Superior Responsibility: Spider-Man & the Thread of Identity

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

In case you didn’t know, in February of 2013, at the end of 700 issues of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker died. Well, Otto Octavius aka Doctor Octopus, as he lay dying in a prison hospital, managed to switch bodies with his greatest nemesis, and then his body died with Parker’s consciousness or spirit or whatever still in it. Essentially, Dr. Octopus became Peter Parker, aka the Amazing Spider-Man, now referring to himself as—with no sense of irony—the Superior Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man title that started in 1963 ended with that 700^th issue and Marvel began a new series, The Superior Spider-Man, also written by Dan Slott (with pencils and inks by varying artists).

This was a controversial move among die-hard Spider-Man fans, especially those active in various internet forums and on Twitter. They were not happy with Dan Slott (though not as unhappy as many were at the prospect of a black Spider-Man, but that’s not really surprising). There have been plenty of things over the years that have made Spider-Man comics fans unhappy with the Marvel writers and/or editorial. The most prominent among these was the “soft reboot” of Spider-Man’s continuity in 2008 that magically dissolved Peter Parker’s 1987 marriage to Mary Jane Watson and put his secret identity back in the bag after the events of 2006’s Civil War (to name two events that many fans also complained about when they happened), but to actually kill Spider-Man and have someone else take his place unbeknownst to everyone else in the Marvel Universe? That is akin to saying that the Peter Parker we’ve known for years was really a clone of the real Peter Parker who’d actually been wandering America with a faulty memory since the 1970s! Oh wait…they did that once already. It didn’t stick.

Of course, this didn’t stick either, and comics fans should have known better. In the penultimate issue of Superior Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s consciousness regains control of his body, and he saves the day. Soon after volume 3 of Amazing Spider-Man began with what I assume will be a long story about putting to right everything Octavius did wrong. I don’t know, I have basically dropped the Spider-Man titles for now…perhaps in the future there will be another iteration I’ll be interested in. But here’s the thing, a returned “real” Peter Parker/Spider-Man will still be responsible for whatever ills caused by Doc Ock assuming his identity, just as he is still responsible for everything done by previous versions of Peter Parker/Spider-Man who made poor choices because of the thread of shared identity, regardless of what changes to the character have been made, undone or forgotten.

If there is one thing we can count on in mainstream superhero comics it is the strange tension between the accretion of change and the status quo. That is, while the status quo tends to draw characters back towards it, undoing the events of intervening issues, the changes back and forth and the inconsistencies they engender become part of that on-going story. Even when writers and editors don’t explicitly bring them up within the narrative as they are happening, chances are some creative team down the line is going to pick out that rupture as a way to develop a rehabilitative narrative and turn the story back in on itself. Honestly, I never know if I should love or hate this kind of thing in serialized superhero comics. It seems awfully insular, but at the same time some really fun stories and creative thinking through attention to detail have come out that way. I guess, the most accurate answer is that sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it, depending on how well it is written. I love the mid-80s revelation that Mary Jane knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man all along, and the related account of her abusive and poverty-stricken family that belied her party girl attitude. But I hated the early 2000s recasting of Gwen Stacy’s time in Europe before her death as a time when she secretly gave birth to Norman Osborne’s rapidly maturing Green Goblin offspring.

Superior Spider-Man is the latest iteration of this cycle. It is just that by appearing to remove Peter Parker altogether, ending a 50 year-long series and starting a new title, the change seems all the more extreme and hostile to fans that abhor change and uncritically embrace their facile notions of tradition. However, Dan Slott seems to have been attempting to accomplish something interesting with the character of Peter Parker/Spider-Man with this series. By temporarily removing him, Slott provides a narrative space for a rehabilitation of a Spider-Man character that despite his self-righteous pretensions regarding power and responsibility has a long history of both abusing power and being something of an impulsive jerk. Furthermore, the inconsistency of how characters are written over the decades means that there are extreme cases where Peter Parker/Spider-Man has been particularly self-centered, immoral or brutal. For example, there’s the 90s story where Peter struck his then pregnant wife Mary Jane (Spectacular Spider-Man #226). Or the 60s comic where he refused the Human Torch’s help with the Sinister Six (Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1), despite his aunt and girlfriend being in danger. Or, in the 80s, when he brutally beat up Doc Ock and tore his mechanical limbs from his body in Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man #75.

Even Slott has contributed to this when he had Spider-Man condone and participate in Guantanamo-style torture of Sandman for information during the “Ends of the Earth” story-arc. Peter didn’t even bother with the usual moral-wrestling afterwards.

Slott attempts a potential rehabilitation of Spider-Man not by trying to put the genie back in the bottle and writing a Spider-Man that annoyingly clings to a classic and pollyanna notion of his morality, but by going in the other direction. He gives us a Spider-Man who adopts the dubious code of the contemporary superhero, who does the things that so many fans want their “heroes” to do and gives us the piling consequences to such an approach. In other words, the Superior Spider-Man blurs the line between the behaviors of heroes and villains in the superhero genre by muddying the very identity of the hero within the narrative itself, rather than by creating a new character (like Spawn) or a parody of an existing character that exists in a separate narrative space (like Lobo was supposed to be to Wolverine). In the course of 30 issues, the Superior Spider-Man kills two different super-villains (shooting one in the head!), viciously beats three others (two of whom are harmless, jokey type foes), blackmails J. Jonah Jameson (currently acting mayor of the city of New York) in order to get a property for his own secret headquarters (Spider-Island), hires groups of armed minions, sets up his own network of surveillance cameras and spider-bots all over the city, and never considers the rapey implications of being with women under an assumed identity.

He charges head first into the criminal status quo, using the language of “finally doing” what other superheroes, like Spider-Man, never have the guts to do. He destroys “Shadowland,” Kingpin’s ninja-filled headquarters and reveals the current incarnation of the Hobgoblin’s secret identity the first chance he gets. Basically, he acts decisively, aggressively and without a thought to the consequences. He is always sure that what he is doing is right, and if not unambiguously and morally right, then at the very least justified. When Mary Jane Watson’s nightclub catches fire, rather than swing over there to save her no matter what, like Peter Parker would do, Octo-Parker merely alerts the fire and rescue authorities and chooses to take out Tombstone and his toughs instead. Mary Jane is surprised when her confidence in her hero’s arrival ends up being misplaced. Octo-Parker doesn’t care about her feelings, he only cares that he did the rational thing. Most versions of Parker would have agonized over the choice.

I am of the school of thought that what makes the Amazing Spider-Man work as a comic book is not Spider-Man himself, (or at least not just Spider-Man), but Peter Parker—both in terms of his relationship to his alter-ego and his various social relations with his large supporting cast. The Superior Spider-Man for the most part eschews his social obligations for his own ambition. Sure he is able to maintain a better relationship with his Aunt May (a point made creepy by Otto’s romance with May once upon a time) and a romance with fellow scientist Anna Marie Marconi (my favorite new character from the series), but only because he is also willing to ignore what he deems as “petty crime,” unconcerned with the potential personal costs of those crimes as the real Peter Parker learned to be upon the death of his uncle.

It seems to me that Superior Spider-Man is a kind of answer to a particular kind of fanboy complaint about Peter Parker’s frequent whining and self-doubt. At its heart, Spider-Man comics have been best when they successfully mix a kind of high-flying urban adventure story with characters deeply enmeshed in a setting rife with contingencies. In other words, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” is not about doing “the right thing,” it is really about there being no right thing. There are no good choices. There is only taking responsibility for the outcome of your choices. If anything, Peter Parker as sad sack who occasionally snaps at the people around him and takes on the guise of a happy-go-lucky nut in a bright blue and red costume making with the snappy patter as a form of catharsis (and cathexis), shows us an attitude to the world that is more real (and subsequently paralyzing) than our own often is. The various tales of Spider-Man highlight the complex (forgive me) web of human interaction. It is like a four-color version of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The more you can do the worse the possible outcomes for doing it.

To put it as succinctly as I can, the story of Spider-Man’s origin begins with his sense of responsibility for his inaction—not doing something, not stopping that thief led to the death of his Uncle Ben. Thus he decides to make his life one of action. As the 60s cartoon theme-song says, “wealth and fame he’s ignored / action is his reward.” However, moving beyond that origin point, taken broadly, the Spider-Man narrative seems to be actually about the equal dangers of taking action. Everything Spider-Man chooses to do has consequences, some foreseeable and others not so much, and all of them, even when he succeeds, are to some degree bad. This is especially true when he acts impulsively, like in Amazing Spider-Man #70, when he decides to stand up for himself and put a scare in J. Jonah Jameson, but then realizes he may have given the man a heart attack!

It becomes clear, looking over the arc of Amazing Spider-Man with the 31-issue run of Superior Spider-Man as a kind of coda, that “With great power, comes great responsibility” is not referring to the responsibility to do good that comes with great power—it is everyone’s responsibility to try to do good—but that the consequences of acting have a greater reach the greater your power. Even one of Spider-Man’s most classic scenes reinforces this idea—when saving his girlfriend from a plummet off the George Washington Bridge, the snap of her head when caught by his web breaks her neck and kills her. The tragedy is compounded for the reader by Spidey’s self-congratulatory monologue upon catching her and as he pulls her back up. It may not be Spider-Man’s fault that Gwen dies, but it falls in the realm of his responsibility. In the epilogue story aptly named “Actions Have Consequences,” in the final issue of Superior Spider-Man (this one written by Christos Gage), Mary Jane and Carlie Cooper (another of Parker’s exes) even discuss Gwen’s death in the context of Peter’s responsibility and their own safety. As Mary Jane succinctly puts it when Carlie confirms that Peter was taken over by Doc Ock: “Explains a lot. Doesn’t change anything.”

Unfortunately, like most things superhero comics, because of that tension between constant change and adherence to an always returning status quo, whatever promise Slott’s Superior Spider-Man run may have had to explore this idea of responsibility as a core aspect of the Spider-Man character collapses by series end. Unable to deal with the multiple moral quandaries set up by the Green Goblin, Octavius makes the noble sacrifice. He erases his own memory and consciousness from Peter Parker’s body, allowing Parker’s psyche to take over again. In that moment the story becomes not about responsibility, but about some essential Peter Parker-ness that makes him best suited for the job. Boring. In fact, it is worse than boring: the manifestation of Parker’s spirit or psyche or whatever (don’t ask me how it is supposed to work) makes a defining statement that actually makes his perspective indistinguishable from Octo-Parker’s. He says, “When there’s time, you weigh the options. When there’s not, you act. And you always do the right thing.” But isn’t that basically what the Superior Spider-Man has been doing for the 30 issues before this confrontation, because he was sure that his every choice was right?

It certainly doesn’t help that the moment of the “real” Parker’s triumphant return is marred by Giuseppe Camuncoli’s lackluster art and his seeming inability to draw a recognizable Peter Parker. He has a tendency to draw faces like characters are in the middle of an aneurism after straining too hard on the toilet.

