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'Comic Book' Superhero Wayne State University Wayne State University Dissertations 1-1-2015 Turning The aP ge: Fandoms, Multimodality, And The rT ansformation Of The comic' Book' Superhero Matthew Alan Cicci Wayne State University, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Other Communication Commons Recommended Citation Cicci, Matthew Alan, "Turning The aP ge: Fandoms, Multimodality, And The rT ansformation Of The c' omic Book' Superhero" (2015). Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 1331. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@WayneState. It has been accepted for inclusion in Wayne State University Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@WayneState. TURNING THE PAGE: FANDOMS, MULTIMODALITY, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE “COMIC BOOK” SUPERHERO by MATTHEW ALAN CICCI DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate School of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2015 MAJOR: ENGLISH (Film & Media Studies) Approved By: ____________________________________________ Advisor Date ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this work to my wife, Lily, and my three children, Maya, Eli, and Samuel. Without my wife’s ceaseless support, patience, and love, I would have been unable to complete this work in a timely manner. And, without the unquantifiable joy my children bring me, I am positive the more difficult parts of writing this dissertation would have been infinitely more challenging. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of my committee members—Dr. Jeff Pruchnic, Dr. Steven Shaviro, and Dr. Suzanne Scott—for their time and willingness to be a part of this project. However, I would like to offer a special thanks to my advisor on this project, Dr. Chera Kee. Dr. Kee went above and beyond in this capacity. More than a just a mentor or an editor, Dr. Kee was passionate about the project and brought a wealth of information, questions, and challenges to the dissertation that strengthened not only the writing but the writer, as well. Her feedback was invaluable to the project, but so to was her insight into professionalization, my work’s relationship to other fields, and her overall enthusiasm. It is an understatement to say she helped mold this particularly absent-minded graduate student into someone confident and prepared for his impending appointment. For all this and more, I am truly, deeply appreciative. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………........vi Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...................1 Chapter One “Reel Comics: How Films Borrow From Comics and How Comics are Becoming Films …….17 The Business of Superheroes ………………………………………………………………………………………………….…20 Superhero Films as Serials, Superhero Comics as Widescreen Television Series ……………………….27 The Effects of a Filmic Superhero Comic ……………………………………………………………………………………38 Chapter Two “Marvel Team-Up: Hawkeye, Loki, and the Innate Resistance of the Female Superhero Comic Fan………………………………………………………………………………………………….………………………………………….56 The Masculine Coding of Superhero Comics ……………………………………………………………………………..64 The Hawkeye Initiative: A Direct Challenge to Superhero Fandom & Industry …………………………..73 Loki & the MCU: An Indirect Subversion of Superhero Patriarchy ……………………………………………..84 Female Superhero Fandoms: Now and in the Future…………………………………………………………………97 Chapter Three “Flame [War] On! The Superhero Genre’s Invocation of Race to Address Adaptation Anxiety.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….105 Contextualizing Racebending, Canon, and Contemporary Adaptation Theory.………………………..109 The Superhero Fan Racial Discourse: Troubling & Not Really About Race.……………………………….125 The Small Step of Racebending.………………………………………………………………………………………………148 Chapter Four “Uncanny Fandom: Media Spreadability and the Reframing of the Superhero Comic Fan”.……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………155 Becoming Anti-Fan.…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………162 From Comic Reader to Just About Anyone: How Everyone Became a Superhero Fan ………………166 The Evolving Superhero Fandom……………………………………………………………………………………………..179 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..189 iv References…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..192 Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………204 Autobiographical Statement………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..205 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Final Page of Infinity #1 (Cheung, 2013)……………………………………………………………………………….29 Figure 1.2 End Credit Scene Avengers (2012)…………………………………………………………………………………………29 Figure 1.3 Panel as Action, Time, and Space (Romita, Amazing Spider-Man #88, 1970)…………………………41 Figure 1.4 The Fourth Wall (Bolland, Animal Man #5, 1988)………………………………………………………………….49 Figure 2.1 Black Widow Then (Land, Black Widow Deadly Origins #1, 2009)……….