Roz Kaveney - Superheroes! - Capes and Crusaders in Comics (2008)

Superheroes!
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‘Like a modern Gulliver, she brings back news of other worlds, of
marvellous utopias and dystopias, in order to throw light on the
one we live in – or think we live in. Roz Kaveney’s knowledge
is awesome, her analysis passionate: this is a work of eloquent
advocacy, urging readers to pay more attention to a crucial arena
where ideas about men, women, virtue, and power are discussed
- and formed.’ – Marina Warner
‘Combines a command of literary theory with a hands-on grasp

of how pop fiction gets built by producers and used by readers.
Indispensable.’ – Geoff Ryman
‘Roz Kaveney writes about the superhero myths with intelligence

and love, from the inside, without the lofty alienation that says these
texts are interesting but too dumb to know it. This book should be
on the shelf of every comics fan, and proves that everyone should
be a comics fan.’ – Paul Cornell

!
Roz Kaveney
Superheroes
Capes and Crusaders in
Comics and Films

Published in 2008 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and Canada

distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © 2008 Roz Kaveney
The right of Roz Kaveney to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act
1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any
part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, eletronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the proior written permission
of the publisher.
ISBN 978 1 84511 569 2
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typeset by JCS Publishing Services, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow,
Cornwall.

This is for John M. Ford and for Jane

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 The Freedom of Power – Some First Thoughts on

Superhero Comics 1
2 The Heroism of Jessica Jones – Brian Bendis’ Alias as

Thick Text 63
3 Watching the Watchmen – Sharing a World with

Superheroes 100
4 Dark Knights, Team-Mates and Mutants – Sustaining

the Superhero Narrative 139
5 Some Kind of Epic Grandeur – Events and Reboots

in the Superhero Universe 176
6 Gifted and Dangerous – Joss Whedon’s Superhero

Obsession 201
7 Superherovision – From Comic to Blockbuster 226
Index 269

Acknowledgements
My special and particular thanks are due to Rob Hansen for spotting
many factual errors in my various drafts, for pulling out vast numbers
of individual comics that I needed to see in order to develop my
arguments and for having me round once a week to go through
a selection of the week’s new comics. He bears no responsibility
for those errors in which I persisted. It is no exaggeration to say
that I could not have written this book without his constant help
and advice; I also owe him and Avedon Carol endless amounts of
hospitality in the shape of cups of coffee, mozzarella-and-tomato
sandwiches and refried bean burritos.
My thanks are also due to Nick Lowe, whose almost casual
remark, in the course of a train journey – that the DC and Marvel
continuity universes were the largest narrative constructs of human
culture – was the spark for this book, and to Graham Sleight, whose
distinction, in conversation shortly before I finished, between
terminable and interminable narrative helped me to think through
some important points in revision.
Veronica Schanoes, Jennifer Stuller, Jennifer Stoy and Lesley
Arnold all read sections of this book as work in progress and their
comments were extraordinarily helpful.
Leyte Jefferson and Mary Borsellino and various of their friends
provided me with many episodes of the animated shows Gotham
Knights and Justice League Unlimited, and copies of the Toonverse
comics, about which I would have written far more had I had more
space, and to which I will devote due attention at a later stage.
Lesley Arnold also provided me with access to many, many, issues
of comics, as did Mehran Baluch.
Sierra Hahn and others in the publicity department of DC Comics
were friendly and cooperative in the matter of complimentary

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copies of graphic novels, as were Nick Landau and Andrew James

at Titan. The publicity department at Marvel were entirely polite
in their response to my requests for assistance.
Various comics creators answered my questions and were
generally helpful – among these were Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore,
Peter Hogan and Mike Carey. Craig McGill, Grant Morrison’s
biographer, was also very helpful.
Adi Tantimedh gave me vast amounts of good advice, much of
which I took.
Will Eaves at The Times Literary Supplement commissioned reviews
of several of the films I discuss here.
My nephew Michael McCarthy turned out, over Christmas lunch,
to be working on an undergraduate dissertation that overlapped
with my discussion of many of the films here; our subsequent
conversations were of significant help to me and, I hope, to him.
The staff of Forbidden Planet, Orbital, Gosh! and the late
lamented Comics Showcase were extremely helpful.
My thanks are also due to the editorial staff at I.B.Tauris,
particularly Philippa Brewster and Jessica Cuthbert-Smith.
Paule was, as always, deeply supportive while I was working on
this project.
The chapter on Joss Whedon was written as a paper for the
Slayage conference in Barnesville, Atlanta. My thanks are due to
Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery for inviting me to speak and for
much hospitality while there.

1
The Freedom of
Power
Some First Thoughts on
Superhero Comics
Origin Story
Officially, I never read them as a child. They were gaudy trash and a
waste of money, and I only got to read them round at the houses of
friends. Later on, they were one of the things I bought with money
I had earned, often by buying National Geographic and Punch cheap
at jumble sales and selling them for slightly more at second-hand
shops. Like most adolescent geeks, I had to find ingenious ways of
subsidizing my habits.
Part of the appeal was that American superhero comics were
forbidden. In newsagents in the 1950s and 1960s, if they were
present at all, it was in the lower rungs of revolving wire racks
whose higher rungs held pin-up and fetish magazines. You did not
have to have read Frederick Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent
(1954) to make a connection: beefcake poses and skin-tight clothing
and queer intimacy.
Somehow it was less OK to read them than to read British
comics, with patriotic heroes like Dan Dare, or the strips in the
newspapers – and admittedly my childhood was a golden age for
those, what with Jeff Hawke and 4-D Jones in the Express, which was
my parents’ newspaper of choice. The Eagle and the other comics
in its group had lovely art; at one point, a sick friend was lent an
entire back-run of both Eagle and Girl, and I got to sit and work my
way through both. I still feel that Belle of the Ballet was almost as
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fine in its way as Dan Dare, and that Lettice Leef was significantly
more amusing than her kinsman Harris Tweed.
Like pornography, superhero comics always teased, they always
offered more than they could ever deliver, on splash covers where
grinning villains played with our heroes and heroines as figures
on a giant chessboard, or spun them on a wheel of death. Part of
the thrill was always that, no matter how powerful superheroes
were, they always managed to find themselves in a jeopardy
commensurate with their strength. And yet, to deliver fully on that
promise would always have been to make that jeopardy more real
than the commercial medium could bear. Comics taught me that
disappointed expectation of greatness that is part of the aesthetic
experience: things are this good, but somehow, in one’s mind, they
might be better yet.
Yes, comics were strangely sexy, even when I was young enough
not to be entirely clear what sexiness was. They offered fantasy and
danger and risk and masks and skin-tight clothing. Wertham was a
long way from being wrong about comics; he was just an uptight
sexist prig who did not understand how complex and various
human sexuality is. As a teenager, I was never quite sure what the
Comics Code was, but I knew that every time I picked up a comic,
it had passed some sort of censorship. I remember resenting this,
inchoately, knowing that one of the reasons why comics so often
disappointed me was that someone was leaning into my enjoyment,
imposing limits on material whose whole point was that it should
have none.
Yet, often, especially when I picked up Marvel comics rather
than DC, I found material that blew my head off. Beings that ate
worlds, like Galactus, or who simply had names as resonant as
the Living Tribunal. They were creatures of dream and nightmare,
available once a month for a shilling. Because comics had to avoid
the specifically and overtly sexual, they often dealt in other kinds
of ecstasy, and linked them with that pervading sexiness that
nonetheless got through. This sense of the vast, oceanic and mildly
perverse combined with my teenage religiosity to give me a taste
for the sublime that has never deserted me.

The Freedom of Power •
At a more intimate level there were moments of psychological

insight in the comics that I read that have haunted me ever since, no
matter how corny they are, as when Mr Fear turned to Daredevil
(the man without fear) and said that he had his own version of
their story and in that version ‘I’m the hero and you’re the villain’.
That was an important lesson for me to learn when I was 15 years
old and a self-centred prig, and I learned it not from religion, nor
political economy, nor from great literature, but from superhero
comics.
To be fair to DC comics, which I read less frequently, they
contained material that affected me as well. If, as a critic, I have
been obsessed with shadow doubles, and with the nightmare self
that is both threat and parody, it perhaps has something to do with
Superman’s freakish antagonist/other self Bizarro, or with the
hideous Man Bat that Batman fought and conquered, yet whose
hideous wings were capable of sky-borne flight where Batman
could only ever swing or glide.
There is poetry in this material, both in the ideas and in the
drawn images that embody those ideas. I used to own an issue of
Daredevil in which, for page after page, the blind acrobat lawyer
simply traversed rooftops and swung between skyscrapers, in total
silence, without speech bubbles, thought bubbles or sound effects.
It has stayed in my head as an image of pure athleticism and joy, as
blissful as a Mozart rondo. Gene Colan was the artist for this, as for
much else that I loved in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Back then, if you liked comics, you liked superheroes, because
they were most of what there was. There were still aviators, but
I thought that the Blackhawks were big bores. There were mystic
adventurers like Dr Strange, but he so clearly lived in the same
world as Spider-Man and the Hulk that it was no surprise when he
started teaming up with, or advising, Marvel’s actual superheroes;
his mystic powers were rather close to being superpowers,
anyway.
There is a grey area between magic and impossible powers, to
put it mildly. The original Green Lantern’s ring was magic, and the
later ones were given their rings by an intergalactic agency, the

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Guardians of the Universe. (The original Green Lantern’s magic

ring was later explained away as indirectly deriving from the same
technology, which involves magic as well as science, conveniently.)
In both cases, they acted as a focus for will, and – as we all know
– magic is a technology of will, and any technology sufficiently
advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
Comics helped teach me to play with paradox, and with the
complex and double-natured; they are one of the reasons why I
enjoy the postmodern condition without needing to dignify it with
elaborate structures of theory. If my work is ‘theory anorexic’ as
has been claimed, comics are partly to blame, or thank.
Powers and Responsibilities

So, superheroes, male and female . . . what is a superhero?
A superhero is a man or woman with powers that are either
massive extensions of human strengths and capabilities, or
fundamentally different in kind, which she or he uses to fight for
truth, justice and the protection of the innocent. A substantial
minority of people without powers as such share a commitment
to the superhero mission, so they are generally regarded as
superheroes in spite of the absence of such powers. Prior to Siegel
and Shuster’s invention of Superman (1933–8), masked avengers
of this kind were the default group and were only gradually largely
superseded. The mission is an important defining characteristic, as
much so as the powers – many of the opponents of the superhero
are as powerful as the hero, or more so, but they either lack moral
compass or have specifically chosen evil. Nor is it enough to do
no harm; most superheroes are as obsessed with duty as are the
central characters of Corneille’s dramas.
Superman has powers of both kinds but has them of his nature,
not by self-improvement: he has preternatural strength and
preternaturally keen senses, but he is also able to fly, heat things
with his gaze and bounce bullets off his chest. Daredevil, on the
other hand, has keen senses, as a by-product of his blinding by
radioactive material, and his developed senses include not merely

the standard remaining four but other senses, such as balance

and location, and an extra sense often called radar; he is also, by
constant exercise, in superb but merely human physical condition.
The Fantastic Four have ahuman abilities – stretching, invisibility,
the capacity to become living flame, a stone-like skin coupled with
immense strength – acquired by exposure to cosmic rays during
an experimental space flight; they are also effectively the four
elements.
In most cases, these powers are the result either of anomalous
personal situations or of accidents. Superman is the survivor of an
exploded planet and his powers derive in part from the difference
between Krypton’s sun and Earth’s. Others have been bitten by
spiders, or altered by cosmic or gamma rays, or given powers by
beneficent aliens. It is the fate of the superhero to be set apart
from the common run of humanity and to experience a degree of
estrangement as a result.
Some figures normally classed as superheroes have no such
powers in and of themselves, and thus regularly confuse the issue
by being an exception to this rule. Batman is an extraordinary
human being who has trained many standard human abilities to
their limits and beyond, but has no special abilities. He is separate
and estranged, however, as the result not of accident but of human
malice – as a boy, he witnessed the deaths of his parents during a
mugging and swore vengeance on all criminals.
What Batman does share with superheroes proper is this
estrangement and the liminal status that is another of the superhero’s
defining characteristics. Superheroes are uncanny and exist at the
threshold between states – it is the threshold that is important
rather than the states it lies between, which is why liminality, of
the most basic and literal kind, is a useful descriptive term here.
There are many ways in which superheroes can be liminal – they
can be socially dead, though alive, through the loss of their original
family (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man), or exist as figures of the
twilight (Batman). Many of them have an animal aspect, whether or
not they literally metamorphose, others take on part of the nature
of an alchemical elements, while remaining essentially human (the

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Human Torch); to exist in two realms at once is also a way of being

liminal. They can be the abstract embodiment of a quality – the
various versions of the Flash, and Marvel’s Quicksilver are both
avatars of Speed.
They can, in a few cases, be literally both dead and alive;
Superman has died and been reborn, as has Hal Jordan, one of
several human Green Lanterns. They may be morally liminal, good
and evil at once or at different times, or possess shadow doubles;
Superman has been turned to evil by possession and by various
sorts of Kryptonite, and he has a parodic surrealistic amoral double
in Bizarro. Hal Jordan turned to the dark side – this was later
explained away as his possession by Parallax, a powerful evil being
– and then died, his spirit becoming the embodiment of the Spectre
for a while, before being reborn free of the taint of Parallax.
Almost all superheroes are to some degree vigilantes: they do
not work for the authorities, though at times they work alongside
them, and they are sometimes accepted as a volunteer auxiliary of
the police and other organs of the state. Superman, in particular,
is deferential to elected officials to an extent that has sometimes
led to his being portrayed negatively as the mere lackey of corrupt
officials who exploit his goodwill – in Frank Miller’s The Dark
Knight Returns (1986), for example.
Some of them, and many of them some of the time, are at odds
with the authorities. Batman periodically finds himself in conflict
with new district attorneys who wish the police to dispense with
the alliance. In the conclusion of Brian Michael Bendis’ run on
Daredevil, Matt Murdock has been imprisoned as the result of a long
campaign by an FBI agent. In Alan Moore’s Watchmen, (1986–7)
masked vigilantism has been suppressed by law, and most of them
have complied. In the Marvel Civil War storyline (2006–7), the
superhero community is divided by an Act obliging them to register
and reveal their identities, with internment as the punishment for
non-compliance. (This is very clearly intended as a comment on
the decline of civil liberties in Bush’s America – Sue Storm, one
of the moral centres of the Marvel Universe, says at one point that
she thinks the USA went mad after 9/11.) Another of those moral

centres, Captain America, is assassinated in the aftermath of Civil

War, and this may be that rare thing in comics, a real and permanent
death.
Most especially, the X-Men, as mutants, experience bigotry; as
such, they have regularly operated as Marvel’s stand-ins for ethnic
and sexual minorities. To pick but one of many examples, in one
storyline of Brian Michael Bendis’ Alias (2002–4) – which has
no connection with the television show of the same name – the
misidentification of a lesbian teenager as mutant helps pinpoint the
small-town bigotry from which she feels forced to flee.
In the Marvelverse, mutants are potential victims of hate crimes
and of state-sponsored pogroms, and of the sort of bureaucratic
prying that is often a prelude to the latter.The mutant community is
shown as deeply politically divided between those who want to make
an accommodation with standard-model humanity and those who
either regard themselves as superior or regard genocide of so-called
‘flat-scans’ as the only way of saving mutant lives. Periodically, in
side-bar alternate universes like the worlds of event storylines like
the Age of Apocalypse (1995) or the House of M (2005), we have been
shown the boot on the other foot. As the character of the mutant
supremacist Magneto evolved over years of continuity, we discover
that he spent his childhood in a concentration camp, and that if you
look into the abyss too long, the abyss will look into you.
There are also mutants who, as a result of social exclusion or
because of poor morals, abuse their power to live outside the
law: Gwen in the television show Angel is a good example of a
criminal mutant and an odd outcropping of X-Men style mutants
into the Whedonverse. Between the underworld of crime and the
underworld of the hideously mutated or transformed living in
sewers, the bright glossy world of comics has always had a dark side
– one might almost say, a noir side.
Latterly, both in Joss Whedon’s run of Astonishing X-Men (2004–
7) and in the third film X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), mutants have

I have used the term ‘event’ generally throughout this book. For a
full discussion of events, see Chapter 5.

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to cope with the possibility of genetic therapy that would simply

turn them back into ordinary humans. The analogy here is not
merely with blue-sky theorizing about gene-therapy for sexual
identity, but with the political project of gay absorption into the
suburban mainstream preached by, for example, Andrew Sullivan.
In the parallel Marvel continuity that has followed from the House
of M storyline, most mutants have been turned back into normal
humans by magic, and are still victims of persecution by other
humans, now as ex-mutants.
In the Civil War and Decimation (2005) storylines (see Chapter 5),
the small rump of mutants still extant are effectively being held as
prisoners on what might as well be called reservations. Approached
by the factions in the row about registration, they for the most part
refuse to take sides. Approached by her former lover, Tony Stark,
for support, Emma Frost, who survived the destruction of the
mutant nation Genosha, simply asks him where he was, where were
the Avengers, when millions died, ‘when our babies were burning’.
Mutancy in the Marvel Universe is a free-floating signifier, but a
very powerful one, emotionally and polemically; the same is true of
a number of other concepts, notably that of the superhero itself.
In many cases, this ambivalent relationship with the authorities
is closely linked to areas of moral ambiguity. Particularly during
the period when the Comics Code held sway, it is part of the
mission statement of many superheroes that they do not kill, no
matter what the provocation. Like many arbitrary artistic choices,
this is an endless generator of story and the occasions when this
rule is breached are always events – the execution of Maxwell Lord
by Wonder Woman (to stop him using a hypnotically controlled
Superman as his assassin) leads to an estrangement between her
on the one hand and Batman and Superman on the other, which
helps precipitate the Infinite Crisis, DC Comics’ major 2005–6
rebranding exercise (for an extended discussion of this and its
1985 predecessor, see Chapter 5). However, as we shall see, long-
established rules and characters are only broken or re-imagined
with impunity some of the time, and mistakes are often made.

Because of this anomalous relationship with society, many

superheroes have secret identities. Superman is the reporter Clark
Kent, Batman the industrialist and socialite Bruce Wayne, Spider-
Man the photographer Peter Parker. Sometimes the secret identity
is merely a useful expedient, and sometimes it functions as the
expression of a divided personality, most notably in the case of
Bruce Banner, who turns into the Hulk under emotional stress, but
rather more subtly in the case of Batman (where there often seems
a profound disconnect between the playboy tycoon Wayne and the
dour vigilante).The idea that the angst-ridden world of superheroes
is straightforwardly a form of escapism is a misconception; the
process of self-identification that is part of enjoying comics involves
a far more complicated dialogue between one’s own problems
and those of the characters one enjoys. Part of the point of Matt
Murdock for me, once Frank Miller took the character over in the
early 1980s, was the heavy dose of Catholic guilt.
Many superheroes are either orphaned or otherwise estranged
from their families of blood; many of them acquire families of the
heart in groups of co-workers or support systems, or work together
as groups. Batman has an entire family of assistants and associates
– the various Robins being merely the most obvious – as well as
Alfred, who is both Bruce Wayne’s butler and Batman’s technician
and battlefield medic. Those of us isolated by temperament or
sexuality in our teens need a literature that consoles with the
possibility of finding friends of the heart, and comics provide it, but
not in any simple wish-fulfilment form; the relationships between
team-mates or mentor and pupil are almost always shown as works
in progress, as prickly soap operas in which things can go wrong.
The long association of superheroes with each other in crossover
groups like DC’s Justice League of America (JLA) and Marvel’s
Avengers means that they and their broader support groups are
caught up in each other’s destinies. In Alan Davis’ alternate world
miniseries The Nail (1997–8), the non-involvement of Superman in
the affairs of the world – he has been brought up by Amish parents
instead of the Kents – means that his colleagues in the JLA are less
effective and that some of Superman’s closest associates, notably

10 • Superheroes!
Jimmy Olsen, have turned to evil.The playfulness of comics is often

distinctly dark in its thought experiments with its own material.
Many superheroes are paradoxical beings: his blindness means
that Matt Murdock can hide in plain sight, as it were, because he is
the one person no one will ever suspect of being Daredevil. Most
secret identities are of this kind – Bruce Wayne is frivolous and
money-grubbing, as is Tony Stark, so that no one suspects them of
being Batman or Iron Man. Both Superman and Spider-Man are
news journalists, which gives them a perfect excuse for being near
where the action is. The one natural thing that can harm Superman
is a rock from his lost home. In his identity as the lawyer Matt
Murdock, Daredevil sometimes defends men he handed over
to the law in the first place, and latterly he has been accused of
malpractice on this basis.
Iconographically, almost all superheroes are good-looking and
muscular, and wear costumes that emphasize the fact. There are
obvious exceptions – Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four is not any
the less a superhero for looking like a pile of orange rocks – but
the same is true in the world of celebrity, for which the world of
superheroes is, as Jennifer Stoy has pointed out, a fairly obvious
metaphor. Both celebrities and superheroes are wish-fulfilment
people, living complicated and glamorous lives that we envy in
spite of the perpetual hard work and potential tragedy that goes
with the glitz. ‘When you’ve got it, flaunt it’, says Max Bialystock
in The Producers (1968) and that they certainly do, often given a
particular assist by artists like Alex Ross and Alan Davis, both of
whom sometimes draw characters so sinuous, sinewy and stylish
that it hurts to look at them.
Of course, superheroes have supervillains to struggle against,
though the lines are often drawn in an arbitrary way and there are
a significant number of characters who have crossed the line in
both directions. Hal Jordan, DC’s best-known bearer of the Green
Lantern uniform and ring, went to the dark side, and returned.
Marvel has an entire team, the Thunderbolts, who were originally
villains working a scam with new identities and variously sought
redemption because they liked being good better. They were often

The Freedom of Power • 11
On the Artists – Briefly

If, in much of what follows, I talk far more about writers and
editors than I do about the artists who give comics so much of
their appeal, it is not, let us be clear, because I do not hugely
admire the best of those artists. It is because they have been
written about more, and because many of the writers in whom I
am interested have been extraordinarily lucky in finding artists
who were prepared to be servants of their vision. Sometimes I
am writing about artists who were also writers, or managed to
find writers to write what they wanted to draw – Alex Ross, for
example, is the auteur of Marvels (1994) and Kingdom Come
(1996) quite as much as the wonderful writer Kurt Busiek and
the more ordinary Mark Waid. Let me here, though, record
the names of artists like Bolland and Adams and Sienkewicz
and Gibbons and Davis and Buscema and Romita and Colan
and Vess and McKean and all of the others. Someone should
write a book that properly celebrates the work of all these
men, but that book is not this one, partly because it would
cost so much to produce.
led by the current Baron Zemo, a figure more morally ambiguous

than many of his team, since he may have laid aside his family’s Nazi
ideology, but he still regards himself as a man meant to rule. Post
Civil War, as written by Warren Ellis, they are effectively a different
group with different objectives, in spite of some continuity of
personnel.
Some supervillains are career criminals; some are mad scientists
using crime as an alternative to corporate or government funding;
some are the rulers of rogue states; some are aliens or are time-
travellers whose agenda are so caught up in paradoxes as to be
almost incomprehensible. The Avengers’ regular opponent, Kang,
is at war with various other time-travellers and self-appointed
or metaphysical guardians of chronological reality; he is also has
problems with his younger and older selves, and with his clones.
There are reasons why some supervillains decide that being good is
an easier way to make a living.

12 • Superheroes!
Many superheroes have nemesis figures who are tragic, partly

because they are the superhero’s dark self. Superman has Lex
Luthor, the millionaire and scientific genius whose quest for some
way of damaging the being whose strength and integrity perpetually
shames him regularly reduces him to ignominy. The television
series Smallville (2001 onwards) places the origins of this feud in
Luthor’s young manhood and Superman’s adolescence. This is not
original, but rather a return to what was continuity before the
Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot of the DC Universe in 1985 and the
consequent reinvention of Superman continuity by John Byrne, and
plays teasingly with the possibility that in this version of continuity
things will work out differently. At one point, for example, Luthor
has a vision of a world in which he becomes a completely ethical
human being, and rejects it, without yet embracing evil, because
it is a world in which he has no power and cannot escape the
normal tragedies of the human condition. For a while, in main DC
continuity, Luthor is President of the USA and abuses his office to
attack Superman, risking the lives of everyone on Earth to do so;
he ends up a deranged fugitive. In the aftermath of Infinite Crisis,
however, he manages to blame his crimes on a genetically identical
corpse (actually the son of his virtuous cognate in an alternate
world). Such figures always find a way of coming back, but never
really change, whereas Jean Grey and Elektra are at least chastened
by tragic death and resurrection.
Very few, if any, of these arch-adversary figures are ever female
– the relationship between the Batman and Catwoman has always
been flirtatious as much as combative (and latterly she has largely
rejected burglary for good works). His other significant female
opponents are Poison Ivy – whose hatred for him is less personal
than a question of his being a) male and b) not a plant – and Harley
Quinn, whose feud with the Batman is mostly about attracting the
attention of her main love object, the Joker, or Poison Ivy, with
whom she has a relationship that is sometimes represented as being
almost as romantic as the one she has with the Joker.
Generally speaking, the relationship between superhero and
principal adversary is rarely seen as having a homoerotic component

– even now that the Comics Code no longer operates – and is more
a matter of the motiveless malignity of an Iago towards an Othello:
‘he hath a daily beauty in his life/ that makes me ugly’. One obvious
exception to this is the relationship of Superman and Luthor
in Smallville, where, because the show is as much a part of teen
genre as superhero material, adolescent ambivalence is certainly a
factor, along with their rivalry over various young women (see my
extended discussion of homoeroticism in teen media in the first
chapter of Teen Dreams (2006)).
Another such relationship is some portrayals of that between
Batman and the Joker, explicitly in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight
Returns (see below in Chapter 4), implicitly in his murderous
attitude to Batman’s young sidekicks, male and female. The
Joker murders the second Robin, Jason Todd, and leaves Batgirl,
Barbara Gordon, in a wheelchair for the rest of her life; in Alan
Davis’ The Nail he tortures both of them to death. Interestingly,
the intensely perverse implications of this are comparatively rarely
followed through even in ‘slash’ fan fiction, which has no particular
problems about making use of the quasi-pederastic implications it
is possible to impute to Batman’s relationships with his male wards
and assistants.
The other antagonist relationship that is sometimes given quasi-
erotic implications is that between Charles Xavier (Professor X of
The X-Men) and Magneto. It is a canonical given in continuity that
the two mutant leaders used to work together and were friends; in

the Ultimate continuity, it is even canonical that Xavier neglected

In the 2000s, Marvel created various titles in what we must call the
Ultimate continuity, some of which, but not all, differ radically from the
main line of Marvel continuity. All set their origin stories at the time of
publication. This affects Ultimate Spider-Man comparatively little, save
that Aunt May is a contemporary active woman in her late fifties rather
than the standard near-crone. The Ultimate X-Men storylines tend to be
grittier and use parallels with contemporary terrorism. The Ultimates,
the equivalent of The Avengers, is very gritty indeed, with several of
the team being near-psychopaths and the Hulk a monster who eats at
least some of his victims. Earlier they created the M2 continuity that

14 • Superheroes!
his heterosexual partner, Moira McTaggart, and son David because

of the intensity of the relationship with Magneto. As portrayed by
Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the Bryan Singer and Brett
Ratner films, the implications of this are strongly played up to,
especially in the flashback to some 20 years earlier in X-Men: The Last
Stand, where the two men – still friends – are shown bickering like
an old married couple. Since McKellen is apparently aware of the
existence of the slashfic culture, in which this pairing is common,
this may be a decision of the actors rather than the director.
The struggle between good and evil tends, of course, to take
the form of violent struggle, because that is the way that, since
the beginning, comics have chosen to stylize moral contention. It
is not the only way – insidious corruption or inventive outwitting
of cunning schemes are also reasonably common – but it is the
predominant mode. Some editors, Marvel’s Jim Shooter, for
example, have regarded fights as so important that plot and
character could be largely discarded in their favour.
There are superhero comics that manage to avoid this almost
entirely – Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid (1988–9) is that rare thing,
an almost entirely pacifist superhero, most of whose enemies give
up in self-contempt when shown her moral and physical beauty
– but they are rare. Punch-’em-ups are as standard a feature of
superhero comics as they are of chivalric romances, and that is just
how things are, a rule of the genre.
Powerful Adversaries
Parents disapprove of comics, and so do teachers. In 1974, I was
brought face to face in the most telling way possible with the sheer
dislike that superhero comics engender in some other people, as
well as with a version of one of the criticisms of them that any
study is going to have to engage with. I had been living and working
deals, rather charmingly, with the next generation of various Marvel

characters’ families, notably Peter and Mary-Jane Parker’s daughter,
who becomes Spider-Girl in her teens.

in Leeds, and renting a room from a young feminist woman I knew

through the nascent Leeds Gay Liberation Front and because she
went to the same consciousness-raising group as my best friend
and my assistant at Yorkshire Television. When I lost my job and
returned to London I could not shift all of my possessions at once,
and got her permission to store, in her attic, a refrigerator box
that contained the comics I had collected between the ages of 15
and 25. When, a few weeks later, I returned to Leeds to collect
them, she informed me, through a closed door, that she and some
of her friends had had a discussion about the sexism explicit in and
implied by superhero comics, and had taken my collection from
the attic and burned it.
I always tell this story when explaining my commitment to anti-
censorship politics, but it raises other questions as well. I have never
been under the impression that their decision was motivated by
a serious examination of the implications of particular storylines;
the point was that they felt the imagery of superhero comics to be
objectionable in and of itself, so objectionable that it could not be
recuperated or merely critiqued, and had to be burned. I find the
sheer visceral quality of that position intriguing in itself.
Yet, they had a point. In some of what follows, I discuss the
often-unthinking male-centredness of both of the comics industry
and its products, the occasional misogyny towards, and regular
marginalization of, women characters. Though there have been
significant women comics writers in the superhero field, and
occasionally artists, women have tended to be most important to
the industry in editorial roles.
It is no coincidence that some of the finest storylines that comics
have ever produced, the runs in which they have come closest to
real tragedy, as well as many of the most tiresome, have dealt, quite
specifically, with women who overreach themselves. Both Jean
Grey and Elektra, in their classic storylines in X-Men and Daredevil
respectively, arrogated to themselves a level of power that they
could not combine with firm adherence to a moral compass, and
fell. I cannot think, off-hand, of storylines involving sympathetic
male characters in which there was such a fall, partly because male

16 • Superheroes!
characters tend to be treated with greater indulgence. The male

characters who overreach, and fall, are always supervillains, either
the cosmic powers like DC’s Darkseid and Marvel’s Thanos, or that
small group of supervillains who are more than career criminals.
The avoidance of homoeroticism at least means that, in general,
the superhero comic has dispensed with that common trope of
mainstream media, the antagonism between men in which the
heroine is the field of conflict, or only there to make homoeroticism
deniable. It is not that female characters are never placed in jeopardy
in superhero comics, so much as that this happens to them no more
often than it does with male characters. This is partly a matter of
the increasing number of tough female characters in comics since
the 1970s, partly a matter of the law of diminishing returns. After
Spider-Man’s first sweetheart, Gwen Stacey, died from a fall from
which he failed to save her, killed by the Green Goblin, there
was little point in trying to duplicate that particular sensational
moment. One of the very few examples in recent years of woman
as hostage came in the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee Hush, where the Batman
and Catwoman put Lois Lane in danger in order to snap Superman
out of the besotted trance in which Poison Ivy has placed him.
One of the few other exceptions is one of the most unpleasant
and egregious ones, and has been the source of much righteous
feminist protest among comics fans. During the thoroughly inferior
War Games event (2004–5) in which the Batman’s contingency plan
to set Gotham’s gangs against each other gets used in an attempt
to impress him by Stephanie, a supernumerary female Robin
figure, who is captured and tortured to near-death by the hideously
disfigured Black Mask with an electric drill. She subsequently dies,
because Dr Lesley Tompkins decides she has had enough of patching
up young people the Batman has involved in his world. Not only
is a young woman hideously penetrated and broken by a male
monster; her actual death is partly caused by her stepping out of a
subordinate role and is reconfigured as the responsibility of an older
woman who, let us be clear, is one of the people who helped parent
Bruce Wayne after his death, and whom he now rejects, specifically
punishing her by making it impossible for her to practice medicine,

even in the Third World, where she goes to seek redemption.

There is a complex of misogynistic ideas here – Stephanie is a
manipulative adolescent who overreaches through good intentions
– that leave a very nasty taste. Nor is the situation helped by the
death in the middle of all of this by one of the Batman storyline’s
few African-American characters, Orpheus. (The question of race
issues in superhero comics is a complex one that has been addressed
so cogently in Jeffrey A. Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics
and their Fans (2001) that I feel unqualified to address it here.)
Let us be further clear that it is not the fact of physical
vulnerability that is the issue here. This is not the first time that
characters in Batman’s circle have been badly hurt. Batman had his
back broken by Bane, and, as already mentioned, the Joker beat
the second Robin to death and shot Batgirl in the spine, leaving her
paraplegic. In none of these cases, though, was there such a strong
sexual implication in the violence, and in none of these cases was
the guilt spread around from a male villain to a second, female
character. The point, though, is less that comics are capable of ill-
thought-through sadistic woman-blaming material than that this
was a rare case that sparked the coming together of feminist fans
to protest.
It is not as if the tendency of comics to occasional misogyny
were no worse than those of any other art form. The not-always
positive reaction of comics to the revival of feminism in the 1960s
and 1970s – the Hulk was attacked by the Valkyrie with the cry
‘every male chauvinist pig will tremble!’ – was short-lived.
However inadequately, comics often depicted women who were
strong and also nurturing, and it is a matter of historical fact that
the influence of writers like Chris Claremont, working on X-Men
in the 1980s, was to have an effect on the rise of the strong woman
character in films and television in the 1990s and 2000s. We would
know this even if Joss Whedon had not said so in, for example,
interviews surrounding his own work on Astonishing X-Men. The
rise of such characters in television and film has had a knock-on
effect in comics. One of the most interesting comics of the early
21st century has been Brian Michael Bendis’ Alias, even if, as I

18 • Superheroes!
argue at length in Chapter 2, it is far more about general issues

of personal growth and autonomy than it is a specifically feminist
parable of those issues.
Long before second-wave feminism, long before a serious if
intermittent attempt by the comics industry to clean up its act,
comics also gave us, back in the Golden Age, two of the strongest
and most active women in popular media. Wonder Woman was so
very obviously a feminist icon that she was condemned by Wertham
as a possible lesbian role model from a post-Second World War
perspective in which any woman who stepped outside the home and
pursued a career was seen as suspect, and the idea of a woman who
might be dominant in her emotional relationships was especially so.
Various attempts to tame her have never taken in the long term,
even the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when she was
stripped of her powers and connection to the Amazons’ island was
an attempt to modernize her as a heroine in the Emma Peel mould;
Diana is and always will be a proud Amazon.
It also needs pointing out that Lois Lane, though sometimes the
butt of crude practical jokes by Superman that play on her vanity
and pettiness, is also a career woman and good at what she does.
Inasmuch as she fails to notice what is in front of her face – that
her klutzy colleague Clark is actually the demigod of her dreams
– it is signalled as a paradox, because normally Lois is a woman
whose ingenuity and perspicacity cut through complex deceits.

There is a convention in fan and critical discourse about comics,
whereby the period from the invention of Superman and Batman in the
1930s, through the Second World War, and on to the Kefauver Hearings
and the introduction of the Comics Code is seen and referred to as the
Golden Age. The subsequent two decades are referred to as the Silver
Age, which is generally held to end with the liberalization of the Comics
Code in the early 1970s. The subsequent decade is sometimes referred
to as the Bronze Age, and the decade and a half that started in 1985 with
Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns is rather more acceptedly referred
to as the Dark Age. Some critics have tried to popularize the idea that
the rise of writers like Busiek and Bendis in the late 1990s and the early
21st century has inaugurated a neo-Silver Age.

Sometimes she puts herself in danger as part of an elaborate

flirtation; more often the dangers in which she finds herself are the
result of her being so good at her job. This was also the case back in
the early days of the newspaper strips and comic books: Lois was
always a smart sassy career girl, in contrast to the other women in
Superman’s life. The period during which she was often demeaned
was the 1950s, in which women were being driven out of work and
into the home, and the whole point about Lois was that she stuck
with her career. Compare Lois Lane with the protagonists of Doris
Day’s films and those of her imitators, and the point is clear.
More recently, since John Byrne’s reboot of Superman continuity
in 1986, Lois has been a knowing partner and wife to Superman,
while assisting in the pretence that she is married to Clark Kent,
but without abandoning her career for a second. It is more or less
a given that she is a more gifted reporter than her husband, partly
because he spends so much time disappearing to change into his
other persona. When Superman seems to disparage her career in
any way, it is usually solid evidence that he is temporarily on a wrong
path. It is because the comics continuity, after enjoying the game of
keeping Lois in the dark for so long that the 1940s sex-war comedy
aspect of it started to get stale, moved on to an equal partnership
between them, that it is sad that not only the 1970s Richard Donner
films, but also the 2006 Bryan Singer Superman Returns went back to
the old assumption that Lois does not know. At least in the Donner
cut of Superman 2 (as opposed to the commercially released Dick
Lester cut) she was shown as intelligent enough to have worked it
out and only re-deceived because Superman turns back time.
There is also, of course, the question of the art, and the ways
in which women are represented, especially on covers. All
superheroic characters are presented in a sexually objectifying
manner, but women characters are especially so, with breasts and
buttocks constantly exaggerated. There is even a fannish term –
Good Girl Art – for the most cheesecakey kind of pose, with the
term Bad Girl Art being reserved not for work of a low standard,
but for work that most approaches the pin-up. This is something
that has worsened over the decades – the people who burned my

20 • Superheroes!
comics had comparatively little to complain about by the standards

of what was to come. It is certainly an aspect of comics that reflects
a predominantly heterosexual male world of writers, artists and
readers and is often alienating to everyone else.
Part of what some of my sisters and comrades have tended to
find offensive about superhero comics has been that very sense of
the possibilities of extraordinary human beings on which comics
are intrinsically built. Our lives, it is argued, will be changed
by mass movements of solidarity, not by single extraordinary
individuals, whether or not they wear masks and capes. This
critique is, it seems to me, rather beside the point. It was never
the case that the superheroes of either the DC or Marvel universes
were pure vigilantes; they always deferred to legitimate authority
to at least some extent, rather more so than most pulp heroes had.
The relationship between Batman and Commissioner Gordon is
complex and problematic, certainly, but it is far more collegiate than
confrontational – as demonstrated by the Batsignal. The point of
the Civil War storyline is a discussion of whether superheroes serve
society best as agents of the state or as independent responsible
individuals, and the point is made that Bush’s America, with its easy
abandonment of civil liberties, is not a state anyone should feel
comfortable serving.
Nor is reliance on superheroes ever shown as a substitute for
collective action; at the most patriotic times of the Second World
War, superheroes were shown as participating in the war effort,
not as replacing it. It is not just for practical reasons that you do
not have, in the middle of a war, Superman settling things once and
for all; it is because it would feel wrong. Superheroes lead a life of
selfless public service for the most part – glory-hounds like DC’s
Guy Gardner (one of the secondary Green Lanterns) or Booster
Gold, or Crackerjack in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City (1995 onwards)
are mocked. It was by trying to profit from his powers and sulking
The searchlight with a Batman symbol stencilled onto it with which

Gordon and other police alert Batman to the fact that he is needed.

when he could not, that Spider-Man got his Uncle Ben killed, the
sin that haunts him ever afterwards.
More recently, as we shall see below, the extent of the problem
of superheroes is one that the comics themselves have considered
far more thoroughly than almost any other medium. ‘Unhappy the
land that has no heroes’, someone says in Brecht’s Galileo, receiving
the riposte ‘unhappy the land that needs them’. For the last two and
a half decades, one of the great themes of comics, as we shall see
below, is the question of whether superheroes, and by extension
other extraordinary people, can be trusted with their powers. Alan
Moore’s Watchmen deals with this theme, but so, in different ways,
do Ross and Waid’s Kingdom Come, Brian Bendis’ Powers and many
particular runs of longer-lasting titles (see Chapter 3 for a more
extended discussion of this).
Spine-Tingling Sagas
Because, however intermittently, I was reading comics in the 1960s

and 1970s, in my teens and twenties, I never had the difficulty some
people have in reading comics, which is that of not knowing quite
how to look at a page and decipher which way the narrative line
goes from frame to frame, especially given the post-1960s greater
freedom of artists and writers to make use of splash pages – a single
powerful image dominating a double spread – or the extension
of the standard grid across a whole spread, or the subversion of
that grid. The best thing one can do is to treat grid like the idea of
metre, something that is always there in a sense, even if it defines
its presence by absence, and expect to read left to right, left to
right, in several rows heading downwards, even when this is not
necessarily what is going to happen in this instance. Scott McCloud,
in his Understanding Comics (1993), tackles this far better than I ever
could, and I strongly commend his work to the attention of those
with this problem.
Another problem, less often cited but nonetheless real, is the
distinctly cavalier handling of time within comics continuity.

22 • Superheroes!
Referred to as the sliding or floating timescale, this means that

things that happened in comics of the 1960s and were shown as
happening in the then present – the Fantastic Four’s flight, Spider-
Man’s being bitten – are at any given point things that happened
at an unspecified point in the past considerably less than four
decades ago. When he got his powers, Spider-Man was a teenager;
when, in 2006, with G.W. Bush or someone very like him in the
White House, he outs himself (in Civil W ar) as Peter Parker as part
of his support for the Superheroes Registration programme, he is
at most in his early thirties, and more probably his late twenties.
Time happens in superhero comics, but it happens slowly in some
respects, rather more briskly in others.
There have been various attempts to rationalize this, particularly
by DC – re-imaginings of origin stories in time periods less long in
the past, the revelation that certain characters age slowly as a result
of whatever gave them their powers – but it is simply one of those
areas in which the commercial need to keep certain characters
going forever is more important than any even vague attempt at
realism, which, after all, in worlds where men and women can fly,
is hardly a consideration. Like the tight clothing and overly lush
diction, this was something I learned to live with.
Another reason why I had comparatively little problem with
comics was that, during the same years, I was developing my
passionate love of opera, an art form of infinite respectability
with which comics have a surprising amount in common. Both
are radically impure forms based on some fundamentally absurd
conventions; both are irritating if one does not develop a taste for
preposterous rodomontade and brightly coloured costumes. Both
of them can do certain things that other art forms can only do with
great difficulty; comics and opera can slow narrative time down
while moving it forward at a steady pulse, without having necessarily
to indulge in the dreamy floatiness of slow-motion photography.
Both forms can give you, effectively and without implicit comedy,
the thought processes of both parties in a dialogue, or a clear sense
of what everyone is saying at the same time in a complex scene.
Both are also concerned to show us gods and heroes and monsters,

male and female, in all their power and dignity, but also with all
their passionate emotional human intensity. Both, accordingly,
have a tendency to inflate language into something that can
become bombast, or can be more charitably seen as a necessary, if
sometimes loopy, grandiloquence commensurate with the scale of
what is sometimes being portrayed. At their best, both can portray
immense emotions played out on vast canvases, and yet be capable
of dropping to pianissimo in a second when it is needed.
Both opera and superhero comics often need length as well as
scale to tell their stories. Wagner’s Das Ring Des Nibelungen runs
for many hours over four nights to take us from Alberich’s original
theft of the Rhinegold to his son Hagen’s eventual drowning as
the Rhinemaidens take it back and Valhalla burns in the sky. The
Dark Phoenix saga played out over many months, from Jean
Grey’s original awakening to the Phoenix’s power when she self-
sacrificingly piloted a spacecraft from orbit to save her friends,
assuming she would die, to her eventual acceptance of the necessity

of her death. In between these two sacrificial ‘deaths’, we have
her in the politics of the Shi’ar, one of the Marvel Universe’s
several galactic empires. We have her slow corruption in dreams
by the mental manipulations of the Hellfire Club, and we have her
eventual metamorphosis into the Dark Phoenix, a being that rends
star systems for its prey and regards her friends as amusing trivia.
One of the many reasons why the versions of the Dark Phoenix
plotline in Ultimate X-Men, X-Men:The Last Stand and, more loosely
and with Willow rather than Jean Grey, in Season Six of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, failed to work is that the process of corruption and

When the assumed past of a comic or some other franchise is
changed in order to make sense of current continuity, this retroactive
continuity is standardly referred to as a retcon (retroactive continuity).
The subsequent retconning of this particular storyline – the Phoenix
produced a duplicate Jean while the original slept in a cocoon under
the sea – is something that needs to be ignored when considering the
original impact of this storyline. It was, very clearly, an afterthought,
and not an entirely welcome one.

24 • Superheroes!
redemption was never given time to breathe, and the scale on

which an evil Jean can be effective never shown.
When I talk more generally of thick texts – texts that we learn
to read as collective, contingent compromises – both operas and
superhero comics are significant parts of the template I have in
mind. Both are collective works of art, in which the librettist and
composer, or writer and penciller, are crucial to each other’s input
and others, like the conductor or the inker, almost as important.
Both are commercial works of art that are always based on the
compromises that that involves; there is always a crucial sense of
how things might have been productively other, and sometimes we
get to see how that might have worked. We get to listen to the early
draft Leonora as well as to Fidelio, and learn a lot about the latter
from the former; Alan Moore tells us in detail, in the notes to the
hardback and Absolute editions, how Watchmen in its final form
evolved from a distinctly different project; the Absolute edition of
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman shows us how radically different were the
original colour schemes from what we have got to know.
Both comics and opera are minority art forms in which it is
possible and desirable to develop areas of expertise, an expertise
that marked one out as slightly weird, slightly obsessive. To know
one’s way around the operas of Verdi or Wagner or Mozart may
be very much more respectable than to understand the arcana of
Marvel Comics’ continuity, but it still means that, sooner or later,
you are going to find yourself expounding far too much detail for
your hearers, when someone expresses a mild taste for the Queen
of the Night’s second aria, or Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films. They
are also fields in which there is always going to be someone who
knows more than you. Both comics and opera have a significant
following of the anti-social and awkward; a taste for them can also
teach you the hard way to be sensitive to other people’s lack of
interest.

The Absolute editions of DC comics are glossy hardbacks with very
high production values.

Both are art forms that teach you to cope with disappointment.
In the case of opera, the issue is sometimes the particular problems
of performance – the soprano’s sore throat, the conductor’s
perversity – and sometimes more particular problems of the
canon: if you love Verdi, you may not be as fond of Donizetti; if you
love Aida, you may not be so taken with the early works of Verdi
like I Masnadieri. In the case of comics, there are disappointments
intrinsic to the mode of production – the need to produce to a
planned release date means that some months, artists or writers
may not perform at their best – as well as the fact that some writers
and artists are persuaded to take on titles for which they have
no especial fondness or compatibility. It is always worth bearing
in mind that the best way to think about comics is in terms of a
particular run of a title or a particular storyline; few titles manage
to retain consistent excellence over the decades.
Learning to read comics is also a matter of coming to understand
not only the specifics of continuity, but of its importance in the
abstract. Narrative universes as vast as those of the Marvel and
DC continuities are not the product of any one person, even of an
editor-in-chief as creative and innovative as Stan Lee of Marvel, but
rather the process of slow accretion and of the desire to make sense
of what were once quite random narrative choices as they came to
impinge on each other. No one artist or writer is responsible for
these continuities – they are collective works of art.
One of the sources of this book was the casual remark by Nick
Lowe in the course of a train journey that, by now, these two
continuities were the largest narrative constructions in human
culture (exceeding, for example, the vast body of myth, legend and
story that underlies Latin and Greek literature), and that learning
to navigate them was a skill-set all of its own. That conversation
helped me to formulate the ideas that I spell out at greater length in
the first chapter of From Alien to the Matrix (2005) about competence
cascades, thick texts and the geek aesthetic; it also made me realize
that I had, as part of my loose intellectual project of engaging with
aspects of popular culture as difficult, to deal with the comics
mainstream. I have mentioned above the relevance of comics to

26 • Superheroes!
my concept of the thick text; the entire history of the frequent

evolution of comics fans into comics creators of real ability is a
good example of what I mean by competence cascades.
Another applies more generally to all comics readers. Like
most comics fans, I discovered, I am still learning the finer points
of continuity by reading and re-reading, and by asking friends to
explain things, and by paying attention to the small footnotes that
Marvel sometimes put in the corner of the frame. Understanding
continuity is one of the pleasures of serial works of art; another
is the realization that, if you don’t understand quite everything
that is going on, nonetheless the texture of referentiality that you
are experiencing at the same time as your incomprehension is
something that you can both trust and be comforted by. There is
the sense that this is a creation you can trust; there is the sense that
you will understand more on later readings.
When he was working on Sandman, Neil Gaiman remarked to
me that he was putting in the level of reference, both to comics and
to other material, that he loved in work he admired as a teenager;
after all, he said, ‘one of the most valuable lessons I learned from
books and comics was that, if I did not understand something, I
had better go and look it up’. If the non-comics reader is sceptical
about this being an issue, I refer them to Walt Simonson’s Thor in the
1980s, where an extended run during which Thor leads the struggle
against an invasion of Earth and Asgard by frost giants is followed by
a shorter run in which, transformed into a frog, he leads the frogs
of Central Park against the local rats. Is this a reference to the lost
Batrachomythia in which Homer is supposed to have parodied his own
heroic gestures? Given Simonson’s academic background before he
became a comics writer, it is at least plausible. (It also signals that
at least one major writer in the field is conscious of the sense that
what is being created is a version of epic.) One trusts that the use
of continuity and of other knowledge will give one an entertaining
ride. And there is also the possibility, thrilling as a tight-rope walk
until it actually happens, that that trust will be betrayed.
The continuities of comics universes are also valuable commercial
properties and, as is usually the case when art and commerce mix,

not every decision that gets made is in the long-term interests of

either shareholders or the Muses. Comics are as prone as any other
art form to latching onto short-term fashions while missing out
on important long-term trends. The two major comics houses have
often made decisions with an eye on their rival instead of on what
they do best. Sometimes, decisions have been made at an editorial
level that were bad in terms of the developments that followed, but
which also retrospectively compromised previous material, which
it no longer became quite as possible to view with nostalgia. For
example, as part of the 2006 reboot of DC and the plot of Project
OMAC, a part of the Countdown to Infinite Crisis (2005–6) storyline,
the decision was made to have the minor superhero Blue Beetle
Ted Kord murdered in cold blood by the tycoon Maxwell Lord,
previously his friend. This had the positive result of freeing up
the costume and name of Blue Beetle to be attached to a young
Chicano superhero, but at the cost of retrospectively trashing the
extended friendship of Kord and Lord as we had seen it in the long
1980s run of Justice League of America written by Keith Giffen and
J.M. DeMatteis.
This run is itself a good example of how superhero comics
are not always what you would expect; it largely consisted of a
situation comedy in which a number of costumed men and women
sat around in rooms, waiting for crises and bitching at each other,
very amusingly. If we are now to read this with the later murder
of one of these characters by another in mind, our enjoyment is
compromised. This would be forgivable if the actual material
in which it happened were better, but, alas, it was part of the
Countdown to Infinite Crisis . . . Because of the long-term damage to
past and future it involves, I have referred to this sort of corporate
editorial decision below as ‘strip-mining the continuity’.
Another good example, also from DC, is the death of Sue Dibney,
wife and partner in detection of the Elongated Man, in Identity
Crisis (2004). If you have gone to the trouble, over many years,
of creating a Nick and Nora Charles pairing whom your audience
loves and laughs with, it is never a good idea to kill one of them off
for the sake of a cheaply gimmicky mystery. Sue’s ‘murder’ turns

28 • Superheroes!
out to be an accidental death caused by another superhero wife’s

experiments with her husband’s equipment, the Atom’s shrinking
gadgetry – things that the mind of woman is not meant to know.
The crucial clue is footprints on the surface of Sue’s brain; there
is a level of what is at once silly and unpleasant that does not gel
with tragedy. In the Marvel Universe, there is the trashing of the
long-term character Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, in order
to facilitate the reboot of the Avengers and set up the House of M
and Decimation storylines.
One of the major driving forces of the creation of these universes
was the commercial imperative to create brand loyalty to more
titles within a single publishing house’s products. Crossovers, in
which a character from one comic produced by a house visited the
story of another, meant that there was a chance that readers who
were not buying the first comic would start to buy it in addition to
the second. Team-up comics like the Justice League of America were
even more likely to interest readers in characters they had not
previously bothered with.
Though there have always been other rival houses, the
domination of the field since the 1960s by DC and Marvel has
meant that there were two very clear and distinct brands; the point
about a continuity is that, generally speaking, its characters inhabit
the same universe and no other. If you were reading the various
Superman titles, you might expect him to be visited by Batman,
Green Lantern or the Martian ManHunter; you would not expect
him to have to deal with Spider-Man, Thor or the Incredible Hulk.
The distinction between these universes is crucial: the reader who
is not comics-literate needs to keep it clear in her mind from the
start.
What may have started as a commercial decision has become
a distinct difference of philosophy and style, even though there
are many writers and artists who have worked for both houses at
one time or another. Broadly speaking, DC is all about heroes and
Marvel is all about heroes and their feet of clay; generally, DC is
unfailingly, one might say glibly, optimistic about human nature,
and Marvel rather more sceptical. And the moment one says such

things, one thinks of a million ways in which they are untrue while
continuing in the knowledge that the two universes have a radically
different feel.
A crude way of putting this would be to take DC’s Superman
and Marvel’s Spider-Man as representatives of the two houses.
Superman is, essentially, a god; his alien origins have given him
powers that make him one of the most powerful players in his
universe and his moral virtues and wisdom make it hard for
him to make mistakes. He is ruled by a sense of duty. His secret
identity as Clark Kent is in many ways a mask behind which he
hides to protect those he cares about. He knows, and cares, that
his entire planet and people died soon after his birth and after his
father sent him to Earth, but he does not agonize about this the
whole time.
Spider-Man, by contrast, is deeply fallible, human and young,
and dominated by a sense of guilt towards those whom he failed to
save. His Uncle Ben, who taught him that ‘with great power comes
great responsibility’, died because Spider-Man stood by and let a
man who had cheated him be robbed; Gwen, his first love, died
because there are limits to his powers – he caught her falling, but
could not stop simple inertia breaking her neck. Most importantly,
Spider-Man, gallant, constantly quipping, is the mask behind which
the shy working stiff photographer Peter Parker hides; all that
they have in common is neurosis. Superman is idolized by almost
everyone except the deeply evil; Spider-Man is endlessly traduced
by the media. DC heroes are on the brink of being gods and Marvel
heroes are always at risk of being regarded as monsters. The period
when Lex Luthor is President is one of the few points at which
Superman has trouble with the authorities; in the Marvel Universe,
even the Avengers regularly have problems with bureaucrats who,
for example, object to organizing security clearance for all their
supernumerary members.
On the few occasions when both houses have licensed crossovers,
the results have been mixed. The best of them is undoubtedly Kurt
Busiek’s Avengers/JLA (2004–5), which was drawn by George
Perez, who has been a stalwart of both houses for years. This is

30 • Superheroes!
partly because it acknowledges the radical differences of tone

between the universes: the Avengers regard the spick and span DC
Universe as proof that the JLA are fascist control freaks, whereas
the JLA regard the messiness of the Marvel Universe with disdain
– and partly because Busiek and Perez get to produce imagery that
draws on the accumulated iconic power of both worlds. The sight
of Superman in torn costume making a last stand clutching Captain
America’s shield and Thor’s hammer is genuinely iconic because so
deeply wrong at important levels. It is magnificent and it is also in
a real sense contrary to nature.
Crossover narrative threads, which start in one of a house’s titles
and continue over the months in several others, are an effective
way of compelling readers to spend more money. Inevitably, for any
of this to work, and not seem entirely and transparently a matter
of tricking readers into spending more money, the crossovers and
the team-ups have to be done at the same level of creativity as the
primary material. Such crossovers are sometimes ways of rebooting
the entire universe, or significant aspects of it – this will be dealt
with in greater detail below. Of course, one reason for events is to
compete on equal terms with the other house.
For example, because in 2005–7 DC were running the Countdown
to Infinite Crisis event and Infinite Crisis title and the subsequent 52
title and One Year Later event as major reboots both of the universe
and individual characters, Marvel ran the mediocre House of M
event, and its sequels, the intergalactic event Annihilation and the
rather superior Civil War event, all of which significantly rebooted
some aspects of the Marvel Universe and the relationships between
characters. This is not to disparage the Marvel events – on the
contrary, I think Civil War rather more interesting than the DC
material, fine as some of that is, partly because of its real-world
political commentary. The company’s commercial masters saw
the need for an event, the editors and writers came up with a
particularly good idea; we do not complain that Bach’s cantatas
were commissioned for specific liturgical or political purposes.
Individual superheroes are shown as having back-story; the
obvious examples of this are Superman’s birth on the doomed

planet Krypton and his father’s decision to send him away from
certain death, or Batman’s witnessing the murder of his parents.
Either a title will start with an origin story or will sooner or later
go back and fill it in; occasionally, as with DC’s Donna Troy, the
back-story will be changed, but this will never be a simple matter
of ‘pressing the reset button’. It will be a new origin story that
includes an explaining away of what was previously claimed to be
the case, whether through amnesia, time paradox or whatever.
A team presented as a team from the beginning, with characters
that had not previously existed, like the original X-Men line-up,
will have an origin story as a team, but will also have back-stories
for each of the members of that team, which we may not learn for
some time and which will be a source for more story. Generally
speaking, these back-stories will not be revised so much as subjected
to endless elaboration, sometimes creating entire new characters in
the process. For example, Scott Summers (Cyclops of the X-Men)
was originally an orphan who subsequently acquired a brother
Alex (Havoc). Later on, Chris Claremont told how they were
parachuted together when the plane carrying their parents went
out of control. Subsequently, he decided that their parents were
kidnapped by aliens, that their mother was raped and murdered
by the Shi’ar Emperor D’Kenn and that their father Christopher
Summers became the interstellar buccaneer and freedom-fighter
Corsair (for complex reasons, he did not reveal his actual identity
to his sons and persuaded the telepaths in their lives to keep the
matter quiet).
Later still, in Ed Brubaker’s 2006 miniseries Deadly Genesis,
it emerged that their mother was pregnant with her husband’s
child at the time of her death, that the child Gabriel was born by
caesarian, enslaved by the Shi’ar and found his way to Earth in late
childhood, where he was recruited by Charles Xavier from Moira
McTaggart’s research group. Gabriel Summers (Vulcan) was one
of several X‑Men sent by Xavier in a doomed rescue attempt when
the original group were captured, assumed dead, at the hands of
Krakoa, the Island that Walks Like a Man; this took place during
the Len Wein run that preceded Claremont in the late 1970s after

32 • Superheroes!
the revival of the title that had lapsed during the 1960s. The team
were killed, save for Gabriel and one other, Darwin, who were
carried into space, comatose, when the second rescue team, the
one containing what we had hitherto considered the canonical
secondary group, defeated Krakoa. The only inconsistency – that
the new first rescue party save Scott, as did what is now the second
group – is ironed out by the fact that his mind and memory had
been suppressed by Krakoa and not restored by Xavier, not that this
cuts much ice with his newly discovered brother.
This is a radical revision of canon, but it is done with enough
attention to what has gone before, and opens up enough of what is
implied by canon, that it is to be distinguished from strip-mining.
We have always, for example, known that Charles Xavier, however
benevolent, is capable of real ruthlessness and of expending the
lives of his young protégés for what he regards as the greater good.
It does not compromise the tone of what has preceded it.
That fidelity to tone is important: Brubaker’s Winter Soldier run
on Captain America took one of the basic premises of the character’s
continuity and changed it, but in the process not only remained
faithful to that continuity’s emotional weight, but actually deepened
it. Captain America, it needs to be remembered, emerged into the
Marvel Universe in ‘modern times’ (see above for a consideration
of time in superhero comics) with an extended back-story as the
artificially created super-soldier of the Second World War. In this
role he had a teen sidekick, Bucky, whose death in an explosion,
just before Captain America was frozen for decades, has constantly
haunted him. It affected, for example, his relationship with serial
sidekick Rick Jones back in the 1960s; in the early 2000s, it is a plot
point in his refusal to give approval to teen superhero groups like
the Runaways and theYoung Avengers, who subsequently are among
his supporters during Civil War, to his mild embarrassment.
What Brubaker did was at once to darken the Bucky of the 1940s
by showing him as the Young Turk trained to do the back-stabbing
and throat-cutting part of commando work, which Captain America
was too honourable to cope with, and by announcing that he did
not exactly die. Frozen like Captain America, he was captured,

defrosted and brainwashed by the Soviet Union. He is, in fact, the

Winter Soldier of the title, an assassin decanted as necessary by his
controller, now, after the fall of Communism, a freelance.
In one sense, this changes everything and in another it changes
nothing. Captain America gives Bucky his memories back and it
is unclear whether Bucky can live with them; Captain America
has exchanged one set of guilty feelings for another. A motivating
wound in danger of becoming a cliché has been effectively renewed;
drastic revision of continuity is sometimes a good idea. One cannot
know for certain, but it seems likely that this exemplary resurrection
of Bucky is intended as a rebuke to DC, whom Brubaker had left
for Marvel, for the botched resurrection of Jason Todd, the dead
Robin in the Red Hood storyline.
It certainly contains a rebuke to another Marvel handling of
Captain America. Mark Millar in The Ultimates portrays Captain
America as a gung-ho fanatic, a necessary man whom it is dangerous
to cross or even disagree with. The left-wing Millar dislikes Captain
America, but is fascinated by what he has created to the extent
that he has him say things too brilliant for a real right-winger to
come up with. When Brubaker has his quiet, democratic version
of Captain America talk eloquently about the sacrifices made by
the French Resistance, it can, I think, be taken as a gentle rebuke
to Millar for the moment where he has Captain America say, to a
Nazi alien ‘Surrender!! You think this letter on my forehead stands
for France!?!’
When previously established characters come together as a
team, there needs to be an origin story for the team, a particular
emergency that they have to handle together. In the case of the
Avengers, it was a series of incidents involving the likes of the
god Loki and the temporal invader Kang the Conqueror. One
of the problems with such teams is that most of the villains and
emergencies individual superheroes tackle are not such that they
need a group. Inevitably, the existence of teams demands a constant
escalation of the scale of menaces, either in terms of the particular
cunning of individual villains or in terms of the introduction of
problems on a cosmic scale, such as the various wars between

34 • Superheroes!
interstellar empires in which Marvel heroes in particular are prone

to involve themselves – the Kree–Skrull War, and the rather crassly
titled Operation Galactic Storm, or even vaster conflicts between
quasi-abstract principles of existence such as the so-called Infinity
War and Infinity Crusade that Jim Starlin wrote for Marvel. Major
events and reboots (see below) tend in this direction, as does the
most successful crossover between the two houses’ continuities,
the Kurt Busiek/George Perez Avengers/JLA in which two cosmic
entities engineer a collision between the two multiverses in order
to outwit a third entity, recruiting the two teams for the purpose.
Both houses’ continuities embody – Marvel cheerfully, DC rather
more ambivalently – the idea of a multiverse, in which there are a
number of alternate worlds in which the standard characters may
be radically different or non-existent. (One of Marvel’s superhero
teams, the eXiles, consists of alternate versions of various X-Men,
who travel between timelines fixing anomalies, like a world in
which the Avengers have become vampires.) The DC Universe has
the anti-matter Earth 2, which is ruled by a Crime Syndicate who
are radically different versions of Superman, Batman and so on,
who are opposed by a virtuous Luthor and others (pre-Crisis these
existed in an alternate world). Generally speaking, DC has tried to
prune these outcroppings to a minimum; the point of the Crisis on
Infinite Earths of the mid-1980s, the Zero Hour of the 1990s and the
Infinite Crisis of the mid-2000s was not merely to sell extra comics
but to render manageable potentially over-proliferating material.
Ironically, the lasting effect of 2006’s Infinite Crisis is gradually
revealed (in the weekly comics 52 and its sequel Countdown (2006–
8) to have been the return of the DC Multiverse.
Unfortunately, one of the side effects of Crisis on Infinite Earths
– which killed some characters off and changed the back-stories
of others – was that some authors felt justified in entirely arbitrary
additional revisions of back-story. As I argue elsewhere, this is the
sort of thing that is only justified by results, and in some cases
was not: the character and career of Hawkman has endlessly been
made unclear as a result of this. Part of the pleasure of reading in
continuity is watching the slow unfolding of a career and the spins

that different writers put on a character within the parameters that

have been collectively created; radical alterations to the facts of
such a career are often a falsification of the emotional content that
has attached itself to that career across time.
The Marvel Universe, by contrast, has always gloried in the
proliferation of timelines to an extent that it sometimes becomes
almost impossible to keep straight in one’s mind, yet somehow it
remains accessible to most readers. To give two examples: Rachel
Grey is the daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey but was born
into a timeline, came to the present from a dystopian future that never
happened. Cable, her half-brother, Summers’ son by Madeleine,
the woman he married when Jean was supposedly dead, was sent
into the future to have a disease cured and came back when he
was significantly older than his father. Marvel material is explicitly
set in a multiverse; when they were working for Marvel’s short-
lived UK line, Dave Thorpe created and Alan Moore developed, as
part of the story of Captain Britain, a powerful empire that rules
across many timelines and polices, in its own interests rather than
altruistically, such matters as waves of probability sweeping out
destructively from individual timelines.
This empire was added to the mainstream Marvel Universe
along with Captain Britain, like him, mostly occurring in the
various X-titles as written by Chris Claremont and by Alan Davis
(who was Thorpe and Moore’s artist on this material in the first
place). Captain Britain’s erstwhile girlfriend Courtney Ross,
his world’s analogue of the inter-universe empress Saturnyne,
has become a recurring character in the continuity, sometimes
as Emma Frost’s rival as White Queen of the Hellfire Club. The
run of Uncanny X-Men during the House of M event dealt in part
with the ramifications of so sudden an alteration of reality when
viewed from the perspective of Saturnyne’s empire. Neil Gaiman’s
re-imagining of the Marvel Universe in terms of the Jacobethan
period 1602 (Nick Fury as Walsingham, Magneto as Torquemada) is
explicitly positioned as a timeline created by time paradox caused
by scientific meddling in one of the dystopian alternate futures that
Marvel’s heroes constantly fight to prevent.

