Archive for category comics
Brightest Day and Dead Baby Birds
The first page of Brightest Day #0 made me laugh out loud. It’s the first volley of a more traditionally ‘heroic’ era for DC Comics superheroes – and it opens with a baby bird falling out of its nest and striking a tombstone with a spatter of blood, dead.
I feel better already.
Admittedly, Brightest Day co-writer Geoff Johns has said that the tone of the book is “not necessarily optimistic”. It does, however, arrive as a cheerier sequel to his hearts-torn-out-and-eaten-in-front-of-their-owners storyline Blackest Night, and showcases a dozen resurrected characters suddenly pardoned from the growing bodycount of recent superhero stories.
The narrator of the parodic Ambush Bug: Year None put it like this in 2008: “Squeamish, gentle reader? Then it may be time for you to give up reading graphic literature, since we have truly now entered… the Guignol Age of Comics.” Look, you really need to see the font for the full effect:
It’s not just blood and gore that make some squeamish, but also the actions of the heroes themselves. Marvel is promoting its new Heroic Age – a “throwback to the early days of the Marvel Universe, with more of a swashbuckling feel”, according to editor in chief Joe Quesada. Have comic books become so compromised that announcing “heroes will be heroes again” deserves a headline in the mainstream media?
Many trace this grim-and-gritty superhero trend back to comics like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in the mid-1980s; Moore says he suspects “that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories…”
Everyone would have their own list of superhero stories gone wrong. Personally, I think that Kevin Smith’s Batman series The Widening Gyre seems to have been written just to prove that Frederick Wertham was right about creepy superhero sexuality. I cocked an eyebrow when the alternate-universe Captain America purposefully used a kindergarten full of children as cover during a firefight in Ultimate Avengers #4. Hell, DC just published a story in which a hero murders a villain while quipping “For justice” – a catchphrase associated with their kid-friendly Super Friends title.
I’m torn, though, whenever I feel the urge to complain about what’s being done to these superheroes. In my last column for Bookslut, I talk about alternative superheroes and “underwear perverts”, like James Kochalka’s Superf*ckers and Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys. I end up saying we shouldn’t be so precious about ‘perverted’ superheroes. It’s very difficult for a single story – or even a decent-length run – to do any lasting damage. Superheroes have “existed for too many years, through too many stories, at the hands of too many writers and artists to be corrupted by swear words or a sex scandal.” That goes for Marvel and DC’s own stories, too.
I don’t want to be a they’re-raping-my-childhood! hysteric. I’m all for violence, gore, and death – I’m actually murdering someone as I type! I’m just tired of the so-called “real world” intersecting with superhero stories in the most grim and least interesting ways. This quick, lovely piece by David Uzumeri summarises it best. Comparing Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto to Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All-Star Superman, he writes:
“Books like Watchmen or Identity Crisis take that tack with American superhero material; they’re both about scratching under the shiny veneer and finding the rotten underside of a metaphorical golden age, about how, in a grown-up world, pragmatism trumps idealism.”
If idealism can triumph anywhere, shouldn’t it be in superhero stories?
(Oh: the baby bird in Brightest Day #0 is magically resurrected a couple of pages later! So, uh, no harm done.)
Superman is the Mighty Newspaper
From Overheard in the Newsroom: a conversation about the demise of pay phones.
Editor: “Where would Superman change nowadays?”
Reporter: “Change? Where would he work?”
You might’ve read that Peter Parker recently lost his job as a newspaper photographer. Don’t worry: it’s hardly the first time in Marvel Comics’ history that Spider-Man’s infamous no-good-deed-goes-unpunished luck has cost him his job – and it wasn’t just your typical downsizing, either. (Poor Parker lost his job for doctoring a photo to prove the innocence of his long-time journalistic enemy – and current Mayor of Marvel’s New York City – J. Jonah Jameson.)
But with the growing numbers of doomsayers claiming the real-world newspaper industry is failing, I wondered: can superheroes live without them?
Superheroes and newspapers share some mutual strands of DNA. Newspapers still contain comic strips, of course, and it’s common knowledge that even the term ‘yellow journalism’ was named after a comic that ran in the last years of the 1800s. And superhero comics and newspapers were sold side-by-side for decades, too, until the former became the domain of specialised comic book stores instead.
