Art by John Romita,Sr, and Mike Esposito
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.– Paul the Apostle,1 Corinthians 13:11
Over the past seven chapters of this series, we have traced the evolution of the superman from the eighteenth century up to 1938 and the coming of the Superman comic book character: our history stops there, as the comic book medium was soon awash with superheroes, and would remain so until the present day.
Indeed, it is depressing to note, the commercial comic book is overwhelmingly dominated by the superhero at the expense of other popular genres. And the comic book superhero is at present – by consensus of its aficionados – in a state of decadence.
We’ve seen , with the death of the dime novel, of the newspaper serial and of the pulp magazine, how entire pop media can shrivel away. The comic book magazine may be fated to join these dinosaurs in extinction.
If it is, I doubt it will take the superhero with it. Hollywood and the electronic game have claimed this king of the four-color pamphlets. As pointed out in previous chapters, the superhero existed before the comic book, and will continue to exist after. It is a kind of contemporary archetype that resonates with twenty-first-century psyches, not necessarily in a laudable way.
The superhero is a vehicle for power fantasies. That is far from news, of course. And there are other character types that also cater to the reader’s craving for wish fulfilment; tales of business tycoons, brilliant inventors, heroic revolutionaries, boy wizards, femmes fatales, genius detectives, and ugly-ducklings-turned-superstars abound. But the superhero strikes one as being uniquely unhealthy due to the nature of its particular power dream.
When I was a small child — say around eight years old — my favorite superhero was Superboy. Part of his charm lay in the simple pleasure of identification with this kid (like me!) with wonderful powers — a not unwholesome fantasy.
However, consider the cover picture below:
Art by Curt Swan and George Klein
What does this image tell me about my childhood proxy? He’s alone, unjustly reviled by society (his own parents turn on him), despite his clear superiority to the rabble. Now, the illustration is obviously an exaggeration made to serve one transient story — but it’s the kind of exaggeration that would resonate with a child.
Powerless and dependent, a child craves nothing so much as agency and autonomy. His world is entirely out of his control; he is told to clean his room, finish his homework, stop talking back. Ah, but little do they know of his secret life as a superhero!
The superhero is thus an expression of resentment that the child co-opts. Other negative sentiments it expresses include anger, acted out vicariously by the systematic use of violence to solve all problems.
These ‘bad’ feelings, though, can of course serve to empower a child psychologically. I’m more worried at the persistence of superhero fantasies in the adult. Fictional superman revenge fantasies, as Gramsci pointed out, were one of the roots from which Fascism grew.
Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality. Although this sort of Mittyesque daydreaming is supposed to cease in maturity, I suggest that more adults than we suspect are bemusingly wandering about with a full Technicolor extravaganza going on in their heads. […]Though from what we can gather about these imaginary worlds, they tend to be more Adlerian than Freudian: the motor power is the desire not for sex (other briefer fantasies take care of that) but for power, for the ability to dominate one’s environment through physical strength […]
Gore Vidal, The Waking Dream:Tarzan Revisited
I’m not necessarily referring to adult comic book fans, either; the enormous success of various superhero movies shows that this figure resonates strongly with the public at large.
No, I doubt that the continuing allure of the superhero will lead to more vigilante ‘justice’, or to a resurgent Fascism. But it is time for one adult reader and comics lover to say goodbye: me.
Art by Neal Adams. An even more self-pitying version…
* *
As for the superman, he has in recent years taken a new guise, in the movement popularly called transhumanism.
Transhumans — also called post-humans– are postulated future beings of human origin “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”, according to the World Transhumanist Association. The latter also defines transhumanism thus:
- The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
- The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.
Transhumanists foresee humans benefiting from radically extended lifespans (possibly even immortality), direct mind-machine interfaces, astonishingly high intelligence, perfect control of body processes…an entire laundry list of (so far) wishful thinking.
From the transhumanist site euvolution
Eventually transhumanity — whether the whole of the human race uplifted, or a tiny elite — may, in this scenario, slip the contingencies of existence and attain godhood.
One Christian author had foreseen such Luciferian hubris, and named it that hideous strength, in the book of the same title:
The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe […] would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.
C.S.Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)
While the memory of last century’s racial atrocities endures, let us not be too quick to abandon mere humanity.
Resist the temptation of the superman.
Maybe I’m reading into this something that isn’t there, but it seems to me like there is a worry in this piece that films and games having the superhero will increase a worrying descent into negative power fantasies?
If that is the case, I don’t think superhero power fantasies really compare to the heated desire for violent power in film genres like masculine action, cops, crime, gangsters, rough justice, war, westerns etc. I really don’t think most superhero films give people a whole lot of a negative power fantasy that is anywhere close.
The power of flight and webslinging seems romantic by comparison to Death Wish, Dirty Harry and any modern equivalents.
It’s an attempt to elevate a complaint about something that offends individual tastes into an enlightened position.
I deeply hate boring autobiographical comics about dreams, jerking off and neuroticism, but I don’t call for them to not exist and try to couch it in intellectual terms.
Alex just wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 words about the history of superhero comics. He expresses reservations in this part, but to take him as unambiguously disdainful of the genre in all its permutations seems pretty silly.
