Why is Comic Studies So Predictable?

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

Defining the concept COMIC has, perhaps, been the cause of more ink spillage and deforestation than any other single theoretical topic in comics studies. Interestingly (and rather predictably), work on this topic has loosely followed the same trajectory as earlier attempts to define the concept ART.

McCloudDef First, we have formal, aesthetic, and/or moral definitions of comics roughly paralleling traditional, pre-twentieth century definitions of art. Nontable examples include David Kunzle (The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825, 1973), Will Eisner (Comics and Sequential Art, 1985), Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 1993), David Carrier (The Aesthetics of Comics, 2000), and Thierry Groensteen (The System of Comics, 1999/2007). Comparisons are easily made to Plato, Kant, and even John Dewey’s accounts of the nature of art. But, just as the second-half of the twentieth century saw a widespread rejection of any such account of the nature of art that entails that an object is an artwork solely in terms of some properties (whether formal, aesthetic, or moral) that inhere in the object itself, during the early twenty-first century comic studies has seen a similar turn away from formal definitions in favor of other approaches. Interestingly, the three main alternative approaches to defining comics match almost exactly the three main approaches found in earlier, twentieth century work on defining art.

First, there is the outright rejection of either the necessity of, or even the possibility of, a definition of the concept at all. Notable examples of such an approach in comic studies include Samuel Delaney (“The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism”, 1996), Douglas Wolk (Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, 2007), and Charles Hatfield (“Defining Comics in the Classroom, or the Pros and Cons of Unfixability”, 2009). The connection to Morris Weitz’s (and others’) Wittgensteinian rejection of definitions of art, and his embrace of the “open-endedness” of art, is obvious.

Next we have historical definitions – those accounts that locate the “comicness” of comics in the historical role played by particular comics, and in the history that led to their production (and, perhaps, in intentions, on the part of either creators or consumers, that a particular object play a historically appropriate role). One notable example of an historically-oriented approach to the definition of comics is to be found in Aaron Meskin’s work (in particular, in the concluding remarks to “Defining Comics” 2007, which is otherwise rather hostile to the definitional project). Meskin’s comments (and likely any other account along these lines, although this seems to be the least developed of the options) owes much to Jerrold Levinson’s historical definition of art, whereby an object is an artwork if and only if its creator intends it to be appreciated in ways previous (actual) artworks have been appreciated.

Finally, we have institutional definitions, which take something to be an comic if it is taken to be such by the comics world. The primary proponent of something like an institutional view within comic studies is Bart Beaty (Comics versus Art, 2012). Such views obviously owe much to similar, earlier approaches to the nature of art due to Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and others. Of course, one of the primary challenges here is to determine what counts as the “comics world” in a way that is informative and not viciously circular (i.e., an account where the comics world is not defined merely as those of us who take comics seriously).

Conan Thus, the work on defining comics has closely mimicked earlier debates about the definition of, and nature of, the larger category of art (presumably, all, most, or at least typical comics are artworks – even if possibly bad artworks – solely in virtue of being comics). This much seems undeniable, but it also seems somewhat problematic. After all, sticking solely to approaches and strategies that appeared plausible when used to define art is only a wise strategy if we have some sort of prior conviction that the properties and relations that make an object an artwork (i.e. that explain the artwork/non-artwork distinction) are the same properties and relations (or at the very least, the same kind of properties and relations) that make an object a comic (i.e. that explain the comic/non-comic distinction). And to my knowledge no argument has been given that this is the case. As a result, it behooves us to ask if comic studies has been too traditional, and too unimaginative, in this regard. Isn’t it possible that we could be convinced that there is an adequate definition of comics, but also convinced that such a definition should look very different from extant attempts at defining art (i.e. it would take very different kinds of factors into consideration)? And, more to the point, isn’t it possible that such an attitude could be correct? If so, then the close parallel between work on the definition of comics and work on the definition of art seems unfortunate, since it seems to ignore this possibility in favor of recapitulation of past history.