Ultimately, what interests me about Superior Spider-Man is its existence as a self-contained example of the flexibility of identity made possible by serialized narratives. There is an incredible torsion of serialized comic book characters, a slow (and sometimes fast) twisting of a character’s identity until editorial has no choice but to declare that the character was a Skrull or a space phantom all along. Much like he did with his run on She-Hulk (though more subtly), Dan Slott plays with this meta-knowledge, by having Spider-Man’s Avenger cohort check him for those possibilities. But the possibility they can never check for without mimicking She-Hulk’s addressing of the fourth wall, or being written into the self-reflexive comic world that Alan Moore created when he took on Supreme, is that this strange-acting version of Spider-Man is the result of 50 years of changeless change.

Or perhaps, it might be more accurate to adopt Paul Gilroy’s notion of “the changing same” to the discussion of serialized comic book identity. Rather than look for an authentic identity as emerging from a relation to some originary moment or particular period of time (like the Silver Age or the Ditko era), we should see it as a developing diverse set of possibilities bound together at any given point by a shared set of collected signifiers that have come together to represent the character. As such, at any period of time the same set of signifiers may not all be present, or have made room for newer ones or to rehabilitate ones previously abandoned.

While the crisis in Superior Spider-Man revolves around the changes evident to those close to Peter Parker/Spider-Man, to the public at large, Spider-Man has not really changed. He is an unpredictable enigma upon which preconceived notions can be projected. Sure, some of Parker/Spidey’s relatives, peers and other companions can tell something is off about him, but the Spider-Man identity remains mostly unchanged in that whatever bizarre behavior he may be exhibiting must be seen in context of a figure that once leapt around the city in an iron spider suit, or a black costume, or a black costume with a slavering maw, or with two extra sets of arms, or drove around in a Spider-Mobile, or…or…or… In other words, he remains a colorful figure that is always changing—compelling but potentially dangerous.

I have not read every Spider-Man comic ever published, but I’ve read enough to appreciate that Slott’s Superior Spider-Man distilled a particular essence of the character that at least feels like a thread that existed throughout the character’s history. There are other elements of the character that have been emphasized over the years—his “spiderness” in Stracyzki’s strained and mostly ignored “The Other” storyline, his employment at the Daily Bugle, his relationships with women, his totemic rogue’s gallery, his run-ins and misunderstandings with the law. But his struggle over the range and depth of his responsibility to others has basically always been there. In removing it as an obstacle to being Spider-Man, Slott manages to put it back in focus as essential to making 50 years of continuity cohere.

[This piece has been cross-posted on The Middle Spaces]

XX-Men: The Failures of Brian Wood’s All-Woman X-Team

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

A very slightly different version of this post first appeared at The Middle Spaces.

At the end of last year, Orion Martin wrote a piece for The Hooded Utilitarian entitled, “What If the X-Men Were Black?” that argues that the metaphor of Civil Rights issues as persecuted mutants fails, or that at the very least the elasticity of the mutant metaphor to cover race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity means that it’s susceptible to appropriation and undermines any ability to productively comment on those social issues. Impressed by this essay, I thought it would be interesting to look again at the first arc of Brian Wood’s recent X-Men series, which features a much hyped team of all women and see what the result might be of a mutant superhero group in which the persecution metaphor might be peeled away due to the fact that all the team members are women, in favor of a more direct reflection on issues facing women, both as members of the X-team, but also as characters who ostensibly directly represent a real-world (albeit diverse and far from monolithic) political identity.

Marvel’s X-Men has a decent history of including women in its super-teams, sometimes even in the role of leader. You have to ignore the original X-Men where Marvel Girl (aka Jean Grey) was the only woman, but later, Jean would be joined by Storm, and then Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Rachel Summers, Psylocke, Dazzler, Jubilee, and so on… The New Mutants had Wolfsbane, Karma, Dani Moonstar, Magma. Various forms of X-Factor and X-Force all had women team members. In fact, take Dazzler and Jean Grey out of that first list and you have the core of Wood’s X-Women team, but that record of including women is still only good in relation to the rest of superhero comics. There are still a ton of more men in the X-Men than women, and aside from Storm and Jubilee, the most popular X-Women have all been white…

Racial Aside #1: Psylocke complicates the “white women” aspect of this analysis, but in a way that highlights the deep problems with representations of race and ethnicity in superhero comics. I never gotten over her 1989 transformation from Captain Britain’s big-haired hippie sister into hottie Asian ninja in butt-floss. My complaint about Psylocke is not the race-bending—I am all in favor of black Human Torch or Heimdall and support people’s desire to see an Asian-American Iron Fist—but that her transformation was written into the X-narrative to fulfill the dual fetish of the Asian woman and the exotic ninja killer trope is egregious. She just looks “Asian.” (Well, kind of. There was also some kind of genetic manipulation of the body afterwards or something. Who can keep this stuff straight?) She is literally an Anglo woman whose mind has been put in an Asian woman’s body with no connection to any form of Asian culture or family or community, except in the most facile way that being a “ninja” makes that the case.

Racial Aside #2: Bling! (yes, the exclamation point is part of her name) is a queer African-American student and X-Man in training at the school during this series. However, her crystalline appearance obscures any physical racial markers, and more troubling, her codename and backstory (she is the daughter of a famous rapper couple) become the primary way race is encoded on her.

So with that history of better than average—but not good enough—representation of women in X-Men comics and of the team itself being used as a metaphor for disenfranchised groups, it seems fair to judge this X-Women comic with that in mind, and as such, I can say with some confidence, that it fails. Furthermore, if a focus on a new team of women characters was to any degree supposed to attract new readers—more women and/or folks intimidated by the steep learning curve of 50 years of continuity who might see this as a fresh start—it totally fails on that account as well.

I first picked up these issues of Wood’s X-Men not only because I was interested in the representation of women in this comic, but mostly because Rogue, Kitty, Storm and Rachel are sentimental favorites of mine. The height of my collecting X-Men was in the 1980s, and if you don’t count the handful of issues of Grant Morrison’s early New X-Men run (in 2001) that I quickly got rid of, I bought no X-Men comics between 1988 and 2004 when Whedon and Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men series came out (a series that managed to capture something akin to my memory of the X-Men’s voices from the 1980s—as opposed to the Claremont-reality, which in returning to those early issues I found to not be as good as I remembered), and those 80s comics shaped what I consider my ideal and “most authentic X-Men.” I don’t know from Gambit or Bishop or Jubilee or whoever. That said, despite my fragmentary knowledge regarding 1990s X-Men, I do not count myself as a total neophyte regarding the comics’ characters and major tropes. I’ve managed to glean some info from that era via friends and Wikipedia, and yet in reading this series I found myself struggling to follow what was going on, what was at stake, and why I should care. It’s not hard to imagine that someone totally new to the comics would have been even more lost.

I am not one to complain about the frequent re-booting of numbers in contemporary superhero comics. Personally, I’d prefer for all on-going titles to be series of varying lengths—volumes bound together by time period and or theme, and creative team. I think this would help overcome the crippling burden of continuity, make comic stories easier to organize, and most importantly provide frequent places for new readers to jump on. What is the point of starting a new series with a new number one, if the very first arc is so enmeshed in established continuity that the reader is struggling to catch up with stuff that happened years before in some other version of the series? This is especially the case when the guest star/villain is someone that is basically an obscure character that does not have connection to the iconic stories of X-Men past that might have some reach beyond the die-hard comic fans. Back in the height of my collecting days as a kid, Jim Shooter, Marvel’s editor-in-chief, enforced the philosophy that every comic was potentially someone’s first, and as such writers should write with that in mind. I am not suggesting that we need to go back to the days where a page or two of every issue is dedicated to re-cap, but I do think that, if all that “Marvel NOW!” bullshit is going to really mean anything, any new series needs to make an effort to introduce characters and situations. And I do think it is bullshit, because let’s face it, the urge to completism is what pushes modern comic marketing—own the whole series, own all the variant covers, get the collected trades if you miss something, so that you can understand what happens next. The reason folks complain about the rebooting of numbers, is not so much the numbers themselves, is because despite the editorial lipservice to creating places for new readers to jump on, the re-numbering is about manipulating the collecting culture’s penchant to obsessively pick up first issues despite the harsh lessons of the 1990s comic market collapse. The weak effort of these Marvel NOW! issues and series to actually introduce characters and create something of a fresh start (at least narratively) just reinforces that Marvel is more interested in wringing out every last sale from current readers than finding new ones. It is a classic case of diminishing returns.

There is no effort in this “new” series to establish the characters, but even worse there is no effort to establish or explain why this particular iteration of X-Men…X-Women…exists. It seems like these characters just happen to be the ones who are around when Jubilee calls to say she needs help. If anything, the fact that Jubilee’s problem includes a baby she has recently adopted and is responsible for, suggests that her entre into maternity is what makes this a case for the women of the X-team.

Jubilee is being pursued by John Sublime… Who? Some villain from the X-Men’s past we are told is immensely powerful and dangerous, but if you don’t know who John Sublime is (and I had never heard of him), there is no sense of what he is really capable of, what he has done in the past, and what is at stake in potentially trusting him when he claims to have arrived not to hurt Jubilee, her baby or the X-Men, but to warn them of a new threat. I used Google to look up Sublime’s history and found his backstory to be nauseatingly convoluted and kind of stupid. Stupidity I can handle. These are superhero comics after all, but without any real introduction his presence loses any impact it might have to all save the most informed X-Men fan. I guess he is some kind of hyper-evolved sentient bacteria that can possess people and has psychic powers? Maybe? Actually, even after reading the comic I am not sure what his powers are, because even though he ends up allying with the X-Men, he is never depicted using them.

The new threat to which Sublime has come to warn the X-Men is his sister, Arkea (I didn’t know bacteria had sibling relationships or identified as a particular genders—like I said stupid—but I am willing to overlook this), except she doesn’t possess people, she possesses machines. That is, except for Jubilee’s baby. She hitches a ride on him, but this is never explained. . I guess it is possible that this baby has a neuro-prosthetic device that allowed Arkea to possess him, since he comes from a hospital where we are told that work is done, but again, it is not explained. In fact, a simple three-issue arc can’t even keep the effects of the possession on the baby (Shogo) straight. Sublime tells Jubilee in issue #3 the reason the baby has been asleep the whole time is because of the possession, but we are shown the baby awake in a panel in issue #1 when he is ostensibly still possessed.

There are several things like this in the narrative—small details that seem to be explaining something, but that only lead to more questions. For example, I guess Rogue can’t fly anymore without absorbing someone else’s power to do so, but still has super-strength and invulnerability? I am sure some X-Men superfan would be able to explain it to me, and a reference to Northstar suggests he was the source of her flight and speed, but since Northstar doesn’t actually appear in the comic, it remains unclear. Again, I can imagine that an X-Men neophyte would really have no idea what that meant despite this being an introductory issue.

Arkea is mostly a direct threat through her possession of Karima Shapandar. Who? This is another character I had never heard of and whose history as an “Omega Sentinel” is deeply convoluted. So, we have a new foe who wants to take over the world who is connected to one former villain turned temporary ally, to another one-time villain turned ally who was in some kind of coma in Beast’s lab until possession by Arkea wakes her up. We are told that Karima the Omega Sentinel is also very dangerous, but since we are simply told all of this in a way that mostly relies on previous knowledge, there is little sense of what is at stake in this story-arc except the most generic idea of Arkea “dominating the world.” Oh, and I guess Karima is their friend, so the X-Men are reluctant to harm her body even though her brain is likely dead.