Alex here. Andy, I was born in 1954. I spent more than four decades a reader and fan of the superhero, both in comics and on the screen. I don’t regret at all the pleasures this has brought me, and I still fondly revel in nostalgia for my old super-pals. And hey, I still buy the occasional pamphlet or catch the odd film; I’m seeing Thor 2 tonight.
This 8-part history was by no means undertaken to set up my elitist credentials by belittling superheroes. But like any genre, popular or not, it bears examination. I’m not taking a view of superheroes as easily dismissed trash fit for the lowest of hoi polloi.
I see myself as asking questions, while bringing a historic context to help me work out answers– answers that are valid for me alone, age 59.
I would be more than pleased if my work here informs, at least in part, the answers of others.
BTW, in a recent interview on The Comics reporter, Jeet Heer mentions ‘the pre-history of the superhero’…have I coined a phrase? Or unconsciously plagiarised? Mr Heer, what do you say?
Seems like it’s a phrase that might well have been current before your series? Here’s at least one use:
http://the.sagepub.com/content/113/1/57.abstract
And it’s used in Jeet and Charles Hatfield’s superhero reader, it looks like. Only recently out, but probably written prior to the start of your series:
http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781621039549
I bow to precedent, then!
There will be a ninth installment, possibly a tenth, a sort of historic dictionary of superhero tropes (eg linking superhero chest emblems to heraldry and shamanism…) though not for some time.
Robert Adam Gilmour, if you read my past installments of this series you’ll see how I link the western, the thriller, the crime story and other genres into the superhero.
I wasn’t expressing concern about violence, really, but rather about the very notion of super-humanity. “I am of this Earth, earthy”. So is everyone, and I see no value in trying to transcend our condition, but do see much danger.
I did see your previous instalments and they were very interesting.
AB says: “I wasn’t expressing concern about violence, really, but rather about the very notion of super-humanity. “I am of this Earth, earthy”. So is everyone, and I see no value in trying to transcend our condition, but do see much danger.”
This is the clarification I was looking for. I too am worried by transhumanism. I keep worrying about what me might lose. My brother, who is a lot smarter and knowledgeable about science thinks my worries are unrealistic. He talked about a hearing mechanism for the blind that allows people a sort of Daredevil awareness of their surroundings that is almost like a new sort of sight. According to some this is transhumanism and it seems like a harmless example to me.
I often fantasize about a time when we don’t have to worry about diseases, the common cold or even allergies (I am in continual dread of working a job or having an important day with my nose overflowing with snot).
Michio Kaku did a documentary for the BBC about humans having mastery over their own lives and he discussed extended life, eradication of disease and transhumanism.
Like most people, I like to trust scientists know what they are doing and think of the implications of everything; but I don’t know how much most scientists possess that foresight or care.
In that show, a young woman was interviewed and I cant recall if she was a scientist or not; but she appeared to me geekily excited about transhumanism and the idea that people might be made more uneven if they could alter themselves.
Maybe I’m an idiot who feared the worst and doesn’t understand but I was worried by the way I interpreted her attitude, it was a very short interview though.
Yeah, Michio isn’t making me feel confident…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDYqclPUmYM
…apparently he is a genius but I’m not smart enough to know which people are smart enough for me to trust.
Robert, I think we’re on the same *wavelength of unease* (mixed metaphors, so shoot me) regarding transhumanism.
It’s almost futile to speculate about it as it hasn’t, by definition, arrived yet.
But a survey of admittedly fringe views of tranhumanity is pretty bloodchilling for us mere grubby hom.saps.
Your examples are eloquent.
Robert Adam Gilmour:
‘Yeah, Michio isn’t making me feel confident…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDYqclPUmYM
…apparently he is a genius but I’m not smart enough to know which people are smart enough for me to trust.’
Nor am I, Robert.
But I do know enough to state that Michio is, probably unconsciously, a factual retailer of falsehood; or worse, one who believes his own story…i.e. the sincere person selling his or her own falsehood, not even for money or fame: for existence.
The liar that doesn’t believe itself dishonest– and possibly isn’t: this is a needful case of honest, transparent, educated and well-monitored debate.
BTW I probably fulfill the above criteria.
How? Let us see…
I really think most of the transhumanist program seems like bunkum, as far as I can tell. Most of the things they claim are going to happen are not only nowhere in sight, but may actually simply be impossible. (We’re nowhere near creating the kind of AI they’re talking about.)
Technology does transform society, but usually in ways that are hard to predict (the internet being a good example.) I would agree that seeing those changes as automatically good or as fundamentally transforming our spiritual and ethical selves leads dubious places.
hey alex, just want to say that I enjoyed this whole series
Thank you, Jones.
A parting remark…
I identified the first two illoes as being by ‘John Romita and Mike Esposito’ and ‘Curt Swan and George Klein’. When I finished writing the article I went online to check: I was right. Not from memory, but from recognising artistic style.
But that’s a strange waste of cognition, isn’t it? I could have trained to recognise a Rembrandt from a ‘scool of’ just as well.
I can roll a cigarette one-handed. But that dexterity would have been more fruitfully employed on a musical instrument…
Sigh.
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