Sideburns #22: "A Healthy Alternative"

Lo-fi webcomics by Justin Zyduck. Every Monday (sorry for the lateness).

Superhero Theory: Just A(n Invisible) Girl

(This is an expansion of a comment I left on this post at 4th Letter. It was maybe a little regrettable, as it arguably veers off-topic from the original post, but if nothing else, you may appreciate the abbreviated version to be found there if you don’t feel like slogging through my usual informal dissertation.)

So hey, remember last week I made that comment about Stan Lee being good-naturedly condescending toward women in his early ‘60s work?

This is what I’m talking about:

Later...


(Fantastic Four #11, art by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, February 1963)

You see what I mean. There’s no outright, rampaging misogyny; Stan isn’t hacked off that Sue’s not in the kitchen preparing a nice roast for her husband and his buddies or anything. Instead, there’s an attitude that I’m sure Stan felt was well-intentioned: look, Sue is a woman, and women (“females,” as Stan’s characters often say with a certain befuddled jocularity) are emotionally fragile creatures, so every now and again the Fantastic Dudes do well to protect her by reminding her they think she’s swell. I can’t be too hard on Stan Lee for this, I suppose; the attitude, I’m sure, would not be uncommon for 1963, and anyway he also points out the times where she actually did save the rest of the team, which is a fair sight more than Lois Lane would have been capable of at that time.

But the years pass and attitudes change, and at some point, later comics writers looked back at these issues and cringed at Sue. They saw her fragile characterization as a mistake to be rectified. So they amp up her powers, make her really confident and well-adjusted — the “mother figure” of the team. Chris Claremont had her fight Iron Fist to a standstill once. Later writers overcompensate for Stan Lee’s wilting stereotype by making Sue virtually faultless.

This, too, is well-intentioned, but it has an unfortunate side effect:

See, we can identify with the men in the Fantastic Four because of their human flaws — Reed for his tendency to get wrapped up in himself and his work, Johnny for his immaturity and temper, Ben for his gruffness and struggles with self-pity. But we don’t get to see ourselves in Sue? The modern Sue Storm is impossibly compassionate, selflessly responsible, always putting her family before herself, the calm in a storm. As David Brothers pointed out in response to my comment, “The team literally would not function without her being there to hold them together.” And through it all, she still has time to look beautiful.

Oh crap, in trying to make Sue Storm a modern character, they’ve made her into a model 1950s housewife!

Well, now what do we do? I’ve got to justify this to myself somehow if I’m to feel okay about reading these things into my adulthood. That means it’s time for…

! ! ! ! M E T A T E X T U A L F A N W A N K ! ! ! !

Everybody's favorite!

Right, Wikipedia summarizes Sue Storm’s prehistory thusly: “As detailed in The Marvel Saga: Official History of The Marvel Universe #16, Susan Storm, and her younger brother, Jonathan grew up in the town of Glenville, Long Island, children of a physician named Franklin Storm and a woman named Mary. The parents left their kids alone one night to travel to a dinner honoring Dr. Storm. On the way, a tire blew out but only Mary was injured. Franklin escaped injury and insisted on operating on his wife. He was unable to save her and she passed away. After his wife's death, Dr. Franklin Storm became a gambler and a drunk, losing his medical practice, which led him to the accidental killing of a loan shark. Franklin did not defend himself in court, because he still felt guilty over Mary's death. With their father in prison, Susan had to become a mother figure for her younger brother.”

Okay, we can work with this. Suddenly a teenage girl has the responsibility of raising a brother who’s probably only a few years younger than her. So Sue gives up her childhood for Johnny’s sake; we establish a pattern of sublimating her own desires for the sake of her responsibility to others.

Hey, this is going to give you some legitimate self-esteem issues. Johnny’s friends teasing, “Hey, is that your sister or your mom?” Sue probably doesn’t make many friends, and she can’t go out after school because she has to make sure Johnny learns his multiplication tables or else he’ll be held back. And Johnny’s probably young and bratty enough to add to this: “You’re always bossing me around! I wish I had a real sister!” They live with their aunt, who’s apparently too busy running her boarding house to contribute much to Johnny’s upbringing; perhaps there’s an element of “You’d better pull your weight around here,” unspoken or not.

