Tag Archives: Superman

Voices From the Archive: Matt Thorn on Jack Kirby

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Translator and manga scholar Matt Thorn replied to some of my thoughts on Jack Kirby a while back. I thought I’d reprint his comments here (I’ve added some markers just to make it clear who’s speaking.

[Noah:] He [Jack Kirby] draws awesome monsters, though. Which is no small thing, and which I really appreciate about him.

Matt Thorn:What you said. Kirby was much, much better (IMHO) at drawing the ugly and grotesque than at drawing the beautiful, which is probably why D.C. took the embarrassing step of having someone re-draw Kirby’s Superman. I prefer Kirby’s take, but the whole thing about Superman is that he’s all shiny and handsome and sparkly, right? Kirby’s Superman looks like a college wrestler with a chip on his shoulder. Which is very cool, but, yeah, not the image of Superman D.C. wants to convey (then or now). The Thing is probably the character that is most iconically Kirby in my mind. Grotesque, and yet sympathetic, and somehow just very cool, in a very anti-Superman kind of way.

[Noah:] Haney’s not subtle, and the quality varies obviously. But he’s way more attuned to a world outside his skull than Kirby is.

[Matt Thorn:] Noah, I think you nailed it there. Kirby seems unable to successfully step outside of the world inside his own skull. His half-hearted attempt to write “groovy slang” illustrates that he didn’t know much about or really care much about the world outside his skull, at least not after WWII. And that is of course fine. As others have noted above, many great artists are enormously successful at being what I controversially characterized as “self-indulgent,” and what Mike more generously characterized as doing work that is “personally meaningful to them.” Whether you see it as a feature or a bug, I think it’s fair to say that Kirby’s worlds are more or less self-contained, and while they may speak to “the human condition” at large, he was never one whose work really reflected the world outside his door.

Which, AGAIN, is PERFECTLY OKAY.

 

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Superman vs. the Zeitgeist

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As you may or may not know, Clark Kent apparently quit his job to become a blogger. It’s gotten a lot of mainstream media play (because the media likes to talk about the death of media, and bloggers like to talk about the rise of bloggers, natch.) Tim Hodler at TCJ is less impressed:

—Apparently Clark Kent quit his job or something? I’m not going to link to them (such behavior should not be rewarded), but newspapers are actually reporting on this comic-book plot point as if it is news. This continual urge on the part of the media to treat fictional events as newsworthy developments is the one thing comics as an art form has going for it that no other American art form seems to, but boy does it seem dumb.

Like Tim, I’m not going to read this comic. But I think most of his other comments here are kind of confused. First of all, other media get treated as newsworthy all the time. Movie releases are huge, high profile news events with no small frequency. Many media outlets (the Atlantic, for example) regularly devote space to episode recaps of television shows; the twist on Homeland was big enough news that I know there was a twist on Homeland even though I actually know just about literally nothing about Homeland. That stupid Aaron Sorkin show (the “Newsroom” right?) was reported on in much the same way the Superman-leaving-news is being reported on; that is, it was a media-enthusiastically-covering-the-media story. In fact, from the one page Andrew Sullivan is reproducing, the media reporting on entertainment is actually the reason Clark is leaving the Daily Planet — a nicely incestuous meta-twist to the nicely incestuous meta-memeness of it all.
 

 
In fact, I’d say that comics is actually far less likely to get these kinds of stories into mainstream outlets than other mass-entertainment — for the very logical reason that comics is a lot less popular than television or film or (for that matter) sports. It’s because having a story like this in the mainstream is novel that it’s noticeable.

Moreover, I’d say that getting media attention is a sign that DC is doing something right. Pulp entertainment is supposed to slavishly and shamelessly follow the zeitgeist; it’s supposed to be about whatever stupid shiny thing happens to be in the news. Mainstream comics are actually pretty bad at doing this, partly because they’re built around 40-70 year old characters, and mostly because their fanbase is incredibly hermetic and insular.

So a storyline like this — which effectively panders to a great big audience rather than to the same old tiny audience — seems like a step forward, to me. Someday, maybe, in some golden dawn, mainstream pulp comics can rise out of their subterranean level of shittiness, and attain the relatively elevated mediocre shittiness of 24 or Homeland or Breaking Bad. Dare to dream.

Update: Tim has interesting clarifications in comments, as do several other folks, so please be sure to scroll down.

The Real Action

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Has anyone “really” read Action #1?

This question — on the face if it, a rather strange one — was raised by cartoonist and scholar Don Simpson, comic book artist and art historian, on the COMIXSCHOLARS-L list serve maintained at the University of Florida just a few days ago. (And if you haven’t signed up for the list yet, what are you waiting for? After all, the only requirement for membership is an intellectual interest in comic-art.) The context for Don’s question was a thread devoted to what is nowadays an increasingly contentious issue for lovers of all kinds of literature: the shift from print to digital culture. More specifically, we were discussing the aesthetic and formal consequences of that shift, debating the losses and gains, and considering the question of when and whether the transformation in the material instantiation of comics (from print to screen) constitutes a fundamental transformation of the comic art form itself. (I say “we,” but the truth is I was mostly lurking, while letting others handle the heavy lifting; my usual mode.)

The terms of the debate may seem rarified, but the stakes were high. For example, if a given comic was originally designed for the medium of print, and you have “only” read it in an electronic format on a screen, is there a sense in which it might be said you have not “really read” it at all? (And I apologize now for the proliferation of scare-quotes in that sentence; I’m just trying to avoid leading the witness. As I hope will become clear, my purpose is not to diminish the glories of the digital archive, nor to romanticize the encounter with print, but to insist nevertheless that the differences between these two modes of transmission are worth thinking about.)

