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Comics Grow Up

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-8267780

1527-2117

Gerry Canavan,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Once a garish, juvenile embarrassment, superheroes have escaped from the margins of Western culture to become the dominant paradigm for blockbuster entertainment in our moment. In 2019 alone, Avengers: Endgame (dir. Anthony and Joe Russo) pushed the record-breaking tradition of the hyperpopular Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise to its highest heights yet, becoming the number one highest-grossing movie of all time after taking in $2.79 billion at the box office—while the muted, cerebral Joker (dir. Todd Phillips) became the single most profitable superhero film ever, grossing more than $1 billion on a tiny $60 million budget, perhaps inaugurating a new type of middlebrow superhero film in the bargain through its calculated pastiche of critically acclaimed dramas (especially two of Martin Scorsese’s early works, Taxi Driver [1976] and The King of Comedy [1983]). Scorsese (who was for a time attached to Joker as producer and potential director) launched a thousand think pieces and social-media micro–flame wars with his declaration in an interview that these films were not properly cinema at all but more akin to a roller coaster at a theme park. In a widely circulated New York Times op-ed, Scorsese (2019) adds that the political economy that once allowed middle-market and independent film to circulate has now collapsed almost entirely in the face of blockbuster hegemony and the near-monopolistic control of a single corporation, Disney, over the highest-grossing sectors of the industry.Meanwhile, on television, a similar explosion of superhero-related media can be found in multiple registers, from the comparatively lowbrow Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–20) on ABC and the ever-expanding DC Comics Arrowverse on the CW to postmodern, experimental critical darlings like FX’s Legion (2017–19) and Amazon’s The Tick (2016–19) to the genre’s prestige-TV breakthrough moment with HBO’s Watchmen (2019–20), which extends the famous and perennial best-selling Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons metacritical graphic novel from the mid-1980s with new characters and situations set in the 2010s. In short, today superheroes are utterly ubiquitous and a source of constant cultural consideration, reconsideration, and re-reconsideration—while, paradoxically, the characters’ comic-book origins themselves remain an odd curiosity, almost an afterthought, interesting to most ordinary consumers of superhero media only for the way the films draw on, remix, improve on, and mostly ignore them.What, then, is the status of comics studies in a moment in which figures exploding from the pages of superhero comics seem to be achieving cultural hegemony but in a media context largely divorced from the comics form and focused on a sector of the industry that has rarely enjoyed either popular or critical respect? Comics studies as a discipline has historically taken tremendous pains to distance itself from the superhero, tending to prefer the canon of more highbrow, artistically ambitious, and critically lauded confessional autobiographies (Art Spiegelman’s 1980 Maus, Alison Bechdel’s 2006 Fun Home, Marjane Satrapi’s 2000 Persepolis, and so on) that emerged out of the underground comics and alt comix scenes. But the superhero continues to return anyway, delimiting both the popular and the critical imagination of what comics are and what sort of things they can do—in just the same way that in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) Superman keeps rudely intruding on Ware’s attempt to use the comics medium to tell a different kind of story. This routinized drama of disavowal and rapprochement of the popular as a category for the study of comics, in uneasy relationship to something aspiring to “literature” or “art,” has been a reliable engine for comics scholarship for decades. This situation is similar to how science fiction studies often becomes hopelessly preoccupied with articulating some clear difference between science fiction and the other speculative genres and how literary scholars of essentially any historical period can justify a new monograph by appending “new” or “long” to the name of their subdiscipline. Superheroes—in all their mortifying excess, for all the attempts to banish them—remain a core problematic for comics studies, a handy frame around which nearly any sort of argument or investigation can be structured.What, then, might comics studies look like after superheroes or, at least, after superheroes cease to be such a big problem for it? If such a thing can be imagined, we could do much worse than starting with Marc Singer’s Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies, which smashes the familiar slogans and lazy habits of comics scholarship like a man of steel bursting through a brick wall. Singer’s groundbreaking essay “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race” (2002)—the title nodding to both Frantz Fanon and Ralph Ellison’s “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” (1953)—has long been a tentpole in my comics courses, troubling familiar fantastic narratives that see heroic white vigilantes electing to violently self-police their surroundings under the authority of their own noblesse oblige and drawing our attention to works that tell stories about race with more success. In Breaking the Frames, Singer extends this critique of race in comics to new types of texts (including the nonsuperheroic confessional memoir