Fast forward a few years and we see her as a young adult, timid and deferring, still taking care of her brother. All of a sudden she’s fighting aliens and mad monarchs while at the same time acting as the mother figure in the weird pseudo-family dynamic of the Fantastic Four.

So with all that going on in her life, if you tell her she’s not contributing?

Yeah, she is going to have a hard time hearing that.

Now we have a Sue Storm who has self-esteem issues because of her specific history, not just because she’s a woman. She has a relatable character hook: being taken for granted spurs her feelings of inadequacy. We can identify with that feeling once and a while, can’t we? And just as the Fantastic Dudes struggle to overcome their personality flaws for the sake of the team and the safety of the city/world/universe/whatever it is today, so too is Sue’s triumph greater when she saves the day despite her own self-doubt.

So is this a viable characterization, or is the danger of sliding back into “fragile female” territory too great? There’s a great potential for extreme dodginess, but Grant Morrison did something similar to this in FF: 1234 and it seemed to work pretty well.

(Post-script: this same bloody thing happened to Jean Grey, as well. In the original X-Men, Scott is the brooding leader, Hank the funny intellectual, Warren the smooth ladies’ man, Bobby the immature kid, and Jean is ... the girl. Why do you think they kept turning her back into the Phoenix in the 1990s/2000s? Because there’s precious little personality, little else to the character other than “mother figure,” so you might as well go all-out and make her the ultimate goddess personification of life-giving force.)

Sideburns #21: "Public Service Announcement"

Lo-fi webcomics by Justin Zyduck. Every Monday.

Superhero Theory: Voted Most Likely to Fail (or: Pym Articles)

Henry Pym as a character has always fascinated me, and it has nothing to do with the spousal abuse aspect.

Let’s look at the cover of Avengers #1. This is Marvel’s answer to DC’s Justice League (okay, okay, historians know that the Fantastic Four was technically the response, but Avengers is the one actually using the JLA’s formula) -- an assemblage of superheroes, and yet, only one of them actually looks like the traditional notion of a superhero. Iron Man looks like some kind of robot, the Hulk is a monster, Thor has the cape and brightly-colored tights but the eye focuses more on his bizarre metal helmet and the fact that he’s a gol-durn longhair. Only Ant-Man, and in the next issue, Giant Man, has the full-body tights and helmet/mask most people associate with superhero.

(Note: I am shortchanging the Wasp here, but then again, so is the cover copy – “THOR! ANT MAN! HULK! IRON MAN!” but no “THE WASP!” And in these early stories, the Wasp acts largely as a companion to Pym and not her own character – it’s “ANT-MAN AND THE WASP!” not “ANT-MAN!” and “THE WASP!”.)

Visually, then, (Gi)Ant-Man is the most “traditional” of the gang, the most obviously superheroic. And yet, Henry Pym was one of the few failures of the early Marvel era; his series in Tales to Astonish was bumped to make way for a Sub-Mariner feature, and he never graduated to his own series (and still technically hasn’t). He becomes an Avengers mainstay, probably because it seems wrong to completely abandon a Lee-Kirby creation, but even there, he’s most famous for becoming schizophrenic (in the comic book sense, not in any true, clinical sense), hitting his wife, and changing costumes and code-names constantly.

A lot of superhero writers, aspiring and otherwise, say they’d like to try and rehabilitate the character (Dan Slott seems to be having a go at it in Mighty Avengers). But lately I’m thinking maybe it can’t be done. At least not without creating, in essence, a totally new character. See, Pym can’t be fixed because he was never broken in the first place. He was a non-starter; there’s no comics with Henry Pym that you can go back to and say “This was the definitive take on the character; let’s analyze what makes these stories work and update them and apply them to modern comics.” Either there is no definitive take on Pym, or his definitive take is the guy with a personality disorder hitting his wife.

