Re: Superheroes and the curse of superpowers

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

Dear Professor Gavaler,

I am a biologist at the University of Oklahoma, currently writing a review paper about our research on sensory processing by weakly electric fish in South America and Africa (a major focus of my research program). In this review, I have drawn an analogy between the electrosensory abilities of weakly electric fish and X-ray vision in superheroes like Superman. One of the points that I am trying to make is that extraordinary sensory capabilities also carry high liabilities. In the case of electric fish, the metabolic demands of generating electric fields leaves them extremely vulnerable to low oxygen and low food availability.

I would like to complete the analogy by referring to the costs/curses that usually come with the superpowers possessed by superhero characters, but I need a scholarly source(s) to back up this claim. My initial literature review has turned you up as the leading expert on superheroes in literature and pop culture. So, I’m writing to ask it you could refer me to any work of your own or work by others that discusses the sometimes costly tradeoffs that come with superpowers.

You can find more about electric fish and our research at my lab website if you are interested.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer. I was fascinated by the reading I did from your most recent book!

Sincerely,

Michael

Michael,

You have an interesting project, and your analogy is apt. The notion that a superhero’s powers are also a curse has been a standard of the genre since the early 60s. I don’t believe it applies to Superman or most other WWII-era heroes, but Marvel Comics popularized the idea with characters like the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the X-Men. Often the curse is more psychological–the moral obligation that, as Stan Lee phrased it, “with great power there must also come–great responsibility!” The self-sacrificing curse comes in other forms too. The Thing, for example, routinely saves the world, but his powers also make him look like a grotesque monster.

Since your analogy is biological, Daredevil may be a better example. In the 1964 premiere, Matt Murdock saves a pedestrian from being struck by a truck carrying radioactive material. As a result of the exposure, Murdock gains bat-like radar but he’s also blind. He can’t have one trait without the other. In some sense, this does apply to Superman then–if you think of kryptonite as his liability. Being from Krypton gives him a range of extraordinary powers, but it also means he’s extremely vulnerable in this one area, while normal humans are unaffected by kryptonite. The film Unbreakable does the same thing with Bruce Willis’ character, who is invulnerable–except he can easily drown.

If you need a citable source, I touch on this briefly in On the Origin of Superheroes. On page 38: “And the whole tragic twist of Marvel’s Silver Age heroes–that superpowers are both blessing and a curse–comes down to one word, “barak,” from Job 1:5. It means both ‘bless’ and ‘curse.'” I also spoke a year ago with journalist Jim Rendon about a similar idea for his book on post-traumatic growth syndrome. I don’t know if his book is published yet, but I wrote about it in more detail here.

Let me know if any of that helps.

Best,

Chris

Hi Chris,

This is very helpful. Thanks so much for sharing your perspective on this issue. I think you’re right that Daredevil is probably a better example (I just started mass-consuming the Netflix version a couple weeks ago). But, I think we will still stick with Superman just because he is an example more familiar to a general audience. Your pinpointing of the tradeoff for Superman is spot on.

I ordered a copy of your book (it was released too recently for our library to have a copy) and I look forward to reading it. We will probably cite it as a reference for our paper, and may include a personal communication reference based on your email (I will get your permission first if that is the case). I will definitely send you a copy of our paper when we have it completed.

Thanks again for your help! Much appreciated.

Best,

Michael

Glad I could help, Michael. And, yes, you have my permission to quote our email correspondence too. And would you mind if I included our correspondence in a blog post?

Btw, the Netflix Jessica Jones is even better than the Daredevil (and her powers create some major liabilities).

Chris

Hi Chris,

It would be absolutely fine to include our correspondence in your blog. I will follow up in a couple weeks when we finish the paper we are currently writing. This project has me intrigued by the parallels between superheroes and animals with extreme adaptations in biology. A core principle in evolutionary biology is the notion of the adaptive tradeoff – traits that carry a large adaptive advantage in one capacity also come at high costs (e.g., metabolic, reproductive, or survival).

Best,

Michael

Blind Gaze

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

In the Netflix Daredevil series, Matt Murdock first meets Elektra when he’s crashing a faculty party. He walks across a crowded floor in search of booze, as his progress is intercut with glimpses of Elektra: her expensive bracelets, her lips on a wineglass. The back and forth between his face and the bits of her suggests we are seeing her through him, his gaze creating an erotic, impressionistic, portrait: sex as vivisection.

The director of the episode, I believe, is Floria Sigismondi, but even though she’s a woman, the framing here is a perfect encapsulation of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze tropes. Mulvey argued that women onscreen are turned into individual body parts, which then freeze the narrative in fetishistic contemplation. Elektra, as body, interrupts Matt’s progress; she is framed through his gaze, even as she immobilizes that gaze.

The caveat here is that there is no gaze; Matt is blind; he can’t see Elektra.

You might think Matt’s blindness would undermine the male gaze. But instead it perfects it. His super-senses are more male gaze than the male gaze itself. His hearing, his smell, mean that he does not see her all at once, as a person, but rather as bits and pieces. Through his blindness, he knows her and possesses her more completely than if he were sighted—as he demonstrates at the scenes end, when he gets the better of her in a battle of wits, and leaves with her, future intercourse heavily telegraphed.

