Heroism and Comics Form

Instead of the disembodied abstraction that is typically the norm, I begin and end by remarking on my own embodiment as a white female scholar of popular culture reflecting on comics studies by reviewing four books written by white male scholars, all of whom make significant contributions in theorizing comics form. Queer theory teaches us to question the naturalization of norms, so while I observe that all four are male-authored texts that focus mostly on male characters, creators, and audiences, I do not assume bodies neatly match up with genders and sexualities. Instead, guided by queer of color critique, I emphasize each book’s contributions in theorizing heroism and comics form while asking whether and how they engage, illuminate, limit, or even refuse analysis of intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and nation as intertwining social constructions. Three are studies of male superheroes. The fourth, Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie, explores a world organized around a male character who is the antithesis of a hero: Archie is “a young man to whom things happen; he is not someone who makes things happen” (16). Overall, I am struck by the significance of gender (especially masculinities), sexuality (especially heterosexuality), race (especially whiteness), and nation (especially the United States) for the objects, creators, collaborations, audiences, and industries under discussion. On the other hand, imagining female, feminist, and queer readers and readings of comics is largely foreclosed, while maleness and masculinities are often reified and underexplored as historical constructs, even in work that makes significant contributions.One of my guiding premises is that queer studies and especially queer of color critique have much to offer comics studies. As Siobhan Somerville (2014, 203) explains, queer since the 1980s functions both “as an umbrella term that refers to a range of sexual identities that are ‘not straight’” and as an analytic that “calls into question the stability of any such categories of identity based on sexual orientation,” thereby exposing the latter as constructions that “establish and police the line between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal.’” In addition to this guiding premise, I build on queer of color analysis modeled by scholars such as Roderick Ferguson, José Esteban Muñoz, and Fatima El-Tayeb, all of whom examine gender, race, sexuality, and nation as intertwining social constructions. Ferguson (2004, 149n1) defines queer of color critique as “a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique” that interrogates such “social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” Ramzi Fawaz (2016, 32) further theorizes the post–World War II “superhero as a distinctly queer figure of twentieth-century popular culture” by approaching “popular fantasy and its political effects” from the perspective of queer theory, which “is a body of knowledge that concerns itself with the ways queer or non-normative figures generate alternative desires, bring into view unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and facilitate the production of novel forms of kinship and affiliation.” Although none of the books I discuss here draws much or at all on queer theory, all take up comics form in ways that both illuminate and swerve away from queer figures, alternative desires, unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and nonnormative social and sexual relations. The figure of the “little boy” as privileged subject and imagined reader and scenes of intergenerational transmission of comics among fathers, sons, and brothers also recur, suggesting that masculinities and relationships among men are central to almost all of these comics as well as the communities and networks that transmit their meanings.The story of Captain Marvel and his alter ego Billy Batson, Brian Cremins tells us, “starts with a kid and his books” (3)—namely an editor and writer for Fawcett Publications, Bill Parker, who as a boy read about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and later invented Captain Marvel. But Cremins focuses especially on cartoonist and critic C. C. Beck and writer Otto Binder as cocreators of “one of the best-selling characters of the 1940s” (8). By recovering Beck’s theories of comics form in fanzines, letters, and other archival sources, Cremins does valuable work situating Beck as a figure “like [Will] Eisner” whose “body of work remains one of the great achievements in twentieth-century comics in the United States” (9). Cremins also explores Binder’s career as a pulp science fiction writer and his invention of the animal character Mr. Tawny as his autobiographical surrogate. Here Cremins’s remarks on the importance of fantasy and on animals as expressions of “a shadow self, one hidden from the world” (51–52) suggest that animals can function as queer figures, as in Jack Halberstam’s (2011) work on animated animals. In a discussion of how Billy Batson’s black valet, Steamboat, remains fixed in place while Billy’s movement and mastery of spaces signal his heroism, Cremins also denaturalizes racial categories and explicitly names white supremacy as a problem. He foregrounds as exemplary the story of Steamboat’s removal after objections from New York City junior high school students in the local Youthbuilders program. “If the form is as flexible and promising” as Eisner and Beck believed, Cremins argues, then it also “offers the means and opportunity” (103) to subvert racial stereotypes. Drawing on work in literature, psychology, and memory studies as well as fanzines, he examines relationships among the “medium of comics, the lure of nostalgia, and the art of memory” (4).Cremins concentrates especially on Billy as “a fiction of lost innocence, a marker of the idealized notions of boyhood and masculinity in America in the 1940s” (56). He assumes the comic targeted boy readers (and, during World War II, soldiers) who found appealing the story’s fantasy of “sheltered innocence” (75). Cremins also analyzes the comic as an extension of the boys’ adventure genre, which goes back to the nineteenth-century dime novel, when white boy adventurers, often accompanied by a subordinate person