So why is this? Allow me to present my thesis:

Henry Pym fails because he is a DC superhero in the Marvel Universe.

I kind of think Stan Lee was hedging his bets with (Gi)Ant-Man. Y’know, just in case that whole “Fantastic Four style” he and Kirby had going was more trouble than it was worth, and kids really did want DC-style stories. (I suspect the same is true of the unambitious Human Torch series in Strange Tales, which, with its suburban setting and odd adherence to secret identity concerns, is rather like a Silver Age DC comic). I’ve never read the old Tales to Astonish stories, but nobody ever talks about them, so I am inclined to believe they were not noteworthy.

But Pym himself lacks the hooks Stan built into his other heroes. He’s a mature, square-jawed scientist who discovers a way to give himself superpowers, and decides to use them responsibly to fight crime, aliens, and spies. He’s not a neurotic kid like Spider-Man or a misunderstood monster like the Hulk, and he doesn't have any of Tony Stark’s frailties or even the man-out-of-time angle Stan Lee used on Captain America to fully “Marvelize” him. Pym is just a straight-up superhero. There’s not much differentiating him from, say, the Flash or the Atom. Heck, he even has a sidekick like a DC hero, in the form of the Wasp (getting to her soon; wait for it!)

The most interesting things about Pym in his early incarnations are:

1.) He started out as a protagonist in what was intended to be a one-off horror story (“The Man In The Ant-Hill!”), but Marvel repurposed him into a superhero. Even as a kid, that idea was fascinating to me, but really, it’s just trivia. At best, it adds a metatextual interest (see: The Thing as a carryover from the Marvel monster era).

2.) His “sidekick” is also his romantic interest. “Partner-in-peril” always had a nice, florid ring to it. Imagine Jim Steranko doing a series about two lovers fighting crime side by side -- Action! Romance! Thrills! But Stan Lee’s stories, for all else they had going for them, were quite condescending toward women (though in a good-natured way, and not unusually for their time, I suppose), and so instead of an electrifying, tension-filled partnership, you get a lot of the Wasp talking about clothes and hunky guys.

3.) He changed his costume and powers and name.

Now here’s some metatextual goodness you can play with. Stan Lee retools Henry Pym’s schtick again and again because he knew he had a flop and tried to fix it. As above, so below: in the story-world, Pym knows he’s unsuccessful and tries to revamp himself.

Lee’s desperateness becomes Pym’s. Every new costume change Lee gives him to try and keep up with Iron Man and the Fantastic Four’s success just chips away at Pym’s self-worth. “I know!” thinks Lee/Pym, “Giant-Man’s a silly name anyway! I’ll change it to Goliath!” And that fails to take off, either.

Because the truth is, Pym just cannot cut it as a superhero. He’s a guy who’s trying way too hard (and how telling that he hits on Yellowjacket, his best outfit/name combo, after a nervous breakdown that leaves him no longer quite himself!), whereas his Marvel compatriots just sort of seem to grow and change organically into something that works (Spider-Man’s evolution from Amazing Fantasy #15 to about Amazing Spider-Man #3 or so is surprisingly fluid and naturalistic if you read it all at once, as opposed to Pym’s abrupt changes).

In the DC Universe, where he arguably belongs, he’d have been okay. Never a big success, but you know, he’d have settled into a nice C-lister status and would have resigned himself happily to showing up for crossovers and maybe as a supporting character in someone else’s series (like Rip Hunter in Booster Gold). But in Stan Lee’s new Marvel Universe (not that he thought of it as such, of course) there was no room for such a traditionalist as Henry Pym.

And yet … that “metatextual goodness” I mentioned isn’t my idea. Pym’s inferiority complex is actually in the comic books. Stan Lee was very self-referential in playing with that sort of thing: Iron Man would redesign his armor because he wanted it to look more “drama,” and Paste-Pot Pete changed his name to The Trapster because the old one “sounded too much like a comic book title!”

Despite himself, Pym is relevant, then, because now he represents something greater than himself, as the best superheroes do. Unfortunately (for him), what he represents is failure. Some musicians never get signed, some writers never get published, some actors never get work.