Ever Oedipus and/or Freud blindness has been associated with castration. Daredevil’s disability carries with it the threat of unmanliness. One could, perhaps, imagine a Daredevil series which thought through that stereotype, and which thought about the ways that disability questions the necessity, or the righteousness, or the centrality, of strength, competence, virility.

That’s not the Daredevil series we’ve got though. Instead, Elektra is aroused and excited when she learns that Matt isn’t really blind. She wants a man who can fight her, and whose disability is only a show. Matt, for his part, is thrilled that she has found out his secret; he babbles about how she really “knows” him, which means in part that she knows he’s not actually disabled. The two eventually fall out over whether Matt should murder (Elektra feels he should) but her obvious contempt for his disability is never an issue. As far as the show is concerned, it’s natural for Elektra to prefer a sighted man to a blind one, and Matt (who is blind) is pleased that she does.

Similarly, Matt’s ability to sense Elektra, and to frame her in his gaze which is not a gaze, works as a deliberate assertion that he is not castrated. His disability is filmed in such a way that it makes him fit even more firmly into the tropes of manliness. The most striking thing about the Daredevil series is its utter disinterest in ever giving us a Daredevil-eye view of the world; we do not experience the world as Daredevil does. Instead, Daredevil’s vision is the traditional vision of film. Blind men, the film assures us eagerly, see with the same manly eyes as ever.

No Trenchcoat for the Giant Squid

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

So, as some of you probably know, I’m currently working on a Patreon to fund one column a week about topics I can’t get mainstream sites to publish. (The column will be called Twisted Mass of Heterotopia, by the by — or it is called that, since this is the first one!)

This piece is a kind of sample of the sorts of things I might write about. I initially placed it at a lovely little crime fiction site called The Life Sentence. But before it could get published, the site shut down. Because there’s no business model that makes printing things like this affordable.

So, since it was homeless, I figured I would run it here. If you’d like to see essays like this on a regular basis, please consider contributing.

Thanks also to Lisa Levy, my editor, who offered a bunch of suggestions that made the piece better.

__________
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s 1987 graphic novel Watchmen famously opens with a murder mystery: the Comedian, superhero and government operative, has been thrown to his death from his upper-story apartment. The detective investigating the crime, trench coat and all, is the brutal, deadly superhero Rorschach. After the police leaves he invades the Comedian’s apartment in a grid of light and shadow, his body leached of color as a semi-silhouette against dramatic squares of black and yellow. In this context, Rorschach’s masked face, with its shifting globs of black on white, becomes a genre reference. The superhero’s secret identity in Watchmen is noir — at least until Moore and Gibbons undermine that, as they undermine most everything else.

Watchmen is probably the most critically acclaimed superhero comic ever ;,regularly appearing high up on best of comics lists, and even garnering a spot on Time’s list of 100 Best Novels,. It is perceived as, and presents itself as, serious art . And part of the way that it presents itself as serious art is by using the tropes of tough pulp crime .

Compared to highbrow lit, crime fiction can seem declassé. But superhero comics have long been aimed at children, and have a tradition of whimsical goofiness — Captain Marvel fighting an evil sentient worm, or Wonder Woman bouncing off to the stars on the back of a giant space kangaroo, In comparison, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson come across as relatively validating and adult. Crime lends superheroes grit, seriousness, and realism.

And so Rorschach’s origin story involves the true-crime 1964 Kitty Genovese rape . In a case early on in his career Rorschach investigates a child’s murder, and ends up killing her killers in bloody fashion. He later breaks a man’s fingers for information, and tracks down a crime boss in a shadowy prison saturated with enough blood and tough talk to fit neatly into the lineage stretching from Assault on Precinct 13 to Oz.

Watchmen created a whole slew of adult, gritty violent superhero narratives in its wake. One of the most notorious was a 1994 Green Lantern story in which GL”s girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. Another was the 2004 series Identity Crisis in which Sue Dibny, the wife of that silly character, the Elongated Man, was brutally murdered. These comics were not necessarily highly thought of, but they show the trend towards using crime and pulp violence as a way to signal adult fare, and separate superheroes from their infantile past. There’s nothing like a murdered superspouse to demonstrate that comics aren’t for kids any more.

The most recent high-proifle example of superhero crime as validation is the highly aclaimed Daredevil Netflix series. Daredevil is the most ground-level, grimy, street-level-crime focused Marvel franchise since 1998’s Blade. The series is loosely based on the also much-admired Frank Miller/Dave Mazzucchelli graphic novel Born Again — not so much in its plot as in its vision of Matt Murdock fighting alone against the Kingpin and his tangled web of organized villainy. Daredevil’s origin story (in both comic and television) involves his boxer dad enmeshed in a price- fixing scheme. On Netflix, his first episode battle is against human traffickers. These familiar genre narratives signify realism because they ooze a familiar corruption and sleaze.