It is certainly possible that some, if not all of these omissions and poor plotting and characterization are addressed in later plot arcs in Wood’s X-series, but I wouldn’t know because I gave up after the first three issues. There was nothing that made me want to keep up with it, and I am confident that a new reader drawn to a point where in theory they could jump on would likely feel the same way. In fact, I would go as far to argue that this would be especially true of a reader drawn to the ostensible appeal of an all-women X-team, since there is never any effort to make this iteration of the team cohere except as the most cynical sales ploy that is only notable on the meta-level. And if it were to bomb, well then editorial would have an example of an all-women comic that failed to point to when explaining that they just don’t sell—rather than examining their own publishing practice and the flaws in the story-telling (See the recent Fearless Defenders series for another example).

The only saving grace of these three issues is the art by Olivier Copiel and a team of inkers and colorists. In particular, I enjoy the depiction of a scene in issue #2, where Rogue smashes her way into Beast’s lab and seems to break through the panels to evoke her strength and sudden arrival. Generally, speaking the women in these issues are not drawn in the awkward positions meant to display all their physical assets at once, leading to ridiculous contortions, and even Psylocke is drawn with a different uniform from her purple butt-floss ninja classic. I like Rachel Summers Final Fantasy-inspired long red leather coat as well. But there is still some of the typical comics cheesecake, like Akrea/Karima’s semi-supine form when she first awakens or the way Psylocke seems to stick out her butt when she uses her psi-bow, or whatever it’s called. Some of the action sequences are also well-conveyed by the art, though, especially the train derailment sequence in the first issue.

But the art is not enough—at least not by the standard of the first full story-arc (and that seems fair)—to make this series compelling. Perhaps I should not be surprised given Brian Wood’s characterization of the project in an article about the series from USA Today. He says: “I feel like as far as the X-Men go, the women are the X-Men. Cyclops and Wolverine are big names, but taken as a whole, the women kind of rule the franchise.” This could indicate the potential for an interesting take. It brings up the question: why are Cyclops and Wolverine the big names, if the women on the team seem to be the backbone of the franchise? A good series might take up that question more explicitly. Instead, what we get is a series more in line with the second part of his quotation from the news story, “[I]t’s the females that really dominate and are the most interesting and cool to look at. When you have a great artist drawing them, they look so amazing and always have.” Wood gives no indication what makes these women so “interesting,” except perhaps his assertion that they are “cool to look at” and “look so amazing.” When it comes down to it, it is only their appearance as women that makes them interesting in his eyes, not their social position as women in the X-world, or these particular individual characters. They are defined only by their appearance and their sexuality (he makes sure to discuss the potential promiscuity of the characters). Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise given the accusations against Wood by female comics creators, but even if that weren’t the case, I can’t imagine the attitude he displays being all that different from other comics writing dudes, except perhaps that he tries to couch it as liberating to women—as some would say, he is the classic “fake feminist.” Wood seems able to spout the platitudes about how “Most [comics] are written and drawn from a very male point of view, pandering to the largest demographic of readers, and at times with a sexist point of view, with lots of T&A and so on,” but with the inability to see how his own work may fall in line with that tendency as well.

Looking through the list of people who’ve written X-Men comics, I see no women on that list, and while having a woman doing the writing is by no means a guarantee of a good comic, if the women of the series really do dominate it, as Wood would have us believe, then it is beyond time to allow a woman to dominate the series from the writer’s seat for a change. I mean, it’s only been 50 years. Sure, Louise Simonson worked as Claremont’s editor on Uncanny X-Men for four years, and she did get to influence the characters by writing about 60 issues of X-Factor and 30-some issues of The New Mutants, but the flagship title? It has always remained in the hands of men.

Sympathy for “Sympathy for the Devil”

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

Baudelaire may have said that “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” but I think it is just the opposite. The finest trick humanity ever played was persuading itself that the devil was real.

Back in January, Noah Berlatsky posted a list of 18 songs about the devil over on Salon.com. After looking through the list I thought there were some overlooked gems. The most egregious was perhaps obvious, but as far as I’m concerned also the most worthy of inclusion: The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” I immediately tweeted at Noah (and I probably wasn’t the only one) about his oversight and we had the following exchange:

Now I can’t speak to why the allusion to the Kennedy killings is so objectionable to Noah (though I am sure he will come by the comments here and enlighten us—at least, I hope he will), but it did make me spend some time thinking about the song some more and what makes it so great.

It is probably deserves mentioning—as I did in my first tweet—I am no huge fan of the Stones. Generally speaking, I can take them or leave them. They have some great songs, no doubt, but I am not enamored of their white-boy blues-man pose, and find Keith Richards to be about as obnoxious a figure in rock n’ roll as there is (his comments on hip hop being particularly irksome). In the old Beatles or Stones binary, I am a Beatles guy. Despite this, I do have something of an obsession with “Sympathy for the Devil” and make it a point of collecting various covers of it. I love the live version by Jane’s Addiction (it takes Perry a while to warm up, but when he does his screech is haunting) and I even own Laibach’s Sympathy for the Devil EP on vinyl, which is nothing but really bizarre covers of the song. Heck, one of my first bands back in college, The Milk Lizards, used to do the song at our shows, so I’ve even sung it a bunch.

From the first lyric, the song does a great job operating in this tension between the personified and the historical. He personifies evil through his voicing of Lucifer, but as the examples of his evil deeds accumulate it becomes clear that every single one of his examples are evils for which human beings, not fallen angels, are responsible. Jesus Christ’s “moment of doubt and pain,” whether it is a reference to Gethsemane or his cry on cross, is his most human. The backing “whooo-whoo” gives the song the feel of a ritualistic chant while questioning the assertions of the singer. Who? Who? Who really is responsible for the events he lists? Who is the devil and what purpose does the idea of a devil even serve? Isn’t he just a convenient excuse for humanity’s corruption, short-sightedness, greed, selfishness and capricious penchant for violence? Doesn’t belief in the devil and his evil implicitly legitimize a network of institutions that put God at their head in opposition to this evil, but actually perpetuate the wars, massacres and murders being enumerated in the song’s lyrics—“kings and queens who fought for 10 decades for the gods they made”?

The idea of making gods is actually quite important to the theme of the song, because while the song claims the name we should be guessing is “Lucifer,” its speaker doesn’t say “I am Lucifer” or “My name is Lucifer,” but rather “Call me Lucifer.” In other words, the name we guess should be our own, but we made up Lucifer instead. Isn’t that the puzzle mentioned in song’s refrain? The inability to turn our gaze upon ourselves, our own institutions for the pain and evil in the world?

Sure, that “our” might be problematic. What do I have to do with “the Blitzkrieg rage” or the overturning of Czars (a thing that I’d argue needed to happen, but nevertheless led to decades more corruption and suffering)? But at the same time, the “I” in the song is metaphorical. It is any “I” informed by ideology or bound by duty to do things like driving a tank into France or going into the Ambassador Hotel to put a few bullets in Bobby Kennedy’s head and back.

Which brings me back to Noah’s objection, which still strikes me as too literal-minded. Our discussion about that one line—“I shouted out, ‘Who Killed the Kennedys?” When after all, it was you and me”—made me think of Ladybird Johnson’s journal entry on the assassination of JFK, and her report on Jackie Kennedy’s response when asked if she wanted to change out of her “dress…stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood – her husband’s blood.” Jackie replied “with almost an element of fierceness – if a person that gentle, that dignified, can be said to have such a quality – she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’” Who was this “them” she referring to? Based on the timeline of the day of the assassination this was after Oswald had already been captured, so the use of the plural is weird. I am not trying to plead a case for Kennedy assassination conspiracies, because as fishy as everything surrounding it may be, the ability for 50 years to pass without even one conspirator coming forth or someone in the know providing evidence makes it increasingly likely that Oswald did act alone—no secret can be kept that well for that long. No, I just mean that her accusation resonates with the Stones’ lyric, even if the anguish of the recently widowed undermines the ability to interpret the specificity of her statement in any kind of definitive manner.

Regardless what she might have meant or not meant, I think of Jackie’s exclamation as referring to everyone. You and me. The fact that Jackie probably bought the whole Cold War ideological narrative just reinforces this notion, since she probably felt she lost her husband due to his efforts to protect the little people from the big bad Russians, Cubans and Communists. In other words, “they” were the American people. Who else would feel guilty? Not his actual assassins. Why would they care? Why wouldn’t they feel glee to see Kennedy’s blood on her dress?

I am not making the claim that Jagger and Richards were making a reference to this in their song, but rather the notion that there are broader implication for political assassinations already present in terms of the systems of belief that support those kinds of actions and their global consequences. The whole “Camelot” pretension is bullshit. Americans were outraged at their leader being killed as their leaders worked to kill others. “We” put them there to do that. Evil is what men do. If Malcolm X was right that Kennedy’s killing was “chickens coming home to roost,” then “Sympathy for the Devil” with its Afro-Latin sounds was an attempt to sacrifice one of those chickens and cast some protective blessing or ritualistic warning through pop music.

And sonically, the song delivers just that. It’s fantastic. It feels kind of raw and loose. Not only the ragged “Who-Who” chant, but the halting jagged pecking guitar solo and Jagger’s many affected exclamations of “yeah” introduced with their uncertain “um.” Along with his grunts and cries, it gives the song an uneasiness. The song is frenetic. It builds to a desperate feel without actually getting any faster, cohering around the piano chord changes and the bubbling bass. And yes, the choice of the conga drums, shakers, and the samba rhythm give it that kind of worrisome “voo-doo” feel. I think it was meant to sound primitive and dark to white ears in 1968, but I give it a conditional pass because it works. Jagger sings with a fantastic coaxing menace that matches, if not surpasses, any other performance of the role of the devil—barely contained, but somehow civilized, in way that tanks and kings are signs of civilization. “Sympathy for the Devil” gives us the realest and most affecting devil in pop music, but giving us something to really be scared of—ourselves.

And thus, that’s why if you meet the devil you should “have some courtesy, some sympathy and some taste some taste / Use all your well-learned politesse” because you are meeting the devil every day, and a little sympathy, compassion and politeness can go a long way avoiding the kind of denial of humanity, lack of empathy, that perpetuates evil and makes us all potential devils.

On the Interpretation of Mind MGMT

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT (by Dark Horse Comics) unfolds like a dream. Not like a Hollywood dream, where, despite some strangeness, the dream remains coherent and dictates useful messages to the protagonist to be sussed out in waking life. Nor like the constructed dreams in Christopher Nolan’s wildly overrated film Inception. That film had the worst representation of dreaming I have ever seen. Its insistence that dreams have to “make sense” or else the dreamer will awaken is at odds with how severely and fascinatingly strange dreams can really be—a strangeness our dreaming selves can sense or even question, but that does not disrupt the dream. In fact, it is the very understandable abruptness of the sensation of falling or violence that often startles us awake, not the strange, not the incoherence of the dream. The kinds of compression and transference that occurs in dreams—the conflation of people, the access to pure knowledge, displacement of people and events in time, the superimposition of places, the transgression of social norms, etc…—is the normality of the dream-world. The cold sleek video game-like architecture of Inception is really the death of dreams and of human imagination—plus, the film itself is a mess that fails on the many levels of genre it tries to emulate. Inception completely misses what makes dreams useful and fun. Dreams are malleable protoplasmic psychical energy that functions as a form of mind management that resists interpretation, and that is often diminished by attempts to do so.