36 • Superheroes!
If, as is the case with both houses, your heroes have powers that
enable them to move entire worlds by acts of will, as well as to
stop quite trivial stick-ups by the judicious application of minimum
force, you are going to need storylines set on a vast canvas. There
are only so many times that a figure as titanic as Superman can
content himself with the local and petty. Accordingly, the backdrop
of both continuities is vast in scope and scale, time and space and
levels of power – the multiverse is only one aspect of this question
of scale.
Both continuities contain horizontal layers of reality as well
as these lateral ones, the nature of these embodying the rather
different implied theological assumptions of the two houses. Much
of DC’s theology is to some extent optional, given that much of it
is contained in the various ‘adult’ comics of DC’s Vertigo line, but
at least some of the characters and assumptions of the Vertigo titles
remain consistent with material in the DC mainline. Neil Gaiman’s
The Identity of Captain Marvel

DC, Marvel and various other US and UK publishers have
at different times claimed rights in Captain Marvel, into
whom, originally, Billy Batson turns by saying ‘Shazam!’ (The
original Fawcett title closed after DC sued for plagiarism,
alleging similarities to Superman, but the British reprint,
under different laws, continued with new material, closed
and was later revived.) Threatened with a suit by Marvel, the
UK publisher of the magazine Warrior changed their version’s
name to Marvelman, under which title both Alan Moore and
Neil Gaiman did impressive runs early in their careers. As
reprinted and completed in the USA by Eclipse as Miracleman,
the Moore run and its Gaiman sequel is one of the most
impressive meditations on superheroes as quasi-deities and
redeemers, but remains incomplete as the result of lawsuits
and other issues.
Meanwhile, Marvel felt entitled to create a character
called Captain Marvel, or more correctly Mar-vell, a captain
in the Kree space navy, who defected to the USA on which

The Books of Magic was commissioned to be a summary of all the

material about magic and the supernatural across the whole of the
continuity as well as with material from his own work and that of
Alan Moore. Inevitably, he created a viewpoint character for the
occasion, Tim Hunter, who became a figure in continuity, as well as
being an interesting precursor of Harry Potter with his untidy hair
and spectacles.
Supernatural and Godlike Beings

In the DC Universe, then, magic and the supernatural exist
alongside the wonders of mutation, aliens and super-science.
Superman is vulnerable to magic as well as to Kryptonite; other
heroes, notably DC’s version of Captain Marvel, owe their powers
to magic rather than to that sort of highly developed, or fictional,
science which is indistinguishable from magic
he was spying and became an Earth superhero and

defender of righteousness throughout the galaxy. He even
acquired a human alter-ego in the shape of Rick Jones,
who changed places with him, in exile in the Negative
Zone, by clashing wristbands. Later on, Mar-vell died; his
powers were inherited by his son Genis, an occasional
member of the Thunderbolts, who does not use his
father’s name. For a while the name Captain Marvel was
appropriated by a black superheroine, who subsequently
adopted the sobriquet Photon, a name briefly adopted
by Genis. Mar-vell’s opponent – as spy – and occasional
lover subsequently, Carol Danvers, goes by the name Ms
Marvel in tribute to him. It is also worth noticing that in the
Marvel Universe, Captain Marvel’s powers are conferred
by alien super-science and breeding – Carol Danvers got
in the way of a Kree super-weapon and gained her powers
by surviving, whereas in the DC Universe the powers of
the various members of the Marvel family – including the
morally ambiguous tyrant Black Adam – are conferred by
magic.

38 • Superheroes!
Though the Marvel Universe has its magicians – notably Doctor

Strange – the DC universe is perhaps happier with magic than
its rival. Some occasional members of the Justice League and
the Justice Society are magicians, such as Zatanna and Doctor
Fate; during Grant Morrison’s run on the Justice League of America
another member of the team was an angel, Zauriel, who had taken
a prolonged sabbatical from Heaven in order to stay out of the way
of a more powerful angel he suspected of plotting rebellion.
Angels, then, in the DC Universe, are roughly as they are
in Judaeo-Christo-Islamic mythology, only with less damned
nonsense about merit; they are the police writ large, with the
standard copper’s arrogance towards civilians, or the Feds, with
the standard sense of a big picture to which individuals may need to
be sacrificed. Heaven is the Silver City where angels live – where
God is mentioned, he is either indirect or literally, in Mike Carey’s
Lucifer series, deus absconditus. This sort of thing has only affected
the mainline of DC continuity through the presence of Zauriel and
his enemies in the Grant Morrison-era Justice League of America, and
through the Spectre – originally a spirit that helped the unjustly
dead work for justice, who has gradually been revised so that he
is the literal Wrath of God – given moderation and humanity by a
dead human anchor. He is rather more than an angel in his powers
and, when not moderated by a human partner, quite terrifying. For
a while the fallen Green Lantern Hal Jordan worked his passage
to redemption by being the spirit through whom the Spectre
manifested. This in turn meant that the Spectre was, like Jordan,
corrupted for a while by the demonic Parallax, one of several
occasions when the Spectre has ceased for a while to be a force for
good.
Devils and demons are rather more common players in the DC
Universe, participants in Faustian pacts on occasion, sometimes
possessors of human bodies and souls. Jack Kirby created Etrigan,
who was summoned by Merlin to influence the outcome of Arthur’s
final battle, and Etrigan, turned into (or possessing – continuity
is contradictory on this point) a human called Jason Blood, fights
evil less out of virtue than for sport. Later, Alan Moore reinvented

Etrigan as a rhyming demon, who talks in verse. Occasionally a

character will continue to be involved in the storyline even though
dead and damned, as Arcane did in Alan Moore’s period of Swamp
Thing. (Swamp Thing also included, in Moore’s ‘American Gothic’
storyline, one of the few occasions where the DC Universe has
seemed less monotheist and more gnostic; apparently opposing
forces of good and evil turn out to be hands, one dark and one
light, reaching out for a handclasp.)
There are other supernatural layers to the DC Universe. It has a
version of Faerie, though this most usually occurs in Neil Gaiman’s
work and work spun off from it; it has the realms of the Endless,
Gaiman’s personifications of abstractions like Dream, Death,
Despair and Desire. Beyond Gaiman’s own work, the Dreaming has
been the ultimate destination of the starfish-like mind-controlling
invaders that periodically bedevil the JLA. There is the home
dimension of the magic-working imp Bat Mite and Mr Mxyzptlk
(not apparently magic, but having multi-dimensional powers that
indicate he might as well be), who bedevil Batman and Superman
respectively. There is the Green, the continuum of plant life that
underlies our reality; various once-human beings, all of whom
once studied biology together, are to a varying extent participants
in the Green. Among these are the Swamp Thing as reinvented by
Alan Moore – a plant elemental with the memories of the dead
Alec Holland – Black Orchid, as reinvented by Neil Gaiman – a
constantly re-blooming flower with the memories of a dead woman
who fights crime – and the Batman villainess Poison Ivy, aka Pamela
Isley.
There are also quasi-eschatological beings that operate in the
world of DC continuity. Jack Kirby created the New Gods, a race
of superbeings led by the Highfather, and his opponent Darkseid, a
monstrous being in search of the Anti-Life equation that will enable
him to rule the universe. Though these are called gods, they are
properly conceived of as mortal entities of immense power and
longevity; Superman has stood up to Darkseid in battle in Justice
League Unlimited, the television cartoon series, and even defeated
him in Jeph Loeb’s Batman/Superman in the ‘Supergirl’ storyline

40 • Superheroes!
where Darkseid had apparently destroyed Kara, Superman’s cousin.

Both Darkseid and the Highfather have sons, and exchanged them
as hostages to the intermittent truce between them. Darkseid’s son
Orion, who hides his disfigured facial legacy behind a mask, has
become a paladin of good, his heritage occasionally manifesting
in ill-temper and intolerance; the Highfather’s son escaped the
orphanage into which Darkseid cast him and became the escape
artist Mr Miracle, aka Scott Free (Kirby is an intense creator,
but never a subtle one). The Mr Miracle who features in Grant
Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory is a different character, one of
Free’s acolytes. Though the Jack Kirby titles featuring the denizens
of Apokolips and New Genesis included the title The New Gods,
there has never been a sense in which Darkseid and All-Father have
ever been seen, particularly once formally adopted into mainstream
DC continuity, as more than powerful beings living in a universe
created by Another.
The Marvel Universe, by contrast, has far more in common with
the world of the Gnostics than it does with that of standard Judaeo-
Christian mythology. It has, notionally, a single ultimate deity, very
occasionally referred to as the One Above All, to whom the Living
Tribunal answers, but, on the only occasion that purported to show
this entity, what we got was Jack Kirby at his drawing board. Most
of the time, the Marvel Universe is a field of contention between
powerful beings in constantly shifting alliances.
The most important entity we have seen regularly in the
Marvel Universe is Eternity, a quasi-personified embodiment
of everything that is. For a while it seemed that Eternity had a
peer, perhaps a consort, in the shape of Infinity, but it became
apparent that they were aspects of the same androgyne. Possibly
as important are Death, sometimes a hooded skeleton and
sometimes a beautiful silent woman (quite unlike the teen Goth
Death that Gaiman created, and who has become the default
version of Death in the DC Universe ever since), and her male
aspect Oblivion.
Though one thinks of him as a star-travelling menace, the
world-eater Galactus is regarded by all/both of these as their peer;

interestingly, given that he was once a mortal man. Galactus, a being

who eats worlds, and devours the life energy of their inhabitants, is
a survivor from the cosmos that preceded the Big Bang, a creature
whose intelligence has become subsumed into vast appetite. He is
in some sense an embodiment of entropy, to some degree a threat
that subjects peoples and their planets to trial; though powerful, he
can be defeated by intelligence rather than brute force.
There are other figures of eschatological importance, like the
Living Tribunal, who arbitrates disputes at this level, and the quasi-
gods who rule various magical realms – of these the most important
are the opponents of the magician Dr Strange, Dormammu and his
sister Umar. Marvel has its own equivalent of Darkseid in Thanos,
originally part of a family of dissident gods who fled Olympus for
the moon Titan. Thanos is erotically obsessed with Death, commits
endless murders, and tries to make himself a player on her level in
order that she notice him; at times he becomes godlike, but always
overreaches himself, is always dragged back to the level of flesh by
the less-powerful heroes who oppose him, and by the potentially
godlike Adam Warlock. Warlock resists godhood because he
knows its temptations; divinity is one of several sites in the Marvel
Universe where the righteousness of great power is constantly
interrogated.
To complicate matters, Warlock has a time-travelling future self,
the Magus, keen to ensure that Warlock be corrupted and become
him, the emperor of a vast realm in space and the metaphysical.
Warlock is at one point Thanos’ pawn against the Magus; on
another occasion they are allies when the Magus returns from non-
existence. The morality of these alliances is often an interestingly
grey area; the Marvel Universe is one in which moral sides are not
always neatly drawn and as below, so above.
The pantheons of Greek and Norse mythology have objective
existence in the Marvel Universe – Thor and Hercules are
superheroes as well as gods – but they are purely local phenomena
of comparatively little cosmic importance. It is sometimes argued,
as in Jim Kreuger’s Earth X, that they are shapeshifting aliens locked
into their current forms by human worship and imagination.

42 • Superheroes!
Asgard and Olympus are locations within the Marvel Universe, and
characters with no particular connection with them are liable to
end up there when caught up in the schemes of its enemies, notably
the X-Men and the New Mutants. The villains of these mythologies
– the God Loki in particular – are liable to turn up and act as
supervillains; Loki’s schemes are part of what brought the original
Avengers together. Though Thor is a god and hero, the occasion
when he brought Asgard into close proximity to Earth was a disaster
for both worlds; his disastrous reign as god-king of Earth, undone
by time paradox, is a good example of the nightmares created by
power out of control, which I discuss futher below.
The Marvel Universe also has a variety of Hells and Devils, only
some of which are finessed as alternate dimensions. The Silver
Surfer and the Scarlet Witch are both manipulated by a tempter
called Mephisto; the X-Man Ilyana Rasputin is kidnapped to, and
grows to maturity in, a dimension ruled by the demonic Belasco
(named, obscurely, after the actor-manager who wrote Madame
Butterfly).
Another layer of quasi-supernatural material was added to the
Marvel Universe by Jack Kirby. The Celestials are space gods along
the lines of Erich von Däniken’s claims, vast demiurgish beings who
intervened in human evolution at various points. Their principal
creations, the immensely powerful and immortal Eternals, and the
monstrous Deviants, have had roles in human history. This material
is currently being revisited and re-imagined by Neil Gaiman in what
is only his second outing in Marvel material and the first in main
continuity. Kirby and Stan Lee also created in the purely temporal
world beings so powerful that they might as well be supernatural.
The Watchers are a corps of alien observers who sit around not
intervening in the lives and deaths of entire species, but every so
often one of them cheats in a good cause.
One of the most impressive things about the Marvel Universe is
that it has managed, on occasion, to build on the sheer mythopaeia
involved in Kirby’s original creation of Galactus with his vast purple
armoured head-dress; in Avengers/JLA Busiek has his characters
solemnly intone as they arrive at the site of their conflict with

the villain, ‘His stronghold . . . It’s Galactus. He built it from the
remains of Galactus’. When comics are at their best, the art is as
monumental as this sort of dialogue; George Perez represents the
stronghold as a vast jumble, crowned off-centre with the head-
dress. The teams’ ship, which a few pages earlier dominated an
entire double-spread splash page, is reduced to the size of an insect
by comparison.
Both DC and Marvel’s superhero continuities have a large space-

opera element. Green Lantern is only one of a corps of such
recruited by the benevolent Guardians of the Universe (currently
four Green Lanterns are from Earth, not counting the JSA Green
Lantern, whose powers derive from magic and only indirectly
from the Guardians). In DC continuity, Earth has been invaded by
a variety of species, sometimes operating as an alliance, and one of
the events of the Infinite Crisis was a war between two powerful alien
planets, Rann and Thanagar. Though the quasi-avian inhabitants of
Thanagar are generally malevolent, two of them, Hawkman and
Hawkgirl, have been active as superheroes on Earth, albeit with
conflicting loyalties. An Earthman, Adam Strange, regularly saves
the inhabitants of Rann, though lacking superpowers. These details
aside, there is a tendency for the space-opera elements in the DC
Universe to be ad hoc.
The space-opera elements in the Marvel Universe are
somewhat more thought out. Essentially, there used to be three
significant interstellar empires: the blue humanoid Kree, the green
shapeshifting Skrull and the quasi-avian humanoid Shi’ar. The Kree
Empire fell apart, something largely engineered by its ruler, the
Intelligence Supreme (a brain in a tank containing the minds of
many significant Kree), as a eugenic measure – he wanted the Kree
to experience adversity and start evolving again. The Skrull were
crippled when Galactus ate their homeworld and have declined
into squabbling fiefdoms looking for a royal claimant to give them
legitimacy (this latter struggle is a plot point in both of Marvel’s
comics aimed at younger readers, Runaways and Young Avengers).The
Shi’ar have become a dominant power by default, but clearly not

44 • Superheroes!
for long, since a current (at writing) storyline in X‑Men continuity

is called ‘The Fall of the Shi’ar Empire’. The Shi’ar have a long and
complicated involvement with the X-Men: their current empress,
Lilandra, was for a while Charles Xavier’s lover, but they were
badly damaged by his twin, Cassandra, when she took over his
body. More recently, they wiped out all of Jean and Rachel Gray’s
relatives in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of the Phoenix in
human shape. Lilandra is a despot, only benevolent by comparison
with her entirely monstrous brother and sister, who in turn have
been betrayed at the height of their seizure of power by Gabriel
Summers, Scott Summers’ evil younger brother, the murderer of
their father Corsair and now self-crowned emperor of the Shi’ar.
I have gone into some detail about the backdrop of these two
continuities, simply to give an idea of their scale and complexity,
a scale and complexity achieved less by design than slow accretion
of plot conveniences and periodic attempts to rationalize the
result systematically. They are vast and gaudy, and as nothing in
complexity to the personal stories that the comics produced by the
two houses tell.
In the 1950s, DC comics re-imagined a number of pre-existing

superhero titles that they owned, or had acquired, and fitted them
into the same universe; Green Lantern is a good example of this,
with the ring being changed from a magical device to one provided
by alien super-science, but retaining the need to be recharged
regularly, and its operation as the embodiment of the wearer’s will.
The point about Marvel’s superheroes is that most of the crucial
ones were invented, in a string of brilliant ideas, by Stan Lee, Jack
Kirby and Steve Ditko over a period of a couple of years.The others
were inherited from the various companies out of which Marvel
had grown – both Submariner and Captain America were Golden
Age characters who were re-imagined and reintroduced in the early
days of Marvel, with an explanation for their long disappearances
(Captain America was frozen in an iceberg; Submariner became an
amnesiac bum).

As has, I think, been demonstrated without need for extended

further summary, the interlocking story arcs of the characters of
the DC and Marvel universes are endlessly fascinating both as soap
opera and myth cycle. These are stories that constantly generate
new characters, and any character, no matter how seemingly ad
hoc their creation and sketchy their original creation, may become
the focus of a particular writer’s attention and start to be dealt with
inventively and in detail. To pick two examples, Renée Montoya,
a Gotham City detective who originally appeared in the animated
Batman TV shows, has gradually become a significant figure in DC
comics, partly as the focus of storylines in Ed Brubaker’s police
procedural comic Gotham Central, and more recently as the ex-lover
of the new Batwoman and as a replacement for the dead vigilante,
the Question. Cassie Lang was periodically mentioned as the object
of custody suits between her mother and her father, Scott Lang,
the Ant-Man murdered by Wanda Maximoff; she is now one of the
Young Avengers, as Stature, having inherited her father’s powers.
This is even without the sort of radical invention that periodically
occurs. The next chapter will deal at length with Jessica Jones, a
character created by Brian Bendis in Alias and inserted into Marvel
continuity as if she had always been there. When Neil Gaiman was
first invited to work for DC he took on a comparatively obscure
heroine, Black Orchid, and reinvented her as one of a group of
plant beings all connected with the same research programme.
Again, he took a crime-fighter with a sleep gun, the Sandman, and
made him a mere shadow of the real Sandman, the Lord of Dreams.
Many comics creators rightly complain about working for hire, and
that the products of their imagination can be endlessly recycled by
the company; the up-side of this is that some of what later writers
do with characters created by someone else is fascinating work in
its own right.
Particular events in continuity may be revisited and sometimes
revised endlessly. This will sometimes take the form of flashbacks
– the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents during a casual mugging is
something that almost every significant Batman writer has shown
us replaying in his head sooner or later – and sometimes take

46 • Superheroes!
the form of visits through travel back through, or across, time.

When it originally happened in an episode of The Fantastic Four,
the destruction of the Skrull homeworld by Galactus was an
impressive enough event; it was even more so when, during the
Alan Davis run on The X-Men, Xavier and a selection of his pupils
found themselves, via time travel, caught up in this event. Xavier,
no great believer in Prime or Temporal Directives, tries and fails
to dissuade the Eater of Worlds from his course of action; the X-
Men fight copies of themselves and other superheroes created by
a Skrull spy school (aided by copies of dead heroes who resent
being regarded as surplus to requirements). The eXiles find
themselves at one point in a universe running a few years late,
where the Dark Phoenix saga is playing out with a potentially
different outcome.
What I want to suggest is that much of what is best in superhero
comics comes from the sheer size of the body of lore that comes as
part of the package, that one of the things that makes for good work
in this field is letting the wisdom of continuity work for you. This
idea is less hideously Jungian than it sounds; to work consciously
in a shared universe, and to go with the grain of that universe as
most comics writers do most of the time in their best work, is
to demonstrate that particular sort of competence that comes in
what I have elsewhere called ‘competence cascades’. This may be
an example of what Steven Johnson calls emergent phenomena
in his book Emergence and elsewhere, and may be an example of
what James Sarowiecki in his 2004 book of that name calls ‘the
wisdom of crowds’, without being nearly as determinist as even
those models that I am describing.
If you are guided by the internal logic of the artistic form or
corpus you have put yourself in the way of working with, and so
produce something that can be called an emergent phenomenon,
it is, as I would describe it, rather more the result of conscious
choice than either Johnson or Sarowiecki has suggested. There is,
after all, a reason why poets wrote sonnets for several centuries
and why composers write symphonies, and that reason is not only
to do with the demands of the cultural market place. There is at

once challenge and comfort in writing something that may surprise

an audience, but will do so in a context of structure that they find
familiar and congenial. No one forced those poets and composers,
and they would not necessarily have starved if they had done
otherwise, yet they chose to work inside a cultural context that
gave them access to constant metonymy of other poems and music.
We often do our best work when working with what we know.
All genres have rules. Works within a genre often echo each
other, sometimes polemically, sometimes as a game and sometimes
because there are particular extraordinary examples of a form
that later creators can only with difficulty get around. The second
subject of the finale of Brahms First Symphony echoes the choral
finale of Beethoven’s Ninth; asked about this, Brahms merely
responded that any fool could see that. What I am suggesting is
something further: in part, one of the particular genre rules of the
superhero comic is successful navigation of, and negotiation with,
the vast body of lore and continuity that the form has built up.
It is perhaps because it represents such a withdrawal from the
possibilities of writing with continuity as well as a betrayal of the
conspiracy between writer and audience to believe that continuity
makes entire sense, that strip-mining of the kind involved in the
deaths of Stephanie and Sue Dibney, and the madness of Wanda
Maximoff, comes across as so deeply irritating. For the sake of brief
sensation or plot convenience, things are unpicked that worked and
had further life in them. When, as is always the case – at least by
default – the company and its editors make or allow the decisions
involved, it is usually a piece of short-termism that does not make
entire commercial sense in the long run. At just the point when the
Batman comics had started to acquire a significant online female
fandom, War Games alienated that fandom with the gratuitous
torture and death of Stephanie, and was not good enough in
objective artistic terms, or successful enough in financial ones, to
justify this.
This, above all, is one of the standard indictments of comics
writing, that it takes place within a cash nexus, that it is work for
hire and almost by definition unoriginal. Certainly the failure of

48 • Superheroes!
the comics companies to recognize any moral right on the part of

their writers and artists in the products of their hands and brains
has led on many occasions in the past to quite signal injustices, most
notably in the case of the long struggle of Siegel and Shuster to
profit from their original creation of Superman, particularly when
the character spun off from comics into television, film and other
properties. The question of economic injustice and contractual
inequality has to do with a particular model of copyright that exists
under late capitalism, and is not necessarily to be linked to the
broader question of whether originality in the arts is necessarily a
precondition for high quality.
The assumption that the great artist necessarily makes up
new things is both something that has never been fully true and
something that was always a product of a particular moment in
history. Much of Western literature, art and dramatic music has
concerned itself with the Greco-Roman or Judaeo-Christian myths,
or with such lesser bodies of narrative accumulation as the matter
of Britain. The realism of the 19th and 20th centuries concerns
itself with the representation of a consensual set of assumptions
about what society is, which has left many texts stranded when
cultural attitudes to class, gender, race and sexuality have changed,
and the unreality of some of those assumptions is exposed. This is
not to judge the quality of work on the basis of its adherence to later
views that were not available to it at the time, but it is to throw into
question the realist project and its implicit assumption of moral
superiority over material based on myth, fancy or whimsy.
The law of copyright means that the only way to work publicly
with the material of the DC and Marvel universes is to work for
hire for those companies, or for the associated television and film
franchises. There is, of course, one exception, which is symphonic
music; the American composer Michael Daugherty (who also
wrote the opera Jackie O. and the piano concerto Le Tombeau de
Liberace) produced a Metropolis Symphony portraying, inter alia, Lois
Lane in perpetual danger and Superman’s (temporary) death at the
hands of the rampaging monster Doomsday (portrayed through
a tango that rises to a crescendo). He is also the composer of a

linked orchestral piece representing Bizarro. Camp as Daugherty’s

composition often is, his work based on the Superman mythos is as
serious as he is capable of being; his project is as much to recruit
popular culture as material on which high art can be based as to
mock it.
The two best literary novels to come out of our obsession with
superheroes avoid the problem of campness. The two adolescent
protagonists of Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude (its very title
an allusion to Superman’s retreat) are comics fans, and the novel’s
sense of period is as closely tied to the month-by-month issue
of comics in the period it covers as it is to developments in pop
and rock music. When they discover and use a ring that makes it
possible for the wearer to fly, and play with it in the way that makes
most sense to them, by acting as masked vigilantes, it is a thing
that bonds them together and yet not enough to prevent issues
of class and race and educational attainment driving them apart.
Lethem writes, here and in his essays, out of deep affection for the
superhero trope; he also does so without illusions.
Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay alludes
constantly to the comics of the Golden Age in its portrayal of the
industry in its 1930s and 1940s first heyday. Rather than slot his
two protagonists into the careers of known figures, Chabon invents
an entire career for them; their creation of their first character, the
Escapist, leads to their getting the opportunity to create others.
Chabon plays an inventive game here, whereby Kavalier and
Clay anachronistically play with some of the themes and artistic
experiments of considerably later periods in their 1940s work; this
is a game that only means anything to people who know what he is
talking about, of course, and is only possible because he is clearly a
deeply committed fan himself.
Not only do Lethem and Chabon demonstrate that comics are
a valid theme for fiction to discuss, they also make it clear that
comics creators and fans are too. Where various screenwriters
have moved into comics with varying degrees of success – Kevin
Smith’s Daredevil run, Joss Whedon’s period on Astonishing X-Men
(which I discuss in Chapter 6) – and comics have recruited various

50 • Superheroes!
genre writers like Brad Meltzer and Orson Scott Card, as yet no
mainstream novelist has moonlighted in the industry. Given that
Chabon did work on the script of the second Spider-Man film,
it is clearly only a matter of time. As I write, the thriller writer
Ian Rankin has just been recruited to write a run of the John
Constantine comic Hellblazer.
I should at least mention in passing the ongoing Wild Cards shared
world anthology series (1987 onwards) produced by George R.R.
Martin and various friends and associates. This had its origins
in a role-playing game improvised by Martin’s circle, in which
superpowers were the positive outcome of an experimental alien
virus that more usually caused grotesque deformity or death. The
Wild Cards continuity allowed its writers to deal with AIDS, urban
squalor, the McCarthy era and the rise of demagogic politicians,
and was the source of a few quite extraordinary stories like Howard
Waldrop’s ‘Sixty Minutes Over Broadway’.
Interests have to be declared – I contributed superhero stories
of my own to Temps (1991) and Eurotemps (1992) devised and edited
by Alex Stewart and Neil Gaiman, part of a series of shared world
anthologies that they, I and Mary Gentle produced in the early
1990s. All that is relevant to mention here is that the first of these
stories – ‘A Lonely Impulse’ – used the superhero motif primarily
to make some sarcastic points about government bureaucracy
and the tall poppy syndrome, and secondarily to be lyrical about
dreams of flying. By the time of the second anthology and my
story for it, ‘Totally Trashed’ (texts of both stories can be found
on my website), the world we had collectively built had already
acquired enough story complexity that I found myself writing
something where the main point was to make sense of other
people’s continuity glitches. In the process of doing that, though, I
found myself with a well-dovetailed farce plot in which even a typo
that we had let slip in the first volume could be made use of as a
central plot point. When I talk about ‘the wisdom of continuity’, I

www.glamourousrags.dymphna.net

have some experience of how that works, even in a continuity that

consisted of twenty or so stories.
One subject I have generally not addressed in this book is that
of superheroes on television (but see the box on Heroes for an
exception), simply because the sheer scale of the subject would
have unbalanced my discussion of other issues. Superman has been
the subject of several shows – most notably The New Adventures
of Superman/Lois and Clark and the current Smallville, while the
Batman featured in the campy 1960s show and in various rather
superior animated series, currently Gotham Knights. Justice League
Heroes
There is also Heroes, whose first season was aired in 2006–7,
but is clearly work of a standard that radically revises one’s
view of what is possible with superheroes on television. One
of the crucial things is how slowly it moves. We are used to
stories of superheroes moving fast enough that five significant
things can happen in the 20-something pages of the average
comic. Heroes, though, is gently paced even by the standards
of episodic television; by the half-way mark of the first season,
we were little closer to understanding what is going on and
a very long way from forming a superhero team or dealing
with the atomic explosion that will soon destroy New York.
Several of the characters didn’t even have a proper handle
on what their powers are yet, and were even further from
accepting that they have them and are stuck with them.
Several characters’ powers were still evolving by the series
finale.
Heroes is a genuine serial in that it deals with the slow
accumulation of knowledge among the characters and in the
audience, episode by episode. We remember individual shows
as much for what we find out as for what happens – there
was, after all, a time when we thought that the preternaturally
persuasive Eden was just a helpful neighbour or that Sylar was
simply an ordinary brain-eating serial killer. Heroes is also a
show that takes the time to see its characters in the round,
with all their moral ambiguity and mixed values; a decision

52 • Superheroes!
that Eden makes in the last seconds of her life turns around
everything we have thought about her, and leaves us with
an indelible impression of someone smart and resourceful
enough to make a right choice when she seems to have no
choices left.
Episodic television is at one level all about making the
audience watch next week, partly for the thrills and spills, and
partly for the characters. Making us fall in love with characters
is hardly something original to Heroes. One might argue,
indeed, that the real originality rests in a show like the new
Battlestar Galactica, where it is fairly hard to like any of the
variously deranged religious fanatics that populate it, yet we
remain fascinated. What Heroes does, though, is create several
characters whom we start off liking, and love more the more
we see them, while allowing them to be largely ineffectual, at
least for the moment
The closest thing to a central focus to the show is in the
end the Petrelli brothers, Peter and Nathan, an unlikely pair of
saviours. Peter is a neurotic New Yorker, trapped in the shadow
of his corrupt politician brother and a father badly in hock
to the Mob; he is a competent male nurse who over-invests
in his dying patients and has fallen in love inappropriately
with the daughter of one of them. He is only just starting
to understand what his powers are, and misunderstanding
them has taken him closer to self-destruction than is quite
sane or comfortable. What he has, though, is a sense that it
is important to try to do the right thing, and it is this sense of
right action, without the safety net of clear knowledge, that
is a significant part of the show’s mission statement. The fact
that, in the end, it is the corrupt older Nathan who has to save
the day and, moveover, save it from Peter’s inability to control
his powers.
Even more than in Peter, though, this ethos is embodied
in the show’s most attractive character, the chubby Japanese
nerd Hiro, of course. Peter, though, has had to work it out
for himself, whereas Hiro has a long-standing fascination
with comic books to provide him with a moral compass once
he learns that he can bend time and space around himself.
When he uses his powers to cheat at cards, he expects it to
go wrong because he knows from comics that personal gain
should form no part of the hero’s journey; he feels guilt when

he tries and fails to save people as much as joy when he

succeeds. He has a gift for friendship; part of the attraction of
Hiro is his utter and reciprocated devotion to his best friend
Ando, but another part is the way that he manages to charm
everyone he meets, even Peter’s cynical brother Nathan. If in
the end Nathan does the right thing, and (presumably) dies
in the attempt, it is because he cannot bear the disapproval
of Hiro and of Claire.
Hiro is also the focus for much of the show’s sheerly
fannish pleasures: when, at the end of the first episode, he
finds that he has teleported himself from a Japanese commuter
train to the middle of Times Square, we feel a surge of utter
joy as he waves his hands in the air and shouts ‘Hello New
York’, a surge that we feel all over again when he finds the
scene duplicated in a comic book that he has to steal when he
realizes he has come to the USA without dollars.
One of the reasons that Heroes works is that it never
neglects the pragmatically real; Hiro and Ando cheat at
roulette and cards because they are trying to survive in a
foreign country without money, and Nathan is worried about
the effect on the electorate should they ever believe that a
candidate can fly. Part of learning to be heroes is acting in
completely non-heroic ways. The geneticist Mohinder gets fed
up trying to prove his murdered father’s belief in mutants true
and goes back to India for several episodes. This is also, we
may as well point out, a mainstream American show, several
of whose characters are not white, or American.
What then is there not to like? Blandly menacing as
Mr Bennett – the man who is trying to put a lid on all this
– is, he is too much a default setting for this sort of plot: his
reaction to the fact that his adopted cheerleader daughter is
self-regenerating is to try to steal her memories as a way of
keeping her safe, right up to the point where he demonstrates
his redemption by sacrificing his memories of paternal love
for her for the same reason. The cheerleader Claire is one of
too many women in peril, only one of whom, the bad girl
Niki/Jessica, sex worker with a super-strong murderess for split
personality, has much chance of doing things for themselves.
Heroes is glorious, touching, fun and we can hope that in
these respects as in others, the creators have thought of ways
for it to be better.

54 • Superheroes!
Unlimited exploits continuity intelligently, while various earlier

JLA animations like Superfriends and most Marvel-based animations
have not. There are a plethora of non-continuity superhero shows –
Mutant X is dull and The 4400 interesting in concept but mediocre
in execution.
Death, Rebirth and Other Plot Devices

I am, as is reasonably clear from everything I have written so far, not
only intellectually fascinated by superhero comics and what they
have to tell us about creativity, originality and attractive people in
tight-fitting clothing, but also a fan. I have read superhero comics
on and off for 40 years and more and am unlikely ever to stop doing
so permanently. The current book was originally to some extent
intended to be primarily a study of the superhero films, which
treated the comics as crucial background material, rather than
what it has become: a study of comics that treats the films based on
them as essentially second-hand material and only occasionally of
merit in their own right.
However, one of the things that informs what follows is the period
during which I became largely alienated from superhero comics
from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, for a variety of reasons. Part
of the issue was time and part was money – either one buys comics
as they come out or, increasingly, waits for the trade paperback
collections – and part was the uneasy awareness that somewhere
else in the continuities might be material by interesting new writers
and artists that one had never heard of and that would turn out to be
crucial both to one’s appreciation and to making sense of continuity.
A friend was so outraged by the poor quality of Avengers Disassembled
that he did not bother with Bendis’ subsequent work for Marvel,
thus missing out not only on his best work, Alias, but also on plot
elements in New Avengers that may yet turn out to be crucial to Civil
War. It is possible to resent quite deeply the extent to which the
comics companies are keen to part one from one’s money.
This became so nakedly the case during the period when I largely
stopped reading superhero comics, as to be entirely repellent. The

so-called Dark Age was also the age of laminated covers, of multiple
editions of the same issue carefully bagged by collectors for the
different cover art, of people buying comics to collect and not to
read. At the time, this felt like a betrayal of the promise some of us
had felt at the time of Watchmen and even of The Dark Knight Returns,
the promise that comics were going to grow up, and the feeling
that part of that growing up might be setting superheroes aside.
This was also the period of a lot of rather wonderful non-
superhero comics, of the lives of Mexican villagers and hip young
Chicano dykelets in the work of the Hernandez brothers – whose
work is still gorgeous, but who long ago stopped saying anything
that struck me as especially new – of the satiric picaresque
adventures of the barbarian warlord Cerebus the Aardvark (before
Cerebus’ creator Dave Sim became so caught up in deep misogyny
as to make his still-brilliant work almost unreadable in its anger and
pain). It was the time of serious graphic novels in what was almost
the literary mainstream, of which perhaps the most lasting example
is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which manages the almost inconceivable
feat of writing about the Holocaust in terms of cartoon animals.
It was the period when Alan Moore moved on from Watchmen to
the abortive Big Numbers project with Bill Sienkewicz, which, had
it ever consisted of more than two issues, might conceivably have
changed things forever.
It was a time when DC and to a lesser extent Marvel were hedging
their bets with Vertigo and other subsidiary houses and playing
around with eschatological comics as a substitute for superheroes.
This is as good a point as any to discuss Sandman. Asked by DC’s
Vertigo editor to pick a character to re-imagine, Neil Gaiman took
the name of a Golden Age crime fighter and almost nothing else.
His Sandman is Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, and in his company
Gaiman takes the reader on a voyage through Heaven, Hell and the
human heart (see Neil Gaiman and Sandman box).
What attention I was paying to comics tended to go towards
Neil’s work and that of his stablemates rather than to superhero
comics that seemed to me to have taken a step back from plot and
character into endlessly proliferating combat scenes. Nor was I

56 • Superheroes!
Neil Gaiman and Sandman

As a critic, I am in an odd position about Neil Gaiman’s work
in general and Sandman in particular, not merely because
we have been friends for two decades, but because we were
particularly close during the years when he was writing it. I
can remember, perhaps even better than Neil himself, various
plotlines that he never got round to but discussed over
drinks; I am my own best source for various crucial pieces
of information about how totally the central story arc was
planned from an early stage. At least one character in one
Sandman volume has been widely and erroneously supposed
to have been based on me; the truth is more complex and
the character is based in part on one of my ex-flatmates
whom Gaiman met, in part on the idiolect of characters in
an unpublished novel of mine. I mention this to indicate
the difficulty of trying to unpack the roots of so complex a
creation. This makes objectivity hard, which is why I have
taken so long to get around to discussing this work in print.
In Sandman, Dream is, and for a while we are not clear
what this means, one of the Endless. We know that Death is his
sister, because he has been imprisoned by the magus Burgess
as the result of a ritual that went wrong and summoned him
in her place. Even so, it is not for a while that we meet Death,
who turns out to be a sparky Goth punkette, a perfect foil to
Morpheus’ dour gloombucket. And yet, we are told from the
beginning, she is quite specifically his elder sister, the oldest
but one of his siblings.
These are, as we eventually discover, Destiny, Death,
Dream, Desire, Destruction, Despair and Delirium (who used
to be Delight). They are not gods – they are rather more
important than that – so much as embodiments of crucial
aspects of the universe’s nature, that came into being as soon
as the universe produced life; we learn from one of the side-
bar tales (this one included in Endless Nights, a collection
produced several years after the body of the text) that life in
this context includes the beings we know as stars as well as
the angels and demons of popular mythology. In The Books
of Magic Gaiman shows us the very end of the cosmos, with
Destiny finally closing his book and dying, and his sister ending
all things. They are a family, and bicker and have favourites

and feuds; Gaiman is touching about the brother/sister

relationship of Death and Dream, and of Destruction and his
two younger sisters, while the antipathy between Dream and
Desire becomes the driving force of what we gradually realise
to be the most tragic of plots.
This plot proves to be the story of how Dream, weary of
his own existence, especially after his long imprisonment by
Burgess, settles his affairs and, without consciously setting out
to do so, creates a set of circumstances in which he will cease
to be. There are certain laws that even the Endless are forced to
obey, and among these is a prohibition on kin-slaying, which
Desire tries to manipulate Dream into breaking unconsciously.
In the end, however, and as part of a set of circumstances
that Desire set in train many years earlier, without intending
this consequence at the time, Dream kills, or more precisely
mercy-kills, the immortal severed head of his son Orpheus. As
a result, he becomes the prey of the Furies, and dies.
The Furies are set on Dream by Lyta Hall, widow of
Hector Hall (one of several men in continuity who bore the
name, though not necessarily the gasmask and sleep gun of
the original Golden Age Sandman), whose son was born in
Dream, Morpheus’ realm, and was therefore taken from Lyta
by Dream to be his successor. Morpheus never acknowledges
to himself that he is pursuing his own destruction, but his
every act is consistent with it. He is a being of immense power,
but he is a prisoner of limitations and of the nature of the
universe. The version of the DC Universe that Gaiman creates
is vast in its scope in space and time, and yet it is still bounded
by necessity.
Sandman is an incredibly rich text, full of interpolated
tales, many of them meditations on aspects of story, like the
condign punishment of the author who rapes and imprisons a
Muse and is afflicted with a plague of story ideas. It is typical
of Gaiman that the ideas are good ones and that he was
inventive and profligate enough to throw them away on this
particular narrative point. Sandman is also the story of various
humans in whose lives Morpheus ends up intervening; there
is Rose, the heroine of A Doll’s House, whom he rescues with
her brother from a serial killer’s convention, one of the most
chillingly funny things Gaiman has ever written, and which he
originally improvised in conversation over dinner with Alan

58 • Superheroes!
Moore; there is Barbie, Rose’s ex-flatmate and the heroine of

her own story, in ways that she and we never quite imagined
were possible; and Hob and William Shakespeare. It is a work
of huge linguistic and imaginative invention; it is also quite
profoundly humane.
entirely wrong, though in the process I missed some fascinating

work that I have had to catch up with since.
On the other hand, not all of Vertigo’s product was as good as
Sandman with its constant inventiveness of myth and story. Some
of the best Vertigo comics were those that spun off from the sub-
universe created by Gaiman. The work done by Peter Hogan and
Caitlin Kiernan in The Dreaming took some of Gaiman’s characters
and setting and made them more intensely Gothic, or simply Goth.
And Mike Carey’s 75-issue run on Lucifer took the sardonic spin
that Gaiman had added to the figure in Judaeo-Christian mythology
and made something very rich and strange from the story of how
he and Michael, and their various human children, cope with the
realization that the Creator has plans of his own and has manipulated
them endlessly, even in their loyalty or rebellion.
Hellblazer was never as good in other hands as it had been in its
early days under Jamie Delano; the scruffy trench-coated magus
John Constantine is not a character around whom an infinite
number of stories can usefully be told, which is why, when Alan
Moore invented him, he was a foil to Swamp Thing, his Virgil
through the Gothic world of the real America and through his own
powers. Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles was a little too determinedly
hip in its take on magic for my taste; a similarly scary hipness
characterized Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis’ homage to Hunter S.
Thompson.
People whose judgement I respect are fonder of Garth Ennis’
Preacher than I am, and some of its conceits – the John Waynesque
assassin who eventually takes his six-shooters up against the Lord
God, the untrustworthy Irish vampire – were indeed powerful

and sometimes amusing. On the other hand, I got very tired of

jokes about bodily mutilation and male rape, though the nadir of
that particular trope was reached in an episode of the de- and re-
constructed superhero comic The Authority, when a particularly
unpleasant assassin is turned into a number of chickens and
will spend eternity being anally penetrated by his own yokel
relatives.
One of the odder phenomena of the Vertigo years was the way
that British writers, working with American material, were capable
of a degree of social snobbery about the American poor that they
would have considered unacceptable when applied to other British
people. Does it really have to be spelled out that rape is no laughing
matter even when its victim is a psychopathic mass murderer
working for the Priory of Zion? It did not take especially long for
the new adult comic to become bogged down in laddish clichés of
its own, ones rather less innocent than those of most superhero
comics. By the turn of the millennium, I had ceased to expect very
much from the comics I had had hopes for in the late 1980s and
superhero comics started to interest me again (see box on Alan
Moore).
In thinking superhero comics a form that had burned out, I had
been a victim of the Whiggish theory of pop cultural history in
which things move forwards in an endless progress of excellence
and forms that have reached their use-by date are discarded. Joanna
Russ’ concept of the wearing out of genre materials was one that
appealed to me, because, at the time, I was also (wrongly) inclined
to think that the big glossy space opera had had its day in the novel,
and we would not see much more of that . . . I have, people tell me,
some strengths as a critic, but an ability to foresee the future is clearly

Space opera is the standard term for the subgenre of science fiction
which is less concerned with original perceptions about science and
society and the ways in which they impinge on each other than it is
in drawing on the body of SF for gaudy backdrops and swashbuckling
adventure plots. It has at times been used in a derogatory sense, but is
more generally accepted as one of the things that SF does well.

60 • Superheroes!
Alan Moore
One of the reasons for the reawakening of my interest was the
(temporary) return of Alan Moore to the form in a number
of titles for America’s Best Comics. Moore had spent much
of his time since Watchmen writing a novel, and on his vast
Jack the Ripper tapestry From Hell and on the pornography
project Lost Girls with Melinda Gebbie – both of these are
monuments to just how fine non-superhero comics can be as
works of serious art. However, Moore found that there were
still stories about superheroes that he wanted to tell, however
vast his irritation with the partial failure of the revolution he
had started in the 1980s. Supreme, which completely destroys
the fourth wall between comic and reader and shows his hero
dealing with different versions of himself, including abortive
drafts by other hands, was a piece of blasphemy against the
Golden Age only possible to someone who was still deeply in
love with the material.
This is how it always seems to be with Moore’s radical
critiques of the form he has revolutionized and constantly
turned against and constantly turned back to. He writes The
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with its late Victorian team-
up – Mina Harker, Alan Quartermain, Hyde, Nemo and the
Invisible Man – and he displays the imperialist racist sexist
corrupt warmongering of the time. Yet he also enjoys the
idea of what he is doing as a ripping yarn, and the monstrous
rapist Hyde dies bravely holding the Thames bridges against
Martian tripods. Tom Strong, Moore’s tribute to all those
brilliant scientific adventurers who built electric cars and lived
in towers and travelled to the farthest reaches of the Earth
and beyond, is genuinely charming and innocent. Part of the
point is, of course, that Moore uses Strong to demonstrate
that this sort of hero did not in fact have to be as racist and
sexist as they actually were; the result, though, transcends any
satirical point. The sheer power of the Tom Strong universe is
demonstrated not least by the fact that it became a continuity
that generated other material – most notably Peter Hogan’s
slick and pacy Terra Oscura.
Promethea combined Moore’s desire to create an
iconic female superhero with a meditation on the power of
story. Promethea is an identity that suffuses creators who

make use of it – a portrayal of magical initiation; Moore is

fascinated by ritual magic as a mode of performance that
changes consciousness the way art is supposed to, and by
a consideration of what it is to end the world – or should
that merely be ‘the world as we know it’, the mundane world
of pragmatism and sexist racist classist things as they are?
Promethea succeeds in all these things, partly because of J.H.
Williams’ wonderful art; I once read the entire run through
in an afternoon, and spent the next hour walking in parks in
a state of bliss previously only encountered through religion,
chemical means and the late quartets of Beethoven.
Then there is Top Ten and its pendants Smax and The
Forty-Niners. The easy description of Top Ten is the pitch ‘Hill
Street Blues in Superhero City’ but, as always with such things,
this simplification misses the glorious farce of some of its plots,
the inventiveness of the world and the characters’ bizarre
powers and the deep compassion of Moore’s characterization:
an alien superheroine whose life cycle means that, some of
the time, she needs to eat a lot of people, but is not otherwise
a bad person, and the laddish butch dyke cop she vamps
telepathically. Smax takes two characters to generic fantasy
land and lets Moore do his take on all those tropes, including
killing a dragon that really, really deserves it, while The Forty-
Niners is the coming-of-age story for the elderly Precinct
Captain of Top Ten and how he found himself after a good
Second World War as a pre-teen fighter ace. Moore always
manages to take the whimsical and make it deeply and
poignantly humane; his tales of superheroes constantly raise
and redefine the standard.
not one of them. The various critiques and parodies that seemed to
herald the final decadence and departure of the superhero comic
turned out, in the long term, to demonstrate that it had strengths
that made it viable, and tested those strengths to destruction. Also,
the particularly dull period that superhero comics went through
in the 1990s proved to be a historical phenomenon rather than a
permanent thing – characters started having conversations again,
and even going several pages without hitting anyone.

62 • Superheroes!
What also became clear to me was that this material interlaced

imaginatively with everything else I was interested in and working
on. Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, was a man whose creativity was
informed at a deep emotional level by his adolescent reading of
comics; in due course he has become a comics creator in his own
right. The same is true of all the screenwriters and others whom
Jennifer Stoy has usefully christened the ‘fanboy creators’ – Kevin
Smith, Alan Heinberg, Guillermo Del Toro and so on.
The audience for the teen movies I was working on overlapped
significantly with one of the main markets for superhero comics,
and the audience for the science-fiction movies I was writing about
with the audience for superhero-based blockbusters. And, as I
developed my ideas about thick texts and the universalization of
the geek aesthetic, it became clear to me that superhero comics
were a crucial part of my ongoing argument about ways of looking
seriously at popular culture.
Hence the present book, and hence also a rediscovered love
in advanced middle age of what I loved when I was a teenager,
and loved again in my thirties. I should have known, when I felt
disillusioned with the whole subject for a while, that the thing
about superheroes is this: they always come back from the dead
sooner or later.

2
The Heroism of
Jessica Jones
Brian Bendis’ Alias as
Thick Text
There is, in a sense, no such thing as a typical superhero comic,

simply because there are, in the end, only the very popular and
the doomed, two categories that do not particularly or reliably
reflect merit, even inversely. There are, as I have said, particular
runs of certain long-lived titles that are worthy of critical
consideration. On the other hand, some of the best short-lived
titles were never designed to be anything else, resulting from the
need to plug a particular gap in continuity or from the availability
for a comparatively short time of an artist and a writer who had a
particular project in mind.
I shall consider runs of long-standing comics that are both
typical of that comic and superior to its general level, and runs that
were particularly designed to be innovative, to break the mould
of that comic as it had been up to that point in Chapters 4 and
5. For the moment, though, I shall deal with Alias, a short-lived,
though much-admired, title from the early 2000s, which Brian
Michael Bendis added to his already considerable body of work for
Marvel and various independents. Simply because it manages to be
remarkably thoughtful about the nature of the superhero even after
half a century of consideration, it demonstrates the capacity of such
a title to be a rich, thick text.
It is often asserted by those who disapprove of paying serious
attention to popular art that popular art is incapable of being

64 • Superheroes!
complex and sophisticated in its structure and its appeal. Many of

the false friends of popular culture admire it precisely because they
assume it is never complex and sophisticated – and, let us be clear,
some popular culture, like some high culture, works at a simple
and naive level. In both cases, the simple and the naive are choices
taken in the context of sophistication’s being available as an option;
even the naive is never an innocent choice, and has not been for
several centuries.
It is also far too common among the defenders of the less
commercial kind of graphic novel to create a false dichotomy
between their work and that produced for the major houses. Lazy
journalism is often a part of the mix here: it is far too easy for
someone who has just discovered Art Spiegelman or the Hernandez
brothers to praise them by disparaging superhero comics and
saying that they are not like them. One of the reasons why this
book is necessary is because of too many lazy comments about
underwear worn outside tights, or about the useful convention of
sound effects.
This chapter will accordingly demonstrate, at some length, that
Alias responds to a close reading as a thick text, a reading that pays
attention to its relationship to the rest of its writer’s work, that
deals with the book’s relationship with the broader issues of Marvel
continuity and that gives some weight to the collaboration of writer
and artist. Alias is a particularly fine superhero comic, but its merits
differ from the standard run of such things in degree, not in kind;
one of the reasons why I have selected a piece of work by Brian
Michael Bendis for this extended discussion is that he is not one of
the best-known stars of the field, but a well-respected professional
who is currently doing a lot of work for Marvel. I might equally
have written at this kind of length on Kurt Busiek or Peter David,
for example.

The Heroism of Jessica Jones • 65
Brian Michael Bendis, a Career in Comics
Much of Bendis’ early work in comics does not deal with

superheroes at all: Goldfish and Jinx (late 1990s) deal with the lives
of petty criminals at the point when they find themselves pulled
into rather more seriously criminal events, and Torso (1999) is a
fictionalized documentary about the little-known serial killer case
in which Elliot Ness was factually involved in after his successful
pursuit of Al Capone. Fortune and Glory (2000) is a satirical account
of Bendis’ own adventures in Hollywood when there was some
possibility of his work being optioned; rather closer to being a
superhero comic, Sam and Twitch is a supernatural police procedural
about two detectives caught up in the bleakly sardonic world of
Todd McFarlane’s Grand Guignol comic Spawn.
Bendis is currently producing Powers (2000 onwards) for Top
Cow Comics (a quasi-independent comics company in a close
working relationship with Marvel), a police procedural set in a
world of superheroes. It is thematically linked to Alias in that it
deals with two homicide cops, one of whom is a superhero who has
lost his powers and become mortal after millennia of life, the other
an aggressive and brutal young woman who develops lethal power
after being taken hostage and tortured. Her powers first manifested
at the expense of an ex-boyfriend who attacked her, but Deena has
used her police skills to conceal the manslaughter and may be on
her way down a very dark path indeed. Powers demonstrates the
richness and complexity of Bendis’ thoughts on the subject of
superheroes.
When Bendis started working for Marvel in 2000, he threw
himself into it with great brio and some considerable success. His
run on Daredevil (2001–6) was an exemplary re-imagining of what
has always been one of my personal favourites among Marvel’s
titles, but only became a comic of real stature during Frank Miller’s
run in the early 1980s. In Miller’s and again in Bendis’ hands it
became a wonderfully dark piece of cinematic noir. Bendis’ run on
Ultimate Spider-Man, (2000 onwards), where his brief was to tell the

66 • Superheroes!
early years of Spider-Man’s exploits as if they were contemporary,

managed to be both thrilling and charming.
At his best, Bendis brings to comics writing a delicious pseudo-
realistic terseness that is highly cinematic. He is very fond of the
pregnant pause in dialogue – in comics this tends to mean the
shift to a panel or two of silent close-up of the person who is
communicating more by their silence than they would by speech.
His characters often have a default dry wit, but he is not so obsessed
with this as to abandon the stock idiolects we have grown up
loving; as written by Bendis, Spider-Man is still the same bantering
neurotic as in any other hands.
Not all of Bendis’ work was of the highest standard. His brief
run on Ultimate X-Men was no more than competent, and the part
of it that dealt with Wolverine on the run in New York and involved
with Spider-Man and Daredevil rather than his usual team was
significantly better than the section that re-imagined Emma Frost
as a mildly hostile schoolmarm and killed off Hank McCoy. The
nadir of his work for hire was Avengers Disassembled (2004), where
he carried out editorial decisions to break up the long-standing
team and in the process made sexist nonsense out of the character
of the Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff, having her go insane and
kill several of her team-mates. This was one of the prime examples
of what I call above ‘strip-mining the continuity’. It might not
have been so bad, had the actual story-telling not been wretched,
surprisingly so for Bendis.
The traducing of Wanda Maximoff continued in the central story
of the House of M event, in which the deranged Wanda changes the
whole of reality so that her father Magneto won his war with the
humans years before. However, without being exemplary, the actual
writing here is competent and there are some neat conceptual
twists and powerful emotions deriving from them. In a world in
which there are far more mutants than ever before, the statistics of
wild probability have produced one, a young girl, whose power it is

However, see below for an account of ‘What if Jessica Jones had
Joined the Avengers?’.

to see that this reality is a fever dream created by a sick woman, and
to communicate the truth to all she talks to. However, Peter David
writes the character significantly better in the run of X-Factor (2005
onwards) in which she later appeared. Bendis does a fine job of
showing the effect of this revelation on those whom she disenchants
– they realize what the life they should have been leading would
have been, and in many cases are appalled by the crimes that the
illusion has made them complicit in. In the end, Bendis’ House of M
is no more than a structure on which other comics in the event – of
distinctly varying merit – could be hung, but it is not shameful.
Nor, surprisingly, are the early parts of Bendis’ work on a re-
imagined New Avengers, with a grittier team taking up the slack
left by the collapse of the earlier one. In the gifted hands of Kurt
Busiek, for example, who is accomplished in this sort of game
with continuity, the basic team of seven allowed for in the group’s
charter was constantly being extended with associates, probationers
and visiting past members to a point where it was sometimes hard
to keep track of the fact that the group was supposed to be small
and lean. A case can be made that a radical break was needed –
what was actually done was crude and unpleasant and, it needs to
be pointed out, has since been undone in respect of the death of
Hawkeye – Clint Barton is apparently back from the dead, even if
his nom de guerre has been reassigned to Katie Bishop of the Young
Avengers. Both current versions of the team – Bendis’ and the far
darker incarnation Mark Millar has produced in The Ultimates – are
small lean teams.
Like the original team, back in the 1960s, Bendis’ Avengers are
brought together by a particular emergency in which they find
themselves fighting alongside each other. Originally it was the
machinations of the god Loki; here it is a prison break on the high-
security supervillain facility attached to Riker’s Island, the Raft.
Some of the team are visiting the Raft – Daredevil in his civilian
identity as Matt Murdock, Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman) in her
capacity as a SHIELD officer – when Electro mounts his raid.
Others, like Captain America and Spider-Man, head out there the
moment they realize that there is a problem.