Persepolis and Kyle Baker’s 2008 Nat Turner, ostensibly historical fiction). He also expands his aim to the rhetorical conventions and uninterrogated assumptions that have guided comics’ reception and ascension in the academy, paying particular attention to the highly problematic and extremely dubious distinction between popular comics and prestige comics. Singer identifies these tendencies in contemporary comics studies in a way that educates the newcomer to the field while also problematizing them for the expert, essentially forcing the field as a whole to (finally) ask why and under what assumptions certain texts have become canonical. Singer also takes to task those academics who “dabble” in comics studies from the hobbyist perspective of “lapsed fans or childhood readers” (15) rather than treating it as a place for serious study, requiring particular expertise and comics-specific modes of analysis, and not simply a degraded or inferior mode of prose fiction.In this way Singer persuasively gives voice to, and seeks to dispel, a mood of anxiety that ramifies through and around comics studies, in which comics scholars feel compelled to constantly rehearse the same demand for recognition. Singer essentially argues that comics studies has become respectable and, therefore, needs to be respectable: Respect, then, is a quality I find simultaneously overvalued and underpracticed in comics studies. It’s time for comics scholars to stop demanding respect from others and start treating our own discipline as an academic discipline. It’s time to take the chip off our collective shoulder and focus on producing the same high quality of work that would be expected in any other field. Having successfully made the case that comics deserve serious consideration as art or literature, history or ideology, culture or commerce, it’s time we commit to reading them that way. (35)In six chapters he provides a compelling, if often provocative and aggressively iconoclastic, revisionist study of the comics canon. There are no sacred cows here, and indeed, the tone of the book sometimes borders on the exclusively negative, having precious little patience for any of the field’s problematic favorite creators, no matter how beloved—but for a field that has been so overly fixated on its own self-promotion and self-congratulation this may be a necessary sort of bitter medicine. In chapter 1, he focuses on Umberto Eco’s (1972) famous essay “The Myth of Superman.” Eco’s argument is one that has frustrated fans of superhero narrative and comics scholars for decades. Eco claims that comics are actually a form of antinarrative, in which events happen only to be undone or forgotten, forever returning the stories to a perpetual originary status quo without permanent consequences or emotional stakes. Singer seeks to rescue Eco from his critics, whom he thinks simply dismiss Eco without actually engaging him—and compellingly demonstrates how comics scholars have frequently attempted to shield comics from the sorts of interpretive scrutiny scholars would freely make about other cultural texts in other disciplines, for fear of what their unhappy conclusions might say about comics (and about us, as comics readers).This demand to take comics seriously is on full display in the next chapter, “The Abuses of History,” which reads beloved, ostensibly revisionist superhero narratives like Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s Planetary (1999–2009), Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come (1996), and Alan Moore, Rob Liefeld, Ian Churchill, and Norm Rapmund’s Judgment Day (1997) against the grain of their mostly rapturous critical reputation. Praised for their experimental qualities and their thematic resonances with postmodernism, especially with respect to history and nostalgia, these texts are revealed in Singer’s gaze to partake in shockingly reactionary politics, especially in their treatment of race. Planetary sees its restoration of comics’s lost golden age brought about by the return of an ageless and nearly all-knowing white man, Elijah Snow, who takes control of the powerful Planetary Corporation back from the multiethnic coalition he had left in charge in order to benevolently rule the world from the shadows, as is his birthright. In the what-if future of Kingdom Come, the classic superheroes return to wrest control back from a younger generation that has similarly failed to properly uphold their legacy; as Singer summarizes, “Kingdom Come is the story of a group of angry white senior citizens who battle and imprison their young, multicultural, and generally unworthy inheritors” (92). Most disturbing of all may be Moore and Liefeld’s comparatively less-known Judgment Day, given Moore’s reputation in the field as a sort of kindly, truth-telling wizard, dispensing psychedelic anarchist wisdom while fighting the corporate overlords who have seized and misuse his work (most famously Watchmen): Judgment Day tells the story of Marcus Langston, an African American petty thief and heroin addict who discovers he is fated to die in a liquor store robbery at age nineteen—and who rewrites his fate in the Book of Destiny to become the superhero Sentinel instead, a fraud ultimately revealed in the wake of Langston’s further crimes. In Singer’s retelling, the stereotypical and racist portrayal of Sentinel as an undeserving aberration improperly seizing power and prominence from more-deserving white heroes seems absolutely impossible not to read in allegorical terms—and, as Singer suggests, “any allegory for comics history that rests upon [Sentinel] is one that implies a correlation between the diversification of superhero comics . . . and