Some superheroes never catch on.

Sideburns #20: "Captive Market"

Lo-fi webcomics by Justin Zyduck. Every Monday.

Superhero Theory: I Want a Clean Fight, You Two...

I know I said I was going to do a post on Henry Pym, but something came up.

Here are four panels (five, technically) of Spider-Man punching bad guys.

(Amazing Spider-Man #3, art by Steve Ditko, July 1963)


(Amazing Spider-Man #369, art by Mark Bagley and Randy Emberlin, Late November 1992)


(Amazing Spider-Man #563, art by Mike McKone and Marlo Alquiza, August 2008)


(Amazing Spider-Man: Extra! #3, art by Fabrizio Fiorentino and maybe an inker or two, May 2009)

The first three images are comic book hits in the classic style: Spider-Man punches a guy, and his foe cleanly flies back from the impact. Sometimes there is a sound effect, sometimes there is a little stylized “explosion” at the impact point; there can be both, one or the other, or neither, that's all up to the artist.

The last one is something I’ve been seeing a lot lately, combining the classic hit but adding blood, and this is something I do not really care for.

I find it inappropriate, but I don’t mean in a prudish sort of way (because I enjoy a good slasher movie, after all), and I don’t mean in a “Won’t somebody think of the children?” knee-jerk way (because frankly, kids love blood).

I mean it is inappropriate for the representational nature of superhero conflict.

Let me explain that. Last week I said that superheroes allow us to tap vicariously into melodrama. Spider-Man’s sadness and the Hulk’s anger are not (or ought not be) realistic portrayals of those emotions, but rather representational of those emotions: stylized and enhanced.

Superhero conflict is similarly stylized and enhanced. Combat is just a physical manifestation of an ethical or philosophical conflict. Xavier and Magneto’s coexistence vs. superiority conflict is dramatized by having the X-Men fight the Brotherhood. Batman and the Joker fight to settle larger issues of chaos vs. order. In that first image, Spider-Man isn’t really fighting random burglars; he’s not even really fighting crime, he’s fighting his own inclination toward inaction, which is what got Uncle Ben killed in the first place (“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” and all that jazz).

(At the risk of veering off-topic: This whole thing is a very delicate balancing act. Strip an X-Men vs. Magneto battle of any deeper meaning and you’re left with a hollow, generic battle between random costumed characters. Make it too much about the conflicting philosophies and you’ve over-literalized it; then the X-Men and Magneto are just discussing their conflicting ideologies, and at that point you might as well abandon the superhero conceit altogether and just write a literary story about race relations or whatever. Finding the right equilibrium is where the true skill in superhero comic writing comes in.)

In the real world, however, you can’t put order in a bat costume and chaos in clown makeup and have them duke it out. Violence is just violence, and it doesn’t really solve anything other than immediate conflict. So violence for violence’s sake in a comic is pointless -- we have that already in the real world. It doesn’t mean or stand for anything.

And I abhor violence in the real world, but I love comic book battles and action movie fights. If you really hit Electro with as much momentum as Spider-Man does in the second panel above, you would probably snap his neck. But in the comic world, he flies backward bloodlessly and gets up in the panel after that. Because there’s no serious consequence, it’s fun and exciting. Heck, it's like some kind of wacky ballet, really. You can be a pacifist and root for Spider-Man (“Hit ‘im again, Spidey!”) because it’s not the violence itself you’re after, it’s the solution to the problem; because superheroes live in a representational milieu, they can solve problems via punching and kicking and you don’t feel too bad about it.

But when people start bleeding, that sort of shatters the representational nature of the fight, because now it’s real, and now there’s consequences. The burglars in the first image get knocked down and their story is done; I guess they wake up with maybe a headache but are basically okay, so there is no need to think about them anymore. But I look at the guy Spidey is whaling on in that last image, and I think “Jeez, that guy’s really hemorrhaging, isn’t he? He’s going to need medical attention; he might have brain damage, even.” An image like this makes it hard for me to root for Spider-Man; the violence is no longer symbolic.

