CAPED COMMODITIES AND MASKED MEMORIES: ‘THE AMERICAN COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY, COLLECTIVE MEMORY, AND THE SUPERHERO Michael Schulz A Thesis in The Department of ‘Communication Studies Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Media Studies) at Concordia University ‘Montréal, Québec, Canada March 2005 © Michael Schulz, 2005Library and Archives Canada Published Heritage Branch 395 Wellington Street ‘Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada NOTICE: The author has granted a non- exclusive license allowing Library and Archives Canada to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell theses worldwide, for commercial or non- commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. 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In compliance with the Canadian Privacy Act some supporting forms may have been removed from this thesis While these forms may be included in the document page count, their removal does not represent any loss of content from the thesis. Canada Conformément a la loi canadienne sur la protection de la vie privée, quelques formulaires secondaires ont été enlevés de cette these. Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant.Abstract This thesis explores the relationship between collective memory, history and popular culture as it pertains to the American superhero comic. It examines some of the reasons behind and ways that American comic book publishers change their superhero character properties over time, This entails looking at the consequences of the ownership of character properties to the industry and the resulting economic impetus to alter their characters to both resonate with contemporary audiences and to keep them accessible to new readers. Despite these changes, those aspects of the superhero comic that are changed by this economic drive rarely disappear. Rather, comic book history continues to play a vital role in comic book fandom. Thus, this thesis examines the development and role of comic book reprints in the industry and comic book fandom. In a similar vein, it explores the role that knowledge of a character’s—or a publisher's stable of characters’ —diagetic history plays in contemporary superhero narratives and how such knowledge is disseminated. Both of these studies argue that knowledge and appreciation of past comic books play a vital role in contemporary comic book narratives and fandom. Finally, this thesis examines how discarded elements of past comic books come into play as allusions in later superhero narratives. This thesis questions if such allusions have been used as a means to represent the historical moments that the alluded to ‘elements of past comic books are associated with. Ultimately this thesis argues that such allusive comics are one of the many textual resources that some theorists consider vital to understanding contemporary collective memory.iv Acknowledgements I would first and foremost like to thank my parents without whom this thesis ‘would not be possible. I would also like to thank Dr. Charles Acland for supervising this thesis and shepherding it through its many transformations, mutations, and permutations. Thanks also go out to the other members of my committee—Dr. Martin Ailor and Dr. ‘Matt Soar—for their support, excellent comments, and kind words. I must give Jeny Nussey a giant thank you for her endless support and patience. Special thanks to Sheelah ONeill for helping me out whenever I found myself in a jam. Finally a round of applause .g0es to my friends in Montreal, Calgary, and Okotoks for keeping me sane and listening to the odd insane rant about this monstrosity.TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Chapter One ‘The Secret Identities of Comic Book Publishers Chapter Two Recycled Wonder Chapter Three Superpowered Pedagogy Chapter Four ‘Tamnishing the Silver Age Conclusion Bibliography 7 48 B 104 139 147Introduction, This thesis will attempt to think through and establish aspects of the relationship between popular culture, memory and history through the example of the American superhero comic. This will entail examining some of the ways that pop culture, memory and history overlap and fold into each other and the specific forms this takes in the contemporary comic scene. In order to do so, however, it is necessary to establish how and why American comic books have changed over time along with how older texts and knowledge of comic book history continue to circulate. Building upon this foundation, this thesis will examine how allusions to and uses of older media images and styles ean be used in later texts as a historical shorthand one way that our knowledge of popular culture can overlap with a more general sense of the past. Before we continue, however, it may be of some interest to discuss how this thesis came about. Originally this project was conceived of as a way to write about one of my favorite ongoing superhero teams, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and the effects that a series of revisions to their continuity has had.’ Never an ‘A’ or even ‘B’ list group, the Legion has nevertheless had a long history punctuated by fairly substantial changes to the group and the periodicals it appeared in since its first appearance in 1958. The team, although best known for clean-cut teen superheroes with names like Lightning Lad, Shadow Lass, Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl, also has the dubious distinction of having had its continuity radically revised more often than any other group of comic book characters. Indeed, since the mid-1980’s it has had its back story " As will be discussed further in the first chapter, comic book continuity is basically the diagetic history of 1 series’ character or characters as established by published stories.substantially changed on no less than four occasions, including two total reboots that effectively jettisoned, in the first instance, neatly forty years of stories. Yet, despite these efforts to wipe away the Legion’s history to make it more accessible to new readers it never really seemed to go away. Instead, stories published in the wake of these revisions and reboots were often in a constant dialogue with those they replaced. Usually this took the form of either retellings, with some variations, of ‘classic’ legion stories or more subtle references to characters, costumes, and stories that had been erased from the official diagetic history of the Legion. Although it wasn’t necessary for new readers to ‘get’ these nods to the team’s discarded pasts, for those in the know or even those who wanted to eam more about the Legion’s history, they provided another level upon which these new narratives could be enjoyed. ‘These references to the Legion’s history were almost certainly, at least in part, an attempt by DC to not totally alienate the long term readership of the team’s adventures. Indeed, the Legion’s fandom is noted as one of the most devoted and involved subsets of comic book fans.” It is therefore unsurprising that the company made some gestures—not the least of which was the inclusion of the Legion to the roster of characters and titles who had their early stories reprinted as part of DC’s high-quality, and high-priced Archive line—to Legion fans after having changed or officially erased the continuity of their beloved team of super teens. What interested me about this state of affairs was that these references to and retellings of Legion history were often as much a commentary upon the time in which 2Matthew J. Pustz notes the devotion of Legion fans on p. 82 of his Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and ‘True Believers Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999).they were originally written as they were the actual words and pictures in the source material. Understanding how these allusions to the Legion’s history could engage with a broader sense of our own past quickly became the central question I wanted to address in this thesis. To a certain extent this focus also comes from the more general realization that—regardless of whether or not old comic books, television programs or films are regarded as valid historical sources by professional historians—imagery and other aesthetic elements from old media texts are commonly deployed by the creators of later texts to stand in for a perceived essence of the context in which they were created. In other words, whether we like it or not, for many of us allusions to and parodies of television programs like Leave it to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show provide the framework within which we understand and imagine life in the American Suburbs in the 1950’s, Rather than describe this state of affairs as a symptom of post, super, or regular modemity, this thesis is an attempt at exploring some of the conditions necessary for the proliferation of texts that draw on our memories of popular culture to construct a broader understanding of the past. To do this I will tum your attention to the American superhero comic, a genre that, as warily noted by scholars like Geoff Klock and Matthew J. Pustz, has increasingly ‘become characterized by dense intertextual references to its own past.’ I will, within this introduction, briefly sketch the odd relationship to time and memory characterizing the superhero genre that was first observed by Umberto Eco. Hopefilly this will give a sense of why the superhero genre is a fertile site to study the relationship between popular culture and collective memory. I will then provide a short history of comic books sincethe rise of the direct market, or, in other words, since it moved from being a mass medium aimed at children to a niche product that targets a more adult demographic. Finally, I will set down the goals and methodologies of the chapters to follow. ‘The American comic book industry has complex relationship with time and memory. Until relatively recently, comic books were a highly ephemeral commodity: inexpensive to purchase, cheaply printed on low quality paper, often owned by children and adolescents (whose capacity for destruction cannot be underestimated) and produced in great quantity. They were something to be used, abused and disposed of: a low quality product filled with prose and pictures assigned an equally low place on the cultural totem pole. On the other hand, at least for the most successful characters, there is something timeless about them. More precisely, many of the characters, (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or Spiderman for example), have, in some ways, been taken outside of time, their aging and deaths prevented by the intervention of their entrepreneur owners who instead choose to place them in an eternal present. Taken together with their superhuman abilities and garish costumes, this failure to feel the ravages of time has lent these characters to comparisons with mythical figures of yore, indeed, comic book characters have often been compared to mythic figures, within the academy this is evident from a range of works like Bill Boichel’s “Batmen: Commodity as Myth,” Umberto Eco’s “The Myth of Superman,” or Richard Reynolds’, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. However, as pointed out by Umberto Eco in his seminal essay “The Myth of Superman,” one point of divergence between superheroes and the heroes of classical myth lies in their relationship with time. * Indeed, this tendency to draw heavily upon its past is one of the most frequent criticisms of writers who feel that mainstream comics are increasingly dooming the entire medium. See: Klock, Geoff, How 1o ReadFor Eco, one of the defining features of mythic characters is that their stories are always told in past tense, they are events that happened in the past, no matter how remote, and are largely already known to the audience who hears them. With the rise of modern theatre and the novel a new type of ‘typical’ character and storytelling emerges premised on the audience not knowing what is going to happen next and that the characters experience time much like their readers, that is to say they are born, gain experience and die. In other words modem characters are inevitably ‘consumed’ (Eco"s term) by the plots of which they are a part.* Thus, some of Eco’s fascination with American comic book characters stems from their unusual relationship with time which seems, to him, to be an odd hybrid between the mythical structure of old infused with modem conventions. In Eco’s words, “The mythological character of comic strips finds himself in this singular situation: he must be an archetype, the totality of certain collective aspirations, and therefore he must necessarily become immobilized in an emblematic and fixed nature which renders him easily recognizable (this is what happens to Superman); but, since he is marketed in the sphere of a ‘romantic’ production for a public that consumes ‘romances,’ he must be subjected to a development which is typical, as we have seen, of novelistic characters.”® Thus, as a result of their being set in the present and trying to conform to novelistic conventions of a linear life while at the same time attempting to keep these characters unchanging archetypes, Eco finds a convoluted and paradoxical relationship to temporality in American comic books. ‘Superhero Comics and Why, (New York: Continuum, 2002) p. 4 and Pustz, p. 143, * Boo, p. 109-110. * Ibid, p. 110.‘This elastic relationship to time is only exacerbated by the then fairly rigid genre convention of superhero comics of each issue constituting a discrete episode in its featured character’s career with little to no reference to previous adventures and an ‘equally minimal impact on frture issues. As Eco puts it, the stories develop in a kind of oneiric climate-of which the reader is not aware at all- where what happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said.® Indeed, Eco finds it telling that events like Clark Kent and Lois Lane marrying or having a child are only conceivable within specially framed and explicitly labeled “Imaginary Stories,” indicating both a concession to the pressures of novelistic character development while keeping Superman timeless by telling readers that it doesn’t really count. But Superman has gotten married. Perhaps only for a decade of his sixty-plus ‘years in print, but he has taken the plunge and is another step closer to consuming himself as Eco described. Comic books have changed pretty dramatically since his article was first published in 1961 and were, indeed, changing as he wrote it. The changes ‘contemporaneous with Eco’s work were largely due to the rise and influence of Marvel comics in the 1960's.” The two key changes that Marvel’s successes had on the industry, as far as this thesis is concerned, were an increasing use of serial narrative techniques and ° Thid, p. 114. 7 Although he doesn't refer to them in his section on comic book time, Eco does seem aware thatthe, then, recent Marvel publications were, in atleast some respects, substantially different than their DC ‘counterparts, See p. 122.a greater rooting of their characters in contemporary life. Thus, a Marvel reader in the 1960's and early 1970's could conceivably have followed Spiderman’s literary career from his inception in 1962 as a bespectacled square persecuted by slang talking teenagers to a confident college student wary of a friend’s use of LSD in 1971, with many a failed romance and sticky situation along the way. One could say that, since Eco wrote this essay, the novelistic elements of the ‘American superhero comic book have largely won the tug of war with their mythic counterparts, However, while comic books have become increasingly serial in their narratives, and perhaps had to in order to remain viable entertainment products, the clastic relationship with time Eco described has persisted. Doubtless, this is due more to the drive by their publishers to continue profiting from their character properties than any desire on the part of their creators to fashion their characters as modern myths. Nevertheless, the continuing tension between the tendency of comic books to be increasingly novelistic—serial, and grounded in contemporary society—in order to sell to contemporary audiences, on the one hand and timeless—unaging and therefore always potentially profitable—on the other has had some interesting effects on the sgenre/industry’s relationship to history and memory. Indeed, the tension between these two poles will inform the entirety of this work. However, before we can begin the meat of this thesis it may be helpful to provide abit of context for the contemporary comics scene. For instance, it is now well established that the comic book industry, in terms of content, sales and the role of the creator, has changed dramatically since the late 1970"s and that the audience is far older.* * See Comic Book Nation or Chapters 4, 5 and 7 of Bongco, Mila’s Reading Comics: Language, Culture, ‘and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books, (Gatland Publishing: New York, 2000), of Chapters 1Nevertheless, it will be useful to go over a few points of this narrative, In particular it will be necessary to establish the importance of the emergence of the direct market, the perceived change in comic book readership, and the shifting stature of the creator within the industry. After this has been done, I will examine some of the creator-oriented discourse that has emerged since the transformation of the comics scene in the 1980's. The first shift that is important to note in order to understand contemporary comics is the emergence and eventual dominance of the direct distribution market. In 1974, comic book convention organizer Phil Seuling began the direct distribution system. This system was designed for the growing number of comic book specialty shops to ‘enable them to cater more to comic book fandom than newsstands and ‘mom and pop” grocery stores; the established point of purchase for comics up until that point.” For fans and merchants alike, the advantages of direct distribution over the newsstands were fairly obvious. Under the traditional system, comic book companies determined how many copies of various books newsstands would receive, while under direct distribution comic ‘book shops order, from a distribution company, as many copies of a given title that they feel their customers will purchase. Further, for the comic book companies themselves, the direct market represented a way to save capital as they were obligated to take back unsold comics from newsstands regardless of whether or not they were adequately displayed. ‘Through the direct market, all sales to comic book shops are final. It’s important to note that, in the long run, the purely economic benefit of the direct distribution system has become questionable. There has been a sharp decline in and 2 of The Many Lives of Baiman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, Pearson and Uricchio eds, (Routledge: New York, 1991), see also Chapter 4 of Brooker, Will Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon, (Continuum: New York, 2000)readership since mid-1990"s. In the twenty-five years between the system’s introduction and 1999, newsstands and other traditional venues, in the case of Marvel Comics, have gone from accounting for ail of their comic sales to a mere 9%. This would not necessarily be cause for alarm except for the fact that the total number of comic shops are declining."