“We Are Who We Choose To Be”: Sadistic Choices, Forking Paths, and the Rejection of Social and Narrative Progress in Superhero Comics and Films

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Eric Berlatsky

The idea for this paper began when I noticed a pattern in a series of superhero films that I was showing to a recent class devoted to the genre. Whether it was the 1978 Richard Donner Superman film, the pilot of the 1970s Wonder Woman television show, the 2002 Sam Raimi Spider-Man, or the 2008 Christopher Nolan Dark Knight, superheroes are repeatedly asked to make a “sadistic choice” (to quote the Green Goblin) between two equally unpalatable options. In the case of Spider-Man, he must choose to either save Mary Jane Watson from being dropped off of a New York City Bridge, or to save a tram-car full of children from the same fate. Superman must save Lois Lane or Hackensack NJ from being obliterated by a cruise missile. Wonder Woman must save either Steve Trevor or Washington DC from death-by-Nazi, and Batman must save either Harvey Dent or Rachel Dawes from the Joker’s explosives. As the Goblin notes, these choices seem designed to define the heroes, and heroism itself. Will they make the “selfish” choice that benefits them directly, or the more “selfless” choice that benefits the greater good.

These choices seem to advance the familiar superheroic dictum, “with great power comes great responsibility,” suggesting that super powers make people necessarily more responsible to others and that “heroes” must abandon their own selfish interests for the good of the many. In fact, however, these scenarios most often emphasize not the burden of great power, but the ways in which great power alleviates the hero from responsibility. In almost all of the examples mentioned above the hero is never actually forced to make a choice. Rather, Spider-Man, Superman, and Wonder Woman are all able to triumph over time itself and save both parties. It is my goal in this paper to indicate the ways in which this exercise in simultaneity provides a useful metaphor for the ways in which superhero comics, particularly those by mainstream publishers, treat matters of diversity. Rather than shouldering the ethical burden of social, political, and temporal “progress,” Marvel and DC more often attempt to have things “both ways,” retaining a troubling embrace of white male hegemony, while simultaneously introducing more diverse characters and storylines, without ever admitting that these two ends may be mutually exclusive. These companies, like their heroes, seem unwilling to “progress” temporally, or ethically, particularly in terms of race, class, and gender equality, despite initial appearances to the contrary.

Part and parcel of this problematic, as mentioned, is the fact that the scenes described deny temporal progress in multiple ways. First, each scenario presents a fundamental spatiotemporal impossibility, the idea of being in two places at the same time. The Superman film acknowledges this most clearly when Lois is initially killed by the missile, prompting Superman to reverse the Earth’s rotation, improbably turning back time and saving her life. More metaphorically, the Spider-Man film also “turns back the clock” and brings the hero’s lover back from the dead by restaging the comic-book death of Gwen Stacy, which occurred some thirty years previous in Amazing Spider-Man #121 (1973). In the comic, as in the film, the Green Goblin hurls Peter Parker’s love interest from a NYC bridge. In the comic, however, Spider-Man is too late to save her. The film Spider-Man, then, succeeds not only in saving Mary Jane and the children, but also in metaphorically traveling through time to save Gwen Stacy. The fantasy of power in play in this alternate continuity, or “forking path,” is a fantasy of overcoming the progression of time and therefore overcoming mortality itself. Concomitantly, it is a fantasy in which ethics are not asserted, but abandoned.

As Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular, and existentialist philosophy in general, remind us, our identity and our ethics are only a compilation of the choices we freely make dynamically in time. If we do not have choices, we have no ethics. Indeed, near the outset of “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre also discusses a “sadistic choice.” He tells of a “boy” he knew, who “was faced with the choice of leaving for England and joining the Free French Forces…or remaining with his mother and helping her to carry on” after the death of her other son (24). Sartre uses the example to explain the ways in which “we are condemned to be free” (27) and to insist that our choices will define us. We do not make our choices on the basis of a ready-made system of ethics, argues Sartre. Rather, ethics are made only through choices. “In creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be” (17). Similarly, the film Green Goblin functions as a surprising Existentialist when he tells Spider-Man, “We are who we choose to be,” emphasizing the ways in which heroism, ethics, and identity are a matter of choice. In my initial examples, however, and quite frequently, superheroic power involves not the power to make choices, but the power to avoid them. Here, Superman and Spider-Man need not choose between their love interest and a broader catastrophe. They instead save everyone involved, denying the basic relationship of cause and effect, and therefore of ethical responsibility.

In the 1962 essay “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco articulates the ways in which mid-century Superman comics operate in an “oneiric climate” that involves a basic denial of temporal progression, and therefore of mortality, and of ethics, citing Existentialist thinkers like Heidegger to make the link. Like Sartre, Eco notes that the “existence of freedom, the possibility of planning….[and] the responsibility it implies” all depend upon temporality (156). However, subsequent critics like Charles Hatfield and Henry Jenkins have argued that the introduction of “continuity” particularly to Marvel in the 1960s served as a rebuttal to Eco, pointing to the ways in which events in continuity did have consequences and therefore could serve as a meditation on ethics, morality, and social progress. Indeed, Gwen Stacy’s death is one of the most obvious examples of “events with consequences,” and therefore, as Ben Saunders illustrates brilliantly in his book Do the Gods Wear Capes? it serves as an event that can teach both Peter Parker and his readers important truths about ethics, about cause and effect, and about the real possibility that we will never be powerful enough to overcome mortality, nor good enough to avoid tragedy.

