That the online letters site is a dead link, less than a year later, is characteristic of DC’s current tendency to dodge, switch, and frantically second-guess, chasing the market rather than leading it. Dennis O’Neil, former Group Editor of the Batman titles—whom I interviewed in his New York office, in 1998—conceded in the early years of the new century that comics had become the “R&D division of the entertainment industry,” a “hidden asset” of Warner Bros., rather than an autonomous narrative medium in its own right. In September 2011, attempting to grab back some of the market share from Marvel’s successful cross-platform Avengers franchise, DC cancelled all its current titles and launched fifty-two of them (“the New 52”) from issue #1. Less than six months later, it withdrew half a dozen of those titles, which were already suffering poor sales, and launched a “second wave” of replacements. Batman’s official history and continuity is constantly being written and rewritten in a series of editorial earthquakes, and as reboot after reboot is forced through, secondary female characters like Stephanie Brown and Barbara Gordon often have their backstories crudely retconned or simply wiped off the record.
I wrote this chapter years before Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr were founded, but the rise of an increasingly widespread and sophisticated online culture—where legions of fans now protest the loss of Stephanie Brown’s role as Batgirl or the unconvincing fix of Barbara Gordon’s spine, after twenty-five years of disability—has made little difference to DC’s corporate project. Editors Jim Lee and Dan DiDio post on Twitter now, using the same platform as the comic book readers and, theoretically, entering into a vast, democratic discussion, but their word—or their 140 characters, in this case—is still final.
“if Bruce is Batman only 5 yrs how can he have 10 yr old son (Damian)?” asks one fan, @kingmob29.
“Batman around b4then as urban legend only public last 5,” @jimlee replies firmly.
If anything, the shift to online media has made it easier for DC’s editorial to erase swathes of character history and backstory and cover up the traces. The aesthetic of the reboot and the retcon, the decision that continuity has changed and certain aspects of the remembered past never took place, is ideally suited to electronic records that can be instantly changed and covered up. Shifting and dodging, like copying and pasting, are easier in the age of Wikipedia; digital archives of comics can be swiftly rearranged, official histories can be re-edited, and if the fans’ shelves of printed comics and collected editions contradict the current status quo, they can be reclassified as old-school, quaint, and out of date.
Specific details of the history I propose in this chapter have also been rewritten. As Marc Singer points out in his recent book, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (2011), Grant Morrison originally imagined Arkham Asylum as drawn by Brian Bolland, “and my vision was of it being ultra-real to the point of being painful.” As Singer notes, “even if we set aside Morrison’s stated preference for Bolland’s style, the disjunctions between the art and script of Arkham Asylum suggest that Morrison’s symbolically overburdened story would have benefited had it been grounded in Bolland’s solidity and verisimilitude.” The 2004 “Anniversary Edition” offers a glimpse not of Bolland’s version, but Morrison’s, through his thumbnail sketches; everything is the same as the final, original Arkham Asylum, except for the fact that it’s all totally different.
And of course, everything is totally different now, in 2012, just prior to the release of Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film. Everything changed in Summer 2005, when Nolan wrote firmly in black ink over the cultural memory of Joel Schumacher’s Day-Glo Batman & Robin (1997), the last entry in the franchise; everything changed again in 2008 when Nolan’s The Dark Knight was seen by many reviewers to transcend not just the character but the superhero genre, earning comparison with classic gangster cinema like The Godfather, and even reaching the heights of Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama.
Everything changed, and yet in some ways everything is still exactly the same. In this essay, I was working toward a sense of the comic book author as—in Roland Barthes’s term—the “scriptor,” an editor of existing material, producing novelty from the familiar; and Nolan’s Batman was enthusiastically received by comics fans in much the same way that they had previously embraced Miller’s Batman, Morrison’s Batman, and Moore’s Batman, as a new spin on the old myth. We wait to see what the marriage of seventy-year-old icon and hotshot auteur will bring next: it’s this alchemy, this chemistry, which fuels the Dark Knight. Fans won’t be picking up the phones when Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises is released, as they did when Dark Knight Returns was first published—or if they do, it will be to text, rather than call. But the buzz is the same.
