So I got another Jeff Parker digest — Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four Volume 2. The first three stories are fairly pedestrian: the FF battles dinosaurs in the first, then they fight something else in the second, and then they battle Namor the Sub-Mariner in the third. It’s standard-issue super-adventure, told professionally but without any particular spark.
The fourth one is the charm, though. Titled “It’s Slobberin Time”, it features a super-villain called the Street, who is, like the name says, a sentient piece of pavement, with a fire-hydrant stuck in him and everything. How did the Street come to be? Well, he tries to explain, but the FF is so busy bickering they can’t hear him…then the Thing goes off to get a specialty sandwich…Reed zaps the Street with some doohickey which makes him fall apart…and the subsonics summon Lockjaw, the giant dimension-traveling dog with the weird thingee on his head. Lockjaw is intensely and ominously interested in the Street’s fire-hydrant (“put that leg down!” wails the hapless supervillain.) But then the Thing comes back with his sandwich, Lockjaw eats it, which screws up his digestion, and then he starts burping himself across time and space, taking the FF with him.
My son loved, loved, loved this issue…or, as the boy himself put it, “I laughed so hard I farted!” I laughed out loud at several points myself, and even the rather indifferent artist seemed inspired; Lockjaw’s look as he tries to digest the sandwich is, for example, adorably hang-dog. Awwww.
In other words, “It’s Slobberin’ Time” isn’t so much an adventure with funny parts as it is a joke with loopy bits of adventure stuck on to create some sort of narrative. It’s not a tale of super-heroics, but a parody of super-heroics.
In thinking about super-hero stories, parodies are often seen as a kind of peripheral sub-genre — super-hero stories, qua super-hero stories are adventure pulp; parodies may be liked or disliked, but they aren’t really what the genre is about, either for its supporters or detractors.
But I’ve got to say that, at least for me, much of my sincere and long-term love of super-heroes is linked precisely to the way the genre is not only made for, but actually made of, parodies. All genres include parody of course, but for super-heroes, parodies are really central in a way that they’re not in…for instance, romance, or detective fiction. The earliest worthwhile super-hero comics were probably Jack Cole’s Plastic Man and C.C. Beck’s Shazam, and ever since then, super-heroes have consistently been at their best when going for laughs. The Mad Magazine parodies like “Superduperman,” Ambush Bug, Flaming Carrot, the Adam West Batman…even, say Super-Grover from Sesame Street. As far as public profile, and even, I think as far as aesthetic success, super-heroes are as likely to be parodic and silly as they are to be serious. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight drew a lot of its charm from its constant teetering on the verge of self-parody; Grant Morrison’s Animal Man was often indistinguishable from parody; even the dark, grim, Watchmen brought up classic super-hero parody tropes with some verve (how do you pee in that costume? and, of course, there’s the Silk Spectre Tijuana Bible….) On the alt comics side, it seems like everybody near about works with super-hero parodies Crumb, Ted Rall, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes (at least sort of), Jeff Brown, Johnny Ryan, Jaime Hernandez (I believe…I could be misremembering that one….). And, indeed, despite the ascendance of largely straight-faced movies like “Dark Knight,” parody remains extremely popular as a super-hero mode, whether within comicdom (Marvel Zombies) or outside it (Captain Underpants) (both of which, incidentally, are pretty bad…but that’s the way it goes, sometimes….)
In a lot of ways, I think, super-heroes are most adult (and somewhat contradictorily, most accessible to a varied audience) not when they’re violent or sexy or nostalgic, but when they’re funny and parodic. All those goofy powers and nutty costumes and bellowing about truth and justice while beating each other over the head… super-heroes are just funny. Which isn’t quite the same thing as saying that they’re stupid. Sure, lots of super-hero comics are witheringly and unforgiveably dumb, but the genre itself has virtually from the beginning also had practitioners who embraced and celebrated its own goofiness. The whole Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex thing…that’s not making fun of the super-hero genre; it’s an exercise occuring well within the boundaries of the super-hero genre itself.
I guess the point here for me is twofold; first, the super-hero genre really is smarter and more worthwhile than it’s often given credit for being; and, two, mainstream super-hero comics don’t take advantage of that as much as I wish they did. Maybe we are moving past the low water mark, though. I’m sort of hoping for the day when the Marvel Adventures line is the — parodic, smart — flagship for the company, and the continuity cluster-fucks are the undermarketed backwater. Dare to dream.
You could even argue that some of the best superhero stuff, like early Spider-Man or Fantastic Four, have parodic elements. I know that some of the most memorable parts of Stan Lee’s Spidey are the goofy, knowing narration, like when Stan would write something like, “now I’ll sit back and let ol’ Artie give you some crazy sound effects for a few pages!” I love that stuff.
The Fred Hembeck World War Hulk parody that was hidden inside this really horrible “what if” comic turned out to be worth the cost of the issue, despite being all of three pages long. They’ve done a couple of these throwaway gags–my favorite, like anybody else who saw it, was when everybody in a room is looking to the left, except for Daredevil, who is looking off to the right, because, you know. His eyes don’t work.
The new Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 has a great parody of super-teams. Actually it takes up most of the issue and totally brings Jaime back to some of his early superhero parody days…only better (and with some clever gender commentary, since all the heroes here are women). His mature drawing style, combined with a razor-sharp sense of timing and wit make it a total winner. The Beto contributions are kind of lame, but there is a hilarious Martin and Lewis as superheroes in space bit which is almost worth the price of admission. If only I had actually seen any Martin and Lewis, it would, no doubt, have been even funnier (actually, I’m not sure it is supposed to be Martin and Lewis because of my ignorance on the topic…but it’s pretty hilarious any way you slice it).
The Street? Some kind of tribute/ripoff to Grant Morrison?
I agree with Eric that the new Jaime Hernandez superhero stuff in New Stories is great, some of his most purely entertaining work in years. It’s a parody of “team” books as well as a sly commentary on the kinds of characters likely to show up as superheroes. Jaime’s team is constructed from the kinds of characters who would probably be the goofy minor sidekicks in a traditional team book, notably women of all ages, shapes, and sizes. It’s a real blast to read and Jaime’s drawing is, as always, exquisite. I can’t believe New Stories is only going to be annual, though: I could do with a lot more than one small dose of this stuff every year. It’s a shame that Jaime isn’t as prolific as his brother, especially since I’m increasingly less interested in Gilbert and more interested in Jaime the more I read of them.
I’ve also recently been catching up with a lot of the Alan Moore ABC books that I hadn’t read before (I’d previously only read Promethea and Tom Strong). There’s a lot of superhero parody in that line, and Jack B. Quick and Cobweb are especially strong in that regard. Jack is a hilarious parody of the Reed Richards type, the amoral scientist with such a complete faith in scientific progress that he barely considers the consequences of his latest bizarre experiment. Indeed, practicality rarely even enters the picture: he does things not because it’d be any benefit to anyone really, but just to see what happens. Cobweb is a more straightforward parody, a kitschy lesbian superheroine whose main power is that she doesn’t wear any underwear. Of course, the two most straightforwardly parodic characters in the ABC universe — First American and Splash Branigan — are mostly just annoying. Branigan at least has some funny lines when he appears in other characters’ stories, but I can barely deal with a full story of either character. Parody is much more fun when it’s subtle and modulated, not hitting you over the head with its cleverness.