From: [r--el--y] at [carina.unm.edu] (Robert Kelly) Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.misc Subject: Uber-Christ and Super Anti-Christ (Part 2 of 4) Date: 3 Apr 1993 20:14:26 GMT The following is my thesis on comics. (B) Bobware: I own all the rights and then some. Feel free to use as long as you don't publish without my consent. It is slack-less for you to do so otherwise. UBER-CHRIST AND SUPER ANTI-CHRIST Preface and Caveats My analysis of superhero characters using an inter-disciplinary approach exposes the values in demand by comic book's target audience: the majority of publishing companies are commercializing a self-destructive ideology, and demonstrate that comic books--in their current popular form--are perpetuating distilled values of a dominant culture. As certain parts of my discussion shows, the mainstream is changing. The question which I ultimately address in this analysis is "What are comic books changing into?" My examination methods pull from my experiences with postmodern, feminist and semiotics. Other essays helping me were John Fiske's British Cultural Studies and Television and Mimi White's Ideological Analysis. The adaptation of television analysis is uniquely appropriate for use of comics analysis. For instance, as a text, not only do comic books hold the form of combining pictures with words (albeit purely written, instead of both visual and audible) but comics share certain aspects with video texts: % a presumption of immortality of form (i.e. there is always a continuation of plot "to be continued" in next month's issue), often found in soap operas (Allen, 82). These plots are not cliff-hangers, but character interactions that extend for years; % fundamental situations within which characters are found (by the audience) or created (by the authors) do not change, similar to situation comedies where characters do not advance as part of plot resolution--next month, character X will still possess the same emotional problems within the same society he or she started the plot in (Allen, 123). Most familiar of these are how character Y--even though he can fly at "super-speed"--is always late for picking up his date. Thus little, if any, character development occurs; % stories have multiple authors: a writer, an artist, an inker, a colorist, an editor and an editor-in-chief. All of these people have corporate restrictions placed upon them for the quality and style of work. Formerly, they also had "morality restrictions" as governed by the Comics Code of Authority (CCA). Just as it may be difficult for someone to locate the "author" of a television program, it is difficult to locate the single author of a comic (Allen, 4). In this paper I refer to the collection of authors as a design team. The audience of this paper may be unfamiliar to many comic books and superheroes I reference here. For me to include all of the references in their original form (the comic books themselves) would make this report unwieldy and too burdensome for the purposes of the paper. I have limited my references as much as possible without sacrificing content or analysis. Researching a field such as comics--a field that is consistently referred to as "illiterate" and "immature"--is difficult. No agreed mechanisms exist to provide "quotes"; no way of documenting visual "allusions" that exist for literary allusions and not set structure for bibliographies. Thus, I have created my own. A Brief History of Comic Books Comic books began as collections of newspaper funny pages. Then, a Sunday newspaper cartoon would fill an entire page. A printer or publisher would gather the old funny pages and a promotional special to be given away for free. One entrepreneur in the early thirties tested the market by placing ten- cent price sticker on comics to see if they would sell by themselves. Why give them away when you could make money? After a few attempts, this lead to Famous Funnies #1--a monthly release selling reprinted stories. Soon thereafter comic books featured original stories with original artwork. Simultaneously, two young men in high school collaborated on a new heroic fantasy. Originally slated for newspaper comic strips, Superman took six years to sell until 1938, where a publisher hired Jerry Seigal and Joe Shuster to write and draw Action Comics starring Superman. Soon, each bi-monthly issue was selling over a million copies across North America. The costumed superhero--as opposed to "average" heroes like Tarzan and Buck Rodgers--was born. Action Comics was followed by Detective Comics featuring Batman. Soon thereafter many superheroes were created--including "World War Two's Amazon Adventuress" Wonder Woman. Many of these heroes provided examples for Americans to emulate during the war. The similarities between the 30's and 40's Wonder Woman and Rosie the Riveter are astounding. In the 40's, Walt Disney's creations and