Certainly, continuity, and even death, remain, even now, as central components of the Marvel and DC universes. Events do occur month after month, and these events do seem to have consequences, resulting in the births, deaths, marriages, and separations of heroes and/or their enemies, companions, lovers, and acquaintances. It is worth noting, however, as Marc Singer does, that rarely, if ever, are these consequences permanent. Superman, after all, has died and come back to life, as have Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Phoenix, Batman, Captain America, and a slew of others, helpfully chronicled by Wikipedia’s extensive chart of dead and resurrected characters. Superman and Spider-Man have both been married and now are not (though neither has been divorced). Spider-Man has graduated high school and been returned to it in at least three different alternative realities. These events happen both “in the continuity” of the basic Marvel or DC universes and in “alternative continuities” in the comics and other media like video games, television shows, and movies, all of which continually elaborate new paths forking outward from the temporal “nodal point,” what David Bordwell calls an “intersection,” from which they begin. The “Imaginary Stories” of the 50s and 60s cited by Eco have been superseded by Marvel’s “What If” tales, DC’s Elseworlds, periodic reboots of standard continuity, the Ultimate Universe, and etc. There is no fan of superhero comics and/or films that is not versed in the idea of multiple realities, and, indeed, Henry Jenkins notes that the age of strict continuity was very brief, if it ever truly existed. He argues that there has been “a shift away from focusing primarily on building up continuity within the fictional universe and towards the development of multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters functioning as it were in parallel universes” (“Just Men”). As a result, like their own characters, the editorial staff of Marvel and DC never have to live with the ethical and material consequences of decisions they make about characters and worlds. Instead, time can be rewound, universes rebooted, and/or alternatives created, allowing mutually contradictory outcomes to coexist, just as they do when Superman both fails to save Lois and rescues her.

In this way, contemporary comics resemble a series of thought experiments of the “What If” variety. “What if” Superman died? (an eventuality played out both in a 1950s “Imaginary Story” and in the 1992 in-continuity comic adventure)? What if he didn’t? What if Aunt May died? What if the woman who died was just an actress playing Aunt May? What if Gwen Stacy came back as a clone? While these perpetual reboots and alternative explorations are both frustrating and delightful to fans, the provisional nature of all superhero adventures denies any kind of permanent consequences.

What then, if anything, does this have to do with questions of diversity? Though Marvel and DC have been introducing racially diverse characters to their superhero universes since the 1960s, in the past few years, such efforts have increased dramatically, and have been widely celebrated in the popular media. Certainly, this increase in attempts at diversity is preferable to the alternative. But the reliance on the structure of multiplicity as opposed to continuity limits the impact and suggests the ways in which comic book companies (and perhaps their primary fan base) are willing to accept diversity only up to a point, as long as it requires no sacrifice of privilege on the part of hegemonic interests.

It is worth recalling, in this regard, that the superhero idea is a variation on the notion of the übermensch, popularized by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The übermensch itself is tied to the idea of racial Eugenics, a discourse that imagines an ideal human being as a blond-haired, blue-eyed hyperintelligent white man to be achieved through selective breeding. Early proponents of Eugenics opposed immigration by “lesser races” and were, not surprisingly, anti-miscegenation. The quest to become “ideal” or “super” was then, in many cases, the quest to become “whiter.” As critics as diverse as Gershon Legman and Chris Gavaler have noted, the Ku Klux Klan is not far removed from the idea of superheroes, masked men embodying and protecting white male privilege by rooting out the alternative through violence. A true transformation, then, of the superhero concept along the lines of racial, gendered, or sexual egalitarianism would need not only to introduce characters and heroes of different backgrounds, but to challenge the notion of white male heterosexist supremacy. It would have to make a choice between white patriarchal heterosexual privilege and actual equality.

Unfortunately, as I have articulated above, contemporary comics are not designed or inclined to pursue this kind of choice. As in other matters, diversity is almost always presented in the form of a “What if” question. What if, for instance, Spider-Man were black? This thought experiment is explored through the character of Miles Morales in the Ultimate universe. Interestingly, in this timeline Peter Parker dies in order to pave the way for Miles’ ascension to superhero status. In a vacuum, of course, this turn of events seems to dynamically symbolize the exact scenario I suggest. If Peter Parker is a symbol of white privilege, then perhaps his death is a symbol of the sacrifice of the privilege that must occur if true equality is to be achieved. However, “Ultimate” Peter Parker is only one “forking path” and, in fact white, straight, male Peter Parker remains as Spider-Man in the primary Marvel Universe. In truth, Marvel is not willing to sacrifice white male power and privilege for the sake of diversity. Instead, diversity here becomes a consumer option that requires no sacrifice of another more common to the superhero idea, that of white supremacy.

Similarly, “Wwhat if Superman were black” has been answered in multiple contexts, none of them challenging the primacy of white male Clark Kent. In 1992, John Henry Irons was introduced as Steel, briefly replacing Superman while he was dead. When white Superman returns, however, Steel becomes a secondary or supporting character, indicating the ways in which DC, like Marvel, is unwilling to entertain the notion of the sacrifice of white power and privilege for the sake of diversity. Another black Superman, Calvin Ellis, is President of the United States in an alternate, secondary continuity. Again, what exists here is not temporal, social, or political “progress” in time, but the willingness to view space-time as a series of forking paths, where any spatiotemporal “intersection” can be revisited and followed without sacrificing any other path, regardless of its troublesome politics. Likewise, John Stewart, James Rhodes, and Sam Wilson are introduced to answer the question, “What if Green Lantern, or Iron Man, or Captain America were black?” In all cases, however, even though these shifts have occurred “in continuity,” the emblems of white power and privilege that are Hal Jordan, Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers return to their original roles (or will), displacing their African-American counterparts into subsidiary ones.

Woman superheroes often undergo similar fates, as the dual questions of “What if Gwen Stacy had lived?” and “What if she were bitten by a radioactive spider?” can both be explored in the alternate universe Spider-Gwen. Likewise, the recent turn to the idea of “Thor as Woman” will seem progressive until Thor the man returns to the role (likely keeping the female Thor as an alternate or subsidiary character). In this, as in the above examples, the typical strategy, is to create separate but “unequal” universes, timelines, or comics magazines, just as separate but unequal schools, bathrooms, hotels, and drinking fountains were created in the aftermath of Plessy vs. Ferguson and in the Jim Crow south. Obviously, the results are far less important in the world of formulaic genre fiction than they were in real historical circumstances, but it is worth noting the ways in which “progress” here is rejected in favor of marketing “alternatives.”