When Are Two Comics the Same Comic (Part V)

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

Recently, DC Comics has produced a series of re-issues of Batman stories – the unwrapped editions – that present the artwork in pencils-only form. The question I want to explore here is whether these works are instances of the same comic – that is, the same work of art – as the original inked and colored edition. I’ll use the unwrapped edition of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman: The Court of Owls as my example, although the questions raised could apply to any comics in this series.

It is worth getting one potential misunderstanding out of the way from the outset. The unwrapped comics appear, to be reproductions of the original art produced by Capullo. Now, it is tempting to think at first glance that this somehow gives us special access to the art – after all, when we go to comics-as-art exhibits at museums, it is usually the original art (often just pencils, although often pencil-and-inks as well), and not inexpensive floppies, that are hung on the wall for our viewing pleasure. Thus, it might seem like the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls is not only an instance of the same comic as the earlier, inked and printed version of the comic, but that it gives us particularly privileged access to this artwork in virtue of providing us with particularly privileged access to (accurate reproductions of) the original pencil art.

This, however, would be a mistake, I think. When we view original art at a comics exhibit, it is not obvious that we are even experiencing the relevant comic in the first place. Now, I am not denying that the original art pages are artworks, but only suggesting that they are not the same artwork as the comic that we experience when purchasing a floppy at our favorite comics dealer. The reason is simple: individual pieces of original comic art are singly-instanced artworks, while comics themselves are mass-produced, multiply instanced artworks. To mistake one for the other would be to ignore Nelson Goodman’s distinction, formulated in The Languages of Art, between autographic and allographic artworks. Of course, looking at the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls, or looking at the original art pages, might give us additional information relevant to interpreting the multiply-instanced inked-and-colored artwork that we experience when reading the comic. But that doesn’t meant that experiencing either the unwrapped comic, or looking at the original art pages, is a case of experiencing the comic itself. After all, facts about Snyder’s life and personality might be relevant to understanding The Court of Owls as well, but that doesn’t mean that learning about his life amounts to experiencing the comic, or that his biography is somehow a part of the work.

There is another argument for the claim that the unwrapped edition of The Court of Owls is an instance of the same comics: we might point out that the original inked-and-colored version, and the unwrapped version, tell the same story. I don’t think this strategy works any better, however. In his essay “Making Comics into Film” (in The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Aaron Mesking and Roy Cook (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Henry Pratt investigates the criteria by which we might justifiably claim that a comic and a cinematic adaptation of that comic (or vice versa) might be said to tell the same story, despite minor changes in plot and the rather more major differences between formal properties and storytelling conventions in the two media. For this project to even make sense, it must be at least possible that a comic and a film can tell the same story. But if that is the case, then sameness of story told is not sufficient for being instances of the same artwork, since the comic and the film are obviously distinct artworks.

This is not to say that I believe that the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls is not an instance of the same comic as the inked-and-colored version. But I do think the question is a difficult one, and that the obvious quick strategies for defending an affirmative answer are flawed. In addition, we do have very different aesthetic experiences when reading the two different versions of the story, suggesting a negative answer isn’t completely out of the question. So, is the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls an instance of the same comic as the inked-and-colored version?

Was Spider-Woman Harmed in the Making of this Cover?

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

So everyone is no doubt aware of the Milo Manara Spider-Woman variant cover art controversy that occurred a couple of weeks ago. Marvel’s commission of the cover, and its subsequent reaction to the backlash, was sadly typical of a mainstream comics industry that seems to want to embrace its large and growing female readership yet seems utterly incompetent when it comes to actually doing so.

Now, I don’t want to talk about Manara’s Spider-Woman cover art for any of the standard and by now familiar reasons. I don’t mean to suggest that the issues relating to the depiction of females in comics raised by the incident are not worth attending to – quite the contrary. But one public comment regarding the incident got me thinking about a different issue.

On September 2, Kelly Sue DeConnick – the current writer of Captain Marvel – made the following statement in an interview when asked about her take on the cover:

“The thing I think to bear in mind is Jess is not a real person – her feelings are not hurt by that cover.” (full video interview here)

Now, this is certainly true.

