing his black costume. Luke Cage
acknowledges him and simply says, “Dig the outfit, man” (Civil War #7, 24).
At the Center of the Web
If one were to read only one of the many supplementary Civil War cross-overs,
then it should be Straczinski’s Amazing Spider-Man (#529-538). These are some of the
best crafted comics within the larger narrative and they offer a great number of
significant supporting details that make the meaning of Civil War clearer. Most
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importantly, Spider-Man is the key figure within Marvel’s universe and the character’s
position on events can reasonably be interpreted as a surrogate for both the publisher’s
view and as the anticipated reader’s response. After first appearing in Amazing Fantasy
#15, Spider-Man almost single handedly ushered in Marvel’s Silver-Age renaissance and
he has continuously been the company’s single most profitable property. The first Spider-
Man movie alone has grossed nearly $405,000,000 in domestic ticket sales
(boxofficemojo.com). When Marvel wanted to issue a reaction to the September 2001
terrorist attacks, they could only do it through the blank white eyes of their banner-head
character (Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2 #36).
The creative composition of Spider-Man was revolutionary; prior to his
introduction, superheroes were simply objects whose action-packed exploits were meant
to be observed from a distance. If the reader was to locate themselves in the text, then
they were meant to identify with the sidekicks that accompanied the paternalistic
hero/partner. In contrast, Spider-Man mirrored the readers, who were empowered, albeit
vicariously, through their fictional doppelganger’s heroic adventures. At the beginning of
his career, Spider-Man was a fifteen-year-old boy. In addition to sharing an approximate
age with his readership, Spider-Man’s alter ego, Peter Parker, embodies many of the
stereotypes traditionally associated with comic book fans. He is bookish and exhibits an
above average intelligence which attracts hostility from socially privileged peers (i.e.,
athletes and cheerleaders). Spider-Man has aged about ten years in the comic book and
the average age of readers has increased proportionately. The predicaments the character
faces as both Parker and Spider-Man have gotten more complicated over the years, but he
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still deals with issues with his hallmark sense of humor, which belies a basic immaturity
and an actively suppressed trepidation in the face of mature situations. Although many
would vehemently disagree and perhaps “protest too much” in the process, this would not
be a wholly uncharacteristic trait to ascribe to today’s avid (rabid) comic book fan. Also,
Parker is from the Forest Hills section of Queens, New York. It’s a historically blue-
collar suburb and money problems are frequently a concern for the character. Unlike
Batman, for instance, the majority of readers can more or less identify with Spider-Man
in terms of his economic situation. This last trait is particularly significant to a reading of
Civil War; both Mark Millar and Tom Breevort have highlighted the class conflict that is
central to the story and Spider-Man’s movement from one of Iron Man’s penthouse
apartments to a life on the run with the resistance confirms what Spidey’s (as well as the
reader’s) allegiances should have been from the beginning.
How Spider-Man could have been wrong about which side of the Civil War he
should align himself with is precisely what makes him a compelling character. Most
superheroes’ motives are located in an extrinsic abstraction; they are moved by a higher
calling of some sort or another. Captain America, for example, serves a mythologized
notion of a basic and irreducible liberty and, by contrast, Iron Man serves Futurist
teleology; neither can comprehend his own potential for error. There is no such higher
calling to guide Spider-Man; the character epitomizes strict existential responsibility. To
best understand any superhero it’s usually best to begin with the beginning and to take a
look at the origin story the character is branded with. Peter Parker, a fifteen-year-old
nerd, visits a science exhibit and is bitten by a radioactive spider; Parker discovers that
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the bite has given him incredible strength, agility, a sixth sense that warns him of
impending danger, and the ability to cling to virtually any surface. This is a very familiar
story and one would be hard pressed to find anyone in America who didn’t possess at
least some acquaintance with it. However, it is a mistake to think that this is the moment
when young Peter Parker becomes the Amazing Spider-Man. The irradiated arachnid
may empower Parker, but he retains the freedom to determine its meaning for himself. It
may be fate or a fluke or even, as it has recently been considered in Straczinki’s vision of
the character, totemistic powers derived from the mystical/primordial essence of “Spider”
itself, but the arrival of the powers are not in itself meaningful. Spider-Man’s significance
as a hero stems from his capacity for selfishness and his ability to make selfless choices
despite it. Moments after he learns of his abilities, he enters a pro-wrestling contest and
then, creating a costume and persona as a gimmick, he becomes an overnight sensation
by performing feats on television. He may have great powers at this point, but he is
hardly the hero he will eventually become. One night after a performance, a thief robs the
T.V. studio’s offices and the costumed Parker does nothing to either help or hinder the
thief’s escape; a short while later, the very same thief attempts to rob Parker’s home and
shoots and kills his uncle. It is only at this moment that Parker learns that his choices
have ramifications on the world in which he lives, or as the narrator in the last panel of
this famous first appearance puts it, “with great power must also come great
responsibility.” It is the death of his Uncle Ben and not the bug bite that transforms a man
with incidental spider powers into the Amazing Spider-Man.