The problem with representations of dreams in literature and movies echoes Susan Sontag’s concerns in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation.” She writes, “Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.” The same is true for dreams. In her indictment of the interpretive impulse of the contemporary critic, she of course brings up Freud, whose work, despite being widely discredited, has permeated Western views of art, relations, culture, what-have-you, to such a degree as to become a nearly invisible force. He remains unnamed, even as his terminology is put to use or re-appropriated in the language of not only critics, but everyday conversation. Sontag’s concern with the hermeneutics of Freudian interpretation emerges from the problems inherent to the manifest content of the dream (“the dream” in this case being the stand-in for “art”) being a transformation of an unreachable latent content. As Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams, “I am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought-processes, full of meaning and emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis.” The emphasis there is Freud’s, but if I were to emphasize something it would be: at which I arrived. This is nothing new, I guess, but the idea that Freud or his psychoanalytic protégés serve as gatekeepers for secret knowledge gleaned from the free association of dream material is laughable. Freud’s own writing feeds this doubt. He admits the over-determined nature of dream imagery, making their connection to a singular source (and thus meaning) impossible. He explains that “[Dream-work] only comes into operation after the dream-content has already been constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an approximately connected whole, a dream-composition.” In other words, even telling a remembered dream, even before its content is analyzed, is a form of preliminary interpretation. This form of dream-work deals with the consideration of intelligibility. To re-tell the dream the dreamer must order and edit the dream and/or make poor excuses to mitigate its incoherence. “And somehow, despite looking like mi abuela’s nursing home, I knew it was my college cafeteria…”

Sontag is right that in making the meaning of the dream the primary concern, the experience of the dream is lost. She warns that the over-emphasis on the content of art devalues critical concern with its form. In the case of dreams, we seem to have something that resists attainable meaning in terms of its images, scenarios, sensations, but whose form is predicated not on its experience, but on its telling—a telling that requires a bit of both conscious and unconscious interpretation. She writes that “interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable,” and that certainly falls in line with Freud’s interpretation of dreams. In Freud’s view, dreams are a form of wish fulfillment in which the latent conflicts our conscious mind will not let us express manifest themselves in the incoherent and fragmented experiences of the dreaming vision and sensation. Dreams then are a form of safety-valve that lets out the pressure built within the dreaming subject through conflicts between id and super-ego but that transforms them from the literal desire into the strange and symbolic. The dream manages the mind’s discomfort with the mind’s own anti-social taboo desires. Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever the source and function of the dream experience, more time needs to be spent with the dream itself—with the dreaming of it. The same is true in literary analysis. More time must be spent with the text. Whatever my other theoretical concerns may be with any text, the foundation of the work is the experience of (close-)reading.

Mind MGMT provides ample material for just that—spending more time with the dream itself. It is a fantastic example of how compelling dreams can be. While the series itself does not purport to convey a dream world like Nolan’s Inception or 1984’s cheeserific Dreamscape, it constructs a dream-like world nonetheless. In fact, since its world slowly unfolds through the eyes of Meru (or sometimes—as in a dream—from outside of herself) without calling itself a dream, the sense of it being dream-like is all the more compelling. Furthermore, the inclusion of strange complimentary stories, mission briefs and directives in the margins of its pages, provides hypnogogic knowledge—the sense of just knowing something, as you often do in dreams. In this way, Mind MGMT avoids even the certainty of doubt, and lets the reader float along as layers of secrets are peeled away to reveal more mystery.

Reading the first collected volume, The Manager, the series begins with a reference to dreaming, with the focus of it panels shifting from a fighting couple falling from a balcony, to a figure on the street below throwing a Molotov cocktail into a bookstore window, to a man walking by the burning store to shoot another man in the head, but who in turn has his throat slashed by a woman with a large knife. The captions read: Ever have a dream that is like a story? And at the end of the dream there’s a twist ending? Some kind of shocking surprise? How can your mind do that to you? You’re creating the dream.

These multiple shifts of perspective in the first couple of pages set the tone for the rest of the series. A blacked-out panel provides the only transition to the “real” story, Flight 815 (a Lost reference–Damon Lindoff wrote the intro for the first collected volume) where all passengers and crew apparently and very suddenly lost all their memories. Two years later they have not regained them. This disassociation is shared by Meru who “awakens” in her apartment with no food in her fridge, a table full of past due bills and her ”new” idea to write about the amnesia flight, a follow-up book on her true-crime bestseller. However, upon calling her literary agent, it appears as if the idea is not as new as it seems to her. Somehow he already knows, but this does not strike her as strange. Sensing something familiar even as she starts a project anew, Meru’s hunt begins to find Henry Lyme, who according to the flight manifest, boarded the plane, but was not among those who got off when it landed.

A dream is a strange limbo in its ability to put the dreamer in a state of simultaneous knowing and unknowing. There is a great library of knowledge immediately accessible to you—you just know things and the experience of the dream cannot shake that knowledge. Conversely, there is the experience of cognitive dissonance—not accessing what you know you know. Meru’s search for Henry Lyme becomes one of these simultaneously impossible and possible tasks that even accomplishing does not accomplish. As complications increase, she becomes enmeshed in a complex plot of agents and former agents of Mind MGMT—a defunct and yet somehow still-functioning agency of paranormal people: immortals who can recover from any wound, animal empaths who teach dolphins to talk, people who can see the immediate future, ad writers who can encode brainwashing messages into their ads, a man who can kill by pointing his finger, and so on. Meru’s investigation for her book — which should be at least somewhat routine given her previous success at investigating “true crime” and writing a best-selling book — becomes mired in a fruitless cycle of discovery and amnesia—a deep questioning of the “true.” Secrets are peeled away to reveal more secrets, more mysteries. Mind MGMT, both the comic and the agency it is about, is a journey through layers of secrets hidden by barely disguised suspicion that serves as a fetish—obsession with peeling away the façade of intelligibility of the dull everyday waking life in search of more intelligibility, which itself can only be another layer of façade—an eternal onion with no center. If the cycles of the dream experience are allowed to continue it becomes the substitute for understanding through interpretation. Each latency is the manifestation of another latent conflict.

Meru’s quest—and thus the reader’s—however, becomes not about learning some truth, but about constructing some form of legibility in a world that increasingly seems like it has no stable framework. Meru is learning to interpret this dream she is living in. As such, Kindt’s book becomes about the experience of interpretation, of encoding intelligibility upon the unintelligible. It challenges the reader to take up Sontag’s perspective on art regarding the experience of it, while providing an experience of the intellectualized process of interpreting it.

The transformation of discovery into more mystery is reinforced when even finding Henry Lyme fails to lead to an end, but just turns Meru’s quest back on herself. She is the source of mystery, or at least the mysteries she explores in the outside world are just mirrors of her own half-remembered history—the self-created dream with the surprising end. Even her name, Meru, calls to mind Mount Meru, a sacred mountain in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology, considered to be the center of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes, suggesting that she is the source of all she investigates. In Lacanian terms her self only exists as a symbolic relation to an unattainable self. The self is a narrative that is told through a dream language of expanding and compressing symbols that can never be read the same way twice.

As such, Meru’s hunt for herself is in relation to a fluid dream vision of history in Mind MGMT —tensions between Mind MGMT and a Soviet counterpart either parallel Cold War anxieties, or a schism in the agency creates them. A variety of crimes and disasters, Hollywood murders, Zanzibar tsunamis, suburban riots, university uprisings, the undefinable terrors of human history are revealed to be the results of Mind MGMT agents working with or against orders—who can tell? Some agents are put into a form of sleep, unaware of their mission or abilities, until awakened, accidentally or intentionally to cause mayhem when the conflicts of a constructed life and their secret lives come to the surface—but even that secret life might turn out to be constructed when picked at again. As the story progresses Meru moves from the periphery to the center. The CIA agent tailing her and apparently ignorant of Mind MGMT may have once been her lover and one of their recruits as well—knowledge and relations are suddenly constructed from nothing with equal measures of doubt and certainty. Examining the panels of early issues reveals that figures later revealed to be involved in the layered conspiracies were there all along, in crowd scenes, in the background, as a shadow. Kindt succeeds at making the coincidental seem planned and vice-versa. Mind MGMT exists to shift public opinion and fulfill political goals, but also to police itself. The world is managed and the managers are managed until all sense of origins is lost. There is no unmanaged mind. It is always already managed—managing itself, managing others into managing it. And so on. To arrive at a place against interpretation is to have interpreted your way there.

There is a moment early on, when Meru—being simultaneously led and followed on her hunt for Henry Lyme—is alone in a Chinese jungle. The text reads “She’s stripped down to nothing. Just a translator. No provisions. No map. No weapon. But…no rent due, no utilities turned off. No bounced checks.” The suggestion is that this nightmarish adventure is a form of wish fulfillment—an escape from the mundane responsibilities of her life. And yet, at that point the narration is Lyme’s voice, not hers. He is narrating her desire and perspective. She sees herself from without. The concerns Lyme imagines she escapes from are the modern post-industrial concerns of an elite worker class that finds itself scraping by as the apparent systems of world capital fail it. It is not until Meru finally finds Lyme, that the narration shifts and her voice takes over telling the story. Could it be that that those everyday concerns are also a form of wish-dream? Lyme’s word balloons are blotted out by Meru’s narration in caption boxes, and for the first time she seems to awaken into her real self through his telling her of his own history—but even that will come into doubt. The timelines of their narratives don’t match up, nor do the identities and motives of the people they involve. As in a dream, times, places, events, people are unanchored.

As the story unfolds and collapses, Kindt’s art beautifully reinforces the dream vibe. The use of watercolor throughout creates a fluidity marked by the translucent saturation only possible with that medium. The panels are a bit of dreamy haziness as the color bleed out of the penciling in several places. Furthermore, the panels are placed within the confines of non-photo blue guidelines that indicate the area on the page within which Mind MGMT agents are to print their reports, creating a juxtaposition between the wash of uncertain color and the officiousness of the blue ink’s message. The comic itself is uninterrupted by ads, except those that seem to be selling something encoded with secret messages to possible Mind MGMT recruits—but to further confuse the issue, sometimes the back page seems to all have small classified ads for actual comic shops and the like.

Ultimately, there is something Foucaultian about Mind MGMT and its depiction of the relationship between power and knowledge. In the series, power is dispersed globally and manifested through the creation of knowledge. As Foucault reminds us, not only does knowledge equal power, but more surreptitiously, power equals knowledge. The Mind MGMT agents use their powers to create, destroy and shape knowledge for each other, for themselves and for the world at large. The very concept of “meaning” loses all meaning when experience is shunted aside as a valuable category by the Freudian hermeneutics that freely associate discrete categories of latent meanings to infinite manifestations. Mind MGMT effectively demonstrates that the distinction between experience and interpretation is a false dichotomy. The mind is always already managed. Returning to Lacan, I can’t help but think of his concept of the unattainable Real. It is impossible to exist outside the symbolic. As such, rather than concern ourselves with the categories of experience (of the body and the senses) and intellect (of the mind), it is better to perceive the human condition as the Sinthome (symptom without cause). Meru’s troubled stories (for Mind MGMT arcs overlap and partially efface each other) are a telling of the sinthome, which “can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject.” Mind MGMT revels in that sometimes (often times?) frightening space of the undifferentiated conscious and unconscious and finds joy in being, but understands simultaneously that to be is to be in relation to being.

