Those Old Essays

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So I notice in the new site, I can't find a way to the old essays that were in their own section of the old site. I wanted to refer people to the one about Superheroes not being allowed to have proper stories, but cannot because it appears to no longer be available!

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The old essays were lost to time and space with the site update but I happen to have that specific one (It is the one that references the Death of Superman as a source right?) Buried on my TC1100 I can get to it after work.

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Boom!

Print Comics
or
I’m no title and I’m a sad panda.




The popular modern comic book is flawed. I will try to address the two core reasons why, and the problems that arise from them separately. However, it will become clear that these two main problems are so integral to a host of other problems, and to each other, that a certain degree of overlapping will be impossible to avoid. In fact, each problem both causes and is a result of the other in a sort of Super Vicious Cycle, and separating the two may be meaningless. Essentially, the characters have become reduced to static icons and the books in which they appear suffer from a never ending story syndrome.

By "popular modern comic book" I mean those comics which have been regularly published during at least the last ten years by Marvel and DC. Though the vast majority of these comics have the two flaws I'm addressing, I shall focus on the Superman titles in particular for several reasons. First, Superman is perhaps the most widely recognized icon in comics today. Second, it is widely accepted that Superman is the basis for the modern super hero and super hero comic as we know them today (one could argue that anti-heroes such as Marvel’s Punisher are so unlike the Superman model that they can't possibly be based on it.* But the anti-hero is alsobased on Superman by opposition. For example, if you base Y on -X, you are still allowing X itself to be your model, still justifying X as something worth basing other ideas on, etc.). And third, due to the above reasons, Superman is often seen as the king of superhero comics and, as they say, when the king is ill, the land suffers.*

What I have called the never ending story syndrome partially arises from a lack of "living" characters. That is, characters who grow and change as living people do. Dynamic entities. Comics today are instead populated with static things, icons. With a cast of unchanging icons, the writers of these comics must continue to fill the pages of their books with something. If not character, then events. The best example of event driven books would be Marvel’s various X-books (X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, X-Force, X-Factor, etc.). But, I said at this paper’s outset that it would focus on Superman and his titles. Luckily, for this paper at any rate, the Super books contain two of the most widely known and publicized events in comics history. And both are instances of events replacing actual character development: The Wedding of Superman (1986) and the Death of Superman (1992). Though, as I shall show, one could say that they are one and the same.

One of the key subplots throughout the history of Superman comics was the long-standing courtship between Lois and Clark and Superman. On one level, it was just a simple love story. However, by drawing forth the tension between Lois' love for Superman and Clark Kent’s love for Lois, it caused Superman to constantly ask a question that is central to his whole double identity: "Who am I really, Clark or Superman?" By having Lois and Clark get engaged and eventually married, DC cheapened this dramatic tension and ultimately rendered it moot. Now there was no division between Clark and Superman. They truly were one in the same. Some might have hailed this as a great example of character growth, and in many ways it might have been. But that's not what happened. It has caused Superman to stop growing. There is nowhere else that Superman can go in terms of character growth without further cheapening his core character. And that is what has happened. Superman is now experiencing marital problems. Basically, Lois doesn't like the strain of having to worry if he'll come back from a mission every time he dons his cape. It's the policeman's wife situation on a cosmic scale. But this doesn't add or change anything about Superman's character. He still goes out to defend the world or universe without a second thought. The only thing this supposed tension between the two succeeds in doing is making Lois look weak and whiny. The wedding was the first nail in Superman’s coffin as an dynamic organic entity; his first step to becoming the dead static force that he is today.

The Death of Superman. What could have been a brave and dramatic move on the part of DC, what could have been the most important moment in comics history, what could have defined a generation of comics and comics readers, what could have been the ultimate sacrifice for the ultimate martyr turned out to be nothing more than a cheap crossover spectacle to boost sagging sales across the entire Superman line of books. The method of his death is interesting, as it clearly shows how icons, as opposed to characters, interact with one another. A "character" with no past, no goals, no dialogue, no inner monologue/struggle, in fact no language, and no name suddenly appears on Earth and starts destroying whatever is in its path for no reason. This invincible force of a character, who is later dubbed Doomsday, duels Superman until both are dead. Both fight each other simply because they are there. Doomsday wreaks havoc without reason or provocation and Superman witlessly slugs it out with him despite the obvious fact that head-on attacks are ineffective. No clever plans. No Superintelligence. Just a lot of mindless punching and kicking. There isn't even an attempt on the part of the writers to do anything vaguely interesting from a character development point of view. At the battle's conclusion, Superman does not change, he is the exact opposite of change. He is dead; he is literally showing the death that he has lived through since his marriage to Lois. Doomsday, being a hideously contrived plot device that existed solely for the purpose of killing Superman, cannot change because he is not truly "there" in the sense of being a character in the first place. He has no basis as a character from which he could change. Superman’s supporting cast are all very saddened by his death, but no one is inspired or changed. And now that Superman is dead, so too is Clark Kent. Might anyone make the connection between the death of the first and the disappearance of the second? Might there be the possibility for character growth for anyone in discovering this? The questions are moot, because Superman is not truly dead (indeed, the character was never truly alive if you ask me)! Superman returns from the great beyond. Certainly such a journey, one spanning life and death and return, this if nothing else must yield some bit of growth for Superman, some new truth or perspective on life, a change of some sort; of any sort! Well, almost.

