While I love
comics/graphic novels as a beautiful and meaningful art form, superhero stories
don’t typically capture my imagination; certainly not with the consistency and
intensity that marks a fan of the genre. Growing up, I read mostly French adventure
comics like Tintin, Lucky Luke, Asterix, Gaston, The
Scrameustache along with American comic strips like Peanuts, B.C.,
and Archie. It wasn’t until later in life that I delved into superhero
comics, with the Death of Superman arc being one of the earliest stories
I remember reading. On TV, I tuned in to Spider-Man (1967) reruns and
the 90’s X-Men cartoon. Movies like The Rocketeer and Tim Burton’s Batman/Batman
Returns selectively brought me closer to the genre, as did the seminal Batman:
The Animated Series and associated movies like Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.
Also, the fantastic Jim Carrey-starring film, The Mask.
Throughout
the years, I’ve periodically added some superhero books – particularly Elseworlds
stories, along with seminal works like Kingdom Come – to my bookshelf along
with other graphic works such as V for Vendetta, Dean Motter’s Mister
X, and others, while staying comfortably away from publishers’ mainstream
continuity. A notable exception: I threw myself into Mike Mignola’s Hellboy
universe and diligently collected its many books for years until I eventually gave
up out of sheer exhaustion. I also attempted to devote myself to DC’s Earth
One series, appreciating the initiative to develop independent and updated
stories for classic characters. But I gave up on that too as I found the
writing to be uninspired at best and the art unexciting– at least insofar as
the Batman and Superman books were concerned. (I haven’t read Grant Morrison’s Earth
One Wonder Woman books, so have no comment to offer on their merits.)
For all my mixed
appreciation of superhero comics, it’s not for rejecting their fundamental
concept – namely, to tell stories of people with extraordinary abilities – that
I’m a genre skeptic. At their best, superhero comics certainly earn their
comparisons to the old mythologies of gods, goddesses, strange and magnificent
creatures, and the gifted (or cursed) heroes and villains of epic sagas. And
they unquestionably can offer a perspective on the societal issues that
preoccupy us today as well as stories in any other genre. But in my
observation, these great stories are instances of superhero comics that
transcend their genre more than they inhabit it. If we consider genre as a
pattern of storytelling, superhero comics rely on a generally consistent
application of narrative methodologies, formulas, and tropes that often bely
disturbing assumptions and philosophies beneath flashy spectacle.
In this
respect, while Alan Moore may arguably lack a bit of nuance in his criticism of
superhero comics, I can’t disagree with the general cut of his perspective.
From The Guardian:
“Hundreds
of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that
had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys –
of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I
think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to
which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was
not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an
awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no,
comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than
people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the
same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more
comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”
He
thinks that’s not just infantile but dangerous. “I said round about 2011 that I
thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if
millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of
infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can
very often be a precursor to fascism.” He points out that when Trump was
elected in 2016, and “when we ourselves took a bit of a strange detour in our
politics”, many of the biggest films were superhero movies.
Perhaps the
correlation between the popularity of superhero movies and Trumpism is unfair,
but looking at the patterns of superhero storytelling I have to agree with
Moore, if not in the specifics than at least for the need to take a critical
look at how superheroes signify in pop culture.
An
emphasis on the status quo, with narratives almost invariably rooted in violent
conflict.
While comics clearly allow for changes in some respects – for example, Harley
Quinn’s turn from villain to anti-hero, hero Hank McCoy’s development into a
villain, Batman’s changing Robins and expanding roster of allies – there is
nevertheless a status quo expressed in the way in which the victories, defeats,
deaths, and transformations of both heroes and villains are always provisional
and reversible. That status quo? Conflict, specifically violent conflict – the
perpetual antagonism of heroes and villains. Batman will never save Gotham or
defeat the Joker, the Green Lanterns will never oversee a peaceful galaxy, the
Kingpin will always be a criminal kingpin, and so on, because the absence of
conflict removes a key rationale for superheroes. The genre’s fixation on
conflict isn’t hidden, either; scan the headlines of comic book news sources
like ScreenRant, or comment boards, and we easily find questions about who
would win in a battle, who is most powerful, who has the heavier boots with
which to kick ass, etc.. Batman vs Superman? Hulk vs Ghost Rider? Black Adam vs
Superman? Ironman vs Captain America? This Marvel character vs that DC
character?
A related
problem is the extent to which character growth, despite the odd exception,
also seems to favor stagnation rather than growth, particularly for villains.
Maybe there are nuances I’m missing from my outside perspective, but every time
I read about the latest arc in this or that comic, it always seems as if
villains are consistently the same in terms of motivations. They don’t learn
from their mistakes, change for the better, or suffer tragic (and permanent)
consequences for their actions. They just keep coming back time after time, reinforcing
the impression that the underlying impulse for superhero comics is to sustain
conflict.
A
fixation on power and vigilante action. The desire to pit heroes and villains
against each, in any number of combinations, comes with a necessary fixation on
the power needed to win a fight, whether in terms of force, intellect, or both.