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This post has been cross-posted at The Middle Spaces.

Black Lightning Always Strikes Twice! – Double-Consciousness as a Super-Power

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Osvaldo Oyola

This is a slightly revised version of a piece that originally appeared on The Middle Spaces.

At the end of my overview of the five sad issues of Marvel’s Black Goliath, I mentioned that I was interested in spending some time with DC’s Black Lightning, so I made a point of seeking out its abbreviated 11-issue 1977-78 run and then was lucky enough to find the first five issues of the 1995 run at Half-Price Books for three bucks. As one of the commenters on that Black Goliath post mentioned, the Black Lightning run is superior to Marvel’s attempt to give another black character his own title, but at least Marvel had made two attempts, Luke Cage – Hero for Hire in 1972 and Black Goliath in 1976, before DC had even tried its first. In addition, those five issues of Black Goliath set the bar very low. It would be difficult to not improve on it, especially since the same creator, Tony Isabella was responsible for both. First of all, unlike Black Goliath, Black Lightning is his own character from name on—that is, he is lightning that is black (with a cool catchphrase, “Black lightning always strikes twice. . .” which references his penchant to follow up on problems in his community), not just a black version of an existing (or previously existing) character, like Henry Pym’s cast off Goliath (and later Giant-Man) identity. Secondly, Black Lightning focuses on a black community in DC comic’s iconic city of Metropolis that for the most part has been ignored, and mostly by Superman who calls Metropolis home. Jefferson Pierce is a kind of hero in his civilian life as well, having returned to where he grew up to be a high school teacher in a needy district, after having found success as an Olympic athlete and a having earned English and teaching degrees in college. Lastly, what I like about it—though there is also where it starts to enter problematic territory—is that Jefferson Pierce’s “blackness” is explored in relation to his superheroic identity. I find the problematic racial naming of Bronze Age characters somewhat mitigated if race is actually explored in their narratives, rather than the name being allowed to stand on its own as a kind of monolith of meaning. Geoff Johns made a point of bringing it up as recently as 2006 in Infinite Crisis #5, when Black Lightning is on a mission with another black character, Mr. Terrific. Lightning says by way of explaining his name, “Hey, back when I started in this business I was the only one of us around. I wanted to make sure everyone knew who they were dealing with.”

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All that being said, it is still not a very good comic. Sure, it could have been worse. With a name like Suicide Slum they could have made Black Lightning come off like “Ghetto Man” from NBC’s Superfriends-like “Legend of the Superheroes” in 1979, but whatever promise was present in its setting and exploration of racial politics of superhero genre remains untapped. Almost immediately, Black Lightning’s narrative is mixed up with the baroque continuity of things like the League of Assassins (with an appearance by Talia Al Ghul in issue #2) and Jimmy Olsen shows up a few times, as does Superman—not sounding very Superman-like (not sure if that is sign of how Superman was being written at the time or a sign of Tony Isabella’s writing). The only interesting part of Black Lighting’s battle against street level crime is that his main opposition is this bizarre figure called Tobias Whale. Tobias Whale is drawn to emulate his name, inhumanly white, swollen, shapeless as if meant to echo Ishmael’s sentiments about Moby Dick expressed in Chapter 42 of Melville’s unrivaled novel.

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.

The reference may not be explicit, but I love the idea of an African-American superhero struggling against that kind of ineffable whiteness that pens in possibilities for individuals and communities. But that’s all there is here: ideas. While I can find lots of compelling possibilities in this comics, not one is developed, implicitly or explicitly. Foremost of these for me is that when Jefferson Pierce dons the persona of Black Lightning, he puts on a big afro wig and adopts a street-wise idiom full of black slang. This is intended to obfuscate his civilian identity as an upstanding member of society who talks “good English” and helps kids in the community by being a good teacher and a role model. What an excellent way to use the (secret) identity tropes of the superhero genre to explore DuBoisian double-consciousness! What a great opportunity to explore the construction of so-called authentic Black identity and its association with urban criminality and poverty!

Isabella set up the aspects needed to do this—the crime is connected to people outside of the community preying on them and or manipulating their needs, the accepted and most visible authorities of the superhero community (like Superman) ignore them, from the outset Black Lightning has a contentious relationship with the cops, and so on. But these are mainstream comics, they were not ready to fearlessly explore this in the 1970s and they are not ready to do it now. I think that level of sophistication requires a more developed reading audience and the problem with superhero comics is that for the most part they still don’t know what audience they are aimed towards. As Adilifu Nama writes in his great book Super Black (2011), “[Black Lightning] articulated an acceptable (albeit formulaic) version of Black Power politics as black social responsibility” (25), but who is the audience for that kind of representation of black power politics in comics even if the implicit white power themes of the genre desperately need that kind of balance? And is it all that useful a thing to try to explore when it is written as awkwardly as it is here? Look at the panel below, from Black Lightning #5. The superhero rhetoric about crime is just the kind of dehumanizing attitude about urban problems that does marginalized black communities no good.

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Before moving on, it bears mentioning Black Lightning’s co-creator, Trevor Von Eeden. As one of the few African-Americans working in mainstream comics at the time, he deserves more attention, not only because at such a young age he co-created such a seminal and potentially amazing character despite working in an industry hostile to people of color, but because he is clearly a talented comics artist, and while the panels I included from his work don’t show it, his run on the original Black Lightning always demonstrated an impressive fluidity of movement and had great expressiveness in his figures. He would go on to develop into an even better artist, as he was still a teen in the late 70s, and had room to grow. Furthermore, according to him, he was the one that convinced the powers that be how terrible the original idea for DC’s first African-American superhero with his own title, “The Black Bomber,” really was (and it was terrible – you can read about it here). Furthermore, there is an on-going dispute where Tony Isabella tries to take full credit for the creation of Black Lightning, when it was Von Eedon who at the very least designed his look (note how in the link above describing the “The Black Bomber” and the origins of Black Lightning Isabella doesn’t even mention Von Eeden at all!). Why should the writer get primary credit in a medium where words and pictures work together? It seems to me from what I have read that Von Eeden should have been allowed to have more influence on the character, especially since what Isabella ended up writing started weak and got worse when he got another chance in the 90s. As Von Eeden said, “If I wrote a Black Lightning story, it’d OPEN in a classroom–we’d get to meet Jeff Pierce’s students, and hear how they think, and what they have to SAY! I’m tired of black ‘heroes’ preaching to kids–whose p.o.v. they don’t even know.” Sounds like Von Eeden’s input could have led to something worth cherishing on its own merits, rather than on what could have been.

All that aside, what interests me most about the Black Lightning/Jefferson Pierce is something Von Eeden was not happy with: the awkward performance of blackness that the title tackles via the afro-wig and language shift. I am not sure that most white writers would be up to the task, but I’d love for a black comic writer/artist team to explore the idea of a successful African-American man abandoning his bourgeoisie pretensions to serve his community as an educator, and that also takes on a “down in the hood” persona to protect that community from the perniciousness of white supremacist capitalist forces that play upon the community both legally and illegally—while struggling with the problems of such self-conscious code-switching. I’d like something that seriously deals with the limited opportunities in those communities as they’d play out in the genre. This comic book could be brilliant. I imagine something like the DC comics version of The Wire, where even the best of cops and superheroes are corrupt or corruptible, where the system’s obsession with the appearance of success undermines an ability to try anything that might actually improve the communities most affected by crime. I imagine something where Jefferson Pierce has to come to grips with his own problematic position as a figure being held up as a role model for success in the black community, when being an Olympic athlete or even an a college graduate should not have to be the only way to escape the indignities suffered by so many of his neighbors and their kin. I imagine something where Black Lightning challenges the superhero status quo—where he’d decry that as the true super-villain. In the 80s, he’d be part of Batman’s The Outsiders (which were something like DC’s version of the X-Men), but I have no idea how explicitly the issues that would make his character the most compelling were ever explored in that title.

The idea of Jefferson Pierce “passing for blacker” is appealing because it provides a way to put the double-consciousness of the secret identity trope to bear upon the racial politics of the superhero genre, and to comment on our own racial politics. Black Lightning’s very conscious manipulations of both people’s expectations of him would make for a superpower I think a lot of people have in real life and put to use all the time. Most often we are just code-switching. It doesn’t make you a fake, it just makes you multi-dimensional and able to more deeply penetrate the many different facets of a community, which only appears homogeneous from a privileged position on the outside.

Reading Black Lighting made me think of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s graphic novel Incognegro (2006). The similarity might not be apparent, except for the surface theme of being about black characters, but the approach to passing in both struck me. Typically, racial passing is characterized in terms of individuals taking advantage of the ambiguity of race to gain certain privileges—ranging from marrying into a white family (like Clare in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing) to just getting a table at the Waldorf-Astoria—but both these books are in conversation around the use of race and racial passing as a strategy for infiltrating a community to work toward changing it.

Mat Johnson writes Incognegro to be very self-conscious about race and identity, which makes sense given the fact that it deals with how African-American journalist Zane Pinchback uses his ability to pass for white as a way to infiltrate and report on southern lynchings in the 1930s—lynchings that were for the most part ignored by the dominant white media of the time. In other words, he is participating in some dangerous shit. Pinchback claims that it is white America’s lack of a double-consciousness around race that allows him to adopt the role of a white man. It is not only his light-skin, but also his astute observation of white southern culture, that allows him to blend long enough to gather information about lynchings and those involved. Similarly, Pierce’s adopting of a so-called “blacker” urban mode in donning the guise of Black Lighting is based on a double-consciousness. Understanding that his typical grooming and use of language is used to mark him as different from conceptions of “most blacks” in both white and black communities, his conscious change is meant to both protect his civilian identity and to better blend into the street life he is patrolling, garnering trust and gaining information about criminal activity. He’s like a one-man superhero Mod Squad.

Of course, Incognegro isn’t a superhero comic, but the opening discussion of identity certainly does echo that genre. His friend Carl calls him “Zane, the high-yellow super negro” and Zane, preparing for another trip south narrates, “I don’t wear a mask like Zorro or a cape like the Shadow, but I don a disguise nonetheless.” Unlike a superhero, Pinchback can’t save anyone. He can only observe and report. But perhaps part of my reason that I think of these two comics together is that somewhere between them is a comic I would not only want to read, but follow, buy and support (not that I wouldn’t support Johnson doing more comic work, nor do I mean that comics should be limited to superheroes). The thing about Incognegro is that the seriousness of the topic and the peril of the environment into which the protagonist and his northern friend, Carl (also passing) enter, makes the latter’s attitude about passing hard to swallow. He is just so painfully willing to play at being white and to ignore the dangers to himself and his friend (and unwilling to accept his friend’s wisdom as both a African-American that grew up in the south and who has also passed many times to infiltrate the sites of lynchings) that I have a hard time buying him as a character. Certainly even if Carl had lived his whole life in Harlem and thought of white southerns as dumb yokels, he should have known to fear of those lynch mobs, had some inclination to think back to those “A man was lynched yesterday” signs that were hung from the midtown offices of the NAACP. His comedic attitude towards passing and his wild exaggeration of whiteness (adopting an English accent) may offer some exploration about the socially constructed nature of race and stereotypes, but it does not fit the tone of the rest of the graphic novel—and certainly his final fate is anything but funny. I am not suggesting that it is played for laughs, but rather that Carl’s antics are laughable to the point of undermining my suspension of disbelief.

