The Iron Man films – and the cinematic Marvel universe in general – possess some pretty odd politics. Shane Black’s take on the villainous Mandarin, however, was a clever twist in a sometimes-too-clever-for-its-own-good movie. It turns out Iron Man’s nemesis isn’t a murderous, magic-ringed, uncomfortably ‘ethnic’ tyrant; he’s a down-on-his-luck actor chewing the scenery for cash.

(Alyssa Rosenberg deftly dissects the movie’s ideology, saying Tony Stark’s enemies are “the movie’s great joke, and the subject of its major critique of the War on Terror, and unfortunately, Iron Man 3′s significant weakness.”)

Of course, some Iron Man fans are pissed. For example: Shane Black and Marvel “wiped their ass with decades of Iron Man history, reducing Shell Head’s lone significant adversary to a punchline.”

It’s a striking example of ‘superhero embarrassment’ that often appears when comic book characters migrate to other media. In Bryan Singer’s first X-Men, the mutants are dressed in post-Matrix black leather. When Wolverine complains, he’s asked if he’d “prefer yellow spandex”. Or in a recent episode of the TV show Arrow, where a character is mocked for daring to suggest Oliver Queen’s vigilante could be called something as ridiculous as Green Arrow.

Perhaps the grandest example of this was poor Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. He wasn’t allowed to appear as his giant, purple-helmeted, planet-eating self. That’d just be stupid. Instead, he was… a hungry space-cloud or something?

Comic books often channel this kind of embarrassment back to their pages: look at DC’s current Superman costume, meant to suggest body armour instead of a strongman’s silk. But comics also respond to ‘superhero embarrassment’ with what could be called ‘superhero defensiveness’. In fact, it’s one of Geoff Johns’ go-to techniques. His epic Green Lantern tale is a retort to everyone who joked about how goofy it was a magic ring wouldn’t work on anything yellow. In Batman: Earth One, he has a villain mock Batman for wearing a cape. Batman uses the cape to defeat his opponent, saying it’s actually a weapon.

This defensiveness reaches its peak in Johns’ new run on Aquaman. Poor Aquaman has been the butt of jokes in our world for years, and Johns brings that mockery into Aquaman’s world, too. In the first issue, he’s asked: “So how’s it feel to be a punchline? How’s it feel to be a laughingstock? How’s it feel to be nobody’s favourite super-hero?” Since then, every issue pauses to answer the presumed eye-rolls of the public at large with a ‘you think Aquaman’s dumb? No, you’re dumb! Aquaman’s rad!’ setpiece.

Movies and TV shows sneering at their source material can be frustrating – but so can the need to always turn the bizarre, nonsensical, beloved elements of superhero stories into logic and practicality.

Here’s two epilogues (one old, one new) as part three of my ‘Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds!’ from Routledge’s 2008 anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Here’s part one. Here’s part two.

In 2005, Grant Morrison was appointed as the DC Universe ‘revamp guy’: a creative consultant who helps to revise older, out of date characters to bring them back to popularity. This played into this year’s Infinite Crisis miniseries (2005-06), a sort-of-sequel to the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The last page of Infinite Crisis #1 (2005) was packed tight with Muscle Mystery. Here, the long-forgotten, long-overwritten Superman from Earth-2 came back into current comic book reality using his own kind of ‘superhero poetry’ – punching not just through space, or time, but physically shattering the continuity barrier itself!

And the shockwave of this blow shifted continuity for other heroes, too. There was only one who mattered to me. Continuity, you see, fragmented around a member of the current Doom Patrol in a double-page splash in a crossover issue with the Teen Titans (#32, 2006). It showed us all their previous incarnations thrust back into the present: shards of the recent, rebooted Doom Patrol; pieces of the 1960s originals; moments clipped from Morrison’s strange, ludicrous, heartbreaking run. And hidden within this mosaic – tucked away so you can’t make out a face – one thing’s impossible to miss:

Familiar, skintight, leopard-print trunks, framed with beach as background.

That’s how I ended this piece when it was originally published. Now it’s 2012, and Flex Mentallo is finally back in print. The colours of the comic have been unexpectedly redone for its new edition, however, and the vivid dayglow of Flex’s worlds has been replaced with grim blues and greys.

(It also had the unfortunate effect of ‘whitewashing’ some minor characters. Accidental, I think, but still depressing, and happens pretty regularly in comics.)