The fact that the Kingpin is involved in a complicated gentrification scheme seems like meta-commentary . The upscale skyscraping jauntiness of Iron Man or Thor or even Ant-Man has no place here in these grim, rent-controlled, crime-ridden streets. Daredevil is tougher and truer because he’s fighting street-level dealers and pimps and local-news-headline scum. The hero has supersenses (not very realistic that) but he usually uses them to figure out whether people are lying so he can torture them in classic tough guy style. The interdimensional alien invasion which closes out the Avengers film serves as the backdrop for the Daredevil series — the evil Loki’s monster army destroyed all the buildings that the Kingpin plans to rebuild. But that decidedly un-gritty invasion backstory serves as a foil. Those silly things fly around up there in someone else’s superhero narrative. Here (for the most part) our superpowers are dark, serious, and earth-bound.

An alien of sorts also whooshes in at the conclusion of Watchmen — and not coincidentally, that ending has often been seen as one of the series’ weakest moments. All the grim darkness and dark grimness, and this is the end? Rorschach’s pulp investigation turns out to be a preposterous red herring set up by super-villain/hero Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. No one was out there murdering superheroes, as Rorschach thought. Instead, it was all a distraction from Veidt’s plan to build a giant Cthulhu-analog complete with broadcasting psychic-brain and explode it in New York, thus uniting the world against the alien invaders. The whole thing is utterly preposterous sci-fi goofiness. And Rorschach, our intrepid detective, is disintegrated by Dr. Manhattan with an energy blast. So much for realism.

I remember reading Watchmen when I was in high school and being hugely disappointed by the goofy conclusion (did I mention Ozymandias catches a bullet? He’s got Tibetan mystical skills or something, so he catches a bullet.). But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the ruthless silliness with which Moore undercuts his own pulp validation. Rorschach thinks that crime and the brutal law of the streets is reality. As a ground-level detective, he figures that the problems he faces are ground-level problems that he can work out. Solve a murder, find the killer, break a few fingers —maybe it won’t save the world, but it’s doing good by inches in the muck of Real Life.

But what if Real Life isn’t particularly real? What if all that local-news-panic crime doesn’t actually matter? Veidt saves the world in one big rush by dropping a gigantic alien bomb — or possibly he doesn’t save anything, and just kills a whole mess of people, like George Bush rushing into Iraq. Either way, he and his ridiculous megalomaniacal schemes are a lot more real, in the sense of real consequences, than Rorschach wandering around looking for some cape-killer who seems small-scale enough to exist but actually doesn’t. Pulp conspiracy theories are too small; the people at the top have bigger plans. There are supervillains, and they always win. All the time.

Watchmen is often credited with deconstructing, or undermining, superhero tropes — with showing how naive and silly the caped saviors are. That’s a reasonable way to read the comic. But I think, by the end, you could see it not as a deconstruction of supeheroes, but as a way to use superhero tropes to deconstruct, and undermine, the grim gritty myth of pulp noir crime realism. At the end of Watchmen, Rorschach is dead, and the debris and blood is being washed and cleansed away from the New York streets. The future is gleaming and shining and new. and littered with dead bodies. The small scale cop solving just one murder at a time seems almost too cheerful—an exercise in Nostalgia, which, not coincidentally, is the name of the perfume line Ozymandias’ company abandons at the conclusion of the comic. A fake alien is more real in the end than a fake gumshoe. And compared to the machinations of the superpowers, crime looks less like reality, and more like a distraction.
_______

If you’re interested in seeing more columns like this, consider supporting my patreon.

“But They’re Ours”— John Jennings Talks about Black Superheroes

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

John Jennings seems like he’s got superpowers himself, he’s involved in so many projects. He teaches at the University of Buffalo. He’s involved as a curator of the Black Comix Arts Festival. He collaborates with Stacey Robinson on the Black Kirby Project; he’s just co-edited a new book about black identity in comics called The Blacker the Ink, and he’s got about a bazillion other comics projects he’s working on.

And as if that’s enough, he took time out to talk to me about black superheroes, Jack Kirby, Blade, Power Man, and Captain America’s black sidekick (not that one). Our conversation is below—part of HU’s ongoing roundtable on the question of Can There Be a Black Superhero?
______

‘Night Boy’ created by ‘Black Kirby’ (John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) and Damian (Tan Lee) Duffy

Noah: What do you like about Kirby, and what are you less fond of?

John: I think it’s more liking than disliking. I remember being a kid and not being attracted to the work and all. I felt like he was destroying the characters that I love so much. Because, his work on Captain America, as a kid, it looked blocky and crazy looking and abstract. But for some reason you notice the work and you’re attracted to. And as I got older I started to realize, this guy was actually creating some of the conventions, as far as how superhero comics are done.

And then when we started working on the Black Kirby project, we started to realize how experimental it was. I remember reading this interview about the Black Panther. And he said he felt like his friends who were black should have a black superhero. And he did create a character who was African and not African-American. Instead of creating a black character that would be from his own country. And also the fact that Wakanda doesn’t actually exist.

I thought Don McGregor’s run on Black Panther was in some ways really progressive, and then we turn back to Kirby and it becomes this weird cosmic odyssey thing with this monocole dwarf guy. It’s really strange. It’s this odd thing to happen after a story grounded in progressive ideals. Because McGregor had him fighting the Klan, and he was in Africa helping out his people, which was great. But I think Don McGregor as a writer has always been a lot more connected to the ideas of the black subject.