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Responsibility is the source of Spider-Man’s motivation and anguish, and the
entire weight of Civil War is situated on his shoulders. Months prior to the passage of the
Superhuman Registration Act, Spider-Man’s Aunt May’s home in Queens is burned to
the ground by a former boyhood friend of Peter’s (Amazing Spider-Man #518). Tony
Stark arranges for Peter, his wife Mary Jane, and his Aunt to live rent-free in the
luxurious Avenger’s Tower located in mid-town Manhattan. Stark also supplies Peter
with a technologically enhanced costume that augments and improves his already
formidable powers. Spider-Man grows indebted to his new benefactor. His debt isn’t a
product of the material comfort and nifty toys that Stark can provide him; it is because
Stark seems to assume the paternal function in the Parker family. As Captain America
notes, “[Spider-Man] wears his need for a father figure on his sleeve, and [Stark] played
that role to the hilt to make him do what [Stark] asked” (Iron Man/Captain America:
Casualties of War #1). Very little is known about Spider-Man’s biological parents; in
Untold Tales of Spider-Man #-1 (July 1997) it was explained that they were agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. who died on an undercover mission to take down the Red Skull, but
otherwise there are virtually no mentions of them in the past forty-five years of Spider-
Man comics. The true patriarch of the Parker family is Peter’s Uncle Ben and his absence
is the crux on which Spider-Man’s story hangs. As discussed above, it is Ben Parker’s
death that is the moment that transforms Peter into Spider-Man, but it also forces him to
assume the father figure’s role in the family, to guard May against the occasional
illegitimate suitors (Dr. Otto Octavius, for example), and to locate an appropriate
surrogate. Spider-Man agrees to be Iron Man’s right-hand man even though he does not
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agree with the registration act for the sole reason that Stark has positioned himself to
supply the comfort and security for the Parker family that Peter has routinely failed to
provide. Peter even chooses to sacrifice his most valuable possession, his secret identity,
to Stark and his agenda on the condition that his family will be protected. The mask has
always served as a barrier to separate his family from the dangers of his heroism, and by
surrendering his secrecy he passes the patriarchal torch to Stark.
The choice Spider-Man faces is not unlike Sartre’s example in Existentialism and
Human Emotion of the forlorn young man who must decide between staying home with
his ailing mother and joining the Free-French fighters. Assuming the absence of an a
priori good to dictate his decision, Spider-Man is free to choose between either of his two
options. It would be equally valid to follow his convictions into the resistance or to
follow his dedication to his family into Iron Man’s camp; either way, he is entirely and
personally culpable for the outcome of his choice. Because he is a paragon of existential
responsibility, the Registration movement’s unlawful detention of their opposition
transforms Spider-Man into an uneasy jailer, and the death of Bill Foster is Spider-Man’s
crime whether he pulled the trigger or not. He had been acting as if he were simply Peter
Parker for most of Civil War and had been making his choices based on a legitimate
concern for his immediate family; he unmasked and acted accordingly; he traded the
mantle of a superhero for the badge that comes with being an agent of the state. In the
end, Spider-Man restores his superheroic subjectivity and chooses to resists registration
for the sake of both the world he occupies and for the persona that he had fashioned for
himself in order to occupy it.
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Figure 37. Panels from Amazing Fantasy #15 by Steve Ditko (August 1962).
Appomattox
Civil War’s dénouement hardly provides a catharsis. The specific seriality of
mainstream superhero comic books deplores both stalemates and ultimate resolutions. In
other words, a victory is a necessity, but only if that victory is an indicator of future
crises. As mentioned, Civil War can be read as a seven-act play; however, it would be a
faulty reading not to recognize that it is only a single act in a significantly larger dramatic
structure that began with Avengers: Disassembled (Aug. 2005-Jan. 2006) and has
continued after Civil War in Secret Invasion (June 2008- Jan. 2009) and Dark Reign
(Dec. 2008), which at the time of this writing has yet to be resolved. Even extending the
narrative frame to encompass these additional cross-over events is ultimately insufficient.
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For example, the key events that led to Avengers: Disassembled occurred in Avengers:
West Coast #56 (March 1990).