The challenge of this question will be familiar to anyone who has ever debated film with a true cinephile; it’s a variant on the insistence that if you didn’t see a movie in a real-live public movie theatre, then you didn’t really see it. It is hard not to respond to such challenges defensively; after all, they question the validity of our experiences, implying that our encounter with the artwork in question was in some way impoverished, and hence less than fully legitimate. Very quickly, such conversations can degenerate into debates about the relative merits of the opposed technologies of transmission, and the larger, more abstract questions — “what does it mean to have ‘seen a movie’?” or “what does it mean to have ‘read a comic’?” — get sidelined.

But Don hit upon a provocative way of re-framing the debate. Instead of contrasting print with digital comics, he pointed out that there is obviously a difference between reading a copy of Action #1 from 1938, and reading a facsimile or reprint. But while the majority of people have not had and will never have the first experience, Don felt that “one would be hard pressed to argue that of the thousands if not millions who have read some kind of facsimile edition of greater or poorer quality are somehow missing out on some ontological dimension of great import.”

Partly because I just like playing devil’s advocate, but more because I was inspired by Don’s initial observation — that hardly anyone alive today can be said to have “really” read Action #1 — I fired off a response to the list suggesting that there were some important and even fundamental (if not necessarily ontological) dimensions worthy of our consideration when comparing the experiences of these different readers. Good ol’ Noah Berlatsky read it, and invited me to resubmit my thoughts here; and so, for what it’s worth, I offer up the ruminations that Don’s provocation inspired in me, only slightly tweaked for public consumption.
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Whether you can afford to read an insanely priced original copy of Action #1 (and that oxymoronic phrase, “original copy,” already suggests that we are in philosophically paradoxical territory), or whether you have read a facsimile of the entire book, or whether (like most of us) you have only read the Superman story, sans commercials and accompanying adventure strips, in a modern reprint collection such as the DC Archive Edition — or (indeed) whether you have read Action #1 in some version online — it was clearly a very different experience to read Action #1 in the late Spring or early Summer of 1938.

That difference is obviously partly a function of history — which is why it wouldn’t be the same thing to read the “original” comic today, even if you happen to be one of those members of the 1% who can afford to buy that particular thrill. But for most of us, the different reading experience is not simply or only a matter of temporal distance. The text that we have read is likely to be significantly materially different from that of the “original”: if we have read a print version, then we are talking about different paper stock; different standards of line reproduction; different color quality; different weight and heft, whether we are reading a hardcover or paperback; different surrounding contexts (most likely other Superman stories, rather than the generic mix of adventure tales that first accompanied the Man of Steel on the newsstands). If we are reading an electronic version, our experience will be still further transformed; we may have gained the ability to expand single panels to many times their usual size with the swipe of a finger, for example, even as we will have inevitably lost the phenomenological dimensions of the encounter with print.

I’m not sure that any one of these reading experiences could be said to be more authentic or legitimate in some absolute sense than any other. But on the other hand, I do think that when we write about comics critically, and especially when we teach them (something I am privileged to do as part of the University of Oregon’s Undergraduate Minor in Comics and Cartoon Studies), we are obligated to at least think about the experiential difference that these material differences make.

When I teach the first year of Superman stories from Action, using the (wonderfully practical and reasonably priced) Superman Chronicles Volume One collection from DC, I want students to understand that while my choice of text has put some interesting old comics in their hands, their reading experience will nevertheless be radically different from that of Siegel and Shuster’s first audiences. I therefore also ask them to read some excerpts from Gerard Jones’s Men of Tomorrow, so they can start to get a sense of those lost historical contexts. (Some of these are harder to invoke than others. For example, imagining the world before TV may be difficult for many of my students, as it is for me; sadly, however, it is easier for my students to identify with the experience of living through a profound economic depression.) I try to recreate some pop-cultural contexts, too, by lecturing about and providing examples of some of Superman’s literary and comic-strip precursors — things that were just part of Jerry and Joe’s consciousness but which are obviously obscure to most contemporary teenagers (newspaper adventures strips such as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, SF pulps, excerpts from Philip Wylie’s crappy novel, and so on).

But we also have an archive of Golden Age comics at the UO (left to us by Gardner Fox himself — and yes, it was a good day when I discovered that resource!). This archive includes copies of Action and Superman from as early as 1940 (as well as examples of early Flash Comics, Adventure Comics, and other cool stuff), and the last time I taught my course on the “Modern American Superhero” I built an assignment around it. The students were required at some point in the term to go to Special Collections, where the books are housed, and order up a 1940s superhero comic — I didn’t even specify a title — and then asked to write about the different experience of reading the “original” comic versus reading the modern reprints they have been assigned.

These essays were a treat to read. For a start, the students tended to write with more sensory and tactile awareness than was the norm in their other papers. They would find themselves describing the feel of the paper, even the smell of the paper, and the different quality of the colors as they appeared on newsprint. (Which is to say, they responded with enhanced aesthetic awareness, from the get go.) Almost without exception, they seemed compelled to talk about the strange advertisements and curious government-sanctioned messages they encountered interleaved between the stories. (Which is to say, they responded with a heightened sense of political and cultural transformation.) And many of them then went on to draw illuminating contrasts between the superhero strip that headlined the book they had chosen, and the accompanying adventure strips that made up the anthology in their hands. (Which is to say, they came away with a more acute sense of the generic contexts in which superhero comics were first established.) Some talked about the comics as paradoxical “time machines” that provided them with a glimpse of a lost historical reality even as they paraded a cavalcade of fantasies that never were.