If you look at something like Sabre. Sabre was centered in a post-Apocalyptic world, and the main character was an African-American man. And he was in an interracial relationship with a beautiful white woman. Most of it was about him trying to protect his family. It’s interesting because the character —he looked like he was loosely based on Jimi Hendrix. He was very swash-buckling, always musket and sword in hand. Had this pirate feel to it. It was a funky book, and this was Don McGregor.

Paul Gulacy and Don McGregor

Yeah, I’ve been trying to read his Power Man. Which, I feel like he’s much more conscious of racial issues. He has a hooded Klan like supervillain attacking a black family who’s trying to move into the suburbs. The writing’s just hard to get through. It’s not written very well.

Right—as far as—that era. If you reread the Essential Power Man, it’s bad.

It’s overwitten and it doesn’t make any sense and the dialogue’s a mess.

Have you seen Jonathan Gayles documentary White Script, Black Supermen? Gayles is a cultural anthropologist. The impetus for him creating the documentary was this one story where Luke Cage tries to get $200 from Doctor Doom. And he was totally disgusted by the fact that this guy was just a hustler. And that was part of the dissonance. You have a black reader, and this is the first African superhero to have his own book. He is also an ex-con. And he is not necessarily really a superhero, he’s a mercenary. And he’s working in the hood primarily, adn his villains aren’t really well thought out.

Steve Engelhart and George Tuska

They didn’t really understand what they were talking about with that particular character.

Race in superhero comics was really strangely handled early on. Because it was directly related to blaxploitation films. Superhero comics are very reactive and they are a business and they see trends and they try to jump on top of them. And that’s pretty much what happened. That’s where you get characters like Shang-Chi, who was pretty much Bruce Lee.

So, I’m wondering, given the inauspicious start with black superheroes, why are black superheroes important. Or why do you still care about them?

It’s interesting, because the superhero as a structure, it’s an old idea. From the 1930s. I think it’s important for people who participate in society to see themselves as a hero of some kind, or to see themselves in a space where they feel that they can connect with popular culture.

Because popular culture is our culture. That’s a lot of times the first time you see or recognize yourself is through the popular media you watch. I know it affected me as a kid coming up, watching pulp fantasy stuff and reading these things.

And honestly there’s a lot of serious issues with superheroes as a genre. It’s hyper-violent, it’s misogynist, it’s just very sexist, it’s kind of homophobic. But it’s ours; it’s our thing. It’s an American construction. And I understand why it exists—and it does mean something when you’re not there. I think that’s the thing; there needs to be representation, as far as a diverse array of representations. And written from the right standpoint as well.

And honestly I think it’s more important to have black creators working than it is to have black superheroes. Because there’s a handful of black writers in the mainstream. One of the most important books —I don’t know if it’s going to get canceled, but the new Ghost Rider book. A Latino character, a Latino superhero, written and drawn by two African-American men. That was unprecedented; I don’t think people really knew that that was happening. And it’s Marvel.

I think there’s something about just how dominant the superhero is right now. As I think it really is as popular as it was in the 30s. It’s just not in the comics.

One of the thing that bothers me, is that people say what kicked off the trend was the X-Men movies. But it was in actuality the Blade film. It was 1999, and that predates the X-Men movie.

How was the Blade film? I haven’t seen that.

Blade is awesome. You know why I like Blade? Because it’s a Blaxploitation movie with vampies.

That sounds pretty good!

It’s a fun movie. I don’t know how much of this is legend and how much is truth, but Wesley Snipes, he wanted to be Black Panther. But they wouldn’t let him do Black Panther, so he was like, what else do you got?

So they gave him a C-level character. No one knew who Blade was. I knew who Blade was because I used to read the reprints, but he was kind of a lame character. He had these green goggles, it was a dumb character.

But he translates really well to the screen. THe’s pretty much a martial artist, and Wesley Snipes is an amazing martial artist, he’s a 5th-degree blackbelt. So he choreographed the entire movie. It looks great. It’s out of control crazy.

My friend Sundiata Cha Jua, a historian, says that after Blade was successful, Marvel began to take over the franchise. When you watch the first film, it’s a very “black” movie. He relies on this serum to prevent him from becoming fully a vampire, he’s a daywalker. And if you look at the first movie, he gets his serum from this Afrocentric incense store. And he’s in a community of black people and they know who he is. And I thought that was really important.

But when it starts making more money—because Blade made a lot of money. They start to dilute his connection to the black community. And they start erasing him from his own movies. And as I recall, I think Wesley Snipes took them to court over the third movie. Because he’s barely in it. It’s Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel because they were trying to create a spin-off to Midnight Suns or something like that.

Or you look at Stan Lee’s movie, his documentary, which I enjoyed. But again they don’t mention Blade as the jump off for the Marvel scene. Or for the Marvel franchise. Stan Lee did not create Blade. Gene Colan and Marv Wolfman created Blade. So it doesn’t make sense for him to be in Stan Lee’s movie. But it’s false to say that the X-Men jumped off this franchise.

I saw a couple of articles, like, hey, don’t forget about the Blade movie.

Is part of the problem with getting more black characters and more black creators is that the superheroes are so centralized in Marvel and DC? There’s so much energy and interest in the big two, that the only way to get a black superhero is to make Captain America black, or something like that.