It’s not like if I see blood in a superhero comic, I instantly cast the thing onto the fire. In fact, the hero bleeding usually works, as long as it’s not overdone; villains can be vicious, and a bleeding hero always tickles the suffering/Passion centers of the ol’ collective consciousness. But nine times out of ten, if Spider-Man punches a guy and a stream of blood flies from his mouth and/or nose? It adds a bit of realism, but this may not be what you ought to be going for in superhero stories.

(Similarly: These days when the Hulk rampages through New York, you've got thousands of displaced people and refugee camps springing up. I am not exactly sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, this kind of continues the injection of realism into the fantastic in the Stan Lee style, but I feel this might be a bit much. The Hulk's property damage was about as symbolic as the violence before, and now that it's firmly literalized, it's less easy to think of the Hulk as a "misunderstood monster.")

Of course, I could just be being an old man about this sort of thing. "Superheroes had a code when I was your age; they pulled their punches an' the villains rolled with 'em! Where is my tea?" Hm. What do you think, True Believer? (Josh: as an artist I would be interested in your take on this sort of thing.)

Sideburns #19: "Serving Suggestion"

Lo-fi webcomics by Justin Zyduck. Every Monday.

Superhero Theory: An Introduction

With updates on this blog related to Wyatt being necessarily sparse (but I promise you dudes, the slightest progress made on our end will be documented and categorized, both for your sakes and for future historians’), I think we could do with another weekly feature around here.

So: I love superheroes and I love blogs. My favorite comics blogs don’t just review new issues or talk about things that their authors like -- they perform some level of analysis, toward what I like to call “superhero theory” (which is a punchy descriptor, if not entirely accurate). Scipio on the Absorbascon has an intriguing thesis about what he calls the “dynastic centerpiece model” of Silver Age DC Comics, this is a brilliant piece about Batman, the “Delineated” series cuts to the heart of 40-and-up-year-old characters, and plok’s articles about Fantastic Four have given me a level of respect for Roy Thomas I never thought possible.

So inspired by blogs such as these, and many others, every Friday we’ll sit down and have an informal chat about superheroes, what makes them tick, and what makes them work.

-------------

To begin: why do I -- a 24-year-old adult, married, employed, financially secure as one can be in this economic climate -- love superheroes?

Well, the first reason is the most obvious. By putting it first, I’m not trying to get it out of the way, I’m trying to stress its importance:

I liked them as a child.

No matter what kind of academic bollocks I or anyone else can feed you about superheroes being “modern mythology” or “allegorical works exploring the use of power” or “examinations on duality,” most people who read superhero comics as adults read them as children. I am a guy who’s pretty indulgent of his inner child (little kids seem to think I’m cool because I’m essentially a 10-year-old boy who can drive a car). And I read superhero comics because, when you strip everything away, it’s a pleasant reminiscence. Nostalgia is only a bad thing if taken to excess, I believe.

And why do little kids like superheroes? Because they look cool.

To drive this home, among the earliest superhero comics I read, and certainly my favorites at the time, were from the David Michelinie/Todd McFarlane run on Amazing Spider-Man (specifically, #305 and #307). Now, people say that kids like Spider-Man because the Peter Parker character is relatable as an alienated youth, but in these stories, Peter is clearly a grown-up, is happily married, and is touring the country in support of a book on Spider-Man photos he’s taken. Heck, he appears as a guest on Johnny Carson at one point! Nothing about the conventional “Spider-Man” formula that we all cite as being the reason for his success is present.

But look at this:



Okay, we can criticize McFarlane about Spawn and everything else all day, but look at that page! More importantly, look at it as an elementary school boy (or girl, as the case may be).

Superheroes, at their most basic level, are a visual phenomenon. If you don’t believe me, how could those early Image superheroes with their half-formed personalities and their unimaginative codenames have sold so many comics? Because, in the cultural context of the time, they looked really cool! Spider-Man looks really cool! He is dynamic! Nobody would really look like that in a skintight outfit, but he does! Spider-Man does have all that alienation and reader-identification stuff going on, of course, but the best costume in all of comics is the bait that lures you in to discover that in the first place.

