Media

...Postmodern" is a phrase lit...

...crit...

...Suddenly, the difficulties of being Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne became as important as those of their alter egos...

...Comics—the first and still the all-but-unbeatable giant in the industry...

...Just a sad adolescent fantasy, right...

...And "the death of literature" is a phrase lovingly applied by critics of the postmodern for what they see as the betrayal of the humanistic tradition...

...MEDIA COMIC RELIEF FROM 'GILGAMESH' TO 'SPIDERMAN' The first time I assigned a comic book—Frank Miller's grimly revisionist Batman saga, The Dark Knight Returns—for my course in "The Art of Narrative," the consensus of my colleagues (I heard it through the grapevine) was "God—what's he trying to do now...

...The American comic book as a serious visionary enterprise was born around 1938 when two dreamy, shy Jewish kids from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster took their handdrawn concept to a New York publisher who had been publishing "animal funnies" and gangster comics for some years...

...Their names are Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Delirium, and Despair, and the seventh sibling, who has mysteriously departed, is unnamed...

...You want we should call the chopped liver, already, a pât...

...A story, maybe, about a skinny, pushed-around, four-eyed reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper who was really a strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men...

...What the hell: like all high churchisms, it's a bother, but a harmless one...

...FRANK McCONNELL 22: 28 February 1992 Commonweal...

...And a new line of heroes, from Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, were developed just for their neuroses and hangups (e.g., Spiderman, Daredevil, and most poignantly Captain America, a WW II character resurrected during Vietnam and now agonized by the lost certainties of his patriotism...

...Batman: natch...

...Bingo...

...The world of The Sandman is our world, populated by ordinary, variously screwed-up folks, and it contains no superheroes...

...That's the same sort of uneasy semantic bourgeoisification that got people to stop talking about "movies" and start talking about "film" or even—bleah!—"cinema...

...Frank Miller's four-part series, The Dark Knight Returns, is a stunning reexamination of the Superman/ Batman mythos in terms of Reaganamerica's internal decay: and a major source not only for Tim Burton's Batman film, but for a lot of what I've been saying here...

...His opponent—now an agent of the Fed—is, of course, Superman...

...And myths they are: it's been said that no Indian ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time, and likewise no American—unless you were raised by, say, a sect of vegetarian neo-Babylonians—ever needs to be told who Superman and Commonweal 28 February 1992: 21 Batman are...

...The comic book really began about forty years later...

...The fact is—though you're not going to hear it from many of the tenured priesthood of what Ezra Pound contemptuously called "Kulchur"—that some of the best and most human fiction in America, not to mention the rest of the world, is appearing not as "novels" but as that morethanfaintly-contemptible form, the comic book...

...Well, hey: I'm here to tell you that the one phrase is pointless and the other one is silly...

...Even more intricately, Alan Moore has produced a series of self-contained narratives—V for Vendetta, Miracleman, and Watchman—which with increasing genius (there is no other word) explores the idea of the comic book altogether as a psychic mechanism for dealing with the killing dubieties of our end of the century...

...It's a comic written by Neil Gaiman (like Moore, one of those transatlantic Brits), and for the life of me I can't think of a more fascinating enterprise in contemporary fiction...

...Yup...

...types like to apply to contemporary writing that celebrates the equivalence of all truths and the breakdown of all certainties, even the certainty of the nobility of the human adventure itself...

...Sei gesund...

...In fact, like the movies, and like jazz, and for interesting reasons not like TV, the comic book is a true mass-cult art form that grows up against the sanctions of the cultural establishment, aka the good-taste fascists, and elaborates its special genius and energy in a fierce and defiant faith in itself...

...And it was going to get better...

...And two years later a seventeen-year-old kid named Bob Kane, who loved the dark, brooding world of German Expressionist films, invented Superman's inevitable complement: a wealthy, powerful, attractive guy who was really, because of a deep and unhealable psychic wound, a compulsively vengeful, nocturnal guerrilla...

...All the immense later elaboration of the "superhero" comic in the forties and fifties comes out of the yin/yang tension between these two myths...

...It's why Supes and Bats are less interesting for what they do than what they are (how many times can you save the world or clean up Gotham City...

...Check out Miller, Moore, or Gaiman...

...Now around the sixties, the time of our public national comingapart, the comics began "outing" this always-latent tension...

...Right: like Sister Carrie, The Great Gatsby, and virtually every other novel written here since 1900...

...Listen: Gaiman has invented, out of whole cloth, a mythology not just of the comics but of storytelling itself: storytelling, which I take to be the quintessentially human activity, from Gilgamesh to American Psycho...

...Superman's problem is that he's really God and Batman's is that he really isn't...

...It was about this time, by the way, that I realized nobody does grow up, exorcised my expensively acquired snobbism, and began reading the damn things again...

...They are two crucial ways of finding a "real" identity, a self you can call your own and hold onto against the encroachments and impingements of the "real" world, the everyday life of the city which, as all us adolescents know, is in some subtle way out to get us...

...And then there's The Sandman...

...Sandman, in other words, is evolving into a web, nearly Joycean, of interrelated tales, invoking all the world's major myths, whose ultimate assertion is the heroic hopelessness of a man as the storytelling animal...

...From the late seventies, at least, and through the eighties, the art has matured and—just as Ellington and Basic did for Jelly Roll Morton—reaffirmed and validated the genius of its earlier manifestations...

...What kind of story would a skinny, pushed-around kid from Cleveland, for crying out loud, invent...

...Bruce Wayne, now fiftyish, retired and heavy-drinking, decides to become Batman again because he is outraged at the urban sprawl...

...Of course, the publishers refer to them as "graphic novels" these days...

...And if I have to tell you who I'm talking about, then you must be a strange visitor, etc...

...But read it and then tell me that it's less admirable than Coover or Pynchon or Mailer or DeLillo...

...Jazz and the movies had a head start...

...Well, maybe just be honest...

...And right now, just on time, it's approaching the kind of shimmering zenith jazz and the movies both hit in the midthirties to the midforties...

...It is, however, haunted by gods...

...And the central character, Dream, who is profoundly uncertain of his ultimate involvement with human life, is not just "Dream" but the "Shaper of Form," that is, the narrative urge incarnate...

...I can't begin to describe the brilliance of, say, Watchman...

...Could it be, asked the aesthetic Yalie, tremblingly reading Fantastic Four #167, that this stuff is as good as the Holy Cross fifth-grader had thought it was...

...Well, not gods, exactly, but a family of seven characters who are called "The Endless," who are anthropomorphic projections of the essential human fears and aspirations, who are projections of our own condition and therefore are the origins of all gods and mythologies: and who know that that is all they are...

...And the final confrontation is as apocalyptic as the Reagan/Bush world deserves...

...As Paul Tillich argues, the religious quest, the quest for an authentic self, is always caught between the irreconcilables of transcendence and immanence...

...If you think literature is dead, or if you think that authentic mythmaking is somehow impossible in the computer age, you probably can't read and you've sure been shopping in the wrong bookstores...

...And Superman's popularity was so immense and unshakable that it made the publisher—D.C...

...They both began somewhere around the beginning of the century, so by now they've convinced all but the most dunderheaded that they are among the central imaginative glories of the age...