So I don’t know if you’ve heard but there’s this movie coming out this weekend. It looks like it’s dead serious about taking superheroes deadly seriously—an artistic strategy that the original Watchmen comics were smart enough to equivocate about. That panel up top may be moody and reflective, a key dramatic moment, but it also depicts a grown man wearing a cape, and a purple and gold cape, at that. Neither writer Alan Moore nor artist Dave Gibbons ever glosses over such facts: Watchmen the comic is a serious superhero narrative, yes, about sex and death and politics, but it is also a serious superhero narrative, about men and women who for some bizarre reason wear tights and dominos. Even before the knotty plotting and blueprint-precise artwork, the friction between two such disparate modes and moods—the serious, the frivolous—is what grants the work its awkward fascination in the first place.
Who knows what the movie will or won’t do, but it should be noted that the history of Watchmen‘s reception by its artistic followers is too often a history of wilful misunderstanding. In the wake of Watchmen, even the most talented of its students have copped only the surface and attitude from the work, all clenched teeth and R-ratings. Moore and Gibbons’s questioning of the very validity of the genre as a vehicle for serious work has been abandoned; the young turks simply take the existence of Watchmen as proof of that validity, and shirk any work of their own. So, I’m not a real fan of the deadly serious school of superheroes: I find that such works, no matter how skillful, have mistaken for mere cynicism and posture what, in actuality, is Moore’s candid mistrust for every claim and supposition the genre makes. That scepticism isn’t Moore’s alone, though. The funniest, most thoughtful, and often most searing entries in the masked hero genre all share in that same mistrust—of heroism, of power, of masculinity, and in short, of the superhero as modern myth. Here’s a look at a handful of them.
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Scribbly and the Red Tornado (1940-44). Superheroes first appeared in comics in 1936 and first caught on big after Superman’s introduction in 1938; so the story goes. The genre in those early years resembled nothing so much as mass-cult folk art, filled with some startling, crude, and id-ridden work. Executed either by the pens of underpaid teenagers not yet good enough—or WASPy enough—to break into legitimate cartooning, or by drunks who couldn’t hack it as pros, the rushed and naïve chutzpah of those adventure comics makes them forceful, entrancing stuff. But they are also, if you refuse to swallow their pulpy conceits, inherently ridiculous. Cartoonists eager to undermine the ubermensch made quick work of their targets, bringing out their satires before the ink dried on Action #1. The beginning of the ’40s saw the debuts of such slapstick strongmen as Boody Rogers’s Sparky Watts, Basil Wolverton’s Powerhouse Pepper, and Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. But Sheldon Mayer’s Red Tornado stands out even among this zany crowd.
Where the outlandish qualities of the superhero craze often serve as just the jumping-off point for those other characters’ stories, the Red Tornado strips (or the few I’ve read) entrench themselves in superhero silliness, allowing for a thorough skewering of the genre’s sensibilities. Like most long-underwear types, the Red Tornado has a costume, a secret identity, an origin story, even sidekicks. Only thing is, that costume consists of a helmet made out of a pot and actual long underwear, since “his” alter ego is Ma Hunkel, a pragmatic housewife of intimidating proportions. She dons the Red Tornado garb not to strike fear into the hearts of men, but rather to defend her grocery from mobsters, to protect her neighbourhood, and to impress upon her kids/sidekicks that Green Lantern ain’t shucks. No tortured, ennobled tough guys here—Mayer was always in sync enough with his kid readership to know that the idea of hardworking mom as secret superhero would somehow ring true. And if even that concept sounds too groan-inducingly earnest, keep in mind that Mayer was one of the great comic book humourists, always ready with elegant pratfalls, goofy dialogue, and irrepressible energy—he never cartooned a saccharine or brooding moment in his career.
Herbie (1958-1967). As World War II ended, so did the demand for superhero adventures. When the fad began anew in the late ’50s, perhaps a character like Herbie, the Fat Fury, was the only reasonable response. Alan Moore’s favourite superhero is an ugly, slothful, rotund adolescent, who possesses an arsenal of magic lollipops and spends his downtime saving the world and ignoring advances from beautiful women—a dual existence that feels like a biting commentary on the boyhood wish fulfillment rampant in other superhero comics (here are some smarter insights into the series). Writer Richard E. Hughes seems to have no patience for superheroics, playing up the leaps in logic and impossible feats required by the genre, while artist Ogden Whitney downplays the sensationalistic bombast on display in other titles. This staid cartooning clashes with the dog’s breakfast of plot in much the same way Herbie’s bland personality drives his overbearing father into vein-popping fits of unprovoked rage. Alternately insane and anaesthetised, the resulting collaboration is surreal in its dullness: this is a comic about a little fat nothing who traipses weightless through time and space, frightening Satan himself, terrifying even the comets in their trajectories. Take that, you superdupers.
