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American :

Fractal 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. 2

This dissertation titled

American : 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 . Ogles

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

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 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 that is composed of an indeterminate number of intersecting threads. Identical to fractals, the complex geometry of the found in superhero comics when as a whole is constructed by the perpetual iteration of a single that was established at the genre's point of in Comics #1. The of 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, .

Approved: ______

Robert Miklitsch

Professor of English 4

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 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. 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 . 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 I owned as one continuous story. As it turns out, my early forays into 5 obsessive compulsiveness proved to be exactly the reading strategy one needs to bring to contemporary American superhero comics.

Superheroes have been a staple in 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 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. '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 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 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 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. 6

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 #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 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, and secret identities, Action Comics #1 supplied the genre with a specific ideological framework. Superman was first heralded as 7 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

Ennis' Preacher and 's The Walking Dead, have excelled at exploring different genres. Japanese 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 8 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 " curve," which is a term he uses to illustrate popular culture's trend toward ever increasing complexity and sophistication. The chapter presents a selective 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. 9

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. 10

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am, of course, indebted to my dissertation committee which was chaired by

Robert Miklitsch and composed of Roger Aden, Samuel Crowl, and 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 . 11

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 of America……………………………..……………79

The ……………………………………………………….…85

Society as Super-Villain………………….……………………………...91

The New Guard………………………………………………………….95

The of 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 ………………………………………………..134 12

Military-Industrial Complexity………………………………...……….141

The Superhero’s Superhero…………………………………………….150

Convergences…………………………………………………………...166

Collateral Damage……………………………………………………...174

Race and Class………………………………………………………….177

At the Center of the ……………………………………………….185

Appomattox……………………………………………………………..191

Afterword……………………………………………………………………………….194

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….196

13

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Panels from , ……………………………25

2. Panels from /: Night on Earth by ……………..27

3. Sierpinski’s Triangle from Wikipedia.org……………………………………….40

4. Cover, #1 by Vincent Sullivan (March 1937)………………...55

5. Cover, Action Comics #1 by (June 1938)…………………………...57

6. Cover, Detective Comics #27 by (May 1939)………………………...59

7. Cover, All- #3 by Everet Hibbard (Winter 1940-41)……………….62

8. Cover, Comics #75 by (February 1950)…………69

9. Cover, #4 by (September 1956)…………………..76

10. Cover, Showcase #22 by (September 1959)…………………………...77

11. Cover, Brave and the Bold #28 by (February 1960)…………...80

12. Cover, Amazing #15 by (August 1962)…………………….87

13. Cover, Hero for Hire #1 by John Romita (June 1972)…………………………..93

14. Cover, : Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #4 by Steranko (September 1968).95

15. Cover, #178 by Mike Sekowsky (September 1968)…………..98

16. Cover, #77 by (April 1970)……………………....100

17. Page 19 from Amazing Spider-Man #121 by Gil Kane (June 1973)……...…...105

18. Cover, #181 by (November 1974)………………………….110

19. Cover, #1 by (September 1985)…………………113

20. Cover, X-Men #1E by Jim Lee (October 1981)………………………………...117

21. Cover, Marvel Super Heroes: #1 by Michael Zeck (May 1984)…118 14

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 (May 2000)…………………………...131

27. Cover, Tales of #39 by Jack Kirby (March 1963)……………………143

28. Cover, #128 by (November 1979)…………………...…145

29. Cover, Captain America Comics #1 by Jack Kirby (March 1941)……………..150

30. Cover, #4 by Jack Kirby (March 1964)……………………………...154

31. Cover, Captain America #250 by (October 1980)………………...158

32. Page 18 from Captain America #175 by (July 1974)……………162

33. Cover, New Avengers: 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 (November 1991)………….181

36. Cover, Truth: Red, White, and Black #1 by (January 2003)………183

37. Panels from #15 by (August 1962)…………….191 15

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 and it is an eight issue mini- series written by ; 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, , 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 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 16 foretold to Hal Jordan’s predecessor, , 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, 17 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 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 . 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 18 particular publisher's . 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 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 19 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 ’s 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 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 20 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 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 . 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 ” 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 “” became popularized after it appeared on the cover of 1978’s Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by ; 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 “” 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. 21

