The Problem with Hollywood Super-Dudes

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

The summer superhero blockbuster season has officially commenced:

Avengers 2 opened in May, Ant-Man follows in July, and Fantastic Four in August. That’s only half of 2014’s six films, but 2016 will make up the difference with a record eight.

There was time when I thought the genre had an artistic future. But after Heath Ledger’s Oscar for playing the Joker, Warner Bros. and Marvel have only been interested in reproducing the same formula-driven commercial product again and again. So to analyze the nature of Hollywood superheroes, I’m calling in two experts from opposite ends of the literary spectrum: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of the most acclaimed novelists of Russian literature, and Blake Snyder, a third-rate screenwriter that Sylvester Stallone once likened to a flatworm.

I read Crime and Punishment in A.P. English as a high school senior—and I even finished it (a dubious honor my adolescent self did not award Moby Dick). I started The Brothers Karamavoz in college while working graveyard shifts as a warehouse security guard, but after totaling my Toyota on a sleepy drive home, I quit both.

Snyder started his career writing episodes for the Disney Channel’s Kids Incorporated before going on to pen Blank Check and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a comedy Roger Ebert called “moronic beyond comprehension” and which its star, Sylvester Stallone, declared “one of the worst films in the entire solar system,” insisting “a flatworm could write a better script.” And yet when a good friend of mine—a former script reader for a California production company—wanted to collaborate on a screenplay, he handed me Snyder’s Save the Cat!

The how-to screenwriting guide explains why the Sandra Bullock comedy vehicle Miss Congeniality is a better movie than Memento. It comes down to formula: Miss Congeniality hits all 15 beats on The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, while Christopher Nolan’s directorial debut “is just a gimmick that cannot be applied to any other movie.” If Snyder were a poetry professor, he would lecture about the superiority of sonnets to free verse, while defining the greatest works of literature by the uniformity of their iambic beats.

Rodion Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s pawnbroker-murdering philosophy student, would classify Snyder as “ordinary.” Raskolnikov explains: “men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. . . . The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them.”

In other words, Hollywood spec writers play by the rules. And Snyder understands those rules well. He divides the universe into ten idiosyncratic genres. His “Dude with a Problem,” for example, includes Die Hard and Schindler’s List, while “Superhero” goes beyond Batman Begins to claim Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind—and probably anything else starring Russell Crowe. Snyder’s ur-Superhero is Gulliver surrounded by Lilliputians: “a Superhero tale asks us to lend human qualities, and our sympathy, to a super being, and identity with what it must be like to have to deal with the likes of us little people.” So Batman, Frankenstein, and Dracula are all Superheroes “challenged by the mediocre world around them,” because it’s really “the tiny minds that surround the hero that are the real problem.”

Raskolnikov would agree. His second category, “extraordinary” men, “all transgress the law,” because “making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people.” So “all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it.” The rut-dwelling Lilliputians, meanwhile, will try to “punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfill quite justly their conservative vocation.”

Snyder fulfills his Lilliputian vocation for Christopher Nolan when he shouts “screw Memento!” and dismisses all the “hulabaloo” because of its low box office revenue. That was in 2005, the year Batman Begins premiered, and three years before Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight. Raskolnikov warns that “the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them,” and sure enough, Synder lauds Nolan’s caped crusader for following “the beats down to the minute.”

Or does that means Nolan is a Superhero who overcame his Gulliverness by conforming to the Lilliputian Beat Sheet? Either way, he, like Bruce Wayne “is admirable because he eschews his personal comfort in the effort to give back to the community.” That, says Snyder, solves the problem of “how to have sympathy for the likes of millionaire Bruce Wayne or genius Russell Crowe.” They save the cat.

And Raskolnikov agrees again. His “extraordinary man” has “an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep” if overstepping “is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea,” and idea which might be “of benefit to the whole of humanity.” That’s how he rationalizes killing and robbing that nasty old pawnbroker. He argues (faux hypothetically) to a cop: “Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”

It doesn’t matter how the cop answers, because a real Gulliver wouldn’t have asked a Lilliputian for his opinion. That’s Raskolnikov’s downfall. He’s reading from the wrong page in Save the Cat! He wants to be a Superhero (“An extraordinary person finds himself in an ordinary world”), but he’s really just a Dude with a Problem (“An ordinary guy finds himself in extraordinary circumstances”). Worse, his circumstances are self-inflicted. He fell for Snyder’s Superhero formula because it “gives flight to our greatest fantasies about our potential.”