…………………………………59 Figure 2.2 Black Widow Now (Noto, Promotional Art, 2014)………………………………………………………………….59 Figure 2.3 New 52 Catwoman (March, Catwoman #1, 2011)…………………………………………………………………67 Figure 2.4 THI Example: Horn’s 2003 White Queen, Koldioxid 2013 Hawkeye……………………………………….76 Figure 2.5 New 52 Starfire (Rocafort, Red Hood and the Outlaws, 2011)……………………………………………….78 Figure 2.6 Guillory’s Manfire (2012)……………………………………………………………………….................................78 Figure 2.7 Stills from Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) & Thor (2011)…………………………….………86 Figure 2.8 Sample Loki’s Army-produced Images…………………………………………………………………………………..90 Figure 2.9 Sample Thorki……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….90 Figure 2.10 Marvel Now Loki (Garbett, Loki: Agent of Asgard #1, 2014)………………………………………………..95 Figure 2.11 New Loki v Old Loki (Garbett, Loki: Agent of Asgard #12, 2015)……………………………………..…..95 Figure 3.1 What’s Wrong With This Picture? (BOCA, Martin, 1982)……………………………………………………..137 Figure 4.1 Taking a Bow at SDCC 2014…………………………………………………………………………………………………156 Figure 4.2 Doc Ock Cosplay………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….184 vi 1 INTRODUCTION “From day one, one of the superhero’s greatest powers was to be able to leap across different media channels in a single bound.” – Henry Jenkins (“Multiplicity” 304) Henry Jenkins, a well-regarded media and fan scholar, isn’t wrong, but one should probably add that superpower has definitely strengthened over time. Today superheroes are more ubiquitous and prevalent than they’ve ever been before. Take Spider-Man, for example: while he has long been a commercially viable, and thus fairly visible intellectual property, he can now be found mugging on the front of increasingly geek-chic apparel, protecting iPhones as a decal or skin, and popping up on any number of internet forums as the central character of a popular meme; he is immediately accessible to the growing number of casual gamers thanks to the wildly successful tablet game Spider-Man Unlimited (a game with over ten million downloads), and, most visibly, he has consistently swung across your local cinema’s theater screen over the past fifteen years thanks to five summer blockbuster films.1 Spidey’s prominence is not a sole, character-specific incident. Nor, as Jenkins contends, is his, and other superheroes’, multimedia success particularly surprising. Both Marvel and DC, the top two publishers of comic books, have long looked to turn their four-color pages into technicolored movies, cartoons, and televisions shows.2 In fact, comic books’ inspiration of animated or live-action material is quite staggering. These two publishers alone have inspired over 130 live-action films or serial films starting with 1941’s Superman and culminating with, to date, a slate of films scheduled out to 2020. Throw in an additional 46 (and counting) feature-length animated films, starting with 1993’s Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and another 127 television series (42 live-action, 85 animated), and the comic industries’ relationship to the film and television industries becomes much clearer. 1 Not only has the character headlined multiple films, his recent inclusion in Marvel’s slate of upcoming films suggest he will be onscreen at least that often in the next fifteen years. 2 Marvel Entertainment is an asset owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. DC Comics, Inc. is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment, a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner. 2 According to historian Sean Howe, this multimedia output is a natural result of these companies longstanding attraction with moving their characters onto the silver screen. In his thorough history of Marvel Comics, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Howe chronicles Marvel front-man Stan Lee’s unyielding interest in film; Lee spent much of the ‘60s and ‘70s in Hollywood hobnobbing with directors, like Alain Resnais, and executives while pitching scripts for popular Marvel properties like the Silver Surfer. Despite a number of poorly-produced and poorly-conceived projects, Lee kept pursuing movies and television.3 As Howe put it, “Stan Lee wanted nothing more than to change Marvel’s Hollywood fortunes,
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