“Goodman Meets S*perm*n” (1962). Watchmen might exhaust the whole superheroes-in-the-real-world shtick, but it was Harvey Kurtzman who first came up with the idea when his MAD series began besieging popular culture from every front. In those early ’50s parodies, Superduperman ends up a lowest-rung copyboy creep, Bat Boy an unrepentant murderer, and Woman Wonder finds herself in an abusive relationship, “married! …content with the normal female life of working over a hot stove!” And these are the punchlines, folks. By the time the ’60s rolled around, though, Kurtzman had already endured a lifetime’s worth of failed business ventures, and so had lightened up a bit. His cycle of stories starring blank-eyed Goodman Beaver, that perpetual innocent abroad, only deals with orgies, satanism, guns, crime, media lies, imperialism, and impending nuclear holocaust. Oh yeah, plus there’s his bit on just how damned rotten people are and always will be—for that topic, he calls in Superman for service once again.
This time, the man of steel’s gone incognito, bearded and bemoccasined, until Goodman stumbles across him on a fishing trip. Tired of catching flack for doing good, S*perm*n (the asterisks protect trademark, preserve universality, encourage lewdness) has spurned humanity and taken to minding his own business out in the wild, but Goodman brings him back to the city to show that there are still good people around to care about. That city, though, is illustrated by Will Elder, so it’s a flat certainty that every inch of its streets and buildings are cramped and seething with the worst kind of rottenness, larded with the chickenfat details Elder so loves. Crooked cops, booze-peddling grandmas, anti-semitic restaurateurs, razor-wielding maniacs, not to mention wide-eyed disingenuous innocents: these are the “good” citizens that S*perm*n can only choose to abandon, again and again. Everyone’s rotten, Goodman learns—even supermen.
1963 (1993). The first and best of Moore’s attempts to “fix” the superhero, after he’d left its gaudy corpse to be ravaged by wannabes in the ’80s, was the series of one-shots grouped together under the title 1963. More loving homage than mistrustful critique, the comics celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the old Marvel superheroes like the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man by mimicking their adventures exactly, complete with groovy dialogue, oddball ads, and insider bulletins presided over by the domineering personality of Affable Al Moore himself. Most of Moore’s bile is kept off the story pages, and reserved instead for the text pieces, which condemn that era’s unethical comics culture in general, and Stan “The Man” Lee‘s blowhard gloryhog persona in particular. While the actual stories obey the classic Marvel formula perfectly—wisecracks, extradimensional travel, threats posed to the entire universe as we know it—they also cast damning glances on the repression and paranoia of the times in which that formula thrived, a running commentary for which each fake ad provides a gigantic exclamation point. Which isn’t to say the excesses of the ’80s and ’90s don’t come in for their share of barbs, too—but those same excesses (spoiled artists, flash and quantity winning out over content and quality) put a halt to the completion of the series. The penultimate issue sees the timetraveling ’60s characters quaking in fear at what the ’90s seem to have in store for them—which is, in fact, the grim legacy that Moore’s Watchmen helped leave for the genre.
“The Death Ray” (2004). Read just the panels of Daniel Clowes‘s last honest-to-god comic book, and you’ve got a dry and distant but fairly typical superhero story. Andy’s deceased father was a scientist; Andy is a scrawny high school weakling; Andy smokes his first cigarette and awakens the nicotine-fueled powers his father had created for him; Andy exercises those powers judiciously. Read between the panels, though, or consider that dryness and distance a moment, and you’ve got what Clowes must think underlies every superhero narrative: the story of a casual murderer. Andy, with his super strength and death-dealing weapon, becomes a quiet sociopath playing God, using the familiar generic expectations and trappings of the superhero (power, responsibility, righteousness) in order to justify his chilling, offhand acts of orchestrated brutality. Andy is a superhero who kills people, sure—big deal, in the post-Watchmen world. What’s worse, though, is that he kills the people we’d probably wind up killing, given the right powers, and the right responsibility—that is, normal, everyday people. Annoying neighbours, sisters’ boyfriends, people who don’t pick up their dog’s shit—we’re all fair game, in Clowes’s take on the costumed do-gooder. God—or S*perm*n—help us all.
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Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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