Raskolnikov fails to be “a man of the future,” but Nietzsche (who ranked reading Dostoyevksky “among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life”) took that “extraordinary” character type and renamed him the ubermensch. After Jerry Siegel adopted it, DC completed the circle by calling Superman “The Man of Tomorrow.”

But Dostoyevsky is no origin point. After explaining his theories, even Raskolnikov admits: “there is nothing particularly new in all that. The same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before.”Or as one of Snyder’s studio execs told him: “Give me the same thing . . . only different!”

That, sadly, is the state of the Hollywood superhero.

Darna: ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Philip Smith

Darna by Ghettobrigante

Darna is often described as ‘The Filipino Wonder Woman’ and there are many persuasive reasons why such a comparison might be made. In the 1951 comic Darna is described as having ‘kisig ni Apolo at lakas ni Samson’ (which I translate as ‘the elegance of Apollo and the strength of Samson’ – Tagalog speakers, please correct me – I am still learning), which almost directly quotes Wonder Woman who was described in 1944 is ‘as beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules and swifter than Mercury’ (issue 38, 1944 quoted in Berlatsky’s book on Wonder Woman, page 139). Darna was later seen as a Wonder Woman clone when, in 1991, a film version showed her blocking bullets with bracelets. This became a key aspect of the character and was repeated in the 2009 television show.

Darna paratexts have encouraged the comparison; in 2013 Marianne Riviera, the current most recent Darna, posed in Wonder Woman cosplay for a magazine shoot. The comparison between the two is almost inevitable, and is dramatised in fan art such as that by Glee Chan.

Darna/Wonder Woman fan art by Glee Chan and Marian Rivera as Wonder Woman

Darna clearly borrows tropes from other American characters. Her powers are similar to those possessed by Superman. She transforms from her non-hero incarnation Narda into Darna by saying ‘Darna’, in a manner very similar to Captain Marvel saying ‘Shazam!’ That she is derivative is hardly surprising – many superheroes in the 1940s were variations on a well-established formula and the industry at the time did not particularly reward originality.

Conversely, there are those who maintain that Mars Ravelo, Darna’s creator, was pitching the idea of a female superhero in 1939, two years before Wonder Woman’s first comic book appearance. In such a timeline Darna is not a Wonder Woman clone, but a character who emerged independently around the same time.

I am not particularly interested in answering the question of which character came first. What does interest me is the question of why it matters. I believe that this is important because it is rooted in the artistic relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. Filipino comics. Both Filipino superhero comics and Pinoy Manga have often had to fight accusations of being derivative with the implication that Filipino comic book creators simply recycle the cultural work done elsewhere. If Darna is nothing more than the Filipino Wonder Woman, then, it follows, she has little value alone and can be subsumed into Wonder Woman studies. The argument that she exists independent to Wonder Woman, then, can be read as an assertion of Filipino national identity through comics.

One of the reasons why I find this interesting is that different incarnations of Darna seem to cycle between being an icon of Filipino identity and an outward-looking international figure. We have had English-speaking Darnas whose identity and attitudes are largely indistinguishable from an American equivalent, and we have had Tagalog-speaking Catholic Darnas whose enemies draw heavily from Filipino folk-law – see, for example, Roberto Feleo’s ‘Darna’s Fortress of Solitude’ (1987). It is noteworthy in this regard that in the original comics Darna looks distinctly Western, and the first actress to play Darna, Rosa Del Rosario, was biracial, as was Nanette Medved, who played her in 1991 and Anjanette Abayari who played Darna in two films in 1994.

So, is Darna more than a Wonder Woman clone? And, more importantly, does it matter?

Whose Gender is Artificial?

Posted on May 17, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Radical feminist writer and blogger Meghan Murphy has written several posts over the last couple of weeks about how awful I am. I don’t really have much interest in responding in kind, but I did want to talk briefly about one argument she makes in her most recent piece, in which she accuses me of believing that gender is real, rather than a construct.

Berlatsky says feminist critique often involves a critique of “femininity,” which is true… Though he doesn’t quite get why. He writes:

Is femininity a tool to devalue women? Or is the devaluation of femininity a tool to devalue women? Wearing high heels doesn’t necessarily make you a dupe of the patriarchy. It could mean you’re a super-powerful rock star, and you want to show that femininity can be strong, too.