In his reading of “multiple draft” or “forking path” films like Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, and Groundhog Day, David Bordwell notes that in almost all such films, though multiple alternative narratives are presented as emerging from one spatiotemporal “intersection,” (“What If”) the director is careful to “mark” one narrative as the correct, “real,” or “authentic” path. For a conventional single narrative, Bordwell, argues, it is always the final path that “we take…as the correct one” (“What If”). In serialized and multiple narratives wherein there is no “final” version, it would seem, as Karin Kukkonen posits, that there would to need be no “baseline reality” or preferred version. In truth, however, and particularly in regard to diversity, there is, as Marc (qtd. in Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 214) has argued, a preferred “state of grace” for iconic characters, a constellation of historical, physical, and personality attributes that are deemed authentic by creators and fans, even if no currently functioning “version” of the character fulfills them all. In the case of the heroic pillars that mint cash for Marvel/Disney and DC/WB, part of the superheroic “state of grace” seems to be, in most cases, whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. Certainly, there are characters whose “authentic” identity is black, or female, or even gay (or all three), but the economic and symbolic flagship heroes of Marvel and DC are white men who still serve the symbolic function of the übermensch, an ideal founded on notions of white power and privilege that are diametrically opposed to ideals of diversity and equality.

While Steel exists as an independent character, he was also introduced as a decidedly “inauthentic” Superman to be shoved aside upon Clark Kent’s inevitable return. While John Stewart has played the role of Green Lantern for years at a time, both in the comics and on an animated television series, Hal Jordan repeatedly returns as the “one true Green Lantern” (despite his death) both in the comics and in a failed blockbuster Hollywood film. Tony Stark/Robert Downey is the white hero who fights brown terrorists in the Iron Man film franchise, while Rhodes is a faithful friend and sidekick. Blond-haired blue-eyed Steve Rogers roams the movie screens even as he has been momentarily displaced/replaced by Sam Wilson in the current comic book series. In the Marvel Universe, it is always Rogers who is the “authentic” Captain America, the perfect representative of the white male heterosexual privilege that is America, whether we like it or not.

On one hand, it might be seen as laudable that comics companies, like their heroes, wish to “save all parties,” refusing to sacrifice their iconic heroes even as they attempt to introduce alternatives. At the same time, ethical decisions are predicated on sacrifice and difficult choices. Alternative continuities and reversible temporalities allow comics companies to avoid those choices. In fact, in clutching so tightly to nostalgia for the middle part of the twentieth century, when most of their heroes were created, they, like Superman, show a perhaps buried desire to spin the Earth backward upon its axis to a time when Jim Crow ensured the white power and privilege that superheroes exemplify. Likewise, it takes us to a time before second-wave feminism or the gay rights movement. While it is perhaps understandable that Superman does not wish to sacrifice Lois in order to save strangers, at long last white male America should be willing to sacrifice our own power and privilege, rather than constantly revisiting and rebooting it, while retaining more diverse alternatives only provisionally and without any permanence. As the Green Goblin says, “We are who we choose to be,” and as long as we choose to privilege white power, and to refuse temporal, social, and political progress, we should not be congratulating ourselves on a provisional, temporary, and, yes, marginalized, turn to diversity that functions primarily as niche marketing. Perhaps questions like “What if Ms. Marvel were a Muslim” and “What if Batwoman were a lesbian” are the beginning of a more egalitarian comic book world, but it can only be a beginning if we are willing to progress forward in time from there.

Bordwell, David. “What-If Movies: Forking Paths in the Drawing Room.” Observations on Film Art. http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog.

___. “Film Futures.” Observations on Film Art. http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/poetics_06filmfutures.pdf

Duncan, Randy, Matthew J. Smith and Paul Levitz. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Trans. Natalie Chilton. 1962/1972. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on A Popular Medium. Eds. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2004. 146-64.

Gavaler, Chris. “The Ku Klux Clan and the Birth of the Superhero.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 4.2 (2103): 191-208.

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012.

Jenkins, Henry. “Just Men In Capes.” Confessions of An Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/just_men_in_capes.html.

___. “ ‘Just Men In Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics In An Era of Multiplicity.” The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 16-43.

Kukkonen, Karin. “Navigating Infinite Earths.” The Superhero Reader. Eds. Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. 155-69.

Lee, Stan and Gerry Conway, writers, Gil Kane, penciler, John Romita, Sr., penciler and inker, Jim Mooney and Tony Mortellaro, inkers. Amazing Spider-Man: Death of the Stacys. New York: Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2012. Originally published as Amazing Spider-Man #88-92 and #121-22, 1970-73.

Legman, Gershon. Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. 2nd edition. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1949/1963.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions (often published as Existentialism is a Humanism.) 1957. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990.

Saunders, Ben. Do The Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. London: Continuum, 2011.

Singer, Marc. “The Myth of Eco: Cultural Populism and Comics Studies.” Studies in Comics 4.2 (2013): 355-366.

Spider-Man. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Willem Dafoe. Sony, 2002.

Stealing Your Relics for Your Own Good

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Well, I was supposed to have another post today, but it fell through…so. Second episode of Agents of SHIELD, just as racist as the first? Somewhat improbably, yes.

Our team heads off to Peru to find an object of great power, which they appropriate in the name of international law and harmony and because white people are the best ones to hold onto bombs, just ask Hiroshima. The Peruvians understandably don’t see it quite that way, and try to get the object for themselves. In particular, one of Coulson’s old flames, a (surprise!) hypersexualized Latina woman tries to use her wiles on him, but he’s too stoic and smart and white. The team sets aside its internal differences to self-actualize through the slaughter of the brown people whose stuff they’re stealing. Then at the end Samuel Jackson shows up and gives forth with the silly over the top indignation just to show that there’s no hard feelings from POC about the pillage and murder. Happy ending all around.

