Comics As PHILOSOPHY This Page Intentionally Left Blank Comics As PHILOSOPHY
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Comics as PHILOSOPHY This page intentionally left blank Comics as PHILOSOPHY Edited by JEFF MCLAUGHLIN University Press of Mississippi / Jackson www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2005 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First edition 2005 ϱ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Comics as philosophy / edited by Jeff McLaughlin.— 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-57806-794-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. I. McLaughlin, Jeff. PN6712.C58 2005 741.5Ј09—dc22 2005004453 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available To my late brother Gord, for letting me read his Fantastic Four. To my dad, for giving me my allowance to spend on comic books. And To my wife Deanna, Just because I love her. This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi What If? DC’s Crisis and Leibnizian Possible Worlds 3 —JEFF MCLAUGHLIN Describing and Discarding “Comics” as an 14 Impotent Act of Philosophical Rigor —ROBERT C. HARVEY “No Harm in Horror” 27 Ethical Dimensions of the Postwar Comic Book Controversy —AMY KISTE NYBERG Truth Be Told 46 Authorship and the Creation of the Black Captain America —STANFORD W. CARPENTER Plato, Spider-Man and the Meaning of Life 63 —JEREMY BARRIS Modernity, Race, and the American Superhero 84 —ALDO REGALADO Deconstructing the Hero 100 —IAIN THOMSON viii Contents Jean-Paul Sartre Meets Enid Coleslaw 130 Existential Themes in Ghost World —LAURA CANIS AND PAUL CANIS Making the Abstract Concrete 153 How a Comic Can Bring to Life the Central Problems of Environmental Philosophy —KEVIN DE LAPLANTE The Good Government According to Tintin 173 Long Live Old Europe? —PIERRE SKILLING Drawn into 9/11, But Where Have all the Superheroes Gone? 207 —TERRY KADING Bibliography 228 Contributors 236 Index 239 Acknowledgments Obviously putting together an anthology involves more than one person. Thus I must thank a variety of people who were instrumental in getting this book into your hands. First, I must single out Gene Kanneberg Jr., for without his kindness and knowledge this book would not have been born. Even though Gene and I were strangers at the time we met at the 2002 International Popular Culture Conference in Toronto, he introduced me to a number of important people who have played central roles in this project. In fact, Gene literally took me by the hand and walked me over to the publisher at University Press of Mississippi. Director Seetha Srinivasan and Assistant Editor Walter Biggins at the University Press of Mississippi have been extremely supportive towards this project. At times when I felt I was being a real pain nagging the contributors to get their work in on time (or at least only a few months late), Seetha’s first words to me would come back to haunt me. “You’ll find out that writ- ing a book is often easier than editing one.” This may be true but to do so would have meant that I would not have been able to learn from the papers assembled here. “Assembled” is probably the wrong term since these essays required very, very little editorial reshaping. A poke here and a nudge there was all that was required. Accordingly, I’m honoured to be have been able to collect the ideas of R. C. Harvey, Amy Nyberg, Stanford W.Carpenter, Laura and Paul Canis, Pierre Skilling, Jeremy Barris, Iain Thomson, Kevin LaPlante, Aldo J. Regalado, and Terry Kading. Anne Stascavage helped me with the nuts and bolts of the manuscript. As my editor at UPM she was infinitely resourceful and patient with all my “green” questions. ix x Acknowledgments A debt of gratitude is owed to Thomas Inge for it was he who suggested the title Comics as Philosophy to me as we sat on a hotel shuttle bus heading to the airport after the Toronto Popular Culture conference. Thanks must also be given to Annette Dominik who provided the French-English translation of Pierre Skilling’s essay on Tintin. I’d also like to express my deepest appreciation to all of the reviewers who helped with the evaluation process including Dr. Bruce Baugh, Dr. John Belshaw, Dr. Christine Daigle, Dr. Annette Dominik, Dr. Michael Gorman, Dan O’Reilly, Dr. Kate Sutherland, and Dr. Robin Tapley. Their insightful comments gave me confidence in the selections that I had made and their suggestions helped make these fine essays even better. Doug Sulipa started with a small comic shop in the attic of an old house in Winnipeg, Manitoba where I first met him some thirty years ago and now he has one of the largest collections in North America. As a senior advisor to the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, he was instrumental in providing