He seems to see femininity as innate, here. As though, to critique social constructs is to critique something essential about females. But “femininity” is an idea — a set of characteristics (invented and reinforced by a patriarchal society). It says “woman” means “delicate,” “passive,” “pleasant,” “accommodating,” “pretty,” “nurturing,” “irrational,” and “weak.” Feminists say women are not “naturally” any of these things. So no, femininity isn’t about “strength,” despite the fact that women are “strong.” And this is because femininity and femaleness are not connected in any material way.

What’s interesting to me here is that Murphy claims to be undermining femininity even as she reifies it.

My point, in the bit she quotes, is that there’s nothing innately weak, or innately debased, about wearing high heels. Wearing high heels is coded feminine, and is therefore seen as weak, or wrong, or silly, or stupid. But both the decision to code high heels as feminine, and the insistence that femininity is weak…those are cultural choices, not some sort of absolute truth. And pushing back against either of those assumptions — by arguing that high heels don’t have to be feminine, or arguing that high heels, as “feminine” espression, don’t have to be weak — is effectively challenging the innateness of femininity.

Murphy starts out by saying she thinks femininity is a construct too. But the construct is for her awfully real looking and solid. First, she insists that femininity has to mean nurturing, irrational, weak; it can’t mean anything else. And second, she seems oblivious to the possibility that particular gendered expressions are only feminine by convenience. She doesn’t mention any gendered expressions at all in her paragraph, presumably because everyone knows what the signs of femininity are. Murphy’s “constructed” femininity thus has both a stable meaning and a stable expression. It’s solid enough, in short, to serve as a way to police women, who are dupes and tools of the patriarchy if they express themselves in certain ways deemed artificial and constructed.

Murphy thinks she’s getting out of patriarchal thinking by de-naturalizing gender. Patriarchy insists, in her view, that gendered differences are true; by insisting that gendered differences are not innate, she paves the way for women’s liberation. But in fact, she simply replaces the binary male/female with the binary natural/artificial—and that binary is used to police and chastise the same people as ever. Note that it’s femininity here which is seen as artificial: a patriarchal trope if ever there was one. Feminine gender expression is seen as false, frivolous, weak, debased; male gender expression (in Murphy’s piece, and in general) is seen as unmarked, unremarked, and natural. The artificiality of femininity is supposed to free women from patriarchal expectations, but really it just repeats the same old patriarchal prejudices. Feminine gender expression isn’t real. That’s what patriarchy says, and Murphy cosigns it.

In contrast, maybe a better way to approach gender expression is to admit that we don’t really know what’s artificial and what’s natural, or even what those words mean in the context of human behavior. The most human thing about humans is they use all those artificial tools, like language; humans are most natural when they’re most artificial, and maybe vice versa. As long as there is a “wrong” “artificial” “weak” gender expression, it seems likely that it will be attributed to women, and used to denigrate them. So, why not just stop policing people’s gender expression altogether? As long as an individual’s gender expression isn’t hurting or impinging on others fairly directly (like, when masculinity is used as a lever to get people to shoot each other), people should be given leeway to express their gender as they wish without being told that they’re dupes or artificial or monsters or failing feminism. Because it doesn’t make much difference if you’re censuring people in the name of biological truth or the one true feminism—especially when it’s so often the very same people who end up being censured for performing their gender wrong.

Julia Serano said most of this better than me in her book, which you should buy.

Slow, Cheerful Doom

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Madeloud, way back when.
_______

Bunkur
Nullify
Three Stars

One single seventy-eight minute ultra-slow doom metal track from Holland. It starts off with some clanging which resolves itself into the sound of a train starting up. You’re not on the engine though, nor even on the caboose. Instead you’re sitting on the track in the middle of a barren plane, listlessly whacking at one of the rails with a two by four. Occasionally, a massive, drooling derelict leans towards you from the platform above and spits out phlegm-pocked gibbets of indecipherable apocalyptic imagery. The PA system crackles with more and more insistent feedback, inspiring you to hit that rail harder and harder, and the derelict to try more insistently to cough up a lung.

This all goes on for some time.

Still going.

Stilllllll gooooinnnnggggg.

Stillllllllll gooooiinnnnnnngggggg.