This is typically expressed by continually expanding a character’s power set
and/or increasing the potency of these powers (even to a god-like scale).
Considering that most superheroes (or antiheroic protagonists) are vigilantes –
they act outside the law regardless of their respect for it (e.g. Batman and
Spider-Man, who turn over criminals to the police, vs the Punisher who tortures
and kills criminals at his own discretion) – much of their heroism rests on the
moral quality of their individual characters. It shouldn’t be a surprise that
this raises serious ethical questions on heroism defined in this sense, because
beyond the escapist power fantasies of defeating bullies/villains and avenging
wrongs, there comes the question of how to hold superpowered people accountable
when they specifically act outside of institutional, or at least
social/communal, frameworks. While some works, like Kingdom Come, are
quite thoughtful on the topic, I tend to see more pseudo-profundity in the
genre. For example, the X-Men are often seen as a commentary on civil rights,
given the discrimination mutants face from humanity, but the analogy never made
sense to me. Black skin, non-heterosexual orientations – these don’t vaporize
people, cause objects to explode, violate people’s mental privacy (or override
their will) or actually hold the potential to harm/kill anyone the way mutant
superpowers do. If anything, the gun control debate is the better framework,
but that would require challenging the idea of superheroes operating unchecked
in the world.
Moore is
right to point out, in my view, how the comics industry missed the point of Watchmen
not only by ignoring justifiable skepticism of “heroes,” but by glamorizing
antiheroes. They don’t seem to have adjusted their storytelling to account for Watchmen’s
critique of power. Works like The Boys notwithstanding, the default
attitude is to continue valorizing the powerful as messianic saviors of the
powerless, a gesture made especially easy when the stories are really little
more than fights between superpowered beings without any really connection to
their societies. Our role is to trust in these beings and have faith they won’t
turn against us – a faith that is often used to harshly judged skeptics – as
heretics and/or villains – who develop fail-safe plans in case a superhero goes
rogue, as Batman does in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. To put it
simply: comics tend to focus on superheroes as empowered beings, not empowering
beings.
An
algorithmic approach to novelty and the seemingly unavoidable shift away from
realism.
From variations on the original character, including evil doppelgangers and
alternate dimension variants, to saddling heroes with kid or animal sidekicks, the
comics industry has a somewhat predictable approach to introducing novelty in
their stories when the original character runs out of steam. A related
tendency, when creators become bored with realism, is the decision to include
magical, supernatural, or miraculous science-fiction elements to the story – an
effect that, to me, is similar to how Hanna Barbera ruined Scooby Doo by having
the gang confront actual ghosts rather than exposing charlatans posing as
ghosts and monster. At times, it reaches the point where what is appealing
about a character, the premise underlying their story, is diluted by all the
additional characters and conceptual shenanigans. An example that comes to mind
is the Hulk, initially interesting as a modern reinvention of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s classic Jekyll/Hyde binary, who these days is reconceived as a starship
piloted by Bruce Banner. Really?
Incoherent
worldbuilding.
The universe superheroes inhabit, particularly Marvel’s and DC’s, mash together
so many different mythologies, cosmologies, and theologies that they achieve an
impressive incoherence in which their worlds cannot possibly function. Magic,
supernatural entities, advanced technologies, science-based powers, aliens,
mutants, angels, demons, ancient gods, the Judeo-Christian God, vampires,
zombies, and what-have-you – all seem to collide together on account of insisting
that characters exist within a shared universe. The impact isn’t only on the
physics of these universes, which is confused at best, but also their histories
in that if the world has a particular set of natural laws than societies would have
to develop differently than in a world with a different set of laws.
It’s not
only that superhero universes tend to be conceptual kludges, however. Even
familiar activities such as scientific discovery and invention tend to be
detached from reality, with lone geniuses single-handedly inventing devices so
far beyond our current capabilities that they might as well be magic. It’s
tempting to look at all this and appreciate the boundless imagination of these
mash-ups, however implausible, illogical, and even nonsensical they are. If
superhero comics were typically written as hard science fiction, that would be
something. But even when dressed in sci-fi clothes, what we get is essentially
fantasy – and not the disciplined fantasy of a Modessit Jr. or a Tolkien, but
rather the kind of fantasy in which anything can happen because the
storyteller’s whim is not bound to a narrative universe with clear rules,
fictional or otherwise, just as our real universe is. Plausibility isn’t
necessarily about being realistic – that is, true to our world – but about creating
a methodically conceived and purposefully implemented internal logic for
narratives to follow. In the end, I’m of the view that smart fun is more fun
than dumb fun.
Reminder ...
Before
moving on to discuss Marvel and DC’s cinematic universes, it’s worth re-emphasizing
that any critique of patterns in superhero storytelling doesn’t preclude any
specific story from being excellent across any number of facets – art, characterizations,
plot – either separately or all together. In this sense, then, my enjoyment of
superhero stories really depends on the extent to which they diverge from the
patterns, cliches, tropes, and philosophical assumptions I’ve described.
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