Prolegomena to any future study of comical books: The Superhero
After writing my tribute to Dave Cockrum, it
washed over me that it might be good if I wrote something about comics that
didn't have to do with the death of a friend. Those of you who check out this
blog from time to time who know me as that ex-comic book writer, might be
getting terminally exasperated with my extended musings on politics and the
ontology of the which and why. and wonder when I'm going to start talking about
important stuff, like who is stronger, Grant Morrison or Neil
Gaiman?
A couple of problems: I don't
think I'll be doing much reviewing of current comics, because a) I am not in the
stream of things. While I pick up comics from time to time, these days I treat
them the way I treat books: they can sit there for a while before I read them.
When you're a fan, comics are the equivalent of news. Being in that steady
stream lets all that four-color oxygen stream over your gills as you flick your
fins back an forth, immoblie to the eyes of others but rushing headlong with it
all rushing by your face. I don't tend to read the corporate coming attractions
when I read the books: it all sounds so wonderful that I feel ashamed that I
don't rush out and by twenty more books next
week!
And that brings up the other big
problem: not a lot that I do read excites me all that much. Let me be fair and
say that I mean that pretty much literally: Most of what I've been picking up
has been entertaining, well crafted stuff (if a little thin on a bang-per-buck
scale.) Some have tickled me, some have impressed me with this or that--but
books that start the antennae twirling and lift me ever so slightly off my seat?
Not so much.
Some of this, of course, has to
do with my being a geezer--and in that it is the same as with rock and roll.
When you've gota brain crowded with decades of stuff, those chords and that beat
just don't have the impact that they did when they were relatively new. Few
things will equal these days the slam my senses got hearing Janis Joplin sing or
hearing Jeff Beck lay for the first time. But that's not fair to my
sensibilities either: my aging ears still got excited by Nine Inch Nails or
Nirvana, for example.
So it might not be
simply my decrepitude that makes me sub-orgasmic over the current stories of
Alan Moore or Brian Azzarello (to name two people I like): there might be a
reason that comics conversations seem to refer back repeatedly to Watchmen and
The Dark Knight Returns. But giving a lukewarm endorsement to something current
would really be unfair, especially since I may have missed The Greatest Comic
Ever OMG! by not picking up one of that vast torrent of
books.
Sad, innit? A terrible
confession for an ex-letterhack to
make.
It does leave reminiscences--I
have a few, but it's usually taken Death to dislodge them--and more general
considerations. So herewith, one of the
latter.
When I was back there in
seminary school, one of our favorite topics of discussion, among us young turks
who were going to take comics to the next level, was how to make the comics
universes more real. Greater depth, more consistency, aspects of the world more
fully thought out. We would agonize over the problem of telescoping time, where
having members of the Fantastic Four meet JFK in an early issue and president
Nixon in a later one jarred a bit--to say nothing of the problem of Reed and Ben
being World War II veterans. (These days even using Vietnam vets is a problem.)
We wrestled with what we called the sliding-scale problem endlessly: was there a
way to really work it out--or would we (like Starlin and Chaykin did for Nick
Fury, and Marv Wolfman later did for the FF) just give them immortality potions
and say to hell with it?
But there was a
greater problem that I harped on: technology transfer. How is it possible, I'd
say, that in a world with antigravity, FTL travel, time travel, conscious
computers, an alien contact every 2 1/2 weeks, and teleportation, that people
still run around in gasoline powered cars with rubber tires? How is it possible
for Tony (Iron Man) Stark to be a wealthy industrialist when not one of his
inventions has ever made it to
market?
Now there have been all sorts
of comics series attempting to answer the question what would it really be like
in a world with superheroes in it? From the aforementioned Watchmen, to Marvels
and Astro City, to strips like The Authority (which I haven't read: see above),
trying to thread superheroes in with the real world has become fertile
ground.
However, they ultimately smash
their keels in what I call the Fundamental Theorem of Superheroes: that
A superhero strip is a story in which,
whatever the science fiction or fantasy elements are in the main premise, the
background is always everyday
reality.
It's
true: change the background too much, and the strip becomes science fiction or
fantasy. Not that there's anything
wrong with that, but it stops being a
superhero strip. (and usually doesn't sell as well.) Part of the problem is
that, when the focus is on the superheroic exploits of the central characters,
strange aspects of the background world get in the way, distracting and slowing
things down.
But more to the core than that,
superheroes are fantasy fulfillment. They embody our myths and our self-images,
or they fail. And therefore, for maximum effect, they should be us. And it gets
harder to be us if you have a vastly different backdrop. (Magnus Robot Fighter
had all this gorgeous Russ Manning art in it, but none of us kids ever wanted to
be him: fighting robots in 4000 AD was wrong-end-of-the-telescope
territory.)
As a writer, I realized
with a bit of resignation that there's simply a basic disconnect between the
foreground and background. No getting around it: you can play with the tensions
all you want (and to good effect), but there's no solving it. The superhero
strip is basically like opera: there's a contradiction built in to the form
itself.
A corollary to this fundamental
theorem is that things get worse the longer you go on. At the beginning of every
strip or shared comic-book company universe, the disconnect between foreground
and background is invisible (if one cares to make it so), but the more stories
one does, the more fantastic menaces and secret sources of power drop into the
narrative--the less and less like your background your foreground gets, This, I
think, is why, in Freudian return-of-the-repressed fashion, the impulse to
reform the Big Guys' continuity keeps getting stronger and more frequent the
longer and wider it gets. these days, from this chair at some remove, it seems
there's a continuity upheaval every two years or so. And it not only puts off
the casual comics reader, being thrown into a thicket of continuity changes
every time one turns around--but it's working towards a goal that can't be
achieved. (One of the reasons I like Astro City so much is not just that most
excellent Brent Anderson artwork, but the fact that Kurt has made (I'm sure
completely consciously) that disconnect the raison d'être of the strip.
Kurt and Brent know they're teetering between magnificence and absurdity every
issue: it's awfully fun to watch.)
What
to do about the Superhero Universes? You have, i think three options: 1) give up
on these giant continuity monsters and read (or write) small standalone books
where it doesn't show up; 2)try to ignore it, minimize it, and continually try
to reconcile the foreground and background (because 'tis better to have loved
and lost, and your reach should exceed your grasp; or 3) Settle back and enjoy
the opera. Quiet: the curtain's going up--!
Posted: Tuesday - December 05, 2006 at 03:10 PM