In this great Mindless Ones piece, they say this new colour scheme manages to show us Flex “through the eyes of a Flex who has been dosed with a previously undiscovered sixth form of Mentallium, ‘Grey Mentallium’, a lump of dull moon rock that shows you all of life’s possibilities as filtered through the PRISM OF ADULT DISAPPOINTMENT.  And hey, maybe it’s only fitting that you find yourself freshly disappointed while reading your favourite superhero comic about how your perception of superhero comics change as you get older.”

It makes a horrible, monkey’s-paw sort of sense that this is the price Flex pays for his resurrection. To sit on our dusty, real world bookshelves again he must sacrifice some of his otherworldly optimism. This is what it takes to have his story read once more.

As Morrison has a character announce in his half-empty / half-full conclusion of Animal Man: “And every time someone reads our stories, we live again.” (Animal Man #24, 1990).

When Flex Mentallo’s fame spread, his musclebound morality was called into question. Was he pure of heart or brutish parody? The pinnacle of the masculine ideal or cruel mockery of same? Questions like these were posed in a court of law when the Charles Atlas corporation sued DC Comics for copyright infringement.

“There has to be a limit to how far you can let someone ridicule your trademark,” said Jeffrey C. Hogue, President of Charles Atlas Inc. “They took that character and made him into something that was not an Atlas man…” During the case, repeated reference was made to Flex ‘beating’ a woman in his Doom Patrol appearance. Flex does shove away his would-be girlfriend during his origin story, saying “I guess I was a brute!” (Doom Patrol #42, 1991). It’s a shame that they never read on to see Flex’s later adventures, and the hero that he became.

The court reached a decision on April 29 2000, with the judge failing to “…discern a substantive difference between ‘surrealism’ or ‘irony’ on one hand, and ‘parody’ on the other, much less do we find them to be mutually exclusive.” Charles Atlas’ lawsuit against DC was dismissed, but for Flex, it seemed a hollow victory. Perhaps because of potential future legal issues, the case did what Black Mentallium never could – and Flex disappeared from comics altogether.

Does our real world always have the final stamp of authority over fictional heroes? After Morrison made a guest appearance as an omnipotent author in his own Animal Man comic, a very familiar character showed up in the pages of DC’s Suicide Squad. He was called ‘The Writer’ and looked suspiciously like the comic-book Morrison. His power was to rewrite the universe as it happened – but since he’d once written himself into his own comic, now he was fair game for other writers to use in their books. Later in the issue he suffered from unexpected writer’s block and was, uh, eaten by a werewolf (Suicide Squad #58, 1991).

Morrison said he wanted more than simply to have himself drawn onto the page, to ‘fake’ our world, as he did in Animal Man. Instead, he wanted to explore “…the two dimensional surface of the comic itself and at the point of interface where 2-D becomes 3-D and then touches 4-D.” But how could he be alive to say this after becoming werewolf-food? Remember the advice given by the Chief back in Doom Patrol #21 (1989):

“Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances, Cliff. It might help to consider the Zen koan, ‘first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is’.”

It does help. So does the term ‘krypto-revisionism’, referring to moment when the comics audience actively ignores certain plot twists, choosing to believe their own versions of stories instead; in a terrible and touching pun, the term is named for Superman’s own ridiculous, kitsch, often out-of-continuity super-dog. As does how the court’s ruling in the Flex Mentallo case highlighted a certain line from the background material provided: that Flex “…represents Morrison’s argument for a space beyond critique”. These distinctions – between fact and fiction, between official and imagined, between the page and the world that sits around it, above it – might not matter.

That’s no excuse for nihilism. Flex says: “Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.” (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996). Morality, again, is called into question in Flex Mentallo. Someone tries to commit suicide, reassured that somewhere out there they have an antimatter twin who will live. This is countered by Morrison refiguring parallel worlds into conscious choices. Flex Mentallo’s narrator, the once-psychic child who first created Flex, tells this story while dying of a drug overdose. At least, he might be dying. In one reality, the pills are killing him, but in another they’re just M&Ms. The decision appears to be his.

It’s not that nothing is real. It’s that everything can be. Flex Mentallo wouldn’t be bothered by Alan Moore’s famous statement in the Superman story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?: “This is an imaginary story… aren’t they all?” It’s not that all fiction is just fiction; it’s that my story, out here, is imaginary too. I’m just another in a long, long line of ridiculous narrators who’ll disappear from continuity the moment the page is turned. I suppose I should watch out for werewolves. Radioactive spiders. Cosmic rays.