But we shouldn’t forget certain claims are objectively (even if only fictionally) true of a fictional character (e.g. Jessica is a superhero) and other claims are objectively (again, even if only fictionally) false of fictional characters (e.g. Jessica lives on the moon), regardless of the fact that the character is question doesn’t actually exist. In particular, the production and publication of Manara’s cover now makes it fictionally the case that Jessica (at least once) poised herself atop a building, in a body-paint version of her costume, ‘presenting’ herself (in the biological sense of the term) to anyone in the city who might want a look. Regardless of how we might want to re-construe or reinterpret the art, this is what it in fact depicts.

Of course, as DeConnick notes, Jessica’s feelings aren’t hurt by this – not even fictionally. She isn’t fictionally aware that an artist decided that she would expose herself this way. On the other hand, she now just is the sort of (fictional) character that – perhaps in a single moment of questionable judgment – is willing to engage in some rather extreme exhibitionistic behavior. In short, the incident depicted on the cover is now part of how we understand what sort of person Jessica is.

Given this, we can meaningfully ask: Did the Manara cover (fictionally) harm Spider-Woman? And I think the answer here is uncontroversially “yes”. Whatever Jessica’s motivations for engaging in the behavior depicted in Manara’s art, this contribution to Spider-Woman’s narrative seems to be a negative contribution to her character – a representation of vice, not virtue.

The more important question to ask, however, is perhaps this: Independently of the other kinds of harm undeniably caused by the cover (and well-covered elsewhere), should Manara feel bad for producing this image because it (fictionally) harms Spider-Woman (or should Marvel feel bad for commissioning the image, or should we feel bad for consuming it)? Have we (i.e. Marvel, or Manara, or readers, or some combination of the three) done something morally wrong by adding this incident to the story of Jessica’s life? In short, should we care that we have done something objectively (albeit fictionally) harmful to a fictional character? Is there any sense in which we have moral responsibilities to fictional characters at all?

Of course, characters are harmed via depicting them doing non-virtuous things (making them non-virtuous characters) all the time – we call them villains or antagonists, and we need them for at least some sorts of story. But here the fictional harm done to Spider-Woman was not done in the service of any identifiable narrative needs. It was done for no reason at all, except presumably titillation. So unlike the case of villains, there is no story-related reason to alter Spider-Woman’s character in this negative manner.

So, was Spider-Woman harmed in the making of this cover?

Note: I have simplified a number of issues in the above in order to facilitate my main question:

The narrative content of cover art does not always straightforwardly depict events that we are meant to take to have actually occurred in the narrative contained within the comic – cover art can play all sorts of other commercial or aesthetic roles in addition to straightforward storytelling (see my previous post here).
I have assumed that unsolicited exhibitionism is, all else being equal, morally bad (since, for example, it might harm those exposed to it against their wishes).

If one is unwilling to grant me the simplification in 1, or refuses to grant 2 for the sake of argument (since the questions I am trying to raise is a larger one about the moral properties of fiction), then feel free to imagine a relevantly similar depiction of a until-now (mostly) heroic fictional character engaging in morally unacceptable sexual behavior for no reason other than, perhaps, the sexual gratification of the reader, and where that incident is depicted in the main body of the narrative.

Are Some Panel Layouts Inherently Superior to Others? (Groensteen and Page Layout Roundtable)

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

This is the second installment in the PencilPanelPage roundtable on panel layout and Theirry Groensteen’s work (The System of Comics, Comics and Narration). Check out Adrielle Mitchell’s first installement in the series here!

In Comics and Narration Thierry Groensteen introduces a four-part taxonomy by which we (or at least he) categorizes comics in terms of the nature and structure of panel layout. The taxonomy consists of different ways in which the payout of the panels might be more or less regular:

Do all pages have the same panel layout (or are they all variations on a single such template, etc.)?
Are all the tiers of panels on a particular page (or all the tiers in the comic, etc.) the same height?
Are all the panels within a single tier (or all the panels on a page, or all the panels in the comic, etc.) the same width?
What is the number of panels placed on each page (i.e. what is the density of the page)?