° This, along with a sharp increase in the price of paper and other essential supplies for the publishing of comics and stiff competition from video games and the internet for consumer dollars, is seen to be among the reasons for this decline.'" Indeed, since 1995 it has become fairly commonplace to hear the comic book industry referred to as being in crisis, if not dying, However, beyond the economic and structural changes brought about indirectly by the direct distribution system there have been other, equally important, changes. Possibly the most important has been the shift in target audiences from a mass audience of adolescents and children to comic book fans, described by Dennis O'Neil as, on average, “twenty-four, male, and very literate.”" Unsurprisingly, this rethinking of the target audience for superhero comic books can be considered to be, at least partially, responsible for a shift in their content. The impact of direct distribution on this aspect of comics is fairly straightforward. Books targeted at this market were often published without the Comie Book Authority's seal of approval and distributed solely through specialty shops, usually with the tantalizing (for this adolescent) label “suggested for ° Boichel, Bill, “Batman: Commodity as Myth.” in The Many Lives of Batman, p. 15 or Bongco, p. 129- 13 "ptiis, Warren, Come In Alone, (San Francisco: AIT/Planct Lar, 2001), p.190. 1 See Bongeo, p. 191-7 or Raviv, Dan Comic Wars: How Two Tyeoons Battled over the Marvel Comics Empire- And Both Lost (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), p. 60. Pearson and Uricchio, “Notes from The Batcave: Aa Interview with Dennis O'Neil,” in The Many Lives ‘of Barman, p.29. interestingly, O'Neil claims this information is based upon some market research done by DC comics and direct market distribution companies.10 ‘mature readers” or, in more recent years, under the adult oriented imprints of the large ‘companies (Vertigo or Wildstorm at DC for instance or Marvel Max at Marvel Comics). This shift towards more complex and adult themed superhero comics is generally linked to the publication of Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen in 1987, although earlier, less noteworthy, books were published.’ While much has been written about this trend, and these authors in particular, for the purposes of this introduction itis sufficient to say that the move towards complex superhero narratives is alive, well, and an increasingly vital part of comic book publication. Indeed, it can be argued, and is by Geoff Klock in How and Why to Read Superhero Comics, that these then iconoclastic works have spawned a tradition as entrenched as that which they were written against; a tradition which the books I will be discussing in portions of this thesis can be seen as falling within, ‘An important feature of the growth of this type of superhero comic, and the critical discourse that continues to spring up around it, is the attention paid to their creators. In part a response to the growing importance of fandom as the target market for their products, DC comics, as part of their bid to regain some of the market share they had lost to Marvel in the 1970's, introduced a royalty plan in 1981 in order to attract popular creators.'* This act, although not as beneficial to most creators as many would like, can be seen as the beginning of the emergence of a star system within comics. Throughout the 1980's a relatively small group of comic auteurs emerged: Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, Alan Moore, John Byme, George Perez. These authors’ names often became featured nearly as prominently as a given comic’s feature character upon their See: Barr, Mike W., and Bolland, Brian Camelat 3000 (DC Comics, December 1982-April 1985), the series was 12 issues in length.u covers. Critically acclaimed, popular with the fans and often given greater creative freedom (not to mention compensation) than other creators; these writers and artists, created the canonical works of the contemporary comics scene and remain among those discussed in critical discourse about comics, Indeed, Warren Ellis, a ‘star’ comic writer and comic industry critic who emerged in the 1990’s goes so far as to claim that creators are now more important to the comic consumers than characters or brand preference. He states that once, the characters were the most important part of a book to its audience. Then, the publisher’s brand became paramount. Later, a schism emerged, where for every person who aligned themselves with a publisher, another aligned themselves with a particular family of books from a publisher. All these identification systems have pretty much gone the way of the dodo with the new century. But a new alignment is emerging, More and more stores are racking their books not by publisher, nor alphabetically by title, but by creator.'* Even if one is not entirely inclined to position creators as the exclusive reason a comic fan now purchases a given title, itis clear that they have become one of the crucial forces driving the medium. ‘As mentioned above, paralleling the development of the comic book industry— from the production of mass-marketed books predominantly targeted at minors to @ niche product with literary pretensions aimed at more adult, and presumably more literate, fans—has been the emergence of a critical literature on comic books. In terms of the ™ Wright, Bradford, Comic Book Nation p. 261-2.12 superhero genre, a veritable boom in academic work began in and around the release of the 1989 Batman film. The critical anthology The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, was released in 1991 and featured a selection of essays ranging in perspective from journalistic interviews of acclaimed creators, to textual and political economic analyses of Batman. Since then, academic work on American supethero comics has produced a fairly large and varied body of literature. Despite this variety some of the contours of this critical discourse must be ‘mapped out. Some of the notable approaches to the superhero comic included studies on the representation of race and gender within the genre, such as Lillian Robinson’s Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes ot Jeffery A. Brown's “Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Superhero,” and ideological criticism of supethero narratives like Matthew Wolf-Meyer's, “The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference.”'® Examinations of comic book fandom, like Matthew J. Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, studies of the political economy of the industry, such as Matthew P. McAllister’s “Ownership Concentration in the U.S. Comic Book Industry,” and works on the history of the comics, like David Park’s “The Kefauver Comic Book Hearings as ° Elis, p. 78. should note that I, as « comic book consumer, have yet to find a store laid out inthis fashion. See: Robinson, Lilian 8. Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (New York: Routledge, 2004), Brown, Jeffery A, “Comic Book Masculinity and the New Black Supethero,” in the African American Review Vol. 33, 1, Spring 1999 p. 25-42, Singer, Marc, "’Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race” in the African American Review Vol. 36, #1, Spring 2002, p.107-119, or Williams, P,, “All's Fair in Love and Journalism: Female Rivalry in Superman, in the Joumal of Popular Culture, Vol. 24, #2, Fall 1990 p. 103-112. For an example of political criticism rooted more in the oeuvres of ‘prominent creators than representation see: Wolf-Meyer, Matthew, “The World Ozymandias Made: ‘Utopia inthe Superhero Comic, Subculture, andthe Conservation of Difference,” in the Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 36, #3, Winter 2003, p. 497-517.B ‘Show Trial: Decency, Authority and the Dominated Expert,” are also common." Finally there have been analyses of the superhero grounded in psychoanalytic, mythological, and structuralist theory.'® And this only reflects the work that has been done on American superhero comics and ignores the literature on comics created in other countries or that are situated in a different generic or industrial context. As one can see, I am not writing in a vacuum. For the most part, the comic-specific academic works I will be utilizing over the course of this thesis fall into the historical, political economic and fan-oriented camps; although some of the analyses that directly address intertextuality and memory within superhero comics will also be employed. All too often it seems that works situated in these different perspectives tend to be written in near isolation from each other. Thus itis rare for more literary theory driven analyses of the content of superhero comics to draw upon the insights of those scholars who have researched the political economy of ¥ See: Pustz, Matthew J., Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Relievers (Jackson: University of “Mississippi, 1999) or Brown, Jeffrey A., “Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital,” in the Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 30, #4, Spring 1997, p. 13-32 for work on fans. See: McAllister, Matthew P, “Ownership Concentration ia the U.S. Comic Book Industry,” in Comics and Ideology, McAlister, Sewell and Gordon eds, (New York: Peter Lang, 2001) or, McAllister, Matthew P., “Cultural Argument and Organizational Constraint inthe Comic Book Industry,” inthe Journal of Communication Vol. 40, #1, Winter 1990, p. 55-71. For recent work on comic history see: Nyberg, Amy Kiste, Sea! of Approval : The History ofthe Comics Code, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), Wright, Bradford W., Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, (Batiuore: Johas Hopkins University Press, 2001), or Park, David “The Kefauver Comic Book Hearings as Show Tria: Decency, Authority and the Dominated Expert,” in Cultural Studies Vol. 16, #2, March 2002, p. 259-288. + Some comic oriented work grounded in mythological, structuralist and psychoanalytic theory: Reynolds, Richard, Superheroes : A Modern Mythology (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), or Lang, Jeffrey §., and Trimble, Patrick “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? An Examination of the ‘American Monomyth and the Comic Book Superhero,” in the Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 22, #3, Winter 1988, p. 157-173, Brody, Michael, “Batman: Paychic Trauma and Its Solution,” inthe Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 28, #4, Spring 1995, p. 171-178, or