Despite this, not a few scholars still seem bemused, if not outraged, by the recognition that our two propositions—that comics is a serious art form, and that superheroes should be studied seriously—don’t quite meet, that these propositions may assume different modes of seriousness and do not necessarily lead in the same direction. Superhero comics and superhero studies alike have sought to capitalize on the first proposition, that comics is an art, often ignoring the specific problems posed by the genre, its commercial history, and its ideological baggage. Yet there are good reasons why superhero comics make some people nervous. Rigorous analyses of the genre need to grapple with those reasons, not simply bewail the fact that the equation Comics = Art does not automatically give the genre a free pass. Questions of political content, gender and eroticism, ability and disability, the depiction and celebration of violence, the worship of power, and the genre’s reliance on a spectacular hyper-realism all stand in the way of any easy absorption of our first proposition into the second.
While the best superhero comics are vital and fascinating as comics, superhero studies can only proceed on the basis of addressing, rather than eliding, the moral, social, and ideological issues that the genre raises. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons certainly understood this when they coauthored the landmark graphic novel Watchmen (1986–1987), a powerful deconstruction of the genre that nonetheless remains in and of the genre. (In terms of shifting public perceptions of the genre, Watchmen is to the superhero what Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996) has been to the comics art form as a whole.) Likewise, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams understood this when they sought to make Green Lantern/Green Arrow responsive to the political debates of its time (the early 1970s), and Harvey Kurtzman, Wallace Wood, and Will Elder understood this when they expertly satirized Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in early issues of Mad (1953–1954). A number of more recent superhero titles—such as Mark Millar et al.’s Red Son (2004), Grant Morrison et al.’s The Invisibles (1994–2000), Steven Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen’s It’s a Bird (2004), Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary (2000–), Kurt Busiek et al.’s Astro City (1999–), and James Sturm and Guy Davis’s Unstable Molecules (2003)—similarly challenge superhero-phobia with searching, questioning, at times even subversive content. The history of the genre is packed with, if not built on, contradictions, provocations, creative breakthroughs, and ideological troublemaking.
The recognition that comics is a legitimate and endlessly adaptable art form does not win for the superhero any respite from close critical scrutiny. The kinds of seriousness that will make superhero studies productive must confront a variety of issues, ideological as well as aesthetic; economic, historical, and political as well as formal. While we doubt it will be possible to achieve a harmonious consensus on all such questions, we do expect that a mature field of superhero studies, of the kind that is now starting to emerge, will confront, at last, the old charges about academic elitism. It may not do so in ways that make anything easier, or anyone more comfortable, but the intellectual yield and social relevance of the work will be enough. In the meantime, we recognize that there are valuable scholarly works that embrace both of our propositions at once, as well as important ones that approach the superhero, and comics more generally, from a more skeptical angle. We think that superhero comics can bear up under such scrutiny--and warrant it.
The primary aim of this reader is thus twofold: first, to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated or influential commentary on superheroes, and, second, to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical concerns. Our book brings together essays, articles, and book excerpts by leading freelance writers and academics. It covers a range of topics, including—but certainly not limited to—the following:
• the definitional boundaries of the superhero
• superheroes and the human body
• superheroes and the modern city
• superheroes and gender
• superheroes and fan culture
• the business of superheroes
• the superhero as modern mythology
• the superhero as futurology
• the political, psychoanalytic, and parodic uses of the superhero
To address these topics we have organized the volume into three sections, each opening with a short introduction. The first section, Historical Considerations, explores the prehistory and early history of the superhero genre, and features both primary sources and secondary readings. The second, Theory and Genre, spotlights the range of approaches that scholars have adopted in discussing superheroes, and genre more generally, from folklore and myth studies to cultural studies and critical theory. The third, Culture and Identity, examines the superhero from the perspective of gender, race, sexuality, cultural patterns, and reader identification.
This format echoes the one we adopted for our previous volume, A Comics Studies Reader (2009), and the two texts are intended to complement each other. The potential audience for both books includes not only academic specialists working on comics, film, and popular culture, but also students and scholars from across the humanities and historically-minded social sciences, as well as comics fans and general readers. While it would be unrealistic to expect that every historically significant article or monograph on this multifaceted topic could be collected in a single volume, we have striven to include a fair cross-section of the most salient contributions.
The superhero is a polarizing genre that has generated fierce battles for a host of reasons: political, gender-oriented, psychological, formalist, and aesthetic. Is the genre inherently authoritarian, or does it contain multiple ideological valences? What should we make of the hypermasculinity of superhero comics? Is their highly stylized imagery evidence of sexism, a foregrounding of sexual anxiety, or a vivid display of a queer sensibility that is otherwise culturally suppressed? Is the collaborative mode of production used in the making of most superhero comics a betrayal of auteurist authenticity or a way of creatively synthesizing different artistic talents? Is the superhero an embarrassing offshoot of science fiction or a meta-genre that imaginatively fuses together material from a variety of literary traditions? All of these are hotly debated issues, and the very passion stirred up by these arguments is one of the best reasons for taking both the superhero genre and its critics seriously. The intent of this collection is to highlight these debates and tensions with a view toward pushing the conversation forward.
NOTES
1. An influential formulation of this distinction is given in the first chapter of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which depicts the medium as a glass pitcher that can hold an endless variety of “liquids,” i.e., stories. Given the lengths to which he goes to disentangle the medium from its best-known genre, it is mildly ironic that many of McCloud’s fictional comics deal in superheroes. See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) and Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987–1991 (2008).
2. In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that our previous coedited volume, A Comics Studies Reader (2009), features only two contributions on superhero comics out of more than two dozen essays. While we did not consciously set out to exclude superhero analyses, we ended up reproducing the field’s prevailing unease regarding the genre. Superheroes also receive less attention than might be expected in our first coedited volume, Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (2004). The present volume will hopefully redress the imbalance and help integrate superhero studies into the study of comics more generally. We have added a third editor, Charles Hatfield, precisely because he is a preeminent comics scholar who has written on both superhero and non-superhero comics, and has taught courses on superheroes at the undergraduate and graduate level.
3. The term “super-empowered individual” was coined by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who uses it to refer to non-state actors who “can increasing
ly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by a state” (5). While he came up with the phrase in the context of writing about Osama bin Laden, it has a definite superhero studies ring to it.
4. See Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965). An excerpt from Feiffer’s groundbreaking study is included in this volume, as is an excerpt from Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which offers a rather sweeping critique of comic books in general. Other early works include Steranko (1970); Lupoff and Thompson (1970); Thompson and Lupoff (1973); and Jacobs and Jones (1985, confusingly billed as “the first history of modern comic books”). In addition, roughly half of Daniels’s Comix (1971) is devoted to superheroes. The earliest surveys of comics and cartoons tended to relegate superhero comics to a few paragraphs or a single chapter: see for example Becker (1959), Sheridan (1942), and Waugh (1947).
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