68 • Superheroes!
Bendis’ handling of this material is psychologically acute and

inventive. Faced with the outnumbered superheroes who put them
away, many criminals defer any attempt actually to escape in favour
of mayhem and the quest to find out precisely who, say, Spider-Man
is – the answer being someone they have never noticed. Spider-Man
and Captain America work together effectively, but the older man is
intensely irritated by the younger one’s incessant neurotic bantering
prattle. Bendis makes the rather routine criminal Electro credibly
individual with his decision to do the job in his old costume simply
because he can, and his subsequent attempt to escape frustrated by
his efforts to persuade a waitress he has a crush on to go with him.
This sort of thing is why we read Bendis’ work, but it is not, or at
least not yet, the best of his work with superheroes.
The best is his work on Daredevil and his quite remarkable work
on the comparatively short-lived comic Alias. Alias was followed
by a linked comic of considerable merit, The Pulse, also scripted
by Bendis, which continues the adventures of Jessica Jones, now
a celebrity columnist on the Daily Bugle and in a relationship with
Luke Cage. Since Luke Cage is now a member of the new Avengers,
Jessica also appears in New Avengers, where one issue deals with their
marriage; she is clearly a creation of whom Bendis and his audience
have become very fond. The Pulse overlaps with another short-lived
event, Secret War, also written by Bendis, in the course of which
Luke is injured. A segment of The Pulse deals with the progressively
desperate attempts of the pregnant Jessica to find where he has
been taken for safety. I shall, however, in what follows, restrict
myself to Jessica’s arc in Alias, only mentioning later material about
her by Bendis and others when it is directly relevant.
Alias
Alias was the flagship for MAXX, a Marvel line of comics aimed
at a non-adolescent market. What this meant in practice was that
its heroine was at liberty to be foul-mouthed and drunken, and
to sleep around, none of which was, for once, gratuitous, and all
of which helped contribute to the book’s intelligent meditation

on what it is to be a woman superhero. Alias is, though, the first

mainstream comic in history whose first line is ‘Fuck!’; although on
this occasion it is one of her clients who swears, Jessica’s swearing
is an intrinsic part of her character and within a few panels she
begins as she means to go on.
The events of Alias happen concurrently with some of the events
of Bendis’ run on Daredevil, most especially the outing of the blind
lawyer Matt Murdock as the crime-fighting superhero and his
decision to maintain the deception for the greater public good. If he
acknowledges the truth, he will be prosecuted, jailed and disbarred,
and criminals he has helped put to away will be back on the streets.
The runaway Rebecca’s obsession with Daredevil in Alias’ second
volume, Come Home, relates to this revelation: ‘What I mean is
that I love him for representing something morally ambiguous . . .
this beautiful man who so clearly defines something undefinable’.
Jessica and Luke’s stint as Murdock’s bodyguards overlaps entirely
with incidents in Daredevil where we see the moment when a
disguised Black Widow is allowed past them from her point of view
instead of theirs; Bendis established his own sub-continuity within
the Marvel world.
The overlap is in part thematic: in both comics, the theme being
dealt with is the complexity of truth, the necessity of lies to survival
and the need to make things real again. I mentioned above Electro’s
decision to wear his costume to commit a crime he is hired for, in
which he has no personal investment save his fee; for Bendis, masks
and the reality they both obscure and make manifest are one of the
reasons for his fascination with costumed crime-fighters.
The titles, both of the comic as a whole, and of the individual
volumes in which it has been bound prior to its collection in a
single hardback, are rather more significant in their details than is
sometimes the case; thought has gone into this. Alias as a title for
the series as a whole indicates that it is a book about all the people
Jessica has been – daughter, orphan, mother, lover, sister, hero,
drunk, slut, detective and moral agent; it is a title linked to our
discovery of who Jessica actually is. As the title of the first volume,
it indicates that she is not who she thinks she is, that she can be

70 • Superheroes!
Jessica Jones
To summarize briefly, as written by Brian Michael Bendis,
Jessica Jones, who used to be the superheroine Jewel, until
something bad happened, is a burnt-out case, a hard-drinking
private detective whose cases, during the run of the book,
increasingly pull her away from divorce work and the like and
into a renewed interaction with the world of superheroes and
supervillains from which she walked away some years earlier.
She still has her powers – flight, strength and a degree of
invulnerability – but most of the time she chooses not to use
them; indeed, they make worse the standard tension between
the police and the private sector. Jessica thinks of herself as
someone who is deeply unlovable and unworthy of love, even
though she has friends and lovers who care deeply about her.
She acquires a sidekick, in the shape of a young man who
insists on running her office for her, whether she wants him
to or not. (More recently, in Alan Heinberg’s Young Avengers
comic, we discover that there is a whole generation of
wannabe superheroes who think of her as their role model.)
As presented in the early stages of the comic’s arc,
Jessica is the antithesis of the Good Girl Art superheroine. She
wears baggy clothing instead of a tight revealing costume,
and presents herself as almost shapeless; her hair is unkempt
and her language foul. She is refusing not only to be a
superheroine, but also to present herself in ways that might
be consistent with that role. Where most superheroes have
a secret identity, she is plain Jessica Jones, and unadorned;
one of the more ironic meanings of the title is that where
most characters in a superhero comic present themselves
under secret and assumed identities, she is the simple thing,
unmasked. She refuses glamour along with everything else:
my view is that this is a point about autonomy in general
rather than a specifically feminist one.
more. She can not only return to the person she used to be; she can
be better.
The title of the second volume, Come Home, relates in part to
Jessica’s attempt to find the runaway Rebecca; it also relates to her

growing reinvolvement with the world of superheroing, which she

left and to which she is having gradually to return. Volume three,
The Underneath, refers to the sordid underworld in which Jessica
searches for Mattie Franklin; it also refers to the repressed secrets
that Madame Web forces her to confront. And The Secret Origin of
Jessica Jones, the title of the fourth and last volume, is not merely
a reference to that volume’s flashbacks and explanations of past
trauma; it is an indication that this entire four-volume arc has been
an ‘origin story’, that everything so far in these volumes and the
flashbacks is the story of who Jessica came to be, not Jewel, but
Jessica Jones, the better, stronger, version.
Part of Jessica Jones’ problem, we gradually realize, was that she
came of age and into her powers in a time that expected her to be
a superheroine, always pretty and always bright and cheerful. The
very name she took, Jewel, and her costume of virginal white, sky
blue and pastel pink, were part of a more innocent age, or – more
to the point – part of a more innocent way of looking at things, a
way of looking at things that ignored much of reality. Jewel was
in love with the idea of being a superhero; Alias is a book that
punctures that particular romanticism to replace it with something
equally romantic, but harsher.
A superhero is, very clearly, what Jessica is, no matter what
she says or does. She has the powers and the mission to perform
righteous acts; she also has the liminality. I have been criticized for
seeing liminality wherever I look and need it, but let us confront
the evidence. Jessica has risen from not one, but two comas, and
if there was any question of the extent to which her comas are
metonymic deaths, they should be answered by the scene in which
one of the more obnoxious of her and Peter Parker’s schoolfellows,
Flash Thompson, precipitates her discovery of her powers by
mocking her as ‘freaky coma girl’ while doing a zombie impression.
She has lost her original family; the death of relatives is for heroes a
standard rite of passage, another, social, death.
The name she takes, Jewel, is elemental, and one of her powers
is flight, of a sort, which puts her perpetually in potential transition
between earth and air. Her first flight ends by plunging her into

72 • Superheroes!
water, from which she has to be rescued by Thor. As a noir detective,

she inhabits those most liminal of realms, twilight, darkness and
shadow; in her comas, she inhabits, and is affected and instructed
by, dreams.
One of the strengths of the book is the way that the artwork
constantly changes, from contemporary grime and darkness to
various shades of pastiche, many of them references to Marvel’s
Silver Age heyday or to manga, and to the cute innocence that
Jessica has left behind her, along with her dreams of superheroing.
Bendis’ principal artist on the book, Michael Gaydos, is replaced at
such times by other collaborators for pages or groups of pages. Most
often Mark Bagley and Rodney Ramos, who draw Ultimate Spider-
Man for Bendis, draw these flashback sequences in a deliberately
retro way.
We know from hints that something terrible happened to Jessica a
long time ago; we learn this in part from the sort of self-destructive
behaviour that in popular media and the therapy industry is always
the outward sign of inward trauma. Bendis exercises considerable
restraint in not allowing us to know until the book’s fourth arc
precisely what that trauma was, and just why Jessica refuses to think
of herself as heroic. He trusts the material enough to know that
we will be genuinely shocked when we find out her story, because
there is a sense in which we think we already know it.
Jessica is a woman, and the traumas of women, we think, are
as predictable as those male crimes that create them, but in fact
Jessica’s back-story is both a standard tale of rape and abuse and
something different and even worse. The failure of her relationship
with Scott Lang is demonstrated by her refusal to tell him precisely
what happened in her past: ‘What a guy thing to say? A girl has
a secret in her past – she must have been raped!’. Scott, like the
reader, wants a story that fits neatly into understood categories;
Jessica ends up committing to a relationship with Luke, who comes
to know and accept everything about her, in a relationship workable
because unidealized. He also waits to be told what Jessica’s trauma
is rather than assuming that he knows already.

As her past unfolds and her present spins out of control, we learn
that a superheroine was never a very sensible thing to be; yet, and
this is the journey of learning that Jessica takes in the course of the
title’s run, she comes to terms with the fact that in everyone’s eyes
save her own, she is, and always has been, a hero, whether or not
she puts on a silly costume to fight crime. The simple fact that she
survived what happened to her with her sanity more or less intact
is heroism in itself, and the heroism of ordinary people as well as
that of superheroes. Part of the heroism of ordinary lives is simply
this: to survive experience.
Jessica is of course a completely new character who has no
previous role in Marvel continuity; Jewel is posited, however,
as someone who was at school with Peter Parker, as a girl who
narrowly avoided being run over by the same sort of truck full of
radioactive waste that turned Matt Murdock into Daredevil. Her
parents were killed and her powers were given to her by the type
of experimental military material that produced Captain America.
The Avengers are in her past and she sleeps with Luke Cage, Carol
Danvers is one of her best friends and she has J. Jonah Jameson and
Matt Murdock as clients. When Jessica is in trouble, Murdock is
her lawyer. We read her present in the light of a past that feels like
a comic of the time that we happened never to read.
In an excellent paper delivered to the Wisconsin SF convention,
Wiscon 2006 – ‘The Secret Origins of Jessica Jones’ – Karen Healey
suggests that this story ‘resonates as an echo of feminist efforts in
history and biography, where the real women whose historical roles
were often discarded or downplayed have recently been uncovered
and brought to the light’. Jessica Jones is the Marvel Silver Age
superheroine who was hidden from history. Healey sees this as an
ironic comment, intentional or otherwise, on the way in which
Marvel moved from pre-feminism to post-feminism without much
of a feminist moment in between them.
I am sceptical of the idea that there is any consciously feminist
comment intended here, given that Brian Michael Bendis has
elsewhere shown little in the way of sympathy with anything
that can be called feminism; he was the executor of the deeply

74 • Superheroes!
misogynist strip-mining of Wanda Maximoff’s continuity in Avengers

Disassembled and House of M. His own work as an independent
creator, in Powers or Jinx, say, shows no particular active commitment
to either feminism or misogyny. I would place Alias far more in
the context of his fascination with the preservation of individual
autonomy and authenticity, and the relationship between actual
and apparent truth. This does not rule out a specifically feminist
reading, of course, as long as we are clear that it is not based in
auctorial intention, save as a particular case of a general principle.
There is a further problem with reading Alias as a specifically
feminist text, which is the way that Bendis seems to pose a
dichotomy between Jessica as superhero – whether as the naive
Jewel or the later mature version who finally resolves her problem
– and Jessica as mother of an unborn child. In the last issue of The
Pulse, it is to her child, now newborn, that Jessica addresses a long
speech in which she talks of being a superhero as something that is
now in her past. In earlier issues of that comic, Jessica is attacked
by the Green Goblin and beats him viciously because she fears he
has caused her to miscarry; later she discusses children with the
iconic Marvel mother/heroine Sue Storm, and hangs on her every
word as if she, Jessica, is unworthy. It needs also to be pointed
out that the madness of Wanda Maximoff derives in part from her
magical attempt to recreate children taken from her by a glitch in
reality. It is not to make any negative statement about motherhood
as a career decision by women to say that, in Bendis’ hands, it is
problematic.
I also think it probably more useful to regard this as an example
of what I call ‘the wisdom of continuity’, the way that sometimes
the presence of a gaping hole in what has been done and imagined
hitherto will help individual creators make some of the right
decisions. It hardly matters whether or not Bendis intended the
sort of feminist comment on his chosen genre that Healey so
effectively describes. He was driven by the logic of story and by
the pre-existing complex continuity of the secondary universe he
was working in. His original intention was to work with an existing
female superhero – Spider-Woman – who has, especially as he

writes her here and in his run of New Avengers, some quite significant
issues of her own about being a superhero. Bendis has since written
both an origin story for Spider-Woman in main Marvel continuity
and a version of her in the Ultimate universe, in which she is Peter
Parker’s gender-swapped clone.
When he was not allowed at that point to make Jessica Drew,
Spider-Woman, the central focus of his new project, Bendis created
Jessica Jones rather than work with some more obscure but actually
canonical female character. And the thing that makes Jessica Jones
special, her back-story, derives perhaps less from any direct sense
on Bendis’ part that a feminist parable was needed than from the
need to set himself story challenges that made this new character
interesting.
For example, in the book’s second major plot arc, Jessica is
searching for a teen runaway who may have been the victim of anti-
mutant hate crime; in fact, the reason why Rebecca has been isolated
in a small bigoted town is not that she is a mutant, but because she
is a lesbian. One of the reasons she has allowed her schoolfellows
to think of her as a mutant is that at least having superpowers
would render her vaguely cool, and because it happens that the
local pastor has an obsession with mutants as the anti-scriptural
abomination of the month. As a result of the Claremont period on
the various X-Men comics, and specifically as a result of his God
Loves, Man Kills (1982), anti-mutant prejudice has been so solidly
coded in Marvel comics as a way of writing about homophobia in
general, and religiously motivated homophobia in particular, that
Bendis does not have to have been aiming for any great enlightened
statement about gay teen angst to have come up with this plot.
Yet this arc, with its extended examples of the girl’s scrapbook
and artwork, is a telling portrayal of that angst of which Bendis
and David Mack, who normally drew the Alias covers but produced
several pages of Rebecca’s artwork in collaboration with his partner
Anh Trahn, should be rightly proud. The dialogue between Jessica
and the smugly bigoted local preacher is particularly admirable, as
is her clumsy fling with the well-intentioned local sheriff. Part of
the arc’s strength is that Jessica does not actually do very much; she

76 • Superheroes!
is a long way from being a great detective. She talks to Rebecca’s

separated parents, gets drunk and has sex with the local sheriff,
looks at Rebecca’s work and talks to her schoolfellows, and is
wrong-headedly suspicious of the local reporter who tries to help
her. She fails to foresee or to prevent the murder of Rebecca’s
father; she only finds Rebecca – who is reading her poetry in a bar
– because a neighbour boy knows where she is. She brings Rebecca
back just in time to witness the arrest of her aunt and for the girl
to be attacked by her mother. About the most impressive thing she
does for Rebecca is an accident; driving her back, Jessica takes a
phone call from Matt Murdock, who is having troubles of his own,
and Rebecca, who hero-worships him, has a second of glee in the
reflected glory of overhearing.
What we take away from this arc, though, is not any political
message so much as an awareness that Jessica has, as one of her
powers, one not usually thought of as a superpower but nonetheless
important. She has the ability to empathize out from her own
damage to other people’s; she is an adequate detective in spite of
the drink and the messy emotional life because she is motivated by
other people’s pain. Given a choice between her professional ethics
as a private detective and moral behaviour, she always chooses the
latter. Acting as a cyber-honey-trap for a gay married man, she
gives him a serious talking to about the necessity of confessing to
his wife as well as simply giving his wife the dirt. Typically, though,
she pumps him for his psychiatric knowledge before coming clean.
Jessica, Captain America and the Nature of

Heroism
In the book’s first arc, Jessica gets caught up in what might be a
standard narrative of blackmail and murder, but is given more
point by her past and by the context of the superhero life. A woman
whom Captain America has been seeing is murdered; Jessica finds
herself with a film record of his secret identity that places him
at the scene of the crime. Knowing that she is caught up in the
machinations of people who will kill to serve the workings of their

plot, and with no particular reason to feel warmth towards Captain

America, Jessica does the right thing almost obsessionally and at
some risk to herself – she is tough but she is not invulnerable.
She is arrested on suspicion of being the killer and then assaulted
by the actual murderer, a giant thug for hire whom she beats into
giving her the name of his employer. The thug, Man Mountain
Marko, is a Marvel Silver Age minor villain – Spider-Man beat him
a couple of times – to whom Bendis gives unlovely sexual fantasies
about his victims’ corpses. The woman who originally hires Jessica
spins a spurious tale of lost sisters that almost certainly directly
references Chandler’s The Little Sister; when Jessica tracks her down
to a campaign headquarters, the reference is to Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver. The dialogue between her and her police interrogator again
has Philip Marlowe’s blend of intransigence and sarcasm, as well
as a strong implication that she has been arrested purely so that
a cop can play out a sexual scenario involving superheroines that
is running in his head. The echoes of Chandler, associating Jessica
with the virtues of the noir hero as described by Chandler, help
demonstrate, even at this early stage, that Jessica is wrong about
herself. Given the deeply misogynistic assumptions of much of
Chandler’s work, there is a conceptual wit in linking this flawed
heroine to him, and yet Chandler’s most famous description applies
to her:
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself
mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be
a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He
must be . . . a man of honour. He talks as the man of his age talks,
that is with rude wit, with a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust
for sham and a contempt for pettiness.
Gendered pronouns aside, it is remarkable how accurate a

description of Jessica Jones this is, honourable, sarcastic, foul-
mouthed and committed to a sense of herself as ordinary as she is.

The Simple Art of Murder (1944).

78 • Superheroes!
In a few pages of investigation, Bendis references Jessica as

superhero, detective, objectified sexual fantasy and vigilante; but
as well as all these popular culture archetypes she is a vulnerable
woman who picks Luke Cage up in bars, has a blistering row with
him when she turns up unannounced in the middle of the night
and is too scared to go into her own apartment. Jessica cannot
forgive herself for the simple fact that she is a normal human being
at the same time as being someone who can fight and fly; she sees
contradictions where none exist. She has been made to question
everything about herself and come up with some harsh answers.
The plot she has been embroiled in is less a matter of framing
Captain America for murder than of revealing his identity and
embarrassing a President who has been seen to favour him and
other superheroes. This can usefully be seen as a comment on
the culture of sexual scandal and the undercutting of heroes and
authority figures that featured so heavily during the presidency of
Bill Clinton, a period when his wife referred to a ‘vast right-wing
conspiracy’ of the kind we see here. It would not work nearly so
well with a character less iconically clear-cut as Captain America;
Bendis is reminding us that even paragons have sexual lives, and,
by extension, that Jessica can have a messy sexual life and still be
a paragon. Even more importantly, Jessica is learning that even
paragons are human and vulnerable.
The immediate potential beneficiary of the plot is a Democratic
candidate; the men with whom real power lies are beyond party
as they are beyond the law. Though not, as it happens, beyond the
capacity of extra-legal authority to intervene: the security agency
SHIELD has bugged Jessica without her knowledge and takes the
conspirators down after a confrontation in which her life has been
threatened and the threat taped. The usual sympathy of Marvel’s
editors and writers with a left-wing or liberal political position is
thoroughly on display here, not least in the way that the conspirators
are punished as they would not have been in life – we will see other
examples of this political bias in the Marvel comics of the early
2000s, but it was hardly a new thing.

The fact that the plotters’ scheme depends heavily on the

assumption that Jessica will do the weak thing and the venal thing
can be seen as a demonstration of the misogynist politics of such
conspiracies, but is more usefully seen as a demonstration to the
reader that Jessica is not what she might be, and has every excuse
for being. She works for hire, but her soul remains her own; there
are very good reasons indeed why she is unhappy with the idea that
anyone might manipulate her.
One of the book’s most poignant bits of dialogue comes when
Captain America comes to see Jessica in his civilian garb as Steve
Rogers.
CA: You didn’t give up the tape
JJ: I guess, to everyone’s shock – No, I didn’t. But – to be honest
– it didn’t even occur to me to do that until he told me that
was what they were counting on.
CA: Have we met before?
JJ: Yes
CA: Hey, yeah, you were at the Avengers mansion
JJ: A couple of times
CA: Ah, don’t be insulted . . . Why don’t you do it any more?
JJ Just don’t
CA: No, I really want to know. I never met anyone who— I really
want to know
JJ: Because. Well, because it became very clear that I could
never be you.You, any of you. I just don’t have what it takes.
I don’t have that thing. That thing that inspires people to be, I
dunno, better than they are. That thing . . . So.
CA: Well, like I said before. I’ve met a million people in my life.
And I honestly can’t think of three who would have done this
for me. What you did? You protected me when I needed it
most. You did it. And that’s – well, that’s the stuff, so what
I’m saying is that maybe you’re being a little hard on yourself,
huh? Okay?
JJ: You’re not going to salute me or anything, are you?
Even as early in the book as this, Jessica gets an endorsement from

one of Marvel’s principal icons of folksy righteousness. Bendis

80 • Superheroes!
avoids the trap of subtlety here: we know Jessica is too hard on

herself, but it does not hurt that knowledge to have Captain
America tell her so. Also, she is outside the standard model of
reaction to superhero behaviour to the extent that she finds it
embarrassing; she can take praise from Captain America, but an
actual salute would be too much. One of the problems with the
standard model of superheroing that Alias raises is just this – how
can you be a superhero and self-conscious at the same time? The
finest thing about Captain America here is that he is not too proud
to acknowledge that he needed help and she gave it to him; this is
the most important lesson he teaches Jessica. After a girls’ night out
with Carol Danvers, who is still a superheroine in spite of major
traumas of her own – the scene is a Sex in the City exchange in
which Carol portrays Luke as an obsessive, a ‘cape-chaser’ who only
ever dates women with powers – it is back to the job for Jessica,
investigating the gay psychiatrist mentioned earlier and a missing
husband whose back-story is peculiarly relevant to her own.
Carol Danvers and Rogue

Carol Danvers discovered herself to be in an advanced state
of pregnancy, which turned out to be the result of her being
impregnated by a time-traveller who had abducted and
seduced her, using mind control in order that she give birth
to him. He then grew rapidly to maturity, in order to abduct
and seduce her. Not only was she grotesquely abused by
her lover/child (who then aged into senility as fast as he had
matured), but her colleagues in the Avengers failed to notice
that she was hardly in her right mind when she agreed to all
of this, and let her go off without thinking things through.
The superhero community has let both Carol and Jessica
down, largely by being unthinking men with a tendency to
think women capable of any irrational behaviour, and not to
examine the possible causes.
Later, Carol Danvers fought the mutant woman Rogue
at a point when the latter was still a villain – indeed, their
fight precipitated Rogue’s self-reinvention as a hero and an

Though it could easily be taken for a simple piece of plot

machinery, Jessica’s friendship with Carol Danvers is – seen from
the vantage point of long-term Marvel continuity – something
rather more; there are reasons why these two damaged women are
each other’s support mechanism beyond banter about men. For
one thing, Carol Danvers has a history of alcohol abuse rather like
Jessica’s; she left the Avengers for a while in disgrace after drinking
on the job. For another, she has a back-story as traumatic as Jessica’s
turns out to be, one that, like Jessica’s, turns on her sense of self.
Jessica’s involvement with Luke Cage is something that
embroils her with continuity at a serious level, as well as being
one of the many ways in which Bendis uses this comic to challenge
unexamined orthodoxies. The relationship between Jessica and
Luke starts off as casual sex, for one thing, and as casual sex that
may have consequences, but not automatically negative ones.
Interracial relationships are rare in comics to begin with, and, given
their controversial status within the African-American community
X-Man (people who only know Rogue as the waif of the X-

Men movies will be in some severe misapprehension as to her
back-story). Contact with Rogue’s bare flesh enables Rogue to
steal other superbeings’ powers for a while; Rogue’s fight with
Carol entailed, largely inadvertently, a far greater theft. Carol
lost most of the qualia aspect of her memories – she was left
knowing the facts of her life, but not how they felt.
Rogue, on the other hand, suffered for a while from a
version of multiple personality disorder, and in the long term
acquired a level of empathy that made simple villainy no
longer an option for her. Carol has recovered much of her
sense of self, but only gradually: the worst of it is that she is
denied standard comic-book closure through violence by the
fact that Rogue has reformed. When she confronted Rogue,
the X-Men defended their new colleague and Rogue was
genuinely sorry. There are reasons why Carol is a boisterous
woman about town, though it is clear that, at least in Bendis’
version of her, she is also quietly a haunted woman.

82 • Superheroes!
as well as among whites, have become a site of potential conflict

since the 1970s, when Luke’s white friend Iron Fist was involved
with the African-American Misty Knight. It is probably the case
that Jessica and Luke are the first such couple where the woman
is white. Later, in The Pulse, after the birth of their child, Luke
specifically refers to the issues surrounding their relationship as a
‘biracial superhero couple’ when proposing to Jessica.
Luke is not just any African-American character; he was one
of the more durable products of Marvel’s attempt in the 1970s
to open out the traditionally white-bread superhero. He was,
specifically, Marvel’s take on the trash-talking, no compromises
hero of blaxploitation films, a former criminal with a bad attitude
and an invulnerable hide. His actual title lasted for 120 issues or so,
and the character proved even more durable.
Jessica as Outsider
Jessica’s next case involves Rick Jones, almost the living spirit of
Marvel continuity; it was in saving him from an atomic test that
Bruce Banner was turned into the Hulk and for a while Rick Jones
was the angry monster’s good angel. Later, when Captain America
was defrosted, he was the trainee sidekick for a man out of his
time; later still, he was the alter ego of the alien warrior Captain
Marvel, changing places and dimensions with a clash of wristbands.
In some mystical sense, Rick is the living embodiment of human
evolutionary potential: he stopped a devastating interstellar war
between the Skrull and the Kree with a few mystic passes. From
time to time, he is kidnapped from his life as a mediocre singer-
songwriter to be threatened, or taken hostage; he is one of the
Marvelverse’s representatives both of ordinary humanity and of
the extraordinary potential that Stan Lee’s liberalism sees in the
ordinary. This section of Alias is interspersed with extracts from
the ‘real’ Rick Jones’ autobiography, illustrated by Bill Sienkewicz
in a brightly coloured hyper-real style that offers a profound
contrast to the noir, muddy style of Gaydos’ work with its thick
lines.

Jessica is hired by Rick’s flaky wife to find him and, without any
great difficulty, finds him playing his guitar; she is saddened to find
him a paranoid mess, who sees alien enemies round every corner.
For a while she believes, and tries to help, only to discover from the
Avengers’ butler that this is an impostor, that the authentic Rick
Jones is still in LA. Yet her empathy with him and his wife is an
empathy with real pain and disorientation, even if nothing they tell
her is factually true; Jessica is always in good faith.
She has seen herself in this classic sidekick; she sees herself even
more in someone who is not even a sidekick, but a crazy person
who wants to be one, who wants to be more important than they
are. ‘People like to have a little bit of the fantastic in their lives,’ the
psychiatrist tells her,‘and they want it so bad that they’ll put on hold
any rational logic so they can hold onto it. They’ll believe any crap
you tell them, so badly do they want not to be ordinary.’ Jessica,
whom we already recognize to be extraordinary in a number of
ways, applies this fallaciously to herself.
Talking to ‘Rick Jones’, she confides that she shares his sense
of the huge excitement involved in actually being near or with
superheroes. She cannot be a superhero herself, she claims,
because if she were, she would not find this exciting. True, she has
powers, but that does not make her special. Because this part of
the conversation is placed out of chronological order, after she
realizes ‘Rick Jones’ is a fraud, after her chat with the psychiatrist,
we realize what she does not, which is that an epiphany that results
from hanging out with a crazy person may not be as useful as all
that.
The two extended conversations that end the second volume
are ones in which Jessica finds herself at a distinct disadvantage,
that she has entirely earned. Sharing a gig with Luke, acting as
bodyguards to Matt Murdock – elsewhere in Bendis’ work of
the time Matt Murdock has been outed as Daredevil and is busy
denying everything – she has to stand and take it when Luke spells
out to her his point of view about how badly she has treated him.
She raises the cape-chaser issue and he says, superficially sensibly:
‘If I was a lawyer, I would probably end up fucking a lot of lawyers,

84 • Superheroes!
but being in our profession, I am probably going to end up fucking

a lot of people. In our profession.’
Jessica does not pick Luke up on this, but it is clear that he does
not regard her as a civilian, describing, as he does, being a superhero
as ‘our’ profession. And, of course, one of the reasons why she can
take this from him is that Luke has never bought in to most of the
stock but unneeded aspects of superheroing – the costume, the
mask, the secret identity – and he has always been ‘hero for hire’,
a mercenary. He is not Captain America, nor does he pretend to
be; he is not the embodiment of an ideal, just a working stiff with
powers. He is, in his own way, as Chandlerian a figure as she is and
as totally a teller of unwelcome truths.
There is a clear contrast between Luke’s bluntness when he
tells Jessica that her behaviour is not adult and the elliptical way
in which, on a first date, Carol’s colleague in the Avengers, Scott
Lang, asks Jessica not to drink. Scott Lang appears to be what
Jessica needs in some ways: like her he has a past, in his case a term
in prison, which he has got over to become a superhero. He also
has a much-loved daughter Cassie, later to emerge as a superhero
in her own right, as Stature of the Young Avengers. Scott Lang is
always a possible permanent relationship for Jessica, though he
lacks the down and dirty appeal of Luke; the interruption of their
first date by a battle between a team-up of Spider-Man and the
Human Torch, and Doctor Octopus, indicates that the exigencies
of the superhero life may always be what comes between them.
Lang’s suggestion that Jessica have a soft drink instead of
vodka is rendered irrelevant by the fact that their waitress, who
has presumably taken cover, is not coming back. And though his
remarks about her drinking were phrased far less bluntly than
Luke’s more general criticism of her behaviour, she resents them
more – ‘it was totally rude’ – even though she knows ‘I kind of
needed someone to do that for me’. For reasons of which we are
not yet aware, Jessica has a problem with people who manipulate
her and with people who assume authority over her.

Jessica and Female Solidarity

This becomes apparent in her dealings with J. Jonah Jameson,
Marvel New York’s crusading newspaper editor with the obsessive
hatred of Spider-Man. He hires her to get the goods on Spider-
Man’s secret identity and sets her to work with Ben Urich, his
investigative reporter. Like many others who work for Jameson,
Urich has no especial brief for the editor’s obsessions; he has known
Daredevil’s identity for a long time, and also turns out (in Bendis’
later comic featuring Jessica, The Pulse) to have guessed Spider-
Man’s. He is only too delighted to cooperate when Jessica uses the
newspaper’s expenses money to do social work on the pretext of
hanging around soup-kitchens and AIDS wards, spending Jameson’s
money on following spurious leads.
Just as she does not cavil at Cage’s reference to ‘our’ profession,
so Jessica bridles at Jameson’s remarks about superheroes as much as
she does at his insults to private eyes. Jessica’s reaction to Jameson’s
combination of bullying and insults is not, though, necessarily an
ideal response – however natural it is – to his insults of her both
as former superhero and as private eye, because, as it happens, she
turns out to have to deal with Jameson on rather different terms.
After a brief incident – she is buying cigarettes and walks into a
robbery, then has to keep the shopkeeper from hurting the robber,
then has to pay for her cigarettes – which reminds her why she does
not work as a superhero, Jessica finds a young, confused, angry girl
wearing a Spider-Man costume in her apartment.
‘Jessica?’ the girl says, and ‘They lied to me!’ before staggering
to the window, leaping through it and flying drunkenly off into
the night, banging into adjacent buildings as she goes. Jessica
takes refuge with Scott – who is only too keen to let her do so
and thus score ‘potential boyfriend brownie points’ – and asks
another ex-boyfriend, Clay Quartermain of SHIELD, for the girl’s
identity. When not giving her a hard time about dating an Ant-Man,
Quartermain tells her that, of the three extant Spider-Women,
this one is probably Mattie Franklin, an orphan who is J. Jonah
Jameson’s ward.

86 • Superheroes!
In subsequent retrospect, the Mattie Franklin affair turns out to

be one that has even more ramifications for Jessica than we realize
at the time. Her concern is misunderstood: Jameson mistakes her
enquiries for a shakedown and Jessica Drew, the principal Spider-
Woman, turns up at her apartment and hurts her simply for asking
questions. Jessica Jones is forced to face uncomfortable facts about
herself; the psychic Madame Web finds out about her past as well as
prophesying danger in the imminent future. Mattie turns out to be
in a type of trouble that Jessica knows more about than she realizes:
Mattie has been hooked on drugs by a low-level gangster who, it is
implied, is pimping her as well as leeching her blood to make the
drug MGH, which gives its addicts temporary superpowers.
This is a case in which Jessica has to accept help, from her
irritating would-be sidekick Malcolm and his extended social circle,
from Jessica Drew, from the incompetent superhero Speedball. She
also has to compromise on her relentless refusal of glamour: she
needs to get into a dance club and does herself up to the nines to do
so. Later, when she and Jessica Drew need to get into a hotel suite,
they pretend to be a gangster’s groupies and charm their way past
a hotel clerk. Jessica has to compromise, and in moderation this is
not a bad thing.
This is also a sequence in which we are reminded that a lifestyle
like superheroing with its constant fights is one in which it is possible
for even the strongest person – and Jessica is only in the Marvel
Universe’s low middle range of strength – to get seriously hurt.
Taken by surprise by the gangster Denny’s drug-induced strength,
Jessica is beaten badly; returning home battered, she is attacked by
Jessica Drew (whom she knocks down in retaliation) and briefly
stunned by Speedball’s psychedelic bubbles. The fight with the
drug-empowered gangsters is one in which all three superheroes
get hurt. Jessica Jones only survives because she is prepared to be
seriously violent, smashing a television over Denny’s head and then
finishing him off with a phone handset.
Where most superhero conflicts in the comics are choreographed
combats, the fight here has the messiness of real violence. Speedball
does not even realize that the two women are on his side until Jessica

Drew suggests he pay attention to the fact that she and Jessica Jones
have just ‘kicked the shit out of everyone but you’. Speedball is
there working with the police; Jessica Jones flies away from them
with Mattie – the first time we have seen her fly. She has finally to
use the powers she despises and she does so to help a young woman
who has been drugged and victimised by a superficially charming
man.
When we finally learn Jessica Jones’ own back-story, we realize
with a shock of recognition that in rescuing Mattie, she is rescuing
her own younger self, carrying out a rescue that did not happen in
her case. Mattie is important to Jessica’s own cure, simply because
they have so much in common. By making a story so close to her
own come out better, Jessica starts to heal.
This arc has a brief epilogue: after a stint in rehab, Mattie turns
up to thank Jessica, and we learn that Jameson has for once done
the right thing and has praised Jessica’s heroism in the Daily Bugle.
This is an effective and charming little plot point – the thing
about Jameson, his schtick in long-term continuity, is that he hates
superheroes almost as much as the villains they fight. Later on, in
the Civil War storyline, he faints from sheer rage on discovering
that his long-term employee, photographer Peter Parker, is
Spider-Man. Mattie’s confused remarks about a mysterious ‘they’
who lied to her, her desperate search for Jessica Drew, these are
never explained except as the result of her drug-addled paranoid
fantasies; some bits of some plots never get resolved (though not,
as it transpires, Jessica’s own).
Scott Lang turns up and he and Jessica settle their differences.
She is furious that he has not been in touch; he is furious that he is
in love with this woman he does not understand; and yet somehow
they talk it through. She tells him to stick his head up an ant’s ass;
he tells her that he is in love with her. And they agree to go out
again. All of this is Bendis deliberately misleading us and setting up
further hurt both in Alias and other bits of Marvel continuity. (Scott
is one of the Avengers that Wanda Maximoff kills in her frenzy; his
daughter Cassie is one of theYoung Avengers who so admires Jessica
as a role model.) Jessica is investing in people again, which means

88 • Superheroes!
that she is becoming vulnerable; in letting herself have hostages to

fortune she is starting once more to have something to lose.
The Secret Origin of Jessica Jones

The Secret Origin of Jessica Jones starts as one might expect, with the
secret origin story for the superheroine she used to be, a pastiche of
Marvel 1960s story-telling, full of referentiality. At school, Jessica
is so anonymous that, when people are mocking Peter Parker for
being ‘Midtown High’s only professional wallflower’ they do not
even notice her to taunt her on similar grounds. She is hung up
on Parker, and ironically is just about to speak to him about this
when he suffers the spider bite whose consequences we, but not
everyone else, know. Distracted, she nearly walks under a truck of
radioactive waste similar to the one that blinds Daredevil. Jessica
is, at this point in her career, perpetually on the brink of something
happening; she is living in the New York that produced so many of
Marvel’s superheroes at the time when that happened.
Her little brother catches her masturbating over photographs
of the Human Torch – I suspect that Jessica is possibly the only
superhero, let alone the only female one, who has been shown
masturbating, however discreetly – and next day mocks her for
it in the family car; the ensuing fight between them causes her
father to take his eye off the road and crash, fatally, into an army
lorry carrying ‘hazardous experimental material’. Her parents and
brother are killed, and Jessica spends six months in a coma before
being ousted from it by a power-outage caused by Galactus and the
Silver Surfer, presumably during their first confrontation with the
Fantastic Four.
Adopted by a pleasant middle-aged couple – not her relatives,
but otherwise remarkably similar to Parker’s Uncle Ben and Aunt
May – Jessica returns to school, to find herself no longer ignored,
but the object of fascinated prurient interest and occasional
mockery from the bully Flash. Peter expresses solidarity in the face
of bullying, neither of them knowing for many years just how alike
they are at this point, and she takes his concern for pity, and rejects

it. Full of adolescent angst, she runs off into the long summer
afternoon towards the next stage of her destiny.
All of this is part and parcel of the stock Marvel superhero
origin story: the accident, the alienation, the sense that no one
understands; and now comes the realization that one is no longer
as others, that life has been radically reconfigured. Images flash
through Jessica’s mind as she runs – her dead brother, Peter on
the brink of his destiny, Flash mocking her, her father about to die,
her pin-up of the Human Torch. At this point Gaydos gives us a
page of small-panel reprises of all of these images as they occurred
elsewhere in Alias; this moment – fugally bringing in all sorts of
moments and Jessica’s state of abstraction – is known as fugue. She
is thinking about sex, death and alienation, and suddenly all of this
climaxes in her realization that she is many feet above the city, that
she has run into the sky.
What happens next is what never happens even to other Marvel
superheroes as far as we have seen: Jessica falls out of the sky and
into the Hudson, and has to be rescued by Thor before she drowns.
He asks how she came to be so far from land, but does not stay for
an answer – too busy ticking her off for her cursing at what has
just happened and too distracted by the adulation of people who
are more interested in the saviour than the girl he just saved. Thor
saves her life, but in important ways, he also lets her down now and
later; his treatment of her demonstrates how flawed the sense of
mission even of a god can be.
With J. Jonah Jameson denouncing Spider-Man on the television,
for the first time in what is to be almost two decades of Marvel
time, Jessica asks her adopted father what someone should do,
if they developed powers, and why the public have such mixed
attitudes to superheroes. ‘Image’, he answers her – people like the
superheroes clean-cut like the Fantastic Four, while Spider-Man is
too ‘creepy’. As to the mission that goes with the image. ‘Would
I try to help people? We’re supposed to. It’s a society and all that.
But . . . when it comes down to it, it’s hard to know who’s worth
risking your life for.’ Jessica gets far less sage advice than Peter does,

90 • Superheroes!
but her subsequent actions indicate that she thinks she understands
that same sense of mission.
In the event, the decision is taken out of her hands by events;
she goes out to try out the extent of her powers, discovering her
strength and becoming rather better at flying. She sees a robbery
in process: the C-grade costumed villain, the Scorpion, is robbing
the customers of a laundromat for the contents of their wallets
and purses. Jessica descends from the sky and lands on him
with a ‘whump’. One of the by-standers asks her if she is ‘like, a
superhero?’ and she confirms that she is. Jessica first accepts the
title when someone gives it to her – someone who also thinks
that costumes are a fad – and it really is as simple as that, in the
beginning.
In the present day, Jessica is offered, through Murdock, a case
almost surreal in its comic book aspects: she is asked to go to the
Savage Land, a secret jungle enclave in Antarctica, and search for
its white ruler’s lost sabre-tooth. To take this case would be to
place herself entirely back in the world of superheroes and their
adventures, so of course Jessica refuses, claiming, untruthfully to
some extent, that she hates to travel. But her superhero past keeps
haunting her as a result of Jameson’s positive news coverage; even
her crank clients are men who think their wives are sleeping with
the Hulk. Then she has a case referred to her from the Avengers’
mansion, a request involving a figure from her own past. Gaydos’
art is particularly telling as she listens to the answering machine:
three frames of her looking down in almost identical drawings, then
the machine, and then her face looking up with an expression of
real anguish. Then she dashes from the room, in a series of frames
that centre on the phone, and we hear the noise of her vomiting.
We still have no idea of what happened to her in the past, but
for the first time we have a clue – the phone message mentions
the Purple Man, Killgrave. It needs stressing at this point that
before Alias we have never thought of Killgrave as a particularly
interesting villain. He is a second- or third-string villain with an
odd appearance and a mildly creepy power, who has been beaten
by the likes of Daredevil. His power – compelling people to do

what he wants – is interesting enough, but he has been shown as

vulnerable to people with a will strong enough to overcome his.
Yet Jessica’s reaction is extreme. She does what she would never
normally do and goes to the Avengers’ mansion to shout at Carol
Danvers, who has given her name to these potential clients.Whereas
in their previous rather superficial conversation in the first book,
Carol was dressed as a civilian, here, when they are talking rawly
about real things, she is, of course, in the superhero costume that is
the essential truth about her. Jessica is furious and Carol refuses to
regard her anger as legitimate; there are people whom Jessica can
help and it is ultimately as simple as that. Interestingly, given how
she is dressed at the time, Carol makes a distinction between ‘the
person you act like’ and the person ‘you really are’, and ties their
friendship very closely to her knowledge of that fact, also saying
that Scott feels the same.
Carol may be right and she may be wrong – her talk of closure
is perhaps a psychobabble too far – and it is clear that Jessica has
always regarded their friendship as being about shared denial:‘What
I need is for you to stop telling me what I need. I would never
throw shit in your face about all the fucked up things you’ve . . .’
What makes this especially telling as a demonstration that Jessica
at this point regards friendship as being about shared denial is that
Carol Danvers has, in continuity, a genuinely disturbed personal
history. This is a good example of what I have called, in Chapter 1,
texture; the reader does not have to know the back-story, just to
feel confident that the writer does.This particular thread in Jessica’s
story is not entirely done with until issue 13 of The Pulse, when they
discuss it while Jessica is in labour and Carol both acknowledges
her past and makes a sardonic joke of it: ‘ But I really doubt that’s
going to happen to you now . . . Odds alone.’
Captain America appears and asks Jessica in for tea, but she is
not ready to socialize in the Avengers’ mansion. And she and Scott
have another row, partly because he acknowledges that he actually
knows all about Killgrave, it came up in the security clearance
before they started dating. Jessica screams at him ‘Respect my
fucking boundaries’ – which could almost serve as an epigraph for

92 • Superheroes!
the entire series – and leaves him in the cab where he has joined
her, growing from ant-size to normal to the annoyance of the
cabbie, and without a wallet. Jessica flies up to a rooftop and is sick
again, at which point she tellingly feels her stomach. This is typical
of Bendis’ economy and capacity to play fair with his audience – he
is simultaneously referring back to the stress Jessica feels when
thinking about Killgrave and to the pregnancy that we start to
realize is a part of her story.
The scene in which Jessica confronts the families whose relatives
Killgrave killed and has not admitted to is quietly gruelling; it
helps set up the realization by those of us who have encountered
the character in other comics that this is a far darker take on the
man who can make anyone do anything than we have encountered
before. It really does not matter that the specifics – he made the
people in a diner stop breathing so he can eat in peace, and later
that he makes people fight to the death for his amusement or to
make a point – owe more than a little to the diner scene in an early
issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman; as Stravinsky once said, ‘Good
artists pay homage, great artists steal’.
The Jessica who acknowledges that she has prior experience of
Killgrave and agrees to help the relatives’ pressure group put things
to rest is a quieter, less abrasive Jessica than we have seen up to this
point. It is interesting that, when she returns the original call and
agrees to meet them, she is looking at the photograph of herself as
Jewel standing with a younger Carol; she is trying to pay attention
to Carol’s suggestion that she, like the relatives, needs closure.
Bendis is a realist about the emotions. We next see Jessica waking
up in some confusion after making a drunken idiot of herself in
Luke Cage’s apartment, flying in his window in the middle of the
night, smashing his refrigerator and vomiting on her clothing.
Embarrassment as much as the process of healing has made her
ready to tell Luke the story of what happened to her – that, and his
attractively abrasive, laconic attitude to Killgrave – ‘Guy’s a little
fuck with an attitude.’
The time has come for Bendis to tell us what happened to Jessica,
and Luke, partly because of his capacity for stillness, is the perfect

listener. I have talked before of the skill with which Gaydos uses
small, almost identical panels, to represent slow changes of mood,
and this is particularly relevant here. What makes the back-story
peculiarly unbearable is, of course, that it is represented in a light
cartoony style, as a Marvel comic of its supposed time, in an earlier
less gritty age, with the alliterative credits – ‘Bashful Brian Bendis’
and ‘Magnificent Mike Gaydos’ – that characterized Marvel’s
slightly tongue-in-cheek early years. Jewel is flying through New
York, she hears a commotion, sees two men fighting and walks
between them, into a personal hell.
Here and later, Killgrave is represented not only as a supervillain
with the power to warp minds, as a misogynist whose first reaction
is to tell a pretty girl to remove her top and as a selfish man who
sends her out to beat up policemen in order that he can finish his
meal, but as a critic of the whole superhero ethic. He asks Jewel
for her name, ‘Not your silly made-up name, your real name.’
Killgrave understands the magic power of real names; he is not a
magician, because his power is based on pheromones, but he acts
as if he were.
The most chilling moment in Jessica’s story comes in the
interlude after this first tranche of back-story when Luke asks her
how long Killgrave had her and she says ‘Eight months’. Everyone
– her friends and her colleagues and her family – simply failed to
notice that she had disappeared and was in the worst place in the
world. For eight months. It is also impressive that Bendis avoids the
obvious – Killgrave did not rape Jessica. He constantly humiliated
her in every other sexual way possible: she had to bathe him, she
had to watch while he raped random pick-ups he had compelled
to make love to him and (it is clear from the illustrations) to each
other and ‘on a rainy night, with nothing to do, he’d make me beg
for it’. Jessica became Killgrave’s whipping girl for every defeat he
had ever had at the hands and fists of male superheroes. For eight
months.
This is both terrifying in itself, and also sensitive. Rape would
have been the cliché; it would also have been something that left
Bendis open to the charge of being a man who did not understand

94 • Superheroes!
the issues. By making the issue humiliation of a kind that is less

gender-specific, Bendis writes with greater empathy and less
chance of alienating his audience or writing crypto-pornography.
To have one’s will taken away, to lose the authenticity of one’s own
feelings, is one of the worst things of all.
All of this ended in a catharsis, when Killgrave, in a moment
of petulance, sent Jessica out to attack the Avengers; interestingly,
given his own history with the character, the victim of her
apparently unprovoked assault is Wanda Maximoff. Bendis also
reminds us of the actual consequences of violence, too often left
prettied up in the Marvel and DC universes – Jessica’s attack is met
with deadly force by Thor. He misses, but then she is attacked by
Wanda’s android husband, the Vision, and he leaves her seriously
broken and in a coma from which she takes months to awaken. The
superhero world failed to save her, and then it nearly killed her.
Carol had failed her for eight months, but saved her in this
moment. And people went on saving her, whether she wanted
them to or not; in a dream drawn so that the characters have
the big eyes and cute perky noses of Japanese manga comics, the
psychic mutant Jean Grey befriends and wakes her, Carol and Clay
Quartermain and Nick Fury offer her a dream job, as SHIELD
liaison with the Avengers, and what seems like the entire superhero
world apologizes to her. And Jessica refuses, because she is done
with the superhero life.
This is a moment that Bendis reprises twice, in not especially
obvious ways. In a thoroughly feeble – arguably deliberately and
sarcastically so – ‘What if?’ comic, he shows us what would have
happened if Jessica had said yes, and taken the job. She is a complete
superhero, who spots early on that Wanda Maximoff is going off
the rails, and is so perfect that she gets to marry Captain America.
It is interesting that one aspect of this alternate world is that what
is probably the worst storyline Bendis has ever been involved with
does not happen. The other point about it is that in it Jessica moves
from being a viewpoint character in whom the writer is heavily
invested to being what is called, in the world of fanfiction, a Mary
Sue, a mere surrogate for auctorial wish-fulfilment. Jessica needs to

The Pulse
The second reprise of Jessica’s back-story was in the last issue
of Bendis’ The Pulse, offering another rebuke to the convenient
pieties of the comic book. In a piece of retconning, which
risked falsifying the achievement of Alias but is so well done
that it does not, we learn that Jessica did give superheroing
one last shot before becoming a moody drunken gumshoe.
She dressed up in a dark, masked costume and called herself
Knightress, for about a week. In one of Alias’ several jokes with
superhero time, it is suddenly the comics world of the late
1980s and early 1990s:
Got myself a new look. I was in a much darker place. I tried

to reflect that . . . And now I look back on it and I get that
little throw-up in my mouth that I get when I think of my
hair choices back then. And truthfully . . . everyone was
doing darker costumes back then. Even Spider-Man went
all black. It was the super hero equivalent of leg-warmers.
The fact that the look and name she adopts are closely parallel
to those of DC’s dark superheroine of the time, Batman’s ally
the Huntress, is a joke about the constant reworking of that
character’s origins.
Jessica as Knightress gets in on a fight with the C-list
supervillain, the Owl, and is cut helping out Luke, whom she
meets for the first time on this occasion, who is enough out of
the loop that he has no idea of her back-story. We realize that
this is part of his attraction for her. She also gives up this new
secret identity in a flash when the children of a minor arrested
villain need to be taken somewhere other than the police
station and she needs to prove she is a responsible person.
Jessica, even this damaged cynical Jessica, knows what is
important and what has to be sacrificed for it; she empathizes
with the children because she remembers how it was when
she lost her parents. She still thinks at this point that she is
‘a bad person’; when she falls asleep on Luke’s arm – he has
come to her apartment to help with child care and really is ‘a
different kind of superhero’ as Marvel used to say – he looks
down fondly at this woman he has just met and says ‘Yeah,
you suck.’ This is, in this context, one of the tenderest of the
many tender things Bendis has him say to her.

96 • Superheroes!
work through problems in a real way, in real time, not in the rapid
turn-around and reset that is, alas, so often the superhero comic
standard. Here is one of the real insights of this excellent storyline:
that healing takes time and closure does not come conveniently at
the end of a three-dollar issue.
Jessica’s confrontation with Killgrave starts badly when he
greets her as his ‘favourite comic book character of all time’, and
goes downhill from there. It is never entirely clear how mad he is,
whether his fourth-wall-breaking discussion of their relationship in
terms of the comic book characters we know them to be is insanity,
clarity or a strategy to freak out someone he can no longer get
to with his psychic powers. In any case, whenever Jessica tries to
discuss the victims he has refused to acknowledge, he describes
her emotions in the third person, criticizes the development of her
back-story and warns her against breaking continuity. The effect is
memorably creepy, especially when he warns her not to turn to the
end, because ‘something really bad is going to happen to you’.
Bendis is both acknowledging possible criticism of Alias – ‘One
day you’re a high-flying superhero who no one’s ever heard of and
the next you’re the centre of the world’ – both as a disruptor of
Marvel continuity and as a Mary Sue story. He is also trying to go
one better than the scenes between Clarice Sterling and Hannibal
Lector in Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and the Jonathan
Demme film of the book. He is trying to control her again, but
when she challenges him on the premise of his position – ‘If this is
just a comic book . . . why don’t you just walk out of here?’ – he
points out that ‘I’m not the writer’.
Jessica reports back to her client, who is hostile in the extreme,
and then it becomes apparent that, for reasons unconnected with
Jessica, Killgrave has escaped and is on the loose. Jessica is rightly
terrified – has he not told her that something bad is coming for
her? – and Bendis makes great play with the paranoid particulars
of escaping someone who can control not only your will, but your
perceptions. She rings Malcolm and tells him to leave her office,
and watches while he does so alone; she is rung by Quartermain
and offered SHIELD protection, but dare not take it for fear that

Killgrave is controlling him. She hides out with Lang, and wakes to
find him apparently eaten by his own ants.
Killgrave is in the apartment; Lang has not in fact been eaten,
merely paralysed and made to look at Killgrave with sexual desire.
Killgrave continues his critique of the comic book they are all in
‘Subtle yet expressive artwork, mainstream with just a touch of
indy’ before compelling Jessica to see Carol in bed with Luke and
Lang, and then go with him into the street, where – to attract the
attention of the superhero world – he orders passers-by to beat the
person next to them until dead. He orders Jessica to kill Captain
America, calling her a whore as he does so; Bendis deliberately
prepares our sympathetic response to what follows by stressing the
character’s misogyny.
At this point, in what comes close to being a dea ex machina, a
version of Jean Grey, planted as a pre-hypnotic suggestion when
she wakened Jessica years before, appears and tells her that her
will is free, if she wants it to be. Jessica’s will was corrupted by
Killgrave before; what Jean Grey does is subtly different, in that
she allows Jessica choice. And Jessica chooses to beat Killgrave
almost to death. In the background, we see a shop, whose name is
Mr Bendis Outlet; this is an acknowledgement that the author, like
us, experiences this as catharsis.
Captain America looks on with approval, saying ‘wow’ at the
brutal efficiency of Jessica’s demolition of her former torturer.
Once she is done, and standing with a look of fulfilment on her
face, Jessica is embraced by Carol Danvers: ‘Jessica, you did it, you
did it, look at you’; she looks over her friend’s shoulder at us with
tears in her eyes. Whether or not she ever acts as a superhero again,

Earlier, in one of his comic book riffs, Killgrave accuses Jessica of
acting like a whore for acting naturalistically in the full view of readers.
He is not just a misogynist but a postmodern misogynist who knows
enough to turn Mulvey’s male-gaze theory on its head; Killgrave also
echoes the Katherine Bigelow/James Cameron Strange Days by using its
killer’s trademark framing of ‘shots’ with his hands. For a full discussion
of Strange Days and its use of gaze theory, see my From Alien to the Matrix:
Reading SF Film (2005).

98 • Superheroes!
Jessica has achieved fulfilment in a moment of purging violence.

As Killgrave is carted away to jail in an ambulance, she sits on
nearby steps with a sphinx-like expression. The arc of Jessica Jones,
superheroine, is for the moment done; she has dealt with her past
and moved through it, in a moment that both accepts the convention
of comic book violence and represents its full implications.
The book ends with a settling of Jessica’s business as a human
being, not a hero. She tells Scott Lang that she is pregnant, not by
him, and he walks away from her; she goes to see Luke, who insists
on telling her that he has fallen in love with her even before she
has told him she is having a child and it is his. All of this could have
been sentimental and mawkish, particularly in the afterglow of
what precedes it. The fact that it is not is partly the result of Bendis’
skill with slow broken natural speech in which people express their
feelings by constantly interrupting themselves:
Luke: The thing of it is, is I’ve grown quite . . . I worry about
you. And I, when you told me all that shit about what
happened to you . . . I found myself really caring. So,
though I know you’ve got some shit going on with one
of the Avengers or something. And I know me and you
– we’re all just how we are with each other. I just wanted
to tell you that I’m here. And I’m, well, here. If you, I
don’t know. I just think about you a lot.
Jessica: You like me?
Luke: Yea
Jessica: You mean ‘like me’ like me?
Luke: We in high school now?
Jessica’s arc in The Secret Origins of Jessica Jones began in high school
and it is entirely appropriate that high school be referenced again
during its hopeful emotional close. It also helps that Gaydos’ dark,
often gloomy art can light up and become entirely different when
the browns and blacks suddenly centre on the pale grey of a toothy
smile or an up-turned eye.
These two battered adults have suddenly found the wisdom to
be together and the book ends with Luke giving that most perfect

of comic book endings – ‘All right then, new chapter’ – perfect,

because nothing ever ends in a superhero comic, even one that
turns on its heroine’s offering serious dissent from the entire
superhero project and learning to take from it only those things
that she needs. To adopt Graham Sleight’s terminology, Alias is a
perfect example of a terminable, end-stopped narrative within the
interminable context of the Marvel universe. If it is a paradox that
this particularly fine superhero comic should quietly subvert the
form and its ideology, well, what else do you expect from a comic
book? and specifically a Marvel comic book, because a significant
part of Jessica’s arc has to do with accepting that she is a flawed
human being, whether she identifies as a superhero or not, which is
to say that she moves towards the complexity of life in Marvel, and
away from the shiny idealism of her earlier shinier model of being
a superhero, which was partly a critique of Marvel’s early days, and
even more a critique of their major rival, DC.

3
Watching the
Watchmen
Sharing a World with
Superheroes
Superheroes Team Up
Particularly over the last two decades, one of the principal subjects
of the superhero comic has been a reflexive examination of its own
major premise. Superheroes, like masked vigilantes, are profoundly
problematic individuals, at serious odds with some of the major
assumptions of a democratic art form. Critics of the genre often
assume, wrongly, that it pays no attention to the ethical issue at its
core, whereas in fact it is obsessed with it almost to the point of
cliché.
When Siegel and Shuster created Superman, the alien dressed
in a circus strong-man outfit originally spent most of his time in
unequal battles with ordinary decent criminals. The problem with
this was, after a short time, that a story in which the hero’s victory
is inevitable is a story without suspense, which meant, in turn, that
he and other superheroes had to be given opponents who were a
serious threat to them. At once, the existence of such opponents
meant either that there had to be powerful villains – Lex Luthor
was added to the mythos at an early stage – or other superheroes
with whom Superman could be tricked into fighting. It meant, in
other words, that a world that was different in having one person
with superpowers to cope with became a world in which ordinary
people had to cope with many people with superpowers. It also
eventually meant the creation of the superhero team.

Watching the Watchmen • 101
The original purpose of the superhero team-up comic was to

sell more copies, both of the new team-up comic and of the comics
relating to each of the characters included, by persuading those fans
who were interested in one character but not another to decide
that they were more interested in both than they had thought. This
much is obvious, but the very moment that decision was taken for
commercial purposes, an artistic agenda inevitably had to kick in.
When commerce and art mingle, it is not always the case that the
latter will be damaged by subordination to the former, and one of
the major reasons for this is that the needs of commerce will create
Superheroes v. McCarthy?
Interestingly, the early 1950s was the time of both the
McCarthy/HUAC interrogations of left-wingers and, prompted
by Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, the Senate
Subcommittee hearings – generally known as the Kefauver
hearings from the presidential hopeful who chaired them – on
the role of comic books in producing juvenile delinquents.
When superhero comics deal – as, say, DC’s older group the
Justice Society of America (JSA) sometimes does – with what
was going on in the early 1950s, the standard retconned
assumption is that superheroes suffered during the McCarthy
period. The JSA was retconned as the Earth 2 equivalent of the
Justice League, some members of which got folded into the
continuity of Earth 1 after Crisis on Infinite Earths. This is also
the assumption of the relevant sections of George R.R. Martin’s
Wild Cards anthologies. In a piece of attractive reflexivity,
the threat posed to the existence of the comics industry
by Wertham and the Kefauver hearings gets amalgamated
with the McCarthy era threat to the liberalism that is that
industry’s default politics; the long-term consequence of the
hearings was the self-regulation of the industry, known as the
Comics Code, from 1954 onwards. In the United Kingdom,
the scare about comics was spearheaded by the Communist
Party, somewhat abetted by George Orwell; the British affair is
described in Haunt of Fears (1984) by Martin Barker.

102 • Superheroes!
formal parameters for art, and that interesting work will be done
in the solving of the problems that this throws up.
What then, are those problems? As I have remarked above, if a
comic is to put a bunch of the most powerful men and women in the
world in a team, then there has to be a menace of commensurate
size for them to fight. In the so-called Golden Age (1930s–early
1950s) this was simple, in a sense, because there were always
the Axis powers to fight, though the teams involved were small
groups whose relationship was never formalized. In the Silver
Age (1950s–1970s), DC and, in due course, Marvel produced
teams of superheroes which were larger and which tended to fight
extraterrestrial menaces or superpowered villains rather than
involve themselves in the Cold War.
Up until the 1980s, the menaces fought by superhero teams,
both those assembled from characters with their own comics – the
Justice League of America, the Avengers – and those who inhabited
ensemble comics like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, only
inflated slowly. Much of the time the problem was supervillains
whose agenda was to neutralize the heroes or steal their powers.
My early memories of superheroes being used as chess pieces relate
to one of these stories. Marvel often brought menaces from space,
out of time or from mythology: the Avengers are brought together
by a fight against Thor’s evil brother Loki and later on fight the
extra-temporal conqueror Kang and involve themselves in wars
between interstellar empires like the Skrull and the Kree, who at
this stage regard Earth as a primitive planet ripe for exploitation as
a base, or a source of troops. Later on in the Marvel Universe, the
empires that replace these two have learned to treat Earth with a
certain respect.
The problem with all of this is that the point of diminishing
returns eventually gets reached; as Alan Moore says, ‘I had been
thinking about why superhero team-up comics almost never work,
and I think it is because you have to set your team against ever-
escalating menaces.’ One does not have to agree with Moore about
the actual merits of all team-up comics to acknowledge that he

has put his finger on the problem; none of this has stopped Moore
creating further superhero teams.
This means, in turn, that there has to be another story for the
comic that deals with groups of superheroes to tell, one that looks
at the whole question of what superheroes are for, that performs
the thought experiment of asking whether the world would be a
better place if they existed, or, even more importantly, not. As the
newspaper headline in a comic once asked ‘Why must there be
a Superman?’ To a quite remarkable extent, this is the story that
such team-up comics have been telling for the last three decades,
especially since Alan Moore’s own Watchmen comic, but to some
extent even before this.
The Trouble with Superheroes

It is a story that relates to some degree to the very simple fact
that superhero comics, even when they cross over with each other,
have to deal in conflict, and are as likely to deal in conflict between
superheroes, eventually resolved, as they are in alliances against
greater menaces. This is so much a default – mostly a rather tedious
default – that it has become one of the things most often mocked in
the comics themselves. For example, when in eXiles the Alternate
Universe-hopping team find themselves battling the Fantastic
Four, the eXile TJ reflects, ‘It’s an unwritten rule. If two groups
of superpeople unexpectedly cross paths, they punch first and ask
questions later.’
This is partly a matter of pandering to the interest of some
comparatively unintellectual fans in precisely how superheroes rank
in power against each other, and thus a way of selling comics with
a frame of the ensuing conflict on the cover. It is also, rather more
interestingly, sometimes a way for a good writer to do something
interesting with character and dialogue, by having individuals
whom continuity has made three-dimensional banter against each
other in a mode of combat that is as much verbal as physical. It is
also a way of dramatizing the never-to-be-forgotten fact that these
beings are not like the rest of us, that most of the time they bounce

back when hit, unlike the buildings and other property that gets in
the way of these combats.
One of the simplest points about the conflicts of superheroes and
supervillains is that they normally do vastly more damage to the
neighbourhood than they do to each other. When, in the course of
the 1990s and 2000s, it became almost a cliché that villains would
point out that superheroes are careless gods who render ordinary
human achievement null and void, the point was not without
merit. For example, this has become a major thread in Lex Luthor’s
claimed motivation, and part of the rationale for Maxwell Lord’s
destructive brainwashing of Superman in DC’s Countdown to Infinite
Crisis. It is also the rationale for the Superhero Registration Act in
Marvel’s Civil War storyline, triggered by a disaster – a disaster that
quite specifically goes outside the normal assumptions of superhero
comics – in which third-string superheroes try to capture a villain
whose destructive power is beyond their capabilities, and get
themselves, and a lot of civilians, killed.
Careless destruction, then, is one of the standard indictments
against superheroes by the other inhabitants of the world they
live in; another is that they are aliens, or gods, interfering in the
working out of ordinary human destiny. Often this is phrased in
terms of xenophobia and discredits the people who utter the view:
Luthor is quite specifically represented in his period as President of
the USA as appealing to the lowest common denominator in this
matter (see for example the Public Enemies collection of Jeph Loeb’s
Batman/Superman), and many of the mobs who picket the Avengers’
mansion at various points in the Kurt Busiek run are shown to be
bigoted against, say, mutants or androids.
There is, however, a real point here. If superheroes chose, they
could rule the world with a rod of iron, and there is a serious
question as to whether this would ever be acceptable. Someone with
powers is, after all, not accountable, and the general assumption
of comics and the other materials that spin off from them is
that absolute power corrupts absolutely, no matter how fine the
intentions of those involved. In the television cartoon Justice League
Unlimited, for example, the League find themselves up against an

alternate world group, the Justice Lords, who themselves, having

made a wrong decision a decade or so earlier, are brainwashing
villains into niceness and treating democratic institutions as, at
best, a rubber stamp. During the Kurt Busiek run on The Defenders,
the Hulk, Submariner and Doctor Strange are mentally influenced
into becoming petty tyrants; Marvel’s alternate world group, the
Squadron Supreme, originally run the world under the influence of
alien mind control, but, after overthrowing those enemies, find it
hard to relinquish the power they have taken.
We must not assume good intentions. In Mark Millar’s Top
Cow comic Wanted, supervillains took over the world decades
ago and murdered all the superheroes; the most we can hope for
is that we be secretly ruled by callous and exploitative villains
rather than demented and sadistic ones. In the Jeph Loeb Batman/
Superman storyline Absolute Power, time-travelling villains from the
future have wiped out most of the Justice League and abducted
Superman and Batman in infancy and childhood in order to bring
them up as tyrants. In another storyline, Grant Morrison’s JLA
Earth 2, an alternate Earth is run by the Crime Syndicate – a
brutal Ultraman, a version of Wonder Woman who is Lois Lane
turned evil dominatrix, Owlman, a drug-addled Flash and so on
– who rule selfishly and bicker constantly among themselves over
sexual jealousy and so on. The corruption of the best is the worst,
as the Latin tag says. Specifically, these are versions of standard
superheroes who kill regularly and gratuitously, whereas normally
they never kill at all.
When, as a result of Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and
the Kefauver hearings on comics as a source of delinquency, the
comics industry produced, in 1954, the Comics Code, there was
no particular requirement that superheroes not kill criminals.
However, the various requirements to avoid sadistic violence and
to avoid glorifying criminality are presumably part of the reason
why, from that time on, Superman and Batman and many other DC
superheroes were shown as avoiding killing in any circumstances. In
the 1930s and 1940s, both heroes had occasionally killed criminals
rather than handing them over to the law.