I have to back up a little. I’m interested in the mainstream characters. As an exercise, I think Black Kirby works because it’s making fun of the superhero genre, and bringing in black power politics. It’s celebrating Kirby but also critiquing him. And it’s interesting as a visual exercise, or as a critical design project. But honestly I don’t have that much interest in mainstream superhero comics as far as black expression. I’m really not satisfied with what I’ve been seeing.

Or the characters who I really like, they screw them up or they do something wrong with them. Like, Mr. Terrific, I love Mr. Terrific, but his book was awful. I think the more interesting things around diversity are happening in the independent black comics scene.

Because it’s not just superheroes. It’s all these different types of genres; there’s action adventure, like Blackjack. There’s stuff like Rigamo, which is magical realism gothic fantasy.

Che Grayson and Sharon De La Cruz

So with mainstream comics there’s issues around nostalgia. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing. So not only do they want to be accepted by the mainstream, but they want to make a monthly comic book. It’s very difficult to do that when you’re flipping burgers or you’re teaching a class here or there trying to make ends meet. It’s a very differnt model. I want to tell them, no, make books about your expeirence, and put them out when you can, because you’re not DC.

It seems like there’s a problem with nostalgia and superheroes for black people, since black experience in the past was often one of oppression.

The 1930s when the superhero were created, the first black characters were extremely racist. You had characters like Whitewash who was Captain America’s sidekick, and his superpower was that he always got captured and had to get rescued. He was in blackface and he had on a zoot suit.

Whitewash Jones was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. His dialogue was often written by Stan Lee

And of course guys like Ebony White from the spirit. They’re based off how the black image had been constructed in minstrelsy and other racist propaganda. Even advertisements and products that were being generated had these extremely derogatory, hyperbolic stereotypes. So illustrators when they draw the pantomime of a black image, they’re drawing from the Jazz Singer directly.

I’m curious about what you think about the fact that one of the things for the superheroes is it’s about law and order.

I think it’s about justice. That’s the thing—my favorite superhero is Daredevil. I totally related to this kid. Because I was bullied, and i was poor, and I thought I was smart—I was pretty smart. I just related to that character, and he was a fighter, and I liked that about the character. More than anything, I just loved the fact that he was too stupid to quit. I loved that. That’s his real superpower, and that’s an interesting life lesson to pick up. Don’t give up. I’ve seen many stories where Daredeivl would have died if he just gave up. But he couldn’t because his father taught him not to. I thought that was awesome.

Yeah there’s this thing about law and order, but they’re vigilantes, and they’re saying, in this resounding voice, I have the power to make things right. A lot of people were really upset when they saw Captain America punching Hitler in the face back in the day. They’re violent characters. And they’re reifications of a particular type of jingoistic urge. But they’re ours and they love them.

I love superheroes. And I hate superheroes at the same time.

I think that most folks who don’t understand how these problems in our society actually manifest think that if I do this “one thing” then the problem is fixed. It’s a very Western way of thinking. We are taught to think about the “object” and not the “system”. So, making one African superhero is awesome but, what about the systemic issues around the disparity in the first place? It’s the same problem with integration in our country historically. Our country would put “minorities” in a white space to prove a point or to illustrate a law. It hardly ever thinks “once they are in this space have we really provided a place where they can grow and flourish”. It needs to have this token example to say ” Yeah. It’s messed up in our country but, look at this ______________. See? We got that issue covered.”

So now. We have a black writer (David Walker) on a black superhero at DC (Cyborg). Let’s see how it pans out. David’s a good friend and great writer. Should be exciting!

Art by Ivan Reis and Joe Prado for the new Cyborg series

Elephant Man

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

What makes a loving husband and father-of-two go on a shooting rampage, murdering sixteen people in their homes, most of them women and children? I don’t know, but Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales pleaded guilty of it in June. He dodged the death penalty with a life sentence, but his August 19th hearing will determine whether he can ever earn parole.

Dr. Jekyll couldn’t recreate the monstrous serum that released his Mr. Hyde. The same is true of Sgt. Bales, but we know some of the ingredients: contraband alcohol, snorted valium, steroids, and the anti-malarial drug mefloquine which can induce such side effects as hallucinations and psychotic behavior. Bales also suffered PTSD and a traumatic brain injury from multiple deployments.

When asked by a judge why he massacred the Afghan civilians, he answered: “Sir, as far as why — I’ve asked that question a million times since then. There’s not a good reason in this world for why I did the horrible things I did.” He acknowledged that he “formed the intent” of killing each victim, but he didn’t remember also burning their bodies. When pressed, he said, “It’s the only thing that makes sense, sir.”

Sgt. Bales sounds like a confused observer of his own actions. Which he is. We all are.

“Like a rider on the back of an elephant,” argues psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does.” Mostly we just sit on top and watch what happens, recording the bumping and jostling of our emotions and actions. We’re not steering the elephant. We just pretend we are. “Then, when faced with a social demand for a verbal justification,” Haidt says, “one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case, rather than a judge searching for the truth.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Bales said after his arrest. The elephant always does the right thing, and it’s our job to prove it—to ourselves and everyone else. The counter evidence was too great for Bales’ lawyer to challenge in court, but Haidt calls us all “intuitive lawyers” defending our elephant-sized intuitions.

