My writing isn’t experimental. When I’ve nodded to the repertoire of avant-garde effects, I took it for granted that the experiments in question were conducted by others, in the past. Now they’re part of the palette. A literary critic who puts the word “experimental” within a mile of my stuff is either in bad faith or ill-informed about a century including Oulipo, Language poetry, and, well, surrealism. Even lamer, the Fallacy of Contemporary Influence, in which generations of writers work miraculously in concert. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out that Michael Chabon and I really weren’t formative influences on each other. It’s math, literally. Look for common denominators instead.
Likely every writer with the luck of being reviewed or interviewed undergoes a similar time-lost sensation, of being made by stuff that’s no longer fashionable or even legible by the time their own work emerges. Mine was aggravated by the used-bookstore lag I’ve described elsewhere, and by what may have been a compensatory crush on mandarin, rather than outlaw, dialects. I sometimes think that Raymond Chandler made so much sense to me for the English boarding-school diction underneath the hard-boiled slang. No wonder that when I first tried, my criticism sounded like ersatz G. K. Chesterton. Much as I exalted Seymour Krim and Lester Bangs, I didn’t have access to that informality—my defaults were highfalutin’. I sounded a lot less hip than writers decades older than I was. For instance, John Leonard.
Furniture
However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing positions for the whole duration of the story. For that matter, when night falls—whether it is depicted or occurs between chapters—characters must be permitted to sleep in beds, to rinse their faces in sinks, to glance into mirrors, and so on. (It is widely believed that after Borges mirrors are forbidden as symbols in novels. However, it is cruel to deny the characters in a novel sight of their own faces; hence mirrors must be provided.) These rules attend no matter how tangential the novel’s commitment to so-called “realism,” no matter how avant-garde or capricious, no matter how revolutionary or bourgeois. Furniture may be explicit or implicit, visible or invisible; may bear the duty of conveying social and economic detail or be merely cursorily functional; may be stolen or purchased, borrowed, destroyed, replaced; may be sprinkled with crumbs of food or splashed with drink; may remain immaculate; may be transformed into artworks by aspiring bohemians; may be inherited by characters from uncles who die before the action of the novel begins; may reward careful inspection of the cushions and seams for loose change that has fallen from pockets; may be collapsible, portable; may even be dragged into the house from the beach where it properly belongs—but, in any event, it must absolutely exist. Anything less is cruelty.
—The Novelist’s Lexicon, 2010
IV
FILM AND COMICS
I offer a merciful break, for a section or two, from self-advertisements, and from the claustrophobia of the novelist worrying about novels. Instead, other people’s work, in other mediums. (A cynical fly on my studio wall buzzes: “But your brush still moves like a self-portraitist’s. And you haven’t put the mirror in the closet.”)
First, three exultant riffs on the superhero-as-private-cargo cult. Which is, pretty obviously, how I prefer them.
Supermen!: An Introduction
So answer the question, even if only in the privacy of your mind: Who was your first? No, go further back even than your “official” first—recollect, if you can, not the first superhero with whom you consummated your curiosities but the first who gave you an inkling, the first to stir the curiosities you hadn’t known you possessed, the first human outline in a cape flashing through your dawning gaze. Was it Adam West’s Batman? A tattered five-year-old issue of The Silver Surfer, in some godlike prodigal older brother’s dorm? A Mad magazine parody? Underdog? Some kid on your summer beach who clutched a towel to either side of his neck and leaped yelping off a dune and then looked at you like you were stupid for not getting the reference that burned so powerfully in his mind?
If you’re approximately of my generation, things untangled themselves pretty quickly after that first disordered flush of infatuation. Superheroes, when you looked into the subject, appeared to spring from a few stolid figures and then to degenerate into a fractious and enthralling rabble. That’s to say, I’m forty-five years old, and for me, Superman and Batman were pretty much like my parents. The anchor DC characters were heartening to have around, and good in a crunch, and sometimes, with their long histories, still surprising when you dug their old photographs out of the trunk—you hung out with people that looked like that? You dated him? But, increasingly, dull and taken for granted. (Wonder Woman, Flash, and Aquaman were your aunts and uncles, familiar without being vivid.) Marvel’s first-order characters were pretty established, too, but they still had the alluring scent of their fresh invention over them. They were something like cool kids who’d lived on your block in the decade before you started playing on the street and now were off at college or in the army, but their legend persisted. I’d put Thor and the other Avengers in that range, and the Fantastic Four, and Hulk, and Dr. Strange. Spider-Man was your older brother, of course—a great guy, an idol, but he didn’t belong to you. What was wholly yours were your contemporaries, the oddities launching themselves before your eyes: Ghost Rider and Warlock and Luke Cage and Deadman and Ragman and Omega the Unknown, or nutty gangs like the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Defenders. These were as thrilling and unreliable as new friends in the schoolyard, and they lived in a world your parents, or Superman, would never even begin to understand. Beyond them lie even more antiheroic antiheroes, the Watchmen and Invisibles needed to gratify our recomplicating appetites.