What’s interesting here is that this isn’t even really a superhero narrative. There aren’t any metahumans about; it’s a basic action-adventure narrative. Yet, the superhero filled world it exists in remains important — and part of the way it’s important is in the racism. Superhero genre default is that the powerful are good; the righteous who win are right. In the context of international security arrangements, this ends up meaning that stark imperial condescension is justified, and the bad guys are the indigenous people who object to having their borders violated and their resources robbed.Similarly, online activist Skye’s efforts to argue for people resisting oppression are pooh-poohed; rebellion against authority is portrayed as violent while the gun-wielding international agents with the flying fortress are just protectors.The connection between superpower narratives and the international superpower couldn’t be much more naked, or much more unquestioned.

Be White Or Explode

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Agents of SHIELD starts out as a black superhero story. Mike Peterson (J. August Richards), a laid-off factory worker, is on the street with his son when a building nearby explodes (as they do.) He hears someone screaming for help inside, and uses super strength to smash handholds in the wall, climb up, and save the damsel in distress. He then leaps to the ground and slinks away, covering his head with his hoodie. He’s soon being referred to as the Hooded Hero.

This seemed like an intriguing development. No one had told me that AoS was based around the adventures of a super-powered, single-dad, working-class black man. Even the hoodie — a reference, intentional or otherwise, to Trayvon Martin’s death the year before the pilot aired — seemed potentially positive. The symbol of supposed black criminality reversed and turned into a heroic icon; that could work, maybe. Maybe?

Or then again not so much. As you know if you’ve seen any of the series at all, the Hooded Hero is not the hero. He’s just some schlubby plot point. He never gets to save anyone else. He volunteered to be a guinea pig for an experimental treatment after he was hurt on the job, and his powers are unstable. Soon he’s experiencing uncontrollable rages, beating up his old factory boss, and engaging in kidnapping, assault, and other nefarious super-villainesque deeds. It turns out even the woman he saved wasn’t an innocent, but the evil scientist herself. At the end he gives a speech about how people like him don’t get a fair shake, etc. etc., and the white guy hero without superpowers listens to him sympathetically and calms him down to where he can be ignominiously shot with some sort of sedative for his own good. Yay.

It all seems wearisomely familiar, doesn’t it? For me I was reminded of one of the first comics I think I ever read; an old Flash story from way back in the 1970s. The comic is about Ms. Flash; Patty Spivot is standing in Barry Allen’s lab when (improbably) another bolt of lightning hits, electrifying the shelves of chemicals and giving her superspeed just like Barry Allen had. She too decides to fight crime with her super-speed…except there’s a catch. Her powers are (wait for it) unstable; whenever she runs anywhere, she causes poison gas to seep into the air, or fires to break out. She doesn’t believe that she’s causing the damage, so Barry has to contain her and eventually figure out a way to depower her. Only guys can be Flash; empowered women are too dangerous. End of moral. (It was all an imaginary story anyway, so I guess you could see it as some sort of critique of Barry’s paranoid misogyny, if you felt like being kind.)

Just as the female Flash is a danger to us all, so, in AoS, is the black supehero. The Hooded Hero talks throughout the episode of his desire to be good, and he’s supposed to be a good man confused by the treatment he’s undergone. But that just emphasizes the disconnect between power and blackness. Good white people who get superpowers go off to save the day; the Hooded Hero proves his goodness by recognizing that he can’t do anything but stand there and let the white super-espionage dudes get a clear shot at him with their magic depowering gun.

You could argue I guess that the Hooded Hero doesn’t need to stand in for all black superheroes ever; he’s just one guy, after all. But the show stacks the deck by, inevitably, presenting him as the only black character around. Other than the wearisomely obligatory Asian martial arts expert, the entire SHIELD team is white. (Update: Skye, the superhacker, is bi-racial, with Chinese ancestry.) The climactic surrender scene, then, takes on racial overtones that the show is clearly not prepared to handle. Peterson rails against the giants, the people putting him down — which diagetically are supposed to be the superheroes. But as a lone black man facing a sea of white agents, it reads as a lament about whiteness. In that context, the denoument, in which the solution is for the black guy to trust patiently that the white cops shooting him are beneficent, seems almost unbelievably callous — especially, again, in light of the perhaps accidental but unavoidable resonance with Trayvon Martin.

None of this is particularly surprising given the crappy record of the superhero genre on race…but still, the gratuitous stupidity of it make you shake your head a little. Joss Whedon, who’s supposed to have a brain, directed — and yet, the best he could come up with is a parable about how black men with power need white agents of the state to shoot them for their own good? If this is how the series handles race, maybe it’s just as well that there aren’t any black continuing characters. Erasure is bad, but condescending disempowerment may just be worse.

Can a Genre Be Racist?

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Nate Atkinson

In a series of articles on race and superhero comics, several HU regulars cast doubt on the possibility of racially progressive superhero comics. This, in turn, prompted Noah and others to suggest that the superhero genre is itself racist. Conceived in an era of scientific racism and honed through nationalist propaganda, the superhero genre seems to contain a worldview that pulls creators toward narratives that are, if not exactly white supremacist, unable to comment thoughtfully on issues that concern African Americans.

Of course, there are rebuttals. Some argue that because two Jewish kids created the Ur-Superhero back when Jews weren’t exactly white, therefore superheroes can’t be totally racist. However, this rebuttal ignores the fact that you needn’t be racist to create racist art. Another rebuttal follows from the idea that the traits that make the superhero different also make them super, which suggests that superhero comics portray difference, and maybe even diversity, as a social good. This seems like a difficult possibility to reject out of hand, but the fact that few superhero comics have thoughtfully addressed issues of diversity creates a difficulty for anyone looking to make the case. To my mind, this suggests that the jury is still out on the question of whether the genre is racist.

But what does it mean to call a genre racist? To answer this question, I’ll start with a brief definition of genre.

Following the work of Carolyn Miller, I’m defining genre as social action, i.e., as a typified response to a recurring situation. Defined as such, we recognize eulogies as eulogies because they respond to a situation that recurs (the funeral). This is not to suggest that the genre is not defined in part by form and content, but that this form and content responds to, and is therefore shaped by the situation and audience to which it is addressed. As the funeral situation evolves and audiences for eulogies change, the genre will evolve with it. So, if you found a eulogy in an old file cabinet you could recognize it as a eulogy based on its formal characteristics. However, those formal characteristics exist as such because they address recurring needs and expectations.