Again, I would not mean to suggest that these students were having something closer to the “original aesthetic experience” of a person who read superhero comics in the 1940s — or to suggest that the experience of such a person should be regarded as more “authentic” than that of a contemporary reader. This discussion is not (or need not) lead to the reassertion of some metaphysics of presence by the backdoor. My point is simply that the students were having a different experience from that of reading a reprint or a digital scan. Moreover, this experience is one that, from a pedagogical and scholarly point of view, might be thought of as educational and productive — an experience that deepened their knowledge and appreciation of the history of the comics form, and the processes of comics reading.

It was also a privileged experience — no question. (I hadn’t read many golden age books before I discovered this archive, either.) And (to bring us back to the question of whether it matters whether you have read an “original” comic if you have “only” read it online), it is by no means obvious to me that many salient aspects of this experience could be reproduced digitally — even if we were to scan the “original” books in their entirety.

If I may be allowed to invoke a parallel from my own education: when I was trained as a scholar of Renaissance Literature, I was required to spend some time setting type by hand for an old-school letter press, working from a piece of manuscript written in Elizabethan secretary hand. The project was not scrupulous in its historical verisimilitude; the press itself dated from the 18th century rather than the 16th, for example, although the systems were still close enough for the purposes of my teachers. I blush now to recall how petulant and dismissive I was about this assignment at the time; it seemed only a short step away from dressing up for an SCA gathering, and I couldn’t imagine what I would learn from it. But actually this forced encounter with an older printing technology actually taught me a huge amount, very quickly, and in a way that stuck. I learned in a practical way about the differences between early modern printed books and modern mass-market paperbacks. I learned how errors occurred, and how difficult it was to correct those errors even once they had been noticed. I felt first hand the temptation to set verse as prose, for reasons of expedience, and to tamper with authorial spelling and syntax rather than undo and re-set a whole page of type to correct a mistake I had noticed too late. I came to understand in a phenomenological way the differences involved when reading, say, a modern edition of Othello versus the (radically different) print versions that we have from early 17th century. In short, it was an experience that made me a stronger reader of Shakespeare (and other early modern writers), from a scholarly point of view — much better placed to interpret and contest contemporary editorial choices.

So: at the risk of repeating myself — to ask students to be aware of the differences that both material and cultural contexts make in the reception of texts is not necessarily to argue for the privileged “authenticity” of a particular instantiation of the text. It is not to elevate the experience of print over the experience of digital texts on the grounds of a mystified or fetishistic understanding of the “original” book. It is simply to insist that how and when and in what form you encounter something makes a difference; and to insist further than once you become aware of those differences, your whole response to that artwork can change.

As comics scholars today, we live in a true “golden age” of reprints from quality publishers such as IDW and Fantagraphics — while the digital archives of sites such as comicbookplus.com have made available an incredible range of rare materials: comics I had only read about or seen cover images for; comics I never knew existed. Faced with such an embarrassment of four-color riches, it is easy to forget (or repress) the potential difference that the material instantiation of those comics makes to the reading experience. But Donald Simpson’s observation that, in an important way, very few of could be said to have “really read” Action #1 reminded me of those differences (even though I think Don was ultimately making a different point).

It’s a counter-intuitive observation that raises issues that, for me, are more epistemological than ontological; it goes less to the question of “What is a comic?” and more to the question of “What is reading?” What do we mean when we say we have read something? Again, the question may seem rarified and abstract, but the stakes remain high (I personally believe the world would be a better place if more people asked how it is they think they “know” stuff, after all).

To put it another way; while most of the time it’s probably not that big a deal, there are circumstances in which it might be considered a problem that most people who would claim to have read Action #1 have in fact “really” “only” looked at a modern reprint of the Superman story that Action #1 contained. Not to say that this itself would not be a worthwhile thing to have done; in fact, if you have done it, then if nothing else you have already met the minimum requirement for one of my classes. But the kind of reading I am trying to encourage is finally a little more imaginatively and historically engaged than that.

For the record, and lest I be misunderstood, it may be worth reiterating that I have no problem with digital comics, and am not speaking against them. I read quite a few and when print versions are unavailable or prohibitively expensive I require my students to read PDFs on their computers.

But I think that as comics scholars and critics, we need to remember that the experience of reading a comic digitally is not the same as reading it in print; and that the experience of reading a reprint is not the same as encountering an “original” comic; and further, that reading a printed comic is not the same as actually being lucky enough to look at original production art (something else I try to make possible for students by bringing in examples of original comic art, and organizing exhibitions of the stuff). Good critical work on comics must remain conscious of these differences. This is not an elitist position or a metaphysically dubious one. It is merely a scholarly one.

Force For Good

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I’ve recently finished reading Ben Saunders’ book, Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. It’s a really enjoyable study. The chapter on the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman in particular filled me with bitter envy; I wish I had written it, or that if I had it would have been done so thoughtfully.

Anyway, perhaps in recompense for my blighted hopes, I thought I’d talk a little about the non Marston-Peter parts of the book and about some differences I have with it. In doing so, I’m going to refer to Ben as “Ben”, because we’ve been corresponding, and so it feels weird to call him by his last name. Hopefully he won’t resent this or other liberties.