But maybe the superhero genre with its larger than life themes might be a better space in which to explore the comedic and the tragic (an tragi-comic) elements of race, racial passing and its many contexts. Perhaps there is a way for its “four-color” world to take advantage of the fantastic in a way that Pleece’s black and white art flattens the phylogenic racial differences we are so quick to see in the real world in order to make Incognegro work visually.

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Incognegro does have other things going for it. The subplot of the sheriff’s deputy being a woman living like a man develops a compelling connection between the social construction of race and gender. The book also suggests a conflict between Pinchback’s anonymous work passing for white to report on lynchings and the opportunity for recognition as a writer provided by the Harlem Renaissance. Overall, it is a lot more sophisticated than Black Lightning even tries to be, but that isn’t a surprise given the literary writer and the subject matter.

The lynching theme of Incognegro also made me think of the poem or saying that is part of Black Lightning’s schtick, “Justice, like lightning, should ever appear to some men hope, to other men fear.” There is an unspoken double-consciousness at work there as well, because “justice” is not a neutral term or idea. Lynch mobs thought they were dispensing justice. The men that killed Emmett Till thought they were dispensing justice. What kind of justice was ever won for the countless black men (and women) who were lynched in the south (and north) to this day? I am not sure about that “ever should” part of the quote, but it certainly does appear as hope and fear to the very people that Black Lightning and Zane Pinchback are trying to help. The proclivity of “stop and frisk” is evidence that this kind of thing continues today. People like Mayor Bloomberg considered it a form of justice, but who defines justice?

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The 1995 version of the Black Lightning title is in many ways worse than the 1977-78 version. I have not read Black Lightning’s time with Batman’s team The Outsiders, so I am not sure what he was written like then or what his relationship to black communities was in the 80s, though one of the letters included in issue #3 of that second volume gives me a clue—“I was never a fan of Black Lightning in the past; his anger and arrogance rubbed me the wrong way, But now that Tony Isabella has toned the character down some I find him much more likeable.” The letter writer’s attitude makes me think that Black Lightning is just the kind of black superhero character I want—not kowtowing to the white establishment of the superhero community. Can you imagine resenting the confidence and anger of a college-educated Olympic athlete superhero who is trying to help out his historically marginalized and terrorized community?

It seems what that letter writer probably really liked about the 90s version of the comic is how black urban America is represented as being every bit as terrible as the imaginations of white people could develop in the crack wars era. Many of the letters speak to how “real” it seems and make comparisons to Detroit and Chicago. It is incredibly violent. The colors are ever dark and muddy. It is full of stereotypical characters and very hokey use of African-American slang. I have only looked at the first story arc (issues #1 through #5), but unlike the original series there is no sense that the community that Black Lightning is trying to help is anything but a violent and hopeless place with a black political machine that exploits it. Sure, these ideas are not bad in and of themselves, but as others have explained many times—when the field of representations of African-Americans is so narrow, the few ways we get to see them in comics is troubling. Basically, the 1990s Black Lightning title was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the wave of movies like Boys in the Hood, New Jack City, Juice and the like (just as films like Shaft and Super Fly influenced the creation of Luke Cage). The “realness” of the comic representation is being measured against representations of those communities in entertainment narratives (and I am including representations in the news as an “entertainment narrative”).

In the end, I want to like Black Lighting, and when I consider the character as I imagine he could be—as he is in that one panel from Infinite Crisis—it is easy to think of him as being my favorite DC character. All I need to is ignore the limited and problematic exposure he has had and imagine him representing something bigger, not taking shit from the likes of Superman or Batman, or you know just “the Man,” and inscribe him into my own narrative of the potential for the superhero genre. All I need do as reader is to think of his as not only struggling against super-villains or Tobias Whale, but against his own representation in the genre.

Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Derivative Character as Meta-Comic

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Osvaldo Oyola

Marvel Comics’ She-Hulk is perhaps the most high-profile of their many female characters that are derivative of successful pre-existing male characters. However, three decades since she first appeared in Savage She-Hulk #1, writers (especially John Byrne) have worked to develop the character into someone who is not merely a shadow of a male character with no defining personality or history of her own in titles like The Avengers, Fantastic Four and eventually her second solo book, The Sensational She-Hulk. In fact, by the time Dan Slott got around to writing her solo title in 2005, the character’s winking reference to her own status as a comic book character became one of her defining features, and Slott developed this into a knowing and charming run, that while not free of problems, represents some of Marvel’s best output in the 21^st century.

At the heart of Dan Slott’s run on what are referred to as She-Hulk volumes 1 & 2 (despite being the 3^rd and 4^th volumes of She-Hulk titles) is an alternately critical and nostalgic concern with the subjects of continuity and rupture in serialized superhero comic book narratives. Slott uses the space of a marginal title that probably never sold very well to undertake a meta-narrative project that is as much enmeshed in the insularity of the mainstream comics world (what many people refer to as “continuity porn”) as it is a critique of such obsessions.

There is a sense of adult whimsy that really helps to keep this run afloat. Some comics critics, like Jeet Heer, may claim that “superheroes for adults is like porn for kids” (in other words, a bad idea) or that it is time to abandon superheroes altogether, but I think Slott’s work here proves that wrong, as it eschews the self-serious attitude of typical post-Watchmen/Dark Knight “adult” superhero comics in favor of embracing the ridiculousness of the genre that is best appreciated by long-time fans who have learned to have a sense of humor about their beloved Marvel comics stories. Aiding She-Hulk in this meta-project is Stu Cicero, who often seems to be a mouthpiece for Slott himself, though that kind of problematic direct voicing of the author’s position on the tradition of superhero comics is often skewered by the series’ afore-mentioned sense of humor.

Stu works in the law library at Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg & Holliway, where the majority of the action in Slott’s two She-Hulk runs occurs. Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk begins working at this firm that specializes in “super-human law” after losing her job as an assistant D.A. (all the times she helped to save the world left all the cases she tried susceptible to appeal as owing her their lives effectively prejudices all juries) and then being kicked out of Avengers’ Mansion for her irresponsible hard-partying ways. Her new boss’s insistence that she work in her civilian guise of Jennifer Walters means her identity as She-Hulk won’t compromise her cases. Furthermore, her connections to the superhero community would be helpful in drawing new clients.

As a law firm that specializes in trying cases involving superhumans, one of its greatest assets is the comic book section of its law library. The conceit in these series is that Marvel Comics exist within the Marvel Universe (something that has been established since the very early days—Johnny Storm is shown reading a Hulk comic back in Fantastic Four #5 and the Marvel Bullpen has been depicted in various titles countless times), telling the “true” stories of the adventures of Marvel superheroes. Stamped by the Comics Code Authority, “a Federal Agency,” they are admissible as evidence in court. Now, this is of course ridiculous. The Comics Code Authority was never a federal agency, but even more absurd is the idea that comic books would ever be taken so seriously. How could anyone expect the stuff depicted in comics between 1961 and 2002 to be internally consistent? How can anyone expect that everything printed in a Marvel Comic, down to the most obscure detail be made to jive with every other thing as to be of value in a trial or lawsuit? But therein lies what makes this run of She-Hulk so great. The comic has a lot of respect and attention to the minute convolutions of Marvel Comic history—one might even go so far to say it has a reverence for them—while never forgetting they are just funny books. The fun is in engaging with the stories to find ways as fans to make sense of it all (or just make fun of the fact that it doesn’t make sense), but not to take it all so seriously that you come off as if trying to argue a federal case from comic books.

It is with this conceit, tongue planted firmly in cheek and the ability to comment on the very kind of comics that She-Hulk is an example of firmly enmeshed into its narratives, that Slott is able to get away with a lot. Foremost, among these things is to examine the role of sex and She-Hulk’s sexuality in her past and the way it has shaped views of her character. This is not free of problems and I am conflicted about how it is depicted, but it does not wholly undermine the project. While I appreciate the frank discussion of She-Hulk’s sexual appetites and the effort later to directly address and rehabilitate the adolescent approach to sex common to this whole genre of comics, there is a bit of slut-shaming going on and more than one gratuitous scene that is in line with the sexualized objectification of the She-Hulk character and her Amazonian voluptuousness. In other words, like many attempts at satire, this comic sometimes crosses the line into being what it seems to want to be commenting on. (But this is not just a problem with mainstream superhero comics—as much as I love Love and Rockets, I sometimes get the same feeling from Gilbert Hernandez’s work). It is for this reason that Juan Bobillo’s pencils seems to serve Slott’s series the best. It has a kind of soft rounded cartoony look that makes She-Hulk look a little chubby and cute in both her incarnations (more Maggie Chascarillo than Penny Century) and that gives the series’ whimsy a visual resonance. The rest of the artists on the series vary in their skill and appropriateness to the material and sometimes fall into the questionable range of Heavy Metal-like cheesecake.

The meta-fictional aspect of this She-Hulk run is one that has its origins in the first printing of her story, as the only reason she even exists is that Stan Lee, worried that CBS would use the success of The Incredible Hulk TV show to create a female version of the character, rushed one to print first in order to claim the trademark on her. From her first appearance, she served a meta-purpose—not the purpose of a story that needed telling or that was even necessarily worth telling, but the purpose of protecting control of a brand. That first series—Savage She-Hulk (1980-82)—demonstrates that in its weakness. The Sensational She-Hulk, (1989-94) written and drawn in part by John Byrne is by most accounts a lot better. I have only ever read a handful of its issues (they are on what I call my “all-time pull list”), but one of the things that is notable about the series is She-Hulk’s tendency to directly address the reader, breaking the fourth wall, so to speak. She often acts as if she knows she is in a comic—but even more often than that she is frequently depicted in various forms of wardrobe distress. There is also a whole issue of Fantastic Four (#275—also written by Byrne) that centers around her efforts to stop a tabloid publisher (depicted, not coincidentally, to look like Stan Lee) from going to print with nude photos of the emerald giantess, taken from helicopter as she sunbathed on the roof of the Baxter Building.

While not part of her original conception, unlike her cousin Bruce Banner/The Hulk, Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk’s transformation seems to have a lot more to do with uninhibited sexuality and sexual appetite than with anger. Sure, She-Hulk gets mad and smashes stuff, but since for the most part she can control her transformation and even prefers her She-Hulk identity and remains in it most of the time (for months or years at a time), anger has less to do with it than her desire. Slott’s run on the title explores a key part of that desire—Jennifer Walters’s desire to escape her petite less assertive human form. Jennifer Walters has the typical social inhibitions, especially ones that are used to deny ourselves pleasure and immediate gratification (for good or ill), while for the most part, She-Hulk has no such compunctions.