Peter Parker and the Daily Bugle; Clark Kent and the Daily Planet. The journalistic careers of Spider-Man and Superman’s alter-egos are almost as much a part of their core identities as radioactive spiders and last-minute rockets from other worlds. Heroic reporters aren’t just limited to handy secret identities.
DC Comics has Lois Lane, of course, but she’s never gotten the respect she deserves. It’s partly because she’s always existed first and foremost as a love interest for Superman, but it certainly didn’t help that she was forced to fail to notice that Clark Kent’s real identity for so long.
Marvel has Ben Urich, a reporter who first appeared in 1978. He’s an investigative journalist of the hardboiled school – incessantly smoking, rumpled trenchcoat, code of honour – made more famous in Frank Miller’s legendary run on Daredevil. He’s now the hero of his own occasional series that offers a behind-the-scenes look at Marvel’s crossover events, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meets All The President’s Men.
What about a tabloid-sponsored superhero? One of the interlocking series that formed DC Comics’ Seven Soldiers ‘mega-series’ in 2005 was The Manhattan Guardian. Taking his superhero identity directly from the newspaper that employs him, ex-cop Jake Jordan agrees to become publicly what others are only in secret: a superheroic reporter. He’s a revamped version of the original 1940’s Guardian, a vigilante who was aided by a group of orphans called – adorably – the Newsboy Legion.
The Manhattan Guardian works because its hero makes obvious the same logic that links superheroes and newspapers. Lois Lane always wondered how Clark got the best Superman stories; cruel irony meant that Peter was providing the photographs used to defame Spider-Man in the Daily Bugle. Superheroes are, almost by definition, where the action is – so who’s better to bring home the scoop?
While writing about superheroes and their relationships to the cities in which they live, theorist Scott Bukatman discusses the connection between Superman’s never-ending battle and Clark’s work at the Daily Planet:
“In a way, then, Superman and his alter-ego, crusading journalist Clark Kent, are fighting the same fight using the same methods: ubiquity, speed, enhanced powers of vision and perception, and incorruptibility.” In fact, Bukatman continues, “in a strong sense, Superman is the mighty newspaper.”
One of my favourite details in DC’s epic Final Crisis series from 2008 was that Superman has an emergency printing press in his Fortress of Solitude. Here, interdimensional villains use electronic media to spread the deadly “anti-life equation” that removes all traces of humanity’s free will. How will superheroes get the news out to the resistance? They become heroic newsboys, spreading the good word one paper at a time.
Psy-Ops, Simplicity, and Superheroes
When I first heard that comic books were air-dropped onto war zones, I remember thinking it must be a goodwill gesture. Something fun, something bright. Something to distract the suffering children.
Yes, I’m an idiot.
It somehow didn’t click that the thousands of comics, say, dropped on Iraq in the early ‘90s were more likely show Saddam Hussein cutting off his own head than a cheery selection of Calvin and Hobbes.
I was planning to discuss psy-ops and propaganda comics while writing about Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza for Bookslut, but Sacco distracted me with his hundreds of pages of heartbreak. Would it have been too tenuous to compare his work with Captain America punching Hitler back in 1941? They’re both designed to win hearts and change minds, after all. And comics have a long history of being used as propaganda – whether to rally support at home like Hitler’s glass jaw above, or loaded into cluster bombs and dropped on the enemy to destroy morale.
Sometimes, however, the pretty pictures can have the opposite effect. During World War II, the Japanese reportedly dropped leaflets designed to convince American soldiers their wives were busy being unfaithful at home; they were illustrated – ahem – graphically enough that they became collector’s items. “Our guys loved it,” says military historian Stanley Sadler. “They’d trade them like baseball cards.”
That same article by Ian Urbina references a failed use of superhero-specific propaganda, too. In 2000, DC Comics made special Superman and Wonder Woman comics in multiple languages to illustrate the dangers of land mines. But… umm… what were those weird, word-filled clouds hanging over the heroes’ heads? Urbina explains:
“Though widely understood in some contexts, thought bubbles appearing above a cartoon character’s head left some readers, especially rural ones, completely baffled, according to press accounts.”