Marvel tended to operate by the same rules in its early days; one
of the many interesting things about Wolverine on his introduction
in the X-Men and elsewhere during the late 1970s was that he
was quite prepared to kill, at a time when even the Punisher
sometimes used non-lethal bullets in his vigilante crusade against
crime. Generally speaking, the rule was that superheroes did not
kill each other, and did not kill human beings; when it came to
invading aliens or rampaging robots, the rules tended to be more
permissive.
These rules have gradually eroded to a point where the various
superheroes who stand by them in all circumstances are shown as
doing so as a matter of personal ethical choice, but are admirable
for doing so, most of the time. During the Grant Morrison run
on Justice League of America, Batman threw Huntress out of the
organization for a while purely on the basis that she had been about
to kill Prometheus, a supervillain who had been prepared to murder
a number of civilians as a side effect of killing off the League. Even
when he is responding to a murderous attack on his kinswoman
Kara, in Jeph Loeb’s Batman/Superman run, Superman contents
himself with imprisoning Darkseid in the Source Wall at the edge
of the universe rather than kill him. In Operation Galactic Storm there
is a serious dispute between the Black Knight and Captain America
over the former’s apparent execution of the Kree Intelligence
Supreme for interstellar war-mongering and genocide.
Yet this ethic is often seen as problematic. Both the fake
resurrected Jason of Jeph Loeb’s Hush! and the genuine one of
Under the Hood rebuke the Batman for not executing the Joker long
ago and allowing him to continue to inflict misery and death on
hundreds of people, including many of those closest to the Batman
himself. After Wanda Maximoff’s murderous rampage, several of
the Marvel superheroes – though most notably the more morally
ambiguous ones like Emma Frost – are prepared to contemplate
executing her, simply for the safety of the world, and Captain
America insists that this is not an option. Given that she imposes
both the House of M and the Decimation on the world as a result of

being left alive, Captain America’s choice is shown as having serious

consequences.
There are even times when the attempt by those superheroes
who stand by this ethic to impose it on others is seen as dubious in
itself, as having more to do with personal issues than with ethics.
One of the few redeeming features of the generally wretched
Countdown to Infinite Crisis storyline is just this: that when Wonder
Woman makes the decision to execute Maxwell Lord rather than
allow him to continue to control Superman mentally and use the
Kryptonian to murder his enemies, she genuinely has no choice.
She has used the truth-compelling aspect of her lasso to make Lord
tell her how she can stop him, and he says ‘Kill me’.Yet, as a result,
her two closest colleagues reject her professionally and personally,
rather than standing by her when a clip of the killing is released to
the world’s media. Both are keen to say that there must have been
another way; neither of these two most intelligent of men comes
up with any suggestion as to what that might have been.
However, they do have a point. Part of the assumption of
many modern comics is that ordinary humans only tolerate the
metahumans among them because they believe them essentially
harmless and benevolent, and that that tolerance would disappear
the very moment that belief did. Certainly Wonder Woman is shown
as seriously discredited in the public mind by what happened – up
to this point in the Greg Rucka run and before it, she has been
treated as a secular saint in her role as ambassador from Paradise
Island. In other comics, the idea that a superhero has killed or nearly
killed is always a huge public issue. In Hush!, part of the nameless
villain’s plan is to trick the Batman into killing a Joker who for once
is innocent; when, in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, the
seriously injured Joker kills himself to frame the Batman, it is his
death that finally makes the Batman a fugitive from justice, pursued
by a Superman who sees his old friend as a threat to the mission
they once shared.
In Kingdom Come, arguably the prettiest of superhero graphic
novels – Alex Ross is for some reason particularly fine when
drawing heroes in late middle age – Superman has retired after a

young superhero Magog was acquitted after executing the Joker

(for, among other crimes, murdering Lois Lane). The conflicts of
superheroes and supervillains escalate to a point where they unleash
an atomic explosion that devastates Kansas. Worse, the attempts
by Superman and some of his allies to imprison all supervillains,
and the efforts of Luthor to sabotage him, and of the Batman to
work against both of them (for reasons too complex to spell out
here, and which do not make entire sense without the beautiful
illustrations of Bruce Wayne looking urbane and wise) create an
Armageddon-like conflict that the human authorities attempt to
resolve with nuclear weapons.
The point Ross, and Mark Waid, who provided a script for his
visions – it is, for once, clearly this way round – are making is
simply this: that the superhero project is one that always implicitly
involves the use of deadly force, and will accordingly have, sooner
or later, deadly consequences. No one elects superheroes or,
come to that, supervillains; their actions are unaccountable except
morally. Superman and those like him are at least aware of the
issue of having duties as citizens that involve them in a project of
restraint, as well as the use of their powers for good.
This is stated so powerfully here that it is in a way a shame that
Ross and Waid went further, by making the apocalyptic strain in the
narrative explicit. A preacher, Norman McCay,, who has already
had visions, is recruited by the Spectre as a human witness to
events as they unfold, and intones passages from St John’s Gospel
at regular intervals – not that the name Magog is without similar
associations. In the aftermath of mass death, and the world’s
stepping away from the brink, Wonder Woman becomes pregnant
with Superman’s daughter, and Batman is asked by them to foster
the child; the averted Apocalypse is to be followed by the birth of a
The character is modelled from photographs of Ross’ father Norman

Ross, but his name is also fairly obviously a tribute to Ross’ influences:
Norman Rockwell, the Saturday Evening Post laureate of Americana and
Windsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo.

comic book messiah. One of the obvious ways in which superheroes

can be made palatable is to present them in eschatological terms.
It is a given of the Marvel Universe that superheroes are
resented by a significant part of the public; parts of the gutter press
like J. Jonah Jameson’s Daily Bugle are only too prepared to run
anti-superhero stories, and Jameson’s personal crusade against
Spider-Man is one of that universe’s most reliable constants.
When Jameson is furious at Parker’s self-unmasking during Civil
War, there is a genuine issue here: Parker has, as Jameson points
out, been engaged in a massive conflict of interest all these years,
taking news photographs of himself making the news. This is even
truer of Matt Murdock’s relationship with the criminal law. Even
those superheroes who are more or less normal have a difficult
relationship with the normal rules of society.
Yet there is a pragmatic argument in favour of secret identities,
which is that superheroes have friends and families who have to be
protected from revenge. This is the point Captain America makes
over the Registration Act – do you feel happy, he asks Spider-Man
when they fight, that villains have your aunt’s address? It is the main
plot point of Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis. In Moore’s The Killing
Joke (1988) the Joker does not shoot and cripple Barbara Gordon
for being Batgirl, but rather because she is Commissioner Gordon’s
daughter and the Batman’s friend. The running joke of the Batman
comics is that the various versions of Robin are ‘the boy hostage’,
but in a world in which there are no secret identities, every friend
and relative of a superhero is a hostage to fortune. Of course,
though, the same applies to every friend and relative of ordinary
police and prosecutors, save for the particular resentment that
masked vigilantes spark in their more or less deranged costumed
opponents.
When Frank Miller had a television psychologist say, in The
Dark Knight Returns, that the Batman is personally responsible for
creating costumed villains as a reaction to his effect on the popular
psyche, Miller was making a right-wing joke at the expense of
social liberals. However, over the ensuing period, the argument
became a reasonably common one. Miller’s own Batman – Year One

shows Batman fighting ordinary decent criminals, and Jeph Loeb’s

The Long Halloween and Dark Victory show a Gotham City in which,
early in the Batman’s career, costumed villains move into a power
vacuum created when the ordinary human Mafia tears itself apart
in civil war. Even in the Gotham Knights animated cartoons, we see
supervillains making this claim, and, significantly, two of Batman’s
regular opponents, Harley Quinn and the Scarecrow, are renegade
psychologists. To what extent, if there were no superheroes, would
there be supervillains? It is a question that it is legitimate for the
mundane characters in superhero comics to ask.
Astro City
Kurt Busiek has done a lot of work in Marvel, and more recently
DC continuity, but some of his best work on this theme comes
in his independent comic Astro City, whose inhabitants are
proud of their superheroes, and to which tourists come just to
gawk at them. Yet even here it is possible to spark resentment
– just as much as in the world of Alan Davis’ The Nail (the
DC Universe apparently without Superman) or Marvel’s Civil
War – when the superheroes fail to catch a serial killer and
the Mayor plays a sinister game of spin-doctoring, arguing
that superheroes do not care for ordinary people enough to
catch their killer, or that, perhaps, superheroes are secretly
responsible for the deaths as part of some concern alien to
ordinary people.
The Mayor – or to be more precise, the representative
of an alien invasion fleet posing as the Mayor – makes
particular play with his revelations about the nature of Astro
City’s equivalent of the Batman, the Confessor. In Astro City:
Confessions, we gradually learn that this terrifying white-haired
man who appears out of mist and at night to scare villains
into submission is both priest and vampire, wearing a cross in
order to mortify his undead flesh and fasting lest he commit
the mortal sin of taking human life. He has, of course, a young
sidekick called Altar Boy. What the aliens do not understand
is that the Confessor really is a hero, who allows himself to
be staked and destroyed in order to expose the aliens for

Even those comics in which most people, most of the time,

regard superheroes as demigods show that there is a dark side to
all of this public adulation. In Moore’s Marvelman, the golden age
that ensues when the Marvel family seize control is preceded by
the nightmare few minutes in which the evil Kid Marvelman fills
in the time while he waits for a final confrontation by killing as
many Londoners as he can in the most brutal and sadistic ways
he can imagine; the subsequent near-worship of his executioner
Marvelman by the general public has something hysterical to it.
One of the ways in which Moore makes this governance of the
what they are. One possible answer to the question of what

superheroes are really good for is just this – they are prepared
to sacrifice themselves every day for the greater good.
What is also interesting here is that Busiek achieves this
quite powerful insight, and a tale of real emotional intensity,
by playing intellectual games with the Batman mythos. In Astro
City the Confessor is the closest thing that he gives us to the
Batman, and the Confessor is both priest and vampire. This
works as a joke, but it is more than a joke, it is a metafictional
conceit of real resonance. Altar Boy is an attractive figure
– a kid from the country who comes to town looking to be
a sidekick, and who gets his wish. His name is a joke about
the standard slash fiction assumption about the nature of
the Batman/Robin relationship, particularly during the Dick
Grayson period. Confessions, though, is a moving story of non-
sexual love, initiation and vocation. Altar Boy trains himself to
be the Confessor’s successor.
In a 2006 single issue of Astro City, Busiek shows us how
the hero Samaritan meets regularly with Infidel, a supervillain
he has, for the moment, succeeded in imprisoning. The
Samaritan hopes to persuade his enemy that virtue is the
better game to play; his enemy lives in the hope that one
day the Samaritan will tire of all this virtue and the common
people whom he diligently serves. Both are aware that virtue
and villainy are choices made for reasons that include both
reason and emotion.

world by Olympians so tolerable is that it is preceded by some of

the most graphically nightmarish images comics have ever seen;
Kid Marvelman has a warped whimsical sense of humour in his
murders, and the technique Marvelman has to use to dispose of
him is itself more or less the stuff of nightmares.
In the prelude to his post-Infinite Crisis run on Superman, the
miniseries Up, Up and Away (2006) Busiek shows a Superman who
has been deprived of his powers for most of a year as a result of the
Infinite Crisis and who has got used to being Clark Kent, and being
a better reporter than when he had other things on his mind. He is
also quietly domestic, but then his powers start to come back and
he worries about the effect this will have on his relationship with
Lois. Don’t be silly, she ruefully tells him, I married a firefighter and
sooner or later it was always going to be time for you to fight fires
again. This would always have been a telling image, but is rather
more so in the post-9/11 era. It is not just that with power comes
responsibility, it is that the power and responsibility are matters of
life and death – the lives of everyone on the planet, and sooner or
later the death of the hero.
Being a superhero is not, in a sense, a choice; it is a vocation
or a way of coping with oneself. Bruce Wayne needs to be the
Batman to cope with the overwhelming grief about his parents’
deaths and his impotence, as a boy, to save them. As the cost of
his crusade – Barbara Gordon’s crippling, the deaths of Jason and
Stephanie – the survivor’s guilt with which he is coping grows ever
more intense, rather than being ameliorated. He is trapped in the
sort of cycle of cure and consequences of cure and needing a cure
for those consequences that we normally associate with addiction.
Moreover, the Batman needs to be Bruce Wayne, not only to
be the tycoon whose money pays for all the shiny Battoys, but, I
would argue, in order to retain a perspective on the world that
is not entirely about the night and the superstitious and cowardly
criminals who inhabit it. As well as servant and battlefield medic,
Alfred the butler is there to monitor his master’s sanity, and the
balance between his two personae; in the first issue of Grant
Morrison’s run he remarks that the Bruce Wayne persona has been

Confessions of Spider-Man
Before the public self-outing of Spider-Man in Civil War, there
came the points at which he was obliged to confess first to his
wife Mary-Jane and then his aunt, both of which occasions
are of interest. In the case of Mary-Jane, the revelation was
designedly a damp squib: she had known for years, it was
suddenly revealed, and had always held it against him that
he did not simply tell her. She had not known because of any
process of working it out – she had seen him leaving his home
in costume and realized that the obvious was in fact the case.
The issue then becomes, rather more interestingly, what the
young couple do once it is accepted that she knows, and the
answer is a long soap-opera about her coming to terms with
what he does with his spare time.
Belatedly, during the J. Michael Strazcynski run on The
Amazing Spider-Man, Aunt May finds out about Peter’s activities
as Spider-Man when he comes home too badly injured from
a fight to put the shreds of his costume away in a safe place.
Partly because of her friendship with Otto Octavius, the
civilian identity of Doctor Octopus, and because of the death
of Gwen Stacey, Aunt May had always been hostile to Spider-
Man; after a day spent wandering the streets, she accepts the
situation. Intelligently, Strazcynski has her and Peter confess
to each other different versions of what happened to Uncle
Ben – May had always blamed herself for his death for reasons
almost as good as Peter’s. He was killed when out at night
after a row with May, by a criminal Peter had earlier let go.
Both have feelings of guilt; neither is actually all that guilty.
We get as well, the almost obligatory scene where May
tells Peter that she knew he had a secret and had assumed that
it was that he was gay. The analogy between the secret life of
the adolescent member of sexual minorities and the secret life
of the superhero is one that partly explains the fascination for
many queer teens of superhero comics, and probably helps
explain the tendency of comics to a comparatively enlightened
stance on sexual issues. And the joke remains a good one:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s mother Joyce asks her, when the
truth of Buffy’s late-night activities is revealed, ‘Have you tried
not being a vampire slayer?’ (the joke is echoed verbatim in
Bryan Singer’s X-Men 2, because it is telling enough to be
worth stealing).

acquiring rather too much of the Batman’s growl and that the
personalities need to be kept distinct.
The question of whether Bruce, the Batman or neither is the
real person is one on which it is possible to waste a vast amount
of ink, and the precise relationship is one on which no two writers
seem able quite to agree, let alone readers. However, I would argue
that we can all accept that the Batman engages with the world in
the way he does partly as a choice to help the hopeless and partly
because it is the only way he can live with himself. Moreover, he
needs the light-hearted act of being Bruce Wayne to keep himself
from being as psychotic as the villains he fights. Interestingly, there
are major contributions to the Batman mythos that hardly talk of
Bruce Wayne at all. Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke is very specifically
about a confrontation between the Batman and the Joker over the
issue of whether a good man can be broken by ‘one bad day’, and
we spend enough of it inside the Joker’s head space that we actively
need to see the Batman as he sees him, not as a person with another
life. In the Frank Miller Dark Knight comics, the two identities have
almost entirely fused.
If we compare the Bruce Wayne persona with some other secret
identities from outside the superhero mythoi, another interesting
point emerges. Both Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel – two of
the models on whom Batman is in part based – pose as entirely
worthless fops, whereas Bruce Wayne is an entirely effective
businessman, even if he lets his business be run by managers on a
day-to-day basis. On the other hand, as Bruce, he is always liable
to be a target for crime in the same way as any other rich man
in Gotham City; as playboy and tycoon, he is vulnerable in a way
that he is not when the Batman. Much is made of this in some of
the animated cartoons: in the episode Chemistry (in Gotham Knights)
Bruce is seduced by a plant woman sicced onto him by Poison Ivy
as part of an attempt on all Gotham’s richest men and women. Ivy
has no idea at all that she has caught the Batman. Being Bruce much
of the time is not without its risks, yet the Batman needs to retain
his other self.

Most supervillains are, after all, only supervillains, though there

are many, many, exceptions. The Joker is never not the Joker – he
does not spend half his time pretending to be a sane man; a majority
of supervillains are in a sense representatives of humours or
obsessions. In those cases where this is not true, the public persona
is not a way of staying sane, or balancing the dark side, it is simply
a way of interacting with the world in a non-criminal way. Luthor
is always Luthor, though sometimes he pretends to be an ordinary
businessman or politician rather than an evil super-scientist;
Spider-Man’s nemesis, the Green Goblin, is always present, even
when whichever member of the Osborne family is currently using
the mask is using their civilian identity and apparently in control
and sane. The madness always lies behind the eyes, not inside the
mask.
Far more than a career, being a supervillain is an identity; it is a
choice that was made once and can only be taken back by an equally
profound act of will. More supervillains become superheroes than
become ordinary civilians when they tire of evil; this is for some
reason more likely to happen in the Marvel Universe than in the
DC Universe, where Catwoman is something of an exception,
whereas in Marvel we have, for example, Emma Frost, Hawkeye,
most of the Thunderbolts (though some of them rather equivocally)
and even the Juggernaut (though not in the X-Men films). However
admirable this is at a personal level, it does make it harder for the
populace at large to keep clear in their heads who is good and who
is bad this week; the world in which there are superheroes and
supervillains is one in which it is harder for people to trust their
saviours.
I would maintain, in fact, that the whole question that underlies
the problem of superheroes in the world is the question of trust.
Ordinary people do not trust them, any more than they trust their
governments and for many of the same reasons. This is particularly
the case when government gets involved in the creation and
utilization of superheroes; Captain America was the successful
result of a secret weapons programme, and when totalitarian
regimes experiment on human beings, even volunteers, we tend

The Thunderbolts
The Thunderbolts are a particular case in point, as well as a
classic example of how well Kurt Busiek works with continuity.
During a Marvel event, in the course of which most superheroes
disappeared to another world and were assumed dead, the
Thunderbolts stepped up as superheroes, and were not what
they seemed. They were, in fact, the current incarnation of that
middle-range supervillain team, the Masters of Evil, posing as
heroes as part of a vile scheme. In the event, however, some of
them discovered that public adulation was worth more than
loot, or did not want to disappoint a young recruit unaware
of the truth, or simply made a pragmatic rational choice that
this was a more sensible way to utilize one’s skills. Currently,
even their once and again current leader, Baron Zemo, has
abandoned the Nazi ideology in which he was reared, and is
behaving during Civil War in a way that is self-involved and
arrogant, but hardly villainous, in spite of his multiple double-
crosses of almost every faction.
Once Zemo has gone off to a dubious apotheosis,
the Thunderbolts are taken over by the government as an
assassination squad with the redemption part of the group
mission largely abandoned; this reflects the cynicism of Warren
Ellis, who took over the strip from Nicieza at this point, but is
also indicative of the dark mood Marvel chose to adopt at this
point. A Thunderbolts run by Norman Osborne and including
Venom and Bullseye on its roster, as licensed government
murderers, is so far from Busiek’s vision as to be practically a
new comic.
to talk of it as a war crime. Elsewhere in the Marvel Universe, a

number of characters have their provenance in, or have spent time
being experimented on by, government labs, including ones run by
the USA and Canada; it was such a programme that vivisected the
long-lived and self-healing James Logan and gave him his trademark
metal skeleton and claws, and robbed him of his memory so that he
became the psychotic Wolverine.
A particularly extreme example of this paranoia about heroes
and their origins comes in Mark Verheiden’s 1987 Dark Horse

comic The American, a long-lived superhero based on a minor

character from independent comics, but parallel to Captain
America. Its premise is that this hero does not in fact exist. His
identity is a front for a programme of suicide soldiers, altered by
plastic surgery to look like the template, and treated as entirely
expendable individually. Reporters who uncover the truth of the
story are casually butchered, until one of the squad goes rogue
and the former sidekick, Kid America, who has lost a son to the
programme, helps him rescue a drunken reporter and bring the
truth to light. Also involved in all of this are a still-living cyborg
version of President Eisenhower, the now brain-washed former
nemesis Bones and Eisenhower’s daughter. The American makes
some fairly predictable points about spin-doctoring and the dark
side of American patriotism, but has an attractively bittersweet
cynicism about its deeply flawed heroes.
Examples of this dark perception of superheroes and where
they come from proliferate. The characters of Marc Gruenwald’s
Squadron Supreme are currently being given an equally cynical back-
story in Straczynski’s Supreme Force for Marvel’s Maxx line – they
are perhaps, though not yet explicitly, the Ultimate Universe’s
version of the Squadron. The Superman equivalent, Hyperion –
Marvel’s Squadron Supreme are deliberately far more cognate with
DC’s Justice League – is shown being brought up in an entirely
faked version of the Kansas farm, where his parents are actors
paid by the government and successive presidents have to have the
vast expenditure explained to them. How else, after all, do you
bring up a child who can incinerate his classmates with beams
from his eyes, and how, save by giving him the perfect American
adolescence on a Midwestern farm, do you try to ensure that this
being sees himself as a loyal American rather than as a man among
bugs? Straczynski is not sympathetic to what is done to the young
Hyperion, and it ends in tears, of course, but he is sophisticated
enough to see how government might not regard itself as having
too many alternatives.
Supreme Force is a dark reading of the relationship between
government and superheroes, but not an entirely unusual one.

When Hyperion becomes critical of the way he has been reared,

the US government – specifically the Bush government – uses
his alien background to discredit him, and to smear the Clinton
administration at the same time, until he makes it clear that he will
not back down and is powerful enough that they cannot make him.
One of the subjects of their experiments with Hyperion’s DNA
uses his powers to become a serial killer; when other superheroes
unite to trap him, the government recruits him as a one-man covert
force to drop into the territory of enemies.
Governments, then, produce superheroes by inhumane experi-

ments; they utilize them in illegal and covert programmes, and
they treat them appallingly. This applies even when they are, at the
same time, persecuting them for being, for example, mutants, or
simply assassinating them for being potentially dangerous, as hap-
pens in Straczynski’s other non-continuity superhero comic, Ris-
ing Stars for Top Cow (with the complication that the power of the
superheroes in that particular comic is a constant and the more
you kill, the more powerful the survivors become). Inevitably, this
applies as much when there is only one superhero as when there
are many: Kurt Busiek’s non-continuity Secret Identity for DC has a
protagonist who is the only person with powers, and has to spend
as much time evading government kidnappers and vivisectors as he
does on his good deeds.
A world with superheroes in it is a world in which menaces that
would end life on earth are routinely turned aside. It is, however,
also one in which there are malefactors as powerful and motivated
as humanity’s benefactors; there is clearly a principle of universal
balance that applies. It is a world in which the process of saving
lives and preventing crime and disaster is liable to be endlessly
destructive of property, and the commitment of superheroes to
saving life and never taking it is a personal ethical commitment
rather than obedience to laws, laws that superheroes tend to think
do not apply to them personally. It is also a world in which the
populace is constantly tempted to quite unsavoury prejudices and
mass hysterias, and in which governments will publicly stir up

such scares, while also being tempted into extravagantly illegal and
immoral actions by the convenience of having superheroes to use
or to take the blame.
It is also a world in which superheroes themselves are subjected
to quite extraordinary emotional pressures as well as the stress of
dealing with the public and government, not the least of which
stresses is their need constantly to take ethical decisions in which
their extraordinary situation is a major factor. ‘With great power
comes great responsibility’ said Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, and
he might as well have been speaking to every single one of Peter
Parker’s colleagues. Add to this the maintenance of a secret identity,
effectively a mode of self-chosen non-sanity, and the concern for
relatives and friends should that identity be breached, as well as
the particular problems that go with the individual superhero’s
condition and situation – being, for example, unable to touch your
friends and lovers, as with Rogue of the X-Men, or the Batman’s
survivor-guilt – and it is clear that, intrinsically, but especially for
the last 20 years, superhero comics have considered the rights and
wrongs of their fundamental assumption with an obsessiveness that
might almost be called neurotic.
Watchmen
Of course, a tremendous influence was Alan Moore’s Watchmen
(1986), in which we find classic treatments of almost all the themes
I have outlined above. Watchmen was thought of at the time as the
superhero comic that deconstructed the whole idea and made
superhero comics redundant thereafter; this was not the case, but
it did prompt some serious soul-searching on the part of everyone
who wrote superheroes. It was an influence on much of the best
work that followed it, which is really all one can ask of any work
of art.
In the early 1980s, DC had bought up the intellectual copyright of
the minor comics house Charlton, its continuity and its characters,
and DC editors proposed to Alan Moore, whom they had recently
hired on the strength of his work for the British comic 2001, that he

develop this material even more radically than he had the DC horror
comic Swamp Thing. In the event, as Moore worked on the project,
the idea of using the Charlton material became impractical, and in
response he devised a plot that worked far better with entirely new
characters. None of the Charlton characters found their way into
his eventual creation, though one of them, the Blue Beetle, was to
become a much-loved standby of DC continuity as a minor figure
in the Justice League of America.
What started as a reinvention of forgotten characters evolved
into one of the highpoints of the graphic novel. Watchmen creates
memorable characters and a brilliantly visualized and thought-
through setting; it makes effective but unsplashy use of the comics
page in its deliberate and austere reworking of the traditional nine
panels; it works complex variations on the superhero motif to a
point where it can be seen, in retrospect, as having reinvigorated
by its ingenuity and creativity a genre that it might have written
closure to by its intimidating excellence. Like Moore’s earlier V for
Vendetta, it is also an intelligent political tract whose timeliness in
the 1980s has not caused it to date.
Plotline
A not especially short summary is essential. In a slightly but
significantly alternate 1980s, masked vigilantes had become an
actual feature of American life in the late 1930s, many of them, as a
group called the Minutemen, serving with distinction on the home
front in the Second World War. An accident in a nuclear research
facility in the 1950s created Dr Manhattan, a being of apparently
infinite power and some remaining human motivations, whose
presence tipped the balance of world power totally in the favour
of the USA. One of the consequences of this was a successful
campaign in Vietnam. Nixon is still President after the abolition of
the constitutional amendment limiting the number of presidential
terms, and – we are told in one of many almost subliminal references
– through the suppression of the Watergate scandal through the
state-sponsored murder of inquisitive journalists. Minor cultural

differences include the prevalence of fast-food curry restaurants

in the USA (the omnipresent ‘Gunga Diner’ chain), electric cars,
spherical filters on cigarettes and the popularity of comic books
about pirates. This last point is important, not to the plot, but to
the way parts of the story are told.
In 1977, after a nationwide police strike, masked vigilantism
was suppressed by law and most of the former superheroes, like
Dan Dreiberg, the former NiteOwl, have gone into more or
less anonymous retirement. The major exceptions to this are
the Comedian, who remains what he has been for many years, a
brutal government enforcer, and Rorschach, a more-than-slightly
deranged outlaw. Laurie, who inherited the role of Silk Spectre
from her mother, is Manhattan’s live-in girlfriend and has given up
other contacts with the superhero world save for a vague friendship
with Dreiberg. Manhattan retains his role as the USA’s major
military asset, but is primarily interested in his scientific research.
Adrian Veidt, who fought crime as Ozymandias, but ceased to do
so several years before the law would have obliged him, is one of
the world’s richest men through his many investments, as well as
its brightest and strongest.
These, along with the survivors of the earlier group of super-
heroes, the MinuteMen, Laurie’s mother and Hollis, Dreiberg’s
predecessor as Nite Owl, are the major characters of Watchmen.
They are counterpointed, often literally, by a number of minor
characters, most of them the proprietor and customers of a New
York news-stand: a young comics fan, a butch woman cabdriver
and her feminist girlfriend, a forensic psychiatrist and his wife, a
group of young hoodlums, two homicide cops and the staff of a
right-wing magazine.
The precipitating event of Watchmen – which originally appeared
as 12 individual comic books – is the murder of the Comedian,
thrown from his skyscraper apartment. Rorschach investigates,
visiting former allies and opponents like the cancer-ridden ex-
convict Jacobi, formerly the villain Moloch, treating his ‘friends’
with abrasive contempt and his ‘enemies’ with the casual extreme

violence that is his hallmark. Increasingly he involves Dreiberg in

his investigations.
These two figures, Rorschach and Nite Owl, are both riffs on
the Batman – the psychotic avenger side and the gadget-obsessed
detective side – just as Manhattan is a variant on Superman, and the
Comedian a dark equivalent of Captain America. Rorschach has
the contempt for criminals that is an important part of Batman’s
choice of costume – ‘criminals are a cowardly and superstitious
lot’, the young Bruce Wayne says – where Rorschach refers to them
more simply as vermin. Ozymandias is best seen as a variation on
an older model of forerunner superhero in the pulps, Doc Savage
for example, though he also has much in common with various
supervillains, as we shall see. This tendency to echo and vary
the pre-existent was already the case with the Charlton comics
characters from whom, at several removes, they also derive.
Manhattan is disgraced by the imputation that most of those
closely associated with him – his adversary Moloch, his former
girlfriend Janie – have contracted cancer from his presence. He
withdraws from human contact to sulk on Mars. This precipitates
an international crisis, the Soviet Union moves troops into
Afghanistan and war looms. A key image in ‘Watchmen’ is the
Comedian’s trademark smiley smeared with a drop of his blood;
one of the many visual puns that characterize the book is between
this and the nuclear clock standing at five to midnight. In one of the
minor subplots, Nixon and his war cabinet consider the ‘acceptable
losses’ of a nuclear war and retreat to their bunker as a deciding
point looms.
Rorschach learns that the Comedian was investigating the
disappearance of a number of creative artists and scientists; he
is framed for the murder of Jacobi and remanded to a jail full
of criminals longing for revenge on him. Laurie takes refuge
with Dreiberg when Manhattan’s departure puts her, his official
girlfriend, out on the street, and they start to act in their old
vigilante roles, commencing a sexual relationship as a by-product
of this.

All of this is further countered by a television interview, in the

course of which Manhattan is discredited; Laurie and Dreiberg’s
fight with the gang has the voiceover of the interviewer to describe
it and the words of Manhattan’s government handlers: ‘battles,
conflicts, whatever it is you super-people do – am I making you
uncomfortable – the show’s over – getting aroused – intimate
moments’. The scene is at once terrifying, hilarious and deeply
sexy.
Dreiberg proves impotent in an ordinary sexual encounter
between him and Laurie, yet they are tender and touching when sex
fails. He describes an experimental exoskeleton that broke his arm;
Laurie comments, ‘that sounds like the sort of costume that could
really mess you up’, and he replies, ‘is there any other sort?’. They
rescue people from a fire and then make love on the roof of his owl-
ship, half in and half out of costume; they need to be superheroes,
but they need to be their civilian selves at the same time. After
making love, he tells her that they should rescue Rorschach; in
case we had not noticed it, the sexual act and the acting out of
superheroics are two activities that are closely intertwined.
In due course, they release Rorschach from a prison that has
become a war zone because of his presence in it. By this point,
their investigations have started to point to Veidt (interestingly, the
means by which Dreiberg proves this involve cracking the files in
Veidt’s computer by guessing his passwords, a comparatively new
plot point in the mid-1980s). Manhattan appears and takes Laurie
with him to Mars; Rorschach and Dreiberg head to Veidt’s home in
Antarctica.
On Mars, Laurie tries to persuade Manhattan to involve himself
in human affairs again. At first she fails because of his realization
that she has left him for Dreiberg; she was his one remaining link
to humanity. As they talk, she finally puts together the truth of her
parentage – that the Comedian, whom she has always hated for his
attempted rape of her mother, was also her father by an affair some
years later – and is almost broken by this discovery. For Manhattan,
however, it is evidence of the gloriously unpredictable aspects of

human nature and the way it overcomes entropy, and evidence that
he should help the human race to continue to exist.
Rorschach and Nite Owl confront Veidt; he reveals his master
plan, which is to prevent nuclear war by providing convincing
evidence of an alien invasion. He has, moreover, already put this
plan into effect, killing or driving insane half of the population of
New York in the process – specifically, killing all of the news-stand
customers, with the exception of the right-wing magazine’s staff.
As a by-product of this plan, he has killed all his accomplices and
given Manhattan’s associates cancer to discredit him.
Nonetheless, Veidt’s plan appears to have worked, and the world
becomes a safer place. Veidt tries and fails to kill Manhattan, who
is so estranged from human emotions that he does not even resent
this; in the process Veidt kills the giant mutant cat which is the
only being for which he shows any affection. Manhattan, Laurie
and Dreiberg accept the situation; Rorschach does not and so
Manhattan kills him in cold blood before abandoning humanity and
its concerns forever. In a final twist, and the last frame, the office
clerk at the right-wing Frontiersman magazine pulls the diary of
Rorschach’s investigations out of the nut file to make up a page . . .
Manhattan’s remarks about the glorious unpredictability of human
nature may yet come back to haunt the world. As Manhattan says
to Veidt before leaving the book, and the world, forever, ‘nothing
ever ends’.
Other concerns in this very complex plot include the back-story
of Manhattan’s transformation from an unimportant researcher to
an inhuman quasi-deity, and the back-story of Rorschach’s evolution
from vigilante to near-madman. In jail, the forensic psychiatrist
grills him about his past and Rorschach tells him how he avenged
a little girl whose kidnappers fed her to hungry Alsatians – this
section of the book is almost unbearably horrid and painful to read.
Laurie discovers the secret of her parentage and is reconciled to
her mother. Hollis is brutally murdered by the street gang as part
of a growing public mood of paranoia about former vigilantes.

Allusions and Characters

The book’s title is, of course, primarily a reference to Juvenal’s
‘Quis custodet ipsos custodes’, usually translated as ‘Who shall
watch the watchmen?’, and as such is seen in the book on several
occasions scrawled on walls as graffiti or carried on placards. It is
also a reference to Einstein’s statement that he would rather have
been a watchmaker; in a reversal of this, as a boy, Jon, the future
Manhattan, makes watches as a hobby, and his father throws the
pieces out after hearing of Hiroshima, telling his son to be a nuclear
physicist. On Mars, Manhattan builds, and travels around in, a giant
timepiece of glass fused from red sand, which Laurie eventually
breaks; we are not told that a timepiece is the closest thing he
now has to a heart, but this is the implication. He is, among other
things, L. Frank Baum’s Tin Man, a figure of pathos because, for all
his infinite power and knowledge, he has lost empathy and moral
compass.
He is a being of quantum energy caught up in the paradoxes
of predestination and uncertainty. He tells Laurie that she will
inform him of her affair with Dreiberg several minutes before
she does so, but he only feels the anticipated emotional anguish of
abandonment when she has told him. His status as a being beyond
time, in one aspect of his nature, is closely linked to Watchmen’s use
of interleaved flashbacks and repeated images; he is one of several
characters who can be seen as counterpointed narrators overall, in
as much as the story reflects their narrative idiolects, and who tell
parts of the story at a more literal level.
Einstein is most clearly referenced in Manhattan’s career via
the watch business, but so are various other nuclear physicists.
Oppenheimer’s quotation of Hindu scripture during the original
bomb tests – ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’
– is obviously relevant here, and the cold-blooded nature of
Manhattan’s interactions with humanity can be seen as related
to Oppenheimer’s rival, Teller, who helped create the concept of
mutual assured destruction in our world. Manhattan’s perception
of the intricacies of the quantum universe and his sense of it as

both fixed and unpredictable relates to Heisenberg’s version of

quantum physics. There is no very profound meditation here on
quantum theory or the history of nuclear weapons; Moore was an
averagely well-informed man of the 1980s, who picked and chose
from available material what was useful to his narrative rather than
making easily summarized points. Manhattan’s name relates, of
course, to the project, not the island.
All of the superheroes in Watchmen are deeply flawed human
beings, even the comparatively sympathetic Dan Dreiberg,
Laurie and Hollis, though in each case their flaws are balanced by
corresponding strengths. Dreiberg has turned the dilettantism that
might otherwise have paralysed him to the development of skills
and technologies of actual use; Laurie’s ability to go out and fight
crime has stopped her being frozen by anger against her mother.
These two are the closest thing Moore gives us to identification
figures; it is significant that both of them are past first youth and
that Dreiberg’s retirement from vigilantism has left him mildly
paunchy and deeply frustrated with his life.
Yet Dreiberg is shown to have the soul of a poet; Moore uses one
of the appended chunks of prose at the ends of the individual issues
to establish this clearly. Perhaps of all the characters, he alone has a
sense of the sacred; it is worth quoting at length his remarks about
his totemic owls:
Perhaps instead of measuring the feathered tufts surmounting its
ears, we should speculate on what those ears have heard. Perhaps
when considering the manner in which it grips its branch with
two toes behind and the reversible outer toe clutching from
behind, we should allow ourselves to pause for a moment and
acknowledge that these same claws must once have drawn blood
from the shoulder of Pallas.
He and, to a lesser extent, Laurie make the decision reluctantly to

accept what Veidt has done; they do not give up on responsibility,
however, and plan to continue being masked vigilantes whatever
the cost. They are not entirely admirable, but they are entirely
likable; this is a book that avoids having a moral centre, but they

are the closest thing to it in the sheer ordinariness that is a part of

their heroism.
Three of the prose segments at the end of each issue are devoted
to ‘extracts’ from Hollis’ fictional memoir, ‘Under the Mask’.
Moore devotes considerable warmth to creating this figure of an
earlier and kinder America with his folksy stories about cuckolded
garage owners with a taste for opera, and his sense of the absurd
about the pursuit to which he dedicated much of his adult life.
Hollis is a useful foil to the younger superheroes simply because
he is not even slightly neurotic; he is plausibly amused rather
than disconcerted by the possibility that sexual psychopathology
underlies the decision to become a masked vigilante.
Whereas Dreiberg and Laurie return to superheroing, the whole
point about Hollis is that he gave it up when he grew too old for it,
and was good enough at what he did that he lived that long. Yet he
is also a victim of his younger colleagues and friends; the world is
not kind to him. Just at the point when he has his post-retirement
career as a garage mechanic planned, Manhattan releases electric
cars that make his skills redundant. One of the reasons why young
gang members beat him to death is that they were themselves
beaten up earlier when they attacked Laurie and Dreiberg. Moore
constantly reminds us that actions have consequences and that we
cannot know what those consequences will be. Hollis is the most
likable of all these characters, and is doomed by the others.
Rorschach is not likable at all, and is more or less clinically
deranged. Damaged by his childhood, working as a vigilante has
brought out in him an almost demonic brutality and capacity for
violence. When imprisoned and taunted by fellow-convicts that he
is, at last, locked in with them, he points out to them that, on the
contrary, they are locked in with him. He has a way of looking
at things that means that, when the prisoners come to get him in
his cell, he tricks them to their deaths, carved or electrocuted by
the acetylene cutter they planned to use to get to him and then
kill him. Moore’s scepticism about the superhero ethos is informed
here by a balanced sense of the human possibilities that go with
neurotic flaws – Rorshach is demonically clever.

A number of small details combine to represent him as unpleasant.

His personal cult of President Truman, whom he believes to have
perhaps been his unknown father or at least dubs him an exemplar
of traditional virtue, sounds innocent enough. When we reflect
that Watchmen is to an important extent a parable about nuclear
deterrence, and the necessary ruthlessness of statecraft, and that
Truman was the American President who ordered the nuclear
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rorschach’s cult of him looks
rather less innocent.
Unlike the inner monologues of all the other characters,
Rorschach’s are represented as unpleasant by being scrawled on
lines of exercise paper. His inner monologue is, indeed, the diaries
he gives to the Frontiersman; at other times, he talks to himself,
presumably aloud, and is allowed the standard small capitals script
of the book’s dialogue. It is clear from the sample scripts included
in the deluxe edition that this distinction was something Moore
Steve Ditko
Rorschach is also Moore’s tribute to the artist/writer who
created the Charlton character, the Question, from whom
Rorschach in part derives. Steve Ditko was one of the key
figures in the early days of Marvel Comics, as important as Stan
Lee in producing such figures as Spider-Man and Dr Strange,
but less adroit in coping with the vagaries of the industry than
Lee. Ditko was a figure of extreme political views, a follower of
Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and a right-wing libertarian.
As an anarchist of the left, Moore is at once attracted
and repelled by Ditko, who quarrelled with Lee, partly over
Marvel’s liberal slant in the 1960s and 1970s, partly over Lee’s
desire to have the Green Goblin turn out to be tycoon Norman
Osborne rather than, as Ditko wanted, a random nameless
criminal. The scene where the police unmask the feared
Rorschach to discover an unattractive little man of whom no
one is afraid is possibly a reference to this row between Lee
and Ditko, though Moore says he did not consciously intend
one.

thought of from the beginning, rather than one of Gibbons’ many

excellent ideas.
Rorschach’s back-story is interesting: he is the scrawny,
unappealing son of a prostitute mother who often told him that
she wished she had aborted him. He was the sort of child who
is punished for retaliation against bullies, partly because his slight
stature meant that he never ‘fought fair’. There is a real sense in
which he is a pun on the concept of the secret identity, because
his identity as Kovacs is a person no one notices, including the
reader. Rorschach dominates the first page of Watchmen with his
apocalyptic rant as voiceover and, as a man with a ‘The End is Nigh’
placard, Kovacs traipses across the scene, trailing his feet through
the Comedian’s pooled blood on the sidewalk. It is still not until
many pages later that we definitively make the identification of
the two men. Talking to his psychiatrist, Rorschach says, and he is
clearly right, that the incident with the kidnapped child fed to dogs
changed him from Kovacs impersonating Rorschach to Rorschach.
As an antisocial man with a slant on human affairs that is at an
angle to normal empathy, Rorschach is also a version of an archetypal
fan of comics and science fiction. As a man living by himself, with
odd enthusiasms (birdwatching, classic torch songs) and mildly out
of condition, Dreiberg is another. Moore understands his audience
well enough to know that they will respond positively to the mild
teasing implicit in these portrayals.
Rorschach is to some extent Dreiberg’s shadow self, and the fact
that they are both aspects of third things – Batman clones, fan-boys
– strengthens that fact. The few scenes in which Dreiberg talks
about their relationship and how hard it is to be Rorschach’s friend
are genuinely affecting; the point at which Rorschach responds and
acknowledges the respect he feels for Dreiberg, whom he normally
mocks and carps at, is equally so. It is a good example of Moore’s
sense of balance that Rorschach ruins the moment by holding
Dreiberg’s hand a beat too long.
He takes his name from the piece of experimental fabric which
he made into his mask, a piece of black and white cloth in which
the black and white endlessly flow into patterns. He is not just a

man with a face made of blots, he is also what we choose to read

into those blots and the stories we tell about them. He is a hero,
he is a Nazi and someone whose distaste for sexuality is itself a
perversion; whichever we choose to see. Looking at blots for the
prison psychiatrist, he claims to see a pretty butterfly when what
he actually sees is a dead dog with its head sliced in half; in a sense,
the world he has inhabited since the incident with the child and the
dogs is the world he chooses to see.
He adopted mask and crime fighting as a response to the death
(which actually happened in our world) of Kitty Genovese, raped
and murdered while her apathetic neighbours watched. Moore does
not let us simply or straightforwardly disapprove of Rorschach,
because the world of thugs and demonic violence he inhabits is an
all too real one. Significantly, Genovese’s death is the only thing that
happened in both our world and his, except for the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan; both crime and the threat of nuclear war are real
issues, even if they are being discussed in a comic.
Rorshach’s name is at one point misheard by the police over the
telephone as Raw Shark. As such it relates to the literal sharks that
the comics fan small boy at the news-stand reads about in his pirate
comic, sharks that are harnessed by its protagonist to pull him and
his raft of corpses towards his destination of damnation. The issue
in which we learn his back-story is, because Moore never opts for
subtlety when crudity is called for, named The Abyss Gazes Also, from
the obvious quotation from Nietzsche: ‘Battle not with monsters
lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss
gazes also into you.’
Yet, this man dies a martyr to the truth, in his own warpedly
clever way. Earlier, trapped in his cell, he mocked the thugs who
had come to kill him until one reached in to strangle him, and
then tied the man’s hands together with torn clothing so that his
enemies could not reach the lock. When they cut their accomplice
in half to get to Rorschach, he breaks his cell’s toilet with a kick
so that the man with the oxyacetylene torch is electrocuted by the
water-splash on live wires. This is the man who goes to his death
refusing compromise in the face of annihilation, knowing that he

has already sent his diary of the investigation to the Frontiersman. As

we see in the last panel of Watchmen, it may well be Rorschach who
has the last laugh, and, through him the Comedian, whose death he
has investigated to the end.
Which is as it should be, because Adrian Veidt is altogether too
arrogant and smug in his attitude to the people he has made into his
puppets for his absolute victory to be entirely satisfactory. He takes
his name from Hadrian, the emperor in whose reign, and those
around it, Gibbon believed human governance to have achieved its
most successful flowering, and Conrad Veidt, the exiled anti-fascist
who played so many memorable Nazi villains. His superhero name,
Ozymandias, is the soubriquet of one of his idols, Rameses II, his
other being Alexander. His arrogance and cult of these heroes
make him more vulnerable than he realizes; Dreiberg breaks into
the computer files which prove Veidt’s guilt by typing in ‘Rameses
II’ as a password.
‘Ozymandias’ is, of course, also the title of Shelley’s sonnet,
quoted in the title and epigraph to the eleventh issue, Look on my
Works, ye Mighty. At one level, this title seems to endorse Veidt’s
critical stance to the actions of other superheroes; they have talked
about saving the world, while he has taken action. On the other
hand, it also links him to ultimate failure and futility: ‘round the
decay/ Of that colossal wreck, the lone and level sands stretch far
away’. The sonnet also makes a direct link between the pharaoh
and the artist who at once mocked him and commemorated him
– ‘the hand that mocked him and the heart that fed’; Moore is not
simply condemning or praising Veidt and his actions. Veidt may be
a criminal, but he is also a Maker, an artist in his way, at whatever
vast human cost.
Veidt identifies with Alexander’s cutting of the Gordian knot.
The problem of the world as it is can only be solved by a single
broad bold stroke, not by the piecemeal social engineering, to use
Karl Popper’s phrase, of taking out one supervillain at a time. Once
he has made this decision, of course, individual lives start meaning
as little to him as they do to Manhattan. The figures from the past
with whom he identifies were both, of course, mass murderers

once you choose to look at them in that way; Veidt kills several
characters personally or indirectly, and millions of others through
his plan, several of whom we also know. Rorschach, by contrast,
whom we think of as far more obviously murderous, kills no more
than five people in the whole of his career.
In his cult of personal excellence, bodybuilding and travels in
faraway lands,Veidt is like an older tradition of pulp heroes, as I have
said. His cult of the great of classical and Middle Eastern antiquity
also links him to DC’s version of Marvelman (Moore used a British
recension of the character in his and Gaiman’s book, Miracleman):
the cry ‘Shazam!’, which replaces Billy Batson with Marvelman is,
of course, an acronym for the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of
Hercules and so on.
Veidt is also, as we eventually discover, the book’s villain, all
powerful in his wealth, his ingenuity and his ruthlessness. In a
way rather different to that which applies to Rorschach, he has
looked into the abyss and become a monster. As such he is Lex
Luthor, of course – another Alexander, I need hardly point out
– and perhaps most especially R’as Al Ghul, the Arabic-named
master of conspiracy who is perhaps one of the Batman’s most
intriguing opponents because he comes closest to being his shadow
double. Once Veidt has explained the final ramifications of his
plot to Rorschach and Dreiberg, the latter begs him not to put
it into execution and Veidt mocks him: ‘Dan, I’m not a Republic
serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if
there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?
I did it thirty-five minutes ago.’ Yet in some important respects, a
serial villain is precisely what he is, a mass murderer of staggering
ambition whatever his motivation. Bond’s opponent Blofeld
regularly appears stroking a Persian cat; Veidt’s cat is sacrificed to
his attempt to murder Manhattan.
In one of the novel’s most effective moments of misdirection,
Veidt is attacked by an assassin whose bullet strikes and kills Veidt’s
secretary. In the subsequent struggle, the killer bites down on a
cyanide capsule, or rather, since the whole thing is a fraud, Veidt
breaks one in his mouth. Dreiberg challenges him on this point:

‘You couldn’t have planned it. What if he’d shot you first?’ and
Veidt replies ‘I’d have had to catch the bullet’, looking sardonic
when Dreiberg is incredulous. And later, when Laurie shoots him,
he does catch her bullet in mid-air; ‘catching the bullet’ is of course
notoriously one of the most difficult and deadly tricks in the stage
conjurer’s repertoire. Veidt is a magician, and a trickster, and is
therefore also linked to comics’ major trickster villain, the Joker.
One might have supposed that the closest figure in Watchmen to
the Joker would be the Comedian, but he is not that sort of trickster.
It is certainly true that the Comedian comes closest to wisdom
in his many grim jokes. He is an unpleasant murderous thug, but
when, after killing the Vietnamese woman who scars his face for
leaving her pregnant, he points out to the disapproving Manhattan
that Manhattan could have stopped him, the bitter jest he makes of
it is true. When he tells the nascent Crimebusters group that their
efforts are pointless, and sets fire to their chart of social problems,
he is expressing the same sense of the pointlessness of what they do
that comes to haunt both Veidt and Manhattan.
One of the reasons Veidt beats the Comedian personally and
hurls him from a window is an earlier beating given him by the
older man; another is that he shares with Veidt and Manhattan,
whom Veidt also tries to kill, a certain capacity for wisdom. He
is, to that extent, the double, the dark self that Veidt needs to kill,
not least because the Comedian is honest about the vein of sadistic
violence that Veidt is in denial about. The Comedian is a joker and a
truth-teller through his bleak dark jokes.
Veidt is, however, almost entirely humourless, except for that
sardonic silent look. He is like Manhattan in this; he does not
share the other characters’ taste for traditional superhero banter.
Violence is a serious matter to him, not something to be celebrated:
when Rohrschach and Dreiberg attack him, he in seconds reduces
them to men bleeding and on their knees before him. All he says
is ‘Manners’, rebuking them for attacking him at dinner; there is
humour of a sort in that, but it is of a very dry kind. Earlier, when
he kills the assassin he has himself commissioned, he is utterly
silent, utterly effective, as he was when killing the Comedian.

When, knowing that his plot has succeeded and he has brought
peace to the world, Veidt gloats, and where most villains would at
least crack a gag at this point, he speaks in utter seriousness quoting
Rameses’ inscriptions: ‘Canaan is devastated, Ashkelon is fallen,
Gezer is ruined . . . All the Countries are united and pacified.’ He
is utterly serious minded, and for once the cliché ‘deadly serious’
actually applies.
Apart from his strength, athleticism and intelligence, he has
the particular self-taught gift of coming to intelligent conclusions
about the nature and future of society by viewing many television
screens at once. He is – and this is another area where Moore is
both attracted and repelled by his creation – a perfect creature
of the age of McLuhan and intertextuality and Baudrillard and
Debord. The opening of the eleventh issue of Watchmen is worth
quoting at considerable length because it helps describe Moore’s
own working methods as much as it does Veidt’s, who is speaking
here:
Multi screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs’
cut-up technique. He suggested re-arranging words and images
to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future
to leak through. An impending world of exotica, glimpsed only
peripherally. Perceptually the simultaneous input engages me like
the kinetic equivalent of an abstract or impressionist painting.
Phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose meanings, coalesce from semiotic
chaos before reverting to incoherence.Transient and elusive, these
must be grasped quickly.
What Veidt does have in common with the majority of the book’s
superheroes is his isolation; he murders his core group of silent
East Asian minions and kills his cat. Manhattan and Rorschach’s
isolation is something on which we have already commented.
Hollis lives alone, as does the ageing Sally Jupiter, whose marriage
collapsed and who had her child through an affair with a man who
earlier tried to rape her, the Comedian. He in turn deserts and
murders a Vietnamese woman whom he got pregnant, and lives
alone. The only one of the original Watchmen who appears to have

had a satisfactory emotional life was the lesbian Silhouette, who

was purged from the group for her sexuality and later murdered. It
is in this context that the potentially durable relationship between
Dreiberg and Laurie is one of the few signs of hope in this bleak
book.
The relationships of the minor characters are equally
dysfunctional: the working relationship of the two right-wing
journalists is one of abuse and contempt and almost until the end
the newsvendor is a chameleon, telling each of his clients what he
thinks they want to hear. The relationship between the cabdriver
and her woman lover ends in violent abuse; the psychiatrist and his
wife resent each other and have a social life in which their friends
have a voyeuristic interest in his clients. One of the few relationships
here that involves kindness is that between the newsvendor and the
small boy who reads the comics on his stand; however, presumably
the boy is sitting on street corners because he has nowhere else to
go.
A male writer and a female artist who are part of Veidt’s design
team are engaged in having sex when he discovers the bomb that is
about to kill them. One of the few moments of kindness in the book
is that he does not tell her what he has found, allowing her to die
unknowing and momentarily happy. In a sense, this is a description
of the book’s dark gloomy take on human relationships.
Watchmen as Thick Text

The story-telling of Watchmen is not simply a matter of its linear
narrative. We are shown this world in vast detail and any aspect
that we are persuaded to concentrate on is liable to turn into a
plot point or a moment of emotional intensification. As Veidt says:
‘An impending world of exotica, glimpsed only peripherally’.
The omnipresence of fast-food curry restaurants in this alternate
New York seems merely a gesture, until the moment when Laurie,
contemplating the massed corpses Ozymandias’ scheme has
produced says ‘Tandoori to go. That’s all they went out for, these
people . . . Tandoori to go.’ And she breaks the reader’s hearts with

the inadequacy of her response to mass death, and its absolutely

observed humanity.
Watchmen is heavily loaded with subplots: there are the lives of
the people at the news-stand, all of which are to be cut short as the
human cost of Ozymandias’ plot to save the world, and the many
flashbacks to the stories of them and other superheroes. A lot of
incidents endlessly recur, seen from slightly different perspectives,
so that we learn about the Comedian’s attempted rape of Laurie’s
mother long before we realize that they subsequently had the affair
of which Laurie is the progeny. Early in his career, Ozymandias
tries to organize his colleagues and is mocked by the Comedian,
who sets fire to his charts and organizational maps and mocks
his aspiration to be ‘the smartest guy on the cinder’. All of the
characters have moments from their past that haunt them and of
which we gradually learn the significance. ‘Transient and elusive,
these must be grasped quickly’, as Veidt says.
This is also a text about texts. Each of the 12 issues, save the last,
comes with an appended prose section – and the twelfth ends with a
reader possibly about to discover the most important prose section
of all, Rorschach’s diary, of which we have had extracts in passing
throughout. We get excerpts from Wallis’ memoirs, Dreiberg’s
rhapsodic prose about birdwatching, the prison psychiatrist’s
assessment of Rorschach, a chunk of material from the Frontiersman
defending masked vigilantes against their liberal political critics,
and an article about pirate comics. All of these deepen the texture
of the narrative.
A story is in order here about the complexity of Moore’s method
and the extent to which it is not entirely under his conscious control.
When I interviewed him, about half-way through the production of
Watchmen, he asked me where I thought the plot was going:
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You’ve set that up terribly neatly. Clearly the
Comedian’s killer is Ozymandias. And I suppose this is the Report
from Iron Mountain plot about preventing nuclear war by creating
a plausible alien menace.’
‘What makes you think that?’ he growled through his beard.

Tales of the Black Freighter

Inside the narrative, a young boy at the news-stand reads a
comic book, ‘Tales of the Black Freighter’ (a title that refers
to the stock translation of Brecht and Weill’s song ‘Pirate
Jenny’, whose ‘schiff mit acht segeln’ becomes ‘the ship, the
black freighter’). In the story, which we get in fragments, but
which makes perfect sense to us by the time we have read the
whole book, a man is desperate to get to his home and warn
people of a pirate ship; to get there, he becomes capable of
doing anything – building a raft from corpses, harnessing
a shark, killing a man for his horse – and comes to realize
that the pirate ship is there for him, its new recruit, rather
than anything else. He has become the thing he dreads in an
attempt to save what he loves. The relevance of this to Veidt’s
trajectory is clear: as we come to understand the story, we get
to understand his internal journey. The comic book is linked to
Veidt intimately; its writer is one of the team he uses to create
his extraterrestrial menace and then kills.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘ what put me onto it was the perfume ads.’

He looked bemused.
‘All of the perfume ads, which are produced by one of Veidt’s
companies, have, as slogans, quotations from popular songs of the
1920s and 1930s. Except for one, which is a misquotation.’
‘What?’ he said.
‘It says “Nostalgia, by Veidt. Gone is the fragrance that was so
divine”, and of course the lyric is actually “Gone is the romance
that was so divine”.’
‘And?’
‘The words of the song,’ I said. ‘“What’ll I do, when you are
far away, and I am blue . . . With just a photograph to tell my
troubles to . . . when you are kissing someone new”. All of that
happens to Manhattan – he is on Mars, he has blue skin, he talks
to a photograph, and Laurie is kissing Dan. It is his situation
exactly, and it’s tied to Veidt through the ad, which means Veidt
is responsible.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s very ingenious. But I didn’t know I was

quoting a song.’
‘Tell me,’ I asked. ‘Did you ever see Robert Redford in The
Great Gatsby?’
‘Yes . . . ?’
‘It was the theme tune.’
Moore’s endlessly allusive mind constructs chains of reference

so complex and reflexive that even he does not keep entire track
of them. Watchmen is one of the things I always think of when I
talk about thick texts, because it contains within itself large parts
of the past and, as it happens, the future, of its chosen genre and
is quite remarkably open to close readings, readings closer than
Moore knew at the time. To describe it as the most profound of
meditations on the world with superheroes in it is to limit a work
that has many other meanings and many other axes to grind; it is
nonetheless true. ‘Who watches the watchmen?’ the tag asks, and
there is no ultimate answer; themselves, each other, the mundane
world, the reader. No one, the anarchist Moore reminds us, is good
enough to be another person’s master; all superhero comics are
implicitly considerations of power and how power brings with it
both absolute freedom and a life in chains.