I picture a blind lawyer, Daredevil’s alter ego Matt Murdock, arguing why his vigilante-by-night job doesn’t make his legal career complete hypocrisy. There are a range of available justifications (failure of enforcement, police corruption, court incompetence), but none of them are the actual reason he runs around in a skintight unitard with little devil horns beating up bad guys. That’s just something his elephant does.

This sounds like a weirder form of double identity than most superheroes face, but two of Hollywood’s biggest, Batman and Wolverine, encode the same human-animal duality. Comic books stock a zoo of animal men, including, most obviously, Animal Man, and continuing down the alphabetized cages: Ant-Man, Badger, Beast, Black Canary, Black Panther, Blue Beetle, Cat, Catman, Catwoman, Chameleon, Cheetah, Crow, Green Hornet, Hawkman, Hellcat, Howard the Duck, Lizard, Man-Bat, Man-Thing, Man-Wolf, Nite Owl, Penguin, Scorpion, Sabretooth, Toad, Tigris, Vulture, Wasp, and Yellowjacket.

To the best of my memory and search engine abilities, there is no Elephant Man. Not unless you go back to 1884, when the deformed and destitute Joseph Merrick assumed that freak show moniker. Victorians ate him up. Even the Princess of Wales (a queen of animals?) stopped by his bedside to ogle. Advertised as “Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant,” Merrick believed his secret origin was the fairground elephant that frightened his pregnant mother. His doctor called him “the most disgusting ” and “degraded or perverted version of a human being” he’d ever seen.

Which explains his ticket sales. Victorians were busy being disgusted by all manner of animal men. H. G. Wells wouldn’t get around to populating Doctor Moreau’s island of half-men for another decade, but Robert Louis Stevenson began his vivisection of humanity’s animal side with his 1882 play, Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life. Professor Brodie of my English department assures me she’s only related to the real-life Deacon by marriage. Even so, you might not trust her with the keys to your home lest her inner elephant feels an atavistic urge to pillage. Deacon William Brodie was an upstanding member of his Edinburgh community until they hung him 1788 for robbing by night the homes he woodworked by day.

Stevenson took four years to expand the two-faced Deacon into The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The doctor is the ultimate, elephant-straddling lawyer. Jekyll has no control over what his inner Hyde does. Drink, rob, rape, murder, he’s a stampede of animal urges, and when he dies it is with a “dismal screech, as of mere animal terror.”

Victorians were screeching with terror too. Not just of Hyde, but of all such criminal degenerates hiding among their fellow Jekylls. Evolution, they believed, might be slipping backwards into the animal mud which humans had once stood so divinely above. Wasn’t Joseph Merrick’s elephantine deformities evidence enough?

So who will save us from these animal men? Well, oddly enough, other animal men will. Superheroes aren’t like the rest of us. Being “super” means you’re only half-human to begin with. Bruce Wayne would just be another lazy socialite, but instead of abdicating control of his inner beast, he yokes it for his own moral mission. Bat-Man is a Jekyll-controlled Hyde. Beating up degenerates keeps Bruce from degenerating into one of them.

Wolverine has to battle himself to keep his berserker rage under control too. It’s a duality we all experience. Do you just make excuses for your elephant or do you try to seize its reins? It’s scary enough admitting the elephant exists. We aren’t so different from the Victorians. Instead of Darwin skinning our animal side, we have psychologists like Haidt poking their non-rationalist sticks through our cage bars. Who wouldn’t snarl when told their moral reasoning is just ad hoc rationalizations for emotional reflexes? Who wants to work as hard as a self-cage superhero, when it’s so much easier watching from your animal’s free-ranging back?

Perhaps Sgt. Bales is just a degraded version of a human being. Maybe he doesn’t deserve life, let alone parole in twenty years (he’ll be 68). He lost his inner battle against his berserker rage. He was a mere animal when he butchered those families. He needs to be caged. I would like to believe that makes him unique, that he’s a throwback from our animal past. I would like to think other human beings, if placed in the same crucible of environment and chemical horror, would not commit the same atrocity. I want to believe I could never sit before a judge, with my lawyerly hands folded in front of me, and have to say:

“It’s the only thing that makes sense, sir.”

The Freewheelin’ Daredevil

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

The Comics and Music roundtable index is here.
______________

In his notes on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Born Again, Brian Cronin writes:

“And it all ends with a likely Bob Dylan reference, so how much better can you get?”

Cronin is of course donning the cap of coyness here. The final page of Born Again isn’t a “likely” Dylan reference, it’s a bare faced homage to the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan—the ultimate evocation of tenderness for a certain generation of record collectors; the knight in lusterless armor finally getting his girl.

Karen Page’s one time junkie whore has kicked her addiction and is now in the arms of her destined love or as Wikipedia helpfully tells us:

Critic Janet Maslin summed up the iconic impact of the cover as “a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging”.

Of this description I have my doubts. Perhaps the word “reinspired” would work better here. It seems to me that women have been depicted (by men) clinging to men long before Dylan and his photographer got their hands on this quintessential moment.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” seems overly sentimental musically but correct lyrically for much of this comic, the song apparently written by Dylan when Rotolo left him to study in Italy. The album cover captures that point in time when she had returned safe to his arms in a trench coat and two sweaters, the fire escapes and tenements like a pastoral landscape in the background.