the erosion of the genre’s moral codes” (88), a truly unsettling conclusion about a text from one of the medium’s most accomplished and widely acclaimed creators.Chapter 3 doesn’t let up on Moore, reading his League of Extraordinary Gentleman (1999–2007) series while refusing (as so many critics do) to ignore its nostalgia for Victorianism and the lost British Empire. The remaining three chapters of the book take up nonsuperhero comics, challenging authors and texts that often seem to be beyond any negative critique. Chapter 4 looks at Chris Ware not as an author and artist as much as an editor, taking to task his promotion of a tiny sliver of nonfantastic comics output as “reinforc[ing] some of the same aesthetic hierarchies that once dismissed all comics as juvenile trash; his selections are ready for admission to the literary canon largely to the degree that they do not trouble its values” (32). In Singer’s judgment Ware thus reproduces a comics middlebrow that cannot “reflect the full diversity and potential of comics” (152). In chapter 5—arguably the most shocking chapter, in terms of the work it seeks to topple—Singer explores the canonization of Satrapi’s Persepolis in literature departments. He finds, first, that Persepolis has been canonized almost exclusively in noncomics terms, with scant attention to its participation in a larger field of comics production in France and internationally, and second, it has also been canonized to such a degree precisely because it refuses to challenge its audience about its assumptions about Iran, Islam, Christianity, Western liberalism, comics, or literature in any meaningful way. In Singer’s final chapter, Baker’s Nat Turner comes under a parallel but no less forceful critique, as Singer finds the text exemplary of the misreadings that can happen when comics are taken too seriously, on the one hand, and not seriously enough, on the other; Nat Turner is treated by its critics as “either . . . characterizing [the] comic as a work of historiographic metafiction that is not intended to be taken literally, or, conversely, . . . claiming that its depiction of slavery is more accurate than historical sources, even those written by former slaves”—a paradox of contradictory interpretation that exemplifies the “celebratory impulse that currently governs the field of comics scholarship” and the way it deforms the work of criticism (33).Singer’s brief but fiery coda lays out the ultimate stakes of the book’s argument: the crisis of the humanities within the larger neoliberal crisis of the university requires scholars to obtain a different sort of orientation toward and justification for their work. “If comics no longer require us to justify their existence,” he writes, “neither do they particularly need us to sing their praises” (247). What is needed, he goes on to argue, is a rededication to the rigors of the methods of archivization, interpretation, and curation that separate the scholar from the fan. “We don’t have to view our scholarship as either a heroic struggle or a leisurely pastime, just a responsibility to maintain the highest standards and social purposes of our respective fields,” Singer concludes. “We must welcome the role of expertise in the pursuit of knowledge and assert rather than demean our authority as scholars” (248). In Singer’s view, in short, comics studies has outgrown its infancy—and so it’s finally time to buckle down and get on with the real work.The undertheorized and vexatious relationships among childhood, adulthood, fandom, and scholarship Singer identifies as structuring contemporary comics studies certainly did not begin with Breaking the Frames (even if that book is an especially good articulation of the various tensions involved and a useful roadmap for the way out). Many recent works of comics scholarship from the last half decade have, in various ways, similarly sought to problematize the slippery equivalencies between fans and scholars, between the popular and the prestigious, and between comics and “literature” (however broadly or narrowly defined) that have deformed much comics scholarship—all while adding new histories and underrepresented voices to the ongoing debate. American Literature itself recently published a special issue “Queer about Comics” (2018), guest edited by Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz, which sought to excavate the queer imaginary lying hidden within the mainstream understanding of the medium—particularly regarding the superhero, whose core conventions of the “secret identity” and highly eroticized, skin-tight costuming has long been recognized as sublimation of the experiences both of the closet and of kink. Scott and Fawaz do partake in some of the boosterism Singer deplores—especially in their attempt to talk back to a critical conversation that would have them shout “Queer zines, yes! Superhero comics, no!” (Scott and Fawaz 2018: 197)—but their introduction to the issue also articulates a methodological approach to comics studies that “reads them within their original generic, material, and cultural contexts—that is, we must read them as comics and not as some rarer and more elevated form with no connection to their own history” (Singer 33). In the special issue’s introduction, Scott and Fawaz’s studies of the characters of Nubia (Wonder Woman’s black twin sister, frequently forgotten and written out of the character’s biography) and the mutant superhero Storm (a miniature version of the work Fawaz does in his magisterial 2016 The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics) merge historicization and formal visual analysis with Scott and Fawaz’s own highly personal memories of first