4
Dark Knights,
Team-Mates and
Mutants
Sustaining the
Superhero Narrative
The Growth of Storylines to Runs

One of the things that, from the creation of the genre, defined the
sort of story that a superhero comic could tell was the standard
size of a comic, which was in turn dictated by such considerations
as the availability of paper, what the distributors wanted and what
advertising could be sold. Back in the Golden Age, when things
were simple, the stories that were told could be simple too, and
audiences were still amazed enough at the concepts they were
meeting for the first or tenth time that they asked for little more.
There were no stories that took more than one issue to tell, and
for the most part issues contained more than one story; issues that
contained only one story were the ones that were singled out as
special ‘book-length’ issues.
Even then, though, relationships of hero and villain were
explored over and over without a reset button and with occasional
acknowledgements that they had history together. Increasingly, the
particular encounters we saw came to be part of continuity; when
villains recurred in the lives of a superhero, there was a sense of
an ongoing antagonistic relationship. Partly as a result of this, the
accumulation of continuity made it possible for things to become

more complex. Marvel’s habit of doubling up even some quite

major characters in the front and back halves of issues when they
had not yet earned their own comic meant that stories about them
were more likely to become serials, albeit serials each of whose
episodes could stand alone. Increasingly, the story of the next
issue would start in the last few panels of the current one – every
triumph of the hero was seen as temporary, with a new menace
lurking round the corner. By the end of the 1960s, certainly by the
mid-1970s, comics were getting themselves caught up in long and
complicated storylines that were not just hero meets villain, hero
and villain fight, hero takes villain to jail.
This meant, for example, that there could be long-standing
story arcs, like the long delay before it was revealed precisely who
was hiding between the mask of the Green Goblin. It meant that
there could be strings of revelation like Doctor Strange’s discovery
that, behind his enemy Baron Mordo, there lurked the evil god
Dormammu and that they had to be prevented not merely from
seizing magic from Strange and Mordo’s mentor the Ancient
One, but from attacks on the fundamental principles of reality.
It meant that the Avengers’ quite casual connection with Captain
Marvel could embroil the Earth in the war between the galactic
empires of Kree and Skrull. It meant, in due course, that DC, most
especially in its team-up comics, had to follow Marvel in telling
longer stories. It meant that story-telling could be paced and that
continuity could become more than one damn encounter after
another.
It also came to mean that there could be, by the 1970s, the sort
of event that I deal with below and the sort of run I deal with in the
current chapter. It can be argued, to some extent retrospectively,
that the first storyline consciously conceived of as such was Marvel’s
The Avengers – The Kree/SkrullWar (1971). Once it became clear that
comics were holding onto an audience that would consider first
buying individual issues and then buying those issues collected
into a more durable form, possibly with additional material in the
shape of design sheets, introductions, or commentary, it became
commercially viable to start creating short-run comics, or to find

Dark Knights, Team-Mates and Mutants • 141
other ways to tell the sort of story that would work in permanent
form.
Whereas back in the Golden Age comics buyers were primarily
driven by their interest in the characters and what might be
happening to them this month, increasingly they were as motivated
by the writers and artists as much as the titles. This was in part a
consequence of the cult of personality at Marvel – Lee and Kirby
and Ditko and so on – but DC increasingly had its stars as well:
anything Gardner Fox had a hand in was liable to be worthy of
attention. This meant, in turn, that attention was liable to be paid
when a new writer or artist came to a long-standing title, or when
a long-established writer or artist was involved in creating one.
Young writers could make a name for themselves and attention
would be paid to what they were going to do next, especially when
and if they changed jobs between the two major houses.
To some extent, before then, and certainly from the 1980s
onwards, we are talking less about individual fine issues of comics or
even one good issue after another, but about runs of comics where
a long game was played, or special short runs when a writer and
artist were allowed to do something remarkable.The fact that many
such long runs, or particular short runs, are distinctly mediocre
should not blind us to the fact that some of the best superhero
comics of recent years were conceived of against the background
of a strong probability that they would be sold as issues and then
sold again in a trade paperback (a ‘trade’). By the early 2000s,
the only reason why individual issues still sold was a combination
of audience sentimentality and a desire to know in a hurry what
happens next; the future of comics, including superhero comics, is
almost certainly in trade paperbacks, CD-Roms of complete runs
and in a shift from illegal fan downloads to legal ones.
The market has never entirely abandoned the quick fix of the
week’s new issues and the monthly cycle of which titles come out
in which week. A lot of fans are still hooked on that particular
buzz, yet increasingly the trades are important and there are
complications to that importance. Some comics do not sell
especially well, month to month, and may tip the borderland of

cancellation, yet sell particularly well as trades or digests: Brian

Vaughan’s Runaways, which Marvel aimed at younger readers, but
which was a distinctly classier production than that might imply,
sells better in collections than in its individual issues, and has sold
well in deluxe hardbacks that combine three digest-size collections.
There are also, it has to be added, writers who work better at the
length of a trade collection than they do in slow-moving individual
issues – Brian Michael Bendis is one of these.
In this chapter, then, I shall be looking at various specific runs of
particular titles, and at some superhero graphic novels that were
Moore’s Forty-Niners
Alan Moore’s The Forty-Niners, a prequel to his police procedural
superhero comic Top Ten, is interesting for a variety of reasons
apart from its sheer quality – not the least of which is the
interesting fact that it was written for publication as a finished
trade book, but is divided up into chapters that are more or
less precisely the length they would have been had they been
published as individual issues. It is also a charming piece of
story-telling that goes in directions we would not entirely
expect, and yet know are coming because its hero is someone
we already know, the ageing Precinct Captain of the earlier,
but chronologically later, comic.
As above, Moore’s reservations about working in the
superhero mainstream have to do with the ownership of his
creations, not with the utility of continuity in story-telling.
Steve Traynor is a young, a very young, war veteran when he
comes to town trailing behind him his glory days as JetLad;
part of the fun is that we know he will end up a success, and
that he will find love and lifelong partnership with fellow
aviator Wulf (both of these characters referencing characters
in the comics of the 1940s). And along the way Moore gives
us some gloriously entertaining stuff about the vampire
Mafia and some other aviators with views about how to run
a city, views that in their authoritarian brutality remind us of
Watchmen’s Rorschach, but also of another figure who looms
over a rather different cityscape . . .

originally issued in monthly parts – this was, of course, also true

of Alias and Watchmen, which I consider in Chapters 2 and 3, and of
the various events and reboots that I consider in Chapter 5. Space
dictates restricting this to three particular runs that I have selected
on the basis that one is a classic graphic novel that helped redefine
a character for two decades, one is a good example of what can
be done by way of story-telling inside continuity without a second
of radical reinvention, and the third is a brilliant re-imagining of
characters and scenarios that had started to go very slightly stale.
Loeb’s Batman
In the end, this was an arbitrary choice, and there are a
number of similar runs that I considered and rejected with
some regret. Jeph Loeb’s various Batman titles, for example,
offer a far sunnier version of the Dark Knight than Miller’s or
most others in the post-Miller era. The Long Halloween and
Dark Victory show us the Batman as a detective working
alongside the police and baffled by a series of murders of
Gotham’s old-time Italian-American mobsters; it offers a
particularly inventive revision of Harvey Dent’s continuity and
does not make him less tragic a figure by suggesting that
the charismatic DA had a dark side even before he became
Two-Face. Loeb’s Hush! has a storyline primarily designed
to enable the artist Jim Lee to do utterly gorgeous takes on
most of the Batman’s cast of allies and enemies, and yet it was
compelling enough to have determined continuity far more
than may have been intended. It also has moments of tellingly
neat psychological insight, as when the Riddler reveals that he
has worked out the Batman’s other identity, and the Batman
points out to him that he will never tell, because that would
spoil the enigma by sharing its answer.

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns

In the early 1980s, Frank Miller made a name working at Marvel.
He took the fading Daredevil and made it a title that excited people,
introducing the blind vigilante lawyer’s assassin ex-girlfriend
Elektra, taking a podgy gang-boss from Spider-Man and making the
Kingpin a satanic Godfather of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and also,
for example, taking a routine villain like Bullseye and making him
the stuff of which nightmares are made. Miller also transformed
the soap-opera aspect of the comic: Matt Murdock acquired
Catholic guilt to go with his other problems, which included a
mother who had left home to become a nun. There is a nervous
energy to Miller’s period on Daredevil that made it feel even more
like NewYork than it had in other hands, and for the first time Matt
Murdock was not only heroic, but sexy.
It is in the context of Miller’s work on Daredevil that the news
that he was taking on a Batman project was greeted with real and
justified excitement. The Dark Knight Returns was not his first project
for DC – Ronin combined his samurai obsession with his fascination
with corporate dystopias and had some powerful imagery of
dismemberment and emotional pain. What could not have been
foreseen at the time of The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One,
the project that succeeded it, was that this was probably going to
be the best of Miller, that misanthropy and a distinctly odd fetishist
attitude to women would increasingly dominate his work thereafter.
Sin City, his extended exercise in porno noir, is certainly not like
anything else, and was admirably – if you can stomach it – filmed
by Robert Rodriguez, but generally Miller’s work of the 1990s
and 2000s has been a disappointment: a sequel, The Dark Knight
Strikes Back, tips all the way over into mannerism, incoherence and
unpleasant right-wing point-scoring; All Star Batman and Robin is, if
possible, worse, with the dementedly right-wing politics allied to
the sexual fetishism and misogyny of Sin City.
The Dark Knight Returns has all of these things, but is the comic in
which Miller kept his demons on a leash; it totters perpetually on
the brink of insanity, but never falls. It has, it needs to be added, been

much parodied, and deserves it for its various excesses, particularly

those to do with the Batman’s obtrusive voiceovers. Its unforgiving
attitude to the effect of time on female bodies is unpleasant, but is
at least balanced by Miller’s creation of the first female Robin in
the resourceful Carrie Kelly – who ends up rescuing the Batman
at least as often as he saves her. It is, it has to be added, probably
important that Carrie is a girl-child whose cute androgyny could
not be further away from the pneumatic dominatrixes of Sin City,
and that this remains true even in The Dark Knight Strikes Back when
she has grown up to be the new Catwoman.
To summarize briefly: the Batman has not been sighted for 10
years. Bruce Wayne hung up his cape when the Joker killed Jason
Todd, the second Robin, it is implied, and has been gratifying his
addiction to adrenalin in other ways, such as – in the first page of
the book – motor-racing, in which he takes serious risks in order
to win. ‘This would be a good death’ he says, but not good enough;
there is no woman in his life, nor any boy, because he is in love
with death. Gotham City has gone from bad to worse and is largely
under the boot of a vicious teen gang, the Mutants; Commissioner
Gordon, who is about to retire, is a weary old man tired of holding
back the barbarians. When two Mutants start to mug Bruce Wayne
and think better of it – ‘He’s into it . . . Can’t do murders when
they’re into it’ – he decides to come out of retirement and starts a
war on the Mutants.
Harvey Dent – Two-Face – has, supposedly, been cured, by
having the acid-scarred side of his face restored, and is paroled; he
promptly goes on the rampage, believing in his madness that both
sides of his face are now scarred. The Batman defeats him; Gordon
retires and is replaced by a young woman Commissioner pledged
to suppress vigilantism. The Batman fights the Mutant leader
inconclusively; he nearly loses and only survives with the help of
Carrie, a teenage girl who wants to be the new Robin, more or less
irrespective of what the Batman thinks about it. Subsequently, he
engineers the freeing of the Mutant leader and this time beats him
into insensibility. The Joker, again supposedly cured, escapes and
goes on a murderous rampage; the Batman fights him and, badly

injured, the Joker takes his own life in a way that leaves the Batman
on the run for murder.
An international crisis that Superman fails to resolve leads to
the detonation of an EMP weapon over Gotham; with the help
of teen gangs who idolize him, the Batman restores order to
the crippled city. On the orders of the President – a caricatured
Reagan – Superman comes to Gotham to arrest his old friend.
With help from Green Arrow, whom Superman maimed for his
acts of environmental terrorism, the Batman beats Superman and
dies of a heart attack in his moment of triumph. Alfred dynamites
stately Wayne Manor. At the funeral, Superman hears a heart start
to beat again, and says nothing; in the Batcave under the ruins,
Bruce Wayne plots his next move with the help of Carrie and his
other lieutenants.
All of this is told in a dialogue-heavy highly dynamic style,
constantly interspersed with vox pops, fragments of television
programmes, fatuous presidential speeches and short anecdotes
about the effect the Batman’s activities have on the public good:
a deli owner is inspired to beat a mugger with a rolling pin; a
paranoid goes on a rampage in a porn cinema; a mother hurrying
home is blown up by the Mutants with a hand grenade in her
purse. There are constant references back to the Batman’s back-
story – this is one of several classic Batman stories where we
get the death of his parents as the psychic wound that constantly
torments him.
Though it is notionally broken into four equal parts, and was
published in four large issues, the act structure – The Dark Knight
Returns, The Dark Knight Triumphant, Hunt the Dark Knight and The
Dark Knight Falls – with the act breaks coming at the defeat of
Harvey Dent, the defeat of the Mutant leader and Jim Gordon’s
retirement, and the death of the Joker – there are too many plot
issues and plot arcs for this structure to feel wholly natural and
organic. Miller was getting an unusual amount of space for each
issue, and there is something quite arbitrary about the placement of
some of the book’s highlights. He was having to create a grammar
of structured narrative different to the straightforward 20 or so

pages per issue he and others were used to, and he was not entirely
successful in making it work coherently.
The drive of the narrative is, however, sufficient that this is the
sort of weakness that only occurs on analysis; when reading The
Dark Knight Returns, one is swept away by its sheer mad intensity.
Nonetheless, this structural tendency to the ramshackle is a
problem with the later Elektra Assassin, where it is carried by the
hallucinatory expressionism of Sienkewicz’s art and some powerful
fetishist images. This is a book in which attack gunships look
more like high-button boots than any helicopter ever designed. It
becomes a real problem in the vastly inferior The Dark Knight Strikes
Back.
The constant monologue of the Batman, in which he monitors
his physical condition in the middle of fights, is both intense and
absurd: as he swings back into action, ‘this should be agony. I should
be a mass of aching muscle . . . the rain on my chest is baptism.
I am born again’. This is the sort of thing much parodied in, for
example, Dave Sim’s free-floating Cerebus the Aardvark, where at
one point the incompetent superhero Roach goes all Dark Knight
on us (elsewhere Cerebus is the Moon Knight, the alien-costumed
Spider-Man of Secret Wars, the Wolverroach and, when Sim decides
to parody Gaiman, Swoon).
One of the reasons for this is that Miller’s art is not especially
kinetic – it is not insignificant that one of the key fights in The Dark
Knight Returns takes place in a pool of mud that slows the Mutant
leader down – and his writing has to carry a burden that another
artist might have taken for him, the burden of showing action
memorably. Yet it does not matter how static his drawing of fights
is when his Batman says things like ‘This isn’t a mudhole . . . It’s an
operating table, and I’m the surgeon. Something tells me to stop
with the leg. I don’t listen to it.’ This is overstated macho nonsense,
but it is also magnificent in its way.
This static quality to Miller’s drawing is one of the reasons
why he uses so many talking heads; it is also why the moment
when the Batman tortures a Mutant into giving him their plans
is so specifically a question of removing a blindfold to reveal him

suspended from a building in a sudden swoop of perspective. The

climactic fights with the Joker and Superman are a sequence of
monumental poses – Miller is not ashamed to have learned from
Michelangelo and Blake, it seems. His character drawing tends to
the sketchy; if there were not a long iconography of Harvey Dent,
Jim Gordon and the Joker in our heads, it might be harder to keep
track of who they are.
There is a deliberate contrast between the weird but compre-
hensible villains who return for one last time from the Batman’s
past and a younger generation who are far more monstrous.
Harvey Dent’s delusion is genuinely tragic: he believes that the
Batman has engineered his mocking by a public who go along
with the pretence that he has been cured rather than rendered
more hideous. The Batman nearly kills them both in the process
of preventing his blowing up Gotham’s twin towers – and there
is a historical irony for you – but does so in a mood of genuine
compassion that contrasts with his attitude to all of his other
opponents in this comic.
The Joker is shown first of all as near-catatonic; he is almost
unrecognizable as he sits quietly while orderlies bicker round him
in what is no longer Arkham Asylum but the Arkham Home for
the Emotionally Troubled, and has traded in gloomy gothic for
institutional white. He hears, on the news, reports that the Bat
is back and his face suddenly stretches into his trademark rictus:
‘Batman,’ he whispers, ‘Darling’. The world has passed him and
Harvey Dent by; for 10 years they have sat quietly in their cells,
having their psyches rebuilt by the foolish liberal psychiatristWolper,
who believes that they can actually be changed, and that the forces
of vigilantism are far sicker than the monsters they fight: ‘Batman’s
psychotic sublimative/psychoerotic behaviour pattern is like a net.
Weak-egoed neurotics like Harvey are drawn into corresponding
intersticing patterns. Y ou might say Batman commits the crimes
using his so-called villains as narcissistic proxies.’ Wolper’s eventual
murder in the course of the Joker’s escape is almost contemptuously
casual, yet the erotic charge of the Joker’s relationship with the

Batman indicates that Wolper has seen, but misunderstood, aspects

of their relationship.
The Batman and the villains he is used to fighting have enough
back-story that they can understand each other at least; a newer
generation of monsters are opaque to him. It is not even clear
whether the Mutant leader is strictly human – he and a lot of
his lieutenants are monstrously large and muscular, and he has a
mouth full of fangs, something like a lamprey’s, something like a
shark’s. Steroids and extreme punk hairstyles account for some of
it, perhaps, but the teeth remain unexplained. One of the Mutant
lieutenants is a staggeringly butch transperson called Bruno, and
Bruno has almost Frankensteinian swastika bolts as piercings
through the nipples of enormous breasts – outrageous bodily
modification is clearly a part of Mutant style.
The Mutant leader talks less like a criminal than like a barbarian
warlord. Harvey Dent demands a ransom – ‘Five million – it would
have been two but I have expenses’ – but the Mutant is a different
kettle of fish: ‘We will kill the old man Gordon. His women will
weep for him. We will chop him. We will grind him. We will bathe
in his blood. I myself will kill the fool Batman. I will eat the meat
from his bones and suck them dry. I will eat his heart and drag
his body through the streets.’ He is a figure of inexplicable, almost
unstoppable aggression who bites the Mayor’s throat out when the
elderly bureaucrat tries to negotiate with him. The Batman almost
admires him for the perfect animality of his strength and drive:
‘He’s fast, faster than I am, and stronger. And seemingly impervious
to pain. But they do come smarter.’
One of the strengths of The Dark Knight Returns is the poignancy
of its meditation on ageing: Jim Gordon is on the brink of retiring
and is glad to be done with the struggle, Selina Kyle has become
a podgy panderer whom the still-trim Joker mocks for the effect
of time and forces to dress up in an unbecoming Wonder Woman
costume, Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) is a balding cripple whose
days as superhero are over. Superman talks of the past as glory
days that are done – ‘Diana went back to her people, Hal went
back to the stars’ – and of the Batman as someone who endangers

everything that can still be accomplished by superheroes by insisting

on overt behaviour.
Superman becomes one of Miller’s mouthpieces for a distinctly
jaundiced view of humanity; Miller manages this quite cleverly by
making Superman voice it rather than Bruce Wayne. Human beings
cannot bear the idea that ‘there are giants in the earth’, and the
condition on which it is possible to help them and do good is that you
take no credit for it. The specious arguments of a Benjamin Wolper,
and the feeble leftism of Carrie’s parents in which the Batman is
callowly accused of being a ‘fascist’, are all then rationalizations of
a fundamental resentment of inferiors towards superiors. Where
Siegel and Shuster took the figure of the Superman from Nietzsche
and reconfigured it for democracy, Miller has the iconic version
of Superman voice as urbane weary wisdom a particularly crude
version of unfiltered Nietzsche.
Of course, Miller is also playing, quite consciously, with fascist
iconography: come the nuclear winter and the electronic blackout
of the missile attack that Superman fails to prevent, and what
does the Batman become in order to restore order? He becomes
quite literally the Man on Horseback of Samuel Finer’s model
of authoritarian seizures of power, putting together a coalition
of Mutants who have escaped from jail and the faction of former
Mutants who have become the so-called Sons of the Batman,
enforcing zero tolerance of petty offences with wire-cutters and
napalm. Order is restored in the face of failures by the authorities
and the normal social institutions: middle-class executives become
looters and the one churchman we see is an ineffectual bigot who
has to be saved by a boy he distrusts for having a loud boombox.
Even Gordon manages nothing more than a failed attempt to
save from a fire a woman whom he thinks is his wife – his wife is
in fact not in the burning building and they both survive. Earlier,
he warns his successor Yindel not to think she can understand the
Batman by thinking of him as a simple criminal. In a long speech
he compares the Batman with Franklin Roosevelt and talks of the
rumours that the President allowed Pearl Harbor to happen in
order to force America into the Second World War. ‘But a lot of

people died,’ he says, ‘but we won the war. It bounced back and
forth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big.’
Yindel answers him, at the time, ‘I don’t see what this has to do
with a vigilante’. Later, when the Batman is bringing order to the
streets of Gotham, one of her men has a clear shot at him, and
she holds him back, saying ‘he’s too big’. Normally, the Batman is
shown as supplementing the forces of law and order; Miller shows
him as something superior, who does necessary things that they
cannot.
For Bob Kane, when he invented the Batman, the choice of
costume was a simple matter of picking something that would scare
the ‘cowardly and superstitious’ criminals, and this is the default
way most writers see the Batman and his compulsions. For Miller,
it is in large measure not a rational choice so much as possession
by a dark monstrous Batspirit that may or may not have objective
existence. One of the strengths of The Dark Knight Returns is that
it regularly turns on a dime between dark comedy, coarse satire,
action that is emotionally and viscerally impressive even where it
is visually static and introspective gothic horror; it is too much of a
caricature to be a reliable picture of a three-dimensional world, but
it does have the richness and complexity.
Miller’s version of the Batman is older, and conscious of it; he is
even jealous of Carrie because she has years to learn to fight crime,
years that he does not have any more. He is also far less of a detective
and far more of a gunslinger – other versions of the Batman fight
crime with forensic intelligence, whereas Miller’s tortures suspects.
In order to find out what the Mutants are planning, he suspends
one of them from the highest point in Gotham by his feet, hanging
sardonically next to him – this goes beyond the sadistic into the
deranged. The disguises he constantly wears to gather intelligence
or entrap people into crime are grotesque, where in most Batcomics
they are as elegant as he is. His athleticism has become a chunky
forcefulness: even the sleek Batmobile has been replaced by a tank.
Where, in earlier runs, he had been what Grant Morrison calls a
‘hairy-chested love-god’, this Batman is almost entirely sexless
– Alfred jokes sardonically about not needing to renew the wine

cellar at Wayne Mansion, ‘given your social schedule of late, the

prospect of there being a next generation . . .’. The Batman has
always been liminal in a number of ways, one of them that he was
cut off from his parents by their early death; now he is cut off from
the future as well, or so it seems.
Where most superhero comics take place in a rolling present,
The Dark Knight Returns deliberately places itself in a period that
is the Batman’s future, but the actual present that it was written
in – Reagan is President and the Soviet Union exists as the real
threat that it was not even at the time the comic was written.
Certain features of these 1980s are exaggerated and stylised: the
Mutants and others wield unfeasibly big machine guns and some of
the fashions – not only of the Mutants – are deliberately odd and
estranging, Yindel wears a leather greatcoat of a size and shape so
enormous it is hard to see how she stands up in it. It is a present day
for which Miller and his Batman have little but contempt.
The attitude to the media is an area in which the satire is
especially scathing – the Batman’s every move is debated to and fro
by talking heads who are none of them interested in the facts of the
matter, even the ones who, like this overweight future Lana Lang,
support him. These are media that are heavily censored beneath
an appearance of being able to say whatever they like; part of the
deal Superman has struck with things as they are is that he is never
mentioned explicitly, and a link-woman is tut-tutted at for using
the ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ catchphrase when he breezes
unseen, but felt, into town. One of the reasons why The Dark Knight
Returns has stayed fresh is that Miller’s perception of new media
as having become ‘infotainment’ was accurate at the time and has
since become more so. Tragedy is the story of the fall of a great
man, and these clowns twitter around the edges of it.
Nor are the audience for the media significantly better; the
only person who applies the lessons the Batman teaches correctly
is Carrie, his one true supporter, who becomes, like the dead
Jason, a ‘good soldier . . . who honoured me’. Even she only just
about matches up to his standards; he regularly threatens her with
dismissal for taking risks, for letting herself be seen by criminals

they are trailing, even after she has exceeded her orders and saved
his neck by doing so. Everyone else is cowardly – in this version
of the Batman, it is not only criminals who are a cowardly and
superstitious lot – venal and timeserving and obsessed with image
at the expense of substance, from the President on down.
This is shown vigorously in the art, drawn by Miller, inked by
Miller and Klaus Janson and coloured by Lynn Varley. Many of the
pages have an unusual 16-panel grid, but this constantly opens out;
the many vox pop and talking head characters are accordingly tiny
and detailed, and thrown into unflattering contrast with a coarsely
heroic Batman who on several pages takes up a single giant panel
in a heroic pugilist pose. Much of the time Varley colours things
– even the shell-suits the Mutants wear – in quite delicate pastels,
which makes the sudden blocs of dark blue, dark grey or dark
brown of the larger panels deliberately crude by comparison. This
is a book in which Miller manages to be almost entirely the auteur
of his own comic; anything that is here is here because he meant
it to be. The Dark Knight Returns remains, with all its flaws and all
the areas in which it makes us uneasy, one of the most impressive
comic books ever written.
Kurt Busiek’s Avengers Forever

Critics who are sceptical about the usefulness of an obsession with
continuity to comics writers would do well to contemplate the
career of Kurt Busiek. Busiek has serious claims as a creator of
original material – Arrowsmith, Secret Identity, Shock Rockets – and
of material that critiques and pastiches the obsessions of the main
superhero houses – Astro City – but he has equal claims to regard for
his work for both Marvel and DC.The miniseries Avengers Forever is a
side-bar to the long period in the early 2000s when he was writing
The Avengers, most of the run being drawn by the excellent George
Perez, who also drew the Justice League of America/Avengers crossover
that Busiek executed so tremendously. One of its characters – on
the pretext that she is an Avenger at some unspecified future date
– is Songbird, one of Busiek’s running characters from his other

major Marvel strip Thunderbolts, in which he took a lot of second-

string Marvel supervillains and re-engineered them as quasi-
reluctant heroes. Songbird, for example, had a previous career
as Screaming Mimi until she decided to use her sonic powers for
(more or less) good.
Using your powers for good is part of the mission statement
of all superheroes, but the Avengers, created as Marvel’s answer
to the Justice League of America, are particularly keen to do so,
saving the world from menaces and living in considerable style in
a New York mansion provided by one of their number. The line-up
of the Avengers has constantly changed and most superheroes who
have been members are always liable to turn up to help out when
they are short-handed. The hard core of the group has tended to be
Iron Man and Thor, with Captain America joining as soon as he was
defrosted. Janet Van Dyne has been a member much of the time, as
has been, though rather less, her husband Hank Pym in his various
manifestations as Ant-Man, Giant Man,Yellowjacket super-scientist
and occasional violent spouse. The archer Hawkeye has often been
a member, as have the formerly evil mutants Wanda and Pietro and
the Scarlet Witch, up to the point where she kills several of her
team-mates after going crazy. The android the Vision has likewise
been a member much of the time: in the current New Avengers
run scripted by Bendis, the line-up includes Spider-Man, Spider-
Woman, Wolverine and Luke Cage.
Busiek’s period on the comic lasted for several years; he made a
particular point of bringing back favourite villains, several of them
more than once. Pym’s parricidal robot Ultron turned up a couple of
times, for example, and the time-travelling Kang on two occasions
– The Kang Dynasty and the side-bar Avengers Forever. Busiek’s period
was not one with major innovations, though he introduced some
attractive new characters and stuck by his professed general rule of
only inventing new superheroes if he could find a way of giving them
roots in ethnic minorities. Part of the charm was that much of the
run was drawn by the veteran George Perez, with his fine line and
endless delight in vivid rendition of scenes with more recognizable
characters in them than it is quite sane to be able to name.

Busiek has a strong sense of historical period – the short-lived

and incomplete Arrowsmith is perhaps the best of all reconfigurings
of the First World War into a magic universe with its young
American hayseed aviator and sense of the tragedy of war – that
feeds into the time-travel plot of Avengers Forever. In both Arrowsmith
and the post-collapse Shock Rockets, Busiek demonstrates a real grasp
of how military and quasi-military organizations function through
Marvels
Busiek’s sense of period served him particularly well in his
magnificent project Marvels, a showcase for Alex Ross’ work in
the Marvel Universe in a way that Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come
was for Ross’ work on DC characters. The premise of Marvels
is that an ordinary New York civilian – a news photographer
who starts his career alongside J. Jonah Jameson – talks to
us about all that he has seen in the course of a long life, a
life which has overlapped with Marvel continuity from the
patriotic adventures of Captain America and Submariner
during the Second World War onwards. For once the standard
floating present of superhero comics is abolished so that the
revival of Captain America and the formation of the Fantastic
Four and the Avengers happen in a particular period once
and for all.
Marvels is a thorough-going hymn to the embattled and
flawed decency of the average American coping in a world in
which the concept of the average is changing as he watches.
The central character is guilty of paranoid bigotry towards
mutants when he reads about their discovery and stops being
a jerk the moment he finds a mutant child in serious danger.
Marvels is one of the best descriptions of how it would feel
to live in a world with superheroes if they were real; the near
photographic intensity of Ross’ images works equally well
in quiet domestic scenes or a picture of New York about
to be engulfed by a Submariner-unleashed tidal wave. It is
also, in its quiet and unshowy way, one of the most telling
demonstrations of Busiek’s solid inhabiting of the world of
continuity.

that sense of mutual dependency and collective self-esteem that is

usually called esprit de corps; all of his writing about the Avengers
and the JLA (he has done short runs on the DC comic as well) is
marked out by that sense of the group as a unit.
Busiek’s obsession with continuity is not merely a comprehensive
grasp of who fought whom when in which costume and for what
stakes; for Busiek, continuity has always been about character
and emotions as well as a fannish keeping of scores. One of the
pleasures of his JLA/Avengers is that the interactions of the two
teams are based on hostilities and camaraderies that feel anything
but arbitrary. Thus, Busiek’s Superman and Captain America get
on amazingly badly at first because the self-righteousness that is
a part of their outstanding virtue grates on each other, whereas
his Batman gets on with Captain America almost on sight because
of mutual recognition by serious people. When you think of this
in the abstract, these are not the relationships that would occur
to you, but when you read Busiek’s take on it, you find yourself
nodding in agreement and accepting that it must be so.
One of the outstanding characteristics of his work is Busiek’s
through-and-through emotional decency; this is a man who likes his
characters and who wants them to behave well. This is why his run
on Thunderbolts is better than those written by his successor – Busiek
has an emotional investment in his former villains’ redemption
that makes him ingenious in finding different emotional paths for
them to choose. Karla Sofen (Moonstone) finds herself drawn in
the short term to a performance of virtue by pragmatism, sexual
attraction to the Avenger Hawkeye and the moral influence of the
alien artefact that gives her power; none of this takes in the long
run, alas. Eric Van Joosten (Atlas) is influence by a desire not to
disappoint Jolt, the one member of the team who is not a former
villain and is unaware of who her team-mates actually are. It is this
decency that makes Busiek such an ideal writer of Superman in
both Superman and Action Comics, as well as the short-run Up, Up and
Away; Busiek really means all this stuff.
In Avengers Forever, he set himself a quite remarkably complex
problem, not least in finding the emotional truth of his characters,

a task which his grasp of continuity in human terms makes possible.

As well as a piece of incredibly complex plotting, Avengers Forever
is a virtuoso display of character continuity, since its cast are a
selection of Avengers from different time periods within the history
of the comic, including, as I have mentioned, two Avengers from
a possible future. The Captain America in Avengers Forever is the
depressed version who became almost entirely disillusioned during
Watergate, which was far more complex in the Marvel version
even than it was in reality. There are two versions of Hank Pym:
one of them during the delusional phase when he believed himself
to be the fun-loving Yellowjacket, literally on the eve of marriage
to Janet; the other is Janet’s contemporary and chastened by the
failure of their marriage – through spousal violence on his part,
and through her gradual emergence as a rather more hard-bitten
woman with leadership potential – neither version of Hank can
entirely cope with this older, tougher version of the woman they
love.
The premise that makes this assembling of Avengers from all
over the continuity possible is a storyline that also tries to rectify
one of the more bizarre anomalies of the Marvelverse, the feud
between the time-travelling immortals, the brutal warlord Kang
the Conqueror and the intriguer Immortus, and the revelation,
many years after they first appeared, that they were aspects of
the same person. Kang spends centuries traipsing around the
timeline creating an empire here and failing to create another
there, and gets beaten every time he turns up in the late 20th
century. Immortus, meanwhile, plays longer subtler games with
history. Kang becomes Immortus when he is old and tired, and
fiercely resents knowing that this will happen to him. All of this

Of these, Songbird turned down the chance to become a reserve list
Avenger in a Thunderbolts storyline subsequent to Avengers Forever, and
is currently, during Civil W
ar, acting in a quite morally equivocal way,
so it is not guaranteed that Marvel intend to follow through on this.
The other, Captain Marvel – Genis, son of the original Kree warrior
– is currently intermittently connected with the Thunderbolts and has
developed a rather different look to the one he has here.

and much else besides – Kang’s clones and imitators, Immortus’

secret masters – was accumulated over the decades, and Busiek
sets himself the task of telling a story that will provide a Grand
Unified Theory of Kang.
Because this is an Avengers epic – the first such epic was The
Kree–Skrull War – it needs to have a space-travelling component
as well as a time-travelling one. The book starts with a sinister
flash-forward to an intergalactic empire whose genocidally brutal
enforcers style themselves Avengers and wear uniforms designed
after Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man and Captain America; their leader
has the face of Rick Jones. Back in the present, the then-current
group of Avengers take a comatose Rick Jones, their on-and-off
sidekick, for a consultation with the Kree Intelligence Supreme,
at this point a prisoner of war on the Moon. This is the sort of
comic book in which a trip to the Moon is a slightly inconvenient
commute; one of Busiek’s strengths, here and elsewhere, is his sheer
enjoyment of the scale on which, in comics, it is possible to work.
A book whose characters travel to the Old West, various alternate
worlds and the end of time itself is not going to fuss unduly about
the Moon.
Ever since Jones put a stop to the Kree–Skrull War back in the
early 1970s by demonstrating mental powers he had not previously
possessed, the Intelligence Supreme (a vast tentacled head in
a container) has researched the young man’s powers, seeking
information on what genetic material might be extracted from him
and other humans to kick-start Kree evolution. (The Intelligence
Supreme has at this point destroyed the empire it ruled in order
to force his people to struggle for greater fitness to survive – it
is really not a nice being.) As the Intelligence Supreme watches,
soon joined by the mysterious advocate of balance, the former
supervillain Libra, Immortus’ envoy Tempus arrives to kill Jones,
swiftly followed by Kang, who prevents him, and Immortus,
who raises an army from all over time to assault his younger self.
Restored to consciousness in the middle of this, Jones is instructed
by the Intelligence Supreme and Libra to summon Avengers from
all over the timeline of the organization, and does so.

The Avengers and Rick are warned by Libra to get out of the
standard environment of the time-stream, in which they are
vulnerable to the paradoxes that are one of Immortus’ main
weapons, and head for Kang’s citadel, Chronopolis, effectively the
centre of time. It is being destroyed by Immortus’ armies; as they
watch, it falls and Immortus collapses its central citadel into an
amulet of infinite power, the Forever Crystal. Pacheco’s art, here
and elsewhere, is particularly good in its portrayal of monumental
citadels; for Busiek, part of being a villain is that you inhabit the
endless rooms of an over-complex palace of mind. The Avengers
escape in one of Kang’s Sphinx-like time machines and decide to
fight back; Immortus’ desire to kill Rick puts them on any side that
is not his. They intervene against his current projects: in the Old
West, the 1950s and a possible future when the human race has
been nearly exterminated by returning Wellsian Martians.
These three locations, and the engagement with them of the
teams into which the Avengers divide, are a chance for Busiek to
play with, respectively, Marvel’s Western comics; the precursor,
unrelated, Avengers created in a single issue of What If?; and the
world of Killraven, leader of the human resistance to the Martians
in a short-lived title about which enough people are nostalgic that it
was revived for a short run under Alan Davis. Like the best virtuoso
material, in comics as in music, there is emotional charge both to
the display of skill and to the ends to which that play is put.
To complicate matters further, the apparent issue in the Old
West is an invasion, using dinosaurs as shock troops, by a different
earlier version of Kang – as Hawkeye remarks, ‘I wonder if time
travellers have to keep a list so they know who they’re mad at in
which year’ – which other Avengers will shortly appear and deal
with, which means that their actual target, as Songbird realizes, is a
subtler attempt by Immortus to change events that we have already
seen in earlier comics by different hands. Several of the gunslingers
they attempt to ally with are Immortus’ shape-changing pawns, the
Space Phantoms, one of whom impersonates Songbird for a while.
Interleaved with this are two more straightforward episodes.
The struggle against the Martians involves an alliance of Killraven’s

forces with old or immortal Avengers in whose time Captain

America and Hank Pym are dead martyrs, but the actual campaign
fought is a mopping up operation. It culminates in a moral lesson
about choice – whether to pursue the last Martians or allow an
alien race, and a robot child, to be born – of a kind that Marvel was
very fond in early days and for which Busiek is clearly nostalgic.The
1950s episode lasts long enough for an initial confrontation with the
1950s team to turn to friendship, for Richard Nixon to be exposed
as a shapeshifting Skrull and for Immortus to appear and declare
this possible alternate world now surplus to his requirements, and
wipe it out.
Janet van Dyne and Genis make a hairbreadth escape when this
world is returned to unbeing; by making us care about the people
we have briefly met, and whom Immortus has wiped out with a
hand wave, Busiek has made us care about one of the central issues
of the comic. Where the Avengers try to avoid mortal violence,
even in self-defence, Immortus and Kang are utterly casual about
entire worlds of possibility, and the Intelligence Supreme is hardly
better. The central message of Stan Lee’s Marvel has always been
that sense that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, and
the whole point about villains like Immortus and Kang is that they
are far too casual about wiping people out.
Immortus’ base is a vast labyrinth, to wander through which is
to risk despair or danger; the team find themselves separated and
some of them have demons to confront, while others fight literal
foes. Hawkeye gets stuck with the job of plot function, fighting
and outwitting Immortus’ servant Tempus and procuring an
important plot token, the Synchronic Staff. The self-aware version
of Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne work as a team; Pym’s alter ego
Yellowjacket comes to realize that everything that has been said
about his real identity is true. Since he hates Pym – and the idea
of being Pym – his dark night takes the form of a preparedness to
betray his colleagues; captured by Immortus, he offers him a deal.
Though he reconsiders this when more fully informed about its
implications, the fact that Yellowjacket is prepared to do this takes
Busiek into areas of moral complexity that his generally sunny

approach does not normally touch on. Most often he is a writer

who makes villains do the right thing, not heroes betray their
comrades.
Captain America, who has thus far not been as central to the
action as he normally is in the Avengers, finds himself confronted
by his old ally Nick Fury, a version of Fury from a time between
his period as a war hero and his stint as the all-knowing head of
SHIELD, an intelligence agency that sometimes seems to rule the
world, quietly. Fury, or what appears to be Fury, tells him that
everything they do is pointless. To defeat Hitler is to replace him
with new menaces – Captain America bridles at this. To beat Hitler
is to prove to oneself that evil can be beaten, and if once, why not
again, as many times as needed?
Captain America had talked himself into despair, but he now talks
himself out of it. Songbird confronts her criminal past, and nearly
despairs. Genis appears and tells her that in the time he is from
they are together; her problem has been that she feels unworthy
and she is told she has a future. It is worth pointing out, even if it
is obvious, that the three big reversals of characters’ moods that
happen in this section all have to do with their coming to terms
with time and change; beyond the belief of arrogant mortals that
time is something that can be channelled and controlled, we are
being shown, time is a moral force that changes us.
This is the lesson that Kang has never fully learned. In a prolonged
interlude, Busiek shows us this villain in quite considerable depth,
not only trying to make sense of everything that has happened to
Kang in the Marvel Universe but to show what it felt like at the
time. This is more information than we would usually get in comics
about villains and their back-story and their emotions, but, without
spelling it out explicitly, Busiek shows us the sense of entrapment
that is crucial to Kang’s character and behaviour. Bored by his own
time, Kang created a personal cult of violence and ambition and has
failed entirely to understand why nothing he does works for him.
At an overt level, this section is a prolonged boast of conquest and
intrigue and survival; at the level of subtext it is a hymn to a despair
far more total than that to which Captain America and Songbird are

tempted, because Kang knows how his story ends. LikeYellowjacket,

he will do anything to change his destiny; because he has done so
much, so futilely, already; we not only see him as trapped in endless
repetitions, but see the path of villainy as essentially being just
that. Y
et, counter-intuitively, we find ourselves more sympathetic
to Kang than to his older, more apparently pacific self, Immortus,
simply because he is more vulnerable and more the occasional
victim of violence as well as its perpetrator.
What follows – an extended piece of passage work in which the
escaped Avengers realize how often Immortus has manipulated
them – is the sort of virtuoso geekishness at which Busiek excels,
but lacks the emotional force that, say, the recitation of Kang’s
career has. It is there primarily to allow Yellowjacket to make his
deal with the devil, and he promptly appears and takes his friends
captive on behalf of his new master. This master has, we now
learn, masters of his own: beings from the end of time, the Time
Keepers, propose to prune the timelines in order to ensure their
own existence, justifying this with an at first plausible rationale of
controlling the excesses that we have already seen the human race
as capable of inflicting on other species.The space empire we saw in
the book’s opening frames, and have visited again with the Avengers
whom Immortus briefly throws there, is a very bad thing, the sort
of thing that, the Time Keepers argue, happens when humanity is
allowed free rein among the galaxies. They have a right to protect
their own existence and to police the multiverse, they argue, and
humanity is too much of a risk.
Captain America and the others spot the fallacy in all of this: the
Time Keepers apply double standards. They themselves are only
one possible outcome – another is their evil equivalent the Time
Twisters – yet they never assume that they ought to be prevented
from existing or limited in the power available to them. The all-
knowing beings who condemn humanity for its crimes are one of
the stock tropes of SF as of theology; it is attractive that Busiek
argues a contrary case and does it with some skill. Later on, once
victory has been achieved, Captain America has the confidence to
put the argument most effectively:

The Time Keepers feared what humanity could do – and in that

at least they were right. We have to make sure that those dark
futures – the tyranny and oppression visited on the galaxy by
humanity – don’t happen. But we have to do it as free men, not
as prisoners.
This is, after all, one of the central arguments ofWestern philosophy,
from Augustine and Pelagius onwards – are we saved by grace,
works of piety or a combination of the two?
Of course, in order to get to the point where Captain America
can sum up the question so succinctly, there has to be a big battle.
This is a comic book, after all. The Time Keepers summon all the
bad versions of the Avengers we have ever seen in continuity and
Rick Jones, who has returned with Kang, Libra and the Intelligence
Supreme as reinforcements, responds by summoning a vast horde
of good Avengers, a greater number by some orders of magnitude,
of course.The argument is in the end about the odds, and producing
a larger army in defence of your side of the argument is, in such
a debate, a winning riposte as well as a matter of having the big
battalions.
Libra’s role in all this has been very much that of Basil Exposition
– he explains the rules of the game and agonizes about taking sides.
Having been a comparatively ordinary supercriminal earlier in his
career, he has become an occult representative of balance, and he
realizes that even the forces of balance have in the end to choose
a side. He is faced with the choice between the sterile restricted
orderliness that the Time Keepers would force on the timelines,
a wild chaos in which evil prevails, and the productive chaos of
humanity’s expansion as policed by the virtuous. The point of
balance is not, for Busiek, to stick with neutrality and blandness
and irresponsibility; it is to step outside those dichotomies that
have been falsely proposed.
The Time Keepers have murdered their pawn Immortus for
dilatoriness in killing the Avengers, and for being conned by
Yellowjacket, who changed sides once he realized what the stakes
were. They try to take back this petulant act by forcing the weight

of time onto Kang, to turn him into his alter ego prematurely; by
a supreme act of will, he resists and is split into himself and a far
younger version of Immortus than we have ever seen, a version
younger than Kang himself. Both of these withdraw once victory
is achieved, to think about the way their destiny has been altered.
We know from those Avengers who come from the future that this
incident will be known as the Destiny War, and what Busiek shows
us is that Destiny is not as fixed as continuity would seem to make
it. The various Avengers return home, which, in the case of those
whose home is the past means that they have no memory of all
this; Y
ellowjacket returns to his marriage to Janet with no memory
of the treachery to which he was tempted or of the reasons for
it. Back on the Moon, the Intelligence Supreme has snaffled the
Forever Crystal and lurks in the background, reminding us that it is
a villain, just a very smart one to have profited from all this welter
of confusion . . .
So, why is Avengers Forever, a short-run graphic novel in a broader

continuity of near-infinite extent, something that should hold
our attention? Obviously, for those of us who like such things, it
is full of hair’s-breadth escapes and sudden reversals, of constant
telling allusions to much-loved storylines and guest appearances
by favourite characters. But, further, I would suggest that part of
the point is that it demonstrates how complex, both in terms of
plot and in terms of moral weight, that continuity can be. Our
sympathies shift between characters – even the villainous Kang
acquires emotional resonance he has rarely had elsewhere in the
Marvel Universe, prior, that is, to our meeting in Young Avengers
with a teenage version keen to refuse his destiny in turn.
Part of its charm is that, under all the flash of its fights and
adventures and confrontations, Busiek is making a point about the
nature and purpose of heroism: the difference between villains and
heroes is not just prowess or charm, but rather a concern to do
the right thing even when it is difficult. The Avengers from ‘our’
time are quietly shocked by the future Avengers’ preparedness to
kill even the genocidal Martians and their cyborg quislings. The

decision by the Black Panther that enough is enough, that a choice

between life and more death has to be a choice for life, even at
the expense of vengeance, is the result of appeals to him by kinder
gentler Avengers who have not gone through his experiences, and
he accepts that they are right.
It is in the context of this concern to do the right thing that
the book’s games with the concept of destiny become more than
games. Rick at one point meets an older, one-armed bitter version
of himself and learns that, if you cannot avoid fate, you can at least
accept it with dignity; Yellowjacket – and it is worth stressing that
Hank Pym has always been one of the more flawed of the team
– nearly commits unforgivable sins in the name of flouting both
destiny and his own real nature. Working with this vast cast, of
whom his target audience knows so much, means that Busiek can
work elegant variations and parallels on his central themes; we
know that this mopey version of Captain America will buck up in
due course, and the fun is seeing how it happens and how it plays
out.
Another of the book’s strengths is Pacheco’s art – he is not one of
the very best of the crop of comics artists working in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, but he is assuredly at the top of the second rank.
One factor in this is his effective use of large-scale composition
on the splash pages that periodically break up his competent but
unexciting use of a constantly shifting grid; he has learned from
George Perez how dynamic you can be while also sticking in every
single one of the characters and variants of characters that your
writer has stuck you with. Pacheco has worked with Busiek several
times, most notably on Arrowsmith; the slightly innocent, fresh-faced
quality he brings to his characters works rather well with Busiek’s
moralized, charming, thoroughly decent take on them.
Grant Morrison’s Period on New X-Men

The 40 issues Grant Morrison wrote of New X-Men in the early
2000s were quite specifically intended to kick-start into centrality
a much-loved and popular group of titles that had lost their way

a little in endless complexity and endless revisiting of the same

characters’ standard traumas. His manifesto/pitch document,
handily included in the first hardback collection, makes the point
that the audience to whom Marvel were attempting to appeal with
their books in general, and perhaps with the X-titles in particular,
was one that was used to the snappy dialogue and angsty plots of
television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is no accident that
one of the writers who picked up on the X-Men when Grant
Morrison had finished with them was Joss Whedon himself.
The main weakness of this run has nothing to do with Morrison’s
writing. Marvel pushed out the issues on a punishing schedule that
exceeded one a month, which meant that, though most of the art
on the Morrison run is perfectly fine, and some of it is lovely, not
all of it reaches high, or even minimal, standards. Moreover, the
run changed main artists several times over, so it does not achieve a
consistent style and it is harder than usual to keep track of different
artists’ portrayal of the characters. Morrison’s central cast are
iconic enough that this is not a problem, but, for example, in Jean’s
vision at the end, it is only dream plot logic and his bad haircut that
enable us to identify the man who advises her as the former rebel
Quire grown to maturity.
Morrison was always the bad boy of the British writers, his long
run on the Vertigo title The Invisibles, for example, used the freedom
Vertigo gave him to create an occulto-anarchist primer in which an
alliance of a tantric magician, a drag queen, a butch young dyke and
others significantly outside the mainstream of superhero comics take
on not only the apparatus of the British state but the metaphysical
creatures of madness, conformity and nameless dread that lie
behind it. His run on the more mainstream Doom Patrol was hardly
more orthodox with its surreal villains trying to destroy consensual
reality; the outcast status of the characters he inherited here meant
that they could empathize with the sheerly weird enough to defeat
it, and to have a bad conscience about doing so. Animal Man became
a fourth-wall-breaking meditation on the nature of superheroes
and whether one should even be in the business of writing them; it
is the superhero comic whose hero has most serious conversations

with its writer. Even his run on DC’s flagship team-up, JLA, did
some moderately radical things, like having the entire human race
temporarily become superheroes to defeat an apocalyptic foe. His
quite remarkable Seven Soldiers ofVictory (2006) teams up a group of
second-string superheroes who never actually meet, but separately
fight different battles in the same war against particularly evil Sidhe
invading from a version of Faerie.
Rather than provide a detailed commentary on 40 issues, we
need to look at what Morrison did to the X-Men and their world in
the course of his run. One of the crucial things was that he made the
central issue of the comic the question of extinction: Hank McCoy
and others discover that the human race is in its last generations,
that a gene has emerged that will simply turn human history off
for good. In a few generations, the mutants will be all that there
is, unless humanity frustrates biological destiny by altering its
own genome. Because Morrison has a dark streak, that sense of
humanity as doomed means that efforts to exterminate mutants
go into high gear. Morrison’s occultist anarchism makes him less
political a writer than other British writers of superhero comics,
Mark Millar in particular, whose run on Ultimate X-Men is a useful
point of comparison here, but his sense of paranoid dread is very
British.
One of the first things Morrison does, in fact, is have Sentinel
robots strafe the mutant haven Genosha and exterminate the 16
million who live there. One of the directions that other writers
had taken the X-titles in was making there be more and more
mutants all the time, and Morrison realized that, if mutants are a
nation, your characters are simply under less threat all the time.
Rather than have this particular act be an overt declaration of war
by humanity, Morrison created Cassandra Nova, a mutant predator
more nihilist than any of the standard X-villains. Even Apocalypse

The later decision by Marvel to have the Scarlet Witch reduce the
mutant population to 198 by magic is more or less an endorsement of
Morrison’s decision, which is one of a number of things he could not
have done without permission.

has as his aim destroying society as we know it in order to force

both humans and mutants to evolve under pressure; Cassandra kills
for the sake of killing, to spite her twin brother Charles Xavier.
Again, by creating Cassandra, Morrison is not just making up
yet another evil twin, though she certainly is that: a foetal Xavier,
it turns out, strangled her in the womb and the being of pure
energy that is Cassandra constructed herself a body over many
years from his discarded cells. She is, in other words, quite literally
the avatar of Xavier’s bad faith. This famous pacifist killed his
unheimlich twin before they were even born and at some level he
has always known this; at some level this is the truth that underlies
his endless struggle to be virtuous. This is the sort of complication
of continuity that cannot be undone and no one wishes it undone
– Cassandra is one of those villains who always finds a way of
coming back and is effective even in less talented hands. Whedon
uses her quite effectively in Astonishing X-Men and Claremont does
something quite moving, in a kitsch way, with her and Xavier in
The End.
Cassandra kills millions as an opening shot, and then moves to
the specific, evicting Charles from his body in order to be more
effective in destroying everything he cares about. She drives the
Shi’ar empress, his wife, mad and sets the aliens to exterminate
his pupils; just to be on the safe side, she also develops nano-
Sentinels that will kill the X-Men from the inside out, and has
one of his pupils bash Henry McCoy’s brains in when he starts to
suspect the truth. Cruelty is always more important to her than
truth; McCoy’s constant metamorphosis to an ever more bestial
physiognomy makes him vulnerable to Cassandra’s mockery. She
has almost defeated him with her words even before she makes the
unfortunate Beak hit him time and time again.
Cassandra is an effective villain because she is pure malice;
she is only vulnerable because her nihilism makes her unable to
understand sheer heroism. A Shi’ar warrior arrives, dying, in
time to tell his comrades the truth; with his mind crippled by
the neurological diseases with which she has crippled her own
body before trapping him there, Charles Xavier struggles to get

the truth out. And though she is a powerful telepath, she does
not know people very well: she thinks that former villain Emma
Frost is selling out her new friends when Emma offers her her
body back as a refuge, whereas Emma is in fact trapping her in a
mindless alien shell. ‘Not my mind, my precious mind’, Cassandra
cries out like the Wicked Witch of the West, and is reduced to
imbecility.
The X-Men are constantly betrayed by what is false within
– one set of pupils engage in a riot that costs the life of several
promising pupils, another set become the acolytes of a new teacher
at the school who proves to be not what he seems. One of the
central relationships of the Morrison run seems like a betrayal even
if it turns out to be the last best hope for humanity and mutants
alike: when the X-Men dig Emma Frost out from the rubble of
Genosha, and Xavier asks her to work at the school, this is not a
standard Marvel reconfiguring of a villain. Emma was always one
of the leaders of the Hellfire Club and had used her powers for
personal enrichment, spending much of it on cosmetic surgery and
designer clothes; she is distinctly cynical about Xavier’s mission as
about almost everything else. The fact that Morrison gives her a
secondary mutation that has saved her – about to die, she turned
into living diamond – provides a handy metaphor for how little she
is subject to other sorts of change; she is hard and glittery down
to her soul. ‘Once a villain, always a villain’, McCoy says when he
thinks Emma has betrayed them all to Cassandra, and he is clearly
voicing a concern held by many of those who know her.
Or so it appears. When Emma first puts seductive moves on the
depressed Scott Summers, whose marriage to Jean Grey is in that
particular kind of trouble which comes from deep boredom, it seems
as if she is merely ‘playing with fire’ – literally, since Jean Grey is the
Phoenix – and trying to steal an old opponent’s husband. She abuses
her role as his psychotherapist to flirt outrageously, appearing in
his mind in a version of Jean’s old costume and referring to herself
as ‘Auntie Emma’ as if she were sexually harmless.
Yet, as Jean finds out in amused incredulity, Emma has fallen in
love and is vulnerable for possibly the first time since childhood.

Scott and Jean were teenage sweethearts and both have grown up
into a far darker world than the one they inhabited when they were
first together. One of the real strengths of the Morrison run is to
interrogate a relationship that has become a cliché and make us
understand that it is, perhaps, over. Another is that he takes one
of the First Couples of comics and breaks them up, and does so
without our feeling that anyone is particularly in the wrong; comics
morality has normally more in common with soap-opera or tabloid
morality, but Morrison insists on his characters acting like adults.
He does so with real wit – Scott’s attempt to persuade himself
that adulterous flirtation inside telepathically induced illusory
scenarios does not count is by way of being a reference, I think,
to Bill Clinton and ‘I did not have sex with that woman’. This
sometimes involves Morrison in corny but effective jokes: when
Jean asks him whether he slept with Emma in Singapore, he
answers that she kept him up all night. It is literally true, but not
as effective a disclaimer as he perhaps intends. One of the most
effective things Morrison does is show how Emma and Jean move
from their original hostility to a warily collegiate relationship;
in a series of pages without dialogue, they venture into Xavier’s
mindscape when he is trapped in Cassandra’s body, and free him,
acting as a highly competent team.
Morrison brought Emma into the centre of things partly because
he wanted to write dialogue for her; she is one of the real strengths
of his run simply because we are waiting to find out what she will
say next. When her nose is broken by human vivisectors – part of
a secret society who dissect mutants in order to transplant mutant
organs into themselves and become something new – she says
that she is ‘very very cross indeed’ and only Morrison’s version of
Emma could make this sound one of the most threatening lines you
have ever heard. Further, he gives her a quintet of protégées, five
adolescent girls who have done their best to become her clones in
every respect, and who are referred to by everyone as the Stepford
Cuckoos. When they turn on her, as they inevitably do, and call her
a stupid old woman, Emma has a particularly effective dark night
of the soul. ‘I’m only twenty-seven, you ungrateful wretches’,

she says, but they are not listening, and she is clearly lying even to
herself.
Scott Summers has always been a gloomy leader with a lot
of doubts; over the years, this has become more and more of a
cliché, even in the hands of the brilliant Chris Claremont in the
period when he continued to produce X-Men material at a point
when he had lost his edge. The default setting became to give Scott
angst if writers did not know what else to do with him. Generally
this meant Scott stopped being especially competent, but did not
become interesting in the process; some of the most amusing and
powerful scenes Morrison writes for him and Logan are ones in
which the older mutant tells Scott to stop feeling sorry for himself,
simply because Logan is speaking for most of the audience. It is
something of a relief for someone actually to tell him that he has
become so clenched that ‘only dogs can hear you fart’.
The U-Men, the conspiracy of vivisectors, is one of Morrison’s
many wonderfully nasty ideas – like other villains before them,
they see the school as a handy target, and plan to use it as their
organ farm. Morrison has Scott and Emma confront their
leadership as if they were civilized men, only to find themselves
trapped; Jean is on her own in the school with the children, but
of course Jean, and a bunch of mutant children, is quite enough
to see off the merely average villains that all the U-Men, in the
end, are. ‘Define defenceless’, Jean says as she goes to war, and the
Phoenix’s flames rise behind her. The problem is that a Jean who
has to fight by herself is a Jean who uses all of her power; Jean Grey
becomes clearly the Phoenix again, with all that implies in terms
of the possibility that she will become a greater menace than the
things she fights.
In the Claremont years, the only time Jean was cool was when
she was doomed, and she never worked all that well after the
Dark Phoenix storyline was taken back. In a piece of strip-mining,
it was announced that the Phoenix had taken Jean’s shape rather
than possessing her, and that Jean had slept out the time of her
supposed death, and Scott’s marriage to her clone Madeleyne, in
a cocoon beneath the sea. There is something inevitable to the fact

that Morrison kills her off again because she was probably never
going to be as cool again as she is in the best moments he gives
her, though her gravestone says ‘she will rise again’ and, knowing
Marvel, she probably will.
The theme of what is false within applies to several of the other
storylines: Xavier and Jean are prevailed upon to help Fantomex, a
mutant criminal on the run from one of the weapons programmes
that have experimented on humans, mutants and Sentinels to
produce ever more bizarre creations. Fantomex, for example, has
a nervous system outside his body, in the shape of a flying saucer
called Eva; he is also an accomplished liar: it takes some time for
Jean and Xavier, two of the most intelligent and able telepaths on
the planet, to realize that everything he has told them about his
back-story is a lie, and that their visit to his aged mother was an
illusion. There are times in the stories about experimental beings
like Fantomex and the creatures who immediately precede and
succeed him in the Weapon X series of experiments – one of whom
acquires extra bodies every time he touches someone – when
Morrison perhaps drifts too far into the sort of nightmare he used
so effectively in The Invisibles. What he finds scariest, and makes
most scary, are nightmares so ineffable as to be vague when you try
and think about them.
This is why some of the most effective sections of his run are the
ones that push the conventional to its limits, but not beyond. The
Cassandra run, for example, and the school riot, and the attempted
murder of Emma with a diamond bullet that shatters her into a
thousand perfect pieces, are more like X-Men comics as we have
known them than the Fantomex line, only better. Morrison clearly
enjoys doing this sort of generic stuff – he brings in long-standing
X-continuity characters, Bishop and Sage, to investigate the murder
and has them largely fail. The gun was fired by the obnoxious
slumgirl mother Angel; frightened of what might happen to her
swarm of babies, she was made to do this by the influence of Esme,
one of the Cuckoos. But they fail to discover who persuaded Esme
to act in this, merely discovering that it was a tallish man. Since

McCoy and Jean literally reassemble Emma – ‘Wake up,’ she says to
her rival, ‘Scott needs you’ – the whole issue is allowed to slide.
This is wrong, as it happens, because the attempt on Emma was
merely one gambit of many. The gentle mystic Xorn, the man with
a black hole inside his skull and a habit of preaching gentle wisdom
to his class of pariah pupils, is in fact Magneto, returned yet again
from the grave, and he seizes New York with his usual genocidal
aims made more plausible by what happened in Genosha. He traps
the various X-Men with a series of gambits – Logan and Jean are
sent spinning into the sea, McCoy and Emma are marooned in the
Pacific – that ensure their absence by appealing to their sense of
mission. No matter how many times such calls for help or to arms
turn out to be traps, it is the nature of heroes to answer them, and
to try and survive. It is their own nature that is the thing most likely
to defeat them.
By the same token, because he is a serious villain and not just
a punch-bag for good guys, Magneto will always fail because of
his own nature; a significant part of what defeats him, though, is
that the world has moved on. Magneto is not what Xorn’s pupils
are interested in following, because for them Magneto is a dead
hero on a t-shirt. The earlier rebels of Morrison’s run – Quire and
his gang – adopted the striped t-shirt and unfortunate haircut of
an evil mutant in an old newspaper article; interestingly, because
Morrison does not normally go in for hommage, it is an article and
illustration we are shown in Issue 14 of the original run. It is also
the article and illustration we see Phil Sheldon looking at in the
Busiek/Ross book Marvels. Magneto is a figure from 1960s politics
and Morrison puts him in a world of situationism and spectacle.
By casting aside his identity as Xorn, Magneto rejects much
of the hold he had on his pupils: Beak and Angel were flattered
by inclusion, but Beak has moral qualms when it actually comes
to killing humans. Using the drug Kick to enhance his powers,
Magneto becomes short-tempered and almost accidentally kills
another of his followers, in a moment of rage at a stupid joke.
When the renegade Stepford Cuckoo Esme reveals her infatuation
with him – it has been blindingly obvious to everyone up to that

point – he rejects the young girl brusquely; she attacks him and he
kills her, plunging her earrings into her brain. By the time the X-
Men actually arrive, he is already almost on the ropes, but manages
to kill Jean before being gutted by Logan. Jean survived the sun
by becoming the Phoenix but she is still human enough to die; she
and Logan previously had the moment of total emotional honesty
that was always pending between them, and without its being
specifically sexual, Morrison makes it a Liebestod nonetheless.
Morrison delivers everything that X-Men comics are supposed
to be about – paranoia about being a minority, operatic emotions
and final tragedy. In an epilogue to his run, he delivers something
more, a total nightmare. We are plunged centuries ahead into utter
nightmare: humanity is gone save for one last boy and his battered
Sentinel companion. A few X-Men are all that stands in the way
of the entire destruction of life as we know it by a Henry McCoy
turned into the monstrous vivisector and gene pirate that we know
– from the world of Apocalypse and his alter ego there – that the
cuddly avuncular scientist has the potential to become. Jean has
hatched from the egg of the Phoenix innocent and all too prone to
be his pawn. In a terrifying twist we learn that the drug Kick was
nothing of the kind, it was an intelligent bacterium, Sublime, that
has possessed pawns of its own with the aim of removing complex
life altogether; when Scott and then Emma dropped out of their
responsibilities, Henry took Kick in despair and was lost. Of the
originals, only the immortal Logan endures, with the remaining
Stepfords and Beak’s grandson at his side; the desperate nature of
the situation is such that even Cassandra Nova is at their side. They
lose, and one by one they die in the most terrible of pain; Jean
realizes too late who she is and what she has helped happen and
breaks Sublime’s control of McCoy so that he too can return to
innocence and die.
Jean has a vision of a myriad future dead X-Men and knows
what she must do; ‘if you want to grow a new future to replace the
one you just cut away’, she is told by a man who might be Quire
grown to maturity, or might not, ‘you have to water it with your
heart’s blood’. She has already had a vision of the point at which the

world took turn for the worst – Emma propositions Scott at Jean’s
graveside and he refuses her – and she influences events for the
better. In the last full page of Morrison’s New X-Men Scott embraces
Emma and says yes to life for himself and the world.