The central truth about Batman is that he remains essentially unchanged, even though, in each incarnation from each author, in each new version for each new decade, we seek something different and find him, in turn, reflecting back our culture and concerns from a fresh angle.
Batman survives, and rises again after each fall, because of this dynamic.
NOTES
1. See Bob Kane with Tom Andrae, Batman and Me (Forestville, CA: Eclipse Books, 1989), 120–121, 130.
2. Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs, The Comic Book Heroes (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997), 63.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, 64.
5. Ibid, 65.
6. Ibid, 64.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid, 97.
9. Ibid, 65.
10. Not to suggest that this phenomenon is unique to comics. Tulloch and Jenkins note that “many important science fiction authors came from fandom, while many writers within the genre regularly attend fan conventions.” John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences (London: Routledge, 1995), 187–188.
11. Jones and Jacobs, 67.
12. Letter from Mike Friedrich, Detective Comics #335 (New York: DC Comics, January 1965).
13. Detective Comics #338 (New York: DC Comics, April 1965).
14. Letter from Mike Friedrich, Detective Comics #335 (New York: DC Comics, January 1965).
15. Letter from Kenneth S. Gallagher, Detective Comics #336 (New York: DC Comics, February 1965).
16. Letter from Leon J. Tirado, Detective Comics #335 (New York: DC Comics, January 1965).
17. Letter from Doug Potter, Detective Comics #337 (New York: DC Comics, March 1965).
18. Letter from Guy H. Lillian III, Detective Comics #335 (New York: DC Comics, October 1966).
19. Editorial reply, ibid.
20. Jones and Jacobs, 65.
21. Letter from John Wilson, Detective Comics #336 (New York: DC Comics, February 1965).
22. Letter from Walt Smith, Detective Comics #340 (New York: DC Comics, June 1965).
23. Letter from Henry R. Kujawa, Detective Comics #492 (New York: DC Comics, July 1980).
24. Letter from Scott Gibson, ibid.
25. Letter from Mark Ryan, ibid.
26. Letter from Will Brooker, JLA #20 (New York: DC Comics, July 1998).
Section Two
THEORY AND GENRE
A GENRE IS AN EMPIRICAL SOCIAL REALITY: NOT ONLY A CRITICAL CATEGORY FOR organizing works, but also a tradition and pastime upheld by an audience attuned to such works. Indeed a genre is something on the order of a loose social compact, a set of concepts and practices that groups of people use to help them sort through and make sense of things. It therefore has a lived-in quality. If today we can study the superhero as genre in quite specific terms, that is because it plays important roles—communal, aesthetic, intellectual, and psychological—in the lives of many people. By now the genre is entrenched, having achieved a high degree of specificity and self-awareness. It constitutes a little conceptual universe. Criticism now assumes the superhero narrative’s distinctive nature (and of course this Reader presupposes as much).
Yet academic analysis of the superhero has not always been able to assume this. Historically, academic studies, which lag
ged behind fandom’s highly specific understanding of the genre, first sought to place the superhero within other, larger generic contexts. Early analyses tended to treat superhero narratives as a vague subset of other, more inclusive categories. John G. Cawelti, a pioneer in the academic study of what he called formula fiction (1977), subsumes the superhero in the mega-genre of the adventure story. All such stories, he notes, express the basic fantasy of the hero “overcoming obstacles and dangers and accomplishing some important and moral mission.” To Cawelti, the superhero constitutes simply a particularly childish type of the adventure hero, one subject to unabashed adulation as a beloved parent is by a child. These are stories, he suggests, “constructed for children and young people.”