So as the title of the book implies Do the Gods Wear Capes? looks at superheroes in terms of religion. However, Ben is not (thank God) adding to the dreary discourse which attempts to validate superheroes by asserting that they are modern myths. Rather, he makes the much more interesting claim that superheroes are myths about modernity. To quote his conclusion at some length:

Superheroes do not render sacred concepts in secular terms for a skeptical modern audience, as is sometimes claimed. They do something more interesting; they deconstruct the oppositions between sacred and secular, religion and science, god and man, the infinite and the finite, by means of an impossible synthesis. They are therefore fantasy solutions to some of the central dichotomies of modernity itself. A cynic might conclude that the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy such fantasies applies no less to their unlikely depictions of ethical perfection as it does to the spectacle of men and women who can fly, climb walls, and see through satellites. But, less cynically, we might instead interpret these stories as testaments to the strength of not just our will-to-power, but also of our will-to-love — our will-to-kindness, concern and decency. The dream of the superhero is not just a dream of flying, not just a dream about men and women who wield the powers of the gods. It’s also a dream about men and women who never give up the struggle to be good. W.B. Yeats once wrote, “in dreams begin responsibilities.” But perhaps possibilities of all kinds begin in dreams. And perhaps among these possibilities there is still the prospect of a spiritual awakening — even from within the skeptical, rationalist, materialist assumptions of modernity.

Ben works this theory through in terms of a number of characters…but he starts, logically enough, with Superman. For Ben, Superman isn’t defined as the quintessence of strength or the quintessence of power — rather he’s defined by “essential goodness”. Various creators have attempted to struggle with what “essential goodness” means in various ways. Ben talks about the early Siegel/Schuster issues, in which Superman beat up capitalists, suggesting an uneasy antagonism between the good and the democratic/capitalist institutions of the United States. In the 1950s, Ben says, Superman comics linked “the good” and the United States in a more straightforward manner (“Turth, Justice, and the American Way!”) Later, in the 70s and 80s, creators who worked on Superman struggled with his establishment image. For instance, Ben points to the Eliot S! Maggin story “Must There Be a Superman?” in which Superman is told by the Guardians of the Universe that his presence on earth is hurting the moral development of humanity, and in which he is confronted with the moral dilemma of how, or whether, to encourage migrant farm workers to organize.

People often argue that superheroes are dumb because they’re simplistic; because they create a bone-headed binary between good and evil. Ben’s argument is that, in fact, Superman stories have traditionally not so much asserted as investigated this binary. In the light of late modernity, as religion has faded, Superman asks “how can human beings be good?”

Ben finds one of the most effective answers in the Morrison/Quiteley All-Star Superman, in which Superman-as-reporter=Clark-Kent visits Lex Luthor in prison. Luthor spends the entire visit boasting about his greatness and threatening Superman and so forth. Unbeknownst to Luthor, though, riots and chaos are breaking out in the prison around him, and Superman-as-Clark has to save his life repeatedly. Ben concludes:

At such poignant moments, we see that only Luthor’s vanity could allow him to think of Superman as his enemy. In fact, Superman is his gentle savior — so gentle that even as he preserves Luthor’s life, Superman allows him to maintain his illusions of power and control. Thus, through Luthor, we see that Superman’s devotion to humanity is such that even the worst of us will always be treated with infinite patience and compassion. The results are both funny and moving, and leave the reader in no doubt as to the most incredible aspect of Superman’s character. Few human beings are ever so good. This, perhaps, is the final, paradoxical lesson that we can draw from the 70 years and more of Superman’s adventures — that it may be easier to fly, to see through walls, and to outrace a speeding bullet, than it is to love your enemy.

The sentence that most stays with me from that paragraph is this: “Few human beings are ever so good.” I like it’s simple wistfulness, and I like the way it suggests that, while few are, some might be — that goodness is, after all, something we can share with Superman. Being good isn’t a fantasy. It’s something people can strive for.

But while I like that sentiment, I also feel it’s perhaps a little misleading. Because while human beings can be good, they can’t actually be good in the way that Superman is being good in Ben’s description. The goodness Superman offers, in Ben’s telling, is the goodness of providing complete physical protection while simultaneously allowing the object of that protection to not know what is happening. Obviously there’s a metaphorical sense in which this could happen — anonymous charity, for example. But, in the first place, we’re not reading about anonymous charitable donations, and part of the reason we’re not reading about anonymous charitable donations is, surely, because we would rather watch Superman exercise his many, many superabilities. And, in the second place, even the “anonymous charity” analogy is a vision of the good dependent on a disproportion of power.

Ben is attempting to disaggregate. He looks for the most essential superquality, and that quality is goodness. All the others — strength, speed, flight, superbreath, and on and on — are just gilding on the basic concept. Superman is not about the powers. He’s about the good.

But what if, instead, he’s about both? Or what if, even, the good is essentially one of his powers? Tom Crippen suggests something like this in his own take on Superman and modernity.

Superman has a fine temperament and a lovely smile. It’s not a question of him personally being cold. I saw him on the cover of a kids’ book of math problems, or possibly it was a display ad for an insurance company. But he was taking off into the air and looking delighted about it, and why not? The reaction was perfectly right for him. He’s agreeable and fun loving; that’s not the whole of his personality, but the stuff is in there. It’s there along with all the other qualities the best sort of personality would have. You can assume the presence of all of them, whatever they are; they’re implied, and any of them can surface. If Superman flies off looking keen and determined, that suits him too. So the problem isn’t so much that Superman himself is pompous, either in his icon form or as a continuing-story character. It’s that, as a character, he seems like an afterthought to himself. Everything about him is derived in such a straight line from the central premise—this man is super—that there’s not much point to experiencing him.