Anything can happen in an imaginary story.

Next: the Return of Flex Mentallo!

It was also the subject of my first published academic chapter – bearing the unwieldy title ‘Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds!’ – in Routledge’s 2008 anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. My chapter was also an odd mix of analysis, autobiography and flat-out fiction, and I’m still amazed that they saw fit to publish it.

With Flex Mentallo now back in print, I thought I’d put up some excerpts of my chapter over the next few days. (The analysis, not the autobiography. I’ll spare you that much.) I began by asking what Morrison’s offbeat stories in Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and even Justice League of America meant for superheroes used to solving every crisis through action. A blast of heat vision, or ice breath, or an uncomplicated left hook…

Super-muscles are untrustworthy at best. Regular human weightlifters have more muscle mass than Superman but they can’t pull a moon out of orbit. And when Animal Man absorbs the power of flight from a passing bird, how come he doesn’t have to flap his arms to fly? This jaw-droppingly obvious fact was finally pointed out to the hero during writer Tom Veitch’s post-Morrison run on Animal Man. “What’s this so-called ‘bird power’ you talk about? The birds don’t have it! The poor creatures have to flap their wings!” The response? “Uh… you’ve got a point there.” (Animal Man #35, 1991).

Morrison’s Justice League of America aren’t his Doom Patrol, and they didn’t fight men with clocks for heads and nursery rhyme monsters – but the surreal logic of superheroes still questioned the validity of the body as a way to resolve conflict. Entire issues take place in dreams with bodies left, inert, waiting impotently for minds to return (JLA #8, 1997). Or in other worlds where the heroes are flattened into two dimensions, the same way we see them on the page (JLA #31, 1999). In one memorable scene, an enormous superbody is the host to an entire miniature world with a population that must die out of natural causes before he can be rescued (JLA #30, 1999).

Morrison once had the Flash remembering that “…with powers like ours, you have to learn to fight like a science fiction writer writes.” (Flash #130, 1997). It means rethinking conventional morality, too. Superman now has a reason for refusing to kill beyond the fact that it’s wrong. Superman berates rookie heroes who were happy to kill their enemies, saying: “These ‘no-nonsense’ solutions of yours just don’t hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel.” (JLA Classified #3, 2005). And you know? He’s absolutely right.

Perhaps it’s not that the overmuscled superbody is obsolete against the ontological threats of parallel universes and antimatter twins. It’s just that it must be stronger, faster, and harder than ever before to fight these forces of postmodern angst. I mean, how does the Flash move smoothly between parallel dimensions? He just moves really, really, really fast.

In a moment of genius by Morrison, a Superman ancestor visiting from the future attempted to return home by virtue of his superhuman strength alone. He actually punched his way through time (DC 1,000,000 #4, 1998). This pushed the boundaries of the superhuman body, and the credulity of comic fans. When asked to explain it, Morrison said: “It’s superhero poetry.” Readers should “bask in the audacious, absurd beauty of a man literally battering his way through the time barrier…”

That’s how Animal Man flies like a bird but without wings. That’s how Superman’s biceps can lift an oil-tanker and still be smaller than his head. Their bodies are superhero poetry. It’s Muscle Mystery.

Enter Flex Mentallo, Hero of the Beach. He’s too much of a man to question how his muscles function; it’s enough that they do. And it’s a good thing he’s not bothered by these same existential questions as his origin is more confusing than most. He was born as an imaginary friend of a young psychic boy, then brought forward into DC Comics ‘reality.’ His story provides multiple points of origin: he’s the childhood creation of psychic Wallace Sage; he’s the fictional brainchild of Morrison himself; he’s the wimp from the faded Charles Atlas commercials from my childhood half-memories. Will Brooker, in a discussion of the ambiguous signs of Flex’s sexuality, points out that these multiple origins themselves also suggest a ‘queerness’ present in the narrative structure itself.

Does Flex whine about his unreality, like Animal Man’s Buddy Baker? Does he wail about whether or not he’s even human, like The Doom Patrol’s Cliff Steele? No. “I’m a superhero,” he says, and that’s everything he needs to know (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996). In Morrison’s work, it’s the characters that are clearly labelled as ‘imaginary’ that can most easily withstand the shock of parallel worlds.