As such, the fact that She-Hulk engages in lots of casual sex becomes a defining part of her character and a conflict within the comic (her bringing home a string of men without proper security clearance to the Avenger Mansion for one-night stands is part of what gets her kicked out). It is a problematic, but fascinating aspect—on the one hand, explicitly addressing sex and sexuality is something Marvel comics hardly ever do in a way that could be considered mature (and by mature, I don’t mean humorless—sex can and often is funny, absurd, irrational), but as I mentioned before it also falls into the trap letting sexuality overly define her character. At one point, she forced under oath to list all the people she’s slept with as She-Hulk (too many to actually list in the comic, instead the panels transition to the court reporter reading back a scrolling list) as opposed to how many she has slept with in her normal human identity (around three). It is this kind of stuff that undermines Slott’s work to establish her character as a formidable lawyer—not because we don’t see her solving cases and doing research, all the things trial lawyers do, but because her sexualization is always at the forefront no matter what else she is doing.

Yet, despite this short-coming, Slott’s She-Hulk series tells some interesting stories and uses its self-awareness to explore some of the very troubling notions of sex and sexuality in Marvel comics that plague the title. Foremost among these is a story revolving around a sexual assault case against the former Avenger, Starfox (not to be confused with the anthropomorphic fox video game character).

Even though Starfox was first introduced in the 1970s, he is definitely a character often associated with the 1980s. In addition to his super strength and vitality and his ability to fly, his main power makes him, in the words of Stu Cicero, “a walking roofie.” He has the power to calm people down, make them open to suggestion, “stimulate their pleasure centers” (whatever that means) and make them infatuated with him. Starfox is a character, at least in his hey-day as an Avenger, who was often played for a laugh. He was a libidinous lothario that the ladies drooled over and/or who constantly pursued them. However, the nature of his power puts his appeal into a questionable zone. What does it mean when your power influences people to want to sleep with you? How is that really different from a roofie or being a mind control rapist like the Purple Man? As a kid I never thought about it, but the adults who were writing the Avengers back in the mid-80s should have known better.

Slott clearly does know better and uses the plot arc of Starfox being accused of abusing his power to put this explanation into the mouth of Stu Cicero. Stu uses an example even folks not familiar with superhero comics should be able to understand: Pepe LePew—the horny skunk who is the Warner Bros. cartoon poster child for normalizing sexual assault through comedy.

Starfox’s dismissive attitudes to the allegation and his apparent lack of regret serves as a kind of stand-in for the stereotypical superhero comics reader, biding his time through “the boring parts” (women complaining about harassment and assault) and awaiting his eventual exoneration and/or escape to go on more salacious intergalactic adventures. The victim’s testimony, however, leads to She-Hulk realizing that her own past tryst with Starfox may have been influenced by his power. She tracks him down, and he gets his “exciting part”—a fight with She-Hulk wherein she kicks him in the nuts, but he is transported off-planet and out of reach by his influential and cosmically powered father (Mentor of the Titan Eternals – more ridiculous obscure continuity stuff). It seems that even in the comic book world the powerful and well-connected can escape the consequences of their actions. But beyond that, the story works to underscore how superhero comics have a history of not following up with the actual consequences of the puerile sexual behaviors and attitudes that have long permeated the genre. Later, it turns out that Starfox’s abuse of his power is a side effect of one of his evil brother Thanos’s schemes. In that way, he is left off the hook for the ultimate consequences of his sexual violence. He is allowed to remain “a hero” to be used by some future writer. However, at the same time as a result of seeing the possible abuse of his powers first hand, he has Moondragon (a character with her own history of abusing her powers for sexual dominance) use her psychic powers to turn them off, so he could never do it again intentionally or inadvertently.

For some people, that last bit of retconning is what is wrong with superhero comes, but I love that kind of stuff. There is a certain pleasure in reading a story that allows the actions of the past to stand, but recasts them in a way that takes into account a broader consciousness of the societal meaning of those actions. In this way, those old Avengers issues with a skeevy Starfox still exist, but now we know that skeeviness was not “heroic.” It allows the reader to correct his or her interpretation of the past, not by convincing us that how he acted in the past was acceptable (or just part of the time in which it was produced and thus excusable), but by reinforcing that it wasn’t. Sure, ideally I may have liked Starfox to have turned out to be the kind of douchebag that he seems to be without any caveats (I never liked the character), but at least now some writer who insists on using him has an excuse for his powers not working the same way anymore.

Of course, serialized superhero comics being what they are Starfox’s history remains in an ambiguous space. Everything that happens in these She-Hulk issues could be ignored by a future writer, and Slott seems to have written the series with the knowledge that he was toiling in a sort of bubble within the Marvel Universe. He puts words to that effect into Jennifer Walters’s mouth (and there is a new She-Hulk series starting in February, so we’ll see if that’s the case). But this willingness to grapple with comic book continuity (and an apparently frightening knowledge of it and its inconsistencies) is part of what makes the comic so compelling. Yes, on one level it appears to be more of the insular continuity obsessed dreck that weights down too many titles and definitely Marvel’s big “event” series, but rather than take it seriously, Slott brings the discrepancies and ethical slips to the fore as a way to invigorate his stories with pleasing ambiguity. The inclusion of material comics within the comic narratives lets those ambiguities exist as the seeds of possibility rather than mistakes to be fixed. Peter Parker profiting from his constant defrauding of Daily Bugle publisher, J. Jonah Jameson, the fact that half the beings in the universe were killed by Thanos (and later brought back), the existence of Duckworld, cosmic beings like the Living Tribunal, the contradictory fates of the Leader, and following up with undeveloped characters and stories that have their origins in crap like Jim Shooter’s Secret Wars—all of these things are explored in Slott’s She-Hulk series not with the pedantic obsession of the stereotypical comic nerd, but with good-natured humor and critical nostalgia.

Another aspect of the series that works in its favor (and that has often worked in the favor of some of the best superhero titles) is its strong supporting cast—fellow lawyers Augustus “Pug” Pugliese and Mallory Book, “Awesome Andy” (formerly the Mad Thinker’s Awesome Android) as a general office worker, Two-Gun Kid (the time-displaced former Avenger cowboy) as a form of bounty-hunter/bailiff, Ditto the shape-shifting gopher, comic book-obsessed law library interns, and Southpaw, the angsty teenaged super-villain granddaughter of one of the firm’s partners all serve as interesting companions and foils to She-Hulk. In addition there is a whole range of guest appearances ranging from Hercules to Damage Control to The Leader to a then dead (and later returned) Hawkeye. She-Hulk seeks to embrace, rather than obfuscate, the over-the-top and often incoherent mess of the Marvel Universe.

It is impossible to put myself in a position of someone unfamiliar with the history of the Marvel Universe to know if She-Hulk is the kind of series you can enjoy without that deep knowledge, but I think you can even if you have just some knowledge—even just a passing familiarity with the tropes of the superhero genre would be sufficient (as it is sufficient for an appreciation of something like Alan Moore’s Top Ten). Like any other valuable work, from Shakespeare’s to Junot Diaz’s, knowledge of its many allusions and references improves and deepens comprehension, but is not wholly necessary. Ultimately, the crazy details, characters and events of past stories that Slott dredges up are so absurd and contradictory that for all we know as readers they could be made up on the spot.

Whatever the case, Dan Slott’s She-Hulk is the kind of series that is probably best for long-time fans of Marvel Comics, who still look back fondly on its stories and characters, but have grown up enough to admit their absurdity and their reflection of problematic attitudes. Yes, She-Hulk exists within the skein of the Marvel Universe, and thus may be an example of what Lauren Berlant would call “cruel optimism.” This is when ”the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it”—the “scene of desire” in this case being an entertaining and adult superhero comic book immersed in its convoluted continuity—as what there is to work with often recapitulates the very problems the reworking is trying to overcome. And yes, there is not much creators can do within that skein to make lasting change to an editorial approach and historical context that reinforces the social attitudes that makes She-Hulk “a skank” while Tony Stark is a “playboy.” But Slott’s work does work to question those attitudes in an explicit and entertaining way, even if when it comes time to answer them (like in the panels above) suddenly Zzzax strikes again.

Queer Silence and the Killing Joke

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Osvaldo Oyola

Recently, as part of an interview with Kevin Smith, Grant Morrison claimed that all these years no one has gotten the ending of Alan Moore and and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke (1988). Morrison claims that those obscured and silent final three panels are meant to suggest that Batman is finally killing the Joker—breaking his neck or strangling him. In other words, The Killing Joke is a form of final Batman story. In the interview Kevin Smith reacts to this interpretation as if it were some form of big revelation that utterly changes the framework for understanding the story. The reaction on the web was mostly similar, just look here and here and here. Comment threads on stories reporting this were filled with a lot of speculation about how this killing interpretation holds up in light of the fact that some of the events from The Killing Joke (like the crippling of Barbara Gordon) made their way into the main Batman continuity, because clearly the Joker is not dead.

I think it an adequate, but nevertheless anemic interpretation. Sure, the killing exists as a possibility, but other and more sweetly radical possibilities might actually redeem (in part) a great, but flawed book, that Moore himself later repudiated. The Killing Joke is built on the uncertainty inherent to the serialized superhero comic book medium, so we can’t look to what was included or not included from it in the main continuity as evidence of the acceptability of Morrison’s interpretation, because the book itself works to remind us of how the history constructed by long-running serialized properties are incoherent. No. I think the interpretation’s weakness comes from being an unimaginative ending to the Batman story. The Killing Joke reminds us that as a series of events the Batman story makes no sense, but rather it coheres through the recurring structural variations within that history. Moore is having Batman and Joker address that structure in a winking and self-referential way. Violence, even killing, is already a central part of the recurring interactions of these characters (how many times has the Joker appeared to die only to return?), so why give weight to an interpretation claimed as an end that only gives us more of what already explicitly pervades the entire genre—violence? Instead, a close “listening” to how Moore and Bolland use sound (particularly, the lack of it in certain key panels) to highlight the queerness of the Batman/Joker relationship provides the reader with a different way to interpret those final panels.

I contend that rather than indicating violence, that final silence is recapitulating an intimacy between the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime that is found in several silent panels throughout the work and that echoes the intimacy implicit in the structure of the Batman/Joker relationship. As such, in the end, when the Joker tells the joke that makes Batman join in the laughter, when the Batman grabs the Joker by the shoulders and the panels shift their perspective to show the Joker’s hand kind of reaching out towards Batman’s cape amid the depiction of their laughter and the approaching sirens, followed by a panel that shows only their feet (and a wisp of Batman’s cape), and then finally just silence amid raindrops making circles in a dirty street, instead of violence, I imagine they are locked in a passionate embrace and kiss.

In his book, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock does a great job of breaking down how The Killing Joke is structured in a such a way to comment on the contradictions, misprision and re-imaginings that pervade the histories of these characters. While Moore’s comic plays on the idea of the Joker and Batman being two-sides of the same coin—two men playing out their psychotic breaks in different (but dangerously violent) ways after experiencing “one bad day”—the profound similarity between the two is one that emerges from the structures of the serialized medium they appear in (and in the multiple mediums versions of these characters have appeared in over the years). They both have deeply entwined “multiple choice pasts” that outside of their individual encounters of repeated conflict makes for a farraginous and incoherent history. It is the structure of the relationship and the homosocial desire it represents that provides a foundation for understanding their stories regardless of the confusion of how long it has really been going on and what from it may or may not really “count.”