Roger B. Rollin, in an article for College English in 1970, “Beowulf to Batman: The Epic Hero and Pop Culture,” had also categorized the superhero within the adventure tale. Rollin’s article uses the specific term pop romance to denote “television programs, films, and comic strips in the adventure category” (note that he does not distinguish between newspaper strips and comic books, another sign of his generalizing approach). The pop romance, Rollin argues, offers not mere escapism, in the pejorative sense, but rather a way of reflecting and coping with “tensions and problems […] not usually very far removed from present reality.” Furthermore, he proposes that pop romance and epic poetry—Beowulf, Spenser, Milton—have “significant esthetic and intellectual parallels,” which may be exploited to introduce students to the classics by analogy. Underlying his argument is, first, a concern for relevance to his (Vietnam War—era) students, whom Rollin sees as resistant readers staring back at teachers across a yawning generation gap; and, second, the model of archetypal criticism constructed by Northrop Frye in his seminal Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a model that enables critics to highlight commonalities between classics and pop.
The team of Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence also writes from an outside or nonexclusive perspective, albeit one at least vaguely aware of comics’ history. Their study The Myth of the American Superhero (2002), though much later than Rollin and Cawelti, builds conceptually on their earlier The American Monomyth (1977) as well as Jewett’s The Captain America Complex (1973). In some ways their concerns and methods hark to an earlier era. Like Rollin and Cawelti, they view the comic book superhero as part of a larger cultural pattern, indeed what they call, drawing on Joseph Campbell, a mono-myth. This pattern, they argue, manifests in and is reinforced by heroic tales that encourage an “attitude of credulity” and a pseudo-religious “yearning for fantasy redemption.” For Jewett and Lawrence, the specificity of the superhero genre matters little (the cover of their book juxtaposes Superman and Batman with Clint Eastwood in gunslinger guise). What matters is a political argument about the hazards of hero worship: the monomyth they descry is fundamentally antidemocratic, and, via its dissemination across popular culture, controlling; it “manag[es]” consciousness and dictates behavior. In essence, Jewett and Lawrence express concerns about media effects and ideology similar to those of Wertham and Ong—though nearer cousins to their work are Cawelti on formula and Richard Slotkin’s study of American frontier myth, Regeneration through Violence (1973).
Unlike Cawelti or Rollin, Jewett and Lawrence do comment on the historical emergence of the comic book. They christen the 1930s, the decade of the superhero genre’s arrival, “the axial decade.” However, their interest rests not on the particular history of the comic book superhero but rather on a greater cultural trend; they argue that the 1930s laid the template for “mono-mythic entertainments” across media and genres. In the superheroes of the axial decade, including Superman and Batman, they locate the blueprint for subsequent pop culture heroes such as “Kirk and Spock, Dirty Harry, Rambo, and the Steven Seagal characters” (their argument operates on a level at which all these heroes appear alike rather than different). Perhaps as a result of this larger focus, they are less precise in their dates and facts than a comic book fan or historian might wish them to be. However, their comments on the superhero’s “segmented” identity and sexual renunciation give real insight into the genre.
The arrival of Richard Reynolds’s Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (UK 1992; U.S. 1994), seemingly the first academic monograph devoted to the comic book superhero, signaled a change in scholarly approaches to the genre. Reynolds derives his understanding of the superhero from reading widely among superhero comics and consulting the lore of fans and creators. He sees superhero fandom as a “very cohesive subculture,” one that “tightly define[s] and defend[s]” the genre and “has built up its own lively and heuristic critical discourse.” He charts the history of the comic book, albeit briefly and from a superhero fan’s point of view (the Golden Age gives way to the Silver Age, and so on). Further, he notes the range and diversity of superheroes, stressing their differences rather than their generic identity alone. Also, he explores changes within the genre by reading the comics against each other, rather than simply gesturing outward toward broad social changes. In essence, his analysis of contemporary superhero texts stresses the ways they respond to and reinterpret the tradition of which they are part.
Reynolds’s was the first monograph to acknowledge something fans already knew: the intertextual richness of the superhero tale as a comic book genre, that is, the extent to which superhero comics were in dialogue with each other. He takes superhero comics as critical sources in their own right. For example, he begins inductively by reading that ur-text of the genre, Superman’s first adventure in Action Comics #1 (1938). He identifies the essential elements in that comic that would later become generic markers: the orphan hero, the hero as demigod, the devotion to a personal rather than legal sense of justice, the contrast between the human and the superhuman, the secret identity (cf. Jewett and Lawrence on segmentation), the hero’s doubtful relationship to political order, and the indiscriminate blending of science and magic. Aspects of Reynolds have dated: for example, his comments on superhero films clearly predate the digital blockbusters of today. However, his comments on the comics’ visual rhetoric, the genre’s essential setting in the modern metropolis (New York), and its conservative function as an upholder of the “social order” all remain provocative.