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 in 1983. Although DC 22 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 ] 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. is Captain , is Thunderbolt, Nite- is Blue , is The , The is , and Spectre is Nightshade. 23 established and clearly defined heroes, . 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 ? 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 crash-landed in the Soviet

Union and he had been raised as a Stalinist instead of as a 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 24 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 object, held in ’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 when it seems that he fails to understand some of the most fundamental aspects of The Caped . The clearest example of this is near the beginning of the second chapter of TDKR when Batman blasts a with an M-60 machine gun and says something snarky to his corpse. Batman comes into being at the moment his parents are gunned 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 26

Batman, but it cannot 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 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 , have gone to to investigate a “partial multiversal collapse” in which a number of 27 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 ’s imagination in 1939. Each of these versions of the character initially seems fundamentally different than the others. While the 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 28 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 , 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 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 29 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 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 , 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 30 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 , 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 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 “S” centered on a five-sided 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, , Ideology: Visions of Superman at 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 31 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 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 . 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 32

Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink and Pecos Bill and “all the rest who speak for various regional identities in the of American , 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. , 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 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. 33

(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 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, , 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 (’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 34 remote 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, galaxies, or the remoteness of a distant past or future, the narrative is unambiguously anchored to the here and now. Neither the day the 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, 35 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 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 . 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 36 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 ’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 , 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 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 is, after all, a sure way to sell the next installment of a story, but the

3Events culminating in Superman V.2, #75. . : DC, January 1993. Print. 37 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 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 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 38

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 39 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 is a constant and his or her is a historically shifting variable. To see this in action, one need only to glance at Superman's arch-, . 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 . 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:

40

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 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 constitutes is a difficult issue to reconcile; one would find it equally difficult to compare computer-generated 41 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 as a medium for memoir and creative non-fiction. Since the beginning of the 21st Century, superheroes have laid virtual 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 , 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 42 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 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 43 standard for good taste. There is an identical thesis in books like This Book Contains

Graphic Language: Comics as Literature by Rocco Versaci and : 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 ’ 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. 44

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 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 have virtually made household names of creators R. Crumb, , and Marjane

Satrapi. In 2006, Time Magazine named ’s its choice for the book of the year over offerings from more widely accepted forms of literature. Thanks to 45 works like these and Art Spiegleman’s mammoth accomplishment , 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 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 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 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. ’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 , 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, 48

dominated everything personally: the scenario, the actors, the camera work, and

above all the cutting (or montage). 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 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 49 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 50 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). 51

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. 52

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 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 54 in the , 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 (#57, 1951) is a suitable for the end of the Golden Age of Comics. 55

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, 56 exoticism, and adventure contained within the flimsy pages of these “Brand new! Action- packed stories in color!” An escape to whole 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 stories as the dominant narrative mode. and The Katzenjammer Kids were pushed aside by characters like 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 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. 57

Figure 5. Cover, Action Comics #1 by Joe Shuster (June 1938).

Siegel and Shuster had been trying to sell their , 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- 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 ) were excised and other panels were redrawn, rewritten, or 58 rearranged in order to accommodate the comic book’s full-page layout and significantly more rapid . 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, , 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 and of pulp-magazine characters like 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 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 59 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 to topple his or her oppressor. The message in these earliest adventures was clear: the superman was concealed within the . The early Superman, also similar to Joad, was a bit of an ; 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 ” began in the 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)

60

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, , 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 61 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 ?), 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 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 outrage.

6 Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and , to name a few. 62

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 , 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 ,

Green Lantern, The Spectre, , Dr. Fate, Hour Man, , The Atom, and

Johnny . The significance of this book was that each of these heroes, whose 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. 63 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. 64 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 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. 65 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 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 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.

66

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 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 , carrying Hitler and Stalin off by their shirt collars, and depositing them before the League of Nations like dangerously misbehaved children. In March, 1941, published the first issue of Captain America

Comics which showed that star-spangled 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. 67 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 of Kavalier and Clay, has offered a rather odd observation on this point and claims that:

There was a sort of 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 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 ( 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 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 68 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 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 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 , 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. 69

Despite the 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. , formerly Timely Comics, attempted to resurrect their principal WW2 characters (Captain

America, Sub-Mariner, and The ) 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 70 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). 71

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 ’s Department of Hospitals and was the director of mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue and 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, 72 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 73 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 , 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 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, , 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 74 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 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 . 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 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/ publication, Mad, was increased in page size, marketed as a magazine rather than as a comic and, therefore, outside of the CCA’s scrutiny. Although ownership of Mad has changed hands, EC’s publisher, , retained editorial control over the magazine until his death in 1992.