The possibility of parallel worlds colours everything in Flex Mentallo. Is it all a writer’s delusional drug trip? An elaborate supervillain hoax? The terrifying effects of Black Mentallium? A pocket universe of paper where the world’s ‘real’ heroes have been hiding? It’s all about leaving these possibilities open rather than shutting them down; not destroying parallel worlds but instead keeping them alive. Morrison is much more interested in the infinite earths than in the crisis.

Flex is pulled apart, put back together, and his very existence questioned again and again – but he never doubts himself. His Muscle Mystery holds him together. He’s so strong that when he strikes a pose, the words ‘Hero of the Beach’ actually appear above his head like in the old Charles Atlas advertisement. His biceps have conceptual powers all their own. Flex narrates:

“So I summoned up the power of Muscle Mystery – activating the occult of each musclecord, each tendon. Above my head, my famous ‘hero halo’ shimmered into view. And I flexed, reaching out to probe the interior of the bomb with my bodymind.” (Flex Mentallo #1, 1996).

His ‘bodymind’ suggests that his muscles and his heroic subjectivity are indivisible. Flex’s invulnerability isn’t a brittle costumed shell that could crack, allowing disruptive energy to escape or dissipate. He’s all man, through and through, and his boy scout morality remains absolute. When an admiring woman says to him “Boy, I just adore all-male he-men!”, he humbly answers: “And you’re a fine, hardworking woman.” Even when the story’s villain is unmasked, Flex doesn’t want revenge. He offers him the same chance we all had, reading the advertisements in those old comics, and tells the villain:

“Gamble a stamp! I can show you how to be a real man!” (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996).

Next: Flex gets dragged into the ‘real world’ of our legal system! Can even he prevail?

Here goes:

Over the years, Watchmen has become something I admire more than love. When I first read it, however, it absolutely amazed me. If I try, I can still remember the sick, breathless sensation I felt reading its grim climax.

Anyway, Watchmen survived Snyder’s film and it’ll survive these Before Watchmen prequels too. It is a little sad that someone will have to wade through all the prequels on the shelf to purchase the original. If DC was serious about this, they’d do a single 12-issue story – something to sit proudly next to the Moore and Gibbon’s collected Watchmen – instead of these scattershot miniseries.

Corporate comics will always focus on characters rather than stories because it lets them produce more material and make more money. (The idea that Rorschach has been sitting, unused, for decades must’ve been making DC executives wake up in cold sweats.) As Josh Flanagan wrote for iFanboy, DC have the legal right to make more Watchmen against the wishes of Alan Moore, and “morality and what’s right doesn’t come into it.” But why shouldn’t morality come into it? Isn’t the whole point of morals that they come into everything?

The most depressing thing about Before Watchmen for me isn’t the cult of nostalgia or corporate greed or wondering why Darwyn Cooke said yes. It’s seeing how – yet again – so many comic book fans automatically take the side of the company over the creator. Do they think Marvel and DC are the ones protecting these characters? And unhappy creators could cost them the new stories they desperately want? I don’t know – but if superheroes teach us anything, I’m pretty sure it’s not “morality doesn’t come into it”.

Buzzfeed summed it up like this: “So this is Herbert Chavez, who looks normal and not at all creepy. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Bizarro would be proud.) Andy Khouri, much more sympathetically, described it as an “unsettling quest” symptomatic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. “It is of course within this man’s rights to alter his body in any way he sees fit,” he writes, “but it’s not hard to imagine the Man of Steel disapproving of Chavez’s actions.”

Ignoring empathy for a moment – sorry, Superman – this makes me think about Superman’s face. All the faces of comic book superheroes look wildly different depending on which artist happens to be drawing them. And I asked last year if we were willing to accept the ever-changing facial features of superheroes “because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?”

But Superman isn’t a human being with a human face, caricatured onto the comic book page. The page is where he was born. Pencil and ink are his origin story; his planet Krypton. So what, in essence, does this Superman look like? He has a square jaw. A cleft chin. A spit-curl. Dark hair, white skin. That’s about it. Everything else can change on whim.