discovering the characters as young people; this becomes a template for the issue’s investigation of both superhero and nonsuperhero comics, exploring not simply what is queer within comics but what is queer about comics as a hybrid, experimental art form—and perhaps even causing us to question whether the categories of the “fan” and the “scholar” can ever be severed quite as fully or as completely as Singer would like.Qiana J. Whitted’s EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest has a similarly intermingled relationship with boosterism and scholarship, this time about the much-ballyhooed, lurid EC crime and horror comics of the 1950s (which became a centerpiece of Fredric Wertham’s 1954 Seduction of the Innocent moral panic, led to congressional hearings, and culminated in the creation of the Comics Code Authority). Whitted reveals the other side of this scandal, one that has not yet been given proper attention in histories of the period that have tended to focus on the salaciousness and gore of EC’s comics output: the company’s commitment to progressive politics and racial equality, and its ongoing refusal to submit to the logic of white supremacy (as enforced by normative scolds, both before and after the code). Whitted, too, like Scott and Fawaz, situates herself as a fan as well as a scholar, beginning her preface with her memories of reading Mad Magazine as a kid—but that initial push toward comics has allowed her to bring together a largely forgotten archive of antiracist comics that push against more symptomatic, skeptical readings of the industry. Her archival recovery of major works of this period, alongside a political-economic reading of the corporate structure of the industry, allows us to reinterpret the output of EC Comics as a testimony against racial prejudice, over and against its reputation as a source of salaciousness, in antilynching comics published under its “crime comics” aegis and the well-known “Judgment Day!” (1956) space opera, whose depiction of a galactic utopia culminates in the last panel in the principal character’s removing his space helmet to reveal a black face. Whitted’s excavation of “Judgment Day!” goes beyond a close reading of the story itself to the controversy behind its publication; the ostensibly liberal Comics Code, intended to ensure the comics industry’s good morality and politics, was deployed here to attempt to prevent the story’s distribution if possible and to demand unnecessary edits if not, all in an attempt to blight its dream of a better, more inclusive future. (For Moore and Liefeld to later twist this optimistic story’s title for their own reactionary Sentinel story is simply another knife in the back.) That the Comics Code was always a tool to enforce whiteness, heteronormativity, and capitalism comes as no surprise—but Whitted tells a remarkable story of EC Comics counter to its contemporary reputation as a smut merchant, revealing the company instead as a space of innovation working against the constraints of its era.A similar project of archival reclamation can be found in Noah Berlatsky’s Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948, which seeks to bracket most of the postwar history of the character to focus on its creator’s originary vision of a feminist utopia legislated by women’s political and sexual domination of men. Berlatsky’s close reading of the William Marston era of Wonder Woman argues unexpectedly for the basic superfluity of all post-Marston material, in the sense that (whatever its other merits) it has nothing to do with Marston’s radical vision (Berlatsky 2017: 213–14). What Berlatsky does with a single creator, Andrew Hoberek (2014) does with a single book in his Considering “Watchmen”: Poetics, Property, Politics, which begins from a pointed question not often asked: why do we accept the inclusion of a single comic (often Watchmen, if not Maus) in a top-ten or end-of-decade retrospective of prose fiction, when we obviously wouldn’t accept the inclusion of a film in a list of the best novels? What is it about comics that allows them to slide, so promiscuously, into so many other categories of creative endeavor? Hoberek’s study of Watchmen argues that Watchmen is not literature—of course not, it’s comics!—but that it becomes literature, or at least literature-adjacent, through its anticipation of shifts in the literary marketplace that would soon follow its own publication in 1986–87. And yet paradoxically it is only through its specifically visual, nonliterary mode of composition, a multiauthor collaboration that combines an existing staple of defunct Charlton Comics characters with Moore’s revisionist superhero worldview and Gibbons’s incredible visual precision and formalist innovation, that the work actually achieves its ultimate greatness. In Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon, J. Richard Stevens (2015) takes an opposite approach from the limited scope of Berlatsky and Hoberek, attempting to tell the full story of Captain America from his earlier incarnation as a Nazi fighter to a “commie smasher” to antiwar countercultural icon to conflicted symbol of the War on Terror. Stevens’s treatment combines narrative summary with production-centered analysis, reception studies methodology, and even quantitative modeling to give a full picture of what the multitudinous signifier called Captain America has come to mean to different creators and different audiences in different cultural moments, which by metaphorical necessity can never be separated from the stories America tells about itself. Filtered through multiple editors, multiple corporate owners, and multiple individual authors, Captain