Superbeing and Time

I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the the world crystalizes for us .... They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life ... Such images constitute a program, establish our soul's fixed fund of capital, which is allotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings. It seems to me that the rest of our life passes in the interpretation of those insights, in the attempt to master them with all the wisdom we acquire, to draw them through all the range of intellect we have in our possession. These early images mark the boundaries of an artists's creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made.

- Bruno Schulz

I keep not posting the promised follow-up to my big mock-pastoral post, mostly because I wrote it, it was crap, and I didn't post it. I've decided to try to break its down for smaller post spare-parts. I was going to start tonight by doing something like this to the NYT article on graphic novels - biff! pow! - but Kip Manley did it better. That saves time. Moving right along. A quibble:

The term ''graphic novel'' is actually a misnomer. Satrapi's ''Persepolis'' books (another installment is due this summer) are nonfiction, and so, for that matter, is ''Maus,'' once you accept the conceit that human beings are played, so to speak, by cats, dogs, mice and frogs.

Haven't read "Persepolis". But Animal Farm is Soviet history in barnyard code. If Maus isn't a novel, does that mean Orwell's novel isn't a novel? My strong instinct is to call Maus a novel, ergo fiction, even though it's a true story. (Surely we aren't going to start calling all those first novels non-fiction, just because the authors flagrantly inform us of the most embarrassingly intimate details of their dysfunctional families and ex-love-lives, with just a few names changed to protect the guilty.) But this isn't what I want to talk about.

[UPDATE: I quite inadvertently deleted a track-back from Majikthise, so I will reward her for my faux pas with a plug. She has a blog devoted to analytic philosophy and liberal politics. I poked around a bit and it seems a bit of alright. Have a look.]

The graphic novel - unlike the more traditional part of the comic-book universe now being celebrated by fiction writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem - is a place where superheroes have for the most part been banished or where, as in ''Jimmy Corrigan'' and ''David Boring,'' they exist only as wistful emblems of a lost childhood.

This remark is almost insightfully wrong. Well, I actually haven't read the relevant Lethem (though Belle and I knew the guy slightly before he hit the big-time.) But the Escapist, in Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay - while perhaps not a perfect, mint-condition, plastic-slipped analog of Proust's tea-dipped madeleines - is the focus of profound wist. The mood of Chabon's novel is relatively warm, yes. His heroes' arch-anomies are less black and nefarious than those of poor Jimmy Corrigan and David Boring. But it is striking the degree to which the literary function of superheroes is the same in all these cases - as "filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes." Often excruciating, but with pain of unachieved adulthood contending with hope for redeemed childish innocence. This is what I tried to talk about in my abandoned post, without notable success.

The thing about superhero stories is that they make no sense whatsoever, not even a little tiny bit, and never will; but once - when you were small - this made so much sense that nothing else seemed to. To screw up the mind's eye until it is capable of steady double-vision - seeing these senseless stories as children do and as adults must - is a big part of the trick. The child is the father of the man (as Billy Batson is the father of Captain Marvel.) And your mum and dad, they bulk you up. To see childhood and adulthood strangely overlaid, because all superheroes are just big kids, is often a very effective literary obliteration of the passage of time for the sake of a meditation on roots and origins.

And the classic superhero comic story is, in a sense, dead - the naive exuberance of that golden age tarnished and unrecoverable - but in a sense it's alive. To see an art form as both dead and alive is intriguing. [Too harsh, especially in light of "Spider-Man 2" box-office figures.] And the content of the superhero stories - well, here it gets complicated. But the odd thing is how all the seemingly crippling limitations of the absurd artificial manners of superhero stories can be transmuted into exquisite studies of those manners, which are badges of childhood and also symptoms of madness. There are so many eloquent ways of allegorizing or symptomizing, to complement a highly equivocal, nostalgic mood, using standard tropes of the superhero genre. This filament in the solution glows like a secret identity or true origin story.