Archie would be created--along with westerns featuring Gene Autry and Roy Rodgers. The late 40's and early fifties became known as the Golden Age of Comics for the wide variety and diversity being published. Note: this time was dominated by white male heroes. Racial issues were not to be tackled until the upcoming decade. During the 50's, one publisher, E.C., decided to publish comics which were above the industry standard. Aiming to expand their audience, the publisher began to print comics for mature audiences--discussing racial issues, humanitarian ideals about warfare and Jewish persecution. The hit, however, wasn't with the serious stories, but with the irreverent, satirical MAD. With the wave of McCarthyism came a book called the Seduction of the Innocent. Written by Frederick Wertham, this book used E.C.'s mature titles--including horror comics--to accuse all comics of creating anti- social behavior and illiteracy. Much like the 80's Parent's Music Resource Center (PMRC) lead by Tipper Gore, the Comics Code of Authority (CCA) was created to promote "wholesome" comics. Among the "rules" which publishers had to follow [and some still do]: % authority figures--such as police--were not to be shown disrespect or in disrespectful situations; % material that would be deemed offensive was not to be shown (and regularly censored by CCA artists)--including blood; % criminal activity was not to be glamorized, thus the "hero" always won; Also, all comics who adhered to the code placed a symbol of the CCA on their covers. Taken one step further to insure companies would conform to "decency standards," pressure on the comic distributors was placed to blacklist any comic which didn't have the CCA symbol. The audience never had a chance to see the "offensive" books. In the super-heroic side of life, Batman's publisher, National Comics, had bought Superman trademark. Years later when Joe Shuster would die in poverty, a movement to insure the rights design teams and creators would flourish. Batman also discovered a sidekick, Robin--who became a teen-age success. What followed was a little ridiculous: Batman, Batwoman, Batdog and Batmite (a midget alien creature that existed as a humorous relief from monotony). In Action Comics, the Superman family was spawned: Superwoman, Supergirl, Rex the Superdog and Beppo the Supermonkey. There's also a superhorse in there somewhere. Due to the CCA, comics became sanitized, uncreative trash. During the late 50's and early 60's, popular culture began to settle into television: the Superman and Batman series found incredible success in the television medium. Marvel Comics Group--now the largest purveyor of American comics-- was formed by three other men--Stan "the Man" Lee and Jumpin' Jack Kirby. Later they would be joined by Steve Ditko. With a new twist on superheroes, they made new stories available and are considered to be the figureheads of comics as we know them today. Marvel's top-seller, the Spiderman, found its way to television via the Public Broadcasting System's educational show Electric Company and the market-music sensation "the Archies" revitalized the 40's Archie character. Keeping up with the news, Marvel also created the Black Panther who, you guessed it, was the first black superhero in mainstream comics. The sixties also spawned another phenomena: underground comics-- now commonly known as comix. These counter-culture comix were the home of pot-smokers, explicit sex, misogynistic rapists/brutality and anti-authoritarian demagogues. Due to the CCA, much experimenting with the comic medium was hampered: not just with story content and characterization, but with design/ presentation techniques as well. And, while they were underground, many of these techniques began to be used by the mainstream design teams. With the rise of Reaganomics and the 80's feverish nationalism--which included Rambo and the Terminator--also came the anti-hero in comics. In fact, I'd say that comics were the predecessors of the movies' top guns. The killers-for-hire that were once defeated and imprisoned now began wholesale murder sprees as "dark" or "grim-n-gritty" superheroes. Sometimes these anti-heroes justified their actions because they were being oppressed. Other anti-heroes jumped on the "War on Drugs" bandwagon and killed because their country told them to do so. And then there were the few that killed because they were insane... "psychopaths" that liked killing people. In a society where murder on television was an hourly event, comics could not compete under the rules of the CCA. The CCA was dated and inconvenient so publishers began to work "outside" the CCA by forgoing distributors and selling directly to vendors. The anti-heroes-- who killed drug-dealers and, more recently, rapists since "they deserved death anyway"--soon received their own comic books. Soon after this wave of violence kicked itself