I’ve always wondered why Hollywood’s obsession with plastic surgery is only ever used to look young. One day, an actor will go under the knife to give themselves new emotive abilities: anime-sized eyes for augmented empathy, or expanded tear ducts to better gush during tragic third acts…

Writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo explored this idea in their fantastic mid-90s horror comic Face. It’s the story of David, a plastic surgeon who is summoned to perform surgery on an aged, reclusive artist named Andrew Sphinx. But Sphinx, who was a personal friend of Picasso, wants something different from the surgery. Something a little more… cubist.

If someone wants to look like Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain or Brandon Routh – sure, that’s one thing. Truly resembling the comic book Superman, though, is something else. You’d need to make your nose into two quick strokes, like an upside down seven, and abstract your eyes into featureless circles attached to the eyebrows above.

Otherwise, like Andrew Sphinx says to his surgeon: “You’re still stuck in classical realism, and you’re not even aware of it.”

As always, there was plenty we talked about that didn’t make the final cut, mostly because I try to keep my Bookslut stuff from becoming too seeped in superheroes. (I fail at this with embarrassing regularity.)

Here’s a little more of our conversation about comics as cinema, accelerated storytelling, his superhero writing on Iron Man and Fear Itself, and his appreciation of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.

One thing I admire about Casanova is its crazy economy of storytelling. And that’s one reason why I can’t imagine Casanova: The Movie – unless it was something like Total Recall was to Philip K. Dick. Casanova feels more comic-specific than, maybe, your superhero stuff. Would you agree?

I hope not. I think that’d mean the superhero stuff fails on some level.

Perhaps it’s just that your Iron Man seems born out of the Robert Downey Jr. take on the character.

That’s an illusion of publication schedule. I had four or five issues in the can when the first film came out. I had no special access; I saw the trailer when everybody else saw the trailer.

So why does Iron Man feel more ‘cinematic’ to me than Casanova?

I think that’s the grammar of superhero comics right now – or, rather, it was when I came in. Over this last year, from issue #500, Iron Man’s started to change. You can see the pages changing, the density change. As Fear Itself came along it kind of had to grow backwards a little bit, but you’ll see change coming out the other side. That’s my own proclivities as much as anything else. That was the grammar – or the accent, maybe – of the language that superhero comics were speaking. Three, four panel pages.

I got a really fascinating note from Joe Quesada on the first issue of Fear Itself: that I write so close to the bone, I carve away so much, we had a 48-page event that read like a 22-page comic. And that was a problem. I’d cut away so much in the interest of keeping things super-accelerated that I’d crossed the threshold and he found it too brisk. Fear Itself #1 is huge. It’s a big comic where a lot of things happen. It’s not slight – it’s lean. So I did a draft where I went back and added, which I hardly ever do, you know? And he was absolutely right. It was an incredibly trenchant observation. My natural instinct is to cut away, cut and cut and cut, until acceleration is almost a character.

It’s funny that in blockbuster crossover comics like Fear Itself – or Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis – you get to have an economy that you mightn’t in regular titles. They deal with so many characters, so much appearing on every page…

Final Crisis is a great example. Look at what Morrison cut out, and look at the backlash that particular book received. Now, I’ve studied Final Crisis like the Torah. I love it for what’s not there as much as for what is there. I suspect that’s why people wail and bitch and moan that they don’t get it, they don’t understand it. Never mind the inherent absurdity they can keep track of, say, thirty years of Legion continuity or four series of Star Trek or thirteen different Doctors Who – but a single Grant Morrison comic that doesn’t take the time to point out that those are Eclipso Gems? It somehow causes paroxysms of confusion and rage.

You can read the rest of the interview at Bookslut.

The fact that the Hulk went from grey to green in his earliest issues due to colouring difficulties? Decades later, it’s the rationale for two different Hulk personas warring inside Bruce Banner. Inconsistent Supermen and Batmen confusing your readers? Fix it with an apocalyptic storyline about the multiverse collapsing into a coherent whole! And then, later still, fix that first fix with another story bringing the multiverse back!

Lately, I’ve been writing about superheroes, their corporate owners, and the public domain. Comics work these issues into the fabric of their ongoing stories, too – mostly by framing them in the most ironic and heartbreaking ways. But in Batman Inc., writer Grant Morrison takes these issues and feeds them into Batman’s war on crime.

“Bruce is obviously a corporate CEO, billionaire and playboy superman,” says Morrison, “so what would Batman look like when that guy applied everything that he normally applies to Waynetech to Batman’s mission and way of life?”

