The Superhero Reader
Page 24
Recent genre theory has reminded us that a genre’s social purposes are at least as if not more important than its formal and aesthetic components; indeed, Amy Devitt has shown that genres are defined “less by their formal conventions than by their purposes, participants, and subjects.” The “purposes” of fandom include participation—on a social level as close by as one’s local comic book shop—in the vast narratives of superhero comics, and fans have collectively embroidered on those narratives in ways quite alien to the original comics of Jack Kirby. Indeed, vast narratives may function best for fans when their points of historical origin are elided, when launch points are multiple and slightly blurry, and when there is no single, unquestionable, canonical source text to follow (or when claims to canonicity are bracketed off). In any case, Kirby provided the raw material for shared universes that have gone on and will continue to go on without him.
WORKS CITED
De Haven, Tom. Our Hero: Superman on Earth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Devitt, Amy J. “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre.” College English 62.6 (July 2000): 696–718.
Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman” [Il mito di Superman e la dissoluzione del tempo”]. 1962. Rev. version trans. Natalie Chilton, Diacritics 2.1 (1972): 14–22.
Gaiman, Neil, et al. “Change or Die!” Afterword. The One. By Rick Veitch. West Townshend, VT: King Hell, 1989. 188–209.
Gartland, Mike. “A Failure to Communicate: Part Two,” The Jack Kirby Collector 22 (Dec. 1998): 36–43.
Harrigan, Pat, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2009.
Lee, Stan. Son of Origins of Marvel Comics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.
McLaughlin, Jeff, ed. Stan Lee: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Raphael, Jordan, and Tom Spurgeon. Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003.
Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. 1992. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Ro, Ronin. Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Roberson, Chris. “Mark Gruenwald, the father of modern superhero comics.” The Myriad Worlds of Chris Roberson. Blog. 2 July 2007. Web. 29 July 2010.
Navigating Infinite Earths
KARIN KUKKONEN
“Navigating Infinite Earths: Readers, Mental Models, and the Multiverse of Superhero Comics,” by Karin Kukkonen, is reproduced from Storyworlds 2, with permission from the University of Nebraska Press. ©2010 by the University of Nebraska Press.
IN A RECENT STUDY OF MULTIPLE WORLDS IN PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND NARRAtive, Marie-Laure Ryan argues that our “private encyclopedia” is deeply rooted in the classical notion that there is one world in which we live and through which we think—rather than many such worlds. As Ryan puts it, “[f]or most of us, the idea of parallel realities is not yet solidly established in our private encyclopedias and the text must give strong cues for us to suspect momentarily our intuitive belief in classical cosmology” (Ryan 2006: 671). Cognitivepsychological research on mental models, that is, scenarios we mentally develop in order to reason, also stresses that situations triggering the creation of multiple mental models are difficult to process (see Jarvella, Lundquist, and Hyönä 1995), and that we construct mental models in order to eliminate alternatives and create coherence (Johnson-Laird 1983; Garnham and Oakhill 1994). Thus, when reading fiction, interpreters construct “a three-dimensional model akin to an actual model of the scene” (Johnson-Lair 2006: 37) in order to locate the characters in a story, monitor the events and project the narrative’s progress (see Harman 2002). In such contexts readers’ mental model is called a “storyworld,” and it relies on the same one-world ontology that Ryan associates with “our intuitive belief in classical cosmology.”
Readers of contemporary superhero comics, however, seem to be less fully invested than others in this classical cosmology—a cosmology that favors singular over multiple realities, in narrative texts as well as everyday life. The stories of heroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have been published for decades on a weekly or biweekly basis, written by ever-changing authors. As a result, inconsistencies emerged in the different storyworlds and encounters involving these characters, and continuity, or the coherent and consistent development of the characters and their storyworlds, became a problem. In response, superhero comics made a virtue out of necessity and presented their storyworlds as part of a larger “multiverse,” in which a variety of mutually incompatible narrative worlds existed as parallel realities. Villains aim to turn the entire multiverse into their dominion, and superheroes unite to maintain the status quo across storyworlds.
Insofar as it involves a set of incompatible storyworlds, the multiverse of superhero comics differs from other narratives that cluster storyworlds. Ryan outlines several strategies through which multiple worlds are accommodated in narratives, in a way that can be reconciled with classical cosmology: they can be explained as the product of a character’s imagination (mentalism), as a computer-generated world (virtualization), as a symbolic world (allegory), through reference to the author (metatextualism), through magic, or through an explicit invitation to the reader to choose his or her own story (2006: 669–71). Superhero comics, however, take a multiworld model of reality—the multiverse—largely as an ontological given. The storyworlds of the superhero multiverse involve not just plural private worlds or “subworlds,” that is, the imaginings, hopes, and beliefs of characters (see Ryan 1991: 116–23; Ryan 1992; Werth 1999: 210–58), but rather fully parallel, equally actualized realities. And even though these comics feature metareferences outside the storyworld to authors and readers (see Kukkonen 2009), these are not always used to reduce the multiplicity of comics storyworlds. At issue in the superhero multiverse, rather, are mutually incompatible realities—unrelated (or at least highly distinctive) narrative worlds featuring different sets of superheroes as well as counterfactual scenarios involving alternative developments in the story of a known superhero. These cannot be reconciled as subworlds within the larger storyworld, and a baseline “textual actual world” (Ryan 1991: 113) is not always established. In superhero comics, multiple scenarios are the case, and it can be a challenge to determine when and how storyworlds of the multiverse form a set of counterfactuals, that is, “what if” alternatives departing from what is the case.