Reynolds signaled a new, more specific superhero criticism based on expertise in the comics themselves, a trend borne out by the rest of this section. Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (2002) carries Reynolds’s method to a logical extreme by way of Harold Bloom’s model of the anxiety of influence, wherein an artist-poet’s “strong misreading” or “misprision” of her/ his precursors results in new works and in the renewal of the genre. By this model, all “poetry” becomes “criticism”—or, in this case, extending the logic of Reynolds, new superhero comics become self-reflexive critical texts on the genre. What interests Klock is the “comic book whose ‘meaning’ is found in its relationship with another comic book,” and the possibility of “approach[ing] superhero comic books on their own terms.” Genre self-awareness is Klock’s starting point, as he posits the 1980s’ so-called revisionary superhero movement—in particular its taproots texts The Dark Night Returns (1986), by Frank Miller, and Watchmen (1986-87), by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons—as the moment when the superhero genre crossed over from infantile “fantasy” to “literature.”
According to Klock, these texts are the first to gather in, organize, and comment on the entire history of the genre: essentially, texts that reflexively pose allegorical arguments about the genre itself. Klock’s argument favors a type of Bloomian “strong” reader (Miller, Moore) whose willful reinterpretation of the tradition can subsume “weak” readings, making generic elements his own and striving after a simultaneous “negation” and yet strengthening of the genre. Miller, says Klock, uses realism to intensify the genre, while Moore uses it to “empty out” and defeat the genre, thus to “take [his] place at [its] head.”
There is always a risk that this direction in criticism will pro
ve insular, that such criticism may come down to a self-regarding fascination that replays the excesses of fan discourse at its most parochial. However, both Reynolds and Klock continue to pay attention to the larger social, ideological, and political issues in play around the superhero. Reynolds sees the superhero as enacting a tense relationship between political order (the state) and individual conscience (vigilantism), a topic also of concern to Jewett and Lawrence. Klock moves in this direction too, analyzing Miller’s Batman (Dark Knight) as both a revolutionary and the source of a new, potentially hegemonic order. The divisive political meanings of the genre, in particular its association with fascist ideology (again, cf. Ong and Wertham), at once motivates and complicates Klock’s readings.
One aspect of superhero fandom’s specialization if not insularity is its fascination with continuity, that is, the way serial superhero comics seek to maintain the semblance of a single overarching world shared by many heroes. The eruption of a superhero “universe” into a “multiverse” of divergent timelines multiplies the potential for baroque continuity-based stories. While this issue might seem to be of only narrow fannish interest, in fact it intersects with larger issues including the pleasures of serial narrative and narratological theories about the making of “storyworlds,” i.e., the mental models readers develop for understanding stories. According to cognitive narratologist Karin Kukkonen, the complexity of superhero multiverses challenges these models, and challenges narrative theory as well, calling on scholars to develop a more complex theory of how readers understand such tales. The teeming cosmologies and intricate narrative clockworks of today’s superheroes have made the genre something of a test case for the possibilities of vast narratives assembled in piecemeal, serial form. How do readers learn to construct storyworlds that will enable them to navigate these byzantine multiverses? How do readers learn to juggle multiple Earths, when the narratives do not insist on elevating one Earth over other and reducing the others to phantasmal “subworlds,” or dreams? Kukkonen shows how two devices help readers navigate these multiversal narratives: one, the use of a stable visual iconography that distinguishes each hero (and each version of a hero); two, the prevalence of characters who must be guided through the multiverses and therefore serve as reader surrogates. Thus readers are enabled to distinguish among the various alternate worlds given in the narratives.
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