Batman, Inc. features billionaire Bruce Wayne publicly admitting to funding Batman’s expensive gear and gadgets; all while, as Batman, travelling the globe and bestowing the rights to “wear the bat” to heroes of his choosing. Morrison’s inspiration was the hype around Tim Burton’s first Batman movie in 1989. In the academic anthology The Many Lives Of The Batman, William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson describe Bat-Mania like this:

During the summer of 1989, this bat-logo permeated American culture, appearing on candy, boxer shorts, leather medallions, earrings, baseball caps, night lights, sterling silver coins – in short, on any item capable of bearing the trade-marked image (or unlicensed likenesses thereof). The bat-logo’s omnipresence diffused its meaning, reducing the wearing of a black bat in a yellow oval to a mere gesture of participation in a particular cultural moment.

Batman’s symbol is everywhere in Gotham, too. Batman’s obsessed with it. He’s made it into his weapons, his vehicles, and everything else imaginable. In Gotham After Midnight, we see that he’s rigged Wayne Manor to spray the symbol across every single surface. Sometimes it feels like he’s terrified his memory is slipping away, a la Memento, and he’s designed his entire life to remind him that he’s Batman. Every thrown Batarang whispers as it returns to him: “You’re Batman. You’re Batman. You’re Batman.”

In our world, anyone can wear the Bat-symbol – so long as they’re willing to pay for the merchandise. But within his own universe, Batman is incredibly protective of his brand. Many times over the years he’s angrily told someone not to wear the symbol. In Batman Inc. #4, Morrison retells a moment from way back in 1956’s Detective Comics #233, as Batman calls out after Batwoman: “Wait! You can’t just… no one can wear a Batman costume in Gotham but me!” She says: “Ridiculous! No man, maybe!”

Batwoman quickly proves that she’s worthy of wearing his symbol, but others aren’t so lucky. Morrison’s current run is filled with ‘fake’ Batmen; his very first issue has a cop dressed as Batman shooting the Joker in the forehead. Other impostors attack him throughout, all driven mad by becoming Batman. And later, Batman’s memories are stolen and implanted into fresh bodies in an attempt to create an army of perfect bat-soldiers.

“They’re stealing your DNA. Your memories. To imprint unstoppable soldiers. Driven by your trauma.”

“Then tell them they can have it. You can have it, too. If you can bear it all at once.”

It turns out no one can handle the superhuman levels of pain and misery fuelling Batman. Impostors that borrow his story, mission, and iconography without permission will be destroyed by them. Only the ‘real thing’ can survive.

Morrison is no stranger to taking the external demands on his stories and narrativising them. My favourite example is the second volume of his epic The Invisibles; it took the need for action and accessibility required to boost sales and turned it into a growing anxiety about what this (seemingly glamorous) violence was doing to heroes’ psyches. And the idea of Bruce Wayne applying corporate logic to Batman’s mission makes perfect sense – but can the men and women who take on his heroic identity survive? Is the fact that they are ‘official’ Batmen enough to shield them from the horror built deep into the brand’s DNA?

I ended my last Bookslut column by wondering if we should apply the moral code of these fictional superheroes to their corporate status, too. I can happily imagine Superman wishing himself into the public domain. Batman, though, would be horrified at every bat-shirt, every bat-lunchbox, and every homemade bat-costume. They’d never be “mere gestures of participation” to him. They’d be signs of tragedy to come.

This month, my Bookslut column looks at some of the grand ironies of corporate-owned superheroes. It barely scratches the surface, and there were a dozen other half-formed ideas and outrages that didn’t make it into the finished version.

The letter that inspired me – Joanne Siegel’s angry response to the chairman of Time Warner – can be read in full here. And in his book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, Tom DeHaven describes how Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel’s fury with DC Comics had begun decades earlier:

In October 1975 he sat down at his old typewriter and composed a screed of malice and grief, a cry for recognition and justice, and a thundering imprecation: “I, Jerry Siegel,” it began, “the co-originator of SUPERMAN, put a curse on the SUPERMAN movie! I hope it super-bombs. I hope loyal SUPERMAN fans stay away from it in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds SUPERMAN, will avoid the movie like a plague.

Want more? The long history of court cases involving comic creators is summarised in this massively depressing article by Paul Slade.