Anyway, contrasting what Chabon is doing with what Clowes and Ware are doing seems to miss the more impressive basis for literary comparison.

And, come to think of it, emphasizing the contrast misses the the fact that all truly quality superhero storytelling - at least these days, fallen away from the Golden Age as we are - always works this way: wistfulness for lost innocence. But nostalgia in a good or at least suprisingly subtle and appreciative literary way, not just in a sad bastard aging fanboy snuffling into his cape in the Android's Dungeon way. How to explain the difference?

It has been stoutly maintained by defenders and would-be rescusitators of the traditional cape book that the best superhero stories are those that attain not just epic proportions (that's all too easy) but some sort of true mythic grandeur. This isn't exactly wrong, but only so long as 'mythic' is understood in a 'filaments in the solution of childhood' way, not in an 'If this be Ragnarok' sort of way. Superhero stories unfold surprisingly rich literary potential when they serve as touchstones of memory, occasions for surprisingly subtle and poignant reveries about things past.

Here is Alan Moore, whom I have quoted before in this vein, expounding what I take to be the fairly standard line that good superhero stories are, in some sense, true myths:

As I mentioned in my introduction to Frank's Dark Knight, one of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time ... You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth.

I think this is not a terribly incisive stab at what makes Dark Knight good. What Moore says which I think is absolutely correct and closer to the heart of the matter comes before and after. He says: "Knowing the fate of characters in even a potential future lends them a sort of poignance which is very important." Dark Knight fits: aging Batman battling 'The Big Blue Schoolboy' in a distopian future. More elaborately, and with reference to the projected 'myth' of the twilight of DC's gods Moore envisions in his never-developed treatment:

Every minor shift of attitude in the current Bruce Wayne's approach to life that might be seen in Batman or Detective over the next few years, whether intentionally or not, will provide twinges of excitement for the fans who can perceive their contemporary Batman inching ever closer to the intense and immortal giant portrayed in the Dark Knight chronicles. It also provides a special poignance ... while I was doing some of the episodes of "Under the Hood" for the Watchmen text backup and especially upon seeing Dave's mock-up photographs of the Minutemen in their early, innocent days, I felt as if I'd touched upon that sense of "look at them all being happy. They didn't know how it would turn out" that one sometimes gets when looking at old photographs. Dark Knight does this for the Batman to some degree, and I'd like to try to do the same for the whole DC cosmos in Twilight . I feel that by providing a capstone of the type mentioned above, but one which embraces the whole DC universe rather than just a couple of its heroes, I can lend a coherence and emotional weight to the notion of a cohesive DC universe, thus fulfilling the criteria set out in my ramblings about the effect of all this on the idea of DC continuity as mentioned above. Being set in a possible future, it does nothing that cannot be undone, and yet at the same time has a real and tangible effect upon the lives and activities of the various characters in their own books and their own current continuities.

Inching out further on a limb, see whether you agree with me: it's only the accretion of all these little, apparently quite incidental moments and atmospheric touches of unexpected, old snapshot poignance that makes Watchmen great. Many other things about the book are quite nice in their way. The story is fun, but - standing it against the meterstick of absolute literary achievement - just sturdy melodrama with a nuclear blast at the end. It's entertaining, but formally stock and standard. Moore is better than merely talented because he has a reliable, professional talent for building really nice stock structures (akin to the skill some people have for endlessly churning top-40 hits out of their souls.) These constitute the canvases on which he indulges his genius for strangely ambigious mock-pastoral moodiness. His superheroes are exquisitely rendered wise-fools.

In our next unbelievable issue! Crisis On the Infantile Earths! Someone Really Dies!

Comments

[Josh Lukin]

Morrison has for the past fifteen years been infuriatingly explicit about his engagement with the "highly equivocal nostalgic mood" of which you write so passionately, JH (I, by contrast, wrote a clumsy piece in my undergraduate years touching on the subject , one which people keep embarrassing me by citing). Possibly the Flex Mentallo series is his pithiest meditation on the subject. I shall have to dig it out in my new apartment before commenting further . . .