Tom sums up the point by saying that Superman, “By definition, by being super, he is the best of whatever comparison he finds himself in. If he is one of two large men, he is the best—that is, strongest—of the two of them.”
By the same token, there are two good people in a room, Superman is the most good.

And part of the reason he is the most good, I think, is because he is also the most strong. The goodness of Superman can’t be disaggregated from the superness; the two are intertwined, and that intertwining has meaning. If the ultimate good is the ultimate force, then it seems logical to conclude that goodness and force rely upon each other.

Here’s another take on force and heroism from Simone Weill’s The Iliad, Or The Poem of Force.

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does, for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter. The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in a desert…

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it. The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.

There is one Superman tale I can think of that captures some of Weill’s insight into force. That would be Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” In this “imaginary” story, Superman deliberately kills an overpowering enemy..and then, in expiation, exposes himself to gold kryptonite, destroying his powers. Here, force and goodness are definitively separated; the first, as Weill suggests, must be cast off if the second is to survive. But when force disappears, so does Superman. What’s left is a good man who is not a superhero — a good man who decisively declares “Superman was overrated. Too wrapped up in himself. Thought the world couldn’t get along without him.” At that point, the comic ends. Superman is still supergood, but he can no longer perform superfeats…and the superfeats were, as it turns out, the point.

I think Ben would respond to this by saying that superhero comics have confronted these very issues — that they explicitly question the goodness of power. Ben talks about this most directly in his last chapter, which focuses on Iron Man (aka Tony Stark). Ben notes that from his inception, Iron Man expressed

ambivalence towards technology — desired as a source of power, but feared and resented, as the cause of a crippling dependency for those who rely upon it…. [This is a] fundamental element of the original version of the Iron Man character — built into his armor, we might say, in the form of his chest plate, which is not only the main energy source for the suit, but also prevents the inoperable fragments of shrapnel embedded in his chest during his days in Vietnam from reaching his heart and killing him. Tony Stark’s very life depends on this piece of equipment; consequently, he can never remove it, amking it a resonant symbol of the double-edged nature of his techno-dependence, as well as a literal barrier to intimacy.

Ben argues that this ambivalence about technology — ultimately an ambivalence about power and humanity’s wielding of power — cryztallized in a 1979 storyline by David Michelinie, Bob Layton, and John Romita, Jr. known as Demon in a Bottle. The story centered on Stark’s effort to get out of the armaments industry, and the government’s subsequent plot to take over control of his company. In addition, the arc follows Tony’s struggles with alcoholism. In the story, Ben argues, dependence on alcohol and dependence on technology are linked. Both alcohol and the Iron Man suit are technologies of control; alcohol providing the illusion of control over one’s own emotional state, the suit providing the illusion of control over….well, everything else.

The cure for both forms of dependency, it turns out, is to acknowledge that the fantasies of radical independence — absolute power, total control, complete self-reliance — are just that: fantasies. The answer to the problem of negative dependence is therefore not the pursuit of independence…but the radical acceptance of interdependence.

In a virtuoso move, Ben then links this realization to the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous — an ideology which Ben argues is specifically focused on modernity’s obsession with control and power. Leslie Farber, a psychoanalyst whose theories were central to AA, is quoted by Ben as follows:

“Nietzsche, I believe, was not as interested in theological arguments about the disappearance of the divine will in our lives as he was in the consequences of its disappearance. Today the evidence is in. Out of disbelief we have impudently assumed that all of life is subject to our will. And the disasters that have come from willing what cannot be willed have not at all brought us to some modesty about our presumptions.

For AA, of course, the solution to this solipsistic mania for control is to put one’s faith in a nondenominational higher power — to acknowledge that one does not have the ultimate power over one’s own life, much less over the world. Ben links this realization to a Warren Ellis/Adi Granov Iron Man story from 2005, in which Stark experiences something like a crisis of faith, and is able to go on only by acknowledging the limits of his own power and knowledge. Stark in this story does not know that he is doing the right thing…but his uncertainty is itself the (ambivalent, uncertain, but still) sign of his goodness. Like a recovering alcoholic (which Stark is), the acknowledgment of his own limits allows him to function, and to function for good.

The problem, though, is precisely with the “function”. AA critiques alcohol as a technology of (false) control. But the solution it offers is a solution — which is to say, it is a technology itself. The 12-step program is a program, a system, a utilitarian fix. It specifically brackets content (what exactly is that higher power?) in the interest of getting the alcoholic back to becoming a functional member of society. As Ben says, AA does not insist on the existence of God, but rather “insists on the necessity of the God concept.” God is not a transcendent hope; he’s a convenient tool, like a socket wrench.

Tony Stark does not, then, take off his suit of armor to find vulnerability and connection; he takes off his suit of armor to put on a bigger, badder, better suit of armor. The acknowledgment of his dependence and powerlessness is not the beginning of a different kind of story. Tony Stark does not change his life; he is still committed to an existence where he gets up, suits up, and shoots bad guys in the face with repulsor rays. The change for Stark is simply a retooling; humility is a necessary pit stop on the way to greater feats of godlike power. The means, in this case, justify the end. AA is a part of, not a solution to, the technological pragmatism of modernity, in which even god is valued solely as a cog in an ever-more-functional machine.