Born Again may be seen as an apocalyptic text divining this fleeting state of heaven…

…a paradisaical condition always on the edge of disaster; a state of perfect goodness where stories are perpetuated when no more need be told—a testament to the prescience of Miller and Mazzucchelli. The comics boom of the late 80s, that period which ushered in Miller’s Daredevil, was followed inevitably by bust and then capitulation; the present day sales figures befitting nothing less than high end toilet paper. The superhero form now even rejected by that one time font of spandex adulation, the Eisners (though this last rejection is most likely an aberration born of the judges doing the nominations.)

But such an interpretation would be to mistake apocalypse (a revelation of god’s divine will) for prophecy. The two may be intermingled but should be seen as distinct.

Suze Rotolo wasn’t a junkie who needed saving, that part is clear. No, that junkie whore was the America of sex and drugs, that 60s VW van of lust and freedom gone mad.

The new Jerusalem is one where strength and patriotism has triumphed over the nuclear threat; the hard rain has ceased to fall. The world is in the process of being reconstructed just as the sign (a tribute to Mazzucchelli’s own partner, Richmond Lewis) on the right hand side of the comics page indicates. Nuke (as coarse a symbol as any) has been defeated by that bastion of American patriotism, Captain America—all this as illusory as the life and death of a secondary character in a second tier superhero title; everything as ephemeral as Matt Murdock and Bob Dylan’s happiness.

Karen Page—manipulated to the end by her gods—”died” in 1998. Suze Rotolo died of lung cancer in 2011. That evocation of joy, as transient as a fading photograph, now extinguished; that VW van of protest now disappeared, replaced by the dumpster truck of progress, capitalism, and acquiescence.

Excess Meaning

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Above is a art project Bert Stabler and I worked on together. I wrote the words and he drew the image.

Except, as you’ve probably noticed, there are no words. When it came down to it, Bert decided that the pictures looked better without the text. So he took them out.

In some versions of comicdom, this could be seen as a cardinal sin. As Joe Matt says, “”I’ve gotta draw minimally to serve the storytelling! The writing always comes before the art!” Similarly, Ed Brubaker argues “I’ve always felt that the writing was far more important than the artwork… As long as the art supports the story…” It’s hard to see how Bert could have more thoroughly violated these precepts.Not only does his art not serve the storytelling, but in the name of the art, he actually went ahead and removed the words altogether!

Of course, in our project, the words were always subordinated to the drawing; Bert did the artwork first, then I provided words…and then he decided the words didn’t fit (in some cases literally — too much text for the boxes.) But that merely underlines the point that art here was not subordinated to storytelling.

Bert’s piece takes several steps towards abstract comics. Appropriately enough, Andrei Molotiu has taken on a lot of these issues at his Abstract Comics blog (from which I pinched the Matt and Brubaker quotes). Specifically, Andrei has argued that art in comics should not be, and often is not, subordinated to the demands of text or narrative. Speaking of the art-must-follow-story meme, Andrei says

This is exactly the logic of illustration–which is a form of logocentrism… And here we can expand the discussion beyond abstract comics, which occupy only the extreme position (like “purely harmonic music”) in a wider range of art that exceeds narrative demands.

In another post, Andrei goes on to look at some examples of non-abstract, art-superfluous comics.

For instance, he talks about a Bob Kane story from 1941, in which Kane used a ton of circular panels, as Andrei shows:

Andrei goes on to say:

Now, what does this mean? Probably nothing. (Which is not to say it’s not significant; just that it’s probably not meant to mean.) One can obviously draw the parallel between the circular panels and the moon–but the resulting interpretation (Batman as creature of the night, etc.), would be generally valid for ANY Batman story: so why specifically this one? Similarly, one can find some connection to the closing words of the story, where Bruce Wayne, with a wink, tells Commissioner Gordon: “I guess the life of Bruce Wayne does depend quite a bit on the existence of the Batman!” There is a kind of circularity implied there, I guess, and we can then claim the circularity is echoed formally in the art… And yet, if that’s the great realization, the theme of the story–again, the Bruce Wayne/Batman dichotomy is a constant throughout the strip. Why this story specifically?

I don’t know. Maybe Bob Kane had a brand new compass he had purchased the day he drew this story, and he was just dying to use it. But my point here is: I’m not so much interested in fully motivated signs, portentous (a la Wagner) leitmotifs charged with meaning as you can find in, say, “Watchmen” or “The Dark Knight Returns”–works in which their creators seem fully in control of their formal language, in which every single (or almost) signifier can be seen as adding something to the story’s theme. Rather, I’m interested in what, at this point, may be called automatisms, tics perhaps, that nevertheless affect our experience of the comic.

Andrei is drawing a distinction between formal elements that can be collapsed into the theme and formal elements that are tics, excesses over meaning. As an example formal elements linked to theme, you could perhaps take this Gruenwald painting, where the idiosyncratic formal use of scale illustrates the phrase “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

And as an example of formal tics that do not link to theme, you could take the insistent circular repetitions in the Frank Miller Spider-Man/Daredevil crossover which Andrei analyzes.