5
Some Kind of Epic
Grandeur
Events and Reboots in
the Superhero Universe
Events and Reboots?

It took a surprising amount of time – until the beginning of the
1970s – for the occasional crossing-over of characters from one
title’s continuity to another’s to be followed by the logical extension
of storylines that moved from one title to another, so that, in order
to find out what happens next to your favourite character, you
might have to buy a comic you would not otherwise buy. It took
even longer for such stories to evolve from simple two-parters
into something more complex. Once Marvel had started issuing
several X-Men related titles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it
became viable to run a storyline through all the related titles for
several months, and in due course this became a quasi-regular
occurrence.
What took even longer was the evolution of the ‘event’ storyline,
which quite possibly has a short-lived run of its own, and also crosses
over into a number of other titles. So-called ‘event’ storylines are
one of the more obviously commercial ventures that superhero
comics go in for – they are, after all, primarily there to persuade
fans to buy more comics – and, by comparison with the best story
arcs and detailed re-imaginings of individual titles, or groups of
titles, tend to be less successful. In this chapter, I shall also deal
with the reboots of their entire continuity that DC did in the 1980s

Some Kind of Epic Grandeur • 177
and again in 2005–6, with mixed results. Inevitably, these have in

common with other events the fact that they are stories that feel as
if they were devised by an editor rather than a writer, and on which
so many writers and artists collaborate, across a number of titles,
that focus is liable to be lost completely. And, of course, there are
exceptions to this rule, one of which, Marvel’s Civil War has been,
with all its faults and its slightly disappointing ending, the most
intelligent piece of political comment, protest and analysis that the
comics industry has ever produced.
The Death of Superman and some Batevents

One of the first, and in some ways least bad, examples of the
non-reboot event is the so-called Death and Return of Superman
(1993), which was widely publicized in the mainstream press
(and is, perhaps, most important for being memorialized in the
last movement of Michael Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony).
Essentially, a mysterious silent being – who has no name, but is
referred to by his opponents as Doomsday – batters his way out
of imprisonment and proceeds to rampage across America, killing
everything in his path; in one of several moments of near bathos, he
allows a small yellow bird to settle on his hand, and then crushes
it. A detachment of the Justice League turns up to oppose him,
and are trounced and left more or less for dead. Superman arrives
in time to save them, but makes no headway whatever against the
monster. Moreover, he saves a family from death at the cost of a
few minutes that might otherwise have enabled him to distract the
creature from its principal goal: Metropolis.
The creature appears to grow stronger the more it is hit, and
various bony protrusions sprout from its joints and facial features;
one of the strengths of the sequence is that no attempt is made to
rationalize Doomsday, to give it motivation or even to explain its
attributes. It is death incarnate, pure and simple. And it is the Death
of Superman, who batters it into quiescence but dies of the injuries
it has inflicted, and is left a shattered, though still handsome, corpse

cradled in the arms of Lois Lane, who has, of course, insisted on

covering the story.
The second volume of this event, World W ithout Superman, is a
strange mixture of the funereally pompous, the sentimental and the
genuinely affecting. Superman gets a state funeral, presided over
by the Clintons, and with most of the standard DC superheroes
forming the cortege. Batman, of course, stays out of this procession
and polices it from the shadows, because someone has to. Lois,
Jonathan and Martha Kent and Lana Lang have to conspire to
pretend that Clark Kent is missing, perhaps trapped or dead in the
rubble of Doomsday’s rampage, because, even after Superman’s
death, his secret identity has to be preserved, simply to protect
those he loves from the vengeance of his enemies.
The sinister scientists of Project Cadmus have already tried to
seize the body and now tunnel into Superman’s tomb and steal it.
They do this against the orders of their ultimate boss, Lex Luthor:
Luthor has at this point in his career had his brain transplanted into
a clone that lacks his baldness, has flowing red hair and beard, and
affects to be his own son. Luthor had hoped that Superman would
die or be defeated at his own hands, but is not in any hurry for a
resurrection. He has his dupe, a shape-changing alien who has taken
the identity of Supergirl, (who herself, rather more memorably and
iconically, died in Crisis on Infinite Earths) steal the body and return
it to its tomb.
In Smallville, Jonathan Kent has a heart attack from which he
nearly dies, broken-hearted as he is by the death of his adopted son.
In death dreams, he revisits the battlefields of his youth, attempts to
harrow Hell and finally rescues Superman from demons who have
posed as the inhabitants of Superman’s native Krypton. Perhaps,
he suggests, Superman’s mortality was an illusion, produced by
the Kents’ limited perspectives when rearing him. Whatever the
existential status of these dreams, he awakes renewed and, back in
Metropolis, Superman’s tomb is found to be empty.
The third volume, The Return of Superman, creates a number
of pretenders to Superman’s role, two of whom were to become
long-term characters in the DC Universe. The African-American

weapons designer John Henry, aware of the song of the same name,
and attempting to expiate his design of a good cheap automatic
weapon that his ex-girlfriend Angora has put out on the streets of
America, builds himself a set of steel armour and a great hammer.
Unlike the others, he makes no pretence of being Superman, but is
merely an admirer who is trying to fill his shoes, as, in a small way,
is the lumbering ex-thug Bibbo, who in a few scenes does his best
to clean up his slum while wearing a Superman pullover.
The brash and brattish boy Conner insists on being called
Superman, rather than Superboy, and has many of the right powers,
while lacking judgement and skill. He is far too fond of hogging the
limelight, but is essentially well-intentioned, when he can spare the
time from flirting with the TV news reporter Tana, who becomes
his Lois. It is clear that he is in some degree a clone of the original
Superman, even though this appears to contradict the remarks of
the Project Cadmus scientists that there were aspects of Superman’s
DNA that they were unable to unravel.
We see another Superman born from a ‘regeneration matrix’ in
the Fortress of Solitude. Mysteriously, this one has to wear dark
glasses and has no sense of moderation in his pursuit of justice,
killing or maiming villains unlucky enough to encounter him. He
seems to know much of Superman’s private past, but in a distant
and detached way; Lois is not sure whether or not to regard him
as genuine. He explains the changes in his personality as the result
of his death, as does the next Superman pretender, a Terminator-
like robot, a part of whose face is flesh and appears to be that
of Superman. This proves to be Cyborg, a villain who has fused
himself so totally with machinery and artificial intelligence that
he functions, more or less, as a contagion, acquiring new bodies
and machine parts as he escapes death time and time again. He

It gradually emerges in later comics that Conner is a chimera, whose
DNA is a patchwork of Superman and Luthor. If readers are somewhat
amazed to discover that Superman and his worst enemy have a child
together, they are entitled to be.

destroyed Green Lantern’s hometown and now he tries to trash

Superman’s reputation forever.
Of course, the authentic Superman rises from the dead, and of
course the more admiring pretenders help him in his struggle with
the more villainous ones.Various reboots of his powers ensued – for
a while he acquired blue skin and affected a rather more Kryptonian
mode of dress; the death had mythic power but affected nothing all
that profoundly in the long term, save to demonstrate to Luthor
that annihilation of the being he hates is not going to be as simple
as all that.
Given the mythic power of the event that occurs at its core, Death
of Superman is a long way from being all it might have been. One
problem with it is that the decision to make Superman’s nemesis
a malign force of nature means that their conflict is essentially
impersonal, whereas the most interesting Superman villains
have been those like Luthor with a keen brain and a wicked
tongue. Another problem is that the resurrection was handled
uninterestingly and with a slightly mawkish religiosity – if you
are going to use the resonant symbolism of an empty tomb, you
really need to earn the cultural force of that symbol with your own
contributions.
The four replacement Supermen are not especially interesting
– John Henry has gradually become an interesting character over
the years, but Conner never really acquired stature or dignity until
the events leading to his death in Infinite Crisis. Nor is the grief of
Superman’s close associates made especially moving or powerful;
the situation of their having to continue to protect his secret
identity for fear of the consequences is a nice touch with potential
for turning emotional screws, but is uninterestingly executed.
The stateliness of the official proceedings is unrelieved by wit or
humanity, it needed emotional complexity to work and that is very
precisely what it does not get. Death of Superman was an interesting
concept and a missed opportunity.
Much the same can be said of other major DC events, which
include, for example, Knightfall (1993), the story of the crippling

of the Batman by the monstrous steroid-freak Bane, who defeats

him in hand-to-hand combat and breaks his back. The Batman is ill-
advised in his choice of successor, appointing the vigilante Azrael,
who takes the whole caped crusader thing rather literally, and
when he recovers from his injuries the Batman has two enemies to
overthrow instead of one. This sequence is one of several Batman
events in which Miller’s legacy of pretentiously posturing grittiness
started to reach the point of self-parody; another is No Man’s Land
(1999), in which Gotham City is devastated by an earthquake and
the US government is persuaded to leave it to rot. Ironically, this
was mocked at the time – long before Hurricane Katrina – for
the implausibility of any US government’s doing any such thing. No
Man’s Land is an interesting missed opportunity for its Hobbesian
perception that, once government collapses, the police and well-
intentioned vigilantes become little more than another gang fighting
for parity. There is also the previously mentioned more recent War
Games, with its unfortunate tendency to kill off female characters
and characters of colour – and make it their own fault.
The trouble with all of these Batman events is their tendency to
the doom-laden and portentous. It is not calling for the return of
Adam West-style campery to ask for a version of the Batman and
his crew that is a little more nuanced, a little less Hobbesian. Even
Miller’s Dark Knight was known, after all, to crack a joke or two.
DC have also grown over-fond of the Batman’s having a cunning
scheme as a way of setting up and resolving vast plotlines; given
the terrible consequences of various of said schemes when copied
and used by others – as has happened on a number of occasions
– plausibility might dictate that he avoid them in future. Even
since Stephanie triggered events that included her own death, in
War Games, by misusing the Batman’s game plan for a meltdown
internecine struggle between Gotham’s gangs, the Batman’s
various schemes to prevent his superpowered colleagues going bad
– the creation of a nanobot-powered corps of sleeper soldiers, the
OMAC project – have been used by the mysterious instigators of
Infinite Crisis. One hopes, but does not trust, that he and DC will
have learned a lesson from this.

Some Marvel Events

Marvel, meanwhile, had one of the first and most catchpenny
of large events in Secret Wars (1984–5), not to be confused with
the later, much better and almost entirely unconnected Secret
War (2004). A powerful being abducted a bunch of heroes and
villains to an alien planet and obliged them to fight it out, with
their hearts’ desires as the prize – this led to no very interesting
character work and some very standard fight scenes. On the other
hand, it sold a reasonable number of action figures, which was,
apparently, according to the articles in the collected edition, one
of the reasons why it ever existed in the first place. Though there
was no reset button and no sense that it never happened, the only
lasting consequence of importance that derives from Secret Wars is
the black costume that Spider-Man acquired on the alien planet
and wore for a while. Since it proved to be an alien symbiote, and
has subsequently taken over – and driven mad – two of Marvel’s
grittier villains, Venom and Carnage, this is a detail relevant to the
greater whole of continuity.
Most of Marvel’s other events – Inferno, (1989) for example, in
which New York City became for a while co-existent with Hell
– also had few consequences. (Onslaught (1996), in the course of
which most of the heroes disappeared from the world and had to be
replaced, led to the creation of the Thunderbolts by Kurt Busiek.)
Various X-Men-centred storylines have for a while replaced the
whole of Marvel reality with an alternate world like that ruled
by Apocalypse, but these are automatically reset when the time
paradoxes that caused them are resolved. The Age of Apocalypse (1995)
produced several unpleasant or virtuous characters who crop up
from time – an evil vivisecting version of Beast, a comparatively
sane and virtuous version of Saber-Tooth, the teleporting Blink
who often leads the eXiles – but thus far these have been peripheral
to principal storylines.
The House of M/Decimation (2005) storyline may prove an
exception since it has had permanent consequences as well as
significantly affecting the situation of a number of important

characters. In the main comic run House of M, written by Brian

Michael Bendis, there is a debate about the fate of Wanda Maximoff
after her slaughter of several fellow Avengers. Various mutant
leaders – notably Emma Frost – vote for her death and are over-
ruled by Captain America with the plea that we do not do this to
our own; the mere fact that Wanda’s death is being considered leads
her brother Quicksilver to suggest she alter reality drastically to
save herself.
What Wanda comes up with is a world in which everyone is
happy ever after, including her father, who won his war with the
humans 30 years in the past and has ruled the USA and much of
the rest of the world ever since, a world in which mutants have
become the majority. In other storylines in other comics, we see a
version of Peter Parker who is married to Gwen Stacey rather than
Mary Jane and has passed his powers off as mutation-derived; an
intelligent version of the Hulk is the de facto ruler of Australia; and
so on. However, this is a fool’s paradise; the child Layla, apparently
a living embodiment of Wanda’s sanity, jogs the memory of the
superheroes she encounters and shows them the reality that has
been lost. They confront Wanda again, and again she is rescued by
her brother, who is confronted by their father, furious at what has
been done in his name. No more mutants, she breathes, and the
world changes again.
Now there are only 198 mutants in the world, a figure which
does not include Magneto, Quicksilver or Charles Xavier; no
one knows where Wanda is. Suddenly, all the bigots who used to
hunt mutants are hunting former mutants and the Westchester
campus of Xavier’s school has become something between a refuge
and an internment camp, with human-piloted Sentinels policing
its borders. One miniseries, Sentinel Squadron, does a nice job of
humanizing these troops, revealing that a couple of their leaders
are themselves ex-mutants previously excluded from command
roles as a result. Magneto gets power of a sort back in no small
order; Quicksilver steals from the Inhumans the crystals that give
them their powers and becomes a living focus of mutagenic energy,
often afflicting the mutants he tries to help with extreme versions

of the powers they have lost. Callisto, for example, gets back all
her huntress super-senses, but to a degree of intensity she cannot
live with.
One nice touch in all this across the whole of Marvel continuity
is that those heroes whom Layla awoke remain aware of the truth
of what has happened, whereas no one else knows. Ms Hill, the
new post-Nick Fury director of SHIELD – Fury was sacked for
exceeding his authority and fighting a private war with post-Doom
Latveria in Secret War – finds out by having her psychics read Spider-
Man’s mind. Later, X-Factor find out and are furious with their
former colleagues in the X-Men for not telling them. For once,
in genre fiction, a secret is being kept that is genuinely huge and
for which there is a genuine reason to keep quiet; this may be one
of those plot strands that gets quietly forgotten about, but more
probably it is going to have long-term consequences.
Someone in the Marvel offices clearly decided that the Marvel
world had too many mutants in it and decided to rein back the
endless creation of new powers and new characters, while doing
so in a way that can be changed with a reset button by their
eventual successors. What is attractive and impressive about this
is that the consequences are largely seen in terms of their effect
on character – Peter Parker, for example, is horrified to discover
that, in Wanda’s version of his ideal world, he is married to his dead
sweetheart rather than his living wife, and his guilt over this and
the non-existent children he remembers is another of his burdens.
Quicksilver acts with incredible rashness in the first place and is
not a man ever to learn from mistakes; on the contrary, he is shown
escalating those mistakes constantly. The one obviously important
new character to come out of all this, Layla, is a creepy child
who hangs round the X-Factor mutant detective agency saying
she knows everything, including where to inveigle a villain into
standing so that he is killed by falling debris for planning to kill
her. There is conceptual wit here and entertaining invention – she
also says that one day she and X-Factor’s current leader, the self-
duplicating Jamie Madrox, will marry, and it is not clear whether
she is prophesying, or merely teasing.

Civil War
The wit and invention are also present, to an even greater extent, in
the Civil War storyline (2006–7, but ongoing in its consequences),
which is the closest Marvel has ever come to writing political satire
and protest. Back in the 1970s, the dislike of superheroes and the
detestation of mutants by the general public were used as a handy
place-marker for comments on racism and homophobia, but did
no more than encourage imaginative empathy by doing so. Civil
War, by contrast, is a detailed, nuanced and complex take on the
assault on civil liberties under the presidency of George W. Bush
and the War on Terror. It sets up divisions between much-loved and
long-standing superhero characters, and it is impossible at present
to see how this will be easily resolved afterwards. In so doing, Civil
War allows a case to be made for both sides of the question of,
say, imprisonment without trial, while clearly taking a view that is
anything but neutral.
The set-up of Civil War is both very simple and highly complex;
it has always been the case in the Marvel Universe that legislative
and executive attempts to control superheroes are on the political
agenda, only slightly outweighed and superseded by attempts to
control those superheroes who happen also to be mutants. At
various points in the few months before the Civil War storyline
formally started, reference was made by some characters, for
example Ms Hill – the new director of SHIELD – to a Superheroes
Registration Act that would have, say, the New Avengers working
directly under her authority rather than being what she regards
as occasionally useful loose cannons (the characterization of Ms
Hill, one of a number of far from indistinguishable unpleasant
bureaucrats in the Marvel Universe, as someone quietly irritated
by anyone to whom she cannot give orders is one of many minor
details that Bendis and others handle effectively).
In a major but plausible retcon, it is revealed that some of the
cleverer and more establishment superheroes have been engaged
in a quasi-conspiracy that goes back to the aftermath of the Kree–
Skrull War. Tony Stark (Iron Man), Reed Richards of the Fantastic

Four, Charles Xavier and Doctor Strange have been meeting

regularly with Namor of Atlantis and Black Bolt, leader of the
Inhumans; T’Challa of Wakanda is distinctly more sceptical about
the value of such meetings: ‘You just decided all by yourselves that
you are the Earth’s protectors’. Over the years, Namor warns
constantly that he is waiting for humanity to destroy itself so that
Atlantis can dominate again; Stark becomes keener and keener on
the idea of an international superpowered police force and finally
tells the others that they need to cooperate with legislation that
will sooner or later become inevitable.
What makes it inevitable is, as he predicted, a specific incident:
the young and underpowered New Warriors, who have become
a superhero reality show, stumble across a covey of supervillains
escaped from jail, one of whom, Nitro, uses his power of blowing
up and reintegrating himself to destroy the New Warriors, the
town of Stamford, Connecticut and 600 civilians, many of them
children. Lobbying by the dead children’s parents (the analogy with
the parents’ lobby that produced the anti-paedophile Megan’s Law,
mandating the right of parents to know of paedophiles in their area,
is explicit) means that a Bill is rushed through, demanding that all of
the superpowers reveal their secret identities and make themselves
available to the authorities. Non-compliers are to be deprived of
all civil rights and due process, and imprisoned forever in special
jails. It is clear that this is only a first step towards conscripting
all superheroes as a militia that will police America and the world
forever.
What Marvel have successfully done with this is create, across
some 70 or 80 comics, a storyline in which character work enables
the writers to place much-loved heroes on different sides in
what seems like a real conflict about real issues, rather than the
factitious conflicts of Secret Wars. The analogy with current political
phenomena like the PATRIOT Act and the camp at Guantanamo
Bay is loose enough that no particular one-for-one correspondences
can be made, and there are points at which earlier conflicts are
specifically evoked. When Tony Stark persuades Peter Parker to out
himself as Spider-Man, one consideration that weighs on Parker

and his wife Mary Jane is whether he will be expected to ‘name

names’ as in the days of McCarthy and the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee. It is explicit that Reed Richards is in part
motivated, in a telling piece of reverse psychology, by the fate of
a favourite uncle destroyed in that period and a determination not
to put himself in that position. The situation is polysemous enough
that Reed is haunted by the Tom Lehrer song ‘Werner von Braun’,
sung casually by a security guard – ‘Once the bombs have gone up,
who cares where they come down?’. Later, Reed reveals that he
has developed a predictive mathematics of human behaviour that,
he believes, demonstrates that his is the only sane course of action.
Other characters link the question of Superhero Registration to
the Civil Rights issue and to slavery – Luke Cage justifies his non-
compliance in terms of refusing to be ‘shackled to the Man’ – and
to the draft resisters in the Vietnam War – Jessica Jones takes her
and Luke’s child and decamps to Canada for safety. Some characters
justify compliance in terms of obedience to the laws created by a
democratic government; others, like Guido of X-Factor, point out,
not entirely accurately, that Hitler was elected. One of the things
that make this an effective storyline is that we see the whole thing
from enough points of view that we can respect, intellectually
and emotionally, the positions of many of those whose side we
ultimately condemn.
This is one of the things made possible by spreading the event
across so many of Marvel’s titles – New Avengers, Ms Marvel, Amazing
Spider-Man, X-Men, X-Factor, Thunderbolts and so on – as well as
running the two Civil W ar titles, Civil W
ar and Front Line. The last
is peculiarly interesting in that it is that relatively rare thing, a
superhero comic in which superheroes comparatively take a back
seat. One of its running plot segments concerns two journalists:
Ben Urich of the Daily Bugle is a character with much Marvel back-
story, and the ex-alcoholic radical journalist Sally Floyd was the
central character of the Decimation comic Generation M. Ben does
his best to uncover the truth while working for Jameson, whose
editorial line is all in favour of Registration, and Sally, rather
more inclined than he to see conspiracies everywhere, finds out

the hard way that the Registration Act suppresses freedom of the
press and Habeas Corpus. One of the things that Busiek’s Marvels
demonstrated was that sometimes the interesting story is the one
told from the sidelines.
The fact that the Registration Act criminalizes people who
only have good intentions is what sticks in the gullet of Captain
America, perhaps the closest thing the Marvel Universe has to a
moral centre. He objects to the Act not because of analogies with
other situations, not because of what it may become in the future
– the time-travelling Cable tries to warn the President (who is not
The Case of Speedball

Another segment of Front Line is the one dealing with the
surviving New Warrior, Speedball, who previously has always
been the irritating twerp he was, for example, in Alias. Here
though, he becomes a figure of quiet authority; he regrets
what happened in Stamford, but he will not say that he was
wrong. His friends died trying to arrest a murderous villain,
because they were heroes; he will not defame their memory.
Deprived of his powers by the blast, he is thrown into a
federal prison to be brutalized by guards and prisoners (and
by implication raped); he is disowned by his family and, on
recovering his powers, thrown into the prison camp Stark
and Richards have built in the Negative Zone. Yet he will not
capitulate, and becomes quietly admirable. A system that tries
to break this good young man cannot, we and his lawyer Jen
Walters (She-Hulk) realize, be right. Reed Richards tries to get
him his day in court, and this results in Speedball’s attempted
assassination.
In a further moral complexity, Speedball, left by this
attack with returned powers and constant agony when he
uses them, decides to dedicate himself to atonement for his
accidental crime. He takes the name Penance, dresses in a
black plastic costume that goes far further into the realm of
fetish clothing than any previous superhero costume, and
fights through the pain. He does this in the new government-
sponsored incarnation of Thunderbolts, alongside some of
the worst villains Marvel has ever produced.

drawn as G.W. Bush) of dire consequences and is rebuffed with talk

of the November mid-term elections – but because he thinks it
wrong. When he sets up a resistance movement, Captain America
is not joined by his old friends like Iron Man, but by his former
partner Sam Wilson and Luke Cage and another hero of colour,
Black Goliath. He is joined by the Young Avengers, whom he tried
to keep out of the superhero game; Spider-Woman, the double
agent whom every side has betrayed, also sides with them. We
know, because he is Captain America, that he is right.
There are many, many side issues to all of this: Zemo regards it
as a side issue to a forthcoming battle with the Grandmaster that
he does not expect to survive. Wolverine tracks Nitro, and then the
trail of those who employed him; this seems to be Damage Control,
the firm that rebuilds after superhero battles, but it is not clear who
lies behind them. Peter Parker agonizes about his loyalty to Stark
and whether he has taken the right side, eventually deciding that he
has not and going on the run after apologizing on television to the
American people. Sue Richards walks out on her husband after the
cloned copy of the long-missing Thor that he and Stark have built
and programmed kills Black Goliath. What is impressive is that in
all of them the intellectual conceit, the satirical agenda and even
the constant pages of heroes hitting each other are secondary to
the human story, and to the long-built emotional weight provided
by continuity. To pick an example I have mentioned elsewhere,
Zemo demonstrates his change of heart to Captain America, who
fought his father before him, by returning, via a time bubble, the
mementoes of Captain America’s life in the 1940s, which years
earlier Zemo had destroyed in front of him.
The culmination of all of this is somewhat less impressive than
the set-up. At the height of a final battle between pro-Registration
forces and the resistance, Captain America realizes that he has lost
the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people and
orders his forces to stand down, handing himself over to the police.
Even though they are aware of the extent to which Iron Man has
both orchestrated and profited by the social forces he and Reed
regard as inevitable, Ben and Sally abandon their exposé; during an

interview, Sally tears into Captain America as an elitist who has lost
touch with reality. Some of the resisters – Sue Storm, for example
– apparently make their peace with the authorities; others, like
Spider-Man, continue the struggle. Does Millar intend an analogy
between Captain America’s backing down and the way Al Gore did
not pursue the question of the Florida vote in the 2000 election? It
is interesting to consider this.
This storyline has been commercially very successful – Marvel
deferred publication of the later issues of Civil War in order to
maintain the quality of its art rather than hand pages over for
completion to lesser artists. It is also, clearly, the lead-in to other
storylines: the invasion of Earth by the vengeful Hulk and the
inhabitants of the planet to which the Illuminati exiled him; the
creation of a 50-state initiative in which every part of the USA has
its own superheroes; the corruption of the Thunderbolts into a
government-sponsored assassination squad. Clearly, there is a sense
in which it is still too early to judge the long-term effects of the
story on the Marvel Universe.
Nonetheless, at a time when most of American popular culture
was avoiding political issues like the plague and when even quite
casual protests against the Iraq war – like the remarks made by one
of the country band the Dixie Chicks – were greeted with howls
of vilification, it is interesting that superhero comics produced a
work of significant protest art, significant because it supplied a
lot more than protest. It is also emotionally powerful – the last
issue of Civil W
ar: Front Line shows us a Tony Stark who is apparently
entirely victorious and yet deeply troubled. He is the new director
of SHIELD, and the journalists who might have exposed his
machinations have congratulated him on them; his old friend-
turned-enemy Captain America is in custody.Yet he throws his Iron
Man head-piece across the room and drops to his knees in anguish;
in successive frames, the viewpoint pans up and away from him in
his penthouse suite, until he is an insignificant mark in a cityscape.
In a Bendis side-bar comic, Civil War – Confessions, Stark delivers
a monologue on his motives and we realize at the end, as he says,
‘It wasn’t worth it’, that he is standing over the corpse of the

assassinated Captain America. Earlier, though placed later in the

comic, Captain America has asked him whether it was worth it,
and Stark has refused any answer save ‘You’re a sore loser’. There is
genuine tragedy in the breaking of this always uneasy friendship.
DC and its Crises

In fairness to DC, the event/reboot that also appeared in 2006
only seemed less radical in its implications by comparison with
Civil War’s extremes. Where its predecessor Crisis on Infinite Earths
(1985) was only, if magnificently, an attempt to rein in what was
seen as the excessive complication of the DC Universe, Infinite Crisis
tried at the same time to rejig the universe so as to simplify the
complexities that had resulted from its predecessors’ less felicitous
adjustments, and to do so in ways that created space for changes,
such as more superheroes of colour and other innovations, like an
explicitly lesbian Batwoman.
Infinite Crisis also had at its heart acts of great destructiveness
perpetrated with good intentions by those who wanted to return
matters to a kinder, gentler, more old-fashioned state of affairs; we
learn that the ends do not justify the means even when perpetrated
by the best and brightest. In the context of Bush’s America and
the struggle of red- and blue-state America, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that here too a moral, even a satirical, comment was, if
not intended, at least available to interpretation, especially when
the villains of the piece turn out to include recensions of Superman
and Superboy, and not, let us be clear, evil twins like Ultraman
either.
Crisis on Infinite Earths

To explain the logic of this, it is necessary to go back to the grand
original of reboots, Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985. It was felt by a
number of the DC creative team that their universe had become
too complex for new readers to follow, and it was also decided that
certain quite popular characters should be killed off for good; Julie

Schwartz put it with his usual forthright succinctness – ‘Every ten

years’, he said, ‘we need to give the universe an enema’.
The resulting 12-issue comic was one of the most impressive
pieces of work George Perez has ever drawn and was effectively, if
not memorably, scripted by Marv Wolfman, demonstrating as often
before that his forte is for powerful scenes rather than either great
story arcs or great individual lines. One of the obvious criticisms
of the series is that Wolfman’s storyline has at least one climax too
many: the evil Anti-Monitor not only comes back from apparent
destruction rather often, but revises his plan of universal destruction
each time he does so. Another problem is that the entire concept is
paradoxically and at the same time metafictional and crude.
The premise is that the universe was originally intended to be
one, but that attempts to observe its creation by an Oan scientist,
Krona, resulted in its splitting many times over, into many timelines
in a universe of ordinary matter, and also a universe of anti-matter
where evil, in the shape of the Anti-Monitor, becomes dominant.
The good Monitor of the universe of ordinary matter tries to set up
lines of defence to save at least some of the worlds, while knowing
that an ideal solution will be to return things to the unity they once
possessed in the process of saving them. They are called Monitors
and Krona, but they might as well be called good and bad editors.
To complicate matters further, part of the Monitor’s game plan
involves his own death at the hand of one of his assistants, whom
he knows to be possessed, some of the time, by his opponent; the
ruthlessness with which he allows her to be lumbered with this
load of karmic guilt is only excusable by his own decision to die;
religious analogies clearly apply at some level.
Many, many timelines are devoured by the Anti-Monitor’s
device before Barry Allen, the Flash, sacrifices himself to destroy
it, appearing dying in a variety of times and spaces to his friends in
the process. Supergirl fights the Anti-Monitor to a standstill, dying
in the process. One of the two Wonder Women dies in the last
moments of the fight with an Anti-Monitor resurrected for the last
time, her essence travels back through time and becomes the spark
that imbues the other Wonder Woman in infancy (the starting point

for Perez’s memorable stint on Wonder Woman in the immediate

aftermath of Crisis on Infinite Earths). These three were to be only
the most important of the vast number of DC characters polished
off, or drastically revised in the course of this series.
Flash was replaced, almost instantly, by the former Kid Flash
who stepped up to take on his mentor’s role. Supergirl, on the other
hand, was absent from the DC Universe almost until the very eve
of Infinite Crisis some 20 years later – a cynical person might regard
the decision to sacrifice her as having a certain amount to do with
the disastrous Supergirl film of 1984 and the potential franchise’s
consequent loss of worth. The covers Perez drew for successive
issues, of the Superman of Earth 1 cradling the dead girl in his
arms, and of Flash facing his titanic opponent with resolution, are
particularly strong images; some of the covers for Crisis on Infinite
Earths have the remorseless busy-ness that is the downside of Perez’s
facility with large crowds of characters, each drawn as individuals,
but not these two.
One of Crisis on Infinite Earth’s surprising strengths is the way that
Wolfman and Perez manage to play off two recensions of Superman
– the somewhat ageing one of Earth 2 featuring heavily in the story
– against each other, with a version of Superboy simultaneously in
the mix. Even when cooperating, as here, they have subtly different
approaches to things: the older version is even here (unknowingly
foreshadowing his role in Infinite Crisis) subtly more naive and
idealistic than his younger self. His position after the destruction
of his world – large parts of it have been edited into Earth 1 –
including many of his colleagues in the Justice Society, is peculiarly
painful and poignant, especially when his cognate persuades him
that it is his duty to help and survive in this new world.
The plot relies a little too heavily on touching every single base
in DC’s continuity, from prehistoric savage characters to a mage
in pre-deluge Atlantis and various points in the far future and the
– at this point simple, compared to what it became – supernatural
world. More worryingly, it relies a little too much on a variety
of dei ex machina; the resurrection of the Earth 2 Lois to share
her husband’s exile is a sentimentality too far. The complex role

of Alexander Luthor, the son of a virtuous alternate world Lex,

is too much a matter of plot mechanism for easy summary – for
this entirely to work, he needed to be a memorable character and
Wolfman never makes him one. The attempt by various villains
to exploit the situation is a plot strand too many and never goes
anywhere terribly significant; one cannot help but feel that a less
ambitious, tighter plot might have been preferable.
What Crisis on Infinite Earths does provide us with is a sense of
the tragic far too often missing from the DC Universe: existence is
saved, but at a staggering cost. Entire universes die and are seen to
die with moments of real pathos and heroism taking place along the
way; the evil Crime Syndicate Ultraman goes into non-existence
with courage and grace, fighting to the last, as he has done all his life.
I have mentioned the deaths of major characters, but many of the
minor characters who die get effective touches like this along the
way. One of the strengths of Perez’s work in this is that as well as
the large and sometimes over-busy panels, much of the story-telling
is done in tiny intricate frames on a grid that constantly changes –
many of these grace notes come in small gemlike thumbnail panels
of a face and some dialogue. It has also to be added that Crisis on
Infinite Earths was trying to do a number of things at the same time
– a commercially driven reboot of a property as well as a piece of
epic story-telling – and managed to do most of them effectively, in
spite of the fact that it was doing many of them for the first time.
Zero Hour
DC’s next attempt at a reboot, Zero Hour, eight years after Crisis
on Infinite Earths, lacked the sheer power of much of this and had
comparatively few lasting effects. A villain with the unmemorable
name Extant is messing around with the single timeline of Earth
and removing most of the DC Universe’s future-time locales. He
turns out to be working for the renegade Hal Jordan as one of the
latter’s schemes, in what we are told to think of as his madness,
to alter the past so that Coast City was never destroyed and with
it much of his personal life. In a subsequent major retcon, this is

reconfigured as his having been possessed by Parallax, the ‘yellow

impurity’ that the Guardians imprisoned in their power battery;
by this point, Jordan has sacrificed himself to save the world and
spent a time as the spirit currently possessed by the Spectre, which
is in turn corrupted by Parallax. One of Jordan’s successors, Kyle
Rayner, brings back the Guardians, whom Jordan had destroyed,
and re-establishes the Green Lantern corps – he also brings Jordan
back from the dead, sane, purged and redeemed. None of this is
foreshadowed, or indeed had even been thought of, during Zero
Hour, one of a number of areas in which the 1990s reboot has not
importantly affected what follows.
It is also significant that, in the 2006 reboot Infinite Crisis,
characters feel they have to explain the events of Crisis on Infinite
Earths to other characters who, in the nature of things, are unaware
that it happened. No one ever feels that they have to talk about
the events of Zero Hour, which are never mentioned, nor even
significantly alluded to in the extended discussion between DC
editors and creators that is included in the collected trade hardback
of Infinite Crisis. Nor, accordingly, will it be discussed any further
here.
Infinite Crisis
Infinite Crisis rebooted the DC Universe in a number of ways, not
all of which are yet entirely clear. It followed on from a number of
storylines, some but not all of them explicitly part of the Countdown
to Infinite Crisis event that preceded it, and was followed in turn
by the relaunch of most of DC’s titles with a rubric that indicated
that the starting point for all of them was a year after the events of
Infinite Crisis. At the same time, DC produced 52, a weekly comic
that covers the events in the continuity within the missing year,
with varying results in terms of interest and quality.
Various superheroes have died, or die in the course of 52, and
are replaced by new characters who take on their costume and
role and are in many cases significantly less white bread than their
predecessors; the new Blue Beetle is a young Hispanic man, for

example. Notoriously, the new Batwoman is a lesbian and ex-lover

of long-standing character, the former Gotham City cop Renée
Montoya, who as 52 proceeds becomes a masked vigilante in her
own right, replacing the Question when the original Question dies
of cancer.
Infinite Crisis has one of its roots in the events of Identity Crisis, the
death of Sue Dibney and various other characters and the revelation
that earlier on some of the Justice League mind-wiped the rapist
supervillain Doctor Light, leaving him somewhat incapacitated;
they also removed 10 minutes of the Batman’s memory when he
disagreed with this action. In The OMAC Project, one of Batman’s
subsequent schemes for controlling his peers in the Justice League
should they go too far is subverted by the telepath Maxwell Lord
into the creation of a million cyborged superbeings with a brief
to destroy all superhumans. Lord also murders the current Blue
Beetle and brainwashes Superman into his personal killing machine;
Wonder Woman kills Lord as the only way to be sure of defeating
him, and her execution of him is widely broadcast. She quarrels
with Superman and the Batman over her decision.
In other storylines in the so-called Countdown to Infinite Crisis,
most of the important alien races find themselves fighting a war for
territory when the geography of the galaxy is radically reconfigured;
various Green Lanterns attempt to hold the peace, and at the start
of Infinite Crisis many characters, surplus to the requirements
of plot, head off to help them. In Villains Unlimited Luthor puts
together a coalition of supervillains out to lobotomize the heroes
before the heroes do the same to them; a smaller group of villains,
led by the mysterious Mockingbird, oppose this coalition out of
general bad attitude. To complicate matters further, it becomes
clear that Mockingbird is the real Luthor and ‘Luthor’ an impostor.
The Spectre, currently without a human host, goes crazy and tries
to destroy magic.

Times have certainly changed: when DC decided not to use a page of
art depicting love-making between Montoya and a pick-up in 52, they
thoughtfully allowed the pencil sketches to appear on their website.

These dark doings are used, in the early issues of Infinite Crisis, by
the elderly Superman of Earth 2 – one of the characters left over
from Crisis on Infinite Earths with a full memory of what happened
– as an argument to himself that he is justified in deciding that the
Earth produced by the crisis is a botched job. His ageing wife Lois
is dying and he believes that only a recreated Earth 2 can save her.
He is encouraged in this belief by his two companions, Alexander
Luthor and Superboy, but is, as we gradually realize, their dupe,
not least because much of what has gone wrong, has gone wrong at
their instigation. It is Alexander who has impersonated his virtuous
father’s evil cognate, for example, and Superboy who has moved
the galaxy around.
Alexander has rebuilt one of the Monitor’s machines, using
parts of the Anti-Monitor’s corpse; he kidnaps various superheroes
to power it, among them Power Girl, whose identity has always
been unclear but who is now definitively revealed to have been
the Power Girl of Earth 2, but who refuses to cooperate in the
destruction of the world which has adopted her. Lois dies on the
new Earth 2, and her husband is persuaded by his younger cognate
that Earth 2 is not the perfect world he wants – ‘A perfect world
would not need a Superman’. Repentant, the older Superman
becomes the ally of Earth’s superheroes against Alexander, who is
trying to create a perfect world by mixing and matching elements
from all the disparate Earths of the multiverse, and a demented and
homicidal Superboy who merely wants his own homeworld back,
and is prepared to destroy everyone and everything to get it. Quite
specifically, and as a signal of this, he kills Conner, who may be less
motivated, and may be a chimeric clone of Superman and Luthor,
but still understands the difference between right and wrong and is
prepared to die for it.
Superboy is tricked and defeated and deprived of his powers by
his two older selves; the older Superman dies of his wounds and
the Superman of main continuity loses his powers for a while; the
mad Superboy is imprisoned to become a plot device another day.
Alexander Luthor escapes, but is murdered by Luthor and the Joker,
the latter having been insulted by Alexander’s failure to recruit

him. The result of his manipulations is a new Earth, devastated by

all that has happened, and with important bits of its nature changed
in ways that we will only gradually discover; for example, the time-
traveller Booster Gold discovers, before his death in 52, that his
knowledge of events that are historical in his time of origin no
longer applies.
Obviously a part of one’s judgement of Infinite Crisis depends
on one’s view of the consequences of the changes that have been
made, and to some extent of the particular storylines and writing
and art on the various titles most affected. Certainly Kurt Busiek
has recharged Superman with significance, and Grant Morrison’s
intelligent lightening of the Batman’s sombre tone is very effective;
on the other hand, much of 52 is frankly dull, particularly in its
earlier stages.
I have commented in Chapter 1 on my serious reservations about

Identity Crisis and The OMAC Project – they retrospectively damage
much-loved characters and storylines without earning the right to
do so. I should, though, in fairness comment that Gail Simone’s
Villains Unlimited is glorious amoral fun in its bloodthirsty way,
and has a nice moment of confrontation between Catman and
Green Arrow where the villain tells the hero that the heroes need
to remember that they are supposed to be the good guys, and act
like it.
What, though, of the seven parts of Infinite Crisis judged as an
autonomous work of art? Somewhat to my surprise, as happened
with Crisis on Infinite Earths, I was rather more impressed when
reading it as a whole than I had been when reading individual issues,
specifically the incredibly complicated plot, which I have so very
briefly summarized above, made a lot more sense as a whole. One
tendency of the comics industry is that the rise of trade paperbacks
as a significant part of the industry means that many writers think
in longer paragraphs than they would for the individual issue;
individual issues can thus now be less impressive than the whole
run. At the same time, with the exception of one or two scenes,
like the death of the older Lois, it never quite delivers the requisite

emotional punch – the point of this story is, after all, to break our
hearts a little as well as to revive a franchise.
I was impressed by the book’s slow demonstration of the extent
to which exile and resentment have corrupted its two major
villains, both of whom were heroes at the time of Crisis on Infinite
Earths. Superboy in particular has become a monster, his slaughter
of various heroes and of his cognate Conner Kent is seriously
unpleasant in an artistically justifiable way; the worst things come
by corruption of the best, and Superboy never accepts that he is
no longer even slightly the good guy in all of this. If one of the
important themes of the superhero comic is the responsibility
to use great power with great moderation, then his arc within
Infinite Crisis is an important discussion. The decline of the more
or less heroic Alexander Luthor of the earlier event into the satanic
intriguer here has also something of the tragic about it – he decides
that his nature is essentially flawed and determines to be a villain.
Just as much of the strength of Crisis on Infinite Earths came from
George Perez’s artwork, so Infinite Crisis stands or falls on the
quality of Phil Jimenez’s work. Incidentally, this is another reason
why the collection is so superior to the issues, in that particular
panels have been redrawn and radically improved and altered with
considerable care. Jimenez is so notoriously a passionate imitator
of Perez that, on their first meeting, Perez greeted him with a cry
of ‘Son!’; their art is similar enough that the few pages of flashback
and of revived alternate Earths that Perez drew for Infinite Crisis gel
with Jimenez’s work in a way that the interpolated work of other
pencillers does not.
Like Perez, Jimenez can at times be too busy; a vast scene of
superheroes attending a ceremony in a cathedral is well-drawn but
mostly notable for the sheer number of quite obscure characters
he gets in. You spend too much time ticking the faces off to feel
very much about the occasion that has brought them together.
On the other hand, Perez has also taught him how to use small
panels for moments of intensity like Conner Kent’s final agony,
and how to open them out on the next page into iconic whole-
page panels like the one of Earth 1 Superman, Batman and Wonder

Woman reunited in grief as Wonder Girl sobs over Conner’s

corpse. Nor do these moments have to be static – a double-spread
in which both Supermen tackle a revived Doomsday is dotted with
thumbnail panels showing particular moments within this broader
single conflict. Like Perez before him, Jimenez turns a script less
accomplished than ambitious into something with real epic scope
just by the intensity of his best art; with all my reservations about
it, and the larger revamp of which it is part, I have to acknowledge
that Infinite Crisis, like Crisis on Infinite Earths before it, has a loopy
magnificence.
If, in the end, I prefer the more humane scale and the intelligent
politics and deep sense of emotional betrayal that characterize
Marvel’s Civil War event – the sense that quite ordinary and
admirable people like Carol Danvers and Peter Parker can become
for a while the accomplices of atrocity without turning into red-
eyed monsters – that is in part a compromise between my love
of comics and my fascination with the issue of how close they can
come to the real while preserving their essential nature. And the
fact that the two continuity universes can both support work on this
scale, and to some degree also this level of accomplishment helps
explain why I still feel the love for the partly delivered promise of
superhero comics that I felt when I was 10.

6
Gifted and
Dangerous
Joss Whedon’s
Superhero Obsession
Whedon and the Fanboy Creators

It ought to be a truth universally acknowledged that artists working
in popular media draw their influences from other popular media
as much as from the canons of great art. One of the reasons why
we do not always stress this fact is that there is often an element of
apologia in our work on popular culture, an implied bid to have it
admitted to those canons or not to have it unthinkingly dismissed
by high culture’s gatekeepers as unworthy of attention. If, writing
about television shows, we ignore the influence on those shows
of, say, superhero comics, we not only end up understating the
sheer richness and allusiveness of our texts, but may also end up
misunderstanding and misrepresenting the artistic personality of
the writers who are our subject.
To be specific: some career decisions by artists may seem
perverse at first glance, but then, more fully considered, reveal
themselves as connected closely to the driving forces of their
work. Joss Whedon’s decision to divert his attention from more
personal projects not only to develop a project – in the event an
abortive project – based on the DC character Wonder Woman, but
also to become the writer on the comic book The Astonishing X-Men
(2005–7) is one such decision. I have called this chapter ‘Gifted
and Dangerous’ because what I am arguing is simply this. The

two six-issue runs of The Astonishing X-Men published as volumes

under those names should be as central to our sense of the artistic
personality of Joss Whedon as any of his television and movie
scripts, as well as something we can enjoy as much. I also intend
to show that his comics obsession is the source of much of what is
strong in his work, as well as of some of his weaknesses.
Whedon earlier worked on the script of the first X-Men movie,
but it is known that only a couple of, admittedly very typical,
lines from his script made it into the final version – it is normally
assumed that one of these is the point at which Wolverine convinces
Scott that he is the genuine article and not a shape-changer by
saying ‘You’re a dick’. Work on this movie could be seen as merely
another piece of Whedon’s work as a script doctor, but this would
be an error, given his often-stated devotion to this particular part
of the comics universe. Far from being perverse, these decisions
are logical extensions of interests that have dominated Whedon’s
work from the beginning and which help us understand both the
strengths and the occasional weaknesses of his more celebrated
work.
Whedon is one of a group of youngish creative writers – most
of them working primarily in television or film – whom Jennifer
Stoy has termed the ‘fanboy creators’, suggesting it as a term not
only for Whedon, but for Rob Thomas, Ron Moore, Ryan Murphy
and Kevin Smith. J.M. Straczynski, the show-runner/auteur of
Babylon 5, is working on a number of Marvel titles. Allen Heinberg,
who wrote several 2004–5 issues of Young Avengers for Marvel and,
in 2005–6, Wonder Woman for DC, was a writer on The OC and
had Seth in that show attempt to sell a comic book to Wildstorm
Comics. Common characteristics of this group would include an
obsessive habit of popular culture intertextuality in their dialogue
and plotting, a constant moving back and forth between forms, and
the use in their core work of tropes derived from the favourite
reading and viewing of their youth; the British writer Russell
T. Davies might usefully be seen as a UK equivalent, though his
obsession is with Dr Who, which he now show-runs, rather than
with comics.

Gifted and Dangerous • 203
I would further argue that this early reading and viewing has
trained these writers in the skills necessary to use those – often
quite complex – tropes effectively; negotiation and parsing of the
tropes of popular culture produces a competence cascade, the
flowering of many talented individuals where once only one or
two flourished. The unabashed influence of earlier texts on their
work is one of a number of ways in which the productions of
the fanboy creators are thick texts, which is to say they are texts
whose contingent, collective and polysemous nature renders them
especially satisfying. The fanboy creators are also a variant form of
their favourite reading and viewing matter’s assumed ideal reader/
viewer.
It is also, unfortunately, the case that their creations are
often flawed in precisely the ways that comics are often flawed,
by unexamined use of default clichés and by over-fondness for
storylines that return to a status quo ante – in Star Trek fandom
this is often referred to as the reset button. Nearly all of them
have an almost morbid fondness for torturing their protagonists
with unhappy love affairs that drag on for an implausibly long
time – the on-and-off relationship between Logan and Veronica in
Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars is a good example of this. Whedon, in
particular, has a remarkable tendency – for a professed sympathizer
with feminism – to associate sexual fulfilment with death, and this
again is something he may have learned from comics.
One element in the contingency of their works is the choice of
form and of genre.Where a writer like Neil Gaiman made his name
in comics before also producing songs, novels and screenplays,
Whedon and Smith made their names in television and film before
adding the writing of comics to their CVs. In all these cases, but
especially the latter two, this implies an absolute refusal to regard
any one literary form as superior to any other. I would suggest that
this is another defining characteristic of the fanboy creator – that
comics are a defining influence on their work and a form in which
they feel entirely at home.
At this point, I would stress that the use of the term fanboy
accurately depicts the situation. The reasons why no women fall

into the category almost certainly reflects glass ceilings in the

relevant industries rather than any gender-determined matters of
taste and inclination. Given the growing presence of women in, say,
the comics fanbase, I would expect this situation to change.
In the absence of any real knowledge of what his take on Wonder
Woman would have been or of the details of his script for the first
X-Men film – which seems to have been available online at some
point, but is no longer – I will concentrate on Whedon’s use of
superhero tropes in his better-known work, the extent of specific
influences from well-known comics in this work and on the extent
to which his work on the Buffyverse-linked comic Fray and on The
Astonishing X-Men reflect his interest, one might legitimately say his
obsession, with the figure of the superhero. Not only is he currently
working directly in the comics and film superhero genres, he has
always centred his attention on characters who are either best, or
at least relevantly, considered in the light of superhero tropes.
We know, specifically, that the adolescent Joss Whedon was a fan
of comics in general, and that he was a fan of the Chris Claremont
period X-Men in particular. He has said as much in his introduction
to the collection of Fray, and the influence of Claremont’s work
would be obvious even if he had not. We need to look at his work,
and at Claremont’s and see what Whedon might have learned from
Claremont’s example. More generally, we need to look at the
driving dynamics of superhero comics and see how they emerge in
Whedon’s work for television and film, as well as in his comics.
Superhero Comics as Influence on the

Whedonverse
Buffy is a superhero; it is one of the most obvious things about her.
Of course it is also relevant to consider Buffy as the heroine of a
high-school film: she has the rivalries, the short-lived but intense
emotional entanglements and the difficult relationship with the
school principal of the central characters of teen film from the
John Hughes sextet and Lehman’s Heathers onwards. But then, so
did Spider-Man, though the relevant comparison in his case was

with the world of Archie comics. Joss Whedon has linked Buffy
specifically to the blondes in slasher films and made a particular
point of the extent to which she is his answer to the Last Girl,
who in the classic slasher film survives where her frailer sisters die.
Much has rightly been made of her as a variation on motifs from
the world’s major religions; she dies for humanity, she harrows
Hell and so on.
However, this last point links her to that other linked category
of people who die for humanity and harrow Hell. It should not
be forgotten that among the rival saviour cults of the first two
centuries of the Common Era was the cult of Hercules, the
character of Greek literature and mythology reconfigured as a
saviour demigod, Hercules Soter. There is a large area of carryover
in Western culture between the Redeemer and the superhero. And,
of course, Buffy is a redeemer and so are several of her friends
and associates – her opponent turned lover and then friend, the
ensouled vampire Spike, for example, dies to save the world and
adopts a posture of crucifixion as his inner fires burn him.
Buffy has gained powers that are massive extensions of standard
human abilities – strength and athleticism – as a result of becoming
a Slayer. She has died twice and been reborn, her liminal status is
undoubted. She spends much of her time in twilight and darkness,
and has lost her original kin either through death (Joyce) or
desertion (Hank). She has a family of the heart in Dawn and the
Scoobies, and a shadow double in Faith, whose own oscillation
between good and evil is a standard superhero trajectory. Buffy
has prophetic dreams; her dreams also link her to other Slayers,
notably Faith, dream is another place of twilight.
She has a secret identity only in the sense – though it is a very
important sense – that no one expects a slightly ditzy blonde
schoolgirl to save the world on a regular basis; she is one of what
Alice Sheldon, the SF writer better known as James Tiptree, called
‘the women men don’t see’. She has a sense of duty that leads her
into endless trouble with the authorities at her various schools
and universities and which she has to put ahead of her feelings for
various lovers, most notably Angel whom in ‘Becoming Part 2’

(2.22) she has to kill to save the world. When, later on, she decides
that she will attempt to save her sister, even if the world ends as a
result of her failure, it is as a consequence of all the other things she
has sacrificed to the mission rather than mere selfishness.
Buffy is a paradoxical being: in order to fight the creatures of
the night she becomes someone who haunts the night herself; to
save humanity she has to struggle to retain her own humanity and
risks becoming merely the embodiment of the struggle. Those of
her schoolfriends who acquire powers also do so in paradoxical
ways: the logical computer hacker Willow becomes an all-powerful
witch, and one of the most dangerous aspects of her magic is the
habit of cutting laterally through to a solution to problems – a
skill she acquired from hacking – her return of Amy to humanity
is essentially a hacking of the original spell’s operating system.
Cordelia, the queen of consumerism, becomes someone who
renounces wealth, looks, love and even humanity for the sake of the
mission; a teenager almost sociopathic in her lack of consideration
for the feelings of others becomes an empathic clairvoyant who
feels the pain of beings in trouble.
Especially in the early series, Buffy has a profoundly antagonistic
relationship with the Sunnydale authorities; she is arrested for
Kendra’s murder and expelled from school at the behest of Mayor
Richard Wilkins, himself precisely the intially shadowy supervillain
in whom comics regularly trade. Challenged by Xander in ‘Selfless’
(7.5) over her decision to execute Anya when the latter turns back
to evil, Buffy says ‘I am the Law’, echoing both Batman and the
English comics character Judge Dredd.
The Slayer is, almost by definition, a vigilante protecting the
run of humanity from supernatural menaces of which they are for
the most part blissfully unaware (in this way, Slayers are not so
much like standard superheroes who combat menaces of which
the public is aware as they are like Tolkien’s rangers and wizards).
On a day-to-day basis she protects individuals and occasionally she
confronts Apocalypse. Buffy, partly because she survives so long,
learns to carry out her mission with discretion – she spares Spike
and Harmony on several occasions because of her intuition that this

is the right thing to do. This is often compared to Bilbo and Frodo’s
decisions to spare Gollum; it is also cognate with, for example,
Matt Murdock’s advocacy of the rehabilitation of the Gladiator,
whom he had defeated as Daredevil.
Buffy acquires a support group in the Scoobies, several of whom
become or are significantly powerful beings in their own right. Not
only would they have died without her long before they developed
those powers and abilities, but they would, as we see in ‘The Wish’
(3.9), have become particularly formidable vampires. In various
of the alternate worlds beloved of Marvel Comics, we have seen
figures of righteousness such as Iron Man turn to the bad; I have
already mentioned how, in Alan Davis’ The Nail for DC Comics,
even as harmless a figure as Jimmy Olsen is shown to have serious
potential for evil without the positive influence of Superman and
Clark Kent.
One of the standard, though often debated, assumptions of the
modern superhero comic is that, for many of us, moral standing is
a product of contingent circumstances, that what it takes to change
people to the dark side is what the Joker, in Alan Moore’s The Killing
Joke, calls ‘one bad day’. Though the Batman of The Killing Joke
disputes this, and the Joker’s experiment in driving Commissioner
Gordon mad fails, it is clear that a standard comics assumption is
that some become evil by choice and others have evil thrust upon
them – if not at the time, then in one of the reconstructions of
continuity that make comics too complex. Hal Jordan, the Green
Lantern who became the murderous Parallax, had more recently
been shown to have been possessed by Polaris, an ancient evil being,
and to have had no control over his actions. And the influence on
Batman himself of a single trauma in his past indicates that the
Joker, like a number of his adversaries, has that real insight into his
personality that comes from being in part one of his shadows.
This sense of evil as a contingent circumstance is important
to Joss Whedon’s view of vampirism, though is only a partial
description of it – you can see him as being in dialogue with the
comics version of this sense. On the various occasions when Angel
gets his soul back, he is near-broken by the guilt of Angelus’ actions;

it is as if he were not personally responsible. Spike, on the other

hand, has less guilt because he accepts responsibility for his killings,
when in the Angel television series he is nearly dragged into Hell
from Wolfram & Hart (‘Hell Bound’, 5.4) he does not regard it as
especially unfair. Yet in ‘Damage’ (5.11) he and Angel discuss the
extent to which evil was something that was done to them as much
as something they are.
By the same token, it is possible for supervillains to reform.
The difficulties involved making this career change – not least in
deciding what ‘good’ is, in the context of the lack of moral compass
that made them villains in the first place – has kept various comics
titles, notably Busiek’s Thunderbolts, going for some years. Of Buffy’s
associates, Angel, Spike, Anya and, rather more ambiguously,
Illyria, Darla and so on have this trajectory; Andrew both has it
and parodies it. The vicissitudes of human–mutant relationships
have caused the X-Men’s nemesis Magneto to move backwards
and forwards between good and evil on a regular commute. Again,
Vampires as Superheroes
Vampires, more or less by definition, have superpowers. When
vampires choose to work for good, especially when the object
of the enterprise is their own redemption or a loyalty to friends
that transcends their personal status as good or evil, then
those vampires become superheroes almost automatically.
Marvel’s version of Dracula is a supervillain, as is the vampire
Baron Blood, but other characters such as Blade and Hannibal
King are vampires who work for righteousness, as is the
Confessor in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City comic, a Catholic priest
turned creature of the night who wears a large silver cross
in order to mortify his undead flesh. Morbius is a scientist
infected with pseudo-vampirism and desperate for a cure – he
only fights superheroes if they get in his way. Jeff Mariotte
has said that, when he went to work on the Angel comic, Joss
Whedon specifically asked him to explore the idea of Angel
as superhero.

reformed villains in Joss Whedon’s work, as in comics, are always

prone to backslide and be forgiven.
Faith, who refers to herself and Buffy at a point when they are
finally reconciled after years of estrangement as ‘hot chicks with
superpowers’, has a fairly standard arc for a superhero, being
tempted over to the dark side and then working out her redemption
by going to jail for some years. If you are a superhero, and jail cells
are not built to hold you, staying in jail is an act of redemptive will,
a penance imposed by your conscience rather than the state. Staying
there is also a good that has to be weighed against the possible
consequences of crises in which you are needed – the moment
Wesley tells her (in ‘Salvage’, Angel, 4.13) that she is needed to deal
with Angelus, she breaks out of jail on the instant.
Spider-Man was told by his doomed Uncle Ben that ‘with great
power comes great responsibility’. Most superheroes work for free
and even the very small minority who do not do pro bono work
much of the time, Buffy is, as an adult, always broke, as is Spider-
Man.When, in ‘After Life’ (Buffy, 6.3) Anya claims that Spider-Man
takes money for saving the world, Xander corrects her, not merely
because he is a geek, but because he regards it as an important
moral truth that Buffy, as a superhero, has to live by.
Dawn: You can’t charge innocent people for saving their lives.
Anya: Spider-Man does.
Dawn: Does not.
Anya: Does too.
Dawn: Does n— (catches herself) Xander?
Xander: Action is his reward.
Anya: Why are you never on my side?
Of the major characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander and

Andrew are clearly identified as comics fans, and both Dawn and,
more improbably, Cordelia in her later appearances in Angel show
signs of continuing acquaintance with comics. The alternative is
that the renegade power, Jasmine, who possesses Cordelia, is the
comics fan – Cordelia’s reference to the Heaven where she has
been trapped as ‘Misty Magic Land’ (a reference to Alan Moore’s

Willow and Kitty Pryde

One particular area of Buffy in which the influence of Chris
Claremont is obvious is in the characterization of Willow
and the indulgence Whedon and his team sometimes show
to her. Some fans have assumed that this is merely a matter
of Whedon’s personal affection for Allison Hannegan, but it
goes deeper than this. Whedon has said: ‘There were few
interesting girls in comics young enough for a twelve year old
to crush on . . . Until Kitty Pryde. She was such a figure of both
identification and affection, I even forgave her her inability to
think of a decent name for herself.’ Elsewhere he has said of
Kitty, ‘I love her logic . . . and her power, which is both cool
and visual’. Kitty Pryde was one of the Claremont period’s
additions to the X-Men, a bright teenager and computer geek
with the power to walk through walls, but whose contribution
to the X-Men had far more to do with her intelligence than her
comparatively lightweight powers. For the first few seasons of
Buffy, it is Willow’s intelligence as much as her growing skill in
magic that is her crucial contribution to the group.
People sometimes ask why Willow is Jewish, given how
rarely this is mentioned or impinges; one of the best reasons
I can think of is that Kitty Pryde is. The convenience of the
computer skills they both share is obvious. One of the strengths
of Claremont’s period at the X-Men was that his characters
regularly thought their way out of trouble as well as fighting
then-current Promethea series) is entirely appropriate thematically,

if surprising in character terms
Another of Claremont’s strengths was ensemble writing; the
whole point of the X-Men when first devised was that they be a
young team, still coming to maturity and identity, as opposed to
other Marvel teams like the Avengers, most of whom had their
own mature adult identities and, indeed, their own comic books.
They were not just about whatever the mission of the storyline was,
they were about their complex interactions, their crushes on each
other, their desire to have relationships with missing or rejecting
parents and their need to study, as well as to save the world. The

their way out, or relying on creaking plot machinery, and Kitty

was as much the brains of the outfit as their mentor figure
Charles Xavier. And, of course, when Joss Whedon came to
write The Astonishing X-Men, just about the first thing he did
in the comic was bring back Kitty from the semi-retirement
other writers had put her in, and start her snarking away at
the powerful telepath Emma Frost (who in Joss’ hands mostly
sounds like Lilah Morgan, but in her confrontations with Kitty
sounds more like Cordelia Chase).
It is also perhaps worth remarking that it is widely believed
in the fandom that Claremont’s original plan was to have Kitty
grow up and come out as a lesbian. It was further believed
– I do not know with how much authority – that Claremont
was overruled on this by his editors at Marvel who felt, in the
early 1980s, that it was untimely for the book to go in this
particular direction. Certainly her relationships with Storm,
her dance teacher Stevie and her aspiring evil mentor Emma
Frost have a degree of emotional intensity at least equivalent
to her notional romance with Colossus. And, in defence of
Marvel, it has to be noted that Kitty was notionally underage
at this point in her career. In any case, the vexed question of
Claremont’s intentions towards the character was sufficiently
discussed in fandom that that too might be an influence on
Joss Whedon, part of that fandom, in having Willow in due
course come out too.
Claremont period X-Men are at least as relevant a model for

Whedon’s Scoobies, and for Angel’s detective agency, and for
the crew of Serenity as the original Scooby-Doo team. It is of the
X‑Men, rather than his own characters, that Whedon has said ‘Take
a few characters and really fuck them up . . . The mission statement
is always “Why do I love every single character? What makes them
worth writing about?”’.
I should also mention briefly that whereas for Ridley Scott,
Ellen Ripley was an ordinary person capable of great heroism, and
for James Cameron she was an aspect of the triple goddess, and for
David Fincher she was a woman promoted beyond her talents, for

Joss Whedon, when he wrote Alien Resurrection, she was a superhero.