(There’s an intriguing theory towards the end, too, wondering why we’re seeing more and more comics of Superman in black-and-white variations of his costume. Warner won a legal victory over an early monotone ad showing a preview of the famous cover of Action Comics #1 – so is DC now “already preparing for a world where it may wish to minimise any aspect of Superman it doesn’t fully own”?)

The Comics Reporter added some welcome comments to my piece:

Mainstream comics publishers such as DC and their communities have ascribed a real-world moral authority to these fictional characters for years now. Why shouldn’t that extend to broader ethical issues involved in their creation, publication and distribution? If Superman, Batman and Spider-Man are presented at times as moral agents capable of instructing and inspiring their readership, why wouldn’t the expectations they engender apply to a situation where the press of ownership concerns has taken precedence over the greater morality represented by treating people with compassion and gratitude?

And for some ideas of how public domain superheroes have always existed in the Marvel and DC universes, check out this piece on IO9, inspired by the release of Marvel’s new movie Thor. Of course, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s smash hit The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen forged a Justice League-style supergroup from famous fictional characters from around the turn of last century: Stoker’s Mina Harker, Wells’ Invisible Man, and so on. I wonder if we’d ever see something similar combining characters from Marvel, DC, and whoever-the-hell-else in a hundred years.

For my money, Moore’s best work on Superman wasn’t when he was writing the official version for DC Comics. It was when he was working with an obvious knock-off – still Superman, just with the colours changed and logo filed off – in Supreme. Imagine if he’d been able to tell these stories with the real thing. Wouldn’t they have meant more?

Writing this piece, I found it painfully difficult to reconcile this history with the unbridled optimism that powers the best superhero stories; with my childlike love of these characters and their worlds. I kept thinking of the court case over Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison’s “Hero of the Beach!” from the pages of Doom Patrol. In the court’s ruling over the character’s copyright, it highlighted a particular line from the background material provided by DC Comics. It said that Flex “…represents Morrison’s argument for a space beyond critique”.

A space beyond critique: pure optimism, pure altruism, pure imagination.

Why do these ‘heroes’ seem more interested in press coverage than helping those in need? What happened to following a good deed with a quick, humble disappearance? Don’t these guys remember the theme song to the old Spider-Man TV show? “Action is his reward”!

I’ve written before about the one thing Superman – the perfect, original superhero – says he cannot do. He laments that he can’t cross into our world, our reality, to save the day when we need him most. And if these men (yeah, pretty much just men) are the best we can do when it comes to real life superheroes, we’re doomed if we’re attacked by anything worse than an evil costume party.

In a rare burst of optimism, here are three examples I’ve found to prove Superman wrong about his limited abilities in the real world.

You might remember a story from last year about a family, facing foreclosure, who were packing up their belongings when they found a copy of Action Comics #1 in their basement. That happens to be the first appearance of Superman from 1938, and it’s worth a frightening amount of money. Here Superman was, 70-something years later, appearing again to save the day.

New York suffered an infamous blackout in 1977: 3,400 arrested, 558 cops injured, 851 fires, and $1 billion in damage. Those statistics come from the New York Daily News – the newspaper that managed to go to print during the blackout. How? Because Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie was shooting its Daily Planet scenes in the building, and the newspaper borrowed the film crew’s generators. “The newsroom was bathed in generator-powered klieg lights,” as the New York Times described it, “which made it more difficult than usual to distinguish between fantasy and reality.”

(Like I’ve mentioned earlier: it’s not just that Clark Kent happens to be a reporter. It’s that Superman is “the mighty newspaper”.)

One more? In Joe Kubert’s award-winning graphic memoir Fax from Sarajevo, he mentions the cars that served as volunteer ambulances during the Serbian siege. They needed to carry the critically wounded through sniper-filled streets of Sarajevo to a makeshift hospital, not far away, but far too far. The inside of the cars were lined with comic books – because “two or three copies can stop a bullet or a bomb splinter.”

I don’t know the details of that family’s near-foreclosure; maybe it was too perfect a story to fact check too thoroughly. And maybe getting a newspaper out during a crisis isn’t exactly a miracle on par with flying around the earth so fast that time turns backwards.

Look closely, though, and you can see that Kubert’s drawn Superman on the covers of the comic books that served as ambulance armour. I hope the Man of Steel stopped a sniper’s bullet by letting it burrow deep into his paper chest.