If superhero comics are a genre, to what situation(s) were/are they addressed? Often, we look for the answer in eras. For example, we might argue that Superman reflects the anxieties of late depression—a culture of feeling shaped by a sense of injustice and the need for strong leadership. Not coincidentally, this was the era in which the US flirted with fascism, and in which certain European nations embraced it. Thus, we have the argument that the genre is tainted by fascism, or a fascist mindset that trips easily into racism. However, by defining an era according to a specific concern, one is forced to operate at a level of abstraction at odds with the rhetorical conception of a situation, which includes historical context, but also material constraints such as medium, power dynamics between the producers of and audiences for texts, and so on. Where does this leave us?

To define superhero comics as a social action, i.e., a motivated, conventionalized response based on the demands of a recurring situation, I think we need to look at the relationship between the producer and the audience. Specifically, we need to see comics as a response, at least in part, to the situation of adolescence as experienced by boys. After all, adolescent boys were, until quite recently, the primary audience for superhero comics. Moreover, and more to the question of race, white adolescent boys were the imagined audience for comics, which is to say they were the audience to which comic creators addressed their narratives.

Is it any surprise, then, that the X-Men are a lousy metaphor for race? Sure, mutants appear as a persecuted minority, but they’re a minority that assumes great power as a birthright. This strikes me as a better metaphor for the young white man who is old enough to see power on the horizon, but is feared and despised by the adult world during this particular stage of his development. Compare this to the young black man, who can expect to face fear and hostility for years to come.

A similar combination of power and persecution dogs Superman. Though he is celebrated as a hero, he submits to daily humiliations. Why? We can psychologize Kal-El all day, but I’d bet money that the answer lies not in his character but in the demand it fills. Namely, it’s an effort to connect with an audience of young men subject to the regular degradations of adolescent life.

How does race factor into all of this? After all, it’s not as though young black men aren’t subject to fear and persecution. The answer is that superhero comics, as a general rule, assume that unearned power lies behind or beyond the fear and the persecution. The mutant, the Kryptonian, the scion of billionaires, the kid genius who sticks to walls… All of these characters could get everything they want and more. Only two things hold them back. One is ethics, and this is a potential positive to the genre. The other is less positive: it’s the notion that lesser beings are holding them back (I’m looking at you, X-Men).

So, is the superhero genre racist? As a rhetorical theorist, I’m contractually obligated to answer yes, and no.

Yes, the genre is racist. It is addressed to a situation unique to an increasingly small but nevertheless over-privileged group. As a result, it developed conventional features that make a dog’s breakfast of any effort to incorporate issues of social justice that don’t entail being nicer to young white men.

No, the genre isn’t racist. Situations recur, but they evolve over time. As the audience for comics grows increasingly diverse, the conventional features of the form will change accordingly to better address the situation of the readership. Sure, we’re going to read some confused comics as we transition, but it will all work out in the end.

In short, the answer to the question of whether a genre can be racist is yes, but it doesn’t have to be. As to whether the superhero genre is inherently racist, I want to suggest that it has developed some narrative conventions that are, if not racist, seriously problematic. However, I’d be reluctant to consign the genre to the realm of minstrel shows and Orientalist travelogues. Instead, I’d argue that recent flare ups over its less progressive features indicate a genre that’s struggling to expand the range of situations to which it can speak.

The Horrible Perfection of A Wes Anderson X-Men

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Kailyn Kent

There’s a decent number of Wes Anderson spoofs floating around: his ostentatious and predictable style of filmmaking makes him a sitting duck for parody. However, most are only moderately successful– even SNL could only manage to blandly lampoon his work in “New Horror Trailer: The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders,” a well-named skit which misses more targets than it hits. Why joke about Gwenyth Paltrow, who only appeared in The Royal Tenenbaums, when you could take on Jason Schwartzman, who has spent his entire career playing Anderson roles? Margot is iconic, but why not give the Anderson treatment to an existing horror icon? That’s the genius of the skit’s unaffiliated follow-up, “What if Wes Anderson made X-Men?,” which more than spiritually succeeds the SNL effort. It lovingly captures Anderson’s rhythms, charms, and awkwardness nearly beat for beat. On one hand, the Anderson-X-men pairing is so absurd that Patrick (H) Willems and his crew suggest that you could give the Anderson treatment to any series—What if Wes Anderson made The Flintstones? What if Wes Anderson made Breaking Bad? On the other hand, they make an amazing case for Anderson rebooting the X-Men in particular. Anderson’s quirky, nostalgic style would celebrate the goofy excitement and teenage longing of the original, while removing the toxic ‘epic-ness’ of recent reboots. In turn, the X-Men would give Anderson license to make the uncomplicated boys adventure story he clearly wants to make, free from intellectual expectations and his colonial pretenses. It’s a match made in heaven. Almost.

Wes Anderson would make an unexpectedly wonderful director of superhero movies for several reasons. First off, his films are devoted to the tension between boyhood fantasy, empty manhood, and maternal reason. (He makes a little room for feminine fantasy, which is often portrayed as wistful, and resigned to abandonment.) This axis resembles Superhero logic more than it departs from it. The superhero, a muscled Peter Pan, is the boyhood fantasy, and is juxtaposed to his faltering alter-ego who faces real life, ‘adult’ responsibilities. Superhero stories, however, tend to make dupes and conquests of the women. Not in the Anderson-verse, where the ladies call it like they see it, (even if their role is rather proscribed.) Wes Anderson’s third act typically calls for a reconciliation between fantasy and reality. He’s a generous filmmaker, in that neither side comes out victorious over the other; they instead consent to the necessary, life-affirming quality of both perspectives. I treasure Anderson’s formula, because I am grateful to find movies that simultaneously act as an ode, a critique, and an apology for grandiosity, and that don’t ignore the ways that women are often alienated by grandiosity. Thus, Anderson could honor the grandiosity of the superhero narrative, while assenting that this grandiosity can be destructive, delusional, and gendered.