A page for which the answer to (2) and (3) is affirmative is a waffle-iron grid. Further, the more variation with respect to (2) and (3) found on a page, the more irregular the page. Factoring in (1), we also have a criterion for measuring (roughly) the regularity of the panel layout of an entire comic.

The density of panels on a particular page – i.e. criterion (4) – while discussed at the same time as the first three criteria, is somewhat orthogonal to measuring the regularity of a page although variation in density from page to page obviously increases the irregularity of the comic in the relevant sense. Clearly, however, if the number of panels on a page varies from page to page, then as a matter of geometrical fact their layout must as well – thus, with regard to measuring regularity criterion (4) is redundant, subsumed under criterion (1).

This taxonomy is interesting, and allows us to categorize comics in terms of three distinct (although not completely independent) dimensions: the regularity of panel height (on a page), the regularity of panel width (in a tier or on a page), and the uniformity of these when considered page-to-page. Taxonomy is, of course, a wonderful tool for analysis and explanation, but a taxonomy is only as good as the explanation of, and analysis of, the relevant phenomena that it provides.

Digression: One pet peeve of mine is the tendency of scholar in the humanities – comics scholars definitely included – who propose taxonomies as if a system of categories is an intellectual end in and of itself (and as if they are following a more ‘scientific’ methodology). A taxonomy is a tool, however, not a result.

So, the obvious question is this: Are there any theoretical questions that can be answered by attending to the complex geometrical framework for analyzing comics panel layout provided by Groensteen? Groensteen seems to think so: he argues that, in general, the more regular the panel layout, the better the comic and its narrative (all else being equal). His argument for this claim is somewhat indirect – he identifies a regularity-eschewing ‘movement’ in comics, which he calls the neo-baroque and characterizes as preferring:

… the destructuring of the hyperframe by images that bleed off the edge of the page and intrusions into the gutter, the use of multiple insets, the maximization of the contrast between large background images and the inset panels, the vertical or horizontal elongation of panels (as if to achieve a shape as far removed from the square as possible!), and the frequent stacking of very narrow horizontal panels… (Comics and Narration p. 47).

Groensteen stridently disapproves of such strayings from the waffle-iron way of truth:

It is as if the simple succession of panels was no longer deemed sufficient to ensure the production of meaning: the apparatus must become more sophisticated (or more hysterical) by piling special effect upon special effect (Comics and Narration, p. 47).

It is worth noting that Groensteen’s complaints have a bit of a Euro-elitist tone to them: He explicitly blames the neo-baroque movement on the pernicious influence of manga (pp. 47, 61) and 1980s American superhero comics (p. 47, fn. 17, p. 61).

Setting this aside, however, it is worth asking whether Groensteen could be right: Are some panel layouts (and maximally regular waffle-iron grids in particular) better suited for effective narratives than others? There are two possible questions one could ask here:

In general, are comics better the more regular their panel layout?
If comics had to restrict itself to a single layout, would a more regular layout be better than a less regular one?

Groensteen seems to think the answer to the first question is affirmative, but I just can’t see how this could be the case. As many scholars have argued (and see the predecessor to this post by Adrielle for some evidence) panel layout can be carefully attuned to the type of story being told and the way in which the teller is telling it, resulting in narrative effects that are both theoretically interesting and likely unachievable by other, more ‘traditional’ means. Chris Ware’s work, for example, would be far less compelling had it been produced in a regular 3×3 grid (interestingly, Ware somehow gets a pass from Groensteen, despite his vast deviations from panel regularity in Groensteen’s sense.)