off, other mature books found their ways to the shelf. Not the least of these was DC Comics' Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a book that "intended to be a headstone for superheroes" comics, but actually did the reverse. The Nature of the Medium "Superman is one version of the hero with a thousand faces--to employ the title of Joseph Campbell's excellent book on the subject--and his appeal should therefore not surprise us. But Superman is a crude version of the hero; if you will, an elementary one. Unlike his more developed analogues (sic) in all the world's great religions, Superman does not offer love or goodwill, self-knowledge or contemplation as keys to man's salvation. He offers his own physical powers. Ultimately Superman's message for man rest on in his superior strength and lies in his power to be an enforcer of his own judgment of what is good and evil." (Barrier and Williams, 18) With the above quote in mind, comic books are a medium where not only do actions speak louder than words but actions completely overshadow words. Words, as proven in stories, are secondary and sometimes completely unnecessary for the story's resolution. Therefore, unless the production team decides to "step outside" of the medium, not only are plots going to be visually presented, but visually resolved as well. The characters are "graphic ideals"--icons under the control of a design team. Superman is a masculine figure, meant to be seen by all people with a heroic build -- the same build fascists used during the 1930's and 40's in Germany and Italy. The image of one man, pure in body, is one we've inherited from the Greek Adonis. When Richard Campbell writes that we have one hero with a thousand faces -- we can see it in the medium of comics: all you have to do is change the face or the costume and you have a totally different hero but signifying the exact same socio-political beliefs. Women, also, suffer from the "thousand faces" syndrome. Instead of being a "perfect warrior" like Superman and Batman, she is the epitome of what fashion has dictated as a good woman: large breasts, thin waste and more often than not, blonde. Furthermore, characteristics of the beauty myth are extended not just to super- women but to all women of the medium. Thus, not only is Wonder Woman an extreme example of the beauty myth, but so is Lois Lane, Mary Jane Parker, Ms. Marvel and Black Canary. Only until recently has the question of the super-woman's form come under scrutiny by the medium itself. With these restraints placed on characterization and visual resolution of plot, characters become less human and more "iconic": that is, less real and more image. When creating a new character, a design team says, "Well, we need a stealthy character who can do (blah, blah, blah)." The team will examine other stealthy characters in the medium, for instance Batman, and then create a new character as a variation of Batman. Or inversely, a design team says, "I need a new villain to defeat Superman. I want this villain to (blah, blah blah)." The team then designs a villain do cope with Superman's amazing masculinity. Another side effect when dealing with graphic ideals in context of plot, story, characterization and resolution is the fact that resolution is going to be presented in a form of physical action: most commonly violence. Like television, it is easier "to shoot first and ask questions later" when you're dealing with a comic. The superhero is not a representation thought, ideology or morality. The superhero represents physical resolution -- even to the point where the violence itself become iconified by words like "BAM!" "POW!" and "SOCK!" Since the design teams know that words are no longer necessary, a majority of comics do not use words to convey the actions of the characters. More often than not, when "BAM!" or such is used, it is for humorous intentions--sort of a visual allusion to the campy sixties Batman where violence was depicted by the use of words. With plot resolution residing directly in violence, the most successful character icons will become those which are most suited for violence and appear to be most violent. Thus a character with a gun is more successful than a character without one--a prime example is the difference between comics with the criminal-killing, gun-toting Punisher and comics like the criminal-killing Wolverine. The latter possess large knife-like claws and doesn't sell as well as the former (which has several titles each month) but sells significantly enough to keep its own series. What comics are faced with is an ever increasing cycle of violence-- one character trying to out "perform" and thus out-sell the previous. Robert Kelly [r--el--y] at [triton.unm.edu] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Sir, I think I wanted to express the duality of man - a kind of Jungian thing, sir." Full Metal Jacket