Gabillie, Jean-Paul, “Cultural and Mythical ‘Aspects of a Superhero: The Silver Surfer 1968-1970,” inthe Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 28, #2, Fall 1994, p, 203.213.4 American comic books and vice versa.'” One of the goals of this thesis is to find a way to make these different approaches speak to each other in a productive manner, ideally by demonstrating their inter-relatedness and without privileging one set of theories and methodologies as inherently superior to all others. This introduction has sketched some of the foundation upon which the rest of this thesis will built. This has consisted of discussing some the developments in the American comic book industry's recent past, including the emergence and dominance of the direct market, the rise of largely adult fans as the dominant market for superhero comics, and the increasingly important role of star creators in the industry. We have also examined some of the critical literature on American comic books that has emerged, focusing upon Umberto Eco’s seminal writings on the nature of time within superhero comics. Although somewhat dated, Eco’s twin observations on the need of superhero characters to remain essentially the same while simultaneously existing in the modem world nevertheless inform some aspects of the chapters that follow. The first chapter, entitled, “The Secret Identities of Comic Book Publishers: Superheroes as Character Properties,” will try to bring together two fairly disparate trends in writings on comic books. The first such trend is the tendency to focus purely on the comic book industry as a business predicated upon licensing out characters to appear across a variety of products and media. The second trend is to focus purely on the ‘medium of comics in and of itself with an emphasis on applying literary analytical techniques to the great works by the great creators. Itis the intention of this chapter, using a variety of sources, to try and bring these two discourses info communication with » sn exception to this is Matthew P. McAllister's, “Cultural Argument and Organizational Constraint in the Comic Book Industy.” This aticle does try to loosely link the profit motive ofthe comie book industry15 ‘each other and to attempt to find a point between them that may be a useful jumping off point for future study. ‘The second chapter, “Recycled Wonder: The Commodification of Comic Book History,” will look at the changing perceptions of reprinted comic books between the 1960's and the present. This will hopefully make clear that despite the commercial pressures to keep the diagetic histories of superhero characters—a point that will be elaborated upon in the first chapter—older material has, since the 1960's, been repackaged and circulated amongst comic book readers. Nevertheless, this chapter will try to illustrate that perception of reprint books—ineluding who they should be marketed to and how—has changed dramatically. Ultimately, this chapter will make the argument that the emergence of comic book fans as the primary audience for such products and the importance placed upon knowing comic book history within fandom has promoted the emergence in the last fifteen years of high-priced and apparently high-quality reprint collections. The third chapter, “Superpowered Pedagogy,” will address the techniques and products designed to familiarize new readers with the detailed histories, backstories, and conventions of the superhero genre, Drawing on work on textual and genre competency, this chapter will look at how, despite periodic efforts to streamline mainstream superhero books, a great deal of knowledge about the characters, their histories, and the genre’s conventions are continually at play in contemporary comics. Proceeding from this, 1 will then look at some of the narrative techniques and specially designed products that the industry markets or, in many cases, fans create to both educate newcomers to the genre to changes in their output over the years16 and to provide more knowledgeable readers with a greater depth of knowledge about the genre and the industry. Finally, the fourth chapter “Tarnishing the Silver Age: Comics and Collective Memory,” will attempt to bring together the work from the previous two chapters into a discussion of how imagery from comic book history is often deployed to evoke certain feelings and ideas about the context in which they were created. Placing emphasis on the necessity of both change over time and awareness of these changes for such works, I will link up some of the discourses on collective memory with recent representations of one of the ‘great’ eras of comics: the Silver Age. In the process I hope to explore some of the possibilities and limitations of this intersection between our memories of cultural texts and forms and a broader understanding of the past. ‘Taken together, the individual chapters of this thesis will provide a better understanding of the relationship between our memories and knowledge of popular culture and our broader sense of North American society’s past. I have attempted to minimize broad theoretical assumptions about modem, post-modem or super-modern society in favor of a slightly more concrete analysis of how ideas about, and experiences of, pop culture past circulate in contemporary comic culture. Ultimately, I hope that this thesis will be of use to individuals interested in more than just men and women in spandex, capes and masks... but hey, that’s in here too.7 Chapter One ‘The Secret Identities of Comic Book Publishers: Superheroes as Character Properties Commercial Anglophone comics are working against a massive drag factor in terms of breadth and purity of vision and other yardsticks of quality or cultural importance. A vast amount of the art form’s energies are turned towards keeping the hundred or so company-owned continuing superhero comics alive... It's the hypnotic lie that has otherwise intelligent and talented people providing life support for old ideas, not for short periods to establish themselves in a harsh marketplace, but for years on end. -Warren Ellis, creator of Planetary and Transmetropoltian, in Come In Alone, (San Francisco: AIT/Planet Lar, 2001), p.16-17. [Ron] Perelman said that he would take Marvel far beyond the sleepy and small business of publishing comic books. “It is a mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property,” he said, “Disney's got much more highly recognized characters and softer characters, whereas our characters are termed action heroes. But at Marvel we are now in the business of the creation and marketing of characters.” -Ron Perelman, former owner of Marvel Comics, as quoted in Comic Wars: How Two ‘Tycoons Battled over the Marvel Comics Empire- And Both Lost by Dan Raviv, (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), p. 12. ‘The two quotations above illustrate, in many respects, two lines of thought about comic books and the superhero genre that seem to run throughout both the industry itself and much of the critical work upon the subject. On the one hand you have the18 impassioned criticism of one of the medium’s top creators, both in terms of sales and acclaim, decrying the exploitation of creators by industry giants along with the medium’s lack of prestige and diversity. Critics along this line, Ellis included, tend to wish for comic books to become a legitimate medium: embracing a wide range of genres, being creator driven, and judged by the same criterion as similar art forms like film or novels. On the other, you have a former owner of Marvel Comics selling the virtues of the company to potential investors. In extreme cases, this line of reasoning has a tendency to view the characters and content of superhero comic books as empty symbols owned by large corporations which can be plastered on products ranging from pajamas to potato peelers in an indiscriminate quest for profit, This chapter outlines the contours of these two approaches, and the tensions between them, to understanding the superhero. This chapter will attempt to recontextualize the superhero and, to a certain extent, character properties in general. 1 argue that it is necessary to see them as more than components of a genre of comic book, film and television narratives, as properties which large corporations seek to maximize exploitation of, or as the pure creations and tools of gifted writers, artists and directors. It is precisely because they are constituted in the space created by these competing forces that I argue that contemporary superhero narratives are interesting. Recent revisionist superhero narratives, in particular, can productively be seen as the result of a combination of these factors. Following this, I argue that revisions to superhero character properties have become an essential part of the comic book industry, as it attempts to keep its characters attractive to contemporary audiences and potential licensees, especially the film and television industries.19 In order to make this argument, this chapter will examine several aspects of this phenomenon. This will begin with considering the creator oriented discourse which has emerged in the wake of the changes to the industry, detailed in my introduction, that have occurred since the1980’s. I will comment on this discourses’ critique of the mainstream, American, comic book industry and explore its imitations. Secondly, I will consider the attractiveness of the revisionist movement within superhero comic books to the corporations that publish them. To do so, I argue that it is useful to focus on the concept of superheroes as ‘character properties” and will thus trace out the emergence of the trademark laws that enable this and question the extent to which the publication of comic books is really the business of a comic book publisher. The final section of this chapter illustrates these tendencies by way of an example that looks at how creative talents and industry interests can clearly converge in instances of genre revision. For this section 1 will use Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates as an example of how an attempt to revitalize certain Marvel character properties by ‘star’ talent can result in a truly revisionist, and very interesting, genre piece. Far from the anonymous figures who worked in the sweat shops of the Golden ‘Age of comics (roughly the late 1930’s until the late 1940's) creators have become, perhaps, the central focus for fan, industrial and critical discourse about the medium. One merely has to open up a recent issue of Wizard magazine, a periodical that can be considered the Premier of comic books, to read about the latest lucrative exclusive contract a given creator has signed with a publisher or an interview with them about their latest project. Indeed, the growth of creator-owned or creator-participant characters, where the creator maintains some financial and creative ownership over a character, in20 titles produced by the two major publishers is testimony to their perceived importance to the medium and its fans. ‘Unsurprisingly, this is reflected in much of the critical writing about comics. While this tendency is present in some of the earlier critical work on comic books, most notably the interviews with Dennis O*Neil and Frank Miller in Pearson and Uriechio’s The Many Lives of Batman, | will look at Geoff Klock’s How and Why to Read Superhero Comics and Warren Ellis’ Come in Alone as representative, if somewhat extreme, examples. I shall begin with Klock’s work. Klock’s How and Why to Read Superhero Comics is as important and insightful a tract as has been written on the subject. It is an in depth analysis of revisionist comics since the mid-1980's using an array of literary theory. Using the ideas of Harold Bloom, Klock argues that revisionist comic books are those that are written to both acknowledge and challenge the poetic tradition of the superhero comic books.” Initially, Klock points out that many superhero titles and characters have survived for many decades and through many changes of creative teams, constituting a complex history and tradition which revisionist creators can refashion. *! From this point, Klock proceeds through a chronology of “A-list” creators, primarily writers, beginning with Frank Miller and Alan Moore in the 1980°s and ending in the present with Kurt Busiek, Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison. He treats each of these authors and their works to an in depth literary analysis, often using the work of Lacan, to tease out the hidden meanings of their best known motifs, themes and other aesthetic choices. Further, Klock evaluates each of the authors, both in terms of their furthering a ® Klock, Geoff, How to Read Superhero Comies and Why, (New York: Continuum, 2002) p. 28. ™ Tid24 project of radically changing superhero comics” and their importance to a canon of ‘comic book creators, although the line between the two often seems blurry. While Klock does provide very interesting readings of some of the most important books published in the last twenty years, for the purposes of my project his work has some, understandable, limitations, Although his definition of what a revisionist superhero comic is and some of his observations about their relationship to the traditions of the genre are very useful, his exclusive focus on the great creators and works of the genre is limiting. Klock’s attempts to use Lacanian theory to glean insight into Alan Moore's Watchmen, for example, is quite interesting as literary criticism but it is less useful if one is trying to look at the broader picture of genre revision that has occurred since Watchmen’s publication. In short, his focus on important works and creators does not provide very much insight into the proliferation of the phenomenon among lesser titles and creators. Indeed, commercial and genre influences are almost entirely absent ftom his analysis which inadvertently gives one the impression that these works are entirely the result of artistic genius working in a vacuum, Nevertheless, we will return to Klock in the final section of this chapter when we consider the importance of changing and updating superhero character properties, using revisionism as the most extreme example, to both the industry and the genre. Getting back to the task at hand, Klock’s exclusive focus on the great creators of the comics—over the industrial interests, fan activities, and other extra-textual factors that influence the creation of comies—may be because Klock seems to be what I would 2 Kock actually seems 1 have a teleological endpoint for the evolution ofthe genre, going so far as to predict its future in his final chepter22 like to call a medium activist. This is to say that Klock is interested in raising the cultural capital of the comic book medium to a level on par with film, prose or visual art. Thus it is not surprising that he uses the tools provided by critical literary studies to both explore the theory itself and to treat comic books as an object equally worthy of analysis as the ‘modern novel. Nor, in this light, is it surprising that his interest is in the best work produced by the most acclaimed creators in the field. While there is nothing wrong with this per se, it does blind his analysis to the importance of character properties as commodities and the influence this fact wields upon the medium (a current example could be the pressure the success of television's Smallville is exerting upon DC Comics to reconfigure the Superman titles). Another unabashed medium activist is Warren Ellis. His book, Come in Alone, is a collection of critical pieces he wrote for the website Comic Book Resources and is simultaneously a scathing criticism of mainstream comic book publishers and a blueprint to ‘save’ the comic book medium. Strongly anti-superhero, Ellis advocates a iversification of comic book genres along the lines of Japanese Manga, greater creators’ rights and the proliferation of small press publications in the face of the big two publishers. All of these moves, he feels, would go a long way to ensuring the continuing existence of comic book industry, should the publication of superhero comies finally collapse. Further, he believes that it would help the medium gain the prestige necessary for it to be seen as a legitimate, respectable, creator-driven form in the eyes of the mainstream world and the cultural elite.”* And perhaps he isn’t wrong, Both he and Klock are likely correct in thinking that a greater focus upon important creators, radical change to (and perhaps an abandonmentof) the superhero genre and a proliferation of genres and publishers would be good for the medium both in terms of its artistic quality and public respectability, Elis is also likely correct that the big two publishers are more interested in servicing their long- running superhero titles than saving the medium.” This is most forcefully put when he states that “this business is not going to be ‘saved’ by everyone putting their combined weight and creativity behind concepts and characters owned by corporations. Because corporations aren’t in it to save comics. They're in it to save themselves.”?> Here, he points towards a basic point which limits medium and creator focused analysis of contemporary superhero narratives: the comic book publishing industry is not about the publication of comic books. Rather, its focused on the production and ‘maintenance of character properties. As I shall argue below, to truly understand the superhero genre and the mainstream comic book industry one must disentangle them, at least partially, from both the comic book medium and the talents of individual creators. When the Wamer Brothers Corporation acquired DC Comics in 1968 it did not do so to expand its publishing arm. Rather, DC was looked at as potentially rich source of licensing and movie properties.”° This is not surprising when one considers that by the late 1960's, in the wake of the excitement generated by the Batman television show, DC Comics” licensing fees already outstripped their magazine sales.”” Similarly, in the recent struggle over the ownership of Marvel Comics, as chronicled by Dan Raviy, this fact 2 Enis, Warren, Come In Alone, (San Francisco: AIT/Planet Lar, 2001), p. 12-17. 2% Ho puts this mostly strongly in Elis, p. 141-4 2 Ibid, p. 142. % Boichel, Bill, Batman: Commodity as Myth,” in The Many Lives of Batman, p.16. Aithough I have seen conflicting dates for this transaction, 1968 does seem to be the year Warner Communications purchased DC comics, For another source see: Cook, Brad, “Wamer Brothers: What’s up Doc?,” at Brandchannel.com, 29 July, 2002, at hitp:/fwww.brandchannel convfeatures_profile-aspid=82. ” Gordon, lan, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890-1945, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), p. 153.24 became a recurring theme. Throughout his book, nearly every player in the high finance struggle over the company sang the praises of Marvel as a source of licensing revenue because it was home to a score of characters which many people can easily identify, even if they are not emotionally attached to them. Indeed, the greatest fear of the author was that Marvel may have gone into bankruptey during this period and its host of near mythological characters would go up for auction in a piecemeal fashion.”* Or worse yet, ‘one may assume that they would disappear and eventually fall into the public domain... Thus, although seemingly paradoxical, the central operation to current comic book publishers is not the publication of comic books. Rather, itis the creation and ‘maintenance of character properties. By the term character properties, I am referring to any fictional character that has been registered, trademarked, copyrighted or patented and can be utilized not only in the creation of fictional narratives but licensed to promote a wide variety of products. It should be noted that this phenomenon is hardly limited to the comic book industry. It is prevalent—as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Role-Playing Game, recent Law and Order and CSI video games, or the revivals of the He-Man and Strawberry Shortcake cartoons and toy lines attest—throughout popular commercial culture, One could even go further and include the ownership of the likeness of long dead celebrities like Fred Astaire and Steve McQueen, popular wrestlers, like Hulk Hogan and pom stars, like Jenna Jameson, in this category. With this in mind, I hope to briefly explore the phenomenon of character properties as it pertains to the comic book industry, arguing that it, more than the notion of words and pictures upon a page, defines the industry and the products it produces. To ® See Raviv, Dan Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled over the Marvel Comics Empire- And Both Lost (New York: Broadvay Books, 2001), p. 12, 34, 54, 176-7 or 266, for example. His fear that the characters25 this end, I will begin by describing the historical background of character properties in ‘North America. I will then proceed to briefly discuss how they function to generate revenue for the corporations that own them. Lastly, I will discuss how the protecting, if not the attempted enhancing, of the economic value of character properties, by their ‘owners, can have interesting effects upon the narratives they produce; often intersecting and redefining the conventions of a genre dominated by the characters of the two largest comic book publishers. While it is true that Richard Outcault no longer holds, in the eyes of most scholars, the title of “father of the comic strip’ he can be regarded, especially in the context of the comic industry, as the father of modem character properties. Indeed, as lan Gordon points out, in his Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890-1945, Outcault’s Yellow Kid character’s capacity to promote newspapers was at the heart of the struggle between Pulitizer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Journal over Outeault’s services in the 1890's." Andrew Wemick, in his book Promotional Culture, claims that the Yellow Kid was valued as a promotional sign that stood in for the newspapers themselves, explaining both the character’s value to Hearst and Pulitizer and the emergence of the term ‘yellow journalism.’ Nor were these newspaper barons the only ones to see the commercial potential of the Yellow Kid. Outcault himself attempted to copyright the name and likeness of the kid in September of 1896 in an apparent attempt, to control and profit from the vast number of products being produced bearing the Yellow Kid’s image. ‘will be auctioned off and then “simply disappear,” can be found on p.166. ® Gordon, p. 14. 2 Wernick, Andrew, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression, (London: Sage Publications, 1991) p. 95.26 Although, due to an application irregularity, Outcault’s copyright application was only partially successful, it did establish the legal status of illustrated characters as properties that could be created, sold and licensed in the marketplace. In fact, a few years later, Outcauit created his next character, Buster Brown, with copyright laws and licensing revenues in mind. This is, of course, reflected in the existence of the Buster Brown line of shoes long after the demise of the, now largely forgotten, comic strip.’ ‘Thus, the concept of the character property was born alongside the modem comic strip and the two have been intertwined ever since, ‘The strength of character properties as sources of licensing revenues was increased, according to Neil Harris, by the expansion of copyright law in the 1920's and 30’s, These broader laws led to a situation that had significant financial benefits for individuals like Walt Disney and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1930’s. In 1924, for example, copyright was expanded from protection from literary imitation to cover any form of adaptation and subsidiary, and in 1936 it was decided that anticipation by older, public domain forms does not invalidate one’s copyright. Thus it became possible to copyright a Hercules or Buffalo Bill while leaving the actual mythological and historical figures within the public domain.” ‘This latter development would have great significance for the comic book industry. In 1940, National Periodicals (the company which would become DC Comics) sued Bruns Publications to suppress a character called Wonderman, arguing that he was a blatant imitation of their new sensation, Superman, Bruns Publications, on the other hand, % Gordon, p. 31-44. 2 Harris, Neil, “Who Ovms Our Myths? Heroism and Copyright in an Age ‘of Mass Culture," in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) p. 240-242.27 argued that Superman was merely an updating of the Hercules mythology and, therefore, not eligible for copyright. The judge disagreed, claiming that Wonderman was too close in specific details to Superman and set a landmark precedent for the protection of character properties in favor of their owners.> Jane Gaines argues by the late 1940’, after the United States Trademark Act of 1946, called the Lanham Act that trademark protection emerged as the preferred legal device to protect character properties.” Unlike copyright laws, which originated in an attempt to protect authors from piracy and were seen to reward individual enterprise and creativity, trademark law began with the intention of protecting consumers from shoddy, imitation, merchandise, This shift towards trademark protection originated, according to Gaines, in the aftermath of the so-called “Sam Spade’ case between Warner Brothers and Dashiell Hammet. The dispute between Warmer Brothers and Hammet began because ‘Warner Brothers sought to prevent the author from publishing further Sam Spade novels after the success of the film version of The Maltese Falcon. The studio felt that they had legal ownership of the character after purchasing the rights to Hammet’s novel. The judge disagreed, He decided that one could copyright characters only if they constituted the whole of the work, as was arguably the case in the dispute between National Periodicals and Bruns Publications because comic and cartoon characters were so easily rendered and recognized out of context.’ In light of this decision, and with the emergence of television and all of the licensing potential of its programs” characters, trademark rapidly became the preferred » See Hanis, p. 242-3, or Gaines, Jane, “Superman and the Protective Strength of the Trademark,” in The Logics of Television, Patricia Mellencamp eds, (Bloomington: tndiana University Press, 1990), p. 175 Gaines, p. 171 % Gaines, p. 17628 ‘manner of insuring a monopoly on a character's profitability. Trademark was considered advantageous to entertainment companies for two main reasons. The first was that because trademark protection protected properties in terms of their source, rather than copyright’s focus on authorship, companies were able to register titles and characters if they indicated that they were part of a series of stories or programs from the same source. ‘This was particularly useful to companies producing works for visual media as the distinctive appearance of their characters, and in some cases series’ titles, could basically be constituted as brand names unto themselves which could then be easily licensed out and imprinted upon a variety of products. This not only facilitated the financial exploitation of characters, but, according to Gaines, helped sever their connection to any ‘one given author or creator.** ‘The second advantage of trademark over copyright protection lay in its longevity. At the time, copyright protection existed for 50 years after the first publication or release of a given text or the author’s life. After this, copyrighted works, including characters, reverted into the public domain unless they were part of a continuing series. With trademark protection, however, fictional characters were, and are, protected for as long as they identify a series of narratives from the same source.*” Taken together, all of these legal decisions have created an environment where protected character properties, especially easily recognizable ones, have become valuable commodities which lend themselves to a variety of media and licensing uses. % Gaines, p. 177-8. * Gaines, p. 181-2.29 ‘The extent to which character properties serve to generate large licensing revenues or further synergistic corporate strategies is fairly well established.”* From this perspective it is easy to see why one can regard the primary business of American comic book publishers as being the management of their character properties, Nor is this a recent development. Many writers have pointed out the extent to which navigating through a world flooded with licensed products is a common place occurrence in contemporary consumer culture. In an interesting contrast to these descriptions, Jane Gaines invites her readers to imagine they are in America in 1948: the usher punches your SUPERMAN Club Card as you enter the local motion picture theater to see Chapter Three, “The Reducer Ray,” and as you enter the dark house you carefully slip the card back into your SUPERMAN billfold, anticipating the fifteenth week when a completely punched card entitles you to a free admission. As you leave the theater, still chewing the free SUPERMAN bubble gum, compliments of the exhibitor (who paid 52 cents for a box of 80 sticks), you pass the dry- ‘goods store where you see a SUPERMAN movie viewer exhibited in the window...” She continues, in the same vein, pointing out the extent to which the licensable aspect of protected character properties has been an economic incentive for the comic book publishing, or any other entertainment, industry for decades. * See McAllister, Matthew P, “Ownership Concentration in the U.S. Comic Book Industry,” in Comics and Ideology, McAllister, Sewell and Gordon eds, (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), p. 17, 26-30 Gaines, p. 185, Bold type in original30 In simple terms, using the case of Marvel Comics as described by Dan Raviv, the exploitation of character properties works, in a nutshell, as follows:"° The publication of comic books develops, and keeps in circulation, the company’s stable of character properties. These are then licensed for secondary commercial purposes, like pajamas toys, films and television programs, generating the bulk of the company’s income. The advertising and promotional work, done by the licensees for their specific products, is considered to boost the sales of all licensed products, the comic books themselves and raises the profile of the featured characters in general. This, in tum, keeps the character properties in circulation and raises their overall value in terms of both selling comic books and licensing. Given that the licensing of the characters is vastly more profitable than the sales of the comics they appear in, some may question why Marvel and DC continue to bother publishing comic books at all. Indeed, Warren Ellis once claimed that “if you subtracted the Superman comics from DC’s schedule tomorrow, about fifty thousand people would notice (if that.) And the Superman apparel and merchandising machine — which is where the actual money in the Superman trademark is generated ~ would roll on without noticing. Hell, the WB stores don’t even sell Superman comics.” While this may be ‘true, the current owners of Marvel Comics seem to feel that “the characters in the movies and on the sheets and lunch boxes had to be based on something.” In effect the publication of comic books by the two largest publishers is—more or less—research and development for licensing revenues; a loss leader for a larger enterprise. © Raviv, p. 54, Ellis, p. 14131 One can see how it hes become well established that comic book character properties are often seen, from a political economic standpoint, as profitable signifiers deployed across a wide range of commodities in the service of corporate quests for profit. At this point, however, beyond suggestions of the economic and legal benefits of the serial form or suggestions that the content of American comic books has been subordinated to larger corporate licensing goals, most analysis in this vein stops.” The importance of character properties to publishers’ profits, beyond the actual sales of comic books, does have an impact upon the form and content of many comic books currently published. As will be briefly sketched out below, this impact is cannot be seen as merely negative or simple. I would like to open this discussion with a question: what are The Ultimates? ‘There are a few different ways of answering this question. Beginning in 2000—the same year as Bryan Singer’s film adaptation of X-Men and a year prior to Sam Raimi’s Spiderman—Marvel’s line of ‘Ultimate’ titles, consisting at present of Ultimate Spiderman, Ultimate X-Men, The Ultimates and Ultimate Fantastic Four, are an attempt to resituate and revise several of their most popular, and enduring, character properties in ‘order to make them accessible and relevant to audiences currently unfamiliar with them. Itis also an attempt to capitalize upon the increased publicity these characters have received since the recent spate of Marvel Comics based films. The Ultimate line is also a fictional universe entirely separate from the continuity of the titles Marvel has published since the 1960s. Lastly, they are also a family of books originally written by two writers consistently ranked in Wizard Magazine's top ten creators list, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, and who have apparently been given a great deal of creative freedom for * See Gaines, p. 178 or McAllister, p. 28,32 writers handed such canonical characters."* In short, Marvel’s ultimate line can be seen as a set of revisionist genre texts constituted by, at least, the two vectors of force so far identified in this chapter: the growth of complex storytelling by star creators and the corporate interest in maintaining and, if possible, increasing the value of their character properties. ‘Although skeptical about their chances for succeeding, Warren Ellis has pointed out that the Ultimate titles are an attempt to ‘save’ mainstream American comic books, and superhero comic books in particular. * Being interested in transforming the medium itself, Ellis would like nothing more than to see the larger comic book publishers, with their stables of serviced trademarks, collapse. Nevertheless, Ellis is correct in his observation that the Ultimate line’s project of reviving the flagging fortunes of older superheroes points to some of the long term difficulties in basing a business upon character properties. Many of Marvel’s characters, like Spiderman, the Hulk, Captain America and the X-Men have become a recognizable part of our common culture, Maintaining this status and keeping them interesting to contemporary and future audiences is a challenge. One only has to think of the disappearance and failed attempts to revive many older character properties, like television and radio’s the Lone Ranger or Superman's pulp predecessor Doe Savage, to see that Marvel’s character equity is far from secure. * See Wizard #112 (January 2001), p. 155 or #0 (September 2003), p. 164, for top creator listings. The ‘extent of their cteative froedom can be judged from articles about the line: Lawrence, Christopher, “The Ultimate Test,” in Wizard #112 (January 2001), p. 40-43, Lawrence, Christopher, “Ultimate” Avengers,” in Wizard #121 (October 2001), p. 22-7 or Cotton, Mike, “Fantastic Voyage,” in Wizard #145 (November 2003) p. 44-50. * Elis, p. 112,33 ‘One of the chief difficulties faced by Marvel is, pethaps ironically, one of the key ‘components—within the comic book medium at least—of the superhero genre: continuity. In a nutshell, continuity in comic books is the remembered and referenced history of their characters and their fictional universes. Thus, in many cases, Marvel titles are essentially open-ended continuations of soap opera like sagas stretching back to the carly 1960's, As later chapters will attempt to demonstrate, continuity is difficult to do away with as it a source of pleasure for comic book fans when their knowledge of, often obscure, aspects of a character's past is rewarded by references to past issues. However, as has been pointed out by Ellis,“* few potential new readers, especially in light of the recent Marvel films, are likely to be interested in sorting out the details of 40 plus years of character history. While this would be a difficult enough problem to overcome with an isolated title which solely featured one character, itis further complicated by the phenomenon of superhero comic book universes. ‘The superhero universe is another characteristic feature of the superhero genre, as it has manifested in the comic medium. Beginning, arguably, with the publication of the first Justice Society of America story in the early 1940's and first really developed as a concept by the Marvel titles of the 1960s, superhero universes have tended to be the fictional worlds inhabited by all of a given company's characters and constituted by their interaction. From the perspective of the reader, superhero universes allow for more complex stories because they create a community for their characters to shape and interact in. From a commercial standpoint, the universe serves as a promotional tool. It makes it possible to have more popular characters ‘crossover’ with less popular * Ellis, p. 112.34 characters. Thus they can launch new characters in popular titles or have a character like Spiderman appear in a less popular title, like Runaways, to boost its sales.“ Offsetting the promotional and, for knowledgeable fans, narrative advantages of ‘company superhero universes is that it creates another layer of knowledge that can be daunting to a new, or potentially new, reader. If, as Ellis argues, the amount of knowledge required to comfortably follow the exploits of one contemporary superhero comic is unrealistic to demand of a new reader, the added complication of any one given superhero title drawing on the past events of another may seem ridiculous. However, as I will illustrate below and in the next chapter, the industry does attempt to redress these problems with a number of narrative techniques and products. A related challenge to the ongoing value of character properties lies in their tendency to become associated with specific historical moments and appear as dated, if not outmoded. This has been a particularly difficult problem for Marvel characters as, their topicality and contemporainty in the 1960°s was largely how they differentiated themselves from DC and was an important basis of their popularity. Indeed, this is an article of faith for those familiar with the history of the company and its characters. As the dust jackets of their Marvel Masterworks series of hardcover reprints states, “these ‘were characters who spoke, thought and acted like ordinary people, albeit people who ‘were blessed — or cursed — with extraordinary powers. Their adventures weren’t neatly tied up at the end of an issue. As in real life, their actions could have long-range consequences. And some were hated and feared simply because they were different.” “ For a discussion of the promotional aspects of superhero universes see Ellis, p. 188-189. © Marvel Masterworks, vol 7, 1988.35 Unfortunately, from a corporate perspective, what made the Marvel stable of characters contemporary in the early 1960s is precisely what dates them today. The Ultimate line, then, is an attempt to solve these long-term problems with Marvel’s characters and produce books capable of capitalizing upon the popularity of texts featuring Marvel superheroes in other media."* This is at the core of the line’s mission statement, summed up by Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, as being to “refashion the Marvel Universe (as if Stan Lee and company created it in 2001) to create a jumping on point for readers of all ages... These characters are iconic, we just have to tweak them to add relevancy.”” Thus, one can see that the Ultimate line is a set of revisionist superhero texts that are intended to keep Marvel’s core characters accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences. Nor is it unique. Revisions of comic book characters and continuity with these intentions have occurred on many occasions, with many different results—not all of them positive—and differing impacts on the actual published comic books of the major players in the industry. These revisions, primarily driven to update characters for new audiences and their contexts, have generally resulted in the wholesale rewriting of comic book continuity. They are usually geared towards eliminating elements of a character that are perceived as dated and reducing a character's backstory, or at least the elements of it that a reader is expected to know, to a minimum. In some cases, often termed ‘reboots’ within the comic book community, these revisions result in totally erasing a character's entire fictional history, enabling creators to start from soratch.*? The Ultimate line is an example * This is especially true of Ultimate X-Men, see Lawrence, “The Ultimate Test,” p. 40-41 © Quoted by Lawrence in, “Ultimate Avengers,” p. 24. 5 Te should be noted that although the term ‘reboot’ seems to have come into common comic book culture ppariance in and around the 1994 relaunch of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the actual practices the term36 of a reboot, although one that, as a special imprint of Marvel, has not yet displaced the titles set in its original continuity. I should point out that revisionist superhero narratives are amongst the most talked and written about kinds of superhero narratives. For example, Geoff Klock’s book How to Read Superhero Comics and Why focuses exclusively upon what he terms revisionary superhero narratives, while two of the most famous and acclaimed superhero comics ever published, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, are considered revisionist superhero narratives par excellance. Indeed, itis rare for a critical work on the genre not to devote considerable time to them, As Klock and others have pointed out, revisions of the supethero genre and its characters have produced some, if not most, of the genre’s most interesting and exciting works and, as such, merit attention. But what exactly are revisionist or revisionary superhero narratives? Klock argues that the revisionary superhero narrative is a label that “has been used by the comic book reading community to denote any superhero story that attempts a reworking of given characters or concepts.”*? While Klock himself, for reasons that will be discussed below, works with a narrower definition of the concept for his project, focusing on the ‘visionary’ aspect of the term revisionary, this definition is a succinct way of defining the works I will be discussing for the balance of this chapter. However, I would like to describe had been done, albeit occasionally, since at least the mid-1980’s or, arguably, the mid-1950’s, Indeed, John Byrne, the creator responsible for the ‘reboot’ of Superman in the 1980's uses the term on his ‘website when explaining some of his rather bitter remembrances of that project. The FAQ's section of Byrne's website can be found here: v 2 sionstabout~ComictBook+Projects#!30 * Basically, al of the titles in the Ultimate line are set in their own company owned comic book universe. ‘This universe and its continuity have no direct ties to the other titles Marvel publishes beyond those stories chosen to be retold in this new continuity. Thus, the current Marvel title Uncanny X-Men is a continuation of the characters and continuity that began with the publication of Uncanny X-Men #1 in the mid-1960"s, while the ongoing Uttimate X-Men is essentially an independent entity that may retell certain cherished X-37 amend Klock’s version of the popular definition of a revisionary or revisionist superhero narrative slightly to denote any superhero story that attempts a reworking of given concepts, characters, or their histories. 1 also feel that it is important to stress that when discussing revisionary or revisionist superhero narratives the terms are often used to denote works that are revisionist in at least one of two senses. The first level, perhaps most usefully associated with the reworking of concepts, is that of narratives that are seen to be attempts at, or result in, a general generic transformation or revision. Alan Moore’s series Watchmen is an excellent example of a revisionary superhero narrative that operates on this level. Although the project was originally conceived as an attempt to revive interest in the Charleton stable of superhero properties that DC had recently acquired, the book’s real importance lies in its deconstruction of the superhero genre. A deconstruction that, critics like Klock argue, has either made possible or, at the very least, influenced nearly every ‘adult’ supethero narrative created since.** In terms of gauging a given work's importance within and influence upon the genre of superhero narratives, particularly if a critic is examining a given work as art or literature, narratives that operate on this level are the ones given pride of place. Further, itis revisionary narratives that work to revise the genre as a whole that most easily lend themselves to comparison with revisionist texts Men stories, like the Phoenix Saga for example, but is not bound by what happened in the previous forty- years of X-Men ttle. ® Klock. p. 16. © Indeed, Klock claims that “the contemporary superhero narrative might be viewed as consisting of a series of footnotes to Miller and Moore.” Klock, p. 3,38 looked at by scholars, in disciplines like film and literary criticism, that are interested in generic transformation.** ‘The second, and slightly more modest, way that the label revisionist superhero narrative is used is to denote superhero texts that set out to rework or, in some cases rewrite, a given character and their history. John Byme’s Superman: The Man of Steel, which effectively restarted the character’s continuity from scratch in a 1980s context, is an excellent example of this kind of revisionary narrative. While not particularly influential in terms of its storytelling innovations or serious exploration of the underlying themes and concepts of the superhero genre, The Man of Steel is still considered an important revisionist work in the comic reading community. This is because The Man of Steel not only attempted to rework Superman into a character that was more attractive to a contemporary audience but explicitly, and some ‘would say ruthlessly, rewrote the continuity of the character, rendering the previous forty years of stories null and void, Further, in many ways The Man of Steel was as influential as Watchmen. Not only were the changes made in the series reinforced throughout DC’s line of comic books, licensed products and texts in other media, but the success of The ‘Man of Steel in reviving interest in the character of Superman prompted a host of other ‘works that sought to rework characters and their histories with an eye towards making them attractive to a contemporary audience including, arguably, Marvel’s Ultimate line.*> * See Cawletti, John G., “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” in Film ‘Theory and Criticism, 2 ed, Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen eds, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 559-579, for an example of such eiicism, * This was true of DC in particular. Some notable examples would include Hawibworld, a reworking of Hoowkman apd Hawkworan that has served asthe bass ofthe ineamaton ofthe characer of Hawi in the Justice League cartoon, Emerald Dawn, areteling of the origin ofthe Silver Age Green Lantern, and the self-explanatory Aguaman: Time and Tide. Its important to note that not all ofthese revisions were particularly successfisl. The changes to the Hawk-characters have almost become a cautionary talc in the consequences ofan unvuceessfil revision of a set of characters.39 It is important to note that these two categories of revisionary superhero narratives ate not mutually exclusive, Many of the more ambitious and literary revisionist works that have arguably sought to transform or deconstruct the genre itself were, at the same time, reworkings of specific characters and their histories. Frank Miller’s influential work: ‘on Batman, in the form of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: Year One, can be seen as a classic example of a revisionary work that not only interrogated and transformed the genre itself but revived interest in a character by reworking it to appeal to 2modem audience. Indeed, so many revisionist works of the first type simultaneously rework characters and their histories that it is easy for one to mistake works like Byme’s The Man of Steel as merely being weak attempts at the kind of more radical revisions that are evident in works like Moore’s Watchmen. This lumping together of revisionist narratives that often have very different goals and ambitions can result in comparisons of apples with oranges. Most of Alan Moore’s revisionist works, for example, can be seen as attempts to create high art out of the low culture cloth of the superhero genre, while Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright seems largely motivated by a desire to alter the history of the comic book continuity of the Superman titles to be more in line with the version of it put forward by the WB’s successful Smallville television series. Comparing the two would, at best, highlight the intellectual and aesthetic complexity and depth of Moore’s work in contrast to the fairly straightforward superheroic storytelling of Waid. At worst it would dismiss Waid’s work as being inconsequential when compared to the canon of “great? superhero narratives that has been created since the emergence of serious superhero narratives in the 1980s.