More promising, perhaps, is the second question (although it is not, I think, what Groensteen himself has in mind): If all comics had to be produced with the exact same panel layout, would a regular one be preferable? The answer here might be affirmative – it might be the case that a regular waffle-grid is neutral in a certain formal sense, so that it is amenable to functioning in all sorts of different narrative environments in a non-interfering manner (although the positive contributions of panel layout of the sort mentioned in the previous paragraph would be ruled out). Of course, certain metafictional comics that make direct use of panel layout would be impossible. But the second weaker claim regarding super-regular waffle grids does not seem immediately absurd in the way the first does.

So, are some panel layouts inherently superior to others?

How Do We Interpret Comic Book Covers?

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

Comics are both a substantial art form and a commercial industry. Thus, it is not surprising that the cover of a comic can play multiple roles. The cover is usually the first (and sometimes only) part of the work seen by consumers before purchase. Nevertheless, covers are not purely merchandising: A cover is also a part of the work of art proper, and thus should (or, at the very least, legitimately can) be taken into consideration when interpreting, evaluating, and decoding the narrative contained in that work. Given that comic book covers are often created by someone distinct from the artists who craft the narrative portion of the comic found between the covers, interesting questions arise with regard to how the content of the cover art influences our interpretation of the work as a whole.

Two questions arise immediately:

What role should the content of the cover art play in our interpretation of the comic as a whole when the cover seems to conflict with the narrative found inside the comic?
What role should the content of the cover art play in our interpretation of the comic as a whole when the cover references other comics (or other pictorial art)?

Of course, sometimes the cover of a comic is just a playful exercise in metafiction, with broken fourth walls and other types of silliness that usually (although not always) are meant to have no real bearing on our understanding of the story contained inside the comic. Such is likely the right reading of this She-Hulk cover (although,given that the She-Hulk often engages in metafictional strategies within the narrative proper, the right reading of this example is likely more complex). But in other cases, things are more involved. Let’s look at two sorts of example. The most obvious sort of case is where the content of the cover can outright contradict the the content of the interior pages. This can happen in three ways, all three of which are illustrated by Adam Hughes’ cover for Fairest #3.

The narrative content of the cover can conflict with the narrative found in the interior pages: Hughes Fairest cover depicts the Snow Queen playfully writing the word “Fairest” on the frosted window. But this contradicts the interior content in two ways: It is unlikely that the character in question is the sort to do anything playfully, and there are no panes in the windows of her castle as depicted in the interior pages.
The appearance of characters on the covers can conflict with their appearance within the interior pages: On the same cover, the Snow Queen is depicted with pink skin, but within the interior pages she is consistently drawn with bluish-white skin.
The cover art can incorporate the title of the comic into the art itself (thereby implying that the characters have metafictional knowledge of the title of the comic in which they appear, and thus have knowledge that they are fictional characters). The Snow Queen’s inscription of “Fairest” on the window functions this way, while there is no indication within the interior pages that there is any sort of metafictional fourth wall breakage.

Given these sorts of conflict between cover and interior content, we are (or at the very least, I am) left wondering exactly how the content of this cover is meant to fit into an overall interpretation and assessment of the narrative. Is the Snow Queen playful, or not? Does she have blue/white skin, or pink skin? Does she know she is fictional?

Another sort of question arises when cover artists reference other (typically iconic or important) comic covers. A particularly interesting example of this phenomenon arose with the LEGO minifig covers that appeared on Marvel comics as part of a tie-in with the Marvel Superhero LEGO sets and videogame. These covers raise interesting questions about the appearance of characters: Are we meant to imagine that Wolverine (the canonical Marvel character) temporarily looked like a LEGO minifig? Or that he could have? In short, if the cover is a legitimate part of the work as a whole, and thus provide some information regarding the appearance of the characters, exactly what information should we take from this cover?

There are other questions that arise from this sort of cover, however. The LEGO Wolverine cover references the iconic cover to the first issue of the seminal Wolverine limited series. Is this merely to be taken to be an homage? Or should we interpret the narrative within the pages of the most recent issue with the older limited series especially in mind? These questions are raised, but seem to be left unanswered, by the cover art itself.

So, how should we interpret covers in mainstream superhero comics?

Is Tong Transgender?