The loudness of the feedback changes some; the shrieking varies a bit; and every so often there’s a sound like a rusty gate being dragged across a chalkboard. But basically, nothing happens until past the 45 minute mark. At that point, the percussion shifts from single thwacks to a series of leaden drum rolls, the feedback resolves itself into a recognizable tolling, and suddenly we’ve got something that almost seems like a groove.

That lasts for about ten minutes before the momentum frays and cracks into more insistent feedback drifting above lumbering percussion and the same hideous screaming. And then it goes on like that for a surprisingly long time again, till eventually the screaming and the bashing drop out, and you’re left with just the feedback chords, which phase in and out, finally suggesting a train again laboring off into the distance.

Nullify is one of the more extreme examples of doom, and as such it encapsulates the genre’s paradox. In some ways, doom, is absolutely the quintessence of metal — metal stripped down to its bleak, black, featureless soul. It almost isn’t even music anymore; just a giant, repetitive pummeling; a noise stripped of all meaning except pure, blind force. It’s the overwhelming soundtrack that lets you, the tiny hobbit, know that the great Sauron is upon you, moments before he crushes you beneath his heel.

And that’s why, at the same time, it ceases to be metal at all. Doom really does function almost as a soundtrack; background shoegazy ambience for a pleasantly Tolkienesque apocalypse. Being pummeled very, very slowly is, as it turns out, kind of restful. Almost despite itself, the nihilistic Nullify, promotes a spirit of peace and goodwill, as extreme metal fans and non-metal fans join together for 78 minutes, of slow nodding to the same non-beat.
nullify

The Possible Black Superhero

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Donovan Grant

Editor’s Note: Donovan had a number of comments on James Lamb’s recent piece about the impossibility of superhero diversity. I thought I’d highlight the first one here. I’d encourage folks to go read the whole thread…and of course, James’ original piece, if you haven’t yet.
______

I have to say that while I agree with Osvaldo in that the summations of the superhero genre’s origins and continued practices of white supremacy and racism (and sexism) are totally sound…the conclusion of the black superhero as a contrariety feels too defeatist, too fatalistic to justifiably apply in accordance to real world history and in the face of actual social change. Because at no point are the instances of progressive comic work, however inefficacious or vain in their attempts, ever brought up beyond the naming of a number of black heroes. Did Captain America: TRUTH or Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 or Icon or Ms. Marvel just not happen? The industry has a long, long way to go in order to achieve true diversity and by doing so it will most probably have to upend the very foundation of defining what a superhero is and what their stories should be about. But I can’t see that as an impossibility in today’s fandom. There are too many outspoken fans and too many ambitious creators, however small their steps are being taken in, who are working and commenting on the works to be more progressive and are conversing about race to write off the whole of the medium as immovably white supremacist.

To me, it speaks to a larger myopia of our nation’s history in general. Yes, we still have a nation built on slavery that currently sanctions government to target black Americans, but that’s being directly confronted with right now as we speak. We’ve been through segregation and we’ve been through Jim Crow and we’re still going through those injustices in some institutions, but is the suggestion at the heart of this essay speaking towards a larger resignation of combating a socially destructive industry rather than working to make it better?

I almost hate to do this, because it’s the ultimate cheese-card, but I’ve gotta quote Dr. King in this instance as I feel he sums up the situation perfectly:

“The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place. Failing to understand this as a normal process of development, some Negroes are falling into unjustified pessimism and despair. Focusing on the ultimate goal, and discovering it still distant, they declare no progress at all has been made.

A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory. It underestimates the value of confrontation and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered.”

Saga and Trauma

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Philip Smith

For those who have not yet encountered it, Saga is a science fiction fantasy series set against the backdrop of a long-running interplanetary war. The main characters, Alana and Marko, are deserters from opposing sides of the conflict who, with their daughter Hazel, find themselves pursued by bounty hunters and other interested parties. Saga is a comic about war, not only the actuality of war but the politics, and, perhaps most profoundly, the psychological and social reverberations of conflict. All of the main characters have, at some point before the story begins, witnessed and participated in acts of violence on the field of battle, and their lives have been shaped by the trauma they have lived through. This provides writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples with fertile ground to approach the question of life after war. What makes their approach unusual among comic creators is their attempt to make contact with readers who are either current or former members of the military. This means that in the letter pages of Saga the rubber meets the road as it were; Vaughan and Staples attempts to depict the effects of war can be measured against the experiences of their readership.