Secondly, Wes Anderson assumes that people go to the movies for the same reason they go to see a middle school play: to see someone they love say something amazing (and/or ridiculous,) while wearing an amazing (and/or ridiculous) costume. In essence, Anderson transforms celebrities into the audience’s family members. Fans will come to see who Bill Murray or Tilda Swinton will be in this one, or because they could never imagine Ralph Fiennes or Bruce Willis in that role, wearing those clothes. This isn’t so different from how comic books work– they are sold based on reader’s attachment to certain, iconic characters, who are put in unbelievable situation after unbelievable situation. Fan devotion is laid most bare in fan-art and fan-fiction, where fans put favorite characters, even destructive, “evil” ones, into absurd, adorable, and kinky situations. Wes Anderson’s style is a close relative of the fan-fiction mind-set. His films are ‘love letters,’ to Jaque Costeau, or the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his troupe of real-life actors. This may explain part of his appeal. Like a mother bird regurgitating food for her babies, Wes Anderson handles the digestion of a story beforehand, putting it on-screen so that its inherent love-ability is accessible to all, (who are willing to eat it.) Anderson would make a perfect match for superheroes, who are already celebrities and icons. He would derive great pleasure by putting characters into ridiculous costumes, in ridiculous settings and scenarios, while making them say earnestly ridiculous things. These components are already native to the genre, although most modern filmmakers try to evade or disguise them through ‘bad-assery’ and self-mockery. Wes Anderson would call a jump-suit a jump-suit, and would love every freaking minute of it.

Finally, the X-Men would be a wake-up call for the filmmaker. I have a sinking suspicion that each consecutive Anderson film reduces the female characters’ voices, reaching a point of near muteness in The Grand Budapest Hotel. As their voices fade, the films lose the friction that made his movies interesting in the first place, and the ‘boys adventure’ quotient increases inversely. Wes Anderson seems to be in the business of making bouncy, nostalgic escapades that lionize the value of cross-generational male friendship, and displaced father-son relationships. He’s careening head-first into superhero narratives, but he may be in denial about it, convinced that he’s actually making smart movies about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, (or Lord help him, fascism.) If Anderson were to truly commit to a superhero franchise, he might need to back-pedal a bit, and perhaps re-discover the power, and ethical necessity, of his earlier approach.

There’s a problem, however. Anderson’s style is inaccessibly white. His movies cater to white nostalgia about self-absorbed aristocrats. While I do not find him to be an explicitly racist director, I sometimes wonder why I don’t. He indulges in non-stop colonial nostalgia, from the wall-paper to the entire premise of The Darjeeling Limited. He employs racist language to elicit shocked guffaws from the audience, making his character ‘flawed’ in the way that your grandfather is ‘flawed,’—incorrigible, yet loveable anyway. But are they lovable? This friction makes his perennial father-son conflicts poignant, yet the racist language is never really addressed, or treated like a flaw worth resolving. Anderson cast an indeterminately ethnic actor as Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel, playing a refuge from the Middle East, yet most of Zero’s lines are spoken in narration when he’s an older man– a role played by a white, Jewish actor. Anderson would white-wash perhaps the noblest part of the X-Men—its commitment to diversity, and its stories about civil rights, hate-crimes, prejudice, and genocide.

Then again, X-Men often does a pretty terrible job talking about racism. I am not an avid reader of the X-Men, and never have been, so I will cite the opinions of better informed writers than myself. In his piece “What if the X-Men Were Black,” published on this blog, Orion Martin comments, “What’s disturbing about the series is that is that all of these issues are played out by a cast of characters dominated by wealthy, straight, cisgender, Christian, able-bodied, white men. The X-Men are the victims of discrimination for their mutant identity, with little or no mention of the huge privileges they enjoy.” In “Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants,” Neil Shyminsky argues that the X-Men appropriates the Civil Rights struggles for a white audience, re-imagining these morality plays with white victims. He cites the work of recent authors like Grant Morrison in combatting this, but largely finds, “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.” Noah Berlatsky reviewed Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s original X-Men, which was created before the series committed itself to having a diverse cast.

Noah and Neil both reflect that the original X-Men’s creators were Jewish men who anglicized their names, perhaps with the same mix of eagerness and frustration that Angel voices when trussing his wings behind his back. Most generously, the X-Men comics could be seen as a metaphor for Jewish assimilation and combatting anti-Semitism, but only of a masochistic kind: “[Lee and Kirby] nonetheless persevered in tightening that truss, which, in this comic at least, consisted not merely of new names, but of what can only be called a servile, deeply dishonorable acquiescence in hierarchical norms, casual misogyny, and imperialist fantasies.”

The films don’t look to be much better: Elvis Mitchell wrote of the 2000 original, “the parallels to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Xavier) and Malcolm X (Magneto) are made wincingly plain,” and “clumsy when it should be light on its feet, the movie takes itself even more seriously than the comic book and its fans do, which is a super heroic achievement.” You can’t accuse Mitchell of being a hater, however: he repeatedly extols the poignancy of the original comics in comparison, saying, “Perhaps that was the reason “X-Men” comics struggled and failed initially; the world wasn’t ready for misunderstood young martyrs with special powers saving the world and living through unrequited flushes of love.”

Wes Anderson would be the kind of director who would value those flushes of love, while completely disregarding the “seriousness” of the series, special effects, civil rights and all. The Anderson treatment would be honest about the X-men’s heart, but it would also be a confession of defeat. I’m not sure whether Patrick H Willems intended that as part of the commentary: in 2011 he mocked Hollywood whitewashing in “White Luke Cage,” without really pointing fingers at anyone, least of all Marvel. “What if Wes Anderson Made the X-Men?” is part of a series of auteuristic take-offs on superhero properties, which are as much love-letters as spoofs. Intended or not, the skit functions like a critique of Marvel, not of the X-Men or Wes Anderson. How perfect would it be for Hollywood’s whitest director to re-make Marvel’s most prominently diverse cast? So perfect. That’s the sad part.