So we look at superheroes because they’re totally rad. But why did I read them? And why do I still read them, even though I’m old enough to pay taxes and make my own dentist’s appointments?

Well, you see, I like ELO.

The Electric Light Orchestra is probably my second-favorite band behind the Beatles (although, really, “second-favorite band”, “third-favorite” doesn’t really mean anything, does it?). People get on frontman Jeff Lynne’s case for his bombastic production style -- the massive orchestra, the elaborate harmonies and intricate arrangements -- and complain that there isn’t really any depth to the songs, to the lyrics. It’s all just rhyming “moon” with “June,” isn’t it?

But I think that’s the point. We all know “Mr. Blue Sky,” right? It sort of regained popularity a few years ago, appearing in trailers and commercials, and it’s not hard to see why. With that warm vocal, the really crisp strings, the fat, regular bass, and that goofy smacking-the-fire-extinguisher sound, it’s just so happy, so joyful, so positive. But what’s it really about? “It’s a nice day outside.” That’s it. Check the lyrics, there’s nothing more to it than that, really, but the way Lynne puts the song together, it’s just so darn jubilant, isn’t it? It’s not simply a nice day, it’s the best day EVER!

And he does the same to the sad ones, too. The conceit of “Telephone Line” is nothing more than “I’m trying to call the person I love, and she’s either not home or not answering the phone,” and yet, after Lynne lays on the strings, particularly those cello flourishes in the chorus, it is the most tragic thing that has happened to anyone ever!

And can’t you identify with that? We’ve all been there. Intellectually, you know it’s mundane, but it certainly feels like tragedy at the time, doesn’t it? Secretly, at least. You feel it, but you don’t say it, because that would be too…

…melodramatic.

And that’s what superheroes are good for. Melodrama. Bright costumes, bright colors: this is an exaggerated world for exaggerated people with exaggerated feelings -- but you must always be able to see a sliver of yourself in there! What is Spider-Man if not the extrapolation of that nagging suspicion that you could be really successful and well-liked among your peers if only you didn’t have all this stuff in your life getting in the way? The Hulk is our anger, Iron Man is our mistakes come back to haunt us. We may indulge ourselves vicariously through them. Even Doctor Doom gets his moment; who hasn’t felt unappreciated and secretly wanted to shake an iron fist at the world and mutter “I’ll show them!”

(It’s not just Marvel, although this is what Marvel pioneered with Stan Lee at the helm. The first Flash story I ever read was Mark Waid’s “Terminal Velocity” storyline, a story in which a man is keeping a secret from the woman he loves for what he thinks is her own good. In Wally West’s case, however, it just happens to be a secret involving an extradimensional energy field and a machine that can level a city with earthquakes.)

But in recent years, some writers have been scaling back the melodrama. Brian Michael Bendis is in some ways the epitome of this, or at least the most prominent example. He dumps the dramatic excess in favor of a sort of realism -- at least, the sort of realism you see in film. Literalism might be a better word, although I’m not sure if that’s a loaded term. I mean, even when Bendis used thought balloons, he used them as indicators of reaction and not introspection.

The justification for this is that it makes the characters more “realistic,” and while many people debate this, I have to concede it’s true. I think that’s fair. I would argue that superheroes under this style are rounder, more subtle characters, certainly more rational individuals.

But I don’t want Peter Parker to look at his problems rationally, with a level head! He wears a red and blue outfit with weird white reflective eyes -- this is a man who has license to be dramatic! Let the superheroes be operatic!

Let Superman have a storybook romance with Lois Lane he can never hope to consummate. Doesn’t that just, I don’t know, mean more? Doesn’t it make you feel more, at least? Because if I were Superman… sure, I probably would let Lois know I was Clark Kent, and I’d settle down with her, get married, get an apartment. That would be rational, that would be realistic; that’s what I’d do.

But I wouldn’t look like Superman does in his skintight outfit.

NEXT WEEK: Less macro, more micro: a look at the Avengers’ Henry Pym.