This essay explores the sometimes labyrinthine complexity of the superhero multiverse, as well as the means by which readers navigate that ontological labyrinth, via three tutor texts: Marv Wolfman’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–86), Warren Ellis’s Planetary (1999–2009), and Alan Moore’s Tom Strong (1996–2006). In Crisis on Infinite Earths the superheroes of the multiverse of the publishing house DC unite to face the threat of expanding antimatter. Superman and Kal-El (a version of Superman who ages and marries Lois Lane), different versions of The Flash, and other superheroes from across the multiverse team up in a final stand against the onslaught of antimatter. Crisis on Infinite Earths is a classic instance of the narratives of the multiverse, setting a precedent for later superhero comics like Planetary and Tom Strong, which likewise feature threats from alternative worlds and several character versions that meet each other. In Planetary a team of superheroes investigates the popular culture of the twentieth century. They travel through numerous fictional worlds and encounter alternative versions of other superheroes. Meanwhile, in the stories of the Tom Strong series, Strong is incarnated as a hero in the various popular-culture styles of the twentieth century, including those associated with its pulp fiction and superhero comics. Chronicling the history of these various styles and the heroes who figure in them, Moore portrays Tom as repeatedly encountering other versions of himself.
My argument is that although the storyworlds of the superhero multiverse are not easily
reconcilable into storyworld and subworld, or into one baseline storyworld and its alternative versions, you do not need to be a superreader, mentally juggling the innumerable storyworlds of the multiverse, in order to read superhero comics. Rather, the creators of superhero comics deploy a range of strategies to help readers navigate this multiverse of mutually incompatible realities, including iconographic elements in the portrayal of different character versions and the strategic use of reader surrogates, i.e. characters whom readers follow and identify with as the story unfolds. In fact, the Crisis on Infinite Earths mini-series was conceived as an attempt to unify the DC multiverse, to clear up the problems with narrative continuity that had been created through decades of storytelling in weekly installments (see the Introduction to Wolfman 2000). But ever since superhero comics featured the multiverse, they also cued readers to establish a mental model of multiple parallel realities, enabling them to navigate the multiverse and cope with its violations of classical cosmology.
The first part of this article begins by exploring how readers move from the comics text to a mental model of the events as they read the story. In an effort to extend previous research based on verbal propositions and narratives, I argue that images provide visual clues from which readers construct the mental model of the storyworld, rather than a direct, analogue representation of the storyworld. The next section then turns to continuity and counterfactuals and examines the challenges that the multiverse in the superhero narratives of Crisis on Infinite Earths, Planetary, and Tom Strong poses to human cognition. Cognitive-psychological research on counterfactual thinking and mental models shows that generally only a very limited set of counterfactual options is kept in mind. Superhero narratives, however, present their readers with uncounted numbers of storyworlds and character versions who travel between them. The remainder of the article explores strategies superhero comics use to mitigate these challenges to human cognition. For one thing, superhero comics have developed a very detailed encyclopedia of costumes and visual attributes, an iconography that provides shortcuts into readers’ knowledge structures, enabling readers to keep different character versions distinct and connect them to their original storyworlds. Further, reader surrogates—characters whom readers follow as the story unfolds—move on a path through the multiverse that connects only a limited number of worlds at a given time and thus reduces the cognitive load for readers. And when reader surrogates are given explanations of the structure of the multiverse in the story proper, readers acquire by proxy the mental model that the surrogates construct at the diegetic level.
FROM COMICS TO MENTAL MODELS
Comics are a medium employing three modes of expression: words, images, and sequence. On the level of meaning-making in the reading process, that is, for understanding what the story is about, these three modes of expression work together. Because a cognitive approach to narrative is not tied to one mode of expression, it promises to be a particularly useful paradigm for comics studies. However, research on storyworlds in narrative, and mental models more generally, has been developed largely on the basis of verbal narratives or propositions. Thus, in order to move from the comics text to the level of storyworlds, we need to explore in some detail how the components of comics narratives prompt the construction of mental models.
Time and space are the basic categories in terms of which we conceptualize our world as human beings. In his Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant describes time and space as “pure forms of intuition” (1986: 44) that precede and structure our experience, and Kant’s contemporary Gotthold Ephraim Lessing details in his essay Laokoon how the various arts engage with time and space. Lessing holds that there are “arts of time,” such as prose and poetry, and “arts of space,” such as painting and sculpture. Arts of time unfold through the reading process of a written text; arts of space attempt to capture a “pregnant moment” and provide us with a holistic but punctual impression that does not itself unfold through time (Lessing 2003: 23)—even though it may evoke or connote a temporal sequence. Thus, suggesting that the arts of time and arts of space differently engage with our “pure forms of intuition,” Lessing provides in Laocoon an early account of what media studies today calls “media affordances” (see Kress 2003): that is, how different means of expression, different semiotic channels such as words and images, enable us to communicate different things or, for that matter, the same thing in different ways.