Incoherent Icon

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

The first volume of Milestone Comics’ Icon asks two provocative questions: “What would a black superhero be like?” and “What would happen if Superman landed on earth in the antebellum South and was found by an enslaved black woman?” Unfortunately, as it turns out, these two questions are antithetical; trying to answer them both at once results in storyline that, despite some intelligence, resolves into incoherence, it’s most provocative possibilities drowned in genre default fisticuffs and capitulation to unexamined tropes.

But let’s start with the positive. Dwayne McDuffie, M.D. DBright, and Mike Gustovich’s answer to their first question is smart, funny, and so brilliantly obvious it makes you slap your forehead. What would a black superhero be like? they ask. And the answer is that a black superhero would be…a conservative Republican. Why on earth would a black man like Augustus Freeman, with Superman level powers, spend his time arresting low level criminals and attempting to aid the cops? Because he has politics like those of “Rush Limbaugh” (who gets a call-out) or Clarence Thomas. He’s a reactionary — and it’s that which puts him in line with the reactionary politics of the superhero genre. The iconic (if you will) moment of the series comes when he tells his young-but-hip sidekick Rocket that they need to aid the police. She tells him he’s nuts, and he replies pompously, “Don’t assume everything’s racial” — and then of course he asks the cops if he can help them, and they start shooting at him. “Don’t assume everything’s racial, huh?” Rocket says in exasperation. “I’ll try.”

McDuffie and his artists do that rare thing in black superhero comics — they acknowledge the tension between the law and order imperative of the superhero and the fact that law and order, in real life in the U.S., is inevitably directed against black people. Icon (both comic and superhero) work consciously to bridge or finesse that gap. The hero subscribes to a black conservative self-help philosophy that goes back to Booker T. Washington (who is mentioned by name): he tells black criminals they discredit the race (“Your behavior reflects poorly on our people and on yourselves”) and his goal as a superhero is to be an inspiration by showing black people that they can be heroes, and succeed, according to white cultural norms which he accepts — but which other characters, like Rocket, do not necessarily. (As she says upon learning Icon’s origin, “I think I just figured out how a black man could be a conservative Republican…You’re from Outer Space!”)

Rocket both inspires Icon to take responsibility for the black struggle, and (to some degree) argues with him about how to do that. Her own acquiescence in his brand of superheroing isn’t really thought through as well as it might be, but incidents like those with the cops, and a later pointless slugfest with some supergang members, nicely illustrate the problems of black conservatism and the contradictions of black superheroism. But while the comic sees Icon’s ideology as flawed, it also sees him as admirable and as having qualities — inspiration, hope, and (given his wealth and power) resources — to contribute to the black struggle. Black superheroes, Icon suggests, are silly and don’t always make sense, but, like black conservatives, they can still be valuable and meaningful. By acknowledging the contradictions inherent to black superheroes, Icon makes perhaps the best mainstream case possible for their value.
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But then there’s the answer to the second question. What would happen if Superman were a slave in the antebellum South?

Icon is an alien; he lands in a damaged ship on earth, and takes on the genetic imprint of the first human he encounters — a woman who is a slave. Icon then lives through the last century and a half plus of black history; he helps slaves escape through the Underground Railroad, fought with the Union in the Civil War, got a law degree from Fisk, met his wife during the Harlem Renaissance, and fought for the U.S. in World War I. “Icon” is not just his superhero name, it’s a description of his character — he embodies the black experience.

Symbolically, you can see the appeal. Logistically, though, it’s nonsense. Icon is, again, at Superman level powers. If there were a slave in the antebellum South with Superman level powers, would he be mucking around with the Underground Railroad and joining the Union army? Surely not; a superpowered slave would be able to have a much more direct impact.

Successful slave revolts were impossible in the South because of the massive disproportion of weaponry, personnel and power. The arrival of Icon would have changed all that irrevocably. You can think through various scenarios, but presuming Icon was not a pacifist (and he fought in the war, remember), surely he would have made some attempt to liberate the slaves. And given what we know of his powers and of technology in 1850s America, that attempt was likely to have been at the very least partially successful. There would have been successful revolts; you can easily imagine a free state carved out of large chunks of the American South, with Icon as a protector and guarantor. A black superhero in slavery times isn’t just a cool origin idea; it’s an idea for an alternate history. If Icon is Icon, then black history, and world history, could not be the same.

The comic can’t imagine that, though, precisely because it’s a superhero comic. For the most part, superhero comics say that the present is just like our present, except with powerful beings zipping around. There are revisionist exceptions (like Watchmen) but those are presented as exceptions. Icon wants to be just a standard superhero story. And as just a standard superhero story, it can’t radically alter history, or radically reimagine the present. McDuffie is able to criticize (with love) black conservatism, but in a broader sense he is wholly trapped by a vision more reactionary than even Clarence Thomas could manage. No matter how much power they had or acquired, slaves in Icon still have to wait on white people for their freedom.

Maybe these issues are explored in greater detail later in the series. But in the first collected volume, McDuffie and his cocreators have smart things to say within the limits of the superhero genre, but they have little ability, or interest in pushing at the edges. As a result, Icon can see the contradiction between superheroes and blackness, but can’t really address it beyond making a joke or two. Superheroes can fly to distant moons and free the inhabitants from tyranny, but when confronted with a giant prison camp in the Southern United States, all they can do is a bit of remediation around the edges. In the context of superheroes, the goal of black empowerment can literally mean nothing more than black people flying and hitting bad guys. A more just world is something the comics can’t even dream of.

Chasing Utopia

Posted on March 4, 2015 by Donovan Grant

It’s been a whirlwind week or two here at the Hooded Utilitarian for discussing race in comics. Building on earlier treatises about Black Panther’s exercises in assimilation narratives, Black Lightning’s equivocation on race and the X-Men turning black Noah Berlatsky asserted that the original Milestone Static comics kind of suck. J. Lamb argued that the superhero genre is fundamentally white supremacist, which makes most all black superhero characters generally useless.

As a black comics fan, this is abjectly depressing.