America becomes in Stevens’s hands another useful case study for Singer’s warnings about reading comics from a fannish perspective that seeks to argue our art always has good politics, whether it actually does or not. Captain America as an icon can be twisted into standing for or against more or less anything, precisely because the character has over the decades meant so many different things. Stevens argues, “Any critique of a long-standing comic book narrative that makes longitudinal claims must strive to account for the positioning of the text with its continuity, the positioning of that continuity within the contemporary state of the medium, and the existing relationship between the fans and the text” (Stevens 2015: 285). Without the sort of rigorous specificity offered by Berlatsky’s and Hoberek’s tight temporal bounds or else the polyvalent, indeterminate heterogeneity of Stevens’s longue durée study, “Captain America” can simply mean whatever I choose it to mean, neither more nor less—precisely what Singer warns against.This meandering tour of contemporary comics scholarship and something that could possibly be called the new comics studies of the long twenty-first century might find a final port of call in any number of recent works, from the Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda special issue of Critical Inquiry titled “Comics and Media” (2014) to Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives (edited by Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen [2016]) or Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation (edited by David Lewis and Martin Lund [2017]) or Aaron Kashtan’s paradigm-shifting study of webcomics, Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future (2018). But I want instead to end on another book published in 2019, Lara Saguisag’s Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics, which is able to take up the relationship between reception and comics in a different register precisely by short-circuiting the assumption that comics scholars are, must, or should be originally fans of the material they study. The century-long span between our era and the comics of the era Saguisag studies allows for the methodological precision and objective distance that Singer calls for in studies of more contemporary material; thus, Saguisag is able to see quite clearly how comics, as a medium closely associated with childhood and with children, is often preoccupied with pernicious educational messaging that seeks to naturalize historical conditions and social relations (usually of cruelty and exploitation). Thus, we see ethnic and racial discourses about assimilation and purity replicated in these comics, which present mischief-making as delightful and a healthy sign of white boyhood while enforcing second-class conformity for young girls and for people of color. Saguisag recounts the unhappy racism and sexism of the era through recapitulation of sickeningly familiar gags about blackface and control over young girls’ bodies, and she explores the ways artists were often also able to sneak resistant and counterhegemonic messaging past the censor and to allow other people the occasional freedom to be “naughty” too.But what is so striking—almost vertiginous for this child of the 1980s—is Saguisag’s final turn to the successors of this period’s comics, especially Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes (1985–95). After 170 pages of exploring Progressive Era comics, Saguisag reveals Calvin as a hidden repository for an 1890s anxiety in the 1980s, reproducing and at times simply replicating many of the gags from the Progressive Era strips while rewriting their concerns for the consumerist, technology-supersaturated kids living somewhere in the murky boundary between Generation X and the Millennials (Saguisag 181)—the objective, historical gaze turned with intelligence and incision on our own era precisely through deliberate juxtaposition with a supposedly distant past. Calvin and Hobbes is then smartly paired with Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks (1996–2006), which has much of the same concerns, only filtered through a black urban boyhood rather than a white suburban one, disrupting comics’ assumed whiteness and displacing racist assumptions of the medium reaching back to the Progressive Era (and beyond), while also refusing the air of unquestioned innocence that Calvin gets to enjoy. Unprotected from the realities of American society—living in the real world rather than Calvin’s ahistorical idealized one—Huey and Riley are constantly surveilled and are often under threat; when Huey makes a wish list of adult weapons he wants for Christmas, it is not for “boyish games” but “for arming himself and his family against possible Klan attack” (Saguisag 184). A whole possible second book passes by in this too-brief eleven-page conclusion before Saguisag ends with a suggestive, ultracontemporary glimpse at the way images of Donald Trump have coopted the Progressive Era imagery of the “naughty boy” for a new purpose, “disassociating this figure from notions of potential and progress” in favor of “a petulant child-king, a tantrum-throwing toddler, a spoiled schoolboy, and a hopelessly incorrigible child” (186). The comics history of the Trump era has yet to be written, though I’m sure it will be, and I hope it’s Saguisag who does it. Saguisag’s book, like Whitted’s, is a model for how the careful and deliberate archival study of comics can shine new light both on well-worn received histories and on the literature of the present, precisely through an appropriately unshakeable commitment to being a very serious reader of the funny pages.