[jholbo]

It's funny. I haven't actually read a lot of Morrison and I have always sort of vaguely thought of him as a counter-example to what I'm saying. Which probably just goes to show that I haven't read enough Morrison. I actually just recently read the first volume of "The Invisibles". I only sorta kinda like it.

[Kip Manley]

The Invisibles is a fascinating failure: there's a lot of energy in there, and the furniture for a really cool epic—thing—is crammed into that attic, unpolished, hidden under dustwraps, but the first chunk fails the gel, the second chunk is crippled by the first, and the third was criminally truncated. (Something better should be done with his tonal mix of Trevanian and Eco and Jerry Cornelius.)

Flex Mentallo is the must-read; it's maybe my favorite superhero story ever. His run on Doom Patrol is also essential, and thank God they're finally collecting it. I'm also awfully fond of his Animal Man, though his various obsessions are getting their first main workout there and don't sit well together, yet. So read those; Morrison is definitely working your side of the street. (His New X-Men, just completed, did a fine job of walking the lines you limn in "Crisis on Infantile Earths," above; the steps Marvel has taken in undoing what he did—that wasn't really Magneto, that was a, a clone or something, we'll figure it out in a minute—are as tragic in kind if not in scope as Maximum Clonage, et al.)

Anyway: I'm a fanboy on the subject, so I'll shut up for now, or I'll start trying to work out a theory of The Filth in this itty-bitty comment box. Set Invisibles aside for the moment, though, is my advice. You need to be in a more forgiving frame of mind to properly enjoy it.

[Josh Lukin]

Jeepers, for years I was convinced it was my fault that I didn't love The Invisibles, and now smart people like Kip Manley and Jess Nevins start expressing sentiments identical to my own.

I second Kip's advice --Doom Patrol, along with Animal Man and the DP spinoff Flex Mentallo-- and add that Morrison's JLA also tries to walk a few of those lines you limn, in its own way.

[Stephen Frug]

Sorry to pull the comments off Morrison, but to John's final point about Moore: I *don't* agree. I think Moore's brilliance in WATCHMEN encompasses, but goes far beyond, what John outlines.

First, I would disagree with the characterization of Moore's plot as simply a "sturdy melodrama with a nuclear blast at the end.... entertaining, but formally stock and standard". I think he takes those materials and does more with them -- in this case, entwining them in all sorts of interesting questions about responsibility, guardianship, the morality of harsh utiliatrian choices, etc; questions, that is, ultimately about power. (These are questions that cast light on the Superhero genre, of course, but also far beyond that.) Moore's best work often takes stock tropes and does them well, but he also (often not always) uses them in ways which make them much more than what they normally are.

Further, there is all sorts of other brilliance in the work. It's been a while since I reread it, but a few things stand out in memory: the characters, both the superheros and the other, more minor ones, are fully human, rounded people. The powerful juxtapositions (of two panels, of panel and text, of two running lines of text and panels, of the Pirate story & the rest, etc) are formally incredible. His riffs on what goes to make a person the person they are (in the Rorsarch chapter, the Silk Spectre restrospective, etc), are superb, as are his riffs on themes such as fatalism/free will in the Dr Manhattan retrospective chapter (brilliant in a literary, not a trying-to-be-analtyic-philosophy way, of course; different aim). The novel is quite simply and powerfully *well written*. And on and on.

So no, I think Moore's brilliance goes much beyond what you say. (He shows other sorts of brilliance in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in From Hell, in Promethea, in V for Vendetta, in Swamp Thing, in others I haven't read probably, but here I'm focusing on Watchmen.)

SF

[nnyhav]

Biff! Pow! Truncate! Bzzurkk!

And from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Superagencies, we have Wham! Whack! Voila! (Weighted Average Maturity, Coupon, Loan Age respectively -- 'mortgage' etymology from French 'death by degrees'?)