Comics Aren't (Just) Funny

CHAPTER 3 COMICS AREN’T (JUST) FUNNY Deconstructing Superhero Comics The United States of America is a Western culture enamored with its faith in the rugged individual. Many who comment on popular culture have noted the American fascination with celebrity, and I believe there is a significant overlap among the American fascination with celebrity, faith in the rugged individual, and enduring affection for superheroes. But that overlap has its traps. In 2010, many conservatives speak of Ronald Reagan in such glowing terms that we may forget a poll in 1986 that revealed 56% of African-Americans believed Reagan to be a racist—a distant parallel of charges leveled at Barack Obama by his detractors in the first year of his presidency. In 1983, Reagan also suffered a 35% approval rating—another chink in the armor his supporters envision today and another parallel with Obama early in his tenure as president. Americans suffer the distortions of memory, especially as it is tinted by our mythologies. Americans are also rocked time and again when our heroes in real life prove themselves to be human. 2009 was punctuated by the fall of professional golfer Tiger Woods, who had garnered superhero status as an athlete and a celebrity with the implicit message that he was invincible and morally superior. But Woods fell from grace and lay among the countless bodies scattered in the ditch of shame that follows such idolatry. Americans desperately want superheroes walking amongst us, and we are determined to create them where they don’t exist— just as we are even quicker to excoriate them when they inevitably prove us wrong. I mention Reagan above because the mythology that has sprung in the decades since his presidency are not the only connection I see with a discussion of superheroes. Reagan’s iconography included hair that is eerily reminiscent of Superman, and Superman is the first superhero of the comic book era and arguably the most enduring. Like Reagan, Superman is also the embodiment of the traditional, the neat, the conservative impulse of the American Way. Unlike Reagan, Superman cannot fail us… • • • In his Chapter Six, “The Superhuman Condition,” Gravett (2005) includes a full- page painting of Superman by Alex Ross. The room is dark except for a table lamp with its shade askance, and Superman sits in the limbo of his two selves with his modern Clark Kent round-rimmed glasses and open white dress shirt along with his Superman uniform exposing the expanding mid-section of a middle-aged man. Gravett opens the chapter: Comics’ “‘Golden Age’ dawned in 1938, when Superman, the first of their kind, came down to Earth and walked among us as Clark Kent” 69 CHAPTER 3 (p. 74). The first manifestations of superheroes in the comic universe were colorful, but “their moral spectrum was usually limited to black and white,” adds Gravett (p. 74). The genesis of the superhero in American popular culture fit well into many aspects of the American Dream, including the influence of the Jewish community as central to the emerging industry, explains Gravett. The Golden Age was typified by self-contained superhero stories with each issue, but the superhero genre was enormously popular and profitable throughout the first few decades of the genre. Gravett notes, however, that a few longer works existed in this early era, predating the rise of graphic novels in the late 1970s and 1980s. After a dip in the success of comics and the superhero subgenre in the 1950s— under the weight of Dr. Wertham’s attacks—comics and superheroes were resurrected, as Gravett explains, by the sci-fi booms of the late 1950s and the ascendency of Marvel comics in the 1960s. Contrasting with the do-gooder image of Superman in the Golden Age, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others at Marvel re-introduced the superhero as more human. Peter Parker and The Thing were reluctant superheroes and victims of science gone bad. All four members of the Fantastic Four and Peter Parker struggled with real-life issues such as relation- ships and work. Gravett (2005) adds that Marvel also expanded the comic book conventions from single-issue stories to what would be called the Marvel Universe—and later the DC Universe. Comic superhero stories were serialized and existed inside huge comic book worlds where superheroes from one comic book would cross paths with other superheroes. Comic book creators became more aware in the 1960s and 1970s of the continuity of characters and stories as larger narratives and as “commercial properties, recognizable brands, to be licensed and merchandized” (Gravett, p. 76). In what may fairly be called symbiotic, superhero comics have been powerfully influenced both by their contribution to popular culture/media and by their value as integral parts of the American market system. Another pivotal shift in the superhero genre includes the work of Frank Miller, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore, Watchmen: “DC Comics granted their acclaimed creators the rare opportunity to examine what superheroes might be like if change was not always an illusion and time caught up with them at last” (Gravett, 2005, p. 77). One value of exploring superhero comics as a genre in classroom settings is to examine how the genre has evolved, possibly as either a reflection of or influence on the surrounding popular culture—from the idealized superhero to the more human superhero to the time-bound, thus even more human, superhero. The freedom to shape and reshape iconic superheroes and minor superheroes— from Superman and Batman to Daredevil and a growing list of new superheroes— was first realized by Miller and Moore, and then expanded to Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and others—many of whom, such as Gaiman, moved also into other genres beyond comics. As Gravett (2005) shows, the superhero genre, despite its fluctuating popularity and perennial detractors, is vibrant and important—and sophisticated. 70 .

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