Images seem to provide an analogue mode of representation, depicting the world and its spatial extension “directly.” Does this mean that what we see in an image in comics translates directly into the mental models we construct when engaging with the narrative? Most likely it does not. For one thing, even in the case of photographs in newspapers and films, images do not depict the world through pure analogy or iconicity but are deliberate means of communication, anchored in particular discourse contents and imbued with rhetorical purposes (see Aumont 1997). Further, even though Johnson-Laird describes his mental models as “icons,” he distinguishes them clearly from visual images as such (2006: 37). Johnson-Laird’s qualification is part of a larger debate about whether we use “mental imagery” when thinking and the extent to which this “imagery” corresponds to actual visual images (see Block 1982 for a collection of basic positions in this debate and Ganis et al. 2004 for a more current overview).
Thus, whereas the images of graphic narratives such as comics provide cues for constructing both the spatial and temporal dimensions of the storyworld, they are more like blueprints than photo-ready copies of the mental models that inform the design of the storyworld. Significantly, it is not obligatory for storyworlds to follow the principles of Euclidean space; for example, the distances between characters and objects in a room that figures in a narrative do not always correspond to our construction of the room in the mental model (see Langston, Kramer, and Glenberg 1998). Storyworlds, in this sense, are not representations of the content of the text, but representations of content that we take to be important or especially worthy of notice. Driven by the requirements of text comprehension, our primary goal is not to process spatial information accurately, as we might if the spatial details were presented on the flat, two-dimensional plane of Euclidean geometry, but rather to process the information thematically and according to the forms of embodiment such information enables.
Let’s consider an example from Promethea, written by Alan Moore and penciled by J. H. Williams III, in order to flesh out this claim more concretely.
As Sophie Bangs travels through the storyworlds of the previous incarnations of the heroine Promethea, she is pursued by reptile warriors in Hy-Brasil. Hy-Brasil is the storyworld of the 1930s Promethea, which harks back to the adventure comics of the time. In the upper half of the page, we see Grace, the Promethea of Hy-Brasil, kill the two reptile warriors in a single somersault. We also see Sophie from the front as she observes the event in shock. In the lower half of the page, Grace has landed from her somersault and calms the animals. She is still in full swing from the movement, her sword drawn and bloody. Sophie, however, has changed her position completely: we see her back and no longer her face as she looks at the events. We can make sense of the relation between these two images by supplying the events that can be assumed to lie between them.1 In other words, as readers process the visual clues of this page, they do not focus on the discrepancy between the panel images as such, but instead understand them as being tied to separate “events” (Walsh 2006). In this example from Promethea we first see Sophie shocked and overwhelmed by the events. Her facial expression and gestures communicate this information directly to us. In the second image we take a distanced position alongside her as she tries to make sense of what has just happened. This is the important narrative information in relation to Sophie here, not how much ground she really covered or the exact coordinates of her trajectory through space.
More generally, visual clues are integrated into a broader model of the world of the narrative, rather than being tre
ated as iconic reproductions of features of that world. That is why the depiction of events on a page of comics does not need to be continuous in order for us to develop a coherent mental model of those events. In fact, panel images in comics are usually to some degree disjunctive or discontinuous, to stress the event-like character of the “pregnant moment” they depict—that is, the way that moment is caught up in a larger flow of happenings or occurrences. Readers scan both images and words for salient information as they imagine the storyworld. Even though images have different media affordances from words, their differences are not crucial for the construction of mental models; both provide clues about how to build a storyworld.
THE MULTIVERSE: CONTINUITY AND COUNTERFACTUALS
The previous section identified how readers use the text of comics to construct mental models or storyworlds; this section explores some of the challenges the alternative realities of the multiverse pose for the construction of mental models.
As we have seen, the continuity of the story a comic tells is not necessarily provided by the coherence of its clues, but by the (more or less coherent) mental model readers construct on the basis of those textual clues. The storyworld is not a reproduction of the visual information the story represents, but a model of what the interpreter takes to be relevant for understanding the story. Johnson-Laird develops the notion of a mental model on the premise that reasoning is a semantic process (Johnson-Laird 1983; see also Johnson-Laird, Byrne, and Schaeken 1992: 418). Human beings do not compute abstract logical formulae but construct a mental model for reasoning and develop a causal scenario to make sense of facts (2005: 203). Such mental models are also at the basis of meaning-making when we read fiction. We develop mental models in which we locate the events, characters, and settings about which we read. We use the mental model to draw inferences about what has happened in the story and to project what is going to happen. Out of this process of reasoning within a model—of answering pertinent questions of the narrative from a stock of knowledge that is organized in a mental model—continuity and coherence in storytelling emerge. Different paradigms of reader-oriented research have developed their own accounts of mental models: van Jijk and Kintsch (1983) call them “situation models”; Werth (1999), Stockwell (2002), and Gavins (2007) call them “textworlds”; and Herman (2002) calls them “storyworlds.”