In Gruenwald, the formal elements relate directly to the spiritual meaning; in the Frank Miller, the circles are just a way of organizing space; an abstract, musical surplus, which contribute to pleasure or experience without, Andrei says, contributing to narrative or meaning.

The question I have here though, is this: are narrative and meaning synonymous? Obviously they aren’t; Gruenwald’s painting isn’t a narrative, but it’s intended as an illustration of a thought or a metaphysical insight. But what about in Miller?

Perhaps one thing that the circular motif does is to insist on its own integrity. It draws a border; looking at those images, it’s hard to avoid the sense of space. In both of the sequences form Miller above, the words are literally pushed off to the edge, allowing the circles to spread — Daredevil’s senses, his “sight”, reaches out across the page, marginalizing the text. Logocentrism is (again, literally) replaced by iconocentrism. This is the case even in instances where the text is more interspersed with the circles, as below.

The spinning multiple figures against the whiteness demand attention. It draws you down into an excessive, vertiginous whirl of motion that makes the banal text (“Got you fella! Hang tight!”) seem like the superfluous bit.

Thus, the image spilling over the words does not exceed meaning. Rather, its meaning (or one meaning) is the excess itself. When Andrei says illustration is excess, he is not illustrating the way in which illustration does not mean; rather, he’s illustrating that very meaning, which is excess. The circle is a hole in narrative — a vortex that escapes the story’s staid linearity and in its place spins out an ever-expanding circumference of pleasure.

Bert’s excision of text can also be seen as a kind of deliberate overtopping, or annihilation, of narrative content.

In Bert’s drawing, the Peanuts characters flow and morph, losing their coherence as they dissolve into a kind of post-modern iconic glop. They don’t cease to mean; rather, their meaning is unanchored from its original context and sent oozing along the chain of signifiers. So Schroeder turns into a guitar which turns into tombstones haunted by a cute little death and Linus and Lucy fuse into a single terrified/terrifying blob of torment and tormenter. It’s a violent detournement — and the violence is not only in the drawing, but in the (lack of) text. The Peanuts characters are all caught in the boiling cauldron of narrative meltdown, and their blank, stunned, failed efforts at speech only emphasize their tortured transformation. The speech bubbles hang emptily in the design — the last, sad trace of the vanished stability of logos, as around them rages the free-associative chaos of the image.

_____________
In the examples so far, Andrei’s conception of the visual as excess (beyond meaning in his formulation, of meaning in mine) has worked fairly well. I think it is possible to find instances that call it into question though. For example:

This is one of Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji. It’s title of this particular plate is “Fuji as a Mirror Stand.” The point, or meaning, is, then, a kind of visual pun — the image of Fuji in the background with the sun sitting on top of it recalls a mirror sitting on its base.

If that image is what the print is about, though, what to make of all that action in the foreground? The man with his dog crossing over the bridge can be seen as a visual mirror of the mirror, perhaps — but Hokusai makes it very difficult to see the action there as pure formal doubling. Instead, we want to see it as narrative. What (we ask with the dog) does he have in that bucket? Where is he going, and where are those boatmen going under the bridge? Will they speak to each other? Do they see each other? What’s their story?

In this case, we might say that the narrative, or the demand of narrative, acts as an excess; an addition balancing on top of the mountain. Human stories pass over and pull under the image; what you see is disturbed by the demands of what happens. You can look for your reflection in the serene and distant mountain, and you may even see it, but your dog is still beside you, excessively nuzzling, demanding that you move on.

Here’s another view from the same series which works in somewhat similar ways.

The title is “The Appearance of Mt. Fuji in the Fifth Year of Korei.” It is supposed to show the actual date of the appearance of the mountain. Befitting such a momentous occasion, the figures gathered here are intently focused on Fuji. On the left, government officials stare, their attention riveted — so much so that their hands imitate the curve of the mountain’s top. On the right, a group of villagers gaze with similar single-mindedness…for the most part.

There is one exception though. A single villager has been distracted; he points off to the side at…what? A bird? Falling bird poop? Godzilla?

You could easily read this as in line with the last image. The meaning of the drawing — its purpose and point — is the view of the mountain itself as miraculous and devotional presence. But there’s a story in excess of that image; something has happened, and though we don’t know what it is, it draws us away from the image and on to the next panel, even though, in comic-book terms, there isn’t one.

But while you could read this as narrative excess over the meaning of the image, you could also read it as image excess over the meaning of narrative. The scribe next to the pointing man has been recording the story of the mountain on the day of its new creation. But he is distracted by sight — first of the pointing finger, and then, presumably, of whatever it is over there that we can’t see. For us, the hint of a story is a distraction from the view. But for the writer in the image, the hint of a view is a distraction from the story.

Of course, outside the print, there isn’t really a view or a story — just a mystery waiting to be charged with meaning. Narrative and image both leap at the chance, climbing one on the other, each over each, like Mt. Fuji rising through Hokusai’s frame.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Daredevil

Re: Superheroes and the curse of superpowers

Blind Gaze

No Trenchcoat for the Giant Squid

“But They’re Ours”— John Jennings Talks about Black Superheroes

Elephant Man

The Freewheelin’ Daredevil

Excess Meaning