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

Here at PencilPanelPage we post relatively often about identity and identification (my favorite all-time post along these lines is still Quiana’s early post “Can an EC Comic Make ‘You’ Black?”). In this post I intend to continue this grand tradition. So let’s talk about my new favorite character: Tong.

Tong is one of four adolescent moloids (or ‘mole-men’) who were saved by the Thing after being rejected by the other (more ‘devolved’) residents of the Forgotten City, and is taken in by the Fantastic Four (see Fantastic Four #575). Tong soon settled in with other super-powered adolescents at the special school known as the Future Foundation (the ‘FF’). Now, things get interesting when the Fantastic Four go off on a vacation in another dimension or something – they all die, but didn’t, and then I got confused!

At any rate, the important part for our purposes (as detailed in Matt Fraction and Mike Allred’s FF volume 2) is the fact that The Future Foundation is temporarily handed over to Ant Man, who runs the school and protects the world with the assistance of She-Hulk, Medusa, and Darla Deering (in the old mechanical Thing armor). While struggling to figure out how to defeat Dr. Doom, save the world, etc., Tong discovers that she is, in fact, a girl. After donning a dress, she makes this announcement to her ‘brother’s’ (explanation for scare quotes below), and throughout the rest of the series she is identified as female.

Now, I don’t want to focus on how the coming out story is told in this case (although it must be admitted that Tong’s announcement is handled in much less of a “Look, it’s a big event in comics! Hope you’re paying attention!” manner than was the introduction of a transgender character into the DC universe at roughly the same time – so kudos to Fraction and Allred for handing the story in an understated and elegant manner). What I want to think about here is the narrative potential of comics for telling this sort of story.

So here is the question: Is Tong transgender? Now, taking “transgender” on a literal reading, this would require that Tong has shifted from one distinct gender identification to another. But it is not clear that Tong really identified as male (or as having any gender or sex!) prior to her autonomous choice to self-identify as female. Of course, she and her three brothers (I’ll stop using the scare quotes, since I take it that the point of using them earlier is now becoming clear) have been identified by themselves and others as male. But it seems rather plausible that this is a sort of ‘default’ assignment due to their physical appearance. It is striking that the four young moloids rarely use singular, gendered pronouns in the comic (they usually work together, and refer to themselves communally as “we”). In the critical coming out scene it is only Tong that uses such a pronoun and, in fact, only Tong who uses the first-person pronoun “I” at all, suggesting that it is only she that in some sense has a true identity. In addition, the moloids are an engineered race, created by the High Evolutionary, and it is not clear that moloids have primary sexual characteristics of any sort (how would we understand gender identification in a culture and race that lacked biological sexes?) Heck, one of the brothers is just a disembodied head in a floating glass jar!

I also don’t want to get into nit-picky discussions about whether or not the moloids other than Tong really do have a sex or a gender. The point I am interested in is that there doesn’t seem to be any reason (in this story at least) to assume they do at the outset. As a result, we are free to understand Tong’s choice as, in part, a decision to have a gender, rather than a decision to choose one gender over another. This, in turn, points to one of the powers of fiction – it allows us to imagine possible scenarios (such as a being without either sex or gender to actively choose to have one) that might be difficult or impossible to experience or realize in real life. In this particular case, we are confronted with a story in which gender issues play out in a way that seems distinct from how they play out in the real world (since presumably most if not all humans identify with one or another gender throughout their formative years, even if this identification is difficult and perhaps eventually abandoned for another). Considering such counterfactual scenarios could be important for our understanding of the concept of gender itself. Of course, Fraction and Allred are not the first to create stories that explore gender and sexual dynamics that are quite different from those that are usual, or even possible, within our own culture or species (Ursula Le Guin’s work comes to mind). But it is possible that comics are especially suited for this sort of exploration, because comics are (at least partially) a pictorial medium. Many of our preconceptions regarding both gender and sex are related to physical differences – that is, differences we can see. As a result, it might be the case that a pictorial medium is the ideal place to examine, explore, and subvert our preconceptions and prejudices with regard to gender and sex. It’s an interesting, and exciting, possibility.