75

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 , 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, , was a forensic scientist and was drawn in a 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 accident which grants the hero his or her superpowers, Showcase #4 contains one rather remarkable detail. Before a strikes a rack of laboratory chemicals and transforms him into the fastest man alive, Barry Allen is shown enjoying an old issue of .

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 76 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 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, “,”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 (Showcase #8), Mr. Element/Doctor Alchemy (Showcase #13), (Flash #105), (Flash #110), and Captain (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 “” category. For example, (Flash #106) is a super-intelligent and telepathic ape bent on world domination and is never associated with the Rogues. 77 and writer , 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 78

#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 named Hal Jordan, was recruited into an intergalactic police force by a of space 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 of Central City, but Green

Lantern took his superheroism and 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 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 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 79 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 , Wonder Woman, Superman, Green

Lantern, Batman, Flash, and Martian . The Brave and the Bold #28 can be 80 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 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 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 of the Body Snatchers (1956), Starro infiltrates the suburbs 81 and turns the hapless inhabitants of Happy Harbor into his mindless slaves. Like all of the various zombies, aliens, and robot that preoccupied American popular culture in the 50s and early 60s, Starro the Conqueror is obviously a for the widespread cultural paranoia regarding the influence of the specter of Communism.

However, the alien 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 , 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 , this sort of depiction helps foster the ideological supposition that America has become a stand-in for the “world” and that its 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. 82 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- , hard-boiled private eyes, and Robin 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 83 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 84 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 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 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) 85

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 , 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 86 their own. 21 Leiber, who is better known by his pen name , 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 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 ,

The Invincible Iron Man, , 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. 87 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 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, 88 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 like Batman’s Robin, Captain America’s , or The Human

Torch’s ; 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 to accompany him, and Gardener Fox, who had written a lighthearted character name 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 . 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 89

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 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 90 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 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. 91

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 , Charles Xavier, professed a peaceful integrationist solution; the team’s most significant rivals, and the , 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 , who were social drop-outs because their physical mutations would not let them pass for human, and there was the , decadent aristocrats that profited from the conflict itself and manipulated all sides of it. The X-Men operated 92 as more of a simile than as an and its 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 , in Fantastic Four

#52 (July 1966); , 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 : 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 (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 in Amazing Spider-Man #51 (Aug. 1967). Robertson was an editor at the who functioned as an occasional and ally of Peter Parker and as a calm and rational counterpoint to J. Jameson, the Bugle’s hot-tempered publisher. 93

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 . 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 “Luke Cage” to remind himself of where he’s coming from. Realizing that someone with his power would 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. and . New York: Marvel, February 1972.18. Print. The title changes from Luke Cage: Hero for Hire after this issue, but the numeration remains consistent. 94

From the first moment the audience is introduced to Cage, he is in Seagate’s recreation yard disrespecting a man named “” 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 , 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 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. 95

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 (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 96 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 (#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 , 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 , 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 of Conan (1974-1995) 97 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 . She was accompanied by , 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. 98

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 ’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 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 99 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 gadgets. The thugs Batman faces are depicted as shocked that they are facing a dark 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 . The character, a wealthy masked 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, was cheated out of his fortune and became a leftist, anti-establishment champion of the down-trodden.

100

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, Hamill, Gene Marine, Hunter S. Thompson, these

men I admired tremendously—weren’t they combining fiction techniques with 101

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 were meant to indicate the ideological opposition between the older, 102 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 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 , the dark manifestation of industrialist ’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 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 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. 104 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 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. 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. 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 105

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) 106

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 107 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 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

“” 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 108 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 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 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 ” during the six years he periodically wrote and illustrated Daredevil. By 109 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, by his childhood, struggling to maintain his 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, , 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 . First appearing in The Incredible Hulk #181,“This gaudily garbed intrudes upon the scene, claws bared, teeth clenched, his face awash with almost .” 110

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 , 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 (, , 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 111 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 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- 112 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 , 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 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 113 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 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 , but ultimately they only deliver the sort of totalitarian state that any superhero worth his or her tights should consider 114 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 115

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 116 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 “’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 117 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 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 118 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 ” 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 in 119

Central Park and enter it on the last page of The Uncanny X-Men #180 (April 1984) and suddenly appear in the sky over 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, .