She is a liminal being with a bad attitude to authority, and the scene
in which she demonstrates her power during a basketball game is a
classic superhero response to being bullied.
Joss Whedon’s mild infatuation with Willow is one example of
perhaps the most negative aspect of his infatuation with comics:
Buffy and Angel, but perhaps even more so Willow, are cut too
much moral slack. All three of them are to some extent examples
of what Jennifer Stoy calls ‘superhero exceptionalism’; their actions
have consequences, but allowing us to disapprove of them for those
actions is not one of those consequences. Buffy’s brutality towards
Spike in, say,’ Dead Things’ (Buffy, 6.13) has no real consequences
for her; Angel’s mind-wipe of his colleagues in ‘Home’ (Angel,
4.22) does not lead to major disasters and, had there been a sixth
season, he would have been seen coping with the consequences of
his Samson smash of Wolfram & Hart rather than condemned for
the deaths it caused; Willow’s abuse of magic is spun as an addictive
Serenity
I mention the crew of Serenity here briefly, partly because of
the way Whedon’s film Serenity and late episodes of his TV
space opera Firefly such as ‘Objects in Space’ reconfigure the
show to some extent, from being about its Clint Eastwood-like
captain Mal to being about River, the mad girl to whom he gives
refuge. When I first heard about Firefly, I described it as a cross
between the pirate scenes in Alien Resurrection and The Outlaw
Josey Wales, and that was a reasonable description as far as it
went. When the show starts being about River, it moves from
being a Western to being a superhero origin story, because
a superhero, with her telepathy and programmed fighting
skills, is what River is clearly in the process of becoming. Much
of what I have said about Buffy as superhero applies to River
– powers, bad relationship with the authorities, liminality (she
is both mad and terrifyingly sane, and is first seen rising from
a box which might as well be a coffin).

weakness rather than a former victim of bullying’s unhealthy

interest in power. Faith’s attitude to jail as a personally imposed
penance rather than submission to democratically constituted
authorities is a more attractive version of the same tendency.
One of the strengths of good comics writing is the inexorable
working out of continuity and its consequences; one of the worst
flaws of comics writing and television writing is an excessive use of
the reset button. Whedon never uses the reset button at the crude
level of plotting, but his shows are sometimes prone to it at a moral
and emotional level, particularly, it has to be acknowledged, when
his overseeing of them became less close. The fact that it never
became something on which he cracked down when other people
were running his shows on a day-to-day basis indicates at least that
he was comparatively unconcerned about it.
Joss Whedon’s fascination with alternate universe versions of
his own continuity –‘The Wish’ (3.9) and ‘Normal Again’ (6.17)
in Buffy, ‘Birthday’ (3.11) in Angel – can be seen as influenced by
Star Trek, of course, but it is a trope most especially associated with
comics in general, Marvel comics (which had for many years a
title What If?, devoted to such stories) in particular and the various
X‑Men titles even more particularly still. Claremont’s Excalibur
spin-off had a storyline called ‘The Crosstime Caper’ and the more
recent title eXiles deals with alternate versions of X-Men characters
teaming up to repair the timeline of alternate worlds that have
gone seriously wrong.
One of the current X-Men line-up, (though not appearing
in Whedon’s team), Rachel Summers, is quite specifically the
daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey from a dystopian future
which she time-travelled to prevent that future existing. Moreover,
the changes effected by her interventions have allowed a set of
circumstances in which Jean Grey can never have been Rachel’s
mother, having been dead at the time as a result of becoming
the Dark Phoenix. The circumstances of Dawn’s existence as
Buffy’s sister – she is essentially a supernatural artefact, the Key,
reconfigured as Buffy’s sister by the order of monks who protect it
– are rather different, but equally causationally dodgy.

Sticking with the X-Men and getting ahead of ourselves for a

moment, another intermittent member of the group, Lilyana
Rasputin, was kidnapped to a demon dimension as a small child
and briefly snatched back when rescued. In the time it took for a
groping hand to find her again through the mists of the portal, she
experienced the time to grow to maturity and become a powerful
and morally equivocal mystic warrior in her late teens. Again, the
personal history of Connor, Angel’s son, is different, but has, shall
we say, a family resemblance.
Various others of Buffy’s circle have direct cognates in the
world of comics superheroes and other characters. Rupert Giles’
back-story as revealed in Buffy in ‘Halloween’ (2.6) and ‘The Dark
Age’ (2.8) is closely paralleled by the back-story of the mystical
adventurer John Constantine, originally created by Alan Moore
in Swamp Thing and subsequently the central character of his own
comic Hellblazer. John Constantine is a seedy adventurer with a
provincial accent, striving to atone for the deaths of his original
colleagues during an exorcism in Newcastle, the circumstances
of which remained vague for some time. The parallels between
what happened in Newcastle, and what Giles and Ethan had to do
with the demon Eyghon in ‘The Dark Age’, are loose, but directly
similar in this: both Constantine and Giles are haunted men with
something to atone for.
The most obvious parallel, apart from the career of Buffy herself,
is the career of Willow, who moves from being a mousy hacker to
becoming a witch with the power to shatter worlds. This gradual
evolution is paralleled by the way that Jean Grey came into the
fullness of her link with the abstract cosmological principle, the
Phoenix, over a period of many months and issues, before becoming
its entirely amoral and murderous aspect, the Dark Phoenix, and
choosing to die rather than continue to destroy her friends. Of
course, there are differences. Jean Grey’s sudden access of power
came from sacrificing herself for her friends and being reborn,
whereas Willow’s came from rising from a coma to re-ensoul
Angel. The first hints of Jean’s darkness came during a period when
she was under the sway of hallucinations of amoral power induced

by the Hellfire Club – in turn, of course, a reference to the classic

British TV show, The Avengers – whereas Willow’s came when she
tried to take revenge on Glory for sucking out Tara’s mind (‘Tough
Love’, Buffy, 5.19). Those of us who had grown up reading the
X‑Men could nonetheless recognize the tropes from an early stage,
and worry about them.
During Willow’s rampage, Andrew specifically references Dark
Phoenix in his remarks about her. The somewhat disappointing
handling of this matter in the show relates in part to the fact that
Willow pulls back from the brink without having to pay the level of
consequences that Jean Grey did. At the time the Dark Phoenix saga
first appeared, it was assumed by all concerned that she would stay
dead, until someone thought through the implications of her being
the Phoenix. Interestingly, though, Chris Claremont, the writer,
had apparently not especially intended Jean to die in expiation of
her casual acts of world-shattering and had the decision imposed on
him – at a stage when his original version of the script had already
been drawn – by an editor concerned that the comic preach a
consequences-based morality. Even in Claremont’s version of the
plot arc, Jean Grey was stripped of her superpowers. In the long
run, of course, she came back; another thing Joss Whedon learned
from Claremont in particular and comics in general is that death
really does not have to be permanent when you are dealing with
superheroes.
The chastened earth-linked power of the later Willow has much
in common with Jean Grey’s abilities. Like Willow perceiving the
growth of individual flowers, Jean Grey draws on the essence of
the natural order; just as Willow in her dark phase starts to suck
the life out of the earth itself, Jean Grey as Dark Phoenix sucks dry
the energy of an entire solar system. Often, when writing about
such matters, Claremont modulates the standard rodomontade of
comics into a more thoughtful mode; he is an obvious influence on
Whedon on the rare occasions when the latter has to go mystical
on us.
There are other elements in Buffy and Angel that can be seen as
deriving from comics. The amalgamation of the Scoobies into a

Teen Titans – Another Parallel

In the 1980s, the X-Men’s major DC rivals were that other
group of superpowered teens, the Teen Titans, who were
going through a particularly fine run scripted by Marv
Wolfman and drawn by George Perez. The storyline collected
as The Judas Contract reveals that a long-term member of the
team, Terra, is actually the mercenary Tara who has infiltrated
them at the behest of the assassin Deadshot; her malignity
is revealed in scenes where she smokes, uses bad language
and wears eye-liner. I find it hard to believe that a comics fan
like Joss Whedon did not have this in mind when creating
the characters of Faith and Tara, or the entire Angelus arc of
Season Two of Buffy.
single superslayer to defeat Adam (in ‘Primeval’, Buffy, 4.21) can

be seen as parallel to various precedents, but perhaps especially
to the fiftieth issue of Excalibur, a title started by Chris Claremont
though at this point written as well as drawn by the English artist
Alan Davis.
Obviously, we can legitimately assume that more recent comics
are relevant to Whedon’s work as well, since he regularly praises
current comics writers: not only Alan Moore, but also Warren Ellis
and Garth Ennis, for example, in his introduction to the collected
Fray. The empowering of all potential Slayers in ‘Chosen’ (Buffy,
7.22) is paralleled by, for example, the sudden forced evolution of
the entire population of Earth into superheroes in order to fight an
alien menace in the World War Three storyline of Grant Morrison’s
tenure of Justice League of America. In ‘Chosen’, the cutting between
a number of powerless and then suddenly empowered potentials all
over the world is precisely the strategy that comics would adopt at
such a moment. The way that, throughout the early part of Season

Excalibur was, at the time, as again currently, a team split off from
the X-Men and based in England; most importantly Kitty Pryde was
one of its leading members.

Seven of Buffy, we see potentials we have never met before suddenly

slaughtered in each episode, is likewise a very comics-influenced
piece of shorthand, and again, quite specifically, something that
Claremont does on a regular basis. There are interesting parallels
to be drawn between the serial story-telling technique of comics
and television shows, and almost certainly a significant set of back-
and-forth mutual influences. These are, after all, the two current
artistic forms in which serials are the dominant mode of narrative.
But this is potentially too vast a subject to do more than touch
upon here.
I do not propose to discuss at length the extent to which the

narrative rhythm of the Whedon television shows are negatively
influenced by those of long-running comics titles in their failure
fully to deliver a satisfactory pay-off. Comics are, after all, titles
that are intended to go on for a long time, and even after the
genuinely tragic end of a run like the Dark Phoenix saga, or the
doomed love affair of Daredevil and Elektra, there always has to be
a next issue, in which something else happens. Once the decision
had been made that Buffy’s story not end with her death, there was
always going to be something provisional about any season end, not
merely because the story goes on in our heads, but because it goes
on in that of its creator.
The perfect ending of a television show – that of Six Feet
Under, for example, where one after another the show’s family
of undertakers are seen dying, often a long way into the future
– is one that gives us complete closure; it is incredibly rare for a
comic to end that totally. Neil Gaiman more or less manages it in
Sandman, but only by very careful planning from an early stage in
the comic’s run and by the use of Shakespeare’s plays as part of
his plot, ending the entire sequence, as he does, with the dying
Shakespeare’s composition of The Tempest, whose epilogue becomes
his own. Joss Whedon’s decision to allow the creation of a post-
‘Not Fade Away’ Angel comic book, and his involvement in the
comic Buffy Season Eight, indicates the extent to which any end to
the television show and the broader story is provisional. I cannot

say this without a shadow of a doubt, but I have a strong suspicion

that those of us who grew up reading comics and obsessing with
particular storylines are less prone to dissatisfaction with the way
the stories of Buffy and Angel worked out than those who did
not.
Whedon as Comics Creator

Though various of the shows’ writers and actors – notably Jane
Espenson, Doug Petrie and Amber Benson – have written or co-
written runs of the Buffy and Angel comic books, Joss Whedon’s
only direct contributions to the comics version of the Whedonverse
come in the Tales of the Slayers and Tales of the Vampire anthology
comics. In the latter, Whedon provides a linking narrative in which
a vampire tells a bunch of Victorian trainee Watchers a group of
stories, most of which are set in the 20th century; he also provides
a somewhat by-the-numbers tale of a young Goth Tolkien fan who
feels empowered by becoming a vampire. Jane Espenson and Drew
Goddard’s contributions to this collection are significantly better
than Whedon’s.
The same cannot be said of Tales of the Slayers, good as Espenson’s
Austenesque tale of a young girl and her sinister suitor is. Petrie’s
story about the New York Slayer is interesting for giving her a
name, Nikki Wood, which is subsequently confirmed as canon.
Whedon contributes a tale of the first Slayer, which discards much
of what was said of her in ‘Restless’ (Buffy, 4.22) – the implication,
for example, that she is prelinguistic – in favour of the more
historicized version of her that appears in ‘Get it Done’ (Buffy,
7.15). The other Whedon contribution to Tales of the Slayers is a
missing scene from Fray in which the Slayer of the future finds a
bunch of old Watchers’ diaries and the Scythe nestling among them.
This at least explains how, between one issue of Fray and the next,
Melaka Fray acquires the Scythe, because in the comic, even as
collected, there is no explanation whatsoever. One of the besetting

I owe this insight to conversations with Lesley Arnold.

sins of Joss Whedon that he did not learn from his comics-reading
youth is his occasionally cavalier attitude to continuity.
Fray
Fray, then, is the story of a moderately amoral underclass woman
in a city of the future who has never questioned why she is strong
and has never had any dreams of fighting vampires. Vampires
exist openly in her world, and killed her twin brother, but they
are not thought of as supernatural, just as a variety of mutant or
alien that it is smart to stay away from. The death of young Harth
has alienated the thief Melaka from her cop sister Erin, whose job
Melaka regards as that of protecting the upper classes rather than
society as a whole. Erin is half concerned to bring down a sister
who is a threat to her own hard-won position, half-concerned that
one day Melaka will get herself into a situation out of which she
cannot fight her way.
Then everything changes. A mysterious man – from the
pathological cult that is all that remains of the Watchers’ Council –
burns himself to death in front of Fray. A demon, Urkonn, informs
her of her mission to fight vampires. This she is disinclined to do,
until one of her sidekicks, a young girl with one arm, is brutally
murdered. It transpires that the master vampire is her twin Harth,
who got the Slayer dreams and is trying to open a Hellmouth; she
defeats him, with help from Erin, but he survives to fight another
day. By this time, Fray has realized that Urkonn has a demonic
agenda of his own, and that he killed her friend to motivate her; she
executes him: ‘He was a good teacher . . . even a friend . . . For a
friend, I make it quick.’
Fray is an astonishingly assured piece of work. Whedon and his
artist Karl Moline strike exactly the right balance between fast story-
telling in multiple panels and splash pages full of an appropriate

The letters columns of Marvel’s titles in its classic period in particular
were always devoted to nit-picks and positively Jesuitical suggested
rationalizing fixes for them – famously always rewarded with a ‘No-
Prize’ from the editorial staff.

sense of wonder; we first see Fray leaping off a roof in the middle of
a heist with air cars buzzing past her. If there are areas of clunkiness
– Urkonn has to pause the action at some points to explain to Fray
the nature of her world – well, exposition has always been one of
those things that a paradoxically fast-moving and kinetic form like
comics has had a problem with. Whedon learned from Alan Moore
how to repeat a panel in a different context to demonstrate the
ongoing nature of traumatic past incidents – the events leading to
Harth’s death – and from Claremont how to manage ensemble:
one of Fray’s strengths is that for someone who thinks of herself
as a loner, she has a lot of people who will come out and fight the
vampires when she says it is necessary, including her sister and a
whole bunch of other police patrolpeople.
The relationship between Fray and the rest of the Slayerverse is
complex. The first issue’s opening sequence takes us to the barren
wastes of a demon world where Urkonn consults with his masters
among mausolea and flayed corpses; if anyone has ever wondered
what a post-Apocalyptic demon world looks like in Joss Whedon’s
mind, they could do worse than check this more or less canonical
version.
The back-story of Fray’s world is that at some point in the early
21st century, a Slayer and her allies rid humanity’s Earth of their
supernatural predators and closed off dimensional portals for
good, with – it is implied but not specifically stated – themselves
on the other side. Since then, potentials have been born and have
come into their power, but without recognizing what it is; the
Watchers have become a cargo cult of fanatics. The presence among
humanity of various sorts of mutant – Fray’s fence Gunther is a
water-breather who looks rather like the Creature from the Black
Lagoon – means that super-strength is just another oddity among
many, and that when vampires reappeared, they were just regarded
as another minority of the odd-looking and dangerous. Fray’s world
is, in other words, an interesting reconciliation of all of Whedon’s
shows; this future of slums where the sun hardly shines, and of
upper classes moving above them in aircars is not inconsistent with
Firefly and we can, I think, take it that the back-story of the last

active Slayer is at least a closing storyline that Whedon at one point

considered. The early issues of Fray appeared in 2001, even though
later issues were delayed until 2003, appearing either side of the
Buffy TV episode ‘Chosen’.
Fray herself is more like Faith than she is Buffy, while having a
sense of guilt about her brother and a sense of responsibility for the
other denizens of her slum that is not apparent in the dark Slayer.
She steals from the rich, and to a very large extent gives to the poor;
what she does have in common with Faith is foolhardy confidence
in her own abilities and a pronounced degree of self-love as well as
self-loathing. She loves the thrill of action – something that Moline
captures brilliantly – and also the excitement of finding moment-
to-moment solutions to problems. I would suggest that a major
influence on the way she improvises descent from lethal heights by
swinging from cornice to passing car owes a lot to classic Spider-
Man and Daredevil. Of all the comics spin-offs from Buffy and Angel,
Fray is perhaps the best, certainly until the new Buffy Season Eight,
because it is least constrained by TV continuity, freest to draw on
the great comics of the past.
The Astonishing X-Men

Whedon’s work on The Astonishing X-Men (not all of which has been
published at time of writing) is as caught up as any other Marvel
comic in 40 years of continuity, and revels in the fact. In the first
pages of Whedon and John Cassaday’s 24-issue run, Kitty Pryde
returns to Xavier’s school where she was trained and, as she walks
through its halls and drifts through its walls, she and we reminisce
about the past, reliving past images of Kitty’s arrival at the school
and occasional teen rebellions against Xavier. The past is most
especially relevant, since one of the reasons she has been asked back
is because Emma Frost, formerly the White Queen of the Hellfire
Club, has asked for her. Emma needs, she claims, someone without
recent loyalties to her as a team member to watch her. Kitty does
not need to watch her, Pryde says, remembering past encounters,
‘I can smell you’.

The recruitment of Frost to the team after years of villainy and at

best neutrality is one of the relics of Grant Morrison’s particularly
fine run on the comic. Many fans were suspicious of Whedon’s
handling of Emma Frost, given his past form with strong morally
complex figures like Lilah in Angel. They saw what he did in issues
12–18 of his run as essentially taking back Morrison’s innovation
and retrospectively making Frost’s turning away from the dark
side a mere stratagem, and not even hers. In the event, Whedon
managed to have his cake and eat it: Cassandra had implanted a
suggestion into Emma, as Emma trapped her, which had become
a full-blown manifestation of survivor-guilt and fear of returning
to evil. Emma is betrayed by what is false within and plays on the
worst fears of her team-mates, fears that each of them manages
to survive and overcome. She returns to herself in time to put
the nearly awakened Cassandra back in her box and that, for the
moment, is that. Emma and her colleagues are then abducted by
their alien enemy Ord and have to defer any post-mortem on her
actions until later.
In the long run, Emma may even have done them a favour. It is
clear, for example, that the seduction of Scott Summers, the team
leader – which Morrison showed as starting on a mental level
long before the death of his wife Jean – has become something
more; Frost may destroy Summers, because it is in her nature to
do so, but it is clear that she has feelings of a sort for him, even
as she apparently blasts his mind. The Scott who survives this is
a significantly more effective leader than he has been for some
time.
There were always clues in what Whedon showed us that things
were not entirely as they seemed. When, at the end of Issue 12, we
have what appears to be a reveal of the Big Bad, with Emma joining
up with a re-established Hellfire Club that includes Sebastian Shaw
and Cassandra, there are clues for those of us who were paying
attention that this is a delusion in Emma’s mind. One of the club
is a grey-faced Goth girl, who was, as it happens, the dead child
whom the X-Men found in Emma’s arms when they dug her out of
the ruins of Genosha early in Morrison’s run – she is a clear signal

not only of delusion but of survivor-guilt. Whedon plays fair, but

only if one is paying attention.
The antagonism between Emma and Kitty is one of the strongly
written personal relationships that Whedon has brought to the mix.
As I say earlier, relationships are always what this comic book has
been about when it has been any good, in the hands of Claremont
and others, as much as its wonderfully lurid storylines about risks
to the fate of the world, the universe and the human race. Because
consummation of the Summers/Frost relationship was the reveal
on which Morrison ended, Whedon had, along with the writers
of the other titles in X-continuity, the job of showing the reaction
of other team members to it. Wolverine, for example, arrives in
Scott and Emma’s bedroom with a viciously sarcastic ‘Which stage
of grieving is this?’ and he and Summers promptly fight, leaving
Emma Frost to complain of being stuck in perpetual rivalry with
the dead woman her lover still cares about enough to fight over.
It is not that Whedon brings to the comic a psychological
realism that was not there before; on the contrary, he is not signally
better at this than Morrison, or than Claremont, even the tired
and repetitious Claremont of now, as opposed to his glory days in
the 1980s. It is that Whedon is a rather funnier writer than either
of them. Under Claremont, the team developed a nice line in dry
banter that was used among themselves as much as to disconcert
villains, but Whedon’s dialogue is snappier. What is also noticeable
about Whedon’s comics dialogue is that it is closer to sounding
like spoken dialogue, broken into parallel bubbles of short speech
between breaths, than that of many others. He is perfectly capable
of the rodomontade that is one of the besetting features of comics
writing – some would say besetting sins, but I disagree – but in
general his comics dialogue is laconic and anti-romantic. Again, he
is not special in this, Brian Michael Bendis has made a trademark of
something similar, but Whedon does what he does with great élan.
The storylines of the first two six-issue runs are full of Whedon
trademarks. An alien – Ord of the Breakworld – is on Earth trying
to destroy the X-Men or, failing them, humanity, because of a
prophecy that one of them will destroy the Breakworld. He has

funded a genetic ‘cure’ for mutation; he is in alliance with the more

ruthless sections of the US government who regard the rights of
mutants as nugatory beside the possibility of war with aliens. I have
remarked above on the resonances of the ‘cure’ – X-Men: The Last
Stand derived this storyline directly from Whedon, apparently; I
will also comment on the extent to which fulfilling, averting and
ironically outwitting prophecies is a Whedon trait.
The second storyline is equally resonant with Whedon’s other
work and with his skill in looking again at things we have come to
take for granted. The X-Men have always trained in a computerized
room of pistons and holograms called the Danger Room; it is as
much part of their schtick as the costumes and the fast jet. Whedon
comes up with a particularly intelligent ‘what if?’ – what if the
computer that controls the Danger Room came to sentience? What
would it feel about the young people it is supposed to test to near-
destruction? And further, if you were Xavier and had to weigh the
welfare of your team against that of a newly intelligent computer,
which would you choose?
This is a storyline that enables Kitty to save the day through
intelligence and empathy rather than relying on the brute strength
of the men in the team. It is a chance for the team to quarrel,
again, with their mentor, and among themselves. It is also the sort
of intense powerful stuff for which we turn to Joss Whedon in
whatever medium he chooses to write:
Xavier: You made me so proud
Colossus: You knew she told me in her head, right as I was
about to crush her
Xavier: Peter, I’m certainly not going to breach your mind
right now. What did Danger say?
Colossus: She spoke the moment you upgraded the danger
room, the moment she was born, she called out to
you.
Professor, will you tell us what she said?
Xavier: Where am I?
Colossus: It took her a long time to know that you heard her,
and ignored her. Y
ou knew that she was alive and you

kept her trapped for years so that you could run your
experiments. You understand why that is a problem
for me.
Xavier: I didn’t . . . By the time I realized what had
happened. I saw no other course. My team needed
to be prepared. Mutantkind needed to be protected.
Whatever the cost.
Wolverine: What you been doin, Prof? Hanging with Magneto,
cause that (expletive deleted) sounds just a little too
much like him.
In the final arc of Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men, still

underway at time of writing, the inner struggle is largely done with
and replaced by an external one again. The team, temporarily split
by circumstance, but reunited in spirit, travel to the Breakworld,
and whatever their good intentions, will doubtless fail to cheat
prophecy. Ord and his peers, like most villains in comics, fail
entirely to understand that to attack people in order to frustrate a
prophecy is almost certainly to ensure its fulfilment. If this parallels
all sorts of things in Whedon’s television work – from ‘Prophesy
Girl’ (Buffy, 1.12) to the ‘father will kill the son’ storyline in the
third season of Angel – it is because he learned his plotting from
comics in the first place, that he gives back to the form what he
took from it to begin with.

7
Superherovision
From Comic to
Blockbuster
Keeping Faith with the Original

When a story is uprooted from one art form – from the novel,
say – into another, such as film, it is hardly germane to complain
that the finer points of the novel have been lost in the film. A film
may have subtleties of its own, but they will not, in general, be
the same. Actors may use details of the writer’s characterization as
guides for how to inhabit the character, but equally may have their
own ideas, while a designer’s vision may be informed by a sense
of period detail radically different from the author’s. Many fine
novels adapt into mediocre films, while some of the best films trust
the strengths of books so forgettable that only scholars remember
them. What is important is that the adaptor find in the material
adapted some kind of truth, important to them and to audiences,
both to an audience that carries over into the resulting film specific
aspects of the original’s plot and characters and to an audience that
has no such close expectations.
The adaptation of various superhero continuities into blockbuster
films has been characterized, at its best, by consideration of what
Bryan Singer calls the essence of the material; the important thing
is not to include every single detail of characters, but rather to
discover the emotional truth of what the characters, and the major
stories surrounding them, mean and then work with that material
in an intelligent way. Superhero films have to find a large multiplex
audience, but they have to do so without alienating the large body

Superherovision • 227
of fans of the comics, who will have certain expectations and whose
goodwill is important to the word of mouth.
At the very end of Singer’s second X-Men movie, X-2 (2003),
comes a moment that is entirely sublime to those of us who grew
up on comics, most especially on the X-Men comic and the other
productions of the Marvel group, and entirely mystifying to anyone
else. Jean Grey, the telekinetic Marvel Girl, has given her life to
save her friends, a group of young mutants, and the two men who
love her have been seen stifling both their manly grief and their
deep mutual dislike. On the face of the waters where she drowned
there appears for a second what might be merely a flash of light, or
might be the shape of a bird. In cinemas, one half of the audience
sighs deeply; the other half doesn’t.
This is because those who read comics know that continuity is
being, in essentials, followed, and that the flash of light is a hint of
Jean’s eventual return as the Phoenix; the sigh is because all too
soon, she drifts to become a force of amoral destruction as the
Dark Phoenix. She dies heroically, but the power that brings her
back is more than she can control. Even though later writers and
artists tried to take it back, it is one of the authentic moments of
tragedy in a popular art form in which the tragic only occasionally
rings true. Singer, himself someone soaked deeply in this material,
is at once too much an artist and too much a fan not to allude to the
bittersweet inevitability that he at that point hoped to film.
The 40 years or so that most of the major Marvel titles have
been appearing monthly on news-stands, the 60 years and more
of DC, ensure that all of them have associated with them iconic
moments that matter deeply to those of us who grew up with
them. Perhaps they do not matter as much to us as Lear on the
heath, or Emma snubbing Miss Bates, but they are as important as
Holmes and Moriarty going together over the Reichenbach Falls.
When they turn up as moments in big, blockbusting movies, it is a
minimum requirement that the movies honour the emotional truth
of those moments; movies and comics both trade in dreams and
need to deal honestly with their audiences.

* * *
It is not always so, even when the film overtly copies specific images.
The unsatisfactory Ben Affleck-starring Daredevil (2003) includes
a moment important to anyone who followed the adventures of
the blind vigilante lawyer during its finest hour – the period when
Frank Miller was writing it. Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner
(the disturbed father-obsessed woman assassin whom Daredevil
loves), fights and is beaten and killed by the even more competent
assassin Bullseye (Colin Farrell). He flicks a playing card that cuts
her throat, and then impales her on her own trident. Her wounded
lover crouches over her dying body as sirens wail in the distance.
In the original, Elektra’s death was a deliberately shocking image.
Miller intended it to be read specifically as a sexualized killing of a
kind that the heavily censored comics industry rarely allowed. By
specifically copying the image and dialogue that were once shocking,
director Mark Steven Johnson ends up weakening the moment’s
effect; it is perhaps the fact that he has copied it so precisely that we
notice, not its power to shock.
The problem is Affleck; Garner has some of the right mad
intensity and Farrell almost exactly the demon-king brutal
deftness. Daredevil has always been the most interior of comic-
book superheroes – in Miller’s hands, each issue was an extended
soliloquy of straining muscles and Catholic guilt – and Affleck and
Johnson give us almost nothing of that inwardness. Having your
hero repeat, with varying degrees of conviction, ‘I’m not the bad
guy’ is so much less subtle than the best of the material they were
drawing on as to be almost laughable.
This is a particular example of a more general issue about filmed
comic books. It is almost too easy now to put on the screen what
we saw on the garishly printed page, and only by making it difficult
again is it ever going to work as well as it once did. Some of the best
Daredevil artists – Romita and Colan, for example – were working
for a writer, Stan Lee, Marvel’s Ellington, who would give them a
scenario and then add script to their drawings. At their best, the
scenes, often using radical revisions of the standard comic-book
grid, of Daredevil moving silently through the city he protects have

a fluid grace that supersedes, rather than imitates, a sense of real

elapsed time. Those still moments of motion, though, were the
product of hours at a drawing board and the exercise of real skill.
To imitate that grace, but not the sense of effort that lies behind
it, is always going to end up looking cheap. It is almost too easy
to produce a CGI version of your hero and set him swinging from
virtual building to virtual building. Significantly, one of the few
really effective moments of Daredevil is the scene where hero and
doomed heroine meet: a cute and brash pick-up, politely resisted,
turns into a mutual display of martial arts skill as mating ritual;
the stars fake it a bit, with wire work and stunt doubles, but there
is actual flesh actually straining. Singer relies on CGI far more
sparingly and less obviously in the X-movies. When, in X-2 the
teleporting midnight blue be-tailed Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming)
raids the Oval Office, he flashes in and out of space so vigorously
that the Secret Servicemen, and at least one eminent movie critic,
Alexander Walker, think that there are several of him. Singer does
not make the magic of superpowers look easy, and that is why his
movies work. When Sir Ian McKellen, as the villainous Magneto,
pulls the iron out of a victim’s blood and uses it to smash holes in
his prison, the actor makes it look difficult, and spends as much
skill on portraying the strain of mental muscles as he does on the
character’s complex motivation.
It is not just that Singer loves the material, it is that he respects it
and the processes of its production, and knows enough to let well
alone. Marvel’s were always the hip politically liberal comics; the
material about mutants was always intended as a parable about the
consequences of bigotry for us all. Magneto is an interesting villain
because he is a terrorist responding in kind to the violence levelled
at his people. (The comics often had as a subtext the possibility that
he was right, the brief of the X-Men being very much that they
defend people who hate and despise them and elect governments
who periodically try to kill them.)
Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) is almost a fine film, though it failed at
the American box office by comparison with, say, Singer’s two
films or Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002). Part of the problem is that

the monstrous alter ego of his hero Bruce Banner is entirely CGI.
The technology used – which draws on and distorts Eric Bana’s
features and the director’s face-pulling – is inferior to that which
mapped Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers (2002) on every
last twitch of Andy Serkis’ performance, and we are not yet ready
for an entirely virtual protagonist. Oddly, the Hulk’s galumphing
leaps across the landscape are something that CGI can do well;
that, and showing things being smashed. Yet, in the end, this can
be done no more effectively than through a few lines on a page of
a comic book.
In Hulk (2003) Ang Lee understands that the resonance of the Hulk
comes from the fact that he is at once the werewolf, Frankenstein’s
monster and King Kong. He is the creature of violence that
bursts from the id of an ordinary man; he is the creature made by
science; he has as his main weakness his love for a woman. Jennifer
Connolly does an admirable job of updating heroine Betty Ross
– here Banner’s fellow scientist – and Sam Elliott is extraordinary
as her obsessed father, General ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross. For Lee, this is
also a tale of fathers – an issue that obsesses him – and he rewrites
the Hulk’s back-story so that the creature is produced by a mixture
of Banner and Betty’s work on medical nanotechnology and ante-
natal genetic manipulation of the young Bruce by his disturbed
murderous father (Nick Nolte). Accordingly, the Hulk is not
merely an expression of an average man’s suppressed rage, but the
instrument of his equally brilliant father’s murderous spite.
This is interesting enough in itself as a revision of the comic’s
version of the origin story that it might have worked. The
final confrontation, in which father and son have both become
monstrous, lacks both that fine brutal madness that Stan Lee would
have brought to it back in his heyday and that particular poetry
that Ang Lee himself brought alike to the domestic drama of The
Ice Storm (1997) and the aestheticized mayhem of Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon (2000). In the end, The Hulk does not work, but
not for lack of skill or lack of intelligence or lack of love for the
material, proving that it is as hard to adapt the textured resonances

of 40 years of a comic book’s continuity as it is any other literary

source.
Stars in Their Class

Superman Films
The gold standard of superhero movies was set by the first
Superman film – Superman The Movie (1978) – and by the first two
Batman films, films that were dealing with characters so thoroughly
embedded in popular culture that at some level audiences do not
need to be told the crucial facts about them. Superman is, of
course, one of the few figures in modern popular culture to have
a life in our minds that no longer connects with the vast body of
lore known as the continuity of the DC Comics Universe. He was
born on another planet, carried to Kansas in his space-travelling
cradle, reared humbly, and periodically dies to relieve the world’s
pain. In summary, his career sounds like a creed, which is why we
feel, from time to time, the need to blaspheme. Some of us, come
to that, do not clap hands to save Tinkerbell either.
Superman was invented by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the
mid-1930s USA as at once the ultimate tough Jew on whom people
did not pick and, in his guise as Clark Kent, the good-hearted
greenhorn learning the big city from goyish sophisticates. At their
best, Donner’s original film and Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns
(2006) capture both those aspects of the character in a way that
acknowledges 70 years of story – the utter implacable charming
strength of Superman, the fussy competent clumsy charm of Clark
and the amazing capacity of the characters around them to fail to
realize that they are the same person.
Donner’s original film starts off with pomp that was much
mocked at the time but has worn surprisingly well: Jor-El (Marlon
Brando in his most Shakespearian mould) helps despatch some
miscreants to the Phantom Zone, and Superman II (1980), before
deciding to send his son away just in time to escape the explosion of
Krypton. The icy crystalline quality of Krypton’s buildings and the

austere asperity of Brando’s tone are carefully contrasted with the

home in Kansas where, in a second prelude, the future Superman
grows up. Mario Puzo’s intelligent screenplay is built around the
realization that Superman is a man with two fathers, Jor-El, from
whom he gets power and knowledge, and Jonathan Kent, from
whom he learns to have a heart.This is less of a contradiction than it
might have been, because Jor-El always intended him to be Earth’s
servant and saviour, but Jonathan and Martha are what makes that
possible.
Superman retreats into the seclusion of the Fortress of Solitude
and then arrives in Metropolis in a pair of fake eyeglasses to be
about his fathers’ business. Here he meets his soulmate Lois and
his antagonist Luthor. One of the problems with the Donner film,
let alone with the Dick Lester completion of Donner’s second film
and the subsequent inferior films with Christopher Reeve, is that
too much of it is played for light comedy. This works, much of the
time, with Lois – in spite of the reactionary implications of a plot
that depends on an investigative reporter taking until the second
film to notice the obvious – because Margot Kidder and Reeve
manage to suggest sexual chemistry that sizzles, and because the
comedy between them does not stand in the way of the darker side
of their relationship, the lengths to which she is prepared to go for
a story and the death from which he has to break his father’s rules
to save her.
It works far less well when Luthor is turned into an arrogant
clown rather than a competent evil genius; Gene Hackman talks
a lot about his brilliance, but his schemes are too vicious to be
amusing, while being played in too broadly comic a tone to be
upsetting or threatening. Nor does it help that he has the frenzied
mugging of Ned Beatty at his side; in the first film, and the early
parts of the second, he does have the entirely charming Valerie
Perrine as his floozy. It is an interesting difference between the
climate of the 1970s and the 2000s that in the earlier film, Perrine’s
Miss Teschmacher sneaks a kiss from the temporarily incapacitated
Superman before saving him, on condition he divert the missile
Luthor has sent winging towards her mother before saving

California, and Reeve is at some level flattered by her attention.

There is no such moment of grace between Brandon Routh and
Parker Posey in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns.
The strength of the first film, and what is good about Superman
II, has in large part to do with the presence of Reeve, who manages
to be knowing enough in both his personae that we are taken into
the joke, while at the same time conveying a steely integrity that
is no joke at all. It is a fascinating performance simply because it
is an internally contradictory one. In the first film, Superman’s
adversary is Luthor, but his real enemy is time and chance and
mortality; his home dies before he is old enough to affect it, and his
adopted father dies of a heart attack. Luthor’s attack on California
jeopardizes thousands whom he does save, and kills Lois, whom he
only rescues by turning back time. In the second film – Donner’s
cut of which was about to be released at time of writing, but was
not yet available – his opponents are Zod and the other criminals
that his father imprisoned, but his real enemy is his own desire for
a normal life.
There is an incoherence here: the rule that he has to renounce his
power to be happy with Lois, or renounce Lois to regain his power,
is a completely arbitrary rule, imposed from beyond the grave by
Jor-El, which only makes sense as plot convenience. There has to
be a way for him apparently to lose his power in order for him to be
able to defeat three equally powerful opponents, whom he tricks
when he cannot defeat them. The other major incoherences in the
second film are that Zod – impressively played by Terence Stamp
– has no real agenda, bar dominance for its own sake, and that
Luthor continues his alliance with the Kryptonian criminals, quite
ludicrously, even after the third time they have betrayed him and
decided to kill him. Good as the first and large parts of the second
Superman films are, they do suffer from the belief by director and
screenwriter that in important areas a comic book movie does not
have to make sense.
After his work on the X-Men franchise, one had hoped that Bryan
Singer would make more of the revived Superman franchise than
he did, yet he ended up not merely repeating much of Donner and

Puzo’s storyline, but much of the time recapitulating Lester’s corny

comedy. Returning to Metropolis as Clark, Superman struggles
through the Daily Planet with enormous suitcases, not because he
is feigning physical weakness but because they hold his life, are
unwieldy as well as heavy. Yet there are moments where the comic
has a darker tone that is rather more appealing: when a minor hood
steps up and fires a bullet into Superman’s eye, it flattens and falls
to the ground; Superman looks at him with a glint in his eye that
reminds us of what a man of such power could do, if he were not
such a paragon.
At such moments Brandon Routh captures the magnetism
and the strength of the character, as well as displaying a gift for
physical comedy. Elsewhere – and elsewhere means far too many
quarter hours of film – his performance is overly concerned with
reverence, not merely to the religious parable, but to the legacy of
the late Christopher Reeve. Routh has acknowledged that, much of
the time, he did not so much act as imitate Reeve; however much
one admired Reeve’s patient fortitude in the face of humiliating
illness, his knowing twinkle in the part was not something that
should have been copied here.
Singer has, to a worrying extent, remade Richard Donner’s 1978
movie, but in a darker key; his little bits of homage include recycling
some of Marlon Brando’s footage as Superman’s Kryptonian father.
As Lex Luthor, Gene Hackman wanted to break California from
the mainland; reprising not only the part, but the scam, Kevin
Spacey’s sardonically murderous Luthor builds a new continent
that will swamp the East Coast. Reminded by Kate Bosworth’s Lois
Lane that this will kill millions, he retorts, in the film’s best line
‘Millions? Billions . . .Yet again the press underestimates me.’ There
is a gutter viciousness to Spacey’s Luthor as he stabs Superman with
a deadly Kryptonite shiv that gels inadequately with light comedy
touches copied from Donner.
We have, in so many respects, moved on since 1978. Parker
Posey is as charming as Luthor’s brainless floozy as was Valerie
Perrine, but the joke was thin even then. What has worn less well is
the assumption that Lois, most brilliant of investigative reporters,

has never worked out that her hick colleague is the man of her
dreams. This is a worn-out piece of 1940s sex war comedy, only
made tolerable by the implied lubricity Kidder and Reeve brought
to it, and both the comics and the TV show Lois and Clark dispensed
with it long ago. It particularly does not work when we realize
that Superman’s absence on his homeworld has coincided with
Lois’ bearing his child, moving on to a more quietly heroic fiancé
and writing articles of great bitterness on ‘Why the world does not
need Superman’.
There is nothing wrong with this sort of re-imagining – Mark
Millar recently produced for DC an alternate universe in which
Superman, reared in the Ukraine, became the heir to that other
man of steel, Josef Stalin, and Grant Morrison’s run revisits the
charm of the 1950s Silver Age – but it needs to be more daring and
less reverential. In the first two X-Men movies, Singer made good
superhero movies because the Marvel characters lack that weight of
significance held by, for example, Superman falling spent to Earth,
after lifting Luthor’s continent, in a posture of crucifixion.
Singer is at his best in, say, a flashback to the young Clark running
exhilarated through cornfields and leaping into the sky. The film
is intelligently designed; the clash of periods within the material
is resolved by having the high tech of a modern newspaper office
jammed into an art deco office no one likes to tamper with, which
is not a bad metaphor for the film, come to that. Singer’s vast
special-effects budget makes us believe that a man can fly, all right,
but the fatal uncertainty of tone that characterizes the screenplay
and performances of Superman Returns leaves us uncertain that we
need especially to care.
Batman Films
When fans heard that Batman (1989) had been placed in the hands
of Tim Burton, they did not know what to think. After all, at that
point in his career, Burton was as known for the quaint quirky
camp of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) as for the significantly darker
Beetlejuice (1988). It was at least as plausible that he would pursue

the jokey nonsense of the Adam West television series of the 1960s
as that he would go with the dark tormented psychosis that was,
in the mid-1980s, the cutting edge of the character as written by
Frank Miller and Alan Moore. His decision to cast Michael Keaton,
with whom he had worked on Beetlejuice, seemed like a pointer in
that direction; Keaton has to be one of the least massive stars ever
cast in the role of the Batman, or even considered.
Yet, in fact, there was a reason, apart from a good working
relationship, why Burton had chosen him – he had already decided
that part of his vision of the Batman was that the costume should be
physically massive rather than the man inside it, that the sheer weight
of the Batman’s feelings of responsibility for the people of Gotham
should have an objective correlative in the relationship between the
suit and the man inside it. Burton argues that he needed an actor
who could make it plausible that no one ever suspects Bruce Wayne
of being the Batman; Keaton’s comparative slightness made him a
good choice here and also enabled him to play Wayne as a slightly
Gatsbyish figure whom people do not recognize at his own parties.
This is in contrast to the normal portrayal of him in the comics
– Wayne is always a presence, even when he is pretending to be a
social butterfly.
The production team had to experiment extensively with
possible costumes in order to have a Batman suit that provided
the necessary level of physical impressiveness while also being
something inside which Keaton could act and move; even as it
is, there are times when he is stiffer in his moves than is entirely
appropriate to an action hero, and one may surmise that these were
from early shoots, since his movements do become more fluid in
some of the later sequences. What all of this loses is the sense of the
Batman as someone who can move at great speed: the various set
pieces, as when the Batman rescues Vicki Vale from the Joker and
they abseil to safety, have ponderousness and weight where they
should have had agility.
Of the serious actors cast as the Batman in film – I am omitting
Adam West from consideration here since the film he starred in is
so wholly and solely a spin-off from the television show – Keaton

was vastly the best until Christian Bale, whom I somewhat prefer.
Keaton gave the character vocal authority when it was needed and
had a sense of the absurd, which meant that the long scene in which
he tries to come out to Vicki Vale – as the Batman, but she assumes
otherwise – is genuinely funny and ambiguous. He also gets the
character’s intelligence, the scenes where he and Alfred go through
CCTV footage trying to work things out make us respect him, as
well as the deep spiritual anguish: the scene where, spied on by
Vale, he places flowers on the site of his parents’ death is genuinely
moving.
Much of the casting of the film is quite extraordinarily good
– Pat Hingle plays Gordon as a man solidly in middle age, and at
one point it was considered having him play Gordon as a young
patrolman who consoles the young Bruce. Billy Dee Williams
was an effective piece of colour-blind casting as Harvey Dent,
and it is a matter for some regret that they did not stick with him
when, in Batman Forever (1995), they got round to Dent in his later
incarnation as Two-Face.
One of the things that characterize the Burton films for good
and ill is that they avoid stupid decisions, but often come up with
half-smart ones. Sam Hamm and Burton came up with the idea that
the film should show the Batman as a man in love, as someone who
has found one way of curing his psychic pain and is offered quite
another in the shape of true love. The trouble with this is that they
chose not to give him a heroine who was in all respects his equal;
Kim Basinger is beautiful and shows signs of intelligence, but the
character of Vicki Vale as written is a talented photographer with an
alleged long history of war journalism (she has just returned from
Corto Maltese, the war-torn island also referred to in Miller’s The
Dark Knight Returns), but who shows remarkably little capacity for
taking care of herself in situations of physical danger.
The trouble with using Vicki Vale as the heroine is that she is a
character from the 1940s and 1960s, whom Burton and Hamm failed
to reinvent significantly in the feminist 1980s. There are reasons
why she was largely dropped from the comic by Julie Schwartz
in the 1960s; she was always a Lois Lane clone, more interested

in finding out the truth of the Batman’s identity than in pursuing

Bruce Wayne. There are, in the vast sea of continuity, considerably
more interesting female characters for the Batman to be involved
with: Talia, the daughter of R’as Al Ghul, and the mother of the
Batman’s one known child, for one. Burton deliberately made a
film that was set in several time periods simultaneously – the cars,
the fashions and the buildings could be the 1930s, the 1950s or the
near future – but in this particular respect, they went retro and it
was not a good idea.
The other half-smart decision made was to cast Jack Nicholson
as the Joker and to re-imagine the Joker as a character whom
Jack Nicholson could play. The result is certainly magnificent in
its way: Nicholson has a gift for the sinister and the demonic and
for making a line as innocent as ‘Haven’t they heard of the healing
power of laughter?’ something wondrously appalling. Burton and
Hamm made the entirely reasonable decision that the Joker is the
Batman’s shadow self and then pushed the point far too far. Not
only did they have the Batman make the Joker what he is today, by
precipitating his fall into a chemical bath that bleaches his skin and
distorts his face – and in this they echoed Alan Moore’s The Killing
Joke – but they decided to over-egg the point by having Jack Napier,
the Joker’s earlier self, be the young thug who killed Bruce Wayne’s
parents.
This is too neat an idea to get away with unless with far more
subtlety than Burton and Hamm bring to the table. As it is, when
the Joker tries to kill Bruce Wayne – not having any idea of who
else he is – he uses the line ‘Have you ever danced with the devil
in the pale moonlight?’, a phrase he used 20 years earlier when
threatening the child Bruce with his gun and which he likes to say
before killing people, though we almost never see him do this apart
from on these two occasions. To have the pair of them argue, during
their final tussle, over which of them is responsible for the other’s
existence is to labour a point into the absurd.
The decision to make the Joker a man whose former identity as
Jack Napier was already gratuitously murderous and occasionally
whimsical, to have his defining characteristics previously present

and merely pushed into extremity by his physical disfiguring, is

too much of an explanation. The point of the Joker, as he evolved
down the decades, was to be the evil Lord of Misrule, a figure
who needs no reductive explanation because he is a principle of
the universe. Moore’s version – in which he is an innocent driven
mad by tragedy and ‘one bad day’ – is already a revision of this,
and not an unintelligent one, but it is not reductive so much as
pushing the question to one remove. Sam Hamm’s version is too
pat and therefore too rational for a figure who embodies the casual
cruelty of unreason. There was a further problem, which is that, by
the time he came to play the Joker, Nicholson had already started
to move from being stocky to being portly; he was too essentially
solid a figure to play a quicksilver trickster with entire conviction.
Powerful as his delivery of his lines is, it has a tendency to the
portentous, which undermines their cruel flippancy. When he
poses as a mime artist, or a ringmaster, it is always a matter of
an earthbound presence playing with costume, rather than a devil-
may-care figure playing another cruel game.
Hamm and Burton introduce an element of specifically sexual
sadism to the character through Alice (Jerry Hall), the woman over
whom the Joker quarrels with his gang overlord, and whom he
disfigures with acid – announcing casually to Vicki Vale that Alice
is the first sketch for the masterpiece he intends to make with her
– and either kills or drives to suicide. This is not entirely alien to
the things they admired in the comics: Alan Moore’s Joker in The
Killing Joke is less explicitly sexual in the scene in which he cripples
Barbara Gordon, but there is a strong fetishist element in the scenes
in which he tries to drive her father mad. Miller’s Joker is almost
explicitly in love with the Batman – ‘Batman . . . darling’ are the
words with which he awakens from near-catatonia.
Alice loses her identity when she has her face cut and burned
and has to hide what is left of herself behind a mask, a mask that,
once she is dead, the Joker crushes like an eggshell. He does this
in front of Vicki, indicating very clearly the sort of destruction he
wishes to carry out on her, a destruction that is precisely parallel
to his trashing of an art gallery in the name of his infantile ego.

Identity for men, in this film, is all bound up with the creation of
a persona of strength; identity for women is bound up with their
physical beauty. Comics have their own dark record of grotesque
sexism, but the Burton film takes this to a new level.
Happily, in spite of all these mistakes and missteps, there are
positive things to record about what was, and remains, one of the
best films made from the general continuity of a comic book, if
not from specific material. I have already referred to Keaton’s
performance and to the minor parts; Burton is surprisingly good
at crowd scenes as well. What Burton did achieve, by hiring Anton
Furst as designer, and through wonderfully gloomy cinematography
– which fed back into the comic almost as much as the film took
from it – was a sense of Gotham City as a concrete place and a
state of mind. Bob Kane took Gotham’s name from traditional
representations of New York as a city of fools, but Burton, like
others before him, saw that the Gotham of the comics was an
essentially Gothic creation, and he went with what that gave him.
In its best sequences, the film is a wonderful blend of the action
thriller of its own time and the expressionist gothic nightmares of
earlier ones; there is no particularly good reason why the Joker
should drag Vicki with him into a deserted cathedral except that
it enables Burton to make the final fight between the Joker and
the Batman into a distorted equivalent of a sacred marriage and do
so on vertiginous heights with grinning gargoyles as witnesses and
weapons. Much of the look of this sequence foreshadows Burton’s
later The Corpse Bride (2005) with its more explicit profanation. It is
no small praise to say that one of its major strengths is just this – it
looks like the idea of a Batman movie.
On the other hand, Batman Returns (1992) looks like the Platonic
idea of a Tim Burton movie and is nonetheless splendid, and
nonetheless a good Batman movie for that. The opening, after all, is
pure Burton and might almost have been an out-take from Edward
Scissorhands (1990) or one of Burton’s stop-motion animation films:
the hideously deformed child that will grow up to be the Penguin is
abandoned by his upper crust parents, themselves no oil paintings,

and dropped neatly in a cradle into one of Gotham’s rivers, where

he is swept away into an underground world of sewers and the
concrete caves that serve as their meeting points. It is winter
then, and it is winter 33 years later; Batman Returns is a film about
justice and revenge and the coldness of heart that is necessary to go
through with them, and it is also a film about Christmas and how
the vengeful forget its meaning.
When people talk casually about Batman Returns, they often talk
of it as a film with two villains, by which they mean that it is a
film with two supervillains in it, forgetting that its real villain has
nothing super about him except for his cheerful malice. There is
never any pretence that Christopher Walken is anything other than
bad; his name, Max Shreck, is almost that of Max Schreck, the little-
known actor who played Nosferatu, and part of his grand scheme is
to suck Gotham dry of its electricity under the pretext of giving it
new supercharged life. This is a film in which the demented freaks
have a certain amount of justice on their sides and the charismatic
ordinary man is the stone killer who throws his inquisitive secretary
out of a high window for knowing too much. He is a man who
inhabits Bruce Wayne’s world rather than the Batman’s, and it is
Bruce Wayne who sticks a major spoke in his wheels of intrigue by
simply refusing to invest any money in his schemes.
Walken is extraordinary in this role, he was some years from
the pretty boy psychopath he had been in The Deer Hunter (1978)
and Annie Hall (1977) and had not yet matured into the demented
paterfamilias role he plays in most of his later films, though that role
is foreshadowed here. He has effortless charisma and is wonderfully
patronizing; he plays the Penguin like a violin and is mercilessly
condescending to the shorter, less gorgeous Wayne. Even before he
decides to kill her, he treats Selina Kyle with an obnoxious sexism
– ‘We haven’t yet housetrained her, but she makes a damn good
cup of coffee’ – that is a significant part of what will turn her into
his nemesis.
Lest it sometimes seem that I am obsessed with comics continuity
at the expense of things that are wonderful, let me clearly state here
that Daniel Waters and Burton reinvent Catwoman and the Penguin

Heathers’ Team
I have written elsewhere about Daniel Waters’ script for
Heathers (1989); it is worth pointing out that one of the
strengths of Batman Returns is that it reunited the team of
scriptwriter Waters and producer Denise De Novi and is visibly
a product of their sensibility effectively melded with that of
Tim Burton. Max Shreck is a more charming version of JD’s
satanic capitalist father, and Selina’s persona as Catwoman is
as much a revenant as Veronica in Heather’s last scene. You
become your real self by dying and being reborn – this is a
Waters obsession (see also Demolition Man (1993)), though it
is presented here in less religiose terms than it is in Heathers.
almost entirely, and that their versions are, if anything, superior

to anything that comics have come up with, with the only partial
exception of the silken smoothness of Jeph Loeb’s Catwoman in
Hush! and elsewhere. The Waters/Burton Catwoman is quite
explicitly a reaction – not entirely a positive reaction – to feminism;
at one point, rebuking a woman she has saved from muggers with
the remark that ‘you make it too easy’, she goes on to say, ‘I am
Catwoman, hear me roar’, echoing a well-known slogan.
Selina is almost a caricature of the good secretary with the
hopeless life, saying, ‘Hi honey, I’m home’, like Lucy Ricardo
every night she returns to a flat empty except for knick-knacks,
mirrors, soft toys and clothes. Sanity has given her no identity,
she is the daughter of a demanding mother and the secretary of
a monstrous boss, and the only relationship she has is with her
cat. When she is thrown to her death, it is the cats of Gotham
who revive her, in a scene that makes no literal sense, but who
cares? She is the spirit of female vengeance and the cat and she are
also suddenly bizarrely sexual, whether in the leatherette costume
she makes for herself, or in the identity of Selina, which has now
become even more of a mask for the real her than Bruce Wayne is
by now for the Batman.

Waters does not avoid the sexual comedy of Selina and Bruce’s
relationship: when Bruce dates Selina, they both have to make
excuses and leave, and when they finally recognize each other’s
dual identity – after accidentally reprising, as Selina and Bruce,
banter about mistletoe they exchanged in their masks – she says
plaintively, ‘Does this mean we have to start fighting?’. Their
relationship is doomed, as opposed merely to not working out:
she is the spirit of vengeance and he has sublimated his vengeance
into a desire for justice. She wants to kill Shreck and he wants to
have him sent to jail; as it happens, Shreck shoots her repeatedly,
and she mocks him that all he is doing is taking away some of her
nine lives, before frying him with one of his own power cables. She
vanishes, seemingly dead. Bruce thinks he sees her from his car,
but we cannot be sure of her survival until the last frames of the
movie, when we see her on the rooftops of Gotham, looking up at
the Batsignal.
What makes all of this work is not just Waters’ script and
Burton’s direction, it is Michelle Pfeiffer whose performance
here is quite extraordinary. After all, she has to make plausible
several versions of the same woman – the oppressed secretary, the
demented dominatrix and the slightly deranged possible girlfriend
to name but the three most obvious poles she moves between – and
to give all of them star quality and sexual charisma. There are many
reasons for disapproving of Hollywood’s sexism and this is one of
them: that an actress as good as Pfeiffer got so few good roles by
comparison with her male contemporaries and that those dried up
when she got a little older.
Danny DeVito’s performance as the Penguin is partly a matter of
the prosthetics and the design, but he also brings a vengeful seediness
to the part that makes what he does acting as well as a cartoon. He
is an ugly little man, unsure in his humanity, but he is also a lecher
and a glutton, both of them in an unappealing way. At one point
Shreck tosses him a whole salmon and he chews it throughout the
next scene, dribbling blood and guts onto his evening clothes. The
Penguin is vain and unrealistic in his attempts to seduce Catwoman
and a fool in his preparedness to be seduced from villainy to politics

by Shreck. He is also, like all the best villains, an overreacher; he

seizes control of the Batmobile and takes it on a rampage and
makes the mistake of gloating at the seemingly helpless Batman,
who almost casually records his words and uses them to discredit
him in the middle of his political campaign. He is funny and horrid
and murderous and disgusting; the thing that kills him, though, is
that he betrays his own essence by trying to cast other first-born
children into the sewers as he was cast, and then by using his own
totemic birds as suicide bombers.
Up against three barnstorming performances like Pfeiffer’s,
Walken’s and DeVito’s, all that Keaton can do as Bruce or the
Batman is hold his own as the straight man. In this film, the fact that
he is the Batman is more or less a given and is only really examined
by showing how good he is at it; there are many reasons why he is
more accomplished and sane than his two shadow doubles here,
and one of them is that he has put his energy into competence
rather than demonic glee. This is in many ways the best Batman
movie, simply because it gets what has always been the essence of
the comics: that this is a man with problems, who has turned his
anger into a fuel for justice and a joy in being good at things.
This is one of the aspects of the character largely lost in the next
two films – Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997) –
not least because when Joel Schumacher took over the franchise,
he made some bad decisions about casting, including both the
actors he hired as Batman. Notionally, at least, Tim Burton was the
producer on Batman Forever, but it has never been clear how much
input he had into it; it is significant that he makes no contribution
to the extensive commentaries on the DVD release. Schumacher
has talked at great length about the pop sensibility he wanted to
impart; this was in large part the worst kind of music-video glitz,
an over-miked sound-track and the use of a particularly garish
palette in the design work. Generally speaking, the look and sound
of Schumacher’s films are inferior in look to the best of the Batman
animated films – Mask of the Phantasm (1993) say, or some episodes
of Gotham Knights.

Schumacher has also said that he cast Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne
in Batman Forever on the strength of his performance in Tombstone
(1993); this is interesting because it helps to define what is peculiarly
maladroit in his casting here. Kilmer was, indeed, extraordinary in
Tombstone, playing, not the hero, but rather his eccentric doomed
sidekick; Kilmer’s Doc Holliday is a wonderful foil to Kurt Russell’s
deliberately stolid Wyatt Earp, a Southern gentleman-rogue who
swaps Latin tags with the Ringo Kid and mocks the cult of the
quick draw with a small silver tankard. But this does not qualify
him to play either Bruce Wayne, whom he makes vaguely petulant
and spoiled, or the Batman, for whom he lacks the authority. He is
not helped by a dull Robin – Schumacher picked Chris O’Donnell
after, he claims, considering both Ewan McGregor and Jude Law,
a choice which, if true, is incomprehensible – and a vapid heroine.
Nicole Kidman is a fine actress, but was given very little to do as
a mildly depraved psychiatrist. The film is also weakened by its
villains: Tommy Lee Jones never brought his considerable gifts to
the part of Two-Face, preferring to mop, mow and grimace rather
than to think out his performance; nor does it help that Jones is not
the best-looking of men and that the unscarred side of his face is
marked with lines, pocks and wens when the point is supposed to
be that there is a contrast.
The performance by Jim Carrey as the Riddler is one that
transcends consideration of good or bad acting into sheer weirdness;
at a late stage, he says, ‘Was that over the top? I can never tell’,
and a sighing audience reflects that his director should have been
able to, even if he couldn’t. There is a weird homoeroticism to
the relationship between the villains here, as a progressively more
sequinned Carrey twines himself around his partner in crime.
Again, one should not fetishize continuity, but the point about the
Riddler has always been that he was the astute trickster criminal,
the auguste to the Joker’s vicious pierrot, and Carrey plays the part
as if he were auditioning to play the Joker.
It is such a cliché of discussions of superhero films that Batman
and Robin represents some kind of nadir, certainly for that franchise,
and arguably for the genre, that one is almost tempted to look for

arguments for its rehabilitation. Certainly, there is a floridity to its

badness that makes it more sheerly enjoyable than more boring bad
superhero films like Catwoman (2004); a lot of money and even talent
was expended on making a film that was this execrable. Several of
the people who turn in quite remarkably dreadful performances
have been good in other films: Uma Thurman, for example, whose
Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy is a thin retread of the mousiness and
demented sexiness of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, or Alicia
Silverstone as Batgirl. Others, like Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr
Freeze, are just as bad as you would expect – which is interesting,
given that Joel Schumacher appears to have considered getting
Schwarzenegger on board as a dealbreaker for this movie.
Schumacher is certainly a significant part of the problem, here
as in Batman Forever. He made the decision to opt for a light touch,
in the name of making the franchise more ‘family friendly’, but his
idea of a light touch is ill-timed and often tasteless jokes. Hardly has
the film begun but Robin is bickering about having a motorcycle
rather than a car and Batman is looking at the camera and saying
‘This is why Superman works alone’; this is one of the very first
lines George Clooney’s Batman gets to speak and it seriously cuts
into our chances of regarding the character as having the necessary
gravitas and authority. Schwarzenegger’s Freeze has joke after joke,
most of them to do with the violent death of civilians; even James
Bond’s jokes – a schtick which has grown tired with the years –
tend to be directed at people who have just paid the price of trying
to kill him. Batman and Robin tries to recapture the campy archness
of the 1960s television show, but has a catchpenny nastiness that
deprives it of the innocence that went with that camp.
One problem is the designs for Gotham, which are Anton Furst
re-imagined by a hyperactive child with a taste for Soviet posters
and art nouveau; the beetling tower blocks of Gotham have been
supplemented by monstrous concrete giants in contorted poses,
holding up viaducts and the like. Gotham’s Observatory, where
much of the action takes place, is situated inside a giant sphere held
up by a vast Atlas. One looks at the excess of this and wonders.
Another issue is the new look of all the Batman’s kit, from his car

to his Batarangs to some handy individual heaters he pulls out of

his utility belt when he needs to save Freeze’s victims. These are
constructed to be shiny, black and slightly fetishistic. Schumacher
explains that he was told to redesign all of this in order to make
them – his word – toyetic; we are used to films being hampered by
the necessity of making a particular release date. Batman and Robin
was produced to be coordinated with the release of toys.
For once, we cannot entirely complain that comics continuity
has been neglected; Pamela Isley has Woodrue as her mentor,
though he proceeds to betray her and attempt her death in a way
that precisely parallels, and copies, Shreck’s murderous attack on
the future Catwoman. On the other hand, in a remarkable piece
of telescoping of two parts of the DC Universe, Woodrue’s major
scientific enterprise is not plant-related, but the devising of Venom
and the creation of Batman’s steroid-fuelled nemesis, Bane. Or
rather, it is a character who looks like Bane, but is almost entirely
devoid of menace, being merely a heavy who does some of Poison
Ivy’s heavy lifting for her. I have written previously about the comics’
strip-mining of their own continuity; it comes to something when
a film franchise is allowed to pull all the teeth from a character that
later episodes in the franchise might have wanted to do properly.
There are a very few things to relish in Batman and Robin other
than for sheer kitsch value; Clooney is occasionally moving in his
scenes with Michael Gough’s dying Alfred, and Gough himself is
unfailingly excellent in his last performance in this role. On the
other hand, Pat Hingle is made to debase his role as Commissioner
Gordon by having the old man lose all dignity under the influence
of Poison Ivy’s pheromones. The film is distinguished by some truly
weak fight sequences, of which the one between Ivy and Batgirl is
perhaps the most ineffectual; one young woman in black leather
fights another who is wearing tight-fitting green leotards and
brandishing a poisonous whip made of vines, and there is no charge
to the scene whatever. What is the point of reducing the Batman
franchise to the level of a cheap camp exploitation blockbuster and
then not even delivering a good fetishist catfight?