That’s the case for superhero comics as well, I think. Ben is right when he sees superheroes as a myth of modernity. But I think he’s overly-optimistic when he sees in that myth a hopeful sign of a possible spiritual reawakening. Rather, it seems to me that superhero comics suggest not modernity’s possible salvation, but its depressing limits. For both superheroes and modernity are genres in which the good waits upon the powerful.

Bursting With Boredom

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Superman…unconscious?!

Kirby fans often note that his comics are bursting with ideas. And, after reading DC’s two volume 2003 collections of Kirby’s run on Jimmy Olsen, I can’t deny it. Lots and lots of stuff happens in these stories. There’s secret underground hippie biker lost realms, secret government clone projects, green Jimmy Olsen clones, scrappy fighting kids, miniature clones of scrappy fighting kids, gratuitous Scottish accents, extradimensional evil, extradimensional good, alternate versions of Don Rickles, tiny worlds populated by even tinier monster movie rejects,groovy hippie pads, loch ness monsters, evil tycoons, evil mad scientists, and and lord knows what else. Just about every page has enough plot points to keep a typical contemporary comic happy for a year.

And yet. All those ideas, all that frantic creativity — you read one page and it’s charming; you read two pages and it’s impressive — you read a whole comics worth, though, and it starts to get wearisome. Kirby’s stereo has one volume, and that volume is everything plus the kitchen sink plus a four-armed monster and an atomic explosion. Occasionally he throws in schticky banter, not so much as a break from the noise as to make you wish the noise would come back and the banterers would shut the fuck up. And then (mercifully or not) the plot’s back, racing, racing, racing to nowhere in particular.

Superman…unconscious?!

Because, the sad truth is that, for all of Kirby’s ideas, not a one of them goes anywhere or builds to anything or does anything except sit there saying, “Ayup! Here’s an idea!” The result is that, for all the wild rushing and hand waving (literally with the four-armed monster(!!!!)) these books are incredibly, deafeningly tedious and repetitive. Protagonists are beset by antagonist, protagonists are knocked unconscious/otherwise immobilized; protagonists come back and beat antagonists (or occasionally realize that antagonists are good guys.) Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It goes on and on, remorselessly, through more than 300 pages. Plot development, characterization, a point of any kind — forget it. Fight, setback, victory, fight, setback, victory. Epic.

Superman and Jimmy Olsen…unconscious?!

People often talk about the cosmic scale of Kirby’s comics. Maybe that’s true in some of his other work, but here the cosmic touches look suspiciously like the stupidest kind of fantasy/sci-fi cliches. Evil vs. good; dark vs. light. You can tell the bad guys because they say, “We’re bad guys!” and blow things up, whereas the good guys say “We’re good guys!” and blow things up. Also the good guys banter and the bad guys rant. The ranting is more fun than the banter, but not sufficiently more fun for me to care enough to root for one side or the other.

Marston/Peter were devoted to feminism and fetish; they had a ideological backdrop which informed and gave resonance to their nutty ideas. Bob Haney had a bizarrely idiosyncratic grasp on genre and the holes in genre which made his ideas stumble and bump against each other in a series of pratfalls which were both unexpected and meaningful. But Kirby, at least in the Jimmy Olsen series, has no ideological commitments to speak of, and when he uses genre — as in his use of vampires or werewolves — it’s carefully compartmentalized. The vampires and werewolves are from another world; Jimmy and Supes fight them and eventually help them, but they never really themselves end up in a horror story. Instead they fight, experience setbacks, and then attain victory.

I know what I’m really supposed to like in Kirby is the art. I’ve never really fallen in love with his work, but there are definitely moments here I enjoy. Here for intance:

In the left panel, everything’s blocky and off, even Superman himself. The pose, with arms behind him, makes his silhouette seem off; and even the S on his chest seems squashed and askew. In the right panel, the cityscape is tilted and odd; it looks like a lego city built on an incline. Both images have an odd, lumpiness — a material forcefulness that is not so much contradicted by, as built upon, their imperfections.

And, of course, this is hard to resist:

In this power-packed issue — we look up the newsboy legions’ noses!

So, yes, I can appreciate that to some extent. And maybe the real way to enjoy these issues is not to read them at all, but just to flip through looking for those goofy Kirby monsters or enjoyably odd perspectives. But I did unfortunately read the thing…and having done so, I”m afraid Kirby’s art, enjoyable as it often is, doesn’t repay me for the couple of hours flushed down the drain. The power of the art, indeed, starts to veer towards self-parody; it seems to be relentlessly trying to convince you that something interesting is happening, to make up for the utter lack, not of ideas per se, but of ideas that have any meaning or consequence. Kirby ends up sounding like one of his typical monstrous creations, screaming “Aaruk! Aaruk!” It’s loud and has an initial novelty, but it doesn’t exactly fill me with admiration for the critter’s volcanic creativity.

Snap Judgments: Five DC Reboots

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The comics blogosphere can’t stop talking about the DC Comics reboot in September. Some bloggers are cheering. Others are jeering. But anyone can offer a general impression. A true comics blogger explains why something sucks, and then explains how everything would be better if said blogger was in charge.

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Action Comics #1
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Rags Morales and Rick Bryant

Pros
Grant Morrison has written great superhero comics.
And lots of people seem to really like Morrison’s All-Star Superman.