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 , 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. 120

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 (1986). This legendary sequence of comics examined every horrific detail of a tactical 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 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 . The brutal civilian casualties and break-neck pace of The Mutant Massacre truly set it apart from previous events like 121

Secret Wars which was filled with , 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

#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 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 122 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. 123

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, . A 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 126 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 127 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 #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: & #1 Amazing Spider-Man #534 Black Panther #18 128

Cable & #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 & Deadpool #31 #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 #7 129

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 #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 , 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 130 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 with his mentor 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 . 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 , 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 131

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 132 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 - 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 . 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 , which updated “The Earth’s Mightiest Superheroes,” The Avengers, with a similar treatment. The Ultimates was littered with fairly superficial attempts to update 133 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, 134 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 135 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 136 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 , 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 and 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 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 137

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 cash cow.

Reading Millar’s statements of intention can be slightly disheartening; it’s not unlike discovering that if he had had his druthers 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 138 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 .

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 139

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 , 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. 140

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 (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. 141

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 , Iron Man’s 142 origin is detailed in his first appearance in #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 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 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” -Chu. Shrapnel from the exploded booby trap is lodged in Stark’s chest and cannot be surgically removed; it would fatally 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 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. 144

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.

145

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 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 in these issues; a business rival, , 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 Dynamo and the Titanium Man and the nefarious . 146

At the end of 1987, Michelinie (with artists Mark Bright and Barry Windsor-

Smith) began the 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 .” His autocratic obsession 147 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 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 “” 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 landmine on the battle field; his injury comes from a particularly 148 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 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 “” 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 149 destruction. 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 150

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 151 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 152 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 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, , 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 , 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. 153

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 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 ; he literally had been frozen in a block of since the final days of World War Two. When a Nazi super-villain named launched an explosives-laden 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. 154

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. 155

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 156

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 by today’s rules! I’ve spent a lifetime defending —

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, 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 157

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. 158

Figure 31. Cover, Captain America #250 by John Byrne (October 1980).

In an unfortunately brief but highly celebrated run, 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 , 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 159 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 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. , 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 160 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

“” 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 “-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 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 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 161 these events, Steve Rogers temporarily sheds his red, white, and blue Captain America costume and begins calling himself , a man without a country.

162

Figure 32. Page 18 from Captain America #175 by Sal Buscema (July 1974) 163

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 164

“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 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. 165

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). 166

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 167 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 - 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 168 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, (Earth’s

Sorcerer Supreme), Professor Xavier (leader of The X-Men and the world’s most powerful telepath), (Mr. Fantastic of The Fantastic Four and one of the world’s greatest scientific minds), (the king of the incredibly powerful

Inhumans who live in near isolation on the Moon), and (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 169 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 170

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 171 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 ’s classic DC comic, (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 172 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 . 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 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 ’s control. In what becomes a major turning point in Civil War, the clone remorselessly kills , , for resisting arrest and would probably have killed others if Susan Richards, 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. 173

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 is experiencing a contraction that has transformed it into a vast wasteland of fragmented worlds suspended in an infinite . 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 174 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 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 175 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 . 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 . 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 176 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

, 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 177 intended for his ideologically estranged spouse. Civil War may have strained the familial ties that bind The Fantastic Four, but once the 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 178 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 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 179

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 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 . The Wakandans financed their technological development 180 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 . 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. 181

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 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 ) and the four men escape together to establish the resistance. 182

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 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. 183

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. 184

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 , 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 185 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 186 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 ’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 , 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 187 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 188 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 bite that transforms a man with incidental spider powers into the Amazing Spider-Man. 189

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 ’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 190 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 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. 191

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 that began with Avengers: Disassembled (Aug. 2005-Jan. 2006) and has continued after Civil War in (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. 192

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 193

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 , 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 . 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. 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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