One way in which Vaughan and Staples approach the veteran is through the portrayal of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Trauma, to use Roger Luckhurst’s words, ‘issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge.’ The traumatic moment is too overwhelming to be integrated with the individual’s understanding of the world. It is thus pushed beyond the bounds of accessible knowledge and becomes, instead, a kind of ghost event which repeatedly erupts into consciousness. The U.S. Department for Veteran Affairs assert that between 11 and 20% of US soldiers to return from Iraq and Afghanistan describe symptoms consistent with PTSD. This results not only from witnessing warfare but, for 23% of women veterans, from sexual assault.

Attempts to depict trauma in literature often employ repetition, symbolism, substitution, and temporal disjunction. Comics are a particularly effective medium for describing trauma, as has been demonstrated in works such as Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Brian Bendis and Dave Finch’s Avengers: Disassembled. These comics leverage the simultaneity of the comics page, the overlapping of panels, and the capacity for the visual dimension of comics to repeat and distort images to communicate the experience of living with trauma.

One visual exploration of trauma in Saga appears in #27 where Marko, in the grips of an ‘F-spiral’ brought on by taking a bad batch of the drug Fadeaway, recalls accidentally killing a civilian. On the following page we are taken from Marko’s face as he realises what he has done backwards in time through a series of panels, first capturing first moments of violence, then his time with his former lover Gwendolyn, to more violence, being given a sword as an adolescent, learning to create fire, reading violent comics, to, in the lower right of the page a bleed of Marko the child with his face frozen in a grimace. The background for this final image is rough brush-strokes of orange which invade the panels of the images above, creating a blood-splash that runs across these multiple time periods. There is no speech assigned to the child Marko, but the last words from the splash page before, when the son of the civilian Marko killed calls ‘PAPA!’ certainly resonate. This montage of images suggests but denies temporal order, with time periods and identities symbolically informing one another.

Marko is not the only character whose life has been shaped by trauma. Prince Robot IV’s head is a television screen which involuntarily flashes images as they enter his consciousness. Vaughan has described the TV screen as ‘a way to visualise post-traumatic stress disorder’ (The Comics Alternative Jan 19 2015). This is introduced in #1, in which the image of a severed horn flashes onto his screen to indicate both a pun on sexual dysfunction, and a literal image from the bloody conflict in which Prince Robot IV was involved. He has physically returned from war, it seems, but the violence through which he has lived has made a psychological return impossible. Later, in #2, as he questions a soldier about Alana and Marko, the image of a man engulfed in flames suddenly flashes on his screen. These images serve as a panel within the diegesis, allowing the past to visually invade the present as traumatic memories burst into consciousness. This trauma is explored more explicitly in #12, which opens with Prince Robot IV in a war zone. He witnesses a medic dying from exposure to gas. The scene ends with him covered in blood. Subsequent panels show that this scene has been playing out on his screen as he sleeps. One is reminded of Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story in which the story of witnessing a man being killed by a landmine opens with the sentence ‘This one wakes me up’.

Vaughan also explores the social impact of war and strategies used to mitigate trauma. In #26 we learn that a would-be convenience store robber was a veteran and was carrying drugs. Marko asks why, to which he is told ‘Why would a veteran of the Wreath army be carrying Fadeaway?’ ‘Because he’s a veteran? Honestly, you’re probably one of the only vets who’s not using.’ The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence report drug dependency among soldiers is more than double that of civilians, and that this number is rising. This is Alana’s route of escape; during the comic she becomes a habitual drug user and the theory that she does so in order to manage trauma is made explicit in #26.

The depiction of trauma within the comic has been accompanied by an attempt to engage readers who have seen conflict. As early as #4 Vaughan asked in the letters column for any readers who were members of the military to get in touch. It was not necessarily straight-forward to assume that those who have been involved in a conflict would want to read about war and its aftermath, but Vaughan’s question yielded results. In response, #6 featured a partially redacted postcard from SSG David C in Guantanamo Bay which read ‘XXXX SAGA XXXX is XXXX the XXXX best.’