The Killing Joke is an even more brutal and direct indictment of the superhero genre’s state of arrested development than Watchmen (1987) was. Moore’s work seems to want to drain any remaining appeal from their accreted and subsequently problematic histories by appearing to complete the trajectory that Batman expresses concern about in the text itself. Unfortunately for Moore, however, it didn’t quite work. A work built on highlighting the artifice of the comic pastiche becomes something of a lauded lurid spectacle. Even though The Killing Joke seems to consciously want to stand outside of continuity it nevertheless falls victim to continuities’ power to assimilate or exclude narrative events. Thus, the maiming of Barbara Gordon and the suggestion that she’s raped were later rehabilitated into the main continuity of the Batman line (wheelchair-bound, she becomes the superhero dispatcher, archivist and IT-tech, Oracle). So, in the same vein it is not outside the realm of possibility that Grant Morrison could be right and the death of the Joker has simple been excluded from continuity in the same way that “official” history ignores Bat-Mite or the Rainbow-colored Batman costume. However, within the skein of The Killing Joke itself, the possibility of a kiss, of a breaching of the limits of their homosocial bonds to transform it into a homosexual one not only fits within the structure of their relationship, but levels a more powerful indictment against the pathologies of repression and violence that pervade the genre.

Batman killing the Joker may be a suddenly popular interpretation of the end of The Killing Joke because many readers seem uncomfortable with the unresolved ending of the two of them standing in the rain laughing until their laughter fades away under the howl of an approaching siren and then becomes silence. For some, for Batman to laugh along with Joker is too “out-of-character” and/or shows that the Joker is right all along—the world is an unjust and disordered place and for Batman to think he can provide order by dressing up as a bat and beating people up is as crazy as running around performing random and outlandish acts of violence as a way to get a laugh. But I see that shared laughter as indicative of not only an unresolved narrative tension, but also sexual tension. It is a “here-we-are-again-drawn-together-but-at-an-impasse” kind of laugh (which is an echo of the joke itself). Sure, the idea that Batman and Robin had/are having some kind of sexual relationship has long existed, but there is a kind of rough intimacy to the Joker and Batman relationship that makes me agree with Frank Miller that their relationship is “a homophobic nightmare.” Joker can be seen to represent what happens when you allow queerness free reign, Batman when it is closeted. They are both extreme reactions to a comic book world where queerness is defined as deviancy, and as such deviant behavior is the only way to express the queerness underlying their relationship. Any chance to express intimacy outside of those confines is engulfed in silence, and it is by seeking out these silences in the text (or how sound and silence interact) that this special bond between them is demarcated.

TKJ-hands

The book opens with three straight pages (22 panels) without a word of dialog and no narration. Instead we have the typical establishing shots that perfectly capture the prison for the insane/sanitarium trope used whenever the Arkham Asylum set piece appears. Batman is not here to solve a mystery or quell a riot. He arrives to pay a personal visit to the Joker. When the silence is finally broken, Batman speaks. “Hello. I came to talk.” This is a profound reversal. The panels here alternate between a normally taciturn Batman doing all the talking—expressing his feelings, seeming almost desperate in his desire to reach the Joker—and the normally boisterous talkative Joker being silent. The scene is punctuated by the the “FNAP” of the Joker putting down cards in a game of solitaire. The scene has the rhythm of a tense discussion regarding a topic long in the air, but only finally broached by an anxious or disillusioned lover. There is a desperation and emotionalism that seems to emerge from long contemplation on the part of Batman about his relationship to the Joker. The visit suggests that Batman has come to accept that violence will not resolve the conflict between their extreme reactions to a queer identity. When the man in the cell turns out not to be the Joker at all, but a double duped into taking his place while the real Joker escapes, that moment melts back into something like the “typical” Batman and Joker story. Joker has escaped and needs to be captured before he accomplishes some outlandish and murderous scheme.

This time, the Joker’s outlandish plan involves driving Commissioner Gordon mad as a way to get Batman to admit their similarity through madness. The image of the Commissioner stripped naked and made to wear a studded leather bondage collar does a lot to equate madness and queerness run rampant. The Joker’s desire for Batman to “come out” and admit they are the same echoes a dichotomy between the closeted and the “out” individual. The Batman character is largely about his secret identity, the construction of a hyper-hetero playboy cover for his life in spandex and a mask, tackling, wrestling and binding (mostly) other men in the guise of combating criminal deviance. He is homophobia turned inward. The Joker on the other hand has no identity outside of being the Joker. He embraces his mad flamboyance and doesn’t see it as deviant, but as a different form of knowledge about a world that could create him and/or Batman. The Joker is dangerously queer and that is his allure. He is the manifestation of licentiousness that homophobia conjures when it imagines queerness.

Even the past given to the Joker in The Killing Joke reinforces this idea. Sure, he is given a pregnant wife in the version depicted, but her death frees him from the yoke of a heteronormative life as much as being chased into a chemical vat by Batman does. It is suggested that losing his wife is just as much to blame for Joker’s particular madness, but the real clincher is Joker’s assertion regarding his past: “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!” Despite the choice between these varied pasts, what remains constant is the centrality of Batman to the Joker becoming who he is, which helps to fuel the Joker’s desire to have their relationship be of primary importance in Batman’s life (as it is in his). Whatever violence the Joker commits, whatever other desires he may evince, they are subsumed in that primary desire. In a genre where beginnings and endings are written, erased and rewritten so as to become a palimpest, it is the recurring structure of the characters’ engagements that define them more than any sense of origin or goal.

This intimacy explains the uncharacteristically intense tenderness with which Batman seeks to confront the Joker. When he catches the Joker near the story’s end, Batman finally gets to broach the subject, to bring up the issue that precipitated his attempted visit with the Joker earlier. He says, “Do you understand? I don’t want to hurt you,” and makes the offer: “We could work together. I could rehabilitate you. You needn’t be out there on the edge anymore. You needn’t be alone.”

Look at the panel right after Batman makes that offer. There is a vulnerability to how the Joker is depicted. He is slightly hunched as if suddenly aware of the cold rain, his eyes are in shadow as if to hide tears and he is looking at Bats from over his shoulder with a frown that is at odds with his usual exaggerated grin. It is perhaps one of the few (if not only) human moments between these two characters and it is a silence.

The strange thing about Batman’s offer that the Joker contemplates in heavy silence is that “out there on the edge” exactly where Batman lives as well. The offer to rehabilitate the Joker is also an offer to rehabilitate himself—to rid them both of the desires that repeatedly and destructively bring them together. This is Batman as Brokeback Mountain. By making this speech, Batman is revealing himself to be something of a hypocrite, unless he means to find someway to admit his own flaws and overcome his own secrets, to really become a part of the “togetherness” that he suggests can help the two of them to avert their fate. The Joker refuses, saying “it is too late for that. . . far too late.”

Silence marks several other important panels throughout the work, including Batman’s wistful look at the portrait of the anachronistic “Bat-Family.” The picture (made to emulate a Bob Kane sketch) depicts characters that no longer existed in the main continuity at that time. The original Batwoman and Bat-Girl (not Barbara Gordon) were editor-mandated creations—romantic interests for Bruce and Dick in order to combat the accusation of Frederic Wertham that Batman and Robin are a “wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” The inclusion of the portrait serves to destabilize the notion of coherent history that the whole of The Killing Joke is working at. But it is also a signal of the need in the past for Batman to have a “beard” written into the story to deflect gay accusations. It is a reminder that even the lighthearted era of the (now false) Bat-Family was part of a structure of secrets and lies meant to cover for fear of a repressed desire. The nostalgia of this scene is laid with irony, since the call to a simplistic normative family is belied by the constructed nature of that “family” and the queerness of their life of masks and costumes.

Even the most contentious scene in the graphic novel, the brutal shooting of Barbara Gordon, leading to her disrobing, (likely) rape and photographing, is attended to in silence. Now, I think the scene itself is part of what makes The Killing Joke flawed. Its brutal treatment of a beloved female character, who has been shown on more than one occasion to be able to hold her own, is egregious. The sexualization of the violence against her also serves to give the scene just the kind of morbid appeal that plagues a lot of contemporary comics, and distracts from the ways The Killing Joke can be seen as a (re)visionary text. It is completely unnecessary for Moore to make his point. Yet, regardless of its failure, the scene’s silence casts it as part of that unspoken attraction between Batman and the Joker. Like an especially twisted reference to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), this is a love triangle, with Barbara playing the proxy for the desire between the “rival suitors.” Sedgwick writes, “in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power. . . this special relationship may take the form of ideological homophobia, ideological homosexuality, or some highly conflicted but intensively structured combination of the two” (25). Thus, the maiming and violating of Barbara Gordon is not about her at all, but about the Joker’s desire for Batman. She is the proxy through which this desire is expressed as it literally serves to summon Batman to attend to him so they may take up their “highly conflicted, but intensively structured” relationship. It is this very structure that helps the Batman oeuvre to cohere despite its historical ambiguity.

The silence of those two final panels echoes the silence immediately following Batman’s offer, just as it parallels the silence that attends many of the scenes that highlight their intimacy. The silence is a recapitulation of that moment of tender vulnerability seen in the Joker as he contemplates the offer, and I think that silence is best filled not with violence —violence is loud and obvious and strewn throughout The Killing Joke and the entirety of the Batman canon—but rather with tender love. The silence is the signal for that which cannot be depicted or spoken aloud. It is an actual act of bravery on the part of Batman, proving to Joker that it is not yet “too late.” The Killing Joke’s abundant self-awareness regarding the incoherence of comic history also suggests an incoherent future where anything is possible as long as it can be enclosed in the broad structures of their relation—even Batman and the Joker as lovers. That—not violence, not a killing—would be an end to the Batman story as we know it.

I don’t see the kiss as the definitive action of those panels—I can’t say what really happens in because there is no “really happened”—but find it much more profound than killing. The kiss is a more delightfully radical possibility than the usual violence of the genre. It upends their entire history, but somehow still fits within its skein. The off-panel action remains unseen because that’d be a real end. Violence doesn’t change anything in superhero comics, it is a normalizing force that builds routine, and killing is just the beginning of a come-back story. It is love that transforms. Sure, it would be best if superheroes could move beyond the pathologizing of queerness, but to even have a chance to imagine a world where Batman and the Joker could both be saved from their violent self-destructive spiral through loving each other is too wonderful to dismiss.
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Osvaldo Oyola is a native Brooklynite. As a kid in the early 80s, in the days before people got the idea that they might be worth something, he would scour flea markets and yard sales for cheap old comics from the 60s and 70s. These days he’s still obsessed with Bronze Age comics, but mostly for how they represent race, gender, and urban spaces. He is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on the intersection of pop culture and ethnic identity in contemporary transnational American literature, writing on Los Bros Hernandez, Junot Diaz and Jonathan Lethem. He still lives in Brooklyn, with his poet wife and cats named for Katie and Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He writes briefish thoughts on comics, music and race on his blog, The Middle Spaces.

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