of color, explored exotic, often racialized spaces far from home (see Saxton 1991 and Streeby 2002). While boys and masculinity are the main focus of this study, Cremins dedicates it to his grandmother and cites cartoonist Trina Robbins’s memories of her “childhood discovery” of Captain Marvel, Billy, and most significantly Captain Marvel’s sister Mary as a “pretty major inspiration” for her own career (quoted on 13). Cremins’s brief mention of fanzines publishing photos of children in Mary Marvel costumes made me wonder about girl fans, as did Beck’s remark in a footnote about how much his daughter and granddaughter enjoyed the series. At the end, Cremins analyzes a 1981 photograph of himself, surrounded by other “white middle-class boys” (148) and wearing a Shazam! T-shirt with an image from the Captain Marvel–inspired Saturday morning cartoon. With no memory of its origins, he speculates about the significance of wearing a T-shirt “with a character created for children in the 1940s” and concludes “the weight of nostalgia is literal,” for the boys had “inherited a nostalgia for the popular heroes of the generations that preceded us” (149) even though the author did not read the original comics until much later.In Paul Young’s monograph on Miller’s Daredevil, on the other hand, the author centers his own responses as a twelve-year-old boy and teenage fan, which he, unlike Cremins, remembers very vividly, even describing his study as a “masochistic project” and an “exorcism” (18, 20). Starting with the question, “Why did Miller’s Daredevil blow my twelve-year-old mind?” (5), Young admits he still fears that writing a book will not “purge” either “the images or the rotating feelings of attraction and apprehension they inspire” (9). As “wretched” as he finds Miller’s gender politics especially, he is “still haunted by what those images showed me and what they meant to me beyond what they depicted” (10). In a dialogue between Young as a boy and his older self, he explores the “hold” the comic exerted on his imagination in order to “shed some light” on Miller’s success “and what that success meant for the discourse of superhero comics past, present, and future” (10). Throughout, Young frequently refers to his past as a minister’s son growing up in small-town southern Iowa, foregrounding his and his brother’s responses to comics, which continue today in their biweekly podcast, To the Batpoles! Along the way, Young also shows how Miller helped lead the creators’ rights movement and contributed to the “mainstreaming of superhero comic books beyond their traditional market of children and lifelong fans” through “grim, violent, and/or erotic ‘adult’ content and successful Hollywood franchises” (5). Miller did so, Young suggests, through a range of formal strategies, including breaking with 1940s superhero conventions of reverence for life and modeling “looser, cartoonier drawing styles and non-Code-approved violence” (210). Young contends that Miller used subtlety, irony, and complexity to muddy the good/evil binary of previous superhero comics and raise thought-provoking questions about the relationship between justice and the law. In each chapter, Young credits Miller with achieving a self-consciousness and formal complexity that expose “the act of creating comics” (72) and the conventions of the genre.Although Young incorporates insights from feminist film theory and at times addresses masculinity as a construct, I found myself a resisting reader when he moved from a particular, embodied, twelve-year-old, white-heterosexual-male “me” to a universalizing scholarly “we.” Toward the end, Young alludes to Miller’s saying, of 300’s Spartans and vigilante superheroes such as Batman, that maybe “cultures need guys like that”; Young further clarifies, “I do mean guys—the reckless male narcissists who can’t or won’t make subtle distinctions between good and evil—to do the dirty work of ‘preserving civilization as we know it’” (227). Clearly Young is criticizing the problem of reckless male narcissism and paternalistic investments in defending a racialized “civilization,” but when he says Miller “lets us sit with that ugly possibility” and “squirm at our own enjoyment and/or disgust” (227), I feel the force of my own disidentification, as Muñoz (1999) put it. Although many female readers undoubtedly enjoy Miller’s work, I am not part of the “us” who receives enjoyment, even if ambivalently mixed with disgust, from comics that explore whether white male narcissism is necessary or desirable to “civilization.” I suspect that gender, sexuality, race, and nation shape such enjoyment in ways that also merit analysis and that considering their intersections in the field of superhero comics might teach us something about the construction of masculinities and imagined relationships among men.Scott Bukatman also mentions his past as a young reader, but unlike Young he only started intensively reading Mike Mignola’s Hellboy as a Stanford professor with research funds available to purchase new Dark Horse oversize library editions of the comics, which originally debuted in 1993. Bukatman insists he was not “returned to the world of my childhood,” however, which he observes “isn’t a place I especially want to revisit anyway” (6). Although he includes a chapter on convergences of technique and materiality in children’s books and comics, he does not single out the figure of the boy reader, instead emphasizing how color can “provide a space apart that absorbs a reader” and “provides an antidote to pedantry” (99), enabling a “nonlinear mode of reading” (100). Bukatman suggests that Hellboy deviates from many other superhero comics in making its forensic detective protagonist “our surrogate” rather than “a figure of identification,” such that “our interest is deflected or dispersed into the world itself” (198). Bukatman also emphasizes Mignola’s “handmade ethos” (109) and “increasingly non-naturalistic” art, with its “refreshing attention to—and pushing of—the formal properties of the medium of comics” (9). Arguing that Mignola’s art is not strongly shaped by a realism primarily indebted to cinema and television (9), Bukatman turns to a variety of media, “children’s books especially, but also sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and