#7 saw a letter from SPC Allen P. who, at the time of writing, was an intelligence analyst on active duty in Afghanistan. He wrote ‘my job is to track down insurgents to capture/kill’. He reported that he bought his comics online. The fate of Allen P became a narrative within the letter pages; in #9 Vaughan reported that the comics sent to Allen P had been returned to them and urged the writer to get in touch. Allen P wrote again when he got back to San Antonio in #11 to assure Vaughan that he is well.

#7 also featured a letter from Ogden MF Curtis, a medium machine gunner who was also in Afghanistan. He received his comics by mail – a friend bought two copies of each issue and mailed him one. #9 included a letter from Airman First Class Taylor, who was deployed in Qatar and reported that he also acquired issues digitally. In #26 a survey of Saga readers showed that many listed Iraq and Afghanistan as countries they had visited, suggesting a high number of veteran and active duty readers.

Many of these readers hint at or explicitly confirm that they struggle with trauma. In #17 Dick L. from Prescott, Arizona wrote ‘I did pretty okay in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yeah, some guys got blown up, but I made it home in one piece … physically, at least.’ EMC Timothy Van Kleek, VSN aboard USS Elrod, whose letter appeared in #20 was more explicit:

‘I have been serving now for 15 years, and the country has been at war for most of it. I’m not on the front lines every day, but there isn’t an aspect of my life, of society as a whole, that the conflict hasn’t touched. I can feel it hanging over me constantly, like the Sword of Damocles. I may not always agree with it, and I certainly realize that what I do is a direct cause of the deaths of my fellow human beings (a fact that has caused me serious psychological trauma on more than one occasion), but I continue to do it.’

What is perhaps surprising, however, is that the aspect of Saga which seems to appeal most to readers with military backgrounds is not the depiction of trauma but the exploration of parenthood. EMC Timothy Van Kleek goes on ”Why? Many reasons. Seability. Pay. Skills training. But mostly because I have a family […] The trick, and perhaps this is why Alana is so bitter, is to not let it affect you negatively. I never tell my little girl that “I’m doing this thing I sometimes hate just to take care of you.” And I never bring my frustration or anger from work home with me.’

#7 featured a letter from Major Sam DeWind, a veteran of Iraq and an officer of 16 years service, who was, at his time of writing, based in South Korea ‘within the effective range of a couple thousand pieces of North Korean artillery’. Major DeWind’s sentiment rhymed with that of EMC Van Kleek ‘I’m really connecting with your protagonists and their struggles as parents in a perilous world […] during the periods of heightened provocations and tensions here, most notably the shelling of Yeonpeong Island in 2010, you learn something about who you are as a parent’. By contextualising war within their role as a care-giver, these veterans and active duty officers engage in what Robert Kraft calls ‘seeking the resonant influence of social support, redefining the event [and] finding meaning’. Family becomes a touch-stone, in other words, which allows them to partially mitigate the impact of trauma.

What these letters suggest is that the (albeit small) sample of veterans who read Saga not only empathise with the depiction of trauma in the comic, but that they also strongly identify with the coping methods which Vaughan and Staples portray. It is perhaps noteworthy that, while Saga engages explicitly with war and its aftermath, it does so in a fantasy setting, thereby applying a filter to war which mimics the substitution and symbolic engagement which characterizes the trauma narrative. The act of writing a letter may also employ a well-established means of addressing trauma through narrative. Saga is thus immanently relevant to a place and time when conflict damages the emotional lives of many, when men and women kill and die, and come home broken from conflicts overseas, when living with trauma is a reality for many, and the question of the place for veterans in society affects us all.

Please Don’t Hunt Me Down and Harass Me

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Things about your writing you never want to hear:

“It’s just disturbing.”

“No, no, this can’t be.”

“That’s a little terrifying to me.”

And my all-time least favorite:

“How are people not going to hunt him down and harass him when this book comes out?”

The book is On the Origin of Superheroes, due out next fall from the University of Iowa Press. You can probably guess it’s about the pre-history of the superhero genre, or, as the subtitle says: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1. So that’s literally everything up until Superman, including—and this is the disturbingly no no hunt-me-down terrifying part—the Ku Klux Klan.

But first a major thanks to Major Spoilers. The comic book podcast recently interviewed superhero scholar Dr. Peter Coogan, and the conversation centered on my article “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero.” It was published in England’s Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics in 2013, and its argument is part of the book: superheroes are descended from the KKK. Actually superheroes are descended from all kinds of things, and the Klan is just one of them, an idea Major Spoilers still found “hard to swallow.”