It may be latent in human psychology to model the world on a fall from innocence, since we each go through one. I can’t know because I speak as an American, and I do know that as a culture we’re disastrously addicted to easy fantasies of a halcyon past, one always just fading from view, a land where things were more orderly and simple. (The model is doubly useful, open equally to our patronizing dismissals of the past and to our maudlin comparisons to a corrupted present.) For that reason, so many really smashing cultural investigations open up a window onto the truly disordered and frequently degenerate origins of things we’ve sentimentalized as pure and whole and pat.
A collection like Supermen! works like a reverse neutron bomb to assumptions about the birth of the superhero image: It tears down the orderly structures of theory and history and leaves the figures standing in full view, staring back at us in all their defiant disorienting particularity, their blazing strangeness. Like Luc Sante’s Low Life or Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, in place of generalizations about the vanished past it offers a revelatory nightmare of evidence that the place we came from is as deep and strange as any place we might have been ourselves, or might imagine we are on the way to going. Just as the drug slang and hippie argot or jive talk that struck me as so characteristic of the ’70s where I encountered it so often turned out to be rooted in ’20s and ’30s jazz-hipster vernacular, just as Pre-Code Hollywood films can so often seem shockingly advanced, so, too, motifs and gestures we might believe typical of our own postmodern comics era are rooted in earlier explorations.
That’s not to say this isn’t primitive stuff (or that much of the pleasure it imparts isn’t in its crudity and naïveté), only that the primitive stuff, when you turn your eyes to it, is so rich and singular, so jam-packed with curdled or mangled sophistications borrowed from other mediums and forms, that it verges on precognitive sight in its total blindness. And, that the primitive stuff can make you consider how primitive the sophisticated stuff of the present might be, too, in ways we can barely know. Beyond that, my own generalizations turn useless: One turns to the catalog of marvels within: the oblique id on display in the tendency of these artists to instinctively side with their sneering, cackling
villains, so much more like cartoonists than the heroes, thus displaying a howling self-loathing—the Flame, being flogged in silhouette, and his seeming readiness to undress in the long panel in which he contemplates his seductive rescuer (“Only one thing can stop them,” she teases him: “Fire!”); the Basil Wolverton science-fiction comics, each panel like some uncanny rebus, all surfaces stirring from beneath with some incompletely disclosed or acknowledged emotional disquiet, a barely sublimated mystical Freudian dream; Sub-Zero’s absurd masochistic fracas with Professor X, who in his lumpen brown armor comes as near as any comics villain ever did to embodying SHITMAN (Sub-Zero even punishes him with a shower at the finish, adding, “make it hot!”); the insane verbal and visual poetry of Fletcher Hanks, who can smash your mind merely with the force of his unexpected hyphenization (“IF I CAN DOMINATE THOSE VULTURES UP THERE, I’LL BE ABLE TO CON-QUER THE EARTH!”); Rex Dexter’s rocket ships and robots plainly cribbed from the pulp-science-fiction magazine covers of Virgil Finlay and Frank R. Paul; Jack Cole’s hysterical and frenzied battle between the intrepid proto–Plastic Man Daredevil and the towering racist monstrosity the Claw. To give yourself to the pages in which these supermen appear is to helplessly rediscover the magnetic force of a totally opaque and infinitely awkward and versatile iconography, to recover the seed of mystery at the heart of superhero love to begin with—like learning a foreign language that turns out to be the only tongue you’ve ever spoken.
—book introduction, 2009
Top-Five Depressed Superheroes
1. Black Bolt. Black Bolt isn’t allowed to speak because his voice is so horribly destructive that it might demolish the world. His wings resemble accordions, the most harmless and charming of instruments (apart from the kazoo), mocking the cataclysmic potential of his speaking voice. He never learned sign language, and it can be infuriating waiting for him to scribble a note, or while he attempts to indicate his thoughts with a scowl or pout. In restaurants it takes Black Bolt hours to decide on the simplest order. Ostensibly many other superheroes look up to him for leadership, but if you really pay any attention to his band of followers, you perceive immediately that they are all freaks, with lousy powers. His dog is ugly.
2. The Vision. The Vision has red skin and a synthetic body which oscillates from ethereal to super-dense. Neither state, however, serves as a satisfying expression of the feelings inside him. The Vision is obsessed with his traumatic past: An evil android created him for dark purposes. This sort of hurt can be difficult to get over, and most other superheroes have always steered a respectful berth around the Vision. In 1973 the Vision quite unexpectedly got married, to another superhero, the Scarlet Witch. They were divorced in 1997. In her memoir, published last year, the Scarlet Witch revealed that a substitute android had been created to fulfill a majority of the Vision’s requests for public appearances, and claimed that toward the end of the marriage she had found it difficult to tell the two apart. The Scarlet Witch has recently been linked in British tabloids with Liam Gallagher of Oasis.