The perceived simplicity of comic art is what makes it so appealing for cross-cultural propaganda. Unfortunately – and setting aside the possibility that this story is another example of the “caveman panic” rumour circulating around the Lumière train – it’s never that simple. Read this fascinating piece on the attempts to cure “The Forever Problem” at a New Mexico nuclear waste vault. Once you set aside a shared written language and a shared visual vocabulary, how do you communicate grave danger to humans living a thousand years from now?
Comic books have hundreds of specific visual conventions, from the wavy lines above an angry man’s head in the newspaper funnies to the ornate font Marvel’s currently using to imply that Thor and their other Norse Gods sound kinda ‘Ye Olde’.
And superhero comics may be many things – daft, adolescent, awe-inspiring, overtly sexist and conceptually daunting – but they’re rarely simple.
Underwear On The Outside
In Superman: Secret Identity #3, the Man of Steel wonders if his costume might be a little snug. It’s the latest of god-knows-how-many updated retellings of Superman’s origin story, so we get to see him wearing his costume in public for the first time – uh, again – and muttering: “All right, Clark. Don’t think about how tight it is.”
As far as catchphrases go, it’s no “Up, up, and away!”, is it? When even Superman is worried that he looks stupid in his iconic, entire-industry-inspiring costume, you can understand how difficult difficult it is to wear your underwear on the outside.
The popularity of superheroes used to be able to force anyone into costume. In his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (2006), Peter Coogan uses a character called The Scorpion to illustrate this trend:
“The Scorpion, created by Howard Chaykin, exemplifies this shift. The Scorpion’s adventures were set just before WWII, and the character himself was a pulpy soldier of fortune with some science fiction elements. The Scorpion debuts without a costume, wearing a leather jacket, flight scarf, riding boots, and armed with pistols. A new creative team was brought on after the second issue, and the Scorpion was made over, appearing in the third and final issue in a blue-and-orange cowled affair sporting a large scorpion chevron.”
Like I wrote when talking about Power Girl and her costume’s notorious cleavage window, you’re currently more likely to see superhero comics apologising for oulandish outfits than embracing them. The first example I can remember was a decade or so after the Scorpion’s crisis, when John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad ditched their costumes altogether.
The Suicide Squad was a team consisting of various villains and sociopaths, forced into good deeds by their government in order to reduce their prison terms. It was a serious espionage story with an alarmingly high body count. (At least it seemed high when back in 1987; now, a smattering of character deaths seem to be expected in even the most lighthearted superhero books.)
In time, the supervillains on the Squad ditched their costumes altogether, deciding on a more ‘serious’ look for their serious stories. I can see why. This year, DC released JSA Vs. Kobra. It’s a grim tale of global terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and suicide bombing that took itself absolutely stone-faced seriously – even while starring a character called Mister Terrific who has the words FAIRPLAY written down the sleeves of his jacket in giant letters.
I’ve spent my whole life honing my ability to suspend disbelief, and I still had to stifle a giggle at this yawning chasm between style and content.
For the non-comic-reading public, costumes can be an even harder sell. Recent superheroic TV shows don’t dare. Smallville is still clinging to its long-standing “no flights, no tights” policy for young Clark Kent. And NBC’s deservedly-maligned Heroes is happy to be one of the stupidiest shows on TV – but god forbid they’d ever put their characters in costume, because that would just look dumb, right?
Coogan suggests three elements to define a superhero: mission, powers, and identity. Costumes, he says, is an integral part of the latter – “iconic representations of the superhero identity”. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins agreed, concreting the importance of Batman’s “theatricality” in the minds of the millions who saw it. However, it still required his costume to become practical military-style armour, rather than just bright fabric for symbolism alone. (Well, okay: symbolism and ease of impromptu dancing.)
The costumeless Suicide Squad later find themselves unwillingly involved in a major crossover called “War Of The Gods” in issue #58 (1991). Before they head off to battle angry mythological figures, they’re told to put their old costumes back on by the immortal antihero Black Adam:
“Everyone who has one should be in costume. [...] We go to fight gods and magic. Ceremonial garb has a value and should be worn.”
Maybe it’s that simple. Superman should remember this the next time he’s feeling shy.