Superman was exactly the same after his death as he was before. If one were to read issues prior to Doomsday and issues after Superman's return from the dead, without bothering with the intervening Superevent, one would see the very same character. Save one feature. Superman suffered from terrible nightmares about his defeat, his death, his failure to win against all odds. The editors at DC opted to handle this with yet another contrived event called Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey in which Superman somehow finds the slain body of Doomsday (which has managed, just as Superman, to resurrect itself), and fights him again. Only this time Superman is triumphant and Doomsday is killed beyond even comic book "re-mortality's" ability to bring back the dead. So rather than dealing with the issues of failure and guilt and what it means to be a hero and how to cope with loss or deal with the stress of having so many lives depend on the work of so few in some sort of intellectual or psychological way that might have forced some change in the character of Superman, he simply punches the affliction in the face and moves on.

The problem is this: all characters in literature have a growth curve. At the end of that curve, a character should be retired or allowed to die or ride off into the sunset. There must be a conclusion. Otherwise that character's impact is lessened and their core conflict, their meaning to us, is watered down.

Since these titles must become never ending stories, and since the characters are truly icons that cannot change, the stories have to take place in an eternal now. But the now has to be continually updated to represent the present of the real world (or the present of the fictional world of the comic). The events of the past are constantly recast as well in order to retro-actively fit into the new continuities made by the new presents. This temporal editing can occur so many times within one title or character that it becomes difficult to know which events correspond to the most recent version of the past (and present!). Add to this the fact that the more long-lived titles must cram decades of action into a considerably shorter amount of time to keep their characters at roughly the same age and you're left with a past that is muddled and hacked beyond comprehension (in comic book time, Superman has only been in Metropolis for somewhere between seven and ten years or sometimes less according to the current editors even though his books have been printed since 1938). Granted, the very format of comics brings up dozens of questions about the nature of time within and between each panel, page, and each issue, but this vagueness cannot possibly account or make up for the degree of time compression that must turns seventy years into seven. The time between and within panels et al. can be inferred by visual and textual cues by comparing one panel to the next.

This constant re-editing of the past and present is incredibly contrived and can lead to disastrous effects when trying to retain a continuity within a title much less within one universe which spans dozens of titles. The best example of this was in 1985 with DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths story line. The continuity of the DC universe had been edited and re-edited so many times over the decades that not even DC’s editors could disentangle themselves enough from their Gordian Knot of plots to know anything for certain about the pasts of their major characters (perhaps a better title would have been Postmodern Crisis on Infinite Earths?). Crisis was basically an attempt to reset the DC universe in order to definitely rewrite the past: Alexander cutting the knot in two. Though Crisis did solve the glaring continuity errors within individual DC titles, it also opened up a whole new bag of smaller inconsistencies. We were given a new present for the entire line of DC books, but there was confusion among readers, writers, and even the DC editors themselves about the events previous to Crisis. The pre-Crisis DC universe was never officially erased, only cut off. Did events of pre-Crisis past that do not directly contradict the post-Crisis past still happen? In an attempt to solve this confusion, DC has had a "mini-Crisis" every five or so years since. Each one addresses certain events in these vague pre-Crisis pasts, while ironically opening up other, smaller areas of confusion based on the same vagueness. Since the rewrite of the rewrite of the rewrite didn't necessarily exclude events A, B, and C does that mean they still happened or not? No one knows. To solve this problem, the DC editors have introduced the concept of "hypertime" which is a phenomenon without any real explanation outside of the fact that it is something and it is the reason why certain events fall into and out of the timeline. I don’t think I need to point out that this latest "solution" is obviously either the work of a certified madman or a 5th dimensional being with a more enlightened understanding of time than our own.

The concept of the future doesn’t give us a break either. The future of a comic title makes no promise for termination. An on-going title must always take place in the now, in its own present. The future must always be in a state of uncertainty. One might say that here at last we have an element of realism. We cannot know the future of a comic's story line in the same way we cannot know the future of our own lives. But this isn't the right way to look at it. There is a future in our world, one that we will eventually reach (assuming we're lucky enough to not die). But for these characters, there is literally no future. They remain the same age, they learn nothing, they do not change. They are merely in a new state of "now." So what we have are static characters without a definite past or a stable present or even the possibility of a future.