So, is Tong transgender?

Is She-Hulk a Superhero Comic?

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

So I’ve been reading Charles Soule and Javier Pulido’s new She-Hulk title, and really enjoying it. But it got me thinking about comics and genre a bit, and puzzling over the question that makes up the title of this post: Is this comic a superhero/superheroine comic? I think it isn’t (and, further, that is a good thing!)

Some background: The new She-Hulk series focuses on Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk’s legal career. Of course, some superheroing does occur (it has to – the She-Hulk is an Avenger, after all!). But even when it does, it is in service to aspects of the plot directly tied to the She-Hulk lawyering activities (for example, she is attacked by automated robots when attempting to contact Tony Stark regarding a case) or social activities (at the end of a night out, Patsy Walker/Hellcat convinces the She-Hulk to cheer her up by helping her raid a Hydra facility). In short, the comic is about a superheroine. But it doesn’t seem to be about the fact that she is a superheroine.

Now, the term superhero comic is a genre term – it refers to a type of comic that contrasts with war comics, romance comics, crime comics, funny animal comics, etc. Although I don’t want to tie discussion to any single theoretical account of genre, it seems clear that particular works of art get grouped together into a single genre based on having certain, aesthetically and narratively relevant, characteristics in common – these might include setting, theme, plot, style, etc. Further, once a genre exists, other works (both within and outside the genre) can be fairly interpreted not only in terms of their inherent characteristics, but also in terms of how those characteristics relate to the characteristics standardly associated with the genre in question. As a result, not every comic with a superhero or superheroine in it is necessarily a superhero comic in the relevant sense (just as not every story with a cowboy in it is a western). And given this understanding, the new She-Hulk series just doesn’t seem to be a superhero comic: it lacks too many of the standard characteristics associated with the genre (even the John Byrne and Dan Slott runs with the character, for all their metafictional weirdness and their development of the working lawyer side of the character, still revolved primarily around the standard sort of hero-versus-villain superhero plot). Of course, given the presence of a superheroine as protagonist, proper interpretation of the comic will likely benefit from comparison, and contrast, with more run-of-the-mill superhero comics, but that doesn’t mean that it is one.

All of this points to a rather illuminating observation regarding the comics industry. Until the rise of a number of upstarts in recent years, DC and Marvel jointly had a near-monopoly on recognizable superheroes (and between the two of them still own the majority of this particular narrative resource). As a result, however, they seem to have concluded that, since they had a lot of superheroes in their stable, they should only make superhero comics. It is not only that they don’t publish very many comics that don’t feature superheroes. In addition, for the most part they have failed to publish any comics that feature superheroes/ heroines in anything but the generically-bound sort of stories we are used to seeing superheroes/ heroines appear in. This might not seem all that weird or short-sighted at first glance, but imagine a similar (imaginary) scenario in film: MGM signs Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, James Garner, and John Wayne to exclusive, long-term deals, and then decides that it had better make westerns, and only westerns, from then on.

As a result, the new She-Hulk series is notable for two reasons. The first is that it is, if the first two issues are any indication, one of the coolest comics being published today (of course, people that know me know it is likely that I would say that about anything with Shulkie in it, so take with a liberal dose of salt if necessary). More importantly in the long run, perhaps, is that the new She-Hulk might signal Marvel’s willingness to explore different sorts of stories, and different sorts of genres, with their characters. If we are lucky, then maybe we will get all sorts of new stories, utilizing new perspectives, that explore all sorts of aspects of our favorite superheroes, superheroines, supervillains, and supervillainesses, and not just their ability to beat each other up or get all angsty about how hard it is to beat each other up. While battling-super-people stories are great (it is what got me into these comics in the first place), stretching a bit in this manner would be welcome too.

But maybe I am wrong, and the difference between this comic and previous mainstream superhero stories isn’t as vast as I think. So, is the She-Hulk a superhero comic?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Roy T. Cook