medieval manuscripts” to “understand effects or possibilities in the medium of comics and to find vocabularies that will help articulate what it is that comics do” (10).For readers seeking to explore queer possibilities in this beautifully illustrated volume, Bukatman’s emphasis on Hellboy as “a comic steeped in the heretofore taboo genre of supernatural horror” (47) might be one place to start, since horror and the gothic are privileged genres in queer studies. The connections to Lovecraftian weird fiction and the occult detective could also open up questions about sexuality, gender, race, and nation, as could Bukatman’s comparison of Hellboy to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, who is “able to cross between civilization and destiny, retaining the morals of white culture while avoiding its decadence” (74). Hellboy’s resistance to following his destiny might be understood as a queer deviation: “Resisting one’s destiny is hard and lonely work—those horns can grow back” (77). Mignola’s fondness for “nonchronological stories and his use of nonlinear narrational devices” (181) might also be illuminated by recent work on queer time by Elizabeth Freeman, Halberstam, and others. Gender and sexuality are rarely the explicit focus, though openings pop up here and there, such as a footnote where Mignola explains that he felt he needed more female characters but “couldn’t draw” them since he was “terrible at drawing women” (227). Elsewhere, Mignola says he was surprised to that many of Hellboy’s are women and it be to know more about and to the that Mignola’s focus on that work in ways other than through female and queer and the books focus on Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie explores “one of the most of a art and out of Archie, whose comics of a in the and Although Archie superhero comics they only this a since is something Archie is for Archie is “a comic about But far from a this was one of the great Archie was “the and Archie comics with “the possibilities of life in to or the of Archie comics was from their as well as their attention to the was “one of the great of through body for “the of his characters and variety of their which Beaty’s that body is comics are to the than to that have on those that can be most the of or those of that such in both the and analysis of comics” by “the in the form of “children’s comics and comics, he suggests, with formal they comics, comics, and and (6). to “the scholarly to by the as both and during as lead in which “a of complexity and interest that was The of their and their a to that and especially “the and of the comics form as a significant alternative to graphic modeled on (8). one of the many of reading Twelve-Cent Archie is its of what we might such a queer the comics he Beaty’s book is nonlinear and can be read in any while each of his is “like Archie which can of the addresses these queer most explicitly in his remarks on who he suggests is but whose for women” is often as a of such a reading since he finds no that Archie and the instead as an male however, we of not as an identity but as an analytic that denaturalizes and then a queer reading of is Instead, emphasizes how the male of Archie comics an on Archie, and thereby creating a that was for a male reader” so much so that is a between the success of Archie comics and the of of and He observes that is of and and are for color and and a range of male body while is only one female body At the he Archie comics popular with a young female and speculates that the of and in that that Archie comics a of female could enjoy and their since theories of reading” teach us that do not what they read while white stories created by the of characters in Archie comics, which the social of the rights in the was a of white and where all could be on his own in observes that was for a white kid growing up in a of in the a of his own only Although the of in Archie comics, he their He the book by remarking on his enjoyment in his own who is the was when he read his the world of as I used to do” about female and the of Archie comics made me on my own reading I was in in Iowa, a that was then mostly though home to a significant of and that is about of where Young I as a Archie and comics after from around the then around the to read them my was Archie from to thereby the of Archie comics and in I was reading them at the of their I to they so with the color, the art, and the I of their could them with could them up and them even when a and most of all their and could purchase them at the and many other in my to and I my to them for me at the they and that might do it even though I had brothers also for things and my had a hard time I moved on to and and had mostly lost interest in Archie by my As a twelve-year-old, I enjoyed the Shazam! television that preceded the Saturday morning animated on Cremins’s mostly lead was a often in and I was also to a Shazam! the superhero in the body of a female I Archie comics and for a America that but like I art, and the meant to the which me even though I like either As a white I as did but did not with was and I was by how the for some weird which I later as white a I was to the and alternative that women in The and after through the of a local that and comics to By the time I to I had in with the comics that both in the local the from the in and in my of especially and which up science fiction, and all in one I especially the and since Archie comics a major on my Archie In and about comics with a white man from one of my He with me how in a place he was as a by the male bodies and queer in the superhero comics I so I with this in order to suggest are still many possibilities for and queer figures, alternative desires, unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and queer and nonnormative and kinship even in comics created by white men and mostly at a white male in about form and heroism in comics studies are still many questions to about intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and Streeby is professor of studies and and of the at the of books World and and the of of and the of through and of Streeby an on reading comics as fiction in and and is for with Ramzi Fawaz and

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