Cons
The unbearable Modern Myth/Super Jesus/Underwear Messiah garbage.
And All-Star Superman was incredibly overrated.

Odds That It Will Suck
High. In his 70+ year history, Superman has starred in about 5 good comics. The rest are about why the world “needs” Superman and his crappy merchandise.

How I Would Make It Better
Superman is an escapist fantasy about male potency, which is why Action Comics should be an adult comic. Every issue should be 22 pages of hardcore sex where Superman fucks his way through Lois, Lana, Lex, Jimmy Olsen, Martha Kent, Krypto, and consequently saves the world. Superman isn’t Jesus Christ. He’s Ron Jeremy-meets-Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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Wonder Woman #1
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang

Pros
Azzarello has written some good (crime) comics.
I like Cliff Chiang’s artwork, if for no other reason than it doesn’t look like everyone else’s artwork.
The new costume is a slight improvement over the last new costume.

Cons
Azzarello has written some terrible (superhero) comics.

Odds That It Will Suck
Super high. When it comes to crappy comics, Wonder Woman has an even worse track record than Superman. Nobody at DC knows what to do with this character.

How I Would Make It Better
I’m tempted to just write “make it porn” for each these. But in all seriousness, the only way that Wonder Woman would ever be good again is if William Marston came back from the grave. The next best alternative would be to find a writer who has a similar personality to Marston: feminist, polygamist, BDSM enthusiast, lesbian fetishist, furry, all-around pervert and political visionary, etc.

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Teen Titans #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund

Pros
Lobdell has experience writing teen superheros, going back to Generation X.

Cons
Generation X was actually kinda boring.
Superboy is not and will never be badass, no matter how many ‘tats he has.

Odds That It Will Suck
Very high. Teen Titans was tolerable for about 3 years in the early 1980s. Everything before and after was a miserable failure.

How I Would Make It Better
The core problem with Teen Titans is that it’s never been about teenagers, but rather what adult writers want teenagers to be. Superboy, Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash – these kids revere their elders and try to emulate them. Fuck that noise. Adults don’t deserve reverence. Plus, teenagers don’t want to read about obedient, law-abiding teens, and adults reliving their youth don’t want to read about obedient, law-abiding teens. They both want sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll (or substitute in hip hop). The Titans shouldn’t be fighting crime, they should be fighting for the right to party, and generally reminding adults how much they suck.

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Batgirl #1
Written by Gail Simone
Art by Ardian Syaf and Vicente Cifuentes (cover by Adam Hughes)

Pros
Having a writer with an actual sense of humor never hurts.

Cons
Barbara Gordon can now walk again, which means DC eliminated one of the tiny handful of disabled heroes.
That Adam Hughes cover freaks me out. She keeps smiling at me with her cold, dead eyes…

Odds That It Will Suck
Medium. Batgirl is a fairly straightforward character who stars in straightforward adventures. No history of greatness, but no history of terribleness either.

How I Would Make It Better
Comics starring solo heroes often tend to be a dreary reads because the protagonist rarely has anyone to interact with. This leads to page after page of mind-numbing narration just so the writer can justify their wage. This book needs a big supporting cast, preferably other superheroines who accompany Batgirl on her adventures. So it would essentially be Birds of Prey with Batgirl. And like Birds of Prey, there should be plenty of lesbian subtext, because lesbian subtext improves everything.

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Swamp Thing #1
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Yanick Paquette

Pros
I’m drawing a blank here…

Cons
Mediocre writer, mediocre artist, a character who is ill-served by being dragged back into mainstream superhero comics.

Odds That It Will Suck
Certainty. Alan Moore is a tough act to follow. And outside of Moore’s run, Swamp Thing doesn’t have a rich history to draw from.

How I Would Make It Better
Well, I probably wouldn’t make it at all. But if I had to, I’d shamelessly rip off the best parts of Moore’s run. At minimum, the comic should have purple prose, leftist politics, and psychedelic yam sex.

Can The Subaltern Draw?: Waiting For Nabil Fawzi

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Welcome to “Can The Subaltern Draw?,” a new monthly column by Nadim Damluji that will explore what comics look like in the in-between space of cultures. Two things: Column title should be pronounced with tongue in your cheek and the author really agrees with Anne McClintock, especially when she writes: “I believe that it can be safely said that no social category should remain invisible with respect to an analysis of empire.”

One of the main reasons I embarked on a year of comics-related travel was to find historical proof that non-Western alternatives to Tintin existed. One of the stops in this journey was Egypt, where I was looking specifically for a regional comic book hero that children from all over the Middle East idolized, learned from, and escaped through. Where was the Syrian version of Astro Boy hiding? Why doesn’t the Arab World have a Superman?

In 1964, an editor at Lebanese publisher Illustrated Publications (IP) seemingly answered this very question in the form of mild-mannered Nabil Fawzi. As catalogued in an excellent 1970 article from ARAMCO Magazine, IP reasoned the Middle East contained a potentially viable market for the same adventure comics that had become popular (and profitable) in the United States; comics like The Adventures of Superman. But instead of creating a Superman-like hero for an Arab audience, IP decided to teach the man of steel himself how to speak Arabic through translating the already abundant English editions of the comic. With these translations we bear witness to the the birth of Nabil Fawzi:

“The first comic strip to be issued in Arabic by IP was Superman. In the guise of Nabil Fawzi, a reporter for ‘Al-Kawkab Al Yawmi’ he swooped into the Middle East from distant Krypton on February 4, 1964, to the instantaneous delight of thousands of young Arab children.”

