I was absolutely inspired by Gorjus’ divine Animal Man post of a few days ago to think a little more about the power—or at least the potential—superhero comics have to foster critical thinking, to defamiliarize moral and ethical contradictions, debates, and hypocrisies that have become so ordinary as to be invisible. In our e-mail exchanges after his post, we discussed how it might seem silly to offer up superhero comics as one of the major sources of our early understandings of morality, what with having grown up with caring parents and in the church. But if you grew up in the sort of church culture that I did, you know that the notion that the values of “the church” might somehow be in opposition to the values of “the world” really only registers in terms of economic consumption, of lifestyle: Veggie Tales v. Spongebob, or Left Behind v. The Da Vinci Code. Outside of that arena, that division between church and world blurs: religion becomes a way, as Walker Percy once wrote, to “sanctify the status quo,” so that leading a “Christlike” life is simply a matter of being a solid, dependable, middle-class American, just like Jesus was.
Not to get off on one of those rants again. I offer that up only to say that one of the main sources you might expect to inspire moral or philosophical deliberation is more typically assimilated into the Borg-like complex of late capitalism. Of course, comic books are made and produced by large corporations whose main object is selling movie, video-game, and toy licenses for the properties they own; they are not stone tablets from a cloud-ringed mountain or koan-inscribed bamboo leaves from a snow-bearded zen master. So don’t get the idea that I’m holding them up as outside that capitalist system, either: the reason you haven’t read a good Superman story in years is because Warner Brothers needs to sell S-emblazoned bedsheets and party hats.
But for all that, the hardest thinking I remember doing as a kid was inspired not by any of Jesus’ parables or directives (it was clearly understood among my friends and family that turning the other cheek was a good principle, but if someone picked on you at school you should bust them in the mouth) but by stories I read in Captain America and Amazing Spider-Man. Some of these stories caused me no end of consternation, vexed me with new ideas that were no less bothersome for my inability to articulate them. They made it possible for my later readings in literature, history, sociology, and philosophy to shove open a door that would otherwise have been locked.
Case in point: Captain America #292, “An American Christmas,” which came out in December 1983.
I love this cover, incidentally—the bubble at the bottom credits it to “Hannigan and Janson.”
This issue came near the end of writer J.M. DeMatteis tenure on the title, a tenure I’ve written of before with admiration, particulary for the way in which DeMatties was able to work in a subtle critique of the Reagan 80s in a time when every exemplar of manly Americanness was being appropriated by the Right. The pencils for this issue are by Paul Neary, who replaced my all-time favorite Cap penciller, Mike Zeck, when Zeck left to work on a little project called Secret Wars. More on that later. Neary did solid work, though I always missed Zeck.
Anyway: this comic could have been terrible. DeMatties and Neary stage a battle between Cap and the Black Crow, a mysterious, poweful Navajo superhuman (who is paralyzed from the waist down in his civilian identity) who claims that the “Earth Spirit” has sent him, the embodiment of America past, to kill Cap, the emodiment of the modern US, in order to satisfy a cosmic balance. Here’s here’s how he describes his mission:
It would be disingenuous of me to try to recall exactly the responses that 8- or 9-year-old pre-fessor Fury had as he read this story. But I hope it’s not going too far to say that I remember feeling a confused sense of injustice—not on behalf of the oppressed Navajo people, but on behalf of Captain America. After all, here’s a guy who has dedicated his whole life to helping others, to saving lives, to righting wrongs, to protecting the innocent and weak. Aside from some Nazi soldiers in WW2, he’d never even killed anyone to this point in his career. So to hold him accountable for the historical transgressions of something so nebulous as “modern America” probably seemed like very spotty thinking to me at the time, concerned as I was with being sure that I wasn’t unfairly made to clean up any of the messes my brother made.
I do remember for absolute certain that the conclusion of the story perplexed and confounded me. Cap’s in the midst of doing the thing he usually does, where he gets beaten to within an inch of his life by a more powerful foe but then reaches deep inside and, tapping reserves of strength and courage that ordinary men would have long ago exhausted, hits his opponent really hard in the face with his shield. But instead of that familiar, comforting finale, DeMatteis gives us this:
Unsatisfying, thinks the pre-fessor! Kneeling? Hugging? Huh? Not to worry though: it was a comfort to be able to put aside those questions exactly one page later. There we read a famous epilogue running through all of Marvel’s books that month in which various heroes go to investigate a mysterious alien construct in Central Park and get zapped—to where, the story doesn’t reveal, but the house ad on the next page indicates that they’ve been transported to the pages of the Marvel Super Hero Secret Wars maxi-series: twelve issues of heroes fighting villains, heroes fighting other heroes—absolutely no kneeling whatsoever—all published in the service of promoting a kick-ass line of action figures. (This is not to denigrate Secret Wars, which I love).