So why go through this horribly contrived process of manipulating time and changing the past? Because otherwise the core characters would have to change. If nothing more, they would at least have to age. And this cannot be done. In short, the editors cannot risk making any changes to their icons. Superman, for example, is the same person he was last year, ten years ago, thirty years ago, etc. He has no inner struggle, he has no inner growth. He's just this mechanism that swoops into the middle of some cataclysm and comes out of it triumphant. Reading a Superman book is like watching a Christmas special. "The world is doomed/Christmas is ruined. Oh wait, no it's not." This stagnation comes from fear. The fear that any dramatic change to Superman (or to any major character for that matter) will alienate the purist fans and they won’t buy the book. But, now more than ever, comics companies think they need the purists because they form the majority of the reading and therefore buying public. What the publishers are forgetting, however, is nothing ventured nothing gained. If these companies would stop looking at their bottom line and short term returns and simply tell good stories with characters who change (instead of big events that exist only to make the characters look cool and give them opportunities to pose dramatically and say one-liners as they work to make everything the same again), then they would undoubtedly gain even more new readers than the number of purists they may or may not have lost in the transition.

Now that the problems of icons and never ending stories have been explored, let us do more and try to find a way out of their wicked grasp. What is needed is good storytelling. And the foundation of a good story is a group of characters; individuals who grow and develop and learn over the course of a narrative. Not static icons that simply fall into tired equations and punch each other. The most obvious solution would be to consciously seek the opposites of icons and never ending stories. First, to counter the icon problem, make sure characters live along a growth curve, that they grow and change throughout a story, and when they reach the end of that curve, when they have gone as far as they can, when they have served their purpose to the story, they go away. Second, just as the characters have a growth curve, the story should have a sort of narrative curve from beginning to end. The traditional setting, rising action, climax, denouement and conclusion will work well enough. This isn’t to say that events such as The Death of Superman didn’t have the five basic elements of plot, it's just that the conflict was completely centered around two groups of superpowers instead of two characters since, as shown earlier, Superman and especially Doomsday can hardly be called characters. Still, on its own, it is a story. However, when placed inside the over all girth of Superman lore from meager Kryptonian refugee to Earth-based hero to billions, it becomes one more part of the problem. Namely, the never ending story problem. Though individual Superman comics or storylines may have perfectly innocent narrative curves of their own, each one adds to Superman's narrative curve until it is so illogically and impossibly huge that it gives rise to the never ending story problem. It's a Supernarrative curve that refuses to die! So to counter the eternal now that arises in modern comics, the title must reach a conclusion and must be written with the intention of concluding from its inception. The characters, the world in which they live, all these must be finite. They require limitations in time, space, knowledge, ability, all characteristics. Otherwise, the narrative curve will end up looking like the Dow Jones Average: jagged valleys and peaks that are inexorably climbing into a meaningless infinity becoming ever more burdened by its own existence.

There is yet another solution. A sort of simultaneity between individual storylines which I will call episodic independence. An example: If all that survived of our civilization was a single Bugs Bunny cartoon and aliens watched it (having naturally mastered the technology behind universal translators), they would be equipped with all they'd need to know about Bugs Bunny. In other words, any Bugs Bunny cartoon can exist independent of all the others. Each cartoon could be a window into a parallel universe existing simultaneously and independently of its other selves and we would lose no knowledge about the character of Bugs Bunny. Since each little adventure is a complete story in itself, its narrative curve is quite normal; each story begins, comes to a climax, and ends. And since each little adventure does not contribute to a timeline that becomes increasingly impossible to maintain even minimal amounts of continuity, there is no danger of falling into an eternal now. The characters are free to change and grow. There is no fear of alienating the purist fan base. It is understood, perhaps as part of the subtext, that the characters will return to a "normal" status between the conclusion of one installment and the beginning of the next.

Though episodic independence may work well enough for gag-driven tales that do nothing to change or develop a character (Bugs Bunny simply isn’t going to have a crisis of character where he must seriously agonize over difficult moral decisions and the like) this technique can extend the life of a "living" character who does change and grow for as long as a public can endure the presence of said character.** The Simpsons has done this masterfully for years.* The Simpsons themselves are allowed to grow and change and learn throughout the course of a single episode, so much so that their entire lives can be turned completely upside down by the conclusion. Yet without so much as blinking, the public accepts the return to normality that has taken place by the beginning of the next episode. Homer can go from bungling boob to rage-aholic to loving father to laughing stock in one episode and be back at square one by the beginning of the next. As a result, the characters enjoy the timelessness of modern superheroes yet they manage to grow as characters and captivate us on a weekly basis for years.

Instead of drawing a curve that is a wire thin line stretching across decades; constantly seeking greater heights in the desperate yet fleeting hope that inundating us with another Greatest Threat Ever or New Superpowers or New Outfits or other flashy gimmicks will somehow fool us into thinking these are living characters, narrative curves like that of The Simpsons are solid, firm.

SOME SOURCES!
Crisis on Infinite Earths: #1-12. (1985)

The Wedding of Superman: Superman: The Wedding Album. A collection of the wedding issue from 1986 with a few extras. (1996)

The Death of Superman: Superman: The Man of Steel #18-9, Justice League America #69, Superman (2nd series) #74-5, The Adventures of Superman #497, Action Comics #684 (all from 1992)

Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey: #1-3. (1993)