me with some suggestions and back issues that helped move my investiga- tions along. Sadly, when it came time to go to do my doctorate work, I had to give up my monthly purchases because it was a matter of either eating or reading. Nevertheless, the mere fact that you hold this anthology in your hand shows you that comic books have continued to play a role in my life. In fact, I remember one of my first philosophy essays used the Death of Jean Grey of the X-Men as a discussion point. Hence, I must express my gratitude to all those artists who gave me hours and hours of enjoyment over the years. To attempt to name them would be a disservice to the one or two that I would mistakenly overlook. Lastly I have to thank you dear reader. Whether you’re a student, a pro- fessional, or a comic book enthusiast, reading this collection shows that your interest in philosophy is as genuine as your interest in comic books. May you always find pleasure in both. —JEFF McLAUGHLIN June 2004 Introduction When we read comics, we make a series of aesthetic and philosophical choices. Although these choices are usually made subconsciously, they’re nevertheless real decisions that we face every time we open the comics section of the newspaper or crack open a new comic book. From the very outset, then, the form of comics—its language and how we understand it—is rife with philosophical quandaries. Once we start ana- lyzing the contents of comics, we can face its theoretical concerns through its various storylines, narrative arcs, drawing styles, and commentary. Comics as Philosophy is a collection of essays that explores the ways in which comics, both in form and content, can articulate and complicate philosoph- ical concerns, and vice versa. The essays here, written by scholars from diverse critical perspectives, also discuss related issues such as audience reaction and censorship, showing how comics have been a key battleground in cultural debates in the courtroom, the op-ed page, and the academy. This collection shows how a cartoonist’s careful construction of a world in comics form can give insight into the world in which we live. The con- tributors to Comics as Philosophy reveal how the issues and questions that philosophers deal with can be found not just in some remote branch of aca- demia but in unassuming and easily accessible places. In doing so, they achieve the most noble goal of informing and educating individuals who may or may not be sitting in a university classroom. As the eleven authors present you with a variety of philosophical perspectives and draw from what they consider to be philosophically significant comic books and comic book genres, readers will see how these fields may be used to provide intel- lectually stimulating insight about the other. xi xii Introduction The essays that make up this collection address two fundamental ques- tions and provide a sense of the breadth and depth of the branches of philo- sophical inquiry. The first question asks: “What is the Good?” Thus the topics touched upon in this collection include: What constitutes a good life? What is a good thing to do? What is a good form of government? What is a good society? The second enduring question is “What is the Truth?”: What is the truth about reality? What is the truth about the human condition? What is the truth about the nature of art? The first essay, “What If?: DC’s Crisis and Leibnizian Possible Worlds,” argues that the multiple universes that were home to the superheroes of DC Comics—including Superman, the Flash, Batman, and Wonder Woman— depict the well-known metaphysical concept of possible worlds. The neces- sity of multiple universes was used by DC artists and writers to explain the interrelationship of DC’s Golden, Silver and Bronze-aged characters, but the essay analyzes how this construct ultimately became an overwhelming continuity problem for the publisher. After nearly fifty years of production, DC was forced to confront the fact that cataclysmic events that occurred in Superman comics, for example, weren’t even mentioned in The Flash, despite the fact that both heroes ostensibly lived in the same world and were produced by the same publisher. DC’s writers and artists realized that these disparate narratives needed to be unified because the internal conflicts of its comics were too startling to ignore. This crisis was eventually resolved in an expansive storyline, documented in several DC comics ventures, that destroyed several alternate worlds and ultimately collapsed others into a single universe. A few hundred years previous to DC’s 1986 predicament, German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz wondered whether the world that we live in with all its grief and pain is the best one that God could have created.