But if my doubts and confusions about the end of “An American Christmas” were submerged in the frenzied mental lather that I worked up in anticipation of just what might happen in this “secret war,” they were not completely washed away. To switch metaphors, the jolt of trying to understand why the end of this admittely occasionally hokey story was so very different from what I had expected created a gap, a mere hairline fracture but a gap nonetheless, in the ideological filter being constructed around my mind (not that there’s not another ideological filter right behind that one, and not that we aren’t prisoners of our beliefs in our own subjectivity, Althusser blah blah blah). This was my first exposure to the idea of complicity, of collective guilt. It was the first time I confronted—rather than just reading about it in a safely compartmentalized Bible story—the notion that just because one individual doesn’t personally wrong another individual, that doesn’t mean that he or she hasn’t materially benefited from that long-ago transgression, that he or she doesn’t bear some responsibility for the fact that his or her privilege is built on the back of someone else’s misery. There’s something pleasantly perverse in the idea that I, a son of Faulkner’s Mississippi, learned about bloodguilt and the sins of the father from a comic produced in New York City. Heh.
Anyway. I realize that I haven’t answered the quesiton of why superhero comics as a medium in particular are more apt to do this type of work than, say, a television show, a movie, a song—is it just because this is a medium towards which I’m biased? Is the superhero the embodiment of something archetypal and mythic that touches something in our Jungian unconscious? Is it simply the frisson generated when a genre ostensibly rooted in adolescent male power fantasies refuses, if only briefly, to satisfy those fantasies? And what does it mean that kids don’t read comics anymore?
Again, many, many thanks to Gorjus for setting me thinking in this direction. Go read his Animal Man post again, because it is a thing of beauty.
And don’t worry. Surely my family will do something ludicrous soon.
Wow. I’ve never read that comic before, but the questions it raises of collective guilt still bother me. To what degree am I complicit in the sins of the past? That question, for from being dead, is perhaps raised more today than before, in an era when we are digging out and putting to trial the near-corpses of Byron de la Beckwith and Edgar Ray Killen.
What Cap seems to do, and what apparently pleases the “Earth spirit,” is to acknowledge complicity: Cap accepts the past, and in doing so, absorbs it and destroys the hurt. Perhaps that’s a naive few of it, but acknowledgment in and of itself can be gigantically important (see: the reopening of Emmett Till’s case).
Besides the notion of apology for collective/inherited guilt, there’s also a terrific and chivalrous tipping of the hat here by Cap; one of my other favorites is between Ace and Wild Weasel when both the Skystriker and the Warthog are out of ammunition . . . .
For a contemporary look at the continuing struggle of the Navajo Nation against sins against their culture and the land, check out this link to a decision handed down yesterday by a federal court in Arizona. It’s not good news for the Navajo.
Yeah, that’s a good point, and I wonder if then we see the limitations of a serial medium for dealing w/ this: we get the acknowledgment, the acceptance, the hug, and then next month it’s back to punching the Absorbing Man in the face (or whatever)—all the feel-good, but none of the hard work of the follow-up, except as it’s delegated to supporting characters (like D-Man during the end of the Gruenwald era).
I’m with you. The reluctance of violence in certain comics always stuck with me. You could do more good sometimes by not fighting. And the Bruce Wayne of Dark Knight Returns felt that way. There were others, and obviously he fought and did many violent things, but at the same time he understood that he was paying a spiritual price.
Also, the notion of not stooping to your enemy’s level seperates good from bad; that just because they are doing it doesn’t make it right to do it to them…enter my thoughts on the death penalty. That if you are good, you remain above that and do not compromise your morals to beat them. Can’t think of specific ref’s to that off the top of my head…but I did catch an episode of Miami Vice the other night that explained it beautifully. Tubbs doesn’t shoot the man who murdered his brother, instead arrests him…and as they all know would happen a corrupt judge has the guy out in a matter of an hour and the guy hops on a plane to South America. Justice isn’t really served but Tubbs’ character retains what makes him a “good guy” and that is a victory in itself.
you comment:
“I realize that I haven’t answered the quesiton of why supehero comics, as a medium in particular are more apt to do this type of work than, say, a television show, a movie, a song…”
well, none of those things are any more or less apt. its the willingness of the participant artists in the medium to DO something with their stories, rather than the format itself to be able produce ‘feeling’.
As for collective guilt…i think there is a real problem for ‘maligned people’ in the transition to equality because the actors and supporters of the subject inequality often never make the Capt. America overture. example:
Uncle X was a racist, now he’s not…or at least much less so. He shouldn’t have to walk around like he has an albatros aroun his neck, BUT that’s not what he does. he pretends all that racism was something that existed and ended in the ‘past’ and that he had no more to do with that than he did with little big horn. as if the many adults alive today had no complicity and all this ‘racism’ was perpetrated by mysterious people that are all somehow magically dead in some undisclosed year.
its disingenuous and its an attempt to pretend it all didn’t happen.
More specifically, it reminds me of many conservative commenators that are called on as the ‘counter-point’ on controverssial issues concerning race. they somehow always seem to acknowledge the ‘bad old days’ but point out that ‘this isn’t one of them’. sometimes i agree. sometimes i don’t. that’s not what bothers me. what bothers me is the fact that many of these advocates have somehow NEVER seen an incident that they’d label as racist. they never seem to find any modern example, and perhaps THAT sort of denial is, in a way, just as bad as the act itself…because they become enablers.
Okay, so I’m pretty sure that, in the next day or two, I’m going to write a fairly long response to this post for Long Pauses. Great stuff.
Thanks, D, and good comments, Mooch and Wags. I remembered that one of the other caveats I should have thrown in to the main piece was about my discomfort with how some problematic racist stereotypes get reiterated here in the guise of subverting them: Black Crow is still a “savage indian” who wants to kill the civilized white man, who of course is the one who teaches the savage a valuable lesson about compassion. Troubling.
Mooch, I think that tendency to “leave the past in the past” is amplified by the born-again ideology so woven into southern culture—Uncle X has gotten religion since that time when he was such a racist, and as a new person in Christ, is no longer accountable for his past actions.
Great stuff!
Let’s not forget how complicit we all are in the sins of the present.
[...] know Why Not? I told you how I became a vegetarian because of comics, and Professor Fury has detailed the role of comics in awakening in him the idea of complicity in societal sins of the past. Are we ju [...]
“the reason you haven’t read a good Superman story in years is because Warner Brothers needs to sell S-emblazoned bedsheets and party hats.”
Groan – this sad little mantra has become doctrine for all too much bad critique.
Interesting ideological find though, encapsulating Liberal Guilt and the ever new american which Faulkner rebeled against joining the european haunted by history mode.
I dunno. I’d be less inclined to think it a sad mantra if I could think of a truly great Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man story from the last 10 years. (Morrison’s Supes might end up being great, but the jury’s still out). Comic book companies make storytelling decisions based on multi-market “synergy” all the time, and those decisions rarely result in good stories. But I’ll bite: can you elaborate on why you think that’s a too easy claim to make?
I’m intrigued by your final sentence, too, but a little confused; what’s the diff in the european and American or Southern “haunted by history mode”?
I’m also taking this as a challenge to try and find the last few great Superman stories. The pre-(and slightly-post) Crisis Alan Moore stories leap immediately to mind, but there’s GOT to be something else. I’m thinking, actually, the Superman story in Hitman is good, as is Kingdom Come . . . .
I’m also going to look for great Batman and Spider-Man stories. A worthy challenge!
Well, I ain’t saying there are no great stories with these characters, but simply that its hard to tell good stories with icons so central to the WB (or whatever) “brand.”
I’d throw “Superman: For All Seasons” out there as a great Supes story from the last ten years.
i don’t agree that there are no great stories being told, but i do agree that it’s harder to tell them now. on the other hand, if you were ten again, some of the current stuff would be pretty freakin’ SWEET!
nostalgia is great, but it’s just a feeling. go check out a random comic from the eighties that doesn’t tie to a memory of your youth and it’ll read alot like an issue of savage dragon: not necessarily that BAD but not necessarily that great…
the majors go up and down in waves as far as quality goes. but i do agree the negative effect “branding” has on storytelling.
but people buying wack stuff is the real culprit.
characters may NEVER get a great run unless the sales fall on their titles. otherwise, the “it ain’t broke don’t fix it” instinct leads editorial to kick in. so as much as i love spidey, when it feels like the writers are treading water, i drop it. when a stupid crossover happens, i drop it. when it seems fun/interesting i pick it up. vote with your dollar and all that.
but now i’m rambling. great blog.
peace.
samax.
[...] Mike Zeck left the series with issue 289, and Paul Neary was the regular penciller starting with issue 292. For a long time I bemoaned Zeck’s departure; although my affection for his pencils are no [...]
I’m also taking this as a challenge to try and find the last few great Superman stories. The pre-(and slightly-post) Crisis Alan Moore stories leap immediately to mind, but there’s GOT to be something else. I’m thinking, actually, the Superman story in Hitman is good, as is Kingdom Come