Translation: Superman IS Nabil Fawzi

Indeed, while it has been exciting to find plenty editions of the Arabic Superman (technically pronounced “Suberman”) in my Egyptian book market excursions, it is very weird to see the well known hero recast with the name Nabil in a presumably Arab Metropolis. I say “weird” because all that has changed is the name. Essentially a big eraser was taken to the English text and the editors at Illustrated Publications (after convincing Western publishers to license the material) retold the story of arguably the most famous American superhero to a captivated Arab audience. In order to give you a sense of what exactly these alterations look like, I’ll pause here for a bit of show and tell. First let’s look at how some covers changed:

English covers via the archive at Cover Browser.

Before I found their English counterparts, I was confounded by these Arabic covers. As you can see, the most noticeable difference is that most of the text — sometimes known as “context” — is removed. I found both scenes so confusing that my best guesses were up top the artists were depicting a Zombie invasion and below they were illustrating that one time Nabil mistook a weeping child’s room for a phone booth. Another noticeable difference is the color palette, which takes on a different shade in the Arabic versions. The blond crying boy turns into a red head, and Superman’s signature “S” gets a less iconic red and pink treatment. Beyond the covers, the “S” on the chest represents the most glaring difference throughout the Arabic translations:

Since Arabic moves right to left, the “S” was inverted along with the rest of the art before being translated. For me that backwards “S” serves as a visual cue throughout the entire translated series of how misplaced “Nabil” is in his Arabic surroundings. In fact, I find the whole translation of Superman to be a somewhat problematic venture, insomuch as it deferred the creation of a uniquely Arab superhero in favor of re-presenting a clearly American icon. You can change his name, place of employment, and hair color hue, but at the end of the day Nabil Fawzi still looks like American-bred Clark Kent. This new idol for Arab children — and a lot of them considering IP publishing  2,600,000 translated copies annually — was identical to the long established idol of American children: a superhero living in a big Chicago-like city but raised and moralized on a small Kansas farm. Ultimately, the name “Nabil Fawzi” does as good a job at disguising this true identity as Clark Kent’s glasses do at obscuring his identity as Superman.

Back in 1964 (especially in 1964), other Arabs shared this concern. As the ARAMCO article recounts, there was a real objection to importing a Western product instead of generating a new superhero out of the rich Arab history and artistic talent. Unfortunately, the article brings up this criticism as steadily as it dismisses it as “impractical” based on the testimony of Leila Shaheen da Cruz, then publisher of Illustrated Publications. As she states in 1970 on the reality of creating an Arab superhero instead of translating an American one:

“That kind of art work, story continuity and long-range planning, is still unfamiliar to most local artists or is too expensive. The adventures of Sinbad, the Sailor, for example, would be a natural out here, and we know that there would be a rich market for an adventure strip based on the exploits of Arab commandos. But so far we haven’t found a local cartoonist who is not either inexperienced or overpriced.”

The main reason I contest Mrs. da Cruz’s assessment is because I have in my possession Arab comics dating back to the 1950s which refute her claim that local cartoonists were “inexperienced,” and bearing in mind the original retail value of these issues I doubt their talent was “overpriced” either. Indeed, creating Nabil may have been a good business decision, but it is deeply unfair to claim that a profitable business choice was creating a cultural product that Arabs could not.

Now for a moment of contrapuntality: I don’t think that translating Superman was a completely deplorable endeavor. For one, his success ushered in a string of other well-known comic book heros. Superman was soon followed by Arabic versions of Batman and Robin (renamed “Sobhi and Zakhour”), Little Lulu, Tarzan, and The Flash. These are comics that I grew up reading in Lebanon, and I concede that on some level a child escaping through comics is a child escaping through comics no matter where that child happens to read them.

In retrospect, Superman’s presence in the Middle East served as an integral chapter in the history of Arab Comics as a whole. One can argue that without Nabil Fawzi fighting evil from the 60s onwards, we wouldn’t have many of the talented regional artists we have creating comics today. In fact, many of the generations who read Nabil as kids later grew up to challenge his faux-Arabness. Take for example The 99, an extremely popular Arab superhero comic created by Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa. These comics feature the same tropes found in issues of Superman, with the chief difference being they are actually Muslim heros (with powers based on the 99 attributes of Allah) for a new generation of children to look up to.  Bringing it full circle in a way, a recent crossover event featured members of The 99 fighting crime alongside DC’s Justice League (of which Superman holds a membership card). In an interview I conducted with Dr. Al-Mutawa in Abu Dhabi, he explained that The 99 was created precisely to form new positive associations with Islam among children globally. Just as Superman was being Arabized in the 1960s, today The 99 is being translated for an English speaking audience. Encouragingly, this time around characters like Dr. Ramzi aren’t being recast as Dr. John in translation.

I’ll leave you with a subversive contemporary take on Nabil Fawzi and his famous friends that was recently spotted in Indonesia — the country with the highest population of Muslims — and subsequently made the blog rounds. Isn’t it strange to see Mr. Fawzi putting his actions where his name is?

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Another link to that indispensable ARAMCO Article that this post heavily relies on is here. I also highly recommend checking out these scans of the same article that some kind soul put on the web. Those certainly are some wonderful accompanying graphics.

Speaking of, here is one more cover comparison that I didn’t want to clunk up the body with: