In a recent interview in Rolling Stone — part of the pre-publication hoopla for the much-anticipated A Man in Full, his first novel since the 1988 Bonfire of the Vanities — Tom Wolfe bemoaned the state of contemporary American fiction. With only a few exceptions, he declared, fiction writers are still sunk in the liberal, touchy-feely, every-protagonist an-abuse-survivor quagmire they fell into during the 1980s. Hardly anyone, Wolfe griped, is getting his hands dirty these days with the Big Questions: love, death, redemption, religion, morality, and truth.
He’s right, of course, that much American literature remains myopic and self-referential. But there are some people who are trying to explore big questions. And they’re doing it in books openly hostile to the moral relativism of modern liberalism that Wolfe has so often exposed in his own writing. The only problem — and the reason Tom Wolfe may not have noticed them — is that their books are comic books: The new generation of draftsmen and authors writing the latest installments of Superman, Batman, and their modern successors form the first sizable group of American storytellers to try once again to present moral tales in a smart, compelling, and literate way.
Comic books derived from the marriage of newspaper comic strips and the cheap adolescent adventure magazines known as “pulps.” The first popular newspaper strip was Richard F. Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid,” a clever satire of urban life, which debuted in 1896 in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The success of “The Yellow Kid” quickly led to the appearance of other strips, aimed far more at adults than children. George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat,” an almost Dadaist strip that first appeared in 1911, was a favorite of Woodrow Wilson’s. Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which ran from 1905 to 1911, was a series of art nouveau fantasy sketches relating the adventures of a boy lost in a world of dreamscapes.
The same year that “The Yellow Kid” appeared, the publisher Frank Munsey began to print his new magazine, Argosy, on cheap, “wood-pulp” paper. Combining adventure and action stories for a young audience, Munsey and his rival publishers discovered such classic pulp authors as Max Brand, Dashiell Hammett, Ray Bradbury, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan.
The pulps and the comic strips came together in 1933, when two Eastern Color Printing salesmen, Harry Wildenberg and M. C. Gaines, formed the notion of printing comic strips in the pulp-magazine format. The new comic books of the 1930s were aimed almost entirely at adolescents — offering the derring-do of such stock characters as Dick Tracy, Tarzan, and Flash Gordon. By the onset of World War II, comic books had become what most people still think of them as: the superheroic adventures of such morally spotless, lantern-jawed protagonists as Batman, Superman, and Captain America (who all arrived around the same time as the war), waging a never-ending battle against urban crime.
In the first decade after the war, however, the tales of the superheroes were joined by a darker breed of “funny books” as a new company, EC Comics, began publishing risque horror and crime stories — featuring, under titles like Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror, zombies and mad scientists holding voluptuous women hostage in ruined castles. (EC Comics also published a tiny, start-up humor magazine called Mad.)
These new comics were considered dangerous enough to warrant the hearings begun in 1954 by the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. The hearings were prompted primarily by the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, a book by New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham that claimed a direct link between comics and juvenile delinquency. Wertham went after not only the EC Comics sludge but the mainstream heroes, claiming that Batman’s relation with Robin was homosexual: “If Batman were in the State Department he would be dismissed.” Comics, Wertham concluded, “arouse in children fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune. We have called it the Superman complex.”
Nothing much came of the Senate’s hearings, and historians tend to dismiss Wertham as a crank and a right-wing nut. But the source of his fire was in fact leftist rather than conservative. Influenced by the Frankfurt School of social theory — a mix of Marxist and Freudian theory — he was one of a long line of social critics denouncing popular American culture from the left.
Had Wertham known what comics would bring in the 1960s, he might have held his tongue. The decade produced a new crop of “alternative comics,” many done by artists and writers reared on EC Comics and Mad magazine. Titles like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Zap! gained popularity among the hippies by attacking the police and promoting drug use and counterculturalism in general. Ralph Stedman’s “freakout” drawings for Hunter S. Thompson’s Rolling Stone articles were typical of the genre. (The comics’ humor, however, sometimes cut both ways: Zap! was run by Robert Crumb, who — a fascinating 1994 documentary revealed — loathed the hippies and thought his drawings a scathing satire of their lives.)
The mainstream comics eventually recovered from Wertham, but they came back with a twist. Writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby of Marvel Comics introduced in the early 1960s a new breed of superheroes: Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, and many others. These heroes were humanized versions of the traditional superhero, suffering normal problems like low-paying jobs, broken hearts, and family squabbles. The archetypal Marvel hero was Spider-Man, an awkward teen-age science nerd named Peter Parker who acquired super powers after being bit by a radioactive spider. (During the Cold War, a lot of heroes got their superhuman gifts from accidents involving radiation.) Unlike Superman, Spider-Man — although his signature trope was his ability to toss of barbed quips while in battle — constantly doubted his abilities.
Still, when push came to shove against the bad guys, these new heroes weren’t all that different from a paragon like Superman, and during the 1970s and early 1980s, comics were in marked decline. It wasn’t until 1986 that comic books were dramatically recharged when Frank Miller published Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a book-length “graphic novel” that tells the story of a fifty year-old Batman coming out of retirement.
The Dark Knight Returns was compelling in a way that no comic had been before, offering literate dialogue, a social commentary, an obsessive lead character whose very sanity is in doubt — and a scathing depiction of liberalism. Set in an undetermined future, The Dark Knight Returns painted a world in which psychotherapists and lawyers have filled the streets with violent criminals.
Miller’s new Robin is a girl, the daughter of former hippies. In one particularly striking scene, while the teenage Robin stares out the window at the crime-ridden streets, her parents sit inside smoking marijuana and bemoaning the return of a “fascist” crimefighter like Batman: “The American conscience died with the Kennedys. All the marching we did in the ’60s, it’s like it never happened.” As they speak, their daughter’s face goes from being hidden in shadow to shining with light. She lifts out of her slump and gazes up in wonder as, after more than a decade, the Bat Signal once again lights up Gotham City.
Predictably, The Dark Knight Returns was not universally praised. Art Spiegelman, the 1960s-under- ground artist who went on to the New Yorker and who won a Pulitzer prize in 1987 for Maus, his own brilliant graphic novel about the Holocaust, called Miller’s Batman “a rather fascistic Reagan-era hero.” What Miller had done was to bring an unprecedented level of realism to the squalor of the post-1960s city. Batman was still the sternest of moralists, and if his obsession with crime seemed nearly psychotic, it was a reflection of the frustrations of many Americans over the explosion of crime during the previous thirty years.
The Dark Knight Returns was enormously popular and fathered the entire generation of artists and writers who are writing comics in the late 1990s. The latest incarnations of superheroes are blessed with mythic powers that make them not inhuman but superhuman — representing human emotion and experience on a heroic scale.
In a 1994 issue, Marvel Comics’ Incredible Hulk — a hero who turns into an unthinking, unstoppable green behemoth when he loses his temper — had to struggle with his inability, despite his godlike strength, to prevent a close friend from dying of AIDS. But the writer, Peter David, wasn’t interested in easy tearjerking: In one scene, the Hulk’s best friend Rick becomes hysterical when his hands are covered with infected blood. Another group of Marvel characters, the X-Men, are genetically altered mutants who have to deal with a society that despises them — and which at least some of them despise in return. This premise allows the writers to explore issues of racism in surprisingly serious ways: the human racists who want to exterminate the mutants, and the mutant racists — “Homo Superior” — who want to rid the earth of humans.
Also resisting modern liberal bromides, although with more cartoonish humor, are the new breed of alternative comics. Titles like Hate, Peep Show, and Eightball are as countercultural as their precursors from the 1960s — except that the culture they’re countering is often the culture of political correctness. The most bracing and original (and pornographic) is Eightball, written by the award-winning Daniel Clowes. (In 1997, for the first time, Esquire included a comic, by Clowes, as part of its annual summer fiction issue.) In one recent issue, the adolescent hero goes to a party and spends the entire time mentally insulting the young pseudo-rebels he sees:
These are just average upper-middle class kids and yet they all envision themselves as alternative “fringe-dweller” types . . . . The only way to really separate yourself from the mainstream is to contrive an extreme persona . . . . and all that gets you is a pathetic fashion show of freaks . . . . with made-up opinions.
Perhaps the high point of modern comics came in 1996 with Kingdom Come, a four-part series written by Mark Waid and painted by Alex Ross. Narrated by a Protestant pastor named Norman McCay who is plagued by visions of Armageddon, Kingdom Come tells of a world in which Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the other old “League of Justice” heroes have been rejected. Humans have instead put their faith in a younger, more violent, and less ethical group of heroes who often fight just for the thrill of fighting. The older heroes finally come out of retirement, and the ensuring battle seems to be building to the apocalypse McCay foresaw. In the end, only an angelic intervention prevents the battle from destroying the world. The older heroes reestablish order, making it their cause to teach the younger ones how to use their powers to preserve life rather than destroy it.
Even the new comics that shun this kind of grandiosity manage to deal with religion and ethics with respect and sophistication. Probably the best comic being published today is Daredevil, “the man without fear.” Originally a 1960s Marvel Comic created by Stan Lee, the new Daredevil was revived in the mid-1980s by Frank Miller and is now being written by Kevin Smith, the young independent film director who made 1994’s Clerks and 1995’s Mallrats.
Daredevil’s alter ego is Matt Murdock, a New York lawyer who was struck blind in a freak childhood accident that left him with preternaturally heightened senses. Murdock is obsessed with justice — and he’s also a practicing Catholic. In a recent issue he is interrupted during confession when his super-hearing picks up the heartbeat of a young woman who is about to be the victim of a crime. On his way to the rescue, Daredevil offers a prayer:
Lord, every night You put on this immorality play for me, show me the disparity between man’s magnificence and his actions. Eons of evolvement, and we’re still seeking the darker corners to state our impulses. How disappointing it must be for You to see us at our worst.
This isn’t Crime and Punishment, and the literary gap that Tom Wholfe decries isn’t going to be filled by comic books. But it isn’t Richie Rich or The Archies either, and conservative moralists and lovers of good storytelling could do a lot worse than to follow the latest round of superheroes flying above the streets of Metropolis and Gotham.
Mark Gauvreau Judge is a contributing writer to New York Press.