Everyone knows that black comic heroes hardly register as competition against white heroes for popularity. They barely exist. The fact that having one non-white costumed character on the big-screen is typically seen as an enormous boon for diversity is pretty demoralizing. When you add this to the fact that, as J Lamb wrote, non-white heroes function “within a paradigm defined by Western perspectives on violence and ideal beauty, in an industry dependent on White male consumer support .” I’m left feeling outright bamboozled.

The truth wouldn’t sting so much if these essays were written some time last year, but they just reaffirm what I had concluded after reading All-New Captain America #1. One of the most banal, vapid comics I’ve ever read, All-New Captain America#1 truly underlined the utter fecklessness of the black super hero. We have Sam Wilson, the first African American super hero in the role of Captain America with all of the variant covers and implied importance that the role suggests, adorned in the American flag boasting a triumphant reach to the utopic mountaintop, published within twelve days of the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted for shooting Michael Brown. The book’s lack of self-examination makes the juxtaposition painfully jarring.

It isn’t as though I had ambitious hopes for the new Black Cap book. But I honestly thought the idea of a black Captain America would mandate a minimal degree of content, especially with books like TRUTH in Marvel Comics’ rearview. In this series, we’re presented with pages of wintry, hoary dialogue where Sam Wilson briefly recalls the death of his parents whilst dodging gunfire for no reason. He battles Hydra and fights Batroc, the French stereotype in a typical superheroic battle that is requisite for a Captain America comic, I suppose. However the concept of a black Captain America and what that means to him or anyone is completely passed over for an adventure typical for white Steve Rogers. The issue eschews moments of reflection from Sam, opting instead to toss in empty critiques of America’s obesity problem and government corruption. Remarks by the villains on how Sam’s nothing more than a sidekick are carefully worded; the reader can infer racial bias if he or she feels like it, or ignore it if the idea of a villain being racist is too upsetting or unpleasant.

Exploring the importance of Sam’s new role should be a no-brainer. Why else was an irrelevant Joe Quesada ushered back onto the Colbert Report to promote the book? Comic readers understand diversity is often an empty gesture in comics, but this is “Captain America”. I had no real fantasies about Sam talking about systematic racism or making birther jokes, but that the book literally says nothing about how the figure representing America as its premiere superhero is now black reveals how ruefully optimistic I was when expecting comments on the black super hero’s existence from a white writer.

The disappointment isn’t just mine. Writer and Public Speaker Joseph Illidge wrote about the first issue of All-New Cap on his weekly column for Comic Book Resources, “The Mission”. When reading it, you get the sense that he’s holding back a deeper sense of disappointment than he’s letting on. Lines like “I’m not going to make this a polemic on non-Black writers writing Black characters, because the dialogue on that subject may very well be reaching its golden years. That said, I would have preferred a Black writer handling this book.” Reading that, I can’t help but see an image of eyes clenched shut and a setback induced sigh.

He mentions the HBO series “The Wire” and says how it was a show where white writers presented black characters with a strong sense of authenticity. Illidge labels “The Wire” as an exception, and reiterates that white writers will almost always miss out on the nuances of the black experience. In the 50+ to 75+ years of Marvel Comics’ history the company has been generally viewed as the more diverse universe when compared to DC. Surely at some point, in all that time, one of those characters managed a convincing portrayal of the black experience.

As J Lamb wrote, black heroes can only do so much within the confines of the white establishment they exist in. Luke Cage may get his origin story from wrongful imprisonment and Tuskegee-inspired experimentations, but he won’t spend his super hero career warring on the treatment of black people by white authority. But it’s with relief that I recall a series of issues during Stan Lee and John Romita’s run of The Amazing Spider-Man where the sole black supporting characters Joe Robertson and his son Randy interact with each other in ways which feel honest and timeless.

In Amazing Spider-Man issues #68-#70, Randy gets involved with campus protesters who want the school Exhibition Hall to be used as a low-rent dorm for students. It leads into a number of scenes where Joe and Randy try to convince each other what’s right for a black man to do in the modern world of 1969. Quotes from Robbie like “A protest is one thing! But, the damage you caused..!” resonate sharply with the critics of the Ferguson protestors. The same goes for Randy’s comments about militarism, which mirror protestor Barry Perkins comments about feeling triumphant while fighting back against the police during the Ferguson protests.

A few issues on, in #73, the creators include a scene in which Joe and Randy discuss college. Randy protests his social placement, exclaiming “What’s the point bein’ a success in Whitey’s World? Why must we play by his rules?” Joe (or Robbie as he’s often called) maintains that by only educating one’s self can one truly bring about societal change. Randy, looking out at the reader, asks his father to explain why, if that’s true, educated black men in America haven’t prospered. Robbie has no response — he’s interrupted by J. Jonah Jameson bursting into the room ranting about Spider-Man. As in Static #4, where Holocaust’s grievances with racial inequality evaporate the minute he tries to kill a white child in cold blood, the discussion on racial inequity is silenced when the white guy (and, thematically, the white hero) enter the room.

But whatever it’s limitations, the fact remains that the two black characters in this comic are having a realistic discussion about racial injustice and how to deal with it. Randy isn’t presented as a hothead who doesn’t know any better (there was another character named Josh for that during the Campus protest arc), and Joe isn’t shown as a stodgy relic of the old guard. Education is said to be key to enlightenment, but Randy questions the very system providing the education. The scene is interrupted by a white man, but it has no easy answers for a white audience.

But the Robertsons aren’t super heroes.

So what’s the point? If black super heroes can’t engage in this type of discussion in any meaningful way, what does it matter that black supporting characters do?

If the super hero genre has been inherently, historically white, it’s all the more important to note those moments when white creators and black creators attempt to relay the black experience. It’s also important to note where they go wrong and to examine how, despite their efforts, superheroes continue to present a narrative of whiteness. The few successes can perhaps serve as a template for the future, so we don’t have another All-New Captain America to suffer through. Those few scene with Joe and Randy suggest that meaningful diversity is possible in a superhero comic, however unattainable the whole of the genre appears to make it.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Can There Be a Black Superhero? Roundtable