* * *
One of the things that made the decision to revive the Batman
franchise even remotely sensible was the sheer enthusiasm of
Christopher Nolan to be involved with it. After the inventive
psycho-thriller Memento (2000), he was a hot property, who got
through the second-feature problem with reasonable success –
Insomnia (2002) is not a great film, but it is not a disastrous failure
either. He and his scriptwriter David S. Goyer on Batman Begins
(2005) brought intelligent choices to the project. Nolan combined
the early stages of Batman’s career in Gotham, for which he had
some particularly fine sources in continuity, Miller’s Batman:Year
One and Loeb’s The Long Halloween. They also decided to spend a
large part of the film not merely on the death of the Wayne parents
but on the missing years during which Bruce acquired the skills
that made him into the Batman.
The mechanism they chose for this was a villain who was added
to the roster in the 1970s: R’as Al Ghul, the leader of a vast
international conspiracy devoted to smashing modern civilization
in order to put purifying barbarism in its place. They were true to
the essence of the continuity’s handling of this figure; he may never
have been quite the father figure he is here, but he is, for example,
the grandfather of the Batman’s son. Casting Liam Neeson in the
role was as intelligent a choice as using R’as in the first place, he
has the accumulated authority of his mentor role in Star Wars I –
The Phantom Menace (1999), not merely a mentor, but a mentor’s
mentor.
This is a film full of fathers, in fact: Nolan gives the young Bruce
Wayne several to choose from, not least among them Michael
Caine as Alfred. Given the charming effete world-weary Alfred
that Michael Gough had sustained through four films, Caine had
to provide something very different; he plays Alfred as a sergeant-
major who is the source of much of Bruce’s strength and all of
his self-confidence. When Bruce asks if, during his absence, Alfred
ever gave up on him, Caine gives his reply ‘Never!’ precisely
the right combination of actorish resonance and parade-ground
gravel.

Nolan had money to spend on his cast: Morgan Freeman makes

Lucius Fox, the head of R&D at Wayne Enterprises, yet another
father figure – the man who provides the Batman with his armour
and his car and his grapple gun and who, after a boardroom coup,
will run Wayne Enterprises so that Bruce does not have to. Gary
Oldman, as Jim Gordon, manages to look quite stunningly like the
drawings of the younger Gordon in Year One. Interestingly, Nolan
picked up on the idea, mentioned by Burton as something he
thought of, but did not do, of Gordon having been the patrolman
who looked after the boy Bruce in the aftermath of his parents’
death.
Nolan picks up on Loeb’s idea that there used to be conventional
gangsters in Gotham before the masked maniacs filled their
ecological niche. Tom Wilkinson as Carmine Falcone, in a couple
of very impressive scenes, demonstrates to the young Bruce that
the city is run by powerful evil men. Wilkinson also demonstrates
the utter powerlessness of ordinary criminals in the face of what
is to replace them; it is the work of moments for Cillian Murphy’s
Doctor Crane – the Scarecrow – to reduce him to gibbering
wreckage. In a movie full of great bulls of men, Murphy’s silky
slight villain is a useful contrast; he can be effortlessly sinister
without raising his voice and manages to convey a sense of the
doctor who is sick that imparts wonderful wrongness to his every
scene.
The fact that the weapon R’as and Crane bring to bear against
Gotham is fear usefully counterpoints the essence Nolan reads into
Bruce’s character, someone who is frightened of his own capacity
for fear and has projected it outwards. Nolan’s version of Bruce
Wayne is a man who was scared by bats when he fell into the cave
as a child, and who believes that his fear is what killed his parents
by making them leave the opera early – he saw the demons in
Gounod’s Faust as more bats – and walk into the alley where they
die. As he matures, Bruce learns to take that fear and project it
outwards; his Batman decides that criminals are a cowardly and
superstitious lot as a remedy for his own fear and his own irrational
guilt.

Just as the hideously sane but amoral R’as comes to an

accommodation with the merely criminal Falcone, whom he plans
to betray and destroy, and the deranged criminal Crane, in order
to pursue his agenda of destruction, so Bruce learns to make an
alliance with what he hates and fears, to become what he hates and
fears. Whereas when a child he was driven to distraction by bats,
now, as the Batman, he summons them to distract his enemies.
The performance of Faust that he gets his parents to leave is far
from being an irrelevant decoration. He is aided in this quite subtle
interpretation by an extraordinary performance by Christian Bale,
who brought to the role the same steel-eyed intensity he had shown
as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000). It is
interesting that Nolan chose to cast neither an action hero nor a
matinee idol like Clooney, but a young character actor; in this he
made, in a very different way, the same sort of intelligent choice as
Burton with Keaton. The only real weakness in Nolan’s cast is Katie
Holmes as the love interest, and even she has the odd excellent
scene: when, at the end, she acknowledges that she has realized her
childhood playmate is not the wastrel she thought, but a man of
responsibility, and nonetheless walks away from him, she is quietly
chilling.
Interestingly, Nolan only used CGI in Batman Returns to tidy up
the stunt-work and miniatures on which the film largely depends;
he believes that to make the incredible look real, it has to be as real
as you can make it. His Gotham is less fantastic and baroque than
the one Anton Furst built for Burton, partly because the additional
decorations Schumacher had added to that look had spoiled it; the
Gotham of Batman Begins is a combination of the golden city with
its monorail and centralized services and the slums that exist in the
shadows of its infrastructure as if they were in another decade.
Gotham is a character in Nolan’s film far more even than in
Burton’s; its very modernity is the weakness that R’as planned to
use to destroy it, by pumping Crane’s fear gas through the high-
pressure water-mains. When Bruce realized what R’as was about,
he burned his remote monastery home about his ears; R’as replies
by destroying the Wayne mansion, but fails to understand that

Gotham, far more than any mere house, is the habitation Bruce’s
father left to him. To save that city as a living organism, the Batman
is prepared to destroy a significant part of it, the monorail.
The theme of fatherhood is tied up neatly in the last act: Lucius
becomes head of Wayne Enterprises, Alfred pulls Bruce from the
burning mansion, and Jim uses the weaponry Lucius provided to
blow up the monorail. When Bruce leaves R’as to die, it is because
he has found replacement fathers who will honour what his actual
father left him, rather than trying to destroy it in the name of some
utopian vision of destruction. In the ruins of the mansion, Bruce
finds the fragments of his father’s stethoscope; he has become the
Batman, but he is also being acknowledged, by this legacy, as the
physician and surgeon that Gotham needs.
Spider-Man Films
The temporary collapse of both the major DC-derived superhero
franchises is part of the reason why Hollywood belatedly turned to
Marvel as a source for material to adapt; another delaying factor
here was that the major Marvel creator, Stan Lee, was still active
and influential, and, after abortive Captain America and Nick Fury
films, disinclined to cooperate with film projects that were not
as good as they could be. Even so, some of the resulting Marvel-
based films were more or less unsatisfactory: I have mentioned
Hulk and the disappointing Daredevil and will pass over The Fantastic
Four (2005), only pausing to mention that it was a film doomed by
hopeless miscasting of most of its principals.The obvious exception,
Michael Chiklis, had pretty much cast himself as Ben Grimm by
walking up to people at parties and demanding the role; he was
good, but casting directors are supposed to find the right person,
not wait for them to turn up.
Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man adaptations are two of the very
best superhero adaptations simply because they show a respect
for the material that is rational and yet not slavish; they are free
recensions of the origin story, the feuds with the Green Goblin
and Doctor Octopus, and a version of the Mary Jane Watson love

story. They are films neither of the original comics, nor of the
Ultimate Spider-Man storyline, but draw freely but sensitively on
both versions of the continuity. Without being flashily well-written
(even though the sometimes-florid Michael Chabon worked on the
screenplay of the second), they are solidly plotted; characters are
given comprehensible motivations from the start that expand and
become more complex in a way that draws on the complexity that
years of comics make possible. They are a model of what films that
draw on comics might be like.
The title sequence of Spider-Man 2 (2004) – a sequence of
images drawn by the hyper-realistic comics artist Alex Ross – does
the double duty of reminding us of the events of the previous film
and that we are to spend two hours in the world of Marvel Comics.
When Steve Ditko and Stan Lee invented Spider-Man, the whole
point of him was that he was young, vulnerable and made mistakes.
Even more than the first film, Spider-Man 2 inhabits not only the
vehement acrobatics of the comic-book, but also its occasionally
lachrymose emotional territory – rather more movingly because
the corrosive effect of necessary secrets is a more common
experience than the acquisition of vast power.
One of the major strengths of both films is the nearly profligate
quality of the casting: a franchise that casts Cliff Robertson as Uncle
Ben and Rosemary Harris as Aunt May is not stinting on the casting
budget. Willem Dafoe has just the right level of insane glee to play
Norman Osborne and the Green Goblin; he is also convincing in
his scenes as Harry Osborne’s disappointed bullying father – we
believe that the Goblin’s attempts to corrupt and co-opt Spider-
Man are in large part a continuation of his earlier attempts to build
a relationship with Peter Parker.
It might have been a repetition too much for Raimi to have
built an element of paternal concern into the relationship between
Parker and Doctor Octavius, before the latter becomes a monster
– Alfred Molina has a chubby authority that is absolutely right and
makes Octavius an appropriately tragic figure. ‘I don’t want to die
a monster’, he says as he sacrifices himself to save New York from
what he has built, and it is one of the most moving lines Molina

has ever delivered on screen. The fact that he is a man who, had an
accident not robbed him of moral sense, might have been a mentor
to Peter is present, but not over-stressed.
Rather than give us the complicated roster of Spider-Man’s love
interests, the films opt for the Ultimate Spider-Man strategy of having
Mary Jane Watson be the girl of his dreams from the beginning;
Betty Brant appears in her role as Jameson’s invoice clerk, but
there is never any clear reference to the brief liaison that existed
between her and Parker in the comics. It is Mary Jane rather than
Gwen Stacey that the Green Goblin hurls from the bridge, and
she survives where Gwen Stacey died. The version of Gwen that
appears in the third movie, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is a
thin shadow of the original who is essentially present so that Peter,
during his brief period of contamination by an alien parasite, can
demonstrate moral corruption by playing two women off against
each other. It was pointless to introduce Gwen to so little ultimate
effect.
One of the films’ real strengths is the portrayal of Mary Jane
by Kirsten Dunst, who has charm, vulnerability and emotional
strength in equal measure.We believe in her as the woman as driven
by dreams of a successful career as model and actress as Peter is by
his sense of responsibility and his guilt; one of the most successful
things in the first two films is the moment near the end of the
second where he explains to her why they can never be together
and she tells him that he is wrong, that she is strong enough to take
the risks involved in being his love. And she proves it time and time
again.
The first film has a moment of quite incomparable tenderness
when, after Spider-Man has saved Mary Jane for the second time, he
hangs upside down and she rolls down his mask to free his lips for a
kiss. It is erotic precisely because he trusts her to roll it thus far and
no further, and because she understands the game they are playing
enough to comply with his wishes. It is a particularly intelligent
piece of writing in the second film that it is when she starts to think
again about that kiss that Mary Jane starts to realize that her friend
Peter has never let her kiss him for fear that she will recognize the

feel of his mouth. Kirsten Dunst understands the emotional good

sense that makes Mary Jane Watson so much more than a Lois Lane
clone; she walks out on her wedding to John Jameson and comes
to Peter’s apartment in her white floaty gown and is the girl of his
dreams in his arms for a moment. A police siren screams past and
he reacts; and she lets him go, knowing that the price of being with
him is that he will always go off to his duty of being Spider-Man
and leave her standing. The last thing we see of her in the second
movie, though, is not the devastated sorrow when he left her at the
end of the first; it is the resigned smile of a woman who knows that
she has got what she wanted and is prepared to pay the price for
it. Dunst has not been praised nearly enough for her work in these
films.
Tobey Maguire’s large eyes and hurt sensitive mouth make him
ideal casting in the first film, where he has to start out as one of
life’s victims, a nerd bullied at school, and only gradually come
to terms with his powers and the obligations they impose on him.
He is, though, good at joy, at discovering he has become muscular
overnight, at discovering that he can run around rooftops and
swing down avenues, and is still as good when his face is covered by
a mask and we cannot see those eyes.
In the second film his Peter Parker has had two years of having
his life wrecked by his sense of obligation. Patrolling the streets
cuts into his college course-work and his friendships; he has cut
himself off from his sweetheart Mary Jane to prevent her being
used as a hostage. The exhilaration of the highly coloured action
sequences is set against the highly specified greyness of Parker’s
daily real life: a cheap flat, a greedy landlord, dishonest employers.
When his powers appear to fade, it seems like a solution; the image
of Parker walking away from a trashcan with his costume in it is one
of many Raimi usefully copies from decades of the comic. Maguire
is also good at mixed feelings: when it seems that he is losing his
powers, he has to cope with the temptation of thinking that this is a
good thing, and be called back to his duty by circumstance and by a
pep-talk from Aunt May; unlike either of the comics version of the
storyline, this Aunt May knows, even if she does not know that she

knows. Maguire is perhaps a little prettier than one’s ideal Spider-

Man, but he has everything else that the role takes.
Where Raimi supplements the original material, it is
occasionally with pregnant in-jokes; Spider-Man shares a lift with
Hal Stark, the comics-obsessed Michael Novotny of the American
version of the TV series Queer as Folk, implying a subtext to Peter’s
fraught relationship with his best friend Harry. More often, it is to
undercut the daftest bit of the premise: Kirsten Dunst gives real
authority to Mary Jane’s fury at being left out of his decisions about
their relationship, whereas in comics she always knew and resented
not being told. When a wounded, mask-less Spider-Man is passed
over the heads of Elevated-train passengers he has just saved, the
convention of the secret identity is stretched close to breaking
point, as it needs to be.
Raimi loves this material, but his attitude to it is never
unthinking; he makes explicit in his films things that have often
only been implicit in the comics on which they draw. Part of the
tragedy of superhero and supervillain alike is that their roles are
a seductive trap, an addiction whose name is endless repetition;
this may be a feature of comics, but it is also an acute observation.
Octavius’ response to the disaster that killed his wife and warped
him is to steal the equipment that will enable him to do it all over
again, only more destructively. The difference between him and the
younger Spider-Man is partly this – that he can only break the cycle
by dying, whereas, by finally telling the truth, Parker can choose
to change.
Spider-Man 3 suffers in general from an over-egging of the
pudding and in particular from a failure to develop the themes of
the second film seriously. In particular we simply have too many
villains: we get the Sandman – a being made of sand in the Marvel
Universe – who is reconfigured as the accomplice of the robber
in the first film and as the man who actually shot Uncle Henry.
The problem with this is partly that the Sandman is altogether too
second-string a villain to carry the film and that the second thought
that makes him Henry’s killer brings the whole thing dangerously

too close to make Spider-Man’s back story identical to Batman’s in

general and movie-Batman’s in particular.
We get the alien parasite and the rival photographer who it takes
over and transforms into Venom, Spider-Man’s evil twin, once
Peter himself has rejected the corruption that goes with its power.
One of the problems with this is that it is material from rather later
in the comic’s arc – the Venom storyline is darker than quite suits
the tone of the films thus far. More importantly, neither of these
villains can carry a movie by themselves, while together they are
not an alliance that has any great resonance.
Lastly we have Harry, torn between his desire to avenge his father
on Peter and his awareness that the Green Goblin is not a good
thing to be. Having the trilogy culminate in Harry’s redemptive
death means that the focus on the trilogy is as much on Harry’s
arc as it is on Peter’s or on Peter’s relationship with Mary Jane.
The reason this is a weakness is that it parallels both other arcs.
True, it is about the valuable lessons Harry learns about power,
responsibility and virtue, lessons which parallel those learned by
Peter. On the other hand, though, inasmuch as it is about Harry
and Peter losing friendship and then getting it back, and this up and
down process parallels Peter’s love affair, the homoerotic subtext
between Harry and Peter becomes something that is not a radical
interpretation of the text, but close to being text itself. Having
Venom and Harry in the same film is at least one shadow double
too many – the third film is the weakest of the series because it
over-determines the material.
X-Men Films
The other successful Marvel franchise derives much of its strength
from the fact that, though he rightly sees the X-Men as a free-
floating signifier with whom a lot of groups can identify and
from which they can take comfort, Bryan Singer made a lot of
intelligent choices concerning their specific status as icons of the
way membership of a subculture, the gay subculture for example,
becomes a way of building a family of the heart. Families of the

The Gay Narrative of X-Men

If it seems fanciful to find in X-Men (2000) a specifically gay
narrative, consider what happens in it. The first film is the story
of how one character, discovering her outsider status but not
knowing what it means, goes on a journey and eventually
meets another person in a similar position of ignorance, who
is as entirely different from her as it is possible to be, and yet
somehow is exactly the same. And suddenly both of them find
themselves in a new world, full of shiny people who are also
like them, some of whom are bad and some good and all of
whom want to make use of them. When you are alone, being
of potential use to someone else, is, after all, not the worst
thing that can happen to you. This is, in most respects, the
standard narrative progression of a coming-out story.
heart, we are shown, can be a safe place in which characters can

mature and grow. By the end of the second picture, Bobby Drake/
Iceman and Anna Paquin/Rogue have stepped up to be contributing
members of the team.
X-Men fundamentally reconfigures the Rogue of continuity,
a former criminal of mature years, into a waif who becomes the
centre of everyone’s attention. As written by David Hayter, and
acted by Anna Paquin, Rogue becomes to some extent what is
known in fannish circles as a Mary Sue, an idealized fan-identification
figure. To some degree, Singer chooses to do the same to Logan/
Wolverine, whose trademark berserker violence is distinctly toned
down in this first film and is only occasionally unleashed even in
the second; as played by the charismatic song-and-dance man Hugh
Jackman, Wolverine becomes a matinee idol rather than a heavy.
Singer could not, dealing with a whole group, give us the sort of
origin story that is the standard way of dealing with the first film of
a superhero franchise; he had to treat the X-Men as an established
group, of whose back-stories we are only vaguely aware, into
whom our viewpoint characters are inserted and eventually treated

as equals, or at least – in Rogue’s case – equal foci of attention. By

making this the story of how two members are inserted into the
group, he provides a story that makes emotional sense.
His first film, The Usual Suspects (1995), had demonstrated how
very good Singer is at creating an ensemble and working with
actors; his second, Apt Pupil (1998), had given him a good working
relationship with Ian McKellen, which meant that the question of
whom he should cast as Magneto was solved pretty much from the
outset. In a very real sense, that set the pattern for his casting as
Charles Xavier of Patrick Stewart, another British Shakespearian
gone Hollywood, and with both the acting skills and iconic quality
to stand up to McKellen. The very few scenes across the franchise
in which they are basically alone with each other are electric, which
is why Singer, and Ratner after him, ration them.
The Auschwitz scene with which Singer inaugurates the franchise
is here partly to show how Eric Lensherr’s journey to becoming the
monster Magneto started; it also reminds us of what the stakes are
in something as seemingly innocuous as a Mutant Registration Act.
One of the strengths of Singer’s two films is that he raises, as the
comic does only occasionally, the possibility that Magneto might be
right; significantly, it is only at a late stage, when the life of Rogue,
his quasi-sister, is threatened that Wolverine decides formally that
he has found the right side in the X-Men and Xavier. This is not
because they are the side that are going to win, but because they
are the side that does not decide to murder adolescent girls for the
greater good of mutantkind.
One of the subjects of Singer’s two films is the moral decline
of Magneto, who is not even loyal to his own, and terminates his
alliance with the X-Men against Stryker at a moment’s notice when
given the chance to exterminate ordinary humanity – McKellen is
a famous Macbeth and a famous Richard, and shows his Magneto
learning to wade in blood, and be a king. One of the reasons why
the fandom has so relentlessly eroticized the Xavier/Magneto
relationship is that they are constantly trying to seduce each other
politically; Xavier in particular is trying constantly to recreate the
friendship and working relationship they once had.

The first film was made on a comparatively low budget as these

things go, and accordingly had to ration both its effects and the
extent of its ensemble work; it has a very good secondary cast in
Famke Janssen, James Maynard, Ray Park and Rebecca Romijn-
Stamos. One of the few weaknesses one can impute to it is the fact
that we don’t get enough of the byplay within the two groups, the
heroes and the villains who are, in a sense, also part of their family
– that is very much a matter of time and cost.
We get far more of this, as well as far more action and spectacular
stunts, in the second film, X2, simply because Singer was given a
far larger budget. The first film dealt with an attempt by Magneto
to transform a large party of the great and good into mutants,
powering a ray with the life force of the unfortunate Rogue, a
plan which he continued after having it pointed out to him that his
victims would only change briefly, and then die. The second deals
with Stryker, a military scientist who abducts Xavier and intends
to trick him with mind control into using the telepathic enhancer
Cerebro to destroy all mutants; Magneto affects to assist the X‑Men
in preventing this, but is actually planning to have Xavier kill all
humans instead.
Along the way, Magneto escapes captivity; Stryker’s men attack
the school; Storm and Jean Grey save the jet from air-to-air
missiles by the power of their mind; Wolverine fights and kills Lady
Deathstrike, one of Stryker’s later experiments in building super-
assassins, he being one of Stryker’s earlier models. Jean sacrifices
herself to save the group, thereby avoiding choosing between Scott,
her long-term lover, and Wolverine, the bad boy to whom she is
also attracted. In the first film, the limits imposed on him meant
that Singer had to concentrate on comparatively few storylines; at
the climax of the second, he is cutting between seven individuals
and groups and managing to remain completely coherent. X2 is an
astonishingly assured suspense movie.
It is often also very funny – an early scene of young mutants loose
in a museum, or the scene where the teleporting Nightcrawler
demonstrates that the White House is not safe from him – these
scenes are as entertaining as some of the others are deeply

disturbing. In Brian Cox, Singer found a Stryker who could hold his
own against McKellen and Stewart; this is a film about fanaticism
and sacrifice. In the end, after all, the answer to the Strykers and
the Magnetos is that they are keen to build a world, perfect to their
specifications, with the deaths of other people; Jean Grey, on the
other hand, is prepared to sacrifice herself.
Another point about Singer’s films is the clear division he
makes in his colour schemes, especially in the first film, between
scenes where ordinary life, even the ordinary life of mutants, is
going on, and scenes where superheroics and supervillainy are
featured. Ordinary life is many-coloured and full of light, whereas
superheroics take place in dark shadows with little illumination.
Now, this is partly a matter of picking a lighting scheme that will
show off special effects to their best, least cartoonish, advantage,
but it is also a look that contrasts the dark deeds that are sometimes
necessary with the bright day of Xavier’s classes and the ordinary
lives through which our heroes pass. A good example of this is the
scene towards the end, when Xavier and his crew appear in the
White House after freezing in time everyone save the President.
He can go on with his broadcast and with ordinary life, but the
mutants are out there, watching. He may not have known what he
was endorsing when he empowered Stryker, but he does now. They
tell him, and then they disappear, taking darkness away with them;
the X-Men are benevolent, but they could choose to be a threat.
It is noticeable that most of the casual grace note references
to continuity, the appearance of minor characters whom only the
fans will spot, take place in these warmer scenes; when, in the
second film, characters who had this role in the first film start
to be relevant in the darker scenes, it is because they are seen as
starting to step up to take on major roles. As one would expect,
these are characters like Kitty Pryde and Colossus, who became
major figures in the comic as it evolved.
The evolution of these two characters, and of Bobby Drake and

Pyro, the Xavier pupil who defects to Magneto’s Brotherhood, is
one of the ways in which Brett Ratner’s continuation of the franchise

in X-Men:The Last Stand productively drew on the rules Singer had

established for the franchise, just as the mad proliferation of grace
notes was something where he allowed his co-writer Zak Penn,
who had worked on the second movie, to talk him into fannish
excess. My own feeling is that Ratner did not entirely understand
Singer’s possibly intuitive and unplanned use of light and shade – he
copies the dark side of Singer’s palette, but not systematically.
The real problem with his film, though, is that he, Penn and
Simon Kinberg decided to combine two major X-Men plots, one of
which, the potentially more powerful one, ends up being skimped
as a result. It is widely rumoured that one of the reasons why Singer
left the franchise to make Superman Returns is that he wanted to
make the Dark Phoenix saga and saw it as a storyline that needed
to stretch across two films; this may or may not be true, but it
certainly reflects the fact that The Last Stand becomes unalloyedly
the parable about women not being able to handle power that the
comics version arguably to some extent avoided being.
In comics continuity, the resurrected Jean is fine for a while with
her survival and increased powers and is then tormented by dark
dreams of power, a gambit, a mental assault, by members of an
organization of rich mutants, the Hellfire Club, who bring out Jean’s
dark side and find themselves with cause to regret it. Interestingly,
though the Ultimate X-Men opted for the same solution as The Last
Stand, that the Phoenix is a subconscious aspect of Jean that Xavier
has repressed with his own mental powers, its creative team opted
for the same solution as the original – that the Dark Phoenix is
awakened by malignant tampering – whereas Ratner and his team
have it be intrinsic to the resurrected Jean to the extent that the
first thing she does on rising is kill Scott, off screen.
This, and Jean’s subsequent murder of Xavier, are radical
revisions of continuity, to put it mildly, and might have worked had
they been stages in a consistent escalation; Jean wants to be free,
this makes sense, and killing the more staid of her two suitors, and
the mentor who trapped her power, are viable ways to this. What
then happens is that she stands around for most of the rest of the
film looking sulky and forms an alliance with Magneto more or

less by default. It is, after all, not that Magneto does not want to
control her, it is that he tries to do so with his usual rhetoric rather
than by telepathy.
In order to give Magneto something else to do in this film,
Ratner and his writers imported the Cure plot, which is ongoing
in Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men. They make Rogue,
rather than Hank McCoy (the casting of Kelsey Grammer in this
role was surprisingly effective), the X-Man so unhappy with her
lot that she takes the Cure, and make the Cure Magneto’s pretext
for a major mutant attack on a human centre of population. What
makes no sense, even when given the superficial rationale of his
preparedness to sacrifice foot-soldiers – ‘Pawns go first’ – is
Magneto’s unpreparedness simply to have Jean destroy the research
facility with a pass of her hand.
When Jean eventually does let loose, she is out of control,
killing as many of what is notionally by this point her own side
as anyone else. Logan fights his way through the storm of debris
she has created, taking terrible wounds that heal as we watch; the
nascent love affair between them has, as its climax, his execution
of her, and Jean, in a moment of briefly returning sanity, letting
him. Given the extent to which the Dark Willow plotline in Buffy
the Vampire Slayer drew on the original Dark Phoenix storyline, it
was interesting to see an X-Men film draw on that sequence in its
turn; the gashes on Logan’s face were uncannily similar to those on
Xander’s as he tries to calm the mad Willow.
Ratner’s film is full of moments that look good but add nothing
past that; a crowd of mutants is moved in on by troops, only to
prove to be manifestations of a single mutant man. Storm fights an
equally photogenic female mutant who is supposedly Callisto, but
the fight lacks the context that made that particular encounter so
memorable. Ratner draws on the comic for imagery, but fails to
do anything memorable with it apart from killing Scott; Magneto
loses his powers, but gets them back at the end; Charles is killed,
but is reborn in his brain-dead twin. Even Jean’s death is qualified
by the fact that she is, after all, the Phoenix. X-Men: The Last Stand
is a long way from being a shameful mess, but it is, for reasons that

should have been thought through, a huge disappointment after the

Singer movies.
Elektra
It can be generally accepted that one of the good things about
the deeply flawed Daredevil was Jennifer Garner’s performance
as Elektra, the ex-girlfriend turned tragic assassin; accordingly,
we got an Elektra film in 2005, which is worth considering, even
though Elektra is only marginally a superheroine, or supervillain.
Garner had the right elongated ranginess and yet enough in the way
of curves to wear one of the more bizarrely fetishist costumes even
Frank Miller has ever designed. Director Rob Bowman has pointed
to the paradox of that costume, which is that assassins wear black
to hide in shadows, but Elektra goes around wearing pillar-box red
or scarlet; she is so arrogant that she doesn’t care if people see her.
The first problem with making Elektra was that the character’s
best story in comics continuity had already been told in Daredevil;
she is a living embodiment of Matt Murdock’s emotional pain
as much as a character in her own right. The second is that the
best single story she has ever been given in her own right, in the
Miller/Sienkewicz Elektra Assassin, is a story that rehabilitates her
by demonstrating that sometimes an amoral assassin is a necessary
person, when, as for example, here, they are after a candidate
for the US presidency who is a tool of an apocalyptic conspiracy.
The combination of this storyline and the extreme bondage and
domination relationship between Elektra and the agent who first
tries to catch her, and then becomes her accomplice, made Elektra
Assassin a dodgy proposition.
Intelligently enough, the film’s makers then went to the
contextualizing material of the comic: the ongoing feud between
Elektra and Daredevil’s blind sensei, Stick, and the mysterious Hand,
a sort of ninja death cult force of ultimate evil, who do gangsterism
and assassin work as a sideline to keep their hand in. Elektra was
trained by the Hand when Stick rejected her, but could not follow
them all the way into demonic treachery; another reason why she

wears red is that these teams of good and evil are traditionally
colour-coded, save for the chief villain, who wears a soiled cream.
Casting Terence Stamp as Stick had a positive side – he has the
requisite authority – and a negative one – he played it with a posh
English accent rather than a working class one, when the whole
point of Stick as imagined by Miller is that he is a high-powered
martial mystic who works as a janitor and acts like a working
stiff. The central committee of the Hand, by contrast, are routine
bureaucratic villains, save for their ambitious princeling Kirigi
(Will Yun Lee), a charismatic martial artist rather than an especially
talented actor. His team of specialists are a stylish array of freaks,
most of them having some relationship with Marvel characters;
they are one of the areas in which Bowman shows a capacity for
fantastic visual poetry of which we could do with more in this
mostly earthbound film.
Elektra is hired for a killing and asked to wait two days before being
told her targets, a father and daughter with whom she has already
bonded as neighbours. She protects them instead, and continues to
do so when Stick refuses to help them. They are outmanoeuvred
and outclassed by the Hand’s team even when father and daughter
prove to have skills of their own, but are rescued by Stick. The girl,
Abi, is a martial arts prodigy whom the Hand wish to possess and
corrupt; she brings out an apparently maternal instinct in Elektra
that results in scenes that are mawkishly sentimental where they
are not vaguely perverse.Years earlier, Kirigi assassinated Elektra’s
mother, starting Elektra on her rampage of vengeance and also
afflicting her with obsessive-compulsive disorder. When this
manifests itself in neat patterning of everything, from bathroom
supplies to a fruit basket, it is a neat gag, but Bowman and his team
of scriptwriters cannot resist having it spelled out as part of her
psychic wound in an entirely over-determined and over-stated way.
One of the reasons why this film has a worse reputation than it
entirely deserves is its nervous underlining of every plot point.
When Elektra says to Stick, ‘You talk in riddles, old man’, it is not
merely a clunky line, it is a clunky line that restates the bleeding
obvious.

The confrontation between Elektra and Abi on one side and

Kirigi and his team on the other deserves to be in a better film.
They meet in the abandoned house and garden maze of Elektra’s
parents – handily close to Stick’s camp in one of the script’s many
infelicitous coincidences – and Kirigi twirls through the air at his
victims in a storm of dustsheets, among which he hides and which
he manipulates with his mental powers. He defeats Elektra, who
is rescued by Abi, who in turn is trapped by snakes – which have
crawled out of the tattoos of one Kirigi’s team – and killed by
Kirigi’s female minion Typhoid. Elektra summons her resources of
strength and kills Kirigi and his servants, then raises Abi from death,
as Stick had done for her. This latter scene is a colossal letdown;
the fights, and most especially the scene with the dustsheets, are
remarkably impressive up to that point.
Elektra is a long way from being a good film, but it has touches
of visual invention that make it entirely superior to the execrable
Catwoman with which it is often compared. Its strength is that,
much of the time, it trusts the continuity vision of the ethically
challenged heroine, and it notably falls apart whenever it shows
the softer side that the character does not really have. From Miller
onwards, Elektra was one of the areas of the Marvel Universe that
drew on the creepily mystic side of martial arts movies, and the
film uses this interplay effectively. It is sentimentality that is its
principal undoing.
What is remarkable is how much Hollywood has made use of

existing comics material rather than using its own. The reasons
for this are essentially that the track record of invented material is
even worse than that of bad adaptations of less-than-stellar comics.
As another example, we have the rather good Guillermo del Toro
film Hellboy (2004), adapted from Mike Mignola’s comic books
about a son of Satan turned supernatural crime fighter. We have
the far less good Blade films, with Blade 2 (2002), also by del Toro,
adapted from a minor Marvel title about a half-vampire who kills
his father’s kind. There is also the entirely disastrous Van Helsing
(2004), which draws vaguely on the Universal creature features of

the 1940s, but is essentially a continuity created for the occasion,

and only intermittently entertaining in its derangement.
One of the things that comics continuity gives a film about
superheroes is an overarching sense of what all of this stuff is
for. There are points in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000)
where you simply long for the characters to reference the comics
they are shown as reading, simply in order to provide short-
cuts for explanations that become long-winded as Bruce Willis’
hero discovers from a series of accidents, and beatings, that he is
invulnerable, and Samuel L. Jackson’s character persuades him
to start fighting crime. At the point when Willis realizes that the
physically fragile Jackson engineered the train crash that he survived
and others did not – and has as his motivation the desire to be a
villain since he is not a hero – you feel an almost physical need for
him to say, ‘so you want to be my Lex Luthor?’, just to stop the
string of circumlocutions with which direct reference is avoided.
Comedies tend simply to take the content of continuity for
granted; the weak comedy My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) assumes
audience familiarity with a vocabulary of superpowers, supervillains
and mysterious meteors.The teen comedy Sky High (2005) does the
same: a teenage son of heroes who appears to have no powers trains
as a sidekick and stays true to his friends even when his powers
develop; together they defeat a villain who underrates them. Even
the one good superhero comedy – the Pixar-animated The Incredibles
(2004) – draws on the whole post-Watchmen discourse about the
role of superheroes in society, with its set-up of superheroes forced
to withdraw into civilian life because of the endless litigiousness
of the people they rescue, and its fanboy turned supervillain. Part
of the point is that its central family’s powers are inevitably ones
we relate to similar powers elsewhere – great strength, great
speed, invisibility and force fields, endless tensile strength. At the
end, after defeating their would-be nemesis, the Incredibles find
themselves up against the troglodytic Undermayor. Not only are
they a mixture of the Justice League and the Fantastic Four, but they
find themselves fighting a villain who is more or less the Fantastic
Four’s Mole Man with the serial numbers filed off.

* * *
Examples could be multiplied – the point, however, is clear.
Superpowers are a useful metaphor for thinking about talent and
the role of the talented in society, whether from the Incredibles’
quite right-wing standpoint – ‘if everyone’s special, then no one
is’ – or from Spider-Man’s more liberal one – ‘With great power
comes great responsibility’. We need to think about political power
and personal autonomy and good citizenship and gender equality
and the treatment of minorities, and the superhero comic has been,
over the years, one of the places within popular culture where these
issues were considered and given useful metaphors as tools for
thinking about them. Marvel’s Civil War storyline is only the most
recent and extreme example of this. The fact that these discussions
have taken place for the most part in the superhero comics of DC
and Marvel, and the films adapted from them over the last decades,
means that the vocabulary in which we discuss these issues has
become one in which, for convenience, we use analogies drawn
from those continuities. Superhero comics and films are not merely
a vast narrative construct, but a way of thinking about the issues
they regularly discuss. They are not about just men and women
with bulging muscles and fetishist costumes; they are about the real
meaning of truth and justice, and ways of living in the world.

Index
a –actor f – film
ar – artist m – Marvel character etc.
d – director r – run
dc – DC and Vertigo character t – TV show, character from TV
etc. show etc.
e – event w – writer
A title in italics without a code indicate a comic published independently
or semi-independently
52 dc e 30, 34, 195, 196, 198 Avengers m 8, 9, 11, 13, 28, 29,
30, 33, 34, 42, 43, 54, 66–8,
Affleck, Ben a 228 73–5, 79–81, 83, 84, 87, 90,
Age of Apocalypse m e 7, 182 91, 94, 98, 102, 104, 140,
Alfred dc 9, 112, 146, 151, 237, 183, 210
247, 248, 251, 252 Avengers t 215
Alias m r 7, 17, 45, 54, 63–99, Avengers Forever m r 153–65
143, 188 Avengers/JLA dc/m r 29, 34, 42
Alien Resurrection f 212
Alternate worlds (see also Bale, Christian a 237, 250
Multiverse) 9, 12, 34, 94, Bane dc 17, 181, 247
105, 158, 160, 182, 194, 207, Banner, Bruce (see also Hulk,
213 Defenders) m 9, 82, 230
American,The c 117 Barton, Clint (see also Hawkeye,
Angel t 7, 205, 208, 209, Avengers) m 67
211–18, 221, 222, 225 Basinger, Kim a 237
Ant-Man (see also Hank Pym, Batgirl (see also Barbara Gordon,
Scott Lang, Avengers) m 45, Oracle) dc 13, 17, 109, 246,
85, 154, 158 247
Astro City c 20, 110, 111, 153, Batman (see also Bruce Wayne,
208 Justice League) dc 3, 5, 6, 8,
Authority c 59 9, 10, 12, 13, 16–18, 20, 28,
Superheroes09 index.indd 269 14/11/2007 10:46:11

31, 39, 34, 35, 47, 51, 95, Captain America (see also Steve
104–12, 114, 118, 122, 129, Rogers, Avengers) m 7, 30, 32,
132, 143, 144–53, 156, 178, 33, 44, 67, 68, 73, 76–80, 82,
181, 196, 198, 199, 206, 207, 84, 91, 94, 97, 106, 107, 109,
231, 235–51, 256 115, 117, 122, 154–65, 183,
Batwoman dc 45, 191, 196 188–91, 251
Batman f 231, 235–240 Captain Marvel dc 36–7
Batman and Robin f 244, 245–7 Captain Marvel m 36–7, 82, 140,
Batman Begins f 248–51 157
Batman Forever f 244–5 Carey, Mike w 38, 58
Batman Returns f 231, 240–4 Carrey, Jim a 245
Beast, The (see also Hank McCoy, Cassandra Nova m 44, 167–74,
X-Men) m 182 222
Beetle, Blue (see also Ted Kord, Catwoman (see also Selina Kyle)
JLA) dc 27, 120, 195, 196 dc 12, 16, 115, 145, 241–3,
Bendis, Brian Michael w 6, 7, 17, 246–7, 265
18, 21, 45, 54, 63–99, 142, Catwoman f 246, 265
154, 183, 185, 190, 223 Cerebus c 55, 147
Bishop (see also X-Men) 182 Chandler, Raymond 77, 84
Bishop, Katie (see also Hawkeye, Civil War m e 6, 7, 8, 11, 20, 22,
Young Avengers) m 67 30, 32, 54, 87, 104, 109, 110,
Black Orchid dc r 14, 39, 45 113, 116, 157, 177, 185–91,
Bolland, Brian ar 11 200, 267
Brubaker, Ed w 31, 32, 33, 45 Claremont, Chris w 17, 31, 35,
Buffy t 23, 62, 113, 166, 204– 75, 168, 171, 204, 210–11,
10, 212–18, 221, 225, 262 213, 215–17, 220, 223
Burton, Tim d 235–43, 244, 249, Clooney, George a 246, 247, 250
250 Colan, Gene ar 3, 11, 228
Busiek, Kurt w 11, 18, 20, 29, Comedian dc 121, 122, 123,
30, 34, 42, 64, 67, 104, 105, 129, 131, 133, 134, 136
110, 111, 112, 116, 118, Comics Code 2, 8, 13, 18, 101,
153–165, 173, 182, 188, 198, 105
208 Competence cascades 25, 26, 46,
Byrne, John w ar 12, 19 203
Constantine, John dc 50, 58, 214
Cable m 35, 188 Continuity 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 19,
Cage, Luke m 68, 73, 78, 81, 92, 23–6, 28, 32–5, 37, 38–40,
154, 187, 189 42–5, 47, 50, 51, 57, 60, 63,
Caine, Michael a 248 64, 66, 67, 69, 74, 75, 81,

Index • 271
82, 87, 91, 96, 101, 103, 110, Death of Superman dc e 177–80
116, 118, 119, 120, 139, 140, Defenders, The m (see also Hulk,
142, 143, 153–64, 168, 172, Submariner, Doctor Stephen
176, 182, 184, 189, 193, 195, Strange and others) 105
197, 200, 207, 213, 219, 221, Delirium dc 56
334, 337, 231, 238, 240, 241, Dent, Harvey (see also Two-Face)
245, 247, 245, 252, 257, 260, dc 143, 145, 146, 148, 149,
261, 263, 265, 266 237
Continuity, wisdom of 46, 50, 74 Desire dc 39, 56–7
Countdown to Infinite Crisis dc e Destiny dc 56
27, 30, 104, 107, 195–6 Destruction dc 56
Crime Syndicate dc 34, 105, 194 Dibney, Ralph (see also Elongated
Crisis on Infinite Earths dc e 12, Man, JLA) dc
34, 101, 178, 181, 191, Dibney, Sue dc 27, 47, 196
193–5, 197–200 Ditko, Steve w ar 44, 128, 141,
Crossovers 9, 28, 29, 30, 34, 153 252
Cyclops (see also Scott Summers, Donner, Richard d 19, 231–4
X-Men) m 31 Doomsday dc 48, 177–8, 200
Dormammu m 41, 140
Dafoe, William a 252 Dream (see also Sandman) dc 39,
Danvers, Carol (see also Ms 55–7
Marvel, Avengers) m 37, 73, Dreaming, The r 58
80–1, 91, 97, 200 Dreiberg, Dan (see also Nite Owl)
Daredevil (see also Matt dc 121–136
Murdoch) m 4, 4, 6, 10, 15, Drew, Jessica (see also Spider-
49, 65–9, 73, 83, 85, 88, 90, Woman) m 67, 75, 86, 87
144, 207, 217, 221, 228–9, Dunst, Kirsten a 253, 254, 255
251, 263
Daredevil f 228–9 251, 263 Elektra m 95, 144, 217, 228
Dark Knight Returns, The dc r 6, Elektra f 263–5
13, 18, 53, 107, 109, 144–53, Elektra Assassin m 147, 263
237 Ellis, Warren w 11, 58, 116, 216
Dark Knight Strikes Back, The dc r Elongated Man (see also Ralph
144, 145, 147 Dibney, JLA) dc 27
Darkseid dc 16, 39–41, 106 Ennis, Garth w 58, 216
Davis, Alan w ar 9, 10, 13, 35, Event 7, 8, 16, 30, 38, 66, 68,
46, 110, 159, 207, 216 116, 140,143, 176–200
Death dc 39, 40, 56–7 eXiles 34, 46, 103, 182, 213
Death m 40, 41 Excalibur 213, 216, 216n

Fanboy creators 62, 201, 202, Green Arrow (see also Oliver
203 Queen, JLA) dc 146, 149, 198
Fantastic, Mr (see Reed Richards, Green Goblin m 16, 74, 115,
Fantastic Four) m 128, 140, 251–3, 256
Fantastic Four m 5, 10 22, 46, 88, Green Lantern (see also Hal
89, 102, 103, 155, 251, 266 Jordan, though there are a
Fantastic Four, The f 251 number of other Green Lanterns
Farrell, Colin a 228 active) dc 3, 4, 6, 10, 20, 28,
Firefly/Serenity t f 211–12 38, 43, 44, 180, 195, 196,
Flash (see also Barry Allen and 207
various others, JLA) dc 6, 105, Grey, Jean (see also Phoenix, X-
192–3 Men) m 12, 15, 23, 24, 35, 44,
Franklin, Mattie (see also Spider- 94, 97, 166–75, 213–15, 222,
Woman) m 71, 85, 86, 150 227, 259–62
Forty-Niners, The 61, 142 Grey, Rachel (see also Rachel
Fray 204, 216, 218, 221 Summers, Phoenix, X-Men) m
Frost, Emma (see also X-Men) m 35, 44 , 213
8, 35, 66, 106, 115, 165–75, Grid 21, 153, 165, 194, 228
183, 211, 221–3 Grimm, Ben (see also Fantastic
Fury, Nick m 35, 94, 161, 184, Four) m 10, 251
251
Hackman, Gene a 232, 234
Gaiman, Neil w 14, 24, 26, 35, Hawkeye (see also Clint Barton,
36, 39, 40, 42, 45, 50, 55–8, Katie Bishop, Avengers,Young
92, 132, 147, 203, 217 Avengers) m 67, 115, 154,
Galactus m 2, 40–3, 46, 88 156, 159, 160
Garner, Jennifer a 228, 263 Healey, Karen 73–4
Gaydos, Michael ar 72, 82, 89, Hellblazer dc 50, 58, 214
90, 93, 98 Hellboy f 265
Gibbon, Dave ar 11, 129, 131 Hernandez brothers w 55, 64
Golden age of comics 18, 44, 49, Heroes t 51–3
55, 57, 102, 139, 141 Hogan, Pete w 58, 60
Gordon, Barbara (see also Batgirl, Holmes, Katie a 227, 250
Oracle) dc 13, 109, 112, 239 Homophobia 75, 185
Gordon, Commissioner Jim dc House of M m 7, 8, 28, 30, 35, 66,
20, 109, 145, 146, 148, 149, 67, 74, 106, 182, 183
150, 207, 237, 247, 249 Hulk (see also Bruce Banner) m
Grayson, Dick (see also Robin) 3, 9, 13, 17, 28, 82, 90, 105,
dc 111 183, 190, 229–30, 251

Index • 273
Hulk f 229–30, 251 dc 9, 29, 30, 34, 39, 42, 54,

Human Torch (see also Johnny 105, 156, 167
Storm, Fantastic Four) m 6, Jupiter, Laurie (see also Silk
84, 88, 89 Spectre) dc 121–37
Huntress (see also JLA) dc 95, Jupiter, Sally (see also Silk
106 Spectre) dc 134
Hush dc r 6, 106, 107, 143, 242 Justice Society of America dc 1
Identity Crisis dc e 27, 109, 196, Kane, Bob w ar 151, 240

197 Kang the Conqueror m 11, 33,
Immortus m 157–64 102, 154–64
Incredibles, The f 266–7 Keaton, Michael a 236–44, 250
Infinite Crisis dc e 8, 12, 27, 30, Kefauver hearings 18, 101, 105
34, 43, 112, 180, 181, 191, Kelly, Carrie (see also Robin) dc
193, 195–200 145–52
Intelligence Supreme m 43, 106, Kent, Clark (see also Superboy,
158–64 Superman) 9, 19, 29, 112,
Invisible Girl (see Sue Storm, 178, 207, 231
Fantastic Four) m Kidman, Nicole a 245
Invisibles, The dc 58, 166, 172 Killgrave the Purple Man m 90–8
Iron Man (see also Tony Stark, Killing Joke, The dc 109, 114,
Avengers) m 10, 154, 158, 207, 238, 239
185, 189, 190, 207 Kilmer, Val a 245
Kingdom Come dc r 11, 21, 107,
Jameson, J. Jonah m 73, 85–90, 155
109, 155, 187, 253 Kingpin m 144
Jimenez, Phil ar 199, 200 Kirby, Jack w ar 38, 39, 40, 42,
Joker dc 12, 13, 17, 106–9, 44, 141
114–15, 137, 145–9, 197, Kord, Ted (see also Blue Beetle,
207, 236–40, 245 JLA) dc 27
Jones, Jessica m 45, 63–99 Kree m 34, 36, 37, 43, 82, 102,
Jones, Rick m 32, 37, 82–3, 158, 106, 140, 157, 158, 185
163
Jones, Tommy Lee a 245 Lane, Lois dc 16, 18, 19, 48,
Jordan, Hal (see also Green 105, 108, 178, 234, 237, 254
Lantern, JLA) dc 6, 10 38, Lang, Cassie (see also Stature,
194, 207 Young Avengers) m 45
JLA (Justice League of America) Lang, Lana dc 152, 178

Lang Scott (see also Ant-Man, Maximoff, Wanda (see also Scarlet
Avengers) m 45, 73, 84, 87, 98 Witch, Avengers) m 28, 45,
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 47, 66, 74, 87, 94, 106, 183
60 Meltzer, Brad w 50, 109
Lee, Ang d 229, 230 Mignola, Mike w ar 265
Lee, Stan w 25 42, 44, 82, 128, Millar, Mark w 33, 67, 105, 167,
160, 228, 230, 251, 252 235
Liminality 5, 6, 71, 72, 152, 205, Miller, Frank w ar 6, 9, 13, 65,
212 107, 109, 114, 143, 144–53,
Living Tribunal m 2, 40, 41 181, 228, 236, 237, 239, 248,
Loeb, Jeph w 16, 39, 104, 105, 263–5
106, 110, 143, 242, 248, 249 Miracleman 36, 132
Loki m 33, 42, 67, 102 Misogyny 15, 17, 55, 73, 74, 77,
Lord, Maxwell dc 8, 27, 104, 79, 93, 97, 144
107, 196 Molina, Alfred a 252
Luthor, Alexander dc 194, 197, Montoya, Renée dc 45, 196
199 Moore, Alan w 6, 21, 24, 35, 36,
Luthor, Lex dc 12, 29, 100, 104, 37, 38, 39, 55, 58, 60–1, 102,
132, 178, 234, 266 103, 109, 111, 114, 119–38,
142, 207, 209, 214, 216, 220,
M2 continuity m 13 236, 238, 239
McCloud, Scott ar 21 Morrison, Grant w 38, 40, 58,
McKellen, Ian a 14, 229, 258, 105, 106, 112, 151, 165–75,
260 198, 216, 222–3, 235
McCoy, Hank (see also The Beast, Multiverse (see also Alternate
X-Men) m 66, 167–72, 262 Worlds) 34, 35, 36, 162, 197
Magneto m 7, 13, 14, 35, 66, Murdock, Matt (see also
173, 183, 208, 225, 229, Daredevil) m 6, 9, 10, 67, 69,
258–62 73, 76, 83, 109, 144, 207,
Maguire, Tobey a 254, 255 263
Manhattan, Doctor dc 120–37 Murphy, Cillian a 249
Marvel, Ms (see Carol Danvers, Mutants 7, 8, 42, 54, 66, 75,
Avengers) m 104, 118, 154, 155, 167–72,
Marvelman dc 36, 111–12, 132 183–5, 224, 227, 229,
Marvels m r 11, 155, 173, 188 259–62
Mary Sue 94, 96, 257
Mason, Hollis (see also Nite Owl) Nail,The dc 9, 13, 110, 207
dc 121, 124, 126, 127, 134 Neeson, Liam a 248
Maximoff, Pietro (see Nicholson, Jack a 238–9
Quicksilver, Avengers) m Nite Owl (see also Dan Dreiberg,

Index • 275
Hollis Mason) dc 121, 122, Pryde, Kitty (see also X-Men) m

124 210–11, 216n, 221, 223, 224,
No Man’s Land dc e 181 260
Nolan, Christopher d 248–50 Pulse,The m r 68, 74, 82, 85, 91,
95
Octopus/Octavian, Doctor 84, Pym, Hank (see also Ant-Man,
113, 251, 255 Yellowjacket, Avengers) m
Olsen, Jimmy dc 10, 207 154, 157, 160, 169
Osborne, Harry 252, 255, 256
Osborne, Norman 116, 128, 252 Queen, Oliver (see also Green
Ozymandias (see Adrian Veidt) dc Arrow, JLA) dc 149
121, 122, 131, 135, 136 Quicksilver (see also Pietro
Maximoff, Avengers) m 6,
Pacheco, Carlos ar 159, 165 183, 184
Parker, Ben m 21, 29 113, 119, Quinn, Harley dc 12, 110
209, 252
Parker, Peter (see also Spider- Raimi, Sam d 24, 229, 251–6
Man) m 9, 14n, 22, 29, 71, 73, Reeve, Christopher a 232–5
75, 87–9, 113, 119, 183, 184, Referentiality (see also texture)
186, 189, 200, 251–6 26, 88
Parker, Mary Jane (née Watson) m Retcon (retroactive/
14n, 113, 183, 187, 251–6 retrospective continuity) 23,
Parker, May m 13n, 88, 113, 252, 95, 101, 185, 194
254 Richards, Reed (see also Mr
Parker, May ‘Mayday’ (see also Fantastic, Fantastic Four) m
Spider-Girl) m 14n 185, 187, 188
Perez, George ar 29, 30, 34, 43, Robin (1) Dick Grayson (2)
153, 154, 165, 192–4, 199, Jason Todd (3) Tim Drake (4)
200, 216 Stephanie Brown (5) Carrie
Pfeiffer, Michelle a 243, 244, 246 Kelly dc 9, 13, 16, 17, 33,
Phoenix (see also Jean Grey, 109, 111, 144, 145, 244,
Rachel Grey, Rachel 245–7
Summers, X-Men) m 23, 44, Rogue (see also X-Men) m 80–1,
46, 169, 171, 174, 213–15, 119, 257, 258, 259, 262
217, 117, 261–2 Rorschach dc 121–36, 142
Poison Ivy dc 12, 16, 39, 114, Ross, Alex ar 10, 11, 21, 107–8,
246, 247 155, 173, 252
Powers 21, 65, 74 Routh Brandon a 233, 234
Promethea 60–1, 210 Rucka, Greg 107

Runaways m 32, 43, 142 Spider-Girl (see also May ‘May-

Day’ Parker) m 14n
Sandman dc 24, 26, 45, 55, 56–7, Spider-Man (see also Peter Parker)
58, 92, 217 m 3, 5, 9, 10, 13, 16, 21 22,
Sandman m 255 24, 28–9, 65–6, 67, 68, 72,
Scarlet Witch (see also Wanda 77, 84, 85, 87, 89, 95, 109,
Maximoff, Avengers) m 28, 42, 113, 115, 119, 128, 144, 147,
66, 154, 167 154, 182, 184, 186, 187, 190,
Schwarzenegger, Arnold a 246 204, 209, 221, 251–6
Schumacher, Joel 244–7, 250 Spider-Man f 24, 251–4
Secret identity 9, 29, 70, 76, 84, Spider-Man 2 f 50, 229, 251–5,
85, 95, 119, 129, 178, 180, Spider-Man 3 f 255–6
205, 255 Spider-Woman (see also Jessica
Secret Identity 118, 153 Drew, Mattie Gordon and
Secret War m r 68, 182, 184 others) m 67, 74, 75, 86, 154,
Secret Wars m e 147, 182, 186 189
Shi’ar m 23, 31, 43, 44, 168 Spiegelman, Art w ar 55, 64
SHIELD m 67, 78, 85, 94, 96, Spike t 205, 206, 208, 212
161, 184, 185, 190 Squadron Supreme m 105, 117
Shuster, Joe w 4, 48, 100, 150, Stacey, Gwen m 16, 113, 183,
231 253
Siegel, Jerry w 4, 48, 100, 150, Stature (see also Cassie Lang,
231 Young Avengers) m 45, 84
Sienkewicz, Bill ar 11, 82, 147, Stephanie Brown (see also Robin)
263 dc 16, 17, 47, 112, 181
Silk Spectre (see also Laurie Stewart, Patrick a 14, 258, 260
Jupiter, Sally Jupiter) dc 121 Stark, Tony (see also Iron Man,
Silver age of comics 18, 72, 73, Avengers) m 8, 10, 185–91
77, 102, 235 Storm (see also X-Men) m 211,
Sim, Dave w ar 55, 147 259, 262
Singer, Bryan d 14, 19, 113, Storm, Johnny (see Human Torch,
226, 227, 229, 231, 233–5, Fantastic Four) m
256–61, 263 Storm, Sue (see also Invisible Girl,
Skrull m 34, 43, 46, 82, 102, Fantastic Four) m 6, 74, 190
140, 158, 160, 185 Stoy, Jennifer 10, 62, 202, 212
Sky High f 266 Strange, Doctor Stephen m 38,
Smallville t 12, 13, 51, 178 105, 128, 140, 186
Spacey, Kevin a 234 Straczynski, J.M.S. w 117, 118,
Speedball m 86–7, 188 202

Index • 277
Strip-mining 27, 32, 47, 66, 74, Tom Strong 60

171, 247 Top Ten 61, 142
Submariner m 44, 105, 155 Transmetropolitan dc 58
Subtext 12–14, 111, 164, 229, Two-Face (see also Harvey Dent)
245, 255–6 dc 143, 145, 237, 245
Summers, Alex (see Havoc, X-
Men) m Ultimate continuity m 13, 13n,
Summers, Gabriel m 31, 44 23, 33, 65, 66, 67, 72, 75,
Summers, Rachel (see Rachel 167, 252, 253, 261
Grey, Phoenix, X-Men) m Unbreakable f 266
Summers, Scott (see also Cyclops, Up, Up and Away dc 112, 156
X-Men) m 31, 32, 35, 44, Urich, Ben m 85, 187
167–75, 213, 222–3, 259–62
Superboy (see also Clark Kent, Vampires 34, 207, 208, 219, 220
Conner Kent) dc 179, 191, Van Dyne, Janet (see Wasp,
193, 197, 199 Avengers) m 154, 157, 160,
Superman (see also Clark Kent, 164
JLA) dc passim 3–20, 48–51, Veidt, Adrian (see also
104–6, 148–52, 177–80 Ozymandias) dc 121–137
Superman f 231–3 Venom m 116, 182, 247, 256
Superman 2 f 231–3 Verheiden, Mark w 116
Superman Returns f 19, 231, 233, Vertigo 36, 55, 58, 59, 166
235, 261
Swamp Thing dc 39, 58, 120, 214 Waid, Mark w 11, 21, 108, 155
Walken, Christopher a 241, 244
Team-ups 30 War Games dc 16, 47, 181
Texture (see also referentiality) Wasp (see Janet Van Dyne,
26, 91, 136, 230 Avengers) m
Thanos m 16, 41 Watchmen dc 6, 18, 21, 24, 55,
Thick text 24–6, 62, 63–4, 135, 60, 103, 119–38, 142, 143,
138, 203 266
Thor (see also Avengers) m 26, 28, Waters, Daniel w 241–3
41, 42, 72, 89, 94, 102, 154, Wayne, Bruce (see also Batman)
158, 189 dc 9, 10, 16, 45, 108, 112,
Thunderbolts m 10, 37, 115, 116, 114, 122, 145, 146, 150, 236,
154, 156, 157, 182, 187, 188, 238, 241, 242, 245, 248, 249,
190, 208 250, 251
Todd, Jason (see also Robin) dc Wertham, Frederick 1, 2, 18,
13, 33, 106, 112, 145, 152 101, 105

Whedon, Joss w 7, 17, 49, 62, 102, 106, 115, 119, 165–75,
166, 168, 201–25, 262 182, 184, 187, 201, 202, 204,
Wolfman, Marv w 192–4, 216 208, 210, 211–25, 227–9
Wolverine (see also X-Men, X-Men f 256–60
Avengers) m 66, 106, 116, X2 f 227, 229, 256–60
154, 189, 202, 223, 225, 257, X3:The Last Stand f 7, 14, 23,
258, 259 224, 261, 262
Wonder Woman (see also JLA) Xavier, Charles (see also X-Men)
dc 8, 18, 105, 107, 108, 149, m 13, 31, 32, 44, 45, 168–70,
192, 193, 196, 201, 202, 204 172, 183, 186, 211, 221–5,
258–61
X-Factor 67, 184, 187
X-Men (see also Excalibur, X- Yellowjacket (see also Hank Pym,
Factor, eXiles, groups whose Avengers) m 154–65
members wander in and out Young Avengers m 32, 33, 45, 70,
of the main X-Men, also New 84, 87, 164, 189, 202
X-Men, confusingly titled Grant
Morrison’s run on the main title) Zemo, Baron m 11, 116, 119,
m 7, 13–14, 15, 23, 31, 34, 189
35, 42, 44, 49, 66, 75, 81, Zero Hour dc e 34, 194–5

Roz Kaveney - Superheroes! - Capes and Crusaders in Comics (2008)

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Superheroes!

Superheroes01 pre.indd 1 20/11/2007 12:11:33

‘Combines a command of literary theory with a hands-on grasp

‘Roz Kaveney writes about the superhero myths with intelligence

Superheroes01 pre.indd 2 20/11/2007 12:11:33

Superheroes01 pre.indd 3 20/11/2007 12:11:33

In the United States of America and Canada

Copyright © 2008 Roz Kaveney

ISBN 978 1 84511 569 2

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset by JCS Publishing Services, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk

Superheroes01 pre.indd 4 20/11/2007 12:11:34

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1 The Freedom of Power – Some First Thoughts on

2 The Heroism of Jessica Jones – Brian Bendis’ Alias as

3 Watching the Watchmen – Sharing a World with

4 Dark Knights, Team-Mates and Mutants – Sustaining

5 Some Kind of Epic Grandeur – Events and Reboots

6 Gifted and Dangerous – Joss Whedon’s Superhero

7 Superherovision – From Comic to Blockbuster 226

Superheroes01 pre.indd 7 20/11/2007 12:11:34

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copies of graphic novels, as were Nick Landau and Andrew James

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Superheroes02 ch01.indd 1 14/11/2007 10:36:37

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At a more intimate level there were moments of psychological

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Guardians of the Universe. (The original Green Lantern’s magic

Powers and Responsibilities

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the standard remaining four but other senses, such as balance

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Human Torch); to exist in two realms at once is also a way of being

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centres, Captain America, is assassinated in the aftermath of Civil

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to cope with the possibility of genetic therapy that would simply

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Because of this anomalous relationship with society, many

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Jimmy Olsen, have turned to evil.The playfulness of comics is often

Superheroes02 ch01.indd 10 14/11/2007 10:36:38

On the Artists – Briefly

led by the current Baron Zemo, a figure more morally ambiguous

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Many superheroes have nemesis figures who are tragic, partly

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his heterosexual partner, Moira McTaggart, and son David because

deals, rather charmingly, with the next generation of various Marvel

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in Leeds, and renting a room from a young feminist woman I knew

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characters tend to be treated with greater indulgence. The male

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even in the Third World, where she goes to seek redemption.