The conclusion of Civil War occurs as the final battle between the opposed heroes
spills into the streets of New York. The anti-Registration resistance gets the upper hand
in the battle and is physically beating Iron Man’s army. Captain America stands over the
defeated Iron Man and hesitates to deliver the killing blow; at the last moment, Cap is
tackled by an assortment of police, fire fighters, and paramedics (the now iconic heroes
of 9/11). Now seeing the physical damage and threat to the civilian populace that the
superhero feud presents, Captain America orders his team to stand-down and
“surrenders” himself into police custody. This gesture isn’t meant to be an end to the
debate; Cap has an epiphany amidst the rubble he is partly responsible for and declares
that his side may be winning the fight, but that they are losing the argument. He will
continue the fight, but he’ll do it as Steve Rogers rather than the embodiment of the
American abstraction and he’ll do his fighting as a subject of the justice system rather
than as an outside alternative to it.
Several significant events unfold in the aftermath of Civil War. Most importantly,
Captain America is assassinated by his long-time nemesis, Red Skull, on the courthouse
steps before his trial can begin. Iron Man rises to political power and is installed as the
director of S.H.I.E.L.D., which makes him the de facto coronated king of superheroes.
This promotion allows for the realization of his “50 States Initiative,” which de-
concentrates the superhuman population from the coasts and creates a local superhero
team for each state in the union. Lastly, a mafia contract killer makes an attempt on Peter
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Parker and his family’s lives which fatally wounds Peter’s Aunt May. Of course, none of
these outcomes is permanent. As Mark Millar has said,
I want this book to be dated in 10-20 years. I want it to be dated in five years. The
thing about comics is that it’s a pop medium and a mistake people make is
dreaming of posterity. We’re a disposable pulp medium in the sense that most
readers don’t keep or re-read our work, they just move onto the next pop thrill.
(Marvel Spotlight: Civil War, 24)
It isn’t just Civil War’s commentary on Bush-Era politics and partisan hostilities that will
spiral into meaninglessness as time presses on; the major events within the narrative will
grow increasingly obscure and eventually fade from memory as well. Every comic book
that has been published since the completion of Civil War has been a handful of dirt cast
down on its significance. Already, in one of the worst cheats in the history of narrative,
Spider-Man has regained his secret identity and saved his Aunt May’s life by making a
bargain with Mephisto, Marvel’s representation of Christianity’s Satan. Iron Man’s
meteoric rise to power and prominence has collapsed in classically tragic fashion under
the weight of his own hubris and his only real asset, his intelligence, has been corrupted
and deteriorated by the Extremis virus. Even the “death” of Captain America lacks
permanence; the first of a five-issue mini-series titled Captain America: Reborn appeared
on comic book store shelves in the first week of July, 2009.
194
AFTERWORD
The quality that makes Civil War a worthy subject of study is not that it is not an
unusual composition. Without a doubt there are moments of extraordinary writing and
illustration throughout the event, but it is precisely how it typifies the American
superhero comic book genre that makes it interesting. Just as Marvel was threading cross-
over events into other cross-over events as a way of constructing a universe-wide meta-
narrative, the company’s only major competitor, D.C., was doing exactly the same thing.
At D.C., Identity Crisis became the Infinite Crisis, which became 52 and Countdown,
which became Final Crisis. The structure of American superhero comic books is truly
unique; imagine if there was a cultural expectation that every past, present and future
television show on a given channel needed to be interrelated and every show impacted,
informed, and occupied the same unified space as every other program. The scope of
such a project and the coordination of talent that would be required to construct it are
entirely mind-boggling unless, of course, you regularly read superhero comics, which
have been executing exactly this type of narrative structure for the better part of the last
seven decades.
To return to the original metaphor, superhero narrative is fractal; it is a pattern of
images that is composed entirely of an indeterminate number of identical image patterns.
Extracted from the larger and more complex fractal, the singular image pattern (a single
comic book or story arc) may be mistaken for being over-simplistic or even childish, but
it is actually quite a rich subject. This book has attempted to show that even an apparently
undemanding story of any random masked crime-fighter thumping a bad guy possesses a
195
remarkable political dimension that runs concurrent with the comic’s literal
interpretation. This isn’t to suggest that comics operate as concealed propaganda; the
politics are always present whether it is intended or not. Some authors choose to highlight
this quality, but no author is fully capable of escaping it. Reading the politics is only one
of several possible approaches to the superhero genre. This book only barely
acknowledges the potential for such diverse readings as offered by feminist,
psychoanalytical, historicized, and queer approaches to the texts. Although a structural/
ideological reading has been privileged here, it doesn’t enjoy primacy over any other
possibility and there is much still to do with the American superhero comic book.
Meaning is never hidden in a text and the literal story exists concurrently with all its
possible interpretations. Ernest Hemingway was wrong about the shape of narrative; it is
nothing like an iceberg. There is no “deeper” meaning submerged in frigid waters and
waiting for students to hold their breath and go diving for it. It’s always right there on the
surface of twenty-two pages printed in full color action.
196
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