3. Deadman. Deadman’s problem is worn on the sleeve of his name: He’s dead. He handles it pretty gracefully, having been a circus acrobat in his former life. Deadman rarely bothers to dress as a civilian, since his secret identity is a corpse. His skin is red. It probably ought to be green, but the Spectre’s skin is green. This is only one of several ways in which the Spectre appears to occupy turf which probably ought to have been Deadman’s. In earlier days Deadman regarded himself as the Spectre’s protégé. However, the Spectre never proposed Deadman for membership in the Justice League of America. Deadman doesn’t know how to raise the subject with the Spectre, so he never calls him anymore.
Deadman has a nagging feeling that in his trench coat he resembles a flasher. At least this much is true: He feels naked without it.
4. Ragman. Ragman was given his powers by the electrocution of five failed Jewish immigrants who had been sitting in an alley complaining about their failed businesses—a knife sharpener, a pawnbroker, a hat blocker, a mohel, and a tenement owner who was ruined when the Village Voice listed him as one of the city’s Top Ten Slumlords in 1976. All the strength of the five men flowed into the body of a homeless man picking through a garbage can nearby, who became Ragman. Ragman is the poverty superhero, unable to afford a costume other than a big pile of rags. He never fights villains who can afford costumes. Instead he rescues starving kittens and breaks up three-card monte games. Ragman keeps himself in White Castle hamburgers by buying cartons of cigarettes and selling singles for a nickel apiece. During the Giuliani mayoralty Ragman was discreetly paid off to move to Baltimore, where he remains.
5. Omega the Unknown. Like Black Bolt, he never spoke. Energy beams came out of his hands, not always at his command. He might be considered Superman’s depressed cousin, since he’d come from a destroyed planet. Unlike Superboy, Supergirl, or Superdog, Superman has never acknowledged Omega. Omega’s priorities were very unclear, and so he had the power to depress others, as well as himself. Omega’s comic book was so punishingly dull that Marvel began to put the Hulk and Spiderman on the cover, and once, in a measure of striking desperation, Scrooge McDuck made a guest appearance. After ten issues the title was canceled anyway. After cancellation, Marvel was contacted by attorneys from Omega’s home planet, which turned out not to be destroyed at all. This resulted in the first recall of the entire run of a published comic book in the industry’s history. Until a successful appeal of the court’s order in 1996, Marvel was still required to refund the full cover price of any issue of Omega the Unknown returned by a consumer, as well as the cost of return postage.
Shout, 2002
I got this larkish thing, based on painter Scott Alden’s imaginary superhero, into Playboy. This was a secret victory, since I’d had several stories rejected on the basis that “Hef has a policy against any mention of masturbation.” I suppose they figured he wouldn’t know what le petit mort meant.
The Epiphany
The Epiphany, Earth’s subtlest, secretest, most selfless superhero, may perish at any instant. That every waking second is a matter of life and death is, for The Epiphany, a way of life, mortality his middle name. In fact, he’s roused himself from ordinary sleep to find he’s been strapped to The Chair of Death by his nemesis, the snide, jaded, and callous French Supervillain, Le Petit Mort!
Yet, as always seems to be the case, there is plenty of time, while secured to The Chair of Death, for The Epiphany’s life to flash before his eyes. For The Epiphany, this happens in reverse:
His “golden” years, semiretirement, laurel-resting, award-accepting, fan-mail answering, reenactments of his greatest adventures in television docudramas, clasped to the First Lady’s bosom during visits to the White House of a president whose policies he finds bankrupt and manner he regards as repugnant, always feeling the charlatan, the ersatz-hero, dolled up in his Epiphany suit yet not actually detecting any throb of his powers, forever playing the part of himself, chasing ghosts of defeated enemies he now misses as if they were friends, though god knows he hated them heartily enough at the time.
Those years of meandering exile in the transparent invisible timeless extra-dimensional Precinct of Snoredom, in the hapless company of The Boneless Men, from where it seemed he’d never return.
His triumphant rescue of The Polymorphs from their captivity in the nefarious tendrils of Stockholm Syndrome and Capitulator, really the last fine moment he could call his own.
That momentous final battle with his mocking midcareer nemesis Déjà Vu, in The Forest of Trees Falling, which no one actually ever heard about but The Epiphany vows he will never permit himself to forget.
Those long disillusioned years attempting to hold together a Super-group with his fellow heroes Eureka!, Tour de Force, and Non Sequitur, in order to do mortal combat with the repulsive and unsettling group of Supervillains Le Petit Mort had for a time assembled around him in the cause of World Conquest—Freudian Slip, Wandering Eye, and Senior Moment�
��and the terrible lonely realization that he and the others could never hope to coordinate their schedules, that like him they mostly failed to control or even predict the marvelous onset of their powers—that sudden eclipsing of their civilian identities by their heroic ones—and therefore that the life of The Epiphany was to be a solitary and lonely one, at last and forever, and that his covert feelings of attraction to Non Sequitur could never hope to find an appropriate moment to be confessed.
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 17