So did Peter Coogan when he first reviewed the essay, but he came around quickly, recommending that JGNC publish it: “This is one of those articles that once you’ve read it, it seems impossible to unthink it. I’m going to incorporate this idea into my teaching and my own work. I can’t believe I didn’t see this connection.”

Pete (we’ve since become friends) also warned me by email about his Major Spoilers conversation before it aired: “I wanted to give you a heads up because the hosts had a reaction that some of my students had, which is to feel uncomfortable about Superman having any genealogical relationship to the Klan. People just don’t like that idea.”

No, they really don’t. And I don’t either. The first time I introduced the notion in class, my students and I searched for every possible way to define superheroes in a way that excluded vigilantism. It’s hard to do. Secret identities, codenames, costumes, chest emblems, the KKK has them all. Pete tried too, arguing that superheroes only “supplement the police” and so “support legitimate authority” by “turning criminals over” after stopping them with “minimal level of violence necessary.”

And that does describe plenty of superheroes and proto-superheroes. The 70s Avengers even became a department of the U.S. government, each employee earning a tax-financed salary of $1,000 a day. As far as violence, the Lone Ranger’s creators Fran Striker and George W. Trendle were one of the first to lay down the law for their radio writers: “When he has to use guns, The Lone Ranger never shoots to kill, but rather only to disarm his opponent as painlessly as possible.”

But there’s a lot of violent gray zone. Martin Parker’s 1656 “Robbin Hood” didn’t kill, but he did merrily separate clergymen from their money and their testicles:

No monkes nor fryers he would let goe,

Without paying their fees;

If they thought much to be usd so,

Their stones he made them leese.

Worse, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko considers superheroes “moral avengers” who must kill criminals in order to champion “a clear understanding of right and wrong,” even if that means violating the “pervading legal moral” code. Pete would place Ditko’s homicidal Mr. A with the 70s Punisher, who, like lots of pulp heroes of the 30s, constitutes his own one-man legal system, marshal-judge-executioner.

The problem is that ill-defined term “vigilante.” Instead of a toggle switch—either you’re a lawful hero or you’re a lawless villain—I see a spectrum. Spider-Man, like most superheroes, swings somewhere in-between, chasing crooks while cops chase him. But whether gunning down the bad guys or leaving them wrapped with a bow in front of police headquarters, superheroes are independent operators. Which means when they disagree with the law and the government, they make their own judgments. Even star-spangled super soldier Captain America turned noble criminal rather than obey a law that violated his own sense of morality. And while Iron Man backed the Superhuman Registration Act, it wasn’t from blind allegiance to his government. He backed it because he personally thought it was right.

The KKK were the product of a very different Civil War, but their fictional characters in Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansmen and D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation play by the same rules. Pete read aloud their mission statement on Major Spoilers:

“To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal; to relieve the injured and the oppressed: to succour the suffering and unfortunate . . . “

Sounds like any superhero, doesn’t it? Until you get to the last phrase:

“and especially the widows and the orphans of Confederate Soldiers.”

“Hey,” said the hosts, “he tricked us!”

They eventually concluded that the difference between a hero and a villain is a matter of perspective, because probably even Lex Luthor thinks he’s helping the world. Pete also swooped to the rescue with Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and a superhero’s “ontological vocation of humanization.” In other words, a superhero has a deep calling to become more fully human and to help others to do the same. Clearly the KKK’s attacks and lynchings fail that criterion.

Pete’s point sounds exactly right, and the hosts “sighed a little bit of relief,” but for me this is where the Klan parallel is most disturbing. Even though Major Spoilers acknowledged that I am “not advocating for the Klan” and that I am “not saying superheroes are racist and fascistic,” Dixon and Griffith didn’t consider the KKK racist and fascistic either. Unlike Lex Luthor, who knowingly turns others into his tools and so is not helping them become more fully human, the Klan did not consider African Americans to be human. From Dixon and Griffith’s grotesque perspective, ex-slaves were subhuman obstacles preventing white Southerners from actualizing themselves. So in the most perverse reading of Freire possible, the KKK fixed the problem. In their minds and in the minds of their fans, they were superheroes.

Which is to say, yeah, please don’t hunt me down and harass me when the book comes out.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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